Theater, she says to me as we eat incomprehensibly complex burgers and drink straightforward beer, is dying.
It's news to me, because we have just left an enormous theater, practically a stadium of a theater, with every seat filled. The tickets to the show we watched sold an entire run in a few hours' time. It's news to me because I had just done the very same thing just a few days before, sat in a full theater with few vacant seats on a Wednesday night in October. It's news because when we ran some numbers on the last show I helmed, we realized that 5% of the population of our town watched us over three days. If a similar phenomenon occurred in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, it would mean that nearly a quarter of a million people would have attended the theater each night of performance.
It's news because theater does not seem like a killable thing.
We make the mistake of believing that just because something is marketable and profitable that it is a business. Business is a killable thing - we call supply and demand a law for a reason. But despite the capital flowing from investor to company to patron to performer, despite the army it requires to build and clothe and light and create, despite the illusion of supply and demand, theater is not an industry. It is not a business. It is not a product. Theater is the art of storytelling. It is the art of empathy.
At the heart of theater - at the heart of any storytelling - is a performer that tells a story that speaks truth to the audience; the truth has to be, to some extent, universal. The audience, in return, must recognize and acknowledge the truth that the performer speaks. They must understand each other. Empathy.
We don't need majestic edifices filled with sculpture and light to trade these truths. We don't need to gather five thousand watchers to a dozen actors to understand or empathize, and yet for millennia that is precisely what we have done. We hew stone into amphitheaters or line cushions with velvet, we play before royalty or in converted barns. Children playact for one another in schoolyards. The words of playwrights are so revered that we have translated them down the centuries and the stories that echoed in those stone amphitheaters are spoken aloud still today.
Theater is dying? No. You may as well say music is dying, or painting is dying, or storytelling. You cannot kill the thing which makes us human.
All the world's a stage, wrote the Bard. We would do well to remember that we are merely players.
