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On the Virtues of Mediocrity
By Steven Leigh Morris
The catalpa tree blooms for seven days once a year. Poet John Ciardi wrote that the tree is a messy nuisance, but how he waited for the miracle of those seven days.
“He gazed up at the blue sky and knew that heaven—at least in this life—was neither a time nor a place to be grasped and made into a possession. It came in fleeting moments and then went away again to leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears. Very much on the verge of tears. And very frightened.” – Mary Balogh
This essay makes no claim to be excellent. It’s run-of-the-mill, as these things go. Run-of-the-mill. Isn’t there a better phrase than that? Something less of a cliché?
Were this article truly excellent, and more argumentative, it would name names. That would stir things up. That would be fun. That would get hits.
But no, the purpose here is to keep things general, bland, to lower the bar, to create something soon to be forgotten, something to drift aimlessly in the great sea of mediocrity. Great sea of mediocrity? What sense does that make? – the word great used in conjunction with mediocrity, unless it’s meant ironically. Poetically. Let’s just call it a big sea of mediocrity. That’s the ticket. Remove the grandeur and the sparkle.
There are complaints in the ether made by those whose names shall not be named, who write for websites that do not weave, that theater is so awful because 1) it is awash in mediocrity, 2) there’s too much of it (theater and mediocrity, that is) and that 3) critics (this would include bloggers) are too forgiving of all that theater and of all that mediocrity.
Proposals for remedy, from these complainants, come in many shapes and sizes. One calls for critics to punish all that mediocrity by being vicious, on blogs and in newspapers, to be truthful, and candid, and merciless, which is equated with love for the art: to indulge in attention-getting cruelty in the forum of public opinion, to rail against mediocre performances, and plays, and direction, and design. This will stimulate healthy discussion, they argue. It will also drive away the mediocrity, pound it into submission, so that only excellence remains.
I’m putting the full force of my mediocre mind to work on this idea, and it sounds really sensible! — like the practice of the gardener who removes all the green tomatoes from his vines in order to make room for the red ones.
But hold on: Even if we could agree on what is excellent and what isn’t – a dubious proposition — mediocrity is tenacious, mediocrity is pervasive, mediocrity is 90% of what we do, all of us, in everything we try. Mediocrity is life itself. So isn’t the call to pound mediocrity from our stages — all of life’s stages, not just the theater’s – an act of war against life itself? Not just life, but creativity — the kind of creativity that produces all that mess and mud and mediocrity, the mulch through which excellence sprouts?
Because an excellent idea, beautifully executed, often emerges from many failed experiments. Even in rocket science, rockets crash. Scientists know this. Our most innovative movie companies know this, too. So does Apple. That’s why they hire designers and visionaries and allow them to fail, over and over. They actually pay them for it. Not because these companies are pursuing failure. The failure they endorse is in the pursuit of excellence.
This leads directly to the second proposal, which is to write reviews of (i.e. to acknowledge in public) only those plays performed in theaters that have demonstrated a certain level of professionalism.
Because audiences, whoever they are and whom we all know are even more dim than the rest of us, presuming that they’re not actually the rest of us, are unable to discern between professional and amateur work. Poor, confused creatures, our audiences, subjected to the work of amateurs.
Amateur. When did amateur become a curse word? Almost as toxic as the phrase community theater. Community is just grand. So is theater. But put them together in a sentence of praising amateurs and, holy moly, get ready to duck and cover. Such snobbery.
Throughout his career, Eugene Ionesco claimed to be an amateur playwright. Then again, being a French wordsmith, he must have known that the word amateur derives from the Latin amator or lover, as in doing something for the love of it. Didn’t Ionesco spearhead a global movement in the theater? Didn’t he change the way we think about the world? An excellent, professional article would be able to answer those questions, but my lips are sealed by amateurism and mediocrity.
So the aforementioned proposal is simply to ignore the work done anywhere except at certified professional theaters. And who does the certifying? Probably some committee comprised of mediocrities. And the certified theaters would be . . .? Is Center Theatre Group now to become a defining standard of what all theaters should aspire to? Manhattan Theatre Club? La Jolla Playhouse? Seattle Rep? The Public? Rogue Machine? The Guthrie? The Goodman? Wooly Mammoth? Theater @ Boston Court?
This raises the questions: Whom should we ignore? Which mediocrities should we snub, and which should we eviscerate in our march towards excellence? And why? What failed experimental theaters should critics refuse to discuss, on the grounds that audiences, those feeble-minded lambs, are too dim to discern between, say, a slick, popular success on Broadway and an ambitious, troubled, deeply flawed experiment in the tiny upstairs theater at L.A.’s The Complex. The latter shouldn’t be discussed in public? Or should it be pounded into mortar by those of us who, in our infinite wisdom, stand up for standards, for what’s professional and commercially viable and the looming difference between that, and the crap that is everything else? Because, of course, promoting flawed experiments is akin to advocating for mediocrity and amateurism – the heart of our problem here in Los Angeles, or so I’ve been hearing. Does anyone have an extra pair of marching boots? I feel a wave of patriotism coming on.
“…and you thought beauty was the outward show – but now you know the truth, my Love – it’s always been the inner fire…” –John Geddes
Okay, before this gets too pedantic — oh, did that happen already? – let’s get to the essences of the mediocrity that is fueling these proposals to improve us all: that what is good and what is bad, what is worthy and valuable and what is not, is a matter of some objective standards that we can, and will, and should, all agree on – such as: The world is flat and lies at the center of the universe. Galileo said no to that, and was labeled a heretic by a Church committee. The greater population of Europe agreed with its committee that the world is indeed flat and at the center of the universe, largely because its committee was informed directly by God — the same source for a number of bloggers I know.
The perception of excellence may come from consensus, like the Tony Awards and the Ovations, but that often has little to do with actual excellence, and it has nothing to do with the considerable outpouring of what is now acknowledged to be excellent art and music and performance that was derided when it first appeared in amateur venues, but came to be regarded as excellent only after the vast majority of mediocre taste-makers became persuaded by a few excellent minds. Those were just the happy outcomes. As for the others . . .
Does excellence reside in conformity or in eccentricity?
Taking the mediocre view for a moment, I’ll argue for the former. Did anyone find those marching boots yet? My feet are getting cold.
Galileo insisted that the world is not flat, and does not reside at the center of the universe. Silly man.
But to further dissect the various aspects of mediocrity, there’s a distinction between mediocrity that comes from a cavalier disregard for the effort it actually takes to create a work of art deserving of an audience, let alone a paying audience. There’s a former copy-chief at a newspaper I write for who had a mantra, “Let’s get it right.” That copy-chief was let go in one of many waves of budget cuts, to be replaced by a different copy-chief, who, working with a diminished staff and therefore pressed for time, had a different mantra: “It doesn’t have to be done well, it just needs to get done.” (For the record, that copy-editor is also no longer with the newspaper.)
The mediocrity that comes from disregard is difficult to countenance under any circumstances. But the mediocrity that stems from vision and conviction that get battered beyond recognition by the innumerable factors that make art go haywire 90% of the time, is something else entirely. Sometimes the two forms of mediocrity are impossible to distinguish from each other. They both look mediocre – the mediocrity born of vanity and sloppy, cavalier disregard, and the mediocrity born of ambition and passion gone awry. Perhaps it’s wiser (to elevate a mediocre phrase) not to throw out the baby with the bathwater.
The thing about theater in Los Angeles, from where these self-improvement proposals are emanating, is that for any number of legal and financial reasons too tedious to go into here, the scene’s primary virtue has been its capacity to be a laboratory – for playwrights, ensembles, directors and designers. Much of the work here is imported, particularly by our mid-size and larger theaters, but a fair proportion of work developed here, in the Hollywood Fringe festival, in workshops and regular productions, travels to other cities, where it either receives acclaim, or it doesn’t.
Another thing about theater is Los Angeles is how excellence crops up sometimes with regularity in the same places, more often sporadically in the most unexpected corners of the city. Such odds can’t really be certified or averaged.
The thing about developing new works is that, even from the perspective of the creators, those works succeed about 10% of the time. Those are not good odds from a commercial standpoint, but to use that as a rationalization for adopting punishing slash-and-burn practices is, unwittingly, a war against the very excellence that such practices purport to promote.
At the heart of the matter is the question of whether excellence is nurtured, or whether it’s allowed to stand only because everything around it has been pilloried and scorched by a small but clamoring army claiming to do God’s work. Or perhaps some combination of both. Does removing 90% of “mediocre” theatrical activity from public focus really allow the remaining 10% to thrive? Or would that 10% shine, regardless? I believe it would, and does anyway. Why impose yet more restrictions upon the already daunting impediments to creating excellent work? As though, of that surviving 10%, about 90% of it wouldn’t be mediocre the next time around, when those people attempt their next productions. Because those are the odds, no matter who is creating or producing.
So what’s the point of pruning away “mediocrity,” which plays such a pivotal role in defining the excellence that shines above it?
Twentieth century American poet John Ciardi has a poem “The Catalpa” about a tree which blooms fleetingly, once a year. If a branch is dead, he trims it. Other than that, there’s considerably tawdriness produced through the year by this plant.
That tawdriness is part of the life cycle. But when the catalpa blooms, well, that’s what everyone waits for. The bloom will come.
The loftier virtues are not righteousness and indignation, but nurture and patience.
Heaven is neither a time nor a place to be grasped and made into a possession. It comes in fleeting moments and then goes away again to leave one nostalgic and yearning and on the verge of tears.
Earlier Notes From Arden:
Independent Shakespeare Company: How soaring economic disparity is drowning local theater, and how Independent Shakespeare Company has found a model to survive.
