We are nowhere, and it’s now —Bright Eyes
It’s funny being nowhere.
One of the mystery ingredients of our scene, and the final seasoning in my "Elements of Style, Minnesota Edition," is comedy.
By comedy I don’t entirely mean Dudley Riggs, though that franchise has fed the scene here generously with writing and performing talent for decades. I don’t entirely mean shows geared to crank out the laughs either, although I’m aggressively in favor of growing the Gross National Humor Product, and Minnesota hasn’t been backward in its contributions.
What I mean is that we don’t do earnest well here. Or grim, tragic, soul-searing, straight-faced, or wet. We import that stuff mostly, or do an unconvincing imitation, kind of like your aunt doing the voices from
South Park. Minnesota grim is, as Samuel Johnson said of a woman preaching, like a dog walking on its hind legs—not done well, and surprising to find it done at all.
When I hear people say Minnesota Style is cerebral, reserved, anti-fashion, what I hear is not about shyness or excessive intellectualism, but the refusal, at bottom, to take things, including the self, too seriously. And when I look at work that is distinctively Minnesotan, I find even the writers of more serious tone associated with the state—August Wilson, Lee Blessing, for example—are often quite funny page by page.
To paraphrase Milan Kundera, Tragedy is Elsewhere.
Olympus ain't as much funny as New Ulm
Tragedy is about death, the great brought low by pride and arrogance. It’s about poetry and wisdom and all-consuming feeling. It was about all the dead guys littering the stage. It’s not about the survivors. And tragedy happens at the center of the action, where important things happen, in the capital, the palace, Olympus, New York. Anywhere but here.
Comedy is all about surviving. It’s about spring coming impossibly again. It’s about being fooled and foolish, and warns us against seeing finality in anything, even death. In comedy, the terrible thing has happened to someone else, and, boy, is that a relief.
Comedy is the kind of thing that happens here.
It’s like we’re in one of two modes in Minnesota, either dressed in lots of funny clothes, waddling and slipping down wackily and having to take turns driving down the street because there are glacial peaks and crevasses occupying a lane and a half; or we’ve made it through, it's up to 23 degrees or so, and out come the roller blades and messenger shorts, the message being,
Jesus, I cannot believe I lived through that, but it sure does feel good to still be alive and almost thawed out.
Placelessness
Bright Eyes, in case you don’t know, is singer-songwriter Conor Oberst, in what used to be his main incarnation. He’s from Nebraska originally, so when he talks about being nowhere, you may assume he knows whereof he speaks, in terms of literal landscape, though I believe the nowhere in the song I quoted from is actually not a literal one, but the nowhere we’re all settling into. The placelessness.
We all have a kind of dual citizenship now: where we are in actuality, and in that nowhere, so close to everyone everywhere we can hear them breathe, barely, over the noise of everything in the universe roaring like the sea in a seashell.
And the now is simply one of those moments we all have when you take a breath all your own, and see where you are and everything around you for what it is, in that mildly disconnected and disconcerting human way.
Conclusions
I want to conclude my rambles through the wilds of Minnesota Style with one of those “nows,” a glimpse of a possible “later,” and a cautionary word about provincialism.
First, provincialism.
Once upon a time, just as all humans were once Africans, New York was the American theater.
With the regional theater movement, outposts of theater were hewn from the savage landscape. Theaters like the Guthrie were like the forts of the wild west, importing and distributing the treasures of the cultural capital (and the occasional load of infected blankets) for the benefit of art-hungry locals.
Then regional theater bloomed, and little sprouts came up all around. Artists wriggled up from the soil all over the place: writers, actors, directors, designers. And they were good. And they looked around and saw that they were good. Sometimes there was barely enough rain and way too much fertilizer, but theater folk are wiry and hardy and used to getting by on very little.
But unfortunately the idea that the best theater comes from New York, or Paris, or Dublin, or San Diego, or really anyplace else but where you’re from, is stubborn.
So the big institutions wherever you are keep right on importing their leaders from elsewhere. Those leaders stick mostly with plays from elsewhere, written by writers from elsewhere, with fine actors from out-of-town in the leading roles, and exquisite directors put up in short-term housing.
Now if I were going to argue the point, I’d call this provincialism—the idea that what we do here can’t possibly be as good as what we can buy and bring in from elsewhere.
And the imported leaders of our institutions will say that I’m the provincial, and an ingrate, for complaining about all the wonderful culture they bring us.
And so the argument might go on forever, if the world stood still. But it’s not. It’s now.
And I’m not really arguing to change that other-directedness in our institutions. For one thing, I think it’s unassailable there. Where I’d like to root it out is in us, the kind of people who read MinnesotaPlaylist, the artists themselves, and those who care about them. We need to stop thinking we won’t ever have really made it without the validation of New York or the Pulitzer committee or whoever.
In my first Minnesota Style post, I said that I thought the story of the last twenty years in Minnesota theater was the loss of the middle. I think in the next twenty years we’ll see what’s left of the middle go on shrinking like the polar ice caps (I know some of you don’t believe in global warming, so PLEASE don’t write me about it, just bear with my naiveté) while the top level steadily downsizes and becomes even less about here and now.
But I don’t think that’s the story.
I think the story of the next twenty years in Minnesota theater will be what happens at the bottom—the bottom, top, and middle of the bottom, as well as the tippiest part of the top hanging down toward the bottom, and probably some stuff sticking in from the side. I think all those bits are going to continue to become more interesting than the tattered remnants of what some of us came of age imagining was a career path. And I hope that we’ll decide somewhere along that path, that what we’re doing here and now is sufficient and important to the final degree, without relying anymore on someone elsewhere to tell us so.
Changes in media and the economy will probably mean that what’s being mounted as theater twenty years from now will be freaky different, but I think the venues hosting it will be far closer to the model of Bedlam Theater or Bryant Lake Bowl, than the Guthrie, the Childrens’ Theatre , or even stand-alone rental spaces like the Theater Garage.
A lot of big theaters will probably turn into spaces like the churches Philip Larkin talks about in his great poem “Church Going.” If you don’t know the poem,
read it. It’s a thing of beauty.
My guess is probably going to be as laughably inaccurate as those expert predictions of the future from the fifties that assured us that robots would soon be doing all the dirty, boring work, but I imagine theaters with lots more spaces, plenty of big screens, sockets to jack your spine into the matrix, extra soy meat on the menu, lots of booze, and programming slopping everything together, music, dance, movies, plays, visual art, in a mad gumbo. I have no idea if that will happen, but it sounds fun and messy.
The only absolute certainty for the future of Minnesota Style is that it will cost two dollars less with a Fringe button.
Hold onto that sucker.
