James Wolcott's Blog: A Hiss Is Just a Hiss, A Sigh Is Just a Sigh:
It's a poignant fact that the audience for theater, as in so many of the performing arts, is graying and getting stooped--it's not exactly news for anyone in the field. But it's never occurred to me to wonder what it's like for those acting, singing, dancing, and monologuing on stage to watch their audiences wizen away, and now I know. In a rueful, hard-punching first person essay, Mike Daisey (whose performance of his monologue Invincible Summer was the recipient of an unwelcome baptismal dousing) confronts the mortality issue:
The numbers are grim--the audiences are dying off all over the country. I know because every night I'm onstage, I stare out into the dark and can hear the oxygen tanks hissing.
The reliance on life support supports is only part of the atrophy of energy and daring that Daisey (here's his blog) diagnoses and deplores in regional theater, which has evolved into a corporate organism devoted to its own self-perpetuation
5:21 AM
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