I’ve been driving around back roads in upstate New York during this holiday season. Today as I headed towards Lake Placid to go ice skating, I saw a series of dilapidated houses and I couldn’t stop thinking about the people who live there. I kept wondering, “Has anyone in that house ever seen theater? Does it mean anything to them?”

I think about this a lot at home. I see someone coming out of their south Philadelphia row home just a block away from me and I think “Is there any play that I could make that guy would want to go to?” I wonder about what kind of thing I could create that this dude might pay money to go and see. It’s a little hard to imagine. But I want to think that’s possible. That the thing I make could be useful to that guy.

What percentage of people in the US saw a play last year? I can’t find any data on this in my 10 minute online search. But it has to be really small right? 10%? 5%? 1%?

What’s the equivalent number for people that have watches a television show in the last year? 95% Probably more, right? 99%? 99.9%

Can I make plays for people that aren’t exactly like me? Because that’s most theater audiences. For these folks in out in the boonies there closest performing arts center is 40 – 90 minutes away. That’s where they can see Theater with a capital T. With lights and sound system and people performing the latest Broadway tour. What does theater mean to them? Is it Broadway? Is it red velvet seats? Is it Edward Albee’s Zoo Storey?

But is that actually “theater”? If not than what is theater? Who is it for? What is its core?

Mostly, it’s citified urbanites who like to take in high culture? It’s people who can afford a seasons subscription. It’s a beautiful lobby in a city center with printed tickets and programs and a snack at the intermission. Is this who I making this stuff for?

I spend a lot of time defining what my art is. I spend less time defining who I want my audience to be. In theory we all use bloated language and talk about the universality of our message but that’s a lot of crap. My theater is mostly useful to well educated people. People like me. Probably not racially diverse. Probably liberal. And likelier than not a fair bit older than myself.

I know that the people seeing my plays are NOT my neighbors. Or the folks out here in the sticks. And that’s a little worrying. If the apocalypse comes and movies and television are over will I still be able to make work without a fancy light grid and sound system? Will what I do carry on? What’s at the core of the thing I want to share?

Ugh. I don’t know. It’s the day after Christmas and I just wanted to go ice-skating.

This is at the center of my confusion lately: what theater is good for and how to make it the most “that” that it can be. But then I think, man, can’t I just make the play I feel like making?

Ok, how about a dictionary diversion: What is “theater”?

You can read the web page. But let’s dissect it quickly:

Numbers 1 – 3 define it as a structure or place. Which makes sense. Traditionally, we do think of “Theater” as a building, a structure. But, beyond the place I think there’s something deeper than that to explore.

Number 4 uses “dramatic literature” and specifically “plays” as a definition of what theater is. And again, this might be a part of what it is, but for me I think there’s something more than that. The second part of #4 says “dramatic representation as an art or profession (aka ‘drama’)” which starts to get closer.

I think my favorite piece of the whole thing rests in the fifth attempt to explain the word theater which I will quote in its entirety:

5 a : dramatic or theatrical quality or effectiveness

b : spectacle: something exhibited to view as unusual, notable, or entertaining; especially : an eye-catching or dramatic public display

c : entertainment in the form of a dramatic or diverting situation or series of events

Isn’t this last definition what we hope all of our “theaters” might be? Something heightened in its dramatic quality or effect, eye catching and entertaining in its display?

It’s a feeling, a connection, an experience of event – something that occurs between humans regardless of place that helps us process who we are. And that should be possible whether or not I have a performing arts center with a booth and a grid and dressing rooms right? That should be possible whether my audience is 10 or 10,000.

It should be possible to create a moment of dramatic effectiveness that isn’t dependent on a place or a script, that is about an intangible need to connect, to create and to share.

It should be something that I can share with my Philadelphia neighbors, right?

I want to believe in a theater that can be useful, even up here.

More on this later…

A

We’ve made it through the mountain of presents. We’ve gone sledding with the niece. The family just tore through two giant plates of my Christmas nachos. And now we’ve all retreated to our respective corners to play with our stuff, fall asleep, or make good on a random promise to write an essay every day. But it’s holiday law you have to eat a massive meal every 4 to 5 hours so I don’t have a ton of time.

I’ll have to make this quick.

I don’t buy myself a lot of stuff. I’m the “I won’t buy new shoes until the current ones are literally coming apart on the street and even then I’ll feel bad shelling out more than 30 bucks” type. This actually happened to me recently. I was walking around a city looking at a potential grad school and the heel of my boot fell out of the back of the shoe. And I didn’t throw it away. I brought it home and tried to sew it back in.

If it’s for work – a music download for a show I’m working on or a book that I should read as research – it’s a lot easier to justify. I have a hard time giving myself “gifts”: things that are for purely aesthetic pleasure, things that whose function is an indulgence, things that don’t “do” anything. I have the same trouble in my art making.

Once in a while I have an excuse to do something artistic that isn’t “real” – aka it has no potential to become part of anything I’m working on at a professional level. Like this Halloween when I spent a full day and the equivalent of a week’s food budget making a jellyfish costume I wore for 4 hours:

But chances are, if I don’t think something has the potential to turn into a “real” project, I let it go pretty quickly. I rarely commit a lot of energy beyond a passing daydream to ideas unless I can see them morphing into a fully realized production. This is why none of you have heard about my “South Philadelphia Cat Tour” fantasy. (Someday world, some day…) I’m not in the habit of offering myself the gift of spending a little artistic capital just for the hell of it, because it’s fun, even if it’s not “useful”to my career.

What’s the old saying: Bread and roses? Maybe even in our art practice, we need a little of both.

Here’s a list of creative things I want to do and I can’t see the obvious use of. There’s no grant that needs to get written for this and I have no idea how any of these make it into a single project I’m planning. But they are some artistic gifts I’ll try and “buy” in 2013.

I want to:

–       Spend a few days making something with a person in Philly I’ve never worked with

–       Sing with a choir

–       Work with a visual artist

–       Make something for an audience of less than 10

–       Look up a bunch of Norse mythology

–       Make a piece that’s no longer than 5 minutes

–       Learn a lot about wine

–       Work with (in?) water

–       Play the piano

–       Create something performed in another language

–       Get onstage myself

–       Make a meal the central focus

–       Work on a scene from a play I’m not producing, just because its fun

–       Read a lot about something I never got to take a class on in college

–       Give myself permission to stop something in the middle

–       Take a dance class

–       Contact a person I’d think would never respond and ask them for coffee

–       Write something creative without a second author

–       Watch another person’s process

–       Create a board game

That’s mine for now.

What are yours? Throw them in the comments.

Happy happies and merry merries to one and all.

A

If someone asks me what I do I say I’m a theater director.

But is that what I actually, literally, do?

Well, I’m also a self producer. And I run a small company. Which means most days I’m not in rehearsal. Most days I spend a lot of time doing a lot of non-creative things. And the more success (read money) I seem to find for these works, the more it seems like that’s what I do.

An average day “working on my art” includes:

Answering 30 – 40 emails, reading trade blogs (generally 3 -5 a day), reading email listservs that might contain relevant into to follow up on, making lists of important people I should contact, making lists of places I could tour my work, working on an upcoming grant or updating my calendar of grants I could be working on, writing potential presenters to please consider my work, looking over budgets, asking people for money, writing press materials, and scheduling.

Maybe if I’m feeling really ambitious I make get to compiling some directing research, but that’s maybe, if I get around to it and I’m not feeling too brain-dead to think creatively.

This is essentially the job of an administrator.

That is what I actually do most days.

What it feels like I’m doing less and less is writing and dreaming about rehearsals. When I was balancing chemistry classes like I was in college or working a million day jobs like when I was 23 I still found time to let my brain wander on strange and new ideas. The rough thing for me these days is that I when set aside time to be creative I have a tough time turning off that administrator brain.

Some honest statistics:

In 2006, I presented my first major work in Philly. It was a show called The Ballad of Joe Hill a 6 actor play with music about a labor organizer and songwriter. We did it at Eastern State Penitentiary.

Some basic facts, it was:

– A loose (read ill defined) collective of artists: no contracts or formal definition of what one’s “job” would be if they participated

– No one got paid

– Largely self funded, though we did have a small amount of donations using local fiscal sponsor

– All cash based, or went through my personal bank account

– Totally illegal. I mean, you know. It’s what happens when you first do stuff. IRS, please don’t read this.

This is a pretty standard type of first self-producing effort. You make a lot of mistakes. You learn a lot. You beg, borrow and steal everything. It’s pretty exiting and overwhelming.

For me and my co-producer the whole thing cost about $2,500.  And roughly estimating I’d say 10% of time was non-artistic work.

A few years later I made a show called SURVIVE! which was a choose-your-own-adventure installation about humanity in the universe. It’s looked like this:

This one, a big jump up in terms of scale of self-producing had a lot of differences from Joe Hill. It:

– Defined group for duration of project and worked hard to explain what everyone was responsible for. We wrote contracts for the first time and everything.

– Used fiscal sponsorship as a way to legitimize the finances of the project. This cost money. It also meant I had to keep financial records that I wasn’t embarrassed to show to someone else.

– Had a mix of self funding, small grants, and a first major foundation source

– Paid everyone (designer, actor, SM, and director alike) a stipend of $1,200 for time spread out over 9 months. I don’t want to calculate the hourly income. It would make me sad. But it was a start.

– Forced me to figure out how to deal with 1099s and required people to declare this income on taxes (not to mention get my own in real working order).

It was a big show. A massive show. Thousands of square feet of space with audiences in multiple places at once. Simultaneous sound and light that all had to sync up and time exactly. And we did it without a production manager (WHAT?!). I’m still a little amazed we made it.

And given all that, we still only spent a total of $23,000. And in that project, 50% of my working time was non-artistic.

In 2011 I worked on a feminist re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with a lot of awesome ladies. It was presented at the 2011 Live Arts Festival after a year of work as a Live Arts LAB Fellow and starred the awesome Catherine Slusar.

I was coming up on the end of the 20’s decade with this piece. I felt like I needed to get serious. So I buckled down and:

– Offered a much larger and more realistic salary for myself and two of the major collaborators on the piece. I also upped designer fees.

– Made my first attempt at weekly pay for the ensemble

– Wrote grants like a machine. LIKE A BOSS.

– Because of stipulations of Live Arts support did my first show in “real” big ass theater with a high level tech capacity

– Opened a Swim Pony bank account, got an EIN, and hired a suite of management staff for the duration of the project

That show cost about $110,000. It was two years from start of planning to production. It was exhausting. Rewarding, but exhausting. I felt like a CEO. And when I estimate, about 90% of time was non-artistic

This pattern continues on in my work. I made a promise to pay a higher weekly artist salary for every project I do. For The Giant Squid, a recent co-collaboration with The Berserker Residents, we were able to do the equivalent of eight weeks of work at $450 a week. That felt insane to say when we started. I know plenty of small companies in town that don’t manage that pay grade. On almost every level, my co-producers and I have gotten much better at producing.  It’s basic neuroscience right? The neural pathways you spend time on get stronger.

And just for reference, I did some calculations for comparison. Next year, I’ll be presenting a new version of Joe Hill at Live Arts. It’s a re-working with new tweaks to the plot and structure as well as updated historical research. It’s the same size cast, scope of design and will still be performed at Eastern State. We’ll spend about the same amount of time in rehearsal, maybe just a bit less. I just submitted a grant proposal with a budget of a little over $120,000.

Remember in 2006 when I spent $2,500?

The scale of professionalism is catching up to artistic process. This is what I should have been doing all along. And it takes 90% of my time to make that happen.

That’s what I am doing these days 90% of the time. I don’t want that to be the case forever.

What do I do to change that? Still figuring it out. A few things that help:

– If I decide to stop working on grants and start trying to write a rehearsal plan sometimes I’ll change clothes. I try and put on my “artsy-est” outfit.

– I also take a shower in the middle of the day if I need to get out of admin brain. Water is creative magic, for whatever reason it clicks in the right brain.

– I’ll give myself a fixed amount of time in morning to do whatever I want on any creative project I feel like (the morning is my best creative time) since I know the other stuff will expand to fit the time I allot to it.

– I’ve actually tried to tone down the production scope on projects, focus all the money on people, to keep the overhead low and the creative content high.

– I’m researching people I can hire to take some of this off my shoulders.

I’ll keep trying to come up with answers.

I’d love to hear some of yours.

A

PS – Photos thanks to JJ Tiziou (jjtiziou.net)

A friend of mine who works for a well known video game design company recently posted a thoughtful article on violence in video games. Reading this got me thinking about responsibility in art making.

I’ve been contemplating grad school recently (another essay! Oh my god another essay!) and something that kept popping up in these info sessions was this idea of the artist who is responsible for their art. All these schools are looking for “responsible” directors. What is such a thing? It’s directors who, in the words of one prestigious New England based institution “are not afraid to take risks, and they take responsibility for the philosophical and political implications of their work.”

Yes, on some level, I know practically you can’t just make something and then claim no accountability for what you just said and did. But what exactly does it mean to take responsibility for the work we create? How much are we held accountable for what our audiences take away?

Everyone has had the experience where an audience member reads something into your work you never considered. Audiences carry their own valences of meaning that they place on top of the stories we tell. We can craft, but we cannot control. In my personal opinion, I think most theater works too hard to try and limit the take away of an experience to a singular narrative or idea. In my own work I have been trying to take some lessons from our compatriots in dance or visual arts about how we can let go of the need to make every moment bite sized enough for the audience to digest it easily.  That’s what I feel like makes better art. But is it responsible to hand over so much of the meaning making in my work?

A quick detour.

Do you remember this horribleness with a woman who killed herself over a prank phone call to Kate Middleton?

I know, I know. I hate this crap too. And I would never bring the thing up except that a few days after this thing threw up all over the media I was listening to the radio, and some horrible commentator on NPR was going on and on AND ON about how terrible these two DJs were, chastising them and the station for this horrific prank, and how dare they, how dare they, they SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, and even if no one had died this would STILL be a crime because who thinks this is funny and it shouldn’t have happened ever ever ever, did you hear me ever.

And all I could think was “Lady, you are such a fucking liar.”

Twenty-twenty hindsight I say. Thousands, probably millions, of stupid pranks like this don’t result in tragedy. They end up as stupid pranks that some people laugh at. The higher caliber a famous person, a few more days floating around the internet. 99% of the time this is the outcome. It just happens to really suck for two people for whom it wasn’t. You can certainly argue whether the prank phone call these people made was “art.” (for the record I would argue a resounding no) but I think the point can still be made  that artists can’t always control how people react. This lady on NPR really thinks NO ONE ELSE IN THE WORLD would ever think this is funny or would consider doing something like this to a public figure? Apparently this woman has never listened to a morning radio program on a major station. And if you read this transcription it is about the tamest prank phone call I’ve ever seen.

Asides now asided, to my point. People do things they think are funny all the time. People make art they think is deep and impactful all the time. Some people agree. Some people don’t. Some artists want to make their audiences happy. Some want to offend. No one wants something like this. If these two moron DJs (who from the transcripts, do sound like morons) had any conception of this as a possibility they would never have done it. I think it’s hard to imagine it would occur to anyone to predict such a thing.

The universe is an incredibly erratic, random and irrational place. Who knows how many millions of prank calls to millions of celebrities’ underlings narrowly missed a random series of coincidences in which their actions lead to tragedy? Two Australians happened to hit the shit storm bull’s-eye.

You can argue if they did something stupid.

You can bet they will never have a sense of humor again.

But does that make them responsible for what happened?

If the answer is yes, that sucks. That seems crazy. It makes me nervous to invite people to my plays because I disagree with my audiences often. The critics are the most obvious and public responders, but there have been countless times I’ve been chatting in a talk back or after a show and thought “What the hell play did YOU see?” after a viewer talked to me about their experience.  Even the simplest of my works never mean just one thing. My GOAL is for them to mean LOTS of things.

Is taking responsibility the same as accepting blame for every person’s response to what I make? Am I accountable if someone sees my depressing play and gets really depressed? What if they get so depressed and quit their job and stop eating and hide under a blanket for a year?

If you produce a playwright’s play do you have to stand behind every word written in the script? Every reference or allusion in the text? What if that playwright has written another play, incredibly offensive, that has nothing to do with the one you want to put on? What if that playwright simply happens to public espouse opinions you find odious?

And what if someone reads something into a scene I never intended. Is that still my responsibility?

I once saw a production of a Shakespeare play in which the production’s sole black actress in the cast was hanging laundry for the ruling (white) lady of the house. The costumes, the staging, the text’s emphasis on difference in class all added up in my mind to a pre civil rights-era black servant.  The choice was jarring and threw the scene into strange contrast with everything else the director was doing with the production. I believe this was unintentional, just a random choice to use an African American actress in a 50’s style cleaning outfit and a haughty white woman yelling at her without thinking about the historical implications it might engender. I don’t know for sure. And I don’t know if that makes it better or worse that the person might have had no idea.

I know there is no single answer. It has to be a spectrum. And there’s not much to do but try and use your best judgment about what is okay and what isn’t.

But where do you cut the line?

Are there things that people think I’m doing that I have no idea about?

Probably.

<shudder>

A

Bad is stronger than good.

You don’t have to agree with me. But know that this is the generally accepted truth. It’s hardwired into us. A negative experience will always weigh heavier on our minds and hearts than a positive one. I’ve heard this in pop psychology, most especially prominent in John Gottman’s rules for relationships. I was interested if this idea could be applied outside of the construct of marriage. What if I wanted to test the strength of my LTR with artmaking? I wanted some data. So for the past few days I’ve been working my way through this: http://www.csom.umn.edu/Assets/71516.pdf

Before I read the article I thought, “Well that’s depressing to think about.” After reading it, I think “Oh god. It’s worse than you knew.”

To quote the first sentence of the article’s Concluding Remarks “In our review, we have found bad to be stronger than good in a disappointingly relentless pattern.” In just about every aspect of life (work, sex, relationships, learning, money, memory, emotions, development, trauma, our senses, even our social support systems) it would appear that negative experience vastly overshadows the positive. Check out p.338 for a particularly depressing study about the cumulative negative effect of a widow support group.

And the worst part is that this imbalance does not tip toward the negative just a little bit. How much more impactful is a negative experience than a positive one?

Five times more.

Let me repeat that: One nasty experience happens to you? You need FIVE positive ones to balance it out. You say something mean to your spouse? You need to do five nice things to erase your emotional debt. Lose $50? You need to get $250 back to feel recompensed in full.

Five to one.

This makes some basic evolutionary sense, right? One over-trusting instinct with a tiger affects the survival rate a lot more than being a downer about not wanting to try a new berry after the last one tasted gross. Or as a New York Times article about the review article said: “Negativity bias got built into our minds during millions of years of evolution because early humans who were oblivious to danger often got a brief, bloody lesson in natural selection.”

Anecdotally, though it’s startling at first, the more I think about it, the more I have a hard time imagining a world where this ISN’T the case.  Think about when you interact with a person who is needlessly rude or cruel. How many people does it take to reassure you that first person was an idiot asshole before you start to feel better? Easy to ignore those nice people. Harder to shrug off the jerks. Or, as Schopenhauer put it, “We feel pain, but not painlessness.”

In instances where we are particularly vulnerable (READ MAKING ART) this seems particularly germane. Write an essay, create an entire play, perform for 90 minutes in front of strangers and what you will focus on won’t be the countless moments of smooth sailing but the couple stumbles that overshadow everything else.

We even seem to naturally think people who say negative things are smarter than ones who are kind. We are apparently nature-made to give more credence to critical review. Take that literally for a moment actors, directors and designers. Do you remember the last nasty slight sent your way? Can you quote it? Do you remember its sting? Chance are, probably, yeah, you do. But do you have any recollection of the articles that praised and extolled your virtues? Science says probably not.

What the hell do we do about this?

Gottman, the same psychologist who first introduced the five to one ratio, proposes that  his patients in marriages place exaggerated emphasis on the positive in their home. The New York Times article cites a statistic that despite urban legend of asshole executives’ profits rising to the top, the most productive teams managed 5.6 positive interactions for every negative.

Back to the arts. I think we as a field suffer from a negativity epidemic. We thrive on investigating, deconstructing, even deifying our love/hate with what we do. The arts are sublime! But they make us feel crazy. It’s so hard to make, but if I’m not producing I’m worthless. We know that it’s the most meaningful thing in the world. But no one appreciates what we do. We are starving, after all.

And the problem is that even if we are equally vocal about the love as we are the hate (and let’s be honest that’s a really big if) here’s how the math starts working out:

Love/Hate  =

(Love)

(Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate)

2 x Love/Hate =

(Love + Love)

(Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate)

3 x Love/Hate =

(Love + Love + Love)

(Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate )

4 x Love/Hate =

(Love + Love + Love + Love)

(Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate)

5 x Love/Hate =

(Love + Love + Love + Love + Love)

(Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate + Hate)

I think I’ve made the visual metaphor point here. What I think when I see this equation is this: casual nastiness and off handed disgust with creative process isn’t cute. This isn’t amusing disenchanted snarkiness. It isn’t artsy ennui. It is a systematic way to destroy something you deeply care about.

I am no innocent here. I’ll be first to admit having long prided myself on my relentless dissatisfaction with my work, on my need to never ever ever believe I’ve done enough. To seek out only the audience members that have “the bad” to say. To talk about pieces I’ve slaved over as if they were far less that what they could have been. To ignore the growth they engendered and focus only on the shortcomings. To never be satisfied and constantly undercut what I did do with what I wished it had been.

I thought this perfectionistic tendency was a sign of a creator that truly cared about the quality of the product I produced, self-satisfyingly pronouncing my commitment to settle for nothing than the very best. I say I am hard on myself, on my collaborators, and on the work because I love it. That I have to be that exacting, that regimented and suspicious. Forget the compliments, they’re for suckers. I don’t want them, I don’t need them, just tell what’s wrong so I can fix it.

Five to one.

Do you notice, fellow creators, how much you love a new collaboration? How easy it feels? Even if you know somewhere inside that the work with your long term collaborators is richer, isn’t it just more immediately gratifying to get that fresh newness that comes with someone you still want to bust your ass to impress?

Five to one.

Don’t you love that new rehearsal, new company, new medium feeling, where it seems like a certain weight that you have to drag around with your regular partners is just lifted? And why is it that you find yourself more and more frustrated by the increasing list of little flaws in those you’ve been working with over the years?

Five to one.

Do you sit with your colleagues and bemoan the state of your work, your form, and your function in it? Do you spend hours dissecting what’s wrong with what you’ve made or what you’ve seen?

Five to one.

Do you trust that your co-creators know how much you value them, their time and efforts? Do you take on faith that all those things you told them you loved about them when you started working together are still stored away in their memories for safekeeping?

Five to one.

Stop for a moment and think about what you do and the people you do it with. When you talk about it, when you talk about them, what do you say and how do you say it? For every, ‘This is bullshit’ do you have five ‘This is exactly what I needed’s ? For every, ‘I’m just so fucking tired of -‘s do you have five ‘Thank god I have -‘s ?

Five to one.

It takes five steps in the opposite direction for every one towards anger, resentment and negativity. For every thing I find that I am frustrated by, do I have five things I can say that I truly love about what I do?

I should. I’m not sure if I do.

And if I don’t, is that the fault of theater, or me?

A

I miss being hungry for the work in an uncomplicated way: unadulterated and sparked from genuine interest. I crave to be un-tinged by the producer’s brain. I just want to want to make and make and make like I used to.

I fell into directing, mostly because I had looked at other people and thought “I can do that.” I didn’t have much ego about it, just said “Why not?” and did it. And then one day I realized that THIS was who I was and what I did, as if it had just been waiting for me to get there. That this was the thing I’d always been intended to do.

I had terrible taste. I picked plays that were overdone and  underwhelming. Things in anthology books that everyone buys at Barnes and Noble. Broadway hits from 20 years ago long since past their expatriation date. Chrisopher Durang. Steel Magnolias. Agnes of God. Late, tragic, Tennessee Williams. Characters’ whose tears and laugher were just under the surface, massively emotional and dealing with those emotions ALL THE TIME.  Uncomplicated nutbags that in retrospect seem like self-indulgent excuses for actors to cry. Stuff I would never do now. But at the time, at the time it was SO exciting. So electrifying. So full. So much.

During that time I created my first piece from scratch. It is funny to write this but the truth is that I have never had a project that has come close to the totally raw, completely maniacal drive with which I attacked that piece. I read anything I could think of. I devoured music, images and text compiling a massive overarching collage of meaning. Or rather, I read into every book I encountered my imaginings of this story. It seemed like every piece of music, every line of text, every image around me was destined and intended to fit in some way into this giant thing that was welling up within me.

I dreamt this work. It spilled into every spare moment. Filling the lines between notes in class. Creeping into my thoughts on the treadmill. Playing itself across the back of my brain as I walked across the campus. I was in love with this story. I fell in love with making this play. It was totally consuming and it seemed that I didn’t need anything else in life but to do more of this work.

The play was a meditation on the myth of Ceyx and Alcyone. You can look it up for more details but in brief: Ceyx begs his wife to leave the island out of a fear of never accomplishing anything. Alcyone is inconsolable knowing that the god Poseidon has a vengeance against her for rejecting him. He sneaks off in the night and of course, dies, leaving her to wait, pathetically, on the shoreline for years, singing to her husband starving and wasting. The gods, tired of her lamentations, send his body back to shore and as she runs to it, they both turn into birds, halcyons, to spend the rest of eternity together.

It wasn’t a clean piece. It wasn’t really much of a story. It was a series of meditations on an esoteric myth: a scene where two lovers dare each other to deeper and deeper levels of proclamations of “If you really loved me you’d –” ending with them drowning each other in a bucket of water:

There was also a scene in which Ceyx’s boat is made toy size and Alcyone watches from a far as a life sized Poseidon drowns it:

A pair of sails unfurled into a giant pair of wings. A man turned a woman turn into a bird and regretted it. A strangely large amount of mopping.

To me seemed like the earth had moved. It felt like I shared that with my performers. That we’d all given birth. My brain was on fire with ideas that weren’t mine, just channeled through me. I wanted to watch the thing over and over again. I played it in my head again and again. From the outside, I can’t really say, I wasn’t paying much attention. A Polish theater reviewer happened to be visiting the department giving me my first (and currently only) international review:

“Music surrounds us from all sides, perhaps a little too aggressive and accidentally chosen… But what acting – quite a few Polish actors would envy these twenty year olds for their abilities. The boy sitting next to me begins to cry buckets halfway through the second performance. I am not surprised: the unhappy Alcyone, shaken by spasms with every despairing moment of Ceyx’s sinking ship did not leave me unmoved either.”

My mentor saw it and said “You know, when you told me what you wanted to do, I thought, this is a play about break up. And usually when a student wants to make a break up play it’s almost always terrible. But this was actually very good.”

My mom cried after she saw it because she said she was sure that her getting divorced had ruined my ability to love unconditionally.

The funny thing was that I had no idea that any of these things were in the play that people saw. I was floored that anyone thought it was about the end of my first real relationship. I just thought I was digging around a Greek myth. I had no idea what audience watched. Or what the piece ultimately said. I didn’t have to. I never wrote a grant or pitched it to a presenter. I just made stuff. All that time, as I dreamed and thought and read and reacted I never had to explain.

I just tried to satiate the hunger.

The very next year I made another piece about another myth with more money and resources, more advice, and ostensibly more experience. Same cast. Bigger theater. Big disappointment.  Parts of it, many parts of it, worked. It was objectively a much “better” play. But it didn’t give me the raw, unadulterated heart of that first piece. I don’t know if an objective audience would agree with me. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe even if they liked the second one better for its polish and care and craft, I’d still rather make the first one.

I don’t know what to do with that. In work, in life, in all the choices that matter. Do you run to the thing that feels sticky and rough around the edges, that because of its coarseness continues to catch at your clothing, pulling at you and requiring attention; or do you move ahead carefully, healthfully, allowing experience to change you, grow you, maybe temper or dare I say settle you?

I’ve spent a lot of years learning to feed myself, but I worry that I’ve forgotten how to be hungry.

A

PS – Thanks to Ben Camp, Kate Hurster, Felicia Leicht and Sarah Yardney for being in those photos. And Sam Dingman for being there in spirit.

Remember this image:

Ok. So, picking up from yesterday, let’s say we put a 10 year ban on any play that has a living room, a relationship and ignores the audience. If Naturalism Prohibition begins tomorrow, how do we proceed?

I would propose the first thing we need to get into our heads is that theater, live performance of any kind, will never be able to compete with recorded media in terms of the scale of its reach. PSY can perform for an astounding 80,000 people in Korea and pretty much max the size that live performance can go, and still be equaled in terms of shear numbers of one weekend of a small indie movie rolling out in most major cities or a video game release that can be downloaded immediately online by just about anyone with an internet connection.

We don’t have to view this as a bad thing IF we define our objectives beyond simple numbers of butts in seats (which, by the way, doesn’t have to be the only way evaluate ourselves to the outside world: check out these smart people or look up #newbeans on twitter for some thoughts on that). Instead let us look at the TYPE and DEPTH of experience, a place I would post we might possibly have a chance to not only compete but excel.

What are the super powers of live performance? Here’s a list I come up with:

– It doesn’t have to the same every time: Why do people go to concerts when the recording will always have the technological advantage? Because there is something amazing about hearing that thing you know so well anew, with subtle changes and differences that happen that singular time you happen to be there. Ironically, just about everything we do in rehearsal puts an emphasis on just the opposite – on creating a machine that will run the same.

– The performers can respond to the viewer: Can we think about this in a wider context than simply “they laugh so we wait a bit longer for the next line”? Is it possible to really give them a role that matters and genuinely requires performers to take them in? Perhaps in such a way that without establishing that connection the performance doesn’t exist? I think so. But I think it might mean really changing what we think a “play” can be.

– The audience can interact with the performers/space/experience: Movies don’t do this. But (almost always) neither do we.  This is a huge asset we’re ignoring. Why do people like theme parks and video games? Why the huge success of Sleep No More in NYC? Because there are audiences that like the fact that they can relate to the actors, walk around the world they enter, and in some cases even shape the narrative that occurs. Let’s find those that are craving a chance to be a part of our art beyond just sitting down and passively watching.

–You can use ALL your senses: This is another game that we will win over almost all other types of art. You can FEED people, you can make them TOUCH things, you can evoke SMELLS. You can even get them to lie down and change their sense of gravity in relation to their bodies. This is not a trivial advantage. No movie, no matter how good, can ever as realistically convey the taste of a dish as well as actual food.

I’d love to hear additions to this list. I’m sure there are more, and as I think of them, I’ll add them above.

So the question for theater, in my mind, is rather than trying to be less-effective movies, how do we create THIS kind of experience in as rich and rewarding a way as possible? Perhaps in doing that, we might feel less like Gollum clutching the precious (which for the record is mostly how I feel about my audiences – the only thing maintaining my existence and something I can barely hold onto). Can we instead work as a medium towards making these aspects the most important parts of the experience? Can we take that ingenuity and creativity and build new approaches that maximize what we are uniquely suited for?

Let me invoke that image again.

I like this picture a lot.

It’s from a show I created in 2010 called SURVIVE! It isn’t the flashiest photo from that show. Not by a long shot. It’s not the one I use in work samples. But I think it illustrates what I should be doing.

This photo is a moment between performer and audience that is totally spontaneous, unique, and above all live. Each person in it has a totally individual perspective of the experience that will be different from every other time this scene is performed. Each person has a tactile relationship to the object being shown as well as to each other. Each person is necessary from the story to continue and plays a part in what’s happening, regardless of whether they are actor or audience. Each person has to constantly re-negotiate the contract of participation to continue forward.

And because of that, this tiny moment that might be occur between just three people does something that no movie can do.

Theater can do THIS moment better.

– A

PS – Thanks to JJ Tiziou for taking that amazing picture. http://www.jjtiziou.net

Day one: I try the best I can to try and articulate a huge looming dark cloud of a feeling.

Day two… is a little harder. So I’ll start basic, with a mission statement. This is, in theory, where the work begins, right?

Swim Pony is committed to the creation of unique live performances that are joyful and defy tradition in order to bring contemporary audiences beyond their experiences of the every-day.

It’s not perfect. It sounds a little frou-frou fancy, right? I don’t know that I always feel like the things I make really do connect beyond the fact that they happen to be things I find interesting one year to the next. I also wonder sometimes if the need to define and explain causes us to create boundaries on our work that ultimately inhibit it. But that’s another essay, so for now, let’s proceed.

When I re-read that statement, these are the parts that stick out as mattering the most:

Swim Pony is committed to the creation of unique live performances that are joyful and defy tradition in order to bring contemporary audiences beyond their experiences of the every-day.

If there’s a reason I choose THEATER over some other way of expressing, it’s that I want it to matter that it’s LIVE and that it’s that goes BEYOND every day life.  Without the first it could be recorded and without the second I could just experience it directly.

This gets me to my despair with naturalism.

What do I mean with that term? Well, (and I’m going to have to generalize here) I’m mostly talking about plays that:

–       Use a fourth wall to pretend like the audience isn’t there

–       Focus mostly on interpersonal dysfunctional of relationships, families or work environments (aka people talking to other people about the things they do everyday)

–       Tend to be set in a realistic, often domestic, space like a house, workplace or social setting

I gave a talk once about devised theater and to prove a point, googled something like “best new broadway drama” or something like that (I don’t remember the exact search so don’t get all fact-checky on me with this) and this is the image that popped up:

You have all seen this play.

It had a beige couch and a couple talking about how upset they were. Oh, and everyone is white and not too terribly concerned about money. They just have a really shitty relationship. It centered on two people who were movie stars. And The New York Times review probably called it “a searing drama.”

I’m exaggerating. But you know what I mean.

Searing as these performers might be, is there anything about this experience that isn’t better served as a movie? I mean that totally sincerely. If I turned this into a movie I could much more easily make sweeping visual transitions between realistic spaces, get much closer up and intimate with the performer’s faces (especially if I’m comparing to a massive broadway house), and create a far more “realistic” setting. I’d even go so far as to say that the world I’m asking you to buy into (by dimming the lights, by telling you to be quiet) is a lot easier to jump onto when I know that it’s going to keep going whether or not my cell phone accidentally goes off. And to boot I can get it out to a hugely larger number of people.

This shortcoming is not the fault of a single actor or director or set designer.  This is a shortcoming of the entire community that engages in the medium of theater. Someone, please convince me otherwise. Because some days I feel crazy, like we’ve all just decided to ignore what seems obvious. And by engaging that denial, we’re actually ignoring the things that theater DOES do that movies can’t.

The pretending the audience isn’t there. I need some help! Please, make it okay again. Something has flipped in my brain and I can’t go back. It feels like in a world that allows so many opportunities for us to disengage and isolate through technology, what a waste, what an incredible missed opportunity to create community or ritual or just connection by including them. By seeing them. By taking advantage of the moment to say, we are all here, together, and we are all going to pay attention to one thing, because how often does that happen? And you are NECESSARY for that to happen.  But I mostly feel like I could be there or not. Or that if I don’t laugh or audibly sigh I’m the problem. And the effort it takes for me not to notice the guy next to me coughing is not worth it because almost always I’d rather just watch the conflict of him and his cough instead of what’s on the stage.

Why is it always the moment when the play goes OFF script that the audience sits up and takes notice. We know this phenomenon and share these stories. When the lights went out and the play finished by candlelight. When the comedian cracks up and just can’t bring it back. When the set falls down. Two weekends ago I saw a show (out of town) where a guy did a spit take and hit a woman in the audience. BEST MOMENT OF THE PLAY. Is it possible that immediacy of moment, that moment where we are connected in surprise or discovery, that moment of being united together in how to navigate this journey can BE the whole thing? I still find it in rehearsal, but so rarely in performance. And for the record, I hate audience participation. But it’s mostly because I feel like that role has been predefined and if it goes poorly, I have failed the show, not the other way around.

I know, there are people who still prefer the old way to receive a story. And of course I have seen amazing naturalism performances. And of course the people who do this well are incredible talents. But there are fewer and fewer people who want this kind of experience and they are increasingly rarified a niche of the population. Are the theaters that do these plays like people who staunchly insist they only need a landline phone? There’s nothing morally wrong about that choice, but it’s going to mean you are working against a giant cultural tide that everyone else is riding. And slowly, are you making yourself obsolete to a large portion of people? Try and tell me that theater is as relevant a medium as it was 100 years ago before recorded film existed. I just don’t buy it.

I think I’m at the limit for today.

Tomorrow: looking at what theater superpowers I think it might we might have forgotten.

A

Why make theater?

I’ll be honest – I have doubts. A lot of my friends have doubts. There seems to be something in the air lately. A worry, a question, about what the hell we all are doing.

Sidebar: A few months back I was rehearsing The Giant Squid at Swarthmore College and ran into my former thesis advisor. For those unaware, I completed a degree in chemistry and I really liked the stuff. And though I ended up pursuing theater, I loved hard science. It had rules but still allowed for experimentation. I liked understanding how the world works at the tiniest of levels. On my shelf I still have the thesis on chiral binding properties of copper-porphyrin aggregates and ct-DNA to remind myself the word laboratory didn’t always just refer to experimental theater but that I actually once worked in, you know, a laboratory.

So back to Squid, it was a super strange colliding of worlds to introduce the man who taught me the finer points of circular dichroism spectroscopy to the actor with whom I’d just discussed the best angle to allow a giant tentacle to wrap around her 14 months pregnant belly pad.

He asked why I had returned to the college. I explained I was putting on a show for the student body.

“Oh yes! And is that what you are doing these days?”

And I told him that, yes, in fact I had a small company in Philadelphia that made original works of theater.

“Fantastic! Why, it’s everything you always wanted Adrienne. Congratulations.”

When I tell this story in person I deliver that last sentence as a punch line. I exaggerate the “Fantastic!” and pour on feigned gushy-ness for “everything you always wanted.” As if it’s funny, ridiculous even, to imagine that everything I always wanted was to run a theater company. And when I realized I was doing that, I also realized that there are lots of times when I talk about my work in this kind of diminishing way. That even though I spend so many of my waking hours advocating to others about what I do, I still find myself angry at my art form a lot of the time. And it’s a little scary, if I’m really honest about it, that as a person who does exactly that for a living, I ought be the last person who would want to make running a theater company sound like a laughable pursuit.

And yet…

As young creators, I think we spend a lot of time taking in information without really questioning: best practices of creating, tips about living a life filled with art-making, and information about systems that support the work we create. No one would deny that a life in the arts can at times be incredibly punishing. And while I deeply believe in the intrinsic importance of artistic experience as a concept, if I’m to keep at this particular mode of it for another 30 years, I need to know it’s worth doing this art, in this way, at this time. Because those same skills that I’ve honed to question my work to make it my best also keep me up at night asking: “Why do I make theater?” “Why do it this way?” “Why is it useful?” “Is the result worth the effort?” and “Do I even like it?”

I worry sometimes that I’m playing the harpsichord. There’s nothing bad or wrong about that instrument. It’s just not terribly useful or relevant to a vast majority of people in the world. So in the last few months I’ve been trying to pick that instinct apart. Figure out whether it’s conventions that I think the form has gotten stuck in, its place in a changing and increasingly technological society, the non-profit system that surrounds it, the harsh under-capitalization it suffers from, all of these, none of these… And in trying to figure out how to reconcile myself, I thought it might be interesting to share these thoughts and elicit responses from other smart people thinking about the same kinds of things. So for the next month, I’m going to write at least 500 words every day for 30 days to see if I can define what I really think about theater and how I make it. And after 15,000 words of my own (and hopefully a bunch from other people in response) it might be possible to get to the parts of live performance that are amazing and transformative so that I can cut out the other crap and really concentrate on making what matters.

Either that or make a quick pivot back to research chemistry so I can stop playing the harpsichord before it’s too late. (#stopplayingtheharpsichord)

See you on the other side

– Adrienne

Check out Swim Pony in a profile of one of our favorite designers Lisi Stoessel (set designer for Lady M and SURVIVE!). She talks about our work as well as a good friends of ours The Berserker Residents

http://uvamagazine.org/only_online/article/theater_as_youve_never_seen_it_before