Playwrights Outnumber Theaters: 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing # 2
- In our first installment of 13 Ways Of Looking At Self Producing (following up on our introduction to this series, we focused on desire and need as essential prerequisites to a success in such an effort. There’s little sense in pursuing a self-production of your playwrighting work unless you have some measure of those two elements. But the need to self-produce continues to grow, which may turn even more playwrights and actors to self-production. The Dramatists Guild of America states that the organization has over 8000 members and not all writers of plays belonged to the Guild — although they should IMHO. Conversely, the number of theaters available to stage plays continues to wane as the New York Times reported last July. Emailing the theaters registered in the Guild’s resource directory last year recently saw a bounce back of more than one out of every five emails because those companies listed no longer existed. (Community theaters have proved hardier in that there are still 6000 of them according to AACT. While they tend to mount productions of already legitimately presented plays, you should check out their new play festival that will start to accept the next wave of script submissions on May 1st 2024.)
Theatre has always been as Tom Stoppard pronounced “a series of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster” but having less stages than ever is an obstacle on an entirely different level; we can’t even find that road to disaster. When Michael Paulson of the New York Times declares in the above linked article that “There is less theater in America these days. Fewer venues. Fewer productions…” this choice to self-produce seems not so much brave as obligatory; “All theater is sharing…”, Michael Hordern argued, “You share with the audience.”. As Simon Callow wrote of Michael Chekhov, “It was vital, he said, to engage with what he called ‘the will of the auditorium’, to reach out to each member of the audience and share the creative act with him or her.” Part of what is being self-produced is an audience to share in this co-creation. No audience, no sharing, and no theater.
Examples of playwrights and colleagues who felt this imperative to self-produce abound in the recent Gothamist article: they’re using basements. dining rooms, and restaurant patios. There are tips on how to produce in spaces such as outside venues and as Sebastiano Spinella of HowlRound noted, “Historically, the time in which performances took place in real theatrical buildings is relatively limited compared to the phases where the stage space was an open space: a market, a fair, a square, a street, or a churchyard.” (Even distinguished performers such as LaChanze felt the need to become a producer although she isn’t forced to resort to “loft theater” to get her show up.) In our case at Knowledge Workings Theater, self-producing though arduous at times accomplished all of our objectives starting with an enormous assist from Orietta Crispino at TheaterLab by placing our first show in TLab Shares. That meant we got to:
1) Create a new piece of theater — #maketheaterlive
2) Provide well-paying work for talented actors and craftpersons
3) Raise the profile of that same group through publicity and social media efforts so they can continue to #maketheaterlive
We notice the same imperative in groups such as The Playwright Connection (administered by Bob LeBlanc, Rachel Feeny-Williams, and Vivian Lermond)on FB: members who pursue both traditional and innovative methods to get their work before an audience. Threads may offer more leads in this area as groups such as Stage Crafts join and share info about venues; and methods, in their case in Los Angeles where theaters also close. And as we move on in this series to other aspects of self-production, that’s where our readers should come into play. Pooling our ideas about resources will give us more ideas about ways and whereabouts for our projects such as those listed in the Gothamist article like the Brooklyn Center of Theatre Research, the Brick Theater, East Village’s Frigid, Loading Dock Theatre, Feral Theatre Company, Pocket Ghost Productions New Relic Theatre, and Wet Spot. As Tad D’Agostino stated in that same article, “I have a play, I want to do the play, I’m not going to wait for everybody to give me permission to do the play — I’m going to find a space and do it.” And that may mean doing it in the street.
In our next installment, we’ll deal with another aspect: the fear that self-produced means self-centered, but until then PLEASE comment, criticize, and/or collaborate with your own take on self-producing.
