Theater in its time

There are many things in life that we rediscover, and it is interesting how - in the middle of a lecture - the skies can open up and a truth suddenly starts to blossom inside one's own head. This may not be a new truth, but the fit at the moment seems so apt.

I think one of the interesting overlooked aspects about theater is its relationship with history. Film interprets the story in its time and freezes it. Ever after it must be viewed with an understanding of the world and times in which it was made. We may interpret a film in present day, but the film itself is a thing of its period. It is an artifact the day it is published.

Theater is always a present interpretation. It is ALWAYS produced with a contemporary perspective on the work, because it cannot be truthful otherwise. Every person involved in the play experiences the world the day it is performed, and in an existential sense, it cannot be the same intepretation of a year in the past. A play is a live performance. Even a film of a play is a film bound to its time, not a play.

This semester it was in an introductory class of students with limited theater background, and I was trying to find connections to help them understand the way theater relates to its time. I used to use a clip from the 1992 film of David Mamet's 1982 play Glengarry Glen Ross, but that's so last century that few students have seen it. And I don't watch enough film to have a good alternative reference. The play is a good example of Mamet's tactics, known to all theater people, of a contemporary male aggression that is as compelling as it is fearsome. But if I point to it as a cultural marker, I have to remember that it is already 30 years old. And although I've not seen the play recently, I expect it is performed with a different sensitivity to what makes people angry and what makes them react as they must in the play.

I think the students get it. They grasp intellectually what was going on, but they can't get to the gut-level grasp of that open-range world, when all the old bets were off and the new ones had not been placed yet - before the crisis of AIDS and cultural revisionism of the 1980s and the Reagan years.

I find myself lecturing on America in the 1970s and about the social breakdowns of the era. It was the transition from the political and social turmoil of the end of the 1960s through the metastacizing of the drug culture. By the 1980s we had a full blown drug market and a hypersexualized popular culture, an anti-law-enforcement culture that had not been seen since the 1930s, major cities that you dared not enter at night, and a fuel crisis prompted by a failed effort to prop up a fraudulent power in Iran. It actually seems so much worse in retrospect than I remember feeling at the time. But all of that dysfunctional culture fed Mamet's writing, and by 1982, Glengarry was where he had to go to go over the top.

I think about the other playwrights that came out of the period, and I wind up assigning Sam Shepard's Fool For Love (1983) as a reading. I am fascinated by the construction of the story and how it moves from naked aggression to lyrical storytelling, and seems to end with acceptance of unresolved despair. It is a kind of playing out of our intentional abandonment of social frameworks in the 1970s. As artists and teachers we have reflected on this connection between art and its time and embraced it intellectually. But the moments when you see it in action make it profound.

I have to wonder what the effect is on my students. For them, typically born about 1990, the 1970s is as distant as the Depression was for me. It's old news and moldy history - and I can see my uncle wince as I said as much about his stories. My students are good people and they are going about building their lives on a different set of assumptions, ones framed by the more recent world that grounds their experience. They listen patiently to my grand pronouncements and grasp the outline, but their frame of reference to the history is only intellectual.

Ultimately, I understand that this only matters because I have lived to experience it. The intense experiences of the 1940s and 50s belonged to my parents. My students today will remember most the world since September 11, 2001. But that doesn't mean we should not try to understand the worlds that spawned the one we live in. It is through the arts that we may sense the real spirit of the times and its relevance. Whatever we do in theater, it always will be interpreted in the present, and therefore a reflection of and comment upon its time of performance.

Scenemaker
May 15, 2011