Of late, I begin most of my days trawling the Internet, searching for intriguing theatre stories that largely escape the glare of the usual purveyors of stage news. I am, in this chore, curating the American Theatre Wing’s Twitter feed, as a supplement to the company’s work, looking for stories that complement our interests; when I find a story that’s a bit offbeat, off-topic or which seems to call out for a prefatory opinion, I tweet it as  myself.

My highly unstructured survey of each day’s theatre journalism is driven almost entirely by the relatively indiscriminate Google News. As a result, I am rapidly surveying screen after screen of headlines assembled because they include, or are attached to articles which contain, the word “theater” or “theatre,” depending upon the stylebook of the individual publication. On the average day, I’m scanning about 500 headlines and making snap judgments about whether to read an article, and then again whether to share it more broadly.

This gives me a particular and perhaps peculiar overview of what’s “making news” in theatre, yet it has consistently yielded a type of story, and therefore a type of theatre activity, which seems to be happening on a daily basis: theatres are either being demolished, slated for demolition, or saved from demolition and restored by either government agencies or community action. Having realized that these stories are so commonplace, in cities and towns both large and small, they rarely appear in either The Wing tweets or my own, since the net effect would be as repetitive as finding the stories about them has turned out to be.

If you’re at all familiar with my writing, you might well expect me to have a knee jerk reaction: elated at restorations, heartened by stays of execution, worried about potential razings and despondent over losses. But in point of fact, that’s not the case.

I am pleased that each and every venue written about has seemingly provoked such passion within the community where it exists. People seem to genuinely treasure theatres, the older the better, even long-shuttered ones, be they legit houses or movie palaces. Whatever the circumstances, they provoke wistful editorials of bygone glory days as well as hopeful declarations about how a revitalized theatre can in turn reenergize the real estate and community around it. Indeed, the mantra of a theatre as a center for economic development seems to have infiltrated the general consciousness. Those stories that I stop to read are replete with tales of other communities that preserved their heritage and their economic base by causing theatres to rise up to their past vitality, as the basis for rallying the troops to save the venue in question.

And that’s where my skepticism sets in.

Can it be true that in each and every case where a theatre was saved from the wrecking ball and lovingly brought not simply up to code, but back to its architects’ original intent, downtowns have truly been saved? Is there really enough quality entertainment on tour or being produced in each of these locales to motivate the populace to once again fill the theatres as they did in the heydays when they were built three-quarters of a century ago, 100 years past, or even earlier? Does every feasibility study generated miraculously discover hordes of people ready to abandon their LCD TVs, their Wiis, and their generally busy schedules to gather together as in halcyon days for the marvel that is live performance? No question, it would certainly be nice to think so. And no question, it has worked in many places. But I worry.

I worry that theatres built for another era, when population, demographics and entertainment options were different, are being saddled with at times unreasonable expectations; that after the opening celebrations fade, they will once again decline in popularity and vitality. I worry that theatre companies will be persuaded to participate in the dreams of a municipality or developer that don’t really suit their needs creatively. I worry that if you rebuild it, they will not come.

This pessimism is infused not by a dark cloud that has suddenly hijacked my love for and faith in the power of theatre. It comes from article after article in which the sole focus is the building itself, not the art or entertainment necessary to make it viable. Articles that have heralded the rebuilt and expanded Arena Stage are not the examples of which I speak, because that project was undertaken by a vibrant and ongoing artistic institution that was expanding to meet its needs. It’s the projects in small, out of the way towns, and those disconnected from clear creative impulse and need which I fear may one day tip the scales of economic development away from restoring theatres, because one too many has failed to measure up.

At this point, I should interject that I love old theatres, and could spend hours exploring their nooks and crannies. As The Tony Awards have surveyed most every venue in New York of late, I have marveled at how theatres have been shoehorned into unusual physical configurations, and I have been as thrilled at finding vintage lighting panels which (reportedly) still function as I have been at seeing ceilings stripped of grime to reveal painted constellations, or freshly imagined in the spirit of vintage artwork.

I love the trip back in time I take whenever I visit Goodspeed, restored some 45 years ago in the spirit in which it was built in the 1870s; harbor deep emotion for the unsightly food terminal that is home to Long Wharf, where I did some of my earliest theatergoing; and I am eager to see what the renovations at Hartford Stage have meant to a building in which I learned my trade. My emotional investment is considerable.

But it’s another Connecticut venue that fuels my concern for the daily litany I survey of projects completed, underway or proposed nationally: the Connecticut Shakespeare Theatre. This 1200 seat structure, perched where the Housatonic River meets Long Island Sound, was, for a time from the 50s through the 70s, a serious attempt to rival theatres in other Stratfords — those in Canada and England. For theatergoers of a certain age in southern New England, the mere mention of the spot brings memories of shows starring Morris Carnovsky and Katharine Hepburn, of school trips that were first encounters with Shakespeare. But the Connecticut theatre reportedly operated for many years reliant on the largesse of a few wealthy patrons who kept it going even as audiences shifted their allegiance to upstart regional theatres in Stamford (The Hartman, itself now gone), New Haven and elsewhere; when those patrons passed away, so did the theatre, leaving bars, motels and shops named for a Bard who had fled.

I wish the Stratford CT effort well, just as I wish every theatrical endeavor well. But I fear that at least some of the theatre revivals I read about every day are not truly theatrical endeavors, but are instead real estate deals. You can take any room, most any building, and make theatre in it, but when you restore “A Theatre,” only live performance can take place in it. I hope that anyone involved in preserving and restoring theatres, or pleading for their renewal or survival, remembers that to keep a theatre alive, there must be the act of theatre to fill it. Because if there aren’t performers to “tear up the stage,” as we sometimes read about performances, then perhaps it might just be time to tear that theatre down, rather than let it serve, as too many do, as boarded up eyesores, or as the imagined, reinvigorated home of unidentified plays and players.

Sometimes, it’s best to let the past give way to the present and future, and instead of clinging to buildings filled with memories and ghosts, build wholly anew, for today’s theatre groups, so that they may flourish.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

To the question, “How long should a man’s legs be?,” President Abraham Lincoln is credited with responding, “Long enough to reach the ground.” The quote may or may not be accurately ascribed to Lincoln, but it has been on my mind a lot of late, although not in regard to physical stature.

If you are a regular theatergoer, you are undoubtedly in the habit of ascertaining, before you see a production, what the running time will be. Your motivation may be practical: notifying the babysitter, figuring out what train to catch, making post-theatre dining reservations. But undoubtedly you have found yourself cheered, more than once, when your inquiry results in the answer, “90 minute, no intermission.”

It is the cheerfulness which concerns me. I am not entirely certain when the tide turned towards the single-act play (and in some cases musicals), but they seem much more prevalent of late. Perhaps this is simply evolutionary, as we’ve watched theatre go from five acts to three acts to two, and the standard is turning once again. But unlike other devolutions in theatrical scope, which have been economically driven (playwrights say they can’t get large cast plays produced, and therefore write more “practically,” to name one troublesome example), the “full-length” one-act play is actually counter to theatrical economics, as it wreaks havoc on intermission concessions sales, to the dismay of many managers and producers.

Years ago, in my press agent days in Hartford, I would regularly get a call from the major local critic, on a Wednesday or Thursday, asking about the length of the production that would open on a Friday night. His query was practical; he would leave the theatre immediately at the end of the production and go back to the paper to write for the next day’s edition, a schedule that even the New York papers had abandoned (and because we had only five previews, we were loathe to invite him sooner). As we came to know each other better, I would try to call him preemptively, and if I forgot, and received a Thursday call, I would pick up my phone and announce the number of acts and running time before I even said hello. After we had presented a few shows that were single act, intermissionless plays, for which the critic voiced his enthusiasm, I brashly asked, “Look, if all our plays were one act without an intermission, would we be assured of better reviews?” I was met with the only half-joking response, “It wouldn’t hurt.”

In recent weeks, I have noted an articulate and enthusiastic theatre tweeter lobbying for exactly that – that all plays should be unbroken and brief. We have debated the issue as effectively as one can do in 140-character snippets, but his advocacy of this position, and my prior experience with such opinions, moved me to say more on the topic.

Yes, I will confess that on occasion, I am heartened to know that I can make it home with enough time to brush my teeth and settle into bed before the start of “The Daily Show” at 11 pm. But it has never occurred to me to hope that playwrights would simply write shorter, which is in fact code for “less.” I am, however, an enthusiastic advocate of 7 o’clock or 7:30 p.m. weeknight curtains, which we had instituted in 1986 at Hartford Stage when audience surveys revealed a 2 to 1 preference in the audience for earlier start times – among an audience that snapped up tickets for the decidedly wordy works of Shakespeare and Ibsen. I like getting home early, but not at the expense of theatrical complexity.

I want to say to playwrights, already hobbled by the number of sets and number of actors they can utilize, please don’t restrict yourself by word or page count. Write the stories you want to tell, and take the time you need to tell them. As a notoriously discursive essayist myself, I also urge you not to be afraid of digressions if they illuminate your story, your characters, your themes. We cannot afford to have you put in a position where you must sacrifice texture and subtext in favor of train schedules or simple impatience. I am not naïve, and marathon events like Angels in America andThe Norman Conquests have their economic and logistical challenges, but they are in fact the exception, not the rule (yet often all the more recognized precisely because of that fact).

The issue of play length is perhaps most on my mind because of two plays I’ve seen in the past fortnight: Caryl Churchill’s A Number and Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. The former I saw recently in London, having been enthralled by its New York premiere several years back. The latter I saw for the first time less than 24 hours ago, after reading about it for years. Both (even the second viewing of A Number, in a wholly new production), were profoundly memorable events for me. The former, with only two actors, four characters and a chair, manages to encompass a vast array of themes: familial love and loss, the nature of identity, the ethics of cloning, the slipperiness of truth. The latter transcends the dingy office in which it’s set and lifts the act of reading a classic book into rarified realms while illuminating an extremely familiar (to me), brilliant text, in a way that made me examine it as if new. Both experiences could only take place live, in a theatre; they would make no sense and lose their impact on film, radio or television. The former runs perhaps 50 minutes and says all that needs to be said, the latter requires some eight hours altogether, including a dinner break, and its very completeness is part of its impact.

I will never seek to silence anyone’s opinion about theatre, but I will ask those who advocate or agitate for more compact works to, similarly, try not to direct the playwright’s voice. Let’s not create a producing and theatergoing environment in which only the brief can survive. We need plays of every shape, size, subject and length if the theatre is to remain alive and vital.

And so I return to my opening epigram, but only to transform it. How long should a play be? Long enough to reach its audience.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

I have a confession to make. I am a lurker. But please don’t alert the authorities.

By lurker, I am using the slang term for someone who frequents internet chat rooms, following the exchanges, but rarely, if ever, engaging in them. I have done so since at least the mid-90s, and I have a pseudonym which I have, only occasionally, employed in order to tentatively enter the fray, from which I almost instantly pull back for months at a time.

It probably goes without saying that I lurk only in theatre chat spaces. I am amused, informed and at times, quite shocked by what I read there. I distinctly remember an occasion back when I worked at Goodspeed, when I read a heated discussion about some bygone musical that Martin Charnin had worked on. I knew the conversation was rooted in patently incorrect information, but I saw no point in trying to correct it – even though at that moment, Martin was in the rehearsal hall up the street, and readily accessible to me. While I had a strong desire to enact the chat room equivalent of the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen shuts up a loudmouth critiquing the work of Marshall McLuhan by suddenly producing McLuhan himself from behind a stand-up sign in a movie lobby, I refrained. After all, I was pseudonymous, and in the anonymity of a chat room, the “Martin Charnin” I produced could have easily been a high school intern.

I’m reminded of this because as a blogger, any credibility I might enjoy is tied to my lack of anonymity, to my willingness to reveal my identity and my professional experience to anyone who wishes to know about it (you can do so via my bio here). My “open identity” was fostered by my Twitter experience, where I was readily identifiable by my title and company from the beginning, almost 3,000 tweets but less than two years ago.

As I have become an ever more enthusiastic tweeter, and now as I blog weekly, I have also noted that I rarely check on chat rooms anymore. Yes, lurking can be cured, but Twitter is addictive; perhaps I have traded caffeine for high fructose corn syrup.

To be sure, I very consciously cultivated my tweets as coming from the head of the American Theatre Wing, and while they reflect my thoughts and interests, I am also aware that they could be taken out of context, or misinterpreted as an official position of the organization. In fact, I was very nervous this past May, as my follower count had grown and we were in the midst of Tony Award season. From the chat rooms, I knew of the very, shall we say, passionate opinions people hold about the Tonys. I wondered whether Twitter would become a forum whereby people could barrage me directly with their criticism, even though I have repeatedly explained that I don’t tweet about the Tonys because there is an official Tony Twitter account, and I was neither going to compete with that nor risk getting enmeshed in Tony debate. I also cannot comment unilaterally on the Tonys because they are a partnership with The Broadway League, not solely the purview of ATW.

So I was pleasantly surprised when the Tonys came and went this year with no comments lobbed directly at me. While I saw conversations about the pros and cons of the awards and the broadcast, they were by and large, civil and thoughtful. I took every one to heart, even if I, by self-imposed policy, did not respond.

When I do check in on the chat rooms now and again, it seems that they are not as active as they used to be, and I can’t help but think that Facebook and Twitter have taken their toll on this form of conversation. The fact that Facebook and Twitter offer, if you wish to exercise it, control over who sees your messages and whose messages you see, has provided for a civility I often saw abrogated in chat rooms, where people were attacked for factual errors (even when they were correct), imprecise declaration of opinion, for having certain opinions, and even infractions as minor as the occasional typo.

I believe that spirited, thoughtful conversation and well-mannered debate about theatre is healthy for the form. It also benefits those who are unable to see certain productions, because it allows them to essentially triangulate opinion and arrive at their own understanding of unseen work. But while Facebook and Twitter seem to me a form of the Roman Senate, chat rooms are more akin to the Arena, and one joins the battle at one’s own risk.

A final anecdote: many years ago, I was driving the late New York Times critic Mel Gussow to see a production at Hartford Stage. The conversation turned to the work of August Wilson, then perhaps four plays into his famous cycle and still premiering his work at Yale Rep. I confided to Mel my then-held opinion that while I admired Wilson’s work, I didn’t really like it. “Well, you’re wrong,” declared the famously mild-mannered Gussow. “No I’m not,” I replied quickly. “Not liking something is my opinion, and opinion can’t be wrong. You may feel I’m missing something in the work, but my not liking it is true, and it’s my right.” Mel then promptly withdrew his statement, and we proceeded to discuss the pros and cons of Wilson’s work, which I have indeed reassessed more than two decades later, aligning myself much more with what was and is the prevailing sentiment.

In chat rooms, it seems to me, it’s very easy to be wrong, and to be told so by countless strangers. On Twitter, I may not always be right, but the people I’ve chosen to follow, and who have chosen to follow me, seem happy to ponder topics with me, with the scorn pared away by the brevity imposed on each thought.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website

My friend Cassandra Kubinski stopped by the Wing office the other day. I was very surprised to find, as we chatted, that I hadn’t seen her in well over a year. It turns out she’d spent much of that time living in Nashville pursuing her singing and songwriting career, opening a music venue there with a friend for a short time. Cassie and I aren’t close friends, but I’m very fond of her. She has been very good about staying in touch overall, so this gap was anomalous. We first met about 13 years ago when she was in two productions at Goodspeed Musicals, while I was general manager there. I calculate that Cassie is about 27 or so now. Do the math. Or let me help you: she played the title role in Annie.

* * *

Theatre is a transitory field, albeit less so for those of us in administration, or on a resident theatre’s permanent staff. But for actors, directors, designers, authors and so many others, theatre is, among many other things, a constant go-round of meeting, bonding, working together, then breaking apart, only to start all over again with yet another group. As a result, friendships can operate somewhat differently than what you might be used to. Because everyone is constantly moving on to another project, it’s hardly unusual to go for a long period of time without seeing someone you consider a friend, then picking up right where you left off. One benefit of the proliferation of cell phones, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter and the like is that they actually allow theatre folk to stay in touch much more easily than when I entered the field. If you really want to find someone, you don’t end up in endless phone tag with a home answering machine, or, to date myself, their service.

At the same time, I have found theatre to be remarkably constant, perhaps because I spent much of my career in institutional theatre, which affords more continuity. The people I met when I worked at Hartford Stage are still an important part of my life, and rarely a day goes by one when I’m not in communication with at least one person who I know from my tenure there. But as a result, we have grown up together, aged together, shared losses and successes together.

Yet on some level, I will always be the impetuous, abrasive boy press agent. Pete Gurney will always be my adoptive W.A.S.P. uncle, who was so proud of me when I got the job at the Wing, and told me so; Richard Thomas will always be my energetic, mischievous older theatre brother who egged me on to my first (and only) shot of tequila; Kate Burton remains my warm-hearted, “everybody’s favorite” older sister, who once laced into me for not sharing a secret with her; David Hawkanson and Mark Lamos will always be my thrilling, aggravating, wisdom-imparting older cousins who teased me, taunted me, and taught me the ways of the world.

Because these relationships remained in place, and still do, for more than half my life, for a long time I never had any sense of growing up. Just as with my blood relatives, or with my high school friends, the interactions between me and members of my theatre family revert to old patterns the moment I see them – often shocking outsiders when I lapse into the casual profanity that was the lingua franca of Hartford Stage in the mid-80s.

So it is only recently that I have begun to understand that I may now be the uncle, the cousin, to young people who entered my circle at one point or another during my career. As Cassie sat in my office, I looked at this extraordinarily self-possessed, determined young woman (which she has been since I first met her) and felt proud of her as she talked of her career, her changing perspectives, and her achievements. I sensed there were some disappointments along the way too, but hey, who tells their uncle or older cousin about those?

I realize there is a younger generation to my theatrical family, and though I cannot claim to have mentored them in the ways that Hawkanson and Lamos, and Michael Price of Goodspeed (another uncle), mentored me, I am extraordinarily happy each time I see them, and so thrilled with their successes. Howard Fishman, once a high school intern at Hartford Stage, is a successful recording artist with numerous albums and a flourishing concert and club performing career; Kate MacCluggage, who would answer phones on weekends at The O’Neill Center and is now the leading lady of The 39 Steps here in New York; John Barlow, once an intern at the American Shakespeare Theatre in CT, who used to do errands for me in NYC while I remained in CT, established one of Broadway’s top p.r. firms, and now contemplates his next career move; Lex Leifheit, who did p.r. at The O’Neill Center, now runs SOMArts in San Francisco; Chris Jahnke, who came to Goodspeed fresh out of college, is now a top-flight orchestrator and music director.

Though their successes and increasing authority are reminders that I am indeed aging, since they are all now adults and have become my peers, I harbor great pride in their achievements. Just as Kate Burton is fond of saying about her and me, “The kids have grown up, and are in charge.”

A week or so ago, I noticed that I was being followed on Twitter by a young man named Christopher Kauffmann. With a few quick clicks, I determined that he was the same Chris who, along with his younger sister, had appeared at Goodspeed in Finian’s Rainbow. I didn’t know him as well as I knew Cassie, and I haven’t seen him once in the ensuing years. He’s living in New York, acting. We’re going to meet for coffee soon. And I’m going to be very proud of him, too.

* * *

A final thought: there a countless young people who I’ve encountered over the years, and regret that I don’t know better. Every year at the Wing, some three dozen kids spend two weeks in our SpringboardNYC program, while several hundred participate in our Theatre Intern Group. I wish I had more time to mentor them, to become their theatre family, and I feel the same way about the six classes of the National Theatre Institute that were at The O’Neill during my tenure (one kid I remember a bit from those years, because he was so tall, was named John Krasinski, and he’s done pretty well with no help from me). Someday, I hope we all meet again, as peers.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website