The content question

Tony Adams has started a lovely discussion about content. There are plenty of comments from folks you all know and love, and then there's a post from Kris Vire, following up on HIS views on the question of content. Specifically, Kris is talking about the American theater's greatest enemy: the MFA. (His post is also titled 3-2-1 Content, which reminds me of the first magazine to which I ever subscribed as a kid...ahh, youth.)

There's always been this part of me that has avoided talking about the MFAs and how they've helped ruin theater because I don't have an MFA. Like I'm somehow calling sour grapes because I'm not a produced playwright in New York and have Pulitzer prize winners telling everyone how wonderful I am because I paid their salaries.

I'm going to shamefully quote Kris here, because he makes a multitude of points here very succinctly. You'd think he works in journalism!

Tonight, for the second year in a row, I took in the WTA's Actors' Scene Showcase, in which a bunch of actors, most fresh out of undergrad or grad school and new to the city, perform scenes for casting directors and theater nerds like myself in hopes of getting noticed. Because they're mostly just out of school, they perform stuff by playwrights whose work is currently getting noticed in schools, the ones who are regularly written about in American Theatre and taught in scene study classes: Neil LaBute, Sarah Ruhl, Martin McDonagh. My friend Brooke, a director and playwright herself, pointed out a double-whammy of my favorites: a LaBute scene from Autobahn ("That Neil LaBute just loves women so much") followed by Ruhl's Melancholy Play ("Okay, I get your whimsy thing now.")

Kids out of school, apeing what they learned in school that was written by playwrights writing what they were encouraged to write in theater school. Content what?

By the by, who are the currently most-talked-about, most mass-audience-accepted playwright and director in Chicago? How about the never-trained-as-a-writer Tracy Letts, who actually wrote what he knew and was mocked for it by certain New York critics, who found him not urbane enough? And how about David Cromer, who keeps directing these classic plays about small towns that would be mocked by those same critics if they were new? And who likes to tell
reporters (including myself) how he never finished high school or college, let alone grad school?

"Write what you know," as long as you can afford six figures in loans for the Ivy League. Do we have a content problem in theater? I think we might.

For the love of Pete, I hope these kids aren't doing scenes from Noah Haidle plays!

It's a vicious circle. So many new plays that are getting attention are rich kids writing about rich people for rich people programmed by rich people. Who wants to watch a bunch of smug, clever bastards on stage who know more than I do? Not me, mister. I don't want to feel stupid. I want to feel moved.