If there is a civic duty to go the theater
Geoghegan, Thomas
THERE' S SOMETHING odd about living in a city of three million (and not having it be New York). What's odd is this: live theater. Chicago has pages of it. Maybe a third as much as New York's,...
...108 DISSENT / Winter 1998 "It's . . . I just don't think he's right...
...Flipped out the lights, though I was in no mood to laugh...
...Go to the theater...
...It's not autobiographical...
...Who wants jury duty...
...My God...
...I'd much rather sit in a restaurant like Bistrot Zinc...
...No one else was there...
...Wait," my friends say, "you have to be a poet, and argue both sides...
...There's a sign: "Quiet/Rehearsal: The Seagull...
...Even a publicpolicy book...
...Fifty people a night: that's crazy...
...People only laugh in the dark...
...Fine...
...Three people on a Sunday night...
...It's especially important in a city...
...I don't mean we should go to the plays they put on at the University of Chicago...
...Since my own perishing, I now try, like a good citizen, to see more plays as they flicker out...
...Did Fitzgerald ever see a second act...
...Give up the British pound...
...There is a real human being screaming in front of me, and I feel like I'm expected to do something...
...Now I was frightened...
...Someone who's lost a pension or been fired from a job...
...Why did I write about falling wages...
...Soldiers argued...
...In my search, I heard of only one, a young woman, age twenty-six, who had produced (some said) at least two plays...
...It's odd how plays used to shock the Puritans . . . now, in an age of movies, it's only the Puritans who can bear to go...
...And backers...
...But the problem is that there is something dark and archaic about the theater, and it's not human sacrifice...
...Or a novel...
...It's Christmas time, so no one comes...
...Maybe a third as much as New York's, often at a quarter the price...
...So I waited, and because waiting in the theater leads to madness, I thought one day, "I'll write a play...
...Yet how do we justify our staying on...
...Under anesthetic, I'm winched up on stage and told there'll be questions...
...The MC says: "You...
...How can we be citizens and not see plays...
...That's why the theater over there still survives...
...July 1996...
...My friends were shocked that I didn't tape it...
...How many see a play...
...I get Willy Loman at the office...
...Why isn't anyone here...
...Some nights, ten people will be there...
...Why did we even whisper...
...They're puffy, etc...
...The whole point is the sadness, the great sadness, that I can never see N., or the rest of them, reciting again...
...Except for the baby...
...There's drama enough . . . indeed, I'm part of it...
...What better theater anyway than a Chicago restaurant, with two busboys circling the table and trying to take my plate when there's a single strand of asparagus left...
...But what makes it worse, or stranger, is that I, too, like the people in the trattorias, hate the theater...
...Here we are, in a new space...
...Yes," she whispered...
...It's a dark play," a friend says...
...It's not like a film, which is just a flickering of light...
...Still no producer...
...The night before, we do a read through and I worry about the actor who's playing "me...
...So...
...yET I THINK, somehow, in our time, it's the first duty of a citizen to see a play...
...Six actors (non-Equity, but $250 a week...
...All these people have jury duty...
...To my horror, they begin eating the food...
...N., they meant...
...And there's no chance for a fantasy life in a play...
...There's a story about the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar...
...An actress: N.) What can I say...
...My big idea was a buffet: lavish food for all the backers...
...Say nothing...
...House manager...
...She took the debates of the English Civil War, the famous Putney Army debate of the 1640s, and put them on stage...
...I phoned Larry...
...There are no third acts in American life...
...Shouldn't theater now be about our growing gap of rich and poor...
...Why not...
...The other night I turned to a tearful B. during Emily's Child, a play about a Down-syndrome baby, dying, and I said, "We're the youngest here...
...As in: Should Englishmen, by virtue of being born, have the right to vote...
...I used to do the numbers . . . twenty dollars a ticket: dream on...
...December 1996...
...Radio...
...Like with panhandlers in subway cars...
...What are you doing here...
...It's sad to think . . . no one is taping it...
...I've never been up at DISSENT / Winter 1998 109 seven in my life...
...OK, no politics...
...Also, I'm at the age when there's a darkness about intermission...
...I did have two "readings...
...Alone...
...Just three or four people to hold it in mind a few more days...
...Long pause...
...I'm not paying them...
...Denise, the secretary, says: "Can you please go out and talk to him...
...The ushers could hand us red hats when they seat us...
...Maybe because we're asking for money...
...No one laughs...
...I'm only halfway through...
...But there's nothing...
...THOMAS GEOGHEGAN is a lawyer and the author of Which Side Are You On...
...And what annoys me beyond reason, and makes me grieve for my city, and fume at the people in Bistrot Zinc and the Asian noodle shops, is: No one goes...
...It's the idea of voting...
...There's no net...
...A man who is a stand-up comic says: "I'll tell you why no one laughed, you forgot to turn out the lights...
...In a way, it's closer to London than New York: cheap, and although much of it is bad, there's enough good to keep anyone frustrated all year long...
...Or not to the off-Loop ten-dollar stuff that I love...
...Sick...
...Do people think I'm like that...
...A poor wretch up there on stage . . . and something coming on, and on, and the man or woman is up there, saying over and over, "I can't move...
...So why pay even ten dollars to get the same sense of civic panic as in the subway...
...But the day comes, and his friends pull him into the streets, and Molnar blinks, looks at the trams, the crowds...
...Oh I love the city, with all the theater . . . ." But even at ten dollars a ticket, no one is in the seats...
...FOR ME, theater should be political...
...Four-star food is choking our theater...
...It might be too late to tell people, "Get up from the table...
...B. and I go to dinner...
...And now that I'm near fifty, I see, oh, only too clearly, how there is, in fact, going to be a second act...
...Well," Larry whispered, "does this make me feel great about theater, or does it make me despair...
...If you want to reach people do a movie...
...We don't like to vote any more...
...The last time I went it was Agamemnon, and I'm haunted by how my companion, Cassandra-like, froze at the door and wouldn't go in, as if she could foresee that there might be a pop quiz...
...Yes, more than ever, I feel it's my duty as a citizen, The other night I went, as a volunteer, to see a Caryl Churchill play, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire...
...Babies abandoned on the sides of roads, all because Christ had not come and people had no right to vote...
...Don't you have theater duty...
...Something terrible is coming toward us, even as the city blossoms like a garden, but for some reason we can't leave...
...But isn't she young...
...Young...
...In the Oresteia one is actually on the jury and, in the end, deciding Orestes's fate...
...So how do people do it...
...Don't these people have theater duty...
...Somewhere, an actress is perishing tonight...
...Were there questions...
...And that's what I think when I go out at night and see all the people in the restaurants...
...Then one midnight . . . I did it...
...Off Loop...
...No one ever hears of them or can find them, since they're in basements, with rats...
...It's sad even with the lights off, it's sadder with the lights on...
...Sure enough, she didn't return my calls...
...This eerie sense that all of it is perishing, unrewindably, right before our eyes...
...A few of us, single, are still trapped here, with our suburbnesting clocks ticking and the first act of our lives really over...
...Who was she...
...It's the hardest writing, it's impossible...
...Frightening to see that even London has trattorias, just as if it were a world city like Chicago...
...Not a word...
...I worry about really being trapped, and it won't even be the second act...
...They've been in their own private second act for years...
...There's the trapped feeling of the theater in our public life: the growing gap of rich and poor...
...This, more than the decline of the voting rate, the growth of inequality . . . this civic disaster is what makes me sick...
...he says...
...Even when I go to Steppenwolf, which was founded by John Malkovich, and which is Chicago's "kick-ass," rock-and-roll theater, why is it that out in the seats they're older than the College of Cardinals...
...But the actors show up first...
...Where did you get her...
...I blanked out...
...New York, being a metropolis, doesn't count as a city...
...A boulevardier, he's out every night, with actresses, smoking...
...OK, I exaggerate...
...But it's not a comedy...
...So why do I go...
...My God, what is playing down there but the Oresteia...
...These will be the true enemies of the London stage...
...I see it as a test of our citizenship...
...It's great...
...Not fifty cents on a dollar: the whole dollar...
...It's crazy...
...New cast...
...I hate the idea of a "second act...
...Even if it's the rave in the Reader, the free weekly...
...That night I went home...
...I had to laugh," she says, "the way you looked at the guy who's playing 'you.' "Hey...
...I asked a friend, "How much would it cost to get this thing produced...
...There are no producers...
...I'll stop...
...I'd never get this show on...
...Not just the city's, but America's, because this is America's greatest city...
...But a play...
...A friend, Julia, phoned and said, "I just went, it's great, and only three or four people are there...
...The next day people laugh...
...More about Thatcher England than Clinton America...
...So guess what...
...If I can find someone to go with and seethe to...
...Doesn't Aristotle say that somewhere...
...Julia says it's our duty," etc...
...They don't expect it," someone says...
...Most don't last that long...
...Electrician...
...Lighting designer...
...A friend tried to talk me out of it...
...Sometimes, astounding plays for ten dollars...
...I'd say, "What did you think of the play...
...Sure enough, when Agamemnon fell dead, someone popped up to lead a discussion...
...But never give up British food...
...She laughs...
...Light years of unread plays to photocopy at Kinko's, but no one to produce them...
...So, for example: It's wrong to eat babies...
...Only I can't change cars at the next stop...
...But the next week I got calls...
...I remember gasping, "Dollars...
...Make him go away...
...Everyone is looking at me, I'm the lawyer...
...Who was she...
...It's . . . a comedy...
...They're screaming, like they scream in the lobby of our law firm...
...It was the best play I'd seen in years...
...I could play it on my VCR alone at night, when I stagger home after spending thirty dollars at a bistro...
...Even the film stars, up close, on a live DISSENT / Winter 1998 107 stage . . . they don't look so good...
...Ye s . " "Simple, bare-bones...
...You have to tell people, like a Miranda warning: "Don't do this unless you're prepared to lose every cent...
...And even if all that happened, our losses would be greater than the French Army's at Verdun...
...Then one day from City Hall he gets a summons: Jury duty, 7:30 AM, next Monday...
...They put them on for twenty thousand dollars...
...And another sign: "Warning/This Play Has Frontal Nudity" (another play, not Chekhov's...
...Maybe it's the plays...
...I want to go into Bistrot Zinc, the panAsian noodle shops...
...On the other hand, they're hormone-free...
...Women wept...
...Isn't it a duty, for each of these deaths, that some of us in the cities come out and see...
...I whispered...
...Now I think: if only that were true...
...You might still reach a few thousand...
...And that's why, when the lights flash, and I still haven't got my Coke, it's only the old who come back from intermission...
...It's your duty to go there, now...
...Ye s ." "Oh . . eighty thousand...
...Aren't you sweet to have thought of us...
...Another friend said, "Look, even if you do write one, why would you...
...A reading for "backers...
...Only, isn't the whole point of a play not to sit and hit rewind...
...Ages ago I would quote F. Scott Fitzgerald: "There are no second acts in American life...
...Didn't tape it...
...I suppose I go to seethe that no one else is going...
...Besides, those were the three who knew about the growing gap of rich and poor...
...Newspaper...
...Here are the expenses: Director...
...Once in, I feel trapped...
...If Shaw or Brecht were alive now (let's put aside Odets), wouldn't they be writing about this...
...She's too old...
...She stood there, crying, and I had to drag her...
...I'm too embarrassed to ask the old one...
Vol. 45 • January 1998 • No. 1
