Just Wrought

This is Why I am Shutting Up

I kicked off 2011 here at Just Wrought with an essay called “Demons’ Year Off” in which I promised to reduce my ranting and “listen more than talk going forward”.  In a more recent piece, “Joining Averroës’ Search” I renewed my commitment to keeping quiet so that others, ideally smarter, more informed and better positioned to effect change might join the discussion.  (Admittedly, this is a bit of a quixotic gambit, given how mum most of Seattle’s artistic administrators have kept during this crisis.) Today, with his post over at the Seattlest “Open Letter to the Intiman Board”, Jim Jewell has reaffirmed my faith in the ability of smart arts professionals in this town to lead the way out of this crisis, and maybe even show the nation how it is done.

“… For all of the difficulties facing Intiman, you have also been presented a unique opportunity. While every other theatre in town, and really in the country, tries to figure out how to make difficult transitions, shifting the earned/contributed income balance and trying to break from the failing subscription model, you have a blank slate…. This is not the time to try to fix a broken model, but to take the pieces you have and build something new. It isn’t enough to be stewards; a steward could easily work in hospice. We need you to be shepherds, to lead, and to be willing to follow, the rich flock of artistic talent in Seattle.”

Jewell goes on to offer suggestions both bold and innovative, but neither impossible nor even all that risky, compared to the very real risk that Intiman’s board will do nothing significant at all.

He rightly points out that the subscription/season model is a tumor that sucks the vitality out of arts institutions across the country, and he offers a sober workable alternative tempered by his experience as the former Marketing and PR Manager at Seattle Children’s Theatre, the founder and de facto leader of the marketing discussion group Holes Not Drills, and as Managing Director of NewsWrights United.

For better or worse, whether in self-congratulation or deprecation, I can’t help but think of myself as Sam Adams in Seattle’s struggle to become a world class theatre town.  As folks are happy to point out, I have a knack for starting loud and unruly conversations; but Sam Adams, drunken loud-mouthed Tea Party-thrower that he was, was never well positioned to lead the colonies anywhere except into ever rowdier arguments.  In the end, he had to turn the struggle over to his betters and let them lead the cause. If I’m Sam Adams, then Jim Jewell is my cousin John: smarter, better informed, and better positioned to effect the change we need.

Jim, the floor is yours.  Let facts be submitted to a candid world.

 

The Dream of the Black Soldier

It is hard for me to imagine some future day when that day 67 years past will cease to captivate  human imagination.

To all of the human beings whose fates were altered that day; in other words, to all of us: wherever we go, whatever we do, let us go and do it seeking peace, with the understanding that sometimes the world must be wrested back from those who would hold it in ignorance and malice.

 

  (...Louis opens his eyes and smiles at the audience, raising his arms out of the ice troughs like a prophet.)

SLOTIN:  The time is come.

DREAMER A:  It's June the 6th, 1944.

DREAMER B:  I'm in an amphibious landing craft headed straight for Omaha Beach.

DREAMER A:  Normandy.

SLOTIN:  Time is come. 

DREAMER A:  As I look around at the other soldiers puking up their last rations--

DREAMER B:  As the LC bounces across the channel's heavy chop.

SLOTIN: I realize a strange thing.

BLACK SOLDIER:  I am a black man.

SLOTIN:  I have always been black.

DREAMER A:  From Arkansas maybe, or the Carolinas.

DREAMER B:  I am the only Negro on this boat.

BLACK SOLDIER:  Hell, I'm the only Negro in this entire invasion.

DREAMER A:  And even with the shells lofting columns of sea and spray all around us. 

DREAMER B:  And even with the shore looming closer and closer, and the thrill and terror pumping so thick I can taste it.

DREAMER A:  I have to laugh.

SLOTIN:  Because I realize there's been some mistake:

BLACK SOLDIER: This ain't my war.

DREAMER A:  The boat hits the beach. 

DREAMER B: We can hear the bullets clanging on the other side of the steel landing ramp.

DREAMER A:  And then down it drops.

DREAMER B:  And we can see machine gun fire churning the water in front of us to a wall of froth.

BLACK SOLDIER:  Ain't nobody stepping into that.  But when I turn round, the Navy skipper's pointing his sidearm Colt at us.  So what do we do but go?  White boys falling all around me.  Some cut to pieces by the guns, some just drowning under their gear.  But I move forward.  Kraut bullets just won't hit me.  Ain't my war.
      I got me a Browning automatic rifle and I start pumping her good into anything that moves up on them cliffs.  And then I'm up the cliffs.  I leave all them white boys behind dying and such down on the beach.  Ain't got time for that.  Ain't my war.  Every lousy Kraut blue-eyed bastard I find, I just jerk back on my B.A.R. and pump some lead in his face.
      "Damn, Fritz.  Sorry now, ain't ya?  Should a thought a that sooner, hunh?  Now get down in hell where you belong.

DREAMER A: And then I'm running.

DREAMER B:  Running ahead.

BLACK SOLDIER:  I ain't got time for this.  This ain't my war.

SLOTIN:  I run past Paris.

BLACK SOLDIER:  Sorry, Ladies.  Much as I'd like, ain't no time for that now.

DREAMER A:  I run forward.

SLOTIN:  Past the Maginot line.

DREAMER B:  Into Germany.

BLACK SOLDIER: And I kill Krauts when I see 'em, but ain't wasting no time neither.

DREAMER A:  I'm running.

DREAMER B:  Past Berlin.

SLOTIN:  Past Hitler.

BLACK SOLDIER:  Ain't got time for that lousy little shit-ass now.  Let 'em eat his own lead.

DREAMER A:  I'm running.

DREAMER B:  I'm into Poland now.

DREAMER A:  And then I'm there.

SLOTIN:  Auschwitz.

BLACK SOLDIER:  And damned if it don't look just like "Gone With The Wind".  Big ol' plantation with big ol' pearly white columns.  And who you think's sitting up on that porch, just a-sipping on a julep but the Doctor himself.

SLOTIN:  Mengele.

DREAMER A:  Kill him.

DREAMER B:  Kill him now.

BLACK SOLDIER:  Yeah.  Now we got somebody worth killing.  I stroll on up them front steps drop my BAR from my shoulder and get set to shoot, only the gun ain't a gun.  Just a damned stick.

DREAMER A:  A yardstick.

DREAMER B:  A slide rule the size of a yardstick.

DREAMER A:  It's hard to say.

DREAMER B:  It’s all pretty hard to say.

SLOTIN:  At any rate, Mengele smiles.  He gets up, and from his vest pocket draws a very small knife.

DREAMER A:  A scalpel--

BLACK SOLDIER: And cuts me open.

SLOTIN:  To find the foolish Canadian Jew inside.

BLACK SOLDIER & SLOTIN (together):  Louis.

BLACK SOLDIER:  And right then and there it dawns on me--

DREAMER A & DREAMER B (together):  We got trouble.

(Blackout.)

BLACK SOLDIER & SLOTIN (in darkness):  Louis... we need to talk, Louis.

 

From Louis Slotin Sonata

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.

Joining Averroës’ Search

One of my favorite stories by Jorge Luis Borges is “Averroës’ Search”.  It’s not a very good story— Borges himself admits as much in a rather tortured apology that he tacks on at the end—but it’s a story about theatre—at least in part—and since it’s one of the only times Borges, a favorite of mine, touches on the art form that I have sunk so much of myself into, the short piece has become special to me.  I can approximate how many times I have read it by counting the different colors of pencils I have used to mark it up: dark blue, light blue, purple, green.

The story opens with the great Islamic annotator of Aristotle lamenting the frequent appearance in the Poetics of two words  that, to a devout Muslim of the 12th Century, seem to have no meaning at all: “tragedy” and “comedy”. 

He had come across them years earlier in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could guess as to their meaning….  Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid them.

In the very next paragraph Averroës takes a break from his work and looks down from his balcony. 

…  There below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play.  One of them standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin’s monotonous cry,  There is no God but Allah.  The boy standing motionless and holding him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful.  The game did not last long— they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the worshippers or the minaret.

For me, this is Borges at his best and most loveable: a great thinker imagining a great thinker struggling to imagine a concept that, in fact, palpably surrounds him.  As many of my friends who like to argue with me point out, theatre will always survive.  You literally cannot not have theatre.  But as Borges might counter, you can certainly have it without knowing you have it.  Perhaps that’s where we are heading.  The great Argentine did foretell the internet after all.

Recently, in a fit of frustration that so many people seemed to miss the point of my recent post about playwrights not making a living from their plays while plenty of folks make one making theatre, I recently wrote the following self-pitying status on Face Book. 

I somehow need to find a way to harness the average Seattle theatre artist's endless enthusiasm for arguing into an actual force for change.

Yes, we're all smart. We're all well read. We all know how to attack a straw man and cleverly defend the indefensible, but at what point do we decide we can do better and then take steps to do it?

It's a cliché, but it always applies: if not us, who? If not now, when?

Maybe self pitying isn’t the right description.  Maudlin?  Mawkish?  In any case, a good friend and theatre colleague blithely chimed in: “Shut up and do a show.”  It’s good advice.  Well, again, advice isn’t really the right word.  No one telling you to shut up is giving you advice so much as dictating a directive, and a rather ironic one at that, since it’s impossible to tell someone to shut up without opening your mouth.  Still though, the person who said this has a largely gentle heart, and I know he would not want me to do anything I did not really want to do. 

With the understanding that I did not have a lot of room to talk about Seattle theatre unless I was actually making Seattle theatre, I have been pushing pretty hard on producing over the last few years.  This spring I wrote and served as executive producer for The New New News: A Living Newspaper; a little over a year before that I served in the same capacities for It’s Not the the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper.  And before that there was The Ten Thousand Things at Washington Ensemble Theatre, The Don Juan Cult Concerto at NSCC, Tuesday and An American Book of the Dead- The Game Show at Annex Theatre.  Just listing those shows makes me smile and feel tired at the same time.  Boy, have I done some shows since coming back to Seattle in 2002!

Now it’s 2011 and I have foundered on a fact that frightens me a bit and that I need to share with you.  I don’t want to put on another show.  Even if I did, I don’t have one.  It’s just not in me at the moment.  And I don’t know if it ever will be again.  (It feels like a long moment, frankly.)  I believe this is something that every theatre artist has to face at some point.  A future with no shows.  But just like Averroës, I will be surrounded by theatre whether I know it or not, whether I want it or not.  After all, isn’t the Intiman’s colossal failure a tragedy in the truest sense?

So, with the understanding that one earns one’s right to speak about Seattle theatre by making Seattle theatre, I need to cash in for a while and keep my mouth shut.  I will still keep Just Wrought active, and still post here, but my advocacy for Seattle becoming a World Class theatre town, and all the kvetching and posturing that goes with it, is hereby retired indefinitely.

It is time for me to shut up, sit back, and watch the show… as produced by others.