What about Mee?

April 11, 2003 3:09 PM

The (Re)making Project: "There is no such thing as an original play," says playwright Charles Mee. His site offers full-length transcriptions of his own hilarious, profound works and encourages users to plunder them: "Please feel free to take the plays from this website and use them as a resource for your own work: cut them up, rearrange them, rewrite them, throw things out, put things in, do whatever you like with them.." Mee's generous, Classicist approach to his work contrasts sharply with, say, Lars Ulrich.

In helping live theater overcome its marginalization in the U.S., Mee's accessible, re-mixed adaptations of Greek tragedies seem like a positive contribution. But why does live entertainment like sports and music draw Friday-night crowds while theater plays to a tiny national audience?
posted by dhoyt (21 comments total)

But why does live entertainment like sports and music draw Friday-night crowds while theater plays to a tiny national audience?

(Desire to teach) x (Earnestness about teaching) = 1 / (Degree to which your "average citizen" is interested in such an activity during their free time)

Dispute that how you will, but the telling point for me is just how many people complain to their local movie critic saying that they just want to know whether a movie is entertaining, and therefore worth their money, or not. People aren't necessarily anti-intellectual, but their budgets don't have separate "entertainment" and "ennobling edification" buckets. Non-entertainment-related art will always suffer up against bread & circuses, because most people think their lives don't have enough "mindless" fun in them in comparison to their workaday workload.

And I'm not familiar with any playwright who doesn't consider their primary purpose to teach the audience something. That's how it should be; that's how almost every writer in every genre thinks about their work; but playwrights and stage directors and stage directors also pump up the "earnestness" in the above equation a lot. I like the theater; I love going to live theater events; but most people can smell its erudition a mile away, and they turn tail. I find it hard to believe that it will ever be any different. Smart movies have the same problem; smart books have the same problem; smart TV has the same problem. The thing about theater is that there aren't very many "dumb" plays. (Not that every play is actually smart, but most every play that gets put on by most every repertory company has a finely polished patina of smartness.)

You can say that it was different in Shakespeare's day, but in Shakespeare's day, there wasn't film, television, arena sports, the Internet or a low-budget printing press.
posted by blueshammer at 3:20 PM on April 11, 2003

Oh, dhoyt, don't even get me started.

I think there are many factors. Among them:

1) The "art for art's sake" attitude of the early twentieth century. When you are a visual artist or a musician, the "art for art's sake" work you do might be discovered after your death, so you can ignore the public. In theatre, if you say "fuck the public," and nobody ever sees your work, your work is gone before you are. Never-the-less, many folks in theatre couldn't give two poops about what the great unwashed masses want to watch.

2) The "art for the proletariat" movements of the early twentieth century. Intellectuals sitting around positing what the workers of the world want to see who, at the same time, have no connection to the workers what so ever. They made theatre aimed at creating social revolution that real human beings are not interested in because, while it might be intellectual stimulating, it often has no soul. Real people like things that effect their emotions - like sport and music.

3) Competition from Movies and TV - the big ones. Why pay $30 to see some guys standing around and talking when you can see similar guys sanding around talking for $7.50 (with popcorn, which you can eat in the movie theatre - try eating pop corn in a stage theatre) or for free at home.

Live theatre often tries to steal from film and TV, usually to disastrous results.

There are some bright spots - things live theatre can offer that TV cannot. Improvisation (especially ComedySportz - the true theatre of the masses in many ways), interactive theatre, the weird new forms of theatre that occasionally achieve popularity (Stomp, Blue Man Group, De La Guarda, etc), and visually stunning live theatre (such as the work of Julie Taymor).

4) In community theatre, the "season" system, which allows dreadful shows to run for as many performances as popular shows.

---

Historically, Live theatre as a popular form is entirely market driven.

I look at China. For over a thousand years, theatre grew, developed and changed to meet the public taste. It was a thriving art form. In the last twenty years, it has been largely codified and frozen (sometimes by government decree) - it no longer adapts to meet contemporary needs. As a result, attendance is dwindling...

The solution? Maybe get theatre out of the hands of intellectuals and into the hands of Corky St. Claire.

On Preview: Blueshammer rocks.

Oh, and nice links.
posted by Joey Michaels at 3:23 PM on April 11, 2003

a play by Brad, entitled "Poor Lars. "


Lars - "Hey people, don't steal from me."

90% of internet users - "BASTARD! THAT'S TOTALLY ILLOGICAL! WHY CAN'T I STEAL FROM YOU????"

The end
posted by bradth27 at 3:41 PM on April 11, 2003

It's not that people don't have time to do both, because a people go to twenty baseball games a season and no plays, rather than ten games and ten plays, for example.

It's not money, since the price of a ticket to a movie, a play (local theater), and a sporting event is basically comparable, within a few bucks.

I can't see any way that the reason behind the lack of support for theater comes down to the fact that people do not want the kind of entertainment that theater provides any more. I suspect the reason is that the rewards of the other forms of entertainment are more immediate and obvious, even though I believe they are qualitatively less in the long run.
posted by Hildago at 3:44 PM on April 11, 2003

Lars - "Hey people, don't steal from me."

90% of internet users - "BASTARD! THAT'S TOTALLY ILLOGICAL! WHY CAN'T I STEAL FROM YOU????"

What's illogical is the assertion that P2P file sharing hurts artists, when there is no evidence that it does, and at least anecdotal evidence that it doesn't.
posted by Hildago at 3:47 PM on April 11, 2003

...I can't see any way that the reason behind the lack of support for theater doesn't come down to the fact that people do not want the kind of entertainment that theater provides any more...
posted by Hildago at 3:49 PM on April 11, 2003

Untrue. Even with the downturn in the economy and the disruption of a musician's strike, receipts for Broadway shows - and the touring versions of them in other locations - are at record highs. What people don't want is to have to think. They'll go see the bastardization of Aida, complete with with go-go dancers and cartoon characterizations, and they'll pay $75 or $80 a throw to do so and consider it money well spent. They will not, however, sit still to be talked down to by Charles Mee or anyone else for that matter. Outside of an essentially urban and/or academic audience, nobody ever sees or hears of this stuff and if they did, they wouldn't want to.
posted by JollyWanker at 4:01 PM on April 11, 2003

Oh my, this thread is so full of false dichotomies:

"Real People" vs "Intellectuals and Artists"

"Entertaining" Sports & Music vs. "Educational" theater

etc, etc.
posted by signal at 4:05 PM on April 11, 2003

People want to see theatre when it is of interest to them.

When we do original work out here that catches the public's imagination, we can run it for months. We have no mechanism in place in any of the local theatres to do this.

As long as theatre artists turn a blind eye to attracting an audience, theatre will continue to languish on the fringe.

Sigel: It is a dichotomy, but in this case (and in my opinion, of course), it is not false. Theatre people, ignore my words at your peril!
posted by Joey Michaels at 4:17 PM on April 11, 2003

What people don't want is to have to think.

That's kind of what I meant, even though I neglected to put it like that. In my private universe, theatre means little local shows, not big touring spectacles, which have some other name that I haven't assigned yet. Sorry for the confusion.

People do want passive entertainment, not just as a matter of preference, but almost totally exclusively. It's really, really hard to deny this, even if you're the most cheery humanist in the world, which I'm not. Roger Ebert has a nice quote about it:

"I noticed this tendency years ago, when my phone rang at the Chicago Sun-Times and a reader asked what I knew about Bergman's Cries and Whispers. I said I thought it was the best film of the year. Reader: 'That doesn't sound like anything we'd like to see.'"
posted by Hildago at 4:57 PM on April 11, 2003

But why does live entertainment like sports and music draw Friday-night crowds while theater plays to a tiny national audience?

Where I live, local theater beats the crap out of local live music performances. Easily and consistently. I'm a musician and part of a local music alliance and I've been trying to figure out why. Seriously, there are at least three local theaters constantly doing something -- and that's aside from the college/university productions, and the comedy troups. But there is exactly one struggling venue dedicated to local live music, and even they're really a CD/record shop by day. Nobody 'round here pays the bills as a music venue.
posted by weston at 6:29 PM on April 11, 2003

What's illogical is the assertion that P2P file sharing hurts artists, when there is no evidence that it does, and at least anecdotal evidence that it doesn't.

What's illogical is not being willing to call a theft a theft. If I steal a car, and take it for a drive, and no one gets hurt, and I return it with the same amount of gas in the tank as when I left....is it still theft?
posted by bradth27 at 7:01 PM on April 11, 2003

bradth27: how very zen of you.
posted by mb01 at 8:03 PM on April 11, 2003

bradth: no matter how hard you push it, you can't make that analogy stick. You've monopolized use of that particular car for that particular period of time without authorization by its legal owner, so it is theft. But that's not what happens when you download a copy of a song. Instead of taking the actual car, you walk up to it with a new high-tech Star Trek matter duplicator and make an exact copy. Then you take your brand new copy, which you paid for by purchasing the matter duplicator and paying for the electricity needed to operate it, and drive the car away. And don't even bother to return it, because the original owner still has their original car, untouched in every detail, no atom out of place.

Is it still theft?

Real-world analogies like "theft" and "piracy" don't work in the digital world. Until someone invents a matter duplicator, there will be no reasonable analogies because nothing like this situation can exist.
posted by Mars Saxman at 9:42 PM on April 11, 2003

so Mars Saxman = Richard Stallman? (I just love the "car copier" analogy, and use it often when talking with people about why sampling isn't theft.)
posted by Vidiot at 10:08 PM on April 11, 2003

after all, intellectual property isn't really property, is it? you can't really steal someone's ideas and hard work to create and produce the end product, can you?
posted by mb01 at 10:20 PM on April 11, 2003

I saw a fantastic As You Like It last week, presented by the drama students from the local University.

Great theatre is all around us; it's just a matter of getting there. Since entertainment went 2D, we've got to re-learn how to give good audience.
posted by emf at 12:27 AM on April 12, 2003

I agree with Lars Ulrich that music shouldn't be ripped off. But I don't see how p2p filesharing is any different than cassette-taping songs off the radio, or videotaping sitcoms from T.V. Except maybe that more people do it?

I'm probably more likely to buy a CD if I've heard a few poor quality mp3s samples from it, rather than buy it absolutely unheard like in the good old days, but I've said this before, and it's not exactly on topic.

Mee on the other hand is possibly selling himself short, and I'm not sure Shakespeare would agree, although parts of Shakespeare's plays have become part of the public lexicon. They're still undeniably his work, with copyrights to prove it.

But, I completely disagree that "there's no such thing as an original play".

"O, o, o, that Shakespe-herean rag", or, "If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well / It were done quickly" for example.
posted by hama7 at 3:31 AM on April 12, 2003

Great theatre is all around us

Depends where you are. the British small-theatre circuit is dire, because companies uniformly dread frightening the horses, so you get a dreary procession of 'safe' plays by Agatha Christie, Neil Simon, Alan Ayckbourn, etc, etc.
posted by raygirvan at 5:14 AM on April 12, 2003

(Desire to teach) x (Earnestness about teaching) = 1 / (Degree to which your "average citizen" is interested in such an activity during their free time)

blueshammer, I hope you haven't copyrighted this - I am so gonna use it ...
posted by MidasMulligan at 8:12 AM on April 12, 2003

Raygirvan, I think it's a matter of joining the local amateur troupe and working until you get your own choices on stage. That's what I do, anyway.

I haven't got a problem with the popular choices - directors and actors don't want to waste their sweetness on the air, after all - but your choice is only going to be picked if you're on the shop floor.

If all else fails, there's usually plenty of drama right here :)
posted by emf at 3:00 PM on April 12, 2003