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A Democratic theatre

Prior to 1900, physicists believed that we could measure space and time independently. Einstein taught us that space and time are inseparable. Oddly, most theatre artists still operate using pretwentieth-century physics: they create live events in which space and time are distinct, measurable quantities. In fact, many basic artistic concepts long ago embraced by your average high school teacher are, for some reason, ignored by many of the American theatre’s most entrenched and influential practitioners, educators and institutions. Theatre is maturing into a dead art form because, by and large, our established practitioners have neither the will nor the imagination to create new dramatic forms that accurately reflect the newest intellectual frontiers of humanity. By choosing to cling to antiquated belief systems, playwrights are loosing their historical authority to anticipate the future. Our theatres, our processes of making and developing new work, our systems of funding are so grounded in long disproven fallacies that we have started to forget the very scent of drama. Regional American theatres, originally founded on the ideals of Democracy and the promise of art for everyone, have evolved into houses of elitism and exclusivity. American Realism, the virus hatched in these incubators, continues to infect our collective imagination and inhibit our cultural progress. The spiritual danger to Realism is that the form can only function through the withholding of information. Dramatic action, those petty on-stage conflicts that the Realists would like us to believe are the heart and soul of a play, are only made possible through a complicit distortion of point-of-view and by limiting and controlling the audience’s access to its own humanity. In realistic plays, basic human truths are heavily guarded by a self-anointed master class of playwrights, designers and directors. This invisible cabal does its best to define the human experience for us and they dole out their holy secrets from the altar, using inbred theatrical techniques similar to those of religious oligarchies. Not only is the world of these plays pawned off as an accurate representation of a universal reality, but, as with many sermons, the events of the play are placed in a bogus but emotionally provocative causal relationship. Realistic scenes pretend to be happening in front of us for the first and only time and, faced with this urgency, we become hopelessly tangled in the maze of the on stage story – rather than being reminded of our own complicity in the real world events that the drama is representing. In a realistic drama, we only get to see what the playwright and director want us to see. All scenes that contradict the artistic agenda of the makers are jettisoned in the production process. The audience is forced to experience the psychological revelations that best prove the pseudosciences of those in charge. When playwrights do begin to ask legitimate and important questions about the human condition, a distinctly American play development model forces them into a world of ‘pay-offs’ and ‘character investment’, corporate techniques that force an audience to look for answers in the play instead of inside themselves. Young theatre artists, born with the passion and drive to move our culture forward are coerced into believing that their natural brilliance and unique vision is actually a problem Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 16(3), 2006, 281 – 282