By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

At the end of my last posting on season planning, I noted that despite the fact that we had announced our season, sometimes that is not the end of the process. Such is the case this year.

You’ll see that we have in fact had a change in our plans, and will be producing A Moon for the Misbegotten by Eugene O’Neill, rather than Orlando by Sarah Ruhl.

This kind of change is not uncommon in the field, although we try to keep it as rare as possible. Changes occur for a variety of reasons: a central artist withdraws from the project (usually because of a better paying job offer), an expected source of funding fails to materialize, performance rights agreed to in principal but not yet formally signed are withdrawn by the licensor because of a more lucrative or higher profile offer for production (or exploitation in other media like film or tv) that demands exclusivity, the early part of the planning process for a production reveals a greater demand for resources than was originally anticipated (“I know I agreed to do The Tempest with 8 actors, but I really can’t do it with less than 12!”), a new play has not had sufficient time to undergo anticipated revisions or the development it needed.

Sometimes it is combination of several of these, any one of which might be overcome individually, but when taken together make it clear this is simply not the right time to follow the original plan out of stubbornness. Our primary obligation is to make the best possible art we can, and we remind ourselves, as Emerson put it, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Sometimes all this happens rather late, leaving a theater scrambling to fill the gap. (I received a call from a staff member at another theater just this morning, looking for suggestions to replace a play that had just fallen out of their season.) Fortunately, in our case, O’Neill’s marvelous and deeply moving play has been on our short list for several years running. And to further our good fortune, the director and set of actors whom we most wanted for the project were all available at the same time. So while it is a shame to not have Sarah’s voice on our season this coming year, the opportunity to instead offer one of the most glorious and challenging roles for an actress in the canon of American dramatic literature is tremendously exciting.

And now we begin, over the next few months, planning for 2011-12.

By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

As you likely have seen, we announced our season for 2010-11.  Some of you may be disappointed to see your recommended plays not make the final cut.  A number of the suggestions you contributed are truly excellent ones, and it is entirely possible, even if they did not find their way onto the season this year, they will pop up some time in the future.

That is another facet of season planning.  It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking only a show or a year ahead.  One of the advantages we have at the Arden, given the relative stability and support of the company, is to think in longer-term strategic ways about our work and our mission.  Two of the plays on our season for 2010-11 are the result of several years of planning.  It took that long to move them from projects we wanted to do, to getting the right artists in place or securing the performance rights.

Sometimes, a play will stay on a “maybe” list for a number of years, until the right convergence of factors —  be it personnel, balance of “actor weeks” or other costs, or most importantly, passion to tell this particular story at this particular moment.  This last is actually critical.  It moves us from the consideration of “here’s a play I like” to “here’s a play that is important for us to do”.  We often debate the degree to which a play compels performance at this particular moment.  We see our obligation as members of our community not merely to entertain, though we want to do that too, but to tell stories that are deeply and immediately connected to the forces shaping our lives right now.  If we are asking you to invest your time and money and attention (not to mention our own efforts), we’d better make sure we are enjoining you in a conversation that can have vital impact.

I want to thank all of you who contributed suggestions, comments and ideas.  We were sufficiently overwhelmed by your interest that it became impossible to respond to each individually, but in previous posts I have tried to give some sense of the basic foundations upon which the season is eventually built.

Below, in alphabetical order, are abbreviated reactions to some of the ideas you suggested:

Arcadia – Mr. Stoppard’s strong relationship with our cross-town colleagues at the Wilma has tended to make this play their purview (as noted, they produced it in 96-97).  But the wit, deft language, and challenging storytelling certainly make it a contender.  Arcadia in the Arcadia.  Hmm.

“Anything new from Michael Hollinger” – apparently, we agreed.  Ghost-Writer coming soon.

Brighton Beach Trilogy – The Walnut produced these consecutively in 03-05, seems a little soon to take them up again.

Dancing at Lughnasa – actually produced by the Arden in 2005-6.  So, good taste.  But we are not likely to revisit it any time soon.

Doubt – without a lengthy discussion of the merits of the script,  I’d note that sometimes a play seems to be past its most exciting moment of “freshness” (usually just shortly before Hollywood catches on it would be a good idea to make the movie), and yet is not quite ready for “re-discovery”.  This play may fall into that “in-between” category.

Desire Under the Elms (actually by O’Neill, not Williams) – the tug of a work from the American classic cannon is hard to resist, especially one from a master story teller speaking of betrayal, family, and the battle for the American Dream in difficult economic times.  The question:  what, or who, would spark a visceral production of the piece to speak to our audience today?

Machinal – requires at least 10-12 actors (the original Broadway cast from 1928 lists 22).  See my earlier post about “actor weeks”.

Fetch Clay Make Man – debuted at the McCarter in January 2010.  Playwright/slam poet Will Power is absolutely an exciting and unusual voice. We will have to look into this further.

The Glass Menagerie – The Walnut has snapped this up for next year.  Maybe they are reading our blog.

Noises Off – a personal favorite of mine (hardest I’ve ever laughed in a theater), but didn’t quite meet the “important to do now” test this year.

Parade – one of our perennial “maybe’s”, and pending the right circumstances and personnel, might well turn up on a future season.

The Pain and the Itch — Bruce Norris’ penchant for pricking at the conscience of well-intended but flawed liberalism makes this play a contender.  As the dramaturg on the original production in Chicago, I am also keenly aware of some of its challenges, including the controversy surrounding the character of a five-year-old girl suffering from a sexually transmitted disease.  Bruce’s latest play, Clybourne Park, which recently ran at Playwrights Horizons in NY and Wooly Mammoth in DC, is also worth examining.

If you have further questions (or comments) about our process this year, feel free to post them.  I will do my best to answer.

And lastly, as the heading of this post suggests, in season planning you never know when, just as you think things are set, something changes…

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.