Today is probably not the worst of all possible days for theatre (or Sturgeon's Revelation)

A recent mailing from Goodman was the (perhaps too) obvious jumping-off point for this blog.  Just as Candide is oblivious to the fact that today is not the best of all possible days, many people go around acting as if the glory days (of the theatre or the arts in general) are all in the past.  Maybe if you are well-informed enough to be reading this blog and know about Chicago's Off-Loop theatre scene that thought hadn't even crossed your mind.  But let's focus only on the quality of writing.  It can certainly seem that most contemporary playwrights don't really stack up against the giants of the past.

This is probably the wrong comparison.  Not only are we often working through a nostalgia for a past that didn't really exist (see Stephanie Coontz's The Way We Never Were or more popularly Billy Joel's Keeping the Faith), but we cherry pick the best of the past to go up against the average quality shows of today.  Most things from the past only last because they were of higher quality than anything else.  This is particularly true of television from the 1950s and 1960s.  Granted, this analogy will probably break down 40-50 years from now when virtually all television shows from 2000 onward will be available in The Cloud* (ripped from DVDs created in our day).  Actually, an astonishing amount of 1980s and 1990s television has made it out on DVD as well, to the point where we can legitimately say this represented typical TV viewing habits and not just the high-lights (Alf, the Greatest American Hero, Simon and Simon, the Dukes of Hazzard, etc.).

Sturgeon's Revelation comes in handy here.  It is stated that "ninety percent of everything is crud."  While it was specifically coined to prevent comparing the worst of genre fiction to the best of non-genre fiction, it applies equally well to theatre of different eras.  Roughly 90% of contemporary drama is workmanlike, average, marginally insightful, but the same holds true for drama from the 1970s, from the 1950s, and so on.  If anything, I would argue that today's Off-Loop community has so many great actors that they often elevate mediocre scripts well beyond what is deserved.  This probably was not the case in the 1950s and perhaps not even the 1970s (while some companies were definitely tearing up the floorboards, the sheer mass of great acting talent arguably wasn't as strong as today).

While it is a bit of a stretch, I wonder if the same holds true for other regional theatre scenes.  I certainly always hear about how cautious small regional companies are, and yet according to DPS, the most produced works from 2000-2009** across the entire US were almost all contemporary: http://www.dramatists.com/pdf/atPlaySpringSummer10.pdf  I assumed that Streetcar Named Desire, Glass Menagerie, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and perhaps Desire Under the Elms would be the top 5, when in fact only Menagerie is tied for 10th.  Personally I take this as a promising sign.

As I have been reading through some of the obscure plays from the 1950s and 1960s that DPS is keeping in print, it strikes me that most of these are crud (or dross which sounds a bit more elegant).  So what is the point of Anderson's Long Tail, if so much of it isn't very good? 

That's an excellent question, which I will return to in my next blog entry.

* Obviously, this is what the Internet will be called in 2050.  Can I stake my claim to the term now?

** This list presumably is only for paid-rights performances, as Shakespeare comprises approximately half of all contemporary productions.