A License to Pleasure.

By ALANA SHILLING.

SEPTEMBER CAN PROVE a dangerous month for morality. Perhaps Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) knew it; he reserved his most vehement jeremiad against corruption and the excesses of the papacy for the “September” eclogue of The Shepheardes Calender (1579). There, one scandalized shepherd relates his journeys through a land where “The shepheards there robben one another/And layen baytes to beguile her brother”(34; 39-30).¹ That was no country for naïve rustics; the very wolves are such gifted actors that they have mastered the roles not just of sheep but of the dogs that guard them.

Ah, but September continues to threaten propriety even now: It is a time of great moment for New York City’s notorious “dens of iniquity.”² Put differently (it is doubtful that St. Augustine would flourish in contemporary public relations), the New York theatre season of 2013-2014 is poised to begin, to dash across New York with all the ardor that months of anticipation can confer upon it. The preparations can be imagined all too well. In those off-Broadway venues tucked into the Art Deco buildings of downtown Manhattan, baristas are assiduously securing their supply of fair-trade espresso beans and reviewing their recipes for gluten-free scones while bartenders are furiously brandying their Ranier cherries. At the Metropolitan Opera House on the Upper West Side, those crystal chandeliers that hang like glimmering celestial dandelions are being dusted while the golden damask stage curtains—the largest in the world!—are curried with care. Meanwhile, in midtown Manhattan, the ushers of Carnegie Hall are pacing the crimson carpets, cultivating that bafflingly genuine congeniality which they lavish with largesse upon the Hall’s patrons.

In midtown Manhattan, the ushers of Carnegie Hall are pacing the crimson carpets, cultivating that bafflingly genuine congeniality which they lavish with largesse upon the Hall’s patrons.

Such elaborate rituals—and all are meant to secure, ultimately, the pleasure of those who, by the dozens or hundreds or even thousands will soon flow and ebb from the theatres nightly. Perhaps the soundest benediction to bestow is less panegyric and more apotropaic—an ode on behalf of future theatrical enjoyment beginning with words of the many who have despised it in the past.

♦

ANTI-THEATRICALITY IS AS old as Western philosophy and so enduring that it still frames most current debates about violence in films.³ Though the husk of disapproval that Greek philosophy or Christianity may have imposed upon us seems to have been cast aside, it is difficult to deny that delitescent prejudice has seeped into the crevices of our judgment. We are—to some extent—inevitable heirs of anti-theatrical rhetoric.

Plato famously blamed nothing less than civic disrepair on the “imitative arts” (which included theatre) in Book X of the Republic, exiling the rhyme-makers and rhapsodes from his ideal city. According to him, such characters fashioned debased realities, mere copies of a copy that nonetheless seduced audiences away from the truth. With the judgment of citizens so distorted, the very stability of the state was jeopardized.

Not all antagonists have objected to theatre on ontological or political grounds, however. For some, theatre’s vice was pleasure: it provides too much of it. “The need of amusement is much less than people commonly apprehend, and where it is not necessary, it must be sinful.” That grim pronouncement against prodigal pleasure was made by John Witherspoon (1723-1794), a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.⁴ Though the shrill appeal to Puritan morality is perceptible in Witherspoon’s statement, the infamia associated with actors was not always tethered to religious conviction or philosophical objections: In ancient Rome, theatrical diversions excited such baseless opprobrium that that the censors routinely refused to allow the construction of a permanent theatre.

Predictably, anti-theatricality acquired a new urgency with the advent of Christianity. Tertullian (160-225), the first expositor of the Trinitarian theology, condemned acting as nothing less than “a lie against our own faces, and an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator (I.414).” He marked the beginning of a long tradition of religion-backed anti-theatricality, from St. Augustine to the fourteenth century Lollards, the Puritans in the sixteenth century, the Jansenists a century later and some fundamentalists even today. Histriomastix (1632), by English polemicist William Prynne (1600-1669), bears particular note—if only as a curiosity. As inelegant as it was impassioned, Histriomastix was a thousand-page diatribe condemning every form of theatre. The full title of the book is foreshadows the histrionics of the whole:

Histrio-mastix.
The players scourge, or, actors tragædie, divided into two parts. 
Wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers arguments, by the concurring authorities and resolutions of sundry texts of Scripture, That popular stage-playes are sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly spectacles, and most pernicious corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable mischiefes to churches, to republickes, to the manners, mindes, and soules of men. 
And that the profession of play-poets, of stage-players; together with the penning, acting, and frequenting of stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christians. All pretences to the contrary are here likewise fully answered; and the unlawfulnes of acting, of beholding academicall enterludes, briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning dancing, dicing, health-drinking, &c. of which the table will informe you.⁵

Though he repeats them with vigorous emphasis and frequency, the grounds of Prynne’s condemnations are unoriginal, limited to predictable charges: the theatre encourages unwelcome sexuality, spawns immorality and invites general civic disorder. His vitriol against the theatre so offended Queen Henrietta Maria—herself an admirer of the stage— that Prynne was fined, pilloried and imprisoned. Undeterred, he continued his imprecations from prison. He ultimately lost his ears and went to his grave with “S.L.” (Seditious Libeler) branded on his cheek.⁶

Not every opponent of the theatre was concerned about immortal souls. One piece of ephemera from the eighteenth century, “Letter to the Right Honorable Sir Richard Brocas, Lord Mayor of London from an unidentified Citizen,” objected to the institution on economic grounds, as an impediment to economic stability and future prosperity. The Citizen (an Anglican bishop, as it happens) maintained that the theatre must be abolished because of “encouraging audience members to “gratify their Inclinations in a lewd and unlawful Way.” For the Citizen, the encouragement of lascivious behavior is doubly problematic: It damages profit both present and future by distracting from labor and undermining procreative activities. In reference to the latter, the Citizen speculates that the creation of offspring provides “more Hands …and consequently the Manufactures will be cheaper; we shall make greater exports, and gain more at foreign Markets.” The distressed, unapologetically pragmatic Citizen attempts to calculate the economic damage a new theatre would pose, offering concrete figures and voicing particular worries about the theatre’s impact on the silk trade.

Even the most noted dramatists— including Ben Jonson, Jean Racine, Pedro Calderón—nourished anti-theatrical sympathies. While Jonson and Racine routinely embedded anti-theatrical sentiments in their plays, Calderón renounced his pen entirely and reclaimed it only to compose religious dramas, autos sacramentales. Even the notorious libertine Lord Byron (1788-1824) remained aloof from drama, though he would write several plays of his own. Of his dramatic poem Manfred, he snidely remarked in 1817 that

I composed it actually with a horror of the stage and to render the thought of it impracticable, knowing the zeal of my friends that I should try that for which I have an invincible repugnance.”⁷

A similar inconsistency is detectable in Nietzsche who proclaimed drama the height of human experience in The Birth of Tragedy (1886) — only to recuse himself in The Case of Wagner (1888), dismissing it as a “revolt of the masses.”

♦

THIS ABBREVIATED SURVEY of anti-theatricality is not invoked here as a straw man but rather to vouchsafe pleasure’s place in the upcoming theatre season. Anti-theatricality is the legacy of centuries and though it may seem obsolete, it insinuates itself into the very marrow of even the most devoted, progressive theatre goer’s bones, shaping experiences covertly. Sometimes anti-theatrical sentiments can actually enhance a performance, as it did in March 2013 in the Public Theatre’s production of Neva, a play by Chilean dramatist Guillermo Calderón (b. 1970). In other cases, the tradition of anti-theatrical discourse colonizes enjoyment, threatening to foreclose on it altogether, a process to which the New York City Opera’s fetching 2013 production of the Offenbach operetta La Périchole nearly fell prey.

On Lafayette Street in the East Village stands a Romanesque building, the former Astor Library. It houses a New York institution, the Public Theater.⁸ And March 31, 2013 marked the final performance of Neva’s month-long run at the Public in a production directed by Calderón himself. St. Petersburg furnishes the backdrop for the play, the action of which unfolds on January 9, 1905, “Bloody Sunday,” an event that would presage the Russian Revolution of 1917.  The stage—claustrophobic and dim—is occupied continuously by the play’s three characters, all actors—Masha, Aleko and Olga Knipper, the widow of Anton Chekov. The violence we imagine exploding across the imaginary streets and alleys just beyond the curtain of that tiny stage somehow seems less real than the theatrical arabesques performed before it. Putatively a rehearsal of The Cherry Orchard, the actors perform very little of it. They instead indulge Olga’s wish to stage Chekhov’s death, sometimes reciting impromptu monologues and at other moments making declarations of love meant to endure only as far as the proscenium extends.

In the final minutes of the play, as Olga feigns love for Aleko, Masha (played with vicious vitality by the Brown-educated Quincy Tyler Bernstine) fulminates in a monologue filled with yearning for a reality beyond the stage.⁹ The world rains in her words as she vacillates between the dreams of real power, of revolution, and the insubstantiality of theatre’s shadows. She castigates Aleko and Olga, feverishly challenging them:

Who cares? Outside it’s a bloody Sunday, people are dying of hunger in the street and you want to put on a play. History passes by like a ghost—there is going to be a revolution. And who is idiotic enough to lock themselves in a theater… I’m ashamed to be an actress. It’s so selfish, it’s a bourgeoisie trap, a trash-heap, a stable full of mares. Olga you’re a she-mule, no an ass…How many times can you cry and claim truth onstage? And be more real and find new symbols? Enough. It’s already 1905 and I believe that theater is finished…You disgust me. I could start by burning this theater, I would like to see it burn and with it the arrogance, the vanity. I hate theater-love, its false gestures, its class, its sarcasm, its pretentions. It suffocates me… I detest your rehearsed gestures, your black tears, your gorilla laugh, your pauses full of meringue…”¹⁰

At the height of Masha’s mad soliloquy she seems to fall backwards. Darkness overtakes the stage. Scene. Curtain. Play.

The condemnation of the theatre in Neva’s final minutes cut to the quick. It was one of those moments that robs the room of air only to give it back, infused with unanticipated exhilaration. At precisely the moment that the theatre was dismissed as meaningless, it was validated. After a cavalcade of unconvincing, fragmentary performances, Masha’s anti-theatrical tirade regains the thrill of the theatre by renouncing it violently. The reaction of the spectators was instructive. By embracing the rhetoric of rabid anti-theatricality, it seemed that Neva gave its audience a peculiar dispensation to enjoy the theatre. And to judge from the audience’s reaction, which seemed at once one of stupefaction and ravishment, that dispensation was gratifying.

♦

NEVA IS INSTRUCTIVE. By devaluing the very source of enjoyment—theatre—the pleasure gleaned from it was both legitimated and excused. Perhaps if the anti-theatrical prejudice had not been so deeply embedded, the prospect of performing its debasement would not have been so powerful. In the case of La Périchole, however, every frivolity of the theatre is indulged—and the sensibilities of a number of patrons were offended.

In late April 2013, the New York City Opera concluded the 2012-2013 season at City Center with Jacques Offenbach’s La Périchole (1874), directed by Christopher Alden. The NYCO was founded in 1943. It has been known informally as “The People’s Opera” thanks to its mission to make opera—particularly new or obscure works—more accessible to a broader audience. In 1965, it was installed at Lincoln Center in the David Koch Theatre. There the NYCO sat as if a retort to the neighboring Metropolitan Opera. In 2011, financial straits forced the NYCO to abandon their Lincoln Center home. They became an itinerant company, performing at venues from Brooklyn to Harlem.¹¹ The financial woes that plague the company prove dire even now. General Manager and Artistic Director George Steele is currently engaged in a furious bout of fundraising attempts, what he calls an “urgent fundraising appeal.” According to a recent article in The New York Times, the NYCO’s current financial woes could result in a bout of cancellations. If the NYCO fails to raise $7 million by September 30, 2013, they will be compelled to cancel the 2013-2014’s upcoming productions. Without an infusion of $13 million by December, the entire 2014-2015 season is at risk.¹²

The 2013 Alden production of the operetta was received warmly by even the most exacting of critics, including The New York Times’ often gelid Anthony Tommasini who praised the production as an “exhilarating staging with a wonderful cast.”¹³ And it was certainly a delightful confection, from the llama-shaped piñatas suspended above the stage like garish, improbable stars in the firmament to the bibacious characters and a farcically elaborate seduction plot. But the delight was not shared, not by a long shot. Although many of the audience members were swathed in mirthful enjoyment, I witnessed a countermovement within the ranks of the audience, a stalwart resistance to enjoyment.

One Irish gentleman in his mid-forties, a professed lover of all theatre, discreetly slipped away before the end of the first act, shaking his head in disappointment. Meanwhile, the intermission became a forum for complaint. One septegenarian lamented to her companion in querulous tones, “Well, I guess the music’s fine but the rest is just nonsense. Rubbish really; I don’t know what they were thinking. I guess I just have to close my eyes and listen to the music.” Another patron said, “I can’t say I’m enjoying this; it is all too foolish and trivial. What were they thinking with this?” One of the orchestra’s violinists sympathized with these grievances about the frivolity of the very score he would soon return to performing as he declared in stentorian tones (as if to recuse himself of association), that “Time could be spent in a much better fashion. The music is wonderful and the plot is just such a waste…” He completed the phrase by shrugging in disgust.

It is true that the Offenbach operetta is more full of needless complexity than a Molière. Set in Peru, the operetta details the misadventures of a pair of starving street performers, Périchole and her lover Piquillo, who are so impecunious that they cannot afford a marriage license. They arrive in Lima amidst town-wide celebrations for the birthday of the depraved Viceroy, Don Andrès. After an unsuccessful performance, the couple separates in desperation. The famished Périchole drifts to sleep and awakens to find the Viceroy hovering overhead, eagerly waiting to pledge his love. Since decorum dictates that he can only take a married woman as his mistress, Don Andrès swindles Périchole (after the ample consumption of libations) into marrying a stranger—who happens to be the embittered Piquillo (also of course inebriated). He then installs her as a lady-in-waiting in the palace. The plot becomes more preposterous as it gains momentum—the gullible Piquillo is even sentenced to prison that is especially reserved…aux maris récalcitrantes. In short, the operetta is congenitally, fetchingly silly, full of hilarious mistaken identities and intentions and ludicrous attempts at wooing.

The NYCO’s production did nothing but render Offenbach’s operetta as a thoroughly pleasurable, madcap romp. So we return to the question of why that production inspired such rancor amongst audience members (and orchestra) despite critical acclaim? Why did La Périchole arouse such a resistance to enjoyment? It was not a simple case of latent Puritanism and the vestiges of anti-theatricality, though such prejudices did play a role. It was a matter of an unfortunate collision between inheriting one history too earnestly while rejecting the myths bequeathed by another.

On one hand, La Périchole is the apotheosis of so much of what the anti-theatrical position has condemned for centuries: it represents lust, debauchery, deceit…And unlike Neva, it was completely unapologetic about it. What makes La Périchole particularly intriguing, however, is that anti-theatricality alone did not trigger the negative reaction to the operetta. After all, The Phantom of the Opera has been at the Majestic Theatre since 1988; The Lion King has played at the Minskoff since 1997 and their popularity continues, unstinted, though neither can truly excuse itself of the charge of “frivolity.”

♦

La Périchole’s vulnerability, however, derives from its rejection of the modern mythos of opera—not even “high” culture could excuse it. To state the painfully obvious, opera is a theatrical form suffused with high-culture associations—with furs, champagne, galas and even the delicate sipping of water from tiny, triangular paper cups at intermission. But as the sport of patricians, opera is a relatively new invention, particularly in the United States.¹⁴

Opera, in its origins, was associated with bourgeoisie entertainment. The first public opera house opened in Venice in 1637, accessible to patrons of varying means. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, opera was little more than an excuse for social interaction. As is well known, most audience members whiled away the time between intermissions with gossip and card-playing. In fact, ladies’ fans surviving from the period were covered with sketches; they mapped other boxes in the opera house and identified the occupants of each. Opera did not escape the satirical engraving by William Hogarth and Wagner did not elude the condemnation of Nietzsche.

But scholarly research suggests that a devious development took place in the United States between 1825 and 1850, particularly in New York. In an effort to create class distinctions, opera was appropriated as an art form for the elites, as an institution that became the fortress of high culture.  Buildings were constructed for operas alone, a code of behavior was codified, a dress code adopted and only operas in foreign languages—operas less accessible to the masses—were performed. In sum, opera became the means by which an illusion of exclusivity was invented.

The NYCO’s production did not simply embody so many of the vices that anti-theatrical rhetoric identifies with the theatre; it also failed to defend its worth on the grounds of affiliation with an art form of the elite.

Thus, the NYCO’s production did not simply embody so many of the vices that anti-theatrical rhetoric identifies with the theatre; it also failed to defend its worth on the grounds of affiliation with an art form of the elite. It is difficult to manage grave nods and feel anointed as a member of the cognoscenti when one of the star performers is slinking around a neon-colored stage wearing nothing but an improvised mask made from a swim-cap, a lycra shirt, speedo-cut swimwear and leather boots, all the while singing the charms of being “incognito.” Thus, Offenbach’s operetta finds itself doubly condemned, by embodying the expectations of one discourse while violating the expectations of another, and by refusing the refuge of respectability that status as an object for the elites would give it.

Why speak of the old and the known on the threshold of quite the opposite? The new season is one that will bring to the stage (among so many other productions) The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Underworld at the Classical Stage Company. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Opera will stage an operetta originally performed in the same year as La Périchole:  Strauss’ Die Fledermaus (1874)—and for the Met’s New Year’s Eve Gala no less. Taylor Mac will doubtless charm audiences in the story of a cross-dressing prostitute in Good Person of Szechwan at the Public Theatre and both the new opera Anna Nicole (yes, based on the American tabloid princess Anna Nicole Smith) and, pending fundraising success, Bach’s Endimione (1772) at the New York City Opera. It is a matter of pleasure. Unlike Mr. Witherspoon, I believe one can never have enough. And the best benison for the 2013-2014 season is a simple exhortation: Enjoy.

♦

Alana Shilling comments on cultural events and New York theatre for the Fortnightly Review. Shilling has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Her special interests are reception history and the afterlife of Latin poetry in the Renaissance.

NOTES: