Visible Soul, The Mirror Up to Nature, Theatre Ideas, Theatre Ideas, Marsha Norman, An Angry White Guy in Chicago, Rat Sass, Mike Daisey, DevilVet, Jonathan West, The Clyde Fitch Report, Mike Daisey

I often consider it my niche to condense discussions like this for those who haven't the time or energy to read everything that encompasses such an impassioned, complex look at the state of our art. But, I'm not doing that this time. It seems that what's needed most here, from us as writers, and you as readers, is engagement. So, please, pick a few of the above, read them throughly and get involved.

As for my part. I'm sad about regional theatre. I do think it's broken. No doubt about it. I think my theatre is broken. Our priorities are out of whack. In fact, I kind of think that everything about the theatre, except for the theatre itself kind of sucks.

No one can make a living. "Nice" spaces are way too expensive. Most ticket prices are too high. Young people don't come to the theatre. The audiences we do get are too small. Broadway is pretty much void of art. New plays don't get done enough. Play development is broken. Big theatres get the lion's share of public funding. The government doesn't care about the arts. No one cares about theatre. The biggest critics in the country are assholes. Bloggers can be assholes too. The regionals all do the same plays. Theatre is anachronistic. Competition from home entertainment is too great. Artistic directors are risk-averse. The declining quality of arts education will ruin the theatre eventually. Arts coverage in the media gets worse and less everyday. We're losing an enormous amount of talent to film and TV.

Go ahead, I'm sure you can think of a few more. So what is good about theatre these days? Why bother? And is making a list like that a waste of time?

For the answer, you'll have to come back.

Over at his "half-hillbilly, Demi-Cuture" blog, Tony's been taking on the critics in his "Critiquing the Critics" columns.

Recently, one of the critiqued critics - Tom Williams - responded to Tony's efforts in a not-too-pleased tone.

I was told about your insults toward me on your blog. I read what you posted. I am trying to understand why you would run a theatre company and then insult reviewers? What do you gain from doing that?

Read it all here, and form your opinion.

What a sec. How do I get points for this?

Arkansas Tech bans Sondheim's Assassins. 2007 Bay Area Critics Circle Award winners announced. New Rep announces their 08-09 season. (Is it really season announcement time already?) Check out this list of art retreats around the country. The NY Times looks at a gaggle of new musicals opening this spring. The 2008 Frigid Festival is coming soon. The House Theatre has a new show. Holy Moly, the 43-year old Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo is done. Change is afoot in the Bay Area scene.

Is it better to have a really cool space in which to do your shows or to pay everyone pretty well?

If you could only do one, which would you choose? Which is more important to the participants? Which contributes more to the success of a company?

I got a root canal this week. I had my gums cut open, my bone ground down, and I'm still taking vicodin several times a day to keep my head from exploding.

I saw a bunch of theatre. I saw Lone Twin at the Wexner Center doing their wonderful show Nine Years. It's the very definition of sublime. The artifice is so slight it's nearly subliminal. Any message or agenda is completely subsumed into the story-telling. The stories themselves are direct and straight-forward, and kind of goofy. "Look at us! Have a great big look at us!" they cry. "This is shit-ness!" I saw it in New York about a year ago, and it completely snuck-up on me then. I saw it twice this week and still really loved it each time.

Here's the scoop, from TheBadandUgly.com.

Hey-O Superhero Fans! There have been strong buzzings that crazy genius cum commercial sellout Julie Taymor (Titus, Across The Universe) had cast her Across The Universe leads - Jim Stugress and Evan Rachel Wood - as Peter Parker and Mary-Jane in her upcoming Broadway adaptation of Spider-Man featuring music by Bono and The Edge. Surprise, surprise, the rumors might be true, says a spy who attended a workshop for the musical in progress:

Click here to read the full spy report.

What I thought I would do to keep us honest in this discussion about financial models is to tell you about Berkeley Rep's dark night of the soul, our moment of crisis--what we've perceived of as being action-steps to address that; and five or six years later, what we perceive as being the outcome at this moment; and then to raise a question.

You on the East Coast felt that 9/11 was really your crisis, but it was in fact a national crisis, and it certainly had ripples throughout the country and at arts organizations throughout the country. We found out that not only did 9/11 have an impact but it came, unfortunately, at the same time as the dot-com bust. And I was fond of saying, at that point, that every dentist was more invested in technology in San Francisco than they were anywhere else in the country. And so the impact on organizations in our part of the country was pretty devastating.

We immediately began cutting our budgets like crazy, trying to anticipate how bad it was going to be. And we realized that no matter how bad we thought it was going to be, it ended up getting worse. And for a few years, we found that we just couldn't figure out what was the right thing to do. I responded in one way; Tony Taccone, our artistic director, responded in another way; and I think neither of us felt, for a few years, that we could get a handle on what was going on. And one of the things that happened was that we all got very internal. Our programming got very internal and, frankly, our programming was not as strong as it had been for many years before or thankfully as it has been since then.

And what are we going to do about this problem of the disappearance of critical culture? You have to find ways to be sneaky, to be clever, and to find little avenues to continue it. I think that the world is kind of mixing up right now, and trying to figure out what the place for judgment and discrimination is in this new mediated, wired, info-age world. We all, I think, have spent time being depressed about this "everyone's a critic" ethos on the Internet. And everyone is a critic. But on the other hand, there's a couple of really good bloggers out there. So why take aim at all blogging?

Someone said to me the other day, "Hey, I saw the HotReview. What an idea--an edited blog!" And I thought, "Wow, is that what I'm doing? I thought it was called a journal." You know, an edited blog used to be called a journal, where you're interested in the quality of the writing and you edit the writing carefully. That used to be called, you know, a journal. So maybe there are places for us to meet in the future, when all of this equalization sends up all of its dust. Everybody gets a chance to express the fact that they're a critic, and then becomes hungry again for the views of people who know a little bit more about the subject. So I don't know. Yes, I'm dismayed, I'm discouraged, but I also am in my 40s and have to look, hopefully, to a long life of figuring out what to do about this and I'm not giving up, regardless of what Eric says.

Here's an interesting article about the NEA, published twelve years ago in In Motion Magazine. Maybe it's in response to the Mike Daisey thing, maybe not. But it seems relevant to the discussion.

Although the nonprofit arts world contains thousands of organizations populated by tens of thousands of artists, administrators, technicians, trustees and donors, few are aware of its systemic features, nor are there many knowledgeable about its origins and the influences that have shaped its evolution.

As with participants in most large organizational systems, the citizens of the nonprofit arts world find it difficult to perceive changes, even massive developments, that occur gradually.

READ MORE

It's not one of mine. It's an article for Seattle's "The Stranger" and it's by Mike Daisey. Who I'm gonna start calling "the bravest man in the American Theatre".

I won't hide it from you, loyal friends, I cried reading this, even as I sit here at Luck Bros coffee shop, 300 steps from my front door.

Seven years ago, I left Seattle for New York--I abandoned the garage theaters and local arts scene and friends and colleagues--because I was a coward. I'd already tried to sell out once, by working at a shitty Wal-Mart of a tech company, but I knew I would not survive in the theater if I stayed. I fled to New York to bite and claw a living out of the American theater as an independent artist because I was young and stupid enough to think that would actually work. Today, my wife and I are one of a handful of working companies who create original work in theaters across the country. We're a very small ensemble: I am the monologuist; she is the director. We survive because we're nimble, we break rules, and when simple dumb luck happens upon us, we're ready for it.

We return to Seattle maybe once a year. During my first week back this time, I ended up at a friend's party, long after the rest of the guests had gone, in that golden hour when the place is almost cleaned up, but the energy of the night is still hanging in the air. We settled down in the kitchen under the bright light, making 4:00 a.m. conversation and, as all theater artists do, I asked the traditional question: "What are you working on?"

My friend's face fell, for just a moment--she's a fantastic actress, one of the best in the city, with an intelligence and precision that has taken my breath away for years. She corrected a moment later, and told me carefully that she wasn't going out for anything now--that she was giving it up. She has a job-share position at her day job to let her take roles when needed, but now she is going to go permanent for the first time in her entire life. After 15 years of working in theaters all over Seattle, she'd felt the fire go out of her from the relentless grind of two full-time jobs: one during the day in a cubicle, the other at night on a stage.

It all started innocently enough. Chris Platt noted aloud that the Jeff Citations will now be called the Jeff Awards, just like the closely related Jeff Awards.

The difference is that there will now be equity and non-equity Jeff Awards. The non-equity folks used to be stuck with paltry-sounding citations, now they get awards.

Well, "Julie" wasn't gonna take it lying down. She fired-up her practically anonymous and definitely-built-by-good-ol-USA-unionified-workers-keyboard and spoke her mind.

Nothing could drag the national reputation of the “Jeff Award” down more than to include non-professional theatres to share equal consideration with professional theatres.

So, get over there. Read it. And don't forget to leave your two cents in the comments.

On a side note: Can anyone report a theatrenet thread with more than 66 comments?