Some good old fashioned populist rabble-rousing
Too Big?
Lynn Gardner, theater writer for the Guardian UK, is a woman after my own heart. I can always depend on her to be just as grumpy about the state of things in the theater world as I am. Even when she's celebrating the dramatic growth of new work in the UK, she's quick to give dire warnings about the bleak future to come. I imagine the two of us could very easily split a few bottles of scotch together, and hopefully that will happen in the UK, where the resulting hospital bill will be easier to handle.
But when I thought she couldn't possibly make me admire her anymore, just last week she cranked the populist rabble rousing up to eleven with a blog entry titled "No Theatre Is Too Big to Fail", in which she argues that constantly coming to the rescue of big brick and mortar institutions squeezes out true innovation rising up from the bottom. I've talked about the way big expensive buildings can sink arts organizations plenty of times in the past, but Gardner boiled it all down to one simple statement: "Just because a building is there, it doesn’t mean it has a right to continue to be there for ever."
Here in the US, we spent much of the past two decades throwing up lots of big, expensive buildings for our legacy arts organizations to hunker down inside of, like some latter-day arts Maginot Line.
Now, I'm not advocating for the people to take up their torches and pitchforks and assail the walls of our cultural palaces (even though I think the Guthrie would make an especially picturesque backdrop for a Bastille-like event). Big legacy organizations like Children's Theater Company can manage to exist healthily for half a century, occupy a big building and still manage to turn out a surprising number of new and interesting work (with some of that possibly Broadway-bound). They can even achieve the pinnacle of entertainment: appearing on the Target Field Jumbotron; thus joining the hallowed ranks of baseball hall-of-famers, guys in fuzzy mascot heads and random people swapping spit.
Software
Since this is the internet, allow me to use a computer metaphor: buildings are the hardware of the Theater Computing System. Sure, you can construct a Cray-like monstrosity capable of 400 gazillion whatevers-per-second, but it doesn't make a lick of difference if it's running bad code. In our metaphor, the software those systems run is made up of little fleshy bits called humans. All this meat-based processing means that what's really more important is who is running the buildings and what they do with them. This is why we obsess so much over who will run the Guthrie next. When we drop that new code into our biggest supercomputer, maybe something exciting will happen (even though a good portion of the most exciting candidates for the job have already said no to it).
But the soft infrastructure of the theater world is always bigger than one person. We have an entire sea of outdated code and creeping malware to wade through. We're stuck in an endless subroutine over whether or not subscription models are "dead" while true improvements in rewarding customer loyalty go by the boards. We've reached a point where professional actors are willing to fight for the right to not even get paid minimum wage. Directors who try to boldly reimagine old works find themselves in legal trouble. And, as usual, the only solution Americans can seem to get behind for anything is tax breaks for big operations.
You might say that the software development arm of our operation hasn't been too keen on the whole "development" thing. I'd recommend downsizing, but with the hollowing out of the creative middle class, I'm not sure who would replace them.
Damn, this is starting to sound like a primer on Marxism… ALL ART IS PROPAGANDA! VOTING IS A LIE! WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR WITH EASTASIA!
Ingenuity, of Sorts
But don't you worry, friends. I'm a true red-blooded American. I believe in freedom, opportunity and pork gravy, though not necessarily in that order. As Americans our true superpower is in not giving a one whistling fart about the "right" and "traditional" way to do things. We're at our best when we're told something is impossible, and we just keep on trying anyway. (We can also be at our worst when we do that, but I'm trying to stay positive here.)
So, while the NEA can hand us a tidy, toothless quartet of recommendations for dealing with declining arts patronage, you can count on an American to tell them exactly how badly they're blowing it.
When American dancers were told that the dance world was dying, they just moved in and colonized the museum world.
When we've had generations of theater makers told that theater can only sustain itself in the big city, they started creating a renaissance in the suburbs.
When the musical based on Tupac Shakur's work closed last year, and it was quietly declared that hip hop musicals just don't work, brave Americans said, "screw that". A year later we have a hip hop musical about Alexander Hamilton, and it's the hottest ticket on Broadway right now.
Why would anyone make a hip hop musical about an 18th century Secretary of the Treasury? AMERICA!
See, folks, at our heart, we just don't give a damn, and if you harness the chaos and unpredictability that breeds, we can find new ways to make this theater thing work. It'll be sloppy. It'll be scary. But, damn, it will be fun. And it doesn't require Frank Gehry drawing up $100 million plans and it doesn't need central planning to prop it up.
But, if you simply must have a big, pretty building to look at, then here's all the theater architecture porn you can handle.
Shop Local, February 9-15
Last week, I delved into the Playlist calendar to point you toward listings that are completely Minnesota-made, and damned if I'm not gonna do it again!
In the Age of Paint and Bone, Nimbus Theatre
Marie-Jeanne Valet, Who Defeated La Bete du Gevaudan, Sandbox Theatre
Rehearsing Failure, Theatre Novi Most
Shade's Brigade, Eric Webster
Skin Deep Sea,Workhouse Collective
These Old Shoes, Transatlantic Love Affair
Triple Espresso, Triple Espresso, LLC
