The Theatre, The Theatre - What's Happened to the -

Stephen Leigh Morris of the LA Weekly explains it all for you in American Theater's Failure of Nerve.

If you want to see an exercise in recycling, just turn to the regional theater openings announced in American Theatre Magazine. To watch the majority of new plays in the established venues of New York and around the country is to hunger for the kind of electrical charge that, in their times, made Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and August Wilson the buzz of America’s coffee shops, cocktail parties and subway lines. Their plays, frequently denounced by critics and audiences, were indispensable to the lifeblood of the culture and its conversations. For that same vitality today, we turn not to the theater but to TV, to the likes of Jon Stewart, George Clooney and Oprah, who, under the weight of colossal commercial pressures, show far more bravery than most of our institutional theaters. The underlying causes of the blandness in our theater are more nuanced than the obvious “commercial pressures” that everyone talks about. Compounding the problem is an identity crisis. Theater gets so little respect because it has so little self-respect.

N.B. - another fine read: Playwrights' Theatre? by George Hunka. Why fine? Because I agree with him! Subjectivity noted.

8/1/03

Overheard conversation in a Palo Alto cafe:
(two women, ages 55 - 65)

A: I saw that play - Homebody/Kabul just before I left.
B: What did you think of it?
A: I didn't- I didn't think it was successful.
B: But they go to Afghanistan- This woman?
A: Right. You never know whether she dies or disappears or...you know, pulls a Kurtz.
B: Arrogant, naive Westerners flying themselves headlong into something they know nothing about.
A: Reminded me of a Paul Bowles novel. The Sheltering Sky? But I have to tell you about the play. Well- it was nearly four hours long! If you're Shakespeare-
B: Or Mozart-
A: Right. Anybody else- forget it. You don't get to write four hour plays