My friend, the playwright Mike Folie, emailed me this interview with monologist Mike Daisey, who offers ideas on reinvigorating the dying American theatre.

A couple of quick reactions:

1. Last I checked, the theatre had been dying for 2,000 years. For God’s sake, WHEN WILL IT JUST DIE????
2. Whenever that finally happens, somebody will just start a new one.
3. Eleven years ago at the RAT (Regional Alternative Theatre) Conference in New York City a bunch of attendees were offering dystopian views similar to Mr. Daisey’s of what was going to happen to theatre in America and what to do about it. Many of the prescriptions, like those of Mr. Daisey, were interesting and fun to talk about and utterly impracticable. Erik Ehn suggested trading bread for admission. Here’s what I know about bread: Most of it goes stale before anyone eats it. The birds in my back yard are well-fed indeed. Meanwhile, many of us who buy tickets find it more convenient to pay with a credit card than to carry around fresh home-baked bread. You see where I’m going with this.
4. If anything, in those 11 years I’ve seen more alternative theatres pop up all over the country. They are the future. They do what they want, when they want, even in the face of great indifference or unforeseen spectacular success, and there’s no stopping them. Are the artists making a lot of money in them? No — but the actors on-stage at the Public and the Mark Taper Forum aren’t making a lot of money there, either; they tend to be movie actors on the way up or on the way down. These alternative theatres, meanwhile, have a DIY ethic that will seem familiar to anyone who produces a print-on-demand book or podcast or blog — they put product out inexpensively and often and attract niche audiences. And this is fine — because more and more, everything is a niche.

If the main thrust of Mike Daisey’s ideas is related to audience development, then I’m with him. If it’s about finding ways to keep local artists tied to theatres, then I’m with him again — except, all over the land, they are already (just not in larger theatres).

Let’s make an agreement to check back in on the state of the American theatre in another 11 years — 2019 — and see how we’re doing. I say this, by the way, on the afternoon of Moving Arts’ 15th anniversary celebration. Almost every single week of those 15 (and a half) years, we’ve been going out of business. Some day, it’s going to happen for real.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 28th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Thoughts, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.