Theater

...Television does not satisfy our need to examine our shared experience in ritual form...

...There are countless people who have told us how important we've been to their lives and their work...

...It's a deep-seated thing to break through, but if it is to be taken on, it should be the theater that does it...

...What is going to happen when corporations have taken over the funding of the arts in this country...

...In what it said and how it said it, Welcome Home was far from radical, politically or theatrically...

...It sounds almost too hopeful—but it happens...

...Running through the varieties of professional theater, the report's authors moved past Off-Broadway, past Regional Theaters with Budgets under $250,000, past Off-Off-Broadway, and came finally to Black and Chicano Theaters, and from there to the final group, last on the list, Other Small Theaters, in which category were thrown together children's theater, women's theater, ethnic theater, and street theater...

...The shows were wonderful fun...

...The pace at which they work, the low personal incomes, the multiple jobs within and outside the theater—all result in a high burn-out rate...

...They suffer from a grave economic fact: Unlike car manufacturers, calculator makers, and tomato growers, theater companies can practice only limited economies of scale...

...What was once a public experience, a gathering together, is now private...

...They are often collectives, produce a small number of plays, commonly develop their own material, and have a life-span of three to four years...

...Questions without answer...

...How come there aren't a myriad—or even a handful— of younger people fighting to take our place...

...Television and motion picture drama escapes the fate of live theater by selling to mass audiences (in the case of television, the mass audiences are sold to the advertisers who subsidize the shows...

...Begging...

...As successful as anyone else in our country that we know...

...Thus, as the NEA noted, "there [are] few possibilities in live performances for increasing productivity that characterizes the rest of the economy...

...I am not surprised by the near-invisibility of people's theater, even to the official national body that might be most expected to note its presence...

...Last summer its park performances drew an estimated 15,000 people in and around San Francisco...

...There is no catharsis in the theater, no solution of a centuries-old Carol Polsgrove, a contributing editor of The Progressive, is a free-lance writer in Oakland, California...

...Faced with the hard job of making theater pay for itself, commercial companies— at least some of the time—can simply raise ticket prices...

...If we don't reach out, the time may come, soon, when there are none left to reach out to...

...Those groups that hang on sometimes do so with productions of greater audience appeal but less political power...

...In New York, hospital workers use a Bread and Roses drama project to examine issues in their work lives...

...In the 1981 funding decisions, I was told, "anything that had any political connotation to it was wiped off the board...

...t happens—but it happens, alas, only seldom and in scattered places...

...But, as I heard one viewer note, the Moral Majority—the target of the productions—was an easy mark, especially in the Bay area, and the political perceptions the Mime Troupe brought to the subject did not rise above the predictable...

...Who wants to be morbid...

...When the town of Miller, South Dakota, celebrated its centennial, the Dakota Theater Caravan spent five weeks there and wove the lives of the townspeople into a play...

...Provisional's Barry Opper noted that the fate of Provisional Theater is uncertain...

...It wasn't long before the words "Communist front" were humming along the telephone lines of Saint Peter...

...Does it have to do with the recent election...

...Hopers...

...There is, among some people's theater workers—not all, but some—a real sense of crisis in the culture./'We don't have time to putz around," said one woman impatiently, when a panel at a recent San Francisco people's theater festival went round after weary round of a familiar fight (experimental versus political theater...

...The chill has already struck at the state arts agency in Minnesota, a leading theater state...

...Although it did touch on a couple of issues that might have discomfited the audience (racism and lesbianism), in form and content it was a fairly traditional play...

...If we want our arts not to be something "sold" to us, it would be appropriate for those who are not professional theater artists to reach out to those who are, to say, We want something from you—even though we may not be sure just what it is we want...

...Meanwhile, Provisional Theater of Los Angeles, after a decade in business, including several years as a full-time salaried company, can now afford to keep only one member on salary between productions...

...Not everyone was mollified...

...The three actors resist all attempts to get them to explain what the scenes mean, and the consequence, the night I saw the production, was a dramatic and good-humored exchange among members of the audience...

...they held a town meeting, and spoke out to public and press on the purpose of their work...

...But in our society, the dramatic impulse so strong in virtually every human community has almost literally gone down the tube...

...A theater company in Santa Cruz helps a group of elderly citizens stage a play about aging...

...Can we afford to ignore the reality...

...But stop and think: When was the last time, on stage or screen (large or small), you saw drama which spoke of that danger: what it is and why...

...We want to create a set of images that fly in the face of the current imagery of fear that you see in the popular arts, popular music, politics, religion...

...When it is not celebrating, the town has a population of only 1,900...

...One notorious recent tale is told of the Tennessee Arts Commission, which tried to undercut a Federal giant to Knoxville's The Play Group to take its anti-Klan production, /// Live to See Next Fall, on tour...

...To escape their economic impasse, some companies, like desperate shoemakers working into the night to compete with assembly lines, have scheduled more and more performances...

...There is a feeling now that funding agencies, even if they have money left to give when the Reagan Administration finishes cutting their budgets, will cast ever colder eyes on troupes tinged with politics, as are most people's theater companies...

...Tired of asking favors for the past thirteen years...

...However loose the public purse strings in recent years—and alternative theater companies of all sorts have benefited from the largesse of the NEA and the now defunct CETA— the strings have had a tendency to tighten whenever agencies have sniffed the odor of politics...

...armed services "a weird cult...

...No matter how much we've been told it can't be done, we've stubbornly insisted, 'There must be a way...

...Am I just sick of drifting hat-in-hand on behalf of the Theater, trying to bankroll one impossible dream after another...

...We don't talk about it much," he said...

...Companies that take another route, heavy support (if they can get it) from grant-giving agencies, have to please not only their audiences but also the grant givers...

...alone, we are reassured that we will be safe, if we only keep buying the things that bring us fear free of charge...

...On opening night 400 people showed up, the second night 600 came, and the third performance drew 1,000...

...If drama is to do more for us, if it is to illuminate our lives with the public power inherent in no other art form, those who work in what I have called people's theater will have to find ways to make us know our unsatisfied hunger...

...More than ever...

...The viewers' analysis is part of the performance—the words, if you will, to go with the mime...

...One of the most solid of political theater companies in the country is the San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has endured for more than twenty years...

...Does it have to do with the map of Nuclear America hanging in our office...

...Although some people's theaters endure, many make their entrances and exits so rapidly that we scarcely note they were there on the stage...

...It is a feeling surely common now...

...Not everyone who works in people's theater would respond, but enough would...

...Particularly offensive was a Theaterwork ad in which the War Re-sisters' League called the U.S...

...Factwino Meets the Moral Majority was a crowd-pleaser, a political pep rally for the already convinced...

...but like the junk food it sells, television drama does dull our appetite...

...Does it have to do with being forty years old...

...It was in Saint Peter, Minnesota, last summer that Cherry Creek Theater and its nationally distributed publication Theaterwork were fingered by a "pro-family" newsletter as "very liberal" and "un-American...

...But their capacity to endure is being put to the test, as the economic vise in which all companies are caught presses alternative theaters with special severity...

...I keep realizing how awfully tired I am...

...And now it's the 1980s...

...How come there are almost no other people our age doing this any more...

...And that may be as difficult as finding money to keep the shows on the road...

...Alone, we sit in our darkened rooms and take in those nightly messages of fear...

...A fine Chicano theater, El Teatro de la Esperanza of Santa Barbara, spends months putting together productions out of the stories of company members and people they interview...

...Its description of Women's Theater (a subcategory of Other Small Theaters) is a confession of sorts—a revelation both of official attitudes and of their inadequacy in the face of substantial theatrical activity: "Women's theater—that is, theater dealing with the themes of [the] women's liberation movement—is fragmented and has a high attrition rate, although it persists throughout the country with, perhaps, as many as 100 such groups...

...Its special problem is the one that besets women's organizations generally—the reluctance of funding agencies to support them even at the level of other special interest groups...

...And an Illinois troupe, United Mime Workers, refuses to perform Mime Is No Object, a silent paradigm of the way our economy works, unless there is time set aside at the end for the audience to talk about what went on...

...The people at Cherry Creek, in the midst of planning a national conference called The Gathering, responded with diplomacy and fortitude...

...The Mime Troupe gets approximately 80 per cent of its income from audiences...

...There is a feeling in progressive circles," said Cherry Creek's artistic director, David Olson, "that there's been a real failure to nourish the imaginations of our people, including our families and even ourselves...

...To advertise its Neil Simon movie Only When I Laugh (based on a Broadway play), Columbia Pictures spent almost $4 million in four weeks—and recouped it in one weekend...

...The consequence, as they themselves say, is that the quality of their work suffers...

...Last spring, before The Gathering in Saint Peter, Theaterwork reprinted a letter that Provisional Theater's Barry Opper had written...

...In it he said, "We've been dreamers...

...When the people, themselves, create their own theater," Deborah Langerman of United Mime Workers has written, "using their political, social, or economic problems as subject matter, cultural production is put in the hands of the people for whom it is intended, making the theater produced for them by people presuming to know what their needs are irrelevant and elitist...

...But, wow, are they resounding lately...

...We do have theater workers still—like those at Provisional—who can and do examine it, with power and insight...

...But there are not many of them...

...I really feel we are in danger—all of us, the planet...

...Because of the controversy, Cherry Creek lost $35,000 in promised private donations and ended up saddling itself with a debt so that the show could go on...

...So we want to spread out the images of people at work, people who delight in their work...

...problem on stage, no singing of a revolutionary song, that can be as effective as the changing of attitude...

...Even with amplification, audiences can grow just so large and performances can be given just so often...

...The best way to do both—to keep companies going in these unfriendly times and to create drama that will pull us from our television sets back into real life—may be to travel further along the path people's theater has already taken: away from the commercial conception of theater as something one set of strangers produces for another set to consume, and toward a communal conception of theater in which particular audiences and particular companies sustain each other in relationships that are intimate and continuous...

...On the larger theatrical scene, they are consigned to the status of bit players, as was made clear in a report last May from the National Endowment for the Arts, Conditions and Needs of the Professional American Theater...

...To these companies and others like them, the making of drama can be a deeply political act...

...A feminist company from Minneapolis, At the Foot of the Mountain, uses its powerful confessional play Junkies, wrought out of its members' experience with addiction, to lead those who watch (often teenagers) into a recognition of their own addictions...

...It need not be up to performers, always, to make the first move...

...as the result of having entered into a new process of relationships with other people...

...There is a way.' And we've been successful...

...Tickets for the Royal Shakespeare company's marathon production, The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nick-leby (which goes on for more than eight hours), are selling for an astounding box-office price of $100 a ticket on Broadway...

...Their hectic performance schedules leave them too little time to develop new productions and refine old ones...

...The commission finally backed down under threats of adverse publicity and a lawsuit, but, by failing to live up to its own obligations to promote the play, it did what it could to sabotage the performances...

...The NEA, whatever crumbs it has tossed to grass-roots culture, has been far more concerned with setting the table for the arts establishment...

...As even the NEA recognizes, women's theater companies persist in spite of high attrition rates and lack of support from funding agencies...

...Television has appropriated it, turning it into a perpetual sales pitch for soap and cars and the consuming way of life...

...But the Dakota Theater Caravan believed itself engaged in an act that was both political and experimental: The Caravan is one of a number of companies, sometimes called "people's theaters," that are subverting consumer entertainment through the nature of their productions and the relationships they form with their audiences...

...At the present time, there are about fifteen women's theaters in New York City...

...And, struggling to survive in a cultural vacuum, they may not be with us for long...

...For people's theater, concerned that live drama not be an experience for the economic elite only, raising prices significantly is out of the question...

...There have been times when political concerns were examined on the stage with intensity and significance: The great plays of Western civilization—the tragedies of Sophocles, the histories of Shakespeare—have been political...

...Somewhat apologetically, the NEA's research division noted that "little data are available" on "many small/theaters with varying degrees of professional orientation...