Please Don't Start a Theatre Company

Ask yourself whether this is primarily a way to meet your own artistic or career needs. If so, then give yourself a time period in which you will devote at least at much energy to advancing your career in other ways as you were going to spend reading that Nolo Press book on how to incorporate.  Make meetings with larger theaters to see if you can join forces, try to see if you can connect with someone else with a space, an audience, some kind of demand that you can supply.


Rebecca Novick, "Please Don't Start a Theatre Company" (at 2AMt)

What does pro-am theatre look like?

The always restless American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage has launched an online journal of provocations, HowlRound. Here is Meiyin Wang on "The Theatre of the Future":

Theater will be performed by audiences—as in Rotozaza’s Etiquette—where two participants sit across from each other at a café table, listening to instructions over headphones, moving around objects and participating in the enactment of a narrative. Or, as in Gob Squad’s Kitchen, where the collective attempt to recreate Andy Warhol’s underground movies, where by the end, the four performers are replaced by four audience members on stage, participating in this quirky meditation of the unknowability of the past and optimism for the future.

And furthermore:

I quote Ben Cameron, from the Doris Duke Charitable Trust, who spoke so beautifully at Under The Radar this January—who compared the religious reformation in the 15^th century and our current Arts Reformation—“which is dramatically shaped by new technologies and a massive redistribution of knowledge. With the means for cultural and artistic production and distribution having been democratized. There is a term, pro-am, amateurs who are doing work professionally—a group expanding our aesthetic vocabulary, even as they assault our traditional notions of cultural authority and undermine the assumed ability of traditional arts organizations to set the cultural agenda.”
 
With increasing interactivity and participation from audiences who are no longer satisfied to be on just the receiving end, content changes. Form changes. Authorship changes.

American playwrights only write about New Yorkers in their apartments discussing their feelings.

Michael Billington, critic for the Guardian, reviewing the National Theatre's production of Blood and Gifts: "JT Rogers is that rare creature: an American dramatist who writes about global issues."

Is it true that this species of American dramatists is rare? If so, why? Discuss.

In which I propose a moratorium.

Followers of this blog know that I consider Adam Szymkowicz's blog essential reading. However, reading an interview with a different playwright every single day, answering generally the same questions, makes we wonder about the question "What kind of theatre excites you?" It seems many of the interviewees (smart writers, all of them!) feel their answer must include some variation on "I get bored by plays that are just TV dramas or sitcoms put on stage."

Is it time for a moratorium on this particular complaint? Better: let it be allowed, but only if the speaker is willing to name names. Who are these evil playwrights shrinking our stages into TV screens? Let us out them and destroy them!