A few summers ago, I took a friend to a Sydney Theatre Company season launch, though quite why she agreed to come would prove unfathomable.
“Nobody cares about theater,” she told me after the following year’s productions had been announced.
Earlier that evening my friend had tried to inveigle a theater company official to photograph her, requesting Cate Blanchett be captured as background scenery. He declined.
Who does care about what theater has to present, beyond its occasional bankable star? Moreover, how many care compared with the global reach of Netflix or the sugar high of multiplex blockbusters?
In a world of Brexit, Trumpists and angry white conservatives fearful of the rights of others who deride calls for empathy as weakness, I’d argue that theater can not only promote human diversity, it might also save lives at a low ebb.
When technology has atomized us and we retreat behind phone screens passing one another on the street, the dark theater space hones our attention and shapes the empathy sorely needed in a collective experience.
Certainly, Darwin-raised and Brisbane-based Australian playwright Stephen Carleton understood humor can plant an epiphany while we are distracted with laughter, with his Griffin award-winning play The Turquoise Elephant, whose carnival of materially rich grotesques made us laugh at climate change denialists and also question our own culpability.
However, given just 110 bums on seats for each performance at the SBW Stables Theatre in Sydney’s Kings Cross you could argue about the reach of the work’s important questions.
There is a vastly bigger audience on Broadway, and the hottest ticket of the moment is Hamilton, a hip-hop musical about the crucial role of immigrants in building the US that has won 11 Tony awards and is likely to gross US$100 million a year in its New York incarnation alone.
When US vice president-elect Mike Pence took his seat at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Friday last week, he was booed by audience members.
At curtain call, actor Brandon Victor-Dixon, who plays Burr, respectfully directed a speech at Pence.
“We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, but we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us,” he said.
On a much smaller scale, there is a piece of theater helping people discuss something as pertinent as respect for diversity: depression and suicide. Every Brilliant Thing is a one-man UK show that is to return to Australia in February after playing Perth, Melbourne and Geelong earlier this year, and before that London and New York.
It is a different show every night, because audience members — generally equal numbers male and female — participate. One five-star review out of Perth said its audience was released back into the world “enriched and enlightened by the experience.”
Every Brilliant Thing tells the story of a seven-year-old boy whose mother has tried to take her own life. The little boy starts making a list of things that make life worth living. Ice cream. Kung fu movies. Sunlight. Select audience members receive numbered pieces of paper corresponding to these brilliant things and get their little moment in the spotlight, some even standing in for particular characters, either from their seats or briefly on stage.
Perhaps the humor is relatable because audience members probably think back to the optimism of their own childhoods.
HBO has recently recorded performances of this theater-standup hybrid for a screening later this year. Taking over the narrator’s role from Jonny Donahoe for this new season at the Adelaide festival is another British actor, James Rowland.
The writer, director and performer are careful not to sell the work as autobiographical to allow space for audience members’ response. Nonetheless, the material has a personal resonance amid its universal appeal.
“I get sad a lot,” the blond-bearded Rowland tells me in the London office of Paines Plough, a touring theater company, recalling the profound effect of first seeing Donahoe perform the role three years ago.
“I’ve never myself had medical treatment for depression, but to be honest, I don’t think I have any friends who aren’t affected by severe mental health issues at some point in their lives,” he said. “This show definitely makes people more aware of the way it’s affecting them, in a way [interacting] you often don’t.”
Director George Perrin, on the opposite couch, tells me mental health has become a completely new conversation, while the stage has played its role.
He has spent time recently with comedian Ruby Wax, who some years ago was commandeered as a poster-girl for depression, along with celebrity polymath Stephen Fry.
“Mental health is a sliding scale, like physical health,” Perrin says. “Sometimes I’m physically healthy, sometimes I’m not.”
Every Brilliant Thing is “just one group of people in a room telling a story to another group of people,” Perrin says. “So if you think theater can’t affect people’s lives, then you don’t think people can affect people’s lives. There’s something about this show that wants to hold your hand and allow you to see through other people’s eyes. I see first-hand the impact it has on people.”
Writer Duncan Macmillan chips in: “It’s an imaginative, empathetic exercise, and we could probably all do with a little bit of that. Particularly in this time of social media and polarization and fake news stories and who we choose to follow making us more extreme. We’re growing further apart. Here is one of the few places we actually have a communal, social experience.”
“Now, more than ever, theater has not just a possible role, but an obligation to preserve these pockets of unmediated, unpoliticized, social, communal, empathetic works,” Macmillan says.
Indeed, as Macmillan points out, accessibility may not be fashionable in terms of critical taste — “uncool,” even.
However, hopeful, realistic, unsentimental theater that encourages people to express their feelings and listen to others is just what the world needs now.
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