A PATH FORWARD

A couple of years ago, I was at a dinner party full of theatre people. 

We were, as theatre people are wont to do, discussing all of the shows we had recently seen. Someone brought up Definition’s production of Fairview. Most of the group gushed – they loved that play, they loved that production, they’ve loved that script for years and thank GOD someone finally did it here – but one white person in the group had an issue with it. They told us that they “wished it offered a path forward.” 

No one wants an essay where one white person debates another white person on the value (or lack thereof) of Fairview, but that comment has stuck with me. I don’t understand why “a path forward” is an expectation anyone needs to place on theatre, but I think it’s an expectation more and more people hold. There has come to be a sense, among this theatre community and its gatekeepers, that a good play should hold some sort of utilitarian function. 

I don’t get this at all. 

The Zone of Interest doesn’t offer a path forward. Parasite doesn’t offer a path forward. Works of art in other media, like film, or literature, or even more broadly into music and visual art, aren’t burdened with an assumption that they will, to justify their existence, solve a problem. They are allowed to be art: to crack open questions, to let people feel without resolution. 

For some reason, theatre is not allowed to be art in and of itself. In order to be valuable, worthwhile, or important, theatre has to do something outside of theatre. It has to change minds. It has to open conversations. It has to urgently meet the moment that we are in. It has to perform some sort of measurable and tangible social good, or else it’s frivolous. Unlike a novel, or a film, or a painting, a play has to offer a path forward. 

Maybe there is a historical justification for this. Something about the Greeks and the polis, but I don’t have the kind of academic background to follow that thread to the present. What I do have is years of experience working as a Literary Manager of a local storefront, where I witnessed so much programming in service of grant narratives and donors. 

Everyone knows ticket sales aren’t enough for nonprofit houses. An actor tells us so after every show before soliciting donations. When you are put in a position where you have to constantly beg for money in order to continue to exist, it makes sense that you would be incentivized to point to a social value your work can perform. Fuzzier artistic values — humor, heartbreak, structural innovation, really really exceptional craft — won’t cut it. At least not for new work. You can get grants for proven entities like Chekhov or Ibsen, but if you want to program new plays, you have to convince DCASE and the Donnelly Foundation that those shows are doing something actually valuable. Teaching us a lesson about gun violence, perhaps. Or making a queer child feel seen. And that is not to say that there aren’t great plays about gun violence or queer kids out there, but that is to say that it is hard to get a $20,000 grant by saying a show is simply extremely cool — even when some of the very best shows are just that. 

In the best case scenarios, companies find plays that are still really cool, and spin narratives of their social function around them. Many great plays slip through the cracks of the nonprofit industrial complex. Dance Nation, Primary Trust, and X are all plays that have stuck with me for years that are by no means “issue plays” but which could, by a deft marketing and development department, be twisted to look like them with the sexiest little blurb ever. 

In the worst case scenarios, checked-out artistic directors program mid-to-bad plays that should have been essays. This results in a lot of mildly entertained audiences leaving the theatre with the same opinions they entered with, perhaps with an added sense of self-satisfaction for having “done something” by going to see an “important” show. But consuming is never active. And while the act of making art can sometimes be activism, passively absorbing art never is. 

Playwrights play this game too. When I applied for grants for my self-produced production of  The Best Damn Thing at The Understudy, every other sentence was some bullshit about queer girlhood and how important it was to offer representation. But that was never what I cared about as I was writing the play. I wrote The Best Damn Thing to reckon with a deep loneliness that I felt at one point in my life, and to dig into the tragedy of a friendship that had run its course. Unsurprisingly, these are the parts of the play audiences most resonated with, but these aren’t urgent social issues, so I had to spin it.

Theatres everywhere are spinning narratives about the social goods that their shows can achieve that aren’t theatre itself. Especially now, as the Trump administration cuts arts funding and pushes attacks on “woke programming,” there is a mounting pressure placed on companies to present a meaningful resistance. 

But theatre is not good at doing that at all.

For one thing, theatre moves way too slowly to meet the moment. Five years ago, when I was a literary manager, I read so many plays about the bees dying. Some of them were great — someone here should produce The Apiary! — but unfortunately, none of them are relevant anymore, because the bees are coming back. Now, when I meet with current literary managers, they complain about all the AI plays coming their way: plays that will inevitably efface themselves as the technology they are trying to capture is developing faster than any nonprofit production calendar ever could. 

I wrote The Targeted in 2019. It didn’t get programmed until this summer. The fastest path from first draft to production I’ve ever had for a script of mine was two years for DOGS. With global events as they are now, how could any script written two years ago be expected to offer a tangible solution for the crises we’re currently facing? How could anything someone is writing now predict where we will be in two years’ time?

For another thing, within a nonprofit ecosystem like Chicago’s, companies keep catering to the same audiences again and again. There are very few meaningful efforts to bring new patrons in. Instead, we program shows for other theatre makers and for the older patrons who have stuck around. It’s a small, small community obsessed with a ritualistic taking of medicine. No one outside of the group ever buys a ticket. Why would they? It doesn’t seem particularly fun. If we just keep regurgitating the same opinions to a group of people we know already agree with them, how are we doing anything that matters?

On top of that, while companies want to program plays that offer solutions, theatres can’t offer anything that good, lest the other reliable income source — the donors — don’t like it. So companies wind up in a bind: they have to do activism, but they can only do activism if wealthy, well-meaning liberals approve of it. The activism has to inspire hope. 

So shows have to be urgent, but not despondent. And timely, but not too radical. And essential, but never bitter or angry. Never alienating or rageful or so unsettling that people might hate it. Shows have to effect change, but only in ways that a big cross section of people won’t be too scared by. But when has that kind of lowest-common-denominator decision making ever led to real progress?

Artistic leaders will insist that a meaningful act of transformation can occur when you see their  shows. But transformation never comes from telling people what they should think, and art that is truly revolutionary is not being programmed two years in advance by well meaning liberal artistic directors with well meaning liberal boards of directors in their 50s or older. Art that is revolutionary isn’t happening within a capitalist apparatus at all. It is happening when Gazans write poetry about the genocide and and share it online. It happened with the guerilla theatre tactics of Act Up. 

Nonprofit institutions are trying again and again to do something that they fundamentally cannot, and something has to change. Theatre should not stitch a wound up, it should rip it open. I don’t think a play can change someone’s mind. And I don’t think theatremakers are the right source to lead the revolution. But that does not mean theatre is useless. 

Theatre is essential because of what theatre singularly offers: arenas for collective thought and feeling. 

In a world that is increasingly mediated, with distractions encouraged and available everywhere (even the Alamo Drafthouse lets people have phones now!) any experience that requires full focus is something we have to cherish. It is very easy, all the time, to turn away. Theatre offers a space where that is not possible. Theatre brings together groups of people from wildly different backgrounds, with different interests and lives, and insists they sit together and lose themselves in the same emotive experience. It insists we sit with the same thorny questions. I don’t know where that happens these days outside of church. And when done right, I truly think theatre can feel holy. 

I wonder, too, if this insistence on utility in art is a symptom of a broader illness in our culture: a consequence of the capitalist, Protestant creep that encourages us to treat every moment as a means to an end. Don’t go on a walk without tracking your step count. Don’t enjoy a meal without logging your macros. Optimize. Synergize. Looksmaxx. It’s not surprising, in a world that prioritizes productivity above all else, to develop an expectation that art always serve a purpose. But so often what makes art special is the opportunity it offers us to step outside of this constant current, and relish in a kind of radical purposelessness. 

The best theatre, in my opinion, forces audiences to sit in emotions they might not like. Perhaps that’s empathy for someone they might otherwise dismiss. Perhaps that’s discomfort with a kind of group-think that feels hauntingly familiar. Perhaps that’s a deep and almost scary recognition of self. 

The best theatre leaves audiences with questions. It creates lobbies for different ideas to bounce against each other. It doesn’t baby an audience or hold anyone’s hand so they can feel good in the end. It allows characters to be reprehensible in one breath and then deeply sympathetic in the next. It doesn’t offer easy answers. It doesn’t offer answers at all, because it can’t. Instead, it lets the audience leave a bit cracked open and unsettled. Not self-satisfied, but reflective. It doesn’t offer hope or optimism in the way donors or granting bodies or well-off subscribers might want. It reflects back the reality of what we are facing, which can be messy, and awful, and deeply hopeless, and it trusts people to be adults and handle that. 

The best theatre doesn’t apologize for being theatre; it doesn’t insist that it’s doing something beyond just being art, because it understands that art itself is valuable. Art itself is important. 

I don’t think this is just my opinion. Look at two of the most successful shows of the past season: Birds of North America and Octet. These are shows you walk out of feeling ripped apart and a bit helpless. Like Fairview, these shows don’t offer a path forward, they hold up a mirror. They give audiences an opportunity to look closely at parts of themselves they might otherwise want to avoid. They’re not topical, they’re timeless. (Yes, even Octet, because the internet is not new.) These shows both premiered in 2019, and they are both still totally absorbing because they engage with fundamental terrors of being a human being — being online and having a father. They both just announced a remount and another extension respectively.

I hope that artistic directors learn from these shows. 

I hope that their takeaway is not just that people like two-handers and musicals, but that they actually examine the artistic connective tissue between them. 

I hope that collectively we can start holding theatre to the standards of other art forms. Let theatre be gripping, hilarious, terrifying, heartbreaking, confounding, and upsetting, and let that be enough. I think, if we release ourselves from the belief that theatre must enact change, the theatre we make will be better, and more people will come to see it. At the very least, it’s time to stop lying to ourselves about all the urgent challenges our work addresses and refocus on what made us fall in love with the work in the first place.

Theatre can’t change the world. Theatre maybe can’t change anything. But it shouldn’t have to, because it still does something nothing else can. And if we need a path forward for the artform, I hope we follow one that focuses on that.