Let's give credit to shows that give us credit
A few months back I hit up the
Revolver at the Ritz: 12 Experiments performance, a mishmash of theater, comedy, poetry, scientific lecture and several other artistic disciplines. It was a fairly frenetic evening with more hits than misses, including a few segments that stuck with me. One of those was a faux publishing pitch session, in which local authors Marty Kihn and Sarah Stonich attempted to sell a panel of actual small-press publishers on story pitches for classic books, all without mentioning any keywords that would give the title away. When concocting a plot summary for
The Great Gatsby, for instance, Kihn and Stonich were barred from saying words like “Egg” or “Daisy.” It was a fun bit that got a lot of laughs from the crowd, myself included, and after the show I got to thinking about what that laughter said about us all.
I tend to appreciate art that gives its audience credit for knowing a few things. The Revolver publishing pitch sketch assumed that most of the folks who packed the Ritz that evening came armed with at least a working knowledge of the English-language literary canon. I imagine someone completely unfamiliar with
Gatsby might still have been amused by the general awkwardness of the situation on stage, but a viewer with no idea of why “Egg” was a forbidden word would have a decidedly different experience than would all of the recovering lit students in the room. Not that any of the books presented were exactly standard-bearers of artistic obscurity, but I have to think the same act would have played to a considerably more muted reaction at most comedy clubs around town.
It’s something I see a lot on the Twin Cities scene. We mount a lot of productions here that assume our audience is on the same page, or at least an adjacent one. Just looking through the roster from last year’s Fringe Festival, I see plays aimed at brows both high and low, shows that rewarded knowledge of everything from David Mamet to Richard Brautigan to
The Human Centipede,
Star Trek to
Lolita to
Dr. Who, Shakespeare to Batman (and sometimes both at once). In the past month, Walking Shadow put on a
one-man Odyssey, Hardcover Theater staged an adaptation of a turn-of-the-20th-century surrealist cartoonist’s
third-best-known creation and RedEye produced
a play whose synopsis page included a ten-volume suggested pre-show reading list. That’s fairly heady stuff, no two ways about it.
The flipside of all of these brain games is that they’re bound to leave some potential audience members feeling excluded. Theater takes a lot of lumps for being elitist and inaccessible. A lot of those are undeserved, but it’s hard to imagine that many new converts are going to be won over by a play about a superintelligent sack of potatoes who “have read their Swedenborg.” It’s easy to feel a little guilty or self-conscious about that. Sometimes I worry that I fall into the stereotype of the superior, out-of-touch intelligentsia snickering at obscure references. But you know what? I think that might be OK.
It’s a cliché to say that our local scene has something for everybody, but it’s close to true. Whether your tastes run to intense gender politics, slapstick comedy or classic musicals, you probably won’t have to wait too long for a production to roll straight into your wheelhouse. Certainly there are still plenty of underserved audiences within our community, and it’s very important that we keep trying to create work that speaks to those viewers. At the same time, I think it’s also rather a fine thing to make art for people who really know their art.
Despite what a century of Hollywood marketing types desperately want to believe, there’s no such thing as one-size-fits-all entertainment. Of course theater shouldn’t be solely the domain of people who nod knowingly at a script’s every literary name-check, but neither should the artists feel too bad if those references sail right over half the audience’s heads. We have some pretty sharp people –
some of the most literate in the nation – coming out to shows in the Twin Cities. It’s only natural that we should play to that strength.
So keep it up, Minnesota theater-makers. Keep digging into those weird little nooks and crannies for the most obscure source material available. Keep searching for new angles on old classics and finding undiscovered gems to turn into new classics. Keep striving to be the smartest folks in the room. Not everyone is going to get it, but you could say that of anything. For those that do, it’s a grand thing to be a part of.
