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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
In an increasingly flat-screen world, stars like Al Pacino and Gwyneth Paltrow look to theater for a human connection. Will the rest of us follow?
Mar 4, 2003 | What do Al Pacino, Whoopi Goldberg, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Antonio Banderas, Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Ralph Fiennes, Sigourney Weaver, Macaulay Culkin, Rosie Perez, Vanessa Redgrave and Kathleen Turner all have in common? All of them have lately acted, or are soon to act, not on the big or little screen, but on the stages of Broadway, Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway and London's West End -- reversing a 50-year trend that saw stage actors flee the boards to fling their images up on a thousand-thousand hovering specks of light called the movies.
Why are they doing this? It seems as counterintuitive as if the fall of the Berlin Wall were to prompt a massive exodus from the progressive West to the labor-intensive East -- refugees heading away from easeful technology, toward effortful improvisation. Theatrical shows don't reach as many households as movies do, don't earn as much money for the actors as film and television contracts do, don't offer the kind of verisimilitude the movies do, don't have as many special effects, and don't offer as much directorial leeway (you can't shout "Cut!" midscene onstage, retouch a star's wrinkles or dub a bungled line).
So why would actors want to exchange the high-tech perks of screen fame for the sweat and greasepaint of the boards? For that matter -- it's relevant to ask this in the same breath -- why is it that people are so keen, in cash-strapped times, to go and see them? In New York, advance sales are down (the blue-rinse set is not shelling out as reliably as before) but spontaneous buyers are up. During a week in February that the government had scarily branded with a Code Orange alert, theater attendance in New York soared 26 percent over the same week last year, the New York Times reported. This was especially interesting when you consider that theater attendance in 2002 had jumped 5 percent from 2001, and gross sales had increased by 15 percent.
At least three of last year's new shows were undisputed hits: "Hairspray," "La Bohème" and "Movin' Out." To this honor roll, if you were feeling generous, you could add four others: "Far Away," with Frances McDormand; "The Mercy Seat," with Sigourney Weaver and Liev Schreiber; "Flower Drum Song" (a spectacular retooling of the old Rodgers and Hart musical loaded with Vegas-style dance numbers); and "Medea," with Fiona Shaw. Two of the succès d'estime came from London -- "Far Away" and "Medea" -- underlining how tight the special relationship between our two countries has lately grown, in theaters of war and drama. It smacks of what AOL Time Warner executives might once have called "synergy."
Early this year, Gwyneth Paltrow got an Olivier nomination for acting in "Proof" on the London stage. Young American playwright Christopher Shinn got one, too. The English theater-and-film director Sam Mendes directed two repertory productions of "Twelfth Night" and "Uncle Vanya" in Brooklyn in January; later this spring, he will direct "Gypsy" on Broadway with an American cast, starring Bernadette Peters. Theater attendance is not up in London as it is in New York, but two new theaters opened in 2002 all the same, and a series called "Broadway in London" opened at the John Labatt Centre in February, starting off with "Cabaret." A traveling version of the stage musical "Chicago" is playing to full houses in Moscow, of all places. What is it that is drawing movie actors and movie audiences back to the old-fashioned theater? I have an answer.
Three months ago, after having worked for a decade as a freelance writer and researcher, I became a theater editor at a national magazine. I started work (or rather, was cannoned into the ring) during the opening week of New York's Broadway season. I had been a regular theatergoer before then, had acted in plays and musicals, and (masochistically) had produced a staged version of "Nicholas Nickleby" in college. In the '90s I even wrote a musical about Moscow (well, nearly). So, I was no stranger to the theater, but I had not thought about it in any depth. My Fridays, like most people's, were more often spent out with friends or at the movies than in any space where a grinning pack of strangers was likely to hoof and declaim under a hundred gelled lights. Since October, though, my work has compelled me to see more than 80 performances, and this crash course has put before my eyes again and again the singular virtue of this form of entertainment, and made me appreciate the allure it holds for overworked, red-eyed, self-isolating modern civilization. I call it the human component.
Almost everything we citizens of the modern, industrialized world see these days -- when we are not talking to one another in person -- we see on a screen. Waking up, we punch the off button on digital alarm clocks, turn on the television for the morning news, and click on the home computer to harvest the night's crop of e-mail. Heading to work, we drive past a battery of yellow-bulbed traffic instruction signs, or, if we live in a town with a subway, we walk past a gantlet of neon advertisements and digital stock and newswire tickers.
At the office, screens of continuously streaming infotainment are inlaid in the walls of the elevators that take us from the lobby to the floor where our cubicles cluster; once in the cubicles, we turn on the computer and begin eight to 12 hours of intense mind-lock with a screen a foot from our faces. We spend much of the day surfing the net or composing messages to colleagues, friends and relatives on e-mail or IM. The collective, regular, repetitive patter of key clicks from countless keyboards echoes through our corridors all day long, mimicking the lulling, looping rhythms of jungle rainfall.
Years ago, I read an essay by the waspish British critic Gilbert Adair that heralded the coming supremacy of the screen, and hailed the day, not far off, when books and newspapers would be remaindered for good. At the time (it was 1997), even though I was enraptured by e-mail, addicted to the word processor, and devoted to film, I felt a qualm. Today, that qualm is much magnified. Screens are too much with me lately, as, I suspect, with everybody. I treasure every nonscreen interaction -- they grow fewer and fewer.
