The Business of Theatre in the Attention Economy

Last weekend I watched a Hindi play. Although I’m very interested in theatre activity, my work hours and time management prevent me from watching all the plays I would like to. But last weekend, I watched the same play, twice, Saturday and Sunday.

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Several years ago, or what feels like it, I could contemplate the world for hours, drifting between incomprehension and acceptance. But it doesn't really bother me that I can hardly sit still without having to resort to using the internet, or a phone to constantly re-engage and connect with other living elements of my world.

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Somewhere I read, a guy had correctly pointed out that we now live in the attention economy where human attention is a scarce commodity. Our reserves of attention and attention spans are getting shorter and shorter, the further we’re exposed to instant gratification and an assault of data and information every way we turn. So something that holds our attention for really long is what will be prosperous in this economy.

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So when the internet is where-its-at, when your marriage is validated when you update your facebook status, and most of these public and data-rich activities are performed for the public eye, it behooves one to hold the precious and rare away from the scrutiny of jaded, cynical eyes roving through the cesspit these beholders believe the internet to be.

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I have been living without a functioning computer at my flat for a few months now, and I find that while I’m sorely missing out on the music I want to listen to, I am getting so many other things done that I would never get the chance to do if I would be glued to my twitter timeline every night, or bouncing off the wikisphere or blogosphere drowning in a flurry of hyperlinks. Cooking, reading, talking to friends on the phone once in a while. Yeah, this is not a bad deal.

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Perhaps at a time like this, an art form like theatre is the most relevant. For art to exist, for artists to survive and interest in art to sustain, it must adapt. But maybe the inability of an art form like theatre to adapt to this age of easy accessibility, unavailability in a virtual form like an e-book or a music album or a film turned into bits, keeps it real. And pure. Theatre remains something to be experienced, in the moment, and is no less visceral in its approach and execution than it was a thousand years ago on the ancient Grecian podiums.

A Lesson in Star-gazing

Mother:What do you mean... He's not coming back?

Jim: Oh, no, he'll come back. We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die.

The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right... every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out it never lights again.

I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out.

Mother: Just as long as he comes back.

Jim: I wish he wouldn't, Kate. One year I simply took off, went to New Orleans;for two months I lived on bananas and milk, and studied a certain disease. And then she came, and she cried.

And I went back home with her. And now I live in the usual darkness; I can't find myself; it's hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. I'm a good husband; Chris is a good son... He'll come back.

Arthur Miller had something very interesting to say of the pivot of drama. That it is not just a matter of creating the right characters and getting them to make up the story as they went along. The point is in knowing, as intimately as the character, not just why he would do something – but why he cannot abstain from doing it; why he cannot just walk away from it. In the creation of that motivation to act lies the reality of drama.

I keep coming back to this exchange. It’s a depressing play, All My Sons, by Arthur Miller. It doesn’t end very well, either. A man lives in guilt for many years, knowing whether he has actually caused the death of 21 fighter pilots in providing faulty fighter jets, knowing that his friend suffers in jail for it. His nerves are frayed by the guilt, his wit dulled and any joie de vivre diminishing in the ever-present doubt that eats away at him.

One of his sons went missing in the war; the same war for which he was commissioned to assemble 21 fighter jets. This son had a sweetheart, the son of his friend now in jail, and the sweetheart re-enters his life on the arm of our man’s younger son. The wife has been utterly shaken by the war and the loss of her son, although she never believes he is truly dead. The dialogue is hopeful and young – the lovers talk of the days to come, neighbours discuss astrology, husbands and sundry. Until the sweetheart’s brother demands that she break off her engagement with the younger son and return as our man put her father in jail. Drama, more of it, ensues. This particular exchange takes place between the wife (called Mother) and her scientist neighbour, Jim, while anxiously waiting for her younger son, Chris, who has just discovered the damning allegations against his father, to return.

Is it true that once our star goes out, it never comes back? Do we lose all the integrity we may possess, all the truth and purity we have lived by, in a passing moment of bad judgement? I may have, in a bid to preserve one of the longest and most beautiful friendships in my life, lied, wilfully, constantly and almost in disbelief that my eyes do not, in fact, speak the truth when all my tongue can do is roll off unconvincing, plastic words that taste bitter even to me.

Maybe my star went out a long time ago.