Excerpt from the Symposium Response

Excerpt from the Symposium Response Steve Scott Okay, thank you . . . any questions? [laughter] As I was just moaning to everyone this morning, this conference has been both exhausting and exhilarating. In my line of work, as I just said outside, we don’t have staff meetings to talk about theatre and “moral order,” but we do have staff meetings to talk about budgeting and how we’re going to sell the goddamn show to the goddamn audiences and all of that. So it’s interesting to bring these kinds of theoretical questions into some of the practical spheres that I deal with every day. And forgive me if I don’t go through and kind of distill each of the presentations; I am thinking more about the questions raised by the presentations, and from a very sel¤sh point of view, i.e., “how does all of this affect me, and how am I processing all of this?” I found, actually this morning, I found a couple of statements that were made in different presentations that distill the basic tensions that I think we’re all dealing with. In Mr. [Nicholas] Dekker’s paper, he at one point, in the discussion of the Edwardian pack of managers, and their attempts to make the theatre “respectable,” said “respectability equals morality”—if in no other way but through dress codes and etiquette codes and other outward shows. There is certainly a tension between that and the thing that Ian [MacLennan] pointed out in the last paper on cross-dressing at the Globe, that “the more an act is done, the less of an impact it has.” And I thought David [Carlyon] had a fascinating point in his presentation on William Dunlap yesterday, about how we, even as theatre artists and theatre scholars and theatre people, are sometimes afraid of our own theatrical impulses, that we strive in some ways to antitheatricalize our own theatricalization. As we keep talking about audiences and audience response, it seems that the basic tension throughout the history of our art form has been between the rational and the irrational creative impulse; the impulse that causes us to tell stories or to try to get at other feelings of creation and how scary that can be for us and for our audiences. We’ve talked about censorship and how the kinds of things that are not or were not considered to be “respectable” tend to be based on sexual impulses. In our discussion of the NEA controversy yesterday it was interesting that it boiled down to projects that deal with human sexuality and different expressions of human sexuality. And, of course, sexuality and theatrical creation come from exactly the same place— scary, unknowable, and uncontrollable in some ways, even to us. So I don’t know where to go with that tension because it’s the tension that I’ve, I think, been exploring since I was old enough to realize what that tension was, and I think it’s something that we all try to negotiate. But I found that the question that echoed through presentation after presentation after presentation was “how do we rationalize what is essentially an irrational act?” . . . that is, an essentially irrational thing? Even in the act of explaining, as we all were attempting to do this weekend, we must ask, how can we explain those things that are inexplicable? And I’m thinking about in my own life, about the whole idea of the antitheatrical , and how we rush to examine our own theatrical impulses and, in some ways, to rationalize and tamp them down. Even in the practice of the theatre as business, when I’m dealing with my board, my job is not to be the free artistic being that I am in the rehearsal room; my job is to sit down in my business suit and explain to businessmen how what we do is important and necessary and all of that stuff. So this question resonated with me in a number of different ways. Coming back again to the role and responsibility of the artist in initiating the dialogue: in one of the discussions we got into on Friday...