Flux Theatre Ensemble

After h/ting through Isaac to David Dower's heartfelt post on the New Play Blog (I'll wait for you to read them), I finally got around to writing a post I've been meaning to put together since the New Play Convening.

For those too busy to link-jump, the gist of both posts is the impossibility of the open play submission. Those at an institution who have time to read plays submitted over the transom (as the folksy saying goes) are exactly the people who have no ability to move a script forward at said institution. Arena got rid of their policy, forgoing a false inclusion for authentic limits.

I'm not sure what it says about the process (or me) that I would never even think of submitting a play to Arena or a similar sized organization; in the past year since I resumed submitting my plays, I've sent them to places that say they're actually looking (for a contest or festival), though both productions of my work this year (Riding the Bull in Seattle and Dream Walker in NYC) came through connections, not submissions.

The issue is bigger than Arena and certainly bigger than me; as Matt Freeman wrote in the comments of an earlier post on the subject, what is at stake is our faith in the idea of our field as a meritocracy. Studies reveal that this is patently false; women and artists of color are underrepresented, class presents barriers throughout a playwright's life, and a Masters from the right school can seemingly provide a faster track to success (such as it is).

This idea of a meritocracy, so fundamental to the American myth, is under assault in far more places than just the new play field. The growing gaps of income inequality, and the persistently corrosive effects of systemic gender and racial inequality, must be considered when we talk about inequality in theatre. One emerges from the other, and then sustains its progenitor by narrowing the stories we share on our stages.

This is an old ragged tune, and I don't need to sing every verse here. What I do believe is that a meritocracy is possible, and closer to achievable than we might think.

In neuroscience, our burgeoning understanding of the brain reveals that there are many divided areas of local activity that sometimes send information via transportation nodes to the brain at large. It is a system of systems, and it depends on vitality of activity at the local level as well as an effective means of sharing that activity across the whole.

The new play structure of these United States resembles a brain with dementia. The links between local activity and brain-wide communication are broken; and so information is lost, connections go unmade, and a great gyre of forgetfulness keeps the whole stumbling system in a fitful dark. Connections are top down: a play gets enough good reviews in a major city, and trickle down to theatres eager for a false legitimacy. This is not how a healthy brain works, and this is not how our new play structure should work, either.

We need a means of connecting local vitality through effective national hubs of communication, and the model for how this might works already exists. The New Play Map, created by Arena, is like a working brain that lacks consciousness. The connections are beginning to form, and now a will needs to emerge from them.

Every time that I read a play and love it, I share it with the rest of Flux; and if I'm particularly inspired by it, I'll advocate for it here on the blog and elsewhere. But without a context for that advocacy, it's difficult to achieve any momentum.

What we need is a Yelp-like database to emerge from the New Play Map that allows for participants to advocate for the new plays they read.

Here's how it could work:

-After reading a play that you feel confident in advocating for, you log-in to the platform (you've created an individual profile already). You ONLY use the platform for advocacy - this is not a reviewing platform. If you don't like something you read, it ends there. Read the full story

Readers of this blog may remember the profound impact the 2009 Network of Ensemble Theatre's Conference had on the thinking of myself and fellow attendee Heather Cohn. So we were thrilled to attend Micro-Fest LA, NET's mini-conference on new play development in Los Angeles from December 3rd-5th. It was indeed a jam-packed 3 days - what follows are the recollections I keep several weeks after.

FRIDAY, December 3, 2010
We began with a welcome from the ever-wonderful Mark Valdez and continued with presentations from a psychologist looking at creativity and John Malpede of the Los Angeles Poverty Department.

"Loose and tight" was how the psychologist described the brain's creativity, saying that creative activity was not confined to one side, but required a focused relaxation that allowed unexpected connections to be made on the right and then articulated by the left. This makes stress the great enemy of creativity; a heightened playfulness is required to summon the muse.

Malpede's speech was moving because of the clear impact LAPD continues to have on a community afflicted with poverty. Malpede's conversion from East Coast performance artist to West Coast missionary reminded me of John O'Neal's move from NYC to the the South to form Junebug, and struck again that chord of uncertainty of my own work here in theatre-stuffed NYC.

The night ended with a performance of Clown Town City Limits by Two Headed Dog. It was clowning by way of Sam Shepard, and while I loved the tonal dissonance of the piece, I wish their had been more consequences to the characters' actions (my own aesthetic baggage, yes). After a brief talkback, there was a party we were too jetlagged for, and we rested up for day two.

SATURDAY, December 4, 2010
I started with a Dramaturgy workshop (Heather went to movement) where I was given the great gift of Elinor Fuchs essay, Visit To A Small Planet. These questions approach a play as if the dramaturg is traveling to a new planet, with its own laws of physics, social structures, and ecosystems. There are no accidents in the world of the play, and through a series of questions, the unique ways the world works are brought to light. But this essay deserves its own post, so I will leave it for now.

We then were treated to 10+ minutes of physics which, as readers of this blog know, I could have easily wished to be 10 hours. It was pretty basic stuff, but he approached the second law of thermodynamics in a way that was new to me, and conceptually very helpful (again, probably a separate post).

Then we were up on our feet, brainstorming what made an ensemble structure's approach to developing new plays unique. There was a flurry of exciting ideas that now live on paper, and I look forward to NET sharing those with us!

Next up was Clark and I Somewhere in Connecticut by Theatre Replacement. I loved this play: a rabbit-suit wearing man describes his obsession with a suitcase full of family pictures he finds one night by a dumpster. His increasingly obsessive quest to understand these strangers leads to legal consequences and a beautiful reversal near the end of the play.

Obsessive love is something that has always fascinated me dramatically; the need to control the beloved's story, however benevolently, is almost always catastrophic; except, in this case, in the instance of pets; which, while sometime master of their own actions, have less agency to change the stories we invent for them. The obsessive purity of a central character's love of her pet dog is mirrored in the narrator's obsession with the photographs; for all the staging's whimsy, it is an unsettling piece that makes you look at the strangers you call family in your own life. The rabbit-suit device may have blunted the emotional impact of the play (the actor's face was obscured by the costume a lot of the time), but that didn't prevent the performance from moving me (and thinking deeply about it after).

We then saw two short Art-Bursts: the energizing krump and spoken word performance of Buckworld, and nightmarish dreamscape of Sadam Hussein set to the music and voices of Killsonic. There are more ways to make theatre than are dreamt of in my philosophies.

And there was more theatre to come: at 8PM, we saw two performances, The Ghost Road Company's Stranger Things and Post Natayam's SUNOH! Tell me, Sister. I responded most strongly to the second piece, especially the haunting second dance which featured a woman made featureless by fabric over her face and body, dancing to escape and transforming the fabric into wings. Heather and I both walked away thinking of possibilities for Ajax in Iraq and Menders...and then collapsed asleep.

SUNDAY, December 5, 2010
The last day began for me with a group discussing Culture & Creation (Heather went to group talking about Space). I attended this group hoping to learn tactics for successfully building a collaborative community of cross-cultural artists to bring into Flux Sunday, but time kept us mostly conceptual.

Then, there was a truck, and this truck had pancakes. 'Nuff said.

At 1PM, we saw our final round of performances, Critical Mass Performance Group's Untitled and Watts Village Theater Company's Clover and Cactus. I loved the first piece: I don't think I've ever seen excellent traditionally naturalistic acting merged so seamlessly with a poetic staging before. Devised work often leaves me feeling removed from the heart of the play, but grounding the more abstracted peregrinations of the piece with really detailed, nuanced human conflict and change gave me a way in. I wish I could see what happens next with this play in development!

And then, after some parting words, we packed and went our separate ways. I'm looking forward to the synthesis of all the ideas and energy generated by these busy three days. Thanks to good people of NET!

Read the full story

Homing - the ability of certain animals to return to a given place when displaced from it.

The Homing Project is the proposed name for the project described in this post, A Simple Plan.

Here's how we got here:
Recently, books and reports like Outrageous Fortune, The Gates of Opportunity, The Sands Report, NEA's Public Participation In The Arts Report, combined with movements like 50/50 by 2020, convenings like Arena's New Play Institute, and the conversations of the blogosphere have led me to hope that we are at a singular moment of change in new play development.

To aggregate the many issues facing new play development into overarching themes:
- There is a shrinking audience for new plays.
- There is a divide between institutions and playwrights.
- Female playwrights, and playwrights of color, are underrepresented on our stages.
- Great plays are not being written because good plays are being developed instead of produced.
- Overly influential playwriting tracks at elite MFAs may be creating educational inequity.
- Royalties do not provide enough income for playwrights to live.
- Playwrights no longer feel as if they have homes.

That last issue may be the root of them all: the most local of narrative arts has lost it's sense of home. Theatre has lost its place in our culture because it has lost its sense of place. There is no "there" there.

Here's where are now:
I'm proposing a project to change that. For right now, I'm calling it The Homing Project, and I'm hoping to apply to the Pepsi Refresh Project to get started.

The idea is simple, if a little crazy. RVC Bard rightly wondered if I'd taken my meds.

The Homing Project is a creative stimulus package that imagines a critical mass of the 4,000+ producing theatre organizations each producing 3 plays from a unique playwright over 3-5 years time.

In other words, this project believes we can work together as a field in an intentional way to create meaningful artistic homes for playwrights.
It believes that by doing so, we can shorten the divide between theatre leaders and playwrights.
It believes that while doing so, we can equitably represent the diversity of our field.
It believes by doing so, we will help good playwrights write great plays by actually seeing their work produced.
It believes these great plays will be more likely to connect with an audience the playwright knows from a sustained relationship over time.
And, it hopes that these great plays, through connecting to a specific audience, deepening the playwright/insitution relationships, and equitably representing the diversity of our country, will lead to an increased hunger for new plays and a more sustainable living for playwrights.

I don't believe that the new play machinery of our country is so impossibly divided and complex that it can't collaborate intentionally on a project of this size. All it will take is leadership from a few playwrights and organizations to get the ball rolling.

Here's how it might work:
A robust online platform that plays matchmaker between playwrights and theatres must be created. The playwrights would create a profile that would use a range of aesthetic tags to place their work into a searchable context. While that may sound like a rough tool, Pandora has shown it can be sensitive enough to work.

So a participating theatre would then enter the kind of work their mission supports and be given a list of possible matches. Playwrights would have a series of page samples available online. If the theatre liked what they read, they could contact the playwright or agent for a full script.

Theatres, isn't that better than all those playwrights sending you plays your mission could never support? Playwrights, isn't that better then the current process of mystery and secrecy?

Once a theatre finds some playwrights they like, the courting process begins, until a deadline arrives where every theatre must have chosen their unique playwright. And then, over the next 3 to 5 years, that theatre produces 3 plays from that playwright.

It sound daunting, but all we're asking is 1 play a season for this project. You can still produce A Christmas Carol and A Comedy of Errors. And if you didn't get the playwright you wanted most, produce her work, too. You just need to commit to creating a home for 1 unique voice for a short 3-5 years.

Do you want to reach 50/50 in 2020? What better way than a nation wide collaboration where you can see in real time the gender breakdown of participating playwrights. And if you don't like what you see, let that inform your choice.

Do you want to see more opportunities for playwrights of color? Now you can create them, and see who else is doing it too, and find ways to collaborate and build new audiences together.

Do you want to see greater geographic diversity? Start a petition for your local college to produce a local playwright, and then find that playwright in the online database.

Playwrights, you don't want your work produced by that community theatre that's fallen in love with you? That's fine. But maybe you're passing up an audience that, over 3 years time, would become devoted to your work. Why not say yes? It doesn't mean you can't have other plays produced elsewhere.

Where it takes us:
So let's say 1/10th of our 4,000+ potential partners sign on. In 3-5 years time, 400 playwrights will have written 1,200 new plays in a sustained partnership with unique institutions in unique communities.

Maybe some of those partnerships will last, and playwrights will move home to be supported by the communities they left for New York.

Maybe we reach 50/50 in 2015.

Maybe we break through all the good plays and start making some great ones.

Maybe our capacity to collaborate on a project local in impact and national in scope allows us to raise our profile in this country, and become more essential to our culture.

And then maybe we do it again, and this time 1/2 of the 4,000 partners join us, and 2,000 playwrights have a home that leads to 6,000 new plays written for specific communities.

And then maybe we don't need to do it again, because we can't imagine ever going back to a way of making theatre where audiences, artists, and institutions treat each other like strangers. We don't need to do it again, because we've actually created artistic homes.

What do you think? I'll be posting the 1st step I think we can take shortly. Read the full story

On the other hand, maybe it's simple.

The IRS reports 1,982 not-for-profit theatres with a budget over $75,000.
AACT lists 1,034 community theatre members.
A rough count lists 265 theatre on Indie Theater.org (that's in NYC alone).
TCG has 88 theatre programs as University Affiliates, and Twitter peeps tell me the number of programs is around 200-300.
*01/29/10: Adam hooked me up with a search engine for colleges - searching for theatre specific programs yielded 1,118 results - so the numbers that follow are actually potentially higher.

So let's say there are roughly 3,500 current theatre producing entities in this country (probably a conservative count, but there may be some cross over above as many community theatres have a sizable budget, and for the purposes of the thought exercise of this post, the exact number is not critical).

What if these 3,500 organizations each committed to produce 1 play a year from 1 unique playwright for the next 3 years?

You would have 3,500 different playwrights each developing a unique relationship with a company and community over 3 years.

Those playwrights would have the opportunity to see 3 of their plays fully staged, which, as J. at 99 Seats so rightfully points out, is the only way good playwrights learn how to write great plays.

And in 3 years time, 10,500 new plays would see the light of stage.

Some of the relationships developed at these theatres might turn long term, some wouldn't. But all of the communities served by all of these theatres would see a nationwide commitment to new plays and living playwrights being treated as essential.

What would this do to the national profile of new plays and playwrights?

Of theatre in general?

Some might prefer to leave community theatres off this list, but to me, our national decline in straight new play attendance demands as inclusive an approach as possible. If playwrights don't want to be produced by a partner organization, that is their prerogative. And they can certainly continue to have their work produced elsewhere, they'll just (for 3 years) be able to count on a home for their work.

Impossible logistically? Not at all. London's Bush Theatre created a website for producers to find plays, and a similar model, properly administered, could be used to play matchmaker-matchmaker between participating theatres and playwrights. The 365 Plays/Days, Lysistrata, Free Night of Theater, and The Laramie Project all serve as examples of successful national collaboration between theatres.

Some playwrights would be besieged with offers, and others would still be left out. Some theatres will protest having to work with their second or third choice, but if they don't have a list 20 playwrights deep they'd like to work with (I do), they're not reading enough (or the right) plays. And this proposal doesn't mean they can't also produce Proof, Doubt, and Twelfth Night; they just also need to produce, once a year for 3 years, a truly unique voice.

Even if only a 1/4 of the hypothetical 3,500 participated, you are still looking at 875 theatres and playwrights working together over 3 years in a program that is local in impact and national in scope. You are still looking at 2,625 deserving new plays (and yes, I think there are that many out there) seeing the light of stage.

Imagine it like a creative stimulus package for new play development. And just like the stimulus, there will be waste and mistakes. But there will also be a clear message to audiences and artists that new plays matter. And maybe, the connection between a theatre and playwright will kindle into the long term relationships idealized at the start of Outrageous Fortune; our Chekhov will find his Moscow Arts Theatre, our O'Neill will find her Provincetown Players, and our national theatre will find its way (or at least its mojo) again.

Crazy, right? Right. Though it may be crazier to continue to make small fixes to big problems.

I don't know. But, what if instead of just talking about supporting playwrights and doing new plays, we all agreed to do it. Not a huge change individually, but a sea change together. Read the full story

If the audience is as important as the actors in making a play work, why don't we spend as much time casting an audience as we do casting a play?

A backdrop for that question:

This weekend, I was lucky enough to observe the American Voices New Play Insitute at Arena Stage's convening on black playwrights. I was there on behalf of my goodly employer TCG, live tweeting the event @tcg and hashtag #newplay. Also make sure to check out Parabasis, Mission Paradox, 99 Seats and the New Play Blog for some in depth analysis of the event later this week.

At the convening, a playwright was discussing the impact of a racially charged joke early in her play on a primarily white audience. They froze, afraid to laugh; but as marketing tactics paid off and the audience diversified, black audience members who laughed at that moment gave the white audience members permission to do so, too.

What this example illuminates is the potential for a diverse audience to echo and enrich a moment on stage through the conflict and confluence of their different perceptions. You are aware not only of the meaning of the moment on stage, but of the meaning of your response in relation to rest of the audience. And this doubling of awareness and meaning doesn't necessarily distance you from the story, but makes it more visceral and immediate.

For more on how an audience's perception affects a play, check out these recent posts on A Different Case For Diversity, Let Me Down Easy, Quantum Darwinism, and More On Presence.

Which all leads us to the question: if the composition of an audience is as essential to a play's alchemy as the make-up of the cast, why don't we pay as much attention to casting the audience as we do to casting the play?

Obviously, I don't mean holding auditions for audience members; I mean considering the composition of the audience as carefully as we do that of the cast.

So who needs to be in the audience for the play to be fully heard?

Who is the choir for this play to preach to, and who is the power this play needs to speak truth to?
Both that power and that choir should be in the room together.
Who is this play about in the community? Are they represented in the audience?
And who in the community doesn't know about the people in this play?
Because they should be in the audience, too.
What are the conflicts in the play? Have all the sides of that conflict represented in the house.

Now, a theatre can only fit so many people, and we only have so much time in the day. But another take away from the convening was the power and necessity of reaching out to local partners who can advocate for you within the communities that the play needs present.

And with the aid of social media, we don't need to guess at who our audience is and how they think. We can ask. We can discover the complex and unique perceptions of our audience without relying solely on the blunt tools of demographics.

I could be very wrong: it could be our best way is to appeal to a devoted niche from an ever more fragmented culture.

But when I think of the audience I want to write for, act for, and sit in; it is an audience of diverse experiences united in focus, multiplying the power of our mutual awareness through our different perspectives.

Now, how do we make that happen? Read the full story

So I'm going to be blogging about TDF's new publication, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, as part of Isaac Butler at Parabasis' posse of bloggers. Today, all of us will be addressing Chapter 1: Dialogue in the Dark, Playwrights & Theatres. In the days to follow we'll be focusing on individual chapters, and I'm thrilled to say that I'll be joining with Scott Walters next Tuesday to talk about Chapter 5: Whose Audience Is It, Anyway?

But for now...Chapter 1: Dialogue in the Dark, Playwrights & Theatres.

First things first: the most important thing to note about this study is the limit of its scope. 94 theatres and 250 playwrights were surveyed, with an additional 31 playwrights and 67 artistic leaders/educators/agents/producers rounding out the survey results over a series of roundtable discussions.

When you consider the IRS reports 1,982 theatres with a budget over $75,000, and the latest New York Innovative Theatre demographic study lists 900 playwrights responding to their last survey; you begin to understand how small a slice of new play activity the report is actually covering.

In some ways, this isn't significant, as the study is specifically looking at playwrights who are "successful", a term defined loosely in the book, but understood to mean playwrights who are regularly being produced at a regional and Off-Broadway level. The survey focuses on a sample of those playwrights, and the theatres that are able to financially produce at that level.

In other ways, it is very significant, because the invisibility of the theatres and artists not covered in the study obscures one of the most powerful solutions to the problems addressed in the book. We'll get back to that. It is simply important to remember that the book addresses a statistically significant slice of new play development, but a slice all the same.

Still with me?

Because of the above, the other important thing to note about the book is the data is primarily self-reported. Most of the data concerns what playwrights and theatre leaders are saying and thinking about themselves and each other. In that light, it is extremely interesting.

But, with all of the controversy surrounding new play production, the primary take away of this book is our desperate need for a real time mechanism to report the true demographic breadth of play production in this company. Maybe that road runs through the play publishers, who would have information on rights and therefore the most representative data. Or maybe that road runs through organizations like nytheatre.com, who could work with other regional organizations to give monthly snap shots of local and national break-downs of percentages of plays written by women, people of color, new plays vs classics, etc.

In the end, we will need to have some accurate, comprehensive, and timely mechanism to measure those demographics, or we will continue to be uncertain of where exactly we are, where exactly we're trying to get to, and what actual progress is being made.

Still with me?

Good. All that aside, the book is a triumph, and a real asset to move the conversation of new play development forward.

It starts with the divide between theatre leaders and playwrights. From the playwright perspective, the pressures of declining audiences, corporate boards, and communities of aesthetically conservative tastes force artistic directors to take avoid taking risks with new plays. From the artistic director perspectives, playwrights are either writing plays of lower quality; or plays of high quality but formal difficulty that do not speak to their audience.

In other words, each side believes a large measure of blame rests with the other, though both this chapter and the book itself feature anecdotes of relationships that are working.

Underwriting both opinions are stark financial realities detailed in later chapters. Most new plays don't make money. Most playwrights don't make a living writing plays. Whatever lack of communication driving the distance between playwrights and theatres is fueled by this dire economic reality.

The equation of this distance seems to be something like this:
1. Most new plays don't make money, so...
2. Theatres cannot afford to keep playwrights permanently on staff, which means...
3. Playwrights cannot stay in a local community, so...
4. Playwrights move to cities where they form communities with other playwrights, and...
5. End up writing plays that will be seen primarily by an audience of their peers, which is...
6. A small audience, so smaller theatres are chosen, which leads to...
7. Smaller plays being written for a specialist audience, which then...
8. Make artistic directors hesitant to program these plays that don't speak to their audience, and so...
9. The artistic directors program the few plays that are hits, which...
10. Still don't necessarily speak to their specific community, and so...
11. They don't make money even on the hit plays they program, which means...
12. They can only afford to do hit plays with small casts, which gives us...
13. The current system of new play production, wherein a small number of small cast plays with a traditional narrative that are anointed as hits receive many productions, and so...
14. To change this dynamic, the funding community gives to new play development, focusing on premieres, which leads to...
15. The much bemoaned development hell and premieritis, which ends up...
16. Perpetuating a system where most new plays don't make money, and most playwrights don't make a living.

One potential solution is ironically present in the very first paragraph of the very first page:

Think about the relationship between playwrights and theatres, and images will spring to mind: Chekhov, surrounded by the actors of the Moscow Art Theatre, reads his play to them. Moliere, starring in his own work, gets carried from stage to deathbed by his company - his literal and figurative family - for whom he writes and with whom he brings his comedies to life. A wharf in Provincetown, fog sifting in and water lapping at the floorboards - Eugene O'Neill's first sea play is being performed by the band of passionate amateurs who discovered him. Or think about Brecht directing his own play with the Berliner Ensemble; Caryl Churchill discovering hers through research and improvisation with the Joint Stiock Theatre; or August Wilson traversing a country in step with not one theatre, but many partners in ambition, vision, song. And then there's Shakespeare, looming over all of them, a player among players on the banks of the Thames, at home in his Globe.

Shakespeare, Moliere, and Brecht were not separate from the financial decisions that brought their work to life, but directly responsible for it. They were shareholders in the life of their company. They brought their own strawberries to market. And they did so with a particular community of artists that, like the Provincetown Players and Moscow Arts Theatre, had made a commitment to long term collaboration with each other under an artist/producer model.

Flux Theatre Ensemble functions under this artist/producer, long term collaborative model. I believe that artists can and should be responsible for the consequences of their plays in a community; and I believe a producer should have their hands dirty with the theatre they're making. The silos of our specialist corporate culture may no longer be the ideal for making theatre. But whether you are a traditionally structured company or one of Travis Bedard's bands, all roads to recovery lead one way: to the audience.

We'll talk about that on Tuesday. And make sure to check out Isaac's blog for links to the other bloggers covering the book! Read the full story