The late theatrical director and innovator William Ball, who founded the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, charged his artist colleagues with the awesome social responsibility of speaking truth to power. I remember him speaking to a group of us once, insisting that "the most deplorable events that have transpired in human history can be explained by the mere fact the people are more afraid to speak in public than they are to die." Bill Ball knew that even in societies where freedom of expression is considered a fundamental civil right, most people prefer not to "muddy the waters." Furthermore, he recognized that the political, social, and economic costs of speaking out against injustice are burdensome, and, consequently, injustice frequently goes unchallenged. He started America's first conservatory for actors partly because he loved the theater, but also because he knew that social engagement, critical thinking, and public debate require constant drill and practice. Ball saw the theater as a bastion of democracy and a training ground for its champions. His "soldiers of the theater" employed clowning and comedy far more persuasively than the young men of that time were using mortar and shells in Viet Nam.
The Lark's work is also about getting back to the basics of public discourse by using theater, a political forum since the Greeks, as a platform for open discussion. At the heart of our mission is an affirmation of the individual playwright's role as community leader and as fulcrum for the principle of free expression in society. As the globe gets smaller, we see fresh opportunities to bring forth voices from a wider network of communities and to tap into the creative power of more individual artists than ever before.
We aim to bring truth back to political discourse by giving space and credibility to the true voices of citizens as a counterweight to media manipulation and the unrealistic reliance on technology to solve social problems. The human network is the flipside of the information revolution; what cannot be improved through computers, technology and specialized systems is human contact and the trust that it engenders - and theater is at the intersection of contact and trust. Theater, therefore, helps us to focus on each individual's life and the power of local community, and enhances a conversation about democracy that can only happen in person. We, at the Lark, are in the process of creating a global network in order to ignite social change and prompt political discourse by going beyond mere news and analysis of world events and seeking more dynamic interpretations of meaning through the very intimate prism of theater - a practice that has enriched the world, and the language we use to describe it, for millennia, from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Chekhov, Shaw, Miller, Kushner and an explosion of diverse writers who now need our support in order to be heard.
John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Sunday, July 1, 2007
MAKING THEATER SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY
In his “I have a dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. rebuked the nation for its failure to measure up to its own standards: “ I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” King envisioned a better world in which freedom would be universally applied: “This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’ And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.”
King helped us see that wherever we are, there is still more to do, and that we cannot rest until it is done. His exercise of free speech, while unpopular with some Americans, was his right as a citizen.
As the media has become a conglomerate, however, expressions of honest vision like King’s have become increasingly rare. Hardly any politician will venture out on a limb, and, more to the point, it is often difficult to raise the money necessary to get behind alternative voices.
For that reason, I believe that the theater plays a significant role in the future of American democracy. Grassroots theater, in particular, has the capacity to preserve the strengths inherent in a multicultural society, to teach trust and collaboration, and to develop new thinking that addresses the issues of the day. Projects that are successful in one locality can be held up as examples in another. Wildly successful projects will prove themselves as they gather stakeholders and enthusiastic audiences.
A little bit of history about recent developments in American theater is probably useful here. The regional theater movement in America grew first out of the vision of Hallie Flanagan, a theatrical producer, director, playwright and author who was hired in 1935 to create the Federal Theater Project as part of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration established to provide jobs to unemployed Americans during the Depression. Flanagan’s vision was to bring theater to the great majority of Americans who had never experienced it and to create new works in geographically-diverse parts of the country that were relevant to people in local communities. In 1938, Flanagan was brought to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee over concerns about the “content” and “messages” of the theater that was being produced and the Federal Theater Project was closed in 1939.
The regional theater movement began again in 1947 when Margo Jones founded Theater ’47 in Dallas, Texas. Though touring shows did exist at this time, there were no quality professional American theatre companies outside of New York. Jones believed in the decentralization of theater. She wanted her art to exist all across America, beyond the realm of commercialized Broadway. She reasoned that if she and her collaborators succeeded “in inspiring the operation of 30 theatres like ours, the playwright won’t need Broadway.”
In 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was formed and along with the Ford Foundation was responsible for a new infusion of capital to support a growing network of regional theaters around the country. Of course, the condition for granting this money was that the theaters had to form Boards of Directors that were composed of local business leaders who would, ostensibly, be more responsible for managing the organization’s funds than the artists who had fostered and developed the regional theater movement.
This was probably the most critial moment in the movement’s history: at the same time that the financial capacity of the theaters was increased, the decision-making authority of the theaters’ original leadership was curtailed. In most cases, a Board President or senior staff person unfamiliar with the art form was put into a position to alter the artistic direction of the company. This was the moment when the regional theater movement stopped being about a vision of free expression and broad-ranging representation of American’s voices and became part of a commercial network that would ultimately be bent to serve Broadway and the film industry instead.
Insisting on fiscal responsibility is always a good thing. But the regional theater movement was built upon a larger principle than merely producing theater that generated a consistent bottom line from ticket sales. It was created to achieve an expanded dialogue with American citizens, wherever they lived, to give the most talented among them a vibrant platform for the expression of new and dissenting ideas, and to revitalize the theatrical repertoire so that people in the future would understand our experience. Lorca said it best: “Theater is the memory of a society.”
Under these circumstances, we are failing to achieve Margo Jones’ dream of a world that is free of the commercial constraints of Broadway; instead, we have ended up with dozens and dozens of smaller Broadways, each one subject to the wheeling, dealing and speculating necessary for survival under the current economic model. In the face of ever-increasing costs, these mini-Broadways have no more chance for success than the real Broadway in New York, and they are limited in how they can collaborate because they have been placed in direct competition with each other.
Theaters compete tooth and nail for local and national funding based on their individual records of success which usually entails the complete “lock-down” of plays and projects that might someday move on to Broadway or the movies. The regional theaters have, in some respects, become the tombs for extraordinary works of art and expression that may (or may not) have received a premiere production at one theater for three to six weeks and will never be produced again. Furthermore, there are almost no incentives for theater companies to produce second, third or fourth productions of plays because the economic model doesn’t currently allow for it and because there doesn’t yet fully exist a culture of trust and collaboration among theaters nationally and globally. It also makes sense that a play that will be embraced by several artistic directors, each responsible to their own constituencies, is likely to be more universally relevant and engaging than a play that cannot gather this kind of support.
This is where the Lark can make a difference in the world. First, we exist to open doors to new voices and keep them open. In an ideal sense, democracy’s main strength may be that it draws upon an entire society to enlist its leaders. If the democratic view of the world assumes that talent is as likely to occur in one citizen as another, then it is natural to conclude that the talent pool will increase as we give more citizens the chance to be heard and acknowledged.
Next, the Lark spends its days creating strategies to galvanize local communities around the important ideas of emerging and established writers who are striving to reach for more. Like the democratic process, the Lark’s process allows for dissent and open discussion, for consensus-building, decision-making, action and reassessment. Always the door remains open, free expression is encouraged, and the relationship between the individual and society is nurtured and deepened.
And, finally, we are committed to developing models for connecting successful local work to a global network. If the Lark is truly able to lead the field as “a mobilizer,” to provoke and support the creation of innovative new work on a local level and bring artists and institutional leaders together as part of a growing collaborative network of theaters, universities and community outreach organizations, we can change the face of theater in America and the world and give back to the regional theaters what they have lost as cultural institutions. We can expand every individual’s opportunity to be heard and, at the same time, ensure a new repertoire of innovative, rigorously developed works of theater that will achieve global distribution.
John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director
Friday, June 1, 2007
THE SHAKESPEARE RULE AND THE NELSON PRINCIPLE
My very earliest challenges as a young director during the 1980’s were plays by Shakespeare. I was part of a group that started an outdoor Shakespeare festival in an area of New England where most of our audience had, at that time, never seen a play at all, much less a Shakespeare play. We were categorically not surrounded by Shakespeare experts; there was no one to tell us what the scene was about or what the words meant. The actors and I had to figure it out on our own, and we learned if we’d gotten it right when the audience came. Even when it didn’t work, it never occurred to me that there was a problem with the play that Shakespeare wrote. The burden was on me and the actors to discover the secret key to every scene, to follow the labyrinth to the treasure in the center of the play. The joy of Shakespeare is in the searching and the discovery, in the long meanderings down myriad passages of meaning, in the collaboration with one’s artistic traveling companions, and the ultimate triumph of grasping something true and good to share with an audience.
At about the same time, I started a program in the local public library where actors could read a new play aloud each week for an audience of community members. I had everything I needed for this: a gorgeous and intimate public space; a company of actors (Shakespearean actors, no less!); and a network of friends who knew lots of up-and-coming playwrights. I think it was the freshness of the entire enterprise in that tired and economically-depressed region of the country that helped this festival catch on. Audiences flocked in crazy numbers both to see the Shakespeare and to get up close to young writers in our “Plays in Progress” program.
I noticed right away, however, that there was a difference in the way people responded to Shakespeare on the one hand and new plays on the other. Due to my enthusiastic but sometimes misguided direction of the Shakespeare in the early days, audiences were occasionally confused about what was going on. Their response to this confusion about a moment in Shakespeare was to accept it, to bear personal responsibility for not understanding an idea that was, perhaps, too large to be comprehended all at once, and to focus fully on the next scene. No one questioned the playwright, not Shakespeare, though sometimes they questioned the acting and the direction; usually they bore the burden themselves.
The experience was completely different with the new plays. If audiences didn’t understand the play right away, or if someone had the slightest idea of how to make the play better in his or her estimation, audience members would not hesitate to prescribe, proscribe, re-scribe or pronounce their own solutions to challenges they perceived in the play they had just experienced. I am the kind of person who believes that people are generally good, with benevolent motives, but what could explain the conflict that arose so predictably after each play reading? I was in charge of facilitating these discussions, and, while the experience was new and exhilarating for everyone, I observed that the playwrights often felt diminished and discouraged afterwards. This had not been my intention at all, and I wracked my brains to figure it out. The answer, of course, was staring me in the face from across the park, where the Shakespeare was playing.
Here is how it goes: we expect Shakespeare to know what he is doing. He is a four hundred year old authority and a font of wisdom and truth. Done right, his plays are amazingly entertaining, emotionally engaging, and stunningly complex. We are reverential, perhaps overly so at times. However that isn’t how we think about the living, breathing playwrights who write contemporary plays. We feel we know as much about life and the world as they do. We have a thing or two to say about what they write. And, of course, we have the best of intentions; we only want to help.
This is when I formulated my “Shakespeare Rule” for talking about new plays. What if we at least pretended that every new play we approached was as perfect as a Shakespeare play? How would we talk about it differently, if we assumed that it contained everything it needed already to succeed and that the burden was on us to penetrate its meaning? What if we gave full credit to the author, whether the play works or not? What if we listened more carefully to what that author’s particular individual voice is trying to say instead of bending its meaning to suit something we already know? This was a completely different way of thinking about plays for me – and very difficult at first. But the results of this approach are very clear. Either we grow to fully understand the play as it was conceived and written by the playwright or – we don’t. We spend time discussing what the author created, not what she or he didn’t. We allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable in the presence of new or even flawed ideas. And we come to honor the leadership role that artists play in inventing the language necessary to describe and shape the future.
The Shakespeare Rule is why I was so inspired by the Laura Pels Foundation Keynote Address delivered by Richard Nelson on April 9, 2007, at the annual meeting of A.R.T./New York. Mr. Nelson speaks fervently about the necessity for taking the playwright’s leadership role seriously:
"…I am not saying that a playwright should avoid and ignore comments and reactions to his work, quite the opposite. But I am saying that our mindset toward playwrights should be this: 1) the playwright knows what he is doing, 2) perhaps the play as presented is as it should be. So that the onus for change is not on the playwright but on others, on the theater. And the theater is there with a full array of tools to support the playwright as he or she attempts to improve upon his or her play. How to improve a play should be the domain of the writer, with the theater supplying potential tools, a reading say, or a workshop with clearly delineated goals. These are tools that should evolve out of a need, as opposed to being a given."
For those of you who want to read the whole speech, here is the link.
As for me, I have given Mr. Nelson’s recent words a prominent place in my thoughts. I have labeled it “the Nelson Principle” and it resides in my library next to “the Shakespeare Rule.” I’ve made lots of copies to share with the playwrights we work with, in case they haven’t seen it already.
John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director
At about the same time, I started a program in the local public library where actors could read a new play aloud each week for an audience of community members. I had everything I needed for this: a gorgeous and intimate public space; a company of actors (Shakespearean actors, no less!); and a network of friends who knew lots of up-and-coming playwrights. I think it was the freshness of the entire enterprise in that tired and economically-depressed region of the country that helped this festival catch on. Audiences flocked in crazy numbers both to see the Shakespeare and to get up close to young writers in our “Plays in Progress” program.
I noticed right away, however, that there was a difference in the way people responded to Shakespeare on the one hand and new plays on the other. Due to my enthusiastic but sometimes misguided direction of the Shakespeare in the early days, audiences were occasionally confused about what was going on. Their response to this confusion about a moment in Shakespeare was to accept it, to bear personal responsibility for not understanding an idea that was, perhaps, too large to be comprehended all at once, and to focus fully on the next scene. No one questioned the playwright, not Shakespeare, though sometimes they questioned the acting and the direction; usually they bore the burden themselves.
The experience was completely different with the new plays. If audiences didn’t understand the play right away, or if someone had the slightest idea of how to make the play better in his or her estimation, audience members would not hesitate to prescribe, proscribe, re-scribe or pronounce their own solutions to challenges they perceived in the play they had just experienced. I am the kind of person who believes that people are generally good, with benevolent motives, but what could explain the conflict that arose so predictably after each play reading? I was in charge of facilitating these discussions, and, while the experience was new and exhilarating for everyone, I observed that the playwrights often felt diminished and discouraged afterwards. This had not been my intention at all, and I wracked my brains to figure it out. The answer, of course, was staring me in the face from across the park, where the Shakespeare was playing.
Here is how it goes: we expect Shakespeare to know what he is doing. He is a four hundred year old authority and a font of wisdom and truth. Done right, his plays are amazingly entertaining, emotionally engaging, and stunningly complex. We are reverential, perhaps overly so at times. However that isn’t how we think about the living, breathing playwrights who write contemporary plays. We feel we know as much about life and the world as they do. We have a thing or two to say about what they write. And, of course, we have the best of intentions; we only want to help.
This is when I formulated my “Shakespeare Rule” for talking about new plays. What if we at least pretended that every new play we approached was as perfect as a Shakespeare play? How would we talk about it differently, if we assumed that it contained everything it needed already to succeed and that the burden was on us to penetrate its meaning? What if we gave full credit to the author, whether the play works or not? What if we listened more carefully to what that author’s particular individual voice is trying to say instead of bending its meaning to suit something we already know? This was a completely different way of thinking about plays for me – and very difficult at first. But the results of this approach are very clear. Either we grow to fully understand the play as it was conceived and written by the playwright or – we don’t. We spend time discussing what the author created, not what she or he didn’t. We allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable in the presence of new or even flawed ideas. And we come to honor the leadership role that artists play in inventing the language necessary to describe and shape the future.
The Shakespeare Rule is why I was so inspired by the Laura Pels Foundation Keynote Address delivered by Richard Nelson on April 9, 2007, at the annual meeting of A.R.T./New York. Mr. Nelson speaks fervently about the necessity for taking the playwright’s leadership role seriously:
"…I am not saying that a playwright should avoid and ignore comments and reactions to his work, quite the opposite. But I am saying that our mindset toward playwrights should be this: 1) the playwright knows what he is doing, 2) perhaps the play as presented is as it should be. So that the onus for change is not on the playwright but on others, on the theater. And the theater is there with a full array of tools to support the playwright as he or she attempts to improve upon his or her play. How to improve a play should be the domain of the writer, with the theater supplying potential tools, a reading say, or a workshop with clearly delineated goals. These are tools that should evolve out of a need, as opposed to being a given."
For those of you who want to read the whole speech, here is the link.
As for me, I have given Mr. Nelson’s recent words a prominent place in my thoughts. I have labeled it “the Nelson Principle” and it resides in my library next to “the Shakespeare Rule.” I’ve made lots of copies to share with the playwrights we work with, in case they haven’t seen it already.
John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director
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