This past Sunday, many of Triad Stage’s nearest and dearest gathered at the former Ellenburg & Shaffer Glass Studio for a celebration of our 10th Anniversary season. It was a superb evening filled with excellent food, wonderful drinks and dear friends celebrating the success of Triad. Animals from our glass menagerie were the feature of a silent auction and Jeff Polish came over from the Triangle to present a mini version of The Monti.
For those of you who haven’t yet experienced The Monti, I encourage you to get a ticket for any of the shows in the Triangle or to the upcoming shows in Triad Stage’s UpStage Cabaret. Each Monti is a unexpected, irreverent and highly entertaining evening of storytelling. I’ve been thrilled to get to tell stories at a couple of Monti evenings and was delighted to be joined by Linda Sloan, Donna Bradby Baldwin and Fern Reagan as we each told stories about Triad Stage.
All in all the evening was a great kick off to our 10th Anniversary celebrations and a wonderful reminder for all of us who work at Triad Stage of how lucky we all are to get to create theater for such a dedicated and daring audience.
As I write this, EDUCATING RITA is in tech downstairs in the theater. I thoroughly enjoyed watching the designer run on Saturday afternoon. Eleanor Holdridge has put together a great cast and is shaping a truly affecting production of a play I treasure. I think EDUCATING RITA is worthy of re-examination and still rings as true today as when it was first written. Perhaps it is even more pertinent in this age of No Child Left Behind-- for the passionate point of the play is that learning cannot be simply standardized but is a lifetime process of discovery of ideas and self.
I’m always happy to turn the directorial role over to one of our guest artists, freeing up some time for the planning, dreaming and envisioning that I belive to be a central aspect of an Artistic Director’s job. Although we don’t announce our new season until late winter, the task of the moment for the Artistic Department is selecting our 11th season.
I find season selection to be one of the most difficult and invigorating aspects of my job. Budget constraints, audience development, artistic growth and our core values all intersect as I try to fashion a season that will enage our artists and audience in five amazing stories. Too often budget drives the season selection process at theaters around the country and I consider the New York commercial theater’s reliance on the small cast play—a relatively recent dramatic formula dictated by financial necessity and distinguished primarily by dramatic works as small as their cast size— one of the greatest crises threatening our national theater. The lost gems of America’s theatrical heritage are forgotten because of cast size and are replaced by the sit-com and/or afterschool special relationship play. The end result is the bold new American writing stands too little chance of being produced while TV fare for the live stage dominates too many theaters too many places.
Attempting to balance artistic vision with the financial realities of budgeting a season creates a conflict that ensures our nation’s theaters are too often programmed with a series of compromises that result in too many substandard plays taking up far too much time and resources. It also ensures bold plays don’t get written, too few artists get employed and fewer and fewer people are drawn to the epic magic of theatrical storytelling when TV does kitchen sink realism better and for far less cost to the consumer.
As exciting as receiving the American Theatre Wing’s National Theatre Company Grant is for Triad Stage, it also carries a challenge. If we are indeed one of the ten most promising theater companies to emerge in the past 15 years, I believe that we must now turn our attention to how we live up to that promise and take our place as a leading national theater company. We need to affirm that we recognize the honor of being called promising and then re-double our efforts to live up to that promise. It thrills me to know that our way of working— collaborative, daring, investigative, and artist centered— has established a growing reputation for us as a place where great American theater actors want to work.
I am also thrilled that we have built an audience that is collaboratively engaged with us as we shape this theater. Our decision to grow an audience rather than to chase some who rejected us during our first few seasons has paid off. Our core audience is strong in their dedication to our journey together. We still wrestle with issues of content, but—as the recent success of THE GLASS MENAGERIE proves—we seem to be able to experiment with style in a way that not only attracts national attention (check out Production Notebook in November’s American Theater) but also captivates our core audience.
We also have a proven track record of expanding our audience with the work that Laurelyn and I do investigating myth and music with a distinctive regional voice. The surprise hit DEBUNKED, a commissioned play by Alexander Woo, is another example of our audience’s interest in new stories and unknown quantities. Our successes with plays like A LESSON BEFORE DYING and THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK demonstrate our ability to take difficult plays, produce them well and to partner with area organizations to make theater a part of our community dialogue.
Add this to the praise of nationally and internationally recognized scholars and critics for our production of TOBACCO ROAD and American classics by writers like O’Neill, Hellman, Inge and Williams and it becomes clear that Triad Stage has a unique affinity for being a company that re-envisions the great classics of the stage.
The success of adventures that sprawl across the stage and defy the confines of the realist tradition like AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS and BLOODY BLACKBEARD prove we have an audience that is hungry for far more than the kitchen sink dramas and comedies that have been the economic necessity for the American theater long after the theater realized that TV and film do realism far better than the stage ever can.
Recently I’ve been focusing on a needed shift away from obsessing about WHAT we produce to an energizing focus on WHY we produce and HOW we produce. I’ve given myself a challenge of looking at plays for next season that address our core values, provide an emotional experience for our audience and bold opportunities for our artistic partners. I’m looking in unexpected places for plays that may have been forgotten, re-imagining familiar plays and focusing on plays that inspire me.
Part of our promise—and part of the challenge to living up to that promise—is bravely crafting an identity for ourselves, developing a unique voice to engage in a much needed debate about the direction of the American theater.
The man who has made up his mind to win will never say "impossible".You have to believe in yourself. That's the secret of success.
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