My apologies for the long silence. I recently found a wonderful platform (Scalar) for my two books (DIY Theater MFA, which has been released; and Building a Sustainable Theater, which will come a bit later). Both will be available to read on the web for free, and there will be a free downloadable pdf as well. A paperback and/or ebook may come later. Anyway, I’ve been working on that.
As many of you know, one of the things I enjoy is adapting ideas from other disciplines to theater. My latest enthusiasm is for the software firm 37signals, whose founders, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hanssen, not only have created a wonderful collaboration app called Basecamp and an awesome email app called Hey, but they also write books that push against the take-a-lot-of-venture-capital, work-til-you-drop, and get-big-and-cash-in ethos of Silicon Valley. They believe in being profitable and sustainable. Love it.
Their newest book, *Shape Up,* written by Ryan Singer, is available to read free online or download as a pdf, or you can buy the print edition (yes, that’s where I got the idea for what to do with my books). Shape Up is a “guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.”
Product development at 37 Signals works on a 6-week cycle—in other words, unless they are creating an entirely new product (and even then), any features they add or tweaks they undertake are distributed over no more than six weeks, after which there is a two-week period in which they go through a process to decide what will happen during the next six weeks. “Six weeks is long enough to build something meaningful start-to-finish and short enough that everyone can feel the deadline looming from the start, so they use the time wisely. The majority of our new features are built and released in one six-week cycle.”
Crucial to this process is a way of budgeting time, which they call “appetite.” You can think of appetite as a “time budget” for a project. In the software world, time is the most important aspect of planning—how much time the designers and programmers will need to write the code and design the user interface. The usual approach is to describe all the things that you’d love to see on a particular feature, and then estimate how long it will take to make those things. These estimates are inevitably wrong, and the projects stretch on and on. 37signals does it in reverse. They first ask, “how much time are we willing to allot to this project,” and then they “shape” the project to fit the six-week maximum time frame (”small batch” items are allotted fewer than six weeks). If the project isn’t complete by the end of the 6-week cycle, it is abandoned, not extended. This keeps things honest.
I want to apply this idea to production budgeting in theater.
Unlike software development, in theater money is the foundation of the budget. During the recent online discussions of the regional theater crisis, when people (like me) suggest scaling back, someone would inevitably create a sample budget to show that it is impossible to do a production for less than some exorbitant amount of money, and then dismiss the concept of scaling back as “impractical” (ignoring the historical fact that, until the 1960s, theaters always operated in the black, and if they didn’t, they closed). Here’s what these nay-sayers will do. They’ll start with the play: we want to do X. It requires 5 actors, one setting, and two costumes for each actor. We want to pay a livable wage. Now the cascade begins (some of these numbers are estimates):