And Buffalo's new theater season is stronger in its absence

One of the most notable aspects of the theater season beginning in September is the number of important new plays in the lineup. Indeed, most of the Kavinoky Theatre season is pulled from last year’s Broadway season: Mauritius by Theresa Rebeck; Is He Dead?, the newly rediscovered play by Mark Twain, adapted by David Ives; and The Farnsworth Invention by Aaron Sorkin. The Alleyway Theatre has snagged the rights to David Lindsay Abaire’s Rabbit Hole, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize. BUA is offering John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt and Paul Rudnick’s The New Century. The Paul Robeson Theatre has scheduled August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean. The New Phoenix Theatre will present two hits from Great Britain that played in New York last year: Conor McPherson’s Seafarer and David Harrower’s Blackbird.

Just a year ago, such fresh choices would have been unimaginable. Why? Because Studio Arena Theater would have blocked everybody else in town from getting the rights to these plays, that’s why.

There is a pecking order in the American theater, wherein permission to produce plays is first offered to those able to pay the most. Publishers like Dramatists Play Service and Samuel French, representing the interests of playwrights, hold plays back from smaller theaters in hopes of getting more lucrative bookings from larger theaters.

In Buffalo, that has meant that Studio Arena Theatre always got first dibs, and everybody else had to wait until Studio had decided—or we never saw the new plays at all. With Studio Arena closed for the moment, the playing field is entirely changed and it’s a whole new ball game. If there is a silver lining to the Studio Arena fiasco, that’s it.

Consider John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt. Set in New York City, 1964, the play tells the story of a Catholic nun who suspects a popular priest of pedophilia, at the school where she is the principal. Doubt opened on Broadway in March of 2005 to universal acclaim. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, it won the Tony as Best Play and embarked on a limited tour with its original star, reigning first lady of Broadway, Cherry Jones. Numerous regional productions followed. In fact, every major city in America had seen Doubt by the end of the 2007-2008 season—except for Buffalo. First Studio Arena didn’t do it. Then, as their financial woes mounted, they couldn’t do it.

With Studio Arena out of the game, the Kavinoky immediately announced Doubt for their upcoming season. Then, as its subject matter proved too dicey for the Kavinoky, they nixed it. Quickly, Buffalo United Artists snapped it up. At last, a production of Doubt will open in Buffalo this fall with local actors Lisa Ludwig and Louis Colaiacovo in the leads—fully three and a half years after its Broadway debut.

Studio Arena may not be gone for good. Artistic director Kathleen Gaffney is determined to fight the good fight. She ran a summer program through 80-year-old Studio Arena Theatre School, and she recently announced an on-stage conversation with actor Stephen McKinley Henderson for Curtain Up! on September 19 and 20, as part of a “Distinguished Alumni” series. Both evenings will be followed by celebrations in the Studio Arena bar.

Gaffney also reports that she attended a session called “Theater on the Brink: Surviving a Crisis,” at the recent TCG (Theatre Communications Group) convention in Denver that she found useful and encouraging. There were about 40 attendees. Gaffney reports that the theaters that have survived a crisis and come back from the brink have three elements in common: “a return to the original mission, at least one devoted board member who will not give up, and a local business that provides the first funds.”

She is determined that Studio Arena will be such a theater.

The task must be somewhat disheartening, as a return to the original mission is the very theme Gaffney has been espousing since her first day on the job in 2006. Early on, she worked to establish closer and more cooperative relationships with Buffalo’s other theaters, but the financial situation was just too dire. Studio Arena ended up in financial debt to MusicalFare, which produced Bat Boy on its stage, and to Road Less Traveled, which produced To Kill a Mockingbird. When Studio Arena filed for Chapter 11 protection, bitterness was inevitable.

Gaffney would soon discover just how deeply the resentment toward Studio Arena was felt by many local theater practitioners, who saw the institutions as arrogant without justification and a bully in its business dealings.

Many perceived that Studio Arena collected titles and sat on them. As a LORT theater, they had the ability to block others from doing specific plays—put a hold on them, as it were—without ever doing them at all.

The result has been that Studio Arena, charged to bring Buffalo the very best in the American theater, actually served the opposite function, preventing contemporary titles from ever playing in Buffalo at all. Over the years, the Buffalo audience became disconnected from the larger theater world and ignorant of what is happening in the contemporary theater. This was exacerbated as the offerings at Studio Arena became more and more watered down. At a time when the American theater was becoming more daring, more diverse, more political and more edgy, Studio Arena Theatre was becoming more conservative, cautious, and frivolous.

As a consequence, Buffalo may be an active theater town, but it’s not an especially knowledgeable theater town.

When Alleyway Theatre presents Rabbit Hole, for example, it will be the very first professional production of any David Lindsay Abaire play in this city—ever. We have never seen his biggest hit, the remarkably inventive Fuddy Meers. We haven’t seen Kimberly Akimbo. Even his play Wonder of the World, about a surreal trip to Niagara Falls that starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Sedaris at the prestigious Manhattan Theatre Club, has never been seen in Buffalo.

Buffalo has never seen Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery—Eileen Heckart’s remarkable farewell to the stage. We have never seen Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby or The Goat. We have not seen Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, the 2003 Pulitzer winner. We have not seen Sarah Ruhl’s The Clean House, or Christopher Durang’s Mrs. Witherspoon, or Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out. This is not far-out stuff; it’s all very mainstream.

Buffalo is not even keeping up with beloved native son A.R. Gurney. When Gurney’s Buffalo Gal opened in New York this month, I was amused that Buffalonians seemed so interested. The production at Primary Stages has no relationship, whatsoever, to the production of the same play presented at Studio Arena six years ago with Betty Buckley in the lead. In addition, Buffalo has entirely ignored the remarkable body of work Gurney has produced since that production, six years ago. These have included edgy, political, youth-oriented scripts that have been playing at the Flea Theatre in New York. Buffalo claims to adore Pete Gurney, but dramaturgically we barely know him. We’ve seen Indian Blood and Crazy Mary, but we have never seen any of the political work: not Mrs. Farnsworth, or Post Mortem, or even Screen Play, which is set in a futuristic Buffalo. Each script is playful, surprisingly subversive and wonderfully theatrical in that very Gurney way.

Having discussed some of the plusses of having Studio Arena gone, at least in its most recent incarnation, it bears mention that there are significant losses. Buffalo no longer has a theater with serious national aspirations.

Of course, in recent years, Studio Arena barely asserted its connections to the larger theater world, and, as the saying goes, the person who does not read has no advantage over the person who can’t. And while it is true that at the time of its closure Studio Arena had hardly any national profile at all—the painful transfer of Ring of Fire, the Johnny Cash revue, notwithstanding—given the right project, it did have the power to attract a Betty Buckley or a Richard Maltby, Jr. to its doors. That ability is, for the time being, lost to Buffalo. We are unlikely ever to see Cherry Jones in a play here, and if we did, the vast majority of the audience would likely say, “And who is this Cherry Jones anyway?”

This season, however, begins to reconnect us, as multiple theaters are able to access some of the most exciting scripts in the contemporary theater. The irony, of course, is that by educating audiences, small theaters may be paving the way for Studio Arena Theatre to return, reconnected to its original mission and stronger than ever.