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.

On The Meaning of What We Do III: Haiti, Pt. 1

Okay, so as basically everyone knows, on January 12th a 7.0 earthquake hit Port-Au-Prince in Haiti and displaced 1.5 million people. (By the way, when I googled to get references, I saw that there have been three 4.0+ earthquakes in the last 48 hours). I wasn't going to blog about it at the time because there seemed nothing to say. There was a huge devastation, there was some actually passionate reporting going on, and that was the fact. A huge wave of death and destruction.

The first On The Meaning Of What We Do post was a response to Scott Walters and his response to Tom Laughlin's post Trivial Pursuit. What does what we do matter?

So I put up a defense of our craft in general and I moved on with my life. But it turns out there's another big thorny issue in the room, and I only stumbled across it when I returned to school.

Yesterday, one of our professors began our speech class and told us what we would be doing for the first half of the semester. We would be listening to recordings of survivors from Haiti and trying to find a way in to the tragedy through our voices. He began the project by sharing with us a quotation from Brecht (which unfortunately I can't find verbatim right now) which said something like 'I will show the world who I am and what my life was like, rather like holding up a single brick and saying This Was My House.'

He tried to lead us into the moment, and we tried to explore for a few minutes what it would be like to face a pile of rubble, listening to hear if there was some quiet, nearly fading sound of life underneath it. He tried to lead us to engage with the sounds of human grief.

Needless to say, within ten minutes of hearing this project the class had devolved into figuring out whether this play was... acceptable? Responsible? Ethical? Now, as the debate unfolded, it turned out that there were a number of strains of dissent about the project. I've broken up the different strains of debate into multiple posts, simply so that I can focus on them.

The first line of debate: "Theater is about events in human history. And that history is now."

It brought to mind a lot of anxieties that come out of dealing with current events (particularly contemporary tragedies) as opposed to history. The concept of creating a work of art around the Holocaust is not, in and of itself, controversial. If someone said "and my play is set in the Armenian Genocide," very few eyelids will bat. But people -- including myself, had a strong negative reaction to the idea of doing a play directly in the wake of one of contemporary society's harshest tragedies.

And it doesn't have to necessarily still be going on. You can do a play about 9/11, for instance, but how you represent it is going to be deeply scrutinized. I get very upset and angry when I see a play that simply invokes 9/11 in passing, or tosses out the phrase "Hurricane Katrina" to remind us that shitty things happen.

Yet, at the time, the Holocaust was just as deeply effecting as 9/11. Even something like the destruction at Troy should have that same horror and trauma behind it, although it doesn't.

One of my classmates put his finger right on the pulse. He said, "Everyone's in a different place in Haiti. I've already gone through my grieving process. I've cried my eyes out already about it. And now I've moved on. But I understand for people who are not, this is too much."

The core concept behind this project is to use the empathy of the theater to try and take on others' experiences and pass them along. But when this project was presented to us, many of us seemed to feel that we wouldn't be adequate to that task. That we might be too emotionally frail to serve as a proper conduit for the current moment. One of my classmates protested with the obvious: "Too soon, too soon!"

We usually think of the "Too soon" charge as being just one of those ways in which people with conservative tastes try to tut tut the edgier section of society from having their fun -- I think mostly of South Park and their line-crossing. I also remember the bated breath about who would make the first film about 9/11; and the strange anti-climax when United 93 and WTC came out. What were we expecting?

At any rate, this is an open question to me. When there's such a deep wound -- whether personal or global -- what is it about the historical that makes it acceptable? Is it just the sum collection of society's grief process taking place? To what degree should we wait until the grief passes?

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?

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.

Conversation II: You, Yourself, And Your Audience

Culture is a conversation. I keep saying that. Each of us puts forward our little bits of culture because we want to engage with each other (or the egotistical ones who just want to be heard; just as bad in conversation as they are in culture).

So obviously, I think that any time we actually engage in conversation, we're going to improve our artmaking as well as whatever else we gain in the conversation. In a previous post I mentioned Don Hall's nice approach of publicly communicating with critics. Next, via Rob Wienert-Kendt's The Wicked Stage, American Theatre uses Facebook to actually talk to the audience. Specifically, they decide to talk to the potential audience, as opposed to the realized audience. They ask the question: Why do you not see a particular play? The answers are not life-shattering, but are definitely worth looking over.

Court Commentary:Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission

A brief juxtaposition. Here's Matthew Yglesisas on the campaign finance ruling that just came down in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which basically said that because corporations are people (an idea with its own fascinating court history), there should be no limit on their campaign spending:

Something worth mentioning in the context of the Citizens United decision, though not directly tied to the issue at hand there, is that a group doesn’t actually need to spend vast sums of money to have a decisive influence on politics. It just needs to be able to credibly threaten to spend said sums. Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Here's a quote from Anne Bogart (h/t Monica Reida) about Athol Fugard and his views on censorship:

Athol Fugard, the South African playwright, described censorship as hesitation. For him censorship is not necessarily the proximity of government inspectors or a threat of imprisonment but, rather, on the physical hesitation of his hand while writing. Censorship is his own private vacillation provoked by whatever doubts are out to ambush him. Censorship is a physical hesitation in the light of fleeting thought or doubt about how his peers might receive what he is writing, whether or not they will like it or if it will be published.

Two writers writing in different contexts about the same phenomenon. I think both of them speak to the heart of why this case sincerely disappointed me.

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.