by Robert Faires
Fifty people on a stage, slouching in chairs, clutching coffee cups, stifling
yawns. On this summer morn they have come into a rough circle to invoke a new
American theatre.
It is a theatre that will infest every corner of the country, a theatre of
risks, of vaulting imagination, a theatre of community and of service that
survives on scams and barter, a theatre of size and scope but also poverty and
tawdriness, a Big Cheap Theatre.
In a sense this theatre already exists, in the small companies producing their
own personal brands of theatre in cities across the country. You know the kind;
Austin is home to many such groups: Frontera/Hyde Park Theatre, Physical Plant
Theatre, The Public Domain, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Troupe Texas, Vortex
Repertory Company, to name a few. They share qualities: They work in houses of
fewer than 150 seats; they produce most shows with budgets of two to three
figures; artists share multiple responsibilities (acting, building sets,
raising funds, etc.). Most of all, they are aggressively independent, staging
works which matter to them and that they believe matter to others.
Still, the existence of such companies is always threatened. Because they make
intense demands on the people who run them, they are almost always on the verge
of collapse. If they don’t drop from financial exhaustion (artists emptying
their own pockets to fund the company’s work), they fall from physical
exhaustion (artists draining themselves meeting company responsibilities on top
of other responsibilities: spouse, child, day job, etc.). When the few people
at the heart of the company wear down, the company dies. Often, the death is
untimely. The artists involved may have had more to say but had no more
strength or patience with which to give those words voice.
Two years ago, someone came forward to say that it doesn’t have to be that
way, that there is a way to extend the lives of these smaller, independent
stages and at the same time develop a national repertory company for
experimental theatre. The someone was Erik Ehn, a Bay Area playwright whose
highly imagistic and sensuous work has gained him widespread attention of late.
(Ehn’s Anarchy in the Oklahoma Kingdom [AOK] was staged in Austin
in August.) Ehn offered his ideas in an essay for the Yale journal
Theater. In “Towards Big Cheap Theater,” he wrote, “Experimental
theatres, geographically and economically isolated from one another, struggle
separately when they could be struggling together – not in less pain perhaps,
but in a common and revivifying pain.” He proposed the creation of an Art
Workers’ Hostelry, an organization to provide “art exchanges” among small,
non-profit theatres: exchanges of scripts, productions, artists, and ways of
working. The Hostelry would be a structure through which these disparate
theatres could draw strength from each other. These “theatres that choose to
operate under radar, below the market – the pushcart robbers, the fools for
God’s sake, the creeps, the busted alchemists, the trolls” – could then “build
a national theatre from a foundation of ethics, of assembly, of no-money.”
The proposal struck a chord in theatre artists across the land. Some wrote
responses to Theater. One took action. A playwriting professor at the
University of Iowa persuaded the chairman of the Department to host a meeting
of interested companies on the university’s campus. The first weekend in
December, 1994, representatives of 20 “small broke theatres” assembled for
three days of food, drink, and talk of Big Cheap Theatre. Of the 20, five came
from Austin.
The heavy Austin presence resulted from a local Ehn connection developed in
the months prior to the conference. Don Howell, an Austin theatre educator,
patron, and supporter called Ehn to see about getting copies of his plays. In
turn, Ehn put Howell in touch with Allison Narver, then the Artistic Director
for the Annex Theatre in Seattle, who was interested in learning more about the
theatre scene in Austin. They connected, and Howell helped put together an
event that got Ehn and Narver to Austin for a weekend. With sponsorship from
the Austin Circle of Theatres, Dance Umbrella, and the UT Department of Theatre
and Dance, Ehn presented a playwriting workshop and a program on the Big Cheap
Theatre idea here last October. During his visit, Ehn invited Austin’s theatre
companies to Iowa. Five accepted: Frontera/Hyde Park, The Public Domain,
Physical Plant, Salvage Vanguard, and Howell’s company, teeny feats.
The Austin Squad, as Ehn dubbed them, joined groups from Dallas, Seattle, New
York City, Washington, D.C., San Diego, Minneapolis, and San Francisco in Iowa.
The attending companies discovered they had many differences – from the sizes
of their respective groups and the number of people in them (one individual to
dozens of people) to the amounts of money with which they work (zero dollars to
$900,000), to the focus of their work (new plays, site-specific works,
community outreach, etc.) – but they found similarities, too: an
everyone-does-everything way of working, shared interests in using spaces to
engage audiences more actively, a sense of theatre as a way of seeing or
behaving, an ethic. If nothing else came out of the conference, this
confirmation to each group that there are others like it, groups that share its
philosophies and goals, was valuable. As Ehn noted in a report on the event
published in Theater: “We became aware of each other. This, on its own,
relieves the pressure.”
But more came out of it. Ehn again: “We met each other, we identified our
separate missions, we took steps towards giving to our shared mission; lastly,
we committed ourselves to building on the serendipity of our collegiality.” The
participants discussed creating a network, not exactly like Ehn’s Hostelry, but
very like it. They exchanged information and talked of sharing work. The
conference gave birth to a fanzine.
It also gave birth to the rat, or RAT, as name and symbol for this movement.
Names for the assembly had been loosely tossed about beforehand; at some point,
Ehn’s Art Workers’ Hostelry was abandoned. In its place emerged RAT. To some,
it was an acronym for “Regional Alternative Theatres” or “Raggedy Ass
Theatres.” To others, it stood for nothing but itself. The ambiguity seemed to
appeal to the Iowa gang. Then, Ehn seized on the term and – as he is wont to do
– illuminated the metaphor lying within: “We squeezed through drainpipes to get
to the Iowa idyll (to find its corn). We looked for a name. We became the Rat
Conference.” The rat imagery became key to the sensibility of these groups and
their future together. Ehn ended his report with these words: “Our ability to
flourish is not tied to dominance or status. We will thrive by eating through
insulation and scurrying across the tops of beams. We will not influence our
environment through leadership; we will infest. Leave the old structures in
place; we need to breed in the linen closets; we need to steal xerox. We want
to stay small and grow to many.”
In the name of the RAT, then,
theatre artists from a dozen spots across the land – Johnson City, Tennessee,
Brooklyn, San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, D.C.,
Dallas, San Antonio, and, yes, Austin – gathered in the Annex Theatre in
Seattle in August. In some ways, the second RAT Conference was a replay of the
first: lots of introductions, descriptions of work and ways of working, talk of
what RAT could and should be. But while the talk covered similar ground – a
necessity given the number of new members – it was no less animated or
powerful. Every session pulsed with deeply felt sentiments about the import of
theatre.
Where the second conference built on the first was in sharing ways of working.
Seminars were led by participating artists: “Budgeting/Financial Management for
the Smaller Raggedy Ass Theatre,” “Guerrilla Marketing,” “Theatre in Bars,
Alleys, Warehouses, and Station Wagons,” and assorted workshops on Big Cheap
Theatre, in which artists shared success stories of how they pulled off
impressive stage effects using inexpensive or free materials (e.g., TV sets as
lighting instruments) or nontraditional means (puppets, actors to describe
special effects). Seeded throughout these seminars were stories of failure –
i.e., how not to do something – and secrets to scams, ways in which
materials or services could be obtained for nothing or next to it, generally by
taking advantage of the system somehow.
In many ways, the RATs define themselves in opposition to the system. Both
conferences have been filled with talk of what the affiliated companies
don’t want: They don’t want this new entity to have officers or a board
of directors or to be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. They don’t even want a formal
name. In the final discussion of the second conference, the group rejected
setting the RAT designation in stone. They want this entity to be like their
art, rising out of a need and purpose. Someone suggested creating a new name
every time they meet.
The rejection of institutions and mainstream procedures may smack of the
condescension of self-styled rebels, but it is more: the exploration of an
alternative form of organization. The basis for that lies in the history of
these groups in creating alternative art: new plays, new visions of established
works, works created for specific sites. The independence fueling these artists
is fueling their approach to organizing.
That independence also allows them to “frame the debate,” as they might put it
on Nightline: While some groups are responding to arts funding cuts and
the demonization of art by trying to persuade the system to be more generous,
the RATs are responding by inventing a new system. It acknowledges the dominant
system and the value of its wealth – hell, it steals from it to survive – but
it is based on the principle that it will always exist outside the dominant
system. Again, Ehn expressed it succinctly: “When we demonstrate the moral
usefulness of theatre, we represent resources the rich covet. The rich want to
come begging to us. It’s spatially impossible for money to follow you if
you’re reaching for it; better to go where the money isn’t and lure it after
you.”
Interestingly, the place RAT may be going next is where a lot of money is: The
Mall of America. Enthusiasm is generating for a third conference to be held on
Leap Day, 1996, at the monster mall in Minnesota. (It’s tied into a scam, of
course: cheap air fares to and from the Mall if you go and return the same
day.) The idea, in true RAT fashion, is not to spend any money there, perhaps
even to promote a “Day Without Shopping” art event. Issues on the table:
Bringing more diverse voices into the RAT mix. More ways to bridge those
geographic distances.
The RAT Conferences have already changed Austin theatre and will change it
more. From the first conference, Jason Neulander and David Bucci of Salvage
Vanguard Theater were able to facilitate a West Coast tour of Bucci’s play
Kid Carnivore, making stops at RAT-affiliated theatres. At the second
conference, Vicky Boone of Frontera/Hyde Park connected with Seattle director
Susan Fenichell (who has directed at UT) to discuss bringing her adaptation of
The Bacchae, Torn to Pieces, to Austin. Frontera/Hyde Park has
also commissioned a new play from Ehn, to be developed next year. And some
RAT-affiliated artists will be coming to town in January for FronteraFest.
As Austin theatre alters, expect to see the theatre of America alter, too, to
grow with more visible and vibrant new work, work of community and service.
What do we call it? Experimental? Alternative? Neo-communal? That isn’t the
RATs’ worry. As Ehn expressed it following the first conference: “Definition is
historical, and we’re just now present. Brochures are way down the pike.” n
This article appears in October 13 • 1995 and October 13 • 1995 (Cover).