Like the death of someone you love or a brush with your own mortality, a national crisis, imminent or active, throws new light on everyday life, differentiating with unusual clarity the things that really matter from the things that don't. So is the theater one of the things that matters, or isn't it? I asked my wife, J., a theater actress from the age of 14, why the theater matters at a time like this and she said, "It doesn't." I know she didn't really mean it, but I also know why she said it. There is something about the theater that sometimes makes you want to slap it. Like a lot of the arts, it is too often too inclined to give itself airs, and you don't like to encourage it. But if you cruelly and disingenuously announce that you don't think it matters, and you don't care about it, then you can preserve your secret feelings about it without having to talk about them too much.

Is the theater important? I think so. It's not a basic necessity of life, like food or shelter, and I certainly don't think it's more important than any of the other wonderful arts, or more important than a hundred other fascinating and inventive human pursuits — like sports or science, for instance — but I do hope and believe it's as important as any of them. I have spent my life in the theater and I love it. It seems superficial to discuss why without being able to go into real detail, but I said I would try, so here are a few random examples:

I saw Charles Busch's play "Shanghai Moon" at the Greenwich House Theater a few weeks ago, and the sets were so good and the play was so funny and the actors were so wonderful and the whole thing was so deeply invested with a passionate love for old movies, and for the fun of the theater itself, that I felt very inspired and happy. My mental landscape now includes that crazy show, those jokes, those costumes, those performances, and always will. I think that's worth something.

There is also something beautiful about sheer problem solving, and the theater is full of problems and full of solutions. The problems of narrative construction, the problems of acting, the problems of direction, the problems of design.

When my play "This Is Our Youth" was put on for the first time in 1996, the set designer, Allen Moyer, who also did the props, was responsible for providing the $15,000 cash that one of the characters has stolen. There was no budget to speak of, so Allen made fake money by Xeroxing imitation $20 bills on sheets of greenish-yellow paper, and whenever he wasn't busy with something else, he sat on the steps in the theater in the dark, personally cutting out each bill with a pair of scissors until he had enough stacks of them to pass for $15,000. I'll never forget that, because it showed the difference between somebody who cares about his work and somebody who doesn't; and just caring about something that much, even if it's the authentic look of fake stage money in a play scheduled to run for three weeks, seems very important.

There is a lot of bitterness and disappointment in the theater, but having spent time in both the theater and the movie world, I have to say I like the feel of the theater better. When you work in the theater, you often get the impression that people are there because they actually like it. That gives a nice feeling.

Most important, the theater serves as a kind of public imagination, or a place where imaginations can meet. Where you can glimpse a little bit of what it might be like to be someone else. I think that's enormously valuable, and the worse things get in the wide world, the more important that becomes. I love watching the backs of the audience's heads as they all watch the same story at the same time. And you know some of them are enjoying it and some of them are bored. But they're all there that night, watching the same show that some playwright cooked up in his or her own mind two years earlier, and then gave to actors, designers and a director to bring to life.

I think we live so much in our imaginations — not just artistic types, but everyone — that in some ways the imaginative connection you get between a play or movie or book or painting or piece of music and its respective audience is as close as we ever get to each other. And all right, with all the suffering and misery and death and destruction raining down on people all over the world, and all the stupidity and ignorance and bullying and intolerance, and all the people running around in a panic trying to choke off the breath of life wherever and in whomever they find it — are those pursuits important, but the theater isn't?

Kenneth Lonergan is a playwright (``Lobby Hero'') and a screenwriter- director (``You Can Count on Me'').

Fuente: The New York Times
Febrero 2003