Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast: Making Art Work · Nick Petrella and Andy Heise

#360: David Cote (Playwright, Librettist, and Theater Critic) (pt. 2 of 2)

·32 min·2 clips

David Cote recalls panning Rabbit Hole as a TV movie, then genuflecting before its playwright at an awards event years later.

1. Part two of Arts Entrepreneurship Podcast Episode #360 covers librettist David Cote's views on collaboration, criticism, residencies and arts entrepreneurship. 2. Hosts Andy Heiss and Nick Petrella interview Cote, a New York playwright, librettist and theater critic whose operas include Blind Injustice and Lucidity, and who was the longest-serving theater editor and chief drama critic of Time Out New York. 3. Cote's central thesis is that the work depends on community: "find your collaborators" and "hold on to them." 4. He places the ideal composer-librettist relationship between "best friend" and cordial business partner, accepts that the composer is "top dog" in opera, and says the only bad collaborations were with composers whose music "doesn't do anything" for his words. 5. He contrasts opera, where "dark atonal weird music" can need supertitles, with musical theater, where lyrics must be intelligible, and says he would like to write a musical if he found a brilliant composer. 6. On criticism, he says the New York Times recently moved away from standard written reviews, jokes that he "went from one dying profession to another," and tells the story of panning David Lindsay-Abaire's Rabbit Hole before bowing to him at a Drama Critics' Circle award for Good People. 7. He describes his Yaddo stay of four weeks, applied for roughly 15 years after his McDowell residency, and plans for a month in Oysterville, Washington, and three weeks at Marble House in Vermont. 8. He defines success as freedom to take chances and to live in doubt, saying he was a frustrated writer for years after being rejected from a Bard fiction workshop and that he began writing seriously around 2008. 9. He criticizes a culture of "cultural conformity and regurgitation" and says he was advised to "be a sponge" at McDowell and to prepare for "total strangers to hate you" before becoming a critic. 10. Suited to emerging playwrights, librettists, critics and arts entrepreneurs seeking candid career perspective.

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