By Marc Jampole
As New York Times
culture reporter Dave Itzkoff details in “To See or Not to See? A Season for High Art,” New York City theaters—Broadway and off—are currently offering
an unusually large number of productions of what many call “serious” drama,
which means plays that tackle serious subjects in nonconventional or
experimental styles or belong to the “canon” of classic world literature.
The language of serious theater is often elevated, sometimes
strange. The characters portray both positive and negative traits. The endings
are often unhappy or ambiguous. Serious theater tends to make viewers think
about deep philosophical or social issues. Among playwrights considered to be
authors of serious works are Shakespeare, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter,
Tennessee Williams and Berthold Brecht, all of whose works are in production in
New York City at this time.
And how does Itzkoff describe this amazing cornucopia of
high dramatic art? “The current theater season has been a veritable snob’s paradise.”
A snob’s paradise!!
To understand just how anti-intellectual this statement is,
we have to review all three meanings of the word “snob” given in
Merriam-Webster’s (or any other standard) dictionary:
1.
“Someone who tends
to criticize, reject, or ignore people who come from a lower social class, have
less education, etc.”
2.
“One who
blatantly imitates, fawningly admires, or vulgarly seeks association with those
regarded as social superiors”
3.
“A) One
who tends to rebuff, avoid, or ignore those regarded as inferior; B) One
who has an offensive air of superiority in matters of knowledge or taste”
Snobs criticize those they think beneath them. Snobs
fawningly imitate and chase those considered socially superior. Snobs have an
offensive air of superiority. Snobs are thus among the most distasteful and
despicable people in the world.
Who would want to be a snob? Yet “snob” is the first word
that comes to mind to a writer about culture when describing those who like
serious theater.
Admittedly, serious theater engages our intellectual
faculties more than light theater or most musicals do. Sometimes serious theater
is hard to understand. To call serious theater an intellectual pursuit is
accurate.
But why is someone a snob by virtue of liking serious theater
or preferring it to light theater?
It’s just another of the almost daily examples of mainstream
media criticizing intellectual pursuits. Reporters and pundits go out of their way to
say denigrating things about intellectual activities.
That it’s a cultural reporter who should find excitement in
Beckett and Shakespeare who is delivering the blow against these authors, and by
implication against intellectualism, is also nothing new. In the recent past we have seen a sciencewriter imply that brilliant people have no common sense and
an education expert say people don’t need algebra. Mass media editors like nothing more than finding and then funding a
self-flagellating expert who will denigrate his or her intellectual discipline.
Calling serious theatergoers snobs is a throwaway line in an
article which focuses primarily on the business aspects of having so many
productions of serious theater in town over a short time frame. For example, he
discusses the marketing challenges of the Pig Iron theater’s production of
“Twelfth Night,” which follows by a few weeks the closing of the acclaimed
Elizabethan-style version imported from London with Tony-winner Mark
Rylance.
Itzkoff, the culture critic, does not consider the cultural
implications of the seemingly sudden return to serious theater—that audiences
may be tired of the flash and glitz of Broadway musicals or that a new
generation of theatergoers is now discovering the joys of Odets, Albee and
Ibsen (three other “serious” playwrights whose work has popped up on New York
stages in the recent past). Did the trend start in the hinterland or has New
York become the last American bastion of classic drama, much as it has for
serious post-bop jazz? There are so many
approaches that Itzkoff could have taken to exploring this sudden and wonderful
outcrop of serious theater. But he decided to write about the one topic held
above all others by mass culture— making money.
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