Art vs. entertainment: Student theater should be more than average

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of seeing Edward Hall's stunning and ambitious "Midsummer" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The play used a very minimal set, costumes which were beautiful in their simple theatricality and an all-male cast of actors whose energy and love for the text allowed it to soar to heights not often seen when "Midsummer" is performed in this country. Every aspect of this expertly-wrought production impressed, and I found myself thinking, "Wow, this is a truly amazing theatrical experience. Why can't Princeton have more art like this?".

From the B.A.M., I caught the yellow line to 42nd Street; a friend of mine, a recent graduate of Princeton now working in the city as an actor, had invited me to see a performance of his show, "Alice in Wonderland." The play, which followed a modern-day Alice through a sexual awakening as she journeyed through a dildo-filled Wonderland, was the least artistic, most offensive piece of pornographic filth I have ever seen, and I found myself thinking, "Wow, this is the worst piece of crap on which I've ever wasted two hours of my life. Thank God you don't see this kind of art at Princeton." (It should be noted, however, that the budget for this piece was clearly much higher than the budget for the average Princeton play).

As I left the theater, it dawned on me that, in the course of one day, I had seen two works of theater which ran the gamut from awe-inspiring to nauseating.

Returning to Princeton that evening, I found myself thinking about the arts at Princeton and where, in this spectrum between impressive and uninspiring, most of our work falls.

As I have said, my opinion — as far as the theater is concerned — is that productions as inspiring as the B.A.M.'s "Midsummer" occur infrequently at Princeton. Thankfully, however, productions as sickening as this particular "Alice in Wonderland" are also infrequent (if not altogether unseen). I find that most of the student theater (and student art, in general) that gets produced on campus falls somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. That is, your average Princeton production is simply that: average. Not outstanding. But not terrible, either.

Considering all of the campus groups that produce theater at Princeton (with the exception of the Program in Theater) are entirely student operated and that the arts community is (as I have argued) gererally unsupported by the rest of the Princeton population and underfunded by the University, this is not a bad state in which to be. Nevertheless, I often wonder why student theater at Princeton can't have more life and push more boundaries . . . why it can't defy these obstacles.

In truth, I often find, when I go to the theater here at Princeton, many student productions simply aim to entertain, but only manage to do so with a moderate degree of success. Many productions, when forced to walk the fine line between arftulness and entertainment value, forgo art for the sake of being fun and selling tickets, but, even so, the arts remain underpatronized (not surprising, of course, considering the alternative enterainment options available at Princeton).

The situation, however, is really something of a double-edged sword: those productions that aim for a certain degree of artistry, experimentation or imaginitiveness often risk alienating their audiences altogether.

We know art needs an audience to exist. We also know when art panders to that audience too much, it can lose its artful quality and become kitsch. What's more, we know when it disregards its audience for the sake of waxing more artistic, it can become schlock. In my opinion, there is a preponderance of kitschy and shlocky theater at Princeton. I would like to see an increase of serious theater at Princeton, theater that seeks to do more than present its audience with an hour's entertainment and, yet, is entertaining enough to draw and keep an audience.