Mike Daisey's On My Mind

With Sunday's post-show panel at How Theatre Failed America coming up fast (now with free beer!), I am finding interesting stuff on Mike's website, including a link to an article about a 4-actor resident company being formed by Portland's Artists Repertory Theater. A step in the right direction, of course, and kudos to them. Mike links to an article in the Portland Mercury that quotes Daisy on importing actors, and then makes an outstanding leap:

The outsourcing conversation feels particularly relevant on the heels of the Drammys. Most of the awards given to Portland Center Stage went to people who were brought in from elsewhere, which kind of strikes me as complete bullshit. It’s no commentary on the quality of the work PCS was honored for—I sure can’t argue with the Outstanding Production nod to Twelfth Night, for example—but if you’re going to insist that these are “local” theater awards and not allow any touring productions or non-locally produced shows to compete, where’s the logic in then recognizing what is essentially touring talent, brought in from New York to work on a single project?

Brava, Allison Hallett. A tour is a tour, and most productions are the regional theatres are not regional, but rather limited run touring shows. And when does the theatre community that cares about our regional movement, the movement we fought so hard to bring to life, stand up and say enough, this sells out every value that was the foundation of this movement, and it violates the regional theatre's raison d'etre. We can do better. We must do better. And Mike Daisey, God bless him, has forced the conversation to take place (although man there was a desire at NPAC to skip the outrage and focus on the positive steps that have occurred -- the moderator of the discussion kept steeringf us clear of any sense of outrage to focus instead on happy talk).

Mike Daisey Spells It Out

H/t to Isaac at Parabasis. If you have been reading my blog, you must read this: Mike Daisey's "The Empty Spaces, or How Theater Failed America" published in Seattle's newspaper The Stranger. If I haven't convinced you that the current system is broken, Daisey's essay will. Mirror Up to Nature finds it depressing; I find it a trumpet call to a new era in regional theatre, one that isn't beholden to New York, and one that puts the artists in control. The talent of people like Mike's friend should not go to waste.

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.

What Might Have Been

Back when I was in my late teens, I stumbled on American resident theatre pioneer Margo Jones' inspiring book Theatre-in-the-Round (1951). In the late 40s and 50s, Jones brought into existence a resident theatre in Dallas called Theatre followed by the year: Theatre 47, Theatre 48, etc. It was a brilliant idea that created an annual New Year's Eve ritual of gathering patrons together to ring in the theatre's new name each year.

I recently reread this book, which I recommend highly not only for its spirited endorsement of the arena theatre form (and she makes an excellent and very practical rationale for it that still stands up today), but also for an indication of the values of the original regional theatre movement in America. I would like to quote extensively from the early part of the book, and ask you to imagine how the American theatre might have been different had we followed Margo Jones instead of Tyrone Guthrie.

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 theeatre lies in the new plays.

American resident theatres followed Guthrie, an Irishman who came up through the English repertory theatre tradition, in preferring a repertoire dominated by the classics. University theatres followed suit, abandoning the living playwright -- especially the living playwright of a previously unproduced play who might be able to be in residence for the production -- in favor of a series of classics. Tom Loughlin wrote, "the expectation is that universities will present us with “traditional” art in traditional ways, the “high art” that everyone talks about. There is absolutely no expectation that universities will produce any sort of original art whatsoever, but rather act as a museum of art in every possible way. Shakespeare will be done as “Shakespeare,” classics are expected, and high art will be enjoyed by all...the name of the game is not creation; it’s re-creation." The resident theatre has also moved down the road to museum as well, focusing their creativity on the formal production elements, deconstructing the plays to make their own concoctions, and virtually ignoring the existence of the playwrights who are creating our theatrical legacy.

The commercial non-profits (a term coined by Bob Leonard of Virginia Tech) and the universities go hand in hand on this. If you are looking for evidence that Tom's call for a uniting of the artist and the academic is needed to force change, you need go no further than a comparison of Margo Jones and the latest American Theatre listings. Jones believed in full productions, and as a result she encouraged many, many playwrights including Tennessee Williams (she was co-director of the original Glass Menagerie).

The regional theatre movement got highjacked; it is time we took it back.