Submission 131 / Day 130

POUND to The Gamm Theatre

There are some theatres that I hope will do my play simply because they're prominent and because of the opportunities that might follow a success. But sometimes I come across a theatre where the body of work suggests an aesthetic sensibility so close to my own that, regardless of the theatre's prominence, I think, "I want to be part of that". For me, Gamm Theatre of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is just that. And I had never heard of it before stumbling upon the web site.

Gamm's play selection suggests a persistent fascination with the human beast -- as a spirit, as a machine (frequently a broken one), and as any number of other things. It's a fascination I share and that's best represented in my play, POUND . . . which is now on the way.

Having never seen a production at Gamm, I can't swear that their reach doesn't extend their grasp, although the reviews suggest it does not. But, at the very least, it's a joy to encounter a theatre whose production history if anything exceeds the promise expressed by the theatre's mission statement.

Ah, yes, the "Mission Statement". For a document that, in theory, is supposed to serve as both a guiding beacon and as an attainable goal, the amount of nonsense spouted in these missives is quite amazing. I say this as a playwright who tries to align my submissions with the aspirations expressed in these documents and that often means I give mission statements more attention than some of them can bear.

The most common fault is that they're simply absurdly grandiose, but I don't fault theatres or anyone else for grandiosity or even pomposity because that's the unfortunate label nihilists of all varieties use to condemn aspiration . . . and I'm a big believer in aspiration as my project demonstrates. Still, it doesn't take a nihilist to see the occasional gaps (chasms?) between aspiration and practice.


Not long ago I came across a theatre whose mission statement proclaimed its aspiration to "explore the full range of dramatic possibility". Wow! Then I went to the script submission guidelines which advised, "Cast limit of 4 and the majority of roles should be for women in their late twenties". The full range of dramatic possibility must not be as vast as I had imagined.