If I Ran the NEA: One Suggestion That Would Change the Face of the Arts

After having been interviewed last week on Studio 360 (in an unfortunately-named episode called "Too Much Theatre?") discussing the #supplydemand "controversy," I wanted to follow up with a few thoughts on how I think the NEA ought to handle its business. So here is a single recommendation that would change the face of the American theatre (and frankly, it ought to be applied in all of the other arts too):

Recommendation: The NEA ought to confine itself to providing seed money for theatres in underserved communities.
     There are two pieces to this recommendation:
            1. "providing seed money": applicants receive money for a total of five years after which they are expected to be self-sustainable. This is the nonprofit equivalent of venture capital, given because the proposers seem to have a good idea that needs to get off the ground and also seem to have the wherewithal to give them a shot at doing what they say. You get a limited number of years to become sustainable, after which you're done. No more grants for Steppenwolf or Lincoln Center -- they're old enough to be booted out of the house. How long can these massive organizations continue to live in the NEA's basement? Right now, in perpetuity.  Time to be grown-ups. On the other hand, when funding fledgling organizations, the investment doesn't have to be huge to make a significant impact. Just large enough to allow the theatre's staff to focus their attention full-time in bringing their theatre to a point of sustainability. If Rocco Landesman is concerned about providing theatre artists with a livable wage, then fund them when they don't need much to survive. If the theatre fails after 5 years, oh well, most small businesses fail. If the founders then create another new theatre and apply for funding, the NEA (like any good venture capitalist) would take their past track record into account.
          2. "underserved communities": to get NEA money, you have to prove that you have a specific audience in mind that isn't currently being served by other theatres. Whether these are towns or cities that don't currently have theatres or parts of communities who do have theatres but who have a group that isn't having theatre created for and about them, those who apply for funding have prove that this isn't another vanity project to get artists' careers "off the ground." This needs to be their career -- an idea to which they are deeply committed on a long-term basis. As Adam Thurman would say, this requires artists to become project-oriented, and seize control of the means of production. If you don't want to do that -- if all you want to do is act or design sound -- then you'd better find someone to team up with you who does want to do it, or else focus where there is money. Also, we need to expand the definition of "diversity" to include geographic diversity, demographic diversity, educational diversity, as well as the more well-known types of diversity. Serve everybody, not just middle-class urbanites.

Welcome, Studio360 Listeners

My recent interview with Kurt Andersen on Public Radio International's Studio 360 is now available.


I hope you enjoy the show, and feel free to leave comments as always.

This Is Good Advice, Too

Jess Hutchison gives a kick in the pants: "Do the Work."

Addendum: Your Theatre's "Why"

Last week, I wrote a series of posts addressed to a theatre major getting ready to graduate about "finding your why." Let me take a moment to state the obvious: finding your "why" is critical not only to you personally, but to your theatre as well.

Simon Sinek, in the video I have linked to several times, tells us that "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it," and that you don't want to sell to everyone who wants to buy your product, but to those who "believe what you believe." In other words, you don't want to sell your productions as just another commodity, but rather create what Seth Godin would call a "tribe" that is committed to the type of work that you find valuable.

If you look at all the mission statements for theatres across this US, what you will find most of the time are bland generalities that basically boils down to "we do theatre," which is a what. If the "why" of your theatre is "so I can promote my career," there is nothing there for the potential audience to buy into, no reason for them to be loyal, or to follow the development of your work. People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Many of the large regional institutions started out with a very strong "why," which came out of the passionate beliefs of the founders. But it is when leadership is passed from the founder to the next generation that mission "slip," as Sinek calls it in the chapter of "Start With Why" called "Slip Happens," is most likely to occur. The board goes out looking for a new leader, and finds somebody who is dynamic and charismatic, but who has an entirely different idea for the organization. And that's fine, as long as the organization completely changes direction. But it rarely does, because the Board also wants to hold onto the already-existing audience, all of whom bought the "why" of the founder. The result often ends up being a "fuzzy why," and slowly the audience will drift away, because they instinctively will sense that something has changed -- they no longer know "who you are."

So develop a clear, dynamic "why for your theatre, one that everyone is on board with. If the only way to get agreement is to create a "why" that is bland and general, so that it covers all the bases at once, then you have problem that may only be solved by getting rid of those who don't share the vision. Jim Collins says that an important part of going from "good to great" is to get the right people on the bus. The first step to doing that is to make sure the bus is clearly labeled with a destination, and that everybody on the bus wants to go there.

Advice to a Theatre Major: Finding Your How (Part 1): You Are Not a Migrant Worker

I've spent a few days talking about the importance of "finding your why," finding the reason you get out of bed in the morning, the thing that drives you to not only do theatre, but do anything that you find fulfilling. And the purpose of all this is to help you, through looking inside and out, into your past and present, and at society's past and present (theatre history has a lot of techniques that could be dusted off and put into practice again) to find your own individual path.


This is important, I would argue, because education (especially theatre education) tries to tell you there is one true path for everybody. That's why books like Robert Cohen's Acting Professionally: Raw Facts About Careers in Acting, which I read when I was in high school in the mid-70s, is still in print forty years later, and is still ruining the lives of all but a handful of actors with its one-size-fits-all advice. That's why the information in that book and books like it, are still taught by the majority of teachers in so-called  "pre-professional programs," despite a success rate that is beyond dismal. Hey, it's better than nothing, right? Wrong.


What I am telling you is that there are many ways into the forest, and each of you has to find your own place to enter. And that's why you need to understand your why. "Why" is your north star that you keep in sight as you weave your way, sometimes in directions that seem counter-intuitive, through your daily life.


Now let's look at your "how." First, review Simon Sinek's "Golden Circle," watching from about 2:20 in through about 4:30 or so.





Remember, as Sinek says, "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." If your "why" is totally self-serving and egoistic, then you will eventually find that people start not wanting to work with you. They instinctively sense that your "why" doesn't include them. On the other hand, if your "why" is inclusive and inspiring, people can sense it, even if you don't explicitly tell them in words, as long as your actions illustrate your why. Again as Sinek says, your goal isn't to sell to everyone who wants what you sell, but rather to those who believe what you believe. You want to surround yourself with people who help you fulfill your "why."


And this requires that you think about yourself very differently than you are "trained" to think about yourself. Most theatre training isn't about creating independent artists with a strong "why," but rather about creating employees. And not just employees, but employees with the mentality of a migrant worker willing to put up with whatever the employer dishes out in order to have the chance to work. As the A Chorus Line lyric says, "I need this job, oh God, I need this show." What is taught most strongly is compliance. Dennis Baker wrote about this in the Rutgers program, and I have observed it in action myself -- the attitude of all too many theatre professors is that your job as an artist is to jump when they say jump and ask how high on the way up. 


In fact, the lessons we imbue most strongly in the young theatre person would be applauded in any boardroom in the world.

1. Know your place in the hierarchy. In the rehearsal room, the director is king. Everyone else does the director's bidding. And the director does the producer's bidding. In the academy, we really reinforce this because not only is your director king in the rehearsal studio, but he's also your king in your classes where he can give you lower grades if he doesn't like your attitude. In the corporate world, the producer is the stockholders, the director is the CEO, and the rest of the artistic staff are middle managers and employees. Fits perfectly. In the theatre world, we have a slogan that can be trotted out whenever anyone questions the hierarchical model: "You can't make art by committee." We make sure that idea, which is never backed up with any data, gets tatooed on the psyches of every drama major that is "trained."

2. Efficiency is everything. If you don't believe that this is a strong value, suggest to a group of theatre artists that a less hierarchical, more collaborative rehearsal process might create a better production. The first argument you will hear (after "You can't create art by committee,") is that we "don't have time" for that, we have to get the show up. We have internalized the short rehearsal period to such an extent that we behave as if there was another tablet Moses brought down from Sinai that decreed how many weeks are allowed for the creation of a production. After all, time is money, right? Perfect for the corporate environment. The majority of Broadway productions fail every year at a rate most businesses would find horrifying, but we never question this value. It's too expensive to spend money on rehearsal -- better minimize the investment and hope for the best.

3. Do what you're told. Everyone is trained to wait patiently for the director to indicate what they should do, and then do it as effectively as possible. Don't take chances carefully analyzing the script you are given to understand how it works in order to develop your own ideas about how you might creatively support it -- that'll only get in the way of doing what the director tells you. You are a blank slate to be written on by the superior intelligence of the director. Yours is not to question why, yours is but to do or die.

4. Strive to be what they want you to be. This is what everyone learns in auditioning class. The theme song for this is "Dance Ten -- Looks Three" from A Chorus Line sung contrapuntally with "Razzle-Dazzle" from Chicago. What does the market want right now? That's what you should be. Great way to move up the ladder in corporate America as well. What's conventional wisdom about getting your second job? Play well with others. Theatre is Dale Carnegie central.

5. Delude yourself about the product you are working on. I was once told that, if asked by someone about the show I'm currently working on, always say its the best thing you've ever been associated with. Say something critical about the product and it gets back to someone else on the show -- you're dead. Production is a process of group self-hypnosis. Loyalty demands that you leave your critical mind at the stage door. This skill is particularly helpful in the corporate world when you have to defend your products against accusations of health hazards or environmental destruction. Tobacco execs were experts at this skill -- it's ingrained in theatre people, too.

6. Don't let your ethics get in the way of your career. Given the slim employment opps in the theatre, it is in your best interest to accept whatever comes along that pays. In fact, having no moral or aesthetic values at all is a great benefit, because you'll have nothing to stand in the way of employment. And if anyone asks about an artist's responsibility to society, you can laugh with great commitment. An artist has no responsibility to ANYONE, you can snap. Does the play reinforce negative stereotypes? Hey, it's only theatre -- we don't actually affect anyone's ideas, right? Film filled with violence and misogyny? It's entertainment -- nobody really takes this stuff seriously. A highly developed sense of rationalization can serve you well in the corporate world, too. Just take a little of that money you make, wipe the dirt off of it, and contribute a few bucks to a women's shelter or something.



It's time for this corporate theatre training to end, and the way it will end is if you, as theatre artists, begin to take your talents seriously, determine your "why," and then sell to the people who believe what you believe, who share your values, who want to do similar things. Throw away your CD of A Chorus Line and buy a copy of Daniel Pink's Free Agent Nation and Tom Peters' The Brand You 50. Stop asking for people to "give you a chance" and instead start making your own chances. 


Or you can keep playing the Scarcity Game, putting up with 88% unemployment and pounding the pavement, hat in hand, looking for artistic handouts. 


The choice is yours.

Tom Vilsack, Ezra Klein, and Assured Mutual Idiocy

I'm not certain I can write coherently about this, because I am so angry. It might be better to just read this blog post on "Blog for Rural America" entitled "What are the rural subsidied that Ezra Klein and Tom Vilsack are debating?" And even more: "The Myth of Rural Subsidies."


Ezra Klein, obviously on some sort of buzz following a reading of Edward L. Glaeser's self-congratulatory and parochial book Triumph of the City, wrote a blog post entitled "Why We Still Need Cities," a title which implies, like the Religious Right's mythical "assault on Christmas," that there is some sort of assault on cities underway that he and Glaeser need to defend against. He concludes his superficial piece of a superficial book with a superficial conclusion:

The overarching theme of Glaeser's book is that cities make us smarter, more productive and more innovative. To put it plainly, they make us richer. And the evidence in favor of this point is very, very strong. But it would of course be political suicide for President Obama to say that part of winning the future is ending the raft of subsidies we devote to sustaining rural living. And the U.S. Senate is literally set up to ensure that such a policy never becomes politically plausible.

What???? 
   First of all, there isn't a "raft of subsidies" devoted to "sustaining rural living," there are subsidies devoted to sustaining corporate agriculture, and that is something else entirely. As is noted in CFRA blog post linked to above, "USDA investment is [badly skewed] toward very large farm operators and away from investing in programs that build a future for all of rural America. The report found that the USDA spent nearly twice as much to subsidize just the 20 largest farms in each of 13 leading farm states examined as it invested in rural-development programs to create economic opportunity for the 3 million people living in 1,400 towns in the 20 most-struggling rural counties in the same 13 states." Sort of like the arts funding distribution system: the rich get richer. Subsidizing Archer Daniels Midland is NOT "rural living." In fact, it is subsidizing the killing of rural life. Plus, more is spent per capita in urban areas than in rural areas.


Vilsack, rightly feeling that Klein's post was a "slam on rural America," takes part in an interview with Klein four days later in which he defends rural areas in what seems to me the most stupid terms possible. People may remember that I took Rocco Landesman to task for his insulting comment about Peoria when he first took over at NEA, but that was nothing compared to Vilsack. Basically, Vilsack says that we need to subsidize rural living because rural areas supply 44% of the military, and because the people there have good values. WTF??? Rural areas should be supported because they raise all-American cannon fodder?

Here's the problem: Vilsack can't really deliver a smackdown to Klein because he'd have to own up to the actual subsidies that are going to corporate agribusiness, which he can't do because he is bought and paid for by agribusiness, and always has been. And so he is incapable of defending rural areas because he thinks of them as great big storage units to be mined for food and water. 

All it would have taken was a glance at the Amazon comments on Glaeser's book to be able to kills Klein's urban buzz. Here is something from Louis C. Nuyens:

Before we are too quick to unquestioningly praise cities, we should remember that today's cities rely unsustainably on fossil fuels, even if we believe the concocted attributions contained in Glaeser's fascinating but sometimes fantasy-based analysis.

The inconvenient truth is that the sustainable carrying capacity of the Earth might be a lot closer to one billion than to seven billion or more, and sustainable land-use -- which might increasingly require that food, water, construction materials, and energy supply come from locations near to the people who use them -- might look a lot more like semi-rural small towns than like medium-to-large modern cities in which nature is paved out of existence, human activities are disconnected from awareness of the limits of natural resources, and virtually all essential food, water, energy, and materials must be delivered from remote locations.

When Klein stops eating food and drinking water from rural areas is when I'll start listening to his ideas. 
   And what about all that money that goes to pay for urban problems. What percentage of the prison system is taken up housing urban criminals? What percentage of the war on drugs? What percentage of arts funding goes to urban areas? What percentage of urban planning money goes to urban areas? The list could go on and on.


Makes me so damn mad...


And while you're at it, take a look at this:"Well-Being in Rural Congressional Districts."

More on Finding Your Why

In the comments of yesterday's post, "Advice to a Theatre Major About to Graduate from College (Part 2)," a commenter, The Waltzing Belgian, who has experience with my approach to play analysis as described in Introduction to Play Analysis, writes:

The problem with using the analogy of the Major Dramatic Question is that the question "Will Hamlet--?" isn't answered from within, it's answered mostly based on clues from the play, from the plot, which guide it in a certain direction. This may be a good way for Nervous to concentrate her efforts: by looking at specific instances from her own past, problems she has solved, ways that she has dealt with things. Simply "soul searching" makes a great bumper-sticker, but it can lead to some radical wish-fulfillment dead-ends. If led unchecked, it could provide answers like "Hamlet really wants to explore the universe". It isn't enough to simply look within, a big part of it consists of looking back and possibly even of talking to other people as a mirror for looking at yourself.
4:21 AM

Of course, we're dealing with an analogy here, so the correspondence won't be one-to-one, but the point he is making is true: the further along in the play you are (i.e., the older you are), the easier it is to recognize the Major Dramatic Question. 


However, without going into a major play analysis geek out, I would also point out that the MD? arises when the protagonist first commits to a course of action, which we call the Moment of Engagement. This is the moment when the protagonist takes the first step along the road that is the play. In Hamlet, it occurs in Act I Sc 5, when Hamlet speaks to the Ghost of his father, who tells Hamlet he must "Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder," to which Hamlet responds, " Now to my word; It is 'Adieu, adieu! remember me.'I have sworn 't." At that moment, Hamlet commits to a course of action, and the audience wants to know whether Hamlet will kill Claudius. In other words, while the MD? is answered at the end of the play, it starts very early in the play. Had Hamlet said to the Ghost, like Dickens' Scrooge, "You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!'' we would have a very different play.


All of which is to say: you don't have to know how the play ends to find your "why." It is a commitment to a specific course of action.

But I would also agree with my waltzing friend's point that your "why" doesn't come wholly out of one's inner self. By all means, look back on your past experiences to find out the characteristics of those that gave the greatest  fulfillment. And be specific. If you really enjoyed working on a particular show, what made it fulfilling? Were there certain rehearsals that were satisfying -- what made them so? Was it working with a certain individual? What is it about them that made it fulfilling? Was it what the play had to say? And don't just confine yourself to theatre experiences. What experiences in school, on the job, in a volunteer organization did you find fulfilling, and why? You're looking to see if there is a common thread, something that can be applied to a variety of situations.

The goal is to fill your life with as many things as possible that you find fulfilling.

That's why it is a good idea to make sure you don't confuse your "why" with your "what." If you make them the same ("my why is to do theatre, because doing theatre is what gets me out of bed in the morning"), then you have only a single option. And that means you will spend much of your time frustrated and unfulfilled, define your non-theatre work in a way that is unfulfilling ("my day job is the lousy thing I have to do to put a roof over my head so I can do theatre"), and miss a lot of opportunities that will be fulfilling. Maybe even more fulfilling than theatre,

As far as "wish-fulfillment dead ends," there is nothing about this process that guarantees success. After all, Hamlet might have been killed before he revenged his father's murder. But joy comes from trying to accomplish something, and being aware of the experience as it occurs.