SOME NOTES ON THE THEATRE

(Addressed to the San Diego Community
Theatre, at the Globe Theatre, Feb. 19, 1940)

Most people, it seems to me, are too casual about the
theatre -- as perhaps most people are too casual about
everything. I realize that workers in a little theatre of
this nature are here for various reasons:

it's fun to do plays -

it's pleasant to work with people in a medium that
gives an extra color and warmth to life -

it's a way of killing an evening (and sometimes a
morning and afternoon, too) -

it's a fascinating world, magic, stimulating -

it's a good place for self-expression -

it enlarges your social life -

it acquaints you with plays, dramatic literature you
wouldn't perhaps otherwise encounter -

it makes you more and more competent in one of the
various arts and crafts of the theatre -
acting, designing, directing, etc. -

it's something that got wished on you and you can't
get out of it -

it's a deeply interesting and rewarding way of
spending your spare time -

it's something you intend to make your life work -
you're going to be a professional (some of
you of course are, or have been) -

it's your training ground for learning your future
calling.

And so, naturally, with this wide divergence of reason for

(2)

being connected with a theatre like this, there's plenty
of leeway for casualness about it.

If your bread and butter doesn't come from it, if your
future is not dependent on it, if you're not all on the
board of directors - as I assume XEXX you're not - and
thus can't dictate policy or pick plays - then if you
don't take the drama seriously, it's understandable.

However, I don't believe anybody should be casual about
the theatre - no matter how minor his interest in it is.
I feel EX so strongly that you've got something MEX on
your hands - and in your hands here -- and I'd hate to see
it slip through your fingers before you've realized how
precious it is, and, as an organism, how important and
how profound.

Please don't get the idea that I think you should be religious about the theatre - that you should come in on tiptoe, with bated breath, full of awe and mysticism.

Not at all. You should have some fun out of it. You shouldn't, I think, touch any aspect of the theatre without joy, honest-to-God delight. For it's platitudinous that joy is the very stuff of the creative instinct -- and so what I'm saying is, "Give that creative impulse a chance."

And if you do, with gusto and joy, it will reward you greatly. And as it rewards you - it will reward the audiences who come to see your plays.

(3)

You certainly have no right to ask anyone to sit through
one of your productions and to go out without being in
some way **changed**. I don't mean completely made over, con-
verted, changed in a moment to something new and strange
and unrecognizable **xx** (like the villain in the last act
of **East Lynne**, or changed as I understand some people are
by the ministrations of evangelists or a good woman). I
mean only - an evening in the theatre should **somehow, some-
where, change the cells a little**. Or change **one cell**, even.

But you've got to give the spectator that little, or
you're falling down on the job. (I realize that Broad-
way hardly ever does that. But in essence you can be
superior to Broadway - in fact you are superior to Broad-
way in this respect:n Broadway, even at its best, is a
commercial enterprise - in fact, it's very **immense** largely
solely a real-estate enterprise. "Rehts. Terrible. How
much do we have to take in in order to keep open?" Of
course, you have the problem, too - but it's not the major
one, nor on such a grandiose scale.)

This change then. To explain. You know how in life, more
so when you're young, and you haven't dulled your senses
completely by indulgence, and stupidity, and all the hor-
rible things we do to ourselves to make us worthy of the
grave before we're really dead -- in life, you know, if
your senses work at all properly, how magical things some-
times happen to us. We see a lifted hand, or a pattern of

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(4)

light and shade, or arrangement of color, or hear a
thrilling cascade or manipulation of sound, or see some
physical motion of a landscape or a crowd of people --
when something stands out arrested, fixed in time, im-
mortal -- and we are overcome with a pleasure beyond the
personal, an aesthetic one, a tingling of the spine, and
perhaps a few tears -- tears not for anything so suspect
as sentimentality, but the natural animal response to what
we have had to call abstractly, beauty. And after this
has happened to us we are - even if minutely -- someone
different, a *little* different. We have had an experience
that has reached us, and we are never quite the same again.

Even more so - and more often, we should see those moments
on the stage. We - as theatre people - should make those
moments happen, or consider ourselves failing in our craft.

The stage is a platform for eloquence. Eloquence of word,
of light of physical presence, of movement, of color, of
sound. And we are duty bound, with all these eloquences
at our command, to make those moments when the spine tingle,
or the mind flares with a new light, or the tears rise.

This is the theatre - not life. It is larger and more sig-
nificant than life. It is a compression and yet a heighten-
ing beauty and mystery of moments caught and held and illumined.

It is a rocket that flares and sparkles and bursts, its
tentacles streaming down grandly for a moment against dark-
ness. Well, the revealing thrilling moments happen in life.

(5)

They must happen more often and more grandly in the theatre.

Don't let anybody come in and go out unchanged. Reach them,
speak to them, make them hear, make them notice, feed and
sustain them, change them. Don't maintain the status quo,
never the status quo - for the status quo is death.

I suppose most people don't realize that they're looking for
food and drink and light - looking for help - when they go
to the theatre. But I firmly believe they are. Oh, they've
come to be entertained, yes, but they want pathetically some-
thing to make them more able to face life and the complexities
of living. The motion pictures, in the main, don't know this.
And you notice how tired people have become of the endless
repetition of a ridiculous picture world bearing no relation
to life. And how people, by the millions, are staying away -
in spite of double features, Banko, Screeno, Bunko, or what-
have-you-0.

Yes, people, even if they don't know it, want something. They
want the illumined moment. And so you have a great instrument
in your hands here. The living theatre. A place to enlarge
and illumine life.

Now before we can enlarge and illumine life - we have to
look at life. We have to inhabit this world crowding around
us, not the world of the neighbor next door, and the friend
down the block - that world, too, of course - but not that
world only. The world of sections, of city, of state, of

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farm and crossroads, of America, of Peru, Patagonia -
in short the entire globe. For we're tied together and
we can't escape. And we know now we can't quite escape.
We must constantly seek to comprehend, as well as the
flow of tides, the flow of the tides of man in the ag-
gregate, his needs, his impulses, and his right to dig-
nity. It's a large order to be alive in the world today.
It's strenuous and often demoralizing. But the more we
seek to know and to comprehend, and to add what we can
to make it bearable for ourselves and others to live -
the more revelation we stumble on, and the more we have
in our hands the power to change that world. (Even a cell
at a time.)

As revelation comes to us - and it does a little at a time
if we allow our God-given senses to function - we find we
have something to say. As individuals we begin to have
a special and unique wisdom. Thus it's time to ask our-
selves, what do we know? What have we got to say? And
how are we going to say it in the theatre? And I believe
that you ought to be pretty clear about what you want, as
an individual, to say about life - and what, as an organized
theatre, you want to say.

In fact, I believe you ought to have a very clear program --
not a program merely of what plays you intend to do - but a
program of your policy, of your aims and your goal. And I
think this of the greatest possible importance.

(7)

Nothing on this green earth survives without an idea behind it, a burning abstract compulsion, a pure concept, a central notion and aim. Look at our country itself. ~~We'd~~
be - right now - right this minute - completely disorganized and probably in ruins - certainly at war - we'd be many bickering states and tongues - if it hadn't been for some very fine ideas by such people as Mr. Thomas Jefferson. Ideas - it's true - almost impossible of realization - such as "All men are created equal", etc. But without some such rigid and strong ideal concept, the practical forces toward such an end would never have got into operation at all. We now largely believe that every man has a right to live and a right to work - and we stagger forward, and back a little, forward again a little farther, trying to achieve a torturing and difficult ideal: a government truly of the people, by the people, and for the people. But we wouldn't have been going anywhere - even staggering - unless we'd heard of that imposing ideal. You can't handle it, you can't see it with your eyes - and yet it's stronger than your flesh and blood, and it outlasts them both.

An ideal, a goal, an intention, an aim. Without it, there's no core to an undertaking. It's like a body without a heart to pump food to the farthermost cell. And without that core, that beating heart, you know what happens. The cells collapse, the body dies.

I realize that a theatre, your theatre, can stand for a time

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without any hard and fast intentions. (Perhaps you have
them. I haven't asked.) All I want to tell you is that
I believe they must not only be _practical_ ones, they
must be _visionary_ ones, too.

I realize, too, that even if you haven't got them, they
exist. Formless and chaotic - but real enough. For the
composite need in all of you in this group is a driving
force, and though inexact and not very clear, it directs
what the nature of your enterprise is. (You know baking
powder has a certain property, and when combined with
other chemical compounds finds itself, say, in a biscuit.
Combined with some other things (exactly what I wouldn't
know) its original nature bends and contorts, is impinged
upon (it goes through a kind of hell, I suppose), and it
finds itself at last, instead of being in a biscuit, in
an angel food cake. It has fulfilled its need, its
function, to the letter - but the results are quite dif-
ferent.

What are you making here then - bread or angel food cake?
Your cells are determining it. The thoughts you think and
the deeds you do. You see, there's no accident about it.
Every time we cut a piece of goods to make costumes, or
dab paint on a flat, or walk across the stage, or pull a
curtain, or put a word on paper - we reveal ourselves, what
our nature is, who we are, what we think. What a betrayal
it is!

(9)

I should think that if nothing else would, our vanity
at least would make us stop and consider what trivialities
of soul we are revealing. I should think we'd try to
find out what we're doing, I should think we'd also use
our talents truly and deeply, to reveal the exact and the
timeless, the important, the life-giving truth. I should
think we'd take the theatre seriously. I should think
we'd take *life* seriously. Which has been the burden of
these few notes on the theatre. Thank you for hearing
them.

--Lynn Riggs.