Friday, November 20, 2009
Media / Theater "It's Not in the P-I" Goes National
Posted by Brendan Kiley on Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 4:59 PM
On NPR's On the Media. (The Stranger's story about the project is here.)
Paul Mullin accompanies this announcement with his usual broadside.
There’s a stereotype about Seattle, and especially its artists, and even more especially its theatre aritists, that we have an inferiority complex. We have trouble believing that anyone who lives and creates their art here can really be doing work of such quality to deserve national recognition. After all, if you’re such a good playwright (or actor or director or designer), why the hell are you living here?Alas, I think there’s some truth to this myth. But I also earnestly believe that in the next few years we’re going to see the stereotype so completely exploded that it will never be able to reconstitute to haunt us again.
If this coverage by NPR proves one thing it’s this: the rest of the nation actually does give a damn about what we do in this city. They actually do care what happens to our newspapers, and they actually do want to know about what kind of original theatre we’re doing here, what stories we’re telling, uniquely, as Seattleites.
What they don’t care about, what they will never care about, is how carefully and exquisitely we craft a restaging of some chestnut from the canon, or the play that knocked ‘em dead off-Broadway last year. And this isn’t because those stories aren’t good, it’s because those stories aren’t uniquely ours. Seattle theaters that dedicate themselves exclusively to craft and the canon and providing a local outlet to New York’s latest exports are museums. And Seattle will never have as good museums as New York, Chicago or LA.
He's got a point. And if some theater somewhere in the city had been willing to work with Paul on this project (on his admittedly fast timeline), our city's professional acting talent could've read the scenes for the national radio audience.
But there wasn't, except for North Seattle Community College, whose student-actors got the chance instead.
1
There really needs to be a separate slog for the arts. They get in the way of the political stories. Just a thought.
Artist....attack!
Artist....attack!
3
I think this is great, but one thing bothering me about this is that we also have a very vibrant rich Fringe scene in Seattle - Balagan, WET, Annex, Theatre Schmeatre, Open Circle, Macha Monkey, etc. -- all of whom have a variety of very talented people working for them.
Were any of them approached for this show?
Or just the big houses? Considering the struggle the smaller theaters have to get recognition and HOW MUCH they do for local playwrights and stories, I feel they might have been more open to something like this. And to neglect them is not conducting due diligence...
I don't know the facts, I'm just asking...
Were any of them approached for this show?
Or just the big houses? Considering the struggle the smaller theaters have to get recognition and HOW MUCH they do for local playwrights and stories, I feel they might have been more open to something like this. And to neglect them is not conducting due diligence...
I don't know the facts, I'm just asking...
4
A wonderful artist and person, a colleague(sp?) Elizabeth Halfacre, had a show at North Seattle Comm College a few yrs ago. She showed me several works onhand offsite, but when I attended the exhibit, NSCC was closed that Sat. afternoon. A vantage point through the windows gave a nice distance to the work.
http://www.elizabethhalfacre.com/
http://www.elizabethhalfacre.com/
5
Boy, it's a lot of work to figure out what this post is about. Something like, "a play about..." up top would help me skip this altogether
7
The media just likes a good story. About the media. They don't care if it is a good play or not. This is just the radio equivalent of the travel section article you posted about earlier. It ain't the art that's getting written about, it's the angle.
8
This might force artists worldwide to become as cloying and fey as "Seattle Artists". A whole new Middlebrow Era is about to unfold!
This might force artists worldwide to become as cloying and fey as "Seattle Artists". A whole new Middlebrow Era is about to unfold!
9
MIddlebrow?! Heaven forbid! Not Seattle. Never!
I tell ya, it's damned hard indeed to weather all these aspersions cast by folks afraid to even put their names to something. Yeah, that'll change things for the better.
I tell ya, it's damned hard indeed to weather all these aspersions cast by folks afraid to even put their names to something. Yeah, that'll change things for the better.
12
I hope they don't pay to much attention to us -- it's vital for our art scene that we maintain that illusion of podunkery here in Seattle.
What's made Seattle's Arts (of all forms) great is that it wasn't LA or NYC. Those seeking strictly vainglory and bright lights had to move away to find the ego-stroking they so warmly desired.
This worked as tool for natural selection. It left behind, to us, those few gems who practiced their art for the love of the art, not the love of its praise. Our slow simmer reduced the sauce to its most flavorful elements while boiling off the vapid and self-aggrandizing .
If the Ought Decade has been anything for us, it has been the decade in which Seattle, sadly, lost its essential humility. And with the hubris has come douchebaggery, across all fronts and with quarter for none.
I can tell you this much: If you really care about Seattle's Art & Theater, keep it our little secret for as long as you possibly can.
What's made Seattle's Arts (of all forms) great is that it wasn't LA or NYC. Those seeking strictly vainglory and bright lights had to move away to find the ego-stroking they so warmly desired.
This worked as tool for natural selection. It left behind, to us, those few gems who practiced their art for the love of the art, not the love of its praise. Our slow simmer reduced the sauce to its most flavorful elements while boiling off the vapid and self-aggrandizing .
If the Ought Decade has been anything for us, it has been the decade in which Seattle, sadly, lost its essential humility. And with the hubris has come douchebaggery, across all fronts and with quarter for none.
I can tell you this much: If you really care about Seattle's Art & Theater, keep it our little secret for as long as you possibly can.
13
@3:
I asked Paul about this myself when the article first appeared, noting that Annex most likely would have been very interested in helping to develop this piece, and his response was something along the lines of, "well, you guys have already picked your season and I didn't think you'd have anything available until next year" (I believe that's a reasonably accurate summation; if not, Paul will no doubt correct my faulty memory), which is understandable, since that's the way most theatres operate, regardless of size.
However, I pointed out to him that we have just recently begun opening slots for "off night" performances on Tuesday & Wednesday evenings, in part to allow us to take advantage of just these sorts of unforeseen opportunities which might fall into our lap on short notice.
I don't know whether Paul and Dawson went to any of the other small companies in town to pitch this show; my guess is that, if they didn't it was an oversight based on a quite reasonable assumption that, like the larger houses they did go to, none would be able to squeeze them into their already tight production schedules.
@12:
That "secret", at least so far as theatre is concerned, has been out of the bag as it were for roughly 20 years. Most of the fresh-out-of-college kids who started the fringe theatre movement here hit town in the late '80's and early '90'. They're the ones who developed Seattle's small theatre scene to the extent that, by the mid '90's we'd gained a reputation, within the larger national theatre community at least, for being THE place to go if you wanted to do edgy, interesting work.
Although that influx has slowed somewhat over the past five or six years, new artists continue to flock to Seattle in droves, as evinced by the plethora of young, new companies that continue to sprout up like so many mushrooms in a rain forest: New Century, Balagan, The Satori Group, W.E.T., Strawberry, Nebunele, Pony World, Theatre Machine, just to name a few of the (IMO) more ambitious start-ups are all less than five years old. Heck, the average age of the artists currently running Annex, a company that's been around for 23 years, tends to skew into the late-20's; some of our staff weren't even born when the company was founded in 1986!
Theatre Puget Sound lists roughly 120 companies ranging from tiny fringe theatres all the way up to the big Equity houses currently active in the I-5 corridor between Olympia and Everett, with most naturally situated within Seattle itself. Outside of New York and Chicago, Seattle has the highest concentration of producing organizations per capita of any other city in the nation, including Los Angeles, which despite being a center for media with a huge population of performers, doesn't come anywhere near this level of density. That sort of artistic fecundity just doesn't occur in the kind of cultural "backwater" you seem to want to perpetuate here.
Grunge for example would never have become a world-wide cultural phenomenon that changed the face of the entire music industry if someone from the outside hadn't noticed what was going on up here under our seemingly perpetually dark, drizzly skies. Isolation may be beneficial in terms of limiting distractions and allowing one to develop their own unique voice, but what's the point of developing a voice if all you're going to do is whisper only to those closest to you?
So, I see nothing in the least bit wrong with people here having the ambition to do greater things, either artistically or professionally; all great things are born in part from great ambitions. It is only when ambition overtakes all other considerations that one loses that essential "humility" as you call it, and honestly, when I look around at the vibrancy, the richness, the sheer potential for greatness the Seattle theatre community possesses at all levels, I simply don't see that happening.
The only thing that's changed about this paradigm in the past decade or so is that the national mainstream media has begun to catch up and take greater notice of what people within the larger community, whether they're from Boston or Pasadena or Orlando or Anchorage have already known for decades.
More...
I asked Paul about this myself when the article first appeared, noting that Annex most likely would have been very interested in helping to develop this piece, and his response was something along the lines of, "well, you guys have already picked your season and I didn't think you'd have anything available until next year" (I believe that's a reasonably accurate summation; if not, Paul will no doubt correct my faulty memory), which is understandable, since that's the way most theatres operate, regardless of size.
However, I pointed out to him that we have just recently begun opening slots for "off night" performances on Tuesday & Wednesday evenings, in part to allow us to take advantage of just these sorts of unforeseen opportunities which might fall into our lap on short notice.
I don't know whether Paul and Dawson went to any of the other small companies in town to pitch this show; my guess is that, if they didn't it was an oversight based on a quite reasonable assumption that, like the larger houses they did go to, none would be able to squeeze them into their already tight production schedules.
@12:
That "secret", at least so far as theatre is concerned, has been out of the bag as it were for roughly 20 years. Most of the fresh-out-of-college kids who started the fringe theatre movement here hit town in the late '80's and early '90'. They're the ones who developed Seattle's small theatre scene to the extent that, by the mid '90's we'd gained a reputation, within the larger national theatre community at least, for being THE place to go if you wanted to do edgy, interesting work.
Although that influx has slowed somewhat over the past five or six years, new artists continue to flock to Seattle in droves, as evinced by the plethora of young, new companies that continue to sprout up like so many mushrooms in a rain forest: New Century, Balagan, The Satori Group, W.E.T., Strawberry, Nebunele, Pony World, Theatre Machine, just to name a few of the (IMO) more ambitious start-ups are all less than five years old. Heck, the average age of the artists currently running Annex, a company that's been around for 23 years, tends to skew into the late-20's; some of our staff weren't even born when the company was founded in 1986!
Theatre Puget Sound lists roughly 120 companies ranging from tiny fringe theatres all the way up to the big Equity houses currently active in the I-5 corridor between Olympia and Everett, with most naturally situated within Seattle itself. Outside of New York and Chicago, Seattle has the highest concentration of producing organizations per capita of any other city in the nation, including Los Angeles, which despite being a center for media with a huge population of performers, doesn't come anywhere near this level of density. That sort of artistic fecundity just doesn't occur in the kind of cultural "backwater" you seem to want to perpetuate here.
Grunge for example would never have become a world-wide cultural phenomenon that changed the face of the entire music industry if someone from the outside hadn't noticed what was going on up here under our seemingly perpetually dark, drizzly skies. Isolation may be beneficial in terms of limiting distractions and allowing one to develop their own unique voice, but what's the point of developing a voice if all you're going to do is whisper only to those closest to you?
So, I see nothing in the least bit wrong with people here having the ambition to do greater things, either artistically or professionally; all great things are born in part from great ambitions. It is only when ambition overtakes all other considerations that one loses that essential "humility" as you call it, and honestly, when I look around at the vibrancy, the richness, the sheer potential for greatness the Seattle theatre community possesses at all levels, I simply don't see that happening.
The only thing that's changed about this paradigm in the past decade or so is that the national mainstream media has begun to catch up and take greater notice of what people within the larger community, whether they're from Boston or Pasadena or Orlando or Anchorage have already known for decades.
14
COMTE,
You say "if they didn't it was an oversight based on a quite reasonable assumption that, like the larger houses they did go to, none would be able to squeeze them into their already tight production schedules."
A big part of this story in The Stranger is that the big houses all said no because they're totally inflexible and can't quickly put up a new production, "But nobody could commit to turning the production around fast enough, not even on their smaller secondary or tertiary stages."
You say in your answer that Annex keeps certain nights open for exactly this kind of work. And they didn't approach Annex. I don't know about the other theaters, but clearly there's a theater in town that can turn things around quickly. Yes, not the big houses, but I guess as a frequent theatre-goer and occasional volunteer, some of the best work I've seen has been on the Fringe.
Again, I think this is a very cool, worthy project. I just take issue with the martyrdom aspect of the story. The answer could be that oftentimes, Fringe theaters produce local playwrights and they didn't want to offer to knock off one of their own. But I also think Kiley missed something by not asking this question.
You say "if they didn't it was an oversight based on a quite reasonable assumption that, like the larger houses they did go to, none would be able to squeeze them into their already tight production schedules."
A big part of this story in The Stranger is that the big houses all said no because they're totally inflexible and can't quickly put up a new production, "But nobody could commit to turning the production around fast enough, not even on their smaller secondary or tertiary stages."
You say in your answer that Annex keeps certain nights open for exactly this kind of work. And they didn't approach Annex. I don't know about the other theaters, but clearly there's a theater in town that can turn things around quickly. Yes, not the big houses, but I guess as a frequent theatre-goer and occasional volunteer, some of the best work I've seen has been on the Fringe.
Again, I think this is a very cool, worthy project. I just take issue with the martyrdom aspect of the story. The answer could be that oftentimes, Fringe theaters produce local playwrights and they didn't want to offer to knock off one of their own. But I also think Kiley missed something by not asking this question.
15
Fringee: what Comte is too much of a gentleman to point out is that most of the fringe companies in Seattle have a poor or dwindling track record of locally developing new work. Some of the companies you mentioned simply don't do it at all. Some do less than they used to. (And others, for great reasons, only develop work by women.) Gone are the glory days (the 90's) when the question a fringe company would ask a team submitting a project is "why isn't this a new work?"
Annex alone has stayed that course. And yes I understood Annex's turnaround time because I love Annex and am intimate with its workings.
I will always consider Annex when planning future projects. In fact, I'm considering them right now. It makes sense given that they're the only fringe company I know of with a deep unwavering commitment to developing plays as they should be developed, by people who actually live in the city of their development.
Annex alone has stayed that course. And yes I understood Annex's turnaround time because I love Annex and am intimate with its workings.
I will always consider Annex when planning future projects. In fact, I'm considering them right now. It makes sense given that they're the only fringe company I know of with a deep unwavering commitment to developing plays as they should be developed, by people who actually live in the city of their development.
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