The Community Theater Handbook
by Gary P. Cohen
If you have a notion to set up a community theater company, you should buy this book and make heavy use of it. If you're helping run a community theater already, you should still buy the book as a source of good insights into what you're about.
Cohen has logged some 30 years of community theater work. His experience includes managing, directing, designing and all the usual run of grunt jobs. He's now the producing director with Plays in the Park, operated by Middlesex County, New Jersey (take the Grandview Avenue exit off U.S. 1).
What Cohen has tried to do in this book is provide both guidance and a safety net. Guidance in that he describes lots of processes that go on in community theater, from the night you and your friends catch the bug all the way through to the arrangements you make for customer parking on performance dates. And a safety net in that he includes many useful cautions and points out where you'd better have a backup plan.
In my view he has done quite a good job. His 150 pages contain these chapters:
- The Theater Building Itself
- Personnel
- Securing the Rights
- Planning a Season
- Auditions
- The Rehearsal Process
- Technical Aspects
- The Director
- Theater Essentials
Which really does pretty well cover it. Cohen writes clearly, his advice is concrete, and he amplifies many of his ideas with stories from productions he has worked on. His Community Theater Handbook will be a good investment for anyone pursuing this line in the arts, and it is personal enough that it will make a good present for any intending performer or manager.
A special strength of the handbook is the way Cohen's experiences feed into the exposition. Having lighted shows on a low-to-zero budget, he can set out a strategy for making your plot fit your resources. He's had many little chats with the licensing reps at French's and MTI, and he can tell you what information to have ready when you call them up (and what kind of disappointment you must be ready for if your musical happens to go on tour). His companies have tried several approaches to casting, and he can help you be aware of opportunities as well as potential disasters there. And, this is important, Cohen has been associated with successes, so he's an optimist. You gotta be an optimist in community theater.
If I were going to criticize the book, I'd say it reflects an institutional take on the field. Little theater groups and clubs organize themselves in all kinds of ways and create their work in many styles. As I read Cohen's book I kept responding, Yes, but what if the participants don't want to have a single producing director, and what if the director and designers don't want a box set? You might argue that community theaters mostly do put up box-set musicals and they mostly recruit some of their leaders from Chamber of Commerce circles, and so the author has pointed in the right directions for the great majority. And as I reread my questions even I think they verge on quibbling. These limitations, in any case, don't get in the way of what Cohen can teach you about management, artistic and technical operations in a community theater.
Let me close these notes by quoting a definition and a piece of strongly worded advice, neither of which I've seen in print before:
Definition: A community theater is a "theatrical producing organization serving a limited area and operating under an amateur licensing agreement" (page xvii).
Advice: "[D]on't ever be personally legally responsible for the theater--make sure you and the board set up a corporation so that no one is personally liable" (page 39).
Couldn't have said it so well myself.
| Approved Ben Teague web site |
 |
Books and plays:
Theater books
The Community Theater Handbook