TCG report, part 1

Attending the Theatre Communications Group annual conference is a little like attending the upcoming Minnesota Fringe Festival—your experience of it depends a lot on what expectations you bring into it and which of the many many presentations you happen to attend. Also, there is inexplicable performance art.

(Editor's note: I've discovered that many Minnesota theater artists do not know what is this TCG we speak of. In brief: They're a national theater alliance. They also publish American Theatre magazine. Got it now?)

The following is some incredibly subjective reporting in two parts, taken from my personal experience and what I gleaned from conversations with other people in the hallways of the Palmer House in Chicago where the conference was housed. It is also written in the spirit of continuing conversation and somewhat free association.

This year's conference from June 17-19 was titled "Ideas into Action" while attempting, in theory, to focus on 4 "motifs" labeled Artists and Artistry, Race and Gender, The Arts Learning Continuum, and Creative Ecology.

There was also a fifth unstated perhaps but somewhat more prominent motif—the awesomeness of Chicago's arts scene, and the way in which it has made Chicago one of the most exciting cities in the world right now. My conference highlight may have been the brief, somewhat rambling speech given Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, the most persuasive speaker I've ever heard on the value of the arts— probably because he's clearly speaking from actual practice rather than optimistic theory.

While most Democratic politicians we know—and an unfortunate number of arts administrators too—pay a nice bit of lip service to the value of the arts ("We're proud of our strong cultural heritage. . . We believe the arts help students learn. . . It's important to have the arts and community and blah blah blah. . ." then proceed to give nothing to and ask nothing of any real value from the creative community—except for marketing, perhaps.), Daley seemed to speak from a deep understanding of the relationship between arts, culture, community, and city—born by passion and personal experience.

Here's something I've never heard a politician say, "Politicians don't bring people together. Artists do." We should remember this insight the next time we have the urge to whine about why President Obama hasn't healed all the nation's wounds yet.

And I've never heard a politician, while explaining all the ways they support the arts, intelligently acknowledge the difficulties of government support for the arts—both the criticism he takes from artists he may be indirectly supporting through city government and the way in which artists need freedom to survive. "If the government dominates, then it becomes too bureaucratic," he said. I think he was talking about finding the right balance between city safety requirements and artistic freedom, but he might also have been talking about city life anywhere, all the time.

I loved how he kept returning to the idea that he wants to change the education curriculum to put arts education first thing in the morning. Then, he said, students would be energized and excited for the rest of their school day.

"If you don't have art [in your city]," said Daley, "You don't have a society." And, throughout the city, you can see that he's put his attention where his mouth is and that a good deal of the praise Chicago architecture, Chicago theater, Chicago living is receiving nationwide proves his sometimes expensive instincts correct.

I was raised in the suburbs of Chicago by a father who loved the Chicago Cubs and the City of Chicago out of all proportion with either of their attractiveness at the time. I personally have witnessed some pretty amazing changes throughout the metro area since Daley became mayor in 1989. Not every single one of them are good, but many are—and, either way, the changes are noticeable, impressive, and often artist driven, uniquely genuine and creative.

Mowing the grassroots

Then, on Saturday night, I slipped into the back of a Mayan gift shop in Lincoln Square where they had laid out 40 folding chairs around what you could call a thrust stage—though it was really nothing more than a 6 x 6 elevated wooden plank. There were maybe 6 portable stage lights hanging from the ceiling and a long white sheet that they used both as a projector surface and a cover over the concrete cinder block walls behind them.

The play I watched, My Name is Flor Contemplacion actually felt like an urgent, worthwhile story; well-written and emotionally affecting though also stunningly overly earnest at times (the way passionate activist/artists can sometimes forget that even people who will die by the end of the play ca still have a sense of humor while they're alive). Regardless, the thirty people in attendance gave the short show a standing ovation anyway because they were so excited by the subject matter and the performers (or they needed to get their asses off those uncomfortable folding chairs).

I mention it because, even as I praise Mayor Daley, I also reconfirmed my sense that, for what it's worth, the Chicago theater feels much more urgently grassroots than Minnesota.

In the session called "Born in Chicago: The National Impact of Chicago Playwrights," featuring Tracy Letts, Rebecca Gilman, and Lydia Diamond, each of them talked about their early work in the "storefront" theaters, like this one, that dot the city.

Daley himself mentioned "storefront theater" a lot. The term is generally applied to the type of place I went to see My Name is Flor Contemplacion where the artists take whatever open space they can find in a retail store on a well-traffic street and convert it into a performance space. Folding chairs, makeshift risers, precariously hung lights, creative, minimal set design, not enough space for the actors to move—it's a pretty common experience in Chicago. We don't really have it in Minnesota right now.

Letts even said that he still tries to think of his artistic home, Steppenwolf, as having the heart of a storefront theater (having started actually in a church basement in the suburbs before growing into the 10+ million plus institution it is today). He called it just a "just storefront theater made good."

Is this what Creative Ecology means?

Most everything else that they praised about being a playwright in Chicago is also true in Minnesota: the Midwestern practicality; the ability to get support for your work from small theaters or to just produce your own work yourself ; the sense that theater artists here are in it to really work hard at it rather than get famous or rich (as they might be in Los Angeles); plus the affordable and enjoyable urban quality of life.

But I went to this particular session because I was curious why playwrights specifically identified with the city of Chicago (like Rebecca Gilman whose Dollhouse is currently at the Guthrie) are now the toast of the national theater scene while Minnesota playwrights, though there are many, aren't as influential a category—if we're even identified as a singular category

Are there any identifiable differences between the Chicago ecology and Minnesota? Letts, Gilman, and Diamond each talked about their work within the Chicago theater ecosystem before their work was known and seen outside of Chicago; they seemed to describe an ecosystem in which the bigger, nationally known but local theaters were influenced and inspired by what was happening in the smaller theaters around town as much if not more than theater outside Chicago.

Perhaps it's because I've been thinking about grassroots marketing this month, or perhaps its because I'm biased toward my hometown, but I can't help think that Chicago has a much more grassroots theater scene in general than Minnesota—where the work done in those most basic, forty-folding-chair theaters pushes upward and influences the largest, most expensive houses.

Minnesota's theater scene, on the other hand, may be as hierarchal and segmented as any in the country. Remember that the Guthrie didn't spring from a church basement; it was deposited here by a famous New York classical director (and two colleagues, see comments below). The Playwrights Center, though begun by five local playwrights, these days mostly uses its prodigious grants to entice playwrights from other cities to live here for a year or two. (Or more. I am one of those playwrights myself, having arrived here seven years ago.) Most of the professional mid-sized theaters that occupy the land between the youngest artists and the Guthrie are particularly niche.

Looking in or looking out

All of which reminds me of another presentation at the TCG Conference this year, "Theatre Becoming Centers in the 21st Century" which saw our own John Bueche, Executive Artistic Director of Bedlam Theatre, sharing a panel with the Carlo Scandiuzzi, Executive Director of the multi-million dollar ACT Theatre in San Francisco and Molly Smith, the Artistic Director of Arena Stage. I'm pretty sure that John was the only presenter on that or any other panel who passed out beer and a fake beard.

When I asked John about it afterward, he seemed amused and resigned to telling me about how the discussion quickly turned away from the ideas Bedlam believes in, about the theater being an active member of the community in which it resides, while turning quickly into a conversation about how theater-makers can use the idea of a community center to get the community more interested in theater.

There's an important and somewhat sad difference.

My impression over the weekend was that Chicago's own experience suggests that if a community takes an interest in the theater and the theater returns that with a real interest in their city, if both are valued rather than simply used—used either for increasing ticket sales or tourism—than both the community and theaters prosper. (And the ticket sales and tourism follow in due time.)

Part 2: How and why to network, what we all can learn from clowns, and the value of affinity groups.