Re: RAT Theatre in our time.

[Michael Wright <myquagga@yahoo.com>]

yes, but it's always been bread and circuses vs. art. 
i honestly think that a portion of the people in that
audience would see work out of the mainstream if they
knew they were welcome--and that they were welcome not
to "get it" like the enlightened or whatever we
presume ourselves to be.  it's like teaching poetry. 
if we only teach poetry which is extremely difficult
to understand, then we turn off possible poet-lovers;
if we teach sekou sundiata and other contemporary
people, then we maybe embrace possible poet-lovers.  i
have no real answers to this stuff, but i believe in
my heart and art that we can serve the larger public,
if we try.  it was brecht's fantasy, too.

mw




--- "Jack Bentz S.J." <jbentzsj@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Last night I went to the epitome of what I have
> devoted way too much of my 
> life mocking and it made me wonder.  Somehow I found
> myself in a cheap seat 
> at a Pops concert featuring band leader Norman
> Leyden and the Norman Leyden 
> Singers.  The program was a musical tour of Broadway
> throughout the last 
> century starting with Romberg and ending up without
> me.  I only made it to 
> the choral arrangement with choregraphy of "Five
> foot Two and Eyes of Blue" 
> and then had to drag my companion over the knees of
> several old couples who 
> were singing along.
> 
> How was it that in a huge concert hall of at least
> two thousand people was 
> I, the man of the people, the only one longing for
> the door?  Me, I love 
> cheese and irony but then perhaps I have come to the
> end of the line.  Was 
> there too much dancing that featured women with
> hands on hips and men on 
> their knees with arms outstreached?  How was this
> group of twenty singers 
> able to seriously do a box step while singing a
> medley of hits from the 
> flapper era?  Don't even ask me about "Makin'
> Whoopee!"
> 
> People loved it all.  They sang along.  The were
> brought to their feet or 
> their walkers with 'Grand old Flag."  But where was
> I with my theater for 
> the people rhetoric?  These were the people and yet
> I had no desire to serve 
> them this sort of garbage.
> 
> Other people?  But the people in front of me are the
> people.  I wondered if 
> the audience I wish to serve is really my own narrow
> aesthetic projected on 
> an imagined audience?
> 
> Jack
>
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=====
Michael Wright, (918) 631-3174, fax (918) 631-5155 

Shameless Self-Promotion Department: my new book, PLAYWRITING MASTER CLASS, is available (and discounted on amazon and heinemann.com).  Seven wonderful writers (Elena Carrillo, David Crespy, Gary Garrison, Velina Hasu Houston, Julie Jensen, Guillermo Reyes, Elizabeth Wong) share their process as each develops a short work based on the same prompt: "there is a key in an envelope in a drawer."

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