Filed under: feminism, space, theatre | Tags: knees, manspreading, patriarchy chicken, theater, theatre, violence
TRIGGER WARNING: This piece will devolve into (imaginary) violence and (imaginary) men will be the victims. Also, some strong language.
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A few times in the last few months, I’ve gone to the theatre and found I was seated next to a young man. How young, I’m not sure – maybe 20s or 30s? But every time, I find myself contending with their young man knees pressing into mine. It drives me absolutely bananas but I refuse to be knee pressed out of the space to which I am entitled. I’ve sometimes just stuck my coat over my knee and let the young buck press into that. I’ve tried to suddenly pull away. I’ve tried some quick shifting. Those boys don’t even seem to notice. The one next to me at Into the Woods was audibly crying during the Father/Son song “No More” but that didn’t stop him from manspreading into my space. “Hooray,” I thought, “This generation has learned how to cry and experience emotions!” but “Boo! They have actually gotten worse at manspreading than previous generations.”
The boy next to me at Tao of Glass seemed very comfortable with his knee in my space and got very animated about various pieces of music in the show. I could feel it in his knee! I mentioned this irritating situation to my partner at the intermission and he offered to switch seats with me so I took him up on that offer and, lo and behold, somehow Mr. My-Balls-Are-Too-Big-to-Be-Able-to-Keep-My-Knees-in-My-Own-Space could suddenly keep his knees in his own space. He didn’t stray even once. Funny that.
These young fellas very clearly know how to keep their knees in when they are next to other men but as soon as they are seated next to women – bloop! Knees are OUT! Still! In 2023!
I don’t remember this being a problem when I was a young woman. Either men of my generation were better at maintaining their own personal space or as a young woman, I was so used to pulling my knees together (like a lady!) that I didn’t notice. I honestly don’t know which of those it might be. My feeling then was if a man was pressing his knee into my knee, he was definitely flirting with me. Or a creep.
In my youth, I did an awful lot of giving way. I made space for young men everywhere I encountered them. I yielded to their presence. I did make myself small for them. At 49, I don’t do that anymore. I sometimes end up in games of Patriarchy Chicken because I just don’t automatically make way for men. (Thanks, Charlotte Riley, for the concept of Patriarchy Chicken!) I won’t yield on the street if I don’t want to and when I go to the theatre, I claim the space of my seat!
I was thinking about it the other day – especially about how Mr Knees (at the Glass show) refrained from doing what he’d done with his knees when he was next to a man. Why don’t men press each other’s knees like this?
I suspect it’s because they’re afraid of other men – either that they’ll be seen as gay or that there may be violence.
And something about that thought made me want to go back in time to that first act of the show with Mr Knees and it made me want to punch him in the dick. Just – reach over and – POW! It would not be easy to do practically but something about the fantasy of it really thrilled me. (When I really thought it through, logistically, I think an elbow to the dick would be more ergonomic and simple – but for elegance of phrase, let’s stick with a punch.) Then I thought about how many young men it would be very satisfying to punch in the dick and I thought if the risk of pressing your knee into a lady’s knee at the theatre was getting punched in the dick by ladies who’ve just had enough of this shit – I don’t know – maybe they wouldn’t feel so comfortable letting their knees roll out into women’s bodies. I got kind of fired up – imagining how great it would be to take all the years of smallifying myself and pulling my knees in to make space for men and just roll it all up in a nice first and punch the next guy who couldn’t keep his knees to himself. I started to feel myself to be quite dangerous and I started eyeing all the young men who might be good candidates. It was invigorating.
Now – to be clear, the odds of me actually punching anyone are very low. I’m conflict averse. I don’t like making a fuss and I’d be very unlikely to make a disturbance in a theatre. I would not want to disrupt a show. It’s hard enough putting on plays these days. That’s my sacred space! Also, I’m fully aware that you’re not supposed to go around punching men in the dick and that I’d be in big trouble if I did. I’m just saying – I would like for this to be a viable enough threat that young men at the theatre would think, “Oh gee, I don’t want to get punched in the dick. Maybe I ought to pull in my knees!” That’s all I’m asking for. I ‘d like to invoke a similar fear to whatever is driving them to not do this to other men. That’s all I need. Or, fellas, if you can bring those knees in some other way – that’s good too. All I want is some nice bodily autonomy everywhere I go. Can you help me with that?
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Filed under: art, community, Creative Process, dreams, economics, theatre | Tags: academia, graduate school, NYC, sustainability, theatre, theatre company, theatre making, toxic
Once upon a time in New York City, my friends and I started a theatre company. We’d have readings and rehearsals at our apartments. We made molds for masks in my kitchen. We had snacks and drinks and a generally lovely time. We wrote our first fundraising letter at Yaffa Café in the East Village and rubbed one of their buddha statues’ bellies for luck. The bumps in the road were quickly smoothed and we threw some fun post show parties. We also made some pretty kick-ass magical shows, if I do say so myself.
It went like this for a few years but then issues of sustainability started to become more serious. There were the questions of how we could sustain the work as the city got more expensive – and the questions of sustainability in our personal lives, in the things we did for money, or our relationships got very loud. I could see that my career as a teaching artist was not going to be sustainable either so I decided I needed to go to grad school so I could bring myself and my company to the next level.
But what WAS the next level? Was it a particular marker of success? Was it financial stability? I hoped those things were possible. I thought they would be – but I think I was looking in the wrong place.
I went to graduate school thinking that a credential might offer me the possibility of a life in academia where I could bring my company along with me. Part of why I chose the program I did was because one of our teachers was doing just that there. She ran the dance department and her company, in residence, performed there at least once a year. I was interested in that model. But then I went there and saw what was happening and a couple of months in academia killed that dream fairly quickly. It was not for me. Somehow I’d imagined that making art in a college would be intellectually rigorous and artistically supportive – instead it was lazy, petty, toxic and insular. And hardly anyone was having any fun.
If there’s one thing that I relied on heavily and enjoyed pretty consistently when I first started making shows in New York, it was the abundance of good will. We didn’t have a lot of money to pay our people but we worked hard to have a good time and we really had a good time. We generally really liked and admired one another and lived in an atmosphere of mutual respect.
In graduate school, every decision I made was challenged and not in an artistically interesting way – more like everyone constantly questioned my judgment and respect was in short supply. I had to fight for even the smallest things. There were power struggles – like when faculty members accused me of “stealing” their actors. There were issues with the shop. There were issues with the teams. I heard that the entire design department discussed if I “knew what I wanted’ because the costume designer had given me capes and tights in her designs, over and over again when I explicitly reiterated that I wanted no capes and no tights, over and over and over again, every time we met. I was open to a lot of things but if there was one thing I knew for sure it was that I did not want to see any tights or capes. Despite my best efforts, my actors were in capes and tights in a terrifying array of rainbow colors for their fittings. None of us were happy about it. I let the designer have a couple of capes in the end because I was so sick of fighting. Every good thing begun there turned rotten eventually.
I’d gone there hoping to figure out a way to make my life and my company sustainable and I came out ready to quit theatre entirely. I didn’t.
And in the intervening years, I have made a lot of things I’m proud of but it’s been a long time since the spectre of toxic theatre-making hasn’t haunted me.
When I first started in NYC, I really felt strongly that enough good will could over come any hardship. We had issues here or there; they weren’t a big deal. But my immersion in toxic methods and patterns in grad school and beyond made it hard to create with any kind of genuine optimism. Even with the nicest, safest people, I was braced for disaster.
It’s taken a long time to clear my system of all the disorder that my time in grad school created. The program was only two years but it has taken fifteen to sixteen years to re-set all the damage it caused. If I had it do all over again, I wouldn’t go. The degree has done almost nothing for me. It gave me a handful of underpaid college courses as an adjunct and that’s about it. It did nothing for my personal sustainability and almost killed my company entirely.
But I didn’t set out to write about why going to grad school was a bad idea for me. I’m here to tell you about those magical first years when we were awash in possibility and confidence and love and hope and how this year, for the first time in a while, I could remember what that felt like.
I know from this side of things how incredibly rare sustainability in theatre is. I know a lot more about the business of theatre making and what it takes to make a living wage from it. The landscape for the arts has changed a great deal over the last 20+ years. I have a much clearer sense of how all of it fits together and where there is space to hope and dream and where there is opportunity to advance and where there is not.
I have become wildly less ambitious than I used to be – at least, less ambitious in the usual way. I no longer dream of a big Broadway debut. But I suppose I have become more ambitious in that I am striving for a kinder, warmer, more human and more fun way of doing things.
When I started, I really thought that the way it worked was – you made something really cool and a big shot (or a big shot’s assistant) came to see it and then good shows would be magically transported to Broadway. It was a very sweet naïve sort of dream. But not harmless, though – because I kept feeling like I failed when I made things and they didn’t “go anywhere.”
The thing that I’d like to go back in time and tell myself was that the thing itself was the gold. The process, the fun, the parties, the rehearsals, the hanging out and making something we were proud of – THAT was the miracle. I’m sure the me of twenty years ago would have rolled her eyes at a future me coming to tell her to enjoy every minute. But it’s not so much that I’d want that earlier version of me to enjoy it while it was happening, because I WAS enjoying it while it was happening. It’s more that I wish she could have continued to enjoy it while she was on a roll, to have continued to make work with people she liked in an atmosphere of mutual respect and appreciation, even if it meant giving up some of her ambitions or getting a different kind of day job. If I had it to do over again, I’d have let my hopes for sustainability and professionalism drift away and just luxuriated in our process. It’s possible that might have actually led me to the success I’ve found so elusive. But if it didn’t, I’d have had a lot more years of very pleasurable art making. That’s the dream for my younger self now. And maybe this self too.
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Filed under: Acting, advice, art, clown, comedy, community, Creative Process, dance, music, musicals, theatre, Visual Art, writing | Tags: effort, failure, Love, pride, process, terrible, theatre
Sometimes someone you love makes a work of art of which you are not a fan. You wish you liked it but really, you think it stinks. If it’s a piece of performing art work, like some theatre or some dance or some music, you might sit through it trying to understand why this person you love has worked so hard on something so terrible. This feels bad. Sometimes we don’t go and see the work of people that we love just to avoid the feeling. It’s not so much that we’re afraid to have to talk to them about their terrible work afterwards – it’s just that we don’t want to sit in the theatre or stand in the gallery or in the concert hall wondering how our loved one could make such a thing.
I’m sure a lot of my friends have had this experience with my work, too. I don’t like to think about it but I’m pretty sure I’ve lost friends because they just hated my show and they didn’t want to deal with me later. I have a fairly long list of people who came to see a show of mine and never spoke to me or saw me again. This shit is personal.
But what are we supposed to do?
We all have our own taste and if we really care about art, we have our opinions that rarely align fully with others. That’s how we create original stuff! We all have our own aesthetics and sometimes people who love us personally hate what we make. I wish it weren’t true but all evidence points to a complicated mess of love and art and hate all mixed up.
Unfortunately, I’ve often found the way to deal with this is to just not see (or read or listen to) things. I don’t have to feel bad about how I feel about someone’s work if I don’t see it. The problem with this strategy is that I pull myself out of community by doing this. Theatre, for example, runs on reciprocity. I go see your show, you come to see mine. If I don’t go to shows, where is my audience going to come from? If I don’t go see your show that I’m definitely going to hate, how can I expect you to see mine? That you will, likewise, hate? This is a problem I have been wrestling with for decades.
I think I have cracked it for myself now. Watching the show of someone who I love and respect, trying to figure out why they thought this was a good idea, I realized that it was beautiful. The show itself did nothing for me, I promise, and I wish it had and I’m sorry. But the FACT of it? The FACT that all these people came together and worked so hard, with such diligence and passion and belief in their purpose? That fact is gorgeous. It is tremendously difficult to do and the fact that people do it, typically for very little reward, is fucking beautiful. It doesn’t matter if I like it. I don’t like most things. I wish I were more catholic in my taste but I’m not. So – what I feel like I’m going to lean in to is just the joy of watching people make things, to celebrate bad art as good in the larger sense.
I’d like to approach the work I see in the future with the grace that I give youth and community theatre productions. A lot of people I knew in my theatre-soaked youth, who made fun of my obsession, who thought I was a weirdo, now have kids who are in school plays, who’ve become dancers, musicians, actors, singers and these parents are so PROUD of them, bless their hearts. And I’m sure all those school plays are awful. I feel like I need to tap into a parent’s pride when I experience bad art. Because I am proud of everyone who fights through the forest of challenges to actually make something. I wish I liked what they make but maybe pride is enough. Maybe loving their love is enough.
If you’re someone I love whose work I’ve seen, this post is not about you. YOUR work, I love. And I love that you made it. And I’m proud of you.
We want people to love our work, of course we do. We want them to think we are brilliant and we only make marvelous things. We want to believe all that work leads to stellar shows. We want our work to be so good no one could hate it. But – sometimes, especially in the trenches of underfunded art, we don’t achieve the masterwork status we were aiming at. And if you feel bad that I might not be crazy about that artwork you made, just know I’m not crazy about Hamilton, either, okay? You’re in good company. Most people really love it. I don’t. But – I’m still proud of them for making it! And I’m proud of you too.
Photo by Jason Vail
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Filed under: Rejections, theatre, writing | Tags: 2022, rejection, round up, theatre, Year End
This is only the second one of these rejection posts I’ve done this year. I just find I don’t have much more to say about any of these anymore. I feel like I’ve said all the things about rejection in every previous post. It’s also that I’ve found it hard to get motivated to apply for things theatrical or residential when COVID is still stalking through the land. I did manage to apply for almost double of what I applied for last year, so I guess that’s progress. *
The Leah Ryan Fund
I think this is one of those things that is actually relatively easy to apply for so even though I don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning it, it’s still kind of worth it to just give it a shot. It costs me no money and one day I could be surprised.
CRNY Guaranteed Income for Artists
The state of New York came up with a beautiful scheme to actually help the artists here. It will provide a Universal Basic Income for a substantial amount of time (I can’t remember how long). It was a pretty simple application and distributed via lottery. I think these things are the way to go. I wasn’t selected but I don’t take it the least bit personally and it’s really almost impossible to take it personally. This rejection is neither a reflection on me nor my work so while I could have really used a UBI, it would have been like winning the lottery and I really don’t expect to win lotteries, so it’s fine. There was not even a hint of sting in this rejection for me. I’m just so glad this scheme exists. It gives me the tiniest hint of faith that there are some with some power who are thinking of sensible and actually helpful things to do to help artists.
Paul Newman/Joanne Woodward Award/Bloomington Playwrights Project/Constellation Stage and Screen
This thing has so many names. It has merged. It was renamed. It is merging again? I don’t know. I guess I’ll keep applying – whatever it’s called. It’s a pretty painless application and the production plus actual money is a good motivator. I cannot keep track of who is running it or what it is so I’m just going to continue to call it the Woodward/Newman Awards. Sorry everyone else.
Jane Chambers Prize
This is one of those where they don’t bother to reject you; They just send you an announcement of the winners. Feels like bad form to me. But it does force me to read the email!
Book Pipeline
This one does the just sending you the winners thing. I guess it’s a trend! Anyway – I submitted my Middle Grade novel but they did not accept it. That’s okay. My friend’s kid listened to the podcast version when she was home sick with COVID and had a lot of fun questions and is reported to love it, so publishers be damned. I’m very happy to have made something a sick child could love so I’m not sure I can do any better than that. Sometimes you win anyway. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about and want to listen to it – it’s on a handful of platforms but not all of them for reasons I don’t understand.)
Clubbed Thumb
Clubbed Thumb are a cool theatre company here in NYC. I thought it might be cool to submit something to them since they had a few windows of open submissions this year. I sent them my Medusa play and it wasn’t “a perfect fit” for any of their opportunities but I did like that they described themselves as a small company that tends to support weirdo comedies so maybe I’ll find another piece at some point. I tend to write weirdo tragi-comedies which may not be QUITE close enough.
Audible Theatre
In February of 2020 (good god, can you remember such a month?!) I submitted The Dragoning to Audible. As you can see, I was exploring audio options for that piece even BEFORE the pandemic hit. But then it hit and I just went ahead and made The Dragoning rather than wait to hear from places like Audible. Good thing I did, too, because these folks took two and a half years to send me a rejection! I submitted in February 2020 and got this rejection email in November of 2022! They do plan on keeping my work on file, though. So definitely count on that leading to something. (Not.)
Playwrights Foundation
I applied with my Comedy of Errors prequel. They let me know it did not reach the “semi-finalist stage.” Ugh. Can’t just tell me I’m rejected. They have to tell me I’m so rejected I didn’t even make the first cut purge. Nice. Nice. So nice.
Audio Verse Awards
Because we made a second season of The Dragoning this year, I was able to submit us for these awards. I’ll be honest, we had to nominate ourselves this year. But – I figured if there was a shot to recognize some of the people who worked on this show, I wanted to give us that shot. Unfortunately, you have to make the finals altogether to be considered at all and we just didn’t have the votes. Popularity contests are not my strong suit.
IndieSpace Pay Your People Grant
It’s pretty kick ass that IndieSpace (formerly known as the League of Independent Theatre Fund) does a lottery for its grant giving. It means the application is really pretty simple and they literally pick names out of a hat. It is super stressful waiting for the names and since I missed that I needed to RSVP for the event, I had to do it on zoom, which meant I was also petrified that the wifi would cut out just when they called our company name because if you fail to respond after three calls, it goes to someone else. Wifi held on for the draw but alas, we were not drawn from the hat. A lot of companies were, though, like a lot, a lot – and that makes me feel like there may be some hope for the field a little bit.
SUMMARY
So in 2022, I applied for 15 things, received 9 rejections and 6 non-responses. I spent $95 total to submit.
In 2021, I applied for 8 things, received 5 rejections and 3 non-responses. $50
In 2019, I applied for 71 things. I spent $652 to do that.
There’s been a bit of a shift, I’d say!
*Wondering why I’m telling you about rejections? Read my initial post about this here and my patron’s idea about that here.
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Filed under: art institutions, education, Shakespeare, theatre | Tags: access, accessibility, Arts Education, arts institutions, education, fiction, hip-hop, literature, Marvel movies, Shakespeare, theatre
In an interview about my work in Shakespeare education, I was asked what we did to make Shakespeare accessible to the students. I couldn’t help but laugh. To me, it’s like asking, “How do we make hip hop accessible to the students? How do we make Marvel movies accessible?”
You don’t have to make Shakespeare accessible. It just is. Does everyone love it? Nope. That’s ok. Not everyone loves Marvel movies either, believe it or not. But put a really fantastic Shakespeare play in front of students and they’re just as likely, if not more likely, to enjoy it, as a fancy grown-up crowd would.
Are there tools to help them engage with it more deeply? Absolutely. I use them all the time. But the only preparation the entire student audience at BAM had for Ralph Fiennes’ Richard the Second was a 45 minute workshop from me in their classroom. And those students were INTO that show. Richard the Second! Not A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Richard the Freaking Second. They get it. They got it. It wasn’t that hard.
This is true of most rigorous art works. My friend has his students watch four hours of a Wagner opera in his class. Not all at once, granted. But despite lots of people declaring that those students aren’t really capable of engaging with complex music, they love it. They’re into it. They benefit from context, sure – certainly in the way that I’d maybe enjoy a Marvel movie more if someone broke down some of the related back stories for me before I went. But – ultimately – it’s not a special skill to be able to enjoy or engage with a work of art.
The conversation around accessibility is entirely backwards. We don’t need to be discussing how to make things like Shakespeare accessible to students, in terms of their understanding, because it is easily done. Open the door to the work. Put powerful words in their mouths, maybe just a few at first but eventually they’ll be ready for all of them. Let their bodies be animated by exciting language and the access has happened. The real difficulty of access is making sure everyone is welcome in the building. It’s making sure people with disabilities can come and experience everything. It’s making sure there are affordable tickets for people who want to attend. That’s the main accessibility issue as far as I’m concerned.
Many times, I’ve been a part of breaking open a student’s world by bringing them to see some amazing show and they fall in love with the language and the feeling and the world. But how will they return? How could they afford a ticket without the grant funded student trip? How could they bring their grandmother to see what they have seen? That’s the accessibility I’m concerned about.
I’ve seen too many students, who others have counted out, take hold of Shakespeare’s language and shake the very foundations of their school. I will never forget the student who no one wanted to work with, who was a real pain in the ass for his teacher and whose school was in real trouble – and he took hold of Launcelot Gobbo’s speech in Merchant of Venice and showed us all. He thought he was rebelling doing it by himself – because I’d structured the speech as an Angel/Devil exercise for groups of three students. But he wanted to do it alone – and was so good – we brought him to BAM to showcase his work. That speech was his. He owned it. No one imagined he could do it but he was extraordinary.
I’ve learned that the program I spent thirteen years teaching Shakespeare for is gone. First, they cut off its limbs by separating it from live performance and then they just ran a sword through it so they don’t teach Shakespeare there at all anymore. That’s how you really make something inaccessible – you no longer give students access to it.
And on one hand, I understand it – Shakespeare’s hold on the American Theatre is extreme and it prevents the work of women and people of color from rising through the ranks. It is very important that we give voice to writers other than Shakespeare. But it’s not as if this theatre, that killed its Shakespeare for students program, has stopped producing Shakespeare for adult audiences. It’s just not for young people anymore and I’m afraid it’s from some misguided idea that they just can’t get it, that they are unable to understand it. Often people with fancy degrees think you need a fancy degree to be able to relate to Shakespeare. And I’m sorry but your fancy degree doesn’t give you special powers that a kid from East New York doesn’t have. You may be able to analyze the trochees but that kid knows how that show made him feel.
I feel like denying kids access to Shakespeare is denying them a multitude of valuable experiences. Could they learn to explore juicy language, expand their sense of possibility and self, discover a sense of size and power through another writer? Sure. Of course they could. Will they though? The movement has been toward non-fiction in schools. Shakespeare was the only one left. He was the only writer named in the Common Core. Sure, it’d be amazing if schools started teaching Adrienne Kennedy all of a sudden but I think it’s unlikely to happen. Students will just get less literature in general and they’ll see less live performance.
We have decades of Shakespeare education. The culture is rich in references to his work. Giving kids access to his language means they’re part of that conversation, not excluded from it. Giving kids powerful speeches to say means we’re giving them powerful models that they may have in their bones when they run for office down the road. It may mean they have richer images to be inspired by as they write the great works of the future. The more exciting rigorous and visceral language we can give young people to say, the more tools they’ll have for whatever they do.
Does it have to be Shakespeare? No. You could try some Christopher Marlowe. I’m a big Thomas Middleton fan myself. But trading one dead white man Renaissance writer for another doesn’t really help. And our culture has done a real great job of burying women and BIPOC writers so sometimes it’s hard to find writers that a school will recognize as “literature” but you know, please teach them anyway. Find the ones that get students fired up and please show us all. But meanwhile, we’ve got Shakespeare. His work has inspired people for hundreds of years. Don’t deny kids access to that power. That’s the real accessibility issue.
This post was brought to you by my patrons on Patreon.
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Filed under: art, theatre, writing | Tags: archetype, Broadway, champagne, character, Fates and Furies, film, Lauren Groff, novelist, playwright, screenwriter, theatre, tropes
This book I’m reading is not the first book to do this, but it is the latest and it is enough of a trend that, when it happened in this book, I may have said, out loud, “Oh no, not this again.”
It’s this thing where novelists and screenwriters put a playwright in their piece. In these works, the playwright always becomes super successful and gets famous and rich and, I have to assume, receives all the accolades the writer dreams of, but in theatre form. My sense is that they do this because they don’t want to write about a writer too close to themselves. If they’re a novelist, the protagonist can’t be a novelist, that’s too close – and a playwright, they imagine, is like a novelist but more social and glamourous. A screenwriter imagines that a playwright is like a screenwriter but artier and nobler.
I’ve read and seen a lot of works with playwrights in them and the plays are ALWAYS a triumph within the narrative. They always end up with a hit. They are always on Broadway or the West End or featured at the National Theatre in London. It is tremendously easy to become a hot famous playwright in a novel or a movie. It seems to be a particularly sexy fantasy for other writers.
But I know a lot of playwrights. I even know a lot of very successful playwrights and I’m quite certain that while their lives are full and interesting, they are never nearly as glamorous as these other forms make them sound. Their paths to success are never simple. There is no overnight success for a playwright. It just doesn’t work like that. And there’s something so wild about the fantasy that it does. It doesn’t work like that for other writers, either, I’d imagine. You don’t just meet the right person at a party and instantly end up on the New York Times bestseller list. You don’t write your first film in a drunken stupor that weeks later is featured on screens across America.
But this story line is so common now, this one of a playwright catapulted to success, that it has started to feel like a trope. The trope within this trope that I often see recurring is the playwright revealing important things about himself and his personality through his work. We see scenes in his life repeated onstage, sometimes word for word. (I’m saying he and his because it is almost always a male playwright who is the subject of this work.) The novel or film includes whole swaths of the playwright’s plays so we can learn more about him. Or maybe so we can understand the Freudian echoes or Jungian archetypes operating beneath. Those “plays” almost always suck and they are almost always enormous hits in the story. Do bad plays become hits in real life? Yes. All the time. I’d even say most of the time when I’m feeling cynical. But these plays are not SUPPOSED to be bad in the book or movie. They’re supposed to be genius. And aside from being bad, they just don’t function well as plays. Like, they’re not theatrical or dramatic. Maybe every writer thinks they can write a play? I don’t know – but nothing makes me want to throw a book across the room like a novelist’s epic “brilliant” play in the middle of the story.
The book that made me think about this is Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies. It is beautifully written and artfully constructed except for the theatre stuff. It’s an interesting mix, though, because some of it is spot on, theatrically speaking. She has the atmosphere of the field and the vibes of the location down. She has spent some time in theatres. She probably has some actor friends. But there are these moments where the story moves so dramatically away from the possible. The actor who gets drunk and writes a brilliant play (that is secretly punched up by his wife) and that play becomes an instant sensation and then another and another until they’ve got a country house in Connecticut or somewhere. It’s like this novelist knows what actors are like at a party but not how the economics of playwriting actually work in this era.
I was rolling my eyes at this instant success of this instant playwright (no development necessary for this wunderkind!) and then (slight spoiler) in the second half of the book, we learn that the instant hit was manipulated into position by the wife. She blackmails someone into asking and paying for a production at Playwrights Horizons and when no one comes to that production that she bribed into existence, she calls all their friends. But even this is improbable. Are theatres impervious to being bought? Nope. If someone offered them enough money, I have little doubt that arrangements might be made. But how would a criminal from Philadelphia know which theatre to put pressure on? How would he know who to throw his cash at? I feel like you’d at least need to know a TINY bit about the theatre business before you bought your way into it.
Also – I’ve tried to get all my friends to come out for things in New York City and that this wife could fill up an off–Broadway house on such short notice, with their friends, feels like some magical thinking. I think the author thinks this means the wife character cheated her way into helping her husband succeed – but having the skill to browbeat all your friends to come out for a show one night is probably actually what one needs to succeed. If you can get a couple hundred friends to come out and support you, you’re probably 75% there, as far as a theatre career is concerned.
So this little revelation certainly helps mediate the question raised by the sudden random success of the playwright earlier in the book – but it doesn’t explain how this sudden success turned into a celebrity style career. Even the most famous contemporary playwrights still struggle to have their work produced and very few of them are treated the way the one in this book is. I can’t think of one. (Not a living one, anyway.)
I am starting to find this trope very transparent. Every time I encounter a playwright in a work in another genre, I feel like I understand how they ended up there and why the author chose that particular profession for their protagonist. Maybe I’m hoping that the next person who wants to write a playwright will consider what tropes they’re falling into and either learn a lot more about the theatre world or choose a different profession for their protagonist. I do not blame this author (Lauren Groff) at all. The transposition of one kind of writer to another is very logical but it raised a lot of questions for me.
Is this book the story of this author’s life? I would never assume so – but then, the way she writes the playwright’s life as such a direct reflection of his life makes me think it must be. I actually think playwrights are less inclined than other writers to write autobiographically but you’d never know it from the way they’re depicted in fiction.
It’s like, it must be so nice to be a fictional playwright in a novel or a film! You never have to struggle with producers over your rights. You never have to talk to a theatre’s administrators about where they’re going to get the incentive money to put up your play. You never have to fight with directors over the way the show is going. You never have to cry in the greenroom about how the actors fundamentally misunderstood those lines. You just go to fancy parties, have fun artistic friends and drink nothing but champagne after shows! It’s a dream! Who wouldn’t want to be a playwright?!
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Filed under: art, Creative Process, theatre, Visual Art | Tags: art, Artist, garbage, research and development, storage unit, theatre, trash
My storage unit was filled with show shit. That is, it was full of props, set pieces, costumes, puppets, mask molds, rehearsal materials, marketing stuff and lots of random creative remains. I hadn’t seen these things in a long while so when it began to emerge, I said, “Well, a lot of this is going in the garbage!”
Meanwhile, it’s complicated. I saved a lot of this stuff out of a sincere hope that I’d find a way to produce the shows again. I have those giant gold frames, the hat boxes and the portable racks for a show that we toured for a little while and hoped we’d tour again. I kept the materials from our creative process on The Door Was Open in case we got the opportunity to explore further. We haven’t. And those six hula hoops probably aren’t entirely necessary to keep around. Nor is the big bag of wallpaper scraps. But I kept them because I hope they WOULD be called into service again. That wallpaper was a miracle in our Research and Development process! Could I really just get rid of it? I haven’t made any theatre (in person) in years. What a lot of leftovers from my theatrical practice! What a terrible theatrical pack rack I seemed to be! I was feeling very rueful about it, truth be told.
But my dad, who was helping me move all this stuff, had a different perspective. To him, it looked like a theatrical life well lived. He told me he was proud of me for making all those shows that that stuff came from. He said it reminded him of the spaces of some theatre folk he knows (and respects). I was feeling like my artistic work had turned into trash and he talked me down off that ledge. It’s really something to watch your feelings go from trash to pride so quickly.
I was talking with a friend about this experience later and she could relate to that feeling around thinking of one’s art as trash. She talked about her body of work adding up to some crap in a closet that her kid would have to deal with someday. She tells me she often thinks about just hauling it all out to the garbage. That thought horrifies me, though! I treasure her work. I could not bear it if she threw it away and I hate that it ends up in a closet because people should get to see it!
But we all struggle with this, I suppose. This feeling that a life dedicated to creation means generating a lot of trash. Sometimes it is literal trash. In my case, I should definitely put that bag of wallpaper scraps in the recycling. That much, I think I can surrender safely. But sometimes having a body of work can just FEEL like trash. It can feel like we’re hanging on to old garbage because it’s not the thing we’re working on at the moment – but it’s not trash. Having a bunch of evidence of previous creations is actually very cool. It’s easy to forget how meaningful these things were and are, still. Don’t throw away your work. Someone will treasure it. It is not trash.
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Filed under: Acting, Justice, theatre | Tags: Acting, actors, art, Justice, lawyer, respect, Respect for Acting, respectability, theatre, Uta Hagen
Mostly I don’t worry about respectability. I’m aware that I work in fields that lack a certain respectability and that by operating at the margins, I do not rank high on a lot of people’s respectability scales. I notice it particularly in the comments on anything that proposes providing support for artists (for housing, basic income, anything – “Why should we help these people who don’t even do a regular job for a living?”). I have made a kind of peace with my lack of respectability and can sometimes even revel in it.
Recently, though, I found myself thinking about it – after wrapping up jury service on a civil trial, spending hours watching lawyers. Lawyers, despite all the jokes to the contrary, experience a high level of respectability. Often, immigrants want their children to grow up to be lawyers (and doctors!) so that they know the children have achieved something like respectability. No one shakes their head regretfully when they hear someone is going to law school. It’s a sign they are entering a respectable social class, a genteel profession. There may be a lot of jokes about how terrible lawyers are but no one will be disappointed if their kid becomes one.
After sitting through a week and a half of a personal injury lawyer trying to gaslight us into punishing a doctor for something he didn’t do, I really don’t think law is such a respectable profession anymore. I may not make a lot of money but I don’t try to convince people of lies. I may do things that a lot of people don’t understand but I don’t waste people’s time and attention on spurious situations. I don’t take advantage of vulnerable people and expose their innermost life details to groups of people for no good reason. I do not find the guy who does this kind of work respectable.
The other lawyer, the guy defending against this case didn’t strike me as all that much more respectable, honestly, even though he at least had truth and science on his side. But this man spends all his time pushing back on the specious claims. He’s participating in it, too. If this lawsuit had not been brought, he would not have had a case. None of it struck me as particularly respectable. And yet.
It made me feel my own lack of respectability keenly in a way. I do not usually pay much mind to such things but I thought of all the actors I know, tired of being asked “Oh, where do you wait tables?” when they tell someone they’re an actor so they just decide to go to law school, just to get some respect for a change.
I read a quote from Uta Hagen recently where she explained why she called her book Respect for Acting. Her sense was that there wasn’t enough respect for the work and she hoped to foster some. (I’ll put the whole quote below. It’s bracing and inspiring.) There’s even less respect now than there was when she wrote the book and I suppose I’m thinking about it because it is not easy to live in a culture that does not respect what you do. Being exposed, at length, to the work of a job that IS respected and find it, instead of respectable, somewhat reprehensible is a kind of an unpleasant turnaround. I know this particular kind of law isn’t the only one and there are many many lawyers whose work I admire and am grateful for. (I think of the heroes who showed up at JFK airport the day Trump implemented the Muslim ban.) But – as a whole? I don’t know. Maybe we could treat artists with a little MORE respect and the vast field of law with a little less. It’s not all respectable.
I called the book ‘Respect for Acting’ for a very clear reason. I did not call the book ‘Delight in Acting’ or ‘Love of Acting’ or ‘The Fun of Acting.’ I called that book what I called that book because of the shocking lack of respect that was creeping into both the teaching and the practicing of acting. Now? Forget it. We have allowed so much to recede or languish that I don’t know what I could call a book today. ‘Demand for Acting’ might work. …There was a time when people became bored and they took up bridge or golf; ladies had an affair or had their hair rinsed and joined a book club. Now they want to act. And there are fools with no standards who allow them into classes and theatre groups and tell them to live their dream. I don’t care about dreams. I care about work and responsibility and truth and commitment. You can see how old-fashioned I am. When you are bored or depressed, you might be advised to visit a museum, to look at the art. You are not, typically, advised to pick up a brush and become a painter. It is understood that this is a rare gift, and foolish to presume it might be yours. If your soul is crushed, it might be suggested that you listen to classical music or submit to opera. It is not suggested that you audition for the Metropolitan Opera, or even your local, provincial opera company. You haven’t had the training. But acting? All you need, it seems, is the dream, and there are doors–doors that once meant something and once housed some standards behind them–that fly open and embrace you. And it enrages me. If there is some small society that calls itself amateur or community or whatever, and they want to get up and do plays, that is fine. I’ll contribute money and I’ll support you in the joys of understanding plays, but do not call yourself an actor. Do not think that your dream is similar in weight or meaning to the years of training and commitment that I and all the many actors whose work I love and respect and envy have invested in this art. Respect what is an art. It is not a pastime, and it is not something to get you through a bad time, and it is not something that should be taught to everyone with a dream. The term seriousness of purpose comes to mind. Apparently, only mine.
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Filed under: American, Justice, theatre | Tags: boring, court, judge, jury service, Justice, law, lawyer, theatre
In one of the videos they play for jurors, the narrator explains the Court as being a lot like Theatre. He explained the roles and the conflict, the set and the setting. I was intrigued by this explanation because, as a theatre maker, I would not assume people understood theatre any more than they do a court.
If court is a show, though, it is not necessarily a good one. One thing that surprised me, in serving on a jury, was how willing to bore the audience everyone seemed to be. There were multiple moments where I thought, “Are they trying to win this case by boring us to death?” The first time I thought this was when the Plaintiff’s lawyer interviewed his hired-gun medical witness and had him slowly answer medical questions and read medical records for over an hour – both of them speaking incredibly slowly with very little inflection. The second time I thought this was when the Defense read the plaintiff’s description interview onto the record. It went something like this:
QUESTION: Where did you live then?
ANSWER: I don’t remember.
QUESTION: You don’t remember?
ANSWER: I don’t remember.
It was the world’s driest dialogue read dryly by one dry lawyer. And he read “Question” and “Answer” each time, too. I’m a professional actor and I feel like I could inject some zest in almost anything but I would shake in my boots if I was challenged to read this dialogue.
The third time I felt this way was during the plaintiff’s lawyer’s closing statements wherein he pulled out a stack of medical records, chose the one from the top, flipped to the back, slowly found the doctor’s name and then read it, followed by their description of the patient’s complaint. It was the same phrase over and over, the same procedure, over and over, one stack of papers after another, for maybe fifteen minutes? The reading I could handle. It was the minutes of searching for the page and then slowly pulling out the next one. My god. If it was a show I’d have left it.
The last time I felt this way was during the judge’s “charge to the jury.” We were warned by the officer that it generally took 50 minutes for him to read this thing so we were prepared but wow. The judge did his best to zhuzh it up but the material is long and dull and I cannot imagine an actor who could make it work. Maybe Mr. T. Because every show would be improved by the presence of Mr. T.
But, of course, all these exceptionally dull and tedious hours are not for theatrical purposes. No theatre maker would DARE bore their audience like this. But then – a theatrical audience is not compelled by law to sit there and listen. Maybe that’s the major difference.
The architecture of this particular courtroom was also really not effective theatrical space. I was Juror #2 so I was seated at this odd point of convergence of the space wherein absolutely everyone spoke directly to me. There were five other jurors in the box but almost every single person on “stage” looked almost exclusively at me while they spoke. I imagine that’s mostly to do with the way the space is arranged but I also know that I am a well trained audience member so I am easier to talk to than most. I am easy to read and incapable of cutting off the channel of a “performer” who needs it. This is why I prefer not to sit in the front row of a show if I can help it. It’s a lot of work for me to be that channel! I kept wanting to tell the folks in the courtroom to work the ROOM, not just me.
This was not a situation of being at a concert and being convinced that the singer is singing just for me, though I have certainly experienced that phenomenon. At times the lawyers were directly in front of me, maybe a foot and a half away, looking directly into my eyes. It was EXHAUSTING.
If court is a show, it is an incredibly tedious one, with dull performances and awkward acting. It’s overly long. And you’re not even allowed to talk about it until it’s all over.
Was it dramatic? No.
Was it comedic? Briefly, for a moment or two. The way a joke at the DMV is a nice break in the atmosphere.
Was it romantic? Can’t imagine how. If there was ever a meet cute in the jury room. I’d like to hear about it because it is not a meet cute atmosphere, that is for sure.
Was it action packed? No. All events happened six years before. All drama was long past.
If courts are theatre, they’re very very bad theatre. Which came first? Courts or theatre? Or did they evolve alongside one another? I suspect courts have a different lineage. The first courts were part of the Court and it was mostly just going along to see the king and hoping he’d see things your way. It feels to me that the courtroom is designed more like a king’s court than a theatre. Our court system is certainly better than a king’s authoritarian rule (though it might not feel that great lately!) – but it is not good theatre, that much I can tell you.
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Filed under: American, feminism, movies, theatre | Tags: American, American Buffalo, cinema, macho, Ray Liotta, theatre, True West, WTF podcast, WTF with Marc Maron
When I saw Ray Liotta had died, I was shocked and saddened. I was a fan of his work and he seemed like a good human. In his honor, I listened to an interview he did with Marc Maron on the WTF podcast a few years ago and enjoyed learning more about him and his journey. It did make me think, though. And it did make me wish for change in the way we do show biz. Apparently, Liotta had no real interest in acting when the opportunity to do it presented itself to him. He got talked into auditioning for a show because of a cute girl and stuck around because a teacher encouraged him. Nothing too crazy there. I’ve definitely heard this sort of story before.
But it’s the reason that Liotta theorized that his teacher encouraged him that got me thinking. Liotta had always been a jock and, it sounds like, a fairly macho guy. His teacher responded to him because they didn’t get a lot of guy’s guys there in the college theatre department. He saw a kindred male spirit and a kind of rare bird that they needed on the stage. Liotta really wasn’t that keen on acting in the beginning but he got to play some very juicy roles at his university and it’s not just because he was good. I’m guessing Liotta’s college decided to do A Streetcar Named Desire because they had a guy who could play Stanley Kowalski. They did Taming of the Shrew probably because they had a guy who could do a macho Petruchio. Liotta got to learn how to act by doing some of the best roles in the canon and the college got to do some shows on its list. All very reasonable. Many a school will choose their season based on who they have in casting pool. I get it on all levels.
But it also troubles me – because while I’m glad we had Liotta’s talents to enjoy on the screen – the way the path was smoothed for him (when he gave not two figs for it at the start) and the way it is not smoothed for so many others, just doesn’t feel FAIR to me. The way the American Theatre (and Cinema) fetishizes macho men is disturbing, really. There are endless roles for them, despite the fact that the theatre is largely populated by women and gay men. “Fellas, is it gay to be into theatre?” Maybe a little bit! Yet in spite of the inherent queerness in the form, or maybe because of it, the macho man is embraced, encouraged and given pride of place over and over again.
The American Theatre is dominated by macho plays and macho actors. How many revivals of American Buffalo do we need? A lot, apparently. I loved True West the first time I saw it. And even the second and third time. Then there was that time I assistant directed a production of it at a college of 75% women. Enough’s enough. Anyway, Liotta wasn’t in the theatre for long – because this pipeline between the theatre and film was built for men like him. Macho men from the theatre get snapped up into film, which also has a high demand for men who could be mobsters and so someone who had no interest in acting at first could be swept up into one of the most prestigious careers around. And I’m glad that it happened to Ray Liotta because I’m happy we had him while he was here but I can’t help feeling sad for all the people who LOVED the theatre, who ate, slept and drank it, who would have done anything to have a shot and no one ever took them under their wing and helped them to a wide range of opportunities. No one ever chose a season based on their presence in the casting pool. No one saw them in a play and put them in a soap opera. No one ever saw them in a soap opera and put them in a prestige film. I hate looking at a class full of actors and knowing that the person most likely to find success will be the man most macho, no matter how much more talented or dedicated or passionate his peers might be. Sorry, ladies, non-binaries and gays, the theatre is dependent on there being thousands like you but it will always choose the macho fella who doesn’t care about it first. The theatre loves a cool disinterested man who can help it grapple with masculinity, I guess. Anyway – RIP Ray Liotta, even if I am a little mad about how your success came to you. One day I’d love to hear a story about a woman who just didn’t care that much about theatre but some teacher just had to have her in the show anyway and she became a big big star.
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