I am done bitching in bars. I am pushing my stakes on the table publicly, here and now, and I encourage my colleagues in theatre to do the same. Our stock-in-trade is dialogue. Let's employ its power to discover the way forward towards a world class theatre in Seattle.
When The Stranger asked me at the end of the year what my biggest regret of 2011 was, I said:
I regret that due to limited resources, we had to mothball NewsWrights United prior to the Occupy movement blowing up, because I would have really liked to cover that in a living newspaper. Adjacent to that is my regret that none of the big houses in Seattle (or small, for that matter) saw fit to include making topical theatre, based on events happening right here right now, as part of their regular programming this year.
Well, shade my regret mitigated by the news from across the pond that my former playwriting student German Munoz has organized a living newspaper about the Occupy movement called The Occupied Times. After spending a month researching and visiting the Occupy sites in London, emerging playwrights will present a night of short plays in the format of a living newspaper. They will act as reporters and cast a critical eye on the Occupy movement, its supporters and detractors, all under the Arcola Tent.
And color me even more vividly gratified when I saw that the project gave Seattle a shout-out in their press release: “This project was inspired by It’s not in the P-I: A living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper presented in Seattle in 2009 as a response to the closing of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper by Newswrights United.”
Not surprisingly, The Occupied Times seems to be garnering the same sort of media excitement that the two living newspapers NewsWrights United produced in 2009 and 2011. The London Evening Standard ran a preview of the piece and quoted my friend German thusly:
We want the show to explore sides of the movement that have not been heard. We're hoping to reach people of all ages who feel they've made up their minds about the Occupy movement. People who either think of the protesters as a bunch of lazy hippies who don't want to get a job, or see them as martyrs fighting the good fight against a system that is unbearably corrupt. Of course neither of these are completely true, and we want to show audiences our responses as artists and help them make up their own minds.
I heartily encourage my friends in London to check out this fresh, locally grown theatre inspired in the crucible of the right here and the right now. Here’s the show info:
Six Degrees Productions presents . . .
The Occupied Times: A living newspaper about the Occupy movement
For all enquiries and ticket requests, please contact: German Munoz of Six Degrees Productions on 07854 231 085 or g@germanmunoz.com
And as for my friends in Seattle, do you ever wonder why the Big Houses haven’t picked up such a wildly popular and media magnetizing idea? Well, in fairness, maybe they will now that it is being done in London, one of the two officially approved cities for sourcing new plays.
I went on record a while ago saying that I will not be doing reviews here at Just Wrought. However, in order to make a couple of larger points later, I will have to stipulate some things about Mike Daisey’s performance last night at the Seattle Rep’s production of his new one-man show, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. Here’s why: I was pressing my way out of the theatre after the show, doing my best to spare myself and Kurt Beattie the awkwardness that always ensues when we try to casually chit-chat, when I overheard an older and obviously well-off man say to his wife, “I’ll be interested to see how his [meaning Daisey’s] performance grows after a couple weeks. I mean, this was only just opening night after all.”
Yeah.
So let’s get something straight from the start: Mike Daisey’s performance was brilliant, alternatively hilarious and harrowing; funny and furious: one moment cannily manipulative and the next heartbreakingly earnest, and it only grew more compelling as the evening progressed. Frankly, I expected no less. Daisey is a brilliant performer. Full stop. What’s more, he’s a consummate professional, meaning that he will bring that brilliance to every performance he does of this piece or any other, night after night, week after week, venue after venue. To engage in speculation about whether Daisey’s performance will improve or decline after a couple weeks is to indulge in the worst kind of aesthetic fetishism, and worse: it lets you off the hook of the message.
Unfortunately, this hobbyist’s game has been getting played more and more here in Seattle. “Hans Altwies’s performance was brilliant the other night,” says the canny theatre-goer, making plain that she not only knows Hans Altwies by name, but also understands the nuances of his work well enough to gauge when he’s brilliant and when he’s not. Well, I got news for ya, knowing theatre-goer. Hans Altwies is always brilliant. Like Mike Daisey, Hans is a consummate theatre professional, and he’s going to give you the acting goods in great plays, okay plays and terrible plays alike. What’s more, Hans is not the only brilliant actor in Seattle: we have at least a hundred world class actors in this town—way more than we can sustain with a living wage. What we do not have in huge supply are shows that matter, right here and right now to our fellow citizens. (Yes, I understand Of Mice and Men is moving. But no, I do not agree that staging it yet again can make a wit’s worth of difference in most people’s lives.) The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs is different. In his show Mike is telling stories that you simply cannot and will not hear anywhere else—true stories about the lives of our fellow human beings who make, by hand, the “shit”—as Mike calls it-- that we consume.
If you are reading this on a digital device (and how could you not be?) Mike provides a journalistic investigation that is as intimately connected to your life as the technology you are using right now. He did the risky leg work that no “professional reporter” was willing to do, and he got past the corporate obfuscation that no other journalist could breech. If you want to hear these stories in the next few weeks, the only way you can do it is to show up at a specific place, the Seattle Rep, at a specific time and listen to Mike tell them to you. If you say to me that the Rep’s tickets are too pricey, I will listen respectfully and sympathetically, but I will counter with a question of my own: how much did your phone cost? Was it more or less than a ticket to Mike’s show? And how can you really assess how much it really cost, unless you find out how it was made and by whom?
Artists want their work to have impact, and certainly theatre artists are no exception. Unfortunately, a lot of us, a lot of the time, stay caught in the trap of thinking that exquisite craft is the only way we can really move people. After all, our stories are old, often ancient; surely we can only make them relevant by telling them so well that our audiences will be altered somehow by the excellence of our execution. Why else would you do Of Mice and Men? Or Hamlet? Or All My Sons? Most of us already know the message of these works, so the value must lie in the medium. And so it does.
Please understand, I am not looking to explode the canon. I, too, see great value in revisiting the classics over and over again. But I also believe that there is another path to relevance available to theatre artists. When we bring current local issues into our theatres we replenish its vitality for effecting change in the here and now; and we guarantee its rightful place among the arts that lean into the future and not the just the past. Theatres do not just have to be museums.
I have to admit to having been inspired by The New New News to sit down and write this update on the site's progress. The play's argument that transparency is lacking as news is reinvented (at least as a business model) online hit home with me. We're in one of those historical periods of exploration, financing tiny little caravels to travel uncharted paths, and it's just plain discourteous not to leave a journal behind.
Let me start with the more reader-relevant details before moving on to a discussion what makes The SunBreak tick, and what our online magazine plans are.
The New New News continues its run for two more weeks at the Theatre One Stage at North Seattle Community College. While we at NewsWrights United understand that the piece will never join the ranks of the classics, we are nonetheless very proud of the immediacy of the stories we are telling, and the overt impact they are having in our community. Theatre for, by and about the people of Seattle! Market fresh, and indeed, quite perishable! (We only have two more weeks.)
You can check it out by ordering your advance reservations here.
The Puget Sound’s NPR affiliate 88.5 KPLU ran a segment on our show this morning, A look at "The New, New, News: A Living Newspaper."You can read the accompanying text article and listen to the audio here.
But I won’t leave you without a little teaser:
The play also explores how long time print journalists are making their way in the world of blogs and virtual newsrooms that don’t have any firewalls separating them from the demands of advertisers.
They pull back the curtain of online journalism and raise a lot of interesting questions.
Mullin and Nichols say they don’t want people to take sides, new versus old, paper versus digital. But they do want us to be aware of the changes happening in journalism, and to question these changes so we can make the profession better. They say that if the public does not take these changes seriously, our democracy could eventually suffer.
We have finished up our West Seattle and Capitol Hill runs, and now only have two weeks left at our home base in North Seattle. So get your advance reservations now by clicking here!
... one of those moments in storytelling where, in ways you couldn’t have predicted, disparate elements of narrative and meaning all come together.
For this longtime fan of the much misunderstood mass microblogging service, it was fantastic.
I am one NewsWright who is delighted that Monica enjoyed the show, especially since she helped us so much in the early phases of our research, suggesting leads, pointing us toward whole new stories to run down, inviting us into her “meet-ups”. We do wonder, though, if she recognized herself in any of the characters.
There's nothing about News that's passive, or simple; very little that is formulaic… which is unusual and welcome in an age where everything can and will come to you. At the end of the night… one is rewarded with an excess of interesting thoughts about the world we inhabit….
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And then The Stranger’s Brendan Kileychimed in. He hasn’t seen it yet, but that doesn’t stop him from recommending it:
….[NewsWrights United] put together The New New News—about the rise of local blogs, how the Seattle Times got a Pulitzer Prize for its readers' Twitter coverage of the Maurice Clemmons manhunt, and what happened to Art Thiel when he started his own blog and had to get tangled with selling his own ads. Judging by their last effort and the seriousness of their material, The New New News should be scarier than the ersatz Mack the Knife.
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I particularly enjoyed Rosemary Jone’sinterview at Examiner.com because it gives NewsWrights United’s Managing Producer, Jim Jewell a chance to say why he believes in the work we do.
Right now, theater looks to me like newspapers in the 90's, watching changes all around them and somehow believing themselves above the change, too venerable to fail. We spend too much time in the theater talking about what theater is instead of actively engaging the form and deciding what it will be, and we aren't too far from the crisis newspapers have found themselves in: failure to evolve.
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So what does all this good news for NewsWrights mean to you? Well, for one it means that if you had hoped not to leave Capitol Hill to see the show, you better order your advance reservations soon. We have only one week at the Erickson, and it starts tonight. The following two weekends will be staged at Theater One on the North Seattle Community College campus (advance reservations for those performances here).
Of course, you can always risk walking up because we always hold back a quantity of pay-what-you-can seats. You just have to ask yourself, are you really cheaper than the majority of your Capitol Hill neighbors? If so, show up early. All evening performances start at 7:30 pm. The matinee is at 2 pm.
Gee I wish I could tell you, but then you might think you don’t need to come to The New New News: A Living Newspaper, and that would be so so wrong. Because you do need to come. We open FRIDAY! Book your reservation now so you you too can get a taste.
Seattle has already lost the print edition of the Seattle PI and the … The Empty Space. We need to fight against the Darwinian trend of saying that only the strongest survive, and take action against the slow erosion of the cultural tapestry of Seattle. We are a city that prides itself on its intellectual acuity.
Kate Whoriskey Artistic Director of the Intiman Theatre
I am often accused of arrogance. The aspersion does not bother me much. I try to remind everyone who will listen that the last thing they should be looking for in a playwright is reticence. Dramatists can be wrong—often are— but after all boldly framed public dialogue is what we wright when we write. Institutional arrogance, however, is an all together different, more heinous sin. My recent work blurring the line between journalism and theatre with NewsWrights Unitedhas opened my eyes to the prevalence of this poisonous phenomenon in both fields.
Back in June 2010, at a panel on monetizing on-line news David Boardman, the Managing Editor of The Seattle Times, made a stunning statement about the recent death of his former competition, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "The reality is: it's not like something was lost.” This is not the first time someone at The Times has gone out of their way to kick the corpse of The P-I. If you choose to watch the video (Boardman makes his remarks at timestamp 52:50 in the video provided below) you will notice that the journalism insider panelists barely blink at Boardman’s chilling dismissal of Seattle’s longest running daily newspaper. In fairness, they might have been reluctant to register the churlishness of one in the rare position to offer them a paying job in their chosen field. (As a playwright I have long since been liberated from this kind of fear, since no artistic director is willing to pay me, or any local playwright, at a rate comparable to even what an Equity actor makes, let alone a living wage.)
The Seattle Times survives through the idiotic exigencies of fate. It could have easily been the other way around, and in their hearts they know it. The jury remains out on newspapers. So “Fairview Fanny”, as The Times is traditionally nicknamed, would do well to watch her step in the cemetery lest she dance into her own grave.
The chasm gapes even wider and closer for The Intiman Theatre, one of Seattle’s three Big Houses. In a recent email to everyone in their database the Intiman made it clear that unless a half a million dollars is raised by the end of March, and then another half million by September, the theatre will cease operations. In the business, we call this a “shoot-the-puppy” campaign: a deeply desperate move, fraught with risk, but also deeply arrogant. At its core the implicit message is:
Our survival matters so much that you should overlook our ineffectuality, our malfeasance, our self-dealing, our cowardice and even the very arrogance of this plea. We matter more than the artists we underpay. We matter more than the audiences we fail to reach. We matter more than the smaller organizations you will not be supporting so that you can help us survive, because we must survive and you must pay now for nothing more than the chance to watch us live another day.
Allow me to honor the clarity of Intiman’s ultimatum with some clarity of my own: I hope they die. I hope they do it soon and with a minimum of suffering. And most of all I hope they do it without siphoning precious funds from the rest of us who make theatre in the Pacific Northwest.
In her note on the Intiman’s blog which I quoted at the top of this post, Artistic Director Kate Whoriskey invokes the ghosts of The Empty Space and The P-I as if she actually suffered their loss instead of showing up on the scene quite recently and long after those beloved institutions succumbed. She merrily previews the upcoming season: “I will be directing my husband in The Playboy of the Western World,” assuming we would be delighted by this nepotism. She must imagine we were similarly delighted when we learned that she had been hand-picked for her position by her predecessor Bart Sher without any input from the community, the patrons, and very little, it seems, even from board “Without the Intiman, will we be as strong?” she implores in closing. And all I can think of is the Lone Ranger joke. He and Tonto are surrounded by a band of Apaches. He says, “Looks like we might die here, old friend.” And Tonto replies, “What’s this “we” shit, Kemosabe?”
Seattle theatre is alive and thriving. Buy me a beer and I will name you at least 100 theatre organizations in Western Washington more deserving of your donation than the Intiman. For now I will give you three for free and attempt to tier them to your tastes:
If you like raw gusty innovative new stories which actually take place here now in Seattle, then support the project for which I currently serve as Executive Producer, NewsWrights United. We are world premiering our second edition The New New News: A Living Newspaper this Friday. Our ticket prices are considerably more affordable than the Intiman’s. If you can’t make the show, you can still support us here. (I don’t hate our odds of surviving past September.)
If your tastes are more conservative, but you still want to support a smaller endeavor; if you love the classics and want to see them done with verve, talent and bold new insights, support Seattle Shakespeare Company. They have a production of Three Penny Opera coming up that I am itching to see, since it’s by my favorite German playwright and it stars one of my favorite undersung Seattle actors, John Bogar. You can donate to Seattle Shakes here.
If your tastes are still more conservative, and/or you are rich enough to consider such smaller theatres beneath the consideration of your largesse, give some money to A Contemporary Theatre. The day before Intiman sent out its desperate plea, its fellow Big House downtown announced that for the second year running it had booked a budget surplus. You can donate to an already healthy ACT here.
All three of these organizations prove that at every level of operations we can do better than what the Intiman has been doing. We know this in our hearts. What we do not know is if the Intiman can do better than what the Intiman has been doing. I tend to doubt it, and that is why I believe it is time to let it die.
Please do not misunderstand me. The shuttering of the Intiman represents a loss nearly as terrible and irrevocable within Seattle’s cultural ecosphere as the loss of the P-I is within Seattle’s journalism world (Mr. Boardman’s fear-born callousness notwithstanding). I will not dance on the Intiman’s grave. But I will also not be a party to keeping the institution on life support past the time of its viability, especially when doing so means diverting funds from theatre arts organizations that have been more successful in reaching and expanding their audiences, like, frankly, NewsWrights United, Seattle Shakespeare Festival and ACT.
The Intiman has been arrogant for a very long time. If Kate’s note is any indication, they have no intentions of improving their tone-deaf messaging. They want you to believe this current crisis was the fault of one lone mismanaging scapegoat. But as Michael Strangeways pointed out on the SLOG comments board: “Brian Colburn... didn't steal the money, or spend it. Years of overspending and waste and the laziness of the Board has led to the woes of Intiman. It wasn't one man/woman, but many, including fair haired child Bart Sher.”
Losing the Intiman will be a tragedy, but we will survive. We can even hope to be a better community for it in the long run, if we guard against institutional arrogance. We need to remember that artists matter more than institutions, that audiences matter more than funders, that plays matter more as works of art than career stepping stones. As Mark Handley, author of Idioglossia, remarked on Face Book:
I'm too much of an evolutionist to take this seriously. Every one of the theaters that produced me as a young man are gone, squeezed out by creeping provincialism. People seem to think that this is ALL (read: $60 ticket, NY director, LA actors) or NOTHING (as in: nothing, gone, kaput, out of business) is the way to go... *sigh*
So yes, harsh as it sounds: please let the Intiman die with dignity. Its time is done. In its place, let's build something new, local and accountable. We actually already have the pieces in place for that. The Intiman will not live to see the promised land, but if Kate Whoriskey is serious about making Seattle her home-- claiming its unique triumphs and defeats as hers too-- then perhaps she will still be living here when we finally grow into a “world class” theatre town.
(Above is full video of the panel discussion “Town Square: Revenue Models in the Changing Media Landscape”from which I referenced David Boardman’s glib remarks about the death of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you dare, surf a little past the Boardman quote and you can see me holding Publicola’s Josh Feit’s feet to the fire on his equally glib Pollyannaish assessment of arts coverage in the current environment. If you decide to watch the entire event, you will witness the nearly monolithic patronizing attitude of the panel (David Brewster excepted) to questions from an audience who is clearly not buying their uniformly optimistic outlook. Oh, journalists love the concepts of honesty and transparency, as applied toothers.)
Seattle’s NPR affiliate 94.9 KUOW will be running an interview with me and Jeremy Richards about a story NewsWrights United stages in The New New News: A Living Newspaper about the Twitter coverage of the 2009 Maurice Clemmons manhunt, now infamously known as the “WAshooting Feed”. The segment will air on the radio on Saturday, February 12 at 12:06 pm PST, but the sneaky tech-savvy listener can access it now and forever at “Tweeting the Manhunt”. I welcome your thoughts. (But I already know that I talk to fast.)
The show itself premieres on Friday, February 18, in West Seattle at Olympic Hall at South Seattle Community College. Advance reservations can be made here.
We will also be delivering the “paper” to North Seattle (click here) and Capitol Hill (click here) locations. Don’t miss it!
Over the last 48 hours on-line news sources have exploded with fresh stories about Maurice Clemmons, the prematurely released Arkansas felon who, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2009, walked into a coffee shop outside Tacoma, Washington and murdered four Lakewood Police officers as they drank their morning coffee. Clemmons then led law enforcement on a two-day wild goose chase throughout Western Washington before being shot dead in Seattle by a lone cop. In those two days it became clear that local journalism would never be the same, not in Seattle, not anywhere.
It is this very urgent transition which we cover in our latest production The New New News: Living Newspaper, investigating the on-line reportage of the Clemmons Manhunt in a section we call “#WAshooting” after the Twitter hashtag used to track tweets concerning the ongoing chase. We are fairly certain that our upcoming opening, (Friday, February 18) has exactly nothing to do with the recent rash of articles about Clemmons, but we welcome the renewed interest in the case nonetheless, and not just because it might cause the curious to check out our show. The story of Maurice Clemmons will not go away, nor should it, because its implications affect the future of Western Washington, U.S. national politics and the nature of journalism across the globe.
Certainly the once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is hoping we forget about Clemmons. While Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee granted clemency to the 8-time felon, who otherwise would have been incarcerated until 2015, in part because Clemmons claimed in his application that he came from “a very good Christian family.” (One need not wonder what Huckabee’s decision would have been if instead “Muslim” had been the adjective modifying the subject of that clause.)
Likewise, it is not hard to trace a deterioration of relations between Western Washington police and the communities they serve since Clemmons’ murderous rampage. Had Maurice never left his Arkansas prison would Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk have given Native American wood-carver, John T. Williams, more than four seconds to put down his carving knife before shooting him dead?
We will never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that active crime investigations will never be covered the same anywhere in the future. From now on, journalists, law enforcement, regular citizens, and yes, even criminals, will all be privy to instant information, some of it deeply flawed or downright false, as it emerges on Twitter or whatever tool we will be using to share data. We examine this fundamental shift in The New New News. I could tell you how, but really, I’d rather show you. The first copy drops on West Seattle’s doorstep a week from Friday. Why not order your “subscription” now?
Does it automatically mean you are stuck in a self-referential rut as a playwright when the same talented young actress who, back in 2008, played a character based on your wife, less than three years later gets cast in a completely different play portraying, not a character based on you, but actually you, the playwright?
I really couldn’t be more delighted with the material that the New New Newsies are generating, while simultaneously managing to rehearse the show, take care of their families, go to school, and/or hold down full-time jobs.
You can read It’s Not in the P-I-veteran Brian Thomas Gould ranting about “The Table Read” and how he uses it to read his director based on the roles he’s been cast in.
Or check out “Memories of Homemade Bombs” in which NewsWright Actor Tammy Batey recounts her days as an actual ink-and-paper journalist covering Stratton R. Maxey for the Federal Way Mirror. On April 14, 1999, Maxey accidentally blew off his left hand while handling a homemade bomb.
And then, of course, there’s Courtney A. Kessler’s “Playing the Playwright”, in which she relates her experience as an actor playing both my wife, scarcely disguised as the character Jenny Wolfe in The Don Juan Cult Concerto, as well as more recently myself, in a brief scene in The New New News about how NewsWrights United decides to cover our stories.
By the way, you can order tickets for the upcoming New New News here. We know you wanna.
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