The plays we have held as classics have one thing in common: the theatre as a metaphor. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Carol Churchill and beyond, great playwrights have understood that the power of theatre lies in the imaginative. A few people on stage, an artificial world, language and story all wrapped in a larger metaphor of human experience. Even Brecht, with his alienations and direct political messages still used metaphor: the chalk circle, the city of Mahagonny, etc.
What happened?
Most of the time when I attend the theatre these days, which I admit is not often, I am usually blasted with a polemic, didactic and rather obvious set of statements couched as theatre.
Identity politics drama and social issue plays are actually extended blog posts (like this one) intended to convince of something I already understand: racism, sexism, intolerance are bad.
I get it. Do you have anything original in mind?
Also, it seems like the audiences at these shows are the sung to choir of the cliché. They nod knowingly and embrace the stuff going with a strange sort of "we are with you, we get it" cultism.
Don't get me wrong: I'm about as leftist as they come, somewhere just to this side of Ché Guevara on many issues. However, the liberal soapbox that is the typical stage event makes me embarrassed to be a liberal.
Do the artists putting on the play, which is expensive, difficult, laborious and unprofitable not realize they are speaking to an ever shrinking club of enablers? There is no one's mind out there in the audience that needs changing. It's all your friends, Facebook and actual, who are egging you on. You are hollering into an echo chamber.
Where are the playwrights exploring worlds that provoke my imagination? Where is the stagecraft that transforms a simple setting into a universal symbol? Where are the stories that touch my deep human need for myth, fable, folktale? Also, why are you yelling at me?
If the theatre continues this slide towards becoming a very small soapbox, it should come as no surprise that most people have no use for it. Netflix is so much better and a lot less expensive.
Theatre has always had a special set of elements that make it a unique art form: a live event where imaginative forces touch on powerful themes through language and images that can only occur in real time.
I'm still seeking that kind of theatre, but I seem to mostly find reductive, badly staged, predictable and polemical theatre in my home town of Seattle.
Waiting for Godot is a pretty good play. It's two guys and a tree. It's also a powerful metaphor for the human experience.
I wish more theatre makers appreciated that.