Transcript of David Henry Hwang’s Speech at TCG 2011 Fall Forum of Governance Friday, November 11, 2011

David Henry Hwang: Thank you Teresa. You know, as a first generation Chinese-American kid growing up in L.A., there were a couple of things I had to get used to when I entered the theatre. One is all the hugging, because, if you’re Chinese you don’t really do that, you know—you’re lucky if you hug your kid— and the second is being praised. As you’ll see in Chinglish, you’re supposed to criticize yourself, if you’re Chinese, and if someone praises you, you say, “Oh no, no, no, that’s not true.” Then at a certain point, I realized that in theatre, the absence of praise is worse, so then I decided that praise was a good thing, and so, after an introduction like that, Teresa is sort of agonizingly wonderful.

You know when I look back, when I think about the American theatre, and my experience of it over the last few decades, it reminds me of how I got my first play produced. It was called F.O.B, or fresh off the boat, and I was a student at Stanford, playing jazz violin, and wanting to write plays and I felt it was really important that I get to see one of my plays produced, so I read it in my dorm. And I directed it myself, I got kids from the dorm in it, and I finished the first draft in November of 1978. We did the dorm production in March of 1979. It went to the O’Neil in June of 1979 and opened off-Broadway at the Public Theater in June of 1980. So, the amount of time of time between the dorm production and the Public Theater premiere was 15 months. Now, it is certainly true that I have gotten a lot of extraordinarily lucky breaks even then, but the very idea of thinking of a show traveling from a dorm production to off-Broadway in 15 months is a little hard to conceive of today. I think that says a lot about how the American theatre has changed since I started out.

Certainly, theatre has become more professionalized and we care about our budgets, which are important, and we care about our trustees, who we value you all and there are many benefits to the artists, for instance when I travel to a city to do a play, I’m not sleeping on someone’s couch. But at the same time, I wonder about what are the downsides of this sort of professionalization. In a day when a play could go from a dorm to the Public in 15 months, there were a lot of silly things that got produced around the country and things that we won’t remember. But on the other hand, there was a sort of flexibility and a dexterity in theatres and an ability to programs things, an ability to move quickly, which is harder to find nowadays. But the central question becomes: are we growing artistically? Because all of you are here, you’ve joined these boards, you’ve come to New York this weekend, because you care about art. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have bothered to schlep this far. And so, let’s talk about whether the theatre structure as we know it now is conducive to artistic growth, to what extent it is, to what extent it can stand to grow, and how can we start to look at the small model that we’ve grown up in and look at what’s good about it and look at what could be better.

Just a little bit of background: A lot of you of you know this, but the not-for-profit movement is in many ways a baby boomer creation. It was conceived in the 1950s, but it was really raised and given impetus by a few things: the founding of the NEA in 1965; a lot of conceptualization and funding and support from foundations like Ford and Rockefeller; as well as the founding of TCG in 1961. And the not-for-profit movement, given its name, was founded as an alternative to commercial theatre. The vision was that you could have theatres around the country, resident theatres, and they would be freed from the pressure of having to make money, and at the same time—okay, so you see where I am going with this—and many of them were conceived as having resident acting companies. It was the way to think of a method through which you could spread American theatre across the country, like Johnny Appleseed, and that actors and artists would be able to make a living and have, at least, you know, kind of a middle class lifestyle. I think that the field expanded fairly easily until about the 80s and 90s. Funding continued to grow from the NEA and foundation money followed. And then we got into the Culture Wars in the 80s and 90s, culminating in 1996, when the NEA’s budget was cut by 50% and foundation money also started to become a little harder to find and people needed to think about their institutions and raising money more creatively. And then we come to the 2008 recession, which has been hard on a lot of nonprofits and some are on shaky financial footing now, and some have closed. But if we look back at these last 50 years, what is good and what could be better about this model?

The movement has achieved many successes. There certainly has been that expansion of theatre across the U.S.—that Johnny Appleseed-like flowering. And I would even say that in most American cities now, you have one, maybe two or three, theatres that I sort of call “vested.” I mean, they are established enough in their communities so that the community has ownership of the theatres, they’re proud of these theatres and on those occasions when some of these theatres fall into financial trouble, the community has most often rallied and found a way to keep the doors open. And not only do those theatres exist, but their health has spawned what is sometimes called “independent theatres or indie theatres,” all around those communities and so the health of the American theatre in terms of creativity, in terms of what artists are doing, I think, is pretty good.

Now, what hasn’t worked? Well, first of all, the resident acting companies, by and large, didn’t really happen. There are a few of them…OSF, Steppenwolf…there are a few out there. But by and large, the resident acting community hasn’t seemed to happen in most cities. But one thing I noticed that I find interesting and a little bit disturbing over the last few years as we hit these tough economic times is that sometimes I wonder if these institutions that we’ve built have become more important than the artist. The institutions exist to support and perpetuate themselves, and there are a lot of good reasons for that, but in terms of the balance between running an institution and supporting art, I wonder if that calibration is not quite right. I think of a lot of artistic directors and executive directors and people I know who’ve said over the last few years, with pride and justifiably so, “well, I didn’t have to lay off anybody.” And I think that’s great. However, you know, there was sort of a hidden layoff in that proposition. A lot of times, the theatres have managed to remain open, essentially, by cutting expenses. And what that means is maybe fewer productions, maybe smaller casts, maybe safer choices, fewer new plays, less attention to diversity and new voices. So in some sense, there is a layoff that had happened, but the layoff was of artists, not of institutional leaders and administration. And so what the American theatre has created now through the not-for-profit movement is, I would say, that people can make a living in the theatre, a sort of middle class living in a lot of these cities, but it sort of tends to be the administrative class that is able to make a living. And that, except for the artists that become artistic directors and lead the institutions and therefore become part of that administrative class, the rest of us artists are freelance and we don’t have steady paychecks and we don’t have health insurance—it is a trick to cobble together a sort of middle class lifestyle.

When we get to this question of the alternative to the commercial theatre, I would say, you look at the commercial theatre today and it’s much healthier than it has been through most of my career. I remember the 70s and the 80s when theatres were empty, they were being turned into parking lots and the Marriott Marquis, and that’s very different right now. I think about as late as even 1995, if you remember the Tony’s from that year when Sunset Boulevard won and—whatever everyone thinks of Sunset Boulevard—the point is, there were so few nominees that in the Book and Score category, Sunset Boulevard ran unopposed. So, they just couldn’t find four shows to nominate for Book and Score. Obviously today, commercial theatre is booming. Mostly musicals, but we certainly are at a moment right now where there are seven new American plays that are opening on Broadway this fall. So, the commercial theatre is doing pretty well. But the downside to that is that the commercial theatre, to me, pulls the field, pulls the cart of the field, in a way that it did not 20 or 30 years ago. That there is a sense on the part of some theatres, of some trustees that the best thing we can do for theatre is to move a show to Broadway or to win the Regional Theatre Tony. Both of those are great things, but are they goals? To me, that reflects a larger trend in our culture, which has been evolving also over the last 20- 30 years, which is this notion that things that don’t make money aren’t worth anything, and to me that’s a very impoverished idea. Therefore, it’s not surprising in some sense that commercial theatre pulls the field in a way that it hadn’t before. But I also feel that the not-for-profits, by virtue of the term, need to stand as a bulwark in this culture against that mentality.

[Applause] Thank you.

I like the commercial theatre. I’m very happy to have a show on Broadway now, I’ve had seven shows on Broadway, I’ve written two Disney Broadway musicals—you can’t get more commercial theatre than that—sometimes I say my hands are not clean—but, however I feel that commercial theatre needs to be a part of a larger ecology of theatre, which means that the theatres value, just as much as they do a regional Tony or transferring a show to Broadway, ideally, value work which is created for the artistry alone, never intended to make money and never will. And that is something more difficult to do as we baby boomers grow older. Because no one knows—and I think that I can say this having done several shows on Broadway—nobody knows what is commercial. When we did M. Butterfly, we got terrible reviews out of town in Washington DC. The Variety review actually said, “not Broadway material,” and when we opened on Broadway, the actors had a betting pool about how long the show was going to last. So, now, 23 years later, people look back and they just assume that we only got good reviews and that it was always a sure thing. It was definitely not a sure thing.

Shows go to Broadway for one reason: somebody feels that they will appeal to a mass audience and make some money. And that is a very narrow slice of the American theatre. It doesn’t really, to my mind, feed the growth of the art form. If that is what your goal is, it’s as impoverished as the mentality that says, “that which doesn’t make money isn’t useful,” because as an artist, I don’t write something because I think it is going to go to Broadway. In that way, lies madness. You have to write something, you have to create something, because it gives you the opportunity to explore something that you are curious about. Write something that you feel is important in your heart. And then, if you’re lucky, sometimes, other people will agree. But in that calculus is the recognition of the importance of failure. And artists have to be able to fail in order to succeed.

I think about the first play I ever wrote, which was an off-Broadway flop, it was called Rich Relations. I’ve written a lot of plays about Asians, and I thought, I ought to write a play that doesn’t have any Asians in it, which is a perfectly reasonable goal, and I have done so subsequently, but this was the first time I tried to do it, so I just wrote a sort of auto-biographical play about my family and made them all white. So, that lacked a certain cultural specificity also. But out of the failure of that work, a lot of great things happened. It was my first off-Broadway failure and I realized I was always going to be a playwright because it’s not hard to want to stay in the profession if you’re just getting praise. Also, I learned to work with non-Asian actors, which I think led directly to my feeling comfortable writing my next play which was M. Butterfly. Similarly, my first big Broadway flop was called Face Value, and it got terrible reviews out of town. My favorite was a review where the headline was M. Turkey, which is funny now, but that idea, which was to write a comedy about mistaken racial identity, for the next decade or so eventually led to a play called Yellowface, which I think is pretty good and a lot of people like.

So, going to Broadway should be a happy accident. Commercial success should be a happy accident. It should be icing on the cake, not the cake itself. The cake itself is about the artists having the opportunity to explore and to grow and make something that I find meaningful. And everything else is gravy.

[Applause]

So, how can we improve this model? You guys are here for this weekend and you are going to be talking about a lot of ideas so I’m just going to throw out some ideas, which are kind of wacky, but just as an attempt to begin stimulating thinking and to hopefully think outside the box a little.

Number one: how can we channel more resources to artists? Here’s an idea—sometimes you can kind of look at ideas as small, medium and large—here’s a medium idea, and I’m stealing this from Oskar Eustis, which is putting a playwright on staff. The idea that you would take a playwright, and it could really be any artist—I like playwright because, you know, I am a playwright, but it could be an actor, it could be anybody—and you put them on staff. You give them a salary and you give them health insurance, which, of course, is a big issue. And some theatres are doing this: the Public has Suzan-Lori, the Goodman has an artistic associate, the Arena has the American Voices for the New Play Institute. But if every regional theatre in America took one artist and put him or her on their staff, the incremental increase in budget would not be that large and you would therefore have what, 100, 200 artists who are being supported, who are able to make a middle class living, who have health insurance, and were able to do their work.

[Applause] – Thanks.

Another notion is to invite outside producers and projects into the theatre. This falls into the middle category and some people do this already—the Public, for instance, invites the LAByrinth. But a lot of people who lead the major theatrical institutions in America are baby boomers and sort of came up as the movement was growing and have a particular aesthetic and taste. I think it’s useful, especially with all the activity that goes on around these cities, outside the major theatres, to invite some of those people in and give them slots.

And speaking of slots, I have sort of a big, wacky idea, which is I have a lot of questions about the subscription-slot model. Because you know, most artistic directors will say, “Well, I have more projects than I can possibly slot in,” but I wonder about whether—because every now and then you hear a play fell out of somebody’s season—that the theatre would say, “This is a great opportunity to send the script over there; let’s pitch them this project.” And I look to the commercial theatre and I’m asking myself, well, what can we learn from that model? In that model, you have basically—most of you, some of you probably know this—but in that model, you diverge the landlord function from the artistic curation function. On Broadway, most of the majority of theatres are owned by one of three entities: the Shuberts, the Nederlanders and Jujamcyn. I would say Jujamcyn probably curates the most, and the other two landlord more. What does a producer do? A producer cultivates a few projects that he or she is interested in, tends to have a very small staff and tends to only focus on projects that they are passionate about. Stuart Oscar, who produced M. Butterfly, used to say a producer is someone who knows the writer. That was a great definition of a producer. But really, what might it be like if we took some of the institutions, these wonderful buildings that have been built, and started to separate the producing and landlord functions so that you would have not-for-profit theatre producers in these cities who are developing one, maybe two projects that they really believed in, with a very small staff, and then try to book them into these theatres.

Now there are a lot of downsides to that idea and in a lot of ways it’s impractical, but it’s a big notion that I hope will help us all think outside the box a little and reconcile what is this model that we grew up with, but which really is quite new and which was made up by people that are just a little older than us, in their 60s.

Another thing that I would consider: we need to program the theatres’ advantages. One of the reasons that Broadway is booming right now is because of the digital age. Once there was a proliferation of virtual realities and once you were able to duplicate anything that was on a media, then suddenly the value of the live experience became more treasured. And you started to see this even around 2000 and the late 90s, when the pop musician Prince started giving away CDs in order to promote his live concerts. And today, pop stars tend to make more money off of touring, off of merchandizing, off of related income streams than from the sale of CDs, like when I was growing up. So theatre has that inherent advantage. It is the only place you can go to get a live, dramatic or comic experience. It’s one of the reasons Broadway is booming.

But what do regional theatres have that works inherently to their advantage? I would argue that regional theatres have access to their community. They can tell stories, they can look at material, they can foster voices that are about the roots of the place of where they live. I’m thinking of an example of my wife who was in a show by the playwright Christopher Cartmill, Homeland, which was written for the Lied Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, and it was about the history of that state. It is very hard to make an impact on the whole country; it is a lot easier for theatres to make an impact where they live. And I think, that also is good for funding. It lets the community know that the theatre is engaged with the issues that are important to the community and that the theatre really considers this to be their soil. This is something that not-for- profit theatres can do, an advantage they have that television can’t do and film generally can’t do, and so why don’t we play more to our advantages?

Basically, I’m saying, we need to respect this ecology of theatre. You know, I started out as part of an Asian-American theatre movement artists—we didn’t know we were a movement, we were just a bunch of Asian-Americans and we were writing and we never thought we’d be studied, let alone produced around the country. But because of that, because we were just writing what we cared about, we were able to come up with some new ideas, some new stories, some new aesthetics, and I would argue, not only in terms of content, but even if you look at say, avant-garde theatre, it is creating aesthetic and ways of thinking about theatre, feeding the profession, the art in a way that a focus on Broadway and the commercial theatre does not. Because this is how theatre has always been made. Whether you look at the Greeks, or whether you look at Chinese Opera, theatre has been about people drawing from the soil of the communities they live in and helping to define the identities of those communities. Historically, there is no relationship between commercial success and the art. You have people like Shakespeare, who was pretty successful in his time, and you have people like, I don’t know, Mozart, who wasn’t particularly successful.

So, it doesn’t help to rely too much, in terms of advancing the art, on wanting to have a commercial success.

I feel that over the time that I’ve been working, artists have had to learn to think more about business. We learn to look at ourselves as entrepreneurs who create a product, and then we try to sell that product, in a way. And I feel that theatres can stand, and I hope you take these next few days to think more like artists. We have this model that was born 50 years ago but it can be reborn at any moment. And as an artist, with each new work, you try to find a way to be reborn. And I thank you all for being here. And for taking the time and for caring about the American theatre enough that you will also try to examine ways to be reborn at every moment.

Thank you.

[Applause]