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His solution: a gathering of theater artists to draft a document assessing current problems and stating a vision for the future. His inspiration: the Freedom Charter created in 1955 by antiapartheid progressives in South Africa. “This Charter was more than a bunch of requests,” Hall noted. “It signified the intense need for change.”
Hall’s call for an off-Loop theater manifesto generated considerable response and he’s working on setting up an informal confab in August. Any and all are invited, but he doesn’t expect much attention from well-established theaters. “Companies that are getting grants for children’s programming, marketing, and so on are not likely to want change,” he says. “We’re targeting theater artists who are not in the corporate loop. We’re asking them to spend a day creating a statement that says, ‘This is what we want, what we need, what we’ve earned; this is why we do what we do.’ If we can get 50 of these disenfranchised theater folks in one room we’re all going to have the same complaints about marketing, about the level of help they get from the city, and so on.
