More on Seattle
Dunkirk NY – I hadn’t realized when I posted the article on the situation in Seattle that it had been the cause of some buzz amongst theatre bloggers. The reason I think the situation is so interesting is that it’s bringing to the forefront once again what the fundamental issue really is in this country in my view: will the theatrical tastes on New York City continue to dominate regional theatre, or will regional theatre seek to find its own unique voice independent of New York?
I’d like to make sure one thing is perfectly clear before beginning this discussion: I am not interested in changing what goes on in NYC. Nor am I anti-NYC. NYC, as a region in the country, is free to produce and create whatever its particular theatre community would like to see. What I am interested in changing is the perception generally held in the rest of the country that what goes on in NYC is the definition of “success,” and as a consequence the perception that theatre artists must go to New York to achieve success, or perhaps more accurately, fame. So this post is not directed at those who work in New York City. It is directed at two audiences: the people in other cities outside of New York (and specifically at the boards of regional theatres), and at theatre educators and young acting students either still in school or just recently out of school. We do not need to have people in NYC do anything at all for us to achieve the goal of a strong regional theatre in this country. What we need to do is pay attention to our own back yard.
When I was a young instructor at my first job in rural Nebraska, the school I was teaching in was threatened with extinction. It was a small rural liberal arts community college of about 300 students; not much of a school by anybody’s measure. But it meant a lot to the people of Fairbury NE (pop. 4800), because they had started it themselves before WW2 in order to offer more educational opportunity to their sons and daughters. It did not take long for me and others to discover that the larger institution which it had joined – Southeast Community College, headquartered in Lincoln NE – sold it a bill of goods in order to take advantage of its liberal arts component and then set out to close the campus and consolidate it up to Lincoln.
The community had been trying to fight gamely to keep the college open, but they were losing the battle. What was immediately apparent to me and others was that the college’s board of directors was nothing but a collection of puppets basically doing the bidding of the college president and his strategists. We concluded that the only way to defeat a closing of the college was to replace the members of the board through the election process. In the intervening years our coalition to keep the campus open successfully elected three board members committed to keeping the campus open, but it wasn’t enough. We ran out of time, and despite appeals to the state legislature, the courts, and a massive public relations campus, the campus was closed. One more election and we might have had a majority.
My point in telling this story is to get theatre people and interested artists to understand that, if they are interested in changing the picture of regional theatre in this country, the first place to start is the board of directors of those theatres. All too often boards are just puppets of artistic directors and are seen as nothing more than people required to go out and get major donors to contribute (and reach into their own pockets to do so). But it is the BOD who hire the artistic directors and who are the true leaders of the theatre. Their power lies in the by-laws that were needed to approve them as a 501(c)(3) corporation. It is the BOD that is charged with setting the direction of the theatre, and they have the power to hire and fire the AD and the MD of the theatre. Frequently, however, the members of these boards have drunk the theatrical kool-aid like everyone else, and believe that they must model their theatre as a reflection of Broadway and the New York City theatre scene. Changing the composition of board members should be the first step in creating any significant change in how regional theatre is created in this country.
How does that get done? Like anything that requires change – you put pressure on people by making the situation public and getting a public discussion going. Letters to newspapers, letters to the board members, picketing, creating newsworthy events forcing board members to respond, boycotts – all these things can be effective. Unfortunately there may not be the possibility of voting board members out, but finding out what the process is to replace board members is critical. Ultimately, creating and/or installing a board of directors friendly to the idea of regional theatre which hires local talent and produces regional-based theatre is the single most important step actors and regional talent can take to make this happen.
The second key to creating a stronger regional theatre is to educate a new generation of theatre artists who will create a countercultural movement against the entrenched bureaucratic mentality now pervasive in regional theatre. By and large, actors are trained to be sheep, and the essence of the wisdom given to them is “do all the things necessary to please people and make them like you, and you will find success and stardom.” Wear the right clothes, market, network, have the right audition technique, and all this will lead to success. Make sure you look like the clone of what a Broadway star should look like. Above all else, sacrifice your own personal integrity and become a marketable product for the powers that be.
This attitude needs to change within educational theatre – that monkey is on the backs of people like me. We have to teach them how to be entrepeneurs, how to create their own theatre, their own themes, there own messages; but beyond that, we have to teach them how to incorporate the unspoken and unexpressed fears, hopes and desires, not of themselves and their friends, but of the everyday men and women who know nothing about theatre, and whose daily struggles they must empathize with. If we can do that, we can easily overcome the pablum served by a weakening regional structure. It will take sacrifice, like any other large-scale change movement has taken in this country. The question is whether or not we think it’s worth it. It’s not a matter of changing the system, it’s a matter of overtaking it. Creating a more activist-minded corps of artists with the next generation can help us create the change we need. Creating more theatrical sheep will not get it done. -twl
Chicago is full of entrepreneurial theatre, though it often falls under the moniker “storefront theatre.” Many, many, many theatres were started in Chicago by actors and designers and etcetera so that they could tell stories the way they want to do so. Most are interested in finding their own voice, and the diversity of these voices is very impressive.