AT25: An Eye on the Future
Sarah Ruhl, playwright, New York City
What the next 25 years might bring in theatre:
1
Either: Our government will start more and more to imitate Scandinavia, and everyone, including artists, will have health care. There will be a new government agency for the arts, granting us months and years to finish projects, simultaneously revitalizing our theatre and our economy.
Or: The government won't imitate Scandinavia, and so, in response, the Dramatists Guild will become an incredible force for change, replacing the United Auto Workers in its pull, determination and tactical brilliance. We will do away with subsidiary rights participation, so that playwrights will only give back their own earnings to a theatre when they earn as much per year as their artistic directors; then, and only then, will writers give tax-deductible donations to the not-for-profit theatres that produce them, out of gratitude and choice (rather than giving away 40 percent of their New York income by fiat). We will convince theatres who produce our work to provide us with health care for two seasons. Playwrights and dramaturgs working at the same theatre will have health insurance; directors and managing directors will have the same health insurance.
2
Either:
Theatre artists, worried about the effects of institutional sameness on art, weary of the economics of theatre and of competing with pilot season, will band together to create different models of poor theatre. There will be a resurgence of non-Equity, non-subscriber-based theatre, beautifully alive and reminiscent of New York in the '70s. These new ensembles will have such loyalty and such groundbreaking life that it would be unimaginable for an actor to leave a show for a cameo in a movie. The level of dedication and synergy in these ensembles will be almost religious in nature, banding artists together in small communities rather than living as traveling mercenaries. The audiences, in awe of the newness of the work, the relevance, the sheer liveness of the performances, will be diverse, across age, race and class. The performances will feel like ancient and contemporary ritual, as central to the lifeblood of the community as food. Actors will hand out bread at the end of performances, which will themselves be free.
Or:
Theatre artists, weary of the economics of theatre and of competing with pilot season, will slowly stop acting in plays, writing plays and directing plays altogether. The art world will be completely consumed by commodity culture. The only thing running on Broadway will be Disney musicals. Straight plays will be a thing of the past, relics from another time. Once a year, stars will do staged readings of A Christmas Carol for nostalgic and charitable reasons in the Hollywood Bowl. After many years of this state of affairs, a great cry will well up in the nation, and new, miraculous plays will be written by the very young, who have never before seen a live play, or snow (this will be after global warming has taken effect). These plays will be much like the groundbreaking plays written in Greece during the birth of democracy, and the symbolist plays at the turn of the century. There will be a new poetry on our stages, and a new form, unimaginable to all of us now. Let us, then, turn our attention to the invisible and visible worlds—to poetry and to health care—to prepare ourselves for the next epoch.