BAM Crash

Yesterday, the New York Times published an article entitled “Brooklyn Academy of Music Lays Off 13 Percent of Its Staff.” A little over a week ago, it was Center Theatre Group in LA announcing it was “postponing” it’s final production, closing its largest theater space, the Mark Taper Forum, and laying off 10% of its staff. The Westport Country Playhouse, a 90-year-old regional theater in Connecticut, has seen most of its staff dismissed as its board “reimagines” the venue as, basically, a roadhouse. The Triad Stage in Greensboro has been closed entirely, and the Public Theatre in NYC eliminated the Under-the-Radar Festival. Oregon Shakespeare Festival is also in serious financial trouble, cutting their staff and their season by more than half.

As they said on The Office, “My God! It’s happening.”

There appears to be a severe crisis in the regional theaters across the nation, and while many point to the pandemic as the most prominent factor, what we’re also seeing is that audiences just “aren’t coming back” like everyone hoped they would. The world changed in the two years we were locked down, and it’s a much different landscape for the arts today.

BAM president Gina Duncan, the Times said, seems to recognize this. She said in her letter to the BAM staff “that the changes were necessary in part to help BAM to ‘weather the downturn in charitable giving for the arts, and address an outdated business model that heavily relies on a shrinking donor base.’ She said that the organization faced a “sizable structural deficit” each year.” (Anyone who knows me knows why I italicized “an outdated business model.”) Announcements of cuts at the other theaters used similar language.

As some of you know, I have been writing and talking about the unsustainability of the nonprofit business model for many, many years on my old “Theatre Ideas” blog, which I wrote from 2005-2012, as well as on The Clyde Fitch Report, and briefly on my Creative Insubordination blog. I have long been skeptical about “legacy” theaters such as OSF and CTG with their massive investments in ever-larger performance spaces, and their always growing administrative staffs. Indeed, the Times wrote, the number of fulltime staff positions at BAM had “dwindled to around 200, and the latest round of cuts are expected to move the number below that threshold.”

“Dwindled” to around 200 full-time staff??? Seriously? And OSF dwarfs that: it cut its staff from over 500 in 2020 to roughly 250. CTG had 200 full-time staff. To understand what this means, we need a point of comparison. Staff numbers for OSF, BAM, and CTG prior to this round of cuts is 950 full-time positions. Multiplied by 52 weeks, that means 49,400 work weeks. By means of comparison, Actors Equity, in it’s current annual report (2021-2022), by comparison, lists 196,388 work weeks for its entire membership. In other words, the work weeks of the full-time staffs of three theaters equals over 25% of those of all of the professional actors and stage managers in the US. Administrative bloat is what happens when theaters become institutions.

It’s certainly not the artists who benefit from this situation—most are freelancers brought in for a single show or two, or for a season if they are fortunate, and paid very little, especially when compared to the Artistic Director and Executive Director. (Broadway World, in discussing the elimination of the Under the Radar Festival, rather pointedly noted that “Oskar Eustis took in $1,122,561 in compensation, but two other executives also made over $450,000: Chief Advancement Officer Laurence Jahns was at $484,240 and Executive Director Patrick Willingham was at $472,293.” The Under the Radar budget was estimated at $500,000.)

It isn’t an accident that the theaters that are crumbling today are some of the largest and most prestigious theaters in the nation, and I predict there will be more to follow. Institutions with massive buildings, and a tradition of relying on subsidy to close their budget gaps, will start to fall one after another.

To make matters worse, many of these legacy institutions have recently seen leadership changes and the hiring of a younger generation of BIPOC artistic directors who are being forced to face these hard times following the fallout of the pandemic.

Frankly, I am not certain why any artist, but especially a BIPOC artist, would want to take over a wheezing theatrical dinosaur. Sure, it’s an opportunity to cash in, but is it worth it? Does anybody believe that these theaters are going to tolerate the changes necessary to diversify their audience? Why do these visionary leaders not follow August Wilson’s call in The Ground on Which I Stand (a much more radical manifesto than #We See You White American Theatre, in my opinion) and start something of their own, building an audience of people who want the kind of plays they want to do. August Wilson:

“We need those misguided financial resources to be put to a better use. We cannot develop our playwrights with the meager resources at our disposal… Without theaters we cannot develop our talents. If we cannot develop our talents, then everyone suffers. Our writers. The theater. The audience. Actors are deprived of material, our communities are deprived of jobs in support of the art: the company manager, the press coordinator, the electricians, the carpenters, the concessionaires, the people that work in the wardrobe, the box office staff, the ushers, the janitors. We need some theaters. We cannot continue like this.”

Well, it looks as if mainstream legacy theaters can’t continue like this, either. The old way has become obsolete already—or at least we’re finally willing to recognize it. Who will step up and create a new model?

Artists, it’s your time to shine.

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First, there's one guy dancing, and people think, "He's kinda weird." They walk right by, pretending not to see him. The dancing guy could stop, but he doesn't...until a second guy joins him, and the ball starts rolling. It takes vision to be the first one, and also determination, but it also takes courage to be the second. [Be sure to watch to the end]

I know this is an oft-referenced video in business books, but nevertheless very few people, in business or otherwise, seem to apply it to their own behavior. Instead, they keep thinking that if they continue to do it the way everybody else does, the way they've been told things work, they will eventually succeed. Finally, they give up in despair, tell themselves that they just weren’t good enough or not lucky enough, and then (in the case of theater people) they go into higher education, where they teach their students the same damn thing that didn't work for them. It is _The Myth of Sisyphus_ of theater education.

In a 2023 tweet that led to the 2025 National Book Award winning One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been against This, author Omar El Akkad wrote, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” I’d argue that the reverse is also true: one day, when there is no risk, people will have always been for the change that they resisted when it was starting. I guess it’s just another way of saying it, really.

Buckminster Fuller said "Dare to be naive." Start there. The dance that they guy is doing is definitely not cool, but it’s just the way he feels like dancing. The guy in the video is enjoying himself—that’s the second key: do what you’re doing with joy. Third, he clearly has no interest in what other people think of him—so, pay no attention to naysayers. Fourth, keep doing it. As long as you believe in what you’re doing, keep doing it. Fifth, embrace the second arrival. Going back to Buckminster Fuller, he is also quoted as saying, ""You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."

In other words, dance and keep dancing.​

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I seem to be in the midst of a urge to read or reread inspiring books about theater. It started with Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, which I will write about later, and really set sale when I finished Sara Farrington’s The Lost Conversation, which I wrote about a few days ago.

I’m not sure what has taken me in this direction. Maybe it is a sense that finally theater people are considering whether we might have taken a wrong turn, and are being drawn back to the past before forging a path forward.

Yesterday, I was drawn toward Robert Edmond Jones’ 1941 classic The Dramatic Imagination. Jones was a groundbreaking designer of scenery, lights, and costumes, and his book discusses all three, but his main topic is the pure power of the imagination and the importance of theater as a way of allowing everyone, both artists and audiences, to experience a glimpse of a transcendent world.

His style of writing might best be described as “thick description,” to borrow an anthropological term. I find myself thinking of a painter who applies layer after layer of paint to their canvas, creating depths that seem to glow through the surface of the painting. He adds image after analogy after reference after metaphor after fact until something emerges from the depths of his mind that seems to contain all of those elements at once, like a stirring chord played by many instruments.

In a chapter called “Some Thoughts on Stage Costume,” he uses as a prompt thirteen lines from John Milton’s poem Samson Agonistes, and from there we are given a fascinating 12-page description of his mind at work. I’ll give you a few examples:

…a costume of Milton’s own time will inevitably express the characteristic qualities of mind of life at that time. Let us bring to mind what we know of these qualities. Great names arise in the memory: England: Elizabeth the Queen, the sovereign who once said, I could have wept but that my face was made for the day: Sir Francis Drake, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the streets of London all hung with blue, like the sea: William Shakespeare, author and player, the greatest master of public art the world has ever know: Marlowe, with his “mighty line” — Kit Marlowe, stabbed in the Mermaid Tavern in Southwark over across the bridge; Sir Walter Raleigh, with his cloak and his sea-knowledge and his new colony, Virginia, in the west on the other side of the world…

The list goes on, layer upon layer, and upon and, until a sense starts to emerges:

As we dwell on these things, the dramatic imagination begins to sketch in our minds the first vague outlines of a costume. It is bold and fantastic and elaborate and ceremonious and splendid, a typical expression of the Age of Daring.

He then moves on to Milton’s “mood out of which he contemplates his subject.”

Milton’s mood is mature, noble, grand. His season is autumn, splendid and serene, a “season of mellow fruitfulness.” And we find in his poetry a great elegance, a slightly rigid elegance perhaps, like the elegance which is at times almost a constant in the music of Handel or Purcell. It is often gay, jocund, buxom, one might say; hearty, with a great natural health coursing through it…”

And on he goes, until suddenly he declares, “All at once we see it. The figure—I had almost said figurehead—draws near and in our imagination we watch its majestic progress across the stage… We see it for an instant, plain and clear. Now it has vanished. We saw it. And now we must make it.”

Jones sees theater as a process of evocation, a summoning of life out of the imaginative ether of the collective and individual unconscious. I’m reminded of Faustus convincing Mephistopheles to conjure the image of Helen of Troy, who rises out of nowhere to enchant Faustus.

Jones was writing in 1941, a year when people were once again prophecying the death of theater, which he says he has not taken seriosuly in the past, “but this time there is greater content of truth.” It is a time not unlike our own, in which the theater is “dwindling and shrinking away… It is essentially a prose theater, and of late it has become increasingly a theater of journalism. The quality of legend is almost completely absent from contemporary plays.” While he had grown up in a theater of realism influenced by photography, movies, he says, have taken over that style, since movies are photography plus movement and voice, and by doing so, it has given permission for artists to create “a theater set free for beauty and splendor and dreams…”

The loveliest and most poignant of all stage pictures are those that are seen in the mind’s eye. All the elaborate mechanism of our modern stage cannot match for real evocation the line [from King Lear] Tom’s a-cold. A mere indication of place can send our imaginations leaping…It is this delighted exercise of imagination, this heady joy, that the theater has lost and is about to find once more.

And he was right. Three years after his book was published, we had the first production of The Glass Menagerie, followed quickly by A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman, all straining away from realism toward some level of poetic imagination. Jones looks back toward Marc Blitzstein’s famous 1937 production of The Cradle Will Rock, Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre modern-dress, bare-stage production of Julius Caesar, “the procession of wet black umbrellas in the funeral scene of Our Town.”

Finally, he declares:

The only theater worth saving, the only theater worth having, is a theater motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every trace of the photographic attitude of mind, when we succeed in making a production that is the exact antithesis of a motion picture, a production that is everything a motion picture is not and nothing a motion picture is, the old lost magic will return once more… We need not be impatient. A brilliant fresh theater will presently appear.

And here in 2026, as the old Broadway and regional theater wobbles under the weight of Too Much, I find myself believing in Jones’s faith that something new is waiting to be born. If only artists can be reminded of the nature of that “old lost magic,” which Jones is still in touch with and can sense, but which will take a new form that will reflect our own time and our own imagination, then something new will arise. We saw glimpses of it in the work of the artists Sara Farrington interviewed, most of which was cut short by the AIDS epidemic.

But today we are called on to once again use our dramatic imaginations to summon the new thing.

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I recently read Sara Farrington’s (Theater Is Hard) wonderful book The Lost Conversation: Interviews with an enduring Avant-Garde. The interviews with playwrights, dancers, directors, and performers of the 70s and 80s avant-garde scene in New York City — Joanne Akalaitis, Richard Foreman, David Henry Hwang, Mac Wellman, Robert Wilson, Bill T. Jones, Kate Valk and many more — were done just before the start of the Covid pandemic, when the performing arts were shut down along with everything else. Farrington has described this as a “how” book, in which she discussed with them not only their work but the conditions that the work was made within: how much did you pay for rent? how long did it take you to find your confidence? how did you find your way into the avant-garde scene? The artists, most of whom were in the 70s and 80s when interviewed, are lively, funny, and down-to-earth.

I worked at PAJ Publications/Performing Arts Journal during the late 80s and early 90s, and I met several of the artists (Robert Wilson’s office was just down the hall from PAJ Publications on Varick Street), and thanks to the publishers, Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, as well as the occasional visits from my friend and mentor, Alvin Goldfarb, I was very aware of the work of most of them. I have also just finished reading composer Phillip Glass’s memoir Words Without Music, who made his career in the downtown art scene and talks extensively about many of these artists, particularly Joanne Akalaitis, his former wife who co-founded Mabou Mines and with whom he frequently collaborated, as well as Robert Wilson, with whom he famously created Einstein on the Beach. I recommend reading Glass’s work alongside of Farrington’s to get a real taste of the scene.

If you are unfamiliar with these artists, Farrington provides a list of resources, including documentaries, films, filmed productions, books, journals, and articles. This is a treasure trove.

One of the most illuminating things Farrington asks is how much they paid for rent during this time, amounts which today sound almost impossible — usually a couple hundred dollars a month, give or take. Many of the artists were able to support themselves doing part-time work, although several revealed that many of the artists had wealthy families (although, it seemed to me, not very many of those interviewed fell into this category). Still, I became aware of how important such practical details as rent and the availability of lofts and storefronts was to the flowering of the avant-gard scene at that time, as was the proximity of so many artists in a small area of New York. They were able to easily walk to rehearsals, regularly encountered each other on the street, and all supported each other by seeing their work — often, entry was free.

There was also a striking lack of interest in fame and fortune; the focus was on creating work rather than making money and building a career. The art was an end in itself. They weren’t spending money on publicity and marketing, they weren’t creating institutions (although many essentially formed companies of artists who regularly worked together), nor were they spending time chasing grants or trying to please boards of directors. They just…did stuff.

If I were still teaching, I guarantee that I’d be trying to build a course around Farrington’s and Glass’s book as well as the films and documentaries the former lists. I found the book exhilirating and energizing, and I recommend it to anyone interested in alternatives to today’s corporatized theater, which is ending (Oska Eustis is right, just late to declare). Also, subscribe to Farrington’s Substack, Theatre Is Hard, and check out the backlist at publisher 53rd State Press. And while you’re at it, check out Performing Arts Journal (you may need to get access to JSTOR to read articles, which can often be acquired through your university or public library).

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Just a quick note to let you know that you can buy my e-book Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career for $2.49 during the month of July during the Smashwords . Use the code SSW75 at checkout. Basically, the book says, you are an artist, not an employee. From the blurb: “This book is about change, innovation, rebooting the theater system in order to make it more widely available and its artists more strongly empowered. It is written for theater artists who are trailblazers and bushwhackers who want to take control of the theatrical means of production by starting their own theaters--theaters that are sustainable financially, artistically, and personally. If that's you, this book is for you.” For $2.49, you might find something useful in it!

Oh! And my other e-book, DIY Theater MFA: Growing Your Skills When You Don’t Have the Time, Money, or Opportunity to Pursue a Graduate Degree is even cheaper: $1.74! Same checkout code: SSW75. Blurb: “What if you want to improve your skills as a theater artist, but you don't have the time, money, or opportunity to pursue a graduate degree? Could you design a learning program for yourself that would effectively promote your own growth as an artist? In this provocative how-to book, Scott Walters argues not only that such a thing is possible, but that doing so has many advantages over the traditional route. In this brief, practical book, Walters provides a roadmap for those who want to create a theater education that is tailored to their own talents and interests.”

For $4.23, you can get all the Scott Walters content anyone could want!

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When I wrote Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career, my goal was to encourage theater artists to think of themselves not as employees hired by institutions or corporations, but as owners who had control of their career and the means of production, and who had skin in the game. My goal was to empower theater artists to form theaters anywhere in the country, not just a few major cities. Over the years, I had come to see the whole nonprofit system as a mixed blessing, at best, and the commercial system as artistically bankrupt. My book was meant to serve as a lighthouse, one of many, I hoped, that described alternatives for living a sustainable, rooted, creative life.

Recently, a friend of mine sent me a news release and website link about an exciting development: the creation of a legal business structure called an Artist Corporation which is about to be made law in Colorado. The A-Corp was devised by Yancey Strickler,

“a writer and entrepreneur whose work supports creative people. He’s the cofounder of Kickstarter, The Creative Independent, Metalabel, Artist Corporations, the Dark Forest Collective, and DFOS (the Dark Forest Operating System). He’s the author of the books This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, The Dark Forest Anthology of the Internet, On the Creative Life, The Dark Forest Era, and the cohost of the New Creative Era podcast with Joshua Citarella.”

Clearly, this is someone who has devoted his life to helping artists thrive and “to make cooperation as easy as competition, especially for creative people.” The A-Corp is another important step toward that goal. What is it? Here’s a brief description, and a link to a TED Talk.

The problem that A-Corps address is that creative work doesn’t quite fit into the business structures that exist today:

“Today, when artists want to formalize their creative work — to collaborate, share ownership, protect their intellectual property, or simply get health insurance — they’re forced to use legal structures that were designed for conventional businesses. LLCs, S-Corps, and C-Corps don’t account for the unique realities of creative work — shared intellectual property, artistic mission protections, the way creative collaborations actually function, or the need to keep creative control in the hands of the people making the art. The result? Most artists either operate informally — without protections, without benefits, without building equity — or they spend thousands on lawyers to retrofit business structures that weren’t built for them.

WHAT THE LAW DOES

Artists keep control Artists must own at least 51% of all voting power at all times. This is locked into the statute and cannot be changed by an operating agreement. The people making the art always control the company.

A stated artistic mission Every A-Corp has a stated artistic mission in its founding documents. The company can specify that the mission has primacy over financial objectives, that they’re equal, or define its own balance. The mission has legal weight.

IP stays with artists Artistic work can never be transferred to non-artist investors or third parties. If the company dissolves, all artistic work reverts to the artists who created it. These “reversionary rights” are not available to creditors.

Investors without control Economic rights can be separated from governance rights. Investors can hold rights to distributions, royalties, and revenue participation without getting any voting power or creative control.

A new kind of share The A-Corp creates a new type of ownership unit — the A-Corp Share. Unlike traditional equity, A-Corp Shares can separate economic rights from creative control, be issued to artists in exchange for their creative contributions (not just cash), and be structured as fractional units that let collaborators share in the upside of work they helped create. An artist’s creative work is recognized as a capital contribution with real value, not just sweat equity. This makes it possible for a band, a film crew, or a game studio to build shared ownership that reflects who actually made the work.

Easy to form By July 2027, Colorado will provide long-form articles with check-box and fill-in-the-blank provisions covering ownership, governance, IP terms, tax treatment, and more. No expensive lawyers required for standard setups.

And the cool thing is you don’t have to live in Colorado to take advantage of this. No matter where you live, you can incorporate in Colorado. Think of banks like, say, PNC Bank, Bank of America, or Chase – each of these is incorporated in Delaware, but their headquarters are elsewhere. While it would be great to have A-Corps made law in all 50 states, artists don’t have to wait for the political process to move forward. Just incorporate in Colorado. In fact, you can pledge your intention to form an A-Corp

Are you curious about how an A-Corp might benefit your creative work? There is a “Model Your A-Corp” calculator where you can “see what an Artist Corporation could look like for your creative practice.” Give it a try!

I am strongly considering doing a new edition of Building a Sustainable Theater to include this information, because the model I described there could easily be adapted to the new A-Corp structure, and benefit from some of the elements contained in it.

Information about this breakthrough needs to be distributed throughout the US. Musicians, painters, dancers, theater artists, filmmakers, writers – anyone who does creative work – would benefit from exploring this new idea. Thank you, Yancey Strickler, for all that you have done and are doing for creative artists.

Readers, we need to spread word about A-Corps far and wide, and I hope you’ll help me by sending this your fellow artists. I especially think that A-Corps provide a perfect shell within which to build a sustainable theater.

[FYI: in case you’re interested, the ebook version of Building a Sustainable Theater will be part of the Smashwords 2026 Summer / Winter Sale, where it will be available for 75% off of the usual $9.99 price. The sale starts July 1st, and I’ll send out a reminder.

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Blog Posts

What If You Don’t Go to College?

Arguments are being made that, given the cost as well as the likely impact of AI on the white collar job market, it might be better to try another path. Maybe so -- but if you do, you'll need to take a more active approach to learning. The Momma Bird Stuffing Your Beak with the Worm of Knowledge isn't a thing anymore.

From the Archives: The Wal-Marting of the American Theater

Back in 2012, I wrote an essay for HuffPo (then still called Huffington Post) comparing the American theater scene to the WalMart supply chain. It was the first essay I wrote for them, and to my surprise it ended up being the featured article on their home page while generating thousands of views -- the only time in my life that I went viral!

From the Archives: Black Bird at the Heart of Life

Some musing on the role of the artist in times like these. This post was originally published almost two years ago to the day on Substack. Worth revisiting if only for Sinead O'Connor's amazing rendition of a Blind Willie Johnson song, in my opinion

Fleeting Thoughts

Joseph Campbell and Nietzsche’s Idea of Loving Your Fate

Joseph Campbell channels Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati—life does not happen to us, but for us, and when we respond not with despair but with inner resolve, strength reveals itself. Looking back, we often see that the wreckage was never ruin—it was transformation in disguise.

Scott Russell Sanders on the Demands on Our Attention

Perhaps we are overwhelmed by the constant stream of news from everywhere about everything and everybody.

Clif Bars and Theater

This quote is from Gary Erickson, the owner of Clif Bars, but it could just as easily be applied to the theater and film scene, especially the regional theater.

Just a reminder that the RSS Feed for the blog is https://scottwalters.net/blog/701835956.xml and the RSS feed for Fleeting Thoughts is https://scottwalters.net/fleeting-notes/770540575.xml?limit=10. Put one (or both) into your favorite RSS Reader (Inoreader, Feedly, Newsblur, Feedbin, or the Vivaldi browser, for instance) and create your own newspaper!

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Greetings! I could have sent this newsletter last Friday, but I didn’t think anyone would open it on Independence Day, so I held off.

Housekeeping

1. A while ago, I announced the arrival of “fleeting thoughts” on the blog. After posting a few, I decided that they made the blog main page look kind of junky and haphazard. Rather than abandon them entirely, I’ve moved them to a separate page: https://scottwalters.net/fleeting-thoughts/.

2. For those of you who want to follow my blog posts while the pixels are still drying on the screen, the RSS feed (I continue to use Feedly for following blogs) is https://scottwalters.net/blog/701835956.xml.

Blog Posts

• In my continuing quest to find new ways to use AI in teaching, I decided to use Google’s NotebookLM help me to prepare to read the first 3 chapters of John Locke’s 1689 “Second Treatise of Government.” Here’s how it went: Using AI to Read John Locke.

• On June 28th, I received a box of the 3rd edition of Introduction to Play Analysis. I explained why I was excited about this edition: Unboxing! 3rd Edition of "Introduction to Play Analysis."

• As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been working on a personal project to examine my own values and beliefs, and put them into words. One of the areas I started questioning first was my political values. I had been curious about classical conservatism and how it developed in the 20th and 21st centuries (the Never-Trumpers are probably representative figures in this regard). Here’s how it went (bonus: a video clip of Shere Khan in the original Disney Jungle Book): It Ain't Me, Babe.

  ---

  Fleeting Thoughts

• Louvre Closes

  On June 16th, the Associated Press announced, "The world’s most-visited museum shuts down with staff sounding the alarm on mass tourism." Apparently the staff spontaneously went on strike "during a routine internal meeting, as gallery attendants, ticket agents and security personnel refused to take up their posts in protest over unmanageable crowds, chronic understaffing and what one union called “untenable” working conditions." Theater people who have been trying to explain diminished attendence as COVID hangover should take note.

• Change Your Widget

  I want to consider this video, by the founder of Strong Towns, as a starting point for some analogical thinking. In it, Strong Towns founder Charles Marohn questions why we have designed our towns to accommodate deliveries from large trucks. I found myself struck by the way that siloed thinking leads to decisions that are made without considering the major effects it will have on other aspects of life I was particularly struck by his discussion of the fact that Venice has no cars or trucks because of the canal system; in the comments, one reader shared an example of how garbage is removed from Venice. Anyway, it got me to wondering what decisions in other areas have shaped to a large degree the possibilities available -- or the possibilities that seem availabale, but that might be transcended simply by reconceiving the "rules" we have imposed.

And that’s it! It’s been very hot here recently, and I’ve been avoiding my non-air conditioned study. I’ve also been working on the sequel to last year’s Fence Project. This time it’s personal. And I might or might not be starting a new book project…

All the best, Scott

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My last newsletter was about theater and AI. This one only has one theater-related post, and it is twelve years old. But I hope you find them interesting anyway. So here goes:

A good friend of mine, Tom Loughlin, and I go way back. Tom, who like me is a retired theater professor (although his specialty is teaching acting), wrote a post on his blog A Poor Player (link in my article) called “The Age of Futility” (also linked to in my article), which discussed a common question that most of us eventually have to come to terms with: “what’s the point?” After reading it, I was inspired to respond in an Old School way on my own blog.

The Age of Sensibility.

I also wrote a long post about, well, me! (Part of my new category “Personal Ruminations.”) I discuss how, all my life, I have been fueled by curiosity, and how a long ago appendix by writing teacher Peter Elbow (truly a Terry Pratchett-worthy name) explains how I keep my “enthusiasms” barreling forward.

On Curiosity

And finally, I intend to dig stuff out of the archives, either from my old blog (the origional Theatre Ideas over on blogspot) or other places where they might have disappeared into the cyber mists of time. This one was written twelve years ago almost to the day.

From the Archive: Saying It To Their Faces

Thanks for reading!

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I continue to feel much better, and as a result I’m doing more writing. For those of you who were going back through my newsletters to read previous things I’ve posted, I have bad news: once I discontinued my subscription to Micro.blog they all disappeared. I saved a backup, but that doesn’t help except as a record. Sorry.

I continue writing about theater, but at the moment focusing on how AI might be used to make aspects of rehearsal prep easier.

Using AI to Make a Rehearsal Schedule (Part 1 and Part 2). Man, if AI had been available before I retired, it would have saved me a LOT of work.

Context for My AI Posts. In which I explain why I’m focusing on practical uses of AI and not writing about the hot social media issues.

Using AI to Learn Lines. In which ChatGPT introduces me to several possibilities for creating “sides” for learning lines, including Anki.

By the way, apparently SiteJet Builder, which I used to create the new author page (scottwalters.net), does not have a way to allow comments. So if you have something you’d like to share in response to a post, email me at scottwalters at hey dot com and indicate whether you’d like your comment to appear on the blog (if so, I’ll paste it there).

Til next time!

Scott

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Dear Reader — Well, I finally seem to be over my walking pneumonia and am back to normal. During that time when I was mostly too tired to do much, I did manage to finally create a brand new author page for my writings. This website (scottwalters.net) brings together in one place my books, some of my articles, connections to my old blog, and a brand new blog, called “Back to My Books.” The title is drawn from Ruined by Reading by Lynne Sharon Schwartz: “I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing. Can I go back to my books now?" That’s kind of where I am these days. I will be canceling my micro.blog subscription and writing exclusively on “Back to My Books.”

Why change yet again? As I think I mentioned before, I had become frustrated by the increasing complexity of WordPress, which, in turn, drew me to the simplicity of micro.blog. But for what I really wanted to do, I needed something midway between WordPress and micro.blog, something that would give me some formatting flexibility without a daunting learning curve. I found it in a somewhat new addition to my hosting site; it’s called SiteJet Builder, and it is free as part of my Reclaim Hosting cPanel.

So what does this mean for you? For the time being, nothing — I will continue to send out a “weekly” newsletter of my writing through Substack. For a variety of reasons, my goal is to get off of the Substack platform, whether that means simply downloading my subscriber email list and sending an email from my personal email newsletter, or using the newsletter function on SiteJet (if there is one — I’m still learning what SiteJet can do). The one change you may notice is that the topics I write about may be more interdisciplinary — i.e., not solely theater-related. If that’s not something that interests you, you may want to unsubscribe now.

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Not a whole lot about theater.

On micro.blog, I posted a quotation from the book Monoculture by F. S. Michaels:

“As arts organizations become part of the world of markets instead of being buffered from it, their focus shifts from preserving human heritage and culture to attracting and building a paying audience. It’s easier, after all, to measure artistic success in terms of tickets sold than in terms of something vague like aesthetic triumph. Arts organizations start to think and act like businesses, adopting management philosophies and marketing techniques and training staff in management and business practices. That training is offered mostly through business schools, which also stress the importance of the market.”

On “Back to My Books,” I wrote two posts so far.

One is an “about this blog” post to give you an idea of the focus.

The second is more substantive: “We Need a New Theatrical Movement,” which is in response to Fergus Morgan’s Crush Bar post (on Substack) called “I want to see a new theatrical movement. Someone start one: When was the last time a group of artists with a new idea took our stages by storm?” I think Fergus main point is spot on — there’s not much creativity on display in the contemporary theater of late. But I felt as if I needed to talk about one of the barriers to creativity he placed at the center of his post: subsidy. There’s an old saying that, if you want something to get done, give it to someone who is busy. That has also been the case historically as far as movements are concerned: most we created by people who had little money, limited time, and not much room for error. In other words, creativity thrives within limits, not abundance, so don’t let anything stand in your way!

Otherwise, I posted a few things about politics that weren’t worth sharing. But I have plans!

Thanks for reading! It’s good to feel better again.

—Scott

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Dear Reader — I’m feeling much better, and have done some writing this week. Here’s a summary:

The Death of PAJ: Performing Arts Journal

Prior to going to New York to do my doctoral program at City University of New York - Graduate Center in 1988 (?), I reached out to Bonnie Marranca, the co-founder and editor of Performing Arts Journal/PAJ Publications, and I volunteered to help them with anything they needed. I was shocked to receive a letter back telling me that their office assistant/editorial assistant had just left and would I like a job. Would I?!!! I learned a lot during the two years I worked there. Last week, I stumbled on the fact that Bonnie was retiring and Performing Arts Journal had published its final issue. I wrote about my time there.

The Importance of Imagination to Social Change

A description of activist Joanna Macy’s three types of three types of activism in every social movement: holding actions, systems change, and worldview changes. It seems to me that the arts are particularly suited to the latter. I don’t, however, think that necessarily applies solely to political activism. In fact, I think we have been giving far too much attention to the political sphere to the detriment of our sense of being a part of both a larger and a smaller world (home, neighborhood, community, region, metaphysics, etc).

Freakonomics on the Economics of Theatre

Michael Rushton informs us that “Freakonomics Radio has a new three part series on the economic landscape facing live theatre. Links to the 3 part series.

Last Night's Entertaining Dream

I woke up laughing. I was dreaming about a new musical about…dramaturgy!

Regrets: I Have a Few (On Teaching)

I read Carl Hendrick’s “Ultra-Processed Minds” and I find myself wishing I could start my teaching career over again, and refuse to give so much away to “coverage.”

Now Reading: On Consolation

It seems to me that a large portion of new ideas that, when eventually adopted, turn out to be game changers are made by people secure enough to risk imagining a new direction.

I hope you find something here to think about for a minute or two.

All the best,

Scott

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Jaron Lanier on AI

This morning, I listened to Sean Illing interview Jaron Lanier, a tech insider known for his work with Virtual Reality, and also a humanist thinker about things tech. This interview is about AI, and Lanier’s thoughtful humanism was refreshing. His dismissal of the Turing Test as being a distraction that leads to the waste of energy and resources seemed spot on, and his encouragement that we stop thinking about AI as a separate entity was a breath of fresh air, as was his assertion that AI is just another technology that needs continual improvement. I provided a link to the podcast, if you’re interested.

In a follow-up, I wrote Jaron Lanier's "Oy, AI" -- Don't Try to Hide the People.” In this essay, he refuses to follow those who idolize generative AI (he even rejects that moniker--he calls it "mashup AI," which is, frankly, a lot more accurate) as well as those who fear it, seeing both orientations as based humanity's religious impulse to create biblical golden calves and then fear and worship them as if they didn't build them themselves. Marx might have called this reificiation. His solution is to make Mashup AI more like the Talmud. And it is that link that cracks open the AI debate and lets in some light and air.

I’ve been reading a lot of literary critic Edmund Wilson’s essays, as well as a book describing his career. In On Edmund Wilson's Style and Career Path, I summarize his writing style, which I find bracing and invigorating.

Also, in his essay "Thoughts on Being Bibliographed," Wilson described his general approach to his writing career.

"To write what you are interested in writing and to succeed in getting editors to pay for it, is a feat that may require pretty close calculation and a good deal of ingenuity....My own strategy ... has usually been, first to get books for review or reporting assignments to cover on subjects in which I happen to be interested; then, later, to use the scattered artices for writing general studies of these subjects; then, finally, to bring out a book in which groups of these essays are combined. There are usually to be distinguided ... at least two or three stages; and it is of course by the books that I want to stand, since the preliminary sketches quite often show my subjects in a different light and in some cases, perhaps, are contradicted by my final conclusions about them."

Brilliant. I wish I'd had that paragraph much earlier in my writing life--I would have save the drafts of some of the articles I published on websites that no longer exist. Still -- perhaps it's not too late to start.

I deactivated my Threads account…

On Apr 12, 2025 I complained about the weather.

And in Erich Fromm "On Disobedience", I, well, quoted Reich Fromm on disobedience:

“Disobedience, then, in the sense in which we use it here, is an act of the affirmation of reason and will. It is not primarily an attitude directed against something, but for something: for man’s capacity to see, to say what he sees, and to refuse to say what he does not see. To do so he does not need to be aggressive or rebellious; he needs to have his eyes open, to be fully awake, and willing to take the responsibility to open the eyes of those who are in danger of perishing because they are half asleep.”

I am not a man of action, but I will say what I see, and I will refuse to say what I don’t see.

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Well, I actually have a few things to share this week.

First, I wrote a post about “The Barter Theater and the Importance of Alternative Stories",” which uses as a leaping-off point a post by Grace Walker who had written a Substack post entitled “eat the box office” in which she wrote about having been inspired by the origin story for the Barter Theatre in Abingdon, VA. I, too, have been inspired by that story, and encouraged by the fact that so many established theater artists told Rob Porterfield, Barter’s founder, that his idea just wouldn’t work, but he did it anyway and he proved them wrong. I’m not certain where Ms Walker encountered this story, but I suspect it might be Todd London’s invaluable anthology An Ideal Theater. “Students, in my opinion, need to hear this story and stories like it (there are many, many more just as innovative), but most theater programs don’t include them anywhere in their curriculum, which is a damn shame,” I wrote. “A semester-long course could be devoted solely to London’s anthology – I know, because I’ve done it many times myself. While American Theater Magazine publishes an article by a theater professor who says that students need to learn more about the new demands of getting a job in the traditional New York theater (websites, video clips, etc.), I believe that they should be receiving information about how other theater artists have created vibrant and innovative artistic lives outside of that dehumanizing environment.” In the last sentences of my post, I muse: “I don’t know. Maybe I need to do such a course on-line.” I hope Ms Walker will continue to question, and not be dissuaded by nay-sayers. I sincerely believe that there are better ways to lead a creative life in theater than those currently promoted.

If you’re curious about my personal writing style (and why wouldn’t you be?), I wrote “It’s Just My Opinion and Other Time Wasters,” which is basically a restatement of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Some once said that I “write mostly in declarative sentences,” and apparently some people find that sounds arrogant. Oh, well!

I also added on to my previous post about AI, but this time closer to home: On AI in Music Composition and Image Generation. As usual, I seem to be an outlier, as artists seem to be in a wild mood about AI “stealing” their work without permission and stuff like that. I argue, among other things, that “the new Most Important Person in the Room is going to be people who have a command of descriptive language and knowledge of past art styles and artists. In other words, art and music history majors, or more broadly, the humanities.” And that AI will encourage the democratization of creativity, which I consider a positive thing four society.

“More people will be able to have the experience of _making something themselves_. Instead of creativity being confined to a small number of designated professionals, people will be empowered to express themselves more gracefully. I can imagine parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, who previously had to buy whatever birthday cards and party favors were available at Target, being able to generate things specific to their kids' likes and interests. People who never could draw or play an instrument will, through the power of words, be able to express themselves. Kids will develop an interest in art and music (and film, when that technology matures) that they wouldn't have had if they'd needed to buy a piano or a raft of art supplies. People will more easily be able to create an image for a blog post, or for their web page. In other posts, Mollick asks the AI to create an interactive game for him to teach certain skills that he teaches in his business classes. Teachers will be able to create presentations and teaching games tailored to the kids in their own classroom. This is like the transition from having to know HTML to create a website to being able to do so through drag-and-drop elements in Wordpress. It's similar to using Adobe Photoshop without the steep learning curve, or at least, a _different_ learning curve. Will this reduce jobs for commercial artists or composers? Maybe at first, but at some point professionals, who are skilled in working with AI, will be in demand because they have joined an understanding of AI with their own knowledge and creativity to make fabulous things that someone else would never have imagined.”

This data is over 20 years old, but I doubt is has changed much since then:

“One study (Leveraging Investments in Creativity 2003) found that 79 percent of all grants to individual artists were under $10,000, 66 percent were under $5,000, and sadly, 50 percent of all grants to artists in this country were under $2,000.”

Because Art John R. Killacky

But by all means let’s stay locked into the non-profit model for the arts. It’s really working!

Thanks for reading!

Scott

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I’m currently reading a lot of the essays of the brilliant literary critic Edmund Wilson, whose insights into the work of novelists both famous and obscure I find dazzling. His essay on Charles Dickens, “The Two Scrooges,” published in The New Republic in 1940, is one such essay. It’s the kind of writing to which I now aspire. Wilson was a prolific independent journalist whose essays, memoirs, poetry, and drama fill many fat volumes. The speed with which he wrote seems superhuman, which is something I admire but not emulate. Regardless, in order to undertake anything even remotely comparable in thought and style requires a great deal of time and focus.

I couple days ago, I finished reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, which I admired very much and which I recommend without reservation. I began writing about Kimmerer’s book this morning in the hope of including it in this newsletter, but to do it justice will require deeper thought and better writing. Similarly, I have an essay comparing Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi that has been percolating in my mind for months, as well as some thoughts on the more immediate issue of artificial intelligence and the arts.

I look back on the thousands and thousands of words I wrote over the course of eight years on my old Theatre Ideas blog, all while teaching overloads, directing plays, and running a general education program at UNC Asheville, and my mind boggles. I’m not capable of that today, nor do I really think I was capable of it back then either.

What I’m trying to get at is that these newsletters are likely to become more sporadic than the weekly schedule I currently am working on, at least for the time being, because I don’t write as quickly as I used to. My hope is that the ideas and the writing will be of a higher quality. I announce this mainly so that none of you get concerned if you don’t receive a weekly missive from me. There will be more coming. In the meantime, I recommend you check out Edmund Wilson!

A lot of this week’s writing was not about theater.

I wrote about “The Lack of Inspiration in US Politics,” which is basically a call for metaphor, story, vision. Sample:

When was the last time you heard a politician say anything that was inspiring? I mean truly inspiring, rhetorically inspiring? “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” inspiring? When was the last time you heard a politician quote a poem or a novel or a play? When did they last refer to a philosopher or a songwriter who wasn’t Taylor Swift? Campaign speeches have become a series of social media posts strung together in a row with all the energy and excitement of listening to a bowling ball rolling down the basement steps. Debates are no longer about ideas but just about gotchas, name calling, and fact-checking.

A connected quotation from Frank Delaney’s novel Ireland:

The one joy that has kept me going through life has been the fact that stories unite us. To see you as you listen to me now, as you have always listened to me, is to know this: what I can believe, you can believe. And the way we all see our story—not just as Irish people but as flesh-and-blood individuals and not the way people tell us to see it—that’s what we own, no matter who we are and where we come from. That’s why I spent my life as I did—because that was all I have ever owned, stories. Indeed, our story is finally all any of us owns, because, as I once told my grandson, a story has only one master. – Frank Delaney, Ireland

I also wrote about AI, although this is about AI being used in medicine. I suspect I’ll eventually write about LLMs and the arts, which a lot of people have been fulminating about. But this one is about my mother, who died in 1978 from liver cancer, and what AI and AlphaFold might have meant to her. Of course, science has always had a tradition of building on the research work of others without the expectation that those who came before will be paid for their discoveries. But that’s for a later time.

See you next time!

Scott

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I confess I am fascinated by this Scottish theater company, who does a new play every week and performs in a pub. Last year, they celebrated their 20th anniversary. Here is an article about their 20 years in business. And below is a song with pictures written for the celebration. I have never seen a production, and I can’t even say whether I’d like what they do, but what I do like is the way they seem to have thought about theater from the ground up.

Read more.

I'd Come Out of Retirement to Do This

If a university wanted to create an innovative theater program, I would come out of retirement to create a BA in Sustainable Theater. It would focus on environmentally sustainable design, playwriting, directing, and acting. There would also be a large component devoted to starting and running a company, and seniors would run their own company out of a storefront.

Read more. Or read the whole damn book.

After I published this, a friend of mine sent me a link to an article in American Theatre Magazine (Winter 2025) entitled "Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching" which made my head explode. I sent a Letter to the Editor — I doubt it will be published.

Rosie Brownlow-Calkin, in the article "Unfinished Business: What Theatre Schools Should Also Be Teaching" (Winter 2025), is generally correct in diagnosing "that undergraduate theatre training programs have a moral imperative to prepare students for the profession, not simply teach them to be good at what they do." However, the prescription--that students ought to be taught things like "how to shoot a self-tape or build a website" and how much rents are in NYC--fails to acknowledge that the system itself is dysfunctional and exploitative. Anyone who spends even a few minutes with the employment numbers published by Actors Equity should be deeply disturbed that the median theatre income for an Equity member is zero dollars--more than half didn't make a dime from theatre. And of those that did make any money, the average annual income was less than six months of rent. Saying "life in the business would be tough" isn't just an understatement, it is malpractice. If theatre departments really wanted to help theatre majors with their entry into the theatre, they would be taught how to create companies and self-produce in cities and towns across America, instead of focusing on preparing them for the dysfunctional con job that is the New York theater scene--and I include the regional theaters who have abandoned the purpose of the resident theater movement and have become mere outposts of NYC. Theatre majors would do well to read Todd London's An Ideal Theater for examples of the resident theater tradition, and theater professors would do well to start thinking in terms of alterative paths to a life as an artist. As Brownlow-Culkin rightly says, "the times, they are a-changin’;" they're just changing a lot more than theater professors seem willing to admit.

Maddening.

I wrote about two social philosophers I admire, Ivan Illich and John McKnight. (This was a result of my personal project, which is enjoyable.) There was a link to theater:

My friend Tom (the same guy who sent me the American Theatre magazine article) recently posted a video he found on PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

Read more here: Ivan Illich, John McKnight, and Asset-Based Communities.

Keep on thinking, folks!

Scott

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I’ve been enjoying Michael Rushton’s Substack “Arms’ Length” and his series that is basically the ABCs of Arts Policy. I particularly liked his takedown of urban “arts districts,” which have always seemed to me to be more about real estate developers trying to gentrify. Anyway, here is Rushton: open.substack.com/pub/micha…

I also wrote about a personal project I am undertaking — it won’t be public-facing at all.

That’s all for this week!

Scott

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Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Birth of Show BUSINESS (Part 1)

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a character is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he responds. “Gradually, and then suddenly.” He could have been talking about the changes to the American theater in the last quarter of the 19th century. In my February 23 post I described “The Rise of the Combination Company and the Death of the Resident Stock Company.” Today, I want to describe the capture of the American theater by businessmen.

Gradually, Then Suddenly: The Birth of Show BUSINESS (Part 2): The Resistance

The brilliant essayist Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book _Hope in the Dark_, "Resistance is first of all a matter of principle and a way to live, to make yourself one small republic of unconquered spirit." That's the first step toward escaping this collapse: sharpen your principles and develop an unconquered spirit. And one way that can help you with this is to find others in the past who did something similar. There are more than you think--I have only been writing about America's leaders, and only theater people; there are so many others across the world, throughout theater history, and in other art forms who can provide inspiration, strength, and models to draw upon for the future. It is going to take a combination of creativity and historical awareness to start something new and keep it going.

A throwback to 2009

Thoughts on Style While Feeling Crummy (Embracing My Inner Paglia)

Theatre is hard, and there is a lot to learn. Failure will be constant, and should not be seen as anything but failure. You learn more from failure than success, but only if you look deeply at the failure and mine it for its treasure. There are thousands of years of theatre history. and theory, and criticism, and they need to be learned before young artists have the right to be taken seriously. And even then, there is more anthropology and psychology and philosophy and comparative religion to be understood before they have anything to say that will be of interest to anyone older than fifteen.

Mar 5, 2025

You know what I think is weird? That people will condemn you for not keeping up with the news while they think nothing about ignoring philosophy, literature, theology, cultural criticism, history. You will be at the mercy of spinmeisters if you lack a worldview that structures the news.

Enjoy!

Scott

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