From cast parties to interviews, the irrelevance of theater has been a motif of the past few weeks. “Why do I keep at this withering form?” one playwright shook his head. “Join a band, take up bonsai,” an actor grumbled. “Theater’s done.”
The clincher came when I saw a Seattle Arts & Lectures brochure advertising a lecture series called “When Theatre Mattered” by University of Washington Professor Barry Witham. The title is mournful but hopeful—if theater mattered once, it might again someday. I gave the professor a call.
Apparently, theater mattered in the 1920s and ’30s.
According to Witham, Depression-era theater was relevant because it was inexpensive, readily available, and grappled with topical issues. “It actively participated in the debates about American isolationism, labor, race,” he said. “And many of these plays had successful presentations in New York in front of a large, heterogeneous audience.” (I was happily surprised to learn that the “workers’ theater” was not always formulaic socialist-realism but embraced jazz, popular culture, and—that rarest jewel among “socially relevant” artists—ambivalence.)
Why doesn’t theater matter today? “It still does,” Witham said politely. “But theater has become so incredibly expensive to produce and attend, it forces itself into being safe; it won’t risk offending its core audience. I’m not saying musical theater is vapid and Ibsen is everything—theater should be popular entertainment, but there should be a wider variety of voices.”
Marianne Weems, artistic director of the Builders Association (see Stranger Suggests, page 27), is one of those voices. A Seattle native, Weems said, “If I could do in Seattle what I do in New York, I’d move back in a second.” Weems collaborates with dozens of artists, from actors to architects, to create ambitious, media-saturated performances that go on to national and international tours. Seattle can’t support her.
I was mulling over these conversations when I got an e-mail from Andrew Finley, English teacher and director at West Seattle High School. His students are performing The Laramie Project, the documentary play built from interviews with Wyoming residents in the wake of Matthew Shepard’s murder–a gutsy move for a high school. Last May, budget cuts at West Seattle High put theater and other arts programs on the chopping block. Parents packed out an emergency PTA meeting, demanding that the school find another solution for the budget crisis. The artsy mob ruled, and theater stayed.
Like any good educator and director, Finley introduces his students to a range of theatrical work. In the past few years, they’ve done the predictable Pippin and Grease, but they’ve also performed A Bright Room Called Day by Tony Kushner and now they’re tackling Laramie, which is often protested venomously by self-described “homo haters” like Reverend Fred Phelps.
West Seattle High produces “popular entertainment” and meatier theater, and parents fought to save it. Tell their kids to take up bonsai and they might respond that self-deprecation is self-indulgent.
