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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/

Mayannah, Rosemary, and Ani prepare to dine.

Went and saw Brainpeople at convergence last Thursday night.  I must admit that I don’t know how to feel about it.  I take that back, I do know how I feel about it; I just…as I so often do…question whether my impression is correct.  I suppose it’s silly, really.  After all, one’s impression is one’s own and needn’t seek any external validation; however, one can be off-base in the variables one puts in one’s calculations, and that is what I fear.  Regardless, this is just an avoidably long way around saying that I thought it was a not very good play. In fact, a bad play.

While no expert, I am familiar with Jose Rivera: References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot, Marisol, and I listened and laughed as he described the insults and stupidities endured as a Hollywood screenwriter in Tales from the Script. So I am still a bit shocked.

First, let me disclaim a few things.  The convergence production was very good:  I’m assuming (having not seen it anywhere else).  That is, the set was sumptuous.  The atmosphere was wonderful (lighting, sound).  It was storming when I went to see it and you could hear the rain pounding on the roof which added to the eerie effect of the thing; and the effect of the dystopian environment and fear of a police state was effective.  I thought the acting was terrific, especially that of Kristi Little, which frankly blew me away and was worth the whole trip.  Her portrayal of Rosemary, and her deft powerful shifts through multiple personalities was both terrifying and exhilarating.

The problem I have is with the play itself.  And it could be that I’m in this phase where I’m obsessing with Eric Overmyer and Len Jenkin and the Wooster Group and Megan Terry and reading Brecht and Artaud and Ionesco, in short, dealing with playwrights who are challenging form and structure and authorial position.  But, I was just shocked that here is a very, very good playwright who has three women on the stage and the majority of the play is monologs.  That was just flabbergasting.  And one significant piece of the play has a major character (Rosemary) catatonic on a chair periodically chirping pieces of a rather predictable sentence.  I just could not believe that I was watching a Jose Rivera play (whose past character lists include a coyote , a cat, madmen, guardian angels).  I couldn’t believe that Rivera would handle three characters like playwriting students in a 101 class.  And to make the characters more effective within this stultifying mold, he just gave them quirks which seemed more contrived to me than anything fundamentally real at their core.  I felt, more than once, that the choices Rivera made were intentional and contrived (not developing naturally out of the writing) and pushed in place to serve the plot’s outcome, not, again, any sort of organic meaning from the writing or meaning that rises up out of the unconscious.

The plot is that one woman (Mayannah, played by Laurel Johnson) lures two other women (Rosemary and Ani, played by Laura Starnik) to her house with the offer of $20,000 if they can make it through dinner.  This is one of the plots.  The other plot uses the literal presumption that you are what you eat to suggest that you literally can experience the memories, feelings, etc., of whatever creature it is that you have consumed; this theory is key to Mayannah whose parents were eaten by a Tiger when she was 8 years old.  By eating Tiger every year at this strange dinner, Mayannah hopes to be able to find her parents via one of her guests.  In this case, Rosemary, whose multiple personalities make her susceptible, apparently, to channeling Mayannah’s consumed parents.  Interesting as all this is, I could only see a re-hashing of Hollywood plots.  Since every pitch for a screenplay is supposed to be a combination of two movies in some way, Brainpeople is House on Haunted Hill meets Altered States.

One of my professors, David Todd, has mentioned in passing, and I’m paraphrasing, that once you become a playwright and sit through enough plays there comes a point when you can pretty much see how a play is going to play out right off the bat.  And there are two outcomes for this: one is that you become very cynical about what you’re seeing and the second is that you begin to develop a taste for stuff that really challenges you in new ways–or stuff that is surprising or occasionally you get surprised by more traditional fare that is really, really good.  Unfortunately, with this play, I found myself in the cynical position.  It was very hard for me to be there after a certain point.  Once I realized how this play was working I was just dispirited. Dispirited, I think, by the fact that meaning was going to be handed to me in this utterly conventional way.  There was a clock on a table on the set facing the audience and I found myself staring at the hands while time passed in five minute increments.  The only place that really blew me away was when Rosemary told her story and there I was overcome by Little’s acting which was just flat out great.  I’m certain, too, that some credit is due Clyde Simon’s direction in keeping Little’s transformations on edge like that.  Starnik had her moments as well, describing her love affair with Mayannah’s father through the television, which demonstrated glimpses of Rivera’s sense of humor and the bizarre, which were unfortunately missing from most of the play. Johnson got a moment, too, describing her first communion gone awry.  Regardless, other than those few points, the seams and mechanics of Brainpeople, the formal strategies and plot points, were just way too visible and the rotation of monologs among the women, some of which nearly turned the characters into cartoons, were just disappointing.