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The only time I was detained by police was in January 1969, when I attended the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69 along with my grandmother. The Ann Arbor police shut down the production after the nine cast members disrobed in a “free-wheeling adaptation and radical interpretation” of Euripides’s The Bacchae.
Here’s an account from the local newspaper:
“With the audience only allowed to enter two or three at a time, it was an hour before all were in place, some sitting on the floor, some on chairs, some on scaffolding. At the door, all were asked to enter in the spirit of meditation. Once inside, they found a gym mat in the center, with actors uttering strange noises, gyrating, rolling their heads, crawling through the audience on hands and knees, whispering in ears …”
Time magazine dismissed the show as “shamelessly alive from the waist down and shamefully dead from the neck up. Eloquence of speech is abandoned for voodoo gibber. The play is reduced to a trampoline for directorial acrobatics.”
I loved it.
Local and regional theaters are in deep trouble. With production and operating costs up sharply, attendance down by a quarter or even half, increased competition from other forms of entertainment and the average age of the audience hovering around 50, it’s not surprising that many companies are cutting staff and pruning schedules. To take one example, New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater will not renew its lease on the building that had been its home. It will, instead, perform in a number of partner venues in partnership with local civic, cultural and nonprofit organizations.
Some blame Actors Equity for cutting back the pay scale waivers for theaters with fewer than 100 seats or California’s state law AB 5, which required theaters to reclassify independent contractors as employees, in some cases doubling the amount that the state’s performing arts companies pay their talent and staff. But the problems go far deeper.
For local and regional companies, ticket sales almost never cover costs. Between 40 and 80 percent of their funding comes from grants and donations. Anyway, new productions require up-front outlays for scripting, sets, costumes and design long before ticket sales begin to generate revenue. Meanwhile, the death of the subscription model for selling tickets eliminated a key source of reliable revenue, while local newspaper’s decline reduced theatrical coverage.
The golden age of the 1960s, when funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford, Mellon, Rockefeller and Shubert Foundations gave rise to some 400 regional theaters including Minneapolis’s Guthrie; Washington, D.C., and Houston’s Arena Stages; and Yale Rep, has receded far into the past.
Especially striking is the declining presence and visibility of experimental and avant-garde theater—which challenges traditional theater conventions and norms in terms of structure, narrative, subject matter, staging, representation and modes of expression.
Radical alternatives to theater as usual haven’t disappeared—Culture Clash, the Chicano comedy and theatrical troupe flourishes, and the Living Theater still exists—but the defining elements of experimental theater have been absorbed and commercialized by mainstream theater and other forms of media even as its radical sensibility has, I fear, been lost.
Today, it’s common for theatrical productions to break the fourth wall—the imaginary barrier separating performers and spectators—and for plays to reject linear storytelling and make extensive use of flashbacks and dream sequences and even to abandon narrative altogether and simply set a mood. Political and social commentary, challenges to existing norms, improvisation, integration of various art forms (including projections and multimedia) and innovative use of space (such as multilevel sets) are widespread. Representation of previously marginalized voices and stories, too, is pervasive.
And yet, the hallmark of the theatrical avant-garde—the attempt to create a new sensibility and outlook, epitomized by the experience I underwent at Dionysus in ’69—has faded. So, too, I fear, has been dramatic theater’s ability to reshape self-understanding.
The three pillars of the American theater—Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller—each expanded the boundaries the American imagination and American sensibilities in ways that went far beyond those found in the movies and other more popular and accessible forms of entertainment.
O’Neill not only introduced the techniques of realism to the American stage, tackling difficult subjects like alcoholism, drug abuse, family dysfunction and mental illness with honesty and depth and experimenting with expressionistic dramatic techniques, he gave voice to a new sensibility, involving existential despair and demonstrated how the theater could offer a critique of American capitalism, history and identity.
Miller revealed how dramatic theater could serve as a vehicle for social, political and economic critique without becoming mere agitprop. His gift for creating complex, flawed and relatable characters disillusioned or crushed by the pursuit of material success, his analysis of economic and societal pressures and patriarchal expectations on family relations and his critical reflections on the American dream demonstrated the possibility of creating a democratic form of tragedy that focused on the lives of ordinary women and men. Meanwhile, his analysis of past examples of hysteria and paranoia and the manipulation of fear and suspicion by those in positions of power showed how a historical lens could be used to comment on contemporary issues.
Williams, along with Alfred Kinsey, was among the architects of a revolution in American public thinking about sex. His frank and nuanced portrayals of human desire, his explorations of sexual repression and frustration and the psychic consequences of living in a society with rigid and confining sexual norms, his openness in addressing nonnormative sexualities, including the homoerotic, his vivid portraits of female sexuality and his candid analysis of how sexuality is tied to power, emotional manipulation and struggles for control has shaped all subsequent artistic treatments of sex. In addition, his explorations of human vulnerability and the fragility of human relationships, his lyrical language and use of symbolism and poetic expressionism and his embrace of a Southern Gothic sensibility, with its flawed and eccentric characters and themes of decay, despair and the grotesque, greatly expanded the boundaries of American literature.
A recent New York Times opinion piece entitled “One of America’s Proudest Cultural Institutions Is Imploding Before Our Eyes” provoked quite a response. The opinion piece declares that “The American theater is on the verge of collapse,” and “this crisis requires federal intervention. That’s right: The American nonprofit theater needs a bailout.”
Read the comments and you’ll quickly see that most readers consider the op-ed grossly wrongheaded. Most readers blame regional theater’s plight on theater directors and playwrights. They note that the audience “will pay through the nose for Beyoncé or Taylor Swift,” but today’s “Plays are almost exclusively lectures about capital-I-issues, which are tedious to sit through.” Or as another comment puts it, “Theater’s problem is that the audience it really wants to serve are critics and social justice warriors.”
Negativity pervades the comments. Here’s one example:
“Much of the blame lies with the theaters, offering preachy, politics-laden stuff that drives a message home with a sledge hammer. Seems to me it’s possible to have plays of substance—with great production values aka real sets—which don’t pander to the Disney-minded crowd and at the same time provide exciting, character-laden, narrative.”
The reader responses are startling in their lack of positivity. They describe plays that are tedious to sit through and decry stunt casting, the shallowness of the plays’ political statements and the allegedly relentless hectoring on race and gender issues.
If the theater world has lost the Times’ readership, its problems are even worse than I imagined.
Live theater’s underlying problem aren’t, I think, merely a matter of affordability (though it’s shocking to realize that the top ticket price for A Chorus Line in 1975 was $15) or rising production costs or competition from other forms of entertainment. It is a change in audience preferences that, I fear, can’t be solved by more reasonable pricing, more relevant themes, more diverse stories or more immersive technologies or more innovative marketing—though all of these will surely help. Without a college-aged audience, the future of live theater is bleak.
I wholehearted agree with one reader who wrote this: “We need to explain what’s unique & essential about theatre: how it mirrors human interaction without the (evident) interference of a narrator, editor or camera lens; how it reveals the way people really speak to each other—how they learn the truth about & how they deceive their loved ones and themselves.” Those are messages that colleges and universities are capable of doing, if they chose to.
At its best, theater transports us into another world that is more emotionally intense, psychologically complex and dramatically rich than our own and leads us to reconsider our outlook, attitudes and values. Live theater can transform our sensibilities. I speak from firsthand experience.
When Shakespeare was born in 1564, there was not a single theater in England. It was only during his youth that the first English theaters since Roman times opened. Those theaters served as a vehicle for bringing key issues to life to an extraordinarily broad audience that included an amazing share of London’s population, including servants and apprentices. Theater was so fraught that it’s not surprising that several of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights were arrested (and tortured) for libel or met suspicious deaths.
Yet, even though London’s theaters were closed in 1592, 1604, 1642 and 1648, the theatrical world bounced back, not just because it offered refined or bawdy or comedic or tragic entertainment, but because it was in the theater—as the literary critic Toby Erik Wikström demonstrated in the case of 17th-century France—that audiences grappled with the pressing issues of the time: slavery, royal authority and the earliest stages of globalization.
Live theater won’t die. After all, local and regional theater companies serve as the minor league and farm teams not only for Broadway, but TV and the movies. It’s where our leading actors and actresses get their start and cultivate the skills that they would bring to the little and big screens. But dramatic theater needs life support, and colleges and universities are well positioned to help.
Provide stage space and parking to nonprofit theater troupes at a minimal cost. Integrate these productions into the curriculum. Do what the CUNY campuses do in New York: reach agreements with the theater companies to offer student tickets for no more than $20 (and often for free).
Let’s not leave audience development to the theaters themselves. These hard-pressed organizations have other urgent demands on their time and resources. Campuses need to do a much better job of serving their communities, for example, by filling the void left by the decline of local newspapers and taking on the task of covering local news. But one relatively simple and straightforward way to engage in community service is to offer a helping hand to local, community and regional theater companies. God knows they can use our support.
