This site, The Plays of Max Sparber, is now an archive of writing and a resource for older works by the playwright Max "Bunny" Sparber. If you are interested in his newer work, written under the name Bunny Ultramod, you can find it at Ultramod Plays: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.
We’re about to experience an epochal change in American theater. It’s been coming for a while, and you can be co-owner of its future. We’re coming out of a period of extraordinary conservatism, which seems to universally be understood as a reaction to both an increased institutionalization of American theaters (especially non-profit American theaters) and the aging of their subscription audiences. But this seems to be in a sort of death spiral, as the audiences are starting to literally die off, and are not being replaced by a new audience.
Many of the artistic directors of these theaters are now nearing retirement age. Other theaters swap out their artistic directors every decade or so, just as a matter of course. And you could take one of those jobs. Yes, you. Because the people who are most likely to get plugged into those positions are the people who can figure out how to rebuild the audience for American theater. If you can sell seats to a younger audience, you’re going to control the future.
Because the same impulses that caused these theater institutions to retract to artistic conservatism in the 90s and onward will now force them to try something radical. Two decades ago, they had an audience, and they had to hold it. Now, once again, they have to build an audience. And they are buggered if they know how to do it. Nobody really seems to. They throw parties for people aged 20-40. They offer lower ticket prices. They have cookouts with the cast. They set up Facebook accounts and run ads on popular blogs. Does any of it work?
Who knows? I’d say we have about a decade before the system really starts breaking down, and suddenly every American theater goes into a total panic. That’s a decade you have to prepare for the moment. I am predicting what I’m going to call the “Easy Rider” moment, and I’m calling it this because, in 1969, when “Easy Rider” came out, it was the moment when the American studios felt most desperately out of touch with American youth. And then the independently produced “Easy Rider” made $19 million dollars, and suddenly the studios threw up their hands and turned over the keys to the studio to the longhairs, many of whom still run things -- Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, etc.
I’m giving us a decade, and we have that time to figure out how to reach the kids. How to turn them into theater audiences. And it won’t be by doing things through mainstream institutions -- revolutions never happen that way. It will be through bold, relentless experimentation. With themes. With venues. With outreach. With casting. With how we charge for plays. We have a decade to play around. Somebody will figure it out -- theater is, after all, a medium that is forever dying and being reborn, just like Dionysus, its patron god. And that person, and those who follow them, will get to take charge when the institutions start feeling that they may be crumbling, and flail about for their saviors.
It could be you.
Many of the artistic directors of these theaters are now nearing retirement age. Other theaters swap out their artistic directors every decade or so, just as a matter of course. And you could take one of those jobs. Yes, you. Because the people who are most likely to get plugged into those positions are the people who can figure out how to rebuild the audience for American theater. If you can sell seats to a younger audience, you’re going to control the future.
Because the same impulses that caused these theater institutions to retract to artistic conservatism in the 90s and onward will now force them to try something radical. Two decades ago, they had an audience, and they had to hold it. Now, once again, they have to build an audience. And they are buggered if they know how to do it. Nobody really seems to. They throw parties for people aged 20-40. They offer lower ticket prices. They have cookouts with the cast. They set up Facebook accounts and run ads on popular blogs. Does any of it work?
Who knows? I’d say we have about a decade before the system really starts breaking down, and suddenly every American theater goes into a total panic. That’s a decade you have to prepare for the moment. I am predicting what I’m going to call the “Easy Rider” moment, and I’m calling it this because, in 1969, when “Easy Rider” came out, it was the moment when the American studios felt most desperately out of touch with American youth. And then the independently produced “Easy Rider” made $19 million dollars, and suddenly the studios threw up their hands and turned over the keys to the studio to the longhairs, many of whom still run things -- Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, etc.
I’m giving us a decade, and we have that time to figure out how to reach the kids. How to turn them into theater audiences. And it won’t be by doing things through mainstream institutions -- revolutions never happen that way. It will be through bold, relentless experimentation. With themes. With venues. With outreach. With casting. With how we charge for plays. We have a decade to play around. Somebody will figure it out -- theater is, after all, a medium that is forever dying and being reborn, just like Dionysus, its patron god. And that person, and those who follow them, will get to take charge when the institutions start feeling that they may be crumbling, and flail about for their saviors.
It could be you.
I guess I’m still a spoiled child in a lot of ways, but I don’t like having to ask permission for anything. And that’s what we typically do in the arts. As playwrights, we send off our scripts and wait for somebody to decide they’re going to let us have a production. As actors, we audition for roles, and hope somebody lets us up on the stage. It’s endemic to the arts. Artists submit to galleries. Directors apply to work at theaters. Artistic directors consult with boards. And everybody turns to sources of money, begging permission through grant applications, or from private donors. In the end, it’s often not even all that clear who has the final say of yes or no, although I suspect whoever has the most money gets the biggest say.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind these gatekeepers of culture if they demonstrably prevented bad work from getting made and championed great work. I see no evidence of this. In fact, having witnessed the arts funding process, and the process by which art is selected, it’s been my experience that all sorts of extraneous factors dominate the process. Art is not a meritocracy, and, really, how could it be? We don’t actually know what is great and what is terrible in the arts. We are creatures of idiosyncratic tastes, and we’re in a medium where there cannot be objective absolutes. Art is good because people collectively decide it is. It’s bad because people decide it isn’t good. The very things that we think we can point to as objectively bad -- amateurism, shallowness, cliche, plagiarism -- have all been deliberate choices by some very intelligent artists, who have successfully used it to make art. Art constantly looks inwards, asking what it is and challenging whatever definition it locates. And it should.
But the trouble with this approach is that it means a lot of art falls outside what others are willing to invest in. A play that doesn’t act like a play is going to have a hard time finding a theater to produce it. An actor who doesn’t act like an actor is not likely to be cast. I think it’s a little easier to engage in this sorts of explorations in the world of fine arts, in part because many artist are perfectly capable of making the art themselves, and only need ask permission when it comes to displaying the art (and, even then, there are plenty of ways to show art that don’t involve begging a gallery). The fine arts also benefit from a century of restless experimentation, and so challenging the norm is expected, and celebrated, in contemporary fine art. But theater is a collaborative medium. It’s not enough to just write a play, it must get produced. It’s hard enough to get a play produced that behaves like a traditional play; if you start getting really outre, you’re mostly going to be on your own. I think this model encourages a sort of conservatism in theater, and discourages innovation.
A permissionless world
We’re at a time when traditional gatekeepers are collapsing everywhere else. It used to be that if you wanted to make a movie, even a short one, there was an economic gatekeeper in place, in that the equipment was quite expensive. Beyond that, once you made the film, there was the issues of finding a place to show it, and, if you wanted a larger audience, finding a distributor.
These things are all still in place, but the Internet has created an alternative. Nowadays, you can make a film digitally, edit it yourself, and place it online, without needing anybody’s permission, and at minimal cost. Every 10 minutes, users upload 24 hours worth of videos to YouTube. Some are only seen by a handful of people. Most are seen by several thousand -- about the average audience for the entire run of a play in a black box theater. Some are seen by millions, or tens of millions, or, in the case of a video of a child biting another child’s finger, 245 million times. There have been YouTube filmmakers who have moved on to careers in mainstream filmmaking, and there are a surprisingly large number who make a living from putting films on the site and claiming a percentage of ad revenue. It has completely bypassed the traditional gatekeepers of culture, although YouTube has some gates of its own.
Similarly, the Web has given quite a few writers a place to publish without having to go through the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing world. The variety of platforms writers can use just keep expanding, from blogs to sites that let you self-publish books to Kindle. This has happened with music as well: It’s become extremely inexpensive to make music digitally, and extremely easy to distribute it online, and nowhere in this process do they need to beg anybody for permission to do so.
It seems like we are, for the most part, in a permissionless world. This has generated an explosion of creativity. Of course, there is a lot out there that is ephemeral, or bewildering, or unchallenging. But this is to be expected -- according to Sturgeon’s Law, 90 percent of everything is crud. But if you have 10 pieces of art, by his metric, you have one that’s worth a damn. If you have 100 pieces of art, you have 10 that are worthwhile. And if you have 1 million, you have 100,000 great pieces of art. Art benefits from there being more of it, and suffers from creating a gatekeeping system that guarantees less of it.
We are the children of the revolution
This fact can be quite threatening to established gatekeepers, who benefit from a sort of manufactured scarcity. There’s a real fear that there is a limited amount of audience members out there, and limited funds for making art, and we’re better off if we limit the pool of people trying for these audience members and this money. I don’t buy that for a second. This is precisely what American theater has done for a half-century now, and it has produced dwindling and greying audiences, playwrights who cannot make a living from writing plays, and an endless parade of plays that all sort of look like other plays, many written by a handful of people who all graduated from the same half-dozen colleges. I suppose if your the sort of person who makes this sort of play, American theater is going to seem just right to you at this moment. Most of us aren’t.
I’m not going to argue mainstream theaters must change how they do things and create some sort of YouTube model of making plays. Even if I thought they should do this, they’re not going to listen to me. And even if I thought they should do this, I don’t think they could. They’re beholden to the existing model. They have salaries to pay, and a mortgage to pay for, and an audience that may be dwindling but isn’t likely to appreciate their theater suddenly upending an existing model in favor of another one. No, they are what they are, and what they are is an institution.
But I’ll be damned if I am going to spend the rest of my life pleading with these decaying institutions for permission to do my plays. I don’t want to create theater that consists of people begging each other for opportunity. I want to see a type of theater where any significant need for permission ceases to exist. It’s just the modern way to do things.
This is why I have been writing plays that can be produced for almost no money. It’s why I write plays that don’t require a theater space to be performed. It’s why I don’t require that people pay me to do many of my plays, or get my permission, or even ask me. Screw that. That’s all we have in theater now, and we need less of it. We need to invent mechanisms by which anybody can make a play and produce it. We need to figure out ways these people can get an audience for what they do. Because these people are us. We’re the ones who make theater. Let’s start doing it on our own, without asking anybody whether we have permission to do so. Who are these gatekeepers anyway? As far as I am concerned, they’re ghosts, haunting us from theater’s past.
And what are we? We’re star children. We’re anarchists. We’re rock stars from Mars. We’re the future, if we want to be.
I suppose I wouldn’t mind these gatekeepers of culture if they demonstrably prevented bad work from getting made and championed great work. I see no evidence of this. In fact, having witnessed the arts funding process, and the process by which art is selected, it’s been my experience that all sorts of extraneous factors dominate the process. Art is not a meritocracy, and, really, how could it be? We don’t actually know what is great and what is terrible in the arts. We are creatures of idiosyncratic tastes, and we’re in a medium where there cannot be objective absolutes. Art is good because people collectively decide it is. It’s bad because people decide it isn’t good. The very things that we think we can point to as objectively bad -- amateurism, shallowness, cliche, plagiarism -- have all been deliberate choices by some very intelligent artists, who have successfully used it to make art. Art constantly looks inwards, asking what it is and challenging whatever definition it locates. And it should.
But the trouble with this approach is that it means a lot of art falls outside what others are willing to invest in. A play that doesn’t act like a play is going to have a hard time finding a theater to produce it. An actor who doesn’t act like an actor is not likely to be cast. I think it’s a little easier to engage in this sorts of explorations in the world of fine arts, in part because many artist are perfectly capable of making the art themselves, and only need ask permission when it comes to displaying the art (and, even then, there are plenty of ways to show art that don’t involve begging a gallery). The fine arts also benefit from a century of restless experimentation, and so challenging the norm is expected, and celebrated, in contemporary fine art. But theater is a collaborative medium. It’s not enough to just write a play, it must get produced. It’s hard enough to get a play produced that behaves like a traditional play; if you start getting really outre, you’re mostly going to be on your own. I think this model encourages a sort of conservatism in theater, and discourages innovation.
A permissionless world
We’re at a time when traditional gatekeepers are collapsing everywhere else. It used to be that if you wanted to make a movie, even a short one, there was an economic gatekeeper in place, in that the equipment was quite expensive. Beyond that, once you made the film, there was the issues of finding a place to show it, and, if you wanted a larger audience, finding a distributor.
These things are all still in place, but the Internet has created an alternative. Nowadays, you can make a film digitally, edit it yourself, and place it online, without needing anybody’s permission, and at minimal cost. Every 10 minutes, users upload 24 hours worth of videos to YouTube. Some are only seen by a handful of people. Most are seen by several thousand -- about the average audience for the entire run of a play in a black box theater. Some are seen by millions, or tens of millions, or, in the case of a video of a child biting another child’s finger, 245 million times. There have been YouTube filmmakers who have moved on to careers in mainstream filmmaking, and there are a surprisingly large number who make a living from putting films on the site and claiming a percentage of ad revenue. It has completely bypassed the traditional gatekeepers of culture, although YouTube has some gates of its own.
Similarly, the Web has given quite a few writers a place to publish without having to go through the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing world. The variety of platforms writers can use just keep expanding, from blogs to sites that let you self-publish books to Kindle. This has happened with music as well: It’s become extremely inexpensive to make music digitally, and extremely easy to distribute it online, and nowhere in this process do they need to beg anybody for permission to do so.
It seems like we are, for the most part, in a permissionless world. This has generated an explosion of creativity. Of course, there is a lot out there that is ephemeral, or bewildering, or unchallenging. But this is to be expected -- according to Sturgeon’s Law, 90 percent of everything is crud. But if you have 10 pieces of art, by his metric, you have one that’s worth a damn. If you have 100 pieces of art, you have 10 that are worthwhile. And if you have 1 million, you have 100,000 great pieces of art. Art benefits from there being more of it, and suffers from creating a gatekeeping system that guarantees less of it.
We are the children of the revolution
This fact can be quite threatening to established gatekeepers, who benefit from a sort of manufactured scarcity. There’s a real fear that there is a limited amount of audience members out there, and limited funds for making art, and we’re better off if we limit the pool of people trying for these audience members and this money. I don’t buy that for a second. This is precisely what American theater has done for a half-century now, and it has produced dwindling and greying audiences, playwrights who cannot make a living from writing plays, and an endless parade of plays that all sort of look like other plays, many written by a handful of people who all graduated from the same half-dozen colleges. I suppose if your the sort of person who makes this sort of play, American theater is going to seem just right to you at this moment. Most of us aren’t.
I’m not going to argue mainstream theaters must change how they do things and create some sort of YouTube model of making plays. Even if I thought they should do this, they’re not going to listen to me. And even if I thought they should do this, I don’t think they could. They’re beholden to the existing model. They have salaries to pay, and a mortgage to pay for, and an audience that may be dwindling but isn’t likely to appreciate their theater suddenly upending an existing model in favor of another one. No, they are what they are, and what they are is an institution.
But I’ll be damned if I am going to spend the rest of my life pleading with these decaying institutions for permission to do my plays. I don’t want to create theater that consists of people begging each other for opportunity. I want to see a type of theater where any significant need for permission ceases to exist. It’s just the modern way to do things.
This is why I have been writing plays that can be produced for almost no money. It’s why I write plays that don’t require a theater space to be performed. It’s why I don’t require that people pay me to do many of my plays, or get my permission, or even ask me. Screw that. That’s all we have in theater now, and we need less of it. We need to invent mechanisms by which anybody can make a play and produce it. We need to figure out ways these people can get an audience for what they do. Because these people are us. We’re the ones who make theater. Let’s start doing it on our own, without asking anybody whether we have permission to do so. Who are these gatekeepers anyway? As far as I am concerned, they’re ghosts, haunting us from theater’s past.
And what are we? We’re star children. We’re anarchists. We’re rock stars from Mars. We’re the future, if we want to be.
Because I have been writing plays that I give away, sometimes with Coco’s assistance, I have been feeling a great freedom to make these plays as terrifying as possible, in a way. You always pay to do art, in some way or another. I am not going to ask for a fiduciary relationship; I will, instead, ask that you do something frightening, or impossible. These plays in the Fast, Cheap and Out of Control series sometimes feel as though they have the quality of a dare to them, and I don’t think that will go away. Instead, it will probably increase.
I like theater to be a bit of a dare, or something of a prank. I was once asked if I ever wrote a play I was a little afraid to have produced, and I answered that I think we should always try to write plays we would be a little afraid to have produced. But now I think I was wrong, at least in terms of my own writing. I don’t want to be a little afraid of my own plays. I want to be terrified of them. I want the idea of producing the play to fill people with a genuine concern. Will there be arrests? Will there be riots? What will become of my reputation?
The balance to this is that I also try to write plays that are instantly appealing, at least to me. These may be plays I would be terrified to have produced, but they are also plays I desperately want to see. I did a production of “Sleaze Book Club” a few months ago, and my mother showed up for it. The play involves a group of performers reporting on pornographic paperbacks they have read, and I was reporting on something called “The Pimp Wore a Dress.” I have always tried to be a gentleman around my parents, who have hardly ever even heard me cuss. So I was petrified about describing the details of one of the most hideously pornographic books I have ever read before my mother. At the same time, what great theater! So I made sure to introduce her, so that others could appreciate the spectacle. There have been hints that somebody in Minnesota will soon be doing "Basement Porn Party," and I am chomping at the bit to see it.
I suppose I think the things that frighten us are worth exploring. We tend to create rather safe experiences of terror -- horror movies, for example, which, by the fact that they have been categorized into a genre, are, in some way, minimized. Further, these films tend to abstract our fears, by creating metaphoric substitutes for them. These can be really terrifying, but you rarely watch one and think, good god, what if my mother knew I was up to this? Could I get fired for participating in this? Will I be arrested as I leave the theater?
Of course, you probably won’t, no matter what you're seeing. Art itself is a sort of genre, and it’s surprising how much you can get away with when something is labeled art. But, then, you might find yourself slapped in irons. Performers and audiences have been arrested in the past. It happens once in a while. And what a thrill!
Every so often, art should feel decidedly unsafe for those who see it, and those who make it. It used to be that you knew something was worth a damn if there was a chance of the theater getting raided -- or, for that matter, the bar, or the bathroom, or the bookstore. I like art where the people onstage have dared themselves to do something they are afraid to do, and you have dared yourself to see something you’re afraid to see. And sometimes these dares aren’t worth it, and I am not sure that I will produce dares that are worthwhile, although I will try. But sometimes you try something that you find quite frightening, and, once done, you discover you love it.
I had a dream once. David Bowie came up to me at a party, joined by his wife, who, in the dream, was not Iman, but a very tall, very pale, disinterested woman who looked like David Bowie. In the dream, David Bowie knew me, and he made romantic overtures toward me, inviting me to join him and his wife in bed. I did not know what they would expect of me, or if I could produce what they expected. I could not imagine enjoying it, and seriously considered the likelihood that I would be injured by the experience. The whole scenario filled me with horror. And yet I knew I couldn’t refuse. How could I go through life not knowing what I had missed? How could I live, having refused this opportunity?
I want my plays to be the equivalent of David Bowie and his nightmarish dream wife propositioning you at a party. It’s a tall order, but we have to shoot for something.
I like theater to be a bit of a dare, or something of a prank. I was once asked if I ever wrote a play I was a little afraid to have produced, and I answered that I think we should always try to write plays we would be a little afraid to have produced. But now I think I was wrong, at least in terms of my own writing. I don’t want to be a little afraid of my own plays. I want to be terrified of them. I want the idea of producing the play to fill people with a genuine concern. Will there be arrests? Will there be riots? What will become of my reputation?
The balance to this is that I also try to write plays that are instantly appealing, at least to me. These may be plays I would be terrified to have produced, but they are also plays I desperately want to see. I did a production of “Sleaze Book Club” a few months ago, and my mother showed up for it. The play involves a group of performers reporting on pornographic paperbacks they have read, and I was reporting on something called “The Pimp Wore a Dress.” I have always tried to be a gentleman around my parents, who have hardly ever even heard me cuss. So I was petrified about describing the details of one of the most hideously pornographic books I have ever read before my mother. At the same time, what great theater! So I made sure to introduce her, so that others could appreciate the spectacle. There have been hints that somebody in Minnesota will soon be doing "Basement Porn Party," and I am chomping at the bit to see it.
I suppose I think the things that frighten us are worth exploring. We tend to create rather safe experiences of terror -- horror movies, for example, which, by the fact that they have been categorized into a genre, are, in some way, minimized. Further, these films tend to abstract our fears, by creating metaphoric substitutes for them. These can be really terrifying, but you rarely watch one and think, good god, what if my mother knew I was up to this? Could I get fired for participating in this? Will I be arrested as I leave the theater?
Of course, you probably won’t, no matter what you're seeing. Art itself is a sort of genre, and it’s surprising how much you can get away with when something is labeled art. But, then, you might find yourself slapped in irons. Performers and audiences have been arrested in the past. It happens once in a while. And what a thrill!
Every so often, art should feel decidedly unsafe for those who see it, and those who make it. It used to be that you knew something was worth a damn if there was a chance of the theater getting raided -- or, for that matter, the bar, or the bathroom, or the bookstore. I like art where the people onstage have dared themselves to do something they are afraid to do, and you have dared yourself to see something you’re afraid to see. And sometimes these dares aren’t worth it, and I am not sure that I will produce dares that are worthwhile, although I will try. But sometimes you try something that you find quite frightening, and, once done, you discover you love it.
I had a dream once. David Bowie came up to me at a party, joined by his wife, who, in the dream, was not Iman, but a very tall, very pale, disinterested woman who looked like David Bowie. In the dream, David Bowie knew me, and he made romantic overtures toward me, inviting me to join him and his wife in bed. I did not know what they would expect of me, or if I could produce what they expected. I could not imagine enjoying it, and seriously considered the likelihood that I would be injured by the experience. The whole scenario filled me with horror. And yet I knew I couldn’t refuse. How could I go through life not knowing what I had missed? How could I live, having refused this opportunity?
I want my plays to be the equivalent of David Bowie and his nightmarish dream wife propositioning you at a party. It’s a tall order, but we have to shoot for something.
