Theater and the Playgoer - a Scene

LIGHTS UP:

Theater: “Can I start you off with a farce?”

Playgoer: “I’m not seeing your Neil Simon.”

Theater: “No Simon. We’ve got vintage Ayckbourn. Our British sex farces have aged nicely. Or perhaps a Feiffer, a Durang, or a -”

Playgoer: “What happened to the Simon?”

Theater: “Couldn’t sell it. Took it off the menu.”

Playgoer: “Crap. Well, what do you recommend?”

Theater: “I like a Durang, but most people order an Ayckbourn.”

Playgoer: “Oh, God, no. No Durang. Last time I had a Durang, you don’t wanna know. Uh… Okay, I’ll have an Ayckbourn.”

Theater: “Would you like to see the dance menu?”

Playgoer: “I always get the Twyla Tharp.”

Theater: “Tharp it is.”

Playgoer: “Can I go ahead and order? I’ve got to be in bed by ten.”

Theater: “Absolutely.”

Playgoer: “See that woman?”

Theater: “Jimmy Choo or Manolo Blahnik?”

Playgoer: “Blahnik. What’s she having?”

Theater: “That’s a Martin McDonagh, but if you’re leaning in that direction today’s special is a brilliant twist on a McDonagh by a fresh face.”

Playgoer: “How’s it served?”

Theater: “On its own petard.  Brantley sees promise.”

Playgoer: “Nah. I had a thing by a fresh face years ago. It was rotten. I can still taste it. I guess I’ll do the Shakespeare.”

Theater: “That comes with Ibsen and Chekov or Shaw and O’Neill.”

Playgoer: “What was that thing you had, like, five or six seasons ago?”

Theater: “You mean the Albee and Miller?”

Playgoer: “Yeah, can I get that?”

Theater: “No problem. Dessert?”

Playgoer: “Do you do an improv?”

Theater: “Hemorrhoid Guy Mistakenly Sees Female Dentist. It’s great.”

Playgoer: “Sold.”

Theater: “Coffee?”

Playgoer: “Decaf.”

THE END

Glacial play development, playing the odds

The gestation period of a play is most often a number of years. Playwrights tend to take their sweet time. Plays get workshopped ad nauseam. Theaters program their seasons a year or more in advance. When a new play finally opens, it plays for a few weeks, gets reviewed, then closes never to be seen or heard from again.

Does a lengthy, precious process produce better plays?

Plays might as well take years to hit the boards - no one's in a hurry. The demand for new plays is at an all time low. A glacial development process is filling the gap. Playwrighting these days means hitting the workshop circuit, being a re-writer in residence.

If today's long journey from idea to opening night is intended to be a way for theaters to reduce risk and consistently produce plays of value, it's a failure. Fewer plays means fewer good plays. Theater has always been a numbers game. Even the best playwrights miss now and then. We like to think we know a hit when we read one. The fact is, only an audience knows a hit when it sees one.

Most theaters are set up to produce four to six plays a season. Given the same resources, why not produce twelve or twenty-four plays or more? No sets, less rehearsal, an ensemble, more plays - it's been done and it worked out reasonably well (see: English Renaissance Theater). 14/48 proves that audiences love theater on the edge. Maybe high gloss is less appealing than high risk, rough hewn and flawed.

Theater has always been a numbers game.

Going the way of the Poet

A recent Theater Development Fund study, Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play, found that theater in general and new plays in particular are in a long, relentless decline toward cultural oblivion.

The Playwright is going the way of the Poet, laboring for love, taking pride in token rewards, competing with the dead, and serving a shrinking, increasingly uniform audience.

People who work in industries facing oblivion often see the ax only as it falls. The only people surprised by the speed and scope of the newspaper industry slaughter were the people who worked for newspapers.

If you work in the theater, for love or profit, consider the ax.

What great plays have in common

The great plays of the Elizabethan theater have a few things in common:

Serious themes

Simple sets (a dressed stage)

Great costumes

Heightened language

Complicated plots

Big casts

Murder or marriage

The best of the Elizabethan plays were, in their time, popular and profitable. Even the unpopular plays were, most of the time, break even due to supper low overhead and savvy risk management practices.

Modern plays have in common:

Serious theses

Extravagant sets

Great costumes

Prose

Relatively simple plots

Small casts

Few murders or marriages

The best of the modern plays are not popular and are subsidized.

If I could change any one modern convention, it would be our use, or abuse, of language. Verse is the natural language of theater and plays to its strengths. Audiences love wordplay.

Take Eminem. Over eighty million albums sold.  More than Bob Dylan. I love Bob Dylan. I love Eminem.

Writing a good play is hard. Writing a good play in verse is only slightly harder, in the beginning, and then it's easier. You can learn how write verse. I can teach you how in one day. Getting good at it will take longer, but you can get good at it. Don't rule out writing in verse just because Shakespeare wrote in verse and everyone think he's so dreamy. If you're a playwright, he's your biggest competitor.

Beat him at his own game.

My Comfy Job

Before working at Microsoft I was a:

Bus boy

Bartender

Unskilled labor guy

Surgical orderly

Salon Manager

High School Drama Teacher

Airport Limo Driver

King County Land Plat Office Word Perfect Wiz

Receptionist, Communications Assistant, Promotions Producer, video editor and Producer - all at KCTS.

And in-between all of the above were countless acting and directing jobs. I've been a singing and dancing salt shaker. For the love of God, I did MIME!!!!

KCTS was the first gig that became something like a career and the first that offered reasonably good health care. In Playwrights' Nurturing is the Focus of Study (New York Times, January 15, 2010), there's a quote about bad teeth that hit home. My teeth are something like 50% fillings. I learned a lot at KCTS, like the almost inevitable dysfunctions that come with being a not-for-profit organization.

My current job is not all that "comfy" (Mullin's word, not mine). I like it, but it can be brutal. I work with super smart people. Smart people can be fun, but they're also a constant reminder that I have a BFA in acting. I like that I make decent money. Growing up, we had no money. Poverty sucks. I like that I can support child development programs in my old neighborhood.

Ten years in a for-profit corporation has taught me that the world is full of smart, ambitious, creative, inventive people who dream up crazy things, make them a reality, sell them and make money. I swear, the only difference between entrepreneurs and most of the theater people I know is that the entrepreneurs have better imaginations.

We are living in a time when great stories are being told - stories that are thematically driven, explore universal themes, have broad appeal and exert an influence on our culture. The vast majority are being told in the vital forms of our time, TV and film. Our theater is a future footnote. That footnote will describe how the film industry extended the brand of their most successful properties by turning them into Broadway musicals.

If you want theater to be relevant, figure out a way to make it necessary to a large and diverse audience. If you want to ensure its continued decline, keep doing what you're doing.