This is our youth

MinnesotaPlaylist invited some brave souls to critique a few recently closed productions - unconstrained by the temptation to recommend or reject - for further discussion. . .
 
These days, how often does the average student have the time, opportunity, or even the desire to see a theatrical production? In the fast-paced, technology-driven world of today, going to a play is becoming a unpopular pastime for my generation. As television and Internet consume new Millennial culture, young adults often have stereotypes of live theater as stuffy actors reciting poems or songs that were written by dead white guys. Theater, in the mind of the typical 16 to 21-year-old, is fairly boring.

At the same time, the theatrical world’s response to youth apathy has mostly been a thinly-veiled pandering to the presumed desires of young adults—sex, explosions, and big shiny set pieces. It’s as if Broadway is selling shock value in order to fill the red velvet seats. Art and enlightenment are repressed in order to make money, leaving perennial theatergoers at a loss, as they see their favorite medium crumble in the face of a society that now says it’s okay to wear your dirty blue jeans to a show.

As the industry flounders in a tide of assumptions by both viewers and creators, where does theater as a medium have to go? Is it possible for theatrical troupes and playhouses to retain artistic integrity while still inspiring something new and exciting that will grab a younger audience?

One successful direction would be that taken by The Lighthouse Group’s recent Light’s Up! production The Flickering Wall, written and directed by Nathan Christopher. Performed in and around the Illusion Theater and the Hennepin Center for the Arts, The Flickering Wall presented me with something that I have not experienced in a theater for a very long time: surprise.

Part of what makes theatergoing so dull for students like me is the very passive role an audience takes in traditional playhouse productions. Play tickets don’t usually come cheap, and when your seat is twenty rows back, the onstage “human energy” that audience members pay especially to see is almost lost. But The Flickering Wall crossed the audience-player barrier seamlessly and with great success. As the troupe led ticket holders on a winding tour of not only the Illusion Theater, but of the mindset and personality of Theater society itself, it was impossible for the audience to remain passive.

It is a rare treat when audience members have the opportunity to interact with the actors and crew of the Theater world during a production. The old ideas about “suspension of disbelief” and verisimilitude seem to become elements of an elaborate experiment. In The Flickering Wall, for example, ticketholders were first told upon arrival that the elevators were broken, so the Stage Manager (Amanda Whisner) assured us that she would lead everyone up one floor to the Illusion Theater by the backstairs.

On the surface, everything seemed pretty straightforward, believable, and real. But when the ticket holders followed benignly into the hallways and backways, a flurry of people and interactions distracted the unsuspecting audience from our odyssey upstairs. Each person the audience met on the way had their own inner turmoil or an ideology that consumed them. The characters were vibrant reflections of common personalities in the Theater world: Ida (played by Nathan Christopher), the stubborn elderly seamstress; an egotistical director (Adam Whisner) and his two harassed and harrowed actors (Jill Underwood and Nathan Tylutki); two amateur performers (Tony Brown and Piper Sigel-Bruse) who stopped at nothing to capture the audience’s attention for even a few moments; plus the audience member who just cannot turn off her cell phone (Amy Schweickhardt), a lovelorn building maintenance man (Darien Johnson), and one man in grey who seemed to represent and feverishly pontificate on some heady philosophy about reality (Justin Alexander). The “show” to which we were apparently being led turned out to be, in fact, the leading itself.

Meeting these characters was an enjoyable affront on the consciousness. Theater audiences, from my perspective, are supposed to believe in the fictional world for just as long as the show lasts. This is an easy task when the actors stay on a stage and the audience in their seats. Mixing the two creates a theatrical identity crisis that the Lighthouse Group seemed to delight in. How is one supposed to hold true that this soliloquizing man touching my shoulder is both real and fictional at the same time? The finesse with which The Flickering Wall played with the audience’s sense of reality was a new experience for me.

It was like a great labyrinthine game that I had to grapple with, and this involvement gave me a more deeply invested interest in the characters. Watching old Ida relive a girlhood memory right next to me, at times looking directly into the eyes of the audience, the weight of the moment was amplified tenfold. And it wasn’t only the actors that cast this spell, but an extremely deft use of light and sound dispersed throughout the hallways, stairwells, dressing rooms, and break rooms of the tour that added to the ethereal, all-encompassing other-worldliness. There was surprise around every corner, and it was presented in such a clever and fascinating manner that I honestly did not even notice time passing.

So much of theater today is mired down by a formula that appears to have been created to just awe the audience and remove all instigators of thought except pure shock. All that equation does is feed the misconception that today’s youth are mindless. But with productions like The Lighthouse Group’s The Flickering Wall, there is still hope for the Theater and its relationship to younger audiences like me.

I particularly remember how at one point during this production, the character of the director got up on his figurative soapbox. He complained about how aimless the direction of the theater seemed and how everything seemed to just generally be going to pot. And as he passed judgment on his very own line of work, I noticed a tiny, perhaps incidental detail that stuck in my brain – the Director happened to be holding a coffee cup advertising “The Guthrie Theater.”❦

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