August 30, 2023
Let’s be clear right up front: this website is for startups. Brand new theaters. I’m not interested in trying to figure out how to save the Public Theatre or the Brooklyn Academy of Music, or any other theater that’s been around for a while, no matter how small. Those theaters already made their choices, and they now have so many pieces locked in place that it will take complicated intellectual Tetris to make even the smallest change. I’ll leave that task to someone else—I’m interested in bushwhackers. Joseph Campbell, when talking about the Knights of the Roundtable pursuing the Holy Grail, said “Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure.” Each of you will begin your adventure at the point you have chosen.
At the top of my “Foundational Principles” page there is a Buckminster Fuller quotation that I have used as my North Star for a long time: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” I have no interest in fighting (much less saving) the existing reality of regional theaters. These ideas are for those who want to make something new.
Isn’t it about time that we gave some attention to artists whose only desire is to make art as much as they can in their lives? Not careerists hustling for fame and fortune. Not people whose only dream is of one day performing on Broadway and then parlaying their success into a TV show or movie. No, I’m interested in people who would be happy having an opportunity to do theater as much as possible while living a normal, sustainable, abundant life.
Singer-songwriter Mary Chapin Carpenter expressed the vision well in her song “Passionate Kisses”:
Is it too much to demand
I want a full house and a rock and roll band
Pens that won't run out of ink
And cool quiet and time to think
Shouldn't I have this
Shouldn't I have this
Shouldn't I have all of this, and
Passionate kisses
Passionate kisses, whoa oh oh
Passionate kisses from you
In other words, she is revolting against the idea that making art means giving up all the rest of life: a house, a family, nice things, time for contemplation, and a personal life. And she’s right! It is time for artists to put down roots in a community and rejoin normal life.
But we’ve all been taught that this is an impossibility. We’ve been marinated in the myth of the Starving Artist, and we’ve been brainwashed to think that the only valid way to lead a life in the theater is to move to New York, wait tables, struggle, live hand-to-mouth, hustle and network, put up with abusive people who have power, drop everything and travel across the country on the next gig, do what we’re told, ignore our own artistic vision, and generally become a cog in the star maker machinery, to quote Joni Mitchell (I seem to be on a musical roll today), whose song “Free Man in Paris” lamented having given up her independence to pursue somebody else’s dream:
I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive