Change II: Can David Beat Goliath?

So, people are angry at Facebook. Honestly, I looked at the updated privacy controls today, and I have trouble understanding what the hubbub is all about. I don't put anything on my Facebook that I consider to be private, and most of the content is pretty easily put into Friends Only mode. I feel like the same hubbub came up when Google's algorithms started pitching me ads based on what I wrote in emails or was searching for, but I find it difficult to get my ire up.

That being said, if people want to protect their information, their only real choice is to quit Facebook. And honestly, at this point, Facebook is deeply embedded in my life. I hire actors by going through my list of friends on Facebook sometimes; I find about a majority of my friends' events on Facebook; I keep in touch with people I would have lost touch with all the time on Facebook and it often amounts to big stuff.

Some people, however, are determined to leave Facebook, but to create their own. And these people are four NYU students behind a project called Diaspora, and the many many people who appear to have donated (including, allegedly, Mark Zuckerberg himself -- maybe he's hoping to appropriate it later, like Toyota's part-ownership of Tesla).

Diaspora isn't even done yet, but it is an interesting question -- when it is ready, what will it take to shift the vast majority of users from Facebook to Diaspora? New social networks have, at times, been able to create themselves in the face of larger, more connected social networks (Friendster to Myspace; Myspace to Facebook). The question is, can Diaspora leverage its advantages over Facebook in the face of Facebook's ultimate advantage: its existing community?

It's interesting to see whether it is possible, or whether this will also fall prey to the same individual-lethargy-to-action as Move Your Money did (which I wrote about here).

A Week of Seeing Shows

I had a jam-packed week full of seeing shows. A few words on each:

• Darius Homayoun's a joyous shot at how things ought to be: a fourth-year independent project at New York University's Experimental Theater Wing. Darius, who comes from Dubai, is a good friend of mine from the four years we've studied together, and I was bursting with pride over this work. Conceptually, he begins with a fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm (The Twelve Brothers), presented by himself and a group of actors who, between segments, make no bones about being a group of actors. Between scenes they use each other's real names, ask each other the real time, and comment on how they think it is going. Then they hop into the story-telling, beautiful and imaginative. Soon the two world blends, and the narrative caves in on itself as Darius realizes why the story is important to him. A fantastic work, and one which I'm hoping to remount with him, possibly in the fall.
  
  
• Alex Johnson's Staging Staging: The Historiographical Consequences of Post-Revolutionary Russian Avant-Garde Performance Aesthetics: also a fourth-year independent project at NYU:ETW. As you can see, we have a thing for long titles this year. Alex's project was a non-play -- a play which fails to happen. He begins by trying to give a lecture on the Russian Avant-Garde, but is then interrupted by a group of protesters, some of which are audience members who have volunteered beforehand and been trained in what to do. Vaguely. Again, a war breaks out between Alex Johnson, ostensibly trying to give his thesis lecture, and the protesters, who simply want to make known their demands. It begins as somewhat of a satire on the dull-headed Kimmel occupation from last year, but soon takes a more sympathetic ear, as you realize that these young people may not have a purpose or direction to their aimless protesting, but they are driven by very tangible desires and hopes. Pretty soon, the audience had a pretty strong urge to join in (I'm not making this up) and we basically interrupted Alex's show to have a conversation with him about his show -- which is basically what his show was ready to accept. In today's talk-back, Alex said "I made the show fail-proof, which obviously made it success-proof."
  
  
• Lope de Vega's Fuente Ovejuna, directed by Chilean director Carlos Diaz. Diaz used the space he was given in an incredible way -- it was long and wide, and actors spent the entirety of the show running in and out of it, and exerting massive amounts of energy. Unfortunately, that meant that when the show wasn't working, it was (as one of my friends put it), just a bunch of people running and shouting. Some of the scenes were in Spanish with no translation, which at first I was irritated by, but then I realized wasn't really a problem -- I just wasn't the primary audience, being monolingual. After all, almost none of the theater in New York treats the blind or the deaf as part of the audience -- I, as someone who didn't learn Spanish, have a whole range of theater which is open to me, so it isn't particularly a problem if just this one had scenes that were inaccessible. Sometimes the running and shouting and the acoustics of the space drowned out the words of the actors, and sometimes the athleticism drowned out what could have been a subtle and moving tale and instead made it a passionate and exhausting play, but overall it was a play well directed, and sometimes it even worked for me.
  
  
• Pipeline Theatre's Psycho Beach Party: earlier in the week, I was performing with Pipeline in their Brave New Works evening of emerging theater companies; then I was seeing their fantastic play. I haven't laughed so hard in a while; John Early as Chicklet was a virtuouso of hysterical energy for the entire evening. It was just a wild, fun romp, but I -- not familiar with the play previously -- was rather taken by the play's fun but incisive investigations into sexual and gender identity, which I hadn't really been expecting to be so forward while still being fun. Pipeline definitely holds fun to be the key virtue, and with their over-sold audience it's clear that it's working out for them.
  
  
• A reading of an original musical Who's George: my friend Sydney Matthews dug this little chestnut out of the attic, written by her grandmother, and we just informally read it in the back of Bar 82 (nice folks, by the way, who are building a little venue in a back room). The play is hysterical in its adorable genuine spirit and strange ways of saying things. I laughed even harder than I laughed at Psycho Beach Party. We may be bringing this production to the stage as well this summer.
  
  
• The Stella Adler Studio's production of Show & Tell: I very much dislike this play. It reads as though a television writer was trying to write an episode of CSI and then realized he could make it into a play so that he could get it made. There's also a lot of unwarranted romantic hoopla that just distracts from the part of it that works: a genuine reflection on what grief looks like when the catastrophic incident (a bombing of a classroom) is so horrific that it can't allow normal grieving processes (because the childrens' bodies can't be recovered). On the anniversary of the Oklahoma City Bombing, this had the potential to be particularly poignant. The technical aspects were also a huge failure. That being said, the actors did amazing work with what they were given, particularly my roommate and company-member Joel Fullerton. Who just found out I have a blog last night. Hi Joel!
  

I normally don't see this much theater, but I will keep trying to update you.

Diversity XXIV: The Checklist pt.2

Glad to see that there's some positive responses to the idea of the checklist.

99 Seats said probably the most important thing about it, which is that it's a complicated checklist and would take some thought to figure out what would be useful. And the reason for that complication is exactly what RVCBard said in my comments section:

I wish it were that simple, but the things I'd put on that checklist are cognitive, which presents a whole 'nother layer of problems - mostly the fact that people can justify anything.

It's true that any thing you'd put on the checklist that has to do with correcting your attitude or behaving differently would be completely useless. And the whole checklist, even if it is actionable in every part, will be pointless if the person is using it in bad faith (as a bit of window dressing; forced to as part of a legal settlement, for instance).

Isaac chimes in:

Guy's checklist idea wouldn't correct the structural inequalities that would make it harder for people from certain backgrounds to be qualified for various jobs-- just as blind orchestra auditions doesn't change that the fact that learning to master a musical instrument is expensive-- but it's an interesting thought experiment.

Yeah, thought experiment is perfect. The thing that was getting to me about implicit bias was that even if we remade America from top to bottom, and really ensured that every person of every background was on an even keel economically, educationally, etc., then there's the possibility that still people will not have equal opportunities, because of implicit bias. Clearly, however, we're not at that near-utopian end point.

On the other hand, this isn't purely an esoteric thought experiment. This is from the perspective of someone who runs a small arts organization and wants to say, "Well, okay, I'm not exactly in a position to level the entire economic playing field, but I am in a position to create better hiring practices. What can I do on that front?"

So anyways, I think one checklist question that came to me as I was falling asleep last night is that if you are hiring, you are going to be limited in your choice by the applicants. And your applicant pool is going to be limited by who comes across your want ad and notices.

So one point on the checklist should be reaching out to minority champion organizations with your hiring position. In other words, when you think to yourself, "I need a playwright," don't just put your playwright ads in the usual places -- Craigslist, Backstage, etc. It's not that those places necessarily have anything wrong with them (I have no idea of the demographic readership of Craigslist or Backstage, actually). But you need to also make sure you reach out specifically to groups like the one that RVCBard is forming for playwrights of color. For young actors, I remember that there's a group at NYU for both artists of color (The Collective) and female artists (The WOMB -- which I didn't know about until I looked up where to link to for The Collective).

I haven't figured out exactly how to word this checklist question, but the thrust of it is, start by making sure that you're getting a diverse range of applicants: make sure your want ad is in the hands of champion groups. And if you're looking at your applicant pool and it still doesn't look like a reflection of the diversity in the community, keep pushing for more applicants.

Just one tiny step, perhaps. Small in the face of the widespread structural challenges that face us. But on the level of individuals, it could make a huge difference to someone who could get an opportunity.

Quantifying the Arts IV: Tie Professor's Salaries to Wages

Scott Walters, of Theater Ideas and CRADLE(arts), has decided that he isn't busy enough and has started a new blog with Tom Loughlin to generate new ideas about a Theater curriculum, named TACT (continuing a love of acronyms...). I'm excited to see what goes on over there, because I'm interested in changing the curriculum of the arts.

Anyways, my first introduction to the new blog was this post, which contained a Modest and Tactless proposal: "Tie the salaries of theatre professors to the income of their students."

Before you get all up in a hizzy (there was a brief second where I did), I think it would be good to revisit the spirit in which this proposal is offered, which probably goes back to the Kushner quotation that Scott used during his last "modest" proposal:

I can take comfort, however, from Tony Kushner who, when he proposed in his outstanding speech and essay "A Modest Proposal" (American Theatre, Jan98, Vol. 15 Issue 1) that we "abolish all undergraduate art majors," recognized that "Since[undergraduate arts education] so very lucrative, I can say let's get rid of it and we don't have to worry that anything will actually happen. So my speech is rather like theatre in this regard, and this frees us to consider the validity of my proposal...as a pure abstraction ultimately productive of nothing more unpleasant than a spasm of conscience and perhaps something as pleasant as a whiff of scandal and a flicker of ire." I should be so lucky.

Now, Scott's proposal this time around is a lot more fully fleshed out than the lottery idea, and it seems like it would work.

There's one huge, huge problem though: Scott notes that there is no profession (since the Actor's Equity salary median of all actors is $0), so tying professors' pay to students' performance in "the profession" may get professors to compete to turn out students into a system that won't support them. Even if some college out there figures it out, their incentives would now be aligned with a system that doesn't work. So what if professors are making sure that some of their students are earning over $8,000 a year? It's not a huge improvement over the current system, since the rules he proposes still allow a large number of students to fail.

But I take Scott's point in the context of the blog, which is that if professors were aligned to their students' interests, they would fight for curriculum reform. In fact, there's the possibility in this system that theater professors would suddenly find incentive to reform the theater industry -- trying to encourage students to make living wages at theater start-ups back home rather than pouring in to the over saturated market in New York.

I would like to point out, however, that there is a certain degree to which professor's salaries are tied to their profession. Now, before I make this point, I probably should make it clear that this is based on my own university, New York University, and is probably not representative of all schools.

But at the same time, it's clear that NYU pays its theater professionals a tiny fraction of what they pay (as a for instance) Business School professors. Although our school's financials are private, and therefore we can only speculate on much of the budget, public tax returns show that the highest paid NYU employee is a fertility doctor at NYU's School of Medicine, who makes something north of $2 million a year.

Why does the fertility doctor make north of $2 million a year? Because NYU feels it has to have the best fertility doctor in the field -- and therefore, it has to pay above the prevailing wage for fertility doctors (and in this case, above the prevailing wage for a top-of-the-line fertility doctor).

Our theater school also employs working professionals as our teachers (at least in our professional training classes) and, therefore, they have to pay better than what those teachers would be making in the field. Which, in our case, is basically tuppence. Whereas a business school teacher is probably forgoing a salary of $100k or more, the top-of-the-top teachers in our theater program would probably not really be making much worth talking about if they were outside of the school.

Again, this is probably a problem endemic to schools which seek to employ working professionals to teach. There's a different model for academics, since the competition there is almost exclusively other academics, and therefore isn't so moved by the economic fates in the market. And also, the difference between this process and Scott's proposal is that whereas right now, in general teachers' pay is linked to the success of an industry as a whole, Scott's proposal makes the individual teachers responsible to the success of students in specific.

One last point I want to make: Scott's proposal really only makes sense if the success of students really is affected in a huge way by teachers in the college level. Which of course to some degree it is. But if we look at the current problems in the American Theater (of which much ink/0101s have been spilled), then we can see that unless the system incorporates the change of the industry into it, the teachers will simply fail. The way the system is set up, there's too many artists for too few jobs, because the jobs are overly concentrated. As he points out, there's an 8:1 employment ratio within AEA, and I'm sure many of that 8 are just as qualified as that 1, but there's a glut.

The walk-away is that Scott once talked about needing to move the riverbed. I agree that tying professors' salaries to the success of the students is key. But to what success? In my last post I talked about how the market is incredible because it forces valuation on the intangible, because it can't deal with anything that isn't valued. When we structure the economy (the way that Scott's gedankenexperiment does), we need to choose what we value, because that's going to be the output of the system.