TCG Member Map

Thanks to the good people here on campus, I now have a visual representation of the distribution of TCG theatres across the US.

Response from American Theatre

This was left as a comment on the "Nylachification of American Theatre Magazine" post by Sarah Hart, Managing Editor of American Theatre:

Mr. Walters,

Your concerns about expansive coverage for theatres across the country, regardless of urban proximity, are valid and something we struggle with in every issue. We work to balance a range of diversity over all our issues, including geographic, stylistic, racial, age and size of theatre, while still telling compelling and timely stories. Does it come out evenly in every single issue? Of course not. Does the ongoing reporting in American Theatre show an honest breadth of the work that exists? We hope so.

Still, breaking our national theatre community into reductive statistics is complicated. I doubt an accurate tape measure exists. So many stories reflect national issues and transcend so-called regions. Should we be ghettoizing our writers or training programs because they have a specific address, when their plays or students fan out across America and often internationally? In our April issue is an essay by Wallace Shawn on his writing process; he’s obviously a New York writer, but he reports that his favorite production of his work was done by Rubber Rep in Austin, Tex., whose productions are prominently featured in the issue. Is that a New York story? What about profiles of Julie Marie Myatt and Craig Wright, both playwrights based in Los Angeles, but who have had important productions in Ashland, Ore.; Louisville, Ky.; Houston, Tex.; Washington, D.C.; and Minneapolis, in addition to New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Our March issue features the text of a play by Tarell McCraney, who lives in New York, but whose play premiered at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre and takes Louisiana as its setting. He’s interviewed by a Miami-based journalist. Our December cover features a community-oriented production in Arkansas.

That said, I do wonder which features you were counting and which you weren’t; my tabulations come out differently for the January and February issues.

We are eager to receive pitches and press releases from writers and theatres all over the country--from you or from anyone who might read your blog. The more theatres are in communication with us, the more we can look for the right ways and times to cover them.

Sarah Hart, Managing Editor, American Theatre
with the American Theatre staff

I would like a little time to consider my response to this thoughtful and fair comment. If the signature is any indication, and judging from the fact that I sent my original email to Jim O'Quinn, it seems that the staff of the magazine as a group were involved in addressing this question, which is very flattering and, to my mind, shows great willingness to be open to discussion.

Let me clarify my method for delineating the articles, which I also must admit was done fairly quickly. If an article was written by a NY/LA/Chicago-based writer, it went into the Nylachi pile. This included articles by staff members. If the article was about a Nylachi-based artist, or seemed to be receiving attention because of a Nylachi production (regardless of the location of the premiere), that went in the Nylachi pile. As far as the News-in-Brief numbers, I used the datelines as the arbiter.

While I consider my response, if any of my readers would like to communicate with Ms. Hart, please feel free to use the comments box for this post.

The Nylachification of American Theatre Magazine

For a few months now, I have had a sense that American Theatre Magazine, the flagship magazine of the American regional theatre, seemed to be focusing primarily on Nylachi. But I told myself no, you're probably cherry-picking. But yesterday, I decided to take a look at the February 08 articles and count the articles written by Nylachi authors or written about Nylachi theatres. Here is what I found:

Feature articles:

• Nylachi:10
• Non-Nylachi: 1

News in brief

• Nylachi: 3 (plus probably two more labeled "cyberspace" about Tommy Tune and Willie Nelson / Anthony Herrera, who obviously aren't really regional artists)
• Non-Nylachi: 4

Well, maybe that's an aberration. So I dug out the Januray 08 edition:

Features

• Nylachi: 9
• Non=Nylachi: 2 [although I didn't really know where to put an essay by Naomi Wallace and an articel about Penn (of Penn and Teller) doing Macbeth in NJ -- add them here if you'd like]

News in Brief

• Nylachi: 9
• Non-Nylachi: 3

So what gives? Theatre Communications Group was created by the Ford Foundation back in the 1960s to serve as a service organization for regional theatre, and on the masthead for the magazine it says "Theatre Communications Group is the national organization for the American theatre." So have they decided that the American theatre is a Nylachi -- and primarily a New York -- phenomenon? Have they decided it really isn't worth the effort to venture outside of Manhattan? Is it just that money is tight and they can't afford to travel, or does this represent a real blindness?

It's not that the articles aren't interesting -- they are. It's just that nearly everything is being filtered through a particular lens. When articles on "Master Acting Teachers," for instance, include two teachers from Yale, two from NYU, Columbia, and Rutgers -- oh, and then U of Washington and U of South Carolina, one senses a certain geographical bias. How might one create such a list? What sort of research does one do to arrive at that grouping. It wouldn't be by asking your NYC actor friends, would it? Or just assuming that the "name" programs must have the "best" acting teachers? This is a self-perpetuating system, and I find it annoying that it is being aided by a magazine whose reason for being is the advancement of regional theatre.

Perhaps the magazine is just reflecting the current realities of the regional theatre movement, and if that is true, then it is simply more evidence that the regional theatre movement has sold its soul to the NY-centered commercial theatre. If it doesn't reflect the current realities, then what the heck are the editors thinking? Surely there are writers who don't live in Nylachi who might be qualified to write about the theatres in their own region, for crying out loud; surely there are regional theatres west of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line who deserve some attention. I'm not proposing that we ignore Nylachi -- heaven forbid, there is too much good stuff going on -- but an attempt at balance might be nice. American Theatre now includes a section in each issue about theatre around the globe, so maybe they could start looking at the South and the West as foreign countries and put them in this section...