Something about this HowlRound article about the theater of the future by Meiyin Wang continues to nag at me. Here’s the quote:
There will be no titles of playwrights, directors, actors, designers, managers, producers. There will be theater makers. That will be all that is allowed on a name card. “Theater maker.†People you meet will include a writer/designer. A director/electrician. A sculptor/actor. A film editor/musician. A cook/dramaturg. A plumber/poet.
Part of what bugs me about the quote is that it conjures, at least in my mind, this image of nondescript, generic “theater maker” drones, all of us interchangeable (and thus utterly replaceable). Part of the problem is also — I think I’m self-aware enough to realize this — that I’ve invested a great deal, psychologically, in the title “playwright,” and I don’t want to lose it. Part of me just doesn’t think speculating about the future is ever a very accurate endeavor, and I just want to dismiss the whole thing as (given the odds and the multiple future universes that might unfold) highly unlikely.
I also struggle with the simple fact that I’m not actually a “theater maker” by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve directed a few times, but only my own work, and I’m not particularly skilled in that regard. I’ll happily (if begrudgingly) do readings for friends, but I’m not a good actor, and I respect the talent of my friends well enough to know I never will be. It’s been years since I hung lights or ran a light board or built a set, and while I might be helpful as an assistant in those endeavors, I’d also be bored after a while. I’m a playwright and only a playwright… and honestly, I’m fine with that.
What bothers me more than anything, though, is that the prediction she makes seems to fly in the face of virtually every other trend we’ve seen across the entire world in the last hundred years or more. That just doesn’t seem smart. We artists are so doggedly interested in bucking the system, in resisting the tide, in fighting the good fight, and given how marginalized we are in America, that makes sense… but we do sometimes carry the rebellion a bit too far, don’t we? This may be one of those times.
Not long ago, my wife needed to find a doctor for an ailment arising from a metal plate she’d had implanted in her arm many years earlier. She started with a visit our general practitioner, but he was of little use. We had x-rays taken, and I sent those x-rays to a dear old friend who happens to be a gifted trauma surgeon, hoping he could direct us to someone who understood arms. My friend sent us not to an arm surgeon, but to THE surgeon in the entire region who specializes precisely in the unique section of the arm she was having trouble with. He was the kind of doctor who only performs a small number of surgeries, over and over again all year long, year after year, keeping up with new techniques for dealing a small handful of nerves and muscles and bones. There aren’t more than a small handful of medical professionals with his expertise. He’s exactly who we wanted to diagnose and treat her condition. (Which, thankfully, did not require surgery.)
I’m sure you can see where this is headed, but I’ll continue a bit longer. When I needed a lawyer a few years ago, to handle a very particular matter, I didn’t just Google the term “lawyer” and contact the first person who came up in the search results. I asked around, interviewed a few candidates, and found a lawyer with expertise in the issue with which I was struggling. (She did great work.) When my wife and I wanted help finding a home in Silver Spring, we didn’t just choose any Maryland-licensed realtor; we chose someone who knew our neighborhood and understood our unique needs.
Specialization is how we made all of those decisions. It’s how most of us make most of our decisions. We don’t just want any mustard: we want stone-ground or honey-mustard or horseradish, in a plastic squeeze jar or a glass jar, in bulk or in small gourmet-sized quantities — and there are companies that have specialized in each of those niches. There aren’t four television networks providing all of our entertainment and informational needs; there are hundreds and hundreds in multiple languages, accessible on a variety of different devices and in different packages. There aren’t generic “biologists” studying all of the world’s species and infectious diseases and evolutionary history; there are sub-categories of sub-categories of sub-categories of biological scientists, each researching very particular questions about very particular organisms. Whatever unique needs we have, a specialist or class of specialists emerges to respond to them.
Why should theater be any different? Why should we have playwright/lighting designer/actors, when every other industry is made up of, oh, ninth-inning pinch-hitting right fielders and organic Kenyan coffee importers? Are we really any different?
No, we aren’t. We might wish we were, but we just aren’t. We might even — as cultural leaders — advocate for things to be different in the world (though specialization seems to have brought us some pretty spectacular things, so I can’t see why we would), but we aren’t magically exempt from the grand tides that tug on the human species in the modern world.
Those tides would seem to suggest that we are in fact more likely to have, say, mystery playwrights and adaptation playwrights and even St. Louis playwrights and all other sorts of highly-specialized playwright varieties than “theater makers.” (You could  write the same sort of sentence for, say, scenic designers or directors or costumers, but you get my point.) Although I’d like to think that I can write in any genre, the fact of the matter is that there are some — farce, for example — to which I’m not suited. I don’t write musicals, and I wouldn’t even know where to start. There are many subjects with which I’d find it very hard to engage, but a few I am called to again and again, engaging with them from different angles, but always with the same specific voice and intellectual intent and creative inquisition.
Yes, we are all generally “theater makers.” (Though I prefer the term “theater practitioner.” To me, it’s a practice, not a construction project; you do it over and over and over again, and it’s never done.) We may appreciate and understand each other’s tasks and skills, we may speak a shared language, and we may create and sweat and dance alongside each other, but we are not the same. We are a team of specialists, gathered together to perform a shared creative task, one that requires many diverse skills in which each of us has, I hope, deep expertise.
Even those of us, like Meiyin Wang, who seem to be interested in questioning this trend toward specialization are also, I would argue, specialists: they serve the unique purpose of questioning our categories and our limits, refreshing them and reinvigorating our sense of who we are and why we call ourselves what we call ourselves. For that they are essential to us.
Finally, let me close by saying that I am not suggesting we all need to remain in a single box. In fact, as I argued not long ago on 2amtheatre.com, I think most artists ought to develop a significant second (non-theatrical) career, for a variety of reasons. But even those jobs, if I’m reading trends correctly, are likely to be more and more specialized, especially as the world’s population continues to grow. Instead of playwright/lighting designers, we might have science playwright/pediatric dental surgeons. (To be fair, Wang did refer to “plumber/poet” as a possibility, which is at least closer to what I’m suggesting.) That strikes me as a far more likely (and desirable) future… though predicting what’s to come is still, I believe, generally a fool’s errand.
Agreed.
Yes, I can and have done just about every job in a theatre building at one point or another. Some I do better than others. I may not focus lights, but I can improvise at the light board as needed. (Just did that for a jazz concert in my venue, which meant paying attention to the shifts in their improvisation from show to show.) And I do sound design as well–if I weren’t at heart a playwright, that’s probably what I’d do instead.
But I am at heart a playwright, and all the work I do–lighting, sound, marketing, design–is filtered through that prism. In each case, I’m telling a story. With sound, it’s more explicit, with lighting, it’s more abstract. But it’s still tied to who I am as a playwright–telling stories and creating worlds is my day job.
We are simply “theatre makers” when we start, if we’re lucky enough to study at a program that encourages you to work at any and every job in the building. By doing that, we find what we do well, what we do better than anything else we try. And yes, it’s nice to be able to jump from discipline to discipline as needed–it’s vital for me with my own theatre company, because we’re very small–but it’s important to have focus, to know who you yourself are.
And it is the blending of unique voices, unique talents, that makes theatre so exciting.
More to the point, it will be the idiosyncrasies of theatre artists & companies that will continue to attract audiences, to make the medium stand out from film, tv, video games, etc.
You just agree with me because I mentioned mustard varieties. I know the way to your heart. 🙂
I really like your suggestion that we’re simply theater makers “when we start.” It’s almost like we are undifferentiated cells in an embryo, each containing the entire genetic code of the full human being, but each destined to specialize and serve a unique purpose in the bodily ecosystem. One becomes a nerve cell, one becomes a muscle cell, and so on.
I actually disagree with everyone…EVERYONE! I think Wang’s argument that specific roles in theatre will be erased is unrealistic and, indeed, one narrow possible future. But I also think increased specialization is equally unlikely, or equally likely in that it is also one narrow possible future.
The wonderful thing about theatre is that not only does it encompass any number of artistic styles (from Shakespeare to Rude Mechs to Mamet), but any number of processes as well. The twelve dozen kinds of mustard scenario actually proves that the trend isn’t toward specialization, but towards variety. There is no one right kind of mustard, and there is no one right way of creating or thinking about theatre.
Though, for my money, it’s Batampte’s Delicatessen-Style Mustard.
I love Batampte. The half-sour pickle? Perfect.
Yes, the trend is definitely toward variety… in addition to specialization, in my opinion. I don’t see a clear argument against specialization in what you’ve written. I’m also not sure how process enters the picture, either.
Ultimately, I believe our differences here are probably largely semantic…
I’m not making an argument against specialization. Or against using no titles whatsoever. I’m saying that I doubt the future will narrow down to be mostly one or the other. Rather, it will expand to encompass both of those paradigms, and many others as well.
The half-sour is a strange creature. Like a cucumber that resisted. Or a pickle struggling desperately to regain its youth.
A cucumber that resisted! I love that SO much and will henceforth begin to use it myself, attributing to you (of course) whenever appropriate.
I have no idea what the future will do. I really only know about the recent past, and I’m drawing a (thin and tentative) line from there into the future, which is as yet unwritten.
I think I’m both. As a kid, and again in grad school, I was a “theater maker”–building puppets, writing songs, creating and directing performance scores. When I got out of grad school, I turned into a full-fledged “playwright”–sitting in workshops, sending stuff out, seeing it done by directors who turn it into something quite different from what I’d intended (and not generally in a good way…)
“Don’t write plays,” Ellen Stewart once said to me, though she hardly knew me. “Make shows.”
There’s nothing like collaborating with brilliant professionals who understand your vision and can take it farther. But this playwright gig has way too much time sitting around, fingers crossed, muttering “choose me, choose me” and then cutting off a few toes if the slipper doesn’t fit.
Maybe it’s just that the grass is greener. And yes, I know about aesthetic fights with your cohorts and collaborators, and collectives that fall apart. But from where I currently sit, this theater maker thing is starting to look a lot more fun.
Monica Raymond
femmevox@hotmail.com
Frankly, if it looks like fun, I say: do it. Life is too short to not live fully and with great joy.
But I think the “choose me” phenomenon is a bit different. You could, after all, find others to produce your plays with… and still only be a playwright/producer. You wouldn’t NEED to also be a lighting designer, director, actor, etc. I’ve worked that way myself.
Still… if it looks like fun to try on different hats, try ’em on!
Heck, I’ve even tried acting (not very successfully) and directing (long way to go) myself. And I used to run light boards and build sets (in high school and college). So I’m not a stranger to the pleasure of experimentation…
But I know what I am now, and that’s a playwright.
Frankly, if it looks like fun, I say: do it. Life is too short to not live fully and with great joy.
But I think the “choose me” phenomenon is a bit different. You could, after all, find others to produce your plays with… and still only be a playwright/producer. You wouldn’t NEED to also be a lighting designer, director, actor, etc. I’ve worked that way myself.
Still… if it looks like fun to try on different hats, try ’em on!
Heck, I’ve even tried acting (not very successfully) and directing (long way to go) myself. And I used to run light boards and build sets (in high school and college). So I’m not a stranger to the pleasure of experimentation…
But I know what I am now, and that’s a playwright.
Hmmm.
I think you make some good points but as someone who describes herself as a theater maker I feel like there is more room for creative flexibility than in what you’ve described. Because that’s what I am. I make theater. I’m not a playwright, though I’ve written plays, I’m not a director, though I’ve directed, etc. etc. I went to graduate school for Dramaturgy which I have a hard time believing is a profession. It’s a tool. It’s a tool for making theater. What I am is a theater maker. But in that, I am also a visual artist. I am also an educator. I am also a storyteller. etc. etc.
I think when it comes to art the boundaries need to be wider than when it comes to other professions. I profoundly don’t believe that specialization should exist in the arts. And I’m not just talking about theater. I think artists should be trained beyond their expertise because when creativity hits they need the tools to follow it no matter what path it takes. I think we are seeing this in the visual arts world where more and more visual arts are looking to performance and technology, even if they were originally trained as sculptors or painters.
I suppose I could just say I am an artist but the reason why I love theater, why I’ve devoted my life to this craft, is that I find theater contains all the arts collaborating together. And I don’t want to only collaborate in one way. It’s why I get pissed off when someone tells me my job as a dramaturg is to do research. No it’s not. My job is to make theater. Which I do.
When it comes to art the world should be our canvas and our materials whatever we can get our hands on.
This is not to say that some people aren’t better at some things than others. I have no doubt you are a better playwright than I am. But I’m sure you would agree there are some things that can’t be said with words. For me, I want the flexibility, education, tools, and hundreds of thousands of open boxes to be able to build whatever my future art holds.
There’s a kind of person — I have been one in the past, and I may in some ways still be one — that resists categorization tooth-and-nail. I might call it, if I were feeling whimsical, the “Nobody puts baby in the corner” psychological profile. I admire the defiance of it — which in its best moments becomes confidence — but it doesn’t personally compel me the way it used to.
I am not saying — to reiterate a point I tried to make in my post — that artists should ever be limited. No one should tell a playwright that if a particular creative challenge requires her to, say, sculpt or dance, she shouldn’t even try. But you yourself have noted the collaborative nature of the theater (which, incidentally, is the primary reason I changed my entire career from poetry to playwriting). There are always willing collaborators. So why shouldn’t she find a sculptor or dancer to collaborate with instead? Might the resulting piece of art not be better with two experts working on it than one generalist?
Yes, of course, there are some thoughts that can be expressed with words. As a playwright, if I had such thoughts, I would find someone to help me express them… and not try to be who I’m not, no matter how defiant I might feel about my “right to try” or how confidence I might feel about my ability to do it well.
I think it’s true, I do resist categorization. But I still would urge you to open up your box every now and then and see what else you can add to a piece (not every piece but a someday piece) without using your words. I just think life is more interesting that way.
Open my box? Are you kidding? Love, Pandora
I do appreciate where you’re coming from, and I agree that experimentation is both necessary and revitalizing. And I do in fact do it — as I hinted in my post, I do occasionally act (in readings) and direct (my own work). I’ve also been a dramaturg once or twice– I liked it — and I used to paint for fun. Is there farther I might go? Perhaps, but I don’t feel the urge very often.