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ICE CUBE: The Philadelphia Theater Awards
Last Monday night at the Kimmel Center, about 400 members of the Philadelphia theater community got together to finish what the Theater Alliance started.
ICE CUBE: The Philadelphia Theater Awards
Last Monday night at the Kimmel Center, about 400 members of the Philadelphia theater community got together to finish what the Theater Alliance started — they gave away the remaining awards meant to be part of the annual Barrymores along with a posthumous Lifetime Achievement prize to Wilma Theater co-founder Jiri Zizka.
An honorary and voluntary committee of local stage artisans pulled off "Theatre Philadelphia: A Celebration” without a hitch. Each presentation for the $10,000 F. Otto Haas Award for an emerging artist was outrageous fun, in particular Alex Bechtel & Co.’s “Dream Weaver” cover dedicated to nominee Thom Weaver as well as Lee Ann Etzold’s bare-breasted salute to her Bang co-star and creator Charlotte Ford (actor and 11th Hour Theatre Company co-founder Steve Pacek won the Haas). The $25,000 Brown Martin Philadelphia Award for theater companies celebrating cultural and spiritual diversity went to Flashpoint Theatre Company, for last season's Slip/Shot drama about race penned by Philly playwright Jacqueline Goldfinger, who had already had won a Barrymore for outstanding new play this year. Along with those awards, a new seasonally recurring $10K gift was announced — the June and Steve Wolfson Award for an outstanding small theater company.
Jiri Zizka was celebrated by his son, Krystof, and ex-wife, Blanka Zizka for his dedication to advancing the avant-garde as artistic director and co-founder of the Wilma Theater, and helping turn Philadelphia into an adventuresome theater town.
Along with lionizing Zizka, Theater Philadelphia poked fun at the departure of its red-carpet Barrymores as well as bemoaning the loss of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s full-time theater critic Howard Shapiro, a staffer who took a buyout rather than be moved to the paper’s New Jersey bureau.
The whole shebang was an emotional frivolous success and by night’s end, after a buzzing post-show celebration in the Kimmel’s lobby, the theater crew wound up boozing at Quig’s Pub atop Plays & Players with Greg Giovanni and I staring into our Jack Daniels.
Then the next day came and a good portion of that same community – the Theater Philadelphia organization — got together for a town hall at the Arden Theater.
“Well, I’d say that we’re pretty far from being an organization,” laughs Thom Weaver, one of many locals who worked hard to put Theater Philadelphia — the event and this team of volunteer theater professionals — together. “I think we’re best described as a working group.”
Weaver went on to discuss the shuttering of the Theater Alliance and its highly regarded Barrymore Awards. This spring, the Theatre Alliance's board decided that its main goals had been fulfilled and that it did not want to compete for funding with the city’s theater companies that it served.
Philly’s theater community is growing in several directions — in size and in racial and gender diversity — toward the mainstream as well as the avant-garde,
“We are still in need of an organization that can serve the clearing house function that had been addressed by the Theater Alliance, that as well as issues that had never been addressed by the Alliance,” says Weaver. In that regard, the never-before-dealt-with function that Weaver would like to see addressed most quickly is having a dynamic web site and presence. “We need to get a better handle on that,” he says of the function Facebook, Twitter and a constant online presence has on all commercial enterprises, Philadelphia theater included.
Weaver & Co. also want Theater Philadelphia to make certain the future of government funding and grants goes their way. “We need to find advocates for all sorts of funding opportunities,” he says. The re-constitution of an awards system, whether it’s named Barrymore or not, is also on Theater Philadelphia’s plate. In the immediate future, the members of Theater Philadelphia wish to have a discussion with the publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer in regard to a full-time theatre critic. “Criticism is part of the continuing dialogue of the theater. We think this city’s paper of record didn’t realize that enough people would care if they did away with a full-time theater critic,” says Weaver.
Before all that begins, though, Weaver is excited to note that Theater Philadelphia is a working group designed specifically for the Philadelphia theater community. “Part of reason we’re successful so far is that we are for and by those professionals,” says Weaver.
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