The Human Millipede of the Prairie: The State of South Dakota Theatre

I recently found out that the Mitchell Community Theatre is auditioning for their performance of No Sex Please, We're British, the 1971 British farce by Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot. As many reading this may be aware, this is a play that was produced by the Sioux Empire Community Theatre only a few months ago. The Olde Towne Dinner Theatre in Worthing produced this play as recently as 2008, and the Brookings Community Theatre did it for their 2009 - 2010 season.

I've been hunting down and reading through the websites of almost every community theatre in the area, and the play titles seriously blend together. Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring; You Can't Take It With You by George Kaufman and Moss Hart; Almost, Maine, by John Cariani; On Golden Pond by Ernest Thompson; Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling; Rabbit Hole by David Lindsay-Abaire; The Foreigner by Larry Shue; and so forth. This doesn't even touch the bibliography of Neil Simon, which has been thoroughly mined, or the ever-present musicals (Grease, Godspell, Annie, the Nunsense plays, Annie Get Your Gun, etc.).

Plays produced here that don't fall under the category of these common titles will typically fall under one of three other categories: Sequels to successful shows (e.g. Alone Together Again by Lawrence Roman; The Savage Dilemma by John Patrick); plays by well known playwrights (e.g. Neil Simon; Ray Cooney); or adaptations of well known literature (e.g. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest adapted by Dale Wasserman; To Kill a Mockingbird by Christopher Sergel). The latter category will often, though not always, be chosen based on whether or not a recent movie adaptation has been made, probably an effort to piggyback on any potential popularity.

The Limited Reference Pool

Now, I should note that I get why a number of these scripts are staged and re-staged in the region. Most of these theatre companies are tiny groups that are just barely squeaking by financially. Their very existence depends on filling those seats, and audiences tend to drift toward the familiar. Without the business, there's no show. It's also probable the powers that be within these groups are folks who don't actually have much knowledge of the vast variety of plays out there that are both within their means of production and family-friendly enough not to offend the sensibilities of their audience. So their selections for each season come from a fairly small reference pool, probably what they remember having seen elsewhere in the region.

It is hard to expect that any of these community theatres are going to take on genuinely challenging scripts, unless it's something that's popular and/or has been successful nearby. They are all working with limited resources--not just space and money, but labor and talent. Try staging a classic of naturalism, realism, or expressionism from the late 19th or early 20th centuries, or something from the Theatre of the Absurd, or hell, maybe something from Renaissance England that's not by William Shakespeare, and your performers--composed mostly, if not entirely, of people from the community who have no special training or education in acting--won't have the faintest clue what to do with it.

Is this a problem? Naturally, I think so, but I'm also an occasional participant in theatre and have a degree in it, so I am pretty biased. For the sake of getting some stuff off my chest, here's my take on it.

Problem Number One

There's a world of incredible scripts out there, both contemporary and classic, that South Dakota will probably never know. I'm not talking about the highly controversial stuff filled with lots of swearing and sex. Even excluding the hundreds or thousands of extant scripts first performed before the 19th century, there are still thousands of interesting--even well-known--plays that have never been staged in South Dakota outside of, perhaps, a University setting. It's a significant loss to the lovers of culture, history, philosophy, and other intellectual fields, although it is a loss that, perhaps mercifully, most people will never recognize.

Again, I understand why these unknown (or only-known-to-theatre-scholars) plays don't get performed. The main reason is money: producing a play costs money that has to be made back in ticket sales, and since the general public seems to be far less likely to see a play they've never heard of than one with some kind of familiar connection, the community theatre that dares to produce such a play can pretty much count on losing the money that they barely scraped together in the first place. In short, these types of risks are almost guaranteed to be theatre-at-a-loss, and relatively few companies are willing to take a chance, especially given how unpredictable audiences can be.

Unfortunately, this is a cycle that is self-perpetuating. These shows never get performed because nobody's familiar with them, so nobody becomes familiar with them because they're never performed, so they never get performed because... well, it just goes on like that. Furthermore...

Problem Number Two

Due to the unfamiliarity with anything outside of a handful of comfortable, familiar plays, finding talent that has any idea what to do with anything outside this norm is near impossible. Seriously, try casting The Adding Machine by Elmer Rice, or Miss Julie by August Strindberg, or go nuts and take a chance on someone who's really out there like Eugene Ionesco or Samuel Beckett, using the average amateur actors from the community, and see if they can even figure out what to make of the script within six weeks, much less get their lines memorized. Perhaps the biggest challenge most community actors are likely to take on are (some of) the works of Shakespeare, but only because it's William "We don't know what is being said but it's supposed to be the greatest stuff ever written so we'll fake it" Shakespeare.

I'm picking on actors, but I could also say the same of directors, designers, and technicians as well. Scripts that are especially bizarre, highlight long-forgotten cultural concepts, or use archaic language and/or alien dialects are likely to be immediately dismissed by the theatre management long before the initial decision-making process begins. And, to be fair, if the people who are producing the play don't know what's going on, there's no way the audience will be able to make sense of it.

The handful of plays typically produced in the area, most originally performed within the past century, get produced over and over because they're straightforward in terms of performance and tech; none of them require any out-of-the-ordinary skills, knowledge, or creativity. Many of the most popular plays also have a cast of fairly colorful characters (e.g. The Curious Savage by John Patrick; The Nerd by Larry Shue), along with situations and dialog that are nearly impossible for anyone but the most unskilled of actors to screw up (e.g. The Odd Couple by Neil Simon). Consequently, the maintenance of the status quo of South Dakota community theatre continues, which leads me to the next problem it causes...

Problem Number Three

There's no actual training in community theatre. Besides the fact that there is a difference between poor acting, adequate acting, and good acting, there's a difference between being able to sew and being able to costume a show; there's a difference between carpentry and building a set; there's a difference between reading a script and analyzing a script. Relatively few people involved in community theatre in South Dakota know this because there's no demand for training or education in this art; the people at the helm of these companies have managed to pull off season after season for years without these things, and unless someone can clearly see that something is broken, nobody will attempt to fix it. Hence, the perpetual cycle will continue because, for all intents and purposes, it works just fine.

Here's a personal hypothesis about why musical theatre is so popular in the area: It goes beyond the fact that musicals are the only type of live theatre that currently enjoy mainstream success. I suspect, on the whole, that local musical productions tend to be of higher quality than the non-musical straight shows. Straight shows focus on the script and the acting. While musicals also (usually) involve a script and acting, they tend to focus more on the singing and dancing. A cast of performers who are excellent singers and dancers is far more important in a musical than a cast of performers who are skilled actors. Skilled singers and dancers are probably also easier to find than skilled actors, because training for those skills are more accessible than training for acting.

Acting is often considered something that people can fake their way through. This is an attitude not shared with singing and dancing, probably because it's easier for the average person to identify poor singing and dancing than it is to identify poor acting. An audience might complain about clumsy dancing or off-key singing, but for whatever the reason, they are far less likely to complain about wooden acting, confused dialog interpretation, the inability to make acting choices, the tendency to keep hands perpetually in one's pockets or at one's sides, a lack of comic timing, desperate-looking bids for cheap laughs that make little contextual sense, nervous sauntering reminiscent of a pee-pee dance, and the plethora of other indicators of bad acting that dominate casts of amateur actors. Why? Probably because a number of these problems are somewhat subtle, and few members of the audience bother to look for them, assuming they'd even know what to look for in the first place.

As far as much of the current crop of thespians and theatre audiences are concerned, the status quo is acceptable because, to their credit, it still works... for the most part. There are still enough people paying to put their butts in those seats, meaning that the theatre companies are still able to produce another season of the same shows of the same quality. It's not broken, so nobody needs to fix it. Personally, though, I suspect that this model is not sustainable long-term. That is because:

Problem Number Four

Okay, it's established that money is needed to keep theatres open and running, and that much of that money has to come from patrons. Here is the point when I will speculate on the future and general audience behavior. Predicting the future and predicting audience behavior are virtually impossible to do with much accuracy, so take this for what it is. Humans like to try to predict things, as futile as it may be, and as a human I reserve the right to engage in pointless behavior too.

This is a very oversimplified approach, but I'm going to categorize the largest part of each theatre audience in the area into two groups. Sure, there are going to be people watching plays who don't clearly fall into either category, but I'm talking about broad groups; hypothetically, where a significant chunk of the money is going to come from whenever one of these plays is produced.

The first group is easy enough: they're made up of the acquaintances of the cast and crew. Family, friends, colleagues, coworkers, significant others, students, roommates, inmates, stalkers, and other people who know someone involved with the show. One reason why musicals will draw larger audiences is because there's a larger cast involved, meaning more patrons can be drawn from this first group.

There's a drawback with this first group in that it's made up of people who probably won't otherwise see a show unless their personal acquaintance is involved. On the other hand, the first group is fairly reliable, even if inconsistent, since members of this group can always be counted on to show up whatever the quality of the production; this is one advantage that community and collegiate theatre have over professional theatre. One should also consider that the members of this group represent a great deal of age diversity, since everyone from the elderly parents of the three-line actor to the pre-adolescent children of the stage manager are likely to be present.

The second group are those who come because of the art, or because they feel that supporting local theatre is important. They may not know anyone involved with the production, but they enjoy seeing live theatre and may even prefer it over watching something on a movie screen. The reason they feel this way is probably because they've been seeing plays semi-regularly for a long time, because many of the members of this second group remember a time when plays were more culturally significant than they are now.

Now, I don't want to imply that live theatre has become insignificant in the eyes of the public. It hasn't; at least, not completely, and not yet. It has, however, lost its cultural significance considerably over the past, say, three or four decades, supplanted by the cinema, television, and live music. Theatre used to be the thing that much of the public used to do, because a hundred years ago, it was the only option for a social, narrative form of entertainment--motion pictures weren't much more than a novelty until maybe the late 1910's, and television wasn't really widespread until the 1950's. At this point, we now live in a world where a majority of the people who are consumers of this type of entertainment don't have memories of a time when seeing a play was a popular thing to do.

Consequently, the members of this second group are primarily made up of the elderly; people whose time on this earth is guaranteed to come to an end within the next few decades. They will almost certainly stop being the major consumers of live theatre within the next generation. We can't honestly believe that the audiences who are willing to shell out twenty dollars a head to see Grease or Annie for the umpteenth time are going to be around forever. Since these are the people who also contribute a lot of money to theatre in donations, their passing will be a major blow to the continued survival of South Dakota community theatre.

I should make mention that there's sort of a third group of note, the target audiences for children's theatre (or "family theatre" or whatever the careful euphemism is these days). Indeed, one way to bring in some income for one's theatre company is to perform something like Cinderella or some other Disney-fied fairy tale that originated from works that could almost be considered children's horror (seriously). But I digress.

Something has to change, and it has to change soon. Theatre needs to become a cool thing to do again, especially for younger audiences (in this context, "younger audiences" means under 60 years). Unfortunately, in the minds of the public, particularly because of the aforementioned cycle of the same plays over and over, theatre is a bland, poorly done, over-priced means of entertainment meant for the elderly. It's certainly not seen by many people as a legitimate form of art that can be just as challenging and mind-blowing as any other type of art, because that sort of theatre just doesn't exist here.

The Bottom Line

Some of the most interesting and enduring plays, along with some fantastic contemporary stage works, are being ignored or forgotten on most stages in the area, and the specialized knowledge and skill required to do these works well (or even adequately) have been neglected. But this trend, the cycle, the current model... it can't last forever. Either something will change or local theatre will vanish as a standard and become a novelty, like drive-in movie theatres, malt shops, and video rental stores--that is, it'll disappear except for, perhaps, two or three barely-financed playhouses that have to resort to acting as more of a tourist trap than an important landmark of local culture. Just imagine the billboards on I-90: advertising free ice water has worked for others, I suppose.

The First 100 Plays Read (Over the past year)

It seems like I've been away from theatre for too long. So, for the past year, I've been trying to scrape off the rust that's accumulated from my absence. One of the tasks I've given myself is to read plays; as many plays as I could manage. To be honest, it hasn't quite been a year since I started this task; I do believe it began back in August or September of 2012 with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. Either way, it's an accomplishment during a time when accomplishments have been few and far between.

In celebration, here's the list of plays I've read. In some cases, I've made a note if I've read more than one translation or version of a specific play. Years refer to the year the play was first performed to the best of my knowledge; two dates are given if the time between the play's creation and its staging was significantly long. Some of these are plays that are new to me, others are plays that I read way back during college and recently re-read.

• A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen - 1879
• A Memory of Two Mondays - Arthur Miller - 1955
• A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams - 1947
• A View from the Bridge - Arthur Miller - 1955
• Alcestis - Euripides - c. 438 B.C.E.
• All My Sons - Arthur Miller - 1947
• Alone Together - Lawrence Roman - 1984
• Angel Street - Patrick Hamilton - 1938 (Originally titled Gaslight)
• Antigone - Sophocles - c. 441 B.C.E.
• Arsenic and Old Lace - Joseph Kesselring - 1941
• 'Art' - Yasmina Reza - 1996
• August: Osage County - Tracy Letts - 2007
• Back of the Throat - Yussef El Guindi - 2005
• Bad Seed - Maxwell Anderson - 1954
• Adapted from the novel by William March
• Body Awareness - Annie Baker - 2008
• Bug - Tracy Letts - 1996
• Buried Child - Sam Shepard - 1978
• Bus Stop - William Inge - 1955
• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams - 1955 (Two versions)
• Child's Play - Robert Marasco - 1970
• Come Back, Little Sheba - William Inge - 1950
• Crimes of the Heart - Beth Henley - 1980
• Dangerous Corner - J. B. Priestley - 1932
• Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller - 1949
• Dirty Hands - Jean-Paul Sartre - 1948
• Don't Drink the Water - Woody Allen - 1966
• Dracula - Hamilton Deane and John L. Balderston - 1927
• Adapted from the novel by Bram Stoker
• Dream Girl - Elmer Rice - 1945
• Elizabeth the Queen - Maxwell Anderson - 1930
• Everyman - Anonymous (Morality Play) - c. 1510
• Glengarry Glen Ross - David Mamet - 1983
• God of Carnage - Yasmina Reza - 2006
• Harvey - Mary Chase - 1944
• Henry IV - Luigi Pirandello - 1922
• If - Edward Plunkett, Lord of Dunsany - 1922
• Key Exchange - Kevin Wade - 1981
• Killer Joe - Tracy Letts - 1993
• Look Back in Anger - John Osborne - 1956
• Low in the Dark - Marina Carr - 1989
• Medea - Euripides - c. 431 B.C.E.
• Miss Julie - August Strindberg - 1889 (Three translations)
• Mr. Marmalade - Noah Haidle - 2004
• Nickel and Dimed - Joan Holden - 2002
• Adapted from the non-fiction book by Barbara Ehrenreich
• 'Night, Mother - Marsha Norman - 1983
• No Exit - Jean-Paul Sartre - 1944
• No Sex Please, We're British - Anthony Marriott and Alistair Foot - 1971
• Oedipus at Colonus - Sophocles - c. 401 B.C.E.
• Oedipus the King - Sophocles - c. 429 B.C.E.
• Our Country's Good - Timberlake Wertenbaker - 1988
• Adapted from the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally
• Picnic - William Inge - 1953
• Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus - c. 480 - 410 B.C.E.
• Pterodactyls - Nicky Silver - 1993
• R. U. R. - Karel Čapek - 1920 (Two translations)
• reasons to be pretty - Neil LaBute - 2008
• Red - John Logan - 2009
• Reynard the Fox - Arthur Fauquez - 1958
• Rope - Patrick Hamilton - 1929
• Say You Love Satan - Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa - 2001
• Seven Against Thebes - Aeschylus - c. 467 B.C.E.
• Six Characters in Search of an Author - Luigi Pirandello - 1921 (Two translations)
• Six Degrees of Separation - John Guare - 1990
• Slasher - Allison Moore - 2009
• Sleuth - Anthony Shaffer - 1970
• Spring Awakening - Frank Wedekind - 1906
• Street Scene - Elmer Rice - 1929
• subUrbia - Eric Bogosian - 1994
• Summer and Smoke - Tennessee Williams - 1948
• The Adding Machine - Elmer Rice - 1923
• The Broken Heart - John Ford - c. 1625 - 1632
• The Crucible - Arthur Miller - 1953 (Two versions)
• The Curious Savage - John Patrick - 1950
• The Dark at the Top of the Stairs - William Inge - 1957
• The Flies - Jean-Paul Sartre - 1943
• The Foreigner - Larry Shue - 1983
• The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams - 1945
• The Haunting of Hill House - F. Andrew Leslie - 1964
• Adapted from the novel by Shirley Jackson
• The Homecoming - Harold Pinter - 1965
• The Letter - W. Somerset Maugham - 1927
• The Mystery Plays - Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa - 2001
• The Nerd - Larry Shue - 1981
• The Night of the Iguana - Tennessee Williams - 1961
• The Odd Couple - Neil Simon - 1965
• The Persians - Aeschylus - c. 472 B.C.E.
• The Pillowman - Martin McDonagh - 2003
• The Playboy of the Western World - John Millington Synge - 1907
• The Rats - Gerhart Hauptmann - 1911
• The Respectful Prostitute - Jean-Paul Sartre - 1946
• The Spanish Tragedy - Thomas Kyd - c. 1582 - 1592
• The Suppliants - Aeschylus - c. 470 - 463 B.C.E.
• The Waiting Room - Lisa Loomer - 1994
• The Way of the World - William Congreve - 1700
• The Weavers - Gerhart Hauptmann - 1893
• The Weird - Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa - 2004
• The Woman in Black - Stephen Mallatratt - 1987
• Adapted from the novel by Susan Hill
• The Women of Lockerbie - Deborah Brevoort - 2003
• 'Tis Pity She's a Whore - John Ford - c. 1629 - 1633
• To Kill a Mockingbird - Christopher Sergel - 1970
• Adapted from the novel by Harper Lee
• Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett - 1953
• Woman and Scarecrow - Marina Carr - 2006
• Woyzeck - Georg Büchner - 1837/1913 (Two translations)