There are theater artists interested in the kind of work you describe. I happen to be one of them. But many of us have been shut out because our interests are not in the activist fury of the day but in craft, innovation, form & content, and (dare I say it) universal themes. But as you suggest early on, the theater has taken a wrong turn. Yet then you move on without discussing what that wrong turn was, and why the theater is still on that path. It made national news this week—a field that says it’s committed to “inclusion” showed its true colors. It was a missed opportunity to have a worthy conversation. Instead, the theater shunned a heretic.
I did indeed, because my focus is on inspiration rather than condemnation. Jones thought the problem was realism and journalism, which is similar to the “activist fury” of today. I have no stomach anymore to enter the fray of today’s “national news” — I spent years doing so on my old blog (theatreideas.blogspot.com). I find the discussions mostly shallow — full of sound and fury. But occasionally someone suggests that perhaps we should be revisiting the visionaries of the past, but as someone who taught Drama for several decades, I have become convinced that today’s theater people, including most professors, don’t know who those visionaries are. I am trying to bring their names and their ideas back into the conversation. I don’t know what form the new theater will take, but I believe that it starts with people inspired to do something different. If that is you, then you may look at some of these books as a foundation for your vision. One aspect of that journey is to realize that you can’t be shut out of something you don’t want to join. The error many of our young visionaries have made is that they want to run the old institutions, instead of creating something new outside of those institutions — something that makes those institutions irrelevant — and then resisting the desire to join when the old institutions come calling. Ezra Poud famously said “make it new.” Don’t pour your new wine into old containers.
The book sounds up my alley, I’m going to check it out.
I agree with you about building outside legacy institutions. By hook or by crook, I’ve managed to self-produce three productions in NYC, so I’m no stranger to the life of an artist working on the fringes.
Because I have done, and I am doing that work, I have experienced the limits of the “parallel institutions” path. Outsider artists still need resources. We need rehearsal spaces that don’t require ideological commitments for entry. We need critics willing to engage with the work on its own artistic terms—what it is attempting, how its form and content dance together, where it succeeds or fails—rather than judging it through the prism of fashionable morality. And we need grant funding that doesn’t favor particular identities or political commitments. As I wrote in my most recent post, one grant I applied for this year only weighted artistic merit as 25% of the criteria.
Isn’t the stage precisely where we should explore contentious social questions? Theater can put competing ideas, especially deeply uncomfortable ones, into embodied conflict in front of a live audience without requiring artists to resolve them before the curtain rises. That’s one thing theater can do that few other forms can—especially as theater has no ratings system like film.
I agree artists need to build new structures rather than simply trying to take over the old ones. Artists also need brave commentators willing to name what has gone wrong with the existing structures. There has been very little self-reflection—the problems are frequently blamed on external forces (the government, the system, capitalism, “hate” etc.) but I rarely hear, “Maybe we (the theater artists and administrators) took some things too far. Maybe we played a part in driving away audiences and artists.” Without people bravely coming forward to say this, the artists working on the outside are left trying to build a new theater without anyone honestly explaining why the old one stopped working.
One of the things that became very clear from reading Sara Farrington's "The Lost Conversation" is how important low rent and available space was to the flowering of the avant garde in the 70s and 80s. That's why I am skeptical that anything new is going to come from NYC because rents are ridiculous and space is scarce. I also am skeptical that the grant-based nonprofit system is viable any longer, and the idea that there is going to be a sudden upswing in money is a fantasy that is not worth waiting for. Find your people (use your blog to do this), leave the city, and create theater where it is inexpensive enough that you can produce one thing after another without bankruptcy and without having to ask permission or beg for money. You have the producing experience, so you have a head start. Anyway, that's MY belief. But I would encourage you, as a working artist, to not only create work but to write about it afterwards in order that someone else can be inspired. And engage with the ideas of past visionaries as well as asking new questions. Use your blog to right about your vision, and to work through your ideas. Actors are told that you can't act a "not" -- the same is true for all theater artists. Identifying the wrong turn is a very small part of the process -- telling people the next right turn is far harder, and far more valuable. My job, as a theater historian, is to point to some of the turns others made that might be worth doubling back for. I hope you find something in Jones's book, or Farrington's book. You are the Indiana Jones of your own adventure trying to find past treasures that you can build something new from.
I didn’t ask for your advice, Polonius. What I did was point out that you, yourself, articulated a “wrong turn” but failed to state what you think that wrong turn was. I wonder why you spend far more time giving me advice I didn’t ask for than actually finishing the thought you started. Perhaps an unwillingness to say what you think is, in fact, the real problem in the theater—and you just demonstrated it.
And you’ve just reminded me about why I usually don’t provide a comment button. I apologize that I offended you. Since I, myself, am not a theater artist, and am now retired, I’m not certain that my opinion of the “real problem” is important. However, here’s a few possibilities:
The Business Model Doesn’t Work. When the mean theater income for an Actors Equity member is zero because more than half of the membership didn’t work in the past year, you don’t have a profession, you have a hobby that pays a little. That’s why I wrote “Building a Sustainable Theater.”
The Theater is Too Centralized. New York is no longer a sustainable place for theater people to live and create.
Theater Should be a Dialectic, Not a Lecture. Plays are written with a melodramatic moral structure that over-simplifies the conflict between the main characters.
Too Much. Production values are too resource heavy, and the mistaken belief that theater requires a theater space with lots of equipment takes away production opportunities.
Careerism Has Replaced Artistic Vision. Theater is all hustle and few values.
We Need More Permanent Companies. There is value in continuity.
We Need More Rotating Rep. If you have a company, and your production values are not resource heavy, you can easily and inexpensively bring back popular productions, and also do plays that may not have mass appeal but are worth doing for other reasons.
I could probably go on, but I won’t because it will end in arguments over various issues instead of inspiration concerning other possibilities. My off-the-top-of-my-head list is probably not your list, or anybody else’s, and it will derail Robert Edmond Jones’s ideas. Which is why I haven’t written a “Here’s What We Ought to Do” post (although I did put a lot of it into “Building a Sustainable Theater”).
No need to apologize, especially since you answered my question.
I wasn’t offended. Irritated, yes, but offended, no.
I keep my comments open, even though some comments are inconvenient. From your own blog, I see you advise artists to listen to other people’s views. The number of comments may or may not play a factor in a post getting eyeballs—I haven’t yet figured out how that works.
I had a recent experience that made me wonder whether building an online/social media audience necessarily translates to butts in seats. A well-known artist in the “heterodox” sphere with many followers recently put up a reading that was supposed to have been sold out—to everyone’s surprise, there were about 12 people there. It made me wonder about the value of creating an engaged social media audience if they don’t understand that the only real audience that matters to a theater artist is the one in the seats.
I definitely agree with you regarding the spread of theater that lectures. I’d go further to say I’ve seen plays that put the audience on the stand as the accused, rather than having the confidence to let them observe and draw their own conclusions. How many times do audiences need to experience this before they say “to heck with it, I’m not going back”? And who’s creating and programming those shows? It’s not “the system.”
I’m an AEA member, so I also see the problem. That union was created at a time when labor laws generally were not as strong as they are today. I truly wonder if that union is harming the field more than helping actors get real wages. These days, I get more emails from them about their Political Action Committee than I do about how they are creating pathways to new jobs.
Thanks again for the answer, we seem to agree on many things. Looking forward to reading Jones.
There are theater artists interested in the kind of work you describe. I happen to be one of them. But many of us have been shut out because our interests are not in the activist fury of the day but in craft, innovation, form & content, and (dare I say it) universal themes. But as you suggest early on, the theater has taken a wrong turn. Yet then you move on without discussing what that wrong turn was, and why the theater is still on that path. It made national news this week—a field that says it’s committed to “inclusion” showed its true colors. It was a missed opportunity to have a worthy conversation. Instead, the theater shunned a heretic.
I did indeed, because my focus is on inspiration rather than condemnation. Jones thought the problem was realism and journalism, which is similar to the “activist fury” of today. I have no stomach anymore to enter the fray of today’s “national news” — I spent years doing so on my old blog (theatreideas.blogspot.com). I find the discussions mostly shallow — full of sound and fury. But occasionally someone suggests that perhaps we should be revisiting the visionaries of the past, but as someone who taught Drama for several decades, I have become convinced that today’s theater people, including most professors, don’t know who those visionaries are. I am trying to bring their names and their ideas back into the conversation. I don’t know what form the new theater will take, but I believe that it starts with people inspired to do something different. If that is you, then you may look at some of these books as a foundation for your vision. One aspect of that journey is to realize that you can’t be shut out of something you don’t want to join. The error many of our young visionaries have made is that they want to run the old institutions, instead of creating something new outside of those institutions — something that makes those institutions irrelevant — and then resisting the desire to join when the old institutions come calling. Ezra Poud famously said “make it new.” Don’t pour your new wine into old containers.
The book sounds up my alley, I’m going to check it out.
I agree with you about building outside legacy institutions. By hook or by crook, I’ve managed to self-produce three productions in NYC, so I’m no stranger to the life of an artist working on the fringes.
Because I have done, and I am doing that work, I have experienced the limits of the “parallel institutions” path. Outsider artists still need resources. We need rehearsal spaces that don’t require ideological commitments for entry. We need critics willing to engage with the work on its own artistic terms—what it is attempting, how its form and content dance together, where it succeeds or fails—rather than judging it through the prism of fashionable morality. And we need grant funding that doesn’t favor particular identities or political commitments. As I wrote in my most recent post, one grant I applied for this year only weighted artistic merit as 25% of the criteria.
https://kevinrayworks.substack.com/p/identity-crisis
Isn’t the stage precisely where we should explore contentious social questions? Theater can put competing ideas, especially deeply uncomfortable ones, into embodied conflict in front of a live audience without requiring artists to resolve them before the curtain rises. That’s one thing theater can do that few other forms can—especially as theater has no ratings system like film.
I agree artists need to build new structures rather than simply trying to take over the old ones. Artists also need brave commentators willing to name what has gone wrong with the existing structures. There has been very little self-reflection—the problems are frequently blamed on external forces (the government, the system, capitalism, “hate” etc.) but I rarely hear, “Maybe we (the theater artists and administrators) took some things too far. Maybe we played a part in driving away audiences and artists.” Without people bravely coming forward to say this, the artists working on the outside are left trying to build a new theater without anyone honestly explaining why the old one stopped working.
One of the things that became very clear from reading Sara Farrington's "The Lost Conversation" is how important low rent and available space was to the flowering of the avant garde in the 70s and 80s. That's why I am skeptical that anything new is going to come from NYC because rents are ridiculous and space is scarce. I also am skeptical that the grant-based nonprofit system is viable any longer, and the idea that there is going to be a sudden upswing in money is a fantasy that is not worth waiting for. Find your people (use your blog to do this), leave the city, and create theater where it is inexpensive enough that you can produce one thing after another without bankruptcy and without having to ask permission or beg for money. You have the producing experience, so you have a head start. Anyway, that's MY belief. But I would encourage you, as a working artist, to not only create work but to write about it afterwards in order that someone else can be inspired. And engage with the ideas of past visionaries as well as asking new questions. Use your blog to right about your vision, and to work through your ideas. Actors are told that you can't act a "not" -- the same is true for all theater artists. Identifying the wrong turn is a very small part of the process -- telling people the next right turn is far harder, and far more valuable. My job, as a theater historian, is to point to some of the turns others made that might be worth doubling back for. I hope you find something in Jones's book, or Farrington's book. You are the Indiana Jones of your own adventure trying to find past treasures that you can build something new from.
I didn’t ask for your advice, Polonius. What I did was point out that you, yourself, articulated a “wrong turn” but failed to state what you think that wrong turn was. I wonder why you spend far more time giving me advice I didn’t ask for than actually finishing the thought you started. Perhaps an unwillingness to say what you think is, in fact, the real problem in the theater—and you just demonstrated it.
And you’ve just reminded me about why I usually don’t provide a comment button. I apologize that I offended you. Since I, myself, am not a theater artist, and am now retired, I’m not certain that my opinion of the “real problem” is important. However, here’s a few possibilities:
The Business Model Doesn’t Work. When the mean theater income for an Actors Equity member is zero because more than half of the membership didn’t work in the past year, you don’t have a profession, you have a hobby that pays a little. That’s why I wrote “Building a Sustainable Theater.”
The Theater is Too Centralized. New York is no longer a sustainable place for theater people to live and create.
Theater Should be a Dialectic, Not a Lecture. Plays are written with a melodramatic moral structure that over-simplifies the conflict between the main characters.
Too Much. Production values are too resource heavy, and the mistaken belief that theater requires a theater space with lots of equipment takes away production opportunities.
Careerism Has Replaced Artistic Vision. Theater is all hustle and few values.
We Need More Permanent Companies. There is value in continuity.
We Need More Rotating Rep. If you have a company, and your production values are not resource heavy, you can easily and inexpensively bring back popular productions, and also do plays that may not have mass appeal but are worth doing for other reasons.
I could probably go on, but I won’t because it will end in arguments over various issues instead of inspiration concerning other possibilities. My off-the-top-of-my-head list is probably not your list, or anybody else’s, and it will derail Robert Edmond Jones’s ideas. Which is why I haven’t written a “Here’s What We Ought to Do” post (although I did put a lot of it into “Building a Sustainable Theater”).
No need to apologize, especially since you answered my question.
I wasn’t offended. Irritated, yes, but offended, no.
I keep my comments open, even though some comments are inconvenient. From your own blog, I see you advise artists to listen to other people’s views. The number of comments may or may not play a factor in a post getting eyeballs—I haven’t yet figured out how that works.
I had a recent experience that made me wonder whether building an online/social media audience necessarily translates to butts in seats. A well-known artist in the “heterodox” sphere with many followers recently put up a reading that was supposed to have been sold out—to everyone’s surprise, there were about 12 people there. It made me wonder about the value of creating an engaged social media audience if they don’t understand that the only real audience that matters to a theater artist is the one in the seats.
I definitely agree with you regarding the spread of theater that lectures. I’d go further to say I’ve seen plays that put the audience on the stand as the accused, rather than having the confidence to let them observe and draw their own conclusions. How many times do audiences need to experience this before they say “to heck with it, I’m not going back”? And who’s creating and programming those shows? It’s not “the system.”
I’m an AEA member, so I also see the problem. That union was created at a time when labor laws generally were not as strong as they are today. I truly wonder if that union is harming the field more than helping actors get real wages. These days, I get more emails from them about their Political Action Committee than I do about how they are creating pathways to new jobs.
Thanks again for the answer, we seem to agree on many things. Looking forward to reading Jones.