The Beauty of Being Small and Nimble

A while back I was saying that if I was starting a theater company, I’d want it to be small and nimble and seasonless and possibly for-profit, for a bunch of reasons. (1) If a play was a hit, I wouldn’t have to cut it short after four weeks just because I’d scheduled another play when I was picking a season eight months ago, and (2) so I had the option of putting up plays that were written super-recently. To that last point:

You Say You Want a New Play? Well, boy has Gus Schulenburg got a new play for you! You see, Gus runs a company called Flux. Flux had Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B. slated for their season. …Then the rights fell through. So what did Gus do? Write a brand new play. For the same cast and design concept. In two fucking days. This play will have its world premiere in two months. So from initially deciding to write the full length to seeing its first performance will be a 62 day process. That’s Cafe Cino speed if ever I saw it.

I don’t know MacLeish’s play and may have enthusiastically gone to see once I’d read about it — but I would absolutely, definitely go to see Schulenburg’s. How could you not, just to see how they pull it off?

Read about it here. Read Isaac Butler’s post, which I quoted from, here.

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