Should Literary Managers Be Developing Playwrights?

Mead Hunter asks:

Do playwrights really want unvarnished honesty? If I say to you, “We passed on your play because we felt your ending was lame,” what subtext do you hear? If you rewrite that ending under the impression that now Theater XYZ will gladly produce it, and that doesn’t happen, then you will really feel had. The danger of specific criticism is that will be received as advice -- or even as a promise.

Isaac responds:

I will respond to this by telling a story, a story of rejection! Rejection of me!

The story is a pretty simple one about an agent who took the time to gave Isaac five pages of quality, incisive, honest feedback. Says Isaac:

This is the important part [of the story] here though: These notes were far, far blunter than I have ever seen notes given in theatre to anyone working in any field other than design. And I'll tell ya... it didn't feel awesome. It took a couple of days before I could get through that I was kind of upset at the rejection to actually see what the notes were. But at that point, I dusted myself and the proposal off and went to work. That project has laid dormant for awhile, because of other writing needs, but when it's time to go back, I'll reexamine those notes and see how I feel.

From Isaac's perspective, the downside from the perspective of playwrights is a bit of bruised feelings, and the upside is higher quality work.

I always favor the honest, polite, incisive commentary. The key, of course, is in the politeness. I believe that there is always a way to phrase criticism in such a way as to remove any of the personal rancor from it. There is no need for you to pretend that things are not wrong when they are wrong, but there's also absolutely no need for you to use the sort of language such as "your ending was lame." In fact, the more specific your criticism, the less likely the playwright is going to be insulted.

The times that criticism really hurts, emotionally, is when you realize it is both right and difficult to fix. If someone gives you a straightforward, clearly true criticism, you tend to just implement the change and be done with it. If someone gives you a complex and clearly wrong piece of criticism, we tend to ignore it. But when something cuts down to the core of what you're working on, boy, that hurts like a raw nerve. They don't have to insult you, or be brusque, or dismissive--the truth and the depth of the criticism does all the pain itself.

I had that recently myself. A friend of mine sent me back a draft with the note that, from moment to moment, the play stands very well on its own, but the logic behind the characters' motivations are confused and conflicted. I stared at the script for hours with a terrible, sinking feeling that the hours and hours of work I had put into it was worthless. It's a really painful feeling.

But what's the alternative? That I walk around with a terribly flawed script without knowing it? Without being so trite as to say "no pain no gain"... wait, I just said it.

Anyways, a separate issue is whether literary managers have some sort of responsibility to do this. And the answer is no. They are busy. It would be nice if they could. But they are not our parents, or our friends, or our mothers. If a theater decides we have potential, then we should be developed. But theaters and their literary managers have the right to decide how to spend their time. I know how much time I spend just responding to my friends' work, and I get something on the order of two or three plays a month. It takes me time to give good criticism. How much time are we expecting a literary manager to spend giving criticism?

To Orange County: A Minor Apologia

In my last post, I did something I frequently finding myself doing: ragging on Orange County, California. It is not a place I particularly like, although it is my home. The arts scene is rather small. But one thing it does have is South Coast Repertory.

Now, South Coast Repertory is, as Repertory theaters go, actually a fairly good one. It has originated a few Broadway plays in its time, it does fairly good productions of quality plays, etc. But every failing you'd like to accuse Repertory companies of, you can basically accuse SCR of.

When I worked with the Stage Managers there, briefly, they all swapped car notes because they all drove 1984 Volvo Station Wagons. I am not kidding. There were four 1984 Volvo Station Wagon owners, and all of them were fretting that their Volvos would not make the next emissions test and they had no idea if they could afford the fees or afford a new car. The actors almost all commuted from Los Angeles, and one of the actors made his primary income doing English voiceovers of Anime imports.

However, whereas SCR normally either commissions plays from prominent playwrights who've found success in New York, or they're doing standards, I do have to applaud them for this:

“South Coast Repertory is pleased to host this remounting of the Chance Theater’s acclaimed production of Jesus Hates Me,” said Associate Artistic Director John Glore. “This partnership is born of an idea that began to take shape among the members of SCR’s artistic staff almost two years ago, out of a desire to make greater use of the company’s Nicholas Studio (SCR’s former Second Stage), to create stronger ties with other performing arts organizations in Orange County and to offer alternative programming that might attract new theatergoers to both organizations. In presenting this Chance Theater production, SCR has an opportunity to try out an idea which, if successful, may well lead to further collaborations of this kind in the future.”

The Chance Theater’s Artistic Director Oanh Nguyen will again direct Jesus Hates Me, which will feature the same cast that appeared in the 2009 production. Chance Dean plays Ethan, Timothy Covington is Trane, Karen Webster is Annie, Jennifer Ruckman is Lizzy, Dimas Diaz is Boone and Ben Green is Georgie.

Now, the play itself, written by Wayne Lemon, is not indigenous to Orange County. It had its premiere in Colorado (according to his website -- it took me a bit to figure out which of the "premieres" was the first one).

But this is the first time in my personal experience or memory that South Coast Repertory has promoted the work of or partnered with another local theater company -- largely because the Chance Theater (only a decade old, billing itself as "Your Off-Broadway Theater in Orange County") is the only non-SCR theater company that I know of in the Orange County area (I may be wrong, there might be one or two others).

I hope that SCR does more of this. The Chance charges lower prices, has more experimental work--it takes more chances. So I hope that when they hit gold, they get some more transfers to SCR, and that money and respect flows back to the Chance. Maybe one day local people will get interested in the arts and find outlets for self-expression, a community to join...

Change I: Move Your Money, Move Your Theater?

So, elsewhere, most of the internet is talking about Outrageous Fortune, which so far seems to be a wake-up call about how shitty our industry can be sometimes (see also: How Theater Failed America). Yet again, the refrain I hear is, "Yes, we know it's shitty, but how do we change it?"

That's not to say that solutions haven't been proposed (I'm going to update my list of solutions-heard soon to take into account more things I've heard), but that when the conversation veers back to what's wrong in the world, we have to remember the major question: and how do we change it?

Anyways, Scott Walters put up a brief post a couple days ago comparing our desire to change theater to the nascent Move Your Money movement spearheaded by Huff-Po. He compares it to the desire to decentralize American theater.

I remember when I first really started thinking about the decentralizing theater problem last summer (when I first came into contact with Scott), I felt torn. I thought his idea was brilliant and necessary, to get the arts out of New York/Chicago/Los Angeles and into the nation. I also thought that I would never leave New York City to make it happen.

It reminded me powerfully of a baseball fan on the Daily Show (sorry, I couldn't find the clip) who, in the wake of the Roger Clemens steroid scandal, said, "This has brought shame on the entire sport of baseball... but honestly, I'll have forgotten about this come next baseball season."

It also reminds me of how, no matter how low Congress' approval ratings get, the re-election of incumbents remains above 90% -- because in general, people may dislike "Congress" but they do tend to approve of "My Congressman." And if each person on average thinks their congressperson is alright, but as a mass of congresspeople they seem to continue to do stupid things, then our usual check of elections will not have any effect. It's a systemic problem -- we want to change not our congresspeople, but the system by which congresspeople as a mass become stupid.

When Eugene Jarecki appeared on The Colbert Report, I had the same impression. See, I bank with a big bank: JP Morgan Chase. I became a JP Morgan Chase client when Washington Mutual, my bank, collapsed.

I loved Washington Mutual. When I had a problem with a vendor, I would call them, and they would call the vendor themselves and work things out. I was never on hold for more than five minutes with them. I had great customer service. When they went out of business, I was in Europe.

My credit card, on the other hand, is from Citibank. Citibank are cruel bastards. Every month, they sneak on average $5 of fees. If I call them and threaten to cancel, they refund me the charges. After an hour on hold and only after direct threats. When I went to go look for other credit cards, however, I can't find any that pays me nearly as much as Citibank does -- they're literally bribing me with their cash-back scheme (which pays more than any other credit card I qualify for, even after the fees take away, I've done the math). I've considered simply not having a credit card, just to get Citibank out of my life. There's the chance that, in the near term, when I get a business bank account I might get a credit card for the business, and therefore I won't be running such large sums on my credit card, and can close my personal credit card and just go with my debit card for personal purchases.

At any rate, the comparison between Citibank and WaMu was what really cemented my loyalty for WaMu. Their website was easy to use -- Citibank's was always broken, and for a full year I had to hit the "stop" button halfway through loading or else it would freeze.

Also, I had some experiences previously with another bank that was at one time a "local" bank (they're now national, with the demise of one of the other big banks): Wells Fargo. When I was heading to college, I went to my local Wells Fargo bank and opened an account. Right before I left I suddenly remembered something. "You do have branches in New York, right?" "Of course we do." This was a lie. Although it was possible for me to pay my bills online and get things mailed to me on the east coast, I spend about a third of my time on the West coast and two thirds on the East Coast.

Jarecki would call having local branches to me whether I'm at home in California or at home in New York "a convenience" that I'd have to do without.

When I was in Europe, the financial crisis struck, and Washington Mutual went under. I was terrified. Who would I be banking with? Citibank? That was my worst nightmare: to have Citibank hemorrhaging my personal finances the way they try to hemorrhage my credit card. And would there be a break in services while I was in Europe?

When JP Morgan Chase emerged as the buyer, I was tentative. I had no idea who they were and I'd never banked with them before. I wanted to see what they were like. They handled the transition from Washington Mutual to JP Morgan Chase seamlessly. By the end of the year, I was a happy JP Morgan Chase person. I haven't had cause to call them for support yet because, well, everything worked. There was one day that my debit card didn't work in an ATM, but they'd warned me ahead of time and told me how to work around it.

So when Eugene Jarecki was telling me to leave my bank, I couldn't see a compelling case to do it. I mean, I knew that Big Banks were a problem. But my bank is not a problem! They provide me excellent service and excellent care, at basically no cost (there's no ATM fee, no fee on my banking, using my debit card like a credit card has no fees, and then they pay me interest).

That's the problem with Move Your Money. Individuals act based on individual motives. My choices are not only positive for me, but most of the time they effect the people I know positively, they are good on the economy, etc.. It's only on the very macro-est economic of levels that my choice is bad, because I'm one of many people who are contributing to the existence of a "too big to fail" bank.

So, Scott threw out this suggestion that moving our theater would be like moving our bank, and that's our hope of decentralizing theater. I'm saying it's got some of the same problems.

In theory, in terms of the artistic future of the United States, I think we need to leave New York City. But there are no institutions I love nearly as much as The Public Theater. My home in Orange County, California not only lacks institutions like that, but lacks the audience and the institutions to create such institutions. As Don Hall pointed out, the first domino in the problem is real estate, and Orange County has such an incredible real estate bubble (even now) that the cost of starting up a theater company is inhospitable, especially considering as there are no theaters for rent anywhere (the concept just doesn't really exist), and car culture means that there is no such thing as a cultural center, nothing with which to attract people who you don't know.

Other than that, following the dream of decentralization means that I would basically pick a community at random and wander in. But that's really just a different form of cultural imperialism. If I can't create theater in my own community, then I guess I should just go where I want to be--to the community I want to live in, which is Brooklyn. I love it. I love the people, I love my artistic contemporaries.

It's a problem. And I'm part of it.

Diversity XX: OOB Diversity pt 2

99 Seats agrees with me:

All of this is incredibly present to me, at 36 years old, single, childless, falling right in the income levels here, working full-time outside of theatre. In terms of finances, there isn't much difference between what happens in the OOB scene and what's described in the lives of "successful" playwrights in Outrageous Fortune. Which is scary, in general.

Well, it's scary if you're on the regional theater side of the playwright equation. In the OOB world, this is basically what I expected my life to be like, and its encouraging to us to know that:

1) We wouldn't be doing any better in the regional theater track (which I am now forbidding anyone who has read Outrageous Fortune and the NYIT demographics report to call "successful")

2) We are better supported by our fellow OOBers than Playwrights are supported by the regional theaters.

Lesson: if you're a talented playwright with a vision, you're better off self-producing or entering the independent producing community with partners who are willing to develop you. And maybe, if you're lucky enough, John McCain will call you out.

Diversity XX: OOB Diversity

The fantastic folks at the New York Innovative Theater Awards have published a report on the demographics of Off-Off Broadway. It seems to fall in line with my previous belief that in some areas we make diversity happen (women are slightly disproportionally over-represented as producers, men as playwrights, just to take one random dataset). One of the more surprising results, actually, his how in many areas we fall roughly along national averages (income, for instance, although most of that income is not from Off-Off-Broadway), or race (I think our slightly disproportionally low percentage of African-Americans might be explained by our slightly disproportionally high percentage of people identifying as "multiracial."

(I say this, by the way, with the caveat that I'm not really highly versed in statistical analysis. These are just my impressions as I read through).

So, I guess the take-away is that we on Off-Off-Broadway are young, well educated, politically motivated, and then... basically average.

Oh dear. I don't know if we're going to like that...

Pithy Thought of the Day

A thought experiment: suppose you showed up to a club to dance on a Friday night, and you had a DJ who had absolutely no idea about what music is popular at dance clubs these days -- for instance, if I was DJing. This DJ might decide that the safest way to keep his audience happy is to open up the Billboard Top #40 and just play them in reverse order, from lowest to highest. This way, he figures, by the time the playlist finishes, he's basically pleased everybody, because he's playing the most popular music, so statistically speaking, he's safe.

Will the people at the club be happy?

Outrageous Fortune II

Okay, I'll say something quick.

August Schulenberg notes this:

...the study is specifically looking at playwrights who are "successful", a term defined loosely in the book, but understood to mean playwrights who are regularly being produced at a regional and Off-Broadway level. The survey focuses on a sample of those playwrights, and the theatres that are able to financially produce at that level.

Matt Freeman notes:

One thing that struck me in particular was the expression of frustration that there aren't companies that coalesce around a playwright anymore. I don't see that, personally. Maybe that's true on the scale of regional theaters 'filling slots'...but on the Off-Off scale, I see it all the time.

I have been working with a single theater company (more or less) in New York City since about 2004. Just over six years of productions. Do we produce on the scale of Manhattan Theater Club? No. Have I gotten reviews and publications and all that other nice stuff? Yes. Do I still work, and work hard, in an unrelated field to make ends meet? Yes, yes I do. Still, when I read chapters about the nomadic lives of playwrights now, I felt a bit happy to know that's not my position.

So if playwrights like me who work Off-Off-Broadway are:

1) Not that much less financially stable than the "successful" playwrights

2) Supported more by companies willing to champion our works (I write plays and have my own company, Freeman notes his own relationship with a good company)

Then the term "successful" appears to be better worn by the off-off-Broadway folks than by the industry writers! Here I was thinking that I had chosen passion over money, but it sounds like all I did was choose to be happier.