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Are there trends in our plays?
Does the theater hold a mirror up to nature?
But if you look away from the awards podium, there was a sea change.
A decade of macerating in social media has given us that loneliness-in-a-shouting-crowd sensation.
But theater has been there, plugging along, reminding us howactualcrowds function and think.
Sometimes, this happened for…not good reasons.
In 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda andHamiltonwere the ambassadors of a riotous, accessible, Shakespearean experience.
No one has managed to imitate it yet, but perhaps its descendants arejustoffstage.
Wide-scoped culture writers who also wrote about film or televisionwrotetruly importantpiecesof performancecriticism.
And more nonprofits followed Roundabout and Manhattan Theater Club into Broadway production.
Then theres all we lost.
Each wound seemed unacceptable at the time, but its hard to remember whats missing once its gone.
We also lost a number of the theatrical collectives that had made the best art of the decade.
We lost the Off-Off hothouse P.S.
Venues, though, are mostly replaceable.
That unwritten book still wakes me up in the middle of the night.
So what were the big middle-level institutions into this decade?
Two grand openings from 2012 reveal the warring impulses of all this renovation and expansion.
Both places are crucial in our theatrical ecology, and I would never wish the Public ill.
But … what sort of theater bar is it where the actors cant afford a drink?
What message does that send?
But we still hear its echoes.
Harris simply…refused to be canceled.
The excruciating … pauses … in that piece of radio are my idea of hell.
We never really reasoned our collective way through it.
Would there have been more documentary-style theater in the 2010s without this debacle?
You cant prove a negative; I cant show whats not there.
Harris refuses to be precise, and thus shes always truthful.
Theater is conversation at a distance.
Theater is thinking in public.
So what happened to conversation and thinking?
The more we learn, the more were sure that the greater part of the truth is hidden.
So we become conspiracy fans andSerialaddicts, and, in the theater, we steered increasingly into theWeird.
(Theyre like the jewels of the earth, our workshop leader said both accurately and hilariously.)
Anne Washburn, the playwright who broke through into national consciousness with herMr.
I think of it often.
Telephone brain also made us need to engage with attention as a vanishing resource.
Some shows got extremely briefConstellationson Broadway was so short Im still irritated about it.
I am going to need you to stretch to more than 70 minutes, guys.
The show has basically occupied the city for the entire ten years.
If the 2010s theater has a flag, its probably a tatty blue button-down.
The alchemy of marathon production turns into the cure for our decaying ability to focus.
I hope it comes back forever.
The arc of the 2010s was characterized by a growing sense of fearfulness and powerlessness.
Theres a question that were all asking ourselves, all the time.
These are careful thinkers.
How can they be wrong?
So, these days, Im taking spirit fromThe Undercommonsby Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
In their writing, Moten and Harney reject immiseration.
Above all, they call forstudyas a means of revolution.
But study can set the mind free from these old forms and tyrannies.
Study can teach us how to jam the machines.
The theater is a kind of wilderness.
No one owns it.
It doesnt stand up to examination.
It doesnt offer a step-by-step.
It doesnt reveal its sources.
What if we stopped trying to tell people what not to do in the theater?
Ecologically, we already know that we need wilderness so the world can breathe.
Purposelessness isitselfa kind of sacred purpose.
Throw your MFAs into a bonfire!
The wilderness has always been the place for wild beastsbut also hermits on their pillars.
Dont despair if you dont find an obvious mission there.
Go back into the wild.
Its where saints go to study.
