Nobody Likes The Guthrie's Dry White Season

By Isaac Butler

The Star-Tribune published a bit of reporting over the weekend noting that the Guthrie theater's Christopher Hampton festival was a massive commercial and critical failure that sold only approximately 50% of the available seats, received mixed-to-negative reviews, and cost so much money that likely budgets and wages for the rest of the season will take a hit.

The Guthrie's artistic director Joe Downling, lest we forget, prioritized this mini-fest of Hampton's work over programming a single work by a woman or playwright of color. And one of the rationales given at the time was that he had seats to fill.

But he didn't fill them. And the end result of this will like be further justification for more conservative, less forward-thinking, less-diverse choices.  It's maddening. 

Comments

[Sean]

This has been something that a lot of people in Indy theater repeat as a mantra - if you're gonna fail, you may as well fail with pride. Do what you think is *right* and *good* and then when nobody shows up, you'll at least know that your motivation was something *other* than "tricking people to show up." I always file this under "smell how you like", but that's because I'm old and Digital Underground seems relevant.

[Ben]

I thought Rohan's point about how many other currently living playwrights there are that are certainly deserving of a festival was a welcome reminder that there ARE PLAYWRIGHTS DESERVING OF SUCH A CELEBRATION...and then I remembered that none of them are personal friends of Dowling's and therefore probably wouldn't "merit" such an event...and then I quietly wept.

[Jack Worthing]

Sarah Ruhl and Tarell Alvin-McCraney deserving a season of their work? Really? When Hampton's plays have held up for 40 years and are sorely under-appreciated in this country? I see...

[Jack Worthing]

To be clear I'm referring to a point made in the newspaper article.