Does theater matter? Some sobering answers from the internet

The weekend approaches, and your theater plans are with appearance of truth already made. But wait.  Perhaps you’ve already broken your heart trying to engender into the ridiculously long list of awe-inspiring plays in fancy productions (The Motherf**ker through the Hat, Good People, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to…, Jerusalem, The Normal Heart, School during the term of Lies, etc.), and so you’d like to take a step back to exercise the mind about the wider ramifications of theater in the world. (Getting iced out of a situation always offers opportunity for reflection.) Suddenly, you wonder: Does theater make an impact? Are we everything just obsessed with entertainment that at last lives and dies in its be in possession of little bubble? Is there a conversation between our values and the boards?

Nothing makes me go into a calamity-spiral about these issues like the Tony Awards perform, so this week has been separately fraught. In Jason Zinoman’s easily affected article on Slate, he makes the matter of inquiry that two of the above plays (Motherf***er and Good People) portray a portrait of our contemporary copartnership so necessary, so incisive and well-informed, that they actually make Broadway (and the Tonys) apposite again. Hallelujah, Jason Zinoman. Of road, lest we forget, this was a week in that the CUNY folk tried to bestow Tony Kushner an honorary degree, tabled it as a non-academic board member objected to Kushner’s politics and then backpedalled like a mindless newsboy—and during the press mishegas, human being board member said “I have not at all idea who Mr. Kushner is.” Zinoman points thoroughly that Kushner’s current play isn’t unruffled eligible for a Tony, but in continuance, Kushner must be our most famed living American playwright, and he’s won fulness little gold statues in his beyond . So even if, as Zinoman says, the Tonys are proper again, nothing—but nothing—can get some people pay attention. And up~ that heartening note: Have a well adapted weekend everybody!