On this, the last day of the year, in which direction do I turn my head? Over which tense should my meditations hover: the past or the future? Do I drink coffee to linger in 2008 or take a sleeping pill to get the hell out of it?
Today Janus crouches above the door, gazing both ways, facing away from himself once again. Both his faces stress me out. For me 2008 was full and productive; I did some tough and brazen things, hit some new standards, and don’t think I screwed up anything of great import, which I suppose is an accomplishment in itself and is certainly a relief. But for all of us it’s been a year of great change– time will tell if, for some of us, it will have been The Year of Change, the year after which nothing is ever the same. We have not metabolized these shifts, although we feel them in and around us. We know that with change comes gain. And with change comes loss. And anxiety. And exhilaration. Furtive peerings into a darkened future. An urge to step into it. A strong yearning to turn back.
My exit post for 2008 concludes a series of meditations on change– specifically, on possible changes to the theater world in an Obama-led America. I’ve gathered these comments from theater colleagues of all stripes, from writers to actors to directors. As you might imagine, their hopes that a new administration will strengthen support for the arts are tempered with fears about the already-tenuous arts economy; as I write, we’re feeling the rumblings of implosion in theater companies and development programs across the nation.
Regardless of earthquakes and avalanches, I doubt that any of the contributing commenters below will choose not to do what they do. As cliche as it sounds, most of them probably couldn’t meaningfully do anything else. There is some comfort in that, isn’t there? It doesn’t really matter what flavor or color the apocalypse/ renaissance comes in if we’re all going to have to take a piece. Who knows what kind of creative work will emerge in the coming year. Will it be dark? The past year once again proved that uber-bleak productions like Soho Rep’s Blasted can be the very ones that shift the gaze by just a few degrees, but in a permanent way. Will it be joyous? The past year proves that transcendent, gorgeous work like Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights can do the same (click here for a video clip).
I say our final actions of the year are to button our coats, close the door of 2008 behind us and keep an eye out for each other as we step into the poorly-lit future. Let’s go, I guess. Let’s go.
From Jeremy Bobb, actor (Beast, NYTW):
“How will Obama affect theater?… I guess my first response is: not that much. Not directly, anyways. And especially not at first. The government has some more important stuff to take care of financially before they start rearranging arts funding.
I also think it’s a cop-out to blame the Bush administration for the state of American theater. Even in the sixties, a time people look back on as a thriving creative era, theater people were still bitching about “the state of things”. There have always been highs and lows in our industry… it’s always been tough… and actors and writers have always been poor as hell. i don’t expect that to change because of a new president.
I do, however, think that if he’s able to rejuvinate the economy we’ll see a spike in money spent on theatre, which will bring a bit more diversity in the offerings. And I suppose he’d be a little more liberal about arts policy in general. But at the end of the day it’s just another lawyer politician, and theatre will never be on the top of his list. As mamet would say, we are a “culturally despised profession”. The only effects on us will be trickle-down effects.”
And, finally, from Chris Alonzo of Suburban Vampire Productions (among many other affiliations and grand pursuits).
NOTE: This is an excerpt from a full blog entry Chris wrote in response to the Obama/ Theater question, to be found here:
“It’s, at this point, old hat truth to acknowledge the positive effect the Bush administration has had on the arts world, from movies to plays to comedy to visual art. It is a golden goose of a thing. Mocking the President for showing his wiener is one thing, but using all the righteous anger over death and destruction you can pull together and turning it into something powerful or funny; that’s rad
. That’s what it’s about. That’s Dada, man. That’s Guernica, man.
If anything, the issue I always had, as a theater artist dedicated almost exclusively to political and social satire, was figuring out the angle on so wide a barn. George Bush has been easily parodied in so many millions of predictable ways, from dumb-ass to devil, that I couldn’t even find a foothold. It’s in part why I chose to make this the central aspect of the Suburban Vampire mission statement:
We want to inspire outrage, not at The Other Side but at ourselves. It is easy to yell at the President from a theatre on the lower east side. It is easy to curse AOL/Time Warner and Halliburton and rich old men. It is harder to admit that our own complacency is to blame.
That, to me, was much more interesting. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t value in great pieces taking the Bush administration straight on and that it can’t be done in an excellent and satisfying way…but still I wonder about the purpose of all this preaching to the choir…I [have] seen one too many under-informed “satirical” piece that just boiled down to “George Bush is evil because uh I don’t know why exactly look at his dumb head ha ha!!” And let’s face it: unless the theater is playing Devil’s Advocate to conventional wisdom it might as well fold up all the scenery and move a game show on the stage. If you’re not gonna bother teaching or challenging anybody in audience, at least entertain them with an exciting game of trivia and chance, with the possibility of a trip to Milan.
And that, I suppose, is where Obama’s presidency provokes a beautiful challenge for the theater, and one that I’m salivating over. It’s already CW that Obama is killing satire. But I disagree. Obama is, to be certain, a hopeful and admirable figure, and I hope his Presidency succeeds in turning around this country. The global positive vibes alone are worth the price of admission. But there will be fruit…
…What I hope for our agit-prop theater artists and satirists is a renewed Age of Nuance. George W. Bush has been our target and our clown for the past eight years, and our audience is pretty much down with the whole idea that he’s an evil idiot and war and enormous, unfeeling corporations are very bad things, and so is intolerance and hatred. These conclusions have already been drawn, and then are enforced through the plays we create, but then what? What is our big dumb point, especially in the theater where, for the most part, our audience skews leftward? What do we have to say about war and about homosexual rights and about the American Family and about Faceless Technological Giants that is genuinely intellectually provocative?
…Of course, none of this matters because all funding and donations will dry up and all theaters everywhere are going to fold because of our new Great Depression, and we can debate what kind of plays we were going to write while we’re waiting in line at the Gershwin Theater, which will have been converted to a soup kitchen. We will hunt down Harvey Fierstein and we will eat him for survival. And they will find money for a new WPA, but it will only pay for new seasons of America’s Next Top Model and CSI: Miami.”