Chapter 26

It seemed to me that chapter 26 spent a great deal of time examining the failings of digital technology in performance, with particular emphasis on its dehumanizing effects.  I found this stance interesting considering the amount of time spent in previous chapters lauding the ability of digital performances to enable us to see our humanity in a new light, whether through comparison with the machine or by creating new, eye-opening, and previously impossible imagery.  While I appreciated the author's attempt to show us both sides of the technology debate, a few sections in the concluding chapter seemed to me to be too little to late.  An examination of the difficulties of and arguments against the combination of technology and performance, perhaps by including negative responses and side effects of the works discussed throughout the book, would have lent that much more credence to his arguments for the benefits of technology in performance.  Including such an examination so briefly and so close to the end, however, reads more as a token attempt to counter earlier cheerleading than as a thoughtful examination of the issues.

Setting that complaint aside, I did find his point about the irrelevance of traditional theatre to modern audiences to be rather eye-opening.  There has been quite a lot of buzz (consternation, lamentation) in recent years about the shortening attention spans of the younger generations.  Television, the internet, mobile phones, iPods, and the like have encouraged the development of a society that demands new stimulation every few seconds.  Theatre in the traditional style, full of monologues, dialogues, and single-location settings, is not very well-equipped to sustain the interest of this "stimulation" generation.  A world as staid as that presented on stage, after all, bears little resemblance to the world they experience everyday.  How can they be expected to relate? 

Modern playwrights, directors, and design teams, I believe, recognize this gap between the world of the theatre and the "real" world and it is this that has, at least in part, lead to the current enthusiasm for the use of projection and other digital forms of expression.  Technology has become our primary tool for viewing and understanding the world and it is only logical that theatre, serving, as it so often does, as a mirror of life and human experience, should embrace this tool.

This commentary, however, is not meant to imply that there is no place for traditional theatre anymore.  Great art is great because it is enduring and because it says something meaningful about life, or love, or because it makes us laugh.  Modern film-makers have not destroyed Hitchcock, modern composers have not overcome Bach, and modern artists have not overshadowed Monet.  Just so, modern playwrights will not render irrelevant William Shakespeare, or Tennessee Williams, or August Wilson.  An audience hungry for new art does not mean there is no audience ready and willing to appreciate the old.