Response from Joshua Conkel

After asking permission from Mr. Conkel, the author of The Chalk Boy that was reviewed by Rachel Saltz in the New York Times, and that I commented on below in my post "On Ruralism," I am posting Conkel's response. I do so not only to provide balance, but also because I think Mr. Conkel's response illustrates the kind of willingness to thoughtfully reflect and engage in the examination of an issue. Mr Conkel writes as follows:

A friend sent me a link to your blog and I must admit I was a little surprised by what was being written about me and my show. I had seen the New York Times review only a couple of hours before and was still really sensitive, so in a way it's probably better that my comment didn't publish.

While I don't fail to see the irony in a New York Times theater critic accusing me of having contempt, it was still a painful experience to read, particularly because up until that point the show had received mostly glowing reviews. As one of your comments on your original post pointed out, my show is really small and I was amazed that they came in the first place.

That said, I'm wise enough to know that not everybody will like my work. I'm also still an emerging writer and I'm trying to take critiques to heart and hopefully learn from them. This is why I'm still struggling with Ms. Saltz's comment that I have contempt for small town America. See, I'm from small town America. I was born in rural Kentucky and grew up in rural Washington, where the fictional town of Clear Creek lies.

Clear Creek, like my hometown, was once an ideal and beautiful small town that has progressively been taken over by chains and strip malls. My intent was to satirize the grotesque corporate chains that are destroying the character of small communities, not the small communities themselves. As for portraying rural characters as ignorant or boorish, I tried to make the four teenage girls in my play as deeply sensitive and wise beyond their years as possible and not the opposite, thank you very much. Many, many reviews praised me for doing just that.

Since the review came out yesterday I've really been doing some soul searching. Do I have contempt for small town America? I don't think I do. I can say that growing up poor and gay in a rural setting wasn't always pain free so I'm sure a lot of that hurt seeps into the fabric of the play. But contempt? No sir. I simply wanted to portray the type of community I was raised in as honestly as possible, with both its admirable and not-so-admirable qualities represented. A lack of respect for blue collar workers? This son of a sailor and a secretary will thank you to apply that label to somebody else.

Of course these are all quibbles since, as I stated already, I can't make people respond to the play in the manner of my choosing. People's opinions will be what they will be. A quick google search of "The Chalk Boy" will send you to other reviews from people who loved the play and were moved by it. I wish that you'd seen or read the play before you so readily agreed with the critic from The Times who, some valid criticism aside, mostly reviewed the play based on her own attitudes and not the work itself. It seems highly unfair.

Please don't think I'm attacking here. I just wanted to put in my two cents.

Sincerely,
Joshua Conkel

We have exchanged a couple emails, and I have enjoyed the exchange. I responded:

Are you sure you don't want this posted to my site? I think it is a good defense.

To some extent, you got caught in a cross-current. My response was less to your play (obviously, having not read it or seen it, I can't really respond to your play) than to a combination of the Saltz interview and Matt Freeman's toss-off comment about contempt. The key here, from my perspective, is not whether YOU have contempt for small town America, but whether your PLAY has contempt for small town America -- even small town America that has been taken over by strip malls.

As far as being from small town America, my experience has been that people who have migrated from a small town to a big city often bear a lot of anger at their treatment -- after all, often they left for a reason. My concern -- and this goes WAY beyond your own production -- is that we have a society that regularly portrays small town America negatively, with very few counter-examples. The effect this has is to make people, especially young people, feel compelled to leave their towns for the city. I think this "rural brain drain" is having a horrible effect on our society, our economy, and our mythology. So I am particularly tuned in to plays, TV shows, and films that propagate that attitude. If you say it isn't present in your play, I'll take your word for it -- obviously, somebody else thinks otherwise, which is what I was responding to.

I don't know Saltz, so I don't know what her values are that you feel are getting in the way.

I don't think you are attacking at all, and in fact I value any discussion of issues of substance, whether I come out "on top" or "on the bottom." Which is why I am suggesting that you allow me to post your email as a post on my site. I think it would lead to discussion.

Finally, Joshua writes:

In terms of small towns, I get what you mean and I hear the same frustration a lot from my family and ESPECIALLY from my Southern family, which is partially why the play takes place in Washington instead of Kentucky. I'm sensitive to your point of view in this regard to be certain. In my case the decision to leave (the gay thing aside) was largely economic. There are NO jobs where I come from.

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Divine Fury

My friends, wanting to spare me my murderous impulses and practicing a therapy I respect and despise, tell me to calm down, give it time, things are happening. Things are happening: I want to look at them and see what's really happening. And to those who share my view of what the theater might be but defer to the sluggard drift of things, I want to say what Brecht's Galileo said to the Little Monk, temporizing in pity for those who, fixed in the old routines, scrape a living somehow -- on the premise that if whatever is is not right, it is at least unalterable -- "I can see their divine patience, but where is their divine fury?"
Herbert Blau
The Impossible Theatre: A Manifesto

I look around the theatre world, both on-line and off, and my mind boggles at the sheer complacency and superficiality. Over at TCG, Teresa Eyring pens a few vacuous ideas and thinks she's done something that deserves comment. Eyring, who as head of TCG ought to be considered an important leader of the theatre world, calls John Connolly iat Actors equity "visionary" because of a few vague generalities that have nothing to do with anything touching on the most important issue of his constituency: 86% unemployment, a migrant lifestyle, rampant under-employment, and the abandonment of the theatre by anyone over about age 35. What other leaders should we be looking at? The members of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education spend their annual meeting wandering the empty theoretical hallways of 1980s Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, blathering on about how many actors can dance on the head of a fresnel, while ignoring the idiocy that the art form has fallen to, and the contributions we as teachers make to feeding that fall. Into the vacuum of artistic leadership steps the theatre blogosphere, which for the most part simply reproduces the same self-involved, anti-intellectual, superficial thinking that exists everywhere else. Where is our sense of rigor? Where is our divine fury?

Mike Lawler at ecoTheatre pitches an article on the "supposed greening of theatre operations in this country" to Jim O'Quinn of American Theatre, and AT is interested enough to take him up on it, but when it is submitted, he is asked to rewrite it because it isn't "objective enough." What does that mean? Mike "contact[ed] theater artists across the country to talk about it, and even ask[ed] those I[he] was interviewing for other writing projects what they thought," so it wasn't just Mike's opinion. But clearly, from the use of "supposed" in the above sentence, the article had a skeptical viewpoint that might have cast a small shadow on the happy talk of American Theatre. We can't have even a small interruption of the self-hypnosis that substitutes for actual thought about what we do and how we do it. Well, eventually, AT decided to publish the article in the latest issue -- as an opinion piece. It is great that it was published, and I congratulate Mike, but it should have been a feature article, not a short "opinion piece."

Here in the theatrosphere, Theresa Rebeck publishes an article on the blog for The Guardian (why does she have to go all the way to London to find a place to publish an article attacking the New York stage? We wouldn't want to interrupt the Happy Talk!) that ends:

There's some feeling in rehearsal halls and writers' retreats and drunken dinner parties, that maybe the American theatre participates rather too enthusiastically in the supposed gender bias that the American media tosses about willy-nilly while discussing candidates for higher office. Mostly it is women playwrights who feel that way; male playwrights think the system is really, really fair and that women playwrights who raise these questions are whiners or dirty feminists. After all, everyone is discriminated against! It's show business! Nobody's happy! We're all narcissistic egomaniacs, you can't expect it to make sense! This is about the work. Which means, apparently, that any woman who cares enough to raise her voice about the fact that women's stories are not reaching the stages for which they are intended is a whiner, a dirty feminist and a lousy artist too - because a true artist wouldn't care.

Honestly I am not making one word of this up.

"Who owns the stories, owns the culture." For the life of me I can't remember who said that, but by God it is true.

That last line alone could have fired some really valuable thinking about the nature of artistic responsibility, the contribution art makes to society, the necessity of a diverse viewpoint. But no, what we got was a link to the article and a collective shrug: Guess that's "Just the Way It Is," huh? Gender bias? I don't know...what do YOU think?

What do I think??? I think some theatre people need to do a little reading, a little thinking, and little reflection and self-examination. Read some good feminist books, and some good book about racism while you're at it. Think about power, think about bias, think about how choices are made within our society and whether you just want to go along with it or resist it. And once you've read, and thought, and reflected, and examined yourself -- THEN SHARE. But publishing kneejerk shrugs that exist at the same level of thought as those who say, "Hey, I ain't a racist -- I never owned no slaves." And if you can't do better than that, then don't do anything at all. Silence is better than superficiality.

Kant to the contrary, the arts are not ends in themselves.

They are part of the larger society, the have a role in forming its self-image, its sense of what is right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable. When I say that making art is a moral act, I mean that it contributes to helping us answer Aristotle's question "how are we to live?"

In his essay "Corn-Pone Opinions," Mark Twain wrote, in the voice of an African-American slave boy pretending to preach a sermon, ""You tell me whar a man gits his corn-pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is." Twain explains: "The black philosopher's idea was that a man is not independent, and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter. If he would prosper, he must train with the majority; in matters of large moment, like politics and religion, he must think and feel with the bulk of his neighbors, or suffer damage in his social standing and in his business prosperities. He must restrict himself to corn-pone opinions -- at least on the surface. He must get his opinions from other people; he must reason out none for himself; he must have no first-hand views."

The theatrosphere is mired in corn-pone thinking. A few months back, we had a series of discussions about courage, and the general consensus was that nobody is going to say anything that might affect their employability -- about anything, because who knows who is eventually going to be in a position to hire you? Well, frankly, that is not only pathetic, but it is a recipe for continued disaster. We are behaving like theatrical Nero's fiddling while the lobby burns. And the general effect, beyond the continued downward slide, is a theatrosphere mired in malaise and boring as hell to read.

Jill Dolan was writing about university theatre programs, but she could have been writing about the theatre blogosphere when she wrote:

I continue to believe that university theatre programs should push at the envelope of cultural expectations about the arts. If we defy conventional beauty and body image standards; if we routinely commit to color-blind or cross-race cast our productions; if we teach students to critique representations of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, ability, and other identity markers in our own and mainstream productions, along with their aesthetic and ideological values; and if we teach students to reach outside conventional theatre to form their own companies and to create their own plays and performances, then we’ve truly added something to the national dialogue not just about the arts, but about citizenship and democracy. Supporting the status quo is untenable.

Italics are mine. And double-underline it.

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For devilvet

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Whatever

That seems to be the overall tone of the theatropsherians of late, at least when it comes to theatre. "Whatever." But then, much of the theatrosphere isn't writing about anything as boring as theatre anymore, it's all about the presidential campaign. Why actually think up ideas when you can bash McCain and fret about whether Obama is being mean enough?

Even when someone like Teresa Rebeck raises the issue of the dearth of female playwrights, the best we can come up with is a stifled yawn, a shrug, and a relativist mumble? Tony Adams: "If audiences don't seem to care how does one expect a commercial/institutional producer to care? Not saying that's right, but that's how it is." Yawn. Whatever. Matt Freeman: " There may be an unconscious male bias in the decision making...but from where does that bias spring? Any thoughts on this? I'd love to hear them." Ho-hum. I can't actually be bothered to come up with any ideas of my own. I'll just throw up a subject heading -- "Sexism in Play Selection," maybe? -- and see if anyone has anything to say.

Is there anybody actually thinking out there anymore? George Hunka and I have never seen eye to eye as far as theatre values, but damn it, he makes an effort to actually put some ideas out there. I click around my RSS feeds, and the only blogs I see addressing anything approaching ideas are the management and marketing blogs. Otherwise, it is a alternation between self-promotion, political musings, and open threads on general topics.

Bloggers, people read us because we have ideas, not because we figured out how to sign up at Blogger and Typepad. If we don't actually care about the theatre, if we don't actually have any ideas about theatre, then let's just shut down. It's been like naptime for weeks!

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On Ruralism

I can't tell whether Matt Freeman has his tongue lodged firmly in his cheek when he writes that he kind of likes a little contempt in this theatre, and I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt he's earned as a long-time respectful blogger, so I'll just say that I give Rachel Saltz great credit for expressing discomfort with the small town bashing that seems to lie at the center of The Chalk Boy by Joshua Conkel. In her last paragraph, she writes:

A cynicism that too often looks like contempt runs through the play: for Clear Creek and the other nowhere towns that form “a dotted line across America’s grossly obese belly”; for the pop culture inside that obese belly; and, most important, for characters like Lauren, whom Mr. Conkel uses as straw men. If you lead with contempt, it’s hard to make an audience follow.

Indeed. It must have been really bad for a reviewer from the New York Times to be discomfited. I've addressed this topic before -- this constant and gratuitous bashing of small town (especially southern) America in theatre, film, and TV, as well as in the mainstream media, which is seen as acceptable by urban dwellers because they often share those values. It is one of the last acceptable sites where narrow-minded prejudice and offensive stereotypes are allowed to be displayed without censure. Let's call it ruralism, following the examples of racism, sexism, ageism, and all the other isms that we've become aware of as being offensive and hateful. We're seeing ruralism rearing its ugly head yet again in some of the attacks on Sarah Palin which are based on an assumption that population size is equivalent to value. Now, I take a back seat to nobody in my contempt for McCain and his choice of Palin, but it raises my hackles when urban bloggers and MSM journalists portray small town America as backward and unworthy of respect. If you want Blue States to stay, blue, just keep it up. Obama skirted the edges of this prejudice with his "bitter" comment, which reflected the urban-dweller's disconnect from non-urban lives.

As artists, we should be better than that, especially at this time in America that is so awash in contempt and disdain.

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Teresa Eyring's Non-Response

I see from Dennis Baker's post "Response to Teresa Eyring's Response" and Mike Daisey's September 4th post on his blog that Teresa Eyring has responded to letters, including mine, Dennis',  and Mark Valdez's, concerning her previous editorial "How Theatre Saved America, Part 1" published in the July/August issue of American Theatre. I haven't yet received my copy of the latest issue , and since TCG doesn't find it necessary to put the letters section on their website (because, you know, why in the world would somebody want to read anyone else's thoughts?),  I don't know whether Mike Daisey's response was published at all, or even if he formally submitted it (did you, Mike?), but he did effectively rebut Eyring's original article point by point here.  It is a shame if it wasn't published.

Eyring's response, at least as published on Dennis' blog (is that the whole damn thing?), is a non-response, and if it represents the depth of thought of TCG's Executive Director, we are in some serious trouble. She chooses to focus on her choice of title (blaming it on Daisey's influence -- the Devil Made Me Do It) rather than the real issues that Daisey brought up, and that Dennis and I addressed in our letters. The one sentence in which she makes any attempt to address more than the title is peevishly defensive: "I have also written about-and will continue to write about-the troubles and the failures in our system, such as the Feb. ‘08 column on actors’ compensation and underemployment (which received exactly zero discussion in the blogosphere)." So take THAT, all you blogospherians! How DARE you ignore anything she has written? Surely we, like Joe Biden, are a bunch of big blowhard doofusses. Or is it doofii?

Anyway, let's go back and take a look at Ms. Eyring's editorial, which (unlike letters) is posted in the American Theatre archives. The first three paragraphs of this twelve-paragraph article are a Valentine to actors about how important they are to the theatre. She quotes Garland Wright (a director) and Ian McKellan (a Brit) to make her point. (Sidenote: have you ever noticed how many of the articles in Actors on Acting are by people who aren't actors? Doesn't that seem strange to you? At least when viewed in light of the book's title? Maybe there was some monologist doing a show called Actors Under Acting that Cole and Chinoy were responding to...) However, at the end of the third paragraph, she drops all that stuff to ask "what do we find when we examine in broad daylight the current financial realities of the stage acting profession?"

My heart quickened! What indeed? She turns to Collegegrad.com, that source of all things theatrical, for the answer: "long periods of unemployment, intense competition for roles and frequent rejections in auditions." Get out! Did you know that? Why didn't anybody send me an email? But wait -- there's more: " Because earnings for actors are erratic, many supplement their incomes by holding jobs in other fields." I hope you're taking notes. She then turns to the Actors Equity report for 2006-2007, noting the dismal employment figures.

I'm breathless now, because clearly she gets it: actors don't make much money. Man! How could I have missed this?

And what's the source of this dismal situation? Why, college theatre departments, of course, who continue to crank out acting majors and what's worse they sometimes saddle them with student loan debt so that they have to "head straight for pilot season" (because, you know, the employment figures in TV and film are so much better than in theatre) and skip a career in theatre. Or, "Young actors devoted to the stage often pull together their own companies and pay themselves little or nothing in order to pursue their craft."

But then she gets serious: "Is the situation an irreversible byproduct of market forces? Is there hope for something better?"  Her answer: "In the late 1980s and ’90s, the Guthrie raised the largest endowment the American theatre had seen up until that time and designated as one of its purposes the increase of actor salaries and the support of a large year-round acting company." Now, let's just pause there for a second: what about that "irreversible byproduct of market forces" question? Was that just too damned hard to really go into? Too Big Picture? Well, maybe I'm just being a doofus for even wondering why she brought it up in the first place, just to let it dangle there unanswered. Let's just erase that sentence, sorta like Etch-a-Sketch. Moving on: just how much hope are we supposed to glean from the effort of a single regional theatre that did something ten or twenty years ago? That's the best she can do? But hey, I feel a lot better knowing that there's this one theatre who a couple decades ago actually committed to a permanent acting company and raised some money to do so (say, isn't that what Mike Daisey suggested these theatres do, instead of raising money for new building? Wasn't it that idea that Nichaolas Martin poo-pooed as being uninteresting to donors? You know, the Nicholas Martin that was interviewd in American Theatre last issue?).

But alas, my raised hopes are almost immediately dashed by a single clause in the very next sentence: "While the Guthrie’s acting company is no longer fully intact..." So, see, that one time back twenty years ago when actors could have ongoing employment -- that didn't really work out. (Say! Wasn't that what Mike Daisey was saying in his performance? That once there was a commitment to permanent companies, but now...not so much?)  But don't despair, because "many of [the former Guthrie company] members still reside in the Twin Cities with families, homes and continuing work in the theatre community—including at the Guthrie." Wow! You mean you could cobble together a bunch of part-time jobs to put food on the table and a roof over your head? Imagine that! What a deal! That sounds way better than being part of a permanent company!

But if that prospect doesn't ring your bell, you can always apply for a "Fox Foundation Resident Actor Fellowships, administered by TCG, [which] provide support both for actors to further their professional growth and for theatres to deepen their relationships with actors. In that program’s “extraordinary potential” category, which is focused on early- to mid-career artists, grantees can use up to $10,000 to pay off student loans." Wow! That's way better than talking about that whole "irreversible byproduct of market forces" thing, and all that business model stuff. Who needs a reasonable wage when you can get a one year grant? I'll bet those fellowships will vastly improve those Actors Equity numbers in no time flat, and that $10,000 for student loans? Gee -- that oughta do it, huh? Let's see, how much does Yale charge a year? "The tuition fee for 2007/2008 is $25,735. A reasonable estimate of costs to be incurred by a student attending Yale School of Drama and living off-campus in the 2007/2008 academic year is between $39,135 and $40,435." So that 10G oughta cover a little over two months of expenses! SIGN ME UP!

So there you have it -- an in-depth exploration of the "current financial realities of the stage acting profession." Because the rest of the article doesn't say anything. The next paragraphs talk about how LORT theatre provide 36% of what little Actors Equity employment there is, but don't get too excited about that because "theatres on average continue to experience declining working capital and difficulties in maintaining audience levels. Under these circumstances, the fundraising priority tends to be generating enough support to meet basic costs—and perhaps even to maintain stability." I hate to be nit-picky, but just why aren't artist salaries considered "basic costs"? And why doesn't the desire to "maintain stability" extend to them? (Gosh, wasn't that what Mike Daisey was asking?)

Well, let's not talk about all that stuff or we might get depressed. After all, we should focus on the Good Stuff, right? We don't want people to think we actually have a problem. Because after all, "Actors’ Equity’s visionary new executive director, John Connolly" is on the job, and he must get it, because he was once an actor himself! So let's get excited about John's visionary ideas that will surely save the whole damned stage acting profession! Ideas like: "How to ride the wave of opportunities offered through new technology-based media platforms" -- because on-line and stage acting are pretty much the same, right? And then we could "better utilize old technology—such as videotape—to promote, disseminate and celebrate the work of theatres and actors." Because what we need is more celebration, not more money. And then there's that "ever-increasing interest in international dialogue and exchange," because why work at home when you can tour the world? And then we could "collaborate on building a stronger national arts policy" -- there's a new idea! Why didn't we blogospherians think of that? I guess that's why I'm just a small-time academic, and John Connolly and Teresa Eyring are visionary Executive Directors.

Eyring concludes this deeply visionary and inspiring article: "Along with AEA, innovative funders and TCG theatres nationwide, we look forward to a productive investigation of these and other topics aimed at enriching actors’ lives and work." As long as they aren't like Mike Daisey.

You know, I'm really glad Ms Eyring drew my attention to her article. I don't know why we blogopherians didn't spend a couple weeks digging into all the innovative red meat she offered up for us. Why, I alone could have spent a month chewing on that whole Guthrie thing in the 80s and 90s. Really, I just oughta shut Theatre Ideas down and let Teresa Eyring do the intellectual heavy lifting she is obviously so capable of doing. Actors of the regional theatre, I hope you feel honored to have a visionary like Teresa Eyring working on your behalf. This whole unemployment thing oughta be a thing of the past in no time flat now that she's on the job. A new Golden Age of American Theatre is in the works.

Sheesh.

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Big Blowhard Doofus

According to CNN, at a Maine delegate breakfast in Minneapolis, Karl Rove called Joe Biden a "big blowhard doofus."

In keeping with the high level of Rove's discourse, Biden's campaign sent out a news release to the press quoting Biden as saying:

"Fatty fatty two by four, Can't get through the White House door" and "I am rubber, you are glue; everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you."

Calls to Karl Rove for comment were not immediately returned.

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