Howard Sherman: With U.S. theatre seasons being announced almost daily, things have been pretty lively around the old Twitter water cooler, with each successive announcement being immediately met with assessments at every level. How many female playwrights or directors? Is there a range of race and ethnicity among the artists? Is the season safe and predictable or adventurous and enticing? How many new plays, or actual premieres? How many dead writers? How many American playwrights? Any new musicals? The same old Shakespeare plays?
2 comments:
I've noticed the same trend that this article mentions: theatres around the country have very often been producing a handful of the same plays. Those plays may change from year to year: for example, a few years ago, the show "Red" was everywhere. "Spring Awakening" seems to be pretty popular, especially among college theatre companies (I know 3 universities that did Spring Awakening this year.) Everyone and their mother wants to do War Horse now. I'm conflicted as to how I feel about this trend. Yes, repeats of plays can be redundant, but because so many theatres have a geographic-specific audience, this gives more people the opportunity to see good shows (or at least shows that have been popular in NY). I do wish that more theatres would produce more new works or less well-known productions, but at the same time, I absolutely understand why theatres want plays that will bring in money. I'm not sure if theatres will do less well-known works and take bigger risks in this economic climate without some increase of government support or some other system of support from donors or companies, all of which has been very difficult to come by.
He makes some good arguments here, particularly against redundancy of productions in general seen in rep theaters all over the country, but I think he forgets some key points as well. For one, he doesn't acknowledge that New York isn't just the theater capitol of the nation, but the entire world, so it is natural that plays which are successful on New York stages are considered to be among the best plays in the world. I can't see why local theaters wouldn't want to bring this kind of quality and innovation to their audiences. Culture has a natural tendency to spread from central hubs, like New York and LA in our current cultural climate. That being said, he also forgets to mention that one of the most recently reoccurring productions that I personally have witnessed in the past couple of years has been August: Osage County which premiered at Steppenwolf in Chicago. I think this play is a notable exception to the New York trend that proves that all these local companies really desire to do is bring high quality and relevant plays to their audiences
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