SHOW TITLE: It’s Raining Inside Again: The Arts Administrators Show
PRODUCER: Punch the Printer Productions
HAILING FROM: Minnesota
SHOW DESCRIPTION: Wholesomeness meets pandemonium as Mr. Rogers goes behind the scenes of your local theatre company to explore the depths of a unique and peculiar ecosystem: the administrative office of an arts nonprofit.
WHAT CAUGHT MY INTEREST: The administrators are the unsung heroes who make art happen. Isn’t it time they had a show of their own?
Just who do you think you are, anyway?
We’re Arts Administrators (the people who do all the business-y things for artists and arts organizations). And we’re also artists. And some of us are not arts administrators- we’ve got dancers and puppeteers and techies and designers and a professor and lawyer for good measure. And sometimes we get so angry and worn down, and the printer jams so repeatedly, that we’d like to punch it.
So what’s the big idea?
We mashed up Mr Rogers Neighborhood with the chaotic story of the theatre company in his imagination. Mr Rogers, ever calm, genuine and reliable is a comfort for us left brainers working in a right brain world. The theatre company in his imagination, is more like what our lives are actually like. It may seem like we embellished a bit, or exaggerated here and there, and while, of course, we did a little (this is theatre after all!), a surprising amount of what you will see happen, or hear said on stage is based on real events that have or are happening in the administrative offices of arts organizations all over the Twin Cities.
How did you come up with a screwy idea like that?
It all began with snakes in a bowl. On a desk. In a office. After the snake incident, we got to thinking: weird shit happens all the time in the arts, from ridiculous audience members to overzealous volunteers, incomprehensible show titles and novelty-sized props. Conversations with our colleagues led to the birth of a google doc (because we love cloud-based tools) to capture the best quotes and tales. After a year of accumulating some of the strangest, funniest, and sometimes saddest stories of the world behind the spotlight, we decided we should do the only thing we professionally know how to do: make a show!
We hope we’ve created something fun and funny that illuminates an oft forgotten section of artists: us type-a, organized, just-trying-to-make-sense-of-it-all producers, marketers, program managers, and grant writers.
Why should I care?
Mr. Rogers knows
Mercury’s in Retrograde.
Arts administrate!
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