Mike Lew - Playwright
  • News
  • Thoughts on the Theater Blog
  • Bio and Resume
  • Full Length Plays
  • Short Plays
  • Press

Six Actionable Steps for the Theater #3: Hire a Diversity Officer

4/30/2013

10 Comments

 
Theaters large and small should have the humility and the foresight to hire a diversity officer. Corporations have one. Hollywood studios have one. You should have one too.

Hire a diversity officer and vertically integrate them into all your activity: season planning, casting, hiring and board cultivation (Think of the NFL Rooney Rule.), audience development, marketing, and staff training. I guarantee they will never be lacking for things to do.

We in the theater like to think we're so open-minded and so inclusive that we don't even need a diversity officer. But the statistics for inclusion of women and artists of color belie that argument. Moreover the mark of someone who is truly open-minded is one who has the humility to recognize when they need an outside perspective. I keep hearing "it's getting better," but it's called "best practices," not "better practices." By the time it gets best, we'll be dead.

You need a diversity officer because - 
1) national demographics are shifting
2) if the theater hopes to shape the national discourse, then the plays we put out should reflect the diversity and values of all Americans
3) theaters are publicly-funded institutions that are accountable to the populations they serve
4) the only way to attract new audiences is by widening the perspective of the stories we tell;
5) many efforts at wider community outreach feel half-hearted at best and tone-deaf at worst; and
6) as forward-minded as we like to think that we are in this industry, the theater is actually lagging behind corporate America when it comes to putting women and people of color in power positions.

If you can't afford to hire a diversity officer, get an artist to volunteer as one. But really consider whether you can or can't afford one. Because I would argue that what you really can't afford is to alienate your audience and lose the faith of the artists who comprise your community. While nobody seeks to offend, we all have our blind spots. In the past year alone, I've witnessed...
- one member-based theater that offended their female artists by putting out a season of plays that was nearly entirely written by men
- several theaters that offended the Asian community by staging stories set in Asia without casting any Asian actors
- one play with a depiction of a transgendered character that was so offensive to a transgendered audience member that he wrote a protest letter to the producing theater

A diversity officer would have been able to help in all of those situations, and those were just the situations that erupted in controversy. Behind the scenes, a diversity officer would be able to contribute perspective on all of the hundreds of microdecisions that go on in a theater every day.

Because those microdecisions add up to a theater's integrity and values. And I think we can all do a lot better.
10 Comments

Six Actionable Steps for the Theater #4: Common App for Summer Development Conferences

4/26/2013

4 Comments

 
Continuing on in this series of six actionable steps we can take to improve the field of new plays... and remembering that we're going in order from most feasible to most batshit...

I'd mentioned this idea earlier in the Fall on my Facebook feed, and I believe my agent brought this up at an LMDA conference as well, to largely positive response.

Each year in November/December I apply to about 11 summer development conferences and they all ask for the same thing: my play (sometimes anonymous, sometimes not), my resume (or sometimes a bio), a synopsis of the play and a casting breakdown, and a one-page application statement.

I send the same exact play to all of these conferences, and say pretty much the same exact thing in my statement (sometimes tailoring it a bit here or there). Yet I spend about an hour on each application, mostly sorting through each conference's particular set of submission requirements.

These conferences get about 600 submissions a year. (I know that because during Spring Rejection Season invariably I'll get 11 rejection letters informing me that my play was carefully considered among 600 talented applicants... *WAAAAAAH*... but I digress...)

If the summer development conferences were to create a common application online - like they do for colleges - you'd be saving 600 playwrights 10 hours of their time every year. That's 6,000 hours a year. (I know it's dangerous to just brazenly multiply a projection, but I do it for rhetorical purposes knowing that the principle itself remains solid.)

On the writers' side, a common app would save us a boatload of time and in those rare instances where a writer is unaware of a conference (or doesn't have it together enough to juggle all those deadlines), our work would be reaching a wider body of decision-makers.

On the conferences' side, sharing resources might cut costs, allow for increased coordination and exchange of ideas between conferences, and might attract new grant support (since - especially for the smaller conferences - it may be easier to garner new funding collectively). For instance, creating an online common app seems perfect for a TCG/MetLife ThinkIt/DoIt grant. Garnering funding as a group might also reduce reliance on onerous annual application fees levied on playwrights.

Over the long term, thinking of these development conferences as a collective rather than as a gaggle of individual groups might also yield interesting collaborative possibilities. For instance, doing a shared press release of the work that's been chosen might make play selection more of an event and attract future production support for the plays. (I'm thinking particularly of the upfronts in television, which is when all the TV networks announce their entire fall lineup, all at pretty much the same time.) Or in the case of plays of particular promise and scope, it might be interesting to send a play through multiple conferences in a coordinated way. (This already happens for a few lucky writers, but it's by chance and not by design.)

One argument against doing all this is the concern that all the conferences might end up picking the exact same plays. But I would argue that these conferences are already getting the same plays from the same pool of applicants, just in a way that's inefficient for both parties. With a common application, each conference's unique aesthetics would still guide their decision-making, which should yield the same kind of aesthetic diversity that's happening now.

The point is that there's no real "TCG" or "LORT" for development conferences (since these things are relatively new), but now that summer development's here to stay you might as well form an alliance, starting with something that will make writers' lives much easier year in and year out.
4 Comments

Six Actionable Steps for the Theater #5: Specialized Co-Pros

4/24/2013

1 Comment

 
Recently there's been a lot of movement towards co-productions, mostly between two smaller-sized companies. But a place where co-productions might be particularly effective is between large institutional theaters and theaters that serve a specialized audience. In NYC I'm thinking particularly of what would happen if theaters like The Public or Second Stage paired up with theaters like Ma-Yi or New Georges, under either a co-producer or associate producer arrangement.

At first it seems like the benefits of such an arrangement would be all on the small theater's side: increased resources, increased visibility, the ability to take on stories of larger scope and to reach a larger audience. But the benefits to the larger theater are palpable too: an influx of new audience members, increased artist diversity, and more efficient use of the space (since theaters that own a building don't always fill it).

But perhaps the greatest benefit to the big theater would be the expertise that the small theater brings to serving their particular audience. Increasingly I find that when big theaters try to do plays that are set in a specific cultural milieu they fall flat on their face and end up having to do big mea culpa talkbacks and apologetic press releases. This kind of arrangement might help avoid that.

These partnerships will take a lot of ego suppression and some flexibility in adapting to each other's working methods. And they can't just be financial in nature (i.e., "Yeah we'll do your whatever show; just give us $150,000.") But the long term goal here is audience development. On both sides of the equation, if theaters keep going to the same pool of subscribers year in and year out, we're not (pardon the expression) diversifying our holdings. Which is bad for the long-term viability of this art form.

Institutions large and small can therefore benefit from sharing resources and expertise (and , and in the process broaden the art we present and the people who see it.
1 Comment

Six Actionable Steps for the Theater - NUMBER SIX

4/22/2013

6 Comments

 
I'm starting a new page on my website, Thoughts on the Theater, which is meant to be an infrequently-updated place to collect my ideas on the field that have little to do with my work as a writer. 

To whit - Seth Rozin at InterAct recently had me in Philly on an NNPN panel. As he put it, "My goal is to have a conversation around the major challenges in the new play industry that will identify concrete, actionable programs or initiatives that can improve the chances for a greater quantity, quality and diversity of new plays to be produced... I would love it if each of you could bring a concrete idea to the table OR identify a soluble problem."

I presented the panel with six ideas, which I'll be posting here. As I did for the panel, I've decided to list the ideas in order from "Hmm what a sage idea, Mike, we could do that tomorrow" down to "That's batshit crazy." Here's the first idea, which is the most practical idea.

I will get to the rest when I feel like it.

6. The Blacklist - In Hollywood, as in the theater, there is a huge volume of screenplays that are highly praiseworthy but for whatever reason can't be produced. So someone created The Blacklist, an annual list of the best screenplays that were neglected that year. I believe the same thing exists for TV pilots. At any rate, we could very easily do the same thing for theater, and pair up with American Theater magazine or The Dramatist to publish the results (or blog-publish them). This would be a great way to highlight plays that haven't yet gotten their due, as well as unsung writers.

Let's say we survey a diverse group of around 300 people - mostly playwrights and lit managers - and ask them to create a list of their top 5 favorite (other people's) plays that have been kicking around for a while but haven't yet found production. We then tabulate the results and highlight a list of frequently-mentioned plays. We could also ask high-profile playwrights to write up a short testimonial about their #1 pick, in the hopes of bringing more attention to lesser-known writers.

Way down the line, it'd be great to get an angel investor who'd be willing to provide enhancement money towards producing one (or several) of the plays on the annual list. This would enhance artist buy-in with institutions, because the writers will essentially be electing a "people's choice" winner for production in the next season.

In my experience, fellow playwrights are hugely committed to championing each other's work, and lit managers are enormous advocates as well. But we can't always translate that enthusiasm into any kind of concrete result. If theaters know that there's a wealth of built-in support behind particular plays, perhaps they'd be more willing to take a risk on producing them. I think of how Madeleine George's Zero Hour was so beloved by fellow writers but kicked around for years until she produced it herself with 13P, or how Jorge Cortinas'  Bird in the Hand was developed everywhere but produced nowhere until he self-produced it with Fulcrum.

This is something we could do to provide more attention to those overlooked gems.

BONUS. My wife and fellow playwright Rehana Lew Mirza posits that we should make a blacklist specifically for women playwrights and for playwrights of color, which might help theaters put more thought into season planning. In our opinion, theaters generally: 1) don't produce a lot of plays by women or by writers of color; and 2) may have trouble finding a way into scripts told from under-represented perspectives. So advocating specifically for these groups would give theaters the confidence that a wealth of fellow artists see the merits in these plays.
6 Comments
    Tweets by @MikeLew4

    Archives

    October 2014
    July 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    August 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013

    Categories

    All
    @2amt
    @howlround
    @newplaynetwork
    @tcg

    RSS Feed