The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [129]
17.
PLAYS “R” US
IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 2001, I went with my wife and parents to see August Wilson’s play King Hedley II, at the Virginia Theatre on West 52nd Street. The play was set in 1985—Ronald Reagan’s America—and the action took place in the scraggly backyard of a street of row houses in a barely-getting-along urban neighborhood. A half-demolished brick wall at the back of the stage formed an enclosure separating the world of the characters, black people who were no longer young and no longer hopeful, from the prosperous, front-yard world familiar to the audience. No one was going anywhere; and the ironically named King Hedley and his neighbors delivered furious monologues about the cruelty of life in Reagan’s morning-in-America world, while also not failing to ensure their own inevitable failure, and even destruction. Wilson was also, of course, revealing to his audience the backyard world of embitterment and selfimmolation from which they would normally be shielded. Wilson’s incantatory language apparently hit its mark: At the intermission, my father turned to me and said, “They all seem very angry.”
Aristotle hypothesized that the theater arts permit the viewer to experience the catharsis that comes of feeling powerful emotions not normally encountered in daily life. Aristotle was talking about terror and pity, and probably that serves perfectly well to encompass the world of a play like King Hedley II, or Suzan-Lori Parks’s Topdog/Underdog, or O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night, or any number of the serious and unsettling plays, whether originals or revivals, that have been mounted on Broadway in recent years. These works of theater provide the moral and intellectual anchor of Times Square. The critics of the new Times Square complain that the “unsettling experiences”—experiences of the unpredictable, the incongruous, the unmannerly—central to urban life have been evacuated from this all-too-calculated global crossroads. They’re right; and yet those disturbing experiences are still available inside the world of the theater. King Hedley II may not have constituted a cathartic experience for my father, but at the very least, it provoked a moment of troubled recognition— “They all seem very angry.”
It is patent that theater doesn’t “matter” in American culture; it’s scarcely mattered in half a century. But it matters greatly in Times Square, and not only economically. The illusionistic worlds inside the theaters offer relief from, and an alternative to, the illusionistic world of Times Square itself. They are spaces carved out from Times Square’s increasingly totalized environment. Some of them offer themselves as contrasts to, or subversions of, that environment. (One of the two main characters of Topdog/Underdog makes a living, when all else fails, playing three-card monte, presumably not far from the theater.) To emerge from these plays is to carry with you a memory, or perhaps just an image, of something that will not be assimilated into the glossy world of Broadway, just as King Hedley and his friends cannot be assimilated into Ronald Reagan’s America.
Of course, most of these illusionistic worlds aren’t meant to be disturbing in the least. They’re meant to be—even if in fact they’re often not—delightful, sentimental, splashy, and sparkling, just as they have always been on Broadway. Frothy escapism is the bread and butter of Broadway. Take a musical like 42nd Street, for example. Just as the 1933 movie muted the bitter misanthropy of the 1932 novel, so the play—itself a revival of a David Merrick production from the sixties—gentles the Depression-era desperation of the movie. The kids who find a dime on the street and sing “We’re in the Money” are urchins; but a moment