Just Wrought

While Simultaneously Reading Stephen Jay Gould and Larry McMurtry

For reasons I would rather not get into I have taken to re-reading all my journals since I started handwriting them into marble comp books back in 1997. (I was typing for a living at the time and wanted to spare my wrists keyboarding my personal thoughts. I never went back to a digital.) The review is a pretty tedious endeavor. I wish I had described a lot less of my career woes and a lot more of my physical delights, but youth is ever wasted on the baselessly self-fascinated. Every so often as I read, however, I run across a little snippet, or string of them, that pleases me such that it prompts a desire to share.

9/26/07

. . . . Surprisingly, I find a deep correspondence between the Gould and the McMurtry. Both maintain—one overtly, the other subtly and subversively and ultimately more convincingly—that life has no plan, no forward progress, not even dominant echoes or themes; just the faintest hints of them. Contingency is all and contingency is one brutal motherfucker.

Experimental Results

I made a promise to myself a while back that if I was going to use the word “experiment” in association with my work as a theatre artist, I had to do so more like a scientist and less like some avant garde poser.  As I said in my earlier post “Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”: 

Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable.  In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.

I would add that good scientists publish their results whether or not they find them gratifying.  And that’s exactly what I intend to do here and now regarding the experiment of publishing my play Ballard House Duet simultaneously with its recent world premiere.  (I enthusiastically explained my reasons for initiating this experiment here.)

So as of this posting, here is how my sales break down by channel:

Not a data/chart nerd like me?  Okay, here are my plain English conclusions:

1. I have too much unsold inventory.  If I had listened to my publisher and ordered the number of books he recommended I’d be sitting on a mere 3% overhang now, which would have been right in the estimator’s sweet spot.
2. “Show sales” was my strongest channel, which is gratifying, since offering the script simultaneously with performances was the main point of this effort.  If I did this again I would lean even more heavily into this channel: maybe invest in a more visually pleasing display than the cardboard box with the words “Scripts for Sale - $10” scrawled on the front of it in ballpoint pen.

The bottom line is I turned a profit about three eBay sales ago.  I am now $19.59 richer for this experience; but based solely on the data, I would have to give myself a C +, since I moved only 78 % of my product. 

Of course, it is much harder to quantify all the things I have learned from the experience, not to mention all the nerdy fun I have had.  Here’s a quick list:

• People will buy scripts at a show, but they have to be reminded, in the pre-show speech and then again at intermission and after the show.  The display of scripts has to be prominent.  You have to make buying them easy and fun.
• eBay is not the best means of selling a script on line.  It wound up costing me $2.31 out of every $10 script I sold on-line.  Given the cost of printing, that left me with very little margin to take any profit.  If it hadn’t been for show sales, with their much wider margin, I would still be bleeding red ink at this point.

The best outcome of this experiment was, of course, the chance to talk about the experiment itself: to revisit the question of whether it makes sense to publish play scripts simultaneously with world premiere productions, and more specifically, whether it makes sense for a playwright to put up his own capital to do so. I would say the short answers to these questions are, “Yes, with some improvements in the process.” And “No, a playwright already banks enough when he or she antes up their play for staging.”

Fellow playwright Joshua Conkel chimed in on Facebook to point out, “…In the U.K. it's common to get the script at the show. It costs a few pounds and it also serves as the program…. Oberon Books does it. And then of course the script goes out to bookstores and all that. It's great!”  Perhaps as Seattle grows as one of the nation’s hothouses for locally grown new theatre, it might behoove us as to explore a script sales model like the UK’s, though it should also be noted that the simultaneous publishing experiment has been run quite extensively here in decades past. Bret Fetzer explained in comments posted on my earlier blog:

The experience of Rain City Projects -- which published plays in conjunction with productions for over ten years… was that when the theater promoted selling the script, it succeeded, and when they didn't, it didn't. The single most significant factor, by an order of magnitude, was having someone hold up the script in a preshow speech and say "This is for sale in the lobby; if you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to buy the script." Other approaches -- such as plugging the script for sale in a program ad -- had a fraction of the impact of a live preshow plug.

Over time, theaters became less invested in promoting scripts. There was a trend away from preshow speeches, and even the theaters that still did them just wanted the speaker to say the essentials and get off the stage. Most of the theaters producing new plays were small, volunteer-run organizations, so there was no one to consistently make a plug for the script, and trying to educate a rotating crew of house managers about this was too much to accomplish on top of all the other stuff that had to get done. Everyone supported the idea of selling the scripts in the abstract, but in practice it fell by the wayside.

But the main reason Rain City Projects stopped publishing individual scripts was that, as these were brand new plays getting their first production, a majority of playwrights learned a lot of new things and did significant rewrites after the production. Immediately the scripts were obsolete and the playwrights didn't want them sold or distributed....

My experience working with Original Works Publishing, eBay and Amazon Direct Publishing leads me to believe that new technologies and processes might allow theatres and playwrights to keep their inventory small and flexible enough to offer scripts, either in hard copy or electronically, such that some of the challenges Rain City Projects faced might now be mitigated. 

One conclusion seems certain: folks who bought my script seem very pleased indeed to be able to own a permanent document  of an otherwise inherently ephemeral experience.  Theatre is fleeting, but perhaps we theatre artists could work a bit harder to bottle some of our volatile moonshine for future times.

 

Rain City Projects Rocks It World Class with Vol. 3 of Manifesto Series

So I know you are going to find this hard to believe, but I was recently getting into it with a fellow playwright about the failures of the New York-centric hub-and-spoke model of new play development.  His argument was the tired old saw: “If you want the best product, you have to get it from the where all the best gather to produce it.”  If I recall correctly, he gave as an example: “If you’re were looking for a new sensei for your martial arts dojo, you would to look to Okinawa.”  I really have no idea what that means.  I did, however, offer the counter that if I want the best cheese, beer, wine, meats, fish, fruit and vegetables, I don’t really need to look beyond the Pacific Northwest.  Then I posted a helpful link on his Facebook wall to my essay “Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter.”

The link disappeared within an hour.  So much for the free exchange of ideas.  I suppose when it comes to thoughts on theatre, the proper direction of flow is one-way from New York City to everywhere else.  

But honestly, I don’t even need to argue when amazing Seattle institutions like Rain City Projects regularly put world class money where my big mouth is.  Case in point, their upcoming release of Volume 3 of their Manifesto Series, a regularly published anthology of great Northwest Plays.

Can I even express to you how honored I was to be included with the likes of Yussef El Guindi recent winner of The Harold and Mimi Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award, or my personal heroine Elizabeth Heffron, or Stranger Genius Award winner Chris Jeffries or the fiercely incomparable Bret Fetzer and Stephen McCandless, all hand-selected by the nationally renowned playwright and playwriting teacher Naomi Iizuka?

Nope. I don’t believe I can, but— dammit!— I can try.

This coming Sunday we will be celebrating Volume 3’s release with free readings from several of the collected plays.  I’ll be there.  Yussef and Elizabeth mentioned they might be, too. So why don’t you come on down so we can sign your copy, hot, fresh, and locally sourced, right off the presses!?

 

 

Here are all the crucial details from Rain City Projects:

 

Rain City Projects is releasing the third book in its Manifesto series - anthologies of plays by Northwest playwrights. We're very excited this time to have an anthology of seven plays selected by Naomi Iizuka who started by writing a manifesto of what theater should be and then chose plays she felt exemplified her vision. Please join us for a reading of short excerpts from Ms. Iizuka's delightful manifesto and from the plays she chose including:

Language Rooms by Yussef El Guindi

Clubfoot by Bret Fetzer & Stephen McCandless

Mitzi's Abortion by Elizabeth Heffron

Vera Wilde by Chris Jeffries

An American Book of the Dead by Paul Mullin

Live! From the Last Night of My Life by Wayne Rawley

and Wizzer Pizzer by Amy Wheeler

Sunday, April 15th at 2:00pm

The reading is FREE and will be held at Elliott Bay Book Company 1521 10th Ave, Seattle, WA 98122

Manifesto v. 3 will be available for purchase along with Manifesto v. 2 (edited by Steven Dietz) and Manifesto v. 1 (edited by Erik Ehn).

Louis Slotin Sonata is #1!

Funny story: I mentioned on Google+ this morning that sales of the Kindle version of my play Louis Slotin Sonata seemed to have gone through the roof (though in the interest of perfect honestly, I must now instruct you to picture a roof approximately six inches off the ground.)  Shortly thereafter, my friend and colleague Wes Andrews chimed in to point out that the play is the bestselling e-book in the playwriting category.  (See the rankings here. ) 

Shocking!

At this point I began mentally listing reasons this might be so:

1. In November, Louis Slotin Sonata will be receiving a production on the retired ocean liner, The Queen Mary, produced by California Repertory Company, or Cal Rep for short, the resident theatre company at California State University – Long Beach.  Now, a staging of the play does not necessarily translate into a significant boost in Kindle sales.  I only saw a small uptick when A Red Orchid produced Slotin in Chicago last year; but I wonder if, since the play is being done under the auspices of a university, perhaps certain professors are assigning the text as course reading.  If so, that would be sweet.  I’d like nothing better than to start feeding at the trough of mandatory academic assignment, especially in light of how often and eagerly I rail against the dangers of academia infecting American Theatre with the debilitating disease of elitist inaccessibility.
2. It ain’t exactly hard to top a list of books about playwriting.  It’s a bit like being the best ice-hockey player in Chad: an achievement, undeniably, but one that needs to be placed in context.  Adding to the irony is the fact that that Louis Slotin Sonata isn’t about playwriting, it is playwriting.  When I first published the script “playwriting” was the closest category Kindle offered.  (A further irony is implied here: Amazon recognized that books about playwriting were more likely to sell than plays themselves.)  All that said, I flatter myself to think that reading Louis Slotin Sonata might teach you things that you won’t learn from Playwriting for Dummies (number two on the list).
3. You can only get Louis Slotin Sonata on Amazon.  While Slotin is probably my best known play, it is not necessarily the most successful by all standards.  Tuesday has had more productions and The Sequence has netted me more money.  A while ago I decided that I would hold Slotin back from hard-copy publication, if only to see how well it might do if solely offered electronically.  It was an experiment. I like to think Louie would approve.

Regardless of how I might try to explain it, the situation remains absurd.  And thus, it is my sworn duty as a theatre artist to do everything possible to perpetuate it.  You can help.  You can order the play for your Kindle of course, but if that does not work for you either because…

• you do not have a Kindle (I sure don’t)
• or you already have a copy of the play
• or don’t have the $7.99 to spend

… you can still help by going to Amazon and supplying a review of the play.  Reviews and good ratings help raise the profile of an electronic title. 

So think back.  Did you see Slotin in Los Angeles, New York, Seattle or Chicago?  What did you think?  Type those thoughts out and post them to Amazon.  Maybe give the play some stars.  Then sit back with me and see how long we can keep this absurdity going.

By the Whites of Our Eyes

While reading Brian Christian’s evocative new book The Most Human Human, which manages to explore an impressively wide and variegated territory while covering the secondary contest at an annual Turing Test competition to determine which human entrant seems most human, I ran across this random fun fact:

.... Humans are known to have the largest and most visible sclera—the “whites” of the eyes—of any species....  There must be some reason humans developed it, despite its obvious costs.  In fact, the advantage of visible sclera—so goes the “cooperative eye hypothesis”—is precisely that it enables humans to see clear, and from a distance, which directions other humans are looking....  Chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—our nearest cousins—follow the direction of each other’s heads, whereas human infants follow the direction of each other’s eyes.

All evolved traits have costs associated with them.  A peacock develops his tail to attract a peahen at great nutritive cost.  In fact, he does so as a way of signaling, “I must be really special because I can squander resources on this utterly useless and even detrimental fancy fanny fan.”  So likewise, there must have been costs to developing these large and prominent sclera of ours.  The most obvious leaping to my mind is the fact that when I can easily see what other people are looking at, they can just as easily do the same with me.  This is mutual mind-reading, plain and simple.  And we have to assume that being able to read each others’ minds was ultimately more advantageous to our forbears than permanent obfuscation.  We were stronger when we understood each other well.   We still are.

As usual, I see implications for theatre.  A while ago I posted here an essay explaining why solo shows are not plays, and therefore not, strictly speaking, theatre.  I conceded, however, that they belong to the even older art of story-telling.  Now, based on some of the newest science available, I am no longer convinced it really is the elder form.

Communication based on gesture, eye movement and even sympathetic neuronal patterning (more on that later when I abstract research on “mirror neurons”) may well have preceded verbal communication, which leans so heavily on semantic content.  Put more simply, our evolutionary ancestors may have been “play-acting” long before they were “story-telling”.

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.

Playwright as Toolmaker: David Ball’s Incomparable BACKWARDS & FORWARDS

A bunch of us local playwrights (the same ones you won’t be seeing any time soon at a Seattle Big House near you) are busy working on the next edition of A Living Newspaper.  Last fall we produced the very first edition, It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper.  All through this process we have been working with an actual journalist, Tom Paulson, who in addition to being one of the founders and executive producers of NewsWrights United, also works as a freelance reporter specializing in science and world health issue.  Tom was on staff at The Seattle Post-Intelligencer for over twenty years prior to the demise of that paper’s paper edition.  Dawson Nichols and I have been bugging Tom to actually write something for the stage, an “article” for this next edition.  He says he wants to, seems eager even, but then turns shy, complaining that play-wrighting is an entirely different sort of scribbling and that he does not know the method.  (How I wish that a particular subset of the playwrights’ community shared this reticence to perpetrate dramatic mediocrity.)  So Tom asked us if there was a book he could read to find out how to write a play.  I said I didn’t know of any, smug in my belief that no such book could possibly exist.  Dawson said “Backwards & Forwards by David Ball.”  So I ordered Ball’s book from the library, and quickly discovered by the first few pages that once again Dawson had smashed my smugness:

A play is a series of actions.  A play is not about action, nor does it describe action.  Is a fire about flames?  Does it describe flames?  … Why do you think actors are called actors?

Where had this book been all my playwright’s life?!

Ball presents Backwards & Forwards as "a technical manual for reading plays'', but since its publication in 1983, it as been fully recognized and celebrated for what it really is: a stealthily but thinly disguised treatise on how to write them.  And why not?  No self-respecting playwright would want to write anything unworthy of the kind of careful reading Ball demands his students give a play.  With plain-spoken, clearly articulated admonishment, Ball calls us back to bare bones, reminding his putative readership: actors, directors, designers, anyone involved in actually staging theatre that scripts are nothing but architecture

Play characters are not real.  You cannot discover everything about them from the script.  The playwright cannot give much, because the more that is given, the harder it is to cast the part.  The playwright must leave most of the character blank to accommodate the actor.  Scripts contain bones, not people. 

Some other gems to tempt you into ordering this book, just as I intend to, after returning this copy to the library:

A character’s self description, or how others in a play describe a character, is not reliable for the simple real-life reason that what people say is not reliable….  Description must be validated by examination of action.  Action either verifies description, rending description redundant, or it reveals that the description is wrong.  Redundant or wrong: that is all description can be.

And. . .

A particularly insidious trap is the old assertion that character changes during a play.  But people in plays don’t change any more than people in real life do.

He goes on to point out that Edmund’s seeming point-of-death conversion to goodness at the end of King Lear--

Edmund:  I pant for life.  Some good I mean to do. / Despite of mine own nature

--isn’t a conversion at all, but rather yet another attempt to best his brother Edgar.

… By Act 5 Edgar is revered for his virtue, not his land.  Now Edmund must appear virtuous to get what he wanted all along: equality to Edgar.  It is the same trait, same desire.  Edmund’s character has not changed, but a changed situation calls for different tactics.  Edmund remains Edmund.

And then there is this, which hints at presaging a theory I am working on, that theatre has a unique line of attack on the collective unconscious:

The good [theatre] artist does not seek a group response, but rather a group of individual responses.

And a particular favorite in light of the struggle for a return to locally grown new work:

Playwrights—even great ones— do not write for the ages.  They write for their specific audiences….  Special problems arise when a play is done for an audience other than the one it was written for.

Just this morning I had to scold my 8-year old son.  He loves my tape measure, has always loved measuring things, but he also likes to pay the tape out and then let it reel back all at once in a ever-accelerating rush so that it slams back into the housing.  This drives me nuts because the edge of the tape is sharp and I’m worried he’s going to cut himself.  I said, “This is a real tape measure: a tool not a toy.  And some tools can hurt you if you don’t use them properly.”  I was instantly reminded of the penultimate paragraph in Ball’s book.

Think of the script as a tool.  Before you pick it up to use, know which is the handle and which is the blade—or you might cut your throat.

How many theatre artists are keeping their tools that sharp?  How many really respect or even care about the potential danger in what we do?  Is there any danger any more?  Are museums inherently dangerous or safe places to visit?  I think audiences come to theaters  not for craft, nor excellence, nor even for great directing nor great acting,  not even for important  ideas illustrated through words strung  beautifully together.  Audiences come to be thrilled.  Are will selling them that?  Are our tools sharp enough to cut us?