In the financial world, when a market shifts to a new equilibrium based on current conditions, it’s called an adjustment. Sam Theilman’s recent Variety filing that Off Off Broadway is getting hit especially hard lately, with a reported 25 percent venue closing rate shouldn’t surprise anybody: that, too, is an unfortunate adjustment.
Off Off has been off for quite a while, now. It should be a place where new, innovative work and artists (actors, directors, playwrights, designers) are created, nurtured, and taken to the next level. It has become a place where umpteenth productions of long-dead, overproduced playwrights, schlocky borscht belt shows, and “experimental” theatre go to die. The blame for this — like everything else to do with any current fiscal crisis — belongs to everyone: patrons, artists, producing theatres.
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To say it has been esteemed playwright David “F’n” Mamet’s year on Broadway would be a vast understatement: the last time anybody had three separate plays on Broadway in the same year? Can’t remember. But it looks like his hot streak is coming to an end in a way that only he could’ve written.
November, a farce about a miserably bad presidency’s last days — starring Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf — made decent reviews and finished out its entire January-to-July run: for any Broadway show, an accomplishment. Not bad.
Come October, though, and there are two Mamet plays opening up within a month of each other. The first was late-October’s Speed-the-Plow, a star-studded revival (Entourage‘s Jeremy Piven, Mad Men‘s Elizabeth Moss) of Mamet’s 1988 three-hander concerning Hollywood executives and the assistant who drives a wedge between them (originally starring Madonna in her Broadway debut, and a Tony-winning Ron Silver). The show opened to stellar reviews that far exceeded the excitement over the original production, with the New York Times‘s make-or-break critic Ben Brantley writing that “(the show) lifts its audience into the ether.”
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