| American Theater's Failure of Nerve
by Jason Loewith on 5/30/2007 05:20:00 PM
Thanks to local actor Gary Houston, who pointed me to this article from the LA WEEKLY by Steven Leigh Morris, excerpted below.
A few weeks ago, the Pulitzer Prize for drama was awarded to David Lindsay-Abaire's The Rabbit Hole, a study of a marriage in the wake of the freak-accidental death of the couple's child. The play originated as a commissioned work at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, from where it traveled along the narrow-gauge railroad we now call American Theater. Very few people wrote negatively about The Rabbit Hole. There was, however, a collective "huh?" heard around the country when the Pulitzer was awarded to that play.
When I heard The Rabbit Hole had won the prize, I had to look up my own review of a production at the Geffen Playhouse last year, because I honestly couldn't remember what it was about. The problem is not with my memory. The Rabbit Hole is an emblem of the kind of finely crafted, polished, entertaining, emotionally vivid, mildly thoughtful (but not too heady), palatable and ultimately forgettable experiences that constitute most new plays on our national stages.
I was reminded of the play's Pulitzer win again earlier this month, when SCR presented its 10th annual Pacific Playwrights Festival, a potpourri of seven wonderfully performed readings, workshops and full productions of plays in various stages of development written by very good dramatists, including Jose Rivera, Richard Greenberg, and writer-lyricist John Strand along with composer Dennis McCarthy.On hand to untangle the knots in each work were notable directors, some of them playwrights themselves. On the opening day of the festival, the authors met with literary representatives from about 40 of the country's more prestigious theaters, including Manhattan Theatre Club and Actors Theatre of Louisville, and it was clear that SCR was using the fest as a kind of swap meet - a way to get these plays, and their writers, on the national map with multiple productions.
The festival, hosted by associate artistic director John Glore with literary manager Megan Monaghan, on the surface seemed like a fine thing. What sane playwright could object to having his or her play marketed even before it's finished, or refined by such smart directors as Pam MacKinnon, Bart DeLorenzo and Chay Yew? What producer doesn't want his or her new musical to land on Broadway, then tour the country, then be made into a movie?
None, of course. But what's good for the theaters may not necessarily be good for The Theater.
Much has been written about the politics of this year's Pulitzer selection - particularly on how the committee vetoed more-adventurous works initially submitted by a jury. Unlike in other Pulitzer categories, it's a mistake to use the drama prize as a measure of greatness or as a symbol of adventurism. There's never been a shortage of scribes ready to do the heavy lifting of moving the theater forward in scary new directions with works that challenge the assumptions of the culture and of the theatrical forms we've become used to, but these are not the kinds of works represented in the Pulitzers, or being produced along the regional theater byways, or at this year's Pacific Playwrights Festival.
Of course, money is at the bottom of all this. Money is at the bottom of almost everything: Because of the dire climate for arts funding, the theaters have formed alliances, and those alliances have evolved into chains, like Denny's, and the food they serve tilts toward homogenization. To watch the majority of new plays in the established venues of New York and around the country is to hunger for the kind of electrical charge that, in their times, made Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and August Wilson the buzz of America's coffee shops, cocktail parties and subway lines. Their plays, frequently denounced by critics and audiences, were indispensable to the lifeblood of the culture and its conversations. For that same vitality today, we turn not to the theater but to TV, to the likes of Jon Stewart, George Clooney and Oprah, who, under the weight of colossal commercial pressures, show far more bravery than most of our institutional theaters.
The underlying causes of the blandness in our theater are more nuanced than the obvious "commercial pressures" that everyone talks about. Compounding the problem is an identity crisis. Theater gets so little respect because it has so little self-respect. Among the Pulitzer categories, only the drama prize gets dropped like a date with bad breath - three times in the past 21 years; four times during the '60s. Playwright - and festival participant - Donald Margulies, who won the Pulitzer in 2000 for his Dinner With Friends, calls this "Pulitzer condescension." But if theater wants more respect, it might first try giving greater value to what it does best, uniquely, as theater.
I can't imagine an unorthodox, once-befuddling little play like Waiting for Godot - with its capacities both to turn the theater on its head and to confound half the audience - standing a chance at a festival like this. Here, the playwrights are in consultation with too many intermediaries, even at the formative stages of their plays, just like in the movies. With no marketing strategy in place, Waiting for Godot was eventually produced in every corner of the globe, on the strength of its conviction and literary merit, stemming from the uncompromising vision of an author who wrote in a kind of solitary confinement. Samuel Beckett certainly didn't collaborate with directors, dramaturges or anybody else while he was in the formative process of writing, yet this is now the protocol in American new-play development. As Edward Albee told the Weekly earlier this year, "The big problem is the assumption that writing a play is a collaborative act. It isn't. It's a creative act, and then other people come in."
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man, i see this happen all the time and i can never figure out how an editor doesn't catch it, because...
...i have such a hard time taking an article like this seriously when the author doesn't even know the correct title of the play.
this kind of article makes me a little mad. what's all the damn complaining about?! why is this person giving such (and frankly undo) credit to SCR. sure, they commission tons of writers that end up being produced around the country, but they are not The Theater. nor is THAT indicative of what's truly happening in the American Theatre.
take a closer look around.
sarah ruhl's work is mopping up broadway and off-broadway alike with mind-boggling success for what is rather non-naturalistic writing.
suzan-lori parks and bonnie metzger have the entire world doing suzan-lori's off-the-cuff-non-realistic-sketchbook-like plays every week FOR A WHOLE YEAR!
the SITI company plays to small-town universities and major regional institutions on a weekly basis with some of the most aggressively theatrical work i've ever seen in my life.
500 Clown is tearing it up on the steppenwolf stage with their unique brand of clever theatricality as i write this!
all 4 of these artists i've just mentioned are their own unique people with their own unique voices and should be recognized as making humongous contributions to the American Theatre. and i could go on! sure, David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole (and, ps, there's certainly no "The" in the title) will be produced about 100 times across the country next year but since when is talking about loss, hope, and love NOT "indispensable to the lifeblood of the culture and its conversations"? how is that homogenizing THE WHOLE AMERICAN THEATRE?
i think the American Theatre needs to stop looking at what we're not and start looking at what we ARE. if you look and you can't find it, then you ain't looking hard enough because, brother, it's there. the revolution toward a livewire immediate theatre that acknowledges the potential of its form and its audience is alive and well and kicking in chicago right now, i can assure you. it's all over the country, in fact. but the revolution will not be televised, that's for sure.
this is one of the rarest golden ages in the American Theatre we've had in a long time. Broadway productions grossed $880 million in 2006 and Spring Awakening (about as theatrical as Broadway's ever gotten) just won 8 Tonys. 16 year olds go to the theatre to scream their hearts out at Elphaba and Glinda nightly!
let's be a little prouder of what we are, shall we? i understand the desire to kickstart some new theatrical creativity, but honestly? is this guy for real? let's not just throw out the baby with the bathwater please.
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