Go See TAKING OVER.

Danny Hoch is one of the reasons I do theater the way I do it.  I saw his Jails, Hospitals, and Hip-Hop back in 1997 (wow…way back when), and was struck by how he was able to use what he saw around him to create important, exciting, fun theater that mattered.  Years later, I got to meet him through my own playwriting, and got probably the biggest validation of my young career when, after the first real reading of Welcome to Arroyo’s, a producer asked Danny what kind of work his Hip-Hop Theater Festival produced, and Danny pointed back to our stage and said “that.”  (I hope that sentence makes sense.)  Years after that, I found myself at Danny’s house, stirring the intricate squash-based meal he decided to whip up for a small group of friends who had come back to his place after a reading of Till the Break of Dawn.  I say all this to point out that I have undying respect for and gratitude towards Danny as an artist, a producer, and a human being.

So maybe I’m a little biased, but I think that his new play Taking Over is one of the best pieces of theater I have ever seen.  It does exactly what great hip-hop theater should be doing in this day and age: combining worlds, making disparate ideas and styles and cultures meet to form something new and powerful.  It’s personal and it’s political.  It’s hilarious and completely serious.  It’s a relatively even-handed study of gentrification that still manages to take a strong point of view and stick to it wholeheartedly.  I love this play.   You need to go see it.

Why Will Smith Matters.

From the always on time Ta-Nehisi:

I see a lot of that in Will, when I watch him acting. Dig his style in Hancock or I Robot. Whatever you think of those movies, you can see hip-hop oozing out of dude’s pores. I make no brief for black exceptionalism here–this is how identity works. But I think one of the things that’s so cool about this generation–the Andre 3000s, the Jay-Z’s, the Colson Whitehead, the Junot Diazes–is how we claim our heritage but not to the exclusion of the rest of the world.

The Arts Need to Think Big.

From the LA Times:

But it is also L.A. Opera’s leap of artistic imagination with this production that has provided it with the stimulus to think big. Taking bold artistic chances always opens new avenues. So fat cats in the audience besotted by Brünnhilde and her war whelps are no longer enough. Hip art galleries are enticed to get in on the act. Choppers will whirl over the Music Center in Stockhausen’s “Helicopter” Quartet. Want him or not, Wagner will permeate the environment. Now that it has taken the plunge, L.A. Opera has no choice but to operate in an atmosphere of hope, to try to tap into what will quite possibly be the country’s new mood.

Three thoughts:

1. Obviously, we’ll be hearing lots about hope over the next few years.
2. Thinking bigger doesn’t necessarily mean spending bigger.  Your ideas start with programming, but then you’ve got to figure out fiscally responsible ways to make those ideas come true.
3. I remember reading a while back that Google employees are expected to spend 10% of their time working on “impossible” projects, like an elevator to the moon.  This process has them exercising their minds to solve unsolvable problems, but it also potentially leads to discovering ways to make impossible things happen.  Arts organizations would be wise to adopt something like this; all departments need to be thinking creatively about real life and theoretical solutions to real life and theoretical problems.  We’re in an artistic field.  We need artistic solutions.
   

More on Women Playwrights.

From Bloomberg:

Let’s call this drama: Many Women Playwrights in Search of a Stage. Because if you write plays and have the wrong chromosomes, you’re in for a lot of frustration in New York.

I’ve touched on this before, then again, then again, and I still think it’s a great and important conversation to be having.  My points remain the same:

1. It’s a travesty that more women aren’t produced, especially in New York.
2. It’s ludicrous that more plays with female protagonists aren’t produced.  Every time I write a play like The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity (which calls for an all-male cast), I’m drawn to write a play about women in counterbalance.  It’s a personal and emotional decision, not a social one, and I can’t expect anyone else to stick to the same standards, but at base, the idea is that “women’s” stories (whatever that means to you) are just as vital as the same old male stories we hear all the time.
3. All that said, and this is my major major major bone to pick with the whole discussion: this isn’t just a question of men vs. women.  People of color, male or female, are drastically underrepresented on the stage.  Period.  And take it further: all we see on a great many stages, especially on the New York stage, is an educated (often highly educated) white moneyed male’s view of the world.
   

The Bloomberg article cites Oskar Eustis (for whom I have a lot of respect–I think he’s doing a great job at The Public) as saying (and I’m quoting the article here, not him): people tend to associate with those they’re comfortable with; among artistic directors that often means male playwrights they’ve worked with before.  This is true, for sure.  John Patrick Shanley can get a new musical done because of his track record.  A new John Guare play is going to programmed into a major company’s season — and it should.  Theaters cultivate relationships with playwrights, not just plays, and that’s a good thing for the health of the art form.

But.

Look at the new writers being cultivated and produced throughout the city (and the country): they’re young.  They’re white.  They’re men.  They’re straight.  They’re of a certain economic class.  They’re products of the big schools.  And look: I like a lot of their work.  I know some of these guys, and I dig them as people.  I’m not begrudging anyone their success.

But there are great playwrights out there, female and African-American and Asian and Latino and gay and lesbian and so on and so on, and theaters have relationships with them, and are even developing some of their work, but that work is not being produced.  Punto.  There’s something else at play here.  Yes, artistic directors tend to associate with people they feel comfortable with, but that comfort doesn’t just come from having worked with a writer before.  People tend to feel comfortable with people who look like them, speak like them, share some kind of cultural background with them.  Punto.

There’s a lot at work here, and a quota system doesn’t fix the problem.  Here are some things that will help:

1. More women and people of color in decision-making and decision-shaping positions (not just Artistic Directors, but all throughout the administrative side);
2. Willingness from Artistic Directors to trust the instincts and value the opinions of these folks in the decision-making/season-planning process;
3. Willingness from Artistic Directors to produce seasons that reflect the make-up of the United States (and New York City), not just their current audiences.  The audience myth is a self-fulfilling prophecy; if you program shows that appeal to a particular audience, of course they’ll be the only audience that shows up;
4. Break away from the slot system: everyone can’t do their “Black” play in February.  It’s bad business, for one thing.  It’s offensive, for another.  It doesn’t build sustained new audiences, for a third.
5. Develop new audiences.  Really.  Aggressively go out and build new audiences.  Cultivate relationships with communities, with young people, with folks that don’t traditionally go to the theater all that often.  Find out what they like.  Find out what they need.  Work with them.  Theater should be a populist art form.  Populist does not mean dumbed down.  It does not mean a lowering of standards.  It means doing work that actually matters to someone, that impacts them.  I walk out of 50% of shows saying some variation of “that was fine, but why should I care?”  If you’re asking people to pay five-to-ten times as much as they’d pay for a movie ticket, you better be giving them a reason to care.

This went on way longer than I planned.  I’m sure we’ll come back to it.

Two More Texts.

Following up on the events of Tuesday night:

Thursday 10:26 — “If I went to school with Barack Obama our lockers would be next to each other.  True story.”  — CO’B

Thursday 11:11 — “Everything has that ‘new Presidency’ smell!!!” — Yofo (YF)

They keep on rolling in.