That all American institutional theatre, commercial and non-profit, is an integral part of American corporate life, is a contemporary cliche. In the 1980's, many resident theatres pursued growth by imitating corporate models of institutional organization. Consequently, these theatres locked themselves into an assembly line of artistically anemic programming that eliminated any playwright whose words were daring enough to open up new pathways of perception.
Recently, a leading Broadway producer began the practice of distributing audience surveys of plays in progress "in order to prevent playwrights from going off in a tangent and writing something that neither the audience or producer wants!" Can non-profit theatres be far behind? No, since a look at the seasons of the LORT theatres reveal that they already represent little intellectual or artistic diversity. "Ethnic playwright" is another code name for drive-by reading and other quickies merely to satisfy diversity grants. Experimental playwriting of artistic excellence from playwrights representative of our various American cultures abounds, but America's institutional theatres have decided that such writing is, as they like to inform playwrights, "not for our theatre." Consequently, our nation is deprived of its own stories and ingenious playwrights.
I concur with the vision of Robbie McCauley as she stated in Theatre, 1997, "My utopian vision of theatre would include numerous small market theatres. They would reflect the communities in which they existed and the visions of their creators. Audience development work would get people away from their televisions and into the theatres. Audiences would pay reasonable prices--about the price of a movie. Public money would subsidize the centers but self sufficiency would be encouraged."
This is almost an exact description of the Indie Theatre Movement that is burgeoning across the country, a movement led by such visionaries as Jason Neulander. From Austin Texas' Salvage Vanguard Theatre, to New York's Lower East Side N'Yorican Cafe, independent theatre spaces that give young and talented writers a chance to produce their work in a professional environment are cropping up. Hot, talented, iconoclastic in concept and structure, these playwrights thrive on artistic risk and aesthetic adventure.
An interview with Jason Neulander leads this issue's exciting new playwrights. Jason, one of the primogenitors of America's latter twentieth century Independent Theatre Movement, offers NuMuse readers some insight into his vision for his Salvage Vanguard Theatre.
Adam Bock's neo-post modern take on the myths of Orpheus and Persephone, Percy Stripped Down, is the tale of the battle between the gods Venus and Pluto for the love of a mortal boy, Percy, Elly's search in the underworld for her girlfriend, Orpheus, and the blood antics of Scorpio.
David Bucci describes Kid Carnivore as "a play about four self-indulgent no-talent punk-rockers. The play is divided into verses, repeating choruses and solo. The anti-social, inarticulate band members mediate social constructions like brotherly competition, love triangles and professional jealousy with intentional juvenile game playing. I kind of hate this play and all the characters in it but I am continually drawn back to it because I see all too much of its pathetic frustrated desperation in everything around me."
Hours is Thalia Field's drama written to be rendered in the hybridized virtual theater of the future. Field says, "It is both rock concert and hypertext, oral narrative and multimedia circus. The text prompts are for the voices of live performers, while the visual scenarios are intended to be digitally produced as a kaleidoscopic collage of dramatic fragments, spinning and circling the thematic and emotional vistas of the play as a whole. The channel-surfing quality is meant to co-exist with a more formal exploration of the basic units of human relationships, that of couples, families and artists. The empty sets are merely nicknames for the containers of times in which we find ourselves groping for experience and in which we find ourselves compelled to speak and narrate that experience for the sake of others. Hours, like all of history, is not only possible, but predictable."
Gina Gionfriddo's Briar Rose is "a dark comedy about lost love, partner swapping and snow. Two couples vacationing at a ski resort share an impromptu dinner and an academic argument. By the next morning, one member of the party has vanished and the remaining three will never be the same."
In Nine Come Elana Greenfield investigates the very nature of storytelling and the elusive composition of time, past and present. Paul, as the scribe, gives structure to experience. But, the playwright poses the question, is the storyteller distorting the experience by the act of recording? Whom does the memory belong to? How can we remember? At the end of experience, the bar, Nine Come, is hopping. Worlds converge. Time goes backward. The book opens.
The Whole Wide World is Alva Roger's impressionistic gait around the globe with Maya, a young woman on her search for her auteur/hero, Ousmane Sembene. In Europe, Maya discovers many things--not the least of which is the torture of being the unseen object and the constantly observed subject, or, to put it more plainly, black and female in a white world. The Whole Wide World is the dramatic, female, contemporary version of James Baldwin's famous essay, Stranger In The Village. Roger's depictions of settings, characters and emotions achieve a vividness beyond objective reality.
We are at a moment when the past, present and future are converging and today's playwrights are making decisions about the kind of theatre we have had, as well as the kind of theatre they will have. It is no mere coincidence that so many playwrights in the Independent Theatre Movement are alumni from Brown University's Creative Writing Program. NuMuse urges them to continue to lead the way, to continue to take artistic challenges and practice artistic courageousness, and to continue in their determination to create a new living and breathing theatre in America.