“we have lost sight of any collective belief that society could be different. Instead of a better society, the only thing almost everyone strives for is to better their own position – as individuals – within the existing society.”
Richard Wilson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level
No, I’m not talking about the freebies we give to family and friends who come to our show. I’m talking about the way book proposals use the term: “comparables,” books that are similar to what you’re writing, books that yours could be compared to.
Theater has been comping the wrong competition for over a century.
At first, theater saw movies as the competition, which made total sense because once the Theatrical Syndicate abandoned most theater buildings on “the road,” theater owners began scheduling movies into their now-empty spaces. When theater was competing with silent movies, we focused on the fact that live theater had actors who talked; when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer arrived in 1927, that argument no longer worked. Movies could provide entertainment for a much lower cost than live theater, while telling stories in the same way theater did: actors pretending to be characters. Ever since then, we’ve been trying to catch up. We hitched our wagon to “liveness,” especially if there was a national star in the cast. That worked a little. Then we tried to sell prestige–theatergoers were among an elite. Except that theater needed to sell a lot of tickets to make ends meet, so we couldn’t be too elite. At the same time, commercial theater tried to keep up with the spectacle that film could provide. That was harder, because film had more money and better technology, and once green screens and CGI started to appear, theater was on the ropes. Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark was (or at least should have been) the last gasp of that competition. One wonders how many actors have to be injured before our quest for theatrical spectacle will be abandoned.
If movies killed theater with spectacle, TV stole all the non-spectacle stories: situation comedies, doctor shows, soap operas, domestic dramas, legal dramas, cop shows. All to be consumed without having to leave the comfort of your home. Then TV started comping movies, and the race was on. Meanwhile, theater kept on comping both of them (hey! see Hugh Jackman In Person in Music Man!), and kept getting it’s ass handed to it. Finally, streaming services and the internet delivered the coup de grace. Everything everywhere all at once without getting out of your jammies. Game over.
The thing is that theater never should have been comping movies, TV, or streaming services in the first place, because all of them are mass media whereas theater is a local medium. Local in the sense that, at any one time, only the people present in a particular town in a particular building at a specific time can participate. This is so obvious, and yet it is usually ignored. No matter how popular the live version of Wicked is, the Gershwin Theatre can only hold 15,464 people a week, compared to the $165M the movie version brought in on the first weekend. To make the comparison concrete, the live theater version would have to sell every ticket for $10,669 to match the movie box office take. That illustrates the difference between “local” and “mass,” and we should take it seriously.
So if film and TV are not appropriate comps for theater, then what is? Well, I would argue that something like a local restaurant might be a good starting place, at least as far as scale is concerned. It is something that requires people to leave home to partake of a unique experience in a particular town and a specific space that has a limited capacity. People are eating something that might be conceivably cooked at home, either by themselves or in a frozen or delivered version ala Hello Fresh. So what is the “value added” that can make a local restaurant viable? Why are people willing to leave the comfort of their own home to pay considerably more for food than they’d pay to make it at home? Yes, if it’s a fancy restaurant, it sometimes has something to do with celebrating a “special event,” as a commenter argued about theater in a previous post on Creative Insubordination entitled The Value of Liveness. But a restaurant would have a hard time making ends meet by relying on Valentine’s Day and anniversary celebrations. Sometimes, people just head out to their favorite pizza place, even though they could just as easily cook up a frozen pizza at home faster and more inexpensively.
The point I’m trying to make isn’t really about what makes people go to a local restaurant (although I think people in theater would do well to think hard about that topic), but rather that the scale of a local business like a restaurant matches that of a local business like a theater, and so could serve as a more appropriate comp than a mass medium like movies or TV. This involves a real transformation in the way that we think about theater, and of artists’s place in the theater, which might be more of a sticking point than we’d like to admit, because we’d have to abandon fantasies.
Nobody becomes a “star waiter” working at a local restaurant; in fact, the idea of becoming a waiter in order to acquire international fame and fortune is patently absurd (Hollywood “discovery” myths to the contrary). Sometimes a chef might make the jump to celebrity status, I guess, if they end up on the Food Channel or publishing a bestselling cookbook, but for the most part being a waiter or chef or cook is an end in itself, something you do because you like the work or need the money. Someone starting a restaurant may have a vision involving its atmosphere and decoration, the type and quality of the food served, the friendliness provided to regular customers (“your usual, Norm?") or any number of things that will give the restaurant a special identity. But the goal isn’t mass fame, it’s local appreciation. And that, ultimately, is the first transformation in our thinking that needs to occur in order for theater to thrive.
What is it that Biff begs from Willy near the end of Death of a Salesman? “Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?” There are better dreams to dream than fame and fortune, one that focuses on the day-to-day enjoyment of making something artistically nourishing for people you care about and who care about you.
As Apple famously said, Think Different.
”The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated."
Ortega Y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses
I recently stumbled up a thirteen-year-old blog post by the always-insightful arts thinker Diane Ragdale, who tragically passed away less than a year ago. (You could do a lot worse than to spend time working through her ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.) The post I’m looking at here is entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi”, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that just about every paragraph provides an insight that could instantly make our theater system better.
The first half of the essay is a summary–actually, more than a summary; an _analysis – of an article in the NY Times about the indie jazz label Pi Recordings, and I think we are best served by simply quoting her:
Here are a few keys to Pi’s success (which I gleaned from the article):
(1) Unlike many labels that flood the market with product (often as a hedge against the uncertainty of not knowing which will succeed or not), Pi releases a handful of albums per year and is highly selective in choosing which artists to get behind. Virtually everything it releases meets with critical acclaim. Because it has earned a reputation for consistently putting out great albums and has a very clear niche, it has a devoted (and growing) fan base.
(2) Given its limited release schedule, and the limited revenue potential of each of its releases (these are not mainstream artists), Pi keeps its overhead low. Its owners are pragmatic and disciplined. By staying small they have been able to maintain artistic integrity.
(3) Pi has a long courtship with an artist before it makes a commitment. Once in, however, Pi invests deeply in the development of its artists and ensures that each receives sufficient resources, attention, and support from the label. This is a critical factor in the label’s remarkable track record and reputation.
Pi’s strategies are serving both its artists and its customers.
To boil it down further:
Ragsdale then goes on to share her own brutally honest points about arts organizations today (I’m going to use bold to highlight my personal favorites):
It seems that more than a few overleveraged and underperforming professional nonprofit arts organizations need to both better differentiate themselves and hold themselves to higher artistic standards; to right-size their institutions and reduce fixed costs given the amount of income they can reasonably expect for the forseeable future; and to provide more time, attention, and resources to artists and to the development, production, and thoughtful promotion of artistic works.
And then there is a paragraph that ought to become the screensaver on every computer at Americans for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts (consider the whole paragraph bolded):
I’d much rather live in a community with a sustainable number of boutique arts organizations than one with a deluxe mall featuring four high-end department-stores (the “flagship” orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet companies) that suck up the majority of the resources and a bunch of strip malls made up of undercapitalized retail chains and mom-and-pop shops that either saw their best days in 1985 and haven’t been able to make improvements since, or were formed in recent years and (while perhaps promising) are struggling for attention, customers and capital.
I seriously fear that the strip mall nonprofit arts sector is our future.
Her diagnosis (back to my bolding):
We tend to think of a ˜sustainable state" for the arts and culture sector as being one in which existing arts organizations have achieved equilibrium and can crank along in perpetuity. This is wrongheaded: even if we could achieve a state in which all existing organizations could secure adequate resources to keep running year-after-year, the lack of creative destruction in the sector would eventually lead to its stultification (oh wait, we may be there now). This is one of the consequences of letting some institutions get ‘too big to fail’ (and too big is relative to the size of city you are in and the other arts organizations in your market): the majority of arts sector resources get sucked into the incumbents and rather than creative destruction (reinvention of those firms or their replacement by younger, more innovative ones) we end up with plain old destruction (losing the boutiques and watching the big organizations calcify).
As Ragsdale predicted, we are seeing the calcification of our “too big to fail” regional theaters even as we speak. For example, this year Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre has used its subsidy to produce Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and the upcoming production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Color me unimpressed.
There needs to be a whole lot of “creative destruction."
As Diane Ragsdale’s analysis of Pi Recordings suggests, if theater is going to not just survive but creatively thrive, it isn’t going be because of the Big Theaters, it’s going to be through the efforts of the Indies who are focused on high quality, developing artists, serving audiences, and staying small and focused. This has certainly been true historically. You can see these principles in action within the theaters that revolutionized the theater in the late 19th- the early-20th centuries: Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre in Paris, J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society in London, Otto Brahm’s Die Freie Buhne in Berlin, and the America’s entire Little Theater Movement that resisted the artistically barren commercial Broadway stage in the first decades of the 20th century. All were small, selective, and artist-focused.
And this is why former-NEA Chair Rocco Landesmann had it completely backwards when he suggested, at the Arena Stage’s “From Scarcity to Abundance” convening in January 2011, that because the supply of theater [in the major metropolises – after all, Landesmann was a New Yorker] had outstripped audience demand for it, therefore the NEA ought to stop giving grants to a bunch small, obscure theaters scattered across America and instead focus it’s largesse on a few major insitutions (e.g., Steppenwolf and the Guthrie, or the Arena for that matter). Ironically, it was Diane Ragsdale who was interviewing Landesmann when he said these words. Seven months later, it is clear she disagreed with his diagnosis: Ragsdale is putting her money on the pi’s.
It is also why we shouldn’t rely on organizations like the Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition, led by “a small leadership committee consisting of Arena Stage, Center Theatre Group, Pasadena Playhouse, The Public Theater, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre of Washington DC” who are asking Congress to provide –get this – $500M a year for five years to help regional theaters stay afloat (the entire annual allocation for the NEA currently stands at a grudging $207.5M). First of all, the geographical footprint of that “leadership committee” is breathtakingly narrow: two theaters from Washington DC, two from LA, and one from New York. I mean, come on. As importantly, the collective annual budgets for those five theaters? Between $60M and $77M (averaging $12-$15 each). This group is the theater’s fat boys pulling up to the table for a feast. Nevertheless, it’s all nothing but a pipe dream: we’ll be lucky if Trump, Musk, and Ravaswamy even allow the NEA to continue to exist after January 20.
No, this is not the group that is going to revive the theater. It’s going to be the scrappy boutique theaters that show the way. Theaters rooted in a community, run by visionary artists committed to figuring out what a vibrant theater looks like in the 21st century. Independent, and proud of it.
“Murdoch believed we should cultivate a kind of ‘mindfulness’. By making a habit of focusing our attention on everyday things that are valuable or virtuous, we hone our ability to act well at decisive moments. ‘Anything that alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness will do,’ she wrote.”
John-Paul Flintoff, How to Change the World referring to philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch
“Happiness is often presented as being very dull but, he thought, lying awake, that is because dull people are sometimes very happy and intelligent people can and do go around making themselves and everyone else miserable.”
Ernest Hemingway, Islands in the Stream
I feel seen.
The winter begins!
“I do not think of old age as an ever grimmer time that one must somehow endure and make the best of, but as a time of leisure and freedom, freed from the factitious urgencies of earlier days, free to explore whatever I wish, and to bind the thoughts and feelings of a lifetime together.”
Oliver Sacks, Gratitude
“The arts can turn a piece of banal knowledge into a truth that has the power to move us, when a hundred propositions leave us cold.”
Susan Neiman, The Left Is Not Woke
“Although Goethe was intimately connected to the social and cultural life of his time, he also knew how to maintain his individuality. His principle was to take in only as much of the world as he could process. Whatever he could not respond to in a productive way he chose to disregard. In other words, he was an expert at ignoring things.”
RUDIGER SAFRANSKI Goethe: Life as a Work of Art
A lot of wisdom packed into four sentences.
