Christy DeSmith [2]“Edifice complex.” That’s the diagnosis playwright Edward Albee gave to American arts organizations—more specifically, it seemed, to nonprofit regional theaters—when he spoke at the Westminster Town Hall forum in 2005. Though the pun drew laughs, Albee followed with a hard, damning statistic. “Ninety-five percent of the money we give as a country does not go to creative artists; it goes into buildings and organizations,” he pointed out. “But great music, great art, great theater can be performed on the streets. It does not need a fancy theater to occur.”

At the time of Albee’s talk, lovely new facilities for a number of local arts organizations were in the works, with designs by pedigreed architects (Guthrie Theater, Walker Art Center, MacPhail Center for the Arts), or plans to rehabilitate historic quarters (Ritz Theater Foundation, Minnesota Shubert Performing Arts & Education Center). Other historic theaters renovated in earlier years include a “building preservation fee” in the price of most tickets (Southern Theater, Theatre de la Jeune Lune).

For many theater artists (or almost anyone lacking a development staff, really), the costs of renting one of these facilities are prohibitive. One way around that, though, is to get creative about where and how to stage work—to find a site that’s not devoted exclusively to performance. The origins of site-specific theater are often traced to the now-disbanded New York troupe En Garde Arts. For a time during the mid-’80s and through the ’90s, this company was staging work in such unconventional settings as the Chelsea Hotel and a pier on the Hudson River. Other companies followed suit, expanding on the Shakespeare-in-the-park tradition and looking to public spaces, cultural landmarks, and art galleries as performance venues—places that are far less expensive than theaters, and sometimes free.

An upcoming site-specific production is Cityceased, a theatrical walking tour of South Minneapolis’s Lakewood Cemetery that opens September 1. Four actors and a musician will enact an ethereal piece of fiction that considers the histories of both the cemetery and the people buried there (which includes many notable figures, although this play won’t call attention to any particular graves). It’s a novel idea, but Kristopher Lencowski, the show’s director, acknowledges that economics had much to do with spawning his unusual show. “I’ll be totally honest—the cemetery isn’t charging us anything,” said Lencowski, an approachable twenty-seven-year-old with wide, fiery blue eyes. “I’m a young director, and it’s expensive to get a theater. As a point of comparison, my friend rented the Ritz [the rehabbed theater that reopened in Northeast Minneapolis last year] and it cost her $3,500 for one weekend. I’m running four weekends and it cost me nothing.”

At the same time, from the perspective of Lakewood Cemetery, Cityceased might add up to something of a public relations opportunity. Not only is it good form to support the arts, but hosting this show could also serve to demystify the cemetery for the public, and even enhance appreciation for its acreage. In fact, the press release for Cityceased includes an enthusiastic quote from Lakewood’s president, Ron Gjerde, Jr.: “It is our hope that these performances encourage thinking and conversations about the significance of remembering those we’ve lost. We think the beauty and peacefulness of Lakewood will provide the perfect backdrop for such a conversation.”

 

Producing theater has always been a financially risky venture, what with the upfront costs not just for a venue, but also for talent, costumes, props, scenery, and so on. Nonprofit theater, in order to meet those costs, has become more reliant on corporate donors and steady ticket sales. The challenge of maintaining healthy donor relations and getting “butts in the seats” (as theater marketers say) often means playing it safe (Lencowski’s word for such shows, actually, was “boring”); thus the preponderance of Shakespeare revivals and, as of late, film adaptations for the stage.

Of course, several prominent yet scrappy companies in the Twin Cities are already known for performing well outside of tradition, and outside the bounds of a traditional stage. Ten Thousand Things strips down Shakespeare and other classic works and takes them to prisons and halfway houses; Open Eye Figure Theatre offered “The Driveway Tour” a few weeks back, bringing puppet shows to residential lots; Frank Theatre has lured audiences to defunct factories and warehouses. To stage a show in one of these venues is to largely reject the commercial or even overtly corporate brand of theater that now dominates the mainstream scene. Site-specific directors, often working with minimal resources, even take it a step further by dispensing with seating, sound systems, and lighting infrastructures altogether. Instead, they work in the raw environment, often incorporating topography whenever possible; sometimes the setting is almost a character in itself.

This approach is more than an exercise in cost savings; it’s a tool with which theather can grasp for novelty, to distinguish it from so much other passive entertainment. Young directors, such as Lencowski, are cash-strapped, sure; but they’ve also noticed that much of today’s static theater is no better at transporting an audience than television or film. Furthermore, some would say that the modern theater, which often retains antiquated notions of etiquette, requires not so much a viewer’s participation as it does her best behavior.

Site-specific theater, on the other hand, makes entirely different demands on its audiences. Onlookers might walk as far as a mile in following the performers, as they will with Cityceased. They might crowd into small corners of an emptied office building with the cast, or stand in place for hours on end as they did last year during Days and Nights, a show by Skewed Visions, a local company whose productions are all site-specific. There are generally no seats to be found, which encourages interaction between audience and performer; it relaxes the relationship. “One thing you can currently say about theater that’s inside is that there’s this wall between you and the people out there,” said Gülgün Kayim of Skewed Visions, alluding to the storied “fourth wall” that separates stage actors from audience. “And we don’t have that wall, clearly.”

After producing theater for a decade, Skewed Visions finds itself at the forefront of the site-specific theater trend. Company members have lately fielded invitations to speak at theater conferences worldwide and even to tour their work. The latter proposition has thus far proved tricky, since each Skewed Vision production is intrinsically linked to the space for which it was designed. Kayim, Charles Campbell, and Sean Kelley-Pegg, Skewed Visions’ cofounders, stumbled upon the notion of site-specific theater in the mid-’90s when they were graduate students at the University of Minnesota. Kayim’s first job as program coordinator for public art on campus at the Weisman Art Museum stirred associations with architecture and visual art installations. And, of course, there was little possibility of this trio getting its work into traditional performance spaces. So in 1997, they installed a performance piece in a vacant storefront near Elliot Park. They went on to build shows for moving cars, a private home, and even the rooftop of the University’s Tate Laboratory of Physics. Later this month, they’ll open Strange Love, a piece tailor-made for the Casket Arts building in Northeast Minneapolis. (Chalk it up to coincidence that both Lencowski’s and Skewed Visions’ shows involve the bereavement services industry.)

The artists have found that site-specific theater has the ability to reclaim the vitality of live performance. It gives a jolt of immediacy and locality, restoring a characteristic that has been essential to this art form for most of its history, all the way back to the Greek amphitheaters. After all, theater was envisioned as a communal event—a give-and-take between people gathered at a common point, as opposed to an entertainment created for sedentary, sedate onlookers. Site-specific work becomes a distinct entertainment choice apart from watching You Tube videos or the latest reality TV hit.

But despite achieving a measure of national recognition, Skewed Visions has found that its site-specific imprimatur traps it in something of an eternal infancy. Few theater companies make bank nowadays, but the limited handfuls of people who can see a Skewed Visions performance ensures that the company will always be small potatoes, financially speaking. Much of that is by design: “Theater has been sort of looked at as an economic prop; you sell it, you get the receipts,” said Campbell. “Our goal has been to avoid that as much as possible because we don’t see ourselves as making a product.” Still, as Kayim later pointed out: “You can’t get enough people in there to make it [financially] worth your while unless you set them down on bleachers. But then all of a sudden you’ve got traditional theater again.”