The Future of Theater, from The Harvard Magazine
Rody Vera has made it part of his mission to be on the lookout for noteworthy articles about theater and to share it with his colleagues. The following article, while it talks of American theater in particular, can actually be describing the present state of Philippine theater as well. Just substitute the commercial theater companies for Broadway and the subsidized and school-based companies for the non-profits, and the points still ring true.
The complete article can be found here:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/the-future-of-theater
Some excerpts:
In a digital era, is the play still the thing?
“In order to maintain its ideal form, theater needs to be subsidized,” says Robert Brustein, senior research fellow and founding director of the American Repertory Theater (ART). "
"Theater can never completely ignore the marketplace and the critics, who influence ticket-buyers. ... Yet “the nonprofit theater is meant not to be a hostage to newspaper critics,” says Brustein,... If a nonprofit theater has enough resources independent of box-office receipts, “It can defy its critics, or even stay ahead of its critics,” he declares."
“There’s a syndrome in our profession—to blame the audience, especially young people,” says Diane Paulus ’88, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater. ... "I’ve always found this deadening, because it doesn’t give you any room to change. We have to flip that analysis and say, ‘Maybe it’s us—maybe it’s the arts producers. Not just the writers and actors but the whole machine—perhaps we have to do a better job of inviting this audience back to the theater. Have they left? Yes. Have they not developed the habit of coming? Yes. Is it their fault? No!”
"The theater will surely stay alive in the future—the only question is, in what forms? The hunger for live storytelling, for the shared experience of actor and audience, may even increase, if and when people tire of the edited, buffed, packaged perfection of television and film products. “There’s a kind of tremulous fragility to the theater, because anything could happen,” says Lithgow. “There’s a kind of breathlessness.”
The complete article can be found here:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2012/01/the-future-of-theater
Some excerpts:
The Future of Theater
- Photograph by Stu Rosner. Robert Brustein onstage at the Loeb Drama Center, home of the American Repertory Theater, which he founded in 1979
"Theater, an institution at the
heart of world cultures for millennia, now confronts unprecedented
challenges in a rapidly evolving society. Electronic and digital
technologies have spawned an array of media, from 3-D movies to
crowd-sourced video like YouTube to smartphones, that compete with the
stage (and with other traditional media like books, and each other) for
the audience’s finite attention. A youthful generation raised amid a
digital culture may prove harder to lure to a live theatrical
performance; in the 2009-10 season, the average Broadway theatergoer was
48 years old."
“In order to maintain its ideal form, theater needs to be subsidized,” says Robert Brustein, senior research fellow and founding director of the American Repertory Theater (ART). "
"Theater can never completely ignore the marketplace and the critics, who influence ticket-buyers. ... Yet “the nonprofit theater is meant not to be a hostage to newspaper critics,” says Brustein,... If a nonprofit theater has enough resources independent of box-office receipts, “It can defy its critics, or even stay ahead of its critics,” he declares."
“There’s a syndrome in our profession—to blame the audience, especially young people,” says Diane Paulus ’88, artistic director of the American Repertory Theater. ... "I’ve always found this deadening, because it doesn’t give you any room to change. We have to flip that analysis and say, ‘Maybe it’s us—maybe it’s the arts producers. Not just the writers and actors but the whole machine—perhaps we have to do a better job of inviting this audience back to the theater. Have they left? Yes. Have they not developed the habit of coming? Yes. Is it their fault? No!”
"The theater will surely stay alive in the future—the only question is, in what forms? The hunger for live storytelling, for the shared experience of actor and audience, may even increase, if and when people tire of the edited, buffed, packaged perfection of television and film products. “There’s a kind of tremulous fragility to the theater, because anything could happen,” says Lithgow. “There’s a kind of breathlessness.”
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