Recap During the first 75 years of theater in America:
Companies were independent, semi-permanent, self-contained units; They were managed by the leading actor, who chose the plays that were done, when and how long they would be done, and who in the company would play the roles; Company members were paid a share of the profits; They played standard English fare, especially Shakespeare, in rotating repertoire; The theater building was either owned by the company, or were leased long-term; The company played in a particular community, but would go on short tours each year; actors in stock companies normally led stable, settled lives and enjoyed working conditions comparable to workers in other fields; By the 1820s, a star actor from Europe or, eventually, America would come to town and perform plays with the resident company members before moving on to another town.
I wrote this in 2008, and it still is true today:
From Daniel Quinn’s deceptively simple and inspiring Beyond Civilization: Humanity’s Next Great Adventure:
The river I mentioned earlier is the river of vision. Our culture’s river of vision is carrying us toward catastrophe. Sticks planted in the mud may impede the flow of the river, but we don’t need to impede its flow, we need to divert it into an entirely new channel.
“My poetry is basically a poetry of praise. It’s an affirmation of the world, of the beauty of the world, and, at the same time, it’s a protest against cruelty. I cannot accept the cruelty of the world … “
— Czeslaw Milosz
When i largely disconnected from social media, I remembered what it was like to have only my own thoughts to entertain myself. It was the main reason I started reading so much – to make me more interesting to myself!
My latest weekly newsletter in which I talk about Brown’s elimination of the MFAs in Acting and Directing (apparently, the highly-regarded playwriting program emerged unscathed), Trump’s turning the NEA into a military marching band, and a dream about the 5 types of stories in the world (I only remember 2).
Dear Programmer types (e.g., @manton (although you shouldn’t reply–you have enough with answering micro.blog questions), @mtt, @amerpie, who am I missing…): I need some help. Here is what I’m trying to do. I use a nearby academic library to get many books for my research. Many of them have very small print for my aged eyes, so I bought a CZUR scanner and I scan them and convert them to epub to read on my tablet.
I just made the mistake of checking in on Threads. Good God, it’s just one person after another hyperventilating. I was never so glad to get back to micro.blog as now.
playbill.com/article/b…
Brown and Trinity Rep shutting down MFA in Acting and Directing.
Let me take this opportunity to plug my book DIY Theater MFA.
playbill.com/article/b…
Brown and Trinity Rep shutting down MFA in Acting and Directing.
Let me take this opportunity to plug my book DIY Theater MFA.
My friend Michael Phillips at the Chicago Tribune discusses the changes of “emphasis” at the National Endowment for the Arts here. I agree with the reactions of Chicago arts leaders. At the same time, this is why I have argued against seeking government funding in Building a Sustainable Theater. As we saw when Congress eliminated the Federal Theatre Project during the anti-communism scare in 1939, the political winds change and suddenly your business model is on shaky ground.
Every once in a while, rarely, I have one of Those Dreams. These are dreams that have a very different form than my normal dreams, and usually communicatre something to me in a language very different from the way I think. In other words, these dreams (of which I have had a total of three in a decade) seem to come from someone other than me, and are not action oriented, although they can be narrative.
[Since I just sort of launched into The Rooted Stage Series without really explaining what I was trying to do, I think I ought to pause an provide some context. I’ve tried several times to write a Preface/Introduction, but got bogged down. Here, I want to do this as if I was being interviewed by a slightly skeptical version of me, in dialogue form. So: Me is, well, me; and MeToo is the skeptical questioner.
Before it turns into a celebration of Substack, Sophia Efthimiatou’s post has some wonderful thoughts about having nothing to say as the entryway for true receiving, especially artistic receiving. “What has been lost,” she says,
“is a quality that never came easy to us to begin with, and that is our ability to receive. To receive, as Steinbeck put it, “anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine.
Yesterday, I wrote about the birth of the star system prior to 1870, when notable actors would travel from resident stock company to resident stock company throughout the country, performing with the company actors for a few days and then moving on.
Today, I need to double back to talk about real estate for a moment, because it is crucial to the story of what happened in 1896. To do so, I am reliant on the invaluable work, once again, of Alfred L Bernheim’s 1932 classic (reissued in 1964) The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932.
Zelda Fichandler, the co-founder of Arena Stage in DC, and one of the Founding Mothers (along with Eva La Gallienne, Margo, Jones, and Nina Vance):
“There is no real way of likening us to other culture carriers such as the British National or the Royal Shakespeare Company or the present Moscow Art Theatre, since we are all of us broke and have small companies instead of very big ones. We spend half of our life at fundraising dinners and defending play choices to citizen boards of directors, since with the impulse that we should have theaters in our land came also the impulse that the community should be part of them, should put up some of the money, should even have a voice in them, and—now hear this!
As I wrote in The Rooted Stage: Beginnings, part 1 of this series, the first century of the American theater was dominated by the resident stock company which had the following characteristics:
rooted in a single place in a single theater using a consistent group of actors performed a variety of plays independent (i.e., the capital invested in the company came from those within the company itself) organized as a cooperative But all of that changed around 1870, and again in 1896.
I was at a wonderful, new local restaurant today. It opened several months ago, and it was our first visit. The food was excellent, the atmosphere understated and comfortably classy. There was a nice bar with about eight chairs and fewer than ten tables, each of which sat four people. The restaurant is open five days a week for lunch and dinner. The staff seemed to be the two owners–maybe there was another staff person during another shift, I don’t know.
I’m fascinated by the Scottish theater company A Play, a Pie, and a Pint. They’ve just announced their 2025 season, which involves (this year) 18 new plays. Any theater that does work by Dario Fo has my endorsement, and I wish I could see Mistero Buffo.
“Meanwhile, back in the Year One…” – Jethro Tull, Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day
So how did the theater get where it is today? And how could it be different? These are the two questions that form the foundation for this series.
The importance of the first question is described by Alfred L. Bernheim, whose book The Business of the Theatre, published in 1932, is considered definitive by many.
Pretend with me for a moment. I bring you into a room where you find a Red Box, a Blue Box, and a Yellow Box. In front of them is a pile of poker chips also colored red, yellow, and blue. I ask you to sort the chips into the box with the matching color. Easy peasy, right? There’s no value judgment about which color is “better” than the others– there’s no hierarchy.
Back in 2011, I wrote a lot about Holly Sidford’s study for Grantmakers in the Arts called “FUSING ARTS, CULTURE AND SOCIAL CHANGE High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy.” Sidford showed that the tichest 2% of cultural organizations in the US received 55% of charitable contributions and grants, a ratio that was worse than the income inequity in the US as a whole.
Well, I just discovered that, in 2017, Sidford did a followup study to see if anything had changed in the ensuing years.
I’ve been reading Michael H. Shuman’s books for 20 years. This one really has me thinking about how to get my money out of Wall Street.
Put Your Money Where Your Life Is: How to Invest Locally Using Self-Directed IRAs and Solo 401(k)s a.co/d/7QdzzEC
social.ayjay.org/2025/01/0…
Lately, @ayjay has been the source of a lot of new thoughts and new reading for me. One thing about social media is that the changes that happen incrementally sometimes aren’t noticed until someone like Nick Carr adds them up for you. Add in Musk and Zuck eliminating fact checking and social media is a quagmire.
For quite a while now, I’ve been trying to find a through line for the thinkers I’ve admired, and I think I may have discovered it. The umbrella term is (true) anarchism (not the incarnation with violence). Here is how it seems to connect (in chronological order):
Peter Maurin –> Dorothy Day –> Ivan Illich –> John McKnight –> David Graeber –> Murray Bookchin –> Chris Hedges (maybe - I have a certain ambivalence to his self-righteous humorlessness)