Maybe it’s just me, and if so, then you can ignore this observation. But I’m beginning to think that contemporary, especially young audiences have no idea how to respond to live theater. The serious kind, as in Shakespeare.
Worse. It’s entirely possible, at least based upon what I’ve seen lately, that actors and directors themselves are drifting away from creating coherent contexts for the spectacles they mount. Let me speak plainly: given postmodernism’s trashing of history, historical background and/or consideration for any and all authorship, the state of English-language theater seems to be suffering from serious identity issues.
Audiences raised on screen-mediated ‘entertainment’ are little inclined to suspend disbelief and dive into the midst of a text whose roots go all the way down into the European collective unconscious. We are a culture of surfaces, celebrities and digital addictions, and the results can be as alarming as audiences giggling at tragedy and tearing into bags of Cheetohs during scenes of strategic intimacy.
Take a hypothetical audience I might have encountered last week. Pretend this audience was gathered to enjoy a play written in 1603. The audience I have in mind – many of whom no longer read anything in print, much less Shakespeare – had no idea how to engage with the words, the drama, the action on a generic, reference-free stage. So they responded to the surfaces offered, gestures, shouts, etc. In short, the audience laughed at all the wrong moments, as if they were watching a sit-com on TV. They had no emotional or intellectual inclination to enter the drama/text deeply – and they had absolutely no help in this regard from visual design.
But since it takes two to tango, I also felt the missing traction was equally the fault of actors brandishing disparate styles and backgrounds and suddenly showing up in a single space. No unifying direction had been provided, and no insight as to the words, the emotional import, the historical background (another pomo no-no) was in operation. A group of actors seemed to have stepped out into the evening from many separate planets. Lost in lack of translation.
(Never have I so longed to hear these words spoken with an English accent, by actors trained in old-school traditions.)
No one quite knew why they were saying or doing what they were. Neither actors, nor audience. In almost three decades years of watching live theater here I have seen audiences gradually uncouple, disengage, and now, become ignorant (or at least heedless) of what these magnificent texts, these bits of cultural revelation, might mean. But boy can they picnic!
And in all that laughing and eating, no one seemed to miss the play that failed to materialize.
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I just LOVE Christina when she goes all analytical in public!
Foucault noted that “A Mentality is almost never examined by those who inhabit it.”
Christina, it’s not just the English Language Theatre which is suffering from identity issues; it’s the English-speaking peoples themselves who are suffering from identity issues.
Do you think that has anything to do with the folks who, as Foucault might say, are manufacturing discourse and the relation of that discourse to power?
Thank you for putting these thoughts “on stage”. However, I’m not optimistic that many people will view them, or even understand them.
So well declared!
I’m assuming you’re commenting on a recent show at Shakespeare Santa Cruz. Before writing off a whole generation of theatergoers (which feels a bit age-ist to me) I wonder if the venue plays a part. It’s a casual atmosphere, people are eating and drinking before and during the show, and the sound can be problematic (at least for me. I don’t have perfect hearing). So this never felt like “serious” theater, compared to other, more formal venues. Plus SSC uses non-traditional settings, costumes, etc., that’s part of the fun but sometimes it’s over-the-top and might misdirect the attention of theatergoers. What about the audiences at theaters in SF or in NYC? I’ve never seen a bag of Cheetohs there.
I do wish you were specific. Loose the hypothetical. What play? What venue? What audience?
Christina-
I’m going to make a leap and go with the assumption that the “hypothetical” play you’re referring to is “Othello”, which I saw last Friday. Yes, a portion of the audience acted like it was “Animal House Goes To Shakespeare”.
However, I felt that the majority of the responsibility for this very uneven performance lies with the Director. Some actors were gesturing wildly with no purpose and others chose a more contemporary, simple style. It was a mish-mash.
Please excuse the following plug:
Coincidentally, the first play of Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre’s new season, “Dead Man’s Cell Phone”, deals with the topic you discuss. The more we become technologically connected the more we become inter-personally disconnected.
Please come see our play, it will be good.
Thanks,
Gerry Gerringer
Artistic Director
Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre
831-425-1003
There is no h in Cheetos.
@Tom — along with no “h” in Cheetos, there’s not a whole lot of *anything* in Cheetos. Airy-fairy pie-hole fodder for the airy-fairy human product of MSM ersatz “culture”.
Saw Othello this afternoon and the production has settled in. The two main criticisms seem to have been, one, that the acting styles were mismatched which was not so at the show I attended and two, that Iago was not “evil” enough which again, for those of us that understand the banality of evil, was not the case. A clear, evenly acted reading of the play. Not stupendous but perfectly acceptable with some telling moments. My main criticism would be of the set design which failed to visually differentiate Venice and Cyprus (compare Manhattan and New Orleans) but perhaps the evening lighting makes that clearer. Thankfully, there was only one inappropriate laugher who seemed bent on letting the rest of us know he had gotten all the instances of dramatic irony but missed their emotional impact on the characters; audience Aspergers? Then again, he was drinking Yellowtail.