The author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist came to praise American theatre, not to bury it, and given all the doom-and-gloom in the news for the arts and, well, everything else recently, that in itself was refreshing. (Whether Mike Daisey, creator of How Theater Failed America, would have agreed with some of Lehrer’s assessments, such as his assertion that “the best way to prepare your mind for the 21st century may be to see a 16th century comedy,” is an open question.) In addition to the Swiffer analogy (basically, what the Procter & Gamble researchers discovered wasn’t that they needed to improve an old mop—they had to re-evaluate HOW mopping works or doesn’t work in the first place), Lehrer also called upon the work of urban theorist Jane Jacobs in her classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” Lehrer essentially applied Jacobs’ description of a successful and vital neighborhood—one brimming with diversity and multiple purposes, where people from different strata routinely bump into each other—as one of the strengths of creativity in general and theatre in particular. When you can wander and mix with new people all the time—onstage and off—it gives your brain an empathetic and intellectual workout, and that’s exactly what theatre asks of its audiences.

So in a way, the TCG conference is a laboratory of Lehrer’s observations. 886 attendees from all around the country (and some international folks, too) spent three days in intense conversations, both orchestrated and informal, on how to survive, thrive, and grow the art form for a new generation.

Caveat: press was largely excluded from the break-out sessions and “affinity groups.” The latter were organized by job types—so designers talked to designers, freelance artists with freelance artists, etc. How well this served the purpose of letting artists “bump into” people in other aspects of theatre is something I couldn’t tell you with any degree of certainty. The conference also focused on four “motifs”: Artists and Artistry, Race and Gender, the Arts Learning Continuum (essentially, how to incorporate arts education into both lifelong learning opportunities for all and training programs specifically for theatre artists and administrators); and Creative Ecology, or how theatre impacts the larger community—technologically, socially, economically.

Perhaps it’s natural that a theatre critic and journalist would spend a good portion of the conference looking for defining narratives, and I found them in a “trustee workshop” focused on “Creative Tensions on the Board,” moderated by Michelle T. Boone, senior program officer for the Joyce Foundation, which itself received a Regional Funder Award from TCG at the keynote session. Lisa Green, board chair for Lookingglass Theatre , and Chip von Weise, a board member for Redmoon Theatre , shared stories of how their boards had to change and grow to accommodate a number of issues, all of which somehow managed to land on concerns raised by those in the room to create a satisfying narrative arc for the session.

Departure of a founding artistic director? Check. Jim Lasko left that position at Redmoon in 2009, to be succeeded by current AD Frank Maugeri.

Changing the artistic mission of the company? Check. Redmoon’s emphasis on more public spectacles had been mostly Lasko’s idea—and when he stepped away from the day-to-day artistic oversight, the board had to find a way to support that new vision, along with the ideas of Maugeri, while confronting an economic downturn. (Von Weise noted that the non-traditional nature of Redmoon’s work had been a difficult sale to corporate funders even in more flush times.)

Dealing with the fiscal demands of a new space? Check. Green talked about how the board of Lookingglass changed when the company moved to the WaterWorks location to accommodate the new reality for rainmakers. One change was that board members were offered “emeritus” status if they didn’t feel they could meet the new financial-support requirements. As von Weise succinctly put it, “The board is the group that writes checks while everybody else is singing Kumbaya around the art.”

On Friday, a different kind of praise circle was in effect at “Did We See the Same Play?,” which honored the contributions of the Chicago Tribune critics, Richard Christiansen and Chris Jones. As Albert “Bill” Williams noted in his blog report on the conference, no one provided an explanation for the absence of Hedy Weiss of the Sun-Times—curious, given the emphasis on gender at this year’s conference.

What Williams was perhaps too modest to mention is that the many contributions of the Reader in consistently covering every storefront show in town for many years—many of those under the assigning editorship of Williams and Tony Adler (who preceded and succeeded Williams in that position)—are at least as important a part of the critical landscape in Chicago theatre as Christiansen and Jones’ undeniably vital contributions. Many storefront companies such as Theater Oobleck , the now-defunct Cardiff Giant (home base for Tony-winning Urinetown creators Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis) and Curious Theatre Branch (producers of the annual Rhinoceros Theatre Festival) got a lot more coverage early on from the Reader than from the Tribune.

The usual concerns for working critics—not enough space, diminishing roles for staff critics nationally—came into play. Jones, who has taken plenty of hits from local bloggers for what they consider excessive coverage of Broadway in Chicago, pointed out that the media buys from the big shows help underwrite the overall arts coverage in the Tribune (which, I must mention, helps support this Trib freelancer, who shares the “On the Fringe” review column with Nina Metz). In other words—by taking out the big ads, the big boys make it easier for readers to “bump into” coverage of shows that they might not otherwise have considered attending. Jones also pointed out that one big drawback for theatre attendance is that many people take friends and family members to shows who may not necessarily be theatre fans. When the show isn’t good, there is, says Jones “a humiliation factor.”

The Friday afternoon plenary session offered many opportunities to wince—or at least sigh. “By Design: Creativity and the City” would have seemed to fit Lehrer’s observations about urban life as an ongoing creative laboratory hand-and-glove. But the panel, moderated by Carol Coletta of CEOs for Cities, never got around to addressing specifically just what constitutes a creative city. Olga Garay, the executive director for the Department of Cultural Affairs in Los Angeles, made a strong point about the need for artists to have “R and D” opportunities, complete with the ability to fail, that scientists get. But much of the session devolved into buzzword vagaries—in retrospect, the Second City curtain-raiser spoofing the description of the panel was spot-on. The audience left so quickly that a planned award presentation to the engaging Bill Rauch, the current artistic director for Oregon Shakespeare Festival and the former artistic director and founder for LA’s groundbreaking Cornerstone Theater had to be re-scheduled for Saturday. (Where, by the way, Rauch and the other recipients received glowing receptions and made charming speeches. I particularly appreciated Rauch’s succinct description of “good listening is good leadership,” and that “inclusion and kindness lead to better art.”)

Mayor Daley got a standing ovation on Saturday morning when he showed up for a conversation on “Theatre, the Arts, and the Cities We Live In” with Ralph Remington, the director of theatre and musical theatre for the National Endowment for the Arts. Touching on the importance of arts education, the role of the arts as an economic engine (“artists bring more money than sports into a city,” the mayor asserted), and the need for “incubator programs” that provide housing for artists as well as venues for the arts, the discussion was definitely a feel-good interlude, if short on details. No one, including me, had the nerve to ask the mayor if arts education programs in the schools could be aided if his beloved TIFs were eliminated or reined in—but then, apparently no one thought to invite the Reader’s Ben Joravsky to the conference.

Despite the official no-fly-zone nature of the group, I did manage to sneak into a break-out session on “Fostering the Next Generation of American Theatre Audiences,” presented by Hallie Gordon, the director of Steppenwolf for Young Adults; Willa Taylor, director of education and community engagement for Goodman Theatre ; and Rachel Fink, associate general manager and director for the Berkeley Rep School of Theatre. I’ve worked with Taylor and the Goodman’s Cindy Bandle Young Critics Circle as an adult mentor from the Association for Women Journalists, and was delighted to see several of my former mentees at the session.

The real stars, appropriately enough, were the kids themselves, who spoke passionately and articulately of why they care about theatre and how to make it “cool” again. A member of the Steppenwolf Youth Council (a program that was pioneered by Berkeley Rep and which both Steppenwolf and Goodman have adopted) mentioned that classmates had said that they didn’t know they were “allowed” to attend Steppenwolf—they thought it was limited to well-dressed adults. Peer-to-peer outreach was identified as crucial to the success of youth programs—such as having teens conduct post-show discussions for the Steppenwolf for Young Adults programming.

Steppenwolf also incorporates creative socializing in the program—a video showed the teens dancing and talking to cast members for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s The Brother/Sister Plays (also identified by Mayor Daley as one of his favorite recent theatre outings) at a special party that included demonstrations of African dance and a poetry slam. Making teens feel a part of the backstage family—inviting them to rehearsals, partnering them with staff members who can talk about what they do in their jobs—was cited as something that even theatres without dedicated funds for youth programming could do to get younger audiences involved and interested in the theatrical process. And perhaps unsurprisingly, when asked about the best way to get the word about theatre out to teens, the answer came back resoundingly: “Facebook!”

I’m not sure about the future of theatre as a whole, but seeing these kids in action might have been the most inspiring part of the whole weekend.

The final general session brought together playwrights Theresa Rebeck and Tanya Saracho (whose face graced Time Out Chicago last week, which was given away in goodie bags by the League of Chicago Theatres ) with Polly Carl, the director of artistic development for Steppenwolf Theatre . The discussion touched on gender, ethnicity, and the general state of playwriting. Carl mentioned a review of Wendy Wasserstein’s The Heidi Chronicles that described the play as belonging to “the subgenre of feminist theatre.” (Substitute “the subgenre of white male theatre” and the ludicrousness of that statement becomes clear.) Rebeck, of course, has long written and talked about the inequity for female playwrights—most recently in her Laura Pels keynote address this past March, which has been widely redistributed.

Saracho, who founded Teatro Luna 10 years ago with Coya Paz and stepped down as artistic director earlier this year, pointed out that “a lot of people who supported my early work had never been to the theatre” because they had never seen their lives as Latinas represented. Now, the playwright, who has been commissioned by Steppenwolf and whose El Nogalar will be presented with Goodman next season, wonders where she fits into the creative ecology. “I’m part of this system where I feel I need to catch the wheel as it goes by. When you’re making up your own rules, you’re in charge of everything,” Saracho said.

So where on the wheel do Chicago theatre artists fit? In the many informal discussions I had with out-of-towners, including several writers from New York and former associates from my 1990s sojourn in the Bay Area, I was heartened many times by how they marveled at the variety and quality of the Chicago theatre scene—a scene that was presented in “pop-ups” of short scenes throughout the conference, including a brilliant staging of the “Stella!” scene from Writers Theatre ’s A Streetcar Named Desire, directed by David Cromer. (The show got a glowing review from Charles Isherwood in the New York Times that appeared on Saturday.)

As a former Columbia College Chicago classmate of Cromer’s, I was tickled to see how he was mobbed by regional theatre artistic directors when he entered the conference lounge on Thursday (though I’m not sure how much he enjoyed the experience). I was amused that the Socialists were having their convention at the tony Palmer House as well—and that Wallace Shawn was a featured guest at their shindig (though he did show up to sign scripts at TCG—and had a longer line than Tracy Letts, as Letts observed to me.) As a fan of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, I was amused to hear Victory Gardens ’ executive director Jan Kallish and playwright Kristoffer Diaz dish about Joan Rivers’ up-close-and-personal encounter with Christian Litke in the New York Second Stage production of the Victory Gardens hit. (The pictures are on the VG Facebook page—of course!)

And as an admirer of how many great ideas come out of late-night bull sessions (often leavened with booze, let’s be honest), I was stoked to hear Erica Weiss of Route 66 Theatre Company (Weiss was also the dramaturg for Chad Deity) outline for me some thoughts for new methods of theatre management that had been discussed in depth on Friday night by herself and several other attendees. Will those ideas—which seem good on the surface, at least—be put into action? Who knows? But without the “neighborhood” provided, however temporarily, by TCG’s conference, they might not have come out to play at all.

Got your own stories about the TCG conference? Please comment!