Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes.
Al-Anon & the American Theater.
In case you didn’t know (and please skip this if you do), Al-Anon is the sister of Alcoholics Anonymous.
Where Bill Wilson came up with AA as the way to stop drinking, his long-suffering wife Lois Wilson, built Al-Anon as the way for family members to recover from and respond to the destructive effects of living with and loving the alcoholic.
I think the best way to sum up Al-Anon is with their famous phrase:
“I didn’t cause it, I can’t control it, I can’t cure it.”
(“It” being the loved one’s alcoholism. This phrase is known in Al-Anon as The 3 Cs.)
I have long maintained here on Theater Is Hard my belief that the two greatest innovations of the 20th century were vaccines and Alcoholics Anonymous— and by default Al-Anon.
It is my belief that if the tenets of Al-Anon were taught in school, starting in kindergarten, if we could internalize personal responsibility and accountability, if we could abide by the serenity prayer, if we could truly live and let live, then we would not be living in Trump’s necrotic, blame-shifting, abyss-teetering America right now. We would be living in a literal utopia.1
Anyway.
Why am I talking about AA and Al-Anon on a theater Substack?
Well, I recently read Isaac Butler’s article on the state of our contemporary American theater ecosystem in American Theater Magazine, State of Play, which you can read here. Butler accurately and eloquently breaks down the landscape of American theater in our current moment—for the playwright specifically. It’s important to read and lays it all out: Everything now is institution-run, risk-averse, safe. Theaters claim to champion new work but don’t action it, playwrights are unable to survive financially and of course, the saddest of all, playwrights can no longer expect to have an artistic home. (That’s a reductive summation of the piece, definitely read for the fuller picture.)
Butler is right, of course. It’s bleak out there.
But as an acolyte of Al-Anon, I believe there is another way.
In the face of seemingly insurmountable institutional thinking, we cannot forget that it’s the artist’s role in society to flip the bird to literally everything. This includes hallowed institutions, conventional artistic philosophies, crushing trends and boring rules. It is our job to gleefully challenge all of it, not to crowbar and pick-me! pick-me! our way into it.
And I know: considering the iron grip institutions now have on the career trajectory of the average playwright, it’s scary to rebel against them. But… we can. We really really can. We must. It is our duty to rage against the world if we don’t like it. It is our duty to talk about it, write about it, post about it.
Because as Al-Anon says, “Nothing changes if nothing changes.” (Also, what can they take away from us? According to the State Of Play article, we got bupkes anyway.)
Another Al-Anon phrase is “Drop the leash or be dragged.” This is another great way of thinking about the illusion of control.
We cannot control Playwrights Horizons and how they choose to program mostly men with zero consequences. We certainly cannot control the people who still choose to buy tickets there despite their programming. I wish we could manage the programming there, we’ve definitely tried, but if we keep holding fast to that leash? Ever taken a yellow lab puppy on a walk?
But, again, we can control ourselves. We can choose to make work outside of Playwrights Horizons, outside all of this entire false construct. We can, as Al-Anon famously says, “detach with love.”
Another of my favorite Al-Anon concepts is “leaving the dance.”
In terms of the alcoholic, the dance is essentially: the addict acts destructively, their family rescues them, temporary calm is achieved, promises are made, hope is felt, but soon, because they experienced no consequences, the addict acts out again, the family rescues them again, and the dance continues for years, decades, generations. And as long as it does, the addict will never recover— may even die. But Al-Anon teaches the family member to exit the dance, painful though it may be. Because the paso doble doesn’t work with just one guy.
Let’s apply “leaving the dance” to Butler’s stat in State of Play that last fall The Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group had 1,000 playwright applicants and accepted only 10. The article explains that they couldn’t accept more than 10 because…uh…um… poverty? Yeah, that’s the ticket, poverty. Nary a pot to piss in.
Sorry, what’s that you say, kind reader?
Oh, you say it appears the Public is again renovating its already ridiculously lavish lobby?
Huh.
Well, prole that I am, I don’t know how much that costs, but last year I hired a contractor to fix my broken screen door and it was one of the most traumatic financial experiences of my life.
So I’m gonna guess renovating hundreds and hundreds of square feet of East Village real estate must be in high $20 millions which, when you add that to the almost $40 million the Public Theater already spent on the exact same project in 2012, I’d say the Public has the cabbage to accept all 1,000 of those applicants. With that kinda chandelier money they could pay each one of them thousand about $60k a piece. Sounds like a living wage to me.
But sure, just take 10 of them and tell us you’re poor. Do you not drink till 5PM either? (In Al-Anon, DENIAL stands for Don’t Even kNow I Am Lying.)
But it’s hard to say no, I get it. Let’s say the Public Theater Emerging Writers Group bangs on our door at 3AM, stinking of gin, in full Stanley Kowalski mode bellowing:
“Hey Sara?! HEY SAAAAARRRRRAAAA!! Apply to my programmmmm! No no no no no this time we’ll take you, I swear to god this time we’ll take you— hey hey hey hey what would you say to…semi-finalist? Huh? Ok ok ok ok finalist? SAAARRRAAAA!”
Crash. Vomit. Cops.
How do we artists respond? Well, what if we artists stopped applying in droves year after year? What if we just worked together instead? Isnt’t that how we started? How we trained? We all know enough people. What if instead of 1,000 applications they got, like, four? It might force institutions to “hit rock bottom” with no choice but to seek recovery— which, for the average American theater institution, means rebuilding their lit departments.
Yeah, we noticed. Very few lit departments in theaters anymore.2 Which in theory makes sense, landscape being what it is. Why should an institution pay a lit team to read new plays, scout out scrappy, innovative new productions and foster theater companies doing exciting stuff, when artists are willing to fight it out amongst themselves for that coveted slot! After all, this is Thunderdome!
“But Sara, we can’t throw our hands up in disgust!” the skeptics will say. “Don’t be such a pessimist! When the going gets tough, you just abandon the system?! It’ll get better! I swear to god it’ll get better! I’ll pour everything down the drain this time, I swear!”
Al-Anon would ask: “How important is it?”
This system? Not very. Institutional chaos is their choice, not mine. What is important to me is making a play. That’s all that matters to me, to all of us, otherwise none of us would be in this insane racket. And if the current theater landscape can’t help you make your play because it’s gotta be happy hour somewhere, then we do it ourselves. We self-produce, self-fund-raise, self-design, self-cast, self-rent, self-program, self-insure, self-market, self-hustle. We find a way to get the play up. We detach with love from the chandelier people, refuse to enable them, allow them to hit rock bottom so that perhaps then, when they re-emerge, they’ll genuinely value the artist.
And I know: self-producing is shitty, backbreaking and expensive labor. Fund-raising is even worse. Believe me, I know. I’ve been self-producing for decades. Every play I’ve ever done started off as a self-production. I’m self-producing a few things right now and it sucks. Would I kill for an institution to do all this work for me all the time? Yes, I would. But again, it’s wishing the alcoholic would stop drinking.
We are not as hamstrung as they want us to believe. We can do it without them. All of it. We can make theater happen outside this system.
One of last great avant-garde playwrights, Mac Wellman, used to say to us in grad school:
“Stop dreaming.”
It takes a second to realize what Mac is saying here. It’s not a discouragement, quite the opposite. If I could finish the sentence it would be, “...and just do it yourself.” We must stop wishing the contemporary American theater ecosystem were different and throw a brick at it.
We can do it.
The first step is admitting we have a problem.
Theater is hard.
The perennial argument against the value of AA and Al-Anon is that it’s got god and religion woven into it. But you can ignore that stuff and it still works. As an atheist, I certainly ignore it. That said, despite my personal anti-religion philosophy, I’m all in favor of leaning into god if it gets you sober. For real. Whatever works.
I don’t have stats to back this “way fewer lit departments” thing up, but it certainly feels true. And in Trump’s America wars are waged on a feeling.