Finding Death in the Drawing Room

A number of weeks ago, someone on the production staff of Picasso at the Lapin Agile made an interesting decision. Rather than using the standard Loeb Ex audience chairs, the production staff hauled up whatever seating material they could find in the HRDCs large props room-reclining chairs, sofas, pillow cushions. Artistically, the decision complimented the show nicely. Set in a cozy neighborhood bar, Picasso at the Lapin Agile invites the audience to share off stage the comfort and warmth that its characters find on stage. But from a larger perspective, the decision to make the audience as comfortable as possible was a disturbing one. Essentially, the audience of Picasso at the Lapin Agile was made to feel as though they were watching a play in the comfort of their own living room. For anyone familiar with the history of English-language theater, such a sensation does not carry good associations. It is a troubling throwback, in a way, to the days of the drawing room comedy.

Most people know of drawing room comedies simply as a genre concerning the personal relations of the upper classes, a genre made famous today, ironically, by its own parodists like Oscar Wilde. More than a simple genre of theater, however, the drawing room comedy created a revolution in the history of dramatic presentation. Born out of the witty, language-heavy Restoration comedies like those of William Congreve, the drawing room comedy grew in the early 1700s into exactly what its title implies-a comedy presented in a private drawing room.

The birth of this brand of theater essentially marked the death of public theater in England from the end of the Restoration period until the Victorian era. Rather than trying to maintain its appeal to people of all classes, theater retreated into the walled-off world of the gentry. Certainly the tradition of privately commissioned performances began long before the drawing room comedy appeared, but before the Restoration period such private affairs were balanced by theaters like the Globe which attracted everyone from shop apprentices to the nobility or by traveling companies of players performing for more geographically isolated audiences. With the development of the drawing room comedy, however, theater became the exclusive plaything of the upper classes, a form of aristocratic diversion rather than mass entertainment. It became as much a status symbol as a type of art. It should come as little surprise that almost no memorable plays were written for the 200 years of theater's self-sequesterment in the homes of the rich and influential.

To equate a few cushions in the Loeb Ex with the two-century-long death of interesting dramatic work in England would be somewhat overstating the point. The problem that Picasso's original seating design highlights is not an absence of creative talent in the Harvard theater scene. Rather, it highlights an absence of exposure. Like almost any activity at any university, undergraduate theater at Harvard has a fairly static collection of adherents. The same set of people see most of the shows on campus-and they are the same set of people who help produce (or are close friends with those who help produce) most of the other shows on campus. In a small theater like the Ex (which practically comes with a built-in audience) this phenomena is only evident in the repetition of faces at most performances. In larger spaces like the Agassiz and especially the Loeb Mainstage, however, less than ideal ticket sales for excellent shows indicate more clearly the limited extent of the theater-going audience at Harvard.

The same can be said of most activities on campus, of course. The water polo team probably never attracts more than a smattering of people beyond its core fan base. But whereas a sport can thrive on a small but dedicated set of adherents, theater is apt to die from such a situation. Perhaps die is too strong a word, for this death depends on one's vision of the function of theater. If theater is to function strictly as a form of entertainment then it doesn't really matter whether you're entertaining the same 20 people or a different 200 people every week. If theater is strictly a form of self-expression, then again the size and diversity of the audience is of little consequence. The focus of theater lies in such cases in the opportunity it provides for actors or directors or writers to express their thoughts and feelings more than in the number of people who hear those thoughts and feelings.

But if the function of theater is to change the world, then the size and diversity of the audience is of the utmost importance. Perhaps in our day of deconstructed meanings and relative truths such a lofty goal for a few actors strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage is laughable. But history, at least, is on the side of such a grand design. It is not without reason that theater attendance in ancient Greece was a civic duty, that of all the means of entertainment and expression in Renaissance England theater was the most closely censored by the crown (and that theatrical censorship was the last form of censorship to be lifted in England, not officially ending until the 1960s), that social agitators from Voltaire to Vaclav Havel to Wole Soyinka all turned to drama to express their ideas.

But changing the world need not be so dramatic as these examples make it sound. A good production of Me and My Girl could, in its way, have as much of an effect on society as the most openly activist plays like Waiting for Lefty or Not One Flea Spare. It is the nature of theater and not the content of the play itself that is important. Theater of any type teaches us-sometimes it teaches us how to watch and learn from and understand people, sometimes how to interpret their actions and see past their language, sometimes how to love villains and how to hate heroes. But always it teaches us how to observe and how to learn from observation. And the more we learn how to do that, the less we approach the world with prejudice and preconception. The more we learn to watch, the less we learn to judge. And the less we learn of judging, the more we learn of compassion, a state born of watching quietly and not of judging actively.

So what is to be done about the drawing-room-ization of campus theater? The massive project of expanding the audience for theater is more than can be addressed on a single page, and this is not the place for such a manifesto. This is simply an attempt to draw attention to an issue that is of far greater importance than it may at first appear. Theater, unlike almost any other activity on campus or off, has a unique responsibility to expand its circle of adherents. Let plays be entertaining. Let plays offer actors and directors a chance to express themselves. But also let them change lives, slowly and unnoticeably. And through that slow, unrecognizable change in individuals, let them change the world.