Light Cue 23

There was a debate going on about New York Centrism in the theatre blogosphere. Some good points were made. Some bad points were made. Tempers rose and then settled again. You know, a blargument. The most interesting response came from Dan Trujillo who decided to put the proverbial money where his mouth was and create an artistic response to the discussion.

What I enjoy about his piece is that it is a genuine response. It takes an event and processes it, then creates something born of the decay. Something new and beautiful birthed from the dead matter of an argument. An understandable reaction from a playwright who is also a new again father. And there is something more to it as well.

Dan concludes his piece by citing his source material. The various posts on the argument, and this article from November 2001. New York Theatre is Dead it cries over and over again missing its own point. New York Theatre is not dead. New York Theatre, like all theatre, is speaking to a specific localized audience. The theatre is not dead. The audience is. Now before anyone gets all up in arms let me say that I am including myself here as the audience. For I am part of that audience. And I am as guilty of my own death as anyone else.

I was talking with my friend Yuval, who is directing the site specific Italian piece I mentioned, yesterday. We got to talking about the differences between European and American audiences. Now, obviously these were generalizations, but I think they are important, taken with the understanding that they contain no nuance whatsoever. The basic difference, we thought, came down to a matter of engagement. The European theatre goer comes to a show asking “What are you going to show me?” While the American(New York) audience member sits smugly saying “I dare you to break past my jaded disillusionment.”

There is a general unwillingness to truly engage a work. “You can’t do that to MY opera” or “They are DESTROYING Shakespeare” is heard all too often. But what is truly being destroyed? Perhaps it is the quiet set of assumptions that the audience has built up that are being challenged. Shakespeare will never be “destroyed,” his works will still be there on the shelf like new waiting for the next generation to open them up. So what is “destroyed” is an unwillingness to engage in a true negotiation with a text. What is destroyed is a sense of comfort. But whoever said art should be comfortable. Even “experimental” works are a specific genre that conform to certain rules so an audience knows what they are getting into when they go see “experimental” theatre.

New York theatre is not dead, but it is produced for a dead audience. Does this mean theatre does not work for a New York audience, of course not. It works all too well. The creators being a part of that audience know all too well the tropes and gimmicks to use in order to illicit reaction from the jaded New Yorker. It works. But it works on the surface. The typical New Yorker matches, in many ways, the geography of Manhattan. Divided on all sides from its neighbors, it presents a tough and inhospitable exterior, while secretly hiding within it the glorious repose of Central Park. My problem with a lot of theatre in this city is that it speaks to the Divide, or to the grime, but never approaches the soul.

The origins of Western Drama are in religious ceremony. As far from that beginning as we get, as secular as the medium becomes, that origin is always there. That foundational place is always already in the text, an echo weaving its way in and through every production. The production may embrace or reject that but it is always there.

In the days following the trade center attacks, I saw the soul of New York bared. Tremendous acts of giving and hope and honesty that made my native hippy Californians look like cynics. But all too soon the masks went back on, the facade returned and life went on. But life went on too calmly I feel. There have been countless docudramas and documentaries about that event. I have lit more than my fair share of WTC attack inspired works. But there is always a distance. The facade is always there. The docudramas hide behind a tough gritty exterior while the abstract works flow with the rivers. But nothing I have seen truly captures the heart, that raw open spirit that is jealously guarded and kept safe. It is as if the event itself has been passed over in favor of recycling old modes of storytelling, even though the event itself destabelized the very foundation of those modes of storytelling.

Everything returned to normal. A little less awake. A little less engaged. Perhaps we drank a bit more and said a bit less. A local tragedy was turned into a national symbol. The scared little monkeys in Michigan with their guns and militias run around screaming for the heads of the terrorists, while we calmly go to work every day in the buildings where anthrax was delivered or over the bridges that are primary targets. We think nothing of it. And neither does our art. And that is precisely the problem.

I am not sure of a solution. Part of this is my impetus to work in Europe and see if there is some kind of dialog I can work up in my projects. Are there aspects of visual storytelling inherent to each side of the Atlantic that the other can learn from? Are my idealized notions just that, or is there some truth to the situation? What is that truth? What is the role of the American artist in a global community that increasingly disapproves of America. These thoughts keep me up at night. At least when I am not up drafting.