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Artistic Director of New Dramatists
Author of the study: Outrageous Fortune: the Life and Times of the New American Playanother take on this talk. I’ll look to link to the video recorded version once it’s up.

New Dramatists: background — 50 playwrights in former Lutheran church former soup kitchen and homeless shelter; how fitting: metaphorical for playwrights now.

London spoke of the strangeness of creeping around New Dramatists and finding original scripts: Red burning light of the American Life Fornes; “Millhand’s Lunch Bucket” — 1st draft of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone. Plays by David Lindsay Abarre and Nilo Cruz

Toyed with more comic elements, song creation, including a song “What a difference a play makes” — Marsha Norman’s response to a request for a song about a play; but seriously, for London, plays do make a difference; there’s not a playwright that he’s met who doesn’t have the answer to the question: can they single out the play that changed their life. London, again, posits the question: “Do plays really make a difference? Do they really change lives?”

London does not shy away from mentioning his own longing for good movies, books, and music from his ipod. So, as such, London often feels that he is a “rabbi in a church for playwrights where I constantly question my faith”.

London wondered: does the difference a play makes pass from writer to writer; that is, is there a charge that can be passed from one writer to another?

Quote: Nothing is ever gone as long as there are people to remember; people to write it down.

London noted that forms of theatrical expression are fading: seder play, burlesque; although, I will point out that in Cleveland, so far as I can tell, vaudeville and burlesque forms are making a come back.

London: find your faith where you can; hoping people meet you where they live.

London bemoaned the “energy of where our culture is directed” and that we all know what that me;ans. The theaters that were supposed to help instead have invested in “large administrative staffs”; “monumental buildings”, and have failed to provide “structures for sustaining playwrights over time”. One need only look at what is happening in Cleveland to see the constant reality of this.

By exploring the needs of playwrights, London was lead to the study that became outrageous fortune.

Highlights (as fast as I could type, so you’ll be better off reading the full report):

American non-profit theaters are risk averse, corporate-board-driven entities that lack daring leaders; what non-profit theater leaders mean by “audience” likely refers to “large donors” or “key assets”; the economics of playwrights is impossible: otherwise employed or poor $20k – $40k per year; half of sources come from elsewhere; of 90+ percent of income only 15% comes from plays; 3% comes from royalties: $750; average was 35-40 and a winner of Obies, etc.

Surprisingly, despite the posturing, the functioning and economics of theaters have made it impossible for playwrights to exist in them.

MFA programs are pumping out playwrights and saddling them with debt that they will never be able to repay.

Without theaters that support playwrights, can one imagine the early plays of O’Neill; the success of Odetts and Albee; the delicacy of the plays of Horton Foote?

Playwrights need to ask themselves, “how do you get sustained by an environment that won’t love you?”

a challenge to idealism
soul in the machine of a capitalistic economic structure

After casting out an immense IMMENSE oppressive darkness, London switched gears to allow a bit of light in: that we seem to be living during a moment of extraordinary change; Mellon was re-evaluating its priorities; there exists now a great moment of energy and intention (for playwrights). That there is “a weird seismic shift” underway.

Arena Stage: a resident theater embracing its historical responsibility to lead

where do we look for inspiration?
when you stare at something long enough it grows larger
large theaters aren’t evil they are misguided
david grimm

keepers of ecstasy and empathy
bitterness kills playwrights (poets)

You aren’t free when you are passive…can’t blame others, theaters, etc. Playwrights must lead, must be a force for change on your own.

Playwright leadership

passivity and blame are the unfortunate response of artists in a market economy

what will you make happen, what will you do with the gifts of this weekend?

guarre to wilder

theaters serve to stop the homogeneity of our society; to defend against a monoculture.

matt–playwrights–lazy writing practices?
what does it mean to be a writer in a collaborative art?

don’t understand the impulse to write something and then give it to others to fuck it up
plays are unfinished (artistic directors)–but the expectations are different now — playwrights know the play will change, etc.
richard nelson — speech several years ago — treat us like children and we’ve allowed ourselves to be treated like children

troubling in research: despite the fact that there were great stories of collaboration; critiquing institutional theaters of a certain size.
let go of the notion that the institutional theater is “the theater”
pig iron
13p
children’s theaters
theaters in their own community
new theater (create your own)
different models

Howl Round
Arena Stage
http://www.howlround.com/

Went and saw Eric’s play a week or so ago and it was simply fantastic. For the second time this year, Coble teams up with Nick Koesters (Side Effects May Include) and, again, with highly positive results. Coble is a very good writer, and appreciation I’ve gained since taking a course in adaptation a year or so ago and studying his adaptations of Washington Irving stories in Gold in the Bones. I myself was doing an adaptation of Washington Iriving’s The Alhambra, and studying the choices Coble made in his own adaptions was both enlightening and refreshing. Additionally, many years ago I saw his play Bright Ideas at the Playhouse, which is a send up of the Scottish play, based around of all things child rearing. I also have a copy of his play Natural Selection which was in the Humana Festival and is quite brilliant in it’s own right.

My Barking Dog

Coble has the ability to weave complex stories that address complicated problems or longings or impulses in modern society and make them both tight and hilarious. My Barking Dog is very carefully constructed and builds meticulously toward its great truth, which in my opinion is an exploration of how modern society has gone grossly astray: the machine has long been running us.

My Barking Dog begins with two stories of isolation and posits a modern world that is barren of essential meaning and meaningful connection, and therefore psychologically chilling. The two main characters are exemplars of the brokenness of society. Melinda (Heather Anderson Boll) is a socially stunted factory worker who works the night shift at a printing company; there she does a mindless job which she loves because it lets her avoid people and cultivate her yearning to be one with the machine that she “feeds” paper into. Similarly, Toby (Koesters) plays an out-of-work middle manager who finds that he is completely replaceable as a cog in the machine and whose sole pursuit, when we discover him, is identifying wireless networks in his apartment and placating his insomnia. The world changes for both of these characters when a Coyote (barking dog) comes out of the “wild” and onto the fire escape of their apartment building. Melinda turns from feeding a machine to feeding the dog; and Toby forsakes his wireless network hunting to come outside.

There is a natural inclination on both the part of a playwright and audience member to expect the two dysfunctional characters to “find one another” and be saved by this new relationship and human encounter. This is a choice that, thank God, Coble avoids. Instead, Melinda finds a love of revolution and creating destruction from her encounter with the Coyote; and Toby, preposterously, gets impregnated by the Coyote and has its pups–thus entirely re- and comically mis-directing the romantic impulse of this plot line. Along the way, Coble skewers so much of modern life and angst that the play just breezes along gradually unfolding to reveal the dystopian lives we live today enwombed as we are by our technical electronic blah blah blahs and avoidance of meaningful interaction with the world around us.

In the end, Toby forsakes the modern world for life with his mate in the wild, and Melinda vows to bring the wild back into the cities and reclaim them for Nature.

Jeremy Paul directs My Barking Dog (I wonder if the man ever sleeps), and does a fantastic job with interpreting the meaningless tasks that the characters “live” in their “modern” life into engaging stage images that mirror the textual vapidness of their lives. He also keeps the movement and time tight so that the play moves ever onward to the inevitable conclusion.

As much as Coble probably hates it, there is some comparison to be made to Fight Club with its radical re-creation of a character whose sole “job” becomes the destruction of modern society to create a chaos that frees people from their “things”; but the Coyote and the absurdity of Toby’s character allows the play to avoid too painful and damning a seriousness that the message really does carry. We have lost and are continuing to lose very real and important parts of ourselves and we give ever away more of our humanity to the machines that we have created–both literal machines and systemic machines–the Dark Vaders and Empires which inevitably follow on such concessions as we are making now.

Boll has a tremendous ass and looks great smeared in whatever she was smeared in (lotion?); and I wish I could say the same for Koesters, but alas, I’ll remember the admonition that he who lives in a glass house should not throw stones… and just say admiringly that Koesters is braver than I am–especially as regards playing the “bitch” who delivers Coyote pups by Caesarean section.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all to learn that My Barking Dog is in Kentucky some time soon. Now I’ll go back to reading extant texts from a much more civilized time: The Iliad. After all, nothing speaks of intimacy and humanity like running a spear through so-and-so’s teeth.