Arts Reporter

Playlabs at The Playwrights Center in Minneapolis is one of the most prestigious play development programs in the world. They keep their focus on the writer and his text. With the 2008 application deadline rapidly approaching (October 26) this is a good time to review some of the events that took place in 2007. The first is a transcript of my interview with Noel Raymond, co-artistic Managing Director of Pillsbury House Theater and the director in Playlabs 2007 of “Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been…” a fictional account of the dilemmas faced by Langston Hughes while writing a poem the night before appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, written by Carlyle Brown.

Nat: You wanted to be open to what the audience is experiencing right?

Noel: And just sort of watch it from that perspective because that’s the other layer that you get in a reading, is to see whether or not the choices that you’ve made in an intense but fairly short rehearsal process leading up to it, to see whether they actually worked, to see whether the story is clear. You know, you can feel whether or not the audience is following a story and getting all the things that you laid in there in the rehearsal process or not.

Nat: Yes, did they get what you thought they would get.

Noel: Yes exactly. And especially in this, a big part of what we’ve been trying to do is figure out, Carlyle had this vision of a play with spoken text interacting with projected text, so the idea that the audience had to see and hear and read all at the same time and to see whether all of those things came together in a coherent narrative or whether it was distracting and disjointed and all that.

Noel: So sitting in the audience for the first performance was all about did we achieve a coherent narrative, using all of those elements.

Nat: I did a play of mine in Los Angeles with a projector and one night the projector didn’t work at all.

Noel: Yea, so that would have been tragic in this case because the information that he needed and the process was really about the play and the playwright was to see those things realized and to see how they interact with the spoken text.

Nat: After you’ve seen the first performance, you come into the pick up rehearsal, are you thinking ‘ok, we need to do x, x, and y’?

Noel: A couple of things that watching it were clear to me that I saw that were choices that we had made that were unclear. For instance, when Langston tears the sheet of paper out of his typewriter he had been laying it on the top of the typewriter and then using the same sheet of paper the next time he has an impulse to write a line. When I was watching during the first performance what that said was he’s adding to the same sheet of paper. That’s not what we wanted to have happen. Ok, so I needed to think in between [performances] think of ok, what can we do staging wise to make sure that it’s clear that each one of those lines of poetry are coming separately and are fully realized in their separate way and it’s not until the end of the play that they accumulate and become a single poem?

Noel: There weren’t huge numbers of things. Carlyle had a few changes that he made. … We also added an actor because Carlyle had put himself in the show and then realized that because of the way he was staged he couldn’t see what was going on behind him and that’s not good when you’re the playwright trying to

Nat: Right, right.

Noel: so we worked another actor in. but it wasn’t really about specific picky notes at this point. And the actors are all unbelievable and did a huge amount of work

Nat: Sure

Noel: with very little time so there wasn’t much need to fine tune that. If we were putting this up we would get there.

Nat: It’s not like you have six weeks.

Noel: And as long we had the basic builds and enough nuance that the story unfolds as it should, then that’s what we’re going for.

Nat: So you’re done now here, are you going to continue to work with this play?

Noel: I hope so. That’s up to Carlyle, it’s his play, still.

Nat: Have you worked with him before on other projects?

Noel: Not directly in this capacity but we’ve been friends for a long time and talk about theater all the time and have similar aesthetics and ideas about stuff.

Nat: I was thinking that when you have an ongoing relationship with somebody, it can substitute for a lot of overt and quiet communication about ‘we should do this’, you know how somebody works and you can figure out…

Noel: Yea, the dance of how do I say what I want to say, we don’t have to worry about that because we’ve already got that figured out.

Nat: So how do you feel for what you’ve done, given the short rehearsal schedule?

Noel: I don’t give the credit to myself but I really like the piece. It’s beautiful, his idea about the projected text and spoken text and the images and all of that is a really fabulous idea. It’s really beautiful to watch it start to unfold and become itself. I was very pleased with it.

Nat: Good, well we’ll be watching to see what happens with the play. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Audience Reviews

With all the other things that I hope to achieve with Arts Reporter, one of the things I won’t be doing are reviews.  But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to have reviews on the site.  You, gentle reader, will provide the reviews.  Just go to the forum, which will be set up in a day or two, and look for the venue or producing company for the show you went to see.  Each venue or producing company will have a board dedicated to them in the forum, and each show will have its own thread.  Of course you can always run a search for the show title, and if it isn’t there, make a new thread and start it. Just jump in with your review and begin the dialogue with whoever else comes along afterwards and agrees or disagrees or just wants to ask if the show is worth seeing or not.  And if someone from the show wants to jump in to debate your opinion or explain why you didn’t “get it”, then I say the more the merrier. 

Text, Video, Whatever

This particular software that I’m using will also allow you to post pictures so if you want to take your camera to the show and post pictures of you and your friends hobnobbing with the cast before or after, that’s fine. Try to keep track of who’s who in your pictures if you can.  You can even set up your own video review taking issue with the pros (or if no pros covered it, which happens a lot) and upload it to the forum as well.  It’s the Web 2.0; I say go for it.  Now of course the forum will be open to other kinds of discussions, it’s just that I’m anticipating patron reviews in the initial set up.  And there will also be a chat room which I would expect will get most of its use from Thursday through Sunday night as people come back from seeing whatever show and want talk about it with whoever is out there. So be out there. Now you have that community through the forum.

If you have trouble posting media, don’t fret, it is new technology. Just send it to me in an email and I’ll take care of it.

Additional Benefits

The other thing about the forum is that it’s going to give a lot of useful feedback to the producers of the shows.  Only rarely do shows have talk backs after the curtain where the audience can talk and ask questions. Even when they do, it’s not after every show.  The forum and chat are going to be a 24-hour talkback and we can only hope that the producers will be listening.  I think they should. They’ll have a lot of very good information if they do. You owe it to the benefit of your own theater going experience to give it to them - frequently and in large doses

When I first read Charles Isherwood’s article in the New York Times this weekend about ticket price discounting at a number of major New York performing arts venues, my first thought was that New York had finally priced itself into irrelevancy, and therefore perhaps this presented an opportunity for the rest of the country to showcase another way of doing business.

But how could that be when, contrary to the institutions cited in Isherwood’s article, the overwhelming majority of the theaters I was familiar with were struggling to get any audience in the door, and used steep discount in hopes of attracting strangers - those beyond their own circle of family and friends - to come and see their show? I have always been highly critical of this practice, and not just because of the obvious challenges frenetic discounting presents to my ticketing business.

My issue with steep discounting in small theaters is that it sends entirely the wrong message to the prospective non-family audience. It is to treat their production as if it were a commodity, where only price matters. But choosing a performance of Richard II over one of The Pajama Game right around the corner is completely unlike the decision whether to buy a pack of batteries from Wal-Mart or Target. The latter decision can be made purely on price (or politics, if you’re a Wal-Mart hater) because the item is exactly the same no matter where you buy it. This is the very definition of the word commodity: “a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price” www.m-w.com.

Indeed, the reason marketers push brand names and their associated images is to convince us that there really is a difference between Duracell and Energizer batteries. But no theater goer ever makes the decision to see Richard II over Pajama Game on price alone, (unless the price differential is astronomical, like in New York) because unlike batteries these productions aren’t the same. Indeed, two side by side productions of The Pajama Game wouldn’t be the same, and from night to night, the same can be said for the same production of The Pajama Game. That’s part of what makes theater wonderful. The show has value, it cost something to produce, and the pricing should reflect that without going to Mel Brooks extremes ($450 for Young Frankenstein, according to Isherwood). Small, lesser known theaters, sometimes suspect in the public mind for that reason alone, should be pushing quality, not a low price guarantee.

My quibbles with excessive discounting by lesser known theaters aside, it turns out that the problem of ever ascending ticket prices is not limited to New York, a fact that has been known to anyone who has bothered to look since 1966, when Baumol and Bowen came out with their book, Performing Arts - The Economic Dilemma. Here’s the short version: “the richer societies become, the more difficult it is for them to maintain live performing arts”, Bruno S. Frey. This is so because while technological innovation increases productivity and drives down costs, the performing arts, unlike other parts of the economy, do not reap any benefit. It costs the same in man hours today to put on Richard II or Pajama Game as it did in 1966. This phenomenon is now known as Baumol’s Cost Disease, or Bowen’s Curse, a classic example of blaming the messengers, in spite of the fact that Baumol is quite the artist himself. He paints and is a member of the board the Theatre Development Fund.

Why didn’t Isherwood address this in his article? I posed that question in an email interview with Professor Baumol himself, who responded “[T]he NY Times seems to be almost alone in failing to consider the Baumol-Bowen explanation of the persistently rising cost of the performing arts, health care and education…it is recognized that what we have called “the cost disease” and others have labelled “Bowen’s curse” or Baumol’s disease shows that there is no cure in sight for the persistently and cumulatively rising prices of these activities, and this means that their prices will surely have to follow if the activities will be anywhere near self supporting.”

But what about the Signature Theater Company solution Isherwood describes? Prof. Baumol says yes, some can replicate it for a while, but since most of them are already financially strapped they can’t afford discounting even if it does lead to an expansion of audience. Then what about the NFL, an activity which also costs the same in man hours as it did in 1966, but which is played in larger venues, and has a TV contract and merchanding to boot? “The answer” the Professor tells us, “is that it gives the NFL the opportunity to price more cheaply FOR A WHILE. But compoundedly increasing costs must catch up even with a large stadium size and overwhelm the revenue advantage made possible by the very large capacity at the NFL’s disposal”.

I’ll be following up on the ‘portability’ of the Signature’s subsidy model in the future, as well as talking with a marketing expert on pricing who takes issue with Baumol’s Cost Disease. For more on Baumol-Bowen in the music industry, see this excellent article. And yes, the Professor agrees with my critique of discounting by lesser known theaters. Smart man.

Arts Reporter is a news blog for the performing arts. And while we hold nothing against places like Broadway or the West End, our theater coverage, for example, will focus on theater everywhere else in the world. Our interest in theater did not start with Broadway, but with small local theaters in Morocco and California that have traditionally nurtured the career aspirations of some and the pleasant avocations of others. These are the places where new and interesting things are happening long before (if ever) they become recognized by the Broadway establishment. But these are also the places that struggle with finances, marketing, sales, budgets, audiences and respect.

News…

In this portion of Arts Reporter, I will blog about news and events of interest. I welcome your press releases, news tips, and even your gossip, if it is substantial enough that I can follow up on it to write a credible story. And if you want to write with me then by all means let me know so we can talk about how to make that happen.

…and Knowledge

Smaller performing arts organizations struggle with nuts and bolts issues of putting shows together. If they experience turnover among staff and/or volunteers, then they may find themselves reinventing the wheel every time experience walks out the door, whether from burn out or for greener pastures. And yet they are just as likely to be the entryway for the next crop of passionate but inexperienced newcomers. The wiki will be the ongoing knowledge storehouse of how to, what to, and where to.

Who Knows You?

We’ll also be a source of connection (who to) so you can find the people that have the talent, the skill, the knowledge and the experience you need to be successful. How can this one little blog do all that? We’re ambitious. But we also have faith that you will join in to help us by making your contributions and sharing your knowledge and experience with other readers of Arts Reporter. There’s no way Hafida and I can do all of this by ourselves. Theater is a collaborative effort, after all.