A trio of theater companies explores the concept of less development, more immediacy
In an age in which it’s almost impossible to open a Broadway show without a TV or film star in the cast, Downtown theater is still something of a palate cleanser, a place where people are passionate about the theater and not the bottom line. While more commercially-minded companies may workshop a play for months or even years, a handful of theater companies are choosing not to over-think it, and instead put up plays before the feeling of spontaneity has evaporated.
In fact, the theater company Blue Coyote, which will open its latest series of short plays under the title Standards of Decency 3: 300 Vaginas Before Breakfast on June 2, is dedicated to the notion that too much development can drain a play of its freshness—and the company of its cash.
Joe Curnutte (left), Jim Ireland and Carter Jackson in “Yes Yes Yes,” part of Blue Coyote’s Happy Endings. Photo by Kyle Ancowitz
“It wasn’t always a conscious decision, but it has become our standard practice,” Kyle Ancowitz, one of Blue Coyote’s founding members, says. “It just helps us get things done, really. We don’t find a need to develop something to death. We’ve always been able to move from a new script, a new draft, because we have playwrights who work with us for such a long stroke of time we’re familiar with getting their fresh work immediately and moving to a production in four months. The show we have coming up is one of our Standards of Decency evenings. Those are always 10-minute plays requested from playwrights, always on a theme. And those usually go from incubation to production within three months.”
The New York Neo-Futurists have also long hosted a short-play series, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, which operates as both a testing ground for new playwrights and a chance to see developing talent at low cost. Earlier this month, however, the company opened full-length play Locker 4173b, about what the contents of storage lockers up for auction in the Bronx said about their former owners. The contents were exhaustively archived by writers and performers Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo (with a team of assistants) over the course of six months, and the piece had a few readings among the company before the first audience preview. That short incubation period allowed a sense of timeliness that might have been lost had Borg and Rizzolo spent more time working and reworking their script.
“I think that part of what has been so well-received about the piece is that it’s reflective of a lot of things that are going on now for people of all classes,” Rizzolo explains. Rizzolo and Borg’s work was made easier, however, by the framework they had constructed for themselves as ersatz early 20th-century archaeologists, excavating the lives of the lockers’ owners. “There was a blueprint for how to go about it,” Rizzolo says. “It was a task. It was, ‘Let’s use whatever we find and create something out of that.’ And that task was based on things that are going on right now, like the fact that there is a huge upswing in the number of personal storage spaces going up for auction, and that is a microcosm in the greater trend of foreclosure.”
Playwright Steven Cole Hughes agrees with the blueprint concept. A writer working with theater company aMios, Hughes is part of their currently running NYCycle 4: Secondary Sources, the fourth installment of aMios’ series of three 30-minute plays, all of which come with a series of instructions and must be ready for public consumption within three months.
“I’ve been writing plays for a long time, but only in the last few years has it actually become a career and I’ve had commissions and things like that,” Hughes says. “And I find I work so much better when a) there’s money attached and b) when I have deadlines! And this thing we’re working on now, not only are there deadlines, but there are instructions. Christian [Haines, artistic director] will give us all these things. ‘Your play has to be set in this month, in New York, and you have to include this line in your play.’ It’s really fun to have this stuff.” Hughes is a fan of the brief development process that defines the NYCycle series, but he’s leery of adhering to it too often.
Joey Rizzolo (left) and Christopher Borg in the New York Neo-Futurist production of Locker 4173b at The Monkey. Photo by Anton Nickel
“I don’t know if I prefer it,” he says. “It’s definitely great for this. If this was all playwrighting was, I think that would be weird. I’ve been saying to the other two writers that they kind of have a skewed idea of what playwrighting is. They’re both talented writers, but neither of them had any playwrighting experience before. So they both have this idea that this is what writing a play is, when really it’s not.”
That “skewed idea” can also lead to some moments of refreshing awkwardness and impressive talent. When Blue Coyote commissioned five playwrights to explore the place where technology, sex and relationships intersect for Standards of Decency 3, “We caught our playwrights kind of off-guard,” Ancowitz says. If they think about pornography and the Internet, they don’t share their thoughts, normally. And sometimes that misfires, but it always feels like something fresh.”
Whether the lack of development is a selling point for audiences is beside the point. According to Ancowitz, “One of the great things about NYC as a theater town is that there are a variety of theater companies with different methods of working.”
Besides, as Ancowitz and Blue Coyote have found: “Faster is cheaper and more fun.”
