Friday, January 25, 2008

Parabasis: Enhancement?:

Ultimately, enhancement sits in the intersection of show and business, which is usually a pretty fraught place to be.  We can't expect it to go away.  We're not Sweden where, as Mike Daisey memorably put it, the government just shits money into your mouth.  There's a kind of relentless "damned if you do..." logic whereby the alternative could conceivably lead to some really rocky times for professional theater.  And that possibility is, of course, conservatizing... its the same conservatizing impulse that keeps ADs from making adventurous choices and keeps us justifying the current system instead of envisioning and implementing change. We need to look at the implications of all of this and question how choices are being made at the theaters that are the supposed stewards of the nonprofit system. To do that, we need those stewards to talk about this in the open.