The American drama: Crying for its formula?
On 14 January, the New York Times ran “Leaving the Light on for Playwrights,” a story by Patrick Healy about a new play initiative from Washington’s Arena Stage. The new scheme aims to provide, in the words of Arena Stage’s artistic director Molly Smith, “a small, enveloping cradle where we could nurture and stage newly birthed American plays.” It will be an expensive cradle indeed, funded through a $7.5 million grant. At its center is the use of a new 200-seat theatre, but as the story explains, Arena has also developed the American Voices New Play Institute, which this week is holding a “From Scarcity to Abundance” convention. There is also a dormitory of sorts, according to Healy:
Bringing the idea of an artistic home into literal life, Arena has rented a town house with four bedrooms for playwrights to live, work and sleep close to the theater, which is near the Potomac River in a part of Southwest Washington where new condominium complexes and coffee shops look out on boarded-up multistory buildings. … Among the playwrights who have spent time in the town house recently are Katori Hall, whose drama The Mountaintop is probably coming to Broadway next season, and Karen Zacarías, whose plays, including the recent Legacy of Light, have been produced at several regional theaters. Ms. Zacarías, in an interview, described traveling around the country for her play productions and sometimes wishing that she had a home base, artistically. While she lives in Washington, and so has no use for a bed at the town house, she sometimes writes there or hangs out and cooks with colleagues, which invariably leads to discussion of their work.
The cradle is not only a metaphor, but a formal name: the new theatre has been christened the “Arlene and Robert Kogod Cradle.” It shares a name with Scott Walters’ “CRADLE” project, which aims to strengthen “the expressive life of small and rural communities through localization, participation, stability, and self-reliance.” There is a bit of this going about; at manhattan theatre source, some of my early plays were developed as part of their “Playground Development Series.”
All three of the programs I mention above (I’m not sure about the Incubator Arts Project) receive funding from the ever-beleaguered National Endowment for the Arts, so when NEA chairman Rocco Landesman spoke to the “From Scarcity to Abundance” conference the other day, perhaps it was appropriate that he apparently took the tone of a stern paterfamilias addressing his spendthrift children, or a high-school teacher playing Devil’s Advocate to get class discussion started. “Look,” Landesman said in discussing the limited audience for theatre and new plays, all capitalistic free-marketeer rhetorical cylinders firing, “you can either increase demand or decrease supply. Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.” With the NEA supporting these new play programs, I’m doubtful that he was entirely sincere. At another session on the first day of the conference, as J. Holtham noted, a plethora of new programs for playwrights could be listed in just a short period of time:
The Alliance Theatre has committed to doing a full season of new work by playwrights less than a decade out of school. HERE has increased its fees for playwrights. Penumbra is working with 16 new playwrights every year. The Network of Ensemble Theatres has been working with the Playwrights Center and the LMDA. The Bay Area Playwrights Foundation is working with new writers every year. The Hip-Hop Theatre Festival is commissioning new work. The McCarter is producing 80% of its commissions, 5 plays by women, all directed by women. The National New Play Network has increased its commissions, eliminated subsidiary rights and forged new partnerships. Z Space is creating new support for new work. The Playwrights Center is breaking down the barriers between playwrights and artisitic directors and building new connections with the local theatres. The work of the Steinberg Foundation was singled out by Actors Theatre of Louisville and their tremendous financial support for writers. Tuscon Borderlands Theatre is making partnerships with theatres in Mexico, bringing new plays to both communities. Cornerstone has linked up with New Dramatists and has produced every play they’ve commissioned.
And this is just over the past year.
A disinterested observer can distinguish a number of mixed signals — many plays, few outlets, but that apparently is changing; a government agency doing something, but not enough, to promote the arts. And dramatists are proliferating everywhere. Nonetheless, as the above indicates, there is still some concern that the American drama is in crisis at the moment.
These metaphors of babies, cradles and children perhaps are meant to attach more to new work than to the dramatists who write it. Molly Smith is careful to specify that she’s talking about plays, not people: “When you look inside two cupped hands, you have a cradle. That’s what I wanted: a small, enveloping cradle where we could nurture and stage newly birthed American plays,” she says (emphasis mine). But I’m not sure what’s worse: characterizing drama as a form that needs parental support from institutions formed for the purpose (and that is indeed Arena Stage’s plan, according to Healy: the Cradle is “Arena Stage’s effort to brand itself as a national center for producing, presenting, developing and studying American theater”), or characterizing dramatists as a class of artists who need to be paternally or maternally nurtured under the same governmental and institutional aegis, dormitory-style or otherwise. I can’t think of another art form in America — dance, music, visual arts — whose development programs so condescendingly and patronizingly characterize both the work of artists and the artists themselves who create it.
As usual, though, none of the participants in the dialogue (and oh, they do dialogue) discuss either content or form, and whether the limitations of that content or form may be responsible for the declining status of American theatre in the 21st century. Not only does the non-profit theatre seem stuck in a cycle of adolescence, of course; the most talked-about theatre event in the news currently (and the most expensive theatre event on Broadway in history) is a comic-book musical. Nothing against dramatists, new plays or comic books, but the willingness of many American playwrights to be characterized as small children, and to have their work characterized as immature and in need of proper schooling and parenting by both the government and production organizations, leaves this 48-year-old parent-of-two with a lingering bad taste in his mouth.
well said! as a person of a certain age who runs a non-profit i can’t tell you how many times i sit in front of these potential funders giving my pitch having to overcome feeling like a 10-year-old. this is both nature and nurture i would say. nature: theater is touchy-feely and relatively penny-ante compared to the business-y people i’m sitting in front of. nurture: we pat/matronize each other more than anyone from the outside ever could. we’re in a perpetual episode of ‘glee.’
I invariably find much to think about in George’s posts (when I manage to read them), and this is no exception. Among my thoughts this time:
• Isn’t there an element of isolation, of an inward turn, in some of these programs? The idea seems to be that playwrights need mainly to know other theater people and the theater world better. Do we think so about our directors and designers and performers? (Something of the kind does seem to be true of our view of actors, but I won’t go into that.) Whether you propose that artists ought to be acquainted with the contemporary world so as to represent it better, or that they ought to enrich themselves with literature, philosophy, history, etc., so as to understand life, thought, and human nature better, it seems that they ought to know something beyond the mechanics and the practices of their form. To toss off a quick possibility, without considering carefully how and whether it might be done, I think I’d rather see playwrights invited to retreats with businessmen, engineers, schoolteachers, journalists, the random collection one finds in a coffee shop, than with other playwrights. Simply putting them on a jury might do (or for that matter in a jail, though I can see problems). Alternatively, an occasional colloquium with philosophers, historians, professors of literature, and the like could serve the purpose I have in mind. All of this is a little off the track of George’s comments, but I couldn’t help wondering whether the marginal position of American theater is being perpetuated when theater artists hold themselves too much apart.
• There’s the question of what’s next: the old question of what happens to these new plays once they’ve been “cradled,” “nurtured,” and “developed.” I’m aware of contention over this point, but my impression is that what’s next is often nothing. This is akin to the problem of new operas, which typically are developed or commissioned, given one or maybe a few productions, and then shelved. Is something wrong here? George’s suggestion of a state of permanent adolescence applies: it seems our playwrights are being invited to write mere homework exercises, which aren’t expected to acquire any life of their own.
• Molly Smith’s overly insistent image of “newly birthed American plays” reminds me of the legend of the Greek infant who, upon being born, took a good look around and crawled back into the womb.
I’m not against conventions themselves, John — directors and designers have their confabs as well, I’m sure. In any given profession there is a certain insularity, and given the professionalization of the arts in the past decades there is bound to be a certain amount of distance from other parts of life. But yes, sometimes too much is too much.
Agreed, Gaby. Ultimately the characterization of these programs as maternal or paternal bleeds over into the thinking of funders themselves. Nobody became an artist to play the teenager asking for a raise in his allowance. But that does seem to be a common relationship, and it affects the reciprocal attitude between funders and artists.
I don’t know, George. I think you’re looking at it all through a certain lens and missing the larger picture. Certainly, dealing with theatre administrators and leadership, there can be a feeling of paternalism, but this is a conversation that the artists are directly involved in and contribute to, as equals. We’re at the table and asking for support, for latitude. And one of the responses that we get back is often “if you’re not getting what you want, do it for yourself.”
I do want to clarify something about my list of things that are happening: those aren’t just happening in the last year, not all of them. Several are ongoing projects that have gone unnoticed or unheralded. Sometimes we get down in the mouth and bitter about the scene and miss the very good things that are actually happening.
I agree, George, that conventions serve a valuable purpose. And some of my comments (as I said) were a little off the track. But the idea of the town house/dormitory–in the context of the present post, with its discussion of a paternalistic or maternalistic attitude–still sounds to me a little like a sandbox, connoting an invitation for playwrights to go play among themselves (the isolation I mentioned), even though I can see that Arena Stage intends to make something of the fruits of that play.
As you said, George, other art forms in America don’t seem to patronize artists or their work in this way. One might think that people who are determined to write plays will probably manage to do it in the face of DIS-couragement, as people who are determined to write screenplays or novels do. Instead, though this may be a jaundiced view that goes beyond what you’re willing to say, some of those institutions that talk of nurturing and developing risk giving the impression that it takes every bit of help we can give the playwrights to get any work out of them at all.
John: I am doubtful that institutions will develop and nurture risk (if we can use that construction) if the risk is to the beliefs underlying the institution’s own explicit and implicit assumptions about both aesthetics and the cultural position of the theatre and drama — and why would they? They will support those visions that hew most closely to their own, however narrow or wide they may be, and disdain those that truly subvert these assumptions. The attitude of New Dramatists colleagues to the work of Sarah Kane when she was there (Elana Greenfield has a telling essay about this here); the rejection of Howard Barker’s plays by the very theatres that commissioned them; the attitude and actions of the NEA during the NEA Four controversy — all of these testify to the true response of institutions and individuals, public and private, to true rather than purported risk.
99 (and I should point out to readers unfamiliar with him that this is a pseudonym for the J. Holtham mentioned in the post): As a writer you’d probably agree, 99, that words and names carry considerable unconscious but revealing significance, and that the words “Cradle” and “Playground” (and John Branch’s “sandbox,” which ironically was another of the names under consideration for the manhattan theatre source program) imply a variety of assumptions, at least one of which is that this is immature work in need of parental/professional/audience guidance if it is to reach strapping young adulthood. (This is the lens I’m using, and I didn’t provide it — Arena Stage and other similar organizations, in naming these programs, did.) And it provides this perspective not only to those who create and support the drama, but to the audience it is in search of as well. Administrators and dramatists begin to believe that this work is immature and incomplete, and audiences will do so as well — especially those audiences who, unlike theatre professionals, are unlikely to visit a theatre more than a dozen times a year, and that’s pushing it a bit, who want to see a finished product (the Spiderman instance is a bizarre exception).
Of course dramatists in their twenties can produce and have produced mature, supple plays, whatever their flaws (and all plays have them) ready for the stage. But the implication behind these names and programs is that they can’t, which only makes it more mysterious why there hasn’t been more complaint about these characterizations.
If you’re attending a conference in search of support for yourself from other institutions — financial, moral, intellectual, what have you — then you are not on an equal footing, I’m afraid, but come as a supplicant, which is not equal at all (and I’m sure Gaby, who wrote the first comment above, will agree). This is in contradistinction to something like the RAT Conference, an annual gathering of equals in search of communication and the encouragement John’s suggesting, and was leveraging the Internet and the World Wide Web to get the word out about their work long before Facebook, Twitter or YouTube were on the scene. The conference, which consisted of groups that produced both text-based work and devised theatre, lasted only for ten years, and perhaps a study and knowledge of the conference would reveal interesting strengths and weaknesses of this particular organizational model. But it seems to me RAT was more truly equal and democratic (if we want to use that word) than the recent conference.
The efforts I describe in the post are more symptomatic of the disease and dis-ease that now infest American drama; they are not its cure. Instead of providing a path for the future of the American theatre, the noble rhetoric about the contemporary American drama and the good intentions therein expressed may instead provide the asphalt for a new road to hell.
I understand that you perceive this conference/convening as being a group of people in search of support, but, being here, I can say that it didn’t feel like that and it wasn’t constructed that way. It was structured, honestly, if anything, as a forum for the artists to say what was working and what isn’t.
I think these are matters of how you choose to see the relationship between artists and theatres and other similar organizations. The language of theatres is often one of service and that’s how Arena Stage sees itself: serving artists and responding to our requests. I’m not saying it always happens perfectly and there is a learning curve, but being hung up on the words, distinct from the purpose and use, seems counter-intuitive to me. Yep, they call their “studio space” a “cradle,” but, as you point out, make it clear that it’s the plays that are being cradled and born, not the playwrights. And yes, they provide housing for visiting playwrights….in response to many complaints about the transitory lives of playwrights. There are lots of different ways to look at the language. You can look at it however you want.
I don’t know what the RAT conference was like, so I can’t say if it was better or worse than what I’ve experienced here. I can say that it seems like it had a different mission, constituency and structure. There’s nothing wrong with that. Not all gatherings have to be the same. We have a wide field and we can choose the people we want to work with. But we have to recognize the choices we make. “Cradle” can be thought of as some thing for babies. It can also be the birthplace. It can also be protection for something valuable. Words have multiple meanings, multiple resonances and we can all choose how we want to think of them.
I think there’s a value to having a space, in a theatre, for incomplete, early work.