I Interview Myself (The Rooted Stage -- Introduction)

[Since I just sort of launched into The Rooted Stage Series without really explaining what I was trying to do, I think I ought to pause an provide some context. I’ve tried several times to write a Preface/Introduction, but got bogged down. Here, I want to do this as if I was being interviewed by a slightly skeptical version of me, in dialogue form. So: Me is, well, me; and MeToo is the skeptical questioner. MeToo’s lines will be bolded, and my answers will be regular text.]

MeToo: Welcome to “Excuse Me, but WTF???,” the podcast where we try to get to the bottom of just what the heck some of y’all are thinking. Scott, you’ve just launched on your blog what you are calling a “series” called The Rooted Stage that so far has been focused on American theater in the 18th and 19th century. What in the world made you think this needed to be done???

Me: I sometimes ask this question myself… Well, shortly after I released Building a Sustainable Theater, I was interviewed by Munroe Shearer for HowlRound. Early in the interview, he said: “You give a history lesson in the book about the Theatrical Syndicate, and how it can still be felt in the business models of theatres today. Can you talk a little bit more about what the Syndicate is and what remnants of it we still see today?… I couldn’t believe this was my first time hearing this story.” I’ve heard variations on this theme from many, many people, from current undergrads to retired theater professors, all of whom are fascinated by a story that explains a lot about how we got where we are in the US theater today. So in many ways, this is a supplement to Building a Sustainable Theater, going into greater detail about how the theater became centralized, bureaucratized, and commoditized. And lest that lead to despair, I will talk about all the many great artists who successfully fought against this trend throughout the past century.

MeToo: Why did they fight against it? Wasn’t it the inevitable march of progress?

Me: I’d argue that not only was it not inevitable, it wasn’t even progress! It was the result of particular choices made by people with power at a specific time–choices that may have made sense then, but have negative consequences today. I remember reading a story about ham that is applicable.

MeToo: Ham? Like over-the-top actors?

Me: No, ham like pork. You wanna hear it?

MeToo: I guess?

Me: OK, there is a mother who is teaching her teenaged daughter how to bake a ham. She tells her, “The first thing you have to do is cut the end off of each end of the ham.” Her daughter looks at her quizzically, and asks, “Why?” Mom is stopped dead in her tracks. “Hmmm. I don’t know, actually, it’s the way Grandma taught me to do it. Maybe we should ask her!” It just so happened that Grandma lived next store, so the two of them went over and Mom said, “Hi Mom! I’m teaching Buffy how to bake a ham, and I told her to cut the end off of both the back and the front of the ham. That’s what you taught me, right?” “Yes, it is,” Grandma replied. “Well Buffy wants to know why.” Grandma thinks for a moment and says, “Hmmm. I don’t know. That’s how my mom taught me to do it. Let’s call her at the nursing home and ask her!” So they call the nursing home and Great Grandma answers the phone and Grandma explains the situation and asks her why they always cut the ends off of their hams. Great Grandma is silent for a minute, thinking, and then she says, “Oh! I remember! It’s because I had a very small baking pan, and I had to do that so the ham would fit!”

MeToo: Womp womp. And the point is?

Me: The point is that things that were done to deal with a specific situation eventually get passed down generation to generation as The Way We Do Things, and soon nobody bothers to ask whether we have a larger baking pan now. Listen, a lot of people will read Building a Sustainable Theater and then argue that it is utopian idealism–that the model I describe couldn’t possibly work or people would have done it before. The Rooted Stage shows that people did do it before, but it just hasn’t been discussed much in theater history textbooks.

MeToo: Why do you think that is?

Me: Well, partly because theater history textbooks, which have to cover a lot of years in a small number of pages, tend to focus more on the art and artists than on the business model within which artists made their art. So we (I say “we” because I taught theater history myself) focus on the development of theatrical styles and periods and the biographies of the playwrights, actors, designers, and directors. Nobody wants to talk about real estate and how artists made ends meet because they think it sounds boring and irrelevant. But the effect of leaving all that out is to mask the underlying system of production that shapes what is seen as possible. The result is that people think the way things are now is the way they’ve always been, and so we keep cutting the ends off our theatrical ham.

MeToo: So what?

Me: We’re wasting ham! A lot of it. A lot of very talented people who have things to contribute to the theater are becoming frustrated and discouraged and leaving the theater because the gatekeepers don’t value what they have to offer. And this has been happening for decades, and continues to worsen.

MeToo: Gatekeepers?

Me: The people who decide who gets to work: the casting directors, agents, directors, producers, artistic directors. And most of these people have similar backgrounds, have gone through similar training programs, and reside in the same place, New York City. So more than anything, in The Rooted Stage I’m trying to tell the story of how theater became centralized, homogenized, bureaucratized, and commercialized. After I do that, I also will discuss several movements that did their best, many successfully, to resist that trend, and why we might want to reconsider and revise some of their practices for the 21st century.

MeToo: So you think we can restore a Golden Age?

Me: No.

MeToo: No?

Me: There never was a Golden Age. Making a living by making art is hard and always has been hard. But I think we’ve made it much more difficult, complicated, and costly than it needs to be. Theater doesn’t need to be bureaucratic and institutionalized. The Rooted Stage series is supposed to remind us that human beings built this system to solve particular problems in the late 19th century, and that human beings can dismantle it whenever the system no longer helps art and artists thrive. Building a Sustainable Theater describes one way to make it easier, simpler, and less costly. I have absolutely no doubt that others will come up with additional ideas about how to proceed, and I hope they do. The only people I reject are those who say that there is no alternative to the current system, and the only way to save it is with a massive influx of money from the government and foundations. I think artists have always been best the more independent they’ve been.

MeToo: Might it be the case that theater has been made irrelevant thanks to the mass media of film, radio, TV, streaming, and the internet? These are all art forms based, like theater, on the idea of actors telling a story by pretending to be other people. Maybe theater is just an expensive leftover and its economics no longer work.

Me: That’s always a possibility. When cars were invented, people stopped using horses to get to work. So people who loved horses had to figure out a new way that horses fit into the culture, and people who made horse shoes and feed bags had to figure out what to do next as well. That’s part of life. But if horse lovers stubbornly ignored the effect of the automobile and kept insisting that using horses for daily transportation was the only way to get from Point A to Point B, well, they’d have been laughed at, and rightly so. I think that’s where we’re at right now with the theater, and I think there are a lot of people who are trying to pretend nothing has changed. But I think we should be questioning everything. Everything. And part of that process involves looking closely at how we got to our current situation, and what roads were not taken back then that we might want to think about taking today. Analyze the past, imagine the future.