These capitalist constraints are maddening for most artists, but they become particularly slippery for a product that is built to vanish. Theatre is ephemeral, we explain endlessly. Every time we raise five thousand dollars to put up a show in some under-lit black box, we find ourselves trying to justify the existence of a work of art that will vanish after one or sixteen performances. So we say that the product is the memory, not the show. We tell our parents, our friends, the guy we chatted with on Grindr, Theatre is ephemeral, see, that’s one of its values, that’s why it’s fine only twelve people will come to see my one-night workshop in Brooklyn of a show that may never have a future life. We say the fact that theatre is ephemeral is what drew us to it. We latch onto that aphorism because it gives the commercial unviability of our work a fleeting beauty, a glamorous inscrutability. It’s a lovely marketing spin for our potential customers.

I call bullshit on this, or at least I call bullshit on myself for having ever said this. Ephemerality isn’t what drew me to theatre. The truth is I would love to create a live a performance that lasts forever, that is etched into cultural memory. I want to make something that capitalism deems worthy of material permanence. This is a gross desire, I know, but my spiritual yearnings and capitalist schemings are inextricably bound. Call it the spiritual condition of the age of entrepreneurship. If you’re a more emotionally sophisticated person than me, you might say, Material permanence is a capitalist myth, so be glad your art form makes no pretense to permanence. Except that’s not true, is it? If theatre weren’t also under the thrall of the myth of permanence, we wouldn’t have a canon. Ephemerality is a tonic to soothe our own egos every time a play we labored over fades in the minds of our loved ones.

Maybe you’re fine with the fading. I’m not quite there yet.

These capitalist constraints are maddening for most artists, but they become particularly slippery for a product that is built to vanish.

I distrust anyone who says they make theatre because it is ephemeral. I suspect none of us really know why we make theatre. Years of writing artist statements have forced us to find approximations for the gnarled impulses that drive us. This is a false clarity. Oftentimes the reasons we give for why we make theatre aren’t actually what drive us. We just know that those reasons are morally positive, and we want our work to line up with a moral positive. So we find explanations for why we make what we make because that’s easier than telling a literary manager, I wrote this and I don’t know how it might help the world.

At our worst, we conjure up language no better than a product description. We pitch our plays to an imagined group of financiers. This play is worthwhile because it accomplishes such-and-such task successfully. And thus, working backwards, we can imply our play had a use value all along. But if the memory of the play doesn’t remain, does the use value still apply? What use does capitalism have for a forgotten show than never made anyone money in the first place?

I am trying to remember the name of a friend’s show I saw two years ago. I remember it succeeded in making me laugh at something frightening. I remember its structure was highly sophisticated. I remember the color red mattered somehow (as a metaphor? in the design?).

I can’t remember the title, much less what happened in it.