The Case for Inefficiency
Theater is, by almost every modern measure, inefficient. It requires physical presence. It cannot be paused, rewound, or watched at double speed. It happens once, exactly as it happens, and then it is gone. The performance you see on a Tuesday is not the same performance as the one on the following Saturday — the energy is different, the audience is different, one actor had a cold, the other had a revelation. This seems, on the surface, like a weakness.
I want to argue that it is theater's greatest strength.
What Screens Cannot Replicate
Streaming services have given us extraordinary access to filmed performance — and filmed performance can be brilliant. But there is something that happens in a shared physical space between living performers and living witnesses that no recording can capture. Scholars call it "liveness." Audiences simply call it the feeling.
Part of this is biological. In a theater, you are breathing the same air as the performer. You can see their sweat, hear their actual voice without amplification, sense the effort of their body. When something goes wrong — a missed cue, a stumbled line — the stakes are real, and the recovery is heroic. When something goes transcendently right, you feel the room shift. The person beside you, a stranger, gasps at the same moment you do. For a few seconds, you are not alone in your response to something beautiful.
This is not sentiment. It is the fundamental social function of theatrical performance, and it predates every other form of communal entertainment humanity has invented.
The Argument from Attention
There is also something to be said about what theater demands of its audience. A screen competes with your phone, your thoughts, the option to switch to something else. A theater asks you to surrender — to give your attention wholly, for the duration, to the story being told in front of you. This is increasingly rare. It may be increasingly necessary.
Audiences who sit through three hours of Chekhov without distraction report, consistently, that they feel more present, more connected to their own emotions, more capable of complex empathy than when they arrived. Theater is not an escape from life; it is a concentrated version of it.
Theater and the Civic Body
There is a political dimension to this, too. Theater has always been, in its deepest sense, a civic art. Greek tragedy was performed at religious festivals for the entire polis — slaves and citizens, women and men (or so some scholars argue), gathered to witness stories of catastrophe, choice, and consequence. The audience was part of the event; their presence, their reactions, their collective experience was constitutive of what theater was.
In a society increasingly fragmented by personalized media bubbles and algorithmic self-selection, the theater remains one of the few places where people of different backgrounds and opinions sit together and experience the same thing at the same time. They may interpret it differently. They will certainly feel it differently. But they cannot avoid the shared fact of having been in the same room.
A Practical Defense
None of this is an argument against streaming, or film, or any other form of recorded performance. Great art exists across all media. But the argument for live theater is not nostalgic — it is not about preserving something old for its own sake. It is about recognizing what theater does that nothing else can: it puts human beings in a room together and asks them to pay attention to what it means to be human. That is not a niche interest. It is a civilizational one.
Go to the theater. Go often. Go to things that make you uncomfortable. Go to things you don't understand. Take young people with you. The room needs you as much as you need the room.