Tuesday, May 29, 2007

LA Weekly - General - American Theater's Failure of Nerve - Steven Leigh Morris - The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles:

I can’t imagine an unorthodox, once-befuddling little play like Waiting for Godot — with its capacities both to turn the theater on its head and to confound half the audience — standing a chance at a festival like this. Here, the playwrights are in consultation with too many intermediaries, even at the formative stages of their plays, just like in the movies. With no marketing strategy in place, Waiting for Godot was eventually produced in every corner of the globe, on the strength of its conviction and literary merit, stemming from the uncompromising vision of an author who wrote in a kind of solitary confinement. Samuel Beckett certainly didn’t collaborate with directors, dramaturges or anybody else while he was in the formative process of writing, yet this is now the protocol in American new-play development.