from BJ Jones' blog
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October 3, 2007
I had lunch yesterday with the Artistic Associate of Actor's Theatre of Louisville, Sean Daniels. Sean worked at Dad's Garage in Atlanta for many years then spent three years at the California Shakespeare Festival. Mark Masterson, the Artistic Director here at ATL, brought Sean on board to help engender an edgy, forward-looking aspect to the work. It is the same impulse we at Northlight have in bringing in Meghan Beals McCarthy as our dramaturg and literary manager.
Sean and I were talking about the future of American Regional Theatre and he said he was interested in work that is more "theatrical," that is: the kind of stories that you can only experience on stage and not see on TV or in a movie theatre. I think we agree that if we are to give the audience of the future a reason to leave their high-definition home theatres for a night out, they should experience something that can only happen in a room full of strangers.
Sean's career has been very interesting, starting with his work at Dad's Garage (the “Second City” of Atlanta) and then moving to a Shakespeare Festival. He has a perspective that is at once raucous and fresh and yet informed by the structure of the regional theatre as it is practiced today. The concept that “theatricality” is the acknowledgement of the defining characteristic of theatre is not new, and yet many new scripts that we all read come to us less as a celebration of that theatricality, and more of an audition for a job as a staff writer on the next hot TV series.
Subliminally we are giving our audience the opposite of our purpose for being: that we are not aesthetically different than what they can get in their living room, that the process of creation is less satisfying and the experience is the same. More and more of these scripts do not push the envelope in style and scope. The challenge to lift the work from the page to the stage and to celebrate the limits of the small stages is never met. The movement began with Odets and hasn't changed. It’s a bit frustrating as an Artistic Director to receive script after script from young and talented writers who set their work on the set of "Three's Company," and who may have something to say were it not for the environment or form wrapping their themes in the same old package.
Imagine the challenge of the Humana Festival, which produces 6 fully produced new plays every year, all meant to be seen in less than three days, and all traversing different themes, styles, aesthetics, and tones. They must read literally 1,000 scripts to arrive at the six they choose and many of those overlap in the style in which their playwrights limit themselves. In a conversation with Mark Masterson, ATL’s Artistic Director, we talked about the future of regional theatre and our audiences. Many regional theatres are seeing single ticket sales rise but subscription sales falling. Louisville is quite healthy and their audiences are wonderful, if last night's preview of my production The Underpants is any indication. They feel a sense of propriety about the Humana Festival and celebrate the more adventurous work. Mark fully understands the blend of his audience and the industry folk who travel from all over the world to see the work at Humana. It is a challenging job and one that requires the mature and broad vision Mark displays in choosing the 24 theatre pieces his institution mounts every year. 24 plays! I am in awe of Mark. I only choose 5 and that is gut wrenching, although I always feel there is so much more I would like to do if I had the money and the resources. It is a unique challenge and Humana is quite an experience for a viewer, to live through a weekend of six new plays. I highly recommend it if you are as much a theatre junky as Candy and I are.
Sean and I didn't settle anything but the bill at our lunch, but I came away sharing his viewpoint and with a sense of optimism that the future of regional theatre will be in good hands when their time comes.
More Anon,
Beej
posted by seanie d at
12:04 PM
1 Comments:
I have recently been having a similar conversation with my fellow MFA students. We are taking a course called Contemporary British Theatre. It's taught by Mary Karen Dahl (who is the new John Degen). She is amazing. Thoughtful and inspiring and all of the things you think all teachers should be:
http://www.theatre.fsu.edu/pages/people/faculty/dahl.html
In case you're interested, but I have no idea what thaumaturgic means.
So in this class we're reading two - three plays per week by playwrights who have changed British (and western contemporary) theatre in radical ways. The class is made up of the three first-year Directing students, the three second-year Theatre Studies students, and the six second-year Playwrighting students. The class is one of those Socratic questioning deals... Mary Karen asks us questions about the play and tries to stimulate a discussion. The playwrights (who make up half the class) almost never speak. They just sit there and zone out or play around on their laptops (NOT taking notes, I assure you, since at the times that they don't have their laptops, they don't pull out a notebook). Sometimes they comment, but it's rare.
So, last Tuesday we were discussing the play Softcops by Caryl Churchill - arguably one of the greatest playwrights of our time, right? And the only comments made by the playwrighting students were that it wasn't a "good" play because it had no character development, and that it turned them off because it was political and no one wants to see political theatre. Mary Karen kept saying OK, but can you talk about HOW she writes? How has she made this piece of theatre? As a writer, can you discuss her ideas or techniques? The answer was complete silence. So, (bringing it back to the topic of the blog) I made the point that if we wanted to see a linear progression of character development in a Modern American Realism style, we could just turn on TV, so theatre should strive to do more. The playwrights just kind of shrugged.
The other directing students and I have been bitching about it ever since. I don't know if it's because they are technically split between the film school and the SoT, and most of them really want to go into film or television and just HAD to take the theatre classes to get a degree, or what, but it's very frustrating.
It was really only a couple of them who were defending the status quo. The others were as quiet as ever. Oh, lameness! Why have you followed me to my golden fortress of higher learning?
Anyway - this is clearly an epidemic. Just thought you'd like to know that it's even infected the humble college student. Aren't we supposed to be the idealists? Aren't we!?
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