Theater is boring.
This is more true than most theater makers are willing to admit. I can not count the number of times I have seen some version of “Our subscriber base is getting old, how do we get young people into the theater?” “It must be ticket prices, let’s do a special rate for people under 30.” Sure ticket prices may be part of the problem, but they can only account for a small percentage. “It must be competition from TV and movies for entertainment dollars.” Perhaps.
Or maybe, just maybe, most theater is boring.
The sad part is the problem is cyclical. Audiences decline and theaters panic. In order to ensure a slower drop off they play safe with their subscriber base (main source of income) and program boring stilted shows they think their increasingly greying audiences want. They are shocked when younger people don’t want this and choose instead to spend their money on a rock show or going out to clubs. More income drops and the shows become safer, and smaller, and more like sitcoms. They become dead and boring. They lose their theatricality and their aliveness.
There are interesting works out there, they are just not the norm. Cirque du Soleil is an expanding global franchise. Not only do their shows pack in audiences, but these audiences are willing to pay a premium price for the experience. Triple digit ticket prices may be grumbled about but they are paid. When the audience leaves the theater there is a smile on their face. Traditional theater, not so much. And it baffles them, these producers at traditional theaters. “We’ve been doing the same good work we always have, why is our audience dying off?”
Perhaps because the same good work has become boring. Perhaps paying $100, or $40, or even $10 to watch a small handful of people, only slightly more interesting than your friends sit around and talk about inane subjects is too much to pay. I can get that on TV, without cable. Fuerzabruta in New York packs in audiences like sardines. Why? The show is not boring. In fact, it is exciting and big and dangerous. Three adjectives rarely, if ever, applied to the typical regional and mid-sized theater.
Making money with live entertainment is hard. It is hard because you are asking patrons not only for their money, but for their time. Buy a painting you don’t like and you may be out a few hundred dollars, but you can just pack it into the closet, or resell it. CD you don’t like? Take it to the used record store. But with theater we have the audience trapped, for anywhere from 90 minutes to 6 hours. This is a not insignificant amount of time that they are never getting back. If what you are subjecting them to is not fucking awesome, then you are doing it wrong.
I am not saying it needs to be perfect. I am not saying it needs to be above critique. What I am saying is that it needs to not be boring. Sure there are exceptions. Theater makers like Richard Maxwell, and a large slice of the New York downtown avant garde, have taken boredom as an aesthetic lens through which to explore the human condition. That is different. Audiences going to those shows know what they are getting into and love it. Ibsen, Shakespeare, Checkov, Wasserstein, and many many more are regularly given mediocre productions of potentially interesting plays by reputable companies. This drives audiences away in a steady march towards irrelevancy.
Shakespeare should be sex, and passion, and sword fighting, and clownish baffoonery. It should be funny and scary and dangerous. Too often it is a pathetic imitation of a middle school English class production. The average non-theater-going public will go to a show because they think they “should” or to support a friend, not because it is exciting. Shakespeare is thought to be boring when his texts are anything but. Yet the productions he gets make me want to quit the entertainment business.
If the show is not dangerous it is boring. If the show is boring it is not worth spending time to go see. End of story.
Dangerous need not mean the audience risks having scenery fall on them. Ibsen, when his plays were first produced, contained dangerous scary ideas. It was feminism back when the very word was terrifying to the establishment. Not the mock fear we have now but actual existential threat. Today the ideas are small and the plays are still produced. And that is the problem. A new translation does not make it exciting.
Why would anyone produce A Doll’s House or Hedda Gabler unless they had found a way to make it big and interesting and dangerous? English class is boring. Mabou Mines did that with their A Doll’s House. It is awesome and has been touring the world for the better part of a decade now. It is big and dangerous.
It is also theatrical. This is another problem rarely dealt with in theater productions. Most are not theatrical. I hear far too many people say something like “what is interesting about theater is it’s aliveness, having real live performers in front of you.” But that is only true if the production is alive. If we just have a few people sitting around a living room discussing the effects of the Iraq war it is not alive, nor very interesting. It is television. Too often bad television. If you want to write and produce TV shows, that is awesome. Go do it! But please, for the love of god, don’t put them on stage.
I’ll come clean. I don’t go to the theater much. I used to. There was a time when I would go see at least, at least, one show a week in excess of whatever I was working on. The problem I would encounter, over and over again, was a sense of having wasted my time and money on a boring TV show. These days, even if the ticket is free, I typically turn it down because I don’t want to waste my time. And many to most potential audience members have had the same or similar reaction. Why pay $50 for one TV show when I can get a month’s cable for that?
Vaguely apathetic middle class white people who speak in liberal talking points is not interesting theater. Nor are any of the other stereotypes of American demographics being paraded around on stage.
For theater to be interesting it needs to be big. It needs to think in big ideas and make broad gestures. It needs to entertain. Somewhere along the line many (it feels like most) American theater makers forgot that we work in the entertainment industry and began a transition to social medicine. Having a play about a cause is fine, but make it interesting. Angels in America was big and theatrical and scary when it first came out. That play is about as cause driven as you can get.
Theater will never go away. There will always be a sufficient amount of grants to combine with people who think they “ought” to go see a play to keep it limping along. But for theater to truly be alive, it needs to reinvent itself and be something that people are banging down the doors and waiting out in the rain and snow to see. It should cause rioting, or at least dancing, in the streets. It needs to be the event that can’t be missed. Because if it can be missed, why not miss it? There will be another, to be missed production, in a few weeks anyhow.
Or perhaps the apathy in the theater is the same apathy which prevents people from standing up for their rights with TSA, or demanding that 9/11 first responders get health care. Perhaps, then, we have exactly the theater we deserve.
