Gary and I
were stuck in the plane aisle when a woman leaned over her seat and poked at
the book in my hand. "I hope you’re not an artistic director,"
she said. "That's not gonna cheer you up." Of course she was right – she turned out to be an artistic
director herself. No one has much of anything nice to say about the
status quo in the world of new plays, and almost everyone interviewed takes the
opportunity to gripe about it in this detailed study. But since no one likes listening to me
complain, I ultimately chose this passage describing the problem from a writer’s
point of view:
"The
state of playwriting is healthy, most writers agree, but there's a failure of
the imagination on the part of theatres, an inability to make sense of emerging
voices and new work. Theatres, this common critique goes, lack the vision
to realize those voices in production, and woefully underestimate their
audiences' ability to appreciate challenging material. At the same time,
they fail to educate these audiences about unconventional dramatic forms.
Through the eyes of the playwright, the obstacle of unconventionality is
symptomatic of a widespread failure of imagination."
As a producer,
I'll admit that I often read plays with a wary eye towards impossible ideas. By impossible, I mean ideas that are either simply
unstageable with our budget or that contribute needlessly to downtown theater’s
reputation for being pretentious and/or incomprehensible. Come to think of it,
let’s say there are three categories of impossible:
- BORING AND IMPOSSIBLE: Car chases. Climactic gunfights. Enormous country-style breakfasts.
- INTRIGUING BUT IMPOSSIBLE: Thermonuclear explosions. Singing alien plants. Journeys to the Heaviside Layer.
- TOTALLY BANANAS AND IMPOSSIBLE: Characters vomiting mythological creatures. Giant thumbs that bleed abstraction. Talking Jewish lobsters.
No comments:
Post a Comment