The last time I'll talk about the Tonys (I promise)

All sorts of honors

There are many people being honored these days. Here are a few:

(1) Congratulations to the newly-announced winners of the McKnight Theater Artist fellowships. These prizes normally go to actors and directors, so it was especially nice to see lighting designer Barry Browning on the list.

(2) The city of Richfield has its own Human Rights Commission, and that commission just advanced human rights by honoring Miss Richfield.

(3) As Joe Dowling leaves the Guthrie, we are surely teaching him the meaning of the Minnesota Goodbye. After a long, long stream of interviews and retrospectives on his career in every publication in town, we finally sent him out with his own gala, and yet we're still standing in the driveway chatting with him. He should really take some of this three bean salad with him. We just have so much, and we'll never eat it all before it goes bad. Or how about some cake, Joe? I know you have to catch your flight, but just hold on. I'll wrap some up for you. It'll only take a minute.

Forget it, Jake. It's basketball.

Another year, another Tony Award ceremony in the can. And, yes, another protest against the Tony Awards, this time from the Dramatists Guild, against the decision to hand out all the writing awards during commercial breaks. In an open letter to the CEO of CBS, Leslie Moonves, the Guild had some choice words describing the stupidity of banishing writers from the screen:

"Every year, the Academy Awards faithfully includes screenwriters in not one but two categories. And it’s not just the Oscars; the Grammys, Emmys and Golden Globes all award the writers in their respective industries on the air. Ironically it’s the theater that most esteems writers; we are generally recognized as the principal artistic force behind new work, and we even retain ownership and control over the material we create. Yet on the very awards show intended to celebrate our craft, we are effectively negated."

Of course, CBS can shoot back that they're trying to make an entertaining awards show, and since theatre is already so obscure that most random Americans can't even name a living playwright, they have to lean hard on razzle-dazzle musical numbers to draw in the crowds.

I mean, they could, if that was remotely true. The sad fact is that viewership for the Tony Awards this year dropped 10% from last year, coming dangerously close to the lowest ratings the televised event has ever had, (That record was achieved back in 2012.) despite the fact that they were able to pack in all those musical numbers by papering over a good number of their actual awards with commercial breaks. That "nearly record low" number was peak viewership. It fell significantly as the night went on.

The Tonys did, however, become the most Tweeted about TV show that night, even beating out the new episode of Game of Thrones. But, Game of Thrones was the least of the Tony competition for eyeballs that night. Game 2 of the NBA finals buried them, racking up three times as many eyeballs, and every time I say eyeballs in this paragraph, you're coming closer and closer to picturing the two events bagging up literal piles of eyeballs. You're welcome. Eyeballs.

Now, I'm not dumb enough to think that a televised theater award ceremony is actually competing with a televised sports event in any meaningful way. The number of people who were thinking, "Gosh, I want to see if the Golden State Warriors can take on the Cleveland Cavaliers, but I just have to know if The Visit can pull out an underdog win for Best Musical" is vanishingly small, and, frankly, more Americans would rather watch a bunch of grown men throw an inflated rubber ball at a net suspended 10 feet in the air than see who pulled out a win for Best Play.

Maybe it's time that we, as Sean Douglass suggests in the Clyde Fitch Report, accept that theater is actually now an obscure art form. God, that hurts to say it, but I have to admit that it's true. We live in an age where a website has just introduced the idea of making theater companies pay for reviews. That doesn't exactly speak to a general public that is clamoring for more coverage. Sure, I long for a world where theatre gets the same breathless coverage as sports, but we just can't seem to compete with watching a bunch of dudes run back and forth on a polished hardwood floor.

We're a niche market, and it's time to start acting like it, especially when it comes to things like the Tony Awards. This isn't to say that it's all doom and gloom, and we should all give up. This is to say that we are now free from the tyranny of "playing to the masses". Theater is for a relatively small, but passionate group of people, so we don't need to waste time in our awards shows trying to make musical bridges to all the casual fans. There are no casual fans anymore. They're all watching adults in loose shorts who get paid exorbitant amounts of money for pretending to get hurt so that they can have the ball.

So, next year, instead of giving us yet another performance from Finding Neverland, I hope that the Tony Awards will actually let their audience see the awards that they give out. Instead of being afraid of boring the common folk, we should be embracing our weird minutiae, because (in case you haven't been paying attention to the internet) every little niche culture loves its weird minutiae. We are entering a time when theater no longer needs to be about entertaining the rubes with a little song and dance. Fun Home took home all the awards this year, it's sales just quadrupled, and there's not even a single sequin in that show. Theater, even Broadway, is becoming bolder and weirder and more intimate, and we have a small but dedicated audience that will follow us there. We don't have to try to compete with the sports ball, because we don't exist in the same universe anymore.

As John Waters said in a recent commencement speech: “Contemporary art’s job is to wreck what came before." Since we don't have to worry about the world watching, it's a fine time to make a mess. I hope that our awards shows can follow suit.