Theatre & Democracy: Chalamet Edition
First, I want to welcome everybody who has signed up for this newsletter due to my essay on MFA programs from last week, or from my recent article in The New Republic on JB Pritzker and Israel-Palestine policy. This newsletter is somewhat irregular. I only tend to post something here when the spirit moves me, so to speak. That being said, I wanted to share out the remainder of a series that I had been working on last December, on the relationship between theatre and democracy, and the way that the decline of one mirrors the decline of the other. You can find part 1 and part 2 of the series in previous posts.
What got me thinking about this subject again was a recent viral clip of Timothee Chalamet, the Hollywood wunderkind everybody loves to hate. In a recent interview, Timothee said, “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera. Things where it’s like, 'Hey, keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.'” Understandably, this incited an angry backlash from the ballet and opera communities. It's an incredibly arrogant statement, especially about two art forms that have been kept alive only because people care about them so much. There is also a substantial crossover between people who would go to the ballet or opera, and people who watch movies like Call Me By Your Name or Greta Gerwig's Little Women that made Chalamet's career. That sense of betrayal made his statement all the more obnoxious for those in the middle of that Venn diagram. To top it all off, Chalamet's mother was a ballet dancer. There was a strong sense that he was being ungrateful to the arts and audiences that had, sometimes literally, nurtured his career as an artist.
As much of a prick as Chalamet was being, he was diagnosing a real problem that affects elite performing arts. These art forms are kept alive by a small cadre of donors and passionate artists. They are niche, and it is rare that something that happens in the world of opera or ballet enters the national conversation. It isn't clear what the future of these art forms looks like as audiences age and die off, and as donors shift their giving patterns away from the arts. As I've mentioned in my other posts on this subject, American theatre has undergone a massive contraction post-Covid, and has become much more of a niche endeavor than it was even 10 years ago. Since Hamilton in 2016, no show has been such a part of the national conversation (whatever your opinions about Hamilton may be).
Chalamet's point was that he doesn't want movies to whither in a similar way. He wants to work in a mainstream and popular art form, not one that is perceived as niche. As somebody who has worked in both theatre and opera, I understand the statement that he is making, especially as I have watched the fields contract. Gia Kourlas, the New York Times' dance critic, connected his statement to our society's poverty of spirit when it comes to the fine arts: "In Chalamet’s words lies a deeper point: It’s not that ballet isn’t important. It’s that the world can’t wrap its mind around finding its true value." Democracy and the fine arts are connected. A flourishing and open society will have a robust arts infrastructure. It is no coincidence that a society that can't wrap its mind around the value of something like ballet is also one that will carelessly initiate a brutal and pointless war of aggression in Iran.
In my last few essays, I wrote about the problems with the field, but I didn't write about what could be done. Art is essential to human flourishing, and it is essential for weaving the common threads that tie communities together. I simply feel that we cannot shy away from making the arts a part of a wider political project. Theatre can inspire political action and has often been used to advocate for liberatory ideas, as in the plays of Bertolt Brecht. And while I know that theatre alone cannot create a democratic society, I can say that citizens of a contemporary democracy should have at least as much access to great art as ancient Athenians. Theatre acts as a site of civic dialogue, just as it did 2,500 years ago, and we as a people deserve public spaces where the issues of our time can play out.
The only question is how to build such an infrastructure. In a more sane and more just world, public funding for the arts in the United States would be much, much higher than it is now. In 2024, Democratic lawmakers introduced the STAGE act, which was developed by the Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition. This act would have provided $1 billion a year to support the industry, a pittance compared to the federal budget but an enormous windfall for nonprofit theatres. This would make American theatre less dependent on the whims of donors, though it would still represent public money funding private nonprofits. Contemporary American theatre is shaped by the political-economic conditions in which it is produced, and federal dollars to nonprofit theatres would reinforce the system as it currently exists. I believe American cultural life needs to be strengthened and expanded, not merely preserved.
American states could establish a network of state theatres, similar to the Staatstheater system in Germany. These would be professional producing organizations funded directly out of state budgets. They would represent the first true public theatres since the Federal Theatre Project. At a time of declining trust in government, these state theatres are a tangible step that governments could take to bolster their civic culture and improve the lives of their residents. If not the states, other entities can step into the breach. This could include cities funding municipal theatres, and even member-funded organizations like unions. That may sound farfetched, but remember that El Teatro Campesino was founded as the cultural arm of United Farm Workers.
All of this would be done in the name of strengthening the bonds of our democracy. Yet theatre doesn’t just enrich the social capital of a community. The philosopher Ernst Bloch viewed art as utopian. The aesthetic experience of art was the means by which we could grasp the radically new and become open to unrealized possibilities. Art is a utopian anticipation, and works of art are expressions of liberty that revise and expand our experience towards a world that is undistorted by the twisted relations of capitalism. This is the power of the imagination, according to Bloch: the ability to overcome the chasm between what is and what can be. In this way, art sustains us, even in the darkest of times.
