The tl;dr version:

The submission paradigm–the model in which playwrights submit work to theaters–is at death’s door. We need to replace it with a searching paradigm, and technology’s going to get us there faster than anything else.

The longer version–the 4,000-word version that was edited down for the HowlRound post–is going to appear here on Monday. I suspect there are going to be more than a few people wanting to dig into the subject further, and I’m ready. It’s going to be a great conversation.

The evening’s storytellers include (in alphabetical order) Norman Allen, Audrey Cefaly, Ally Currin, Thembi Duncan, Caleen Jennings, Jennifer Luu, me, and Karen Zacarias: a great (maybe even unprecedented?) group of diverse, multi-talented artists. Performances are on 2/23 at 7:30 pm and 2/25 at 9:30 pm at the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and your $12 ticket ($10 for students) lets you sign up for the open mic, too… if you dare.

A few notes from the event program:

It’s always dangerous to let one perspective frame how you see and interact with the world. In America at the moment we are suffering terribly from a “my worldview is the right one” problem. We aren’t stopping to consider, with empathy, how others might see things. That sort of empathy is one of the many powers of theater, so in programming 360º of America, I wanted to gather a diverse set of storytellers to show us a wide variety of perspectives on crossing cultures. And because the most interesting and insightful perspectives often come from places you don’t expect them to come from, we’re opening up the microphone to members of the audience as well. I hope you enjoy what you hear, but more importantly, I hope you leave the theater seeing at least one thing in a new light: your mind a bit more open, your cages slightly rattled, and with new questions on the tip of your tongue. Thanks for coming!

Oh, and if that wasn’t enough: come at 8 pm for 2/25 performance for a fun happy hour and a chance to hang out with DC-area playwrights. We’ve even got a drink being served in our honor: the “Playwrights’ Slam,” which is sure to be a story in and of itself.

A Lack of Civic Pride

In an opinion piece late last year, Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks wrote the following lines, which I discussed in a previous blog post:

True lovers of the performing arts know that, as much as it’s consoling to feel the powerful resonances of old works, the true measure of a nation’s artistic vitality is what the art-makers are creating right now.

I love this quote so very much — naturally, because it places those of us making new plays where of course we belong: in the most important position within the theatrical ecosystem. (Note my tongue in my cheek, please. Or at least mostly in my cheek.) While the central importance of new play makers might be true in theory, however, in practice we’re often (though perhaps less so of late) relegated to the fringes of the ecosystem. (The Fringe Festivals, even.) Even though the whole enterprise of theater (I think it’s safe to say) would sputter and come to a sad end within a decade or so if there were nobody making new plays, we still don’t seem to matter in people’s minds as much as I think we should. Not in general, and not (especially) in DC.

But how do we articulate why we think we deserve that position of prominence… or least more attention than we currently get? What arguments do we make? I’ve asserted that new stories invigorate the minds our citizens, that they de-calcify rigid beliefs that might be holding us back in one way or another, and I think those things are true. I think new plays can be an important part of how our culture imagines new possibilities for itself as well… which, despite those who treasure the status quo, it does still need to do. But that line of reasoning, I’ve been forced to admit, is a bit too nebulous to convince people. We need something simpler. I’m starting to think that what we need, more than anything, is a campaign for civic pride.

There’s a well-known quote that’s attributed (I believe incorrectly) to Winston Churchill. During World War II, he was supposedly asked by his finance minister whether Britain should cut funding for the arts to support the war effort. Churchill’s apocryphal reply? “Then what are we fighting for?” I don’t know whether the story is true or not, but I certainly wish it was. I wish Americans held theater so close to their hearts that they’d protect arts funding against all comers. For a lot of reasons, however, that’s probably not realistic.

But why can’t we at least just be proud of all the art we create? Why can’t a new play, made here in DC by DC artists, be something to show off? Why isn’t every artistic director in this city producing, say, one play by a local playwright every two or three years (at least), just to say “Look at what we did!” to the rest of the country? (I’ll give the Shakespeare Theater every seven years.) I can only speculate that some (but not all, of course) of our city’s artistic directors think of themselves (even subconsciously) as collectors rather than creators. They’d rather shout “Look at what I found,” in other words, than “Look at what we made.” They gather plays from all over the country and put them in their theaters like paintings in museums. Don’t they have some obligation to create plays for other artistic directors in other cities to collect?

I’m not saying — please note — that DC’s artistic directors don’t have plenty to be proud of. I just wish they’d  think of themselves differently: perhaps as venture capitalists, willing to invest in new work (which is, one must admit, always a bit speculative) in the hope of having something amazing to share with the world. And investment doesn’t have to mean production, of course. It could also mean commissioning and workshopping new plays, like Theater J just did with its Locally Grown Festival. It could mean inviting playwrights to join special projects, like Forum Theatre’s (Re)Acts program or Rorschach Theatre’s Klecksography productions. It could mean telling one or two playwrights every season that they can have comps to any show they’d like to see. It could mean putting together a reading of a promising playwright’s work. And yes, it could also mean offering a playwright a full-time job like Arena Stage. There are innumerable options.

I’d like to see a future in this city in which theater companies boast about how much help they give playwrights. In which they subtly compete with each other, comparing the new work they develop and send out into the world. That would be a very fine future indeed.

Next post: Making Space

Developed several years ago with support from the Cultural Development Corporation of DC (thank you!) and in collaboration with fellow theater artists Merry Alderman Ritsch (super double thank you!), Dan Istrate, Tim Getman, Susan Lynskey, Saskia de Vries, Maia De Santi, Scot McKenzie, and Joseph Price (thank you all, too!), the play has gone through several permutations over the years. I’m thrilled to hear what the new version sounds like in Omaha… and to spend a week getting to know so many other new plays as well.

As a bonus, it seems my friend Liz Maestri is also going to be there with her play FALLBEIL. It should be fun!

All of that may come to pass — as I write this blog post, no one and nothing has left town yet — but I expect we’ll find that our fears, while natural, are unfounded. Those of us committed to making new plays in DC will continue to be enriched by their presence in our lives, though perhaps a bit more virtually than before… and we’ll still be facing the same challenges we’re facing right now.

What are those challenges? What is the state of the new play sector in DC? What opportunities and assets do we have? What’s it like to tell new stories in our nation’s capital? How do we start to think about moving the city forward? These are questions with which I have become thoroughly obsessed. I have decided to make it my own personal mission to coax this city in a new direction — to help build capacity and interest and excitement around new plays — and if that’s what I plan to do, I thought, then I really ought to start by taking a snapshot of where things stand today.

The subject is far too big, in my mind, for a single post, so here’s my plan. For the next few posts — this one and two others — I’m going to focus on the three biggest things I believe we need to overcome. (And they are big.) Then I’m going to look at all the things we’ve got going for us… and there’s more, I think, than we realize. Abundance is real: we just need to notice it.

So, with no further preamble… the first challenge:

The Audience Problem

Recently, when I was leading a panel discussion at Theater J about the State of the DC Playwright (yes, the “state” meme seems to have gotten the best of me), I asked the following question:

In DC, audiences have grown absolutely fat on Shakespeare, chestnuts, American classics, and Shear Madness. Most of the “new” work in the city has already had productions elsewhere, particularly New York, which means it arrives here with a road-tested seal of approval. The goal seems to be to minimize the sense of risk associated with going to the theater. “This is a good product, a known quantity,” we seem to be telling our audiences. “You have nothing to fear.” So how on earth do we begin transforming audience expectations, after decades and decades of messages like that, most of them subtle and insidious? How do we start to develop an atmosphere that’s welcoming to new plays?

To be honest, I was shocked by how little my fellow playwrights responded to my question. I consider this the single most insidious factor against which we are working in DC. Of the two million (or is it 1.2 million?) theater tickets sold last year here in the metropolitan area, only a small percentage were for plays having their first productions. The percentage gets larger if you consider plays that are new to the DC area, but that’s missing the point: those productions come with reputations attached to them. They’re like snowballs rolled downhill at DC from elsewhere (typically New York), having already accumulated size and expectations. As a playwright, that does me no good, unless of course my plays get produced elsewhere first and return home to DC, like an Amish teen after rumspringa, to be welcomed back into the family. If I had to guess — and I do, because I don’t have the data I wish I had — I’d say no more than 70,000 tickets (including SOME of the 30,000-ish sold by the Capital Fringe Festival) sold last year were for brand new plays. That’s not, if you ask me, nearly enough.

(Too many similes in that paragraph. I apologize. I get myself worked up about this.)

But it’s not about the numbers. It’s about what’s behind the numbers: a city of people who expect familiarity from theater. Who go to see productions of plays they’ve already seen or that others have already seen and told them about or that they’ve “heard” are good from reviews of productions in other cities or the titles of which they recognize from the American canon. What, I wonder, do stories that meet one or more of those criteria have in common? I suspect that what they share, in large measure, is an inability to surprise us and disrupt our lives and cause turmoil, either emotional or intellectual or (goodness forbid) political. I’m not saying this is true of everything we see on our stages, mind you… but almost.

Is it really that surprising? Think of where we live — or, rather, think of the psychological profiles of the people who buy those two million theater tickets, many of whom toil either inside or in the shadow of the immense hierarchical bureaucracy of the United States government. These are (largely) people who either implicitly or explicitly endorse the stability of that enterprise, or who at least consider it a given circumstance. They may not be looking for disruption, at least not overtly, in their visits to the theater.

On the other hand, I sincerely believe that in all of us there exists a desire for revolution of one kind or another, a desire that does need to be kindled from time to time, and periodically stoked into full flame. Are we taking care of that need with the stories we’re telling here in DC? Barely, I believe. Insufficiently. I think we need to get better at it. We need to choose stories for that part of the human soul much more often than we do. We need to learn how to market those stories to people, too. We need to expand this city’s understanding of what going to the theater can be: not only familiarity, but discovery; not only comfort, but a healthy rattling of the cages.

Hell, to whatever extent our work can refresh and reinvigorate the minds of the people who make up our government, we owe it to the rest of the country to be trying like mad to do so right now.

Next post: A Lack of Civic Pride

This may not surprise you, and perhaps it shouldn’t. Health care centers aren’t generally known for the artfulness of their decor. (Though my own primary care physician’s office features a modest collection of original work that, though not at all to my taste, re-assures me every time I note its presence; I trust a doctor who despises mass-produced landscapes and abstract blurs.) For my own part, the art all just seemed so intolerably miserable and mediocre that I just couldn’t believe anyone would subject another human being to it.

And then my son happened to stop in front of one piece in particular that caught my eye: a watercolor rendering of what was purportedly a small side-street in Rome. Like so many of the others, it was almost impossibly bland; this could have been any street in any corner of any city not only in Italy, but anywhere in Europe (and even a few other parts of the world as well). The image centered on a narrow, cobblestone street, stone steps, a pair of stone houses, and some greenery: nothing more. The only thing “Italian” about the painting was its title: “Roma.”

I visited the piece often as I followed by son up and down the hallway, each time only for a brief second or two, and every time I did, I found myself thinking more and more about my honeymoon in Italy: three weeks in Rome, Tuscany, Florence, and Venice that were among the happiest of my entire life. Could that street actually be in Rome, I asked myself? Might my wife and I have even walked on it? We walked on several very much like it, at least. And several like it, too, at some of our other stops. And then the daydreaming began, and for the next half-hour, while I wasn’t stopping my son from running headlong into the nurse’s station, I went right back to Italy in my mind and had my honeymoon all over again.

And then it hit me: I was re-living one of the best times of my life! That bland painting I’d so quickly dismissed had done it to me! And it probably did exactly the same thing to countless residents of Valley Eldercare as well! Which is exactly what it was intended to do! It actually worked! I felt like giving the artist a serious high-five.

Art has immense, unlimited power to work its way inside us and move us and change us, and we should never forget that. It’s mightier than we realize. Even if we don’t love it, it still does its thing. And sometimes — maybe not always, but at least now and then — it’s important to just stop judging art by its quality and let it function as it’s supposed to function… because you might, like my son in his passion for exploration, just get carried away.

Would you like to help me take it further? You can. All you have to do is come to the reading tonight and react to what you see. That’s it. You’d be doing me a big favor. And I think you might really enjoy it as well. I’m working with a stellar director (Eleanor Holdridge), dramaturg (Grace Overbeke), and cast (Jennifer Mendenhall, John Lescault, Michael Russotto, Deborah Hazlett, Heather Haney, and James Flanagan), who will all give you your money’s worth, to be sure. Most of all, you’ll be contributing to the development of a new piece of art. I’m a playwright who wants to get to know his potential audiences, to write with others in mind. You can be one of those others. Just by showing up tonight!

Thank you.

——————–

I’ve read it twice now. The first time, I was so compelled by the beginning that I read the whole thing in snippets on my phone while building these enormous towers of blocks for my 21 month-old son to knock down. (Talk about disrupting narratives!) The second time, I read it more contemplatively, increasingly overcome by a sense of feeling deeply understood as a playwright, for which I cannot thank Polly Carl enough.

Stories serve so many different functions in human cultures. Some of those functions are, I think — whether we’d like to admit it or not — conservative. They conserve knowledge; they solidify or embody what we already (generally and widely) know about the world; they encode traditions; they teach us about (relatively) unchanging (or only very slowly changing) aspects of being human. And these are all, to some extent, useful functions.

Taken to an extreme, however, these conservative narratives tend to deify or cement certain worldviews and ideas. They begin to urge us to stop thinking or questioning. They reaffirm predispositions and prejudices and errors in judgment and outdated moral stances. They become stale. Even dead. For me, at least, the dysfunctional narratives Polly refers to fall into this category.

It is against these dysfunctional stories that disruptive narratives need to be set. Their purpose, at least to me, is sabotage and revolution. Where dysfunctional stories act like sedatives, disruptions are more like psychedelia: they liberate and reinvigorate the mind, setting the consciousness of those who encounter them whirling. They make us see things we haven’t seen and that we cannot un-see. Though I hate to use this word, because it’s been thoroughly “dysfunctionalized” itself, they are transformative.

But all that’s very unsettling for people. It’s like having your emotional and intellectual apple cart upset, which people naturally tend to resist. That resistance explains (at least to my satisfaction) why we do our utmost to avoid creating and producing too many disruptive narratives. We’re afraid that we’ll all utterly lose our centers and that civilization will completely fall apart. So we don’t fund or support or create the spaces from which disruptive narratives can emerge. We do our level best to suppress them: even us, the creatives of the world! We throw our efforts into conservation because, well, people will more readily pay us for it. I just wish we wouldn’t go SO far in that direction.

This problem is especially different here in DC. In a town that’s thoroughly drenched in power and authority (and the desire for both), we are terrified of all forms of disruption… which is why, I believe, we need it even more. In the 1980s, the punk scene here understood this, and it thrived for a good long while. (It still lives, in fact, to some degree.) I want theater in my city to find the same sort of truth-to-power (or “lit match”-to-power) energy. I try to write the sort of plays that will disrupt whatever I can possibly disrupt. It’s crazy-making at times — one’s own brain can only handle so much of it — but I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Note: I submitted a version of what I’ve written above as a comment on the post, if you’d rather continue the discussion there.