Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter

The second in a series of essays entitled:
Towards a World Class Theatre

Some truths are so self-evident that they can suffer outrageous neglect.  One such is that theatre takes place in places.  There is nothing virtual about it.  Theatre takes place.  In four dimensions: one of time, three of space. (Not even my fancy film friends can do that.)  So it matters where you originally make a play.  Over the last few years I have been having conversations about this subject with my fellow theatre professionals in Seattle: directors, actors, managing and artistic directors, and even arts editors at newspapers; and I have been surprised at how many of them have trouble understanding this fundamental fact of our art form.

 

The Lone Playwright Fallacy

When it comes to art, I’m an amoralist. Just because it’s new and local doesn’t mean it should get produced. If it’s new and local and good, then fuck yes. If it’s new and local and crap and we’ve got a script that's new and from Missoula and good, then... I choose Missoula. Or New Orleans. Or wherever.

This quote is from a local theatre critic’s email exchange with me.  He is suffering from what I call the “The Lone Playwright Fallacy”: the noir filmic image of the archetypal writer holed up in a dank unfurnished flat in the middle of a nihilistic nowhere, supplied only with a carton of cigarettes, a quart of scotch (smudged tumbler optional) and a finicky Underwood.  Our dramatist labors in decrepit solitude until he has a complete masterpiece, dog-eared and smeary, which he then wraps in butcher’s paper and tosses over the transom of the nearest literary agency or regional theatre office.  (He looks a lot like a cliché novelist, doesn’t he?  Why does everyone want to make playwrights into novelists?) 

My email reply to my critic pal:

Plays aren't novels or paintings.  Just as in biology the myth of the parthenogenic clone is bogus because all genetic material requires an enveloping substrate of organic "soup" in order to replicate, plays require actors, designers, spaces, audiences, and, yes (god help me) maybe even directors, in order to mature beyond the embryonic.  It's the reason I have to climb on a plane to LA or NY whenever I want to have a proper workshop with professionals.  This notion that they just appear from "Missoula or New Orleans" is a falsehood convenient for ignoramus artistic directors.  But you of all people need to know better.

This critic and I have a very loving relationship.

Locally Grown Throughout History

Glancing back through the canon, we realize that this myth is belied by the fact that our favorite dramatists almost always worked intimately with a coterie of actors and other artists for whom, and with whom, they tailored their plays.  Shakespeare built his best title roles for Richard Burbage; Moliere cast himself as the Imaginary Invalid, Chekhov’s writing for the stage was reworked and enhanced under Stanislavski’s direction, and Bertolt Brecht had wife and leading lady as a two-for-one- in Helene Weigel, the original Mother Courage.  Working with the same actors and directors, over and over, helps build up trust and a shorthand that allows a playwright to go deeper and farther, faster.  It locks down the fundamentals of collaboration so that greater innovations are possible.

Beyond palling around with actors and directors, I was curious what other “locally grown” benefits a Shakespeare or Marlowe might have enjoyed;  so I asked my friend and fellow playwright, Louis Broome  (my go-to expert in all things Elizabethan) to weigh in. “Shakespeare”, he says “Had no choice but be locally grown.  London was the world. The King's Men could only exist so long as they were relevant to their audience.”  (Relevance to their audience, what a concept!) 

Louis goes on:

What’s different now, and what sucks, is that Seattle Rep’s audience is their donor base, not the public at large.   Everything about a non-profit theatre is defined by its donors. When it comes to new plays, the Rep’s hands are tied because a non-profit donor base has zero tolerance for risk. Risk isn't built into their culture. They have no experience managing risk.  Producing a new work by a playwright or director of note, or a work guaranteed to move to NY, carries no risk. There’s no downside.  In Elizabethan England it was impossible for plays to be anything other than a local or regional event.  Playwrights entertained and earned revenue from a relatively small pool of ticket buyers by writing a great number of plays.  The emphasis in Elizabethan London was on writing plays that put the same butts into the same seats over and over again....

Local Collaboration – It Ain’t Just for Actors

Over the last decade and a half my own Burbage-- the primary actor that served as a siphon on the far end of my personal play development pipeline-- has been the actor William Salyers, a relationship that still runs deep and strong.  (For some flavor of it, you can click here.)  But it is worth mentioning other ways that local collaboration can lead to uniquely successful theatre.  Without the designer Gary Smoot I would never have written at least three of my last five plays.  Gary and I had been close friends for years before he began designing for my plays, stunning everyone in 1999 with his evocative minimalistic masterpiece set for the world premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata.

 

Gary raises to a rarefied art form the long-standing tradition of designers crossing out  and ignoring stage directions.  I always say that if there is a way Gary can get out of building something, he will find it and make the absence brilliant.  By the time we got to attempting the world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, I was openly taunting him, demanding an arsenal of increasingly lethal weapons from American History to be used every time a contestant spun the infamous Bardo Wheel.  Starting with a Powhattan tomahawk, I quickly worked my way up to a civil war cannon, then a flame thrower, and finally my coup de grâce, a “Tomahawk” ICBM missile, to be launched onstage.  Smoot took the demands in stride, even though I would hector him daily running up to tech week:  “I want those weapons, Gary.  You can cross out all the stage directions you want but I still call them out in the dialogue.”  “Oh, we’ll make it work,” was all he’d say.  And he did, by painstakingly handcrafting overnight shipping boxes the exact size and shape of each piece.  Every night, before each scene, whatever weapon was called for, the box was pumped full of thick stage smoke which would, after the package  pieces were pulled apart on stage, momentarily hold the shape of the weapon and then dissipate.  From there it was up to the audience to manipulate the meta-object within the space of in their collective imagination.  It was a brilliant, engaging, unique, and uniquely theatrical solution, which could only be arrived at through a close and contentious relationship between designer and playwright, bothering each other in the same room together.

This sort of intimate relationship between playwright and set-wright is generally frowned upon in today’s play development superstructure.  The alternative model forcefully defended at your favorite regional theater goes something like this: you go to your MFA program, I go to mine.  If, based on the recommendation of the well-known playwright who runs my MFA program, said regional theater decides to develop my play, said theater will assign me the MFA grad designer recommended to them by the  top-tier MFA design school, most assuredly not the same school as the playwriting program.  It is all very polite and respectable, like an arranged marriage without the hot stranger sex.  In the very respectable League of Regional Theatres (LORT), playwrights have no business consorting with designers, let alone taunting them into being brilliant.

But Wait!  There’s more!

Sure, the most compelling argument for locally grown plays is the uniquely superior product you arrive at when you work with a talented team over a long-term collaboration.  But in the immortal words of Ron “Ronco” Popeill, that’s not all!  You also get:

• Local actors evolving a better understanding of how their contribution to the long tradition of our art form can be generative as well as interpretive. 
• Local theatre-goers evolving a better understanding of how plays get made and how audiences can participate in the process, not just as consumers but as co-developers with a stake in improving the product.
• Local board members evolving a better understanding of their roles as patrons of the arts.  We need not look further than the embarrassing example of The Empty Space, shuttered over a debt of $70,000.  Maybe we can dare hope that regional theaters will stop being run like internet start-ups and instead be given the time, money, resources, and  personal attention that are the natural hallmarks of arts patronage in cities like New York, Los Angeles and London. 
• Local funders, artists, and administrators participating in the development of plays as actual investments, with the potential to pump profits back to Seattle in several ways.
• The potential to address the particular conditions of a  community in a timely fashion, approaching the speed of journalism rather than history, as was the case with our recent production of It’s Not In The P-I: A Living Newspaper About A Dying Newspaper.
• The entire nation, as well as the entire English-speaking theatre world, getting more plays about a wider variety of places and peoples instead of-- let’s face it-- knowing arch comedy after knowing arch comedy for, by and about Upper West-Siders.
• A leg up in keeping theatre a playwright’s art form instead of, increasingly, a director’s game. Over the last fifty years, the model of the auteur director serving as the alpha and omega of dramatic endeavor, imposing his or her “concept” on new play and classic alike— a model borrowed from and encouraged by the film industry— has grown increasingly infectious in American theatre.  You need not look beyond Seattle with Dan Sullivan and Bartlett Sher essentially running their respective shops like Triple A feeder teams for the Broadway big leagues.  (We can expect more of the same from the Intiman’s newly appointed Artistic Director, Kate Whoriskey.  Hand picked by the beatified Sher, she is sure to serve mostly as his marker absently placed in a book he may or may not return to some day.)   Hell, the fact that the recently introduced TPS  Gregory Awards has a category for Outstanding Director but none for playwright is a crystalline example of how far this trend has gotten out of hand.
• Finally, and yes, selfishly, “locally grown” allows playwrights to choose where to live based on how well a particular city fits their life, instead of forcing them to accept a one-humongous-size-fits-all solution. When I moved back to Seattle from New York in 2002 I ran into Dawson Nichols, my comrade in theatrical arms from Seattle’s fervent ‘90’s.  Each of us was watching our kids at a playground-- kids that did not exist the last time we had seen each other.  In that moment we renewed our friendship, and then slowly began building back our artistic partnership, only better this time—less concerned with the competition between us, more focused on improving each other’s and our own work.  We cemented our revived relationship in a revival of my play Tuesday, at Annex Theatre, which he directed and I starred in.  Soon after he invited me to share with him any plays I had sitting on the shelf, unpremiered, especially anything I had for young people.  I gave him The Don Juan Cult Concerto. In 2008 Dawson directed the world premiere of the play at North Seattle Community College, where he serves as head of theatre  department.  He wrote this in the program notes:

Paul Mullin has written a play that is a love letter to a Seattle that is gone – grown over and displaced by its own success and popularity.   Seattle is still a vibrant and exciting place but in the 1990’s there was an edge.  Philosophers of art tell us that we can only access universal truths through particular depictions.  I believe this is true, but I have noticed Seattle Theaters seem to value particulars from elsewhere for some reason, mainly New York.  This is because Seattle Theatres often have a self-imposed provincial attitude that doesn’t allow them to see that the grass is in fact greener right here in the Pacific Northwest.  Our particulars are as good as anyone else’s, after all, and there are wonderful playwrights living in our midst.

It is a play about Seattleites, for Seattleites, by a Seattleite.  And I couldn’t have been prouder to see students using it to learn their craft as they premiered it in the city of its conception.  It was the seminal moment of my current understanding of how important locally grown work is.  A year and a half later, in that same theatre, using some of the same student actors, six Seattle playwrights, including Dawson and myself, premiered It’s Not In The P-I: A Living Newspaper About A Dying Newspaper.

Leveraging Seattle’s Innate More-Locally-Conscious-than-Thou Snobbery

The entire Pacific Northwest already embraces the locally-grown movement when it comes to more tangible consumables like cheese, chocolate, wine and beer.  Kate Kraay, a local actor and budding playwright, describes her day job working as a tour guide at Theo Chocolates in Fremont, the only bean-to-bar chocolate factory in the United States:

I have to admit that I have had more people stop me on the street and recognize me from Theo than from plays I have been in.  But then, it is probably my longest running gig, and it is always a full house.   Over the last two years I have worked there, I have seen it grow exponentially, and in a recession to boot. 

That’s all quite nice, you may say, but why buy a Theo chocolate bar as a Seattleite, when I can get a grocery checkout line bar for less?  For one thing, you are getting a lot less chocolate than you think, as most chocolate bars have lots of lovely fillers in them (hydrogenated trans-fats or wax, anyone?).  Theo also uses as many local ingredients as possible. It has become a point of pride for locals, winning awards from London to New York, while being fully invested as part of the community.

It is incumbent on us as Seattle theatre artists to transfer this enlightened heightened interest in  local production to what we wright for the stage.  God, sometimes I think I would give a pinkie to tap into the fierce local snobbery of a Northwestern beer nut or cheesehead and focus it on theatre.  I can almost hear them now:

Oh, you’re going to see Glengary Glen Ross? Oh, no that’s fine if you like stale affected dialogue shoved down your ear’s throat after it’s traveled  2,800 miles from New York and then sat in its packaging for 20 years, after already traveling the 800 miles from Chicago to New York.  Me?  I prefer fresh Kelleen Conway Blanchard.  You should feel how it tickles the ear’s tongue and gladdens the heart’s bowels.  But maybe your palate isn’t quite ready for something so evocative and startling.  Besides, there’s really only enough of it for true Seattle play fans.  You better stick with your 1980’s boiler room boiler plate.

So There’s No Place Like Home.  How do We Get There?

Of course there are plenty of blocks on the long road to home grown.  Over the next few years it will be important to hold accountable the artistic leadership at what we Seattle show folks call the “Big Houses”, namely the Intiman, ACT and the Seattle Repertory Theater.  These juggernauts love to  pay lip service to new works, but when you dig beneath the surface of their “new play initiatives,” you find they consist almost exclusively of importing established talent from  New York rather than fostering much at home.  Kate Whoriskey, as she rolls into town, is blithely open in her contempt for Seattle’s local scene.  This from The Stranger in an interview with her when she was first appointed: “She says she has returned to Seattle more because of Sher than for the city itself and seems more interested in finding the best artists, wherever they are, than in cultivating the local theater ecology. 'The whole world has globalized,' she said. 'And it seems the last place we believe in globalization is in theater.' ” {Emphasis The Stranger's.}

To this I could not not possibly come up with a better response than the one comment left on-line, by someone calling himself “Mr. First-Nighter”:

Odd that Ms Whoriskey would make such a statement, when so much of the rest of the world is currently undergoing a complete re-evaluation of the very concept of globalization, and re-engaging with the long-neglected benefits of localism. Not that there is anything wrong with exposing local audiences and artists to the work and influence of outside artists, per se, but her attitude seems to reflect yet more of the reverse-provincialism we have become accustomed to here. Even more distressing when one contemplates that theatre, unlike other artistic media, relies so exclusively upon the patronage of local audiences, local artists, and local artisans for its growth, nourishment and survival.

If she has indeed no wish to "cultivate the local theatre ecology", then she will no doubt express little surprise or alarm when her abject neglect results in that same ecology turning fallow and stagnant.

Unlike, say, a Greg Falls, who recognized the efficacy of good husbandry, Ms Whoriskey seems rather to envision her role as being akin to a sort of cultural Monsanto, where her only interest is in increasing the yield, while remaining heedless (or worse indifferent) to the irrevocable damage done to the environment in the process.

Sad to say, this does not bode well, either for Intiman and its long-term prospects (which are precarious at best), or for the Seattle theatre ecology as a whole.

In reality none of Seattle’s Big Houses have done enough in the last decade to advance locally grown new work.  Moreover, despite their mournful protestations to the contrary, it is not because of their limited resources.  (More on this in my future essay, “Don’t Let the Big Houses Fool Ya, It ain’t about the Money.” )  Yes, it is true that in 2009 the Seattle Rep had its overall operating budget cut about in half, but it’s also true that in this same year, through an admittedly strange quirk of happy fate, their new works budget quadrupled.  Right now it looks like they plan to take that largess and develop two new plays, in tandem with Western Washington University.  Good for them.  What’s not so good is that they’ve already earmarked one of those slots for a New York Playwright, most probably Doug Wright,  who won the Pulitzer for I Am My Own Wife.  It’s unclear who will get the second slot, but the odds don’t favor one of the dozen or so nationally produced playwrights living in the Puget Sound region.    Whatever synergy the Rep hopes to create with Wright, or whatever luminaries they beg to grace us  with from New York for a few months, it will be transitory and do nothing to nurture the local scene or bring Seattle any closer to being a world class theatre town.

Many of my local playwright colleagues have utterly given up on our Big Houses.  When a friend who works for one recently warned me that I risk being blacklisted by his theater for mouthing off like this,  I mentioned it to Scot Augustson, another local playwright  whom I particularly admire.  He replied, “Oh Paul, how would any of us ever know if we’re being blacklisted by them or not?”  Scot's right.  And as much as good friends have cautioned me about these essays, it is time to be honest and realize you cannot burn a bridge that doesn't exist.

That said, sometimes I feel stupid that I haven’t yet given up.  But I haven’t.  And here’s why.  Those Big Houses essentially belong to us, the citizens of Seattle and the surrounding  region.  We fund them through our attendance and through our generous patronage: direct giving, public arts funding and  donations from the corporations for which we work.  We also support them through our cheap labor as actors, designers and administrators.  They will respond to the demand for locally developed plays.  So long as we make the demand.  Of course, it will not happen easily or overnight or without clever hedging against it on their part.  In the past, when we demanded “new work” all they heard was “New York”.  Artistic administrators also like to blame the boards that have hired them for keeping their creative reins short.  Maybe this is true, but I am tempted to call them on it.  If we need to reach out to the Big House board members to help them understand why locally grown plays are important, we can and will do that.  

I have had more than one Big House artistic staffer say something along the lines of, “Christ, Paul, it’s almost like you’re saying you won’t be satisfied until we’re producing at least one new play by a local playwright every year in our season.”  To which I reply, “It’s not almost like I’m saying that.  That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Here and Now

Seattle is perfectly positioned.  This is the place, here and now, for locally grown plays to resurge to their historical place of prominence.  There are particular reasons that this is so, and I have tried to illustrate some of them above, but the main reason is because we say so.  We get to decide that Seattle is not a satellite.  We are our own city, with our own voices, our own actors, our own audiences, our own plays.  If, as we proceed down this path, we begin to create great plays that we can then export to other places and thus mitigate to some extent this crushing artistic trade deficit we currently labor under, so be it.  But the main point is we want plays for and by Seattleites.  And we shall have them.  Here and now.  Where theatre belongs.

 

*****

 

Next up: "What the Hell does 'World Class' Mean Anyway?"

 

Comments

[Scot Augustson]

Woo hoo!
The only point I question is when you talk about having to go to far afield to develop. I have found an abundance of whip-smart, uber-talented, non-diva-ish local (non equity) actors who have a passion for new work.
I know a lot of the folks you worked with early in your career are now outta town, and there is no shame in relying on old, trusted comrades. But, the pool here is quite lovely.

[Paul Mullin]

Point taken, Scot. And you certainly have a lovely pool circling around you. I'm about to poach some of them lovely fishies.

BTW: did you notice I quoted you on background? That was Heather's favorite quote.

[Matt Sweeney]

I *knew* it was Scot you quoted when I read it. Nicely done, Mr. Mullin.

[Wes Andrews]

Paul:

I think you're being unfair to Kate Whorisky. Check out "The Thin Place" in their new Season: http://www.intiman.org/defaultnews/10seasonreview.html

Looks pretty local to me.

-Wes

[Paul Mullin]

Ah yes Wes. I read about that in the Seattle Times: "Andrew Russell directs the one-actor, multicharacter work."

More on such pieces in my essay, "The One-Person Show: the Lazy Artistic Director's Best Friend"

[Wes Andrews]

Fair enough, but it is very local, exactly what you're accusing Whoriskey of failing at.

[David Baum]

Hi Paul,

For those of us who are not quite as steeped in theatre culture as you are, could you please (at some appropriate time) sketch a step-by-step outline of the infrastructure for new plays and playwrights that you would like to see in Seattle?

What is the model? What should we be trying to build?

[Becky Bruhn]

Locally grown ("slow") is one of the biggest movements on the economic horizon. How profoundly sad to hire a theatre leader who thinks "globalization" is the hot new thing. ("Ma'am, we've heard of it.")

You go, Paul! I feel my patriotic heart pitter-patting. Real working artists (like you and Kelleen and Dawson and Scot) in our town, in our lives, in our schools, in our pubs, and represented on our stages is just about the best thing we have going.

[Paul Mullin]

Wes, was she unfairly quoted in The Stranger? (Not impossible, I've heard) Because if she wasn't, I find her remarks openly contemptuous. And that's what I'm saying.

One local one-person play ripped from radio transcripts does not an in-road make.

[Wes Andrews]

I really don't think someone who is openly contemptuous of Seattle theatre would produce a new play by a local writer in her first year. You might think poorly of the work itself, or the genre, but it's a Seattle play, about Seattle citizens, in a "documentary" mode, much like "It's Not in the PI."

I would interpret her comment on globalization as pertaining to their new International Cycle, and her work "Ruined." If I was feeling very sympathetic, I could also interpret that comment as expressing a frustration that you have articulated--an endless stream of plays about Upper West Siders. A genre, I'll note, that is totally absent from their Season next year.

[Mark Lutwak]

The most specific piece of the puzzle: the official "mission" of a non-profit theatre (in any community). Non-profit institutions are given state licenses to serve their communities with arts services. That's the deal. If the state approves of this mission (and its attendant business support structures), then it gives the institution all sorts of stuff: the ability to accept tax-free donations, freedom from other taxes, entree to all sorts of other benefits.

So, theatres, by definition, are set up to be in dialogue with their communities. Bringing us back to your original point. The work needs to be meaningful to the audience that is actually attending. More often than not, that implies local, original texts. And when not -- in the case of a classic or other "national" contemporary work, a strong justification that this play has something to say to this specific community. Which, of course, involves the producer and other artists' "take" on the work.

Where this cuts the other way, is that artists must recognize that that is how institutions should be planning. If a writer (regardless of quality), is writing edgy, dark, passionate work that appeals strongly to the 19-26-year-old crowd, then he or she ought not to be surprised that a theatre serving the under 18 crowd, or the over 26 crowd, is looking elsewhere.

The institutions (theoretically) exist to enable and mediate the relationship between theatre artist and audience. 50-50.

[Darian]

I hear you Paul. And I say "huzzah". It makes me really want to dig into the idea we've been bandying about at RCP, the "pipeline". Perhaps together we can take the quotes off and build a pipeline for new, local, plays from small houses to big ones.

Any thoughts on SCT? They seem to do local fairly frequently.

[Paul Mullin]

Mark, thank you so much. And great points. So good to hear from you. My best to Y.

Darian, you know I'm all about the pipeline. Let's absolutely rip the quote marks off it and make it real. I'm working with Tom Jacobson in LA to get things going from that side. I think Seattle and LA need to be the start of something on this Coast, though I bet Portland could offer a lot as well.

Also, D, you're not the first to mention SCT's absence from this piece. I sort of left them out because children's theatre has such a different play development model, so dependent as it is on adaptation.

[John Longenbaugh]

Hey Paul:

Provocative and multi-faceted essay. Well done.

One thought though: there's a fundamental problem with our larger theatres producing plays by local playwrights, and it's this: new plays, and by this I mean world premieres, do not as a rule sell as well as established plays with buzz. No it's not fair, no it's not right, but it's the way it is. When I ran Theatre Babylon we featured no less than four world premieres in a six show season. The only one that sold out every night was Lauren Weedman's, and not only was our space roughly a third the size of her regular home at The Empty Space, but she had the long-established reputation to carry it off.

The fact is, a new play by you or me or Scot or Dawson or Colleen, no matter how good, is probably not going to sell as well as another show that's won a clutch of Tonys, or at least gotten a lot of good press elsewhere. It's even debatable whether a new play by a real heavyweight--and here I'm thinking about David Esbjornson's noble but doomed first season at The Rep, including original pieces by Ariel Dorfmann, Ping Jong, and Jeffrey Hatcher--will pull in audiences like a revival or whatever took home the awards on Broadway last year.

Does this mean that they SHOULDN'T do world premieres of work by local playwrights? Of course not. But it's not productive to ignore the financial difficulties of producing these shows.

Instead, I think the argument has to take it as a given that a slot by a local playwright isn't going to be a money-maker, but will be good for the institution for the reasons you note in your piece (and others). During the last 15 years I've been watching Seattle theatre, I've seen the big houses produce plays repeatedly that they knew were not likely to make money--to promote dialogues with various ethnic communities, to stay true to the cultural mission of the theatre, and sometimes just as a favor to a friend. What we need to say is that while we can't guarantee boffo box office, what a play by a locally produced playwright will give the theatre is cultural prestige and an increase in loyalty and support from Seattle's artistic community.

And we also need to admit that in these cash-strapped times, this might not be a strong enough argument to convince an artistic director to hand over a slot in their season.

[Geoff Spelman]

Recalling from my college days, you seem to be putting forth a normative question, you argue that the local large houses ought to better support local playwrights and theater resources. Yes they should. But normative question seldom find a place beyond the boundaries of universities and TV and radio screaming matches. One has to fight fire with fire. The community needs to be more creative and more energetic and pull in an audience that is now glued to Facebook and Twitter. Theater sports, theater competition, theater with music, short theater, whatever draws them in.

Wasn’t Off Broadway a response to the boredom of the same old stuff and the exclusion of new talent and new vision?

If Ms Whoriskey is correct and we are not just competing with New York but Hong Kong and Mumbai, then we have to raise the stakes and create theater crafts that flys off the shelf. Meanwhile the large houses must look with great trepidation at the age of their audience and donor base. They certainly spend a considerable amount of time and energy chasing down the offspring of the well healed to help preserve the cash flow. But this town has a lot of young money. Compete. Find new money for new works. Find a Medici from Medina that has issues with her father. Build something interesting and they will come.

[Tom Elliott]

I think that you need to go for the boards if you want to get institutional theatres in step with the "grow local" movement. As long as local board members are dazzled by out-of-towners who play into their provincial low self-esteem, there can be no sense of local artistic ownership at the top. Boards will keep bringing in carpetbagger artistic directors unless they start to understand that there is a certain appeal to audiences in seeing the same artists develop over time, and that unlike film and TV, theatre is ultimately not a commodity but a communal experience that benefits from local relevance.

And the blackballing quote is priceless.

[Carl Sander]

You’re not having sex with me if you’re thinking about somebody else while riding my heat. Asking to be loved never works. Juicy language makes them week in the knees. Being desirable on your own terms is the key to power. Go Paul Go.

[Jim Jewell]

Glad to see someone else mentioned SCT, because I was going to, though in a different light.

If you're going to trumpet "go local," then point out the fact that our very own beloved local theatre artists can't get over the word "children" in SCT's name long enough to check out world-class theatre. Without doubt, SCT has the best international reputation of any theatre in town, and yet isn't mentioned as one of the "big houses" because even theatre folks don't take us seriously.

Granted, this first point goes against "local," but how many people missed the first visit by an Iranian theatre company to the US in 30 years because it happened to be at SCT? How many people missed the brilliance of Amy Thone as Madame Lafarge and stunning direction by Rita Giomi in "A Tale of Two Cities" because it was produced by SCT? And how many will miss Hans Altweis and David Quicksall's amazing aerial work in the upcoming "In the Northern Lands: Nordic Myths" because it is produced by SCT? And, this last work has been extensively workshopped locally and was written by AD Linda Hartzell and Torrie McDonald, both locals.

My point being that we shouldn't wrench our shoulders patting ourselves on the back, because we are all myopic.

I also take some issue with Louis Broome saying the Rep's real audience is its donor base. I've worked for Development at the Rep as well as Marketing, and am in PR/Marketing now and work closely with Development at SCT, and it is simply an unfair and inaccurate statement. The "big houses" (and we are one - look at the budgets and the union contracts) don't program for donors, but do in fact program for audience. That may not produce any better theatre in the end, but having worked in big houses as well as busted tail promoting little shows for nuthin', I don't like to let the myths perpetuate. Financially, it just doesn't make sense to program toward contributed income.

Great conversation you're hosting here, Paul - thanks!

[Joshua Conkel]

I wondered why Kate was chosen as Artistic Director of the Intiman Sheila Daniels. I loved "Ruined" but it seemed to me (from afar, granted) that Sheila Daniels was next in line.

A lot of my plays take place in a fictional version of Kitsap County. I have never had a Seattle production outside of Cornish. It's funny that my chances of getting one might be better as a New Yorker than somebody who actually lives in Seattle.

[Paul Mullin]

Wouldn't that have been nice, Joshua? For Sheila to have gotten the nod? Would've shown a lot of faith in the local talent.

But Bart Sher wanted his hand-picked viceroy successor, and a Broadway bedazzled board was going to give Bart whatever Bart wanted. Just like years ago when the Rep's board gave Sullivan that idiotic second space, the Leo K.

More on that bungle in my upcoming essay, "Good Friend for Jesus’ Sake Forbear and Never Build another Proscenium Stage."

[Paul Mullin]

Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out" "Lenya wasn't married to Brecht--she was married to Kurt Weill. Brecht was married to Helene Weigel, who was the original Mother Courage."

Wish I could give you credit or run the original comment, but I'm standing by my no anonymous comments policy, even when they are kind and helpful.

I'll be sure to change the original piece to reflect the truth.

[Noah]

Nice essay! Really a pleasure to peruse your rabble rousing. I think for anyone in love with theater it should be a good read. I'm a strong believer in new work and local work. I think there is a contagious excitement when you get to be a part of a projects genesis. And that's huge when the only incentive you can expect for your work in theater is joy.

I get the other side too though (somewhat devil's advocate here). I understand why the Rep puts on Mamet and the Intiman does Streetcar. Those plays are part of a cannon and people want to be familiar with them because of the cultural capitol you will gain. "national" plays are fodder for conversation for a great many more people than "local" plays are.

At the end of the day I think what most people want is a good story told well. I think for people intimately involved with theater we've just heard the same freakin story sooo many times and it feels like nobody's gonna bother buying any new books.... See More

I was fortunate enough to see Tuesday when you guys put that up at annex and I remember feeling totally invigorated by the experience. I'm embarrassed to say it was somewhat of a revelation at the time to realize "national" theater wasn't the only place to turn for rich compelling layered complex stories. I think when more people have the experience of actually going to the theater and seeing new, local, work done well they'll realize there's a far richer cultural world to be found than the one currently offered at the bigger houses.

For my part I'd just be excited to see a play at the rep where half the audience was under 40.

[לפרטים נוספים]

Developing a new operate by a playwright manager of be aware and operate confirmed to switch to NY, provides no possibility. In Elizabethan Britain it was extremely hard for performs to be anything other than a community or state occurrence.