Creating New Theatre(s)

One of my biggest wishes with Single Carrot is that we could provide opportunities for everyone who was looking for them. I frequently get emails from people hoping for employment or asking about work. A big part of our mission is to “fiercely support the growth of young artists”, and it's physically difficult for me to tell people we don't have anything open and that only one (out of ten of us) gets paid beyond our nominal show stipends.

It is my belief that Baltimore has the potential to become a great theatre city (otherwise I wouldn’t be here). Through a long list of factors that I won't dare to ruminate on now, there is what I call a "theatrical brain drain" occurring in Baltimore. There is not enough paid work for theatre artists who want to make a professional career out of this, and so a lot of our young talent has no choice but to leave Baltimore for greener pastures. There are a handful of professional companies, and a very strong network of community theatres, but a very important tier of theatre that “great” theatre cities have to help cultivate young talent is missing. There are very few fringe and semi-professional companies that can give opportunities to budding theatre professionals before they’re able to move to the next stage. However, I know for a fact that there are tons of talented, ambitious, and hardworking individual theatre artists out there looking for work.

On Wednesday, July 8th, we're doing our final dress of our upcoming original comedy, called Slampooned!, which is a “mocudrama” of slam poetry. I'd like to extend free tickets to any of you who are interested to coming to see the show at 7:30pm, with one condition. Following the show, we'll move out of the theatre so that the cast and crew can do notes, and in the space next to our theatre I'd like to meet with all of you, or more appropriately, I'd like you to meet each other. I want to gather any interested individual theatre artist in Baltimore and get them in one room where they can meet each other and talk theatre. There's a chance you'll link up with someone in the room and get inspired to create a theatre or a company, and there's an equal chance you won’t gel with anyone else in the room, but you'll at least get a free ticket out of the deal.

I was once an individual artist looking to get paid for my art, and I got fed up with not getting the opportunities I wanted to do the kind of work I wanted, so I decided to create my own opportunities. Starting a company is definitely not for everyone, but I'm happy to talk to you about it because the more new semi-professional and fringe theatres in Baltimore working to become professional, the closer Baltimore comes to being a truly diverse, vibrant theatre community. For a city of Baltimore's size, there’s a very low number of professional and semi-professional theatres.

I hope to structure the "networking" portion of the evening so that you get a few minutes to talk to everyone else individually—that way it's easier to find people with similar interests and who come with a common perspective—everyone has different levels of experience and is looking to do different kinds of work. There will be absolutely no pressure to start a theatre if there's not a good fit (which I strongly encourage as starting a theatre is like having a baby with a group of other people).

So if you're interested in coming to the show and the event, please send me an email at bjabaily@singlecarrot.com – I hope to see a lot of you there! Please forward this on to anyone you might know who would be interested, too.

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Buck is the artistic director of Single Carrot Theatre. He also works in the development office at CENTERSTAGE.