Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Maybe It's Me, At The End of A Long Day...

...but, I swear to God, this article makes no sense to me. Or, rather, the takeaways are totally and completely contradictory and a few, key, salient points are totally glossed over.

So, from the Larry Eilenberg quote at the end, we're supposed to think that the way to revitalize the theatre is to focus on new, exciting and presumably untested playwrights.

But the board president said that doing new, untested plays didn't work and lead to a shrinking subscription base. And what Loretta Greco did, in planning a season that wasn't reliant on world premieres, helped revitalize the theatre.

Also, the artistic directors seem to be wholly responsible for the theatres going into debt, with massive overages and bloated budgets, but the board and the financial members of the staff are not. In fact, the phrase "managing director" doesn't even appear.

Not even to mention that a theatre is proud of the fact that actors donated to save it. Not members of the community who didn't want the theatre to close, but friends of the artistic director she hasn't spoken to in years.

These are good things? These is a laudable outcome? A mission to produce new plays is not a mission to produce world premieres?

It's times like these when I hit my most bitter and, in a way, most hopeless about all of this and think of the classic Heminway quote: "gradually and then suddenly."

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