New York as Spectacle

Novelist Tom Wolfe suggested in an essay that New York City is no longer a real city inhabited by real people.  It is, rather, a spectacle -- a drama staged and orchestrated primarily for the benefit of tourists.  And as a massive public spectacle, New Yorkers now seem more like characters in the play called “New York” than they do citizens in a particular city.  Having just moved to the city, I would rather think of myself as a regular New Yorker, someone working and raising a family in the city.  But I can’t deny the force of Wolfe’s interpretation of the city.  

In certain parts of the city, it certainly feels like a staged spectacle.  This morning I ran through Central Park.  On my way to and from the park I saw a half dozen double decker buses, packed with tourists.  I pass the Dakota, the building where John Lennon was shot and killed, and the groups of picture-takers.  At the entrance to the park at 72nd, there is a swarm of bicycle taxis offering to take tourists for a leisurely ride through the park.  There are tour guides leading groups of people through the park, explaining the history and significance of everything.  Today I saw tourists in a huge hot air balloon, hovering over the park.  And on all sidewalks, there are families scrutinizing maps or guide books, trying to figure out where they are and where to go next.

But in the midst of all this tourism-fed hustle and bustle, there are regular people going to work, getting old, raising families, going to the post office, buying groceries, and spending time with friends.  Is Wolfe right to paint all these New Yorkers, myself included, as actors in a play?

New York is certainly a theatrical place.  Shakespeare has a character say in As You LIke It, “all the world’s a stage, and all men and women are merely players.”  (The continuation of the line in Rush’s song, “Limelight,” is I think, pure Rush . . . “performers an portrayers, each another’s audience . . . “).  Anyway, maybe it’s not all that hard to think of the city as a grand spectacle or a theatrical event, and of New Yorkers as playing a variety of roles.  And it need not be a criticism of New York City’s drift towards being tourism-centric either.

Anglican Bishop and New Testament scholar Tom Wright has written quite a bit over the past few years about the text of Scripture as a kind of “script.”  Wright claims the script contains Five Acts - creation, fall, Israel, Jesus, and Church.  The peculiar thing about this script is that Act Five is unfinished.  And what the “script” calls for are actors who will learn the story and rhythm and plot and dialogue of the first Four Acts so well that they can improvise what the fifth and final act should look like.  

On the one hand, the actors are constrained by the first Four Acts of the script.  It moves in a particular direction and builds its own cadence and employs a remarkable cast of characters.  On the other hand, Act Five is not completely written out.  It is clear that there is to be an Act Five.  But we are left with only the very beginning of that final act.  Each generation of God’s people is asked to improvise what they think ought to be the continuation of the story in their own place and time.  Given the script of the first Four Acts, they are nevertheless called to an imaginative act, to a creative enterprise that summons all the collective artistry they can muster.  

New Yorkers might or might not be players in a tourism drama called “New York.”  I haven’t been here long enough to know.  But New Yorkers are invited by God into a new role in God’s drama of making the world new in Jesus Christ.  God invites us to try on new clothes, learn to speak in a new way, and imagine our way into a new story line.  The play in New York might look slightly different than it does in Calcutta, or Beijing, or Rio de Janeiro, or Nebraska.  But everyone is offered the role of a lifetime.  So Wolfe and Shakespeare are right, in a way . . . “all the world’s a stage.”  

This gives me an idea.  When people ask me what we’re doing here in the city, no more admissions that I work as a pastor.  I’m going to say, “I teach improv.”