ac Wellman reports that in Los Angeles, the kids don't like to go to the theatre any more because they say it's just "Geezer Theatre."
Geezer: an old fart-some harmless, toothless, witless, pointless guy the world passed by a long, long time ago; and who knows it, and who has kind of stopped trying. Except that Old Fart is a solitary condition, while Geezer is a group identity. Where there is one, there will be many. Geezers gaggle in geezer groups, gabbing the geezer credo that the world is out of step, and that the geezer is its lost and proper center. For every geezer is at heart the Old Pretender-feckless and vengeful, nostalgic, deceitful and vain.
Now it is surely no surprise that a theatre which has sold itself almost exclusively to geezers should have become a Geezer Theatre
1. Each year, as TCG balefully notes, the Geezer Theatre's subscription audience gets another year older. But the looming actuarial crisis is nothing next to the soul death of a theatre which, in pandering to the geezer, has itself become a geezer. Impotent, truculent, and profoundly self-satisfied, the Geezer Theatre doesn't really mind that at this point it is talking largely to itself. Geezer Theatre has no grand vision; you will search the Geezer stage in vain for much mention of, let's say, the wholesale looting of the American economy or the trashing of the Constitution which were the program of the past twelve years. Even its internal debates-as in the case of censorship imposed by an overtly hostile government-are framed in Geezer terms: compliance, a little muttering under the breath, and the firm resolve that truant children who caused this trouble will never eat at the table again.Look at plays of fifty or a hundred years ago. Isn't it evident they were constructed to provoke a direct emotional response from an audience-to induce terror, or helpless laughter, or romantic fantasies about the leading actors-even outrage. Precisely the menu now being served up at the movies. But the plays now being written attempt none of these things. Plays aspire only to become part of some vast imagined ongoing national conversation
2. Commercial entertainment is built on celebrity and thrills. But the Geezer Theatre, like an underwriter, prides itself on taking risks. What risks? There is no room in Geezerdom for Ice-T dusting cops off, no room for the fantasies of Arnold or of Madonna.When I was younger, I believed that theatre was stupid simply because it had fallen into the hands of a lot of stupid people, but as time wore on, this appeared to me less a cause than a symptom. I began to wonder not only what sustained the process, but suppressed any signs of revitalization. It must be said there is a cruel truth rarely mentioned in non-profit circles-that there will never be enough money to go around
3-and bad money surely drives out good people. Moreover there are at least two business practices characteristic of non-profit theatre that have geezerized it greatly.The Flow Of Money: In the non-profit world, money flows almost exclusively from institution to institution, and almost never from individual to individual. Hence, as money flowed, the non-profit system became increasingly bureaucratic and its systemic shortcomings-the incompetence, timorousness, timeserving and rigidity of thought-are systemic in all bureaucracies. Moreover, as in any bureaucratic system, individuals are reduced to interchangeable generic units. The American theatre cares about individuals-in this case, individual artists or audience members-in much the same way departments of labor care for the unemployed or hospitals care for the sick. The real institutional mission is not service but accountability, and the life goals of the legions of art clerks (which is just about all we have to show for thirty years of non-profit theatre) are promotion and retirement. Let the reader only imagine the revolutionary impact of re-allocating funding, with very large sums now going exclusively to creative artists for the completion of their projects, thereby reducing institutions to subcontractors and forcing them to compete. Unless you believe that artists would somehow "waste" the money, or that the art clerks are more deserving of our funds, I cannot see how such a proposal could much worsen the present calamitous state of things.
Seasonal Production: Producers used to produce (and commercially, still do) on a case-by-case basis. They did what they wanted, and you chose to go see it or not. But to survive, the early non-profits were seduced
4 by the idea of subscription sales and the consequent imposition of the season-itself inherently generic and abstract-necessarily led to a standardization of product, and a schedule which no doubt contributes to the widespread phenomenon of artistic burnout. Subscriptions, after all, work on the grab bag principle: since you don't know what you're getting, you must be assured that all items will be pretty much the same. The impact of subscription itself is subtler and more profound. Would the reader prefer dining out in a favorite restaurant if the tab were discounted, but the dates all had to be set a year in advance? Surely this would rob the event of the very spontaneity-the sense of celebration and treat-that is its purpose. Subscriptions in fact are a perfect geezer engine, driving out the spontaneous audience, and attracting people who don't so much like theatre as much as they like to subscribe. For the geezer, as we have said, seeks out the geezer; and as long as there are slightly more geezers than seats, there's even the illusion of scarcity which can be manipulated to suggest the excitement of genuine demand. But as the fell hand of mortality works its will, the truth becomes clear: subscriptions are a mess of pottage and the theatre has bartered its soul in exchange for a moribund audience.But subscription brochures and Parkinson's law can't account for the pandemic staleness
5, the systemic accidie-the stunning lack of new ideas, not just in writing but acting, directing, design and not only in art but in business, affecting the large through the mid-sized and small, not just in theatre but throughout the supporting institutions such as funding, criticism, and academia, sustained now over three generations from founding geezer to mid-career geezer to the fresh new crop of geezers from the eighties-in short, the Brezhnevization6 of the American theatre.A Brezhnevite culture is both slavish and cynical. It adheres to a world-view which it knows to be outmoded, institutionalizing stupidity as a means of self-preservation (and, to no small degree, the preservation of its perks). A Brezhnevite culture is controlled by an elite of clerks, hacks and apparatchiks who, after an apprenticeship of timeserving, inherit a system which they know, better than anyone, doesn't work and can't be fixed. And so the nomenklatura denies reality and freezes time, demanding total adherence to a way of thinking and a set of terms which everyone privately concedes is pure bull.
The remedy is simple enough, but while fresh thinking about the theatre may be praised in the abstract, it's generally buried in the concrete. In other words, the Geezer Theatre is neither stale because it's weak, nor weak because it's stale, but stale and weak because of everything it's denied in order to maintain its orthodoxy. So let's take four of the hoariest clichés of Geezer Theatre-that theatre has to address reality, that it ought to be saying something, that it needs to come from the heart, and must challenge its audience-and see how much has been left out.
Perhaps the quickest way to gauge how theatre's grown out of touch with reality is to look at the kind of reality it describes. Unlike film and television, which principally deal with contemporary settings, theatrical terrain is typically anywhere but here, any time but now-let's say, a rural America that none of its audience can possibly have come from, or a decade virtually no one alive can remember. Fantasy locales make up whole theatrical subgenres: coming of age in the Depression, way down South, as an immigrant, during the Holocaust-whole careers (Horton Foote, Romulus Linney, Preston Jones), and Pulitzer upon Pulitzer (Shenkken, the Wilsons) devoted to events that never happened, yet aspire to historicity.
Not that there aren't plays which take place in the present, but they rarely feel autobiographic or even directly observed. You can think of any number of novels which expect you to recognize that the author is drawing characters, situations, or settings from life. But the theatre deals in generic resemblances, a little like those motel-room "landscapes" created with a palette knife. Characters tend to be "types" (theatre, after all, transformed the homeless into the ubiquitous "baglady"), composites of people the author might have known but didn't, and therefore had to invent. Reality is further displaced by an even subtler process of abstraction. We live in a mass consumer culture. Everything we buy has language on it. Hundreds of people we've never met are "known
7" to us on a first-name basis, like Elvis or Lucy or Hillary. Hardly a desire can be imagined which doesn't exist as a product (some of the most successful being pure thought-products like "life-style"). Yet these surfaces, if you will, of contemporaneous reality are invariably smoothed out in the theatre8. Theatre in fact positively shuns the specificity about mass culture that you find on television (or, to give a different example, in contemporary painters as different as Warhol and Fischl, Kruger and Applebroog). Outside of one or two initial topical references, plays like Eastern Standard and Six Degrees of Separation-which have no other purpose than to show how we live today-exist in the hermetic world you actually encounter only in TV commercials, stripped of televisions, radios, stores, products, brand names9.Only in a TV commercial, one might argue-where people spontaneously or empirically "decide" to use a product-can one sustain the myth of personal autonomy central to the high-minded discourse of principle and desire that's the preferred subject of the Geezer Theatre. Avoiding specificity not only gives the proceedings a tonier air (and minimizes the risk of implicating any actual audience), but is in fact a prerequisite to the peculiar "psychology" of the Geezer Theatre, in which people not only say what they mean, but know what they feel. Everyone recognizes from their own experience how hard it is to understand, let alone articulate, motives and needs, just as we all know that what we want and what we know are, for the most part, the products of large, aggressive corporations. Yet the theatre shows us autonomous beings, possessed of remarkable insights, whose lives are lived on some fundamental human substrate independent of late twentieth-century American culture.
Reality has to intrude with a vengeance when theatre's trying to urge some political (or social, environmental, multicultural, etc.) agenda on you. Here the problem isn't generalization so much as tedium. Plays that attempt to comment on the world we live in are invariably obvious and most are just plain clunky. There's a venerable (Northern European) tradition of plays of ideas and social action-trouble is, as the Geezer Theatre's known for some time, "message" plays leave its audiences cold.
The standard explanations are two: It is claimed that the mere presentation of fact is "undramatic," hence that a play which depends upon fact is dramatic or "workable" to the extent that it converts fact into character conflict-in other words, to the extent it gets away from fact altogether and resembles, let's say, mid-career Arthur Miller. It is also darkly hinted that message plays are essentially "preaching to the converted" (the idea being, I suppose, that the Geezer Theatre's audience is not only homogeneous, but essentially right-thinking). And since this would be an empty exercise and nobody wants to sit through All My Sons again, you wind up with the consensus that there's no point trying to make an overt statement in the Geezer Theatre. Meanwhile, of course, as everyone knows, the process of targeting and delivering messages gets ever more sophisticated in the rest of the world.
The advertisers and politicians who bombard us with their statements have had to address the twin evils of media saturation: the growing public distaste for the effort of seeking the truth of a claim, and sheer signal overload. Not that the Big Lie
10 can't still be effective. But overall, truth has deliberately had a steadily declining role in advertising and politics for the last twenty years because truth is tiresome. Instead, Madison Avenue and the White House11 rely more and more on statements designed to make the listener feel good and render any issue of truthfulness meaningless. What does it mean to say "Kool... it's A Kick" or "It's Morning in merica"? Not very much beyond "Don't worry-be happy." Which is exactly the point.So plays like The Speed of Darkness or The Normal Heart seem ponderous and inartistic not because there's anything wrong with what they're saying-certainly not because they fail to dish out character conflict-but because they're still making statements the old-fashioned way. They not only say what they mean and in so many words, but appeal to the Truth. There's no quicker way in post-Reagan America to seem hopelessly out-of-it than to state your beliefs in a straightforward way and rest on the truth
12. Indeed, the only way these strategies can still be made to work is ironically, where characters-as in Aunt Dan And Lemon make straightforward and unambiguous arguments for propositions the audience is almost certain to disagree with. The really curious thing about Shawn's play-and the best evidence of the theatre's provinciality in these matters-is that the author felt it necessary to add both prologue and epilogue explaining at length how one could write (and read) a play which didn't unambiguously reflect the beliefs of the playwright.Stated this baldly, it's astonishing that a modern writer would need to remind his audience that the opinions expressed-in this case, that Hitler wasn't such a bad guy after all!-aren't necessarily those of the management. No wonder the Geezer Theatre rarely portrays the kind of sociopathic predators
13 (e.g., serial killers, Attorneys General, etc.) who made the eighties so much fun, or the opinions-such as anti-abortionism-it finds truly upsetting. And the few plays like Hurlyburly or Grownups which do venture an entire cast of characters, none of whom is likable or through which the author speaks directly, are greeted with unease. Irony of any kind-that is to say, any kind of statement which purports to say one thing but which from context, one is meant to take in another sense-is not tolerated in the theatre on the grounds that it's dishonest.Maybe all cultures have trouble getting their feelings straight, but American culture, to the extent that it's Anglo-Saxon, has long associated emotional reticence with good behavior
14. It may be nothing more than the natural anxiety of the pioneer (or parvenu) in the parlor, but in America, spontaneity and effusiveness court social disaster. The rest of the world may think of Americans as bumptious and demonstrative, but in the principal arenas of American life-the home and office-strong feelings of any kind (rage, lust, disgust, despair, greed, sorrow, joy, etc.) have generally been suppressed in favor of an impersonal amiability. I'm Charles, I'll be your waiter, and have a nice day, sir.Perversely, however, rather than reinvent ourselves as a refined or artificial people, Americans oncocted a myth of national sincerity. Perhaps, being an insincere nation, we needed to confer such value on emotional sincerity lest we give the show away. Whatever the case,, in the few remaining awkward moments when authentic emotion is clearly in order-as when someone gets married, let's say, or dies or has a birthday-we prefer to demonstrate the appropriate insincerity. We become, in other words, sentimental.
Sentiment is the exaggerated re-enactment of an authentic emotion; the correct response generated artificially. Sentiment has become the emotional lubricant of our culture because it is the paradigm of false feeling, "showing you care" while demanding so little in return. Sentiments are not simply weaker than feelings but occur on a different part of the emotional spectrum. Sentiments are indirect or displaced emotions-they are emotions one "feels" in relation to someone else's feeling.
To feel sorry for or happy for-proud of or ashamed of-is to re-enact one's own experience of sorrow, joy, pride, or shame vicariously. But in a culture of displacement, the two easily become equivalent. As in the office or the home, the theatre is more comfortable with sentiment than true feeling. When people say they go to the theatre to feel something (or care about the characters) what they mean is that they expect the theatre to be sentimental. But if sentiment is not feeling but the play-acting of feeling, then theatrical feeling is the play-acting of play-acting.
Virtually anything real Americans might want to say to each other, such as "I would like to a) fuck you; b) kill you; c) trade places with you"-is incapable of being spoken in our theatre and so goes unsaid
15. Instead, the archetypal protagonist of the sentimental drama is the victim-among the least interesting and dramatic of types (and among the most despised in real America)-yet invaluable for the purpose of moralization. Needy cases are ideal for instilling pity (read guilt), because pity is the conversion-reaction of our truer feelings: loathing and fear. It's only in the theatre, as I said before, that we sentimentalize the homeless and mentally ill16, and in a play like Six Degrees Of Separation-which after all deals with a conjunction of the upwardly mobile with the pathologically dishonest, on the face of it two rather unsympathetic kinds of people-both protagonists-con man and mark-are actually portrayed as victims: two lonely, vulnerable people just trying to reach out to each other.No surprise that making fun of people is the deepest taboo of the Geezer Theatre. Characters are often scorned or shamed, but rarely mocked, and so as ridicule was suppressed-as laughing at someone came to be seen as highly offensive-the Geezer Theatre not only blunted the edge of its comedy but essentially surrendered itself to the righteous.
Whether or not we are or ever were a Puritan people, we are certainly predisposed to be a righteous people, and righteousness is the Puritan fighting strategy par excellence. The righteous are not simply better than you or me. The righteous have an understanding of the word of God that you and I can never get, and as anyone knows who's ever tried, it is impossible to argue with it because righteousness, by its very nature, is beyond appeal. It represents as closed and perfect a world view as its dark twin, racism-each sharing a vision of war between those born light and those born dark.
There is, however, a way to defuse the righteous, and that's to laugh at them
17. So while Americans tend to distrust satire as exclusive, hence elitist, ridicule has been the basis of the most vigorous strain of native comedy. From W. C. Fields to Billy Wilder, the classic strategy of American social comedy (as opposed to vaudeville and sentimental comedy) has been to set the protagonist against a backdrop of stereotypes, almost all of whom are presented maliciously, as objects of ridicule. Thus Bugs is funnier than Mickey, Sturges funnier than Capra, Twain is funnier than Ward, the Kramdens are funnier than the Ricardos, and Eddie Murphy used to be funnier than anyone else from Saturday Night Live except possibly Belushi until he started to take himself seriously. In this Jonsonian world there are only knaves and gulls; a vision so pessimistic that even its most fervently American practitioners (e.g., Altman) become implausible when arguing for the possibility of real social change.Television is what really killed it. Television comedy-situation comedy-replaces ridicule with tolerance, jeopardy with balance. If the comedy of ridicule is antagonistic-its ur-plot being escape and its protagonists either rogues or simple- tons-television proposes the gentler situation of rescue and redemption. Television types are always sympathetic, and TV plots place the protagonist-often through his or her own fault-in a predicament from which rescue comes only through the help of friends. Ridiculous comedy starts from the assumption that everything's screwed up and everyone's a shark or a sucker-hardly a viewpoint compatible with marketing. So television comedy-and the vision of America it promotes-reaffirms the status quo by saying that everyone's OK, and that by needing each other we conquer over small vicissitudes and reaffirm the basic soundness of our lives. Only the most daring television-All in the Family, Roseanne-introduces elements of the dark comedy of ridicule into the framework of the sitcom, and even here, always within the context of a relativistic, homeostatic universe.
But since television comedy is funded by corporate advertising, it has no other choice. Theatre-especially that funded theatre which prides itself on risk and challenge-has (or should have) no such strictures. Indeed, at a time when pandemic knavery and (self) deceit positively cry out for lampooning, ridicule is an area in which theatre could effectively compete with television. But of course, the Geezer Theatre is terrified of giving offense and dismisses as "sophomoric" or "irresponsible" any comedy that relies on making fun of other people. Only it seems in the subgenre of gay comedy-and again, you don't have to be much of a social philosopher to understand how closely America identifies itself with gay America-is malice of any kind considered entertaining.
A theatre is a Geezer Theatre when it's unable to distinguish between image and reality, except that it prefers the glamour of the manufactured idea to the arduous search for truth. A Geezer Theatre deals exclusively in received ideas; its convictions, whether of itself or about the world, are tired and shopworn; it confuses the exchange of ideas with the professional wrestling matches of the Op Ed page.
A theatre is a Geezer Theatre when it makes original thought in any meaningful sense impossible. And so its more intelligent and restless artists attempt to express creativity through the commodification of style, appropriating whole gestural vocabularies merely for effect. Style become fashion, expression comes to mean expressing oneself.
A theatre is a Geezer Theatre when it's incapable of simple, pungent truth. A Geezer Theatre defines its mission in the terms of its most palpable failures, saying for example that its purpose is the creation of a vigorous national theatre, or the nurture of artists. Geezer Theatre claims to be stimulated by the re-enactment of the familiar, it defines the predictable as new, it boasts of challenging audiences with risk-taking fare or bringing the vision of a cultural minority to a wider audience, but everyone understands there will be no risks and no challenges and that whatever identities are presented will already be well known to everyone. A Geezer Theatre pursues "what works" with techniques, such as play development, which are known to fail.
A theatre is a Geezer Theatre when it's impatient with truth. A Geezer Theatre prefers to concentrate on feeling. It is insincere and sentimental, seeking accommodation with a society that has no use for it, whereas the only truthful way of addressing such a culture is, as of old, from opposition.
Whether such a theatre can regain vitality strikes me as doubtful, but whether it can do so on its own seems inconceivable. Like any other hopelessly ill creature in this odd century, two fates remain. As in most cases, existence can be prolonged past any meaningful purpose until, utterly enfeebled and insentient, the patient is doped up and allowed to starve to death
18. That strikes me as a fair description of what's already been started. More and more, the shop talk of the American theatre resembles the murmured conversations of the sickroom: the tragic condition of W__; the ever-worsening state of E__, the difficult passing of J__ (and how the contagion spread). True, there are still new ideas springing up on the fringes of theatre and in the margins of culture-at the Undermain in Dallas, say, or Sledgehammer in San Diego. But between the poverty of thought and the scarcity of surplus wealth, does anyone believe the lumbering Geezer bureaucracies will somehow right themselves?Still, there are always a few in whom the prospect of vigor remains, for whom "experimental" treatments may be attempted. The techniques are generally invasive: the administration of poison or the introduction of foreign objects such as mechanical valves or baboon livers. In the long run, as Keynes jovially pointed out, we are all dead-but in the meantime, the Geezer Theatre still has a choice: it can dwindle away on a morphine drip or it can try to find a pig's heart.
This essay first appeared in Performing Arts Journal 48
September 1994, Vol. XVI, No. 3
Edited by Bonnie Marranca & Gautam Dasgupta,
Published for PAJ Publications by
the Johns Hopkins University Press.
Updated: August 15, 1999