Why Theatre Matters

An interesting read came across my desk this morning, because it mentioned Marvin's Room, by Scott McPherson, the first show of our current season. It relates the history of the AIDS epidemic as a part of theatrical history, and makes some interesting points. My favorite? Emphasis is mine.

But no illness, no disease, no pandemic EVER has given rise to a vast body of dramatic literature...until AIDS. There are individual works about polio or cancer or mental illness but not a continuum of works, not a cohesive and evolving and expanding collection of works as there is about AIDS now, and going forward. The reasons why are several. First, theater always is the art form that responds most quickly and accessibly to the world around it. Plays are written in the vernacular and generally lack some of the levels of abstraction of music or dance or some works of visual arts.

Theatre has been doing this for a long long time. Some of the theatre of ancient Greece was specifically topical and was written to publicly address political themes and current events. I think this timely response to world events is why theatre has survived, even in the days of television and film. Anyway, the whole article is interesting, so go read it. Why do you think theatre still matters in this world of Hollywood big budget spectacles?

The Music of Cat's-Paw

That title is kind of deceptive because, unlike many show, Cat's-Paw only has music for the actors' curtain call. A deliberate decision was made by the director to eliminate all pre-show and intermission music and replace it with some ambient noise and water drips to intensify the feeling that you're sitting in the rusty old water tank with the characters in the show.

But the curtain call music IS pretty great so I figured I'd share it. Since the play takes place in the 1980s, a nice anthemic song was picked. It's "Land of Confusion" by Genesis. Enjoy the creepy puppet show!

The Relevance of Theatre

Central to the heart of our current show, Cat's-Paw, is the argument that water is the heart of all life on earth, that it's a closed system, and that the EPA and corporations are being incredibly lax on the standards of acceptable contamination. William Mastrosimone wrote the show in the mid-1980's but the issue of clean water is still relevant today.

In my news feed just this morning was a story from Dimock, Pennsylvania. The headline? "Dimock, PA Fracking: EPA Water Samples Contained 'Dangerous' Levels of Methane."

From the article:

When the Environmental Protection Agency announced last week that tests showed the water is safe to drink in Dimock, Penn., a national hot spot for concerns about fracking, it seemed to vindicate the energy industry's insistence that drilling had not caused pollution in the area.

But what the agency didn't say -- at least, not publicly -- is that the water samples contained dangerous quantities of methane gas, a finding that confirmed some of the agency's initial concerns and the complaints raised by Dimock residents since 2009.

The test results also showed the group of wells contained dozens of other contaminants, including low levels of chemicals known to cause cancer and heavy metals that exceed the agency's "trigger level" and could lead to illness if consumed over an extended period of time. The EPA's assurances suggest that the substances detected do not violate specific drinking water standards, but no such standards exist for some of the contaminants and some experts said the agency should have acknowledged that they were detected at all.

Sounds like something straight out of Cat's-Paw, doesn't it?

William Mastrosimone, On His Play Cat's-Paw

This essay from playwright William Mastrosimone appears in the acting script of Cat's-Paw.

I wrote Cat's-Paw in 1984. It was s time when I could not help but admire the sheer nerve of the environmentalists who confronted the seal pub harvesters on Arctic ice floes. Many of these unsung heroes felt the blunt force of the hunters' clubs. Other environmental groups pounded 12 inch nails into trees, nails that would fragment loggers' chainsaw blades sending shrapnel through the hair. Many loggers were injured. One lost an eye. That's when I took a step back. Not long after, a pipe-bomb injured two environmentalists before they could deliver it. Bulldozers were burned at a construction site on a mountain top where a ski report was planned. A splinter group of Greenpeace filled the hull of an old freighter with cement and sailed the seas ramming, and sometimes sinking, whaling ships. There was a clear escalation, from the need to bear witness to the willingness to destroy property, to the willingness to kill for a cause. What were some thinking when they took as their mottoes: "Back to the Pleistocene!" and "Visualize industrial collapse!" Why, in an open society, where change is possible, were activists resorting to violence? What makes a good cause go bad?

What if there were a cause so vital to human existence that no one could deny support? If these remarkable activists held such a universally supported cause, say, clean water, and had exhausted all peaceful possibilities for change, would terrorism be justified in that case? That's how the play began.

But that is only a third of the story. Fast forward - past 9/11, past the Spanish and London train bombings - to April 2007 at Virginia Tech University. A student went on a rampage killing 32 people before taking his own life.

The next day NBC network received a package - a video tape made by the killer. The video consisted of a self-glorifying killer who chose a power costume - a tight black T-shirt and double shoulder holsters - that might have been borrowed by some Hollywood body-bag movie. Turing his face into a mask of blind rage the killer screamed threats at the camera. It wasn't enough to take revenge on the world; he needed to be understood by the world.

Experts warned that showing the tape might result in copycat incidents. NBC faced the choice: be exclusive or be responsible. NBC chose to be exclusive claiming free speech and the public's right to know. In truth, the showed the tape because that's how ratings are achieved, and the higher the ratings as per the Federal Communications Commission, the more an entity is allowed to charge for advertising.

And what does it say about the media that the killer entrusted them to his last will and testament, his video, his claim to immortality? He knew they could be counted on to show it over and over and over again. It's a perfect symbiosis. Both parties benefit from terror. The terrorist gets publicity, the media gets viewership.

But that's only two-thirds of the story. What does it say about us that we need to see the video? Information is what enables us to make good decisions in a democracy - right? but the truth is that most of information is repetitive or useless; turn is most of us have a morbid curiosity that needs to be satisfied. By giving in to our need to see mayhem, we give more power to the terrorists. We are all part of the deadly triangulation between the acts of terror, the media coverage, and the viewing.

During her tenure as P.M., Margaret Thatcher advanced a thought that we have not heeded: "Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of oxygen of publicity on which they depend."

Until we figure out how to stay free and still report the news, terrorist acts will involve two explosions. The primary explosion kills innocent people in the street. The secondary explosion occurs in the viewer's mind, over and over again, as a neural pathway is created. Ring bell. Bring food. Dog salivate. News is not just reported anymore; it is designed for effect. The story is edited, parts subtracted, associations established with editing in other stories and/or expert opinions or carefully chosen public reaction. The fear we felt when we first saw the event on television can be conjured again and again, at will, in video replay, as news and entertainment slowly merge. Fear is reinforced. Fear makes us malleable, and caught between the act of terror and media coverage, we exist for a time in a state of impaired judgement.

The terrorist thinks and acts in symbols, and the media appreciates the economy of image. It's not just the Twin Towers that fell but America's economic power; not the Pentagon but America's military power; not just London trains, but Britain's sense of order and peace. Terrorism and media share a capacity to inflate or flatten people. On the television screen, the fruit-fly is magnified into an eagle; the mid less thing becomes a martyr; the crime becomes a myth. And so the collaboration goes. The terrorist in his faraway cave can rest assured there are eager unwitting allies waiting to put the finishing touches on the event.

Ring bell. Dog salivate.