American Theatre Freestyle: Daniel Sullivan
By: Matthew-Lee Erlbach Mar. 25, 2007
By speaking with mainstream, fringe, and up-and-coming artists, we can reassess our role as artist, audience, and entrepreneur at a time where the relationship between culture and the theatre is in great need of discussion, consideration, and action.
DANIEL SULLIVAN is the recipient of the 2007 Mr. Abbott Award for lifetime achievement in directing in the American theatre. He has been nominated for multiple Tony Awards and won for his direction of Proof (2001).His Broadway credits include: Prelude to a Kiss; Rabbit Hole; Afterthe Night and the Music; Julius Caesar; Brooklyn Boy; Sight Unseen; The Retreat From Moscow; Morning's at Seven; Proof; Major Barbara; A Moon for the Misbegotten; Ah, Wilderness!; An American Daughter; The Sisters Rosensweig; Conversations With My Father; The Heidi Chronicles; and I'm Not Rappaport. Off-Broadway credits include Third, Intimate Apparel, In Real Life, Dinner With Friends, Proof, Ten Unknowns, Ancestral Voices, Spinning Into Butter, Far East, London Suite, The Substance of Fire, Psychopathia Sexualis, A Fair Country and An American Clock. From 1981 to 1997, Mr. Sullivan served as artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre, where he directed more than 60 productions. He established Seattle Rep's New Play Program, developing new works by Jon Robin Baitz, Herb Gardner, A.R. Gurney, William Mastrosimone, Arthur Miller, Wendy Wasserstein and Charlayne Woodard, among others. Mr. Sullivan's film and television credits include The Substance of Fire and "Far East." He is the Swanlund Professor of Theater at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana.
MLE: When you started back in San Francisco, the scene, culturally, was a lot different. The theatre was more reactionary than it is now—would you speak to that?
DS: When I started in San Francisco there was no populist movement in the theatre. The Actors Workshop was one of three regional theatres in the '50s. There really wasn't any tradition. There was a tradition of touring shows in cities—and that was usually stars, like The Lunts. But aside from community theatres here and there, there was no professional theatre in cities throughout the country, so that was really the beginning of it. And this was an attempt to have an alternative to the kind of fare that was happening on Broadway. There was no Off-Broadway, there was just Broadway.
MLE: What kind of work were you doing?
DS: We were very influenced by the European avant-garde: a lot of classics, Brecht, Ionesco, and Pinter back in the' 50s. And most of the regional theatres that were starting at that time were doing the same kind of fare. That changed over the years as the regional theatres grew and as every city had to have its own regional theatre, kinda like every city had to have its own baseball team. The citizens of the town would raise the money. That changed somewhat through the' 70s and ' 80s. By the' 90s, the thing had reversed and the regional theatres were becoming conduits to Broadway. The whole idea of "company," of acting companies, began to drop and die because the money began to run out in the regional theatre movement. So though I think the regional theatre movement is still certainly a cut above, it has become the new mainstream in some ways. You have fewer and fewer plays done on Broadway. And most of what is mainstream, in terms of dramatic works, is developed and is produced in the regional theatres.
MLE: How has the theatre strengthened in the last 40-odd years? Would you say that the cultivation of new works is a part of that strengthening, or is that something that comes in a wave?
DS: Well, that is really very dependent on the talented writers who are either there and interested in working in the theatre, or just not. It's very difficult for a playwright to make a living. Most of the writers that I know who haven't had major success on Broadway end up writing for television and for film. But the major part of their energy becomes working on film scripts. Jon Robin Baitz now is doing a series for NBC. Donald Marguiles is writing movies. Most of the writers that I know spend a lot of energy—
MLE: —supplementing their income—
DS: —it's more than supplementing. They supplement their income with plays every now and then!
MLE: So it's not a lack of writers—it's a lack of funding.
DS: I think that's right. I think that writers emerge and very often, after three or four plays, if they've got interest from the media, they find a way to make a living doing the writing that they know how to do. The theatre becomes a kind of gamble that they go further away from. In some cases I think, why go through that pain? That's not necessarily new. That's been around as long as Odets; Odets went to L.A. Very often now, a lot of our best writers just completely eschew the theatre. And I think that's true of actors too. More and more actors really find out in training programs where if you ask, "Do you really want a life in the theatre?," they say, "No, not really: what I wanna do is be a big movie star. And yet if the theatre can get me the kind of visibility I need to get there, then fine."
MLE: And then the actors that go back to the theatre?
DS: Most of the actors I know who go back to the theatre are more interested in it. What happens is that after a period of time working in film and television, they begin to feel powerless—because they're not really shaping a performance. They're really just doing shards of acting put together into a shape that they have nothing to do with. So when they go see the movie, they have no idea that that's what they were doing. In the theatre they can control that and that's important.
MLE: How do we get back our relationship with the audience—is there a kind of relationship we should strive for again?
DS: If we're to maintain a healthy psyche, yes. It's that one-on-one experience, hearing the news from a living person—that whole idea of a gathering. Y'know, you gather to hear the news; you gather for someone. I think we're increasingly going away from that. It's something that movies can't give you; something that only the stage can give you. And the problems are economic. It costs you $90 or $100 to go see a play. It's just so ludicrous that it has become limited to an upper-middle class pursuit. So that whole idea of it becomes increasingly unavailable.
MLE: So what's the fix for that? Is it government funding, like in the WPA? Is it what Europe's doing?
DS: Well I think that even Europe is pulling more and more funding. It's nowhere near where it was in the '70s and '80s. They have started to de-fund a lot of places, which in turn creates these Super Places, like in London with the National Theatre, which is publicly funded. It's really hard for other places in London to find the funding. People start to back the winner with all the money, like a corporation. This has a chilling effect on new theatres and the creation of new works.
MLE: So then in America do you go to the corporations and ask them for more investment? It would seem then that you become beholden to a model that might be counter-productive to the creation of art and risk-taking.
DS: Well, I think there are corporations that stay out of the content area. The problem with corporations though is—okay, look: twenty years ago, you could raise money from a corporation and that would be it. Now, the corporations want a lot more bang for their buck. They're taking a lot of pressure off individual donors, but that's only gonna last as long as the corporation lasts. Once that corporation goes away, then you have to spend a tremendous amount of money and effort trying to find another corporation. These theatres now have huge grant-writing staffs. One of the things that the regional theatres have held up over the last fifteen years is that their subscriptions have been the same, that they haven't lost subscribers. Well, that's just not true. And the way they keep this fiction going is that they have the two-play subscription. What they don't tell you is that it has now become so expensive to sell that one subscription. It used to be that the regional theatre would just send out a brochure, like in March, and you'd get all your subscribers.
Now you gotta have telefunding: twelve month a year phone banks. The amount of money that you have to have in terms of staff, just to sell that one ticket, is just—
MLE: It's crazy.
DS: It is crazy. It's really crazy. When I started at Seattle Rep, there was no charitable giving arm to the theatre; there was no fundraising arm to the theatre at all—there was one person. So trying to talk "that person" into going into the theatre is the hard part. That's why you have musicals becoming what they have. And think about it: If you're gonna spend $100, assume people wanna see their $100.
MLE: ...so the Play then—
DS: —is not the thing.
MLE: Not the thing.
DS: You have to say that it has a lot to do with writing. It has a lot to do with the public not really feeling they're getting their news from the stage. It's the difference between entertainment and challenging thinking onstage.
MLE: Do audiences want to be challenged at all?
DS: I don't think so. I think in general that's not something that one goes necessarily to the theatre to do. Though that could be the motivation of the artist, that is a secondary thing. An artist has something to say, and that is challenging. And for a theatergoer to say, "I want to be challenged." – I don't know what that means. There is a difference between that and "I wanna go and have my misconceptions challenged," – if I know what my misconceptions are. [Being challenged] seems to me to be a secondary and powerful thing in theatre, but not why you go there to begin with. I think you go in there to hear ideas. You know, "I wanna hear ideas. I wanna hear more ideas." If they're challenging: Great. If they're revelatory: Great. And I wanna hear stories told in interesting ways. That doesn't happen a lot in the theatre.
MLE: You don't see a lot of Shaw being done on Broadway.
DS: No, you don't. No you don't. And you don't have a lot of Shaw's writing. You don't have a lot of new Shaws. Y'know, I think Tony Kushner is a real interesting writer. I like to hear what Stoppard's thinking, because that's news to me. I may not necessarily agree with it, but I always want to hear what he's got going on. You have a columnist that you wanna read all the time—I like to hear what's going on in their heads.
MLE: If everything is cyclical, it would seem that there should be an unconscious movement back to the theatre, due to our social, economic, and political context; that people will begin identifying with it more personally again.
DS: You think so? I think so. I was in Moscow during Glasnos and there was really interesting stuff going on in the theatres. People crowded into the theatres because that's how they got the news. They couldn't get the news any other way. They were getting the messages from the plays they were seeing. There's also a tradition of theatergoing and there's a real need for theatre. And without that need, there is entertainment, or there are interesting and provocative ways of doing something. But that finally doesn't interest me. Because then—it's all style. Or anti-style. It's all about curiosities of one kind or another.
MLE: Fetishes.
DS: Sorta what's happened in the art world, where I feel you appreciate the concept, you tune in to the metaphor, the idea behind it, but there's no real need for it.
MLE: So is there a social potential that isn't cultivated or exploited today in the theatre?
DS: Yeah, well I think so. I think the theatre has increasingly become more inner-directed and less political in a way. I mean Kushner, David Hare, Wallace Shawn are some of the few writers who carry their political life into their work. But most American writers—and that includes writers who have taken real chances over the last thirty years, like Shepard and people like that—are really very inner-directed. Or obsessed, like Mamet is, with power. And though he's not necessarily a political writer, I think there are political ramifications to that work. But I don't feel that unless the theatre became egalitarian again as it was in the thirties, regardless of what writers might want to do on the stage, it's not going to have an effect on the population.
MLE: What happened in the thirties?
DS: Waiting for Lefty, for instance, was performed in thirty cities around the country—the world had an impact on it, and it had an impact on the world. I think that something like Angels in America was one of the last plays that had any kind of real impact outside the theatre world, and even that came late. You know, the news comes late.
MLE: Why is that?
DS: I think it just has to do with when it enters the public. These things enter the public consciousness so quickly now through television that by the time the writer has responded, it's already over. You know, finally people didn't care what Arthur Miller had to say anymore and he was always talking about important stuff. And unless the story didn't really engage, they weren't going to show up. I think that's true with most American writers: theatres, actors, artists, won't commit to them just on who they are—they want the thing. They want the thing of value in their hands.
MLE: Lastly, if you were to talk to what is missing in the theatre, what would it be?
DS: There's no development. And the measures of success are all so different. You either do it and it's successful or you don't do it. So that "put up or shut up" mentality forces you to get out there, but it's not friendly to the development of work. I think that the longer lag times in the regionals are much friendlier to the development of work and to the writer's development.
MLE: A lot of theatres have satellite programs for writers, although they don't guarantee production.
DS: No, it's not production. And almost all theatres that have commission programs do not guarantee production, so even though you may make your $5000 to write the play, that may be the last money that particular piece of writing will earn you; and it might not actually ever be seen. Many playwrights write in the dark—they just don't see productions of their plays. It's all bootstraps as far as I'm concerned. If you want it to happen, you make it happen.
.png)
|
.png)
|
Videos
