Incoming!
Abercrombie continues his examination of my ideas in his post Chapter Five, and I have to admit that this one initially ticked me off a wee bit. However, knowing that Abercrombie and I have been friends for a long time, I decided to treat this as a form of basic training in which I am asked to clamber over an obstacle course in order to prepare me for future combat. As Abercrombie states, “I’m not really writing to prove Scott “wrong.” I am writing to try to give anyone who reads his book a deeper look at the obstacles which confront anyone who attempts to put these theoretical ideas into practice.” Benefit of the doubt.
My response will have two parts. The first part will address fully a central claim he makes that is important for validating my book, and the second part will be a “lightning round” in which I respond briefly to questions and assertions.
Part One: On Theory
“Scott has written something theoretical (he admits at the outset that he himself has never tried to establish a theatre using his own concepts), and my effort is to take the theory and see how it might or might not be sustainable under current, practical conditions. Unlike Scott, I have been through the process of starting a theatre from scratch, so I speak from practical experience.”
At the risk of pedantry, I’d like to point out that people often use the word “theory” when they mean “hypothesis.” According to Merriam-Webster, “A hypothesis is an assumption, something proposed for the sake of argument so that it can be tested to see if it might be true… A theory, in contrast, is a principle that has been formed as an attempt to explain things that have already been substantiated by data.” In this sense, Abercrombie is right: my book involves a theory to “explain things that have already be substantiated by data.” What’s my data? History.
What I said in the book’s preface is this: “Have I done it myself? Full transparency: no, I haven’t, but others have. As I said above, I’m a theater historian by trade, which means that not only do I think some pretty important things happened prior to the last 10 minutes, but that some of those things might provide a key to figuring out how in the world we created this totally dysfunctional ‘system’ and how it might be redesigned to allow more people to share their gifts.” There is almost nothing in my book that hasn’t been tried successfully by someone else, either recently, in earlier eras of theater history, or in other entrepreneurial contexts. Thus, it’s a theory that rests on “substantiated data” drawn from the experiences of others.
The Network of Ensemble Theaters provides a lot of different successful models upon which to draw. Their manifesto says the following:
“The most unique aspect of our work is that the primary decision-making power rests in the hands of the artists. Ensemble theater is the antithesis of the corporate model that dominates the theatrical landscape in America today. Our resources are dedicated to supporting artists and the artistic process.
….
We see at the center of ensemble work an essential investigation and evolution of way of working that is fundamentally different in its impetus, its engagement of community, its artist driven organizations, and the collaborative manner in which creation occurs. This is the soul, the essence, of ensemble work.
By joining together in a Network of Ensemble Theaters we strive to give strength to each other; to share our resources; to create a forum for controversy and debate; to document and articulate the heritage and body of work of ensemble practice; and to maximize our ability to bring about change in the world beyond ourselves through the transformative power of collaborative theater.
Again, my book stands on the shoulders of those who have come before. Mine are not new models, they’re just models that don’t get much attention because we’re obsessed with corporate and institutional theater.
However, Abercrombie seems to dismiss the past entirely in favor of only individual, firsthand experience: “Success stories of people who built sustainable theatres, such as Paula Tomei at South Coast Repertory Theatre or the late Zelda Fichandler at Arena Stage in Washington DC, are the exception, not the rule, and were as much a product of their historical time as anything else.” Indeed, we are all products of our historical time, but our time isn’t so unique, so sui generis, so desperate that it stands outside of history entirely.1 If we couldn’t learn from the experiences of others, we’d spend our lives caught in a never-ending Nietzschean cycle of recurrence.
Nevertheless, most of the success stories I describe in the book focus on our own contemporaries, not only those of the past — people like Mike Wiley, Zack Mannheimer, Transcendence Theatre, Double Edge Theatre, Michelle Hensley and Ten Thousand Things.
Not to belabor this topic (too late), but I would draw your attention to Robert Cohen’s Acting Professionally: Raw Facts About Careers in Acting, a book that has been in print for over fifty years and has been a handbook for actors starting their career since its first printing 1972. I read it when I was in high school. Was Robert Cohen himself a successful actor? No, he was a director, a playwright, but mostly he was a college professor who wrote books about actors and acting.
Lightning Round
Group vs solo
“Scott’s model presumes…that there is a group or collective of people who have all contributed some amount of money to form the basis of your theatre; you’re not working solo.”
Not entirely true. Chapter 6: Start from Zero asks company founders to start with themselves alone and then add additional members only when they decide that’s what they absolutely need. Even then, I strongly recommend they add company members very, very selectively and carefully. Indeed, Chapter 7: Meet Mike Wiley describes in detail someone who writes and performs one-person shows while managing all the production details himself, and he makes enough money to have a house and a family while being artistically fulfilled. Frankly, I wish more people started this way, but I am realistic enough to know that most will not.
Control
In my previous post, I suggested “you might actually do some plays instead of just auditioning, thus increasing your experience and building your resume.” Abercrombie:
So this begs the question of which plays. Are you doing the play just YOU want to do, and that make YOU look good? Are you doing the plays the data says you should do but may not appeal to you? Are you doing the plays someone else in the collective wants to do that you might not want to do? Are you doing plays that cost money, or that the collective members are writing? Are they plays that will reflect favorably on your resume if others look at it (and why would you care about building a resume if you’re working in your own theatre?)? In each one of these and several other scenarios, you’re losing some sort of control.
All good questions. Questions that I address in Chapter 13: Why You Should Consider Having a Playwright, Chapter 14: Your Quality of Life Statement, Chapter 15: Vision, Chapter 19: Blue Oceans, and Chapter 20: Your “What” (Your Value Proposition). But to answer more directly: if you choose to be part of a group of shareholders, you won’t have dictatorial control. However, you and everyone else who owns a share in the company will participate in the decision making process regarding all of these and many more aspects of the company. I’ll say this, though: you will definitely have more input than you’ll have into what play a producer is doing on Broadway or in regional theaters.
Laziness
I concede that it is better to do plays than just constantly audition, but I think that actors working within the current system who are not doing plays are really just lazy. If you’re not doing plays, you’re really not pursuing a career. There are lots and lots of plays out there to do. If you’re in NYC, there are 748 venues in operation, according to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. If you can’t find a play to be in, you’re not trying hard enough.
Read my Introduction, and Chapter 5: How Artists Went from Being Owners to Employees to see full take, but briefly: this is victim blaming in defense of an exploitative, disempowering, and dysfunctional system.
Control (Part 2)
I said: you are in charge, so your success rests on your own decisions rather than the decisions of others.
Presuming you’re working with a collection of other artists, this statement is clearly untrue. You are NOT in charge, and your success rests as much on the collective decisions of the group as your own. If you ARE in charge, then you’re an Artistic Director in the old model, which I thought this model was attempting to eliminate (maybe not?)
Yes, and that’s why it is important that you add people to the company carefully. (See Chapter 8: Characteristics of a Company Member). Short answer: You are in charge of who you let into the company, and you should only let in people with whom you share goals and values. If you want complete control, perhaps consider being a novelist or poet.
Geography
I said: you can live anywhere you want, and you don’t have to travel.
“Anywhere” is painting with too broad a brush. Remember, the data has to indicate that there is a market for what you’re trying to sell. If there’s no market where you want to live, you either have to change what you’re trying to sell, live where you want but don't build a theatre there, or live somewhere where there’s a market, but may not be where you want to live. And how can you be sure the other members of your group want to live there too? Or will you simply pull all the members from where you decide to park your ass and build a theatre? And will the economic climate be one where you can eat, cloth and shelter yourself at a reasonable cost? I’d love to live in Aspen, CO, but I doubt my budget would take me that far.
Markets do not pre-exist, they are created. Your job is to identify and seek out your “1000 True Fans” (in places in which there isn’t a major theater scene already) or to create a “blue ocean” (if there is already a vibrant theater scene). And yes, if you can’t find enough people in a place who are interested in what you want to do, or if you don’t want to do the things the community seems to want, then move on. The planning process allows you to discover all this before you lose a bunch of your hard-earned cash.
As far as the other members, you either all agree about the place or you choose your company once you get there (again, see the sections on Transcendence Theater and Zack Mannheimer in Chapter 16: Finding Your Where). And yes, economic climate is an important part of the consideration of where you choose. Just like real life! I’m not making an argument that the decision to start a theater company gives you the power of omnipotence, just that you have more agency than the current system that almost forces theater artists to live in NYC, an economic climate that is unfriendly to say the least. Collaboration and coordination are important skills for working with other people, and sometimes it means making trade-offs.
When You Work
I said you can choose when you work.
If you’re working in the theatre and trying to create one that will be sustainable, this is just nonsense. You will ALWAYS be working, either preparing a performance or promoting your goods. And I am going to assume that, when you first start out, you will have a job and all that comes with that, including not being in charge of your personal work/time schedule, until your theatre can pay you and the other members of the company a sustainable living wage. It seems idyllic to say this, but it’s not a life reality. You’ll probably have to work when you have free time from other obligations.
As with any startup, your theater will likely start out as a side gig. The planning process, which I believe ought to take about a year, while not generating income, ought to increase the speed with which you reach a sustainable scale. During the planning period, your income will have to come from another source (yes, probably a job) while you start the process of building an audience through a series of experiments (see Chapter 25: Testing Your Ideas). You will NOT start out with a fully-produced production, but with the theatrical version of what, in software development, is called a “minimum viable product”: “an early, basic version of a product … that meets the minimum necessary requirements for use but can be adapted and improved in the future, especially after customer feedback.” This is how you find out if people want what you are creating. If you follow my recommendation about budgeting and institute a form of rotating rep (see Chapter 24: Project Budgeting), at a certain point you will have productions “in the can” that you can easily and quickly revive. This allows the company to reduce the pressure to always be creating.
As I say many times in the book, starting a small business is difficult, and a theater is probably more difficult small business than, say, a restaurant or bookstore. The purpose of Building a Sustainable Theater is to increase your chances of success, not to provide an ironclad guarantee.
Yes, some things are different. We can now stream shows at home, for instance; but the same was true of radio and TV. Prior to that, movies cut into theater’s audience; Shakespeare had to deal with bear baiting and brothels. Is our economy working against young artists in unheard of fashion? When I was 23, mortgage rates were over 16%, unemployment was 8.8%, the inflation rate was 10.3%, and the median family income was $22,390.