Drivin' Home This Evening I Thought We Had It All Worked Out

Spent Sunday at the theatre helping to decide our next season of productions. This is an annual event that, over the years has come to be known euphemistically as "The Afternoon of The Long Knives" (which, despite the unsavory connotation, is actually a much older term than many might realize.

But, the desription is nevertheless fairly apt: after receiving and reviewing some two dozen proposals for productions, we go through a series of "pitch sessions" wherein the proposers are interviewed in-person, and at the end of that process members of the Company lock ourselves in a room for an afternoon and don't come out until we've reached a consensus on what shows we want to do. At times, it can get brutal - the first thing we do is scratch off the roughly 50% of the projects we pretty much know we DON'T want to do - and it can also be somewhat emotional, particularly for members of the Company submitting proposals for the first time. The end result, though, is that, by the time we're done, we not only have mutual agreement, but generally the shows that are selected are ones for which either the entire Company, or at least a significant majority, have some outright enthusiasm for doing.

Of course, this is no guarantee that the actual productions that result from these proposals will always meet our expectations; frequently, they don't. But, taking risks is quite literally part of our Mission Statement ("creating bold new work in an environment of improbability, resourcefulness and risk"), and it's one of the things that separates us from most of the other "fringe theatres" (and some would argue, successfully IMO, from most other theatres, period) around here: the willingness to take chances, to embrace uncertainty, and to nurture the new, the weird, and the unconventional. In short, it's what makes Annex, Annex.