the week of september 7-11, 2020
you're searching for good Times, but just wait and see
Welcome to Nothing for the Group, the newsletter where one dramaturg rounds up one week in theatre news, reviews, and takes.
This newsletter is free — no gods, no masters, no paywalls — but if you’d like to sustain this project, you can support me on Venmo (@halvorsen) or Paypal.
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If you’re an artist or administrator in financial need, or if you’d like to directly support theatremakers in your community, here’s a great round-up of local and national grants and resources from Creative Capital.
update on the dramaturgy microgrant project
Last week, I wrote about LMDA’s Dramaturgy Microgrant Project — an initiative to support out-of-work & underemployed dramaturgs and literary staff members affected by the pandemic — and vowed to donate all of last week’s newsletter donations to the cause.
Thanks to your generosity, we raised $360 for out-of-work dramaturgs and literary managers! There is still one week to apply or donate to the fund. LMDA has already met its $2,000 match goal, but all donations raised will be granted directly to people in need.
end of an era
After twenty-four years, Ben Brantley is stepping down as co-chief theater critic of the New York Times. The Times has committed to filling Brantley’s position, but will take some time to choose a successor, as theatres remain closed for the foreseeable future.
It’s long overdue for the Times to hire a BIPOC chief theater critic. After Charles Isherwood’s termination in 2017, there was a big public push to diversify the critical ranks…and then the Times offered the position to a white man who had not applied for the job. There are so many excellent BIPOC theater critics — I’d love to see Soraya Nadia McDonald and Wesley Morris in the top spot — but we shouldn’t assume that hiring one will magically fix every pre-existing NYT editorial issue around representation. (Remember two years ago when one critic body-shamed an actress and another invalidated the gender identity of a performer in the same week?)
It’s long past time to reckon with the outsized influence of the Times on the entire American theatre. I’ve worked in three different markets (Pittsburgh, Houston, DC) over the last fifteen years, and in each one I’ve heard leadership voice, “Well, it got a bad review in the Times” as a reason not to produce a play. We all hate the make-or-break power of Times reviews, yet we still collectively lionize them. This behavior is exacerbated by the ongoing gutting of regional arts criticism.
How many newspapers even have full-time theater critics anymore, after years of buyouts, layoffs, and renewed reliance on freelancers? This affects alt-weeklies all the way up to well-funded legacy publications in robust theater towns. I live in DC, which has 80+ theatre companies in the metro area, and yet the Washington Post never replaced their second staff theater critic position after Nelson Pressley retired last year.
The theatre industry is re-evaluating every broken system, belief, practice, and relationship right now. What would it look like to de-center the Times and create a more equitable, less hierarchical critical landscape?
assorted news
Lloyd Suh’s The Chinese Lady won the Horton Foote Prize. The award recognizes excellence in American theatre and includes a $50,000 cash prize.
The National Theatre of the Deaf is moving to DC. The company also announced the creation of a new organization, The NTD-Connecticut.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced new eligibility rules for 2021. In addition to works that opened before the March 2020 shutdown, the new rules include full-length dramatic works that had scheduled productions postponed or canceled, as well as shows that premiered virtually or outside.
dr. fauci on theatres reopening
In an Instagram Live conversation with Jennifer Garner (side note: Alias is on Amazon Prime and you will not regret watching the first two seasons), Dr. Anthony Fauci said that a vaccine will need to be out for “almost a year” before it is safe to return to theaters without a mask:
Fauci said that even if a vaccine were to be finalized by November or December of this year, that would mean the soonest the majority of the population could be vaccinated is by Fall 2021…However, it will also depend on how effective the vaccine is.
"If we have a vaccine that's a knockout vaccine — that's 85% - 90% effective. I don't think we'll get that, I'll settle for 70% effective," Fauci said. "If we get a really good vaccine and just about everybody gets vaccinated, you'll have a degree of immunity in the general community that I think you can walk into a theatre without a mask and feel like it's comfortable that you aren't going to be at risk."
Start expanding your streaming and digital content plans now, folks!
2021 season updates
Book-It Repertory announced a season of audio dramas. The line-up includes Octavia Butler’s Childfinder (adapted by Shermona Mitchell), Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (adapted by Brandon J. Simmons), Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Mañanaland (adapted by Gillian Jorgensen and Jordi Montes), N.K. Jemisin’s The Effluent Engine (adapted by Jéhan Òsanyin), and Jamyang Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (adapted by Bilal Dardai).
Atlanta’s Theatrical Outfit announced an adjusted 2020-21 season, with in-person performances starting in spring 2021. The new line-up includes digital readings of Lucy Kirkwood’s The Children, Candrice Jones’ FLEX, Jonathan Spector’s Eureka Day, and Zora Howard’s Stew; Made in Atlanta, a new place-based play commissioning program to tell stories of the South, will kick off with a workshop of Dana Stringer’s We the Village; and in-person performances of Nia Vardalos and Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things and Anna Deavere Smith’s Fires in the Mirror.
the (everyone is losing their) jobs report
Center Theatre Group laid off 53% of its staff. I’m glad to see a company offer employees severance payments and health benefits through the end of the year, but I also wish administrative workers had collective bargaining units to negotiate severance agreements instead of blanket acceptance of whatever theaters want to give to cushion the blow.
Joey Sims reported on all of the furloughs in New York commercial and nonprofit theater for the Brooklyn Rail, with hard data from the Atlantic (13 staff members), Theatre for a New Audience (12 out of 19 staff members), Signature (24 out of 44 staff members), and the Public (105 staff members, or 46% of the staff).
I'm also quoted in the article, advocating for — big surprise — institutional transparency about furloughs/layoffs. The greater public has no understanding of the size of the theatrical workforce. I think it's important to demystify that most artisans, artists, and administrators are lucky if they can eke out a middle-class living from their work in good times, let alone a potential year-plus-long shutdown.
For his newsletter Transitions, Joey also talked to Jenna Clark Embrey on the socioeconomic bias of furloughs, an expansion of her very excellent Twitter thread that I highlighted two weeks ago.
things I read & listened to this week
Casey Mink interviewing Suzan-Lori Parks on storytelling, craft, and how to define genius
Diep Tran on Ivo van Hove’s revival of West Side Story, which shut down before reviews hit, and how bad artistic practices can damage the art itself
Audie Cornish interviewing Claudia Rankine about her new book Just Us, which features an essay about the time Claudia went to see Fairview with a white colleague and said individual didn’t go onstage at the end. I won’t spoil what Claudia says to her in response after the show, but it’s perfect.
I’m also quoted in the NYT feature “20 Theater Figures on How to ‘Revolutionize’ Their World” and if you’ve read more than one edition of this newsletter, my answer won’t surprise you. (And yes, I realize I wrote a whole thing several paragraphs up about de-centering the influence of the Times and now I’m like, “Oooh, look, I’m quoted in the New York Tiiiiiimes”, I’m not immune from it either! I was flattered to be asked and I forgive them for spelling dramaturg with an e. We’ll revolutionize style guides next.)
a note on the wildfires
I’ve been seeing so many chilling, apocalyptic orange-and-ash-saturated photos of the wildfires from friends and colleagues on the West Coast. If you’d like to donate to help those affected in California, Oregon, and Washington, here are a few organizations:
Don’t Shoot PDX and Fires Igniting The Spirit are making emergency supply runs to Indigenous communities in Oregon and Washington. (Venmo @Fires-igniting-the-spirit or Paypal)
I’d also encourage you to read Charlie Warzel’s NYT opinion piece "I Need You to Care That Our Country Is On Fire”, about how no amount of empathy can prepare someone for “the emotional, physical and sensory effects of having the world immolate before your eyes.” I keep thinking about this quote:
Would Americans feel a greater sense of alarm about our rapidly warming planet and the disastrous, perhaps irreversible effects of climate change if everyone could experience a fire season in person? Would cable news hosts devote the same nonstop coverage to fires as they do for hurricanes if more of their executives woke up each morning to falling ash? Would more lawmakers care if it looked like this outside the Capitol at high noon?
That’s all for this week! Thank you to Rebecca Adelsheim for the last-minute editorial insights, especially during her first week back in Zoom grad school.
Here’s your reward for reading this far: a photo of my holiday weekend cat-sitting companion Juno, a sixteen-years-young wise ginger prince:
