New York Neo-Classical Ensemble

So I’ve Been Thinking…

Reading Outrageous Fortune, prepping for my new gig at the Old Vic, and thinking long and hard about the nature of companies, what makes good work happen, and the realities of facilitating good work and good relationships. 

I meet so many frustrated low-level mid-twenties people working for institutions we would’ve killed to work at when we were 18 and reading about the birth of Off-Broadway.  And they’re hungry to take the reins and create a new theater that addresses their concerns, is affordable to them, and allows them to put on work that makes them proud.  (Also re-reading Seagull for a probably happening production, so Treplev’s new forms rallying cry keeps ringing through my head, ironies and all).  It’s the youth talking, I know.  A naive belief that things can be changed, and things WILL become better because they should.  And I know that there are practicalities and concerns I have no concept of, but at the end of the day, if the art isn’t good why exhaust yourself putting it together? 

We all know the system is broken in so many ways, and most of them we have zero control over. I was talking to my friend/Three Sisters Director Jess Chayes about mission statements, and I was rereading ours.  The bit that I go back and forth on is (and i’m somewhat paraphrasing) “we seek to revive the belief that the spoken word can change the world around us.”  Sometimes I think it’s just a nifty, optimistic sentence, sometimes I feel it doesn’t actually mean anything and just sounds hokey.  Recently, I’ve been thinking of it differently. It’s Positive Action, the cornerstone of Neo-Classical Technique.  That at each moment we fight with everything we have to get what we want without fear of failure.  And at the moment, over coffees and drinks, I kinda really believe in its beautiful impracticality.  Louis says on occasion (again, paraphrasing) “I wouldn’t recommend living your life like this, it’d get pretty ugly.” Well, I want it to get ugly.  I want a beautiful, multi-dimensional, new theater.  So, I gotta try and make that happen. 

There’s a huge disconnect between the great work I’ve seen this year (and I have seen great work done by companies large and small both independently and through institutions) and what gets programmed each season by the majority of institutions. I understand that when you’re dealing with millions of dollars, most of them gleaned through the blood sweat and tears of overworked development staff, that strings come attached to those millions of dollars.  Everyone knows the salaries keep shrinking as the buildings get bigger, and there are boards to be dealt with and an aging moneyed audience who isn’t even coming out in the same numbers they used to. And there’s a huge failure in terms of cultivating young audiences because the fact is they can’t support you philanthropically.  How do you balance doing new exciting work, pleasing your donors and foundations,  building new audiences, giving stage time to developing artists and established artists, and still have enough cash flow to keep the lights on?  I don’t really know.

BUT

Never doubt the ability of a talented, inspired group of intellectually curious young people to reinvigorate the American Theater.  Group Theater, Steppenwolf, Wooster Group, the Open Theater, etc. There are new approaches, new company models, and new ways of going about creating. 

I think one issue is that, at the end of the day, this is a very go-it alone business.  Collaboration is what makes theater, but success remains singular.  We want OUR success, OUR recognition, OUR career.  And I think that’s kinda death.  WE are capable of so much, whereas I am capable of comparatively little.  Collective ownership of the endeavor seems to be key.

Expect a couple more of these, probably, maybe.  It’s now my job to think about the needs of young artists and what they can get from established artists.  And I think there’s more to be gleaned than just sitting for an hour in a room that happens to contain Alec Baldwin.  I’m trying to articulate solutions, and they’re not coming out as of yet - other than affordable or free space to rehearse and perform in. 

Back to normal As You Like It development blogging I promise.