Expanding our theatrical menu

It is a Western conceit propagated mostly by Broadway and West End that it invented theater. Be it a farce, a drama, an opera, or a musical, there is a perception that great dramaturgy can only be had with stage performances of Western descent, to include Shakespeare, Chekhov, English translations of Greek comedies and tragedies, Austrian, German or Italian opera, Russian ballet, classic Americana, and slick, ultra-expensive Broadway musicals. The situation is not helped by the increasing appetite of theatergoers for extravagant set designs, which only ups the ante for even more gargantuan sets, hundreds of cast members, and even more expensive theater tickets.

Yet one of the best plays I have ever seen involved only three characters throughout the nearly two-hour show, with just a bench and a recliner for props, and the most thought-provoking dialogue I have ever heard, liberally splashed throughout with such clever repartee that I was still quoting them three weeks after seeing the play. Another stage performance that has stuck with me was one that exclusively featured shadows, with the actors playing out their roles behind a huge white curtain, their shadows writ large on the screen by the flickering light of a lamp. One of the most moving plays I’ve ever seen featured no dialogue, took less than an hour from start to finish, and was acted out to the steady beat of a native drum, climaxing with the anguished scream of one of the characters. In all these examples, the plays featured Asian traditional theater, with most performances carried out in ramshackle school buildings, the town’s main quadrangle, or a traditional play house that was more of a temple than a glitzy opera house, where the audience sat in respectful silence as if for Mass rather than chomping on popcorn while guzzling on soda from overlarge paper cups.

Here in the CNMI, we have our own fledgling theater movement, ranging from amateur school plays and excerpts of ballet favorites, to productions put up by local theatrical groups such as the Friends of the Arts. With virtually no indigenous theatrical traditions, local efforts to bring the Great White Way to this remote corner of the Pacific have mostly involved the staging of Broadway or off-Broadway offerings, with scarcely an effort to showcase other Western classics such as the Greek and Shakespearian tragedies and comedies. The Glushko Dance Studio has commendably brought in foreign talent to perform for us local yokels but these once-a-year events are spaced too few and far between to have much of an impact in terms of helping develop a truly local theatrical tradition with standards that are on par with the international stage.

I am not knocking local efforts to provide us with some culture. The fact that the Friends of the Arts still manages to produce several stage and radio plays each season on a shoestring budget and a cast that’s mostly made up of volunteers is a truly commendable accomplishment, an astonishing display of courage and faith that is worthy of at least a Humanities award, if you ask me. However, there is a perception that these plays are mostly intended for the local resident population, and this unwittingly puts a crimp on the overall quality and variety of the group’s offerings. Take for example its last production, [I]La Cage aux Folles[/I]. When I saw it, majority of the audience was composed of statesiders, local residents, and a sprinkling of various nationalities—virtually all of them professionals, college-educated, and no strangers to theater. No wonder that the matinee performance was sparsely attended. To borrow a cliché, this was the equivalent of preaching to the choir. The people who saw the show didn’t need to be convinced to show up because they have already imbibed the habit of going to the theater and are already convinced of the value that they will be getting from the experience. How about the others? The many vacant seats were silent testimony to the fact that the group is failing to reach a larger slice of the local population. And it’s not just this flawed perception of exclusivity that’s putting off a larger slice of the community. As it is right now, ticket prices are beyond the skimpy entertainment budget of the minimum wage earning population. Add to that the challenges posed by the purely English language used in local stage plays and that automatically cuts off more than half of the potential audience that one can have.

What I’m trying to say here is that the potential for a truly multi-cultural entertainment scene on the islands is virtually limitless yet this resource remains vastly untapped. We have at our disposal a community of multi-stranded cultures from which we could tap dramatic material that we could incorporate into the local theater scene. The Japanese have their Kabuki, the Chinese have their operas, shadow plays, puppet theater, and acrobatics, the Koreans have their [I]Talchum[/I] and [I]Pansori[/I] traditions replete with satire, dances and shaman rituals, the Filipinos have their zarzuelas and Palanca award winning plays, the Thais have their highly stylized and ritualized dance forms, the Indians have their gods vs. demons epics, etc., etc. Yet we see none of these and the only way to access these interesting theater forms is to go off-island or for a private company to sponsor the visit of a performance troupe.

I am not convinced, though, that we lack the available talent within the existing pool. Nor do I believe in the lack of interest within the community. What is needed to be done, as with several other things on the island, is to embrace the fact that, for better or worse, whether we like it or not, we are already a multi-cultural community, that the CNMI is no longer just a slice of a homogenized America in the Pacific but is a hodgepodge of Western and Oriental cultures. There must be a reaching out to all the different cultures on the island, an all-embracing acceptance where we must all learn to celebrate not just our similarities but also our differences, where we actively go out and ask each one to show us what they’ve got and to celebrate that with the gusto we show for our own traditions. This will not only educate us but will also enrich our own cultures, expand the minds of people and, better yet, increase attendance at theater performances while lowering ticket prices at the box office. When this happens, more private companies will be inclined to whip out their checkbooks to support the local theater scene, leading to local theater groups having more funds to put up more shows, better production values, and possibly per diems for its performers. There will also be more compulsion to professionalize the performing arts and that could only be good for everyone all around.