The Theatre at the End of the World, Part One
By: James Grissom
Tags: Broadway, Culture, Racism, Theatre, George Floyd

Within the various bunkers in and around New York City, those making their living, so to speak, in the theatre began talking about what the theatre could become, when and if it opened at any time in the visible future. I arranged various Zoom talks with people willing to talk, even as they begged me to keep them off the record, since they might wish to work again in the theatre, such as it was, wherever it was. I agreed.

First the fingers were pointed: What had to change, under threat of revolution, one young actor stated, was that the non-profit theatre stranglehold on New York, particularly its Broadway offerings, had to be broken. Over and over there were tales of the many bad productions emanating from Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre, Playwrights Horizons, Second Stage, all subsidized by subscriptions, grants, and operating without any tax burdens, and yet the prices of their tickets continued to rise, until now they were as expensive as those offered on Broadway, even as the actors and playwrights were paid the lowest of rates, because “we’re a non-profit, dear,” as Lynne Meadow of MTC loves to reiterate, even as she commands a salary and perks of more than one million dollars a year. “That has to stop,” said another actress, who has worked in non-profits, “because they abuse actors and they do not fulfill their primary mission, supposedly, which is to bring in new audiences, and no one can afford those tickets.”

Also attacked were the various “price points” for ticket buying that exist, in which a person with plenty of time and a fairly open schedule can visit TDF or Broadway Box and maneuver for a reduced-price ticket. I myself have done this, and was happy that I snagged a $43 ticket for ANGELS IN AMERICA at the Neil Simon Theatre, only to have the usher laugh when she presented me what are known as the self-fellating chairs of the city’s balconies, where anyone over five-feet-six will be challenged. She kindly moved me downstairs to a section of the orchestra for “the infirm and the wanting,” and I sat between a man hooked up to oxygen and a woman in a flamboyant neck brace. I did not complain.

Everyone agreed that no one should be paying more than $20 for the self-pleasuring seating sections of our theatres, and ticket outlets and papering outlets like Theatre Extras would be superfluous if an agreement, perhaps even an acknowledgment, could be reached on addressing the issue of ticket prices. It was at this point that actors and producers blamed stage hands and stage hands blamed musicians, and everyone got to hear, yet again, stories of two-person plays with one set in a small house that nonetheless had to pay six — or was it eight or ten? — musicians per week, because the union demanded it. But as one representative of Local Number One for the stagehands told me “We’re here. We’re ready for a meeting. We’re willing to make changes to make the theatre better, but we haven’t heard from a single producer or theatre company. And don’t get mad at us because we fight harder for our members than Equity does.”

Donna McKechnie, a Tony winner as the original Cassie in A CHORUS LINE, remembered how, in the 1970s, New York, as a city, had to be resold to the country. With its soaring crime rates, its overall dinge, its seedy corners, tourists were avoiding the Big Apple, but a consortium of civic leaders, theatre artists, and a public relations maven named Bobby Zarem came together and re-branded New York. The “I Love New York” ad campaign was a help, as was the Theatre Development Fund and its TKTS booth, but what primarily revitalized and re-defined the theatre was a concerted effort to involve the citizens of New York in what Joseph Papp called “our” theatre. Fortunately, there was money to be had — grants, arts councils, wealthy citizens who wanted their city to survive, and weren’t so hungry as those today who want names on credits or a Tony on the shelf — so plays were commissioned, staged, moved, seen. Few were getting rich, but a lot of people were getting experience, and I’ll just leave you to peruse the offerings of theatrical seasons from 1973 to about 1983 to see that ours was not as profoundly dumb a theatre as we now boast, and you could see the biggest hit in the best seat at a rate that wouldn’t cripple your budget. It was during this time and up until the early 1990s that people who lived in New York City and were not heirs or hedge-fund managers could attend the theatre and other arts events a couple of times a week. This built both a habit and an audience, but now, everyone kept telling me, the theatre is geared to people “out there,” waiting for a vacation or a school trip or special event to stand in Times Square, like turkeys in the rain, eating ribs in an evacuated thoroughfare, gawping at the lights, and getting ready to see something dumb and shiny. While it is true that tourism has always been at the heart of the theatre’s business, it was once true that the theatre accepted and utilized its role as arbiter of what was done, what should be done, and it was always believed that the folks flying in would see what those working in the theatre thought they should see. Ticket buyers will be strobed to death by MOULIN ROUGE! if that is on the menu, and they will sit through TINA! and AIN’T TOO PROUD, both of them dumb relatives meandering around the feet of DREAMGIRLS, but it never occurs to anyone to go bold and do something new that will excite people, propel them toward the theatre. True, there is HAMILTON, but all I heard from people “out there” is that it was prohibitively expensive, the lottery only benefited people in the city near a computer or a phone, and so it became yet another offering available only to a few.

There is also the possibility, hard to handle, that perhaps people no longer care at all about the theatre. We have for so long been deprived a steady diet of good plays and intelligent musicals within our price ranges that we may no longer miss the experience of attending the theatre. We may be perfectly happy with television and films, their ease and cheapness, their constant supply and replenishment.

But then another conversation crept in.

An assistant to a producer mentioned that his boss, and other producers, had begun reading “Black Is The New Green,” a best-selling book that taught people — “honkies, mostly,” this young man offered — how to sell their wares to affluent blacks. The producer for whom this man worked wanted blacks with money in the theatre, so he invested in the Denzel Washington revival of August Wilson’s FENCES, charged premium-ticket rates, and crowed about the “black royalty” that showed up to honor this play. While there was an audience of young or simply middle-class people — of various hues — who would have benefited from seeing Wilson’s play, they were not and are not part of the “marketing plan” in getting a new audience with new habits into old seats.

The general recipe in New York theatre, across all spectrums, is that people of color are good badges to wear, causes to promote, but the majority of people in leadership capacities, and particularly Broadway producers, have no relationship to or understand people of color, although they enjoy producing shows that are written or directed by them and which utilize their performing talents if they can sell it to an audience with money, giving them profits along with a liberal cred. “I feel like the retarded, dancing monkey a lot,” said a Tony and Emmy winner, who smiles broadly for his “supper,” but knows that he is as bizarre to those who produce him as a ride on public transportation. “Sometimes I’d get a ride in the private car,” he told me, “and a look that asked, ‘Who’s better than me?’”

No one is calling for a theatre of causes, the problem play, the issue play. They are merely calling for well-written plays (which they tell me are out there, and they will take me to them) that address the lives of those who might not live in the tri-state area or have expense accounts.

THE INHERITANCE

THE INHERITANCE

When the COVID lockdown began, it brought to an end the theatre’s season, and forced an early deadline on the plays and musicals eligible for Tony Award consideration. It was an ideal season, insofar as plays were concerned, to place this current conversation, with its roiling currents of race, fairness, equity, worth, relevance. The only two plays that might deserve a nomination for Best Play were both firm fantasies, although the feet of each were planted in different worlds.

Matthew Lopez gave us THE INHERITANCE, fresh from success in Great Britain, a massive, overwritten play about gays ravaged by what they perceive as the two greatest tragedies in their lifetimes: AIDS and the election to the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. While there is no doubt that Lopez possesses talent, and certainly Stephen Daldry directed the seven bloated hours with a skill that was dazzling, I’m not sure where the playwright went shopping for his gay characters, all of whom appear buff and au courant and who can even afford drug addictions and a regular supply of male escorts when gifts go begging and wishes unfulfilled. These men — all played by a cast of gifted actors and one woman, the transcendent Lois Smith — do not even bat an eye when E.M. Forster shows up to chat about his novel Howards End, or when a platoon of men dead from AIDS wander from the back of the Ethel Barrymore Theatre to greet the man who will now own the home that gave rest and support to men abandoned by their families when the sores appeared. These are privileged men, even having the wit of joke writers when necessary, and I thought the play would be a success, but it angered audiences more than it assuaged or educated them, while Jeremy O. Harris’ SLAVE PLAY had the distinction, unique in my three decades in New York, of not only engaging but enraging its audiences, so that I positioned myself on the sidewalks near the Golden Theatre to ask patrons what they had seen and what they thought of it all. Whatever flaws you might find in what Harris has written, and I read the play and spoke to hundreds of people before I saw the play, it has as its foundation a bold, true idea: Racism has distorted, blunted, aroused, and weaponized white people (audiences) to such a degree that they can no longer recognize their own biases and desires. I heard from many outraged patrons who felt “demeaned” by the play, who assured me (whoever I was, but I was white and I had a pad) that they really liked black people “and not just sexually,” as one woman piped in a bit too soon and loudly. “Can we ever do anything right by black people?” asked one man, in his early forties, clearly a Friend of Thirteen, well-meaning, a theatregoer, but a man who looked sadly at what he had just endured. “I don’t like sitting in a theatre and being told what a shit I am,” he told me, which reminded me, growing up in the South of the 1960s and riots and sit-ins and curfews, of an uncle who stopped going to our church because he was tired of hearing how bad a person he was because he wasn’t going within his heart or out on the streets of Baton Rouge to change things for blacks, to even consider shaking the hand of a black person.

SLAVE PLAY

SLAVE PLAY

What I think Harris is doing — and brilliantly — is showing us how desperately whites wish to be forgiven for any past sins, real or imagined or fantasized, with the least possible attempt at actually changing anything about themselves or for anyone else. Just as theatrical producers appear at functions with black performers or write checks to black charities, this is seen as an act of penance, a trip around the Stations of the Cross, and can’t we move along? Some of us will submit to abuse, might even dress as Miss Kizzy from Alex Haley’s ROOTS, and endure a whipping verbal or physical or psychological, but it is all theatrics, smoke. Lopez gave us a fantasy that clouded more than it revealed, grabbed the tear ducts so that one could not so clearly see how false the play was, while Harris threw upon us a pure and open fabrication, a total fantasy constructed to throw a mirror on the audience, with just enough comedy and flair to leave a lot of people thinking it was “just a play.”

A new theatre, many told me, would need to include more plays like Harris’, even though SLAVE PLAY also closed at a loss, unable to secure the audiences I felt it deserved. Is Broadway lost to plays such as his? Is it all stars and fluff? One solution offered by quite a few was a change of personnel in the non-profits, new blood among directors and playwrights, a real effort on the part of producers to find new plays for new audiences. “There is an astonishing dearth of people of color in positions of power,” one writer told me. “If more of an effort were made to engage these people,” he continued, “ we would see a different kind of theatre, one that doesn’t have to be a ‘black’ or ‘Latin’ or ‘Asian’ theatre, but one that is not so damned old and creaky that it can only be appreciated and tolerated by the current, dying audiences. I mean I’m against ageism, but can one of these directors who is eighty or pushing it, turn down one or two jobs and offer it to someone who would like and needs a leg up?”

Ideas percolated, e-mails were exchanged, phone calls were made, and then, on Memorial Day…