Playwrights finally had their say at the end of the first day of the In the Intersection conference. Charles Randolph-Wright, Amy Freed, and Karen Zacarías, all current residents at the Arena Stage’s American Voices New Play Institute, expressed their gratitude for the AVNPI’s generosity — but some also expressed a certain sense of having been disengaged from discussions that took place earlier in the day. Diane Ragsdale reported Zacarias’ comment:

[Zacarias] said that at no point in the conversation earlier had she heard the word “playwright” and that there was no sense of “one person in a room who was alone writing.” She continued, “Maybe that’s why I feel shut out from that big musical world. … I actually think we might all have something artistic to contribute, but I have no idea how to get into that business conversation.”

It didn’t seem that the big musical world was going to go away for the rest of the conference, either. Responding to Zacarias, Rocco Landesman said, “A play is, essentially, a playwright, an idea, a play. … It’s a very intimate thing. A musical is exactly the opposite. It’s a huge collaboration. There’s a book writer, but it’s not about an individual sitting in a room with a play.  … They’re both called theater — or one’s called musical theater — but they don’t have that much in common, at least from a producer’s perspective. … I, as a producer, I only love doing musicals because that’s where a producer really has an effect — has impact.” Emphasis mine, but only just. As I mentioned in this earlier post on the conference, the kinds of partnerships between non-profit and commercial producers that were at the center of the discussion pertained, by and large, to musicals both new and revived, very different, as Landesman said, from straight American plays.

Not that any potential partnership to produce these new American plays wasn’t already fraught with dangers. In a subsection of the report called “Has Artistic Freedom in the Regions Decreased?” Ragsdale points to the small-cast/small-set constraints that American dramatists have always thought limited production potential of their new plays. But there’s disturbingly more, too. The most disturbing meditation came buried at the end of a lengthy comment by playwright Amy Freed:

I was finally in the gladiatorial relationship with a big house … and my playwriting had to change. … To me it was a playwright and audience shift, rather than playwright and institutional structure. Having said that I know — I think we all understand — that there are certain desires on the part of a regional theater or a nonprofit theater in terms of the palatability of the work for a wider mass. … To me that’s as much a question of art as it is of structure. [Again, emphasis mine, if not Freed's.]

If any more proof were needed that more challenging work was in danger of disappearing from non-profit stages, it came from Kevin Moore, managing director of the service organization Theatre Communications Group (TCG), who said that “anytime you start to mass market anything it changes the nature of what it is” — and this is as true of theatre itself as any individual production. As Ragsdale writes, “Moore suggested that many theaters have felt increasing pressure to get more people through the doors and that this has had an inevitable impact on programming. Based on his experiences as a managing director, he expressed concerns that programming in regional theaters was becoming more homogenous, or commercial, and less relevant to the local communities or regions in which theaters are based.”

This is a very different question indeed from whether playwrights should receive staff salaries at non-profit theatres or concentrate on small-cast/small-set plays. It speaks precisely to the kinds of plays that are presented, in terms of form, style, and content, on these stages at all — perhaps the most important question. Is the current American non-profit theatre system putting dramatists and playwrights into strait-jackets in terms of what they can and can’t create, if they’re to have any reasonable expectation of production at these non-profit theatres? Even if these playwrights were to get health insurance and living wages, if they were permitted to dream of casts of 10 or more performers, what kinds of plays would be perceived — by artistic directors and management teams both — as having some kind of potential return on investment? “More homogenous and commercial,” says Moore; to consider “the palatability of the work for a wider mass,” in Freed’s words: if there are to be innovative American dramatists equal in aesthetic ambition as Howard Barker, Sarah Kane, and Mark Ravenhill, what chance would they have for a slot in the Arena Stage season, or indeed, in the season of any medium- or large-sized non-profit theatre, in New York or elsewhere in the United States? Especially at this anxious moment in American history, these theatres should continue to broaden the scope of the kinds of work presented, rather that limiting it to get “more people through the doors,” as Moore describes it. But Freed’s “question of art” never arose during the conference. Theatre is both art and business, for both commercial and non-profit venues — but these qualities must be discussed together, not separately, for the real consequences for the art form to become clear.

As I close today this series on the In the Intersection conference and report and return next week to writing more specifically about American drama after 9/11, I want to point out that the conference itself was a reminder of the growing ties between corporate and commercial entities and the private and cultural life of citizens in contemporary America. The arts emerge from and are influenced by the same cultural landscape as other social endeavors — business, government, politics, the social fabric itself. While the American drama may make no special claim to exemption from this situation, the unique qualities of the form permit specialized imagination and expression. Some of the opinions expressed during the conference, including a seeming surrender to the realities of 21st-century capitalism, underscore the tensions of the culture. In this case, a review of the landscape (and some trends I mentioned in this post, as well as those in the Outrageous Fortune study) suggests a sobering realization: that if the art of American drama is dying, it may be the American theatre that is killing it.

Frenemies? Robert Brustein and Rocco Landesman.

At the beginning of day two — and the beginning of act two — of the In the Crossroads conference, critic and former ART artistic director Robert Brustein looked around the comfortable conference room at Arena Stage and offered a monologue about his position:

[There] are certain ideals that were constructed for the nonprofit theater, which I have not heard a word about in the last two days. We all deviate from the ideals — ideals are meant to deviate from. But you have to know what they are in order to deviate from them. And what I’m not hearing is the fact that there was a time when we were different theaters, we did different things. We didn’t join together to do the same things to please the largest number, to bring in the greatest amount of money, and the greatest subscribers. We did, as a nonprofit theater, most of us did these things because nobody else would do them! We did Robert Wilson, we did Andrei Serban … Because Broadway wasn’t going to do them! And they needed a voice! They needed an outlet. They needed a stage. And they’re not going to get that stage if we are thinking about filling our large buildings — and that’s one of the problems I have.

They’re beautiful buildings, I adore them. They are handsome, architectural contributions to our culture. At the same time they produce certain problems. … You have to fill it. You have to pay for it. … The smaller buildings, the little ones, you know, the fifty-seat, sixty-seat houses, were the things that we were leading. We were doing much more adventurous work. We weren’t worrying about finding partners from the commercial theater. And certainly the commercial theater was not thinking about finding partners with us. It was only when these certain things began to succeed, that we were doing, that we got these looks, and we got these alliances.

Uh, and I, personally — not to beat my own drum (but of course I’m doing that) — tried all my life, forty-six years of running these theaters, to not have these relationships with  commercial theater. We spoke about one yesterday. I didn’t know that was a relationship. I swear to God. It was my friend Rocco Landesman, a former student and former friend.

It was that last line that got the laugh. Brustein had meant to say “former enemy,” and whether this was a Freudian slip or a more benign mere slip of the tongue is for Brustein’s therapist to say. But one wonders which camp Diane Paulus, who currently runs the American Repertory Theater that Brustein founded in 1980, would fall into. On the ART schedule for this season are two revivals — Pippin, a musical; and The Glass Menagerie, the classic Tennessee Williams play — at least one of which has an eye firmly on a Broadway transfer, as had last season’s Porgy and Bess.

To be fair, there is a new play currently running at ART, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, which is playing at the ART’s “second stage” Oberon, a club space which seats (as far as I am able to tell) 100 people. This points to an interesting development in the life of the new American play over the past ten years, the creation of second stages for the presentation of new plays. A response to the perceived lack of production opportunities for new American plays, a few of these new production spaces have opened up, including LCT3 and the Arena’s Kogod Cradle. Neither has a capacity of more than 200; the larger stages of these resident theatres are still given over primarily to play revivals (and therefore known quantities with a certain audience appeal) and musicals (both new and revived). Which is all well and good, unless you’re a playwright who thinks in terms of more ambitious theatrical palettes and larger audiences.

I suppose we can argue whether, as not-for-profit organizations, ART should be  in the business of producing revivals of Pippin or the Center Theatre Group revivals of Funny Girl — and indeed, at the two-day conference, there was a great deal of discussion about this. It could be argued that the amusement and entertainment of the greatest number of community members possible constitutes a community service of some kind, even if it’s a community service that commercial producers can provide just as well. But given the breeding and health of the new American straight play — which was one of the major themes of the conference — it seems that, in this particular theatrical community, the American straight play is in danger of becoming a second-class citizen.

The picture may not be as bleak as Brustein paints it. We still have frequent visits from both Wilson and (more rarely) Serban to New York. Ivo van Hove and Elevator Repair Service (neither of whom seems likely to visit Broadway stages soon, though who knows?) have regular New York homes at the New York Theatre Workshop and the Public Theater. But van Hove is a director, Elevator Repair Service a company. And as excellent and innovative as these may be, they are not playwrights. Dramatists who write for a more coterie audience will be less attractive to commercial producers, as they always have been, because the commercial rewards are more limited. As the partnership between commercial producers and non-profit theaters develops, it will be interesting to see whether this perceived commercial appeal will limit the kinds of plays that are produced, the kinds of commercial enhancement money that can be attracted, even on these new smaller stages. And — as it happens — productions of either new or revived straight American plays, and many musicals, almost never arrive on Broadway without having been developed or first presented by a non-profit resident theatre.

But what have the playwrights to say about all this? More on Thursday when this mini-series continues.

The two contending main characters in In the Intersection — the non-profit theatre and the commercial theatre — want different things, as in any play; the conflict lies in how they try to get these things from each other. The non-profit theatre wants resources to fund and produce more ambitious, expensive projects; the commercial theatre wants the talent and work that the non-profit theatre develops for their own stages. Obviously these are not mutually exclusive in some ways, but these two different wants define the conflict. And, this being Mamet’s America, they both want money.

Theatre, as Shaw knew, always wants money; it is always starving. The history of subsidy to American theatre is far more unusual than that of European theatres, which have a centuries-long tradition of government subsidy to and patronage of the theatre. The first major infusion of federal dollars into the art came with the establishment of the Federal Theatre Project by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1935. During the four years of its existence, Hallie Flanagan’s stewardship of the FTP led to the funding of hundreds of theatrical endeavors, but more importantly, thousands of artists — not because these artists were somehow special and deserving of government money as an entitlement or because they were serving some vague community-based mission, but because they, like so many other Americans, were starving and unemployed too. Its closure in 1939 came with the closure of other New Deal programs that were perceived as socialist in conception. In any event, the war economy was already gearing up, and it was this war economy that would provide the basis for the post-war economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

When the federal government stepped out of the business of funding non-profit theatres, the foundation sector stepped in. In In the Intersection, Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis describes the vision of the Ford Foundation’s W. McNeil “Mac” Lowry, who started the funding of resident theatres through the foundation in the 1950s: “We’re going to attempt to steer as many rewards as possible to those theaters which are clearly manifesting in their work nonprofit values. … I mean, it’s what Mac Lowry did! Mac Lowry got up on a soapbox and said there are certain things that should happen in this country and the Ford Foundation’s going to put its money behind it. We need to find as many people who have some resources, who have some belief in something other than the marketplace, to band together and try to figure out how we’re going to enforce that. … ”

It should be noted that the Ford Foundation (and other foundations and charitable organizations of the time) intended to provide seed money to these theatres, not to fund them throughout their existence, however long that may be. Ultimately the Foundation hoped that these theatres would somehow become self-sustaining, through a combination of public and private sources — but not through the federal government, which had no formal agency to funnel government money to the arts until Lyndon Johnson signed the legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965.

Non-profit theatres suffered a substantial ideological and financial blow with the NEA Four controversy of the early 1990s, but the real one-two combination came ten years later. Both the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the global financial meltdown of 2007-2008 had dire consequences for the non-profit sector. (Indeed, one of the first plays to respond to 9/11, Anne Nelson’s The Guys, was written and produced to resuscitate the Flea Theatre in downtown Manhattan.) Suddenly the priorities of government, foundation and private giving and support shifted from arts and cultural organizations to those with more readily identifiable social-service aims. It’s safe to say that, from the standpoint of 2012, the landscape of giving to the arts has never fully recovered.

Suddenly the Existential crisis that gripped the United States in the post-war era came to bear on theatre itself. Without any God — without any sure foundation for belief or the significance of humanity itself — and with the new capacity for sudden global suicide at our own nuclear hands, just what was the theatre, what was drama, supposed to do? Why was it here? Apart from the money-making capacity of theatrical presentations, why — as an institution, if not as artists — present plays at all? What was the deeper purpose of artistic endeavor? The problem became even more acute because the ideology of socialism had self-destructed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union as any kind of meaningful social force. We were all capitalists now — “the buzz saw of capitalism” (according to Oskar Eustis) and “hyper-capitalism” (“which is not going away,” according to Berkeley Rep artistic director Tony Taccone) appear to be with us forever, if one looks at the situation from an odd rearview-mirror kind of determinism.

In other words, what was theatre’s “value proposition,” as the report had it? It is this question that drives the current crisis of non-profit theatre funding, and a question that produced perhaps the most handwringing at the Arena Stage conference.

More on that tomorrow.