From an April 3, 2007 article in the Portland Tribune by Eric Bartels
“Those who create local theater say Portland audiences are blessed with a vivid menu of diverse and often daring offerings. … Yet, the theater community agrees, its work is never done. For all the creative talent that has arrived with the city’s explosive growth in recent decades, challenges remain. Professional training for actors is limited, and affordable spaces to rehearse and perform in are increasingly hard to find. Like other cultural institutions … even the most established theater companies must compete for ever scarcer funding. And, as ever, live theater must compete for the attention of the public, and its dollars, against more modern, more mainstream forms of entertainment.”
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3 comments:
Thanks to PT for devoting such prominent space to an article on Portland theatre.
Very cool.
Come on - admit it. All theatre people immediately focused in on the picture!
I haven't finished reading this story but, holy smokes, check out this similar landscape look
http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/la-theater-2007-to-play-or-not-to-play-that-is-the-question/16035/
For almost as long as the Sign on Mount Lee has been luring hopefuls, local [L.A.] theater has offered a kind of life raft from the desolation of waiting for agents to call as days turn into decades. (Somebody once noted that Los Angeles is the only city where one can die of encouragement.) For artists in or out of the Industry, theater provides at least some community, and places to perform or be performed. The Industry is often where our artists go to work, but the theater is where they go to work out. ... It may be a cliché, but the theater really is a training ground.
Theater too comes with its own hardships: the difficulty of keeping performance spaces that a company can call “home,” as property values soar; the rigorous demands of time; the relentless poverty from working in an art form with a union-approved pay scale of about $10 per performance under the Actors’ Equity local small-theater contract; the mounting challenges of raising funds for a form that almost never breaks even, as the priorities of public-funding agencies and private foundations drift away from the arts. Then there’s the classic local challenge for a director to keep a cast together when the Industry arbitrarily knocks at the theater door and plucks out a performer or two.
In the articles that follow, we sought to isolate specific moments in the lives of theater artists or companies when they come to that crossroads at which, after considerable duress, they must decide whether to continue doing local theater, or to leave. Through these stories, we hope to learn about these individuals and companies, and what their experiences tell us about the state of our theater.
i disagree a little with the likening of the LA theatre scene to that of PDX.
i lived in LA in the 90's and did a lot of theatre there while waiting for the phone to ring with "real" work. after a decade of it i found that i valued the consistent rewards of the theatre (artistic, creative, social, etc) over the $$$$ which was the single incentive of the union jobs. playing the classics especially brought the satisfaction of delving into texts and roles that have endured, for all the right reasons, for decades if not centuries.
while the far greater mass of LA show biz wannabes looked down at the legit theatre as a dead thing walking i, eventually, gave up the "biz" and fully enlisted in the ranks of actors, famous and the humble, who've played the great roles. from my perspective, giving myself over to the work in this way bestowed more value in experience and growth as an artist than any amount of paychecks could've done.
now, after a sabbatical from the world for a few years i find myself here in PDX - and loving it. the theatre scene here is vibrant, has depth and is exciting for many reasons but... maybe the most important one is that the distraction of commercial work doesn't exist. we all do the work for itself alone; not to showcase ourselves or pass the time while waitng for the "industry" to find us and whisk us off to fame and the "goodlife". this is the good life. oh yeah. i love PDX. it beats the LA thing hands down.
forgive me if what i've written isn't isn't exactly refuting what you meant by the earlier post but i feel quite strongly about this and just had to spout off. thanks
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