Resolutions

Happy New Year! The Village Voice has a fantastic article about New Year's resolutions for Off-Broadway, in which they survey some of Moxie's favorite people from the theater community. Actor Matt Maher wants the theater to assert its strengths:

I want the theater to stop competing with TV and film and just be itself. The more the Internet asserts itself,as more and more people are making their own movies and pilots and websites and interactive sitcoms and the like, the more crucial it is for theater to assert its strengths: richly collaborative, never-to-be-repeated, meticulously planned events that are meant to be shared with people right there in the room with you.

Right on. Moxie has found that as she gets more acclimated to being a part of the workforce, as well as the blogosphere, she has even more appreciation of the fresh raw quality a good evening of theater has to offer. As we all take on more ipods, blackberries, laptops, bluetooth, and youtubing, theater becomes all the more critical.

Playwright Rob Handel (Aphrodisiac) has a resolution for the playwrights of off-broadway, including himself:

In 2007, I resolve to write plays that meet the challenge laid down by the plays I saw in 2006, plays by writers who demand a theater of ideas and language and image—who write characters unafraid to say "Yoi ma i fa ha. d'lal ad na amginck tai" (The Internationalist); who write stage directions unafraid to say "The FIVE SAMS emerge from Samantha" (Dead City); and who demand directors and theaters with the imagination to interpret and execute their scripts.

Moxie found the last resolution the most inspirational, from the quirky, wonderful, and rather brilliant David Herskovits:

The resolution I would like to see us make in theaters everywhere is not to operate from a position of fear—fear of artistic failure, of the unknown, of losing audience or funders, of poor press. Fear of employing an untried talent, of being the first to embrace something new (especially when others may have questioned it), of deploying production practices, schedules, staffing and organizational models outside our zone of comfort.

Fear of letting go of what we know—the comfortable narcotic familiar. All this kills the flourishing creative imagination. We know that and pay lip service to it reli giously, but how often do we really, really let go of our established machinery? And how often do we find ourselves saying no—even in the politest possible way—to impulses only because, really, that's just not how we do things? Say yes!

Resolutions are also given from Adam Rapp, Anne Kaufman, Sara Benson, and Adam Bock, to name a few. Check it out!