Mondo Preview

I wrote last time about the contemporary ecology of the drama, particularly the serious drama, about a theater where tryouts have been replaced by “rolling premieres” in regional theaters or festivals, and where the point of bringing a show to New York is mainly to garner the all-important write-ups in The New York Times and other papers as calling cards that the show can then use in marketing itself to the larger body of regional theaters. Paradoxically, however, the more important the New York reviews in this ecology, the smaller the welcome mat extended to the reviewers who produce them.

In most other places, press nights occur one or two weeks into the production, because the hope is that good notices will help shoo the ticket-buyers into the seats. The show is given just long enough to gel, and then the reviewers are invited. In New York, by contrast, the seasoning of the show is taken very, very seriously, and premature critical comment is discouraged. The publicity agents keep the reviewers away for a month or two (no tickets, no .PDFs of scripts, no press kits)—and this does not change even when, as is more than typical—especially off-Broadway—the official run of the show, i.e., what happens after previews and before the show closes, is only a couple of months. And even on Broadway nowadays, the endless preview is becoming more common, much to the annoyance of the theater scribblers, who are darkly suspicious that producers are trying to substitute word of mouth for the dicta of critics, who view themselves as the official arbiters.

There is an economic impact to all this, but the system is built to absorb it. Obviously, if reviewers are positively discouraged until so late in the run, they cannot help ticket sales early. To fill the seats, there is much discounting before a show “opens.” The hoped-for tradeoff will be that the resulting reviews, when they do arrive, may be more enthusiastic, based as they are on the most refined state of the production, and amp up sales during the official run, as well as long-term royalties from future productions.

Things that help in this strange universe: rolling premieres (already discussed), black box theaters, foundations, and residuals. “Black box” is not a term of precise signification, in New York or elsewhere, but generally implies small scale (off-Broadway—100-to-499 seat) and spare performance spaces, often arranged in multiplex format. This translates into lower production costs. Most of the best stuff off-Broadway also has one or more non-profit producing foundations behind it. And part of the payoff for the foundations may be some residual rights in the plays they produce after the plays leave the New York greenhouse. This stretches the financial reward beyond the New York production.

From a reviewer’s standpoint, though, this system becomes far too much about windows of opportunity. If a reviewer’s window of opportunity does not coincide with the window of opportunity the producers and publicity agents decree, the reviewer may need to turn guerilla, live off the land, buy his own tickets and attend when he will. And two of the three plays discussed here were seen guerilla-style.

These plays were also products of the above-described kind of greenhouse: rolling premiere, black box theater off-Broadway, and foundation support. Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit had had a 2010 premier at Chicago’s Steppenwolf, en route to Playwrights Horizon, both a foundation and a black box venue. Athol Fugard’s The Train Driver had been produced at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town, the Fountain Theatre in Los Angeles, and the Long Wharf Theatre in 2010 before turning up at Signature Theatre in Pershing Square’s simple but elegant space. (Signature too is both a foundation and a black box venue.) Woody Harrelson & Frankie Hyman’s Bullet for Adolf had been produced in Toronto in 2011 before its New York opening at the black box New World Stages. (I saw no discernable foundation support for Bullet.)

I suppose that one reason I wanted...