Nine wishes for NYC theater

Illustration: Marie-Eve Tremblay, Colagene.com

Back in 2000, I started as Time Out New York’s theater writer under editor Jason Zinoman. I had never written a formal review, so there was a steep learning curve. I knew the downtown theater scene, as an Off-Off zine publisher and artist. Now, nearly ten years later, I want to scan the landscape and see what’s happening, what’s not and what should happen more. So here, in no particular order, is a personal wish list—one wish for every year—not just for the 2009–2010 season, but for the long haul.

1. Public Theater: Expand
The House That Joe Built on Lafayette Street has tremendous, unrealized potential. Its five spaces should always be in use, running the gamut from classics and mainstream dramas to experimental work. Look to London’s National for inspiration. Start building a base of under-40 subscribers. Parties. Art exhibits. Make that lobby a social destination.

2. Off-Off Broadway: Unionize
In May, the League of Independent Theater (LIT), an Off-Off advocacy group, applauded changes in Actors’ Equity Association’s Basic Showcase Code (increased budget and rehearsal period). LIT thinks AEA can go further. I think LIT can, too. Let independent theater (usually that means small budgets and 99-seat venues) form its own version of AEA.

3. Nonprofit heads: Retire
Everyone has to make way eventually, and if you look at the directors our three biggest nonprofits—Roundabout Theatre Company, Manhattan Theatre Club and Lincoln Center Theater—the time has come. All three organization heads have done stellar work, but it’s time for new blood to shake up programming.

4. Fringe Festival: Curate
We’ve knocked the Fringe for being trivial and craptastic, but it’s not funny anymore: time for FringeNYC to grow up and curate a quality international festival at the center of its amateur orgy. Best example: the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. Between the tight focus of Ice Factory (currently at Ohio Theatre) and the multimillion-dollar Lincoln Center Festival, there has to be an artistically valid medium.

5. Bloggers: Engage/enrage
This item will generate noise (and that’s the point): I wish bloggers would mix it up more. Does it take a Rachel Corrie fiasco to generate heat? The theater blogosphere has been dull, insular and quiet lately. We need more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries. And here’s hoping for a new breed of long-form critics worth reading.

6. Subscribers: Explore
If wish No. 3 is answered, then I command that subscribers, whatever their age or taste, avoid picking up the phone and bitching at some intern after seeing a show they don’t understand. Did you understand the Francis Bacon retrospective? Or the Metropolitan Opera’s Satyagraha? Approach theater with the same willingness to be challenged that you do with other fine arts.

7. Architects: Build
We need architectural alternatives on Broadway. Enough with the antique jewel boxes that make new plays look musty! Let Frank Gehry design a 900-seat space that is modular, chic and comfortable. The restored Henry Miller’s Theatre opens this fall for Bye Bye Birdie; we hear it’s modern and green, which is a step in the right direction.

8. Signature Theatre: Hire Wallace Shawn
Here’s a very specific wish. James Houghton, head of the scribecentric Signature Theatre Company, has shown guts (the divisive Chuck Mee season). So I wish he’d program a season of Shawn, one of our darkest and most perverse dramatists. Shawn’s Grasses of a Thousand Colors has been published this month, and it was recently produced by London’s Royal Court Theatre. The New Group is supposed to produce it here; what about a coproduction and revivals of older works?

9. Composers: Originate
There’s nothing more depressing than hearing the pastiche-based, watered-down pop of new musical scores. Sometimes they’re successful (Next to Normal). Mostly they’re synthetic trash (Legally Blonde). I wish that composers would dare to write beautiful, complex, slow and orchestrally rich music.

Seems like nine isn’t enough, right? So here is my unofficial No. 10: Talk to us more. I want TONY’s theater readers to chime in—and not just when we give your friend’s show a mixed review. Let us know how we’re doing and what we’re missing. I want to hear your wishes—we’ll post the best ones on our blog, Upstaged.

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