Is Theatre A Luxury?

News from the LA Times:

 "Bloomberg, the New York-based financial news giant, is shutting down its Muse brand of cultural journalism and has laid off its theater critic. The shake-up was part of a company-wide reorganization that came down on Monday and resulted in layoffs around the newsroom. Bloomberg plans to continue to cover the arts, but with an emphasis on luxury. In an email sent to employees on Monday, Bloomberg editor-in-chief Matt Winkler said that the company has decided "to scale back arts coverage and no longer use the Muse brand." He said Bloomberg will align its leisure reporting with its luxury channel on its website, and with Pursuits, its magazine for wealthy readers."

Decreasing arts coverage and dumping the theatre critic has been going on for a decade or more in major magazines (some of which no longer exist) and newspapers. Perhaps not cheerful news (unless your show has been recently panned.)  But also not much new in it either.

But here's what caught my eye:  "Bloomberg plans to continue to cover the arts, but with an emphasis on luxury...  He said Bloomberg will align its leisure reporting with its luxury channel on its website, and with Pursuits, its magazine for wealthy readers."

This is first of all a clear acknowledgement that New York City has become an enclave for the rich, the only ones apart from tourists who can afford theatre tickets.  But Bloomberg's reach is far beyond New York City or even Washington,.D.C., another city that is pushing out its middle class. (In New York as in San Francisco, tech money has filled the space vacated by financial sector downsizing after the unpleasantness of 2008, while in Washington it's big money politics.)

Apart then from the national trend of the disappearing middle class, there's the reality living up to the cliche of the arts as only for the wealthy.  It is not generally true, especially when your definition moves away from arts events that are more glitz than substance much of the time anyway.

But it's a stubborn cliche, even here on the North Coast.  A North Coast Journal music column used the dubious mechanism of noting different kinds of music events by the footwear that characterizes their supposed audiences. For an event sponsored by the HSU Music Department, the footwear described were expensive loafers.

I'm not sure the writer ever attended an HSU Music event, where the audience is usually students, faculty, other musicians and a scattering of others, none of them wearing expensive loafers. This may be the audience that used to go to the Arkley Center (though not often enough apparently), I wouldn't know, I've never been there.  But anyone who has been to any theatre event on the North Coast must know that you are far more likely to see some pricey footwear in Wildberries than anywhere plays are produced.

Money and the arts don't go together like a horse and carriage.  They are more naturally enemies than allies, as a lot of bad art suggests.  While having a rich family helps young people survive long enough to establish a career in the arts, the arts themselves attract audiences and passionate devotees from all income classes.  They fascinate and inspire a self-selected audience and set of practitioners.

But it's also a product of our cultural insistence that theatre is nothing but entertainment, and entertainment is a luxury.  Theatre can be and should be a lot more central and important in people's lives and to the community.        

Revival

How do you make an old play new again? Moving the era of a Shakespeare play, especially closer to our own time, has become a strategy so common that it now seems reflexive, as predictable as the movement of a knee tapped with a hammer. Following the screen success of Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of a few years ago featured teens in prep school uniforms carrying cell phones. But such elements depend on surprise and especially wit, as well as relevance, and their effects wear off quickly. Some work better on screen, but not always even there (Almereyda's postmodern Hamlet with Ethan Hawke was less successful.)

Sometimes, changing the period can be illuminating, but this depends on an original, relevant and brilliantly applied vision. However, there are a couple of other ways to revive older plays and make them more relevant to contemporary audiences.

One way--which is the essential way--is to play it honestly. The most difficult task for actors in Shakespeare and other well-known plays is to convince the audience that the characters are experiencing these events for the first time--that they don't know what happens next. Actors enact emotion, and this is the core of both the performance and the audience response. If the production, and particularly the actors, can make it real, the audience will experience it as new and relevant.

In general, a production that finds the vitality in the play can't help but to make it relevant to the times, because it will engage an audience living in these times. Playwright Terrence McNally spoke recently about the process of creating Ragtime, The Musical (he wrote the script), first produced on Broadway in 1998 and revived there last year, just nine years after the original production closed. He made this perceptive comment (published in the Nov/Dec 2009 issue of The Dramatist) about the revival: " Everything will be the same as before but everything will be different, too. That's because we have a different country than when Ragtime [the novel by E.L. Doctorow] was published and Ragtime, The Musical premiered. If Ragtime seems different to you this time around it's not because we've re-written it. It's because this is a society that has re-written itself."

The Angels Are in the Details

In the difficult case of HSU's recent production of City of Angels, let's start with two transcendent moments. First, Chris Hatcher's rapturous opening song and dance, as the screenwriter Stine. Then as a soon-to-be tragic but fictional singer, Jamie Banister's torch song that was a tour de force of singing and acting.

These two moments alone suggest the potential there was in the talent assembled on that stage. Ethan Heintz (Stone), Brandy Rose, Kelly Whitaker, Anthony DePage, Kelli Simmons Marble...from top to bottom, the cast had talent to burn, and performed brilliantly at times, capably always, and when it became necessary all too often, gamely.

But while the show had many elements that worked well individually--the mixed media, the taped voiceovers, etc.--the flaws in combining them, and in some very basic production elements, were serious and obvious. Audibility was the most obvious--not only spoken lines (in a script famed for its verbal wit--hard to get laughs for inaudible jokes) but even songs could not be heard easily or completely--pretty serious for a musical. Audience members in various parts of the theatre on both opening night and two performances later remarked on the audibility problem.

Part of the problem in hearing was caused by the egregious disturbances in moving scenery on and off during the dialogue and even during the singing--sometimes distracting visually as well as aurally. On opening night, this included an unfortunate stumble in the dimness, which might have suggested intentional comedy, a riff on Noises Off! perhaps. But the overall effect was amateur hour, embarrassing enough in junior high.

Speaking of the dimness, the play was not only hard to hear, it was hard to see. The suspects might include attempted film noir lighting, and the need to keep what was projected on the screens visible. But the effect was obscurity.

Add to that a complicated double story, which this production did not uncomplicate in the way the original production did--by differentiating the Hollywood fantasy elements with strict black-and-white costumes and set, from the "real" Hollywood in color.

So what happens when you can't hear, see or understand the play? Sooner or later you give up trying, and you wait for the end.

The only published review of this show I've seen was Beti Trauth's in the Times-Standard, and though my emphases are different (I wouldn't be so hard on the musicians), I pretty much agree with her premise that the serious problems with this show were largely due to trying to do too much. But there was also perhaps a problem of point of view.

For one thing, the impact of design on the actors and musicians, and their relationship. The action was played on floor level, but also largely on platforms that made a rough U on stage, much of it off floor level and pretty far upstage--away from the audience. This likely contributed to audience problems hearing and seeing. But that singers were often so far away from the orchestra--which was literally buried under tarps in the orchestra pit-- may have been the source of other problems: I wonder just how well the singers and the musicians could hear each other, which is crucial to adjusting volume, as well as playing and singing together, or (as seemed to go awry at least once on opening night) even being in the same key.

So adjusting to the points of view of the actors, singers and musicians is necessary. But the basic point of view that I advocate for is that of the audience. Plays are produced for various institutional reasons--most particularly, educational institutions produce them primarily as educational experiences for their students. All theatrical institutions also have constraints--financial, professional, bureaucratic, etc. And artists often want to push the envelope.

Nevertheless, if an institution opens its productions to the public, and particularly if it charges admission fees, then the production has a responsibility to the audience, and the production is subject to basically the same kind of judgments as all productions are that charge admission to the general public.

So to achieve clarity and keep the emphasis on the play and the performances, if it is necessary to simplify, simplify. There are always going to be difficulties, and difficult choices. A miking system to solve the audibility problem might well have been too expensive, I don't know. And I doubt that the actors could have projected all that much better, especially from so far away upstage. But without microphones, a simpler set closer to the audience might have gone a long way. I do know that Humboldt Light Opera produced some excellent and fully audible shows on that stage (Chris Hatcher was in one--Titanic.)

Theatre is hard to do. But I think of those lines in the movie Bull Durham, defining how to play baseball: you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball. In theatre, the audience wants to see the play, hear the play and follow the story of the play. The production's first job is to make that easy. It's a simple goal and probably as difficult to achieve as superior baseball, but I wonder if the focus itself doesn't get lost sometimes. In any case, the devil is in the details. But then, so are the angels.

A final note: I wrote the publicity copy for this play (it's still all there on HSU Stage), as I do for all HSU productions, so by mutual agreement of all the parties involved, I don't review these shows for the North Coast Journal. (It would be nice to make a living from one job, but after all, this is Humboldt.) So why am I writing about this HSU show now? Well, I've done that before, following the implied rule of everyone involved in a production, that if you have problems with it but aren't in a position to change things, you deal with it honestly after it closes. And then, in what is a not very well kept secret, theatre people themselves talk about a show in ways that no mere published critic would dare.

Audience Beware

Let this be a warning that should be posted in the North Coast Rep lobby during the run of Henry IV, Part 1: Audience members are warned to keep their seats during the show, and those sitting in aisle seats are cautioned not to lean too far into the aisles. For at numerous and unpredictable times, actors will be running at full speed in the aisles, from behind the audience towards the stage, some of them armed with spears. Failure to heed these warnings could result in serious injury.

Theatre is supposed to be dangerous, but short of being physically dangerous to the audience. There was an epidemic of open flames on local stages a few years back, at least once in close company with highly inflammable material that I uncomfortably witnessed. Audience complaints, producer sanity or more active fire safety people--or some combination of these--put that practice out.

Some people complained of noxious fumes, particularly cigarette smoke, coming from the stage, so non-tobacco smoke with posted warnings is now the norm. The latest fashion that probably needs to be addressed is the increasing use of the audience's part of the theatre by actors during the performance. The stage is no longer enough. Actors declaim from the seats and the aisles, and particularly, make their entrances onto the stage from the "house."

There are certain dramatic advantages, or there were before this became commonplace: the element of surprise, the novelty of wrapping the show around the audience rather than limiting the perspective to audience facing the stage.

However, there is a problem: the audience. The "house" is their space. If the audience stays off the stage, they have a reasonable expectation that the actors will not invade their space, preventing them from movement within it. This is more than etiquette: it is a matter of health and safety, particularly when--as in the current North Coast Rep production--the house aisles are regularly used by actors running onto the stage. Sometimes they do so shouting, which merely threatens temporary deafness to the unwary. But they are moving at such heedless speed that the next patron who feels the call of nature at the wrong moment, may wind up a casualty of the long-ago English wars being depicted.

I hope it does not take such an injury, and the resulting lawsuit, to suggest that this practice be abandoned.

First Principles

Let's Hear It for the Audience

I've just finished writing a review for the San Francisco Chronicle of British playwright Michael Frayn's new book, The Human Touch, which is a book of philosophy. Though he writes nonfiction, fiction and screenplays, Frayn is most famous in the U. S. for his comic farce, Noises Off (which I saw on Broadway, and had a seat so far from the stage that I vowed never to economize again with rush tickets; I see Broadway plays so rarely that it makes no sense to ruin the experience with a bad seat) and his intellectual drama, Copenhagen (which I would love to see on stage; I saw the much truncated film version, and I admire the play I read.) Though this book is about the nature of knowledge and even reality, I see the playwright in it--or such is a premise of my review.

Though the central point of the book is a central preoccupation of many of his plays, it may have been especially inspired by aspects of the quantum physics and the ensuing philosophy in Copenhagen, which is about two giants of atomic and quantum physics, Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, in World War II. The uncertainity of what they each said about the Allied and German atomic bomb programs remains an international mystery and inspired the dramatic action of the play. (The mystery and Frayn's involvement in it became the basis of an elaborate hoax perpetrated on him, which he describes with good humor in his little book with David Burke, The Copenhagen Papers. )

However, the point of mentioning all this here is a passage I came across in the introduction to Frayn's first volume of his collected plays, and wanted to share. It's about the role of the audience in theatre. Here's Frayn:

"I sometimes feel that the skill of audiences is not always sufficiently noted. Some theatregoers arrive late, certainly, some of them comment on the performances aloud and wait for the laugh-lines to cough. But the suprising thing is how few behave like this, and how many understand the conventions and are prepared to abide by them. To find two, or five, or ten good actors to perform a play is difficult; to find two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand good people to watch it, night after night, is a miracle. So many people in one room who will sit quietly and listen for two hours---not calling out slogans, not breaking down under the strain of so much communal self-discipline! To be a member of a good audience is exhilarating."