Last night, after reading one of Kersti’s books on Buddhism, I tried to abandon some of my anxieties about my next (undetermined) sense of income, in favor of embracing the uncertainty (impermanence, suffering, egolessness) of what is to come.

And I had an idea that I really like, while my brain was floating around and embracing impermanence.

Here it is, THE FIFTH WALL , my take on how to make theater coverage a nationally interesting, Internet-based, topic of discussion – to liberate it from localized reviewing – to get Slate and Salon to cover theater, and to have that coverage be of national interest despite addressing regional topics.

And just as soon as I go to yoga and embrace more impermanence, I’m going to call Julie and see if I can get this ball rolling.

Mini-festo follows.

The problem with regional theater is just that – it’s regional. In order for theater as a community and an art form to achieve the level of networked consciousness which already exists in the worlds of music, film, television, and writing, many things need to happen – including a looser stance on copyright law, a more lenient attitude towards Actors’ Equity towards videotaping, and a much greater use of the Internet as a medium of communication.

But the first and most important thing that needs to happen to overcome regionalism is simply people talking to each other.

Three walls are around the stage, one wall is between actors and audience – but a fifth wall is between fellow theater practitioners. We practice theater in a vacuum, unaware of major developments in ideas or political shifts. We each try to climb up the slippery walls of the same well, unaware that one state over, someone else has already figured out how to do it.

Not only is the art we make isolated from each other, because there’s a lack of intelligent national coverage on the subject, the art is isolated within the limited scope of its local criticism, unable to attain national significance or context. Slate.com and Salon.com, the leading national Internet magazines, don’t cover theater – and unless something changes soon, they won’t.

The solution is to break down the fifth wall. Nothing is more theatrical than dialogue, and nothing is more contemporary than juxtaposition. Successful examples of combined interviewing lately have included THE BELIEVER‘s series of authors interviewing one another and the Author2Author feature in Beatrice.com. We are living in an age where contrast is context – such as the traveling Matisse Picasso exhibit and the Sundance Channel’s Iconoclasts series. We like interviews, and we like the context of combination. These two factors will get us to explore a new area of the arts or the world.

The world of theater, like any semi-feudal society of secretive knowledge, intense loyalties, murky conspiracies, limited funding, and religious fervor towards outdated concepts for the sake of “tradition” combined with innovation so extreme, constant, and sudden that documentation of work is not only unheard of, but unknown, and the wheel is reinvented daily, is full of its own set of ICONOCLASTIC and opinionated personalities.

Putting them together in unusual combinations is exactly what’s needed to break down the fifth wall.

Here’s my dream list of match-ups:

Julie Marie Myatt, Lisa Loomer, & Sarah Ruhl
Cherrie Moraga and Maria Irene Fornes
Tom Stoppard and Tony Kushner
Mary Zimmerman and Anne Bogart and Nancy Keystone (I’d give my left arm to read this one)
Chuck Mee and Luis Alfaro
Derrick Sanders, Chris McElroen, and Alfred Preisser
Tony Taccone, Bill Rauch, and James Bundy
Kate Buckley and Liz Diamond

And so on.

They could ask each other questions and also have to both answer some from a third-party interviewer. If this was a regular feature on Salon or Slate, I’d read it. And I’m going to try to put it together. I’m hoping that some of the connections I have from all this theater networking will help get the ball rolling.

But I also know that all us theater folks are hurting for intelligent coverage and dialogue on our field. We tend to do director-playwright interviews, groups of people who have worked on a production together, aimed at a production’s release date, which is something I’d like to continue doing when Upstage (the theater blog me and some friends are putting up) gets started. But Upstage is going to be targeted towards an audience that already cares about theater concerns.

This, I think, would make theater coverage as interesting, nationally relevant, opinionated and timeless (as opposed to being tied to openings and premieres) as, I don’t know, that Norman Mailer interview I was just waxing rhapsodic about.

Right? Right!

It feels weird to put what I know is perhaps the best idea I’ve ever had freely out onto the Internet – but all too appropriate given the impermanence of theater, ideas, and everything! Hell, if someone else gets there first, good luck to you – the more theater coverage we have, the better.

Anyway, yoga beckons – Marion’s Iyengar – and I’m going to thank the universe, cheesetastic as that is, for giving me this idea – and then I’m going to fricking make it happen.