the right fit

The job description for an Artistic Director varies quite a bit depending on the size of the theatre company. Back in the early days, the reservation line was my home phone and the bank was my sock drawer. I'd spend the same amount of time using a drill as I would reading plays. Anybody else see that scene in Slings and Arrows where the frantic director is plunging the toilet? I know him. Sometimes I miss needing to be the "jack-of-all-trades" guy I was in the back in the day, though it's nice to have some clothes that aren't covered in paint or holes. So while the "day in the life of me" has evolved and shifted over the years, there is one task that has stayed constant. As far as I can tell, it's the only thing that all Artistic Directors have in common. We pick the plays.

The original impetus for starting a theatre company was the desire to see plays I really loved. So, the first scripts we produced were plays I'd been carrying around in my backpack for years. I started Shotgun in 1992 when I was 24 and, I think it's safe to say, I had a pretty serious crush on all things David Mamet. I wasn't alone. He had won a Pulitzer for Glengarry, his screenplay for The Verdict had been nominated for an Oscar and he had publishers in just about every genre willing to put his words in print. I have poetry, children's books, magazine articles, television scripts, political cartoons and nearly every play written by Mr. Mamet. I had once contemplated doing a "Mamethon" - a 3-week festival of all Mamet plays. You get the picture. Edmond was the story of a man who woke up one day and realized he's been living in a life void of love, truth and excitement. This journey to follow his impulses and experience passion and excitement end up taking him to some dark, crazy places. I loved it. We were originally going to run for Wednesday nights, but some nice reviews in the SF Weekly and Rob Hurwitt's review in the East Bay Express (yes, he was there waaaay before his Examiner/Chronicle days) catapulted us to extra performances on the weekends. Suddenly the question became: what are you going to do next?

I'd always been drawn to those stories that provoked an intense visceral experience. I wanted to see a play that wreaked havoc on my heart rate, changed my breathing patterns, aroused my senses. I also felt like we had to be practical. We didn't have money to lose and I grew up in a family allergic to debt. So, it was about finding plays that could rely on the basic tenants of strong theatre. We wanted to "break it down" to strong writing, acting, directing and design that didn't get in the way. I saw small theatre companies around me going broke doing new plays - so I knew we weren't ready for that. But a company called "Shotgun Players" couldn't thrive on a diet of chestnuts. In the first 5 years it was about finding unknown plays by well know writers - a choice that served us well.

Then we started to dabble in new works. In 1995 we did a season of first works by well-known writers. I worked on an original adaptation of Brecht's Baal with company member Richard J. Silberg (no, not the local poet) and it lit my fire. The next season we did a night of new short plays, a cut and paste job Henry V that included scenes from Richard II and Henry IV part 1 and we did a new play called Approach that had been submitted by a loyal patron Susan Wiegand. I had the fever. From that point on we spent more and more time looking for new plays or opportunities for commissions - usually with a focus on using classic works as source material. For those of you keeping score, this winter's adaptation of The Odyssey - Salt of the Earth - is actually our second foray into this story. In the summer of 1998 we mounted a jubilantly memorable production of The Odyssey written by the aforementioned Silberg with an original blues score, sign language and giant Cyclops puppet that could swallow an actor whole. Oh, and coming up with show specific intermission treats is a tradition that goes waaaay back for us. That summer we sold "Cyclopsicles" by the dozen: triple layered juice treats with a jellybean eyeball frozen inside. Joy.

From that point on I started making a conscious decision to look for new plays. I'd set a goal of doing at least one a year and slowly ramping it up. While there was something comforting in producing a known commodity (Mamet, Churchill anything by Stoppard) I felt a certain obligation to produce new plays - wanting to give back to an art form that had been so good to us. Yes, the classics still have much to reveal to a modern audience but we also need to give voice to the writers who speak for our time. Putting out a call for scripts did more damage to the environment than anything else. All those poor trees. I started putting out targeted feelers to folks in literary departments. What was the great play your theatre was passing on that would be perfect for us?

Before Kent Nicholson was at Playwrights Horizons in NYC he was the Literary Manager at the Magic Theatre. He had been coming to our plays for a while and was pimping himself out as a prospective director. His thing was new plays. I told him to give me a couple to read. He did. The third play in the stack was Adam Bock's Swimming in the Shallows. I was in love by page 18. I remember putting the script down and calling Kent right away to say, YES! We killed with that show - selling out nearly all of the performances and winning the Best Play and Best Ensemble awards at the Bay Area Critics Circle Awards. It also did wonders for Adam whose next play Five Flights was subsequently produced by Encore Theatre and did even better.

We had new play fever. And so did our audience. Critical attention and box-office momentum were making it clear that this was the way to go. Our productions of Winesburg, Ohio (co-produced with Word for Word), The Death of Meyerhold (Mark Jackson) and Dog Act (Liz Duffy Adams) were artistic turning points for our company. Rather than going to used book stores to pick a season we were going to new play conferences and readings. Liz and Joanie both became readers for the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco so that we would have an inside track on new plays and writers.

The advent of this new play euphoria also brought with it a new (or more focused) aesthetic for our work. We started looking for plays that incorporated and mixed mediums of dance, music, multi-media and audience participation. We were drawn to language that broke the rules. We wanted theatre that was "theatrical" - theatre you couldn't see on television. We wanted plays that could be magical experiences and also tools for building community. We wanted to make art that was transformative. That's a tall order, I know. But when there are only so many hours in a day and every hour at rehearsal usually means an hour away from my family or a capoeira class or fixing the hole in my front steps then it's got to mean something. We realized a while back that finding those plays would be a challenge so we embarked on another level of new play production - commissions.

I'm going to wrap this blog entry up quick folks. I promise. But I can't talk about the experience of picking plays for a season without mentioning Love is a Dream House in Lorin. We had just moved into our first permanent home - an old church in South Berkeley - and we wanted to find a way to build a bridge to our neighborhood. A young Bay Area playwright named Marcus Gardley (thank you Amy Mueller) was recommended to us. His grandmother had moved here from the south back in the 40's to work in Richmond Shipyards so he had a history with the community. His play was part love poem part reality check. It involved over 30 actors - some of them neighbors from the community and took on the bread butter issues of racism, gentrification and personal responsibility. It had a full-on gospel choir, spanned over four centuries had a multi-ethnic cast of actors from 8 to "70ish". It was the show we had started a theatre company 20 years ago to make.

People often ask if I have a favorite play. I could no more pick a favorite play than I could pick a favorite child. They've all been different with unique challenges and rewards. Some of the most difficult experiences have led to some of our greatest achievements. Yes, we're going to make commissions a more and more important significant part of our work. We're celebrating our 20th anniversary next year with five of them. POW! POW! So, what have I told the playwrights who we've commissioned for this incredible season? I've told them that YES, I want something socially relevant and dynamic, containing both ecstasy and agony, something theatrical that tickles the intellect and reaches down into your guts. And magical. And for goodness sake - make it challenging. Take us into the unknown. This Shotgun Posse is a restless bunch - we don't like the easy game.

Thanks for reading this riff. Please let me know if you've got any suggestions for future entries. I've got a goal of doing one per week. Hey! Hey! Hey!

Photo Details:
Sorry I haven't figured out how to put captions under the photos yet.
1. Me on the roof with our solar panels
2. Pamela Wylie, Karen Goldstein, Patrick Dooley, Leith Burke and Stan Spenger - cast of David Mamet's Frog Prince. 1994
3. Michael Storm in Brecht's Baal. 1996
4. Adam Bock as Dionysus in our production of the Bacchae. I didn't have any great Swimming photos and I'm hoping he won't mind this pretty hot shot. 1999
5. Beth Donohue in Winesburg, Ohio. 2001
6. Dena Martinez, Margo Hall and Beth Wilmurt in This World in a Woman's Hands. 2009