Some truths are so self-evident that they can suffer outrageous neglect. One such is that theatre takes place in places. There is nothing virtual about it. Theatre takes place. In four dimensions: one of time, three of space. (Not even my fancy film friends can do that.) So it matters where you originally make a play. Over the last few years I have been having conversations about this subject with my fellow theatre professionals in Seattle: directors, actors, managing and artistic directors, and even arts editors at newspapers; and I have been surprised at how many of them have trouble understanding this fundamental fact of our art form.
The Lone Playwright Fallacy
When it comes to art, I’m an amoralist. Just because it’s new and local doesn’t mean it should get produced. If it’s new and local and good, then fuck yes. If it’s new and local and crap and we’ve got a script that’s new and from Missoula and good, then… I choose Missoula. Or New Orleans. Or wherever.
This quote is from a local theatre critic’s email exchange with me. He is suffering from what I call the “The Lone Playwright Fallacy”: the noir filmic image of the archetypal writer holed up in a dank unfurnished flat in the middle of a nihilistic nowhere, supplied only with a carton of cigarettes, a quart of scotch (smudged tumbler optional) and a finicky Underwood. Our dramatist labors in decrepit solitude until he has a complete masterpiece, dog-eared and smeary, which he then wraps in butcher’s paper and tosses over the transom of the nearest literary agency or regional theatre office. (He looks a lot like a cliché novelist, doesn’t he? Why does everyone want to make playwrights into novelists?)
My email reply to my critic pal:
Plays aren’t novels or paintings. Just as in biology the myth of the parthenogenic clone is bogus because all genetic material requires an enveloping substrate of organic “soup” in order to replicate, plays require actors, designers, spaces, audiences, and, yes (god help me) maybe even directors, in order to mature beyond the embryonic. It’s the reason I have to climb on a plane to LA or NY whenever I want to have a proper workshop with professionals. This notion that they just appear from “Missoula or New Orleans” is a falsehood convenient for ignoramus artistic directors. But you of all people need to know better.
This critic and I have a very loving relationship.
Locally Grown Throughout History
Glancing back through the canon, we realize that this myth is belied by the fact that our favorite dramatists almost always worked intimately with a coterie of actors and other artists for whom, and with whom, they tailored their plays. Shakespeare built his best title roles for Richard Burbage; Moliere cast himself as the Imaginary Invalid, Chekhov’s writing for the stage was reworked and enhanced under Stanislavski’s direction, and Bertolt Brecht had wife and leading lady as a two-for-one- in Helene Weigel, the original Mother Courage. Working with the same actors and directors, over and over, helps build up trust and a shorthand that allows a playwright to go deeper and farther, faster. It locks down the fundamentals of collaboration so that greater innovations are possible.
Beyond palling around with actors and directors, I was curious what other “locally grown” benefits a Shakespeare or Marlowe might have enjoyed; so I asked my friend and fellow playwright, Louis Broome (my go-to expert in all things Elizabethan) to weigh in. “Shakespeare”, he says “Had no choice but be locally grown. London was the world. The King’s Men could only exist so long as they were relevant to their audience.” (Relevance to their audience, what a concept!)
Louis goes on:
What’s different now, and what sucks, is that Seattle Rep’s audience is their donor base, not the public at large. Everything about a non-profit theatre is defined by its donors. When it comes to new plays, the Rep’s hands are tied because a non-profit donor base has zero tolerance for risk. Risk isn’t built into their culture. They have no experience managing risk. Producing a new work by a playwright or director of note, or a work guaranteed to move to NY, carries no risk. There’s no downside. In Elizabethan England it was impossible for plays to be anything other than a local or regional event. Playwrights entertained and earned revenue from a relatively small pool of ticket buyers by writing a great number of plays. The emphasis in Elizabethan London was on writing plays that put the same butts into the same seats over and over again….
Local Collaboration – It Ain’t Just for Actors
Over the last decade and a half my own Burbage– the primary actor that served as a siphon on the far end of my personal play development pipeline– has been the actor William Salyers, a relationship that still runs deep and strong. (For some flavor of it, you can click here.) But it is worth mentioning other ways that local collaboration can lead to uniquely successful theatre. Without the designer Gary Smoot I would never have written at least three of my last five plays. Gary and I had been close friends for years before he began designing for my plays, stunning everyone in 1999 with his evocative minimalistic masterpiece set for the world premiere of Louis Slotin Sonata.
Gary raises to a rarefied art form the long-standing tradition of designers crossing out and ignoring stage directions. I always say that if there is a way Gary can get out of building something, he will find it and make the absence brilliant. By the time we got to attempting the world premiere of An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show, I was openly taunting him, demanding an arsenal of increasingly lethal weapons from American History to be used every time a contestant spun the infamous Bardo Wheel. Starting with a Powhattan tomahawk, I quickly worked my way up to a civil war cannon, then a flame thrower, and finally my coup de grâce, a “Tomahawk” ICBM missile, to be launched onstage. Smoot took the demands in stride, even though I would hector him daily running up to tech week: “I want those weapons, Gary. You can cross out all the stage directions you want but I still call them out in the dialogue.” “Oh, we’ll make it work,” was all he’d say. And he did, by painstakingly handcrafting overnight shipping boxes the exact size and shape of each piece. Every night, before each scene, whatever weapon was called for, the box was pumped full of thick stage smoke which would, after the package pieces were pulled apart on stage, momentarily hold the shape of the weapon and then dissipate. From there it was up to the audience to manipulate the meta-object within the space of in their collective imagination. It was a brilliant, engaging, unique, and uniquely theatrical solution, which could only be arrived at through a close and contentious relationship between designer and playwright, bothering each other in the same room together.
This sort of intimate relationship between playwright and set-wright is generally frowned upon in today’s play development superstructure. The alternative model forcefully defended at your favorite regional theater goes something like this: you go to your MFA program, I go to mine. If, based on the recommendation of the well-known playwright who runs my MFA program, said regional theater decides to develop my play, said theater will assign me the MFA grad designer recommended to them by the top-tier MFA design school, most assuredly not the same school as the playwriting program. It is all very polite and respectable, like an arranged marriage without the hot stranger sex. In the very respectable League of Regional Theatres (LORT), playwrights have no business consorting with designers, let alone taunting them into being brilliant.
But Wait! There’s more!
Sure, the most compelling argument for locally grown plays is the uniquely superior product you arrive at when you work with a talented team over a long-term collaboration. But in the immortal words of Ron “Ronco” Popeill, that’s not all! You also get:
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Local actors evolving a better understanding of how their contribution to the long tradition of our art form can be generative as well as interpretive.
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Local theatre-goers evolving a better understanding of how plays get made and how audiences can participate in the process, not just as consumers but as co-developers with a stake in improving the product.
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Local board members evolving a better understanding of their roles as patrons of the arts. We need not look further than the embarrassing example of The Empty Space, shuttered over a debt of $70,000. Maybe we can dare hope that regional theaters will stop being run like internet start-ups and instead be given the time, money, resources, and personal attention that are the natural hallmarks of arts patronage in cities like New York, Los Angeles and London.
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Local funders, artists, and administrators participating in the development of plays as actual investments, with the potential to pump profits back to Seattle in several ways.
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The entire nation, as well as the entire English-speaking theatre world, getting more plays about a wider variety of places and peoples instead of– let’s face it– knowing arch comedy after knowing arch comedy for, by and about Upper West-Siders.
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A leg up in keeping theatre a playwright’s art form instead of, increasingly, a director’s game. Over the last fifty years, the model of the auteur director serving as the alpha and omega of dramatic endeavor, imposing his or her “concept” on new play and classic alike— a model borrowed from and encouraged by the film industry— has grown increasingly infectious in American theatre. You need not look beyond Seattle with Dan Sullivan and Bartlett Sher essentially running their respective shops like Triple A feeder teams for the Broadway big leagues. (We can expect more of the same from the Intiman’s newly appointed Artistic Director, Kate Whoriskey. Hand picked by the beatified Sher, she is sure to serve mostly as his marker absently placed in a book he may or may not return to some day.) Hell, the fact that the recently introduced TPS Gregory Awards has a category for Outstanding Director but none for playwright is a crystalline example of how far this trend has gotten out of hand.
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Finally, and yes, selfishly, “locally grown” allows playwrights to choose where to live based on how well a particular city fits their life, instead of forcing them to accept a one-humongous-size-fits-all solution. When I moved back to Seattle from New York in 2002 I ran into Dawson Nichols, my comrade in theatrical arms from Seattle’s fervent ‘90’s. Each of us was watching our kids at a playground– kids that did not exist the last time we had seen each other. In that moment we renewed our friendship, and then slowly began building back our artistic partnership, only better this time—less concerned with the competition between us, more focused on improving each other’s and our own work. We cemented our revived relationship in a revival of my play
Tuesday, at Annex Theatre, which he directed and I starred in. Soon after he invited me to share with him any plays I had sitting on the shelf, unpremiered, especially anything I had for young people. I gave him
The Don Juan Cult Concerto. In 2008 Dawson directed the world premiere of the play at North Seattle Community College, where he serves as head of theatre department. He wrote this in the program notes:
Paul Mullin has written a play that is a love letter to a Seattle that is gone – grown over and displaced by its own success and popularity. Seattle is still a vibrant and exciting place but in the 1990’s there was an edge. Philosophers of art tell us that we can only access universal truths through particular depictions. I believe this is true, but I have noticed Seattle Theaters seem to value particulars from elsewhere for some reason, mainly New York. This is because Seattle Theatres often have a self-imposed provincial attitude that doesn’t allow them to see that the grass is in fact greener right here in the Pacific Northwest. Our particulars are as good as anyone else’s, after all, and there are wonderful playwrights living in our midst.
It is a play about Seattleites, for Seattleites, by a Seattleite. And I couldn’t have been prouder to see students using it to learn their craft as they premiered it in the city of its conception. It was the seminal moment of my current understanding of how important locally grown work is. A year and a half later, in that same theatre, using some of the same student actors, six Seattle playwrights, including Dawson and myself, premiered It’s Not In The P-I: A Living Newspaper About A Dying Newspaper.
Leveraging Seattle’s Innate More-Locally-Conscious-than-Thou Snobbery
The entire Pacific Northwest already embraces the locally-grown movement when it comes to more tangible consumables like cheese, chocolate, wine and beer. Kate Kraay, a local actor and budding playwright, describes her day job working as a tour guide at Theo Chocolates in Fremont, the only bean-to-bar chocolate factory in the United States:
I have to admit that I have had more people stop me on the street and recognize me from Theo than from plays I have been in. But then, it is probably my longest running gig, and it is always a full house. Over the last two years I have worked there, I have seen it grow exponentially, and in a recession to boot.
That’s all quite nice, you may say, but why buy a Theo chocolate bar as a Seattleite, when I can get a grocery checkout line bar for less? For one thing, you are getting a lot less chocolate than you think, as most chocolate bars have lots of lovely fillers in them (hydrogenated trans-fats or wax, anyone?). Theo also uses as many local ingredients as possible. It has become a point of pride for locals, winning awards from London to New York, while being fully invested as part of the community.
It is incumbent on us as Seattle theatre artists to transfer this enlightened heightened interest in local production to what we wright for the stage. God, sometimes I think I would give a pinkie to tap into the fierce local snobbery of a Northwestern beer nut or cheesehead and focus it on theatre. I can almost hear them now:
Oh, you’re going to see Glengary Glen Ross? Oh, no that’s fine if you like stale affected dialogue shoved down your ear’s throat after it’s traveled 2,800 miles from New York and then sat in its packaging for 20 years, after already traveling the 800 miles from Chicago to New York. Me? I prefer fresh Kelleen Conway Blanchard. You should feel how it tickles the ear’s tongue and gladdens the heart’s bowels. But maybe your palate isn’t quite ready for something so evocative and startling. Besides, there’s really only enough of it for true Seattle play fans. You better stick with your 1980’s boiler room boiler plate.
So There’s No Place Like Home. How do We Get There?
Of course there are plenty of blocks on the long road to home grown. Over the next few years it will be important to hold accountable the artistic leadership at what we Seattle show folks call the “Big Houses”, namely the Intiman, ACT and the Seattle Repertory Theater. These juggernauts love to pay lip service to new works, but when you dig beneath the surface of their “new play initiatives,” you find they consist almost exclusively of importing established talent from New York rather than fostering much at home. Kate Whoriskey, as she rolls into town, is blithely open in her contempt for Seattle’s local scene. This from The Stranger in an interview with her when she was first appointed: “She says she has returned to Seattle more because of Sher than for the city itself and seems more interested in finding the best artists, wherever they are, than in cultivating the local theater ecology. ‘The whole world has globalized,’ she said. ‘And it seems the last place we believe in globalization is in theater.’ ” {Emphasis The Stranger’s.}
To this I could not not possibly come up with a better response than the one comment left on-line, by someone calling himself “Mr. First-Nighter”:
Odd that Ms Whoriskey would make such a statement, when so much of the rest of the world is currently undergoing a complete re-evaluation of the very concept of globalization, and re-engaging with the long-neglected benefits of localism. Not that there is anything wrong with exposing local audiences and artists to the work and influence of outside artists, per se, but her attitude seems to reflect yet more of the reverse-provincialism we have become accustomed to here. Even more distressing when one contemplates that theatre, unlike other artistic media, relies so exclusively upon the patronage of local audiences, local artists, and local artisans for its growth, nourishment and survival.
If she has indeed no wish to “cultivate the local theatre ecology”, then she will no doubt express little surprise or alarm when her abject neglect results in that same ecology turning fallow and stagnant.
Unlike, say, a Greg Falls, who recognized the efficacy of good husbandry, Ms Whoriskey seems rather to envision her role as being akin to a sort of cultural Monsanto, where her only interest is in increasing the yield, while remaining heedless (or worse indifferent) to the irrevocable damage done to the environment in the process.
Sad to say, this does not bode well, either for Intiman and its long-term prospects (which are precarious at best), or for the Seattle theatre ecology as a whole.
In reality none of Seattle’s Big Houses have done enough in the last decade to advance locally grown new work. Moreover, despite their mournful protestations to the contrary, it is not because of their limited resources. (More on this in my future essay, “Don’t Let the Big Houses Fool Ya, It ain’t about the Money.” ) Yes, it is true that in 2009 the Seattle Rep had its overall operating budget cut about in half, but it’s also true that in this same year, through an admittedly strange quirk of happy fate, their new works budget quadrupled. Right now it looks like they plan to take that largess and develop two new plays, in tandem with Western Washington University. Good for them. What’s not so good is that they’ve already earmarked one of those slots for a New York Playwright, most probably Doug Wright, who won the Pulitzer for I Am My Own Wife. It’s unclear who will get the second slot, but the odds don’t favor one of the dozen or so nationally produced playwrights living in the Puget Sound region. Whatever synergy the Rep hopes to create with Wright, or whatever luminaries they beg to grace us with from New York for a few months, it will be transitory and do nothing to nurture the local scene or bring Seattle any closer to being a world class theatre town.
Many of my local playwright colleagues have utterly given up on our Big Houses. When a friend who works for one recently warned me that I risk being blacklisted by his theater for mouthing off like this, I mentioned it to Scot Augustson, another local playwright whom I particularly admire. He replied, “Oh Paul, how would any of us ever know if we’re being blacklisted by them or not?” Scot’s right. And as much as good friends have cautioned me about these essays, it is time to be honest and realize you cannot burn a bridge that doesn’t exist.
That said, sometimes I feel stupid that I haven’t yet given up. But I haven’t. And here’s why. Those Big Houses essentially belong to us, the citizens of Seattle and the surrounding region. We fund them through our attendance and through our generous patronage: direct giving, public arts funding and donations from the corporations for which we work. We also support them through our cheap labor as actors, designers and administrators. They will respond to the demand for locally developed plays. So long as we make the demand. Of course, it will not happen easily or overnight or without clever hedging against it on their part. In the past, when we demanded “new work” all they heard was “New York”. Artistic administrators also like to blame the boards that have hired them for keeping their creative reins short. Maybe this is true, but I am tempted to call them on it. If we need to reach out to the Big House board members to help them understand why locally grown plays are important, we can and will do that.
I have had more than one Big House artistic staffer say something along the lines of, “Christ, Paul, it’s almost like you’re saying you won’t be satisfied until we’re producing at least one new play by a local playwright every year in our season.” To which I reply, “It’s not almost like I’m saying that. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Here and Now
Seattle is perfectly positioned. This is the place, here and now, for locally grown plays to resurge to their historical place of prominence. There are particular reasons that this is so, and I have tried to illustrate some of them above, but the main reason is because we say so. We get to decide that Seattle is not a satellite. We are our own city, with our own voices, our own actors, our own audiences, our own plays. If, as we proceed down this path, we begin to create great plays that we can then export to other places and thus mitigate to some extent this crushing artistic trade deficit we currently labor under, so be it. But the main point is we want plays for and by Seattleites. And we shall have them. Here and now. Where theatre belongs.
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Next up: “What the Hell does ‘World Class’ Mean Anyway?”
