Anne Washburn
Hi, Faith.
Faith Zamblé
Hi Anne. Wow. So strange to have somebody greet you by your name on the phone.
Anne Washburn
Sorry, it’s a little menacing.
Faith Zamblé
It is. But you know what? It keeps you on your toes. I’m alert. How are you?
Anne Washburn
I, personally, am fine. I can’t say the same for everything else.
Faith Zamblé
And on the subject of menace … Let’s talk about the murder room. Where did it come from and where does it sit in your artistic practice?
Anne Washburn
Really, it was two summers ago, and that was the period where everybody felt like, “Oh, my God, I think the American theater is really fucked.” But no one was quite saying it out loud. And I was thinking: going in a room and putting things up on the walls would be really fun, but I hadn’t said anything about this to anyone. I was having semi-informal drinks with some people from Playwrights Horizons, and I mentioned that a director I really respected had said, “Oh, I think the American theater is dead,” and when I’d heard that, instead of feeling sad, I felt it was really great just because somebody was saying it. Everyone at the table was like, “Yes, I want to talk about the American theater being in deep, in terrible trouble.” And I told them, “I just feel like putting things up on walls”. I’d been wanting for a while to do something evidence-board style like you see on cop shows on tv – responding to confusion and tension by putting all the factors up on the wall seemed useful and good looking and dramatic. Playwrights had gotten this small grant about envisioning the future of the American theater, so they used the money to give me one of the rehearsal rooms for a week. I didn’t even know what this would be, but I came in with all these thoughts, and I put them up. Then, I sent out an invite, and people came by to put stuff up on the walls too.
I had sort of envisioned it as, “We’ll put up problems and solutions.” It’s also trying to narrow down all of the different factors at play. For example, one person was like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had all of the theater listings and all the arts listings for New York in one place. Why don’t we have that?” And then a lot of people responded, “We used to! It was called the Village Voice listings, or the TimeOut listing.” We had all of those things in one place, and we don’t anymore. Or people putting down things like, “This is how downtown started, and this is how it worked, and this is how it didn’t work.”
And that was really interesting. I began to realize, [the room] was functioning like a primitive form of Twitter. When people are going around the room, the stuff they’re always most fascinated by is where somebody really takes time to write out what they’re thinking, and why they’re thinking that, and where that thought comes from. People always want to read those entries because you’re getting a glimpse into something. So, the room sort of functions as a way of disgorging all of these thoughts. But then the visual aspect of the room, the way the postings are arranged means that you can see one thought in close proximity to another thought, which is technically speaking, completely unrelated. Your brain just is kind of bouncing around from one thought to another thought to another thought. And in some ways, it just gives you a more complicated look at what’s going on, and in other ways, it does help you to see connections. It also sort of suggests solutions. When you spend time with a lot of unrelated problems, you start to see ways in which they might be able to jostle together productively.
Faith Zamblé
There’s something very organic about this. It’s almost like you’re planting a garden and then you’re seeing which plants like each other or are helping each other grow. It almost becomes this a brain of its own, where the synapses start firing, and then maybe the collective energy that is this murder board, (murder room?), will start to solve its own problems, in a way… Do you remember what you started the room with? Like, what was the first thing you put up?
Anne Washburn
Yes. Someone sent me an email saying something I’ve been thinking a lot about lately… About all of the information which is getting lost on the internet. They wanted to talk to somebody about 13P. Do you know about 13P?
Faith Zamblé
Why does 13P sound familiar? It used to be 13 playwrights, right?
Anne Washburn
It was a collective of 13 playwrights who banded together and committed to produce one play from each writer. It had a dictum to produce the 13 plays, and then the organization imploded by design. It was a reasonably big deal at the time, and because a lot of people were interested in doing something like that themselves, the organization, as it was closing down, invested a lot of time and energy into creating a website with archival stuff, and sort of a DIY “This is how we did it.” All of it was housed on one website, and then it moved to another website and now it’s defunct.
And so, this person was just saying, “We’re losing all of this archival information because it went on the internet.” There are a million things that you can talk about when you talk about the death of American theater and the loss of archival information is maybe not the forefront of that discussion, but it leads to a constellated discussion about the internet and what that has had to do with both the death of democracy, and the death of the theater. That ended up being a theme in the room. There were a number of times when people have come up with great ideas and put up a website that had a lot of DIY information about it. And, it’s all gone.
Faith Zamblé
So many thoughts, but I wonder, when we talk about American theater being “dead”, what does that mean to you?
Anne Washburn
I mean, obviously, it’s not dead, right? And it will never die, because people will always want to make theater. I think what the director in question was talking about was that the American institutional nonprofit theater system, which has been such an important and complex part of life for theater artists, is in real trouble for all sorts of different reasons. There will always be some form of major commercial theater, because people will pay money to go see it. People will always be making theater in backyards or living rooms or something.
When I first started my life in the theater, I thought, “Oh, I’ll just make weird art, and I’ll temp my whole life.” The idea that anyone would ever do my plays in the institutional nonprofit system, let alone in any larger commercial system, seemed crazy and also not even desirable. I have complex feelings about this, but I now see a lot of heavy-duty virtues to the system, especially now that it’s imperiled. At the same time, there are many heavy-duty detriments. All kinds of things about it are–
Faith Zamblé
–questionable at best.
Anne Washburn
At best, and also just in a way, how did we get here? Clearly, there might be better ways. But again, there is an acculturation and accumulation around these institutions. And there are some things a commercial theater system or amateur theater will not replace. The constellation of downtown culture, which did a lot of these things in its own ways, is not possible in a city in which the cost of living is so expensive and space is so expensive. I say “the city” as though New York were the thing, and of course, it isn’t, but the problems that New York has with expensive space are shared by almost any city which is large enough to get enough people together to have a theater scene. And you need a scene, you don’t just need a couple theaters, because what a theater scene provides, which is so important, is opposition. People being like, “I don’t like what you’re doing. I need to do it better.” It’s not just about people gathering together beautifully to make a play that everyone agrees is good. It’s necessary to have stiff competition in terms of this way of making art, or developing a perspective. Choosing to put your energy here and not there. And you need a scene for that.
Faith Zamblé
There’s a part of me that’s wondering if that opposition still exists. But then, it also feels like there are so many plays and so many kinds of plays, it’s hard to know if any of these shows are speaking to each other, or if they are all existing in vacuums? I’d love to hear your thoughts on the current scene.
Anne Washburn
I mean, it’s a tricky thing, right? I think the current scene is one of great richness. When people talk about downtown, one thing they really talk about is proximity, right? Like it was downtown. It was largely the East Village and the Lower East Side. And again, this is not to say that downtown was the scene of all scenes, but it was a robust specific scene. So, when I say downtown, I use it as a shorthand for any scene that gets really lively, gets its own momentum and has its own culture, separate from any kind of sort of larger critical validation or commercial success.
It does feel like there’s less things in less conversation with each other. And I sort of feel like that has to do partly with what a scramble it is to see any of it as you lope all over town, what a financial commitment it is to see some number of it, let alone to figure out where and what it is. Because, yes, to me, it’s a huge pain in the ass to have lost the arts and entertainment listings that made it very possible to swiftly determine what was happening, and the amount of energy you have to go into even just sort of figure out what all the options are…
I used to be able to just look at the listings, and there would be a certain number of things which wouldn’t be in the listings, but it was easier to know what those were. The organization of the whole thing is just falling apart and there are fewer reviews. I know people have really complicated feelings about reviews, but partly from spending time in the murder room and looking at the arguments there I’ve come around on the necessity of reviews and a healthy reviewing system and if that goes we’re in huge trouble and that is, in fact, going.
That is an enormous problem, actually, congruent with all sorts of related problems.
A lot of the problems the theater is facing are very, very related to the problems the rest of society is facing, which sounds like a justification for focusing on this, our small, weird and technically speaking, deeply unimportant art form. But, it is true that it’s easier to see in a smaller system.
Faith Zamblé
Yeah, this is a microcosm of what is going on pretty much everywhere.
Anne Washburn
Yes, and they’re for different reasons and for different things. You know, the one blessed outcome of the culture wars of the 90s is that this system of nonprofits which are mostly not dependent on federal funding, so that when they total out the arts budget, the kind of theater system we’re existing in will not be substantially the worse for it. Who’s going to get screwed over are tons and tons of small community based and educational based initiatives throughout the nation. But weirdly, the major non profit institutions are more insulated from this current time in any sort of direct form than a lot of people.
Faith Zamblé
I guess, by divesting, (I don’t know if I would say intentionally), but being divested from federal funds, you’re freer. But then I wonder, is this all just about money? I wonder what the murder room has to say about money and the theater. Are the problems that the theater is facing now, and by extension, the problems in our larger society, a result of how we place value on the arts? Not that it’s only one thing…
Anne Washburn
The murder room is obsessed with money, as it should be. There’s also a question of, should we be talking about money? There are two major sort of strains. One is: how can we get more money? The other is: this is who’s not getting money. So, there’s the whole question of resource allocation, which is fascinating. As a playwright, you’re oddly separate from a lot of the economies of the theater, because it’s not like anyone thinks you could make your living in the theater through writing plays. So, you’re somewhat distanced from these questions of, “I’m putting in this much time and effort into my art, and why is it not paying me enough to live on?”
There’s a fascinating side question, which is in some ways generational, and this is where it’s like, I’m Gen X, so I come down on this side and can’t fully speak honorably about the argument as a whole, because I have a prejudice. The room is able to hold the argument more justly than I myself.
The question is between late-stage millennials, Gen Xers and Boomers, and mid to early stage millennials and Gen Zs. And it is that whole question of, “Am I being fairly paid for this?” What Gen X sees, and again, I’m not representing it fairly probably, but I will represent my generational stance. What Gen X sees is, and is concerned about, is young theater artists who cannot make work with each other without feel they have to pay each other equitably, and as a result – because ofcourse they are young and broke — are not making anything. And our perspective– I’m just gonna use the royal generational “we”–is, if you’re working with an institution that has money, you should get paid money, and you should get paid what you’re worth. And the whole question of what people are worth is a whole other complicated thing.
But, if you are working with other young theater artists, for God’s sake, why are you ultra capitalism-ing yourself and making money the vehicle? Every time you work with each other, you gain knowledge and experience, and also, it’s an act of love. How have these things become monetized? And doesn’t that seem like the death of art, but also of community spirit? So, there’s discussion in the room about that.
Obviously, there are a lot of systems within the American theater which are exploitational. That’s a charged use of language though, because I think very seldom, and this is a point of confusion, very seldom do people deliberately set out to exploit others in the theater. It’s just very convenient in an art form in which everybody really loves to do what they do, to not notice. I feel like a lot of it is passive or convenient or not caretaking rather than deliberately sinister.
But there’s also other discussion around it too. For example, it’s insane how little arts funding happens in the United States. It’s insane, because it’s a cultural reason rather than an economic reason. And that when and there’s this sort of pushback and forth between a lot of people around, when you talk about the value of arts funding, you have to make a bunch of economic arguments around it’s a net economic boom. It causes jobs. It creates this. It does that. Soft power, you guys!
Faith Zamblé
Ugh, soft power.
Anne Washburn
You have to make those arguments. And also, they’re idiots not to consider them. But in the middle of this, we also, at the same time, have to insist that there are non-monetary reasons why the arts are important. And even if there’s pushback to that idea and disbelief of that idea, you have to hold that space. You have to continue to make that point, and you have to expand on that point, and you have to amplify that point. That is the point which gets attacked, but you have to defend it.
We have to put ourselves in the way of arguments, if for no other reason that we can learn to better fight them. Because right now, we get attacked, we freak out and crumble. So it’s like not helpful on any level. People who are not good at arguing are terrible arguers, and the way to get better at arguing is to do it a lot. Hot take.
Faith Zamblé
No, I love it. And I think, if we’re not already doing that with each other, disagreeing and arguing (lovingly) with people who we respect and are in community with, how are we going to do it with people who don’t respect us and like, don’t really think that the theater community is worth funding or supporting?
There is also something that I wanted to say about your generational point. I’m outing myself a millennial, Gen Z cusp, but I do think that for so many of us, especially those of us who are marginalized in some capacity, the idea of getting paid for what you do is not just a goal, but feels like some sort of cosmic justice. Being a starving artist is not giving what it used to give these days; there’s been a larger cultural shift where people are really thinking like, “Huh, what sacrifices would I have to make to be able to keep making art? And is it worth it? And wouldn’t it be nice if I could find a way to use the skills that I have and that I love to use in a way that will get me money?” But I also think that this has a lot to with MFA culture etc. Something to talk about another time.
I’m really thinking about what you said around creating something with your community as an act of love. I find myself wondering if, as corny as it sounds, love is a currency that people are still willing to buy into, for lack of a better phrase.
I guess that would be my entry to the room.
Anne Washburn
I feel like my generation were kind of the first to get MFAs, and there were very few grad schools. Now there are many, but at the time, there were only a handful. Our assumption was that we would make theater for free for a period of time. Some might get recognized and somehow make money for it. There were models that didn’t involve getting paid for a period of time. And the idea was you would do all this work for free, you’d pay your dues, and you’d have gigs on the side right that were not what you wanted to do. Then, after a certain period, you would have proved yourself, and then you would start to make money. So, from my generation, the expectation that your generation has of being paid for what you want to do right out the gate seems both crazy to us, but also, we look at it and we’re like, “Wow, we should have had that belief in ourselves.” That’s 10 years of your life that you didn’t waste, and that’s amazing, right? But a thing that has happened is there are all these grad programs and all these undergrad programs, and I feel that they just imply by the fact that they exist in respectable institutionsthat if you do this training and gain skills and are talented–which lots of people are–that there’s a way you can make a living.
The other discussion the room has is around, how are people able to make it? There are some number of people who have private money. There are some number of people who are married to people who have money. And then there is an interesting third category. And this is exciting, because there are political responses to this that could be possible. The interesting third category of how are people making it in the theater is that they have incredibly low rent for one reason or another.
And, all of these reasons mean that people are able to dedicate their lives to creating theater in a way that would not be possible if they were motivated strictly by commercial necessity. In a weird way, it’s a boon to have these lucky people involved in the theater but also it clouds the overall discussion and naturally has resentment. It’d be great to be able to have sort of an honest, low-key discussion around that. I don’t know how, because when money comes up, it gets crazy, and shaming is not helpful. But anyway I think this idea of a non-capitalist currency is important. It’s the currency of love, it’s the currency of support, it’s the currency of belief. I think this idea of an alternative currency is helpful and beautiful. ✦
Extended Play is a project of The Civilians. To learn more about The Civilians and to access exclusive discounts to shows, visit us and join our email list at TheCivilians.org.
