Boston Theater Needs To Start Offering Something No Screen Could Match – WBUR

Im going to say something that theater critics arent supposed to say: Lately Ive been enjoying going to the movies a lot more than going to the theater.

Theater has had a special pull for me since I got my first goosebumps seeing Annie Get Your Gun and South Pacific at the South Shore Music Circus when I was in grade school. David Wheelers Theater Company of Bostons brilliant stagings of modernist masterpieces thrilled me in college. That magnet was even stronger after I switched from television to theater criticism at the Boston Globe in the mid-90s. Lately, though, Ive been feeling that pull to be resistible.

To be fair, its not every month that four of the greatest filmmakers in the world release new films: Pedro Almodvars Pain and Glory; Bong Joon Hos Parasite; Martin Scorseses The Irishman; and Franois Ozons By the Grace of God. So it would be premature and probably inaccurate to declare a new day dawning in world cinema.

Still. All four movies deliver what Id call a peak artistic experience. What in the world is that? Its often out of this world, maybe even beyond words, a transcendental experience that leaves one weak at the knees or in awe of the artistic excellence or emotional impact of whats just been witnessed.

As the fall theater season winds down, it disappoints me that I havent had any such peak artistic experiences in Boston area theater this year. David Byrnes American Utopia at the Colonial and Cambodian Rock Band at the Merrimack Repertory Theatre came close, but American Utopia needed more of a thematic through line and the dialogue in Cambodian Rock Band was often a little too unsophisticated when it wasnt talking about genocide. There were a number of other excellent productions this season including SIX at the American Repertory Theater; Admissions at SpeakEasy Stage Company; My Fascination with Creepy Ladies by Anthem Theatre Company; The Purists and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead at the Huntington; Nixons Nixon at New Repertory Theatre.

So isnt excellence good enough? And sharing a communal experience with live actors and audiences that arent siloed into popcorn-munching easy chairs? What more do I want?

What I want not all of the time, but certainly some of the time is to see a play or musical that makes me look at the world differently when I walk out of the theater. Admissions is certainly a provocative play and nicely staged by SpeakEasy, but its debate about the pros and cons of striving for diversity doesnt tell me anything I didnt know about the issue. I often get the sense that Boston theater, unlike New York or even Berkshires theater, is so obsessed with telling stories of the moment that theyre giving short shrift to stories meant to last.

What I want not all of the time, but certainly some of the time is to see a play or musical that makes me look at the world differently when I walk out of the theater.

Will people still be talking about Admissions and SIX 50 years from now? My guess is that unlike say, A Raisin in the Sun or Caroline, or Change, these shows dont address their issues about diversity, empowerment and misogyny in a way that feels transcendent and timeless.

This year is a far cry from last fall, which was loaded: SpeakEasys Between Riverside and Crazy; A.R.T.s The Black Clown; the Huntingtons Man in the Ring; ArtsEmersons import of Measure for Measure; and the long-awaited Hamilton. If you look, for example, at Between Riverside and Crazy, Stephen Adly Guirgis' play feels absolutely of the moment in terms of how it deals with multiculturalism and economic displacement, but is also hilariously written, thoroughly transporting, empathetic, scabrous and redemptive. Not unlike Parasite. And a great SpeakEasy production to boot. If Im around in 50 years, Id get off my deathbed to see this again.

Im still thinking about the emotional and/or intellectual wallop of all of these productions a year later. This year feels more like a tap on the shoulder by contrast. Some of it can be attributed to accidents of timing, but the fact is that theaters often lead with their best in September and this year felt a little complacent.

Take another play I admired Ronan Noones one-man play the smuggler, at Boston Playwrights Theatre, with the wonderful Billy Meleady in the title role of a writer so down on his luck that he turns to a life of violence and crime. Spoken in verse, no less. I chuckled at a lot of the rhymes and had sympathy for the devilish path that the character embarked on, despite the victims in his wake.

It was a far cry, though, from how Scorsese handled Frank Sheerans (Robert De Niro) similar pragmatic immorality in The Irishman or how Bong managed the twists and turns of the central impoverished family of con artists in Parasite. In the play and the two movies were presented with a world in which the only way to live the dream, American or Korean, is through crime, betrayal and stepping on the backs of others.

But even in an amoral universe there doesnt seem like theres that much at stake in the smuggler and everything seems to be at stake in those two films, politically and personally. In all four films, really, as Pain and Glory is about finding personal redemption through art and fellowship and By the Grace of God is a deeply sophisticated, humanistic look at the courage of French victims of child abuse risking everything by standing up to the reprehensible lack of attention by the Catholic Church.

Theater should be offering more than the movies and TV, not less.

I dont mean to single out Noone's play. Im a fan of his work, including this one. But it only served to solidify my dissatisfaction with this season of Boston theater. Theater should be offering more than the movies and TV, not less. And its not about the buckets of money that someone like Scorsese can throw at a film compared to the money available to local theater. God knows there are megamillion dollar movie disasters, but there are also one-man shows that Ill never forget like the Sgn Theatre Companys one-man St. Nicholas from the 90s with Richard McElvain starring as Conor McPhersons protagonist (a theater critic no less).

I could make the same argument about television vs. theater. There was recently a play at the New Repertory Theatre called Trayf, about the conflicts between orthodox and secular Jews. It was cute enough, but not one-tenth as satisfying as an Israeli TV comedy series on Netflix, Shtisel, that dealt with the same issue.And talk about peak artistic experiences if you didnt see the HBO series,Our Boys, an Israeli-Palestinian co-creation about the murder of a Palestinian boy and the tension it creates between Orthodox and secular Israelis, get thee to HBO On Demand. Have I been as moved in a Boston theater as I have on my couch watching Allen Ginsbergs benediction in Scorseses Netflix film about Bob Dylans Rolling Thunder Revue or by Ken Burns storytelling on PBS Country Music? Not that I could remember.

I do think that Boston theater, at least since Ive been covering it, goes through cycles of moving forward and then plateauing, and that part of the current plateau has to do with obsessing about the divisive politics of the moment. That should absolutely be part of the mission of theater in general and local theater companies in general. But lets not lose the artistic forest through the political trees.

One of the undeniable peak artistic experiences in recent years was Dave Malloyand Rachel Chavkins Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812 at the American Repertory Theater in 2015. A.R.T. is premiering the same teams Moby-Dick in December. And the Huntington is about to open Quixote Nuevo followed by Lynn Nottages Pulitzer Prize-winning Sweat.

I hope they all kick-start the theater season. By the end of2020 I want to be eating my words and writing that local theater offers something that no other medium can match.