There is nothing like the kinetic energy of live actors treading the boards to excite the mind’s passion. That is why we cannot leave the theater to its decline. The political implications of its failure are serious ones.
Did anybody catch this year’s Tony Awards?
I thought so.
Actually, I didn’t watch the whole thing either. And I don’t think we missed much. The spectacle was largely banal and the nominated plays and players, for all I knew them, could have come from the Kabuki Theater. Kinky Boots, a musical adaptation of a less-than-renowned 2005 film about a drag queen who comes to the rescue of a shoe factory, won the award for best musical, while Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike, a Christopher Durang comedy about three emotionally stunted siblings having a hard time growing up, won the award for best play. Among the other nominees were the usual revivals (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, and Pippin), and adaptations (The Trip to Bountiful, Matilda the Musical).
All in all, my brief exposure to this year’s Tony Awards did not convince me that the American theater is in terribly good form.
In response to which you may well be thinking: “Does it really matter? When I want entertainment I’ll go see Star Trek or watch Game of Thrones. Broadway is for Manhattan elites and tourists. Movies and television killed whatever vitality it used to have. It’s dead. May it rest in peace.”
But I think we should care that the mainstream American theater, concentrated on Broadway and the shows it can afford to send on the road, is in rotten shape. The political implications of its failure are serious ones.
Political implications?
Am I being alarmist?
Well, consider philosopher Mortimer Adler’s argument in his unjustly neglected minor masterpiece, Art & Prudence. Taking his cue from Aristotle, Adler maintains that those entertainments favored by all or by the majority, those that have the widest and deepest impact upon common life, are of concern to politics, because it is in the context of such entertainments that the polity gathers as a single community to contemplate its collective self-understanding. Popular entertainment, in other words, is where a polity goes, as a group, to do its philosophizing. Thus it is necessary for those concerned with the political good (which means everyone, not just politicians) to seek richly satisfying popular entertainment.
Writing in 1937—interestingly, two years before Hollywood’s annus mirabilis of 1939 when it released Gone With the Wind, Wuthering Heights, and The Wizard of the Oz—Adler declared that the cinema was “the theater of democracy.” Already by the mid 1930s, the cinema had replaced the stage as the most popular medium of mass entertainment. Accordingly, Adler devotes hundreds of fascinating pages to a close discussion of the impact of the cinema upon morals and politics.
So why, then, am I not recommending that those concerned with the political good pay attention to cinema? For surely, the cinema’s dominance of the stage today is even more complete than it was in 1937, and television’s is arguably now more dominant than both.
My answer is that we should pay attention to cinema and television. But at the same time, we shouldn’t let the traditional theater go to seed. As late as 1967, as David Mamet reports in his book, Theater, “there were seventy-two new Broadway plays produced. In 2009 there were forty-three, of which half were revivals.” There are reasons in the economics of Midtown real estate, as Mamet notes, that make it difficult these days to mount a successful Broadway play. But I believe the chief reason, the most significant political and moral reason, why the traditional theater is ailing is that it has lost the sense of its essential power.
In the preface to his 3 Plays, Thornton Wilder confesses that in the late 1920s he began to lose pleasure in going to the theater. The theater seemed to him awash in sentimentalism. It continually failed to draw upon its “deeper potentialities.” Wilder explains those deeper potentialities this way:
“The novel is pre-eminently the vehicle of the unique occasion, the theatre of the generalized one. It is through the theater’s power to raise the exhibited individual action into the realm of idea and type and universal that it is able to hold our belief.”
Wilder in his dramatic work famously eschews conventional staging and narrative expectations. In this he is not so unlike Shakespeare (“Have you ever noticed,” Wilder asks, “that in the plays of Shakespeare no one—except occasionally a ruler—ever sits down? There were not chairs on the English or Spanish stages in the time of Elizabeth I.”) Wilder’s, and Shakespeare’s aim, as it is the essential aim of all theater, is to place the individual action starkly against the backdrop of the transcendent so that we might see and understand its significance the more clearly. Stage furniture and other realistic props, not to mention mindless spectacle, root us in place, and keep our minds from ascending to that communal contemplation that is the glory of the stage.
Movies and television, at their best, can inspire a similar contemplative magic. But there is nothing like the kinetic energy of live actors treading the boards to excite the mind’s passion. That is why we cannot leave the theater to its decline.
The American theater here in the early 21st century is still awash in sentimentalism, and even more in spectacle and the posturing of progressive politics. Those concerned with our political good—and again, that means all of us—should not neglect it. I’m not advocating censorship. What I’m advocating is simply the encouragement and promotion of works that will inspire a healthier self-reflection than is typically seen on the contemporary American stage.
I will leave it to you to consider what forms that encouragement and promotion might take.
This essay was first published here in June 2013.
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All one can say is “good luck.” A century ago Americans went out for entertainment; now technology lets them stay home and watch whenever and whatever they wish. A century ago Americans participated in their own entertainment which is now almost exclusively passive; local theatre built audiences for larger theatre. One hundred years back, American schoolchildren were made to memorise poetry and prose; those skills are dead, and the memorisation needed to act in stage plays is far more demanding than what is required in cinema (i have acted in both media). it is also partly a matter of taste – slightly more than a century ago most middling-sized (and even some small) US cities contained an (unsubsidised) opera-house, now even the Kennedy Center (presumably a major US theatre in its capitol city) tends towards musical comedy. Poor Abe Lincoln didn’t survive his visit to the theatre, but overall the theatre isn’t faring much better.
I write this in 2023- The points made in this article are truer than true: The American Theatre-(DRAMA) is dead. I cannot think of any playwright in the past 20 or 30 years that rises to the levels of Tenesee Williams, Eugene O’neill, Arthur Miller…….. At best the drama has been reduced to hollow one-dimensional political propaganda pieces usually “politically correct” But the obvious needs to be stated: The American theatre is a mirror reflection of the dominant culture of which it exists. Current culture is morally, spiritually,. bankrupt.
I know so little of theater that I initially thought maybe these plays were from this year, but gradually realized not.
Although I can grant there is something unique in live theater Broadway, etc really is mostly about one city. A few plays gain national attention, but most don’t. If live theater is so important than maybe we should pay more attention to various regional theater awards that seem to exist outside the NYC area.
Unfortunately, movies – meaning things you go to a theater to watch – also seem to be becoming obsolete. I have gone to several movies in the past few years and never has there been more than a handful of people in the audience. A few times the audience consisted of me and one other person. Steven Spielberg, who I suppose might be the most popular filmmaker in the world, just made two major films in the past few years and they both failed. I suspect that most artforms and cultural institutions that we take for granted and have been part of our civilization for a long time will in time cease to exist.
The belief that culture might be maintained or revived in the big cities of today is misguided. If one wants to revive culture it would start with classical education and a focus on local theatre.
And awards ceremonies are simply a woke self congratulatory celebration to see who can reach the lowest ebb in a flow toward Gomorrah. The true, the good, and the beautiful are about as dead in NYC as they were during Mao’s purge.