Final thoughts

The theatrical impulse in our species seems to permeate so many aspects of our existence, once we begin looking for it. The courtroom, the classroom, the sporting event: they are all places in which we convene in numbers, watching and listening to the action before us, waiting for an outcome that shifts our perceptions in ways that make our narrative more or less satisfying and coherent. I spent last weekend at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville, immersed in roughly ten new works that I had never heard of before, filing in and out of the theater’s three stages, watching the lights go down, sharing with audiences the particular experience of absorbing new works that had never been seen before. Some were good, some bad, some indifferent, but spending as many of my waking hours watching theater as I did on other pursuits (feeding myself, wandering the streets, lying prone on my hotel bed) led to a few observations. Primarily, since I was still carrying around my anthropological mindset, I got a look into what preoccupied my fellow humans enough to impel them to create theater. Romantic relationships, of course, always top the list. Romeo and Juliet still haven’t worked things out. Get hitched, stay apart, give it some time . . . the questions are never settled. And the boy-girl, boy-boy, girl-girl matters (let alone when you start throwing in third, or fourth parties) have their way of bleeding into everything else, whether it’s inheritance and legacy, success or failure, or how to get through the minefield of a single weekday. The next, perhaps even greater, matter to be settled, is the head-scratching question of satisfying narrative. And this may lie behind the initial impetus, the reason for being, of the theatrical impulse itself. We all share the same conditions, to some degree: we can’t be sure if what we remember is true, we don’t know if our assumptions about the present are correct, and we make our decisions about the future based on flawed and fragmentary data. So we go to church, some of us. Or we go to the theater. We go to class, to teach or learn. If things go badly, we end up attending the courtroom. My program from the Humana Festival contained a quote from the playwright David Mamet to the effect that all plays are at their core about the human experience: that we all live our lives in a world in which we are inevitably condemned to die. Could be. It’s tempting to blame the Reaper for matters not adding up, for our continual search for meaning and our perpetual impulse for theater. But perhaps we could also thank old Thanatos as well; without him, we would not be who we are. Without our compulsion for theater, and for meaning, we would not be able to recognize ourselves. Like it or not, it is who we are.