Challenge
Leverage modest resources to cultivate ambitious, original work, from commission through production.
Plan
Managing a network of diverse partnerships that can offer specialized support each step of the way.
What Worked
Identifying strong new voices; offering a generous development schedule; defining partners’ roles.
What Didn’t
Unexpected expenses can arise when reacting to the evolving needs of the commission.
What’s Next
Implementing the lessons of previous partnerships; hiring a new-works director to consolidate projects.
Partnering with other organizations to extend one’s resources is by no means a new thing in theatre, the world of collaborations. But, says Amy Mueller of Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco, in these lean times it sure seems to be happening an awful lot. Co-productions are cropping up all over, linking small companies to large ones or teaming producing companies with developmental organizations.
For Crowded Fire Theater Company of San Francisco—a group SF Weekly calls “a feisty company specializing in difficult, subversive works by emerging playwrights”—last year was what artistic director Marissa Wolf calls “the year of collaboration.” The company produced three mainstage productions instead of its usual two, and all involved partnerships: Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, co-produced with Asian American Theater Company; local scribe Lauren Gunderson’s Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a rolling premiere planned with, and also mounted at, Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre and Seattle’s ArtsWest; and Marilee Talkington’s multimedia work Sticky Time, co-produced with her company Vanguardian Productions.
Partnering presents challenges, but offers unexpected benefits. In the case of Crowded Fire—which has earned a national reputation for high-quality, edgy new work—the company has learned that if you are flexible enough to manage the artistic, financial and administrative curveballs of collaboration, you might just end up with something that’s greater than the sum of its parts. This has meant an amplification of the good things Crowded Fire already does on its modest $100K annual budget—expanding the resources it can offer in fiercely championing brave new playwrights.
Matchbox Commissions, the centerpiece of Crowded Fire’s keystone Matchbox Reading Series Program, enables Wolf and company to see projects all the way through from idea to production. The process begins with Wolf’s uncanny ability for identifying bold theatremakers she believes will create the kind of work she’s looking for: “It’s political, it’s fierce, it’s smart, and the language and structure offer something muscular, something startling,” says Wolf, who took the helm of the 15-year-old troupe in 2008.
Vanguardian’s Talkington says that when Wolf invited her to create a new piece for Crowded Fire from the ground up, the artistic director was taking a big and generous risk. Yoking a “text-based” new-play company like Crowded Fire and a site-specific, multimedia, devising company like Vanguardian might not have seemed like a good idea at first. According to Talkington, Sticky Time “was a hard piece. It pushed us both dramatically out of our comfort zones.”
Not only did the tech demands vary from Crowded Fire’s usual fare, so did the ways of working—creating on one’s feet as opposed to table work, for example. Yet both companies stepped up to problem-solve whenever the need arose. When Talkington needed rehearsal time to work on tech, Wolf rehearsed the actors; when the tech design needed even more attention, Crowded Fire created a week-long tech workshop, underwritten by Vanguardian; when Talkington needed to focus on the creative side, CF managing director Tiffany Cothran took over the producing and paperwork.
Ultimately, the results were fairly stunning. Sticky Time opened last October on a second stage in Brava Theater’s historic venue in the Outer Mission. The audience of 50 sat on swivel chairs surrounded by a 360-degree set of elevated platforms, backed by projected images and fiber-optic lights. The characters, clad in overalls and workboots, patched rifts in time while weathering ominous “earthquakes” in the timescape. For spectators, swiveling in that space among the folds of time was a deeply unsettling and exhilarating 90 minutes of theatre.
Listening to Talkington’s post-show speech, it was easy to grasp how this ambitious piece came off—loads of dedicated time, expertise and effort, and mutual trust between two committed groups. But given the scale of the effort and the number of moving parts, noted Talkington, “it could have been a bomb.”
Why wasn’t it? Crucially, each partner’s role was identified from the start. Crowded Fire essentially provided the “software” for Sticky Time (dramaturgy, actors, directors, producers, staff) while Vanguardian offered up the “hardware” ($20,000 of multimedia gear). Also useful: keeping finances separate, but in linked accounts. What all the practical details ultimately amounted to, says Talkington, was “a level of support and generosity for the playwright that was really quite stunning.”
Another local playwright, Christopher Chen, agrees. He notes that new-work support from Crowded Fire is “more rigorous than what I’ve been through with more established developmental organizations.” In fact, Chen says he would not have attempted his new piece—The Hundred Flowers Project, a Matchbox Commission set to debut this coming October—had it not been for the support he knew would be coming. This included the standard Matchbox Series 20 hours of workshop support for a reading. But in his case it was augmented by a long-term combination of partnering organizations, including American Conservatory Theater and the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco and the Lark Play Development Center in New York, enabling a two-year plan of development customized to help him create his “dream theatre” of spectacle, movement, media and text.
It’s important to note that Crowded Fire didn’t have all those partners in hand before offering Chen the commission. Wolf made the offer, as always, based on her deep trust and keen eye. But a number of pieces then naturally fell together—Chen was a resident of the Playwrights Foundation, which signed on as co-producer, and Mueller won an NEA grant that allowed the play to go to the Lark; Chen had prior connections to ACT and arranged for a reading there. Hundred Flowers proceeded down a part-planned, part-serendipitous path. Each step of the way, it had the security of a home base and a guaranteed production at journey’s end.
The weeklong design/tech workshop Chen’s show will receive this spring is built on the foundation of Crowded Fire’s experience with Sticky Time. Learning the lessons of previous partnering—but also treating each partnership as a new occasion—is part of the ongoing learning curve that Wolf and Cothran have learned to relish.
Indeed, their flexibility has resulted in a fresh slate of diverse new works that they credit for building out their audience base. Forty-two percent of Crowded Fire’s audience earns under $40,000 annually; more than half are younger than 45; 24 percent identifies as LGBT and in 2011, 41 percent were people of color.
What’s next? Crowded Fire recently hired dramaturg Laura Brueckner to become its first director of new works. Consolidating its development activities under one umbrella will allow the company, says Brueckner, “to build new methods of making new work tailored to each piece.” No doubt there will be plenty of room under that umbrella for like-minded collaborators.
Kevin DiPirro, who teaches at Stanford University, is a recipient of American Theatre’s Bay Area Commissioning Fund, supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
