A Word on the Theatre Summit
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | 2 Comments
I am not going to go head-to-head with Don Hall – this is a sparring match I would lose. I don’t chalk it up to any less passion in my beliefs – it probably has something to do with the sanguine, eat-up-and-laugh-it-out nature of my Italian and Polish Ohio upbringing – which doesn’t really serve me well in a cage match with a self-professed Angry White Guy who touts his rough-and-tumble Irish city-kid background as the source of his in-your-face demeanor. And I want to be clear – I actually like Don, quite a bit. The guy has a tremendous heart and if you can count yourself among one of his friends, the smile and support you get from the him when you run into him on the street can just make your day.
So it’s not so fun to inadvertently find yourself on the business end of the stick he usually reserves for the GOP.
But also because, at the end of the day, I actually agree with Don on a couple of fundamental points. I hope that my record as an actor and general theatre gadabout has proven me to be much more comfortable with rolling up my sleeves and doing something rather than endless discussion about what we should be doing or who is doing it wrong. Frankly, that’s why my blog tends to have long gaps between posts: I like to be sure I’m contributing something useful to the theatre folk I imagine are my audience. And I often get sidetracked with real work: I collected the mass of data that became the start of the Chicago Theater Database because I wanted to actually be able to present people with information, rather than sound off on what I – through anecdotal evidence – believe the city’s theatre is lacking or has too much of. I started Theatre That Works because rather than complain about the lack of coverage or the focus of coverage, I’d start my own source and get out some of the stories I wish I saw elsewhere. I joined the side project partly out of a desire to put my time and energy where my mouth is on matters of theatre management and marketing.
When Nick Keenan told me about the Storefront Summit a couple of weeks ago and asked me to go, I said I would because when Nick tells me I should be in a room for a certain conversation, he does so knowing that I will be able to make some connections that others might not and – perhaps most importantly – be looking for something I can actually do. I was very eager, going into that meeting, to meet some new folks and to hear about what they are struggling with. I wanted to figure out how, through the CTDB, the Chicago Artists Resource, the side project or through my own network of friends and artists, I could help them solve those problems over the long- (preferably) or short- (if necessary) term. I was looking to see what I could build to help folks out.
Looking back, I’m a little disheartened to find that I got drawn into a conversation with Don (who has this infectious energy that I’m sure is amazing in the rehearsal room) questioning why we were even there. I was ill-prepared to answer this question because I was expecting to talk with people who actually wanted my help. Instead, I felt kind of like I had personally forced Don to be there and was being taken to task for it.
And I’ll agree with Don on another fundamental point: most of the time artist/managers get together in rooms like we were in, they complain about the same things: marketing and lack of money. And that’s because those are the obvious things standing in the way of small companies. A fair amount of the people in that room were from nearly brand-new companies, represented by the Artistic Director – the people who probably started the company with a drive to put on shows, and the people whose money is at stake when the shows don’t sell well. So, yeah, they’re thinking about money and audience.
But there were others – folks from the Neos, from New Leaf, even Don himself from WNEP. These guys have found ways past that – unique, creative methods to get past the early problems that face all theatre producers – which would have been at least a little helpful to the newer companies. When I took the job at the side project, I started calling people I knew – Allison Cain of the Factory and now Lifeline, Lara Goetsch of TimeLine, friends who run a half dozen smaller companies – to ask how they get certain things done. And you’d be surprised the advice I never heard: “get more money” or “have your board do it.” There are smart, passionate, innovative folks all over town, and we don’t have nearly enough opportunity to talk to one another. If absolutely nothing else, I’m glad I attended for that reason – it opened doors (I finally met Rebecca Zellar, Benno Nelson and Whit Nelson), made some connections (I work with Claire at the DCA and introduced her to Nick to collaborate on the ‘theatre profile a day‘ project), and sparked some new thinking.
Maybe I’m unique in that I went into that room not wondering what I could get out of it, but what I could bring. Maybe it’s the hubris of an English major who’s taught himself Ruby on Rails in a matter of months that I think I can help find some new, creative solutions to perennial problems.
And though I sometimes get drawn into them, I don’t like getting into heated arguments about my beliefs. This isn’t to say I haven’t examined them – I’m about two ticks down from neurotic in the analysis department. It’s just that I would rather put my energy and passion into doing the thing. Because unlike, say, a universal health care system or a completely free market, I don’t need an act of Congress or worldwide consensus to try my ideas. I can just build it myself, or find people who want to achieve the same thing and give it a go, see what works, what doesn’t and keep going. So if you put me in a room with people who don’t quite know what they want or need, and I think I can help, I’m going to try and help them figure it out. (And I don’t really care if it’s an agenda, a PowerPoint slide or tarot cards that helps get us there.)
And now I’m going back to work.
Buy me a beer?Approaching Anarchy
Posted on | October 2, 2009 | No Comments
We are a scant 13 days from opening The Man Who Was Thursday, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to be a part of this production. Equal parts post-Victorian thriller and outright farce, I get to play both sides of my deepest wishes: I get to be a Bondesque hero with all the self-assuredness and repartee, and I get to wallow in the destruction of that facade as that hero comes up against an enemy who more than outclasses him. (In fact, I’ve been writing myself into that role for a few years now.)
For your Friday delectation – and for those of you who haven’t already seen it when it made its Facebook & Twitter debut a week or so ago – I present the trailer for The Man Who Was Thursday.
By curious happenstance, this trio of young punks (who were just pups when we hocked poor improv as part of Edinburgh’s The Improverts – and who themselves trafficked in Victoriana for their first two sketch shows about the fictitious Brothers Faversham) are working on a bit of anarchy themselves, writing a 45-minute piece on Guy Fawkes (of Gunpowder Plot fame) for BBC Radio 4, to air on (remember, remember) the 5th of November.
Buy me a beer?
Putting Theater in Its Place (Reprint)
Posted on | October 1, 2009 | No Comments
Note: This essay was originally published in 1990 by the Chicago Public Library in a collection called Resetting the Stage: Theater Beyond the Loop 1960-1990. The publication was part of a larger exhibition of the Chicago Theater Collection (part of the Special Collections of the CPL) curated by Scott Fosdick. Originally intended to be published as part of my project Theatre That Works by arrangement with the authors and the CPL, I’m bringing them to a new home here.“Putting Theater in Its Place” by Scott Fosdick is the second of five.
It seems ridiculous on the face of it to suggest that there is any such thing as a Chicago style of theater. How could a collection of 120 producing organizations with a performance history ranging from kitchen sink naturalism to extraterrestrial fantasy, from Second City skits to Kabuki Macbeth, be said to have a recognizable style? Yet it seems equally misguided to suggest the opposite, that theater in Chicago is essentially indistinguishable from theater in any major American theatrical center. When New York Times critic Frank Rich writes that a performance of Orphans by our Steppenwolf company “… introduced New Yorkers to a sizzling, idiosyncratic performance style as brawny, all-American and blunt as the windy city that spawned it,” we may laugh at Rich’s depiction – Chicagoans have a history of laughing at anything a New Yorker says about us – but we can’t pretend this is the first time our city or our theater has been so described.1
The problem is, words like sizzling, brawny, all-American, and blunt only begin to describe a cohesive performance style. Even if the intent is to describe the Steppenwolf style – and not the Chicago style at large – we can quickly suggest several examples of Steppenwolf productions that have been cool, delicate, pointed, and anything but all-American. Yet, anyone who has followed Steppenwolf – to continue with that convenient example – knows that there is something special about the group; and anyone who has followed Chicago theater knows that when an out-of-town visitor asks “What’s it like?” you don’t answer, “Just like theater where you come from.”
The truth hides somewhere between the extremes. Theater in Chicago is not radically different from that in many other cities, but one can discern certain elusive characteristics, ranging from the way actors touch and speak to the ways in which theater institutions work with each other and their constituencies. The guiding ambition behind the essays in this catalog and the exhibit it accompanies is to examine those areas in which it is most often alleged that we can find a Chicago style. The scope of this examination has been left intentionally broad. It ranges from the work of the individual artist to the greater structures within which the artist performs, including the organizational, the economic, and the physical. The period of 1960 to 1990 includes both the strength of The Chicago Public Library’s theater collection and a common frame of reference for current theatrical work. There is no intention of denying the importance of the previous 120 years of theater in Chicago.
Looking at our city’s theater in this way should allow us to give a more precise description of what the Chicago style might be. What it will not allow us to do, however, is make definitive claims about the uniqueness of that style. Without also examining in equal depth the theater of other cities, we can only say to that curious visitor, “This is what our theater is; what’s yours?”
Determining more precisely what our theater is should help us with the more important question of what we want it to be. One of the main reasons the answer to this has been so slow in coming is that there is a fundamental disagreement over whether the question should be framed locally, nationally, or in some combination of the two perspectives. Even to speak of such a thing as a Chicago style is subversive of the traditional goal of establishing a national theater presence patterned after the heavily subsidized theaters in Europe. The strongest expression of this goal can be seen in the periodic attempts to establish a national theater institution, usually envisioned as a repertory company in a lavishly equipped theater building, a direct descendant of the Comedie Francaise.
William Dunlop called for a national theater in 1832. Since then, there have been numerous such proposals, including, in the 1930s, the Federal Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration and the American National Theatre and Academy (which Peter Sellars recently revived, briefly, in Washington, D.C.). In the 1970s, a number of new proposals for theaters, most of them based on European models, were considered by the American Theatre Association’s Commission on Theatre Development. In a policy statement written in November, 1979, and revised in February, 1982, the Commission advised that a national theater institution was unnecessary, because the network of existing theaters across the country amounted to a national theater of a sort more in keeping with American traditions of pluralism. “Our philosophic, economic, and social heritages have been bred from a diversity of cultural and ethnic sources,” the report stated, going on to quote Milwaukee Repertory Theater Managing Director Sara O’Connor at some length:
At issue here is how we see ourselves as a nation. The heart of the great American experiment has been the belief that a nation could be brought into existence whose sense of community would hold firm despite its immense geography, regional differences, and a culture endlessly assaulted, changed, and renewed by wave after wave of immigrants from divergent and conflicting cultures.
The report concluded, “Our National Theatre has been realized.”2
But is this national theater truly national? And must our “sense of community” be nationally defined? From its inception, the United States has tried to balance the need for national unity in some areas while protecting – and even encouraging – state and local differences in other areas. If defense is the area where national unity is paramount, culture clearly is the area that demands diversity. Yet, our theater makers are frequently reluctant, if not embarrassed, to pursue that diversity, opting instead for theater that more often than not is in a city or region but not of it.
The fact that this is still an open question for our nation’s theater is reflected by its inability to agree on what to call itself. Although they often seem shallow, purely cosmetic exercises, debates over names often are the tip of an ideological iceberg. Names matter, especially to the named. They matter most to those who are determined to maintain a new, precarious status. Mass political and social movements often demand name changes. The civil rights movement turned negroes into Afro-Americans, then blacks, then African Americans. Women (Miss and Mrs. to Ms.) and Native Americans have undergone similar transformations. Such name changes represent fundamental alterations in the way a group sees itself, and how it hopes to be seen by the greater society. A name is both armor and banner: it protects members of a group from the degradations of the past, and it rallies enthusiasm for a vision of the future. Any group that does not know what to call itself is not only unsure of what it is, but most likely has serious disagreements within its ranks over what the group should strive to become.
This is the situation that faces the American theater today, the situation that has faced it ever since the New York-based commercial system lost its grip ¬some say stranglehold – on theatrical production. The decentralization process begun by Nina Vance, Zelda Fichandler, Tyrone Guthrie, Margo Jones, and others was from the start very much a movement, and worked hard to gain a sense of identity and even permanency. Movement may seem now rather too incendiary a word to describe what has become such an established (if under-funded) institution, but the American theater still struggles over what to call itself, sometimes as heatedly as a group of firebrands at their first meeting.
The two main candidates over the years have been “resident” and “regional.” Both terms are intended to signal a change from the New York-centric system of the past to the current, decentralized one. Resident suggests a situation in which the theater artists no longer are shipped in from New York, but make their homes in the communities they serve. Resident originally was used to reflect the dream of resident companies of actors performing plays in repertory situations; that dream has proved largely insupportable (with notable exceptions).
That leaves us with regional theater. On the surface, this seems harmless enough, suggesting only a theater that is spread out over several regions of the country. Whereas the American theater of 1950 was produced within a few blocks of a busy Manhattan thoroughfare and then sent around the various regions of the country, today it is produced in those regions. But to many, regional also suggests provincial. In the late I 960s, Village Voice critic Julius Novick toured the country gathering information for a book titled Beyond Broadway. He found little support among theater artists and administrators for the common rubric, regional theater. “To many people it suggests folk plays being performed somewhere in Appalachia by genuine hillbillies,” he wrote, adding that he also found little evidence of variations in style from region to region. “These theaters draw very little except their audiences from their regions.”3
In recent years, however, more and more noise has been made in favor of a regional theater that is truly regional. Early on in the movement, founding directors across the country made clear that the theater they made was fully professional, just as good as that done in New York. As New York’s status as a role model declines toward the vanishing point, there emerges the possibility of theater that not only happens to exist in the various regions (however one may define a region), but that is a product of those regions. We can now envision a theater whose aesthetic, economic, ethnic, linguistic, and physical attributes are tied up in, defined by, and in its part defining of its region. There is less fear now that any deviation from a national norm will be perceived as second-rate, perhaps because what is first-rate is no longer so clearly (if arbitrarily) defined. There has been a remission in the plague of rubophobia, to use Calvin Trillin’s term for the fear of being considered a rube. Since Foxfire and Quilters, regionally specific folktales are no longer taboo; in any case, folktales certainly aren’t the only avenue for regionalism in the theater.
Washington Post drama critic David Richards once speculated about what would happen if a prospective theater-goer were magically transported from Anytown, U.S.A., into the seats of a D.C. theater. “Would it dawn on him midway through the spectacle that he was in the Nation’s Capital? Or would he wonder whether cable cars or palm trees, freeways or Lake Michigan awaited him outside?”4
Richards regretfully concluded that it was an exceedingly rare performance in Washington that gave any indication that a locally defined aesthetic was in operation. He wondered why a political town like Washington didn’t produce more satire (Mark Russell aside), and declared his yearning for the kind of dynamic he perceived to be at work in Chicago, where the Second City regularly made pointed reference to local politics and mores.
If there is such a thing as a regionally defined aesthetic in the American theater – if such a thing is even possible in an era of jet travel and TV, where every enterprise strives to be “world class” – then Chicago is broadly perceived to be among the leaders. Sometimes that aesthetic – the Chicago style, if you will – seems an empowering, energizing thing, as when David Mamet speaks of the lessons he learned as a busboy at Second City or carrying a spear for Bob Sickinger at Hull House in the 1960s. Other times, it-seems rather silly: William Petersen once bragged to an interviewer that when a Chicago actor spits on himself, he doesn’t wipe it off.
Clearly, there are levels of use and misuse in the notion of regionalism. In April of 1989, the South Coast Repertory’s SubSCRiber newsletter heralded a new series with the headline: “Calfest Kicks Off With Three Premieres by California Playwrights.” The reason stated for limiting the program to California writers was the standard one of wanting to invest in ” … the immediate and future needs of its community.” As soon as that base is covered, however, the article takes pains to point out that SCR is not too local:
“Interest from across the country in participating in the creation or viewing of these plays has also been gratifying.” The article suggested that only the playwrights would have to be Californian. And yet, topping the stack of playwright headshots accompanying the article was that of Beth Henley, who apparently became a Californian in connection with the filming of her plays. This is the same Beth Henley whose Southern roots were touted when the Actors Theater of Louisville first produced her plays in the 1970s.
Whether or not Beth Henley now lives in California is beside the point. The newsletter reports that Henley ” … brings SCR and CalFest audiences her first play set outside of Mississippi. The setting is the unyielding terrain of the Wyoming Territory.” Abundance, as Henley’s play is called, may be an admirable piece of writing. But unless she found something in the Wyoming Territory of special significance for modern residents of Costa Mesa, it is hard to see how the play fulfills the promise of community responsiveness.5
The standard response to such criticism is that art is most responsive when it deals in universal values; the best theater transcends petty regional concerns, or so the argument goes. That may be true, but the best art also remains rooted not merely in specifics, but in the specifics of place. Athol Fugard’s plays overflow with universal truths that have tremendous impact on audiences around the world; and yet, his plays are invariably suffused with the images and language of South Africa. To imagine Chekhov without his Russia, Ibsen without Norway, Shakespeare without England, is to imagine them diminished beyond recognition.
The question is not whether the theater should be rooted in a culture, but how that culture ought to be limited. Postmodern artists take the world for their palette, mixing images and styles from wildly divergent times and places. The effect works so long as the individual bits remain identifiable. As Berkeley sociologist and media analyst Todd Gitlin wrote recently, “Postmodernist literature cultivates place names in the same way consumers flock to the latest cuisine – in the spirit of the collector; because the uniqueness of real places is actually waning.”6
Not long ago the Tribune Magazine ran on its cover a photo of a city skyline under the headline, “Where in the World is this City?” It was Tokyo, but as architecture critic Paul Gapp pointed out, it looked like any of a dozen cities. Regional idiosyncrasies are not only pleasing to the senses, they have an importance not easily defined. William Faulkner wrote to Malcolm Cowley in November, 1944:
I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and I don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time. 7
Faulkner said his choice of the South wasn’t important, but made clear that good writing must be grounded in a knowledge of place, a knowledge so thorough that it is difficult to learn more than one in a lifetime. When artists attempt to create from an international outlook, they risk giving up the thing that gives their work depth and power.
To look for a Chicago style of theater need not be an exercise in self-congratulatory boosterism. It is not even essential that we be pleased with what we find. But we would do well to take a steady, hard look at what we have that is ours, before it loses its power to move us. We may find that the Chicago style is a thing that crops up only intermittently. Nevertheless, we must identify it if we are to nourish it, improve it, and value it. The differences will never be as great among American theatrical styles as, say, between French farce and Peking opera. And it may be foolhardy to suggest we can control our theater’s style through force of will. We can, however, inform our appreciation of regional differences with something approaching the sensitivity of a wine lover who would never confuse a Burgundy with a Bordeaux. By all accounts, Chicago theater is a particularly hearty varietal, able to stand up to the harshest scrutiny.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Scott Fosdick worked as a drama critic and/or entertainment editor for 10 years in Chicago, New Jersey, and Baltimore before earning his doctorate at Northwestern University. His articles have appeared in a variety of newspapers and magazines, including Stagebill, American Theatre, Family Life, Parenting, The San Jose Mercury News and The Sunday New York Times, as well as a variety of refereed scholarly publications.
1. Frank Rich, “Theater: Steppenwolfs ‘Orphans’,” New York Times, May 8, 1985, 1: p. 22.
2. American Theatre Association Commission on Theatre Development. “Policy Statement: National Theatre,” November 1979. Revised: February 1982.
3. Julius Novick, Beyond Broadway: the quest for permanent theaters (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), p. 4.
4. David Richards, “What’s So Capital About Our Theater?,” Washington Post, December 16, 1984: p. KI.
5. Cristofer Gross. SubSCRiber: News for Subscribers to South Coast Repertory. April 1989: p. I.
6. Todd Gitlin, “Postmodernism: Roots and Politics,” Dissent, Winter 1989: pp. 100-108.
7. Joseph Blotner, ed. Selected Letters of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 185.
About I, Homunculus
Buy Me a Beer?
Now Playing
Mrs. Caliban
Adapted by Frances Limoncelli
from the novel by Rachel Ingalls
Directed by Ann Boyd
February 5 – March 28
Info | My Thoughts
presented by Lifeline Theatre