On my 11th birthday – the day before Christmas, 1958 – my cousin Morty, also 11 at the time, asked me a question which has remained with me all my life.
We were in Radio City Music Hall, on a family vacation: a week in New York City at Christmastime. We were walking up the aisle after the show, which had featured the Rockettes, the Music Hall’s legendary precision dance company, famous for their long legs and uniform high kicking. Morty was gushing over them.
I said I found them cheesy. I have since apologized to Morty for what I said next, and I now apologize to you, gentle reader, but hey, I was 11. I had been in a couple of school plays, so I added – to my lifelong embarrassment – “I happen to know a lot about theatre, and I say the Rockettes are crap.”
Morty stopped in the aisle and said, “What good is knowing a lot about theatre if it means you can’t enjoy the Rockettes?”
This has become known to generations of my drama students as Cousin Morty’s Question. I have quoted it whenever they’ve brought the issue up first – and they have, frequently, framing it in different ways, for it’s something students worry about. As they start learning more about how theatre is made, their theatre-going experience changes. Instead of simply immersing themselves in the story, they begin to analyze the play’s plot structure and style of dialogue, observe the actors’ techniques, look at the sets and costumes with a more critical eye, and so on. And they fear that their increased knowledge about how it all works may corrupt their simple pleasure in the entertainment.
My optimistic response is that if you actually do know more about how it’s done, then there’s more for you to enjoy. In her book Insecurity: Perils and Products of Theatres of the Real (University of Toronto Press, 2019), my friend Jenn Stephenson, citing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous phrase “the willing suspension of disbelief,” writes: “Coleridge asserts that the audience always retains cognitive possession of their former perceptions as well. Both actual and fictional phenomena are held in balance through a kind of binocular vision.”
We all have that double vision. Anyone over the age of three understands that the actors are playing make-believe; and the experience of watching a play or movie, or of reading prose fiction, is the experience of flickering back and forth between immersing ourselves in the story and enjoying how well the artists are doing their jobs.
Or even how badly. One of the pleasures of being educated is that you can enjoy the crap too. The American essayist and playwright Jean Kerr was married to New York Times theatre critic Walter Kerr. She once wrote that the difference between a critic and a person is that the critic sits in the audience thinking, “This is a very bad play. Why is that?” while the person next to him thinks, “This is a very bad play. Why was I born?”
In fact, the difference in response between someone who is educated in the art form, and someone who is not, isn’t usually that huge a gap. After all, in Jean Kerr’s example, both the critic and his human date agree that it’s a very bad play. Or, of course, two people, educated or not, might disagree on whether the play is any good: as has been said as long ago as in Ancient Rome, there’s no arguing about taste.
The difference between the educated and less-educated art consumer often lies more in their different understandings of why they feel as they do. A person who enjoys an art form but is not well versed in it – for example, me, attending a symphony concert – might come away thinking, “That didn’t work for me, for some reason,” while the expert concertgoer thinks, “The attacks were a bit sloppy and the bassoons weren’t quite in tune.”
Also, it’s students, just starting out, who are most distracted by their new perspective. After you’ve been in the business for a while, you can relax your critical faculties and allow yourself more of the simple pleasure of enjoying the entertainment, perhaps as you did as a child – at least if you weren’t a child like snobbish little me at Radio City Music Hall. I admit that I secretly liked the Rockettes more than I let on, and I’d love to go back now and watch them again, ideally with Cousin Morty by my side.
[This blog has been published with the permission of Dr. Jenn Stephenson of Kingston and Cousin Morty himself, now Dr. Morton B. Caplan of Toronto.]