Let the revolution begin

I'm going to toss out a little quote here and ask that you sit back and think about it, mull it over and consider its implications on the work we do and the times in which we live:

"Every great play we have ever been lucky enough to feast our eyes on has come out of a public [for profit] playhouse." ~ Walter Kerr, How Not to Write a Play.

As mission statements go,"Seattle as a world class theatre town," stirs me not at all. "Seattle is the epicenter of a theatre revolution," is a good start, and we have the motive, opportunity and means.

Mike Daisey's article in The Stranger, The Empty Spaces, motivates. He sums up the argument against the status quo reasonably well but overlooks the fundamental cause. A theatre on subsidized life support is incapable of innovating and competing against other forms of entertainment. So long as not-for-profit theater remains, in the words of Todd London, "The way theater gets done in America,"our theatre will live on unchanged.

The basic conventions of our theatre haven't changed since Ibsen's Pillars of Society opened in 1877. Social drama remains the dominant genre. Thesis driven chamber pieces requiring four actors and a couch are our stock in trade. Neither have produced a masterpiece on par with the greatest plays of the past, nor have they resulted in a popular, profitable and vital theatre. Our audience is getting smaller, new plays are a novelty, and only theater administrators are making a living, still season after season we keep raising the curtain hoping a miracle is waiting in the wings.

The thing I find most depressing about all of this is our lack of imagination. We can imagine a 48-hour play festival and make it a reality. We can imagine the plays of the dead back to life. We take great pride in the powers of our imaginations, but we can't imagine a theatre more popular, vital and relevant than basic cable.

Once upon a time, we were troubadours surviving on talent and wit, scoundrels smart enough to give audiences what they were willing to pay good money to see. These days, all but a very small number of plays and musicals lose money, and most Equity actors make more on unemployment than they do on stage.

We have plenty of opportunity. If most theater is being done for free anyway, why not spend our labor innovating, inventing new ways of working and a new product. We need to start taking enormous risks. We have nothing to lose but our day jobs.

As for means, any empty space will do.

Why 14/48 is the best show in town

Playwright and rabble-rouser Paul Mullin posted a note on Facebook that caused something of a shit-storm in Seattle's theatre community, especially among members and fans of 14/48. Paul took 14/48 producer Shawn Belyea to task for calling the short plays he produces "plays," and for having the temerity to call their debuts "World Premieres."

A play, according to Mullin, is longer and requires more labor to write than a six page 14/48 what-have-you. "To compare that effort to the plays staged at 14/48 and call them both "world premieres" is like comparing a late night jam session to composing a symphony. And to some degree, it's insulting to both composer and jammer."

Responses range from the predictably juvenile, "Don't shit where you eat," to the thoughtfully mature, "All of these posts embody the spirit of 14/48: risk... I hope you feel welcome to risk your thoughts here, too."

Belyea's response started out reasoned, turned testy and then slammed the door and stormed off. No one need defend 14/48. The festival's enduring success speaks for it in full.

Before venturing my thoughts, let's put this brouhaha into perspective: Plays, short or long, wrought in a flash of brilliance or by tedious labor, good or bad, are, to our culture at large, inconsequential. Theatre is not a vital form.

Now, to the point at hand.

The plays that have endured the test of time explore serious themes, entertain a broad audience and lead to catharsis. The tragedies and comedies of the Greeks, the Elizabethan plays, the plays of the Spanish and French golden ages - all have significantly more than six pages. Telling a story that summons complex, deep emotions, comic or tragic, takes longer than Prologue's hour-glass (Henry V).

It takes a good deal of time to see Hamlet through carnal, bloody and unnatural acts, accidental judgments, casual slaughters and deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, all the while coming to know him as a courtier, soldier, scholar, grieving and vengeful son, lover, murderer, philosopher, theatre aficionado and friend. Four thousand twenty lines of verse are required to give the 4,021st line, Horatio's "Now cracks a noble heart, " the power to break our hearts. It takes Tennessee Williams two hours to set up one of the great soul-rending payoffs in modern drama, Blanche's unforgettable exit line, "Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

Six page plays can never achieve the depth and dramatic power their longer cousins have achieved, which is not to say short plays can be dismissed. Short plays shove a playwright's shortcomings back in his face. The skills needed to construct a sound short play apply to longer forms and vice-versa. Same with short stories and novels, sketches and portraits, operettas and operas and go-karts and Formula 1 (karting is F1's farm league).

14/48 is made up of short plays, but the event itself is bigger than the sum of its parts. Players and playgoers come together in a heightened state of awareness because the stakes are alarmingly high. Most of the time, 14/48 achieves what every evening of theatre should and too few do - it wildly exceeds expectations. Fourteen plays in forty-eight hours? That's crazy. But when it all comes together, as it does more often than chance would have, 14/48 is Theatre, equal to or greater than what's playing in any theatre anywhere.

If only what's playing mattered...