A BAM Dialogue: How to Agitate the Theater of the Perfectly Harmless

Before the lecture, the playwrights, Lisa D'Amour and Melissa James Gibson, ask the audience to go through a series of stations [see sidebar later in dialogue]. The audience members return to their seats. The two playwrights and the two directors, Melissa Kievman and Katie Pearl, take the stage. Each stands before a microphone.

LISA clears her throat.

KATIE clears her throat.

MELISSA G. clears her throat.

MELISSA K. clears her throat.

The four smile.

LISA About six months ago, Melissa and I were invited to talk here at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about the current state of the experimental theater. In turn, we asked the two directors we work with the most--Katie Pearl and Melissa Kievman--to participate. After obsessing about the topic for a while, we came up with the nifty title "How to Agitate the Theater of the Perfectly Harmless." A few weeks later when we saw our title written in BAM-style graphics on a postcard, we were elated. Then it suddenly dawned on us that we should probably be able to give our audience an accurate definition of said theater of the perfectly harmless.

LISA looks at the audience. Her blank look can barely conceal her panic.

Well. After much e-mailing, nail biting, and teeth grinding, we convinced ourselves that our primary job was NOT to define the theater of the perfectly harmless, but to propose an alternative, i.e., its antithesis. Tonight, in three terse sections, we offer to you, our audience, a brief and ultimately incomplete treatise on the theater of the imperfectly harmful. The theater of the imperfectly harmful resides in the following continuum. Theater of the perfectly harmful, theater of the perfectly harmless, theater of the imperfectly harmful, theater of the imperfectly harmless.

LISA turns to MELISSA G.

LISA May I rant a moment?

MELISSA G. Please.

LISA The theater of the perfectly harmless is that risk-free literalism which sacrifices complexity and new shapes for old questions and easy answers. I'm not talking about all realism here. I am not sure it would be fair to name a specific play which falls under the rubric of perfectly harmless theater. It is more a collective act--"Oh, we can't make that choice because it wouldn't be popular and well received, it might be considered offensive"--or, as the artistic director of an off-Broadway theater once said to me, "Audiences don't like to think. I've learned that the hard way." To be honest, I can't believe that there is not a regional theater named Theater of the Perfectly Harmless. It has a charming ring to it, don't you think? Kind of like that hotel chain called the Comfort Inn.

However, theater of the perfectly harmless is just a front for a larger, more sinister institution called the theater of the perfectly harmful, a big, greedy, stubborn, sluggish, selfish beast, whose primary concern is overfeeding itself. To be honest, I haven't had to face this beast very often: it is easy to avoid, if you are willing to be a poor artist the rest of your life.

Then there's the theater of the imperfectly harmless, theater which, in striving for abstraction, rejects clarity. Gimmicks in place of narrative. Perhaps some spectacle-oriented theater. In any case, it somehow seems harmless to me, or at least NOT nearly as harmful as the aforementioned big-budget, spoon-feed-them-mashed-potatoes trend.

MELISSA G. I'm wondering if some sort of mathematical cancellation kicks in, whereby the theater of the perfectly harmful and the theater of the imperfectly harmless are flip sides of the same anachronistic coin: if the first is a boring, predictable play, then the second is a boring, predictable play that lasts three-and...