Theatre and the Good: The Value of Collaborative Play By Mark Fe ...

Under the influence of the French director Jacques Copeau, and inspired by social theorists such as Waldo Frank and other authors whose work had passed before his voracious eyes, Clurman came to articulate the relation between the world’s need for groups and the proper meaning of theatre . Gathering together interested people in a crowded New York apartment, Clurman talked, and he could by all accounts talk with a passion and rhetorical power that was unusual even in that more articulate time. New technical methods in theatre—by which he meant the panoply of innovations in design, staging and playwriting that we now refer to as Modernism—were pointless “unless they were related to a content that was humanly valuable.”²⁸ There would be no stars in this theatre. Rather, each person—actor, writer, director, designer—would contribute strength and be strengthened by the group, the whole being united and driven by their service to the play “in which our common belief was to be expressed.”²⁹ The relation with an audience was secondary but essential, the word theatre actually referring not to the performances or to the producing group itself, but to the community formed and sustained by the dialogue between company and audience.

The Critique from Social Science

The notion of theatre practice as a generator of social capital seems to withstand a variety of critiques. Martin Lindstrom, for example, has raised the possibility that young people in a post-modern society may exhibit high social participation but low trust, thus undermining an assumption of the link between trust and participation and their joint role in creating social capital.³⁰ But theatre practice does not seem to exhibit the characteristics of “miniaturization of community” which Lindstrom and others see as causing this disconnect between activity and benefit. His analysis focuses on participation in “single-issue causes.” Theatre is, of course, a miniature community, but is different from a single-issue campaign.