Why isn’t there more science fiction theatre?
Questions that are rarely asked
Previous post: Markets in everything
Next post: The world isn’t flat, installment #736
Our Books
Modern Principles of Economics
Launching The Innovation Renaissance
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will(Eventually) Feel Better
Create Your Own Economy: The Path to Prosperity in a Disordered World
Discover Your Inner Economist
Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding
Judge and Jury: American Tort Law on Trial
Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
The Voluntary City: Choice, Community, and Civil Society (Economics, Cognition, and Society)
Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures
Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime
What Price Fame?
In Praise of Commercial Culture
Entrepreneurial Economics: Bright Ideas from the Dismal Science
Contact Us
The use of special effects to present other-worldly locations and fantastic situations that cannot be achieved in reality is such a staple of science fiction, and largely unavailable in a theatre format.
Does the One Man Star Wars count as Sci Fi theatre? LOL
1) Cost of props.
2) There’s more money in TV.
3) Science fiction spends a lot of time describing either new technologies or unfamiliar social systems, neither of which make for good theatre.
The answer is probably much more complex than ‘lack of special effects.’ Theater generally aims to create a story with minimal scenery and effects work, and no one believes Juliet is really dead when she stabs herself. Many people are also willing to see sci-fi movies with poor-to-moderate special effects.
In fact, is there any other group of readers more willing to suspend belief?
I suspect the reasons are much more complex and tied more closely to the demographics of theater patronage. Theater is more of a niche entertainment, more so than science fiction movies, and I expect the number of sci-fi loving theater-goers is smaller still.
Budgetary reasons may play some part, for while they can control spending they cannot control ticket sales. It is more likely that no small, tight-budget theater (isn’t that true of all theaters?) is willing to take a risk on a type of theater that has no strong precedent. Too strange compared to Wilder or Miller, but too conventional regarding plot and characters to be considered truly ‘experimental’ or modern.
The author forgets that there was actually a “Doctor Who” stage production as recently as the 1990s, not the ’60s.
Not to mention “Stop The Planet Of The Apes, I Want To Get Off!”
Does the Warp trilogy count?
Sci fi doesn’t have to be about special effects. It can be about ideas. Horror works well on stage. I can easily see a play version of “I Am Legend.”
How about science fiction opera? LeoŠ¡ JanáÄek wrote The Makropulos Affair in 1926 based on a Èapek play of a few years earlier. The story is about the consequences of life extension, about as science-fictional an idea as there is. There was a staging at NY Lincoln Center a few years back, too.
Philip Glass as written SF operas as well.
I disagree with the premise, my favorite theater has plenty of aliens, zombies, and even L. Ron Hubbard.
http://www.dadsgarage.com/shows/plays.php
This may be the first time I’ve ever thought Tyler needed to broaden his cultural horizons. sci fi and sci fi elements are pretty common when your theater is cheap and run by people under 40.
Taking a stab:
Maybe art forms don’t gain status until a given lag (eg Shakespeare, kabuki), and Scifi’s too new. Meanwhile, theater aims for “high” art, so it ignores reality TV, rap battles, and scifi, in favor of seasoned art forms such as farce.
Comments on this entry are closed.