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Culture report: gatekeepers
Causing a scene
Illustration: Kim RosenAfter years of private bitching and public grumbling about our nonprofit theaters’ toothless seasons, homogeneous production designs and timid, old-man marketing, I’ve finally found a person with the taste and courage to be the ideal artistic director of the 21st century: me.
You heard right; I’ve sat through enough shit (and genius) and I want some power. Give me an annual budget of $5 million, all my downtown contacts and see if I don’t make a splash. I’d program a season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker and Will Eno. Plus—eventually—younger, unproduced playwrights who landed on my desk. (The more violent and obscene, the better.) Foreign writers, too, in fresh translations. Every first Monday I’d throw a free play reading with an open bar. In the summer, I’d open the doors for a two-month workshop by a favored company—Radiohole, the Debate Society or Nature Theater of Oklahoma—ending in a massive celebration. The advertising would be slick and bold, the tickets cheap, the parties raucous and the shows calculated to enrage, excite and astound. For the first five years, I would not accept any subscriber over the age of 35. I’d have blogs, press conferences, preshow talks and fat souvenir programs. I’d constantly bombard the media with video and op-ed pieces tied to our shows—when I wasn’t hosting a kick-ass party.
The next morning, hungover and broke, I realize that it was all a drunken dream.
Running a daring, high-quality theater in this town is nearly impossible. Whether you head the tiny Vineyard Theatre on East 15th Street (120 seats and an annual budget of $2 million) or the elephantine Roundabout Theatre Company (two Broadway spaces, an Off Broadway house, an Off-Off studio, 44,000 subscribers and $43 million to burn), you’ve got divided loyalties. Are the artists happy? Are the funders happy? Is the board happy? Natalie Portman is interested in Director A? Great, um, let’s find a project. What? Will Smith really wants you to read his friend’s play; it stinks, but the friend writes for HBO. Can you put Jada’s brother in the show? He’ll donate! The subscribers are pissed! The critics hate your guts!
I’m sure our artistic directors would like to do the right thing. I’m sure that the Roundabout’s Todd Haimes would love to hire Jack Cummings III to direct an American classic. Or that Lynne Meadow of Manhattan Theatre Club knows that Qui Nguyen needs her support. Or that Carole Rothman would be thrilled to turn Second Stage Theatre over to the Civilians, a downtown docu-theatrical troupe that could use a high-profile platform.
Actually, Oskar Eustis is already on that—he’s hosting the Civilians’ Paris Commune later this month. Eustis, who took over the Public Theater in 2004, has been rebuilding its downtown and political credibility. Only the third person to walk in Joe Papp’s shoes (after George C. Wolfe’s solid but commercial-minded rule of 1993 to 2004 and JoAnne Akalaitis’s aborted 20-month tenure), Eustis has made good moves: inviting the Wooster Group, hosting the Under the Radar Festival and spearheading an Off-Off series, the Public Lab. But can he truly revitalize the Public, get younger butts in seats, and make plays seem exciting and dangerous the way Papp (1921–1991) did?
Can there even be another Joe Papp? The legendary showman who started Shakespeare in the Park and recolonized the Astor Library was an impossible, controlling figure. He baited the critics, strong-armed the city and did all he could to make himself irreplaceable at the theater he created. His democratizing mission: Bring the classics to the people and foster a spirit of aesthetic adventure. But today, do “the people” want classics? It’s hard enough getting seasoned playgoers to embrace garden-variety postmodernism.
Robert Brustein, who founded and ran the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from 1980 to 2002, sees a bleak picture. “Critics, the subscription audience, the high cost of tickets, the collapse of the NEA as a predictable funding source…all of these things contribute to a general atmosphere of blandness and timidity,” he says via e-mail. “I think Jim Nicola at New York Theatre Workshop is maintaining high standards.… But never say never in the theater. Someone will come along with a burst of energy that will explode the general torpor.”
Gregory Mosher also has hopes for an artistic-director messiah. Mosher led Lincoln Center Theater from 1985 to 1991, and isn’t afraid to suggest radical solutions—like dumping pesky old subscribers. “The ‘next Papp’ is right here, wherever here is—could be Newark, for all we know,” Mosher says. “Joe’s successor is a young person, very likely a woman and a first- or second-generation American, with a startling idea and the determination to bring it to life. Joe had many wonderful qualities, but above all he had a compelling idea. His idea, however, was deeply strange at the time, and threatening to the status quo. And the next great idea will seem equally strange to us. We have to be alert for it and embrace it. And we have to remember that it probably won’t lead to something that looks like the Public, or LCT or any other 50-year-old company, but will be a new form.”
Well, whoever this revolutionary art leader is, I hope to be around to complain about their seasons. And to covet their job.
Also in Theater:
- Q&A: André Bishop and Paige Evans
- Curator's calendar: St. Ann’s warehouse artistic director Susan Feldman
Time Out New York / Issue 653 : Apr 2–8, 2008
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The prohibitively high cost of a postage stamp size ad in Time Out surely acts as a gate keeper for new and old groups. Why should non-profit groups have to pay the same ad prices that Hollywood and Broadway pay? Should not Time Out have a sliding scale policy? The vision you cry for seems to be only an empty call for shock power. The more "revolutionary" (your word) art movements have been connected to a parallel social movement of protest and change. Check out the art south of the border!
I certainly support the idea of a new American theater messiah. I would argue that he will show up somewhere like Austin or Seattle rather than NY. American theater is ever-more regionalized, with exciting new work happening all over the place. This wasn't the case during Papp's reign, and the new Papp will perhaps create a context to platform all the exciting regional work. Maybe it should be called the New American Theater Festival? Yes, we can!
In your search for innovative NY theatre, might I remind you that you have yet to see the work of Blessed Unrest, and we've been at it since the late '90s. Perhaps we haven't purchased enough TimeOutNY advertising space...
Let me just finish this thought and say the artists are there. I'm not so much worried about the groups and writers and directors (well, maybe directors). It's the audience and the CONTEXT for the art that I'm most worried about.
Fair enough, but it sounds like you wish there was a place called PS122. Oh wait, there is a place called PS122. And it's cultivating this audience and these artists. But then again, there is also SoHo Rep, the Ontological, the Ohio Theater, and The Chocolate Factory. Why does it all need to be under one roof? That would promote homogenous programming and close more doors than it would open. The nomadic nature of downtown is what fosters groups like The Debate Society and makes them good.
I love PS 122, Soho Rep, etc, and they're doing great work, but I'll be an arrogant jerk and say that I would push that kind of work to the next level. Meaning bigger budgets, bigger houses, bigger audiences, more media attention. There are artists in their 30s and early 40s who are stuck in a kind of semi-professional limbo. Anne Washburn may get a decent run at the Vineyard, but the audiences grumble, they aren't prepared for her work, and now where is she?
Ben: Scores of press releases sluice through my inbox each week. And of course I worry that I'm missing excitng new groups. Believe it or not, I'm not posing as a cutting-edge cool arbiter of taste. I'm simply dreaming here of a theater in which all the sorts of groups/writers I like can be represented, under one institution, making a unified statement, for which an audience could be cultivated. If you have a list of artists I should know, please feel free to use the comments box for that.
Seriously, David. A season of Anne Washburn, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker, Will Eno, Radiohole, the Debate Society and/or Nature Theater of Oklahoma is hardly cutting edge. Neat, maybe. We've been hearing about these people for long enough now, they'll do fine... not some kickass gnarly knock-em out go gettum coolguy arbiter of taste thing you're posing here. Do you actually take any risks in what you choose to go out and see? Or just how much slips past your inbox every day?
This article is, in large part, idiotic, written by someone with a limited understanding of New York City history and theatre history. It doesn't begin to take into account that the city has been remade in the image of our erstwhile Mayor Bloomberg and the only people who can afford to live here are those who work in finance, just like him. Real estate, the miserable state of education, new media all play a part. Don't lay it at the feet of older New Yorkers. There is more to the picture.
Theatre de la jeune lune in minneapolis has been doing just that for the last 27 years. May be You should come and pay us a visit, or have us visit you in your lovely city. Dominique Serrand, Artistic Director.
GREAT COLUMN. WORKED AS P.A FOR JOE FROM 1970 TO 79. THERE AT THE RIGHT TIME.. PAVLO HUMMEL,COLORED GIRLS' STICKS AND BONES. CHAMPION SEAS ON AND BEST OF ALL THEFIRST SIX YEARS OF A CHORUS LINE FROM DOWNTOWN TO UPTOWN. BROADWAY WOULD NOT EXSIST WITHOUT THE JEWISH THEATRE LOVERS TDF,TDF AND OUT OF TOWNERS.THERE ARE FEW IF ANY REAL PRODUCERS WITH TASTE BACKGROUND AND BALLS. ECONOMICS AND MERCHANDISING HAVE IN MY OPINION KILLED IT OFF .ALSO NO OR FEW REAL STARS.
Hi Mary Ellen: I never declared, in my drunken, power-mad delirium, that anyone over 35 could not attend my dream theater, merely that we would build our subscription base on spectators 35 years and younger. Five years after, we'd open up the doors to anyone. Being 38, I wouldn't even be able to join my own theater. I'm firmly of the opinion—call it heartless—that large institutions such as MTC, LCT and the Roundabout should shed older subscribers on a periodic basis.
playwright and/or actor. at least until it seems that he/she has an idea and is not just trying to startle. but as a supporter of all kinds of theater for 60 years i resent your suggestion that only those under 35 may attend. i am all for enlarging the audience but not to the exclusion of those who have been and expect to continue to cheer it on or at least to be willing to be exposed to new themes, writing, acting, etc.etc. we are not so dessicated that we have nothing to offer.
I will be happy to support yoiur outlandish, butt-kicking new director, manager,
Wait, so in the same section where you bitch about a general lack of guts from NY non-profits, you have a Q&A about LCT's new, potentially gutsy venture, and a piece about what the AD at St. Ann's, a gutsy presenter of the hip young blah blah blah that you want to see more of, is up to? Is that intentionally ironic? This type of article does little except make people who work in theater (especially those like me that have to do things like (boring, I know) balance budgets) defensive.