Sunday, January 27, 2013
"But you're so young to be a playwright!"
A Rehearsal Room of One's Own: I'm not sure why the also-fairly-young actress felt the need to tell me I was "young" to be a playwright, why she thought that was the appropriate follow-up to my telling her I was a playwright. Maybe she hasn't done many new plays? Maybe she has it in her head that "playwrights" are Mamet and Albee and hasn't yet worked with a playwright my age? In any event, I excused myself from the conversation rather quickly and did not talk to her for the rest of the party.
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3 comments:
I think this women had some very valid points about being a young playwright and attracting a young audience. I thought her point of in order to bring in younger audiences into a theatre, theatres should promote more work by younger playwrights. People closer in age can often have similar experience and can often relate to each other better. It just seems like common sense that to do this you should bring in writers about the same age. Although social media does bring people together outside their immediate areas and this can span both distance and age distance, people with age difference were raised at a different time with different ideas on many things. Playwrights closer and age can often have ideas similar to a younger generation ergo attracting a younger crowd. However nice it would be to bring in just younger playwrights to attract a younger crowd the author of this blog post was right in saying that theaters need to appeal to an older generation as well, a wide rarity of playwrights would be overall better for everyone. A variety of writers have way more to offer and when it comes to staying afloat as a theatre, that can save your season.
Maybe older people and/or playwrights are intimidated by younger ones who do just as god a job as they do? There's one brilliant playwright I know of is under the age of 25 and still producing great plays. Young people bring more contemporary viewpoints to the stage and they do it in a way that's fresh and new. For the most part, they're focused on getting their art out there, rather than sitting there old and jaded and grumbling about trying to become the next classic American playwright. I also agree that if big theaters want a younger audience, they should look to young playwrights. Our generation outnumbers the "old timers" anyway.
I have to agree with everything this woman said, and not just because we share a first name. I haven't seen a play with a character under the age of 30 who was more than an obnoxious stereotype of a teenager... ever, actually. As someone who has always been the baby, it's exhausting to have to try twice as hard to be taken seriously, and I think the author describes that feeling perfectly. How on earth are we supposed to do anything important if the mere fact that we were born a few years later means that everything we have to say has no weight be cause we haven't "lived" and we're attached to social media and don't know what real human interaction actually means. Last week there was a story about a play that existed partially through facebook. each of the actors were required to make a facebook page for their character and people could go online and follow the story before the show actually opened. That's a project that probably couldn't have been produced without us "young ins". There's a new form of storytelling now that the internet exists, and just because one generation has a harder time picturing life without it than all the others, doesn't mean our stories or ideas are any less significant.
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