A cry from the heart for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America: Stage true drama in the theatre, darling

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

We saw a performance piece called “Love, Janis” last week. It wouldn’t do to call it a play. It was more of a fictionalized chronicle of Pearl cavorting with her inner child while blasting through her greatest hits at top volume. The music was beyond excellent, and the interstitial crap was no worse than Ray or Walk The Line or The Doors — no act of evil or self-destruction is ever your fault if your records chart well. Creepy and dopey (no pun intended), maudlin and mopey, but ultimately nothing. If they had cut all that and doubled up on the music, it would have been a knock-out tribute show.

Here’s the beef: Was this raucous rock ‘n’ roll encomium performed at an Indian casino, alternating with the Tina Turner and Michael Jackson impersonators? No, alas. Was it the 8 and 10 o’clock headliner act at an off-Strip locals resort in Las Vegas? Guess again. No, “Love, Janis” is part of this season’s “drama” from The Arizona Theatre Company, one of eight “plays” to be presented this season to audiences of rich white people, whose seats will be graciously subsidized by poor black and brown people.

This is “theauhtuh, dahling,” an allegedly high-brow undertaking undertaken in that high-brow “performance centre” downtown — itself graciously subsidized by people who only make it downtown when they are dispossessed by fate and taxes. And although I am speaking of Phoenix, particularly, everything I’m saying goes for every chip-on-its-shoulder burg in America. “We can’t be a true city without theauhtuh, dahling,” even if that “theauhtuh, dahling” turns out to be a complete joke.

What’s the real point of this ugly charade? Wealth is waste, but how can one justify the indulgence of a thousand-dollar gown if there is no “theauhtuh, dahling?” No symphony? No opera? No ballet? None of these boondoggles is profitable, and that by itself is an excellent argument for doing away with them. Mozart can’t make money, but neither can “pops” music conducted by TV’s Doc Severinsen. Cage fighting turns a buck, as do rodeo and tractor pulls, but how can one wear a designer original to a tractor pull, dahling?

My counter-argument in one word: Bah!

Here’s the way a season works at these impeccably unprofitable subscription-based “theauhtuh” companies: One decent classic repertory play, one modern rep play, four to six pieces of allegedly crowd-pleasing crap — just exactly the kind of swill any decent casino boss would cut to ninety minutes, while cutting away half the costumes. Judged as drama, “theauhtuh” in every chip-on-its-shoulder “city” in America is much worse than television. Badly written, badly staged, badly acted, outrageously expensive — yet still incapable of turning a profit.

Fine. You can’t fight City Hall, especially not when the caucasian half of City Hall is preening in the audience, congratulating itself for its vast sophistication — and sneaking out at intermission. It is a fact of Rotarian Socialist life that there will be impeccably unprofitable “theauhtuh, dahling,” regardless of how little sense it makes in empty downtowns, regardless of how vicious it is to tax the poor to subsidize the vapidly idle pursuits of the rich, regardless of how risible the whole charade might be to anyone who cares about true art, regardless, even, of how much better the drama can be in more apposite media. Kenneth Branagh’s film version of Henry V is obviously amazingly better than any staged version ever could be, even if the Derek Jacoby’s Chorus ends up protesting entirely too much.

The fact is, the audience doesn’t give a rat’s ass what makes up the content of their “theauhtuh, dahling.” At least half of the Arizona Theatre Company’s subscribers are septuagenarians. They were understandably aghast at “Love, Janis.” But they would renew their subscriptions and attend — him with a bored reluctance, her impeccably engowned — regardless of what “plays” were performed. Why not Greatest Hits of The Muppets? Why not Cage Fighting: A Drama in Three Acts? Why not Gilligan’s Island, The Musical? Here is a true fact of “fine art,” rediscovered countless times in the Twentieth Century: Pigs will eat anything. The entire point of this gross, taxpayer-subsidized exercise is showing off the thousand-dollar gowns, so whatever happens on stage is completely irrelevant.

But since the “plays” are completely irrelevant, we can take these two vicious contradictions — taxpayer subsidies for the rich and the “theauhtuh, dahling” masquerading for a dowager-dowered fashion show — and use them as leverage to bring true art back to the stage. If nobody cares which play is playing, why not perform real drama? Shakespeare expounds. Ibsen broods. The Greeks quarrel with a brilliant wit. Crave you comedy? We have Wilde, Shaw, Molliere. Not enough to round out the subscription season? There’s Seneca and Plautus, Marlowe and Jonson. Rostand stands not high it may be, but alone. There is so much great drama in the canon, that — believe it or don’t — no one need ever “write” a musical about the Odyssean travails of Job-like Gilligan.

So this is my cri de coeur: If we must have pretend high-brow “theauhtuh, dahling,” let’s at least have good pretend high-brow “theauhtuh.” The ladies can show off their gowns just the same as before, but people who care about art, even while standing on the backs of the poor, will at least have a chance to see a decent play…