theater is campfire, not corporation

Theater is campfire, not corporation.

That, essentially, is my overwhelming response to the bombshell study by TDF entitled OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF THE AMERICAN PLAY.

Forgive me, for the following posting could be wrought with disorganization, as ideas are coming at me very rapidly. This piece was shattering and illuminating to me on many levels.

Okay, so theater doesn't have a lot of problems, but the American theater system has A LOT of problems. I'm reading this study, and I'm drowning in numbers and pie charts and interviews and data data data data and I'm like... HUH? What?! Hello??? This is theater, we're talking about.

Theater is so basic. It is so fundamental. Theater is storytelling around the campfire. Whether your campfire is in a forest, over coffee, in a warehouse, on a walk along the water, on the beach, in a white sterile room, or in a pulsating, accoustically-magnicificent auditorium. It could be in Greece, Rome, London, Toyko, Paris, Cairo, Fairfax or in the backseat of your Toyota Camry. That's theater, it's campfire. Why all the numbers and graphics? Well, let's see.

This study is wrought with all kinds of issues. Theater companies, artistic directors don't know how to work or relate with playwrights anymore. Playwrights don't know how to relate to artistic directors. A "collaboration in crisis," the book mentions.

Audiences are dwindling. Board Members of theaters, donors and grant givers have more clout than people realize. Commericalism, not artistry, is the undercurrent for these REGIONAL theater companies. They are all little machines, now, where Board Members and donors and grant givers are on the other side of the table providing input and nudges for what the theater company should produce. The artistic director becomes a circus freak, trying to balance the needs and desires of the company's artists, the needs and desires of the company's board and then trying to gauge what will and what will not go for their audience pool. Marketing becomes the theater's most vital tool for e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. PLUS, artistic directors have to balance another thing, which many have, but admittingly not all do. And that is EGO. So many regional theater companies are less interested in producing works for their company and for their community. So many plays now are concieved with their future in mind. How much money will this make us? Will our production pick up a ton of local awards and write-ups? Will this production really catapult this playwright? Will the production itself catapult? Will we pave the way for a NYCBroadway production? Will WE be the NYCBroadway production?! On and on and on and on... plays aren't really focused on, the folks are already focusing on the next of the next of the next. Read me?

By the way, the NYCBroadway market is so off the chart, don't bet on that anymore. NYCBroadway is the new Vegas, trying pitifully to be another Hollywood, but ends up looking like a tard little step sister. NYCBroadway is not interested in being the pulse for American theater voices, it is just a commericalized hub. It is producing hits and that's all. The statistic between 1920 and today is stunning. (see below blog post for finding).

My opinion is this. If you have this commericalized mind-set... like if you're thinking about the plays you produce in terms of what amount of success they will achieve, where they will take you, how many awards you'll get, etc., then I think you're in the wrong business. Why the fuck aren't you out in Hollywood with this mindset?? That's where you should be.

American Theater, at some point in the past century, has just become this pitiful corporate machine, like everything else in the West. I use the word 'pitiful' and here's why.

Theater never started out as a corporate being. Like I mentioned, theater started out as campfire. The problem is, it STILL IS campfire. And people in the American Theater system, for years and years now, have been trying extremely hard to make it a corporate machine, and this is why the American Theater system has been failing. This is why the American Theater system has been going on this downward spiral, steadily downward, for DECADES.

Film is corporate. Film has always been corporate, and here's why. Film has ALWAYS been expensive. Since it's invention, with all its cameras and lights and sounds and editing and all that mother fucking shit, film has always been an expensive artform. Which is why there's no surprise big corporate machines, Studios, were created back in the day, early early in film's formitive years. The Hollywood machine is absolutely nuts, disgusting at times, so commerical that it too loses artistic integrity often, BUT, the thing is, it works. That system, as fucked up as it may be, it works for film. It works for film because, after all... films get out there. Films reach people, films and TV make an impact. Films and TV are a vibrant pulse in our cultural bloodstream. Theater, on the other hand, honestly is NOT.

No really, it isn't. Yeah, there might be an amazing play that comes along, blows a lot of people away, but then HBO buys the film rights and then boom! You have ANGELS IN AMERICA. or PROOF. or THE HISTORY BOYS...THE MOVIE! There is a distinction here I want to make clear: stories don't lose relevance, but theater and stage musicals, as the form itself, THAT loses cultural relevance. The History Boys, incredibly successful play, great STORY. The STORY was relevant enough that it was picked up and made into a movie. STORIES are the variable, not necessarily the form. Read me?

The corporate system doesn't work for theater like it does for the movies. It doesn't work for theater, it just doesn't. When you try to implement a system semi-like that into the theater world, you have what we have now in our country. A "collaboration in crisis," to say the LEAST.

Have I lost faith in theater? No, absolutely not. Stories are so essential. They teach us how to live and we need words like we need bread. But I am very disenchanted with the theater system in the US. I need to do more research on how the European system of theater works. From what I gather, a lot of them don't do it like this.

It you want to do THEATER, you have a passion of telling stories, for collaboration, for current events and community and connectivity. If you have passion for money or for nailing a world-preimere play, or nailing an "emerging" playwright... than you shouldn't be doing theater. You just shouldn't.

Theater, really, I think, should be like the numerous European theater companies out there. They're a band of artists and they create their own work together and whenever their process has finished they present their work. They can tour, they can stay based in a community, whatever they like, but that it's clear what their passions are.

I haven't lost my passion for theater, no, not at all, however my vigor and love for the American theater system has rapidly declined within the past 12 hours lol. I want to continue to be an artist and lead a creative life, that is something I don't plan to cease, however, I don't quite know if I want to be apart of this sort of system.

Again, if I went out to Hollywood and tried to make it big, I would expect all this shit. Why? Fuck, beucase its Hollywood. Money and looks talk out there. Get with it. But to deal with this corporate, money bullshit in the THEATER? What's the fucking point of that? Especially when, on a grand scale, theater is not very effective anymore. Well, at least in this country and not to the level that film and television are effective.

You have to have an unyielding intense passion for the craft of theater itself to devote yourself to this fucked up, ineffectual system. I have an intense passion for theater itself, but my passion does yield. It yields because I don't want to get lost in that bullshit. I want to make a difference and I want to point people in the direction of progress. I want to get out there and work. I don't want to write several plays for them to just get stuck in developmental hell in a theater. I don't want to do workshop after workshop for there never to be an ultimate production. For acting and directing in the theater, which I also do, it's a similar predicament. And, I don't want to get trapped in some MFA program- which seems to be so necessary these days- just to get swamped down in debt I'll never be able to pay off because realiztically you live near or just above the poverty level if you are a theater practioner. I don't want to waste time getting rejected in the theater. I'd rather waste time getting rejected in a larger industry, because at least I know that I am on the road to reaching out to people. Does that make sense? I have a large scope and I want to reach a lot of people. Theater doesn't reach a lot of people in this country, not anymore anyway. And it definitely doesn't have the cultural punch it once had. So when you're getting rejected in the theater world, I feel now that it's like so pointless. If I were out in Hollywood, getting rejected, I'd know, at least, that I was CLOSE to reaching a lot of people. Make sense?>

I know that they are so many great minds working right this instant trying to improve the American theater system. In fact the TDF study outlines some amazing new methods and ideas for improving the system-- mainly, actually, improving the relationship between playwright-artistic director-audience-- and there are people in DC theater companies right now who are working at innovating ways to changing things, like recently one DC theater just hired 7 playwright in residence to be on staff!! Yes, that is acutally very amazing.

BUT, there's a long road ahead. And I really don't feel, in my gut, the gusto to jump in and make this muck better. Maybe I'll show back up in a decade if shit has changed, I don't but. But I just feel that it's not my calling to try and help restructure this system. And I'm afraid if offereed a year long fellowship in this area I would go absolutely nuts. I think I might be trapped.

Theater is a poor's man art, and there's nothing wrong with that. People need to understand this. Theater is campfire. It's dances and delights and whispers and shadows and hand-made costumes and characters and story. Okay, duh, yes, I know it's a lot more than that, but ESSENTAILLY, when you pair it down, that really IS ALL IT IS!

To make theater aristocracy is a sham and for 'theater people' to adopt this arrogance and closed off niche of 'theater artists' is ridiculous- those people should be teleported back to somewhere between the Victorian era and the Roaring Twenties, when theater was deliciously bougie and decadent. Those days are done now.

Looking at DC theater, it's like a corporate minefield. Each of the theaters in DC work independly and compete with one another. Yes, there is collaborate overlaps especially among the artists, but basically it's all competition. There's awards seasons, there's the press. But is all so ridiculous, because the majority people that see all the shows are theater people themselves, or if they're not, if they are outsiders and subscribers and such (and don't get me wrong, there are plenty of those), they waft in and out, that's what they do, and these number of people, according to all studies, are dwindling more and more each year.

In the TDF study they use the term "ecosystem" alot. Like the ecosystem of the a certain theater community, DC for instance. Again, though, this term 'ecosystem' is masquerading as a commericalized term, is it not? I envison some sort of marshland where all the living organizms are actually theater companies, and everything is fighting to survive and live in the environment. Why has something so BASIC as theater (as campfire) retreated to this feral state? Art and theater is supposed to transcend that feral state, is it not?

The theater system adopted this corporate system, I think?, because it was hoping to mimick the success of film?? I don't know. But the thing is, this system is not working, period. Money, success, all if this is counter-intuitive to the basic, fundamental concept of what theater IS. This is why a corporate system cannot sustain it. Theater is nature, theater is natural, like relgion or hunting or even sporting is natural. It is not a man-made art form. Film is man-made, and expensive, hence why I think it has been successful from corporatizing.

Now, has theater lost it umphf? Lost its power? Of course not. It's just the system. The current system is cororpoate, aristocratic and uninviting to the majority of the population. If a Latina with a low-income, a hardworking honest woman with 2 jobs in her mid-to-late 30's is sitting outside waiting for her bus and sees 2 billboards, one to her right for a classical theater performance in town, and one to her left about the new show premiering Tuesday night at the CW, this is potentially how she would process both of these advertisements.

She'd look at the classical theater ad and might recognize the name of the theater, might adore the costumes, she might even think the whole thing is extremely clever looking... but she won't go and see this show because the current theater system has not made her feel apart of it's community. She inherently knows that by the price of the ticket, by even the look of the ad, that it is simply NOT for her. It's not her community. That's what it tells her. This experience, this knowledge, is NOT FOR HER.

She'll look at the other ad for the show on the CW premiering Tuesday night and if she likes the look of the ad, she'll be welcome to watch it. She feels invited to that world, to that community, because it open to everyone and its free. All you need is a TV. nothing else.

So, I think there are so many problems in this, all around.

I don't think I want to get caught in the maelstrom of this mess. It's aristocracy, yes, but it's a joke at aristocracy, is it not? The aristocractic are wealthy, influencial class of people. They would go to theater and be entertained. Today, the majority of companies are still presenting work under that mind-set, whether they realize it or not (for proof all you have to do is see the high majority of WHITE people in the audiences of these theater companies). It's a joke at aristocracy because it's a joke to think that theater has huge cultural relevance these day. It just doesn. Now remember, I'm not saying that story does, story DOES have relevance. Extreme relevance. But the craft of theater in this country is built within a system that does not compliment it.

A true theater artist, a TRUE BLUE artist of the theater-- not a business guru, not an ego nut, but a true artist of the theater who believed the only passion and answer to life, was hanging out with friends and writing, performaning and creating theater together, wouldn't dream up a theater system like this. They just wouldn't.

They would dream something like what Ariane Mnouchkine has created with Theatre du Soliel, or what Boal started in Argentina, or even what the Cornerstone Theater Company is doing in LA, or the Toneelgroup Theater Group is doing in Amsterdam.

Not this. Not this.