Boston Theatre Conference examines the state of local stages
WALTHAM -- Calling theater "gym for the soul," director Anne Bogart exhorted about 250 participants in the first Boston Theatre Conference to use the unique expressive powers of their medium to create meaningful work in a challenging time.
In an impassioned, wide-ranging speech here on Saturday, Bogart talked about how she thinks the events of Sept. 11 and the ensuing three years have changed the artist's role. "The choice of content and the reason for that choice is different now," she said, in part because "we are in a more extreme environment of manufactured paranoia."
Bogart, the artistic director of New York's SITI Company, argued that theater, because it creates a live and shared experience, carries particular weight now. "We need to be in rooms together, breathing the same air, discussing issues of importance that aren't too simple," she said. "The art of theater becomes more essential because of the times we live in."
Bogart made the speech midway through a day of panels and small group discussions about the state of theater in Boston, presented by the theater advocacy group StageSource at Brandeis University's Spingold Theatre. With 10 new performance spaces scheduled to open this year and with new companies and partnerships springing up, the StageSource executive director, Jeff Poulos, said in his opening remarks, "We have reached, as a theater community, a very dynamic time."
Rick Lombardo, producing artistic director of the New Repertory Theatre, led a morning panel discussion that explored some of the implications of that dynamic time. Noting that theater has often been the "stepchild" in the Boston arts scene, taking a back seat to such renowned institutions as the Boston Symphony Orchestra or the Museum of Fine Arts, Lombardo asked the six panelists from a range of local companies to look at Boston's current position in the theater world and to talk about how it might develop.
"We don't stump for ourselves," said panelist Kate Snodgrass, producing director of Boston Playwrights' Theatre. Arguing that "Boston is the Democrats and Chicago is the Republicans," Snodgrass expressed a thought echoed by several panelists: The Second City's reputation as a great theater town is partly due to its willingness to call itself a great theater town. In contrast, Snodgrass said of Boston, "we don't tell the world what's going on."
That other theater town, New York, also figured in the conversation. "What New York still seems able to do is to attract young artists who make things," said Robert Woodruff, who moved from New York two years ago to become artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge. "The thing I miss here -- I miss more instigation. When I go back to New York, I'll go to see what the instigators are doing."
But Charles Towers, artistic director of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, said he has been "extraordinarily pleased" with his audiences' willingness to embrace new work. "I have found this to be the most supportive, risk-taking audience that I have worked for," Tower said. "I kind of like this New England audience. The next challenge is how to double them."
That challenge was a recurring theme of the day; as Poulos calculated it, the flood of newly opening theaters could mean as many as 2 million new tickets to sell a year. Tony McLean of Broadway in Boston, whose 2,600-seat Opera House is the largest of these ventures (and who presented a $20,000 check to StageSource from the "Hard Hat Concert" that reopened the house in June), said even he is finding that the widespread coverage of the Opera House's renovation and reopening "is starting to become overkill. My job now is to fill it."
Still, Lombardo said, the very existence of this conference -- which StageSource hopes to make a regular event -- spoke to the strength of the Boston scene.
"Ten years ago, there would have been 50 people in this room," Lombardo said. "And that means there's something going on. So let's put our heads together, because there's a lot of us, and we can do something."
Louise Kennedy can be reached at kennedy@globe.com. 
