The Sky is Falling

May 16th, 2008 · No Comments

This month’s CUNY GC Advocate includes my thoughts on the Provincetown Playhouse controversy and some notes on Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America.

Myself, I hope that as much as possible of the original building is preserved; it would indeed be sad to see the Provincetown Playhouse reduced to a shiny new plaque on a shiny new building. A walking tour of New York’s historical theatres is a tour of absences: this bank used to be an important vaudeville house. This Starbucks was the site of the Astor Place riots. A part of what theatre folks find magical about their form is that the ephemeral moment of performance occurs within solid walls, and leaves behind physical traces in archives and architecture.

I am nevertheless aware of how many urban planning crises and controversies are taking place in this city at the moment. [...] I have not heard many of my colleagues in theatre circles weigh in on the 5,000 people who are losing their homes to accommodate Columbia’s expansion, or on the abandonment of what could have been one of the city’s most beautiful park and residential areas on the Hudson yards in favor of warring plans for office parks to house companies like NewsCorp and Condé Nast. Theatre is embedded in the larger community, is a product of the larger community, and has a responsibility to the larger community. If we only pay attention when the danger is to our own cherished relics, we run the danger of marginalizing ourselves even further than we already have.

The strongest segments of the piece are centered around the rise of gleaming new theatre buildings around the country and how these structures coincide with the collapse of regional theatre’s ostensible mission and purpose which was, as Daisey puts it: “to establish theaters around the country to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage, and health insurance. In return, the theaters would receive the continuity of their work year after year — the building blocks of community.”

But, Daisey continues, “The dream is dead.”

What has replaced this vision of community-building and community-derived theatre? A series of gleaming new buildings that stand empty most of the time, monuments to their own continued existence rather than to the work they will produce. The cost of the buildings reinforces the already prominent strategy of choosing plays not to build a new generation of theatre-goers but to timidly try to appease the dwindling audience we already have. Actors and directors are flown in for individual shows and then move on to other theatres around the country. Good work results not infrequently but successful shows are a triumph over the system rather than the result of it.