In the decades he was wide off the horizon for Broadway nonprofits, Tim Sanford would not have been driving towards New Jersey to see a man about the trees.
However, his new theatre company is a crude, idealistic outfit dedicated to established older playwrights, and a more practical manipulation. So one day last month he jumped into his SUV and took home fresh cut trees across the Hudson River – he couldn't tell you what kind of species – the Ren he produces – As used on the set of Jenkin's play, “How about rocking Jake + Alice?”
This is the job that 71-year-old Sanford created for himself when he and his wife, Aimah Hayes, the artistic director of the Southern Rep Theatre in New Orleans, founded the Tent Theater Company. Advocacy is inherent to its mission. Sanford has successfully left his playwright's horizon in 25 years as an artistic director in 2021, discovering the latest hottest playwright, but bystanders in an industry that is not exactly diligent about maintaining It has won the flag of a group of artists they consider to be. They are creativity throughout their lifetimes.
According to Sanford, older playwrights feel they should simply make a path. Put them all in ashes holes. ”
But for him, age is a often overlooked component of diversity. It has accumulated knowledge of the human experience, and there is a room and must exist. It is also a matter of respecting these artists whose tents call elders.
“This theatre we have, this community, was built on their backs,” he said.
Sanford and Hayes curated a roster of writers ranging from 60 (minimum age) to 85 (no cap) to 52 writers as co-artistic directors of the tent. Name just half a dozen of the most well-known ones: Nilo Cruz, Beth Henley, David Rabe, Theresa Rebeck, Roger Guenveur Smith and Doug Wright. Many are lesser known veterans on the ground.
Tent, a nonprofit organization formed in 2021, is neither an employment program nor a bonenade. The goal is to nurture still active playwrights and raise profiles in the theatre. It is also necessary to create an intercourse of artists and search for them in a more tangential way. To that end, Hayes holds a Masters degree in Social Work from Fordham University.
Some tent playwrights thrive professionally like Craigrukas (“The Days of Wine and Roses”, “Paradise Square”), who oversaw the company's reading material, but many other careers have become quiet It has become.
“They're people who care about people who don't know who's hurting or who attacked them,” Sanford said in his first interview with him, Hayes and the Tent, Brooklyn Prospect in Spring 2023. He said at the edge of the park. Near their home.
“I'm thinking about a particular writer,” he said. “When they realised they gave the artistic director they produced twice in the last 20 years, they hit them, and they still wonder, and they were in the lobby. They come across it, their eyebrows are rising in anticipation: cricket. There is no mention of this play.”
Hayes, 58, said the playwrights were aging.
He is currently running at the Art/New York theatre in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood. Jenkin's dark poetic romance – “Shakey Jake” for short is the second full production of the tent. The first comedy directed by Hayes a year ago was “Where Women Go,” an absurd comedy by Tinahau, who took part in a play's packed tent reading in April 2023 and passed away in August 1985. It was produced by Concord Theatres.
In the case of “Shakey Jake,” the tent does it alone. As Alice, Fred Weller as Jake and Kate Arlington, the play features four cast members, telling a magical story that first meets in their teens and develops the lives of a couple who grow older from scene to scene. It's there.
On a frigid day at East Village last month, I watched them rehearsal as Hayes overseen, Jenkin took notes and Sanford observed. Random time in the process, it was very consumed in pro-rogistics: coffee cans, several beer bottles – everything is part of telling the story in three dimensions, channeled through the human body. Play is not intended to remain on a page or drawer.
Later on the phone, OBIE Award-winning Jenkin said it meant to him, “it means kicking work out there and doing it in a vacuum, as you know.”
Still, he hesitated when he gathered tent writers and invited Sanford to join him.
“I'm not usually a participant in things,” he said.
However, he liked the idea that “Stick and Bones” won Tony in 1972, Rabe, who won Tony, was signed on as well as Jenkin's friends Richard Wesley and Michael Weller. did. And Sanford's idea of ”stepping up” to support older writers really grabbed him.
“No one will do that, right?” Jenkin said. “I mean, I hope you don't do the best job in your 30s. You want to continue growing, keep changing, you want to be deeper and stronger in your work. And it's a lot of years. I think this applies to the author above too.”
Jenkin didn't mind giving his age, but his first mention of the playwright in the New York Times came in 1974. During Bicentennial, he was once again attracted attention for holding workshops in public theatres. The reporter called it. In 2018, when The Times published a list of “Five Plays That Make a SoHo Rep's Reputation,” it included Jenkin's “Dark Ride” from 1981. Critic Mel Gusso described “Limbo's maze, set in a favorite habitat. Author's.”
In the version of “Shakey Jake” I read, the final page of the script was like my notes from the playwright to the reader, and was tacked after the play was over. He calls back to the song that Alington sings as Alice. It is a patch of poetry and a reminder that will live longer than the maker.
“If someone should ask you
Who sang this song?
Tell me it was Ren Jenkin
He's been here for many years
He'll be gone for a long time.”
When I asked Jenkin about it, his immediate response was, “Oh, yes. I'll keep telling them to take it off.” But I told him I love it. , that was true.
“I don't know why I did that,” he said. “I've never done it before. It's just that the play is about mortality, and I put that little tag at the end of the script because it's personal to me. ”
Mortality and sex are the tents I saw, like last year's reading of Kermit Frazier's “They're Lies” and last month's evening evening of Jaclyn Raingord and Migdalia Cruise. It's two of the big topics of the overall job. Bookstore-Cafe on the Lower East Side captivated a crowd only in the standing room.
When Sanford and Hayes began their tents, they spent a year listening to the playwrights stories trying to escape what the writers needed.
Hayes said: There are no champions. No one speaks for me. ”
The tent readings and the gathering of playwrights are their responses, as are Sanford's efforts to fine-tune his gatekeeper colleagues in the theatre.
A complete production is a crucial part of the tent planning, but a smaller piece. It's one a year for now, but Sanford wants two. When it comes to allocating these unusual slots, he said the 60-year-old playwright probably isn't in front of the line.
Age has that privilege.
