Directing Process Class

Here are my thoughts in some preliminary, undigested form.

Several years ago, I enrolled in a very intense, upper-level undergraduate directing class. Every class, we were responsible for presenting a one-act play to the other students. Frequently, the "plays" were compressed versions of classics like Our Town, Suddenly Last Summer, Desire Under the Elms, Spring Awakening, etc. Sometimes they were staged versions of poems. I always found these presentations immensely riveting, stripped down and bare and hastily prepared as they were. And I think everyone else did, too. I remember being shocked by the intensity of my own engagement (wondering why I often spent $12 at the movie theater watching stupid blockbuster movies which cost millions to produce when I already had perfectly thrilling FREE entertainment from my own classmates every other afternoon). So my question is this: is there some way to package and distribute those student performances... locally at least, so that anyone might enjoy them on a Friday or Saturday night at a local theater? (We already have YouTube which has made film a very democratic experience.) All you need is a surface on which to project.

I'm sure there is a good reason for why this hasn't happened yet... but let's take a look at the situation. 1) what I hear from most young people is that they hate their jobs, wish they were doing something creative, miss the good old days when they used to act or paint or dance 2) almost everyone I know has had the experience of going to rent a movie or checking in at the RedBox (that DVD renting machine) at Price Chopper or whatever and not finding a single good movie to watch. 3) it is supposedly very hard to "make it" in the arts.

Assessing the situation on an intuitive level, I feel like we have plenty plenty plenty of talent in this country (how many aspiring artists will basically kill themselves for free just to get exposure, just to be read or watched by a few hundred people?), cheap means of distribution (technology has made it so), and an audience which deserves niche offerings designed for very specific tastes. There is so much artistic talent in this country, it seems a waste I should spend an ounce of energy watching Meet the Spartans for the 3rd time just because it's readily available. In short, we should make other things readily available, too.

In MFA programs, we train hundreds and hundreds of artists. But we devote so little energy to training managers of the arts, cultivating entrepreneurial urges within student artists, and thinking critically about the economics of art (whenever I talked about starting this or that initiative in my program, the dominant response I got was "just shut up and write; that's what you're here for"; true, of course, but I found after a certain point that I just didn't want to devote all my energy to a world that didn't regulate itself, run itself independently, that relied so heavily on its ties to academia and the charity of rich people, on private donations). At a point, it became ludicrous to go on in the old way.

People assume they aren't powerful, well-connected, or rich enough to execute their visions. A few decades ago, this might have been true, but technology has changed everything. Bottom line: content is cheap, distribution easy. Tastes can be made, needs created. Today there are no excuses.