Why Theatre Matters
Gossip
Art is a universal. Anthropologists tell us that every society everywhere in the world, beginning with cave paintings 50,000 years ago, has had art. People have painted, danced, sung, told stories, crafted beautiful objects since the beginning of what we now know as civilization. There was music–mothers singing to their infants–before there was even speech. The practitioners of every art might reasonably claim that theirs is the most basic, the most fundamentally human.
My career has been in the theatre so I should be allowed to make the case for the dramatic arts.
Theatre is gossip and gossip is what all human beings, when there is more than one of them, do. We love to talk about other people, give our opinions of their merits or lack thereof, assess their character and motives, learn about their activities and thoughts. We are social beings, curious about others, and a human universal is talking to others about others. Across the fence in the back yard, on the phone, in the restaurant, we offer tidbits of information and insights about the people we know and observe.
A play is an overheard conversation. Two or more people talk, reveal themselves, interact, and we (in the audience) observe their behavior. And we render opinions and judgments, just as we would observing people next door or in a cafe. We discuss what we have seen among ourselves and draw conclusions. In a play, since the conversations are staged and created by the playwright, those conclusions might be guided, but the fundamental transaction, the overheard conversation, is always the same. We watch people's behavior on stage and make our judgments: he pretends to care about the public good but is secretly ambitious; she is going to betray him; underneath is rough, impolitic demeanor is a good heart; these rich, restless people, have no moral bearings and will self-destruct; and so on. We watch people and talk about them. When we watch them on stage and discuss the play and the characters in it, write articles and reviews, tell our friends why they should go and overhear them themselves, that is the activity we call theatre.
Gossip, theatre, same thing. We all do it. Always have.
Rocco Landesman was Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2009 through 2012. He earned a doctorate in Dramatic Literature at the Yale School of Drama, where he taught for four years. He left Yale to start a private investment fund and then became president of Jujamcyn, a company that owns and operates five Broadway theaters, as well as the producer behind such hits as Big River, Angels in America and The Producers. In February, Landesman received the Thornton Wilder Prize on the occasion of the 75th Anniversary of Wilder's Our Town at Ford's Theater.
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