Bonus Episode 42 PREVIEW: American Theater

To understand how the American theater is being killed, you must first understand the American theater.

You now do this.

You are eligible for like 15 credits of a bachelor's degree.

That is true.

That is true.

And also, you know, maybe don't get it at NYU.

I'm not saying it's a real estate scam disguised as an education, but somebody might.

Every other university.

I also might say that about the Roundabout Theater Company.

I might.

For more, please listen to our education.

Another building in Glasgow just burned down to get turned into student housing yesterday.

Oh, dear God.

Lord.

But let's talk about what it means to participate in the system from the inside.

Let's say theoretically that you want to put up an ice-based musical, for example.

You've written this ice-based musical.

Next slide, please.

This is me.

I'm looking hot as fuck, albeit I've detransitioned.

I'm looking like Saltar.

I'm doing Pirates of Penzance on ice.

Yes, you are

your regular Joseph Fiennes.

With cat-like tread upon me.

So

your regular Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare and Love,

you, well, actually, I found out his real name is Joseph Alberic Twinslton Wycombe Fines.

Have you seen his son's name?

I'm trying to remember what it is.

I'm going to have to look that up.

It's long, I'd imagine.

But so now

you want to get the musical onto Broadway.

There is a system in place that will help you do that.

And that system looks a little something like this.

It's Hero Beauregard Faulkner finds Tiffin.

Also, I think it's pronounced like Finns or something stupid like that.

So, yeah, this is the system.

AJ sort of described this for me broadly, and I kind of charted it out.

I went into a fugue state briefly, and I just like my eyes rolled in the back of my head, and I just walked through every single step of this but basically you start out you've written a play and the first question you got to ask yourself is are you super famous and do you have famous friends who are willing to be in it if so you can skip the entire middle section of this because great Your production has benefactors and your play is going to receive a full production.

You Pasco, you collect $200, right?

But if you

that's how we started this podcast by inviting

up up one in this in this sort of business when it started.

You still are.

Look at your Twitter followers.

Justin, you don't, don't, don't, don't sell yourself shit.

You had just come off of like a run of like massive YouTube videos.

You were like a like household name for like City Skylines.

Yeah, I remember still from if they hadn't, uh, if they hadn't fucked up City Skylines too so bad.

Yeah, we were talking about that before recording.

Oh well.

But if you don't have anybody, if you don't have enough of them, you have the Doom Franklin Project.

Yeah, the Doom Franklin Project.

You know, the next question you ask yourself is: do you have an agent?

And if you do have an agent, your agent's able to submit the play to potentially interested parties.

And this is mostly a lot of regional theaters now will not take unsolicited manuscripts.

So,

or ones not submitted by an agent specifically, because the backlog is so long because of the pandemic, because of delayed productions,

and just lack of money, basically.

the likelihood of your play being read, even if you have an agent at one of those regional theaters, is pretty low unless you have a pre-established relationship with them.

But if you don't have an agent, which is very likely because most theatrical agents went under in the pandemic as well,

the next question you have to ask yourself is, do you have $75,000?

And the answer is yes.

Time to sell produce.

My podcast millions.

Justin, you can sell the nuclear bomb.

So probably you can.

You can raise $75,000.

I can't raise $75,000.

The bombs, that's not the best.

Come on, come on.

We can make Iran get the bomb before the justice, the Supreme Court.

It'd be illegal to sell.

Camera lenses are not worth that much for resale.

Not my bomb.

If you sell the bomb, if you sell whoever's bomb that is,

if you sell the bomb, whose ebom that is, you get 75K.

So you get really mad at me if I sold it.

It's not your bomb.

I get it.

I get it.

The Supreme Bomb is quite a second nuclear weapon.

Look, Satan does not have to doubt about this this is all uh so you you can use that 75k to self-produce um you rent a venue and you pay actors uh the equity uh minimum wage uh and you invite a bunch of industry people to that but if you don't have 75 000 then you submit it yourself and as josh has put here roll a d100 for luck fail on one through 98 i imagine also like the whole process of producing or pre-producing this you have to become god's worst tyrant and also the cheapest bastard on earth.

Yes.

Given that it's your money, you have a very limited supply of it.

You can only pay people the minimum wage.

And if anything goes wrong, you are like turbo fucked.

Does anybody have anybody have to have a D100 on them, by the way, real quick?

He's like, I'll grow your D100.

All right.

Let's see.

Let's see how well there's your problem on ice is going to do.

Yeah.

Three.

Three.

Yeah, I won.

Okay, so we've got a critical pass as well as a pretty pretty much a critical fail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like we killed an actor in the course of staging

the lead actors

with ice skates.

Oh no!

She's never going to skate again.

It's real bad.

And we're out 75K.

So you have failed.

So the fail state sends you right back to keep writing better luck luck next time.

But AJ passed, which takes him to someone actually picked up your script and gave it to their literary intern.

How about that?

Or

you've won a competition.

This can happen a whole bunch of different ways.

You can submit it to the O'Neill Theater Conference.

They will also charge you $35 to read your play and give you no feedback on it if you do not get accepted, which is highway robbery.

I guess I've just blown any chance I'm ever having being accepted to the O'Neill.

But

then, or you you like, you can also be commissioned by a theater company if you have like an old relationship with them.

That's how one of the plays that I wrote that got produced was I was commissioned by a theater company and they put on the show.

But sometimes you'll be commissioned by a theater company and they will decide not to do your play.

And also, brutal, you can't do that play anywhere else in certain contracts because they own the rights to it because they commissioned it.

So, the play is essentially dead on arrival.

You get back to writing.

But

saying all that stuff like went well.

You've won the contest.

Literary intern reads it.

It piques their interest.

Then your script will be selected for a staged reading.

Which is very cool.

Oh, you have.

What play did you do a staged reading for?

It was called John Taliban.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let me just roll that D20 again, real quick.

All right, there you go.

Roll D100.

Come on.

Six.

Six.

Oh,

better life.

Say goodbye to John Taliban, everyone.

All right.

Unfortunately.

But yes, the stage reading.

At this point, you are going to be getting up in front of a bunch of people.

Or people are going to be getting up in front of people.

They're going to have music stands and they're going to read the play for a group of people.

And now there are a whole bunch of different kinds of readings.

But for the sake of argument, this is not one

that is explicitly looking for producers.

A lot of them are just used for like like feedback.

And then, I'm sorry, this would be one that is exclusively looking for producers, but there are a lot of stage readings that can just be for developmental purposes.

Cost bonus episodes.

Industry.

Yeah, exactly.

And that's its own entire industry is just the development of a new play.

Because the most playwrights can hope for at this point.

is

getting your play, get a staged reading at a big

New York.

And then that play will probably be...

To your previous point, a lot of these places that used to exist that are to do with developing new work, well, they're just fucking gone now.

They don't exist anymore.

So yeah, because the pandemic killed them off,

there's a thing called Space at Writer Farm, which just shut down, which was literally just a house in upstate New York where playwrights would go and like do the housework, do all their own cooking and live there for like a week and write a play and share it with everyone.

And even they couldn't stay open.

For something with that like low bar of money that went into it.

They just could not get the funding anymore.

Basically, in the theater world, there is a drawbridge that is slowly being pulled up.

And there are a couple of people who are actually able to make it over, but they were people who are already pretty much climbing up the thing in the first place.

And there is hope that the drawbridge will eventually come down.

But for the moment, it seems like they're sort of like hunkering down.

Anyway, so we're at the reading stage.

And if the reading goes well enough that people are willing to put money into the show, well, then congratulations, you move on to a workshop.

But if the reading does not go well,

then you can still submit that play to like playwriting competitions, which might roll a D20 here.

Yeah.

And pass.

Pass here is an 18 minus N, where N is the total number of readings, workshops, or productions the play has had.

So we're going to say in this situation

that WTYP on ice

has had two.

It's had one workshop, one reading.

So it's pass on a 16.

All right.

Let me just do this here:

roll a d20, and that is going to give us 16 exactly.

We had, we had voted.

All right, we're good, we're good for WTYPR.

Nice.

Congratulations.

Your script has won a playwriting award, and now it has been selected for a stage reading.

Yeah, we're right back to stage reading.

Uh, and again, ask the question: Does the reading go well?

Puts money into it.

Great.

You get that money, you go on to a workshop.

And a workshop production is actors are off-book, not fully costumed, not fully staged,

but they are putting on the show

maybe some light staging, maybe some prop work, but they're putting on the show for potential investors to be like, this is going to be the thing.

And mostly it's decided on lines of either it being like a tastemaker, of it being like, this is going to shake the American theater to its core, or this is a jukebox musical that's going to get in a lot of people with butts and deceits, right?

But then, with that success and with getting that money, also come producers who are going to have their own notes.

And those notes, in a lot of cases, are the thing you have to take in order to get the money.

So, in this example, here, WTYP on ice,

unfortunately, we will have to be cutting the ice portion.

That's fair.

So, this is

very difficult.

We can do it on roller skates, though.

Are you no, no skates at all?

Are you willing to take that note?

I will compromise with anyone.

You tell me this has to be based on Kazakh folk music.

I will start learning.

Can we use Heely's?

If you can buy it,

come on.

Yes, but you have to provide your own.

Okay.

Healy's budget goes through the fucking roof overnight.

It's

B-Y-O-H, I guess.

Just like, just like do a really annoying casting call that's like, must bring own Healies to audition.

We get like pulled out on Twitter.

It's like a real disaster.

Even

if they don't make it into the show, you get to keep their helias.

They have to leave them on the way out.

Yeah.

By the way, if you did say no there, I would have had to tell you to roll a D20 again.

But because you said yes, it's okay, we can move on to the full production, which you'll also note.

We are now at the point where you can get to if you just have a famous friend.

So, so now, so now you have

a full production.

I was in a show very much actually that had the super famous friend.

That super famous friend was Luke Wilson.

Wow.

And

he produced the play.

He had never read it.

He had no idea what it was, but

he gave 75K, or at least a large percentage of 75K to the show to get it to go up off Broadway.

Give us 75K.

We'll make John Taliban.

That would be so good.

Yeah.

And so you do a full production.

And the goal of a full production is to get in critics who will see the work, will write about it, and build up buzz and hype enough that you could get more people with bigger money on board so you can transfer to a larger company.

There's a limiting factor as well that's not just money because 75k is a lot of money, right?

But it's like dentist money.

Like, it's the kind of thing that, like, it's the kind of thing you can fund an indie film, not like even a huge indie film with, for instance.

It's the kind of money that used to be thrown at like, like, you know, like B movies, essentially.

So clearly, it's not.

Everyone with 75K can fund this.

Otherwise, we would be seeing a lot of dentist musicals.

Oh,

you see shit thing.

You do.

You do.

You just don't hear about them because they're terrible.

But these are all, I mean, if you want to talk about earlier, we mentioned how most off-Broadway theaters are

for non-profit producing organizations that program a season.

The handful of commercial for-profit off-Broadway rental houses that are left, those are the ones where the dentist musicals are going on.

Theater row is a big place for that.

I hate the thought that I may just have named the genre here.

I might only think about those as dentist musicals from here on out.

I had to work so many of those shows during my time doing box office and every fucking one of these performances, no tickets were sold.

So they had to paper the entire house.

And so what actually happened was

well, no, no, she doesn't pay for her fucking tickets.

That's the other thing about Nikki Cochran.

That motherfucker has never paid for a goddamn ticket in her life.

She just in the house.

So I guess

it's a situation where you have to like,

you know, you're going to the show because your friend is in it.

You know, yes.

And if it's not that, it's that you got your tickets through a service like something called Club Free Time, which is a real thing

where you can sign up for like $5 and you get access to

free tickets

for a bunch of shows.

And so I remember rather than ever having to sell a ticket for any show when I was doing box office for that shit and or having to like look up Will Call or anything, I just have my list from the different papering services.

And I'd be like, yes, Mrs.

Richardson,

you, you, yes, you have two tickets and be like, thank you, darling.

I'm so excited for the show.

I've heard it's marvelous.

I can't wait to see it.

Yeah.

Variations on Raw's for boxing.

Yes.

So you're just going to give her like a theatrical equivalent of like dumb money, if you like.

Sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

It's not even like a weird art thing that doesn't make sense because I'll go to any weird art thing that doesn't make sense.

It's people who are like buying like a subscription to the theater because they think it's art.

And what they're getting instead is like a dentist's mistress doing a one-woman show.

Yeah, well, and again, and they're not paying for these tickets either.

They're getting them for free.

Yeah.

But hopefully, a lot of them who are getting the free tickets love the show.

They give it standing ovations.

Because if not, guess what?

The play is kind of done.

If it's at the production,

then it's pretty much dead in the water.

Everybody is obsessed with having world premieres.

And if you don't have the world premiere,

then you're kind of screwed.

You can still, there is a path there.

You can still roll the D20 and you might win a playwriting award.

And the likelihood of that going increases with the more development a given play has had.

But it's going to be very negative.

Let me give it a go here.

Rolling D20.

Okay.

And you're now, if you're passing

now, we're going to Broadway.

Hey, okay.

Hey.

We got the ice bag.

We're actually not going to Broadway yet.

Because

now the question is, so we're assuming here that you put it up again and that it also got stellar reviews and sold out every performance.

Yes.

Now, if you've done that, flip a coin.

Oh, come on, man.

Bullshit.

All right.

Flip coin.

Heads or tails.

Yeah.

Heads passes, tails fails.

Come on.

Heads.

Congratulations.

you're going.

Everybody!

Yes, we got Waltersian Bravel.

It's on ice.

But not on ice.

But the ice is somehow done through special effects.

Welcome to Waltersian Bravel.

Yeah,

the Kazakh throat singing arc is like an interesting turn, but like audiences really seem to like it.

Yeah.

So that's the play development process.

And we've got a few more slides in here

about

the nature of what that looks like in more detail.

So

that's the system.

This is actually pretty easy.

We got through it first time.

I don't know any problem.

Yeah, skill at you.

RIPTO play but house is built different.

And by different, we mean not on ice.

That's the thing, though.

I'm glad you took the note.

There's your problem on Heely's.

That we had to provide ourselves.

That's right.

The Tony Award-winning play this year was a play called Stereophonic, and it was nominated for the most Tony's of all time, and it ended up winning.

And it was a commission from a theater that decided not to produce it.

So it is also that you are at the whims of artistic directors who think they know what theater is, but the truth is, nobody does.

Nobody knows that.

It's also nice that you're like starving writing this stuff and the guy who's deciding, and the guy whose whims you're at is making like a million dollars a year.

Exactly.

He's like a penthouse.

You know, board.

He's like a Manhattan penthouse, but also like not that good of a Manhattan penthouse.

It's like one of the mediocre.

Yeah, what we're saying is this guy's work in a different way.

Exactly.

And

he's got a balcony.

It's like, you know, but it just

opens onto the building across the street.

You know,

I will also say.

That's how you can throw glass bottles at your neighbors, Ross.

Oh, it's the easiest way.

But the thing is about this particular chart that we've grafted for you is this is the chart if you are a white guy.

Yeah, if you are not, if you are, yeah, if you are not,

then

all of a sudden, all these other factors start going against you.

You know, for yeah, I mean, you basically have to roll a D20 before every step.

Yes.

An additional D20.

Yeah.

You know, because, you know, while there have been significant improvements in diversifying the canon, there have been obviously more playwrights of color on Broadway and off Broadway that have been produced in recent years.

The fact of the matter is, is that the majority, the vast majority of play productions in this country are have all white creative teams and are written by white men.

That is just how the statistics fall for this sort of thing.

And there was a brief period of time right after the pandemic when Broadway was mostly playwrights of color because the rents had gone down.

And so people were willing to, quote, you know, take bigger risks on plays.

But what was really going on was that the shows that knew how to make money were waiting for people to come back.

Yes.

And the rallying cry was broadway is back broadway is back and then you would go to see a broadway show and you get an entirely new strain of covid that was originated in that theater

says he dash hamilton dash death yeah well moulon rouge was like a particular particularly fertile ground for covid for some reason it was everybody spitting on each other during the show i mean that like higher body count than turn off the dark

i mean legitimately um and and it was it was deeply it was a deeply scary time um but the thing is that we still haven't recovered from it and we're still feeling the ramifications of COVID.

Now we're still feeling the ramifications of COVID.

Like

like Bradway is turns out to be the cultural equivalent of the Sturgis Motorcycle Festival.

But for a different socioeconomic class.

Well, actually, not that different from like a pure class standpoint, but a different

about the like American pessi bourgeoisie, you know?