Live wire

Editorial

What is the state of play?

First of all.

We have to do something. Our immediate physical needs, and (time and temperament permitting) spiritual wants, preoccupy sizable sectors of our attention. Call it the human predicament. Placed in a world we never made but required to sort of act as though we did, we plod through shadows, half-recognized verities, and ill-balanced passions, all the while knowing that the game is rigged, that no matter how poorly or brilliantly we play it eventually we will not pass Go again. We will one day no longer collect $200.

At least that’s why I go to the theater. It’s the place where other humans tell me stories about myself if I can open my mind to the possibility that all stories are mine, that everything everyone has ever thought, or felt, lives and exists within me in some potential unfolding of mind and soul, some imaginative reality—quite different from the usual 2+2=5 scenario of daily life which we’re all compelled to grin and bear.

So what, from my vantage point, is the state of the theater? More to the point, what is our state? We’re talking about plays, after all. Children play, with all their temporarily unshaken brilliance. Us grownups have to be phenomenally creative in order to locate this same sensation of play, what with such notions doggedly transformed in a society-wide conspiracy into the imperative of work (which is supposed to be something different). Children find an intuitive path for reproducing their world in a more true, instinctive, and insightful fashion that they, innocently, actually perceive as work. Indeed, it is work to play. Playing is the best work in town—as people of the theater know well.

But if our natural state is also the state of the play, it ain’t particularly pretty at the moment, by and large. Unless you’re an instinctive authoritarian perhaps harboring a self-flattering, harebrained assumption that you’re naturally going to land on the winning side of the iron heel, or you’re indulging in the cultural moment’s unique opportunities for combining ignorance with indulgence—let’s just throw indolence in there for the alliterative trifecta—then from a very real point of view, things have gone haywire.

While some of us, myself included, look to art for a way to transform society as well as our selves, to produce alchemy, to hold up a mirror to which others will reckon (See! Look! We could all be shining and transcendent if we could stop being so inherently stupid and destructive!), at this point I’m entirely unconvinced that it will ever happen.

It used to be that, at least, culture could be processed more or less in rational time. Now, for whatever achievements of our species that have come about via our rapid-fire global communication, we’re mired in irrevocable doublespeak, disengagement, and a lamentably sad lack of truthfulness. Trip on that: we’ve found a way to send smoke signals and messengers in instantaneous time. Now, flip on the tube and glean the content. We have the vocabulary and venues of genius, yet we’re largely hamstrung and idiotic.

None of this happened overnight. We had it coming. No matter how you voted, no matter which play you preferred, or for what you advocated, we have all drifted together. We all play the same game now. There’s no other game in town. Those of us who write for a living have been walking a shaky line for years now, trying to make connections between our society, its culture, and whatever is percolating within our own skulls. So much of our national discourse has been reduced to infantile emotionalism that any writer today who is thinking at all is crashing again and again into this great reef of forgetfulness, mindlessness, and a startling sense of accelerated decay.

On the other hand.

There are a ton of great plays out there, and performers capable of breaking your heart and putting it back together for you, and technicians whose dazzle will haunt your dreams for years, and artists who can reach across the membrane that separates our secret selves from the world, making us whole for fleeting instants that we can recall on the darker nights to come.

And there is fun, hopefully. There are kicks to be had. The theater has always been a place to have an experience with someone we love, someone with whom we might be looking to reconnect, or connect for the first time.

These are really good about the theater.

(Side note: Theater audiences have, largely, forgotten their rights. Turn off your cell phone? Yeah, that’s reasonable. Don’t crinkle a candy wrapper? Come on—what delicate flower laid down that edict? Is it still all right if I laugh?

(Is it entirely productive for a cast of theater performers to do their thing in utter silence? They’d have to tell me, but by and large I find them pretty hardy souls. They are performing. They need an audience to react. They didn’t get into this thing to work in a vacuum. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that they really enjoy being looked at, examined, resonated with.)

What about the product on the stage? A mixed bag, as always. There were moments earlier in this young century when it looked as though political protest in the theater, in variegated forms, was going to take hold and, you know, change things. But us artsy types have been kicking against the pricks for a very long time with tepid results at best. There’s no reason to stop now—except when a society seems impervious to allegory, metaphor, or the blindingly obvious.

Maybe even then there isn’t reason enough to stop... You’ll have to sort that one out yourself...

But you can’t talk about the state of the theater without discussing Mammon. You might also have noticed that money plays a big part in our lives and our theater. (An unfortunate slip of the keyboard; if money plays, I don’t necessarily wanna.) It’s not always pernicious, though. On a certain level, money is just a promise that I will come through on this proposition, although these days money doesn’t so much swear as unapologetically lie.

More specifically, a mid-sized theater manages to stay open but challenges its audience only within carefully proscribed parameters. Is that good? Hell, no. Of course not. A theater several steps up in the food chain only occasionally offers immediacy and transcendence, leading a generation to believe that the problem with the theater is them, the audience. If it’s done on a grand scale yet still doesn’t connect, then what other answer should they come to?

But it’s not all bad. Not by a long shot. We have small companies establishing their own spaces or thriving in rentals, doing good work and smart business because the intersection between the two is as much a matter of common sense as not. We have brilliant, shattering new work. (We also have new work that seems to exist as a parody of the idea of caring about much of anything at all, which is as close to artistic criminality as the concept itself allows.)

Ultimately here’s the point: For me, the theater bears an uncanny resemblance to life itself. There are long stretches of drudgery, lip service, and those uniquely halfhearted moments in which we each wonder why no one else is applying live wire to this stuff of existence.

And then it happens. Something clicks. It happens in real life, too, fortunately enough, and we see it mirrored on a Friday night at the theater, and we say, “Ahh. That’s right. That’s why I keep on doing this. This is why I keep working and striving and trying to understand, when everything around me seems to whisper: Shut down. It’ll be easier that way.

So.

The state of the theater is troubled, and excellent. The state of our state is run-down, and glowing. One suspects it was always this way, with only the details varying from decade to decade, century to century. We are who we are. Sometimes it is positively thrilling, although there’s a great deal of slogging to endure before we get there. But those moments of passion, especially those stretches when we’re no longer alone, are what keep us coming back, whether it’s to the theater or to the drama that unfolds when we open our eyes in the morning.

Headshot of Quinton Skinner
Quinton Skinner
Quinton Skinner is the theater critic for City Pages. He is also the author of the novels 14 Degrees Below Zero and Amnesia Nights, as well as non-fiction books on fatherhood and rock 'n' roll.