We require theater

Broadway Producer Oskar Eustis made a stop at Green Bay’s Weidner Center at the end of October to discuss the essential nature of theater in an increasingly online society.

“The internet is killing us and we require theater…” he told the audience. “What drama really does is force a character to directly experience the consequences of what they’ve done. And that’s what happened in great drama — it reveals not only who the character is, but also the cause and effect of what we do… We are living in a world that is incredibly skillful at allowing people to evade the consequences of their actions. What better medium is there than social media to avoid the consequences of what you say and do? The way social media is structured right now, you live in a bubble where all you’re going to hear is the positive feedback for the most hateful things that you can throw out into the world because you lob them over the net into some unseen other side, but whatever human damage happens over there is invisible to you.”

In the theater, though, the consequences of each characters’ actions — characters which audience members are often able to relate to — are not only visible, but showcased, demanding that those in attendance see and process them, regardless of their opinion of them.

Eustis questioned, “What else is left in this society where you get a group of people together to go through experiences that can be emotional, deep, intellectual or controversial, where everybody doesn’t have to agree before they come in?”

“I think of the theater as the study of human behavior — as kind of an experimental lab where we are exploring human behavior and human relationships,” UW-Green Bay Theater Professor Alan Kopischke said. “We’re studying how people work and then trying to replicate that believable and compellingly on stage. Those of us studying it benefit tremendously from the insights we’re able to glean from that work. And ideally our audiences have learned by going through these stories and having it play out right in front of them in the same room with other human beings. It’s this exciting laboratory of human behavior and relationships that is tremendously beneficial for everyone involved.”

Kopischke, who is also heavily involved in the community theater scene throughout Northeast Wisconsin, said he views theater as a sort of educational laboratory under which human behavior can be studied without personal inputs skewing results.

“Political tensions have made it really hard for people to talk to each other and for people to empathize with other points of view, but theater is a place where we can bring people together,” he said. “We can throw some ideas and some characters into a room and watch stuff happen and maybe walk out of there understanding people who are different from us. Maybe we see the way that these kinds of interactions could play out and can incorporate those things into our own lives.”

With theater standing as such a powerful educational tool, the art of theater often struggles to garner support for its continuation, including at UW-Green Bay, where just last year the future of the theater major was uncertain.

“We were asked to suspend admissions to our major,” Kopischke said. “We think it’s essential that we continue to have a major on the campus — it is the core of what we’re able to do with the theater department on campus… We’re retooling and coming up with some pretty exciting ideas about how to make this a really unique program that will draw plenty of people and be financially viable, meeting those concerns. But we’re an all-access institution and we are really the only affordable theater program for miles around in any direction. And in order to really be an all-access institution, we have to be able to get the opportunity of studying theater as a major to this enormous Northeast Wisconsin population at a lower price than the private universities are able to offer. Otherwise, we’re not really being all-access. A robust theater experience is an essential part of the university experience.”

While the benefits of attending and participating in theatrical experiences are abundant, whether on the stage or in the audience, Kopischke said Northeast Wisconsin still does not have as robust of a theater-going population as places like Milwaukee and Chicago.

“The Green Bay area does not have a history of regular theater-going as a practice,” he said. “I think the local theaters are doing a really good job of building that, but there’s no infrastructure there, and so we’re having to build the infrastructure… It’s a lot of work… The awareness and the habit of looking for what’s playing in the theaters this weekend, that’s just not there. When you’re in Milwaukee or in Chicago, there’s a whole cohort of folks who are looking for what’s on each weekend. That’s not a tradition so much in our community, but I think it would really enrich the community to reach that point.”