Thinking Out Loud in Public

playbill.com/article/b…

Brown and Trinity Rep shutting down MFA in Acting and Directing.

Let me take this opportunity to plug my book DIY Theater MFA.

My friend Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune discusses the changes of “emphasis” at the National Endowment for the Arts here. I agree with the reactions of Chicago arts leaders. At the same time, this is why I have argued against seeking government funding in Building a Sustainable Theater. As we saw when Congress eliminated the Federal Theatre Project during the anti-communism scare in 1939, the political winds change and suddenly your business model is on shaky ground. Frankly, politicians are craven and often not very bright, and kowtowing to them undermines your creative independence. Alan Jacobs, writing in The Hedgehog Review on a different but related topic, provides enlightening insights about relying on others to support your interests in his essay “What To Do When Management Won’t Take Your Side—Or Even When It Does: Persuasion is the only option.” BTW, The Hedgehog Review is an excellent publication.

Every once in a while, rarely, I have one of Those Dreams. These are dreams that have a very different form than my normal dreams, and usually communicatre something to me in a language very different from the way I think. In other words, these dreams (of which I have had a total of three in a decade) seem to come from someone other than me, and are not action oriented, although they can be narrative. And when I awaken, I always feel sort of peaceful.

Let me give you an example. About six or seven years ago, I had a dream in which this sentence came through: “The worst thing about life is that you can’t win; the best thing about it is that you can’t lose.” I’m still mulling that one.

Last night, I had another, although this was more literary in content. I was “shown” that there are only five stories in the world, and each was described to me. I remember feeling as if it was so simple, and yet explained everything. Of course, as with a lot of dreams, when you cross from the dream into awakening, I left three of the five story types behind. But here are the two I remember. The first is the “simplest” story, and was #1; the last was the most complex, and was #5.

#1. The Easy Win: This is a story (or a part of a story) in which the protagonist encounters a challnging situation and discovers they have everything they need to deal with it. The message of this story: the universe is on your side, you are loved, you’ve got this.

#5: The Ritual: this is the most complicated, and the most common story we tell. The Ritual story can have two outcomes: negative (tragedy) and positive (heroic). In the course of the Ritual, the main character goes through a series of challenges of increasing danger. Regardless of whether they “win” or “lose” the challenge, they emerge with greater understanding. The message: the universe, other people, and yourself if far more complicated than you give them credit for, and the ritual exists to deepen your awareness of this.

As with many dreams, this one seemed more profound at the time because it was accompanied by a sort of calm clarity–that peacefulness I mentioned. In the light of day, these insights seem to my intellectual mind as sort of simple. But in the dream, this wasn’t about the stories we tell ourselves in novels, plays, and films, but rather that these were somehow the meta-narratives of the universe that placed human experience within a narrative frame. Indeed, it was more than human experience, but included the stories of all living beings as well.

I don’t think this means looking at everything that happens and asking “what am I supposed to learn from this?,” as if it was an elaborate story problem that leads to a simple moral. I don’t think it is about learning, but rather about understanding, which is different in depth and may be something deeply felt but that is beyond words.

I wonder how this knowledge will change the way that I look at events.

I also really wish I could remember the other three stories!!!

[Since I just sort of launched into The Rooted Stage Series without really explaining what I was trying to do, I think I ought to pause an provide some context. I’ve tried several times to write a Preface/Introduction, but got bogged down. Here, I want to do this as if I was being interviewed by a slightly skeptical version of me, in dialogue form. So: Me is, well, me; and MeToo is the skeptical questioner. MeToo’s lines will be bolded, and my answers will be regular text.]

MeToo: Welcome to “Excuse Me, but WTF???,” the podcast where we try to get to the bottom of just what the heck some of y’all are thinking. Scott, you’ve just launched on your blog what you are calling a “series” called The Rooted Stage that so far has been focused on American theater in the 18th and 19th century. What in the world made you think this needed to be done???

Me: I sometimes ask this question myself… Well, shortly after I released Building a Sustainable Theater, I was interviewed by Munroe Shearer for HowlRound. Early in the interview, he said: “You give a history lesson in the book about the Theatrical Syndicate, and how it can still be felt in the business models of theatres today. Can you talk a little bit more about what the Syndicate is and what remnants of it we still see today?… I couldn’t believe this was my first time hearing this story.” I’ve heard variations on this theme from many, many people, from current undergrads to retired theater professors, all of whom are fascinated by a story that explains a lot about how we got where we are in the US theater today. So in many ways, this is a supplement to Building a Sustainable Theater, going into greater detail about how the theater became centralized, bureaucratized, and commoditized. And lest that lead to despair, I will talk about all the many great artists who successfully fought against this trend throughout the past century.

MeToo: Why did they fight against it? Wasn’t it the inevitable march of progress?

Me: I’d argue that not only was it not inevitable, it wasn’t even progress! It was the result of particular choices made by people with power at a specific time–choices that may have made sense then, but have negative consequences today. I remember reading a story about ham that is applicable.

MeToo: Ham? Like over-the-top actors?

Me: No, ham like pork. You wanna hear it?

MeToo: I guess?

Me: OK, there is a mother who is teaching her teenaged daughter how to bake a ham. She tells her, “The first thing you have to do is cut the end off of each end of the ham.” Her daughter looks at her quizzically, and asks, “Why?” Mom is stopped dead in her tracks. “Hmmm. I don’t know, actually, it’s the way Grandma taught me to do it. Maybe we should ask her!” It just so happened that Grandma lived next store, so the two of them went over and Mom said, “Hi Mom! I’m teaching Buffy how to bake a ham, and I told her to cut the end off of both the back and the front of the ham. That’s what you taught me, right?” “Yes, it is,” Grandma replied. “Well Buffy wants to know why.” Grandma thinks for a moment and says, “Hmmm. I don’t know. That’s how my mom taught me to do it. Let’s call her at the nursing home and ask her!” So they call the nursing home and Great Grandma answers the phone and Grandma explains the situation and asks her why they always cut the ends off of their hams. Great Grandma is silent for a minute, thinking, and then she says, “Oh! I remember! It’s because I had a very small baking pan, and I had to do that so the ham would fit!”

MeToo: Womp womp. And the point is?

Me: The point is that things that were done to deal with a specific situation eventually get passed down generation to generation as The Way We Do Things, and soon nobody bothers to ask whether we have a larger baking pan now. Listen, a lot of people will read Building a Sustainable Theater and then argue that it is utopian idealism–that the model I describe couldn’t possibly work or people would have done it before. The Rooted Stage shows that people did do it before, but it just hasn’t been discussed much in theater history textbooks.

MeToo: Why do you think that is?

Me: Well, partly because theater history textbooks, which have to cover a lot of years in a small number of pages, tend to focus more on the art and artists than on the business model within which artists made their art. So we (I say “we” because I taught theater history myself) focus on the development of theatrical styles and periods and the biographies of the playwrights, actors, designers, and directors. Nobody wants to talk about real estate and how artists made ends meet because they think it sounds boring and irrelevant. But the effect of leaving all that out is to mask the underlying system of production that shapes what is seen as possible. The result is that people think the way things are now is the way they’ve always been, and so we keep cutting the ends off our theatrical ham.

MeToo: So what?

Me: We’re wasting ham! A lot of it. A lot of very talented people who have things to contribute to the theater are becoming frustrated and discouraged and leaving the theater because the gatekeepers don’t value what they have to offer. And this has been happening for decades, and continues to worsen.

MeToo: Gatekeepers?

Me: The people who decide who gets to work: the casting directors, agents, directors, producers, artistic directors. And most of these people have similar backgrounds, have gone through similar training programs, and reside in the same place, New York City. So more than anything, in The Rooted Stage I’m trying to tell the story of how theater became centralized, homogenized, bureaucratized, and commercialized. After I do that, I also will discuss several movements that did their best, many successfully, to resist that trend, and why we might want to reconsider and revise some of their practices for the 21st century.

MeToo: So you think we can restore a Golden Age?

Me: No.

MeToo: No?

Me: There never was a Golden Age. Making a living by making art is hard and always has been hard. But I think we’ve made it much more difficult, complicated, and costly than it needs to be. Theater doesn’t need to be bureaucratic and institutionalized. The Rooted Stage series is supposed to remind us that human beings built this system to solve particular problems in the late 19th century, and that human beings can dismantle it whenever the system no longer helps art and artists thrive. Building a Sustainable Theater describes one way to make it easier, simpler, and less costly. I have absolutely no doubt that others will come up with additional ideas about how to proceed, and I hope they do. The only people I reject are those who say that there is no alternative to the current system, and the only way to save it is with a massive influx of money from the government and foundations. I think artists have always been best the more independent they’ve been.

MeToo: Might it be the case that theater has been made irrelevant thanks to the mass media of film, radio, TV, streaming, and the internet? These are all art forms based, like theater, on the idea of actors telling a story by pretending to be other people. Maybe theater is just an expensive leftover and its economics no longer work.

Me: That’s always a possibility. When cars were invented, people stopped using horses to get to work. So people who loved horses had to figure out a new way that horses fit into the culture, and people who made horse shoes and feed bags had to figure out what to do next as well. That’s part of life. But if horse lovers stubbornly ignored the effect of the automobile and kept insisting that using horses for daily transportation was the only way to get from Point A to Point B, well, they’d have been laughed at, and rightly so. I think that’s where we’re at right now with the theater, and I think there are a lot of people who are trying to pretend nothing has changed. But I think we should be questioning everything. Everything. And part of that process involves looking closely at how we got to our current situation, and what roads were not taken back then that we might want to think about taking today. Analyze the past, imagine the future.

Before it turns into a celebration of Substack, Sophia Efthimiatou’s post has some wonderful thoughts about having nothing to say as the entryway for true receiving, especially artistic receiving. “What has been lost,” she says,

“is a quality that never came easy to us to begin with, and that is our ability to receive. To receive, as Steinbeck put it, “anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine.”

Recipience has been diminished everywhere in our culture, worst of all in art, which to be considered art at all must fulfill its duty to receive us generously, and where successful, create more space within us for reception. By reception I do not mean acceptance. I mean an anticipation of our humanity, in its totality, from misery to glory. This quality is inherent to all the works we have commonly accepted as “great,” be they plays or novels or paintings or film. But instead of extending an invitation to their audiences, contemporary artists are more and more inclined to abuse them. I have found myself trapped in performances that attempted to rehabilitate me in ways similar to those in “A Clockwork Orange.” Any discomfort I felt did not arise from a sudden recognition of the failings I was instructed to acknowledge within me, but from the stiffness of theater seats I had to endure for indefensibly indulgent runtimes. It occurred to me that I was being treated exactly as I was on social media: like an invisible, inconsequential void, the dark depths of which could only be reached by the loudest projection of opinion. Artists seemed to forget that I was not there as a passive voyeur but as a human being sharing time, oxygen, and a sacred silence with other human beings. It is the silence of amphitheaters and libraries and cathedrals, of the seconds between the last note played at a concert and the eruption of applause, a silence that enters us all simultaneously like communion and within which a unity grows.”

Yesterday, I wrote about the birth of the star system prior to 1870, when notable actors would travel from resident stock company to resident stock company throughout the country, performing with the company actors for a few days and then moving on.

Today, I need to double back to talk about real estate for a moment, because it is crucial to the story of what happened in 1896. To do so, I am reliant on the invaluable work, once again, of Alfred L Bernheim’s 1932 classic (reissued in 1964) The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932. Just a few words about this book. Bernheim was hired by the Actors' Equity Association to write a historical description addressing the question of “how is the theatre run?,” i.e., “the economic factors involved in the business of conducting the enterprise known as ‘the theatre.'” Bernheim endeavored to “analyze the theatre industry as it might the steel industry or the automobile industry or the shoe-string industry, if any of those had been its subject.” The book, which is well worth reading, unfortunately is no longer in print but is available to read online at the Internet Archive to those who are interested, and used copies can be found occasionally online. According to my mentor, Calvin Pritner, the book was standard in graduate theater programs when it was reissued in 1964, but that is no longer the case.

Rather than try to synthesize and paraphrase Bernheim’s discussion of the ownership of theater buildings in the 19th century, I intend to string together a series of quotations from the book. It is another example of how different the business model of theater, commercial and noncommercial, became in the 20th century until this very minute. From this point on, unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are of Bernheim.

If I were going to provide a tl;dr summary of what follows, it would be this:

“During this century and a half each company was a self-contained unit, entirely independent of every other company; entirely independent of every form of outside control and influence, except, of course, that of the taste of the theatregoing public. Each company consisted of a group of relatively permanent actors with a repertoire of standard English plays, which later on was gradually augmented by the addition of contemporary successes from abroad—from Germany and France, as well as from England. The settings, costumes and properties necessary to mount these plays were part of the equipment of each company, and were used repeatedly with necessary alterations and additions as new types of plays were added to the repertoire. Each company controlled, either through ownership or by lease, the theatre in which it played; and as time wore on and the theatre buildings took on a more permanent character, the relationship between a company and a given theatre became closer and closer. The companies continued to travel for part of each season among a limited number of cities, but more and more they remained at their home theatres and were identified with them.”

But let’s be clear: these theater buildings were not the elaborate palaces associated with Broadway or large regional theaters.

“The buildings were flimsy wooden affairs, erected apparently without any idea of permanency. They were burned with discouraging frequency. There is a tradition that one was blown down in a wind storm…It was not until the building of the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in 1766 that there was any serious attempt to make a playhouse durable…”

Often, paying off the cost of the theater building was built into the budget for the first season, and often the cost was financed by the manager himself. “Since the company controlled the theatre, there was no division of receipts between the house and the company. Total gross receipts went to the company out of which, however, had to come rental or the cost of erecting the theatre. For instance, the first permanent theater in America was founded by Lewis Hallam in 1752:

…the profits of Hallam’s company were distributed in eighteen shares. Each of the twelve adult actors, including Hallam, got one. Hallam himself received two additional shares—one for his services as manager and one for the services of his three children. The four remaining shares were assigned to the property.

“Later,” Bernheim adds, “it became common for citizens of a community to aid with subscriptions, in return for which they were entitled to seats for the performances….Still later, when theatres were being erected of a more enduring nature, and when, as a result, they acquired a capital value, they were frequently financed by stock issues, often through public subscription, and were leased to managers for a money rental sufficient to yield a moderate return on the capital expended.”

But the central thing to keep in mind was that the theater company either owned or had a long-term lease of their venue, and the entire endeavor was independently financed:

“…up to about the close of the Civil War, there was no separation of control between the theatre and the company that used it. Whether a company owned its theatre, or leased it, or had the use of it for some consideration, it managed and controlled it in every instance. The theatre [building] was never an independently operated venture as it is nowadays.”

Further:

The manager conducted his enterprise as an individual, or, if he had one or more associates, as often was the case, then as a partnership. All the funds that were needed were supplied by the manager, or managers. There was no outside money in the theatre—no angel to back a show: no speculator in theatrical real estate. No one thought of borrowing money for the theatre, and no one thought of lending it. All the necessary equipment, costumes, properties, sets and effects were bought outright. They could not be rented. There were no theatrical supply houses. The theatre was run on a cash basis.”

Crucially, “The manager was in almost every instance an actor himself, and he was in complete control over every phase of the company’s activity. He was not responsible to any outside interest, for there was never any outside capital invested in the company which might claim a share in management or look for a share of profits.” Indeed. “A theatre owner was not deemed a theatrical manager unless he also actually managed a company and produced plays.”

In other words, resident stock companies were artist owned, artist financed, and artist operated, and thus answered only to the audience. This is one of the things that changed in 1870, and was completely destroyed in 1896.

In Part 4 of this series, I will take a side road and, well, interview myself to explain the purpose of this series. And at long last, Part 5 will bring us to 1870.

Zelda Fichandler, the co-founder of Arena Stage in DC, and one of the Founding Mothers (along with Eva La Gallienne, Margo, Jones, and Nina Vance):

“There is no real way of likening us to other culture carriers such as the British National or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the present Moscow Art Theatre, since we are all of us broke and have small companies instead of very big ones. We spend half of our life at fundraising dinners and defending play choices to citizen boards of directors, since with the impulse that we should have theaters in our land came also the impulse that the community should be part of them, should put up some of the money, should even have a voice in them, and—now hear this!—should even commission theaters into being and hire artistic directors to run them. These artistic directors soon leave, out of enormous fatigue bordering on the Sisyphean, or out of wrath at non-professionals meddling in decisions that are hard enough to make all alone, or out of a general feeling of: ‘Who needs it? What I really want to do is direct, not run an inefficient branch of IBM.”’

This is the problem with the nonprofit system–there are too many non-artists involved, and too much money to be raised. It is why, in *Building a Sustainable Theater,” I suggest that theaters be for-profit, and live within their budget.

In The Long Revolution by Zelda Fichandler, edited by Todd London

As I wrote in The Rooted Stage: Beginnings, part 1 of this series, the first century of the American theater was dominated by the resident stock company which had the following characteristics:

• rooted in a single place
• in a single theater
• using a consistent group of actors
• performed a variety of plays
• independent (i.e., the capital invested in the company came from those within the company itself)
• organized as a cooperative

But all of that changed around 1870, and again in 1896. (Ooh, 1896! Another teaser.) So what happened in 1870?

Not so fast. It didn’t happen all at once–poof! There were several intermediate steps that were based on decisions that seemed pragmatic at the time, but that eventually would lead to the collapse of the resident stock companies entirely. That resident stock companies were locally-owned and self-contained were a mirror of American society in general. As historian Robert Wiebe wrote, “the entire nation at this time was composed of ‘island communities,’ each self-contained, self-sufficient, and loosely connected to other communities. Local autonomy was still the ‘heart of democracy…'”

In the introduction to The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 2) co-editor Christopher Bigsby makes an important connection between Wiebe’s idea of “island communities” and resident stock companies:

In its decentralization, the stock company was fully consistent with Wiebe’s model. Under the stock system, every local community with a theatre constituted an independent producing center, and, in fact, each individual company, in its organization, working relationships, and functional independence, was the theatrical equivalent of Wiebe’s “island community.” Accordingly, actors in stock companies normally led stable, settled lives and enjoyed working conditions comparable to workers in other fields.

Actors performed three nights a week, for instance, until the latter half of the 19th century–how humane is that! But those performances were demanding, to say the least. As Douglas MacDermott outlines in The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 1), a typical performance included:

a five-act main piece and a two-or three-act farce or musical afterpiece, with songs and dances by members of the company between plays and sometimes between acts. A provincial company would have a repertory of at least two dozen main pieces and half as many afterpieces, any combination of which could be performed on a day’s notice. The main pieces included three to six Tudor and Stuart plays, as many as eight others had been written between 1700 and 1750, and ten or more were recent London successes. The afterpieces were normally all of current authorship. Provincial companies did not, except in rare cases of local authorship, introduce new plays."

It was the overlap of plays in the repertory, especially those of Shakespeare, that made the first step toward the rupture of 1870 possible. In the early part of the 19th century, well-known actors, usually from England, began to tour the US. They would contract to perform a set number of plays from their repertoire with the members of the local stock company. Shakespeare was a particular draw. Indeed, as Lawrence Levine writes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, the famed American actor-manager Joseph Jefferson “held Shakespeare responsible for the star system that prevailed for so much of the nineteenth century since “his tragedies almost without exception contain one great character on whom the interest of the play turns, and upon whom the attention of the audience is centered.”

In the paragraph above, I bolded the first step toward 1870: the birth of the star system. It was a very attractive option for resident stock companies, who could provide their audiences with some variety while also charging higher ticket prices and packing the house. Thus, the star actor made an excellent living, and the company members made more than they’d usually make while he was visiting. A win-win. “From the 1820s on,” Bigsby writes, “it became common for a traveling star to be attached to a local stock company for at least part of a season, and increasingly American audiences came to demand nothing less than a star in every performance.” The process, as described by Bigsby and co-editor Donald Wilmeth, was simple:

“A star often arrived the day before the first performance and rehearsed with the company the morning before playing each role. Having played all of his or her roles at least once, the star departed for the next engagement while the company played without a star until the next one arrived.”

The ease of touring was enhanced with the expansion of the railroad system in the US, and soon The Road was seen as being paved with gold by foreign and US stars alike. Famous actors like William Charles Macready, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Matilda Heron, and Julia Dean were stars of the first magnitude who made their fortunes touring.

But soon a problem developed for the local companies. Whereas prior to the star system, an actor in a resident stock company had the opportunity to play a great many roles in rotation and gradually, as they developed their craft, take on larger and more challenging roles. But with the arrival of the star system, this process was truncated, and the best local actors, frustrated in their ambitions, eventually began heading for the major theater towns in order to have a chance at playing more challenging roles and thus becoming stars themselves. The actors of the resident companies who stayed behind, on the other hand, soon became mere backdrops for star turns. But the money was good. For a while.

Predictably, as the stars realized their drawing power, they began demanding a larger and larger percentage of the house, which meant the company remembers saw smaller and smaller profits themselves. However, there seemed to be no other options: audience expectations had been changed. Jack Poggi:

“Tired of the same old faces in the stock companies, audiences came to expect an unbroken succession of new personalities. The managers, realizing that they could not make much money without a star, and that with a famous star they could make a great deal, began competing for the services of the most popular actors by paying higher and higher percentages of the receipts. The biggest stars often demanded so much that the management lost money, even with a full house and increased prices. The only recourse was to cut expenses; the salaries of the local actors were reduced (impelling the better ones to set off in search of stardom, leaving the worse behind), and budgets for scenery and costumes were cut. These economies made for further deterioration of the local company and greater dependence on visiting stars.”

As the quality of the resident company actors deteriorated, the stars began to bring along a co-star, so that they were more fully in control of the quality of their performances. And as the railroad expanded, the stars could travel in comfort, making an excellent living.

Meanwhile, the stock companies began to totter.

Next: Part 3: 1870 [Finally!]

I was at a wonderful, new local restaurant today. It opened several months ago, and it was our first visit. The food was excellent, the atmosphere understated and comfortably classy. There was a nice bar with about eight chairs and fewer than ten tables, each of which sat four people. The restaurant is open five days a week for lunch and dinner. The staff seemed to be the two owners–maybe there was another staff person during another shift, I don’t know. About five of the tables were full, including ours.

So here’s my question: how does a business of this scale make enough money to allow the owners (and additional staff person?) to make a living? And if they can do it, what can theater people learn?

I’m fascinated by the Scottish theater company A Play, a Pie, and a Pint. They’ve just announced their 2025 season, which involves (this year) 18 new plays. Any theater that does work by Dario Fo has my endorsement, and I wish I could see Mistero Buffo.