Bouquet in a theater box (c.1871) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Artchive.com
I started producing theater mostly because my friends and I couldn’t find a place to do the plays we wanted to do. Some college friends and I put together a devised poetry project, followed by a production of Nick Payne’s Constellations in a church basement, then Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, then an original play called Figure Drawing. I was auditioning for plays in Chicago a bit as well at the time.
Working with that association of theater friends (now called Assembly Theatre, active in Chicago) and with various community, commercial, and educational theaters gave me some thoughts about the effect of set processes, scale, regularity, role clarity, mission, and things like that. The stuff you need to become a proper company.
I remember in 2023 I was at the International Roy Hart Artistic Center and I heard someone doing a vocal exercise. I thought, “His voice is amazing. I want to hear him sing that piece ‘Eight Songs for a Mad King.” I forgot about that until later on when I was reading about the history of the center, and found that Sir Maxwell Davies actually wrote the piece “Eight Songs for a Mad King,” with Roy Hart himself specifically in mind, back in 1969. Sir Maxwell Davies’ music was written with such attention to a particular sensibility and skillset, that even at several generations’ remove, hearing a student of the same tradition made me think of the piece. There are many traditions where this sort of thing happens.
I remember showing up at the theater at Wheaton College as a freshman and having a specific impression of a few people by the couch in the hallway. Last year I went back, and it was all different people, but together and in that living room, there was something obvious they shared with the group I had met seven years before. What it was exactly would be difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t know about that couch in that hallway, but everyone who does knows what I mean. There are many such couches and many such hallways.
Sometimes we can build something that grows in vitality to the point where it seems to affect the people associated with it more than we affect it. At some point, if we’re lucky, we can leave and come back, or somebody else can visit half a century later, and there won’t be any of the same people, but the place will be the same. We talk a lot about our need to self-actualize and express our inner lives, but we don’t talk as much about the need we all have to feel like part of something like this. Those of us who like to make things that involve people tend to have this sort of thing in mind.
Also, if you want to start any type of business, you have a practical need to make it clear, simple, repeatable, controlled, articulable, and defensible. The reason for all that is existing is expensive and there’s a lot of competition for attention and time. You’ve also got to scale up to a fair size pretty quickly in order to support yourself, so growing at the speed of relationships isn’t viable. You’ve got to grow at the speed of artificial brand penetration or bust.
I think the reason most people put performances together has to do with the people, primarily. The most informed advice I’ve heard, and most of the stories of effective theater companies that I’ve read, have recommended starting with the people and then growing and focusing yourself into some structures. There’s usually a point in the growth of a company where they have to narrow it down. They have to pick a theater product, so to speak, that they make, and to exclude other theater products. It’s easy to read the history of short lived theaters as cautionary tales. We say, “They had the passion, and the people, but they couldn’t find a sustainable corner of the market. They didn’t quite come into organizational focus.”
All this seems to point us in an obvious direction: Get started on a project-by-project basis if you have to. Start with relationships if you have to. But then, as soon as you can, look around and see what the big durable companies are doing, try to find permanent, built out, future proof roles and systems, and switch to those. Build as big of a returning audience as you can, and make sure they know what they can expect from you. Try to ask, “What is available to do right now that will never be available again?” a bit less. Try to ask, “How do we define ourselves in general? What sort of things can we do successfully every year?” a bit more.
This all seems very sensible, but there are two tensions. One is that performance is a very basic human impulse, and many of its greatest expressions have come out of voluntary, almost spontaneous associations of audience and performers. I believe theater is a uniquely crowd-sourced art form. Some music, certain literature, painting, can arguably be understood as developing a little like science, where a really clever person has an idea and it works and then it gets adopted by the community. Theater has lots of clever people, but they don’t as often make genuine innovations. The most interesting developments in theater tend to just pop up places. I am probably exaggerating the distinction a little in order to make the point. All art forms have a lot in common, ultimately, but theater is remarkable in this way. I believe uniquely so. How can you get organized in a commercially viable way and still do theater in its most interesting environment?
You might see that as an irrelevant, idealistic tension, but there’s a second, more practical concern alongside it: Right now theater in general throughout the country has a brand, if you like, and that brand is not very popular. Theater is recovering more slowly than similar genres in the arts sector since COVID.¹ I’m seeing beautiful shows from large, historically important companies using tickets I was able to get for free because they’re having trouble filling the house. This grand brand comes with some default company structures and organizing principles, industry norms, and those aren’t working either. Look at the strikes.² Look at pay.³ ⁴ Look at the way artists talk about their own industry.⁵ ⁶ Theater makers are disgruntled, and theatergoers just aren’t showing up anymore.
For a lot of people, I think it’s intuitively obvious that, to be successful, the natural desire to participate in the growth and permanence of something outside of ourselves should funnel into a desire for a profitable and commercially sound structure. There’s no reason in principle why it shouldn’t, I guess, but right now I believe it usually does not. If we believe that people have a need to meet up and watch performances, and that people naturally do it if they have a workable situation to do it in, and that they’re not doing it right now only because the theater institutions don’t work, the attitude for folks who want to build something should be maximally attentive, responsive, and facilitative, and minimally prescriptive. We have to stop insisting that companies pretend to know the formula for how robust theatrical events can be reliably produced, and focus only on giving people a place to figure that out.
Under better circumstances, a person who wants to build something in the theater could think like a gardener. They would envision a long-term plan for a beautiful, lasting spot, take the reasonable steps, be diligent, and it would grow. But, these days, we don’t have the kind of confidence and understanding of seeds, weather, soil that it takes to preserve a garden. I believe if you don’t know what’s going to work, you have to be very rigorous about only using what’s working right now. If you don’t really know why something is working, you have to be humble and nimble so you can stop using it as soon as it stops working. The bouquet idea for me is a contrast to the garden. We’re not planting for the long term, we’re gathering together everything nearby that works at this moment.
A lot of theater companies act like this for a short, slightly embarrassing period, and then, as quickly as possible, stop gathering and start planting. I wish them success—a lot of material for bouquets does come from gardens, after all—but I think there are a lot of skills, and I’d speculate that there are some unexplored structural possibilities, that are specific to the “gathering” approach. I wonder if a company that sees it’s whole mission as being on the side of noticing, appreciating, energizing, and facilitating, and not on the side of cultivating a long term artistic home with an artistic mission and house aesthetic, could make some interesting discoveries. That’s the first thought, anyway.
- Robinson, J. S. (2025, March 17). Not all recoveries are created equal: A snapshot of the 4 genres. Building a Thriving Arts & Cultural Industry. https://trgarts.com/blog/not-all-recoveries-are-created-equal
- Miller, S. (2025, February 27). Atlantic Theater Strike may be just the beginning. AMERICAN THEATRE. https://www.americantheatre.org/2025/02/27/atlantic-theater-strike-may-be-just-the-beginning/
- Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Field of degree: Fine and performing arts, at https://www.bls.gov/ooh/field-of-degree/fine-arts/fine-arts-field-of-degree.htm (visited April 18, 2025).
- Olujobi, I., & Wilson, E. (2023, December 1). $5000. Dramatists Guild. https://www.dramatistsguild.com/thedramatist/5000
- Wilson, E. (2024, August 1). The plantation known as the American Theatre. Dramatists Guild. https://www.dramatistsguild.com/thedramatist/plantation-known-american-theatre
- Butler, I. (2023, July 19). Opinion | american theater is collapsing. the federal government must save it. – The New York Times. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/19/opinion/theater-collapse-bailout.html
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