Talks finally resumed yesterday in the stagehands’ strike that has brought most of Broadway to a standstill – and on went through the night, only finally being adjourned without resolution at 6.30am today, which must have felt a bit like being at one of those theatrical all-nighter marathons that Ken Campbell used to do. Talks will resume again tonight at 6.30pm.
But meanwhile, the new Broadway production of Harold Pinter’s The Homecoming – with a cast that includes Ian McShane, Eve Best and Raul Esparza — that should have begun previews on Friday put itself in front of an appreciative audience last night, by doing a one-off charity run-through at an off-Broadway theatre, the New World Stages, instead.
This was a fantastic idea: not just to get the actors’ out of the rehearsal room where, as director Daniel Sullivan commented before the proceedings began, they’ve been holed up longer than they planned, but also to use it as an opportunity to make a collection for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights Aids, a charity organisation whose main Broadway fundraising drive takes place at this time of year and who are therefore missing out on the opportunity to do so. They are losing an estimated $350,000 every week as a result. (The charity is also reaching out to potential donors by launching a “team-raiser” drive to urge people to use e-mail and blogs to reach out to family, friends and show fans who would normally make a donation at the theatre but can’t at the moment; I am happy to play my part and link to it here: click on the logo to your favourite show to donate.
Tickets for last night’s one-off performance were released for free at 6pm, and – since press were not being invited to attend – I wore my civilian shoes (and scarf and woolly cap) and joined the line at around 4.15pm. There were already about 100 people ahead of me, but one of the joys of such events is that, even in the biting cold, you really do feel the sense of community, not to mention the hunger to see affordable theatre, in this town. Queueing immediately behind me was a young actor who had just come from appearing in his own matinee, a musical called Queens Boulevard now previewing at Signature Theatre on West 42nd Street, which I had coincidentally seen the matinee of only the day before! I found out his name was Amir Arison, and he’s the lead! (He is profiled on broadway.com this week as a Fresh Face). Last year, he came to Stratford-upon-Avon as part of Washington DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.
It made the wait go faster talking to him and others around us, and helped to take our minds off the cold. The performance itself was worth the wait, too: seeing these actors performing in front of an audience for the first time on a bare bones set gave it a special raw energy, but also a sense of release and relief for both the actors and audience. The theatre can clearly survive whatever obstacles are thrown in its way: truly, two planks and a passion are sometimes all that is required.
We proved our passion by waiting in the cold (though I do wonder if Chelsea Clinton, also in the audience last night, did her time on the line or not); and the actors theirs by donating their time to do this for free. It was an all-round win. But it’s not necessary for a crisis like the Broadway strike to make theatre as affordable as this: in fact tickets for Amir’s show, Queens Boulevard, are just $20 for the entire run, thanks to a Travelex-style scheme in which the corporate sponsorship of Time Warner Inc has enabled Signature to launch a programme whose slogan is “great theatre, great price”. (The ticket itself states the price as $65, “less $45 subsidy”).
And also on Saturday, I saw the best new American play I’ve seen for some time, Stephen Karam’s Speech & Debate, at Roundabout’s new Underground initiative in a newly-carved out Black Box Theatre space in the subterranean depths of their off-Broadway space on West 46th Street, for which once again all tickets were just $20. The idea of Roundabout Underground, according to artistic director Todd Haimes, is to cultivate “new work by emerging playwrights and directors, giving them the opportunity to debut plays as full-scale productions in the intimate setting of the Black Box Theatre. This nurturing space takes us back to our roots and brings new and vibrant talent into the Roundabout family.”
Those are laudable aims indeed, and it has born rich fruit in this opening production. But will it also bring new and vibrant audiences to a company with a staid subscriber base? Though productions here are not sold as part of the subscription season, I worry that only those theatrically sophisticated and organised enough to get the tickets will have done so; the entire run is already sold out. And one of the dangers of the low price is that, at just $20 a ticket, if people can’t make it they may not bother to return and release them; there were at least ten empty seats (out of a capacity of 62) on Saturday evening.
