Over the past week or so I have been near the center of exchanges about theatre and social media that feel alternately like discussions, vent sessions, and policy ponderings. Social media and theatre and the mix of both — discuss. And when you add in questions of the directionality of the media stream and who controls it you have an endlessly energized exchange — media in hands of creators, media in hands of theatre administration, media in the hands of audience members, media in hands of performers. The conversations going on at this very moment on these themes among dramaturgs and other theatre professionals are active on individual blogs (see Douglas McLennan’s 1/25/2012 post “Leading from Behind – We Need a Better Definition”), on the occasional discussion forum (see the LMDA listserv discussions) , in print and elsewhere. I shall make no attempts to summarize that rapidly morphing discussion here. What I shall do is provide my own little story and recent experience, and parse that a bit. In this discussion as in all discussions that hit on philosophies of art (personal, professional) and perhaps suspicion of new tools and high emotions, details matter. So I offer a few.

I am a literature major who became a social science researcher who worked in court research for many years and morphed into a theatre researcher and dramaturg. I’ve been a pc user since 1983, and emailer since 1984 or so, at first through university accounts then through employer email accounts then free email hosts like Hotmail then gmail. I first read a play that tried (semi successfully) to incorporate projections-as-email-conversations between two characters as a script reader for one of several DC theatres in 2004. I continue to read on the page and see on various stages in the ensuing years as resident of DC, Chicago, Philadelphia, and now New York City the creative challenges for playwrights and the design/creative/ research team attempting to incorporate the use of social media in theatre. Questions, challenges, hits and misses.

So I have the eye of a dramaturg observer, and am technologically experienced, and still openly acknowledge a lot of rough edges. And add to this years of observing individual playwrights and theatre productions (as production dramaturg, as script reader, as critic) as they attempt to bring email and instant messaging and Twitter communications onto the stage into the world of a play.

My active entry into Facebook (2008) was inspired and reinforced by my smart and funny theatre friends and colleagues who used the tool to build communities around their work and their companies, advertise and discuss individual works. Humor and community were my reward for playing in the Facebook playgroup. Twitter use arose similarly for me (2009) – sparked by my curiosity about how theatres were using the tool, and enhanced by humor and instant community. Twitter’s more open anyone-can-follow-anyone structure (unless an account is specially locked down) allows you to learn more about Merrill Markoe’s and Andy Borowitz’s fast and funny brains, for example, than would be possible in the real world. One can get lost in the somewhat messy sea of output in Twitter, but I do find community-level events (such as awards shows or the New York State legislative vote on gay marriage several months ago), organized through hashtag groupings (sometimes jokingly created, sometimes seriously inserted) introduce me to the fun of live tweeting and finding a community instantly, outside my immediate physical world.

Over the past few years I have also observed theatre marketing efforts that use Twitter in a range of ways. I first encountered the idea of a “tweet seat” as last minute notice of ticket availability by various theatre companies. Theatres tweet out news of last minute deals to a specific kind of potential patron – media savvy, quick on their feet (or with their fingers), with flexible theatre-going schedules. I took note. At the same time a different type of “tweet seat” experiment began in different theatres, reported as they occurred in discussion lists, involving audience members given permission to tweet during performances. The commentary I read (on line, in print) about these experiments ranged widely from support for “whatever brings people into the theatre” to concerns about how to control the mechanics and organization of such events to questions about whether this kind of in-the-moment audience interaction/processing has a place at all in the world of theatre. Discussion of the use of a smart phone as a tweeting tool in a darkened theatre can bring up for all of us the annoyance of the light ahead of us, tapping fingers beside us, all of which can distract an audience member from absolute focus on the theatre before her. Any and all of these themes and others seemed to emerge and conflate and enflame in tweet seat discussions.

When an opportunity to become a “tweet seat” participant observer and test out my reactions in the moment to an experiment using social media in a theatre performance, I pounced. I follow @PublicTheaterNY and observed publicity about a planned “tweet seat” event for Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) coming up just after the Under the Radar Festival in early January 2012. And on January 19, 2012 the Marketing Department of the Public Theater invited selected Twitter users to attend and “live tweet” a performance of Gob Squad’s Kitchen. Here’s a little summary of the sequence of events.

1/26/2011
@PublicTheaterNY
Playbill reports on our Tweet Seats: MT: @rss_playbill: Public Opens 1st Perf of Gob Squad’s Kitchen for Live-Tweeting bit.ly/tL4XgZ

I read the article. It feeds into my recent experiences an curiosity, and I am alert for further notifications from @PublicTheaterNY. I do not have to wait long.

I read the article. It feeds into my recent experiences an curiosity, and I am alert for further notifications from @PublicTheaterNY. I do not have to wait long.

1/2/2012
@PublicTheaterNY
Just a few more days to enter SYTYCT for a chance to live-tweet GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN! #kitchenlive #warhol bit.ly/vpz5Y6

Aha, the mechanics are now clear. I follow the instructions, through which you are led to a form (requesting name, a few facts, email, and your Twitter account name). And you are told to wait to hear if you’re selected. I don’t know what the selection process is, though one supposes there was at least a look at the Twitter feed of the folks applying.

1/3/2012
@msteketee
Decided to try to get a ticket to tweet about Gob Squad doing Warhol. I think. We’ll see! @PublictheaterNY #kitchenlive

I enter this day, and tweet that fact, and my tweet is immediately acknowledged with a “good luck” by @PublicTheaterNY. The submission period ends several days later. I tracked two tweets in particular:

1/8/2012
PublicTheaterNY The Public Theater
@HESherman Tweet Seat event is experiment for us – may not be satisfying for actors/audiences. We’ll see, it’s exciting to see what happens.

1/8/2012
PublicTheaterNY The Public Theater
Also, last day 2 enter: Win Tweet Seats for GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN! Winners will live tweet 1st perf from special section! publictheater.wufoo.com/forms/m7x3s5/

Note that the question of who is served by the Tweet Seat experiment is already a topic of discussion. And it is clear here that the experiment is “for us” meaning the Theater generally or the Marketing Department in particular. The tone is experimental.

The contest is wrapped up and winners notified on 1/10/2011 with a Twitter Direct Message to check email. The contest is called here and a few places (including handouts in a kind of press pack the performance evening) “So You Think You Can Tweet: Gob Squad Edition”. The rest of the public process is regular reminders until the Tweet Seat event occurs. Note that the #kitchenlive hashtag can be referenced even now for tweets before, during, and after the guest tweeting on 1/19/2012.

1/13/2012
PublicTheaterNY The Public Theater
Less than a week before the 1st perf of GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN! You will be able see live tweets from that show by following #KitchenLive.

1/18/2012
PublicTheaterNY The Public Theater
First perf of GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN is tomorrow! Be sure to follow live tweets from our guest tweeters at #kitchenlive from 7:30pm to 10pm!

1/19/2012
PublicTheaterNY The Public Theater
GOB SQUAD’S KITCHEN has arrived! Follow #kitchenlive for live tweets from guest tweeters for tonight ‘s first perf -7:30-10pm. #warhol

When we arrive on 1/19/2012 we are presented with a lanyard and laminated tab with our twitter name (see image at head of this blog post), our real name, and the TWEET SEAT SECTION designation . For some of the participants this quasi-review role is a new one and they comment on it among themselves. We are also handed a folder that includes a set of rules: silence cell phones, no calls during performance, lower brightness on phone, only tweet during performance, no photography – though this rule was modified when the performers gave their o.k. for photos before the performance began, to use the hashtag #kitchenlive, and to tweet at the level we wanted with no expectations. We are not informed beforehand in any formal way who the other Tweet Seat occupants will be or how many, though it is clear that many of the crowd know one another. I am older than most by several decades. It turns out there are 25 of us, some of whom brought guests. We alone as a group occupy the last three rows of the Newman Theater on the first floor of the Public Theater, across the lobby from Joe’s Pub. The Marketing folks are most gracious, thank us publicly and privately post event, and give us a free drink at a nearby bar to debrief.

1/19/2012
@PublicTheaterNY
Thanks to all our live-tweeters for capturing the first performance of GOB’S SQUAD KITCHEN. a fun night! #Warhol would approve #KitchenLive

So what do I make of this experience? I journal, I observe, I write up experiences in theatres with great frequency – for my own blog and for other outlets. I would rather be in a rehearsal room or a theatre experiencing the wonders possible there than almost anywhere else on earth. And I found the personal experience as a participant in this partially controlled experiment to be a struggle with role strain. I acknowledge this is in part due to my desire to experience a play as an audience member who might review, therefore I want to be fully engaged and give myself over to the actors and designers and playwright, body and brain, in a way that is simply not possible when one pauses at regular intervals to tweet a reaction or a sensation that is in essence a note for deeper reflection at a later time. Any person attending such an event should expect to have a partial and “distanced” experience of the art before them.

This tweet from midshow on 1/19/2012 that captures a moment and a reflection to which I will return in my formal critical notes on the show, based on both viewings. This was a rare pause and moment I by chance capture on the fly (eyes up and down and taking notes and trying to function, right and left brain together). I was fascinated to hear during the 1/25/2012 performance post show conversation one of the actors in fact references the Woody Allen film Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) as an inspiration for the group for this moment in the show. This movie occurred to me immediately upon seeing the sequence captured in the image at the link below, and visible at left here.

1/19/2012
@msteketee
Simon has gone to other side. Very purple rose of cairo. Others try entice him back. #kitchenlive yfrog.com/o0svjnj

What it was:
Well organized, sensitively structured effort by the Public Theater’s Marketing Department to invited 25 Twitter Users to observe and comment upon a partially improvised work involving projections, audience involvement, and evocation of some of Andy Warhol’s movies.

What it was not:
An artist-driven effort to inform their work directly or to provide information instantaneously fed to the actors. This experiment was not intended to integrate the audience reactions to the theatre creation in any meaningful way – though in this case one could imagine that it might have been perfectly Warholian to dedicate an additional screen somewhere to scrolling audience responses to what they were seeing.

What it all means:
This limited experiment illustrates that such theatre observers can be incorporated into an audience without disturbing other patrons. As a Twitter user in this reporting/experiencing role, I experienced deep role strain in attempting to observe and experience in my conventional audience role while simultaneously attempting to engage as a Twitter user consuming the same experience (observe and note and publicly share fragments of thoughts in the moment). I returned to the show a few days later, taking up the Marketing Department’s offer to the Tweeters of another pair of seats as a kind of acknowledgment of our efforts during the experiment. I yearned for the repeat viewing. And serendipity rewarded me with a postshow conversation with actors and audience members that revealed more of the theatre makers’ art that I could have captures with one viewing, much less one during which I was Twitter-distracted.

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow
Shining at the end of every day
There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow
And tomorrow’s just a dream away

Walking into the darkened New World Stages for TEDxBroadway, I half expected to see a sign saying “Presented by General Electric,” or at least a robot welcoming me to the great big world of tomorrow. After all, this niche TED talk was billed as an imagining of Broadway in 20 years. If Walt Disney were in charge of the daylong event, there would have been intricate models of Times Square—circa 2022—complete with flying cars, jet packs, and a monorail.

Alas, there were no glamorous peeks into a sterile Times Square, save for a brief joke from organizer Ken Davenport, rather the day was full of theatrical industry types waxing poetic on the future of Broadway. Much was made of the current state of affairs—Broadway has seen steady grosses over the past decade, despite economic downturn and tourism lulls—with a hint of urgency when considering the current demographics funneling money into live stage productions. As organizer and Situation Interactive leader Damian Bazadona pointed out, around 83% of Broadway’s audiences are white with average household incomes of $250,000.

While there often tends to be a sense of skepticism when speaking of Broadway’s future, TEDxBroadway was more about thinking positive, and brainstorming for the sake of live theater. Bazadona rattled off a list of needs for the viability of Broadway: incredible original productions, full theaters with diverse audiences, a wider platform to share our greater purpose, and less risk from external factors. “Broadway needs to become an idea factory,” he proclaimed, equating this industry to another—Silicon Valley.

It’s Bazadona’s hope for less risk from external factors that rings closest to the truth for Broadway’s sustainability, and ultimate growth. Theatrics aside, it all boils down to business, not art—money remains the bottom line. Yes, creative types need to continue being creative. Customer service must bounce back from the often-lackluster approach current front-of-house staff take when dealing with New York’s tourists. And marketers must work hard to cultivate new audiences. But the lasting lesson to come out of TEDxBroadway, and the idea most akin to a world of tomorrow, is the necessity for re-thinking the insular mentality most theater owners and producers have when thinking of the live entertainment industry.

Collective thinking is the future of Broadway. No longer can a producer pray for the failure of another production, merely to snag an open theater for their latest work. Billy Elliot might have just shuttered—Nice Work If You Can Get It producer Scott Landis was reportedly sniffing around Times Square, hopeful a show would flop in time for his Matthew Broderick vehicle to plop down for the winter in a warm house—but Elton John’s musical lesson in solidarity must not disappear into the Playbill vault.

Joseph Craig, an entertainment-marketing expert, proved the most provocative on the matter of collective thinking. “We want [tourists] to say ‘and see a show’ when planning their New York trips,” he said, fixating on the need for tourists to look at Broadway as a “must do” attraction. His greatest advice: “worry about how to get people to Broadway in general, not to an individual show.” I half expected to hear the TEDxBroadway audience, made up mostly of business insiders, to roll in the aisles at this blasphemous talk. Why would the Nederlanders want to help a Shubert show fill its seats?

Like it or not, everyone with a theater between 40th Street and 54th Street works in the theatrical industry, emphasis on the latter term—industry. Broadway is only as strong as its weakest link. Tourists are not looking at the minutiae of theatrical ownership and producer credits. Tourists come to Broadway to see a show. They bring their children to see a show. And, hopefully, those children will return to see a show. Business economics 101: Brand Loyalty. Broadway is the brand in question.

Barry Kahn, a dynamic pricing expert, added fodder to argument towards collective thinking, aiming his sights on a universal box-office experience. “What if all Broadway theaters worked out of the same box office?” he asked. Without touching on the precarious situation of box-office union red tape, Broadway as an industry could only benefit from a single point-of-sale. I still find myself irritated over the split between Ticketmaster and Telecharge offerings. In 2012, why must I toggle between two fundamentally different systems when trying to see what shows have open inventory on a Thursday night?

And, from a tourist’s perspective, why do we not hear about touring productions while waiting for a Broadway show to start? Would it not behoove the entire theatrical industry to alert patrons to relevant touring shows while the potential ticket buyers are ripe for arts marketing? I should be able to walk out of Jersey Boys and immediately be pointed to a customer service representative that can tell me about other jukebox musicals playing in my hometown. Movie theaters do this by way of coming attractions. Broadway does it by, what exactly?

There’s a great, big, beautiful tomorrow
Just a dream away

TEDxBroadway planted the seed for a great big dream to blossom in the theatrical industry’s mind. However, the dream is merely a start. It is now up to every person in attendance to see that dream through to reality. It’s time to drop the theatrics of narrow-mindedness, and open up to a collective future. That’s the only way Broadway will be standing on two strong legs in 20 years.

When a theater is only open to the public for 15 minutes before and after a performance—and is otherwise closed and locked, with the public let in and, if necessary, kicked out—the question arises of how to make the performing arts a conversation, a participatory activity more articulated than active listening. Here’s a simple story of how that engagement happened, in a town of 7,000 people, in a way that I have rarely seen elsewhere.

I spent Thanksgiving visiting my parents in the small town they’ve retired to, a few hours north of San Francisco, on the border between wine country and redwood country. Their town has a fourplex movie theater that usually shows only least-common-denominator tentpole movies: X-Men, Avatar, Ice Age. On Monday evenings, the theater shows one screening of an independent film, or a less widely distributed studio movie: arthouse fare.

I went to the Monday-night screening of Buck, a 2011 documentary about Buck Brannaman, a horse-trainer who travels around the country teaching horse-owners how to raise horses without breaking them.  We learn that Buck himself had a very rough childhood, and we see how this informs his own approach to horses.

Here’s what happened that night. An audience of 40 or so watched the movie. Afterwards, most of this group walked from the movie theater to the town’s art gallery, next door, where there was some wine, snacks, and a circle of metal folding chairs. After 10 minutes or so of mingling, we each took a seat in the circle. The two hosts of the evening, the same ones who booked the quality films on Monday nights in this small town, set the simple rules of conversation: we would go around the circle and each speak briefly about our impression of the movie, whether or not we liked it, what we thought. Then we went around the circle a second time, with any concluding thoughts.

The whole thing took about 20 minutes. The conversation was very good: some people had worked with horses, some related to Buck’s family, some shared broader observations; some compared it to the Herzog cave-painting documentary that had been screened the previous week.

Only afterwards did I find out that there were people in the room who were not otherwise on civil terms with each other. Outside of this room, they kept to themselves, or were on opposing sides at zoning hearings, school-board meetings, the standard places where private citizens share public space. Without this circle of metal chairs and the hosts, they never crossed paths except in conflict.

Here was a space for setting all of that aside, not just communally in a darkened theater but in a conversation. The movie itself had only done part of that work. The art was only part of the experience. If the lights had come up in the movie theater and, as usually happened, we had all filed into the street with those we had arrived with, the greater connection would not have happened, and the town and the lives of those who live there would be worse for it.

An exuberant conversation, hosted by Peter Marks and Howard Sherman, broke out on Twitter yesterday about Shakespeare; many good ideas were debated and discussed.  I am writing this post to delve more deeply into one of the fundamental questions about Shakespeare in performance, which is, after all, his native habitat.  Shakespeare in performance should be, at an absolute minimum, (gasp!) watchable.

These are nearly 40 of the best stories anyone ever bothered to write down, and we keep telling them to one another because they continue to speak to us so evocatively, so instructively about the nature of the human condition, about love, compassion, vulnerability, courage, frailty, greed, desire, duplicity, poverty of wit and the richness of the same.  Perhaps the original stories actually belong to Ovid and Holinshed, but we don’t perform Holinshed’s Chronicles; we perform the stories as Shakespeare crafted, altered, excised and embellished them.

I must trouble you again

Harley Granville-Barker, Shakespeare director, scholar and redhead, once wrote, “If we are to make Shakespeare our own again, we are all to be put to a little trouble about it.”  It does take work.

In the course of yesterday’s Twitterchat, Michael Kahn wrote, “I believe firmly that if audiences don’t understand a prod it’s usually director’s & actors’ fault.”  I enthusiastically agree.

I have been to an untold number of productions of Shakespeare where I had almost no idea what the actors were saying.  And neither did they.  They had an inkling, sure, of what a speech was about; there was a wash of emotion or intention surrounding the words as they spilled out, but there was no specificity, no clarity of language.  The language has rarely been familiar in the actor’s mouth as Henry V’s household words.  If the actors understand only the ‘gist’ of what they’re saying, the audience is unlikely to do much better.  Actors and directors have to decide that this is important, that this work of understanding the language —  the muscularity of the language as well as the dictionary definitions of the words, the way the scansion of a line informs us about the character’s essential nature –  is worth burning a significant chunk of their rehearsal time.  (Indeed, their pre-rehearsal preparation time, too!)

Tablework for A Midsummer Night's Dream at the American Shakespeare Center; photo by Michael Amendola

One thing that helps to make Shakespeare watchable is not condescending to your audience, not making your audience feel stupid.  Seriously.  We often assume that our audiences know these stories as well as we do.  Spoiler alert: they don’t!

Well, okay, some of our audiences know and love these stories, and bring their copies of the play with them to the performance so that they can track our cuts.  But in addition to those people, there are great swaths of smart, thoughtful people who come to see our work but for whom many of these stories are brand new.  For whom the stories may exist in only charcoal sketch detail.  They come to the theatre after a day designing web pages, writing legal briefs or teaching math; they come — open to a new experience and to discovery — only to be shut down by productions which sail glossily over their attentive but bewildered heads.

Congratulations on your o-so-ingenious staging that makes it completely impossible for a mere mortal to understand what just happened there.  You may now perform it in an empty theatre.

But this troubles me

Sometimes I suspect that the director doesn’t trust that the production will be exciting if he gets out of the way and just tells the story.  He may feel he has to do something flashy, make it shiny in order for us to sit still.  He may also want to ‘make it his own’ through some – erm, innovative theatrical device.  I know I am completely over being assaulted by ear-splitting drums or synthesized bangs to let me know that something important is about to happen in the play. I have completely exceeded my recommended lifetime allowance of actors shouting over said ear-splitting drums.

Sometimes I suspect that the director doesn’t know what he is doing.  This may be an unpopular notion, but not everyone should be directing Shakespeare.  There is an actual skill set required. A particular director may have great instincts, but that is insufficient to this task.  If the director doesn’t know what he’s doing, there is but so much an actor can do to salvage it.  One has to know some things to do this work well.  One can go learn it.  One can learn some of it on the fly, but to do this work, it must actually be learned.

You can do a traditional production; you can do a modern-dress production.  You can cut some lines; you can do the whole four-hour extravaganza.  You can be high concept (although I wish you wouldn’t); let your own discretion be your tutor.  But you need to know what you are saying, and you need to suit the action to the word, the word to the action.  As Hamlet goes on to say, the purpose of the playing is not to show how frightfully clever the director is, it is to hold the mirror, as ‘twere, up to nature.  You must be put to a little trouble about it.  Trust the text and invite your audience to join you on the journey.

Sometimes its not the information you consume, it’s how you use it:

Fertile Ground Festival Project Lear’s Follies did a clever thing recently. They snagged a link that was much shared around #2amt circles (the Marie Claire article about theatre being behind only sex and exercise for creating happiness)and turned it into an irrefutable, ingenious pitch to attend theatre, ANY theatre, as a cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Here’s their pitch, which arrived in my inbox as part of their email promotion for their festival project:

Scientific Proof- Theatre Makes You Happier!

Are the depths of the dark Pacific Northwest winter getting you down? Forget sunlamps and vitamins.
Try cheering yourself up by going to the theatre!

It is not just our opinion that theatre is a great way to make us feel better. It turns out there is science to back us up.

According to a new UK study involving Apple and the London School of Economics – reported by Hannah Thomas at Marie Claire – people are happiest when they are having sex, exercising, and visiting the theatre!

Why? Well it is not surprising when you consider that curiosity, social interaction, and creativity are known to increase happiness. And it turns out our brains have circuits called that are specifically designed to engage our empathy and make us feel better when we are around others who are engaged in creativity, curiosity and social interactions and feeling happy about it. These circuts are called Mirror Neurons and what we do in the theatre seems particularly designed to light them up.

So if you want to beat the Portland Winter Blues, “get thyself to a theatre!”

We invite you to get out, be social, enrich your lives and take part in the creativity that makes our region such a great place to live.

They continue on with a pitch to participate in the Festival, conveniently timed in the darkest days of Portland winter. But there’s absolutely no reason not to STEAL THIS IDEA and use it to tout your own ability to combat the winter doldrums in your area.

It’s not marketing, its SCIENCE.

As the founder and now social media manager for Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival, I have recently had the delightful and curious experience of being able to dip my finger daily into the stream of material our 100 plus world premiere projects have created to promote their shows. I asked myself, how can I harness this wealth of creative promotion in ways that can be of value to our national new play community? With that in mind, welcome to Post One of a multi-post series called “STEAL THIS IDEA.”

First, some quick background:

The Fertile Ground Festival attracts projects from literally all walks of life and all levels of professionalism- from a writer who successfully overcame homelessness and the sex trade to a writer whose last piece was for NPR and whose next piece might well be for film or television. It also attracts all scales of producing partners- Portland Center Stage and Whitebird Dance both have fully staged world premieres in the festival, while the PDX Playwrights collective has probably 20 plays that will receive bare bones staged readings over the course of the festival. The common link amongst all the projects is that they are all Portland generated, and they are all world premieres.

Every project is tackling the same problem that all new work faces: How do I overcome the “never heard of it” barrier?

Audiences want to get a sense of what the experience will be like before they take a risk on a new work. The challenge is that it is nearly impossible to have real performance footage of a new work before it premieres. So how do you help a prospective audience member glimpse the future of a work that is still in the process of creation?

Here are five incredibly different, very intriguing ways this year’s festival participants are using video to address that challenge:

Variation One: Go Graphic

Festival Project Waxwing, from tiny and brand new theater collective String House Theatre employed the talents of an illustrator to take audio recordings from their new work and create a whole world of atmosphere. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Two: Showcase the Artists

The NW Children’s Theatre and School has participated in the festival three years in a row, contributing world premiere work for young audiences that often attracts some of the festival’s largest audiences. For this year’s project, Rapunzel- Uncut! created by local playwright James W. Moore, they focused their video efforts on a behind the scenes peek at the young rockers who create the ‘house band’ for this hip update on the Rapunzel story.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Three: Direct Address + F word = WIN

Portland’s LORT theater Portland Center Stage, brings a main stage world premiere of Jason Wells’ The North Plan to the festival, creating a video that feels like a direct address confessional from the character’s foul mouthed and hilarious lead character. None of the language in the trailer is directly from the show, but the result is a pretty good snapshot of the show’s key ideas.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Four: Inspire with the Mission

Playwrite, Inc. is a social service organization that utilizes playwrighting as a tool to help transform the lives of “youth on the edge” in Portland. Their project trailer takes a totally different tack, inspiring the viewer with the effect of the work on the young writers themselves rather than focusing on the pieces being performed (which are probably not even written yet!)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Five: Fake it… Artfully

Portland Playhouse, a mid-sized theater company that’s had three very successful festival projects, uses the real actors from their performance to create a trailer that feels like an artful fake of the real show. Particularly effective are the intercuts of slightly disgusting food closeups that create the same unsettling sense of everyday foods that feel suddenly, subtly WRONG that Dexter uses to great effect in their intro sequence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the things I find fascinating about these examples is that, with the new technology available for video creation, it is nearly impossible to identify these projects by budget size simply on the basis of their video trailers. Each is creative, each is polished and feels professionally produced, and each creates a very different set of expectations for the show being promoted.

What can you steal from this? And which approach works best with your mission and aesthetics? I invite you to share your own samples of newplay video in the comments below.

Over the past 48 hours, the culture pages in England have been filled with reports which are all variants of the same story: “Walkouts abound at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Marat/Sade.” I first spotted this on Sunday in The Daily Mail and since then, the BBC, The Guardian and The Telegraph, among many others, have all piled on.

Marat/Sade, while an acknowledged modern classic, is a challenging work with content that surely doesn’t appeal to all audiences. So it shouldn’t really surprise anyone that a play about the Marquis de Sade might provoke squirming and even early exits; I suspect that Doug Wright’s Quills, also about de Sade’s incarceration at Charenton, sent some people fleeing from assorted theatres as well. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if artists involved in various productions of both of these plays see the odd hasty retreat as a sign that they’re succeeding, a badge of honor.

So whether the current press frenzy is a result of an opportunity to portray theatre as transgressive and dangerous during a time when arts support is already challenged, or if it’s a case of schadenfreude to see the fortunes of the august RSC brought into question, or if the show is in fact deeply off-putting – or simply not a good production – I really can’t say. But the reports have set tongues wagging on this side of the Atlantic as well, prompting online chat about whether it’s right to walk out of a show, whether anyone has personally walked out of a show, and so on.  As this seems to be snowballing, I cannot resist sharing a few thoughts and admissions.

Let me start by saying that I have worked on shows that have prompted audience walkouts – and I mean real walkouts, during the show, not politely at intermission. Off-hand, I recall people exiting mid-scene from two productions in particular at Hartford Stage: a 1986 production of Sam Shepard’s The Tooth of Crime and a 1990 interpretation of Büchner’s Woyzeck by director Richard Foreman (which ran, in total, only 70 minutes, but some folks just couldn’t wait to escape). As staff of an institution where I was, in part, responsible for drawing in audiences, this was troubling. But given the artistic choices, it was also inevitable; we did our utmost to prepare the audience for what they would be experiencing before they went in, and then had to let the chips fall where they may.

I consider the mid-scene walk out to be a very strong statement; it is at best impolite, at worst a middle finger thrust upwards at all involved (even if the director, designers, author and company leadership aren’t there to see it first-hand in most cases). During these plays, the people I saw leave made no attempt to do so surreptitiously; they haughtily stood and marched indignantly up the aisles, determined that others would register their statement. In one instance during Tooth of Crime, actor David Patrick Kelly (who was, coincidentally, also our Woyzeck), costumed with a pistol, paused the action as one couple left loudly and prominently – and leveled his weapon at their backs until they were completely gone, to the profound amusement of all who remained, which was the majority of the audience.

If we believe theatre to be a conversation with an audience, and at times a provocative or confrontational one, then perhaps the walk-out isn’t something to look down upon. It certainly beats staying and heckling the cast for material they did not create, but only take part in interpreting. It is perhaps the one opportunity the audience has to express displeasure during a performance, beyond stony silence (which can mean just about anything); theatre audiences do not have the outlet of booing, as opera seems to, but even then the “commentary” is reserved for curtain calls.

I have never walked out of a show mid-scene, or even between scenes, but I will confess to having quietly departed at intermission a few times over the years (never during my tenure at the American Theatre Wing, where such an action, if known, could have had repercussions in connection with The Tony Awards). But there have been times when the lure of television or bed have been stronger than the appeal of a second act, though I am not proud of this; in one case, I left because I was – for perhaps the only time in my life – offended on behalf of my religion and had no desire to watch it subjected to more ridicule. I have no doubt that had I willed myself to stay for some of those second acts, my ultimate opinion of the show concerned might have shifted, but at these times, I wasn’t patient enough to wait and see.

Was I taking the coward’s way out, rather than making a statement? I don’t think so, since every actor I’ve ever spoken with tells me how acutely aware they are, from the stage, of what goes on in the house. A full house in act one followed by one dotted with empty seats in act two speaks volumes. But I bet it’s preferable to audience members fidgeting in their seats, repeatedly checking their watches or glaring at their companions from time to time.

The problem with the walk-out, be it ostentatious or subtle, is that, as I alluded to earlier, it rarely reaches the people to whom the opinion is most properly expressed. They experience it, if at all, only through a stage manager or house manager’s report, and it is the house manager, box office personnel and even volunteer ushers who absorb the displeasure first-hand. Though it feels declarative as it happens, it is a fairly impotent act.

There is a corollary act, more acceptable but no less pointless: the withholding of applause at a curtain call. I have, as I know others have, at times been so miserable at a production that I am disinclined to applaud. But if it is the story, or the production concept which dismays me, withholding applause insults only the actors, who have just spent several hours telling me a story in the manner they’ve been asked to. I may feel better, but it is ineffective – the loss of my two hands hardly register in the overall decibel level of an ovation, nor does remaining seated while the rest of the audience rises to its feet visibly alter a standing horde.

I am not writing to endorse the walkout, since it is an expression of opinion that is misdirected and often falls on deaf ears. I feel for the actors in the current Marat/Sade, since surely they are giving their all, regardless of whether they in fact feel good about the show. But I cannot help but feel that a reduced audience is better than an actively hostile one.

What would I like people to take away from this? That sometimes a walkout is just a walkout, and it can be a sign of failure or even success. It really shouldn’t rise to the level of news coverage, let alone international attention, unless the audience is so decimated after the interval that half the crowd has fled, night after night after night. If you feel you must leave, at least wait for intermission, or if you must go sooner, a scene break. You owe that courtesy to the actors and your fellow audience members; remember, this is much more than changing a channel or stopping a film midstream at home. But if you really want to let the right people know what you think, write a letter or send an e-mail to the producer or company leadership; even tweets may never reach the decision makers.

No one should feel compelled to be miserable at the theatre. Leave if you must – that’s your right. But walk, don’t run.

I suspect that, for many working in the arts, the weekday matinee is no man’s land.

I’m not suggesting that we don’t operate them, or deal with them, but I do wonder the last time any of you have had occasion to attend one as a member of the audience. After all, we’re usually too busy working in the arts to go to a Wednesday matinee, and it’s probably something we instinctively avoid, given the opportunity.

Why? I suspect it is because of our ingrained aversion to the blue hairs.

Now don’t pretend you don’t know the term. We’ve all used it. I can’t even remember how long I’ve known it, or where I learned it. But for those who are in denial, “blue hairs” refers to the senior audience that frequents matinees, named for a hair coloring with a bluish tinge popular a long time ago. I suspect that even the blue hairs look disparagingly at blue hair, and that the term is vestigial of an earlier time. But it is, no matter how you slice it, a form of disparagement, not endearment.

Over the past couple of months, I have had the occasion to attend two weekday matinees: one in New York, one at a regional theatre; one in the company of a senior citizen in his 80s, one by myself. Because of the ingrained prejudices, I expected an audience of candy-wrapper-crinkling, hearing-aid-feedbacking, loudly-speaking-during-the-show-so-they-could-be-heard-by-everyone patrons.  Isn’t that your image?

Well I can report that none of the above were true, at least no more so than at any other performance I’ve attended lately. What did not happen, I should report, is that no one’s cell phone rang during the show, and certainly no one initiated or accepted a call at any time during the performance.

Now in some quarters, the weekday matinee is a thing of the past. The rise of the working woman in the 70s dissipated one of the core constituencies for these performances, leaving retirees and student groups (which makes for a fascinating mix when equally balanced, with revelatory post-show discussions). Many shows both commercial and non-profit opt for two-show days on Saturdays and Sundays in order to bypass the weekday matinee. But they persist – and so do their loyal audiences.

So why are these performances merely tolerated by those on the inside? Yes, it’s an audience that may be less computer and internet savvy than others; they still need to speak to a human being to buy their tickets. Yes, they may move more slowly than other audiences, but that’s a physical issue, not an intentional one. Is their pre-show chatter louder than some audiences? Sure, but that’s because hearing loss is a natural progression in our lives, not some voluntary game played by the old upon the young for sport.

My recent matinee attendance was eye-opening precisely because I haven’t had the experience in so very long (weekday matinees were staples of school vacations in high school and college, but that’s almost three decades ago) and because the experience was only marginally different than any other performance I ever attend (save, indeed, for the hair coloring, which tends to white, or baldness, where I fit right in). Adding to my sensitivity is the fact that I had, unusually for someone my age, cataract surgery on both eyes in May, and because my wife and I both suffer from chronic neck and shoulder pain which can make sitting in the theatre profoundly uncomfortable. And surely this is just a taste of things to come.

I have every intention of going to the theatre as long as I am able (perhaps another three or four decades if I’m lucky) and as I find myself poised between theatergoing novice and lifelong veteran, I know that I may someday be relegated to the ranks of the once blue-haired, perhaps by virtue of failing eyesight (making it difficult to drive or even be out at night), reliance on civic or private transportation when I can no longer drive myself, or even the tyranny of the early dinner schedule at an assisted living facility. But so long as I’m breathing and mobile, I’ll go to theatre.

Will I deserve anyone’s condescension, let alone scorn, at that point in my life? Surely not. Will my wide-ranging aesthetic suddenly lapse into “just wanting to be entertained,” causing me to seek less challenging work? I hope not, and I doubt it. Might I need a larger print program, or be challenged by steps, or even need audio amplification or audio described performances? It’s entirely possible, and I certainly hope they’ll be available to me without stigma.

I write of these issues because in this era of voluminous blogs about audience development and the cultivation of new audiences, our senior audience seems to be absent. Let me make absolutely clear: the necessity of finding new theatergoers and insuring the long-term health of the form is essential, as is arts education in our schools; nothing in this essay should suggest otherwise. But I fear that an important constituency is being largely ignored, at least in our rhetoric these days, and that we do so out of short-sightedness.

Those who attend our weekday matinees (and often make up a significant percentage of weekend matinee audiences as well) are the same people who have been attending and supporting theatre throughout their lives. They do not suddenly appear at our box offices at age 70 simply because they have nothing else to do, but rather because they value what we do. Indeed, they may have vast knowledge of theatrical work dating back a half-century or more. Instead of being vestiges themselves, they may in fact be untapped resources, not simply fans to be shunted into our volunteer usher or docent corps. And to be perfectly honest, if we have and continue to play meaningful roles in their lives, we may receive their support even after they can no longer sit in our seats.

While I suspect that those inside theatres are indulgent of their senior audiences even when such indulgence might drift into being patronizing, I see evidence of this arts ageism in my forays on the web. Not long ago, one Twitter wit asked where theatre today would be without Social Security, only to have another wag double down by making the jibe specific to a particular theatre here in New York. A British website focused on “A Younger Audience” questioned the repertoire at one of that country’s subsidized theatres for one work which was deemed insufficiently appealing to, well, a younger audience. In Washington DC, discounting tickets for seniors (and students) is under investigation for being a discriminatory practice.

In the creation of art, we celebrate and support the new, the different, the challenging, the innovative. But let’s remember that it was ever thus, and the audience that frequents our matinees may have once been early supporters of the theatres they attend, or the audience for fringe theatre before even such a term was common, whether in Greenwich Village or Seattle.

As someone who has begun to mark my life by how many revivals I now see of work which I saw in its premiere, as I prepare to leave the demographic designated by ratings services and ad agencies as desirable, as I move from the era of weddings and births to, sadly, the era of funerals, theatre will remain my joy and my refuge, and I believe it should be that for every patron. We need to nurture and support all of our audiences for the many things that we can bring to them and they can bring to us, including standing by us when some would marginalize our importance and even our existence in an ever-changing economic and social reality.

Because, dammit, I expect theatre to be there for me in another quarter century, and whatever my falterings and failings, I want to be part of an audience, and not as a special interest to be tolerated. Or else I will truly be blue.

They come, with startling regularity, on Monday and Tuesday each week. “The Grosses.” The Broadway League aggregates and releases the gross sales and attendance for every Broadway show on Monday afternoons (Tuesdays when there’s been a holiday), and a wide range of outlets dutifully report on the biggest hits, the biggest losers, and prognosticate on a show’s future based on their own analyses, some informed, some less so. For a few thousand people who work in professional theatre, this is valuable information  (I touched upon this earlier this year in another blog, Scoring). For most people, however, The Grosses have become the new arbiter of quality, since a review runs but once, while The Grosses appear week in and week out.

The Grosses are followed, and sometimes preceded, by a bevy of press releases from individual shows announcing their most recent box office achievements: “Highest grossing week ever in x theatre,” “Highest grossing week for x show,” “Biggest one day box office gross at x theatre,” and so on. Because there is now an industry of websites and bloggers who regurgitate this information largely unremarked-upon, this has become the new currency of achievement on Broadway. “SRO” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “$$$.”

What no one stops to point out is that these ever-higher box office achievements are taking place with the same number of seats in each theatre, meaning only one thing: people are paying more and more for tickets, or records wouldn’t be set. Since the introduction of premium seats 10 years ago, the pace has accelerated; the ability of shows to put tickets at the TKTS booth at varying discount rates has also allowed seats to be filled more strategically, so shows with excess inventory at the last minute need not be bound to a 50% discount, but can use a sliding scale. Box office prices are not even fixed any longer; displayed on video screens in lobbies, I am told they can be adjusted a couple of times each week based on demand.

So the fact is, yes, Broadway is setting records, but it’s doing so by generating more money per seat, or in layman’s terms, raising prices. If you thought it odd when Broadway shows said they were playing to 101.6% of capacity (meaning they’re selling standing room), now we can marvel at how shows can gross hundreds of thousands of dollars more than their declared weekly potential.

Before you start shouting “Occupy Broadway” and running with your hastily but tastefully made signage to camp out in Shubert Alley, let’s take a breath.

The majority of productions on Broadway are commercial enterprises. Each show is its own corporation and it has a responsibility, like any business, to maximize its revenue. Famously, only one in five shows supposedly turns a profit; many of the limited runs on Broadway are fortunate to simply return their capitalization.  Finding investors is difficult, costs are escalating from a variety of sources (labor, advertising rates, etc.) and the entire business model is called into question by many. Can we blame producers for seeking to keep Broadway alive, and shouldn’t we accept that the hits need to be ever more remunerative in order to keep more investors interested in participating in Broadway shows and mitigating their losses elsewhere? I think these are all valid considerations and should not be ignored in favor of simple populist rhetoric.

But at what point do we reach, or have we passed, the tipping point where, to echo some of the Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, the top 1% of the country’s theatregoers can afford and secure 99% of the tickets, and every effort to popularize theatre and insure future audiences is negated by economic reality? Just as people have begun to ask about banks and brokerages, is it possibly unethical to make “too much money” with the arts, whether commercial or non-profit?

Yes, I know that many people don’t pay the “rack rate” for Broadway. There’s the aforementioned TKTS booth, the wide range of discounting practiced by all but the most successful shows, the $20 lotteries for front row seats held at 6 pm nightly in front of many theatres. Frankly, Broadway has developed a balkanized pricing system, with the hit shows charging ever higher amounts while shows with less broad-based appeal forced into a cycle of discounting from which they can rarely escape. But the rack rate keeps increasing, so even the discount seats increase in price.

I shouldn’t pick on Broadway alone, as recent news reports have indicated that premium pricing has infiltrated Off-Broadway, both commercial and non-profit. One New York non-profit that famously gives away tickets to several productions for free each year will also let you acquire reserved seats for a pre-set donation amount, perhaps the most pronounced example of price disparity that allows the “haves” to simply pay in advance for what others must seek out for free at the expense of considerable waiting time. Also, while Off-Broadway’s rack rate may be half of that on Broadway, the Broadway discounts equalize the prices – forcing Off-Broadway to then discount its own seats to a point where the production can’t meet its weekly costs, giving rise, in part, to the reduction in commercial activity Off-Broadway in recent years.

“Load management,” pioneered by the airlines, is the original term for what the arts now politely call “dynamic pricing” and it’s not just a New York phenomenon, as both presenting houses around the country and resident theatres attempt to maximize revenue, although perhaps in a less pronounced manner than what we’ve seen thus far in New York. In the case of airlines, they actually can control seating capacity by running greater or fewer flights on various routes, sometimes limiting seating to maximize the price per seat. Theatre doesn’t have this option, but even as one who years ago pondered how to adopt load management at a not-for-profit, I now look to the public’s low opinion of airlines and air travel and worry that the arts could drive themselves into a similarly unpopular consensus. To top things off, this comes at a time when a recent report has informed us that charitable giving to the arts disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of arts audiences.

There is a theatrical ecosystem and it includes professional theatres from small communities to Broadway; I am sure the same is true for symphonies, museums and all of the arts as well. There is absolutely a case of trickle-down economics, but not in any positive way: it is the negative of the upward price and expense cycle that rolls downhill to everyone’s detriment, but most especially to undermine everyone’s supposed shared goal of attracting new audiences and introducing future generations to the arts, if not out of altruism, then out of self-preservation.

Do we need a movement? Perhaps not yet. But do we need pronounced change we can believe in when it comes to access and pricing for the arts? Absolutely. Otherwise, things will just get grosser.

“Everyone,” I wrote in a tweet to promote my previous blog post, “enjoys a good blurbing now and again.” Although I didn’t mind if someone read some perverse double entendre into “blurbing,” it was neither euphemism nor metaphor. I was referring to the time-honored and oft-criticized practice of skillfully extracting positive phrases from arts reportage or critique in order to employ them in service of marketing a show. As a former “flack” (if we’re going with slang, I’m going all the way), I gave good blurb; it was part of my job. When I left Hartford Stage, the graphic designer who did our print ads presented me with a framed “Ellipsis Award,” for the most skillful use of those three dots, which could cover a multitude of sins and through which one could, if they chose, drive a figurative truck.

I have not personally practiced the dark arts of blurbing, nor craftily employed the ellipsis, professionally for almost 20 years. Yet just as many came before me, others have followed, and publicists and marketers still employ “pull quotes” for press releases, ads, brochures, and the like with skill and abandon, all to pull in the rubes (that’s carny slang for marketing).

I have watched the quotes themselves grow larger as attributions grow smaller; in some cases ads are designed to appear as if the uniformly glowing words at the top are quotes, when in fact they carry neither the necessary punctuation or any source. The pinnacle (or nadir) of this practice came when a Hollywood studio was revealed to have invented both a critic and a press outlet solely for the purpose of manufacturing positive blurbs.

Several decades ago, those of us inside Hartford Stage would have philosophical discussions about the use of blurbs, as well as my artful insertion of ellipses that turned positive words into enthusiastic ones. Wouldn’t the people who saw the ads realize the quote had been subtly manipulated? No, we decided, since no one was likely to have saved the original copy  (remember, pre-internet). Wasn’t the ellipsis itself tipping people off? No, because frankly most people didn’t study them them as we did (and besides, to use an excuse popular in so many situations, everyone else was doing it). Wasn’t using quotes reinforcing the importance of critics, when we wanted audiences to decide for themselves?

To that last question, the answer, to our own chagrin, was yes. We were emphasizing critical opinion for our marketing needs. We had to. Why? Well here it is again: because everyone else was. Blurbs, pull quotes, what have you – they were a necessity. We believed that if a show had opened and we couldn’t feature at last one positive quote from a prominent media outlet in our advertising, the audience would be convinced the show was a dog. Even after the show had closed, we used those blurbs again: in subscription brochures, in grant applications, in annual reports. Blurbs were crack and we were hooked.

25 years later, little has changed, even if the media has. Despite the ability of anyone with a computer to locate a complete review, blurbs, be they accurate or artful, proliferate. The brevity of Twitter facilitates such practice. Even though the original context can be quickly recalled on Google, we still cling to quotes in our marketing, embracing reviews even as (and thus was also always the case) we often vilify the source, namely the critic.

This paradox is at the center of arts marketing. We do everything we can to make our productions critic-proof, yet we throw our arms wide open the moment a critic, any critic, praises the work.  If we bitch about critical power, why do we reinforce it? In brainstorming sessions, over drinks, we dream of cutting the cord, going cold turkey and abandoning quotes in our ads, but we can’t do it. We need our fix and seem convinced that our audiences do as well. As subscription rates have, overall, declined, blurb-laden ads are perhaps more needed (we think) than ever, since single ticket sales have reasserted themselves in our economic models (as they have always done in the case of commercial work).

I will paraphrase the producer Kevin McCollum here, only because I’m not positive I recall this comment precisely: “We are the only business that decides what to do tomorrow based on how we did it yesterday.” And indeed, we in the age of the internet deploy blurbs just as they were used by hucksters a century ago, locked in a perpetual cycle of believing that outside affirmation is the best, and perhaps only, means of assigning value to our work in order to lure audiences.

I’m not raising the paradox to pan critics; in fact I think we must do all we can to insure that full-length reviews written with intelligence and care remain part of the arts landscape. However, the attention span of both editors and consumers seem to favor ever briefer consideration of the arts – which are then further reduced to a ranking of so many stars on a scale, or a subjective, simplistic thumbs up/thumbs down summary by third party aggregators. Arts writing is coming to us pre-blurbed.

In a world of new and ever-evolving media, we are mired in an archaic marketing technique which has, to my knowledge, no empirical proof that it even works. Blurb if you must, but can’t we do better? Or are we just a …. bunch of … addicts?

Previously in this column: The members of Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young devised theatre company based in Washington, DC, have spent the last nine months working on its new project which began with the question: Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories about our own destruction? This weekend, for three PWYC performances, the company will test-drive its new play in front of an audience.

The beginning of production is when devised theatre starts to get weird. For me, at least. It’s like changing gears. In different cars. While juggling. A group of theatre artists who had, until now, simply been friends chatting in somebody’s living room congeal into more traditional roles. Actors are learning lines for roles they helped create. One deviser who has been with us from the start of the conversation takes on the role as director. Another becomes assistant director/stage manager. And the playwright starts letting the text go and takes on the role of producer. There is a brief amount of awkward negotiation that ensues as we all settle into the mechanics of rehearsal.

There are also the usual roadbumps. One actor has an unavoidable conflict arise and has to drop out, and we have to bring in someone who wasn’t there for the devising process, but who is enthusiastic and a great fit. The composer who has worked with us since the first show we did gets a job in Austin, but leaves us in the hands of another composer who is doing incredible work. We have to scramble to find a lighting designer, but acquire a fantastic one, who happens to have a day job at NASA (really appropriate considering the content of the play).

And a reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival goes over great and a review of it sparks a debate about the role of critics in developing work.

All this in preparation for a three-performance workshop production. Think of it as a rough-draft production of the play. We test drive it (fully teched, everyone off-book), and elicit frank, honest feedback from the audience. That feedback will be taken into account, along with everything else we learned in the production process, when revising the show for a full run next year.

Yes, it’s a lot of work. And, yes, it is worth it. In my experience, having time in the space to experiment with design elements, and then seeing those elements in production can add whole new layers of understanding. Also, audiences can see things in your play that not only didn’t you see, but are incapable of seeing, with the entire company being close to the material.

It helps that this time we have funding and a really wonderful space. Around this time last year, I applied for a residency at the Mead Theatre Lab at Flashpoint and an attached grant from the Cultural Development Corporation’s Creative Communities Fund, both of which I was awarded. Basically, we get two weeks in a small but well-stocked black box near Chinatown in DC and a healthy chunk of change that will allow us to pay all the artists involved.

This was back when we were calling it “The Apocalypse Project” and all we had was a central question: Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own annihilation?

That question is still somewhere at the heart of this play, now titled When The Stars Go Out. But it’s a much different piece than what I expected—more intimate, more about one woman’s anxiety than about the collective conscious of the human race.  Oh, we’ve still got some big bad weird. Like zombies and the afterlife and a giant wolf eating the stars. But the horror of all that seems to pale in comparison to one character’s battle with cancer and another who doesn’t know if she’s ready for motherhood.

One of the joys of devised theatre is that, even though I’m in the room from day one, and I’m the one creating most of the written text, the heart of the story is never what I think it’s going to be.

A side note: Sometime early in rehearsal, an actress who is new(ish) to Bright Alchemy tells me how she was explaining our process to another actress who works in devised theatre. The other actress was surprised that there was a playwright attached to this project and asked if that didn’t cause problems as the piece evolved. Our actress said that it wasn’t a problem at all, and that the playwright (me) seemed more than able to get his ego out of the way of the art. This makes me happy and suggests that I’m doing something right. Even if that something right is totally faking being ego-free.

Because this surely isn’t an entirely ego-free process. I mean, come on—it’s theatre. Everyone’s worked hard on this and, in a few day’s time, we’ll get to show it off. So, if you’re in the DC area and want to help shape a new work in process, consider yourself invited. You can find all the info here.

And, if you’re looking for a teaser, here’s the first minute and a half of the play.

I promise, this is not another premature eulogy for Steve Jobs.

I saw this on Google+ this morning. This is an old video of Steve Jobs responding to a critic at the World Wide Developers Conference in 1997, shortly after Jobs returned to Apple.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One thing immediately jumped out at me…

In the context of #2amt and my professional life, I see or hear or read artists and arts administrators compare what they do to Apple every day, looking for instructive lessons (so does every other industry, by the way, simply because Apple both makes cool products and is successful).

But what Jobs says early on in this response is that he starts with the customer experience, and works backwards to the technology. If you were to apply that framework to the arts, then you would start with the audience and then work backward to the product and process. And you might very well end up in the commercial district of creative work and the arts.

It is interesting that most of the arts pros that I associate with would like to be like Apple, but would most definitely not like to be creating commercial product.

I’m annoyed with this disconnect. My request to the ersatz Apple-emulating arts pros is to either shit or get off the pot. If you want to be like Apple, be like Apple. Start with what your audience might most need and enjoy (that doesn’t mean they have to know what that is ahead of time–surprise and novelty are pretty big ingredients at Apple), and figure out how to give them that. In the corporate world, that is what is meant by “marketing.”

But if you’d rather start with your artistic process, which I think most artists would prefer, then stop pretending that you’re going to be like Apple. You won’t be. And that’s OK.

The non-profit model is living on borrowed time. The current model is dying. Even still, I think we spend more time trying to figure out how to fund a show than actually making the show. Read: The way we make money to make art is not sustainable.

Insanity: Doing the same thing again and again expecting different results. Non-profit arts orgs seem to be doing this. Ask for money, produce a show, make no money, gain no audience and ask for money again – all the while, expecting to exist and support its artist’s livelihoods.

The Dream: to make a living as an ARTIST.

Creative fundraising for non-profs is important, no doubt about it. But at some point, if you’re creativity only reaches the boundaries of a bubble that never pops – you have to question the effectiveness of the method. You can call pink – brown if you want but the color will still be pink. New ways of doing the same damn thing – I’m sorry – but that is no paradigm shift.

Remember, the goal is to sustain our lives by making ART. As such, it follows we must be equally invested in the long-term sustainability of our organizations. The things we do in order to sustain our organizations, no matter how much we spin it, is not making art. Grant writing is not making theatre – it’s grant writing. Selling beer in the lobby, also, not making theatre.

But it seems in order for the theatre organization to be sustainable it becomes true that our ability to write grants and get sponsors and throw parties MUST be more sustainable. This is backwards.

Look at Apple. Apple doesn’t sell beer behind the Genius Bar to offset costs because their product isn’t cutting it. No, they just make great, user-friendly electronics. Apple folks don’t make money writing grants, they make money selling and servicing great stuff to people who want it. That’s all they do. Great product and great demand.

I know I’ve mixed the profit/non-profit models – but that doesn’t change the fact that artists have to do more to make less. And it doesn’t mean non-profs shouldn’t work like for profit businesses.

But the goal remains the same (make a living making art). And so does the obstacle. We still need money.

In order get what you’ve never had you have to try something different.

If you’re going to do something to offset the costs of making theatre, it makes sense that activity shouldn’t include doing more work. All your work should be focused on making art – nothing else.

But that’s impossible. Even so, there is a difference between getting grants just to stay afloat and getting grants to pay artists a fair living wage or being able to drop the price of tickets for a few nights or weeks so more people can afford to see your work. And let’s face it – the long-term sustainability of an arts organization depends on good people being paid to make good work and people filling the seats. Great product and great demand.

So what’s the solution? I’ll get to that – but for now – just think about how much you do that isn’t making art so that you can make art.

It’s been a month since the first Dramatists Guild National Conference. In that month, three things have stayed with me: Mame Hunt’s declaration to playwrights to stop writing realism, Julia Jordan’s keynote speech on gender parity, and Marsha Norman’s comment that we need to hear everyone’s stories at the gender parity panel discussion. All three have been wrapping themselves around in my mind as a part of larger conversation about theatre and dominant culture.

While I was earning my BFA in playwriting at DePaul University, we had a class that was guest taught by Robert O’Hara. Sometime during that class, I said that I wished that I was a part of ethnic community. I wanted to feel a connection to some cultural heritage. O’Hara eviscerated me. He told me that I WAS a part of a cultural heritage: that I had Shakespeare and Wilde and Shaw. And he was right. I had assumed that since my culture was the dominant culture, it wasn’t mine at all.

And that’s the issue with dominant culture; because it is dominant, we often forget its context and assume that it is the voice of everyone.

Realism is a part of dominant culture.

The majority of those who post at 2amt are also a part of dominant culture. We’re a rabble rousing, invested part of dominant culture, but we are mostly a part of dominant culture.

When we support a specific style of storytelling, realism or non-realism, we need to realize that it comes from a specific context and be aware of our own biases as artists, particularly those in positions of power, such as artistic directors.

At the gender parity panel, Marsha Norman said that everyone’s stories need to be told. This was tweeted and re-tweeted liberally – but I wonder, as theatre artists, how willing are we to uphold that as our ideal? Are we really prepared to tell everyone’s stories? More importantly, are we really prepared to LISTEN to everyone’s stories?

Because if we really prepared to listen to everyone’s stories; then we need to let go of our personal preferences for storytelling. It means that we see realism as one specific style of storytelling that is rooted in a specific cultural tradition and that it might not resonate with people from different cultural traditions. It means being open to theatre that doesn’t speak to you. It means not engaging in cultural misappropriation, something that I see dominant culture theatre artists do again and again. It means letting go of idea of being able to speak to everyone or for everyone.

It would require a radical shift.

It would require self-awareness. It would require learning how to read plays in new ways. One of the things that resonated with me from Outrageous Fortune was the comment that many artistic directors don’t know how to read Sarah Ruhl’s stage directions. It would require us checking in with our assumptions of audience. It means that when we use phrases such as voice of the people; we consider which people we’re talking about. It would require us to acknowledge our own biases.

I have plenty of personal storytelling biases. I write realism about half the time and I always write for female protagonists. I have no personal desire to tell a male story, but that doesn’t mean I am not moved by male stories. If I looked at it from a limited perspective, I would start writing realistic stories with male protagonists so that I could become a part of the 17% of female playwrights who get produced. Or we could collectively work to embrace a paradigm shift and see everyone’s stories, as they want to tell them.  Think how many stories that are out there waiting to be experienced. There could be a style of theatre or specific story that thrills me that I have no conception of yet.

We’ve already challenging assumptions about dominant culture when it comes to discussions about younger audiences.  Why can’t we broaden this conversation from there to explore the intersection of culture and narrative? Or race and narrative? Or gender and narrative? Or class and narrative? What can we do to make sure that everyone’s stories are told?

or, How Meta-Conversations are Taking Over Our Theatres

Photo illustration featuring members of American Theater Company. (William DeShazer/Tribune / July 2, 2011)

My friend Briana, a brilliant arts educator and visual artist, alerted me (via a tag on Facebook) to an article about the rising phenomenon of texting in the theater and asked me, as an enthusiastic social media proponent and arts administrator, what my thoughts were on the subject. The article quoted multiple sources that implied that the rise in smartphone use during performances, movies, and live events represented a new infantilization of adults- a sensory distraction that was addictive and destructive to the social fabric and to the performances themselves.

So what do I think about that?

I think that you can’t give hundreds of millions of people a device that fits into their pocket and gives them instant access to all the information ever gathered on the planet (and everyone they’ve ever met) and expect this not to transform the way we do everything (including experience live performance). Right now, we are about 2 years past an event horizon that we will later look back at and describe as being as truly transformative as the invention of the electric lightbulb. Right now we tend to only notice when it disrupts our social norms (like the expectation that the only conversation happening in a darkened theater is happening between the speaker/actor/performer and the audience as a silent, absorbent group).

Its a kind of social wild west right now, a lawless time where disruptive technology has arrived but the social agreements that integrate that technology into our lives successfully is still emerging. The new etiquette will emerge. But it will not be the same as before smartphones existed. And the social explosion definitely privileges the visual learners and fluent writers/communicators (whether they are introverts or extroverts) over the kinesthetic and auditory communicators. An extreme introvert who is a fluid writer has a better chance of finding strong community and rising to the top socially in this new world order than the extroverted verbal communicator or the athlete for whom words are not a strong suit.

To use a high school shorthand, watch out captain of the football team, the world popularity contest might just be won these days by the D&D nerd with a wry sense of humor and a good grasp of the english language .

This is  going to create new elites and make those (like teachers, politicians and stand-up comics) who are used to dominating a one way communication channel through primarily auditory cues, extremely uncomfortable.

But here’s the thing:

The ability to have a meta-conversation with an external community while you are experiencing a primary event (through texting, twitter, facebook, etc) is a hugely useful development (we are already seeing it transform how conferences are managed,  how politics gets done, anywhere where the work is about compiling or influencing consensus opinion). It’s too useful to be suppressed from all but the most necessary aspects of daily life. It provides a feedback loop, knowledge base, basis for social cohesion and opportunity for reflection/revelation while an event is in process, rather than in the car on the ride home.

Some of that feedback loop is “shallow.” But it serves the same ends toward relationship building and social cohesion as time honored practices like small talk and coffee meetings- light touches that pave the way for more meaningful network building. And some of that feedback loop can disrupt the primary conversation in useful ways… as Alli Houseworth recently demonstrated with her conference tweets heard round the world.

A paradigm shift is coming. As primary communicators (artists/performers/speakers) we will need to let go of the expectation that silence and eyes on the front of the room means attention successfully grabbed. Instead we should  look for active meta-conversations about the topic/performance to signal successful absorption and dissemination of the experience.

For the performers/speakers who successfully make the paradigm shift there are huge opportunities to gauge the relevance, impact, popularity and success of an event in a whole new way. There’s also huge risks- you will not be able to control the message if you bomb. You will need to work harder to be more interesting than the meta-conversations you have inspired. You will need to create work that allows space for meta-conversation to unfold. That will be an uncomfortable adjustment for most people.

And, just like our brains require the occasional absence of light in order to have downtime and recharge (thus we don’t keep our lightbulbs on all night) society will ultimately evolve  safe spaces where we will, by mutual agreement, turn off our devices and be whole and complete in the moment. Will the theater be one of those spaces? I’m not so sure. Perhaps.

I know that I, avid social user that I am, give myself 10 days in the desert each year, at a place where the local cell tower can only handle 24 calls at a time, where I am forced to be disconnected, unplugged, and engaged with “meatspace” full time for a week. But I understand that respite for what it is. Not a return to a non-connected “normal” but a momentary nap from which I will awake into the meta-conversation that is the new defining normal of our lives.

In case you’ve been in a coma for the last year, there’s this Broadway musical, it’s called Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, and it’s made some headlines. There were accidents and script problems and fights with critics and the official opening kept being pushed further back and back and back and…etc.

Basically, it redefined the term “hot mess.”

And the amount of mockery, vitriol, and somber head-shaking coming from the theatre world as this tragicomedy dragged on has been spread across the Twitterverse/blogosphere in a fine layer of outrage and schadenfreude. Take a few minutes, hypothetical coma patient, and catch up.

The thing is, it’s not the safety issues or the script problems or the lackluster musical numbers that sit center stage when theatre artists take aim at this hot mess. It’s the money. It’s the $75 million spent on said hot mess.

The prevailing argument is that those $75 million could have been used to fund who knows how many other theatrical ventures. Many of which, odds dictate, would not be hot messes.

As I was writing this, theatre artists were debating under the #2amt hashtag on Twitter about NYC spending millions on a new Brooklyn theatre. And there was the inevitable comparison to Spider-Man. I think that comparison will be made for some time to come. Whenever a shit-ton of money is dropped on a single project, one that is too commercial or disintegrates into a headline-grabbing clusterfuck, there will be the question of whether this was more or less wasteful than Spider-Man.

So, here’s the thing. I’m going to say it and I’m going to say it in public. I am grateful that $75 million was spent on Spider-Man. I am ecstatic. I think it’s awesome that producers decided that they wanted to spend $75 million on a single show.

And that gratitude is not diminished one iota by the fact that the show and the process of its creation is, by all accounts, a hot mess.

I have spent the last two years teaching devised theatre and new play development to teens. There are a handful of things I tell them during the first class that I desperately hope I can pound into their skulls by the last. One of them is that it’s okay to fail. In art, failure happens all the time. As artists, this might be institictive. But these are teenagers, and the last thing they want to do is look stupid in front of other people.

“If you are going to fail, fail spectacularly,” I tell them. “If you are going to run into a brick wall, I want you to be going full-speed when you hit. Think of this process of theatre creation as a science experiment. Because even failed experiments teach us something. Which means they’re not really failures at all.”

And now here are a bunch of Broadway producers, a world-class director, and fucking Bono running full tilt at a brick wall. It’s glorious.

Next time I give that talk, I can point to Spider-Man, and I can say this: You think it’s embarrassing to make a big, wrong choice in an acting exercise? You’re afraid of what your friends will think? Here are a group of professional theatremakers and a couple of world-famous pop stars who went and made a big messy risky choice for the whole world to see and criticize. And they hit that brick wall going 100 mph. And they got back up, dusted themselves off, and kept working. Do you think Julie Taymor is going to change her aesthetic? Will her next show be any less theatrical, any less insanely complex and challenging? Of course not.

Or, at least, I sincerely hope not.

Would I love to see $75 million worth of $100,000 grants spread out across threatermakers nationwide? Of course I would. As an audience member, I’m far more interested in seeing what the Rude Mechs can do with $100k than I am seeing Spider-Man, even if it were produced to perfection.

But, as an artist, do I also want there to be people willing to sink $75 million into a single hot mess of a Broadway show so pumped full of spectacle it makes your eyes bleed? Abso-fucking-lutely.

Because if we’re going to fail, let’s fail big, fail in public, and fail informatively. And, yeah, failure can be expensive. But sometimes it’s worth it.

John Lahr, New Yorker theater critic, wrote a piece on Julie Taymor’s frustration with the process of creating a new theatrical work in the era of instant feedback, Twitter, and focus groups. It’s a great piece, full of historical perspective on the role of audience (that is to say, amateur) criticisms of theater. He rubbed me the wrong way, however, when he generalized his annoyance with those who tweet their opinions. He asserts Twitter users are “crickets, not critics,” spewing a “cultural gas of opinion and vitriol.” And, per Lahr, “the Tweetosphere [sic] has no interest in ambiguity, irony, or careful distinction.” So, I proved him right and vented my spleen in this tweet.

A few people must’ve enjoyed this, because they retweeted it, in the process boosting my Klout score 1 point. And I know why. Snark sells. Especially on Twitter. Or in Lahr’s words, “the glibbest and loudest rule.” This may be why Twitter was the perfect medium for Dan Sinker‘s brilliant, satirical @MayorEmanuel saga. With 140 character limits, Twitter encourages the sort of reductionist, over-confident, unambiguous sound-bite phraseology that I so lament in “serious” public discourse.

I suppose, therefore, Lahr has a point in his critique. But he makes the mistake of conflating the limitations of the medium with the limitations of the users. That’s like blaming Peter Parker for not being able to execute aerial acrobatics without visible guide wires in the theater like he does in the movies. As David Loehr and Brandon Moore said, many who tweet are also long form bloggers, informed content matter experts, well versed in subtlety and irony and all that nonsense.

That doesn’t automatically make us Lahr’s scholarly nor critical peers. I’ll be the first to admit nobody would ever give me a theater critic job at The New Yorker. But we also know that there are far fewer such jobs then there are gifted critics. Many are simply toiling away on blogs and on Twitter, because that’s the outlet available to them, and are frankly not deserving of Lahr’s ignorant judgment.

But I’m not really writing this in defense of amateur critics. The good ones can write better than me and defend themselves. I’m writing this because Lahr’s vision of theater as essentially a one-way communication form (with an indulged peanut gallery giving feedback only through gasps, laughter, jeers or applause) may still be dominant, but is by no means unchallenged.

Devised work is showing that you can, in fact, create art by committee. Though, theater artists have been collaboratively creating art for so long that we shouldn’t be surprised. Lahr writes, ”the essence of great theatre is an expression of the individual voice of the makers,” but he doesn’t acknowledge the oxymoron in his own sentence. What, exactly, is the individual voice of a (plural) group of makers? Scripting and otherwise building a show through ensemble improv is certainly nothing new. Conference panel discussions, which are sort of a less entertaining form of theater, can be shifted and enriched mid-course by a gutsy provocateur. If art can be created by committee, how can we so glibly rule out focus groups? I’m serious.

Why not include and build on the audience’ input, either in development of a piece or during a performance? And I’m not just talking about the mad-lib type suggestions that you might throw out at a Second City review. I’m talking about making the art more relevant to the audience by including them in the creative process. Directly, transparently, without defensiveness or arrogant posturing about the false superiority of the story-teller over the story-tellee.

What could be more hyper-local and intensely relevant to new audiences? What could engender deeper communication and relationship between artist and community? In what better way could theater artists learn more about diverse audiences that we so desperately claim to want to serve? How else can we better hold up a mirror to society?

I’m bone-tired of theater artists and institutions that seem to think they have a monopoly on illuminating the human condition. When we treat theater as one-way communication, why are we surprised when the stories we’re telling don’t lead to a flood of new audience members banging down our doors? Instead of thinking of ourselves as uniquely qualified to tell stories, let’s realize that our unique qualifications are really just to tell stories in a certain WAY, with actors and a live audience. Everybody has stories they want to tell, including (and maybe especially) our potential but untapped audiences. Let’s use our skills to first learn and then share their stories, using our artistic forms. Let’s include them in the process, all but guaranteeing that they will become our collaborator-audience. In the process, we will broaden our own understanding of the humanity around us, which might even make us better artists.

NOTE: There are a few Chicago groups I know who are already doing this, in very different ways. I’d bet there are groups doing this all over the country, though they’re probably not on John Lahr’s radar. And even though these examples are in Chicago, I’ve a feeling even Scott Walters would approve. Further, I’d bet these models are sustainable in ways that some of our traditional theater companies can only dream of.

Barrel of Monkeys produces the hilarious and ever-changing That’s Weird, Grandma! from the texts that come from from writing workshops they run in Chicago Public Schools.

Albany Park Theater Project is an excellent multi-ethnic youth theater ensemble that builds their scripts from the life experiences of residents of Chicago’s diverse Albany Park neighborhood. The actors write and perform stories from their communities, while developing their talents as artists and performers.

Among other initiatives, Storycatchers sends theater and musical artists into a juvenile women’s correctional facility to help the young women perform their stories through scene work, poems, and song.

Companies like these give me great hope for the future of theater in an increasingly multicultural, networked society.

I’m not sure who coined the expression “boob tube” but its implication has always been clear to me: people who watch TV are boobs, simpletons, and lack common sense.

Even as a kid, I never really understood this characterization of TV viewers because it was with TV that I first learned to express my autonomy. If I didn’t like what I was watching, I could always turn the channel, turn off the TV, or leave. I wasn’t compelled by the conventions of TV to sit passively and absorb whatever was presented to me. Even as a kid, it seemed to me that only a boob would do something like that.

I thought of this one evening as I sat feeling trapped in a performance I was mostly enjoying. I felt trapped, despite my enjoyment, because the conventions of “fine art” live performance expect me to sit there in a passive boob-like state of awe. Even when I admire the work on stage, this experience can be frustrating. When I dislike the work onstage, the experience is a kind of torture.

I’m not sure when theatres became boob boxes but today far too many theatres are exactly that. Audiences are expected to check their autonomy at the door and accept whatever is presented to them in passive silence. I’ve even attended children’s theatre where some of the kids shushed into a dull silence some of the other kids who were audibly enjoying what they watched.

I suppose it could be argued that theatre, as an art form, requires a passive audience that is willing to sit silently for sixty minutes or more. If this is true, it also explains why this kind of theatre is struggling to find an audience. We live in an age — thankfully — when people are far less willing to play the part of the passive simpleton.

Personally, I’m not too interested in creating or consuming theatre for simpletons. I’m also pretty confident that many of you who follow #2AMt feel the same way. My question, then is this: what can be done to make the experience of theatre less passive for the audience?

I’m sure some of you are already experimenting along these lines. I would love to read about your successes, failures, and ideas for the future in the comments section below.

The Follow Friday posts are back!

We look at communities remembering their own stories and pulling together to give to the arts, philanthropy from donors and from theatre companies themselves, playwrights living in towns small and large. We also look at theatre companies working together and, well, working at all. And we check into the New York Public Library for some fun and games. These are the stories we’ve been following at 2amt this week.

Kris Vire on location, location, location
A look at Theatre Seven’s Chicago Landmark Project, a collection of short plays inspired by specific locations. The shows have their first previews tonight. Instead of inspiring future productions of this work, their hope is to inspire other places, other communities, to put together their own landmark projects. So let’s get on that.

Laura Axelrod on her town
Do you have to live in a city to be a playwright? Laura Axelrod asks and answers that question by sharing her own experiences. She continues by highlighting the benefits, the changes and the disadvantages of working from a small town. Finally, other thoughts and considerations. An excellent series of posts.

Howard Sherman on taking a break
Taking a break from the American Theatre Wing blog, Howard Sherman writes for the New York Times, suggesting that we stop and smell the roses. Is seeing too much theatre a bad thing? Do we spend too much time in the dark? Mark Shenton responds from across the ocean.

Euan Kerr on a free for all
In Minneapolis, Mixed Blood Theatre has decided to stop charging admission for mainstage productions. AD Jack Reuler calls it “radical hospitality.” Admission will be first-come, first-served. What some of the recent “are they crazy?” conversations online have missed is the fact that patrons don’t have to gamble on that–they’ll be able to reserve seats for $15. Are they crazy? Maybe. Like foxes.

Sasha Hnatkovich does the math
Can we do less, but better, with the same amount of funding? Sasha Hnatkovich of the Marin Theatre Company tries to follow the logic of Ralph Remington of the NEA and John McGuirk of the Hewlett Foundation as presented at the 2011 Theatre Bay Area Annual Conference. He’s not sure their numbers add up.

Aaron Andersen makes a federal case
Over at Createquity, Aaron walks us through the “sausage factory of government spending,” pointing out why it’s important to understand how and why it works. He also reminds us that we need to pay attention to more than questions of funding for the arts.

Bill Zlatos on Pittsburgh’s giving
Earlier this month, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council and The Heinz Endowments initiated the Arts Day of Giving, sponsored by The Pittsburgh Foundation.. This was a 24-hour long, online campaign, a challenge to raise money against matching grants. Did it work? They raised $1,410,617.00, with a final matching percentage of 34%. Let’s see how many other cities and communities take up the larger challenge of trying an Arts Day.

Stephanie Orma on adding dimensions
A lovely profile of the work Alfalfa Studio has been designing for Amphibian Productions. Do your marketing materials and posters pop? If not, why not?

Jonah Lehrer on unconventional wisdom
When does the bounty of information and the solicitation of opinions become too much? Jonah Lehrer looks at the wisdom of crowds and the independence of individual thought.

James Still on remembering the future
In his keynote address at the Cohen New Works Festival at the University of Texas at Austin, James Still stops to take in the world, and takes us with him in the process. Creativity, individuality, observation and, in the end, connection.

Maxine Kern on women in theatre
From literary manager to artistic director, producer to dramaturg, Maxine Kern has had an amazing career. Here, she talks about the difference between working on new works and revivals, as well as her hopes for women in the current and future world of theatre.

Joanna Harmon on working together
As part of TCG’s What If…? series of blog posts, Joanna Harmon asks, “What if small companies and loose collectives of theatre artists were enabled by a single group of administrators, rather than each company reinventing its administrative wheel?” How would this work? It already is working in a few places. J. C. Lee responds, asking why we create our own companies to begin with, and why it’s important for artists to have a firm understanding of the business side of things.

James Fritz on the dearth of young male playwrights
In the Guardian, James Fritz panics at the thought that young male playwrights aren’t being adequately represented on the British stage. Meanwhile, Kimberly Lew picks his article apart, noting that the status quo is in no danger. Instead of focusing on what a wider, more diverse pool of writers takes away from one group, why not celebrate what they add to the art as a whole?

Charles McGrath on a literary shuffle
This is why we love the Elevator Repair Service. Having adapted and performed the totality of The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises as well as the first chapter of The Sound and the Fury, they devised a mashup of the three–to be performed in 22 minutes–and presented their Shuffle at the New York Public Library. You know you want to see this.

Elizabeth Keim on a flash mob in blank verse
Jane McGonigal devised a game as part of the New York Public Library’s anniversary celebration, Find the Future. Elizabeth went along for the challenge, a 24-hour sleepover at the library that, ideally, would end with a 600-page, group-written epic aided by–and tasked with unlocking–the secrets of the NYPL. Did it work?