Zack Preston Rouse
June, 2021
Greetings!
As a theatre creator, I have found the making process of a theatrical production to always be everything, regardless of scale. Literally, it’s inspiring, it’s heartrending, heartbreaking, breathtakingly beautiful. It’s an exercise in futility, a simple exercise, a romp, and a snooze. Theatre is life. And it’s hard. It’s insanely hard to build believable characters who breathe like real humans. It's hard to produce shows that reflect humanity in all of its immense depth and breadth. All the circumstantial, financial and psychological trappings that are endemic to our discipline have, over the years, created a kind of collective trauma in our community that needs to be dealt with. Add to this our current cultural awakening that calls us to create true equity across our society, for everyone, now and finally, and we have a tall task ahead of us.
In order for us to move into a new, regenerative model of theatre making in our culture, it is critical we take a few steps to correct some bad habits that we’ve formed. This piece, of which this post is part one, is an attempt at outing these habits in an open forum so that they can be seen, aired out, and moved beyond. We all have these habits to some degree or another, and reading this with an open heart will be more effective than taking the stance that you’ve seen it all before.
I’ll probably fail at my task, but the show must go on so I'll try. I’m going to be very direct and honest in this. If you are offended by something I wrote, I’m sorry. If you’re triggered by something that is in this piece, not my intent. It’ll probably happen. I don’t do passive aggression and I don’t coddle. That’s not to be mean. It’s to be efficient and effective with my words, but equally important is that it’s just my personality. I don’t do small talk very well. And I don’t walk on eggshells. I believe open, honest communication to be the most loving path. I’m sensitive and get my feelings hurt too, sometimes. We all have the right to get offended, feel the way we feel, and get over it. I wrote this piece out of love for you, my theatre community. Take that intent throughout, and any offenses should be less painful. I hope.
Oh, and I curse sometimes. I think it’s fun and adds to the color of my writing. I have tourette syndrome, and that may have something to do with my saying things in a way that is sometimes controversial. Who knows? This is my take and you can take it or leave it, in whole or in part. That’s what freedom is.
Intro
Over the lifespan of my involvement in the making of shows for an audience (I’m 45 years old), I have seen my artistic community work diligently (almost undyingly) to become a more just, more inclusive, more egalitarian, more healthy field of study and practice. In my estimation, theatre communities are the most liberal you’ll find on the planet. They’re so liberal, in fact, that they will play with Christian fundamentalists and not judge them (except by the same standard as everyone else: did you give a good performance?). That said, there have always, as far as I can tell, been systemic issues of patriarchy, hierarchy, racism, sexism, institutionalized and change resistant phobia-maintenance…
Theatre people are people. And we’re people in a greater society that experiences these issues at-large in built-in ways. The theatre, for how liberal a practice it is, is not immune to the character flaws of its greater culture, and we should hope it would never be, because there are no monks. As audiences we want to see ourselves on stage and screen, reflected back at us in a truthful, honest, sometimes heroic and often pathetic manner so that we may attempt, through self-awareness, to grow beyond our limits toward an ability to evolve as a species.
Recently, we’ve seen with the necessary development of movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, some wonderful cultural shifts. We’ve started to see a film industry by and for women. We’ve started to see a larger cultural awakening (Whitey getting woke) to the apartheid nature of our so-called democracy along race lines. And we’ve seen actual prosecutions of murderers in uniform. These are all necessary advancements in society that are now finally happening. And as humans are prone, along with these great strides has come a regrettable Newspeakianism (a kind of leftist fascism of thought a la “1984” by George Orwell) that threatens to shred the very culture that is working so hard to “do better”.
Against the backdrop of a deepening economic and climatic crisis which may render all of these progresses moot in the coming decades, we in the theatre community actively watch our greater society swirl around and through itself: a dying beast kvetching in turmoil over the soul’s lack of agency to save the body. We too feel the push to make Hail Mary maneuvers. Hell, we just want to make work in a world that ignores live theatre as if it’s the 90 year old deaf blind grandmother in the corner with a lemonade. “She’s fine, eat your cake.”
Theatre has been dying for decades. It’s the art form that nobly and tragically accepts one solitary audience member, for the show will go on. We often perform for tiny audiences, we feel dejected by it, we go to the bar and drink ourselves into oblivion, and then we go back to the theater the next night and do it again. Why?
This passion and dedication for the art form shows a resiliency in our field that is second maybe only to journalism. Whole generations of theatre makers come and go with nearly no audience for whom to perform. When I pass someone on the street and they say, “Hey! That was you in that thing I saw, right?!”, I'm ecstatic. Not because I got an accolade, but because someone came to the theatre. Does that make you want to cry? Go buy a theatre ticket, then. You can’t, you have rehearsal? I get it.
This is the crisis that I’ve been living with for the entire time I’ve been a theatre maker. How the hell do I get butts in seats? What the hell are people willing to leave their couches for?
So when the “Woke” movement hit my small-town theatre community during the pandemic, I became aware that a crisis within a crisis was beginning to develop. It started as a trickle. Some of my colleagues started talking about how this word or that word is no longer allowed to be used. “We use this word now because that’s respectful of this group of marginalized people. We don’t talk about that issue this way anymore. We now look at this issue through this lens or in this framework.” It’s certainly a good thing to keep looking at ways to include more people in what is truly the grand socio-self-reflective art. The more the merrier, I say! But then the trickle became a flash-flood.
Whereas pre-pandemic we were all wedged like Dirk Gently’s couch into an unsustainable yet somehow still going paradigm of Scavengerism (begging foundations to prioritize a show over a meal program for poor kids), now we’ve added to this fundamental crisis a new lexical crisis of conscience. If we naturally assumed the best in everyone, and looked at intention when judging a person’s behavior, this year-long homebound respite should have created an opportunity to make some serious headway toward substantive justice.
But alack, we are humans. The result seems to be more of a smorgasbord of intellectual cannibalism. A new lexicon of consequence (vs. intent, as Jordan Peterson discusses) is emerging out of the chaos of swirling linguistics and social media smackdowns. A lack of production and a glut of rancor is now all the community can seem to muster. Previously productive companies are hamstrung by woke protocols and are now impotent to just make the work for fear of being cancelled entirely--which they are anyway by default.
Like all human endeavors, there are growing pains. When the term “non-traditional casting” became the new buzzword (decades ago, now), the progressive companies rightly adopted it to show solidarity with minority groups and marginalized performers: performers who were in every way as talented and passionate about the art form as anyone else, but who for issues of systemic prejudice weren’t given the same opportunities to just work as white men. “Non-traditional casting” was the OG BIPOC-friendly term in theatre circles. You knew if you were a performer from a background that wasn’t male and white, that you had a place in a theatre that was bold enough to publicly state their participation in the practice.
Unfortunately, conjuncting the overarching current philosophy of a true crime entertainment--the lowest common denominator content that will sell the most ads (we have collectively decided that what the most people can tolerate to watch is violence and so that’s nearly all we make anymore), we now have this industry autosarcophagy taking place. This grimaced pathology of assuming the worst in each other has led to a community, already beleaguered by too numerous challenges to count, that appears to want its own total demise and is leaping toward the edge of the cliff like a peaking tweeker.
Older community members post audition notices saying that they’re using inclusive casting methods, and self-labelled leaders in the community smack them down for not using the proper wording. People pile insults onto a hapless victim who was simply trying to include everyone in the rare opportunity to be in a paid production. Debates ensue about whether it’s okay to cast a teenage girl as a teenage girl anymore, or if the girl must now be played by a member of a marginalized group to show solidarity. White, privileged company managers brow-beat the community over social media about what the BIPOC community wants and needs (Thou doth protest too much!), dissertating to such a degree as to drown out any hope of dialogue--or even just the sound of an actual BIPOC voice coming through.
My heart is broken. I watch my own community dismantling itself as systematically as the oppression it purports to make inroads against. I worry that theatre may now, finally, totally be dead, not by the hand of American Spartan capitalism as oracled, but by the hand of its own practitioners over what to call a coffee mug: it’s now to be referred to as a ceramic cylinder. “Get it right. It’s Ceramx.”
I jest as I cry. And yet I hold a glimmer of hope that we can pull something together. Like a show in a moldy basement, the dryer rumbling low during the performance. It could still open. There could still be an audience. There could still be a thing to do and see and learn from. There could still… after all of this last century of challenges, be a theatre art again.
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