On opening night, Eric Purcell was staring into the bulb-framed vanity mirror in the dressing room of the Richmond Shepard Theater in Kip’s Bay. He was preparing for a role he used to play in real life, a successful and money-driven businessman.
All this was planned. Purcell was chosen for the part because the play’s director, Annie Ward, was intent on holding the mirror up to today’s economic crisis. To accomplish this, she not only chose last January to stage a piece called, “The Businessman,” written by a Turkish entrepreneur named Yakup Almelek, but also hired Purcell, who formerly sold oil partnerships on Wall Street, to star in the play's title role. She thought audiences would connect with the economic subject matter of "The Businessman" and that it would be a hit at the box office.
Ward, petite and fiery, said she needs to strategize in order to make a profit as a director and producer on off-off-Broadway. Usually, the short runs of these repertory houses never make much money, at least by the standards of larger Broadway shows. Still, the first step to draw profit for her latest performance was to secure an interested audience. “People are going to hear 'The Businessman,' and then they are going to think about money and their lives, and how they are affected,” she said. “This just seemed apropos. The title, it’s just right there.”
Ward is not the only director in New York who bet the subject of the recession would appeal to crowds. Several producers in the city turned to financial themes as a response to last year's financial crisis and to draw an audience. "Broke-ology," a play by the critically-acclaimed writer Nathan Louis Jackson about a family struggling economically ran at Lincoln Center through November. Six short pieces under the title “The Great Recession” were put on at the Flea Theater in Tribeca and looked at how New Yorkers cope in a downturned economy.
John Shatterton, a playwright and owner of the theater Where Eagles Dare in the Garment District, said that it isn't uncommon for plays to reflect current events and that the economy is currently a good topic for playwrights. "Everyone is dipping a toe into the subject," he said. His latest play is about the subprime mortgage crisis. Historically, economic downturns have inspired art that places tough economic realities center stage. John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “The Grapes of Wrath” described an Oklahoma family's voyage through the dustbowl of the 1930s. Photographers of the same era, such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, captured the despair of the Great Depression by portraying the harried faces of the poor in America.
But art that deals with the lives of the very wealthy and their quick change of fortune was also popular at the time, said Morris Dickstein, author of “Dancing in the Dark, A Cultural History of the Great Depression.” One example he cited is the 1936 film, “My Man Godfrey,” about a homeless man who enters the world of the wealthy as a butler. “Some people thought that art should be about what was going on, that art should deal with the social reality, others wanted to be relieved from the burden of daily life,” he said. Audiences could escape from darker realities by watching the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley in films like 1933’s “42nd Street.”
Caroll Ostrow is the producing director who helped commission “The Great Recession” at the Flea Theater, which looked at the economic crisis through the eyes of struggling twenty somethings. “To ignore the recession would be to ignore something that’s on everyone’s mind,” she said. Ostrow said the goal of the production was to both entertain and to make people think. “New York Living,” one of the short plays in “The Great Recession,” explored the trials and tribulations of young actors thrown into gear by a lost job and high rent in New York.
But because of the economics of off-off-Broadway theater, the subject of a play does not necessarily draw a larger audience. Shatterton, the owner of Where Eagles Dare, confessed that plays about the economy rarely trump love stories when it comes to sales at the box office, and Steven O'Conner, the stage director for “The Businessman” said that the name of the show might not necessarily draw in an audience. "I think it's something that people appreciate after the fact," he said.
Hannah Rothchild, a retired teacher, was one of theatergoers who attended "The Businessman." She didn't know what the play was about before she got there, but came because a friend recommended it. She said she sees several plays a week and prefers smaller theaters. "I like to see the actors working hard. I think they are doing much more work in those little theaters than in the big theaters," she said.
Another audience member, Fey Greygower, was turned off by the moralizing of the play. "Well first I thought, why would I want to see it?” she said. In the end, it was the location that brought her to "The Businessman." “I had just come from an art opening in this neighborhood. It was pure convenience," she said.
Nevertheless, during the three-week run of the “The Businessman,” Ward said the average audience numbered around 30 people and never dropped below 25, so she considered the 11 performances a success. “For a theater in the middle of nowhere, by a Turkish guy that no one knows, it's pretty good,” she said.
