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The following remarks by Sandra Fenichel Asher are based on presentations given at the 2003 New England Theatre Conference in Providence, R.I., and the 2004 AATE conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. Asher is the recipient of two A.A.T.E. Distinguished Play Awards for A Woman Called Truth (2004) and In the Garden of the Selfish Giant (2005).
For six seasons, 1997 to 2003, I was literary manager and then managing director of Good Company Theatre for All Ages, a community outreach project of the Drury University School of Education in Springfield, Mo. Technically, I suppose, my title should have been producing artistic director and Lord High Everything Else—because for most of that time, I was the only permanent component of Good Company Theatre. But when the entire project landed unexpectedly in my lap, I took the optimistic title of managing director, hoping I would somehow manage to get the job done.
I did manage to pull off a number of productions. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss. I was able to produce successfully the plays I wanted to produce for young audiences by enlisting the aid of other community groups and helping their causes as well as my own. The trick was to arrange a series of win-win situations.
A couple of definitions are in order:
"The plays I wanted to produce"—By this I mean high-quality, significant, and sometimes untried works not always guaranteed to bring in an audience. Plays I loved. Plays I was passionate about. Some were my own; others were outstanding scripts I'd read or heard in rehearsed readings at the Kennedy Center's New Visions/New Voices Symposium in D.C. or the IUPUI/IRT/Bonderman Workshop and Symposium in Indianapolis, Ind.
My idea from the beginning of Good Company was to produce two shows each season: one a proven money-maker that would pay for the other, something more risky and adventurous. But the best-laid plans go awry. Mine went completely haywire—at first in an alarming and then in a pleasantly surprising way. My least-known shows turned out to be my biggest successes. More about that soon.
First, another definition:
"Success"—In the case of Good Company, the bottom line was not a big issue. No one expected it to make money, no one required it to make money, no one was relying on it to make money. Each director was paid a small honorarium. As writer-in-residence at Drury University, I also received a small honorarium, but not for running a children's theatre company. So, basically, I was volunteering my time. Royalties were paid to the playwrights, of course, but everyone else involved also volunteered. Rehearsal space was donated by Drury, and our main performance space, the Vandivort Center Theatre, a flexible black box in downtown Springfield seating about 200, was very affordable.
So I could and did put on shows for between $2,000 and $5,000 each. Over the six years of the company's existence, we paid our bills, but even if we hadn't been able to, Drury would have covered the losses.
I realize that's a sweet—if tiny—set-up, but I think much of what happened with Good Company could be extrapolated to larger institutions.
With that hope in mind, here's what happened:
Good Company began, appropriately enough, as a twosome. My co-founder, Mark Gideon, was an experienced actor, director, and secondary-school drama teacher. We originally got together so that he could direct the first staged reading of my then script-in-progress, an adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma.
During a lunchtime meeting for that project, I mentioned that Springfield children needed to see some of the wonderful scripts I was learning about at the Bonderman and New Visions/New Voices, and no one was doing them locally. In some cases, no one was doing them anywhere. Mark agreed to become producing artistic director of what we dubbed Good Company Theatre for All Ages. My job, at first, was to be literary manager, finding and suggesting suitable scripts.
We came up with Judy Blume's Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing as our debut offering that fall because we figured people would come to see it. And they did. We also got considerable media coverage because we were the new kids on the block. We were off and running.
We knew from the start that we wanted to involve the community in Good Company. That's why it was called "Good Company"! So in the winter of our first season, we ran an all-day Saturday workshop at Drury based on my script All on a Saturday Morning. Six teachers were recruited from the area theater community, public schools, and all three colleges in town. They were paid $25 for the day, or they could enroll a child for free (a $50 value). In teams of two, they rotated three groups of kids all morning, teaching them songs, dialogue, and dance. Several of the faculty also took on the teenage, longer roles in the play. After a hot dog or pb&j lunch, all three groups rehearsed together under Mark's direction. At 4:30 p.m., they donned Good Company T-shirts and performed for their families. It was a huge success and earned more than enough money for our second production.
That was a delightful comedy called Interrupting Ert by Colleen Neuman. It had been a Bonderman winner, under the title The Wonderful Machine, and ours was the premier production. We had enough money to fly Colleen to Springfield for the last week of rehearsals and performances, a Drury faculty member on sabbatical donated his house for her to stay in, and she agreed to visit local elementary schools to talk about the play. A letter went out, and 18 schools signed up! Colleen was a trouper and insisted on visiting them all, so she did an hour program in each, and, of course, we handed out flyers about the performances.
And so we wrapped up our dream-come-true first season—and then everything changed. Mark was switching jobs and houses. We hired another director, Maxine Whittaker, for our fall money-maker, Nate the Great. A fine script and a fun production, but not the huge draw we were expecting. Media attention had fallen off. We were no longer the new kids in town.
So, we were approaching our fourth show with little money in the bank.
At this point, we were not yet affiliated with Drury University. We were just an aging Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland putting on shows. But the time had come to ask for donations. With an eye on instant nonprofit status, as writer-in-residence at Drury, I proposed to our dean (who happened to be named Steve Good, a happy coincidence!) that Good Company become a community outreach project of the School of Education. A presence in the downtown arts scene for the school, nonprofit status for us. A win-win match.
Drury's theater department, by the way, didn't want us. The department chair felt that if we were doing theater in their name, they needed to be supervising us and they didn't have time. The School of Education had no time to supervise us either but didn't mind the leap of faith.
Dean Good said yes and opened an account for us on campus. An account with no money in it, but the guarantee that our bills would be paid, if it came to that—although it was clearly preferred that it not come to that. We became nonprofit overnight and were still very much on our own, as our board of directors was Drury's board of trustees, who didn't even know we existed.
Fine with us!
Up to this point, we'd had all adult casts. For our adventurous spring play, we chose my play I Will Sing Life: Voices From the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp for two reasons: to experiment with a young cast and to get the thing produced, because no one else would do it. Enthusiastic staged readings, yes. Full productions, no. A play about children with life-threatening diseases! Cancer! AIDS! Sickle cell anemia! Great idea, charming script, but who would come see it?
Too depressing, right?
Wrong.
I'd been a volunteer at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, and I was determined that the words of those remarkable, articulate, wise and funny children—some of them set to Ric Averill's original and clever music—were going to be heard from the stage.
So it was up to us.
Only suddenly, there was no "us." Mark's life took a turn for the complicated, and he quit. Cold. He did find another director, George Cron, but there I was, with no solo experience in producing shows and a director I barely knew. Auditions had already been announced and were four days away.
If ever I needed "good company," it was now. So I set out to find it. The new director showed up, the play was cast, rehearsals began, and I devised a plan to raise money for the production and to bring in an audience.
To whom might this play be not just appealing but important? I asked myself. People who enjoy theater, or course, but that was much too general.
What about people who care about kids, who work with them in some way? They don't necessarily attend theater, as a rule, but:
1. They do want others to learn about what's important to them.
2. They do want to publicize their causes and organizations.
3. They do want to raise money for their causes and organizations.
Maybe if I gave away 200 tickets to each of the five performances to community charities benefitting children—1,000 tickets total—and let them keep the entire amount of every ticket they sold, they'd do the selling for me.
And, maybe, if I told people I was giving away 1,000 tickets to community charities benefitting children, they'd donate money to underwrite our expenses.
And, maybe, if all the above occurred, we'd get really great media coverage to bring in even more ticket sales, in case the charities couldn't move all of those tickets themselves.
And, maybe, if we did get ticket sales above the given-away tickets, we'd donate a share of that money, too, back to the participating charities. So they'd all get something, just for trying.
I gathered a few likely donors' addresses, and launched my campaign. The first letter went out to the Springfield Community Foundation. We were out of sync with their funding cycle—what did I know?—but, as it turned out, the director did have a small amount of discretionary money—and we had our first $500. That endorsement brought in another local foundation's support. Contributions also arrived from neighbors who were retired teachers, a local doctor, and—at my request—from my husband, in lieu of an anniversary gift.
There was no guarantee that we'd reach our underwriting goal of $4,000, but time was short, so I began offering the free tickets. Seven organizations hauled away between 50 and 200 tickets each:
Make-a-Wish Foundation
A Sporting Chance
The Regional Girs' Shelter
The Victim Center's Children's Services
Camp Barnabas
Drury's Habitat for Humanity chapter
The Boys and Girls Club
Not all the tickets were sold in advance. Those not sold were returned to the box office a week before opening night. But the media response was fantastic, the buzz was out there, and the over-the-counter sales were very brisk. By the end of our five-performance run, I was able to pay all the bills, give each charity $100 over what they'd earned themselves, and still have enough left over to pay the rent for my next two shows!
Without a familiar title, and with a difficult topic—desperately ill children—we filled the house. Audiences were happily surprised to find themselves in the good company of enthusiastic teenagers playing seriously ill and yet exuberant children. Flyers from all the participating charities were available in the lobby. A director from a neighboring state attended a performance and produced the play at her theater soon after.
As for me, I got the production I needed to finish the script—and I should also mention that a portion of my royalties goes back to the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp—so this was a win-win situation raised to the nth degree!
And it taught me something about how I could go on producing plays: Gather as much good company as possible.
Our next play, Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, was co-produced with the Springfield Little Theater and the Springfield-Greene County library system, especially for the gala opening of a supermodern new library center. Maxine Whittaker directed. The "auditorium" space—basically a large room with no wings, no raised stage, no curtains, and no rent to pay—was transformed into the March household, and we played to overflow audiences as one of the much-touted grand opening events; again, a multiple-win situation.
Next, we did Ellen Cooper's hilarious and heart-rending script Home Safe, directed by Herman Johansen. Another Bonderman winner and Good Company world premiere, Home Safe is a two-character one act featuring teenage sisters trapped in their room because of their mother's drunken rage. Again, an important idea, a terrific script, but, for all too many theaters, a regretful "no, thank you."
We sold our production of Home Safe first as an on-campus performance for Drury's Wellness Week. The University's counseling center has money to bring in programs relevant to the students' health and well-being. Why not a play? The director of counseling found enough in her budget to pay our two young actors as well as the director. She also handled the public relations and ran the discussion on alcoholism and dysfunctional families after the performance. We were able to hand out flyers for the public performances at the Vandivort Center Theatre and hang onto a little money to help pay for them.
We were also able to invite people to the Drury performance whose agencies worked with families like the one being depicted onstage, so that they could preview the play and help us bring in the public audiences later, which they did.
Personnel from a local school of psychology and the director of an organization called CASA—Court-Appointed Special Advocates, volunteers who work with children in foster care—helped with the discussion session at Drury and led discussions after each of our public performances as well. Again, a multiple-win situation—and a world premiere of a wonderful play that could have been a difficult sell.
The next fall, we did an early production of Devon's Hurt by Laurie Brooks, directed by Maxine Whittaker. Again, a delightful piece and a production I was very proud of, but I'm afraid I rested on my laurels (no pun intended) and thought that we had enough of a reputation now that people would risk an unknown title just because they knew we did good plays and did them well.
They came, but not nearly as many of them as the production deserved.
So it was back to total immersion, total community involvement. The CASA Project was a commission from CASA of Southwest Missouri for a community-based script about the organization and the young people it served. CASA raised the grant money to underwrite the script and the production, CASA handled the public relations, and CASA sold or gave away most of the tickets. I again chose Herman Johansen to direct.
The CASA Project: Stand Up for a Child had to meet the issues of child abuse and neglect head-on, so our performances would be for adult audiences, but the focus was very much on the children in foster care that CASA served, to raise awareness of their plight and what could be done for them.
With "good company" again in mind, I turned to Drury's journalism department and asked Professor Pat Brierton if students in her features writing class would be interested in doing the required interviews of judges, lawyers, juvenile officers, social workers, foster parents, and so on. She and her students were thrilled to be involved in a project with implications beyond their classroom. Carrying some guidelines from me and CASA director Rhoda Clark with them, the students gathered interviews far more plentiful and well-conducted than anything I could have accomplished on my own. They also kept journals about their feelings and experiences doing the interviews and generously made those available to me for use in the script as well.
The levels of good accomplished by this piece—which turned out to be a choral reading—are difficult to count: The participating students were awed by the people they met and the situations they learned about—so very different from their own, sheltered lives. For some, it was truly a life-altering experience. The people being interviewed were thrilled with the opportunity to tell their stories and grateful that someone cared enough to ask. The media were generous with their attention and fascinated with the subject matter and the collaborative community involvement. During the run of the show—at the Vandivort and again as a Wellness Week offering at Drury—donations were collected, discussions were held, and information was distributed. New CASA volunteers were recruited from the actors, the interviewees, and the audience members. The original cast has since done several additional performances as fund-raisers; other communities have presented their own readings sponsored by local CASA offices; and, thanks to the efforts of director Herman Johansen, a professionally produced videotape has received national CASA distribution to be used as an educational and recruiting tool.
As the fifth year of Good Company approached, I knew my husband was going to retire from Drury and we would be moving from Springfield, Mo., to Lancaster, Pa. Busy with tying up loose ends and planning our new life, I decided to produce only one play, in the spring, but I wanted it to be a bang-up finish and a thank-you gift to the community.
I approached my friend David Harrison about using his poems in a play, which eventually became Somebody Catch My Homework, a title borrowed from one of David's books.
David is not only a wonderful children's author with more than 60 books to his credit, he's a Springfield business owner, a past school board president, and a passionate advocate for literacy. At the time, he was leading a continuing program called Reading Round-up, whose goal is to bring Springfield public school libraries up to national standards—a feat requiring many thousands of new books.
"How about," I said, "if we make Somebody Catch My Homework a fund-and-awareness raiser for Reading Round-up?"
"Fine," David said. "What can I do to help?"
"For starters," I told him, "I need all the children's poetry you've ever written, published and unpublished. Then I need you to help me with the publicity and to be at every performance to sign copies of your books in the lobby. Since this is the last Good Company production, every cent over expenses can go to buy books for the schools."
David agreed. It didn't hurt that one of Reading Round-up's sponsors is the Springfield daily newspaper. Or that David had access to them and to the school board and the public school foundation. Or that he is really good company—devoted, organized, indefatigable in the cause of literacy. Or that his poetry inspired a very funny script.
Maxine Whittaker signed on again as director, Ric Averill wrote delightful incidental music, the public relations was phenomenal, the place was packed, books and money were donated to the cause, the show was great fun. And I thought I was laying Good Company to rest with the equivalent of a 21-gun salute.
As it turned out, the Vandivort Center Theater and Maxine Whittaker wanted to continue doing family theater. Since I was still in town for another year, I let them use the Good Company name so that the cast could continue to rehearse at Drury. They did a reprise of Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy in the fall, this time at the Vandivort, and Jose Gonzalez's Salt & Pepper in the spring—which I'd suggested because, besides being a fine play, its focus on the devastating effects of illiteracy provided great possibilities for community involvement: The Literacy Council, the school system, the library system, and various adult education programs were all candidates for "good company."
Much to my surprise, I did end up producing one more Good Company play, the world premiere of In the Garden of the Selfish Giant. Again, an award-winning play with several staged readings to its credit but no offers of full production. Was it the all-female cast? Was it the subject of a grandmother's death? Was it the unknown title?
Who knows? But Jodi Kanter, a member of the theater faculty at Southwest Missouri State University, also in Springfield, wanted to direct it. She had three weeks open in January of 2003. The Vandivort Center was booked for the proposed weekend of performances, as were Drury and SMSU. But the Springfield Library Center's auditorium was free—and it was free!
Because the play deals with the impact of an impending death on a family's dynamics and because a hospice worker is involved, I got in touch with the director of an organization called The Community Alliance for Compassionate Care at the End of Life—a group of medical professionals, clergy, and interested others involved in hospice and related programs. A couple of meetings later, the Alliance had agreed to fund the entire production—including royalties and honoraria for the actors, director, and a stage manager. They also promised to bring in the audiences. They wanted the performances to be free and open to the public, which was fine with me. And they wanted to lead a discussion with the audience after each performance, also fine.
As it turned out, it was all we could do to find enough chairs to accommodate the mobs that streamed in all weekend. It was a fitting final event for Good Company and for my short but happy career as a managing director.
In summary, I found I'd followed a pattern of three steps that proved successful:
Step 1.
Identify the play I want to produce and the reasons I want to produce it, starting with my own passion for its characters, plot, theme, and style and moving on to every aspect of its potential appeal to all kinds of audiences.
The hospice worker is not the biggest role in Selfish Giant, but she is the most important character in the eyes of other hospice workers!
The original Oscar Wilde story The Selfish Giant is only a small part of this play, but fans of that story loved seeing it used in a modern situation. In fact, the script's first reaings were connected to a planned Oscar Wilde festival in Baton Rouge, La.
In the discussions after the performances in Springfield, gardeners pointed out the healing metaphor of the rose garden in which the play is set. Maybe I should have approached gardening clubs!
Which brings me to Step 2.
Connect with others in the community who are passionate about something in the script and may therefore see a need to make the play happen.
And finally, Step 3.
Create a win-win situation to help those people get what they want out of the project at the same time they help me get what I need out of it.
Or, in brief: What's in it for me? What's in it for you? How we can sow and reap together?
As a playwright, I've learned a lot from being on the other side of the process. I understand now why a director may love a script and not be able to produce it and why so many theater groups choose the same scripts over and over again: plays with familiar titles that bring in audiences. Never mind the economic reasons—it's no fun doing a play if nobody comes to see it!
But I also know that somewhere along the line, a constant diet of plays chosen only for bottom-line reasons is worse than no fun—it kills the soul.
It is possible to do less well-known plays about which we are passionate—and to be successful at it. The answer, I believe, lies in the company we keep—individuals and organizations invited in to share the passion, divide the labor, and multiply the rewards.
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Sandra Fenichel Asher has published 24 books for young readers (as Sandy Asher) and over two dozen plays, including Across the Plains; Dancing with Strangers; Emma; I Will Sing Life; Little Women: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy; Once, in the Time of Trolls; The Wise Men of Chelm and A Woman Called Truth (all Dramatic Publishing) and The Wolf and Its Shadows (Anchorage). Among her many honors are the AATE Distinguished Play Award, the IUPUI/Bonderman Award, an ASSITEJ Outstanding Play for Young Audiences citation, the Joseph Campbell Memorial Award presented by The Open Eye Theater, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in playwriting, AATE's Charlotte Chorpenning Award for a distinguished body of work in children's theater, the New England Theater Conference's Aurand Harris Memorial Playwriting Award and an Aurand Harris Fellowship grant from the Children's Theatre Foundation of America. Writer-in-residence at Drury University in Springfield, Mo., from 1986 to 2003, Asher now lives in Lancaster, Pa., with her husband, two cats and a dog. She is a member of The Dramatists Guild and co-founder of the website USA Plays for Kids.
Visit Sandy Asher's website.
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