Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 1975 - 7

DO YOU KNOW THE EXPLORATION GAP?
GORDON DAVIDSON

Center Theatre Group,
Los Angeles, California

I am apprehensive that your Conference meetings
will confirm what you always knew, deep in your
hearts. Gordon Craig was right. Theatre could work
all the time as art if it wasn't for the director and the
actors.

buildings, there were vastly increased audiences.
More companies, more actors, more drama students
in universities. Each production grew more expensive, more difficult to justify. We took on the look of
a minor industry.

Did you read about Disney's EPCOT an
experimental prototype community-of-tomorrow in
his recently acquired State of Florida? It would be
the technological cat's whiskers, with everything
Stanley Kramer never dreamed of. Monorails, microwaves, solar barbeque pits. Their aim is, "to end
the gap and the delay between the laboratory and the
assembly line."

Simultaneously, the industry's sources dwindled.
The number of experimenters in theatre began to
lessen as the play got to be more like work; the
amateurs ran away to where the stakes were within
reason. We didn't see "the newcomer to Broadway,
or off-off Broadway" any more. The extravagant
risks, for art or ego's sake, got to be very rare. The
airy, deductible gesture reached the point where
nobody at all wanted that size deduction. Finally, of
course, everyone had to think at least partially
commercially. And now we are without what I shall
call an "exploration gap." No one, anywhere, is
involved in the serious process of progressing the art
of theatre with any degree of continuum. The line of
development has been snapped.

The problem, as Gordon Craig would have pointed
out if he were on their Advisory Board, is of course
the actor. A Disney spokesman says in last Sunday's
L. A. Times: "The stopper was always the sociology.
You can't experiment with people's lives."
I hope it's a stopper. I'm all for the gap between
the laboratory and the assembly line; and the United
States of Disney, so far as I am concerned, is ok for a
visit but I wouldn't want to live there.
I am sorry to tell you that I am melancoly; that is,
I am wistfully sad. It is about the energy crisis.
You must have noticed the energy crisis in
theatre. We have been noted for our energy,
probably more than anything else: "an energetic cast
totally misled by the director made the appalling
script a thing of joy and delight;" "the evening made
up in energy what it lacked in style." We know how
to keep it r'loving. It has moved out of the
proscenium. It has moved from Broadway to off and
off-off to regional to community centers. It has
generated self-proliferating groups; it has generated
styles and schools of playwrights and actors; it
generated a cultural interest through the sixties
which made a real difference to American perception. Certainly, directly and indirectly, Theatre has
substantially helped to generate the current need to
get to the truth of the matter, the refusal to accept
things as they seem; that we broke taboos and
cliches and questioned myths has led, I believe, to
the housecleaning of our institutions, establishments
and domestic gods. We started that, with Pop and
Op Art, with the post-Beatie music, with our hair and
our nudity and our strobes and our absurd, ridiculous, marat-sadistic behaviour in the last decade.
As we did it, all our statistics grew, and we
became numbers experts. There were more theatre

For the moment, this is scarcely noticeable; there
is stockpile enough. But the combined effect of being
without research and, as well, finding each successive production needs an increased supply of energy
does, I fear, put us in a dangerous position. There is
a demand for theatre, just as we always wanted. It is
a strident and uncomprehending demand, and partly
our own fault. Our increased audience, our culturally
aware patrons, are now eager for accessible product,
without fully realizing that within the business our
sources are being depleted. We are emptying the
shelves, giving more than we can afford; we are
robbing our art to make sure it is constantly available
to those who have recently learned to want it. And
the more popular and necessary theatre becomes, the
more expensive it is, the less we are perm itted to
explore and extend it.
All this, of course, is no news to you. What you
may not realize is that the condition is by no means
exclusive to theatre, or even to the arts. The
scientist, in precisely the same way, is disturbed
because he is feeling an irresistible pressure to
discontinue research in favor of present demands. In
all areas, the exploration gap is being swiftly and
effectively eroded, to the point where it almost
doesn't exist.
Since the laser, the transistor and genetic engineering, there have been virtually no conceptual
scientific discoveries whatsoever. All of these are
already in general, diverse use and have been for

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