And another...

12/12/2009

Towards a World Class Theatre
Playwright’s rule of thumb #3: if you don’t know what you’re doing, raise the stakes. This is also a favorite for anyone losing an argument. Arbitrarily up the ante and things become more interesting. More interesting equals intrinsically good in a play. In an argument, it’s… well… whatever it is, it’s more interesting.

Over a year ago I was given a “Genius Award” in theatre by Seattle’s weekly newspaper The Stranger. It’s one of those honors that cannot, and probably should not, ever quite sit right: the kind of recognition any artist craves not just for the added publicity and legitimacy it brings your work, but also because, let’s face it: it’s a delicious ego stroke and the $5,000 cash that comes with it helps ease any pointless pangs of guilt over being singled out. Beyond that guilt, however, looms another misgiving which grows out of the fact that the honor is bestowed not in recognition of any particular piece but one’s entire body of work. You’re forced to wonder, “What the hell am I going to do next? And how the hell will that be good enough to garner such praise in the future?” I had no idea. Still don’t.

Nor did I have any idea back then about what I was going to say when I accepted the award at the Moore Theater on that Saturday, September 13, 2008. I did know that the folks at The Stranger enjoyed presenting the awards in flamboyant and entertaining ways. (For instance, Paul Constant channeled an old time booming-voiced boxing announcer when he handed the prize for literature to Sherman Alexie.) So this much I determined: as show people, I’d be damned if I let some tabloid scribbler upstage me. I had to say something engaging other than just “thanks a lot”, but what? That’s when I remembered rule #3. Raise the stakes.

I began my acceptance by magnanimously allowing that Seattle was a pretty good theatre town. The crowd approved. Then I lofted my caveat: we were good, but we weren’t great. The crowd grew quiet, restless. I said I believed we had everything it takes to be great, but we weren’t great; and worse, we didn’t even seem to be moving in the right direction. More awkward noises. Then I said I believed we could be a world class theatre city within 5 years, but only if we wanted to. We had to want it. The crowd liked this. They clapped, they hollered. It felt great. Lots of toasts and backslaps afterwards. I made a self-congratulatory moment into a community-wide challenge. And every one seemed to slurp it with a spoon. Success, by any definition.

Since then, however, not many people have mentioned my acceptance speech, though there is one particularly notable exception. A month after that night I got an email from my sister Margaret. It said simply: “Just in case you were wondering. 9/13/13. Make it so!” Since odds are about even that you do not know my sister, allow me to unpack her cryptic note and translate it plainly into the words I know she intended. “Dear Brother, in case you were thinking that you could make that challenge publicly solely in order to arbitrarily raise stakes and thus add empty entertainment calories to your speech, hoping no one will remember, please think again. I will remember. I will hold you to it. I will publicly mock you if you fail. So deliver me a world class theatre town by the Fall of 2013, or prepare to face my undying scorn.” You see, I come from a very loving and supportive family.

Upping the ante is painless and risk-free if no one is paying attention. Thanks to my sister, such is not my fate. But I am, after all, a collaborative artist. If she intends to hold me accountable over the next four years, then I intend to share her attentions with all of my beloved fellow theatre artists in this amazing city. My discomfiture will become their discomfiture, or at least as much of it as I can artfully manage to share. Which brings me to these essays. This is the introductory first of ten or twelve I intend to write on the subject of theatre in Seattle. During my last 22 years as a theatre professional here and in New York City I have come to some strongly held conclusions about how I think theatre can be made better. I have shared these opinions with friends and colleagues in one-on-one conversations or in small groups in social situations. Now I think it is time for me to share more formally and more widely—to raise the stakes.

A few weeks back, I began keeping a little folder on my computer with text files in it. Some contain embryonic notes and outlines, the beginnings of these future essays. Others consist only of tentative titles, like the following:

Why Locally Grown Plays Matter
What the Hell does “World Class” Mean Anyway?
Why Craft Won’t Save Us
Good Friend for Jesus’ Sake Forbear and Never Build another Proscenium Stage
Since When Are Directors Indispensable?
The MFA Virus
Building the West Coast Pipeline Alternative to New York’s Hub and Spoke Failure
Playwrights and Designers: The Overlooked Partnership
Don’t Let the Big Houses Fool Ya, Money Has Almost Nothing to Do with It
Stop trying to be Respectable, You’re in Show Business.
America loves Playwrights!—The Deader the Better; or How The English Speaking World Wields its Greatest Playwright as a Club to Kill Theatre
Sacrificing Art on a Dubious Union’s Altar
The One-Person Show: The Lazy Artistic Director's Best Friend
The essays will be written with primarily my theatre colleagues in mind; but I fervently believe we need to also invite non-show people into these conversations because, as a self-identified neo-Vaudevillian, and in sharp contrast to the rising class of theatre academic elite, I believe that what the audience wants and needs actually matters.

Potshots of prose alone cannot go any significant distance toward making theater better here in Seattle or anywhere. Only making great theatre will make theatre great here. This series will be about sharpening my arguments and placing them in a public place, where they may serve to convince or be dismissed, or maybe even dismantled and built into something more useful. I am done bitching in bars. I am pushing my stakes on the table and I encourage my colleagues, especially those who disagree with me, to do the same. Our stock-in-trade is dialogue. Maybe we can employ its power to discover the way forward towards a world class theatre in our own home town.