Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
Uncategorized
June 23, 2010
Chicago: Theater Capital of America
Kris Vire, theater editor at Time Out Chicago and a wonderful champion of Chicago theater, makes the perennial pitch: we should be are the theater capital of the United States:
A number of out-of-town critics have praised Chicago as America’s real theater capital over the last several years. What if, instead of continuing to export our stuff elsewhere for praise and dollars, we embraced what London’s Michael Billington, Toronto’s Richard Ouzounian, New York’s Terry Teachout and others have written and sell ourselves, not New York, as said theater capital?
If Cromer’s Streetcar [currently playing at Writers Theatre in Glencoe] deserves more viewers—and it surely does—why shouldn’t they come to Chicago to see it? Instead of courting the Scott Morfees and Jeffrey Richardses of New York, maybe Gigi Pritzker’s ready for another go at producing theater in Chicago after Million Dollar Quartet.
As Alan M. Berks notes in the first installment of his TCG [Theater Communications Group] report from the Twin Cities, one of the unofficial themes of Chicago’s TCG conference was the awesome, non-hierarchical nature of Chicago’s theater scene. Mayor Daley said a lot of great things to the nation’s theatermakers Saturday morning, as he did to the city’s press a couple of weeks prior when marking the tenth anniversary of the downtown theater district, in the presence of NEA chair Rocco Landesman, about the value of theater and other arts in building a world-class city.
So what if, instead of continuing the New York–centric 20th-century model, we make our city a theater tourism destination? With others so willing to call Chicago the real theater destination of North America, wouldn’t it be great if we embraced that label ourselves? What if theater audiences actually had to come to Chicago to see Chicago-style theater?
Coming off this weekend’s TCG conference here in Chicago (which, if nothing else, gave Chicago theater artists like Court the opportunity to strut in front of other national theater-makers), you’ll be hearing more talk like this throughout the coming year, leading up to a Columbia College-planned conference next spring titled Chicago – Theatre Capital of America: Past. Present. Future.
March 29, 2010
Our Most Backward Art Form
“This is a little bit controversial, but I would say it’s our most backward art form. I don’t know what happened to theater. It’s so expensive now—tickets are $50 to $100, so most of the audience members are over 50 and middle class and white. Because there’s so little money in it and it’s just gotten less and less popular every year, the really talented writers are going to Hollywood. Theater just can’t keep them, so the quality of writing is lower. There’s been this response where a lot of the plays out in the mainstream are just pretentious TV shows, bad TV shows. If you go to the theater, people will laugh at jokes they would never laugh at if they saw them on TV. It’s really embarrassing. When European presenters come to New York, they don’t go to see anything that’s on Broadway or Off Broadway. It’s like going to Disney World: the art-world equivalent of Norman Rockwell. Actually, pretentious Norman Rockwell, because every once in a while something flashy happens and then it’s like, Ooh!”
—Young Jean Lee, Playwright of The Shipment
January 29, 2010
Sixty Five and Older
The Guardian asks: are audiences just too old?
Walters is particularly angered by the assumption that just because an audience is old, it’s reactionary: “Those people in your audience who are currently 60, the ones who get hammered as ‘conservative’ and ‘unimaginative’? They were born in 1950, which means they were graduating from high school in 1968. Maybe you’ve read about 1968 ... it was the year America was on fire.”
The real reason why older audiences are not so interested by some younger writers, he suggests, is because they’ve seen it all before.“Being shocked isn’t that big of a thrill anymore,” he writes. “Tell us something important about life. Something with some depth and complexity. Something with some heart and soul, some deep understanding.”
Walters’s attitude is a refreshing counterblast to a society that often seems in thrall to the cult of youth. But as Isaac Butler argues, it’s not entirely fair. Butler describes how one artistic director he knows did some market research into the baby-boom generation – people who are now 60-plus – and what he found shocked and depressed him: “Boomers, by and large, dislike surprise,” writes Butler, “which is why many previews now intentionally ruin the plots of movies. Boomers are among the least loyal of customers and it takes very little to lose their business etc.”
Full article here.
August 12, 2009
Economics of the Curtain Call
Chris Jones doesn’t like the money-back guarantee policy that came with Collaboraction and Teatro Visto’s El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman:
I hope the money-back guarantee dies a quick death, never to return. It’s not that I’m opposed to money-back guarantees in general—I recently took Home Depot up on a similar offer. But a piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech [offering money back at the end of the show] is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres.
It’s a bit like watching an actor leap down from the stage and start clearing tables. Those in the audience know about economic realities, but it still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to see those who bare their souls for an audience’s edification and enjoyment have to stoop to such things.
And although I had my problems with “El Grito del Bronx,” which I did not recommend, no reasonable person could have failed to see the effort, heart and craft behind that show. Nobody was making much money. Indeed, this wasn’t about the making of money. Demonstrably, this was a very personal endeavor on the part of everyone involved. Any thus I think anyone demanding a refund was being unreasonable.
Chris’s aversion to the money-back guarantee (and it does, understandably, seem to be a visceral aversion for him) reminds me Nicholas Ridout’s study on curtain calls—the social exchange at the end of a performance where the actors emerge to accept the applause of the audience. Ridout, a British performance theorist, writes about curtain calls as an economic exchange, but an exchange founded on gift-giving, which seeks to cloak its commodity-values in a social ritual
The audience is trying to figure itself as the recipient of a gift. Its applause is a paradoxical return, because it wishes to establish a relationship in which excess is preserved, in which the economics of exchange are somehow suspended. It wants to feel something extra, garner some ‘affecting surplus’ from the encounter…. A further indication of the affective force of the desire for this experience of the gift might be adduced from the sense of disappointment felt by an audience when actors do not take a curtain call at all. Applause that is offered, but no, as it were, accepted, with good grace, fails to satisfy, because it deprives an audience of the gain it has set out to win for itself through the gift of applause. (p. 165-6)
Is El Grito‘s money-back guarantee the same as receiving, say, a gift receipt with a birthday gift from your friend? Are you offended when the gift-giver says: “If you don’t like it, you can exchange it”? What if your boss says it? What if your child says it? I suppose it depends on the social configuration. For Chris, the appearance of actor Eddie Torres to offer the audience’s money back was a disruption, an offensive disruption, of a social pact, like forgetting to take the price tag off of a sweater you give to your mother. It’s tacky, it’s a faux-pas, it ruins the meaning of the act, to expose the economics of your gift. Ridout again:
...in the theatre the repudiation of the curtain call tends to signify a conviction that both actors and audience share something in their reasons for attending that transcends the theatre, and with it the comparable triviality of the market economy. (p.166)
On the one hand, my instinct is to agree with Chris that, no, theater is not a light fixture. On the other hand, to ignore the ways in which the theater we produce is a commodity bought and sold on a very particular marketplace leaves a lot out of the whole picture. Sure, American theater artists put in a lot of extra unpaid time because they love their craft, but that doesn’t mean that money, what little money there is that circulates in this industry, doesn’t have a very real effect, not only on theater workers but on the way we experience the work, too. It’s a tension, it’s a tension. A lot of my friends in theater ask themselves: what’s the tipping point where I stop giving my free labor to this company/director?
Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique ends with a comic scene depicting the actors dividing up the money from the night’s proceeds (curiously enough, the scene is cut from the Tony Kushner adaptation we’re staging early next year). Not to go all Marxist on Chris Jones, but if we can raise consciousness about what it is we do here, won’t our audiences be richer for it? My sense is that if we take a challenging piece of theater to an audience and say, “Look. We’re predicting this isn’t going to make a lot of money. It’s long/weird/offensive/unpopular/confusing/uncomfortable. Despite that, we’re convinced that it’s worth your $32 and two hours of your time. Please join us,” then audiences will come along for the ride. If a money-back guarantee can make risk more palatable, then let’s go for it.
(Source: Nicholas Ridout, Stage fright, animals, and other theatrical problems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
August 6, 2009
What I’m Reading
-The Complete Plays by Georges Feydeau
-Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack
-Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs by John Grazian
-A Dybbuk by S. Ansky, Translated by Tony Kushner
-The Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Jamison
-Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams
-The Man Who Turned into a Stick by Kōbō Abe
