Why fund theater?

I was asked to write a short essay about why the corporation I work for supports theater as a funder. This was my response. Since I have a theater blog, I thought I'd include it here:

As someone who manages the arts giving at a large corporation, I’m often asked why Boeing funds the arts. What’s behind the question, of course, is a query about how an aerospace company, centered on the work of engineers, benefit from communities having a robust arts scene. My response typically includes three reasons: the arts comprise a natural breeding ground for innovation, provides a civic service, and that beauty serves as a respite from an increasingly overcrowded life.

The innovation answer is expected. However, the kind of causality people imagine is not always what I intend. It’s true that the arts breed innovation and we need innovative workers to design our products but I also mean something else. Our communities need members to think in new ways if we are to respond productively to all the change the world is presently throwing at us. As we become an increasingly global society and experience a growth in international migration, we are experiencing an important shift in demographics all over the globe, whether in the United States, Italy, or South Korea. Other kinds of changes, in the earth’s climate and genetic engineering to name a couple, require a speedy response in new technology, behavior, and ethics. People will have to think differently to create these solutions. Innovation in the form of theater helps us strengthen those muscles. Last fall, I saw Richard Foreman’s “Idiot Savant” at the Public Theater in New York, a thoroughly abstract and non-liner piece of theater in which the characters take orders from a disembodied voice and consider the subjectivity of experience. It was, in a way, a completely non-sensical experience but the humor and acting talent kept one engaged enough to make it through. Like a Faulkner novel, this play asks you to give up on making meaning until it unfolds in its own time. This means choosing to remain engaged while not understanding. At some point if one is open and works hard, meaning emerges. Until then, though, you make your peace with what at first seems nonsensical. This is an emotional and intellectual exercise that theater makes possible and that serves us well as we try to take issues the world puts before us seriously and tackle productively. This skill and patience is needed in our communities but also in an increasingly diverse company.

Innovation then, serves the purpose of developing the workforce of the future but also a civic one. The second purpose, as I see it, is also civic in nature. Theater presents us with a picture of ourselves that we are often willing to encounter only with the distance the stage provides us. One of the special treats of living in Chicago is having the Hypocrites theater company among us. One of the highlights of their 10-year life was a production of Eileen Fornes’ “Mud,” a play about a hard working woman who cannot escape poverty due to a lack of education and the financial and emotional dependence of two men. This production protected the audience from the protagonist’s pain by placing the action in a glass box. The audience walked about the box to view the scenes, with a light bulb lighting up to alert the audience of the direction in which the next scene would be played. As an audience member walking around the box, one finds oneself trying to walk a little faster than ones neighbor in order to get a better view of the action. Near the end of the play, the protagonist tries to escape her situation. With an ax, she breaks the box and leaves, walking out among the audience. As she slowly walks among you, looking at you amazed, sweating, and exhausted, you realize that her pain has provided you entertainment (much like the evening news might) and that you have vied for position for the best peek into her pathetic life. Then the men pick up a gun, go after her, and bring her back in the box and again you realize that you’ve done nothing. This is, of course, a play and in a way nothing is to be done. However, it does implicate the audience about our response to poverty and violence. If someone were to tell us directly that we use often other people’s pain as entertainment and refuse to get involved, we are likely to be defensively shrug it off, maybe even getting angry at the accuser. However, when the argument unfolds in front on us on a stage, we accept it less defensively.

While my first two reasons are centered in civic benefits my third is purely personal but is, in my estimation, the most important. The arts provide the opportunity to experience beauty in a world where the work day keeps getting longer and where we have less time for leisure. Rejuvenation is important for productivity and our souls, a word we often think too slippery to use in public discourse, and Americans turn to theater more than any other performing art form for that rejuvenating experience. That beauty might reside in the sharpness of an idea engendered in the story on stage, the sound of a voice, or the colors and textures of art design. In Josh Schmidt’s and Jason Loewith’s musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s dark play, “The Adding Machine,” which received its world premier at Chicago’s Next Theatre, there is a moment when a husband and wife who have come to loathe each other remember better times during the song “Didn’t We” that is engrossing both because of the emotional content and the register of the actors’ voices. In Mary Zimmerman’s “Eleven Rooms of Proust” at Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre, one loses oneself each time one enters another room filled with beautiful costumes, lighting, set, and words. Living a meaningful life, or perhaps living well, requires working productively, living in consort with ones neighbors, and experiencing beauty. Few of us do any of those as much as we want but our society rarely publicly recognizes the benefits of the third enough.