Rabbit Rabbit #6: Is Theater Dead?
…and other questions I faced in February.
Note: This round of RR is brimming with spoilers about the current Broadway adaptation of A Doll’s House. Tread suuuper lightly.
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In the last act of her one-woman show, Kate Berlant is: KATE, comedian Kate Berlant, part-herself, part-character, has a breakdown. Or rather, a “breakdown.” After forty-five minutes of tap-dancing, whirligigging, and cliche-ing her way through a falsified journey to stardom, she asks point-blank through the fourth wall, “this show means nothing, you’re aware?” to which the audience responds with raucous laughter. In turn, Berlant becomes frustrated. “Theater has been dying for years now,” she continues. “It isn’t dying because it’s irrelevant. It’s dying because it’s being MURDERED!!!” More guffawing, mine included.
Of course, it’s all a joke: her very Off-Broadway show, which closed February 10th, was a smash hit, selling out every single performance. And the concluding note is one of hope, that if nothing else can save us, maybe live theater can. “A night of theater can change your life. Come back!” Berlant pleads before receiving her nightly standing ovation. After witnessing her faux breakdown, it’s a restorative moment. One leaves the theater feeling satiated and a little smug, let in on her big joke about the abysmal state of the arts.
After KATE, I saw a lot of serious theater this February. I say ‘serious’ not to diminish the quality of Berlant’s work, but to make a certain distinction. The three plays I saw, two adaptations of classics and one brand-new work, are all performed in complete earnestness. They feature stacked casts, notable playwrights and/or directors, and promising premises. They are marketed extremely well on social media, intended to draw diverse crowds ranging from regular theatergoers to tourists.
However, each time I left these experiences, I couldn’t help but feel a sense of malaise– maybe even disappointment. The shows didn’t come close to sweeping me off my feet. It was an alien sensation, because I have always been someone who adores theater. There used to be nothing that could move me more. Something is missing now. What is it? Am I just getting older and thus more cynical, or could Kate-the-character have a point? Is it possible that theater is being murdered?
The feeling presented itself most clearly last month when I saw the newest iteration of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House on Broadway directed by Jamie Lloyd, with an adapted script by Amy Herzog. Starring as Nora Helmer, that famous spitfire of a female lead, is none other than Oscar winner Jessica Chastain, arguably in the heyday of her career. Needless to say, I was very excited. I will try to take you through what happened.
Before the play even begins, it…begins. What I mean is that, fifteen minutes before top-of-show, the cast slowly trickles onstage, positioning themselves in chairs upon a moving turntable while harrowing electronic music plays. Then they sit in quiet contemplation. First up is Chastain herself, who rotates so many times it becomes comical after spin #3. I could not stop taking videos of her; she looked so ridiculous.
This routine has grown popular of late: sparing (depriving?) the actors and audience alike of the (apparently) antiquated Grand Entrance in favor of a subdued pre-show, which becomes a mini-show in itself. I saw it in The Glass Menagerie on the West End, when Amy Adams began brushing and pinning up her hair as the ushers showed people to their seats. At first, I was confused: did we arrive late? Can we take a video? Are we meant to talk over this? By round three, though, I was a pro. I didn’t blink last week at the New Group’s The Seagull/Woodstock, NY, when the cast, including Parker Posey and Hari Nef, stretched and chatted onstage ten minutes prior to showtime. That’s right, here we are! Before you expected us! the makers of the production seem to announce without a twinge of irony. Now we will force you to reckon with the inevitable artifice and facade of Drama! And FYI, we mean that in the Aristotelian sense.
Next up in A Doll’s House comes a two-hour, no-intermission block of stilted dialogue, uttered at such a muted level that one begins to question if the actors are aware they are in the historic 974-seat Hudson Theatre on 44th Street, and not a quiet corner office on the set of an HBO show. This is actually possible for Arian Moayed, who will co-star as Torvald Helmer for the next 16 weeks while the world waits for his turn as Stewy Hosseini in season four of Succession.
There is no set or props, and “costume” is a loose term for the cast’s variations on navy blue and black reminiscent of the viral SNL “High School Theatre Show” sketch series. The stage is stripped of sightline curtains, with the entire back wall exposed. When not performing, the actors sit in the wings in chairs. I found myself distracted, watching them watch the show instead of the show itself.
Technical notes aside, the main issue I took with this production was its lifelessness. There’s a reason A Doll’s House is often the sole play that appears on the syllabi of public high schools– it is a classic. It was (and is) subversive. Nora is an undeniably feminist figure, and her choice to leave her husband and children in favor of her own well-being, her sense of purpose, and her life, is one of the most well-known endings in the American dramatic canon.
And yet, it fell flat. Chastain spat out modernized lines about the centuries-long oppression of women that elicited “mmm”s from the audience which reminded me of people snapping in my college classes whenever someone made a particularly nuanced comment. It seemed that the constraints placed on the actors via the barrenness of the staging resulted in performances by people held captive, unsure of what they are and are not allowed to do or say.
When I texted my friend Crugg about the big ending scene, in which Chastain literally departs the theater via the back door, which opens and exposes the streets of Manhattan, she replied, “I don’t think I would ever stop laughing if I saw that. Because someone was like…guys, I have a crazyyyy idea. And they listened and went through all the mechanics to make it happen.” And it’s true. A play that essentially takes place in a vacuum is the offspring of many heated production meetings. Meetings where, in the quest to decode a 2023-friendly message from this play which sent audiences spiraling in 1879, they decided to murder it.
It was probably an accident. But after watching this production, Berlant’s line, “this show means nothing, you’re aware?” becomes for me, not a tongue-in-cheek dig, but rather a dead-serious question. In questioning its own relevancy, Berlant’s show became relevant. She pulled back the curtain while poking fun of our cultural obsession with pulling back the curtain. On the other hand, A Doll’s House, and other theater I’ve seen recently, assumes its own relevancy upon being greenlit by producers and/or the addition of a celebrity to its cast. I believe relevancy must be earned. I wished for a director’s note from Jamie Lloyd, giving him a platform to explain his vision and staging decisions.
There is nothing more embarrassing –and hilarious– than the desperate attempt to be profound. To bend over backward in the search for meaning. And in a society hyper-trained to expose even the tiniest of cracks in a completely earnest performance, it’s nearly impossible to get it right.
Which brings me to this TikTok. The video, scored (earnestly) with a remix of “Empire State of Mind,” reveals the backend of Chastain’s big exit, filmed from the street. She emerges furiously in character, looking around as if oblivious to the real-life pedestrians lined up videoing her. My gut instinct is to complain that this is everything wrong with theater right now. It is slightly chilling that megafans can wait outside to watch Chastain mid-performance on Broadway.
But listen. Behind the music, you will hear the cheers of the audience behind her, confined to the theatre. They are cheering, of course, because the ending is rousing. But when reduced to a collective consciousness inside a dark room, they become fools. They do not see that, right after the wall closes back up, Chastain huffs out a visible wintry breath and sprints back inside, flanked by two PAs. Watching the video is like catching someone immediately drop their smile as they turn the corner after dinner with a friend.
The joke is on the audience too, as Berlant might remind us. We march blindly into a show, surrendering our egos and disbelief to chuckle at Krogstad or weep when Dr. Rank receives his prognosis. The problem for me is that it’s getting less fun to suspend disbelief for two hours when I can feel the manufacturing of my emotional responses. Once I know how I’m supposed to react, I refuse to give in.
I have no solution for the state of the arts. Theater is not dead, mainly because people do still flock to see it. (I didn’t see any empty seats at the Hudson. I was also sitting next to Michael Shannon.) But perhaps what we need is more theater like Berlant’s show– completely new and original works that question the relationship between performer and audience, artifice and authenticity. Or maybe we need to banish movie stars from returning to the stage because their personas are too huge to shed. Oh, and something must be done about those ghastly ticket prices.
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Social photo from Waiting for Guffman (1996)
