You Can't Be Done There From There

Adam Szymkowicz publishes a portion of Gary Garrison's article about playwriting in Dramatist magazine that took me back to the discussions about bringing in out of town actor to perform at so-called regional theatres. Apparently, it isn't just actors, but playwrights, too (gee, what a surprise):

A dinner with the Seattle Rep Dennis Schebetta combined with a Town Hall meeting with local artists/administrators and passionate Guild members quickly articulated a common concern among a lot of our members: dramatists can’t get produced in their own backyards. I’ve heard this serious concern announced in Atlanta, Houston, Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and San Diego. Let me be clear: it’s not about just getting produced in your own backyard, it’s about getting produced by one of the named theatres that’s in your own metropolitan neighborhood. What was extraordinary and different (and incredibly positive) about members talking about this issue in Seattle was the almost instant call – by representatives of the three large theatres: The Intiman, A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) and Seattle Rep – for playwrights to stop focusing on something that’s probably not going to happen for a variety of predominantly economic reasons, and instead to channel that passion and energy in to either co-producing (like 13 P in New York or Playwrights 6 in Los Angeles) or self-producing. To hear representatives of the three big theatres in town say in a straight-forward, no-nonsense but kind way: “Look, we love new writers. But we have twelve-hundred seats that we have to fill or we’ll go under. And base-line economics suggest big commercial names of plays and playwrights are going to sell those seats.”

They said it. Out loud, even. They said what other theatres won’t or can’t or don’t want to say in a public way for a variety of reasons (that have to do with mission statements and grant writing, I’m sure). There was something liberating, for everyone in the room, in the truth being spoken out loud. More importantly, there was something very empowering in dramatists realizing that if they want their stories told to a local audience, they’d most likely have to figure out for themselves how best to do that. And they should. They should figure it out because every voice should be heard, and every story desperately needs to be told.

You'll excuse me, I'm sure, if I don't share Garrison's sense of glee that this was actually said out loud. Not that it should have been kept secret (after all, there's nothing all that surprising in what they said -- we've all known it forever), but that they should say such things without a shred of embarrassment, even a faint hint that they have totally betrayed the foundational purpose of the regional theatre movement: to decentralize and localize the theatre -- well, frankly, is this really something to applaud?

Isn't it time for us to actually consider whether the homogenization of our theatre literature, where we create plays that have no tie to a specific place or community, has been good for the drama? Historically, this so-called "universal" art was not the norm. Moliere wrote his plays about the court of Louis XIV and performed them for the court of Louis XIV; no matter what time Shakespeare set his plays, they all were really plays about Elizabethan England; the Greek plays were about Athens, and the Bible stories that make up the various mystery cycles had a whole lot more Yorkshire than Jerusalem in them. So what have we lost by alienating the artist from a community? What have we lost by not producing the plays of playwrights who live in the community where a theatre is located? A student of mine today in class mentioned seeing a production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Guthrie Theatre in which they inserted a single line reference to a local sculpture, and the audience went nuts. Suddenly, there was a connection that was informed by a shared reality. Moliere's skewering of the "precieuse" in The Precious Damsels was probably a helluva lot funnier in 17th-century Paris where the people in the audience knew exactly who was being ridiculed.

Don't get me wrong: I am all for playwrights taking situations into their own hands and doing productions of their own plays. In fact, I'd like to see all theatre artists do the same, so that those big regional theatres suddenly found themselves boycotted until they came to their senses. But this brazen abandonment of responsibility to the local community? Not acceptable.

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