Hypothetical: if my actions made it plain to you that I neither knew nor cared that you existed, would it be rude, or perhaps just presumptuous, for me then to insist that you care deeply if I died? Or would it just be weird?
Essentially this is the position that Seattle’s regional theaters put me and every single one of my local but nationally known playwrighting colleagues. “You have to understand,” say good friends of mine working at the Big Houses. “We are simply trying to survive here. Surely, you don’t want to see us go out of business. Surely that wouldn’t help your career as a playwright.”
Surely not.
Let me state categorically that I do not want to see any of Seattle’s Big Houses go out of business. (My play Louis Slotin Sonata was the Empty Space’s last production before being killed by its board, so I have a deep and personal understanding of the pain such an irrevocable loss can inflict.) Let me state further that I understand that such a catastrophe would surely not help my career as playwright. Here’s the problem. Would it hurt?
Probably not.
If I have seemed at times radical or outrageous in my banging on the Big Houses, let me assure you, gentle reader, that among my nationally known local playwright colleagues I am, in fact, a moderate voice. Allow me to introduce to you, if you do not already know him (and sadly I fear that the artistic leaders at all of the Seattle’s Big Houses suffer from this specific ignorance), Louis Broome, author of the Ovation Award-winning Texarkana Waltz.
This is from his recent blog reviewing Outrageous Fortune.
If the tax-exempt laws that have sickened theater were repealed, the very next day almost all of the theaters would shut down and a bunch of administrators would be out of work. The players – the actors, playwrights, designers and directors, who were already out of work most of the time anyway – would no longer have the theaters to blame for their sorry state. They would have to either give up the theater and get day jobs, or figure out a way to make theater pay the rent.
I love Louis. I love that he is part of this conversation. I see a lot of holes in Louis’s broader manifesto, i.e. all theatre must be for profit. But I am not prepared to wager he will not fill them in time and with cunning. I am dubious of and vaguely bored with his calls for revolution. But I half-wonder if this is not just my own personal aversion to that word. Others, younger and less jaded, will not necessarily share this particular semantic qualm. Louis stands as a healthy reminder, for anyone who cares to listen, of just how broken the theatre has become and just how frustrated we playwrights are with the administrative machines that have knowingly continued down a path they can see leads nowhere, all the while warning us artists not to say anything negative less we hasten their demise.
So you see, we playwrights run a spectrum. Some care deeply and unconditionally that the Big Houses exist. Some, like Louis, could not care less. And some of us, like myself, have decided at long last to make our caring contingent on getting a little love in return. So show us you care, you happy few who make your living off this thing of ours. Show up on Monday, March 1. It will mean a lot to us. And we have long memories.
Theatre Puget Sound hosts
Outrageous Fortune
March 1, 2010
9AM – 1PM
Detail: 9am – 10:30 Presentation by author Todd London
Break – snacks
10:40 – 12:00pm Q & A in large group
Break – lunch type snacks
12:10 – 1pm small group breakouts and report back
Center House Theatre
rsvp: TDFRSVP@tpsonline.org
Theatre Development Fund, the national service organization, is convening a meeting of playwrights, artistic directors, funders, theatre managers and others in conjunction with Theatre Puget Sound at the Center House Theater in Seattle on March 1, 2010 from 9:00am-1:00pm to stimulate conversation and action to support new American play production. Tory Bailey, executive director of Theatre Development Fund, Todd London, artistic director of New Dramatists, and co-author Ben Pesner will lead the gathering, which will begin with a presentation of the results of an intensive study of new play production in America and then open out to an inclusive conversation.
TDF has just released the book OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NEW AMERICAN PLAY written by Todd London and Ben Pesner, with research consultant Zannie Giraud Voss. The book, drawing on six years of research, examines the lives and livelihoods of American playwrights today and the realities of new play production from the perspective of both playwrights and not-for-profit theatres. The study represents the most comprehensive field study in the history of the not-for-profit theatre to analyze new play production practices and the economics and culture of playwriting in America. Set against a backdrop of dwindling audiences for dramatic work, OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE NEW AMERICAN PLAY makes clear the urgent need for new conversations and practices if the American play is to flourish.
The March 1 meeting will share the study findings and facilitate the beginning of a conversation in which participants can identify possible ways to improve conditions for the production of new American plays, community by community. We hope that a wide group of individuals from the theatre community in the Seattle area will join this conversation.
I'm taking a strong stance on the money because it’s the crux of the issue. And because dumping an accelerant on your fire is fun.
My theater hero - besides you, Mullin, I mean - is Walter Kerr. His book, How Not to Write a Play, is a must-read for anyone reading this.
Kerr, writing in 1955, places our present predicament within a useful context – theater history. "I don't think he will find it there, any more than he has found it in the antipopular theatre of the last sixty years or so. Minority theatres never have produced important work. Every great play we have ever been lucky enough to feast our eyes on has come out of a popular playhouse." By “popular,” Kerr means for-profit, and by “he,” Kerr means critic Eric Bentley, who championed what Kerr derides as, "...a serious theatre that always meant to play to a limited audience, a theatre for the enlightened few." Fifty-odd years later, we remain a minority theater playing to an ever more limited audience.
Outrageous Fortune touches on money in a footnote. [Full disclosure: I’m only up to page 28] Here’s the sentence: “The prevalent system of nonprofit theatre squelches its leaders’ tolerance for risk.” And here’s its footnote: “The irony that the not-for-profits, created to assume risks that the commercial sector can’t tolerate, have become so risk-averse, has been noted by playwrights and commercial producers alike. There may even be a growing sense that the commercial model, without boards and funders, offers independence and freedom not found often in the nonprofit world.”
A growing sense?
I’m not for the end of the Big Houses either. Nothing would be gained and much would be lost. The Big Houses present no threat or competition to anyone trying to create a popular, profitable and vital theater, and actors need a place to practice.
It might be that a not-for-profit model can be re-engineered to such a degree that most or all of the issues raised in Outrageous Fortune can be rectified. I'm betting against it, but it's a bet I'd enjoy losing.
In the end, it's always about the money. The theater is either at the mercy of funders and their tastes and whims, or it's in service to the mob. The mob has more money and better taste. As Kerr put it, "Drama is by its nature a mass art; the presence of the mass in the amphitheater is necessary not only to the financial stability of so complex an undertaking, but also, apparently, to its artistic validity."
Oh - I love you too.
Posted by: Louis Broome | 02/15/2010 at 10:16 PM