Building a Season is Like Falling in Love

As artistic director of a theatre company, the holidays approach like a freight train, but not for the usual reasons. What the holidays mean to me is that I better have a good idea of what our next season is going to be.

The number one question I get asked is: How do you pick the plays you do at 4th Wall?

I usually answer the way most artistic directors do. I say: I read plays, I see plays, I get sent plays, I get suggestions for plays, and then I look at the limitations I have, and I try to pick a season that is entertaining and balanced.

Balanced? How so?

Well, it's great if the playwrights represent what America and Houston look like as far as gender and race, maybe age, too; and it's great if the casts of those plays can be balanced the same way. If the directors and designers and stage managers of those plays can also look like America and Houston, well, now we're cookin' with gas.

Limitations, you say?

Yup: four productions and twenty actors, split up however I want. At least, that's what the schedule and the budget says. 

That's the usual answer: all that up above.

But I know deep down that what actually happens is: the plays pick 4th Wall. The job of the artistic director, if you ask me, is to have some aesthetic sense, some taste, and to use that taste to let a story announce itself to you as something you like.

Not something "important," though it certainly can feel important.
Not something timely, though it can be that, too.
Not something obviously popular, though it's wonderful if it turns out to put butts in seats.

Philip, are you saying that all you have to do is find plays you LIKE?! 

Well, no, I'm saying I have to fall in love...The job is to know something about theater and acting and design, and to let that knowledge, and one's own particular artistic obsessions, lead you to a sort of intellectual and sentimental hunting ground, where the right story puts an arrow directly through your heart. So, you see, what I'm doing right now is trying to open myself up to fall in love.

It's personal; it's singular; it's specific to me as an artist.
I'm reading, I'm seeing, I'm hunting, but I'm hoping to be tapped on the shoulder, and turn around, and be smitten.

And if I'm smitten, I'll make those limitations that I mention above work. I'll find a way around them if need be. I'll even kill them if I have to, because that's the way you behave when Cupid's arrow draws blood.

I say again: it's personal; it's singular; it's specific to me as an artist.

I've picked plays before that I haven't been in love with, and some of them have worked out well, but I always think in those cases: I wish I could've found something better. And, of course, I've been in love and been thrown over for a bigger, richer suitor: the bigger theater gets first pick, just like the football players at Roosevelt High did when it came to dates for dances.

Well, the jocks didn't stop me trying back in 1980's Des Moines, and the bigger theaters in Houston won't stop me, either.

I'm looking for love, and next September, I know you'll be eager to see what my heart has been up to.

See you at the theater,
Philip