99 Seats

Occupational Hazard

2010-06-30T12:29:00.003-04:00

So I've been dieting and exercising for the last about 10 months. I've never been much of a physical exertion person, not a sports-playing guy or avid hiker or whatnot. I was an inside kid in a family that was largely made up of inside kids. We read a lot. I write a lot. These are generally sedentary activities. As I slouched through my thirties, it got...well, bad. And last year, I had one of those check-ups where the doctors and nurses give you stern, stern looks about your behavior. Not fun.

So I joined a gym, cleaned up my act, started eating better. All good things, right? Yep. I've lost some weight, I'm feeling fit and connected to my body. All very good. Except...well...I'm a morning writer. And mornings are my only time to get to the gym. I haven't perfected my cloning techniques yet so...I've had to choose. Be healthy. Or write more.

The scales been tipping to the Be Healthy side of late, but now that I want to get more writing done this summer...something's got to give. Why does it seem like you have to choose between being healthy and being a writer? I think, on some level, I stopped going to therapy because it was working too well. I was getting sane and that was getting in the way of the work. That can't be good.

So now I'm trying alternating: one day of gym, one day of writing. Let's see how long this lasts.

Where Ya Been?

2010-06-22T10:44:00.002-04:00

To quote one of the great philosophers of our time, it's been a while since I rapped at ya. What gives?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but...a lot. Well, technically, it has something to do with the limits of time and space and my ability to juggle multiple obligations in limited waking hours. Or some such thing. Or maybe, just maybe...I'm a lazy bastard. You make the call.

Okay, "lazy bastard" isn't exactly accurate. I do have a full-time, non-theatre-related day job that I regularly actually show up for and often do work at to the satisfaction of my superiors. I have been a busy little bee over at Parabasis, blogging about TV shows and YouTube videos and the like, and every so often talking about the theatre. I've been seeing a lot of theatre, and doing theatre-y stuff. Plus, I did go away for a while, and that was pretty sweet. So it's not like I've been a lump or a hermit, exactly. But I haven't shown up here. And I haven't done a lot of new writing lately. I've been trying to figure out why.

Well, I kind of know why, though. I'm at a bit of a loss. A few weeks back, a couple of friends of mine asked me about my playwriting and got a bit of an earful from me on the subject (sorry, Clare and Ethan!). See, I've been at this game a while and I'm lucky to be kind of prolific, so I have a whole stack of plays. I'll go out on a limb and say that most of them are pretty good, some are very good, but almost all of them need a bit more work. Generally, though, it's either a full re-working (of older plays that have structural flaws) or the kind of work that happens in a rehearsal room for an extended period of time. Not necessarily a full rehearsal period, but a good workshopping or something. Though a full production probably wouldn't hurt, either. They're well on their way to being better plays, but are near the limits of what I can do, just scribbling away at them.

Plays are weird, sometimes mercurial beasties. Beautiful mansions, made of cards, holding lightning in bottles, built on sand. Like Amish barns, they really need a community to raise them. I've tried working on plays at this stage, on my own, or even with a writers' group, and it often comes to no good. As a writer, you can only hear so much of the play on the page, in your head. Writing in a vacuum, for actors in your head, you push too hard or pull back too much and find yourself pulling out the strand that made the whole thing go and it crashes down on your head. Or you know there's a problem, you know there's something out of whack in there, some crack in the basement wall, some fitting that doesn't quite fit and rattles when the wind blows, something somewhere that's off, but you can't find it on your own. You need a sharp-eyed director or actor to come in with a level, check all the corners and the shelves and show you where you need an extra screw or two.

Okay. That's one metaphor tortured. But you get the picture.

I submitted one of these plays to a developmental opportunity this spring and got rejected (there's been a lot of that this spring). Luckily, I knew the folks involved pretty well and did something I almost never do: I asked why I got rejected. As playwrights, we get trained to just take rejection, rub some dirt on it and walk it off. We don't question or probe...for fear of the dread answer: your play sucked. No one wants to hear that. But this time...I had to know. Was the play a worthless mess? Did my cover letter suck? Why would this play, a play that I rather liked, get rejected for this opportunity, one I thought it was really suited for? I asked and got a good, smart, quick answer: it was too done. For this opportunity, this play was too finished. In the opinion of this company, it just needs to be in rehearsal. Which was nice to hear. Except that no one wanted to put it into rehearsal. So...now what?

I've been lucky and worked hard and have had five readings of four different plays in the last 12 months or so. Largely, though, these have been readings I've put together with the help of directors and friends. Believe me, I'm not complaining. But it is a bit of work, finding actors, juggling schedules, especially for a non-paying reading which takes fairly low priority (as it should), managing rehearsal space, doing all of that, in addition to trying to rewrite, so it's a useful experience, and hustle up an audience, and all of it. Others are doing more and I salute them. I kicked around the idea of self-producing, but, ultimately, it may not be the right thing for me right now, for a lot of reasons.

So where does that leave me? With a bunch of plays that don't seem to have homes. So the next thinking was start some new plays, just write for writing's sake, and who cares about the end result. Hence the New Play Project here. Which was cool and all. But got derailed to prep for readings. And when I went to go back...my heart wasn't in it. It's hard for me to start a new play right now because I can't stop thinking about what happens when it's done. I write a play, I work on it for three months, six months, whatever, get that first draft done and feel good about it. Feel great. I do a reading, get some actors together, put it up in front of an audience. And that goes great. Great, grand, beautiful. And then...what? Chances are, it's going on the pile, with all the other plays to wait for an opportunity to come along.

The readings I've had have been well-attended and have, as far as I could tell, gone well. People coming like the work. People involved like working on it. It seems like a good time is had by all. And at the end of it, I have a whole raft of notes and ideas, rewrites and changes to make, to think about. Again, all good. But then what comes next? I've had official type people come from theatres to these readings and give very good, very kind and often very smart notes. And, even when they don't mean to, the implication is always: if you just made these changes, we'll like your script more. At the end of the day, that's what you're aiming for: someone to like your script enough to produce it. And that just didn't seem to be happening.

I've stood in this crossroads for a few months now. On one hand, I have a few very good, pretty "marketable" plays that need some work. On the other hand, I could be writing new plays that are better, striking while the iron is hot. Do I set aside the old plays and throw myself into something new or keep working at the old stuff to get it perfect and let the new work lay fallow for a while? I couldn't decide. So I did neither.

Add to that my own rising frustration with the entrenched ways and issues of theatre that seemed to actually get worse and more intractable every season, as you can see from perusing the archives here, and you get someone who kind of wants to break up with theatre, but can't figure out if it's the right thing to do. Isaac and I have a joke about theatre being like the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of indie film fame and how we're both trying to get over her with varying degrees of success. I'm (obviously) still wallowing in the self-pity party part of it all.

I know a lot of this is self-pity and a reaction to a couple of stinging rejections this spring. But it's also a dilemma that I can't seem to find any help or advice with. When I've mentioned it to people lately, I generally get some nice comforting words, or a pat on the shoulder and encouragement. All very lovely and much appreciated. But this is a bit of an existential dilemma for me, this particular trough. Sure, it's shot through with doubt and confidence issues, but mainly it's a "What the hell do I do now?" kind of thing. I can write new plays. I can dedicate myself to rewriting one play until it's perfect. I can junk the whole endeavor and get an MBA. Or I can stand here at the crossroads of all of these things and watch people who know what they want pass me by. That's the least fun, least productive, least useful option. But it's the one I feel stuck in.

I keep hoping for some kind of jolt to the system, some definitive sign pointing somewhere. Something to show me a path out of this thicket. But not much is coming along. Or I'm ignoring it. Something. I've gotten involved in some film projects, started trying my hand at some TV writing to see if there's a way to more fulfillment, both career-wise and artistically, that way. We'll see.

And I've thought a lot about this blog. Since I've been writing over at Parabasis, that's been my main focus for a while. This place, which I associated with theatre and with my own playwriting mainly, has languished, since neither of those have exactly been on the front burner of late. But maybe it's time for a comeback?

I don't feel any more inspired or excited about theatre right now. Don't get me wrong. I've seen some terrific plays and a lot of awesome people are working their asses off out there. I just don't know how I fit in at this party right now. But I miss making plays. I miss rehearsing and writing and telling stories for the stage. I want to find my way back.

So. Okay. I think I'll be coming back here and writing more about writing, about my plays, about where my mind is at. Really try to use this place, this blog, to keep me on track and focus on the simple things: waking up, writing down words and images, and seeing where they take me. I'll leave the pop culture, politics, theatre rants and ravings to Parabasis. 99 Seats will be about the writing.

I chose the video clip* at the top because...well, Dinosaur, Jr is awesome. And it's a fun song. Of course, it comes from an album that gives this post its title. But the title of the song too is appropriate: Start choppin'. I know I'm in the tall grass, in the brambles, in the weeds, and I can't find a path out. So...maybe I make one? Just start choppin'.

*In case you couldn't see it, here's another version of the same song.

Today In Irony

2010-05-21T12:06:00.003-04:00

Dr. Rand Paul, gubernatorial candidate in Kentucky said this today:

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of, 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP,'" Paul said in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America." "I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business."

Yes, this Dr. Rand Paul, who said this, is saying something sounds un-American.

Uh-huh.

It's like Stephen Colbert is running for office.

I Have Been Remiss...

2010-05-11T19:58:00.002-04:00

...for not highlighting two pieces of very, very excellent writing out here on the interwebs. They're both by theatre guys, but neither is about theatre, in particular. Both of them made my day when I read them so you should read them. One is by my old Youngblood producing partner, R.J. Tolan. The other by more recent vintage friend Sean Williams. Enjoy them both.

Submission Admissions (Again)

2010-05-05T19:43:00.003-04:00

Augh. Uff. Blech.

So, the Tony voters have awarded the 2010 Regional Theatre Award to the O'Neill Center. Honestly, the first person I thought would complain about that was Scott, since it's a bit of a stretch, I would say, to call the O'Neill a "regional" theatre. (Though, as previously noted, I'm ready to kick Connecticut out of the tri-state area.) But he got beat out of the gate by the often-acidic Leonard Jacobs of the Clyde Fitch Report. I generally steer clear of Leonard. We play fairly nice, but don't really get along all that well and the internet is big enough for both of us. I try to give him a wide berth. This, though, is the kind of thing that pisses me off and I just can't let it slide.

Leonard is a member of the American Theatre Critics Association, the group that votes on and recommends an organization to the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing for the Regional Theatre Tony Award*, and begins his piece thus:

For this year, it was announced that the Tony for Regional Theater will go to the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn. And I was one of those who voted for it (we rank them, it was my top choice).

I want to tell you why I voted for it.

I also want to tell you why I almost didn’t.

He starts off with the good, listing a very long and impressive list of plays developed and presented at the O'Neill Center over the last 46 years, a list that includes Christopher Durang, Israel Horovitz, August Wilson, Adam Rapp, Wendy Wasserstein, David Henry Hwang, Jason Grote and other luminaries. Several writers on the list have been there multiple times, building a relationship with the center over time. (I've heard from several writers who have been developed there that there's basically a standing invitation to come back, once you've been invited.) He notes the equally long and lustrous history of music-theatre development there and the Center's other good works and gives it a hearty huzzah.

Then he gives it, and all of the writers he just mentioned the finger. He says:

But I had one very good reason for not voting for the O’Neill: It is an open secret the National Playwrights’ Conference is much less of an “open submission” opportunity for American dramatists as the O’Neill may like theater professionals to believe.

Um. Leonard? What does that mean, exactly? We've heard this before. A few months ago, Rolando Teco, both of Extra Criticum and a staff member at the Dramatists Guild, leveled the exact same charges:

It is an open secret in the theatre world that of the dozen or so slots available each Summer to new plays at the O'Neill, all but 2 or 3 are pre-determined in backroom deal-making worthy of Tammany Hall.

Back then, the hubbub was a bit more about the charging of a submission fee, but the charge is still there, it's still kind of silly and it's, most importantly, wholly and completely unsubstantiated. Neither Rolando or Leonard presents a single actual case of a project circumventing the system or gaming the system or anything. They simply assert that it's an open secret. They don't even have an anonymously sourced quote or a testimonial from a playwright. It's not even hearsay.

Now Leonard doesn't exactly blame the O'Neill's A.D., Wendy Goldberg. Not exactly.

I’m not suggesting that the conference’s current artistic director, Wendy C. Goldberg, isn’t stellar — she has made some wise, cunning, provocative, fruitful, even masterful choices since coming on board. But no one I know in the American theater believes that the submission process is truly blind, truly fair or truly not stacked against you if you are a true unknown. I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve read and posts I come across on platforms such as the dramaturgy.net listserv that have decried the way in which plays and playwrights for the O’Neill are currently being chosen. Sure, you can say that the program is Goldberg’s now and she has a right to workshop and develop who and what she pleases. I am simply saying that someone with Goldberg’s platform has a moral — yes, I said a moral — duty here as well.

She has every right to pick the season she pleases...but she has a moral duty to...what? Pick some other plays? To pick plays that she doesn't like or doesn't think are worthy of development or attention because the writers are unknown? Pick a play that Leonard liked (apparently when he first posted this piece he neglected to mention that he was a reader for the O'Neill. We'll come back to that.)? I'm really not sure what "moral duty" Wendy is being accused of shirking here. And Leonard doesn't expand or elaborate. He doesn't offer any alternative way for Wendy to fulfill her moral duty. He simply, again without evidence, asserts that she's failing it.

Leonard lays on the rousing finish:

Let this well-earned Tony serve as a clarion call to Goldberg — to O’Neill Executive Director Preston Whiteway, too, to anyone who esteems the O’Neill as much I do. It is imperative that the O’Neill get back to discovering more of the undiscovered. Which means it should work with fewer of those “usual suspects.” The very future of the American theater remains at stake.

Pretty stirring stuff. So...obviously, their 2010 season, selected before all of this is jam-packed with big names, TV writers and projects that are already slated for major productions next year, right?

CREATION by Kathryn Walat
THE DREAM OF THE BURNING BOY by David West Read
FOLLOW ME TO NELLIE’S by Dominique Morisseau
CLOSE UP SPACE by Molly Smith Metzler
THE BURDEN OF NOT HAVING A TAIL by Carrie Barrett
A DEVIL AT NOON by Anne Washburn
COMES A FAERY by James McLindon

I'm not saying to toot my own horn or to knock any of these people...but I know two names on that list: Kate Walat and Anne Washburn. Maybe Leonard knows more. Or maybe you do. If anyone reading this has a tale to tell me about any of these plays or playwrights, feel free to e-mail it to me, not for attribution or acknowledgment. I'll simply post a correction, not even name the play. As long as you have a credible story that this playwright didn't go through the open submission process or has been favored by the O'Neill before, I'll recant. Please. Bring it on.

And, if you're reading this, and you happen to be one of these playwrights, please, please, PLEASE send me your story, again, not for attribution if you don't want it to be. If you know that you got in because of some deal with O'Neill and 'fess up to it, just to me (and I can keep a secret), again, I'll recant. But if you didn't, if you paid your $35, printed out your script, slapped a stamp on it and mailed it out in hope, let us know.

Back to Leonard: which of these plays was selected, not by open submission, but by a backroom deal? Which of these plays is evidence of a moral failing?

This pisses me off. It really, really does. In part because I've worked the other side of the ledger and I know how hard submission processes are on staff and how hard they work and how hard it can be to find plays you love. I also know that for most artistic staffs, you want to do as many plays as possible, but there just isn't enough space or time, there's never enough space or time. To then have people throw your choices back in your face and on literally the basis of nothing but gossip say that your choices are somehow tainted...that's a moral failing.

It's also a moral failing to treat these playwrights this way. These writers worked on their submission, worked on their plays and their mission statements and, if Wendy Goldberg is to be believed...

All of the work came through our Open Submissions process – a process
that this organization takes very seriously. It is always a joy to bring the next generation of theatrical storytellers to our campus to help these artists shape and hone their work for production.

If you're going to call her a liar, call her a liar. And then back it up with something. Something that doesn't sound like the bitching of a sore loser or hurt ego.

See, Leonard participated in this process, as he noted. And read scripts that were stripped of their names. So it was a blind submission process, which implies that it's fair, and that the staff at the O'Neill has done some work to insure its fairness. Oh, Leonard apparently (as he implies) knew at least some of the authors, though. Good for him. But none of the plays he read were selected. I'm sorry to make the leap here, but it sounds like he's saying these other plays weren't as good and got through because they're by "usual suspects." So, again, Leonard, did you read these plays? Are they bad plays? Are they not worthy of development?

I've been a part of selection processes before, both as a reader and as a staff member. I know when a process is fair and open and when it's not. I'm assuming Leonard would, too. He seems like a bright fellow. If you're saying that, from the inside, the O'Neill selection process doesn't seem fair, say it. Don't imply or dance around it. You were a part of it. For several years, you say. You would know. Were you a part of this year's? Have you been a part of one since Wendy came on six years ago? If you have, speak up. If not...then what's this all based on?

The other thing that pisses me off about this is that it's so small and petty and gossipy. All of this talk of open secrets is bullshit. It's an open secret that some open admission policies aren't the only way a season gets selected. That's true. But that doesn't mean that the open submission process isn't part of it, or that a play submitted over the transom has no shot of being included. There's never any guarantee, is there? If there is a real dereliction of duty here, if you're saying that no one of any importance ever reads any of the open submissions and all of the plays that are selected circumvented that, say it. Say it plainly and back it up with something. Otherwise, it's just a smear and it's low.

Leonard says:

One of the illnesses plaguing the American theater is the unwillingness of playwrights to articulate their frustration in public, especially within earshot of the powerful organizations that can make, enhance or break a career.

I'm articulating it, Leonard. But my frustration isn't with getting passed over for opportunities or feeling mistreated. It's part of the game. My frustration is with this kind of behavior. It's not journalism. It's not criticism. It's gossip-mongering and scandal-making. It's self-important, self-aggrandizing hackery. It should be beneath you.

*When I originally posted this, I wrote that Leonard is a Tony voter. That was inaccurate. I edited the post to reflect Leonard's correct affiliations and their relationship to the Regional Theater Tony Award.

Summer's Eve* of the Day

2010-05-05T17:38:00.002-04:00

And, of course, it's Joe Lieberman.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) thinks he’s found a work-around on the whole Miranda rights debate for U.S. citizens accused of terrorism: Strip their citizenship and ship them to Guantanamo.

Lieberman plans to introduce a bill that would amend a decades-old law aimed at yanking citizenship from U.S. citizens who fight for a foreign military.

Please note the bolded sections.

Basically, what TNC, Steve Benen, and even goddamn Andrew Sullivan said. This is a disgusting, wrong and thoroughly actually un-American thing to even consider.

Thanks again, Connecticut. You're the gift that keeps on giving.

*Um. Just in case, you didn't know.

Go, Phoenix!*

2010-05-05T17:34:00.001-04:00

I guess I'm pulling for the Suns in the NBA Playoffs now. At least someone in Arizona is doing something right. Here's "frostback" Steve Nash's awesome quote:

“I think it’s fantastic,” Nash said after Tuesday’s practice. “I think the law is very misguided. I think it’s, unfortunately, to the detriment of our society and our civil liberties. I think it’s very important for us to stand up for things we believe in. As a team and as an organization, we have a lot of love and support for all of our fans. The league is very multicultural. We have players from all over the world, and our Latino community here is very strong and important to us.”

Pretty classy fellas. Right on. And it reminds me of this golden oldie from Sadly, No! Remember Michelle Malkin? Remember when she was relevant? Ah, those were the days...

*cross-posted

Quote of the Day

2010-05-03T14:59:00.001-04:00

Gawker edition:

The main lesson here: Don't be racist. But if you really, really are—and really, really need to voice your racist thoughts—don't write them in an email to a devious friend who may later sabotage you. Simply find the nearest well and shout your racist thoughts into them; get it out of your system, and continue on with your bigoted life.

Joining Forces

2010-04-26T23:11:00.003-04:00

Isaac's not the only one making changes these days. Or, more precisely, he's not doing it alone.

You may have noticed things have been a bit quiet here at 99 Seats Central of late. I've been doing some thinking about this blog, about theatre and blogging in general and trying to decide what my next move is. Because, to be honest with y'all, I'm kind of tired of talking about theatre. I know I've only been kicking it for a couple of years and a lot of cats have been at it a lot longer than I have, but there's kind of only so much you can say. I've said it before, but it bears saying again: doing is way better than talking. I've got some things cooking on various fires, with announcements soon to come, in the doing column. And so, maybe it's time for less talking. About theatre anyway.

'Cause, in case you didn't notice, I got stuff to say about other stuff. About other forms of dramatic writing, about other important matters of great importance. But at maybe less of a clip. At the same time, Isaac has been expanding the focus of Parabasis to involve some other super-interesting writers. He approached me about joining forces. I thought about it for a while...and decided to jump in.

Isaac's a friend, a colleague and an all-around good guy. We tend to see eye-t0-eye on a lot of things and even the things we don't, we're able to talk to each other reasonably and with respect. I dig on that.

So...this isn't the end of 99 Seats or anything. Just...a new stage. Come visit me over at Isaac's.

Happy Birthday, Will

2010-04-23T12:42:00.002-04:00

This should make you feel young again.

No matter our differences, or the outbursts of snark, we're all Friends of Will.

Quote of the Day

2010-04-21T17:06:00.002-04:00

The always awesome Ken Lin, as interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz:

Theater really reminds me of an organic food store that just closed in my neighborhood. When I first moved here, I thought, "Wow, there's an organic food store here. This is a great neighborhood." But I never shopped there because everything was so expensive. They are liquidating now and everything is 50% off and I went to buy some things. I went to a counter with all these boxes that were covered in dust and when all was said and done, I still thought that it was too expensive. I think theater is similar. Who wouldn't want a theater to open up in their neighborhood? But, can a community afford to sustain these theaters under the current models? The answer is clearly -- no. Too often, we are in the business of catering to wealthy people, while leaving everyone else sitting in front of the tvs with their microwave dinners. What are we left with? Over-priced, dusty boxes of well-intentioned food. If I could change one thing to change this system, I'd do it, but I don't know what that one thing is.

And also, congrats, Ken!

Through The Looking-Glass

2010-04-21T16:38:00.002-04:00

This is where we are now. Republican candidate says off-hand dumb thing. Republican candidate actually repeats dumb thing. Today, Republican candidate goes even further and continues to repeat dumb thing.

This is the leading Republican candidate to replace Harry Reid. And I'll bet you a chicken that she will continue to be. Because this is what we're dealing with.

I'd like to think that we're coming to the bottom of the barrel of crazy. But somehow...I doubt it.

It's going to be a long year.

The Single Most Important Question of All Time!

2010-04-21T09:38:00.002-04:00

Answer away!

Yes, Stop The Madness

2010-04-20T22:12:00.002-04:00

Aggh. Aggh. Aggh. Aggh. I've been feeling a bit ornery and cranky lately, which is one of the reasons I've been running silent lately. I don't think there's much to be gained from being a public nuisance. But. Well. This kind of pisses me off. The whole thing that went on with Tom a couple of weeks back has stuck in my craw for a bit and I've been wiggling it around and around to try to figure out what it bugs me about it and it's taken me until now to get a better handle on it.

To refresh everyone's memory, Tom wrote this. I responded thus. In the comments, Tom said this (largely without edit):

In the first place, I'd like to say that many of my writings have little in common with what I actually do in my day-to-day teaching. They are things I think about, toss over in my head, muse about. I share them in my blogs partly as a way to clear my head, partly as a way to think things through, and partly as a way to make other artists think about these things. These are not necessarily things I say in class, but when I do say them, I always preface them with a caution that these are my personal opinions and observations, that they are not gospel, and they can take them or leave them. I even offer them the possibility of considering that my opinions are, as has been suggested here, the rantings of a bitter old man - I do not hide that possibility from them. What I actually do - every single day - is my best to prepare them for the careers they aspire to - every facet of those careers that I can think of. Obviously, you have only my word for that as well, but if you'd like to investigate it, please do. There are many Fredonia alums in NYC.

For the record, it is absolutely and unequivocally my practice every single day in my classroom to do whatever is in my power to help my students succeed in reaching whatever goals they set for themselves. In the particular case I quoted in my TACT blog, the young man in question was in my office just yesterday where I had a 30-minute discussion with him talking about his talent, his potential for success, and what he needed to do to make his dream come true. We also talked about the scene he had just done, which was in fact pretty good. Never once did I say to him, "You're untalented and foolish and you should think about digging ditches." I made sure he understood how difficult it was, that the odds were not in his favor, and that he would have to have no small amount of pure luck, but he was bringing some good qualities to the table. Never did I express to him I thought he was being unrealistic. Frankly, that's none of my business, and he is paying me to help him succeed. You'll have to take my word that I did that as well.

In other words, the portrait about my teaching practices being painted here have no foundation in reality to them. They are assumptions readers and commentators have made; none of them have actually seen me teach. These assertions and assumptions have been drawn from the private ramblings that go on in my head, the various things I think about and write about. I would encourage the readers of my writings to assume the opposite - that I keep my private thoughts and my classroom practices largely separate, and generally I offer my own private thoughts to my students only when pressed. You, as a reader, are actually getting to read things going on in my head that my students almost never hear (unless they are reading my blogs as well, which could be possible, but I am not aware that is happening). I teach in a pre-professional program, and that's what I train my actors for, but I make sure they understand every single aspect of that career, its warts as well as its rewards. I am working to change that, working to be able to offer alternatives, and working to find those kinds of students interested in a different approach to doing theatre in this country. I don't like the waste of talent I see in this country - it's not sustainable. When I have the kinds of students interested in sustainable, community-grounded theatre, I will leave the pre-professional training to others, and I will switch my practices and focus on giving those students the kind of education they want.

And now this from Scott. This is normally the part where I profess my respect and affection for Scott and my support, though qualified for his positions. But...I'm feeling ornery, so not this time. I think this whole line of...whatever is crap. And, before you start in (and by "you," I mean Scott) with this being about me defending NYLACHI's evil, evil ways, I think it's crap because it's an impossibly, ridiculously and utterly out of touch way of looking at the business of acting and the ways actors make money and live in places like New York. In fact, I think it shows an odd fixation with NYLACHI (and essentially Broadway) as being the way Scott and Tom measure success.

First off, I will say this: I was wrong to imply or even state that Tom's post was or should be taken as a reflection of his teaching style or attitude. I don't know how he teaches or the way he conducts himself in front of his students and I shouldn't imply anything about that. And, yes, I do understand that a blog post can be a good way to blow off steam or give voice to the things you don't think you can say in other situations. That said, I do think it's naive to think that, if you're blogging under your own name, that your students don't know about it. Playing the "I don't know if they ever read it" card is just abdicating responsibility. So, apologies, Tom.

But Tom's teaching isn't the actual question. The question is the attitude underneath it.

So Scott and Tom think it's nuts for 1,000 people to line up for an open call for Hair on Broadway. It's a sign of NYC being bloated and over-run with young actors who are just wasting their talent at auditions for a limited number of roles that they're pursuing, at least in part, because of a TV-fed desire to get famous. The numbers, odds and systemic barriers to they're ever appearing on Broadway make it just ridiculous for them to try, so we need to re-think our entire system, which is based on actors dreaming of appearing on Broadway.

Okay. Where do we start? I guess, I start with Dennis' video. Yep, that's a lot of people! And yep, Equity open calls have a lot of people there! And yep, an actor needs to take all day sometimes to go to one. I've known people who couldn't, people who had to leave, people who got screwed over by it. I'm not saying it's the fairest way of doing things, but you know, job interviews for any position rarely are. We also don't get a sense of who got seen, what the experience was like, what happened next for any of them. Did any of them get cast? How many? How many parts were they looking to fill? The full cast of Hair is 32 people. Not great odds, no, but not the worst in the world. One three minute video of a lot of people doesn't actually tell a story, other than there are a lot of people who want to be in a Broadway show. We don't even know what kind of training, if any, these folks have. We know nothing about them except they want to be in a show. We don't know if any of them are already in shows or have other arts jobs or

My issue here, though, is with Scott and Tom's very, very narrow definition of success and waste. Not being on Broadway, not winning an Academy Award is a waste, is talent thrown away. Scott fixates narrowly on the unemployment rate for Actors Equity as the definition of success. As far as Scott's concerned, New York theatre begins at 40th St and ends at 53rd, in a way that, as a New York theatre artist (and a native New Yorker) is not what's it like here.

This isn't the part where I say how great the talent is here. That's not what it's about. It's about the path of an artist and the path of an actor and that there are lots of ways and roads to satisfying work. From outside of NY, maybe it looks like making it to Broadway is the goal of everyone, but from here, you know what? It's not. I'm not saying the city is swimming in lucrative acting jobs, but there are other paths and options. And some of them don't involve the stage at all. And I don't see it as a waste.

It can be a struggle and there are trade-offs and hard choices involved. And, yeah, some people wind up leaving the field. But that's going to happen, no matter what. And some do go back to small communities and form theatres. And you know what? Some get jobs in television. Some make commercials. There are a whole raft of things between not acting and being famous, a whole lot of other ways of being successful. I think that Scott and Tom get that, but instead focus entirely on the narrowest bandwidth as "successful" and want that bandwidth to stay just as narrow, but move a few spots down the dial.

I really don't understand the whole attitude. I actually I do understand it. It's bitterness. When people say, "no one owes you a career in the arts," it's that bitterness that they're responding to. We're all familiar with the stereotypical acting teacher who couldn't make it and pushes his or her students to succeed. This feels to me like the flip side of the same coin. I'm sorry to say it, but it does.

I think CRADLE's a grand thing, I do. And necessary. But if these guys want to stop the madness...well, stop the madness. Let it go. The kids will be all right.

Quote of the Day

2010-04-20T16:05:00.001-04:00

Steve Benen edition:

What's the point of even having a public discourse when the leadership of a political party treats the truth like a punch-line?

Now would be a terrific time for a real debate. Republicans could -- get this -- raise legitimate objections to the legislation, and raise concerns that -- believe it or not -- are entirely sensible.

But, no. We can't have real debates because we're too busy suffering through idiotic mendacity.

Note to Republican leaders: liars become pathological when the truth works just as well, but you actually prefer dishonesty.

Well...When You Put It Like THAT...

2010-04-20T13:07:00.002-04:00

A lot of what we do sounds really, really bad in black and white. And in terms of things like, you know, the law. As the folks of the New York State Theater Institute apparently just found out.

An obscure upstate theater group that receives far more state aid than any of New York’s world-renowned cultural institutions is rife with corruption, mismanagement, nepotism and possibly illegal conduct, according to a scathing report released on Tuesday by the state inspector general’s office.
(...snip...)
The report alleges that the artistic director, Patricia Snyder, treated the group as a personal fiefdom, routinely doling out acting roles, directing jobs, production work and other benefits to herself and her family members. Ms. Snyder steered a total of more than $700,000 in payments to her husband, her two sons, her two daughters-in-law and to herself, the report said.

The big-ticket items? Patricia Snyder hired herself as a director and double-dipped on her pension fund through the SSDC (which the article makes sound like some fly-by-night outfit run by either the Chicago Combine or gypsies). She produced an audiobook written by her daughter-in-law, composed by her son and co-produced by her husband. There's some implied stuff about an apartment in the city supposedly for the company but used by her family...which appears to include a number of the artists involved. That's pretty much it.

Now, I don't know these folks or the particulars of this case and there may be real actual shenanigans afoot. If not shenanigans, sketchy business practices with state money, which is, obviously, bad. But...at the same time...where's the line between nepotism and what's essentially a small family business? (Again, I'm not saying they should be enriching themselves off of the public teat or not serving their community; but the entire article treats all of this like a RICO indictment and these "jobs" making "theatre" were essentially no-show or no-work jobs that Tony gave to Chris.) Where's the line between building and becoming a part of a community and being a flim-flam artist who's soaking them for their hard-earned dough. I've heard that Diane Paulus has run into some of the same questions up at Harvard with her production of The Donkey Show and when I read the Globe article a few weeks ago, I had some similar reservations. Certainly there are some questionable aspects to it...but part of it is...well, it's the business of show. We marry people we work with. Sometimes we work with people so that we might...um...marry them. We raise our kids in the theatre, teaching them the trade. (Yeah. Let's put it that way.) Our work is often underfunded, undersupported and, because artists are at the shallow end of the payment pool, underpaid. So we figure out ways, sometimes sketchy ways, sometimes less than totally above-board ways, to get paid. When the hammer comes down, though, it's always on the chiseling individual who's betrayed our trust, never on the system that makes it possible...and sometimes necessary.

But when you look at it in cold, black-and-white letters in the paper of record...yeah, it does sound more like Tony Soprano than William Shakespeare. But how do we fix it without making doing theatre an onerous thing that separates families rather than brings them together?

Quote of the Day

2010-04-14T10:41:00.001-04:00

Lisa Timmel edition:

So, why new plays? Because the world changes and perspectives shift. Because American theatre, in all its forms, thrives on the new, it always has. Our theatre history is full of the degenerate melding of forms: immigrant melodramas, minstrelsy, vaudeville and musicals all of them bubbling up into the mainstream one way or another and getting whitewashed along the way. There simply is no other way to tell the story of this country and our selves without including new work.

Incidentally, the answer to the question “Why classic plays?” is exactly the same: Because the world changes and perspectives shift. There simply is no other way to tell the story of this country and our selves without including plays from other places and other eras.

H/T, as per usual.

Mike Huckabee's a Pig

2010-04-12T10:27:00.002-04:00

I used to have some measure of respect for Mike Huckabee, I really did. He seemed like a genuinely good guy, despite being someone I disagree with completely. I actually used to think he was a real electoral threat, since he was so nice and reasonable and personable.

Yeah. Not any more.

"I think this is not about trying to create statements for people who want to change the basic fundamental definitions of family," Huckabee said. "And always we should act in the best interest of the children, not in the seeming interest of the adults."
"Children are not puppies," he continued. "This is not a time to see if we can experiment and find out, how does this work?"

Even after box turtles, man on dog, the end of marriage as we know it, that's is still one of the more disgusting, wrong-headed and bigoted statements I've ever heard. In any right and reasonable country, this would end his aspirations to higher office. Someday I hope to live in a right and reasonable country.

Fame...I Wanna Live Forever!

2010-04-11T22:41:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine linked to this post from Tom Loughlin at TACT today. Tom recounts an e-mail sent to him by a student in his Acting for Non-Actors class and it started him thinking about the need for fame. Some key bits:

The young person who wrote this email is a very nice and very engaging student. But he is not thinking rationally. He is a victim of what I have come to call the “fame factor” in theatre education. It exists not only in theatre, of course, but across the culture. Created almost entirely by the pervasiveness of mass media, young people no longer pursue success; they pursue fame as well. The writer of this email simply believes he will be famous someday and win the Academy Award, and he needs nothing but the simple fact of his belief in that idea to make it come true for him (except maybe a little more help from me with his acting, as if I could make such a difference – another illusion).

And this:

This widespread drive to be famous is a relatively recent phenomenon in our society. Before the complete domination of mass media on our thought processes, becoming famous was not a concept held by every average person. Most people expected to lead average, normal lives such as they saw around them on a daily basis. Most people people prior to the 20th century lived and died within a 50-mile radius of where they were born. Today’s mass media, however, makes the idea of fame a possibility accessible to everyone. Every movie, television show, reality show, hit song – you name it, and people see it, see it’s famous, and want a slice of that pie. More people today can name movie stars than can name scientists or government policy makers. Because of the fact of its continued and overwhelming presence in our culture, people come to believe that fame is possible for anyone. Shows like American Idol in fact count on it.

And his finale:

The sad truth is that, for all their dreaming of fame, the statistics say that most of our students will not achieve their dreams. Perhaps for 15 minutes, maybe. If we want to be honest educators, we need to start telling students the truth, and build better options for them for their theatrical futures. It can be done if we have the will, and perhaps if we are willing to re-think our own dreams of fame.

For good measure, he links to this Onion article.

I like Tom a lot, but I disagree with just about every single part of his post. I really, really do. I think it's horrible, horrible advice for a young person, even though it comes from a good-ish place. I certainly feel Tom's frustration with the elevated expectations of young men and women, and we should certainly could do more to expand their ideas of success and possible life choices. But other than that...it's just kind of mean and bitter.

Let's think about it this way. A student in a history seminar takes a liking to the course work, even though she's not a major and writes the professor a message saying, "I know my last paper's haven't been great, but I'm really excited by this material and the coursework and I want to be the best student I can be. And, who knows, maybe I'll wind up as President and can invite you to the inauguration! I hope so!" Do you think the professor should respond with, "Well, since no women and only 43 people have ever been President of the US, it's not a very realistic or conceivable goal. You should think about your other options right now!"? Is that going to further this student's career? Their growth? Honestly, we wouldn't even expect a teacher to say that. And way more folks have won Academy Awards in acting (nearly 300) than have won the presidency.

Listen, I get that it's an unrealistic goal if this kid thinks one class is going to turn him into an award-winning actor. But, from my read and Tom's description, this is a young guy, trying it out, and trying to work hard. Why shouldn't he aim high? Say what you want about the politics or whatever about it, but it's basically the highest award an actor can win and it generally goes to a pretty accomplished or skilled actor. Yes, yes, advantages and unfairness and blah blah blah, but really, it's not just given out to anyone. And this kid is willing to do the work. He's not asking for a pass or a easy ride. He's offering to come in and do extra work to feel satisfaction. Why would you want to discourage that?

What's worse about this is making the connection between this kid, who again is looking to work harder, and the likes of the odious reality-TV "stars." When these things come up, there's always this current of, well, sneering at awards and success as the product of a selfish desire for attention. An artist should want to achieve at high level, they should push themselves to be the best they can be, and, in a lot of ways, accolades are proof of that. And they come with a pretty big stage and the opportunity to affect lives. I'm not saying that everyone has noble goals and intents, but not everyone has shallow, self-serving goals, either.

The kid isn't thinking rationally...but what kid is? He's a college student and trying out the things that fall in his path. Today, it's Oscar-winner. Tomorrow, it may be brain surgeon. Or astronaut. But right now he is thinking, if he wants to win an Oscar, he has to work harder and hold himself to a higher standard. All of that is the first step in the right direction. And along that path...who knows? This kid may want to be a big acting star now, but if he pursues it, he may find he doesn't like it and wants to do something else, write, design, direct, or teach. He may decide that he wants to head back to his hometown and found a community theatre. Who knows where his path goes. But to start him off telling him to give up on his dreams...that's a dead end.

Who's Better Than You?

2010-04-07T21:25:00.002-04:00

This post has a whole lot of truth rattling around in it. So go read it.

I have many thoughts on internships and such, but the day job was a bear today. So you have to wait until tomorrow. Sorry.

But seriously, go check this out.

Via via.

Once In A Blue Moon...

2010-04-06T10:47:00.007-04:00

...I disagree with Isaac. It does actually happen. Hold onto your hats.

Isaac highlights this article from the NY Times on unpaid internships in the for-profit world. Scott Walters has dug in deep on the elitist aspect of unpaid internships here and further here. Like Isaac, I have no issues with Scott's take on the elitist aspect and the geographical advantage (While I was intern, I worked a full-time job, but I did have the advantage of living at home). I'm unconvinced, though, by Isaac's claims of exploitation. Or at least that most theatre internships fail to meet the six requirements of an internship, as set out by federal government. Isaac lists them as such:

The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to that which would be given in a vocational school;
The training is for the benefit of the trainees;
The trainees do no displace regular employees, but work under their close observation;
The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and, on occasion, the employer’s operations might actually be impeded;
The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training period; and
The employer and the trainees understand that the trainees are not entitled to wages for the time training. (Note that as an exception to this criterion, tuition assistance and nominal stipends for students are not considered wages).

He says:

The issue is that the Department of Labor does not want internships to be used to skirt minimum wage laws. We all know the nonprofit sector (or at least theatre) is rife with these programs. Yet we also live in a world where many theaters can barely afford the staff they do have. What is to be done?

And what of programs that aren't illegal but are clearly exploitative? I can think of at least one festival where you pay them to build their sets as an acting apprentice. Now, that's not illegal, but it certainly feels wrong in my book.

Internships come in all sizes and flavors, with, honestly, all kinds of names: intern, apprentice, associate, what-have-you. I've done my fair share, as well as my fair share of low-paid entry-level work. First off, it's all pretty exploitative. I have my doubts that any producing theatre organization in this country really pays minimum wage or pays any attention at all to work rules on overtime, comp time, breaks or just about anything. You show up when they ask you to show up and you leave when there's nothing left to do. And there's always something else to do. I'm not arguing it's a healthy thing; it leads to burnout, turnover and brain-drain. We would do well to reform our work practices. But that, alone, in my mind, doesn't equal exploitation.

And, yes, a lot of theatres, including some I've worked at, certainly use interns to skirt paying for support staff. Interns are receptionists, messengers, janitors, sometimes exterminators. They are given crap work to do and told it's building them as an artist and a theatre professional.

And it is. I'm sorry. It just is. Being an intern makes a theatre person a better theatre person. It's an integral part of an education in theatre. Which is why it should be paid (or at least funded), it should be more open and equal access, and maybe a little bit formalized. But it is very much a reciprocal thing.

In a way, you can't have it both ways. An intern program can't be something available only to the elites, giving them an invaluable leg-up in the industry that less fortunate people can't get AND an exploitative "slavery" that benefits the institution to the detriment of the individual. It's one or the other.

I'm talking from my experience, now, so I don't have the charts and figures to back me up and maybe my experience is singular, but I've also seen this at work in practice. When you're an intern, you're learning the ropes, especially in small theatres. Everyone does a lot of different things and, even though you're mostly doing menial labor, there's also the opportunity to be involved in larger efforts, to understand how a theatre functions from the ground up. It's a ground-eye (and sometimes toilet-eye) view, but it's an important one.

Again, this is anecdote, not data, but data is sometimes...incomplete, isn't it? I did my internship at the Ensemble Studio Theatre and basically walked in off the street. Other people in my intern "class" had studied with members of the theatre or met them here or there, but there were also a few of us who'd basically picked the joint out of the phone book. My internship was spent answering phones, stuffing envelopes and serving as a house manager, precisely because I had a full-time job and could only convince my boss to let me out for one morning (the interns were supposed to do 8 hours at the theatre over the course of the week). But we were also given a workshop, a showcase and the opportunity to be involved in productions as assistant stage managers, production assistant, audition readers, god knows all what else. After my internship, I joined a writers' group at the theatre and four years later, I was on staff. Precisely because I knew how the theatre worked, I was part of the community, part of the family.

A lot of the other people I interned followed a similar path and I've worked with several of them since. Others went to work in other theatres. Interns who worked under me as a staff person had similar trajectories. At one point, more than half of the paid full and part-time staff of the theatre were former interns. This is one of the things that often gets left out of the equation. For a lot of theatres and organizations, at least in NYC, these entry-level volunteer positions are your foot in the door.

If we want to move away from specialists with narrow focus, internships are a key part of that path. I worked for a summer theatre with a large crew of interns and apprentices, who paid to be there, take acting classes and work in our scene lab. The students who did saw a 360 degree world of theatre, not just acting or directing or whatever their focus, but all of the parts that go into making a theatre work. Why shouldn't they? How would they build good, strong theatres if they don't?

I don't see any of this as exploitative. Maybe I don't because, you know, I participated in it. Maybe. But I think "exploitation" is not the right word for it. A lot of internships are abusive, that's for damn sure. But then again, pretty much all theatre jobs are abusive. Our entire staffing structure is based on the idea that, for the artistic staffing jobs certainly, people would be there for free, so paying them a small amount is almost a bonus. We work insane hours, for not nearly the compensation we deserve, under ridiculous pressures. My years at E.S.T. I worked roughly the same hours as my lawyer friend. He was taking home twice what I made before taxes. It's totally and completely abusive, sure. But it doesn't stop with interns. It may start there, but it doesn't stop.

By all means, let's try to reform the system, standardize it. Add some protections against abuse. But the intern system is the closest you get to a real apprenticeship in the theatre. Let's not lose sight of that.

Quote of the Day

2010-04-06T09:57:00.001-04:00

Get the customers who already want to love you but can't. There are vast swaths of this city, basically un-covered because they are poor and black. In those neighborhoods and suburbs you can't find the paper sold, and if you don't know about it already you won't see it marketed. "Nobody reads us there," was the refrain I always heard, which ... okay, that's a problem as has a solution: GO GET READERS THERE THEN. Sell as hard there as you do in Lincoln Park. Well, sell harder. And for God's sake, at least pretend the neighborhood ain't a foreign country when you do show up to cover it. Quit condescending and start working.

- Athenae at First Draft

Behold! The Dark Continent!

2010-04-06T09:43:00.002-04:00

Via Ta-Nehisi Coates, this piece from Granta gives the lowdown on how to REALLY write about Africa:

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Pretty sage advice.

Snark aside, it does highlight something I'm currently wrestling with, as I continue to work on this: how do you write about Africa? Do you write about it at all or just tell the story you're telling? How do you approach the complicated legacy and tangled connections we have to that place? It's one of the things I want to unravel in my work, because I want to unravel it in my life. Figuring out where to start is key. And, to be honest, the piece in Granta helps. It helps to remember that it's a large, complex, complicated place and there is no one story of Africa, no one legacy to wrestle with. I can pick at my little part of it and see where it takes me.

Just as long as I leave out the monkey brains.

A Whole New Ballgame*

2010-04-05T09:36:00.002-04:00

The Playgoer brings us this awesome nugget for a Monday morning:

As part of an effort to increase the impact of its giving, the Ford Foundation is to announce a plan on Monday to dedicate $100 million to the development of arts spaces nationwide over the next decade. The plan is by far the largest commitment the foundation has ever made to the construction, maintenance and enhancement of arts facilities.

The plan, called the Supporting Diverse Art Spaces Initiative, is one of several large financing projects that have resulted from a strategic overhaul of the foundation’s operations since its president, Luis A. Ubiñas, took over in 2008. He has moved the foundation in the direction of bundling its hundreds of millions of dollars in grants — which have traditionally varied widely in their focus — into large programs oriented toward specific issues. Other recent commitments include $80 million to bolster public programs for the unemployed and underpaid, $100 million for secondary education in seven cities and $50 million to help cities buy foreclosed properties.

Yeah, that's pretty much unqualified good news. I know there's a lot of talk of the edifice complex and places that spend money on space over artists. I know because I've talked it. And I believe it, to boot. But there's also a need for more space, hopefully cheaper spaces, more multi-use spaces. The quote at the end of the NY Times article sounds the right note:

Judilee Reed, executive director of LINC, said the foundation’s initiative is particularly well timed.
“I think people are beginning to understand that spaces for artists and art are more than just buildings, structures,” she said. “The way these spaces animate their communities and the relationships they have to their communities is ripe for development.”

Right on. More like that, please.

*In honor of this (we're just pretending last night didn't happen) and because "game changer" is, well, pretty over-used these days.

This. Is. Rich.

2010-04-03T09:59:00.002-04:00

Yeah, Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, being attacked for covering up sexual abuse by your subordinates, something the Church actually did is totally like attacking all Jews for something none of them did.

You know what's a lot like anti-Semitism? Anti-Semitism.

Good Questions...And Bad.

2010-04-02T10:35:00.002-04:00

David Cote asked a question in the Guardian:

Anyone leafing through the London Review of Books will see the bylines of published novelists or non-fiction authors. So why don't we read Stoppard on Hare? Ravenhill on Prebble? Churchill on Butterworth? You would enjoy a whole new level of technical perception and aesthetic empathy, not more middle-of-the-road consumer reporting which is virtually indistinguishable from telly or film reviewing. Of course, this raises a perennial question: must theatre critics have firsthand knowledge of the craft?

Wicked Stage Rob follows up at the spiffy TCGBlog:

Of course, the biggest objection to reviewing a field you work in is, as Cote succinctly concludes, “politics.” Another way to put that is: Theatre is a small world and you shouldn’t poop where you eat. With the advent of social media, it can be an even smaller world, as Alexis Soloski, a critic for Village Voice, noted in a blog post last year that tracked her evolving views. She says she used to think there was “no reason theatremakers and critics shouldn’t fraternise. We went to the same parties. We took the same drugs. We even dated one another. And most of my journalist colleagues were also aspiring actors, directors, playwrights or dramaturges; for models, we looked to Shaw or Tynan. We knew the heartache and toil that went into theatrical productions, even bad ones: surely, we were uniquely qualified to critique them.”

The Alexis Soloski piece he quotes is here. The thing is, back in November, Isaac and I went around on this very subject. I said this then and still stand by it:

In an e-mail exchange a while back, Isaac posed the whole "why don't playwrights review plays" question and my response was that it had a lot to do with profit motive: a review from a playwright couldn't be trusted because either they were trying to curry favor with the theatre or they were trying to drag down a rival. Since most reviews are primarily a tool for generating sales (as you can see, I may not have the best feelings about the state of criticism in this country right now), who would want a rival doing the reviewing?

Since doing this blog, I've had my integrity questioned on more than one occasion. I know Isaac has, too, a lot more, even. And it keeps me from writing reviews, from talking about the work. I don't want to talk smack about my friends, even if I didn't like their work, for fear that A) they'll take it personally and B) that it might, somehow, hurt their career (not that this blog is all that, but it is Google-able). I'm happy to talk about things I like, but things I don't...I keep to myself a bit.

When I was in grad school, one of my teachers made a big deal to my class about how hard the life of the playwright is, how much work it is, and how, really, no one else can fully understand it. His point was that, as playwrights, we were all in the same foxhole, all in this together. That made quite the impression on me. I've been in one playwrights' group or another since 1997. I love the company of playwrights and it feels like writing a review is somehow a betrayal of that. I know that's just me; I'm certain there are other playwrights who don't share that same feeling. But that's how I feel.

There's a part in this, too, about the feeling of scarcity. We exist in a field that's perpetually starving and it can feel like you're taking food from someone else if you write a bad review. You're hurting their play, hurting their career and, the assumption is, angling to help your own. We don't have a culture of confidence and safety, where I can say my piece about your work and it won't matter because you have your resources and audience and I have mine. It just feels...personal.

I'm not saying this is healthy or good for the field. In fact, I think it's patently bad and connected to a whole host of pathologies that stunt our field and our artists. Absolutely artists should be able to speak about each other's work critically and honestly, in print or wherever. Of course having the perspective of someone who's been in the rehearsal room recently (or even currently) would shape criticism to the better, give a fuller view. If we want theatre criticism to rise above consumer reporting, we need practicing artists to tell us what they think of the art. However we can encourage that, let's! I'm just saying that it might take some convincing to get playwrights in the right head-space. Myself included.

A few years back, in David's own magazine, I received a pretty rotten review, written by another young playwright. We weren't friends, but we knew a lot of the same folks. His criticism was actually pretty spot-on, if snarkier than I would have liked. Still, I nursed a grudge against that guy for years. Years! I would see his name in press releases and e-mail blasts and give it a dirty look. Finally, at some event or other, we wound up at a bar, next to each other. I'd had a couple of beers, so I didn't mind turning to him and saying, "I owe you a pop in the nose!" At first, he was, of course, confused and mildly concerned (I'm not really the "pop in the nose" kind of fella), but when I mentioned the review, he covered his face with his hands and let out a moan. It was the only review he ever wrote, he felt terrible about all that time and tried to retract it. I told him that I was kidding about the pop in the nose (only sorta) and that his review was actually pretty right. We hugged it out, and kept drinking. A nice ending to the tale, but there is why playwrights don't do more criticism: the way things are right now, it doesn't do anybody much good.

Quote of the Day

2010-04-01T07:32:00.001-04:00

Marion McClinton, in The Chicago Tribune:

Aggressively announce your presence and vitality to the world, not apologize for it. Demand a new house built on the foundation of the 21st Century, not ask meekly for just a seat at the table, busing dishes quietly until everybody else is done eating and accepting their leftovers as the best you can do for now. To do whatever is necessary to succeed, instead of accepting the brass ring remains out of your reach until someone deems it time for you to hold it.

(H/T Isaac)

Things That Made Me Happy Today

2010-03-31T19:46:00.002-04:00

- Welcome back, Tony.

-Broadway is looking very, very exciting right now.

-Exactly how dumb does Fox News think its audience is? Apparently that stupid.

-Today in terrible parenting.

-My blog-brother, Isaac, hit one thing burning up the internets today. Here's the other:

Not To Change The Subject, But...

2010-03-31T13:53:00.002-04:00

...this is just about the best idea I've heard all day.

Okay, maybe I did mean to change the subject a little bit.

Nothing To See Here

2010-03-31T09:02:00.002-04:00

Isaac notices something. His commenters, in particular Aaron Riccio, disagree, pooh-pooh it, say, in essence, there's nothing to see here, keep it moving. And I sigh and shake my head.

After the last dust-up around race and theatre, I've backed off. It gets too contentious, too quickly, people I like say things I disagree with and everyone winds up with a bad taste in their mouth. But...just because it's hard, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be talking about it.

Playwrights and the Public are the first of the major NYC institutions to announce for 2010-2011, at least their tent poles and both are pretty white. We'll see how the other ones come out. Who knows.

Aaron, in Isaac's comments, asks:

It just seems like there's always going to be something to complain about, though. I mean, if not this, it'd be that they weren't having any female playwrights. This is NOT to say that there isn't under-representation. However, I'd be curious (again, I'm a stat man, so if this study already exists, please direct me to it) if there's a demographic study of the current pool of playwrights.

Well. I don't know if he's heard about this book, Outrageous Fortune. Some folks have talked about it. You know, a little bit. Of the 250 playwrights surveyed, which I think would be "the current crop of playwrights" more or less, 76% were white and 24% were people of color, which, overall, hews fairly close to demographics of the nation (though that may change soon). So you would think that a quarter of the plays produced on our stages would be by writers of color. And, in New York City, which has a markedly different racial make-up from the rest of the country, you would expect something markedly different, particularly from our Off-Broadway theatres. (And if Aaron wants more demographics of the field, there's also this study. The findings are remarkably similar, which suggests it's a wider issue.)

I'm not trying to make a case for affirmative action or quotas here. They are something I believe in, that's for sure, and I support, but I do recognize that, given the nature of theatre, they're not necessarily optimal or even feasible. (Who would enforce them? How do you factor for quality? Other, far smarter people than I have some ideas and answers, but that's for another post.) But, to begin with, recognizing that there is a problem is the first step.

It's funny to me that we have no problem in other areas. Take this initiative. It seems like lots of folks are on board for that. Martin Denton's nytheatre.com has a whole section devoted to keeping track. I don't recall seeing any pushback on that front, any questioning of whether or not that's necessary or if the demographics of the playwriting pool demand it. (For the record, the Outrageous Fortune pool was 48% women.) I'm not trying to compare oppressions or get into my lot is worse than yours. I'm simply talking about the field's response to stimulus. Emily Glassberg Sands did her thing and we got this. Maybe if we have a study of minority playwrights, we'll get a section on nytheatre.com.

Anyone who's been reading this blog lately has seen that I'm pretty aware of the state of racism in this country these days. Contra freeman, this is part of that conversation. How does theatre confront the "actual" racism if we can't attend to our own houses? If we're only hearing part of the conversation?

To go in the Way Back Machine, Adam Feldman had a pretty good list of plays by black playwrights last season here. And that's not even the work by Asian playwrights or Latino/a playwrights. And that's not to say there aren't bright spots coming up. But that doesn't mean there's nothing to talk about, to consider, to discuss.

Obviously, this should be the beginning of the conversation. But it's a conversation we need to be having.

And With This...

2010-03-30T10:22:00.001-04:00

...I throw up my hands and go back to bed. I can do absolutely nothing with this.

Good night, everybody!

In Other News, Rae Dawn Chong Writes Angry E-mail to C. Thomas Howell*

2010-03-30T09:28:00.003-04:00

Is this actually news? I mean, news we can use? What, was Phoebe Cates unavailable? Good going, Newsbusters.

Anyway, I always felt her best work could be found in this movie:

*Cf. Like you didn't know that.

Paging Dr. Jones...Paging Dr. Indiana Jones...

2010-03-29T14:13:00.002-04:00

So, clearly, someone hasn't read any Lovecraft, or watched any Indiana Jones movies or seen Ghostbusters or Stargate or really any movie from the last, say, 30 years or so, because otherwise, they'd have known better than to unearth this thing:

Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,500-year-old door to the afterlife from the tomb of a high-ranking Egyptian official near Karnak temple in Luxor, the Egyptian antiquities authority said Monday.
These recessed niches found in nearly all ancient Egyptian tombs were meant to take the spirits of the dead to and from the afterworld. The nearly six-foot- tall (1.75 meters) slab of pink granite was covered with religious texts.

To Gozer or Zuul or Vigo or the Ogdru Jahad or whatever nasty beastie that comes crawling out of that thing: I was with you the whole time! I'll be your Renfield. Or Louis Tully. Or whatever you need. We cool?

World Theater Day

2010-03-29T13:13:00.001-04:00

...was this weekend. What did you do? What did you see?

Double-You Tee Eff?

2010-03-29T11:58:00.000-04:00

Submitted without comment.

Multiple Things I Have Read Recently and Liked

2010-03-29T10:59:00.002-04:00

I figured I'd go with a very descriptive title for this. Why get fancy?

- Via the Clyde Fitch Report, say hello to Karen Greco and PR for Smarties. Her bona fides are, well, bona fide. And these two posts are both grand. It might just be NYC's answer to Adam Thurman. (Who, by the by, has been doing some good work lately himself.)

- Speaking of good work lately, Garrett at the Playgoer has been en fuego as they say on Sportscenter. Read this, this and this, if you haven't already. How's that for a slice of fried gold? Heckuva week, Playgoer.

- Earth Hour happened this weekend. Did you know about it? I didn't until the last minute. Playwright and blogger Susanna Speier wrote about her Earth Hour, and her thoughts have some relevance for theatre, I think:

Rituals with sticking power are infectious as a hit summer blockbuster. They are not the created by well intended non-profits. They are a cultural invasion and an accident. Rituals with sticking power surge up from a deeply visceral collective impulse that is rarely understood at the time of the surge. Whether they want to be or not, people get sucked in by their centers of gravity. Rituals, like languages, evolve through practice as their context is defined and re-defined.

It's good stuff, and worth a longer look (I'll post more on this later). RTWT.

- Also in the world of not-quite-theatre, but totally related (at least in my mind), Charli Carpenter at Lawyers, Guns and Money has a great discussion on measuring race here. Given theatre's diversity problems and looking for solutions, this is interesting stuff to consider.

- Via Rob at The Wicked Stage AND Freeman, TCG's new blog is here. And it's pretty good stuff.

- This is a great interview.

- This is all British-y and whatnot (like a good cup of tea), but it's still pretty spot on. I do like a good manifesto.

We are also here today to make some noise. Governments of any colour are rightly frightened of the ability of performers to make a fuss. We can be very loud, with a size and volume hugely bigger than the amount of subsidy it takes to shut us up. Good. Keep it up. Be proud, be loud, be heard.

Via.

- And last, but not least, in pluggery, my good friend Maria Gabriele's play, Graceful Living is getting a workshop this week at the Ensemble Studio Theatre. She is funny as hell, smart and, as an outsider to American culture (she's a German emigre), she catches weird things that we American often miss. If you can, check it out.

For A Friend. Totally For A Friend. Yeah...

2010-03-26T14:36:00.003-04:00

I buy that. I totally buy that he got it for a "friend."

I think someone couldn't wait for it to arrive from Amazon.

Two for the Price of One

2010-03-26T11:20:00.002-04:00

Like Steve Benen at Washington Monthly, I think this is worth noting:

Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.

The revamping of student-loan programs was included in — if overshadowed by — the final health care package. The vote was 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the House, with Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers.

This is just a good, common sense thing. All sorts of folks agree. Now, can they throw in a little student loan forgiveness? That's probably asking too much.

Quote of the Day

2010-03-26T08:25:00.000-04:00

Sadly, No edition:

You can’t put a price on a return to sanity. You can’t assign an exact dollar figure to a strong and encouraged middle class. You can’t measure the economic value of a citizenry’s restored faith in a livable baseline for their prosperity when emerging from an era where no floor for that basic security seemed to exist at all.
Megan can’t see that, but it’s hardly surprising. She’s fucking thick.

Kitty Pryde & Wolverine 3: Days of Future Past*

2010-03-25T15:13:00.002-04:00

In his play, Music from a Sparkling Planet, Douglas Carter Beane wrote a line that I think sums up a lot of my childhood, and the nature of nostalgia: There's nothing so reassuring as the past's view of the future. As a sci-fi kid, I basically spent three-quarters of my childhood in the future or at least somewhere far, far away from where I was. When I look back on it, from the actual future dates, the future I imagined seems so small and simple. That's what makes it attractive. And still comforting.

Reading KP&W again has been the mother of all nostalgia trips. Not so much because I remember reading it when I was eleven, but because...well, it's such a comic book. An old-school, serial, sent-through-the-mail or picked up at the candy store comic book. I've remained into comics and graphic novels my entire life and my taste in them has certainly grown. I'm now more likely to reach for an Adrian Tomine or a Craig Thompson book than the latest X-men adventure. I don't even know who's on the team these days (though I basically assume it's all the same folks, a little older). When I read serialized comics, I read them in collections and, more often than not, it seems like they were written for that form: long, multi-issue story arcs, with a beginning, middle and end, even in an ongoing series, neatly bound together. At the front of the collection, there's a little summary of what you need to know, if that. (One series that I'm flirting with, an apocalyptic zombie comic The Walking Dead, doesn't even do that. Seriously. No preamble, no introduction. Just open up the collections and start reading.)
It's like they're saying, "If you're reading this, you know who these people are, you know what's going on. If you don't, figure it out as we go."

KP&W is not like that. It's not adult, smooth or slick, really. The art is chunky, clunky and kind of ugly. On the first or second page of every issue, one of the character recaps the story so far, sometimes to someone else, sometimes to themselves, as if they forgot what they were doing in the middle of a cliffhanger. All of the various points and symbolisms and metaphors are clearly explicated and driven home. Numerous bits of backstory and whatnot are either breezed over or left out altogether (Um. Kitty's father is a felon. There's talk of clearing his name, but really, he broke the law. And why is Ogun immortal? And apparently not that immortal, since, you know, he dies. Sorry, I meant to say "spoiler alert." And what's up with him and Wolverine and training, which was never mentioned before and never comes up again?) You get the sense in some sections that Chris Claremont is saying, "Nothing to see here! Keep it moving! Look, Wolvie's got claws!"

It's almost like...it's meant for kids. Oh. Right.

That's the thing that tugged at my soul when I was re-reading this: I'm not young enough to breeze past this stuff anymore. I know that the world is more complicated than this. That a person who's undergone some pretty radical torture, humiliation and reconstructed her personality, like Kitty Pryde does, would have deep, deep scars. I know that there's an uncomfortable flavor of racism underneath the proceedings. I know that your father getting "mixed up" with Japanese gangsters, well, A) is pretty unlikely but B) if it did happen, it wouldn't end so neatly. And I know that comic books can do more than this. Like going back to your old room, or your old town, it all seems a little smaller than you remember it.

That's not to say it's not worth something. It's worth a lot, rediscovering that world, that place. That time when I thought a couple of rocky afternoons and BAM! I'm grown-up. And that being grown-up wouldn't mean anything was really different. I'd just get a new costume and some neat kung-fu skills and a new codename. Knowing how to be mentor or father figure was hardwired or something. Some tough words, a little withholding and the kid grew up. The phrase "a simpler time" has gone pretty battered out there in the world, but that's really what this comic is for me now. A reminder of a simpler person.

I'm pretty sure I still had my original copies of these comics until recently. I moved around a bit until college and had stuff stored in various places. A big trunk full of my old comic books wound up in the basement of my grandfather's house in Brooklyn. My grandfather got sick, and eventually passed away, and the house stood empty for a while. It was broken into once, and after that, my mother and I went to go out there and check on it. I really wanted to check on my comic books. I loved them and feared that the damp basement was rotting them. While my mother and I were walking to the house, a crackhead passed us on the street. This was the early '90s and crackheads were everywhere in Bushwick. He was easy to spot: burnt-looking lips, ratty clothes, skinny, malnourished, desperate. He gave us a weird fish-eye look and kept on. We went to my grandfather's house. I made a beeline for the basement door and my precious comics. Then someone kicked in the back door. I looked and it was the same crackhead we'd just passed. He saw us and ran away. I pulled my mom out of the house. She was screaming "I know you! I know you!" at the guy. And right then and there, I grew up. I decided I didn't need those comics, not so much. When I did finally get them back, I sold 'em.

My coming of age story doesn't need with a huge ice cream sundae...but then again, neither did Kitty's. Not really.

Back to you, Isaac.

*Cf. Appropriately.

Um. Bombshell?

2010-03-25T12:50:00.003-04:00

Has anybody else heard about this?

But Daisey also reported that Oskar Eustis, artistic director of New York's Public Theatre — coincidentally, he's profiled in the most recent issue of The New Yorker (subscription required for the full story) — Oskar Eustis has come very close to making all the Public's offerings free of charge, not just Shakespeare in the Park. He could get a swanky donor to pony up the full ticket price, he believes, because, actually, the money raised from admissions isn't a huge percentage of the Public's income.

That's from a piece by Jerome Weeks in Art&Seek. )Super-commenter/guest blogger cgeye posted it at Isaac's place here.) Weeks is writing about Mike Daisey's recent performance of How Theater Failed America in Dallas and the apparent news that Mike Daisey mentioned during the talkback. Which I haven't heard a whisper of. Have you?

Weeks hits the nail on the head, paraphrasing Kevin Moriarty of the Dallas Theater Center:

Potentially, it's a game-changer. If we remove the ticket price as an obstacle to attending, then there should really be very little to hinder people from coming to the theater. That means, if people still stay away in droves, we have no excuse. We're either a) not offering the kind of stage art they want to see or b) we're not reaching them somehow.

Yeah. Basically.

So...is this for real?

Digital Age

2010-03-25T10:57:00.002-04:00

George Hunka points out this NY Times essay by Michiko Kakautani, and sniffs that it's gone unremarked, probably because it's too long. I like a good challenge, so I read the whole thing. George quotes this bit, which is indeed key:

Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important. Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and they’re increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.

I also liked this quote:

“Reading in the traditional open-ended sense is not what most of us, whatever our age and level of computer literacy, do on the Internet,” the scholar Susan Jacoby writes in “The Age of American Unreason.” “What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”

But I'm a bit more iffy on this:

Given the constant bombardment of trivia and data that we’re subjected to in today’s mediascape, it’s little wonder that noisy, Manichean arguments tend to get more attention than subtle, policy-heavy ones; that funny, snarky or willfully provocative assertions often gain more traction than earnest, measured ones; and that loud, entertaining or controversial personalities tend to get the most ink and airtime. This is why Sarah Palin’s every move and pronouncement is followed by television news, talk-show hosts and pundits of every political persuasion. This is why Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh on the right and Michael Moore on the left are repeatedly quoted by followers and opponents. This is why a gathering of 600 people for last month’s national Tea Party convention in Nashville received a disproportionate amount of coverage from both the mainstream news media and the blogosphere.

And not just for the somewhat false equivalence of Glenn Beck and Michael Moore. And the way that legacy media constantly points its fingers at the unwashed rubes who clamor for a constant stream of right-wing updates as though they play no role in that at all. But that's not my point here.

George connects Kakautani's thoughts more directly to theatre:

As she notes, Internet users seem to be a jumpy lot, demanding the instant gratification that is denied by more complex art of any kind. It is a call for an increased shallowness in some ways, and these digital and virtual connections, it must be remembered, are digital and virtual, not particularly human. They also threaten, Kakutani suggests, to close prematurely those presumably open minds that cross the thresholds of theatre auditoria. "Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking," Kakutani writes; in the theatre, a "bored" audience's desire to have their own prejudices confirmed as well, cutting off imaginative alternatives before they're barely seeded, as well as demanding immediate interpretation of what might be a deliberately ambiguous experience, seems to me to lead to a drama resembling a mountain stream — very clear, but very shallow.

And he wraps up with a quote from Richard Foreman:

I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self — evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available." A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance — as we all become "pancake people" — spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.

Not to put to fine a point on it, I think this is mostly bunk. Just plain, legacy media/snobbish complaining that they just don't make things like they used and slow is better and kids today just aren't no darn good.

I've made no bones about my affection for modern "junk" art and the digital world. I've referred to Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad Is Good For You more than once. But I'll do it again. His basic thesis is that pop culture has grown in complexity and the demands that it makes on its audience over time and that it is actually as good for you as "traditional" entertainment. I think that trend gives the lie to the whole idea of pancake people becoming dominant. And I think it shows us, in theatre in particular, a way forward and way to reach out to younger audiences. And no, I'm not talking about slapping on a Twitter feed.

In Johnson's book (available on Google Books, natch), he compare a classic cop show, like Dragnet or Hawaii Five-O, with a modern show, like The Sopranos. In terms of storytelling, dramatic narrative and backstory, The Sopranos blows Dragnet away. It's an infinitely more complicated form of storytelling, requiring the viewer to have more knowledge about the characters and the world of the story than the old cop show, and, though he doesn't get into this, involving far more sophisticated forms of storytelling, more subtlety, more leaving things up to the viewer to figure out, more suggestion. Compare Starsky & Hutch to The Wire and you'll see what I mean. The Wire, as much as I love it, is a bad example, since it wasn't all that popular when it aired, but The Sopranos was.

Audiences today are smart. Yes, they're probably over-stimulated, and maybe their attention spans have shrunk in one way or another, but their ability to skip to the end is off the charts. Honestly, maybe it has been for longer than we think. They see plot twists coming a mile off. They know tropes and devices the instant they appear and are rarely fooled. They know what they like quickly and if they don't like it, they turn off. I think, too often, in theatre, they're getting the same old slop, even when it's postmodern slop, see where it's going and would rather engage in something that engages them back. If someone is texting or Twittering during your show, maybe, just maybe, it's not them. It's you. I'm addicted to my smartphone, but when I'm doing something engaging, I don't look at it. I don't care if someone's texting or updating their Facebook. I'm watching this thing that's happening in front of me. Rather than depending on schoolmarm tricks and rigid rules, maybe we should, you know, make the shows better.

There are a lot of dangers in this highly connected, on-demand new world, but, as a collaborative, at least nominally interactive artform, we should be thriving here. We should be embracing the digital world as a way not just of putting butts in seats, but of making art, discussing our art, refining and reforming our art. Of collaborating and opening up our process. Connecting with our audiences. Not just selling to them, but investing in them.

When we treat theatre like a literary endeavor, or an art project, it keeps in the one-way, one-dimensional world. We speak, you listen and enjoy and then go home. I think we can do better than that. I think we need to do better than that. This isn't a call for every show to be Twitterable and malleable. I'm still a formalist and a believer in presentational theatre. But we have to remember that the show doesn't start at curtain up and end at blackout. The life of the play can and should extend beyond that. The conversation we're having with the audience should extend beyond that. Otherwise, yes, we lose them to YouTube and Hulu and the Google.

We have to tell the stories of our day, in the language of our day and make it mean something. In short, we have to evolve. And standing athwart the digital river and saying "Kids today ain't no damn good" is basically the opposite of evolution. I think we can do better.

In The 'Wood

2010-03-25T10:36:00.002-04:00

One of my other projects, a non-theatre project (egads!) is starting to gather a smidge of steam. And by that, I mean, we have a website and a blog. The tools for modern artmaking, right (more on that later).

The project is a web series set in my neighborhood, Inwood, and I'm working with a crackerjack team of playwrights who all live here. You can read more about us and the project here.

My first blog post is up here. I know, I know, just what I need: another blog. But this should be a good one, chronicling our webseries as it unfolds. Drop by, check us out...

Looking for Something to Do This Weekend?

2010-03-24T17:03:00.002-04:00

Have you considered this?

NYC WTD Flash Mobs

Create a Spectacle in NYC

A flash mob (or flashmob) is a large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual act for a brief time, and then quickly disperse. In paying homage to our WTD compatriots in Chicago, the NYC WTD Coalition will be assembling the following Flash Mobs on Saturday, March 27th.

The Message directed by Amanda Feldman
A poetic reading of the International Theatre Messages.
Join us in Song directed by Kyle Ancowitz
Performed by the cast of Glee Club a Matt Freeman play currently being produced at the Access Theater, everyone will sing the chorus together with one united voice.
All the World's a Stage directed by Alex Mallory
A play on Shakespeare's famous phrase the mob will split up and encourage everyone to take part in a simple call and response.
Zip Zap Zop directed by Tom Wojtunik
We will storm a NYC park to play everyone's favorite theatre game, with a crowd this big; it should be quite a sight.
[UNTITLED] directed by Amanda Joshi
It's so awesome; we can't even describe it.
Cheers to You directed by Morgan Gould
Just what it sounds like, a thunderous round of applause.
The Kiss directed by Isaac Byrne
We will recreate the famous photo of a nurse kissing a sailor times one hundred.

Flash mobs can be amazing fun; creating a public spectacle and a piece of performance art. Want to be a part of one of these exciting and fun events? Email info@nycwtd.com and let us know.

For more information or to get involved, contact us at info@nycwtd.com

There are a whole bunch of other events and, or course, a party.

Official NYC WTD Event

NYC WTD Coalition Celebration & Networking Event

Time: 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: The Houndstooth Pub, on the South East corner of 37th Street & 8th Avenue
Description: Come mix and mingle with fellow theatre artists who care about international theatre projects both in the NYC and abroad. Hear a dramatic reading of the International Message.

And that message? The U.S. version is by Lynn Nottage. You might have heard of her. And it is awesome.

I challenge all of us to sustain the complexity of our world; to invite a multitude of diverse voices onto the stage. We must open the doors and windows of our theatres to let the world in. It is our responsibility; it is our burden and our gift. We are fabulators...we are cultural watchdogs.

What else you got to do?

Quote of the Day

2010-03-24T16:35:00.001-04:00

Ta-Nehisi Coates edition:

This isn't a matter of boats and tides. It's a matter of how you see the world, and the tools you embrace to change it. I would submit that it's worth recognizing those moments when the problems of East New York look like the problems of East Kentucky. We were never simply fighting racism. We were fighting injustice. Post-1968, injustice got sophisticated. Why shouldn't we do the same?

Shocked, Shocked To Find Gambling Going On Here!

2010-03-24T13:13:00.003-04:00

I just love the wonderful use of the passive voice in this article:

Facts are stubborn, the saying goes.

But myths about the legislation are likely to persist as well. And a lot of people don't agree on which is which.
"People have taken away from the debate a number of beliefs about the bill that are very difficult to shake based on objective reports," said Robert Blendon, a Harvard public health professor who follows opinion trends. "There is enough skepticism out there that questions about how it's going to help the country are likely to continue."

Gee, willikers, Mr. Wizard! These crazy, false and lunatic ideas just keep going out in the world, willy-nilly. However could a little old journalist like me ever hope to stop them?

Um. By pointing them out? And, you know, calling out politicians and pundits who say them? I know, I know, that's crazy talk, because that would mean DOING YOUR DAMN JOB. Whatever was I thinking?

I think we're going to see a lot of stories like these in the next few weeks. Sigh.

Damn Good Advice

2010-03-24T11:03:00.002-04:00

Via 2am Theatre, here is David Mamet's 2005 memo to the writers of his struggling and now canceled TV show, The Unit. It is pretty much as advertised: a master class on dramatic writing in about 30 paragraphs (and most of those are pretty short). I have my issues with Mamet, but this is good stuff. In its original, "shouty" ALL CAPS:

QUESTION:WHAT IS DRAMA? DRAMA, AGAIN, IS THE QUEST OF THE HERO TO OVERCOME THOSE THINGS WHICH PREVENT HIM FROM ACHIEVING A SPECIFIC, ACUTE GOAL.
SO: WE, THE WRITERS, MUST ASK OURSELVES OF EVERY SCENE THESE THREE QUESTIONS.

1) WHO WANTS WHAT?
2) WHAT HAPPENS IF HER DON’T GET IT?
3) WHY NOW?

THE ANSWERS TO THESE QUESTIONS ARE LITMUS PAPER. APPLY THEM, AND THEIR ANSWER WILL TELL YOU IF THE SCENE IS DRAMATIC OR NOT.

IF THE SCENE IS NOT DRAMATICALLY WRITTEN, IT WILL NOT BE DRAMATICALLY ACTED.

THERE IS NO MAGIC FAIRY DUST WHICH WILL MAKE A BORING, USELESS, REDUNDANT, OR MERELY INFORMATIVE SCENE AFTER IT LEAVES YOUR TYPEWRITER. YOU THE WRITERS, ARE IN CHARGE OF MAKING SURE EVERY SCENE IS DRAMATIC.

Check it out here. And for more on dramatic scene writing, this is good, too.

Kitty Pryde & Wolverine 2: Wolverine

2010-03-23T22:50:00.002-04:00

(Isaac at Parabasis and I are blogging through Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. Isaac's first and second posts are here and here. Mine is here.)

"I'm the best there is at what I do. But what I do isn't very nice."
- Wolverine

That line comes from Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's limited series, Wolverine, which predates Kitty Pryde and Wolverine by about two years. It's quoted about 20 times in the course of the six issues of KP&W. Seriously, every time he appears the first time, he says it. It's a great line, but it gets...a little annoying. It is, though, the line that basically changed comic books forever.

When Wolverine was introduced, he was a bit of a throwaway character: this odd, short, belligerent Canadian in a brightly colored suit and these big old claws popping out of his hands. There was no explanation for him, no real depth to the character, just wackiness, a step above comic relief. They almost randomly threw him in with the X-men, without ever really explaining his superpowers or mutation. Slowly the details came out: healing factor, adamantium claws, the obsession with Jean Grey, and the ever-popular amnesia/Man-With-No-Name thing. He had one name: Logan. In short, a useful badass. And that was pretty much it.

Then the Wolverine limited series. Now, all of a sudden, he was a failed samurai, with a code of honor, and a lady love that was all star-crossed and tragic. He had a soul. In a way, Wolverine became one of the first modern comic book characters with a soul. There had been dark shadings to characters in the past and, of course, indie and underground comix out there, but in the world of superhero comic books, in the '80s, perpetually tortured souls were a new thing.

Of course, though, there's only so much torture you can have in a superhero comic. I mean, really, eleven year old boys don't want to spend issue after issue with a character sitting around moping about his love life and keeping his bad-ass berzerker in check. Screw that. You gotta let him out. But you also have to make it safe. Parents don't want their kids looking up to a sociopath who kills willy-nilly (well, at least not yet).

So KP&W is about more than just the maturation of Kitty Pryde, it's about the softening of Wolverine from wild card into, as Isaac points out, a father figure and more benign mentor. Sure, he's full of tough love and leaving his charge out in the snow, but it's all in service of making Kitty Pryde stronger. He's still gotta kick some ass by the end, but he's also in position to lead the X-men.

This push and pull runs underneath a lot of modern, mainstream comics. Comic book are still meant to be entertainment for children and, post-Comic Code Authority, that means it's got to be nutritional, too. The characters who bring danger and complication into the world have to be tamed and smoothed out. The good comics make it about maturation and growth, which KP&W does well for Kitty, but I find Wolverine's path less convincing. It's all pretty easy for him. Except for beating Ogun, of course. Which is when they let the bad-ass out again.

This volume also cements what I think of as the oddest character trait in comics: Wolverine's Japan fetish. The writers grafted it onto a Canadian berzerker and then ran with it. This series pulls Kitty Pryde into it, but, from the get-go, you know it's just a prelude to Wolverine showing up and spouting on about peace and tranquility while standing in a zen garden. Given the vaguely Asian look that artists tend to give him, and his blank slate past, you'd think that it would turn out to have more meaning, but...not so much.

Comic books and kung fu are two of the pillars of a 1980s boyhood and Wolverine was the perfect bridge. He was the first introduction of the ninja to a lot of young kids. The fact that he could take on about twenty of them at one time just increased his legend. Reading it now, though, it's...a little iffy. Not Long Duk Dong iffy, but close. The Japan of X-men comics is always a place of inscrutable, mysterious men, codes of honor and tales of noble samurai, with only two types of women: crazy, overactive badasses with spiky hair and beautiful, distant, unattainable, proper beauties. And they're all in love with the gaijin. Not that comics are particularly known for their sensitive racial depictions, but to have the bulk of the comic set in this, well, comic book version of Japan, all Blade Runner and Seven Samurai, leaves a bit of a bad taste in your mouth. But that's what it looks like now, more than two decades (!!!) later. At the time, it was just about Wolverine, Canadian bad-ass who loves Japan.

And, despite the second billing, and the Kitty-centric story arc, the second half of this book is really about Wolverine and setting the table for his future. From here, Wolverine became the signature character for the X-men and, in a way, for Marvel Comics. He's not as recognizable as Spider-Man outside of fandom, but, after the movies, he's close. And he's certainly more beloved, defended and argued about. For a while, his Wikipedia page was blocked from editing because there was a three-year long flame war going about whether or not he had super-strength (the jury's still out on that). Wolverine brings that out in people. And here, in these six comics, we catch him in the middle of his journey from comic book character into mythic figure.

Thinking about Wolverine and reading these comics again, it reminds me of that adolescent intensity and passion, the kind that got me buying the full set of the Handbook to the Marvel Universe to learn exactly how much Spider-Man could bench (10 tons, just in case you want to know). Isaac, is it having the same effect on you?

Casting Superheroes

2010-03-23T20:52:00.002-04:00

Since we are talking comix, I might as well talk about the other news of the day. From Variety:

Chris Evans will don the star-spangled superhero suit to play Captain America for Marvel Entertainment.
Evans accepted an offer made by the comicbook publisher late last week, beating out a number of thesps who test-screened for the high-profile role.

A few weeks back, when the speculation was at a fever pitch, Alyssa Rosenberg weighed in on the possible casting of John "The Office" Krasinski with this:

But I just think Krasinski is far too much of a relatable, regular guy to take up the shield as Steve Rogers. I think that he's into the running speaks to the body type that's become so popular among young Hollywood actors today: the tall, almost willowy type that looks good in slim-fit suits. Sam Worthington may be the only actor in this particular generation with a real jaw.

(via TNC)

When I posted the news of Chris Evans' casting on facebook, it kicked off a bit of a hategasm. A lot of my friends jumped all over it, and, I gotta agree a bit. Not just because of Evans is Ryan Reynolds light (less Canadian!), but because it's easy superhero casting. And it makes me scared about the direction they're heading already.

The standard weakness of superhero casting is casting only half the role. They err on the side of casting the hero and not the person inside the mask. Especially in "origin" movies, they cast the end of the movie, not the beginning. Hence we get Dolph Lundgren as the Punisher, Brandon Routh (a blank pretty boy) or Tom Welling as Superman, Adam West and George Clooney as Batman, even Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. I loved Christopher Reeve as Superman and he had the comic chops to pull of Clark Kent, but it was a stretch.

Part of the the superhero thing is the secret identity. It has to be believable, understandable and acceptable. The more successful casting, like Michael Keaton or Christian Bale as Batman, Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, Tobey Maguire in the Spider-Man movies shades towards the man in the suit. And also great actors. Superheroes are deceptively tricky parts to cast and pull off. Casting them for the jaw or the body leaves the important stuff out. And Captain America is probably more deceptive than most.

I mean, the guy basically wears an American flag, carries a big American flag shield and is all about decency, fair play and being upright and honest. You know, like America. Ahem. Moving on. In his most recognizable form, he's a perfect physical specimen, blond, blue-eyed and a leader of men and sentient robots. Of course you'd want a guy who looks like this. Or this. But to do that, you leave out his whole origin story. The whole point is that the guy was 4F, couldn't serve in WWII and volunteered for the Super Soldier Project in order to help the war effort. And then he gets turned into the perfect man. Even after that, his cover story is the classic "geek loser who turns into a god when no one is looking." We're used to letting it slide that when Clark throws on a pair of glasses no one recognizes him, but it's harder and harder to make it stick. You need someone who can act it, can make us believe that no one would ever think this guy is a hero. If he looks like a hero from the start, you have to do that much more work.

Casting someone like Chris Evans says to me that Captain America will be a dumb action movie and not much more. It will probably be sort of funny and serviceable. But, honestly, I was pulling for Krasinski. That would have a different look at the character, a more human touch (not Human Torch!). Now we get a smug, wise-cracking wiseapple who's probably going to learn some humility and the real meaning of patriotism. Whoop-dee-do. At least we can look forward to this.

And in other news...

2010-03-23T13:08:00.002-04:00

Vows revenge? Really? They wanna go with vow revenge? That's what COBRA does when G.I. Joe destroys the Weather Dominator. That's what Dark Lords of the Sith do. Is that really the company they want to keep? What's next, endorsements from the Legion of Doom? Nailing down that sweet Cylon support?

Good thing we got this guy on our side...

Like It Or Not...

2010-03-23T12:39:00.002-04:00

...Garrett at the Playgoer is pretty much right. He starts off with a bang:

In an age of mass-produced entertainment and culture, the work of theatre will always be disadvantaged in the marketplace because it cannot easily reproduce and commodify itself for mass consumption.

and then wraps it up:

I'm not saying theatre will die if it can't reproduce itself. I'm not saying it even can reproduce itself. But it will basically always be a loser artform in this economy--i.e. this country. And I mean "loser" in many ways.

So we better get used to it.

And in between...good, sobering stuff. You know what to do: RTWT.

A Whole Other World...

2010-03-23T10:19:00.001-04:00

And a lot of Republicans are living in it.

57 percent of Republicans (32 percent overall) believe that Obama is a Muslim 45 percent of Republicans (25 percent overall) agree with the Birthers in their belief that Obama was "not born in the United States and so is not eligible to be president" 38 percent of Republicans (20 percent overall) say that Obama is "doing many of the things that Hitler did" Scariest of all, 24 percent of Republicans (14 percent overall) say that Obama "may be the Antichrist." [...snip...] We are playing with dynamite by demonizing our president and dividing the United States in the process. What might be good for ratings is bad for the country.

Just another by-product of our liberal media, I suppose....

Quote of the Day

2010-03-23T08:27:00.001-04:00

Sean Williams edition:

Go to your twitter feed or your facebook update page or whatever tool it is that you’re using and take a look at your posts. How many of them feel like an investment, and how many of them feel like a withdrawal? If this page was a bank, and every time you reached out to help, or to inform, or to crack up your readers was money in, and every time you asked people to help you, or to buy your stuff, is money out, what would your balance be?

RTWT.

The Dumbest Smart Person In The World*

2010-03-23T07:30:00.002-04:00

Other folks have noted this post by Megan McArdle, but, well, it enrages me on so many fronts, I have to dive in. Here's the key bit:

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi's skill as a legislator. But it's also pretty worrying. Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority? Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn't want this bill. And that mattered basically not at all. If you don't find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances. Farewell, Social Security! Au revoir, Medicare! The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected. If they didn't--if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission--then the legislative lock-in you're counting on wouldn't exist.

Emphasis mine.

What has been most frustrating about this whole long, bizarre and exhausting process is that it seems like the entire press corps apparently slept through the LAST DECADE. Remember those times? Remember this? Remember this? And this? The thing about these things, changing Social Security and spying on all Americans and, oh, yeah, starting two wars is that they're generally really, really unpopular. Healthcare reform just plain isn't. Not for the reasons folks like Megan McArdle want to say it is, anyway. And let's not mention the fact that when people hear what's actually in the plan, they like it a lot more.

There is basically no way to describe this process as the tyranny of the majority. No actual way. The Democrats compromised, incorporated Republican ideas, in many ways betrayed their core principles to satisfy the GOP and the conservatives and, in return, were kicked in the teeth. The only thing that would have satisfied the opposition party was...nothing. No action at all. And that's untenable.

When the Republicans had far slimmer majorities, they did far worse damage, using all the same legislative tools (and some non-legislative ones) in support of much less popular things. The one thing that the Democrats managed to stop was their plan to destroy Social Security. That's a good thing.

Honestly, it drives me up the wall when people say, "What would happen if the Republicans were in the majority?" We saw that. It sucked. And also, that's the reason they're not in the majority now. Elections have consequences, right? And a smart person like Megan should be able to realize that. Oh, wait...

*Cf.

That Is One Nutty Hospital*

2010-03-23T07:09:00.004-04:00

I think I'll be answering questions with "There's low-fat milk in the outside fridge" for a while.

Previously on Point Dume w/ Enver Gjokaj from Enver Gjokaj

That's my friend Ross Maxwell as the Creepy Neighbor (and the writer, natch). Under his handle Professor Dreadwhimsy, he was the mad genius behind this.

*Cf.

History Was Made Last Night.

2010-03-22T23:49:00.002-04:00

I mean, other than, you know, that. There was also this.

Katori Hall's The Mountaintop was the surprise winner of best new play when this year's Laurence Olivier awards were handed out tonight.
Hall, from Memphis, Tennessee, was inspired to write her play – an imagined account of Martin Luther King's last evening before his 1968 assassination – by a family story about her mother. It was spotted by James Dacre, son of Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who directed its world premiere at the 65-seat Theatre503, above a pub in Battersea.

Which is, well, just cool as crap. Mostly because Katori is awesome. I'm looking forward to seeing the show when it comes to New York.

Kitty Pryde & Wolverine 1: Kitty Pryde

2010-03-22T22:51:00.003-04:00

(Note: Isaac and I are doing a blog-through of the classic Marvel limited series Kitty Pryde and Wolverine. His first segment is here.)

It wasn't the good candy store. It was down the strip a bit, away from the elementary school. The candy store right by the school, next to the Key Foods, that was the good one, well-stocked, shiny plastic toys and the good magazines and a few comics. It was a kid's paradise, always full of loud children and stern clerks.

But the other one...that one was a little weird, out of the way, down by the Methodist Church, past the flower shop. No toys, a sad array of snacks. The clerk was indifferent at best, barely ever looking up from some lurid tabloid or other. But that one always seemed to have more comics. That was the one I went to for my X-men fix.

Like Isaac, I had an older brother and picked up the things he discarded. By the time we moved from Brooklyn to Jersey, he'd moved past comic books and into the world of real art. I was still a kid, ten years old, husky and suddenly the only brown face in my class. WTF? What the hell am I supposed to do now? Read comic books. And read them, I did.

I can still remember the first issue of the X-men I bought. It was the issue after Cyclops married Madelyne Pryor (I have provided links just in case you kissed a girl in high school). You don't really expect a comic book to open up with a splash page of a kiss, but there it was. The X-men is quite possibly the most complicated, intricate, and confusing comic book in the history of everything. Seriously, not just mutant super powers, but multiple alternate universes, timelines, dimensions, and versions of characters kicking around. You basically needed to be an eleven-year old to follow all the switchbacks and retcons. But that just added to the mystery and engagement.

My real thing was The New Mutants. The X-men was always a less than subtle metaphor for race relations (and sexuality and class and whatever else you want to throw on the pile) so it was an immediate attraction. Then you mix it with teen angst and unfortunate love affairs? Teh awesome. It made me feel older and cooler instantly. If there was anything ten year old me could relate to, it was the feeling of suddenly leaving your entire life behind, being thrust into a brand new family, new world and having to figure out who you are now. That's what the New Mutants were all about.

Kitty Pryde was the original New Mutant. They added her to up the youth quotient and it worked like gangbusters. She was cute, smart, brave and, as Isaac notes, accessible in a way that other comic book girls and women weren't. She really felt like a real girl. And yet, somehow, they made it not creepy when she hooked up with Colossus. It was cute and charming: big metal Russian guy and little chick from Chicago. Awesome. And then they busted it all up. With Secret Wars.

Okay, I won't go into the whole long saga of the Secret Wars. We can geek out about that another time. Let's just say that, at the end, Colossus and Kitty Pryde broke up, and we were all simultaneously psyched because we had a shot and heartbroken because she was. She was down, a sad, mopey teenager again.

Then came Kitty Pryde and Wolverine.

Kitty started off as a normal 13-year old girl, given the twee codename Sprite. Four years later, she was a young woman, had saved the world, fallen in love and had her heartbroken. It was time to grow up. And in the world of X-men comics, that means sending her to Japan to save her father from the Yakuza, getting abducted and re-trained by a ninja master and nearly killing her best friend. You know, coming of age, comic-book style.

But it landed at the right time for a pre-teen boy. The story had every thing: mysterious gangsters, kung fu fighting, ninjas, a pretty girl and Wolverine. But mainly it was about becoming an adult. Kitty moves from a world of good guys and bad guys you can differentiate by the color of their costumes into a much more complicated place. At first she thinks her father is being framed or being coerced into working with the Yakuza, but it turns out he's a lot more willing than she thought and weaker than she could have imagined. She is basically kidnapped by the mysterious Ogun, but learns fighting and meditation under his tutelage. The final image of the comic is of an excited teenager about to dig into a sundae, seemingly normal, but we know that underneath she's not the same. After this series, she left behind the codename Sprite and became Shadowcat, and a leader in her own right. It was a turning point for the character. And for her fans. Who were all facing some turning points of their own. Thank God, we had the other candy store. You know the one. By the flower shop. Across from the Methodist Church. The one with the good comics.

Schoolmarms

2010-03-22T22:41:00.002-04:00

I loved this post, like, a lot. Like Zack (I'm assuming the first commenter is Zack), I saw Red last week. They made their "turn off your cell phones" announcement. When it was done, as you would expect, lights flashed on all over the place. One was in the row in front of me. Another guy in the row looked at the person with the cell phone and hissed, "Turn that off!" To which the person answered, "That's what I'm doing!" All over the room, there was shushing, and glaring, and the whole array of schoolmarm discipline all over the place.

This is honestly far more disruptive than any coughing, or even a cellphone ring. There just comes a time when you let it go, folks. Chill out.

Terms of Enjoyment

2010-03-22T22:11:00.003-04:00

The right and proper Don Hall continues his trend of responding and riffing on other folks' posts without linking or noting the original post and comes up with this, responding to the Pink Floyd story I posted here:

A better argument to get someone to buy a vinyl record and a turntable (although still not going to revitalize a fringe medium) is to point out that "Dark Side of the Moon" is an album and is supposed to be listened to in sequence and that it works best on a record as that was how it was intended to be listened to. Content is more compelling than quality of experience. Unless it's parking and that's a gift horse of another color.

Emphasis mine.

This kind of misses the point of what I was getting at. I said:

I've never really understood the urge of some artists to go around and control exactly how their work is enjoyed. Isn't the enjoyment the point?

And that's really what I meant. Do artists get to set the terms of enjoyment? Should they? Do they get to set it in some formats or all? If I prefer to just listen to "Run" or "Comfortably Numb" and enjoy them, can Pink Floyd come into my house and say, "No, no, NO! You have to listen to the whole album! On a record player! You're ruining our music!"? I don't think so.

And to apply it to the world of theatre and the conversations that Don is referencing, I don't think love = control. At some point you have to let go and let it go into the world and find people who connect with it. Joy is certainly infectious and should be. Awesome. But it's not the only thing that matters. The work itself has to mean something.

Don brings up the always interesting world of Star Trek fans. The reason people dress up like Klingons and wear Starfleet uniforms to court isn't because Gene Roddenberry loved it so much, not exactly. He built a world that means something to other people, that connects to their life. He built it faithfully and lovingly, but didn't insist that it could only be enjoyed in wool blend uniforms and with the proper specs.

It's access, yes, but it's also sharing. It's also the artist setting part of their ego aside to say, "This is yours, too. Enjoy it as you see fit." I think that's a pretty good invitation to make.

Making Sh*t Up

2010-03-22T16:49:00.002-04:00

Here's a topic of conversation for you all out there: how do you feel about making up historical figures for works of fiction? In addition to making up an African nation for At Home and Abroad, I'm about to embark on a new project that would involve making up a civil rights era figure. Sometimes I feel a little silly about these things. But they're often necessary.

What about you? How do you feel about creating alternate histories and historical figures? How do you feel when you see a play and there's a figure who is obviously a stand-in or composite for a real world figure? Does it bug you? Do you notice or care?

The Sum Of Our Parts

2010-03-21T16:24:00.002-04:00

So I weighed in on Isaac's points here in the comments a bit, but figured I'd say a bit more, now that I'm out of the fog.

Isaac wrote:

Similarly, our long new play development process that everyone gets so frustrated about is partially predicated on the notion that it is up to the script to fix everything. There's no assumption that a competent group of artists working with a playwright could shape and collaborate with the material in such a way that good art comes out of it, even if on the page it doesn't always look perfect.

And my take is: yep. Exactly right. That is indeed how we work: the entire goal is "fixing" the flawed script, with the idea being that a "good" script is disaster-proof. A solid, tight script is supposed to work in all circumstances, with all casts and directors. During the development process, if you have a bad reading, a part is miscast, or the thing is misdirected, the question you always ask is "Can you still hear the play?" The script is thought of as separate from the production in a way. It exists in its own place. In a way, that's right.

Now, before you get all up in arms about me defending my own rights and trampling yours, lemme finish. In the end, the play is what lasts. It gets published. The playwright has sole control of that. When a play gets produced, the playwright and the publisher settle on the final script, the stage directions to include, the dedication, the whole thing. If the playwright doesn't want to talk to the director about it, he or she doesn't have to. And when it comes out, the playwright's name is the only name on the cover. We get our reward in eternity. Lucky us.

The play, the story and the words have to be judged in a different way than the acting and directing, because they're also less subjective, less vague. You and I can sit in the same room, watch the same performance and one of us can think it's hysterical tour-de-force and the other can think it's a over-acted mess of mugging. With the script, you can at least be specific, you can say you don't buy this turn of the plot or speech, you can point to a specific word or sentence and say that particular thing doesn't work. It's harder with staging or acting or even design. Maybe we should be so well-versed and able to speak to the intricacies of those art forms the way we are about to speak about text.

I believe wholeheartedly in the collaborative nature of theatre and the work we do and I don't believe that it's "all about the playwright," but when we're talking about mainstream playmaking, the buck stops with the playwright. We're right to recognize that.

I do think that critics lean a little too heavy on that and certainly shouldn't feel tricked or scammed by a good production. But I think, as audience members, we basically play StageGrade in our head. A so-so script, poorly directed, but featuring a kick-ass performance, we weigh them together and decide what we think about the play. Of course it takes a pretty good play to support a great performance, to allow for good directing. The play's the...you're actually going to make me say it, are you?

Isaac's probably right: our field is focused too much on the play. But there are good reasons for that. What we need to do a bit more is let the critics and the audiences think about it, but in the rehearsal hall and the offices to keep our focus on the whole megillah. It all adds up.

What Else I Saw

2010-03-21T15:57:00.002-04:00

In my previous post, I left out one other thing that I saw: four audiences. I wish I could say that the audiences were wildly different, given that I saw four shows with different ticket prices, located in different neighborhoods, about different subjects and in different styles. But...nope. A Cool Dip was a little more black, but generally, they were north of 45, and mostly white. The audience at Red was a bit more of a mixed bag and the audience at Glee Club skewed a bit younger. Outside of Red, the younger folks I saw I knew, because they were other theatre folks.

I should also note that at the Off-Broadway institution and the Broadway house, the experience was the most remote, the most "professional." Glee Club and Lenin's Embalmers had curtain speeches, given by the folks who worked the box office or were directly involved in the show we were watching. At Ensemble Studio Theatre, the play's director, also the theatre's artistic director, invited the whole audience to hang out after the show for a dance party. After the show, the cast milled around the lobby, talking to the audience members. Same at Glee Club.

Granted A Cool Dip is in previews and the crew went right into post-show notes and meetings. I'm sure on a regular night, it would be different. And there's, of course, a difference between a Wednesday night preview and a Saturday night regular performance. It's a real comparison. But that was the experience.

Whirlwind Tour

2010-03-21T10:26:00.003-04:00

I had another streak of seeing shows this week and I realized in the middle that I was taking a whirlwind tour of theatre production in New York. I literally saw a show at every level this week: Broadway, Off-Broadway, establishment Off-Off-Broadway and indie theatre. It was, well, kind of exhausting. That's a lot of evenings on a lot of trains all over town. I'm just glad that I didn't have to go to Brooklyn for any of it.

What did I see? Previews of A Cool Dip In The Barren Saharan Creek and Red, and regular performances of Glee Club and Lenin's Embalmers. So for those of you keeping track at home, that's four new plays, three by American writers, one British import, one remount. Three male playwrights. Four male directors. Twenty-three actors, three women. Five African-Americans. Those are the stats. But really what did I see?

Two naturalistic, fairly straightforward plays. Two that jumped in time and place and featured flights of fancy and the dread "theatricality." Three plays set in places other than New York City or any metropolitan area. Two straight-up comedies (though both were pitch-black), but all plays had at least moments of humor and comedy. Two plays revolve around art and artists, two are about government, policy, history, and people.

What did I see? A lot of terrific acting. I'm not even kidding. I saw four casts bust their asses, make me laugh, smile, throw themselves with abandon into a variety of characters. I saw actors push themselves into some surprising places, megalomaniac painters, sociopathic dictators...and Stalin. They were all incredibly well directed in a beautiful productions. It was a four day marathon of great performances.

Obviously, again, I can't really talk about the shows in previews, but you should go see them. And you absolutely definitely should go and see Glee Club and Lenin's Embalmers. Both are really exciting, terrific, fun as hell and some of the best things I've seen in a long time. Great evenings of theatre.

A lot of folks have said good things about Glee Club and all of them are more than deserved. It's a black-hearted laugh riot, full of surprise and the curdled milk of human kindness. There were two specific things I liked about it. One, "downtown" indie theatre is generally thought to be avant-garde, formally experimenting, non-linear or twee and full of whimsy. Glee Club is very, very much not. It's practically Aristotelian: one place, one course of action, it all happens in real time. It's a recognizable place, in the "real" world and presented without frippery or embellishment. The other thing I like about it is its point of view on art. Or Art. Often plays about art focus on the uplifting, soul-stirring aspects, even if they dig into the glorious monsters artists can be sometimes. But it's rare to see a show that says "Being an artist practically requires that you destroy yourself and quite possibly others." It was a thrill to be there.

What can I say about Lenin's Embalmers? I'm not precisely objective about it, since I'm a member of E.S.T., which produced it, and I've worked with a ton of the folks involved. But, boy howdy, it's a grand night of theatre. It is indeed formally experimental, moving through time and space basically by the dint of imagination alone. The company of eight covers dozens of roles, all specific and detailed (including at least three different women named Nadia). But it's not all trickery and stage magic. The play is compelling, funny, streaked through with sadness and death. It's matched by a great production and cast, but the play is the backbone. Sure, it's a Canadian import, but it speaks well to the life of the American play.

So...what did I see this week? I saw four plays. You really can't say anything more than that.

The Fog of Rewrites: Rewriting MANIFESTO (A Writing Diary)

2010-03-19T09:34:00.003-04:00

Where'd I go? Short answer: down the rabbit hole. But I don't really do short answers, do I? No, I do not.

This Tuesday I had a reading of my play MANIFESTO. I've been flogging the reading here, on Facebook and pestering people over e-mail to come and see it for a couple of weeks now, because...well, that's what you do when you're proud of the work. And I am very, very proud of this play. I've been working on it for the last couple of years and this last draft took a big step forward. So I wanted folks to come and see it. Well, eventually I did. For a while there, though, I was pretty sure it was going to be a huge flaming failure or a tremendous waste of time, if I managed to make it happen at all. Which was seriously in doubt.

Lemme back up. You might need a bit of context.

This play was a commission. I originally got the commission in the fall of 2006 (yikes!) and worked on it through 2007. I set out to write a different kind of play than what I'd been working on, something both more personal and with a bigger scope. I wanted to tackle marriage, middle age, the slide from rebellious youth to content maturity, AND the decline and fall of counter-culture in New York and, by extension, the country, the still-lingering effects of terrorist attacks in a fear-based society, AND both the corporatization of art and the essentially selfish nature of making art, particularly political art. All of that in a two-act comedy originally with four actors, mostly played in a blank space. Yeah, I like a challenge.

I think I've mentioned it before, but Alan Ayckbourn is one of my playwriting idols. One of the things I like particularly admire about his work is his willingness to tie one hand behind his back when writing. Oh, you can call it "formal experimentation" if you want to be all smarty-pants about it, but it's also turning writing a play into an obstacle course. In his play, A Small Family Business, he wanted to show a number of families in a number of homes. What did he do? Not have a bunch of individual sets, or a stripped-down unit set, but one set, one house, but depending on who's in what room, it represents a different house. When he was writing The Norman Conquests, he knew he wanted to write a trilogy, but didn't want the audience to have to see all of them in a particular order. Plus his lead actor had another gig, so he couldn't be in the first scene of the first play because he wouldn't be available for rehearsals. So Sir Ayckbourn wrote around the obstacles.

I aim to do the same for myself. I'm just not as smart. I'd already written a play that took place on an empty set: a beach. Great for cheap producing possibilities, sure, but, it's a bitch to write. So much of what we fill our plays up with is built around props, exits and entrances, objects that become metaphors. And drinks! Don't forget the drinks! It's a tried-and-true lesson from the days of the well-made play and the boulevard comedy: when in doubt, have someone make a drink. It's a good way to get people off-stage. Take all that away, though, and you're left with just talking. Lots of talking. Scary, scary stuff. But, like I said, I like a good obstacle course.

Writing for characters in an empty space and trying to keep it from being just a bunch of blather was my challenge and I thought I hit it. Sort of. But, as these things sometimes happen, the play went into a bit of limbo and I moved onto other things. But it kept nagging at me. I got some great notes on it and decided to pop the hood and give it another whack.

Now here's the part where I admit my failings: I'm an adrenaline junkie. Not in the bungee-jumping, pick a fight with the biggest guy in the room, rob convenience stores and put cigarettes out on my arm way, but more like the I get my best ideas when there's a deadline looming way. So I try to set deadlines for myself, deadlines with an aspect of public humiliation, since blowing off my own deadline is never going to give me the thrill I need. (I've got problems. Anyway.) So I scheduled a reading, as is my way, of a new rewrite of a play I hadn't touched in a couple of years. My sense of honor would never allow me to put up said reading without a rewrite, so that means a rewrite had to happen.

I met with my director, had a great, productive conversation, took notes, started making casting calls, did the prep work and, just when I was settling down to do the rewrite, I realized that my performance date was in, like, three days. I can do some quick writing, but the level of rewrite I wanted to do just couldn't be achieved in that kind of time. I had to postpone. I didn't want to do another reading of an old, flawed draft. I wanted the new hotness. I actually kept my adrenaline junkie in check and moved the date. I'd only told a few people, so it wasn't a huge level of public humiliation. It was all good.

Of course, when I moved the date, I reset the clock on rewrites. So I had another conversation, did some new casting, more new prep work (i.e. daydreaming about the play while I ride the subway), and just when I was about to actually get to rewriting...the theatre had to move the reading date. The clock is reset again. More chats, more thinking, more casting, more thinking, more BIG THINKING! New ideas! New characters! Whole new plot points and issues! Better jokes! In my head, this thing is going gangbusters. It's a house afire. On the page...not so much. Yet.

I'm a slow burner of a writer. I think and think and re-think and re-consider and re-think in my head before I sit down to write. Not every single line of dialogue or plot point is laid out in advance...but most of them are. When I sit down to write, there isn't a lot of rewriting, honestly. I usually write my first draft in a rush, then nibble at the edges for a while, then do a big, fat rewrite. Then that's it. I don't have a lot of research pages or notes. I just think about the thing for a while and when it's all baked in my head (or at least three-quarters baked), I write it down. I like to tell myself I do this out of love of Mother Earth and to conserve, but, honestly, it's just how I do it. Your results may vary.

So finally, new date set, casting progressing, all things in place, I sit down to write. And get promptly stuck. On the first scene. For, like, two weeks. Beginnings are super-important to me. I'm a bit of a formalist, so, for me, the first line of a play asks a question that the rest of the play sets out to answer. It's got to be right, otherwise the rest of the play is askew. So I'm reworking the first ten pages of the play over and over, not getting to the big things in the end that need addressing, because I can't address those without knowing the question this play is trying to answer. The days are ticking by, my director is kindly, patiently, but sort of insistently wondering when we're going to see pages and, you know, rehearse. I've invited everyone I know, so now public humiliation is in play. I've cast a bunch of bang-up actors, some of whom I've never worked with before, and they don't have a script. One of them doesn't even have a part yet. Oh, yeah, I decided to write a new part, for someone who doesn't show up in the first act at all. Since I'm stuck on the first ten pages, yeah, I haven't even written that part.

That's the point the rabbit hole opens up and I fall in it. E-mails go unheeded, barely read. Long-standing plans are forgotten. Family, friends, everyone is just an obstacle between me and my computer. Oh, I'm going to work, having conversations, continuing to make plans that I will invariably bail on, but in my head, I'm in an empty apartment with a bunch of imaginary people, trying desperately to make these people do something interesting. They are, currently, resistant. This is not good.

Then the panic sets in. My director is starting to leave his patience behind and getting a bit more insistent about when he's getting his pages. My actors are getting a bit fidgety about what they're going to be doing on a stage in front of people in just a few days. The whole ball of wax is starting to melt into an unsightly lump in my hand. And then...BAM. Break-through. I chuck what I've been working on, go back a draft to my first version, my first impulses. I re-connect to why I wanted to write this play, tell this story. The afterburners kick in, the nose levels out, and I can see the sky again. I have a great first scene! I'm on my way!

Of course, this all happens about 36 hours before the reading.

Did I mention I'm an adrenaline junkie?

I floor it and tear through the rest of the script. Here's the part where this helps make better plays: I don't have time for deliberation, for preciousness. I don't have time to parse dialogue and fret over words. I write from the gut, write from passion and instinct and move on. Some things don't wind up working, but on the balance, it does. Once it's done, it's printed. Once it's printed, we're in rehearsal. Six hours later, we're in front of an audience. Two hours after that, it's all done.

Three days later, I'm picking up the threads I dropped, returning the phone calls and e-mails I need to return. But also torn: on one hand there's the pull back into the script to fix those naggling things that drive a playwright crazy, the lines that refer to beats that have been cut, the transpositions and typos, the two page stretch where that one character doesn't actually say anything, the missed opportunities for better jokes; on the other hand, there are new scripts to be written, new stories to tell. This one? Old hat. Been there, done that. Time to hit the dusty trail.

Or I take the middle path. And write about writing for a while. And watch TV. My DVR is plenty full. And see actual people in the real world. Refill the old gas tank before heading back out on the road. Sounds like a good idea.

My friend Jane always says that, after a reading, a writer needs time to gloat. I'm coming off my gloating phase. It's almost time to get back to work. Almost.

The Real March Madness

2010-03-18T10:30:00.002-04:00

I'm all for insane, 4-day, 64 game, basically 24-hour-a-day spectacles of youth, athletic prowess, skill and fortitude and all, but...come on, the real game in town is in Washington, D.C. this weekend. And it will involve almost no youth or athletic prowess, but a lot of fortitude and some skill. Where the hell is my 24-hour C-SPAN feed?

I'm In Love, What's That Song

2010-03-18T01:10:00.002-04:00

RIP, Alex Chilton.

I really only recently discovered Alex Chilton, through the Replacements (natch). But in my brief time of listening to his music, yeah, I dug it a lot. And I'll miss the possibility of new music. Thank you, friend.

Back At It

2010-03-18T01:09:00.001-04:00

I have not died. Or vanished from the face of the earth. I was in a fog of rewriting and basically nearly everything else in the world fell off my plate. Now I'm back. So...you know. Batten down the hatches.

Another Brick in the Wall

2010-03-12T10:18:00.002-05:00

Obviously, I'm an artist and I believe that artists should have some say over the legacy and life of their work. Still this feels...wrong to me.

The band, whose albums include "The Dark Side of the Moon" and "The Wall," went to court to challenge EMI's right to "unbundle" their records and sell individual tracks online.
Judge Andrew Morritt accepted arguments by the group that EMI was bound by a contract forbidding it from selling records other than as complete albums without written consent.
The judge said the purpose of a clause in the contract, drawn up more than a decade ago, was to "preserve the artistic integrity of the albums."

H/T The A.V. Club. Where they make this excellent observation:

So, yeah, there you go: Listening to "Money" or "Comfortably Numb" sans those songs' original contexts is doing Pink Floyd an aesthetic disservice. Now would Roger Waters please call every classic-rock radio station in the world and tell them that?

I've never really understood the urge of some artists to go around and control exactly how their work is enjoyed. Isn't the enjoyment the point? Not to wax nostalgic too much or anything, but I first heard The Wall on classic rock radio, most likely driving around in a friend's car or in a basement somewhere, out of order, out of context. It took me forever to understand why you can't have any pudding if you don't eat your meat. Or what the hell The Wall was anyway. But I dug the music and watched the movie (and have been kind of freaked out by Bob Geldorf ever since, Live Aid and all) and love the whole thing. Did it matter when I was in my best friend's Buick Skyhawk that I didn't know where "Comfortably Numb" fell in the storyline of The Wall? Not at all.

This is one of those artists vs. accessibility things that are so popular these days, I suppose. Does an artist have an absolute right to control their work at all times? Should that get in the way of enjoyment? Should anyone have to listen to ALL of The Dark Side of the Moon because they like "Money?" (Who doesn't like "Money?")

Sometime RTWT just says it all

2010-03-12T10:13:00.003-05:00

I've been trying to think about how to address this from Ta-Nehisi Coates, but honestly, I don't have much to add. The study is disturbing, but the coverage is equally disturbing and discouraging. But don't take my word for it. Go and read it. Here's a sample, to whet your appetite:

Second this kind of reporting turns a serious problem into a kind of show which people from all political points of view use to graphically (if erroneously) drive home their point--mainly, it sucks to be a single black woman. Which leads to the third problem, the entire framing fits into a narrative of single black female tragedy that's been everywhere of late. If you think about it, there's really no reason why this story couldn't have gone in another (though equally erroneous) direction and declared "Study Finds Median Wealth For Single Latinas At $5." Why didn't it? Latinos are this country's largest minority. Until they are not.

Big Media Jaime

2010-03-11T15:45:00.002-05:00

Well, bigger media, at least. The irrepressible Jaime Green of surplus has got herself a column at the very hip Awl to hold forth on such topics as greenmarkets, local produce and food policy issues. It's something she's written about before and well. Double bonus: she's talking about my local farmer's market that I never actually go to, but often walk by and feel a nice, warm sense of smug superiority over...I don't know, people who don't have farmer's markets to walk by on their way to brunch in an Irish bar. Hopefully, this will continue. Jaime's column, not my walking by the greenmarket.

Public Consumption

2010-03-11T10:04:00.002-05:00

So I made a small change in the world of this blog, one that, well, no one will probably notice. But it's worth noting, nonetheless.

I'm a facebook aficionado, as any of my FB friends will attest. (One could even say that this would not be inaccurate.) And facebook has a nifty little feature where you can link a blog directly to your facebook notes. I had mine linked to my personal blog for a while, but I've changed it over to 99 Seats. I haven't been posting too much over there lately and I want to add more general material to this blog, so, basically, there's a bit of an integration going on.

Either way, like I said, this will mean no change to the folks who read this blog on the interwebs. But, my dear facebook friends, you're actually seeing a new feed. Feel free to click through and see it as it was meant to be seen. Or not.

And, my interweb readers, if you want to find me on the facebook, well, here I am. Friend me, and you can comment there, too. I know some smart folks who make good comments on facebook.

Okay, I've typed "facebook" enough for one day.

The Chef of the Future!

2010-03-11T09:46:00.003-05:00

I may not have mentioned this before: I have a deep, abiding love for The Onion's A.V. Club. I always loved their movie reviews and music reviews, but this site is a daily must read for me for their TV section. Not to overstate the case, but it is the bomb-diggity. And then some. Their daily recaps/reviews of current shows, like Lost, 24 and House are some of the most insightful and smart writing about television going on today. I used to be a fan of Television Without Pity, but what the folks at the A.V. Club are doing is miles ahead of snarky comments and nicknames. Though they do have their fair share of snarky comments and nicknames. So everybody wins!

Just go read this. This essay says more about television, commerce and where they intersect than most articles in legacy media like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Plus it's about one of my favorite episodes of one of my favorite TV shows. Ever.

When I was a kid, The Honeymooners was on every night on WPIX at 11 p.m., for an hour. It was a nightly ritual for me to stay up late and watch. Not to mention that, beforeThe Twilight Zone marathon was an annual New Year's Day tradition, there was a Honeymooners marathon. I was basically raised by Jackie Gleason with the stars Art Carney, Joyce Randolph and Audrey Meadows.

A friend of mine, in a facebook comment, noted the near total lack of working class people from television right now. I watched a little of Parenthood yesterday and was really struck by it. I honestly can't think of a single, prime-time television show on broadcast or basic cable about the lives of working class people, black or white. It's shocking to me.

Noel's got some issues with Jackie Gleason's portrayal of the "working man" and he's got a good point, but, when I was 8 years old, in my mother's row house in Brooklyn, staying up way past my bedtime to watch Ralph and Norton try any scheme to get ahead, it was a vision of the world I could identify with in a way that I couldn't identify with Dynasty or Dallas or whatever other prime time soap was on. Being able to watch The Honeymooners a few hours after Good Times or What's Happening reminded me that the same struggle was still happening. Ralph Kramden becomes Archie Bunker. But who's Archie become? Neil Patrick Harris? Steve Carell? Somewhere the line got broken.

Anyway. I loved reading the essay and I'm liking forward to the rest of the series.

I'll Have A Smarty-Pants Point About This Later...

2010-03-09T12:02:00.002-05:00

...But mostly, this shit is just funny. See also.

I just had a conversation with a co-worker about songs from the '80s and how massively, totally and completely messed up they were. Like, all of them. Okay, maybe not Debbie Gibson. But all the rest? Scary, crazy songs for screwed up people. There's this, this, this, this, don't even get me started on this. These folks took their sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll a little too seriously.

White Flight

2010-03-09T10:20:00.002-05:00

Via the good ol' Prof, Tom Loughlin highlights some of the findings from this study and concludes:

If you connect the dots, a pattern appears which could be considered…well, controversial. It seems as if white people, about 2 out of 3 of whom were born outside the metropolitan area, have migrated to NYC and created a theatrical ghetto, producing theatre primarily for white people while being surrounded primarily by non-whites. In other words, in a city where people of color are in the majority, the theatre being produced appears primarily to be for the minority whites.

I talked a bit about this same study here. Tom asked for and got some additional information. Honestly, I'm loathe to get into a whole "damned statistics" situation here. It's not really my bailiwick. I do think it's worth noting that this study is about participants, not audiences. I don't really quibble with his leap, since it's been documented for other segments and discussed here, there and, well, everywhere.

Honestly, I think Tom (and Scott) are missing the forest for the trees here and looking at the situation from a kind of privilege. This study covers a certain segment of the Off-Off-Broadway theatre, is by no means comprehensive or complete (as the authors state here) and, as someone closer to the ground (though not fully of that world) can tell you, is already a bit self-selected. Reading his post put me in mind of this post by Ta-Nehisi Coates and this part, in particular:

But that said, I think that people passing this data around need to be really careful about using this study to draw inferences about the dating world of black women. One significant problem is that, as any black person will tell you, when black folks date online they don't go to OKcupid. They go to blacksingles. They go to soulsingles. Or if they're truly high post, they go to EliteNoire. (Dig the sensuous piano riffs and candelabra.)

In case you don't click through the link, he's talking about this study about the poor response rate black women get on the dating site, OKCupid. What both of these studies don't take into account is self-selection and the segregated nature of our society.

Even amongst the forward thinking world of Off-Off-Broadway theatre in New York, there is a significant level of segregation. And what that winds up meaning is that the black theatre remains off the radar. I don't mean to fault the fine folks at the Innovative Theatre Foundation, who are doing good things and did a good thing. We need more studies like this. But there are networks and connections for black theatre artists that don't connect to the community of indie theatre in any visible way. A young black theatre artist, coming to New York from an HBCU, say, isn't necessarily going to find a home at one of these theatres. They might at the New Federal or the Negro Ensemble Company or Urban Bush Women. They might find the Frank Silvera Workshop. They might find a group at a larger theatre like Going to The River.

Tom and Scott are exactly right: a lot of the indie theatre community is formed from college students flocking to New York after graduation and then working with their friends and peers. Which necessarily leads away from diversity. You work with people you know. And if all you know are other young, white kids, that's who you work with.

Where Tom and Scott and I part ways, of course, is in the question of what to do about it. They prefer to attack the NYLACHI mindset, to encourage artists to head to rural areas, or back to where they came from. I want to encourage the artists here to look around and actually write and create for the New York around them.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot lately, for a variety of reasons. One, I'm currently reading The Colossus of New York by Colson Whitehead and falling in love with New York again. Recently, I've gone to see quite a few shows, and, for all of the talk about the New York bias and whatnot, I've actually seen very, very few by either New York natives or even set in New York. I've seen plays set in rural Pennsylvania and suburban California and rural Texas (granted, that one was set at the turn of the century, but still...). In the last month or so, I've seen three plays actually set in New York and they were all set amongst the upper classes.

When I write, especially lately, I'm trying to write for the New York I know, the people I see on the subway and on the street. That's the audience I want to reach. I don't want to turn this into a big, chest-thumping roar about how Scott doesn't know what he's talking about; I don' think that's particularly productive. But...it's one thing to live here, to know this city and another to read about, or listen to how others talk about it.

Most of our indie theatres are pretty white, that's for sure. But that's not all of the independent theatre going on. Hell, look at the blogosphere: as far as I can tell, there are only two black playwrights in New York, apparently. But I know that's not true. We're just the ones you can see. The same is true for black theatre. What we don't have is integrated theatres. That's another matter.

Congrats

2010-03-08T22:11:00.002-05:00

Because I didn't really watch the dang thing*, I missed this.

Geoffrey Fletcher, the screenwriter of "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire," is the first African American screenwriter to take home an Academy Award.
The 39-year-old adjunct professor of film at Columbia University and NYU, surprised some by beating favorite Jason Reitman, writer/director of "Up in the Air."

It still surprises me that this was the first. But nonetheless, congrats, Geoffrey!

*Since, apparently absolute honesty is all the rage now, I did watch snippets and then the last chunk when I went to my local watering hole for karaoke night. Just so's nobody thinks I'm a big fat liar. Well, nobody else.

Not Watching The Oscars

2010-03-07T18:32:00.002-05:00

And not because I have Cablevision. (For once, I'm glad to have Time Warner.) But I'm choosing to opt out of the Oscars. It's actually been a trend over the last few years, but this is the first year I'm fully conscious of the choice. And I feel okay about it.

It does seem odd as someone who works in the arts to skip out on one of the biggest celebrations, but there you have it. I am skipping out. I might watch The Hurt Locker on DVD, instead. Or go sing some karaoke at my local pub. But sitting for four hours to watch the pomp and spectacle and terrible jokes and over-the-top dresses? Not for me. Thanks.

I used to care. Like, a lot. I used to really invest in the Oscars, invest in seeing all of the movies, invested in having opinions on the movies and the actors and the politics, invested in the history, the whole schmear. I remember rushing home from a rehearsal or something in college to watch and being SO thrilled that Anna Paquin won for The Piano. (Come on, it was 1993. Shut up.) It was like I wrote it or something. I cared so much about it. A couple of years later, I pissed off a whole party shouting obscenities at the screen when they gave Elia Kazan a Lifetime Achievement Award. (You wanna know why? Read this here. Rat fink.)

I did Oscar pools, tried to see all the films, went whole hog on it. I went to parties, pointed at the dresses, listened to the fancy, rich white folks talk about who they care about this or that. And slowly, I found myself not caring more and more. Mostly, I just don't care what the Academy thinks about just about anything.

When I was younger, and really dug on indie movies, and movies like The Piano and Pulp Fiction got nominated, I got a thrill, like the cool kids were making in the real world. It was exciting and fun and something to root for. It was okay to like folks like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh because they were Oscar-winners. It was a stamp of approval from the larger society.

I have a friend who used to run out and buy the new albums of his favorite artists so that they would wind up at the top of the charts the first week. It was like that. If they did well, I did well. It was the same thing with seeing a movie on opening weekend; not just wanting to make sure I saw it as soon as I could, but also wanting my heroes and idols to have great weekends.

But now...meh. I like the movies I like, and don't really care about critical approval anymore. I don't bother with what's the #1 movie. And watching the Oscars? Not really worth the time. Sorry, Hollywood. Hope you have a good night.

A Little More Anglophilia

2010-03-05T01:07:00.002-05:00

Funny. (And frustratingly un-embeddable).

Not funny. (And I refuse to dignify it with embedding. I refuse!)

Honestly, watching those two clips back to back is like a seminar in good comedy in about twelve minutes. And it really does make the American viewing public look like a bunch of dumb, unintuitive neanderthals. Which clearly they aren't, since Spaced is almost entirely based on American film styles, tropes and references. They just do it better.

For those who don't know the series, Spaced takes just about the oldest premise in the world and makes it fresh and original: Tim (Simon Pegg) and Daisy (Jessica Stevenson) pretend to be a couple to score a sweet flat that's only available to a couple. They're both coming off of rocky break-ups and console each other with pop culture references, recreational drug use and attempts at making careers as artists. That's pretty much it. It's a thin premise and after 14 episodes, it was all done. And it's nearly flawless. I'm not even kidding. The episodes are loopy, scattershot and, often, patently bizarre. They avoid sentiment or obvious developments (though, in the second series, Tim and Daisy do kind of become a couple...but not in a cheesy Ross-and-Rachel way). It's clever, well-done television. And you can see very clearly why from these clips.

Look at the scene where the fake-couples entertain their new neighbor. In the British version, they're active, engaged in continuing the deception, getting tripped up and needing to come up with more outrageous stories to cover their outrageous stories. There's tension and surprise and some just plain funny gags. In the American "translation," yeah, none of that. Lame, standard "sitcom" jokes, and the "wacky artist" is entirely the butt of the jokes for the attractive fake-couple. The actual words are basically the same, but it's all wrong.

Comedy is a strange, delicate flower, isn't it?

Note To Self

2010-03-04T12:54:00.001-05:00

Wherever these folks are traveling next, don't go there.

The Thing About Community

2010-03-03T17:16:00.002-05:00

No, not that Community (though I think there might be a post coming about that sometime soon), but the big idea "community." Over here, I wound up touching on some of this stuff, but I wanted to come back to it, especially after a day when I did something that is a bit new for this blog: plugged a couple of shows directly. Honestly, I felt a little weird about it. I did. Maybe it's still some remnants of my old anonymous persona coming out, giving me the finger and calling me a sell-out. Maybe it's pre-emptive fear of the less-commercial ends of the theatre blogosphere doing the same. I don't know. But it got me thinking about how we think about community and how we perceive it. Or at least how I perceive it. Or how I perceive how we perceive it. Or something.

Maybe it's coming from a fractured, blended, more than slightly fucked-up family situation, I don't know, but I've spent a lot of my life looking at communities (which are often just families writ large) and trying to figure out how they work. That's how I come to theatre, how I come to writing, one of the reasons I've always been attracted to large cast, ensemble plays and ensemble theatre companies. The dynamics of people in groups fascinates me. And watching how it translates out here in the theatre blogosphere fascinates me even more, even when it frustrates me.

When I wrote "THEATRE IS A COMMUNITY ACTIVITY," I really meant it. That's what I believe about it. It's formed from communities, for communities. But the thing about that is: if you're not a part of that community, you'll feel excluded.

When I went to see Mr. & Mrs. Fitch (it's open now, so I can talk about it a bit), I certainly enjoyed watching two master actors working with a script full of witty lines and aphorisms on a beautiful set. But I didn't quite feel welcome there. Sure, it was set in a world I recognized: upper class New Yorkers talking about the issues of the day. But that's not really my world. And, in the end, the message of the play was meant for upper class New Yorkers in the media business. Which is definitely not my world. But for those people, that community, the play spoke to them.

Every community has its shibboleths and passwords. (It's okay if you have to look up "shibboleth." I always do.) Secret handshakes. They're not always nefarious or signs of malfeasance. Sometimes they're just high signs and dog whistles and code. Inside jokes. I read a scene from a play of mine at an event recently and a childhood friend of mine was there. In the scene, two old friends are talking and one of them refers to the other's parents by name, Phil and Sarah. When it was over, my friend knew whose parents I was referring to. My plays are full of little things like that, partly because I mine my life (and sometimes my friends' lives) ruthlessly for my plays, but also because...I like doing it. It's a little nod of the head to the people who are important to me. That's also why nearly all of my full-length plays carry a dedication. I see my plays as gifts, things I make and give away to those I care about.

But...here's the thing: it's totally and completely exclusive in a way. If you don't get the inside joke or can't catch the dog whistle reference to my politics or philosophy, you miss it. And if the theatre is full of my friends, my community who I'm writing for, you can find yourself the only person not laughing in a giggling crowd. And that's a shitty place to be.

Like with Mr. & Mrs. Fitch, if you're not the intended audience, you can feel left out. And those feelings are totally valid and worth bringing up to the audience. Sometimes a writer can get blinded by their community, lost in the secret handshakes and codewords. Or you use the wrong password to open the wrong door. It can be complicated business.

Sometimes, I think, we complain about a lack of community when we feel excluded by one (or more). Or when other communities don't seem to making an effort to reach out to ours. I have a friend who works in social services in a heavily Latino neighborhood. She went to a function with people from another unit, all of whom spoke Spanish, and had a grand time talking to each other, in Spanish. My friend doesn't speak Spanish, not at all. She wound feeling hurt and lost. But she also plays on a soccer team, again with mainly native Spanish speakers. She doesn't feel the same disconnect. A community can do more to reach out, certainly. But just because you feel alone, that doesn't mean there isn't a community.

Like that tone that only teenagers can hear, if you're not the intended audience, the message might actually be repellent. It's something for both artist and audience to think about.

A Bunch of Cobblers, Eh?

2010-03-03T16:43:00.002-05:00

Lord love producer Ken Davenport. He and his staff got into a discussion about what the words "Broadway" and "Off-Broadway" mean to his ticket buyers and, rather than indulge in long-distance mind-reading or repeat chatter from the lobby, they went out and, in extremely unscientific form, you know, asked. The results are here and they are...well...

Broadway fares well. Congrats, Wicked, Chicago, and The Lion King. When people think "Broadway," they think of you. At the top of the list, though: "shows," "plays," "musicals," in that order. Most everything else was either, well, accurate (Broadway does involve "lights" and "theater") or positive.

Off-Broadway, though...got it a bit rougher. Well, a lot rougher.

For the 91% who could actually come up with a word, at the top of the list? "Plays," "cheap," and "not as fun." Ah. Now, again, granted, this is Pew Polling here. But this part stings a little:

And not only were there negative associations in this top group, as opposed to Broadway's survey which had only positive, but these negatives continued on with the rest of the sample. Words like "sad" and "meh" and "wannabes" were amongst the single responses we recorded. In total, over 30% of the people surveyed had a negative first thought about Off-Broadway.

Emphasis, for cruelty's sake, added.

Ken concludes that Off-Broadway has a brand problem. I simply say, maybe we should sell more shoes.

Sigh.

Blackface

2010-03-03T12:11:00.003-05:00

As I mentioned a couple of weeks back, one of the shows I saw recently was Brandon Jacobs-Jenkins' Neighbors at the Public. I really wanted to write about it and discuss some of the issues it brought up for me, but felt like I couldn't because it's a workshop and not open to review. That seemed like cheating. However, that's changed a bit. I think, on the balance, that's a good thing. Neighbors is a provocative piece worthy of a wider discussion, especially more than what the Times already did on it here. (Note to Patrick Healy: Blackface and racial epithets are not the same thing as a famous actor with a fake stump. No, really, they're not.)

I also attended this event on Monday, to hear Brandon, the director Niegel Smith and others talk about using blackface and minstrel shows in theatre to address the thorny issues of race. It was a pretty great conversation and talking with Brandon after helped clarify some things I had issues with in Neighbors and some things that I'm struggling with in my own work.

When I saw Neighbors, I was really struck by how little blackface affected me (in case you don't click any of the links above, in the play, a family of old-style minstrels in blackface move in next door to an interracial family). How do you approach blackface and stereotypes of African-Americans after you've seen this:

Chappelle's Show

The Racial Draft

www.comedycentral.com

Buy Chappelle's Show DVDs

Black Comedy

True Hollywood Story

Seriously, what can Sambo or Topsy tell me after that? I grew up with this, man:
So blackface, in and of itself? Not so shocking to me. But there is a generation for whom it still has power, for whom it still needs to be pushed back against. And I respect that. I benefited from that. I just think we need to re-examine our relationship to it.

In addition to Neighbors, I've come across a couple of plays that use blackface and minstrel shows lately and I'm always left a bit cold. There's a simplistic treatment to it that I think leaves out a sense of complicity and a weird kind of ownership. Minstrel shows are upsetting, racist and disgusting...and the basis for the modern American musical. In fact, the minstrel show is one of the, what, two or three genuine American additions to the cultural legacy of the world. And yet, they're completely verboten and hidden away. It's a complicated history to delve into, with many, many layers to unpack. I think a lot of writers are happy to just say, "This is how they think of you." But it's obviously more complicated and more interwoven than that.

I've approached race fairly gingerly in my work, with one exception (and that apparently needs a new title). Partly as a result of my pre-post-racial upbringing (black dad, white stepmom, suburban childhood), partly because it's so huge and tangled, I wanted to make sure I had my craft down before I broached it. But since this is shaping up into The Year I Write About Race, blackface and minstrel shows looms large over it. It's not a thing I'm likely to use, not any time soon, since I write in more "realistic" vein and it's a powerful, more than surreal style, but it's something in the back of my mind. And I'm certainly excited to see it tackled on stage more.

But it does make wonder about the retroactive nature of theatre. The Dave Chappelle skit up there is six years old. Bamboozled was a decade ago. There's a lot more space to approach the issues of stereotypes and images of blackness, maybe even some more latitude. I think, for certain audiences, there is more to be gained from pushing the envelope even further and drawing a sharper connection between the antiquated tropes of the minstrel show and our own modern forms of entertainment.

Either way, it seems like we're coming into a period of facing some of this stuff head on. For that, at least, I'm glad.

Because I love it and it is, sincerely, a seminal work in my development as an artist and a person, I leave you with this:

One Good Turn Deserves Another

2010-03-03T12:05:00.001-05:00

Matt does me a solid. I return the favor.

I missed Glee Club this summer, so I'm psyched to go and see it this time around. And there's still time for the sweet discount. Who doesn't love a good discount?

Break legs, Matt!

Cheap Theatre. Plus Dancing.

2010-03-03T11:49:00.002-05:00

The Ensemble Studio Theatre has a long, long history of developing, supporting and producing new works and new playwrights, including yours truly. In fact, they were tagged in everybody's favorite book as the top developmental theatre in New York (as selected by playwrights). Go, E.S.T.! But in recent months, as I think I've mentioned here, they've become known for something else: awesome dance parties. The shows come down, the set gets cleared, and the music starts up. Fun ensues.

E.S.T. is just about to open a new production, Lenin's Embalmers by Vern Thiessen, as part of their 10-year old EST/Sloan Project, which produces new plays about science and technology. You can read a bit about the background of the play here. And, on Saturday, March 13th, they're hosting a dance party after the show.

Double-bonus: they're offering a $10 discount to readers of this old blog. That means you! Go here for tickets to the 7 p.m. Saturday, March 13th performance and use the code JTIX99. Come out to see the show, then join me on the dance floor for some grooving. It will be something remarkably similar to this.

Stop Making Sense

2010-03-03T11:39:00.002-05:00

Scott proves himself to be a wise, wise man here. There's lots I like in this, in just about every way, but here's a key bit:

So my quest, through CRADLE and through my teaching, is to open up an awareness and create opportunities for both young theatre artists and also creative people who, like Matt Freeman, want to express themselves even if they make their living doing something else. So yes, write it yourself...and act it yourself, and sing it yourself, and paint it yourself, and dance it yourself. And do it for others, for your community, as an end in itself and not a means to "fame and fortune."

RTWT.

I also like very much that he acknowledges that some of his responses have come from a place of personal anger and annoyance. It's pretty easy to fly off the handle on the interwebs (believe me, I know!) and take things personally or have just one part of what someone says ding your ear in a way that sets you off. We need more taking of deep breaths, thinking through our arguments and thoughts and asking ourselves: Is that really what I meant? Because sometimes, it's not. Sometimes it's worth taking stock.

It's so easy to get locked into a position, both here on the internet and in life, and then use a whole lot of confirmation bias to avoid ever really examining it. You know what that one guy said that time about unexamined life and its relative worth. It's kind of famous. Good on ya, Prof.

Yeah, They Win.

2010-03-02T23:35:00.000-05:00

OK Go pretty much wins at videos.

Took The Words Right Out of My Mouth

2010-03-01T16:48:00.003-05:00

Almost literally. As I've watched the news coming out of Chile, I've been thinking exactly this. And not even in the Katrina "black people loot while white people scavenge" way. It's been more noticing our fear-based news: looting! There's looting! And lawlessness! Scary! Scary!

But, as Yglesias notes, if you've just survived a devastating natural disaster and you're without supplies, how else are you going to get them?

Whipper-Snappers and Alterkockers

2010-03-01T14:22:00.003-05:00

Over at Isaac's, I covered some of the Prof's posts on the audiences we're writing for. I think they're mainly great and really worth reading, so, you know, RTWT. Twice.

I do, though, have more than a bit of a quibble with this bit, that I quoted at Parabasis:

This, by the way, is the type of thing that youthful playwrights cannot write about empathically, having never experienced it. The young are still thrashing around with possibilities, while we are searching for meaning in what we've done and seeking the new thing that will enhance that meaning. Had Arthur Miller written Death of a Salesman at 54 instead of 34, there would have been a lot more sympathy for Willy and a lot less for Biff, I suspect. Salesman is a young man's play. Instead, at 49 Miller wrote After the Fall, a play that looks inward at his life. It is a middle-aged play.

Emphasis added.

Harrumph. I don't want to get my dander up here, but, as a young playwright, I kind of take exception. They're not exactly fighting words...but they're close.

Now, let me say this: I completely understand what's he's talking about, in a large sense. I've been a young playwright, worked with young playwrights and, as hard as I've tried, I've fallen into the traps of A) using easy stereotypes to describe older characters and B) writing plays about the trials and tribulations of youth as though they were the most important things in the world. There is a maturation process that happens, a perspective that you gain. When you're 19, in college, and in love, it seems like a break-up is the most important thing to ever happen in the history of the world. I brought an early play of mine into a writers' group once, one of those plays about a young couple breaking up, full of histrionics and whatnot. And a guy, about my age now, told me, not unkindly, that the writing was fine and all, but...who really cares? A couple of twenty-somethings breaking up? Not the end of the world. That was a lesson I took to heart.

But one I keep learning. Just last week, I brought a full-length play about an older, more middle-aged couple into a different writers' group, one composed almost entirely of writers older than I am. The play read well, but, near the end, I got dinged again. I described one of the leads as "looking good for her age" in the stage directions, which, to someone who was actually the age the character is supposed to be, was a red flag.

I am a young-ish playwright, a couple of years older than Miller when he wrote Death of A Saleman actually. No, I haven't felt real middle-aged malaise and questioning. I know that. But I can't describe it? I can't empathize? That undercuts the entire nature of art, the entire endeavor of making plays. I have parents, older friends and relatives. I listen to how they speak, watch how they move and act, hear their voices, their rhythms and I try to capture that. If was stuck only writing about things that I myself had personally experienced, yeah, I'd just be writing about a bunch of thirtysomethings who are still figuring out their lives. There's room for that, to be sure, but the real great stuff means reaching out to tell a wider story. To connect to something bigger than myself, something more. That's the whole point of imagination. To look at someone else's life and put myself in their shoes.

Plus, since theatre is a collaborative art, we get a bonus: when I finish my play, I cast an actor who is the right age and they say the words and they tell me what I get right, what I get wrong and I change it. It's a beautiful process.

I think that process gets short-changed. And I think that our field's emphasis on the playwright as the sole voice and the way we push people to only "write what they know" in the most limited senses do drive our plays away from an expansive vision and into the narrowest of focuses. But it is possible and can and should be done and encouraged.

On the Death of A Salesman tip...dude. The play's about Willy Loman. He doesn't necessarily come off as the hero, but it's his play. I don't think that Miller's sympathy lies with Biff; it's Willy's tragedy. Arthur Miller may be Biff, and certainly gave him some great scenes and moments, but it's Willy's play. It's not the play of a middle-aged man, sure. But that doesn't mean he didn't understand the middle-aged man in it.

And, for my money, I agree with Paul in the comments: I prefer The Price over After The Fall when it comes to Arthur Miller writing about the concerns of middle age. But then again, what do I know? I'm just a kid.

Yesterday's News, Sometime Next Week

2010-03-01T14:14:00.002-05:00

The Wall Street Journal discovers that playwrights wind up making more money and having more of a career in television. Sacre bleu! Will the wonders never cease?

Seriously, WSJ, I know you'd rather spend your time turning into the NY Post's stodgier right flank, but get with it. The brain drain from the theatre to the lucrative world of television is so 2009.

In current news, via Rob at the Wicked Stage, Robert Hofler has some simple advice for playwrights who aren't getting paid:

My advice: get a better day job.

Like, say, writing for television?

Man On The Street

2010-03-01T13:07:00.003-05:00

Or at least in the room. Paul Mullin is doing a blow-by-blow account of the Outrageous Fortune meeting in Seattle. Check out his updates here.

Apparently these meetings will be taking place all over. Awesome.

House-sitting

2010-03-01T10:32:00.001-05:00

As Isaac noted here, I'll be over at his place on and off this week and next, posting at will. I do like a good house-sitting gig. Swing on over and check me out there.

A Working Democracy...

2010-03-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

doesn't look like this.

I'm all for Mr. Smith Goes To Washington and everything, but I missed the part where he threw 2,000 people out of work in the middle of a recession. Must have dozed off.

Ripped From The Headlines

2010-02-28T20:27:00.002-05:00

I think this sounds like a pretty good premise for a play:

The moral dilemma lawyers in the situation Yoo (ex hypothesi) found himself in 2002 face is this: Suppose you believe it's legal to do something which is very immoral, and you're asked your professional opinion on whether it would be legal to do this very immoral thing, by people who are asking you precisely because they intend to do it. What do you do?

And I just might use it. I'm always interested in plays that are about moral questions (I've been kicking around one for a while). In a way, that's why I follow politics, to find the stories, and even more importantly, the questions of our time. I think the dilemma described there is one of those questions from the last ten years that more plays could and should be exploring. As I've said before, I think the path to the Great Plays of our times runs through questions like that.

Compassionate Conservatives

2010-02-26T16:40:00.001-05:00

That was all B.S., right? Good to know.

Passions

2010-02-26T15:44:00.004-05:00

This is NOT advertising. Honest. But I am a bit of a poster/graphic design whore. It hasn't come up here too often because A) I keep it under wraps since it's uber-geeky and B) there is so very rarely anything to crow about in the world of theatre graphic design. I know this comes as a huge shock to you all. But it is quite true. Theatre graphic design tends to the, um, well, boring. So very boring, stilted, and lame. It's hard to capture what is a fluid, living medium in a two-dimensional one, but, come on, people, we can try harder! Or at least aim for cool. Which brings me to this:

This is the poster for the upcoming Epic Theatre Ensemble's production of Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play (in case you couldn't, you know, read it) and it is, in a word, lovely. Seriously. I don't know this play, have no idea what it's about or what's going on, but this image makes me want to, you know. It's arty and cool and much more intriguing than what we normally see in theatre poster design. You can see it a little better here.

The NY Times did a little piece on the making of it here, which is where I saw it. My favorite part? This:

One of the many images Mr. Scalin ultimately rejected was inspired by Marilyn Monroe’s iconic stance in the film “The Seven Year Itch.”

“One idea was to have Jesus wearing a robe standing over a street vent and having the wind blow up his robe,” said Mr. Scalin. “It was an amazing image but we realized it would send the wrong message.”

For the record, I would also want to see the show with that poster. Honestly, maybe a little more.

Behind The Music

2010-02-26T10:10:00.002-05:00

Both Rob at The Wicked Stage and Josh at Tarhearted have great pieces about music up right now. You should definitely check them out. And not one to be left out...

I just finished Colson Whitehead's lovely coming-of-age novel, Sag Harbor, and had a great time. One of the threads that holds the book together is music. He talks a lot about early rap, '80s punk and new wave, even sets a climatic scene to a lite-FM hit. That and Josh's post got me thinking about the music of my youth. Some of which I discovered well after my youth.

I had (well, still have, since I see them all the time) a pretty tight-knit group of friends when I was growing up. We lived in the same, small, boring bedroom community, rode our Huffy bikes through constructions sites around town, pretended to go exploring in the "woods" of a local nature preserve (we could always hear Route 80 in the background, so it wasn't really roughing it), spent one summer day chasing each other all over town with water pistols (back in the days when you could get water guns that look like real guns just about anywhere...I'm still shocked none of us got shot...though we did get stopped by the cops). And we all got into roughly the same music at the same time.

By a weird quirk of birth order and luck, there weren't a lot of older brothers to be had. I had one, and one of my friends had one, but all the rest were much older sisters or only children or the oldest themselves. So there wasn't a lot of inheriting of record collections, or trying to emulate cool older siblings. We were kind of on our own. And what did we get into? Doo wop. I kid you not.

Maybe it was the influence of Stand By Me. It probably was the influence of Stand By Me, which, when I was ten, was the single most important and honest movie ever made. Period. But from the time I was about 11 or 12, until into high school, I listened to a steady stream of The Inkspots, The Dells, The Orioles, the Chords. Basically my internal dial was tuned to WCBS-FM, all oldies, all the time.

Oh, some "modern" music crept in (taped live off the radio, of course). I liked my Madonna, Michael Jackson, Prince. I could get down with some good Top 40, Casey Kasem action. But underneath it all, I was a Drifters man. I loved Billy Joel's An Innocent Man almost more because it was all a tribute to doo wop.

In his play, Music from A Sparkling Planet, Douglas Carter Beane has a line that's stuck with me since I saw it: "There's nothing more comforting than the past's idea of the future." Doo wop is kind of like that: it was so full of a long-lost optimism and hope, even when singing about heartbreak. It's the sound of that place, that strange, beautiful place right before the raging hormones of your teenage years kick in, when you're still kind of a child, looking at the world as though it's new, but adulthood is coming around the bend and you think that it will just be awesome! Awesome to not have a bedtime, or to eat whatever you want, when you want. It's that age when being a grown-up seems like summer vacation all the time, when having a girlfriend (or boyfriend) means holding hands. You can't possibly see how anything could be wrong with growing up.

And, in 1984, the height of the Reagan years, despite the horrors that were being wrought on Central America, urban America, gay America, poor America, if you were a kid in a sleepy bedroom town in New Jersey, it was the sound of the life you wanted. Happy, clean-cut, obviously nice-smelling kids whose parents weren't divorced, whose older brothers weren't weird punk-rock art-freaks, who clearly weren't the only black kid in class, all singing in unison about the same thing. That, my friends, was the sound of my heart. This was the sound of my heart.

Stand By Me (Single/LP Version...

When I think about the music that made me, I think about that. Lord God, I was so uncool. In my middle school yearbook, I had them print, under my picture: Doo Wop Will Never Die! And I was surprised to discover that I didn't get laid until college.

But, for me, it won't. Underneath the punk rock, alt-rock, indie pop, hip-hop, showtunes and mash-ups that cover my soul in layers like a palimpsest, at the bottom of the well, there's a group of guys, all dressed alike, smiling, dancing in unison and singing in perfect harmony.

Why Do They Keep Thinking They Can Show Him Up?

2010-02-25T17:41:00.002-05:00

Really, why do the Republicans keep forgetting that this guy is really, really f'ing smart and good at what he does?

The ten-year old kid I tutor a couple of times a week asked me the other day to explain the phrase "you don't bring a knife to a gun fight." (City kids ask the most f'ed up things.) I think I'll just show him that clip.

Must See TV?

2010-02-25T10:28:00.003-05:00

I don't have six hours to watch the big Health Care Summit Meeting, but, if you do, you can do it here.

While I do love my political theater, I don't think it could possibly be as fun as this:

Vision Index

2010-02-24T20:37:00.002-05:00

I was out with my buddy Lonnie tonight. Lonnie is kind of like my Obi-Wan Kenobi, wise, kind (well, unless he's doling out the bourbon), and looks snappy in a robe (okay, I'm just assuming that part. His girlfriend can confirm.). We see shows together, talk shop, kick around ideas. He's worked at a bunch of theatres, as a G.M. or Managing Director, lived all over the country. He's good people and a good person to bounce ideas off of. Tonight was no difference.

We started off talking about the 2011 RSC residence that everyone is talking about and that led into a general discussion of big ideas, big vision. I know we're super-sick of talking about Joe Papp, but he was undeniably a man of vision. The New York Shakespeare Festival was a Big Idea. Where are the new Big Ideas now?

One of the things Lonnie mentioned that I'd never thought of before is that we measure our theatres by their physical size, by the number of seats. That's how we draw our distinctions. Grant applications ask for budgets, production lists, but how do we think about vision? There's a gross national happiness index...what goes into a theatre's vision index?

Now I Just Have To Stay Alive Until May 4th

2010-02-24T10:36:00.002-05:00

I have something to live for.

I haven't been able to convince Isaac of the righteousness of the Hold Steady, but that doesn't stop me from trying.

Back Burner

2010-02-24T10:28:00.002-05:00

You throw the balls up in the air and sooner or later, you got a lot of them. Wow. That came out all wrong. Lemme try that again.

So, between preparing for this, the needs of the day job and preparing for a reading on March 16th (details to follow), plus a blizzard of theatre-going (some of which I'll actually be able to respond to!), I've got to put New Play Friday on a bit of a hiatus. I'm unhappy about it myself, but...guy's gotta have his priorities.

Come mid-March, the plate clears up and new scenes will start going up again. I know you're all waiting with bated breath.

In the meantime, come out and see me read on Thursday. You can see the line-up here (it's a good one) and RSVP, if you're all down with the social media.