What We Eat? Building the Successful Theater Company

Welcome to What We Eat where we take a look at the books, movies, and plays that have influenced the direction of Playlab NYC.

Building the Successful Theater Company

by Lisa Mulcahy

I don’t think I am the intended audience for this book. Fifteen years ago when I was just coming out of a small Ohio college, I might have found a lot in Building the Successful Theater Company to inspire me. Today though, I found little in the book that was useful.

Lisa Mulcahy has complied her book from interviews with the heads of fourteen different theaters from around the country. The companies offering practical advice and from the trenches stories include Steppenwolf Theater Company, The Pasadena Playhouse, La Jolla Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre Company, Jean Cocteau Repertory, Bailiwick Repertory, New Repertory Theatre.

The whole book follows a structure that Mulcahy sets out on on page two.

“So, what makes a theater company successful? Primarily, the formula for success is a combination of a sharp artistic focus, a smart objective business viewpoint, a fully operational venue, and a big-picture plan.”

I don’t think she spends nearly enough time exploring the development of a theater’s mission statement. A successful mission statement is difficult to create, and is important for finding board members, programming shows, and raising money. She talks only in very broad terms about fundraising, suggesting that companies hold fundraisers. What she does spend a a great deal of time talking about securing a permanent home. This is a fine goal I suppose, but we’re independent theater producers in New York and it is not likely that Playlab NYC will ever be in a permanent home. It honestly isn’t even a long range goal, although my managing director might disagree.

The seven and a half years since the publication of the book have been very hard on some of Mulcahy’s “successful” companies. The Jean Cocteau Repertory dissolved in 2007. Bailiwick Repertory Theater closed in September 2009. The Pasadena Playhouse closed in February 2010 and is looking into filing bankruptcy.

The book seems to be written for a young people who have no experience in the day-to-day realities of regional theater, young people who dream of establishing a theater in their small town. I would like to see a volume that was focused on building successful independent theater companies, with interviews from successful companies like The Civilians, Les Freres Corbusier, Keen Company, or Vampire Cowboys. That would be a practical from the trenches book that I could recommend.

What We Eat: Theatre on a Tabletop

Welcome to What We Eat where we take a look at the books, movies, and plays that have influenced the direction of Playlab NYC.

Theatre on a Tabletop: Puppetry for Small Spaces
by Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin

“We do small shows because it gives us the chance to pursue our wildest ideas free from the costs and constraints of big-scale, big-budget theatre production without the burden of having to coordinate dozens of production, crew, and cast people. Using tabletop theatre techniques professionally give us the means to administer, produce, create, and perform a show within our own small organization”

The above excerpt from Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin’s book Theatre on a Tabletop serves a permission slip for Playlab NYC to explore big ideas within our own small company. It is a needed spark of inspiration to carry us forward into our second year.

Using the term “Tabletop Theater” allows the authors to explore three different types of puppetry: toy theatre (a popular Victorian era children’s entertainment), found object theatre, and overhead projection theatre (a type of shadow puppetry). For each of the three forms, they provide a brief history, offer directions and diagrams for building puppets and theaters. Finally each section includes an excerpt of a script the authors have produced.

Theatre on a Tabletop: Puppetry for Small Spaces contains not only inspiration, but practical lessons informed by years of tabletop puppetry work by Fong and Kapin. There are diagrams, photographs, supply lists, eight “Basic Laws of Puppetry,” and a useful bibliography.

With a constant eye toward the classroom, the final third of the book shows what a powerful teaching tool tabletop puppetry can be. It includes outlines for workshops of varying length from two hours to two weeks, offering advice for each step of the development of a workshop production including: story boarding, design, rehearsals and presentations. There is also a short coda for puppeteers interested in creating professional tabletop productions.

It is safe to say that Playlab NYC will be taking some time to apply the lessons that Kuang-Yu Fong and Stephen Kaplin provide. More importantly it is their inspiration that we will take to heart.

What We Eat: The Artistic Home

This is intended to be the first in what I hope will grow to be a series of entries about the works that have influenced the direction in which I am working to take Playlab NYC. My attempt to share the books, movie, and plays I have consumed.

The Artistic Home:
Discussions with Artistic Directors of America's Institutional Theatres
by Todd London

Published by Theatre Communications Group in 1988, The Artistic Home was written by Todd London, the current artistic director of New Dramatists. The slim volume is a summary of 13 meetings between the artistic directors of more than a hundred of America’s non-profit professional theatre companies. Peter Zeisler, who passed away in 2005, wrote the foreword. Mr. Zeisler was long associated with TCG, and was instrumental in the founding of the Guthrie Theatre. The introduction by Lloyd Richards, who passed away the year following Peter Zeisler, is perhaps best remembered for his work as dean of the Yale School of Drama in the 1980’s and his close collaboration with August Wilson.

The Artistic Home is split into five sections that examine a number of issues that regional theaters are facing: artists, audience, and day-to-day operations. We often read about the struggles of individual artists, the daily rejection, but here Todd London offers us a look into the struggles of theaters trying to find new directions. Directions where they can better nurture artists, and bring audiences to them. New directions that will allow the theatres to not only survive themselves, but flourish.

This is not a how to book for running theatre. Rather it is a book stuffed with ideas. A book that works for me much like my favorite issues of TCG’s American Theatre Magazine. They both serve me best as a jumping off point for my imagination. It is a book of “What If’s”

I have read reviews of the book that claim that the book is only useful if you are running a large theatre company, I couldn’t disagree more. To my thinking some of the approaches and ideas that are discussed are probably impossible to pull off encumbered with a forty-year history and a large board. However if you are at the very beginning at the birth of a new company there is some flexibility in trying out the ideas thrown around in these pages. Also, there isn’t a board member at any theatre to whom I wouldn’t give a copy of this book.

The best description of The Artistic Home comes from Peter Zeisler. He says in his introduction that reading the book “is like walking in on a high-powered brainstorming session” with the leaders of the regional theatre movement in this country. He goes on to say that the book exists as a starting point for further conversations.

I would love to see a new edition of the book. If not a whole new book then I think at the very least the time has come for a revised edition. Every several years, American Theatre Magazine publishes a kind of regional theatre check in, with a large articles devoted to conversations that follow the same format as Mr. London’s book. Why not compile those into a series of appendix that allow us to see the evolution to where things are now, twenty years later? I would also like to see the model of the books approach applied to Off-Off-Broadway companies.

My copy is becoming dog-eared and filled with marginalia. It is something that I dip into every few years for inspiration of what my theatre company could be.