|
(continued from previous page)
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...
THE CRADLE WILL ROCK In addition to our unique stylistic approach, New Line Theatre is also openly and proudly political in its work, addressing the most relevant contemporary issues in its shows. We believe in the theory of Popcorn, Politics, and Poetry – that our work should contain entertainment, political and social relevance, and a belief in the power of serious art to transform our world. Sally Banes wrote in her book Greenwich Village 1963, "In the early Sixties, the arts became an important arena in which aesthetic, personal, and polemical energies were galvanized by people who were convinced, with evangelical fervor, that they had entered into a new covenant with history through the rediscovery of their chosen medium... The early Sixties avant-garde artists did not aim passively to reflect the society they lived in; they tried to change it by producing a new culture."
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”? 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.) 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”?
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.
LOVE YOUR BAT BOY In his book To the Director and Playwright, Michael Chekhov wrote about the approaches of three of the great Russian directors, all of whom he had worked with. He wrote, "Instinctively, intuitively, Stanislavsky tried to persuade his audience that they were not in a theatre, that his performances were real life, that after the curtain went up, they were one with the characters on the stage. With Meyerhold's super-psychology, you were taken by the scruff of the neck and thrown out of this world and into another of his own imagining. Vachtangov, on the other hand, did everything possible to remind the spectator: 'Look, it is the theatre. It is not Stanislavsky's reality or Meyerhold's otherworld images. It is just juicy theatre.' With Vachtangov, you remained in your theatre seat; nothing was too naturalistic or too illusional; everything was theatrical. And he developed this theatricality to such a degree that you began to love the theatre in a new way – the theatre as theatre." That's the kind of theatre we make.
New Line intends for its audiences not necessarily to feel happy, but to feel deeply. And to think about what they're seeing. The New Liners believe in what actor Laurence Luckinbill once wrote: “Always over-estimate the public’s intelligence. They will thank you for it.” We believe live theatre is one of the most powerful tools in the world for social change, and we believe we have an obligation to use that tool to make the world a better place, to engage the people of our region in a discussion of the issues of our times. Acting guru Stella Adler once said of her famous actor father, "Jacob Adler said that unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger – better – do not act." Actor Ben Kingsley has said about actors, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you."
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.
HEART AND MUSIC
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." |
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 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, Cafe
LaMaMa, 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 
