the same but different

You might not know think you've ever heard of the playwright Wallace Shawn (one of my favorite writers), but you've definitely seen him in one of his innumerable cameo roles in movies and TV:

In an essay entitled "Myself and How I Got into the Theatre," he addresses the differences in theater-going culture on either side of the Atlantic:

And who were the theatre-goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. Those enormous respectable crowds had never gathered in the United States, the way they had in so many European cities, to watch the plays of Ibsen or Racine. The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre just didn't arise. And for those who, somehow, had gone so far as to see a play or two--well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. Having been exposed extensively to the rival storytelling mediums of television and film, most of my fellow-countrymen found it frankly rather peculiar to pay extra money to attend an event in which the faces of the actors could barely be seen, and where you had to strain to hear what on earth they were saying (despite the fact that they never stopped shouting, even when standing right next to each other).

As a newly minted graduate student in a playwriting program, I've had occasion to think quite a bit recently about those differences in theatrical culture. What are they all about? What's the difference between theater in the US and the UK?

Well, first of all, I would argue that the kinds of things you can see in the UK, you can also see in the US and vice versa. All of the problems afflicting Broadway these days (jukebox musicals, half-baked movie adaptations) can also be found in the West End. Sometimes they are literally the same productions (i.e. Wicked, Jersey Boys) or other times they're English versions of the same formulas that American producers have been using (there are stage adaptations of Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Shawshank Redemption as well as the forgettable English film comedy Calendar Girls on now in London).

Similarly, if you know where to look, you can pretty much find in New York the same kind of gems that you can in England: great Sheakespeare, interesting new plays, devised work created by experimental collectives, etc.

The difference, I would argue, is related to the situation that Shawn describes above. It has to do with the audiences. In New York (and the US in general) we have a much more stratified theatrical environment. You have your Broadway audiences, your non-profit subscriber bases, the cultural elite who go to the Lincoln Center Festival, the hipsters who go to see things downtown and in Brooklyn warehouses. But these strata of theater don't seem to be part of the same community and few members of the general public (i.e. people who are not theater-makers themselves) would be found in all of these places.

What's amazing to experience in London is that there is indeed a "general public" for theater. If you look at the programming at the National, an institution whose mission is to represent the nation, you see classics, you see plays by the heavy-hitters (Stoppard, Hare), you see inventive shows aimed at young audiences, you see multi-media and devised work. And lots of these same productions go on to tour the nation (which is, admittedly, easier to do in a comparatively small nation).

Theater education and "community-based" theater is also much more widespread here, which may also explain how a broader audience is developed and maintained. Many major UK playwrights (people like David Edgar and Mark Ravenhill) work with various different community and youth groups to create plays that somehow interact with the community. There is a thriving culture of small theaters outside of London that develop new work and draw in local audiences.

What I'm getting at is a structural difference: there's a more diverse eco-system here in the UK. If the West End were to shut down due to a stagehands' strike the way Broadway did a couple of years ago, no media source would send its chief theatre critics (as the New York Times did during the Broadway shut-down) to review museums and concerts, as if to say that there was no theater worth paying attention to than the commerical mega-shows. Everyone in England knows that there's much more to their theatrical culture than the West End.

My Times gripe is revealing: with more newspapers over here writing about theater, and none of them dominating the market, you have a broader marketplace of critical ideas, more room for different kind of work to be championed and recognized.

And this whole circumstance results in another quite significant difference, one that was mentioned to me last night by an actor who had worked in both countries: "In London," he said, "an actor assumes he's getting paid for his work, unless he hears otherwise. In New York, he assumes that he's not."

There are different funding structures here, which help support less obviously commercial work. The Arts Council has certain requirements for subsidized theater, which is part of the reason why so many institutions and artists do community-based work. (And every citizen, including unemployed actors, gets nationalized health care.)

To get back to Shawn's remark, with which I opened this post, theater in the UK is just a bigger deal than it is in the US.

I don't mean to paint an overly rosy picture here. As my course continues and I have more contact with theater administrators and literary managers, I will learn more from the inside about how things operate here. Having worked in community-based theater in New York, I'm eager to see how the English do it.

At the moment, though, with so much theater to see and to think about, it feels a bit like a bounty of riches.