It was unintentional, and all, but Tboy may have made the holidays a little livelier for one of D.C.'s theatrical impresarios.
It was like this: In the homestretch of the City Paper year-ender he wrote with Bob Mondello, Tboy introduced a notion about theatrical overpopulation, a kind of supply-and-demand question phrased thusly:
"... has been known to wonder whether there aren’t too many little companies pretending to professional-theater status hereabouts and whether a little supply-and-demand consolidation might not be in order."
Tboy still thinks that's a fair question. He's not sure that all the little companies competing for audience and donor support in D.C. have goals and missions different enough to explain why they're separate entities. (Some of you, with your comments here about vanity companies and artistic-director narcissism, seem to be implicitly asking the same question, in a slightly more provocative way.)
The trouble, though, is that Tboy (not Mondello) attributed the question to Longacre Lea's Kathleen Akerley, with whom he's had a couple of conversations on the topic. And in framing and paraphrasing the question for the article, he either misunderstood or inadvertently misrepresented what Akerley had to say.
Tboy's mistake probably made Akerley sound like she was crackin' on some of her colleagues for being shoestring operations with delusions of grandeur--for which Tboy is heartily sorry.
Basically, if he's hearing her correctly now, size doesn't matter. Small companies, big companies, that's not the question--the trouble is that there are perhaps too many companies, period, that haven't put serious thought into why they make theater.
That's the short of it. Here's the long, in Akerley's very own words this time, cut-and-pasted directly from her e-mail:
"When I rant, as I do, about the state of our market I’m primarily concerned with the observation mentioned in the article that there seems to be considerably more supply than demand (Beyond Adam Smith argument omitted). Smaller fry end up temporarily relevant in this regard only because each one has, at some point, been a new bird landing on a sagging ridgepole. But as far as I’m concerned at any given moment all birds on the ridgepole are equal, and equally answerable for their aesthetic and contributions (this metaphor, with its nowhere-to-go-but-poop implications, is now dead).
"I personally favor low-budget story-telling in theater (not because poverty and suffering are glamorous! Haha! You birds and your cans of worms!). I don’t think the market suffers when the scrappy outnumber the streamlined. I even hope that a robust scrappy market will contribute to the refinement of audiences’ palates.
"But I do think every artistic director in town should include with the annual selection of plays a serious meditation on what they have been saying and how they have been taking up that empty space (and yes, I do personally believe that would result in less theater). My wonderfully supportive Longacre Lea artistic associates have been encouraging me for years to "grow" -- add a show or two to the season, develop some outreach, go non-profit and have a board and grants and so on. But my fitful attempts to emulate that model have so far failed because it just doesn’t relate to why I’m talking. And because the impulses that drive my story-telling far outweigh any sense that I should be arbitrarily following a business model into a financially damning and artificial (for me) four show season. I don’t like enough plays to do a four-show season!
"That’s my meditation. Other meditations lead elsewhere, fine. It’s not that any model is per se wrong or that any theater is trying to be like any other theater, it’s just my ideal that none of us, big or small, new or old, reflexively and without integrity continue to take up space."
Tboy offers up this clarification for the sake of debate, and not inconsequentially for the sake of peace at opening-night parties. He hopes you will kindly not blame Akerley for what she didn't say.
You should blame her only for asking that you carefully examine your navel before you ask the Meyer Foundation for that next grant. Tboy, for what it's worth, thinks that's a fine idea.
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