The New Play Sector Talked (and talked, and talked, and talked) in the Capital

This special guest blogpost from Playwrights Foundation Artistic Director Amy Mueller first appeared on Playwrights Foundation's Blogspot. Special thanks to Amy for letting us repost.



Recently, I represented Playwrights Foundation at the New Play Convening at Arena Stage’s new Mead Center for American Theater, hosted by the Bay Area’s own David Dower, founder of Z Space Studio, who is now Arena’s the Associate Artistic Director and architect of the American Voices New Play Institute at Arena Stage. It was an incredibly full four days, with a powerfully eclectic range of people from very different aesthetic/geographic/gender/age/cultural/ethnic identities, representing producing theaters of all sizes from all over, individual playwrights, ensemble theater makers, presenters, festivals, and yes, new play development labs and organizations like Playwrights Foundation.

We did a lot of talking together, and a lot of listening. And those many conversations were a part of a national dialogue, all recorded, tweeted and livestreamed across the country. But all that listening and talking led us somewhere – somewhere that is intangible, and very hard to talk about succinctly. Nonetheless, the momentum of this event will, I believe, succeed in pushing the national agenda about the practices of developing and producing new work and the learning about ourselves and our (un)common work forward.

Not everyone who deserved to be in this circle got to be, and I feel a responsibility to keep writing about it, to share my experience and bring your thoughts and words into the dialogue. If you were in the third circle, on twitter or live stream video, or, if you weren’t, and you want to tell me your thoughts, please respond to my posts here or on Playwrights Foundation’s Blogspot.

It seems fitting that we met up in DC where our elected reps are right now fighting tooth and nail to keep the NEA from becoming irrelevant. The NEA (a relatively tiny agency) plays a critical role in upholding our nation’s value for the arts, and its meaning to “We, The People” in a Democracy. If you haven’t expressed your opinion about cutting the NEA yet, please take this opportunity to do so! I did it in 5 minutes yesterday, and yeah, I felt that glow of citizenship wash over me. No, really, it is extremely important for us to speak up! Do it NOW, and then finish reading this. Okay, so...

Online there is a rich debate raging about NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman’s controversial and frank discussion on the issue of supply and demand in the American theater. You can read lots of interesting commentary on these links Diane Ragsdale and Arena Stage Blog and NEA Blog and I suggest you do. These are some awesomely challenging times for us. It is dangerous, I think, to be dismissive of the firestorm of anti-intellectual, anti-culture backlash. To imagine that our relevancy to the majority is a shared value is myopic. But in the face of a real and present danger, losing faith is not an option. As cultural workers, as the planters and sowers of cultural seedlings, we are damn sure we are relevant but are challenged by issues of solvency.

One of my favorite quotes from the New Play Convening was from Diane Ragsdale, who herself was quoting a professor: “A model is the representation of your beliefs about causality.” Think about it. I don't know about you, but at PF, we are constantly questioning our beliefs about our outcomes, and by inference our models of development. We are constantly making, deconstructing and redesigning our 'model(s)' (for organizational structure, staff roles, governance, and programs for play and playwright advancement). I love the notion that at the heart of all those developing models is belief about impact, a belief about what we mean to cause and how.

So we new play makers are stuck here between blind, passionate belief and the requirement to quantify our impact. Believing in our work, believing it actually does make a difference, in so many ways, as we so claim, believing in art as a transformative experience of beauty, is absolutely essential to making the work – and yet, (and yet), we must become experts in making the case for its relevancy, and become savvy in the business of solvency.

For me, sitting together with colleagues, new and old friends, and talking about our shared passion and our shared responsibility for carrying this work forward, that is, making new theater possible, was exhilarating and inspirational. I did cry a few times, and laughed a lot. Mostly, I listened, actively, heartfully, thoughtfully. It turns out that listening was itself the springboard. And you can listen, too: it's all available at #newplaytv.

Here's to: carrying the flame of passion, the innocence of blind belief, and the wicked ass savvy of financial know-how.

- Amy Mueller
Artistic Director, Playwrights Foundation

Perils of Free?

In Friday's You've Cott Mail, way down at the bottom, Thomas Cott includes a quick quote from Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis, given as part of a larger article in Crane's New York about how major New York arts organizations are engaging the younger generation. Eustis' quote hits pretty close to home in terms of innovative audience development, not because what he's talking about is revolutionary, but because he speaks about the shortcomings of one of the most-well-known free-ticketed events in the country, Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park. Here's the quote, with some extra context pulled from the article:

Oskar Eustis, artistic director of The Public Theater, said the arts need to be more accessible for everyone. Even the nonprofit theater's free Shakespeare in the Park creates barriers.

“By giving Shakespeare away for free, it has become inaccessible for many,” Mr. Eustis said. “Tell someone they have to wait six to 36 hours in line for a ticket and it erases 90% of population that would have considered going.”

In some ways, this is a quote that one can react strongly to without really being empathic about the Public's situation--after all, we're not all just sitting there with drastically popular, massively funded free programming where the demand highly exceeds the supply. But, here at Theatre Bay Area, we're in the enviable or unenviable position of having a similar issue. We've been grappling with this same (relative) issue in the context of our Free Night of Theater program, in which we annually distribute about 5,000 to 6,000 free theatre tickets, and also annually disappoint between 20,000 and 30,000 unlucky people who don't get tickets, don't get the tickets they want, or get overly frustrated by the (admittedly arduous, or at least not hoop-free) process of getting the tickets.



We've tried various ways to "share the wealth" of the program--we do targeted giveaways to businesses whose employees seem likely candidates to become repeat arts consumers while also setting up various roadblocks to dissuade repeat Free Nighters from being able to easily access the tickets. But it's hard, and so when I saw Eustis' quote it got me thinking.



How can we, as artists, arts administrators and (yes) businesspeople balance success with access? How can we make sure, in the case of Free Night, that we're continuing to make the arts available to new people while also ensuring, for the companies' sakes, that we're getting those tickets to audiences that are likely to return (and pay)? What does it say when the leader of one of the biggest free theatrical events in the world essentially says that the very "freeness" of the event "erases 90% of the population that would have considered going?"



In the case of the Public, they're addressing this inequity by creating a "mobile Shakespeare" unit, the goal of which is to take the art to some subset of those people who can't or won't wait in line. And in our case, we're looking at turning Free Night upside down over the course of the next year and seeing if there's a way to keep the success of the program while also improving some of the inherent problems we've tried and failed to solve in the last six years. We'll see how it goes...but we're open to suggestions.