Internships

Scott calls it a plutocracy here, Isaac calls it exploitative here, 99Seats has a "well yes, that's what an internship is" attitude and Isaac sticks by his guns here.

Here's my job experience. Paying day jobs in Southern California (one of the more affluent parts of America):

• Register at a box store for a way-above-market $9.00/hour, because it was a brand new branch in a nice new neighborhood
• Intern (as an Assistant Assistant Stage Manager) for a Repertory Theater, for $150/week, which I once calculated as being less than $1.50/hour on average, sometimes more or less depending on rehearsal. This is one of the only paid internships I have ever seen in the arts field that was paying.
• Popcorn salesman at a movie theater chain for $8.50/hour, but only because I worked until 3 or 4AM. I also got a second degree burn off the popcorn machine, which taught me what skin looks like when it bubbles; and I realized what it must feel like to be universally hated.
• Intern for a software company for $17/hour.

Now, you'll notice two things. You'll notice that, as an intern for theater, I made pittance. And yet that is considered a great internship because it was paid. You'll also notice that as an intern for a software company, I was raking in dough. And I am far, far less qualified to intern for a software company than I am at theater company, because Stage Management is something I've done a lot a lot.

I am one of Scott Walters' plutocrats, unfortunately, there's no way around it, so his point stands.

But I guess what's being left out of the discussion between Isaac and J. is that the NYTimes article was about internships in general, whereas your discussion has been about theater internships. Do you know why theater internships suck? Because working in the theater sucks. You're talking about an industry in which the successful barely make less than half their income through their jobs.

My software company job (which I currently inhabit) considers me a steal at $17.50 for the amount of work I do. They have lately planned to make me full time, which is going to be slightly more money, and include benefits. And I'll still be one of the lowest paid employees at the company, of a company of about 140 people. Think of what they'd pay if I was qualified!

That's literally the one thing that not-for-profit means: it means that if you work here, you will not personally profit. You will get to do what you want with your life. You may find it personally fulfilling despite the hardship. You may, if you get really good at it, eke out a living. Or you'll do what I do, which is get a day job in a field where even the people at the bottom rung get paid quite well -- if you can (which goes back to Scott's plutocracy argument).

Suppose the state decides its going to enforce those internship regulations. You know what's going to happen? They're going to rename "internships" as "volunteer" positions, and nothing will change for us. After all, how many of us have seen a show by ushering for free for an evening? And nobody is going to bat an eyelid at a non-profit theater company taking volunteers. Hell, many non-profit theater companies are run by volunteers! (Some of my friends run a company called Eleven Benevolent Elephants that's been around for 3 years, and one said to me, "You know how we can afford to pay our actors and writers and playwrights? Because we work for free!").

When the crackdown comes, it's going to be at NBC Universal, which can pay its interns if it wanted to. I bet if they took the head of Price Waterhouse Cooper's salary, 30% of what he makes could go to pay the interns in his building living wages. (Don't run the math on that). It's not going to be at the Roundabout, or at the Public. Maybe Broadway will have to pay their internships. But unless the industry that the internships are preparing students to enter starts paying a minimum wage, interns are not going to get their fair share.

Well, they are getting their fair share. Their fair share of a shit pie.

It isn't that I don't have sympathy for the shitty conditions they work in. I have sympathy for the shitty conditions we all work in. But wringing hands about internships is really going after a trailing indicator of the fact that the economics of theater doesn't really work. And we knew that.

(Update: Adam Thurman puts his lawyer on hat to give us a right talking to on the issue. I guess I just wish I had the strength and skill to create that "strong revenue stream" he's talking about, as though those of us who can't pay anybody are just not trying hard enough.)

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.

Diversity XII: Old Dead White Guys

99 Seats goes off on folks like Thomas Garvey who bring up Shakespeare in every argument about diversity. Basically, it's the equivalent of Godwin's Law: You bring up Shakespeare, you lose. I don't know if I'd go quite so far as making it the Godwin's Law of theater, but the point is very well taken.

The argument is better phrased that there is no danger that Scott Walters, 99 Seats, or anyone is ever going to drive Shakespeare out of existence. (I'm producing Shakespeare right now!). So there's no danger in having Scott Walters, 99 Seats, or anyone pull as hard as they want to against Shakespeare. On the other hand, there is a very real danger that the diverse, vulnerable playwrights who aren't getting produced might get further trampled. So really, the concern for Shakespeare is far out-weighed by the concern for diversity.

The only reason I'm hesitant is because the Nth degree of this pull is David Byrne's belief that opry is so dead that we shouldn't teach anything but pop music. There's a lot of diversity that can come through even productions of the classics: maybe the playwright is old and dead, but The Classical Theatre of Harlem certainly fits one definition of diversity.

Still, 99 Seats' post just makes me smile because of:

Because no one ever says, "What about Rutherford B. Hayes?!?" Why? Because he kind of sucked. So didmost of the old dead white guys.

Damn straight, 99 Seats. Give mediocre Presidents the tongue-lashing they rightly deserve.

99 Seats Says Hello

One of the bloggers I've been pleased to follow and get in conversation with lately about the whole diversity thing, 99 Seats, has a post up today revealing his true identity, as one J. Holtham. It's like watching Superman announce his true identity as Clark Kent! Well, okay, not quite as epic. But it still seems like a big New Years.

99 Seats has been insisting on his right to keep is anonymity for the two years that he's been writing pseudonymously. This was born out of his desire to be able to rant against the current theater system while acknowledging the reality of continuing to exist in this system. Sometimes people have been against it. So it goes, I suppose.

99 Seats -- J.'s?-- pseudonymity has always highlighted a series of choices that vocal individuals choose when they decide to go vocal. 99 Seats decided to go completely pseudonymous so that he could speak with absolute freedom without risking his job. Isaac has mentioned that sometimes he speaks more generally rather than focusing on specific organizations when criticizing the industry-at-large so that he doesn't wind up with specific grudge matches. Some people deep in the industry wind up trying to avoid ruffling feathers to the point of not speaking much criticism at all (I can't think of a good example in our field, but I would argue that that's what turned CNBC into the channel that it is today; it's a common affliction in the White House Press Correspondent's pool as well). It's a continuum of choices that continue to come up on a daily basis, and it takes good judgment to keep all of the choices consistent.

I don't have a particular stance on the issues around pseudonymity, so I don't have any particular feelings about the coming out. The reason he gives -- being shifted toward working for a new system rather than preserving a position in the old by this post -- makes a lot of personal sense, and it has always seemed like a personal decision to me.

I guess this is all a way of saying, "Pleasure to meet you!"

Happy New Year!

Well it's New Years, the end of a decade which everyone seems to have settled on calling the "Aughts" but which I steadfastly insist on calling "The Turn of the Millenium" a la "Turn of the Century" which I think worked out really good for McKinley.

Over the last week or so I've been getting a lot of hat tips, linkage, and pushbback from a wide array of folks, all of whom I deeply respect, and it's been very wonderful getting to join them in this conversation: Ian Moss (who's been supporting me for a while), Isaac Butler, 99Seats, August Schulenberg, Ian Thal, and Leonard Jacobs. I probably should even thank Andrew Breibart for unleashing the trolls on me, because it spurred me to take a look at things I believed.

Happy new year, blogosphere!

Legitimacy IX: The Right To Speak

Not much that I want to say on my own, but if you seriously aren't reading 99Seats but are reading this blog (which seems really silly, you should fix that), take a look at this post on the lottery issue.

It encapsulates a bunch of issues but one of them has to do with a simultaneous debate that's raging alongside the debate itself, which is, Who has the right to take part in the debate?

That's a debate I am thoroughly disappointed by. I hate that debate. For instance, I used to read Leonard Jacobs' Clyde Fitch Report. But every time he would link to Isaac Butler at Parabasis he'd refer to Isaac as "trust fund baby Isaac Butler". He often had that sort of casual scorn for people, often based on where they're coming from. Maybe that's a virus that takes a hold of you when you start being a contributor to Fox. So I stopped following his blog, even though it's a wealth of information and a very good blog, simply because it feels unhealthy to me to sit around questioning "does so-and-so have the right to weigh in on this issue?"

We could sit around until the cows come home and debate it. Does Scott Walters have the right to talk about arts administration even though he hasn't been in "the shit"? Suppose Isaac Butler did come from a wealthier background (I have no idea -- he doesn't sign his posts with his parents' income level), can he still talk about ways of lifting up the poor? Does 99Seats have the right to weigh in the debate and keep his anonymity?

Ach who cares! We're not going to keep anyone out of the debate, what with this pernicious free speech thing and the problem that the internet doesn't pedigree people before they register.

I do think his Backdraft metaphor is worth the read. I would have gone with "economists and laborers" or something pedantic like that, but instead I get to be Billy Baldwin for the day.

Diversity III: Actually Everyone Talks About Diversity

Having just hit "publish" on my somewhat irritated rebuttal to 99Seats I do want to mention that his posting on the subject of diversity has been pretty stellar, as well as the posting by Isaac, and Scott, and Matthew. It's been really challenging to read. As of yet, I don't feel like I see an answer I like.

Scott put out a great piece on how fear of change holds us back from action on diversity--which, even though I rejected his one idea, doesn't mean I don't agree with that wholeheartedly. As a matter of fact, I happen to think that the project that used to be called the Less than 100 K project is a far more persuasive and effective way to change the system -- if we create local community theaters in diverse communities, and then find a way to recruit or tour local breakout talent across the country -- rather than making them all apply to the same ten theaters in New York City and then ignoring them until they rot away, never having been given the chance to prove themselves -- I think we have a much better chance at finding talent than simply pulling names out of a hat.

99Seats has a fantastic piece about the tropes of Race plays, and about his own experiences with race. The one thing I might say is that the whole "when black people write about race, they write about their own communities, when white people write about race, they write about race relations" I think boils down to something like this: when people say "race" they usually mean "minority race".

Is August Osage County a play about "race"? It's a play about a white family, a white community, and therefore, it isn't about race. The thing that has always gotten me about Raisin in the Sun is that its plot is largely the same as Death of a Salesman -- it's not a play about "race," but it is considered to be a "race" play because it's about black people. (And don't get me started on the "Black Family adaptation", as its producer put it to me, of Death at a Funeral)

So if a white playwright wanted to write a play, he has two choices: to write a play about two races interacting, or to write a play set in a non-white community. The latter would almost certainly be terrible. LaBute's story of a small Latino family in the Bronx? Mamet's trilogy of plays detailing the struggles of a family of Cambodians living in Indonesia? Alright, now I'm just having fun imagining poor Cambodian refugees shouting "Fuck" at each other and scratching their balls, but the point is that a white playwright doesn't exactly have a lot of options of how to frame a play "about race" except in that "black meets white" way, or in the metaphorical way.

The pit-fall, of course, is trying to write a play about race. Usually if you see one of those terrible plays 99Seats (I wish he would give up his anonymity just because it feels odd typing 99Seats over and over again) is talking about, the pit-fall isn't just the racial insensitivity, it's the same problem playwrights run into when they want to write a play "about war" or a play "about science."

I'm speaking from personal experience. I saw a play listing once that was calling for plays from Middle Easterners "about the Middle East." I said to myself, "Oh thank God, finally some diversity I can participate in!" and I sat down to write a play "about the Middle East." Well I was born in the Middle East, my family is from the Middle East going back generations, my grandfather fought in two wars personally and was involved in Israel's campaign against the British before independence.

The play I wrote was garbage.

I resolved never again to be deluded into writing "about the Middle East" again. What I needed to write was about what I was passionate about. Eventually, I wound up writing a different play, not consciously about "the Middle East" but actually based on my emotional response to the 2006 Lebanon War -- not focused on the event itself, but based on the emotional manipulation in the media around it. It wound up being a movement-theater piece, and the focus turned away from the 2006 Lebanon War and onto political manipulation. Was it "about the Middle East"? No. But it was the best genuine response to the Middle East I think I've been able to muster.

Lastly, Isaac has a fantastic response to that post and the discussion in general in which, among other things, he discusses his own experiences with anxieties. I think one of the thing he's getting at (and which 99Seats is sort of getting at) is the fact that we can't control when something we think isn't "about race" turns out to be "about race."

I recall my own experiences, in my AP English class, how after every book we read, there was always an essay response by a famous black writer about race issues in the book. Chinua Achebe on The Sound and the Fury, Ralph Ellison on The Heart of Darkness, I forget who I read writing a race issues paper Araby. The arguments range from right-on-target (Ellison's The Heart of Darkness essay is pretty apt, and, well, Joseph Conrad was writing about colonialism and The Congo) to kind of weak, weak tea (Achebe's response to The Sound and the Fury didn't really convince me at the time). Worse than that were the feminist responses we read after each (the one about The Heart of Darkness could and should have just said "There were no women in this book.")

Obviously, there are significant race issues in these books, but what irritated me was the dismissal of any possible content in the play that was not about race. All of the descriptions were reductive.

On the other hand, Ta-Nehisi Coates over at Atlantic Monthly uses Clueless to talk about the real goal: the seamless integration of characters of diverse backgrounds into the story being told.

Scott Walters Talks Diversity II: Don't Give Up On Quality.

99 Seats has a post up tackling the question of "Quality" as defended by those people who are against Scott's idea.

I wrote a much longer post as a response to Scott Walters' original post because, although I objected to his idea, I get nervous talking at length about diversity largely because I'm half North African, but because that North African heritage is Jewish I still usually count as Caucasian, and it's hard not to sound like a status quo apologist when you're arguing against a measure put forward in front of diversity.

Luckily, I get tossed something across my plate like 99 Seats, which is written not with just enough lazy scorn, calling the concern of people like me that the quality of plays might be important "The Quality Dodge."

Let me leave aside the implication that we're talking about the bad ideas of affirmative action and the implicit assumption that work from outside the mainstream system will necessarily be of lower quality. That's annoying and offensive enough. I'm having the most trouble with the circular logic of the argument.

First off, wasn't Scott talking about a form of Affirmative Action?

The numbers are put into a jar. Any play by a playwright that has certain characteristics the theatre wants to seek out (say, African-American or international or lower-class or rural, whatever) has additional slips put into the jar. And then a lottery is held.

In his scheme, he proposes not just a lottery, but a lottery in which the odds are deliberately inflated in the direction of certain groups of people. I'm not actually one of those people who have knee-jerk negative reactions to Affirmative Action--I think it was a very important move at the time, and I don't know if its continued utility pays off in a lot of forums. I also agree with the court's ruling in Bakke v. University of California that it is inappropriate for the government to continue the practice on legal grounds.

Anyways, I'm getting sidetracked. My point is that the "implication that we're talking about the bad ideas of affirmative action" is off-base because what Scott proposed was affirmative action. The lottery was only one part of his idea. The other part of his idea was gaming the lottery. Otherwise there's no guarantee that your lottery is going to be any more diverse than your selection process! After all, who says that an equal diverse group of people are submitting?

Secondly the "implicit assumption that plays outside the mainstream" is not the problem. I would be against a lottery system that only selected plays that have won Pulitzers. I would be against a lottery system that only selected Shakespeare plays. The point is, as someone who is in the position of choosing plays, I want to at least be able to say one thing: I chose that play. This is the play I felt strongly about, the one that I walked away from the process thinking it was mine. I wrote a post over at my theater company's blog about how producing a play is an act of love. I really mean that.

It's related to what seems like 99 Seats' central point about our concerns about quality:

What about the question of quality?, you ask. What about it? I'm sorry, I missed the memo where theatres only produce perfect plays. Did that suddenly happen? Sometimes you set out to produce a play and it turns out well. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes you think it turns out well and no one else does. There's always an element of chance in what we do. A while back, Don Hall quoted a Broadway producer who said, in essence, "If I'd produced all the plays I didn't and didn't produce the plays I did, the outcome would have been the same."

I mean, I don't know who that Broadway producer is, and honestly, that's exactly what's wrong with Broadway these days anyways. We're not talking "quality" in terms of successes, necessarily. The Broadway producer that put Assassins up on Broadway, I think, did something of quality that people across the country are indebted to, whether or not he could in any way be called successful. The point is that if I didn't produce all the plays I d and did produce all the plays I didn't, I'd have produced plays I didn't like rather than plays I feel strongly about.

If we're not going to put up plays we feel strongly about, why are we doing this? What is the point of diversity if it's not in the service of plays that we're passionate about, performances we're passionate about? What I'm afraid of (since 99 Seats asked) is that the theater field we're a part of becomes even more about putting on plays for so many reasons other than because we're trying to put on a good show.

99 Seats is aware of that danger. His criticism of many theaters today is not inaccurate:

One of the nice, tidy little lies we tell ourselves is that literary managers are out there, making decisions about which plays are being produced based solely on their personal tastes. That's only true for a small group of theatres. A lot of the major theatres, the ones less interested in new plays, are programming based on an already complicated rubric, one that involves whatever got the best recent review in the NY Times. Basically a lottery in and of itself.

I dunno what self-deluded straw man 99 Seats thinks actually believes that literary managers are perfect people doing their jobs right--but that sort of "oh no they're not the saints we thought they were" applies equally to Congressmen, police officers, and my mother. (By the way, Isaac responds here, and 99 Seats posts an insider response here) But this problem 99 Seats doesn't care about solving. On this problem, 99 Seats counsels:

Why not embrace the randomness, the chance and oddness of what we do?

Why should we embrace our failure on the issue of quality any more than we should embrace our failure on the issue of diversity? It would be equally easy for me to say "Why not just embrace the connection system of the MFA program and just help more black people get in?"

Just because a proposed solution is "extreme" doesn't mean it actually is a solution.

By arguing that there isn't some objective standard of what's good or not, but insisting that the theatres act as though there is, leads us down the same path we're on.

Two separate ideas just got lumped into one there. Nobody (or at least not me) is asserting that there is an objective standard of good, a golden ratio, a well-made play. But one of the most poisonous ideas that Post-modernism (which brought in a lot of great ideas but a few poisonous ones) brought to fore was the implication that because there is no objective standard of good, there are no standards of good at all. And that just simply is not true. The fact that standards might be relative doesn't give us an excuse to simply abandon the concept of good any more than the fact that moral good is relative allows us to just say "well shouldn't we embrace the randomness?"

That last point, by the way, is the subject of a thesis I'm writing and it's something I'm a bit steamed about lately, so I'm going to let it lie there.

My final point: diversity is worth fighting for. So is quality. I don't think we should settle for a solution that guts one for the other.

(also, just as I was finishing up this post, I saw Matthew Freeman's two sentence summation of the same idea I've been writing as:

I don't agree with Scott's provocative idea because I prefer choice over chance. If we stop trusting people to make real decisions, we give up on their ability to make good choices and grapple with complexity.

That's it exactly)

Conversation: Motives

99seats, who I sometimes disagree with but always appreciate listening to, has a post up about the quality of conversation in the theaterblogosphere, which mainly has to do with motives. Money quote:

When Theresa Rebeck writes about the lack of solid structure she sees in young playwrights, the conversation revolves around how it's really about why her plays aren't being well-received or something. When Roland Tec(o) accuses the O'Neill of being a rigged game, it's really about jealousy and sour grapes. When the O'Neill responds, it's really about covering their ass. When I write about the representation of black playwrights, it's really just a plea for more attention. Everyone's motives are questionable and we basically believe the absolute worst of each other. I'd say it's just out here in the blogosphere, but we all know how it is when we meet in the lobby, at the bar after the show, three blocks away from the theatre. (And that's even more gossip, isn't it?) The default is to not take anyone at face value. How do we build communities like that?

The conversation sparked by that piece was responded to by Isaac Butler here (basically, that the motives he's suspicious of are the motives of successful people, and usually he's not a suspicious guy) and by Spencer Ackerman here, who asks:

Would I have opened both barrels on a piece like that if a friend of mine hadn’t written it?

Well, in all honesty, probably, yeah. But that shouldn’t make me beat up on my friend. It should give me pause for when I go all-out on people who aren’t my friend. There should be one rigorous standard — no euphemism, no pulled punches, no intellectual sloppiness, but no unfairness either. Doesn’t mean I have to treat bad-faith arguments as good-faith ones, nor does it mean this blog can’t have fun. It certainly doesn’t mean this blog can’t have friends.

This is another reason I've not been happy about David Cote's "call to arms" for us to engage and enrage. When I look back at the blogosphere as I've been reading it, I haven't seen a reluctance for theater bloggers to spat over the things they feel like spatting over. I've seen all sorts of aspersions cast on the motives or standing of other bloggers--the insults I've seen thrown from Leonard Jacobs towards Isaac Butler or from just about anybody towards George Hunka haven't, in my opinion, served the conversation of theater much at all.

For me, it seems unproductive to question's people's motives when they make statements. For instance, in the example 99seats uses, Theresea Rebeck may be making her comments on the structure of plays because this is her personal belief, or because of her stature as a playwright. Does it matter? When it all boils down to it, even if she has the most corrupt reasoning in the world, if we can't dispute her points on their own weaknesses, then she is correct. If we can't find a cogent and persuasive counter-argument to her points about the structure of plays, then she is correct. If we can, then perhaps she is not. That's the "one rigorous standard" that Ackerman should be applying. That's something we can say to friends, right? "I love you, I respect you, but that last argument you just made has some faults in it."

This is one of the reasons the health-care debate has gone so awry. The Republicans are not debating the plan on its merits. They're simply railing about the "motives" behind the Obama administration. Why? Because it's so much easier! They don't have to make any substantive claims, or battle the Democrats in a forum where winning or losing is left up to the audience. They want to control the debate, so they aim for motives.

Now, I'm not saying we need to pretend that there are no motives. After all, sometimes motives can be part of the argument--if someone is interested in making profit and therefore their prescription for theater is profit-based, and you think that the prescription for theater shouldn't be profit based, then that's a legitimate debate about motives. It's very important to know what people's motives and biases are, as best as you can read them. That's why, for instance, I personally would prefer 99Seats not to be an anonymous blogger (although I can understand why he feels it to be necessary). It would help me understand where he's coming from.

But any argument can be reduced to its motives. If we didn't have motives, why would we speak? The argument itself, however, stands on its own. You can either engage it or ignore it. To fall back to character attacks rather than tackling the argument as put forward itself is not helpful. Liberals failed when they characterized Cheney as evil. When they stick to the rule of law, the systemic demonstration of how and where the law was violated, they can succeed.

In our own private domain, do we weigh other people's opinions based on our perspective on their motives? Sure. When I see a Ben Brantley review of a Richard Foreman piece, I can't help but think that he wants to feel "cool" and "with it" without really understanding the substance of the show at all, and when I see him cooing over a Broadway starlet I roll my eyes. But I still do read his reviews, because in context of his biases I do still often get something out of what he's saying. In fact, that's the power of Critic-o-meter, is that I can get a spread of different biases and imperfect reviews, get a senses to where they disagree and agree, and get a whole opinion.

Inspiration/Dramaturgy II : Play As A Construct III

Back to 99Seats' comments about playwrights needing to think consciously about their work, and my last post analyzing the ending structure of my play Orchestration (published by IndyMill Publishing), and I wanted to loop those two discussions back to each other.

When I first began the play, my initial image was born out of a Beirut concert (and specifically, the song "Mount Wroclai (Idle Days)"), and it basically involved a manic, spiraling waltz. It was also going to be a play specifically about Lebanese colonial history--that was my first conscious set of decisions about the play, and although they informed the end structure, I wound up making a different set of decisions, more abstract ones; dramaturgical decisions.

By the way, I'm using the term "Dramaturgical" to mean something a little bit broader than just decisions made based off of historical fact. For a while, I didn't really understand the purpose of a dramaturgist--I couldn't see the distinction between him and a director. This conversation is making me understand that the dramaturgical role is to think about the play in the conceptual, the theoretical, and the historical--in other words, in terms of the conscious--when the director is thinking inspirationally, making gut calls, etc. I still think that both functions should actually be the same person, or part of the same team equally, but as a concept I think that's the role of the dramaturgist.

When it came to the ending, though, I had a clear desire to have the play fall apart (in old Greek Tragedy, the character falls apart; it seems to me that the modernist tragedy involves the play itself falling apart). But I didn't know exactly how. I stumbled (inspirationally) on the image of him lashing out at the audience, kicking them out. My intuition was lead along by how people who lose control lash out: first by yelling (which is why I broke the silence of the piece with him yelling), then by cursing, then by violence (I put violence before yelling in the play later, as a decision), and then finally by withdrawal and rejection.

My dad (an executive in the software industry with a background in development) challenged me on this point, for good reason. He felt that the audience would feel rejected and insulted by me, the playwright, and that the play would therefore end on a strong negative feeling for the audience. I wanted that image to stay with them, but I didn't want them to feel assaulted; it was a balance.

This is when I used the Pragmatist model of decisionmaking, and one which I think artists should use when making decisions about their art. It's a strict way of looking at decisions on the stage, and it's based on William James' Pragmatism.

James was discussing whether or not there was a God, and he asked the question this way: Assume that there is a God. How would the world reflect that? Assume that there is no God. How would the world reflect that? The answers to the question are not as important as the question (his version of the answers to those questions is that in the present, everything would look and feel exactly the same, but in the far future it was the difference between a perfect ending and a slow decay into chaos).

I looked at my play and asked, "If I do _____, what effect does that have on the audience? How would ______ support my central ideas?" And then I selected the ending with the desired effects, and the best support of my central ideas.

The ending I selected (having the orchestrator kick out all of the audience, but having the ensemble and, crucially, myself as the writer-director greet them as they exited) answered the questions thus:

1. The ending would first give the audience the sympathy and fear of the collapse of the character, would blur the lines between the internal world of the play and the external--both conceptually, because the play is still going on as they exit, and physically because the characters are outside and they travel out of the theater while still experiencing the play. It would also create a sudden, important separation between the world as the orchestrator has created it and the world as I am running it, because I step in to say "hey guess what? The world isn't as negative as this pathetic wreck would force you to believe."
2. The ending strongly supports the conceptual frame I was operating under, Vaclav Havel's "Power of the Powerless", which states that power only exists as long as the powerful control the truth and the powerless operate under that truth. Once the ensemble rebels against the "Realism" of the orchestrator, the audience is invited out of that realism and into another realism of the real world. Simply by greeting them at the door, I retain the right to completely disassemble his world, without having to directly oppose him in any way. That fits in with the conceptual narrative, and therefore it's the right ending.

Of the thousand of endings I can imagine now, none of them fit the test any better -- although I'd love to hear some better-fit endings! (When I adapted Orchestration for film I had to adjust the ending because in film, it had different impact on the audience).

Pragmatic Theater: Realism and The Play As A Construct I

Unlike many of my classmates, I spent the spring of my freshman year reading the entire book of translated Brecht essays, rather than the ones that were assigned ("The Modern Theater Is The Epic Theater" and "Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting"). Now, I know why those two essays are assigned--in terms of the larger history of theater, those are the two that mark the clearest antithesis to Aristotle's Poetics, but in terms of understanding Brecht (and Brecht is a personal hero for me, the man who forms the very core of my artistic sensibility), I think that those essays are poor representatives.

Brecht was a person who loved to contradict himself. He gets the impression of being a radical, especially because the first of the two essays is quite a radical tract. Actually, he turns out to be quite the moderate, pragmatic thinker. He's not interested in things that don't work. That's why when you read Mother Courage and All Her Children, he's not actually driving out all the emotion--he understands that Mother Courage has to be a pathetic character on some level to be compelling. He pushes the form as far as will work (and, admittedly, sometimes too far).

Late in his life, he began outlining a shift in thinking, creating a theory called the Dialectical Theater that would encapsulate both his Epic Theater and the Aristotilian theater he sought to get away from. That dialectical theater is what I really fell in love with, despite the fact that he never got to really articulate it. But I think it was always present in the contradictions within his work.

At any rate, the one thing that gets said most about Brecht is that he's an anti-realist. Brecht himself noticed that, and he wrote one of my favorite essays by him called "The Popular And The Realistic." In it, he puts forward that his theater isn't anti-realistic. Now, he admits freely that it isn't naturalistic, but in terms of realism, he says:

We must not abstract the one and only realism from certain given works, but shall make a lively use of all means, old and new, tried and untried, deriving from art and deriving from other sources, in order to put living reality in the hands of living people in such a way that it can be mastered.

Later on, he says more succinctly:

Our conception of realism needs to be broad and political, free from aesthetic restrictions and independent and convention. Realist means laying bare society's causal network...

He goes on, listing other benchmarks for the term "realist" all of which come from his own socialist interpretation, and which isn't so applicable to day. But you could reword that last sentence to be "Realist means revealing something about the world today."

That's the Pragmatist, moderate Brecht (I have already dubbed my theater aesthetic the Pragmatic Theater, after the pragmatist philosopher William James). What he's saying is that "realism" isn't a certain style of theater (and he's talking about living-room, fly-on-a-wall Ibsen naturalism), it's the accuracy of the play to reality, and in that pursuit we are allowed to use any aesthetic tools necessary.

The reason I use the capital P Pragmatist to describe this Brecht is because this dovetails beautifully into James' model of how we learn knowledge (I've lent someone that book, so I can't quote directly from it, which is tragic). James describes our system of worldview as being the accumulation of rules-of-thumb that we've tested against reality, and we don't change our worldview until something we test it against makes it fail, and then we make the shortest change possible to keep our worldview. That's why when something minor unexpected happens you don't tear your entire worldview down, and you don't often just suddenly change your worldview unprompted.

That's how our audience views our play: they have their worldview, and they test what we put on the stage against it, and if what we're representing matches the world as they understand it, it feels True to them. That's "Realism."

Should we challenge their worldview? Yes. But that doesn't mean negating it (as much of the combatitive, negativistic art of the 1970s and 1980s did), it means finding a way to make their worldview incompatable with itself. If you can make your audience aware of a sudden, deep contradiction, they'll do the questioning of their own worldview. That's what "subversive" really means; it means that the audience follows the logic every step of the way, until they suddenly find that things don't add up. Stephen Colbert does this very well (I could talk for hours about how Colbert is the third big Pragmatist after Brecht and James).

Now, the one thing that Brecht gave to this "realism," and which he is rightfully remembered for, is the idea that acknowledging the play as a construct can be part of realism. We didn't think it was realism, of course, so we put it in its own category, but that doesn't make it untrue. He tried to lay guidelines for how you can incorporate the play into realism, and not have to pretend (which is the true opposite of realism; pretending and lying).

I was going to get to my own view on the Play as a Construct, but I think that's going to be my next post. Too many words makes the baby go blind.

Problem II: Inspiration/Dramaturgy

I was just thinking about something 99Seats said the other day:

Where is the sense of our work as art, as something to discuss, to consider, something that's created with forethought and precision and consciousness?

The discussion was in the context of playwrights' writing from their "subconscious", and the dangerous view that

we, the artist, are just the vessel it passes through, the "voices speak to us and we just write down what they say."

I agree strongly with his criticism, although with the caveat that some people should write that way in the first draft. The first time I sit down to a play, it starts as a gut-instinct conversation between ideas in my mind, or an image that I imagine that sweeps me up in the moment and I try to transcribe it. If I don't have that, and try to simply write down an idea I had, I very rarely will get beyond the first page, because, well, even I won't give a shit.

On the other hand, at a certain point, that inspiration will only get you so far. That's when you tap your cerebrum on the shoulder and go "Hey dude, what needs to happen next?" And then the cerebrum builds a structure for more inspiration to fit into, so that the next time you get inspired you can fit those inspirations together into something that means something.

Anyways, so with that discussion in mind, the sentence also caught me off guard because I remembered that the thing I love most is the art of it, and in-and-among my own art policy, I need to actually think more about the art--the aesthetic of it. Maybe that's why I haven't written much creative over the last few months, I've been thinking in blocks of rational prose.

On the other hand, my output of rational prose has dropped off lately, and my creative work is picking back up. So I'm going to ride that wave and get back to thinking about aesthetics, structure, and everything I love.

Thanks, 99Seats!