Just Wrought

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.

Mark Chamberlin: World Class Theatre Artist

At 11:30 AM this Tuesday, Seattle theatre lost one of its leading lights when Mark Chamberlin died from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident on Sunday. Our city still has one remaining print daily newspaper, and Mark was famous enough to rate a fine obituary therein, but for my own selfish sake, I need to stand here and share my particular thoughts.

Mark made this city a better theatre town. He did so by being an immense talent as an actor but also by being generous with that talent, because theatre is the art form wherein, by definition, nothing be accomplished alone (including mourning). Mark had a rare soulful sensibility as an actor, an enigmatic quality difficult to describe. Yesterday on Face Book my colleague Allysa Keene captured it better than I ever could:

It's a delicate dance to assert perspective and accept critique. It's tricky to know when to lead and when to follow, but wisest artists don't allow their accolades or their insecurities to eclipse the fact that it's simply that: a collaboration, a dance. They acquiesce to all the paradoxes and graciously give their "yes." MC, I am honored by your deference and will miss that twinkle-eyed "yes"...

Perhaps my favorite turn of Mark’s was as Antonio in the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s recent production of The Merchant of Venice directed by John Langs.  While strictly speaking Antonio is the title character of the play, the role is enigmatic and largely thankless; and-- due to its subtlety-- nearly always ends up drifting into the background, until by Act IV the actor on stage becomes little more than a flexi-prop from which Shylock might draw his pound of flesh. Chamberlin, however, never ceded his ground. He made his counterparts Portia and Shylock fight for the focus that they can usually simply assume. And how did he do this?  By living and breathing on stage, deep in the life of his character.  You believed Antonio. You didn’t always know why he did what he did or exactly what he was feeling, but Mark as a consummate actor understood that it is a rudimentary performer who lays these things bare for all to read. He subsumed Antonio’s mystery and made it his own, such that you had to watch to see what would happen next. Such a simple order; and so so difficult to fulfill.

Many people in our business, myself included, need at times to make a second show of their talent, advocating for it outside the theatre, either literally on the sidewalk during a furtive smoke, or in the bar, or, yes, on blogs like this. Mark let his work speak for itself. And he shared that talent for free with the likes of me, doing readings of new plays of mine and others’, when he could have just as easily stayed within the safe confines of Seattle’s Big Houses. The fact that Mark was rehearsing to appear as “the Goat” in New Century Theatre Company's  upcoming production of O Lovely Glow Worm just adds evidence to the incontrovertible case for the man’s eagerness to remain on the cutting edge of theatre in this town. I understand that New Century will be dedicating their upcoming season to Mark.  By doing so, they honor not only him but all of us who had the pleasure of working with Mark or enjoying his work as an artist.

Just recently Mark read something of mine which was part of a quarterly public evening of prose pieces written for performance. A week or so ago I was asked to submit another piece for the next quarter’s offering. I began crafting it with Mark’s voice in mind. This is just a habit I have. I start to shape words for a particular actor’s mouth whether or not I know they will be ultimately speaking them. It helps me hear the music. I have worked on the piece since learning of Mark’s death, and I am still, sadly, writing it with him in mind.

And that brings me to what actors like Mark Chamberlin do for theatre. Beyond making plays possible by being in them, great actors make new plays conceivable by being the living suction that draws the words and stories out of the playwrights who know their talent. Mark was one of my many muses who live, and yes, die in this city. This is my selfish understanding of Mark’s inestimable loss. Muses are hard to come by. And while I have many here in Seattle, the loss of one so generous and so fine leaves me shaken and humbled and, also, strangely somehow more determined to carry on. After all, I believe that is what Mark would do.

* * *

PS:  Mark’s good friend and colleague Ian Bell has already set up a lovely campaign called Mark Chamberlin Memorial Bicycle Rack Project which will raise funds to install stylish bike racks in Mark’s honor in front of all of Seattle’s major theatres. You can check that out and help by clicking here. 

PPS:  Note on the picture above: I particularly love this production shot of Mark, not just because it is from one of my favorite performances of his, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, but also because it makes me happy to see him surrounded, as he most certainly is at this moment in spirit, by his fellow players. Plus, it shows him as what he was in real life: a cool, confident leader: an example to the younger talent of how to be a great artist, and more importantly, a good man.

* * *

PPPS:  Apologies to all. I decided to remove the aformentioned photo as I understand that doing so  most closely conforms with the families wishes.  PM  3/25/11 12:03 pm.

GIA Hands the Mic to A Worthy Voice: Isaac Butler

I heartily recommend you check out Grantsmakers in the Arts (GIA)’s new “Talk Back” series.  The inaugural week of blogs is being hosted by my colleague Isaac Butler, of Parabasis fame.  Isaac holds his finger more firmly on the issues of American Theatre than any other individual I know.  He is keeping the Outrageous Fortune discussion alive when most artistic administrators are hoping that a year’s worth of neglect has helped it die the death of a rag doll.

This from his “kick-off howdy” blog:

…  One of the greatest challenges facing theatre right now from … is that there is very little interaction between artists and funders that is not mediated by large institutions that have as their top priority perpetuating and growing themselves….

And this from the first day’s edition “How do We Know What to Reform”:

…The demand for premieres is not driven by audiences. There’s no evidence that audiences respond (positively or negatively) to premieres.  The emphasis on premieres  comes from funding guidelines and donor desires.  In an effort to get more theaters to do more new plays, funders have inadvertently created a world where those plays can’t get done a second time.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.  (And I am frankly too sick and tired of late to try, though I am finding Isaac’s tireless enthusiasm irksomely re-inspiring.)

So check it out and join in.  Unless, of course, you think all is well.

Always Do the Awkward Thing

It’s my honor to accept this award for Best Original Screenplay for Crimes and Misdemeanors: a boring, flaccid, overwrought drama about, for, and by Upper West Siders.  I mean, if I wanted that, I could go to the theatre.

What’s lamer than telling theatre jokes?  Well, telling theatre jokes to an audience of film makers, for one.

When I was invited to participate as an “acceptor” for the First Annual 20/20 Awards, I could’ve sworn it was a huge joke.  The idea of reevaluating the the Academy Awards twenty years after the fact struck me as an even more absurd than the Academy Awards themselves.

With nearly a years worth of retrospection, I suppose I am glad I was the first presenter of the evening.  Had I known how seriously the others would take their role, I would have frozen, possibly peed, knowing the lame litany of campy jokes I had folded in my breast pocket.  Instead, blissfully clueless as to what would follow, I naively soldiered on with my lame attempt at channeling Jimmy Kimmel.

 

Winter Implicit

Consuming days like communion wafers
Awaiting the theatrics of the stars
Burning dead illusion somewhere beyond
These swamping atmospheres

Suffering through the wrung-out salt-craving
of the season’s seventy seventh hangover. 

That tree is also an outcropping 
of the dumb earth, but it can crown 
itself again from its own skeleton.

Don’t look at me.  I’m meat bound.  Graying. 
My sons are my blossoms
and their daughters, lost summer. 

And what does Ikkyū say? “Chop open 
the cherry tree.  You’ll find no flowers.  
But the spring breeze brings forth. . .” 
Baseball cherry pop grilled steak and mojitos. 

Winter implicit.  
Winter be damned. 
Winter come again.

The SunBreak takes The New New News to Heart

 

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.

So as gratified as I was by The Sunbreak’s very positive review of The New New News:  A Living Newspaper, imagine my even greater gratification when I saw in a separate piece these words written by the online magazine’s editor, Michael van Baker:

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.