Theatre Thursday

Before today’s gab, big thanks to a friend who was very complimentary of yesterday’s Precious review. It always feels nice to hear things like that.

Also, Yahtzee! I appear to have found a way to pirate Reds games online. Do I feel bad about skirting the law? Hell no! I wouldn’t have to do this if MLB would allow 700 WLW to Broadcast online during game time. How else do they expect me to follow the team from Chicago? ESPN gamecast? – well, it wouldn’t be so bad a thing to do if my computer actually had a decently long battery life so I could watch something else at the same time.

Baseball is the only sport that I think might be better to listen to than to watch on TV. The broadcasters are much better (in Cincinnati anyway). For my money, one of the best summers of my life was just after senior year of college – I had no cable and my pal and I listened to every game on the radio each night while playing video games. And, I was working as a pizza delivery man, and could listen to the games in my car. Nothing better.

By the way, as I speak, the Reds are holding on to their first lead of the year. Can they keep it? I don’t know, Pujols is up. We’ll have full analysis of the Reds’ first week as well as Masters coverage on Saturday.

But it’s Theatre Thursday! And here’s today’s essay, entitled:

Am I One of the Infected?

If you’re into low-budget, but highly artistic theatre, you should check out Ozma and Harriet at the Side Project in Chicago. This Tympanic Theatre offering will run you only $12, and was one of the most entertaining and intellectually stimulating nights of theatre that I’ve had in a long time – an example of the caliber of creative work that can be seen with only a minimal budget (running through April 18th, so hurry).

Ozma and Harriet is science fiction in the vein of the Twilight Zone or an Isaac Asimov novel. Taking place in 1991, it’s mostly the world as we know it, with the exception of the presence of a highly realistic android named Ozma built by workaholic scientist Frank Younger. We know that we are in 1991 because Frank’s shut-in wife, Harriet has nothing to fill her lonely Friday nights (Frank is off working, of course) but sitting and watching TGIF - the titan of ABC’s early 90’s Friday night lineups, featuring such classics as Full House, Dinosaurs, Family Matters, and Boy Meets World.

Though Harriet has been warned by Frank against interacting with Ozma (Frank wanting sole control over what the humanoid is taught), curiosity gets the best of her. She activates and befriends Ozma, teaching him the joys of human existence (laughing, friendship, relationships) in contrast to the purely analytical knowledge that Frank gives him. Mostly, they sit and watch a lot of TV. Ozma learns to perfectly ape all of the TGIF lineup, and Harriet starts to feel close with him as her husband becomes more and more distant.

Eventually, the relationship of Ozma and Harriet takes a romantic and sexual turn. Frank discovers what has happened and, blinded by jealousy, sets a deadly trap for his wife if anything ever happens a second time. When it does, Ozma is left confused and friendless, with his only remaining connection to the world being TGIF. In the play’s second act, we see his mind wholly consumed by television – so strongly does it have a hold on him that he can hardly distinguish between a show and reality. If he were to smack someone in the face with a frying pan a la Dinosaurs, he would hardly know whether it would cause pain or uncontrollable laughter.

Though Ozma is an android, how different is his plight from that of a real human being? One of the reasons that Ozma and Harriet works is that the constant presence of TGIF tropes is recognizable to us and, in fact, meaningful. How many twenty-somethings of today remember sitting and watching TGIF every Friday – reruns or no. We knew all of Steve Urkel’s eccentricities as well as we knew those of our best friends. We felt closer to Uncle Jesse than we did to our own siblings. And this extends to all of the major television shows of our youth – I spent countless hours watching and rewatching Nickelodeon (Doug, Hey Arnold, Ren & Stimpy) and Disney (Animaniacs, Pinky & the Brain) – taking in as much from television as I did in my school classes.

But was this a double-edged sword? As Ozma & Harriet points out, television does indeed teach valuable lessons of morality, and familiarizes us with the ways of the world. At the same time, overexposure can be a type of infection, skewing one’s mind into thinking that all of life can be wrapped up into neat little stories, simple lessons, clear morality.

This led me to wonder, am I one of the Infected? Did I watch so much television in my youth that I’ve intrinsically warped my view of the world? And if so, is there a way for me to “wake up?”

I think of two examinable cases: Firstly, I look at my view of the world as an artist. After recently directing a comedy, how much did TGIF affect my choices? The answer is, quite a bit. My inherent understanding of comic rhythms was taught by and will forever be informed by TV episodes. Just like taking a poetry class teaches how different styles of verse work (their uses, advantages, disadvantages) constantly viewing Family Matters and Hey Arnold teaches the way that different types of jokes affect an audience, and how art communicates with viewers.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. As an artist, one needs to find ways to gain that feel for how to manipulate audiences – just as a basketball player needs ten thousand hours of practice to learn the feel of the ball, an artist needs ten thousand hours of viewing and watching the affects of other art - that’s why watching theatre is considered a business expense for theatre artists. Of course, true artists branch away from the establishment, but in order to do so, they need to have a knowledge of what the establishment is.


Case number two: Getting the babe.

One undeniable trope of Disney, TGIF, and Nickelodeon is for the main character to get the girl by the end of the episode. Cory has his Topanga, Urkel has Laura, and every single Disney hero is rewarded for their exploits with a relationship of some sort (see Hercules, the Lion King, Aladdin). I think that an unsaid but clearly visible theme of all youth programming is that morality is rewarded with sexuality. Steve Urkel eventually gets Laura not because he learns how to be attractive to her, but because he constantly proves his worth as a person through moral acts.

It’s nice that we are trying to teach our children morality on television, but it is also problematic. It teaches adherence to an absolute creed, which any adult knows is not useful in analyzing the complexities of a decision to be made as an adult. And moreover, associating relationships with such morality warps the way we think of ourselves and our sexual lives. That is, if we’re not getting any, it would appear to be a judgment of not just a person’s attraction to you, but of your actual worth as a person. I don’t have a girl? I must not be a moral person – all of my decisions must be wrong.

Nobody really thinks consciously about this, but I do believe that these seeds exist in many of us because of the prevalence of a certain type of TV when we were young. To answer my original question, yes, I do feel like I am one of the Infected, and I feel that part of becoming an adult is learning to cure oneself of these wholly powerful, but wholly misguided assumptions about how the world works. When you are young, and everything is new, you try to learn as much about the world as fast as possible, without any regard to evaluating the quality of the teacher. Growing up is about critiquing not just what you learn, but the sources of that learning.

TGIF may not be the Rage Virus of 28 Days Later, but that doesn’t mean it had no ability to zombify us in our, as F. Scott Fitzgerald described it, “…younger and more vulnerable years.”