yesterday and today

An email I wrote yesterday to my friend Larry followed by his response: I'm going to Joe's undergrad playwriting class tomorrow. This is what I told him I would say: I'll start by saying, "no playwright is happy. It's a miserable life. Even the most successful are completely miserable, even if they somehow are capable of making a lot of money." then I'll move on to "no one reads plays anymore. even if you get your play published someday, no one will ever read it. There was a time when it was literature, but that time is long gone." then "if you want a lot of people to see your work, you should somehow land a job in tv or write a film. Most likely you will never get a film made or land a job in tv but if you do, the work you make will be forcibly watered down by your bosses or by executives." "On the other hand, if you want to work in theater, the only way to do so is to water down your work yourself. round all the rough edges. make the "arc" that everyone likes. you must appear to be doing something edgy or new or risky. You must appear to write a play about something but if you actually write a play about something, or write something edgy, no one will ever do that play. which is why you may as well write for tv. you're more likely to get something risky on hbo than on an american stage. although honestly, none of you kids will ever get anywhere near either of those places unless you have a famous parent." "you may think that you have some sort of control in theater that you don't in hollywood but you don't really. and you will never make a living unless you write a big musical that isn't about anything that people like to sing." how's that for an opener? To which my friend Larry replied: There is one alternative to the bleak (and mostly true) options that you present. The artist can work independently. Funding the work him- or herself. Or at least privately, through donations. This obviously means doing things on the cheap. But doing things on the cheap on your own dime often yields greater freedom than working with the crass for-profit bigwigs or through the pernicious and often petty non-profit sector. Anything that's away from institutions. Making it a truly personal kind of art. There are enormous limitations and risks one takes in such a venture, but, at the end of the day, one owns every triumph, along with every mistake. And don't I know that firsthand. I truly believe that the main hope for theatre in this country is for more theatre artists to work independently. Even if it means a parlour-theater, or a living room-theatre, or a studio-apartment-with-or-without-a-bed-that-folds-up-theatre, or an abandoned-school auditorium-theatre, or an empty-barn-theatre, or a conference-room-when-the-suits-aren't-around theatre, rather than renting a costly off- or off-off-broadway house, which is always an option, but a financially costly one. when the people like you, Adam, and the people like myself, and all the bloggers, and all the people in Joe's class, and all the downtown crowd, and all the people that the downtown crowd would never give a second glance to in midtown, and all the people who like what's happening in midtown but have run out of options for what to see or what to be involved in, when all of us are willing to attend and/or produce this independent - and by that I mean TRULY and NOT CHICLY independent - theatre, then theatre as an art form will finally grow its balls back. Theatre seems so lamentably and inescapably middle class to me. If we take capitalism out of the mix, or at least try to, the way a garage band does in rock before they sign to a major label, the way any busker passing the hat does, the way poets reading in a café do, then we would take our art, at first, off the grid, but onto, at a certain point, a larger canvas beyond the grid. Please feel free to quote me in this class and to refer anyone with questions or arguments directly to me. l [NOTE: Joe, of course, does not want me to say those things. I’ll let you know how it goes. Class is at 5.]