Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 42 PREVIEW: American Theater

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

with the Worst of All Possible Worlds Podcast full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/107341939?pr=true listen to their podcast HERE: https://www.worstpossible.world/

To understand how the American theatre is being killed, you must first understand the American theatre. You now do this. You are eligible for like, 15 credits of a bachelor's degree. That is true. That is true. And also, y'know, maybe don't get it at NYU. I'm not saying it's a real estate scam disguised as an education, but y'know, somebody might.

Every other university. I also might say that about the Roundabout Theatre Company. I might. For more, please listen to our education... Another building in Glasgow just burned down to get turned into student housing yesterday. Nice! Oh, dear god. Lord.

But let's talk about what it means to participate in the system from the inside. Let's say, theoretically, that you wanna put up an ice-based musical, for example. You've written this ice-based musical. Next slide, please. ALICE This is me, I'm looking hot as fuck, albeit I've de-transitioned. I'm looking like smouldering. SEAN Yeah, sorry. I'm doing Pirates of Penzance on ice. ALICE Yes. You are With cat-like tread. With cat-like tread. Your regular Joseph Fiennes. With cat-like tread upon...

So, uh, so your regular Joseph Fiennes, in Shakespeare in Love, you, uh, well actually I found out his real name is Joseph Albrecht Twinsleton Wycombe Fiennes. Have you seen his son's name? I'm trying to remember what it is, but like, uh... No, I'm gonna have to look that up. It's long, I'd imagine. But so now you want to get the musical onto Broadway. There is a system in place that will help you do that, and that system looks a little

something like this. Next slide, please. It's Hero Beauregard Faulkner Finds Tiffin. Also, I think it's pronounced like Fins or something stupid like that. ZACH So, yeah, this is the system. AJ sort of described this for me broadly, and I kind of charted it out. I went into a fugue state briefly, and I just, like, my eyes rolled in the back of my head, and I just walked through every single step of this.

But basically, you start out, you've written a play. And the first question you gotta ask yourself is, are you super famous? And do you have famous friends who are willing to be in it? If so, you can skip the entire middle section of this, because great, your production has benefactors and your play is going to receive a full production. You pass go you collect $200. Right. But if you don't, That's how we started this podcast, by inviting you. Oh, sure. Yeah, it was- I was the clouted up one in this sort of business when I started. You still are.

Look at your Twitter followers. Justin, you- Don't sell yourself short. You had just come off of a run of massive YouTube videos, you were like a household name for, Skylines. I still have them if they hadn't fucked up Cities Skylines 2 so bad. Yeah, we were talking about that before recording. Oh well.

Um, but if you don't have anybody, if you don't have a November- Another Doom Franklin project. You had the Doom Franklin project. You know, the next question you ask yourself is, do you have an agent? And if you do have an agent, your agent is able to submit the play to potentially interested parties. And this is mostly a lot of regional theaters now will not take unsolicited manuscripts. So, or ones not submitted by an agent specifically,

because the backlog is so long because of the pandemic, because of the pandemic, because of the late productions and just lack of money. Basically, you you the likelihood of your play being read, even if you have an agent at one of those regional theaters is pretty low. Unless you have a pre-established relationship with them, but you don't have an agent, which is very likely because most theatrical agents went under in the pandemic as well. The next question you have to ask

yourself is do you have $75,000? And the answer is yes! Time to self-produce! ALICE My podcast millions. Justin, you can sell the nuclear bomb. JUSTIN Oh! ALICE You can raise $75,000. I can't raise $75,000. JUSTIN The bomb's not mine. RILEY Come on, we can make Iran get the bomb before the Supreme Court. It's not mine, it'd be illegal to sell it. Camera lenses are not worth that much for resale.

It's not my bomb. If you sell the bomb, whoever's bomb that is, if you sell the bomb, whoever's bomb that is, you get 75k, you can sell pretty soon. Someone's gonna get really mad at me if I sold the bomb. It's not your bomb, I get it, I get it. The Supreme Court has acquired a second nuclear weapon. Look, Sotomayor does not have to know about this. This is all- So you can use that 75k to self-produce, you rent a venue and you pay actors the equity

minimum wage, and you invite a bunch of industry people to that. But if you don't have $75,000, then you submit it yourself, and as Josh has put here, roll a D100 for luck, fail on 1 through 98. ALICE I imagine also, like, the whole process of producing or pre-producing this, you have to become God's worst tyrant, and also the cheapest bastard on Earth. Given that it's your money, you have a very limited supply of it, you can only pay people the minimum wage, and if anything goes wrong, you are, like, turbo fucked.

Does anybody have a D100 on them, by the way, real quick? Yeah, I'll roll your D100. Alright. Let's see how well there's your problem on ice is gonna do. Um, three. Three! Oh, actually one. Wait, you passed?

Yeah, I won! Okay, so we've got a critical pass, as well as a pretty much a critical fail. ALICE Yeah, yeah. We killed an actor in the course of stage... We quadrassected the lead actor's dick with ice skates. He's... She's never gonna skate again. It's real bad.

And we're out 75k. You know? So, you have failed, so the fail state sends you right back to keep writing, better luck next time. But AJ passed, which takes him to someone actually picked up your script and gave it to their literary intern. How about that? Or you've won a competition. This can happen a whole bunch of different ways. You can submit it to the O'Neill theater conference. They will also charge you $35 to read your play

and give you no feedback on it if you do not get accepted, which is highway robbery. I guess I've just blown any chance I'm ever having of being accepted to the O'Neill. But then, or you like, you can also be commissioned by a theater company if you have like an old relationship with them. That's how one of the plays that I wrote that got produced was I was commissioned by a theater company

and they put on the show, but sometimes you'll be commissioned by a theater company and they will decide not to do your play. And also, you can't do that play anywhere else in certain contracts because they own the rights to it because they commissioned it so the place is actually dead on arrival you get back to writing but Saying all that stuff like went well. You've won the contest literary intern reads it it piques their interest Then your script will be selected for a staged reading Um, then your script will be selected for a staged reading.

Ooh. Ooh. Which is where you- I've done this before. Oh, you have? What play did you do a staged reading for? Uh, it was called John Taliband. Oh, I did that. Yeah, mhm.

Yeah. Uh huh. Let me just, let me just roll that D20 again real quick. Roll D100, come on... Six! Six! Oh, on six! Oh, better luck.

Wait, we've done them all, baby! Say goodbye to John Taliban, everyone. Alright. Unfortunately. But yes, the stage reading. At this point, you are going to be getting up in front of a bunch of people, or people are going to be getting up in front of people, they're gonna have music stands and they're gonna read the play.

RILEY For a group of people. And now there are a whole bunch of different kinds of readings, but for the sake of argument, this is not one that is explicitly looking for producers, a lot of them are just used for feedback, and then, I'm sorry, this would be one that is exclusively looking for producers, but there are a lot of stage readings that can just be for developmental purposes. ALICE HENRY Podcast bonus episodes. ZACH Yeah. RILEY Exactly.

Um, and that's its own entire industry, is just the development of a new play. Because the most, most playwrights can hope for at this point is, is getting your play, get a staged reading at a big theater in New York. And then that play will probably never- To a previous point, a lot of these places that used to exist that are to do with developing new work, well, they're just fucking gone now. They don't exist anymore, so.

Yeah, because the pandemic killed them off. There's a thing called Space at Ryder Farm, which just shut down, which was literally just a house in upstate New York where playwrights would go and like do the housework, do all their own cooking, and live there for like a week and write a play and share it with everyone, and even they couldn't stay open. For something with that like low bar of like money that went into it, they just could not get the funding anymore. Basically in the theater world, there is a drawbridge that is slowly being pulled up and there are a couple of people

who are actually able to make it over, but they were people who are already pretty much climbing up the thing in the first place. And there is hope that it will, the drawbridge will eventually come down, but for the moment it seems like they're sort of like conquering down. Anyway, so we're at the reading stage

and if the reading goes well enough that people are willing to put money into the show, well then, congratulations, you move on to a workshop. But if the reading does not go well, then you can still submit that play to like playwriting competitions, which might save them. Yeah, roll a D20 here.

And pass here is a 18 minus N, where N is the total number of readings, workshops, or productions the player's had. So we're gonna say in this situation that WTYP on Ice has had two. It's had one workshop, one reading, so it's pass on a 16. ALRIGHT. Let me just do this here. Roll a d20, and that is gonna give us 16 exactly!

We advance! Alright, we're good, we're good, we're WTYPR, nice. Congratulations, your script has won a Plane Writing Award, and now it has been selected for a stage reading. Yeah, we're right back to stage reading. And again, ask the question, does the reading go well, puts money into it? Great. You get that money, you go on to a workshop.

And a workshop production is actors are off book, not fully costumed, not fully staged, but they are putting on the show, maybe some light staging, maybe some prop work, but they're putting on the show for potential investors to be like, this is gonna be the thing. And mostly it's decided on lines of either it being like a tastemaker of it being like,

this is gonna like shake the American theater to its core, or this is a jukebox musical that's gonna get in a lot of people with butts into seats, right? Right, yeah. But then with that success and with getting that money also come producers who are going to have their own notes. And those notes in a lot of cases are the thing you have to take in order to get the money.

So in this example here, WTYP on ice, unfortunately we will have to be cutting the ice portion. ALICE and ALICE laugh. That's fair. That's fair. This is very difficult, we can do it on roller skates, though. Are you, no, no skates at all, are you willing to take that, no? I will bend, I will compromise with anyone.

You tell me this has to be based on Kazakh folk music. I will start learning through singing. RILEY Can we use Heelys? RILEY If you can provide them, come on. RILEY Yes, but you have to provide your own. ALICE Okay. ALICE Heely's budget goes through the fucking roof overnight. RILEY It's...

BYOH, I guess? ALICE Just like, do a really annoying casting call It's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it's... it They have to leave them on the way out. Yeah, by the way, if you did say no there, I would have had to tell you to roll a d20 again But because you said yes, it's okay. We can move on to the full production

Which you'll also note we are now at the point where you can get to if you just have a famous friend So now you have a full production I was in a show very much actually that had that had the super famous friend, that super famous friend was Luke Wilson. ALICE Wow! ZACH Wow! ZACH And he produced the play, he had never read it, he had no idea what it was, but he gave 75k, or at least a large percentage of 75k, to the show to get it to go up off Broadway. ALICE God, give us 75k, we'll make John Taliban.

ZACH Oh, there you go! ALICE Oh yeah, we saw good, yeah. ZACH And so you do a full production, and the goal of a full production is to get in critics who will see the work, who will write about it, and build up buzz and hype enough that you can get more people with bigger money on board so you can transfer to a larger venue. I'm just thinking here that there's a limiting factor as well that's not just money, because 75k is a lot of money, right, but it's like dentist money. It's the kind of thing that, like, it's the kind of thing you can fund an indie film,

even a huge indie film with, for instance. It's the kind of money that used to be thrown at, like, you know, B-movies, essentially. So clearly it's not everyone with 75k can fund this, otherwise we would be seeing a lot of dentist musicals. Um, ummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Broadway theatres are non-profit producing organizations that program a season. The handful of commercial for-profit off-Broadway rental houses that are left, those are the ones where the dentist musicals are going. ALICE The theatre row is a big place for that. ALICE I hate the thought that I may just have named a genre here. RILEY I might only think about those as dentist musicals from here on out.

I had to work so many of those shows during my time doing box office, and every fucking one of these performances, no tickets were sold. So they had to paper the entire house, and so what actually happened was- Except for one lady, yeah. Cochran. Well no, no! She doesn't pay for her fucking ticket! That's the other thing about Nikki Cochran.

That motherfucker has never paid for a goddamn ticket in her life. She just sneaks in the house. She will. Fuck. It's like a situation where you have to like, you know, you're going to the show because your friend is in it. You know? Yes.

And if it's not that, it's that you got your tickets through a service like something called Club Free Time, which is a real thing where you can sign up for like five dollars and you get access to free tickets for a bunch of shows. And so I remember rather than ever having to sell a ticket for any show when I was doing box office for that shit or having to like look up will call or anything, I just have my list from the different papering services, and I'd be like, yes, Mrs. Richardson, you have two tickets, and be like, thank you, darling, I'm so excited for the show, I've heard it's marvelous, I can't wait to see it.

ALICE And variations on Roz for months, I think. Yes. ALICE So you're talking about a theatrical equivalent of dumb money, if you like. Sure, yeah, absolutely. Exactly. It's not even like a weird art thing that doesn't make sense, cause I don't go to any weird art thing that doesn't make sense. It's people who are buying a subscription to the theatre because they think it's art,

and what they're getting instead is like a dentist's mistress doing a one woman show. RILEY Yeah, well and again, and they're not paying for these tickets either, they're getting them for free! RILEY Yeah. But hopefully a lot of them who are getting the free tickets love the show, they give it standing ovations, because if not, guess what, the play's kind of done. If it's had the production, then it's pretty much dead in the water, everybody is obsessed with having world premieres, and if you don't have the world premiere, then you're kinda screwed.

RILEY You can still, there is a, you can see a path there, you can still roll the D20 and you might win a playwriting award, and the likelihood of that increases with the more development a given play has had, but it's going to be very difficult to get that out there. ALICE Let me give it a go here. Rolling D20. Okay. And you're now, you're passing on a 14 now.

We're going to Broadway. Hey! Alright, alright, we got the ice back. We're actually not going to Broadway yet, because now the question is, so we're assuming here that you put it up again and that it also got stellar reviews and sold out every performance. Yes. Um, now, if you've done that, flip a coin.

Oh, come on, man. Bullshit. Correct. Flip coin. Heads or tails? No. Heads passes, tails fails. Ummm, come on.

Heads! Congratulations, you're going for one! You got a brilliant one! Yes! We got a fillers problem! On ice! But not on ice! But the ice is somehow done through special effects! You're going the wrong way! Yes, we got- well there's your problem. On ice.

But not on ice. But the ice is somehow done through special effects. Welcome to Well There's Your Problem, Tower Man. Yeah, the, the, the, the, the, the, like, Kha'Zix throat singing arc is like an interesting turn, but like, audiences really seem to like it. Yeah. So that's, that's the

play development process, and we've got a few more slides in here still about, like, the nature of what that looks like in more detail, but that's the system. ALICE This is actually pretty easy, we got through it first time, I don't know what your problem is. ALICE Yeah, skillet shoot. RIP to your play, but that was just built different, and by different we mean not on ice.

RILEY I mean, that's the thing though. ALICE I'm glad you took the note. RILEY Well there's your problem, I'm Heelys. That we had to provide ourselves. That's right. The Tony award winning play this year was a play called Stereophonic, and it was nominated for the most Tonys of all time and it ended up winning, and it was a commission from a theatre that decided not to produce it. So it is also that you are at the whims of artistic directors who think they know what theater is, but the truth is, nobody does.

Nobody does. ALICE It's also nice that you're starving, writing this stuff, and the guy who's deciding, and the guy whose whims you're at, is making like a million dollars a year. To throw darts at, like, a board. JUSTIN Exactly. He has like a penthouse. He has like a Manhattan penthouse,house, but also not that good of a Manhattan penthouse, it's like one of the mediocre ones.

Yeah, what we're saying is this guy's broke in a different way. Exactly. And also- He's got a balcony, it's like, you know, but it just opens onto the building across the street, you know? I will also say- That's how you can throw glass bottles at your neighbors, Ross. Oh, that's the easiest way.

But the thing is about this particular chart that we've grafted for you, is this is the chart if you are a white guy. Uh, posh, you print it? If you are not, then all of a sudden, all these other factors start going against you, you know? Yeah, I mean, you basically have to roll a D20 before every step. Yes.

An additional D20. Yeah, because, you know, while there have been significant improvements in diversifying the canon, there have been obviously more playwrights of color on Broadway and off Broadway that have been produced in recent years. The fact of the matter is, is that the majority, the vast majority of play productions in this country

have all white creative teams and are written by white men. That is just how the statistics fall for this sort of thing. And there was a brief period of time right after the pandemic when Broadway was mostly playwrights of color because the rents had gone down. And so people were willing to, quote, you know, take bigger risks on plays. But what was really going on was that the shows that knew how to make money

were waiting for people to come back. Yes. And the rallying cry was Broadway is back. Broadway is back. And then you would go to see a Broadway show and you get an entirely new strain of covid that was originated in that theater. Moulin Rouge? Yes. COVID-19-Hamilton-death. Yeah, well Moulin Rouge was like a particularly fertile ground for COVID, for some reason.

It was just dumb luck. Everybody spitting on each other during the show. I mean, a higher body count than Turn Off the Dark. I mean, higher body count than Turn Off the Dark. A try, legitimately. And it was a deeply scary time. But the thing is that we still haven't recovered from it, and we're still feeling the ramifications of COVID. How we're still feeling the ramifications of COVID.

Like Broadway turns out to be the cultural equivalent of the Sturgis Motorcycle Festival. Yes. way, as it turns out to be the cultural equivalent of the Sturgis Motorcycle Festival. But for a different socioeconomic class. Well, actually, not that different from like a pure class standpoint, but a different demo. Yeah, ask Patrick Wang about the like, American Pessie bourgeoisie, you know?