Selecting the 2010/11 Season

By Ed Sobel, Associate Artistic Director

If you are reading this, chances are you have at least a passing interest in the Arden and our programming. Maybe you are even loyal audiences or supporters. In any case, I’m willing to bet you have at times wondered, “How does the Arden decide what plays to do in its season?”

Most theaters won’t honestly respond to that question, for many reasons. Sometimes they won’t answer because choosing a season can be an ugly, cumbersome process, like sausage making and getting health care bills through Congress. Theater companies don’t want to seem venal or self-interested or capricious or insensitive to artists under consideration, so they don’t risk full exposure. Or sometimes they can’t answer, because they don’t know the answer themselves. They lose their mission, somewhere along the way, and don’t want to be reminded of it.

And I’m not going to answer the question for Arden. Yet.

First, I have to tell you it is a long, difficult and often challenging process. One learns to live with joy (as in, “Ah, this is a play so perfect for us and our audiences, and it’s fantastic, and we are going to do it!”) and much more often disappointment (as in, “Ahhhh, we can’t get the rights to produce this play because a Broadway producer has exclusively optioned them from now until summer 2014.”). We consider many, many, many plays before finally selecting the five you will see in the subscription season and the two for our children’s theater program.

I like risk. And I am now going to do a risky thing. (Don’t tell anyone.) I’d like to ask for your participation. And in return, I promise to be honest and transparent about our season planning process.

Send a comment to this post, with the one play you suggest we consider for the 2010-11 season, and in two or three sentences make the compelling case for why we ought to produce it. Remember, our mission is to tell great stories by great storytellers.

In subsequent posts, I will respond to some of your suggestions, and describe the process those plays go through in our season planning process.

To start off, and to up the ante, I will give you the full disclosure that we are close to “finalizing” (why I’ve put that in quotation marks will become clearer as we go through the coming weeks together) three of the plays for the 2010-11 subscription season, meaning there are likely only two slots left.

The only other thing I ask is that you read my 4th paragraph again. Understand the overwhelming odds are none of the plays suggested here will end up in the season. But then, one might. So if you are willing to risk a little disappointment, give us your best shot. At the very least, I promise we are all going to learn some things.