Creativity is worth more than money in theater business

The art of theater has always been the art of making do.

Sidle up to any theater practitioner the week before an opening and ask him or her how it's going.

Chances are you'll be told they would sell their soul if it would buy them an extra week or a couple thousand more dollars.

Doesn't matter whether it's artistic director Pat Van Eman mounting her latest show at the 70-seat Red Barn Theatre in Hampton or former Richland resident turned Broadway director-choreographer Jeff Calhoun.

The scale of the show might change, but the challenges remain constant.

And thus, I suspect, it has always been.

If we could activate the way-back machine to visit the past, we'd probably find Shakespeare wandering around London in search of an all-night monastery to make copies of his newly revised script in time for the next morning's rehearsal.

In ancient Greece, Euripides would be lamenting the fact that the actor he had in mind when he wrote "Oedipus Rex" wanted more money than the budget allowed.

And somewhere in prehistory, the first paleolithic player would be lamenting the poor lighting that cast distracting shadows on the wall as he enacted the high points of last week's hunt.

The disheartening truth as any regular -- or even occasional -- theatergoer knows is that time and money don't always guarantee success.

For every artistic and financial success like "The Lion King," there's an equally or more expensive and disastrous "Lord of the Rings."

Despite endless tinkering and revisions over time, shows such as "By Jeeves," "Doctor Doolittle" and "Chess" never really caught on.

If neither time nor money is the answer, what is•

The answer is what makes theater -- and any other art as well -- both enormously frustrating and incredibly rewarding.

Creativity and imagination often can triumph over clock and currency and level the playing field.

Those who visit lots of theaters at different economic levels already know that it's not so much a matter of the resources you have at hand as what you do with them.

Shakespeare probably found an out-of-work actor with good penmanship to copy his revisions. Euripides might well have discovered qualities in his replacement Oedipus actor that changed his script for the better. And that paleolithic performer might have discovered that he could improve his performance by working with the shadows to create animal silhouettes and make his own image loom large over them.

The story of "The Muckle Man," which City Theatre Company produced this past season, focused on scientists who had captured a giant sea squid.

Both playwright and producers knew from the outset that there was no way they could affordably create a creature that would withstand audience scrutiny in City Theatre's intimate thrust-stage setting.

As horror fans have long known, what you don't see can be more powerful than what you do.

Describing but not displaying the squid allowed each audience member to create his own image of the animal.

While she was in town working on "The Glorious Ones" at the Pittsburgh Public Theater, Broadway choreographer Graciela Daniele recalled a new musical she had worked on that called for a big car to appear onstage. Lacking the money to build a car, she substituted an actor holding two flashlights to represent the car's headlights. The result was so pleasing that when the show advanced to the next developmental stage with a bigger budget that would have made a car affordable, the simpler but more dramatic solution remained with the show.

Those who attend theater regularly and widely can supply their own examples.

They know that moving and effective productions can be done on a nearly bare stage with a minimum of well-chosen props and some interchangeable black cubes.

Whether it's a lavish extravaganza or a spare but imaginatively conceived show, it's not the size of the budget, it's what you do with it that matters most.