The Small Theatre Handbook: A Guide to Management and Production by Joann Green (review)

Reviews 277 is appropriate that New Zealand Drama has covered so well all the ground up to this point. DAVID CARNEGIE Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand Joann Green. The Small Theatre Handbook: A Guide to Management and Production. Harvard, Mass.: Harvard Common Press, 1981. Pp. 180. $11.95; paperback, $8.95. Joann Green prefaces The Small Theatre Handbook with an epigraph from Strindberg, his summation of a venture into “small theatre” pro­ duction: “Prospects brilliant; situation desperate, as usual.” One might propose, as alternate motto for this lively handbook, Emerson’s impera­ tive, “Hitch your wagon to a star.” The book itself discusses the glory and intractability of stars, instructs us in the proper construction and maintenance of wagons, and cautions us to carry extra traces and singletrees, for we will need them. Not the usual sort of book reviewed in this journal, the Handbook should nonetheless be of interest to many of its readers, whether or not they are victims of the urge to establish a small, non-profit theatre, in order to do the right plays for the right audience. Filled with lively wisdom for the producer, director, actor, technician, and manager, characterized by a vigorous, spare, occasionally whimsical style, at once idealistic and practical, modest and demanding, the Handbook offers us the outlook on theatre that made Green’s Cambridge Ensemble an out­ standing “small theatre” for seven years, together with the practical experience which she gained during that joyous and taxing time. Above all, she reminds us what concentration and business-sense are required in the production of small miracles. One of Green’s first principles is that theatre is both a business and an art. Another axiom: “it is very difficult to get most people to the theatre.” For Green, then, it follows that managers must budget an amount for publicity at least equal to the amount for rent and utilities. That’s good business. She also emphasizes that there is no way of ensur­ ing an audience or of gauging accurately what audiences will come to see; so, she concludes, managing directors must take risks, and should choose the plays they really want to do. That’s good art. And for small theatres, it’s not bad business. Theatre is mortal, Green cautions; success is rare. Small theatres live and die: the life expectancy of those that survive the first year is only six years. Small theatres, then, are inevitably precocious children; and Green counsels care for the child, and the attitude of a child, from those who venture into the theatre, including respect for “every hand and every thing that touches the stage, and every person on that stage,” as if each were a newborn child. With this childlike sense of wonder and adventure, choosing “to do the act regardless of its consequences,” she combines the adult’s sense of responsibility for detail. Green offers rules, principles, and exercises for the director, the 278 Comparative Drama actor, the designer. She discusses salaries, ticket prices, group discounts, timetables, safety. She includes a sample budget, a grant proposal, season schedules, box office report forms, a rental contract, press releases, and public service announcements. She reminds us to “keep extra fuses handy”; to “sweep the stage thoroughly before each rehearsal and before each performance”; and to “enter in innocence and dignity, with a vul­ nerable spirit and with open eyes.” Hers is a vision of theatre as an ephemeral realization of love—love for the body and the spirit of things and persons. Here are the last five of her ten “exercises” for the actor: 6. Find something you love in every person working in your theatre. 7. Find something you love in every character you play. 8. Find something you love on every stage you work on. 9. Find a way to believe that each member of the audience is your equal. 10. Find something you love in yourself. “Acting,” she says, “is the being there for another.” There are, perhaps, several reasons why one might number Green among the New England theatrical transcendentalists, for there is much in her book in the spirit of Thoreau’s imperative: “Our life is frittered away by...