A.R.T./New York | Alliance of Residence Theatres

2004 Laura Pels Keynote Address

Richard Greenberg delivered the Laura Pels Foundation Keynote Address at Curtain Call, presented by the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York (A.R.T./New York) at The New Victory Theater on Monday, June 14, 2004.

Mr. Greenberg's Remarks:

June 14, 2004

I think it's appropriate that I've been asked to address a gathering of not-for-profit theater-people because I spend so much time thinking about money.

I think about ways to obtain more of it. I think about how nice it is for people who have enough off it. Sometimes I think about how badly it can mess up people who have too much of it.

But mostly I think about ways to obtain more of it; and, in service to that end, I sometimes work outside the realm of the not-for-profit theater-- most often in television.

I don't feel the least bit defensive about this and before you judge me, let me explain why: First, in T.V., unlike in film, the writer is very nearly toe author, which caters to my megalomania. Also, it seems to me that lately, T.V. has become increasingly --fitfully-- interesting.

So it happened recently that I found myself engaged in what had been billed as a "conversation" with the highest muckety-muck at a major cable network. We were to talk about an idea I was presenting for a series. The topic of the series was the Off-Broadway theater.

If that sounds as unlikely to you as it did--and does-- to me, you need to know the idea didn't originate with me. it was the brainchild of someone infinitely more distinguished than I-- someone with whom virtually everyone in the mainstream of show business wants to work-- someone I, to this day, have neither met nor spoken to, but who somehow chose me.

The conversation was the usual conference call set-up. I was in New York. The cable muckety-muck was in his office in Los Angeles flanked-- at least that's how i picture it-- by two subalterns. In another office in Los Angeles were two subalterns of the infinitely more distinguished guy whose idea this was

I had met none of these people; they all sounded exactly alike; I launched into my part of the conversation, wherein I described what a series about the off-Broadway theater might he like.

A curious pattern emerged: when I would stop talking, all talking would stop.

This was not my idea of conversational to-and-fro but I soldiered on.

The pattern continued.

I tried to alleviate things, to break through. I became a little trashy, a little swarmy. I said gilb, witless things like: "Off-Broadway: So much treachery, so little money."

To no avail.

Finally, having run out of things to say, I announced: "I've run out of things to say."

They, on the other hand, seemed to possess an inexhaustible supply of silence. After a pause-- a chasm, a canyon, a lacuna-the cable bigwig said this:

"It's an interesting idea, and I'd like to work with you, and especially with the infinitely more distinguished guy whose idea this is, but here's my problem: How do I do a series about something that nobody cares about?" This time I paused.

?hut not for long because I didn't want to lose the deal. I tried playing the "Six Feet Under" who-cares about-morticians card.

Apparently that card had been overplayed. He got a little testy.

"Yeah," he said, "but everybody dies."

"Yeah, " I said, "I know the feeling."

All was not lost, though. It was decided we would continue to develop the idea. I haven't heard from anyone on that call since.

Now, before I go any further, there's something you should know about the cable hotshot: He's not a bad guy.

In fact, I suspect he's quite a good guy. We'd had a wonderful conversation--- an actual conversation-- a few months earlier. He'd wanted to turn a play of mine into a movie-- a play he'd assuredly seen, allegedly loved, but apparently not cared about.

In any event, his remark was not designed to do anything wicked--- he was not trying to establish hierarchy, or undo me or wound me in any way.

Referring to the theater as he had-- and it was the theater as a whole he was referring to; none of the guys on this call could ever keep it straight whether this project was to he about Broadway, Off-Broadway, or the Comedie Francaise for all I know-- so referring to the theater as "something nobody cares about" belonged, in his mind, to the category of value-free statements. It was the common wisdom . It was "the sky is blue, spring follows winter, nobody cares about the theater."

Put aside that in some mathematical way this idea annihilated me-- "nobody cares about the theater; I care about the theater; therefore I am nobody" at least resembles a syllogism, after all - what was worse was it seemed to chime with so many other statements I'd heard over the years, with a widely held point-of-view.

I have wondered myself, from time-to-time, if my life's endeavor might not be , fundamentally, of no interest and no use to the world.

The idea that the theater is dead or dying has been around a lot longer than I have. It persists as stubbornly as the theater does itself, and despite strong evidence of the theater's persistence.

Which makes me wonder-- and had me wondering for days after the cable guy's airy dismissal-- what is meant when people say "the theater is dead"? What's the content of that sentence?

There are those who claim it's an evolutionary thing: the theater is extinct; it's been displaced by film and television and everything that's come after. That's rather grand and quite untestable.

One more specific, less lofty, sub-claim is that realism is no longer viable in the theater because film and television do it so much better.

This charge is accepted even by stalwart theater types, maybe by the majority of theater types, but I wonder: Is even that true?

In the first place, realism in the theater isn't really real most of the time, is it?

It's a style, an approach-- molded,, super-concentrated, artificial. To some these q ualities make theatrical realism seem phony; others think they make it art.

Either way, how can you compare it to the location-shot, default setting realism of the movies?

And if two things are essentially dissimilar, how can one be said to have extinguished the other?

So even this complaint seems,-at best, questionable.

But aside from theory, there's the matter of what actually happens in the theater, the transaction between actor and audience that doesn't seem to me reproducible in the other media.

When I was a kid, I saw a production of "Death of a Salesman" that starred George C. Scott. As I recall, this was a controversial performance: Some thought Scott was too naturally powerful to play Willy Loman (who has not been thought to be too something to play that role? Arguably, the problem is built-in. It's the tragedy off a little man. It may be that anyone powerful enough to play Willy Loman is too powerful to be Willy Loman.)

That didn't matter though, as I sat in the last row of the Circle-in-the-Square Uptown and watched-- bore witness to-- Scott's performance. In the unbearable scene in which Willy pleads for his job-- his economic sustenance, his human validity--- something happened. Definitely to me; possibly to Scott.

What happened to me was, I got scared.

By which I mean, I felt in imminent physical peril.

The seething, barely contained rage of George C. Scott or Willy Loman or whoever was on that stage at that moment was so palpable and immense that it seemed altogether possible that I was watching some kind off breakdown. A line being crossed, the contract of suspended disbelief voided.

It seemed altogether possible that George C. Scott had lost his mind, that he would' abandon the stage, charge the aisle, and grab me by the throat.

This sort of thing has never happened to me at the movies. When I watch T.V.., I don't worry that an actor's going to snap. The cable, maybe.

Barbra Streisand once extolled the joy of acting in movies: Somebody's out seeing your movie, she said, you're home taking a bath. That person calls you and says, boy that was one lousy movie. You say, don't blame me, I was taking a bath.

The thing about the theater is, while the actors may well be on stage taking. a shower, they're never home taking a bath.

And I think this brings us to the other, possibly more tenable explanation of the theater's deadness or dyingness: theater is a local phenomenon. A single group of actors appears on a single stage before a single audience.

Even if there are twenty productions of "Phantom of the Opera" ranging across the eastern seaboard, and they all start precisely at eight-oh-seven, they're twenty unique events-- in one the tenor is cracking, in another it's the soprano.

There's no opening wide in the theater. There's no being seen by twenty million viewers in a single evening. The theater lacks economic simultaneity.

Even the rare show that makes a vast profit makes it slowly and compared to a blockbuster movie or a sitcom sold into syndication, the profits aren't all that vast.

This, I believe, is the measuring stick entertainment executives are using when they declare that the theater is "something nobody cares about." But there's a lack of cultural simultaneity, as well.

People don't see a play by the millions in an hour or over a single weekend-- plays aren't fodder for nation-wide conversation around the water cooler the next day.

And is this altogether a bad thing?

I said before that I like T.V., that medium that everybody cares about, and I do. But I think off it mostly as a kind of pleasant background noise there to contribute liveliness while you're doing other things in the home-- sort of like what I imagine marriage to be, minus the recriminations. When people take T.V. very seriously--when they rush to the water cooler to discuss something they heard on ton "The O.C.", I think --well, that's sort of pathetic, isn't it?

When I hear someone say-- and I have heard someone say this-- "What will I do now that 'Friends' is gone?", I think-- make some friends. There's an unwholesome, even a dangerous aspect to so much popularity.

I find myself these days compelled by reality T.V.

What amazes me most about it is that, though as far as I can tell it's only been around for about a week, it's already formally rigid.

The particular show may be about getting a job, a husband, or radical reconstructive surgery, but I unerringly know when those clouds are going to scud menacingly by something -- a garish mansion; the New York City skyline - no matter, they're always the same clouds, it's always the same menace, and they always arrive at the same time.

Well; so what?

We all know that pop entertainment is, with rare, glorious exceptions, a culture of parrots; we all know most of it's pretty vacuous.

Except I think that that habit of emulation of imitation extends beyond entertainment, grows into us, affects our other activities, other responsibilities.

I remember when the Monica Lewinsky thing happened.

In every person-on-the-street interview, someone -- sometimes several people -- would say: "If he cheats on his wife, he could cheat on the country."

I never knew quite what that meant.

Did my fellow Americans really live in fear that, when they weren't looking, Bill Clinton was going to sneak off and-what: govern Canada?

But it didn't matter that the idea was fatuous.

It had been broadcast; it was rememberable; at the time, it was what many people thought they thought. Probably why they voted as they voted.

So.

Against these media that everybody cares about, with their tendency to repeat, to homogenize, to stifle the imagination, to narrow the terms of debate, there stands...us.

Us among others, but my concern tonight is us.

Paradoxically, the theater, the oldest dramatic form, has right now a status somewhat akin to that of the youngest child in the family. Clamoring for attention and supplies, never getting enough of either.

But it's a funny thing about youngest children: they have a way of turning out weird and interesting.

Lacking supervision, they chart their own course; they follow an eccentric logic; they see the world their own way-- they see the world.

I've been working in the not-for--profit theater for twenty years, during which I've written more than twenty plays. No one has ever asked me to stew toward a broader demographic or to subdue my oddness. My oddness has been encouraged and if, at times, I've lapsed into the normal, the fault has been with me, not with the system that's supported me. I'm grateful for that.

I'm grateful in general that the theater exists.

There are fewer and fewer reasons to leave the house these days. We sit in front of the T.V. staring at shadows, and sometimes it seems the shadows are staring back. Sometimes it seems we're becoming as insubstantial as they are.

The theater demands that we show up - real people in the company of other real people - and participate in an event that's usually mediocre, sometimes transcendent, but always shared, always local.

It's not a total rebuttal to the culture that everybody cares about, but it can be an oasis. There's not much money in it, but it matters. It may even be necessary.

Now, before I conclude this ode to the fiscally malnourished, I'd like to acknowledge someone who's rolling in the stuff: Laura Pels and the Laura Pels Foundation have sponsored this evening's proceedings, as they support so much of theater in this city, throughout the country, and abroad.

I, for one, find it cheering to remember that there are some, wise, discerning, deep-pocketed people who still do care about the theater deeply, and spend their whole lives proving it.

Thank you.