Pitching Arts to Conservatives II

A while back, I wrote a missive (aimed particularly at Scott Walters) about how to win public support for government arts funding again:

Kingston's stance right now is, the NEA is useless to my district, so it is way easy for me to rag on it. After all, how many people in my district have any connection to or value of the NEA? Why not kick it around? What would I lose?

And if you look at the political math, if the NEA's money is going mostly to large metropolises, then it will be undersupported in the House. And probably the Senate too.

As if on cue, there's been a fight a-brewin' amongst the mainstream blogosphere about New York's status as a cultural capital -- are we snobs and cultural imperialists, or victims of our own success? It started here; if you want to follow the conversation, go read Andrew Sullivan's blog (you have to be already -- how are you not?). Here's the post that stuck out to me, though:

The question to me is not whether centers of power or culture or economy are good or bad, but whether there are appropriate checks and balances on their influence, and whether that influence then results in (cultural/political/economic) growth across the country or whether it simply saps the rest of the country of its resources. Is New York robbing the rest of the country of its art and culture? Probably not. Likely quite the contrary occurs. Wall Street, on the other hand, is a lot more culpable when it comes to our financial situation and the drain bad finance has placed on people on Main Street as it were – and there is certainly a problem with letting one industry, largely centered in one city, become so dominant.

I don't know if New York can be said to rob the rest of the country of its art and culture, but I do think New York can be said to be robbing the rest of the country of its cultural support. Here's a breakdown of the NEA's music grants from the stimulus bill by state:

(Adaptistration)

Almost 25% went to NY and CA. 18% of the population (according to Wikipedia) gets about 31% of the arts funding, and Texas (more populous than NY and with its own strong arts tradition, especially in cities like Austin) is getting about 3% of the funding compared with being 7% of the population. (Interesting to note, by the way, that Illinois is equally out of favor, despite being home to Chicago, part of the"NYLACHI" that Scott's sworn his life to balance against.

Scott Walters: Here's Your Challenge

Hey Scott Walters, did you see this quote about the NEA that Playgoer brought to our attention?

“If it created jobs, you’d have 435 members of Congress saying, ‘Let’s put in more money to the N.E.A.’...The only shovel-ready aspect of it is that they need a shovel to clean up some of the bull they believe in over there.”

-Jack Kingston, Republican Congressman from Georgia and Tea Party-panderer.

Rep Kingston (R-GA) appears to be in the knee-jerk art-is-worthless crowd (remember Cash for Clowns?). Maybe he's the enemy, and we arts advocates need to make sure we pressure him to change his mind, or ignore him and fight to support people who don't think like him.

Or you, Scott, can take this as an opportunity.

See, from Kingston's perspective, the NEA doesn't create jobs. On a national level, that argument isn't worth all that much. And to the extent that it is true, the reason it doesn't create many jobs is because we don't fund it much.

But you see, Kingston is from Georgia 1st District. I wish I could find the NEA breakdown on money by district, but I haves me a feeling that it doesn't have much for Georgia's 1st District. And Rocco doesn't seem inclined to take rural theater very seriously, after the whole Peoria shennanigans. Georgia's 1st is home to Okefenokee Swamp. (Oh, and his website also says "The First District is a literary haven." Is he anti National Endowment of the Humanities?)

Kingston's stance right now is, the NEA is useless to my district, so it is way easy for me to rag on it. After all, how many people in my district have any connection to or value of the NEA? Why not kick it around? What would I lose?

And if you look at the political math, if the NEA's money is going mostly to large metropolises, then it will be undersupported in the House. And probably the Senate too.

So my challenge to you, Scott, is can you use CRADLEArts model to the political advantages of the arts? Can you go to Kingston and say, "If the NEA uses the current model, most of its money is going to go to big historic theaters in big cities. If you help reform the NEA's approach, you can bring some of that support to locals in your district. Don't scrap us, fix us."

And maybe Republicans aren't ready for this message. Maybe it's the 54 Congressmen of the Blue Dog Democrats. After all, maybe this is a winning moderate issue for them -- they get to go toe-to-toe with the "urban liberals" of the party (Take that, Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich) and brandish some populist, pro-local tendencies while still investing in a Democratic principle of supporting the arts.

Basically, can we end this manichean game of either pro-the-current-model or anti-the-arts?

Blog Format

Okay.

So.

This is awkward.

I just drafted a post saying that I was going to resign from the internet because Isaac + J. Holtham in one blog is just too cool for me to handle.

And I wanted to reference my own post from two weeks ago about my own striving to face-lift my blog. The only problem? I never hit publish on that post!

So, I'm going to publish the post about my planned changes for this blog, knowing that in comparison with Isaac + J. Holtham in one blog this manifesto-let is probably going to look like the longest suicide note in history.

(Here was the original post.)

So, over the weekend [that was two weekends ago,-e.d.], my brother got married, and for some reason that gave me time to sit and think about where I'm headed in a lot of things. As a result, I'm going to try and restructure the way I go about this blog.

Here's what I think will change:

• Aesthetics - reflecting on my blog currently, in the context of working on my Honors Thesis (which is basically a document on my personal aesthetics), I realize that I write a lot about the systems within which culture is being made (the form of culture; internships, diversity, the creative economy) rather than the culture itself, art and how to make it -- how I like making it. I'm spilling a lot of ink on how to make an ideal theater company, and not a lot of ink on how to make an ideal play. Granted, I want to make a great theater company, but the reason is to support my work and the work of others. My thesis advisor has called me on avoiding making categorical assertions and personal opinion-making, and she's done a lot to help me figure out how to approach talking about how to make work. Specifically, I have been lead over the last few years to slowly hash out a theory of art that is based on my heroes William James and Harry Frankfurt of the Pragmatism school of philosophy, and I want to use this blog to crystallize that thinking more. This leads to point two:
  
• Structure - I'm going to be looking at ways to structure my posts a little bit more regularly, cleanly, and more interestingly -- in other words, pay attention to the aesthetics of the blog posts, not just the aesthetics of my work. I currently follow 202 blogs (I am not making that number up), and I read through them at a breeze. Blogs that work the best for me often have structure that make it clear before I even read a word what content there is going to be in the article. The example of a blog that leverages this excellently is Createquity: there's Around the Horn for a collection of small but important links, New Blogs for plugging links you should be reading, the new Bullet-Point Manifesto for laying out a point-by-point argument, and the Arts Policy Library to examine a key report or book at length.
• Creative Works - I am going to put up more creative works of mine on this blog, in the spirit of others.

Things that will not be changing:

• The RSS Feed - Seriously, how many times am I going to have to click subscribe to get Scott Walters' thoughts in my Google Reader?

I jest, I jest.

Pulitzers

Scott's reaction is pretty much on-the nose, but via Playgoer, the Criticism category almost went to theater.

I never get particularly enthused about Pulitzers. I think the last time I cared about a head-to-head was when Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) lost to Doubt, which pissed me off if only because the last line of Doubt ("I have such doubts!") irritated the shit out of me for a long time, and because Thom Pain (Based on Nothing) may have been the best play ever written.

(I say "best play ever written" in the sense of "The Mets are the best team in history" not in the sense of "It is my studied opinion that William Shakespeare's impact over the centuries earns him the title of 'best playwright in history.'" As in it's just some team-side trash-talk.)

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.)

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 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?

Quantifying the Arts IV: Tie Professor's Salaries to Wages

Scott Walters, of Theater Ideas and CRADLE(arts), has decided that he isn't busy enough and has started a new blog with Tom Loughlin to generate new ideas about a Theater curriculum, named TACT (continuing a love of acronyms...). I'm excited to see what goes on over there, because I'm interested in changing the curriculum of the arts.

Anyways, my first introduction to the new blog was this post, which contained a Modest and Tactless proposal: "Tie the salaries of theatre professors to the income of their students."

Before you get all up in a hizzy (there was a brief second where I did), I think it would be good to revisit the spirit in which this proposal is offered, which probably goes back to the Kushner quotation that Scott used during his last "modest" proposal:

I can take comfort, however, from Tony Kushner who, when he proposed in his outstanding speech and essay "A Modest Proposal" (American Theatre, Jan98, Vol. 15 Issue 1) that we "abolish all undergraduate art majors," recognized that "Since[undergraduate arts education] so very lucrative, I can say let's get rid of it and we don't have to worry that anything will actually happen. So my speech is rather like theatre in this regard, and this frees us to consider the validity of my 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." I should be so lucky.

Now, Scott's proposal this time around is a lot more fully fleshed out than the lottery idea, and it seems like it would work.

There's one huge, huge problem though: Scott notes that there is no profession (since the Actor's Equity salary median of all actors is $0), so tying professors' pay to students' performance in "the profession" may get professors to compete to turn out students into a system that won't support them. Even if some college out there figures it out, their incentives would now be aligned with a system that doesn't work. So what if professors are making sure that some of their students are earning over $8,000 a year? It's not a huge improvement over the current system, since the rules he proposes still allow a large number of students to fail.

But I take Scott's point in the context of the blog, which is that if professors were aligned to their students' interests, they would fight for curriculum reform. In fact, there's the possibility in this system that theater professors would suddenly find incentive to reform the theater industry -- trying to encourage students to make living wages at theater start-ups back home rather than pouring in to the over saturated market in New York.

I would like to point out, however, that there is a certain degree to which professor's salaries are tied to their profession. Now, before I make this point, I probably should make it clear that this is based on my own university, New York University, and is probably not representative of all schools.

But at the same time, it's clear that NYU pays its theater professionals a tiny fraction of what they pay (as a for instance) Business School professors. Although our school's financials are private, and therefore we can only speculate on much of the budget, public tax returns show that the highest paid NYU employee is a fertility doctor at NYU's School of Medicine, who makes something north of $2 million a year.

Why does the fertility doctor make north of $2 million a year? Because NYU feels it has to have the best fertility doctor in the field -- and therefore, it has to pay above the prevailing wage for fertility doctors (and in this case, above the prevailing wage for a top-of-the-line fertility doctor).

Our theater school also employs working professionals as our teachers (at least in our professional training classes) and, therefore, they have to pay better than what those teachers would be making in the field. Which, in our case, is basically tuppence. Whereas a business school teacher is probably forgoing a salary of $100k or more, the top-of-the-top teachers in our theater program would probably not really be making much worth talking about if they were outside of the school.

Again, this is probably a problem endemic to schools which seek to employ working professionals to teach. There's a different model for academics, since the competition there is almost exclusively other academics, and therefore isn't so moved by the economic fates in the market. And also, the difference between this process and Scott's proposal is that whereas right now, in general teachers' pay is linked to the success of an industry as a whole, Scott's proposal makes the individual teachers responsible to the success of students in specific.

One last point I want to make: Scott's proposal really only makes sense if the success of students really is affected in a huge way by teachers in the college level. Which of course to some degree it is. But if we look at the current problems in the American Theater (of which much ink/0101s have been spilled), then we can see that unless the system incorporates the change of the industry into it, the teachers will simply fail. The way the system is set up, there's too many artists for too few jobs, because the jobs are overly concentrated. As he points out, there's an 8:1 employment ratio within AEA, and I'm sure many of that 8 are just as qualified as that 1, but there's a glut.

The walk-away is that Scott once talked about needing to move the riverbed. I agree that tying professors' salaries to the success of the students is key. But to what success? In my last post I talked about how the market is incredible because it forces valuation on the intangible, because it can't deal with anything that isn't valued. When we structure the economy (the way that Scott's gedankenexperiment does), we need to choose what we value, because that's going to be the output of the system.

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

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

Scott Walters places the project in context:

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings me to the question Scott presented me with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.

Change I: Move Your Money, Move Your Theater?

So, elsewhere, most of the internet is talking about Outrageous Fortune, which so far seems to be a wake-up call about how shitty our industry can be sometimes (see also: How Theater Failed America). Yet again, the refrain I hear is, "Yes, we know it's shitty, but how do we change it?"

That's not to say that solutions haven't been proposed (I'm going to update my list of solutions-heard soon to take into account more things I've heard), but that when the conversation veers back to what's wrong in the world, we have to remember the major question: and how do we change it?

Anyways, Scott Walters put up a brief post a couple days ago comparing our desire to change theater to the nascent Move Your Money movement spearheaded by Huff-Po. He compares it to the desire to decentralize American theater.

I remember when I first really started thinking about the decentralizing theater problem last summer (when I first came into contact with Scott), I felt torn. I thought his idea was brilliant and necessary, to get the arts out of New York/Chicago/Los Angeles and into the nation. I also thought that I would never leave New York City to make it happen.

It reminded me powerfully of a baseball fan on the Daily Show (sorry, I couldn't find the clip) who, in the wake of the Roger Clemens steroid scandal, said, "This has brought shame on the entire sport of baseball... but honestly, I'll have forgotten about this come next baseball season."

It also reminds me of how, no matter how low Congress' approval ratings get, the re-election of incumbents remains above 90% -- because in general, people may dislike "Congress" but they do tend to approve of "My Congressman." And if each person on average thinks their congressperson is alright, but as a mass of congresspeople they seem to continue to do stupid things, then our usual check of elections will not have any effect. It's a systemic problem -- we want to change not our congresspeople, but the system by which congresspeople as a mass become stupid.

When Eugene Jarecki appeared on The Colbert Report, I had the same impression. See, I bank with a big bank: JP Morgan Chase. I became a JP Morgan Chase client when Washington Mutual, my bank, collapsed.

I loved Washington Mutual. When I had a problem with a vendor, I would call them, and they would call the vendor themselves and work things out. I was never on hold for more than five minutes with them. I had great customer service. When they went out of business, I was in Europe.

My credit card, on the other hand, is from Citibank. Citibank are cruel bastards. Every month, they sneak on average $5 of fees. If I call them and threaten to cancel, they refund me the charges. After an hour on hold and only after direct threats. When I went to go look for other credit cards, however, I can't find any that pays me nearly as much as Citibank does -- they're literally bribing me with their cash-back scheme (which pays more than any other credit card I qualify for, even after the fees take away, I've done the math). I've considered simply not having a credit card, just to get Citibank out of my life. There's the chance that, in the near term, when I get a business bank account I might get a credit card for the business, and therefore I won't be running such large sums on my credit card, and can close my personal credit card and just go with my debit card for personal purchases.

At any rate, the comparison between Citibank and WaMu was what really cemented my loyalty for WaMu. Their website was easy to use -- Citibank's was always broken, and for a full year I had to hit the "stop" button halfway through loading or else it would freeze.

Also, I had some experiences previously with another bank that was at one time a "local" bank (they're now national, with the demise of one of the other big banks): Wells Fargo. When I was heading to college, I went to my local Wells Fargo bank and opened an account. Right before I left I suddenly remembered something. "You do have branches in New York, right?" "Of course we do." This was a lie. Although it was possible for me to pay my bills online and get things mailed to me on the east coast, I spend about a third of my time on the West coast and two thirds on the East Coast.

Jarecki would call having local branches to me whether I'm at home in California or at home in New York "a convenience" that I'd have to do without.

When I was in Europe, the financial crisis struck, and Washington Mutual went under. I was terrified. Who would I be banking with? Citibank? That was my worst nightmare: to have Citibank hemorrhaging my personal finances the way they try to hemorrhage my credit card. And would there be a break in services while I was in Europe?

When JP Morgan Chase emerged as the buyer, I was tentative. I had no idea who they were and I'd never banked with them before. I wanted to see what they were like. They handled the transition from Washington Mutual to JP Morgan Chase seamlessly. By the end of the year, I was a happy JP Morgan Chase person. I haven't had cause to call them for support yet because, well, everything worked. There was one day that my debit card didn't work in an ATM, but they'd warned me ahead of time and told me how to work around it.

So when Eugene Jarecki was telling me to leave my bank, I couldn't see a compelling case to do it. I mean, I knew that Big Banks were a problem. But my bank is not a problem! They provide me excellent service and excellent care, at basically no cost (there's no ATM fee, no fee on my banking, using my debit card like a credit card has no fees, and then they pay me interest).

That's the problem with Move Your Money. Individuals act based on individual motives. My choices are not only positive for me, but most of the time they effect the people I know positively, they are good on the economy, etc.. It's only on the very macro-est economic of levels that my choice is bad, because I'm one of many people who are contributing to the existence of a "too big to fail" bank.

So, Scott threw out this suggestion that moving our theater would be like moving our bank, and that's our hope of decentralizing theater. I'm saying it's got some of the same problems.

In theory, in terms of the artistic future of the United States, I think we need to leave New York City. But there are no institutions I love nearly as much as The Public Theater. My home in Orange County, California not only lacks institutions like that, but lacks the audience and the institutions to create such institutions. As Don Hall pointed out, the first domino in the problem is real estate, and Orange County has such an incredible real estate bubble (even now) that the cost of starting up a theater company is inhospitable, especially considering as there are no theaters for rent anywhere (the concept just doesn't really exist), and car culture means that there is no such thing as a cultural center, nothing with which to attract people who you don't know.

Other than that, following the dream of decentralization means that I would basically pick a community at random and wander in. But that's really just a different form of cultural imperialism. If I can't create theater in my own community, then I guess I should just go where I want to be--to the community I want to live in, which is Brooklyn. I love it. I love the people, I love my artistic contemporaries.

It's a problem. And I'm part of it.

Outrageous Fortune

I have nothing to say on the subject. I'm not part of the book club, but if you're not following them, go read up. Start here and read forward, and follow the links to the other bloggers, because some fine extended deep criticism is going on in the web this week.

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!

Quality IV: Middle-World

So, if we can throw our minds back to the distant past, to a raging conversation about Diversity that blew across the like a hot wind, and specifically to Scott Walters' posts on the lottery (I and II) and the conversation it sparked, I'd like to continue my thoughts on quality that Scott and August Schulenberg helped sharpen for me, and expand a little further. The point I made about quality back there that I want to bring back to mind before I continue is when I said:

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.

The other day, a close friend of mine mentioned that he was starting to feel that, philosophically, he was a nihilist. I was concerned, because the idea that there is some sort of meaning in the world is very important to me. I asked him what he meant when he said nihilist (because obviously the term is one thing and the actual meaning of the term is another).

He said to me this: in the end, we all die, so what does it matter?

I told him my personal answer to that question, which is that although in an absolute sense, nothing we do matter, because on the scale of the absolute, everything we do turns to dust. (Those of you to whom there is another version of eternity -- whether it be the persistence of energy in the universe or a seat by the hand of God or a transcendent state of nirvana -- have already parted ways with me, assumption-wise. I beg you to indulge two atheists debate the theology of their atheism, if you will).

This is where my point above comes into play. Even though our lives might mean nothing in the absolute, it might still mean something in the relative.

Suppose I am at a moral cross-roads -- whether or not, for instance, to save a drowning child. In the absolute sense, this decision is meaningless. The child dies, now or later, happy or sad, whether or not I intervene.

But at the scale in which we live our lives, this moral choice has meaning. We live our lives on the minute-to-minute scale, and therefore the idea of a child dying now or dying after having lived many years of life is a huge change in both my life and the life of the child.

To some, it seems as though these two statements are a contradiction, or that one gets to the heart of the matter more than the other. To some, the meaninglessness of the absolute wins--all our attempts at meaning are just the pretensions of molecules. To others, the meaningfulness of the everyday wins, and they project that meaningfulness into the absolute -- creating an absolute whose sense of values are exactly the same as ours.

(This is my personal belief as to why advances in astronomy are treated sometimes warily by religion; man was made in God's image, because God is a concept that only makes sense in a human scale. What does the book of Leviticus have to say about Quantum Mechanics or Black Holes?)

At any rate, I happen to believe that it's okay for things to be desperately important to us and unimportant "in the grand scheme of things," for the same reason I think it's fine for theater to be so deeply important to me when, really, we know that we'll only touch so many people in our lives and who is to say how much it will actually impact our culture.

My ideas on this subject were largely shaped by Richard Dawkins. Not only his book The Selfish Gene, but more importantly, this TED Talk:

Middle-World. The scale in which we live our lives. Everything we do is based on those assumptions. And we have the capacity to understand the other scales, increasingly, but there will be limits. That's fine. At the end of the day, we live our lives here in Middle World.

And within middle-world, there's also differences in context, differences in understanding. I'm not saying we need to accept the limitations of our own little contexts, but at the same time, it's fine to have our own yardsticks and contexts. The degree to which people can share that context is the degree to which people can agree on common standards, can form a common culture. And our ability to bridge contexts and translate across contexts is one of our greatest strengths, and one of our highest goals.

When we talk about quality needing to be right from the perspective of the audience, what we mean is, it needs to at least on some level match the assumptions or understandings of that audience. We want to push boundaries, but we don't have to push all of the boundaries--in fact, if we make our desire to "provoke" or "surprise" too central, we'll lose that common context we share with our audience.

I once worked with a director who shared a very different perspective with me on this. We had a big argument, us the cast and him the director, on how we should relate to our audience. One of the cast-members said, "If we make this choice, it's going to hit the audience in the face with a shovel." To which the director responded, "YES! Exactly!"

This is what is wrong with trying to tear apart all of the structures and understandings a person has -- it just simply doesn't work. You can't communicate with them. In William James' Pragmatism, he discusses how people learn. He says that we slowly accumulate theories, assumptions, understandings, and facts, and cobble them together into a web of ideas. When a new theory or fact comes along that doesn't mesh with what we have, we make the smallest adjustment possible to make all of the facts and theories mesh together again. As an artist, you can massage along their understanding, but if you try to shake apart their web of ideas too hard, the easiest thing for them to do will simply be to dismiss you.

This, I think, is what commenter Kiley meant by saying:

... consumers tend to measure new products, services and ideas against that which they are most familiar with, rather than being open to experimenting with something new or unknown. This is despite how potentially beneficially those ideas or experiences might be to them personally or to their collective community. Under this premise, I believe that some / many consumers initially reject most art, consciously or not, particularly that which is not of the immediately pleasing or pacifying nature. Arts ability to prod, provoke, and challenge thus suffers in my mind when it is not wholly support by means external to the marketplace.

I don't know if I agree with the "wholly" part of that sentiment, but the core of it is what I agree with. When faced with an idea that is outside of their own personal "middle-world" (remember that we are all, literally, at the center of our own experiences), they will be hesitant and need some coaxing to come along. You can entice them outside of their comfort zone, but you can't beat them.

In America, this is made more difficult not only because of the market forces, as Kiley rightly mentioned, but also because of the competitive landscape. Consumers can choose what they entertain themselves -- and even if they decide to choose something intellectually stimulating, they can choose to be intellectually stimulated by people who agree with them.

That's part of quality, or of value, or of resonance -- finding that delicate spot where you entice people to some place they didn't think they wanted to go, showing them the other worlds while still resonating in the one they have to live in. Boy that is difficult.