There is a guideline/rule/rubric/something I heard this one time about never responding to your critics. Or maybe it was never respond to your critics publically or some such…
I’m mostly well behaved about such things.
But I want to point anyone who knows the formentors of rebellion who sic their fans and subscribers on someone who doesn’t like a show to what a grown up response looks like.
Mr. Don Hall and his 5-Ring WNEP production The (edward) Hopper Project have gone before the review stand and while you might assume that you can guess Mr. Hall’s stance, would it really be Don Hall if you could?
No it would not.
So if you would please take a look at Mr. Hall’s dialogue with the critics after each review, rather what I would like to believe the bar would be like after the show.
And if you know someone at the Huntington feel free to point them there as well.
I’m not through Part One yet, but I really need to jot thoughts as I go or I’m just going to lose it all.
AD’s honestly believe that there are no good plays anymore. Because of course Really Good Play means Tartuffe.It is really not clear to ADs at major shops who have been running Shakespeare, Moliere, Shakespeare, Chekov, O’Neill for a decade that reading a new unproduced play isn’t going to have the same effect on them, not because it isn’t good, but because:
A.) You’ve only been working with Hall of Fame scripts distilled by 500 years of production winnowing the field
B.) You’re older, more experienced, more broadly read and you’re not going to be as easily impressed as you were when you were 22.
Baseball metaphor: hitters will always tell you that Old Ace Pitcher was the fastest ever, much faster than Young Flamethrower. Because of course he was 19 and seeing Big League fastballs for the first time out of the hand of Old Ace Pitcher and seeing Young Flamethrower’s work after 20 years of seeing Big League fastballs.
To paraphrase Bill James: The real level of the Really Good Play is not Hamlet or a Doll’s House and never has been.
The book’s opening paragraph’s outline the Utopia found by Chekhov, Brecht, O’Neil, Churchill, August Wilson, Odets and Shakespeare, and Moliere – all writers for the ages who were lovingly tended by theatre’s eager to receive their work…
Except of course that they were writing members of a group, not Monks on a retreat who returned from the mountain tops wreathed in glory to deliver the Next Work.No one is arguing that groups that develop a work begun by a singular voice can’t work… they’re arguing that they’re broke. Well, not arguing – stating. What they are also stating is that major nonprofits aren’t doing that. I think that’s a pretty unassailable position.
Everyone wants a comfortable job at a comfortable salary at a nurturing artistic home. And a unicorn. Too bad.That aside, the burrowing of our writers from high school to undergrad to grad to laboratory to internship to retreat to incubator is naturally going to lead to disconnected abstract plays. They are disconnected from reality, living inside a bubble of craft, only talking to other theatremakers and primarily only other writers. To be crass? Inbreeding leads to retardation.(Preemptive rebuttal: the fact the YOU Intrepid Wordsmith haven’t Done That doesn’t invalidate my premise… you are not the entire world snowflake)
Live life in this world and you’ll be able to write about it.
My favorite current example of the real world leading to good craft is smaller by Malachy Walsh. His experiences inform the subject and round the characters but never supersede his craft in the creation.
I wrote a glorious, witty, self-serving piece about the need for big tent tolerance in both religion and theatre.
Oh my god it was bad. As Treplev says in the the Nina Variations (by Steven Dietz – buy now), “Nothing makes an audience run from the room faster then the phrase, ‘I had a dream…’, except perhaps for this phrase, ‘When I was a young boy…’”
You need my personal history like you need a panel of rabies shots.
The summary line of that post was: Some people like musicals, light comedy, Sarah Kane, Shakespeare, and improv. Stop complaining that X Style/Production is Killing theatre.
It’s not. You just think it’s stupid. They mean different things.
That all rattling in my head: religion, and theatre, and the resilience of both remind me of when I was a young boy…
All right I wasn’t, I was like 25 but whatever.
I had one of those Discussions. The kind of Discussion that for me only happens on the Beach or at Diners (or in this case both) about Humankind’s desperate need to define and label and create boundaries for themselves. I belong to this fraction of this fraction of this fraction of the group of people who live in this city/state/country and this is what that Means. We create as small a niche for ourselves in this limitless universe as we can to keep ourselves sane.
Then from the beginning of time we created stories to explain why we were in those niches. Oh we love stories.
And religion gave birth to theatre, and campfires gave way to the public square (of whatever size) to the airwaves but the stories and our need for them never change.
It occurs to me that the reliance of religion on narrative is exactly why there is no significant Right Wing Theatre. Religion fills the narrative needs of bulk of American Conservatives. In many instances with higher budgets and better production values than Off-Wherever Indie theatre.
And for those who aren’t looking for personal but rather group narrative we have the political and athletics realms.
Theatre isn’t going to ever die. SYSTEMS die. Not forms. The narratives we weave, and the reflections of ourselves that we crave will never go disappear.
We need to stop reacting out of anger and fear at every turn. We’re storytellers. On the stage, at the pub, by the campfire, in our living rooms, we will continue to be storytellers.
I’m not saying there aren’t challenges. But the challenges aren’t TO THE VERY FABRIC OF THEATRE ITSELF. The challenges are (in my case) producing the theatre I want to in the style I want to without risking my own money. In many cases it’s a challenge to Have a Career in Theatre. Or to Make Money at This.
Those are real challenges and deserve talking about. But choose your words. How you define your challenges becomes the walls of your world. Make it personal. Which is exactly what your success will be when you achieve it.
What is your Challenge?
“ On the walls of the day In the shade of the sun We wrote down Another vision of us We are the challengers of The unknown ” Challengers – The New Pornographers
It seems in the aftermath of Diversity Weekend and the subsequent release of Outrageous Fortune that the fog of war has lifted and the folks are seeing the enormity of the problems in front of us.
Of course the problems that face theatre are insurmountable.
T’was ever thus.
We are trying to perform communal alchemic creation in a hastily pasted on corporate structure. We have no funding mechanism that doesn’t involve the kindness of strangers and a talent base that pays lipservice to the good of the artform while silently chafing that they’re not paid on the level of their similarly educated (less romantic) peers. We have no economies of scale, no national infrastructure, no global networking, no buzzrwords of any sort to alleviate the problems.
Reflecting on it doesn’t change it. With no disrespect meant, maybe that’s what happens when you’re inside a system and see the cliffs?
There is no system in the wild. Out here in the provinces we just make theatre. It may not be diverse enough, it may not feature enough women, but it’s pretty high quality and getting better all the time… and efficiently produced as hell.
Pride in indie theatre aside, I have long felt that the entrepreneurial model is a bad idea for theatre. We are forced to it because that’s the language our funders speak so we organize that way.
Theatres should be dealt with as record labels and producing groups like bands. Bands meant to be transitory until you find the true connection and labels to be counted on for a style.
The idea that theatre companies are just like any mini-mart (small businesses with small but measurable ecomnomic effects) is patently ridiculous. Theatremaking is as alchemic as any act of creation. It’s chemistry in four dimensions. Every chemical reaction has a limited effect. One of the components will be consumed by the process and the process will end. Of course we expect the theatremaking to continue just the same, because there are budgets and structures and mouths to feed.
And then we question why exactly theaters fall apart, or slide off mission, or stop taking risks, or any number of things that we expect other theatres to manage to do what we can’t ourselves.
Of course these problems are insurmountable, they are built into the system… But we get up and we keep trying because we need to make theatre. Not for Theatre’s sake, for ours. Theatre was here when we showed up and will be here long after we’re gone. Theatre will die the day after Religion. Stop trying to save Theatre and just make the theatre you think needs making.
I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel like a million years ago.
I’d be lying if I hadn’t claimed more than once that this company was three years old. I wasn’t lying it’s just… that was a REALLY long time ago.
Since that time we produced one final show with Gobotrick Theatre Company, Will produced and I performed in (20% of) a five play cycle of Manuel Zarate’s work, I got married, we presented a reading of Seven Jewish Children, and we wrote and produced Orestes. And then took the rest of 2009 off.
We are better at what we do now. We have a clearer picture of what it is exactly we do now.
I still have no long term plan. Well… I have no long term plan for Cambiare Productions.
The long term plan is to finally produce the One True Show that really is everything we want in a production and for Will to get spirited off to Louisville or the Arena and go be brilliant where larger amounts of people can see.
The plan is to feature local artists in roles that showcase them to the best of their ability and let them be noticed.
The plan is to keep growing our process to make it as easy on the cast and crew as it can possibly be, providing them with the most opportunity to shine.
We can do that. We can do that with the resources we have (and a little City help) and the talent this community continues to provide. We can be, for a season, another cog in what is becoming a hotbed of new work development.
I should have a five year plan. I know. Instead I have two consecutive six month plans. We’ll go from there.
Kate Foy of Groundling (and Toowoomba! I just like saying Toowoomba!) has been asking nicely all over the internet for about a year what exactly people mean when they call themselves an “indie” theatre company. I’ve talked with her in roughly 492 different venues about it, but discovered that I never had answered it here where I might be held accountable for it.
I did talk about labeling in a post a year ago but didn’t really get into why I choose that label that I do.
I like specificity. I’m not always good at it but I like it. To that end I would prefer that words retain their meaning. Unfortunately I don’t get a vote. Language remains transient and I have to move with it.
Further, art resists labeling at the best of times.
The two together makes specificity difficult in this case.
Cambiare Productions is technically an itinerant semi-professional community theatre operated by amateurs.
I however can’t use those words because they are each freighted with cultural meaning apart from their definitions.
The amateur/professional divide is intended to be solely about the money, but “amateur” comes with baggage about the expectations of low quality as does “community theatre” as skewered by Waiting for Guffman.
Semi-professional and “Pro-Am” are still really vague. Which part of the machine is the “semi” part? The quality or the money? If I have to explain the label to you it’s not of much use as a label. It’s just a conversation starter.
So I choose “indie” or “independent” theatre, not because it’s technically correct (independent of what?), but because it accurately conveys what we are to people who are interested. People know what an indie musician is or an indie film. They have no preconceived notion of lower quality, simply less money, meaning it probably has a rawness to it. It also implies up and coming, which I hold to be the case.
Garage Theatre would also work if it weren’t a place in my house where I don’t let people go as the corpse of Orestes is still strewn about it.
Do you have a better one word label for “I don’t have your resources yet, but I know what I’m doing and I’m on my way”?
Well. I love lists, and while there’s been a lot of talk over my three years actively blogging about theatre about the failings of the Theatre Education Industrial Complex, we’ve not really attempted to create a curriculum we approve of. Largely because, well, creating a new theatre education paradigm is hard. And I’m not going to do that here, because I’m not sure how to even begin.
Instead? Herein lies a list of things I wish someone had told me over a beer the night of graduation. “Well… you made it, and now you’re ‘In the Club’ so here’s all the things you weren’t taught.” This does include stuff we’ve talked about here in the past. But not all in one place.
I also want to include the one thing I WAS told outside the framework of the program that really helped.
In no particular order:
Read Everything. Consume media. Consume the world around you. An “artist” with nothing to say is “retired”. You need life experience, you need ideas and emotion flowing through you when you’re actively creating, but even more so when you’re not. There’s a reason that a musicians first album – culled from years of struggle and real life intruding on creation – is generally the most alive.
You’re not done learning. And the know-it-all attitude you’re sporting will not endear you to the in-the-trenches veterans you’re now talking with. Lose it. And keep the war stories in their place. They’ve all done crazy things on a show before too, save it for beer later.
This isn’t Bohemia You are not a Romantic Poet. You will not die of consumption in a garret, starving for your art, unless you’re stupid enough to not (y’know) go get a job and pay rent. Those Romantic ideals NEVER work out for the hero. Dead isn’t a career move unless you’ve already got a few films in the can.
You’re an entrepreneur now. Actor, singer, dancer, tech, producer, doesn’t matter. You’re in business for yourself as soon as that tassel flips. Figure out what that means for you. What’s you plan? You have a plan right?
Have a plan. You’re not going to show up in Major Metropolitan Area and get discovered while working at Florsheims. No. You’re not. So how are you going to make that happen? What are you going to do when it doesn’t? Is that really what you want?
Make a friend. Make Five. Make TWENTY. No matter what mama said, you are NOT god’s special snowflake. There are 20 or more of you in every major metropolitan area. I suggest while waiting for a break, you MAKE a break. You’re not going to go from graduation to Great White Way. So be Bill Rauch. Find people you love and a thing you love making and do it. People will notice.
And it can be where you are If you need to get out, get out. But there is an audience for what you do right where you are. If you’re most happy living on the New Hampshire Seacoast? DO IT. And find people who are making the theatre you like and bring them baked goods until they let you play. There’s no such thing as “Never Made It Out”. There is only choosing what makes you happy. Portsmouth is as deserving of great art as Brooklyn.
About the money… About that Plan… There’s no money here. Or there. Or over there. The very best can make a living if they hustle hard. So learn grant writing. Learn business modeling, and budgeting. It’s going to be tight, but you don’t have to go broke making art. Or entertainment. Or whatever it is you make.
Leverage what you know, and keep increasing what you know. If you want to do more than a couple of shows you need to be adaptable and unafraid of the new. You can’t eschew the computer for the ol’ quill and parchment in every instance. You can’t avoid networking because ‘you hate that shit’. Here, we’ll call it “hanging out with different people and talking to them like you actually care”. Now go DO IT.
There’s no time limit. Unless you want to be a Broadway ingénue. You haven’t failed if you haven’t done “X” by 25 or 30. You “fail” if you stop. You rarely stop something you are still in love with. If you stopped because you don’t want to do it anymore? You didn’t fail – you changed. You don’t owe theatre anything.
The one Real thing I was told off the record was by Nancy Saklad. During a rehearsal in a very large ice storm with the power out butchering a monologue from Terranova over and over again:
“You can do this you know. Professionally. If you want it, you can do this.”
After 5 years of college and 3 years in high school she was the first person who ever said such a thing to me. And then she stuck the landing:
My thoughts of course turned to my own desire to have a small theatre alliance in Austin. A group of indie theatremakers in town to help avoid burnout due to isolation, to get off the hamster wheel of scene reinvention, to share resources and ideas, and to spark competitive innovation.
And I know it won’t happen.
There will be friendships and acquaintance-hood and we’ll go to each other’s shows. But no meaningful regular exchange of ideas will happen. Why not?
We’re busy – Ask 10 groups when the best time to meet is – get 12 different answers.
Different needs on different parts of the food chain.
A 1 year old group has very different needs than the five year old itinerant group than the ten year-old landed group.
People want the benefits not the costs.
Everyone wants extra hands at load-in or a volunteer at the box office. But very few want to give up some of their limited free time (see #1) to BE that extra set of hands.
Or more succinctly put… the same problems as socialism anywhere.
We can be as socialist as we want in the corner, but as soon as you try to break that out to more folks you discover why the only socialist regimes on earth have been totalitarian.
This is the post I was supposed to write Monday night… and didn’t.
So Tuesday during work…
Tuesday night…
Wednesday during work…
It’s already mostly in my head so I couldn’t figure out why I was holding up. It’s not like typing is all that taxing.
And it took Will texting me out of nowhere to put the universes’ point to it. Today City of Austin funding award letters arrived.
Despite the flawed grant application the City granted us 77% of our request which should, with better fiscal husbandry, give us enough of a leg up to get us through our modest season.
So let’s talk about what’s next shall we?
In our (nearly) three year association (happy almost anniversary Will) we’ve come upon a slight reputation toward the… depressing? Summed up… when I announced Orestes at work they didn’t ask what this one was about… they asked how many people died.
Which isn’t really fair…
Only one person died in Con Mis Manos. Sure 4 characters died in Elektra, but 2 were in flashback and 2 were offstage.There was only one death of consequence in Intermission and that was a given circumstance not a character death. People may have died in Transformations… but I think only one was actually confirmed… and that was performance art, not a narrative character piece (and if you left Transformations sad you brought that with you). One death in The Nina Variations and the 5 in Orestes.
The whole thing is overblown.
Regardless… it is time for Cambiare Productions to step up to the plate with something lighter. So we will be presenting an as yet untitled piece currently filed under: Cambiare Productions: In Search of Childhood.
I repeat – that is NOT the title of the show.
We’d have to double our postcard budget.
What’s it going to look like?
If you know us at all you know we only have the vaguest idea.
What it will entail in the process is a lot of personal storytelling. A deep metaphysical exploration of skinned knees and mud pies and imagination. Wrestling with puppies and finding Bear the Bear in the closet before bed.
No irony.
No meta adults-playing-kids-doing-adult-things.
For it to be True of course we need a broad range of experiences. Will and I are pretty smart, but we only managed to live two childhoods between us. So we’re going to need your help.
We’re going to be running essentially a scavenger hunt for childhood and we need all the grown up children we can find.
We need you and your friends and your Moms and Dada and Sisters and brothers to join us.
Instructions will come in this space and be easy to spread.
So let’s play.
I talked about Will following up all of my “what didn’t work” analysis about Orestes with a discussion about the parts of the show that were successful. His soft boycott of blogging means he never got to what I’ve been calling the Little Mary Sunshine post, so I’m going to let the nominating committee for Austin Circle of Theatres B. Iden Payne Award committee say it for him:
We were nominated for:
OUTSTANDING PRODUCTION OF A DRAMA
ORESTES
OUTSTANDING DIRECTOR OF A DRAMA
WILL HOLLIS SNIDER
OUSTANDING LEAD ACTOR IN A DRAMA
GABRIEL LUNA
OUTSTANDING FEATURED ACTRESS IN A DRAMA
LA TASHA STEVENS
