A Few Pro/Am Questions

Hello all! Looking forward to seeing you in a couple of days.

As a continuation of Ilana's and my conversation about the Professional vs. Pro-Am debate-- which I tend to boil down to a Professionals vs. Locals debate for a variety of reasons, though I think that dichotomy is changing too-- I have some statements to throw around in advance of our discussion on Saturday. Rather than framing them all as questions, I would wrap this whole post in a blanket of Do You Agree with This Statement or Not, and Why? What's Been Your Experience?

Note: The statements below do not actually reflect my beliefs about regional theatre, or the beliefs of anyone else involved with the blog. They're just meant as a series of potentially inflammatory jumping-off points which have been bandied about. The following statements assume we are in a city which is probably not New York or Los Angeles, and that we're talking about an older model, cliched regional theatre, pre-recession.

Do You Agree with This Statement or Not, and Why? What's Been Your Experience?

-- Locals are amateurs or could be called pro-ams, whereas professionals are from out-of-town.
-- This discussion isn't even relevant anymore because there are no such things as lines between amateur, pro-am, and professional theatre, and the recession is proving that.
-- Theatres want to hire the best/most appropriate person for the job, and if that person lives elsewhere, the theatre will use its available funding to facilitate bringing in the best person for the job; if the theatre has the money, they'll hire the best person from far away. If not, they'll hire the best person from close by.
-- The locals here in [insert city name here] must not be very good because they're still local and haven't moved to New York or LA. If they were serious about working in the theatre, they would have moved to a larger city than this by now.
-- The locals must not be very good if they have to hold down an additional job outside of the theatre to get by and therefore can't make daytime rehearsals.
-- To do a good job and earn a living doing theatre, one needs graduate-level training from a good school that, more often than not, is not located in the city in which professionals wind up doing their work, therefore of course the "professionals" come from somewhere else. (ie went to grad school in New Haven, work in Dallas, went to grad school in New York, work in Chicago, etc.)
-- Professional and graduate school training is ruining the American regional theatre model by churning out fleets of mercenary "professionals" who don't care about the cities in which they're living, but only the theatre in which they're working.
-- How are you supposed to "earn a living" doing theatre if you don't live in a theatre hub like New York? So people who live in New York are automatically outsiders to whatever "local" community they "invade" when they want to work professionally, outside of New York?
-- Regional theatre audiences expect the artistic variety that only a steady stream of newcomers and out-of-towners can provide, rather than the same old local stock.
-- It is cheaper to bring in actors and artists from out-of-town than to keep dozens of people on payroll and with benefits for a season. To fill the variety of roles and positions one needs for a successful theatre season, we would have to keep hundreds of people on retainer to make good shows and who has the money for that?
-- Since regional theatres were intended to be an alternative to Broadway, audiences expect their regional theatres to serve as a window to what's going on in larger, more artistically advanced cities, rather than just reflect local fare.
-- Theatres can't lure audiences in without the appeal of "big-city" names or an imported staff of artists.
-- Smaller mom-and-pop operations eventually implode without the administrative professionalization that staffers specializing in those particular areas bring. (Art people can't do money, money people can't do art.)
-- Local designers won't know what to do with a larger regional theatre design budget even if we did want to hire them because they're used to smaller budgets and they won't know how to fill the space.
-- As Americans, we will always have a "grass is greener" attitude when it comes to art and privilege the unfamiliar (from elsewhere) over the familiar (local).
-- Larger theatres will automatically have less personal connection with their audiences because of their sheer size and need to fill the theatre with more people. In other words, a theatre which seats 600 nightly will naturally have less connection to its audiences than a theatre which seats 20 nightly.
-- Professionals don't care about their work in the way that amateurs do because amateurs are doing theatre out of love, whereas the professionals are doing theatre for money.

Bring your coffee on Saturday morning!

Big Post of Mike Daisey Stuffs

Can't talk about the state of American theatre and its fiscal status without engaging the work of Mike Daisey -- monologuist & provocateur.

Ok, so first of all, there's his piece How Theatre Failed America.  Here's Daisey's article from Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger.  Here's a YouTube excerpt of the monologue.

Here's an interview with Daisey from the Denver Post.

There's Teresa Eyring's rebuttal in American Theatre magazine, called "How Theatre Saved America, part I."  

Here's Daisey's rebuttal to Eyring.

Here's Eyring's follow-up, "How Theatre Saved American, part II."  

The Guardian UK takes on the kerfuffle.  (This post links to many others which are worth investigating.)

GOLD STAR ALERT:  The items of value in this blog post (about the Wilma production) are in the comments section -- LOTS of people want to talk about the issues Daisey raises, and many post links to other fiscal/cultural studies that may be of use for us.

After Eyring, Daisey took on Todd Olsen, Artistic Director of the American Stage Theatre in St. Petersburg, FL, who emailed Daisey a challenge.  Here's round two.  And a follow-up.

I'll paste below an editorial from Back Stage West on Daisey (you'd otherwise need password-restricted database access to read it online).

................

The Sweet and Sour Smell of Regional Theatre Success

Back Stage West 15.14 (April 3, 2008)

Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2008 Nielsen Business Media, Inc. 

A little over three months ago, President Bush signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2008, authorizing a $20.1 million funding increase for the National Endowment for the Arts, bringing its budget to $144.7 million--its highest level since 1995. Not that a lame-duck chief executive would pander to artists to bolster his political fortunes, but the increase did earn Bush some upbeat press. Since studies have shown that every dollar of federal, state, and local arts appropriations has a measurable economic impact on communities, the nonprofit world--including regional theatres--rightly rejoiced.

But a funny thing happened on the way to fiscal nirvana. In the mainstream press and in the blogosphere, the mood has turned sour. Monologist Mike Daisey, for example, recently published an essay in The Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly, called "The Empty Spaces: Or, How Theater Failed America." He argues that nonprofit theatres have become too corporate, too top-heavy with administrators and nonartistic personnel. Worse, he says, their mission has morphed into a risk-averse hash of the original intention of the regional theatre movement: "to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage, and health insurance." Blame the "increasingly complex corporate infrastructure" of these organizations, Daisey declares; blame the expanding marketing and fundraising teams that raise "millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier." Frankly, these assessments seem reductive: There's no founding document stipulating that all nonprofit theatres must be repertory companies, nor is there conclusive proof that young companies aren't being formed every day, drawing in young audiences and young (or younger) donors. What's salient about Daisey's essay, however, is the growing sense that artists are increasingly becoming an afterthought in a business model that too often prioritizes the corporate over the creative.

Here's an example of what we mean. Referring to Daisey's essay, a recent New York Times feature noted that while theatres such as the Guthrie in Minneapolis; Arena Stage and the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C.; the Signature Theatre in Virginia; and Berkeley Repertory Theatre in California have raised tens of millions of dollars to build new homes, politicians don't see these projects as artist-centered but as forms of urban renewal popular with their constituents. For high-level donors, the projects are seen more as a way to affix their names to buildings than to provide havens for artists. Is there something wrong when millions of dollars are raised and spent on building projects while artists remain largely underpaid and underemployed?

Yes, this is an old squall: No artist or staffer ever feels adequately compensated for his or her work. Speaking of which, on the listserv of Dramaturgy.net, the literary manager of a major regional theatre and an Off-Off-Broadway director have been mixing it up on the topic of internships at regional theatres. While no one expects the rare internship stipend to pay the rent, the debate is about ethics: Is it right for regional theatres to rely on cheap labor when top administrators (i.e., artistic and managing directors) often earn six-figure salaries? Indeed, was the nonprofit business model meant to make people rich?

Daisey's solution is a wholesale reevaluation of the regional theatre system. Others--noting the recent bankruptcy filing of Buffalo's Studio Arena Theatre--believe some retrenchment is in order and that we should lobby for more public and private arts funding. Truthfully, all these ideas have merit. We ask industry leadership organizations, such as Theatre Communications Group, to consider Daisey's criticism seriously; perhaps they could convene a special conference to address whether administrators receive outsized shares of the funding pie, thus dewing theatre artists appropriate compensation. Daisey also notes that regional theatres too often import actors from New York. That too should be a prominent part of the agenda.

Yet we also call on everyone to sell the public on giving generously to your local regional theatre. The American theatre community is depending on it.

For Editorial submissions: c/o Back Stage West 5055 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036 email: bswedditorial@backstage.com

Source Citation:"The sweet and sour smell of regional theatre success.(Our View)." Back Stage West 15.14 (April 3, 2008): 7(1). General OneFile. Gale. Boston Public Library. 22 May 2009 

Jack Reuler of Mixed Blood Theatre

A personal reflection about the gaps between commercial and non-profit theatre, with a focus on questions about the success of the regional theatre.

Some Older Materials

The next bits here are from TCG, circa 2002-2003.  I wonder if we might glean some insight from them.

-An article called Art Will Out by Jaan Whitehead (SITI Co./Theatre for a New Audience)

Here's an excerpt:

"The deepest essence of theatre is the connection of the actor to the audience. You do not need sets, lights, costumes or even a stage to create this connection or to create theatre; you just need an actor speaking to an audience. We tend to think of our theatre institutions as the means by which this connection takes place, the means by which we gather resources to produce the art and gather an audience to witness it. But we do not think very much about the fact that the theatre institutions we create are not a neutral means for doing this, that the institutions themselves affect not only what art is presented to what audience but which artists create the art and how it relates to the wider community. Because our institutions are so familiar to us—they seem so natural and inevitable—we do not ask the probing questions about how they affect and mediate the art. In fact, in seeming to be the obvious answer to the issue of how to produce theatre, the institutional model becomes a mask that obscures these deeper questions."

-A roundtable discussion titled "For Institutions: Is Art the Bottom Line?"

Participants of the roundtable:

Beth Emelson, Naomi Grabel, Irene Lewis, Michael Maso, Jonathon Moscone, Jim Nicola, James Still,  Paula Tomei