What is Theatre’s Job?

Rebecca Coleman recently posted in her theatre blog, “The Art of the Biz”, a short article on “Entertainment versus Provocation: What is Theatre’s Job?” What a great topic to stir up conversation. There is a lot of religion around this and it is certainly worthwhile to debate at every stage in an artist’s career. I believe it is virtually unanswerable, but the asking of it provokes clarity and vision in the artist no matter what camp you pitch your tent in.

I think of it as asking “Nutrition versus Flavour: What is a Chef’s Job?” – creating a dichotomy when, in the finest examples of the craft, the two are not mutually exclusive. A comedian would say that provocation is entertainment. A person who loves mystery novels and puzzles would feel cheated by an entertainment that gave up its resolution too early, or too simplistically. A great story of revenge would not be satisfying if the antagonist did not provoke our moral outrage, making us wish he’d get his just dessert. And a story would fail us if it did not leave us with something pertaining to the here and now; whether to confirm our hopes in a happy ending or to shock us by revealing a dark, but familiar evil of the human condition. Provocation is at the heart of our most classic and most contemporary entertainments.

I believe the dichotomy is in “Preaching versus Playing”. In the early stages of childhood development, we play games with children that have to do with sneaking up and shouting “Boo!” Normally this behaviour provokes the primal fear response. But because the child is playing a game with someone known and safe, the response is expressed as laughter. It is the sense of safety and trust placed in the environment that allows “play” to happen.

This is where I see the audience of today’s shrinking theatre. They’re a bit shy of playing because the last few times they did they got burned, or someone cheated on the prize. To compensate, the artists have turned to preaching; telling people why art is good for them and how culturally bankrupt they will be if they don’t support it. Well, when was the last time you genuinely felt like doing something because someone shouted “It’s good for you.”?

I’ve had the unique pleasure to work with a theatre company who regularly sells out all of its performances. In most cases the entire run will be sold out before the middle of the first week. How is this possible? I think it has to do with what Aaron posted as “starting a tribe”. Which, if you follow Aaron’s links through to Seth Godin’s talk, has to do with becoming a leader of a group who shares common values. Like Godin’s idea of group organization (which he says is 10,000 years old) theatre has to turn back to an older model. We were the story tellers, councilors, educators and newspapers of our tribes. Making good, quality theatre is part of the solution, of course. But, as anyone in business would say, making a “better mousetrap” is not addressing the whole picture.

To get our audience back, I think we have to get them to trust us. We have to give them their sense of confidence by not telling them what is good for them. And I think it is the artist’s job to develop and reward his audience by acknowledging its shared values and being true to them. If you bulls**t them, just like cheating a kid in a game, they’ll stop wanting to play with you.

To go back to the culinary metaphor; I compare the audience to the customer base of a restaurant. Remember a time in Vancouver (it was only the 70s) when there were virtually no ethnic restaurants? In about a decade Vancouverites became a lot more “foody” and developed the confidence to experiment and become the loyal supporters of “their favourite” Thai, Japanese or French restaurant. Part of that had to do with the quality of the product, but the other half of that relationship came from the shared set of values surrounding the food.

With all the tools we have at our disposal today such as social networking sites, twitter and other web 2.0 applications, we can “find our tribe”, as Aaron quotes, and offer to lead them. I am confident that theatre will not go the way of the dinosaur, no matter how bad an economy gets. It is too close to our innate mode of communication. If Peter Brook can wander post-war Germany and find cabarets being performed in bombed-out buildings, we can certainly find our audience.

So I would say that theatre’s job is to find its audience, not in a generalized way that “entertains” or “challenges” them as if they a non-descript mass; a restaurant never says it is simply feeding a group of people. The audience is sophisticated, opinionated and has a lot of information at its disposal. It wants dialogue and memorable experiences. We have to cultivate the energy to meet that expectation if we want them to come out and surpass it if we want them to come back for more.