On The Meaning Of What We Do III, Haiti Pt. 2

A few days ago I started ruminations on a project that's going on at my university about Haiti, and its tragedy. I wondered where exactly the difference between the historical and the present day, about the immediacy of the pain.

Scott Walters places the project in context:

If you want to look for the precursor to this assignment, look no further than Anna Deavere Smith. She was interviewing people in LA not long after the riots. And what you are being asked to do, I suspect, is what Smith describes as her technique in the article "The Word Becomes You," and interview in The Drama Review, Winter 1993. Her belief is that if you listen and listen to someone speaking, and gradually begin to imitate them fully, that "the word will become you" -- that the emotion is contained within the words, the inflections, the phrasing and can be sort of channeled powerfully.

I can't speak to how Twilight was received and the emotional tenor of how people felt watching it in the immediacy of the Los Angeles Riots, because I was (I must confess) 4 years old at the time. By the time I reached the age to interface with Twilight, the Los Angeles Riots had become a historical event -- at least in the minds of the public. Attempts to continue performing Twilight, reading Twilight, etc. serves a different purpose: to return to the immediate something which is historical.

There is a good reason to revisit the past, to make the inaccessible accessible. See, today in 2010, the grief process has taken place over the Los Angeles riots and has left us at the end of the process: acceptance. To attempt to revisit the Los Angeles riots serves the purpose of the returning to the mind an event which may think is over, but is not yet over, to bring the lessons from that past event to the fore.

This is not, however, the purpose of the Haiti project. Scott is right to say that the aim of the project is to let "the words become us." But the question is, to what cause, let the words become us?

We don't have any lessons to share from Haiti. We still don't know what's going on. It would be like trying to tell Matthew Shepard's story while he's still in a coma. The only thing we know is the brutality and the pain of the event. Food is only just starting to be distributed. We haven't had the time to speak to the Haitians, to really understand -- we can only snatch bits of their screams and present that as something. (as I'm typing this, a Save the Children call for help ad is playing on Hulu again)

Which brings me to the question Scott presented me with:

By the way, I would sort of question an actor who was afraid of experiencing emotion too powerfully. Isn't that what you do?

Oddly enough, this brings me back to the subject of self-producing that's been in the air lately. When I first came to NYU, I was definitely not a producer. I was not yet a director or a playwright, I came to be an actor. But slowly I noticed something that really, really pissed me off: actors bitching about how much they hated their plays. It was seriously wide-spread. You'd see an actor auditioning for Tommy, and I'd say, "Oh, you want to be in Tommy?" and they'd say, "No, I don't really like that play." "Well why do you want to audition, then?" "Well, I need to do a musical" or whatever the reasoning was.

I didn't want to be in plays I had no passion for. I didn't want to just read the lines that someone else wrote, and perform the actions that someone else had put forward to me. I wanted to be part of the purpose of the play, and part of its creation. This doesn't mean I wasn't willing to perform or work on other playwrights or directors' shows, but I realized very quickly that the acting "industry" is just that: actors are often treated as disposable labor.

(don't get me started on cattle calls, and actors with numbers on their back...)

But I have enough friends for whom the creation and portrayal of emotions is the end-purpose of performance. One of my friends hated a drama she was in, but when she got a convincing cry onstage she'd feel vindicated. But why?

Well, okay, that's not an original question. I guess I should just point you towards the inevitable Aristotle (the goal of theater and therefore performance is emotional catharsis in-and-of-itself) versus Brecht (the goal of theater and therefore performance is to jolt the audience into new awarenesses). And I admit that I am very heavily Brecht-influenced on this and many other issues.

This may be my personal inclinations more than a global idea, which is why I am hesitant to out-and-out condemn this Haiti project. For me, emotional catharsis is not a positive end. It may, at times, be an effective means -- but just as often, the mitigation of catharsis can be equally or more effective towards those means.

The question isn't necessarily whether it is about the actor channeling the emotion too powerfully. The question is, what does it mean to have the audience channel that much emotion? Does it tie them any closer to Haiti than they are already are? Or is it just as likely to trigger defense mechanisms, bring up walls, irritate and enrage. After all, there's a lot of people trying to get at you through Haiti, and not all of them are benevolent. (As I'm writing this, former Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton have just appeared on Hulu to ask me to send money to Haiti). Take the solar-powered audio bibles. And it's not because these people have poor intentions in their heart. Everyone sees this tragedy and they want to step in, to do something -- that's a human nature. If we're just living through this, what are we giving them?

But unless someone can articulate to me what the direction of this piece is, it leaves me more full of questions and doubts than certainty.

Solutions VI: New Solutions!

Nothing makes me more excited to get on the internet than to get up to see young enthusiastic minds cranking away at the problems of today.

Want a little enthusiasm for your own morning?

1. RVCBard is getting together a group of Playwrights of Color together to learn about what they need to get themselves produced. Their ad on Craigslist is here. I'm almost jealous that my 50% Jewish North African roots don't count me as a Playwright of Color. But seriously, the sort of community that they're hoping to build is priceless, and I wish all of them the best of luck.
2. August Schulenberg has a simple plan for the producing community: The Homing Project, a process to help theater companies home in on playwrights that don't have a home of their own, and basically performing a marriage: a commitment to present three plays by the playwright over the course of three years. Sign my company up!

Both of the projects can trace their genesis from one of the conclusions of Outrageous Fortune: that one of the hardest parts for playwrights is the lack of sustained development and promotion. The two projects oddly mirror each other -- one creates a group of playwrights in search of producers, and the other creates a group of producers in search of playwrights. Either way, it seems like positive movement.

Self-Producing: "Playwrights"

Okay, okay, sorry David Dower. I didn't RTWT with regards to Outrageous Fortune. In my defense, when I began to read posts on the report, I saw things like "Aristotle Said There's Supposed To Be Catharsis... but there isn't. Not in this book," and I just had no taste for it. It doesn't sound like I missed much -- much as, when I read the reviews of Bye Bye Birdie, I can decide I don't want to see it. (Adam Feldman: "Bye Bye Birdie; hello, turkey. The featherbrained revival of this 1960 musical is sure to be roasted in so many critical pans that it seems almost cruel to add to the fire...")

But I was fascinated by most of the writing in response, and obviously there are hat-tips all 'round. As the blogging wraps up, I did want to point out what Scott said about self-producing:

As the Outrageous Fortune - a-thon got underway, more and more people seemed to find themselves at a tipping point, with OF providing the fatal push. With the arrival of the new year, J. Holtham revealed his identity (gasp) and indicated "I'm going to be looking very seriously at self-producing, about starting a production company, probably under the name of 99 Seats. More about that as it comes. At any rate, it's a new year, a new decade. Time to turn the page." Josh expressed admiration, and then Matt Freeman and Travis Bedard issued a call for a guide to self-producing. James Comtois obliged, creating an ongoing series entitled "Little Jimmy's Guide to Self-Producing," which provides an excellent how-to for playwrights who want to take control of their own productions in NYC. And suddenly everybody was jumping ship and following Don Hall into self-producing.

To which Matthew Freeman rightly responds:

4. Self Production isn't a bandwagon people recently got on. I've been hearing "self-produce" since I got started writing. Everyone has. I just think people need to know how to do it.

I recently became a student member of the League of Independent Theatres, which is basically a group of folks who've been doing this for probably a decade on average per group. If you look at the number of theater groups in New York (which Robert Zimmerman of NYSCA estimated at about 1000 when I saw him in person -- btw, you were there, Matthew Freeman? I was there too!), you'll see that there are quite enough foolhardy individuals who have been on that bandwagon for years (one of the more recent of which is me).

And there are clearly models of success in this path in the industry, the clearest contemporary I can think of is Moises Kaufman on the big stage and 13P on the up-and-coming. Sure, we folks can't necessarily generate the amount of revenue that Kaufman has been able to generate, but hey -- that's the nature of the game!

But to reflect back on Moises Kaufman for a second, I think that the big change in realization that is coming -- and it hits each person individually -- is that the idea of "Playwright" may actually become an anachronism. "Playwriting" was a step along the path of division of labor in the arts, the creation of big centralized artistic machines. What originally was a group of theatermakers became an actor, director, designers, playwrights, dramaturgs, producers, stage managers, etc. ad nauseum. But look back to what Scott said about Shakespeare:

Shakespeare was a shareholder in the King's Men, and also a householder in the Globe. Meaning that he had a financial stake in the theatre's success. As one of the chief playwrights for the company, it was up to him to crank out new material that would bring in audiences hungry for new material. [...] And he not only wrote plays, but he acted, and helped run the theatre space -- hell, he probably swept up the pit after the groundlings spilled food all over it. And they also took in apprentices, for whom they were responsible to provide room and board in exchange for teaching them the theatre ropes and, possibly, integrating them into the company.

Scott was using it to point to self-producing as an injunction for playwrights to be invested in the companies which they work. But I think it points to something else -- Shakespeare wasn't just a playwright. He didn't see play-wrighting as the end of his responsibilities. Granted, he didn't do everything -- he wasn't Atlas, holding up the globe (which, by the way, is a misconception started by Mercator, who named his collection of maps after King Atlas the map-maker but also drew Atlas holding a globe on the cover despite the fact that Atlas held up the sky). But every part of the process was considered part of his purview.

It comes up a lot for me, in the realm of self-producing. People keep asking me if I'm "sad that I am not going to perform anymore." So far I have performed, in minor capacities, in both plays I directed and self-produced. And my goal with my company is to create a group of self-producers, meaning that sometimes I will be able to perform and let them carry the load of producing, and other times I will be there to support their projects.

But we're trained, from fairly early on in our experience of theater, that there's a specific heirarchy in the world of making theater. Each of these roles, we are told, is distinct, and performed by different people. Well, maybe that worked for the regional theaters. It doesn't work for me. I like having actors collaborate on the script, and I like it when they help design the sound. I like them being involved in their costume design. Some things take technical craft that nobody else has, and so sometimes you need a specialist, but even those specialists I'd prefer if they saw themselves as being part of the project, not just someone who points the lights.

It reminds me of how, early in my training, we were told that when we direct we should never tell actors what result we're looking for, rather, we should employ a careful Socratic method to ask the right questions to lead the actor to the right emotional response. Hogwash. If you have talented, intelligent actors, you can speak to them like partners. You can say, "Here's what we're trying to do right now." You do often have to help them get there, but there's no need to pretend that as a director you're some kind of mystical shaman. You partner with them, communicate with them, and then on day 1 of tech week when you realize that there's a problem in your play that you don't know how to solve, you can turn to your cast with upturned palms and say, "Okay, what do you guys think?" So long as you've shown leadership along the way, they can help you when you're lost.

Because rather than being some militarized hierarchy with a ranking system and a chain of command, the self-producing world is a group of people with a task in front of them. Practices that make that task easier will be repeated. Practices that don't make the task easier will be cut down.

The term "playwright" means, essentially, exactly the same as "theatermaker." And hey, look at this, "theater producer" means "theatermaker" too. In our current tradition, we have equated "playwright" with "writer." There's another wave today of playwrights realizing that wrighting a play may not just mean writing a play.

Diversity XX: OOB Diversity pt 2

99 Seats agrees with me:

All of this is incredibly present to me, at 36 years old, single, childless, falling right in the income levels here, working full-time outside of theatre. In terms of finances, there isn't much difference between what happens in the OOB scene and what's described in the lives of "successful" playwrights in Outrageous Fortune. Which is scary, in general.

Well, it's scary if you're on the regional theater side of the playwright equation. In the OOB world, this is basically what I expected my life to be like, and its encouraging to us to know that:

1) We wouldn't be doing any better in the regional theater track (which I am now forbidding anyone who has read Outrageous Fortune and the NYIT demographics report to call "successful")

2) We are better supported by our fellow OOBers than Playwrights are supported by the regional theaters.

Lesson: if you're a talented playwright with a vision, you're better off self-producing or entering the independent producing community with partners who are willing to develop you. And maybe, if you're lucky enough, John McCain will call you out.

Self-Producing

Lest this blog become simply me reading 99 Seats and getting excited, I probably will try to put the breaks after pointing you towards this post, in which he follows up on the end of his pseudonymity by specifying what his non-status-quo path will be for the new year.

As it happens, the path he's stepping on is self-producing, on the idea that playwrights can't sit around sending envelope after envelope to Playwrights Horizons hoping that they'll be plucked up from obscurity. They need to produce, because it is in producing mediocre work -- or good but problematic work -- that they hone their skills and voice.

It's the philosophy that created 13P (which is ironic, considering one of the playwrights of 13P is the third most produced playwright in America). Every time I tell people 13P's mantra ("We don't develop plays. We do them.) there's a refreshing sense of playwright empowerment. We just do them.

This is the allure that drew me to found my company. It feels so good to know that the work I feel passionate about is going to happen. That's at the center of everything I do.

Another personal experience is that, this summer, a friend of mine who goes way back with me and is about to graduate from a film institute decided that he wanted to team up with me to make a film. Now, to be clear -- I have little-to-no background in film, had never written anything complete for film or directed for film, and had only acted in two extremely poor quality films and a music video. This kid has worked with professionals -- is surrounded by people who work for a living in the field. Not your Ron Howards, but certainly the people who make our commercials and our made-for-TV movies and such.

But he wanted me to direct a film with him. We would put the money up ourselves and try to shoot it in a weekend on a digital camera he owns. He kept saying, "What I'm missing, what people at my institute are missing is stories, new ideas. I know you know stories." I got a short screenplay that I had read and loved off a friend (who is now my roommate) and I directed the film, casting in three lovely actresses who I think the world of and who it kills me I don't get to work with on the stage because they don't live in New York.

When my friend came over this weekend with the footage (which I'd been unable to see before), I asked him as he was booting his computer, "Well, how'd it turn out? I'm nervous. I've never done this film thing before."

And he said to me, "I don't know if this will make you feel better, but regardless of how it came out, just know this: in the film industry, there's a saying that you make 16 bad films before you make one good one."

As I watched the footage, I knew instantly all of the mistakes I made. It's the same feeling I get when I'm directing for the stage the first time anyone who wasn't a part of the process sits in the audience -- even if it's just one person I know, a week before the show opens. A forehead-striking moment of "Well DUH that's not hitting the right notes and BOY that's the moment where I lose them and... etc."

Anyways, I'm glad to hear you're self producing.