Tackling a Difficult Question...

... Which is: "What is Theatre?"

I'm not sure. Quite the answer. Six years of school and six of professional life and that's the short answer.

To be clear, theater is a building, theatre is the art form.

What is theatre then? Well, there are some intrinsic elements that I feel must be accounted for. Theatre is a performance. The bulk of a piece needs to be made up of a live performance, though I fully understand and realize the need to explore the convergence of theatre with other media in this day and age. But there needs to be something more than just performance. What can we point out to differentiate theatre from contemporary performance pieces, or modern dance? Is it story? Is it themes? Visual flair? Perhaps avant-garde theatre and modern dance are so close as to be indistinguishable.

I want theatre to have a story, and to have a point. I want theatre to mean something, because if I'm going to give up my time and money (which is an increasingly larger quantity each time I'm asked to go to a show), I want something bigger, bolder, something that means more than the procedurals gracing the television. I want more than the clever plotting and solid realism dancing across the silver screen. I want my theatre (dare I say all theatre) to take advantage of the fact that it is theatre, that it has inherent advantages over television and film and radio. I want my theatre to finally admit that realism is a vein more apt to be plumbed in film, not theatre. Film does it so well, why must we exist in this world where realism is still trying to be king on stage. Please. Stop it already. But you won't. We won't. The train is rolling.

I won't sit here and rail against realism, as much as I might want to, BUT why can't people take a moment and look at what theatre has to offer? Live actors! Right there. Feet away from the audience. Realism asks us to put a wall there, that infamous fourth one. They ask the audience to pretend, to enter into that Devil's Pact of make believe, that what we see on stage is real. That Hedda Gabler's cabinets are full of dishes and the like. But we know that's not Hedda Gabler. Or Roma. Or anyone but Kevin Kline. Or Jennifer Garner. But we can't say that. There's no acknowledging that in realism. Because it's real.

But here's the catch. The rub. The sandpaper against your bum:

It's not real. The play is just as contrived as anything.

Now don't get me wrong, I won't say realism has no place in theatre, I just think there's too much of it- I dare say I hold the over saturation of realism in the market to be one of the key factors in the (and I recognize the oxymoronic nature of this) increasing decline of American Theatre. There, I said it. Not an answer to what is theatre, but perhaps the start of uncovering my frustration.

Okay, I'm off for the night and will return with more when I can.
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T