How do I do this?

Efficiency

Quick note : for those interested in the women in theater conversation there’s more coming your way. I am trying to get some more data together and want to also include some thoughts about the data that I’ve already put out there, so stay tuned later this week for that.

But for today: Something I’ve been thinking about lately is efficiency.

On some levels one could say that theater isn’t efficient at all. There’s nothing easy about creating work, in fact the easier the work is to create, the more rote or robotic, the less I personally tend to be interested in it. This is efficiency for efficiency sake alone.

This is not what I mean when I ask, “Can we be more efficient?” No, I am asking if we can be more streamlined in the path to the goal we strive towards. In other words, how can we be most efficient at the need we are sating?

And to do that let us first ask: why do we do it, what is the base need to create artwork? I think it’s something to do with our own necessity to express and the need of others to listen. We are telling stories, making music, and moving bodies and in experiencing those things our audiences uncover something about themselves. It’s like a communion of infinite variety – magically shifting the experience of one into the bodies of many.

On one level, the standard four week process is rather efficient, isn’t it? We all know what to expect, when things will arrive, how the art will progress from start to finish. There are, of course, deviations but there is a kind of simplicity in knowing how the process is supposed to work. But is it efficient at delivering this communion? Does this process get us closer quicker to the ability to give a piece of ourselves with those that might take it in?

I don’t know.

Increasingly, in this time when many theaters are losing funding and audience base, I hear stories of shows with rehearsal process that are condensed to three (two?!) weeks of rehearsal. There is this way that we say, there’s simply less room, less resource, less money, so we have to be more efficient with our time. But. But. But… Is it? Is it more efficient? We have shortened the time we take, we have lessened the money that costs, but have we made ourselves more efficient at the ultimate goal? Many days I look at that model and wonder if there’s actually a palpable difference in the outcome. Or is this simply a more efficient means to create something?

I don’t think so.

I think we can feel the difference. I think the audience can too. Even if they can’t articulate why, I think they just know when someone has just started working out a first good idea instead of the third, forth, eight, tenth, deeper and more realized choice. I think this kind of efficiency gets the “job” done, but to what end? I think it prizes the output over the process. I think it makes the external trappings of the product the parts that we place the most value on.

Naïve. Simple. Dreamer. Call me what you want. You can tell me that I don’t know what it’s like to work in the “real” world.

But I wonder if we all have to define “real” art in the same way. I wonder if we haven’t all deluded ourselves into accepting a much narrower definition of our form than is necessary.

When you started creating theater, what was the context?

Was it in a flashy space? Was it with hugely expensive surroundings? I doubt it.

If you’re like me it was in a class in a basement without any stuff. You fell in love with that first moment you saw an actor really transform into a character. You swooned a bit when a designer took a single light and flashed it across a wall in a way you’d never seen before. You adored the director that first changed how you thought about a scene. One found grandeur in such tiny things, and that somehow in all this nothing, something was able to emerge. It is in the midst of this dingy room with its banged up chairs that we find our capacity to create.

And that, I think, is the real efficiency. It’s that with nothing that is tangibly expensive or valuable we create beauty or pain, feelings that are deep and real and genuinely meaningful. We make something so real out of things that are so obviously made up.

The traditional stage with set and lights and sound and costumes and velvet curtain and seats and air conditioning, and lobby and box office – is it efficient?

I don’t think so.

What is theater? Ask yourself. Is it a script? Is it character? Is it telling a story? Is it moving people through space? Is it visual splendor? Is it interplay of light, sound or object over time? Is it some combination of all of these things?

If you know what theater is to you, then ask yourself if you are getting there most efficiently?

Is that other stuff getting in the way of actually getting to the real thing?

Is that push towards “professionalism” actually pulling you from making the thing you desire?

Is it possible that theater is at its core something more basic, more internal, more directly accessed than we’ve made it out to be? If so, can we be brave enough to do it more efficiently? Can we shed some of these trappings for efficiency’s sake and preserve what is most needed?

The past few months, I keep thinking about this question, about whether I could take all that money I spend on building things that I will tear down in a few weeks, and instead create something in a space that already exists. I wonder if I need to budget for all that stuff. I wonder if anyone would even miss it if the work was good enough. It seems so much more efficient. What if I could create a theatrical experience in which the audience interacted directly with the performance? What if I didn’t even need “actors?” What if I could put a “play” into a box and hand it to someone? Is that possible?

I don’t know.

But I feel like I need to ask the question. I feel like I need to find out.

Are you climbing up the mountain?

There’s this thing that my friends and I used to do in college while we were eating.

“Oh my God, I am so fucked right now. I have a biochem lab write up and a Theatre History paper AND I need to read three chapters for sociology.”

“Well let me tell you that I am so f-ed right now because I have to do the Theatre History paper, memorize two scenes, complete three comp sci projects that are all past due and I have an a capella rehearsal until 10.”

“And can I just say how totally and completely screwed I am because I have a poly sci exam tomorrow that I haven’t even started studying for, a 10 pager for linguistics, the Theatre History paper, the scene memorization, two rehearsals and I said I’d tutor my roommate in French for an hour.”

This can go on ad infinitum.

There was a perverse glee with which we detailed and enshrined our over committed-ness. It was pandemic across the student body. It was our mascot, this looming specter of the impossible tasked to us. We wore it with pride the way we might have worn out maroon and white had we been a school with more traditional means of displaying pride. (Perhaps it’s why something as lame as “The Garnet Tide” was allowed to continue into perpetuity. Really? The Garnet Tide? Though, for such an extremely liberal school, a vaguely menstrual symbol of our collegial devotion is also sort of fitting. But that’s a side note.)

Anyway, in thinking a little deeper about the writing that I did last time I was in this space, I was trying to suss out the exact difference for myself between useful frustration at one’s limitations – the kind that leads to progress and growth – and shame and anger that pulls one back and gets in the way. I started thinking about that habit, one that I took to so easily along the route of higher education. And I started to realize how this parasite of “I am so fucked” has found itself quite a number of comfortable hosts here in the artistic community.

How many times when you talk to people about their work do you hear them bemoan their over-full schedule with stuff it sounds like they aren’t really excited about? When was the last time you asked someone the dreaded “What are you working on?” and received a calm and happy, “Just this one amazing project that I love”? I notice in myself a weird feeling of not enough if I answer that I am simply doing one show for months (years!), rather than rehearsing one, finishing off the run of another, while prepping three for the next coming months in the span of a few weeks.

Why is that?

To be sure, there are financial pressures that force us to do more than we ought. But if it were money alone, why are there are an awful lot of projects that I see people take on for next to no pay or exposure? Projects they don’t even like. Projects that they seem to refer to with disdain.

“If you hate the work and you aren’t really getting any money, why are you doing this?” I often want to ask.

But I don’t. It doesn’t feel like my place to tell someone that they seem to be making some pretty artistically self-destructive choices. And who am I, with my measly one or two projects a year, to say anything at all?

What if we all took a step back? What if we all tried to cull the herd and take on things that really serve at least two of three purposes – artistic growth, making money, or real enjoyment.

I used to have a day job that was just a money job. I hated it and it felt like it was actually making me stupider. It was also really easy. And over time, I realized that even if this job paid me double, triple, ten times what I was making, I would still resent being there. And that’s when I quit.

I’ve also had artistic projects that felt like they were so fulfilling and so happiness inducing that I would find a way to make time to make them happen even if I had no cash. So I kept doing them, because they feed enough of the other parts of me at that moment to make the little money worth it.

Sometimes we start things because we love them and they make us happy, and we forget to check back in and see if that’s still happening. Like any relationship, the way that you are when you first start seeing someone/something has to change over time. A job that at one point in life was a real step forward, ten years later might feel like a step back. That only makes sense. But it’s tough in the moment to remember that, that sometimes we outgrow the things we once wanted.

Here’s the image that I have in my head. (PS credit where it’s due – I first started picturing this image for myself after hearing an amazing speech by Neil Gaiman from a commencement at UArts). Imagine the artist you want to be, the life you want to lead. That life is the top of a mountain. With each step you take, are you going up the mountain or down? Are you getting closer to the top, or walking away? Even if the thing you’re considering seems like a good idea, is it still getting you closer to the peak?

If it’s not, why are you doing it?

Coming back to the original thing for a moment: Taking on too much can be a way to distract ourselves.

If we are so busy that we don’t have time to stop and think, when we are so busy looking at the road just in front of us and hacking through the brush just to move ahead, it’s actually easier in some ways. We don’t have to evaluate choices. The work to get ahead is so strenuous, so effortful, that the prize is simply moving forward, having done it at all.

That forward motion may be exactly what you need. Or not. You have to look at the mountain to know.

When I was in school, I had a moment where I realized that by committing myself to a Chemistry thesis, a devised acting piece, an original directing work, a voice recital in four languages, not to mention the choice to shed dorm life and learn to pay bills and cook my own food all at once, I was giving myself an out.

The out was this: If I do all of these things, no one of them has to count.

If my concert was under prepared, that was only understandable, as clearly I had no time to rehearse. If my thesis was a little sloppily slapped together, well that’s alright, because I was balancing so much else. If I wasn’t the actor I imagined, that was because I was too busy not because I didn’t really belong on stage. If I paid my bills late, who could blame me, no one else in my peer group was acting like such an adult.

All these things together meant that no one of them really reflected back on me. Their shortcomings were the limitations of my time. Their successes were the “real” me.

As a life long perfectionist, this has always been a struggle – finding ways to keep hold of this “real” me fantasy. But these days, when I have actually set up my life in such a way as to actually have that stuff, the time and money, I find myself strangely more bottled up than ever. As I found ways to have more control over my life, it was more difficult to keep pretending that given infinite time and resource I would someday make those amazing things that I kept promising myself about.

I think it’s because there’s finally no excuse. There’s not much left between “real” me and myself. And it’s hard look at the things you’ve done and say, “That is the best I could do.” Not because I was busy, not because I was under funded, because it was actually just the extent to which I was capable. This is why we (definitely me!) procrastinate. Not because we are bad. Because we are scared that we might be less capable than we wish we were. So we over book and over commit so we never get the chance to measure the “real” thing, and so we can keep the fantasy.

The times when I have most found myself climbing down the mountain are the times when I was afraid to come up short. They were the times when I let myself be measured by other people’s expectations (and hated them for it!) because I feared myself incapable of succeeding by my own. The times when I have most despised theater and myself in it are the very times when I’m carrying all this crap I didn’t want, when it feels like it’s holding me back, like some kind of gravitational inevitability. That time and energy were conspiring to keep me from my best self.

There is a real sadness in giving up the idea of the “real” self, and as Americans I think it’s especially difficult. We live in a culture that teaches one to dream, dream, dream. BE YOUR BEST SELF, we are admonished. And while I am all for dreaming, the flip side of that tendency is get so comfortable with the imagining of one’s best self, that we never actually bother to get it. You have to give up the ideal to make something real.

I think more likely, more often, the thing holding me back is me. Me struggling to be ok with being less than perfection.

Owning It

There’s a great quote that starts one of my favorite books about the artistic process – Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland – that goes like this:

Writing is easy: all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.

– Gene Fowler

The book is a pretty straightforward and unsentimental view about art making. It talks about how much of your output will be ignored (“Virtually all artists spend some of their time – and some artists spend virtually all their time – producing work that no one much cares about”) and the various ways we set ourselves up for self-sabotage. What this book also says is that the only way to get better at making work is to make a lot of work. As they say, much of your output is there simply to “teach you how to make the small fraction of your artwork that soars.”

I like the idea that when I make crap, it’s not just crap, but crap that builds a bridge towards something else that is not crap. Then at least the crap is useful. And I need that crap to feel useful. Why?

Because I live, work and create in a shame-based economy.

It might not seem like it from the outside, but if I’m really being truthful, most of what I do is to avoid the pain of looking like an idiot. That awesome rehearsal plan didn’t just spring happily from my mind. It took the spectral terror of being left with nothing substantive to say in front of the room to make it come into focus.

People have asked me why this writing project was something I wanted to make public. I might, if I’m being cagey, tell you that I sensed a lot of people were feeling the same way I was.

True. But not actually the truth.

I do appreciate the people who’ve responded to what I’ve written. And I love hearing from you all that these struggles are shared. But the real reason I am writing publically is to shame myself into getting my ass in gear to put words on (virtual) paper on a regular basis.

I do things like this when I know I need a kick in the ass. When I decided I had to leave my day job at NBOME, I wrote a post-it that I affixed to my computer with the date. I gave myself one year from that post it to get out of that job. And then I told everyone I knew about it.

Why? Because, like I said, I live work and create in a shame-based economy. I knew if I kept telling people about the post-it, people would remember to ask me about it. And when those people asked me about, that feeling that I might not get it together to find some other, more sanity inducing, way to make money would surface. I did get nervous that I would disappoint, and I figured out a way to make life happen without the work that was making me miserable. And 4 months before the post-it deadline I left.

If I know that someone will think less of me, if I think that someone will perceive me as failing, I work harder. It’s why I love structure and clear evaluative systems. It’s easy to know if you’re staying ahead of the curve if it’s clear what wrong looks like. I spent a lot of my education in high shame-potential situations. I committed to more than seemed possible. I tried things that I saw other people do a lot better than I did and then held myself to their standards. Once in a while I felt a little insane. I beat myself up about stuff a lot. I was also really productive and found myself doing things I never knew I was capable of.

You might say that this is unhealthy. You might be right. Heck for a really long time I felt a lot of shame about feeling so much shame. That’s how deep it goes.

So for a period of time after school I worked really hard to remove all the shame inducing motivators and gave myself huge swaths of freedom for my art to wander through. I stopped comparing myself to people who had more advantage or resource. I kept things a little closer to the chest so that stuff couldn’t be critiqued until I decided it was ready. I wanted to give my art room to blossom on it’s own, without that fear of failure looming over me.

And while I was in the middle of doing that I noticed something:

I wasn’t making or doing anything I cared about.

I had tried to force myself into a place where I acted as if I didn’t need to care or listen to that niggling feeling in the pit of my stomach when I didn’t do anything creative for a few days. I had convinced myself that the ambition and failure terror weren’t linked. And I was semi-successful for a little while. Until I looked at what a life without one of my biggest motivators actually left me. And that was something I wasn’t really all that excited about.

And then I started to feel bad about that.

Oh, old friends embarrassment and remorse, you’re back! How I missed you so.

I’ve come to terms with regret and shame as ways that I learn from my past mistakes. Just as the impulse to jump too deep into the pleasure pool can get one’s life off track, so similarly can overwhelming feelings of mortification cause one to block their creative selves. But no one sane advocates for the removal of all of life’s pleasures. So maybe we can leave a little room for the negative emotions, so long as they help us get where we’re going.

Thinking about this I recall a thing that I always tell my students when they first start working on their voice. I say that there is no such thing as a “bad” voice, only voices that do what you need them to, and voices that don’t. The voices they have were developed from a style and set of communication patterns that helped them, at some point, achieve something.

High pitched and squeaky? Maybe it helps you to sound small and cute.

Low and monotone? Perhaps you need to show the people around you that you have emotional control.

The point, as I tell them, is that these patterns emerge when doing these things a lot offers some kind of reward. It’s efficient. And there’s nothing wrong with a sound if it’s doing what you need it to. The pattern only becomes a problem, only gets called a bad habit, when you decide you want something and the voice you have gets in the way of doing that. When the natural voice you have developed is something you can no longer control the way you want to. Flexibility is the key.

Whether it works for you is what actually matters.

“Ugly” voices aren’t bad if they’re useful. I think “ugly” feelings can be viewed the same way. Some of my best work has come to me when I have felt my worst. Which is different than saying that I need to feel at my worst to get anything done. For as long as I can remember, shame has been a strong motivator. Sometimes towards good things and sometimes not.

So the question isn’t, “Can I remove shame from my life entirely?” because from what I’ve lived so far, the answer will be no. Instead:

How do I use and shape the natural impulses I can’t always control towards a healthy and productive life?

There’s another saying in the Art and Fear book that I really love:

Artists don’t get down to work until the pain of working is exceeded by the pain of not working.

– Stephen DeStaebler

I write this blog knowing that other eyes will see it.

Because I want to be culpable.

Because I want to be exposed.

Because I want to increase the pain of not working.

It’s already worked, clearly, because I’m still here.

Criticism

One of the things that I really love about Philadelphia is the supportive nature of the community. We are, by and large, a city that prizes community over competition. I’ve had people who’ve taught me to write grants, given me tips on where to find cheap equipment, loaned me costumes, offered me innumerable rides, donated space, the list goes on and on and on. Lest we forget, there are a lot of places that aren’t like that. There are a lot of artist communities where the initial instinct is to undercut each other to get oneself ahead.

This is Philly’s superpower.

Sometimes, though, it also feels a bit like our kryptonite.

In our instinct to be kind and supportive, is it possible that we are sometimes TOO nice? Too nice in a way that isn’t actually genuine. If we aren’t willing to receive and encourage useful and productive critique, do we doom ourselves to a community-wide creative dialogue about our work that is surface level only?

There is a right and a wrong way to offer constructive observation. We’ve all had experiences with a peer or critic who speaks or writes about our work in a reductive way that focuses on a tiny issue or comes from a personal perspective that doesn’t take into account the project’s overall aim or discourse. We all have been there when a particularly nasty something comes out and seems to be there simply to wound.

On the other hand, I also find an unspoken pressure to always have a cheery, unequivocal rave response to anything I see. I feel the need to do it. And I feel it from people I see after my shows, this plastic face people put on with a giant smile and that horrid, omnipresent phrase: “Great job! Congratulations!”

When I was in college I took the simplest directing class in the world. We got an assignment and then once each week presented the work we’d been doing to the other classmates, their respective casts and the professor. It became our artist community. We learned how to talk about what the piece was trying to do, how we all felt it was doing on that front, what frustrations and exhilarations the process was offering and any other observations that might be useful.

There were times some pieces got more laughs. There were times some pieces made us cry. There were times when the work seemed super hot and others when it was stuck in the mud. Everyone’s stuff went through highs and lows and over time, you learned that one week’s success was nothing to get too boastful about because a few weeks later you were bound to be feeling lost in the artistic forest. But that openness of dialogue meant that I always felt like I was getting a real beat on what kind of responses my theater was provoking. I loved that chance to really talk and share what I was doing with people that would watch with keen eyes and interested minds.

Even after I finished that track of courses, it felt like those that I’d shared the experience with were still able to hold on to that sense of interest and honesty as we moved into new projects. I liked coming out of a show and having them ask questions about what the piece was trying to tackle and having a genuine conversation about when it was (and wasn’t) doing what I’d set out to do. In many cases, the opinions were wildly different, which was SO incredibly useful. People picked up things that I hadn’t intended or missed giant swaths of stuff that I thought were obvious.

I’ve found myself every once in a while back in a situation like this – in my voice training programme for Roy Hart, in the LAB fellowship, in a small circle of directors that make similar work – but it feels notably absent in the majority of interactions I have with other artists in Philly. More so than in other places I’ve lived and worked in. Am I alone in thinking this? I don’t think so.

Again, I think it comes from being, on the whole, a small supportive community. But like many small supportive communities, we have to be careful about gentleness to a point of over-protectiveness. I think this impulse is worrisome not only because it gives us a false sense of how our work lands with people, but because it encourages us to think about our work as “good” or “bad.” If we make complex work, that has lots of layers, especially from scratch, it’s likely that it will be neither of those things. Or it will be both. It will be “it.”

If I see a raucous comedy show and I come out with my sides in pain from laughing so hard, is that the same “good” as an emotionally turbulent sweeping drama about genocide that leaves me numb and raw at the same time? Of course not. But I do what everyone does when they see people after a show, “You were great, congrats.” Or “Congrats! What a great play.” Or “Great job. Congrats.”

At this point, the congrats/great is so ubiquitous as to be an empty gesture. It had become so devoid of meaning that I used to see any sign of anything other than complete and total positivity to be a mask for hatred or disgust. Which was crazy making. So I’ve pretty much stopped listening to comments post-show. I assume they don’t mean anything and that the comments that people have that will mean something aren’t going to be said to me. Which is too bad. Because I think I could probably use them more than whoever else they’re going to be said to. But it feels like there’s not a lot of space to hear real responses.

Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Congrats. Great. Like we’re all some kind of “congrats/great” artist lemmings constantly running up to friends, “congrats/great” hugging them and running away to leave them to receive the next “congrats/great” in a giant “congrats/great” receiving line.

When someone says that to you, does it mean anything? Especially when you know a play isn’t simply “great,” (maybe it’s complicated, in-progress, raw, beautiful, heart rending, personal, silly, unfinished, whatever) when it’s something that is more complex that just “great” does that “congrats” mean anything? Wouldn’t you rather that same person just walked up to you and said “I was here for you” or “I am so happy I got to see what you made.” Because, really isn’t that what you’re trying to say?

Regardless of how “good” or “bad” the thing that the person made was, you’re coming up to them because you’re saying “I support you in this crazy endeavor. I know that you, like me want to make something that moves your fellow human beings in some way. And you did it! You threw your heart and sweat into this thing and now it’s been put out in front of all these people. And I was here! I saw it and now I’m seeing you and more than anything I want you to know that I am proud of you.”

At least that’s me. After a show, when I see my artistic peers, that’s what I want to hear. Not that you loved it or hated it, but that you came and you saw the work that I did and likely you know what it took to do what I just did.

I can understand if you’re in a place where you don’t trust people, where you feel like they might undercut, where their motives aren’t in your best interest, you might not want someone’s advice or response. But this is a town where I feel like respect and trust are pretty flush. And you are a bunch folks whose real opinions I’d want to hear. Because I doubt that what I make is only great or terrible. It’s a lot of things, many of which I probably don’t even know.

I am here to learn. Most things I make are in progress. And all of them are still conversation as they enter into performance. I wish there was a way to let people know that it was ok to be however they are after seeing the thing I made – happy, sad, confused, alienated, indifferent, or pensive – and that they have permission to express that being in whatever way they can, without worrying about whether it’s great. Without needing to give me congrats. Seeing them is great congratulation enough.

Next time after a show just walk up to me and say, “No lemming?”

And then I’ll say “No lemming.”

And then you can say whatever you want.