Just Wrought

Seattle Shakespeare Gets it Right

Most of us in the Seattle theatre community have been waiting anxiously to see who Seattle Shakespeare Company’s board of directors would name as the new Artistic Director.  We have seen other theatres in town screw up this decision miserably in the past, most especially by perpetrating the now infamous “nationwide search for talent”.  Thankfully, the Seattle Shakes board saw that George Mount is a locally grown talent that no one in the nation can match in perfectness for this job.  As Phil Miller, the Board’s Chairman, said in an email to Seattle Shakes supporters:

Out of all of the criteria we had in looking for a new artistic director, George has the best balance. He's had hands-on experience in the company's main areas of programming and has deep ties to our arts community. His ability as both an artist and administrator won him a ringing endorsement from the Board.

Deep ties indeed. George knows us. And we know George. He has sweated with us in cramped backstages on the fringe, and he has whispered jokes in the woods with us in Lynnwood and Issaquah and on Mercer Island as we waited to go on in some summer production of the Wooden O.  George is the opposite of a carpet bagger.  He laid the frickin’ carpet. 

When I mentioned to George a few months back that I was rooting for him to land this position, I added that I thought it would be unwise for me to say so publically, given the very little love lost between myself and Seattle’s upper caste of arts administrators and board members.  An endorsement from me might very well have the opposite effect than intended.  George nodded sagely at this, but said nothing.  That’s George for ya.  He’s good at nodding sagely, keeping mum.

So I am incredibly delighted to be able to come of out the closet and proclaim my deep and enthusiastic support for George, as hind-sighted as it might seem now that the deal is done.  Seattle Shakes will certainly thrive under his leadership.  And long long may that last.

* * *

Confidential to George:  As happy as I am for you— and I am truly delighted, as much for the entire  Seattle theatre community as I am for you— I still won’t let you off the hook about developing new work.  You can dance with the pumpkin-panted hack for as long as you like, but some day you need to do yourself and everyone else a favor and direct a world premiere.  It’s what Will would have wanted.

José Amador Calls Out Bardolatry

Check out José Amador’s insightful and fun essay  over at the Seattlest examining our obsequious and unweened relationship with the works of William Shakespeare.  To his excellent points I would add an apologia for my own insolence in presuming to wright plays when, according to so many theatre canonophiles, all the great works have already been written.  However, I feel compelled to note sheepishly that that a few things have happened in human history since Shakespeare died.  And since he wasn’t able to address them, it is up to foolish mortals such as myself to give ‘em a whack.

My own paltry stabs have included so far:

• The advent of the bomb.
• The discovery and unraveling of the recipe for human existence.
• The emergence of corporate personhood.

I’m so sorry that Shakespeare couldn’t live forever to put these important issues in their proper blank verse perspective; but since all Golden Ages are, by definition, over, you’re stuck with the unlikely likes of me and others who pathetically soldier on at the art of dramatic writing, so clearly dead since 1616.

‘Tis true, 'tis pity,
And pity 'tis 'tis true.

Attention Must be Paid — Guess Where?

… A man asked the Zen master Ikkyu  to write down some words of great wisdom.  Ikkyu wrote”attention”.  Not satisfied, the man asked for some more, so Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention”.  Still not satisfied, he demanded more, and Ikkyu wrote “attention, attention, attention”.

    From Ten Zen Questions, by Susan Blackmore.   

 

I just finished reading Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brains, and while I cannot recommend it as an exquisite sample of sparkling prose, I was impressed by the arguments and research provided therein.  A counter to the glib digital cheerleaders from Google to Face Book, The Shallows essentially demonstrates how our addiction to computers and the internet is literally rewiring our brains.

I won’t regurgitate all of Carr’s evidence here.  After all, this is a blog and I have to keep it snappy or you’ll click on to something grabbier.  His conclusions, however, are stunning enough to keep even the most attention-deficited mouse-finger paralyzed for a moment.

Navigating the Web requires a particularly intensive form of mental multitasking.  In addition to flooding our working memory with information, the juggling imposes what brain scientists call “switching costs” on our cognition.  Every time we shift our attention , our brain has to reorient itself, further tasking our mental resources.  As Maggie Jackson explains … “the brain takes time to change goals, remember the new rules needed for the new task, and block out cognitive interference from the previous, still-vivid activity.  Many studies have shown that switching between just two tasks can add substantially to our cognitive load, impeding our thinking and increasing the likelihood that we’ll over look or misinterpret important information.

In short, Web-surfing is a hyperactive exercise in short-term memory.  Carr walks us through some fascinating research that shows our brains do not store memory at all like computers do.

Kobi Rosenblum, who heads the Department of Neurobiology and Ethology at the University of Haifa… has done extensive research on memory consolidation.  One of the salient lessons to emerge … is how different biological memory is from computer memory.  “… Long term memory creation in the human brain,” he says, “is one of the incredible processes which is so clearly different than ‘artificial brains’ like those in a computer.  While an artificial brain absorbs information and immediately saves it in its memory, the human brain continues to process information long after it is received, and the quality of memories depends on how the information is processed.”  Biological memory is alive.  Computer memory is not.

Those who celebrate the “outsourcing” of memory to the Web have been misled by a metaphor.  They overlook the fundamentally organic nature of biological memory.  What gives real memory its richness and its character, not to mention its mystery and fragility, is its contingency.  It exists in time, changing as the body changes.   Indeed, the very act of recalling a memory appears to restart the entire process of consolidation, including the generation of proteins to from new synaptic terminals.  Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes a short-term memory again.  When we reconsolidate it, it gains a new set of connections—a new context.…   Biological memory is in a perpetual state of renewal.  The memory stored in a computer, by contrast, takes the form of distinct and static bits, you can move the bits from one storage drive to another as many times as you like, and they will always remain precisely as they were.

Human beings are compelled to impute some version of our own consciousness to nearly anything and everything we see, so long as it appears to change.  Even trees in a breeze can seem eerily aware to us.  One theory holds that on the evolutionary timeline the suspicion of consciousness in other beings actually proceeded full-blown consciousness in ourselves.  That is, we learned to think by first learning to predict what others might be thinking—even if they weren’t actually thinking.  “As if” gave birth to “as is.” (And now my Web-scrambbled brain suddenly retrieves one of The Onion’s most brilliant Point/Counterpoints: My Computer Totally Hates Me! vs. God, Do I Hate That Bitch.)

Carr quotes Jason Mitchell, head of Harvard’s Social Cognition and Affective Neuroscience Lab: 

The “chronic overactivity of those brain regions implicated in social thought” can, writes Mitchell, lead us to perceive minds where no minds exist, even in inanimate objects.”  There’s growing evidence, moreover, that our brains naturally mimic the states of the other minds we interact with, whether those minds are real or imagined.

By believing the internet is somehow “intelligent”, we are literally rewiring ourselves to be as stupid, scattered and shallow as it is.  One thing missing from The Shallows is an antidote to the neural degeneration that Carr so assiduously documents.  Can you guess the one I might suggest?

Theatre brooks no distraction. You are trapped in a dark room and forced to impute “intelligence” to the brains of actors.  In the theatre, four dimensions of time and space merge to a singular awareness, and the barrier between “within-you” and “without-you” blurs.  You can zero in on the action or zone out of it, but wherever your attention wanders it eventually has to come back, whether you like it or not, to where you sit and what you see and hear from there.  (This is why bad theatre is so stupendously more excruciating to sit through than bad film or television.)  The light your eyes receive is inextricably bound to the air that vibrates your eardrums, activated as it is by the breath of an actor and shared in the lungs of everyone present.  Shakespeare was wrong—or, more likely, purposefully lying—when he suggested that the stage is a place for illusion.  Theatre is nothing but concentrated actuality.  We should all go once in a while if only to pay ourselves some simple human attention.

Anonymous, Anonymous, Wherefore art Thou Anonymous?

Within weeks of starting Just Wrought I had to institute its only rule: 

…I know it's considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one's words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won't be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!

Jan 6, 2010 on “14/48: A Regular Reminder of . . . ”

In the 15 months since, I have only had to enforce the rule once or twice.  Everyone seems pretty happy with it.  Of course, mostly only artists reply here: notorious exhibitionists with notoriously little to lose.  If you look back through the 512 comments which I have accumulated (and I am not recommending it if you have even a half-life) you will find only a handful from artistic administrators and even fewer from board members and arts funders.  That latter group runs particularly mum, not just here, but throughout Seattle theatre’s public conversations.  They did not attend in any numbers the Outrageous Fortune discussion a year ago.  They have not, to my knowledge, attended any of the legendary Shit Storms hosted over the years.  Fact is, they do not engage in much discussion with local artists at all.  I imagine this is how they like it; and how artistic administrators love it.  When it comes to funding, theatre artists are to be seen (on stage), and not heard (anywhere else).

Thus, imagine my lack of surprise when the Intiman Theatre announced last Friday, just before the curtain went up on All My Sons, that a donor would be matching gifts up to a total of $100,000 in order to bail the Intiman out of its ongoing fiscal crisis, and that said donor has chosen to remain anonymous.

Benefactors of the stage have not always been so modest.  Back in Shakespeare’s day, if you supported a theatre company, you damned sure wanted it known, hence the names of the companies:  The Lord Admiral’s Men, The Lord Chamberlains Men, and…

“The King’s Men … [catered] … to a more exclusive clientele at the Blackfriars, which could accommodate some five hundred higher-paying spectators.  Gallants eager to show off their clothes could even pay to sit on the Blackfriars stage and become part of the spectacle.  The practice—not permitted at the Globe— must have annoyed the actor in Shakespeare: later in the century a riot broke out during a performance of Macbeth when a nobleman slapped an actor who had remonstrated with him for crossing directly in front of the action in order to greet a friend on the other side of the stage.”

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World

How far we have gone from Will’s world to ours, wherein a patron can think saving the Intiman is important enough to donate $100,000 (contingent on others doing the same) but not important enough to tell us why, or even put their name to the gift.  I suppose in 2011 America, money is expected to do its own talking.

I have made my opinions on Intiman’s survival painfully clear here.  Equally clear is that someone a lot wealthier than me feels quite differently about the situation.  What isn’t clear is who, or why.  And dang it, I’d like to know.  We make a lot of assumptions about rich people in this country.  One of the most pervasive is that they tend to be smarter than poor folks in direct correlation to how much richer they are.  (This presumption was evident when a Big House Board Member—the only one, to his credit, to ever bother having a conversation with me—pointed out over a casual coffee that the problem with playwrights is how little they understand about the play development process. )  What I want to know from Intiman’s wishful bashful benefactor is what they know about the troubled institution that I don’t, dumb poor artist that I be.  To that end, I am suspending my anti-anonymity rule for this post, and this post only.

Dear anonymous Intiman patron, please feel free to post your unsigned thoughts in the comments section below on why Intiman should be trusted with even more of our money, and I will leave it unmolested for the masses to read and understand.

Shakespeare Would Hate Us

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was thinking of auditioning for The Wooden O this year, since for the first time in a years I won’t be on vacation during their run.  My buddy, who happens to be a Seattle firefighter, but whose wife acts with the O on occasion, trotted out a taunt he likes to tweak me with: “But Paul, you hate Shakespeare.”

He bases this facetious conclusion on a challenge I proposed some years back calling on all Seattle  theatres to self-impose a Shakespeare hiatus for one year.  Brendan Kiley, Arts Editor for The Stranger, picked the idea up and wrote about it here.  I still genuinely believe this would be a grand and beneficial experiment, but not because I hate Shakespeare—quite the opposite.  As a playwright I flatter myself that I understand the man’s genius better than most of the directors and actors who worship so sycophantically at his altar for all the wrong reasons. 

“It’s the language that makes his plays so exquisite.”

“No, it’s his sumptious, multifaceted characters.”

“No, no, it’s the tradition, the chance to etch one’s mark on the living canon of performance.”

It’s all bullshit.  Shakespeare was a great—yes, even the greatest—playwright for one and only one simple reason: he wrought great plays.  All the rest is just so much makings.  You might praise a chef for her choice of ingredients, but you wouldn’t claim them as the reason for her genius.  A year without Shakespeare would help us gain some much needed clarity and distance from the material.  We would come back to it ready to attack with refreshed hearts.  And it would also get us off his cash-cow tit for long enough to taste a little bona fide self-sufficiency.  Hell, we might actually miss Shakespeare.  That currently unfathomable notion alone would make a break worth it, wouldn’t it?

Never mind.  I already know the answer.  It was shouted at me and Kiley at the Seattle Theatre ShitStorm back in 2008.  And it has been shouted just as fiercely upon every subsequent mention.  “Never!  We will NEVER stop staging Shakespeare. Not for a year.  Not for a month.  How dare you!?  You and the rest of your modern playwright ilk are not fit to wipe the soles of his pointy shoes.”  The level of vituperation one encounters upon even suggesting a breather from the bard naturally calls a paraphrase of one of his more famous lines to mind, “Methinks the status quo doth protest too much.”

Yes, American Theatre literally worships Shakespeare.  And I have to laugh, because I am pretty sure he would have hated us.

Shakespeare was a playwright, poet, player and proprietor, in equal measure, despite our hindsighted emphasis on the first of those four.  He made plays to make money and he made a lot of both. He would hate our precious process of endless workshopping plays to an early death on dusty shelves.  At the Globe you worked the problems of a play in performance. 

He would hate that people more often read his plays than see them.

He would hate, or not have been even able to comprehend, a system in which playwrights make plays for performance in cities far from where they live, for less than it costs them to create, for the narrowest sliver of society.

He would hate that so many modern American playwrights have never acted and never produced, have never done anything in a theatre except watch silently from dark seats.

Since he shared them, he would sympathize with the milquetoast middle class aspirations of most American playwrights—“I just want to have a house and a family and make the same kind of money as my friends I went to college with”— but he would grow to hate them eventually.  Shakespeare may have envied his social superiors, but he also knew at his core he was better than them.

He would not hate that we kiss the asses of our benefactors and patrons, but he would hate how poorly and surreptitiously and self-loathingly we do it; almost never managing, as he did, to flatter and skewer with the same loaded lines: floating sublimely above, then suddenly crawling at them from beneath, being everyone and no one at the same time with such stunning success that even today reasonably sane and educated people entertain themselves with the pseudo-intellectual dalliance that he did not even write the plays which he so clearly did.

He would have hated the MFA system for generating new viral spores of actors, playwrights and directors when there isn’t enough work for the ones already in the system.

He would have hated the advent of the auteur director, smothering the natural brilliance of his plays with their dense cloying concepts.

He would hate that artistic administrators make the decisions about which plays get done, instead of a consensus of proprietor/players, all sharing the ownership of the theatre, and thus the risks and rewards.

And most of all, he would hate our necrophilic prejudice for his plays, even the poor ones, over anything new, even the good ones.  As the consummate playwright, he would want us to love the living writers as much or more than the dead.

So, yeah, I’m pretty sure if Shakespeare were alive today he would hate us.

And he’d be writing for television.