"Art Will Out," Part 5: Responses (continued)

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[This is the final installment of the “Art Will Out” series.  Part 5 constitutes the last two responses to Jaan Whitehead’s article from American Theatre’s October 2002 issue that examined the issues of institutionalized theater in the United States.  As you will see, below are a 2003 response article from another journal and a 2004 letter to the editor of AT.

[In the December 2003 issue, Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Ben Cameron remarked, “We were unprepared, however, for the firestorm of reaction” that Whitehead’s essay would generate.  Readers of Rick On Theater who’ve been following along with the series since I posted Whitehead’s article in Part 1 on 3 August will have had a taste of what the staff of AT reaped.

[For those who haven’t been following the series, Parts 2 through 4 were posted on 6, 9, and 12 August.  Go back and have a look—especially at the initial essay.]

“THINKING THROUGH THE AUDIENCE”

by Paul Kosidowski 

[Freelance writer and arts critic Paul Kosidowsi’s article in Theatre Topics (13.1) was published in March 2003.  (Theatre Topics is a journal published by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.)]

Who’s there?

—Hamlet, I.i.1

 

Today, when there is the semblance of a gathered public, it is usually looked at askance by the most seminal practitioners in the theater, as it was by Brecht and Artaud, and by social and critical theorists. Such an audience seems like the merest facsimile of remembered community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing signals of a common set of values but to the better-forgotten remains of the most exhausted illusions.

—Herbert Blau, The Audience 

When Horatio peers into and interrogates the darkness, he invokes some of the key questions of dramatic theory in modern times: Who is out there in the dark? What power do they have over me? Or I over them? Herbert Blau explores the question from a multitude of perspectives-theoretical, psychoanalytical, historical-always returning, it seems, to the tension between unity and fracture that is inherent in the very idea of theatre. Theatre begins, he reminds us, with the act of seeing itself-the gaze dividing the community into the seen and the seeing. “There is no theatre without separation,” he writes, emphasizing the essential and obvious fracture of the drama, even as every urge drives us to deny the divide and cling to the illusion of a connection and a community [Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990: 10].

While some theorists and performers ponder this separation, the theatre professionals with whom I work cling fast to this most exhausted of illusions, always seeking a kind of profound and ephemeral communication across the divide. For us, the question of “Who’s there?” is tied not only to the nature of the drama, but is inextricably linked to box office numbers, marketing matters, and the unsavory, but necessary, business of competing for consumer leisure time. Theatre practitioners are reluctant to put it in such base terms, of course, but our questions about audience are always linked to both institution and art, even if we are reluctant to let those two entities mingle and interact. If our goal is to offer a compelling theatrical experience, a near empty theatre is as great an impediment as a poorly directed play. If the mission of theatre is indeed to bridge the fissure between observer and observed, or at least to create a meaningful, if illusory, connection between the two, isn’t the audience the locus of our energy? Shouldn’t the audience be our primary concern when we shape our art and create our drama?

Of course. Yet, when a production fails, do we think of how we fail the audience, or how the audience failed us? For even as we acknowledge the primacy of the audience, our took across the divide is usually wary and perhaps condescending. The SITI Company’s Cabin Pressure—like Herbert Blau’s The Audience, which informed its dramaturgy—offered a complex meditation on the relationship between performer and audience. Yet, what I remember most from the Humana Festival production was “the audience ballet,” a hilarious dance in which the performers mimicked a crowd wrestling with attentiveness and cascading across the stage in a gloriously funny dance of fidgets and yawns and efforted alertness. We have all seen an audience “perform” like this. The divide between performer and house develops into a chasm, across which meaning or emotion cannot hope to span. Audiences can be maddening. At their most impatient and closed-minded, they are easy to dismiss as an enemy. Perhaps these audiences bear some relation to those dismissed by Brecht and Artaud. But dramaturgy will not serve the theatre if it looks askance. For as much as we need to challenge, provoke and sometimes ignore our audience, we also need to listen to them.

For me, the idea of audience has changed substantially since I left academia to become the Literary Director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. The questions that were once speculative and theoretical have become grounded and palpable. The Audience has become an audience—a collection of particular people who come to our theatre on particular evenings and come away with particular experiences. And I grew up with these people. Unlike most dramaturgs in regional theatres, I grew up with the city and theatre in which I now work*. I have been seeing productions at the Milwaukee Rep for over 25 years, and been writing about them as a journalist and critic for over ten years. Even more importantly, I knew Milwaukee, the community, our audience—and all its strengths, tensions, and faults.

* I suppose I should think about my audience here. The theatres I’m thinking about here are those most like my own-flagship theatres in mid-size American cities. In cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle, the theatre public is large enough for theatres to appeal to certain communities within cities. But in cities like Milwaukee, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, or Denver, the regional theatre must think of its audience in the broadest sense, and likely has an identification with the entire community as part of its formal mission.

However, these connections didn’t seem important when I arrived at The Rep for the first time. My ideas for the theatre had little to do with my community or our audience. Instead, I brought with me an old-fashioned, neoplatonic, “the-best-which-has-been-thought-or-said” sort of aesthetic. I wanted to bring the freshest and most innovative new playwrights to Milwaukee—the work I was reading about, the work that was being talked about around the world. I suspect I was not unlike other dramaturgs who arrive in a mid-sized city after spending two or three years in the heady environment of a graduate program (usually, of course, based on the East Coast). They have spent their time in the nerve center of the theatre world, they have forged their personal aesthetics and are ready to bring it to the American theatre. Ready to make an impact.

But to make an impact on the American theatre, individuals and institutions must begin with their particular American theatres and their audience. And that audience is likely a world away from the audiences—either real or imagined—that we have carried in our mind as we learned and developed our ideas about theatre. We are aware of our new community and aware of our responsibilities. We perhaps hear the members of our audience (and certainly observe moments in our plays that “work”), but we are more interested in bringing our aesthetic to them than in understanding their perceptions and assumptions about what they see on stage.

Perhaps the idea of listening to audiences is just too close to the idea of “giving them what they want” and all the crass populist pandering that the phrase implies. “Art Will Out,” a recent essay by Jaan Whitehead in American Theatre is only one of many examples of a call to separate “art” from concerns about our audiences. Whitehead cautions theatres against losing their artistic identities and becoming driven by “institutional needs”—in other words, programming to sell tickets rather then serve the “artistic mission” of the theatre. Interestingly, Whitehead does celebrate some theatres that put their audience first-so-called “community-based theatres” such as the Roadside Theatre of Kentucky or the San Francisco Mime Troupe-but only ones that serve non-traditional audiences. These theatres aspire “to become an indigenous part of the community, creating a theatrical voice for that community but also becoming one of its civic institutions, like schools and libraries” [Jaan Whitehead, “Art Will Out,” American Theatre 19.8 (October 2002): 35]. That is exactly the kind of institution regional theatres should aspire to become. But to do so, we need to bring the audience and community further into the artistic process, not only through theatre that speaks specifically to community stories and issues, but by listening to their desires and expectations without fear of artistic “compromise.” The division between artistic and institutional needs is not as clear-cut as we’d like to believe. And I think our theatres should seek out a place in which these two drives operate synchronistically—creating great theatre that a community will want to see.

I fear that listening to an audience-seeing a play through its eyes and listening to its reactions without condescension-is considered so perilously close to being “institutionally driven” that we often pay the idea lip service. Are we prepared to face the reality that a play that is right for us (the “theatre professional”) is not right for our audience? If the idea of community aesthetics—theatre created with its community in mind—has powerful artistic integrity for theatres like the Roadside, why is the same attention to audience artistically compromising when it happens in a regional theatre? To make our theatres truly “community based” means partially disconnecting ourselves from the national theatre culture, which can distract us from the people in our own audiences. We certainly can learn from our peers and peer institutions, but we need to listen to and learn from our communities as well. This might mean being skeptical about the play or playwright of the moment. Or it might mean embracing it, him, or her without feeling remorse that we are contributing to the “sameness” of theatre in America. Every year, dramaturgs and theatre people examine the “season schedule” issue of American Theatre, and there is the requisite speculation and analysis about the programming trends in American regional theatres. Why are a handful of plays being done in so many theatres? Why is there a paucity of new work? Which theatres stand out with adventurous and risky choices? These big—picture questions should concern us all, but they should not be the primary questions that drive our own programming choices. If we are thoughtful about our own audiences, I think the big-picture issues will take care of themselves.

How do we think about our audience? Do we consider it a fixed entity, its character and tastes so static and predictable that we know at a glance which plays will “work” and which won’t? Listening to audiences does not mean we should forego our impulses to challenge and stretch audiences, but it does mean we should think carefully about the ways plays can challenge, and how our audiences will respond (or not) to those challenges. Instead, I fear important artistic decisions about programming are made by a sort of bargaining-table bean counting: allow us to do this play (challenging, dark, unfamiliar) and we will reward you with that play (comedy, chestnut, Broadway hit).

I’m asking for a reconsideration of the “regionalism” of regional theatres. it’s related to the cautionary outcry that has been heard as major regional theatres become tryout houses for New York runs. But this isn’t about the bleeding together of commercial and not-for-profit theatre. It’s about treating a play as a community event, a work of art that is intended to speak to a specific group of people. And thinking about a season (or a series of seasons) as a community conversation. It means embracing and nourishing the variety of theatre experience, but making choices with the community in mind. I’m not interested in having marketing experts run the season planning meetings. Or for the artistic mission of a theatre to pander to the lowest denominator of audience expectations. I believe that audiences do want to be challenged, surprised, and perhaps even offended. But I do not think that challenging an audience is the same as baffling them. As artists who help shape our theatres, we need to think through our audiences.

When I talked recently to George F. Walker, the Canadian playwright, we talked about the empathy he felt for the underclass families and petty criminals that populate many of his plays. “I live in the world,” he told me. “The theatre is where I go to work,” I wonder, sometimes, if dramaturgs and other theatre professionals live too much in the theatre and not enough in the world, or at least in the world of our audiences. Most of us are trained together at the same handful of graduate programs, and then move to unfamiliar cities to start our careers. Our ideas of compelling theatre and our definition of a good play are given a foundation there, and continue to be shaped by our own experiences in the theatre as we move through our careers. But just as a playwright needs to have empathy with his or her characters, we need to have empathy with our audience, to see a play through its eyes.

[Paul Kosidowski was in his fourth year as literary director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.  He was a former arts critic and taught theatre history and American literature at Milwaukee’s Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.]

*  *  *  *

“ART WILL OUT: NEW PATHWAYS”

“letters to the editor 

[Zachary Mannheimer’s letter to the editor of American Theatre was published in volume 21, issue 1 (January 2004).]

In the Oct. ’02 issue of American Theatre, Jaan Whitehead raised the question: “Has American theatre become excessively institutional?” (“Art Will Out” [see Part 1]). Several prominent theatrical minds wrote on this issue, and soon a solution surfaced: “Let some talented, courageous new leaders come forward and hitch themselves to the wagon. They will be warmly welcomed into the field—and gently warned. For founding today is very different from founding yesterday,” wrote Zelda Fichandler [“Whither (or Wither) Art?”, May/June ’03; see Part 4] about young voices speaking up and asking for involvement. So where are these newfound leaders? We in the Off-Off Broadway community are here to step forward, make our voices known, contribute to this ongoing “manifesto” and declare ourselves to be the young theatre artists for whom you have been searching.

We are a group called the Off-Off Community Dish, representing a cross section of New York City’s Off-Off Broadway community. We are 20 companies strong, made up of over 500 artists, and reaching an audience base of over 10,000 theatregoers. We produce over 40 productions annually and meet bi-monthly to address issues affecting our community. We work for little to no pay, spend over $300,000 of privately raised money annually, and receive no more than 10 grants per year collectively. The average age of this group is 27, and the average age of our companies is five years. We are “the first real computer generation . . . liv[ing] with very few resources outside [our] own talent and energy,” as Ms. Whitehead puts it. We would like to aid in this process for new American theatre, and do so with every show we produce. However, we continue to go ignored, unheard and unrecognized past our modest attempts at experimental theatre.

[I could not confirm that the Off-Off Community Dish is still extant in 2024.  Many of the constituent companies named in the “Editor’s Note” at the bottom of this post no longer seem to be functioning, though several still have listed productions in 2023 and 2024. ~Rick]

Many of our plays call for a change in the status quo or change in an individual life. But our plays go mostly unseen by those who do not agree with our messages. Our audience has become a recycled cult. No longer is it enough to produce a play and expect a new audience to show up. Audience development, community outreach and children’s educational programming do not guarantee a healthy, diverse audience, despite what our paperwork may illustrate. Notwithstanding the recent altruistic efforts and findings of the Performing Arts Research Coalition [a Washington, D.C.-based collaborative project of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, American Symphony Orchestra League, Dance/USA, OPERA America, and Theatre Communications Group, supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts to improve and coordinate the way performing arts organizations gather information on their sector; 2002-04], we cannot sit down and pat ourselves on the collective back. There is much more work to be done.

In another recent issue of American Theatre (“Facing the Unknown,” July/Aug.’03), Ben Cameron [Executive Director of the Theatre Communications Group, publisher of AT] addresses his students: “Many of you are entering our field at a moment rife with questions and uncertainties. We look to you to be our leaders, finding new pathways for us all.” Well, Mr. Cameron, here are some new pathways that we have created and are attempting to implement.

Arguably, nothing can be done without capital and interest. We must re-evaluate our audience and our work. Why would most Americans visit the cinema rather than the theatre? The answer, in most cases, is simple—accessibility. Movie theatres can be found in almost every town, charging ticket prices affordable to almost everyone, and marketed to a mass audience in a way that theatre could not possibly attempt. Or could we?

That is just one of the many questions we have. Why are we theatre artists not doing what is so innate for us—collaborating? Not simply artistically, but administratively? Why are we not pooling our financial resources to market together? Moving beyond marketing, what about sharing potential finances, as in collectively applying for and sharing grants? How are we as theatre artists to make our voices known if we are not able to tour and publish our work?

Joseph Papp often repeated, “We will have to start charging admission to our free Shakespeare summer seasons if we do not have financial support from the city, privately and corporately.” This should not be the state of things. We should be able, like every other major country in the world, to have widespread funding for the arts. Perhaps we should even use the United Kingdom as a model and establish a National Arts Lottery.

We are being called upon to be leaders—given a green flag to step into the theatrical driver’s seat. Let us meet, discuss, debate and create. Let us begin a dialogue and make our collective dreams a reality. Bring us in. When we raise our hands and ask you to see our work, come and see it. Ms. Fichandler, Ms. Whitehead, Mr. Cameron and Todd London (“The Shape of Plays to Come,” Nov. ’02) all tell us to take the reins, but none tell us how. We know the what and the why—the how is what we need to know.

Ms. Whitehead says, “The new burst of energy in experimental theatre comes from the emergence of a whole new generation of artists who want to shake up the theatre world now, as their predecessors did before them.” We are that generation, standing before you awaiting your approval.

Zachary R.  Mannheimer

Producing artistic director

The Subjective Theatre Company

New York City

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to the Subjective Theatre Company, members of New York’s Off-Off Community Dish signing this letter include All You Can Eat Theatre Company; Prudenia, Inc.; Beggars Group; Smokin Word Productions; Boomerang Theatre Company; Spring Theatreworks; breedingground productions; Stages 5150; Castillo Theatre; Confluence Theatre Company; Vessel Project; and Nosedive Productions.

[In 1986, while I was editor of Directors Notes, the newsletter of the now-defunct American Directors Institute, I went to Baltimore to cover the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place there from 15 to 29 June. 

[(The Theatre of Nations was then a biennial program of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  Its aim was to bring together theater artists and performances from all around the globe to one city for a few weeks.  I reported on ToN for Directors Notes in the September issue, but I also wrote a longer, more detailed report on the festival, the first and so far only Theatre of Nations in North America, for The Drama Review in “Theatre of Nations,” volume 31, issue 1 (Spring 1987 – T113).)

[The connection to this series on the institutionalization of the regional theater in the United States is that both ADI and ToN were attempts to do something that almost all the writers who appeared in this series, from Jaan Whitehead to Zachary Mannheimer, called for in one way or another: more communication among artistic directors and the other leaders of the nation’s resident theater companies.

[In my report on ToN in Directors Notes, I wrote, “We need to rub artistic elbows with colleagues doing different work elsewhere in the world.”  Of course, in the context of “Art Will Out,” the emphasis would be on colleagues around the U.S., because it isn’t just ideas on the art work that ADI was founded to exchange, but the running of the theaters and the solving of administrative problems.

[I went on in the report:

Director of Baltimore’s Theatre Project Philip Arnoult . . . accused American theater artists of being “criminally isolated, not only from the rest of the world, but from each other.”  American Directors, for example, do not talk to one another, asserted Stan Wojewodksi, Jr., Artistic Director of Baltimore’s Center Stage . . . .

[New York City’s] Shaliko Director Leonardo Shapiro explained that “the festival’s important because American theater is completely closed in—just like the rest of the society.”  Dr. Mohan Agashe, President of the Theatre Academy of Pune, India, expressed the same thought: “The reason we go to theater festivals is also to get input.  If you get lost in things only you are doing, you’ll run out of your resources very soon.  At some point, it’s very necessary to see the work of others.”

[In that last remark by Agashe, I would add “and hear the ideas” to “see the work.” The efforts of ADI included symposia that brought stage directors and theater company artistic directors together to talk, compare notes, and hear ideas from one another and from people in analogous positions in other fields. 

[The organization also held a three-day retreat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, to bring theater artists together with a “select team of experts from diverse, mostly non-theatrical fields” so that the directors and artistic directors could explore the various points of view on many topics and issues that came up in the free-wheeling discussions that followed the formal presentations and workshops.  (Many a late night was spent over coffee after an afternoon’s or evening’s session.)

[Unfortunately, ADI, for all the good it did and the promise it showed, didn’t live long enough to follow through on its successes.  The Touchstone Retreat at the O’Neill (which I attended as editor of the newsletter) was meant to be an annual event, with different guests to mix with the directors—but it was never replicated. 

[Nonetheless, ADI’s goals, even as early as the mid-1980s, were right in line with the proposals and suggestions of the theater artists who contributed to the conversation AT started in 2002.  In the days before ADI was launched, at a preliminary gathering (also at the O’Neill), A. Harrison Cromer, executive secretary of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, the union for professional stage directors and choreographers now known as the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), lamented, “Directors hardly ever get together.” 

[Francine Volker, a freelance director from Toronto, said, “Usually, you’re out there on your own.  You conceive an idea, but what do you do if it doesn’t work? You need to talk to somebody who could say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened to me.’”  That’s what Zelda Fichandler called for and the lack of which Mannheimer decried.  (It’s what ADI was meant to provide 17 years before, but never got the chance.)]