It would take forever to recite / All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.
—Robert Frost
How will the new come into our theatre? Will we recognize it? Will we welcome it? Is it already here? If not, what’s the best way to make it happen?
There appears to be general agreement that the old ways aren’t the best. Rumors of the death of new-play development may have been exaggerated, but the obituaries won’t stop. Last spring, within a few weeks of each other, three pronouncements signaled a new era for the cultivation of work for the stage. First, Denver Center Theatre, one of America’s wealthier nonprofits, and one with a long history of support for new plays, announced that due to losses sustained in the diving stock market, it would be suspending new-play development, closing its literary offices, eliminating the position of associate artistic director for new-play development and canceling its new-play festival and the prestigious Francesca Primus Prize for women playwrights. Within a few days, Lincoln Center Theater’s Anne Cattaneo, one of our most respected dramaturgs, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “New-play development is dead. It just became too expensive to do new work….Today, instead of 50 regional theatres developing 50 n ew plays, what you have is one new play by an established writer that gets done 5O times at 50 regional theatres.”
Two months later, the Times ran another article announcing that Jesse Ventura, pro wrestler-turned-Minnesota governor (the muscular butt of a nation’s jokes), would help address his state’s fiscal woes by withholding money promised to major arts institutions, including that flagship of flagships, the Guthrie Theater, which had counted on $24 million to construct a new $125-million facility. Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s artistic director, responded to the governor’s gambit with one of his own: “In terms of encouraging new writers, staging new plays and co-productions, and sending our plays out to other places, we won’t be able to do what we hoped.”
Dowling’s statement was revealing in a couple of ways. While the Guthrie has never been a hotbed of new-play development, by holding out its potential demise as a counter-threat, Dowling was making his priorities clear, despite a mission devoted to “classical repertoire” and “the exploration of new works.” (Do theatres ever hold Shakespeare hostage in this way—no bucks, no Bard?) Second, as with the Denver amputation, it made palpable an attitude that many have noted over the years, a shared sense among institutions that work on new plays is dispensable, in a last-hired, first-fired sort of way.
Of course, no one asks playwrights if it’s dispensable. Decisions about what appears on the nation’s stages are mostly handed down without reference to the artists who write, perform, design and (with more exceptions) direct it. Like so many corporate actions threatened or undertaken in these hardish times—layoffs, division and regional office closings, corporate restructuring—they are top-down decisions. The workers (who, in the theatre, are precisely the “creators”) are an afterthought, if that—pawns in negotiations with, say, Wrestler-Governors.
In the midst of the death knells, Theatre Communications Group, showing a will to positivism and a desire to spur radical rethinking, held a two-day “convening” in Portland, Ore., with an unlikely cast of characters. Joining a handful of playwrights and a slightly larger cadre of institutional theatre producers (managers and artistic directors, including a large children’s theatre contingent) were an assortment of multi-arts presenters, ensemble-based theatre artists, directors, performance artists, literary managers and people who run small theatres and developmental labs. The gathering was a clear attempt to transcend the ingrown discourse of new-play development (the “developed to death” debate) that is nearly as old as the movement itself. With hope in their hearts, the folks at TCG skirted the debates (and once again showed their determination to break free of a past identification with the League of Resident Theatres) by bringing unusual suspects—people interested in the new anywhere, anyhow—and broadening the semantic umbrella. As if heralding an epoch in the making, they called it “New Works, New Ways.” New-Play Development Is Dead! Long Live New Work Making!
The clashing point of two subjects, two disciplines, two cultures—of two galaxies, so far as that goes—ought to produce creative chances. In the history of mental activity that has been where some of the breakthroughs came. The chances are there now. But they are, as it were, in a vacuum, because those in the two cultures can’t talk to each other.
—C.P. Snow
In the ’30s, Harold Clurman, that great inspirer and co-founder of the Group Theatre, was introduced to Andre Gide, novelist and Nobel laureate. “The problem with the theatre,” Gide remarked, “is to find good plays.” “The problem with the theatre,” Clurman rejoined, “is to create a Theatre.”
This exchange adumbrates a great divide in visions for the future: those who feel the American theatre suffers from lack of great, or even worthy, plays, and those who lay blame for a failing art at the feet of artistically deficient theatres. On one side sit, mostly, artistic directors and producers; on the other, writers, as well as a constellation of other independent artists.
Those who take the no-good-plays line often define quality by both artistic measures and those of the marketplace; a “viable” work is one that plays well and sells well. I’ve been talking with other artistic directors about this for nearly 20 years and have a sense that their complaints (which aren’t always shared by their literary managers, whose tastes are often considerably more adventurous than their bosses’) boil down to three: (1) American playwrights write too small; they aren’t engaged enough with the wide world; (2) these playwrights don’t understand structure; and (3) they aren’t writing plays that will connect with “my audience.”
The counter argument holds that we live amid a profusion of playwriting talent—that, as a profession, playwriting hasn’t been this vital in decades—but that the theatres, long on business savvy and short on artistic vision, haven’t kept up. Moreover, those theatres, having helped create a multigenerational playwriting community, have now abandoned it. Erik Ehn, playwright and co-founder of the itinerant, anarchic RAT conference—a shape-shifting network of small, experimental and alternative theatres—stood up for this view in a recent speech to the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. In “slightly doctored” notes from his talk, he contends, “There are plenty of plays out there, lots of excellence,” adding, “To create a new theatre by developing plays first equals trying to build a new house by moving around the furniture.” He compares mainstream new-play development, especially challenging or experimental texts, to Audubon twisting “the necks of exotic birds to help them fit the scale of his renderings.” He calls for a change not only in theatre practice but also in theatre space and architecture, the expansion of time for creation and an emphasis on “hospitality over intellectualism.” New, in other words, means creating a new theatre.
How will the new come into the theatre? How can we make it happen? Should our efforts be focused on the writing or the structures of production, the independent artists or the institutions? The answer, as well as the problem, lies in the relationship between the two.
Is it possible that at the heart of the creativity stoppage known as new-play development are not bad plays (I’m told they exist); bad working models (though these prevail everywhere, such as dead-end reading series and criticism from numerous people with no understanding of process and no interest in producing the play); or bad faith (which, god knows, pervades every theatre where programmers mentally doodle while the writers they’ve encouraged wait weeks or months or, yes, years before the inevitable rejection trickles down to them)? Maybe the fault lines are deeper, as deep as identity, the story we tell ourselves about who we in the theatre are.
I have a confession. For as long as I can remember, I have believed that theatre is singular—the theatre, or, just as grandly, the theatre community. I no longer do. I used to think the nonprofit theatre movement had given birth to a profession of shared values. I no longer do. Forty years after its seeding, this field (note the singular), which we’ve celebrated for its variety and its underlying unity of purpose, has become two, with a mostly unacknowledged rift running through them. Or, to borrow C.P. Snow’s famous phrase, with which he dissected humanistic culture into natural scientists and literary intellectuals, it’s become “two cultures.” Two theatres, two cultures, two galaxies: that of the institution and that of the individual artist.
This dawning awareness has had, for me, the quality of slow-motion heartbreak. Like many theatre people born in the ’50s, I was raised on the all-together-now harmonies of musical theatre and came of age under the sway of the utopian communality of ’70s experimental theatre. As a young professional, I carried a torch for artistic homes, community regionalism and the company ethic implied by “resident.” I’ve devoted much of my writing life since then to this magazine, in the belief that the “we” I used as the principal pronoun of address was actual, descriptive of a community in fact.
Now, as artistic director of a 53-year-old institution that serves playwrights—those most independent of theatre artists—I straddle two realities. One reality features a building, a board, a staff, a company of playwrights and a tight annual budget; it’s driven by a clear mission and sense of institutional responsibility—for vitality, quality, stability and legacy. The second reality is that of the writers themselves. I’m fed by their inspired idiosyncrasy, dogged artistic ambition, bravery and skill. And I’m angry for them, because their stressful, unstructured, mood-swinging writing lives exist outside of the very world whose present and, even more, future depend on their articulated visions. Where are the theatres that are worthy of these artists? I don’t see them. Not because there aren’t theatres with the talent to stage their plays impressively, but because there are so few theatres willing to incorporate artistic lives and bodies of work into the institution’s way of being. At best, playwrights (and, I suspect, all unaffiliated artists) are guests—sometimes welcome, sometimes tolerated, sometimes ignored—in the ongoing life of theatre buildings. It’s worse, I’d venture, for playwrights of color, who bring even deeper cultural differences to bear on a divided situation—a double disenfranchisement. How will we welcome the new when we don’t welcome the bringers of the new?
I don’t mean to suggest that this disconnection is willful. The situation is no one’s fault. It’s an inevitable product of history, generational change and institutionalization. It’s the American way: the innovative becomes the established. Yesterday’s geek-renegades become today’s corporate titans (All hail Misters Gates and Jobs!). The institutional theatre in America still sees itself as the alternative theatre, though the pioneers are gone, replaced by second- and third-generation artistic and management leaders without the pioneering spirit. It has become our Broadway, that which the new theatre must rebel against to get free.
Both sides of the theatrical divide contribute to the climate. Theatre leaders all too often fail to collaborate honestly or take responsibility for the huge imbalance in power that exists between those who hire and choose and those who audition and wait. The myth of community intensifies their astonishment at (or denial of) the depth of artists’ alienation. You could read all about it in these pages last December, when Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company and president of LORT, decried the use of anonymous sources in an article written by three designers about the difficult economics of freelance theatre design. Maso condemned the practice on journalistic grounds but missed the point. He assumed that freelance designers were part of his artistic village, where everyone should feel free to speak his or her mind. They aren’t and they don’t. Truthfulness endangered their livelihoods. They were whistle-blowers—nobody’s idea of a pleasant hire—or, to steal a phrase from John Patrick Shanley, “beggars at the house of plenty.”
Unaffiliated artists, by contrast, can be shockingly naive about what’s at stake when a theatre makes artistic decisions, about the complexities of running an arts organization, about its relationship with its audience/community, about the process by which it functions and the real human cost of programming risks. Moreover, unaffiliated artists in America (of whom playwrights are only one species) are too often mired in passivity, unable to imagine actions other than hitting their heads against the same closed doors. Where is a new generation of writer-founders, playwright-managers? Where are the manifestos?
At root, though, this division stems from the thousand particulars of daily life that create habits and systems of belief. What is a day like for the head of an institutional theatre? What’s that same day for a writer or any freelance artist? The tendencies of those lives read like lists of bipolar opposites:
Add to the list or make up your own. Your story goes here.
One man cannot produce drama. True drama is born only of one feeling animating all the members of a clan—a spirit shared by all and expressed by the few for the all.
—George (Jig) Cram Cook
As the multiculturation of the arts has shown, cultural differences make creative sparks fly. Moreover, there’s a natural, generative tension between the solitary artist and the organization, between the private creator and the public producer. You can see this creative dissension up close and personal in that powerful first collaboration of the American art theatre—between Eugene O’Neill and the Provincetown Players.
In his lovingly detailed paean to Greenwich Village, Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village, The American Bohemia, 1910-1960, the late Ross Wetzsteon retells the story of O’Neill’s relationship with Provincetown’s founding spirit Jig Cook. O’Neill, young, tortured, almost fatally alcoholic, is introduced to the idealistic company by a fellow drunk who knows that Eugene keeps some plays in a trunk. These wildly uneven, blatantly experimental plays—and several subsequent ones—are just what the Players have been looking for. They thrill the neighbors on the Cape and stand out in the purposefully amateur evenings of one-acts mounted in several New York seasons. The newspapers discover O’Neill, Broadway beckons, a couple of Pulitzers follow and the playwright and soon-shuttered theatre part company. It’s the Ur-story and the same old one: kindred spirits making dramatic whoopee, the lure of Broadway, loyalty betrayed, a playwright’s posthumous profession of gratitude for the dead producer’s grace. More important, it’s a story of mutual dependence: a theatre helping the writer find a voice, a voice defining a theatre.
How would the emerging O’Neill have fared in today’s theatre? Whose commitment would now buy that brilliant beginner the years of explosive experimentation he spent with Provincetown? Where would he go to find the heat to temper the talent expressed in his late, great works? And where would he find a statement like this one, taken from the Players’ constitution:
The president shall cooperate with the author in producing the play under the author’s direction. The resources of the theatre… shall be placed at the disposal of the author…The author shall produce the play without hindrance, according to his own ideas.
Is it the hothouse of Provincetown that grows an O’Neill, or the playwright’s fervid imagination—Shakespeare’s, Moliere’s, Sheridan’s, Chekhov’s, Churchill’s—that dreams life into the Globe, Palais-Royal, Drury Lane, Moscow Art Theatre or Joint Stock? This year in New York, the Signature Theatre will dedicate its season to Lanford Wilson’s work. What would the season look like if there’d never been a Circle Rep—an acting company, a director and a shared, evolving aesthetic to grow Wilson’s corpus, play by play? Where are the new Circle Reps? It’s hard enough to find an acting company of any size or consistency today, let alone one that includes a writer or writers in its ongoing artistic evolution.
The founding spirits of the American art theatre—Cook, Clurman, Hallie Flanagan, Zelda Fichandler, Herbert Blau, Malina and Beck, Douglas Turner Ward, Joseph Chaikin, Luis Valdez—knew at the start what we’ve forgotten. Unlike today, when the homogeneous seasons of our national stages reveal a unanimity that feels like anonymity, these pragmatic inspirers shared a catalytic vision, one vision with a mess of names: company, collective, group, troupe, ensemble and clan. Every theatre must find its voice, and every writer must find her theatre.
People have asked me, “Why don’t we have more good plays?” I said, “Why don’t you ask why we don’t have more bad plays, because if you have more bad plays you’ll have more good plays, because that feeds the ground.” That’s the manure that makes things grow. It’s very valuable manure, as manure is valuable to growth. We need activity, we need action, we need trial, we need error.
—Harold Clurman
Two things I know: (1) For writers to understand a theatre’s community, they must be made part of it; and (2) the fusion of individual talent and collective energy fuels great theatre. Twenty-five hundred years of theatre history tells us this, but too few have been listening.
It’s a sad irony that the very systems set up to nurture writers and involve them in the theatre have led to their disaffection. New-play development—reading series, literary offices, the emphasis on premieres—was conceived to foster both writers and work. Instead it demoted playwrights to overnight visitors—the artistic home as Motel 6—and created schism where there should be continuity—from development to production, page to stage.
These processes also disrupted what may well have been the most important theatrical relationship prior to the regional theatre movement: the tempestuous, vibrant, mutually self-interested partnership between the producer and the playwright. Certainly, the success of mid-20th-century plays and musicals brings to mind not only their creators but their producers, benevolent—Kermit Bloomgarden, Robert Whitehead, Alexander Cohen—and maniacal—Jed Harris, David Merrick. When writers and producers share a process, they can share a sense of direction as well; it’s here, in relationship, that the scope of a play can be addressed, that the producer can cheer the writer’s efforts to move away from the “small,” to turn toward the wide world.
Before we knew it, artistic producers had literary managers/dramaturgs running blocking for them. Instead of being wooed, playwrights were customarily held at bay. The intimate producing partnership became a distant one, with the creator separated from the means of production. Moreover, the reading and discovery of plays has been delegated to such an extent that many artistic directors appear to have lost the patience, time and, consequently, the reading ability to wade through a play that may be different or difficult or in progress.
These systems and habits have altered the aesthetic landscape. The different, difficult and new are just what so many writers grope toward. I’ve come to believe that a most common feature of contemporary American playwriting is the search for form. The process of discovery and innovation is integral to the play, built in. Structure isn’t imposed; it’s immanent. Tony Kushner’s Angels in America is a case in point. His “fantasia” structure is a kind of nonbinding structure, allowing Kushner’s imagination to go where it wants, to digress, to elaborate, to move forward and back, like progress itself, one of the play’s main themes. The play dreams itself into being. And then the second part, Perestroika, dreams itself another way. How many of the playwrights you admire possess this “setting out to parts unknown” energy? Think of Edward Albee, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Paula Vogel, Mac Wellman, August Wilson, John Guare, for example. Each of their plays is its own animal; each teaches us anew how to follow its tracks. American playwrights don’t understand structure? They understand it well enough to know you have to discover it.
If these important writers—all important teachers as well—have made it up as they’ve gone along, pursuing those forms-in-formation, what undiscovered territory can we hope to stumble into as their students and less-established colleagues break ground? The solo mind will always be more nimble than an institution. So, playwrights, whether or not they write ahead of their times, will nearly always write forward of the theatres. But how will we welcome the new into the theatre if the theatres stand apart from it, if they no longer have the will or the skill to recognize it?
A second confession: I don’t want to believe what I’ve written. My mind keeps doubling back, accusing itself of dramatizing—the institutional Pentheus on one side, the artistic Dionysus on the other. Pentheus, king of Thebes, up in a tree, decked out in the Maenad’s drag—peeking down at the Dionysian revels (the drunken, theatrical revels), all the time thinking he’s in control, in command. And I accuse myself of taking the analogy too far. Theatres are great ships turning in tidal waters; they resist change. Everybody in them, even the pilots, have their hearts in the right places.
Then I remember the hundreds of writers I’ve spoken to in the past few years, and how few theatres contradict the portrait of disengagement they’ve drawn. And I ask myself—and I ask you the same question—which theatres are truly important to me, which ones do I expect to lead, to draw us nearer to the future, to the new? And I know it won’t be many of the ones our funding community has designated as “leading theatres,” despite their impressive production values and eloquent leaders.
No wonder TCG invited all those ensemble folks to its Portland convening; it’s natural to get excited about the work happening in companies. Who would not want what they have, those community-based and experimental troupes from Appalachia to Blue Lake, Calif., from Wooster Street to Cornerstone’s corner of L.A.? You gotta love them. Collective models only apply so far, though; 999 times our of 1,000, someone will write the new thing alone in a room. But even the mammoth Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which boasts the largest acting company in the country, has been jazzing writers these days. And obviously, not all institutions are created alike: Some are born artist-centered (think Steppenwolf and South Coast Repertory) and remain so in their bones, even as they grow. And then there are the scrappy young theatres—gangs as much as theatres—with funny names, who are the real harbingers of the new, because they refuse to check their imaginings at the boardroom door.
Elsewhere, the century that invented directors also cursed the theatre with one dominant model, supported by theatre consultants and unwitting trustees: the director-led theatre. It’s almost a given that the first choice to run most theatres is a director, and, having selected directors, most theatres define themselves as artist-centered. This unexamined practice, despite a few hundred years of counterexamples, has inflated the importance of the director and devalued the work of the writer and the centrality of the play. Director training, meanwhile, makes matters worse, by shortchanging new-play collaboration and overstressing classical interpretation. The coups of discovering the next fine writer or skillfully telling the new story have been supplanted by the interpretive thrill of tackling The Winter’s Tale or The Wild Duck or mounting both parts of Angels in America. The system self-perpetuates, as board members (in the absence of ensembles and company playwrights) sustain contact with a single artist—a director. Real directors’ theatres can be as compelling as any others—who can’t wait to see what Robert Woodruff brews up at the American Repertory Theatre, in a season where he works side-by-side with Anne Bogart, Peter Sellars, Janos Szasz and Andrei Serban? Not many directors, though, have developed a production “voice” rich and unique enough to compensate for the lack of other consistent, defining voices.
The gulf is real, and crossing it, bridging it, eliminating it is the primary work of this moment, more important than getting nonprofits and commercial producers together, more important even, I’d venture, than the financial health of institutions. What was envisioned as a community of artists has evolved into a community of institutions so cut off from its artists that it keeps looking outside for ways to save itself. The institutions envy performance ensembles, experimental troupes and community-based theatres for the vitality they know themselves to lack. They want the flexibility found only in playwright centers and labs. They look to corporate gurus from the business world to jar their thinking. Maybe it’s time (to paraphrase the New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell) to stop trying to think outside the box and start trying, instead, to fix the box.
The archetype for creative progress in America pits the individual (often in concert with other individuals) against the institution. We’re seeing the hypertext version this year, corridor after corridor: the abused take on the Catholic Church; middle managers and investors take on Enron, WorldCom and the FBI; Tony Soprano bada-bings the networks. House minority leader Richard Gephardt, citing a crisis of “faith in Institutions,” suggests that our hope is in reform.
In the theatre—which, in spite of evidence to the contrary, sees itself as exempt from institutional abuse and corruption—the individual has remained mostly silent. Like an insular family—or people operating under a fragile myth of family—the unspoken agreement calls for silence. During 13 years of “culture wars,” survival pragmatics demanded a unified front under attack. This summer, however, in the process of restoring a mere sliver of past cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, some in Congress declared the “culture wars” over. Maybe we have a bit more freedom now, freedom to be divided, freedom for raucous in-fighting, freedom to fight for the future in loud, angry, impassioned voices.
My hope for the new rides in two directions at once—toward the playwrights who, on a daily basis, strike out into the unknown, and toward a new generation of theatres, a new generation of founders. And my wishes go to everyone who might want to pave the way for the new-individual artists, funders, trustees, future and present theatre leaders. The wish list includes the tentative, naive, impractical and already-tried, but here goes.
I wish for a funding and support structure for nothing less than the total integration of companies of artists, including writers, in established theatres and new ones—not a place at the table but the table itself. I wish for funders who will reserve major backing for the theatres—most of them with budgets under $2 million—that are breaking ground for the future. Let young artists be the mentors, for a while, rather than senior administrators.
Any ideas that reverse the structure of power between institutions and independents make my list: Give artists money to choose which theatres they’ll work with, rather than the other way around; let the writers of last season’s hits—rampantly produced across the country—curate a second production by a contemporary playwright. (You do the 12th production of Fuddy Meers or Dirty Blonde? That’s great. You should. Then David Lindsay-Abaire or Claudia Shear gets to choose another play for your season!) In fact, I can stand behind any idea that links the productions of premieres to those of second and third productions (all of which are necessary and lacking). How about making sure that every list of potential artistic directors contains a full complement of actors, playwrights, designers, nondirecting producers, literary managers and anybody else with a proven sense of service to artists other than themselves? And let’s have a congress, not of commercial and nonprofit producers, but of institutional leaders and unaffiliated artists with full immunity for anything they might say.
I wish, too, that all director- and actor-training programs would devote at least half their production opportunities to the cultivation of new work—training for the real world and stimulus for the future, all rolled up. I wish we could find ways to add flexibility and time to development by partnering producing theatres with theatre laboratories, workshops, non-performance spaces and artist centers. I wish writers could drive and design their own process at theatres. And I wish producers would stop peeking at the schedules in this magazine to pick their seasons.
One final wish: more new plays in every season, more plays, more plays.
Todd London is the artistic director of New Dramatists in New York City and the author of a novel, The World’s Room (Steerforth Press).
