The Woods Are Burning, Boys!

Tom Loughlin provides an "opti-realist" response to the American Theatre magazine's question about theatre 25 years from now. Be sure to have a good, stiff drink to hand when you read it. It is thoughtful, clear-eyed, and honest.

Overall, I agree with his diagnosis. This Broadway-dominated system, whose foundation was initially shaken by the regional theatre movement of the 1960s before it co-opted the movement into serving as a replacement for the pre-Broadway tryout towns of the mid-century (see Moss Hart's wonderful Act One for a vibrant description of that system), will continue its slide into artistic irrelevance, becoming little more than a northeastern Disney World. Regional theatres will become less and less regional, more and more financially untenable, and as artistically bankrupt as Broadway.

While I love Tom's Nebraska analogy of looking down for the spring, rather than up, I would disagree with his belief that "Theatre over the next 25 years will become smaller, less consequential, and highly undervalued by society at large." Smaller, yes, if it knows what is good for it, and as a result artists will rediscover the true magic of theatre, which has nothing to do with opulence and everything to do with imagination. Repeat Peter Brook's first sentence of The Empty Space as a mantra. But it is hard for me to imagine theatre being any less consequential than it already is, or any less valued. I think we have already touched bottom on that one.

Instead, what I believe will happen, once smallness is embraced and magic reclaimed, is that the theatre will rediscover the fact that its lifeblood is not drawn from the mass culture, but from the local culture. Instead of taking its business model from commerce, it will look to local churches as an inspiration for a new relationship to the audience. Back in October 2005, I wrote about this idea. As Tom notes, theatre education will have to change in recognition of the different skills needed to work within such a model. Saying "education" and "change" in the same sentence does funny things to my mouth, but it will happen eventually. Young people will have to be taught to see themselves as facilitators, community members, builders, rememberers, celebrators, healers, and as people who help the community to reclaim its higher angels, embrace its own imaginations, and live up to its potential.

Do I think this will happen, or is this what I hope will happen? Both. I think the collapse of the current paradigm is inevitable and will have to be filled with something new, and that the movement toward local economies described in books like Bill McKibben's Deep Economy and Lyle Estill's Small Is Possible will embrace the theatre as well as the rest of the economy. (I particularly recommend the latter book as incredibly inspirational.)

But the groundwork has to happen now, while the current paradigm maintains its wobbling dominance. Because once the woods are finished burning, we will have to begin to plow anew, and do quickly before the forces of greed and superficiality begin building a theme park on the site.

Wine, Crackers, and Cheese

(h/t Mike Daisey)

Tom Loughlin Does the Honorable Thing...

http://poorplayer.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/you-lose-a-bet/

Mick Montgomery on Mike Daisey

(Big h/t to Dennis Baker)

In a blog post nearly entitled "My Disillusionment," Mick Montgomery of Art of Function writes about the "Post Show Roundtable" that followed a performance of How Theatre Failed America in Los Angeles. Montgomery writes:

I listened to someone from the Odyssey say the words that spell the down fall of all theaters in this country... "I don't want to do Children's Theater, I want to do the Art I want to do."

My message to those folks running theater in this town is... "Guess what? That's not your job." The job of the theater is to support it's audience and community, not exist soley for the purpose of indulging the creative proclivities of the artists entrusted with running the stage. Artistcally, I may want to do a season filled with "True West" and "End Game" and the like, where I could star in or direct them all, but that's not my job as the steward of the theater. My job is to embrace my community for who they are, and then go from there. I'm not saying this is soley doing Children's Theater, but it's about engaging your audience where they are at, not asking the audience to engage you where you are at. Theater is about people, audiences and artists sharing things together. Theater is not about a building or a 'great space' or subscriptions. The theater is the product of the people coming to it, not the other way around. We don't understand that here in Los Angeles.
.......................

I found it ironic that Mike Daisey railed against theaters trying to 'get more money' to solve all their problems with paying artists in his piece, and then comedically, 10 minutes after the show when he asked his panel, what would you need to make big changes to the theater culture in L.A. the first answer out of someone's mouth was... "We need more money."

I sat in my chair and hung my head. Did they not listen to the show?

It's not the money that is the issue. It's our model. Maybe theater needs to be less capitalized and more socialized. Maybe the City should figure out how to support the Theater Arts in L.A. like they support the visual arts. Maybe we do need $5 dollar theater Wednesdays. Maybe we need A Theater Alliance that truly correlates resources and marketing stragies. We have a city with a School District crying out for subsidized arts education, yet no one is there to help that process along. And here I sit asking myself, "What the Fuck is everyone doing? Why doesn't anyone understand how to make this work?" How come people in Portland or San Diego get it, but the place I live, where some of the most talented people in the world are living, can't figure it out?

Los Angeles Theater is the great disconnect. The Theater Community fails to understand the audience, and thus it fails to understand itself. Everyone is just scrambling for crumbs, no one is building relationships with each other through the art. The solutions are so simple. That's probably why I'm so frustrated. [ital mine]

As has been the case for the past two years, Mike Daisey continues to provoke long-overdue reflection and questioning on the part of artists. Theatre artists have a single kneejerk response to every problem: give us more money. Or, in lieu of that, the other knee jerks "we need better marketing." When i reality, we need to do a Cartesian rethinking of the whole thing from the ground up. Peter Brook gave us a good starting point with the first lines of The Empty Space: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged." Three elements: a place, an actor, and an audience. What Brook fails to mention is the relationship between the three, which is what we need to be doing right now.

I would argue that the connection needs to be ongoing, committed, and interactive. As Wendell Berry says in an interview in Conversations with Wendell Berry, ""I think art comes about in answer to a need. At least, mine does. The community needs to talk about itself, needs to remember itself. It needs to recall significant things that have happened, and to mull them over and figure out what the significance is." In this case, "itself" embraces the three points of Brook's triangle: place, artist, audience. It is a three-way conversation that takes place over time. Berry sees the artist not as "an isolated, preeminent genius who materializes ideas from thin air, but as a person who has been in a community a long time, has been attentive to its voices...and who is prepared to pass on what has been heard. There are two things the artist must do: pass on all this is involved -- the art, the memory, the knowledge. And take responsibility for his or her own work -- that is the reason the work is signed, and that should be the only reason." Responsibility, not credit; humility, not self-aggrandizement.

Mick Montgomery made this realization, and it made him hang his head. That is the first step. The next step is to raise your head, look around, and start listening to the people around you.

Tom Loughlin: Locally Produced Arts

Excellent post from Tom Loughlin (A Poor Player): "Locally Grown and Produced -- Art?" As I said in the comments on his blog, one thing that jumped out at me (other than my total agreement with the local food/local art parallel) is the idea of “show business.” To my knowledge, there are no Departments of Show Business at any universities — The Departments, Drama Departments, but no Show Business Departments. Maybe we need to encourage this label, so that potential students can make a distinction between commercially-oriented departments (Show Business), Big Regional Theatre -oriented departments (Theatre), liberal arts-oriented departments (Drama), and community-based departments (Community Arts), or Interdisciplinary Arts. At least there would be truth in advertising.

Celebrating American Theatre's 25th Anniversary

So I just got an email from TCG inviting me to "Gather 'round American Theatre's celebrity piano bar," with performances by the following line-up:

Laura Osnes Johnson, currently Nelly Forbush in South Pacific at Lincoln Center Theatre, winner of the role of "Sandy" on the televised Grease: You're the One that I Want! competition and Sandy in the 2007 Broadway run of Grease.

Michael John LaChiusa, Tony Award-nominated American musical theatre composer, lyricist, and librettist best known for complex, musically challenging shows such as Hello Again, Marie Christine, The Wild Party, and See What I Wanna See.

Marc Kudisch, seen this spring in the Joe Mantello-directed Dolly Parton musical 9 to 5 w/ Allison Janney, Stephanie J. Block & Megan Hilty as Franklin Hart, Jr.

Mary Testa, two-time Tony Award nominee, for performances in revivals of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town and 42nd Street.

Excuse me? Could somebody explain to me what in the world is in this organization's head? Has the regional theatre and the Broadway stage become so interchangeable that these are the people we ask to entertain us are the winners of the Grease: You're The One That I Want TV show? Every time I open American Theatre I am more and more baffled.

Samuel Mockbee: Educating Artists

I was listening to an old edition of NPR’s Speaking of Faith this evening on the way home. It was a wonderful episode called “An Architecture of Decency,” about the famous Rural Studio in Western Alabama. Included in the website for the program was an essay by Samuel Mockbee, the founder of the Rural Studio. I

This brings me to Auburn University’s Rural Studio. It had become clear to me that if architectural education was going to play any socially-engaged role, it would be necessary to work with the segment of the profession that would one day be in a position to make decisions: the student. The main purpose of the Rural Studio is to enable each student to step across the threshold of misconceived opinions and to design/build with a ‘moral sense’ of service to a community. It is my hope that the experience will help the student of architecture to be more sensitive to the power and promise of what they do, to be more concerned with the good effects of architecture than with ‘good intentions’. The Rural Studio represents an opportunity to be real in itself, the students become architects of their own education.

I believe that this could easily be the purpose of the educational aspects of the <100k>

For instance, I have a student who spent spring break in Guatemala with Patch Adams and the Gesundheit! Institute. She has created a small clown troupe who visit a local nursing home. Another of my students spent a semester touring with an environmental group that went to schools using the arts to teach about planting trees. These are small contributions in small places, but I think they are important, and that they receive far too little support in “professionally” oriented theatre programs across the US.

In the same essay, Mockbee writes:

Last year, I was asked to participate in an AlA (American Institute of Architects) Design Conference, along with two other architects and the English architect Michael Hopkins. Each of us gave lectures during the day and then participated in an after-dinner panel discussion that evening. Primarily, the questions-and-answers session that evening settled around questions about how an architect receives and executes major commissions. Each of the other architects were giving their answers to this question when Michael Hopkins interjected somewhat matter-of-factly that the evening before he had received a ‘fax on his pillow’ informing him that he had just received yet another commission from one of his major clients in England.

Later on someone made the observation that Hopkins was working for the richest woman in the world — the Queen of England — while I was working for the poorest man in the world, Shepard Bryant (the client and recipient of The Rural Studio’s first charity house, the Hay Bale House in Mason’s Bend, Alabama). They noted at the same time that my work and the work of Michael Hopkins represented two very different approaches to the practice of architecture. They wondered what the implications of this were. The question was directed at me and I answered that it probably had more to do with our nature than with any convictions — more to do with our own private (and somewhat selfish) desires rather than any commitment to public virtue. But as far as my own convictions went, I believe that architects are given a gift of second sight and when we see something that others can’t we should act, and we shouldn’t wait for decisions to be made by politicians or multinational corporations. Architects should always be in the initial critical decision-making position in order to challenge the power of the status quo. We need to understand that when a decision is made, a position has already been taken. Architects should not be consigned to only problem-solving after the fact.

People then turned to Michael Hopkins for his answer. He replied, ‘Maybe architects shouldn’t be in the position to make those kinds of decisions.’ I took this to mean issues affecting social, economic, political or environmental decisions, and also staying away from making subversive decisions!

At first I was somewhat stunned by his answer and then reflected that perhaps here was a man who could be speaking for most practicing architects.

I do not believe that courage has gone out of the profession, but we tend to be narrow in the scope of our thinking and underestimate our natural capacity to be subversive leaders and teachers.

This easily applies to the other arts as well, and particularly the notoriously conservative theatre, which I do think has lost much of its courage and been over-run with careerism and caution. We talk a big game about “subversion,” but our idea of subversion is focused on pathetic attempts to stick our thumb in the eye of the middle class by saying bad words or acting out heinous acts onstage, rather than being truly subversive by creating a vision that helps to bring into existence a better way of being, by creating with a moral sense of service to the community.