A View From Stage Right; My Manifesto. by Stage Right
A View From Stage Right; My Manifesto.by Stage Right
There is a problem with the American Theatre.
The vast majority of plays produced on our stages are intimidating, antagonistic and often downright offensive to 50% of Americans. I know this because I am one of them and I see that half of the country votes like I do.
This is not to say these plays aren’t entertaining; many of them are. The actors are often terrific–one of this country’s rich artistic resources is its acting community. Ditto for our directors, designers and the crews who execute these artists’ visions.
But, the content of these plays are anathema to many of us.
Other than New York, San Francisco and much of Los Angeles, the majority of theatre goers in America find these plays antithetical to their personal beliefs. When this is brought up to Artistic Directors in Middle America, when they are confronted and told that they are producing plays that are offensive to their subscribers, they usually respond: “Good! That is my mission, to challenge the audience, to not just entertain but to make them think and re-think their deep beliefs and to see another part of society.”
The trouble is, it doesn’t work both ways. It’s not like the Artistic Directors of theatres in Berkeley or San Francisco or Manhattan are challenging their audiences by making them re-think their beliefs. The sad fact is that the majority of subscribers at non-profit institutions maintain their subscriptions not because they enjoy the plays, but because they don’t want to lose their season seats. And the people who run these theatres know it. In fact, they count on it. Therefore, they have carte blanche in choosing plays that will antagonize and offend many of their supporters. It’s the classic co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship, and it is a big problem.
This is an issue I’ve been wanting to cover here at Big Hollywood from the moment I was given the theatre beat. Today, I finally found my jumping off point.
I stumbled upon a mediocre review of what seems to be a typical, feminist, anti-misogyny, anti-religious right, offensive off-Broadway play. I was looking for a “big picture” issue to set the show up as an example of the ongoing problem in how plays make their way to the stage in the American Theatre World. In a feature article in Time Out, I found what I’d been looking for:
Did you catch it? “I was all commissioned up…” This playwright, Sheila Callaghan, has multiple commissions from mainstream, non-profit theatres to develop her work. You and I finance those commissions, as I explained in a previous post. I want to show you a bit of what you’re paying for.
First, let’s examine her current play, That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play. Let me be clear, this play is being produced on a shoestring budget in a 99-seat theatre in lower-Manhattan by a small non-profit called Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. It is NOT one of the commissioned plays at a larger, non-profit theatre. However, the existence of those commissions allows this playwright to write plays like this. She makes a point to say that mainstream theatres probably would not touch this play, but, because Rattlestick is a non-profit, 501(c)(3), you and I subsidize their existence by allowing them to forgo any kind of tax burden. This is how the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre web page describes the play:
By the way, they omitted the fact that the character of Rodney (”The Rod”) is an Iraq War veteran. That’s the guy who “Holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises.”
The mission statement for Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre is also on their web page:
Two productions ago they featured the 10-year-old play Corpus Christi by Terrance McNally (McNally is hardly an “emerging playwright” in need of a “positive, nurturing experience”). Corpus Christi is infamous for its subject matter; it depicts the final days of Christ with the twelve apostles. Oh, and by the way… Jesus and the apostles are all gay!!! The Last Supper scene cannot be described here.
The production before Corpus Christi was Lady by Craig Wright, creator of ABC’s Dirty, Sexy Money (he too needs a “positive, nurturing experience”?). Here is an excerpt of one reviewer’s take on Lady:
What makes me think that if Andrew Breitbart, Gary Graham and I were watching this play, Mr. Wright’s politics wouldn’t seem too “cleverly camouflaged?” I think you get the picture…
So, let’s reset the stats here:
Time for my “Big Picture” thesis: Broadway continues to present left-wing, anti-traditional American values, anti-religious, feminist, pro-radical gay agenda plays because that is where the non-profit money is. Yes, Broadway is a commercial enterprise and plays there live or die by the ticket-buyers, but the REAL money for playwrights prior to their big Broadway break is found in all of the commissions and grants doled out by Artistic Directors and Dramaturgs (a position within a theatre that deals mainly with research and development) in non-profit and college theatre institutions all over America. And these Artistic Directors and Dramaturgs are all protected financially by you and me. By living in the protected environment of non-profit status, they are operating in corporations that are not burdened by America’s draconian corporate tax laws and they are not worried about having to actually sell tickets to an agreeable audience for their survival. They get their paychecks guaranteed by the efforts of their Development Department, not by producing quality entertainment.
So, how do these plays get chosen? The Dramaturgs or Literary Managers at a non-profit theatre have many research and development roles within the organizations, but a major component of their role is to be the main gateway for the Artistic Director by evaluating script submissions. Dramaturgs are prime magnets for a whole host of interns who eagerly work for prestigious non-profits as a stop on the road to their dream job as a director or playwright or…dramaturg!
A typical dramaturg has a disheveled office with piles of submitted scripts on the floor around her desk. She has at a master’s degree (if not a doctorate) and her thesis (or dissertation) was probably an analysis of Shakespeare’s patriarchal paradigm or O’Neill’s racist subtext or a revisionist take on Medea as a modern-day Sarah Palin. She only listens to the early Indigo Girls (before they went corporate and sold out) and she never misses the opening of a Michael Moore film. She has a TV but no cable or satellite; it is tuned only to the local PBS station and is otherwise used to watch DVDs of obscure documentaries, foreign films, and Robert Altman movies. If she’s in New York, she takes the bus, not the subway, and if in LA, she drives a Prius or takes the subway. She lacks a sense of irony.
Her staff is a group of graduate students who require certain days off to attend the local anti-globalization rallies yet insist on using iPods, iPhones and Macbooks all built by slave labor in Chinese Contract Manufacturing plants. Irony is lost on them, too. They have fine leadership qualities, so much so that they are now the RA for their dorm and are in charge of conducting sensitivity training and sexual-harassment seminars reminding all of the co-eds that “one in four women in college will be sexually assaulted,” and they believe it. They also believe that the non-profit they work for is too corporate and misogynistic and needs to be more diverse, inclusive and “push the boundaries” of the western theatre paradigm.
These are your gatekeepers. These are the people who will read through three or four scripts a day and boil them down to one page summaries for evaluation and judgment. Which types of plays do you think they will recommend? What have they been trained in college to judge as art? What subjects do they find entertaining? If they are looking to embrace a play with a serious message, what message do you think is worth endorsing?
******
Sheila Callaghan’s play is absurd. I think she would agree. It is meant to be absurd and to ridiculously reflect the over-the-top violence depicted in Tarantino movies. It is also meant to point out the absurdity of rampant pornography and the insidious waltzing partners of voyeurism and exhibitionism found on the Internet that young men and women are embracing with alarming aplomb. The sad irony and infuriating reality is that my fellow center/right thinkers in the entertainment industry agree with the hazards of the disintegration of the culture and the demeaning depiction of women in the media. The real targets of Ms. Callaghan’s 90-minute diatribe should be the liberal music executives promoting gangster rap acts or the leftist network executives at MTV who finance disgusting reality shows that do more to objectify women than any issue of Playboy ever could. But the only indictment of the music business is the use of White Snake album art in the poster design for the play. Let’s please note that the standard audience for White Snake is young, white, Mid-Western males. But which is more relevant to the culture of 2009 America, White Snake circa 1983, or Chris Brown and Akon? The rap industry is not targeted because of obvious political correctness considerations.
But even more frustrating is that statement in the Time Out feature: “I was all commissioned up, but I had other material that I wanted to put into a play and no one to write it for.” All commissioned up. According to her bio, Ms. Callaghan received awards or commissions from South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County, California. Playwright’s Horizons and Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan. New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The MAP Foundation, The Susan Smith Blackburn Award, The Whiting Writing Award, The Jerome Fellowship… all organizations, foundations and civic entities giving grants to playwrights to support them while they create their works. If you go to the web pages for these organizations and look at their mission statements, you will see pretty much the same thing: “…makes grants that support emerging artists in the creation, development and production of new works…” blah blah blah. Nothing in there about politics. Nothing about pushing a specific agenda. Nothing about challenging the audience with an extreme viewpoint or philosophy.
But the recipients of these grants all tend to do that. Coincidence? I doubt it. I bet if we take a look at the people evaluating the plays and playwrights who receive these grants, they’ll look a lot like our friendly neighborhood dramaturg and her staff. And so it goes… on and on… the circle continues… all the while talented playwrights who celebrate traditional American ideals with stories of hope lose out to those who proclaim the false courage of “pushing the envelope” of societal norms. And I do not begrudge Ms. Callaghan her livelihood or her well-earned honors. I think she is a talented playwright. My beef is with the ideological vacuum in which she is allowed to create her work. Wouldn’t the American theatre be much more vibrant if ideas and voices were allowed to flourish from all sides of our political and cultural zeitgeist?
This is the problem, or more accurately, the root of the problem with American Theatre today. And the solutions are not easy or cheap but they could actually take effect with relative haste and with very real results. The solutions? You’ll have to wait for Part 2 of this manifesto.
Stage Right is on Facebook
There is a problem with the American Theatre.
The vast majority of plays produced on our stages are intimidating, antagonistic and often downright offensive to 50% of Americans. I know this because I am one of them and I see that half of the country votes like I do.
This is not to say these plays aren’t entertaining; many of them are. The actors are often terrific–one of this country’s rich artistic resources is its acting community. Ditto for our directors, designers and the crews who execute these artists’ visions.
But, the content of these plays are anathema to many of us.
Other than New York, San Francisco and much of Los Angeles, the majority of theatre goers in America find these plays antithetical to their personal beliefs. When this is brought up to Artistic Directors in Middle America, when they are confronted and told that they are producing plays that are offensive to their subscribers, they usually respond: “Good! That is my mission, to challenge the audience, to not just entertain but to make them think and re-think their deep beliefs and to see another part of society.”
The trouble is, it doesn’t work both ways. It’s not like the Artistic Directors of theatres in Berkeley or San Francisco or Manhattan are challenging their audiences by making them re-think their beliefs. The sad fact is that the majority of subscribers at non-profit institutions maintain their subscriptions not because they enjoy the plays, but because they don’t want to lose their season seats. And the people who run these theatres know it. In fact, they count on it. Therefore, they have carte blanche in choosing plays that will antagonize and offend many of their supporters. It’s the classic co-dependent, dysfunctional relationship, and it is a big problem.
This is an issue I’ve been wanting to cover here at Big Hollywood from the moment I was given the theatre beat. Today, I finally found my jumping off point.
I stumbled upon a mediocre review of what seems to be a typical, feminist, anti-misogyny, anti-religious right, offensive off-Broadway play. I was looking for a “big picture” issue to set the show up as an example of the ongoing problem in how plays make their way to the stage in the American Theatre World. In a feature article in Time Out, I found what I’d been looking for:
In telling the tale of a pair of feminist vigilantes slaughtering Christian
right-wingers and gleefully blogging about their spree, Callaghan mashes up Abu
Ghraib and Bon Jovi, Harold Pinter and Jane Fonda’s workout videos. Blood,
Jell-O and other fluids feature heavily.
So does Fonda herself, who appears
as a kind of clueless muse. Putting her onstage as a character began with a
challenge from Fagan, for whom Callaghan wrote the play while in the midst of
fulfilling a series of more straitlaced assignments for theaters like South
Coast Repertory and Playwrights Horizons.
“I was all commissioned up, but I
had other material that I wanted to put into a play and no one to write it for,”
Callaghan explains…
Did you catch it? “I was all commissioned up…” This playwright, Sheila Callaghan, has multiple commissions from mainstream, non-profit theatres to develop her work. You and I finance those commissions, as I explained in a previous post. I want to show you a bit of what you’re paying for.
First, let’s examine her current play, That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play. Let me be clear, this play is being produced on a shoestring budget in a 99-seat theatre in lower-Manhattan by a small non-profit called Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre. It is NOT one of the commissioned plays at a larger, non-profit theatre. However, the existence of those commissions allows this playwright to write plays like this. She makes a point to say that mainstream theatres probably would not touch this play, but, because Rattlestick is a non-profit, 501(c)(3), you and I subsidize their existence by allowing them to forgo any kind of tax burden. This is how the Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre web page describes the play:
A pair of radical feminist ex-strippers scour the country on a murderous rampage
against right-wing pro-lifers, blogging about their exploits in gruesome detail.
Meanwhile, a scruffy screenwriter named Owen tries to bang out his magnum opus
in a hotel room as his best friend Rodney (“The Rod”) holds forth on rape and
other manly enterprises. When Owen decides to incorporate the strippers into his
screenplay, the boundaries of reality begin to blur, and only a visit from Jane
Fonda can help keep worlds from blowing apart. Sheila Callaghan’s THAT PRETTY
PRETTY; OR, THE RAPE PLAY is a violently funny and disturbing excavation of the
dirty corners of our imaginations.
By the way, they omitted the fact that the character of Rodney (”The Rod”) is an Iraq War veteran. That’s the guy who “Holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises.”
The mission statement for Rattlestick Playwrights Theatre is also on their web page:
Rattlestick is supported, in part, by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts. Ever want to complain about the sales tax or hotel tax when you visit New York? The good folks at Rattlestick thank you for your support.In order to best foster the future voices of American Theater, Rattlestick
Playwrights Theater is committed to the development and production of innovative
new plays.
Our mission is to provide a positive, nurturing experience for
emerging playwrights, to present diverse and challenging plays that otherwise
might not be produced, and to foster the future voices of the American
theater.
Two productions ago they featured the 10-year-old play Corpus Christi by Terrance McNally (McNally is hardly an “emerging playwright” in need of a “positive, nurturing experience”). Corpus Christi is infamous for its subject matter; it depicts the final days of Christ with the twelve apostles. Oh, and by the way… Jesus and the apostles are all gay!!! The Last Supper scene cannot be described here.
The production before Corpus Christi was Lady by Craig Wright, creator of ABC’s Dirty, Sexy Money (he too needs a “positive, nurturing experience”?). Here is an excerpt of one reviewer’s take on Lady:
Craig Wright has done a masterful job in cleverly camouflaging his anti war,
anti Bush sentiments within the confines of a hunting trip gone sour. As Vice
Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s son prepares to deploy to Iraq this play
resonates in a most timely manner.
What makes me think that if Andrew Breitbart, Gary Graham and I were watching this play, Mr. Wright’s politics wouldn’t seem too “cleverly camouflaged?” I think you get the picture…
So, let’s reset the stats here:
- Sheila Callaghan was “all commissioned up” but wanted to write another play about two mass-murdering feminists who target right-to-lifers. One of the only male characters is an Iraq-war veteran who “holds forth on rape and other manly enterprises.”
- The play is being produced by a non-profit theatre (that means they do not pay any taxes on income, meaning you and I are subsidizing their efforts) which claims they are producing “diverse and challenging” plays that “otherwise might not be produced.”
- In the last calendar year, they presented a play that most Christians would find offensive and blasphemous written by one of America’s most-produced playwrights,
- and a play written by a creator of a prime-time network show in which he “has done a masterful job in cleverly camouflaging his anti war, anti Bush sentiments.”
Time for my “Big Picture” thesis: Broadway continues to present left-wing, anti-traditional American values, anti-religious, feminist, pro-radical gay agenda plays because that is where the non-profit money is. Yes, Broadway is a commercial enterprise and plays there live or die by the ticket-buyers, but the REAL money for playwrights prior to their big Broadway break is found in all of the commissions and grants doled out by Artistic Directors and Dramaturgs (a position within a theatre that deals mainly with research and development) in non-profit and college theatre institutions all over America. And these Artistic Directors and Dramaturgs are all protected financially by you and me. By living in the protected environment of non-profit status, they are operating in corporations that are not burdened by America’s draconian corporate tax laws and they are not worried about having to actually sell tickets to an agreeable audience for their survival. They get their paychecks guaranteed by the efforts of their Development Department, not by producing quality entertainment.
So, how do these plays get chosen? The Dramaturgs or Literary Managers at a non-profit theatre have many research and development roles within the organizations, but a major component of their role is to be the main gateway for the Artistic Director by evaluating script submissions. Dramaturgs are prime magnets for a whole host of interns who eagerly work for prestigious non-profits as a stop on the road to their dream job as a director or playwright or…dramaturg!
A typical dramaturg has a disheveled office with piles of submitted scripts on the floor around her desk. She has at a master’s degree (if not a doctorate) and her thesis (or dissertation) was probably an analysis of Shakespeare’s patriarchal paradigm or O’Neill’s racist subtext or a revisionist take on Medea as a modern-day Sarah Palin. She only listens to the early Indigo Girls (before they went corporate and sold out) and she never misses the opening of a Michael Moore film. She has a TV but no cable or satellite; it is tuned only to the local PBS station and is otherwise used to watch DVDs of obscure documentaries, foreign films, and Robert Altman movies. If she’s in New York, she takes the bus, not the subway, and if in LA, she drives a Prius or takes the subway. She lacks a sense of irony.
Her staff is a group of graduate students who require certain days off to attend the local anti-globalization rallies yet insist on using iPods, iPhones and Macbooks all built by slave labor in Chinese Contract Manufacturing plants. Irony is lost on them, too. They have fine leadership qualities, so much so that they are now the RA for their dorm and are in charge of conducting sensitivity training and sexual-harassment seminars reminding all of the co-eds that “one in four women in college will be sexually assaulted,” and they believe it. They also believe that the non-profit they work for is too corporate and misogynistic and needs to be more diverse, inclusive and “push the boundaries” of the western theatre paradigm.
These are your gatekeepers. These are the people who will read through three or four scripts a day and boil them down to one page summaries for evaluation and judgment. Which types of plays do you think they will recommend? What have they been trained in college to judge as art? What subjects do they find entertaining? If they are looking to embrace a play with a serious message, what message do you think is worth endorsing?
******
Sheila Callaghan’s play is absurd. I think she would agree. It is meant to be absurd and to ridiculously reflect the over-the-top violence depicted in Tarantino movies. It is also meant to point out the absurdity of rampant pornography and the insidious waltzing partners of voyeurism and exhibitionism found on the Internet that young men and women are embracing with alarming aplomb. The sad irony and infuriating reality is that my fellow center/right thinkers in the entertainment industry agree with the hazards of the disintegration of the culture and the demeaning depiction of women in the media. The real targets of Ms. Callaghan’s 90-minute diatribe should be the liberal music executives promoting gangster rap acts or the leftist network executives at MTV who finance disgusting reality shows that do more to objectify women than any issue of Playboy ever could. But the only indictment of the music business is the use of White Snake album art in the poster design for the play. Let’s please note that the standard audience for White Snake is young, white, Mid-Western males. But which is more relevant to the culture of 2009 America, White Snake circa 1983, or Chris Brown and Akon? The rap industry is not targeted because of obvious political correctness considerations.
But even more frustrating is that statement in the Time Out feature: “I was all commissioned up, but I had other material that I wanted to put into a play and no one to write it for.” All commissioned up. According to her bio, Ms. Callaghan received awards or commissions from South Coast Repertory Theatre in Orange County, California. Playwright’s Horizons and Cherry Lane Theatre in Manhattan. New York State Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The MAP Foundation, The Susan Smith Blackburn Award, The Whiting Writing Award, The Jerome Fellowship… all organizations, foundations and civic entities giving grants to playwrights to support them while they create their works. If you go to the web pages for these organizations and look at their mission statements, you will see pretty much the same thing: “…makes grants that support emerging artists in the creation, development and production of new works…” blah blah blah. Nothing in there about politics. Nothing about pushing a specific agenda. Nothing about challenging the audience with an extreme viewpoint or philosophy.
But the recipients of these grants all tend to do that. Coincidence? I doubt it. I bet if we take a look at the people evaluating the plays and playwrights who receive these grants, they’ll look a lot like our friendly neighborhood dramaturg and her staff. And so it goes… on and on… the circle continues… all the while talented playwrights who celebrate traditional American ideals with stories of hope lose out to those who proclaim the false courage of “pushing the envelope” of societal norms. And I do not begrudge Ms. Callaghan her livelihood or her well-earned honors. I think she is a talented playwright. My beef is with the ideological vacuum in which she is allowed to create her work. Wouldn’t the American theatre be much more vibrant if ideas and voices were allowed to flourish from all sides of our political and cultural zeitgeist?
This is the problem, or more accurately, the root of the problem with American Theatre today. And the solutions are not easy or cheap but they could actually take effect with relative haste and with very real results. The solutions? You’ll have to wait for Part 2 of this manifesto.
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