I sit in theaters today and I question who this contemporary audience is and if they find themselves represented onstage. The demographics of the audience are different, theater to theater, town to town; the National Theater attracts older audience members who go to be seen, the independent spaces usually play towards a younger crowd, similar to the Broadway, independent and regional audiences in the US. But the one unifying factor is that the work isn’t made for the audience, it’s made for the artist.
I grew up entranced by Jim Henson’s Muppets. Performing with wry but gentle humor, they pulled back the curtain to snicker at backstage life and deftly expressed all the joy, camaraderie, and frustration of working as an ensemble. Though televised, it embraced the dynamic liveness integral to puppetry, variety, and vaudeville as art forms. So now, looking back at the films as a young arts manager, I’m shocked to realize that Kermit the Frog—whom I love very, very much—is a pretty bad producer.
As a former fellow-traveler, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale than the summiteers, all of this got me thinking: For the twenty two years of Theater of the First Amendment’s producing life as the resident professional company of George Mason University, how did we do?
Alvina Krause, one of twentieth century’s most famous teachers of acting, believed, “if you can act Chekhov, you can act anything!” In the summer of 1976 she was 83 years old, long retired, yet still taking private students in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. Little did she know that seven students from Northwestern University in Chicago would come to study “acting Chekhov” with her, and end up settling into the town for a much longer stay as the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble (BTE).
Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Bay Area hosted a series of six roundtable discussions intended to uncover the best new thinking and practices around what most effectively links audiences, generative artists and the theaters who produce them livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv. The fifth of six discussions was in Minneapolis on Friday 7 March at 11 a.m. PST (San Francisco) / 1 p.m. CST (Chicago) / 2 p.m. EST (New York City).
The Business Case for Radical Hospitality, or No-Cost Access to Theater
2 March 2014
Part two of this series, curated by Aditi Kapil, playwright-in-residence at Mixed Blood Theatre, examines the pragmatics of how Radical Hospitality works, “The Financial or Business Case,” in a conversation with Managing Director Amanda White Thietje, Community Outreach & Marketing Manager Brie Jonna, and Artistic Director Jack Reuler.
How do you work as a group? How do you work without a script? How do you ask someone to fund a group without a script? And how are you still together—financially, artistically? The non-traditional model of creation is frequently mysterious if only because it is hard to understand without doing.
Cape May Stage is a small Equity theater in Southern New Jersey—about as far south as you can go before your hat floats. Geographically, we are isolated from our colleagues in neighboring cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Yet, because our audiences routinely come from those places, we are forced to compete with larger theaters with larger budgets. That demands a creative solution.
We often discuss originality at Q Artistry, an Indianapolis based new works theater organization. We debate it and comb over it with dirty, bloody brushes or pluck at it with a solitary virgin pick. And we always come up with different answers. From talking bowling pins to singing bunnies, we've presented ideas in theater form that were brand new or re-imagined. We've set Edgar Allan Poe to theatrical music in "Cabaret Poe" and turned the villain from the oldest poem known to man into an experience for audiences in "Grendel".
Starting a theater company is much like getting ready to write a book report in the sixth grade. Before you get to the nitty-gritty, you first have to figure out the “Five Ws and One H.” Who? What? Where? Why? When? And, How?
Artistic director and playwright Wendy MacLeod and I wondered aloud: what would happen if, right then, that playwright was placed in a remote community of writers for two weeks, at Ohio’s quiet and serenely beautiful Kenyon College? And what if that playwright could work with the commissioning theater’s literary manager as an advising voice and with all the tools at hand—actors to read, writers to hear, and, at the end, a fully staged reading? And no ticket sales. No critics.
Speaking of centralized authority figures: we are also so accustomed to having the “initial creative impulse” of a play come from a playwright .... But given the core task of the role—establishing the high-level vision for a production—is there any reason why, say, a designer or actor couldn’t serve as a product owner? I mean… why should playwrights be the only theater artists who get to sit in the “big vision” chair? In an agile theater world, they wouldn’t.
In the middle of the National Theater Festival and National Independent Theater Festival in Bucharest, the divide between idependent theatre and state theatre—artistic freedom and money—becomes clear.
Towards a New Collective in American Theater, Part One
3 January 2014
Tired of waiting for a production and the loneliness writing entails, The Welders formed to take action. The warm reception made them realize how much can be done when having a community.
The Weekly Howl is a peer produced, open access discussion about theater culture and contemporary performance that happens in real-time on Twitter using the hashtag #newplay. If you have an idea for a topic or if you want to moderate the discussion, contact us on Twitter @HowlRound. The Weekly Howl happens on Thursdays on hashtag #newplay at 11am PST / 1pm CST / 2pm EST / 19:00 GMT / 8pm CET
A. Nora Long examines our culture's fascination with the starving artist, scrambling to make ends meet... and calls for a movement to dismantle our thoughts about how we make a life in the theater.
Theater management in Romania – A Mandatory Professionalization
10 December 2013
The fall of communism in 1989 ledway to the democratisation of art. Ioana Tamas gives the breakdown of how arts management had to be developed to make this transition successful.
Adam Burnett and Jud Knudsen imagine a world without arts funding and wonder: could that actually be the impetus we need to rethink how and why we make theater?
This initial conversation between Artistic Director Jack Reuler and Playwright-in-Residence Aditi Brennan Kapil examines the artistic case for a theatre in Minneapolis to charge no admission, program ambitious new work that stretches its aesthetics, capacity, and resources, and perhaps more importantly, why this matters?
Paul Meshejian challenges the idea that compensation in theater is something to be taken for granted. Instead, shouldn't we expect to not make much for our art?
Navigating the Gray Areas of a Love or Money Industry; Part Three: All you Need is Love
10 November 2013
The key to successful “amateur” theatre is communication. Danielle Rosvally reminds us that outsiders need transparent frame works so the relationship with the company be a success.
The Dramatists Guild of America presents a panel discussion "Playwrights at the Helm" livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv on Tuesday 22 October 2013 at 2:30 p.m. PDT (San Francisco) / 4:30 p.m. CDT (Austin) / 5:30 p.m. EDT (New York) / 21:30 GMT. Use Twitter hashtag #howlround and direct comments @DramatistsGuild.