Filed under: American, art, art institutions, Art Scenes, business, theatre, writing | Tags: American theatre, art institutions, arts, czar of theatre, Perelman PAC, theatre, writing
A writer of my acquaintance recently had an op-ed published in the Washington Post about theatre and what should be done about the death spiral it seems to be in. In the piece, she proposed some ways to fix some of the problems the field has found itself in. She named the difficulties, the history and offered a solution.
In watching the response to the article roll in, I was struck by how those who were opposed to her ideas seemed to think the proposal was a plan that was about to be put into place. They seemed to think this was a thing that was about to happen. (One thing she suggested was to give funding for big arts institutions directly to artists instead.) There were cries for the loss of these institutions, for the loss of jobs, for the impossibility of artists taking responsibility for their own budgets. It seemed like they thought this writer was a wizard and was giving notice of what she was about to do with her magic wand. They seemed to attribute great powers to this writer, to imagine she could, with a series of words in a major newspaper, transform the whole of American Theatre, whether the American Theatre wanted it or not.
I mean, if only! If writers had the ability to write things and make them so, I’d be pretty psyched! That’s the end of sexism, everyone! No more racism or ageism or ableism! We’re all good because I wrote a proposal! I have the magic pen; Stand back!
No one has the power to make change that universally, at least not in this country. A writer may make a suggestion and individual people and institutions might think it’s a neat idea and do something about it. But wide sweeping systemic change doesn’t happen just because someone wrote a suggestion.
I laughed when I saw this piece about theatre roll through my social media and over and over again, folks in my circle said, “This is what I’ve been saying the last 20 years.” I felt like I have said similar things over the years, but just, not in this framework and not in a major newspaper. But regardless, no one ever complained when any of us said that funding should go to artists directly. No one thought that would be happening immediately as soon as they read the words. No one was mad at us about jobs being lost in the future because of our ideas. Why an op-ed should be different, I don’t know. Ideas are ideas. They are not actions. This writer is not the czar of theatre, charged to make enormous changes. We have no czar of theatre and no one with any overarching power over the field at large. There is no one who can shift the entire landscape of a field without a lot of participation and action and organizing across the land.
People didn’t like this idea? Fine. They don’t have to do anything about it. They can try and go on as they have always done or make another suggestion.
Or I guess someone could write it in the Great Wizard’s book where everything we write comes to pass. If anyone could direct me to that book, I’d really appreciate it as I would love to make sweeping change with just the power of my words. That would be a pretty neat trick. It’s just not a trick that exists yet.
So…everyone who’s worried that the theatre is about to be taken over by artists and that big institutional buildings are going to fall into disrepair, well, I think you can relax. We’ve been talking about this sort of stuff for decades and people are still building big fancy buildings (one opened just today in NYC!) and artists are still having trouble making a living. The status quo may be under threat, in that a lot of theatres are folding, but it won’t change overnight and it won’t change without a very big push from a lot of people. Nothing that anyone writes can change it in an instant. We can just contribute to the conversation and hope that one day, things might be different. The more ideas we have to draw on, then the better off we’ll be.
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