Theater for theater's sake

The latest blow to theater funding, one of a thousand cuts but a deep one this time, has been announced:  MAP Fund will no longer be giving out grants.  Funding from the Doris Duke and Mellon Foundation, once pillars of theater funding, has dried up.  It is just one of so many examples of disappearing funding, from corporations to foundations to public funds

I don’t have any easy answers about what the future is, but I have some thoughts about how we got here.  And maybe some strategies about how we can advocate for ourselves (though no matter what, we seem to be in tough waters).

It seems to me that underneath the reporting of this crisis, there is an idea that we in America have always struggled with: theater is a public good.  Theater, just plain entertaining theater, is worthwhile, whether or not is also serves a social good.  It is something that most of us who work in theater deeply believe, but it absent from theater funding discussions in recent years.  And if we don’t state it, loudly and often, no one will.

In grant proposals (and I write many), much of the emphasis is on how does theater help the goals that American society as a whole has placed higher on the hierarchy.  Of course, theater can be a tool for social justice or education or any of the established goods that we as an American society have accepted as desirable. It is an economic driver as well, which is a good way to inspire politicians who are reluctant to release public funds.  But theater, even if it fails in any way to advance broader societal goals, is in itself worthwhile. 

There has always been an American prejudice that measures value by salary and wealth.   On those metrics, theater will always come up short. But now, even those who are charity minded don’t count theater as a priority.  Modern movements like “effective altruism” don’t even consider culture within their rubric of what is considered efficient use of dollars.

And that is reflected in the changed priorities of the givers.  Foundations more and more frequently declare that they are supporting more worthy causes, and theater, if it is considered at all, is considered through the lens of those causes.  Corporations have pulled away from sponsorship, feeling they get better PR from a hospital or even a sports event.

It is an attitude that we in theater seem to have internalized, or at least accepted as the status quo.  When I hear my colleagues talk about theater, we speak about the secondary, virtuous impact theater brings. We talk about theater as a duty, when instead we should talk about it as a vital and necessary pleasure.  What better way to bring in new audiences and recapture old ones than to embrace that joy?

 Don’t misunderstand me, I have always been an advocate of theater as a social and political tool.  The festival I curate, Rehearsal for Truth, has a mission to continue in the artistic and political legacy of the former Czech President/playwright/human rights advocate Václav Havel.  And my own theater company’s mission is to be a Theater of Ideas, which very much encompasses a political dimension.

 But I find that the best political theater is driven most of all by the innate power of theater, which is manifest even in small apartments or underground venues when larger or more public gatherings are impossible, as was true for Havel’s work.  Havel’s plays succeeded as politics, but in order to do so they had to succeed as plays.  One can write brilliant manifestos, but sometimes it takes live performance to bring ideas fully to life.

Society needs theater because it is capable of expressing ideas and human interactions in a unique way, because being in a room with actors speaking beautiful words is inherently exciting, because the community and ritual of theater is baked into humanity since ancient history, and because art feeds our souls, just as much as food feeds our bodies.  One of my ongoing artistic endeavors has been to recreate works originally created in the Terezín Camps, during the Holocaust.  There, under conditions of great deprivation, the inmates were still driven to use theater to help themselves survive.

We need to rethink how we speak about theater and what questions we ask when we are funding theater.  Yes, it is important to think about modern social questions, it is important to try to find answers to inequality and climate and poverty and health and education and every aspect our social puzzle.  But also, theater is a reason in itself.  And often, the social and political aspects are baked in.  In America, theater is one of the few places left where passionate political ideas, possibly ideas innately in opposition to each other, can be expressed without the nightmare of social media inspired absolutism.  Yet even theater that does nothing more than bring joy and meaning to a roomful of friends and strangers is worthwhile.

And that theater deserves our support, our financial and societal support.  It deserves to be spoken of with passion and love, for doing no more than enriching us, for a few short hours, before we face the hardships of the world again.