Theater in DC

Last summer, I was part of a panel discussing the topic of theatre and urban revitalization at the annual conference of the organization Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas. The paper I prepared for that event is in the blog entry "Art, culture districts, and revitalization."

And last weekend, Wooly Mammoth Theatre Company, which has been in operation in the city for 30 years, had a private conference to which I was invited, as part of a "strategic planning" process they have chosen to embark upon to grapple with the issues of what do they want to be now, now that they have a permanent and beautiful facility located just off 7th Street NW and a couple blocks from the National Mall.

I think what Wooly Mammoth is doing is a really gutsy move. It's not a typical formal strategic planning process involving consultants and lots of Powerpoint presentations, but a messy process involving actors, patrons, board members, staff, and audience. The presentations and discussions convinced me that I was on the right track with the presentation in the summer.

In the summer presentation, I called upon theater professionals to do five things (even if in the entry I said it was four things):

1. Create your own discipline-specific cultural plan/Write a theater plan for your community.

2. Come up with a sustainable facilities plan for your community

3. Create anchoring institutions (to support the discipline, organizations, and artists)

4. Networking/rethinking about how to work together to develop the arts community as a component of the community’s cultural infrastructure and as a force to represent artists and artist organizational interests in land use, capital investment, public finance, cultural, tourism, education, and other local policy matters.

5. Figure out how organizations can share and maximize the value of audiences.

But where the paper didn't offer any guidance was in discussing the question of local and regional theater vs. what we might call national theater being presented locally, as well as the how to better support local theater specifically, and the differentiation between presenting vs. producing theatre organizations.

In their new facility, Wooly Mammoth has repositioned and is focusing less on what we might call general community/neighborhood outreach, and more on supporting local theater as a discipline by hiring local actors, working with academic theater programs at the local universities, and developing and/or working with local playwrights.

The idea of a local/regional versus a national theater, as well as building local audiences and local institutions is being discussed in other places such as the blog Theatre Ideas; in the entry, "Welcome, New Readers" the author lists five key points:

1. Decentralization.
2. Localization.
3. Solidification of the Relation to the Audience.
4. The Improvement of Society.
5. Revisioning of the Business Model.

And the discussion in the New Colony blog ("Goals for Chicago Theater Series - the new colony blog!") about five goals for theater in Chicago:

1) Produce MORE, MORE OFTEN and TOGETHER
2) Theater Companies: Show Some Balls When Programming Your Season!
3) Jeff Awards: Expand to Include Foreign Language Theater.
4) Theaters Should Work Together to Produce More Theater More Often
5) We, As an Industry, Need to Start Educating Our Audiences

To have a thorough "theater plan" as part of a community's arts and culture master plan, these kinds of issues must be discussed in a direct fashion.

This is demonstrated to be true given the news in today's Post, "The lights go dark at Catalyst Theater," about how the Catalyst Theater Company is closing down, having failed to make a go of it in the much bigger quarters of the Atlas Performing Arts Center, and how the Atlas itself is having some difficulties, and is refocusing towards more of a rental facility (this is happening in Bethesda too, see "Bethesda Theatre To Try It as a Rental" from the Post), not to mention the clamoring for a regularized funding stream on the part of arts organizations generally (see "Arts funding source sought in D.C." from the Washington Business Journal).

Not to mention the other failures discussed previously (see the past entry "Cultural resources planning in DC: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king).

Even though failure is part of the innovation cycle, the reality is that systematic and regular failure is an indicator of deeply rooted problems.

That's where we are here in DC, in terms of support of the artistic disciplines.