10 questions: Scott Walters

1) What the fuck is going on?
We’re witnessing the Schiavo-ization of theatre as an art form – it’s dead, but we keep pretending it isn’t. People keep pointing at record ticket sales on Broadway and at regional theatres as proof that there’s life in the old girl yet, but Terry Schiavo probably had more visits from her parents when she was in a coma than she did when she was going to work every day. It’s hardly proof. Where’s the vitality?

2) Do you have any unifying theories about the role of formal education in shaping theatre artists?
The key word in that question, in my opinion, is “artists.” Most theatre educators, unfortunately, aren’t trying to create artists, they’re trying to create replacement parts for the current creaking theatre machine, which, as my answer to question #1 implies, is about as responsible as teaching kids how to do punchcard data entry as a means of getting a high-paying job.

Have you ever noticed that all the ads for theatre programs in American Theatre magazine brag about “training”? Training? Dogs are trained, not artists. But that should give you a clue that most theatre education is about obedience, not artistry. What’s my unifying theory? See the answer to question #3.

3) What do American theatre educators need to do better, generally?
Teach students to value, above all things, innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box, questioning the status quo, taking big risks, failure. In order to do that, theatre educators themselves would have to be innovative, creative questioners who take big risks and value failure. Fat chance, but I can dream.

Let students fail! Give higher grades for risk takers who really make a huge flop! So what if somebody stinks up the place – the air clears and no greenhouse gases are left behind! Theatre educators need to commit to creating gonzo theatre artists. It’s our only hope.

First thing I’d do if I were appointed the theatre education czar is burn every copy of Stanislavski’s books. Tell me any other discipline that relies so completely on theories that are over a century old. It’s pathetic! Surely we’ve had a better idea in a hundred years. And I’m not talking about Stanislavski-juniors like Meisner, Adler, and Moore, either. Throw them all out and try to think it through from scratch: how do we communicate with an audience TODAY? Think!
4) How have your experiences as a theatre blogger influenced your ideas about theatre?
One thing that blogging and reading blogs brought home to me was how little respect many theatre people have for the audience. For some reason, artists see themselves as spiritual, emotional, and intellectual Gullivers tied down by millions of low-brow Lilliputians. It’s all about “personal artistic vision” and “authentic self-expression.” Or else it is about making as much money as you possibly can, which is built on a similar scorn for the audience: “You never go broke underestimating the public.” It’s not the basis of a healthy relationship.

As a result, my ideas about theatre have become more populist, more grassroots, more community-oriented. I think the arts need to be a dialogue, not a monologue.

5) Do you think conservative, right-wing politics are somehow fundamentally at odds with the arts community?
No, but the arts community needs to care enough about the conservatives to dialogue with them and not just insult them. We’re digging our own grave! Half of America is conservative!

Look back at the Romans: when the Christians were a minor sect on the fringes of Roman society, mimes had a field day making fun of them. Then all of a sudden Christians became powerful, and – surprise! surprise! – they weren’t all that keen about theatre. Augustine fucked us up royally, and we’re still recovering.

Now fast forward a couple millennia. In a decade or two of radical change, when progressives were in vogue, the arts bloomed and America created the NEA. Artists, having not learned their theatre history, were doomed to repeat it: we had a field day making fun of conservatives. And now . . . well, you see how it is.

There’s got to be a progressive way to speak to conservatives. (Hint: it doesn’t involve dehumanizing them.)

6) How would you characterize the relationship between religion and theatre in America?
Depends which side of the equation you’re looking at. Many theatre artists – not having learned their theatre history (hey, I’m a theatre historian, OK?) – love to use religion as a whipping boy. So things aren’t so good from that perspective. But drop in on any American church around Christmas or during the summer and you’ll find lots of theatre being done. There are Christmas pageants and vacation Bible school plays everywhere. This reflects a recognition of the power of theatre to reinforce values through entertainment. This is the bridge across which theatre and religion can join hands. Again, it is about dialogue and openness.

7) If class issues are preventing theatre from being a more vital voice in American culture, who’s responsible and how do we fix it?
I think class is, to appropriate Pinter, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that 80% of the theatre audience is drawn from the top 15% of America’s economic class. Thus, government support of the arts looks like another handout for the rich.

As Dudley Cocke, artistic director of Roadside Theatre in Whitesburg KY says, “the assembled spectators for the typical not-for-profit professional theater production don’t look like any community in the U.S., except, perhaps, a gated one. From such a narrow social base, great democratic art will never rise.” I agree.

Who’s responsible? Tyrone Guthrie. He hijacked the regional theatre movement and made it a haven for the wealthy, educated class who would put up with museum pieces in order to appear “cultured.”

How do we fix it? First, decentralize theatre – get over our childish fixation with the Cinderella story of NYC and perform in towns across America. Second, think outside the box – by which I mean, think outside the theatre building. Do theatre in living rooms, back yards, community centers, bars, parks. Third, learn to speak the language. Different cultures and classes tell stories differently – go to them, don’t expect them to come to you.

8) Do you have a working definition of what it means to be an artist?
James Joyce said it in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “I go to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.” To me, Joyce acknowledges both the necessity of the artistic soul and the importance of its connection to community.

9) What are your current theatre theory fixations?
I am really jazzed about Jill Dolan’s incredible book Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre. She writes: “This book investigates the potential of different kinds of performance to inspire moments in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential.”

I sincerely believe that this book could be as important as Peter Brooks’ The Empty Space was for a previous generation. Read it!

10) When you look at the varied landscape of American theatre, what are you most optimistic about?
Grassroots, community-based theatres like Dell’Arte in Blue Lake CA, Roadside Theatre in Whitesburg KY, Los Angeles Poverty Department and Crossroads Theatre in LA, Junebug Productions in New Orleans. Theatre rooted in a community, telling stories of that community, with that community, and for that community.

But what I am equally optimistic about are my students, many of whom arrive at my university with a sincere desire to make a meaningful contribution to the world through theatre. I make it my job to fan the flame of that sense of hope and that belief in the power of theatre to strengthen the hearts, minds, and souls of artists and spectators alike. Every year, when a new group of freshmen arrive, I get to plug into that pure, hopeful energy, and my optimism is refreshed. Thanks so much for asking!

13 thoughts on “10 questions: Scott Walters

  1. I’m commenting on Scott’s remarks strictly as a New Yorker. As you may know, Scott and I tangled recently on my blog over the issue of religion, and my uncivil criticism of religious folk. Here, I’m being civil—civil, goddamnit!—to respond to some points he makes about the dire state of American theater and how to fix it. I’m not entirely convinced by his suggestions to make theater more relevant, populist and inspirational to the common citizen.

    “How do we fix it? First, decentralize theatre – get over our childish fixation with the Cinderella story of NYC and perform in towns across America.”

    We’ll ignore the defensive provincial stance here and point out that the theater isn’t “centralized” in any organizational sense of the word. Yes, the Tonys take place here and a lot of media attention focuses on Broadway openings, but that’s a media issue. The “centralization” of theater isn’t the nefarious work of NYC artists but a natural consequence of concentrated media, wealth, access and population density. There are historical, artistic reasons for NYC being called the center of the American theater universe. Sad to say, they don’t really apply anymore. I’m as chauvinistically proud of my city as the next transplant, but also painfully aware of how stagnant and provincial this town has gotten. Now, if you expect NYC artists to “get over themselves” and move out of the city and perform around the country, some may. Personally, I like living in NYC. I like the people, restaurants, museums, streets, theaters, bars, dog walks, parks and subway. I don’t want to leave. And there’s work to be done here. We have our own theater-ecology crises that need to be addressed. There are companies to support, playwrights to champion, nonprofit giants to shame and commercial behemoths to ridicule. I wouldn’t expect a director or troupe to abandon the cultured, exciting life here to enrich the lives of a theater-loving minority in Iowa. As someone who couldn’t wait to relocate here from New Hampshire, I have to say: there’s a reason why kids leave home. All theater is local. My locality happens to be NYC.

    “Second, think outside the box – by which I mean, think outside the theatre building. Do theatre in living rooms, back yards, community centers, bars, parks.”

    If Scott were to spend a season here, he’d see that playmakers aren’t confined to stuffy traditional spaces. Every summer there are multiple Shakespeares in parks, shows in bars, in site-specific abandoned office spaces and other atypical locations. Whether more artists can be induced to produce outside of spaces is an interesting question. Bring theater to the people! He exhorts. Do the people want theater on every street corner? Buskers can crank a hurdy-gurdy or eat fire in the park, but theater is, to me, a more delicate occupation, one not easily shoved under the nose of a prospective buyer in the public square. We already have hundreds (maybe 600) theater productions in this city every year. Do we need even more, in nontraditional spaces?

    “Third, learn to speak the language. Different cultures and classes tell stories differently – go to them, don’t expect them to come to you.”

    Again, already happening. Stylistic exchanges between pop culture, ethnic folkways and stuffy ole white-man theater has been going on for decades. We have a Latino-pop musical called In the Heights transferring to Broadway; there are festivals devoted to niche populations; the Public Theater is dedicated to color-blind casting and programming plays that give voice to persons of color. Okay, are these ghettoized examples of nonwhite ethnic representation in the theater? Perhaps. I know many downtown theater collectives who may be composed of all-white performers, who don’t really go for ethnic ventriloquy, and no one would expect them to. As for theater that represents different classes than middle-class and upper-middle-class, I can’t argue with that. I’m sick of seeing the drawing-room woes of upper-middle-class white people. I argued as much in my review of Rabbit Hole, then Scott criticized me for demonizing the middle class!

    I suspect Scott is advocating a kind of communitarian, class-conscious, multiethnic, outreach-based populist theater that attracts and inspires folks who might not normally care about theater. It’s a noble cause, and I wish him and his students luck, but I’m not entirely convinced that theater artists, eschewing esoterica and avant-gardism, thinking positively and bending over backward to accommodate the common man is going to do it. There is an ingrained coarseness to popular culture that the best-intentioned arts crusade cannot reverse. First figure out how to wean people off bad TV, bad ideology, bad religion and fast food, then expect them to sit for art. There is a cultural crisis in this country, but elitist artists—in theater or otherwise—are the least of its problems. People like reality shows and ultraviolent summer movies; they like Applebee’s and box wine; they like a strong, inarticulate president who won’t admit mistakes; they like a God who chooses favorites. Bad or snobby theater didn’t create these social pathologies. And quality populist theater won’t destroy them either.

  2. OK I’m not blogging or participating in theatre blogs anymore. But I just have to very briefly say, David, that you are really judging and lumping people together unfairly and I don’t understand how that helps anyone.

    “People like reality shows and ultraviolent summer movies; they like Applebee’s and box wine; they like a strong, inarticulate president who won’t admit mistakes; they like a God who chooses favorites. Bad or snobby theater didn’t create these social pathologies.”

    So if you like reality shows and Summer blockbusters, and, god forbid, go to Applebees, you also voted for Bush. And you. My sad common man, are a cultural mistake. A flaw. A pathological infiltration of a higher, greater culture. Come on.

    People in the theatre that think this way are the exact people I have no interest in whatsoever. Scott says so many fantastic things in this interview. Slinging arrows from the margins just marginalizes theatre artists more. Refusing to participate and be part of popular culture looks more like petulant jealousy than ideological and cultural hatred. All the sudden. Theatre can’t equate itself with “culture” and “cultured” anymore, because it is a non participant.

    A blip on the radar screen of Culture with a capital C. If the world is changing and people are interested in one thing or another. Why must we judge that and aim to slap everybody on the wrists…. apparently doing so by making theatre that tries to kick their ass. And therefore never confronting anything. It’s like a computer nerd trying to hack into his high school’s mainframe to change his grades.

    But these judgments are just ridiculous and offensive. That is all.

  3. Matt: Yes, I am engaging in generalities. Hell, I like crap food and summer movies. But if everything in pop culture were peachy keen, then Scott’s urgent moral tone wouldn’t even be necessary. I agree with him that I want things to change. But you can’t hunger for change without admitting that there are toxic elements that need changing. I’m not trying to dehumanize people. Simply pointing out patterns of cultural consumption that are unhealthy and despicable. If they aren’t unhealthy or despicable, what are we talking about?

  4. Scott says:

    “Teach students to value, above all things, innovation, creativity, thinking outside the box, questioning the status quo, taking big risks, failure.”

    This seems like an argument in favour of the avant-garde, so I do quite seen how David gets to this:

    “It’s a noble cause, and I wish him and his students luck, but I’m not entirely convinced that theater artists, eschewing esoterica and avant-gardism, thinking positively and bending over backward to accommodate the common man is going to do it.”

    It seems to me that the disagreement is not about the value of the avant-garde generally, but about where all that avant-garde-ness needs to happen.

    Does it happen in the basement of an abandoned factory in Brooklyn, by way of a Cheerio-box-wearing performance artist? Or does it happen at a community centre in middle America where a straight-up staging of the Matthew Shepard Story might have a profound effect on the community.

    So avant-gardism has its degrees, like everything else. But ultimately, if avant garde theatre is local, it’s questioning the status quo of the community it’s being performed in. It is thereby somewhat bound by the language that community responds to.

    I guess I’m just not sure I see the conflict on this matter.

  5. Taking a big risk and daring to fail can also mean moving to NYC to try and “make it,” whatever that means to you. Or yes, it could mean putting on a hot-button issue play in your hometown for public edification. Both are valuable activities. Scott seems to value the community-enhancing utility of theater. I’m more interested in the self-expression of the individual artist and the refinement of certain thoughts and forms.

  6. I’m gonna jump in on a new tack that I acknowledge doesn’t really respond to the previous comments.

    First, I would like to make a list of the top 5 “bon mots” that make this interview awesome:

    5 Schiavo-ization of theatre as an art form

    4 Training? Dogs are trained, not artists.

    3 For some reason, artists see themselves as spiritual, emotional, and intellectual Gullivers tied down by millions of low-brow Lilliputians.

    2 There’s got to be a progressive way to speak to conservatives. (Hint: it doesn’t involve dehumanizing them.)

    1 class is, to appropriate Pinter, the weasel under the cocktail cabinet. Nobody wants to talk about the fact that 80% of the theatre audience is drawn from the top 15% of America’s economic class. Thus, government support of the arts looks like another handout for the rich.

    Touche. We should talk about this weasel. Despite our effort to ignore him, he is making a lot of noise.

    So well done, except, wait a second, that quote about Stanislavsky is ridiculous. Trying to teach acting without referencing or acknowledging Stanislavsky would be the equivalent of trying to be a painter without acknowledging the existence of the colour white. Any theory or approach to making acting or directing A CRAFT either appropriates his techniques or exists in relation to how it rejects them, but they are always in the picture.

    Incidentally, Stanislavsky would probably throw those 3 books out also. The Stalinist regime pretty much forced him to write the 2nd and 3rd and he later rejected much of the first in conversations with Michael Chekov, never mind the fact that it is written in an implausibly pedantic style. But come on, lets try to direct or act in a play without talking considering given circumstances….

  7. This “10 Questions” appears to be Praxis’ way of supporting individual manifestos on theatre and art. Cheerleaders are welcome in the comments section. Most often it’s just “Mike said” with his thumbs-up comment, but that’s all that’s really needed. David had his 10 Questions a few months ago, so he understands the premise.

    In his comment here, David doth protest too much, methinks. He knows that there is no “civil” way to piss on Scott’s 10 Questions parade. In the recent debate David pretty much got his rat’s ass handed to himself on a platter over his incivility, in large part by Scott. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.

    David reminds of Adam Sandler in the promo poster for his movie Big Daddy, teaching the kid how to piss against the wall with his back to the audience. “I’m commenting on Scott’s remarks strictly as a New Yorker.”

  8. So, it’s clear that Walters and Cote disagree on more than a few nuances of what theatre is all about. Fine. They’ve both got a lot more experience thinking and writing about theatre than I have, so I’m often inclined to sit back and enjoy the language they wrap around their ideas. And if I had to cobble together a personal manifesto about theatre, I could do a lot worse than picking my personal faves from the Walters-Cote catalogue. And if, occasionally, it feels like a false dichotomy, their debates (and the fallout thereof) make for good theatre nonetheless.

    And maybe it’s because I’ve never been on the receiving end of one of Cote’s acid-tongued retorts, but I find the way he writes about theatre invigorating. (I’m agnostic, but let’s not get into that.) Diplomacy for its own sake is paralysis. It’s empowering to read someone talking about theatre who’s not toeing the line of traditional polite discourse.

    Walters, on the other hand, reminds me of the Classical Rhetoricians. He seems to be concerned with the art of persuasion – be it in theatre’s ability to influence its community, or in his writing’s ability to influence its reader. The writing is academic but with a clear and seductive populist streak – a voice that seems in line with some of his stated ideas about theatre. I love it.

    I’m offended by a lot of things – factory farming, for example – but rigorous and sometimes-emotional debate about theatre just doesn’t offend me. It’s vital.

    Ian

  9. wait a sec, half of my post was a BIG thumbs down. are you sure you’re not just skim-reading nick? also, one must remember that we (praxis) are canadian so our initial impulse tends to be cordial initially. when pushed we can throw it around with the best of them however….

  10. okay nick, you are absolutely correct on several accounts. It is true that:

    i usually go easy on the interviewees

    emotive debate in the comments section would be more interesting and thought provoking

    it is not a quality that occurs regularly on the praxis blog, yet

    the thing is, as co-artistic director of the company, if i was to start hating on many of the the blog interviews, it would be a lot like asking someone to play catch, and then only whipping it at their head.

    having graduated from the theatre school stanislavsky invented (with ND who never gets any props) i felt a bit of responsibility to represent on this one, but i don’t see any way I can get up in people’s grills on a regular basis.on this blog, i have to leave the fireworks to guys and girls like you. it’s much appreciated. debate is a good indication that people at the very least are paying attention and give a fuck.

  11. Sorry I deleted below,then reposted it, thinking I could correct some typos before anyone reponded. My bad. It’s out of order now. Fix it if you want blog admin.
    ***

    Mike, I was talking generally about your comments at all the “10 Questions” interviews done here at Praxis, not your particular comment to Scott. I haven’t read all the interviews, but you seem to be in most of the comment sections. You are in fact, as you have noted, at least half critical in this comment/post. This is atypical when compared to your comments at the other interviews.

    Has there been a counter-manifesto to an interviewee before? Not that this is a bad thing. I’m with Ian that emotive debate can add to the vitality of theatre. Just haven’t seen it at this venue before.

  12. I’m back from my weekend away, and will probably respond in more detail in the coming days on my blog. By just a short note here: yes, David and I tangled recently about religion — happens to the best of us. But I didn’t find his response to my interview uncivil in the least (although referring to me as “provincial” skirted it). I appreciate the serious criticism, and will do my best to respond in kind. Carry on!

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