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February 23, 2004
TT: Far from Times Square
I go to a lot of performances of every kind, and since my job as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal obliges me to cover all Broadway openings, I don't spend nearly enough time wandering off the beaten path. I wish I did. Especially when it comes to theater, New York is full of good things that don't get enough attention, and I'm always happy whenever I have a chance to see one of them. Fortunately, I have theatrical friends who keep me informed about such shows, and one of them steered me last Friday to a production of As You Like It that took place in deepest Queens--Astoria, to be exact, a neighborhood richly populated with Greek restaurants.The play was produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center, which obviously doesn't have any money, since it was staged in the round on the floor of a basketball court in a church gymnasium. The audience was small, the set nonexistent, the dress modern, the décor a handful of tattered pennants--and I loved every minute of it. The cast was young and lively, and John Hurley, the director, kept things spare and simple, letting Shakespeare be the star of the show. I don't mean the production was static. It was decidedly physical, even a bit goofy at times. Yet nowhere did the players get in the way of the play, nor did Hurley smother Shakespeare's words in his own tendentious ideas.
As I watched, I thought of the NEA's new Shakespeare in American Communities project, about which you may or may not know. According to the Web site, this initiative, "the largest tour of Shakespeare in American history....will bring professional Shakespeare productions and related educational activities to 100 small and mid-sized communities in all 50 states." It's recently taken a certain amount of stick from big-city critics who have the addled notion that the National Endowment for the Arts is somehow wreaking havoc on the arts in America by sending Shakespeare on tour instead of Tony Kushner. To paraphrase George Orwell, only an intellectual could say something that stupid--but, then, I doubt very much that the intellectuals saying such stupid things have spent a lot of time watching shows like the APA's As You Like It in places like the Presbyterian Church of Astoria, much less looking at the glowing faces of the people who come to see them.
I did, and as I looked, I thought of something I wrote for The Wall Street Journal five years ago, long before I thought of becoming a drama critic:
We are not accustomed to thinking of art forms as technologies, but that is what they are--which means they can be rendered moribund by new technological developments, in the way that silent films gave way to talkies and radio to TV. Well into the eighteenth century, for example, most of the West's great storytellers wrote plays, not novels. But the development of modern printing techniques made it feasible for books to be sold at lower prices, allowing storytellers to reach large numbers of readers individually; they then turned to writing novels, and by the twentieth century the theatrical play had come to be widely regarded as a cultural backwater. To be sure, important plays continue to be written and produced, but few watch them (unless they are made into movies).
I still stand by those words--in fact, I included the essay in which they originally appeared in A Terry Teachout Reader--but I hasten to add that they don't embody a value judgment, merely an observation on the necessarily marginal position of theater in the age of film and TV. Yet live theater remains indispensable, and never more so than when a troupe of little-known actors performs Shakespeare in the gym of a neighborhood church for a few dozen enthralled onlookers. I love Broadway, I really do, but if you want to know why theater will never die, there's your answer.
If you're curious, the APA's As You Like It will be performed this Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Go here for details and directions.
Posted February 23, 2004 10:51 AM
