There’s some serious doom-talking in the theater community lately, brought on by financial anxiety. Feels like all of us are holding our breath, sensing it’s the end of a cultural and economic era, but unable to exhale until we can see the outline of the next phase of history.
My colleagues are musing about the money woes, and talking about them, and making all sorts of grand pronouncements and predictions. A friend in the field, literary manager of a historically successful repertory company (which secretly is now very much in the red) actually used the word “apocalypse” at lunch last week. I know, I know, theater people are so dramatic. We thrive on conflict and great sweeping events, and sometimes see them where they don’t necessarily exist. But this economic upheaval promises at least some modicum of real-life drama. And it promises us theater folk more than the swelling of powerful national mood swings, to creatively feed us for seasons to come; it threatens to kill off the more financially fragile of us, and some fear it could wipe us out completely. As described by an October 7th Times article, the big NYC theaters are holding their breath along with us downtown theater folk, and perhaps with the rest of the world.
Personally, all this “Theater is gonna be wiped off the face of the Earth!!!” talk drives me up the wall. Bluntly put, it’s bullshit, and I consider it a dismissal of the driving life-force theater has shown itself to possess since it began. Nothing, in the history of civilization, has been able to stamp out our craft for good. I love that the Christian church gave it an excellent pounding in its desperation to snuff out the Pagan bogeyman, only to start it up again within its own walls in the Middle Ages. I love that the NEA censored the crap out of it via financial slashing during the Reagan years–and incited some of the most interesting experimental work of the century. I love that movies, for all their breathtaking immersion and spectacle, can’t kill it. It’s a weed. A tenacious, prickly, ancient weed. Or, better, it’s a mole. A mole as in the game Whack-a-Mole. Go ahead, hit it with a mallet. Pound it down into the ground. It’ll only pop up somewhere else.
Let’s look at the Great Depression, since the economic pundits already have the history books turned to those pages. What happened to theater then? Yes, first theater people made a run for Hollywood with anything that would transfer into a celluloid meal ticket. And great theaters large and small went dark. Actors suffered and went on relief, like the rest of the country. Playwrights didn’t eat. It was trouble and hunger; there’s no denying that.
But did American theater die? Hell no, not even close. The FDR administration made it a priority with the Federal Theater Project, a part of the WPA. In a hard-to-imagine chapter in drama history, the government didn’t just pay lip service to support of the arts, but created tons of jobs for theater artists of all ilk–actors, designers, stagehands, writers. The FDR Administration became a mighty angel for theater across the country, employing thousands of artists from 1935-39; Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, and Elia Kazan all got their start in part through the FTP. Under the leadership of theater artists (Elmer Rice was the head of the NYC unit for a while), it funded existing theaters, commissioned new plays, produced plays of a multitude of genres (experimental theater, children’s theater, classical theater, modern foreign theater, marionette/ puppet theater, radio theater, circus theater), and created touring circuits for rural areas across the nation. Through those touring circuits, the Project brought theater to communities that had not had access to it before. There were people out there who saw plays for the first time during the Great Depression.
And interestingly, this was part of the statement of purpose of the FTP itself:
“The far-reaching purpose is the establishment of theaters so vital to community life that they will continue to function after the program of the Federal Project is completed.” In other words: “Let’s use a national disaster to make theater vital again.” What a way to respond to the apocalypse. The grandiosity, the idealism, the chutzpah: I love theater people.
Hallie Flanagan, Director of the FTP
Of course, this far-reaching revitalization didn’t endure in the way the FTP founders had hoped. As the 30’s drew to a close, the FTP’s funding ended, and director Hallie Flanagan was brought in front of the HUAC to answer for the program’s lefty tendencies. Theater artists went back to pounding the pavement the old fashioned way.
Listen, who knows what might happen to theater now if (when) we slip onto a fiscal black hole. It ain’t the most sought after of art forms in our century’s smorgasbord of media. But that’s the point– we don’t know what could happen. To all my doomy friends I say: freak out if you want, but this theater thing endures like a virus, a bad penny, a weird dream. You may not always be able to make money off it, but if you’re in it to make money, you’re probably making crappy theater anyway; and if you’re in it for other reasons, you’re going to find a way to keep doing it. The human creature finds real joy in re-enactments of history (as Tennessee once said, “Same stories, different voices”), in chains of events toppling into each other like explosive dominoes, in suspense, in greed, in power-mongering, in good guys and bad guys, in sweeping reversals of fortune and plummetings of luck. The backbone of our craft is made of the same raw stuff as is our current financial crisis. And maybe that’s why theater endures. It’s built of the very things that threaten it. So bring it on. We’ve seen this before. We’re way ahead of it. Bring it.