Yesterday I called out A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) as a reason for my going back to the theatre. What I didn’t include in that short essay is a disclosure of my profound bias, namely John Langs, who has been ACT’s Artistic Director for the last five years, and served on its creative staff since 2013. You should know that for even longer than that, John has been my artistic collaborator and very good friend.
I first met John when we were vetting candidates to direct my play Louis Slotin Sonata at Seattle’s now departed Empty Space Theatre back in 2006. He was living in Los Angeles but had directed some shows up here, including a very well received King Lear at Seattle Shakespeare Company. Before I even met with John, let alone hired him, I did my due diligence and asked around with theatre artists, mostly actors, who had worked with him. The praise they gave was effusive. To hear it from them, Langs was like some sort of directing savant always drawing the best out of every performer while making them want to do better. Their unadulterated adulation made me nervous. I get suspicious whenever I hear actors heap praise like this on a director. Stage directors have a tendency to build cults around themselves, with actors serving as acolytes. This arrangement can be deadly for a playwright trying to get a “clean” production of their play, unplagued by high concept and schmaltz . So I insisted on meeting the guy over beers. He seemed normal enough, offering questions and concerns about the script that were sharp and incisive without being arrogant or overbearing. And an additional fact helped weigh the scales in his favor: we didn’t have a lot of other options. Langs went on to give me the best production of the play it has ever had. And so when it was time to hire someone to direct the world premiere of my play The Sequence, his name was at the the top of my list. Since then John has served serious time with me in the trenches of new play development, and has became a treasured friend, remaining so long after I retired from the art form in which he continues to toil.
From what I hear, Langs is catching some flack for ultimately deciding to open ACT back up to live audiences with the theatre’s beloved annual cash cow A Christmas Carol. As I understand it, the argument goes something like this: “In this moment of radical artistic re-envisioning and reorientation, when the theatrical slate has been nearly wiped clean, why on earth would someone restage a dusty old play based on a dusty old book by a dusty old white guy about a dusty old white guy?”
I would love to avoid wading into the current quagmire of cultural revolution, while also pointing out that it was me calling for radically new work since the inception of this blog in 2010. So I’ll bite my tongue and offer the shortest riposte possible: theatre is an art form which feeds on repetition. And it is precisely those plays most familiar to us that can sustain the most radical re-thinkings and reimaginings, while still offering the “clean” essentials of their stories. Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre explained this better than I ever could in a eulogy for the recently departed giant of American stage, Stephen Sondheim.
This, after all, is what a canon is, if we must have canons: not invariable paragons of perfection, necessarily, but works that somehow stay alive with surprise, with the shock of recognition, with argument. The musicals Stephen Sondheim wrote with a handful of deft collaborators remain among the most teemingly alive works anyone has ever composed for the stage, and it is hard to imagine a day when they won’t feel that way. As he put it in the second volume of lyric collection/memoir, Look, I Made a Hat, “The very thing that makes theatre impermanent is what makes it immortal. In a sense, every night of a show is a revival.”
Revival.
The word takes on a much deeper meaning in the context of the vast challenges Seattle Theatre now faces.
Langs understands that in order to get back to telling new stories with force, he has to let us have the old ones, with love. I don’t doubt for a second that John Langs’ future holds huge opportunities for him far beyond his work as the creative leader of downtown Seattle’s flagship theatre complex. He personifies that rare blend of cultivated charm, raw talent, and confident leadership that allows someone to excel in pretty much any career they choose: business, politics, the law. John chose the theatre— God help him— and the collective life of my plays has been bettered by that decision. The least I can do is go see this show he’s producing.
