Christmas Eve Thoughts About Theater

Merry Christmas to anyone reading this blog who celebrates. Also, Happy Hannukah to my fellow Jews who are now four days into latkes, driedels, and other arcane artifacts of Judaica.

Just wanted to throw out there that my friend and I have been talking along lines that were started by me and my father about the future of theater. My dad's view (from the perspective of a computer programmer and the founder of a tiny internet startup) is that the problem with theater right now is its inability to scale--there are high costs getting in and an artificially limited return (a 99 seat theater can only make Ticket Sale x 99 x however many nights--and Showcase Code might add further limitations, etc. etc.). His solution, as an internet guy, is to follow the logic that created Theater on the TV and create Theater on the Internet. Richard Foreman tried something like that this month, live-streaming rehearsals of his upcoming play.

There's something to that, and there's something not to that. After all, the one thing the theater has going for it is liveness--which is why I'm objecting to fourth-wall twentieth-century isolated creations (by the way--my own productions so far have failed to do that to a certain extent, although Orchestration was one such experiment--I kicked the audience out of the theater at the end. It made more sense in context). Broadcasting over TV or over the Internet kills that in the same way that the fourth wall does: it crystallizes it, and kills the danger of doing something dangerous.

Of course, Saturday Night Live, Whose Line Is It Anyways, Mock The Week, The Daily Show, The Colbert Report still manage to capture something of that. They have live audiences, and they're responding to their live audiences to allow a bit of chaos.

So that's one route to go, in terms of scaling.

But another place to look is the music industry. Music has two prongs: one is the music itself which, like film, is a recorded product easily distributed; the other is the live performance, the concert. In music both of those scale. Why? Because we in America have a concert-going culture. So local concert halls, if they have a good enough reputation, can count on being full on a Friday night. And they can bring bands on tour.

Why does this system work?

1) Bands are easy to tour: a decent concert hall will have most of the equipment they need, so they just need to bring themselves, their support team, and their instruments.
2) Most bands are not tech heavy or visual heavy--so long as the acoustics are in, the rest of the show is purely their musical talent.
3) Concert halls are simply fun places for young people to be: they can do whatever they like while the music is going on, and they can drink copious amounts of alcohol if they so choose. It's a social event as much as it is a music event.


So if theater ensemble wanted to tour the way bands did, they'd have to do a few things:

1) They'd have to strip away all of the complicated technical elements so as to have the simplest set-up possible.
2) They'd have to have a flexible set-up that doesn't require a formalized system of etiquette.
3) They should be comfortable with an open bar.
4) They'd have to be in conversation with the audience.

Who does this? Improv groups. Jazz ensembles. Rock bands. Stand-up comics. All viable forms of performance. A stand-up comedian does not rely on internet or television broadcasting to survive (although once he becomes successful, this is a viable way of becoming a huge figure). An improv group doesn't need lights and sets to make their comedy funny. And rock bands don't mind trashed audiences. Any theater ensemble that can shed the dead weight of tradition enough will find itself light enough to travel, and light enough to be viable.

Of course, there needs to evolve a system to handle this sort of touring. Small music halls or Improv performance spaces can accommodate other forms of performance, so long as we assure them that it is worth their while.

Theater and Interactivity Pt. 1

I'm trying to lower my word-count for posts here, so as not to kill anyone foolish enough to try and read my ideas.

I was talking with a friend of mine here in Prague (I'm here studying temporarily) about theater, and he told me that the kind of theater he wants to create isn't so much him creating theater as it is him creating a pretext for theater to be created in the community.

What with my whole "culture is conversation" and "art should be responsive to the community" stances, I was very pleased, and enjoyed the idea. It has inspired me to look at that aspect more. I don't know if that's all I want to do, and I don't know how to do it entirely, but it's a lead that I'm really interesting, and that's that.

But it got me thinking about responsiveness in theater, which has come up for me at various times. Responsiveness in this case means responsiveness in the moment, not a general sort of metaphorical responsiveness.

We've always had this kind of responsiveness. After all, improv is an art form built around audience response. Whose Line Is It Anyway could be seen as the biggest success of theater on television. It takes what we love about theater: watching the actor think and feel in real time, and simply puts them in front of a camera. Whose Line Is It Anyway is for improv what SNL was for sketch comedy.

In the brick-and-mortar theater world, improv also continues to be a successful and lively part of action. Most comedians on television have come from a strong background in this--and the brick-and-mortar pedigree is still a mark of talent. The fact that Stephen Colbert comes from Second City Improv counts for a long way with people, in the way that other people's brick-and-mortar theater experience doesn't in the film/TV world.

And I am starting to think that this success is only going to get bigger.

We talk about theater's losing share in public culture often in terms of its competition. People have ruminated on the ease, comfort, and privacy of watching television. When I talked to my dad about theater, he (a software engineer) looked at theater and came to one conclusion: theater is struggling because it doesn't scale.

But what was he comparing it to? He didn't look to the world of television or film. And he was right not to. After all, statistics seem to show that movie-watching is stagnating. Television, on the other hand, is a little harder to assess. Why? Because television is moving to the internet. Internet is the growing source of entertainment and culture (I say culture as well) so Internet is the biggest competition to theater.

Talk about the 'competition' is not new: George Bernard Shaw was talking about what a theater needs to do to compete for the attention of viewers (one solution: comfy seats). Bertold Brecht argued along similar lines (one solution: let them smoke cigars).

At any rate, if there's one clear defining change between the Internet and what has gone before, it is the internet is interactive. This parallels the growing love of video games. We enjoy engaging our mind into what we're doing, and interaction lets us influence what we're doing. But theater is interactive too. So the theater has an opportunity: to stand as an interactive, communal entertainment.

Now, the internet will always win points over us in convenience. But then again, don't DVDs and films win over movie theaters in convenience as well? What we win over the internet is a sense of life and community.

But at the moment, our habits of theater aren't interactive. A playwright creates a play (usually alone), he takes it to a theater company, which decides everything in advance, and this is presented to a silent audience in the dark part of the theater. So the challenge of theater is how to combine the ingenuity of the artist with the contributions of the audience.

I'll leave it there for now, and think about where I've seen it applied and such, and discuss more tomorrow.