Since the controversy surrounding Lend Me a Tenor has still trickled on through the week long enough for me to find some dedicated time to write down my thoughts, here they are.
What is acceptable to put onstage?
A lot of uproar blew up my Facebook feed from the use of blackface in Ken Ludwig’s Lend Me a Tenor. Up front, I’ve never seen or read the show. I have little interest in farce anyway and adding in something like blackface would just drive my already high “white male guilt” into overdrive. So this show’s probably not for me.
That said; I firmly believe in any theatre’s right to present the show. I also firmly believe anyone (regardless of race) has the right to be offended by the show’s nature and their right to express those feelings. These two statements are not contradictory and they are not mutually exclusive.
But damn did a lot of people I know seem to think they were. I mostly stayed out of the fray but I definitely read a lot of the statuses and comments and this quickly became a very black or white issue on Facebook and, as with most issues, I found it far less cut and dry.
As storytellers, we often push the envelope and – particularly where we have the freedom of expression – many artists will take full advantage when given the opportunity. Blackface, the n-word, the c-word are offensive to many people. As are same-sex relationships, every other curse word under the sun, and casual violence. The list goes on. And in my years in theatre, I’ve noticed that audiences might be perfectly fine with something like a sing-along to “Swanee” (a song filled with racial overtones from a pre-civil rights America) but will balk at the slightest curse word. Two men kissing might be a moving experience for one audience and a disgusting affront to God for another. A play with black characters using the n-word evokes a very different sentiment than a play with white characters using the n-word. But if these situations exist in service to the story that is being told, these offenses can create electrifying theatre, sparking a conversation that will exist long after the final bows.
So my biggest concern when I hear an argument like “it’s unacceptable for that piece of theatre to be put onstage” is that it opens the floodgates. Saying “____________ shouldn’t be done because I/we find _______ offensive” does very little to further the conversation that is Theatre with a capital ‘T’. If you don’t want to see the show, then don’t see the show. And if you want to tell everyone you know not to see the show, then do that too. That is your right just like it’s the theatre’s right to produce whatever they want.
Double standards
Personally, my biggest gripe with Hale Centre Theatre utilizing a culturally insensitive tool like blackface – and the only point I actively bothered to make on Facebook – is that it reeks of hypocrisy. When I performed in their production of The Mousetrap a few years ago, we had to remove simple curse words like “hell” and “goddamn” (from a 50-year-old play) because they offended the sensibilities of the producers and their notably conservative audience-base. Fast forward to today where they show no such reservations for what is arguably a far greater offense, presumably because it doesn’t offend them or their audience.
“It’s called for in the script” is the argument I’ve heard bandied about. And sure, it is called for in the script in the same way that “hell” and “goddamn” were called for in The Mousetrap. That didn’t stop them from violating the contract with Samuel French to make the changes they wanted to make. If Hale wanted to get around it, I’m sure they could. I’ve seen plenty of anecdotes this week about how other theatres addressed the issue without causing offense (using masks, changing the opera from Othello, etc.). This isn’t even the first production in Phoenix this season, so what about this production has caused such an uproar? Perhaps at some level, this response is how the Phoenix theatre community is responding to life after Michael Brown and Eric Garner dominated the news in late 2014. We can’t fix the racial divide in this country but maybe we can direct all of those pent-up, complex racial tensions into a nearly 30-year-old comedy.
The theatre echo chamber
Another thing that this controversy highlighted for me was the notion that even theatre people like to exist within an echo chamber. Many of my friends are involved in theatre. And many of those friends are very progressive liberal people. These people are regularly posting or comment on each other’s walls because usually things are kept light. Politics don’t usually come up because people are kind of on the same page for the most part so there isn’t too much that disturbs this ecosystem. But these people are an incredibly small percentage of the theatre audience in Phoenix. I figure I see more theatre than at least 95% of my Facebook friends. As of this writing, I’m sitting at 719 friends so I’m allowing for about 36 of them to feasibly see more than me and I probably see between 2 and 4 shows a month averaged out through the entire year. But let’s assume that all 720 of us saw 2 shows a month. That’s 17280 tickets for the year. While that would sellout a couple of combined seasons of both Stray Cat and Nearly Naked, it would only sell about two 4-week productions at Phoenix Theatre, and it doesn’t even fill up a single one-week run at Gammage. So when I imagine how much theatre my friends list actually sees, we’d be lucky to fil up half a season at Stray Cat.
This quick mathematical tangent is intended to highlight that there are way more people seeing theatre than the small bubble of actors, directors, designers, and technicians talking about it on Facebook. Too often, we forget that we're a very, very, very small part of this puzzle. And as much as we’d all love for the audience to be a younger crowd, statistically speaking, it’s just not. So you wind up with a predominantly white audience over the age of 60 that are more than happy to go sellout the twenty-somethingth production of Lend Me a Tenor in Phoenix in the past 16 years (and from what I hear, this production is pretty much selling out). Now some of these people might not be bothered by blackface because they’re products of a different era and just don’t know any different (it’s amazing how many people of a certain age are in complete denial about how racist they actually are). Some of them might be bothered by it but they’ll chalk it up to being a “period” show and write it off (“If Mad Men could put John Slattery in blackface, why not a play?”). Some of them might even be offended enough to leave. But they’re showing up in droves in the first place, which means theatres like Hale that play it safe when it comes to programming will continue producing it because it’s a known moneymaker. And if it were me in charge and I was driven purely by pragmatism, I’d make the exact same choice. Because the money is good and the people who are complaining aren’t Hale’s audience and weren’t going to see the show anyway.
Final thoughts
Of course, I’m not purely pragmatic. Hale and many theatres of its ilk offend me not because they choose to tell stories with questionably offensive content, but because with the plethora of stories available to them, they choose the same ones over and over again. They don’t take risks. People who say Lend Me a Tenor is a risk are not accounting for the fact that it’s a Tony-winning play geared pretty much squarely at the older white audience that Hale serves.
The last argument I heard often this week was “we (as theatre people) should support each other.” I often hear this argument made in context like this: there is a pervasive belief that we shouldn’t be critical of each other. I cringe every time I hear this argument. If a company produces bad theatre, I am not rooting for them. When I worked at Phoenix Theatre, it was not uncommon for a production to have a 20% new-to-file rate, meaning 20% of the audience had never purchased tickets to Phoenix Theatre before. If those people see a bad show, they are far less likely to go see another show at any theatre. So why would I want any potential audience member to see a bad show that could drive them away? So I will continue to be critical of the shows I see because I want theatre to be good: not necessarily for me (because I’ll see it anyway) but because if it’s not good, it will drive away new audiences and that is not something the arts can afford.
Of course, theatre is incredibly subjective and I certainly wouldn’t want my tastes to dictate what kinds of theatre should or should not be produced. So let’s remove quality and programming from the equation and focus on something objective. If a company is poorly managed, I might go so far as to actively wish for their failure. Theatres that are not respectful to the artists they employ (in whatever definition that entails) and theatres that squander their patrons’ money (in tickets and contributions) give everyone else a bad name. So I limit my support of those theatres if not drop my support entirely. I won’t go so far as encourage others to do the same, but I do question the logic of those artists who insist that “we’re all in this together” because it would seem that they’re not paying attention. If that truly is your belief, then demand better of these organizations. If they’re not looking out for you, why would you support them without question?
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