Notes from the Editor's Desk -- 12/11/20-12/14/20

A theater that finds its natural language in groveling is an institution incapable of creating either value or meaning. That a theater for whom the impossible effort is indispensable, a theater that gestures towards a people’s mythic, religious and metaphysical impulse, would fare no better under financial circumstances as they are at present is of no importance. Such a theater does not as yet exist in Chicago and so cannot be mourned. This tendency of theaters and their managers to seek reprieve and perpetuate their operations, not thinking, or not daring, to consider what the cultural capacity of a society’s stages can be, is blameless. These institutions can do no more than stand at the end of the public’s attempt to placate their unease with open hands. Lacking in dynamism, they cannot ponder their present crisis, knowing that to do so would create scandal, nor question if they merely assuage the guilt wrought by costs that society may be unable to burden without disaster. A writer’s contempt for the inadequacy of theaters has abated none in light of the present crisis; but it is clear that the writer’s work, if it marks him as the embodiment of the American spirit Whitman and Emerson shared in, is where what is lost is to be constituted new. Make no mistake, it is in the looming spiritual crisis, the one all policy and actuary ignores, where we must learn of charity.

While the specific case of theater offers a study in mediocrity, the loss of independent livelihoods, and the ensuing acceleration of corporate homogeneity and the distraction economy, and the erosion of the public square, should not be treated lightly. Direct experience has shown me that the theaters were sick long before the pandemic. They extended the petty educations of their administrators by way of petty work in arts administration. They operated as an industry without a product. They sought the perpetuation of their operations at the expense of the acolyte and made no effort to develop talents. In this sense, their station at the receiving end of good will is a danger, because it keeps a people from realizing where lies the bureaucrat, where the artist.

Crisis may provide clarity in the end. The writer is, for now, on equal footing with the brick and mortar establishment. This is only a new state of affairs for one of these two parties. Although it will be incumbent upon writers to realize in their work the reconstitution of the American sublime, what should, perhaps, be expected of theater managers and owners are a few basic principles of operation. Without the writer, and therefore without a clear concept of purpose, the operations will tend to grow reliably confused. Before the pandemic, theaters evinced a great waste, which is when nested capacities, for organization and orderliness, fail to produce meaningful levels of emergence. A structure that can no longer accomplish the ends for which it was once constructed is a ruin. GM famously overhauled its principles of production only as a matter of deathbed conversion. What GM was, and what the theaters of which I treat are, is similarly turgid. The unintended irony of calling the Den the WeWork of theater, as a local news service did last year, should lend credence to my assertions. What was being used to make ends meet before the pandemic will not prove viable in the economic recession that lies ahead. A product that is suited to the grandeur of such theaters as the Atheneum’s main stage will be required. The live podcasts offered in these spaces when the podcasts had the funds to produce a live episode, however cheaply, which was provided by their advertisers, who will likely be cutting their marketing budgets, for an audience that could spend money on the extravagance of a mostly free medium, may appear a ludicrous state of affairs in the coming years. That which once was a matter of managerial malaise may become something greater. I imagine it may mean a movement to embrace life’s singularity through literature will commence in earnest and write with those ends in mind.