The Promise

Demolition has started. There is serious work being done at the site. That’s serious business. Dan O’Brien starts full time on Tuesday as our TD and Building dude. That’s exciting. Subcontractors are hard at work on Redwood Street. That’s not what I’ve chosen to write about today.  Instead, I want to write about what we’ve gotten ourselves into.

We’re making promises

That’s what we’re doing, right? We’re making a promise to people about this new cultural center. When we talk to Governor O’Malley’s Chief of Staff or the head of the France Merrick Foundation, the President of the Baltimore Downtown Partnership, our resident artists, our current audience, teachers across the state or current financial supporters of the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, we’re making a promise about our expansion. We’re making this same promise to our architectural firm who is spending a lot of extra hours on this project that may not be showing up on our bills. Yes, we’re making a promise to the tax payers of the state of Maryland.

So, what’s the promise?  Well, we’re promising that we can make a difference.  We’re promising that we can add something to the life of our region.  One of the things we’re promising is interesting and engaging productions of theater that will appeal to a wide range of audiences.  That’s a pretty big promise. Theater doesn’t do that too much, does it?  We’ve segregated live theater into a variety of small communities – designed for very special tribes.  Those of us who are privileged enough to know who Jerzy Grotowski and Clifford Odets and Meyerhold and Kushner are, spend a lot of our time talking to each other. Our theater has become a private conversation most people aren’t interested in. Most people feel excluded from these highly specialized “conversations”- like folks listening in on a private joke between two individuals who laugh heartily at their own cleverness but leave everyone else out of it.

Or we might produce live theater as a sort of low-budget alternative to big media entertainment. From the thirties through the seventies, there were a lot of plays that existed because “grown-up” themes couldn’t be shown in the movies or on TV.  Plays like The Owl and The Pussycat weren’t all that intellectually stimulating, but the subject matter and language could really only be shown on the stage. Poeple who were interested in plays with “grown-up” themes was pretty large. But the category of themes that can’t be shown on TV and movies has diminished to very specific things- just about anything can be shown – but no necessarily get a big enough audience to be produced for filmed media, so now we get plays written, produced and created for tiny little segments of the population, leaving most people confused and excluded.  So, 40 or so like-minded people from a specific community get together for an evening and agree with each other and congratulate each other on their ability to find each other and tell their version of the truth. Theater becomes small low-budget, bohemian versions of Fox News.

So, we can sort of forget what is exciting about live theater in the first place.  Because, I don’t think that’s it.

There are theaters out there that are not doing this.  Good for them. But, not too many of them.

We are promising we’ll try to do it differently.

We’re also promising we’ll be responsible with our resources. We are promising that we won’t squander people’s investment in our idea.  We are making a promise that the work we create will be for the benefit of our community, rather that for the benefit of a few artists who “always wanted to do” such and such a play or a tiny segment of our audience who thrives on discovering the obscure..  We’re promising that when we think about our work, we’ll think about the purpose it serves, that there should be a need for each and every work of art that we create and each and every class we teach. We are making a promise that, to the best of our ability, our work will propel the life of our community forward and we’ll do it in a way that fiscally responsible and as efficient as creating art can be.

We are promising that people won’t get burned again in believing in an arts organization that professes to be there in service of the community.

We’re promising that we’ll be around for awhile. We’re promising that we’ll do our best to continue to be a resource for our community for decades to come. The kind of investment we’re making in the expansion to the new building doesn’t make any sense at all if the organization exists for, say six years.  We’re asking for almost $7,000,000 to make this project work.  That money has to be spread out for many years in order to make the investment worth it. If we pack up because things are getting too difficult or we become disinterested in six or eight years, leaving behind an unusable historic building that has been entrusted to us, we will not be living up to our promise.

We won’t promise that we can make Henry VI, Part 2 a smash hit at the box office. We won’t promise that our work will fit everyone’s tastes. It never has. It never will. We won’t promise that new restaurants will open on Redwood Street in the first year or two. We’re not promising that every student that comes to see our Romeo and Juliet matinees is going to become devoted to Shakespeare. But, what we are promising is that we’ll do our very best to live up to what we are promising.

And, we don’t take that promise lightly.