The Afterlife of Theater

Mercedes Reuhl and Bill Pullman in The Goat
(photo by Sara Krulwich/NY Times)

Bill Pullman said something really interesting in this interview--and it wasn't the fact that he's playing Othello in Norway (an odd, possibly troubling notion that got some intelligent pushback from at least one reader). It was instead this bracing, almost entirely counterintuitive statement about theater vs. film. I asked him about all the lucrative film and TV work he must be ducking to slip off to Norway and do a play, and he replied:

This is so important to my life. I'll tell you, all the film and television things—you do them, and everyone gets so excited about them, and then they disappear so fast. Whereas I’m always amazed about the shelf life of a theatre piece. The Goat was on Broadway, the longest run I had ever done, I think it was seven months, and 600,000 people saw that. That’s a bad night for a movie or a TV show, where if you get 10 million, that’s a disappointment. But people always come up to talk to me about The Goat, and that TV show I did shortly before? Twelve years later, no one has mentioned it. The theatre has more staying power than you think. Maybe it’s a smaller pool of people, but the integrity of the experience stays with them.

I've never thought of it quite that way; I'm in the enviable/terrible position of taking too many of my theater experiences for granted (occupational hazard). But he's got a point, and it's going to stick with me.