10 Conditions for a National Theather
BERMEL, ALBERT
On Stage 10 CONDITIONS FOR A NATIONAL THEATER BY ALBERT BERMEL The commercial, centralized theater is going down the drain, and we all know why. Costs have gotten out of hand, pushing ticket...
...5. The theater must shake off all dependence on reviews...
...Theater is a full-time profession...
...6. The headquarters of the national theater must be run by strong-minded, wildly idealistic men and women with theatrical experience, not by salesmen, land-manipulators, failed directors, bankrupt producers, disgruntled ex-critics, or Washingtonian suckers-up...
...it might as well be subsidized to the hilt...
...Not ask for them...
...They ply their trade out of a tiny, worn lexicon of praise and invective ("brilliant, boring, electrifying, talky") that has no bearing on theater as an art...
...Let's get rid of our puritanical belief in sacrifice and commensurate reward...
...you are a theater pariah...
...Unfortunately, the underlying idea, when not well presented, grew shrill...
...it performed its forgotten task of unifying...
...They should have nothing to do with attracting tourists or industrial investment...
...At the close of the evening a man bounded up to the leading actress as she was taking her bows and swung her into an improvised dance...
...The smart money from individuals, banks and corporations now moves in other directions...
...Not quote them...
...Why should theater have to penalize its public...
...The rest of the audience thought this was actually part of the performance...
...When it experiments, it must not display superiority or take advantage of the audience's instinctive good will...
...No theater seat can compete in plushiness with that armchair or barcalounger at home in front of the TV and in reach of cold beer...
...Each troupe would work for its own, local audience, and aim at becoming a necessary part of that audience's lives...
...Accordingly, national theaters must create opportunities...
...By "popular" I mean theaters that draw spectators from all segments of the population, and that establish themselves as temporary communities...
...In truth, commercial theater is not only arbitrary in whom it allows to succeed...
...From time to time it could swap neighborhoods for a season with companies from other parts of the country, in order to refresh itself and give audiences a few surprises...
...The artistic benefits we could enjoy from a national theater seem to me self-evident...
...Since I believe that live theater is essential to our well-being as a nation, I have long wondered if any kind other than the commercial species might recover the old audiences and bring in new ones...
...9. National theaters must get people into the habit of going to a show around the corner or a couple of blocks away as naturally as they flick on their TV screens...
...Producers, directors and critics have their favorites and promote them shamelessly...
...But only by seeing to it that good theater is readily available can we stimulate appetites for more and better...
...The 10 dogmatic suggestions offered below therefore upend just about every prop of the commercial system...
...We tend to assume that under our present chaos of compromises good artists rise to the top while bad ones get weeded out...
...7. Those who hold political or judicial office federal, state, or municipal Are frequently the targets of theater...
...They tried to make their audience realize it was watching live bodies, not electronic impulses crossed by horizontal lines...
...The actors came offstage, spoke directly to the spectators, and touched them, flesh against flesh...
...it waits patiently in storage for the propitious moment when Westerns or nudies or exercises in pastoral photography recapture the ratings...
...A second ideal I think of here is the Berliner Ensemble, which treats its audiences neither as lackeys nor masters, but as friends...
...During the intermission this miscellany of men and women of all ages went into the bar to drink and talk...
...As with audiences so with producers and bankers, who have come to feel that there is nothing special, nothing distinctive, about a live performance...
...Kildare or Ironside and thereby shut yourself out of this morning's office conversation...
...The history of the modern stage, from An-toine, Brahm, Stanislavsky, and Co-peau to Vilar, Devine and Papp demonstrates that when first-rate companies come into existence they conjure up plenty of first-rate playwrights, directors, and actors...
...Costs have gotten out of hand, pushing ticket prices to fearsome levels...
...A modest, intimate playhouse invites their support...
...Foundations, philanthropists and advisory boards of bankers have demeaned it and humiliated its practitioners by forcing them to waste their time and scatter their energies on profit-grubbing activities...
...3. The playhouses must not be monuments to money...
...2. Theater must disperse itself all over the country, not merely in a few cities but in every neighborhood...
...Many daily and weekly reviewers know little about theater, resist new work, or embrace it uncomprehendingly for fear of appearing stupid...
...Directors encouraged their actors to insult people, assail people Anything to affirm that person-to-person contact...
...They should be houses for plays, welcoming places to gather inlofts, rooms, converted (or unconverted) barns...
...Hence, under no circumstances should they have any say in how much money the companies receive or in their choice of playing material...
...The proper arbiters of taste are audiences...
...When two of my plays were done there some time ago local residents spanish-speaking, black, and white wandered in from the street and the bar, sat next to suburban relatives of the cast, East Villagers, and explorers from uptown...
...The same people also happen to be our prime source of censorship, and censorship has already shown that all it can do is enforce this country's (or any country's) cultural backwardness...
...it is artistically corrupt through and through because of the limited openings for work...
...Comfort is secondary...
...Yes, critics...
...A third model worth citing is Peter Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream, a production that had an unforced warmth and sincerity (to say nothing of its dramatic skills) that I don't remember in any other staging in English...
...Television pap nicely suits the requirements of many of Broadway's former patrons, the nonintellectual middle-class, so that attending a splashy new hit no longer confers status...
...The theater brought these strangers to each other as only theater can do...
...visually it shuts them out...
...One ideal I have in mind is the Old Reliable, whose stage and auditorium together comprised one room behind a tavern on the lower East Side...
...It lives, if at all, only because of the emotional connections struck between actor and actor, and between actors and spectators...
...A national theater would have to be subsidized in any event...
...a prosperous-looking slab tells them it doesn't need them...
...People go to theater, when they do go, for other, more companionable reasons...
...Theater is the most personal and interpersonal of the arts...
...A national theater must shun the self-defeating practice of belittling its patrons...
...If we are reluctant to meet them, we are not yet ready to let go of the shabby commercial theater that remains, and soon it will be too late to have even that...
...This policy of dispersal would, with any luck, displace the road shows that exploit actors and should have been killed off years ago...
...They have secondhand souls, and would be innocuous if no notice was taken of them...
...National theaters will have to be popular...
...While you are taking a tax write-off of 200 grand on a show, you might as well blow five times that sum on a movie and make sure your accountants are earning their Christmas bonuses...
...By then it was...
...The budgets must satisfy the needs of each company, without clauses attached for scaring up "matching sums...
...Supported by commercial sponsors, television is free to its viewers...
...1. A national theater must offer free admission...
...When you saw that musical last night, you missed the latest episode of Young Dr...
...Among the untried alternatives talked about in recent years is the idea of a national theater...
...Forget about the John F. Kennedy Center, which proved to be yet another posh exercise in real-estate upzon-ing conducted by yet another realtor-turned-producer...
...If people don't go to commercial houses, a network of national companies could go to the people...
...But we cannot bring one into being and keep it alive without drastically unsettling a lot of fixed notions of what theater is for and what it should be about...
...8. National theaters must keep theater people working...
...Confirmed inner-city dwellers are panting out to the suburbs, away from the metropolitan playhouses...
...Besides, once a show has died it is well and truly dead in that form, whereas a film, whatever its merits, is a canned product...
...Payment bears no relation to quality or anything else except greed...
...I once sat on an Obie-awards Panel, and never have I witnessed such horse-trading in my life...
...They must avoid bigness, glossiness, fashion, elaborate parking facilities, glass walls, fat upholstery, heavy carpeting, imposing views of a river by night...
...4. National theaters must put their funds into good salaries for the artists, not into fees for architects, builders, interior decorators, engineers, machine-minders, admen, or general merchandisers...
...They must make their audiences feel at home...
...These are some of the minimal conditions for a program of national theater...
...People involved in the Off-Off-Broadway movement of the 1960s understood this...
Vol. 56 • January 1973 • No. 2
