The Commons
Touch
Thanks to a triumvirate of forward-lookers,
a think tank grows in Boston
By R ob W einert- Kendt
32
AMERICANTHEATRE OCTOBER1 2
Boston is a revolutionary capital of long standing,
not only as the young nation’s first “city on a hill,” or as the site of its initial stirrings of revolt, but as a crucial hub for national
upheavals like abolition and the Industrial Revolution, as well as for reverberant cultural benchmarks from Transcendentalism
to the Kennedy ascendancy to the biotech boom.
This past summer Boston became the official home to an unassuming but undeniable new insurgency—one that’s been
years in the making but may have at last found its ideal form in the home of the original Tea Party and the Big Dig. It’s called the
Center for the Theater Commons, and it aims for nothing less than to transform the way American theatre is done and talked
about, both in the short term and, most especially, over the longer one. Call it a think tank, a knowledge platform, a laboratory, a
gadfly—the Center for the Theater Commons, located within the office of the arts at Emerson College, is, as one of its admirers
puts it, an “alternate universe that is naming itself.”
Like many revolutions, this one came together in fits and starts from disparate elements, and formed as much from within
the institutions it aims to shake up as from outside. Polly K. Carl, now ensconced as director of the Commons and as editor of
its popular online journal, HowlRound, recalls a lunch with her friend and colleague David Dower in 2010. She was working
as director of artistic development at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company, after 11 years heading up Minneapolis’s the
Playwrights’ Center, while Dower was shepherding an ambitious suite of new-play development programs funded variously by
the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, under the rubric of the
American Voices New Play Institute.
“I had been in a field conversation for so long at the Playwrights’ Center, and I wasn’t in a field conversation in the same
way anymore at Steppenwolf,” lamented Carl over brunch in Boston last June. Carl is a wiry dynamo, a self-described “boy in
a man’s theatre,” butch but bubbly and irrepressible; she puts me in mind of what Bob Dylan memorably wrote about Bono,
that spending time with him was like “eating dinner on a train—feels like you’re moving, going somewhere.” Carl is a similarly
propulsive figure; more than forward-looking or -leaning, she’s already steps ahead by the time you’ve clocked her.
“David Dower had just gotten all that money for the institute,” Carl continued. “And I said, ‘What if you just gave me a
little bit of that to design a website and I started a journal?’ He had funds for ‘documentation and dissemination’ and he just
was like, ‘Done—take it and roll.’”
So Carl hired a small editorial staff, and HowlRound—named after the ear-piercing screech of amplified feedback, the bane
of every school assembly but a godsend for musicians who know how to sculpt it—was born in January 2011, with a nearly 6,000word manifesto by Carl (“Confessions, Contradictions, Beauty”) that set a high bar for personal transparency and authenticity.
Not every contributor to the now-at-least-daily site has been as intimately honest as Carl, who has written as frankly about her
own grapplings with gender as about her views of economic inequality within nonprofit theatres. But none has pulled punches,
whether in Catherine Trieschmann’s regular “Parenting & Playwriting” series, in opinion pieces by the likes of Marshall Botvinick,
Sherri Kronfeld, Todd London, Karen Malpede, Jason Loewith, Timothy Douglas, Claudia Alick and Richard Montoya, among
many others, or in-depth week-long surveys of regions and topics hosted by hired curators (see sidebar, page 34).
But if HowlRound is the public face and easy-to-find entry point for the Center,
s
Carl’s contribution is only one leg of the new organization’s three-legged stool. Indeed, its origins can be traced chiefly through
Dower, the former founding artistic director of San Francisco’s new-work incubator Z Space, who was looking for new horizons
for himself in the mid-2000s after 13 years at that theatre.
“I had done what I could do to develop Bay Area theatre,” said Dower in a recent phone conversation from Boston. Dower
is more circumspect in tone than Carl but no less far-ranging in the sweep of his vision. “[Artistic director] Molly Smith was
talking about creating a center for American work at Arena Stage, and it seemed like the next step in my own work would be to
develop American theatre and theatre artists, their own voices, their own work.”
Dower started as Smith’s associate artistic director at Arena in 2006, and soon thereafter launched the American Voices
New Play Institute. The following year, the institute partnered with the NEA on a New Play Development Program (NPDP),
intended to bring more new plays out of the workshop/reading ghetto and into full productions throughout the nation’s nonprofit
theatres. Other initiatives included an ambitious multiyear playwrights’ residency program and something called Theater 101,
a behind-the-scenes program taking interested patrons through an entire production process.
The opening of Arena’s sparkling new Mead Center for the American Theater in late 2010, and the addition of Carl’s online
journal to Dower’s already lively Arena new-play blog months later, seemed to seal the deal for Arena as both an inarguable hub
of national creative energy and a fertile R&D site/best-practices laboratory.
This turned out to be too many good things in one basket, though, as Dower recounts.
“There was a perception of conflict of interest,” Dower recalled. “It is true that it’s very hard for an organization to study
itself effectively and document and disseminate that information unilaterally when it’s part of a system like the LORT theatre
system—to be that transparent about what’s happening.”
In retrospect, Carl agreed: “I’m not sure what regional theatre could have housed us.”
Indeed, where to place this strange new hybrid organization, which had unleashed such promising energy and conversation
but whose questions and internal contradictions couldn’t seem to be contained within a traditional producing organization?
From left, David Dower, Rob Orchard and Polly K. Carl in the lobby of ArtsEmerson’s Jackie Liebergott Black Box Theatre. Photo by Mike Ritter.
OCTOBER12 AMERICANTHEATRE
33
who was shopping for a new home for the New Play Institute.
“ArtsEmerson calls itself a ‘world stage,’” Dower noted. “I asked
Rob if there was room in what he was doing for what I do, and if it
could come together in the office of the arts at Emerson. The new
college president, M. Lee Pelton, immediately saw the potential of
this collaboration.”
On the one hand, the institutional baggage of a producing
regional theatre would not be an issue at ArtsEmerson. “It’s so young,
there’s no history that needs to be prioritized,” Dower said. “It has
no legacy structures or even dominant aesthetic. So we can build
something new, adjust to the new normal, rather than try to figure
out how to move into an existing frame without destabilizing it.”
On the other hand, Dower noted, “There are lots of start-ups,
but not many at this level. It’s a unique position we’re in, and I want
to make sure we capture that abundance for the field.”
Dower now serves as a kind of administrative bridge between
ArtsEmerson, which he is helping Orchard program, and the Center
for the Theater Commons, where he is still counted as founder. From
that vantage point, Dower says, he can serve both masters—he can
“develop programs with an eye toward their research value.”
One, for instance, involves what Dower called a “seats” lab.
“It’s focused on running a set of different interventions in communities that are not participating or are under-participating in the
cultural life of Boston,” Dower explained. “We’ll be trying to find
ways to understand and address their barriers to participation, and
working with artists who can help me do that.” That may sound like
relatively standard community-outreach boilerplate—except for the
next part of Dower’s strategy.
“You never budget more than 70 percent of your seats for any given show,” he
There are two main entry points into this comprehensive knowledge-building
continued. “The remaining seats are left
platform: the Journal and the Blog.
there; sometimes you end up papering. What
The Journal contains in-depth articles written by and for the theatre field and is
if we thought of those seats as an asset and
divided into four sections: Opinions, Interviews, Ideas and Process.
developed those as a resource for the field?
The Blog, meanwhile, houses seven different categories:
We’re going to turn them into a resource
n Ideas, Practices, Bright Spots.
and a tool.”
n Podcasts: Every Friday, David Dower interviews theatre artists showcasing
Throughout conversations with Dower,
what’s simmering in the new-play world.
Carl and Orchard, this is the kind of sucker
n #NewPlay TV: Livestreams new-work related events and performances.
punch you regularly encounter: First, a lofty
n New Play Map: Illustrates where new plays are “born” and where they travel
theatrical goal you’ve heard articulated so
on their “life’s journey.”
many times before it makes your eyes glaze
n Happenings and Announcements: Includes “The Weekly Howl,” a Twitter conover, followed by an interesting new way
versation about and for the new-play community, occurring every Tuesday.
to put it into practice that makes you sit up
n City Series: Different U.S. regions are featured in week-long explorations of
and go, “say what?” Orchard mentioned
pressing theatre issues affecting given areas, hosted by hired curators.
offhand, for instance, that ArtsEmerson
n Regular Columns: Theatre practitioners share insights and perspectives in
recently merged its box office and fundraising
ongoing columns organized around themes and topics (Catherine Trieschmann’s
departments into one silo, with the thinking
“Parenting & Playwriting,” a series on finding an artistic home, even a summer
that “everyone who sells tickets also has the
series of short plays published online).
responsibility to raise money,” and vice versa,
Once you’ve encountered ideas proposed on the site, you can share the informabecause at bottom, they’re all “dealing with
tion and opinions via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail. To stay on top of new content being
audiences and asking for money.”
generated every day, you can subscribe to a variety of different platforms:
That’s a head-clearing idea, to say the
n The Journal and the Blog can be followed via RSS Feed or e-mail updates.
least. Even the playwrights’ residencies that
n The Podcast series can be subscribed through iTunes.
Arena pioneered, which are still ensconced
n The Weekly Howl can be accessed through Twitter. Remember to use the
there but will be mined by the Center for
hashtag #newplay to make your Tweets visible.
the Theater Commons for research and
Visit the Commons Library on HowlRound for all things research. Convening Relearning value, may seem at first glance
ports, Commons News and Required Reading are housed in this virtual library. For
like a bit of garden-variety largesse—just
more information visit www.howlround.com. —Rachel Hutt
souped-up commissions with more perks.
Enter the third leg of the stool: an arts manager
who has even more years in the regional theatre trenches than Carl
or Dower, and who had just embarked on a brave new venture of
his own. In fact, Rob Orchard had been set to retire after 30 years
managing Cambridge, Mass.’s American Repertory Theater when
Emerson College tapped him in 2009 to program its four downtown
spaces, some new, some lavishly renovated. After doing it the LORT
way for so long, and knowing the Boston theatre scene intimately,
Orchard had a few stipulations on taking the helm of the presenting
organization that’s now called ArtsEmerson, and currently entering
its third successful season.
“There were three things I told the board when I was interviewing for the job,” said Orchard in a recent phone interview. Cheerfully
pragmatic, Orchard rounds out the Center for the Theater Commons
troika with a deep-rooted local sensibility and an entirely un-jaded
veteran’s wisdom. “The first priority, I said, is that because we have
four new spaces, I want to be rigorous about bringing work to these
spaces that wouldn’t be otherwise seen in Boston. Two, I want to help
generate new work. And three, I want the work to be international.
There’s always competition for resources, but I think we’ve carved
out our own niche.”
Orchard got proof of that in data provided by ArtsBoston after
ArtsEmerson’s first season, which showed that more than two thirds
of the audience for his programming had no relationship to any other
cultural institutions in town.
ArtsEmerson’s fresh, sui generis approach, not to mention the
academic setting of Emerson, were especially attractive to Dower,
How to Read HowlRound
con t in u ed o n pag e 1 49
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The Commons Touch
continued from page 34
Not only will ArtsEmerson’s
wildly divergent spaces create tantalizing
operating theatres for ideas that would be
devilishly hard to carry out in an overheadheavy, season-subscribed LORT theatre, but
the academic setting makes it an ideal place to
record and report results. Emerson’s students,
Orchard noted, “speak the speech of creativity; Emerson students are makers. They study
it but they’re also making it.”
The studying layer is where the loop
closes, with the benign scrutiny of Carl’s
Commons and its many venues of dissemination and discussion (which also include #NewPlay TV, a streaming service, and the New
Play Map, an interactive new-play finder)
busily sharing and arguing over these findings online, in book form and in various
convenings.
OCTOBER12 AMERICANTHEATRE
mike ritter
But with three-year salaries and productions
included, those residencies have been a genuinely radical experiment that, if even partly
duplicated at several regional theatres around
the country, would dramatically change the
playing field. As Carl put it, “If it weren’t
five playwrights who made a living in the
American theatre but actually 50—that’s a
pretty good percentage. That’s a field you
have a shot to live in.”
Theater 101, another Arena-based program that will remain there (but may be
mimicked at ArtsEmerson, and has been
picked up by several regional theatres), was
modeled after an initiative at Steppenwolf in
which theatregoers were invited for minimal
ticket cost to follow productions through
rehearsal, tech, previews and opening. The
result? Said Dower, “What they were doing
was creating these deeply informed advocates
of new work in an organization they loved.”
The Arena version, first employed around a
production of The Music Man, was a hit, too,
Dower said: “The audience was astonished
that that’s how you make a musical.”
The Commons has microfund projects
studying the actual material effect of New
York Times reviews on theatre productions,
on the value of theatre as a form of civic
engagement, on the search for an artistic
home. As Todd London, artistic director of
New Dramatists, who’s written for HowlRound and taken advantage of a microfund
grant, put it, “I’ve thought for 25 years that
the American theatre needs a think tank, and
that’s what this is.”
Dower, Orchard and Carl.
Boston is the Center for the Theater
Commons’s backyard, but not the whole
oyster: The Center will still have a national
mandate and pursue projects outside its home
base—and not only in the vestiges of the
New Play Institute still housed at Arena. All
the same, ArtsEmerson is clearly the central
performance partner in this experiment.
Does Orchard think it’s ready for such a
microscopic close-up?
“Because we’re new and we’re growing,
we’re going to succeed and fail,” Orchard said.
“And I want the successes and the failures
to be equally emphasized.” No, that doesn’t
mean he expects to see individual ArtsEmerson productions receiving scathing reviews
on HowlRound. He puts it this way instead:
“A production process idea that ArtsEmerson
undertakes can be seen as not successful, and
we can have a constructive, honest, smart discussion of why it wasn’t successful. We want
this to be a laboratory for both best practices
as well as less than best practices. I mean, we
won’t be seeking out worst practices.”
That squares with the instincts of Carl,
who closed our meeting with a rousing minimanifesto, a coffee-shop stump speech.
“Discourse is my highest value,” she said.
“I believe in discourse more than I believe in
anything. And the idea that there’s anything
off limits to talk about—I just don’t believe
that. I think we have to talk about everything,
and we have to struggle with it. We have to
be open to criticism; people criticize me for
what I write and it hurts, but we have to be
willing to do it.”
Indeed, the aim of the transparent,
open-source model of the Center for the
Theater Commons is not to begin polite
academic seminars but to broaden and better the theatre field. To that end, alongside
many celebratory and informative posts on
HowlRound are several others that directly
and fearlessly interrogate the structures, ethics and aesthetics of the American nonprofit
theatre. That’s the playing field Carl, Dower
and Orchard know intimately in all its glories
and dysfunctions—and that they love well
enough to want to improve.
“Steppenwolf’s a lovely organization,
and I had a really cool job there, but I guess
my failing as a human being is probably I’m
not interested in my own career as much as
I’m interested in advancing the art form,”
Carl began, contemplating her career’s left
turn into a kind of meta-theatre outside the
institutional theatre. “What I’d seen at the
Playwrights’ Center, which ruined me, is all
these talented people who had no outlet for
their work. And I felt like there were enough
resources for there to be more outlets; I’m not
saying we were going to serve everyone; I’m
not being pie-in-the-sky or Pollyanna about
it. But I felt that legitimately, we could do a
better job of making this field more inclusive
of people like me who want to live in it.”
She cited Dower’s 2009 report, The
Gates of Opportunity, which made similar
points about the imbalance of resources
and access.
“I’m kind of a political activist at heart,
and I think more people should have access
to what we do,” Carl continued. “I’m just not
at ease sitting comfortably in my career, making plays, while I’m one of the one percent
who gets to do what I love.”
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