Today, I wanted to write something about sports. In a matter of moments, my beloved San Francisco 49ers will go to war in their first playoff game in nine years, and I'm having trouble thinking about much else. My brain is filled with weighty questions such as whether or not our secondary will hold up against Drew Brees, can Frank Gore return to his early season success, and if I should wear my Vernon Davis jersey despite that fact that the Niners seem to do better when I don't wear any team paraphernalia at all. But the only play that remotely dealt with sports that I had read recently was one dealing with a former football player's possible brain damage as a result of too many hard hits on the field, and the effect this had on his relationship with his son. Not surprisingly, this play ended up being much more about father-son dynamics. As a deeply obsessive sports fan, this annoyed me. Don't promise me a play about the NFL's lingering controversy regarding their handling of concussions and then deliver the same, stale family drama that's been hitting the stage ever since Oedipus first knocked up his mom. More importantly though, it demonstrated another way in which theater can mishandle its powerful relationship to real-world events.
The ways in which playwrights face these real-world events of mass interest can be divided into three categories. We've already talked about the Wikiplay, in which encyclopedia entries about historical people, places or events are essentially theatricalized. Later this month, I'll tackle the way in which theater approaches large-scale catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina or last year's earthquake in Japan. The third way is the Law & Order approach. The TV show "Law & Order" is famous for ripping its plotlines from the headlines. So Eliot Spitzer runs up a tab with the gals at Emperors Club VIP and a few months later there's an L&O episode about it. The aforementioned play basically does the same thing. In the last few years, media outlets like ESPN have been in a tizzy about concussions. Autopsies of former players' brains have revealed signs of dementia and there have been a number of related suicides, all leading to calls for harsher rules and increased protection. The writer knew this stuff was interesting and sensational and he used it as the hook to reel us in so that he could then proceed to work out his Daddy issues in play form.
Now, when I first decided to write about this, I expected that I could slam all L&O plays for the exact same reasons I just slammed this concussion play and all Wikiplays, i.e. that they lazily capitalize on popular knowledge and interest in the subject matter in order to make their own work more appealing. But then I realized that there is some value in ripping things from the headlines. Unlike a Wikiplay that features subject matter that has already been placed in its historical context, we're still trying to come to grips with how something like the dangers of concussions in the NFL affects all of us. Should we continue to glamourize hard hits? Do these new, harsher rules destroy what we love about the game and, if so, what does that say about us? These aren't life-or-death matters (at least not to the general populace) but they can offer us insights into our culture and ourselves and this is, after all, why art forms like theater exist. Even the quick turnaround from front page to stage has a benefit, denying us the protection that the distance of time creates. The best "Law & Order" episodes did just that. The worst just scavenged the headlines to get the viewers. That's the crucial difference.
Go Niners.
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