When Plano Repertory Theater closed in August, the Dallas Morning News reported that 20 to 40 percent of the audiences walked out of Plano Rep’s production of Shakespeare’s R & J, in the spring of 2004, because two boys kissed onstage. One reason Plano Rep imploded, in other words, was—or was thought to be—the fact that the theater had imposed gay themes on an audience expecting Juliet to be, you know, a girl. Support withered, the theater never quite recovered, and the 29-year-old Plano institution died.
Whether or not the R & J production was literally responsible, the play has become the scapegoat, like that Cubs fan who interfered with a foul ball two years ago in the Cubs playoff series with the Marlins. The Cubs lost the game, then the series, and the frustration of many decades sizzled onto one poor, dumb, hated guy, the embodiment of the Curse of the Goat (which seems to mean that somebody has to be one). Regardless of what the team did on the field, it was, in the primitive logic of curses, all his fault. In the same symbolic way, that kiss in R & J cost Plano Rep its existence.
There are two implied stories here, and I don’t like either one.
Story No. 1: the artists at Plano Rep dared to explore edgy issues of adolescent sexuality, but the audience of comfortable suburban SUVers and AARPists turned out to be hopelessly bigoted and unenlightened. Story No. 2: the theater got what it deserved because people don’t want to pay good money to see somebody promoting homosexuality, especially with teenaged actors, and ruining Shakespeare to boot.
What’s wrong with story No. 1? In the first place, Shakespeare’s R & J—an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet by a playwright named Joe Calarco—hardly pushes the envelope. Although there’s no original dialogue in the play, Calarco gives the action a new twist with the “players” (four boys in a strict Catholic boarding school) and the stage directions. The nuances and complexities of conscience in a pre-Vatican ii school (think of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) are of no importance; Calarco simply counts on a knee-jerk reaction to rote Latin lessons and acts of contrition. When the four boys open their copy of R & J after class, here’s the stage direction:
“The four join together and release a primal scream. It comes from a very deep place. …” Seriously, that’s what it says. And the notorious kiss? Two of the boys are reading the passage when Romeo and Juliet first meet: “They go to kiss, but it is difficult for it is a moment filled with terror and excitement. Eventually their lips meet. Nothing will ever be the same.”
On Shakespeare’s stage, all the actors were male, as movies like Shakespeare in Love and Stage Beauty remind us. Males acted every romantic scene in the great comedies and tragedies, which would be very disconcerting now. Boys whose voices had not broken used to take the parts of women, and older actors kissed them, much to the disgust of Puritan polemicists, who eventually succeeded in closing down the theaters altogether.
Still, think of it: all the great Shakespearean heroines—Juliet, Portia, Rosalind, Cordelia, Desdemona, Ophelia, Miranda—were played by boys. In Antony and Cleopatra, the great queen of Egypt (who is obviously being played by a boy) complains to one of her handmaids that she dreads being taken captive to Rome, where “I shall see/Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness/I’ th’ posture of a whore.” (Emphasis added.) Shakespeare’s own frustration with boy actors brims over through that comment. What can boys possibly know about the passions and complexities—”Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale/Her infinite variety”—of a woman like Cleopatra?
Using boys wasn’t a liability, though, in his comedies. Shakespeare employed them to play a dizzying game with sexual identity. His heroines often take on “disguises” as boys, which means that the audience is watching a boy playing a girl pretending to be a boy. In the action, everybody in the audience knows that the lawyer who saves Antonio from Shylock in The Merchant of Venice is “really” Portia, when of course she’s really a boy. (Got that?) The comedies play with the very idea of identity, sexual and otherwise. They’re about imagination, eros, delay, grace.
Joe Calarco’s R & J, on the other hand, tears away the stage illusion altogether. Boy kisses boy, and suddenly it’s a message—and a pretty easy message at that. Network television has been all over gay sexuality for years.
Shakespeare’s R & J is about more than that, some will say. But here’s my point about the persecuted artists of story No. 1: if we have to blame a scapegoat, can’t it be a better, more original, more imaginative, and more important one than this? Companies are going to lose their audiences if they keep imagining that people have to be shocked by something about sex to experience “theater.” There are other routes to higher planes of imagination, and the greatest theater has usually been written and performed under conditions of censorship.
On the other hand, story No. 2 (the idea that theaters deserve to fail if they offend the tastes of their audience) undercuts the very possibility of creativity in contemporary theater, especially if boards of directors think that ticket sales should generate enough money to keep them running. As Emily Gray of Classical Acting Company puts it, theaters “do not and should not run as commercial ventures. They are places to nurture art and creativity, as well as preserve works of art from many eras. The whole point of nonprofit status for arts organizations is so that they can be financially supported by a community, corporations, private foundations, and government, local and federal. All these are just as important as ticket sales.”
Both Robyn Flatt at Dallas Children’s Theater and Tom Sime, managing director of Contemporary Theatre of Dallas, agree entirely. “Fundraising at the box office places an enormous strain on not-for-profit theaters,” Flatt says. “There is a delicate balance between maintaining artistic philosophy and integrity, listening to an audience, and ensuring self-sustainability.” Sime wants to get theaters off that tightrope. “We need to think of cultural institutions the way we think of public parks and lakes,” he adds. “They are not profitable in themselves, but they make cities more livable. They add value to everything around them. Central Park is hugely expensive to maintain, but it makes all of Manhattan more valuable. It is not a luxury. The wild success of mass-media arts has deceived us into thinking the free-market model should work for the live arts, too.”
The difficulty, of course, is that it is impossible to escape the market altogether, says Marianne Galloway, who founded Risk Theater Initiative in 2003. “A theater that fails to provide a voice for its people, both artists and audience, will struggle to gain support from any outlet,” she says. “The organization must support the community before it can expect the community to support it.”
What the community will support depends on a consonance between what it thinks it is getting and what the theater actually delivers. Suzan-Lori Parks’ Topdog/Underdog at the Dallas Theater Center, for example, got a lot of walkouts in 2004, because one of the black characters entertained himself fairly explicitly with the pornography under his bed. The community that supports it was not expecting a scene like that one. It would have gone unremarked at Kitchen Dog, which produced the outrageous The Dead Monkey earlier this year without conspicuous walkouts. Del Shores’ preachy, self-indulgent Southern Baptist Sissies (speaking of boys kissing) was treated with tearful reverence by the patrons of Uptown Players last summer.
How much can a theater violate the expectations of its audience? How much real novelty, which will always be felt as a danger, can it bring into the experience of its audience?
In a way, the problem now is no different from the one Euripides laid out unforgettably in The Bacchae (405 BC). The god Dionysus returns to his hometown of Thebes, asking for recognition, and Pentheus, the strict young king of the city, feels so threatened by everything Dionysus stands for (including his sexual ambiguity) that he tries to lock up the divinity—with results that strain the limits of horror.
But isn’t the point of theater not to come to that impasse? Theater is perhaps the richest way ever devised of negotiating between powerful, unruly emotions and the necessity of order, between what we imagine or desire and what can be made real in civil life. It’s so important that the ancient Athenians didn’t just contribute to theater. They made the Festival of Dionysus a dramatic contest, and they made every citizen (and imagine the extremes of opinion in that volatile city) attend it.
Call it the other side of politics. Great theater is exactly what we need, in whatever form, in a divided Dallas.
Glenn Arbery is a senior editor at People Newspapers.
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What’s a Rabin, Anyway?
It’s Dallas theater’s homage to the tradition it helped to start.
When NPR’s Bob Mondello initiated his eight-part series on American regional theater last March, one of the first names he mentioned was Dallas director Margo Jones, who helped spark what became the “regional theater movement” in the 1940s. (Watch for Kay Cattarulla’s KERA documentary on Jones next spring.) The idea was that, as Mondello puts it, “theater could be driven by art rather than cash.” Robert Brustein, who founded the Yale Repertory Theater, said that the aim was much bigger than selling tickets. It was “to do exciting new plays, to do innovative productions of the classics, and to develop—ideally—a company, a group of actors, to work together like a ball team works together, knows each other’s plays and therefore can feed each other the way that strange pickup companies can’t.”
Dallas theater enthusiast and benefactor Leon Rabin, who died in 1993, did his part to further the regional theater movement in Dallas, helping to found both the Dallas Theater Center and the Arts Magnet High School. The Rabin Awards, the Dallas Theatre League’s annual recognition of the best in local theater, honor both Leon Rabin’s contributions and the booming local nonprofit theater scene that he helped foster. Margo Jones hoped for 40 regional theaters nationwide. She would be stunned to know that the Dallas Theater League lists 37 local companies as members—and that’s not counting distinguished nonmembers, Dallas Theater Center and Theatre Three.
The Rabin nominations in 20 different categories come from two five-member committees (one for plays and one for musicals) comprised of local playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and dramaturges. We’re predicting a big night for actor Chamblee Ferguson, actress Emily Gray, and director René Moreno.
The Rabin Awards take place November 7 at the Dallas Convention Center Theatre Complex, 650 S. Griffin St. Cocktails: 6-7:15 pm; award ceremony: 7:30 pm; reception: 9:30 pm. Tickets are $25-$100. Attire is black-tie optional. 214-743-2400.
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Not to Miss in November
Through Nov 12
Second Thought Theatre presents Humpty Dumpty by Eric Bogosian, whose credentials as a comic force in American theater ought to strike sparks with young Second Thought’s impressive creativity. Studio Theatre @ Addison Theater Centre, 15650 Addison Rd. 972-450-6232. www.secondthoughttheatre.com.
Through Nov 13
Wingspan Theatre Company performs Danny and the Deep Blue Sea by John Patrick Shanley. Recently the winner of the Pulitzer for Doubt, Shanley has been a powerful playwright since this debut play about two social rejects who meet in a bar. Award-winning Susan Sargeant directs. Bath House Cultural Center, 521 E. Lawther Dr. 972-504-6218. www.bathhousecultural.com.
