Not All Glory

I decided to print Mike Daisy's essay, "The Empty Spaces," in its entirety so that I'd personally be forced to remember its message every time I scrolled down through the 1st Stage blog.  I'm not sure how exactly to respond to the challenge inherent in his grim observations but I know we must find a way.

Seven years ago, I left Seattle for New York—I abandoned the garage theaters and local arts scene and friends and colleagues—because I was a coward. I'd already tried to sell out once, by working at a shitty Wal-Mart of a tech company, but I knew I would not survive in the theater if I stayed. I fled to New York to bite and claw a living out of the American theater as an independent artist because I was young and stupid enough to think that would actually work. Today, my wife and I are one of a handful of working companies who create original work in theaters across the country. We're a very small ensemble: I am the monologuist; she is the director. We survive because we're nimble, we break rules, and when simple dumb luck happens upon us, we're ready for it.

We return to Seattle maybe once a year. During my first week back this time, I ended up at a friend's party, long after the rest of the guests had gone, in that golden hour when the place is almost cleaned up, but the energy of the night is still hanging in the air. We settled down in the kitchen under the bright light, making 4:00 a.m. conversation and, as all theater artists do, I asked the traditional question: "What are you working on?"

My friend's face fell, for just a moment—she's a fantastic actress, one of the best in the city, with an intelligence and precision that has taken my breath away for years. She corrected a moment later, and told me carefully that she wasn't going out for anything now—that she was giving it up. She has a job-share position at her day job to let her take roles when needed, but now she is going to go permanent for the first time in her entire life. After 15 years of working in theaters all over Seattle, she'd felt the fire go out of her from the relentless grind of two full-time jobs: one during the day in a cubicle, the other at night on a stage.

She said what really finished it for her was getting cast in a big Equity show this fall and seeing how the other Equity actors lived—the man whose work had inspired her all her life, living in a dilapidated hovel he was lucky to afford; the woman who couldn't spare 10 dollars to eat lunch with colleagues without doing some quick math on a scrap of paper to check her weekly budget. These are the success stories, the very best actors in the Northwest, the ones you've seen onstage time and time again. Their reward is years of being paid as close to nothing as possible in a career with no job security whatsoever, performing for overwhelmingly wealthy audiences whose rounding errors exceed the weekly pittance that trickles down to them.

My friend looked at me imploringly—she's close to 40, at the height of her powers, but the sacrifices of this theater ask for raw youth: When she arrived in Seattle, she'd eat white rice flavored with soy sauce for lunch for a month at a time. "Maybe if I was 23 again," she said. "Maybe not even then." She looked down at the table as she said this, and I felt a kind of death in the room.

The institutions that form the backbone of Seattle theater—Seattle Rep, Intiman, ACT—are regional theaters. The movement that gave birth to them tried to establish theaters around the country to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage, and health insurance. In return, the theaters would receive the continuity of their work year after year—the building blocks of community. The regional theater movement tried to create great work and make a vibrant American theater tradition flourish.

That dream is dead. The theaters endure, but the repertory companies they stood for have been long disbanded. When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show. To use a sports analogy, theaters have gone from a local league with players you knew intimately to a different lineup for every game, made of players you'll never see again, coached by a stranger, on a field you have no connection to.

Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Literary departments have blossomed over the last few decades, despite massive declines in the production of new work. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater.

The biggest reason the artists were removed was because it was best for the institution. I often have to remind myself that "institution" is a nice word for "nonprofit corporation," and the primary goal of any corporation is to grow. The best way to grow a nonprofit corporation is to raise money, use the money to market for more donors, and to build bigger and bigger buildings and fill them with more staff.

Using this lens, it all makes sense. The worst way to let the corporation of the theater grow is to spend too much on actors—why do that, when they're a dime a dozen? Certainly it isn't cost-effective to keep them in the community. Use them and discard them. Better to invest in another "educational" youth program, mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin, lifeless paste that any reasonable person would reject as disgusting, but garners more grant money.

Every time a regional theater produces Nickel and Dimed, the play based on Barbara Ehrenreich's book about the working poor in America, I keep hoping the irony will reach up and bitch-slap the staff members as they put actors, the working poor they're directly responsible for creating, in an agitprop shuck-and-jive dance about that very problem. I keep hoping it will pierce their mantle of smug invulnerability and their specious whining about how television, iPods, Reagan, the NEA, short attention spans, the folly of youth, and a million other things have destroyed American theater.

The numbers are grim—the audiences are dying off all over the country. I know because every night I'm onstage, I stare out into the dark and can hear the oxygen tanks hissing. When I was 25, the Seattle Rep started offering cheap tickets to everyone under 25. When I turned 30, theaters started offering cheap tickets to everyone under 30. Now that I've turned 35, I see the same thing happening again, as theaters do the math and realize that no one under 35 is coming to their shows—it's a bright line, the terminator between day and night, advancing inexorably upward. A theater I'm working at this year is hosting a promotional event to coax "young people" to see our show. Their definition of young? Under 45.

There are clear steps theaters could take. For example, they could radically reduce ticket prices across the board. Most regional theaters make less than half of their budget from ticket sales—they have the power to make all their tickets 15 or 20 dollars if they were willing to cut staff and transition through a tight season. It would not be easy, but it is absolutely possible. Of course, that would also require making theater less of a "luxury" item—which raises secret fears that the oldest, whitest, richest donors will stop supporting the theater once the uncouth lower classes with less money and manners start coming through the door. These people might even demand different kinds of plays, which would be annoying and troublesome. The current audience, while small and shrinking, demands almost nothing—they're practically comatose, which makes them docile and easy to handle.

Better to revive another August Wilson play and claim to be speaking about race right now. Better to do whatever was off Broadway 18 months ago and pretend that it's relevant to this community at this time. Better to talk and wish for change, but when the rubber hits the road, sit on your hands and think about the security of your office, the pleasure of a small, constant paycheck, the relief of being cared for if you get sick: the things you will lose if you stop working at this corporation.

The truth is, the people in charge like things the way they are—they've made them that way, after all. Sure, they wish things could be better. Who doesn't? They're dyed-in-the-wool liberals, each and every one of them, and they'll tell you so while they mount another Bertolt Brecht play. The revolutionary fire that drew them to the theater has to fight through so much shit, day after day, that even the best of them can barely imagine a different path. They didn't enter the theater to work for a corporation, but now they do, and they more than anyone else know the dire state of things. I've gone drinking with the artistic directors of the biggest theaters in the country and listened to them explain that they know the system is broken and they feel trapped within it, beholden to board members they've made devil's deals with, shackled to the ship as it goes down. I've heard their laughter, heard them call each other dinosaurs, heard them give thanks that they'll be retired in 10 years.

Corporations make shitty theater. This is because theater, the ineffable part of the experience that comes in rare and random bursts, is not a commodity, and corporations suck at understanding the noncommodifiable. Corporations don't understand theater. Only people, real people, understand theater. Audiences, technicians, actors, playwrights, costumers, designers—all of them give their time and energy to this thing for a reason, and that dream is not quantifiable on any spreadsheet.

As I drove home from my friend's house that night, I felt myself filling up with grief. There will be some who read this who will blame her, think she should have sacrificed more, that this is a story of weakness. But I stand by her. I know in my heart she has given full weight, just as so many other artists have given over the years. Much of the best theater of my life I have seen in the garages of Seattle, unseen and forgotten by many. But I remember. Theater failed my friend, as it is failing us all, and I am heartbroken because we will never know the measure of what we've lost.

Mike Daisy can be seen in his one man show, "How Theater Failed America," at Joe's Pub in New York City through May 11.  It sounds blunt and depressing but the reviews suggest he's quite a comic.

Tryouts for the rest of your life

If you're a high school student and you plan to audition for a college theatre program in the next year or so, take a look at Jason Zinoman's article in The Education Life pullout in today's (April 20) New York Times. It's the best description I've read of the actual audition event--from both the standpoint of the student actor and the auditor.

"We're looking for emotional transparency, [Kevin Kuhle, chairman of the undergraduate drama department at NYU's Tisch school] says, "Does the energy in the room change when they come into it? We're looking for that sense of presence, a drive and passionate commitment to make theater."

Don Wadsworth at Carnegie Mellon sums it up: "Everyone asks, 'What are you looking for?' It's so simple that it's boring--something truthful. Someone who brings humanity to their work. And a student who really wants to work hard."

On second thought, any actor who plans to audition any and everywhere should read the article. Sometimes the human dimension gets lost in the mechanics. Here's the article.

The Future of Opera

My last post about Satyagraha attracted some locally high-profile attention, that of Kim Witman Director of Wolf Trap Opera & Classical Programming.

Kim wrote: "I don't know... opera at 1st Stage doesn't sound like such a bad idea to me..."

In the long run I think she's absolutely right! And nothing would please me more than to use 1st Stage as a venue to put more serious music out there for the public.

For now though...

If you've never had the pleasure of an evening of music or performance at Wolf Trap's Filene Center or the Barns, I can't recommend it highly enough. I remember spending many serene evenings (and a few thunderstorms) on the picturesque lawn of that fine institution, listening to Mozart's Figaro, Prokofiev's 3rd piano Concerto, or Bernstein's West Side Story among many others.


Nothing quite compares to beautiful music, a picnic, and a sweeping vista of stars above a tree filled horizon.

Hard to argue, right?

As I said, if you've never had the experience for yourself, Go!

Kim keeps a blog that has some highlights of their season (WT Opera Company) and links to info on the performances. Her latest post recounts some struggles with transcribing the neglected sheet music of a rarely performed opera by Giuseppe Verdi, Un Giorno di Regno. I included an excerpt from its overture if you're interested:Check out her post. "The Future of Opera" looks bright.

simple and true

Blogger Andrew Sullivan of atlantic.com admits to being hooked on American Idol this season.  (Okay, I admit it; I am too.  You've got to have some guilty pleasures.)  He was completely taken by Jason Castro's choice of  Israel Kamakawiwo'ole's "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" on last week's show:

...here is another reason I love America:  It's a white dude in dreads playing a ukelele--a straight guy singing a song that could have been a national anthem for gay men for decades, in a version written by an Hawaiian in honor of a friend who died an early death because of obesity.  And it's also in a strange way completely sublime in its own right and on its own terms.

In our own way, 1st Stage is aiming to be "completely sublime" in our own right and on our own terms.  Artists like Jason and Iz set a high bar.  Here are both men's versions.  

Satyagraha

A London production of Phillip Glass's 1980 opera, Satyagraha, is in rehearsal at the MET in New York, and it is making headlines for its unique use of simple materials (newspaper, woven baskets, corrugated iron etc.) in set design.

Check out the New York Time's video report:

While no opera is in our humble stage's near future (and I'm pretty sure Glass's music makes some of our company member's mind's melt in repetitive musical anguish but...) the ethic of the production: large scale beautiful epics produced from humble small scale materials via the utilization of modern technological opportunities is something we at 1st stage are eager to bring to the Tysons area.

The opera, Glass's second, is a chronicle of young Mohandas Gandhi's struggles in South Africa. Satyagraha, the word, is the philosophy of nonviolent resistance as practiced by the Mahatma. He described:"Its root meaning is holding onto truth, hence truth-force. I have also called it love-force or soul-force. In the application of satyagraha, I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not admit of violence being inflicted on one’s opponent but that he must be weaned from error by patience and sympathy. For what appears to be truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on oneself."

--patience and self-suffering-- great words to live by when you're waiting for local govt permit approval!

Reading List

While we wait for the county to sign off on all of the required permits--it's taking much longer than any of us imagined-- we've read more than a few plays in our search for a season. We can't nail down any of these until we actually have our space but we can at least share our list of real possibilities. (Most theatres, I think, are pretty secretive about their upcoming seasons. We argued over whether to hold off until everything was in place, decisions made, and any possible buzz of anticipation was at full volume. Peter argued--and obviously won this argument--that if we're to ride whatever digital information wave we can catch then we must be completely transparent. The more information that's out there, the better. Hopefully it will flow back to us as well. We could use your input--both the positive and the negative. Here are 10 plays for a start, in no particular order, that have caught our collective imagination. Some have been produced in the DC area, many haven't, but all are good theatre and worth a read at the very least. (Pictures link to Amazon.com -- we get a %!)

• We found Moira Buffini's Dinner after reading her adaptation of Nicolai Erdman's The Suicide (more about Erdman later). As the title implies, a meal is at the heart of this "revenge comedy". The first course is something the hostess calls "primordial soup" which gives you some sense of where the meal leads. Both the characters and the dialogue are bitter and acidic but strangely satisfying

• Eric Overmyer's Dark Rapture is subtitled "A Stage Noir" and like the film genre is filled with double and triple-crossing con artists. The play opens in the midst of a California wildfire and never lets up. This was produced only last year by the Spooky Action Company in Maryland but I doubt if many in our area caught it. It deserves another go if we can find a cast that could double in any number of film noir's.

• Edward Bond is probably one of Britain's best known playwrights but his work is rarely done in the US. The Sea begins with a drowning in a fierce storm on the coast witnessed, in one way or another, by some rather eccentric villagers. There's a deeply tragic aspect to this and subsequent scenes that also happen to be deeply comic. We all loved this play but any production of it depends on finding a 60-something actress with an imperious tone to lead the rabble. Know anyone?

• It's All True, written by one of Canada's hottest playwrights, Jason Sherman, is a homage to events preceding the production of the famous The Cradle Will Rock in 1937 New York. Young Orson Welles, John Houseman and Marc Blitzstein battle the government and each other after their show is shut down because of its political bent. The characters, the scenes and the dialogue are fast and furious and it's all true.

• Inventing Van Gogh by Stephen Dietz isn't as true but it's a great and haunting mystery tale of fabricated art and character. A young contemporary artist with a style similar to Van Gogh's is persuaded to forge a self-portrait of the dead artist. Van Gogh, Gauguin and more than a few other dead folk appear and enter the mix. It has a great first act but we're still befuddled by the second. If we can figure it out, it will be strong contender for a place in the season.

• Still another fascinating mystery is Nicholas Wright's The Reporter. Based on the life of a star BBC Reporter from the 60's and his bewildering and sudden suicide, the action flashes backward and forward as parts of his life are pieced together in an attempt to understand his simple, enigmatic suicide note, "I can't bear it anymore though I don't know what "it" is." It sounds morbid but the search for the note's meaning is so enthralling that you become more interested in the reporter's life than his death.

• So while we're on the subject of suicides, how about Nicolai Erdman's The Suicide. Many in the Marshall crowd know Erdman from The Mandate as well as from a cutting of The Suicide (Samoubistvo) we did several years ago. It just doesn't come as good as this. It's Russian, it's farce, it's political, and it's great theatre. We wanted to do a recent adaptation of this play, Dying for It, but it's unavailable for production in the US. After reading an exact translation of the original though, why would anyone want to do anything else? If we can cut it--the original runs over 3 hours with about 30 characters--we'd like to do it despite the fact that the title is a little heavy for a first season announcement.

• Best title for a new play goes to Howard Barker's The Almighty Seduction of God by the Boy Priest Loftus in the Abbey of Calcetto, 1539. A seizure-prone, adolescent priest discovers he has the power of life and death. Does young Loftus possesses this power by his own accord or has he somehow seduced god into giving it to him? Barker calls his body of work the "theatre of catastrophe". Catastrophic forces are unleashed every which way his characters choose to turn. This is full-impact theatre: Evil is evil and good is good and there is a lot of violence stretched between the two. It's certainly not for everyone and may be a little too extreme for a young theatre looking for an audience.

• Side Man by Warren Leight won a Pulitzer Prize a few years ago and deservedly so. It is to jazz what Amadeus is to classical music. It's an odyssey through booze, drugs, failed relationships and pure talent. It sounds bleak, and it is, but it's surprisingly life-giving in its humanity.

• And finally...Charlotte Jones' Humble Boy was inspired by Hamlet in part but also by bee-keeping and theoretical physics. It's a great combination. This dysfunctional family both frightens and charms you at the same time. No bees but everyone gets stung, and happily so.

Our list is even longer. As we get closer to an actual opening, I'll keep you updated on additions and deletions. Please let us know if there's something out there that you think we should consider.

Undeniable

Some years ago, I was taking the Shuttle to Grand Central. It was Mid-day, and the commuters in my car were surprisingly stoic. As we waited to depart, doors ajar, a young man got on with a guitar. He set a coffee can of change at his feet, put his back to a pole, and when the train doors shut he began to play. I've always considered it a real treat to get a live performance on my commute -- but not everyone shares in my appreciation of Mariachis and Magicians.
This performance deserves a separate category. This guy played an original piece, all the while simulating the sound of a Hi-hat by tapping the coined coffee can with his foot. I'm telling you, (with the exception of our Ipod-ed bretheren) there was not a single person on that car who wasn't nodding their head, thumbing their briefcase, or tapping their foot to keep time. You just couldn't ignore how wonderful and beautiful and engaging it was. Something about it was able to cut through the noise in our brains, the flip-flip-flipping of Noggin traffic and make us all present. Something touched all of us, you know what I mean?

Hopefully, we have all had that experience in some form -- by way of music or dance or art or theater. It's out there everywhere. But what would you call that? What do you say when you see something so extraordinary? I've had the good fortune to know some of these wonderfully gifted practitioners-- some of whose performances still stay with me. I would call it Undeniable Talent. Something that can cut through any prejudice or distraction and command your attention with it's truth, it's beauty, it's whatever-that-may-be.

In the context of working in this Business, that phrase doesn't always seem to apply. In fact it's application in this context to some may seem downright stupid and ridiculous. It often seems that sometimes the very nature of this Business IS to deny talent. Any one in Casting will tell you that Talent is rarely the deciding factor. But perhaps...if there were a place...where people could work...and had the opportunity...a venue...to bring their truth and their beauty and so-on to the public...that shortfall between Talent and this Business would be eliminated? How about that?
Perhaps not. I'm writing on an empty stomach over here.