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.

Cutting-Edge Virtual Brain Palpation (a.k.a. "Theatre")

My five year-old son was climbing a tree and got to about seven feet off the ground when he told me he wanted to jump off.  I balked.  “It looks far,” I said.

“I can do it,” he said. 

“Won’t it hurt?” 

“No,” he assured me.  He jumped.  His feet slapped the hard dirt, and my own soles dimly rang with the sting of the impact.  Turns out, however, that I’m not preternaturally empathic; nor even merely an overly imaginative drama geek dad.  Turns out, according to some of the latest research into what have been dubbed “Mirror Neurons”, I am a human being.

As reports Christian Keysers, Scientific Director of the Neuroimaging Center of the University Medical Center Groningen, the same neuron fires in a monkey’s brain when it grabs a peanut as when someone else grabs the peanut.  Says Keyser:

This phenomenon is not restricted to physical movement.  When someone taps my shoulder, say, my somatosensory cortex makes me feel the sensation.  But simply seeing someone else being tapped activates the same area of my brain.  If I cut my finger, my cingulate cortex and anterior insula will register the pain—and these areas also become active if I see you cut your finger.  The vicarious representations are not quite as strong as those produced when we experience our own sensations, but we nevertheless feel a milder version of what the other person feels.

None of this is all that surprising to my fellow stage artists.  We’ve known for millennia that we can get folks in the audience to reassuringly rub their hands just by chopping off some fake hands on stage.  In such moments, everybody knows that nobody’s fooling anybody, and yet our bodies do get fooled despite our brains’ reassurances. 

These brain circuits can keep us from seeing other individuals as something “out there.”  Indeed, we are able to feel their actions, sensations, and emotions inside us, as if we were in their shoes.  Others have become us. [emphasis Paul’s]…. These brain circuits thus blur the bright line between your experiences and mine.  Our experiences fuse into the joint pool of knowledge that we call culture.

Dear Professor Keysers, my colleagues and I happily wish to inform you that we have been investigating these phenomena for some time.  We call it theatre.  Welcome to the ongoing experiment.

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