Whither the American Theatre?
Valentine Theatre(Photo: Jetta Fraser)
by Dr. David Montee
Dr. David Montee was a theatre instructor at the Interlochen Center for the Arts for 30 years, chairing its theatre program for 21 of those years. He is the author of two books, Translating Shakespeare: A Guidebook for Young Actors, and Don't Put Your Daughter On the Stage? Dr. Montee is a member of Actors' Equity Association, and has directed and performed in New York, Boston, and regionally in well over 150 productions over the course of his 50-year career in the American theatre.
As the international Covid pandemic grinds on, the so-called "woke" debates deteriorate on both sides, and World War 3 peers at us like the worst nightmare from out of our collective psyche, it seems a little disproportionate to wring our hands about the future of the American theatre. However, as someone who devoted an entire professional life to it, I'm afraid I can't avoid it, no matter how hard I might try. My perspective has altered somewhat since becoming largely an observer (in retirement) instead of a regular practitioner. For whatever it's worth, this is what is forming from those observations:
Western theatre in the Greek Golden Age was born with the primary purpose of unifying its culture, not dividing it. That's not to say that thorny issues between factions of the populace weren't thoroughly aired; but those conflicts served as both a context--and a pretext--for ultimately coming together, at least in rational discourse that admitted differing opinions, rather than drawing deeper battle lines in the sand. Aristotle's conception of catharsis--the therapeutic effect of a shared theatre experience--depended entirely upon meaningful revelations of what unites us in the human experience, rather than what partitions us into cultural or political factions.
It seems to me that too much of America's current approach to the theatre experience seems bent on exploiting our differences rather than our shared values; it seeks to focus on our grievances toward "the other side" for dramatic controversy and effect, rather than attempting to explore the means of discovering common ground. Our differences in perspectives become the ending point of the theatrical experience rather than its initiation; social conflict becomes the sole theme rather than the context within which controversial issues and themes are illuminated, and perhaps resolved....whether comfortably, or with some resultant dramatic cost.
Take, for one example, Shakespeare's problem play, All's Well That Ends Well, a play with a surprisingly modern sensibility in that it resides in neither the realms of strict comedy nor tragedy. A common take on the play in today's contemporary "enlightened" culture would probably tend to focus primarily on a number of things in production: non-consensual tricked sex, the arrogance of class warfare, unredeemed misogyny, the unliberated female psyche (when contrasted with our much-improved modern viewpoint, of course), etc., etc., etc.
But what was Shakespeare's primary concern in the play? (And what, perhaps, should be our own?) Forgiveness. And I don't mean any facile acceptance of misogyny, nor maintaining any smug satisfaction with the status quo of class differences, nor a determination to keep gender in its proper place; but instead, a frank depiction of the reality of all of those matters as they existed at the time of the play's creation (and still exist in aspects of our own culture)--and within the context of that depiction, an exploration of possible paths, however rocky and uncomfortable they might be to tread, toward forgiveness. Forgiveness, and a step toward understanding and unification between injured parties. For without that final step, the dramatic conflict examined becomes merely sensational, polemical, and largely meaningless--at least in Aristotelean terms.
Too many of today's playwrights and auteurs (without naming names--I think they might be recognizable to many) are all about the sensationalism of showing our divisions in all of their ugly starkness; but what they aren't about--at least the majority of the time--is suggesting the necessity of reaching out, of understanding, of finding common ground.....and yes, of forgiveness of those who hurt us through their inability to see the world as we see it. And achieving that goal through either laughter or tears, depending upon the genre within which we choose to explore those divisions.
Too much of today's theatre has become politically and socially pedantic, accusatory, precious, and self-congratulatory for its proper and unimpeachable stances; a forum for patting ourselves on the back for how socially correct we are when compared with those shallow folks who have foregone occupying the seat next to us in favor of watching Nascar or The Bachelor on the tube--instead of helping us realize that they are just as human as we are, with similar loves, fears, and insecurities.
If contemporary American theatre fails to find its way back to that shared and unifying experience that was the essence of the Greek theatre from which all of our work was born, audience interest in anything but mindless spectacle--bread and circuses--will continue to decline. We can blame that decline on Covid, the superficial media environment, and various other problems that continue to inevitably arise as the world spins on--but that's a convenience that prevents us from confronting the real issues that are leading to increasingly empty auditoriums, especially in many of our more ambitious regional playhouses.