On Selecting a Season

By David Richard Jones, President and Artistic Director of the Vortex Theatre.

From the mid-1980s to 2005 at The Vortex, season selection mainly involved inviting proposals to the entire board and then approving those that seemed workable, desirable, or useable. This left director selection up to the volunteer spirit and repertory selection up to the taste of willing directors.

In the past year or two, we have (1) recruited directors more actively from the community, (2) established a 5-person subcommittee as an "Artistic Committee" that develops 6 to 9-month seasons and proposes them as a unit to the entire board, and (3) created a more collaborative dialogue with interested directors to blend their taste with the Artistic Committee's sense of what the theatre ought to be doing.

Whether we are willing to take the next step and design seasons before recruiting directors remains to be seen. The dialogue on this issue is a genuine one: on the one hand, the "community theatre" spirit that sees the house as a more or less passive venue for community energy; on the other, the "artistic direction" impulse that sees the theatre's identity as based in its repertory profile and the maintenance of that identity as a job for the people who run the place. Both sides of the debate have excellent arguments.