A Preference for Complexity

The Insult of Melodrama in a Supposedly Realistic Play

The marvelous theater critic Walter Kerr famously started his review of Neil Simon’s Star-Spangled Girl with this line: “‘Neil Simon didn’t have an idea for a play this year, but he wrote one anyway.” Simon acknowledged that Kerr was right, that was exactly what had happened.

We are now in an era when Simon’s dilemma has become the motto of online “content providers.” (Note: I am a content provider.) We are regularly advised how to “generate” new “content” in order to “build your audience.” I was listening for the first time (and, I suspect, the last) to a podcast on blogging in which I was advised not only to keep providing content, but to have it take a certain form. Preferably a listicle (God, what a word) with a title that is “search engine optimized” (SEO). In order to garner the most attention from the Google algorithm, I was advised to find a “Google keyword phrase” I wanted to write about, and then create a “listicle” with a title that takes the following form: Odd number + superlative adjective + Google search term. So: The (7) + (Best) + (Sources for Theater Funding). Viola! You’ll find yourself at the top of the Google search engine in no time.

Suffice to say that the title of my last missive to you, “The Nobility of the Quotidan,” didn’t make the Google cut, nor was it a hot retweet on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter). There goes my career as an Influencer.

I receive a daily “newsletter” from a guy who has a platform about writing. It usually consists of a total of one or two sentences that includes a link to somebody else’s “content.” He has more than 40K subscribers (for comparison, I have 58), and is convinced that brevity is the key—that people will open his daily email because they know they can read it in 30 seconds max. It’s like eating a single M & M.

Recently, to my unbridled horror, there has been a spate of articles about using AI to generate “content,” at which point I start to wonder why you have a blog or newsletter in the first place. (Monetization is, of course, the answer—I’m not naive.) Am I the only one looking for some originality, some personality, some insight that can’t be gotten from scraping the existing internet for other people’s ideas?

The point I’m trying to make is that we have reached a stage where superficiality is rampant and people value a high “open rate” (the number of people who subscribe to your newsletter who actually open the email notifications they receive) over the need to actually have something worthwhile to say.

Other than giving me a chance to fulminate like a curmudgeon over our culture (which, admittedly, is like shooting fish in a barrel), what the heck does this have to do with theater, Scott???

Fine. Fine!

In my last newsletter—as you probably remember because it had a 75% open rate which was higher than usual so it must have been good right?— I wrote about a recent production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya that I found beautiful. And the reason I found it so affecting was its complexity. By “complexity” I do not mean “difficulty,” or “obscurity” or “convolution” (no matter what thesaurus.com tells you), I mean “complex” as the antonym of “simple,” I mean having greater depth than a child’s plastic pool.

Chekhov (and all the great playwrights) do not reduce life to a battle between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. It’s more like the Yin-Yang symbol of Chinese philosophy, where each “side” of the symbol contains a substantial portion of its opposite. That’s life, isn’t it? It’s not a Manichaeistic cosmological “struggle between a good, spiritual world of light, and an evil, material world of darkness” (thanks, Wikipedia’s definition of “Manicheism”). If it was, life would be so much easier.

People love melodramas. In the 19th- and early-20th century, it was probably the most popular genre of theater, packing thousands into performances across the country; and today, many of our superhero films create a similar moral universe separated into Good Guys and Bad Guys. But what makes melodramas really cook—and this has always been the case, and is all that is really needed to justify their popularity—is elaborate spectacle. Trains onstage, burning buildings, ice floes, sea battles, or, today, green-screen special effects, and Tom Cruise riding a motorcycle over the edge of a cliff. We’re not going to one of these movies to question the nature of good and evil in our society, we’re there for the explosions and the ear-splitting soundtrack. And I have no problem with that. Heck, for the longest time, Con Air was my favorite movie, so I can’t claim some aesthetic high road.

The problem arises when melodramatic simplicity makes its way into a play without elaborate spectacle, and instead claims to present a realistic view of society. That’s when people start complaining about being “lectured at” or “hit over the head.” These complaints, couched in the melodrama of today’s political parlance, may be at the root of the unlikely narrative that there is a 30% drop in attendance in theaters across the nation due to the presentation of “woke” plays. I must admit I find this narrative doubtful as an explanation, but there have been at least four people in my X feed who blame the OSF struggles on this. One claimed he had no issue at all with colorblind casting, and liked the plays of August Wilson, but Lynn Nottage was evil incarnate. (I was like “Lynn Nottage? Really?”)

It is easy for me to dismiss these complaints as racist (or transphobic, or…), and many do, and sometimes I do too, and no I am not about to launch into a David Brooks-like discussion of the moral superiority of empathizing with those with whom we disagree. But I am going to wonder whether what we’re seeing has anything to do with an unconscious audience preference for complexity. Are we creating mostly realistic plays that are Manichaean struggles between the forces of darkness and the forces of light that leave our audiences feeling insulted? Or is it just another example of the so-called “polarization” of our culture?

I can’t say for certain. But I will say that to me an awful lot of contemporary American plays have been frustrating because they seem simplistic, by which I mean one-sided. Usually, this takes the form of a protagonist that is painted to be entirely sympathetic and “good” (meaning “on our side”), and whatever pain they endure comes from without and is entirely undeserved—I’ll call these “saint plays”; but it can also take the form of melodrama in which there is clearly a “side to be on” and a “side to be against”—I’ll call these…well, hell, they’re actually saint plays, too, but with more visible and powerful “bad guys” who are usually racists or greedy capitalists or corrupt politicians or whatever is serving as the villain du jour. Saint plays lack moral complexity—the Yin-Yang is composed of an all-white part, and an all-black part. And for me, that makes the play uninteresting. Even juvenile. Life (and thus art) is not a thumbs up-thumbs down thing.

So the question is whether the techniques that makes a social media post “SEO-friendly” has leaked into art forms like theater that were built on complexity but that now insult people who want art to help them understand their complex world. (I’ll say this, though, audiences would do way better being insulted by truly vacuous joy rides—starting, but not ending, with all jukebox musicals. But I digress.)

I find myself thinking about Tevye in A Fiddler on the Roof (as one does), who demonstrates complexity every time he struggles over a daughter’s choice that goes against “tradition.” He works through the problem in a two-handed manner, alternating between one argument, and then, “on the other hand,” something that makes it more complex. Until he gets to his youngest daughter, who wants to marry a Cossack, and then “there is no other hand.” But even that decision he arrives at after going through the process, he doesn’t start there—it is the final conclusion, and ultimately one that he can’t totally stick to. He is caught between the love of his daughter and the demands of his God, and he can’t easily resolve the conflict. That’s what makes it rich, and complex, and perhaps is why so many productions of A Fiddler on the Roof get done each year. It is dialogic, which is the basis of drama. Each side gets a voice. But Saint Plays are one-handed from the start, a dramaturgical Captain Hook.

On one hand, that’s a problem; on the other hand…

I will now try to devise a Google-friendly title to increase my chances of getting this post read. Something like: 3 Great Ways to Offend the Audience. (OK, maybe not 3.)