Weekly Theater Ideas Newsletter
January 23-29, 2025
I’ve been hard at it this week, working on The Rooted Stage series. Writing as blog posts rather than chapters has allowed me to keep my usual writing voice while preventing me from falling into the deadly pseudo-academic voice that I’m sure nobody wants.
Let’s start with those posts.
I began with a discussion of the first step away from the model of the resident stock company that I discussed in the initial post: the birth of the star system.
What Happened in 1870? (Not So Fast) (Part 2 of The Rooted Stage)
“It was a very attractive option for resident stock companies, who could provide their audiences with some variety while also charging higher ticket prices and packing the house. Thus, the star actor made an excellent living, and the company members made more than they’d usually make while he was visiting. A win-win. “From the 1820s on,” Bigsby writes, “it became common for a traveling star to be attached to a local stock company for at least part of a season, and increasingly American audiences came to demand nothing less than a star in every performance.”
“A star often arrived the day before the first performance and rehearsed with the company the morning before playing each role. Having played all of his or her roles at least once, the star departed for the next engagement while the company played without a star until the next one arrived.”
The ease of touring was enhanced with the expansion of the railroad system in the US, and soon The Road was seen as being paved with gold by foreign and US stars alike.
Read it all here.
Let’s talk about the importance of real estate, which will be a major factor in 1870 and especially 1896.
Who Owns the Buildings (The Rooted Stage, Part 3)
“During this century and a half each company was a self-contained unit, entirely independent of every other company; entirely independent of every form of outside control and influence, except, of course, that of the taste of the theatregoing public. Each company consisted of a group of relatively permanent actors with a repertoire of standard English plays, which later on was gradually augmented by the addition of contemporary successes from abroad—from Germany and France, as well as from England. The settings, costumes and properties necessary to mount these plays were part of the equipment of each company, and were used repeatedly with necessary alterations and additions as new types of plays were added to the repertoire. Each company controlled, either through ownership or by lease, the theatre in which it played; and as time wore on and the theatre buildings took on a more permanent character, the relationship between a company and a given theatre became closer and closer. The companies continued to travel for part of each season among a limited number of cities, but more and more they remained at their home theatres and were identified with them.”
Read why this was important here.
Some random thoughts:
Fichandler: The Burden of the Nonprofit System in US
Zelda Fichandler, the co-founder of Arena Stage in DC, and one of the Founding Mothers (along with Eva La Gallienne, Margo, Jones, and Nina Vance):
“There is no real way of likening us to other culture carriers such as the British National or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the present Moscow Art Theatre, since we are all of us broke and have small companies instead of very big ones. We spend half of our life at fundraising dinners and defending play choices to citizen boards of directors, since with the impulse that we should have theaters in our land came also the impulse that the community should be part of them, should put up some of the money, should even have a voice in them, and—now hear this!—should even commission theaters into being and hire artistic directors to run them. These artistic directors soon leave, out of enormous fatigue bordering on the Sisyphean, or out of wrath at non-professionals meddling in decisions that are hard enough to make all alone, or out of a general feeling of: ‘Who needs it? What I really want to do is direct, not run an inefficient branch of IBM.”’
This is the problem with the nonprofit system–there are too many non-artists involved, and too much money to be raised. It is why, in *Building a Sustainable Theater,” I suggest that theaters be for-profit, and live within their budget.
In The Long Revolution by Zelda Fichandler, edited by Todd London
On Restaurants and Theaters
I was at a wonderful, new local restaurant today. It opened several months ago, and it was our first visit. The food was excellent, the atmosphere understated and comfortably classy. There was a nice bar with about eight chairs and fewer than ten tables, each of which sat four people. The restaurant is open five days a week for lunch and dinner. The staff seemed to be the two owners–maybe there was another staff person during another shift, I don’t know. About five of the tables were full, including ours.
So here’s my question: how does a business of this scale make enough money to allow the owners (and additional staff person?) to make a living? And if they can do it, what can theater people learn from them?
In a post entitled “Nothing to Say,” Substack Head of Writer Relations Sophia Efthimiatou shares some interesting thoughts about having “nothing to say” opens the door to receiving, which has become a lost art. She says:
“What has been lost,” she says,
“is a quality that never came easy to us to begin with, and that is our ability to receive. To receive, as Steinbeck put it, “anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine.”
Recipience has been diminished everywhere in our culture, worst of all in art, which to be considered art at all must fulfill its duty to receive us generously, and where successful, create more space within us for reception. By reception I do not mean acceptance. I mean an anticipation of our humanity, in its totality, from misery to glory. This quality is inherent to all the works we have commonly accepted as “great,” be they plays or novels or paintings or film. But instead of extending an invitation to their audiences, contemporary artists are more and more inclined to abuse them. I have found myself trapped in performances that attempted to rehabilitate me in ways similar to those in “A Clockwork Orange.” Any discomfort I felt did not arise from a sudden recognition of the failings I was instructed to acknowledge within me, but from the stiffness of theater seats I had to endure for indefensibly indulgent runtimes. It occurred to me that I was being treated exactly as I was on social media: like an invisible, inconsequential void, the dark depths of which could only be reached by the loudest projection of opinion. Artists seemed to forget that I was not there as a passive voyeur but as a human being sharing time, oxygen, and a sacred silence with other human beings. It is the silence of amphitheaters and libraries and cathedrals, of the seconds between the last note played at a concert and the eruption of applause, a silence that enters us all simultaneously like communion and within which a unity grows.”
Next week, I am anticipating at least two more additions to The Rooted Stage, including an interview with myself by myself which probably should be a considered the Introduction to The Rooted Stage. I will also, finally, get to 1870.
All the best,
Scott