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IN COMES COMPANY We are very proud that New Line regularly casts actors in leading roles who have never worked with our company before. In most New Line shows, about half the cast are actors who are new to the company. This constant flow of new talent is important to New Line’s work. In the casting process, the New Line staff cares far less about formal training and resumes, and far more about talent and a willingness to experiment, take risks, and break rules.
It is also important to us that our company looks like the community we serve, so we are continually working to increase diversity in our casts and our audiences. Some people think that color-blind casting is just about being "politically correct," but we believe that color-blind casting is about seeing the world as it should be instead of the way it is. We believe this may be one way we can help make the next generation better and smarter and happier than ours. If we're not working toward making our world a better place, then what real value does art have? We're very proud that only four of our shows in the last ten years have had all-white casts. But we know we can still do better... SHAKE, RATTLE, AND ROLL
New Line Theater is America’s only alternative musical theatre company. What sets it apart from many mainstream companies, large and small, is its philosophy and its process. Like dozens and dozens of other small alternative companies across America and around the world, New Line takes philosophical and practical inspiration from the theatre models of the 1960s, including Caffé Cino, LaMaMa E.T.C., Judson Poets Theatre, Joan Littlewood's People’s Theatre Workshop in London, and to a lesser extent from the Living Theatre, the Open Theatre, and various theatre collectives in the US and Europe – theatres that emphasized poetic stylization, intellectual seriousness, social and political engagement, and the guiding principle of ensemble.
MYSTIC, CRYSTAL REVELATIONS Like all those companies in the sixties, New Line questions many of the accepted rules of mainstream theatre. Must there be a separation between actors and audience? Must the playing space be restricted to a certain portion of the theatre? Are there alternatives to traditional linear plots? Can musicals be abstract? Can theatre have a purpose other than storytelling? Must each actor be associated with only one character during a performance? Must there be a distinction between “leads” and “chorus”? Can we directly address the audience? Can we interact with the audience? Can we require things of the audience? Must we pretend the action is “real”? Are nudity and four-letter words really all that shocking today? Can they be simply human expressions of emotion, outrage, activism, satire, social commentary? ► Check out this fascinating article from The New Republic about obscenity.  Designer
Robert Edmond
Jones wrote in his brilliant book,
The Dramatic Imagination,
"The only theatre worth saving, the only theatre worth having, is a theatre
motion pictures cannot touch. When we succeed in eliminating from it every
trace of the photographic attitude of mind, when we succeed in making a
production that is the exact antithesis of a motion picture, a production that
is everything a motion picture is not and nothing a motion picture is, the old
lost magic will return once more. The realistic theatre, we may remember, is
less than a hundred years old. But the theatre – great theatre, world theatre – is far older than that, so many centuries older that by comparison it makes
our little candid-camera theatre seem like something that was thought up only
the day before yesterday."
We believe there are two kinds of theatre: that which unleashes the imagination and that which closes it down and does the work for you. We choose that which unleashes. Legendary director Hal Prince once said, Don't sell audiences short. They are open to the adventurous, the challenging, even the dangerous.” With every show, New Line audiences prove he's right. The New Liners intend for their audiences not necessarily to feel happy walking out of the theatre, but to feel deeply. And to think about what they're seeing. As the legendary Del Close has said, "Treat your audiences like geniuses and poets and that's what they will become."
COME UP TO THE LAB New Line’s rehearsal process is different too. Though most companies put together shows in two to four weeks, New Line has a much slower process. We rehearse only three days a week and spend from six to eight weeks rehearsing a show. This allows time for talk, for experimentation, for play, and for a complete change of course if that’s where the work leads us. It allows for Thinking Time, to really understand the piece on a deeper level, to find its unique voice and style, to explore it fully, to collectively research the time period, the context, the social issues, and more than anything else, time to think about how best to communicate the creators’ intentions.
Because of our process, our programming, our content, and the resulting lack of mainstream corporate or foundation support in our budget, New Line does not hire union actors. The union’s rules and restrictions about rehearsals, and the union’s prescribed pay rates just can’t work under New Line’s current model or mission statement. We are very proud that all New Line actors get paid equally, whether leads or ensemble. Though the actors’ union is an important organization, its regulations are not compatible with the goals or resources of an alternative theatre company.
Unlike
many other theatres, New Line has an extremely specific focus for its work –
issue-oriented musical theatre. That’s all we do. We
explore many styles at New Line, many periods, and many, many issues, but all
within the musical theatre art form. And like the
Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles,
Joan Littlewood’s company in London, and the
Steppenwolf in Chicago, New Line
has developed its own style of performance, its own personality – very
aggressive, very intimate, outrageous but serious-minded, and anchored by a
phrase coined by the Actor’s Gang,
“the height of expression, the depth of
sincerity.”
New Line follows in the footsteps of dozens of theatre companies in the past and dozens in the present, and the process we have developed over the years seems to us the best way to make the most exciting, most deeply emotional theatre. Though our audiences, our list of contributors, and our national profile all continue to grow, we will not change our company's founding principles of creating vigorous, muscular, politically and socially relevant musical theatre for our region. As Mother Jones magazine wrote in an anniversary issue, "Better to give us thanks for knowing the importance of being un-earnest, of taking undignified chances, for having the courage to risk all, risk being wrong, risk looking foolish. If there is in fact any secret at all to our amazing longevity, that's surely near the heart of it: knowing how to act the fool like the future depends on it."
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