"Theater teaches us how to be together."
Does it? It certainly requires us to be together -- part of the reason for the craziness of theater people. The art form mandates a collectivity that works in opposition to the (admittedly paradoxical) normative individualism of contemporary U.S. culture. We theater people are a nutty band of gypsies, forced to work together as we stand apart from the nine-to-fivers of the world.
But DO we stand apart? For me, this is an open question. Ehn would say yes, would say (did say) "we are artists. There's a separate word for us because we do on behalf of others what they cannot. We have access to the waters." And on the one hand that's true, but on the other I am suspicious of anything that sets me apart from my dear friends who are doctors, teachers, students, security guards. Don't we all, on some level, do on behalf of others what they cannot? Yet there seems to be the assumption, often, that artists really are a breed apart, that we have chosen a path that sets us at odds with society as a whole, that relegates us to grinding, hanging-by-a-thread poverty or parallel-reality let's-do-lunch fame and fortune.
How can we say that theater teaches us how to be together if the people who make it choose (or are relegated to) a life that is separate from the "us" in question? Yes, there's something to be said for the objectivity of the "outside observer," but how can we wring our hands about audience size, about the idea of making "relevant" theater if, through the very practices we employ (are often forced to employ) to make art and/or live as artists, we distance ourselves from the people we're trying to reach?
Maybe this is a particularly American problem.
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