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Home > Books
Saturday, 06 February 2010
 If the literary geography of the
current American dramatic scene were rendered by Saul Steinberg like his
famous "View of the World from 9th Avenue", it probably
wouldn't look much different: New York foregrounded, the rest of the
country some distance behind, London peeking up in the distance, and in
one corner Yasmina Reza representing Paris.
In the new New Europe: Plays from the Continent, editors
Bonnie Marranca and Malgorzata Semil rearrange the map to offer seven
plays from across Europe which received their world premieres over the
past ten years. The playwrights — Igor Bauersima (Switzerland),
Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk (Poland), Goran Stefanovski (Macedonia), Petr
Zelenka (Czech Republic), Roland Schimmelpfennig (Germany), Juan Mayorga
(Spain) and Jon Fosse (Norway) — address a variety of issues from a
European standpoint, including terrorism, immigration, youth,
globalization, families and post-communist culture.
Some years ago, PAJ Books published a series of anthologies under the
umbrella title Drama Contemporary, which included volumes
dedicated to France, Germany and India; perhaps the market and the
critical interest isn't there to encourage the continuance of this series.
But with anthologies like New Europe, the publishers continue to
urge that dramatists and audiences look outside their own neighborhoods
for a fuller, more inclusive theatrical life.
Highly recommended, and ideal for classroom use (at $22.95 a bargain),
New Europe is now available from Amazon.com.
Home > Books
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
 Santa, in
the form of New Dramatists artistic director Todd London and the
Theatre Development Fund,
left a copy of Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New
American Play under my tree on Christmas morning, though I don't
know why they didn't just slip it into my stocking with the other lumps of
hard black coal. Written by London with Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss,
the book is the culmination of a six year study of the current status of
the American playwright. (Full disclosure: I participated in the study
myself.) The word "grim" occurs with alarming frequency, attached to the
findings of the study, both statistical and anecdotal; I was among over
200 playwrights who were asked about their financial and economic status,
the frequency of play production, our relationships with artistic
directors and so on. It's said that suicidal feelings rise to their
highest point of the year during the yuletide holidays. Outrageous
Fortune may have you reaching for the nearest rope.
The book is a gift to the blogosphere too, which will I'm sure parcel
out selected chapters of the book for further discussion in the coming
weeks. There are chapters on diversity (check), New York centrism and the
use of theatre in "community building," whatever that is (check), and new
play development programs (check). Among the findings are that a profound
conceptual disconnect between artistic directors and playwrights about new
work exists; that it's impossible to make a living as a playwright in
America; that boards, funding agencies and audiences are all primarily
responsible for what the study calls "premieritis," in which first
productions of new plays are frequent and second productions almost
non-existent; that most new play development programs lead only to
more development rather than full productions; that audiences for new work
are shrinking; that theatre, in the world of mass communication, is
becoming a more and more marginal cultural activity. And there's more, of
course. Much of it has been suspected for years, but in collecting broad
statistical and anecdotal evidence, there is now some kind of
substantiation for these suspicions.
Anecdotes prove nothing, and you can prove anything you want with
statistics, but it's hard to quibble with the conclusions of the report
when accompanied by the best that can pass for hard evidence. Its purpose
was to provide as objective as possible a "snapshot" of the current
professional status of the living dramatist in America, and dim it is; TDF
hopes to promote conversation about this picture and the ways in which it
might be changed for the better of not only playwrights but the art of
theatre as well. In this I have no doubt it will succeed.
"One of the clearest messages I've received throughout the course of
this study," writes TDF's executive director Victoria Bailey in the
introduction to the book, "is that language is failing us" — harsh
words, so to speak, for a profession that prides itself on the use of
language. One of the places in which language is failing us, clearly, is
in the use of the word "risk," not to mention "community" and "audience"
(the definition and participation of which in the process of
theatremaking receives a chapter all its own).
It is not the fault of the book that it fails to define "risk" (risk of
aesthetic form or content, risk of financial health, risk of losing
audiences — these are harder to quantify); the study's authors
examined attitudes to the word, not its definition. But it's difficult to
see how any future conversation based on this study will be able to avoid
it. And the issue does arise, here and there, in various comments from
both playwrights and artistic directors. Some address it specifically. One
artistic director (all of the study's participants quoted in the book
remain anonymous — no risk there) says:
It would be easier for me to do a play like Quills
[a play by American playwright Doug Wright about the Marquis de Sade] in
which Jesus comes out of the grave with three erect penises and fucks Mary
on the floor than it would to do No Man's Land by Harold Pinter.
A play that is abstract in the storytelling — I'd do it, but that
would be more controversial than content.
And No Man's Land is one of those four-character
one-set plays that come in for serious drubbing as a formal example
of the shrunken ambitions of American dramatists.
There are other words that are problematic as well, and have to do with
the aesthetic form and content discussion that is beyond the purview of
this study. Chief among them is "relevance." The same example may serve:
Quills may have a better chance of reaching this artistic
director's stage than No Man's Land, but which is more relevant?
Few audience members practice any of de Sade's formal sexual innovations,
no doubt, but more may be titillated by them; Pinter's play, about the
vagaries of memory and power as well as their dissipation in the face of
mortality, could be said to be relevant for any living man or woman. The
study's authors are fond of lists of questions, so I'll offer my own on
this topic: What does it mean to call a play "relevant" or "risky"? In
whose eyes and by what standards? When one writes for an audience (any
audience, really, but specificially a young audience, the demographic
which according to the study seems to be disappearing from institutional
theatres), is there a line between "writing for" that audience and
pandering to its interests and experience, both aesthetic and personal?
How thin is that line, and where does it lie? Should playwrights cater to
that ideal or to Sarah Kane's: "I've only ever written for myself"
— a sentiment which led to one of the most innovative and
influential bodies of work of the 1990s, but almost entirely absent from
this study?
In the recent online imbroglio about Edward Albee's
dedication to the written play as central to the health of the theatre,
Albee was castigated for his aesthetic egocentrism and stubbornness, but
he might have had a point. A second theme to emerge from the study was the
contemporary playwright's belief that the text is no longer at the center
of the production process, but remains to be fulfilled by the work of
others: there is some evidence presented in the first chapter of the book
that some playwrights deliberately leave their plays in an "unfinished"
state, to make them more palatable and attractive to development programs
and directors. Said another participant, in regard to sharing out the
future profits of an untried play:
A [director] a number of years ago said, "A friend called
me. He's got a new play and he asked me if I could get a bunch of actors
together in my living room so he could just hear it. What should I ask
for?" He didn't mean 50 dollars to pay for the chips. It was like what
piece of the play do you think would be fair for me to get as a result of
this? I said, "Zero would be fair." It's out there, and it's hard to tell
how much of it has to do with anybody's actual financial interests, and
how much of it has to do with some seismic shift away from the idea that
the theatre is about the voice of the playwright.
If, in the opinion of directors, artistic directors and even many
playwrights themselves, the theatre is no longer about the voice of the
playwright, it's very difficult to make an argument that the playwrights'
(and the study's) call for an equitable financial return on a written play
has much validity to begin with. Playwrights who see themselves as little
more than a necessary evil have little ground to stand on when pressing
for greater economic return for their work; for ultimately, who then needs
them?
Finally, one weakness of the book is its lack of reference to
self-production, an avenue which many experimental and
non-traditional playwrights have taken: if the system is as sick as
it is painted here, then perhaps the system should be abandoned in its
entirety. Of all the playwrights surveyed, two outstanding absences from
the list of participants in the back of the book are Young Jean Lee and
Richard Maxwell,
both of whom formed their own companies; lacking
bricks-and-mortar theatres, they produce their work where they
can, without the overhead that an institutional theatre requires. It's
true that many self-producers may work out of a sense of their own
vanity. It's also true that many believe that self-production, in the
face of the challenges that working within institutional theatres
represent, is the best way of developing their work: where they're least
likely to give in to the temptation of compromise, and most likely to see
it bodied on stage, where it belongs. It may cost more, in the end: but
given the thin scraps offered to playwrights now, as this study attests,
the reward is not in dollars but in seeing one's work performed as first
envisioned: and this is most likely where the theatrical advances in
America will be made.
All that said, other bloggers will no doubt take it from here. (Mind
you, there's little sympathy for what we might write. One commenter is
quoted as calling Internet critics "anonymous fools," and one literary
agent says: "The playwrights read [online reviews and blogs], and it
affects them. A play's in previews and you call your clients and hear it
in their voices. The playwrights don't listen to the subscribers, yet
they'll listen to some little fifteen-year-old queen who doesn't
know anything." See page 234. Neither anonymous nor fifteen years old
— it's been quite a while since I saw that age — I am amused.)
But in its valued objectivity, broad scope and thoughtful and fair
analysis, Outrageous Fortune will spark the conversation, I'm
sure, that TDF wishes.
Additional notes on the book here
and here.
Home > Books
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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