There is nothing worse in the Art World than Realism and Naturalism. What good is an original painting that — “looks just like the photograph!” — when the duty of the Artist is to transform reality and bend understanding in new, and perhaps, unwanted and unheralded directions? No talent is needed for mimicry or absolute imitation.
There’s an old theatre chestnut — that is basically misunderstood — that goes a little something like this: “Every scene needs to end on a button.” Sometimes you’ll even see a director pacing at the back of the theatre asking out loud, “How do I button this scene?”
It may seem curious to argue for authenticity in an aesthetic arena created on falsity, fantasy and the imperiled facade — but we all must strive for the authentic over the gimmick as we dare to present the world on stage.
When I first arrived in Washington, D.C. many years ago as fresh-faced lad freshly graduated from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, one of the first places I was able to feed myself was at Arena Stage reading scripts at $10 a pop for Lloyd Rose and Jerry Manning. Arena Stage is one of the best professional regional theatres in the world — they were one of the first theatres to employ an acting core on a full time basis — and Zelda Fichandler created Arena Stage out of nothing and ran it for 40 years from 1950 to 1990 until she moved to New York University in 1987 to run the graduate school acting program.
I am not a fan of the One Act Play — even though I’ve written many of them — because I now realize just how ubiquitously they have killed the modern theatre by shaving expectation, shortening audience attention spans and by setting a low-budget watermark for producers and a little-to-none time commitment for directors and actors. One Act Plays are a cheat against the human spirit, as the convenience of mindless television plotting replaces the tension of the live stage performance.
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