Jackie Maxwell.Glenn Lowson
We know budgets are tight. But how is the financial squeeze playing out artistically?
Albert Schultz: I suppose the reaction to the financial meltdown is no different in the arts than it is anywhere else. We're stung, we're cautious, we're wondering what we might have done to protect ourselves and hoping it will all end soon.
If we're really lucky, we have - either consciously or unconsciously - anticipated something coming, and our current programming speaks to our audience's concerns. We're about to open a Depression-era play by Clifford Odets called Awake and Sing! (it opened earlier this month). We just closed David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, a play that comes out of the last recession and, in hindsight, comes as a warning of unregulated corporate greed.
Perhaps the life we imitate is given more meaning by the relevance of the art we make, and probably the art we make is enriched by the additional stresses of our lives. Mostly though, we're thinking about two things: getting the show up and paying the rent.
Jackie Maxwell: When the financial world crashed last fall, a Shaw supporter said to me, "I guess this is why you programmed your Noel Coward cycle." I laughed (or as much as I could at that point) and told him that the Cowards had been planned for over a year and that it was merely a lucky coincidence that these pieces - so many of which are indeed designed to amuse - are currently unwinding.
I think, though, that, as Albert says, one is always aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the endless and extreme vagaries that affect us moment to moment, and that, in programming an extensive season, these complexities and inevitable ups and downs are bound to be reflected. The choice in our case is for the audience to decide if it wants to escape - albeit thoughtfully - or dive in seeking explication, context and challenge. We offer both ends of the spectrum.
I will say, as I put the finishing touches to our 2010 season, that I do see a thread running through it, and that is definitely "money" - how we use it and how we abuse it, past, present and future!
Heather Redfern: At The Cultch, our context is very different than yours - we program and commission contemporary, theatre, dance and music. But I'm certainly going to be very interested to see how artists creating shows this year deal with the uncertain times. That said, much of our current program was also in place before the crash, and we live in the bubble of the pending 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Still, looking over our program, I see an emerging theme too: A desire for transformation and the uncertainty of the journey - whether it be funny, beautiful or dark.
So, okay, that's right now. But like Jackie maybe I can turn the question around to ask how what we're living through now will affect what we see next season. Will we look at the stage then and think, 'Yes, I know where that was coming from?'
That is a key question - and which plays are really resonating for you during this recession?
Schultz: Whenever I've thought of tailoring a programming choice for an awaiting and eager audience I have been mistaken. Like Jackie with the Coward plays, I have found that my moments of zeitgeist-catching prescience have been entirely accidental or at the most subconscious.
Here's a theory, Jackie and Heather: There are three categories of plays that will always, when programmed, give the impression of prescience. One is plays about the futility of war ( Lysistrata , Hair , even Romeo and Juliet). Sadly, we can always find a real life corollary for these. Secondly, plays about the failure of a "system" to address the needs of society (many of the plays of Ibsen, Shaw, Miller, Brecht etc.). We can always find real-life parallels to this phenomenon. The third category that makes a programmer look prescient is the play that makes us laugh out loud, something we are always in need of. There are many plays that fit in these three containers that slosh around in my head constantly.
Then there is a play that never leaves me and never seems to lose its poignancy and (strangely) its urgency. That play is Thornton Wilder's Our Town , a play that gently urges us to slow down and take note of the everyday miracles of our existence. We have done it three times in 10 years at Soulpepper. We will, I think, do it again.
Maxwell: I think Albert has a good point. We brought Saint Joan to Chicago in January, 2008, for example, right in the middle of the Democratic leadership race. One reviewer said that if people really wanted to understand the arguments between Obama and Clinton, then they should hurry down to see Saint Joan , where the context to it all would be given!
As you can imagine, this was not in my mind as we set up this visit. Connections made, contexts clarified, the sense of the world operating in cycles - most good theatre shows this in one way or another.
Redfern: Your examples of plays transcending time and connecting to an audience are great. Three plays resonating for me are contemporary, but are pulling their source material from classic material. I recently saw Catalyst Theatre's Nevermore and Frankenstein , stylistically epic yet dealing with those issues that are at the core of our failure and successes as human beings: Our cruelty to, and our ultimate dependence on, one another; our ability to destroy, which is as strong as our ability to create; our desire to control nature, something we will always fail at doing.
Albert, I know what you are saying about the world depicted in Our Town , but that is a place I have a hard time relating to. An example of what I mean: The Cultch is supporting a new adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four by an emerging company in Vancouver. As I was watching the staged reading this spring I thought the world of telescreens and surveillance will be very accessible to audiences - no longer science fiction, this is probably an environment that is closer to reality for many people than the one with a white picket fence.
I do think that ultimately Nineteen Eighty-Four , Nevermore and Frankenstein are love stories because love is often the gauge that we use to understand big ideas on a human level. Like Jackie was saying, that sense of the world operating in cycles.
So does theatre explore these themes differently than other mediums? Why should audiences spend on a play instead of, say, a DVD?
Schultz: Heather, you make some interesting points about contemporary audiences and what they want/need from the theatre. There is definitely some great work going on all over the world that incorporates digital technology into theatrical storytelling. The thing that for me is so transformative about a play like Our Town , is that it doesn't use anything but chairs, tables and living humans to ask some pretty profound questions.
This is an experience that can only happen in the theatre. An empty space filled with thoughts, ideas, imagination and shared humanity. A room full of strangers enter, a small community of shared experience leaves. For my money, the most powerful theatre is that which engages the audience's imagination the most. I think maybe our job as theatre practitioners is to find environments that are not "closer to reality" but further away, that the imaginative journey can be that much greater.
I think a challenge that we are going to face in the theatre is how to keep up with an increasingly technology-dependent audience. As the world moves faster and faster, a theatre of heartbeat, voice and flesh may be a necessary retreat. That said, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds cool!
Maxwell: There is no doubt that the notion of a shared experience is one of the biggest reasons to attend a play. But it is not enough simply to be in the room. Once there, the onus is on us to present something so alive and so compelling that the experience actually transports ALL in the room, cast and audience alike, to somewhere they were not necessarily expecting to go - the imaginative journey that Albert is talking about.
I am hugely interested in using all sorts of new technology to achieve this, but in the end, I too think that, be it Nevermore , Saint Joan or Awake and Sing! , there is an unmatched potency to the immediacy of the human connection and an opportunity to use that connection to take the audience further along and deeper into the complexities and resonances of the stories.
Redfern: I think we are all agreed that what we do is create a live experience - one that cannot be had any other way. What I see is that artists are grappling with integrating technology on stage and also grappling with the role of what's "live" versus what a DVD or Net-based experience provides every day.
I saw a performance of Rambo Solo at FTA [Festival Transamériques]in Montreal last week, live performance in front of a video screen with very little interaction between the two - which is something I normally don't like, but it worked because part of the story was about how the movie got it wrong. What I was reminded of is that when movies came along we still read books and went to live performance and got something out of it we could not get any other way. It's the same today. No matter how prevalent the computer has become, there is something in human beings that seeks out a shared experience, an element of surprise.