13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing: # 6 Building a Community
After the experience of mounting a full Off-Broadway production with The Jester’s Wife last October, I initially wrote a much shorter version of these 13 Ways of Looking at Self Producing with the hope that the Dramatists Guild would select the piece for its magazine. But they passed; no harm done as it was neither my first rodeo nor my first rejection. So, once my colleagues and I had finished with our somewhat unexpected but delightful run of HONOR as part of The Chain Theater’s Winter One-Act Festival putting this outpouring up instead as a series on a variety of platforms — Medium, Substack, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Instagram, even Twitter, oops, the platform now known as X — seemed like a good idea. An unexpected serendipity is that relevant references keep appearing as I extend the essays. The Gothamist and Wall Street Journal articles, and now some comments from Ralph Fiennes to enrich this Look # 6: Self-Producing As Community Building.
Peter Marks conducted a recent interview with Fiennes on the occasion of the production of “Macbeth,” co-starring Indira Varma and directed by Simon Godwin, about to open at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. Fiennes in talking about why he’s excited to be in a play again after all of his superb film work singled out as a differentiator between the experiences “that sense of community that you get in a stage production.” That statement resonated for me on several levels:
1. Self-producing is about creating community.
2. The kind of community in self-producing differs from a more traditional production.
3. The benefit that this famous and accomplished actor notes of this particular kind of community is the same for all of us no matter our length of experience or lack of prominence.
But first, let’s remember that some aspects of self-producing are about community joining rather than building. There are venues to facilitate collaboration including among your fellow playwrights. For our work, given that we are mainly a New York company, The Alliance Of Resident Theaters has been extraordinarily valuable as both resource in knowledge and subsidized rehearsal space as well as a source of networking opportunities through various round tables that they sponsored. A.R.T. for New York theater producers, directors, and actors is very much a community.
For me, The Dramatists Guild has proved an equally important resource — even if they did turn down my article! One particular area of their resource directory pertinent to this installment is the section on community engagement; see screenshot above. There are many arts centers and alliances included there that can prove helpful to various aspects of self producing.
Groups on Facebook also help with self-producing especially the Dramatists Guild regional groups and informal associations such as The Playwright Connection and the NYC Playwrights Group. While their focus is not on self-producing, many people there will answer questions and offer encouragement about every aspect of playwrighting. Another avenue of community joining is the possibility of co-production where cost sharing occurs with an existing theatre company. That is how we managed to come out of the pandemic with a live stage performance at the esteemed Broom Street Theatre in Madison WI. Are there theatres that might be open to co-producing? Yes, this American Theater article from last September focuses on larger companies, but we get excited about companies like 9Thirty Theatre that invite submissions of new scripts from March to May. Other companies with space or other resources need to find like-minded artists in order to make something happen in the short term as dramaturg Lauren Halvorsen points out in this excellent review.
But when it comes to community building as part as your self producing, then the burden is upon you to start that formation, to be the catalyst. Community depends to a certain extent upon commonality and in the case of self producing, that commonality is performance. The wisdom of Declan Donnellan in his books The Actor and the Target and now The Actor and The Space provides a touchstone for me as a playwright and as a director. But Declan and his colleagues at Cheek by Jowl Theatre also can tell us a great deal about the building of community. In his latest book, Declan offers insight about performance as this cornerstone of self producing: “Performance is woven into the fabric of our lives. It is natural and important to us as breathing. Performance is not merely a habit humans keep repeating across millennia, languages, and cultures. It is more fundamental than that. Performance is what it is to be human. It is the operating system for life.”
In theater, community almost always is required to deliver performances that will engage and satisfy an audience and the artists too. For performance to become production, context is required, a different kind of space both psychic and physical must be conjured in which the proper collaboration can occur. Peter Brook once wrote, “In Haitian voodoo, all you need to begin a ceremony is a pole and people.” But the people must believe in the enterprise; they must be a community.
While not yet resorting to voodoo in our work, the repetition of self producing over eight productions reinforced in me the importance of sharing the goals that are held both jointly and individually among the members of this new community; every production is new even if the players are old comrades. In many instances, we auditioned and then cast actors or selected technical artists whom we were meeting for the first time. Taking the initiative to orient those new colleagues to what you are trying to achieve is necessary but insufficient. If it’s going to be a community, then you have to find out what they want out of the experience. Will everyone be able to tell you explicitly or accurately why they have shown up to be a part of this production? Of course not, and that’s why it’s an ongoing conversation.
Some of this interaction is basic as this outline from Pioneer Drama Services suggests: the most important question for me is, “how do you like to work?” (Pioneer also provides an idea of a community contract, which may appeal to some readers.) Sometimes, we have framed this as an appreciative inquiry, and indeed the entire production process could be seen as a collective inquiry. Asking everyone to describe their ‘peak experience’ in putting up theater not only enlightens as to similarities and differences, but also gives guidance as to how to move forward as a community rather than just a collection of individuals.
Some readers may protest that what is said here about community is true or should be for all theater productions, and that is a fair assessment. However, some productions are still run in a hierarchical fashion and that won’t work as well in self-producing. That’s why establishing community is even more critical for self-producing. Why? In a previous installment, we pointed out that the term ‘self-producing’ constitutes a misnomer: ain’t no way you can get up a significant piece of theater completely on your own. Therefore, since the structures of traditional theater are not available to you in this mode the community that you and others billed for your project becomes even more important.
So what does work? It takes clear, specific, and incentivized objectives to focus and motivate teams. That’s why we recommend that as a follow-up to the appreciative inquiry suggested above that everyone agree on what they are trying to get out of this experience. The late Harvard teacher and theorist on teams, J. Richard Hackman found in his research on teams that simply specifying the ends — what you’re trying to create — was not enough; a successful experience required being explicit about the means — how this group of people were going to produce those ‘ends ‘.
This finding should not be taken to mean that absolute harmony is a requirement. Hackman — whom I was lucky enough to speak to toward the end of his life — insisted that conflict, when well managed and focused on a team’s objectives, can generate more creative solutions than one sees in conflict-free groups. So long as it is about the work itself, disagreements can be good for a team. Indeed, he told me that he and his colleagues found in their research on symphony orchestras that slightly grumpy orchestras played a little better as ensembles than those whose members worked together especially harmoniously.
In building this community for self-producing, diversity matters in both the broadest and more current senses of that word. It’s better to consider what skills are needed rather than just who do we know. This takes us back to the previous installment and the strength of weak connections, the advantages of getting out to the friends of your friends will get you to people who can do the tough things that need to be done
Christopher Massimine in his Medium piece on starting a theater company addresses the issue of inclusivity as “a core value of any successful theatre company. This means that your company must be inclusive of all people, viewpoints, ideas, and cultures. You should also be inclusive of race, religion, and sexual orientation.” We found this to be critical to success. Do we always achieve this state? No, and it is in that failing to do so that learning about how to approach the next production occurred. Our communication and collaboration. That’s why those topics will be # 7 in our 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing.
