A Point Worth Revisiting

With the Arena's heartening new residency program on the brain, not to mention a lot of talk from the TCG Conference about how Chicago nurtures its playwrights by giving them artistic homes, I thought of this clarifying call to arms, from Marsha Norman's brilliant, collegial essay for the Times about August: Osage County:

If we wanted to do one single thing to improve the theatrical climate in America, we’d assign one playwright to every theater that has a resident acting company.

Well, we first might want to start by creating more resident acting companies. But putting the artists at the center of the theater--something echoed by Theresa Rebeck and others last week--seems more and more like a solution people are waking up to (again, Feingold's piece this week on the economics of Broadway and the nonprofits plays into my thinking on this as well). Change is in the air, can you feel it?