Fundable

Douglas Coler, commenting on my post below concerning "1000 True Fans," writes:

Scott, you beat me to it! I also read the 1000 True Fans post and immediately thought of Theatre Tribe. 1000 true fans (+ exponential growth)=subscription base, or nearly so.

I'm also intrigued by the concept of Fundable, which is almost a Kiva type organization in that projects are put forward and funds requested but not distributed until the total requested amount has been pledged. It's not a perfect solution, but one that seems a relatively painless way to raise money. Certainly worth exploring.

Brilliant! And if such an approach could be promoted both locally and nationally (internationally?), a theatre with an innovative approach might really get rolling. What would be interesting, in addition, is to figure out a way your theatre could provide your Fundable fans with evidence of the results of their contributions and interest. For instance, could you produce videos of your productions that would only be distributed to fans? Lots of food for thought... What are YOUR ideas?

Model: Where to Locate Your Tribe

The first three posts (Fear of Falling Off the Map, Get Yourself a Tribe, and And Then) along with the overall statement of philosophy (Empowerment) in this continuing series designed to describe a possible new model for a regional, resident theatre were fairly easy to write. This post, however, requires a leap of faith both for me and for my readers. I have no authorities to quote, no examples to point to, no data to give me support. I am operating on a combination of conjecture and common sense (by which I mean, I suppose, the most unsophisticated form of critical thinking). If these ideas seem foreign to you, jarring, or as Tevye says, "Unthinkable! Absurd!" -- you're not alone. As my friend and mentor Cal Pritner would say, turn up your crap detector to its highest setting. If you have data or experience that supports or contradicts what I am saying, don't be afraid to share it. However, don't feel compelled to tell me that this just isn't for you; if it isn't for you, perhaps you know somebody who it might be a better fit, and I hope you will pass it on.

If you read Margo Jones' wonderful book Theatre-in-the-Round, published in 1951, you find that the goal of the early regional theatre pioneers was for every city over 100,000 people in America to have a regional theatre. The reality is quite different.

Of the League of Resident Theatres member list, the average metropolitan-area population is a little less than 1.7 million people, and the median population is about 822,000. (In reality, these numbers should actually be higher, since cities with multiple LORT theatres were counted only once. If I had included in the figures the population of cities like New York and Chicago multiple times, once for each LORT theatre, the mean would have soared upward.)

Not to put too fine a point on these data, but theatre in this country has been seen as a metropolitan art form. This is a problem in many respects, not the least of which is the lack of non-urban support for the NEA when it comes up for renewal (after all, what's in it for them?), and the lack of theatre education in the K - 12 schools. Nevertheless, Conventional Wisdom (which has a name: Danny Newman of Subscribe Now! fame, who was employed by the Ford Foundation to help regional theatres shore up their subscription ticket sales during the 1960s) is that 1-1/2% to 3% of a population will respond to a theatre by subscribing. So from a ticket sales viewpoint, a large city makes a lot of sense: 1-1/2% of a million is 15,000. Who couldn't make it on 15,000 subscribers?

Nevertheless, I am going to argue that the tribal theatre model would be more effective in a smaller area, rather than in a large city with an already-established theatrical scene. If this seems counter-intuitive, you might want to give a quick read of a previous post on this blog: "On Cows, Pastures, and Theatre," which discusses the effects of too many theatres all nibbling on the 1-1/2% of the population who attends theatre. But that is about why one might not go to a big city, not why one would actively seek out a smaller one.

First, let me be specific: how small should the town be? This is going to seem arbitrary, I suppose, but the number is mainly useful as means of comparison to the LORT numbers more than as a hard and fast rule: I would say the metropolitan area or the county should be no more than 350,000 and preferably under 250,000.

In addition, you should choose a city that either doesn't empty out at night as commuters from distant bedroom communities leave work, or you should locate your theatre within the bedroom community where they are going. If the latter, locate your theatre as close to an exit off of a major thoroughfare as possible.

My practical reasons for a choosing smaller town are as follows:

1. Real estate prices will likely be lower. Real estate in big cities is very, very expensive. Your first major expenditure will be a roof over your (and your audience's) head, so you want this cost to be as low as possible. Furthermore, don't put your theatre downtown where prices are highest, where parking is difficult, and where nobody actually lives. Cheap land or cheap rent in the downtown area will require that you locate in a dicey part of town, which will limit your audience. You want to be easily accessible, have decent parking available, and most importantly you want to be close to where people sleep at night. A theatre following the tribal model exists on personal relationships. You want to be embraced as a "neighborhood theatre," not unlike the neighborhood taverns that Ray Oldenburg writes about in The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffe Shops, Bookstores, Bars, Hair Salons, and Other Hangouts at the Heart of a Community. You want to become a great, good place.

2. Media prices will likely be lower. Advertising rates are based on readership, and readership reflects population. A newspaper or radio station in a smaller town will give you an opportunity to reach the people you need to reach at a cheaper price. Don't be afraid to explore some of the smaller versions of these media. Sometimes they will reach an audience that the larger, more corporate media will not. Again, your goal is to become a great, good place.

My more theoretical reasons:

1. This model lives and dies on personal contact. We are trying to escape from the idea of selling a play as a product. Instead, the play is part of an ongoing relationship, a bridge between two people - an artist and a spectator. A smaller town allows this sort of relationship to be formed a bit more easily.

2. You want to be a large fish in a small pond. You don't want to be one of a large number of theatrical offerings that already exist via theatres that have had years to stake their claims and establish their audience. That said, it could be helpful if there is a community theatre or college theatre in the area, so that the theatregoing habit already exists. If this is the case, the key is to team up with these theatres rather than compete. You don't want the existing theatre folks to be hostile to your efforts. You can help each other.

3. You want to enter the life of the community. You and your company members want to get involved in the community as much as possible through charities, organizations, churches, schools, shelters, political organizations, whatever. Again, the smaller the number in a community, the better likelihood that you can form relationships.

These philosophic reasons can be applied to an extent in larger metropolises as well, especially if you identify your theatre with a specific neighborhood rather than the whole city. However, the practical reasons may be less transferable.

On Demonizing Tyrone Guthrie

Last Wednesday, I wrote a post called "Betrayal of the Regional Theatre Movement -- The Guthrie," in which is posted a comparison of Margo Jones' passionate commitment to the production of new plays and development of contemporary playwrights with Guthrie's commitment to classics that were at least fifty years old. Obviously, I portrayed the latter as a betrayal. As Tony rightly pointed out, Guthrie cannot be blamed for all those Artistic Directors who have continued his policies to this day. We recreate reality every day by our behavior, and Guthrie only headed the theatre named after him for two short years and then he moved on.

To call Guthrie's policy a betrayal is perhaps too strong -- it implies a level of conscious dastardliness that is undeserved. It is important to remember -- and I should have pointed this out -- that when Guthrie was building that theatre, the American theatre was almost wholly committed to the production of new plays. In many ways, Guthrie's commitment to classics represented a rejection of mainstream theatrical practice, and was (at least to some extent) a revolutionary act. His artistic policy represented a turning point in the American theatre. Where previously there had been only a one way street, Guthrie created a crossroads where a variety of decisions could be made: all new plays (Broadway), a mix of new and classic (Margo Jones and those who followed her example in Houston and Washington DC), and all classics (Guthrie).

What tilted the scales was the enormous amount of media attention Guthrie received as compared to other such theatres. This attention came because he was a celebrity, as were Hume Cronyn, Jessica Tandy, and George Grizzard, and because his was not an "acorn" theatre that grew in small increments over a period of years, but rather was born a full-grown oak in a beautiful and unique multi-million dollar theatre. In short, the media hook was the glamor of the theatre, not in the artistic ideas or even in the plays that were produced. Without that glamor, the Guthrie would never have become the 900 lb-gorilla of the regional theatre movement, and there might be a better mix of artistic policies around.

But it did have that glamor, and it's example did become dominant, and once he had laid out that pathway it became much easier for everyone to simply follow along in the footsteps that he had blazed through the Minneapolis snow.

Today, Guthrie's model is dominant, and it is what needs to be revolted against in the same way that he revolted against the Broadway model.

Betrayal of the Regional Theatre Movement -- The Guthrie

Back at the end of last May, I did an interview at Theatre is Territory where I said, among other things, that Tyrone Guthrie "hijacked the regional theatre movement." I wrote about this more fully in a post called "What Might Have Been" back in September. In the latter post, I quoted the matriarch of the American regional theatre movement, Margo Jones, who said in her brilliant book Theatre in the Round, published in 1951, the following:

I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value through­out the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.

Too many people are saying, "I'll do a new play if I can find a good one." Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the vio­lent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are dis­covered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been un­earthed.

Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O'Casey; the Provincetown had O'Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new play­wrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.

The production of classics is healthy, but it is not step in the flowering we want to see in the American theatre. We need progress, and the seed of progress in theatre lies in the new plays.

Compare this to Guthrie, who wrote the following in his 1964 book A New Theatre about the founding of the Guthrie Theatre:

It seemed to us that the only way of knowing a good play from a bad was to apply the test of time. Our programme would be classical; only those plays would be chosen which had seemed, to discriminating people for several generations [ital mine], to have serious merit, which had, in fact, withstood the test of time. This would still offer a very wide choice.....

Now the American theatre has not been long enough in existence to have developed its own classics. A distinctively American, as opposed to merely English-speaking, theatre only began to develop around the end of the First World War, at the beginning of the nineteen-twenties. Before that there certainly had been plays, written by American authors for American audiences, such as the works of Clyde Fitch. These, however, were heavily derivative from European and, naturally enough, especially from English-speaking sources....

If it be granted that fifty years is the absolute minimum of time required before a new work of art can wisely be regarded as a classic [ital mine], then it follows that the American theatre cannot as yet claim to have developed a classical dramatist.

All the same, many excellent dramatists have developed between 1920 and the present time. Several of these, it is reasonable to suppose, may be of potential classical status. In planning a theatre which we hoped to establish in an American city, and hoped might have a perceptible cultural influence in a particular region of America, it seemed neither sensible nor tactful to take such a doctrinaire view of classical status that American plays would have -- for at least another ten years -- to be omitted from the programme.

Moreover, Americans get exasperated by Europeans who point out how brief American history has been. That is is true does not make a fact more agreeable. Europeans use the seniority of their culture to give maddening little lectures intended of course for the betterment and instruction of a crude, young and, of course, totally materialistic society. The British, I am afraid, are the very worst offenders. We use the fact that Britain and America write a similar language, and that the British have been writing for a few centuries longer, to take an absurdly patronising attitude towards our young cousins, not only in cultural matters but in everything where so-called "maturity" of outlook and behaviour might be valuable.

We certainly did not want it to appear as if once again Britain were trying to instruct the colonists. It therefore seemed to us essential to include each season one American play of what we considered to be potential classical status; and to let it take its place in a programme of established classics.

Wasn't that nice of Uncle Tyrone to let an American play be performed in an American theatre? Sheesh. There are several attitudes that must be drawn attention to in the above quotation.

1. That there is no way to tell what a good play is unless at least fifty years have passed. First of all, that is sheer cowardice and laziness -- let other people sift through the contemporary plays and take the chances, and then Guthrie will come along and pick up the gold that has been separated out by others' efforts. And has he not thought that if others followed his example, as they in fact did once the Guthrie opened to fanfare in the national press, that nobody would actually be doing this sifting?

2. This fifty year rule turns theatre into a museum whose main purpose is preservation rather than creation. This makes theatre into a dead art form that looks back to the past and has no truck with the present. It is the exact opposite of Jones' view that the theatre should reflect our own age. Instead, the mirror should be turned to reflect our grandparents' age at best, and preferably ages long before theirs.

3. Despite his stated desire not to seem to be instructing the colonies, there is a Eurocentric snobbery in Guthrie's attitude that is offensive in the extreme. It turns the Guthrie into a Trojan horse, an elaborate gift from the Old Country that completely ignores and undermines the value of the native theatre. In fact, he dismisses Eugene O'Neill, America's Nobel Prize-winning playwright, for his "ponderously repetitive style, his limited vocabulary and occasional very purple patches" which he believes will "ultimately keep him out of a place anywhere near the first rank." But he'll produce Aeschylus, whose style is every bit as ponderous and purple as O'Neill's, without blinking. Pure snobbery.

And the American regional theatre swallowed it. Prior to the opening of the Guthrie, Jones was the model for what a regional theatre should be. Her book was taken as a bible, and artistic leaders such as Nina Vance, founder of the Alley Theatre in Houston, and Zelda Fichlander, founder of the Arena Stage in Washington DC, demonstrated a deep commitment to the production of new American and European plays. No fifty-year rule there, they were committed to the creation of a theatre that reflected American life. But once the Guthrie opened in 1963, according to Joseph Wesley Zeigler in Regional Theatre: The Revolutionary Stage (published in 1973), the regional theatre took a major turn. According to Zeigler, "it further legitimated the movement and gave it national weight. It gave hope to all regional theatres that they too could become known on a national level, that the Times might soon cover their openings, and that actors like Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy [and George Grizzard] might soon set aside a season for them." This desire for recognition by the New York theatre establishment -- the quest for fame -- led other regional theatres to blindly follow the Guthrie artistic policy. Whereas before new work was mixed with the classics, after Guthrie regional theatre seasons came to be dominated by the classics.

The result was the slow draining of vitality from the American regional theatre movement and the hampering of the development of American drama. While a few years later, when the Arena Theatre achieved much recognition when it transferred The Great White Hope to Broadway, there was a resurgence of interest in new plays by the regional theatres, it came not from a commitment to American plays and playwrights, but rather to the desire, once again, to be recognized by the theatrical establishment in New York.

In summary, the opening of the Guthrie theatre in 1963 represents the colonialization of the American regional theatre, a colonialization from which it has yet to fully recover.

Denver Center new plays: Great, But Come On!

Mirror Up to Nature points us to an article in the Denver Post about the Denver Theatre Center's decision to commit to the production of three new American plays, a decision which I applaud enthusiastically and wholeheartedly.

However...

I could really use some explanation about why such a commitment -- a commitment to three plays, mind you, not something like a whole season -- is being portrayed as so financially risky as to be characterized as"knee-wobbling." Yes, knee-wobbling. The article makes it sound like the production of new plays is some heroic undertaking, as if doing new plays wasn't the norm until regional theatres got so wussy about it. The article explains

That risk — both financial and artistic — is the main reason more companies don't, or can't, follow the DCTC's lead. The artistic risk is three-fold: No matter the writer, just paying for a script to be written doesn't mean it will be worthy of being staged one day. So, many get written but are never staged.

It's also always harder to attract audiences to plays they don't know. And Thompson isn't playing it safe when it comes to content.

The financial risk is knee-wobbling. Thompson estimates it's one-third more expensive to produce a new play than an existing one. [my italics] So last year, the Denver Center board expanded Thompson's budget by $1 million, to $11.9 million — and that's when he was staging only one new play, Jason Grote's thrilling "1001." This year, the figure will be $12.6 million.

"When you are working with unknown titles, your risk goes way up," said Denver Center chief financial officer Vicky Miles. "A few years ago, we wouldn't have been in a financial position to take that risk."... The additional expenses only begin with paying writers to write. The playwright also must be present at design meetings, casting, rehearsals and performances. Marketing costs go up.

So let me get this straight. This incredible expense is the result of paying writers for their work, and for including them in the production process? That's the Big Deal? Doesn't that sort of seem like, I don't know, the cost of doing business? God knows what would happen if they had a resident playwright on the payroll, for crying out loud - they'd probably be wearing tights and a cape and be indestructible except for Kryptonite. And those marketing costs: what? Sometimes I think we believe that everybody in the audience has had theatre history. OK, they're doing Merry Wives of Windsor, which I suppose can be marketed as a Shakespearean romp or something, but do we really think that most of the general public has read the damn thing? The fact is that for most of the audience, it, too, is a new play. And while we personally may have seen dozens of scenes from The Seagull in our undergraduate acting classes, the idea that the general public is saying, "Look, honey, they're going to do one of those wonderful Russian plays of the lat 19th century that are so bittersweet and subtle...." I mean, please. Let's talk about the need for marketing.

In fact, this heroic posturing is undercut just a wee bit by this sentence, thrown in a few lines down: "Last year, [Jason] Grote's "1001" sold to a jaw-dropping 85 percent of capacity, while the simultaneous "King Lear" drew 81 percent." Yes, read that again: Jason Grote 85, William Shakespeare 81. Now, tell me again how risky it is to do new work.

I'm sorry, but this whole thing is a myth, an excuse for not having the artistic imagination to actually commit to reading new plays and evaluating them for their stage-worthiness. Instead, we rely on Oscar Brockett to make our first for us. If Brockett says it's good, it must be good.

But here's the kicker:

"The DCTC has even taken on the extraordinary expense of bringing in (and putting up) two entire casts ("Lydia" and "Our House") that are new to the company."

What? They've BROUGHT IN two separate casts and have to PUT THEM UP. Let's compare this expense -- the expense of not having the sack to commit to a resident company and instead jobbing in actors from out of town (dollars to donuts: NYC) -- to the expense of putting up a single playwright for the production process. Remember that playwright who made the whole new play thing so knee-wobblingly risky? Yeah. Do some math and get back to me.

I'm sorry, but I am starting to think that people in the theatre don't know how to use numbers, or think that we the audience don't. Because this just doesn't add up.

So kudos to the Denver Center Theatre for supporting American playwrights. Truly. But can we not do that while reinforcing the myth of the risk of the new? Could we acknowledge that Jason Grote beat William Shakespeare's masterpiece? Can we think about what that might mean?

On Proust, Dopamine, and New Plays

I've been listening (in audiobook format) with great fascination to Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist. In chapters that look at Walt Whitman, George Eliot, cook Auguste Escoffier, Marcel Proust, Paul Cezanne, Igor Stravinksy, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, Lehrer, who "used to work in a neuroscience lab" before deciding that he wasn't cut out for it, reveals how artistic experiments anticipated many of the discoveries of science in the succeeding decades. Each chapter of this book is a gem; I wish that I could create lectures as surprising and erudite as this book. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

The chapter on Stravinksy, and specifically his Rite of Spring that caused a riot at its first performance, got me thinking about our recent discussion of new plays, and of the recent WolfBrown report Assessing the Intrinsic Impacts of a Live Performance (h/t Andrew Taylor, The Artful Manager). You may remember that in a post I called "Trust," I put forward the idea that lacking an ongoing relationship of trust with the artists at a particular theatre (the actors or director, for instance), audiences will fall back to trust the known quantity of a classic playwright -- Shakespeare, for instance. And so there is a perception that audiences aren't interested in new plays, when in reality they just don't trust the artists enough to step out completely into the unknown. People will take a chance on a new Kevin Spacey film that might look a little "different," for instance, because they trust Spacey from past experience. But when you rotate actors and directors through a regional theatre at a dizzying clip, that sort of trust is missing. So: trust Shakespeare.

In the WolfBrown study, this ongoing relationship was called the "Context Index" -- "the amount of information and personal experience with the art and artist" that an audience member has. The Context Index was a "significant predictor for Captivation ["the degree to which an individual was engrossed and absorbed in the performance"], Intellectual Stimulation ["mental engagement, including both personal and social dimensions"], Emotional Resonance ["intensity of emotional response and degree of empathy with the performers"] and Spiritual Value ["transcendent, inspiring, or empowering experience"]. The level of satisfaction with a performance was correlated, among other things, to the level of Captivation.

So we are more likely to be satisfied by a performance, captivated by a performance, if we have prior information or personal experience with an art or artist. But here's the weird thing: The Acting Company's touring production of Macbeth was an outlier -- it didn't fit any of the categories to the extent that the WolfBrown folks had to drop it from the final results because it had so little impact on the audience. Here are some samples of how bad it got: the production "reported the lowest Captivation level (3% were 'completely absorbed')" whereas, by comparison, the Alvin Ailey Dance Troup scored 59% on "completely absorbed;" on Emotional Resonance the production of Macbeth scored the lowest rating of all: 6% experienced a "strong" emotional response; and it rated lowest of all on Spiritual Value as well.

Now, it is possible to just write this off to this production of Macbeth just being sort of crummy (although it got some good reviews). But as I listened to Proust Was a Neuroscientist, I got to thinking. Bear with me, because I am going to do some extensive quotations from the book having to do with neuroscience.

One of the central functions of the corticofugal network is what neuroscience calls egocentric selection. When a pattern of noises is heard repeatedly, the brain memorizes that pattern. Feedback from higher-up brain regions reorganizes the auditory cortex, which makes it easier to hear the pattern in the future. This learning is largely the handiwork of dopamine...But what orders the corticofugal feedback? Who is in charge of our sensations? The answer is experience. While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. From the three-minute pop song to the five-hour Wagner opera, the creations of our culture teach us to expect certain musical patterns, which over time are wired into our brain."

So we hear something new, our brain organize it, and our brain releases dopamine, which "is the chemical source of our most intense emotions." In other words, to use WolfBrown language, something new leads to a high level of Captivation and Emotional Resonance, i.e., pleasure and satisfaction. So, Context gets us into the theatre and gives us a headstart on the patterns we might encounter, and then when we are surprised we get great pleasure from the dopamine release that occurs when we identify the new pattern.

So far, so good. This might help us understand the pleasure we get from seeing a new movie or listening to a new album by our favorite band. As long as the new patterns aren't too extreme and we can fit them into our existing patterns, the result is pleasure.

But there is a catch: it wears off. Lehrer writes: "With time, the musicians [who laughed at Stravinsky] came to understand Stravisnky's method. His creativity was seared into their brains as their dopamine neurons adjusted... What once seemed a void of noise became an expression of difficult magnificence. This is the corticofugal system at work. It takes a dissonant sound, a pattern we can't comprehend, and makes it comprehensible...And then it becomes beautiful." However, this system "can also limit our experiences," because it is a "positive-feedback loop". He goes on: "Over time...we become better able to hear those sounds we have heard before. This only encourages us to listen to the golden oldies we already know (since they sound better), and to ignore the difficult sounds that we don't know (since they sound harsh and noisy, and release unpleasant amounts of dopamine). We are built to abhor the uncertainty of newness."[Ital mine.]

"How do we escape this neurological trap?," Lehrer asks. Art. "The artist is engaged in a perpetual struggle against the positive-feedback loop of the brain, desperate to create an experience that no one has ever had before. And while the poet must struggle to invent a new metaphor and the novelist a new story, the composer must discover the undiscovered pattern, for the originality is the source of the emotion. If the art feels difficult, it is only because our neurons are stretching to understand it. The pain flows from the growth." [Ital mine]

Lehrer concludes -- and this is where my ears perked up and I connected to the audience reaction to Macbeth -- "This newness, however tortuous, is necessary. Positive-feedback loops...always devour themselves. Without artists like Stravinsky who compulsively make everything new, our sense of sound would become increasingly narrow. Music would lose its essential uncertainty. Dopamine would cease to flow. As a result, the feeling would be slowly drained out of the notes, and all we would be left with would be a shell of easy consonance, the polite drivel of perfectly predictable music." [Ital mine]

Or perfectly predictable plays. OUr regional theatre audiences, starved for the context that comes from an ongoing relationship with specific artists, are drawn to see Macbethor The Sound of Music because they trust them enough to bet their money. Once in the theatre, however, what they often find is so predictable that it isn't engaging, doesn't promote the release of the dopamine that leads to emotional resonance much less spiritual transcendence. The result: dissatisfaction. The surveys reflect a shrug. There was no excitement generated because no patterns were broken -- everything lived down to expectations.

When asked, the WolfBrown audience members said that, despite their tepid response, the experience was worthwhile. And while the researchers suggest further research into this, we recognize the spectators' response as one similar to someone who has just swallowed a big spoonful of nasty medicine: it didn't taste good, but I'm sure it was good for me. We taught them that one -- check out Danny Newman.

My point is that the only way, in my opinion, the theatre will revive in popularity is if we create greater captivity, emotional resonance, spiritual value. In short, we need more dopamine, and that means more NEW things, not more CLASSICS. Because let's face it, the buzz we get from seeing a "new interpretation" of a classic is pretty weak compared to discovering something new. But if we need Context to get us into the theatre in the first place, and we can't rely on an Old Name playwright, then we need to have an ongoing relationship with the artists to get them in the door. Once they're there, let the dopamine begin!

Kris Vire Gets It Right About Casting Local Actors

H/T to Isaac for drawing our attention to Kris Vire's excellent post about casting locally. Kris not only makes the points, but gives concrete examples as well, which makes it "stick" (to use the Heath Brothers' term). This is really worth a read. Great job, Kris.

Trust

So as we see from the previous two posts, the health of the American theatre depends on the production of new plays by American playwrights, and the American regional theatres have almost completely abandoned any sense that doing so is part of their job as non-profit organizations supposedly serving the public good. The next question is why.

Why has America's regional theatres resorted to an almost total reliance on "classics"? I'm certain that many artistic directors will argue that the American theatre audience is conservative and doesn't want to see new plays. Like Noah Smith, they point to symphony orchestras and opera companies as being in a similar situation. But can this fear of the new really be true? Americans flock to see new movies and, in fact, are generally distrustful of remakes; they buy tons of new music and, indeed, regard cover bands as lower musical life form; yes, Americans watch re-runs on TV, but not to the exclusion of new shows, or else why would the writer's strike be a problem at all? No, the American psyche has long been focused on the new. So why not new theatre?

A large part of the problem may be the result of our educational system, which puts a major emphasis on plays of the past. Theatre history courses are required for every major, but how many courses are devoted to reading new plays? Perhaps a course devoted to reading the plays published in American Theatre magazine combined with an equal number drawn from a slush pile of new, unproduced scripts would give students a stronger idea of how the theatre fits into contemporary life. Instead, actors and directors go into the field carrying their theatre history anthologies and little else -- is it any wonder we have so many productions of The Seagull? Is it any wonder that most young artists have no idea how to even locate a new play to read, much less produce? Is it any wonder that the most young artists have no idea that a playwright might actually be a live human being who could attend rehearsals and be part of the artistic process? No, we college professors have to carry a great deal of the blame for the lack of new plays being produced by theatre artists.

But that's only half of the equation. I also think we should look at movies, TV, and music and ask: why are audience members willing to lay out their hard-earned money for new stuff? I'd propose that part of it -- and I'd say a big part -- is trust. We buy the latest album by our favorite band because, well, they're our favorite band and we want to see what they are up to now. (And in fact we would feel betrayed if we bought their new album and it was simply remixes of their previous songs and nothing new -- even greatest hits albums usually contain a new cut or two.) We go to certain movies because an actor we like is in it, or it is directed by someone whose movies we have liked in the past, or it is written by a screenwriter whose work we've enjoyed. We've established an ongoing relationship with these people. We trust them.

And it seems to me that what is missing in the American theatre is the trust that results from an ongoing relationship. What would have happened if the second Beatles album was performed by four different musicians than John, Paul, George, and Ringo? Would it have been a hit? Doubtful. Fans would have been outraged. The Beatles ARE John, Paul, George, and Ringo. But our regional theatres rotate actors and directors on almost a show-by-show basis, short-circuiting any possibility of an ongoing relationship between audience and stage. If John, Paul, George, and Ringo ARE the Beatles, who IS the Guthrie? It changes from show to show. Sure, there is an Artistic Director, and sometimes he or she has actually been around more than a year or two, but Artistic Directors are directing fewer and fewer of the productions because they have administrative functions. Instead, each individual production imports a director from somewhere else, and he or she does that single show and is never heard from again. The same is true of playwrights -- are there any regional theatres who have a resident playwright whose work is produced regularly? Perhaps a few, where a playwright has formed a relationship with a specific director, but it is rare.

We theatre people see this as a fact of life, and in fact we see it as a good thing -- we think it is a benefit to cast the "best" actor for each role, rather than maintaining a company where we have to put up with an actor playing a role for which he or she may be less than ideal. But the audience sees it differently -- they like seeing an artist stretch and try something new; they like having an ongoing relationship with an actor, a director. A theatre's identity is in its artists, not in its address. How can we expect audiences to make a leap into the unknown without having established a trusting relationship with SOMEBODY at the theatre?

If we want audiences to support new plays, we need to build an ongoing relationship of trust with them. The revolving door that is American regional theatre has got to stop.

Fear of New Plays

Yesterday, I discussed why a commitment to the production of new plays was important to the health of the American theatre. I quoted regional theatre pioneer Margo Jones, who wrote in 1951 that America's regional theatres needed to assume a "violent" commitment to the production of new plays if the American theatre was going to progress. "We must have our new play­wrights," Jones wrote, "and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays." So now, 47 years later, how have America's regional theatres done in terms of Jones' vision? Is there a problem? If so, what is the scope?

Despite being a theatre person, I kind of like crunching numbers. So I decided to check out the TCG Theatre Profiles database, which has an "advanced search" screen that allows me to search for the specific information I am seeking. Once there, I decided that the best place to start searching for Jones' vision were with the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) institutions, the 73 regional theatres that one might see as following in the footsteps of Jones' Dallas theatre. So I clicked on "LORT membership" and "American Premiere" and "World Premiere" (I didn't want theatres getting credit for importing plays like Stoppard's Coast of Utopia, which was not only considered an American premiere but counted as three productions, one for each part!) for the 2006-2007 season. The results were interesting, to say the least.

TCG separates its theatres into six categories according to the size of their annual budgets. They are:

Category 6: $499K or less
Category 5: $500K - $1M
Category 4: $1M - $3M
Category 3: $3M - $5M
Category 2: $5M - $10M
Category 1: $10M or more

In the 2006-2007 season, the 73 LORT institutions broke down into the categories as follows:

Category 6: $499K or less = 19
Category 5: $500K - $1M = 1
Category 4: $1M - $3M = 12
Category 3: $3M - $5M = 11
Category 2: $5M - $10M = 23
Category 1: $10M or more = 7

So of these 73 wealthy non-profit theatres, 56% of which had budgets over three million dollars, how many of them had at least one American Premiere during the 2006 - 2007 season? 15, or a measly 20.5%. Four out of five American LORT institution did not feel it was necessary to support American playwriting. They broke down as follows:

Category 6: $499K or less = 19 theatres --> 5
Category 5: $500K - $1M = 1 theatre --> 0
Category 4: $1M - $3M = 12 theatres --> 1
Category 3: $3M - $5M = 11 theatres --> 4
Category 2: $5M - $10M = 23 theatres --> 5
Category 1: $10M or more = 7 theatres --> 0

At those 15 theatres that did have an World and American premiere, there was a grand total of 27 productions. They broke down as follows:

Category 6: $499K or less = 19 theatres --> number of productions: 15
Category 5: $500K - $1M = 1 theatre --> number of productions: 0
Category 4: $1M - $3M = 12 theatres --> number of productions: 1
Category 3: $3M - $5M = 11 theatres --> number of productions: 4
Category 2: $5M - $10M = 23 theatres --> number of productions: 7
Category 1: $10M or more = 7 theatres --> number of productions: 0

Look at that carefully: 55.5% of the American premieres during the 2006-2007 season were produced in theatres with the smallest budgets. In fact, a single Category Six theatre produced nearly as many American premieres all of the theatres in Categories 1 through 5 combined: The Actors Theatre of Louisville (10 productions). Without the Actors Theatre of Louisville's commitment to the American playwright, there would have been a anemic 17 world premiere productions of American plays on LORT stages.

If we wonder why American playwrights find themselves drawn to film or television, we need look no further than these statistics, which to me reflects an appalling lack of interest in the fate of American theatre by the artistic leaders of our country. More evidence of the Schiavo-ization of the American theatre.

Why New Plays

Happy New Year! I apologize for the long silence. First, it was my production of Thousand Kites, which kept me very busy arranging reading groups, contacting organizations active in prison issues, coordinating filmmakers who were documenting the rehearsal process, and handling visiting guests including the playwright. But the truth is that the play ended November 20th, and now it is January 2nd. And while there is a certain amount of catch-up involved post-show, such as grading papers, and then the bustle of the Christmas season, the fact is that I needed a little time to start regenerating ideas.

So now I'm back, and it is my hope to post every weekday -- weekends may be hit-or-miss. So for those of you who have been checking in to see whether I have had anything to say, thanks, and I hope you can check in regularly from now on.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When you don't write for so long, you miss a lot of great conversations. Off and on, I may weave back through past posts of my fellow bloggers and add my voice to the bygone chorus. Back nearly a month ago, Isaac raised "The New Play Question(s)," the center of which was as follows:

Why new plays? Why do new plays have intrinsic value? Or what value do they have? Why should we bother doing new plays? Or dedicating theaters to the artistic mission of bringing them to life? What is different (and differently valuable and important) about new plays as opposed to revisitng or reinterpreting or whatever existing texts?

Quite a few people had things to say, and I'm not certain I have a whole lot new to add, but I'd like to throw in my two cents worth. I'm not certain that I can say it any better than Margo Jones did in her inspiring 1951 book Theatre-in-the-Round, which I also quoted here:

I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value through­out the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we ( produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.

Too many people are saying, "I'll do a new play if I can find a good one." Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the vio­lent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are dis­covered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been un­earthed.

Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O'Casey; the Provincetown had O'Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new play­wrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.

The production of classics is healthy, but it is not step in the flowering we want to see in the American theatre. We need progress, and the seed of progress in theatre lies in the new plays.

I think Jones' agricultural metaphor of the "seed of progress" is a good one. Every time a theatre does a classic, it is dipping into the storehouse where the harvest of the past has been saved. But unless we plant seeds, we will deplete our reserves and will have nothing with which to replace it.

How is it possible to "deplete our reserves"? Aren't the classics the theatrical gifts that keep on giving? Can't we keep on reinterpreting the classics forever? Playwright Noah Smith, consciously playing the role of the devil's advocate in Isaac's comments, says perhaps we can:

[I]t would not be the end of the world if new play production decreased. It would be sad, and theatre would become less relevant. But it wouldn't be the death knell for the art form. Believe me, I support new plays and new playwrights, but if almost all we did were revivals ... it would be kinda sorta okay.

Opera is essentially in a situation where 99 percent of it is revivals from a large canon. New operas are written, but rarely do they take off and become part of the regular repertoire. Opera is doing just fine ... yes, it's for a niche audience, but that niche is well filled.

Drawing a parallel between theatre and opera and, I would argue, classical music in general, is a good one, because all three are in danger of starving to death artistically. This is part of what I meant when I spoke about the Schiavo-ization of the theatre -- there is no new activity, no interaction with the now. Those who visit, do so only to remember the past, as there is no future that can be forged. It is nostalgic rather than alive. And that is, in fact, the death knell for the art form. Sure, there will likely still be actors speaking words on a stage, but the performance will take on the atmosphere of a historic town where re-enactors don the costumes of a bygone era and demonstrate the "olde ways." You visit to look back, not forward.

When you strike a note on a piano, the strings an octave above and below vibrate sympathetically. Likewise, when a play is first produced, it strikes a primary note within the culture; thereafter, with each succeeding production as time passes, the audience hears less of the original note and more of the sympathetic vibrations, which are never as strong nor as clear. We must strike our own chords.

The vigor of the theatre is rooted in the audience's curiosity of what will happen next, not its memory of what already has.

How we came to this situation will be the subject of tomorrow's post.