I’ve been avidly following coverage of The Summit and there’s a lot of FANTASTIC discussion coming out of that, but one thing that caught my attention that hasn’t been really dissected yet is the false notion that arts education will save the theater.

When confronted with the stark reality that “the youth” won’t buy theater tickets, theaters oftentimes place the blame on the school system. The argument goes that decreased arts funding in schools begets students who aren’t accustomed to coming to theater, and that by not being exposed to theater at a young age we’re losing all our potential patrons. It’s a chestnut that found its way into The Summit, and it’s a position that Isherwood floated in an article about Rocco Landesman’s tenure at the NEA.

It’s also a myth.

While it may be true that arts education is on the decline, is that really a primary cause for declining theater attendance?

I personally didn’t receive much arts education as a child, and yet here I am in the theater. MFA programs are doing more robust business than ever before. (In fact they barely existed a generation ago.) Where did all those eager young applicants come from? I see hundreds of young audience members at black box theaters enjoying the heck out of off-off Broadway. But those same audience members won’t buy season tickets to larger theaters. Is it really a lack of education that’s stopping them from becoming subscribers?

Take the basic argument of “We need more theater in schools so more people will go see theater later in life” and substitute comparable forms of entertainment where young people are already dropping boatloads of money. The very logic of the construction collapses.

Consider the following assertions:

• No one likes cooking anymore because we stopped teaching Home Ec in the schools.
• We need more video game training in classrooms to ensure the next generation of Xbox users.
• If we don’t teach kids how to listen to standup comedy, Louis CK will go bankrupt.
• Kids who never played live music in school just plain won't pay for a Jay-Z concert.

Now consider the converse, swapping out theater for things that we do teach in schools:

• Good thing we taught kids biology, because zoo attendance is up 50%.
• Colonial Williamsburg is popping thanks to US History classes.
• Now that we have English in schools, bookstores are saved!
• My classroom had a PC, therefore this ipad is nonsense.

The truth is that no one needs to be trained to enjoy theater. Theater is primal. When a show is electric – when a play surprises and delights and actually says something new and truthful about the world that we live in – there’s a collective energy in the room that needs no explanation. It’s just that a lot of theater is terribly boring, and we're not doing all we can to respect audiences enough to present them with challenging work.

A lot of theater buildings feel inaccessible, too. A clubhouse for people already in the know, what with their arcane ticketing rules and inflexible schedules and clueless volunteer ushers and lack of lobby seating and strict bans on beverages in the house. I’ve heard theater people complain, “Young people will drop $100 on a restaurant, but won't buy a theater ticket!” Well would you go to a restaurant where you have to make a prepaid nonrefundable deposit, your reservation time can’t be changed, the host is just a volunteer who wants to eat there for free, if you buy a drink at the bar you can't bring it to your table, you have to be totally silent at dinner, there's only 5 items on the menu and the menu never changes, and you’re kicked out of the restaurant exactly 10 minutes after your dinner? If you wouldn't go to that restaurant, is it because you lack education?

Audiences don’t have a problem with arts education. Theaters have a problem with hospitality. Most efforts at bringing in young audiences are condescending at best. Designated Twitter Seats... because kids can’t stop tweeting. Free Beer with Your Ticket... because all kids want to do is get wasted. No efforts made at changing up the actual plays.

In truth theaters have a serious curatorial problem when it comes to choosing plays that a young, diverse audience can get behind. The fantastic documentary Miss Representation introduces the concept of symbolic annihilation in the media, and it applies exceedingly well to the theater. Why would young people (or people of color, or women) bother coming to the theater when they’re so rarely depicted onstage, and when they're so rarely in command of the artistic process? Is our dwindling audience truly a reflection of the educational landscape, or is it a reflection of a chronic homogeneity onstage exacerbated by an attendant homogeneity in our staffing?

Even if there were some correlation between arts education and audience attendance, it will take a generation to fix the educational system and even more time to measure whether increased arts education had any downstream effect. Whereas we are facing a crisis of audience right here and now. We are in a war of attrition – a war that we know we are losing. In the midst of losing a war, you don’t get the luxury of saying, “I wish we had more military education.” The only recourse is a quick strategy change.

Instead of blaming something so distal as arts education, let’s look at the proximal barriers that are keeping young people out of the theater, and consider fixes we can implement now:

• To attract a young, diverse audience, present work that’s reflective of a young, diverse audience.
• Widen the perspectives being presented onstage. 
• Place more faith in the artists.
• More funding for artists, less funding for buildings.
• Make the theater a more friendly and welcoming place.
• Make seeing theater easier on working parents.
• Lower the barrier of entry by lowering ticket prices.

Right now the institutional theater has the same demographic problems as the Republican Party: largely aging, largely affluent, largely White. If you truly want a young and diverse audience, you’re going to have fundamentally change up your programming in a way that may very well alienate your existing base. Which may be okay. Because that base isn't large enough to form a sustainable coalition.

It actually verges on arrogance, this tendency to blame arts education for our own shortcomings. It’s an elitist argument that absolves us of agency. “We can’t do anything about it! We’ve done all we can! They’re just too uneducated to appreciate theater!”

Am I arguing against education? Of course not. I’m just saying we owe it to ourselves to be more diligent about tracing causality. It’s easy to point the finger at arts education; that’s a factor beyond our control. But taking ownership over the factors we can control? That’s a much harder matter.

This week, my previous post "On Gender Parity" will be published in The Dramatist. So pickup a copy of their Mar/Apr 2014 issue, or read it here in the blog.

Ma-Yi Writers Lab just completed a benefit for the Philippines, in partnership with Playwrights Horizons, in which we wrote a series of new plays based on Filipino proverbs and donated all net proceeds to buy fishing boats for villagers affected by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. Above is a photo of the new fleet!

This benefit came from a variety of impulses: to find a way to donate in a thoughtful way, and to find a way to build community at home while helping people abroad. On Valentine's Day, Rehana and I wrote an article that TCG was kind enough to post about our philosophy behind the event. The original is printed here and it's also appended below.

Moments of tragedy call for community-building, not just financial rebuilding.

by Mike Lew

When the Philippines were devastated by Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda in November of 2013, Ma-Yi knew we had to do something. Ma-Yi Theater Company was initially founded by Filipino artists, and we still have several family ties there. Ma-Yi Writers Lab is the largest collective of Asian-American playwrights in the country, and our artistic impulse was to create a series of brand-new short plays inspired by translations of Filipino proverbs. It’s our hope that the audience will come away from this evening with a deeper appreciation of the Philippines – that the program will become a kind of primer in Tagalog, and that each play will serve as a powerful mnemonic for remembering each Filipino phrase.

All proceeds from the evening will go towards buying new fishing boats for villagers affected by the storm. Our goal is to raise the money on behalf of Negrense Volunteers for Change (NVC), a not-for-profit organization based in Bacolod, capital of Western Negros, an island hit hard by the typhoon. By providing funds directly to a private, non-government volunteer organization working with the communities, we will avoid unnecessary overhead costs and provide immediate relief for the victims of the typhoon. NVC will be able to restore and manufacture fishing boats with clean motors for every $500 we raise, with support going out to Negros, Cebu, Panay, Leyte, and Samar.

This is a chance for Ma-Yi to use our expertise in the Philippines to channel funding towards relief efforts that will directly and palpably affect the victims, and to handle the tragedy in a culturally sensitive way. Oftentimes we in the theater hold up this art form as a commons for discussing today’s political landscape, and the real-life impact of ongoing global events. Last year, in response to ongoing casting controversies in which several theater shows portrayed Asian characters in Asia without using Asian actors, Ma-Yi Writers Lab staged an evening of protest theater in partnership with the Signature, on the set of David Henry Hwang’s Golden Child. This year, the Lab was given the challenge of directly addressing the typhoon, if they dared. The theater won’t survive as a viable art form unless playwrights and producers keep pushing to create work that reflects the deep emotions and ideas presently rocking the world.

This benefit is also an effort at community-building within the NYC theater. In an effort to keep tabs on a rising crop of talented Asian actors, Ma-Yi held an open casting call to fill some of the roles in our ensemble. We received an overwhelming volume of submissions – so much so that we extended the audition process from one day to two – and made first contact with over 100 up-and-coming Asian actors. We’ve partnered with Playwrights Horizons, and they’ve generously donated space and logistical support for this evening. We’ve received publicity support from Ensemble Studio Theater, and several master playwrights – David Henry Hwang, Sarah Ruhl, and Chuck Mee – have all come forth and offered sponsored tickets for artists.

Financial rebuilding is crucial after a natural disaster. But so is community building. This benefit seeks to provide typhoon relief in a truly considered way, and present our collective response to the tragedy in a way that considers our larger theatrical community.

Telling Our Stories, and Sharing Them Too

by Rehana Lew Mirza

When the Asian American theater movement began cropping up in the 60s and 70s, it was an artistic response to a lack of Asian representation in the mainstream media, and was largely in keeping with the political “yellow power” movement. Ma-Yi Theater, now celebrating it’s 25th anniversary, was founded largely as a splinter from that, in order to recognize the ‘brown’ brethren – or the Pacific Islanders – who weren’t at the time considered part of that movement. The Philippines – with its history as an occupied power under the US – has always had a different relationship with the U.S. than other Asian countries. (In actuality, the Philippines as a country has a stronger shared history with other U.S. satellites like Puerto Rico, than say, Thailand.)

But as is the case with all good theaters, Ma-Yi has evolved over the years. Their mission has changed as the needs of their community changed. (Ahem, theaters, take note.) In 2004, Sung Rno founded the Ma-Yi Writers Lab, now the largest collective of Asian-American writers in the country, and what began as a Filipino company began to embrace all Asian-Americans under its umbrella. As South Asians began to immigrate to the country in larger masses, they too felt left out of the Asian-American Theater movement, and yet Ma-Yi again expanded its ranks. When playwright Mike Lew and I first joined the Writers Lab in 2005, Mike not only fell in love at first sight, but also thought, “Wait – she’s Asian?”

What all of this means is that Asian/Pacific/American identity is fractured and not homogenous by any means. Within the umbrella of “A/P/A” hundreds of languages are spoken.  That movement encompasses 52 nations, and thousands of different culinary delights.

So when a group of Asian-American playwrights approaches a benefit for the Philippines, it feels both natural and foreign. In some ways, Ma-Yi is the absolute authority on creating an evening of theater around Typhoon Haiyan. Or are we? What do we have to say about the Philippines? Sure, we have 3 1/2 Filipino playwrights, all of varying levels of connection to the homeland, but so what? And what about the rest of us?

Ultimately this benefit will include a gamut of stories that are incredibly diverse, all showing our unique perspectives even as all of us used a Filipino phrase as a jumping-off point. While we have the freedom of not being ‘responsible’ for representing a culture (which, even if we were of that culture, no one can really represent an entire culture), we also have access to sensitivity gut checks and honesty from those who have a decided stake in how their ancestry is represented onstage. When Asian-Americans are so often underrepresented in the mainstream, it helps to have a clever combination of both flexibility and authority, imagination and knowledge.

With five New Dramatists residencies, two PONY fellowships, and a boatload of awards including the Leah Ryan, Kendeda, Laurents/Hatcher, and Helen Merrill Awards – Ma-Yi Writers Lab is kicking ass and taking names. But I think it’s largely due to the heterogeneous make-up of the term “Asian-American” and our need to acknowledge differences and commonalities amongst one another. Innovisor, a consulting firm, conducted research in twenty-nine countries and found that “diverse groups often perform better.”

Hell yeah we do. Our art is all the better for our differences yet united by a common sense of purpose, and this benefit shows that.

Mike Lew and Rehana Lew Mirza met and married in the Ma-Yi Writers Lab. Mike is currently Co-Director of the Lab alongside Rey Pamatmat, after Rehana stepped down from Co-Director duties earlier this year.

Mike’s plays include Tiger Style!, Collin, Bike America (Alliance, Atlanta; Ma-Yi, NYC; Juilliard and Lark workshops, NYC; Kennedy Center/NNPN workshop, DC; Playwrights Foundation workshop, SF); and microcrisis (Ma-Yi, NYC; InterAct, Philly; Next Act, Milwaukee). He is a former resident writer for Blue Man Group, an EST member, and recipient of the second annual Lanford Wilson Award (via the Dramatists Guild), the Helen Merrill Award, NYFA Fellowship, and Kendeda Graduate Playwriting Award. Training: Juilliard, Yale.www.mikelew.com

Rehana’s plays include Neighborhood Watch (NNPN/InterAct commission),Soldier X (2012 NYSCA Commission; Lark Development Center Studio Retreat);Lonely Leela (workshops with Magic Theatre, Desipina/HERE, and New Georges; reading at 2G); and Barriers (productions at HERE and Asian American Theater Company; Princess Grace Finalist; included on the curriculum at West Virginia University, Yale University and NYU). She is the recipient of an IAAC playwright residency with The Lark Development Center, a Tofte Arts Residency, a TCG Future Leader fellowship with New Georges, the NBC DiverseCity ShortCuts Audience Award, P2 for a Cause Grant, Leopold Schepp fellowship, a 2G residency, and an LMCC artist grant. Training: Columbia, NYU.www.rehanamirza.com