COMMENTS
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to celebrity with no stops in between. The fact that so many of the
most vivid and penetrating images of America's experimental the–
atre speak to subjectivity and address apartness only adds to the
piquancy of the situation. Paradoxically, America's theatrical
avant–
garde
is both disaffected from the values of the entertainment indus–
try, and-to judge by the work of Sam Shepard or Lee Breuer–
draws on them for its counterstatements; a sign, perhaps, of how the
market haunts even the imagination .
The nonprofit, institutional or residential theatres also suffer
from a lack of public dimension. Indeed, the multiplicity of their
labels reflects the instability of their position. Because of inadequate
funding, most nonprofit American theatres are run on a subscription
basis. This makes them not fully public entities because a subscrip–
tion audience is not a proper public alternative to a commercial
market. Subscription replaces the manipulated automatism of mar–
keting with another kind of governed behavior: blanket commitment
in advance to a season of plays known only by their blurbs on a
prospectus . And if the commercial theatre is always in search of
familiar novelty, subscription also encourages predictability. Pepper
your repertoire with Ibsen, Shakespeare, and Chekhov (as many
orchestras do with Mozart, Beethoven, and Mahler), and you will
probably attract the core of subscribers-and cash up front-which
your precariously noncommercial theatre needs. But reinterpret
these authors' plays - many of which challenged and shocked upon
first appearing - in any rigorously fresh way, as a living theatre
must, and you risk offending the very expectations which led your
audience to subscribe in the first place .
Theatres are not like symphony orchestras, opera or ballet
companies, which flourish and are deeply appreciated in many
American cities. There are vital differences between performing
Mozart , Mahler, or Verdi and staging Shakespeare, Moliere, or
Ibsen . Music, opera, and ballet are purified arts, eternal rather than
timebound , speechless , distilled. While drama may aspire to the
condition of music , it remains vernacular, earthbound, tied to the
creaturely human body , a tenant of time and place .
It
shows to the
age, in that endlessly mysterious phrase of Hamlet's, "its form and
pressure."
Drama can be a sounding board for the forms and pressures of
successive ages in a way that music cannot. Sometimes Shakespeare
or Racine can say as much about being alive now as any contempo–
rary playwright. A play, as well as being impeccably performed, like
