Thespis to theater in America: “Why can’t I quit you?”

Let the dialogue begin.... THESPIS, Legendary Actor and Powerless Theatrical Figurehead, sits dejectedly in a coffee shop with his Life Coach, BERNIE. BERNIE So, you’re looking for a new line of work. THESPIS I have no choice. This theater thing just isn’t panning out. BERNIE Well, to be fair, you had a pretty long run. THESPIS I know, right? But I really need to break into the American market someday, and I’m beginning to suspect that’s just not gonna happen. BERNIE There’s theater in every major city, even in most small— THESPIS Yeah yeah yeah, the regional theater movement, blah blah blah, empowering communities, yada yada. How many of those city newspapers have a theater section? I’m not talking buildings, and tax writeoffs, I’m talking about the National watercooler chat room campus Conversation. Which is not and will never be about theater. Where’s the Thespian love? BERNIE But how could theater ever be the main subject of conversation across the entire country? A play is singular, and ephemeral. It happens in one place to, at most, a couple thousand people— THESPIS Don’t give me logic and facts, I’M FEELING NEGLECTED!! I want to be as important to Main Street as I am to Wall Street. BERNIE You’re important to Wall Street? THESPIS (as to a thick child) Those are the only two streets in America. The point is that, back in the day, there was either weeping and bloodshed in my name or the crops didn’t grow. BERNIE Wasn’t that Dionysis? THESPIS I blessed babies! I was a God! BERNIE You were a symbol, an actor with delusions of— THESPIS I was MORNING COFFEE. Now I’m an empty chore trotted out on holidays so the family doesn’t have to talk to each other for a couple of hours. BERNIE Don’t be offended. That’s how they treat the actual god they actually worship. THESPIS His Churches are televised. They have scope, lobbyists, breakfast with the President. The entire budget for the National Endowment for ALL the Arts is less than 50 cents per citizen per year, and it’s still controversial! BERNIE I saw Wicked last year. That was packed. THESPIS And it’s seven years old, and it’s based on a book that’s based on a movie, AND it’s the ONE thing you saw last year. BERNIE I was busy. THESPIS And even packed for all those tours and all that time, it’s been seen by fewer people than a weekly rerun of The Bachelor! And that’s the biggest show on Broadway. Unless there’s a movie star, 40-year-old radio songs, or the actors nearly die, nobody knows enough about it to decide not to care! BERNIE Bitter, much? THESPIS Seriously, I have tried everything to make them love me. BERNIE How so? THESPIS They didn’t like catharsis, so we made comedies. They didn’t like plays so we added music. Music changed, so we made rock musicals. They didn’t like the middle class so we broke the fourth wall and threw out the story. Then they were the middle class so we put them both back and threw out the politics. And they had baby sitters to get home to, so we threw out the third act. And they liked movies so we threw in a sink. But they didn’t like the bathwater, so we threw out the baby. And then they were deaf so we added microphones. And when they were dying, we trolled for their kids, and their kids were poor, so we threw out all the walls. And the actors. And when they got bored we threw out the second act. They liked Reality TV so we threw in projections. They were social so we threw in beer. They played video games so we became interactive. They were online so we made web trailers. They like comic books so we made Spider M— BERNIE I’m gonna stop you. THESPIS Please. BERNIE Why didn’t you just make the plays better? THESPIS What? BERNIE When they didn’t like your plays. THESPIS Ever hear of Arthur Miller? BERNIE Granted, but… THESPIS Tennessee Williams? Edward Albee. Mamet. Kushner. Guare. BERNIE Lots of wrinkled white penises on that lis— THESPIS Hellmann. Hansbury. Wilson. Ruhl. BERNIE Okay, okay… THESPIS The Boy’s Club is gone. Hallelujah. Now they have a wide diversity of plays to ignore! (Beat.) BERNIE Who are “they?” THESPIS What? BERNIE The ones who are ignoring you? THESPIS You know, the general public, the unwashed groundling hoi polloi. BERNIE Well there’s your problem. Okay, your three problems. THESPIS I’m listening. BERNIE 1) You think of them as “them.” And 2) You don’t like “them.” THESPIS Who? BERNIE Your audience. THESPIS I love my audience. Or I would if they’d love me. But they’re small and old and afraid and I just don’t understand them. BERNIE So you put on plays you think they’ll like and get mad when they don’t show up? THESPIS What, theater should just be for my closest friends? BERNIE No. But it is. Theater was only mass entertainment when it was the only entertainment. Then radio, film, and now the interwebs took over that role, because they’re better at it. Movies, at their best, make us forget we’re not sleeping; the best plays remind us we’re awake. There will always be people who seek out this experience, but they will never be in the majority. Which brings us to: 3) You spend so much time and energy apologizing for what theater isn’t, that you lose what it uniquely and wonderfully is. Don’t blame the mass audience for wanting to keep dreaming; life is hard and there is value in escape. But stop pretending escape is what you have to offer, and make plays for the people who want what plays do best. Show the value in that. THESPIS But theater is all about pretending. BERNIE Exactly! So it should never pretend it’s not! THESPIS … BERNIE Look, Shakespeare wrote what he wanted and still made his audience happy. And most of them were illiterate. THESPIS And the rest were busy in the balcony with hookers and mead. BERNIE But audiences watch Hamlet in prisons, today, with all the lights on and no special effects, and weep. And laugh. Partly because of the sword fights and dirty jokes, partly because there is effort involved at connecting the 400-year-old words to their own lives. But mostly, I think, it’s because when performed simply, with clarity and heart, Shakespeare doesn’t lie to you. Not only do his plays not apologize for being plays, they revel in their magical ability to move us in spite of, even because of, their artificiality. They are life-sized. No more, no less. The actors think out loud to the audience, enlisting their advice and confidence. They, and their characters, let the audience in on the fun of their role-playing, gender-bending, twinning, plotting and performing, and the very ridiculousness of the plots and dramaturgy still somehow seem more real than any “well-made” modern play. THESPIS Am I paying you by the word? BERNIE If you try to convince an Italian food lover to like pad thai by making it taste like pizza, you’ll just end up alone, eating a lot of really shitty pad thai. Plays are never going to be more realistic than movies and TV. But what’s magic about the “Magic If” is they don’t have to be. The actor/audience contract is to invest your real thoughts and emotions as if this story is happening right now, for the first time, not to pretend you think it actually is. And unlike a movie, since you’re all in the same room together, breathing the same air, the contract is inescapable; you can see the lighting instruments and the stage floor and smell the actors’ sweat. The shared reality in the room is not that you are actually in Denmark with Hamlet, but that you agree, together, that for the purposes of our story, this is what Denmark is like. Theater is not a real mirror, but a metaphorical one. Shakespeare knew that. And by the way, why has the most popular playwright in America been dead for four hundred years? THESPIS If he were alive today he’d be writing for Two and a Half Men. BERNIE Maybe. Or maybe he’d write exactly the same plays. Someone could, you know. They hold up. That’s why they’re still done. THESPIS No, they’re still done because they’re royalty-free. They’re still done because church folk can get their Culture on without watching gay people kiss or hearing profanity they understand. They’re still done because the schools that still do one play a year need a show big enough to harmlessly cast the untalented kids. They’re still done because theaters are paid to perform A Midsummer Night’s Dream for high schoolers before they graduate into a world where they will never see another play in their lives but might make a tax-deductible donation someday if they can ever find a job. BERNIE You are just not a fun person to be around. THESPIS Try it from in here for a day. BERNIE Look. I feel your self-pity. I really do. THESPIS I’m glad I’m paying you for something. BERNIE All you need to do is find the proper scale for the story you need to tell. If you’re trying to find what street you’re on, a globe is too small to help you and a full-size city map—to paraphrase Steven Wright—is hard to unroll. Movies are grand, larger-than life. (It would look silly to put only life-sized images up there. Because we don’t have to.) But theater, conversely, doesn’t need video monitors showing us closeups of the actors’ faces. Why? Because a good actor’s gestures will show us what her face is doing even if we can’t see her eyes. Theater at its best is a human-scale map of the world, life-sized and no more—a room, a person, a relationship can stand in for us all. Its very lack of confining detail is where its poetry lies. (Or rather, tells the truth.) Its third dimension doesn’t require special glasses. It doesn’t try to overwhelm our senses, like the latest Blockbuster, but ignites them like a home-cooked meal. THESPIS So are you saying spectacle is bad? Cuz Aristotle might have something to say about that. I love nothing more than a good, smooth hydraulic lift to remind me of the good old Deus ex machina glory days. BERNIE Of course not. The puppets in The Lion King gave me goose bumps. THESPIS Was that your one play in 2009? BERNIE Look. Use anything you NEED to better tell the story, then beg borrow and steal to get it. Just make sure there’s not a different, cheaper, more interesting way to tell it with less, because there usually is, and remember that “Because we can” is not an aesthetic, it’s a crutch. THESPIS Okay, small is good, big is bad, I get it. BERNIE “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” Don’t waste your energy complaining big institutions lack the intimacy they were never meant to have. But theaters across the country like the Guthrie, Park Square, Steppenwolf, and the Goodman Theater are figuring out that they all need second or even third smaller spaces to develop newer, more intimate, less-mainstream work for that essential younger audience. These are lower-tech laboratories that focus on the words and the performers, modestly scaled venues where failure—and therefore spectacular success—are still possible. THESPIS So there are Thespian Mega-Churches. Awesome. BERNIE Theater at an even smaller scale is also happening all across the country, and on its own modest terms, is generally thriving—with no buildings to support, no subscribers to make happy, no seasons to balance, just talented people telling stories in a room. THESPIS Okay, but is anybody listening? BERNIE I live in Minneapolis, a city where humility is still considered a virtue, sometimes to excess. But it (quietly) boasts a thriving theater scene where tiny misfit bands of wildly varying talent and resources sold, not only countless tickets, several dozen at a time throughout last year, but also 50,000 seats to 169 shows at the 2010 Fringe Festival. THESPIS Huh. You have my attention. BERNIE Maybe theater is useful and necessary right now, precisely because it is at its best as a ragtag guerilla artform, nimble and anachronistic. Within the last month, what better antidote is there to the “too big to fail” “grow or die” technological rapaciousness of 21st Century America than watching Ten Thousand Things, with just a handful of seasoned, extremely talented Equity actors and musicians, perform Man of La Mancha, a Broadway musical about asylum inmates performing Don Quixote, in a community center full of homeless people? Or Live Action Set’s 7 Shot Symphony, a virtually set-and-prop-free (yet somehow Epic) retelling of seven classical myths through the prism of Sergio Leone Westerns, performed by a rawer, younger, but no less talented group of clown/dancer/actor/ rockabilly musicians in an old Vaudeville House? Both shows are Shakespearean in that they admit their need for the audience’s imagination to fill in the gaps—not pretending to be bigger than they are, but embracing their limitations. Both are also, on their own humble terms, immensely successful at reaching a wide variety of audiences, many of them those elusive twenty-somethings you’re giving up on. THESPIS Wow. Okay. Um… So. To sum up. “Think smaller.” “Pretend, don’t lie.” “Do what you do best.” “There’s still beautiful, stunning theater out there; if they can do it, so can you.” Swell. But should I get a new career or keep rolling the boulder back up the hill? BERNIE Well you can stop feeling sorry for yourself and get to work writing a play that will either languish unpublished or replace Shakespeare in the hearts and minds of high school students 400 years from now— THESPIS Because those are the only two possible outcomes. BERNIE —OR spend all day writing a imaginary argument between the voices in your head to see which one wins. THESPIS Well, I’m not crazy. (He stomps off.) You can get the check. BERNIE (sighs) I always do.