Theater Ideas Newsletter

November 28 2024 throught December 4

Update: I continue to enjoy writing on Micro.blog, even though I haven’t done as much as I’d like (Thanksgiving, doctor appointments, etc). I will continue to put everything—short posts and long—there. As far as moving the newsletter, that option is available to me only after I have been at Micro.blog for a month, which means January 2. So you will continue to receive the weekly compendium from Substack for the time being.

What you’ve probably noticed since I shifted to Micro.blog is that my writing is starting to mix in personal stuff more than before. I’m not only writing opinions about theater. This reflects my own personal journey, as I’m becoming much more interested than in the past in broader questions of meaning, philosophy, and how we live together and might do so going forward. This seems one of the benefits of retirement—having the time to reflect on what I’ve learned in my 66 years.

As Oliver Sacks wrote in his last book, Gratitude: "I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together." (November 29, 2024)

Not that I’m quite at old age yet—Sacks was 80 when he wrote these lines—but the sentiment stands.

Hearkening back to my previous post about “why theater,” which examined whether liveness was valuable enough to justify the expense and inconvenience of live theater, I discovered this quotation from Susan Nieman’s interesting book The Left Is Not Woke: "The arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold." That’s an argument for the arts in general, and not theater specifically—the same thing could be said about film or TV—but it is good to be reminded that our information society needs the power of metaphor to enliven life and make ideas vibrant and memorable.

In 2017, Alan Jacobs wrote an essay entitled “Wokeness and Myth on Campus” (the essay is more generous than the title sounds) for the New Atlantis magazine. In it, he drew attention to the writing of Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who “divides our civilization into two ‘cores.’ This is his term for two cognitive, social, and ethical networks, ‘two different sources of energy active in man’s conscious relation to the world.’ One of these cores is ‘technological,’ the other ‘mythical.’..” The technological, Jacobs explains, is “a stance toward the world that is instrumental and manipulative, in relatively neutral senses of those words. The technological core is analytical, sequential, and empirical.” The mythical, on the other hand, “describes that aspect of our experience ‘not revealed by scientific questions and beliefs.’ It encompasses the ‘nonempirical unconditioned reality’ of our experience, that which is not amenable to confirmation or disconfirmation….[T]he mythical core describes our most fundamental relation to the world. It is our metaphysical background, the elements prior to our manipulation and control.”

While Jacobs’s article applies these concepts in an interesting way to political clashes on campus (and the article is well worth reading), for me, it was yet another reminder that the core of the arts resides firmly within the mythical, and some of the pushback against political theater may have something to do with productions that become more technological than mythical. In some ways, I hinted at this in my August 2023 post “A Preference for Complexity.”

On a personal note, winter began earlier than usual here in our corner of Massachusetts. Since we arrived a couple years ago, winters have been mild and tended to start relatively late. Not this year: November 30th, and much more today:

On the same day I took that picture, I quoted Ernest Hemingway’s late novel Islands in the Stream:

“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.”

(deadpan) I feel seen.

Finally, my long piece of writing builds on an essay entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi” by the late arts leader Diane Ragsdale, in which she describes what can be learned from the success of the small, independent jazz label Pi Recordings. Ragsdale writes:

I’d much rather live in a community with a sustainable number of boutique arts organizations than one with a deluxe mall featuring four high-end department-stores (the “flagship” orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet companies) that suck up the majority of the resources and a bunch of strip malls made up of undercapitalized retail chains and mom-and-pop shops that either saw their best days in 1985 and haven’t been able to make improvements since, or were formed in recent years and (while perhaps promising) are struggling for attention, customers and capital.

My post is called “Diane Ragsdale Provides a Thanksgiving Pi” (see what I did there?), and I hope you’ll spend a few minutes there. And afterwards, you could do a lot worse than to spend time working through Ragsdale’s ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.

I hope you had a pleasant Thanksgiving! See you next week!