"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.)]

"Art Will Out," Part 2: Responses

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[In the December 2003 issue (20.10) of American Theatre, published in, then-Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Ben Cameron published “An Anti-Annual Report.”  In it, he referenced the publication of “Art Will Out” two months earlier (see Part 1), commenting:

In October 2002, we published TCG National Council for the American Theatre member and SITI Company board chair Jaan Whitehead's "Art Will Out," a provocative depiction of the effect of institutionalization on the artistic side of theatres. We realized that this article would cause some rigorous and potentially painful self-reflection—and, indeed, we welcomed the knowledge that it would. We were unprepared, however, for the firestorm of reaction, ranging from immense gratitude that the unspoken had finally been said to white-hot anger that field conditions had been mischaracterized. Subsequently, the May/June issue of American Theatre conveyed what [Alan] Brown and [Paul] Deguid might have called [n their book The Social Life of Information (Harvard Business School Press, 2002)] shared interpretation: A panel of eight field leaders used Jaan's piece as the inspiration for larger reflections on field conditions, and the ever-articulate and perceptive Zelda Fichandler offered her sage analysis of the bifurcated roles of artistry and management, envisaging the relationship as a "both/and"—rather than an "either/or"—rapport. Requests for these articles continue to pour in; the three pieces are appearing on syllabi for students across the country; and the conviction that the magazine can tackle substantive issues self-critically, through a collective, shared interpretation of issues, has become a linchpin in the work we are currently doing—including the work of re-envisioning the role of, and possibilities for, American Theatre itself (a process that will produce a renewed magazine within the next year or so).

[The first four responses to Whitehead’s article are posted below. (The panel discussion to which Cameron refers above and the response from Fichandler will be posted in Parts 3 and 4, respectively.)  Three of the published reactions to “Art Will Out” in this part of the series are letters to the editor of American Theatre—to one of which Whitehead replies directly; the fourth reply is an article from another theater journal (which, you will see, published two responses).]

 “GLOOM AND DOOM”

“letters to the editor”

[Richard Stein’s letter appeared in American Theatre, volume 19, issue 10 (December 2002).]

While I’m sure it wasn’t intended that way, October’s American Theatre was a very doom-and-gloom issue: “. . . will we cling to old habits and plunge to our deaths” (Ben Cameron [in his “from the executive director” column in the October 2002 issue, “Let Go of the Pole”]); “. . . as for MFA programs, the Emperor is butt naked” (Jeanmarie Simpson [from her “commentary” article, “Some Immoderate Thoughts on the Training of Actors”]); “Now we are being urged back into an all-too-familiar tribalism” (Rick Cleveland’s letter [“Similarities, Not Differences”]); “Art Will Out,” Jaan Whitehead’s overly simplistic indictment of institutional theatres on charges of killing the art; Jane Alexander’s heartfelt obituary of one of America’s theatre legends, that “other” Whitehead (Robert) [1916-2002; Canadian-born theatrical producer; in “in memoriam”] who would likely have been appalled at his namesake’s, Jaan’s, conclusions; and, fueling Jaan’s flaming criticism, Ben Sampson’s overview (“The Season’s Top 10” [in “Season Preview: 2002-03”]), which certifies that all resident theatres are copycats, falling all over each other as fast as they can to produce the same handful of plays.

To be sure, there were other, more upbeat pieces in this issue. And I would be the first to agree that self-criticism is an essential element in TCG’s house organ (which it remains, even when it aspires to be something beyond that). I also welcome the occasional provocation: This issue’s Twenty Questions was far more readable than its typically insipid predecessors—but could Nicky Silver have proven otherwise?

I wondered if the preponderance of downers is purely circumstantial, or if theatre’s self-pitying “fabulous invalid” syndrome is alive and well and the theatre in this country really is in dire need of Viagra. To find out, I guess I’ll have to rush to the newsstands (or, in my case, my mailbox) to get the next issue hot off the press.

Richard Stein

Executive Director

Laguna Playhouse

Laguna Beach, Calif.

*  *  *  *
“POSITIVES VS. NEGATIVES”
“letters to the editor” 

[The letter by Roche Schulfer ran in American Theatre, volume 20, issue 1 (January 2003).  Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, established in 1922, is one of this country’s premier regional theaters.  It won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre In 1992 and sent many plays to Broadway, a number of which also won Tony’s and other honors.]

I was very disturbed by Jaan Whitehead’s essay “Art Will Out” (Oct. ’02). Her indictment of hundreds of institutional regional theatres is unfair to thousands of artists and other theatre professionals.

Ms. Whitehead clearly believes that institutions have a negative impact on artistic creation. In fact, institutional theatres provide extraordinary support for artistic development. Regional theatres have made it possible for artists and other theatre professionals to have careers in the theatre. There are certainly companies that fall short of their goals, but Ms. Whitehead’s theory that theatre institutions now exist primarily to achieve box-office and fundraising goals is grossly inaccurate.

I have been the executive director of the Goodman Theatre for 21 years. I went to work in the theatre because I believed that artists could cause people to think about the world and possibly change their lives. I wanted to create careers in the theatre for artists and other professionals. I am proud that last year we paid over $8.1 million in salaries to artists and employees (out of a budget of $14.3 million).

I am proud that each year over 300,000 people experience our productions, and I am proud of the service we provide to our community. Our accomplishments, however, are not unique and our institution is not perfect. The larger institutional theatres must hold themselves to very high standards and use their economic base to further artistic development. The regional theatres that have produced remarkable work on stage and in their communities have done it through determination and hard work, not entitlement.

I am not criticizing the companies that Ms. Whitehead cites as having transcended institutionalization. Their work is outstanding, they deserve support and we can all learn from their accomplishments. Every theatre company should be organized and structured in a way that best enables it to fulfill its artistic mission and goals. In reality, many new forms of institutional development should be explored.

But the growth of professional regional theatre in America is an amazing accomplishment that is arguably unique in the world. While concerns about the effects of institutionalization are legitimate, a blanket dismissal of what has been accomplished serves no useful purpose. If American Theatre is concerned about this issue, why not convene a wide variety of artists and other theatre professionals and engage in a dialogue about the challenges and opportunities facing the institutional theatre?

Roche Schulfer

Executive Director

Goodman Theatre

Chicago 

JAAN WHITEHEAD RESPONDS: 

A more careful reading of the essay will show that I am not “indicting” hundreds of regional theatres or saying that these theatres “now exist primarily to achieve box-office and fundraising goals.”  And I am certainly not making a “blanket dismissal of what has been accomplished” by our theatres. Any such gross generalizations would serve no useful purpose and would, in fact, dishonor the rich variety of theatres we have in this country.

What I am saying is that there are tendencies inherent in the process of institutionalization that favor institutional concerns over artistic concerns, and that enough theatres are experiencing the negative effects of these tendencies that we need to open up a public discussion about them. Tendencies are very different from blanket conclusions.

I think that whether or not the points I make in the essay have validity is best answered by our artists. I could not agree more with Roche Schulfer that it would be great to convene groups of artists and other theatre professionals to discuss these issues. It was my hope that the essay would help open up such a dialogue.

But the one thing I believe absolutely essential to such discussions is that artists be “at the table” in enough numbers for their voices to be heard and that the atmosphere of such discussions be such that artists can express what they feel without fearing it might affect their future job opportunities. Under those conditions, what an exciting conversation could take place!

*  *  *  *

“WHEN ACTORS ABDICATE”

“letters to the editor” 

[James Breckenridge’s response to “Art Will Out” was published in American Theatre, volume. 20, issue 3 (March 2003).]

I very much enjoyed Jaan Whitehead’s essay “Art Will Out” (Nov. ’01). What a wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking article on the institutionalization of theatre and its discontents!

While it is true that audience surveys, graphs and the spreadsheets of accountants have dominated the arts for a number of years, it is also true that some of the artists, actors in particular, aided and abetted this shift of power. Many years ago, actors demanded they be set free from seasonal contractual restraints of the repertory theatre and be allowed to move around, i.e., be available for commercial, television and motion picture work. In the process, they unwittingly gave up their seats in the boardroom, the dining room and even at the kitchen table.

Much of the avant-garde work of the 1960s and 1970s, however new and exciting, fractionalized audiences and broke down standard accepted forms of theatrical communication, smashing the fourth wall, if not the fifth and sixth. In the process, theatres lost a generation or two of audience members. The “collapsing distance between the artists and the audience” was, in part, created by these “artists” and the “art” that many people just weren’t buying.

There are theatres that blame their lack of success on a dearth of institutional funding and, at the same time, say that audiences today are just so bourgeois that they don’t understand what’s happening, what’s “really going on” in the world. They do this while continuing to present works that most audiences demonstrably don’t want to see. Why should we fund projects that have proven themselves to have no audience, no chance to break even and put the very survival of these institutions in jeopardy? Isn’t it curious that Broadway has reemerged today, not through “Kumbaya” programs of dramaturgical quackery, but through productions—many of which originate in regional theatres—that can still tell a story in a way that most can recognize, participate in and respond to?

Ms. Whitehead states that in planning for art, “You would have to ask what is needed to support and nourish playwrights—and actors—and directors—and designers.” My answer is that if you write it, they will come. If you support the playwright, the good old storyteller, you will create projects that will attract and nourish the very best actors, directors and designers in the business, as well as inspiring those still seeking to break in.

It’s time for theatre institutions to get their house in order—-to send the cooks back into the kitchen and set a new table where everyone can participate. To do this, theatres and the people who run them will have to maintain both their financial and artistic integrity. Ms. Whitehead’s article left little doubt that institutions need to be more open in the artistic directions they choose. But, ultimately, alas, if the institution is not financially viable, then the sound produced by its artistic endeavors, however ambitious, will be like the sound of one curtain falling on an empty theatre, with no audience there to hear.

James Breckenridge

Doylestown, Pa. 

[James Breckenridge is a creative script consultant with The PlayCrafters Group, which provides script analysis and private consultations to playwrights and screenwriters.].

*  *  *  *

“RISKY BUSINESS”

by Tanya Palmer 

[Tanya Palmer’s “Risky Busness” was published in Theatre Topics, volume 13, issue 1 (Mar 2003).  (Theatre Topics is a peer-reviewed academic journal established in 1991.  It is an official publication of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and covers theater arts, with a focus on performance studies, dramaturgy, and theater pedagogy.)]

As part of the 2002 Humana Festival of New American Plays, Actors Theatre of Louisville commissioned 17 playwrights to write monologues and scenes responding to a photograph by Lee Friedlander [b. 1934; American photographer and artist] entitled, “Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, 1969.” The photograph interested us for a number of reasons, but one of the primary questions we posed to the writers was this: what is our relationship to monuments we inherited but didn’t create? The responses the writers gave us were too inventive and diverse for me to reduce by summarizing them, but there were two seemingly contradictory impulses that I found revealing. The first was a desire to bring the stone faces on the mountain to life, to cast them as contemporaries, or to transform them into reflections of the characters and their personal struggles. In Lee Blessing’s monologue “Tyler Poked Taylor,” for example, a young gay man transforms the presidents into fantasy lovers, allowing the long-dead men to play an active part in his present day [sic] struggle for identity. The second impulse was to represent the monument and the faces that adorn it as distant, irrelevant, or unfamiliar. In Victor Lodato’s scene, the presidents became ghosts, great white faces that looked like coffins and stared down menacingly at the confused, angry, and disenfranchised people below. Through this experiment, we found that the monument was either mutable and still meaningful or distant and dead, depending on the perspective of the artist who was looking at it. But regardless of which lens each artist was peering through, the looking resulted in inventive and exciting acts of creation.

This interrogation of the monument and its ongoing place in our world was reflected in two recent articles in American Theatre magazine, which focused on a very different sort of monument: the large institutional theatre. Both articles sought to address what the writers perceived as a pressing concern about the way that large institutions relate (or perhaps more to the point, do not relate) with the artists whose work they present, produce and purport to nurture. In “Art Will Out: Can We Put the Art Back In Our Arts Institutions?” author Jaan Whitehead frames the problem like this:

When a theatre grows, the very elements that generate growth—income from ticket sales and fundraising—need to be reproduced each year for the art to be sustained. Theatres become more and more dependent on the box office and on the marketing and fundraising departments to generate this income . . . The institution now needs to feed itself as well as fund its art. ([Jaan Whitehead, “Art Will Out,” American Theatre October 2002:] 32)

She goes on to argue, “[A]s the art becomes increasingly subject to the economic needs of the institution, the institution starts to drive the art rather than the other way around” (Whitehead 32). In the following issue, an article entitled, “The Shape of Plays To Come,” by New Dramatists’ Artistic Director Todd London, asserts [in “The Shape of Plays to Come,” American Theatre November 2002] that there is no longer a unified theatre community, but rather two cultures, with individual artists on one side of the divide and large institutional theatres on the other. There seems to be something in the air. Both articles identify what the writers perceive as a disconnect between the playwrights, actors, designers, and other artists who create the art, and the administrators, marketing directors, and board members who manage the resources. But beyond that, they also identify the cost of that disconnect to both cultures—what happens when institutions suppress or distance themselves from the creative impulse, that “anarchic energy,” as Whitehead describes, that artists possess. These questions, along with our own experiment in monument gazing, have led me to reflect on my own place as a literary manager and dramaturg at a large institutional theatre that is engaged in trying to embrace the new, primarily through the development and production of new American plays. I want to explore the difficulty of embracing the new in the institution, whether it is new plays, new audiences, or new ways of working. And, more precisely, I want to spend some time investigating the way that institutions relate to and manage risk.

It seems like a fairly widely held belief among producers, artistic directors, and audiences alike that producing new work is a risky undertaking. It is not difficult to locate the source of that assumption—new work implies an unknown quantity, with no clear history on which to reflect back that will provide us with lessons on how to proceed. From the point of view of the publicists who must connect with potential audience members and the development departments who are responsible for finding funders, it would seem that a work by a new writer or theatre collective poses unique challenges. if it is a work by a single playwright who is “emerging” or relatively unknown, there is not the comfort of name recognition with which to sell that ticket or sponsorship. With a work that is created by a collective or in some other way pushes the boundaries of traditional models of creation, there may be the additional problem of finding ways to articulate the nature and scope of the work. And from the point of view of the producer or artistic director, there is also the problem of trust—-how do I know that this young writer/director/theatre maker will be able to create a “product” that meets with the standards or expectations of the institution? And even if the artists involved are well known, the play itself remains “untested.” So while there may be a slightly increased sense of security—their work has succeeded in the past—there is no guarantee that this next new play will produce the same satisfying result.

Producing a play always entails a leap into the unknown, whether it is a new work by a young writer or a classic by someone famous and long dead. At large institutional theatres, the process often involves gathering together a group of disparate artists (often strangers) and relying on their ability to engage with the material, to collaborate effectively with one another—not to mention remember their lines and blocking—all within a matter of a few short weeks. Add into that mix a playwright and a play that is still in the process of becoming, and the risk, it would seem, grows exponentially.

So why produce new work? As humans, particularly humans living in an increasingly cutthroat free market economy, one could argue that we are generally fighting to minimize risk. Minimize risk of failure, of financial loss, of bodily harm, of humiliation—all natural and generally healthy responses to an increasingly dangerous and unforgiving world. But art entails risk. Artists are there to challenge the status quo, to shake us out of our sense of safety, to take us in new directions, “think outside the box,” and whatever other cliche you can come up with for refusing to remain asleep, for presenting the world as it is or could be, for dreaming big and behaving badly. This, it seems to me, is why we value artists—or at least it is why I value them. Yes, art can be soothing and affirming rather than dangerous and disturbing, but if that’s all it is why not just eat a big meal, fall asleep in front of the TV., and call it a day?

So as artists we take risks. But why? For individual artists the reasons may be personal and idiosyncratic-a kind of compulsion, an obsession with a singular vision, or a commitment to a certain kind of truth. Or perhaps the reasons are political, reflecting a desire to change the world by unmasking certain assumptions, or presenting untold stories, or creating alternative worlds. Or maybe they’re a bit of both. But there seems to be a distinction between the kind of risks that individual artists engage in and those that large institutions undertake. Clearly, an institution is made of people, and when that institution is a theatre, it is made up of (hopefully) artists and people who support, believe in, and advocate for artists. But it is also, in many ways, an entity in and of itself, with its own set of constraints and demands. just as individuals are responsible not only to themselves but also to their families and/or communities, institutions are responsible to their families and communities as well. And because those communities represent a diverse, sometimes conflicting group of interests, risky behavior requires that much more weighing and balancing and clarity of thought and purpose. Now, clearly, risks exist on a continuum. Okay, you take a risk just by getting up in the morning. But some decisions don’t require group consensus. If, however, you’re about to leap off a cliff, the 150 people who depend on you for their livelihood, and the hundreds of other supporters—volunteers, donors, loyal audience members—will probably want to know what they’re leaping into, or at least why you think it is a good idea to jump.

One of the reasons that we take risks is the desire, on the part of individual artists and institutions alike, to be rewarded. And the greater the risk, the logic goes, the greater the potential reward. But the nature of risk demands that we take more risks. Leapt off a cliff and landed on a luxurious fluffy cloud? Great. Next time it might be a bed of thorns. And sometimes, the reward prevents us from taking the next leap. Because the more you are rewarded, the more you desire to hang onto that reward, and risk doesn’t seem too enticing anymore.

As Jaan Whitehead’s earlier quote suggests, as institutions grow, their need to sustain their growth begins to influence the decisions they make. Growth implies success—the reason theatres grow and flourish is that they are able to reach an ever-widening audience and raise the funds sufficient to keep them afloat. In order to maintain that success and to sustain that growth, institutions, like individuals, will often seek the comfort of past rewards, perhaps forgetting the risk that led to the reward in the first place. But if it is the artists’ responsibility to take risks, do theatres owe their communities an explanation when they cease to take risks other than the most calculated kind? The question that keeps arising for me is this: if you are about to engage in inherently risky behavior (i.e., the producing of new work), is it better to spend your time and energy coming to an understanding of what the nature of that risk may be and articulating the importance of taking it, or to find as many ways as possible to reduce the risk, so it is the least risky risk it can be?

Unfortunately, it seems that much of our time is spent doing the latter. Why leap off a fifty-foot cliff when you can leap off one that’s only ten? There can be very good reasons for reducing risk, reasons that (hopefully) reflect the needs of the individual artist as well as the institution. Take new play development programs, for example. Many of the ways in which new play development programs are created and positioned around the country seem to reflect this perceived need to reduce risk. Context is everything, and by creating relatively low-stakes situations—a reading or workshop, for example—the organization producing a new play series can provide an artist with the time and space they need to experiment, to make mistakes, to throw away and start anew. These things are often impossible in the pressured environment of a tight rehearsal schedule with an opening night hovering above you. And for the institution, these readings or workshops can provide that much needed time to reflect on the nature of the risk that’s being undertaken. What challenges lie ahead as we embark on this journey? What questions do we need to ask ourselves? And sometimes it becomes clear that some risks aren’t worth taking. But the real problem arises, it seems to me, when the risk is so calculated, so disingenuous that it is no longer a risk at all—it is a sheep masquerading in wolf’s clothing.

But what about those institutions, like the one for which I have the privilege of working, that do take the big leap? What of theatres that commit to full productions of new work, that invite playwrights into the room to tangle with a group of collaborators, and at the end of the process open the doors to audiences and critics who will make of it what they will? Are these brave and courageous souls who’ve got what it takes and are willing to take the heat? Perhaps. But just as new play development programs seek to reduce risks by altering the expectations of the audience and reducing the financial investment involved in full production, theatres that fully produce new work have their own way of modulating or “managing” risk. The festival model, like the Humana Festival of New American Plays, is one of those ways. When former Producing Artistic Director Jon Jory started the festival, one of his well-articulated ideas was that if Actors Theatre put up a bunch of new work and created an event around that, then audiences who might otherwise be resistant to unfamiliar voices and visions would embrace the idea of the festival, and the sense of event that surrounds it, even if the individual plays themselves were not always to their liking. The strategy was a remarkably effective one, and while the festival has continued to grow and evolve through the course of its 28-year history, the basic structure has remained essentially the same. But the structure of the festival is only one way in which the balancing act between perceived risk and perceived safety is achieved. Because, much like the theatre that has grown around it, the festival has become an institution—with many of the same institutional needs and restraints, but with one very unique feature—this is an institution dependent on its ability to continually reinvent itself. [n.b.: The Humana Festival was shut down permanently in 2022.]

Unfortunately, one obstacle to the institution’s ability to take on new risks is the prevalence of critics who offer few rewards for daring leaps, lauding instead only impressive landings. After a disappointingly reviewed Humana Festival of New American Plays, I was down in the theatre’s basement sifting through the storage room, assembling boxes to be taken away and catalogued by the University of Louisville’s archival staff. There I found a packet of reviews from the early 1980s. In an article entitled “Louisville Letdown,” Village Voice critic Don Shewey decried the festival’s failure to live up to the promise of its former successes—plays such as Crimes of the Heart or The Gin Game [Village Voice, 31 March 1980]. (The festival in question, interestingly enough, featured John Pielmeier’s soon-to-be award-winning play Agnes of God.) After spending some time feeling comforted and vindicated by these early examples of privileging past rewards over current risks, I came to an understanding of the obstacles that lay ahead for the institution and the artists working in it, not to mention the artists that we hope to invite in as we move forward. Hard won success by our predecessors is what has allowed us the privilege of presenting new work of the scope we now do-but it is that same success that makes the next leap so much harder to contemplate.

I’d like to return for a moment to Todd London’s thoughts on the current state of institutional theatre in America. “It’s the American way,” he argues. “The innovative becomes the established. Yesterday’s geek-renegades become today’s corporate titans. The institutional theatre in America still sees itself as the alternative theatre, though the pioneers are gone, replaced by second- and third-generation artistic and management leaders without the pioneering spirit. It has become our Broadway, that which the new theatre must rebel against to get free” (London 21). If we accept London’s premise, then what is to be made of those attempts to embrace the new within the institution? Is it possible to make these monuments our own? To transform them in our own image? Or are we so distant from the moment and context of their creation that we’ll inevitably be engaged in a disheartening and futile attempt to resuscitate a corpse?

I am a person who has always struggled with my relationship to the past. As the daughter of a historian, I was always made aware of the importance of looking back to understand where we are and where we’re going. But as a former punk rock girl, who is all around distrustful of authority figures, I am reluctant to look towards mentors and models to chart my course for the future. However, the longer I live, the more I realize that I have no choice in the matter. The past is with us—whether we like it or not. We can try to abandon or destroy it, but I wonder if it might not be a more productive use of our time to try and understand it. The question for me is, how do historic models of innovation assist us in our search for new ways of working? How do we escape our desire to seek out the new risks that emulate past successes? How do we allow the new to be new again? One essential element is to look back at the impulse, not the product of that impulse. As a dramaturg, I feel that my role is to ask why—what informs the artistic decisions we are making? Who do we invite into the room, and who do we exclude, and why? There is nothing wrong with building on the work of our predecessors. We stand on the shoulders of giants. But if we are to honor them, truly, we must stand tall and not be afraid to look further along the horizon, to dream larger and wider than they were permitted to dream. Otherwise, we are simply hiding in their shadows. We are sheep in wolves’ clothing, and our risks are muted-and managed-by fear.

[Tanya Palmer was the Literary Manager at Actors Theatre of Louisville.  (ATL was founded in 1964.  It was designated as the State Theater of Kentucky in 1974 and is another of the United States’ major regional theater companies.  ATL received the Regional Theatre Tony Award in 1980.)  Palmer left ATL to become the literary manager at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.  She was promoted to the Goodman’s Producer and Director of New Play Development, coordinating the annual New Stages Festival. She’s also the co-editor of two collections of Humana Festival plays, published by Smith & Kraus.

[“‘Art Will Out,’” Part 3, will be posted on Friday, 9 August, with the AT panel discussion in response to Jaan Whitehead’s American Theatre article.  More responses will follow, including Zelda Fichandler's essay.  Please rejoin the thread to read what other theater people had to say.]