Theater Ideas Newsletter
Week of March 13, 2025
A Play, a Pie, and a Pint -- Why I Appreciate Scotland's Famous Lunchtime Theater
I confess I am fascinated by this Scottish theater company, who does a new play every week and performs in a pub. Last year, they celebrated their 20th anniversary. Here is an article about their 20 years in business. And below is a song with pictures written for the celebration. I have never seen a production, and I can’t even say whether I’d like what they do, but what I do like is the way they seem to have thought about theater from the ground up.
I'd Come Out of Retirement to Do This
If a university wanted to create an innovative theater program, I would come out of retirement to create a BA in Sustainable Theater. It would focus on environmentally sustainable design, playwriting, directing, and acting. There would also be a large component devoted to starting and running a company, and seniors would run their own company out of a storefront.
Read more. Or read the whole damn book.
After I published this, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in American Theatre Magazine (Winter 2025) entitled "Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching" which made my head explode. I sent a Letter to the Editor — I doubt it will be published.
Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, in the article "Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching" (Winter 2025), is generally correct in diagnosing "that undergraduate theatre training programs have a moral imperative to prepare students for the profession, not simply teach them to be good at what they do." However, the prescription--that students ought to be taught things like "how to shoot a self-tape or build a website" and how much rents are in NYC--fails to acknowledge that the system itself is dysfunctional and exploitative. Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the employment numbers published by Actors Equity should be deeply disturbed that the median theatre income for an Equity member is zero dollars--more than half didn't make a dime from theatre. And of those that did make any money, the average annual income was less than six months of rent. Saying "life in the business would be tough" isn't just an understatement, it is malpractice. If theatre departments really wanted to help theatre majors with their entry into the theatre, they would be taught how to create companies and self-produce in cities and towns across America, instead of focusing on preparing them for the dysfunctional con job that is the New York theater scene--and I include the regional theaters who have abandoned the purpose of the resident theater movement and have become mere outposts of NYC. Theatre majors would do well to read Todd London's An Ideal Theater for examples of the resident theater tradition, and theater professors would do well to start thinking in terms of alterative paths to a life as an artist. As Brownlow-Culkin rightly says, "the times, they are a-changin’;" they're just changing a lot more than theater professors seem willing to admit.
Maddening.
I wrote about two social philosophers I admire, Ivan Illich and John McKnight. (This was a result of my personal project, which is enjoyable.) There was a link to theater:
My friend Tom (the same guy who sent me the American Theatre magazine article) recently posted a video he found on PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.
Read more here: Ivan Illich, John McKnight, and Asset-Based Communities.
Keep on thinking, folks!
Scott