AT25: An Eye on the Future
Mike Daisey, monologist and playwright, New York City
The American theatre movement is nearing disaster. Without an adequate sense of tradition or a sense of social responsibility, it is in danger of becoming a movement whose only purpose is self-perpetuation. This idealistic movement begun some generations ago has been unable to achieve a living wage for its actors, a livelihood for its playwrights; it demands that its designers accept 12 to 15 productions a year just to make ends meet, and forgoes its responsibility to train directors while permitting, under the heading of financial survival, the average income of its audiences to climb higher and higher, until this once bastion of social ideals and aesthetic concerns has become the plaything of the upper-middle-class and the very wealthy. How did this happen?
Richard Nelson wrote these words 25 years ago as the opening to an essay about the state of American theatre.
It's instructive to see what a quarter-century has done to these words. Today they seem fiery but obvious: Of course there are no living wages. Of course the work suffers. Of course we play increasingly to the rich. Of course, of course—an expression we don't often think about, it literally means to stay the course. We forget our own complicity. We are our own worst enemy, because we begin to believe that change is impossible.
Today we are in the midst of a seismic transformation in American theatre as traditional subscriber bases are aging and dying off. Though dire, it is an opportunity for risk and reinvention, but we must be awake in our souls to see it through.
How many of us have accepted less, year after year? How many of us have acted with appeasement, as programs are gutted? How many of us have valued buildings over people? How many of us have honestly lost touch with the original source—the charged, cathartic magic of the living theatre?
I submit that we all have, inch by inch. That's why I look forward to the great work of the next quarter-century as a time of crisis and renewal. I hope we begin to take back institutions for artists, in cities and towns we don't hear from today. I hope that we will discover together a new theatre of the living moment, beyond the thumb of film and television. I hope we are making art that is like life itself: unrepeatable, illuminating and unforgettable.