“There is competition everywhere.”

I have to admit that the preceding quote from Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb is true, but I like to think that the ever-struggling arts might take a more collegial view than the one espoused by Gelb in an interview with The Guardian. In that story, Gelb defends The Met’s practice of requiring that venues which show “The Met: Live in HD” series of movie theatre simulcasts may not show the work of other opera companies (the English National Opera is cited specifically). My previous admiration for Gelb’s innovative work in the field of cinema screenings of performing arts is now severely mitigated by my dismay over the exclusionary tactics of the United States’ largest performing arts organization.

I’m not upset as an opera buff – far from it. I might see one opera a year and that tends to be plenty for me. Instead, I’m struck by the fact that while movie studios themselves were forced, decades ago, to divest themselves of theatre ownership precisely to prevent such exclusionary booking practices, an enormous not-for-profit has effectively reinstated it when it comes to using such venues for one cultural discipline. Speaking like a corporate shark or a mob boss who doth protest too much, Gelb says, “We don’t force movie theatres to take our movies; we don’t hold a gun to their heads. They could take the Royal Opera instead if they wanted to.”

Gelb cites the limited repertoire of opera in general, and competition for singers and directors as a cause for his exclusionary tactics (I’ll leave it to you to read the rest of the argument); it’s worth noting that he fails to cite any concurrent or similarly expansive efforts to expand operatic literature or showcase young talent, which surely would alleviate some of his worries. But I cry only crocodile tears for his dilemma, much as I do for the poor beleaguered owners of sports teams who apparently cannot make a buck on their franchises valued in the hundreds of millions, even when they receive corporate welfare to build ever flashier and more exclusive stadiums. The fact is, this past weekend in Manhattan, in addition to the actual Metropolitan Opera performing Faust on stage, you could see that production in at least four major movie theatres on Saturday, while on Sunday, at a single venue of which I’d never heard, you could glimpse Don Giovanni live from La Scala in Milan. I have no idea what the national or international theatre ratio or audience attendance might have been.

Because of my marginal enthusiasm for opera, I immediately began to wonder whether this kind of us-or-them mentality applied to theatre at the movies as well. Although I was aware of past cinema screenings of Roundabout’s The Importance of Being Earnest, the Broadway production of Memphis and a few shows from London’s The Globe, it seemed that the National Theatre’s NT Live series was hugely dominant. Were they similarly anti-competitive? Not at all, per Mary Parker, senior press officer at The National: “We have no limitations – venues that show our broadcasts can show anything else they want, we have no exclusivity as part of our contracts.”

I hesitate to plant my flag so firmly on this particular issue, because I believe that live performing arts are best experienced live in person, not projected on a screen; I likened these screenings to PBS broadcasting writ large when they began. But I have come to realize that I have been privileged to spend my life in Connecticut and New York, supplemented with frequent travel to London, so while these cinema screenings may not be essential for me, they are a lifeline for those less fortunate and with less access to cultural capitals than I have enjoyed for most of my life.  When I spoke with Nicholas Hytner of the National almost a year ago, he voiced strong sentiments about accessibility and exposure through NT Live; indeed, it was that conversation which turned my own thinking on the topic.

But ultimately I’m concerned less about this single aspect of cultural programming, cinema screenings, than I am about collegiality and cooperation (or lack thereof) in the arts. While giving due respect to Gelb and The Met for pioneering this expansion of arts programming, they are now setting the worst possible example by trying to exclude their peers (and they have few anywhere in the world as it is) from sharing their achievements through advancements in technology by owning the category. This is not about competition, as Gelb would have it; this is about cultural monopolization.  Should any arts organization that receives public funding be allowed to undertake initiatives that explicitly deny others?

At a time when all of the arts must find strength in numbers, in unity, in the sharing of ideas and resources, Gelb and The Met are espousing the corporate mentality of Gordon Gekko; it stands in stark relief against the slow-motion implosion of its one-time neighbor, the New York City Opera. It is as if the Met wants not only to be the Yankees of American Opera, they want to be the Harlem Globetrotters too, dazzling us with their skills, but assured of never losing a game. You need never ask not for whom or when the fat lady sings, Mr. Gelb, since given your druthers, she would apparently sing only for thee.

I was invited by Polly Carl of Arena Stage’s New Play Institute to contribute to their very active HowlRound blog in the fall of 2011. Ever the contrarian, I wrote not about new, current plays, but rather about plays which were new and current some 20 to 25 years ago. It proved most gratifying because Bill Cain, the author of the play I focused upon most, saw the blog and wrote an exceptional coda in the comments section.  It is reproduced here following my essay. For all of the original responses, you can read the the post and comments at HowlRound. You can also see .

Are you familiar with any of these plays? Stand-Up Tragedy. Daytrips. Romance Language. A Place With The Pigs. From The Mississippi Delta. Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad. Pill Hill. Messiah. In Perpetuity Throughout The Universe. A few? None? Don’t feel bad, because to my knowledge, none of them have received a major production in years. Yet they were all new plays that received prominent productions from the mid 80s to the early 90s. Some had New York runs, both long and short. I saw them all, and worked on several.

Of the playwrights, some remain active in the theater, others moved on to television, I don’t know what’s up with a few, one passed away recently, another several years ago. They are, in order, Bill Cain, Jo Carson, Peter Parnell, Athol Fugard, Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Mark Lee, Samuel Kelly, Martin Sherman, and Eric Overmyer. Certainly a few of those names are familiar.

So why do I single out these relative obscurities? Because I think they are the barest tip of an enormous iceberg: plays that were once perceived to display value and talent, but never achieved a level of recognition to have become standards, let alone classics. They were hot new plays that grew cold for any number of reasons, and now languish somewhere in the catalogues of companies like Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service like orphans, forever hoping someone will notice them, but always being passed over for the younger, newer, more conventionally attractive.

I should acknowledge before I go on that new plays are essential to the lifeblood of the theater, and I champion the opportunities created for authors to develop and premiere new work, as well as to see it go on to second, third, or tenth productions, whether in New York or Peoria. I hope that new works don’t suffer from the “premiere”-itis that swept regional theaters in the 1980s, when everyone pursued the first production of a new play, but then that work found itself abandoned, for any number of reasons: a bad first production, the fact that it was no longer a “virgin” work that could attract grants, having not attracted the “right” critics to hoist it to the next level, that its subsidiary rights were already encumbered. I love the discovery of new work and nothing herein should suggest otherwise.

But I keep thinking about these orphaned plays, which were in fact once loved. Where do they fit in the new play lifecycle of American Theater? After all, I was not alone in appreciating them in their day, and I was hardly the only person to see them. I know that these weren’t necessarily perfect pieces, but they were effective and evocative, and part of our theatrical heritage as surely as well-known classics.

I think often and fondly of Stand-Up Tragedy, a play I fell in love with upon reading its very first page, when a Catholic priest stated his desire to, in his next life, work for a religion that “doesn’t use a dead young man as its logo.” Only pages later, the same character posited the tenets of all great religions—“Who made the world? What went wrong? What do we do now?” Surely these ideas remain pertinent, as does the central story of an idealistic young man who discovers that his altruistic ambitions may not be enough to save troubled inner-city youths. And Bill Cain, after a stint in television, is back writing plays with a vengeance, with premieres of Equivocation, Nine Circles, and How To Write a New Book of the Bible coming in rapid succession. Whatever the perceived flaws of Stand-Up Tragedy, it is a seminal work by a committed and talented playwright that deserves second, third, and fourth looks.

Not to focus on plays rooted in Catholic theology, but I was also deeply struck recently when I attended a reading at The Public Theater of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play which premiered when I was nine years old, but which I knew had been a landmark play from the early days of the Mark Taper Forum. I saw it primarily because a friend was playing the role of the author, Father Daniel Berrigan. I went expecting agitprop theater that had dated poorly; I came away with a lesson in a Vietnam War-era protest and a soaringly beautiful finale, all the more remarkable for having been fashioned from the transcripts of the trial that gave the play its name.

In a field where only the most dedicated academics and literary managers know much of American playwriting before O’Neill, and where the growth of regional theater made up for the reduction in Broadway venues during the 1960s and 70s, perhaps it’s unsurprising that there is now a body of abandoned plays. Perhaps we simply cannot be expected to produce not only the accepted canon of Western dramatic literature and essential new work and also to perpetually reexamine work from the recent past. But surely there is some compromise position. While New York’s Second Stage began with the mission of reviving overlooked plays from not so long ago, it is now best known for showcasing new work; Signature Theatre Company in New York, with its focus on a single playwright each season, has at times revitalized overlooked works from playwrights’ oeuvres. But the companies here in New York that focus on largely forgotten plays of the past, The Mint Theater and Peccadillo Theater, look back at least fifty, if not seventy-five years for their material. Has much of the playwriting of the 70s and 80s gone the way of the leisure suit and disco, the skinny tie and the Mohawk haircut, and must it wait another thirty to fifty years before it gets another chance?

I wonder whether the not-for-profit theater is guilty of what we accuse “popular culture” of doing, that is to say, constantly embracing the new and abandoning anything that can be accused of being “so five minutes ago” (as is that particular phrase). Do we lionize only the true hits and consign the vast body of literature engendered by and created for our stages to the dustbin of history? Yes, you can browse for them at the Drama Book Shop in New York or the Samuel French shop in Los Angeles, but beyond that, they require archeological hunts, facilitated by sites both commercial (Amazon) and altruistic (the dizzyingly thorough Doollee.com). But how many never even saw publication, relegating them to permanent anonymity? And while I’m speaking mostly of plays, I would be remiss in pointing out that the same fate befalls new musicals too, especially those that aren’t recorded, since so few people can or are even willing to read a score or have it played aloud for them.

What’s fascinating is that whenever someone does have the vision to revivify a somewhat lost work, they are hailed for doing so. Though older than the plays I’ve previously cited, Arena Stage had enormous success with Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind. MCC Theater in New York is poised to resuscitate the musical Carrie, which is likely to prove either folly or inspired, and both critics and fans await it with bated breath. Although I’m citing a work of French origin from the 60s, when the long-forgotten Boeing Boeing hit West End and Broadway pay dirt a few seasons back, non-profits across the U.S. rushed to program it, and soon Roundabout will stage its even less familiar sequel, Don’t Dress for Dinner. There is life, and ticket sales, left in so many pieces.

The modern American playwriting tradition is, arguably, only about a hundred years old, but it has certainly boomed, with countless theaters and training programs encouraging ever more plays (and yes, there are more plays than there are theaters to produce them; it was perhaps ever thus). But I worry that its growth has created an overamped Darwinian ecology which eats too many of its young and narrows its focus to the prize winners and nominees, to the works that become hits straightaway, to those that end up on critical “best of year” lists without giving them all time to be considered and mature before they are, by some unspoken consensus, deemed no longer worthy. I think we owe it to our field to not just support playwrights and their new plays, but to maintain the pulse of their body of work and the work that came before them, so there is a true continuum in American dramatic literature, not just a series of that which, in its time, was deemed the very best. Is it possible? Yes. Practical? Maybe not. But I think it’s a worthwhile goal. Who knows what we may find, barely breathing, but ready to be loved and speak to us once again, perhaps as it never could before.

To once again quote Stand-Up Tragedy, “I don’t have all the answers. I just want to ask better questions.”

*   *   *

FROM BILL CAIN:

The odd thing about Stand-Up Tragedy isn’t that it has vanished but that it ever was. The only reason it ever came to be was because people like you, Howard, had such enthusiasm for it and I remain grateful. My agent, Beth Blickers, still can’t believe that an over-the-transom un-agented first play got picked up for a workshop by the Mark Taper Forum. Bob Egan – who picked it up – is still astonished that it went from workshop to second stage to mainstage at the Taper in a year. And then to San Francisco to D.C. to Hartford and to Broadway. And I still can’t believe that after doing so well in those places that one review in the New York Times could kill it so dead. It took me 20 years to write another play – though writing for television – a critic-proof medium – in the meantime was a very great joy. … I was deeply ashamed of the short Broadway run. And it took me a long time to get over that. Two things eventually addressed the shame – one, immediate – one, over the long haul. The immediate help was that Stand-Up didn’t just teach me how to write; it also taught me why I should write. On opening night at the Taper in Los Angeles – a wonderful night – one of the young teachers on whom the main teacher was based – had flown himself out to see the show. I was very nervous to hear how it had affected him. When I found the courage to ask, he didn’t say that he had liked it or not. He said something much simpler. He said, “I didn’t know anybody had seen me.” When the show opened on Broadway – also a wonderful night at least until the review came out – the boy who was the model for the central student was there and I was terrified of his response. He said something similar. He said, “I’m the hero, aren’t I?” And I said, “Yeah – you always have been.” They taught me what writing is about. Letting people know that they have been seen in all their hidden greatness. It was a big thing to learn. And a new way to evaluate success and failure of a work that took years to write. … The more long term healing element was discovering that the show wasn’t dead. Over the years, having people come up to me and say, “I got started in Stand-Up,” has been a very great and surprising joy. Just the other night at 9 Circles in Los Angeles in a talkback, a young actor said that seeing Stand-Up had been a starting place for him. I asked him if he had seen the Taper production. He said no, he had seen it in Virginia. Who knew? Gordon Davidson said to me after opening in Los Angeles, “Now the play goes out and does its work.” I am very grateful to be a part of that process – both as a writer and an audience member. Nobody talks about Chips With Everything or No Strings – but they continue to work in me and I am grateful. … Thank you, Howard, for bringing all of this to mind.

Once upon a time, perhaps 15 or 20 years ago, I read a really fascinating article which posited that the arts would get more coverage in the media if they opened themselves up and provided greater access to the media. It suggested that the arts were working too hard to “control the story” at every possible turn and that as a result, we received only perfunctory coverage. Why, asked the article, which I believe had been presented as a speech at a conference of arts journalists, couldn’t the arts be more like sports, which gave the press access to practice sessions, to the locker rooms, in addition to the game itself?

Now I’m remembering this article (how I wish I still had it) at a temporal remove, so it would do no good to try to refute many of the points that made up its argument, which was perhaps hyperbolic, or even tongue in cheek, in the first place. But the issue of access remains with me, as someone who used to be one of the guardians who sought media coverage yet attempted to control every interaction between the artists at work in my theatre and those who would write about them.

I’m singing a somewhat different tune these days, although I’m no longer a publicist. While I never placed theatre in an ivory tower, I did respect that the artistic process shouldn’t be constantly opened up to scrutiny at every turn, and that to do so might well be detrimental. But I was doing my job in the very earliest days of the internet, and certainly before blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like transformed every individual in a given production, and on the staff, into a broadcaster of news, gossip and personal opinion, readily accessible to not just the press, but to audiences as well. Consequently, the issue of access has fundamentally changed, in both positive and negative ways.

Several weeks ago, my Twitter sparring partner Peter Marks took exception to the fact that Arena Stage was holding a summit of some three dozen industry leaders to explore the issue of new play production in America. Prompted by a press release announcing the event, which listed the theatre notables expected to attend, Peter sought to report on the two day “convening” but was rebuffed. After protracted discussions, he did not attend; he subsequently set down his thoughts about access in a piece for The Washington Post.

When first made aware of the situation, I stood squarely (but silently) with Peter, assuming that the November event mirrored Arena’s January convening, where the participants numbered over 100, the public was invited and panels were streamed live. But the recent event was by invitation only and, had it not been announced by press release, might have actually taken place unnoticed.

The January meeting, for which a summary report was just issued, became infamous for remarks about supply and demand in the theatre industry as voiced by NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman. News of those comments came fast and furious onto my Twitter stream as he spoke and, I confess, I called the theatre desk at The New York Times to suggest they might want to read what I was seeing (of which they were unaware), fueling what became an industry furor. To the best of my knowledge, no such news came out of the more intimate November convening, perhaps because of a shared commitment to privacy among the participants, but more likely due to the lack of tweeters and bloggers amongst our artistic and management leaders

While trying to keep any conversation in this day and age from reaching the public is difficult, I do believe that there are some conversations which can be most productive when people can speak in complete candor, which public or press presence can immediately mitigate. No one should interpret every closed-door meeting to be nefarious, nor should they cease because of pressure for unfettered inclusion (I should note that I know of several in the non-profit community who resent not having been invited as well). I’m not advocating exclusion, but privacy has its merits. TDF new play study, Outrageous Fortune, was not discounted upon its publication because it emerged from private conversations and used unsourced quotes, after all.

On the other hand…

Recently, a theatre in New York held a public panel on the arts, an event to which the public was invited to attend for a moderate price. Although I am not a journalist, I inquired about whether I might attend and “live-blog” the discussion, in the interest of sharing the conversation with a wider audience. I was rebuffed by the press office, being told that the theatre wanted to keep its event intimate and quiet. Because I have many personal relationships at the organization and because I am not a journalist, I did not pursue this further.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked. After all, this was a public event and anyone there could have tweeted or written about what took place. If I hadn’t wanted to bring my laptop and access a wi-fi connection for contemporaneous reportage, surely nothing would have stopped me from reporting via iPhone tweets (save for an eagle-eyed usher, perhaps). If I did not consider myself part of the theatre community, if I didn’t have friends I might offend, I might well have barreled ahead and, having seen no reports of the event, maybe I should have. I do consider it disingenuous to label something as a public forum and then suggest that only those physically present should have any access to what occurs. A very different case than what transpired at Arena.

All of this brings me around to the buzzword “transparency.” In both of the examples cited, the events were not fully transparent; I agree with one company’s position, while I’m mildly resentful of the other’s. I think transparency is, overall, positive, but it isn’t necessarily an all-access pass. Indeed, some may question why in my latter example, I’m not naming names — in the interest of transparency. I do so because I know the company in question will see this, may well be prompted to consider their future approach and I don’t wish to embarrass them or reveal private communications; I name Arena because the incident is already part of the public discourse.

Let me share a third example, in which the media plays no role. At Hartford Stage in the late 80s, a benefit for donors of a certain level, which proved quite popular, was the opportunity to observe tech rehearsals. With as many as 75 donors at the back of the theatre, the rehearsals proceeded, but a flaw in the plan was quickly discovered: the attendees were bothered that they couldn’t clearly hear the director’s instructions to the actors, the designers and the crew. As a result, the director was fitted with a body mic, to be turned on and off at will, which would allow everyone to hear directives more clearly. While it may have saved on vocal strain, and was perhaps incidental, it did have the effect of transforming that rehearsal into a sort of performance, where with every booming pronouncement, the show’s production team and company were reminded of the patrons at the back, whose presence had impacted upon process, whether imperceptibly or fundamentally we’ll never know.

Smart phones, ever-smaller computers, social networks, the rise of the citizen reporter and critic, the persistence of the mainstream media all promise to insure that we are living in an ever more transparent world. We have seen the impact upon politics and governing (not always the same thing) and every day we see society evolving to address the new openness, whether cultivated or abhorred. While our dressing rooms may remain off limits, we may well be reaching a point where little else in the creative process can be protected, and where surely the field will benefit from broader, open conversation in so many instances.

Perhaps rehearsal rooms will be fitted with the one-way mirrors employed by police dramas (and presumably the actual police), so that rehearsals can be observed, but with those rehearsing none the wiser. Perhaps every pre-show and post-show discussion, every panel and forum, will be streamed or recorded for public consumption. Perhaps the inspiration of first rehearsals and the very first table read of a script will be opened up either live or through technology. Perhaps we can demystify the process of theatre so that more people can appreciate its magic (and no, that’s not an oxymoron).

Let’s face it: we’re heading in a direction where transparency is unavoidable. Would we do better to hold on to the shutters from the inside, waiting in fear for outside forces to rip them from our hands, or to open them (and the doors) as often as we can, perhaps supporting the argument for those times when a little privacy may be of value? The way may not be completely clear, but only with unobscured vision will we succeed in managing this transformation.

Marketing. Advertising. Community Outreach. Audience engagement. Audience Development. Social Networking. Targeted Pitches. And so on.

This litany of phrases are among the buzzwords common to anyone who spends their time focused on attracting audiences to the theatre. They appear in the fire hose spray of blogs and tweets that consume my days and those of other like-minded individuals, as everyone tries to build a better mousetrap to lure theatregoers, and then generously or boastfully (or both) shares their experience and perspective with others.

Allow me a second short list.

Thrilling. Moving. Provocative. Hilarious. Insightful. Affecting. Witty. Stimulating. Shocking. Definitive. Wonderful. Imaginative. Spectacular. Thought-provoking. Intimate. Sensuous.

These are, of course, adjectives, a handful of examples of the language employed by theatres in the efforts listed above, as well as by critics to describe work which meets their favor. These are the words that course through subscription brochures, direct mail pitches and quote ads, perhaps so often that they are robbed of their meaning. They are meant to be motivational, but from overuse, they are rendered impotent.

I have undertaken this exercise because for all of the valuable advice and worthy dialogue that are part of my daily conversation about theatre, there’s one thing I never hear discussed:  tears. Not the verb, but the noun.

Certain films are often described as “tear-jerkers,” a phrase of condescension or disdain. In a continued show of sexism, modern tear-jerkers are usually thought of as being for women, save for the rare male “weepie,” such as Brian’s Song or Field of Dreams (and note how those both are counter-balanced by being set in the masculine world of sports). But we never speak of tears in the theatre, as if admitting to that level of emotional connection is somehow beneath the form’s intellectual and cultural aspirations. Yet three of the most personally important experiences I’ve had at the theatre in recent years have been at shows which provoked me to tears.  Indulge me as I identify each.

My first significant bout with tears at the theatre came during Signature Theater Company’s production of Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful featuring Lois Smith in the central role. In contrast to motion picture tears, which are usually evoked at the climax of the film (Elliot saying goodbye to E.T. perhaps) or at a key plot point (the death of Bambi’s mother), my tears at Bountiful came somewhere in the middle of Act II, as Carrie Watts spoke so plaintively of her desire to return to her longtime home, and plunged into the journey which gives the play its name. She was seeking a past to which she could never return, the comfort of loved ones and surroundings gone or decaying. In her despair, I thought of my widowed father, living in an “independent living facility,” without the wife with whom, among other endearments, he had shared a single beverage glass at meals throughout their decades together. I could keep in touch with him frequently, as could my siblings,  but we could not bring back my mother or restore my father’s true independence ever again, and tears streamed down my face as I recognized in Miss Watts what the word “bereft” must mean, and that this may well be my father’s perpetual state too. The tears – no sobs, not cries, just salty streaks – flowed for a good ten minutes.

I next came to tears at the long-running revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, directed by David Cromer. They began almost immediately at the start of the third act and continued unstaunched for the duration. I was bewildered by my reaction, because when this occurred, it was my second time seeing the production, and although I thought Cromer’s interpretation to be revelatory, I had not been moved as much the first time. Even as my eyes welled up and liquid dripped down my cheeks and off my chin, I was hyper-aware of the fact that the show’s Stage Manager, played by Michael McKean, who I knew casually, was sitting perhaps five feet from me; would he think me in distress, or perhaps be disturbed himself at this disproportionate display (when I saw him a couple of days later, he said he hadn’t noticed me at all, by the way). What had changed between my visits? I had lost a good friend, suddenly, and too soon, just a few weeks before the second viewing. Wilder’s graveyard of the departed, talking about those still alive, had acquired a new inhabitant, who sat on that stage as surely as did any of the actors.

You might wish to suggest that my tears were a result of plays from a different time, since Our Town and The Trip to Bountiful were both more than 50 years old, the product of an earlier era in theatrical writing. But they sprang forth yet again at a new play, Richard Nelson’s Sweet and Sad, during its all-too-brief run at The Public Theater. This slice of life in the Apple family, reuniting the characters and cast of the previous year’s That Hopey Changey Thing, was timed to and set on the day of the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, though it carefully avoided confronting that horror and its aftermath head-on. My tears began late in this play, as the family uncle, an actor now struggling with what must surely be advancing Alzheimer’s, recited a Walt Whitman poem that he would later present at a local 9/11 memorial service. As it happened, thanks to the three-quarter thrust of the Anspacher, the uncle’s back was to me, but the other five actors in the show, playing his nieces, nephew and one spouse, were facing directly at me. I watched them as they watched him, their beloved uncle, fraying more each day, summon his powers of performance, remarkably, yet one more time. I was struck by the supreme beauty of the moment: the poem, the performance of it, the characters’ love for each other, the acting company’s bond built over two separate productions, the deep humanity on display so very close to me, and my tears came yet again, through the end of the play and the curtain call, and the emotion carried me throughout my subway ride home.

I do not regret these reactions, which is why I share them. I see now that their common bond was their exploration of mortality, something I understand in my late 40s far differently than I did when in my 20s. Were tears at these plays unique to me, because of what I brought to each play, because of what had occurred in my life and to those I love and loved? Perhaps. But these tears were cleansing, true and precious. These plays and productions had tapped something in me that arose too rarely, releasing emotions either repressed or until those moments, unformed.

At this point, you may not recall that I began this essay with marketing-speak and a litany of adjectives, but I call you back there because I think so many of those words and phrases, as I said, have been denatured, or used to intellectualize the theatrical experience. I am smart enough to know that few people will buy tickets for something that they are assured will make them cry, yet I think we fail to value and share theatre’s potential to evoke responses that delve into our individual essences, and are essential.

I go to the theatre for many reasons, and a good cry isn’t one of them, yet these evenings I have just described will stay with me for as long as I have memory. They have had the power to move me even through the act of describing them for you. As we analyze, market, raise money, program, produce, we must not abstract or disdain evoking deep emotion through our work, since I think it may be the finest marketing tool we have: truth.

This short essay appeared on The New York Times “Artsbeat” blog in June, 2011. You can view the original here.

I stayed home and watched “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” last night and I don’t care who knows it.

I understand that this is not the most dramatic statement one could make. It doesn’t hold a candle to “I am Jean Valjean” or “At last my arm is complete again.” But given my career, especially over eight years at the American Theater Wing, such a declaration seems to surprise many people, who apparently imagine me at the theater every night.

As a Tony voter, I need to see every show that opens on Broadway and as a theater lover, I see far more than just those. Yet while my nights of theater-going per annum far outpace those of the average American (although I fear that’s a low bar to cross), I do not spend as much time at the theater as any critic, as any adjudicator of theater awards that encompass Off and Off-Off-Broadway, or even as many of the diehard fans who populate chat rooms and Twitter.

The fact is, I believe there is such a thing as too much theater.

I don’t mean that there is too much produced. Rather, I believe that – as in all things – going to the theater four or five times a week, week in and week out, isn’t good for you, and indeed, I think it hampers your ability to be a good theatergoer, contradictory as that sounds. I say this as someone with greater access than many — and someone grateful for an opportunity that many desire.

We experience theater very differently than other forms. We can pick up and put down reading at will, start and stop a CD, and now the DVR lets us pause during live events on TV. In theater, unless we are very privileged, we must attend to every moment or we may never see it again. That single-minded focus can be wearying. So like any exercise, muscular or mental, it’s important to vary our routine to insure the greatest gain.

I also believe that all forms of culture — high and low, academic and general — have an impact on our perception of every other form, and to consume only one with a single-minded passion diminishes the ability to appreciate it most fully. I don’t pretend to comprehend everything that Tom Stoppard writes, but I was surely helped along in “Arcadia” by high school science, just as the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” provided some context for his“Rock and Roll.”

The connections can be unexpected to say the least. I am frequently stunned to read how many young composers, of rock, of theater, of avant-garde works, cite Kiss (a band whose music I thought simplistic even when it was new) as a creative influence.

But I understand: When an angelic young woman begins Jez Butterworth’s Tony-nominated “Jerusalem” by singing the English hymn of that name, I could immediately contemplate the lyrics in their dramatic context because the song was not alien to me. I had known it for decades, despite being American and Jewish. How? The song was “covered” on Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery” album, an almost daily listen for my brother and me in our early teens and an infinitely clearer introduction than in a certain Monty Python sketch, where it was sung to a neurotic mattress salesman (if you don’t know, don’t ask).

Needless to say, I’m not advocating that people don’t go to the theater. Please go, and go often. But I strongly suspect that if you attend to more of the world, to all that’s available to you, then the world of theater will be ever richer, and its effects ever more profound.

I’ll even suggest that “off nights” spent just talking with family, with friends, will bolster your ability to connect with theater (since I hope you do not converse with them during shows). Indeed, I steadily cried through much of Act II of Signature Theater’s “The Trip to Bountiful” because it brought to the surface emotions that I had not yet fully addressed about my family at that time. In the character of Carrie Watts, I saw my widowed father, reluctantly moved from our family home into an “independent living” apartment.

So I’m wondering: is there a work of theater that you feel you appreciated, enjoyed or understood better as a result of something you experienced outside of the theater? When you need a break from avid theater-going, what is the palate cleanser that prepares you for the next course – or feast?

I shouldn’t be feeling ornery as holiday spirit is in the air, but I just read producer Ken Davenport’s newest blog, on theatrical effects, and it’s gotten me a bit riled. Before citing a list of his top five theatrical effects, Ken quotes Spider-Man bookwriter Glen Berger, and, assuming Ken captured the quote accurately, I’ll repeat it:

What really amazes an audience isn’t a big set piece. It’s how you can theatrically overcome narrative solutions. A simple, elegant solution is where the spectacle lies.

I’m riled because 80% of Ken’s list of theatrical effects and stagecraft strikes me as missing the point of theatre. We go to movies for effects, digital or not; we go to theatre for ingenuity, craft and theatricality, which doesn’t require technology. Spectacle is fine, and awe is great, but let me offer my list of some great theatrical effects:

1. Salieri’s transformation early in Amadeus. In the original production, the play began with an aged Salieri wrapped in blankets, clad in a skullcap and very wizened in years. But as his memory takes him back to the earliest days of his nemesis, Mozart, at court, the actor playing Salieri steps out of the chair and the black, peels back the skullcap, relaxes his face and adopts a young man’s voice – transformed into vitality before our eyes, through nothing but a casting off of rags and, oh yes, acting. (I have seen later productions in which the transformation is more gradual, and the magic is lost.)

2. The death of George and Martha’s son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? [spoiler alert] As we agonize with George and Martha, Nick and Honey through the long, dark night and into the creeping dawn in Virginia Woolf, we are witness to a murder, the murder of a child terrorized by his banshee mother, disappointed by his milquetoast father. At his father’s hands we live through the boy’s death with his clutching mother, only to realize, if we have not already, that the boy never existed, and was the pawn in another of George and Martha’s marital games. Ultimately, our sorrow is at the realization of the depth of the “parents” dysfunction, yet it is, as per Mr. Albee, an exorcism, and perhaps now this couple has a chance at a healthier life together. This effect is achieved simply through the words of Edward Albee, as great a magician as the theatre has produced.

3. One cast, two plays, two theatres, at once. Alan Ayckbourn’s House and Garden, two interlinked plays in which the actors travel back and forth between the simultaneous action in two theatres, is a puzzle that reveals the fortitude of actors, the depth of a playwright’s imagination and the intricacy of the director’s task. I could easily list other Ayckbourn inspirations – the eight-play, 16-ending Intimate Exchanges, performed by a cast of two; Taking Steps, in which the actions in three apartments are played out simultaneously on the same single set – but that’s only because Ayckbourn is the master of the theatrical effect achieved with (and sometimes because of) great economy. Related examples are Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy and Michael Frayn’s Noises Off.

4. The transcendence of Vivian Bearing. Loathe as I am to use another death as an example, the ultimate passing of the central character in Margaret Edson’s Witmanages to show the human spirit leaving this world and ascending into some greater unknown. Its tools? An ever-brightening spotlight, and the human body, exposed to all in its frailty, beauty and imperfection. What is the greatest effect, after all, than life?

I did say that I disagreed with 80% of Ken’s choices, because the frying of actual bacon in David Cromer’s Our Town unquestionably has an impact, imparting an olfactory sense-memory in us all, its effect deepened by the original convention of Our Town being played out with its actions mimed and its scenery intuited. But this isn’t an effect, really, it’s a true action happening before our eyes, made special by the Spartan work that precedes it. This is reality, breaking through the artifice of theatre.

I love a helicopter or pyrotechnics as much as the next guy. But give me two men and a chair (as in Caryl Churchill’s riveting A Number) and I am perhaps at my happiest. A script, perhaps a score, actors, perhaps musicians, a director, maybe a choreographer, and the work of the subtlest of designers. That’s theatre – and theatre itself is theatre’s greatest special effect.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.