Cultural Borders

This three-part series chronicles the musings of a twenty-something college grad making theater in London, trying to figure out what to bring home.

I.
Our writer is flying in from America. He has written the show that we are currently producing and his arrival is much anticipated. I am writing him instructions, annotating maps, and listing local coffee shops and grocery stores—all the things a traveller in an antique land could possibly need.

As we talk about him, my boss is excited: “He’s from Cleveland!” she says. I look at her. She looks at me. It takes me a long moment to realize that she meant this to be relevant to me in some way other than the fact that I happen to love the YouTube series “Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video.” I am from Boston, which, by Google Maps’ calculations, puts Cleveland 638 miles away from where I grew up. Were I to bike, it would take me sixty-one hours and fifteen minutes. Were I to bike to Los Angeles, it would take me two hundred and sixty-one hours and fifty-five minutes. Living in a country the size of Michigan it can be surreal to contemplate the sheer square mileage of my own homeland.

II.
One of my jobs at the Gate Theatre, where I’m working, is answering e-mails sent to their general account. Between the spambots and Nigerian princes come the occasional invitations to shows around London, generally by students, usually containing the word “devised.” I got one such invite from a group called the Handle Bards. I was mostly intrigued by the pun, but also got awkwardly excited about the premise: four men bike across the UK, starting in Scotland, finishing in London, performing every night, carrying their set with them.

Biking the entire length and width of the UK is apparently somewhere in the ballpark of 932 miles and can be done in about three weeks with frequent stops and nightly performances. The thing that blew my mind the most about this was that for almost all of the three week run, they were within an hour of London by train. This meant that even if they hadn’t come to London, I still could have seen the show in about as much time as it usually takes me to convince myself to hike all the way over to Covent Garden. A one-hour train ride from Boston, I am in the Berkshires. 

III.
Topics I have seen explored in fair to middling American accents on British stages thus far: American drone policy, changing healthcare legislation, America’s financial relationship with China, and America’s difficult relationship with expansion. All have been brilliantly received at all of their various venues and have sparked conversations of their own, both in conventional forums as well as more informal platforms like Twitter and Facebook. It is tempting to say the Brits are simply more politically involved than Americans, but two of the four shows were written by Americans and one is performed by an entirely American troupe. Yet,  none are actually happening in America.

IV.
Flying in the face of critics, I would happily and passionately argue that it is the ephemeral nature of the internet that makes it so appealing. And yet, in America it can sometimes feel like the Twitter verse and the blogosphere are so ephemeral that they are all but nonexistent. Crowd-sourced social media feels so much more powerful here than it is in America, by sheer virtue of the size of the country. Conversation in my office obviously tends to center on theater in London, but it also troops across the whole of the UK; many times events in Scarborough or Manchester are just as relevant to London as the West End or Southbank are and that is an exceedingly powerful statement.

New York theater is not automatically American theater, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.

Imagine an American theater where New York was just as concerned with work happening in Cleveland (or Dallas, or Pittsburgh, or Seattle, or…) as it is with whatever’s happening at La Mama or Soho Rep. Imagine an American theater where everything that isn’t New York isn’t just dubbed “regional.” New York theater is not automatically American theater, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.

V.
A tentative conclusion, being reformulated every day that I’m here: America is so infatuated with this idea of an “American theater” that it’s lost its ability to make compelling works. We turn out seven consecutive productions of Our Town in lieu of our own work, in lieu of works that are speaking to the regions in which we are working. Shows are so focused on getting their work to a stage in New York that they forget that what is relevant in New York is not relevant in Boston or Chicago or Louisville—that there is an incredible electricity communicated in shared regional languages.

Sean Holmes, the director of the Lyric here in London has recently announced a new project called “Secret Theatre,” an attempt to push back against some of the conventions currently considered inescapable in British theater. In his speech announcing the season Holmes said, “You can only work within the structures that exist. So we decided to challenge these existing structures by going back to first principles.” Perhaps our first structures in America are our communities instead of our country, and our first challenge is to focus on the smaller picture instead of the global impact.