The Claim That Live Theatre is Dying is a Modern Chauvinism
Theatre has been dying for at least 200 years. That’s what the doomsayers have been telling us. Go find critiques of theatre throughout the centuries. You can almost always find someone ringing its death knell. And in some sense, I agree with all of them. Theatre is dying, a long continuous death, for generations now, but not, critically, in its most important, essential sense, which I will return to later. But what does it mean to say that theatre is dying if it’s been happening for so long? Well, it very much depends on the temporal context in which we find ourselves.
Theatre is indeed dying in the West right now because of how it gets funded, which is to say that it doesn’t get funded. Even the social democracies of Europe are slashing funding for public services, the category that the arts are rightly situated within, with the worryingly neoliberal creep of their governments. In the U.S., forget it. Government funding for the arts is a national joke. So we rely on the neoliberal philanthropic model of private donations to nonprofit theatres, dwindling ticket sales across the industry (industry! a problematic frame for theatre), and low interest in buying season subscriptions, a formerly guaranteed money source. Regardless of whether it is for-profit or nonprofit, theatre in the U.S. is attended by all of the constraints that go with running a business. It has come to rely upon rocketing ticket prices, the support of rich donors, and on producing mass-appeal spectacle. The playwright Karen Malpede, in Chris Hedges’ book Death of the Liberal Class, explains what happens when theatre becomes dependent on profit:
Without government support for funding innovation and the non-commercial, the theatre began to institutionalize and to censor itself. The growing network of regional theatres became ever more reliant upon planning subscription seasons which would not offend any of their local donors, and the institutional theatres began to function more and more as social clubs for the wealthy and philanthropic.
That’s the first blush of theatre’s economic problems. I could go on (for instance about how the consolidation and corporatization of theatre has profoundly negative implications for our trade unions, and don’t even get me started about the abysmal state of theatre in academia). But of course there is also the enduring problem of the philosophy of the stage, its sense of purpose, its meaning, none of which are mutually exclusive with the economic problems. They feed each other. As a leftist, I’m always going to emphasize the material realities that distort and pervert our culture, our stories, our sense-making. And distorted and perverted they are indeed. Robert Edmond Jones, that wonderfully verbose romanticist of theatre, wrote in 1941 that “It is our right to be made to feel in the theatre terror and awe and majesty and rapture. But we shall not find these emotions in the theatre of today. They are not a part of our theatre any more.” James Baldwin said in 1987, in response to an interviewer who commented that black people largely don’t come to see theatre unless it is a play with black people in it, that “Well, to tell you the truth I’ve often wondered why white people come to the theatre. There’s very little in the theatre that’s speaking to anybody.”
I submit that the cause for these sentiments has not changed. Of all the shows I’ve seen in the past ten years, from operas to plays to musicals, particularly in the commercial and nonprofit realm, there is very little which I would have been happy to pay for. The productions mostly left me thankful that I got my tickets for free because I worked for the company or I knew a friend. Time well spent? Not if the point is to be changed. A happy exception to this dismal roster, if you will allow me an effusive digression, was a free performance I recently caught, which I would recommend anyone to actually pay for, of Dan Hoyle’s one-man show Takes All Kinds, a work of “journalistic theater” on his part, walking in the footsteps of Anna Deavere Smith’s work of documentary theatre, and truly a magic act of conjuring by Hoyle who allows the real-life voices of the people he interviewed for this piece to flow through him. It really did feel like witnessing a whole new, fully realized human being on stage every time he switched to a different role. Their bright eyes, their crooked smiles, their froggy voices, their subtle dialects, their awkward attempts at humor, it all became real. I was transfixed by their every word.
The political viewpoints of Hoyle’s interviewees he played represented the staggeringly incoherent, frustratingly contradictory, and even unapologetically illiterate politics that has always been central to the American character (though I’m glad Hoyle was able to showcase a relatively adroit Gen Z socialist organizer). But despite this American schizophrenia, there are always profound insights to be had when you truly listen to your fellow citizens. U.S. veterans will often be the most knowledgeable and acerbically anti-military and even anti-imperialist people you can find hanging out in a dive bar. One raggedy chain-smoking bartender in Florida who Hoyle conjured was a veteran who waxed about the towering hypocrisy of American exceptionalism, saying that all empires carry out human sacrifices. The difference now is we try to hide it instead of doing it in the public square. A hardened but lovable convict who Hoyle interviewed after being invited into his home for dinner gave perhaps one of the most morally serious and empathetic exhortations to show radical grace and compassion to your fellow human being — when they don’t deserve it, when they scare you, when they seem totally lost — because this is the source of the only kind of salvation we can ever hope to achieve. A social worker did this for him in prison, it saved him, and now he does the same.
This show is an exception! Of course, not every show needs to be radical, or serious, or political, or full of pathos. But every show should have something to say, it should have intent, an intention beyond “give us all your money or else our executive director is gonna be put in the abjectly miserable position of having to lay other people off instead of giving themselves a pay cut!” Now it’s true, I have my own specific political ideas about what the theatre ought to be. I made those ideas very explicit in this article. But I want to be careful here about maintaining the distinction between art and politics when it comes to the question of whether or not theatre is dying. The theatre is of our culture, it often seeks to mirror our culture, and our culture, I’m sorry to tell you, is decadent and dying. This should be expected of any unrestrained capitalist empire that has found no bottom to its depravity and is totally subject to the deadening effects of the Internet Age, but those are separate matters for another discussion. What interests me here is that we define our terms, as theatre lovers and practitioners, when we say that the theatre is dying. If we mean that theatre, even in its relatively more commercial and popular forms such as Broadway musicals, is an increasingly boutique artform that less and less people are interested in compared to movies, television, and videogames, then yes, theatre has absolutely lessened in its cultural power compared to the days when seeing entertainment necessarily meant you had to go see live performers onstage. If we mean that the theatre of today no longer has anything to say to people that is politically worthy, I would respond that it is an open question whether or not trying to do politics through theatre is a worthwhile frame of operation. As the Marxist author China Miéville said in an interview when contrasting his work with that of the explicitly political Bertolt Brecht:
One of the problems that I have at the moment is I feel like a lot of the discussion about art, particularly on the left, is essentially politics by proxy, and predicated on category error. … If what you mean is, I’m gonna create this amazing piece of work and it’s gonna hold up the mirror, then sure we can judge that and we can say this is a really great success or not. If what you mean is, “I’m gonna mobilize the masses,” then we have to say that Brecht has been an abject failure. Most of the people who go see Brecht plays and love them are not then building the barricades. … I am very, very wary of the idea of doing politics through doing art. I’m wary of it partly because I think it doesn’t work, partly because I think it’s a category error about what art is, and partly because in my experience it very often segues into a really disgusting kind of artistic exceptionalism among artists: “We are the real activists! We are the cultural memory of the people!” It’s unbearable and it’s elitist and it’s disrespectful.
Another way to put it is, sure, put all the radical leftism in your work of art as you please, but if it cannot stand on its own two legs as a piece of art first, if it has little artistic merit, if it’s not any good to watch or look at, then all that politics you put into it doesn’t matter. Being political in your art does not exempt you from aesthetic critique. In regards to trying to “mobilize the masses,” while it’s true that certain militant leftwing organizations such as the Zapatistas perform lots of political plays, their art output is subordinate to their other organizing activities which are more likely to actually bring people into their ranks, namely through mutual aid, trade unionism, explicit political education, and putting guns in people’s hands who are looking for purpose in our fallen world.
But despite the dubiousness which Miéville expressed and which I largely share, I am absolutely not one of these critics who reflexively balks at the idea of there being any explicit political themes in art. “Preachy” is the disparaging word of choice these critics love to use, and overuse, and it generally signals to me that I’m reading a politically inert fuddy-duddy. Yes, of course a political message in a piece of art can be heavy handed and inelegant. But that is a critique which could be made of any other thing that appears in art, not just politics. To stop there is insufficient. The overly emphatic criticism of politics in art strikes me as a lazy attempt to not engage with political questions ever, in art or otherwise.
So these to me are the two main ways in which theatre is dying today — economically and socio-politically. But as I alluded to at the beginning of this piece, it is also not dying, and indeed, is eternal. This is what I mean when I say that it is a modern chauvinism to think that theatre is dying. Yes, it is dying compared to its economic heyday, compared to its former cultural hegemony, compared to the radical theatre of the New Deal-era and the 1960s anti-war movement, and so on. But that is a timeframe of mere decades. And theatre, my friends, is ancient.
Someone once said that even after the apocalypse, if any humans are still around, theatre is the only artform which will come back from that nothing world and still be recognizable to us today. Because theatre is innately human. The extent to which theatre is made to not be human these days is the extent to which I ragefully hate it with all my soul (looking at you A.I.), but I digress. I know this is a cliche, but that’s only because it’s true — we need to tell stories. That’s what happened at the campfires by the trees and in the caves and at the riverbanks over the millennia. You take away all the technology, all our fancy lights and sound and sets and automation and rigging and projections and costumes and props, looking at a person telling a story by being another person feels exactly the same as what it felt like 4,000 years ago. The need is there, and the human body and the mind’s capacity for imagination will fulfill that need through drama. It cannot help but do it.
Don’t get me wrong, there is much to despair when looking at the state of theatre today. But such a state is also one of profound opportunity for those who are grasping for something more. And it will never go away. As Robert Edmond Jones wrote, though in a far more optimistic age than ours: “The only theatre worth saving, the only theatre worth having, is a theatre motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every trace of the photographic attitude of mind … the old lost magic will return once more. … We need not be impatient. A brilliant fresh theatre will presently appear.”
Excellent analysis elegantly stated. I really enjoyed it. Thank you!