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

Through its power to turn us radically toward one another in a setting of mutual dependence and trust, and within the context of preparation for the serious purpose of creating a work of art, theatre may be able to save us from what technology may otherwise make of us. I mean that theatre can save us from shallowness, from mental and spiritual laziness. In times of crisis, pestilence, and war, countless thousands have come together for the seemingly absurd purpose of putting on a play. Susan Sontag’s actors in Sarajevo, emaciated and exhausted, risked instant death from snipers. Some of the actors walked miles each day through a raging war zone to attend rehearsals for a play . They came to work in a cold and dark theatre with holes blown in its side because other people were counting on them. “We must tell the world that we are not animals,” one actor told a reporter, “We are cultured… . We have ideas and dreams.”²³

Because it is live and so to some degree unpredictable, theatre is also an opening, a rift in the fabric of social pre-determination. “As society cyberneticizes, programming the contacts that people make with each other,” Richard Schechner observed with seeming presci­ence in an essay first published in 1977, “theater gains importance as a live activity, oscillating between relatively unstructured interactions, say at a party, and totally formalized or mediated exchanges, say a job interview.”²⁴ What Schechner could not have known in 1977 was that within twenty years society would have become so “cyberneticized” as to include large numbers of people whose main form of human interaction is one structured by a mouse, a keyboard, an illuminated screen, and whose rhythm is that of the flashing cursor which says (to quote Joyce Carol Oates) “Do something Do something Do something.”²⁵ Theatre and its sibling arts may save us from an endless gaze into a screen that offers no reflection. They can save us from the loss, through days and nights of aloneness with one’s personal screen, of knowing what it is to be human.