UPDATE: There's some really great stuff to be found in the comments section (and some lovely praise for yours truly, which I'm always flattered by), including some info about DC and Vermont's cost of doing business. Check it out if you get a chance!
(I would note that this post is an effort to build off of and respond to, amongst other things, the output lately on this excellent blog.)
Lately I feel that I have been in the midst of a debate that is happening about the value of production values and the virtues and demerits of DIY theatre. This post at Jay Raskolikov is one example, as is RLewis' recent post in my comments section but I also hear and read lots of complaints (usually off the record) by various people on various sides of the issue. So I thought it'd be a good idea to get it all out in the open, because I think it points to several interlocking debates.
First off, as words are slippery, let's attempt a couple of definitions. When we say "production values" in this post, we mean, I suppose, the lavishness of the production-- the amount of money and WOW! factor that goes into a production. I will suggest a different definition of this word later, but for now, as that seems to be what people mean when they talk about "production values" (did the show have good technical elements) let's use that. By "DIY theatre", I mean theatre that is the complete opposite-- theatre where the production values are super low, the theatre of available means. I'm not saying that has to be the definition of either of those words in perpetuity, that's just how I'm using them in this post.
So without further ado...
(1) What are ticket buyers paying for?
It seems that, the higher the ticket price, the more we assume that what we're paying for is "production values" rather than "the quality of the show". For example, All Wear Bowlers might be one of the best shows I've seen in five years, but if you asked me to pay $120 for it (the going orchestra rate for a Broadway show) I'd look at you crosseyed, even though I have not seen a show on Broadway in years that comes even close to the quality of AWB. So clearly, even I- with my investment in the quality of theatre over its flashiness- still expect flash when I pay my $120 for a ticket. If that's true of me, it's gotta be true of other audience members.
As you keep lowering the price, a different rationale evolves, one of "supporting" the company putting on the show. This rationale gradually takes over the less money you are spending on a show, until you hit off-off-broadway prices, where the ticket cost is entirelyabout supporting work you like. Of course, even that "support" is inadaquate. As a Soho Rep mailer I got recently explained, every seat they sell actually costs them $70, so every time they sell a ticket for $35, there's a $35 deficit that needs to be made up with contributions. Doing some rough guestimating, elsewhere's production of volume of smoke's seats were in fact worth $26.00 (meaning that if we had sold every seat at $26.00, we would've broken even). We sold the tickets for $15.00.
What these rationales start to do is pervert the conversation away from art. If you're putting on a show that costs a lot of money, you're going to want to give the audience something for what they paid. The something is rarely thought of as "some good theatre", it is instead thought of as the ole razzle dazzle. Going down this path for a long time will lead to... well... where Broadway is now, a lumbering, enormously expensive (and getting pricier and pricier) collection of spectacles.
(2) DIY Theatre, our Savior?
There are all sorts of reasons to find the DIY approach appealing. In no particular order: It's fuckin' punk rock, Peter Brook's "rough theatre" theories are beautiful, it returns theatre to the people not the powerful, necessity is the mother of invention, prolificness, etc. Certainly, I have found much to value in doing work on a very limited budget. The very first workshop of volume of smoke, which was done for $900, was as much an eye opening experience as a director as First You're Born, which had a budget that was more than $20,000. Furthermore, it's nice if you're able to dabble in multiple worlds, to take a break from what can feel like the large responsiblity of helming a big old monstrosity to get "back to basics".
But here's the thing. Theatre is expensive. Doing it in New York (with NYC's real estate prices) is additionally expensive. Given the additional expense of just living here in New York, getting the resources together to do a show, even a DIY show, is no small feat. Talk of the Walk-Up, which cost somewhere between one and two thousand dollars, was funded out of one person's pocket. Given that there are lives to lead, families to build, things other than a theatre career to fund etc. it is unlikely that we're all going to regularly have one to two thousand dollars lying around to do theatre.
And even then the business model don't make a whole heckuva lot of sense. Let's assume for a moment that it was a $2000 show, at a 50-50 box office split theatre with seventy five seats for three performances. In order to break even, you'd have to fill every seat in the house and charge every person $18.00 to see it. And the show they'd be seeing would have next to zero production values (that would be, I guess, the point). But it's also important to keep in mind (thinking from a business-model perspective) what other shows are offering for $18.00, which is pretty much the going ticket rate for most showcases.
There is also an ethical issue here, in that doing theatre on a low budget generally means not paying people, but because it is still so expensive to do, any money generated through ticket sales goes back into the company. In any other business, this would be considered flat out evil, but in theatre, which is generally considered a somewhat Leftist art form, that's just the way things are done. I am increasingly troubled by the idea of not paying people for their work, and at the same time, artist salaries add very quickly to a budget. Paying the staff $200 each for a five character play will cost ya $2000 easy (that's five actors and one each of director, SM, costumer, lighter and setter).
(3) DIY As An Aesthetic
When I've heard DIY theatre critiqued, it is critiqued mainly as an aesthetic that has developed over the past few decades rather than as a means. And as an aesthetic, the complaints I hear (and at times feel myself) are mainly along lines of sloppiness. The show's look kind of slapdash, the performances are very uneven, directorial choices seem more oriented around what's cool rather than what works to tell a story or create a world, the shows are underrehearsed, and in particular state design takes on a kind of functional quality that does not hint at anything larger than itself.
If production-value-oriented theatre can err on the side of empty, meaningless prettifying, than DIY can tend towards what we've discussed on this blog as "collegiate theatre"-- i.e. the theatre where the script calls for a living room set so you steal some stuff that approximates a living room instead of making a different, more accomplishable and thought out design choice. And within that punk rock ethos can be a justification for sloppiness and for a good-enough-for-government-work outlook. After all, Sam Shepard didn't do rewrites, why should I? etc.
But I also think tarring all low budget theatre with this broad brush is a mistake, because there are real virtues to doing work on this level, even if it is exhausting. You get to really take ownership over the work you're doing, for one. There's a kind of creative freedom in having little. There's a sort of raw immediate energy from the best of this work that may very well be unique to the medium.
(4) Some Further Thoughts
One thing I think people respond to is a well produced show. A show that says from the moment you walk into the theatre you are in good hands. That was one of the consistent compliments we got on elsewhere's production of volume of smoke in the Spring , and I really learned about how much good will can be generated from an audience if they walk into the theatre and feel like they are really somewhere else and that someone has their interests at heart at least a bit. This good will is important to generate because unlike in other art forms, you get one, temporally limited shot to get it right.
One of the easiest ways to create this feeling is to have a certain amount of design that the audience can experience as soon as they walk in the door. For both In Public and volume of smoke, I was insistant the floor needed to be altered (with black and white tiles for the first, and with a faux wooden board paint treatment for the second) because (amongst other reasons) I didn't want the audience to think "oh great, another play that's set in a theatre on the lower east side" when they came in, and the dingy, distressed black floors of a rental house scream that to me. In other words, I wanted the audience to feel that a transformation was taking place from the moment they entered the house. And I think to some extent it worked.
The problem is is that that has gotten confused with the amount of money one spends on a show. Well produced and well funded are, in fact, totally different things. The real way we should think about production values is not the expenses lavished on a production, but rather how much the production was valued as a complete experience for its audience. And it is this latter thing that can get lost in DIY work's rush to put up a show for the joy and thrill of it.
So how do keep that feeling-- that a show is well produced with a certain amount of craft and care-- while also maintaining the immediacy and raw energy that comes from doing theatre on a lower budget level?
(5) Or Are We Just Totally Fucked?
And then there's the possibility that (at least in New York) we're totally fucked, that it's just too expensive to do work here and live here. That real estate is out of control, and people will always see your work as second, third or fourth rate when you do it on a lower level. That supply so overwhelms demand that to some extent there's no point in your putting on a show, because only your friends will see it. Etc.
I use to laugh off these concerns, but having seen more theatre and talked to more people outside of New York, I actually think they are very much worth considering. It's important to remember exactly how fast NYC has become a playground of the rich, and that we're still feeling the effects of the Giuliani era in ways that we probably don't even understand.
TO some extent, there is no business model for theatre that makes any sense whatsoever. Only one out of five Broadway shows even recoups. That's less of a success rate than restaurants. Off-Broadway commercial theatre is very hard to make work, there are fewer houses, and the ratio of labor costs to ticket pricepoint doesn't make much sense. Outside of the commercial world, we have a world of theatre whose very nature is admitting that as a business model it doesn't make sense traditionally. We admit this by calling it non-profit. Below that we have the smaller, indie theatre companies and artists who face serious hurdles to growing and advancing. Most sources of non-out-of-pocket funding are eaten up by larger companies, and most sources of increased audiences are eaten up by all the other shows happening simultaneously.
Of course, theatre has rarely made sense as a business throughout time. As I've said many times on this blog, even the Athenians had government sponsorship for the arts (in the form of ticket price subsidies) and of course by Shakespeare's time, heavy patronage helped make everything possible.
I think that the landscape of theatre here in NYC has gone through very very rapid change, and things are at a very chaotic point right now. And a lot of that chaos is reflected in business issues, like that the price of a show at Playwrights Horizons is $65, or the fact that a week's exclusive rental at a cheap theatre is generally over a thousand dollars. I'm not even going to pretend to know how all of this is going to shake out, but I think it's worth looking at the different aesthetic reactions to this business reality, and what their plusses or minusses are.
I'm also interested in looking beyond the NYC landscape. The reason this post is overly NYC-identified is that it's the only theatre scene I can claim real understanding of. So I hope you all in the comments and on other blogs canhelp provide more perspective on all of this. How do these issues play out in Chicago? Or San Francisco? Or Portland, Oregon? Or Seattle? Or Philly? Or DC? Or anywhere else?
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