Day 26: Theatre Towns

So my streak of consecutive days blogging ended at 25. Too bad. I was beginning to feel like the Joe DiMaggio of theater pontificators. But alas, I went to this restaurant in Chicago last night, and it filled me so full of cured meats and cheeses that it pushed all of the theater straight out of my brain. This is a shame because I saw some good theater while in Chicago, and I got a real sense of it as a "theater town." Chicago has a well-deserved reputation as a strong second place to perennial winner New York City in the competition for America's Most Relevant Theater Town. Comparing it to our favorite perennial theater doormat, Los Angeles, led to some interesting conclusions. On some level, Chicago is not all that different from our fair city. Geographically, it may not be quite as spread out as we are but it's certainly not as condensed as New York is. The audience demographics feel roughly the same. And like Los Angeles, the hierarchy of Chicago theater consists of a few at the top, a few more right below, and then a vast sea of storefront set-ups down at the bottom, scrapping for every dollar and bit of credibility they can find while providing the audience with a healthy mix of theater, encompassing everything from the most standard revivals to the most cutting-edge new work.

The difference then is this: In Los Angeles, most people do theater so that they may one day do film and TV. In Chicago, people do film and TV so that they can continue to do theater. This is not a judgment. There are plenty of very good reasons why someone would want to work in film and TV, even apart from the substantially larger paydays they offer. And obviously, this is also a generalization that doesn't always hold up. But you would be surprised how often it does. Even a die-hard like myself didn't come to L.A. to work in theater. I came to L.A. to work in film and TV and when I got sick of trying to claw my way through what I considered to be a very strange and off-putting kind of work environment, I returned to my original master. The only reason I even bring it up is because I do think an audience can sense these opposing motives and differing priorities, and I believe it can effect how they perceive the plays. In L.A., the play is always seen as a stepping stone to some hazy dream that hangs out in the hypothetical near future. In Chicago, the play is the end game. And this gives theater in Chicago an urgency that Los Angeles can't really provide.

I felt that during one of the plays I saw in my time in Chicago. The play was written by a playwright that I've never liked as much as most everyone else does. He always writes with an abundance of intellectual flourishes that result in many of the things I have already talked about here on the blog: self-seriousness, forced quirkiness, insincerity leading to the inaccessibility of emotions. And this play I saw was no exception. But the staging and the performances in the play were given a force, an energy, an urgency by the people involved that had nothing to do with talent and everything to do with heart. It elevated the production above the material for me. I didn't like it, but I liked watching it. And when you have an atmosphere like that, it's a lot harder to disappointment. It creates optimism, and that's something that the L.A. scene could really use.