On Walls and Bunkers

I've been following John Clancy's attempts to create a League of Independent Producers (I love the acronym), because he is dealing with a very, very important issue: the means of production. IMO the way we create theatre in this country is inartistic at best, and bizarre at worst. I sometimes find myself wondering what would happen to the novel if novelists had to work under similar conditions to theatre artists, i.e., with rules concerning how many hours a week they could write, when those hours could be, how many weeks they could work on a novel, when they had to take a break, etc. Or what about painters. Or poets. Our current "system" of production reflects the industrial age in which it came into being: there are "workers" and "bosses" who are creating a "product." It is a wonder that anything worthwhile gets created under those circumstances, and I think theatre artists should take a bow for that. But only a brief bow, because all hell has broken loose.

Things are changing. No, things have changed. They have changed everywhere in our society except in the theatre, which seems to think we can stay in our bunkers (using Clancy's excellent term -- read the whole post here) and hope all this change will go away. As SpearBearer wrote back in December, "I'm sticking with my general philosophy. As long as the actors don't quit, there will be theatre. And if there's one person in the audience, the show will go on." SpearBearer was right about one thing: pretty soon there will be one person in the audience -- probably another theatre person. Back in December, I wrote that theatre is conservative. I still think that is true, but I think that conservatism is a symptom, not the disease.

The disease is desperation.

Clancy writes: "Activism or organizing or agitating or whatever it is I'm doing when I talk out about a new League of Independent Producers, or a new Alternative Touring Circuit, takes time and thought and energy. Most theater artists in New York have a precious small supply of these three things and choose, wisely, to spend them on their work. This is especially true of younger artists still chasing their own voices and visions. So those with the most to gain from a systemic change in the Off-Off or indie world, the younger artists, have the least amount of resources to contribute." Well said, and so true. After reading this, I found myself thinking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Because of the desperate financial situation, most artists find themselves scrambling just to realize their physiological needs at the lowest level of the pyramid -- rent, food, clothing, and all the absurdly expensive things it takes to work in the theatre (e.g., headshots, classes, clothing, etc.). There isn't time, thought, and energy available evaluate abstractions like the means of production -- they're running as fast as they can just to stay alive. But the BBW (Big Bad World) is leaving us in the dust. It isn't enough to stay alive -- we need to do something, or we're gonna die.

Clancy's efforts are a crucial first step. What are the next steps?

U.S. Army Chief of Staff (1999-2003) Eric Shinseki once said, "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." Because we have refused to change our means of production, our relation to the customer (get over it -- if you sell a ticket, those who buy are customers), our sense of purpose, theatre has become increasingly irrelevant. It may be almost totally irelevant already. We need to be reading books like The World Is Flat , and The Experience Economy and The Long Tail and Re-Imagine and The Wisdom of Crowds figuring out how the hell they apply to what we do before we get Netflixed out of business. And rightfully so, if we can't come up with a way of creating art that reflects the 21st century. We need to get out of the Theatre section at Barnes and Noble and take a look at the Business section, because business long ago realized that constant and aggressive change is the only way to survive. Not in theatre -- we spend our time asking the world to change its attitude toward us, whining about the lack of public funding and the supposed shallowness of our audience and the crass anti-intellectualism of the American public. Get over it! The problem is the theatre, not the public! The enemy is in the mirror, even if A Chorus Line didn't mention it.

We need to destroy and reinvent ourselves, and now. Incrementalism is the enemy, because the crisis is here. Tom Peters, in Re-Imagine! writes, "I sincerely believe that in turbulent times bosses at all levels and at all ages ultimately earn their keep by Blowing Things Up and Inventing a New Way...not by preserving and (merely) Making Better the Old Way." It's too late to tinker; it's time to destroy and build anew.

What's the New Way? I don't know. I have a few clues, which I'll try to develop through this blog. But we need to channel a little of that vaunted creativity toward something other than the next show. John Clancy has started the ball rolling. Who's next?

What???

Christopher Isherwood ends his review of "columbinus," a play the NYTW about the Columbine killings, with the following: "The phenomenon we confront in these little monsters, it seems to me, is one that neither journalism nor theater can analyze with satisfaction. It's the problem of evil. Better to leave that one to philosophers."

Leave the problem of evil to philosophers? Tell it to Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, Ford right up to Labute. I know writing overnight reviews is difficult, and finding a tag line to finish with is particularly difficult, but come on, Christopher, at least avoid writing really, really stupid things!

[Yes, I'm back.]

All Done

Dear Readers -- I think this blog has run its course. Surfing the blogosphere, I find my ideas are not inspiring others, but instead irritating them, and lately the feeling is mutual. Time to call it a day.

I have only been writing for six months, but in that time, it seems to me that something has changed. I don't know for certain, but it seems to me that the changed can be dated to the My Name Is Rachel Corrie controversy. Don't get me wrong -- I think the controversy was necessary. But I also think that the tone changed at that point. Suddenly, things got contentious, and everybody (including me) felt the need to "take a stand." Once that happened, and once the blogosphere drew the attention of the national media, it felt to me as if the nature of the blogging community changed in a way that made me uncomfortable. I found myself drawn into debates and getting all red-faced about "issues," when what I really wanted to do was talk about something else. My point is not that the blogosphere shouldn't have gone in the direction that it did, but rather that it has moved in a direction that is not good for me.

My interests are very abstract, I suppose -- theatrical metaphysics, I suppose, or possibly theology. I am concerned about the disposition of the theatrical soul.

Over the course of the months, I developed certain themes. They grew out of a very grim underlying assumption: that unless something significant changes, the theatre will go the way of horse-drawn carriages and Amtrak. I believe that, without a creative re-visioning, the combination of economics and competing entertainment options will make the theatre increasingly irrelevant and unimportant.

From this central idea came several other themes:

1. That the education of theatre practitioners needs to be focused, not on creating practitioners who can fit into and succeed in the current theatre, but on creating theatrical iconoclasts who can, like Descartes did with philosophy, start at a theatrical Ground Zero and build. I feel as if training students to fit into today's theatre is as immoral as training students to do punchcard data entry.
2. That theatre is a local, not a national experience, and so there should be a difference between theatre in different parts of the country. Artists should be a part of the community in which they live, and create theatre that speaks to the people in their theatres, not some imagined "national audience."
3. That what the audience needs right now is intelligence and wisdom and depth. I called for artists to consider whether provocation has become an end in itself, and whether we have stopped talking to our audience and instead started talking at them.
4. That the thing that makes theatre unique is the presence of the actor and the spectator in the same space at the same time, and that the opportunities presented by this fact should be exploited.

Over the course of six months, I am surprised to say that most of what I wrote was a variation on these themes. And now I find myself with little new to say in a new conversational environment that emphasizes debate over discussion. As a result, I have found myself developing a blogging personality that was strident, judgmental, and hypercritical. In short, I had become someone I didn't like. Most of you didn't like this new personality, either, and it had gotten to a point where nearly everything I posted was greeted with derision and attack.

And so rather than continue this slide into John Simon-hood, I think it is best to fall silent for a while. I may be back some day, and if I am, it will be with a new blog. I will leave this one on-line, at least for a while, for anyone who happens to stumble on it and wants to wade through the archives.

Thank you to everyone who made it a lively ride. I have enjoyed your company. Good luck with your projects.

The Four R's

From "What's Supposed to be Going on Here?," a speech by Wayne C. Booth to about 600 freshmen in Orientation Week. Published in The Vocation of a Teacher: Rhetorical Occasions 1967 - 1988

"There are many ways of talking about the arts of liberal education, the arts that genuinely liberate. At the risk of being gimmicky, I'd like to suggest a way of reviving that tired old list, the 'three R's.' Reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic made up a highly simplified, minimal list of the arts of liberation: to be able to read is to be free to learn what other men know; to be able to write is to be free to teach ot move or change other men with your words; and to be able to calculate is to be freed from enslavement to other men's calculations. Without scrapping arithmetic...I'd like to expand the first two of these into four. The new list would have reading and writing mixed up in every one of the four, and it would run like this: first, the art of Recovery of meanings, the seemingly simple but never finally mastered ability to learn what other men have known or believed; second, the art of Rejection of whatever is false or enslaving in other men's meanings -- what is often called critical thinking; third, the art of Renewing or (the thesaurus yields lots of 'R's' here) Renovating or Recognizing or Re-presenting what is valid or worthwhile in other men's meanings; and finally the art of Revising or Revolutionizing thought by discovering genuinely new truth. Both critics and defenders of current education seem these days to be far more interested in the last of these four, revolutionary novelty, than any of the others. Under the names of 'creativity,' 'originality,' or novelty, educationists often talk as if a little institutional doctoring would make it possible for everyone to become intellectually revolutionary, thinking bold new thoughts that nobody else has ever dared to think. Well, maybe. Nobody knows precisely the limits of our creativity. All I can say is that genuinely new ideas seem to me terribly rare, and if it is the goal of education to produce them most of us seem to be doomed to perpetual second-class citizenship."

I would venture that this might apply to the theatre as well...

Boy, the Things That Happen...

Boy, the things that happen when you don't have a chance to surf the blogs for a few days. I peek in at Don Hall's Angry White Guy in Chicago and lo and behold, I find that Don has been talkin' smack about me! In his post "Wallowing in the Misery of the World," Don takes issue with my short post below entitled "In a Nutshell."

He starts by making nice, saying how much he digs me. I dig Don, too (gosh, I haven't said "dig" since I was wearing my cool bell-bottoms!)-- I'm a product of the Illinois State University theatre department, and I developed a lasting love of the Chicago theatre scene (far more interesting and dynamic that any other in America, in my opinion) and the Chicago personality, which Don exemplifies and I also share, having grown up a few hours north of Chicago myself. We both have a tendency to enjoy argument, and we provoke quite a few by stating our opinions rather bluntly. Don's blog is passionate, and committed, and reflects a politica stance that I totally agree with. Keep it up, Don!

But then, like so many of my blogging friends (God love 'em), he takes issue with me! Can you imagine?

He writes that "there is a subtle disconnect that Scott and I have - Scott is looking for, lobbying for a return to less angry, less provocative theater and I'm dedicated to provocation in the even simplest of entertainments. Where Scott seems to want a bit more disgresson [note: I don't recognize this word -- is it a combination of discussion and aggression? Because if it is, I like it -- SW] and less avant garde screaming and cursing, I'm looking for more In-Yer-Face Theatre and less "Annie Get Your Gun". So the battle lines are drawn, of course. Mimicking my post below (have you read it yet? What are you waiting for?), he writes: "I do tend to think that artists, along with the rest of the world, have fallen a little too much in love with being accepted and validated to the detriment of being truthful and of some genuine use to the rest of the culture." He then follows this reversal with a short scene between a TV writer who wants to be provocative about the Hitler and the Nazis but is being "encouraged" (by the show's sponsor and producer) to stop focusing on the ugly parts of history. So ends the text.

Round Two.

I think it is illustrative of the current cultural situation that whenever a discussion of this nature is enjoined (and this isn't just Don, but many artists with whom I have engaged) only two poles can be imagined: In-Yer-Face Theatre and Annie Get Your Gun. For reasons that escape me, when I propose the creation of theatre that engages an audience in a manner other than assaultive, many otherwise imaginative people suddenly find their minds dancing with visions of their last community theatre visit and nothing else. Why is that?

Surely theatre history provides us with manifold examples of generally acknowledegd masterpieces that reside on neither pole: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Racine, Moliere... well the list is endless. In fact, the artist-as-attacker is a pretty recent concept, for all its dominance in the imagination of contemporary artists.

For the record, I am not advocating theatre as after-dinner mint (although I enjoy such theatre, respect the skills that go into its creation, and think there is a place for it in the world). What I am advocating is intellectual complexity, as opposed to intellectual melodrama. I don't think people are easily divided into distinct camps of saints and sinners, heroes and villains; nor do I think that ideas, values, and beliefs are able to be divided in a similar manner. Nor do I believe that thinking in such a way serves the world or the arts in any particularly useful fashion. I also believe that theatre that engages in ideas does so through persuasion, and I have never been of the opinion that bashing somebody on the head (or sensibilities) has ever been too persuasive. If it was, the guys I teach at the prison would be rhetorical wizards. Persuasion is a lot more difficult.

As far as Don's scene is concerned, I hardly see myself as Fred Coe, "all cigars and bluster." Nor do I think, along with Fred's stenographer Alice, that "if people saw more uplifting things on television, things like racism and war would eventually be wiped out, you know?" It takes a little more than that. But I also don't think that if people are assaulted on television (0r on the stage) things like racism and war will eventually be wiped out. You know. Again, it ain't that simple.

And if Abby Mann, the writer in Don's piece, is the mouthpiece of the artist, then I'll pass there as well. In defending his work, he justifies it with ideas that have all the depth of a child's plastic pool: "If we are not aware of history, it threatens to repeat itself. Do you understand this? There are hoodlums who deny the genocide the Nazis perpetuated. It is my duty to tell this story. It is your responsibility to listen." (Could we declare a moratorium on the old saw that if we forget history it will repeat itself? Would that it were true. I'd stop teaching young artists theatre history and count the minutes until the Shakespeare and Aeschylus made their reappearance. Or is it only bad things that get repeated?)

The fact is the Nazis existed. And so did the Resistance. Auschwitz existed. And so did Viktor Frankl. The world is complex. To focus on one aspect of it to the exclusion of the other flattens our perception in the same way as closing one eye affects depth perception. Works of true genius embrace both aspects of experience: we are horrified by Macbeth's brutality, AND we feel his pain when his wife dies. He is not a cardboard cut-out.

Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, writes about the difference between characters and types. "The cognate fact," he writes, "is that in the drama before Shakespeare there are no characters, only types. Literature presented great figures made distinct from one another by a well-marked trait or two, but not rendered unique by complexity. This is not to say that before Shakespeare the persons in the drama were unlifelike 'cardboard.' They were by no means abstractions as in medieval plays, where 'the Vice' is one of the actors. But they were single-tracked in their headlong roles, the shifts in their actions being due to the actions of others, who were similarly conditioned by mutual buffeting. The conflict enabled the playwright to portray the human passions in their variety and fatal consequences. This was enough for ancient Greek drama, the the Elizabethan , and the French classical to hold the spectator breathless. But we cannot say that we know Oedipus or Phedra as we know King Lear, or Lady Macbeth. The latter are as various as we feel ourselves to be, the others not; in types there are (so to speak) no irrelevancies. How does Shakespeare create the roundness of character? By throwin light on new aspects of the person in successive relations. Polonius as a courtier is obsequious, as a royal adviser overconfident, as a father to this daughter callously blind, as a father to his son, endearingly wise. The grand result of this method, this multi-dimensional mapping, is that since Montaigne and Shakespeare, plays, novels, and biographies have filled the western mind with a galaxy of characters we know better than ourselves and out neighbors."

When I talk about theatre, I am calling for the same approach Barzun describes in regards to characters to be applied to ideas as well: a multi-dimensional mapping that reflects the complexity of life.

The FlyBy Lead

Back when this blog was young lo seven months ago, I began with a debate about the regional tendency to import leading actors from NYC. Now Boston's Thomas Garvey of WBUR addresses the same thing in his report "Now Let Us Praise Local Actors." Thanks to YS at "Mirror Up to Nature" for drawing my attention to it, and concurring. Developing your own artistic community is the only way to thrive!

Alison Croggon's Near-Perfect Definition of Wisdom

In the comments of the post below, "In a Nutshell," Alison Croogon wrote the following inspirational sentences:

"Yes, of course artists have to be intelligent, but that is not by any means the whole of what's required...Artists are not only concerned with ideas, but with responding to the world around them through the sensual media they use - words, paint, rock, their bodies - in ways which bypass cerebral thinking, which focus on the materiality and sensual properties of the things they use, and which seek emotional as well as intellectual response."

That is as close to a perfect definition of what I mean by wisdom as I am likely to find. To improve on it would only be to add more details to the basic idea that wisdom is the ability to see, appreciate, and express as much of the world as possible using as much of one's self as possible: the intellectual and the emotional, the cerebral and the sensual, the comic and the tragic, the just and the unjust, the heroic and the cowardly, the love and the hate -- the list could go on, of course. But to me wisdom is the embrace of all the possibilities of the world, and express them in such a way as to guide others to see them as well.

Thank you, Alison!