Adam Szymkowicz publishes a portion of Gary Garrison’s article about playwriting in Dramatist magazine that took me back to the discussions about bringing in out of town actor to perform at so-called regional theatres. Apparently, it isn’t just actors, but playwrights, too (gee, what a surprise):

You’ll excuse me, I’m sure, if I don’t share Garrison’s sense of glee that this was actually said out loud. Not that it should have been kept secret (after all, there’s nothing all that surprising in what they said — we’ve all known it forever), but that they should say such things without a shred of embarrassment, even a faint hint that they have totally betrayed the foundational purpose of the regional theatre movement: to decentralize and localize the theatre — well, frankly, is this really something to applaud?

Isn’t it time for us to actually consider whether the homogenization of our theatre literature, where we create plays that have no tie to a specific place or community, has been good for the drama? Historically, this so-called “universal” art was not the norm. Moliere wrote his plays about the court of Louis XIV and performed them for the court of Louis XIV; no matter what time Shakespeare set his plays, they all were really plays about Elizabethan England; the Greek plays were about Athens, and the Bible stories that make up the various mystery cycles had a whole lot more Yorkshire than Jerusalem in them. So what have we lost by alienating the artist from a community? What have we lost by not producing the plays of playwrights who live in the community where a theatre is located? A student of mine today in class mentioned seeing a production of The Pirates of Penzance at the Guthrie Theatre in which they inserted a single line reference to a local sculpture, and the audience went nuts. Suddenly, there was a connection that was informed by a shared reality. Moliere’s skewering of the “precieuse” in The Precious Damsels was probably a helluva lot funnier in 17th-century Paris where the people in the audience knew exactly who was being ridiculed.

Don’t get me wrong: I am all for playwrights taking situations into their own hands and doing productions of their own plays. In fact, I’d like to see all theatre artists do the same, so that those big regional theatres suddenly found themselves boycotted until they came to their senses. But this brazen abandonment of responsibility to the local community? Not acceptable.

Original post by noreply@blogger.com (Scott Walters)