No submissions today (Day 131), but . . .

The other day in my entry about submitting POUND to the Gamm Theatre I mentioned that, based on Gamm's production history, we may share aesthetic sensibilities. Shared and, more often, unshared sensibilities account for a great deal that goes on or doesn't in this business.

One of the more humbling aspects of being a playwright, or at least one who is not yet commercially successful, is the discovery of how few other people may share the sensibilities expressed in my plays, which constitute after all what I value, what excites me, and what humors me. It drives home as few other things do just how different I may be and, while we all admire originality and individuality, even they can be enjoyed only within the context of community and relationships. Originality or individuality that's so extreme as to be alienating is not a happy situation. Look up the poet, Ezra Pound (the subject of my play, POUND), who spent a painful life dancing on the edge of that precipice.

Shared aesthetic sensibilities can also be vital in the relationship between a theatre's artistic director and the public. It's too much to say that shared sensibilities between AD's and the public are necessary, because it's possible and commonplace for theatres to comprise their seasons entirely of plays that are reliably popular based on the reputations and equity they've acquired elsewhere. I don't know that there are any cases of AD's selecting a play for production without actually having read it and based purely on the reviews, descriptions, and box office receipts from productions in a dozen other towns . . . but it could be done.

There are some artistic directors though who earn the trust of their audiences to the degree that people will enthusiastically come to the theatre to see plays they've never heard of and that are written by playwrights they've never heard of. They do so just because the AD, the person whose judgment they trust . . . whose judgment they willingly substitute for their own, has chosen that play.

The best example that I know of is Karla Boos, founder and AD of Quantum Theatre, who has a genius for finding plays that are unheard of outside the suburbs of, say, Dubrovnik and delivering them to a grateful audience. Karla would be embarrassed by this description, but can you imagine the importance and value to theatre of AD's like Karla who can command a public and who choose to use that power to deliver new art? I don't mean to diminish the value of theatres that restrict themselves to producing plays and playwrights whose reputations are already established --they are the means by which plays reach the broad public and not just the narrow public -- but that can't be all theatre is if it's to have any more relevance and impact than an oldies radio station.

PS. Please do not construe this as a puff-ball blown Karla Boos's way. She's already delivered her rejection.