Wish List and Future Plans
On January 7, 2008, at Java Joe’s Coffee Shop, I met with Red Thread Collective members Tone Forrest (Artistic Director), Craig Barnes (Resident Playwright and Board member), and Clara Soister (Actress and Director) on the community needs for the growth of theater in Santa Fe with a schedule of upcoming productions.
Tone, Craig, and Clara all agree that money is needed to create an important and challenging theater community. The irony is that while Santa Fe is an arts town, there is little funding for the drama. All three RTC members see the absolute need for a performing arts center. Tone wants to “sell it (performing arts center concept) to the community as a vital cultural center” because there is a “need for vibrant, publicly visited” theater. Clara agrees, suggesting that Santa Fe needs and deserves a complex that would be a mini-version of the Denver (Colorado) Performing Arts Complex: “There must be a building with resources where artists and performers can produce good work.”
While agreeing in substance with his colleagues on the need for a New Mexico/Santa Fe regional theater, Craig attempts to come at the problem from a different angle: “I don’t believe in the ‘Build it and they will come’ approach…I think there are a succession of steps that must be taken.” First, there must be at least a few theater organizations that do quality work, that “are consistently in pursuit of and have a record of good work.” From this nucleus of like groups, “We must build a team and expand financing that evolves from the works produced…To do it right, Santa Fe theater organizations must get different monies and attract all types of support from government and individual and corporate philanthropy.” As the situation exists now, emerging theater companies and new work “have no incubation period” and individual productions rise or fall on too many variables.
Tone tackles this problem of audience development head on. He states that Santa Fe audiences are rather small, and it is incumbent on theater collectives to create “professional quality” theater and to “raise audience expectations” in the formation of a healthy environment for the growth and expansion of Santa Fe’s theater companies.
RTC sees the problem of presenting quality theater Santa Fe as a lack of appropriate performance spaces and funding. They see the antidotes to such big-ticket needs as audience development, community outreach, and collaboration among arts administrators, writers, and performers. Clara also added a caveat about “complacency among the producers of drama in Santa Fe.” Using the Santa Fe Playhouse as an example, she believes that the paying of actors (even as little as $50) led to an “upping of the level of theater” that regressed a bit when such financial inducements were eliminated.
In discussing the plight of the small theater company in Santa Fe, Craig Barnes provided two (among many) anecdotes that demonstrate the perseverance needed in getting a play produced in the City Different. Craig related that “from the writer’s perspective, especially an unknown dramatist as myself, the obstacles are enormous…Entry is denied to those without a name. The barrier, as always, is money.” This is where RTC Board President and Producer Walter Dilts makes an irreplaceable contribution to the company’s success. (Mr. Dilts will be the subject of a future piece on Red Thread Collective.) Furthermore, in dealing with the performance space problem, Craig Barnes relived the horror show that occurred on opening night of his Elizabeth I at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe. At 3 P.M., a Santa Fe Fire Department official showed up and discovered twenty items that needed to be rectified prior to the raising of the curtain at 7 P.M. Craig remembered ripping away drywall and finally finding a hidden electrical box that was the SFFD’s major concern. The nightmare didn’t end there. In mid-performance with the thermometer reading 96 degrees Fahrenheit, a duct-taped swamp cooler exploded while the cast in Elizabethan costume and the audience sat sweltering. Artistic Director Tone Forrest was mopping up gallons of water while the cast soldiered on.
However, RTC has overcome all such major and minor annoyances. The Collective has a challenging and ambitious schedule of upcoming events. First up is a co-production of Cynthia Straus and the Duet Project and Walter Dilts and Red Thread Collective of Otho Eskin’s Duet. This play focuses on an imaginary encounter between legendary divas Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Duet opens February 22, 2008, and closes on March 9, 2008. Performances will be held Thursday through Sunday performances at El Museo Cultural. Then, the third play in Craig Barnes’s Elizabeth I trilogy, The Last Tudor, will open June 6, 2008, at El Museo Cultural for twelve performances.
On January 25, 2008, RTC is branching out and will do a “Theater Games and Improvisation” workshop at the Santa Fe Children’s Museum as a pilot program to introduce children to the theater and to raise their self-awareness.
RTC also has a wish list that was articulated by Tone Forrest: a workshop performance of a first dramatic work by a best-selling author, a revival of RTC’s 2002 post 9/11 work The Fire and the Rose, and Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
