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93: The Next Generation If you are an artist, you need to produce. There aren't any ifs or buts about it. And if you are a young theater artist—if you're not established, without money or experience or following, full of passion and promise, disenchanted with conventional definitions of success, in search of a place to learn beyond the commercial or mediatized venues, daring to explore, to try out, to break the line, to develop a voice, technique, sensibility, whatever—you still need to produce. But how? The Dickensian landscape of the experimental theater in New York is an unchanging crisis of mediocrity and muddying through—a rubble of post-ensemble torpor and compromised circumstance; a crowded, shrinking space in which art is subservient to financial survival and the experimental fervor is, for the most part, a pale, dated version of the vital and vitalizing blood-gush it once was. Luck is how, plus a good deal of gumption and perseverance, and the generosity of veteran Off-Off-Broadway impresarios who belong to a radical past and who are now cushioned by a measure of established legitimacy. Here are two cases in point: Sophie Haviland, the 24-year-old coordinator of the Blueprint Series at the Ontological at Saint Mark's Theater; and Paul Nagle and Monika Kling, students of New York University's do-it-yourself, university-without-walls Gallatin Division and the movers behind its marriage with La Mama. Haviland, Nagle, and Kling simply wanted to work in the theater. The Blueprint Series resulted from conversations Haviland had with Richard Foreman in which she told him of her desire to tap into the reservoir of talent from her sphere of young, struggling actors, directors, and playwrights, and of the necessity to create a showcase for serious work and be given the opportunity, the impulse, the key. The space. "I wanted to have a dialogue with other people about making theater, a forum for communication," says Haviland, who does production work for Foreman. "It's very difficult to break in." Although meant for its two resident theaters, the Spin Theater and Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric, the space is rented out, at a nominal fee, as a way of nurturing a new generation of artists who have no regular home and may not have an aesthetic connection to Foreman but who are doing new, interesting work. Ontological's administrative director Paul Schiff Berman says: "It didn't matter what they did. We let them do what they want to do. The point is to have the work out there, to give them visibility and exposure." What's amazing about Blueprint is that, for two weeks in late March and early April, not only was the rental fee waived but the shows were funded out of Foreman's shows. "It was like instant-play," says Anne de Mare whose blithely noirish, randomly violent The Loophole concerned a botanist bookworm in search of the Tree of Knowledge. "It was the most worry-free work I've done. I just had to concentrate on the work itself" The Gallatin at La Mama Festival, in contrast, was an entirely student-generated project that cost more and faced a knottier approval process. The NYU—La Mama marriage is a co-production venture that encompasses master classes to be taught by international guest artists from La Mama, lectures about the heritage of avant-garde theater, three student internships, and the annual one act play festival that will feature two alumni and two undergraduates. Nagle and Kling approached the school's student council (which gave $3585 in seed money), sought the blessing of the dean (who gave an extra $250) and fashioned a proposal for La Mama's associate director Meryl Vladimer regarding the details of the alliance. "It was a bear this year," Nagle says. "We had to convince everybody of the legitimacy of the thing every step of the way." The works themselves were a propitious farrago of nice tries, not bad, not yet, and not quite. More old-new than new-new artists, the two alumni, Dylan Guy and Amy Guggenheim, didn't get to trot out much: Guy's Pinteresque The Incident was but a snapshot of her rhythmic skills with dialogue, and Guggenheim unveiled a mere portion of her Day of the Dead performance-art zone poem, The Virgin of Want. Kling's prickly feminist deconstructionist update of Aeschylus's The Eumenides, called Dead Men We Love (the myth of Orestes's trial is seen from the Furies' point of view), found itself prey to the vicissitudes of first-time production: the direction was terrible, and a painted cardboard set collapsed. On the plus side, Nagle's Sandboxing was a rollicking revue-size rap in which the lives of an interracial cast of six men and women in various states of ritual dress and undress flashed forward from to fancy to adulthood. Blueprint's Joanna Settle (Forty Watts) and Robert Cucuzza (Love Clump) flexed their highly imaginative choreographic wit and elicited doses of playful irreverence from spare compositions. Obviously, the hope is that all the hugger-mugger activity will lead to a new spring on the experimental theater front, breeding different ideas about what comprises theater. What will actually result is anybody's guess. Acting as administrative entities, experimental theaters like the Ontological and La Mama are turning to time-honored organizational methods (altruism, diversification, fundraising in an urgent, discrete, if not concerted, grassroots effort to rebuild a communal artistic base, reclaim a younger generation from the lures of cynicism, apathy, and media-narcotics, and perpetuate, in one form or another, the adventurous, yut ta ha (Blackfoot: what-the-hell) spirit that has inspired so many with a kind of shared mystique. Given the atmosphere of the times, Foreman says, it's rare that a genesis would occur "It's difficult to imagine having a career doing the kind of thing people like me have done throughout the years. People get easily scared off. We have become establishment. That will never change. During the early years, it was clear to me, I used the young cannon fodder in the art war. Now I can at least pay minimum wage. When I began at the end of the '60s, there was the genuine illusion of a genuine counterculture. That illusion has dried up. What will happen now is a moot point." As though he were sobered down by the cold water of experience, Foreman continues: "It seems to me that the only hope for anybody is to be totally arrogant and radicalize their vision, rather than having it both ways, to be well-liked and experimental. It's a tough burden to lay on anybody. If something is really far out, it'll get initial notices: 'Oh. Look, here's something interesting.' But America doesn't sustain that kind of interest. To grow and develop and sustain as an artist is harder than being young and willing to starve doing what you believe." It's an endurance test: to keep vital, young, and alive a theater that proclaims: "Yut ta ha."
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