Big Box Theater

A few months ago, while walking along the Stone Arch Bridge with a friend from Manhattan, the bright blue Guthrie Theater looming above us, I realized that Jean Nouvel’s big new thing might be one of the few places in Minneapolis that would actually impress a New Yorker. So we wandered into one of its many bars and, though it was early in the afternoon, ordered cocktails. Why not? In the dim interior light, we quickly lost track of time. Patrons for the 2:00 p.m. matinees and the 7:00 p.m. evening shows meandered through while we sank deeper into the seductive leather seats, drinking and talking and drinking. We considered seeing a show ourselves, but ordered a six-dollar bowl of almonds instead.
By 9:00 p.m., we were standing out on the “Bridge to Nowhere,” squinting drunkenly at the lights reflecting off the Mississippi River and talking about how beautiful theater in the Twin Cities can be. (When I’m drunk, I say “beautiful” too much.) If the purpose of theater is to entertain, then the new Guthrie succeeds, beautifully. We never even bothered to enter any actual theaters, and we were happy.
On the other side of the river, just north of downtown St. Paul, the Gremlin Theatre company lives in the back of a building on an astonishingly isolated stretch of Sibley Street. Their performance space used to be the loading dock for the rug company that occupied the space after the shoe factory vacated. In 2002, Gremlin renovated it for—no joke—five thousand times less than it cost to build the new Guthrie Theater. The only visible sign that a theater lives inside is a wooden sandwich board set out on the sidewalk on show days.
Sometimes, at an intermission for a show in the Loading Dock Theater, the owners of a coffee shop in another corner of the building remember to open. But they’ve always appeared deeply bewildered by the line of customers waiting to buy something from them. Once I ordered a cup of tea, and the guy behind the counter asked me how to make it.
In fact, the experience of live performance at Gremlin appears on the surface to be so different from the Guthrie experience that I wonder whether they’re referring to the same thing when they refer, in their names, to “theater.”

So what do we—and should we—look for when we go? Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie, currently playing on the Guthrie’s McGuire Proscenium stage until March 25, inspires an interesting analogy to the local theater community. Indeed, Tom, the narrator, informs the audience that the play is, in part, about what theater can and should be. Other theater folk, he tells us, “give you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I intend to give you truth in the pleasant guise of illusion.”
Tom is the play’s writer. He works in a shoe factory (coincidentally apropos of Gremlin’s current digs), though he has bigger dreams. His coworkers call him “Shakespeare,” and he eventually gets fired for writing poems on shoeboxes. At night, he escapes to the movies, avoiding an equally suffocating home life in a St. Louis tenement apartment. (Most living playwrights, too, can be seduced by the movies on the off chance they’ll make some real dough.) He lives with his overbearing mother Amanda—who is like your annoying-but-amusing theater friend from high school who speaks in a distracting, slightly put-upon accent and always wants you to appreciate her—and his terminally shy sister Laura, both of whom await the arrival of Jim, the Gentleman Caller.
Tom describes the Gentleman Caller as “the long-delayed but always expected something that we live for.” We, the audience, are to the theater community what the Gentleman Caller is to the The Glass Menagerie. Without us, the drama doesn’t happen. Yet when we head out for the evening, we, like Jim, are almost always oblivious to the nature of the drama we are about to enter. Generally, we’re just out looking for a good time.
Finally, Laura is theater itself. She can be hopelessly awkward, embarrassingly sensitive, torturously maladjusted, and uniquely beautiful. Sometimes, you just want to scream at her to grow up, get away from her mother, and get a real job. But then, when the lights are magically altered just so and music wafts in from some unknown location, you surprise yourself by suddenly falling for her. As Jim tells Laura in the play, “ … different people are not like other people, but being different is nothing to be ashamed of … They’re one hundred times one thousand. You’re one times one!” And before you realize what you’re doing, before you can think better of it, you have to kiss her.
Laura reminds me of a young girlfriend who loved me even when I didn’t deserve it. In retrospect, I wish she had given up on me sooner and found healthier, more practical ways to expend her energy. Yet her unwillingness to turn off her emotions—the way she insisted on taking seriously things that the rest of the world takes for granted—is a quality that I still admire in theater. The flaws make me reach out to her more tenderly and hopefully.

All the other theaters in the Twin Cities exist in the shadow of the new Guthrie. None of the others have such a grandiose physical presence or sleek production values; in fact, few theaters in the entire world, let alone the Twin Cities, provide as luxurious an experience. Even the almonds are expensive. The Guthrie is to the theater world what the New York Yankees are to baseball, paying large-market premiums to showcase world-class talent—and occasionally nabbing actors from productions at smaller companies that can’t compete with the salaries it offers.
Unlike the Yankees, however, the Guthrie’s presence so changes the landscape that it can take some credit for actually supporting theaters that nominally compete with it for audience. By employing so many artists and technicians, it helps keep talented people in the Twin Cities year round. It makes leftover props and furniture available to many small companies at reasonable cost. It has even begun to help bring these companies to larger audiences by running their productions in the new Dowling Studio. (You can see four top-selling shows from last year’s Fringe Festival in the studio February 1–4.)
Finally, the Guthrie experience is alluring to people who don’t normally consider live performance a part of their life. An evening there is an event in the same way that going to the Metrodome includes more than a baseball game. You can have food, cocktails, and a beautiful view. If the show disappoints, at least there are pretty lights and booze.
At the same time, unfortunately, many people never have an alternative experience. (One full house at the Guthrie is a good-sized audience for an entire four-week run of a Gremlin production.) For them, the Guthrie is synonymous with theater—even more so now that even New Yorkers are willing to acknowledge its grandeur. I wonder, however, whether this showplace fosters false expectations in its audiences and, even sometimes, its artists. If the Guthrie has the expertise and financial wherewithal to create on the stage the type of clean, luxurious, virtually perfect experience that it offers in its numerous bars, why should it hold back? But on the other hand, should a play be that comfortable? Should it be that shiny and impressive? Watching incredible sets fly in and out, for example, you may find yourself marveling at the quality of air-traffic control rather than the quality of the play.
And what then becomes of Laura, whose strangeness makes her so special? “Art is a kind of anarchy and theater is a province of art,” as Tennessee Williams himself insisted, in an essay titled “Something Wild.” “It runs counter to the sort of orderliness on which organized society apparently must be based.” (By his measure, purchasing tea at Gremlin Theater may actually be the more beautiful theater experience.)
Theater, at its best, not only entertains but also nurtures what Tennessee Williams called a “highly personal, even intimate relationship” with us, the audience. We enter a unique, often-flawed world that nonetheless sometimes offers a closer approximation of truth than we see in our day-to-day lives. “It is sad and embarrassing and unattractive,” Williams admitted in another essay titled “Person to Person,” “that those emotions that stir [the playwright] deeply enough to demand expression, and to charge their expression with some measure of light and power, are nearly all rooted, however changed in their surface, in the particular and sometimes peculiar concerns of the artist himself.” In The Glass Menagerie, for example, Williams recreates his memory of his sister in such a way that the true, heartbreaking beauty beneath her odd, fragile exterior can be more easily seen. We simply cannot experience theater if we substitute, consciously or unconsciously, comfort for this peculiar, sometimes “embarrassing and unattractive” light and power.
Of course, no theater should be defined by the experience you have in the lobby. Good theater—being alive and different every night—may seduce us like Laura on the Guthrie’s grand proscenium stage, up in its Dowling Studio, and just as well, down at the Loading Dock Theater (where Gremlin is producing a fun new play, Bach at Leipzig, by a young playwright named Itamar Moses)—or anywhere in the Twin Cities that wants to call itself a theater. Afterward, I recommend going to the new Guthrie for cocktails. I hear the cheese plate is good, too.