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.)

Yes.

Regarding Formal Exclusion

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

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

Matt Freeman responded by throwing down the gauntlet:

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

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

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

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

MY EXPERIENCE AS A PRODUCER

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MY EXPERIENCE AS A DIRECTOR

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

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

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

MY EXPERIENCE AS A PLAYWRIGHT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TO CONCLUDE

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

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

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.

Diversity XXIII: The Checklist

I was reminded by the Guardian's blog post today about our last dust-up about diversity, which started with Scott's lottery proposal. (I won't link to all the significant conversation it started, but the Guardian blog post is a good overview)

At the time, I hashed out pretty clearly what my disagreement with it was, but I forgot to say the one philosophical point on which I agreed with it -- that it tried to find away to address implicit bias in the selection process. As I'm sure I don't need to say, even casting directors/hiring managers/etc. who think that they are open-minded demonstrate biases in their hiring practices. To cite just one example, a study in the American Economic Review found that blind auditions significantly increases the chance that women will be advanced or higher. The reason for this is because it takes away all of the extraneous biasing factors out of the hands of the auditioner and allows them simply to judge on the music. This is why many theaters that judge plays also judge blindly, and that's not exactly a new tactic.

But recently, I heard Atul Gawande's interview on NPR (and was reminded of it by The Daily Show's interview) about his book, the Checklist Manifesto.

The crux of the manifesto is this: every time a checklist is developed of things that you have to remember to avoid infection, and you force doctors to go through that checklist, rates of infection go down. The increase in positive medical outcomes is measurable, and at the end of the process, 80% of doctors say that the checklist improved outcomes and saved lives-- and 92% say that they want the doctor who's operating on them to use a checklist.

But the key revelation, I found, was the difference between those two numbers - the 12% of doctors who think the checklist is hogwash, but still want their doctors to use it. Partly that might be Pascal's Wager at work, but Dr. Gawande has some insight on why else that might be.

You see, even though he developed a checklist and insisted on its use, he didn't think he needed it himself. He thought the checklist was for other doctors. And yet, he too couldn't escape the data: his patients did better when he had a checklist. He didn't make as many mistakes.

The case in which checklists were used were to prevent carelessness. But I think the checklist idea might be able to address diversity... if you can figure out what belongs on the checklist.

So I call upon you, internet: say I'm the head of an organization who wants to ensure diversity in hiring practices. What would you have me put on my checklist?

If You've Just Come To This Blog From The Guardian

I'm always pleased when the Guardian's online blog includes me in a recap of one of the theater-sphere's rolicking debates. Earlier today, they posted a recap of the debate around race sparked off by Thomas Garvey's response to RVCBard.

I just wanted to say two things, if you're just arriving now and missed it:

1. I responded to Isaac's charge, quoted at the end of the piece, that I was taking Thomas Garvey in good faith here.
2. One odd omission from the Guardian piece is RVCBard's stance on the issue, since after all it was her comments that Garvey latched onto and started the whole thing, and without her the issue would probably have died away much quicker and been less interesting. Anyways, this is her biggest response to the debate, and this is her last one. They're crucial to understanding what happened.

In Context Of Our Latest Discussion

I don't have much to add to this post from the incomparable Ta-Nehisi Coates. The focus is on systems, which I always find to be more useful than focusing on individuals. The lines that really struck me:

The point isn't that all white people are somehow guilty. The point is that a choice between guilt/innocence wasn't really present. It had to be created and it carried with it significant social costs.

Diversity XXI: Race in the Theater. Or rather, Race in Conversation

Not much I can say on the subject except:

Part 1 - RVCBard

Part 2 - Thomas Garvey

Part 3 - 99 Seats

There's a lot of rage out there. A few brief thoughts:

1. Thomas Garvey says: "But please, try to skip the temptation to continue the "ongoing dialogue." Let's not "dialogue" anymore - let's just bring city services to Roxbury instead, okay? Let's just pass national healthcare. Let's improve education. Let's move forward."
   
   
   Sorry - you can't stop a dialogue, unfortunately. There will always be a dialogue about race. That's just the way it goes.
   
   
2. 99 Seats says: "Did I mention fuck you? Because, if I didn't, hey, pal, fuck you."
   
   
   It's a tough conversation we're having, and I believe you're pissed. And you make some good criticisms of Mr. Garvey. Imagine how much more powerful that post would be if it wasn't lost in a sea of fucking.
   
   
3. The part of RVCBard's original post that start all of this: "In contrast, my experiences with White people have been confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting in this regard. I can't quite put my finger on why, but I always feel a kind of pressure to perform around White people. It's like I have to prove I'm worthy of their presence. It's proven very difficult to get a White person's attention, especially a White man's. It's even harder to maintain it for more than about 15 minutes. And if you're White, and you met me in person, I'm probably talking about you."
   
   Time for some carefully chosen words.
   
   Well, as someone who I guess is white (half-African doesn't count for me because it's Jewish African... anyways) sometimes it is confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting for the White People too. That's what Chris Matthews was talking about. NOT THAT I AGREE WITH WHAT HE IS SAYING. But Matthews has been told a lot that he's racist (because sometimes he is), and he doesn't want to be, so he's relieved for a moment to escape that confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting feeling.
   
   If you've read good books on this subject like Blink or a million others, you understand that there's a difference between what I usually call hard racism, where like Strom Thurmond you actually believe that one race is better than all others and it should be raised to the top, or soft racism, which can either be stupidity/ignorance like Chris Matthews or institutional and unconscious.
   
   There's a study that shows that blind auditions can greatly improve the diversity of an orchestra. This is not a proof of hard racism -- it's a proof of soft racism. The problem is that seemingly open-minded people may, inadvertently, through tricks of their own unconscious mind, wind up mis-evaluating different applicants based on their race.
   
   The point is, we White Americans want to bridge this gap. But sometimes, we're going to screw up the way we screw up at a lot of things we want to do.
   
   Why am I rambling on this way?
   
   Well, from our half of the conversation, RVCBard, here's what happens. We show up to a meeting with someone who says that this is a White Supremacist country and is clearly on her guard to smell us out: are we the White man who's playing fair, or are we in the category of racists? And we know that we're open-minded, but we also know that
   
   So we want to be on our best behavior. We're nervous, and self-conscious. Like in sex, the more nervous we get, the less pleasant the experience is, and the more likely we are to screw up. It is, as you put it, "confusing, uncomfortable, frustrating, and exhausting." Then it becomes a Catch-22 -- we're confused, uncomfortable, frustrated, and you're confused, uncomfortable, and frustrated, and the chances we'll try it again are low.
   
   Does this mean I agree with Thomas Garvey, then, that it's Black people's fault, and y'all need to move on?
   
   NO.
   
   Thomas Garvey thinks the way to solve the difficulty of this conversation is to avoid it. It's irritating, and as all three players have demonstrated it can lead to incredible anger. But we can't avoid the conversation. I'm not so concerned about the frustrated/uncomfortable quality of the conversation as I am by the people who get up after 15 minutes.
   
   Part of it is we like to pretend that we're not having the conversation. White people meet Black people but they don't want to be talking about race. I don't like talking about it. And nobody wants our only dialogue to be "hey I'm black you're white let's talk about that" / "hey I'm white I don't really know what you're experience is like." And yet it may be necessary.
   
   

I don't know if I made the point I was trying to make (I thought I only had a few thoughts but it turned out to take a lot of words). I'm nervous to hit "Publish Post" because, well, it's so much easier for me not to post this and for me not to weigh in on this issue.

At least I'm not the only Jew who feels this way:

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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.

Diversity XX: OOB Diversity

The fantastic folks at the New York Innovative Theater Awards have published a report on the demographics of Off-Off Broadway. It seems to fall in line with my previous belief that in some areas we make diversity happen (women are slightly disproportionally over-represented as producers, men as playwrights, just to take one random dataset). One of the more surprising results, actually, his how in many areas we fall roughly along national averages (income, for instance, although most of that income is not from Off-Off-Broadway), or race (I think our slightly disproportionally low percentage of African-Americans might be explained by our slightly disproportionally high percentage of people identifying as "multiracial."

(I say this, by the way, with the caveat that I'm not really highly versed in statistical analysis. These are just my impressions as I read through).

So, I guess the take-away is that we on Off-Off-Broadway are young, well educated, politically motivated, and then... basically average.

Oh dear. I don't know if we're going to like that...

Diversity XIX: Paying The Rent

Don Hall steps into the diversity whirlpool with a proposal:

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

Scott Walters is happy, and adds:

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

Scott does go on to note:

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, Don, for contributing another good idea!

Diversity XIII: Comments and Leadership

For the thirteenth, and thusly unlucky, part of the diversity discussion... I give you Harry Reid, ladies and gentlemen!

The authors quote Reid as saying privately that Obama, as a black candidate, could be successful thanks, in part, to his "light-skinned" appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

The internet is of divided opinion about whether, as Michael Steele demands, Reid should resign. For instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is, not to mince words, an African-American himself and is probably better to judge the level of offensiveness/impact of Reids words -- TNC says this:

I think you can grant that, in this era, the term "Negro dialect" is racially insensitive and embarrassing. That said, the fair-mind listener understands the argument--Barack Obama's complexion and his ability to code-switch is an asset. You can quibble about the "light skin" part, but forget running for president, code-switching is the standard M.O. for any African American with middle class aspirations.

But there's no such defense for Trent Lott. Lott celebrated apartheid Mississippi's support of Strom Thurmond, and then said that had Thurmond won, "we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years.'' Strom Thurmond run for president, specifically because he opposed Harry Truman's efforts at integration. This is not mere conjecture--nearly half of Thurmond's platform was dedicated to preserving segregation. The Dixiecrat slogan was "Segregation Forever!" (Exclamation point, theirs.) Trent Lott's wasn't forced to resign because he said something "racially insensitive." He was forced to resign because he offered tacit endorsement of white supremacy--frequently.

The distinction TNC is making is one I made before in an old post called Hard Racism vs. Soft Racism; actual hate as compared with racial insensitivity:

"Hard" racism is an extreme form of racism. "Hard" racism is holding the belief that one or more races are inferior to one or more races. Adolf Hitler was a hard racist. Racial eugenicists are hard racists. Jim Crow Laws are hard racist laws. They codify the notion that one race of people is objectively (in their eyes) worse than another race of people. People who speak hard racism aloud are tagged, unequivocally, as bigots.

Today, we don't see nearly as much of that. But what we do see is a lot more of "soft" racism. "Soft" racism is hard to define. "Soft" racism is non-absolute; it does not hold that one race is absolutely worse than another. But it has a lot of negative connections with a race. One type of soft racism is ignorance. Another sort of soft racism is resentment.

(...)

[S]oft racism can usually be bridged by better communication, more cooperation, and more information.

TNC is right; what Trent Lott said was hard racism in gloves; the feeling that the Segregationalist candidate (who was definitely a hard racist) should have won is not the same as some outdated and insensitive language.

However.

I do not agree, as Isaac seems to be leaning, and as folks like TNC or Ezra Klein seem to be holding, that Reid shouldn't resign as Majority leader.

Now, let's make a quick distinction: Reid has three choices ahead of him: to step down as majority leader, to step down from the senate, or to apologize and move on. He appears to be taking option three.

Now, Trent Lott took option one. I think what was morally obligated of Trent Lott was to take option two, and resign from the senate completely. He was a bigot, and there should be no room in the Senate for bigots. Strom Thurmond should have been long gone too, but I guess bigots like Lott and Thurmond still represent their states adequately enough for their states' tastes.

I think Reid should take option one. I don't think he did something inexcusable. But when we look to our leadership, we demand something more than just actions that are "excusable." We demand leadership that is to be looked up to -- in fact, that leads.

If these comments reveal anything, it is that Harry Reid is behind the times. And we, as Democrats (if you are a Democrat, that is, o hypothetical reader) should push for a majority leader who best represents where we are now, where we are today.

Obama had a very stirring (for me at least) passage in his book Audacity of Hope where he describes going to meet Senator Robert Byrd who, many years ago, was a white supremacist. Many people told him to snub Byrd and skip the meeting. He went to the meeting, and he got some sort of a pseudo-apology, and Byrd basically acknowledged "I was wrong, I was behind the times." That's very laudable of Byrd to realize. But he's not the man I want leading our party.

Think of it from the perspective of a young, capable black man who might want to run for office. If the Democratic party is willing to tolerate leadership who are insensitive on the issue of race, who are clearly outdated, then we're going to lose some of those talented people, who don't want to be part of an organization that tolerates that. They're not going to feel represented.

And I don't want to hear the phrase "How could they think that -- we elected Barack Obama President." We don't just prove these things once. We have to prove them every day.

As a for instance, when Proposition 8 passed in California, the aftermath claimed the job of artistic director Scott Eckern who had donated to the pro-Prop 8 campaign in accordance with his Mormon faith. I think that was the right choice for the California Musical Theatre. As an organization, they have the choice of leaders to present to the community. They communicate their values as an organization through who they put forward as a "leader."

The word "leadership" means something.

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.

Diversity X: The Evolution Metaphor Again

Really quickly: the fact that diversity is contextual is what makes it diversity. If one set of adaptations in evolution were always the right one, there'd be no such thing as biodiversity -- there would be a homogenous population of creatures that all had stumbled their way towards the same set of adaptation. Evolution is driven not genetically, but by the environments creatures find them in.

That's why the New York centrism is part of the diversity problem. If we have a system in which there's only one environment where theater can thrive at all, then we're not going to have a lot of diversity.

In fact, one thing that might help diversity would be to have diverse methods of production and distribution. A multiplicity of contexts in a multiplicity of communities will be far more likely to produce diversity than trying to find a way to get a diverse number of people to apply for the same ten not-for-profit theaters in New York City.

Diversity IX: What I Learned From Dawkins

What I hope will turn out to be a quick thought (although I think I've said that before and I think I've been wrong):

Richard Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is a must-read, folks. Dawkins' ability to explain evolution is second to none. I promise you, you may think you understand evolution, but you don't really understand how it works until you read The Selfish Gene. One of the key points, for instance, is an explanation of individual benefit as opposed to gene benefit.

Anyways, the other important idea that Dawkins instilled in me -- I mean, I knew it, but I didn't really know it (it wasn't reified as my teacher Mary Overly would say) -- was an understanding that genetic benefit is extremely contextual. The point where he excels at demonstrating this is when he shows that "enlightened self-interest" tends to win out over "greed" or "altruism" (that's an extremely reductive interpretation of an already extremely reductive example).

I think we need to remember that not only is quality/value extremely contextual, so is diversity.

To explain.

I ran some demographic analysis on my theater company this week. It's very weak and shorthand and everything, but I learned the following:

• Major regions in the United States are about equally represented: North-East, South, Mid-West are just about equal; North-West is under-represented, and California (my home state) is over-represented.
• Regions outside the United States are poorly represented. Obviously the sample size is too small to make too big a judgment, but the island territory of Puerto Rico is more represented than usual. Not that surprising, because one of my fellow leaders in the organization is Puerto Rican and it was her show to direct, cast, and staff. Other than that, it's just Germany and Israel, one each.
• Gender is actually almost over-balanced in favor of women. Only 2 of 9 of our permanent staff are men; there's only one man in a leadership position out of five (that's me). When you include non-permanent members (people who are only involved on a per-show basis) men are better represented, but they don't break 40%.
• Age diversity is a complete failure; with the exception of our upcoming show Hamlet, our age range is firmly 20-23, with an outlier at 19. If you include Hamlet, we've got someone in her seventies and the median moves further up, but it's still mostly recent-graduates. This is partly because Hamlet was trying to recruit more older folks, but found it difficult to get older folks to commit a lot of time to an unpaid show, the first fully professional show of a brand-new company.
• Educational diversity is basically a complete failure, with almost everyone involved in the company coming on board because they have a recent BFA in NYU. Plus side - no one has an MFA!
• In our little NYU world, though, we have diverse approaches to theater; folks whose primary training was based on Grotowski, Strasberg, Mamet, Adler, and Meisner. Of course, that's like saying we have a broad diversity from within Manhattan's boroughs (we don't, actually, we're very solidly a Brooklyn/Lower Manhattan gang).
• Ethnic diversity is also low -- after Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic is the next category, but there's low turnout from Africa or Asia, nothing Native American, and I'm not sure I qualify as Middle-Eastern "enough."

Speaking of nationality versus ethnicity, it is difficult to decide sometimes which box to place some of my companions in. I'm half-North African and half Polish, was born in Israel but grew up in California. Also, being Jewish makes me ethnically distinct from the North African or Polish sides (I once had a daydream about running for office in Greenpoint and using my Polish ancestry as a way to get the foot in the door, but I realized that as soon as I explained that the reason I left Poland was because the Polish tried to slaughter every single person in my family and their community, it would turn out that we don't have as much in common as I thought).

Recently, NYU paid another attempt at diversity -- a play that a teacher was passionate about, set at the moment when the Civil Rights movement and the Women's Rights movement decided to split.

I thought about auditioning. I walked into the office and said, "Can I have the sides for the audition?"

The lady at the desk (who is my friend and who I know quite well) said, "Here are your white man sides."

Good lord. Is that the sum of who I am?

It reminds me of how the "dark-skinned Southern Europeans" used to not be considered white. Certainly, Jews weren't considered white until the second half of this century. And definitely, definitely this isn't a bad thing. And definitely, definitely I wouldn't equate my struggles with anyone who comes from genuinely discriminated communities.

All I'm saying is, if you're going to talk about increasing diversity, it might be important to talk about which diversity you want. For instance, the proposal to increase access to public school to arts education will address income diversity directly -- and racial diversity indirectly -- but it won't do a lick of good for international diversity.

So has my company accomplished diversity? When my professor talked about the low percentage of women in leadership positions, I smile -- it's hard for me to find talented male men to recruit to fit my needs. On the other hand, when John, who is directing our Hamlet, insists that we have to find more older people, and turns down perfectly qualified people my age because he wants to find someone older, I want to blush with shame.

Anyways, the reason I bring up this contextual diversity because I feel like this current generation of theatermakers is more diverse than the previous generation. For instance, calling for 50/50 by 2020 is a goal that I think is very achievable. In fact, if you look at womens' participation in my arts program, men have become quite underrepresented.

On the other hand, I don't see the same shift happening for low-income communities (in which certain ethnic communities are overrepresented). In the economy as a whole, the disparity between rich and poor is increasing, and access to equal arts education has been declining (even though education appears to be slowly improving in general).

Things to think about.

Diversity VIII: Scott Returns to Quality... And Value

So, Scott brings up an interesting post by August Schulenberg (whose blog I also could swear I'd been subscribed to... what is going on, Google Reader?)

Schulenberg introduces a second concept, value, as distinct from quality:

Quality is concerned with the use of a medium within an aesthetic tradition.

Value is concerned with the role of that tradition within a society.

Quality looks at how art works. Value looks at why.

Okay. That's not how I'd have defined the two words, but that's a semantic difference and one that's unimportant -- let's use the way he speaks right now.

Scott acknowledges that the first half of his post uses the word quality to mean quality, and the second half of the post uses quality to mean value, in the Schulenburg formulation (I hope you're glad I used those two words back-to-back!). He acknowledges that his shift in the use of the word formed a contradiction in his argument. So we're in agreement again.

It was this that led me to propose the play lottery model: sort out those plays that we all would likely agree don't meat[sic] levels of dramaturgical competence, and then, at the point where agreement yields to individual values (which we sometimes call "subjective," as in "quality is subjective"), allow chance to take over. Why? Because otherwise, the decisions that are made concerning plays that are produced are strongly reliant on what devilvet calls "resonance," i.e., the way a particular play vibrates within my individual soul, what I personally "value."

In this passage, it doesn't look like quality and value are two separate ideas anymore. Instead, "competence" (which sounds to me like "basic quality") is merely the approximation of the most "shared value." But at the same time, if we're talking about one group of folks (the "in-crowd") trying to evaluate the basic quality of another group of folks (the disenfranchised), they're going to use their "shared values" (read: monoculture) to resist another group of folks' shared values.

I think that most of the screening that shuts out diversity actually happens at the "basic competence" level, rather than the "subjective resonance" level.

Take a play like The Lily's Revenge. It reflects a set of values that are decidedly not in the monoculture: significant parts of it are attacks on theater, the basic message is that of free love in the actual, literal sense, it attacks the institution of marriage (not "hey gays should have marriage too" but "marriage is an oppressive, out-dated institution" -- a lot of people who are perfectly comfortable with gays marrying would be very, very hesitant to imagine a culture without marriage, no matter how falsely that construct resonates today in the era of Clinton/Sanford/Woods/Spitzer/Paterson/Edwards/Palin/Giuliani/Rove/etc.).

Suppose I was going to try and establish "basic competence" about this play, as a package

• It has 40 characters
• It has 6 director
• It has five acts and spans five hours long
• Ass-licking occurs frequently
• The audience is forbidden from using their cell phones during act breaks as part of the show
• Much of the dialog is lifted verbatim from an extremely esoteric book of essays by a quite out-of-the-mainstream philosopher in extremely technical language
• Act two is written in verse and haiku

The show, on paper, looks like it will take a fortune to produce, take far more man/woman/other-power than you could ever expect, and is very, very likely to alienate even the avant garde theater audience. I'm fairly sure any average measure of competence would drop that script in the "REJECTED" pile without so much as a glance-through.

Why did that show get produced and wind up on many New York critics' top-ten theater lists? Because of resonance. This show resonated for the producing team very strongly, and they were willing to fight for it as hard as they could.

And then, separately, there's this ending for Scott:

However, given that our commerical and regional theatres are mostly not producing using a permanent or even semi-permanent ensemble, but are instead jobbing in artists for individual projects, then wouldn't it be possible that an artistic team could be put together that was, in fact, passionate about a play that has been chosen via weighted lottery? Couldn't resonance be hired?

You can put together a team that's passionate about anything. If you watch talk shows as much as I do, you'll see some very, very delightfully passionate people who, unfortunately, are working on shows that nobody outside of their theater is passionate about. To borrow from a cultural touchstone, I'm fairly sure that the cast and producer of Moose Murders were passionate about their show. In fact, think about the people who knowing its reputation as one of the worst plays in history decided to stage it anyways. And hell -- maybe someone out there managed to turn Moose Murders into a relevant show. If they did, I hope they sent Frank Rich some tickets, because that man needs closure.

One of the most inspiring things I've ever heard in this industry was a Broadway understudy who told a group of students (including me) that if you strive to be the best person you can be, you're striving to be the best artist you can be. That person was understudying All Shook Up, which was one of the more morose theater-going experiences I've ever had.

So my feeling is actually getting stronger, that not only does a lottery system not improve diversity, it actually gives away quality without giving anything in return.

And if so, what happens to our belief that a commitment to diversity leads inevitably to lower quality? At what point do we give priority to our values?

I don't have a belief that a commitment to diversity leads inevitably to lower quality. I believe the following:

1. Diversity can be grafted on, or grown in.
2. Diversity that is grafted on lowers quality.
3. Diversity that is grown in increases quality, because it increases resonance.

If we want to grow in diversity, we do have to water the diversity that's out there (give them more opportunities, fight on their behalf more, etc.), but at some point we have to tackle the roots of diversity. Arts education, not just for those who go to elite schools, but for those all over the country.

Again the demand for us to choose when we'd be willing to sacrifice "value" for diversity. It isn't us who believe that diversity will lower value, it's you, Scott. I just simply don't believe we will get more diversity with a lottery, not if there's a "basic competence" test -- and if there isn't a basic competence test, how will we get diversity?

I'm not saying that the lottery system wouldn't work sometimes. Obviously no matter how random an event is, eventually it comes true. I just think that the odds are lower than proactive attempts to massage towards betterness.

After all, wasn't one of your original contentions that the current system is basically random? If that is true, then why wouldn't it have surfaced the next great diverse writer? My answer is because a select needed few have too much power, and people don't have equal access to put their slips in the jar. I don't see how how a Lincoln Center lottery would fix that. But I can imagine it reducing diversity, as well as reducing value.

Unless your "Basic competence" test was really just a test of "is this playwright black." But I don't think that's what you were proposing, I really don't think so at all.

Anyways, I'm really glad that you're sticking by your guns, Scott. I'm sitting at home having come home early terribly ill, and it's a treat to sit here and distract myself with the big things in life.

Diversity VII: Death of Monoculture

This is going to be a short post because I'm starting to come down with a bad cold and my brain is getting fuzzy, but to tack on to my last post, where I talked about how diversity in theater is also going to be partly about diversity in audience.

I happened to re-look over Isaac's recent post about the death of monoculture in response to an NPR segment which I happened to hear as well, when it aired.

Isaac uses the death of monoculture meme to talk about our frustration that theater isn't changing fast enough, and briefly at the end gets to what the death of monoculture meme is really about:

We experience (To some extent) this sea change going on all over the place and wonder why the art form we love the most, that we are the most dedicated to, isn't changing at the pace of everything else. It's frustrating. And meanwhile, those who do not care about or are actively opposed, particularly those who define "good" as "coming out of the aesthetics of white male majoritarian culture" feel particularly threatened. With everything else changing, there's something comforting about institutional theater to those attached to that monoculture.

I think that's what 99Seats and Scott Walters mean when they talk about the "quality dodge." They're assuming that we're all rallying behind the artistic director in terms of perpetuating the monoculture (or, if you'd prefer, the "European patriarchal system" if you're in the 1960s). Some people are, but some of us aren't, in the same way that some opponents of the Single-Payer System are against health-care reform and other opponents of the Single-Payer System just don't think it's the most effective form of health-care reform.

If you reread Scott's post, it makes a lot more sense if you rephrase the argument as "Quality is irrelevant if you define quality as matching the whims of monoculture. Quality is relevant if you define quality as relevant to the local culture." That's a statement I could definitely get behind. I still would disagree with him that a lottery system would accomplish that shift, but it'd be nice to have common ground.

It doesn't surprise me, by the way, that after Isaac talked about monoculture, he reflected on why the Audience Matters.

So maybe what we need to do is figure out how our culture became mono-culture and take aim at that. The MFA-problem is one aspect of that, the New York centrism is another aspect of that, the inequity in access to arts education from an early age is (I think the most important) aspect of that.

And whereas Isaac is correct in his post that YouTube doesn't making doing theater any cheaper, one of his commenters (Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist!) points out:

People worry that the art of theatre and live performances are dying, but I disagree. In fact, I would argue that youtube (and Vimeo) have helped people to have a better appreciation for the arts and would introduce them to something new, something different. Now all you have to do is look up "Kabuki theatre" or "Bali puppet show" and you'll find a clip. This, in turn, will inspire people to read up on this and even get involved.

In a way, what technology leverages to us is an audience that has equal access to culture. Hopefully that'll be a more diverse audience, and then we'll start to turn the tide on this.

Diversity VI: Quality is Interactive? No, Diversity is Interactive

This diversity thing is fun!

I fell asleep thinking of Scott Walters' post discussing quality last night. I want to take something he said as a jumping off point for a reflection this morning. He said:

I think quality is interactive. Like a rainbow, which exists only when rain, sunlight, and an observing eye are in proper relation to each other, quality exists when a play with certain characteristics in a production with certain characteristics interacts with an audience who recognizes, appreciates, and is able to interpret those characteristics.

I agree. But maybe that speaks to our problem in diversity: a problem that has just as much to do with the audience as it has to do with the playwrights and the artistic directors. I couldn't find any good statistics on the demographics of theater-goers (I found plenty on Broadway, but I don't know if that's representative of theater as a whole -- I mean, I bet it's not), so I'll try and research more when I'm not jotting this down in a hurry to get my ideas on the page.

The problem is, if a play is considered to be quality based on its interaction with the audience, what does it mean to have a dwindling, educated, homogenizing audience?

I will say this: one of my classmates is the child of illegal immigrants who grew up in South Central LA. When I heard on NPR recently that California's latest round of budget cuts had basically decimated what was left of LA's arts-in-schools program and its ground-breaking jazz in parks, my heart broke to think that I would have even less of odds of working with anyone else from that same background.

Before we reach the level of MFA or not MFA, there's a moment in elementary school where students either get involved in the arts, or they don't -- even if they won't become art-makers in the future, they will become the arts audiences. As budgets get cut and public school scale back their programs, increasingly that moment is becoming only available to school districts in wealthy neighborhoods, or to private schools.

If that's the case, then the cards are being stacked against the arts to begin with. If arts are something only the wealthy, educated few receive, then no duh the arts are going to be made by the wealthy, educated few.

Diversity V: Quality Again

I just realized now, as I was going through my media contacts figuring out who I should invite to my production of Hamlet in the Spring, and I realized that my feed for Scott Walters' Theatre Ideas blog was broken. No wonder I've been missing out on him.

I'm glad I did spot it, because he just put up a post answering the blogosphere's response to his lottery idea.

The post begins with a recap of the debate so far. He notes, not inaccurately, that he has largely been dismissed and belittled on the idea. Before I launch back in to disagreeing strongly with him, I want to say what I've been saying every time I've posted on the subject: that he's a very sharp and provocative thinker, and that my disagreement on this subject doesn't lessen my respect for him. He uses a lot of verbs like "howling," "decrying," "huffing," and "puffing" to characterize the blogosphere's response to his ideas. I have no idea if he's come across my post (he apologizes for not being able to track all of the comments he had read, and I don't blame him, considering the viral nature of the post, at least in the realm of theater-blogging).

Alright, meat and potatos time:

Which leads to the thesis for this post: quality doesn't exist.

Ho boy. The thesis of that post is exactly the opposite of the thesis I'm about to embark on for my degree. In a way, I'm really lucky he's advancing this argument. It's time to tangle.

Let's follow the argument:

The reason it doesn't exist is that we define it, when we bother to define it at all (usually it is some vague assumption), in contradictory terms that simulatenously reveal the arbitrary and ideological source of our concept.

I don't disagree that quality is very difficult to find, seemingly very arbitrary. I think the excellent book for this purpose is The Reasons of Love. Frankfurt's argument is very subtle, but the best way for me to recap it is thus:

1. Caring about things is inherent to us.
2. If we try to objectively define why what is important to us is important, we can't--because we can't evaluate importance without having some sort of standard of importance to compare it to.
3. The reason we care about things is because we need some way of determining how best to act.

That's the central important that caring -- love -- importance -- quality -- has to play in our lives. If we have no way to evaluate theater, how can we care about it? Why not just roll around naked in honey? Why would it matter if theater is diverse? Why would it matter that we participate at all?

Given our seeming attachment to the status quo, given our belief that this system of conscious "choice" and single-minded focus on "quality" leads to excellence, shouldn't there be some kind of evidence that the system works? Shouldn't there be a helluva lot more masterpieces around? I must say I don't see many. In fact, I can't for the life of me think of a really, really good, powerful, profound play that has been done on the stages of Broadway or the regional theatre since, well, since Angels in America almost twenty years ago. I see a lot of average, faintly interesting, or adolescently "provocative" work, but nothing that really stakes a claim to become canonical. Indeed, when I look at most new plays, they seem like they could have been written by Paddy Chayefsky or A. R. Gurney, or if they are "experimental," Frank Wedekind or Alred Jarry. No, if this system is so effective, we ought to be able to come up with more than a single masterpiece a generation.

Well, I guess here is the center of the problem. For Scott, apparently nothing worth defending has come out of the system at all. I guess I have to disagree: to take a random sampling of theater experiences that have really moved me, I'd go with Thom Paine (Based On Nothing), The Lily's Revenge, The Team's Architecting. I would be willing to put forward all three of them as a masterpiece of a generation. Scott is, of course, free to disagree -- I don't believe quality is absolute. But if I was involved in any of the theaters that produced that work, I would be proud of my work.

By the way, neither Taylor Mac's nor Will Eno's education isn't listed, Rachel Chaivkin comes from Columbia (in terms of MFA).

The problem with this argument, which is a form of relativism, is that, if every person has his or her own equally valid opinion as to what constitutes quality, then the claim that any play is better than another becomes by definition absurd.

I disagree that relativism reduces every argument to absurdity. I think that in our post-modern times, a false opposition was created: Objectivism versus Absurdity -- Objectivism versus nothing. If there's no objective truth, there's no truth at all.

I think both options are bollocks. I think we each have the right to have our subjective opinions, to stand for them, to argue on their behalf even knowing that they're wrong. Why do we expend so much time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff? Why does Ben Brantley show up to work every day, even knowing that he'll never prove that The Wooster Group did a good job and Julia Roberts didn't.

Think about applying this argument outside the realm of quality of theater, it becomes incredibly corrosive. Should we pull our political convictions out of a hat, because they're relative and therefore absurd? I can in no way prove that Barack Obama's health care bill will reduce the cost of health care in this nation. I can't definitively prove that it will increase coverage. I can't prove the opposite either. I guess that makes the attempt to lobby for or against the bill absurd.

So how can we reject for reasons of quality the use of a lottery to choose a play, when quality is an individual opinion and any given play is as likely to have its champions as its detractors?

To repeat my point: the difference between a lottery and an artistic director does not have to do with guaranteeing that nobody will have issues -- as though there has ever been an artistic director, from Oscar Eustis all the way down, who has ever produced anything that didn't have detractors. Hell, theater critics in the 1600s saw no distinction between Shakespeare and witchcraft (I took a whole course on that and boy howdy is that a fascinating discussion).

The point is that if you run an organization, and you are constantly striving for quality, and you're constantly failing, and you're constantly applying Beckett's Law ("Fail better."), then you may not be able to say that you've created the great masterpiece, but you can say one thing: you believe in the work you've promoted. Taking pride in our work, being passionate about it, and working to communicate that with the audience, sharing that moment.

That's the Ian Thal method of diversity: making the work we're passionate be diverse work, and championing it.

What we mean, really, is not that quality is totally s ubjective -- that the cab driver's opinion is as good as the artistic director's -- but that among trained, informed, knowledgable, and experienced people (i.e., experts) quality is subjective. Which brings us back to education again. There is, after all, a 2500 year conversation about what constitutes quality in the arts, and those whose opinions ought to matter more are likely to have absorbed enough of that conversation, usually through formal education or extensive independent reading (auto-didacticism being a respectable form of education) to arrive at an "informed opinion" about a play's quality.

No. That's not my position at all. After all, one of the great mysteries about Shakespeare is how a man with so poor an education wrote the works that he did -- which has lead so many to try to ascribe much smarter, more educated men with his works. My position is that if quality is subjective, passionate is the qualification. If your straw-man cab driver really, truly loves theater, and can really passionately engage in it, he will come to informed and interesting decisions about theater.

In other words, there has never been consensus, and so the best an educated person can do is pick and choose which part of the conversation they find most attractive.

I'm glad you used the word "conversation," because it's my favorite frame for thinking about the arts. It's a conversation. But whereas you're positing the that the artistic director's job is to select other people's parts of the conversation, I disagree. I think that when artistic directors select plays, they make a statement in the cultural conversation. It's how they participate in the artistic conversation that they care about.

That's why artistic directors (myself included) were emotionally upset by the proposal. It's basically saying, "Your participation in the conversation? Probably not as good as flipping a coin."

Now remember: I'm not pretending that artistic directors have used that conversation well. I'm not pretending that the MFA-centrism is not a problem. But there are better solutions. You proposed it yourself.

Then his argument shifts.

Which is why I say: quality doesn't exist. As a pure, usable, non-ideological, objective concept quality doesn't exist.

Unless we define it differently.

Alright, so what's the definition of quality that takes stands behind the lottery?

But I don't think that is true. I think quality is interactive. Like a rainbow, which exists only when rain, sunlight, and an observing eye are in proper relation to each other, quality exists when a play with certain characteristics in a production with certain characteristics interacts with an audience who recognizes, appreciates, and is able to interpret those characteristics. You need to have all three elements for quality to exist. It is a gestalt. An excellent play in an excellent production that is performed in front of an audience that has no interest in it is not an excellent play and production.

I agree. Quality is interactive, like a conversation. I don't see how this strengthens your point, however. You propose an equally, if not, more so, relativist standard of quality (I mean, "It is a gestalt"? That's the most relativistic thing you could say).

But your last sentence is key: "an excellent play in an excellent production that is performed in front of an audience that has no interest in it is not an excellent play and production."

When the artistic director does his job correctly (not those straw-men failures of artistic directors), then it is exactly that purpose that he serves. Should it be based on education? No. Should it be based on MFA connections? No. But if you take away the lottery, you're not only taking away those points, but you are also removing exactly that interactive element

You're right that we need to restore a set of common language in terms of criticism. How does that coexist with your idea that we should just pull plays out of a hat they'll be equally good or better than the work of an artistic director? I understand your frustration with certain large, established regional theaters, certain big non-profits. But I'm a small time artistic director, and there ain't a single artistic call I've made that I haven't felt passionate about, and which I wouldn't stand behind over a lottery.

That being said, Scott, I want to underline that I spent my time writing this post precisely because I want "to consider the validity of [your] 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." Again, when it comes to bringing diversity, I still think of you at the top of my list of its advocates. It's just this one point.

(Update: forgot to link to the article I was writing about. Silly me.)