Margaret Atwood on "The Gift"

“By the pressures of the market economy we live in, [Hyde] says, we’ve been fooled into believing that there is only one way in which things are exchanged: through money transactions, or buying and selling. Yet on some level we know there’s another economy at work in human societies: the gift economy, which has quite different rules and consequences. It’s the relation between the two economies that The Gift explores…. Money transactions create no bonds of love or gratitude, and imply no obligations. Gifts, on the other hand, are reciprocal, and also emotionally loaded: market exchanges move through the bank account, gifts through the heart. Where the gift circulates, spiritual life flourishes. All societies exist in both economies, says Hyde, but each tends to value one economy over the other. Our own society has overemphasized the market and denied the gift, and the result is stagnant wealth on the one hand and spiritual death and material poverty on the other. The artist belongs primarily to the gift economy; without that element of creation which arrives uncommanded and cannot be bought, the work is unlikely to be alive. The Gift is the best book I know of for the aspiring young, for talented but unacknowledged creators, or even for those who have achieved material success and are worried that this means they’ve sold out. It gets at the core of their dilemma: how to maintain yourself alive in the world of money, when the essential part of what you do cannot be bought or sold."

Margaret Atwood

Lest we forget.

Cal Pritner on Ben Brantley and Revivials

Cal Pritner, founder of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, uses Ben Brantley's review of Hedda Gabler as a leaping-off point for questions of revivals. Check out "Shakespeare and Subsequent Performances" on our blog Thank You! Next?

Quotes

"Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or greater intelligence. Yet it is the onee essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change."

Robert Kennedy

"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker."

Helen Keller

[h/t Tempered Radicals: How People Use Difference to Inspire Change at Work by Debra E. Meterson]

The Divided Soul

An article entitled "A Life Lived Whole" by educator Parker Palmer in Yes! Magazine hooked me this evening. The essay begins:

“There is in all things … a hidden wholeness.”

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk and mystic who wrote these words, was speaking of the human world as well as the world of nature. But in our every?day lives, Merton's words can sound like wishful thinking. Afraid that our inner light will be extinguished, or our inner darkness exposed, we hide our true identities and become separated from ourown souls. We end up leading divided lives, far removed from our birthright wholeness.

The divided life comes in many and varied forms. To cite just a few examples, it is the life we lead when:

• We refuse to invest ourselves in our work,
diminishing its quality and distancing ourselves from those it is meant to serve
• We make our living at jobs that violate our basic values, even when survival does not
absolutely demand it
• We remain in settings or relationships that steadily kill off our spirit
• We harbor secrets to achieve personal gain at the expense of other people
• We hide our beliefs from those who disagree with us to avoid conflict, challenge, and change
• We conceal our true identities for fear of being criticized, shunned, or attacked

My knowledge of the divided life comes first from personal experience. A “still, small voice” speaks the truth about me, my work, or the world. I hear it and yet act as if I did not. I withhold a personal gift that might serve a good end or commit myself to a project that I do not really believe in. I keep silent on an issue I should address or actively break faith with one of my own convictions. I deny my inner darkness, giving it more power over me, or I project it onto other people, creating “enemies” where none exist.

Much of modern drama has focused on this story of the divided soul, because it is endemic to the modern era. Ibsen sounded the chord powerfully in the last quarter of the 19th century in plays like Ghosts and An Enemy of the People, and dramatist after dramatist has added their own notes to it as well. Often, we as artists are able to see this dividedness in others, but not in ourselves.

Some of our conversation on this blog -- conversations about what can be said publicly, for instance, about the work of others; conversations about whether we should take on projects that we don't believe in as a means to other opportunities; conversations about what we do in order to create theatre -- have passionately explored the boundaries of the divided life without really recognizing that these conversations resemble those that take place in places like Enron, or Merrill Lynch, or Lehman Brothers that we often see as being a world away from our own world of imagination and creativity.

But are they really? Aren't all the archetypal hero's journey stories about the courage needed to maintain wholeness, to do what is right and good, to follow our Personal Legend, to speak truth to power?

I think it was Robert Brustein in one of his later collections that discussed that what makes traditional tragedy powerful is that often it was the central character, the hero, who was implicated. Instead of pointing a finger at the audience, the hero (or the playwright) pointed it at himself. Perhaps that is the nature of artistic empathy, an attitude in which the artist sees himself as part of the community, not apart from it. It is hard, because we can't quite see ourselves from afar, so it is easier to see mote in the eye of another while ignoring the beam in one's own. But perhaps if we do, we can create works of art that will not only identify the divided self, but tell stories that give the courage and the reason to unify the self once again.

Migration and Expansion

As you have probably noticed, lately I haven't been doing much writing here. Partly, that was due to the demands of teaching, but partly it was because of a desire not to repeat myself. Over the winter break, I had an opportunity to evaluate my reasons for blogging, and I reached a conclusion that I could do one of two things: 1) quit, 2) focus and expand. I chose the latter.

This blog, Theatre Ideas, will continue but with an even stronger focus on the 100K Project topics: the arts in non-metropolitan areas. This will not be a place where I will engage the latest controversies of the theatrosphere, but rather where I will gather and disseminate my own ideas and those of others concerning the decentralization of the arts. For a while now, I have wanted to broaden the subjects about which I write, but have struggled to do so. To help me, I have teamed up with Cal Pritner to create a brand new blog, called "Thank You! Next?" Cal and I have been friends since the late 1980s -- we collaborated on the book Introduction to Play Analysis. Cal's bio is available on Wikipedia, but suffice to say his is the founding chair of the Illinois State University Theatre Department, where he taught many of the founding members of Steppenwolf, including John Malkovich, Gary Cole, Terry Kinney, Rondi Reed, as well as Judith Ivey. He is also the founder of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and has co-authored a fantastic book entitled How to Speak Shakespeare which I recommend to anyone who wants to make verse understandable. He is also a Mark Twain afficioanado, and is the author of Mark Twain and Me: Unlearning Racism, which will be published in the coming year. Cal has also acted in film, television, and theatre, and has written and performed five one-person shows, including Mark Twain: Traveling and Mark Twain: Unlearning Racism.

Cal lives in NYC, where he sees a lot of theatre, film, and dance. He is someone who thinks a lot about just about everything, and over the years he and I have had a lot of really interesting conversations, both in person and via email. Over the holidays, we decided that we'd like to have these conversations more publicly, so that other people could deepen and enrich it. So we created "Thank You! Next?," which has the subtitle "Two guys, out in the house, with opinions..." as a place where we could discuss pretty much anything that occurs to us. While I suspect a lot of our posts will be about aspects of the arts, we're also interested in politics, teaching, psychology, sociology, sports, and just about everything. Cal's current post, entitled "Why Best?," takes a look at Stanley Fish's NY Times article in which he lists his top ten American films.

I hope that some of my readers will find the time to check out "Thank You! Next?"

Dennis Baker Reinforces Daisey's Point Thanks to Leonard Lopate

Dennis Baker, who is possibly more tenacious than I am about the necessity to make artists part of a community, posts about a recent WNYC Leonard Lopate show (link provided), which talks about Suzan Lori-Parks at the Public. Good stuff, Dennis!

Mike Daisey on Community

Over on Mike Daisey's blog, he is taking the time to respond to a critic who seems to almost willfully miss the point. I'd like to draw attention, once again, to what seems to me to be Daisey's major point in How Theatre Failed America: the need for stability in the lives of artists. [emphasis in red]

"Daisey believes that the gorgeous new buildings American theaters are constructing have trapped them into uninspired, ultraconservative productions."

Once again, my concern is that the emphasis on buildings and real estate traps theaters into not creating artistic ensembles that draw strength from their communities, which then in turn weaken the art form by outsourcing acting and not giving necessary stability to the artists that could actually be the backbone of those theaters. While I do think this kind of corporate thinking in many cases leads to bad productions, I was very clear in scene three that often it does work—many individual productions are excellent, when individual artists make things work, regardless of the environment they are in. This is not only a flattening of the piece—it is just not what I'm speaking about.

"Freedom from expensive surroundings is no guarantee of theatrical quality."

I never implied that it was. Many terrible plays being produced in cheap venues constantly, certainly.

The error here is conflating an absolute of "theatrical quality" with my intentions. I'm interested in a fundamental shift in how the regional theaters of America conceive of themselves, and a value change that involves foster and supporting artists within their cities to create work. It's my belief that local connection and continuity plays a large part of the tissue needed to make things work.

Do we need theatrical quality? Absolutely. Of course we do—that's obvious. HOW we achieve that end, and what kind of theater we have in this country to make these productions happen is the concern of my monologue. Once again, the piece does not slavishly concern itself with the kinds of theater being performed—the concern is that the living moment and experience is happening, AND that it be working toward environments where communities can form to actually care and foster that work.

Why is this such a difficult concept for so many people to understand? Why is it so difficult to imagine that stability and continuity might actually lead to better art? Why is it that every football fam (and I count myself one) knows that the amount of time their offensive line has played together is the most important factor in the number of wins their team has, but theatre people regularly fret that spending more than six weeks with the same people will lead to creative stagnation? It is beyond comprehension. Read any book by a sports coach, and you will see how important it is to championships that players play together over time. Take a look at the number of World Series that the New York "Revolving Door" Yankees have won while Steinbrenner fires and hires coaches and players every twenty minutes in a quest to have a team made up of "stars."

It is about continuity. First and foremost, more important (dare I say it) than even talent. Because talent grows with experience together, and experience grows with time.