By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

Quite understandably, very few of the season suggestions we received were brand new plays that had not yet been performed elsewhere.  One of the frequent debates heard in season planning meetings is about the amount of new work present in a season.  Those of you who followed my recent conversation with Terry Teachout on the issue know that the question pervades beyond the small confines of an artistic office at a regional theatre.  The conventional wisdom, Mr. Teachout’s assertions aside, is that new work must make up a small minority of the programming if a company is to maintain fiscal health.  New work is viewed as “risky” and is administered in a season to audiences like medicine – with a spoonful of sugary known quantities and familiar titles.

But when you actually do some empirical digging (through market research, etc.), you find that most audiences don’t care if something is new, they just care if it is good.  I put it that if you ask almost anyone, they’d rather see a good new play than a bad production of A View From the Bridge.

The real question is what will vouchsafe the experience for the audience, so that they  have confidence they are more likely to see something good and not bad.  Sometimes it is the known title of the play or the reputation of the writer.  Sometimes it is the quality of the acting, or a particular actor (hence the rise of star casting in the commercial theater – “Even if I don’t like the play, I still got to see Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig/Denzel Washington”), or the director.  At the Arden, we try to make it the whole experience; from the moment of our first contact together through attending a production, and after.

This means approaching our relationship with our audiences not as purely transactional (pay good money, get a production in return) but as more holistic and deeper.  The most important relationships in our lives are not reductively transactional;  our job, our family, our education, our community or neighborhood, our spiritual or religious belief.

Most of the time, when we have a bad day at the office, we don’t quit.  When we have an argument with our spouse or parents or children we don’t storm out of the house never to return.  If we take one bad class in a university we don’t drop out of school.  If our neighbor doesn’t shovel his/her walkway, we don’t sell our home and move across town.

Those relationships are built upon greater shared values, and upon a level of trust that is built over time.  That is the kind of relationship we endeavor to have with our audience.  It has to be our task to select a season that demonstrates, and sometimes leads, the shared values of our audience and that validates the trust placed in us.

In our 2010-11 season, you will see a slate of plays each of which in some way exemplifies our trust in you, and yours in us.  One or two may be from a playwright whose work you know and admire, one or two may be lead by a director whom you trust to create a meaningful experience, and one or two may be completely unfamiliar.  For those, we are seeking your trust in your experience with us, and we will do our dedicated best not to let you down.

By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

First, please accept my thanks to all who have posted comments and suggestions thus far. As promised, I am going to respond to some of these, with an eye toward illustrating some of the process and issues we face when putting together the season.

One of our season planners was kind enough to suggest the Jez Butterworth play Jerusalem. Jez Butterworth is a British writer who, at the ripe old age of 25, became the toast of London theater when the Royal Court produced his play Mojo back in 1995. He then devoted time to making the movie of that play, and several other movies (The Birthday Girl with Nicole Kidman, e.g) and it was seven years before he returned to writing plays including The Night Heron, and now Jerusalem. Jerusalem, like Mojo, has created quite a stir in London, and is scheduled to have a commercial run there shortly. So, as our planner noted, there are likely to be some issues with obtaining performance rights, a subject I will tackle in another post.

One thing that is noteworthy about Jerusalem, is that it requires 14 actors. Think back for a moment to consider when you last saw a play (not a musical, but a play) with 14 actors in it. I’m guessing you either just had a flash-back to college, or perhaps some other non-professional theater experience. In professional theater in America, it is now an extremely rare experience.

Here’s why, and its not exactly shocking: actors cost money. By collective bargaining agreement with the actors union (Actors Equity Association , or “AEA” or “Equity” for short) all actors are guaranteed a set minimum weekly salary, along with certain other rights, work rules, and benefits. At Arden the minimum weekly salary in the Haas is $696, but that is only part of the cost. Like the rest of America, not-for-profit theaters are also struggling with rising health care and other benefit costs. For each AEA actor, in addition to salary, Arden pays over $200 per week in benefits. So, every AEA actor costs over $900 per week. When you start to calculate in all the other costs to producing a play (stage managers and crew, box office staff, directors and designers, playwright royalties, sets/lights/costumes construction labor and materials and on and on) you begin to see both why most theaters operate as not-for-profit entities, and are reluctant these days to do large cast shows.

Or at least, most theaters must consider what in the trade is called “actor weeks”. Even at the Arden, where we have chosen to prioritize having actors on-stage over other production costs like the set, over a whole season we can afford on average 500 actor weeks encompassing seven shows. So if Jerusalem takes up 140 (14 actors x 10 weeks – i.e. four weeks of rehearsal and six weeks of performance) that means our other six shows can only use 360. Two of those six are for family audiences, which on average eat up another 150 actor weeks. So we could do Jerusalem, if that were a high enough priority for the theater, but it means we are going to have to do four smaller cast (five actors or fewer) shows in our subscription season to compensate.

The larger issue here, and one that is truly troubling, is the way in which over the last 30 years, playwrights have adapted to the demands of this new economy. They write smaller plays. The result has been a gradual diminishing of the scale of plays seen on American stages. That has lead to a gradual shrinking of the scale of the ideas they contain. It has made our modern theater the purveyor of internal psychological introspection for a small segment of our culture, rather than the dynamic arena for wide public discourse it might be.

Now, I don’t mean to say that one can’t say something profound about the world with 3 or 4 actors. (Waiting for Godot, afterall, only requires 5). But just as there are beautiful sonatas and quartets yet we would be loathe to give up the full symphony, so too do we need plays that are able to show us the world through a variety of simultaneous cultures, points of view, classes, and experiences.

So, will you see Jerusalem on our season? Probably not. But you will see several larger- than-average size plays, in our effort to swim against a very heavy tide.