Putting the Regional in Regional Theater

by David Dower

The phrase "putting the 'regional' in Regional Theater" is starting to crop up with increasing frequency in discussions about the future of the regional theater movement. (Is it a movement? Is it an industry? Is it a field?) There are a number of examples on display right now, in print and on stage, where the major regional theaters are tapping the vibrancy of their own yards to both engage their communities and refresh the sense of purpose that drove the founders of the movement to build these institutions in the first place.

This is on my mind, well- in truth all the time (makes me a lot of fun a parties, let me tell ya...), but specifically coming out of the weekend at the Humana Festival. Here's a quick tour of some of the ways that this return to local roots is cropping up around the country.  Add your shout out if I've skipped someone important to you!

First, there were the examples on stage there: Naomi Wallace's Hard Weather Boating Party and the Wendell Berry piece created by Marc Masterson and Adrien Alice Hensel (the Artistic Director and the Director of New Play Development at the host theater).  Wallace, a Kentucky native now an ex-pat in England, dove into the stories of the Rubbertown neighborhood of urban Louisville for her play-- one of the finalists for Outstanding New American Play in the NEA NPDP inaugural round.  Berry is also a Kentucky voice, and his agrarian contrarian poetry provides the text and focuses the piece on his native landscape.  Two contrasting views of the region that is home to this regional theater.

Threaded between and around my viewing of these productions was the conversation, both facilitated and free-form (over the bar, on the sidewalk, in the elevators at the hotel), which was peppered with reactions to Liz Engelman's "think globally, produce locally" comment and Michael John Garces' discussion of the Cornerstone purpose and process.

Cornerstone, another Finalist in the Distinguished Development category of the NPDP with it's Naomi Iizuka project in the Justice Cycle, is living this regional focus on a micro-level. The stories told, the people who tell them, and the people who see them are all from the neighborhood. Companies like Campo Santo in San Francisco and Milagro in Portland are working in very different ways toward a similarly specific and localized regional purpose. Companies like these are scattered all over the country, and as much as we moan in the field about the Regional Theater having become as preoccupied with the New York market as the system it was built to replace, they stand as proud and stubborn refutation of the sweeping generalization. More than exceptions that prove the rule, they are the exceptions that call me to think more deeply about these questions of purpose, alignment, abundance and infrastructure.

Also circulating right now: Celise Kalke, one of the people invited to imagine the American Theater 25 years down the road for the current isssue of American Theatre Magazine, talks about the vibrancy and urgency Alliance Theater experiences in diving into the issues and stories of its Atlanta roots. Her piece winds up being another call for putting the regional back in regional theater.

And a press release in my inbox this morning reminds me that Sharon Ott will be returning to Berkeley Repertory Theater to direct Amy Freed's You, Nero. While this marks San Francisco playwright Freed's debut at Berkeley Rep, she's been well supported by other Bay Area theaters including ACT, California Shakespeare, and Magic Theatre.  Berkeley also recently premiered a work by another native son, Itamar Moses, about Berkeley High School-- Yellowjackets. In fact, the commitment of Bay Area producers to creating opportunities for local writers is an underpinning of the vibrant playwrighting community there.  A shout-out to Z Space, The Marsh, Shotgun Players, Encore, Playwrights Foundation and others for keeping the Bay Area fertile ground for writers like Freed, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Octavio Solis, Banana  Bag and Bodice , Josh Kornbluth, and many others who are impacting the field nationally from their West Coast perches.

And then yesterday I was touring around the city with Polly Carl, visiting us in the District of Columbia from Playwrights Center in Minneapolis, and we dropped in on rehearsal for Arena's premiere of Legacy of Light, by DC playwright Karen Zacarias. Though this is her first play produced at Arena, she's been sustained by many of the region's small-to-midsize companies like Woolly Mammoth, Round House, and Imagination Stage.

While there's much to discuss in the concern that the regional theater movement has become overly-franchised, each major looking more alike than distinct, and caught in the tractor beam of the New York marketplace, it's worth noting that there's is and has been a vibrant local network under the communities where the major regionals have grown and flourished and that there's a growing interest among these institutions in their own back yards. In my travels around the field I've found many, many more examples of the region in the regionals than cited here. Does it point the way to some energizing shift in the American theater, or simply help remind us that the strength of the field is the diversity of purpose, focus, approach, and institutional structure as much as the diversity of the voices at work in it?