Group Therapy for American Theater

Let’s pretend we’re in Medianville, U.S.A.--home of a nonprofit professional theater company called the Earnest Theater.

The Earnest is working on a new musical called “12 1/2” that has attracted the attention of Broadway producers. It’s a show about preteens: their hormones, their Ritalin, the divorces among their parents--the usual themes.

The 16-year-old pop recording sensation Britannia Arrowwood wants to star in “12 1/2.” Her participation would ensure the show’s success for months on Broadway, after the Earnest premiere. Her zillions of fans would flock to see her, just as they have to her movie “Stalking Samantha.”

But can she pass as a 12 1/2-year-old? Does she know how to act? Apart from drawing a massive youth audience, would she serve the production? Is it fair to jettison the young actress who did the role in workshops, simply because Britannia wants to stretch?

These were among the questions many of America’s leading theatrical producers pondered over the weekend at Act Two, subtitled the 2nd American Congress of Theater, at Harvard University’s Loeb Drama Center.

The goal was to see if the commercial theater that’s centered in New York and the nonprofit theater that’s scattered throughout America might work together on behalf of their common art form. By the end of the conference on Sunday, the group resolved to raise money and use committees to identify specific arenas in which to cement their ties.

Commercial theater relies on nonprofits to develop material, and commercial success can give those projects a much more lucrative shelf life--not only on Broadway but later in productions that rely on the cachet of Broadway success.

Conference participants felt “a strong mutual recognition that our interests are basically the same,” said Ben Cameron, executive director of Theatre Communications Group, which represents nonprofits and co-sponsored the conference with the Broadway-oriented League of American Theatres and Producers.

Still, many potential fault lines lie between the two camps. The first such summit meeting of commercial and nonprofit theatrical players, in 1974, was very contentious. This time, the only parts of the conference open to press coverage were two panels that considered fictitious situations, such as “12 1/2,” that were meant to reflect possible real-life crises but avoided the controversy of actual situations. During the rest of the weekend, behind closed doors, similar issues were discussed without the veneer of fiction.

Role-Playing for a Common Cause

The what-if questions were asked in two “Socratic dialogues” conducted by Harvard Law School professor Arthur Miller in the style of public television’s “The Fred Friendly Seminars.” In several scenarios involving the Earnest Theater in Medianville, panelists played roles that loosely corresponded to their own jobs.

For example, Old Globe Theatre’s artistic director Jack O’Brien played the Earnest’s artistic director during the first such dialogue, which grappled not only with the matter of Britannia Arrowwood but with such issues as whether “12 1/2” should use a brilliant set designer whose creations might cost too much.

The discussion also included the subject of funding for the show. If producers want to take a musical to Broadway, they usually supply “enhancement” money to the nonprofit theater that is developing the show. Serving on the panel as the owner of the Broadway theater to which “12 1/2” might move, Jujamcyn Theaters President Rocco Landesman identified what he called “the Gordon Davidson factor,” named after L.A.’s Center Theatre Group artistic director--it’s when resident theaters pump up the requested enhancement amount without clarifying how much goes to the production and how much goes to the resident company itself. (After the session, Landesman said that he singled out Davidson only “because we’re friends,” and that similar questions have been raised in negotiations with other theaters, including the Old Globe and La Jolla Playhouse.)

For the second dialogue, Davidson took over as the Earnest’s new artistic director. This group considered how to handle a commercial booking of “A Christmas Carol” (with Mickey Rooney) at the local performing arts center that would compete with the Earnest’s own, long-established “Christmas Carol,” how to deal with the new Mayor Harry Hard-line’s slashing of arts budgets, and how to respond to a local right-wing radio evangelist who accused “12 1/2” of containing anti-Christian elements.

The Broadway brass on this panel--Shubert Organization Chairman Gerald Schoenfeld and Dodger Theatrical Holdings President Michael David--generally pledged support for their nonprofit colleagues on such issues as censorship and public subsidy. But later, they didn’t get all of the reciprocal support they wanted. Guthrie Theater managing director David Hawkanson balked at supporting an idea to help the commercial producers get a federal tax credit for their investors.

When a national advertising campaign to promote theatergoing was suggested by Miller, some concern was raised that theater is far too diverse to be marketed like milk. Davidson expressed support for the idea but cautioned that any such campaign would have to be “truly national.”

The only playwright on the open panels was Wendy Wasserstein, but a closed-door artists’ panel reportedly generated a few more sparks than the open-door sessions.

Speaking informally between sessions, South Coast Repertory producing artistic director David Emmes discussed the “Sophie’s choices” facing theaters regarding artist compensation: To raise money to pay the artists, he said, the theater must hire a development director, whose salary at least temporarily takes money away from the artists.

Such dilemmas at nonprofits are why the casting of a Britannia Arrowwood is so tempting to many of the nonprofits’ managing directors, if not their artistic directors: It would mean sold-out houses and younger audiences in one stroke.

For the record, at least as set up by Miller’s guidelines, Britannia did get the job. But without seeing “12 1/2,” it was hard to tell if the sell-out of the seats at the Earnest Theater involved an artistic sellout as well.