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.

Let’s push things forward…

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

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DATELINE: 9/15/2009

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.

First five gallons of bubbles are on me.

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In response to my earlier post on the artist/critic relationship and a brief email exchange after his review of Orestes on Austinist.com freelance writer  Dan Solomon wrote a very thoughtful reply which I think deserves to be featured better and had been lost to the dark matter of the interwebs:

And I quote:

The guiding principle behind my work as a reviewer is that I owe the theatermakers only fairness – I don’t owe them kindness (though it’s rarely fair to be unkind, in life as in criticism) and I don’t owe them support or encouragement or anything else. I owe the readers honesty.

As a critic, I’m a representative of the theater-going audience. (How large a sample I represent, I’ve no idea.) I have to be honest because I’m representing people who aren’t given the same platform I am and I need to do that as accurately as possible. I also owe them honesty because some of them, at least, are trusting that my opinion is worth considering when planning how to invest their time and ticket money, and that trust needs to be repaid.

The responsibility to the artists is a little bit trickier. Fairness is a double-edged sword. With Orestes, and other shows like it, I try to walk the line by focusing only on saying things in print that I’d be comfortable saying to your faces. I read every review I write aloud and try to imagine that I’m saying it to the director of the show – who, often these days (and more so in the future, I’m sure) is someone I know personally. (And probably like. Music criticism’s much easier, as those dudes are d-bags.*) That’s part one of being fair. The other part is trying to actively consider what the goals of the theatermakers are. And they vary. It’s unfair to hold an initial run of an original play that’s being tested out at a new works festival to the same standard that I held Touch. It’s unfair to consider an intentionally-slight, improv-based comedy show in the same context as The Method Gun, or to expect that they’ll be attempting to reach that level.

And the flip-side to that is that it’s unfair to hold a play like Orestes, made by theatermakers who take their work very seriously and intend to be doing work that’s meant to compete with world-class, professional theater, to a standard that isn’t exacting. There have been plays I liked less, and that I thought were less good, objectively speaking, than Orestes, and which I gave more positive reviews to. Because Austin’s theater scene is still relatively small, and not everyone in it as the intention of making big-boy theater, as you put it in that email. Work that’s intended to make a handful of paying audience members, most of whom are the performers’ friends, giggle, succeeds by accomplishing a lot less onstage. Work that’s essentially a dry run of new material succeeds by showing promise. A finished product like Orestes succeeds when it’s as good as the work being done by any company anywhere in the world. Even the greatest companies in the world come up short on that some of the time. (Ask me sometime about some of the crap I saw at Steppenwolf when I lived in Chicago, or the nonsense the National in London tried to pass off in 2007-2008.)

Dan Solomon

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Kris Vire talks a little bit more about the role of critics in a theatre community, and as I just closed a show that was reviewed by 5 very different humans and they had pretty different opinions on the show (which was pretty consistent with general opinion – the wildly divergent I mean).

Avimann Syam of the Austin Chronicle
Michael Meigs of AustinLiveTheatre.com
Claire Canavan for the Austin-American Statesman
Ryan E. Johnson for the Austin Examiner
Dan Solomon for Austinist.com

If Critic-o-meter were to stop by in Austin and handle the math for us I think that they would find it to be about a B-.

I think it was better than that, but it really depended on your mood and expectations when you showed up, so I don’t think it’s too terribly out of line. But what I will say is this: Every single one of them did everything I ask of a critic or reviewer. They told exactly how they felt about a piece and they wrote about it with as much care as we presented it.

That’s all I ask.

We’re all in this together. If we both go out of our way not to piss in the pool we’ll be fine.

But producing companies? You have a responsibility here too. Be self-aware. You know if you’re winning or not, and I understand that you have a momma-bear fighting interest in your show, but take a step back. Ask the unthinkable: are they right? 1 of those 5 above really didn’t like the show, and called me out personally for my performance. I can get huffy and indignant or I can simply ask if he’s right. (He’s only half right).

I’m an adult producing art for public consumption. I have a strong desire to be very good at this. It is in my best interest to have as rigorous a review of my work as I can get. I may discard some of it as not useful to my future work or as an outlier in reference to this work. But if it’s all going to simply be treacley appreciation for “how hard I tried” I will never be one whit better tomorrow than I am today.

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Watch this space.

In this space tomorrow night at a little after 8PM Central Time we will be livestreaming Orestes to your very own computer.

Hopefully we’ll have the chat fixed this time so you’ll be able to talk throughout the show with folks all over the world.

Streaming .TV shows by Ustream

If for some reason you have difficulty on this page you can go to this one and watch there.

Thank you for stopping in.

If you enjoyed our production please feel free to avail yourself of the donate button below.

We welcome your comments and criticisms at any time, either in this space or at 512.524.3761

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Well that was a very long week.

Last week began at 6am Monday morning, not a common time to be awake and alert for yours truly, and ran through until 11PM Saturday night. But Orestes is open and finding it’s footing and I only owe something like 350 more favors to people at the end of then week than I did at the beginning.

The week culminated in one of my best ideas in a bad situation in a long time: Actor Benefit Night.

The City of Austin like other cities is having a spot of financial trouble (you may have heard). One of the City’s responses was to freeze a major funding program for us – their Auxiliary Program funding, which grants small sums to groups on a rolling basis throughout the year. Our actor stipends for Orestes were to come through this program and so needed to be stripped from the budget when we lost that half of our guaranteed funding.

We very much want to pay all of our people. It may not be enough, it may not reflect their talent or achievement, but something.  So: Actor Benefit Night. A publicized event evening with every dime going to the (non-company-member) cast. The community gets an opportunity to directly support each other and maybe the cast can recoup half of gas/fast food money from the rehearsal process. It was moderately successful. Not successful enough that I’m going to brag here about how much that they’re going to receive, but enough that I won’t have to pay them out of pocket.

As proud as I am of the idea and it’s (moderate) effectiveness, there are two things about the night that still rankle.

1. There was a palpable enjoyment on the part of some of the audience that it was going to the cast instead of the company.

   Parse that properly please. I’m all for gleefully giving to the cast. This cast especially. But check your attitudes at the door. Having a name for our company doesn’t make us Starbucks. You aren’t sticking it to the man, you’re receiving a night to give to a different underdog. That show comes out of our pockets, and we’re not trust fund babies. We’re a coupla guys with admin jobs who create opportunities for artists instead of taking vacations.

2. There was a throwaway comment post-show on Saturday about another company in town that pays well on every show being “all class”. It wasn’t meant as a slight and the company mentioned is 100% class, but it hurt.

   We’re going to lose money on this show. My first producer loss ever. Not much I’m sure, we’re not idiots, but a loss nonetheless. That’s not some phantom corporate cash. That’s our money. Our personal money. Mind you there are no regrets, and I’m not looking for sympathy. I choose to spend my money this way, and losing a week or two’s pay on a show hurts my pride not my dinner table, but the idea that not being able to afford an additional $2000 means we’re not a class organization really hurts.

So there’s that.

Morose foot-stomping aside, folks you really do need to see this show. Gabriel Luna is a force of nature and he is surrounded by a group of performers eager to push back. There is a storm brewing down there on Hidalgo Street and you’re going to be sorry you missed it.

EDITED TO ADD:

Don’t post during sugar crash after a very long tech week.

The second half of the above post is a whine and casts its participants in an unfair light. I leave it up because I deserve to take my lumps for it. I didn’t adequately draw out that the commenter in #2 wasn’t intending offense or making a direct comparison, and that the entire thought process was on my end. I take great personal pride in the fact that I’ve never lost money on a show and I’m about to. So I’m taking all money talk a bit more personally than I normally would.

My apologies for the lack of clarity in this post, the oversensitivity and the whine. We return to your regularly scheduled upbeat community building tomorrow.

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We spend a lot of time both in real life and in person complaining about lack of resources. “If only I had… I could…”

And while I’m tired of the conversation, it’s as pointless as me making dinner-date plans for when Natalie Portman comes to her senses, I understand the impulse.

But there’s a very real and very pernicious resource drain that we spend very few brain cycles on:

Hyphenation drain.

To recap: I am an actor by training.

For Orestes I will be playing Menelaus (poor misunderstand bloke), I am the technical director, set designer, master carpenter, prop master, master electrician, and producer.

So which one of those jobs do you think I’m doing to the best of my ability? I’m nowhere near alone in this. How many of our soon-to-be-great directors are busy making rickety platforms right now? how many actors are building props?

This isn’t a plea for pity, my value to an indie theater company is exactly that I can do all of those things, and I think that there’s a lot to be said for Doing for Yourself According to Your Means.

But the global reality of this talent overextension means that there are a lot of people in the system who will never reach their full potential in their chosen focus even if they manage survive burn out.

I’d be lying if I said I had a solution, but it bears thinking on.

PERSONAL TO MY CAST:
I will be off book, as soon as tonight… and I promise that I can string two sentences together. 

There has been some interest in the masks that I’m building for the Furies for Orestes so I’ll take this vanity lap to talk about them a little. Please note that they are only at about 90% completion as pictured. They will receive some additional paint treatment to make them pop from stage as opposed to from 18 inches, and they will be mounted on poles that vary in length from 3-6 feet depending on actor preference.

First the “masks” aren’t going to be worn, they’re going to be manipulated sort of like puppets. The actors playing the Furies double as Orestes family and we were concerned about the ease of transitions between one and the other. So after a few iterations of mask designs that were meant to be worn but transition friendly we ran with an idea brought to us by Friend-of-Cambiare Liz Fisher about masks on sticks. We ran with it. Not EXACTLY as described, but in spirit.   

The masks aren’t aren’t strictly anthropomorphic. Orestes is “hounded by these visions”, he “see his horrors” but they aren’t specific. In myth and legend the Furies are mostly gorgon analogs, but that’s pretty dull. So I ran with the key production phrase, Decay, and the personalities of the characters the Furies were doubling and just sort of winged it.

Iphigenia (above) was informed by this image and by the art over at Phantasmaphile. The face will be finished by charring the edges of the doll face, adding porcelain doll lips, lacquering the face, adding some smudges of dirt to add texture to the face, and lightening the branches to raise contrast and make them more easily seen from stage.

Klytaimnestra is a compromise. She was intended to have that metal lattice work as faux-gorgon hair with the leaves working through it, but that looked like crap (more specifically it looked a lot like an android Grace Slick – NOT the intended effect). So we went a bit more minimalist.  This mask will see the addition of dirt on the face for texture, shading and highlight to better delineate the features of the face from a distance and quite naturally, blood pouring from the gaping sockets on her face.

This is a terrible picture of the Agamemnon mask, forgive me. Where the other masks were based on wig forms, this was based on a skull that I’ve had since my days with Darwin’s Waiting Room in Portsmouth, New Hampshire in 98-99. What is unclear in the picture is that mixed in with the vines and the leaves are a variety of electric cords and cables (and Christmas lights), modern detritus being eroded as nature reclaims it. This mask will receive added texture (the flat black doesn’t work) highlights and shadows like the others to pick up features from a distance and possibly additional cords and cables depending on their visibility

So there you have it. Working models of the mask we will be using for Orestes. Good seats still available.

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Tonight I saw Robert Faires’ one-man presentation of Henry V.

Mr. Faires’ among the many bullets on his résumé is the arts editor of the Austin Chronicle, Austin’s very own alt-weekly, and as such is a major critical gatekeeper in town. I will keep the critique of his performance brief – it’s not my point here – and say that there is nothing so reassuring as knowing that your gatekeepers are theatremakers of the highest order themselves.

The performance has some of the trappings of one-man-showdom that I dislike, but they are easily overcome by Mr. Faires’ likeability and the (always useful) fact that the man simply breathes the verse. It made the evening easy and enjoyable. If you’re in Austin you owe it to yourself to see it.

But, as I said not my point.

Kris Joseph and Simon Ogden railed recently against the preciousness of theatremakers (even some not named Patti Lupone) and the religion of decorum in our playhouses. While I personally would have asked for ground slightly more to the middle of what those fine upstanding gentlemen asked for, they’re not wrong: and here’s my point.

There was nothing precious or pretentious at all about the evening of theatre that Mr. Faires and his director, Catherine Weidner, presented. On arriving at the OffCenter and receiving my complimentary champagne (apparently there was some sort of Federal holiday on) I was informed that I would be seated. This is odd for our fringe spaces, but what the hell… not my show. I waited. And Robert greeted me and showed me to a seat of his choosing.

On setting out to perform a one man version of Henry V, Mr. Faires wasn’t pacing out back trying to find his inner Dionysus, cramming scene 4, or opening his 4th chakra, he was personally greeting and seating all 60 of his guests.

Did he then run out back to compose himself 10 minutes before curtain? No. He simply stepped on stage, surrounded by 20 of those guests, adjusted his props and began when his lights shifted.

It was a piece that could have been told in a bar by as expert a storyteller as Mr. Faires. Simply a gathering of friends who asked for that one story about the time Harry went to France.

That my friends is what we should strive for in the aura around our storytelling, that personal touch. That will curtail the feeling of entitlement on both sides that enables the behavior that we bitch about at the bar and keeps them from showing up in the first place. Stop building a monolith to yourself in every production and performance. You may have a gift. You’re not it.

Mind the difference. 

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I need for you to sit down. What I’m going to say is shocking, and may ultimately be disillusioning for many of you.

I am not now, nor have I ever been, one of the cool kids.

I know. I know. Take a minute.

When we first start talking to a cast in the first handful of rehearsals I always expect to be found out. I expect them to roll their eyes and suck it up for the 6 weeks they’re stuck with us. So it’s always a mild surprise when they don’t storm out and declare us frauds and go tell all their friends at a Cool Party somewhere.

We’ve had the first three rehearsals now for Orestes. We‘ve talked both here and on Twitter about how talented they are (Go see Helen and Orestes in Black Snow if you don’t believe me!) but what you can’t always tell at auditions is how smart a group is. You can read each person’s intelligence, but that doesn’t always translate into a group dynamic.

Folks? This cast is on it and from the gun they owned this script.

We asked that they help clarify Will’s adaptation to make it as crisp and clear as possible. They jumped in and started kicking the tires immediately.

Last night we arrived at the 6h (and penultimate) design for the use of the Furies masks as they began exploring the movement, vocalization, and groupthink of the Triune Destroyer.

Despite my lethargy and That Look on my face, I can’t being to tell you how invigorating it is to know that these 7 people have our backs.

28 days till magic time.

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Andrew Taylor’s presentation in Austin on June 24th.

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