When Bruce Norris was a young boy growing up in Texas, he saw a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun and it had a deep impact on him.  He notes that, as a white child, he was provoked to see himself in the role of “oppressor”.  Some 40 years later, in response to those feelings, he wrote Clybourne Park, now running on our Arcadia stage. We thought it might be valuable to return to Norris’ inspiration, and so last night the Arden hosted a free reading of Hansberry’s play, performed by group of Philadelphia and New York actors and led by director Lee Kenneth Richardson.

The reading, which coincided with the 53rd anniversary of A Raisin in the Sun opening on Broadway, was attended by many who have seen Clybourne Park.  Even in this simple form, with actors at music stands and minimal rehearsal, the power of Hansberry’s storytelling and her ability to capture the complex relationships between her family of characters resonated with rich vibrancy.  Like Norris, Hansberry drew on personal experience when writing the play (her father moved their family into an all-white neighborhood when she was young, and the resulting court case went on to be adjudicated by the U.S. Supreme Court.) Hearing Raisin juxtaposed with Norris’ rendering of another side of the story literally just upstairs, added an additional charge.

Here are a few photos from the evening:

The Arden will present a full production of A Raisin in the Sun, under the guidance of long-time Arden collaborator Walter Dallas as part of our subscription season next Spring.  If last night’s reading is any indication, it promises to be a moving and rewarding experience.

“Home is the place where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” — Robert Frost, The Death of a Hired Man

It’s hard to find a play that isn’t in some way about family.  The great tragedies of ancient Greece (think Sophocles’ Oedipus or Antigone) while pursuing ideas of political power, responsibility, and free will have as their principal advocates members of the same family. (Oedipus murders his father and sleeps with his mother.  Antigone rebels against Kreon, her uncle, because she wishes to properly bury her brother.)  The mighty Shakespeare’s discourses on the ability to take meaningful action (Hamlet) or the vicissitudes of inherited power (Henry IV) look at humanist and existential questions as they play out within family dynamics. (Hamlet seeks to avenge the murder of his father by his uncle.  Young Hal navigates his difficult relationship with his own father, and tests a surrogate in Falstaff.)

The American dramatic tradition is equally, if not more tightly bound to the familial – even plays thought to be primarily of social significance and commentary (Death of a Salesman, Raisin in the Sun) revolve around contests between parents and children or husbands and wives.  With August: Osage County, Tracy Letts draws upon his own family lore, amplifying these stories with an artist’s delight in extreme behavior and moral ambiguity.  But while outrage and outrageousness permeate the play, one should not be so distracted by the emotional fireworks as to lose track of the social critique.  It is not just the pathology of the American family about which Tracy is concerned, but the American family.

Photo by Mark Garvin

The play begins with the interrogation of a Native American woman who agrees to take on the job of caring for this family, descendents of those who have invaded her homeland and destroyed her people.  What follows is not only an investigation into familial betrayals and rivalries, but the diagnosis of dysfunction for an entire class of people. With its large cast of characters and form (a three-act structure) Tracy is not only referencing theatrical days of yore, but also demanding a canvas large enough for individual relationships to take on metaphorical significance and sweep.  In one of our earliest conversations about the script, Tracy told me that the play was partly about what happens when “men abandon the field”.  Certainly the male characters in the play abrogate responsibility for themselves and others in ways both hilarious and damning.  We leave it to you to determine whether the women follow suit.

Sweltering around the arguments, not to mention outright fisticuffs, of the play is the sticky truth that no matter what the members of this family do, they can not extract themselves from their familial history or the family fabric.  Their original sin, as with O’Neill’s great tragic families in Long Days Journey Into Night or Desire Under the Elms, is simply being born.  Their continued afflictions – addiction, greed, self-interest, moral confusion–  are inherited as surely as the mythic American values – the right to happiness, self-determination, ambition, capitalism – of which they are extensions or complements.

Family.  We all have one.  Some may even have one that looks like the Westons.  We all have a country.  Even one that looks like America.

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.

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…

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.

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.

To put it simply, bad math and a questionable conclusion.

In a recent column Terry Teachout, the generally respected arts journalist at the Wall Street Journal wrote: Facts, it’s said, are stubborn things. Anyone curious about the state of American theater will find plenty of stubborn facts to chew on – some of which are tastier than others – in American Theatre’s annual list of the 10 plays and musicals, not counting Shakespeare revivals and seasonal shows, that are produced most frequently in the U.S… I recently spent a couple of hours poring over American Theatre’s lists and came up with this meta-list of the 11 plays produced most often between 2000-01 and 2009-10…

Mr. Teachout counts a lack of “classic plays” on his meta-list, and concludes:

American theaters have a pronounced bias in favor of new and newish plays by American authors, especially ones that have high public profiles… But it also appears that far too many of those same companies may be steering clear of the classical revivals that are no less central to the continuing health of a theatrical culture – and that is very bad news indeed.

I’m not a statistician, but you don’t have to be one to see the serious flaw in reasoning. He’s mixing individual plays and genre. Say 20 TCG theaters across the country are doing the same new play in a given year. That title will show up on the most frequently produced list for that year. But if those same theaters, in an average four-play season, are all also producing three different “classic” plays, then those titles would not show up on the most frequently produced list. But the proper score at a given theater would be one new play for every three classic plays. And across the field nationally it would be one new play for sixty classic plays. This would represent not a lopsided predisposition toward new work, but rather the opposite.

A quick hypothetical illustration:

Steppenwolf does Endgame, All My Sons, Mother Courage and Intimate Apparel.

Arena does Waiting for Godot, Tartuffe,, Guys and Dolls and Intimate Apparel.

McCarter does Oedipus, The Children’s Hour, The Most Happy Fella and Intimate Apparel.

Tally: 9 “classic” plays, none of which make the list of most frequent, but the one new play, Intimate Apparel does.

A related problem: The TCG lists are cross-sectional and not longitudinal. In other words, if Death of a Salesman receives three productions every year for 10 years it would not make the most frequently produced list in any year, despite receiving 30 productions in the decade, while Intimate Apparel, receiving 9 in one year and 16 in a second for a total of (a lesser) 25, would.

To do this accurately, Mr. Teachout should look at every play from every season of the decade at each theater (not the “most frequently produced list”), categorize them as “classic” or “new”, and then look at the numbers. I don’t know what he’d find, but his conclusions would be drawn from actual stubborn facts, not poor statistical work.

The danger here (and why I’ve bothered to post a public response) is that an article like this, already going viral, becomes received wisdom very quickly, especially when appearing in a publication as influential as the WSJ. It begins to have impact on corporate and government funding attitudes and policies and within artistic institutions.

Frankly, I suspect real research would show at least one different conclusion. Namely, most theaters are doing more “classic” plays than new work. They are just doing the same new plays, and different “classic” ones.

But where was the editorial oversight to catch the statistical blunders at this predominantly business-oriented publication?

Update: This blog post was picked up by The Wicked Stage, which is edited by Rob Weinert-Kendt, an Associate Editor at American Theatre Magazine. Terry Teachout and Ed, among others, have continued this conversation there. Click here for the full post and comments.