"But we need theater."
"No, what we need are new forms!  We need new forms, and if we can't have them, it'd be better to have no theater at all."

For the largest part of my creative life in the theater, I've agreed with Treplev's sentiment written by Chekhov in The Seagull.  We're caught hopelessly in historical theater, slowly some minor conventions shift – use of the act curtain diminishes, stage technology diminishes the use of stage "cockroaches" (the anonymous hands dressed in black that scurry on and off in the dark) – but largely the play we do today is the play of the 1930s with a little different polish on the veneer.

We need to find a new theater.  Our society has changed.  Our culture has changed.  But our notion of theater hearkens back to the period of the Hoover presidency.

Some readers might argue, "But surely plays today deal with more topics than anytime in the past."  Is there a playwright who deals with social issues more liberally than Ibsen? Frankly, it seems to this writer that Shaw's work shows a more advanced social agenda than almost anything being produced today.  Likewise, playwrights working to portray human relationships in their full complexity still work in the shadow of Chekhov.

Trendy work over the past several decades have provided small, but (in the end) largely inconsequential enhancements to the theater.  Grotowski's ground-breaking work after 40-oddd years, remains outside the realm of most actors and most theatrical production in the U.S.A.  International techniques – like Balinese dance, for example – don't penetrate into the work of most actors I see.  And, in the end, neither the actors nor the audiences are Balinese.  The experiments in post-modern production and performance art in the 1980s and 1990s really haven't seem to have produced much of a major effect in our mainline theaters.

This trend has been in mind in the last several weeks after seeing works in which directors worked to provide new forms to stories of great heritage.

A recent example in film is Mel Gibson's recent treatment of the story of Jesus' arrest, torture and execution.  Gibson chooses certain elements to include and certain elements to exclude from his telling of this story.  For example, early in the film, Jesus' several followers flee from the Garden of Gethsemene after Jesus' arrest.  The biblical book of Mark relates, curiously, that one young man wearing a linen cloth loses the cloth and runs away naked.  Given an adult movie rating anyway, would the appearance of the naked male butt have changed anything?  No.  But Gibson showed the escaping men, but excluded this curious detail.  Why?  One could cite several such examples.  The point is not whether or not Gibson followed some pre-set exact programme that exists in the mind of this writer.  Rather, the point is whether or not Gibson's choice of material to relate his story enhanced the telling of the story.  For example, Gibson chose to focus the weight of screen time to the physical torture of Jesus at the hands of various groups of soldiers.  But in telling the story, Gibson could have easily focused the weight of the screen time on the false witnesses brought to Jesus' trial.  Is psychological pain of hearing the lies of false witnesses less dramatically interesting than physical torture?  Evidently, the answer to Gibson is yes.  Does Gibson's version meet or improve on the form or structure of the original stories?  

As this article is being written, a production purporting to be Chekhov's Seagull is fresh in mind.  For reasons passing the understanding of this writer, the director chose to treat the play as a Doris Day/Rock Hudson comedy – quite literally. The set was an all brick interior with late-1950's décor.  By all appearances, Sorin's estate was somewhere in southern California and Eisenhower was president.  This made Nina's engagement in Yelyets very strange.  Further, the audience is left to wonder how this nice middle-class American blonde in the Doris Day chiffon as Arkadina could have played in Moscow. The director also saw fit to re-arrange events and scenes that made a nonsense of the play that Chekhov wrote.

Seeing this production comes on the heels of this writer's recent mounting of the A.R. Gurney play, The Dining Room.  In producing the play, I fulfilled what was required of me in my job. It was very successful, people loved it. Despite some mild experiments in structure with over-lapping scenes, The Dining Room is a fairly conservative play.  

So I'm left perplexed.  I want new forms.  I do a conservative, by-the-book production of The Dining Room that meets the expectations of an audience.  I see a Seagull that tinkers with Chekhov's work to the point of destruction.

Where is the new theatre I want so much?