Anger II: A Little More on Malcolm X

I took a moment in the last post to poke at Malcolm X, as quoted by Don Hall, and I did want to mention a profound influence Malcolm X had on my life.

I'm actually a big sucker for speeches -- great flourishes of rhetoric like the one I cribbed from after HCR passed, or the one that nearly makes me cry sometimes, LBJ's speech on behalf of civil rights. The part that always gets me is when LBJ says, in his deep southern twang:

There is no Negro problem. There is no southern problem. There is no northern problem. There is only an American problem.

And I know that the moment I was 100% behind Obama was the moment when he cribbed the same speech:

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America -- there's the United States of America. There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.

So I definitely went through a phase where I was hell-bent to uncover all of the great American speeches and be sure to listen to them all -- really listen to them. I had them on my iPod (where they more than once came up on shuffle when I was trying to liven up a party... my social life, she suffers!), and I liked to walk or drive while letting the words really sink in.

Malcolm X's "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech was one of those landmark speeches I came across. And I was most interested by a passage that I had never heard associated with Malcolm X before, which goes like this:

The economic philosophy of black nationalism is pure and simple. It only means that we should control the economy of our community. Why should white people be running all the stores in our community? Why should white people be running the banks of our community? Why should the economy of our community be in the hands of the white man? Why? If a black man can't move his store into a white community, you tell me why a white man should move his store into a black community. The philosophy of black nationalism involves a re-education program in the black community in regards to economics. Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don't live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer.

Then you wonder why where you live is always a ghetto or a slum area. And where you and I are concerned, not only do we lose it when we spend it out of the community, but the white man has got all our stores in the community tied up; so that though we spend it in the community, at sundown the man who runs the store takes it over across town somewhere. He's got us in a vise.

So the economic philosophy of black nationalism means in every church, in every civic organization, in every fraternal order, it's time now for our people to be come conscious of the importance of controlling the economy of our community. If we own the stores, if we operate the businesses, if we try and establish some industry in our own community, then we're developing to the position where we are creating employment for our own kind. Once you gain control of the economy of your own community, then you don't have to picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business.

It's an amazing principle, that's based on the idea that any system can be transformed, given an understanding of the system. Unfortunately, history proved that it wasn't that easy -- probably for similar reasons to the "Move Your Money" campaign that doesn't appear to have much traction (reasons like me).

It's just a pity that this isn't what Malcolm X was known for -- or the parts of his philosophy where he talks about the social health of the community.

Don't Look Back In Anger

Don Hall has a paean of quotations up about anger. I've always been suspicious of anger: it is useful as a wind at your back, but rarely useful if it tries to do the work of change itself. You need to get angry before you change politically, but political change rarely comes from anger. Who brought us more change: Barack Obama or Howard Dean?

Take this one:

"Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change." -- Malcolm X

I mean, far be it from me to criticize Malcolm X (after all, he might get angry). But I do have this little chestnut of wisdom. There's a story that has been told among my people (Jews) that takes place in the times of Shtetls in Russia. It goes like this:

One day the Czar turned to his tax collector and said, "The Jews of our land haven't been paying in their fair share and I'm sick of it. Go to the Jews and tell them that henceforth, they will have to pay double in taxes."

The tax collector went among the Jews and told them that their taxes would be doubled. And they began to cry, and to wail -- "How could you do this to us? How could God let this befall us?" The Rabbi led prayers to God right there on the spot. "We'll starve! Our children won't have enough to eat! Please, tax collector!"

The tax collector was a nice enough man, and he was moved to see the Jews in their moment of need, so he hurried back to the Czar. Gently, he tried to tell the Czar that the Czar had really hurt the Jews. "I think we may be taking too much in taxes now... they are very poor."

The Czar exploded. "How DARE they! You go straight back to those Jews and tell them that you're tripling their taxes!"

The tax collector went among the Jews and told them that their taxes would be tripled. And they grew angry, they began to shout and stamp and throw their pitchforks to the ground -- "How could you do this to us, you bastard? How could God have let this happen?"

The tax collector was afraid their anger would turn towards him (the way it did in places like America), and ran to the Czar. "Please, your Highness, you have to understand -- they're becoming dangerous!"

The Czar raged. "How dare they question my taxes! Go and tell them that their taxes are quadrupled."

With fear in his heart, the tax collector went among the Jews and told them that their taxes would be quadrupled. Much to his surprise, they began to laugh. "Did you hear what he said?" one old Jew told another. "Our taxes are quadrulped!" They fell to the floor, laughing so hard that tears sprang to their eyes.

The tax collector went back to the Czar in wonder. "You must have been right," the tax collector concluded. "They are not angry or sad, they are laughing?"

"The Jews are laughing?" the Czar asked. "Oh no -- we've pushed them too far."

This is actually told as a joke in my family, but very few people who I tell this to actually find the punchline funny. I mean, I laugh, but I can't explain why.

Anyways, the point is is that much as there are stages of grief, there's stages of the revolution process on the inside.

1. Denial
2. Bargaining
3. Depression
4. Anger
5. Power

I separate Power from Anger because I feel like it's that state beyond anger that is not so emotional as it is directional, an exercise of will. It has anger shooting out behind it, but it doesn't extend anger out in front of it -- it doesn't just rage and tear into things.

It's true that people who cry don't normally solve their problems. But as we're seeing out in the right-wing fringe, the angriest in our society have not been the change-makers. And it turns out we have enough anger out there today. Even though I think we all love Howard Beale's rant about being "Mad as hell and not going to take it anymore," let's not forget where that movie leaves him. I don't deny that often, the change would not have come if they had not come first, but at the end of the day, power is the fuel of history.

... I still like your blog though, Don!

Regarding Formal Exclusion

Scott (who is just leaving now for Lexington and may not be available to spot this) wrote a great post on Monday entitled Formal Exclusion that argued that formal experimentation keeps away older, blue-collar audiences:

I'm tired of inwardly blanching when one of the housekeeping staff in our building asks what the play is about and whether they would like it. I don't like seeing the expressions of bafflement and disappointment on the faces of so many who leave a performance. I don't like the way these plays seem to tacitly filter out all but the educated. I want to find ways to reach everybody, not just the educated, not just the wealthy, and not just the city dwellers. I seek a profound theatre that enriches everybody, not just people who have as much education as I have. Wallace's play took the working class experience seriously, the small town experience seriously, but she couldn't write for them -- she had to signal that, while she was on their side, she is still a member of the intelligentsia, the artist-specialist class. And this seems sad to me. With so few people who can write from experience of these issues, it seems a lost opportunity and a shame.

Matt Freeman responded by throwing down the gauntlet:

If you don't see something to enjoy in the plays being written today, that doesn't mean you are excluded. It just means that today's playwrights don't speak to you. There are lots and lots of plays that will, or have, I'm sure. Be patient, read the things you love, and stop prescribing your taste to other people.Plays aren't written to order. I read the frustration in posts like these, and I understand it. But there's only really one solution if you feel that a certain play that should exist that does not already. Write it.

Mac Rogers and Don Hall respond in similar vein, rounded up in an excellent and thoughtful post by Scott where he does something very hard -- he listens to his critics and hears the truth in what they're saying.

I do want to point out that what Scott originally said was not necessarily directed at playwrights (although responses such as 99 Seats' seem to have interpreted it as such). To the degree that Scott's post was directed at playwrights, yes, the response should be "just write." But I don't think that was the whole lesson. I think there was something to be said for the people who select work for production, more than for the people who write work.

Now, I don't know enough to generalize whole-sale, so let me just talk from my personal perspective for a moment.

MY EXPERIENCE AS A PRODUCER

Even at a very small, new company like mine, there is a flood of ideas coming along. They range from someone wanted to adapt Kipling's stories for children to a devised-work idea for dealing with the implications of Dick Cheney's authorization of torture. Ideas are competing for our time and resources.

If a play is written in a traditional structure, it often becomes compared to the works that precede it. A play I've written that features two men after the apocalypse of the world, one of whom is gay and in love with the other, inevitably draws comparison with Waiting for Godot (occasionally, it will earn Endgame or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead both of which are slightly less obvious but slightly more accurate). In a way, the play suffers some degree of disadvantage of seeming like a clone of a more popular work.

In other words, to some extent, there is a bias towards formal exclusion because it gives you a better handle on the originality of the work, which is something that is absolutely key both in marketing the production externally, and generating excitement for the production internally (which are, by the way, largely the same process).

I am still in the process of putting up Hamlet. (Tickets are still available, but we had a full house last night so it will get harder to get tickets at the door) In a different way, I had a sort of "inward blanch" like the one Scott talks about, only in this case it was when I tried to explain to theater people why we chose Hamlet. I still believe strongly in our production (which examines grief through the inability to express grief, features one of the most stunning performances by the girl who plays Hamlet and an Ophelia who solves the Ophelia Problem), but I could see skepticism on the faces I spoke to.

If you say "We're just going to do a good Hamlet," people are not going to give a shit (generally). If you say "We're going to do a good Hamlet with Patrick Stewart as Claudius and Robert Pattinson as Hamlet," you have their attention. But if you're a small company with a lack of star actors, then formal experimentation may be the hook you need.

This isn't to say that formal experimentation is just a marketing ploy. It is also about the excitement. It may be hard to rally a group of independent actors around a flag like "Let's do a play about two people who fall in love!" You may be able to if the script is genius enough, but it will be harder.

Also, plays that experiment formally have a tendency to pop off the page more when I read them -- this might be a personal thing, but I know that sometimes when it comes to dramatic realism, I can't tell if it is actually good until I see actors inhabit the scenes for weeks, and wear it like a good cloak. Is it two-dimensional, or obscuring a deeper sinister vibe? Is the dialogue stilted, or is it a unique voice? (The movie Serenity, for instance, has dialogue that feels really jerky and stilted for the first ten minutes and then suddenly becomes an irreplacable part of the movie).

MY EXPERIENCE AS A DIRECTOR

This is almost certainly a personal preference, and reveals (avowedly), a weakness of mine, but it is this: as a director, I find it much easier to direct formally then to direct emotionally. I don't know if it is a function of my youth and inexperience, or if it is a function of my personal tastes for Brecht over Aristotle, but I find it easier to work visually and physically with actors than emotionally. That's part of the reason (listed above) that I'm drawn more to plays that have formal innovations over ones that have compelling emotional struggles. I may recognize that play is great on an emotional plane, but simply be uninterested in it.

(This reminds me of accounts of Bertold Brecht, rehearsing Galileo, cutting viciously from his own monologues shouting, "Who the hell is this incompetent, long-winded playwright?" much to the amusement of his cast.)

If other directors feel this way, it explains the ever-presence of the "Director's Interpretation." Sometimes the "Director's Interpretation" is a smash-hit, and other times it is roundly panned. I myself was in a Romeo and Juliet when I was in high school that was set in Kashmir, so that the Montagues where Muslim and the Capulets were Hindi. Friar Lawrence was still Catholic, which had an unintended subtext that wherever Westerners attempt to bring peace, they only bring death. The full extent of this interpretation was Indian costumes, and a Bollywood-style dance sequence at the party scene.

MY EXPERIENCE AS A PLAYWRIGHT

I guess what I'm saying is in the last two sections is that it is very possible that playwrights are writing plenty of non-formally-exclusive works (even young playwrights), and are not getting produced. And I know this because, well, I write non-formally-experimental works sometimes. And it doesn't get produced. Not even by me.

It is weird to talk about, but my tastes as a playwright and my tastes as a director/producer are now so far diverged that I will quite often write a play that I will not want to direct. Part of this has to do with the ol' "artist judging their own work" curmudgeon, but sometimes it simply is this: sometimes my work as a playwright stimulates a muscle that doesn't interest my directing brain. Which is fine. Maybe other people want to take them on.

But there's another facet from my experience as a playwright, which actually goes back to something that came up during the Outrageous Fortune debate. Isaac Butler talked about how we need to produce Playwrights' okay-to-good plays if we want to see more masterpieces. In a way, what he's talking about is being okay with the playwright as they develop from young artists to old established hands.

The example that got tossed around a lot was Tennessee Williams. And I think in this context he works pretty well. After all, the stuff we know him for is very powerful, but often it is very much mid-Twentieth Century realism. Not so for his younger plays. They are often quite odd, quite disturbing in a way that many of his later plays don't quite feel. Ditto for Sam Shepard, who wrote much weirder stuff than Fool for Love and True West.

If I look back on my history as a writer -- look back to the very beginning, it looks much like this:

At the age of 12, I began writing, and the first thing I tried to write was a novel, because that's what I was reading. The novels were set in video-games, and were basically my attempts to dramatize the hero I imagined that I was when I played video games. That's the story that was in my head.

At the age of 16, I first wrote a one-act play for our school's one-act festival. It was, for some perverse reason, a Commedia dell'Arte (which we had just learned about in class the week before) piece, set in an Office. It reads like a set of Dilbert strips, since that is basically my familiarity with offices at the time, being a huge Dilbert fan.

My next full length play was completed when I was 18. It was a realist piece set in the South, and beyond that I refuse to say another word because it was bad. Miserably bad. Miserably, miserably bad. "I hope copies never resurface in the inevitable anthologies of my life's work but secretly I know independent companies in Chicago will try to put it on in sixty years time and the reviews will all say 'Now we knew why Guy wanted it burned'" bad.

I stopped writing for a time. Then I went to a Beirut concert, and suddenly it made sense to me that you could create something beautiful without any words. I gave myself the formal experiment of trying to use absolutely no words. I failed in that experiment, but the failure of that experiment became the point of the piece. (This, by the way, is one of the few things I've ever written that I was excited to direct myself)

Since then, I have continued writing, lurching between plays that are classical naturalism and strangely broken experiments in form, or somewhere (either comfortably or uncomfortably) living in the middle.

I have no illusions that I am a great playwright. But I have a feeling that there's something about the development of a playwright that starts with imitation, then suddenly lurches to "How-do-I-prove-myself-different-from-everyone" experimentation.

Yet here may be the problem that Scott is noting. Because we right now have a system that burns out playwrights quickly. We produce a lot of young playwrights, but we often don't continue the support and development as maturity sets in over the length of a life-time. Even Bertold Brecht, right at the end of his life, conceded that the Epic Theater was youthful and one-sided, and began trying to work out what a dialectical theater that united so-called "Brechtian" methods with so-called "Aristotilian" methods.

TO CONCLUDE

So, my response to Scott's original post is basically that, indeed, telling playwrights not to exclude audiences by experimenting formally may be a lost cause. But there is some grain of truth to be extracted that there may be an over-emphasis on formal experimentation in programming of independent companies (almost over-compensating for the lack of experimentation in traditional venues).

And of course, let's not forget that what is considered "Formal experimentation" for one generation's blue-collar diverse audience may be the main-stream entertainment for the next generation. I believe you can draw a straight line from Theater of the Absurd to Monty Python to The Hangover.

Quantifying the Arts III: Art That Disrupts Economics

Alright, maybe "disrupts economics" is a little bit strong, but via Don Hall comes a work by Caleb Larsen which perpetually tries to sell itself on the internet:

Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay.

Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself.

If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.

“A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter” is tangibly linked, via Ethernet, to the intangible world of taste, aesthetics and worth. It doesn’t matter if the work becomes astronomically valuable—you’re legally required to keep putting it up on eBay once a week until someone else buys it. The argument is you can’t own anything conceptual, neither in copyright or theoretical terms, and the artwork’s logistics ensure that no third party—the highly ridiculous art market—can change that.

Don Hall, who recently tried to wrangle with some intellectual property economics here, finds his allure in the last sentence -- that you can't own anything in copyright or theoretical terms.

I am interested in that myself, but there's something else that interests me -- the fact that we're going to construct our own ideas of owning it anyways.

This is, for me, the real magic of the markets. See, people right now are arguing over how to quantify the arts, how to really measure it, because we only have one measure and we don't like it -- the measure of money. And the reason we have a measure of money is because the market has to come up with values for everything. Because it is the basis of all of our transactions, it has to come up with values of money for things that, previously, were intangible (and perhaps a little holy).

So what began as a way for objectively identifying how my cow stacks up against your three or four chickens now has to wrangle with the concept of the value of part ownership in a company, or the value of the future. And it also has to wrangle with value of artistic taste, whether it's in terms of inflated prices for clothing by certain people, or trying to figure what the hell Damien Hirst is on about. As with stock, people have clearly proven that they're willing to own a percentage of something -- so why wouldn't they be willing to own a moment of something?

So what I'm really interested in is how much are people going to bid on a work of art that they will only own temporarily, as opposed to owning a work of art outright? If the artist were truly correct and the concept of ownership doesn't apply to art nobody would make a bid. Instead, people are going to - on the fly - create their own individual valuations for owning a piece.

If, as is the case, Caleb Larsen is receiving the money each time (and finding a Damien Hirst-like way to make art pay), then each buyer is making their own valuation on what the ownership is worth to them. If the box were to somehow auction itself in the name of its new owner, then people would actually buy the box in terms of speculation -- which would be a whole different economic approach.

I'd love to see an economist speculate on those two differing models. I would also love Caleb to post charts containing the different prices it sells for.

Intellectual Property Stupidity II: What You're Paying For

Don Hall, as previously noted here, got a cease and desist over a review he was responding to, which he posted in full on his blog. After a few days of mulling it over, he has posted his response here, which can basically be summed up with the words "indignant bafflement."

He does a little rudimentary rooting around to try and figure out the cost of the intellectual property, and then decides that the answer is about $300. And then he wonders, rightly so, how it would possibly be in the interest of the paper to pay for such a thing.

Well, I don't know much about the relationship between the paper and the law firm involved, but I might hazard a not-too-outlandish guess that the firm may not be charging by the hour (as Don Hall's projection puts it), but is rather on retainer. This is what they do: they generate hundreds of contracts, hundreds of C&D letters, etc.

And there, I think, is the real problem -- more than greed or spite, I think the real demonstrable ill behind all of this is simply impersonality. The letter Don received is clearly from a form, and although someone clearly entered in the facts of the case, the amount of thought that was put into it was clearly little to none. After all, their website shows them to be a national firm with lots and lots of important clients.

The thing about Fair Use is that it takes thought to apply. Whereas enforcing intellectual property can be fairly automated. Did they reprint your work? Cease & Desist. It's easy to find, and easy to respond to.

My parents have always been distrustful of accountants. Not because accountants are bad people or anything, but my parents have this theory, that if you pay an accountant, they will try to be a "good" accountant by trying to save you as much money as possible. And my parents worried that an accountant who tries too hard to be a "good" accountant may be overzealous in money-saving, and may file taxes incorrectly. If an accountant simply fills out the forms, the client will wonder, "Well why am I paying for this?" An accountant who wants to keep his job in the face of TurboTax will say, "Look, see this money I saved you!" And this is with the best of motives. They're just incentivized that way.

I bet it's the same with lawyers on retainers. Look at how they're defending your rights, Ms. Sullivan! Aren't they a good law firm?

Intellectual Property Stupidity I

I have often held (and I am far from being in any way original in holding this) that Intellectual Property law is currently so restrictive in its conception of Fair Use that it restricts the cultural conversation. But as Lawrence Lessig points out in his discussion in the book Free Culture on the Supreme Court case Eldred v. Ashcroft, it is often difficult to prove the impact of so esoteric a concept to policymakers. "What's the real impact," they want to know.

Well if you want to know what cultural conversation looks like when it's restricted by IP law, you can't look for a better example than this: Don Hall has been posting reviews of his newest show, and writing short responses to them. The purpose is clear: he wants to create a dialog between himself and the critics for the general enlightenment of the public. Don Hall is very courteous in defending his work (although it is at times a teensie bit defensive, I'm okay with that, because it's the blog of a creator and certainly we don't want him not to stand behind his own work).

But under the interpretation of the law put out by one of the papers quoted, this is somehow infringing on their "property". I don't often get to use the word "horseshit" but things like this really burn my canoli.

Anyways, law aside, it is clear that Don Hall did nothing "wrong" -- he didn't systemically reprint any one publication's essays, he simply made a review of one of his own works public, along with some notes. As part of the conversation, it was an interesting strategy, a bold move. From the non-stupidity angle, I kind of liked that Don Hall does this, and I hoped that I'd see more playwright's doing something similar. I'd love to see some of the big titans of the industry posting responses to Brantley or Isherwood on their blogs. Provided that people can keep the tone of the conversation as courteous as Don's, it would be a welcome new avenue of keeping a show alive during and after its run.

Instead, people are going to look at Don Hall's example and say, "Oh dear. I don't want to be a criminal like him."

Stupid.

Diversity XIX: Paying The Rent

Don Hall steps into the diversity whirlpool with a proposal:

Conclusion: if you want more new, diverse theater, shaming people into diversity is going have less impact than providing cost-free space to perform the work currently being done.

Scott Walters is happy, and adds:

Arts funders take note: this could actually work. Diversity supporters take note: this could actually work. I think he's right about diversity in the small theatre scene being more diverse.

Scott does go on to note:

There is one fly in the ointment: the artists themselves. If I heard it once, I heard it a dozen times during my couple days at the Arena: playwrights want to "make the jump" to the regional theatres. They don't seem to be content to stay put -- they've drunk the Kool-Aid and see the theatre world in terms of a pyramid, and they want to "get to the top."

I have to say that, in my personal experience, not all of that is from having "drunk the Kool-Aid" of wanting to "get to the top," so much as the fact as if they want to be part of that slim majority who can survive off of play-writing, it behooves them to get to the top.

I love the people I work with, the people who I employ at my new company. I love them so badly that I want to pay them money, in fact. At the moment, since we are literally three months into our existence as a company, I can't. A year out, hopefully, I'll be able to pay them money. Once we cross into the money-paying threshold, though, I can almost guarantee that the money I'll be paying is a pittance. I'd love to pay my playwrights what the regional theaters can pay them. One day, maybe, I will. I almost certainly will never be able to compensate them in the way that Broadway can compensate them.

Who can blame them? The reason everyone's clamoring toward the top is because we've heard there's money up there.

Don Hall is right that our budgets would be incredibly lighter with rent subsidy. (I feel like someone from either BAM or Lincoln Center or the Met once told me that one of those venerable institutions has their land leased from the city for $1 a year, which they count as one of their biggest donations -- don't quote me on it unless someone can confirm it for me) Right now, I'm in the middle of a show that has a budget of about $11,000, $7,500 of which is rehearsal and theater renting. And without paying anyone. If I could use that $7,500 on the rest of my company, I would 100% positive be paying that to people working for us.

Thank you, Don, for contributing another good idea!