Bubblegum

Recently a colleague wrote to me about seeing a professional show currently opening here in Seattle. His overall assessment of the show was that it was good-- good acting, good designs, good directing, good themes-- but that it was still lacking. He said it reminded him of bubblegum: "Sure it has flavors of racial struggle or LGBT oppression or meta-theatrical-revolution. But then you chew on it for a couple hours, it loses all flavor, and it ends up being tossed out with the program."

Just a few days later, I picked up Peter Brook’s The Empty Space again. I first read The Empty Space in my Introduction to Directing class in undergrad, just over ten years ago. As a young theatre student, the book was read and notated based on what I thought was important, but mostly what the professor highlighted in class. Flipping through the pages, my margin-notes are quite sparse. I'd wager this is due to the simple fact that as a 21-year-old whose primary exposure to theatre had been in the cornfields of Iowa, I just didn't know what Peter Brook was on about.

Reading through the first chapter, “The Deadly Theatre,” I can attest that my newly underlined passages and notes are much more prolific and emphatic. As a working theatre-maker with many more years of theatre viewings and designs now under my belt, I profoundly recognize Brook's definition of Deadly Theatre over the course of my career. He indicts every person involved in creating a theatrical production --from actor to director to playwright to audience to critic--no one is innocent in the creation of deadly theatre.The two passages about the role of the director (and designer) and audiences in creating deadly theatre stood out to me and give me pause as I look around at the Seattle Theatre community, my theatre community.

Let us first look at Brook's complaint against designers and directors:

"Deadliness always brings us back to repetition: the deadly director uses old formulae, old methods, old jokes, old effects; stock beginnings to scenes, stock ends; and this applies equally to his partners, the designers and composers, if they do not start each time afresh from the void, the desert and the true question --why clothes at all, why music, what for? A deadly director is a director who brings no challenge to the conditioned reflexes that every department must contain." (39)

The word that stands out to me in that passage is challenge. I think back to the work I did to apply feminist theatre theories to theatrical design practices and am reminded of Dolores Ringer's four questions of design:

1. In the production I am currently working on, what are the explicit and implicit messages about power in gender relations?
2. How does visual language contribute to these explicit and implicit messages?
3. How do I as a woman and designer relate to the visual language and the world around me? How do I visually process information?
4. How have my relationship with other artists in the theatre and the creative and working process I use been constructed? (299)

Ringer specifically charges designers with always questioning what has brought them to the the visual language they are using. What in their lives and their sensibilities, but also what in the world and society as a whole underpins the meaning of our design? If we do not challenge ourselves as designers, how can we possibly expect to be challenging our colleagues or audiences? And, as Brook so pointedly says, an unchallenged audience is a part of the problem.

Brook begins his criticism of the audience with something beyond their control: the price of tickets. He is not making an argument for affordable tickets to increase audience access, but says that the ticket price represents a buy in from the audience that they are wary of for fear of being disappointed: "...the risk is too great, too many disappointments." But that is merely a prelude to his larger complaint of audiences: that their complacency around and acceptance of Deadly Theatre is perpetuating that cycle of disappointments. He baldly says, "If good theatre depends on a good audience, then every audience has the theatre it deserve" (21).

This brings me back to the use of bubblegum to describe "good" theatre that is, ultimately, just Deadly. Good technically and in content, much of the theatre of Seattle, as my colleague put it, is ready to be thrown out with the program in only a few short hours. The theatre I have seen in Seattle over the last two years have left me with only a handful of productions I am still thinking and talking about. Two of the three were touring productions. Seattle leaders and artists that I chatted with early on all said similar things about how the theatres taking risks were our fringe theatres. Unfortunately, they also noted, Seattle audience's fear that they might end up at a “bad” show in a fringe theatre and so still head to the larger, professional houses instead of the cutting-edge fringe theatres when looking for an evening of theatre. Thus, the status quo doesn’t change in the upper echelons of our theatre community because it is being reinforced through ticket sales and, unfortunately, standing ovations.

What then can be done?

At this point, I sense a dire need for the professionals of Seattle to talk earnestly about our community and the theatre that we are producing. In  a recent interview with City Arts Magazine, theatre-leader Valerie Curtis-Newton discusses the Seattle theatre community's tendency to praise artists to their faces but then to turn around and criticize them behind their back. This isn't helping our community of artists and that needs to change. Brook even discusses the need for open, honest communication between professionals so that we can all grow and be better. Even more than that, though, much of the Seattle theatre audience are other artists and practitioners. If we're afraid to be a part of the conversation to raise up the standard of our product than we are, in fact, being served the theatre that we deserve.

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Brook, Peter. The Empty Space: A Book About Theatre; Deadly, Rough, Holy, Immediate. Touchstone: 1995. Print.

Ringer, Delores. “Re-Visioning Scenography: A Feminist’s Approach to Design for the Theatre.” Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics. Ed. Karen Laughlin and Catherine Schuler. Madison, Farleigh Dickinson UP: 1995. 299-315. Print.