A Supplement to the
Regional Theater Series
[In
the May/June issue of American Theatre,
Editor-in-Chief Jim O’Quinn published an “editor’s note” that included the
following comment:
. . . a pair of in-depth articles examines America’s
ever-mutating institutional theatre system in the light of “Art Will Out” (Oct.
’02), Jaan Whitehead’s much-discussed essay that posited a gap between the
creative needs of artists and the institutions that hire them [see Part 1,
posted on 3 August]. Are our theatre
institutions, on balance and in the main, nurturers of robust and genuine art,
or, on occasion and unwittingly, inhibitors of it? Zelda Fichandler and a panel of eight notable
theatre folk consider this hot-button question.
[Fichandler’s
article, “Whither (or Wither) Art?” is below; the panel discussion to which O’Quinn
refers, “For Institutions, is Art the Bottom Line?” was posted in Part 3 of the
“Art Will Out” series on 9 August.
Readers should note, if they haven’t read Part 3, that it includes “On
Art and Institutions,” TCG Executive Director Ben Cameron’s introduction to the
two pieces, the roundtable and Fichandler’s essay.]
“WHITHER (OR WITHER) ART?”
by Zelda Fichandler
[Zelda Fichandler’s response to Jaan Whitehead’s AT article ran in American Theatre, volume
20, issue 5 (May/June 2003). It was part
of the Special Section, with “For Institutions, is Art the Bottom Line?” that (like
Cameron’s introduction) was entitled “On Art and Institutions.”]
A RESIDENT THEATRE PIONEER GAUGES THE ARTISTIC PULSE
OF THE CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN THEATRE
Not this or that, but
this and that. Because one thing is true, it doesn’t necessarily follow that
the opposite is not also true. Up and down, back and forth, move ahead and drop
back, no straight staircase to the sky but growth in a kind of spiral: success,
success, success, then failure and disappointment, then the struggle to get
unstuck and push ahead, to keep on keeping on, and the one who finishes last
wins. Brecht has Galileo say, “As much of the truth gets through as we push
through; we crawl by inches.”
Over the holidays, I had
the time to catch up with the October, November and December [2002] issues of American
Theatre and was astounded by the thought-provoking riches I found in them.
Every theatre worker in the land appreciates and needs Ben Cameron’s recurring “Cheers!”
Which is not to say that the TCG constituencies aren’t always encouraged to
think outside the box. But here is something else again, something new, I
believe—challenges to and warnings about the box itself. Serious questions are
posed about the very form and nature of what we know as the “institutional
theatre”—a kind of theatre that in the past half-century has transformed the
way we produce (bring forth) our art. We are pushed to think about whether
these institutions do or do not, did but now don’t, nurture the art and the
artists—measured against their founding mission. Since those who challenge and
warn are our friends and colleagues and raise their voices not only out of
anger, disappointment and frustration, but also out of love and a sense of
responsibility, I take their queries very seriously. I hope we can avoid being
defensive and can listen up. Here are some personal ruminations.
I left Arena Stage in
1991, and I know that much has changed since then. It has become increasingly
difficult to keep a theatre pressing forward in a creative way. In my time with
the Acting Company, Margot Harley’s spirited young ensemble that tours the
country with classics and new work, I continued to learn about the aspirations
of young talent and about the amazing audience across America that is hungry
for theatre. Leading an intense actor-training program within a large
university has taught me how the weight of a highly structured, top-down
institution actually feels; I have a deeper empathy with the artist’s sense
that the largest issues are decided above. I speak in this essay as a
representative of what has come to be called the “institutional theatre,” now
under scrutiny, if not attack.
[Zelda Fichandler (1924-2016) co-founded Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage
in 1950 and served as artistic director from then until 1991. She was artistic
director of New York City-based Acting Company, co-founded in 1972 by John
Houseman (1902-88) and Margot Harley (b. 1935) out of the first graduating
class of the Juilliard School’s drama program, from 1991 to 1994. Fichandler
was also chair of the graduate acting program of New York University’s Tisch
School of the Arts from 1984 to 2009.)]
My six-year-old grandson
is wont to ask me how things were in the olden days (starting with the Age of
the Dinosaurs, followed by an unimaginably long historical period pre-TV and
baseball computer games, followed thereupon by the more hospitable present,
which he very much enjoys). My point being that I may be able to bring some
information from my experience with the dinosaurs that others of you may not
have.
What are the critics
saying to us? What do they suggest as the next crusade? What have they
misperceived, and what enlightens us? What is feasible and what is
pie-in-the-sky? And the big issues: A new generation of founders? Challenge the
power of our boards? No longer an alternative theatre as we were founded to be,
pass the torch to the new alternatives? Fold up our expensive tents and
silently steal away? Out with the old, on with the new and every dog has his
day? These are provocative questions, indeed! How do we respond to them? Jaan
Whitehead (“Art Will Out,” Oct. ’02) acknowledges that not every theatre or
board or mission statement is like every other, but feels that the pressure of
institutional art (with the emphasis on “institution” rather than “art”) is
widespread enough to warrant sounding the alarm.
What does she mean by
institutional art? The following, I think: Art that is made with the right eye
on the dollar, the left eye on the stage, with the right eye dominant. Art that
doesn’t fly because it’s tethered to the bottom line. Formulaic art—this was a
hit in Cleveland (Boston, Milwaukee, on or Off Broadway), this could attract a
star, this one got a Tony, this one would be great for group sales or students
or at Christmas or for spring vacation or for St. Patrick’s Day or around Rosh
Hashonah [sic], etc., etc.; too many lows and not enough highs—a sense
of uniformity, predictability, a sense of low-grade depression. Where is
astonishment, derring-do, originality, hoopla? Is it one from Column A and one
from Column B, or does it all add up to something intentional and brave? Does
what we think the subscribers want or what quickens the theatre’s artistic
heart come first?
Ah, what the subscribers
want! The circle that Whitehead traces really exists—I’ve felt the clutch of it
closing around me, and it’s a circle from hell. To stave off death, the maw of
the box office must be fed. We count on the subscribers who make up one-half
(or one-third or two-thirds or 90 percent) of our audience to feed it. [The issue
of subscriber-driven theaters is examined in “‘Subscriptions Are Dead, Long
Live Subscriptions” by Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, a recent AT publication
posted on ROT on 12 June 2024.] Indeed, if we appear plump and chipper,
other sources of nourishment may open up; no foundation or corporation wants to
feed a dying theatre. If things work well and we give our subscribers what they
want (and, of course, what we can afford), they’ll be back next year and we’ll
be set for another season on a full stomach. And while there’s life, there’s
hope.
This looks like a fair
exchange, almost too good to be true, but we become suspicious and look around.
Aha! it’s the audience who is running the theatre! No, the box office is
running the theatre! No, the board and the executive director and his PR and
marketing colleagues are running the theatre! No, the institution in general is
running the theatre! That’s it, we’ve abdicated our creative freedom—that which
defines us and for which we struggled to be born—so as not to bite the hands
that feed us. And where does that get us? What might be the unintended
consequences? Whitehead has opened up some thoughts that we have probably
thought before and pushed aside, for where do these thoughts lead?
A theatre gets the
audience it signals to and deserves, and repertory is destiny. As in any
real-life relationship, the response we get springs from what we send out, give
off, invite. Are we underrating our subscribers? Why should their taste,
curiosity and capacity to chew hard on some tough thoughts or forgive a
well-intentioned miss be less than ours? Presumably, deep down they’re very
much like us despite differences in ethnicity, age, range of income. They come
to the theatre to be awakened emotionally, psychologically, even intellectually
and politically, and to have an adventure, to identify with a life that’s
similar enough to theirs so they can recognize it but that plays out in
different circumstances. Maybe their numbers would increase if we shared our
own personal tastes more fully, opened ourselves up through our work to our own
deepest concerns. And how do we know what they want if we don’t offer
what we want? And how do they know what they want when they haven’t seen it
yet? This is a better line of speculation; we should think further.
And what if the real
audience, the one we must have to complete our work, drifts away and another
audience replaces it who is satisfied with less? Audiences are not
interchangeable integers, after all. Do we think that when the world
turns—which it will—and the economy recovers—which it will—and a new president
stimulates a change in the Zeitgeist (maybe John Kerry? [Kerry (D-Massachusetts;
b. 1943) was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in the
2004 election, losing to the incumbent, George W. Bush (R-Texas; b. 1946; 43rd President
of the United States: 2001-09.]), do we think that then we can return to
what we really want to do? And recover the audience we’ve lost? The future
grows out of the present while the present seeps up out of the past. The
choices we make today describe the theatre we’ll have tomorrow. Process is
everything, and the outcome can’t be predicted. It’s possible for a theatre to
die of starvation, and that, of course, is very sad. It’s also possible for it
to wither away, and that is sadder.
Whitehead invites us to
consider the relationship between institution and art. I think of an
institution as a cradle and the thing we call art as the baby. There is
reciprocal need: the baby needs the cradle, but the cradle is an empty, useless
piece of wood without the baby. Baby Eugene O’Neill [1888-1953; American
playwright; 1936 Nobel Laureate in Literature and only playwright to win four
Pulitzer Prizes for Drama] didn’t have a cradle: he slept in a dresser drawer
on the road with his actor-father [James O’Neill (1847-1920)] and mother [Mary
Ellen (Quinlan) O’Neill (1857-1922)], but he created anyway, or perhaps because
of. The institution can be as lean and simple as that dresser drawer or as
elaborate and multi-leveled as money will buy; the sturdier-yet-flexible it can
be, the more support it can offer. The cradle’s/institution’s function is to
provide a continuity of comfort and stability, an opportunity for growth, an
empathetic, responsive face, a respect for organic creative process, tolerance
for behavioral slip-ups (like flops!) and pride in the baby’s hi-jinks. The
institution accepts that the baby will develop according to its own internal
laws and dedicates itself to providing the environment to encourage that.
Or this metaphor: The
main event is not the institution. The main event is under the Big Top where
the performers with their feats of magic and daring and the audience with its
imaginative belief and its empathy get together and all breathe the same air at
the same moment. All of them are grateful to the management for seeing to it
that everyone has been paid, the lights are on, the event has come in on
budget, the seats are filled and that the tent doesn’t leak. The president of
the board and other board members have the best seats, as they deserve, and
will later throw a party in appreciation of the extraordinarily audacious
circus troupe. The clarity of this relationship is harder to maintain in
threatening times because the board has the responsibility for the survival of
the institution and can become excessively interested in what goes on in the
tent as well as how much it cost to put it there. Tensions are to be expected
and worked through, always remembering that while theatre is a business, its business
is art, not business.
Because one thing is true
it doesn’t necessarily follow that the opposite is not also true. The artist
must have freedom to be playful, to work from internal impulses. But he also
shares responsibility for the fiscal health of the institution; it may surprise
the board to hear that, but I’ve always found it to be so. The various
production departments struggle to stay on budget and are proud when they do
and actors extend themselves in many ways to build audiences. As an artistic
director, I have always celebrated the box office. The dollar that came to us
through it was twice-blessed: once for what it could buy in goods and services
and twice as a vote of confidence that bought us freedom. The first law of the
theatre is success—without success there can be no theatre. That thought wraps
around everything else one can say about what’s right or wrong about our
institutions. It’s the iron-framework of fact. Since the norm of theatre is
failure, not success, and since times are generally out of joint, the box office
has come to be a place of special honor. Looked at in this way, the link
between creativity and fiduciary responsibility is unbreakable.
Here’s one from the
Dinosaur Age that just surfaced in my memory, all of a piece down to what I was
wearing and where I sat. President [Dwight D.] Eisenhower [1890-1969; 34th President
of the United States: 1953-61] had moved into the White House and the
Republicans moved into Washington with him, buying the houses from the
Democrats who were moving out. Our audience at Arena dwindled, and it would
take several years to cultivate another one. In that Republican year, we lost
$10,000 at the box office [equivalent to about $118,000 in 2024]—a large amount
on such a small budget. My teacher and the co-founder of Arena Stage, Edward
Mangum [1913-2001; Mangum left Arena in 1952], had moved on, so that fingers
pointed only at me at the final board meeting of the season where the loss was
to be explained and justified. I did my best. The board members were my
friends, hand-picked by Ed and me and Tom Fichandler [1916-97; Zelda’s husband (separated
in 1975) and co-founder of Arena with her and Mangum; retired in 1986] for
their love of theatre and their willingness to put in $1,000 each [about $12,000
today] to get this idea off the ground. And they were pleased enough with the
season. After I spoke, there was a fraught silence and then the chairman spoke
up—heavily. This was the gist of it: “Of course we’re committed here to a
balanced budget and no red ink and so we regret the $10,000 that was lost in
this year’s operations. Zelda has explained to us how this happened. In the
expectation that this was a one-time circumstance and that she will be able to
guide us to a balanced budget next year and the years following, we accept the
explanation and the loss.” And then the chairman asked that the board give me a
vote of confidence, which they did. This was very sweet of them, and I
appreciated it. But I chiefly remember the gesture as a moment of profound and
unexpected learning. For I had not for a minute anticipated that a vote of no-confidence
was anywhere in the cards.
What I learned was that
while I was entitled to enjoy the freedom to fail, it was anticipated that I
would not indulge in it too frequently. Further, that it would be much more
comfortable for me if the failure could be attributed to some outside power—the
Republicans, the snow, a parade, a flood in the Potomac River—and not to my own
bad judgment or creative misstep. The vision thing was mine to have as long as
whatever that vision generated by way of art could pay for itself by way of
money. When the Ford Foundation and W. McNeil Lowry [1913-93; vice-president of
the Ford Foundation at this time; honored with a special Tony Award in 1963 for
his support of American theater] entered the field towards the end of the ’50s,
Arena became not-for-profit in order to qualify for gifts and grants. But the
same implicit understanding applied over the successive decades (and I never
signed a contract; we would both know when it was time to part). Boards have
become more sophisticated since the ’50s—through experience, they’ve learned
the ways of a creative enterprise (up and down, back and forth). But I lived
through my long tenure at Arena Stage in a state of not this or that but
this and that—Money and Art, Art and Money. In later days,
the unresolved dialectic was not even imposed by the institution; it had become
internalized because that’s how things had to be. Since the late ’80s, the
balance has become even more difficult for the artistic leaders to maintain as
financial support has dwindled.
Whitehead asks us to
cease looking outside and turn our gaze inward, to the inside of our
institutions for the source of our sense of oppression and ways we might free
ourselves from it. And, indeed, we must do that. But the outside is the primary
dimension within which our theatres live. A theatre is an organism, an artwork
in and of itself, and the person who holds the vision is its primary artist. It’s
her angle-of-viewing that, like the super-objective of a play, animates all the
rest. (Ralph Waldo Emerson was wise to note [in Self-Reliance (1841)]
that “an institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.” For man, read person.)
It’s as she confronts the sounds, sights, political conflicts, rhythms,
scientific achievements, timbre of human relationships, status of minorities
and women, contemporary forms of theatre and other art forms, and especially
the economic support systems of her time that her vision for a theatre forms
itself. An artistic director belongs to both worlds—one foot inside the
institution, one outside. Consciously or unconsciously, a personal vision is
born in reaction to a world.
[Superobjective (or, as Fichandler has it here, super-objective)
is a Stanislavskian concept used by actors, acting teachers, and directors. The
device is both what an actor devises as the basis of her or his character
creation and, as here, what the director determines is the principal focus of
the play. It’s called in other acting systems
the objective (Uta Hagen), intention, main action (Aaron Frankel),
spine (Harold Clurman), or project (Bernard Beckerman).
[This isn’t the same as the story or plot action, what the playwright
wrote; the play’s superobjective/main action is what the director brings to the
production that makes it different from anyone else’s version. It’s what drives
the play, in the director’s vision.
[There will be many “immediate” objectives or actions (for individual
scenes and even beats), but only one main objective. All immediate objectives will in some way
relate to the superobjective, which makes the production cohere into a single
event, rather than a collection of scenes or vignettes.]
Just imagine how the
artistic director’s vision would expand and her heart lighten if suddenly there
were a generous infusion of funds and she could pay for everything that she and
the artists gathered around her had ever dreamed of. Then the tension between
art and money could resolve. Then the relationship between institution and art
could become crystal clear, unclouded by the pressures of survival. To think
this way is to play with fantasy of course, for the Great Benefactor has
retired and departed on a long tour of the universe and we don’t expect him
back. But it’s a good bit of fantasy for it helps us to perceive the difficulty
of artistic freedom in a culture defined by success in the marketplace. “He who
pays the piper calls the tune” may be an overstatement of our situation, but
that notion does now thread through all aspects of our institutional life.
But let us imagine that
the Great Benefactor does, indeed, return with a new perspective on the Good
and the Beautiful and, particularly, on those needy arts institutions that are
impeded in their flowering. Could he lull our anxieties (Am I talented enough?
Was that the right decision? Is this play going to make it?) or endow us with
the talent and wisdom that isn’t already ours? Of course not. Take away our
headaches, help us to sleep more soundly, provide more time with our families?
Not a chance. Attract collaborators who will stake their creative fate with us?
Show us how to build acting companies and use them well? Teach us how to be
effective diplomats, fund-raisers, problem-solvers, writers, speakers,
psychiatrists, and still be prepared for rehearsals? No way. Reveal to us how
to treat Moliere and Chekhov as old friends we would never betray, yet move
their texts into a contemporary world, or how to read a new script in an
unfamiliar form and be able to imagine it living on the stage? Strengthen our will
so that we can take the hills and valleys and not flee? Endow us with humor,
tact, wisdom, patience and the capacity to affect others with our exhilaration
in the work? Make clear to us the language of budgets and balance sheets so
that we know how to match expenditures to a value system and spend money
without wasting it? Sharpen our judgment and broaden our taste? Awaken our
capacity for collegiality and our teacher’s warmth so that we may give our
personal attention and support to all the work, not just our own, and to all
the people doing it? Keep us on the pulse of our community so we can fathom our
neighbors’ deepest thoughts maybe even before they themselves are aware of
them? And keep us in touch with our world so its preoccupations can be
reflected on our stages? No, he can’t. Of course he can’t.
I’ve just set down a job
description for artistic leadership—the artistic director and his comrades who
share the vision and contribute to it with their own skills. And that was the
short form! So what can Mr. Great Benefactor do for us where Whitehead
suggests we’re remiss? First, he would allow us to use the planning process as
a way to fulfill our artistic dreams. Planning for the future would cease to be
merely a function of budgeting and become one of dreaming. We would be able to
plan out of the images in our minds rather than within the vise of this year’s
(reduced?) budget and/or the nagging weight of accumulated debt. What else? He
could lift from us the fears that repress the creative spirit. For it’s fear, I
suggest, rather than lack of talent or imagination or good will that leads to
making what Whitehead calls institutional art. Which one of us wants to be the
one to fold up the tent?
Fear encourages caution
and conformity, and caution and conformity are antithetical to what we refer to
as art, since art is always a personal and original way of knowing the world.
Creativity is born out of the capacity to play, and it’s the very capacity for
meaningful play that defines us as human beings. We can play with political
ideas, with scientific hypotheses, with new forms in literature, with bodies in
space; we call a theatre production a play and we play the piano and the violin.
The notion of play is indissolubly connected to the idea of freedom, and I left
something out of the job description. It’s the artistic leader’s role to create
a quiet and concentrated and non-judgmental environment so that the entire
community can play within it without fear. Benefaction can help her with that.
I emphasize the organic connection between funding and fear, for I’m not sure
that it’s fully understood by those pointing to our lapses, unfulfilled
commitments, seeming inhospitality to artists, etc. (In addition to Whitehead,
see Todd London, “The Shape of Things to Come,” Nov. ’02, and Polly Carl, “Creating
the Swell,” same issue [American Theatre, 19.9].)
[At the time of the publication of the referenced articles, Todd London was
artistic director of the New York City-based New Dramatists, an organization of
playwrights founded in 1949 which offers seven-year residencies for developing
writers to build up their playwriting skills and develop their careers and housing
for the resident writers. From 2018 to 2022, he served on the faculty at the
New School’s School of Drama in New York and headed its MFA Playwriting Program.
[Polly Carl was the executive director of the Playwrights’ Center in
Minneapolis, an organization focused on both supporting playwrights and
promoting new plays to production at theaters. After 11 years at the
Playwrights’ Center, including seven as producing artistic director, Carl moved
on to the Steppenwolf Theatre Company as director of artistic development. In 2011, Carl joined Arena Stage as director
of the American Voices New Play Institute.
Currently, she’s is the director and editor of HowlRound: A Center for Theater
Commons at Emerson College in Boston, a service organization whose aim is to
support developing theatre practitioners and facilitate dialogue within the not-for-profit
theater and performance arts field.]
London bravely opts for a
new generation of artistic directors and a new generation of theatres and, for
the companies and playwrights within them, not just a place at the table but
the table itself. “Where is a new generation of writer-founders, of
playwright-managers?” he asks. That’s a rousing manifesto, and certainly
anything conceived in the imagination has the potential to be born into
reality. 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.
News from the dinosaurs:
Beginning in the ’50s there was but a blank slate, and only a few of us were
scratching on it. No models, just us, hanging onto skyhooks. An almost
primitive instinct for improvisation and testing of reality was released. “What
is to be done?” (by chance, the title of Lenin’s revolutionary pamphlet [1902]!)
and “How is it to be done?” were the subtexts of our daily lives. The
sands take lines unknown, as the poet said, even as a painter lays down on his
canvas a random sketch that will define the painting to follow. At Arena, we
sketched as we went, rapidly producing one thing after the other (17 shows in
the first year because the audience was very small and we had to turn
productions over quickly). Poor, so poor! Tireless—no, tired!—we lived play to
play, and all there was of the future was right now. Modestly, slowly, the
audience grew. Unexpectedly, the foundations (circa 1957) and the NEA (1965)
and, later, corporations and our own community found us. They gave us money,
but better than that, they gave us respect. Respect: “to look more at, to give
attention to, to regard.” We felt important to more than this tiny unit on this
tiny budget; we seemed to matter to the culture of our country. It was a heady
ascent during those middle decades.
[Back in the 1950s, theater in the Nation’s Capital meant a touring show
at the National Theatre, whatever was at Arena Stage, and a college production
at Catholic University. Occasionally a special treat, such as a visit from the
D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, would come along. Otherwise, the choices were
pretty limited, and, except for Arena, pretty tame.
[Arena Stage was founded in August 1950, before I even turned four, by Edward
Mangum, a professor at George Washington University; Zelda Fichandler, who
became the long-serving artistic director; and her husband, Thomas C.
Fichandler, who was the executive director. At that time, theater in Washington
was limited. The oldest playhouse, Ford’s Theatre, built in 1863, had ceased
presenting plays after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln there on 14 April
1865, not to reopen as a theater until 1968; it has been essentially a booking
house since then.
[The National, where pre- and post-Broadway productions were mounted,
opened in 1835 (though the current building only dates from 1923); I saw many
plays and musicals there as a youngster. The John F. Kennedy Center for the
Performing Arts didn’t open until 1971.
[As for indigenous productions, the only other outlet was the theater
department of Catholic University, whose renowned director, Father Gilbert V.
Hartke (1907-86), provided Washingtonians with excellent college-level
productions of the classics and stage standards. During the summer, Hartke, the
“show-biz priest,” ran the Olney Theatre (1938) in exurban Montgomery County,
Maryland, which, in the ’50s and ’60s, was countryside. The fare at Olney was
the usual summer-stock shows that played across the country on the straw-hat
circuit, fun but hardly exciting or innovative. Finally, there were the Lisner
Auditorium (opened 1943), on the campus of George Washington University, and
Carter Barron Amphitheatre (1950) in Rock Creek Park which both hosted tours
that included theatrical productions.
[When the Arena Stage joined the line up as the notion of regional
theater spread across the country in the ‘40s, ‘50s, and, early ’60s, prospects
for theater in Washington started to look up. When Arena began in 1950, there
was little regional theater in the United States and no indigenous professional
theater in the Nation’s Capital.]
A kind of promise was
made to us, not in so many words, but a promise: These agencies would continue
to be there for us and would participate in our future, caring that we survive.
The promise was kept over many years, deepening as time went on and as we
evolved artistically. We enjoyed the sense that if we came up with an
innovative idea—artistic or organizational (organization was also considered
creation)—it stood a chance of being funded. Then, for reasons you know, the
promise was broken; the official culture turned its back. The final signal for
me, theatrical in its communicative power, was that during her term as chairman
of the NEA [1993-97], [actress] Jane Alexander was able to pin down only one
private meeting with Bill Clinton [William J. Clinton (b. 1946); 42nd President
of the United States: 1993-2001], which lasted just 20 minutes and offered no
assurances (as noted in her book, Command Performance [PublicAffairs, 2000]).
There was no longer any political capital to be gained for a sitting president
to support the arts. And nothing has happened since then to suggest that the
climate has changed.
Whitehead suggests the
need to “move out from under institutional shadows” and the ripeness for “a new
age of pioneers.” Pioneers will come or not come without our intervention and
will always be welcome, and our theatres cast far more light than shadows—just
imagine the American theatre without them! I salute the work of avant-garde
theatres, community-based theatres, ethnically diverse theatres, ensembles of
form-seekers, playwriting collectives and all forms of socially based theatres.
I admire their creativity and freedom. I’ve watched them proliferate since the ’60s—often
out of a singular aesthetic vision, the product of a single mind, or in
response or antithesis to the institutional theatre. But while we come from the
same line, the same root, these theatres are not “an alternative” but “a
parallel” to the institutional theatre; they will neither replace nor inherit
it, nor do we need to choose one form over the other. We are on different
paths, with different tasks and structures that reflect them. Variants of the
same species, each of us is a vital and essential part of the wonderful
variety-within-unity that is the American Theatre. These parallel theatres are
in great need of increased funding, which their flexibility and very variety
make it hard for conservative funding agencies to categorize and, therefore, to
support. That’s a great injustice that won’t be set right, I fear, until we
have the seven years of plenty due us.
We should work together
to discover and elect a president with an affinity for the arts. We should
write and disseminate broadsides making the case for a New Deal for the arts in
America. We should make immediate contact with [poet, literary critic, literary
translator, and essayist] Dana Gioia, the new chairman of the NEA [2003-09],
who promises to restore grants to individual artists and to find a way to
increase federal funding. We should take inspiration from and look for another
Helen Clark, elected prime minister of New Zealand in 1999 [until 2008], who
promptly declared herself minister of arts, culture and heritage and within
months injected tens of millions of dollars into a “cultural recovery package.”
Something like this grand boost could happen to us; hope is a thing with
feathers.
This isn’t the time, I
suggest, to man the barricades and whip up an assault against a form of theatre
that in the past half-century has become so imbedded in our theatrical
way-of-life as to now be its dominant form, and which at the same time finds
itself in the same position as many solo artists, locked outside and knocking
at the gates. But is it not the time to listen hard with our inner ear and ask
again as we asked before in that Age of the Dinosaur, “What is to be done?” And
“How?”
There is an old Russian
saying: “Circumstances alter cases,” which I take to mean “depending on where
you sit, is how you see it,” or, “a thing changes depending on who’s looking at
it.” It’s about relativism and the subjective nature of truth. Institutions
feel betrayed by this spate of critical articles in American Theatre,
kicked when they’re down—”After all we’ve done for you . . .!”—while the
artists are frustrated and angry and prod the institutions to set new
imaginative goals that will include them.
The feelings of the
institutions are justified. Since mid-20th-century, they’ve been the primary
developer of talent for the American theatre—for stage as well as film and TV.
Go to a movie, turn on the tube, get tickets to a Broadway or Off-Broadway
show, there our artists are. “We promised opportunity for artistic development,
we delivered on that promise; there are more jobs for artists outside of New
York than in it, the so-called center,” the institutions say. Taken all
together, our theatres constitute a kind of national bazaar where Broadway
producers shop for next year’s product and next year’s Pulitzer playwright.
Where else can our new playwrights and their plays be developed but with us?
And we’ve created the
possibility of a new way-of-life for those who want it. Actors, directors,
designers, playwrights can move from theatre to theatre, using themselves
creatively in dialogue with intelligent audiences, often evolving a sense of
belonging with one or several theatres where they can count on coming back.
What with these “theatre gigs”—plus film, TV soaps and commercials, voice-overs,
designing or directing for opera, teaching—an artist can have a respected, even
fulfilling life while building funds for retirement. Besides, say the
institutions, artists don’t really want a home, they prefer moving along from
choice to choice, it’s hard to pin them down even for one project; their agents
stand in the way of long commitments out-of-town.
So what’s wrong with this
picture? Nothing, if everybody’s satisfied with it. Don’t institutions tell it
the way it is? Yes, but there are other voices, speaking up now loud and clear.
They ask for involvement, a kind of permanence and continuity, the sort of
emotional security and ebullience you feel in a personal relationship. They want
their work to add to the overall work of the place, to build something with
others and watch it grow. They want to belong to an idea they believe in and
can serve with their creativity. They want to have a sense of
self-determination and a role in defining the destiny of their institution.
Transient, temporary work
sometimes feels as nothing but a high form of what the manufacturing industry
calls “piece work”—you get paid for the number of “pieces of work” you turn out
and how many you turn out is the measure of things, not you, yourself. On a
rainy day, “jobbing-in”—our word for piece work—can make one feel devalued: a “gig”
can only be followed by another “gig.” You may be moving along but only from
here to there—moving, but not evolving.
If an actor is always
cast because he’s “right for the role” with no consideration for the
development of his own range and versatility, if with each role he starts over
again with a group of strangers who have no collective experience to draw upon,
if he sometimes gets the sense of himself as a kind of commodity—paid to fill a
need—and then “time’s up and thanks,” what is it we’re saying to him? That “Theatre’s
a precarious profession, we always knew that, be glad you’re working”? Is that
okay? Is that enough?
Of all the artists, the
playwright gets the most focused attention from the institution, and never more
so than right now. That’s been my experience and it’s what I observe (see
Lenora Inez Brown’s article “The Real World,” Nov. ’02). But the number of
productions the playwright receives may not be the main point to her. To have
her voice mingle with the voice of others in a collective consciousness as the
play is evolved from within itself into production; to know that even if this
one fails, the next time she knocks with a telephone book of pages in her
hands, they have to let her in—might weigh more than any number of exposures of
her work produced out of any number of disparate motives in any number of
theatres.
[Brown was a former associate editor of American Theatre and the Head
of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism at the Theatre School of DePaul University
in Chicago. She served as a member of the artistic team and a project dramaturg
for the Sundance Theatre Labs in 2000 and 2001. As Director of New Play
Development for Madison (Wisconsin) Repertory Theatre, she developed and
produced the inaugural Fall Festival of the Future new play festival, which
included the world première of Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice. She was the
dramaturg and literary manager for Crossroads Theatre Company {New Brunswick,
New Jersey) when it received the 1999 Tony Award for Outstanding Regional
Theatre, and worked on the book for the 1999 Tony-nominated musical It Ain’t
Nothing But the Blues. She’s a past president of the Theatre for Young
Audiences/USA.
[The American Theatre article referenced is a survey by AT
that “explores the realm of new-work development—and dispels a few myths along the
way.”]
There’s a tendency to
romanticize our beginnings, as if we were an early Ideal Community. The
beginnings weren’t romantic—they were exhausting, impoverished and full of
anxiety, but, yes. there was a specialness about that time because our
intention was so clear and unconflicted. Each of the small band of beginners,
flying blind in our separate air spaces, was struggling to create an artistic
home: a company, an artistic collective, living and working in one place over a
period of time, all of us with the same notion of why it was important to be
doing that, having compatible skills and talents and a view of our world and
the role of art within it, all of us together engaged in an ongoing dialogue
with our audience via theatrical means. It didn’t seem very complicated, it
seemed entirely natural, inevitable, not even requiring elaboration in a
manifesto or a mission statement. What else could a theatre be? How could you
call it a theatre if it wasn’t a place? Who else could define the
culture of a theatre but its artists? Define its style? Didn’t a collective art
form require a collective? Weren’t we here to protest and even replace the
put-it-up, smash-it-down one-shot system of Broadway?
Our earliest banners were
emblazoned with “Not a Hotel for Theatre, but a Home!” and a few of us held
onto these (and still have them!), but not very many of us. As years went by,
other slogans came into style. “Professionalism! You Can Count on Us!” or “Good
Plays Well Done, That’s the Ticket!” Or even “Eight-for-the-Price-of-Six!” And
until I picked up my October, November and December issues of American
Theatre, I had come to think that no one objected to the way things had
become except some of my professional friends and my students, who want to be
in companies, having been trained and proselytized for that kind of a life in
art, but have not been able to find them.
The fact that artists are
angry, frustrated and disappointed is not necessarily bad news. The other side
of these feelings is that artists are insistent, energized, geared up to make
larger commitments; they want in. Artists have become eager to become part of
the warp and woof of institutional life and even take responsibility at its
center (or as London puts it, occupy that center) but find institutions
inhospitable or simply closed to them. Is this perception an illusion? How many
artists have these thoughts and feelings? Six? Six hundred? Six thousand? If we
were to throw a party, would they come? And is it true that the institutions
are inhospitable or closed to artists? Is it too much of an ongoing
responsibility to nurture a group of artists, drawing them into the center of
the work? These questions are, of course, no use in a theoretical way, they
need to be answered in practice. And the theatres would need to make the first
move.
For starters, I suggest
an effusive display of understanding that audiences come to the theatre to
witness and partake of the work the artists have made—that it’s art that makes
the money and not the other way around. “Imagination is the nose of the public,”
wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “by this at any time it may be quietly led.” What else?
Pay those who are mature and committed artists the top salaries within the
institution, at least equal to that of any (other) fund-raiser or
audience-builder. This gesture more than any other will signal where the artist
stands as to recognition and power. In the deepest sense, artists are
teachers—out of the darkness, they bring light—and their salary should be
pegged to what a full professor makes at the university in the theatre’s
community. In some smaller communities, that may still not be enough, so that
allowances should be made for commercial Time-Outs. (Time-Outs for creative
refreshment need to be possible as well.)
Artists should be invited
to become involved in the total life of the institution in order to provide it
with their special knowledge and point-of-view and to have their say. I read
that while Ingmar Bergman was heading the Swedish National Theatre, he established
a five-member artists’ council that he consulted about repertory, company
membership, casting and the like. I don’t know how this idea would play out in
America, though I wish I’d tried it myself. And a proportion of board positions
should be set aside in the theatre’s by-laws or be established by common
understanding for artists to occupy. This would be a very important change in
the way we have operated, but it must be pressed for.
The presence of artists
at board meetings would necessitate a transposition in vocabulary from a
bottom-line, market-share, brand-conscious, focus-group lingo brought into the
boardroom from a for-profit culture to a language of emotional meanings, thus
bringing the board closer to the heartbeat of the theatre and unifying everyone
around the real ideas that underlie the theatre. Significant issues do come up
at board meetings, but are presented in such a way as to disconnect them from
the life of the theatre as it’s experienced by those living it. The artists’
presence will focus these issue[s] in a more appropriate way. Remember that
artists are smart; planning is the strategy by which they bring art into the
world; the artist’s ability to juggle the animating idea along with time, money
and materials is an aspect of her talent. Artists have much to contribute to
the deliberations of a board.
To keep the artist
outside the business of the institution (with which he’s engaged, at any rate)
is to romanticize him (“Artists are above business”) at the same time that it
miniaturizes him (“Artists just don’t have the head for it, they’re fanciful,
unworldly creatures, we need to take care of them”). Why has it taken so long
to see this?
The creative courage of
the artistic director will inspire artists; they, in turn, will support the
risks she takes on their behalf whether or not they succeed. The transparency
she fosters so that information—whether good news or bad—is available to all,
up and down and around the building, will deepen the sense of mutual respect
and a communal destiny. And she will see to it that no one is made to feel
intimidated to speak up; in story and myth, the figure of Death is always
silent. The artistic director’s acknowledgement of ambiguity, relativism,
second thoughts and struggle that exist behind difficult decisions will draw
the artists even closer to her, revealing her as worthy of having, using and
sharing power. The blinding glare of certainty always reduces intimacy and
trust.
And so on. There are
myriad ways for the institution to build an interactive relationship with its
artists that will create the sense of a home where each can be for himself and
also for the other and where all are for the work. Both Whitehead and London
suggest some of these. Eventually, all of us must come to a much deeper
understanding of the nature of the organism that we call a theatre. I hold
close Aristotle’s statement: “What a thing can be, it must be, whether it be a
horse or a man.” Or a theatre, he might have added, had he thought of it. At
some point in the future, we’ll want to define ourselves by whether we insisted
strongly enough on becoming what we can be, and therefore have become it. We
will have come to consensus that artists are the theatre, not a separate
tribe bussed in for the performances. The artists are the theatre, but
administrators who protect and advance the artists’ work are also the theatre.
And the theatre is also its board, volunteers of time, money and caring on
behalf of a profession that must sometimes seem to them a total mystery,
operating as it does on hunches, gambles, the unknown. What else is the
theatre? The repertory is the theatre, its very flesh and bones. Its ticket
prices, its brochures and ads and newsletters, its spaces, even if they’re
humble, the intimacy of people pulling for the same thing, its respect for the
intelligence of its audience, its restlessness and unceasing workload and so on
and so on, and even the way the very air that hangs off the walls tells a
stranger what kind of a place it is—all these are the theatre.
Everything both tangible
and intangible is what a theatre is, and every thing is a part of everything
else. A theatre is a refracted image of life itself and Life is all One, as
Barbara exultantly discovers in the last act of Shaw’s most revolutionary play.
Being all One, a theatre must organize itself in circles—concentric circles,
not vertically as in Enron, but rather like the rings of a tree trunk, with the
artistic director and her artists in the center, yes, but what’s a center
without a circumference? It’s the outer border of the cell that guarantees the
integrity of the nucleus.
Since theatre is both art
and money, money and art, how will we pay for our ultimate epiphany? “How?” The
question hovers and Aristotle is silent. Margo Jones, who had the original idea
of professional theatre outside of New York and with her small, 198-seat
theatre in Dallas, Tex. [Theatre ’47], began the long revolution in which we
are still engaged, would say, “If you have a million-dollar idea, you can raise
a million dollars.” She said this in the late ’40s, however, and I don’t know
how many millions it would take to pay for that idea today. It might be that
the roughly hundred million—plus or minus—that seems to be the price of a new
theatre building could just as well be raised as endowment to support the idea
of an artists[’] theatre. Or if the building is a must-have, then a half of
what is raised, or if not a half, then a third or even a quarter, but no less,
could be set aside for an artistic leap forward. What is a building but the
enclosing of an Idea? [It would take over $8 million in 2002, when Fichandler published
this essay, to pay for what $1 million would purchase in 1947, when Jones
founded her theater.]
Here in the Nov. ’02
issue of American Theatre is a National Call for Manifestoes concerning
the American theatre. It’s sponsored by Playwrights[’] Center, Polly Carl,
executive director, and the Guthrie Theater [Minneapolis], Joe Dowling,
artistic director, with other distinguished associates: Anna Deavere Smith’s
Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue [founded in 1997 at Harvard
University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; relocated to New York City in 2000], the
Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas [based in New York City;
founded in 1985], Actors Theatre of Louisville and Vanderbilt University
Theatre [Nashville, Tennessee]. The Call asks for manifestoes “to imagine new
possibilities for the future, engage in the idealism of the past, step forward
and define our changing times, address the needs and necessity for the creation
of new work of the theatre today.” Among the judges of the winning manifesto
are [freelance dramaturg] Morgan Jenness, [playwright] Tony Kushner and [playwright,
screenwriter and producer] Diana Son.
The engine of the Call
seems to be “the need and necessity for the creation of new work” and the
search for a contemporary American theatre that will define itself by
responding to that thought. It’s of note that the Guthrie, one of America’s
most esteemed theatres, whose artistic director is committed to developing new
work, and the Actors Theatre of Louisville, with its long history of important
new plays and playwrights, will be involved in bringing the chosen Manifesto to
life. I hope that Carl will want to abandon her negative perception of what she
calls “our behemoth institutions with their repressive powers,” and that London
will come to regard his rhetorical cry, “Where are the theatres worthy of these
artists?” as somewhat hyperbolic, since the glass that is half full promises
well-equipped stages, experienced staffs, practiced audiences, in-place
administrative systems—the protection of an institution able and interested to
embrace new thought.
While our institutions
may not currently be satisfying all the needs and expectations of artists, it’s
only through and with them that there’s any hope for growth. In both a Marxist
sense and a practical, theatrical one, only the institutional theatres possess
the “means of production” necessary to carry the work forward. Acquiring these
took labor, love, grit and guts, as well as an act of large imagination
sustained over a long period of time. There is accumulated wisdom within the
institutional theatre. Suspecting or under-valuing these theatres as partners
would be more than foolhardy and would demonstrate to the world an unfortunate
lack of historical perspective. All of us have to listen up, not just the
institutions.
Nothing is so
irresistible as a good example. If the time is right, one or two examples can
become two or four, can become eight or twelve, and so on. Transformation via
contagion is the evolutionary pattern of the resident theatre movement.
The only way to begin
something is to begin it. The only way to change something is to go yourself,
not send someone else. You may not want to grab hold of your destiny; you may
want someone to hand your destiny to you, while meanwhile you can keep on railing
against your unjust fate. That would be too bad; there’s so much future in the
present moment.
I, too, send out a Call.
It’s not as resonant as the other Call and won’t reach as far, but it could
evoke an immediate response, and it’s achievable within current circumstances.
I call out to a leading American playwright whom the world admires and trusts
to step up to the plate and to take on the responsibilities of artistic
directorship of the next theatre that’s looking for one and wants to devote
three-quarters of its repertory to new work.
Our playwrights seem to
be the most angry; the sense of exclusion, of disempowerment, seems strongest
among them. Since their art is seminal to all the other arts, if it can be
empowered to flourish, the other arts will bloom along with it. Beneath “the
rage of powerlessness” noted in one of the articles can lie a deep and rich
source of creative power, but it can be released only by opportunity. A
director, designer or actor as artistic leader can surely provide this
opportunity and each has done so. But a playwright-leader is one of their own
and could serve them with a special understanding. The playwright whose
authenticity is already established and whose empathy is assured carries a
natural authority with other playwrights. Is it to be an impromptu table
reading, a workshop, a lab production in an informal space, a full
production—which is best for the playwright? The “workshopped-to-death”
syndrome will be resolved by someone who has already been there, done that. The
act of “auditioning” will have a different intention; from a test, a judgment,
it will become an exploration, part of the overall process.
A number of our theatres
focus very successfully on new work, but their relationship to the world’s
classics is casual, if they produce them at all. I would hope that a playwright’s
theatre would find the classics essential to its lab/teaching component: No
playwright, no artist, was born yesterday; every artist stands on the shoulders
of other artists working in other forms in other times. Classics in new
adaptations and translations are new works and, representing profound
excavations of the human spirit, belong in any theatre that claims to be
contemporary.
In the work of a theatre,
the playwright provides the scaffold of meaning and intention to which all the
other arts attach. In performance, the actor is at the center; theatre as a
performing art is an art of experience. Through the flesh and blood of the
actor, the playwright comes alive, no matter when she lived. Playwrights and
actors are natural companions, creating in a different way but always
symbiotically. Anton Chekhov wrote to the company of the Moscow Art Theatre: “Never
be afraid of an author. An actor is a free artist. You must create an image
different from the author’s. When the two images—the author’s and the actor’s—fuse
into one, then an artistic work is created.” There are soft rustles in the air;
the idea of acting companies is blowing in again (and, of course, in a few
theatres the idea has never left). Could it be that the playwright, actor,
director could come together in a place in such a way as to form a dreamed-of
golden triangle?
There will be a board who
will understand the precarious nature of the undertaking and yet find it
irresistible. The notion of research and development will be familiar to them;
they will understand that it takes a lot of chaff to yield the wheat, that
without bad plays there’s no field from which the good ones can emerge. One
doesn’t know if the idea rates as a million-dollar idea that could raise a
million (or whatever that is in current) dollars, but it’s not beyond imagining
that it could. The budget has to be large enough to support the goals,
otherwise fear will take over from imagination yet another time. “Art requires
luxury, even abundance,” wrote Tolstoy. Indeed!
There is a level of
fantasy to my line of thought, for is there an established playwright who would
set aside his own writing for the arduous, time-consuming life of an artistic
director? A playwright is the most solo of all theatre artists, while the artistic
director belongs to the entire society of the theatre, last to herself. But
there needs to be but one of you who hears the call. Sui generis, the
example that occurs only once. And what follows is up to the others.
I was given for Christmas
Mel Gussow’s book Conversations with Arthur Miller [sic;
Conversations with Miller (2002); Conversations with Arthur Miller is
a 1987 book edited by Matthew C. Roudané]. Here, from a conversation in 1986,
is Miller’s response to a question from Gussow about his use of time:
If I had a theatre that I was connected to,
a theatre of my peers, a working theatre with a good group of actors, I
probably would have written a number of more plays. I had one experience like
that and that was before Lincoln Center collapsed [Repertory Theater of Lincoln
Center (1965-73)]. I had done After the Fall, and Harold Clurman came to
me and said, “Look, we’ve got to have another play. Do you have anything else?
And I wrote Incident at Vichy. And it worked out magically; there was a
part for every actor in the company. That never occurred to me. There was an
excitement about it. You didn’t have to run around finding
producers. . . . It’s very important. It’s a defense against the
outside. “We’re all in this together.”
Yes, we are.
[At the time this article was published, Zelda
Fichandler was chair of the graduate acting program at the Tisch School of the
Arts of New York University. (Further
details of Fichandler’s biography are embedded in several spots of this post.)
[The première of Incident at Vichy to which Arthur Miller refers above was produced by
the Repertory Theater of Lincoln Center at the Washington Square ANTA Theatre
in Greenwich Village from 3 December 1964 to 7 May 1965. The campus of the Lincoln Center for the
Performing Arts wasn’t completed in time for the production to be presented in
the Vivian Beaumont Theater, which would become RTLC’s home until it disbanded
in 1973.
[The final installment of this series will be posted on
Thursday, 15 August. Please come back to Rick On Theater to
check out the last few responses to Jaan Whitehead’s comments on institutional
theater.]
