I dare you to read Scott Walter's post on his Theatre Ideas blog without taking sides.
No, seriously, I dare you. He's talking about an increasingly important issue that will have a great impact on the future of the theatre.
As long as the so-called regional theatres insist on casting out of New York, and bringing actors, directors, and designers in from NYC for one-shot, drive-by performances, instead of developing and maintaining their own company of artists who live in the community where they perform; as long as regional theatres continue to use their home base as tryouts for productions that are then transferred to NYC, and then use those productions as a way of "proving" their value to local funders; in short, as long as the theatre outside of NYC is created by NYC-oriented theatre artists, the theatre will be centralized.Of course, how you read the above paragraph and how you respond to it depends entirely on how much ish you take with theatre's centralization.
My own viewpoint is that NYC is not to blame for these problems. As Cote points out, there are reasons that the industry is focused on NYC. I blame the regionals, big and small, who continually fail to promote the validity of art created locally. And clearly, there aren't nearly as many good playwrights in Columbus, Minneapolis, or whatever mid-size metro ("Rural enclave", David? Chicago? What? I assume you meant that colloquially.) you're talking about as there are in the Apple, but could we at least hire more local actors?
I'm not sure how anyone can disagree with this:
... when theatre artists in Minneapolis, in Boston, in Austin, in Asheville, in Atlanta feel that they must move to New York in order to work in their own towns, then something is wrong. When young actors graduate from college and feel that they must go to NYC if they want to work, even though they would prefer to live elsewhere, there is something wrong.Some of this is a bit personal to me, because I'm in exactly this position.
In Columbus we saw exactly the above situation happening. Our largest regional theatre hired mostly actors from NYC for a number of years. The result was that fewer and fewer local actors were able to make anything near to a living, and it was clearly demonstrated to all the graduates of The Ohio State University (one of the largest schools in the country), not to mention the grads from the other 4 big schools nearby, that they had to leave town to get work, even if they wanted to be hired here. There's even a great story about an NYC actor who decided to move here because he liked it so much, at which point he couldn't get hired here anymore.
The point is that this NYC-centered thinking has been one of the key factors contributing to the de-theatre-ing of Columbus. We used to have a very active scene, now it's pretty anemic. And an and artist like me - an active, ambitious, well-educated, forward-thinking person who loves Columbus and really just wants to stay here - spends half of every day trying to decide if he should move or not. Part of the reason is that the NYC-centered thinking of our arts leaders helped to disintegrate the roots of our once-healthy theatre scene.
And why? Did they have an investment in the careers of those NYC actors? The great actors of Columbus had once been good enough for them, why change? It seems clear that it was a marketing plan. Or, maybe, it was good for their ego to hire out of NYC, I get that. But it was bad long-term planning. If they had invested the resources they spent on hiring from New York in the local scene, we'd be in much better shape now. If they had helped to grow what was around them, they'd still be going strong. Instead, they failed to lead the community, they sent their money out of town, and now they're paying the price along with everyone else.
And I know this applies in other ways as well. I work with a world-class sound designer who's considering a move to NYC or Chicago. The thing is, he says, he'd have a better chance of getting work in Chicago if he lived in NYC. WHAT? Sorry, that makes NO sense to me.
So, I'm not asking New York to change. I'm pleading with arts leaders in the rest of the country to invest in their communities. If they fail in this it won't be too long before they're wondering why their audiences are shrinking, their scene is a lot more boring, and their favorite actors are all leaving town.
And all of this now leads into a discussion of the disappearance of mid-sized theatres, why we need more blogs, the need for an indie touring network, and related issues, which we'll save for another time.
Okay, I almost just blockquoted the rest of the damned post, so please go read it, and read the comments, too, and get involved, dammit.
Comments (1)
"... when theatre artists in Minneapolis, in Boston, in Austin, in Asheville, in Atlanta..."
If this same sort of thing is happening in such diverse cities, it's probably not the fault of the regionals either. They're likely all responding to the same kinds of external influences, having to do with a lack of public funding that forces them to hire NY talent in order to gain credibility among local private funders as a professional institution.
Local arts leaders aren't interested in where the talent comes from, only in institution building. That's where they get to leave their legacy. The community rallies around its brick-n-mortar institutions, not the talent that may (or may not) originate from the locality.
Posted by Brant | May 29, 2007 10:30 PM
Posted on May 29, 2007 22:30