Hilda Cronje (left) and Bongile Mantsai in ‘Mies Julie’ at St. Ann’s Warehouse.

“Is that fog or haze?”

St. Ann’s Warehouse artistic director Susan Feldman asked that question to set and lighting designer Patrick Curtis, less than 72 hours before the first performance in the company’s new venue at 29 Jay Street in Brooklyn. It seemed like a mundane question with a major deadline approaching, but it was evidence of how smoothly everything was going elsewhere.

Her smoke-based question pertained to a special effect for the space’s opening production, “Mies Julie.” A South African adaptation and expansion of August Strindberg’s sexually charged “Miss Julie,” the play is reset from 19th century Sweden to present day in the barren karoo, where the restless daughter of an oppressive Boer farmer escalates the sexual attraction between her and an African worker.

Originally mounted by the Baxter Theatre Centre in Cape Town, “Mies Julie” was a hit at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival, prompting a quick decision by Feldman to inaugurate the new St. Ann’s space with the production. It opens tonight and will run through Dec. 2.

“It’s very bold, very sexy,” Feldman said. “It captured a sense of South Africa in a way we don’t know in America, and it’s not taken from one point of view or another. Within two weeks of seeing it, we booked it.”

While that may have accelerated the timetable for opening – St. Ann’s had originally planned a “soft opening” with a few concerts, followed by a full launch with “Opus No. 7″ from Russia in January – Feldman thought it would be worth it. “I didn’t want to end this conversation about ‘Mies Julie’ and start again in May.”

As of last Tuesday, there was wet paint in ample evidence in public areas and stencils awaiting paint for signage, even as the “Mies Julie” team was running a dry tech and awaiting the arrival of the actors for the first time (the show had been touring, and so it required minimal rehearsal in Brooklyn). Fortunately, although they had been under an evacuation order from Hurricane Sandy, the new venue was left untouched, requiring only minimal compression of production time on the show.

The 29 Jay Street venue is officially a three-year interim space for St. Ann’s while it works to secure and develop Brooklyn’s old Tobacco Warehouse near its former 38 Water Street home.

“When I went into the church [where the company was founded],” Feldman said, “I had no idea that it would be for 21 years. Water Street was a temporary space for 12 years. We know there’s a future beyond three years, assuming conversion works in the Tobacco Warehouse. But we have made our new theater to work just as our last theater functioned.”

Indeed, the two venues are similar, and similarly flexible. While the stage and seating for “Mies Julie” echoes that used for Daniel Kitson’s recent show, the layout for “Opus No. 7″ will resemble the expansive playing area of “Black Watch.”

“When we packed up Water Street, we realized that we’d only built one and a half walls there. It helped me not to feel tremendous loss,” Feldman said.

The new venue required steel work in order to hang a lighting grid, curtains and support future scenery, a new set of exit stairs and the rehanging of heating units. Unlike more polished arts complexes, the work on Jay Street was economical. “The fit out here took between $900,000 and $1 million,” said Feldman, adding that was exclusive of rent. It did result in some adjustment, such as a merging of the box office and production office into a single space, or, in Feldman’s compression, “the prox office.”

Despite producing in an untested space, the adapter and director of “Mies Julie,” Yael Farber, said that she wasn’t subjected to restrictions, comparing the space to a “widening aperture.” “The conversation was always ‘how does the space accommodate the work’,” said Farber, upon arrival for the first time at St. Ann’s. “Not ‘how does the work accommodate the space’.”

The move is only a few blocks from St. Ann’s previous space at 38 Water Street, and its potential future space at the Tobacco Warehouse. While there is the potential for audiences to feel a sense of dislocation, Feldman said that’s not the case, given the very public wrangling over the company’s search for a new home, necessitated by new development of the Water Street site.

“There was a lot of drama over the Tobacco Warehouse, so when we told our audiences [about 29 Jay Street], there was great relief and joy, especially from this side of DUMBO,” she said.

As mirrors and strip lights were being installed in makeshift dressing rooms (flexible dressing spaces being standard for all St. Ann’s productions) on Jay Street, the company’s executive director Andrew D. Hamingson said they had already begun the design process for their next home at Tobacco Warehouse, pending full approval of the site.

“The conversion process begins this month, and will take from six to nine months,” he said. “We are the designee for the land, which will be converted from parkland to land for private use, within Brooklyn Bridge Park. Then we can go forward with the lease. We expect the process to be favorable.”

This follows what was originally expected to be a more direct move to the Tobacco Warehouse, with the company operating on an itinerant basis for perhaps a year, that was scuttled when park regulatory issues came to light.

But perpetual change, show by show, and now perhaps theater by theater, seems to be the standard for St. Ann’s Warehouse. Describing the past few months, Feldman said, “We went from ‘Festen,’ to our Puppet Lab, to moving out, directly into our build here. It’s been an intensive six months for the staff and crew.”

From the perspective of an audience member attending only the second performance, on Friday evening, the transition was seamless, right down to the signs greeting patrons with the warning, “Theatrical haze and fog effects will be used in this production.”

See the article at the Wall Street Journal here.

“Urk!” “Huff huff.” “Sshing!” “Fwoosh.” “Fwooom!” “Twackk!”

William Shakespeare is credited with inventing countless words and phrases that the stuff of our everyday speech is made on. But I daresay that the words which appear above—if words they be—are not of the Bard’s making. Yet I just read them in Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. That is, in the graphic novels of those plays from Capstone Press, where they’re employed like the “pows” and “bams” of TV’s “Batman.”

You might think that graphic novels of Shakespeare are a freak novelty, but in fact they’re an entire subgenre. I’ve amassed an incomplete selection of these works that stands some two feet high—a mix of comic books, paperbacks and hardcovers. And I know I’m only scratching the surface. (By way of example, Oxford University Press has a series that would apparently be contraband in this country; in North America, only Canadians can purchase it. No kidding.)

I plunged into this array of adapted Shakespeare as a fan of the plays but no expert, and as a novice in the world of comics and graphic novels. My interest emerged from my own experience, at age eight or nine, during Nixon’s first term, of reading The Iliad and A Tale of Two Cities, not in their original versions, but via the series of comic books called Classics Illustrated. Although they ceased publication in 1962, my brother and I scavenged barely vintage copies from paper drives and tag sales and secured them in a tin breadbox (also found curbside); we would withdraw them from their cask on a narrow loft in our garage to read about Sydney Carton and Helen of Troy. Why we required an aerie for this I don’t know—our schoolteacher mother wasn’t likely to have objected. As a result, I am no snob when it comes to this form, but rather a childhood fan looking to see how it has developed.

Remarkably, the original Classics Illustrated titles have been reissued, so I’m now able to see how Shakespeare was handled back in the day. There’s a mighty startled Macbeth on one cover, wearing a winged headpiece in a comic which first appeared in 1955 (and which now costs $9.99 as a reprint, startling me as well), staring at a floating dagger enveloped in a flaming nimbus that evokes the burning bush. The interior art, from the years before Jack Kirby, recalls Prince Valiant, but the language, albeit edited, is unmistakably rooted in Shakespeare (then again, the Norse comic hero Thor was derided in the film The Avengers as “Shakespeare in the Park” for his faux classical aspect). Rather than dumbing down the text too much, words like “thane” and “raveled” are footnoted. What’s most striking, looking at an original Classics Illustrated book after so many years, is that while it is all too obviously a product of another time, it doesn’t seem over-simplified for children; I imagine that those of us who read them once upon a time felt pretty smart without feeling pandered to.

The modern era, so far as I discovered, kicked off in the ’80s with Workman Publishing’s rather conventional Macbeth, illustrated by Oscar Zarate; its first notable creative mark came with what Workman billed as Ian Pollock’s Illustrated King Lear, Complete and Unabridged. Owing more to Ralph Steadman and Gerald Scarfe than to DC or Marvel, this was a Lear of grotesques. I suspect it would send a purist running away quickly, despite fidelity to the original text. Applying the language of theatre, Pollock’s book is visually avant-garde, even almost three decades on.

Indeed, it was the language of theatre that came to mind most often as I traipsed through these recent volumes; primarily dating from the past decade or so, they mostly adopt the visual style of superhero comics or Japanese manga (there are three competing series of Manga Shakespeare). As a result, they resemble nothing so much as storyboards for intricate movies. Because most stay reasonably faithful to the text, the words often crowd the frames; they break loose when they portray action that would be blocked on stage, or offer us a normally offstage vision (we see the dead Ophelia just as the text describes her). Wiley’s manga edition of Julius Caesar is at its strongest as “silent” panels overtake the text in the final pages.

The storyboard parallel is most pronounced in one of the newest entries, the sci-fi epic Romeo and Juliet: The War, credited to four creators, including the august Stan Lee. The horizontal, hardcover, full-color book resembles one of those profusely illustrated tomes on The Art of Star Wars, created to sate the desires of die-hard fans. But don’t go looking for faithful language here: In their first meeting at the masquerade, our futuristic Romeo propositions Juliet with, “Maybe one day I can see you without your costume.” Though less visually epic, there’s also a sci-fi Macbeth graphic novel from Puffin that acknowledges its effort to blend Shakespeare with the works of authors Larry Niven and Anne McCaffrey: If starting the story of the Thane of Glamis and Cawdor with him astride a dragon in the year “Stardate: 1040” sets your heart racing, this is your book.

A futuristic Romeo and Juliet may still startle today’s audiences/readers, long after the tale of star-crossed lovers has been adapted, manipulated, parodied and plagiarized in every possible permutation. But that’s where these many treatments of Shakespeare serve another purpose: to offer new interpretations in different settings and time periods without the expense of theatrical production. To be sure, the most explicitly educational books hew close to a traditional line, as evidenced by the series from Graphic Planet and Campfire Classics: Simon Greaves’s books from the Shakespeare Comic Book Company even subordinate image to text, offering side-by-side original text and simplified modern speech, as if subtitled. The books from Classical Comics, while drawn in superhero glory for the most part (though their A Midsummer Night’s Dream is appropriately pastoral), come in three “flavors” for each title: original text, plain text and quick text, suited to every entertainment or pedagogical need.

Emerging from this collection as among the most intriguing are the books that look least like conventional comics and instead adopt designs that play with visual style in new ways. Hamlet andMacbeth from “No Fear Shakespeare” bear a passing resemblance to the works of Art Spiegelman or Marjane Satrapi, while the Amulet Books Manga Shakespeare series offers the greatest variety—from an anime-inflected Much Ado About Nothing, to a roughly sketched, chiaroscuro Julius Caesar that eschews any shades of gray, to their pièce de résistance (of those I’ve seen): a Native-American King Lear. You may find it jarring to see an Indian chieftain declaring, “Attend the Lords of France and Burgundy, Gloucester” and have trouble with a Cordelia who echoes Disney’s Pocahontas, but there’s no denying that a powerful imagination has been brought to bear.

Indeed, the play King Lear seems to have inspired the widest visual variety; in addition to Pollock’s early entry and the Amulet book illustrated by the one-named Ilya, Gareth Hinds’s stylistically eccentric version for Candlewick Press features typeset text that at times loops around water-colored images—but there’s no mistaking the impact of Cordelia’s death when the color drains from the page.

Although the artistic and textual approaches among these many volumes vary widely, it’s fairly safe to assume that at their root, all are efforts to make Shakespeare more approachable for the novice, most likely pre-college students. The importance of the standard middle school and high school curriculum is surely the reason for the plethora of graphic Hamlets, Tempests, Romeo and Juliets andMidsummers. I found no Titus Andronicus or Timon of Athens in my pursuits; they proved even rarer than stage productions of those plays. The volumes that attempted a more mass-market sales spin can run afoul of their own educational mission; for example, the folks at Spark Publishing, responsible for the “No Fear” series, apparently take an awfully benevolent view of Richard III, as they declareMacbeth to be “the only Shakespeare play with a villain for its hero.”

Depth of Shakespearean knowledge is evident among the creators of perhaps the most innovative of graphic-novel Shakespeares. The authors and artists of the Kill Shakespeare series from IDW Publishing have abandoned any singular work and instead dreamed up a massive Shakespearean mashup in which Hamlet and Juliet join forces to battle against such villains as Richard III and Iago, who seek to vanquish (in the words of their marketing copy) “a reclusive wizard named William Shakespeare.” While the characters are familiar, their quest is wholly new, and their challenge transforms even those we think we know well; the surviving Juliet, still mourning Romeo, has taken on traits more typically associated with Joan of Arc.

For those steeped in the world of graphic novels, Kill Shakespeare is the Elizabethan equivalent of Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series, or perhaps Jasper Fforde’s (unillustrated) novel Something Rotten, although Kill is unmistakably and distinctively its own achievement. Having only finished Volume 1 of the series (Volume 2 is available, while Volume 3 is in the works), I’m already eager to find out if the scantily clad vixen who beckons Iago on the final page is, as I suspect, the formidable Lady Macbeth; Classics Illustrated never looked like this (nor was it serialized).

Coming full circle, it’s worth noting that the Classics Illustrated trademark has been revived, for a new graphic novel series, by the Papercutz imprint. And while newly drawn and edited, these share a common trait with their predecessor of 50 years ago—they conclude with the same message: “Now that you have read the Classics Illustrated Edition, don’t miss the added enjoyment of reading the original, obtainable at your school or public library.” It’s a message that might well conclude every graphic novel version of Shakespeare—although perhaps it’s unnecessary, since these adaptations, if successful, make their own case for the plays. On the other hand, I never did read The Iliad, did I?

*    *   *

Here’s a link to the article as it appeared online here.

I wrote this essay for HowlRound, the online journal of the Theatre Commons, now based at Emerson College. It was posted there on June 30, 2012, unwittingly for all concerned only a day before the national celebration of Canada Day by our northern neighbors. The piece provoked a great deal of comment, and while you can read my original thoughts here, you would benefit from many views other than my own, which can be found in the comments section of the original post.

Canada, land of plays largely unknown to Americans

Quick, name five modern Canadian playwrights (Canadian natives, put your hands down). Can’t do it? OK, name five Canadian plays that aren’t The Drawer Boy or The Drowsy Chaperone. Having trouble? I bet you are.

I’ve probably seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,000 to 2,500 productions in thirty-four years of active theatergoing in the U.S., with occasional trips to England and, yes, Canada. But while I can minimally exceed my own low threshold by citing George F. Walker, Joanna Glass, Michel Tremblay, Morris Panych, Tom Cone and Michael Healy, that’s the sum total of my knowledge of Canadian authors. That puzzles me.

The United States and England may be two countries separated by a common language, but the fact remains that theatrical literature flows fairly freely across the Atlantic, with Irish and the occasional Scottish work thrown in for good measure. If you use theatrical awards as any kind of a yardstick, it’s often hard to tell, based upon nominees and winners in any given year, whether you’re looking at results for The Tonys or The Oliviers. While provincialism may rear its head in certain quarters, there’s no arguing that Miller and Williams are staples of the London stage just as Stoppard and Churchill are revered here—and of course that Shakespeare guy is everywhere, and not just because his works are royalty-free.

But what of Canada? Surely U.S. Customs is not stopping Canadian plays at the border, which seems sufficiently porous to allow U.S. works to make the northbound trek unencumbered. It’s not as if there isn’t a theatrical tradition in Canada (remember that Sir Tyrone Guthrie started the Stratford Festival ten years before founding his eponymously named Minneapolis venture) and thriving theater communities in the major cities of each province. And even if our northern neighbor has mixed English and French heritage, let’s remember that authors as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Marc Camelotti and Yasmina Reza have written their plays in French, all of which have gone on to international success—so language can’t be the barrier.

The love affair between the British and U.S. theater may be rooted in our common heritage, although it’s not as if shows shuttled between the countries constantly since we settled our differences in 1776. But the American stage, which began coming into its own in the early days of the twentieth century, could look to London for a rich, centuries old heritage of authors and actors; a healthy Anglophilia fueled camaraderie. As the glitter of our Broadway evolved the form known as musical comedy, British theatergoers came to love the form as well, beginning a reciprocity that would ultimately expand beyond that particular form. Canada seems to stand outside that mutual admiration society.

It’s not as if Canadian culture has not been embraced by Americans. There are countless Canadian actors who have become big Hollywood box office (some quite venerated, as evidenced by the many awards heaped on Christopher Plummer over the years); Canada’s SCTV and The Kids in the Hall proved as seminal to U.S. comedy and satire as did Saturday Night Live and The Second City; Toronto emerged as a key Broadway tryout town (boosted, no doubt, by a once favorable exchange rate). So where are the plays?

I am taking it on faith that there are a lot of terrific new plays being done in Canada because Canadian theaters’ seasons, based on a cursory survey, aren’t made up solely of imported works. New work is being done and (presumably) people are going to see it. So I first have to ask what’s happening in Canadian literary agencies? Are they aggressively courting the literary offices and artistic directors of American companies—and if they are, is the response welcoming? As for the theater companies themselves, I am used to seeing a barrage of advertising from the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, often in glossy inserts to newspapers and magazines backed by tourism councils. But where are the companies that specialize in new works? Are they the victim, like so many companies that focus on what’s new, of taking a backseat to that which is bigger, higher-volume and already better known? In point of fact, Canada’s greatest cultural export is a commercial enterprise, Cirque du Soleil, the circus behemoth that encircles the globe with its particular style of circus arts. Maybe the clowns are blocking everyone’s view.

The aforementioned festivals, terrific as they are, probably aren’t helping matters much either. They are major tourism attractions with huge audience capacity, and because they are at their height during the summer, they offer the vacation and junket-ready U.S. media the perfect opportunity to take a northerly jaunt to see many plays in a concentrated period of time, fulfilling some unspoken quota of Canadian theater coverage while visiting bucolic towns. But what’s on display there are fine classics by Shakespeare and Shaw and, with increasing frequency, U.S. musicals. The work is Canadian theater, but rarely Canadian literature.

I’m compelled to point out that I’m not lobbying for Canadian plays because I find something wanting in new American plays, and I hastily acknowledge that there are already too few opportunities for new work to be produced here as it is. But there is a cultural lacuna when it comes to Canadian theater that seems perpetual. We owe it to Canadian artists to see beyond our own borders and the theaters of the West End, especially when we can get to major cities in Canada in perhaps one-fifth the time it takes to get to London, and if we’re of a mind to, we can even drive (not an option for London, as you know). To those who say that Canadians have a different sensibility than Americans, I say so do the English, the Irish, the Scots and the French, yet we don’t have any problems there (although some do start quivering the moment any play mentions cricket). And if anything, the Internet should have helped to erode this invisible barrier, since we can now read Canadian theater reviews online at will, rather than trying to hunt down copies of the Globe and Mail at our local, dying newsstand.

For all of our interest in international exchange, in world theater, it is work from other continents that excites the programmers of our own cultural festivals and the centurions of our literary offices. Perhaps proximity breeds indifference, since Canadian work is not familiar enough to us to breed contempt. But I for one would like to know more about what’s going on up there and can’t help but think that at least some of it belongs down here. After all, Canada theater veterans produced the greatest television show about theater ever made, Slings and Arrows, which transcends national boundaries. There must be more.

P.S. Yes, yes, what about Australia, I hear you cry. They speak English too. But that’s half a world away. Let’s look in our own backyard first.

Hearing that the circus is coming to town usually evokes idyllic reveries of a parade of animals trouping down Main Street, the Big Top going up, the smell of sawdust and cotton candy. But when the circus in question is the multinational behemoth Cirque du Soleil, and they ditch the Big Top to stand in the reflected glare of Broadway’s lights, the effect on the Great White Way is somewhat chilling.

Cirque’s Zarkana made its debut last summer at Radio City Music Hall, just one avenue away from Mamma Mia! and Wicked. While Cirque had played New York many times over the years, they’d previously pitched their tent, literally, at the outlying Battery Park City or Randall’s Island, or occupied the unloved Theatre at Madison Square Garden with an oddity called Wintuk. But Zarkana changed the playing field, putting up to 54,000 available tickets a week on the market barely outside the Broadway district, accompanied by a marketing campaign commensurate with that capacity and a nearly four month residency.

While it’s impossible to cite any single cause for what anecdotally seemed a down summer in 2011 for shows that were less than smash hits, there was a lot of murmuring about the Cirque effect. That murmur approached a grumble when tickets were made available at TKTS, the Times Square half-price booth, vying for customers using the exact same tool as Broadway shows with available seats.

On the one hand, the presence of tickets at TKTS suggested that Zarkana was less than a smash. But it also meant that when tourists were seeking entertainment options, the widely marketed brand of Cirque was competing with shows that may have only had a couple of months to begin establishing themselves in the public consciousness. If a family was choosing between a new musical unannointed by the Tonys or the pinnacle of modern circus arts, the choice wasn’t necessarily hard. And the scale was daunting: with more than 5400 seats per performance and as many as ten shows a week, the ticket inventory in midtown Manhattan was expanded considerably; all of Broadway – if every theatre has a show on concurrently, which is rare – has just under 400,000 seats to sell each week.

The plan, it was generally known, was for Zarkana to return annually for five summers. As it turns out, Zarkana must have truly underperformed, because this year is already being advertised as the last chance to catch the show in NYC, the run was dropped from 152 to 121 performances, in June the balcony isn’t even being put on sale, the show has been trimmed from two acts to a 90 minute one-act, and more. While hardly the debacle that Cirque’s previous original Manhattan show, Banana Shpeel, had been (it was radically altered with little success during a protracted preview period at The Beacon Theatre), Zarkana is certainly one of the Montreal company’s rare misfires (although they’re hoping its fortunes will change in Las Vegas, its next home). No doubt this is a relief to Broadway producers, who are more than ready to wave goodbye to the clowns and acrobats that, for their money, can’t depart fast enough.  But Cirque may not give up: thwarted in their effort at a permanent home on 42^nd Street a few years back, they may not be ready to admit defeat in establishing, if not a year-round beachhead, at least a perennial success in such a prominent international destination.

It does raise the question of what happens to the cavernous yet elegant Radio City Music Hall now. Its management has been after a sit-down summer attraction for some time (35 years ago, they produced their own summer spectaculars, running some 150 performances as well). So do they have a back-up plan of their own– or might Cirque rotate in another show from its menu of productions? Is it possible that Radio City will return to a summer of one and two night concert stands, including the return of The Tony Awards, which were displaced in favor of a months-long booking? We know that while nature abhors a vacuum, the owner of an entertainment venue hates empty seats or an empty hall even more. Broadway may have dodged long-term Zarkana damage, but perhaps something equally threatening, or even more so, is waiting in the wings.

Gender and racial diversity in the arts has been a topic of discussion for as long as I can remember. But the ongoing inequities in the American theatre have been simmering for a long time. Intermittent signs of progress – Garry Hynes and Julie Taymor winning Tonys in 1997, dual firsts for women; the rich cycle of plays by August Wilson that brought a black voice to Broadway and stages across the country; the current Broadway season which featured two new plays by black female writers – are received with attention and even acclaim. Yet overall, there is general consensus that these constituencies are profoundly underrepresented.

While dissatisfaction can be directed at the commercial theatre, it is decentralized; each production is its own corporate entity and producers do not consult with all of the other producers. When it comes to new plays, as it happens, a majority of the work seen on Broadway (if not from England) has emerged from not-for-profit companies. Consequently, the publicly-funded resident theatres have become the locus of attention on these issues and, accelerated by social media, the continuing lack of meaningful process may be coming to a head.

The underrepresentation of women and racially-diverse authors on our stages has come into sharp relief recently as a result of the season announcement by The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, one of our oldest and largest companies. In announcing a season of 11 productions thus far, there are no plays by female playwrights (although a Goldoni adaptation is by Constance Congdon), no plays by any writers of color, and only one project with a female director (more accurately, a co-director, with Mark Rylance). In the outcry that ensued, it was noted that almost 10 years ago, while rallying support and funding for The Guthrie’s new home, Dowling had specifically said the new venue would allow for a greater variety of voices; responding to current criticism, he stoked the flames by invoking and decrying “tokenism.”

This prominent example generated press coverage beyond the Minneapolis-St. Paul market, let alone an ongoing rumble of dismay across blogs and Twitter. Perhaps it was Dowling’s defensiveness that made The Guthrie situation so volatile. After all, this past season, Chicago’s acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre mainstage season featured plays only by men (one an African American), and this from a theatre with a female artistic director; I don’t remember comparable outcry. Was this tempered by the season including several female directors? Or has the Guthrie flap made it easier to raise these issues?

Now each new season announcement is being held up to an accounting, not necessarily in its own board room, staff meeting or local press, but by activists seeking to lay bare this congenital issue. In 2012-13? Arizona Theatre Company: Six plays, all by white males. Seattle Rep: Eight plays, two by women, one of them African American. Alley Theatre in Houston: 11 productions, 2 by women (one of them Agatha Christie) and one by an Asian American man. Kansas City Rep: seven shows, six by men and one developed by an ensemble. Obviously I cannot go theatre by theatre, and I think more detailed data will be gathered, but underrepresentation of works by women and writers of color (of any gender) prevails. What of Steppenwolf? Their next five play season includes plays by one woman and one African-American man.

Is it fair to apply what some might call a quota system in assessing the diversity work on American stages? I would have to say, as so many of our resident theatres are on the verge of celebrating their 50^th anniversaries in the next few years, that a public declaration of these figures is not only fair, but necessary. Theatres have been asked by foundations, by corporations, by government funders to break down their staffs and boards by gender and race for years, and knowing that they were under scrutiny may have caused many companies to diversify internally more, or more quickly, than they might have otherwise. Actors Equity has conducted surveys of seasonal hiring, broken down for gender and race, for a number of years – another watchful eye. Now the focus must shift to the writers of the work on our stages if progress is to be made.

It is ironic that the civil rights movement in America is perhaps most associated with the 1960s, followed closely by the feminist movement — the very same period that coincidentally also saw the bourgeoning of the American resident theatre movement. How unfortunate that some of the language associated, for good or ill, with the first two efforts (tokenism, quotas) are even relevant in discussion of artistic breadth of the latter half a century later.

Having had a hand in The Tony Awards from 2004 through 2011, awards show-watching has been more than a pastime for me. But I’m a latecomer to The Olivier Awards. Two years ago I sat at home, watching the livestream in a window on my laptop. Last year, I finally accepted my annual invitation from the Society of London Theatres to attend in person. Earlier today, I spent four hours in the Jazz at Lincoln Center facility, where the livefeed of the Oliviers was shown on a large screen in Rose Hall, perhaps the city’s most unique venue, with views of Columbus Circle and Central Park behind the stage and, in this case, screen.  Today’s experience felt like an amalgam of my prior two: I was watching on a screen, but a big one which often brought the event to larger than life size; instead of calling out the winners to my wife in the other room, I was surrounded by several hundred theatre professionals and other guests.  This was the “NT Live” version of The Oliviers, so to speak.

I had expected the crowd to resemble “the usual suspects” seen at most opening nights, but it was an eclectic mix, with many folks I didn’t know. I spotted producers (Michael David of Jersey Boys, Sue Frost & Randy Adams of Memphis, Jed Bernstein of Driving Miss Daisy and Hal Luftig of Evita), some not-for-profit leaders (Teresa Eyring of the Theatre Communications Group and Victoria Bailey from the Theatre Development Fund), and a smattering of press (The New York Times, Playbill, Theatermania and AM New York). There was a large contingent from One Man, Two Guvnors there up through intermission (they had to depart for a 3 pm matinee), I don’t know how many from Ghost, Paulo Szot of South Pacific, and James Earl Jones.

It is impossible to know how many attendees had seen some, or any, of the nominated shows (I had seen only four), so an obvious question was whether one would feel any “rooting interest” in the room. Certainly the Guvnors crowd applauded heartily as their nominations were announced, but that was the only apparent partisanship in the room (and completely appropriate). What pleasantly surprised me was that the audience did respond as if at a live show, instead of a cinema; there was applause at the end of every musical number performed, all of which came off well on the big screen. If not the same as being there, there was the unifying effect that experiencing entertainment in a large group can bring; there was definitely a frisson of excitement when Matthew Warchus accepted his award live in New York – made even more exciting by it taking place just seconds after the briefly interrupted video feed came back online.

Andre Ptasyzynski’s opening remarks playfully hinted at rivalry between Broadway and the West End – he cited 14 million London admissions last year vs. Broadway’s 12.5, but also noted $1 billion in New York revenues against London’s $800 million, and also differentiated between voting rules for The Oliviers and The Tonys. But the prevailing spirit was of a carefree spring afternoon in London (even if it was nighttime there). The U.S. audience might have benefited from a few annotations by voice or on screen (Collaborators author John Hodge was never identified by name), and it was my sense that even with an introduction, the crowd neither understood who Ronan Keating and Kimberley Walsh were or why they were dropped into the middle of the event’s second act. Presenters from Downton Abbey needed no such identification.

Too often, in the press surrounding both The Oliviers and The Tonys, there’s an effort to stoke the fires of national competition. I’ve always thought it a false construct. This initial large scale opportunity for the New York theatre to join together for the Oliviers was a good first step and reinforced what I have always found to be true: the underlying unity of all theatre communities, wherever they may be and whoever wins their awards.

If you stand on Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, at the corner of either 44^th or 45^th Streets, and look west, you see the iconic image of brightly illuminated Broadway marquees lining both sides of the street. 14 of Broadway’s 40 houses are in view on two streets.

If you stand on the corner of 42^nd Street and Ninth Avenue looking west, you may see only a few glints of light off of display windows or subtle marquees, but there are 11 theatres in the next block: Theatre Row (with five stages), Playwrights Horizons (two stages), the Little Shubert and the newly opened Signature Center (with three). Extend your gaze almost to Eleventh Avenue and make it an even dozen, by adding in Signature’s former home.

There’s no comparison in scale or capacity between the Broadway stages on 44^th and 45^th Streets and the Off-Broadway venues that line this stretch of 42^nd Street, where the largest theatre is 499 seats and the average is probably half that. But there’s no arguing that the range of theatrical production on 42^nd Street is at least as vital creatively, especially when you consider that the Broadway theatres may be home to long running shows, while the turnover at the smaller venues will yield many more new productions annually, even if they do play to a fraction of the Broadway audience.

The emergence of West 42^nd Street is emblematic of a growth spurt among New York’s subsidized companies, and it’s not restricted to 42^nd Street; there’s other recent or planned theatrical renovation and construction going on elsewhere. In The New York Times, Charles Isherwood took note of this expansion, expressing concern that companies might be driven by a need to fill this real estate in contravention of their artistic goals or capacities; he also commented shows’ journeys from these intimate spaces to Broadway, which he sometimes finds ill-advised.

I won’t weigh in on whether certain shows should – or shouldn’t have – transferred to Broadway’s commercial arena, but I will say that such a decision is rooted in one of the most significant conundrums in New York’s theatrical ecosystem: the diminished viability of commercial Off-Broadway production of new plays and musicals. While there are long-running entertainments in New York’s smaller commercial venues (Stomp, Blue Man Group, De La Guarda) and there have been some other hits (I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change; Love, Loss and What I Wore), plays like Freud’s Last Session and the just opened Tribes are relative rarities. Off-Broadway is even now home to one-time Broadway successes (Million Dollar Quartet, Rent and Avenue Q) sustaining their New York lives through reduced expectations.

But when it comes to a Off-Broadway success from a non-commercial company, the only option today seems to be Broadway or bust, as the cost of producing sustained runs in these small venues under a commercial contract proves impossible for most serious-minded fare (or even intelligent comedies) because of many factors, from the limited revenue to the high cost of advertising on a small budget. This is markedly different from 15 or 20 years ago, when the work of companies like Playwrights Horizons and Manhattan Theatre Club would transfer regularly to commercial engagements. A mainstay of Off-Broadway in the 80s and 90s, playwright A.R. Gurney, used to see his shows transfer from a non-profit to commercial run almost annually; now his plays, no matter the reception, get a six-week run at Lincoln Center Theatre, Primary Stages or The Flea and are over. He’s joined by most playwrights in this limiting atmosphere. Even when long-running Off-Broadway hits from the past are revived, they go to Broadway, as recently evidenced by Driving Miss Daisy and Wit.

The great irony is that the New York productions become loss leaders, garnering press attention and respect, but achieving larger audiences and multiple productions in the country’s regional theatres, where they generate healthier royalties for playwrights. Nowhere is that more evident than with Clybourne Park which, after a couple of months at Playwrights Horizons, went on to regional runs in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington DC and almost every U.S. major city (as well as London) before finally coming to rest after copious acclaim, at last, on Broadway.

The Off-Broadway building boom is a boon to theatre both in New York and beyond. But to benefit more theatergoers here, the challenge is to restore a healthy middleground between Off-Broadway not-for-profit runs and Broadway berths, so that work can stay at its proper scale, achieve a modicum of financial success and stick around for as long as people want to see it, while always making room for yet more new work. It’s a puzzle, but one worth solving.

I was invited by Polly Carl of Arena Stage’s New Play Institute to contribute to their very active HowlRound blog in the fall of 2011. Ever the contrarian, I wrote not about new, current plays, but rather about plays which were new and current some 20 to 25 years ago. It proved most gratifying because Bill Cain, the author of the play I focused upon most, saw the blog and wrote an exceptional coda in the comments section.  It is reproduced here following my essay. For all of the original responses, you can read the the post and comments at HowlRound. You can also see .

Are you familiar with any of these plays? Stand-Up Tragedy. Daytrips. Romance Language. A Place With The Pigs. From The Mississippi Delta. Rebel Armies Deep Into Chad. Pill Hill. Messiah. In Perpetuity Throughout The Universe. A few? None? Don’t feel bad, because to my knowledge, none of them have received a major production in years. Yet they were all new plays that received prominent productions from the mid 80s to the early 90s. Some had New York runs, both long and short. I saw them all, and worked on several.

Of the playwrights, some remain active in the theater, others moved on to television, I don’t know what’s up with a few, one passed away recently, another several years ago. They are, in order, Bill Cain, Jo Carson, Peter Parnell, Athol Fugard, Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Mark Lee, Samuel Kelly, Martin Sherman, and Eric Overmyer. Certainly a few of those names are familiar.

So why do I single out these relative obscurities? Because I think they are the barest tip of an enormous iceberg: plays that were once perceived to display value and talent, but never achieved a level of recognition to have become standards, let alone classics. They were hot new plays that grew cold for any number of reasons, and now languish somewhere in the catalogues of companies like Samuel French and Dramatists Play Service like orphans, forever hoping someone will notice them, but always being passed over for the younger, newer, more conventionally attractive.

I should acknowledge before I go on that new plays are essential to the lifeblood of the theater, and I champion the opportunities created for authors to develop and premiere new work, as well as to see it go on to second, third, or tenth productions, whether in New York or Peoria. I hope that new works don’t suffer from the “premiere”-itis that swept regional theaters in the 1980s, when everyone pursued the first production of a new play, but then that work found itself abandoned, for any number of reasons: a bad first production, the fact that it was no longer a “virgin” work that could attract grants, having not attracted the “right” critics to hoist it to the next level, that its subsidiary rights were already encumbered. I love the discovery of new work and nothing herein should suggest otherwise.

But I keep thinking about these orphaned plays, which were in fact once loved. Where do they fit in the new play lifecycle of American Theater? After all, I was not alone in appreciating them in their day, and I was hardly the only person to see them. I know that these weren’t necessarily perfect pieces, but they were effective and evocative, and part of our theatrical heritage as surely as well-known classics.

I think often and fondly of Stand-Up Tragedy, a play I fell in love with upon reading its very first page, when a Catholic priest stated his desire to, in his next life, work for a religion that “doesn’t use a dead young man as its logo.” Only pages later, the same character posited the tenets of all great religions—“Who made the world? What went wrong? What do we do now?” Surely these ideas remain pertinent, as does the central story of an idealistic young man who discovers that his altruistic ambitions may not be enough to save troubled inner-city youths. And Bill Cain, after a stint in television, is back writing plays with a vengeance, with premieres of Equivocation, Nine Circles, and How To Write a New Book of the Bible coming in rapid succession. Whatever the perceived flaws of Stand-Up Tragedy, it is a seminal work by a committed and talented playwright that deserves second, third, and fourth looks.

Not to focus on plays rooted in Catholic theology, but I was also deeply struck recently when I attended a reading at The Public Theater of The Trial of the Catonsville Nine, a play which premiered when I was nine years old, but which I knew had been a landmark play from the early days of the Mark Taper Forum. I saw it primarily because a friend was playing the role of the author, Father Daniel Berrigan. I went expecting agitprop theater that had dated poorly; I came away with a lesson in a Vietnam War-era protest and a soaringly beautiful finale, all the more remarkable for having been fashioned from the transcripts of the trial that gave the play its name.

In a field where only the most dedicated academics and literary managers know much of American playwriting before O’Neill, and where the growth of regional theater made up for the reduction in Broadway venues during the 1960s and 70s, perhaps it’s unsurprising that there is now a body of abandoned plays. Perhaps we simply cannot be expected to produce not only the accepted canon of Western dramatic literature and essential new work and also to perpetually reexamine work from the recent past. But surely there is some compromise position. While New York’s Second Stage began with the mission of reviving overlooked plays from not so long ago, it is now best known for showcasing new work; Signature Theatre Company in New York, with its focus on a single playwright each season, has at times revitalized overlooked works from playwrights’ oeuvres. But the companies here in New York that focus on largely forgotten plays of the past, The Mint Theater and Peccadillo Theater, look back at least fifty, if not seventy-five years for their material. Has much of the playwriting of the 70s and 80s gone the way of the leisure suit and disco, the skinny tie and the Mohawk haircut, and must it wait another thirty to fifty years before it gets another chance?

I wonder whether the not-for-profit theater is guilty of what we accuse “popular culture” of doing, that is to say, constantly embracing the new and abandoning anything that can be accused of being “so five minutes ago” (as is that particular phrase). Do we lionize only the true hits and consign the vast body of literature engendered by and created for our stages to the dustbin of history? Yes, you can browse for them at the Drama Book Shop in New York or the Samuel French shop in Los Angeles, but beyond that, they require archeological hunts, facilitated by sites both commercial (Amazon) and altruistic (the dizzyingly thorough Doollee.com). But how many never even saw publication, relegating them to permanent anonymity? And while I’m speaking mostly of plays, I would be remiss in pointing out that the same fate befalls new musicals too, especially those that aren’t recorded, since so few people can or are even willing to read a score or have it played aloud for them.

What’s fascinating is that whenever someone does have the vision to revivify a somewhat lost work, they are hailed for doing so. Though older than the plays I’ve previously cited, Arena Stage had enormous success with Alice Childress’s Trouble in Mind. MCC Theater in New York is poised to resuscitate the musical Carrie, which is likely to prove either folly or inspired, and both critics and fans await it with bated breath. Although I’m citing a work of French origin from the 60s, when the long-forgotten Boeing Boeing hit West End and Broadway pay dirt a few seasons back, non-profits across the U.S. rushed to program it, and soon Roundabout will stage its even less familiar sequel, Don’t Dress for Dinner. There is life, and ticket sales, left in so many pieces.

The modern American playwriting tradition is, arguably, only about a hundred years old, but it has certainly boomed, with countless theaters and training programs encouraging ever more plays (and yes, there are more plays than there are theaters to produce them; it was perhaps ever thus). But I worry that its growth has created an overamped Darwinian ecology which eats too many of its young and narrows its focus to the prize winners and nominees, to the works that become hits straightaway, to those that end up on critical “best of year” lists without giving them all time to be considered and mature before they are, by some unspoken consensus, deemed no longer worthy. I think we owe it to our field to not just support playwrights and their new plays, but to maintain the pulse of their body of work and the work that came before them, so there is a true continuum in American dramatic literature, not just a series of that which, in its time, was deemed the very best. Is it possible? Yes. Practical? Maybe not. But I think it’s a worthwhile goal. Who knows what we may find, barely breathing, but ready to be loved and speak to us once again, perhaps as it never could before.

To once again quote Stand-Up Tragedy, “I don’t have all the answers. I just want to ask better questions.”

*   *   *

FROM BILL CAIN:

The odd thing about Stand-Up Tragedy isn’t that it has vanished but that it ever was. The only reason it ever came to be was because people like you, Howard, had such enthusiasm for it and I remain grateful. My agent, Beth Blickers, still can’t believe that an over-the-transom un-agented first play got picked up for a workshop by the Mark Taper Forum. Bob Egan – who picked it up – is still astonished that it went from workshop to second stage to mainstage at the Taper in a year. And then to San Francisco to D.C. to Hartford and to Broadway. And I still can’t believe that after doing so well in those places that one review in the New York Times could kill it so dead. It took me 20 years to write another play – though writing for television – a critic-proof medium – in the meantime was a very great joy. … I was deeply ashamed of the short Broadway run. And it took me a long time to get over that. Two things eventually addressed the shame – one, immediate – one, over the long haul. The immediate help was that Stand-Up didn’t just teach me how to write; it also taught me why I should write. On opening night at the Taper in Los Angeles – a wonderful night – one of the young teachers on whom the main teacher was based – had flown himself out to see the show. I was very nervous to hear how it had affected him. When I found the courage to ask, he didn’t say that he had liked it or not. He said something much simpler. He said, “I didn’t know anybody had seen me.” When the show opened on Broadway – also a wonderful night at least until the review came out – the boy who was the model for the central student was there and I was terrified of his response. He said something similar. He said, “I’m the hero, aren’t I?” And I said, “Yeah – you always have been.” They taught me what writing is about. Letting people know that they have been seen in all their hidden greatness. It was a big thing to learn. And a new way to evaluate success and failure of a work that took years to write. … The more long term healing element was discovering that the show wasn’t dead. Over the years, having people come up to me and say, “I got started in Stand-Up,” has been a very great and surprising joy. Just the other night at 9 Circles in Los Angeles in a talkback, a young actor said that seeing Stand-Up had been a starting place for him. I asked him if he had seen the Taper production. He said no, he had seen it in Virginia. Who knew? Gordon Davidson said to me after opening in Los Angeles, “Now the play goes out and does its work.” I am very grateful to be a part of that process – both as a writer and an audience member. Nobody talks about Chips With Everything or No Strings – but they continue to work in me and I am grateful. … Thank you, Howard, for bringing all of this to mind.

This short essay appeared on The New York Times “Artsbeat” blog in June, 2011. You can view the original here.

I stayed home and watched “Law and Order: Criminal Intent” last night and I don’t care who knows it.

I understand that this is not the most dramatic statement one could make. It doesn’t hold a candle to “I am Jean Valjean” or “At last my arm is complete again.” But given my career, especially over eight years at the American Theater Wing, such a declaration seems to surprise many people, who apparently imagine me at the theater every night.

As a Tony voter, I need to see every show that opens on Broadway and as a theater lover, I see far more than just those. Yet while my nights of theater-going per annum far outpace those of the average American (although I fear that’s a low bar to cross), I do not spend as much time at the theater as any critic, as any adjudicator of theater awards that encompass Off and Off-Off-Broadway, or even as many of the diehard fans who populate chat rooms and Twitter.

The fact is, I believe there is such a thing as too much theater.

I don’t mean that there is too much produced. Rather, I believe that – as in all things – going to the theater four or five times a week, week in and week out, isn’t good for you, and indeed, I think it hampers your ability to be a good theatergoer, contradictory as that sounds. I say this as someone with greater access than many — and someone grateful for an opportunity that many desire.

We experience theater very differently than other forms. We can pick up and put down reading at will, start and stop a CD, and now the DVR lets us pause during live events on TV. In theater, unless we are very privileged, we must attend to every moment or we may never see it again. That single-minded focus can be wearying. So like any exercise, muscular or mental, it’s important to vary our routine to insure the greatest gain.

I also believe that all forms of culture — high and low, academic and general — have an impact on our perception of every other form, and to consume only one with a single-minded passion diminishes the ability to appreciate it most fully. I don’t pretend to comprehend everything that Tom Stoppard writes, but I was surely helped along in “Arcadia” by high school science, just as the film “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” provided some context for his“Rock and Roll.”

The connections can be unexpected to say the least. I am frequently stunned to read how many young composers, of rock, of theater, of avant-garde works, cite Kiss (a band whose music I thought simplistic even when it was new) as a creative influence.

But I understand: When an angelic young woman begins Jez Butterworth’s Tony-nominated “Jerusalem” by singing the English hymn of that name, I could immediately contemplate the lyrics in their dramatic context because the song was not alien to me. I had known it for decades, despite being American and Jewish. How? The song was “covered” on Emerson Lake and Palmer’s “Brain Salad Surgery” album, an almost daily listen for my brother and me in our early teens and an infinitely clearer introduction than in a certain Monty Python sketch, where it was sung to a neurotic mattress salesman (if you don’t know, don’t ask).

Needless to say, I’m not advocating that people don’t go to the theater. Please go, and go often. But I strongly suspect that if you attend to more of the world, to all that’s available to you, then the world of theater will be ever richer, and its effects ever more profound.

I’ll even suggest that “off nights” spent just talking with family, with friends, will bolster your ability to connect with theater (since I hope you do not converse with them during shows). Indeed, I steadily cried through much of Act II of Signature Theater’s “The Trip to Bountiful” because it brought to the surface emotions that I had not yet fully addressed about my family at that time. In the character of Carrie Watts, I saw my widowed father, reluctantly moved from our family home into an “independent living” apartment.

So I’m wondering: is there a work of theater that you feel you appreciated, enjoyed or understood better as a result of something you experienced outside of the theater? When you need a break from avid theater-going, what is the palate cleanser that prepares you for the next course – or feast?