A CHALLENGE FOR THEATER IN AGE OF VCR

After 20 years where the biggest TV set in the Sullivan house was a 12-inch black-and-white, we have capitulated to the 1980s and purchased a big color job. To make the rout complete, we also bought a videocassette recorder.

The purpose was to maintain domestic tranquility, but I admit it: I’m watching too. My old argument against color TV was that the color wasn’t any good. It is now. The Venice sequences in KCET Channel 28’s reprise of “Brideshead Revisited” were exquisite. Even the commercials for fast food have appeal. M-m-m, look at those fries.

That used to be my other argument against color: that it gave a false allure to the TV junkstream. That still applies, and it pains me to find certain young people in my house watching “Wheel of Fortune,” even as a joke. But mainly we’re not watching junk on the new set. We’re watching movies from the neighborhood video rental store.

Such a simple process. Pick up a couple of films that you missed the first time around (quite a few, if you spend most of your evenings reviewing stage plays) or that you want to see again. Pay the man a trifling fee, take the cassettes home, slip them into the VCR and, presto--your own film festival. Much more convenient than standing in line at the Beverly Center. Much cheaper than putting down $80 for a pair of tickets for “Cats.”

It’s such a simple and cheap process that it’s got to be worrying the movie houses and the stage people. Certainly it’s forced me to question a long-held belief that God meant for movies to be seen, not on TV, but in theaters--preferably big ones, with mirrored lobbies and uniformed ushers.

I still hold with this theory, but it grows increasingly irrelevant. The old movie palace is dead. Going to the movies now means going to a multiplex, where one’s attempt to enter the dream of the film may be hampered by an out-of-register image, scratchy sound, gummy floors, and a couple sitting two rows behind you who won’t shut up. These days, to invoke Pauline Kael, it’s easier to get “lost at the movies” at home.

A 19-inch screen also turns out to be big enough to accommodate most of the films I want to see. And I’ve come to realize that my real gripe against movies on TV was the way they were chopped up by commercials. (I actually saw Garbo’s “Camille” interrupted for a message about asthma spray.) What a luxury, the other night, to watch “The Natural” unfold at its own pace, with the only seventh-inning stretch called by me.

You will say that cable TV also offers uninterrupted movies--and plays too. True, but not always the films and plays that one wants to see. Moreover with cable, there’s all that other stuff that comes in under the door. I don’t want the Atlanta Braves and the Playboy Channel in my living room. I still haven’t read “War and Peace.”

Books! That’s probably why the videocassette seems such a friendly form even to a theater critic. It has about the heft of a book in the hand. And it starts you thinking of movies as books: magical ones that tell their stories at the “reader’s” command.

That’s new. Since nickelodeon days, we’ve thought of films as providing a pseudo-theatrical experience. A movie was an event shown in a certain hall for a certain number of nights, time, under the aegis of an “exhibitor.” The VCR suggests that the truer parallel is to the literary experience. Films become living novels, to be read in a small circle, or even alone.

What possibilities for the serious film maker! One can imagine new movies being “published” for the home viewer: wonderful triple-decker serials that will take days to wade through. (The Fast Forward button will come into play.) People will subscribe to the Film-of-the-Month Club. Producers will target films for certain groups, including those too disgusted with current films to go to the movies now. It could be the end of the dominance of the 13-year-old viewer.

It could also be the end of the movie house, unless it can clean up its act--starting with those floors. But how--I knew I’d get to it--will the VCR revolution affect the live theater? In a funny way, I think it’s going to help it.

Not insofar as the VCR gives people yet another reason to stay home at night. Still, no matter how satisfying the buttered popcorn is at home, there does come an evening when a person wants to go out and see those city lights. This could well involve taking in a show, preferably different from the kind of thing one can see on the box.

And here’s the central difference between the VCR’s effect on movie theaters and on stage houses. It has proved that going to the movies isn’t central to the experience of seeing a movie--that “The Big Chill” is pretty much “The Big Chill,” wherever you see it, and may be even better at home.

But it hasn’t proved that it can replace the experience of live theater. This remains something you simply can’t get on the box. A friend recently loaned me a cassette of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Sweeney Todd,” taped at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion by Angela Lansbury, George Hearn and company. It reminds the viewer of what a powerful production it was, what a terrific score it is . . . but it’s not the thing itself.

How could it be? The eye looks where it wants to look in the theater, with more changes of focus and depth of field than I think we’re aware of. The camera rules that the eye can only look at what interests the camera. More important, the mind’s eye creates effects in the theater that simply can’t be photographed. Remember how silly the dancers in the film of “West Side Story” looked, doing ballet moves in a real vacant lot? Has anyone ever had that problem watching “West Side Story” on stage?

Finally, the camera can’t capture the heat of a live performance. It can’t track the invisible signals that pass between actors and audience over the course of an evening, acknowledged, finally, at the curtain call--a more magical moment for me than the moment when the curtain goes up. (Maybe because so often in today’s theater there isn’t a curtain.)

Movies (on any sized screen) have a deep magic, maybe even more potent than that of the theater, where the viewer rarely loses himself as completely as he can while watching a fine film. (Akin to that of the reader entering the world of the novel so thoroughly that he doesn’t hear the telephone ring.)

Theater’s excitement is more akin to that of watching sports. We never enter the imaginary world of the play so completely as to lose our pleasure in the skill of the performance: the grace with which these actors are fooling us into accepting their hypothetical case.

One source of admiration while watching Tamasaburo play the spooky lost lady in the Grand Kabuki’s “Kasane” at Royce Hall, for example, was our knowledge that he isn’t, in fact, a woman. Yet we could still “see” the woman he was playing.

The theater audience is also more conscious of itself as a collective presence than the movie audience. Again, that can add to the pleasure--that sense of a collective holding-of-the-breath as the actor slowly rises to his feet and approaches his foe.

The intensity can approach that of a religious ceremony when the audience is greatly moved, as we saw when Dustin Hoffman revived “Death of a Salesman” on Broadway last season. The production will be seen on CBS next month and will doubtless be very moving, but the home viewer won’t participate in it as directly and sweetly as the living audience did.

You had to be there, as the saying goes. In theater, you are there, and the VCR can’t duplicate that. But there’s a double edge to this. When theater is bad there’s no entertainment form that’s worse, not even TV game shows. Because, again, you’re really there, trapped in the middle of it, as at an exceptionally stupid party.

On nights like this, a sensible person would much prefer to be at home with the box. If the VCR revolution means that movie houses are going to have to clean up their floors, it also poses a threat for live theaters. It means that they are going to have to drop their drop their nonsense about the “magic of theater” and to realize that half-good shows in barnlike theaters at stratospheric prices simply don’t cut it anymore.

Theater in the age of the VCR has to discover its true magic and serve it with the flair and the skill of the real magician. Otherwise, who needs it--with “Broadway Danny Rose” and “Casablanca” all cranked up and the popcorn in the bowl?