An Artist’s Battle with the So-called “Uselessness” of Theatre
Questions concerning theatrical art in the United States of America in the 21st Century
I am a junior Theatre and English double major at Northwestern University. If you too are interested in these areas you may have read articles that defend the place of art in society. The articles I’ve stumbled upon in my limited experience tend to point the way toward the good that the circulation of stories can do for societal improvement or the heart. I came to this school with some naive, youthful, and admittedly narcissistic impressions about the purpose of art in modern society. In some of our first classes as freshman in the theatre program at NU, we were asked:
Why do we make theatre? What is its purpose?
The question that bubbles beneath the surface for me during nearly every conversation about the purpose of theatre is why we are so persistently focused on its justification. The reason I am so fixated on it myself is that I struggle to find an answer that I can truly believe. Part of this is because my answers are thoroughly disconnected from most of the theatre I see and even from the way that I watch theatre.
I was raised in a society that leans heavily on television and movies for release. In my youth, I watched the Disney channel and Animal Planet obsessively. Now I watch much less television that many of my peers. I am of the Netflix generation. My peers can talk about Orange is the New Black, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, Arrested Development, or The Office with a wealth of knowledge that astounds me. It’s everywhere. Even as I say I watch less television, I cannot claim to be completely free of it.
If television can do what theatre can, why must theatre continue to exist?
As both a person and an artist, I have tended to the subversive sometimes for the sake of it. I have an unusual haircut. I wear loud, patterned clothing. I squawk about the damage dealt by capitalism and American industry. I bury myself in poetry. I just finished reading Ulysses. In the recent years of my life, I have felt myself coming up against something. Only recently have I been able to truly articulate what it is I feel I am fighting.
I feel a great burden in choosing to be an artist. And I sense the doom of the art form I love. This is because in the communities that I know, it appears tragically difficult (not impossible, necessarily) to simultaneously get people into the theatre and to use theatre as a medium for vivesective, cultural reflection. I believe part of this is due to the nature of the entertainment industry my generation has grown up with in combination with the logic of a capitalist economy.
The customer is always right. You have to get people in the door. Theatre audiences are dying out.
On this campus, student theatre struggles to make itself relevant. We talk a lot about getting students in other areas of the school to come to shows but struggle with articulating our pitch. Advertisement. There’s more theatre to see than there are audiences to pay for it. There are probably a million reasons why this is happening. Partly perhaps because theatre is an artform that has struggled to grow with the technology revolution. Partly perhaps because modern audiences have adjusted to seeing their stories on screens. Partly because seeing films is cheap or costs nothing on the internet in comparison to the inevitable expense of the theatre ticket.
The problem I have latched onto is the issue of value equivalence. In selling tickets, theatre becomes a commodity of entertainment. Audiences will pay for heart-swelling stories of love set to catchy music, affirming tales of bourgeois morality, and even intellectual pieces they can celebrate on social networking websites as tokens of their intellectual capacity and expansive cultural appreciation. Some audiences will pay to feel like they are contributing to the gradual, ever-important cultural changes woven into fables that challenge normative gender roles or sexuality.
It all comes down to: what kind of theatre will you pay for? The flaws inherent to the kind of theatre I want to make all funnels back to the ordering hand of the economy.
I don’t think people should pay for theatre. The government probably won’t pay for it if I am highly critical of its politics. Corporations probably won’t pay for it if I am highly critical of their existence. If I create this kind of theatre, my financial situation exists outside of it. I have to support myself with other means if I am to create this kind of work. If I can support myself. It is likely that my lack of resources could stifle my voice.
So the work of questioning, the work of criticizing, the work of cultural progression is being left in the dust of capitalist valuation. It does not fit into our personalized budget because it satisfies a need that is not based in the individual, but in our culture and society. Cultural critique does not fit into a business model based on individual desires and needs. Nor should it.
Yet the wheels of the American industry continue to turn. I stand with my peers in the wasteland of the culture industry waiting for a rebirth of art, staging plays that satisfy our hedenistic souls. Am I doomed if I make theatre that refuses to allow you to escape? If I force you to confront the contradictions of our culture?
