Perspectives / James Leverett James Leverett was director of literary services for the Theatre Communications Group when he wrote this article originally titled "After the Revolution," in the mid-1980s. When I first began as director of the literary services department at Theatre Communications Group, I was expected to write an overview article for our newsletter every September to introduce the schedules of all the repertory, resident and regional theatres that form TCG’s membership. With the theatres’ rosters spread out before me, I was expected to opine trends in what audiences wanted to see and, even more of a sibylline trick, what playwrights wanted to write. The year I concluded that there were going to be a lot of plays about horses (remember Equus?), I quit and swore a mighty oath never to do another main-currents-in-play-writing article again. Never, that is, until one day last summer when Jon Jory came into my office in New York, shut the door portentously and told me that I must write one to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Humana Festival. At first I demurred, fearing that actually putting pen to paper on the subject would blow my cover and betray what I really don’t know about American playwriting. Jon suggested that I publish under the pseudonym Jane Martin, not only providing the needed camouflage but also solving, for me at least, the great puzzle of who had written those fascinating plays: I had. As attractive as the idea was finally to become a playwright—and such a good one, too, with a juicily mysterious reputation—I thought better of the nom de plume. But Jon’s powers of persuasion and the opportunity to write in honor of such an occasion prevailed. Besides, Jon said he liked my piece on horse plays and thought I might find my perfect readership in Kentucky. When the Humana Festival began, American theatre was in the midst of a revolution. New York, then still the absolute center of the theatre world, was in the second stage of a radical experiment called Off-Off Broadway. Beginning in the 1960s, young directors, actors, designers and writers who were dissatisfied with and often rejected by the commercial stage, turned their backs on the few raffish blocks of the Great White Way and proceeded to fill every available loft, basement and garret with often inchoate, sometimes impenetrable, now-and-then brilliant, unfailingly energetic productions. The first wave, which gave us enduring names like Joseph Chaikin, Maria Irene Fornes, Joseph Papp, Sam Shepard, Ellen Stewart and Lanford Wilson, was theatre-inspired, created in spite of and in opposition to what was happening uptown. The second wave, the one cresting in 1976 when the Humana Festival was getting started, continued the first, but expanded to include artists as involved with other forms as they were with theatre: music, dance, painting, film, video. Richard Foreman, Mabou Mines, Meredith Monk and Robert Wilson were some of the names to conjure with. Meanwhile, outside of New York, the great movement to decentralize American theatre was well underway. It was started in the early 1960s by no more than a dozen theatres, all striving to become established on the European publicly subsidized model and to provide an alternative to the usual transient fare of Broadway road shows. At first, these institutions sought to stage the standard world repertory of great drama, just as orchestras and museums present their classics. It soon became evident, however, that in order to keep the art truly vital, it would be imperative also to support the creation of new works. Theatre people believed this; they convinced the corporations, foundations and endowments that fund theatres; soon audiences joined in as well. In fact, it became an economic as well as a creative necessity to do new plays—a kind of badge of artistic honor. As a result, within a mere decade, the machinery of how drama gets written and produced in this country changed. Arriving on the scene when it did, the Humana Festival at Actors Theatre of Louisville became a flagship of that change. Joining such organizations as New Dramatists in New York (the true vanguard, established in 1949), the O’Neill Theater Center’s National Playwrights’ Conference in Connecticut (whose 20th anniversary was in 1984) and the by-then 100-plus permanent theatres that had appeared around the country, ATL became an indispensable part of a vast national system of playwright support that provided an arsenal of developmental procedures: readings, staged readings, workshops, full productions. Everyone felt terribly good about all of this activity. New names, given their first opportunities in this new network, began joining the older ones: Christopher Durang, John Guare, Beth Henley, Albert Innaurato, Romulus Linney, David Mamet, Marsha Norman and Michael Weller are only a few of them. To echo the words of critic Stanley Kauffman, there was more serious writing going on in this country than ever before. There was more going on here than any place else in the world. But with the new advantages came liabilities. With the wheat came a lot of chaff in the form of a mountain of not very good scripts. We were, to quote Robert Moss, founder of New York’s pioneering Playwrights Horizons, "fanning every flame." Perhaps it took that to keep the fire going. Far more serious was an ailment among theatres called "premiere-itis," which means a drive to garner the financial and publicity advantages of doing the first presentation of a new play, but not deigning to do a second or third. The result was and is a lot of works floating around that have just been seen once and a lot of playwrights stymied in a process of development that extends through several productions. On the other side of the coin, with all of the massive machinery for development in place, a real danger emerged of letting the tail wag the dog, of developing just for development’s sake, sometimes where it was not needed and sometimes where it was downright harmful. Most serious of all was the tendency to consider the whole structure of permanent theatres, those institutions that form our true national theatre, as merely a conduit for Broadway, today’s answer to the old road show circuit. So, where are we on the Humana Festival’s 10th birthday, and where are we going? Many who have labored in these vineyards for a decade, a generation and more, creating not only new work but a whole geography of places in which to perform it, have stopped to ask these very questions. For whatever weaknesses there are in the system, and they are legion, we can say that the revolution of decentralization is accomplished. It has happened because the support for these theatres has generally been great in their communities and because the center, New York, has priced itself out of existence. In fact, theatres have become nuisance tenants on outlandishly valuable plots of real estate that cry out to be developed into high-rise offices, hotels or luxury housing. Commercial success in New York is still the single most lucrative thing that can happen to a playwright, outside of winning the lottery or forsaking the theatre for film or television; but a glance at the number of New York openings last year will tell you that the chances of scoring a hit on or off Broadway now are microscopic. If our permanent theatres were ever merely parts of a commercial pipeline, they are now suffering a drought of Ethiopian proportions. What those theatres now do is provide the possibility for a playwright to have a career, and for plays to have lives, beyond the Hudson River. New York is still an important stop on the route, but just a stop, not necessarily a terminus. In taking stock of the theatre’s accomplishments over the past generation, we discover that the wheat has separated itself from the chaff and we have a band of excellent dramatic writers, a couple of them better than excellent. Premiere-itis having abated somewhat and the flame-fanning resources being not nearly what they were, it is the tendency of theatres now to invest time and money in playwrights who have proven themselves and with whom long-term relationships have been formed. It is a new conservatism which, given the tenor of the times and the outpouring of energy during the past 20 years, is perhaps appropriate. But, as surely as the seasons follow one mother, the new conservatism will be followed by a newer liberality and the picture will change once more. Somewhere, in some basement, loft or garret, the seeds are germinating. So whither? First, I wish/predict that the term "regionalism" will shed its annotation of narrow provincialism and be accepted for what it really is: the strongest suit of a decentralized theatre in an ethnically, religiously, sexually and racially diverse nation. The Humana Festival has always been in the vanguard in this area. It has provided a platform for voices that are nationally important precisely because they speak so strongly and truthfully from and about a region. Within recent memory, there is Husbandry by Patrick Tovatt, an eloquent expression of the problems of our farmers, indeed of the growing alienation of all America from the land. It is indicative that it failed in the urbanly parochial confines of Manhattan, but has gone on to lie produced in other parts of the country where its themes have become more pressing than they were when Louisville first saw it. Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice, speaking in painful detail of a horrible chapter in San Francisco’s history, has been produced in Washington, Minneapolis, Houston and Seattle, where audiences are finding in it something more than a regional case history of a community in upheaval, Tent Meeting by Rebecca Wackier, Larry Larson and Levi Lee simultaneously satirizes religious extremism and admits the possibility of true religious experience, exploring areas very much on the mind of the world right now. It has since been seen in other places here and abroad, thanks to the international exposure it received at ‘the Humana Festival. My second wish/prediction has to do with international exposure. If we need a greater sense of regionalism, we also must develop a counterbalancing sense of internationalism. As we said earlier, the movement to decentralize our theatre began with the desire to bring the great world repertory to this nation’s audiences. Although there are some good theatres providing that rich diet, it is surely the greatest failing of the movement that it has not been able to create even one company of the stature of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Schaübuhne in West Berlin or the Piccolo Teatro in Milan, not to mention such historical landmarks as the Moscow Art, The Comédie Française or the Berliner Ensemble. What our directors, actors, designers and playwrights, not to speak of our audiences, have suffered from not having such touchstones of quality is incalculable. The charges of TV-bound realism, lack of range, and shrunken domesticity that have been leveled—too often with justification—at our theatre artists are traceable to this deficiency. Our good writers are good only in spite of what they lack and what should be in our cultural system something akin to a birthright. It is only through exposure to first-rate productions of Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen and Chekhov, as well as parts of our vast dramatic legacy that are not so well known, that our theatre artists can find the creative forms necessary in which to be, in the most expansive sense, regional. Finally—and here could begin another essay—if our playwrights have been diminished by the absence of a great classic theatre, there has been no shortage of other performance media to fill the vacuum. As much as it has been lamented by some, film and television are givens in our universe, and theatre will always have a particularly close and fretful kinship with them. My one absolutely sure prediction is that, if theatre is to survive at all, it must continue in its effort to define itself in relation to the other media. It can only accomplish this task by becoming more like itself, that is by revealing in the most exciting, challenging ways possible that it is the one thing that the other forms are not: alive!, a special occurrence achieved only when artists and audiences are present together. Theatre can less and less afford to look like film and television, though it may always make creative use of them, along with everything else the world has to offer. It must, instead, look like exactly what it is: a finite space for infinite imagination.