David Shepherd wrote this article
in 1959 about his search for a popular theatre. It was published in Encore
Magazine that same year. David created Compass, the first professional improvisation
company in North America with Paul Sills, and the
Improvisation Olympics with Howard Jerome. In addition, David Shepherd has created
dozens of other formats during his 60 plus year career in improvisation.
THE SEARCH
by DAVID SHEPHERD
In my country, America, we say
something is popular when it succeeds in winning the lead in its market.
Cadillac has become more popular than Packard, for instance, even though few
Americans can afford to buy either. Billions of dollars are spent to announce
the winners until finally the taste of the consumer is determined by
advertising itself. When the rocket ship designs of big cars are copied in
order to sell little cars, then those designs become “popular” in one sense:
their lower price makes them accessible to the public. But in another sense
they become less popular: they simply do not express the public’s taste.
When plays are written to
sell automobiles on T.V., or to capture a lead in the very costly competition
between Broadway producers then the theatre must become an art of making things
attractive, of flattering its patrons. Who can afford to invest in a product
that is not attractive in every way when it costs you $100,000 to put your foot
into the market? But even when this product proves to be a smash hit, we have
to ask ourselves if it is truly any more popular than the rocket ship designs
that are used to sell millions of Americans a new car every January.
 |
| David Shepherd in 1959 |
A popular play from New York is one which
brings thousands from all over the country, anxious to spend from $2.50 to
$50.00 a ticket to see it before it is made into a movie. The most popular
theatre is whichever theatre is most difficult to get into this month. For the
ladies who can get tickets through their clubs, theatre becomes not a habitual
part of life but a very special event. For the administrators through their
businesses, the theatre must be the one place in New York where they can stop thinking and
let the lights and music work on them like an expert masseur. These men go back
to their hotels assured of the popularity of the show if their clients have
stayed pleasantly awake through-out.
Naturally, there is a
rebellion against this state of popularity. The producer or director who wants
a less drowsy, less flattering theatre often decides that the only plays worth
doing are the ones that are the least popular. He looks for paradoxical plays
and will accept even confused and ugly plays. This rebellion might nourish a
small but important voice in the theatre if it were allowed to grow in
seclusion. But usually the rebels are only waiting to be caught in the
spotlight. That is, some fraction of their rebellion or confusion is found to
be useful in the enormous salesroom. They disappear into the same well-paid
circles they once condemned, and their disappearance further confuses and
embitters those who remain.
As the mass media becomes
more powerful and sophisticated, virtually all young dramatists and directors
will make their peace and find their spot in the market-place of attractions.
The trend is becoming visible in every country as T.V. follows movies around
the world. It will make drama attractive to hundreds of millions of people who
have none of their own. It will provide jobs for tens of thousands of talented
people. But it can only impose tastes on those millions very different from
their own. And it cannot help but change the function of the theatre in
becoming a poor sister and laboratory assistant of the atomic explosions of
T.V. and movies.
It is possible that in 50
years the theatre in New York will only be a
testing ground for T.V. plots and outside New York only a technique for children and
old ladies to express themselves? If it is not, we will have to accept an older
notion of popularity than that which is current in America today.
What is this older notion? We
are told, for instance, that the greatest theatres in history – the theatres of
Sophocles, Moliere, Shakespeare – were, at their best moments, popular
theatres. That is, they were accessible to everybody – rich and poor, farmers
and courtiers; seats were easy to get, the stories were common knowledge and
the ways of telling them were rich and various – dance, music, mime, song and
many others. The men who wrote for those theatres had the same strong opinions
and the same fear of censorship as our better dramatists have, but they learned
to couch these opinions in a story and to tell that story in a way that would
satisfy many different tastes at the same time. This kind of popularity is rare
today. When I hear people of different occupations whistling the theme from The
Bridge on the River Kwai in the street, I know an artistic miracle has
occurred: the intellectuals don’t despise it for being middle class, or the
business men for being cheap, or the working people for being long hair. At the
same time a commercial miracle has occurred: the film has played in both the
plush houses and the cheap houses, both uptown and downtown. It has managed to
break through the barriers of habit, taste and income that have grown so high
in cities all over the country.
There is even an older notion
of popularity, one that may not be so hard to apply today. We are told of
certain theatres which produced few important plays, but were important in the
society of their times – the oriental theatre of story and dance, the medieval
religious theatre, the Italian Commedia dell’Arte. These were popular in a
different way. They performed wherever there was an audience – in the fields,
squares, courtyards; they invented material for the occasion and they recruited
talent directly from their audiences. This was folk theatre. It survives today,
but not vigorously, in our fraternity reviews and historical pageants. When the
movies can offer four hours of Biblical massacre complete to the last jeweled
thigh for only 75 cents, who wants to struggle with three rickety acts and
accompanying sets? Progress promises that we will have the five hour massacre
soon and that we will be able to see it in our homes and vista vision. Let us
hope that progress will also bring us this oldest kind of theatre, whether as a
do-it-yourself kit or as a new game, so that some part of our leisure can be
diverted into thinking in dramatic terms for ourselves.
I myself have made an
experiment along these lines. While producing the Playwrights Theatre Club in Chicago, I found it
impossible to get scripts that were relevant to the life of the city and that
would enlarge or diversify the audience. I got a strong impression that the
theatre was upside down. You always start with an old script and its needs, a
director and his needs, publicity and its needs. Instead of publicity, why not
start with the public, instead of a director why not stories that can be
improvised economically? Instead of subjecting people to a precise day, hour,
seat number and schedule, why not let a part of the evening take its own path
while people smoke, drink and talk? In this way a theatre came into existence
call COMPASS, which has played in many locations in Chicago,
St. Louis and New York over the past three years.
COMPASS is a theatre of
improvisation. It provides a way not for theatre to be big and spectacular, but
for a few people to communicate face to face. It tries to turn the limitations
of theatre to its advantage. Before you can even have theatre, people must
first leave their homes and sit down next to other people whom they don’t know.
These people, as a group, have a new but unknown personality and demand to see
certain themes and topics that are on their minds. As this personality emerges
it begins to affect the performance until a tension develops between it and the
personality of the cast. This tension is the raw material of COMPASS. If the
company spends part of each evening dramatizing its own attitudes and part
catching the reactions of the audience, then the wall that separates the two is
broken and they begin to converse in a common dramatic language.
Improvisation produces no
literary masterpieces, but it does what many masterpieces fail to do. It wakes
up the imagination of the actor and forces the spectator to ask questions:
“Where is this scene? Why is that actor doing that? What’s going to happen
next?” Often the actor himself may not know what will happen next. There is no
playwright to spoon feed him with answers to every question the public has.
Nothing is served up to the public on a platter – neither overwhelming feeling
nor total knowledge nor a complete judgment of the world. The spectator has to
work a little for his pleasure because he is watching a process and not a
result. Scenes grow in front of his eyes, and he picks out the common
experiences and familiar characters. When he himself is asked to suggest a
scene or plot, he gets a new pleasure – the pleasure of taking a hand in the
process. While the actors are preparing backstage, he’s discussing with his
friends what they can or cannot expect to see on the stage.
This is a theatre of actions rather
than dialogue, and the way things happen becomes more important to the audience
than the conversations surrounding them. When actors can switch parts, when
scenes can be stopped, started, re-routed and turned upside down, then the
whole question of interpretation becomes visible and accessible. On the one
hand, the actor has to choose a scene where there is no script. On the other
hand, the spectator has to choose whether to buy a scene that has been made to
his order. If these choices brought to light by the director in a kind of dramatic
game, then what happens on the stage is no longer thought of as exciting or
boring, but rather as well or badly done. When the spectator is partly
responsible for the success of what happens on the stage, he gradually becomes
as much of a specialist in theatre as he is in the mysteries of football or
golf.
This is a theatre of stories,
newspaper clippings, events of the week, daily activities, caricatures, scenes
of family life and office life, of factories and resorts. The scenes pass
across the stage like snapshots of life in the community. The actors have to
know that life well enough so that when a customer says “I want to see a scene
about a boy who runs away from home because he doesn’t want to go to a military
school,” they can prepare the background to such a scene in 20 minutes. At
rehearsal the roles are reversed: an actor may say “I have an idea for three
scenes about the sputnik: let’s try it this week and see how the audience takes
it.” Or a writer may come to the theatre and say, “I have an idea for a play,
but it may be too abstract; before I write it, could you try these scenes about
a husband and wife who have the following relationship…..?” Finally, the
director may say, either in rehearsal or performance, “Go on with this scene
but imagine that you lost all your money last week and haven’t the courage to
tell your wife,” or “Let’s do this same scene, but this time in the home of a
cab driver.”
COMPASS is only one solution
to the problem of how theatre can be popular. Its principal technique,
improvisation, is important for its own sake but is more important as a way for
the cast to reach the audience. Its principal discipline, the bare stage, makes
for a style but is more important as a way of opening the stage to the wishes
of the audience. The most important consideration of all is to have theatres
where there are none today – providing always that they make for a cultural
ferment and not a sediment in the lives of the people who attend them. The
theatre can still do many jobs that cannot be done in the mass media. For all
their shattering effects, the mass media are still impersonal, and their
audience is so huge and passive that it is becoming harder and harder to write
well for it.
The search for popularity has
kept the theatre in a constant state of crisis since it came indoors 400 years
ago. What novelist, historian or poet need to concern himself with keeping
hundreds of seats filled with dozens of bellies fed month after month? As soon
as you choose to work in the theatre or write for it, you find yourself
searching for that most elaborate or shocking of spectacles that will keep the
last rows filled on a Tuesday. But at
the same time the search for popularity is what creates theatre. It may not be
a very broad popularity if the search is made cynically by the producer or
condescendingly by the writer, or vulgarly by the actor. It may not be a very
important theater if the search is a political gesture to one class or a
disguised attempt to sell soap. But if the search brings the most important
stories of our culture to the greatest number of its citizens, if it brings
people together instead of justifying their differences in attitude and taste,
then it can be the most vital force that the theatre knows.
Michael Golding is a writer, director and improv teacher. He can be contacted for workshops, festivals
and private consultations at migaluch@yahoo.com. Michael participated in the evolution of the Improv Olympics &
Canadian Improv Games. Artistic director of the Comic Strip Improv Group in
N.Y. & created the Insight Theatre Company for Planned Parenthood, Ottawa. He is a faculty member at El Camino College
in Los Angeles,
working with at-risk teens and traditional students. He wrote and co-produced
the documentary "David Shepherd: A Lifetime of Improvisational
Theatre" (available for free on YouTube).
His book, Listen Harder, a collection of essays, curriculum and
memorabilia on improvisation and educational theatre, is available on Amazon,
Barnes & Noble and CreateSpace. Michael holds a BFA degree in Drama from
New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts & an MA degree in
Educational Theatre from NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education &
Human Development.
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