by David Dower
So, by now many of you have read the news about the creation of the American Voices New Play Institute here at Arena Stage. Obviously, it is an exciting time. It's also daunting, but in all the best ways.
The organizing principle here is somewhat abstract, though the programs are pretty easy to grasp. We're attempting to create a space for the new works sector to study, develop, and disseminate effective ideas for strengthening the infrastructure nationwide. While there are many places focusing on developing new work and new opportunities for plays and writers (funders, play labs, producing theaters, support organizations) there are less places focused directly on the infrastructure. Innovation and discovery occur most frequently in isolation, often remaining trapped in their originating context, rarely achieving scale. What if we created such a space, inside a producing theater and woven into its daily life, for testing and developing these practices, programs, and processes and hosted an ongoing conversation among the field's practitioners focused on immediate challenges and opportunities? How might the sector advance? How might the host institution be transformed? How might the field? We don't start with any of these answers. But we're open to exploring them with others curious to find out.
There have been many questions (not all of them voiced directly to us, but they do get to us eventually y'all...) about why Arena Stage would be so interested in managing the NEA New Play Development Program. There's a sort of "Regional theaters don't do that, do they?" theme running through the critique. But for us, the NPDP was the first step toward a larger institutional metamorphosis as we aim to responsibly program our new building (The Mead Center for American Theater-- no small moniker to live up to!) and fulfill our dual role as a citizen of one of the country's most vibrant theater communities and the nation's capital. Most Washington theaters are dealing with this question of dual citizenship, but as one of the original "regional theaters" we're looking to move into our future connected to that specific history: as a place of inquiry that has always looked across the field --and our own backyard-- at big challenges and set about attempting to address them. The very founding of the theater was sparked in large part by this sense of dual citizenship: Zelda Fichandler's frustration with the fact that there was no alternative to the commercial touring theater around the country, and no place in the nation's capital where blacks and whites could watch professional theater together. So, there's always been an expansive, inclusive vision of why and how it matters that Arena Stage is in the mix.
The NPDP allowed us to begin to express this commitment to inquiry directly and it has served as a trimtab to help us move toward activating The Mead Center as a place of production, presentation, development and study of American Theater. It has also put us in conversation with the whole field as we knock about trying to figure out what that will look like.
The Institute is the next step, the turning of the rudder if we follow the trimtab metaphor here.
So, we're starting with four basic programmatic approaches to the larger goal of creating a lab for testing, developing, and disseminating effective practice in new plays. Three of the programs are directly adopted from their originating contexts. The Playwrights Residencies will be designed through consultation with playwrights who have residencies at large producing theaters, including The Intiman and The Public. The Producing Fellowships are being adapted from the concept of The Producer's Chair at Foundry Theater. The audience program is being adapted from the successful First Look 101 program at Steppenwolf. A fourth major program is an extension of the work The Mellon Foundation has been doing in convening the field to advance solutions around specific challenges and opportunities. These join the NEA NPDP activities to form the core of the inquiry as we launch. We fully expect to morph, graduate, or retire elements of this inquiry as we go, based on their own evident effectiveness-- the Institute intends to remain fluid, responsive, and focused on problem solving.
I'm going to go into a bit of detail here about these programs, fully aware that this is too much to read in one sitting. Feel free to wander away and come back whenever. I know it's a lot. But I'm relieved and delighted to be able to talk about it! And I look forward to talking with you about it. Whether over a table, over a beer, in the comments here, or blog to blog, I'm interested to learn what's on your mind and in your belly about all of this.
The Playwrights Residencies: Creating New Plays
Designed as three-year residencies focused on writing, the residencies come with a meaningful stipend, a health plan, and local housing, as well as two unconventional items: each writer is given an annual budget for new play development and assigned a Producing Fellow to take the point in producing these development paths. The writers are given access to the planning process for Arena's season, a seat at the table whenever convenings are scheduled, and access to the Arena Stage/Georgetown University partnership for interaction with students and faculty as well as Arena staff. The writers will be designing their own residencies, and we fully expect that no two will look alike. One writer will always be local to DC. (We start with Karen Zacarias, who is already at work designing hers.) The other two will not be. Arena Stage and the playwrights will agree on one play that will be a traditional commission-- where Arena funds the development separately in exchange for the option to premiere the work. The rest of the writing that takes place during the residency will be free to find it's own path in the field. We are aiming to find the right balance between encumbrance and support-- how to maintain a light enough touch that the writer can still create and develop relationships outside the building but enough contact that they can feel themselves "at home at Arena". Karen Z. has already engaged us in the search for that balance.
These are residencies that recognize that writers need time to write, that no two writers are alike, that they need options for breaking the isolation that sets in during the writing process, that there are mysteries/blackholes for writers about how an institution functions, and that development processes and schedules need to be adapted and adaptable to the specifics of each project.
[Note to Playwrights and Agents: These Residencies are not designed as a place to begin life as a playwright. They will focus on experienced early to mid-career writers. We do not anticipate an open submission process for this first round.]]
The Producing Fellowships: Producing the New Play Devleopment Process
These Fellowships are one year. They are focused on developing a crop of young producers prepared specifically to handle new work. Each is assigned to one of the playwrights and all are part of the Artistic Development Team at Arena Stage. So they have front line responsibilities for producing the work/activities of their playwright and participate in the overall producing function of the theater. They each produce at least one convening as well so that they interact with the leaders in the field (artists, producers, administrators, funders) along the way. The first group has asked for an 'externship' component and they are spending time in another new play setting to contextualize the work they are doing at Arena. They will be mentored by our Production Office, our Development Office, our Business Office, and our Communications Office at various points along the way, for a full soup-to-nuts grounding in the business of producing theater. They, too, have a stipend and health care. They are also part of the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship program at Arena, and as a result have access to the benefits and learning opportunities of that highly developed, well-respected Fellowship program we've been running for decades. This Fellowship is going to be exhausting, which in itself is part of the training-- stamina being an important ingredient of successful producing. Their direct mentor/supervisor this first round is Ed Sobel, formerly the Director of New Play Development at Steppenwolf, and Ed's at work designing the experience with the first three participants: Ronee Penoi, Travis Ballenger, and Amrita Mangus.
[Note to Potential Fellows: The first Fellowships are filled as we launch this Institute. Subsequent New Works Producing Fellowships will be filled by application to the Allen Lee Hughes Fellowship Program. The next Fellowships will start in January of 2011.]
Theater 101: Converting The Audience to Advocates for New Plays
This program will run alongside a new play development process and we've not yet determined the most effective place to plug it in. The concept is fully borrowed from Steppenwolf's model. We'll enroll a diverse group of audience members (students, retirees, subscribers, local artists) into the program. They will move as a cohort, observing every step of the process of producing a new play festival-- from selection of the projects through casting, rehearsal, tech, and performance. They will meet regularly with Arena Staff to discuss what they are seeing, the rationale underpinning artistic choices along the way, and finally what they saw in the final presentations. Ed Sobel is also charged with helping plan and schedule the first class of Theater 101.
The Convenings: Gathering the Field around Challenges and Opportunities
We will conduct a regular (alarmingly frequent at the outset) series of convenings in DC, in conjunction with Georgetown University's Theater Program, at which we will gather 12-15 people from across the sector to discuss and debate specific issues facing new plays around the nation. We're planning, for example, a gathering focused on forwarding the the discussions about devised work and ensemble support in the new play infrastructure-- a convening which will aim to weave together the multiple threads of the ongoing conversation around the country (from the NET Summit in SF to the NEFA Focus Group in Boston, this summer has been especially active around this topic). We're planning a large gathering of African American playwrights here as part of a wave of discussions about the state of the stage for African American stories and their tellers. (That'll happen over Martin Luther King's birthday weekend, if you want to plan to be around...) There's one on defining diversity, one on the role of the audience, and one on the impact of the Institute and the next generation of Arena Stage on our home theater community.
All of these will be documented and the discussions made available on this blog.
The NEA New Play Development Program: Building the Program's Impact
We're in discussions now about the timing and process for a second round of funded projects. We're also continuing to document the progress of the first round. You may have heard the noise about the creation of a documentary film focusing on the seven projects that received NEA money the first time. This film, supported by WETA and PBS and made by Robert Levi, is shaping up to be an important document on contemporary American playwrighting, and it has created an invaluable archive of the development process for many of those projects. And it is our intention to create a Festival in the first year of the Mead Center in which all seven Round One projects are presented under one roof.
There are other activities and gatherings on the calendar for the first 18 months, like more live-streamed development events, an interactive national new play map that aggregates data on new play development into one place-- picture an on-line version of CNN's big board-- and a series of enhanced readings for new works, but you get the picture. There's much to be doing and much more to be done. So, away we go.
We look forward to working with you in this endeavor.
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