A Monster Season

Alright, so we're a "black box," technically that is. Whenever we find ourselves making a pitch for 1st Stage, the "pitchee" eventually says something like, "Oh, you mean this is going to be a black box theatre." Well, yes, technically I guess, only that's not the way we like to think of ourselves. Black box implies small, intimate productions with two or three actors "trapped"--more often than not-- in a small, intimate conversation about an intimate and small, albeit important, subject. And there's nothing wrong with this, but, technically speaking, it's not our aim. A few years back a group of British playwrights banded together and campaigned to halt what they saw as the lock-step march of British theatre--cash-strapped and hemmed in by shrinking budgets and shrinking audiences-- toward Black Box everywhere and all-the-time. They came to be known as the Monsterists. They no longer wanted to write small, intimate plays with two or three characters. They wanted a hand in producing big, epic productions that wowed audiences and took them to places that even a vivid imagination hadn't discovered. They wanted to create a whole world, not just a slice of life. Monsterism's "Manifesto" called for

• Large scale, large concept and, possibly, large cast productions
• The primacy of the dramatic (storyshowing) over storytelling
• Meaning implied by action (not by lecture)
• Characters caught in a drama (not there to facilitate a polemic)
• The exposure of the human condition (not sociology)
• Inspirational and dangerous (not sensationalist)

One Monsterist wrote, "the big, messy, complex world we find ourselves in is not going to be expressed by a two- or four-handed play in a studio theatre. It must be allowed a cast of 12 or even 20 on a main stage."

I like all this but the truth is we are one of those studio theatres she's talking about...physically and financially, that is. In spirit and intention, we are mainstage. We're in the process now of selecting our first season of plays. It's not as easy as we thought it would be. Certainly we are confined, in part, by our size and our resources, and it would make perfect sense for us to limit our search to small, tried-and-true plays that require a minimal cast, setting, expense and, ultimately, explanation. But, for better or worse, we're not relying on what's "sensible" at this point in our development. We've bought into the Monsterist ideology. We find ourselves more excited about the how we might stage a drowning in a fierce storm on the English coast along with the town that witnesses it than we are about the more typical black box-inclined scripts. We're searching for plays about this "big, messy, complex world" of ours as well as for the actors and artists to stage them. Let us know if you have a title you'd like us to consider in hopes of seeing it brought to life in epic style and glory!...in our small, intimate space.