The Americans Are Coming

Yankee groups of different sizes and aesthetics find more than one way to reach international destinations

By Eliza Bent

Why aren't more American plays seen abroad? "Travel," Mark Twain once remarked, "is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness"—and certainly we theatre folk are an open-minded bunch. Shouldn't it stand to reason that we'd be eager to share our work with international audiences?

Though a number of American theatres produce plays in translation or host artists from other continents, relatively few U.S. productions are seen these days outside our borders. The reasons are varied, ranging from scant arts funding in the U.S., to extra visa red tape following 9/11, to a sense of theatrical isolationism that may be related to larger trends in international relations. (Only 37 percent of all Americans hold passports.) Certainly, recent administrations have had more pressing political and economic crises to deal with than the scarcity of U.S. theatre's presence abroad.

There are exceptions, of course. Broadway musicals crop up across the world as a particularly American kind of entertainment, and heavy-hitting contemporary playwrights such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard receive productions in translation around the world. But the dearth of contemporary American plays done on foreign soil remains as stubborn a fact as the disparity between the slim budgets of U.S. arts funding and their more ample counterparts in Europe.

Funding issues aside, the challenges for artists interested in presenting work in other countries can seem insurmountable: visa issues, coordinating schedules, shipping hurdles, actor availability and language barriers all pose difficulties. When theatre artists stateside do take homegrown work abroad—to festivals, partnering theatres or on tour—their paths around these obstacles vary greatly. I spoke with representatives from several companies, ranging from small experimental collectives to large flagship institutions, to find out how they have overcome both ideological and practical barriers and discovered ways to share their made-in-America art with the rest of the world.

Following in the footsteps of such avant-garde forebears as the Wooster Group and Mabou Mines, two New York City groups—Elevator Repair Service and Young Jean Lee's Theater Company—have joined the small cohort that has successfully tapped into the European festival circuit. Split Knuckle Theatre, a performance troupe based in Storrs, Conn., and New York, found an unlikely patron in the international business community. The irreverent Dad's Garage of Atlanta looks to fringe festivals throughout the world to showcase its comedy pieces. And two of the nation's most storied institutions, the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis and Berkeley Repertory Theatre of California, found success in partnering with a British theatre to bring their co-production of Tiny Kushner abroad.

Though these well-traveled groups have vastly different artistic voices, budget sizes and season programming, they all agree that the experience of going outside our borders is worth the difficulties faced along the way. The Americans are coming!

For John Collins, artistic director of 20-year-old Elevator Repair Service, touring is both a blessing and a curse. Though his company has had sustained success at home and abroad with shows that use nontraditional text for theatre (the best-known example of which is Gatz, an epic, six-hour verbatim reading of The Great Gatsby live on stage), Collins frets over the inconsistency of international touring. "You don't have as much control as it may seem like you ought to," he says, with regard to the choices of curators and presenters. "All you can do is hope that someone who sees your show will be taken enough with it to book it for a tour. Paradoxically, it's hard to tour if you aren't already touring."

According to Collins, the group's early forays in international touring backfired. After the success of Cab Legs, which criss-crossed Europe between 1997 and 1999, ERS was asked to premiere its next show, Total Fictional Lie, at the Berliner Festwochen in Germany. Though the artists had presented a draft of the show in New York and had three developmental weeks in Berlin, "We were nowhere near finished when it came time to present," Collins recalls. ERS ended up presenting a 45-minute piece that was more collage-like and less linear than its previous work. "We didn't tour internationally again for another six or seven years," says Collins—which he attributes not just to scheduling factors but to the fact that the show didn't deliver the kind of product that earned ERS the festival invitations.

Artists interested in touring overseas often assume it's a budget-draining venture. But Collins says that for ERS, touring has actually offered huge economic advantages. "It helps fund a lot of stuff we do back home, and I can pay my actors more when we're on the road," he attests, pointing out that international arts funding is often pooled around a festival and may compensate visiting productions at a higher level than American presenters can ever hope to muster. But the economics of touring can also present a conundrum. "It becomes a part of how you exist financially as a company," says Collins. "It forces you to grow in some ways, but it can stunt your development on other fronts." Being away from home, for example, makes it tougher to apply for grants or seek contributed income from individual donors.

Nurturing relationships with festivals abroad as well as domestically can result in co-commissions and co-productions. ERS's The Select (The Sun Also Rises), for example, was commissioned by Germany's Festival Theaterformen Hannover/Braunschweig; the Ringling International Arts Festival at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.; the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City; the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, with funding from the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Theatre Initiative; and ArtsEmerson in Boston—in short, a powerhouse roster of support.

For now, Collins probably doesn't need to worry about the future of ERS's touring. Having reasserted its presence on the festival circuit, ERS has gained momentum and is nowadays a recognizable artistic brand to audiences and presenters at home and abroad. Nevertheless, Collins isn't convinced that this literary brand is enough to sustain the group—especially when it comes to future projects that may not rely on book adaptations. "I hope we've earned enough audience interest to experiment with new things and still have them on board," he says. Despite the relationships Collins has cultivated with presenters, he admits that they are attracted to things that are easily identifiable—such as the company's ostensible specialty, literary adaptations. "That's always my fear," he says—"that if we go in a direction presenters can't easily describe, we won't get booked. But I guess that's a risk we have to take."

Young Jean Lee isn't one to be risk-averse. The playwright's provocative scripts, which often deal with identity politics, have been touted by critics and audiences at home and overseas. Caleb Hammons, the producer of Young Jean Lee's Theater Company, describes the group's aesthetic as "Young Jean's take on the hot-button issue in America at any given moment."

Nevertheless, Lee hasn't been able to entirely escape the trap of presenters selecting work that is easily packaged and labeled. "The only two shows that have toured extensively are the 'race' plays," she says, referring to Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, about Asian Americans, and The Shipment, about the African-American experience. Church, which premiered in 2007 between Songs and The Shipment and examines aspects of Christianity, has not toured. Hammons chalks this up to the fact that it may be too American for presenters to wrap their heads around. "The culture of religion in Europe is so vastly different than in America," he reasons. (Ninety-two percent of Americans say they believe in God, while in Europe that percentage hovers at 52, with 27 percent citing belief in a spirit or life force.) "The way that the show is structured as a church service might make it not as translatable as Young Jean's other shows."

Lee's next project, Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show, certainly has universal appeal, and Hammons is, not surprisingly, in the process of negotiating co-commissioning interest from European presenters. "In Europe, there's a lot less concern over exclusivity," observes Hammons, noting how a European festival may just be keen on getting a German-language premiere, whereas an American theatre might demand a world premiere production. Hammons, like ERS's Collins, confirms that presenter relationships can often morph into commissioning ones. Looking at the company historically, Hammons and Lee both point out that having an early advocate for your work is quite useful in terms of jumping the puddle (be it the Atlantic or Pacific). "Our touring was jump-started by playwright Richard Maxwell sending out an e-blast for one of my early shows," recalls Lee. "International presenters who were on Rich's mailing list e-mailed me based on that, and I think it brought a lot of them to my shows, which is half the battle." (Many of these presenters were international connections made by Maxwell's company, New York City Players, which has toured internationally since its founding in 1999.)

Elevator Repair Service also had an early cheerleader, namely Mark Russell, who runs New York's Under the Radar festival. Collins concurs with Lee that getting presenters to see your show is a large part of the initial touring equation. "You can have the slickest press packet and DVD, but it will likely just sit on someone's shelf," Collins wagers.

Hammons, for his part, points to other recent backers of Lee: the American musicians Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson. The pair, who curated Vivid Sydney, an arts and ideas festival in Australia in 2010, invited Lee's The Shipment to be the festival's theatre component, even though Vivid's focus is primarily on music. "It's rare for an American group to go all the way to Australia for a one-off," Hammons observes, adding that the company has toured mostly in Europe.

For Hammons, it's a strange irony that Young Jean Lee's productions have been presented in festivals abroad that are specifically geared toward American work, yet the group depends on funding from non-American sources. "It's sometimes sad that we don't get more support from our own country, and that even though our work is American, it's been seen more abroad than it has here."

But why mostly Europe? "If we could figure out what makes a show irresistible to presenters we would never be in town!" Hammons jokes. On top of the inevitable scheduling and money variables, the curatorial visions of festivals constantly change and evolve. ERS's Collins confides how his company has presented two plays in Lisbon, "but the presenter there told us that he was nervous that it would seem like they had a regular slot for us. So we won't go back for a few years—we're always competing with stuff like that."

One strategy is to bypass traditional presenters entirely. Split Knuckle gained the favor of a multinational business with its show Endurance. Based on the story of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, who kept 27 men alive for two years in the Antarctic, Endurance proved to be just the kind of artistic entertainment, complete with leadership themes, that resonated with Korn/Ferry International, a Los Angeles–based global executive recruiting firm. Despite Split Knuckle's frequent efforts to wrangle the presence of international presenters, it was a theatre-loving Korn/Ferry representative who caught Endurance by happenstance during a trip to New York City—and invited the company to perform its four-man show at a corporate seminar in Belgium this past January. The group has plans to work again with Korn/Ferry, and other executive firms.

It was not the first time that Split Knuckle had taken work abroad. The company, whose American-born founding members all attended the London International School of the Performing Arts, presented their adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Pearl at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2006. "The Fringe is the most democratic place on earth," declares artistic director Greg Webster, adding that if a company can commit to a four-week run in Edinburgh, their work will most definitely get reviewed and seen by bookers.

After the Edinburgh Fringe, thanks to those bookers, The Pearl went on to play in Bucharest, Buenos Aires and at various U.S. locations. It also had a production in Abu Dhabi where oil sheiks and wealthy barons dotted the audience. "It was sort of ironic, because The Pearl is about what greed does to people," says Webster with a laugh. "But inevitably people see themselves in your story. You can't think about making theatre for a corporation"—or an oil sheik, Webster cautions. "You have to do what stirs your heart." A case in point: When Endurance, which uses the Shackleton story to reflect on modern-day corporate downsizing, played to those business execs in Belgium, Webster was surprised to learn that most bigwigs identified with the underdogs of the tale.

Webster believes a large untapped market exists in reaching out to businesses whose own employees may be petrified of public speaking. "As actors, it's what we do best! We inherently have skills as performers that are of incredible use to the corporate world," he enthuses. It's not surprising to learn that Webster and other members of Split Knuckle studied Lecoq methodologies. "Lecoq work is all based on empowerment," explains Webster. "As actors we have to ask ourselves, 'How do I navigate the business of art-making?'" Webster believes that the entrepreneurial spirit is a uniquely American quality that offers an interesting perspective for audiences abroad—especially, perhaps, those in business suits.

In Atlanta, artistic director of Dad's Garage Kevin Gillese has a similar vision of the artist as entrepreneur. "I include poets, comedians, clowns, dancers and storytellers in that category," he says. In particular, he admires a comedic duo called the Pajama Men: "They are the perfect example of the artist as entrepreneur. They're originally from New Mexico, but now they're one of the most international acts I know—they are absolutely dominating the global stage right now." The pair has won such prestigious accolades as the Barry Award at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival and the Best Newcomer and Best of the Fest awards at the Sydney Comedy Festival, both in 2009.

Gillese and Dad's Garage took The Supervillain Monologues, a scripted two-hander, to the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival in Canada, and Kill the Dog, a two-person improv show, to festivals in Austria, Germany and Slovenia in 2010. "I basically built Supervillain Monologues as a touring show," he says. "It's funny, fast-paced and has a great hook. As long as a show has these things, I'd say it's pretty much guaranteed to succeed at most fringes."

But Gillese is interested in more than just one-off festival field trips. "I'm very much pursuing a sustainable international touring arm for the company," he says. He's honed in on three sectors: North American fringe festivals, European improv festivals and Australian comedy festivals. Gillese, who is Canadian, has found that visa regulations present some of his most frustrating roadblocks. One of his biggest challenges is to not lose steam when organizing a tour hits one snag after another.

Still, it helps that he's keeping his cast sizes down, and that often with comedy shows—especially improvised ones—sets can be paired down too, which mitigates shipping costs. "I had my technical director Jamie Warde build a collapsible puppet stage for Supervillain Monologues that is totally badass," he boasts. Such ingenuity is crucial when considered alongside the experience of Split Knuckle, for which shipping proved to be headache-inducing. "Because some of our set pieces were irregularly shaped, it was going to cost $10,000 to send it to Belgium," Webster recalls with a groan. As a result the group ended up cutting half the objects from the show, and in the future plans on creating a more transportable set.

What about language issues—isn't all comedy local? How can puns and pop-culture references shine in translation? Says Gillese, "Comedy is local in the same way drama is local—if it's generated honestly, it will resonate deeply with a broader community. Improv is uniquely suited to face the language-barrier problem because it's so flexible and adaptable in the moment." In fact, Gillese argues that improv is far more of a lingua franca in the international community than English.

That may be true. Consider this Split Knuckle mishap: "When we brought Endurance to Belgium, our technical rider requested a screw gun," says Webster. "Even though the Belgians spoke English beautifully, for about a day and a half they thought we wanted an actual gun."

"England and America are two countries separated by a common language," George Bernard Shaw once quipped. Bringing an American show to an English-speaking country may hold hidden pitfalls, but for the Guthrie Theater of Minneapolis and Berkeley Repertory Theatre of California, whose co-production of Tiny Kushner wound up at the Tricycle Theatre in London, the exchange was harmonious.

When Nicholas Kent, artistic director of Tricycle, was visiting the U.S. to coordinate his tour of The Great Game: Afghanistan (which played at the Guthrie in 2010), he saw the collection of Tony Kushner one-acts at Berkeley Rep. "He thought it would be well received by his audiences," says Brooke Hajinian, general management associate of the Guthrie, which had hosted the production before its California run. The fact that the show is an evening of five one-acts, has a four-person cast, plays on an easy-to-pack-up set, and is written by an internationally recognized playwright made it very attractive to Kent.

Large theatres like the Guthrie and Berkeley Rep face specific challenges—such as relying on Equity actors and therefore adding union approval to the mix, or balancing travel arrangements with the planning of a mainstage subscription season—that can make them less likely than their smaller, more flexible counterparts to partake in overseas engagements. But in this case, says Hajinian, "There were very few challenges with this show—especially since Tricycle handled the visas through its sponsorship program." And, according to chief administrative officer at the Guthrie Jacques Brunswick, "Actors' Equity Association looks favorably on any opportunity for American actors to perform overseas." Berkeley Rep contributed the traveling set, the Guthrie provided props and costumes, and the British press brought enthusiasm: "Small is beautiful and bold in Tiny Kushner. This quintet of one-act plays shows Tony Kushner at his most fanciful and eclectic...fierce, strange and clever theatre. It isn't 'tiny' at all," wrote Henry Hitchings in the Evening Standard.

American culture doesn't lack for exportation. Movies, music, fast-food chains, celebrities and politicians from the U.S. are known the world over. Do we really need to export our theatre as well?

"The kind of American culture that creates loud, trashy commercial saturation is not the kind we participate in, in the arts," says John Collins of ERS. "It's critical that we keep the world interested in what's not in Hollywood or on TV. People have gotten pretty cynical about America and its culture—especially in the past 10 years. If we can offer them something on another level, we should."

Caleb Hammons agrees. "America produces more than just tours of The Lion King," he says. "In Europe, theatre is Art with a capital 'A.' We do that here, too. The work we're creating can stand up to other kinds of theatre happening on the global stage."

For Split Knuckle's Webster, it all comes back to funding: "I recall hearing that the yearly endowment for National Ballet of Paris was equal to or close to that of the entire yearly endowment of the NEA in the U.S." All of the artists I interviewed agreed that government-supported arts funding is stronger in many countries outside the U.S. Webster attributes this discrepancy to the fact that other nations deem art more intrinsically valuable than the U.S. does. "Our arts scene has to start shifting and looking for different presenting models," he says. "When you're dealing with other cultures that value art, it can make things easier."

Perhaps it takes a neighbor from the north to answer the question about the importance of taking American work to other countries and other cultures. "I'm interested in taking work abroad," says Dad's Garage's Gillese in an e-mail. "But I wouldn't want to suggest my work is more important than anyone else's. Besides, I'm Canadian." He follows this with a happy-face emoticon.

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