Parabasis

My Reporting From the Convening is Beginning To Go Up

If you're interested in some of things that were said or that happened at the convening you can follow along at the New Play Blog at Arena Stage.  The first post (of 8 or 9, if I remember correctly) is here.

One thing I learned this weekend is that listening full time, while transcribing, coming up with your own opinions, moving the conversation online and responding to people on twitter is exhausting!

Final Clarification on that MFA Stat

UPDATE: Jesus Christ on a stick, I should never have tweeted that stat.  That'll learn me.  David does the final-final explanation in the comments. He's going to post the full piece over at the new play development blog. apologies for all the confusion.

At some point over the diversity convening, someone in the circle paraphrased a quote from Todd London's "OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE", a forthcoming study about the lives and livings of playwrights.  I posted their quote on Twitter.  A lot of conversation about the accuracy of the stat etc. ensued.  I tried posting a clarification based on my own knowledge of the study from the TCG conference.  More conversation re: the accuracy ensued.

So now, once and for all, is a clarification about the stat, for those of you who are interested...It's true that 9 of 10 writers with an MFA in their study got them from 7 programs. Also that a huge percentage of people in their study had MFA's. But I think we were talking about it as though 9 of 10 writers, period, had MFA's from these programs which is not what they found or claim. They also acknowledge that the suggestions for names of the participants came, in a significant part, from MFA programs themselves (as well as TCG member theaters and New Dramatist members) so it's not a reliable stat for the whole population.

John Simon On "Race"

Funny quote from John Simon on Mamet's Race...: [Mamet] has boldly asserted that our 230-year national experience has been a dialogue about race.

This is more revealing of John Simon's politics than anything else. There's nothing bold about the assertion that the race is the song of America... in progressive circles. Its only in Conservative circles-- since conservatives want to perpetuate the myth that we all of a sudden live in a colorblind meritocracy despite the structural embedding of discrimination thanks to that pesky thing called history-- that saying that something like that would be considered "bold".

Question of the Day

An oft-repeated maxim amongst artists is that they want critics to judge a work of art on whether it succeeds or fails on its own terms.  It may not obey a particular critics ideas of what drama should or shouldn't be, but if it works according to whatever the work's "goals" are, then we should celebrate that.

I feel conflicted about this idea, personally. While I like the idea of a work of art setting the terms for its own debate, not every work of art contains a clear mission statement embedded within it (nor should it) and sometimes this sounds, frankly, like a way to avoid someone telling you you work is bad.

Here's the question, though... What should we do when the situation is reversed? What if a work of art fails according to its own terms/goals but is still entertaining or worthwhile in other ways? I'm doing the Critic-O-Meter for Mamet's Race right now, and there's a consensus (not a universal one, but a consensus nonetheless) that the piece is a failure on its own terms, but succeeds as entertainment.  Is that a recommendation that one see the show? 

There's a Reason It's Called "Unforgivable"

I Just Keep Getting Back to This Question

If Home Depot weren't hiring enough cashiers of color, you wouldn't sit around in a meeting talking about it, you'd sue them. Why shouldn't we sue large theaters that aren't diversifying?

(Again: I'm not saying we should, I'm just saying it's worth thinking about)

UPDATE: I wrote this post in great haste in the midst of the convening and wrote a clarifying post in the comments. Because people don't always read comments before posting their own, I realized i should append it to the post. So here it is: 

I was talking, just to clarify about administrative staffing....In other words... aren't some of these issues issues of workplace discrimination? And if so, why aren't they ever talked about in those terms? (for the record, I don't really think class action lawsuits are the answer, but a discrimination paradigm might open some new windows for thinking about these issues.)

Diversity Convening is On Twitter

Follow/use the hashtag #newplay to see what's going on!

Some Quotes From Today

• “The way to promote diversity to hire a diverse group of people. It’s not rocket science, but they’re not doing it. Why not?  Are they interested in diversity at all? I want to know if people mean it. I keep hearing the people in the castle having the conversation, but the people living in the castle, their demographics never change ”
•             “A majority of the theaters in the United States say `diversity’ but mean `butts in seats’. So they go `ooo, look at all these markets I’ve been ignoring and not participating in,’.  The case for diversity is usually made in terms of economic viability. `You’ll stay viable if you reach out to these communities’.”
•             “It’s not just about getting people of color etc. on your staff. It’s about a paradigm shift in the organization that’s inherent in mission and the values of the organization or else it becomes about outreach to this particular show, like the black play in February.”
•             “What about the subtle, or rather not-so-subtle dominance of male themes in work?  Plays that don’t have a lot to do with the muscularity of the human condition tend to get relegated to workshops and don’t get mainstage performances even though the numerical majority of our audiences are female.”
•             “Income stream and money.  The difference between the upper tier where there’s more money and white people and the rest of us philosophically about looking at audiences as an income stream.  The bigger institutions look at the Latino community and say `oh, look, untapped money’ as opposed to us little guys who look at it as a community, as an aesthetic.”
•             “In the 1980s there were all this grant money around to start diversifying. So suddenly these big theaters tried to diversify and they didn’t do anything with the other companies who were already doing that work. So the Guthrie got this money, but didn’t work with Penumbra etc.  And this created a kind of perverse system where (a) they didn’t know how to do that work and (b) it got so you couldn’t do a play by a person of color unless they could get a grant to do it.”
•             “How to write a LORT play if you’re a person of color: Use your ethnic background and exoticize yourself, but in a nonthreatening way, have female characters but make sure there are strong male roles.”
•             “These larger theaters are designed for certain outcomes.  The regional theater system is designed for certain outcomes.  So maybe the issue is creating different models where people can make a living, that are sustainable. We’re creative people, but we’re not creative in terms of business model. A different business model could lead to a different outcome?”
•             “When you want to motivate change and get risk-taking and innovation it takes time. The existing model is to fund change on the margins, and there’s not a lot of way that’s going to create change.”
•             “Our existing model is to build palaces. It’s a 1960s model. It says: Stay Out. This palace is for us.”
•             “We have to take the idea of diversity and turn it into the idea of democracy. Democracy in the arts.  The humane social action and process and practice that elevates and promotes the best in individuals. The book has been written on multiculturalism and diversity. We need to change the frame.”

Quick Embargo Explanation / 2 Diversities

So... some of the posts I'm writing (and Adam's writing) we are composing for Arena, to keep a record of what's going on on an objective level.  Those posts (the objective record/white paper of the 21st century kind) will appear on Arena's blog and my blog as soon as they're proofed/approved, which should be towards the end of the weekend.

Posts that are more my own subjective experience can be posted here without Arena's approval, so those might be coming today and tomorrow, we'll see.  

It seems to me in thinking about this conference that there's a tension between two different kinds of diversity. One I'll call institutional diversity and the other is landscape diversity. Institutional Diversity is the kind of diversity we normally talk about-- integrating institutions, their staffs, the actors they hire, the playwrights they produce etc.  The other one, the kind August Wilson talked about in The Ground On Which I Stand and the kind Michael Kaiser talked about in his blog post on HuffPo is the idea of diversifying the landscape of theater in general, in other words building new institutions and groups that are not Euro-centric.

These two appear to exist in tension with each other, or at least they're generally talked about as in tension. Kaiser's blog post certainly puts them in tension.  Do they have to exist in tension? Does diversifying larger institutions mean that non-eurocentric theaters won't have room to grow?  Can we have both integrated older institutions and institutions devoted to other kinds of work in same landscape? Is there anywhere where we've successfully accomplished this?

Convened!

I'm ensconced in the bowels of Georgetown University talking about diversity in new play development. The posts I'm writing about it are embargoed right now (or at least some of them are, I'll explain that later), but in the meantime, here's Adam "Mission Paradox" Thurman, Scott Walters and yours truly: