This is going to be a quick rant.
Lately I’ve been noticing various new play practitioners saying things like “I wish we could go back to when we had such-and-such” or “Things were better when we did this-and-that.” I have some sympathy for this sorts of feelings — change is hard, change means loss, loss is difficult to deal with — but enough is enough.
Our job to invent and reinvent and make new. We are, by our nature, bringers of change. We’ve got to be good at accepting it, especially if we’re going to ask others to be good at it, too. So when systems are transforming around us — everything from the way plays are selected by theaters to the way people behave when they sit in their theater seats — we really ought to try to at least tolerate those transformations, or better yet understand them. (You don’t even need to like them, though that does help.)
Tradition and the status quo? I believe they’re our enemies, especially when they get particularly rigid (and absolutely when they become deified). So please… don’t hang on too tightly. It doesn’t become you.
Examples, please?
Of?
What inspired this was someone lamenting that fewer and fewer theaters were accepting unsolicited scripts, if that helps.