Again, It's About the Audience, or It's About Nothing.

James Taylor, in a recent, fairly cynical Theatre Talk commentary:

Again, awards are about money. Theater is about the experience—and how that experience stays with us after the rest of the noise fades away.

If theatre accomplishes the latter, the former takes care of itself.  That seems lost on Taylor, who advocates removing any hint of objectivity in awards shows; giving the brass ring to whatever show has the brighter marquee.

What, so we should honor mediocre works with stars so that they'll do more business?  What happens when the buyer's remorse sets in afterward, and the audiences find themselves wishing they hadn't forked over hard-earned money for "Quality, Bad" plays?

Ask anyone in any other industry on the planet what happens over the long term when you trade customer goodwill for fast bucks.  It's about the audience, or it's about nothing, and we should pack up our pageant wagons and roll off into the sea.  If we're not serving The People In The Dark, we're serving ourselves, and only the most depraved would pay to watch someone masturbate.

What Are We Shooting For?

I have spent a fair amount of time catching up on the Los Angeles Theatre Community, of late.  In my second term as president of "L.A.'s Most Ambitious Theatre Company," it seems about time to exercise a bit of curiosity about the landscape.  I've discovered Bitter Lemons, a community-based blog and critical aggregator; I've become more active in my appreciation for the LA Stage Alliance; and I've started reading Rick Culbertson's blog, "Thoughts from a Los Angeles Theater Producer."

A post from Culbertson on March 16th of this year, entitled "Good is Not the Same as Quality" has really got me thinking.  There is much food for thought in this post, and if I get the time I'd like to explore some of the issues he raises from the viewpoint of the shoestringiest of shoestring producers (i.e. Theatre Unleashed.)  But for now I'd like to diverge off onto a glancing subject.  Culbertson writes:

The first step is for producers to accept the distinction between quality and good.  It’s hard for us producers to look in the mirror, but we have to.  And we have to do it as businesspeople, not just as artists.

Once we accept this distinction, we then need to come together as producers.  We need to define the parameters of our work, and the goals of our community.  With those definitions in place, we can begin to control our brand, instead of having our brand control us.

Hear, hear.  I had just this argument earlier this year, regarding our production of The Unserious Chekhov (which closes this weekend!  Don't miss it!)  From an email to our Artistic Director:

The lack of money should be viewed as a challenge rather than a full stop.  The moment you decide to look at a problem from the point of view of, "How do I solve this?" it ceases to be a problem.

A few thoughts:

We may be broke, but we're resource rich.  We have an incredible, talented company.  We have an aggressive and effective publicity team.  We have a building.  The creative staff of Chekhov needs to find a way of using what assets we have to their fullest extent before bringing in new, costly assets.

It is possible to "play the obstacles," to take the hindrances and turn them into helps.  Think about this:  How can you use the fact that we're broke to sell Chekhov, to create an overall aesthetic that is exciting and engaging?  I don't know the answer right now.  Maybe it lies in striking a contrast between our scrappy production of Chekhov comedies and a "SERIOUS" production of one of his plays.

We've been toying with a certain aesthetic, a 99-Seat aesthetic that makes the most of what we have and narrows the focus on performance.  This is an excellent opportunity to crystallize some of the techniques we've used thus far into a manifesto of sorts, a 99-Seat Theatre "Vow of Chastity" similar to the Dogme '95 movement.  [...] The point is, the austerity of our productions can be a selling point.

(I'm really pulling back the curtain in this blog. Good thing nobody reads it!)

I am all too aware of the fact that Broadway quality is out of our reach.  Hell, West Valley Playhouse quality is out of our reach.  I drooled over the set for Broadway Bound at the ADA awards last December.  I sent a text to the set designer (an old college buddy), asking him if he'd be interested in joining TU as our Tech Director.  Heh.  His asking price is more than we spent on all of our sets last year (and he deserves every penny).

Production values, schmoduction values.  We concentrate on what we can do:  Write and perform good theatre.  We hit more than we miss, and that's good enough for me.

But -- and here's that glancing topic -- what the hell are we doing?  What exactly are we shooting for in our Under-99's?  What is our brand?

One of the comments on Culbertson's blog struck me:

A better analogy would be between Off-off-Broadway and L.A., in which case the two are comparative because of the variables. Indeed, off-off-Broadway (SMALL 99 seat theaters) provide a starting point. As shows move up the theatrical chain, and money is applied, they can transfer to off-Broadway or Broadway.

I hadn't considered what we do in relation to Off-off-Broadway.  It's a logical step.  From The Back Stage Guide to Broadway by Robert Viagas:

Off-Broadway evolved in the 1950s as a reaction against the rising costs and perceived lack of experimentation on Broadway.  The Off-Broadway theatre movement began in the bohemian section of New York called Greenwich Village (between Houston St. and 14th St.) and spread throughout the city.

In the 1960s, an even cheaper, smaller and more experimental movement called Off-Off-Broadway emerged as complete rejection of commercial theatre.

I hearken back to a conversation I had with one of our company members, a conversation I touched on in the third part of my melodramatically titled "Deadly Assumptions" series.  It's ridiculous for theatre to try to be film.  Perhaps, then, it's ridiculous for an under-99 theatre to try to be the Ahmanson.

Here's a well-worn passage from Peter Brook's The Empty Space.  I'm going to keep quoting this until someone tells me to knock it off:

It is always the popular theatre that saves the day. Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common -- a roughness. Salt, sweat, noise, smell: the theatre that's not in a theatre, the theatre on carts, on wagons, on trestles, audiences standing, drinking, sitting round tables, audiences joining in, answering back: theatre in back rooms, upstairs rooms, barns; the one-night stands, the torn sheet pinned up across the hall, the battered screen to conceal the quick changes -- that one generic term, theatre, covers all this and the sparkling chandeliers too.

Maybe it's not enough to merely embrace what under-99 theatre is.  Maybe it's necessary to reject what it isn't.  Find strength in the Off-off-Broadway tradition and see where it takes us half a century later.  Say, "To Hell!" with sparkling chandeliers -- with even the remote hope that one of our under-99 productions could ever cross over into a mighty Equity-LORT production.  Buckminster Fuller wrote, "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."  Also, "lort" is Danish for "shit."

I need to let these thoughts stew for a bit.

Deadly Assumptions: A Response to "Why Theatre Matters" (part three)

This is part three of my response to Steven Leigh Morris' LA Weekly cover story, "Why Theatre Matters."  Part one may be found here and part two may be found here.

Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.

-- Robert A. Heinlein, storyteller

Now, to address relevance.  "So, if there's even a flicker of belief that our theater does actually matter, the next question is how to keep it relevant," writes Steven Leigh Morris, committing to paper a staggering tautology.

The theatre has relevance, therefore it must have relevance.

To be fair, there is more to that passage.  Here it is:

So, if there's even a flicker of belief that our theater does actually matter, the next question is how to keep it relevant, and inviting, financially and aesthetically, to new generations.

I'm not sure Morris has established that "our theater does actually matter."  Does the theatre have "relevance," and what does that question actually mean?

Do the game designers behind Bio-Shock fret over the relevance of console games?  Does James Cameron sit awake nights tied in knots of worry over his relevance as an artist?  Has J. J. Abrams ever surveyed a writer's room and asked, "Yes, but does the medium of television have relevance?"

This kind of navel gazing is reserved for people with too much time on their hands.  I used to worry about the relevance of theatre -- then I helped start a theatre company.  The question has changed.  It's not, "Is the theatre relevant?"  The question is, "What do we do next?"  "How do we get asses in seats?"  "What can we do with this artform that no other artform can do?"  I had a conversation with one of our company members just the other night about this, about how ridiculous it is for theatre to try to be film.  Eisenstein's theory of montage doesn't quite play.  (A dialectic approach can be taken to writing and staging theatre but it is far different -- I believe more potent -- than the mere combination of images.)

I refuse the premise.  The relevance of the theatre is a moot point when you're a week away from opening a show.  What truly matters is more sublime:

"The audience has a right to be entertained. They deserve that!"

- Tigger!, storyteller

What's missing in the analysis -- or rather, what Morris glances upon but abandons in favor of his three point wish list* -- is the audience.

To quote the poet, "give the people what they want."  Stop assuming that the folks who fork over their hard-earned money in exchange for a couple of hours divergence are simpletons or Philistines who gravitate to fast food culture over "ART" (pronounced with a soft "r," naturally) for any other reason than a desire for a predictible outcome.  The $15 bucks we charge for our Main Stage shows at Theatre Unleashed might be better spent at the movies or top deck tickets to a Dodgers game.  Our challenge is to reverse that equation:  The money spent on Avatar or the latest Grand Theft Auto sequel might be better spent on an evening at the theatre!

We speak of trust in the theatre all the time:  The Actors must trust the Director.  The Lighting Designer must trust the Set Designer.  All must trust the Playwright.  But, goddammit, the audiences MUST be able to trust the theatre.  Why do people stay away?  They're tired of being disappointed.

The audience wants their expectations fulfilled.  They want to know what they're getting into.  They want to know they are not about to waste time and money on a piece of self-reflective garbage or trite socio-political commentary.  They want Something Worth Seeing.

You could argue that the producer/curators and curated festivals Morris pines for would stimulate the production of such plays.  But what Morris describes is still not audience-centric.  It's not even artist-centric.  It's "expert-centric."  Give me a company fast on its feet and able to adjust to an audience feedback loop over a curator with an eye for "what works."  Of course, such a company would have to pay attention to the dreaded SocNets.  Indeed, such a company would have to submit to the SocNets as a vital communication line to their audience.

In sum, it's the audience.  We need to get out of the mindset of doing plays "for" and audience, and start telling stories "with" an audience.

When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, "We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world." If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

-- David Mamet, storyteller

Until we get back to connecting with our fellows in the immediate, visceral way that truly Rough theatre allows -- burlesque, magic, stand-up comedy, sketch comedy, etc. -- we will find ourselves trodding the boards and soliloquizing for fewer and fewer people.  Theatre was born before audiences drunk and rowdy, cheering and jeering along.  You can't curate that experience; you have to live it.

* Producer/curators, more festivals, and ... an L.A. Theatre Chamber of Commerce.  As to the last point, it exists and is called LA Stage Alliance.  They are in the process of revolutionalizing the way theatres interact with their patrons, and LA Weekly is completely missing the boat.  Where's the cover story on PatronManager, Steven?

The Unserious Chekhov

The rest of my "Deadly Assumptions" series is coming.  As it happens, I am in the midst of preparing Something Worth Seeing at present along with a wonderful group of actors and collaborators:

When you're in the trenches getting shit done, it tends to cut down on your pontification time.  Rest assured I'll find my evenings free soon enough, and will return to my normal cussed self.

In the meantime, check out this article by Josh M at Fine Arts LA: A Community of Cars  (At first I thought the title was "A Community of Cats," which would be a pretty fair description of the LA Theatre scene as well.)

Deadly Assumptions:
A Response to "Why Theatre Matters"
part two

This is part two of my response to Steven Leigh Morris' LA Weekly cover story, "Why Theatre Matters."  Part one may be found here.

 "The city of Berlin spends more on the arts than the entire federal government of the United States," writes Steven Leigh Morris, ramping into yet another canard:  The reason theatre in America suffers is because the government doesn't fund it.  We need a national theatre, we need more taxpayer dollars to support new works, etc. etc.  The problem with this belief in the benevolence of government is simply put:  He who pays the piper calls the tune.  Or as Thomas Jefferson is believed to have said, "A government big enough to give you everything you want, is strong enough to take everything you have."  It was probably Gerald Ford who said that.  Regardless, the truth of the statement is evident.  Just ask the NEA Four.  Sure, they got their grant money -- three years and a court case later.

I know JFK said the following, as quoted in my blog entry of February 5th, 2009, "A Secretary of the Arts?"

Art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.

-- JFK (emphasis added)

Keep in mind, just a few paragraphs above Morris was writing about the role the arts have played in goring "tyrannies of the past."  Is he serious in suggesting that the theatre can serve that role while cashing checks from Uncle Sam?  I'm not against government grants.  As soon as Theatre Unleashed receives its 501(c)(3) status, it's "game on" for any and all funding sources available.  The "lackaday" over an absence of massive government sponsorship of the arts is tiresome.  If in Los Angeles, "the incentives, the economics and the culture couldn't be more different" than New York, as Morris states a little later, surely he would concede that comparing Germany and America is an apples and oranges equation.

It's now been documented -- here I refer to the study called Outrageous Fortune, by Todd London, Ben Pesner and Zannie Giraud Voss, published by the Theater Development Fund -- that the network of midsize regional theaters across our nation has become too paralyzed by fear and the imperatives of institutional survival to move the art form forward, thereby consigning those theaters to a kind of creeping irrelevance.  The evidence for that lies in the aging demographics of their patrons, in a now-staggering system established 60 years ago to provide a viable alternative to the commercial fare of Broadway.

(He is wrong about why the regional theatre system was started -- really, Broadway?  But we'll let it pass for now.  Charles McNulty succinctly sums up the reason for regional theatres in his excellent piece, "Southern California's big theaters need fresh, dramatic thinking."  Read it.)

I would argue that those theatres are "paralyzed by fear" because of the aging demographics.  I submit that the evidence for the aging demographics is the creeping irrelevence.  At the very least, it's a dwindling spiral with each factor exacerbating the situation for the other.  It would be awesome if all our problems could be solved by:

1. Eliminating the need for ticket sales,
2. Which would free us from the need to please a particular audience,
3. Which would embolden us to put some fire back into the theatre's belly.

What's missing from this scenario?  I'll cover that in the next installment.

Deadly Assumptions:
A Response to "Why Theatre Matters"
part one

"And from all sides the same answer -- the risk is too great, too many disappointments. Here we see how the vicious circle is drawn. Steadily the Deadly Theatre digs its own grave." – Peter Brook, The Empty Space

In the March 25th edition of LA Weekly, theatre editor Steven Leigh Morris published a Jeremiad on the state of theatre in Los Angeles. Odds are if you haven’t read his article, the following won’t make much sense, so I do recommend reading it. I have a lot to say about this article, so I’m going to have to do this in parts.

The article kicks off with a lamentation over the lack of respect for one of Morris’ college professors. Morris comments on a press release that crossed his desk in January, listing in some detail the college professor’s screenwriting CV. Morris writes:

Next comes the sentence that stands out for me: “He also wrote some on- and off-Broadway plays.”

That’s it. Theater. Broadway theater! He also wrote some … plays. Might those plays have a title?

If only this were some West Coast aberration, but in fact it’s indicative of a far more pervasive, waning regard for theater in our culture.

Or perhaps it’s indicative of a publicist who knew the only way to net significant coverage would be to wet the beak of theatre journalism with TV credits. Indeed, perhaps this tells us more about the state of theatrical journalism than it does the prevailing attitudes and interests of our audiences.

That “waning regard for theater” that Morris laments has been waning since the dawn of "something else to do on a play night". It’s pretty waned out by now. He goes on with the boilerplate for this type of article (the NEA says arts attendance is dropping and arts programs are being eliminated in our schools; I’m surprised there are any arts programs left to cut at this point) stating along the way, “But the larger point is the divide between the commonly held low regard for theater and it’s actual relevance ….”  I would say that there is no divide between the two, but that would involve taking resonsibility as a theatre professional for my role in "waning regard."  And we can't have that.

We come to this:

This apathy toward the arts, and toward artists, is nothing new in America, but with text-messaging, tweeting, cell-photo–taking and social-networking technologies all tied into the escalating global-corporate control of almost all our affairs — now including unlimited corporate spending in political campaigns under the guise of "free speech," thanks to our Supreme Court — we appear to be surfing on a slow-moving wave toward a kind of globally engineered beachhead. On this beachhead, the sort of independence of thought and language that gets expressed through the arts in general, and in great theater in particular, gets dashed on the rocks.

First, to quote the great Richard Linklater, “Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.” Morris seems genuinely concerned about the lack of “relevance” for theatre, but not once does he mention the obvious: If theatre lacks “relevance”, it is because the audience has been a secondary concern too often, and they are simply spending their entertainment dollar elsewhere. This isn’t rocket science. If I have Netflix streaming through my Xbox to my HD flatscreen, I can sit at home and watch Laurence Olivier play Henry V. What would motivate me to sit in traffic, search for parking and plop down $15 to see a live production?

The remainder of the quoted passage, and the following several paragraphs veer into the heart of “woo-woo” territory. He starts by impugning Twitter and social networking as part of the “escalating global-corporate control of almost all of our affairs ….” This is simply delusional. The fact that Iranian protesters were able to tweet news updates to millions of users on a moment to moment basis; the fact that citizen journalists break stories faster and with greater reach on YouTube than the old, grey Fourth Estate can affect in print; and the fact that we are more connected to each other now than at any point in our history is a complete and utter refutation of his premise. Theatre is story-telling. Social networking and lightning-fast communication is a boon, not a threat. (Although It may be a threat to traditional journalism.)

Morris asks, “Do the people who belittle the arts do so because they’re too expensive, irrelevant, or because the arts have the capacity to say unpredictable and unpleasant things?” I would ask, “Who are ‘the people’ you speak of?” The most onerous belittling of the arts I’ve seen may be found in professional and amateur reviews of plays.

“History shows us that the tip of the spear that gored tyrannies of the past was laced with the arts,” writes Morris, who then attempts to draw a comparison between America, circa 2010 to Soviet Russia, Communist Czechoslovakia, and South Africa during Apartheid. Steven, what Los Angeles are you living in? Sure, we have our share of problems, but people were vanished in the Soviet Union, killed or imprisoned in some gulag. Vaclav Havel was banned from the theatre in Czechoslovakia and spent time in prison. By comparison, we live in a country where “Bush is Bad: The Musical” opens to rave reviews and packed houses and no one gets arrested or shot.

But Morris has to draw these comparisons and make the melodramatic statements he makes because that’s the only way to support his a priori conclusion. So why does theatre matter? “Because fighting for the arts is fighting for our humanity, and fighting for our humanity is fighting for our lives. I can’t think of a more trenchant reason to be producing theater in the 21st century.” Oh, I can think of a few other reasons. But I’ll get to that in due time.

Dark Night of the Soul

"In the Christian tradition, one who has developed a strong prayer life and consistent devotion to God suddenly finds traditional prayer extremely difficult and unrewarding for an extended period of time during this 'dark night.' The individual may feel as though God has suddenly abandoned them or that his or her prayer life has collapsed. In the most pronounced cases, belief is lost in the very existence of God and/or validity of religion, rendering the individual an atheist, even if they continue with the outward expressions of faith; compare crisis of faith."

-- "Dark Night of the Soul," Wikipedia Entry

"The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks."

-- The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, by Douglas Adams

There is a stage of the writing process where I know what must be done, yet I cannot seem to push through and do it. Unfortunately, this phase comes at the beginning.

cartoon by Hugh MacLeod: www.gapingvoid.com

I've hit the wall with Lang. How to put this in words? It's as if I have assembled all the elements called for in a recipe -- let's say I'm making lasagne. I have the noodles, the tomato paste, the ricotta cheese, etc. and they refuse to put themselves together. Worse, all those ingredients are frozen in a huge blob of gelatin, hovering out of reach.

Put another way, it's like a science experiment where you take all the elements necessary for life, the proteins and amino acids, and you put them together in a petri dish ... and wait. And wait. LIVE, DAMN YOU, LIVE!!!

It's very much a "dark night of the soul." The muse is out to lunch, and I'm sitting at my desk surrounded by note cards and books and journals and miscellaneous research material. I need that spark of life, that l'essence de la vie that will animate the piled up components. I know these pieces go together -- I've seen the end product in my mind.

Fortunately, I'm not alone in my frustration. Writers far greater than I have stood at this moment and pushed through. So I return to my "text book," a compendium of words of wisdom I keep in a notebook for just such an occasion.

Here's Philip K. Dick, and a speech he delivered in 1978, "How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later":

However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe—and I am dead serious when I say this—do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.

Hmm. Nazi Germany was incredibly structured and ordered. Frightfully so. Lang was at the height of his powers as a filmmaker, and the events of 1933 certainly contributed much chaos to the filmmaker's life. Lang had the choice of becoming entrenched in the merciless order or throwing his entire life into chaos. My play centers on Lang's "High Noon" moment, the Faustian bargain, his dark night of the soul. I think I can work with this.