A writer of my acquaintance recently had an op-ed published in the Washington Post about theatre and what should be done about the death spiral it seems to be in. In the piece, she proposed some ways to fix some of the problems the field has found itself in. She named the difficulties, the history and offered a solution.
In watching the response to the article roll in, I was struck by how those who were opposed to her ideas seemed to think the proposal was a plan that was about to be put into place. They seemed to think this was a thing that was about to happen. (One thing she suggested was to give funding for big arts institutions directly to artists instead.) There were cries for the loss of these institutions, for the loss of jobs, for the impossibility of artists taking responsibility for their own budgets. It seemed like they thought this writer was a wizard and was giving notice of what she was about to do with her magic wand. They seemed to attribute great powers to this writer, to imagine she could, with a series of words in a major newspaper, transform the whole of American Theatre, whether the American Theatre wanted it or not.
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Emily Rainbow Davis