Just Wrought

You Don’t Have to Hold On

I have maintained that we are better off trying to determine what art does rather than defining it.  I even went so far to make a list in an essay called “The Uses of Art”, in which I promised to flesh out each enumerated “use” with an essay of its own.  (Of course I miserably defaulted on that pledge.)  Further, I have always assumed— like a lot of folks, I suspect— that the best art always sticks with you: it goes into your library for reference and reuse, which is why I can still recite verbatim Puck’s “If-we-shadows-have-offended” Midsummer Night’s Dream show-closer three decades after playing the role.  And when I fail to hold on to a piece of art, I tend to feel a little guilty.  After all, is it not a little shameful to have forgotten easily a hundred times more poetry and painting, music and movies, than I have ever remembered?  Was all that art wasted on me?  

The 13th Century Sufi poet Jelaluddin Rumi and his modern American interpreter Coleman Barks have convinced me otherwise.  Just as art has a variety of uses, it also has many mechanisms.

“There is a South Indian story about soap.  Soap is the dirt we buy.  We introduce it to the dirt we have, and the two dirts are so glad to see each other they come out and mix!  They swim together in the warm pleasurable water and, at just the right moment, the washer lifts the cloth of our true being free of both soap and dirt.  Mystical poetry and other practices may function this way, as soap that dances with what disturbs our clarity.  Then at some moment they drop away and leave us clean, ready to be worn again.”

--From Coleman Barks introduction to a chapter in his collection
The Essential Rumi

Sometimes art doesn’t stay with you.  And sometimes that’s best.  How disgusting and useless would it be if the film from every bar of soap you’ve ever used still remained on your body?  Some art is meant to mix with parts of you and then rinse off, parts and art together.

So the next quiet night you read a poem, and then find you’ve forgotten the entire thing the next morning, don’t berate yourself.  Instead, give yourself a pat on the back for being spiritually hygienic. 

Rumi himself this time: 

“. . . Enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.”

The SunBreak Suggests Some New Strokes

Just because I have excused myself from the debate about the future of Seattle Theatre along with the broader crisis in American Arts doesn’t mean I can’t celebrate an insightful perspective, especially when it comes from someone who sees the problem from sides I can only barely glimpse.  Michael van Baker, Editor and Publisher of The SunBreak once worked for the Seattle Opera and other non-profit arts organizations around town; and in his recent post, “Arts Marketing for Dummies”.  He sneaks us a peak of some of the lessons he learned, with promises of perhaps more and deeper observations to follow:

Because self-preservation is the defining aspect of arts institutional life–ironically, the non-profit model virtually guarantees it–the business model warps in that direction. People begin to have trouble distinguishing between best business practices and those that have worked in the past to pay everyone’s salaries. Over time, the institution’s existence–its habits and proclivities–mediates the art presented. It’s not just a question of the popularity of one work versus another–it’s a question of box office receipts. That’s what’s being discussed when the directors meet: saleability.

It should be discussed! Don’t get me wrong. But, as before, is anything important being left out?

Van Baker sketches some bold fresh solutions, but with the sober understanding that they are not likely to be quickly adopted by a cadre of arts administrators who would rather sink with the ship than swim a new stroke.

Rule: We create art and outsource/outshare the rest….

…  As it happens, arts administrators are not the soulless quasi-corporate drones they are at times portrayed to be. So it’s already the case that most arts organizations collaborate and share a great deal, more than you might expect if you considered how competitive the marketplace is. The problem is, they collaborate inefficiently. … Every single organization reinvents the database, usually in their own way, and the results are sometimes anarchic.

The situation is unlikely to change because, at an institutional level, there’s no apparent incentive and the loss of control disturbs leadership. Thus, database management and mining remains a core function of organizations theoretically devoted to art production.

Van Baker also recognizes a fact which took over a year of me blogging here to sink into my thick skull:  a lot of folks, in this city particularly, would rather quibble and bitch behind backs than make any actual moves.  Says Van Baker, “Of course, the arts being what they are, there are many over-educated people willing to argue about minutiae rather than broader principle.”

Towards the end of the piece Van Baker hints that there might be a larger, more detailed opus forthcoming.  I encourage that effort and look forward to its fruition, especially since I’m shutting up.

Money isn’t Everything… or Anything

My friend Maria’s mom gave me one of those rare koan-ish gifts of wisdom that stick with you for a lifetime, poking you at odd times as you struggle on and off to get to the core of understanding it.  I was in high school, over Maria’s house for dinner, and her mom and I must have been talking about my hopes and aspirations.  I said something like, “It’ll all work out so long as I can find the money to afford all the things I want to do.”  Smiling sweetly, Maria’s mom said, “Oh Paul, don’t worry about money.  Money is the easiest thing in the world to get.”

What?

Okay.  Set that notion on the table a moment so that we can compare it with what a former friend and colleague once flatly told me.  “Paul, theater is an art form for the Upper Middle Class.  Period.  End of argument.  End of story.”  I remember seeing in his eyes the pride of superior conviction as he went on to explain that fundraising, marketing and, by tacit implication, programming itself must be tailored to this essential truth.  Furthermore, since theatre is for, by and of the moderately to handsomely wealthy, then raising money for theatre, which was his job at a large West Coast regional theatre, was the noblest and most essential duty one could perform for our art form. 

Now, honestly, that sounds more sensible than my friend Maria’s mom’s enigmatic epigram, right?  We are on much firmer territory with that kind of thinking, aren’t we?

Are we?

After all, what the hell did my sweet friend’s sweet mom mean?  For the longest time I tended to interpret it prosaically.  “Well, okay… everything else takes money to get.  Therefore money is easiest, since it requires one less step.  Money is freeze-dried effort waiting to be reconstituted for a different circumstance… or something.  Got it.”

I guess that makes a sort of sense but only the sort that isn’t really worth much digging for.
However, as the years blurred by, and most especially as the struggles for the vitality of my art form have come to a head, especially in my adopted home town of Seattle, I am beginning to suspect something lies deeper in Maria’s mom’s words.  

All right.  Let’s dig: if money’s easy and I shouldn’t worry about it, then what is it that is hard and that I should be worrying about?  Maria’s mom did not elucidate.  I realize now that this is because she knew I had to figure it out for myself.  Happily I am beginning to believe that the alternative currency she was pointing me at is one that I, and so many of my true friends, have been blessed with to a richness.  The “hard” currency Maria’s mom wanted me to find and treasure was the precious tender of ideas.

“Oh sure,”  I hear my former friend say, “That’s great.  Wonderfully idealistic and all, but without money, theatre dies.  Raising money is the essential task that makes it all possible.”

What do you think, gentle reader?  If one wanted to destroy the essence of an art form, obliterate its fresh ideas and enchain it to defending at all costs the miserable back-ass-wards status quo of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, could one employ any more effective strategy than keeping its brightest people constantly courting the almighty upper middle-class dollar instead of trading and paying interest on ideas?

All art is a conversation—theatre doubly so.  If my former friend is telling me I can only hold a conversation with the upper middle class of the Western World circa early 21st century I am obliged to either politely ignore him, or firmly insist he go fuck himself.  I want to talk with everyone everywhere and everywhen.  And I buy into this conversation with my ideas or I don’t join at all.  I will not, nor will the colleagues I admire most, huddle acquiescently on the tiny postage stamp theatre artists are ceded when we are told that money is what defends us and what we must defend. 

Maria’s mom always had faith in me when others didn’t.  She is no longer in this world and I have no way to repay her for her gifts so gracious.  So in honor of that fine lady, you can have this idea, and everything you find here, for free:

Yours is the territory you refuse to surrender.

The Macallan Talks – Side Two

 

 

 

A few days ago I shared a transcript I recently found from the first half of a cassette tape recording that William Salyers and I made one evening in 1997 while consuming a bottle of Macallan scotch, each.  As promised, I share the second half of the full transcript at the end of this post.

We are clearly getting drunker on side two.  Alas, this does not increase the insightfulness of our comments.  Just the opposite, I’m afraid.  I sure don’t like myself very much as the discussion wears on.  It feels to me, thirteen years later, like I am trying to badger Bill into believing he will be a better artist once he admits he’s an artist and opens himself up to-- what?—the “wider universe”; the “heroism of art”, or whatever woo-woo crap 30-year old-Paul was spouting.  At one point, I literally say to him: “I think you need to start reading folktales.”  Can you even get more excruciatingly Left-Coast Joseph Campbellish condescending than that? 

In the intervening time since I gave him this advice Bill Salyers has gone on to world premiere the title role in Louis Slotin Sonata  in Los Angeles and then off-Broadway, winning himself several awards and enormous critical acclaim for his efforts.  He also world-premiered my play An American Book Of The Dead – The Game Show, directed the world premiere of The Good Ship Manhattan, world premiered The Sequence playing future Nobel Laureate, Francis Collins, and these are just the examples from my scripts. The quality of his work as an actor in an even broader panoply of plays —classic, modern or brand new (mine and others) — is legend.  And I think it is safe to say that Bill never really changed his point of view from the one he espouses in these recordings.  In other words, for all my high holy exhortation to become a better artist by first admitting he is one, Bill remained a great artist, and became an even greater one, simply by being Bill.  Lesson learned: not all heroes and artists want to be heroes and artists— some don’t even believe in such things— and yet, somehow, art and heroism still happen.

So, with that, here’s some highlights, then the whole thing at the end if you’re interested:

 

Blowing smoke up Salyers’ shorts while simultaneously patronizing him

PAUL:  I consider you to be as great an artist as I’ve ever met.  I consider you... to...I consider that I need to learn things about my craft that you’ve already learned about yours.  I’ve also-- yeah!  And I’m starting to, because you’ve worked at your craft.  You’ve been pragmatic hands-on with your craft in a lot of different ways that I’m just starting to: I’m starting to write for television, you know.  I’m starting to... write for hire.

BILL:  Right.

PAUL:  You know?

BILL:  Right.

PAUL:  Which you’ve been doing for a while.  In fact, in some ways, you... that’s what you do is act for hire.... Except on projects like TUESDAY where you chose to do it because of-- of whatever feelings you have for the work.  Um... but I-- but I think the one thing that I’ve always kind of instinctively known, whether it was because of my religions upbringing, or because of my attraction to art.

BILL:  Mm-hm

PAUL:  Because my attraction to art was one of a knight in shining armor.  And we can talk about that too.  Uh...I have revised my vision-- but not completely on that.  Um... I do think that artists are true heroes.

BILL:  Hmm?  (Maybe this is sort of a verbal shrug?)

PAUL:  True heroes.  That true artists are those people who um.... and I include that person who can make the exquisite phad tai, or... or the exquisite scotch, or, or can uh... well, we can talk about that maybe later, but-- I feel like one of the things that-- that you refuse to admit is that that which you do is beyond your control--

BILL:  Mmm-hmm.

PAUL:  To a certain extent.  And you’re uncomfortable with that.

 

Devolving into faux-Jesse Jacksonism

PAUL:  For many people-- for the born-again Christians of the world-- I would nothing but heartily convince them that there is nothing outside themselves.

(Bill laughs.)

PAUL:  That that world which they have created is their own fucking fucked-up... vision of the world.

BILL:  Yeah.

PAUL:  And that that which they hate is themselves.  And that which they love is a... sweetened aspect of themselves and that they have not left themselves.

BILL:  Right.

PAUL:  You... you I would encourage you to see the other aspect of the universe, and that is that you are constantly connected in a thousand million different ways to that which you feel unconnected to.  And that that the-- that the satellite-- you’re either a satellite revolving around the sun or you are the revolution.  You know?

BILL:  Mmm.

PAUL:  You know?

BILL:  Mmm-hmm.

PAUL:  And uh... not to sound like Jesse Jackson.   Although that would be-- Fuck, man.  I should write for Jesse Jackson ‘cuz that’s great!

(Bill laughs.)

PAUL:  That’s better than anything Jesse’s said in a long mother-fucking time. 

(Bill laughs.)

PAUL:  You’re either that which revolves around the sun, or (Jesse Voice) you are the revolution!

BILL:  You’re right.  That does sound like Jesse.

PAUL:  Umm.  Except it doesn’t rhyme.  But it’s-- it’s a little too sublime for Jesse.  We’ll have to find some other demagogue for it.  But-- although I love-- my heart goes out to Jesse.  I can’t hate, Jesse.  He’s fab--  Did you hear his speech the last convention?  It rocked.

 

Mullin lays an Irish curse on Salyers

PAUL:  There’s-- There’s this great Zen koan that I love.  Says-- the young monk comes to the master, and says, you know, “I’m meditating but I’m too cold.”  And the Zen master says, “Well, you know when cold go to that place where you are so cold that it kills you and when you are hot go to that place where you are so hot that it kills you.”  And I lay this Irish curse on you: “Live in that universe where there is no art.  Be that universe where there is no art.”

BILL:  Well, I think I’ve tried to.  I mean, I--

PAUL:  No, I mean it.

(Paul laughs.)

PAUL:  NO, I MEAN IT!

(Paul laughs hysterically.)

BILL (drunken voice mockery of Paul):  You don’t understand!

 

On whether an actor should ever argue a director down

BILL:  This stuff about-- this stuff about uh-- nobody stops to think about the fact that there was a director involved in that show.  It wasn’t just about what Steven wrote.  It wasn’t just about what I did, you know?  What I-- when I’m-- when I’m rending my hair, my fake hair, at an incredible point and I go, “RENFIELD!”  That’s not necessarily my choice.

PAUL:  Right.

BILL:  That’s me doing what I was told the best way I could.  And I’m--

PAUL:  Right.

BILL:  And I’m presented with the challenge of trying to find truth in that.  Now a lot of actors would have argued Eddie down....  That’s not my job.  It’s not my-- it’s not my job to uh-- promote myself--

PAUL:  Is there ever a time when it’s right to argue a director down?

BILL:  Yeah, when you’re the other director. 

(Paul begins to groan very lowly. )

BILL:  If you’re an actor your job is to do what you’re told as best as you possibly can.

PAUL:  Wow!  Okay!  We come to the truth of it.

BILL:  I’ve-- I’ve long said that.  If you want to direct a play go fucking direct a play.

PAUL:  Well, wait a second.  Wa-wa-wa-waaaiiit a second

BILL:  Okay.

PAUL:  Because I think it’s not as facile as that.

BILL:  I think it should be.  I think if you’re a craftsman it is.

PAUL:  Ah well.

BILL:  --And that’s why I’m not an artist.

PAUL:  Hmmm.

BILL:  I-- I don’t have any patience for that crap.  I mean, it’s another-- it’s another-- it’s another way that the film world has invaded what we do.

PAUL (overlapping):  Well, here we go.  Well, here we go is what I’m saying is like, yes, as the novice, rookie, bullshit actor who’s got a little taste of Stanislavsky, a bad taste via Mr. Uh-- Strasberg.

BILL:  Strasberg, yeah.

PAUL:  Uh....  That’s the last thing they need to be doing is telling the director what their choices are.  But let me tell you something about Mr. (slurry) Mr. Eddie Levi Lee, is that you know more about theatre in your fucking, you know, nose--

BILL:  Then I, then I--

PAUL:  Hair clippings than Eddie Levi Lee knows.

BILL:  Okay, then if I-- if I believe that going into it, I’m a hypocrite when I sign the contract.  And I’m not a hypocrite... so I sign the contract.

PAUL:  I--  augh!

 

On whether an actor should ever refuse a line change from a director

PAUL:  Billy, you’re saying-- you’re saying to me that in no circumstances would it be right for you as one of the best actors that I know uh... to-- to call bullshit on a director.  That

BILL:  I’m saying it’s not my job.

PAUL (overlapping):  That fucking frightens me.  No, it is your fucking job!

BILL:  No, it’s not.

PAUL:  Yes, it is your fucking jo--

BILL:  I don’t agree with you.

PAUL (overlapping):  I went to-- John Sylvain came to me and said-- I had a line that said, “I threw that pass--”  now obviously this is an actor/playwright, a whole ‘nother issue.

BILL:  I know the line you’re talking about, too.

PAUL:  Yeah, said, “That fucking nigger dropped it.”

BILL (simultaneously):  “That fucking nigger dropped it.”

PAUL:  And Johnny said, “You need to cut that.”  And I said, “You need to go fuck yourself, because one, it’s the night before opening, and two, it’s the fucking script, and THREE, it’s the way we rehearsed it.

BILL:  Well, let me-- let me tell you something.  I’m not saying-- don’t misunderstand me.  In that same situation I would have asked John to keep the line.  I wouldn’t have told John to go fuck himself, because John’s the director.

PAUL:  No!  No!  No!.  But see that’s where I digress with you, because John’s fucking with my shit there and he has no business doing it.

BILL:  Brother, it’s not--

PAUL:  And he deserves--

BILL:  It isn’t your shit!

PAUL:  Yes!

BILL:  It’s our shit.

 

To follow is the full transcript of the second side of the cassette.

The Macallan Talks – Side One

 

Giving my demons the year off  has left me time to take care of some housecleaning, like backing up my old files to the cloud before my next hard drive crashes.  About a week ago I ran across a couple of old Word files that I thought were lost forever: transcripts from something called “the Macallan Talks”.  The premise was simple: two full fifths of Macallan 12-year-old scotch, a cassette tape recorder, William Salyers and myself.  We would talk about what we always talked about, but capture it on tape finally so that I could transcribe it and then possibly either publish or stage it.  Or at least that’s what I recall the plan was.  This was over thirteen years ago, so I’m not really sure what I was thinking.  All I know is that this conversation has never seen the light of day until now.

Mostly you get an ardent exchange between two friends who love talking, especially to each other.  Bill and I still blather like this, whether on the phone, since we no longer live in the city, or into the wee hours over scotch and illicit cigarettes, on the now ever rarer occasions when we do manage to get together in person.  What strikes me most clearly now looking over these transcripts is how little our positions have changed in the intervening years. Bill still ardently defends his “craft” against any woo-woo incursions of higher powers or purposes.  I still maintain that what we do, when we do it well, matters in sublime and fundamental ways we can only barely glimpse in fleeting, incomplete flashes.

Had I made these discussions public at the time, I am convinced that they would have been dismissed as the pompous rantings of a pair of third-tier theatre artists who thought way too highly of themselves and each other.  Now?  Well, nothing’s changed.  All of that is essentially still true (sorry Bill, at least you have a television career), but somehow I imagine (hope?) that the intervening near decade and a half gives our arguments some resonance beyond the moment.  Of course, the final analysis is up to you.  I publish the full first cassette side transcript at the end of this post.  I will publish the second side in another upcoming post.  In the meantime, some highlights from the first half:

 

On lying and acting . . .

(I try to start the tape without Bill knowing but he can tell something’s different about my face.  I’m a horrible liar…. )

PAUL:   So let's talk about lying.  Is a good actor a liar or not a liar.

BILL:  Well you know what Plato thought about that?

PAUL:  What?

BILL:  He literally thought--

PAUL:  Micky Mouse's dog?

    (beat)

BILL:  I was about to imitate him and then I realized I couldn't. 

    (He laughs.)

    'Cause he doesn't--

BILL & PAUL (together):  Say anything!

. . . .

BILL:  From what I remember reading in college, Plato said that actors should be killed because they lie.

PAUL:  See I consider myself a pretty good actor and I cannot lie to save my life.

BILL:  Well, I can lie but I consider them to be two separate things.  I don't... I don't lie unless I absolutely have to, and I hold that to a pretty high standard.  It's not about my convenience.  I'll take a lot of shit before I'll tell a lie.  Because of that thing we were talking about.  About how it's an allowance.  How responsibility comes with the power.

PAUL:  Right.

BILL:  And the only way I can tell a lie is to buy into myself.

PAUL:  Yeah, so you involve yourself in the Dark magic.

On art versus craft . . .

BILL:  . . . I think the word "art" is pretty useless.  It is so subjective as to be pointless--

PAUL:  Like "love" or something like that?

BILL:  Exactly.

PAUL:  Well, what would you replace it with?  Or would you?

BILL:  I'm not sure that you need the word.  It's almost used to describe that which people don't have the capacity to describe another way.  When someone says "art" they're either collectors talking about something that's worth a lot of money, or they are people who are moved beyond the ability to express... that.

PAUL:  What about when somebody says, "The way that guy does phad thai is a frickin' art?"

BILL:  he's talking about a transcendent experience     that goes beyond what he understands as being the execution of... the act.

PAUL:  Well, what about that?  Is there something to that?  I mean this "transcendent experience"-- if we don't have a name for it beyond "art" shall we not call it that?

BILL:  I think it's the height of craft.  When I approach a role there are a whole lot of givens.  I think particularly in acting, and particular among young actors, there's a need to over romanticize what we do.

PAUL:  Well, yeah... and then you get into that nastiness of Method and that whole "I-must-go-through-that-which-my-character-has-go-through" nonsense.

BILL:  Yes.  That's right.  And actors saying things like-- in all seriousness-- "I don't like to like to take about the craft 'cause I don't like to over analyze it.  And if I over analyze it, I'll kill it."

PAUL:  Which-- yeah-- sounds like somebody who...

BILL:  Doesn't know what the fuck they're doing.  that's exactly right.

 

 

On going the dangers and responsibilities of playing a dark role

PAUL:  ... Ok, I'm gonna go on the record about TUESDAY.  I think that the reason why TUESDAY was hard was because you had met the wall with your "craft", and with TUESDAY you had to be an artist.  And you were an artist, but it hurt because you were entering a realm where-- to use those fantastic mytho-terms-- you entered the realm where you were naked and raw.  It's like the total hero's journey.  At the beginning we see the hero and he's kick-ass, but he finally meets the challenge that is capable of kicking his ass.  And then it becomes interesting.  That's where the heart becomes involved.  And that's why I argue this art-versus-craft argument over and over again.  And that's why I'd like to try and get to the meat of it.

BILL:  So you're a masochist, because art has to hurt.

PAUL:  No...   No...  It's an old Buddhist thing.  You see Westerners misunderstand Buddhism because they think it's nihilism.  Because they say, "Well what a Zen Buddhist does is he sits in a room for eight hours, and that's torture!"

BILL:  Mmm-hmm.

PAUL:  And it is torture, and I do kinda share the opinion that the people that are attracted to Zen are masochists, but I do it, and I've sat in a room for 8 hours and I'll probably do it again.  See the problem is most Westerners misinterpret Buddhism as saying "You must suffer."  And I would interpret it slightly differently.  I would say true Buddhism is: "You will suffer."  But ultimately the suffering is as unimportant, if not more unimportant than the pleasure.

BILL:  So you don't glorify the suffering.

PAUL:  No.  Not all.  The suffering is a message.  And there's something to be said for computer metaphors-- the suffering is like an error message, saying, "Ok, error in sector B.  You're suffering.  Why?  Why are you hurting?"  Like, why does it hurt to do TUESDAY?...  And you're looking for reasons like your technique wasn't quite right,  and I'm saying no.  You're doing everything right.  You just refuse to admit that that which you are doing is more important than you think it is.  And that that which you are doing is more connected and more vital and more rooted in who you are than you feel comfortable with as a craftsman.

BILL:  Well my reaction to that is first of all is that... if we go that way for a moment, if we accept that as a truism, I have absolutely no problem in saying I'm not interested in that.  I'm not interested in self-flagellation in public.  That has no--

PAUL:  Well, first off that's not what I'm talking about.  And second off, if you were to say that to a Zen master, he'd probably give you a whack on the head, but then he'd say, "Who cares what you're interested in?"  No one cares what you're interested in.

BILL:  But remember I act for selfish reasons.

PAUL:  Well, maybe it's time to wake up. . . .

 

 

To follow is the full transcript of the first side of the cassette. 

 

The Uses of Art

 

Art…

• Reminds us we are going to die
• Keeps us interested in living
• Breaks us open
• Gives hope
• Devastates
• Terrifies
• Delights
• Comforts the afflicted
• Afflicts the comfortable
• Makes us human*
• Magnifies the greater glory of God^†
• Joins the long conversation
• Engenders reasonless gratitude
• Offers the means to become other people
• Demonstrates unprovable truth.

 

I have been noodling on this list for years, mostly because I like to have reasons handy when I teach playwriting.  (An investigation of the uses of playwriting would open a whole other can of worms.)  I have arranged these in a loose, ostensibly amusing order of my own choosing.  I would be truly delighted to hear suggestions for additions, adjustments and deletions.

Over the last century or so we have tended to shy away from objectivity in the arts and have emphatically discarded any objective means of defining exactly what art is.  “It can’t be done,” we shrug; or we toss down the glib gauntlet, “Art is whatever I say it is”, knowing full well that if that were true, then art would be, by extension, whatever anyone says it is, and by further extension, simply everything.  And when something is “everything”, it  achieves equivalence to “nothing.”  Or perhaps even less than that.

So I would like to suggest that art might only be objectively defined in the context of its utility.  Or in plainer words, in order to know what art is, we have to talk about—and maybe can only talk about-- what art does.

I understand I have no special standing to proffer such a list.  I quit college after my sophomore year.  My plays are only rarely and mostly marginally produced.  I am an administrative coordinator at a biotech company, a husband, a father and a person.  That last post is the only one I believe entitles me to talk about art; but I stand fiercely by that standing, because, after all, if art is not for persons, then for whom is it?

My plan over the next few months, or—let’s be honest—years, is to write a short essay about every one of the uses I listed above, and maybe even some I have not yet thought of— maybe some that you suggest.  Please be warned, however, that my track record for delivering on promised essays is spotty at best. 

Happy Holidays.

2010

 

*Not always a good thing.

^†Even if there isn’t One.

Chicago Posts: Awesome Theatre Town? Or the Awesomest?

Chicago is an awesome town.  I know this because I have been there once and I had a blast.  Chicago buys you whiskeys and beers-back in friendly, binged-in pubs, and Chicago puts its arm around you and tells you about its job as an assistant district attorney and how it married its high school sweetheart and has a nice family though one of its kids is disabled with something you cannot remember because of all the drinks Chicago has stood you.  And then later when you go to take a piss you find Chicago making out with this kind of skanky chick in the men’s room stall, and you’re pretty sure she’s not Chicago’s wife who Chicago was just telling you about--what was it?  Five minutes?-- or half an hour ago?  Doesn’t matter.  Who are you to judge?  Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is an awesome town.

 

*

But how awesome is Chicago as a theatre town?  My personal experience on this subject is much more limited.  This production of Louis Slotin Sonata that I am going to see this weekend is my first full production in what is, by nearly everyone’s estimation, one of the United States great stage cities.

Certainly everyone in the business likes to point to the Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company as the model for how to be both commercially successful and artistically relevant.  How many nascent ensemble-based theatre companies have promised you, with their collective hand out for a donation, that they intend to be Seattle or L.A.’s next Steppenwolf?  Me, honestly have no idea if Steppenwolf is all that great.  I have only seen one production by that team, nearly two decades ago, in New York City.  It was their adaptation of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and it was… oh right, it was frickin’ awesome.

Chicago is certainly less shy about promoting its theatre scene than Seattle.  The Tribune’s critic, Chris Jones calls his blog “Theater Loop: News from America’s Hottest Theater City.”  What critic in Seattle would ever be so boldly boosterish?  By my admittedly loose estimation, Louis Slotin Sonata received more reviews per capita in Chicago than in Seattle, Los Angeles or New York.  The fact that they were not all unqualified raves does not really matter.  Coverage is coverage and wide coverage is a sign of health for a theatre town.

To be fair, Chicago does seem to have more than its fair share of block-headed, Broadway-bedazzled reviewers.  Back in January, the above-mentioned Mr. Jones offered his thoughts on Outrageous Fortune, TCG’s ground-breaking analysis of the plight of American playwrights.  He dismissed us as “whining” and “absurdly self-indulgent.”  More recently he began the meat of his review of my Louis Slotin Sonata by saying, “By reacting fast, blocking and ending the reaction, Slotin saved the lives of the men who were with him in the lab that day,” thus moronically parroting the blatant falsehood that the U.S. government began spinning within hours of an embarrassingly avoidable accident.  One might forgive Jones for perpetuating this historical and scientific deceit if the precise counterpoint were not demonstrated over and over throughout the play, providing (I hope) the essential underpinning of Slotin’s unique path to redemption.

So critics can be patronizing blowhard nitwits in the Midwest, too.  Doesn’t matter.  Who is Seattle to judge?  (We can’t even get our best reviewer to commit to staying past intermission.)  Doesn’t change the fact that Chicago is almost certainly an awesome theatre town.  On this trip I want to learn more about how and why this is so.  I think the Emerald City could learn some things from the Windy One.

 

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*A note on Gary’s illustration:  I’m so excited by this one because it gives an inside view to a process usually only seen by myself, Gary and the director of whatever show we might be working on.  Gary likes to diagram.  I think he calls these things bubble charts and they represent one of the ways he gets his arms around a play. 

I stared at this one for like fifteen minutes last night after it came across the inter-tubes.  I could make sense of pieces of it, but the whole eluded me.  I chalked this up to Gary being smarter than me.  The next morning I looked at it fresh and realized my error.  The main path represents not “Paul’s” progress, but “Chicago’s”.  Of course!  I’m not the main character of this piece, Chi-town is (especially in the first paragraph, which this picture maps to perfection.)

Gary’s diagrams cut straight to the heart of a story and expose the essential mechanics that even the writer didn’t fully understand when he constructed it. 

Plus they’re funny.

How Theatre Really Could Save the World

I am reading Jaron Lanier’s simultaneously depressing and invigorating manifesto, You are Not a Gadget and I plan to write a full review of it soon, since it touches on so much of what we are doing over at NewsWrights United, but when I ran across this section I felt compelled to rush to share an excerpt (while noting the irony that rushing and excerpting are two of then things Lanier warns we do far too much of in the digital age).

 

It is easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off of metaphysical overtones…. 

A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing.  A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing.  An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face.  It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history. 

… You could define a … standard for representing oil paintings that includes odors, cracks, and so on, but it will always turn out that you forgot something, like the weight or the tautness of the canvas. 

The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important.…  If you didn’t specify the weight of a digital painting in the original definition, it isn't just weightless, it is less than weightless.

A physical object, on the other hand, will be fully rich and fully real whatever you do to it.  It will respond to any experiment a scientist can conceive.  What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent to completion.

A digital image, or any other kind of digital fragment, is a useful compromise.  It captures a certain limited measurement of reality within a standardized system that removes any of the original source’s unique qualities.  No digital image is really distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.”

Theatre by definition takes place in the real world.  As I wrote in an early draft of my play The Ten Thousand Things: “Theatre has limits.  Limits of distance, scale.  If I can’t reach you with my own live voice, it’s not really theatre anymore.” This drawback, which we have bemoaned since the advent of microphones, turns out to actually be an asset.  Theatre cannot be represented.  It can only be presented.

So why are we still so stuck in representational theatre: literal living room “dramas” that represent so-called “real-life”  in so called “real-time?”  Would our standards as theatre artists be higher if we accepted the truth that our art form may stand squarely on the front line of the battle to keep culture human?  Would we hold our feet closer to the fire of true creation and not just continue to spew out fodder for, by and about an ever dwindling Upper Upper Middle Class?

We theatre artists have to stop thinking we have been left behind in some technology backwater of the struggle for expression, and instead wade into the fray confident that our magic is more powerful than anything Silicon Valley can produce.  Our magic is real.  It is bottomless.  The present of theatre can only be presented.  It can never be re-gifted.

Hey.

Welcome to the fray.

Why is Theatre Puget Sound Diluting its Mission?

Yes, we all cringed when we saw the Theatre Puget Sound (TPS) ads for Theatre Week in years past.   Apparently some PR firm had been hired in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and given the very specific instructions to create a campaign that would confirm every uninitiated civilian’s suspicion about just how lame and goofy live theatre can be.  Bowler hats, canes and dorky “del arte” facial expressions were de rigueur.  Some one who did not know better could easily have gotten the impression that every show in Seattle was some variation of a Godspell Hell.

The comments to Dan Savage’s Slog post here about this flip phone pic  below sum up the general response hilariously.  Comment number 5 buttons them all together, thusly: “Perhaps it is a typo... perhaps it is supposed to read "Live Theatre Weak". 

If you are tempted to riposte in the comments with that hoary Seattle arts chestnut of an excuse: “They were doing the best they could”, please spare us, because anyone looking to encapsulate the thrill of theatre photographically need look no further for examples than any of the images pushed out over the last few years by WET. (Sorry, I just can’t bring myself to cave and call them “Washington Ensemble Theatre” just because some litigious trust-funded ensemble in NYC got jealous of WET’s success.  See here .)

(Just how and why is it that WET can make headphones so sexy?)

As much as Seattle’s theatre professionals longed for a fresh and empowering marketing campaign from TPS to hook people into big and small local theaters around town, the last kind of change most of us would have wished for is what rolled out this Spring.

Announcing Arts Crush,
The Month-Long Arts Festival

on April 19, 2010, at 5:30 pm | Category: Arts Crush

As you may already know, Theatre Puget Sound is planning an expansion of our highly successful Live Theatre Week festival.  In an effort to build upon the momentum of that program and address the expressed needs of the larger arts community, we decided to expand our scope and build a more diverse and inclusive month-long festival modeled after Live Theatre Week.

This October, Theatre Puget Sound will present Arts Crush, a month-long festival that connects artists and audiences with invigorating new experiences at hundreds of events across the region.  More than 200 arts organizations and innumerable artists from all over the Puget Sound will come together as a united arts community to share arts experiences with people of all kinds….

So Theatre Week becomes Arts Crush, and somehow, the theatre artists (mostly actors, actually) that make up TPS’s membership, all of the sudden become, without being asked, patrons of all the arts, because, you know, we make so much money on the stage.  Where are the other major discipline-specific arts organizations that are joining TPS in this move towards expansiveness?  There are none.  TPS basically owns Arts Crush, in conjunction with broad based arts funders like Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs.  None of the non-theatre-but-still-discipline-specific organizations like Velocity Dance or Seattle Chamber Music come even close to matching TPS’s size or influence.

Before I go on, let’s take a quick look at TPS’s mission, shall we?

TPS is a member-driven organization whose main goals are the nurturing of a healthy and vibrant theatre community, developing strong ties among the region's theatre professionals, raising the visibility of the region's theatre scene on national and international levels, and finding ways to develop new and diverse audiences.

Nowhere in the paragraph above is there any mention of cross-discipline arts promotion.

So why is TPS diluting its mission?  My best guess is fear, with a touch of pointless power grab thrown in for flavor.  The move is part of a larger strategy to beat a tasteful and bloodless retreat from world class status.  The thinking goes like this, “Theatre is suffering.  And so are all the arts.  The core audience for theatre in the Northwest overlaps the core audiences for all of the other arts.  Let’s expand our scope, control that shrinking core and hope to hold the ground we have.  We can give up the castle to control the wider, albeit weakened, kingdom.”

Of course this runs counter to what I and many of my colleagues believe is the best strategy to not only save theatre in Seattle but also elevate it to world class status at the same time.  We believe now is the time go on the offensive: to advance, not retreat; to push forward bold new and innovative plans for making a completely different and fresh sort of theatre.  We certainly do not think we should be spending our limited resources promoting “arts” in general.  That sort of “yay arts!”, “up with people!” advocacy ultimately helps no one.

TPS’s desperation is showing.  Just this week an email went out from extending the deadline for applications to the Arts Crush festival.  A cynic has to wonder why.  Could the dilution of the TPS’s core mission have anything to do with it?

Turning Theatre Week into Arts Crush is a mistake.  Theatre artists are rightfully reluctant to underwrite an effort that has expunged the word “theatre” from its name.  (If you played professional shortstop in Seattle, and the Mariners began a promotional campaign promoting all sports, but omitting the word “baseball” from its title, would you be worried, irritated or both?)  TPS should rethink this move.  Seattle needs a theatre advocacy organization that can keep its focus.  If TPS wants to be something other than it is, they should be honest about it and change their moniker to “APS” for Arts Puget Sound.  Of course, if they did that you would have to wonder what it would do to their membership rolls.