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American Theatre Magazine - March 2010At Chicago Dramatists, he offers a novel approach to new-play development--actually producing new works By Kerry Reid (click here to download) On an overcast Saturday afternoon in October, a small crowd gathers in the intimate lobby of Chicago Dramatists, awaiting the start of the company's weekly Saturday Series staged reading of a new work-in-progress. There isn't a celebrity in sight, which normally wouldn't be unusual for this modest 78-seat house in the city's River West neighborhood. But the playwright featured this day happens to have penned the highest-grossing non-musical play on Broadway last year. That writer, Keith Huff, isn't talking about grosses or movie deals for A Steady Rain, however. He's here instead to do what hundreds of playwrights have done since Chicago Dramatists started up 30 years ago--get an airing for his work under the watchful guidance of artistic director Russ Tutterow. Now in his fifties, Tutterow has the sort of calm and genial presence that inspires the adjective "Buddha-like" in those who describe him. He has been working in Chicago theatre since the 1970s, when he earned an M.A. in theatre at Northwestern University and worked with many small companies in the city's then nascent storefront scene. He premiered and directed the very first outing of Huff's two-hander at Dramatists in the fall of 2007, but his associations with the playwright stretch back to those earlier decades. It was Tutterow who staged the first full production at this play-development back in 1982; he has been artistic director since 1986; and he can be found almost every sixth day of the week skillfully handling audience-feedback sessions that follow the Saturday Series, which is itself a cornerstone of the Dramatists mission. Chicago Dramatists is that rare institution in American not-for-profit theatre that exists to both develop and produce new work. The shows in its annual three-play season mostly come from the company's 43 resident playwrights, most of whom live in town and who apply for membership in the program, which gives them access to all of the theatre's development opportunities for three years at no charge. Nearly 200 writers from around the country are considered "network playwrights," which means that, for a membership fee, they can access a smaller array of services, including consideration for the Saturday Series and other developmental efforts. Network playwrights sometimes get full productions, too. Jade Heart, by network playwright Will Cooper, opens in late April. And though the number of productions that Dramatists can fully produce each year is small, the plays that have been developed here and premiered elsewhere number in the hundreds. (Information about most of them is accessible online through the Chicago Dramatists play catalog.) A Steady Rain may be the biggest show associated with Dramatists at the moment, and neither Tutterow nor managing director Brian Loevner is naive about what that publicity potentially means for the company in terms of expanding its national profile and its budget, which currently stands at $500,000--double where it was five years ago. Dramatists doesn't have subsidiary rights for the Broadway run, but in a trademark Tutterow understatement, the artistic director notes that the number of calls he's fielding "have definitely spiked. We're getting calls from people we hadn't known before, including some commercial producers." But changing the way the work is developed at Dramatists isn't on the table for Tutterow or Loevner. As the latter notes, "Seventy percent of the time we're developing, and 30 percent we're producing. That's backwards compared to most theatres." Tutterow points out that full production was always a part of the Chicago Dramatists mission. (The organization started as a writers' collective in 1979, but none of the original members are still associated with the group.) "When we started, a local playwright couldn't get produced in Chicago," he says. "This is a playwrights' workshop and a producing theatre. We talk about it together. The production process, especially the first production, is part of development--it's one of the phases." Networking on behalf of the playwrights with other theatres to get second productions is another big part of what Tutterow does. Loevner notes that more than 50 percent of shows that have been produced at Dramatists in the past eight years have moved on to subsequent productions. RESIDENT PLAYWRIGHT MIA McCullough, whose Lucinda's Bed opened the 2009-10 season at Dramatists, premiered Since Africa, her play about the so-called lost boys of Sudan, under Tutterow's direction there in 2005. It has since enjoyed multiple productions around the country, including in 2006 at InterAct in Philadelphia and another in January '09 at the Old Globe in San Diego. Further back, a 2001 mounting at the politically oriented Stage Left Theatre in Chicago of McCullough's death penalty drama Chagrin Falls earned the playwright the 2003 M. Elizabeth Osborn Award from the American Theatre Critics Association. Like most of McCullough's work, Chagrin Falls started out with readings at Chicago Dramatists. McCullough, who first joined Dramatists as a network playwright in 1998 and became a resident in 2002, says, "I'm sort of the prototype for how [Dramatists] wanted things to work, in that you come through as a network playwright, they get to know you and your work, and then you become a resident." Lucinda's Bed, a fantasia about a woman growing up and facing "the monster under the bed" who haunts her relationships, was a natural fit for Dramatists, says McCullough. "It was a very difficult and vulnerable process for me, so I was glad to have it produced by a theatre where I felt incredibly comfortable and had some artistic control and a say in who my director was" (The piece was staged by Jessi D. Hill, a former artistic director of Stage Left and now a director of new-play development for terraNOVA Collective NYC.) Perhaps the Saturday Series is where Tutterow's gift for working with playwrights comes into sharpest focus. Anyone who has sat through a meandering open-feedback session after a staged reading knows how excruciating the process can be. "The first discussions I attempted--some were horrifying," says Tutterow. "It's taken a lifetime to figure out how to do it." He adds, "I prep the playwrights for the discussion" by asking them questions ahead of time about what they want to get out of the reading. The audience fills out a post-show questionnaire, and Tutterow reads some of the comments, which the playwright usually doesn't respond to. "All new work is going to be developed," says Tutterow, "so it's a skill that playwrights have to learn: What to listen to? Who do you trust?" Most resident playwrights will attend several of their peers' readings during the year to provide their feedback. At the reading of Huff's Tell Us of the Night, the playwright sat quietly as audience members discussed his latest cop-show drama, even when director Kimberly Senior responded to one woman's skepticism about how a certain incident played out by noting that it came directly from the playwright's personal experience. Loevner notes that the offstage community-building provided by Dramatists is itself invaluable for writers: "They need a place where they can commune and be able to have social interaction and people that they trust around them. It's one of the reasons that the residency is as large as it is; it's one of the reasons why the network is as large as it is." Both Loevner and Tutterow acknowledge that having only three slots available on average during the season for full production leads to "healthy competition." But as company dramaturg Robert Koon (who has developed all his work through Dramatists and whose St. Colm's Inch received a full production in 2005) points out, "We're not just developing things for Chicago Dramatists. The focus is to develop things for other stages--to develop the writer, not just projects for us." Koon describes Tutterow's approach to developing work as "Let's give playwrights the opportunity to have a large vision and see what we can do with it." Expanding that vision on the heels of the highest-profile show in the company's history means doing more of what already works, Tutterow believes. "If we had five production slots, we could put five wonderful plays in there," he says. "We're exploring some alternative production programming--some late nights, maybe a musical-theatre cabaret. We will be venturing a little further into musical theatre." The company currently rents out its theatre regularly to Teatro Luna, an all-Latina troupe whose co-founder, Tanya Saracho, is a Dramatists resident playwright. But, Loevner notes, "We want a center for new work. We want multiple theatres. We want lots of classrooms. We want wonderful rehearsal rooms where we can develop all kinds of work and where we invite theatres from the community to perform their work at our space." Company ambitions aside, Tutterow--the man who has nurtured more new work than anybody else in Chicago--says he does what he does because it's, well, fun. "There's a lot of pleasure here for me. I really enjoy it. It's not because I'm dedicated to some mission--I mean, I am, I suppose. But it's still fun." Kerry Reid, a freelance arts journalist and theatre critic, is a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Reader and Performink. From American Theatre Magazine, March 2010, p. 36-38 |
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