The rich tapestry of plays being written right here in town are an important contribution to the planned productions of our theater companies.  Producing local playwrights’material is one of the ways our theatrical atmosphere stays as complex and interesting as it is.  Theaters, large and small, try to make a point of looking to local playwrights for new ideas and content that fits the Northwest sensibility.  SGN interviewed a number of theater administrators and artistic directing staff, asking for their answers to the general question, “Why is it important for you to use locally written content in your season?” Each answer contains different pieces of reflections from production companies, both large and small.

Greg Carter, artistic director of Strawberry Theatre Workshop (Strawshop), says that Strawshop has no particular focus on creating original plays in their mission.  However, three of the first four plays they created as a company (since 2004) were original adaptations: two narrative dramas adapted from Charles Dickens and Thornton Wilder and the third was a puppet play derived from the writings, drawings, and music of Woody Guthrie.  The Wilder piece, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, represented the first time the Wilder family had ever allowed the author’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel to be adapted as a play.  All these adaptations were written by Carter who has a degree in playwriting from Duke University and has taught writing.

“As a playwright myself, I am frustrated that new plays are ghettoized to new works festivals or competitions.  There is very little collaborative play development in Seattle at the professional level.  The exception to this is Book-It, who does exclusively new adaptations.  We’re lucky to have them around, and their efforts make it easier for critics to absorb experimental new adaptations by the rest of us. 

“It is also crazy that there is so much funding available for ‘new work’ in theatre, but only if that work is defined as new writing.  Theatre is inherently ‘new’ every time it is newly interpreted.  That is why playwrights like Ibsen, Williams, and Shakespeare endure.This is the art form in which a great writer like Ibsen offered his words.  He had every intention that actors, directors, and designers do something new with it every time they picked it up.  The idea that the playwright is the only person capable of bringing originality to the stage is idiotic. 

“I was recently challenged by a grant committee to talk about Strawshop’s commitment to original work.  When I explained our history [the three original adaptations in four productions], a committee member said, ‘Weren’t those all written by you?’The suggestion was that since I have also been a director and manager of the company, my playwriting wasn’t valid. 

“I teach a class at Cornish College to students who are just beginning their careers.  Almost all young artists want to be involved in ‘new work’ and they often decide early on that the canon of playwrights is stifling.  I like to describe for them the rarity of great writing in one’s life.  I remind them that [Tennessee] Williams wrote five great plays, but he wrote at least 30 others that are not well-liked.  [Arthur] Miller has three or four brilliant plays, and 25 average ones.  Shakespeare might have 12 great plays, but he has another 12 that are not great.  In general, I like to remind students that playwriting is hard.  The giants of literature are lucky to get it right 20 percent of the time.  If you opened a new theater and the next Tom Stoppard was one of your collaborators, you would be disappointed most of the time.  So would your critics and your audiences. 

“I feel somewhat about minority communities in the arts like I do about the ensemble nature of creating work.  I’ll give you an example: A few years ago we were considering applying for a grant from the Pride Foundation and got stuck in ‘defending’ the contribution we were making to Seattle’s Gay community.  What we wanted to say was that we were dedicated to supporting community, period, and thus every community was served by that.  But that’s not a very compelling pitch to make on a grant application.  Specifically, we wrote that we tried to provide a place for the Capitol Hill neighborhood to see great art and engage in important issues.  Given the profile of the Gay community on the Hill, that also felt like a genuine service.  But how do you write that without sounding like, ‘some of my best friends are Gay’? We wound up not submitting that application and agreed to revisit the Pride Foundation when or if we ever do a play with an issue central to Gay rights.  Was that the right thing to do?  Was that self-censorship or a legitimate assessment of our impact on a niche community?

“For the record, one half of our two-person staff that year was Gay or Lesbian, one-fifth of our five-person board, half of the directors in our first season, two of the 10 actors in our first show, etc., etc., etc.  The issue that challenged my integrity in that grant application was that fact that I knew that the prominence of minorities in our company was not by design.  We have no mission to emphasize diversity in hiring, only a commitment to work with the best artists and managers we can afford, and to do work that appeals to many different communities. 

“On the other hand, if I were Gay myself, I would have felt completely different.  I think I would have felt entitled to that Pride Foundation money – even if the artistic decisions I made were exactly the same.  In an awkward parallel, I trained and worked for years as a puppeteer.  Strawshop has done two pieces with puppets in our history, and when I applied for grant money to the Puppeteers of America and to the Jim Henson Foundation, I did so with a sizable chip on my shoulder.  I casually cast the company in those applications as being committed to puppetry arts in a long-term way – which is only partially true.  I wanted recognition from my people, and, by God, I got it!

“There are three fabulous plays that I would like to do in the next two years.  The subjects are Billie Holiday, Alan Turing, and John Merrick [a black woman, Gay man, and handicapped man].  I want to produce these plays because I want to see these plays.  I want to see great actors have a chance to inhabit these remarkable – and factual – characters and teach our whole community about how they lived and what they lost due to bigotry and misunderstanding. 

“I will dedicate myself to Holiday, Turing, and Merrick, knowing that those characters bring me access to markets that I can’t touch with other stories.  But, they will also enhance our credibility as a diverse workplace.  If that was the only reason I was interested in them, I would feel like a hypocrite.  But I love those plays.  Period. 

“I think the challenge for niche populations is to cross genre as much as possible.  If a community wants to see itself on stage, it needs to do everything it can do to support financially healthy institutions even when they are not presenting work directly connected to their issues.  There is a risk of a ‘passive boycott’ of companies that don’t emphatically show a dedication to minority issues or workers. 

“The GLBT community is so integral in the American theatre as an industry, that to some extent the common themes of Gay empowerment and exclusion are moot.  I don’t know if there is another industry where the upper echelon is majority Gay men, and the lower economic classes of companies are populated with a more traditional demographic.  I also think our customers defy regional demographics.  Theatre in America is a very white art form, meaning audiences are overwhelmingly white even at African-American and Asian-American-focused companies.  Great minority writers who aspire to the pinnacle of Broadway exposure understand that they are writing minority culture stories for a majority culture audience.  This has been true of all the great African-American playwrights, like Lorraine Hansberry or August Wilson.  The clear exception to that rule is Gay writers.  Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, Tennessee Williams, et al, wrote groundbreaking stories of Gay experience knowing that they were speaking to Gays who had shared that experience.  What a fundamental cultural difference American theatre provides racial minorities and sexual preference minorities. 

“The last thing I’ll say is that all communities are bonded today by the lunacy of our current political administration and the war.  There is nothing more important to the GLBT community or the homeless community or the Filipino community or the feminist community or the professional basketball community than the removal of this president and the process of repairing the world over the next several decades.  This is going to affect the way that we study art and the audience for art for a long time.  I was in college during the Reagan administration, and there was a polarization between Gays and straights over AIDS – a political issue, a health issue, and a moral issue.  This was the focus of much art for 20 or so years.  What we are faced with now is a crisis on all those levels that galvanizes anyone left alive in 2008.  I think that we are likely to see less niche art.  I think we are already seeing writers, like Tony Kushner, tackling these ideas and it will become less and less important in this period to identify which community the artist represents.”