CMU School of Drama


Tuesday, November 03, 2020

The Past May Hold Answers, But They Are Imperfect

Butts In the Seats: I came across an interesting contrast in perspective about solutions for a post-Covid world last week. In American Theatre, Jim Warren, the founding artistic director of the American Shakespeare Center proposed a model for theatre to ensure long-term, consistent employment for artists by returning to the rotating repertory model and having artists fulfill administrative roles.

1 comment:

Annika Evens said...

I think the idea proposed of returning theatres to the rotating rep idea to keep people with jobs is interesting, and one I have not thought about before, but reading about this idea, I do not think I agree with it. I think the goal after the pandemic should be to give as many theatre artists a job as possible, not limiting the people who work on a show and only giving 10 actors jobs at a company instead of 10 per show. I also do not agree at all that the actors and artists should be doing the administrative work. That is a whole other job that people have and they too need work, so we should not be advocating for taking away their jobs and giving them to artists who don’t know how to do that. No one would ever advocate for having the bookkeeping perform in the shows the give them more hours of work, so why is it okay to push for that the other way. Seems weird to me. I agree with the tweets that were posted expressing their disagreement with this idea.