jonas

The Cute and The Holy

On a hot summer night, a good friend alerted me to something special in Santa Ana: a bold young theatre company, challenging convention with a new and exciting play. As it turned out, my friend was too kind; the play was flawed, and the young company needed seasoning. But the effort was there, a new theatre was being born, and maybe greatness wasn't far away.

It was an electric night. Hot, and full of possibilities and praise. After the play ended, I felt fortunate to hang out in the lobby, to see and hear the energy coming out of the cast and crew. A lot of dreams were being born.

But then, I heard the most dispiriting words of 1998.

I heard them in the toilet.

I was sitting in the stall. In walked two men, one to wash, one to whiz. They started talking about the play they had just seen. And the whizzer said to the washer, in a moment that almost made me unload:

"That was cute."

I grabbed the aluminum rail and broke into a sweat associated with the most paralyzing diarrhea. In a few seconds, the man and his whizz were gone.

But I couldn't flush him out of my mind.

"That was cute," he had said. As if he had watched "7th Heaven" or a rerun of "Who's the Boss".

But the play was not intended to be cute. It was a tragedy. It examined the dangerous paranoia of right-wing hate groups such as the Freemen and the Aryan Nation. Characters died violently, representations of good and innocent people. The protagonist’s amoral stance had left him numb and rendered him partly responsible.

And here was a theatergoer thinking all this was “cute.”

Which brought me to a very big question: who had failed? Was it the play, the theatre company, or the audience? Who is to blame when theatre about life, love and death elicits only a shrug or a pat on the head?

Maybe all of us.

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