Lindsey Mantoan: Hello, ASTR. Welcome. We've all been talking about ecology and time and change—sometimes all of them at once. Our conference call was very much inspired by Annalisa's article “Decomposition Instead of Collapse—Dear Theatre, Be Like Soil.” That piece really launched all of this.
I have some notes that are not really questions, because there are no answers to them. So, first one: when you're thinking about theatrical ecologies, where do you find abundance these days?
Madeline Sayet: I like the question. Where I find abundance these days is in community and in people. One thing I feel gets lost a lot in the American theatre field/ecosystem, when it is focused so much on fiscal aspects of things, is that most theatre that most people see is performed by their loved ones or in communities, not necessarily large-scale professional productions. Those community organizations are actually thriving, and they're continuously finding opportunities to continue to gather around community in ways that the limitations of the fiscal structures of for-profit theatre just don't allow for. Youth, in particular, are continuously finding new ways to investigate those forms.
During the theatre shut down in the pandemic, suddenly everything was equalized. Suddenly everyone was making Zoom theatre. These moments of equalization and empowerment… I feel good when I think of the resources we have to dream up storytelling that immediately interacts with the people around us, as opposed to having to plan years ahead inside of a system.
Annalisa: I would add that where I see abundance right now is in expanding the frame of what we think of as theatre. No theatre or performing arts venture can exist outside of or outside of connection with the rest of the world, so no art that we make exists in a vacuum.
I am a new co-director at HERE Arts Center, and we are not outside of the pressures and precarities of the finances of the rest of the field. We are facing the same things and having to make really difficult choices and navigate rocky terrain. I look for abundance inside of that by thinking of HERE Arts Center and my work as an independent artist in connection with everything else that isn’t the theatre field.
Lindsey: Thank you. When we think about resources, how can we reimagine our relationship to them, perhaps so we move toward feelings of abundance?
Madeline: As a fiscal reduction in resources is happening now in a lot of these larger theatres, there is a lot more solo performance happening. Theoretically, in the tradition of solo performance, what it should be embodying is this direct call to action with community—thinking about oral tradition and the ways in which storytelling can be immediate and specific. Instead, it isn't being intentionally thought out that way. It’s programmed because it’s fewer people on stage so that we can spend less money, and in that reality, you're reducing the ecosystem being represented in the space and creating isolationism.
There is a lot of possibility in how we think about these moments of “we can't budget for x, y or z, let's cut back.” But we should be thinking how that could be useful or of service to the project and the art and the community in a specific way. How do we not treat that performer like they are a product? How do we make sure we have what they need to build community?
When I was doing the tour of my show Where We Belong, it was really important to me that we had an accountability rider because in my mind a tour was an inherently colonial act. The idea I would show up on other people's land, tell you my story. I don't know you. It makes no sense. With the play there was a requirement they present the work of a local Native writer, and that at the theatre, they're building relationships with the Native communities in each place—there were all these different things and here are always free tickets for all Native audiences, so we constantly have other Native people in the building so the performer is not alone. I'm not being isolated from my community in a way.
Annalisa: So, I'm thinking about the financial pressures that everybody is facing, and one of the easy answers for some folks is like, “reduce cast sizes, cut the cost.” I get that. We're having similar conversations. What I hadn't quite thought about is the potentially unintended impact of cutting cast size, whether they are solo plays or not, then what does that do for the actual worldbuilding that we are able to see on stage? How does that actually enclose—
Madeline: It shrinks the world.
Annalisa: Yeah, it shrinks the world. I thought about that impact in relation to financial pressures.
Madeline: Yes, capitalism is shrinking the world. Next question.
Everybody has been constantly trying to scale up and scale up and scale up. In theatre, it is impractical.
Lindsey: You’ve asked that I not phrase this as a question. Growth and degrowth: discuss.
Madeline: You get to go first.
Annalisa: I have a tangent.
Madeline: You know I love a tangent.
Annalisa: The thing is, professional versus community and educational theatre—that separation is always weird to me. A thing that I learned a couple weeks ago from Todd London was that apparently, back in the sixties during the height of the regional theatre movement, Theatre Communications Group (TCG) decided to serve “professional” theatres exclusively. Before that, it included all theatres: the emerging professional field, educational theatre, and community theatre.
I'm like, look at where the abundance is now. I look at TCG's ongoing transformation that they are going through, and I wonder about that decision to professionalize and exclude and its cascading impacts now. I feel like we all came up through some education with community theatre before ever… I never saw myself as a person who had a pathway into professional theatre. I only ever thought the pathways available to me were through educational theatre.
Madeline: I often miss community theatre, if I'm being honest.
Related to that, for a while everybody has been constantly trying to scale up and scale up and scale up. In theatre, it is impractical. They have a bigger building and more debt, and you're not sustaining the audiences required for that bigger building. Now, we have environmental crisis, and the buildings are no longer viable for several reasons. It is just an important opportunity to think about things like what you were doing in Baltimore Center Stage: how do we share that space? How do we invite other people to share resources in that space when we're not able to do it on our own?
Every one of those big theatres started as community and got bigger. I don't understand, necessarily, the merit to that continuous growth. I think there is something structural, an opportunity, when you do things outside and in physically your community. When do you think of the whole ecosystem instead of winning the theatre war in the city?
Lindsey: Okay, so we're dancing around questions of audience. What are your current thoughts on the ecosystem of the audience?
Annalisa: So, you guys, I was at this convening thing for the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, which, who knows how long that will still exist?
Madeline: Not long.
Annalisa: I was there a couple weeks ago, and there was this study they shared with the group that was a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) study from 2022 on arts participation in the United States. They have a graph of declining audiences, and in 2022 apparently less than 5 percent of United States adults saw plays. That's the end of the sentence. Then less than 10 percent see musicals.
In the face of the multipronged crisis and the political environment that we're in, there are so many people doing what I think is really important, beautiful, valuable work that has political ramifications. I see statistics like that—what actually are we doing? Who are we trying to reach when we're making art?
These days I'm like more interested in—this might sound like woo-woo a little bit—but experiences of wonder and awe and creating a space for gathering. I'll pause there.
Why are we here together, and why are we gathering? Why is that togetherness so vital and important and transformative?
Madeline: I think it is actually about when you gather around story and who you can gather with at any given time. One of my mentors, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., when he would write a play, he would go knock on people's doors, wherever he was, and suddenly he would have a reading. He didn't care. He wasn't like, “you're not good enough.” He was like, “Who is going to sit around and read, and we will talk about the play? I want us to gather around story today because there is something in the story we need to be together around.” That's the heart of the thing.
We can do the same show every single day for a year, and we're never going to reach as many people as a movie. That is not going to happen. Why are we here together, and why are we gathering? Why is that togetherness so vital and important and transformative?
It is just a matter of how we make sure that we're not just neutralizing the art or making it generic or planning something that was popular two seasons ago in a different neighborhood, when what we need is of here and now.
It does happen very often that I see a show and I'm like, “Something is wrong. When was this show written?” “Four years ago.” That explains everything. It hasn't quite caught up to the moment we’re in, and the immediacy of the form is so important. That is something theatre is uniquely capable of doing, and it is really important we're actually empowered to do that.
In the United Kingdom they use stats that prove that going to the arts improves your health as justification for funding. Gathering together with people helps us and heals us in various specific ways.
Lindsey: We've been talking about architectural scale and scaling up buildings, as well as the local, the power of theatre to do something on a much faster pace. The challenge there becomes production, right?
In our call for this conference, we started with “this theatre is closing, that theatre is closing.” If there is a death of some of the theatres in our ecosystem, do we see a way forward that is in the space between professional and not professional?
Annalisa: In these spaces, part of decomposition is being allowed to grieve the thing. There is not a good or moral reason it is one theatre versus another theatre, and people have worked really hard, and that is important to me.
Madeline: Thank you. Grief.
Annalisa: Grief is part of that cycle, and you have to grieve to be able to celebrate regrowth.
When I think about potential futures of what HERE Arts Center, my colleagues and I are talking about what it might look like as a community hub or a civic hub in lower Manhattan, where things that might look like professional theatre happen, but there is also like potentially community organizing in the lobby or drag night on Fridays. You know? The strict boundaries around form, I think, we're not interested in.
Madeline: More theatres are trying to do more of that, but an important part of it is we're not saying artists shouldn't get to be artists. There are some kinds of really cool art that are expensive to do or that aren’t. There is a spectrum, and driving to isolate parts of the spectrum is a tricky exercise. There was a play I directed for Native Voices in Los Angeles last week we did site-specific in a place that was formerly a museum that housed native ancestors’ remains. So we needed to reclaim that space for Native peoples as part of the creative process on that show and honor the ancestors whose spirits were there. You don't have to be this or that kind of artist; sometimes the community needs the spectrum. But it becomes tricky sometimes when the large organizations decide to do things that take resources from the smaller community organizations. I don't know how to solve that part. At a lot of theatres, that's an ongoing issue when suddenly the larger organizations can get funding to do the project when other people have been supporting the artist the entire time. No answer for that one, Lindsey.
Grief is part of that cycle, and you have to grieve to be able to celebrate regrowth.
Lindsey: Should we use that as a segue? We'll open it up so you all can ask questions of our wonderful artists.
Gabriel: Thank you for inviting me. I'm curious, as educators and people in academia, we are storied creatures as we move through life. I'm curious as we move through the next four years…How do you think about opening up theatre in your ecosystems—in production and cast and audience—to people all along the pipeline. I know there are people who get out of prison, people like my father in their seventies who feel they did not take the right steps. They did not get to go to college. They will not now have the money. They will not now have the time.
How do you feel you can open up those spaces and make it feel like their stories still have relevance and that they can still participate in the space?
Madeline: At the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program it has always been really important that the program serves Native artists beyond Yale. That it’s for the field as a whole to access, to develop all of our artists. Native theatre relies on continuously opening up and sharing the resources we do have because it’s such a small community. Red Eagle Soaring, led by Nicole Suyama, who is here, are constantly partnering and sharing information and talent. That's how we share as a Native community. I don't know how the rest of the folks do it.
My mother became a playwright. She was like, “You're doing it, it can't be that hard.” So now she is a playwright. When she was my age, she was doing a different kind of writing, working to get our nation federal recognition. Now, she has the opportunity to be creative, when before it was more important to fight for the existence of our nation. We're always generally looking to include more and more people in our Native communities into the theatre community because that's just what it is for. It is for everyone to be able to participate, everyone to find a voice, especially for Native nations because there are so many different nations whose important stories need to be told. Realistically, the American theatre has heard such a small percentage of the kinds of Native stories that even exist. Not only do we need more Native folks from all the Native nations, but more folks from each nation. It's crazy when you get to have another Mohegan person working on the same project, or there was a reading of a Navajo play—they were able to cast with all Navajos and have that shared understanding.
Annalisa: Like, you meet someone in a store, and you go “Oh, you went to acting school. Did you know there is a theatre conference? Why don't you come?” It is literally one-to-one, the weird little synergies. I walked into a store earlier today and met Gabriel, an actor.
“Do you want to come to the conference?”
Now, here is Gabriel. I don't say this to pat myself on the back at all. I invite you to similarly pay attention to who is around you. Have conversations that invite people.
I think about the times when people did that for me and I said earlier that I never saw a pathway into professional theatre, and the only way that my eyes opened to that is because of one-on-one relationships.
Lindsey: Thank you both so much for sharing your insights and your experience with all of us.
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