I suppose I wouldn’t be in the slightest bit concerned about this, if it were clearly stated that this was a conversation about the professional industry in the US. But if we are claiming to have a conversation about why there are not more successful women playwrights worldwide, and what can be done to change that, then I feel we are having the wrong conversations.

There are many women, around the world, who are working with these issues every day, who are tackling things head on. Who have, for years, been working with issues women face in the theatre – and in the world, because often it’s hard to untangle the two. A lack of women being represented in the theatre is both a manifestation of and a further propagator of a basically sexist society, worldwide.

I don’t know where we start. Do we start with all the women denied education? The women denied a right to write? The women who are culturally or politically deemed inferior, and forbidden to have a voice? How do we support those who dare to speak in these circumstances? Those who risk arrest, who write not for royalties, but for that slim chance that what they write might change the world, even if it’s just one corner of it, in the mind of one audience member?

What of those women playwrights who are free to write, but lack resources? Many of my colleagues write with pen and paper, or falling-apart equipment. Those who write by sunlight, because electricity is so expensive. Those who write on the backs of scrap paper. It doesn’t affect the quality of their writing, but it affects how their writing is perceived. It affects their ability to be taken seriously, to access opportunities, to get their work out there, to get their work known. How do we make sure that scripts which are remarkable and amazing see the light of day, are not stuck in a drawer, are not doomed to live and die on a hard drive?

Speaking of access, when do we talk about this world wide web business – this internet that only the elite few (and yes, I am one) can use, this tool which is at once miraculous and wonderful, and terrifying in the way it further widens the schisms already present? What can we do to broaden the reach, and to bring voices into this conversation – and to take the conversation out – so that we don’t continue to foster the illusion that because we are discussing something online, we are inclusive.

Do we talk about those other issues that make women playwrights’ lives even harder – race, religion, nationality, age, language, sexual orientation? If we want to be inclusive – and I hope we do – how do we acknowledge that these are further barriers faced by so many women playwrights?

And then there’s the question of what women playwrights want. I can’t answer that, because I am only one. I know why I write – because I have to, because I want to make people laugh, to challenge them, to make them question their assumptions, to make them feel. I want my plays to be seen, because as long as they remain on paper, or on my computer, they are not finished products. Where they are seen, how, by who, these are all big questions, to which everyone will have different answers. We must stop assuming that big formal theatre productions in New York are everyone’s dream, without in any way denigrating those whose dream that is. I was taught theatre is at least one person performing for at least one person – there is literally a world of possibilities open for that out there, if we’re prepared to think outside the Box Office.

Can we have a frank discussion about what audiences want? It’s a worldwide reality that there is little or no money to make theatre, and so we must be pragmatic. We must stop talking about developing and educating audiences, and maybe educate ourselves about who are audiences are or could be, who they are, where they are, what they want, or don’t want. We must be open to the possibility that we won’t like the answers. But we cannot afford to ignore our audiences – in my mind, certainly, your audience should always be first and foremost.

Even if we confine ourselves to discussing how we can get more women playwrights produced by professional theatres in the US, when do we step back and acknowledge how deep this system goes – the system of producers and critics and art directors, and relationships, the sexism in the system, and who makes decisions, and why. If we want to push a quota system, how do we support that, how do we ensure that – and again I stop, and I wonder why I am using the word “we”, because I have reached that part of the conversation where I feel I do not belong, and am not invited.

Perhaps you don’t want to have these conversations, because your own needs are more important to you. That’s okay, we’re all human. We might even, if we’re honest, rather baulk at the thought of all those thousands of women playwrights out there, all wanting the same thing we do, and those few shiny opportunities – do our own chances diminish if we try and open the door to others? Isn’t it better to start small, and then, one day, reach out? It’s okay to think that. We all need to pay the rent and put food on the table. It’s natural to put ourselves first…when do we have that conversation, about how often we feel that our closest allies are our biggest enemies?

I don’t have any answers. But I do have a lot more questions. Mostly though, I try to listen.

I have a sad, stupid, bureaucratic little story to tell you — No, wait, come back! It’s more like a sad, stupid, bureaucratic story with a heart of gold.

I work as a facilitator, teacher and director with Rehabilitation Through the Arts . RTA started at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in 1996; today, the program works in five New York State prisons, providing workshops in theatre, dance, creative writing, voice and visual art. At each of the facilities, a handful of volunteer facilitators leads workshops and classes eleven months each year, helping our incarcerated participants to find their voices, cultivate empathy, improve both reading and critical thinking skills, develop non-violent communication strategies, learn delayed gratification and experience a sense of accomplishment, while better understanding the human condition through making art.

RTA’s flagship project is the spring production each year at Sing Sing.  We perform the play twice for the general population of the prison and once for an invited audience of community guests.  This is no less than transformative for the men involved with the project.  Their peers see them in a new light; they become thought leaders and, indeed, rock stars within the prison. It’s usually pretty transformative for the civilian audience, too. ~220 people discover that these men are people who have accomplished a thing, not monsters who belong in cages.

This year, the play is Our Town. I am directing it.  Normally, we perform in a room that most closely resembles a 1950s high school auditorium: it features a wide proscenium stage, absurdly high off the floor of the auditorium, concrete floors, cinder block walls, molded plastic chairs welded to the floor, two lifeguard-like chairs for corrections officers to sit above the crowd, watching. The acoustics are terrible; the moat of distance between performers and audience is daunting. But that, uh, space is unavailable to us this year, so we are performing the play in the prison’s Visiting Room. I saw this as a teaching opportunity: everyone reading this knows that theatre doesn’t have to live behind a proscenium, but the men in the program mostly only know the theatre they’ve seen or participated in behind the prison’s 18-foot high walls.

So we are performing Our Town in a three-quarter thrust, with universal lighting, without a backstage. The men were baffled at the beginning of the process; reading Thornton Wilder’s stage directions, one said, “what do you mean, no scenery?”  So while we are taking Mr. Wilder absolutely at his word, using the A/C vent and the vending machines in the Visiting Room as our backdrop, while we have discovered our own Grover’s Corners inside the peculiar town that is Sing Sing (where “human beings are sort of shut up in little boxes” resonates in a whole new way), we needed to build platforms on which to play, for sight line purposes.

The lumber estimate was twice what we had budgeted.

Kickstarter Comes to Sing Sing (or does it?)

We decided to launch our first-ever Kickstarter campaign to supplement our meager budget — to build the platforms, to rent and build some costume pieces (indeed, I spent last night sewing, as did the actress who’s playing Emily), to help pay for postage to mail out invitations to the civilian performance, to print programs, to defray some transportation costs. About a month ago, I set up the Kickstarter campaign, working with my husband to edit together a video of the men talking about what the work means to them.

What?

You haven’t seen it?

Of course you haven’t.

Because since April 19^th, we have been caught in an Orwellian loop with Amazon Payments (through which Kickstarter funnels the raised funds). They have asked us to submit our employer ID number, our bank account information, our email address. Fine.  We did so.  The difficulty is that they have asked us to submit one piece or another of this information 19 times as I write this. 19 times, ladies and gentlemen.

We had intended to launch our inaugural Kickstarter campaign more than three weeks ago. Our performance dates are May 29, 30 and 31. We have lost three weeks of valuable, nay, even critical fundraising time to the Matrix-like inefficiency of “our payment team doesn’t have telephone support so that they can get their work done more efficiently,” and “I can see that you were able to log into your account and provided your information. It does look like your verification is currently pending. We will communicate your account status within 24 hours.”

I know; I should’ve moved on to another site to fundraise long before now, but I’ve been busy directing a show, pulling and building costumes, designing sound cues, and trying to pay my rent. And I kept thinking that, at any magically real moment, surely Amazon Payments would get it sorted out and we could launch our campaign. (But they haven’t, and stop calling me, “Shirley.”)

I haven’t shared with the men the staggering and repetitive stupidity of the struggle to get the campaign off the ground; they have enough frustration in their lives.  No children will go hungry because Amazon Payments has dropped our account into some antiquated pneumatic tube.  The show will still go on. But I’ve had to restage because we couldn’t afford to build all of the platforms we had hoped, and a tiny, overextended staff is reaching ever farther with less.

Amazon Payments, for 23 days, for 19 computer-generated form e-mails, through several faxes of documentation, for 3 long (and apparently, pointless) conversations with otherwise courteous and apologetic customer service reps, you have asked me to “submit the requested information” and you have thanked me “for compliance with the verification process.”

Kickstarter, you’ve offered no help at all with this morass of a process: “Please contact Amazon Payments with any questions.”

In Our Town, George Gibbs discovers only after treating Emily Webb to a strawberry ice cream soda that he hasn’t got any money on him; Mr. Morgan tells him, “I’ll trust you ten years, George Gibbs, and not a minute longer.” Amazon Payments, I can’t trust you for the length of one email.

LaRonika is a dramaturg, producer, and writer, and has worked in arts education, literary management, and dramaturgy in both Chicago and in the Baltimore/DC area. She serves as the Vice President for Regional Activity for the Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). She is also a current doctoral student in the Theatre and Performance Studies Department at the University of Maryland.

LaRonika Thomas
Hometown: Chicago, IL and West Lafayette, IN
Current town: Baltimore, MD

How do you explain dramaturgy?
With thanks to the wisdom of several other dramaturgs for my definition: dramaturgs listen and question. We listen to and question the play, the playwright, the director, the artistic director, the actors, the designers, the mission of the theatre, the theatre, and the world – both as we know it and as we would like it to be. Robert Brustein called us the “humanist in the woodpile,” and I have always thought that had a nice ring to it. We research and contextualize the world of the play, work closely with playwrights and directors, serve as an audience before there is an audience. We are concerned with the work, with the place of the work within the larger world of the theatre, and the relationship between the audience and the work. We dream of the theatre as we hope it will be, and we work with other artists to make it so.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?
Dramaturgy is certainly in my life everyday. It is in my life both as my profession and as a viewpoint on the world. It certainly influences my doctoral work, for even though my research interests are not directly related to the practice of dramaturgy, the research questions and the path they have led me on are certainly influenced by my professional work as a dramaturg and the questions I ask in my artistic practice. I think the most significant way that dramaturgy influences me everyday is that it provides me with a certain awareness of the world – a desire for context and poetry – for all the wonderful subtleties of the stories that surround us everyday. Stories make the world – it is important to listen to them, to be a part of them.

How did you come to dramaturgy?
I was in college, at Indiana University, as a double major in Anthropology and Theatre. The plan had been to apply to graduate schools immediately after receiving my BA and to go on to get my PhD in Anthropology. But during my last semester I realized that if I made a list of all of the things I had done in college that I really enjoyed, it was heavily weighted with theatre. By this time, I had heard of this crazy thing called dramaturgy, but I did not yet have any experience with it. I did know, in very basic and general terms, that it combined research with rehearsal responsibilities – and that definitely appealed to my nerdy disposition and seemed very fitting for someone with a background in both anthropology and theatre. And then, as if in the next breath, I was out in the “real world,” and had to figure out what to do next. I moved back to my hometown and started a theatre company, which led to my Masters in theatre and where I finally found my way to dramaturgy, which led to me moving to Chicago, interning at the Goodman and beginning my professional career as a dramaturg.
I would not say there was one particular production or event that led me to dramaturgy. I think it was more of an accumulation of experiences beginning from childhood, when I took dance lessons beginning at the age of 5, and then later when I played the villain (I got to die on stage – it was all very exciting to me) in a middle school classroom production of Billy Budd, through high school play productions where I had a very inspiring English and theatre teacher, and beyond. I do remember traveling to Chicago before I had graduated from IU and seeing a production at Steppenwolf – that was, I think, the first time I realized that theatre could actually be a viable profession. And I saw Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind at the Neo-Futurists and remember thinking that *that* was the kind of theatre I wanted to make (and did make a few years later when I dramaturged several shows with them).

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.
This is probably very cheesy for me to say but my favorite stories and storytellers are the next ones, the storytellers about to be discovered and the stories I have yet to hear. I enjoy a wide variety of theatre but recently I have been thinking a lot about my time with the Neo-Futurists and I am interested in how the audience participates in the performance, their relationship with the work. So I am interested in very immersive events, even things closer to performance or installation art, happenings or Fluxus even, or the advent of digital technology in theatre and how that can change the relationship between audience and performance or audience and performer (theatre as video game and that sort of thing). Or shows like Suzan-Lori Parks’ Venus, when the audience is implicated in the events of the play during the show’s intermission whether they choose to stay in the auditorium or go to the lobby. There are also a few shows I have seen in the past couple of years that have really stuck with me – Mona Mansour’s The Hour of Feeling (it struck an emotional center deep within me) and Anne Washburn’s A Devil at Noon (a fantastically structured story that felt so fresh and new), both at recent Humanafests. Also, I was privileged to work on Greg Hischak’s quietly powerful meditation on America, Volcanic in Origin at Source Festival a couple of years ago. I have also been a fan of the work of Chuck Mee since I worked on Big Love at Purdue during my Masters program. And Clybourne Park is a current favorite – in part because it is the show I am working on now and in part because it addresses issues that I think major implications for all of us.
And I also wouldn’t be me if I didn’t mention that I am a big TV fan – if I didn’t work in theatre I’m sure I’d work in television. My husband and I will generally only see movies in the theatre that benefit from a big screen (like The Avengers or The Hunger Games), but we are constantly in danger of filling up our TiVo – Justified, Breaking Bad, Southland, Community, Mad Men, Revenge, Suburgatory, Sons of Anarchy, The Vampire Diaries, Pretty Little Liars, Girls, Parks and Rec, Supernatural, The Good Wife – I love it all and I’m not ashamed to say so. And if you have the chance to catch two recent shows that should have received second seasons but did not, check out Terriers and Rubicon. Such a shame they did not have a bigger audience. And I am a big fan of Joss Whedon – I can’t wait for his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing to hit the theatres (I’ll probably make an exception for my blockbuster rule and see it on the big screen)! Finally, my commute gives me a lot of time with my radio – I use that time to listen to several podcasts, RadioLab, Sound Opinions, and Talking TV with Ryan and Ryan are among my favorites.

Who/what inspires you?
My husband (contemporary photographer, Nate Larson) is an infinite source of inspiration to me, for his incredible work ethic, his dedication to his students, and the creativity evident in his work. My students inspire me – I love when they really dig into a work and show me things I didn’t even realize were there. And, obviously, great storytellers, whether working in theatre, TV, or film. I get excited by people with a point of view, and with an interest in the experience a story can create for both its creators and its audience. I am also inspired by my family, especially my parents and grandparents. I have been lucky enough to get to spend a lot of time with my mother’s parents and my father’s father – their own stories continue to amaze me and fill me with strength and wonder.

What is your dream project?
Oh, boy – this is a tough one. I am not sure I have one, singular dream project. My work has led me down a number of interesting paths and right now I am in a fantastic place, working on my PhD. I love working in theatre – being in the rehearsal room and collaborating on new work. And I love scholarly work, and I love the connections between the two – especially the connections I am making between cultural policy and cultural space, between cities and theatre, how a city is performed in the multiple layers of its everyday cultural work.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?
Wow – another tough question. I’m not sure what kind of work this would produce but off the top of my head I’m going to go with:
Ibsen – I have been intrigued with him ever since I worked on The Last Two Minutes of the Complete Works of Henrik Ibsen. I just love his plays.
George Maciunas – The father of Fluxus and the father of SoHo – he would probably walk out on us within the first five minutes but I would love to get to have a conversation with him, especially about artists and artist spaces.
Picasso – because he destroyed, according to Lefebvre, the space of common sense.
Brecht – a dramaturg, director, and one of my favorite playwrights – a true theatre “maker”
Theaster Gates – a contemporary artist and urban planner working in Chicago and beyond. He makes fantastic work that moves beyond the walls of a gallery space and asks some very big and important questions about the artists role in contemporary society.
And now that I’m on a roll, I can’t stick with just five – let’s make it ten:
Lorraine Hansberry – so insightful in her meditations on home and community, and such a poetic writer.
Wordsworth – I could not resist adding a Romantic to the list – especially the one responsible for most of Lyrical Ballads (including its “Preface” and “Tintern Abbey”).
Suzan-Lori Parks – her attention to language and its effect on the audience continues to teach me so much about the theatre event.
Greg Allen – founder of the Neo-Futurists. I worked on several of Greg’s plays when I lived in Chicago and I only now feel that I really understand his aesthetic. I would love it if our paths crossed again.
Chuck Mee – I love that he posts his plays and is as much a fan of collage as I am.

Charles Mee. Photo by Joseph Moran.

What are you working on right now?
Right now I am a full-time doctoral student at the University of Maryland, so I am not as active professionally as I would like to be right now. You can mostly find me reading and writing and teaching theatre. And I am part of the dramaturgical team for CenterStage’s The Raisin Cycle – working on Clybourne Park has been very exciting and is a great match for me considering my research interests in urban space, cultural production, and the performance of identity. Finally, you can also follow me on Twitter, just like the rest of world.

What’s up next for you?
Mostly scholarly work – I am presenting at a conference on space and performance in April, discussing a paper I wrote on the Chicago Cultural Plans, and I am chairing a panel on the Dramaturgy of Space at ATHE in August. I hope to update my poor, neglected blog again beginning later this spring, so you’ll be able to find out about future projects there. I have also just accepted a position as one of five dramaturgs working on The Recovery Project for America-in-Play. We will be paired with AIP playwrights, working to recover a lost early American play. Then we will work with the playwrights as they write a new play inspired by the lost work. I also hope to continue to consult on new plays, something I love so much that I don’t think I could ever give it up. And I know have a more of my own plays up my sleeve – I look forward to being able to devote more time to them as well.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?
Chicago, DC, and Baltimore are all fantastic place to make theatre – unless you want to work on Broadway or in film and television, go to one of these cities. Smaller large cities like Baltimore are especially fantastic if you want to start a theatre company (for an example, check out the work and history of Single Carrot Theatre), as they have a small network of artists but also have a fairly shallow hierarchy in terms of access to the “movers and shakers” in the city. And so this is the first part of my advice – wear the label of “Dramaturg” proudly, but also consider yourself a maker – a maker of theatre, of culture, of experiences, of life.
Get to know one another. And, as the Vice President for Regional Activity for LMDA, I can help with this. LMDA is a great organization and provides a lot of support for dramaturgs at all stages of their careers – and local concerns are a big part of that! We want to know you!
Make lots of work and make lots of different work to help you find your voice – what you are good at and what you enjoy.
And respect yourself enough to make sure you are adequately compensated. Compensation may not always mean a paycheck at first – it may mean beer or a recommendation, but it should also mean your name in the program and web site and in other materials where you find the designers names, access to people at the companies you work with, substantive work tasks beyond making copies, the understanding that you are a part of the conversation of making the piece – and making the theatre company – what it is and should be, and always ALWAYS a seat at the table with everyone else. And – know when you can’t work without a paycheck any more too.
Find mentors and cheerleaders.
Remember this career is a choice that you made. Stay positive, find the work and the people you love, and don’t forget to have fun – you are one of the lucky few in life who get to dive into their passion.

–
Thank you so much, LaRonika!

First, Peter Sagal on letting people access the joy of giving.

Next, Amanda Palmer on the art of asking.

And finally, Adam Thurman on the gift of giving.

If these ideas speak to you, and if you’re in the Chicago area this April, you might want to check out The Gift Sessions, a one day workshop with Adam Thurman, presented by 2amt.

No hard sell here, but if you want to know more about what the workshop entails, click here. I’ll be there as well as Nick Keenan and Eric Ziegenhagen. Come, join the conversation in person.

Trying to find something actionable to help the industry move forward as a relative non-entity in the industry is quixotic on the best day. Framing the discussion in such a way as those with the keys and the wallets don’t shut down out of blame-weariness and take both with them seems impossible.

My modus operandi when noodling with an argument is to treat it the same way we all treated Choose Your Own Adventures when we were younger. Start from a fixed point and keep working down whichever ludicrous solution might be possible until the solution dies (or turns into a shark). What I sometimes forget to do is move the starting point. I accidentally lock myself into my givens and limit the infinite universe.

A simple conjunction reminded me of this over the last few days and honestly I feel a little stupid. The first was reading a defense of white male directing positions in the comments section of a friends’ personal Facebook page. This defender stated outright that these directing positions required high qualifications and commitment, and a process that required high quality applications and other writing. When I stopped following the conversation for blood pressure purposes he was not apparently aware of what he was implying.

The second was tonight as I tried to catch up on my blog backlog and finally got to this February 19th post on Diversity, Equality, Bus Lanes, and Arts. In it Linda Essig calls back the phrase “valuing (versus managing) diversity”. Which is of course where we’re blowing it. And one more thing.

We gather everything that that we regard as positive characteristics and then we pivot, twist, and stretch reality until we (or our theatre) fits every single one of those characteristics. Because it’s not possible we’re not covering something (we are all things to all people) and we can never be wrong. Ever. At the risk of putting words in the mouth of a stranger… The problem that the gentleman in the discussion above is missing is that: he believes that theatre is basically an upstanding meritocracy that we have a little wrong.

Which of course is wrong.
The theatre industry is a meritocracy the way America is post-racial,
but privilege remains hard to see for many of those relying on it and those who can see it often deny it because they believe it somehow diminishes what they’ve done.

But the fervent belief that our systems are (on the whole) the Platonic ideal is why we’re trying to manage more diversity into our ROI charts rather than performing good-faith examinations of our systems for soundness. Diversity (for whichever subgroup you choose) is it’s own reward. This is part of the ever present push in the tension between art and commerce in the industry to have art win a little. Including all of the voices you can fit in your season because it’s the right thing to do, because including those voices is a value in and of itself, not because it pleases your subscribers is a tough sell.

How do we stop treating diversity as a value-add and simply as a value?

How do we convince leaders that they are leaders not just jumped up accountants?

How can we reframe the conversation about diversity to stop trying to change the %10 and really walk back selection and development systems?

Who do we need to get into the conversation to make that effective?

With the advent of social media, it’s become easier to connect with the people we admire on a regular basis. I love seeing Julie interact with playwrights, actors, designers, and other colleagues every day. Her ideas and opinions compel me to join the conversation and inspire me to action. Thanks, Julie!

Julie Felise Dubiner
Hometown: Hauppauge, LI, NY
Current town: Ashland, OR

How do you explain dramaturgy?

I came up with the handy 3 C’s when I was teaching: Content, Concept, Context.

I’ve described my work in terms of lifeguarding: I’m here, looking out for you. I will try to figure out if you’re waving or drowning if you can’t tell me yourself. And, if you need me to save you – if you fight me, we will both drown.

More metaphors…

I’ve used Red from Shawshank Redemption – we know how to find stuff.

I’m Marie in When Harry Met Sally. I’m Itzak Stern from Schindler’s List. I’m Tom Hagen, the consigliere.

I am Indiana Jones.

I am a very rich man with a powerful coffee addiction on Smash.

I’m a smart girl with glasses, everyone’s best friend. With a powerful coffee addiction.

Mostly, I like to say that we are the ones who double-dog dare theaters, artists, and audiences to dig deeper on all levels.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?

In my actual job, I am using dramaturgy all the time. The obvious ways, like reading plays, or serving as production dramaturg. But, I think once you start thinking dramaturgically, you kind of never stop. We are observers as well as participants, so whether on my job or home with my kid, I am constantly reading the room, trying to ask why we’re doing something a certain way/is there a better way? In these last two years of not wearing the title of dramaturg, I’ve become a better dramaturg. And that, in the end, I feel it is better thought of as a skill than as a job.

How did you come to dramaturgy?

I was a history major who acted and did improv comedy. My junior year, a professor encouraged me to do the background, dramaturgical research with some other history minded students for the university production of Marat/Sade (I also played the Herald – a total dramaturg of a character). After college, I moved to Chicago and was working in the box office of a small theater doing Pride & Prejudice, the director was there one day talking to someone else about historical accuracy, and I just started talking about the period and gender roles – and she hired me to write program notes and then recommended me for an internship at the Goodman. Then I went to grad school. I still can’t believe I got in to grad school with that experience. It’s all worked out fine, but I’m still sure Columbia either made a mistake or just had a slot to fill.

All that said, I don’t know if I was starting out now that I would choose dramaturgy as a career, or sole career. What I was doing 20ish years ago is not what I do now, nor is that kind of research/production based dramaturgy particularly necessary or valued outside of universities and very occasional productions. It is much easier to do your own research now than it was – I may have a deeper understanding of history and trends, and may still be better at explaining or distilling research than your average collaborator, but even I’ve come to prefer people doing their own research and then the best playwrights, directors, designers, and actors find the time to talk it through. But, I don’t think we’re entirely necessary anymore, even for new plays. We’re awesome, especially when we’re wanted and not simply assigned and have the time and proximity to build real relationships – awesome. But being awesome is not the same as being necessary. The literary management side is still necessary for the moment, because at the very least (which is too often the very most), someone needs to handle the submissions pile. I think and hope that is changing, too. Too many artistic directors have relegated really good dramaturgs to just reading and sorting scripts and blocking playwrights instead of engaging in reading plays themselves, or using those dramaturgs to engage audiences, artists, and the institution with process and selection, or elevating those dramaturgs to management or leadership roles.

I will also say that doing improv comedy taught me so much about dramatic structure. More than any of my professors.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.

Oh, wow. I don’t even know where to start. I’ve never been good at playing favorites. One play-going experience that, unsurprisingly, changed me was seeing Angels in America, both parts on the same day in grad school. I’ve told this story a lot. All of us from the rush ticket line in the morning became friends over the day – moving from the top balcony and sneaking down to the main floor over the course of each play’s acts. But, what I think about even all these years later, is the moment when Belize wanted Louis to pray over Roy Cohn. He mumbled some Hebrew, and all the Jews in the audience laughed. Then we turned to our goyishe neighbors and whispered together, “He just said the prayer for the wine.” And there was a second wave of laughter. And the actors knew it would be coming. That moment of audience/play bonding – I’ll been chasing that for the rest of my career.

Music has always been important, but the songs change. I live with a sound designer/composer, so there is always music around. I sing (poorly, but he doesn’t mind) Billy Bragg’s “Milkman of Human Kindness” and Big Star’s “13” to my son at night. I have several songs that are deeply attached to moments in my life, and bands that are the score of my life (U2….), and even co-wrote a play called Rock & Roll: The Reunion Tour (with Matt Callahan, Sean Daniels, and David Hanbury) about that. I haven’t read the book, but the movie Perks of Being a Wallflower left me completely melted, mostly because the soundtrack was filled with several deeply attached songs.

I’m a sucker for Sleepless in Seattle whenever it’s on. There. I have a heart for all you doubters out there.

I could go on about books and poetry for days, but one of the sad truths of my life in lit is that reading plays all day often leaves me too tired to read other things.

Who/what inspires you?

These days, as sappy as it sounds, my son does. He’s four, so every emotion is huge and powerfully felt and loudly expressed. Every day is filled with a thousand Why?’s. Watching his joy when he learned to crawl and walk was incredible, and now watching him learn to read is truly awe-inspiring – as is watching him fearlessly climb the 25’ rope structure thing in the park. All right, that last one is just terrifying. I don’t want to be one of those horrible people who will say that children make your life complete – my life was very complete without my son, and you don’t need to have a kid to be complete. I was, however, unfocused – that’s me. He has helped me focus, both because time is not my own anymore, and also because now there is someone to work for, and to work to make proud of me.

What is your dream project?

I’d love to do something like Rock & Roll again and again for the rest of my life. Collaborating with beloved friends on entertaining and meaningful projects. And being a generating artistic dramaturg instead of a note-giver and gadfly all the time.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?

Only 5?

No

I’d love to write a musical with Brecht or Wendy Wasserstein or Deb Laufer and have Jerome Robbins or Agnes DeMille or Twyla Tharp choreograph it to music by the Watson Twins…or Duran Duran…or Hole…

No.

I’m not smart enough to work with Caryl Churchill. I’m not haunted enough to work with O’Neill. Tennessee Williams would find me a bore and a nag…

No.

There are writers and musicians I dream daily of working with again. They know who they are. Same for a couple of directors.

My partner in life and crime, the noise boy Matt Callahan, is the person I always want to work with, and I think all people should.

What are you working on right now?

I’m the Associate Director of American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We have commissioned 21 of an eventual 37 projects that all deal with moments of change in American history. So, I read a lot and travel trying to identify writers/groups to commission, serve on the artistic staff here, do a lot of administrative stuff. It’s a great job at a great theater with great people.

What’s up next for you?

Naomi Wallace’s American Revolutions project – The Liquid Plain. It’s gorgeous and I will not do it the disservice of trying to blurb it here. Come see it. I’m going to try to blog some of the research and rehearsal process, but I can’t guarantee I’ll pull that off.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?

I would really say – and the other dramaturgs can disagree and come at me with torches and pitchforks if they want – not to think of dramaturgy as a job. As I said earlier, it is a skill. And a skill that you should be sharing with everyone around you if they’re not already unknowingly practicing it themselves. I wish I hadn’t been so specialized – I wish I would have continued with directing and writing especially. There are so few jobs in our field, and so few of them are actually fun, and so few of them lead to leadership positions where you can actually put your own ideas into action. You have to really think about what you want to do and make it happen for yourself. Create a path instead of applying for the 3 positions that open each year that get listed in ArtSearch. Aspire. And learn how to read and create a budget. For real. And aspire.

–

Thank you for sharing your insights, Julie! Watch for the huge coffee cup I’m sending to Ashland to thank you!

Most American theatre professionals will readily explain how professional artistic theatre differs from two other categories of performing art.

What they do is not community theatre. Their artistic collaborators are trained and usually credentialed individuals. A certain amount of money changes hands to permit those artists to feel that they have been compensated. The combination of academic preparation and economic entanglement is believed to assure a higher quality of artistic output. Even within the realm of professional theatre, there are strata largely based on the amounts of payments, the union memberships of artists, and the times of day during which rehearsals occur. A modest amount of sneering goes on both up and down these strata.

What they do is not mere entertainment. This assertion is harder to quantify or explain. I’ve had people try to make the argument to me that art challenges our assumptions about the world while mere entertainment comfortably reinforces those assumptions. However, that means every person would carry around a different definition of art versus entertainment, making the distinction meaningless. For example, as a hyper liberal individual who opposes military adventurism deep in my bones, the excellent production of Bill Cain’s 9 Circles I recently saw at Forum Theatre would, for me, be total fluff. So I can’t characterize the mere entertainment side of this dichotomy very clearly, but I know it’s out there. Some of my friends bring up Tyler Perry’s work as an exemplary piece of mere entertainment. Holiday chestnuts like A Christmas Carol are also frequently implicated.

There’s no real mystery why these distinctions are made and to some extent clung to.

Diane Ragsdale, in a meta-comment to a recent Jumper post (http://www.artsjournal.com/jumper/2013/02/when-does-coaxing-become-coercing/) writes “It strikes me as more than a little ironic that some foundations are now wringing their hands because arts organizations are engaging in ‘spectating’ and are resistant to ‘participatory engagement’, since the shift away from the participatory arts and the engagement of amateurs in the last century was urged by foundations and others seeking to ‘professionalize’ arts organizations. If the field is frustratingly isomorphic it may be so in large part because of ‘field-wide systemic interventions’ by foundations.” In my words – for most of the 20th century, if you wanted money from foundations you had to explain in what ways you were not community theatre and not mere entertainment. It paid organizations really well to seem stuck up about the art form.

As Diane discusses in her post, and a number of related ones; some foundations are now seeking organizations with programming that engages broader communities in more participatory ways. This is leaving some established companies with a severe case of “Who moved my cheese?” thinking. It is possible that new approaches and new types of programming that break down the community theatre and entertainment barriers may be highly fundable in the near future; but that’s not why I think we need to reexamine the value of those barriers.

My concern is that we’ve built those barriers so high that attending community theatre and lighter forms of live performance entertainment don’t function as good doorways into routine playgoing. We are so eager to hold ourselves apart from those realms of playmaking that we do nothing to encourage people who discover playgoing through those channels to discover and appreciate our work as well.

That’s a significant problem, because community theatre and mere entertainment bring in a lot of new audience. Community theatre has the hook of drawing in friends and family members of performers. That happens in professional theatre as well, but often many of the artists in a professional production are out of towners whose friends and family are far away. Community theatre inherently casts locally, and so provides an instant draw to members of that community.

Most mere entertainment either has the power of tradition to attract new audience or the power of celebrity. Tyler Perry brings Madea Gets a Job to the Verizon center in April and will likely bring in more than enough people on that one night to sell out two full productions at Woolly Mammoth. It seems a waste that we don’t have some way to try to lure a few of those patrons back to any of the five theatre venues within five blocks of the center.

I am not sure exactly what an infrastructure for recruiting new playgoers from among the ranks of those who attend theatre we are predisposed to disdain would look like, but it would probably include stronger and warmer relationships between conventional art theatre companies and other producing organizations. There would probably be value in some document, whether paper or digital, that could be made available at all performing venues and drawn to the special attention of new patrons; a document that would present the full spectrum of available playgoing in the region. I note, for example, that TheatreWashington’s Playing Now feature on their web site does not include Dial M for Murder at the Little Theater of Alexandria, a community theatre company performing closer to the center of DC than many professional companies they do list. To achieve a goal of radically increasing playgoing, all opportunities to become a more frequent playgoer should be fully exploited.

In addition to positive actions to capitalize on all theatre audiences, I suspect there would also be value in combing through all our communications to look for any messaging in the sidebands that discourage some segments of the public from considering attendance. Do we choose fonts or use vocabulary that may cause some segments to immediately dismiss the idea of attendance? Is there anything about the look of our lobbies that may make some segments feel out of place? I think it would be a good mental exercise to review the image of your organization and interrogate how welcoming and approachable your organization appears to people who don’t see themselves as culture vultures, but might well enjoy and value the work you produce.

For the avoidance of doubt: I’m not encouraging any organization to change programming to be more like community theatre or mere entertainment. I am encouraging you to build relationships with those who do program those categories that will allow you to fully exploit all their hard work in order to recruit more broad spectrum playgoers. Big tent. Room for a bunch of rings. More people attend the circus.

So there’s my contention. The conceptual moats built around high art American theatre previously served valid purposes. I think they are now doing more harm than good. We should either fill them in or build a lot more draw bridges. But I may be missing something. Is there continuing value to a deep moat that I’m not allowing for? Does it make you feel more important? Wouldn’t consistently full houses make you feel even more important?

David Copelin
Hometown: Los Angeles, CA
Current town: Ashland, OR

How do you explain dramaturgy?

A lot depends on who’s asking. The search for a one-size-fits-all definition has, I think, been discredited by now, and the universal groan that goes up from a kvetch of dramaturgs when it’s asked is quite telling. We are friends of the text, I guess, if it’s understood that “text” is used in the widest sense, not limited to the script or even a particular production. We are also friends of the playwright, living or dead, and we do what we can to make sure that the author’s text is honored — not slavishly, and not pretending to know for sure what his or her intentions are/were (even when the author has made them clear), but with savvy and discretion and imagination. Our functions have been performed in the past by actors, directors, playwrights, producers and others; we have a new title but what we do has been around for a long long time.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?

I’m primarily a playwright these days, and a translator, but my dramaturgical sensibility shows up in my healthy skepticism, my curiosity, and my ability to use both sides of my brain. I find dramaturgy to be an essential part of script creation, though I don’t start from theory or even from a premise. I’d rather tell a theatrical story in as many concurrent and surprising yet satisfying ways as possible. To put it another way: the playwright in me creates draft after draft. The dramaturg in me comments in between drafts. This is, of course, a gross over-simplification.

How did you come to dramaturgy?

I was invented by Helen Barr, Maurice Gibbons, Robert Brustein, Eric Bentley, and Jan Kott, then educated in theatre practicalities by Gordon Davidson and Zelda Fichandler.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.

Plays: Mad Boy Chronicle, King Lear, Three Sisters, A Man’s A Man, Distracted, Yichud (Seclusion), Dr. Kheal, The Wild Duck, Man and Superman, Endgame, Candide, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Tablecloth of Turin, A Little Night Music, and many, many more. Why? Because they have moved me, surprised me, showed me something that I didn’t know — or did know, and wouldn’t admit. My own plays, Bella Donna, The Rabbi of Ragged Ass Road, The Angel Capone, A Clean Breast, and others in process, deal with the nature of illusion, deception, and some sort of doggedness. I’m pretty fond of them, too.

Movies: Pirates of the Caribbean, Amelie, The Great Dictator, Alexander Nevsky, Brigadoon, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Animal Crackers, Manhattan, Chinatown, Rules of the Game, Miss Lonelyhearts, The Seven Samurai, and the list goes on. Oh, I forgot Love Finds Andy Hardy, and all those silly, wonderful MGM musicals with Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney.

Songs: The Times They Are A-Changin’, Lonely Town, A Comedy Tonight, One Meat Ball, An Octopus’s Garden, Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine, All at Once You Love Her, Old Man River, Begin the Beguine, The Physician, and lots of others that tell the truth in unexpected and affecting ways.

Who/what inspires you?

Meryl Streep’s acting, Michael Feingold’s criticism, William Shakespeare’s writing, Jon Stewart, Maria Irene Fornes, Stephen Lewis, F. Murray Abraham.

What is your dream project?

Any play of mine that gets produced in an Equity theatre.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?

Voltaire (orig. image found here)

I love this question. Shakespeare, Mae West, Voltaire, the Baal Shem Tov, and Will Smith.

What are you working on right now?

A one-act called Mind Over Matter and a longer play called Winner Take Nothing.

What’s up next for you?

Keeping on.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?

Listen more than you talk, seek out the wisdom of those less well-educated than you are, and try every job in the theatre that you can.

–

Thank you, David!

Michael E. Evans
Hometown: Palo Alto, Ca.
Current town: Stavanger, Norway

How do you explain dramaturgy?
Dramaturgy is the field of study concerning how plays (and by extension, movies, etc.) are typically written, and in particular, how they are structured. Where is the main turning point? Is there a well-developed protagonist? If there is, does she/he win, lose or something in between? What are the characteristics of the fictional world the author has created? These are typical dramaturgical questions. This is what dramaturgy is – as opposed to what dramaturgs do. Dramaturgs do a lot of other stuff, but the core of what they do and what they are is dramaturgy as defined above.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?
I’m active in local politics, and I’m told my speeches are better than most. When discussing, for example, new zoning restrictions, I try to tell a story.
As to the second part: Dramaturgy – i.e. knowing something about how plays are (typically) written, informs nearly everything I do on the job. When I commission a translation, I try to make sure that the dramaturgy of the play in the source language has been successfully rendered in the target language. This will often mean fudging a bit on the semantic meaning of the original words in order to render the action of the words. When I talk with directors about concept or see their run-throughs, it’s often structure I’m dealing with. Is the story coming through? Does that costume help tell the story? When working with playwrights, I try to help them see the structure of their work. They often find this useful. I don’t tell them how to write, I try to get them to see for themselves what they’ve written.

How did you come to dramaturgy?
I moved to Norway in the early 1970s and stage-managed for 5 years while I learned Norwegian. When there was an opening for a dramaturg, I applied and got the job. But it wasn’t quite that easy. While stage managing I offered my services to the house dramaturg for free. I wrote reports on plays, articles for the program and the like. This was deliberate positioning. I kind of became the inevitable choice when the position opened up. I did study theatre – both in the US and in Norway. Theatre history, criticism, the usual stuff. The only part of my theatre studies I find important today were the lit and playwriting classes. Theatre history, beyond the most basic level, is unimportant to me. Reading Beckett with Ruby Cohn or taking playwriting with Ted Shank were very important. Stage managing was also good preparation: seeing the same scene done a thousand times really shows you how scenes and plays can be put together–how a good actor can milk a line in a hundred ways you never thought possible.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.
Stories:
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. A modern myth, a myth for our time. As good as any of the Greek myths. (But it’s not a good novel…)
Plays:
You haven’t heard of my favorites, because they’re all contemporary European plays and the US never produces contemporary European plays (unless they’re feather-light, like Yasmina Reza’s plays). But here goes anyway: Astrid Saalbach (Denmark): Blessed Child, End of the World, Pieta, Red and Green. Jonas Hassen Khemiri (Sweden): We Who Are a Hundred, Invasion. Jon Fosse (Norway) Winter, Nightsongs. All of these plays have done very well both in their home country and abroad.
Films:
M*A*S*H, Short Cuts (both by Altman), Casablanca (for its precise dialogue: “We’ll always have Paris” is wonderfully tight and pregnant).
Favorite snatch of dialogue not yet found in a play or movie:
SHE: I’m leaving you.
HE: What’s his name?
(A whole little story in six words – beat that!)

Who/what inspires you?
First, the playwrights mentioned above. They have taught me more about theatre than anyone else. I had no idea that theatre do what their plays do. Secondly, a few directors here in Europe.

What is your dream project?
Getting contemporary Scandinavian plays produced in the US and Canada. You guys don’t know what you’re missing.
Writing my second book, on contemporary Scandinavian playwrights.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?
Oh, there are so many. I’m actually quite satisfied with the ones I’ve got. I especially like working with young, “hot” directors. They’re crazy, but inspiring. Keep me on my toes.

What are you working on right now?
I’m finishing up an English translation of a stage adaptation of Das Boot, a novel about a German U-boat in WWII. A producer in London is apparently interested.

What’s up next for you?
Looking forward to working with Astrid Saalbach on translating her new play, a wacky, brutal comedy about four female hairdressers.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?
1. Don’t think you can be a good dramaturg merely by getting your degree (unless it’s from a really top-tier school). I would never hire anyone right from school. Figure on doing other stuff in theatre first: stage managing, PR work, whatever.
2. Learn to write. Really well. And no, I don’t just mean “correctly.” I mean clearly, cleanly, interestingly. If you can’t do that, find something else to do with your life. (I really mean this.)
3. Be curious. Study something else as well. Get a solid minor in something that interests you. (I did a minor in linguistics and have found those courses more valuable to me today than most of my theatre courses.)
4. Learn a foreign language and use it. It amazes me that the US has so many monolinguistic dramaturgs. You have simply no idea what you’re missing.

–

Thank you, Michael! I am inspired to find out more about Scandinavian work!

Fortunately, though, there are hundreds of wonderfully creative dramaturgs doing marvelous work all over the world. Catch up on what some of these dramaturgs are up to right here on 2amtheatre! Today, we feature an interview with Hannah Daniel, currently the Arts Discovery Programs Coordinator at People’s Light & Theatre in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

Hometown: Richardson, TX
Current town: Malvern, PA

How do you explain dramaturgy?

When I first started to explain dramaturgy to friends and family, I said: Hitler’s PR goal was to dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, reducing his arguments and aims into the simplest terms possible. My job is to do precisely the opposite: I meet my audience (be they design team, actors, marketing, audience, students, etc.) where they are and seek to bring them up to the same place.

When I explain my position today, I say that my job is sometimes to make sure everyone (design team, actors, audience, staff) is in the same world of the play, sometimes to acquaint everyone with the world crafted by the playwright then molded by the design team. Sometimes it is simply to provide context, whether that is historical or otherwise (ex: exploring Texas in 1987 or exploring the dynamic between characters). Some people respond, “Oh, research!,” to which I quickly reply, “Well, that’s part of it.” My job is integrating what I know or learn with the vision of others (and my own) to inform those involved with the show (and that includes the audience). Part of my job is knowing what information–text, graphics, interactive media–best serves my intended audience, be they patrons, box office staff, users on Facebook, or actors. Dramaturgy gives context.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?

I was raised in a home with a mother who excelled at analysis and remediation. Today, that translates in my brain dramaturgically because I can see what appear to be disparate elements are actually connected–when does what’s happening in our development meet what’s going on in the rehearsal room and how might both of those connect to social media, for example. If dramaturgy gives context, then dramaturgy exists constantly in my day. I interact a great deal with parents, teachers, and students. When I’m describing a program, I’m giving context for how what we do, our focus on ensemble work, engages with their world and their lives. I think it leaks into the rest of my life the way someone who is analytical might determine more efficient ways to wake up in the morning or prepare a meal or someone who has an eye for design maintain a creative interior of their home. It isn’t so much that they are still “at work” but their brains are still “working.”

How did you come to dramaturgy?

I transferred high schools by applying for and being accepted into the theatre magnet of Richardson High School. As part of the theatre magnet, we had a Thespian Troupe and we participated each year in the Texas Thespian Conference. My junior year, before we exited the bus, one of the directors went over the rules and also pointed out a workshop on dramaturgy and hinted that someone should attend. I asked him what dramaturgy was, but he merely winked and smirked, thus ensuring that my curiosity would get the better of me. (Sidenote: I think avid curiosity, while not a requirement, definitely supports dramaturgy.)

I showed up to the appointed room to discover I was one of six people attending, and the only student. As I was utterly clueless, I mostly listened. The dramaturg from Houston’s Alley Theatre ran the workshop, I remember that, though not her name. (Many apologies to you, wonderful enlightener!) Teachers talked about how they were trying to integrate or introduce dramaturgy into their programs. One teacher, and I fell in love with this idea, required every student to write a one page report on a topic related to the show for which they desired to audition. She gave the example of The Crucible, and had students report on the McCarthy trials, the Salem witch hunt, Puritans, and other such topics. I spent the rest of the conference begging my high school director to let me dramaturg our spring musical Into the Woods. He finally caved, though I now wonder if that was his goal all along.

I can’t say, knowing what I know today, that I did a fantastic or even presentable job, but I had been bitten by the dramaturgy bug. I didn’t even know I was supposed to be part of the design team meetings! I did give a few pre-show talks to the audience, briefly discussing fairy tales in our lives.

I continued to work on- and off-stage in high school, but when I finally sat down to explore college options, I looked specifically for dramaturgy and a BFA program. (The BFA part ended up being moot; I graduated with a BS.) Only two schools at the time offered focuses in dramaturgy at that time: Oklahoma University and University of Evansville. Although I looked at other schools, I chose UE. There I was tested and tried, succeeded and failed, but I hung on to dramaturgy like a pit bull. My shortcomings typically provided better lessons than the projects which I found easy. There was just something about this discipline that stuck to me. And thanks to my professors who both encouraged me and, in training, showed me how much more I had to learn/discover, I kept at it.

So, that’s how I came to dramaturgy. These days, I wear a different job title–Arts Discovery Programs Coordinator–but dramaturgy impacted the way I approach the work I do. And I develop dramaturgical content and resources as part of guides we produce for all our Family Series productions.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.

(Sidenote: You do realize the danger of asking a bookworm to recount favorite books, I hope? I shall endeavor not to prattle on ad nauseum.)
(Editor’s note: I do. I keep a list so I can read everyone’s favorites!)

I enjoy reading as an escape, so epic fantasies–The Lord of the Rings, The Kingkiller Chronicles, The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia–all capture me. But I also love reading to learn, so books like The Tyranny of E-mail: The 4,000 Year Journey to Your Inbox and At Day’s Close: A History of Night win out some days. I surprised myself by enjoying It’s All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels, a non-fiction about a man building his dream bike; history of bicycles is sprinkled throughout. I’m constantly impressed by books that live under the umbrella of YA novels, because really they should be read by everyone. I think of The Giver and Ender’s Game. Anything by the Green brothers, but most recently The Fault in Our Stars and Paper Towns (seriously, if I had that book in high school, Walt Whitman would have made sense). If you’re ever looking for a new book, I’d say start with the YA section (preferably with a librarian in tow) or look at Newbery Medal and Honor books.

V for Vendetta is a perennial favorite, and only more so after I learned the history of the Gunpowder Plot while studying abroad. My favorite moment in The Two Towers is when Sam tells Frodo the reason they are doing this, the reason we listen to stories of heroes, is because there are some things worth fighting for. I should also explain that my DVD shelf occupied is divided between Die Hard/James Bond on one side and Disney/Pixar on the other. There’s a mish-mash of everything from Rachel Getting Married to Cassanova behind that.

Okay, I’m wrapping it up, I promise. I will blast my radio for Pink’s “Perfect” and know all the words to Cee Lo Green’s “Forget You.” I love turning on Pandora to Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, The Rat Pack, or Big Band/Swing while I clean my room and tidy up. There’s something incredibly pleasant about driving down the highway singing along to the oldies station or cruising to classical. Most recently, I’m jamming to The Amazing Octopi, a pop/chill band from Austin featuring an accordion; Paolo Nutini, a young Scottish performer who makes for great cruising music and his lyrics are uplifting without crossing over to cheesy; and Ingrid Michaelson. As long as it isn’t heavy metal, screamo, or headbanger, I’ll probably enjoy it.

Who/what inspires you?

I’ve been blessed to encounter strong people along the way, although I don’t think I recognized their impact and inspiration until after they were no longer in my life. I’m impressed by the quiet acts of kindness, strength, courage, and hope I catch out the of the corner of my eye or with the tip of my ear.

I keep a camera constantly on my person and I love snapping random moments. Sometimes they are blurry, but sometimes they are wonderful, either beautiful or humorous. Looking back on those images inspires me. Knowing the stories of my coworkers and friends inspires me. Reading great journalism inspires me. Life inspires me: to breathe, to laugh, to observe, to consider, to rejoice, to mourn, to challenge, to accept, to continue. Inspiration doesn’t always arrive from beauty; I think it arrives from the stirring of a deep passion, be it amazing or terrible.

What is your dream project?

I used to say Into the Woods; there’s a piece of me ruing my high school self for an opportunity missed and there’s a piece of me loving anything by Sondheim. But after two summers of curating R&D labs here, that’s changed. For me, a dream project would be one in which the voices of all collaborators are valued and we’re making discoveries together. There might be a script, or there might not be. Developing something from a single idea is so exhausting, so exhilarating; it feels and seems a little bit like teaching, to me: daunting but impressive and engaging.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?

My immediate reaction is that I have no idea because I don’t keep up with who’s who in the theatre world. I really don’t. I think it would entirely depend upon the project. I’d love to work with John and Hank Green and Stephen Sondheim, but I don’t know if they’d work well together. Unequivocally, I’d want to work with Madeleine L’Engle. Maybe Thomas L. Friedman or Jonah Lehrer and round it out with either Alan Rickman or Emma Thompson.

What are you working on right now?

Currently, we’re in the early stages of preparing for our spring and summer programming for Arts Discovery; I’m processing registrations. The Winter’s Tale is currently onstage and I’m coordinating with our teaching artists and high school teachers in the area to bring workshops on Shakespeare and the play to their students. I’m also part of the team that runs the social media for The Winter’s Tale as well as Arts Discovery, so I keep an ear and eye out for interesting, engaging content and brainstorm ideas. I’m reading books we can recommend to students if they enjoy our next Family Series production, Stargirl, based on the book by Jerry Spinelli.

What’s up next for you?

Most of what I’m currently doing is leading up to what’s next. Mostly, what’s next is keeping one foot in the present and the other ready to land in the future.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?

Explore. I’ve been amazed how much something I studied for fun or random trivia has come into play during my work. Know where you live (and where your audience lives). Try. Be willing to fall flat on your face. It may be horrendous or it could be stunning. So I guess a part of try would be risk it. Find a mentor. Ideally, someone nearby, but also look at groups like LMDA and find someone who can work with you, fairly critique and analyze your work and push you further. Even if you’re self-motivated, it is essential that you have outside eyes looking at your work and progress; they make an amazing reality check. Limit yourself. I don’t mean say you can’t do something, but know what your limits are. Analyze the best ways you can use your resources, including your self and your time.

–

Thank you so much, Hannah!

“How do you give
In to the true
That wants to become
A new part of you?” – Craig Wright

I expect most diversification in programming to come from new organizations and growth in currently tiny organizations, but bringing it about will still require a couple of things from established, even august, arts institutions.

First, established institutions have an interest in fostering a wide diversity of smaller producing organizations in order to enrich the theatre ecosystem and benefit from the greater number of low threshold doors into playgoing. In order to properly serve this interest, leaders at those institutions will have to overcome fear of competition. As I may already have written and will certainly write again, I don’t believe in competition between arts organizations. We are all fellow travelers. Our common competition is the couch. For every attendance Woolly Mammoth loses to Arena or vice versa, both of them lose thousands of attendances to “Stayed Home,” a long running and well attended production in every city. Still, many company leaders, both paid and volunteer, cherish a fear of helping other organizations succeed due to concerns that success is a zero sum game. That fear has to be quelled if large organizations are to step forward to their proper (and self-interested) role of fostering diverse productions through the sweat and treasure of others.

Second, established institutions will carry some of the responsibility to create diverse productions. All organizations, in order to radically increase attendance, will need to make changes in the plays they choose, in the ways they produce, in the partnerships they make, in the ways they communicate with audiences. I am fomenting revolution, here. I expect it to be unsettling. In times that are rich with both threat and opportunity, currently successful organizations often feel especially at risk. They have, from one perspective, more to lose. They feel they should pause, regroup, and stick to the predictable for a while – just until conditions improve. But when there is real substantial change in progress, retreating to the familiar rarely works. What looks like the safest ground to stand on is probably the place you should be most worried about standing. Your best path forward is probably into the dark, which is understandably scary.

Then the tiny companies themselves need to deal with fear of rejection, fear of ridicule, fear of disappointing partners; in aggregate, fear of failure. Fear of failure that will get in the way of exactly the kind of bold innovation we need them to carry out. Many of the leaders of these tiny companies will emerge from jobs in more established institutions. Their fears could easily drive them to emulate those institutions rather than making their own innovative ways.

So there’s plenty of fear to go around. Here’s all I have to offer. I call it “Failgreat.” In coining this term, I borrow from the engineering concept “Failsafe.” A lot of people missunderstand failsafe. It doesn’t mean engineering in such a way that failure is impossible. It is a tenet of engineering that any system can and almost certainly will fail. Failsafe is the philosophy of designing systems in such a way that when they fail, they will fail in a way that is least likely to harm people or damage property.

The way I would like you to think of failgreat is as a philosophy of making art in such a way that even if a particular project or your entire organization fails, it will be obvious to any observer, especially yourself, that you were credibly striving for greatness right up to the moment of failure.

Organizations that innovate fail often, but when they fail in the midst of striving towards a worthy goal, that failure is more often praised and valued than looked down upon. Failed projects and failed organizations that do attract scorn are those that are shown, after failure, to have been covering up the probable failure or wasting the last available resources on some unworthy activity.

I am convinced that embracing the failgreat principle will help organizations and individuals listen more closely to their aspirations than to their fears, and further that it will create a sense of excitement and progress that will make the very failure it seems to invite less likely. So, I encourage you to go out and make some failgreat art.

Jaz Dorsey
Hometown: Atlanta, Ga.
Current town: Nashville, Tennessee

How do you explain dramaturgy?

I am still reeling from Allison Horsley’s (a fellow dramaturg) brilliant observation that the dramaturg is a thing in process, that we are spilling out of the literary closet into the diplomatic fray of keeping theatre alive by lifting it to its highest potential. These days, when folks ask me what a dramaturg is, I refer to the producer in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, shrug my shoulders and say “It’s a mystery.” I also suggest that they Google Gotthold Ephraim Lessing.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?

I was abducted by dramaturgy and suffer from Stockholm Syndrome in that I have come to completely identify with my captor. These days that translates into spending my time producing a new play reading series for my colleague Carolyn German, the artistic director for the Metro Nashville Parks Theatre Department. This series kicked off in September, 2011. On Monday, February 11 we presented the 11th reading in the series.

How did you come to dramaturgy?

As a child, when asked that infernal eternal question ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?,’ I made it very clear that I was going to be an actor. My aristocratic Southern family thought this was a form of mental illness, so I spent the better part of my adolescence in mental institutions.

I graduated high school from a North Carolina nuthouse and went to Chapel Hill on Vocational Rehab. But I was scarred as far as theatre went, saw only one play during my years there and took no classes in the theatre department. I studied for the diplomatic field with a focus on German and French – but almost all of my classes were dramatic literature. Then I got a scholarship to Germany and made a great friend who was a dramaturg in the Federal German theatre. I also had a friend who was the rehearsal pianist for the Munich Ballet, so I spent a lot of time hanging out with dancers.

When got back to the US, I finished off my undergraduate career with two theatre courses – Acting (which I HATED) and Theatre History, which was taught by the man who become my mentor, Richard Thomas Pike. Rick was head of the set design department at Chapel Hill. Before the class was over, I was his assistant. He told me to research the heraldry for RICHARD III. I found a book entitled SHAKESPEARE’S HERALDRY, took him what he needed. Thinking that I had ferreted this from hours of research, he was very impressed – then I showed him the book. The next thing I knew we were staying at The Gramercy Park Hotel, buying materials for the costumes for a production of RICHARD III for the Asolo Theatre in Sarasota. Rick then resigned from Chapel Hill to head up the set design program at VCU. They had just started a graduate degree program in dramaturgy but had no students. The next thing I knew, I was a graduate student in dramaturgy.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.

Right now I have a short list of brilliant scripts by writers who I have met since founding The African American Playwrights Exchange. I have spent the last six years reading these scripts and now I’m trying to figure out what to do with them. I have also completely relearned American history by reading these playwrights.

Who/what inspires you?

Actors and history – especially when they come together.
Brecht & Weill, Moliere and Lessing, Chopin, Joplin and Offenbach.

What is your dream project?

To produce a play called HANNAH ELIAS – or to see that it gets produced.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?

I’m happy with the ones I’ve got. There are more than five.

What are you working on right now?

A reading of THE CARELESSNESS OF LOVE by Michael Dinwiddie, president of The Black Theatre Network. The play is about the amazing life of Angelina Grimké, one of the first African American women to have a play hit the American stage. The reading will be presented at The Players Club in New York City on Thursday, March 14.

What’s up next for you?

It looks like it’s going to be a very busy year working with playwrights and filmmakers.

–

Thank you so much, Jaz!

I am indebted for this idea to DC actor Danny Gavigan and a bunch of his friends for a recent Facebook thread. Danny posted a question about why local actors’ names are not used in theatre marketing imagery when their faces are. The level of commentary and discourse that followed was, for the internet, unusually high.

The most nearly persuasive argument against including names of not-yet-famous actors is that any additional language on an advertising creative has the potential to distract a viewer from the central call to action – please attend this show. It’s not an idiotic concern. I’ve worked with mass advertising before. Clutter in many circumstances does depress choice. However (as I’ve written previously) for art theatre, mass advertising is a less and less productive tool. Most of your communication should be directed to people with whom you already have some connection and plan to have a connection into the future.

Jason Schlafstein, of Flying V Theatre, brought into the discussion the idea that including the name of an unknown who you want to work with in the future is essentially an investment. You are teaching prospective and actual audience members that performer’s name. Do that a few times over a few years, and with your target audience, you may help that performer achieve a narrow fame that you can harvest as a draw on future productions.

If including actor names in your imagery is the only thing you do to teach audience about your stable of go-to actors, you probably won’t make much headway. However, as one tactic in a broad strategy to build relationships and admiration between your artists and your audience members, it could be a significant contributor.

How else can you create and harvest narrow fame in your operations? Oh, and might you get better work out of people if you were part of making them feel more valued?

If I had to sum up all of my marketing “wisdom” in one sentence it would be this:

You don’t have to do that.

What does that mean? Allow me a few more sentences.

You don’t have to be on every social media platform to promote your work.

You don’t have to spend a ton of money to advertise your work, but your marketing budget also don’t have to be zero.

You don’t need to do what everyone else does.

You can create marketing that is authentic, which is defined as being “genuine or real”. When you do that, people will see your marketing as not just a way of trading X amount of money for Y amount of art. They will see it as a gift. They will see that it was given to them with thought and consideration. Some, maybe many, of them will return that generosity with a purchase. But even those that don’t will be positively impacted by the marketing you create.

That’s the idea behind The Gift Sessions, a live arts marketing workshop presented by me and sponsored by the good peeps at 2amt.

This is intended for those who work within or run arts organizations, i.e. Marketing Directors, Board Members, Executive Directors, dedicated volunteers, etc. That session will be on Saturday, April 20. Our special guests at this session will be Nick Keenan (Marshall Creative, New Leaf Theatre and 2amt), Eric Ziegenhagen from 2amt, as well as several other places, and David J. Loehr (Editor & Artistic Director, 2amt).

The Gift will take place at the Hyde Park Arts Center, located in Chicago. But this isn’t just for Chicago people. If you live in the surrounding states, consider driving in. If you live far away, considering flying in and making a weekend of it. It’s going to be worth your time, energy and money for two reasons.

First, you are going to be in a room with people who are just as passionate about connecting their art to an audience as you are. Does it sound too “spiritual” of me to say that when you are surrounded by that energy breakthroughs can happen? Well I don’t care. I’m saying. I’ve seen it happen.

Second, you are going to have a chance to get your toughest marketing challenges addressed. This isn’t the sort of party where I talk and you take notes. We will have more then enough time to deal with your specific problem. You’ll also have a chance to help your fellow participants with their issues.

Right now the price of the workshop is $90. I say “right now” because the price is going up on March 4. If you use the promo code 2amt, you’ll save an additional $5 on either event.

To buy your seat or get details, click here.

And if you’re wondering just who the hell I am, my bio is below. See you at The Gift Sessions.

The posts I read here are a mix of artistic examples, management ideas, inspirational rants about the value of theatre, and profiles of interesting practitioners. I find it frequently useful for ideas to reuse and to recharge when my particular participation in theatre wears me out. If you’ve somehow found this in spite of not being a regular, please dip in deeper. You’ll find it can do the same things for you.

The event where I met David was the same one that opened with Rocco’s oversupply talk. Hasn’t that been a useful provocation and thought provoker? My current mania for multiplying the audience for live theatre is to some extent a response to that day.

To that end, I’m dipping back into my first post for one idea to reemphasize.

Many people involved in Theatre also make programming for the screen.

Playgoing in film and on television is almost always portrayed as either very stuffy (Privileged people go to something classical in suits. A woman probably has to connive a man into attending.) or nails on the chalkboard irritating (Our protagonist is forced to attend some sort of post-modern play in which the friend who forced him to go mutters nonsense while another extra sprawls across a table moaning. Whole point of the set up is the awkward “So what did you think?” scene that follows.) There must be exceptions, but I don’t run into them.

There is a special exemption for attending student theatre featuring one’s own children. An exemption a lot of people make it real life as well.

There is a lot on the screen that makes play making seem fun and dynamic.

Most stage representations teach the audience that attending theatre is dull and probably not for you.

This bias could be turned around, in much the same way that popular representations by television and film of other changing social values have molded public opinion and policy.

So if you make popular entertainment for the screen, consider including some scenes in which characters the audience likes attend plays and have fun. If ten of you could do that, I’m convinced it would accomplish more than a $Billion national advertising campaign to get people to theatres.

Also, please feel free to draw my attention to any disconfirming instances that I might excerpt to use in that $Billion campaign if I ever get it organized.

Hometown: I was born in Bonn, Germany, lived there until I was eight, and then moved to Korea. I came to America to enter graduate school in 2005.

Current town: New Haven, CT

How do you explain dramaturgy?
Dramaturgy is a creative practice that, through critical thinking, enhances the breadth and depth of artistic imagination. Dramaturgy is an integral process to the origination, development, production, and reception of plays and theatrical performances.

How does dramaturgy appear in your daily life? How does dramaturgy inform or relate to what you do?
In my daily life as a student of dramaturgy and dramatic criticism at the Yale School of Drama and as Artistic Coordinator at the Yale Repertory Theatre, dramaturgy is a training, a conscious artistic activity, and also a habit. I perform the function of a dramaturg in production meetings, in the rehearsal room, in the classroom, and in the theatre. Yet even outside of the environments that associate me with dramaturgy, the practice of dramaturgy keeps me sensitive to the surroundings, critical of and curious about social, cultural and political events, and in constant search of new projects and opportunities.

How did you come to dramaturgy?
I was a student in the MA program in Theatre Studies at Washington University in St. Louis when I was first introduced to dramaturgy. Initially, my objective was to become a theatre scholar. However, through various opportunities in acting, directing, and playwriting at WU, my interest expanded to the production aspect of theatre. Upon contemplating what I could do with my academic training, I arrived at dramaturgy and applied to the MFA program at Yale School of Drama.

Tell me about a few of your favorite stories, plays, movies, songs, etc. and why they are favorites.*
Books:
David Mamet’s Writing in Restaurants: This contemplative essay on being a writer made me feel as if I was the writer myself and, further, made me want to be such a writer.
David Sedaris’s Sanatland Diaries: This essay made me realize how a trivial everyday experience could turn into a fascinating story.
Herman Hesse’s Demian: All the actions and events in this novel touched me to the core, from childhood to adulthood, from innocence to experience, and from naiveté to maturity.
Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood: Haruki combines an epic scale story with a stream-of-consciousness narrative, and this subtle blending optimizes both entertainment and contemplation.

Plays:
Johann Ludwig Tieck’s Puss-in-Boots: The playfulness, the depth, the imagination, and the multiple theatrical layers of this play make me wonder “Could this play be staged?” And I imagine a different kind of staging every time I read it.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust Part I and II: It starts with an allegorical setting but then expands to a cosmic scale. I would love to see it staged as a whole.
Jean Genet’s The Balcony: In its exploration of the theatricality of human nature and politics, this play is both amusing and terrifying.

Movies:
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Like Dead Poet’s Society, this movie seems to settle on the theme of carpe diem. But it goes further in exploring the danger of it, more widely engaging in politics and ideology, in addition to education.
The Matrix: The synthetic blending of science fiction, philosophy, mythical and biblical references, and top-notch cinematography makes a very intelligent entertainment (or entertaining intelligent discourse?)
Before Sunrise: This movie presents a beautiful look on youth, love, and traveling.
Serial Mom: Artistic mischievousness at its peak

Songs / Music:
Hans Zimmer’s score for Gladiator: This score is soothing yet still dynamic.
Michael Jackson’s “We’ve Had Enough”: A not well-known gem by Michael Jackson. This song starts as a ballad but gradually develops into a chant with a profound message. The melody, the beat, the voice, and the message create a great harmony.
Carole King’s “Beautiful”: This song is powerful, truthful, and positive, one that gives me strength.
Shinee’s “Lucifer”: A song by the Korean idol group Shinee. This addictive electronic dance song achieves the effect of an incantation.

TV:
The Wire: The most comprehensive depiction of the way of the world, from the underground (drug dealing) to the top tier (politics), and other related areas (education, journalism, and commerce).
Arrested Development: The highest form of irony and satire

Who/what inspires you?
Inspiration usually comes when I am in the theatre as an audience member. Sometimes watching a bad production gives me inspiration to create something good, or watching a good production gives me inspiration to create something just as good, or better.

What is your dream project?
Building a theatre devoted to staging plays of German Romanticism (Goethe, Schiller, Tieck, Grabbe, Georg Büchner)
Enhancing exchange of theatre between America and Korea.

If you could choose a team of five collaborators, living or dead, who would you choose?
Liesl Tommy (Director), Elizabeth LeCompte (Director), Judith Malina (Director), Ivo Van Hove (Director), Elinor Fuchs (Theatre Scholar)

What are you working on right now?
My doctoral dissertation: Behind Romantic Irony: How 18th-Century English Self-Reflective Satire Anticipated a New German Drama

What’s up next for you?
I will be contributing an article on Intercultural Dramaturgy to the forthcoming The Routledge Companion to Dramaturgy.
I will be teaching a dramaturgy workshop at the University of Nebraska at Omaha in May.
I will be participating in the MATC (Mid-America Theatre Conference) Conference in St. Louis, MO, in March and the ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Conference in Orlando, FL, in August.

What advice would you like to impart to aspiring dramaturgs?
Keep exploring new roles you can fulfill as a dramaturg and a theatre artist
Keep exploring how your role as a dramaturg can serve the art and the society
Always bring a positive presence.

–
Thank you, Walter!

*I started a separate list of all the noted favorites and will post at a later date

I was in London for a few days in the late spring of 2004. I’d been doing weeks of country walking in England and Wales and decided to finish the trip with some urban time to see some plays and knock the sheep droppings off my boots. None of that is very important, but it sets a little context.

I went to a matinee of Much Ado at Shakespeare’s Globe, an all female production that was very well put together. I especially remember their Don John. This is a role that I think can make or break a Much Ado. Theirs struck me as doing good work, but maybe a shade too young. Completely slipped my mind that many would consider her too female for it. She and everyone else had completely inhabited whichever gender the role required. The all-woman nature of the cast disappeared. That’s not the stunt I’m writing about.

As I squashed out of the place the exit line suddenly backed up. There was some kind of disturbance going on in New Globe Walk. A group of four people was carrying placards calling for the rejection of American Theater in London. London should be kept pure for British Theatre. They were loud and boisterous and seemed sincere. Then I noticed they had a pile of confederates all around the outside of the crowd they had drawn leafleting a show performing that night over at the Menier Chocolate Factory called Americana Absurdum.

I took a flyer and saw the show that evening. It was a great deal of fun and thought provoking and well produced – totally legitimate theatre. You can find a review of it here:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/americanaabsurdum-rev

Looking back on it, there were four factors that made this terrific stunt marketing.

1. The artistic style of the stunt was closely aligned with the artistic style of the piece marketed. I suppose this encapsulates the idea that the stunt itself was richly theatrical.

2. They harvested a captive audience, gathered by someone else’s efforts, who were very likely to be hooked by their message. Hundreds of demonstrated playgoers who had just proven we could find a performing venue in Southwark.

3. It was brief and focused. They rapidly riveted attention then delivered the call to action.

4. The stunt was sort of wild, but it remained respectful and legal throughout. Don’t want to have to hold curtain because you’re bailing out a performer.

I roll this out to the world as a terrific example, worthy of emulation, and to point out that I had to dig back 9 years to come up with such a good example. In board gaming, one broad strategy applicable to many games is “Do what the other players aren’t doing.” In many markets, with a minor exception for festival periods, stunt marketing is very much something the other players aren’t doing. It would be impactful even if many companies were using it frequently; but early adopters will reap exaggerated awards.

As ever, I welcome better and fresher examples. What kind of marketing stunts have you pulled? Did they draw audience? Were they artistically fulfilling? Did you feel cheap afterwards? I think that’s what most people are needlessly afraid of.

Lima (bean) burgers, grinding grain blends for homemade bread, fresh milk from family friends who ran a small farm… my folks idea of retirement was decamping the suburbs and repairing to a 10 acre tract further north in New Hampshire so they could farm more and raise small livestock.

You know what we rarely had in our fresh milk? Lucky Charms.

When I got to college I tried every combination of sugared breakfast cereal known to man. I fired up a life long affair with powdered cheese and my soda consumption rose to ‘signature accessory’ levels. It was classic overcompensation -so classic as to be boring and cliché.

As my gastronomic rummspringa gave way (mostly) to more mature tastes I started gravitating to the moderately strange… my wife will go to the store and bring home the oddest flavor of whatever she can find because she knows so well. I’ll try your eel and strawberries maki roll… or the rabbit and parmesan risotto at Il Fornaio in San Francisco, (one of my very favorite meals ever) or the ancho chile and honey basted quail at Mac and Ernie’s is the middle of nowhere (I went for the Cabrito Burger – so sad).

I would love to spend a weekend sampling someone’s molecular gastronomy if it were subsidized, and I am insanely covetous of a night spent at Next.

Yet again I’ve taken the long way around – but here’s what I know. I know that each reader has personally connected to different phases. There’re a number of you applauding my upbringing, a few hearty souls defending my powdered cheese addiction, a large percentage of you (I know my readers) who are itching to join me at Mac and Ernie’s and a few who would like to raise a glass with me over a deconstructed bowl of soup.

And all of you are right.

As we grow up in our theatre silos we tend to experience our theatre in order of complexity from basic trite children’s plays made to show off each child and raise money for chalk or whatever up through early modern and naturalism to more abstract naturalism to formal experimentation to forms that you require an honest discussion as to whether it’s actually still theatre – along with all of the mixing and mingling and gradations therein.

In my sphere practitioners tend to want recognizable narrative theatre with a tablespoon of risk… both as a maker and as a audience member. I have seen waves of loud rejection of true experimentation both on line and at the post show table. Almost as loud as the rejection of “well made” comedies.

There is a vigor to the evangelism of personal taste in internet discourse that abandons common sense or even a cursory look at your regions listings. There is also a holiness attached the the New! Shiny! Thing! that ignores the delight of simple well made favorites.

There is a broad diversity of offerings in your area. You discount many of them for not being by ‘good’ companies or resource rich companies. You discount them because you’ve never heard of the company or the theatre or the actors or the writer. You have a thousand thousand reasons why ‘no one’ in your area is doing “good theatre”. Hell, I was part of a company in San Francisco in 1999 that started because  “no one” was doing new plays. I mean sure you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a new play in San Francisco in 1999 but we couldn’t see them so they didn’t exist.

Don’t be me…

1. Check you local listings.
   Really.
   It’s more varied than you think.
2. Order something other than the usual.
   Sometimes the risk involved needs to be yours.
   Go see something or someone you don’t know or usually wouldn’t like. Support for innovation starts with those who recognize the benefit.
   That’s you.
   (I am terrible at this one)
3. Let’s try really hard to say what we mean.
   Let’s not say ‘someone needs to take a risk’ when we mean ‘do a play that I like that I haven’t seen before’.
4. Most risk is fringe by design.
   The research and development portion of theatre can’t be more than a small percentage or we have nothing to present to wide part of the bell curve of our audience.
   Some folks might want roasted root vegetable gelato with cracked black pepper. Most honestly want mac and cheese.
   They’re not wrong.
5. Don’t mistake your desire for something fresh and new with a need for field overhaul. Go to a few chef’s tastings (readings and workshops) and get a feel for what R&D is actually going on.
6. Don’t conflate the art with the business.
   Saying that the biggest theatres aren’t doing edgy enough work is blaming IBM for not being a nimble startup. It’s expecting foie gras on a Big Mac. You’re expecting the wrong product from the wrong animal. Experimentation isn’t a moneymaker. It never is. In any field.
   Except when there’s revolution.
   Revolution doesn’t happen every day.
7. When evangelizing for risk be specific about the ‘risk’ you’re looking for.
   Are you looking for:
   Experimental form?
   A large theatre to produce an unknown playwright?
   A small theatre to reimagine a classic?
   Found space?
   Found text?
   Improvised aerial Shakespeare in a found space? 

   Give us your context when you’re pushing for something.
   Risk is relative.

8. Risk is relative.
   An ad hoc non-institutional ‘band-style” company has little long term stakes to dash with a bad risk. When you start messing with jobs and families the stakes are higher. You need to factor that in when you’re doing your risk math. If someone were doing season planning with an eye to keeping your job intact would you feel differently?
9. Truly give room to fail.
   Room to fail isn’t ‘allowing the show to open’. It’s giving grace in talking about experimentation and risk taking. It’s talking about a new play with different expectations than Our Town. It’s understanding that sometimes the new form didn’t work in this iteration. But without your encouragement there might not be another iteration. Every time you write dismissively about that “pretentious post-modern X with the bad projections and the interpretive dance” you are shooting risk in the face.
   Feel free. You dislike what you dislike.
   But understand what you’re doing.
10. If no one in your area is taking the risk you feel need to be taken you’ve found your role.
    Congratulations. I’m excited to hear about your process and I look forward to hearing about your opening.

As a free bonus number 11 let me say:
if you think it’s not happening? Ask. Ask here. Ask your friends, ask on the #2amt or #newplay hashtags on Twitter. There is a broad performance universe out there, so much broader than I ever thought when I was the person whining about lack of risk in theatre (or hell the lack of new work).

And when you find that new thing that is taking the risks you think theatre should be taking?
Tell us – tell everyone you know. Disaffected is no way to live.

I invoke the term artistic exceptionalism to refer to the idea that artists are different in kind from ordinary people like me. It has many facets and has been viewed differently over time. Artists may be visited by a divine muse. They may be gifted or afflicted with unusual brain architecture. They may have had life experiences that shaped them differently from the rest of us.

Whatever the ascribed origin of the artistic spark, it usually carries the trappings of high aesthetic sensibility, apparently inspired creativity, a passionate and often unstable emotional life, powerful but brittle ego, and a willingness to dwell in sub-standard housing subsisting largely on ramen noodles and cheese from buffets at institutional events.

As a mental construct, artistic exceptionalism has some utility to the creation of art. Many donors, at least from the renaissance to the present day, have lapped it up with a spoon, disgorging ducats the while. It tends to keep most non-artists out of the artists’ way during the creative process. It magnifies the glamour of the artist, conveying a range of social benefits. It can serve as an attitude salve to artists while working tedious temp jobs.

However, artistic exceptionalism also creates a hedge that makes a lot of prospective audience members keep their distance. They feel pre-rejected, on the basis of their non-artistic status, by artists and works of art. Rather than show up and collect the anticipated rejection, they decide that whole categories of art just aren’t for them. They don’t show up, and until someone makes them feel more welcome; they won’t show up.

Many art forms can thrive in the contemporary world without a large audience, but performing arts and especially theatre rely on what I increasingly think of not as butts-in-seats but memories-above-seats. What I’ve realized over the last few years is that the true medium of performed art is the memories of the audience members. The component parts of a production leave a variety of enduring pieces of art – set pieces, props, costumes, design drawings, scripts – but the only place the production in performance endures is in audience memory.

Looked at from this perspective, performing is analogous to brush strokes or hammer blows in painting or sculpture. A theatre company needs audience for the same reason a painter needs a surface on which to paint – the audience is where you put the art when you’re done with it. We, the audience, carry your work away and do our best to cherish it and share it with others; to make the effects of the production ripple out beyond the few hundred or few thousand who saw it live.

At least we do that when we understand that we have a job; that remembering and retelling are duties of that job. We do that when we understand that we are part of rather than consumers of the art creation and preservation process.

Witnessing, retaining, and relating an artistic performance benefits from a quantity of artistry. Where will you direct your attention at each moment? That requires some of the eye of a film editor. What will you say to people to convey what you saw? That requires some of the articulation of a playwright. How will you convince your second order audience of what you’re saying? That requires a smidgeon of an actor’s performance flair.

I do not accuse anyone reading this of elitism against non-artists; but like many other stereotypes that roam around the culture, it isn’t enough to reject it yourself to reduce its impact. It requires active engagement with the members of your audience to invite us in as, in a small way, fellow artists collaborating with you in the creation, retention, and dissemination of your art.

Finding ways to convey that serving as audience to a play is a fun, active, and important endeavor is critical to attracting more people to embrace it, take it with the right blend of frivolity and seriousness, do it more often, and encourage others to play along.

I’ll close with one concrete idea, just to give you something you can improve upon. It’s an idea for a curtain speech element:

“I looked through our program and counted [number] names. That includes all the artists, technicians, and funders who made this performance actual. I appreciate and thank all of them. However, it leaves out what I hope will be [your ideal total audience for the run of the show] names – all of you plus the people who sat and will sit in your seats for other performances. A theatre audience has a role to play. Once this show closes, your memories are the sole repository of our work. Thank you all for accepting what we are here to offer. Please keep it and share it with friends. Please visit us again for another production. Enjoy the show.”

In my experience, plenty of people in the American Theatre innovate frequently. Whether the subject is artistic style, theater technology, seating plan, or any of dozens of other things, our field is well stocked with people who are willing to try new approaches.

However, and again, this is only based on what I see myself; many of those innovations are undertaken in a fairly haphazard fashion. Many theatrical enterprises operate on such tight resource budgets that there is a perceived obstacle to approaching innovation in a structured way. Somebody has what feels like a great idea. She implements that idea on a particular project. If the new idea is perceived as having improved the outcome of that project, the innovation might be repeated on a future project that is in some way similar; but it might equally well be forgotten.

Implementing a few of the key concepts of the experimental method can help someone focus on an innovation and extract more of the available value from that innovation, and it needn’t take a great deal more time or effort. Here’s a little recipe for turning a “Let’s try to do it this way this time,” into an experiment.

First, when you are making a change, you are doing it because you believe that the change will in some way lead to a better outcome than not making the change. That belief is the core of the hypothesis – the statement of what you are hoping to achieve and learn by carrying out the experiment. Ideally, this is in some numerically verifiable structure that will be easy to evaluate, but don’t feel chained to that at first.

Example: “If I encourage/harass everyone in the cast, crew, and company to vigorously promote our upcoming show on his or her Facebook timeline then we will see 150 (an arbitrary number chosen to represent enough of a benefit that it will have been worth the hassle of doing the innovation) more people attend as compared to our last show. As a side benefit, making this effort and seeing the results from it will increase everyone’s satisfaction with participating in the show.”

Second, come up with a few things you can measure during and after the execution of the innovation to learn whether or not your hypothesis was correct. Ideally, you will design your hypothesis so it relies on things you already measure as part of your operations. If your experiment requires you to measure something you wouldn’t otherwise measure, make sure it is something you want to know and that it won’t be too burdensome.

Example: “We had 800 people attend the last show. The experiment will be a success if at least 950 attend. As to peoples’ senses of satisfaction, I’ll ask folks at the strike party how they think their promotional efforts affected their feelings about the show. I’ll keep a pen and index card in a pocket and just mark down tick marks for ‘better’ or ‘worse.’ At the end of the evening, if my card has twice as many betters as worses, I’ll feel like I succeeded in that way.”

Third, carry out your innovation and collect the information you decided to measure. Now those of you who paid close attention back in high school science classes will remember that full on science would want you to do the show twice, once with the innovation as the experiment and once without the innovation as a control. That’s crazy talk. You’re still going to get useful information about your innovation idea using some prior production or the average of a few prior productions in lieu of an exact copy control.

Fourth, evaluate the numbers you’ve collected against the values predicted. Decide whether your hypothesis has been supported by the experiment. If it has, you can then think clearly about whether to incorporate that innovation into your routine. Because you’ve approached the whole process in a more organized way it will probably be easier for you to remember key parts of the experience and repeat valuable innovations in the future.

Also, borrowing these bits from science will serve as a reminder that even if your hypothesis was disproven, you haven’t wasted your time. You’ve learned something. The particular approach you tried under the circumstances didn’t deliver what you’d hoped. Having engaged in all this in a systematic way will help you understand whether your hypothesis was really wrong – meaning you’ve found an idea you can cross off your list and not worry about any more – or whether you executed your idea poorly – meaning you might try it differently on a future project.

Finally, if your community of supporters includes people of a scientific bent, seeing you apply these methods will encourage them to treat you more like a grown up and increase their faith that you know what you are doing.

I encourage you to define a hypothesis, set metrics, evaluate those metrics, and evaluate your hypothesis the next time you want to try something new. My hypothesis is that you will find your innovative efforts deliver greater rewards when you turn innovation into experimentation.