My Mind 4/17 - 4/23

How I was keeping my mind clean this week:

• Imagining playing with toy cars.
• Feeling guilty about how funny I find news of a priest falling asleep during a suicide hotline call. Spoiler alert: nobody dies.
• Scummy celebrities versus their critics: Baio v. Jezebel and LaBute v. Chicago.

How I was keeping my mind fit this week:

• Wondering with Matt Freeman about raising children in the arts. If the 93% Childless rate amongst NY's Independent Theater as collected by the New York Innovative Theatre Foundation is any indication, the question is not being answered.
• Weighing Tycho of Penny Arcade's response to Roger Ebert saying that video games aren't art. Shorter Tycho: Don't waste your time, Ebert can't take anything away from you.

Important facts:

• A handy chart of where your tax dollars go: 20% to defense, 20% to Social Security, 14% to the safety net, 6% to debt, and then other smaller things. If those are the accurate numbers... it actually seems to me to be about right.
• Another handy chart of sleep schedules. Bottom line: your 20s are an aberration, sleep-wise.
• As polls go, Rasmussen leans furthest to the right, and not for easily-explainable reasons.
• There are 1.1 Million virgins between the ages of 25 and 40. I'm finally part of a minority!
• Voting Yes on Health Care was a big fundraising bump if you were a Democrat. If you were a Republican? Well, we'll never know.
• California's state constitution is the third oldest in the world, after Alabama and India. All three fail to provide political stability or equal access to public services.
• The Double Down is not as bad as many of its fast-food contemporaries. Thanks again, Nate Silver!

Things to watch in the future:

• Will Nick Clegg win -- or at least, break through?
• Will Harry Reid win his financial regulation game of chicken?
• Will Governor Charlie Crist run as an independent?
• Will AIG get in on the action and sue Goldman Sachs?
• Will Viacom back down on censoring South Park?

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.

Self-Producing: "Playwrights"

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

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

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

To which Matthew Freeman rightly responds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Outrageous Fortune II

Okay, I'll say something quick.

August Schulenberg notes this:

...the study is specifically looking at playwrights who are "successful", a term defined loosely in the book, but understood to mean playwrights who are regularly being produced at a regional and Off-Broadway level. The survey focuses on a sample of those playwrights, and the theatres that are able to financially produce at that level.

Matt Freeman notes:

One thing that struck me in particular was the expression of frustration that there aren't companies that coalesce around a playwright anymore. I don't see that, personally. Maybe that's true on the scale of regional theaters 'filling slots'...but on the Off-Off scale, I see it all the time.

I have been working with a single theater company (more or less) in New York City since about 2004. Just over six years of productions. Do we produce on the scale of Manhattan Theater Club? No. Have I gotten reviews and publications and all that other nice stuff? Yes. Do I still work, and work hard, in an unrelated field to make ends meet? Yes, yes I do. Still, when I read chapters about the nomadic lives of playwrights now, I felt a bit happy to know that's not my position.

So if playwrights like me who work Off-Off-Broadway are:

1) Not that much less financially stable than the "successful" playwrights

2) Supported more by companies willing to champion our works (I write plays and have my own company, Freeman notes his own relationship with a good company)

Then the term "successful" appears to be better worn by the off-off-Broadway folks than by the industry writers! Here I was thinking that I had chosen passion over money, but it sounds like all I did was choose to be happier.

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)

Criticism: The Arbitrary Choice

Matthew Freeman at On Theater and Politics has been returning to the "On Theater" of his "On Theater and Politics" after a while of being, understandably, excited/disturbed about the "On Politics" half of his mission statement. Today's post was a short but interesting one:

You're watching a traditional play about something like politics. A politician is meeting with a journalist off-the record. The journalist agrees to call the prominent politician a "well positioned source" and commits to anonymity otherwise. Then, slowly it becomes clear that there's more than just fund-raising shenanigans involved in this story. This political champion appears to have done some truly terrible things.

Throughout the fun little scene, the actor playing the journalist keeps clicking her pen. It's looks like a nervous gesture at first, but the longer you watch, the more you realize it seems almost like a...signal? Or even something deeper. The actor is making a point of the pen's importance in the scene perhaps. You notice, with the clicks, what is written down and what, pointedly, is not.

What you don't know is why this is actually happening. Is it because the director believes that the pen of a journalist is symbolic of something or other? Or, did the director just say... "You know what would look cool? Click the pen. I dunno. Click it after each third word that you say."

Is it possible that an arbitrary decision by the creative team and a decision with some complex thought behind it...can look exactly the same? And does it make a difference, really, to the audience member? Does how a decision is arrived at inform what we see?

Can we sense the arbitrary? Or do we just assume that everything we see onstage was put there with a rigorous sense of purpose?

I've heard this come up a lot whenever there's analysis going on. We ask a lot, whether it's a book of poetry or a political speech or a theater play--what in here is what the creator intended, and what is a byproduct of the creation? (I suddenly want to take that as an analysis of the Bible... I wonder if anyone has ever looked at creation that way.... anyways...)

I'm also going to skate right on by the question of who made the decision. Did the Director say "Hey it'd be cool if you clicked your pen," or did the Playwright have a vivid image in his mind of the pen going click-click-click or was the Actor sitting with the script going "Holy Hell what am I going to be doing during this scene?"

One of my friends, who did an excellent production of Ibsen's A Doll's House, is one of the few people who is comfortable acknowledging how much of his direction he discovers through trust in the arbitrary. It's difficult for me to explain how, when he makes arbitrary decisions, it somehow pays off--he usually finds a way to very clearly relate it into everything that's going on, but if you tried to consciously tackle why one choice worked and another one did, you might have trouble.

If you buy a choice, you can explain why the director was being brilliant in that moment. If you don't buy a choice, you probably won't be able to defend it.

Once the artist's intentions become fixed in the work of art, the work of art is all we have to go by. It's not just about arbitrary vs. deliberate; it's also racist vs. understanding of race, reductionist vs. minimalist--any interpretation is drawn from the audience from the work regardless of the artist's intention.

The job of the artist is not to make brilliant choices in every moment. They should try, but it doesn't particularly matter to me whether or not they "meant" to do X or Y. A work of art is successful when it gives you room to create more, to expand. Whatever was the original intention of the work, a vibrant work sparks new ideas out of the audience, not just the transmission of original ideas.

For example. Take the Old Testament. When The Old Testament was written, did they imagine the creation of a New Testament? The Kaballah? The Hagadah? The Koran? The King James Bible? King James' Daemonology? Paradise Lost? Dante's Inferno? The Screwtape Letters? The Chronicles of Narnia?

In other words, the arbitrariness or deliberateness of individual moments really doesn't wind up being that important. If a choice doesn't work that's a different story--it doesn't matter if the choice doesn't work because the director didn't fix something, or doesn't work because the director made a deliberate mistake.

But to Matthew's last question: I don't think we can sense whether any individual choice was arbitrary or deliberate, but I think we can often get a sense of the show overall--if the show is a grab-bag of strange and hit-and-miss choices that don't seem to have patterns, we can safely assume that a lot of it was arbitrary (this is good shows as well as bad shows--The Lily's Revenge is doing quite well, and it seems to me to have so many arbitrary choices, most of which were AMAZING). And if the entire show works together like a well-oiled machine (like TEAM's Architecting or the work of Elevator Repair Service) then you can be confident in saying that the choices are very deliberate.