This is absolutely an issue, but it seems too simple to call it the full issue. It is not a lack of memory but a glut of it that short-circuits my capacity for meaningful remembrance. Maybe my mind is filled with so much junk-talk-show interviews, clickbaits, gay porn gifs-that I cannot make out one item from another anymore. I like to imagine my mind as a cathedral, a place vast, austere, and uncluttered. Living as we do in an age of endless “content,” where the goal of entertainment companies is to keep us logged on for as long as humanly possible, my capacity for memory must be warped. Maybe the fault lies with the Big Bad that is technology. I can’t remember the title, much less what happened in it. I remember the color red mattered somehow (as a metaphor? in the design?). I remember its structure was highly sophisticated. I remember it succeeded in making me laugh at something frightening. I am trying to remember the name of a friend’s show I saw two years ago. But if the memory of the play doesn’t remain, does the use value still apply? What use does capitalism have for a forgotten show than never made anyone money in the first place? And thus, working backwards, we can imply our play had a use value all along. This play is worthwhile because it accomplishes such-and-such task successfully. We pitch our plays to an imagined group of financiers. So we find explanations for why we make what we make because that’s easier than telling a literary manager, I wrote this and I don’t know how it might help the world.Īt our worst, we conjure up language no better than a product description. We just know that those reasons are morally positive, and we want our work to line up with a moral positive. Oftentimes the reasons we give for why we make theatre aren’t actually what drive us. Years of writing artist statements have forced us to find approximations for the gnarled impulses that drive us. I suspect none of us really know why we make theatre. I distrust anyone who says they make theatre because it is ephemeral. These capitalist constraints are maddening for most artists, but they become particularly slippery for a product that is built to vanish. Ephemerality is a tonic to soothe our own egos every time a play we labored over fades in the minds of our loved ones.
Except that’s not true, is it? If theatre weren’t also under the thrall of the myth of permanence, we wouldn’t have a canon. If you’re a more emotionally sophisticated person than me, you might say, Material permanence is a capitalist myth, so be glad your art form makes no pretense to permanence. Call it the spiritual condition of the age of entrepreneurship. This is a gross desire, I know, but my spiritual yearnings and capitalist schemings are inextricably bound. I want to make something that capitalism deems worthy of material permanence. The truth is I would love to create a live a performance that lasts forever, that is etched into cultural memory. Ephemerality isn’t what drew me to theatre. I call bullshit on this, or at least I call bullshit on myself for having ever said this. It’s a lovely marketing spin for our potential customers. We latch onto that aphorism because it gives the commercial unviability of our work a fleeting beauty, a glamorous inscrutability. We say the fact that theatre is ephemeral is what drew us to it. We tell our parents, our friends, the guy we chatted with on Grindr, Theatre is ephemeral, see, that’s one of its values, that’s why it’s fine only twelve people will come to see my one-night workshop in Brooklyn of a show that may never have a future life. So we say that the product is the memory, not the show. Every time we raise five thousand dollars to put up a show in some under-lit black box, we find ourselves trying to justify the existence of a work of art that will vanish after one or sixteen performances. Theatre is ephemeral, we explain endlessly. Why should they be? and People are going to pay to see your show. Resources are going to be poured into this play. And more often than not, the question is framed in purely economic terms. Through grant applications and play submissions and conversations with our parents, we have to perform our work’s worthiness. We artists are asked to justify our work incessantly.
I thought, This will remain one of my favorite works of theatre I will ever see.īut until I stumbled upon that post on Twitter, I hadn’t thought about that show in almost a year. I parsed through memories of it endlessly. Oh yeah, I thought, I forgot about that production. I came across an old post from a friend reflecting on The House That Will Not Stand by Marcus Gardley at New York Theatre Workshop, which ran in 2018. I had this realization the other day while scrolling through Twitter. I have already forgotten almost every play I’ve ever seen.