On this day of the Tony Awards, I have come to the conclusion that I love theater, but I don’t like it very much.
Does that seem like a contradiction? Is it even possible to love something while not liking it? Psychology Today says yes: “Loving someone is more a reflection of how you feel internally about a person, whereas liking them is an appreciation for who they are.” That’s a useful distinction.
“Internally,” in my heart, I love what theater has been in the past: the purposes it has served, the qualities it has exhibited, the innovation it has implemented, the boundaries it has crossed; and I love what theater could be in the future: the potential to become a theater that is imaginative, profound, engaging, immediate, enlightening, stimulating, sustainable, and artistic.
But I am not “in like” with what theater is today. I especially don’t like theater’s institutions (arts organizations, educational institutions, unions, producer groups) and systems (hierarchical nonprofit and commercial structures, centralized of casting, unsustainable standards of living) that seem to disempower artists, drive them out of the profession, control expression, trivialize creativity, and put markets ahead of artistry.
Lyn Gardner, writing recently in the theater newsletter The Stage, paints a picture of the situation for theater artists in the UK that might as well be describing the situation here in the US. Gardner quotes actor Judy Hesmondhalgh who, while speaking about the UK Universal Credit System, could be talking about the status quo in toto: “You could hardly come up with a better way to stifle talent and creativity from a sector full of self-starters, who want to do nothing more than use their creative skills to make stuff. Stuff that in the longer term contributes not just to the creative economy but to the wider creative health of the country and is necessary for so many industries.” Gardner calls on us to “make more noise, more usefully, to support freelance creatives.”
That’s what I want to use Theater / Ideas to do: make some useful noise.
Hope flows from the innate creativity, optimism, cooperation, imagination, and determination of many, many people, artists and non-artists alike, from the past and from the present, whose ideas have been forgotten or went unnoticed. They were trailblazers, entrepreneurs, and visionaries who have given us a glimpse of new possibilities to create a theater worthy of its history.
Watch the first 1:27 of this marvelous documentary about one such trailblazer, Harold Clurman. Clurman rocked the boat because he loved the theater. So do I. Get ready to rock!