Newsletter: Theater / Ideas for another week
January 16-22, 2025
Believe it or not, I wrote some stuff this week. Amazing what having back pain will do for one’s creativity.
I decided I needed to stop thinking about The Rooted Stage as a book, and instead think of it as a series of blog posts. I wrote the first one:
The Rooted Stage: Beginnings (Part 1)
“Meanwhile, back in the Year One…” – Jethro Tull, Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day
So how did the theater get where it is today? And how could it be different? These are the two questions that form the foundation for this series.
The importance of the first question is described by Alfred L. Bernheim, whose book The Business of the Theatre, published in 1932, is considered definitive by many. “To understand the theatre of today,” Bernheim writes, “one must go back and study the developments from which the theatre of today has evolved. Hence we must examine the theatre of yesterday and trace the evolution of present practices and customs.”
The second question–And how could it be different?– is my own, and reflects my own dissatisfaction with the economic environment in which theater is created today, one that is increasingly desperate, dysfunctional, and financially unsustainable for the artists who make it. And so as we examine previous forms that American theater has taken, it benefits us to keep an eye out for practices that were abandoned for historical reasons but that might be restored to our practice today.
"Snakes on a Plane" is a better movie than "Oppenheimer," or Why Artistic Categories Can Make It Easier to Talk about Art
In this one, I talk about how we might have more interesting conversations about theater and the arts in general if we could agree on a basic taxonomy.
“Pretend with me for a moment. I bring you into a room where you find a Red Box, a Blue Box, and a Yellow Box. In front of them is a pile of poker chips also colored red, yellow, and blue. I ask you to sort the chips into the box with the matching color. Easy peasy, right? There’s no value judgment about which color is “better” than the others– there’s no hierarchy. It’s a simple matter of categorization….
Like the red/yellow/blue boxes I mentioned above, I am not setting up a hierarchical value structure with my terms. This isn’t about creating piles of bad/good/better/best, it’s about identifying kinds of “art” with different purposes. To help us remember this, I will employ Collingswood’s definitions, which are useful, while using entirely different terms that (I hope) will minimize defensive reflexes. First I’ll define the categories, and then I’ll discuss why they might be useful.
Art as Craft
Instrumental Art
Art as Entertainment
Art for Reflection
The More Things Change…
Back in 2011, I wrote a lot about Holly Sidford’s study for Grantmakers in the Arts called “FUSING ARTS, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy.” Sidford showed that the richest 2% of cultural organizations in the US received 55% of charitable contributions and grants, a ratio that was worse than the income inequity in the US as a whole.
Well, I just discovered that, in 2017, Sidford did a followup study to see if anything had changed in the ensuing years. And indeed they had! As a result of a “growing numbers of arts foundations [that] have become concerned about the lack of diversity, equity and inclusion in the nonprofit cultural sector….spurred, in part, by national conversations about economic inequality, racism, LGBTQ rights, class bias and various kinds of unexamined privilege in society overall,” things had actually gotten worse! Instead of the richest 2% getting 55% of philanthropic support, in 2017 they were getting 60%! God knows how much they get today.
I also wrote about how I intend to survive the next four years by reducing my social media consumptions to almost nil, checking in on MSM only briefly to make sure we still have a country, and spending my time tending my intellectual and spiritual garden. Why I felt the need to publish this, I don’t know. You’d do better to read Alan Jacobs’s “You Don’t Have to be There.” And to illustrate: I could spend about a week just chewing on the three quotations Jacobs provides in another post called “Humans.” The quotations are from Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), François Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532), and Martin Luther’s commentary on Genesis 3 (1545). You know: old stuff.
Finally, a book recommendation: Michael H. Shuman’s Put Your Money Where Your Life Is: How to Invest Locally Using Self-Directed IRAs and Solo 401(k)s. If you’re tired of locking up your retirement investments in the stock market and instead want to do something good with it, this book might get you thinking. It’s not exactly a page-turner, but it can be s spur to your imagination. I think it has possibilities for how to fund sustainable theaters, but it might just be a way for some of us to help out our kids with their student loans or credit card debt. This might end up being a longer post later.
That’s all for now!