| Here Comes 2007-2008!
by Jason Loewith on 11/28/2006 03:44:00 PM
The temperature's about to plunge, but the 2006-07 season here is really heating up... we've just opened Christopher Durang's MISS WITHERSPOON (read the Sun-Times rave here); music rehearsals have begun for our world premiere chamber musical, THE ADDING MACHINE; and casting has been completed for the final play of our season, Bryony Lavery's Tony-nominated FROZEN. So what am I thinking about?
Next season!
One of my mentors, Charlie Newell (of Court Theatre on the South Side) likes to talk about his mentor, the late, great Artistic Director of the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Garland Wright, who said that the state of being an artistic director was that of "relentless ongoing-ness". Indeed! The minute you've opened one show, you look at the pile of 15 scripts on your desk, all of which are clamoring for a reading. You talk to your favorite directors in town who are already getting booked up for the next season. Actors are already set for plays as far away as the spring of 2008 - actors you might want to work with.
So, long before the current season's even half-done, I'm deep into planning 2007-2008. But before sharing where I am in season-planning with you, I'd like to pick up a bit with where I left off last time - with the question: how much risk will American audiences generally, and Chicago audiences in particular, want to take in 2007-2008?
It's a question I began to ask myself seriously last fall, after we opened THE LONG CHRISTMAS RIDE HOME to overwhelming critical praise and tepid audience response. No show since I'd been at the theater had received such universal admiration in the press, yet the production sold very, very few tickets. Why?
While I'm sure that there were a number of reasons, I have wondered the most whether the play was simply too artistically and thematically risky... at the time we produced it, productions that were getting positive audience attention in town were far less demanding: last-century classics like ORPHEUS DESCENDING (at American Theatre Company) and AREN'T WE ALL (at Remy Bumppo), musical revivals like MAN OF LA MANCHA (at Court) and PURLIE (at the Goodman)... even the more adventurous plays were geared towards easygoing visual spectacle: HEPHAESTUS [pictured below] at Lookingglass, Mary Zimmerman's PERICLES (also at the Goodman) or the House Theatre's VALENTINE VICTORIOUS.
So why was I surprised that an unknown quantity like LONG CHRISTMAS, with its non-realistic characters and intellectual heft, would sell so poorly?
What followed was what I call my "dark December". To sell tickets, I considered programming a season of revivals - old plays - that still fit our mission, and were heavy on comedy. Plays from the past that (at the time of their writing) were socially provocative and artistically adventurous. I considered a season featuring the Lunt-Fontanne anti-war comedy IDIOT'S DELIGHT by Robert Sherwood (1936), James Magruder's new adaptation of Moliere's THE MISER (the 1668 play, adapted in 2004), John Guare's brilliant satire on race and class, SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION (1990), and Robert Anderson's moving play about teens and sexuality, TEA AND SYMPATHY (1953).
Sounds like a great season (and I still might do it!). Sounds like a season you'd find at Remy Bumppo, actually (a local company of similar size that many folks flatteringly compare us to). Our Artistic Programming Committee - composed of Board members and Artistic Associates - dissuaded me. Indeed, it sounded like a great season, but not a NEXT THEATRE season... we've made our reputation with those gutsy NEW plays that provoke, thrill, and point the art form in new directions (plays like THE NORMAL HEART, KILLER JOE, AMONG THE THUGS, LARAMIE PROJECT, IN THE BLOOD, FAR AWAY... and on and on). And that's why we ended up with another risky season, with MISS WITHERSPOON instead of SIX DEGREES, and THE ADDING MACHINE: A CHAMBER MUSICAL instead of THE MISER.
But it's December again, and I'm wondering again... does the audience really want to be challenged the way (I think) they used to want to be challenged? And although I believe there is an audience in New York for the most adventurous work being written, I think that audience in Chicago is far smaller. Think about Tracy Letts' amazing play, BUG: A Red Orchid Theatre did it here in Chicago in their teeny 40-seat house back in 2001 for a number of weeks. It moved to New York, where it played off-Broadway for a number of months.
But maybe the audience that wants to be challenged is shrinking everywhere, and it's a result of the more conservative times we live in. Members of my own Board - folks who used to pride themselves on watching John Malkovich urinate in a church basement in Highland Park 20 years ago - now have very different tastes. Even when I started my professional career in the late 80s and early 90s, it was hip to see something new and risky in communities all over the country. The Wooster Group's HAIRY APE was playing on Broadway, of all things.
Visionary directors like JoAnne Akalaitis and Anne Bogart were shaking things up at the helm of major regional institutions (New York's Public Theatre and RI's Trinity Rep, respectively). But the Wooster Group has returned to its roots, way off-Broadway, and those two visionary directors were fired by their Boards, just 18 months into their tenures.
Can we trace this "conservatizing" of the audience back to 1990 and the case of the "NEA Four"?
Back then, NEA Chairman John Frohnmayer vetoed peer-approved grants to four performance artists (Karen Finley, Tim Miller, John Fleck, and Holly Hughes [pictured above]) on the basis of their content, deeming it too risky for public funds. The outcry from artists was unexpected by the establishment, but no matter: the damage had already been done by 1993 when the courts reversed Frohnmayer's decision. It was now acceptable to question the "appropriateness" of art, and the debate threw artists and the others on the left of the culture wars - gays and lesbians, PC watchdogs, liberals, and brie-eaters - into a single camp that was easy for the right to demonize, and thus the mainstream to fear.
But clearly, Frohnmayer's action was more symptom than sickness. Coming at the tail-end of 12 years of conservative rule in Washington, DC, the country was shifting markedly away from risk-taking in many ways. The case of the NEA Four was simply the clearest sign yet that post-modern experiment in performance was no longer "cool."
So as I sit down to read plays and consider 2007-2008, this is the conversation that runs around my head. The artist in me lurches towards the new, frightened that it won't meet with your acceptance. The producer in me yearns for the known, fearful that it will simply repeat what you're finding everywhere else (or worse, further stall the development of this art form, theater). Can the Next successfully navigate a middle-ground? Can we keep you on the edge without tossing you out of your seat?
I'd love to hear what you think!
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first of all, jason, THANK YOU(!!!) for posting such brilliant commentary.
how do you think (if at all) the locus of risk has changed? by that i mean this... is it possible that risk is still desired in the theatre, but that it's just evolved to be placed somewhere else? when i look for risk in chicago theatre, i still see it just in a different form than one would expect (based on the past). maybe risk has moved from "risk in content" to "risk in context"? i go to see a Barrel of Monkeys show and i'm floored by their willingness (and skill!) at working within the risk of developing writing and voices (and what that means, exactly). i go see a House show and i'm wowed by the risks they take in building the foundation of an audience-community (one minute you're chatting it up with a cast member in front of the bar, the next minute that same cast member is flying over your head holding a samurai sword, the next day they're replying to a comment you made on their blog, etc...). i go to an Uma Productions show and i always have to stop a few moments to take in the enormous risk (if for nothing more than pure financial risk!!!) of a Brian Bembridge set design that entirely envelops the audience, making them part of "the recipe" of the play. and, of course, i could also tell you lots about a little company i know that takes the risk of doing site-specific plays where otherwise little things like when and where you make a costume change re-defines the term "risk".
is there any benefit in re-evaluating the form in which artistic risk can exist when thinking toward the future of Next's seasons?
maybe risk is still alive, but just lives somewhere else now.
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