St3rv34n' alt='The Lost Thing Theater Movie ' title='The Lost Thing Theater Movie ' />Harvard playwrights, directors, producers, actors, and artistic directors speculate about theatrical prospects for the future. Curtainup is the online source for theater news, features and reviews on and off Broadway, London, California and Elsewhere. Animation by Jennifer Shiman, featuring the 30Second Bunnies Theatre Troupe doing reenactments of movies. Like the drivein, the wank theater is mostly gone. A few have managed to stick around, though, and we spoke to the former manager of one. AURORA, Colo. Five years after the Aurora theater shooting, the stories of those killed on July 20, 2012 shared by family and friends paint. Smurfs The Lost Village is an example that even the big, powerful, wellpaid grownups who run movie studios can learn a thing or two. Flicker Alleys Bluray of The Lost World reveals the film as an essential origin point for historicizing the trajectory of effectsdriven cinema. The future of theater in a digital age, ranging from nonprofits to Broadway. Recently, actor John Lithgow 6. Ar. D. 0. 5, was offered the chance for buckets of money to take over the lead role in an established television drama series. But it came at the very moment that Id been asked to do David Auburns new play, he says. To me there was no question what Id rather do. My original calling, the impulse that made me become an actor, is satisfied onstage much more than it is in movies and television. To be sure, these are creators at the top of their professions. Lithgows long and varied acting career, recounted in his new autobiography, Drama An Actors Education, has earned him Oscar nominations and Emmy, Tony, and Golden Globe awards, as well as a Harvard honorary degree. Auburn wrote the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning drama Proof 2. Lithgow will open this spring. Only a tiny fraction of actors have the luxury of choosing stage over lucrative work on screens, Lithgow notes, adding, In a way, it seems unfortunate that people feel you have to have a movie star in the cast of a Broadway show. On the other hand, it might help theater by strengthening its reputation as the high bar, the best thing you can do. If so, the stars boost may be timely. Theater, an institution at the heart of world cultures for millennia, now confronts unprecedented challenges in a rapidly evolving society. Electronic and digital technologies have spawned an array of media, from 3 D movies to crowd sourced video like You. Tube to smartphones, that compete with the stage and with other traditional media like books, and each other for the audiences finite attention. A youthful generation raised amid a digital culture may prove harder to lure to a live theatrical performance in the 2. Broadway theatergoer was 4. Were in such a crazy flux now, says Lithgow. The whole notion of entertainment is confused and diffused. Its not just all these technologies and the ADD phenomenon of jumping aroundthe video game mindset were not sure what entertainment is anymore. Half of television now is reality television, where you have regular people forcing themselves into the limelight and everybody watching happy amateurs failing before their very eyes. Being voted off an island or being fired by Donald Trump is the new drama thats where dramatic tension is being generated, rather than from the minds of writers, actors, and filmmakers. Entertainment delivered cheaply to a laptop or handheld device beats theater on price and convenience. When playwright Christopher Durang 7. A Yodel for Help in the Modern World, March April 2. New York City in 1. A few years later, it cost only about 3. Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, which ran off Broadway from 1. By 2. 00. 8, the average ticket on Broadway was 8. These seats must be for people in the financial industry, Durang marvels. I dont feel there is any play I personally want to pay 4. Those developments threaten live theater. In 2. 00. 8, five playwrights helped inaugurate Harvards New College Theater now Farkas Hall with a panel titled Does Playwriting Have a Future The consensus was that there are plenty of fine playwrights, but the daunting question is, Does producing have a future because it is so difficult to get new plays mounted. Durang says, The people willing to invest in the smaller return of off Broadway are disappearing. Furthermore, the lucrative world of television, which has produced some excellent drama and comedy in recent years, has been siphoning off some of the best young playwrightsor potential playwrightsfrom the stage. Its very, very important that nonprofit theaters continue to generate new writing, says Lithgow. Its extremely difficult to write a play. He recalls gathering the comedy writers behind his hit television series, Third Rock from the Sun, a few years ago. I told them, Look, you guys write one act farcesone a week Youre brilliant at this During your four or five month hiatus from Third Rock, why dont you write some playsThe field is wide open. Comedy writers used to write for Broadway, but comedy writers today are all writing for television. Write an evening of three one acts Ill produce it for you. And the playwright is in control in the theater writers for film and TV are subject to rewritingtheyre employees. Romance Movies Download Me And My Shadow there. They were all very excited by the ideaand none of them wrote plays. They worked on pilots, played golf, and waited for the season to start again. Drama in the Marketplace Nonprofit theater faces particular problems. People who think everything needs to be determined by the marketplace have no understanding of art, says Tina Packer, RI 9. Shakespeare Company, the theatrical company in Lenox, Massachusetts, that has been a staple of cultural life in the Berkshires since 1. The great cathedrals of Europe would never have been built, Van Gogh would never have painted, Michelangelo would never have sculpted if it were just about marketplace forces. In order to maintain its ideal form, theater needs to be subsidized, says Robert Brustein, senior research fellow and founding director of the American Repertory Theater ART. In the 1. 93. 0s, a tiny sliver of the New Deal Works Progress Administration budget supported the Federal Theatre Project FTP, which funded a flourishing American stage culture from 1. Congress canceled funding in reaction to the left wing character of many FTP productions. Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, and John Houseman were among those who launched their careers under the FTP. Nonprofit theater enjoyed a second golden age from the 1. National Endowment for the Arts NEA giving millions of dollars in grants that, along with a surge of awards from the Ford, Rockefeller, Mellon, and Shubert foundations, energized about 4. Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Arena Stage in Washington, D. C. Brustein himself started the Yale Repertory Theatre with 3. Rockefeller Foundation in 1. These regional theaters, many with permanent companies of actors, directors, and designers, worked together like sports teams, Brustein explains. They allowed for shortcuts. You didnt have to start from scratch, with actors getting to know each other for the first time, or competing with each other on the stagethey were there to provide mutual support. It was a collective idea in a rabidly individualistic society, so its life was destined to be short, he continues. It lasted long enough to create some very distinguished work and to influence the quality of Broadway and off Broadway. But the curtain came down on this golden age, too. The economic recessions of the early 1. Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano, triggered cuts to the NEAs budget, decimating funding meanwhile, some of the larger foundations moved away from theater projects. Today, though, Brustein is guardedly optimistic about the NEA under its current director, Rocco Landesman, one of his Yale doctoral students and a successful Broadway producer, who, I think, is going to try to re stimulate the old ideals of the resident theater. Theater can never completely ignore the marketplace and the critics, who influence ticket buyers. On one hand, when opening an off Broadway show in New York, if the New York Times doesnt like it, youre sunk, says Durang. Yet the nonprofit theater is meant not to be a hostage to newspaper critics, says Brustein, who has written a great deal of theater criticism himself. If a nonprofit theater has enough resources independent of box office receipts, It can defy its critics, or even stay ahead of its critics, he declares. Brustein tells of bringing the ART to Harvard in the 1. New Haven. The ART began with A Midsummer Nights Dream, and drew 1. But the following season, the company lost half its audience.