Unto the Breach

Conferencegoers debate art's role in a divided culture

by Nicole Estvanik

The idea of polarization can itself be polarizing—or at least a catalyst for passionate debate—as proved by TCG's 15th National Conference, held in Seattle June 16–18. The theme was "Creating the Future: Theatre in a Polarized World," and the terms us and them were wielded and dissected by a lineup of provocative speakers, beginning with a keynote sally from Thomas Frank, author of the best-seller What's the Matter with Kansas? His progressive battle cry, expertly articulated, had the heartfelt approval of many—judging by the applause—of the 825 attendees who had arrived from some 200 theatres, hundreds of whom were first-timers at a TCG conference. But as TCG's largest-ever gathering progressed, the conversation zeroed in on assumptions: Is the entire theatre field on the same side of the political fence? How about audiences? What boundaries, apart from party lines, divide Americans? And is the idea of polarization even a useful way to think about our world?

Frank's talk focused on the red state/blue state schism that's dominated American social commentary since George W. Bush's reelection. Why are those hardest hit by conservative economic policy paradoxically its greatest supporters? Because conservatives have erased economics from the discussion, Frank asserted, and have filled the vacuum with indignation. For Middle Americans buying into conservative politics, "Material interests are suspended in favor of vague cultural grievances that are both supposed to be all important and yet incapable of ever being assuaged." And they blame the so-called liberal elite—that is, people like me and you, he told the audience. "We were the ones who stood up for 'Joe Sixpack.' But now it's the conservatives who claim that position." [For the full text of Frank's address and all plenary session speeches, visit www.tcg.org.]

Another noted progressive thinker, George Lakoff, called for an "aesthetic progressive movement" to combat conservative strategy. The cognitive scientist and linguist's latest book, Don't Think of an Elephant, examines the ways Republicans have skillfully shaped the terms of debate to their advantage over the last several decades. "You can't just tell people the truth," Lakoff stressed. "You have to reframe the facts." As theatremakers who understand the power of narrative, he told those gathered, they were in a unique position to do this. "Where's the progressive story? Not there. It has to be told: metaphorically, in drama, day after day."

Lakoff, a Berkeley-based professor whose ideas are hot currency in political-strategy circles, also laid out his theory that conservative and progressive values spring from differing views of family and therefore of nation: strict father versus nurturing parent. The latter model, a template for the liberal/progressive mindset, explicitly values cooperation, trust and openness. The strict-father model that underpins conservative thinking, by comparison, emphasizes self-interest—and evokes fear. "You fight fear with hope and joy," Lakoff declared. "And that's what the arts are about."

Shrinking theatre attendance was a recurring concern of the two-and-a-half-day gathering, and Frank and Lakoff provided an inkling as to why Joe Sixpack may be slipping away. But why, to take another example, are young urbanites doing the same? In another plenary session, Ellen Ullman, a technology specialist and author of Close to the Machine, contributed her troubled analysis of the new Internet culture. The former computer programmer believes the Internet "has helped to weaken the social dimensions of happiness." Describing a generation raised on "My Yahoo, My FedEx, My Blog," she said, "Gradually this group is slipping out of social life together." A casualty of this trend, she predicted, will be the civic space: "The idea that young people will come to a theatre and sit still for an hour and a half and breathe the same air as other people is going to become foreign and frightening."

The commercialization of the Internet, Ullman continued, has created an environment in which "there are really only two entities: You, and what you want." The expert intermediaries of these desires upon whom we once depended—brokers, curators, editors—are being squeezed out. Theatre artists, she warned, are endangered intermediaries as well. "Theatre asks us to enter into a common myth. But technology as it has evolved is based on the idea that we do not even want a shared experience."

Between the plenary gatherings, participants scattered across the Seattle Center campus, the one-time World's Fairground that is home to the Space Needle and three of the conference's host theatres: Intiman Theatre, Seattle Children's Theatre and Seattle Repertory Theatre (ACT Theatre, the fourth host, is farther downtown). Coffee breaks, provisioned courtesy of the Starbucks Coffee Company, were an opportunity to browse the more than 270 titles on sale at the TCG Bookstore in the Seattle Rep lobby. Several of the weekend's featured speakers signed books there, along with playwrights Ping Chong, Will Eno, Donald Margulies and August Wilson. Nearby, tables manned by vendors and TCG business affiliates were troves of information about services ranging from theatre design to fundraising software.

In his welcoming remarks, TCG executive director Ben Cameron had singled out two groups. First, he'd applauded the record-breaking 72 trustees who'd come from theatres around the country. Second, he'd expressed excitement about the 61 participants in TCG-administered grant and fellowship programs who were in attendance, along with dozens of other individual artists. The portfolios of directors and designers from the NEA/TCG Career Development Program and of the New Generations Program mentees were available for viewing in a "Spotlight On" exhibit throughout the weekend, and the energy of these young artists' vision did as much as Starbucks to invigorate conferencegoers between sessions.

Packed into the schedule (a full day shorter than in previous years) were three opportunities to attend a breakout session on a specialized topic. While most were led by panelists, they were structured for open and candid conversation. In addition to the 55 prearranged sessions, a handful of extra breakouts were convened last-minute by participants themselves (sample title: "One-Person Departments: How Do You Function As a Department Manager While Doing All of the Work of the Department?").

One of the most popular sessions—which filled the Seattle Children's Theatre scene shop with more than 100 people—cut to the heart of the weekend's theme. The title was "Programming in Polarized Times: Can Blue (Red) Theatre Survive in Red (Blue) States?", but most in the room seemed at a loss to come up with an example of "red theatre." Panelist Seth Rozin, the producing artistic director of Philadelphia's InterAct Theatre Company, asked: "Why do we keep being told we're a diverse field when we're probably the most homogenous field, politically, there is?"

A show of hands revealed about a fifth of those present came from red states, but some commented that their self-selecting audiences tend to be liberal or to cross over, depending on the issue at hand. ("Religion is the new sex on stage," said Molly Smith, artistic director of Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, touching on the controversial nature of faith that would come up again and again at the conference.) Others rejected the red/blue paradigm altogether as "selling our audiences short." Is the real aim to get a progressive message through to conservatives, asked someone, or simply to widen the pool of theatregoers? "What's making me uncomfortable is the idea of little islands of theatre 'doing this to' audiences," one woman asserted. "Does political change really happen that way?"

Some breakouts addressed practical challenges such as e-mail marketing, touring or succession planning. Others were an opportunity for colleagues to share details of the work they are doing in documentary or science-based theatre, crossovers into opera or international collaborations. In certain cases, they were a chance to step back and position one's own theatre within a larger community: for example, how theatres of color and regional theatres can coexist and together promote diversity.

Daniella Topol, managing director of the Lark Play Development Center in New York, helped moderate one such session for new-play-development organizations, titled "Articulating Our Value, Understanding the Need, Creating Cooperative Interplay." Afterward, Topol commented that the session clarified the importance of keeping this unique group of companies in close touch—for example, to avoid overlap among their festivals' calendars and writers. "We're working together, but haphazardly, not methodically," she said. "We need to raise awareness of one another's resources—this will also help producing theatres to benefit from our services." Several of that breakout's participants reconvened the following day to discuss the option of applying for grants collectively.

There was an anxious aftertaste to the words of Frank, Lakoff and Ullman—a sense that theatre is under siege—exemplified by Lakoff's dark observation that "there's a reason why conservatives are trying to kill off the arts." But three other plenaries mapped more complex ways theatres might respond than simply to assume a fighting stance.

Congressman Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), whose public service spans more than three decades, did not deny the hostile political atmosphere for the arts. But theatres have a powerful bargaining chip when it comes to asking for funding, he pointed out—exposure for politicians, whether it's a photo-op with a famous actor or a front-row seat at a performance in the public schools. "Everybody wants that image, and you have the power to put them there," he said. "You've used your creativity, but not in affecting the public arena where we make decisions about money."

McDermott offered other constructive tips for approaching politicians. Ask for only a sliver of the pie, a single percentage of your state's hotel/motel tax, perhaps; just make sure there's money earmarked for the arts that isn't subject to annual appropriation. Never give a representative the opportunity to say he or she wasn't told about a program that needs funding. And finally, the congressman deadpanned: "Don't not talk to Republicans, okay? Some of them have money."

Perhaps the most talked-about session at the conference was a group presentation by members of Cornerstone Theater Company on their Faith-Based Theater Cycle, a four-year-plus collaboration about the uniting and dividing effects of faith that involved members of several Los Angeles-area religious communities. Eight of the collaborators related their experiences with the project—impressions that were still raw, the cycle having ended only the week before—laying bare not only the rewards of such an undertaking but the discomfort it provoked, the wounds it unwittingly opened.

Playwright James Still observed ruefully that he'd had to revise his mantra from "You can't please everyone" to "You can't please anyone" as he wrote the final installment, the "bridge play," of the cycle. And Cornerstone artistic director Bill Rauch related his reaction when one community member said he felt betrayed by a scene involving a gay Muslim. "For me, with what I pride myself on about Cornerstone's work, the word 'betrayed' was a little bit like electroshock therapy," he said.

As debate around the Islam/homosexuality issue intensified, polarization occurred even within Cornerstone itself. Two of the Muslim actors on stage had withdrawn from the play, and they explained the reasons respectfully, but without apology. Sondos Kholoki-Kahf, a young woman wearing a pale pink pullover and matching headscarf, expressed the responsibility she'd felt to the Muslim community to follow her conscience. But she commented quietly that it was difficult to watch her closely held beliefs cause pain to those she counted as friends. "The more I kept trying to explain why I felt this way," she said, "the more I was looking around the room and it was like bullets shooting into people."

"It amazed me," said another actor, Ebonie Hubbard, of her own family's reaction to the play, "that a lot of people can accept being gay as long as you don't put a religion to it. As soon as I said 'Jehovah' and 'lesbian' in the same sentence, all the acceptance for it was gone."

Following these testimonies, three of the actors crossed to the other half of the stage to present the controversial scene from Still's play, A Long Bridge Over Deep Waters, in which a Muslim character agonizes over whether to come out to his family. "It's the scene with the least mystery, with the least surprise," Still confessed. "Finally, for me, the surprise has to be that it exists at all."

Warmly received, this was the only official performance to take place at the conference (not counting a war protest song plunked on the banjo by Artistic Logistics director Lisa Mount during Friday evening's open mike session). Instead, armed with a schedule from their registration packets, attendees plunged each evening into the Seattle theatre scene. On Friday night, many converged on Empty Space Theatre's downtown home for drinks, food and a cabaret, organized by Theatre Without Borders, featuring some of the largest-ever contingent of international artists to visit the conference (representing 14 nations in all).

The final guest speaker of the conference was Harlem-based poet and musician Sekou Sundiata, who is at work on a performance piece called The 51st (Dream) State, a re-mythologizing of the American dream through spoken word, music and video. As did Cornerstone, Sundiata drew inspiration from group conversations and interviews, even from community sing-alongs. He was surprised by the feelings the process dredged up in others and in himself about citizenship. "I've come to understand that any hope for a possible future, for me, involves the quest to recover some lost, or hidden, or yet-to-be-created meaning of America," said Sundiata, who also read a haunting excerpt from a poem he'd composed after visiting Ground Zero. "I became convinced that this is a great time to be an engaged artist. It renewed my faith in art's special capacity to bridge polarized worlds, to engage our most difficult differences instead of forcing them to the silence of exile, from which those same differences organize themselves and launch a counteroffensive against our sanity."

The Seattle gathering marked TCG's first truly annual National Conference. Previously held in alternate years, it will have its next incarnation in 2006 in Atlanta and will occur each year thereafter. While much of the agenda was devoted to introspection and inspiration, the forging of new relationships was an equally important component. It happened informally over box lunches on the Seattle Rep lawn during the city's famed "sunbreaks." It happened in "affinity groups" that twice brought together representatives of theatres with similar budget sizes and missions to compare the health of their organizations and to trade strategies.

It also continues to happen through official channels, as evident in announcements made throughout the weekend. These included the unveiling of a new TCG endeavor with the William & Eva Fox Foundation to offer the Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowship, a program through which actors of great accomplishment and/or potential will receive generous cash awards and extended working relationships with nominating theatres. Ben Cameron also announced a new partnership between TCG and Americans for the Arts, through which TCG members will automatically receive basic membership in the advocacy organization. And he described a special event that will take place this fall through a TCG-brokered collaboration among the theatre communities of Austin, Tex., Philadelphia and the San Francisco Bay Area. An idea voiced in its early stages at the 2003 TCG conference in Milwaukee will reach fruition on Oct. 20, when any individual visiting a specific theatre for the first time in those three cities will do so free of charge.

Theatre Puget Sound was a valuable coordinating partner that provided dozens of volunteers. Funding for the conference came from the Boeing Company, the NEA, the Paul G. Allen Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Chisholm Foundation, Nathan Cummings Foundation, Seattle's Office of Cultural Arts and Cultural Affairs, Starbucks Coffee Company, Fisher Dachs Associates, Schweickert & Company, Theatre Development Fund and Mr. Bagley Wright of Seattle.

"Only a small percentage of Americans see a play in any given year? Well, we may feel sorry for the society, as we do for the man who has never been in love, but hardly for the lover." These words came from Michael John Garcés, the 2005 recipient of the Alan Schneider Director Award, and they set a tone of optimism for the conference's closing hour. "It is no doubt our responsibility to bring in more people to see the work and to continue to struggle to greater financial success and artistic achievement," said the director and playwright, "but I believe that these are pretty glorious problems to have here and now."

Following the presentation of individual artist awards, which bookended the presentation of institutional awards on the first night, a photographic tribute honored Peter Zeisler, the longtime TCG leader and pillar of the American regional theatre movement who died in January. Outgoing TCG board president Paula Tomei of South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, Calif., spoke warmly of Zeisler's impact and announced the creation of the Peter Zeisler Award, to be given starting at the 2006 conference to an individual or organization "who exemplifies innovative and courageous response to the world around us." She then ceremonially passed the gavel to Abel López, associate producing director of GALA Hispanic Theatre, to usher in his term as president.

It was fitting that the recognition of outstanding work be the centerpiece of the final plenary session. Throughout the weekend, no matter the quandary being discussed—from how to overcome partisan distrust to how to increase subscriptions—one solution ultimately was affirmed again and again: Create powerful theatre, and the rest will follow. The quality of the work will speak across the divide, will pull people in, will keep pace with new technologies, will make painful explorations worthwhile. As Sundiata put it, "Art is its own argument—the only cause it needs to serve is the cause of human experience."

In the conference's final moments, Ben Cameron responded to an undercurrent of unease—voiced in hallways and breakout sessions and scrawled on evaluation forms—that the proceedings had been one-sided. He challenged those assembled, "Do we really want to explore the differences that unite and divide us? Or are we really only asking, how do we get them to listen to us?

"Many of us do exist as interstices of community factions and as conveners of dialogue like Cornerstone, while others thrive as sanctuaries of shared secular beliefs led by a different kind of evangelist like Thomas Frank, celebrating a consistent set of political and social viewpoints," he continued. "Our field and our world have room and need for both. But the ability of any theatre to maximize its role in any community begins with its ability to acknowledge clearly, frankly and powerfully which role it truly plays."

Cameron revealed that a majority of theatres polled in the affinity groups—62 percent—expect to balance their budgets or even embrace a surplus at the end of the year; 70 percent have increased their subscriptions; and 70-80 percent have seen increases in foundation and individual funding—all cause for optimism. However, Cameron reminded the gathering, just as he had in 2003, that fewer than half of TCG's 439 member theatres were present. Many of those who could not attend were the hardest hit economically.

"We have the power to shift our attention from what I have as an individual theatre to what we have as a community," said Cameron, "and to think in new ways about seizing our own destiny rather than letting it be dictated by others." In this spirit the TCG board has articulated three long-term dreams for the field to share: for every single American to have a theatrical experience at least once a year; for the field to control ample financial resources of its own; and for the U.S. to take its rightful place within a true global theatre community.

"If we only have the courage to be willing to entertain the notions of our own reinvention, if we can only move towards this rapidly changing, morphing and confusing future together," Cameron promised, "it might just provide the most thrilling moments of our lives."