Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama

4. Collaborating with Calamity

81 4. Collaborating with Calamity However, one thing has become quite plain: the present-day world can only be described to present-day people if it is described as capable of transformation. —Bertolt Brecht, Can the Present-Day World Be Reproduced by Means of Theatre? Kiss or Kill the Guests? For the writer, there is no visibility without the audience. The relationship between audience and drama completes the circuit of emotional form among writer, text, performer, and audience. Emotional form shapes the impact and meaning of the dramatic narrative and shapes the audience ’s emotional experience in the theater. Artists are conflicted about the subject of the audience. They seek either to measure its receptiveness or simply dismiss it: “What do they have to do with me?” The writer acknowledges the audience through the performer’s bag of tricks that create response, the undeniable reality of box-office receipts, and the urge to eavesdrop on the chatter during intermission. Another way the audience makes itself felt is when a group of university teachers choose the plays for the new season. An anxious discussion breaks out, a mixture of anger, fear, passion, and myopia. If we listened in, we might hear: “This play is new, disturbing; it will shake up the audience.” Or, “I’ve always wanted to do this play; I know it won’t have much audience draw, but it is important.” Followed by, “We don’t do plays based on their popularity, do we? We don’t pander to the audience.” Then perhaps a sarcastic question, “Why don’t people want to see the plays we want to do?” Somewhere in this shifting discussion between high and low art, between pure and commercial is the wagging tail of an ideological dog. The signs of this ideology are such convictions as: (a) an artist lowers himself by considering the audience’s needs, (b) an artist compromises his integrity by catering to popular taste, or (c) the artist’s job is to raise audiences to the standards of the artist. Artists, out of a well-earned antagonism to the mass audience and a corporatized society, can adopt a coolness to emotion as a way of resisting the sentimentality and manipulation of mass media. Remember that modernism caused a fierce fight within its new audiences, a battle [ 82 ] Collaborating with Calamity between conservative traditions and progressive beliefs about the present and future of art and society. In that fight, artists heaped scorn on those resisting the vanguard, the forward rush of everything modern. Riots broke out in the theaters between the contending sides. But it is a mistake to hold on to forms of resistance created in different times, especially if that resistance is not connected to a new campaign for a new audience. Has an uncertain audience for new plays forced the theater to downsize? New plays today are found primarily in small venues such as the Off and Off Off Broadway theaters that seat one hundred or fewer. In fact, these theaters are springing up, not the larger institutional venues. This is not only due to costs, it is as much about artists’ resistance to mass culture, their flight from the commercialism of mainstream theater , and a general alienation from the values of the establishment. Is it also an indifference to what makes the society work? Suzi Gablik in Has Modernism Failed? argues there is “a problem of modernity—loss of belief in any system of value beyond self. . . . Modern consciousness is solitary, consequent to the disestablishing of communal reality” (31). In the age of the Internet and self-obsessed social networks, is her view still accurate? Fighting for an Audience Every reinvention of drama includes a reinvention of the audience. Imagining a new drama includes imagining a fight for a new audience, with a new set of beliefs about the future. That is a fight worth having. Consider the vast numbers of theater departments in U.S. public and private universities and in community colleges. If you think like a film producer, this network looks like a distribution system for new work. What is the reality of season choices in this network—probably two-thirds familiar work from the dead-writer repertory. Yet, isn’t this a country that prides itself on innovation, creativity, risk taking, experimentation? Why, then, do theater departments resist the work of living writers and fail to engage their students in the quest to develop writers from around the country and the world? I...