CHOOSING A SEASON: CRAIG JOSEPH, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR

How did our 2024-2025 OMEGA & ALPHA season come to be? Well, like everything else at Seat of the Pants, it’s part of a process. At the beginning of last season, we created a Script Reading Team (Jeannine Gaskin, Michael Glavan, Lana Sugarman, and myself). Each month, we’d read three scripts and then come to our meetings prepared to discuss them. Conversations would center around facets that made each script a good fit for the work we do (i.e. ensemble cast, enough “meat” for 4 months of rehearsal, elements of theatricality, good balance with other pieces in the mix, etc) and facets that might make it challenging to pull off (i.e. beyond our technical capacities, unclear storytelling, not the right tonal fit for our audiences, etc). Our conversations were always lively and revealing, not only introducing us to plenty of great plays, but also forcing us to sharpen and hone our thoughts on what made for a “Seat of the Pants play.”

When it came time to select the season, we had a bunch of possible titles on our list - a year’s plus worth of reading. I asked each team member to take the list and 1) choose their ideal season, 2) identify some runners-up, and 3) also make an “over my dead body” list of titles they felt we should strongly avoid. When choosing our ’23-’24 season, something magic happened, and everyone on the team chose the exact same season, which was nothing short of a miracle! It wasn’t quite so clear and easy this time around, so I took the group’s suggestions and began weighing them through several different lenses as the Artistic Director.

One thing we’ve always tried to do is to select seasons that have some sort of thematic hook, where the plays all fit together with one another and are somehow related to an idea or concept we’re observing in the cultural zeitgeist. Last year, riffing off the notion that the United States is now living in a “post-truth” era, we programmed TRUTH BE TOLD, a series of plays based on true historical events that all feature protagonists grappling with truth: speaking it to power, facing a hard truth about themselves, attempting to uncover a hidden truth, and so on. After the contentious 2016 election, we programmed ACTS OF DISSENT, a bunch of stories that talked about how we can do debate, dialogue, and dissension better with one another. In addition to this thematic through-line, we also always look for plays that balance one another in terms of genre, cast size, time period, and more.

Looking at the various plays that had risen to the tops of folks’ lists for this year was like looking at those magic dot pictures: a chaotic jumble of many little dots that eventually began to yield up a three-dimensional image once I was able to cross my eyes just the right way. Almost every single play found a character of characters dealing with an unexpected, unasked for, and often unwanted ENDING: of a relationship, a life, a belief system, a place, and more. And each play captured a critical moment or crossroads: would the character be downtrodden or destroyed by this finality, or - like a phoenix rising from the actions - branch off into a new BEGINNING?

This felt VERY appropriate for the state of the world these days, in which - I maintain - all of us are being forced to grapple with changes and transitions that we’re often not looking for or a fan of. Grief and loss feel very palpable - not only as I speak with people about their personal lives, but also in the public sphere. And it’s interesting to watch the news and notice how folks are trying to hold onto what’s slipping away, fight what might be coming next, using the transition as an opportunity to move into a new way of living and being, and any other number of myriad responses.

SO - from all of this - it then became a matter of pragmatics: cast sizes, budget numbers, places we could perform, how titles balanced or commented on one another. And there was - of course - the boon of adding the Salon Series to the mix which - being a seres of new play readings - also felt like a beginning of a different sort. At the end of it all, OMEGA & ALPHA was born!

And we’re certainly hope you’ll join us for the entire season and check it all out!