Flux Theatre Ensemble

David Cote's recently raised the excellent question of why playwrights don't review playwrights in a post for the Guardian. Then my colleague Rob Weinert-Kendt expanded the conversation over on the TCG blog, and J. Holtham added some quality cents at 99 Seats.

At around the same time, I was finishing a biography on my constant obsession Virginia Woolf, and was thinking of the Bloomsbury Group in relation to this question of artists reviewing artists. All of the pitfalls out lined in the three posts above were a huge part of the Bloomsbury group - their reviews of each others work, both public and private, were a source of pain and long simmering grudges for all involved.

They also were an essential part of each others processes, and a source of delight and mutual passion. Their connections went beyond reviewing each other, from informally sharing new work over tea to publishing each others work to writing their posthumous biographies (and of course, drinking and sleeping together). And I thought to myself, "Oh, so like Flux Sundays".

And so we are picking up the gauntlet thrown down by the posts above. Flux will be hosting a series of playwrights reviewing each others work, with some twists. Here's how it will work:

• A playwright to review will be selected.
• 3-6 playwrights, and or/other theatre artists, will read at least 5 plays from the selected playwright.
• The readers will then review the playwright's body of work, contextualizing each play within the whole, looking at what makes that playwright's work unique.
• While constructive criticism is welcome, we're interested in readers identifying what the playwright is doing and describing how, rather than telling the playwright what they should be doing.
• These curated critical essays of the playwright's work will be posted on the blog, but we will also actively encourage and link to other readers' participation, i.e., all are welcome.

Over time, we hope to build a forum of critical thought that will illuminate the body of work of participating playwrights; to not only know each other better, but help each other become better; and to invite all readers to a deeper, more sustained relationship with the plays.

Who's up first? We're beginning with two playwrights beloved by the Flux community: Johnna Adams and Adam Szymkowicz.

I can't think of two better playwrights to begin with: Johnna, with her dizzyingly wide aesthetic range (From Rattlers to Lickspittles); and Adam, who has himself given back so much to the playwriting community with his series of interviews.

Want in? Here's how it works: if you'd like to be one of our critical essayists, please write me at gus@fluxtheatre.org, and give me a sense of why you'd be good fit. Let me know if you'd like to read Johnna's work, Adam's, or both. We're looking especially for playwrights to participate, but all are welcome. I'll then send you the plays to read.

And if you're a playwright who'd like to have your work reviewed in this way, please let me know. We'll be focusing first on playwrights already connected to the Flux community, but will hopefully expand as time goes on, perhaps linking it to the Homing Project (yes, that is not forgotten!)

So...are you in? Are you ready to bring the Bloomsbury? Read the full story

Rob Weinert-Kendt has a great post about the most produced playwrights at TCG's Member Theatres* (with a few Broadway productions thrown in to boot). Maria MacCarthy has a follow-up looking at the gender ratio of the list; 99Seats and Parabasis widen that lens further; all good reads.

These posts got me wondering about productions at the rest of the theatres in the country. Do Samuel French or Dramatists Play Service ever release the number of productions they license? I'm not sure of any other way to survey the other 2,000+ theatres in the country, and it seems as important as measuring what our leading institutions are producing.

For example, my most widely produced plays are written for Equalogy, a theatre for social change. Twice a year for the past ten years, two 1-act plays I wrote on dating violence and acquaintance rape have toured colleges of the Northeast, performing for thousands of students. I have no doubt that nothing I've written has had as positive an impact as those plays. And yet, in that world of theatre we call "the field", those plays are essentialy invisible.

I'm sure this is true for many, many other productions, performed in the streets and prisons, cafeterias and gymnasiums of this country. I wouldn't be surprised if the impact on their communities is just as profound as the work of the larger institutions, and yet when theatre's measure is taken, they are often invisible.

A fully inclusive metrics of real value...what would that look like? Is it even possible?
*TCG is my goodly employer Read the full story

One of the exciting things about engaging with the blogosphere is finding moments of common ground amidst separate discussions. Like the physicists of string theory before Witten's M-theory, we are all unknowingly using different languages to describe the same underlying thing. And like the different arms of M-theory, each language can unravel problems impossible in one of the others (truly one of the most amazing parts of the theory, which I will leave now before falling completely into amateur physicist nerdfog).

Such a case happened recently with two separate threads discussing the metabolism of theatre. How quickly should an artist produce work? How often should an audience come into contact with that work? Is there too much hastily conceived theatre, or too much expectation placed on over-developed work?

A post from 99seats featured this quote:

"If I read an interesting news story and I want to write a play about it, chances are it’s going to be, at best, two to three years before that play sees the light of day. In that time, there will be a Law & Order episode, a CSI episode, an SNL skit, a 30 Rock reference, a novel, a YouTube video and a feature film all about the same thing."

Which led Tim Bauer at Direct Address to second this idea. In the comments, Malachy enlarges it, writing:

"Another aspect is that when work is done often and quickly it changes the way audiences approach it.
Today, a play that has been “developed” over long period of time and then presented in a season that is only 5 plays long, has a lot of pressure on it to be more than it might be, artistically and financially.
The disappointment is sharper because it’ll be another 2 month before the audience goes to the next show when it’s reminded again of how ponderous theatre can be.
But let’s say, for argument that a show is loved. Even this can be detrimental since it’ll still be 2 months before someone sees the next show – rather than capitalizing quickly on the bump the show gives the theatre.
Overall, the current system with its long lead times discourages the idea that the theatre is a place to explore."

From the other side, The Collective Arts Think Tank posits that artists should produce less - that the financial obligation of presenting work before it's ready diminishes quality. Much of their excellent post (and many of the comments that follow) pushes for a slower metabolism for theatre:

"We advocate the opposite philosophy: do less with more. Meaning, make work that is fully realized, full-resourced, and created in an appropriate amount of time.
This also speaks to a problem of supply and demand. If there are hundreds of small theatre and ensembles in New York, and all of them are half-full, then we are overproducing, substituting quantity for quality. Doing less with more may also mean the venues produce fewer shows, artists produce fewer works, and audience remain hungrier longer. We think that's a good thing".

So who's right? My sense is that every artist, company, project and audience have their own unique metabolism, and a sweeping fix would do more harm than good.

For Flux, however, our way may lie in the best of both proposals: bringing our development process more frequently to our audience, while at the same time not rushing plays to full production. This would mean more Have Anothers and Food:Souls, while being more careful of programming plays before their development is complete. I'm especially interested in pairing this philosophy with something like Stolen Chair's developing CSA model (moving towards a model of audience engagement that mirrors Community Sustained Agriculture).

In this model, the monthly crop of work in development is brought to an audience, deepening their connection to the eventually fully realized production. Ideally, this relationship goes beyond a clever reframing and moves towards a substantive conversation that leads to a mutually empowered audience and artist (linking to Scott's last great post on this subject).

In this model, Malachy's goal of sharing the exploratory nature of theatre with an audience rubs elbows with CATT's goal of longer production timelines leading to improved quality. Both goals address a problem the other is ill-suited to solve; both make each other better.

Thoughts? What is your artistic metabolism? Please post in the comments below. And for a visual image of Flux's somewhat intense metabolism, I offer this hilarious picture from our retreat:

We can burn hundreds of calories just by focusing...

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