Well if you’re so smart

David J. Loehr says:

One dream season I’ve thought about before is also Chekhovian…

Three existing plays:Three Sisters by ChekhovAnton in Show Business by Jane MartinMarion Bridge by Daniel MacIvor

Now, these are primarily plays by men.  (Cough.  Jane Martin.  Cough.)  So to balance, I would commission responses from women.  Two or three full length plays to round out the mainstage season.  Maybe those are responses to or variations on the Chekhov, maybe they’re specifically women writing about brothers, that’s up to the playwrights.  But wait, that’s not all.

I would fill my other stages with a regular series of collections of ten minute plays and/or one act plays, also by women, also related to the larger theme, to run for one to two weekends every six weeks.  All new work, performed by local, smaller theatre groups.  That supports the local artists in my community, it gets exponentially more voices on my stage, and it adds to the #neverbedark ideal by continuing to have new, simple, affordable events on a more frequent basis.

I would also want to do readings of plays that would tie in thematically as well, either new or existing work.  Those would be smaller, ancillary events to attract my core audience and patrons, to attract students and new audiences maybe not ready to come to a full production or, more to the point, not able to afford the ticket price for mainstage shows.

That’s just one potential season I’ve had in mind for a while…

Cole Matson says:

I’ve always wanted to do a season on heroes/saints, and the question of how relevant such figures are today (and can we – ought we – be saints and heroes)? My favourite play is The World Over by Keith Bunin (which opens Monday at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe – 
http://www.edfringe.com/whats-on/theatre/world-over – plugety-plug), and it has a great line, “We’re all of us meant to be heroes.” So I’d start with that.

Then, I’d like to do productions of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons and Maureen Martin’s The Red Hat (about St John Fisher, also executed under Henry VIII). I’d love to be able to commission an adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall to run in rep, if we could get the rights. Otherwise, I’d commission a couple Baltimore playwrights I know – either Terry Kenney or Stephen Kilduff – to write a response to Man for All Seasons.

I’d also like to invite Fr Rick Curry SJ, founder of the National Theatre Workshop of the Handicapped and a director who works with war veterans, to create a piece with his soldiers on the theme of being a hero, as well as doing some of Erik Ehn’s saint plays.

I’d also like to invite my current World Over director, a talented young Scot, to create a devised piece on the year’s theme, and/or direct a production of Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme.

Finally, I’d like to commission a play about modern-day saints, like the Algerian martyrs of the film Of Gods and Men, the martyrs of El Salvador, and/or the martyrs of WWII (such as Edith Stein and Maximilian Kolbe). I’d probably open that up to proposals for a full-length play.

Now that’s primarily white guys, but there is some diversity in terms of gender, sexuality, geography, and age, as well as a mix of professional and amateur creators, and a representative from a religious order.

One thing that occurs to me is that this list is primarily white guys because I’m a white guy and know other white guys. Perhaps that speaks to the importance of a show’s administration being diverse first, so that people who belong to different groups will be aware of talented friends who belong to the same groups.

Of course, I’d like to fill in the gaps in the above program with talks, field trips, maybe a book club and other events, as well as a volunteering and educational program, to create a year of discussion and resulting action.

Cynthia says:

I’m fascinated by this discussion because I am opening a small theater in Miami and am formulating my first season. For the past two years I have been attending plays all around my Miami, studying the theater’s voices. Miami is unusual in that the minority of people are white with English as a first language. I’ve been studying these audiences, too. There are four distinct audiences that financially support their culture’s representation in theater: White American older women, Latins, Hindustanis, and Russians. They are not afraid of the new, since they have chosen and succeeded in coming to a new home. What they do wish for is the familiar within the new.

The subjects of interest to these groups do not lie the areas men like to write about–war, heroes, rejection of the mother. Instead they are interested in coping with unfamiliar customs, issues of freedom, mother-daughter relationships, mother-oriented interactions with society, and romances. For instance, the Women’s Theater Project did a play about 2 female elephants that lived in American zoo and had to be moved to another zoo though the elephants were afraid to go. Here we had two characters who had been thrust into a foreign land and were now being asked to undergo yet another drastic change. One of the elephants was young and had been ripped from her mother during her capture.. This play, well done, was sold out at every performance. I think stories that look at the world from women’s perspectives are more often stories that are new in view while maintaining a familiar core. They are stories that understand the heroic effort of getting up each day to face a world that is always, day in and day out, going to be just slanted a bit on the side of condescending and hostile to you because you are not a white, English speaking male.

My goal is to bring Miami’s diverse audiences together as a community and expand it to including a younger audience, those right out of college. I want to give the new with a familar base, that sort of familiar base that we all recognize and so find our common ground. I want to choose my season so that Miami can continue to teach me rather than me assuming I am the one to teach them.