I have heard a lot of people around the internets bemoaning the lack of new plays produced in this country. I was struck with how disjointed this sentiment is in relationship to my own experience and it got me thinking. Here I am teching a new play this week Marko the prince right after opening a new play last week, The Cure for Love. That’s two world premiers in as many weeks. Yet I hear regularly, often from playwrights, that there are virtually no new plays produced.
Now if this week were a diversion from the norm perhaps I would be more ready to agree, but it is not. In fact most of the lighting design I do is on new plays. This is true by a wide margin too.
I wonder if anyone has numbers on new play productions. Is my experience the anomoly or is there some other component to this discussion that I am missing.
I am sure that there are plenty of playwrights who are upset that *their* plays are not produced as often or at the level they would like. Perhaps people would like to see *more* new plays. But I have a hunch there are a lot of new plays produced in this country at a not insignificant level, regional or Off-B’way and above.
So what am I missing? Would someone care to enlighten me?
Offhand, and with no research to back up anything I’m saying, I’d say that there are tons and tons of plays being done today but that, in the eyes of the powers that be, very few are ready for prime time. Even with plays that are good, there is such a mountain to climb, as you well know, in terms of getting the established papers or reviewers to cover them. I also think that this has always been true.
It is rare for a play (or performance or art show) to get an audience beyond friends and family because most people don’t really know what they like and are not interested in figuring it out. Why should they be? After all, we live in a country that thinks a Liberal Arts education is “useless.” Why would our society have an adventurous (liberal) taste in art/theater? How can it think about art when art is “not worth anything?”
How many of today’s revered artists were shut out by that jerk who did the art reviews for the New York Times in the 1950s and 60s and loved Jackson Pollack? Cannot remember his name, (just found him: Clement Greenburg. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Greenberg) but he turned down Yves Klein, Claes Oldenburg, Mark Rothko, Francis Bacon, and on and on and on. He basically had a choke-hold on the art scene and if he didn’t like you, you were dead in New York. Back then, New York WAS the art scene and many amazing artists (Robert Smithson, Carl Andre, even Warhol) were ignored for years because Greenburg didn’t give them the thumbs-up.
Most people at a successful play are there because someone else told them it was something worth seeing. Usually that “someone” is the media or a reviewer or a marketing department or a show on television to pick the next Elle. My take applies to theater, art, movies, music, pretty much any artistic endeavor, as far as I’m concerned. When I had an art gallery* in Berkeley, which opened in 1968, we could not get ONE reviewer to come to the East Bay for the first M.C. Escher show in the United States.
Less than a year later, when he had hit huge in Europe, another gallery IN SAN FRANCISCO got credit for bringing Escher to this country. Grrrrrrr.
Not only did we introduce Escher, we were the first gallery to show the underground comic artists and we were busted for selling obscenity. We won our trial and that ruling allowed comics by R. Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Greg Irons, Victor Moscoso, and all the others to sell in Berkeley. From there… the story tells itself.
We showed Miro, Wunderlich, Chagall, Kandinsky, Dali, and zillions of other artists but even with all that under our belt, the art critic for the Chronicle, the late Tom Albright, still refused to review a show in Berkeley “because Berkeley wasn’t big enough.”
Our shows eventually became very popular and the gallery eventually moved to, yup, San Francisco where we were reviewed regularly.
Sigh.
*The Phoenix Gallery is now the Si Lowinsky Gallery in New York City and the little theater company that opened next door to us on College Avenue is the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Forty years is a long time.