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Wednesday, 06 January 2010
UPDATE: Tom Sellars' "The City's Best (and
Not So Best) Progressive Theater" in this week's Village
Voice addresses some similar issues in contemporary performance as
opposed to contemporary playwriting. The concerns are far from
identical, but there are a few parallels:
If New York wants to stay in the theatrical vanguard, it
must encourage and embolden progressive artists to try projects that
aren't strictly outcome-driven. Theatermakers' creative evolution may
be
stunted, however, by the city's notoriously conservative infrastructure.
Few theaters or arts organizations commission or present experimental work
on a large scale; even well-curated performance series, which could
supply
intellectual fiber and expand public tastes, remain rare.
Ultimately, there are degrees of "avant-garde": Not many
artists today
call for, say, burning down museums and libraries in the name of new
technology, as the Italian Futurists did a hundred years ago. ...
In 21st-century New
York, aspirations look milder and more careerist: Experimental stage
artists want creative outlets and a responsive public. Understandably,
they also seek good publicity and financial relief. But in the next era
— now
under way — there's an appetite and opportunity for enlarging the
theatrical
experience in New York.
Tom is the editor of the Yale Theater journal (for which I wrote a long
article, in part discussing the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's
Romeo and
Juliet, in an upcoming issue). The full article is here. Thanks to Andy Horwitz for the link.
At 99seats, J. Holtham's
post "The Enemies of Good" notes a few comments in TDF's
Outrageous Fortune and writes:
In these quotes, you can see the full effect of this
thinking. According to Guthrie, we can only tell if a play is great if it
stands the test of time. Throughout Outrageous Fortune, several
artistic leaders bemoan the poor state of plays today, the messy, bad
plays they get, the mad crush for just a few plays and playwrights who are
deemed as being "important." Yet they all acknowledge that a play needs a
production to be completed and that a playwright needs commitment to do
their best work. These things, in our institutional theatres, are beyond
luxuries. They're fantasies.
One thing that's only tangentially dealt with is the role
of the critic in all of this. In his various comments here and other
places, Thomas Garvey has typified the attitude that comes from a lot of
the critical pages: it's not the theatres, but the plays that got small.
If a play isn't worthy of instant addition to the pantheon of great plays,
it's to be dimissed. He's caught in the same hunt for the Hit, but of a
slightly different kind: the Perfect Play. Not in terms of structure or
writing, but an instant Classic. Anything that's not has been weighed and
found wanting.
A play that could be good, that could be made better by
production never gets there. Playwrights get stuck in "development hell,"
desperately trying to fix things that would be best fixed in a rehearsal
hall and in previews in front of a living breathing audience. But they
can't. And the theatres sigh and go after whatever got the Good Review,
thinking that's the Perfect Play, the play that will satisfy the audience
and the critics. Critics like Thomas, who ignore all of the structural
issues and difficulties facing a working playwright today, and expect that
when a play hits the stage, it should be a Great Play.
I wonder what an institutional theatre's artistic director would have
to say to this, but few of them, unlike playwrights, have the time or the
inclination to keep blogs. (Nor do many mainstream critics;
in any event, there's evidence in Outrageous
Fortune to indicate that, apart from Charles Isherwood,
few print critics have much influence over an institutional
theatre's programming decisions.) Outrageous Fortune suggests
that we
listen to each other; I've tried to spend some time thinking about the
artistic directors' position, listening to what they said to Todd London
and others. So I posted this in Holtham's comments section, and
repeat it here:
Judging from what I read in Outrageous Fortune, I
don't think that artistic directors are looking for either a Perfect Play
or an Instant Classic — only a good one, a play which resonates with
them, that contains within it the potential for a worthwhile production or
the promise of better plays ahead (hence one AD's emphasis on "building
relationships").
It's the job of the ADs (as well as the Literary Managers)
of institutional theatres to determine which plays are appropriate for
their stages, and it's not simply a matter of whether a given script is a
good play or not. "Not appropriate for us at this time" may, for all its
fudging, be quite true given such things as economics, the theatre's
perceived mission, disagreement among the artistic staff as to a play's
merits, etc. — it's far from a thumbs-up, thumbs-down decision
process.
It isn't just that a given play is, as you put it, "messy"
or "bad." All plays are imperfect, even the great classics of the past.
The AD or the Literary Manager is looking for more than competence, but
with their (educated) eye, whether a play is stageworthy even in its
earliest incarnation and whether the writer is worth paying attention to.
And they've got years of experience behind them to help them decide. Given
the grants and funds now available for new play production rather than
development (this is one of the aspects of the situation that seems to be
improving), institutional theatres have a vested interest in putting new
plays on their mainstages now.
That said, the institutional theatre is always going to be
a little behind the cutting-edge advances of the form. They're
behemoths with bureaucracies to be negotiated, a variety of shareholders
and seasons which must be planned three or four years in advance (which
Outrageous Fortune discusses at length). But sometimes, if a play
is "messy" and "bad," it also lacks the qualities of potential and
ambition that these theatres are looking for. Sometimes they're messy and
bad, period. Ultimately, it's not possible for the playwrights (to whom
all their own plays are stageworthy, relevant, and good) to tell the
theatres what plays to produce and what not. So there's
self-production, as I've mentioned. But even many of 13P's plays and
playwrights, after their premieres, found their way into the institutional
theatres. Some, of course, did not. Which may have been the point. As I
said here, for all this American tradition of
self-production, one does need to go on from there. Otherwise the
problem of no-second-productions-of-new-plays
(which the book also considers) will live on.
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