It was this time a year ago that I got a wild hair to post a note on Facebook about 14/48, Seattle’s semi-annual 48-hour theatre festival (click here for a full introduction). Basically, I went after one of the festival’s producers, Shawn Belyea, for claiming that in the context of the festival he helped world premiere 56 new plays a year. It created sort of a tempest in our teapot theatre community. My earnest praise of 14/48 got a little lost in the shouting. In retrospect, I realize a couple of things:
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I sort of bushwhacked my good friend and colleague Shawn Belyea, and that was unfair. For that I’d like to apologize again here, publicly. (Although trust me, Shawn got his revenge at the Thursday night kick off meeting last year, where he publicly encouraged everyone participating to shout “Asshole!” at me, at first en mass, and then later whenever they saw me walking around.)
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I think even back then I was unconsciously gearing up for the more formal essays I am posting here at Just Wrought. That note (posted below, for the historically curious) was simply an early sloppy skirmish in what now promises to be a longer, more difficult struggle. (And happily, I like to think Shawn’s mostly on my side for this one.)
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I should have put my praise of 14/48 up front, instead of the final paragraph, because I don’t think most of the people I pissed off even bothered reading that far.
So let me make up for those mistakes now, by listing some of the ways 14/48 gets it oh-so-right:
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The Crucible. The crushing time constraints cook out the preciousness, for writers especially, but also actors, and perhaps most importantly and least obviously, directors.
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The Leadership. The crisp, efficient, egalitarian leadership allows for dynamic creative risk-taking. Artistic directors at big and small theatres across the country could learn something from the folks who run 14/48.* They understand that nailing the logistics—consistently and enthusiastically– and then letting artists be, creates more, better opportunities for brilliance than Stalinistically attempting to impose their will on all creative decisions.
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The People. Every six months we have this amazing informal convention of Seattle theatre talent. Every theatre town aspiring to something more than a dilettantes’ scene should try something similar. Be sure to provide, however, the correct combination of work, food and beer. Without hard work, show people tend towards over-compensations of obnoxiousness. Without food, they simply don’t stay. Without beer– on hand as it is at 14/48, free and round-the-clock– participants begin to feel ill-used by a brutally ambitious process. The 14/48 producers have either stumbled on to, or cynically arrived at, a fundamental truth: buy an actor a drink and he’ll give you his heart’s blood without even thinking. No one can witness the talent that accrues at 14/48 without marveling how Seattle has more than a mid-sized city’s fair share of world class actors, directors, musicians, designers, crew, organizers, and—yes, absolutely— playwrights.
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The Marketing. 14/48 has increased its audience share year over year, every year since January 2006. How many other theatres, big or small, can lay claim to that sort of consistent growth. There is no huge paid marketing campaign. Instead, word-of-mouth drives people to the shows in larger and larger numbers. Ironically, this can be attributed to a consistency of product. How can the product be consistent when the subject matter, casting, directors and play order are selected at random? Because 14/48 isn’t selling “quality” in the staid overwrought meaning of the word as used by regional theaters. Instead, 14/48 is selling what show people have always sold best: risk, danger, the unknown and the unknowable. What a wonderful tonic to the tired litany of “craft is king” that I hear over and over from my “respectable” theatre colleagues. Craft isn’t king, the show is!
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The Existential Reminders.
Being a Fool is Your Job. If you are petrified to take risks, fail, or look foolish, you should not be a theatre artist.
Everything Disappears. 14/48 sells and celebrates the fact that unless you plant your butt in that particular seat on that particular night, you will miss the show. That’s leveraging the ephemerality of theatre at its finest. -
A Free Pass from Equity. Let’s face it, a key reason 14/48 can get such amazing acting talent working such insane hours is that Equity, the stage actors union, looks the other way. Just imagine what Seattle actors could achieve in developing new plays if they were allowed the same privilege of working on them for love under some sort of Showcase or 99-Seat Waiver, like the kind of arrangements that Los Angeles, Chicago and New York actors currently enjoy.
So . . .
If you live near or close to Seattle, go see 14/48 at least once, preferably multiple times, over this weekend and/or next.
If you don’t live near or close to Seattle, consider participating in, attending or founding a similar event. At the very least, embrace the fact that what makes theatre theatre is foolishness and ephemerality. Leave your respectability at the door.
If you’re an artistic director at a regional theatre in Seattle or elsewhere, understand that 14/48 adheres to a model that is probably closer to generating future sustainable success than the one you are currently laboring under.
*To his significant credit, Jerry Manning, Interim Artistic Director for the Seattle Repertory Theater, has actually participated in a 14/48 as a director. Whether ACT’s AD, Kurt Beattie has ever even attended one, I’m not sure, but I doubt it. I doubt even more deeply that, during what seems destined to be her brief tenure leading the Intiman, Kate Whoriskey will ever go see what happens at this festival. I hope I am wrong. My pledge: if she does go, her first free beer is on me.
Original Note:
14/48: Not the Full Meal Deal, but a Taste of the Good Stuff
Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 9:55am
The last time I talked to Shawn Belyea about new works, he claimed, with no irony I could detect, that as a producer of 14/48 he was responsible for premiering 56 new plays every year. I nodded, smiled, decided not to argue. I was, after all, trying to win him to my point of view that new works are vital to Seattle’s bid to become a world class theatre town within five years. And, more importantly, I had just bummed a smoke from him and didn’t want to seem ungrateful. But the fact is, I’ve been bristling at that claim ever since.
It takes me on average about a year and a half of sustained work to wright a play ready for production. For the sake of the math I’m about to do, let’s simplify things and say that one of my plays requires about 1,000 hours of work to produce a final script of 80 pages, breaking down to 12 & 1/2 hours of effort per page. (Actually sounds kind of small put that way, but that’s what the calculator’s telling me, so . . . )
Now for 14/48 the playwrights have approximately 10 hours to produce 8 pages. That means that for the two plays I’m about to write for this weekend, I’ll be spending 1.25 hours per page. So bottom line: even with all compensations made for brevity, my fully wrought plays have had over ten times more time and effort put into them. They are a full order of magnitude more “finished.” And that’s not even counting all the added effort brought by actors, a director, a stage manager, designers, administrators, etc. To compare that effort to the plays staged at 14/48 and call them both “world premieres” is like comparing a late night jam session to composing a symphony. And to some degree, it’s insulting to both composer and jammer.
So with that said, here’s what I think the real value of 14/48 is for playwrights: it scares the shit out of us and we love it for that very reason. It makes us let go of our pretensions, procrastinations and bag of tricks to just write for a few hours. It allows us to play with designers, directors and actors, which is SO much fun and SO much a part of what makes being a playwright different and – dare I say it?—better than any other kind of writer. It brings us back into the crucible to live and die by the fire trial that is and can only be live performance. It takes us so long to wright plays that more often than not we are forced to survive long dry epochs out of touch with the raw fear that floods through us at that moment when our work goes up before a live audience. It’s a much needed albeit much too brief taste of the “good stuff”.
And that’s why I can’t wait till Thursday night.
You should have a taste yourself, if you can.
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