The Eternal Theater of the World Stage

Cheap Thrills: Speculations on Entertainment, Media, Art, and Leisure in the Deindustrial Age 

​"Theater is a verb before it is a noun, an act before it is a place." - Martha Graham

Theater is one of our oldest art forms, and it isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon. The current most popular mode of theater, as piped in on internet streams to be viewed on telephone, television and movie screens, is likely to shift and change considerably in the decades ahead. Society has become more isolated with the advent of the internet and our streaming services. These services keep us inside and alone, or inside with our partners and nuclear family units, instead of outside, on the stage of the world, acting with volition, speaking our lines, and interacting with the extended family of our fellows.

 The desire to get up in front of others and act out the role of a character seems to be hardwired into us. The restoration of theater implies the restoration of community. It is difficult to really feel a sense of community around Netflix, Hulu or Prime. I’m not at all sure that the corporate boardrooms of the above companies count as communities. If they are a “community” it must be on par with the so-called “intelligence” community of spies, double-operatives and propagandists, who are often bedfellows with legacy media. Theater does not exist outside of community. Sure, there are one-person shows and monologues, but rehearsal in front of the mirror only takes you so far. To even have people to present a monolog  to as a gift of creativity denotes a community of family, neighbors, friends, co-workers, and colleagues, people you might know from the bus or from the bar.

In James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand quartet there is a very active community theater in the fictional town of Union Grove that puts on productions at about the same rate as your average high school. There is a fall production, Christmas production, and so on. The characters practice in the evenings for seasonal shows and storytelling. The people in these stories use it as a way to give back to their small town, offering hope and something to look forward to as it recovers from the turmoil of national collapse. The theater gives the characters something constructive to do with themselves, a bulwark against societal chaos. Kunstler himself is no slouch as a playwright, so it makes sense that he would imbue his world with a revival of small-town theater and all the possibilities it implies.

These days bingeing on television and sucking on what Harlan Ellison called the glass teat is used as a safety blanket for numbing the pain that comes from living in a decaying culture, in a failing empire, in a world with rising sea levels and burning skies. Watching TV creates the illusion of relieving boredom, of having something to do, but it is a generally a passive medium, and for those who use it as their only form of recreation, it quickly becomes self-defeating. The time that could have been spent having a life is instead spent watching the life of someone else. Yet many of us who have grown up with TV—that is to say, quite a number of us—have grown very accustomed to watching movies and shows. Those of us who haven’t been involved in theater or gone to see live plays may find it hard to create new habits. And while some viewers may be able to switch off the box and quit cold turkey, others might need to be weaned. As our world downshifts to deal with a lower energy base, the medium of the movies that has so dominated the twentieth century might first see a similar downshift as people acclimate to the realities of life without unlimited streams and non-stop television broadcasting.

Pirate cinema movie-houses may step in to fill the void during the coming interregnum, offering flickering images and bowls of popcorn to the people for a small fee.

PIRATE CINEMA

​To go back to Harlan Ellison briefly, his post-apocalyptic novella, A Boy and His Dog (and film of the same) showcases a main character whose two main objectives in life are eating and getting laid. When he can’t get it on he attends a grimy grindhouse cinema where they watch skin flicks. In this setting of a desecrated American southwest the fact that there was still a movie theater catering to people’s baser tastes struck an incongruous chord when I first read it. Who would have the time to run a movie house when most people spent their days scrounging for canned peaches in the ashes of a nuclear winter?  Since the first installment of this column I have wondered about the fate of the movies, and this story always came to mind.  In a deindustrial society, as opposed to whatever is left on the other side of armaggedon, movies could continue to exist for a time.

There is no doubt that cinema can be a high art. What is in doubt is its sustainability. Photography has a history that goes back to the 1700s in its earliest forms, so there is a distinct possibility that it may be one of the suites of technology that gets saved and transmitted to future civilizations. Will it be the same as today’s photography? I can’t think that smart phones will be involved as the dominant mode of capturing images with light. Still, other possibilities remain while the resources for it do. Photography in the future will probably be much rarer than it is now, and done in specialist studios the way it was done at the beginning. Film might also continue to exist in a similar limited capacity.

 I have often thought that a person could run a bootleg movie house enterprise if they had access to a space with some chairs, a sheet, a film projector and a collection of DVDs, VHS or actual reels of films. This could be a lucrative business. Depending on the films chosen, it could even be filthy lucre.  Such a side hustle could be done on a limited basis in the evenings when other work is done. The host could charge a modest amount or be paid in barter and invite people into a den or hall to take in a film or a few episodes of a TV show. As the seemingly endless stream of online content dries up due to systemic forces of economy and ecology, there will be those who go into withdrawal from this opium of the masses . An enterprising individual could create a TV-opium den, powered by off-the-grid solar cells and other renewable energy sources. Such a movie house impresario need not cater to the blood-lust instincts of the populace, though movies with sex and violence still remain more popular than those lacking the same, and are the only reason some people to go to the movies in the first place.

Another possibility for the continuance of cinema in an uncertain future would be a revival of the drive-in. There are still two operating drive-ins on the outskirts of my city. They have a few retro nights every year that are worth going to when old sci-fi and action flicks are played. Every October they run several weekends devoted to the depravity of horror films in the lead-up to Halloween. I can see a future where families arrive at a drive-in theater by horse and buggy to take in an evening of films on a warm summer night, as long as enough energy could be produced to run a projector and the radio transmitter used for the audio at drive-ins. Screening classics such as The Wizard of Oz on annual basis could keep such places in operation, while giving them leeway in other parts of the year to cater to divergent tastes. These trot-ins and bike-ins would likely be even more fun without the noise and exhaust of cars.

The snack part of the operation will remain key. Popcorn has been the original snack food of America for centuries, and having some on hand to go along with films will only be part of the equation. As mass-produced culture fades, so will the mass-produced junk food that keeps it churning. The art of confectionery is not likely to disappear and our sugary treats might once again be eaten as actual treats, which is to say, something rare—as rare as seeing a film itself would be in a future where outside entertainment doesn’t take up such a huge part of people’s budgets. There is a high likelihood such sumptuous refreshments will be made to showcase regional flavors and the creativity of bakers and chocolatiers. The food common to carnivals and street vendors seems just as suitable to sell at such cinemas. Fruitful alliances could be made in mutual aid between vendors and those who run the films.

Today’s movie houses license the films they show from those who made them. Will the creators of the films need to be paid? I suppose that depends on what is left of the legal system, what movies are being showed, and how well the operation is advertised. If kept on a word-of-mouth or hush-hush basis, such an endeavor could be considered a kind of pirate cinema. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow espoused his own vision of Pirate Cinema in his novel of the same name. His book centered around the downloading of films illegally in a draconian England with stringent copyright laws. The character reassembled the films, and often remixed and remade the classics, resurrecting dead screen legends in new roles. My idea of a pirate cinema could certainly include remixing, but I would mostly see them as venues for showing of classics and keeping the film art alive. The question of copyright and who is owed what from a screening might well be moot depending on the situation. A vast number of films may well be in the public domain by the time pirate cinemas come into being. Copyright laws themselves might even change to give people who wish to synthesize, reuse, remake and remix older material more freedom to do so than they now have. Money for new films that address new concerns may well be lacking in times when limited funds will need to be invested with wisdom. As such the stock of old films is likely to be recycled and replayed, while the new films that do get made will lack CGI as the art of practical effects and stagecraft gets revived.

As things unravel AV clubs might be formed by those who wish to keep and repair stereos, radios, televisions, projectors and sound systems. If they got started now they could learn what the energy requirements are for running such a system for a few hours, and collect the necessary photovoltaic cells, batteries and other gear to put on movie nights at their homes or in the park. A night at the bootleg picture show watching flicks from yesteryear might be a cheap form of entertainment for those who’ve been pulled off the endless scroll of TikTok. While the drip feed may not be as fast, it might give many people what they want: a momentary respite from unwelcome realities and some time where they don’t have to think about the problems in their life, a few laughs, and some excitement.

THE GRAND GUGINOL  AND CORPORATE HORROR

It has been said that there is nothing new under the sun. Splatter flicks and sordid films featuring depraved violence may be a newer way of consuming violent spectacles but the spectacle of violence is nothing new. Slashers, psychopaths, and marauding maniacs have been popular in our entertainment for quite some time. People used to go see hangings and other grisly public executions just because it was something to do, and in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that long ago that they did. Much as I’d personally like to see an easing of capital punishment, it stands to reason that murder will be punished by further murder well on into our future. Public hangings were good for the printing trade when newly composed murder ballads would be sold to the public for a sing-along on execution day.

            Horror on the stage can be traced at least back to the plays of Shakespeare in Elizabethan times, if not to ancient Greece and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare’s tragedy Macbeth is perhaps the most famous horror play, with its witches and its murder, with its ghosts and its hauntings. Titus Andronicus is less read by those who aren’t Shakespeare fans or in the habit of reading plays, but it was a revenge story that the Victorians decried due to its bloody imagery. Revenge stories later became popular in pulp novels and on the screen, tapping into the place where jealousy, anger and fantasy all meet inside of our messy selves. It seems revenge stories are as old as humanity, where one person killing in retribution of a murdered family member kicks off one cycle of violence after another.
​
            In 1897 the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol came along and set the stage for savagery. Here the naturalistic exploration of the gory side of life had a heyday in a run that spanned just over six decades of bloody-minded brutality. The tendency for some of us to behave in gruesome ways at the expense of others seems to be a condition of humanity, and people’s taste for more of the same might not change much in the decades ahead. But will people still want to watch it on the stage?

Perhaps the horror shows of our futures will be more akin to what Thomas Ligotti has termed “corporate horror” in his fiction collection My Work Is Not Yet Done. The title novella has a corporate workplace as its setting, as do the two short stories he included, “I Have a Special Plan for This World” and “The Nightmare Network.” Ligotti’s tales featured characters on the bottom rungs of the business ladder, endless managerial meetings with managers who don’t respect their so-called inferiors, power plays, and pollution. As the fallout from our corporate-based culture continues to cascade down a cataclysm of descent, tales of flusterclucked CEOs might become all the rage against the machine. Maybe office workers and managers will be the source of our collective nightmare instead of people like Pinhead and company from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. For that matter it has been reasonably common for the devil to be pictured in various media as wearing a three-piece suit. John Michael Greer did just that with Dell, his depiction of the devil in his deindustrial novel Star’s Reach. 
​
            The ghosts of our mechanized monopolies may rise on the future stages. Such a theater of corporate horror may be one way to hold in memory what went wrong in industrial civilization. It may be another way to exorcise the wicked lingering spirits of multinational conglomerates. If the performances are held in the ruins and the wastelands directors might not even need to hire a set designer. Likewise, a real gallows show might be what is on offer on opening night at an office park or corporate headquarters somewhere near you in the decades ahead, though I hope it doesn’t come to that.

FOR THE LOVE OF STREET THEATER

​It might be better to take to the streets in a different way than as a mob. As the Dead Kennedys sang in their satirical song “Riot”:​

Riot, the unbeatable high / Riot, shoots your nerves to the sky /
 Riot, playing right into their hands / Tomorrow you’re homeless, tonight it’s a blast

Instead of getting into riot gear (and having the police do same) when ticked off at Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, Big Business in all its dark towering forms, why not take a stab at street theater? At least then the end result probably won’t be a mortal flesh wound. Small is beautiful, and street theater allows a direct connection to an audience in a way that is more intimate and immediate than at an indoor setting, and can be a quick and dirty way to spread a message.

Street theater is as old as our cities. Passion and Mystery plays were performed in the streets of the busy metropolitan centers of medieval Europe. The Romans and Greeks performed in public squares as did the Egyptians before them. Most theater has been held outside in some form, and what better place to expose people to the stories you wish to tell than the public square and streets of a busy metropolis? Markets, churches, fairs, and festivals were the places to go to see a performance. It was from the 15th century through the 20th that the theater came to be held in and thought of as an enclosed place. This had the advantage of keeping actors and materials protected in the event of foul weather, and allowed for the gradual development of ever more extravagant sets. Yet all the world is a stage for the actor, and for the counterculture of the 1960s, bringing theater back to the streets was a natural step, leading to the gradual rebirth of the street as the ultimate performance venue.

Groups like the San Francisco Diggers brought actors and mimes into the streets of the Haight-Ashbury during the tumult of hippiedom. As they wrote in one of their pamphlets, “Everyone is kept inside while the outside is shown through windows: advertising and manicured news.”

The Diggers named themselves after the English radicals who began to cultivate common land based on the idea that the earth was “a common treasury for all, without respect of persons.” This was in 1649, in the aftermath of the English Civil War, when the country was in tatters. The Diggers were opposed to feudalism, and dissented against the Church of England and the system of royalty epitomized by the British Crown. It was their agenda to do away with wage labor, to do away with the different economic classes that kept people separated, and to make landowners and private property things of the past, all in the name of an agrarian Christianity. They wished to be free from the exploitation of landlords and having to pay rent in particular. Together they would work the land in freedom from their oppressors.

This came at a time when food prices had doubled, which doubled the number of those who identified as Diggers. The government and landlords retaliated against the Diggers who were violently attacked by the well-to-do and had the laws of the land set against them. Being Christians, the Diggers themselves abhorred violence, as they held every person to be a child of God. Eventually the powers of state rooted them out, though one of the main agitators, Gerrard Winstanley, continued to advocate for Digger principles as a pamphleteer. From there his notions slipped into Protestant belief and remain some of the core principles of socialism.    

​For their part, the San Francisco Diggers espoused a brand of community anarchism and shared the original Diggers’ vision of freedom from property.

 One of the prongs that got this whole thing going was a mime troupe. Mimes are the strong and silent types, so while you might not expect much in the way of cultural change to come from them, it is their very silence which can shake foundations. R. G. “Ronnie” Davis founded the San Francisco Mime Troupe and acted as its artistic director during the heady period between 1959 and 1970, and started having shows out in public parks.

Another prong was the Artists Liberation Front, which started in 1966 as a way for artists to collaborate in mutual aid. One of the ideas that came out of their initial meetings was to host underground art festivals in some of the San Francisco neighborhoods where such things weren’t so typical. Ralph Gleason described one of their benefit parties as “Mardi Gras, a masked ball, with people in costumes, painted with designs, carrying plasticene banners through the audience while multi-colored liquid light projections played around them.” This became one of the first happenings, mixing media together, as is common in theater, and they wanted to do it again and again.

In October the ALF started bringing theater, mural paintings, poetry and other art into places where the poor folks lived in a series of four art fairs. These were billed as Free Fairs where no artworks were sold, but the community was invited to come in and participate to the sound of psychedelic rock music played by bands on the street. Participatory events from Free Fairs to the Free Festivals boomed just a few years later in the sixties with Woodstock and the like and continued on to the Stonehenge Free Festival.

The Diggers formed out of this general maelstrom and ferment in the same year as the ALF, in 1966. Billy Murcott and actor Emmett Grogran started the theater troupe. Murcott had the realization that people’s addiction to wealth and status had a basis in a deeply ingrained internalization around the supposed sanctity of capitalism. He thought that this was a kind of deep enchantment on individuals, so much so “as to have eradicated inner wildness and personal expression not condoned by society.” Murcott was a kind of sigma male who spent long hours alone, reading, and thinking, yet his influence was like an unseen wind, gently pushing the currents of the counterculture in the direction he was working. Grogran, meanwhile was a talented actor with an intense distaste for the mainstream media. They looked to do something about their convictions and took to the stage of the street.

​“The Death of Hippie” was typical of their kind of street theater and performed in 1967. This action was a solemn funeral procession where a coffin with the words “Hippie—Son of Media” printed along its side was carried down the streets of Haight-Ashbury by Diggers in masks. In their mind this march marked the death of the hippie era, and it attracted the attention of the media who broadcast and talked about the event without seeming to have clue about the irony: the message that the hippies had been the creation of the media was picked up and transmitted by the media. This method of communication hijacking and manipulation, which the Diggers called “creating the condition you describe” was one of their signature techniques, and can be seen as an early form of culture jamming.

[Culture jamming is a term was coined by Negativland in the early 1980s and can be seen as a kind of guerilla communication strategy. It shares in common many of the same techniques and ideas as détournement, or rerouting or hijacking an idea, developed by the Situationist International in the 1950s. ]

Some of their other events are still funny such as when they drove a truck of scantily clad belly dancers into the heart of the SF financial district and invited the stiff businessmen in shirts and ties to loosen up a bit and hop on the back of the truck, dance, and quit their jobs. I’m not sure if this kind of action would give people who encountered it today the same kind of jolt to their consciousness as it did back then, but similar strategies might be worth repeating. These days, instead of strippers, it might be more shocking to tell people to quit their jobs, put on an apron, and go back to work in the home economy as a househusband or housewife.

It is interesting to reconsider the original Diggers and the SF Diggers at this time in history. Housing prices have skyrocketed. A demented gerontocracy won’t loosen the reigns of their power and cede leadership to younger generations. Meanwhile newly minted adults who are just starting out can barely afford a place to live and many now never leave the home of their parents. Encampments that mirror Hooverville shacktowns of the Great Depression are a fixture in our major cities and people have taken to living in vans and other mobile homes as a cheaper way to survive. From January of 2020 to June of 2024 consumer price inflation rose almost 22%, not to mention ridiculously high housing costs.[1] A street theater that focuses on the exorbitant costs of living could be a response to these devastating market forces. Landlords and merchants are raking it in, and little is doled out to the people who prop up their profits.

The SF Diggers didn’t just act. They acted on their principles. They opened free stores and gave away free food in the park. On offer were discarded but usable items and otherwise scrounged materials, food that would have been thrown away. These days there are a number of free stores, food banks, and the like, but I don’t know of any that combine their outreach with plays featuring political satire.

Free isn’t the only way either. When I was a kid my parents belonged to two different food co-ops and later ran a third where members bought in bulk for a number of years. With the high prices of food these days, a food co-op sounds very welcome. If it was set up in empty parking lots, places where grocery stores have been deliberately closed so they could rebuild a new one just across the street (as is the wasteful business practice of the Kroger company), the work could be mixed with the fun of theater, puppetry, miming and a festival spirit to bring people together. 

Getting together with one another and acting things out is an innate form of play. Just ask any kid who hasn’t had the habit and inclination beaten of them yet. As adults, if we let go of some of our hangups, we could get back to that sense of play, get back to making up stories for each other that need to be told. I think those stories are there, waiting, deep within our collective memory, filled with characters ready to emerge from the dark slumber of our dreams and imagination. Their stories ache to be written down and their dramas acted out. The set and setting will all follow as the eternal theater of the world stage continues to turn.

There’s some stuff in Minneapolis that’s close. An organization called Heart of the Beast Theater puts on puppet shows, and an organization called the Sisters’ Camelot redistributes remaindered food from the organic distributors’ warehouses. Sisters’ Camelot often caters HOBT’s events for free. HOBT’s stuff is sometimes pretty political, sometimes not very. Not sure if they’re still going, though; I know they went under somehow or other a few years ago, and I don’t recall hearing of them being resurrected.

RE/SOURCES:

Carlson, Marvin A. Theatre: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK.: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Carlson, Marvin A. Theories of the Theatre :A Historical and Critical Survey from the Greeks to the Present.
IIthaca, NY.: Cornell University Press, 1993.

The Digger Archives. < https://www.diggers.org/> Many detailed articles on the history of the San Francisco Diggers on this website.

Doctorow, Cory. Pirate Cinema. New York, NY.: Tor Teen, 2012.

Ellison, Harlan. Blood’s A Rover. Burton MI.: Subterranean Press, 2018. This collection contains all of the stories featuring Vic and Blood from A Boy and His Dog, plus aphorisms, and the screenplay for the TV pilot, and numerous quotations from The Wit and Wisdom of Blood.

Ellison, Harlan. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1973.

Ellison, Harlan. The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on Television. New York, NY.: Ace Books, 1983.

Gordon, Mel, ed. Grand Guignol :Theatre of Fear and Terror. New York, NY.: Amok Press, 1988.

Ligotti, Thomas. My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror. Mythos Books, 2002.

​Tamás, Rebecca. “The Diggers Green Roots.” < https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/02/the-diggers-green-roots> 

.:. .:. .:.
​
The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

​
Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. ​