TIM BOUCHER RAW!

Though they are long gone, my neighborhood here in Baltimore used to be home to two movie theatres, virtually side-by-side: the Hampden Theatre and the Ideal Theatre. The Hampden is now an upscale restaurant called Dogwood and a Bikram Yoga place, while the 1908-1963 Ideal Theatre is now an antique shop called Woodward’s. Pictured below is the refurbished facade as it appears, more or less, nowadays.

While its a bit different than the old marquee which once graced the premises, there’s something rejuvenating about riding by this building on my bike every day and imagining what kinds of wonderful things must have gone on within a theatre which dared to call itself “Ideal,” what kinds of dreams people must have been able to find themselves within in such a place.

Terry Gilliam’s latest movie, meanwhile, has been on my mind. It chronicles in mytho-symbolist form an antiquated gypsy traveling theatre troupe struggling to survive in a world where such things are no longer valued and no longer relevant. While the group has about it actual for-real magic, people aren’t able to perceive it amidst the cheesy costumes, shoddy set pieces and over-all ridiculousness of the presentation.

I’ve found much the same phenomena in the world of professional theatre. Up close, the effects seem just that: affected. Fake. Trickery. Stagecraft. It’s a put-on, a ruse, an elaborately-contrived and controlled scam. Sets might look cheap. Acting might come across as forced or corny. But few people are willing to recognize that a con-artist is still an artist.

People in theatre like to go on and on about how theatre is dying, how audiences are dwindling, how patrons are getting older, appreciation for the craft going down and even – gasp! – that this might be the last generation of theatre. And how can a silly, antiquated, over-the-top theatricality survive amidst a world awash in other media which seemingly have more power and ubiquity? Television, movies, video games. Why should anyone go to the theatre? What purpose is there for a devotee of the stage to go any longer and kneel before the altar?

The Ideal Theatre is only a fading dream. A facade. It doesn’t exist anymore. The stage is used only for auctions. Its shell now houses only curious antiques, puttering around waiting for someone to take them home or put them out of their misery. Memories without rememberers are quickly forgotten.

What then of the Real Theatre, that pitiable remainder left over after dividing the ‘Ideal’ by the many compromises required of its manifestation? The all-powerful god we call Budget. The production team. Time constraints. The artistic staff. The demands and limitations of the venue itself. Available technology. The elusive audience nobody can seem to quite name or locate but which swirls around us on the streets every day, going… somewhere. Somewhere but here. Somewhere but our theatre. Is the cost too high? The reward too small? To manifest anything ideal into reality is to jettison what percentage of our dream and vision? Seventy percent? Eighty-five percent? Higher?

Though theatre thrives on and points to the impossible and immeasurable, it resides in the realm of quantifiable reality. We hold a vision in our hearts, something we want to communicate, to invoke into this world; and we look about for what will make do. We accept appropriate compromises which we can afford, and which will work within the context of what we’re able to pull off. We find what “reads on-stage”, and hopefully – or desperately – cast off the rest. The Ideal Theatre is too much for us, the demands too high. The time isn’t right. We try to reach it, can’t, and fall flat, frustrated.

Which makes me wonder if maybe our striving isn’t ultimately misplaced. If maybe instead of reaching towards something that cannot be, mimicking it with shoddy representations of itself, that we ought not to start with the Real and go from there. A favorite Sufi saying of mine goes something like, “He who sleeps on the floor can’t fall out of bed.”

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t bother, in theatre, to dream or to imagine any more. But maybe that our power, our strength, and dare I say even our glory, comes directly from our ability to embrace the shitty, the shoddy, the phony, the forced, the corny: to not run from and try to hide the compromises Reality subtracts from the Ideal, but to look towards them for inspiration, to highlight them as being the essential underlying uniqueness of what our craft is in this world and what it has to offer. To quote, in closing, Ramsey Dukes’ brilliant 1985 essay on the connection between occult or “real” magic and conjuring, illusion and fakery: “[...] by actually faking magic, we might discover magic. Not just that we should be less scared of the charlatan, less inclined to flee his presence; but that we should actually take lessons from him.”

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