Whether one prefers a Bible study, a soup kitchen, or a motorcycle club, a well-developed civil society institution fulfills two needs for its participants: a communal need and an interest-based need. In recent years and across diverse political persuasions, Americans have united to lament how threadbare their communities have become, regardless of their trust in the government to patch up the holes. No matter who is to blame, 21st-century conservatives must not allow the warm antiquarianism wafting off the phrase “civil society” to cloud its simplicity. To zero in on the welfare state as the chief corruptor of free association is to assume food, shelter, and healthcare are the most basic of human needs. These assumptions can mask the true purpose of human communion, and therefore of civil society organizations. After all, “It is not good for man to be alone.”
Religious practice, while it should not be pursued only for its innumerable temporal benefits, nevertheless does have innumerable temporal benefits. But churches primarily offer a place to gather with like-minded individuals and a place to learn about and approach the divine. In a crude sense, religious worship articulates for believers their metaphysical origin and destination. By contrast, the arts—particularly theater—carve out a space for humans to puzzle out what we are doing here. As Pope St. John Paul II argued in his Letter to Artists:
Even beyond its typically religious expressions, true art has a close affinity with the world of faith, so that, even in situations where culture and the Church are far apart, art remains a kind of bridge to religious experience. … Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.
In a similar vein, Nathaniel Hawthorne said pithily, “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.” Religion and art are kin not only in their ability to nourish the spirit but also in their communal nature. One seldom considers artistic venues as bastions of civil society, but at their height, when sponsored by a community that values the arts, they provide a space for collaborative wonder and struggle. This is precisely why the earliest examples of theater, whether Egyptian, Greek, or Sanskrit, have strong ties to religious worship. By making the sublime tangible, theater asks us to consider ourselves outside of time and space, even as it uses time and space to ask these questions.
Any lover of the “Great Books” will tell you that watching Shakespeare beats reading it any day. But why? The Greeks provide what is easily the most famous example in the Western canon. Athens’s Dionysian festivals, celebrated on the slopes of the Acropolis even before the completion of the Parthenon in 438 BC, integrated the pleasure of live entertainment, the public duty of worship, and the responsibility of civic awareness. To be fair, these festivals also involved the imbibing of copious amounts of wine and earned the disdain of Plato, who famously wrote that “tragic poets” appeal to the basest parts of our souls. In principle, however, this holistic integration of levels of human existence honors a Thomistic vision of our “body-soul composite” as well as an “Actonian” vision of a social landscape.
The power of theater to draw people together and create community justifies its label as a kind of civil society institution. But the content of a play is what makes it truly great. You likely feel more fulfilled and curious after watching King Lear than after attending your child’s Thanksgiving play. In the Poetics, Aristotle justifies the superiority of poetry (which includes dramatic tragedy) to history. He explains that “one [history] relates what has happened, the other [poetry] what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal.” Considering “what may happen” allows viewers to exercise intellectual elasticity rather than to be fed the habits of consumption that characterize most modes of popular entertainment. The American playwright Arthur Miller wrote that “the mission of the theatre, after all, is to change, to raise the consciousness of people to their human possibilities.” If you want information, you stay home and watch the news. If you want consideration, you go out to a public space and watch a performance.
Theater has inspired contention everywhere, at all times, and for all sorts of reasons. Modern theater faces a crisis of both content and community, especially among conservatives. The elements of this crisis correlate roughly with the two dimensions of a robust civil society. Arts engagement typically finds far higher priority among those with liberal, rather than conservative, views. An analysis of theater attendance demographics in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, found that 16% of the general population identified as Republican, as opposed to 2% of the theatergoing population.
And right-leaning folks’ reticence to engage in theater is not unwarranted. Audiences fear being slammed with propaganda by an increasingly progressive entertainment industry. Artists like Robert Cooperman, a playwright and professor who first hosted Ohio’s Conservative Theater Festival in 2017, seek to combat this one-sidedness by carving out a space for “conservative” plays. While initiatives like these lend conservatives an artistic microphone, they can defeat the greater purpose of theater by fighting fire with fire. The exclusivist propaganda from which many people recoil contradicts the Aristotelian vision of “universal” tragedy. A “right-wing” version of this is no solution.
“Sensationalism” is perhaps the most historically decried distortion of poetry’s “universal” function and has been described by Russell Kirk as a work of the “diabolic imagination,” which relishes “spiritual experiences” isolated from questions of good and evil. Shows like this year’s Tony-winning Death Becomes Her and Stranger Things: The First Shadow appeal to that diabolic imagination in their extravagant special effects and buckets of gore. However, this sensationalism is nothing new, and nothing to be overly concerned with. It comes and goes. Aristotle argued that “Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors.” Paradoxically, the constant barrage of sensationalism in today’s media encourages critics to recognize that theatrical spectacles fail to capitalize on what makes theater unique. As one critic said of the Stranger Things production, “You might as well have stayed home and watched it on a laptop.”
Considering these barriers—not to mention skyrocketing ticket prices—why go to the theater at all? Why not stay home and get your entertainment from a laptop? After all, these two aforementioned productions were based on a movie and a TV series, respectively.
An appreciation of theater as a civil society institution defends its relevance and encourages attendance and involvement from the community. Studies have piled up to support the fact that theater promotes pro-social behavior and empathy among both actors and audience members. While noble art invites contemplation of good and evil, and the best plays transcend political pedagogy, laughable theater still proves its own value as a physical and social experience. A 2018 study of elderly Americans long involved in the theater reports that, in addition to enjoying powerful communal reflection after shows, these individuals also appreciated their negative experiences at the theater, which spurred debates and jests among attendees. People interested in strengthening their communities should investigate for themselves what theater is capable of, even if the “investigation” entails reading Sophocles over a bottle of wine with friends or attending a harrowingly bad Shakespeare production at a local high school.
There is a reason people have “done theater forever” beyond holding on to a tradition for its own sake. It has also been for the health of society. There must be something remarkable and human about the stage if, as John Steinbeck wrote, “The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed.” If people passionate about civil society cling to Pope St. John Paul II’s message to artists—who “not only enrich the cultural heritage of each nation and of all humanity, but … render an exceptional social service in favour of the common good”—they will keep theater alive as a space for wonder, struggle, and community.
