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.

What can we learn from the birth of the regional theatre movement? Which arts administrator has reached a mass-critical critical mass? Where did Verdi and Shakespeare work to support their writing habits? How many theatres are we going to have to occupy? Why do we call it play?

These are the stories we’ve been following at 2amt this week. This is Follow Friday.

Michael Kaiser criticizes the blogosphere
Mr. Kaiser is afraid of the rise of the citizen critic. As Adam Thurman points out , his fear is justified, even if we disagree with his conclusions. Goodness knows Travis Bedard, Jeremy Barker and Isaac Butler did. That’s why I’m reaching out to Mr. Kaiser while in DC this weekend.

Simone Scully on the vox populi
Of course, citizen criticism might be even more widespread than Mr. Kaiser thought. At the TCG website, a profile of Barrington Stage and their iCritic project. Walk out of the show, step into the booth & record your reactions to share with the world. What’s next for iCritic? What if it could travel from theatre to theatre? What if it were mobile?

Howard Sherman & Peter Marks, together again for the first time
Conveniently enough, all this talk of criticism in the age of Twitter comes to a head the week Arena Stage hosts Howard & Peter in the Kogod Cradle, talking about the role of critics, the use of Twitter and the brave new world of interaction & engagement. The event will also be streamed live at NewPlayTV and archived for later viewing. Right before the event, we’ll be hosting a 2amt meetup at Arena from 3pm until 5pm, so if you’re in the DC area, come on down and say hi. Stay for the event, maybe we’ll all critique it afterwards.

Diane Ragsdale on making a living
Another theme emerged this week, from Zelda Fichandler’s speech on the history of the regional theatre movement while giving an award to Blanka Zizka of the Wilma Theater, from Michael Dove of the Forum Theatre’s meditation on their words and his call to change “non-profit” into “social profit” to my own post on the idea of staff playwrights as opposed to resident playwrights. Naturally, Diane is right there with a few more “outlandish suggestions” on making a living as an artist in the regional theatres.

Ben Brantley occupies theatre
As the Occupy __________ (choose your nearest protest) movement grows and gathers support, Ben Brantley takes a look at the 99% in the world of theatre, from Willy Loman to Mike Daisey, all the way up to the Civilians’ latest production, inspired by interviews conducted at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park.

Scott Stratten on being awesome
Archived video of the Livestream of Scott’s keynote address at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference this past weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. The main takeaway? People follow awesome. Be awesome. Stop marketing and start engaging. Is it really as simple as that? Watch and find out. Hint. There’s a reason his website is called UnMarketing.

Garry Wills sings of Verdi & Shakespeare
You might be surprised by some of the similarities between the two. “Both were supplying performances on a heavy schedule, to audiences with a voracious appetite for what they wrote. In a career of little over twenty years, Shakespeare turned out thirty-eight plays…Verdi had a longer career of fifty-four years…in which he created twenty-seven operas…” Wonder if being core members of their own companies had anything to with that. Makes you think.

Katherine Catmull on the uses of joy
There is a reason what we do is called “play.” The women of Conspire Theatre remind us of this in the amazing work they’re doing with the women of the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle, Texas.

…and what it means for our future.

I was a lucky audience member for the Oct 26th SDC Zelda Fichandler Award presentation at Arena Stage (which was given, this year, to Blanka Zizka of Wilma Theater). I wanted to attend, in part, because I had just joined the stage directors and choreographers union a few weeks prior and, in part, to support Howard Shalwitz who was being recognized as the Distinguished Finalist. What I didn’t expect was an education in the significance of the early regional theatre movement and how its principals can guide the theatre of today in becoming a true force in our cultural landscape, once again.

As a DC theatre maker, Zelda’s influence on our local community certainly looms large. We know of her as the founder of Arena Stage. We think of her when we sit in the beautiful in-the-round space that bears her name. But for me, a 30 year old who only moved to DC in 2003, started a small theatre company, and has decided to make artistic direction my career, I now realize how little I appreciated the significance of that exodus out of New York and into the regions, over 60 years ago.

I am a member of a generation who have, perhaps, taken for granted the efforts of Zelda, Margo Jones, Tyrone Guthrie, and the countless others who blazed those first trails into the wilderness and forged the community that I so gratefully make a living in, today. For us, there has always been an Arena Stage. For us, Margo’s prophesy of “40 of these theatres all around America, that’s what we need to have” has not only been surpassed long before we were born, but has been met and exceeded in our very own geographic region. Professional theatres under the non-profit banner have always been a part of our lives.

Obviously, this has not always been the case. An argument had to be made to even allow theatres to be invited to the 501(c)(3) party “because [theatre] made a profit” (that comment nearly brought down the house at the event and reminded me of the joke “How do you make a small fortune as a theatrical producer? Well, you start with a large fortune…”). A case had to made that theatre could and should mean more than just financially profitable entertainment. The regional theatre movement had to reach back to the very foundations of our art and rediscover the community building, political-minded, and educational roots that our form of artistic expression is not only well suited for, but possibly best suited for bringing a populace together in public discourse.

Oskar Eustis points out that theatre has always been a social tool for practicing empathy and a forum for challenging perspectives. Starting with the earliest known work in our Western cannon, The Persians, theatre has always been intrinsically married to democracy and the effort of putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes to learn how to live better with one another. It’s apt that Oskar looks back to these early theatrical gods for inspiration for it’s important for today’s practitioners to look to our American Theatrical Founding Fathers and Mothers for guidance in how we move theatre forward for our contemporary audience and the generations to come.

We have lost sight of the founding traditions of our theatrical revolution. We see our non-profit statuses as means to an end. They allow us to solicit tax-deductable donations because this is how our government has decided to support the arts. And while we bemoan the always-shrinking amount of public funds available to our organizations, it’s important to realize how much freedom our United States not-for-profit system truly allots us. On a trip to Toronto a few years back, I found myself full of jealousy for the famous Canadian government funding support and enjoyed telling every theatre artist I met there about “how hard it was” for us, in America and how their government clearly valued the arts more than ours. I pulled out this attitude time and time again until one producer came back with “yes, but the projects we pursue funding for must go though a bureaucratic process that sometimes dilutes and censors the work because it has to go through a series of gateways.” As American non-profits, we have more freedom to do what we want so long as we find the support to make it happen.

Listening to Zelda, I thought about my own theatre, Forum Theatre, and wondered if we were living up to the service organization label we purport to be known by. Are we doing enough to justify our not-for-profit status?

Perhaps the name of our system is partially at fault. Have we unknowingly bought into the negative, profit-less connotation of the term “non-profit.” a term that inspires (if that’s the right word) low expectations with its very word ingredients. If our titled goal is to not make a financial profit, then what are we trying to achieve?

A campaign to replace the term “non-profit” with “social profit” has arisen over the past few years and I wonder if it’s a cause that theatres should take up as a galvanizing force for our industry. A stated intention of exactly what our organizations hope to return to our investors could refocus our missions beyond the needed language to gain 501(c)(3) status and towards a greater good. A social-profit would yield not financial profit but benefits to society. South Africa even has a “Social Investment Exchange” for tracking such organizations.

I firmly believe that a renewed focus on the core values devised by those early pioneers at Arena, the Guthrie, Theatre ’47, and others, is a key component to how we can not only strengthen our field but grow our industry in terms of higher risk and therefore higher investment return. As Zelda said in her speech when talking about dwindling audience numbers, “If that is so, I ask this question: could it be, in part, that the imaginative scale of our work is bowing to meet the budget’s needs?”

As my generation and the one coming up just behind us look to build the theatrical landscape of tomorrow, we would do well to learn from those who waged so many battles before us and forge onwards to a theatre of even greater value.

Other people’s money is not just the name of a play by Jerry Sterner. It is the temptation put before an “agent” when working on behalf of a “principal” that gives rise to “moral hazard.” Other people’s money is also what nonprofit organizations – like theatre companies – use to produce work. There is a lot of business literature, organizational behavior literature, and economics literature that address the relationship between agents and principals and the moral hazard inherent to the task of using other people’s money. There’s even some scholarly literature on principal agent relationship in the nonprofit sector, but nothing specific to the arts. As my colleague Andrew Taylor said, “the nonprofit arts are dripping with principal-agent problems. Just ask any governing board who they work for.” Seeing this question as part of a public conversation on twitter spurred #2amt editor David J. Loehr to ask me to explain moral hazard and principal agent theory as it relates to theatre.

Here’s one example of how the principal-agent problem plays out:

A visionary director, let’s call her Jane Doe, decides to start a theatre company in a mid-size city and, against the advice of her friend the arts administrator, incorporates in her state as a 501c3 with a mission “to enrich the cultural life of the region by presenting new plays generated from interaction with the regional community.” She has three years to get a board in place. She quickly recruits people she trusts, people who buy into her vision and the mission of the organization. Her college roommate is now a lawyer – score! Her neighbor is an accountant – score again! And, her best friend does PR for a health group to round out the functional board trifecta: legal, financial, and marketing. Fundraising begins and private gifts come in. Grant applications go out and grant money comes in. Plays get written and produced. Sometimes, people even buy tickets, but not too many.

Jane’s artistic vision evolves and she wants to direct more classics. Her board of three friends goes along with her programming. Oops…the board now appears to be reporting to Jane rather than the other way around. In a nonprofit organization, the board -– the governing body — is the principal, the steward of the mission and all of its funds, and the artistic director is the agent. Here the moral hazard results from stewardship of mission rather than money, but whenever the goals of the principal and the agent fall out of alignment, you got yourself a principal-agent problem. There are myriad examples of this situation, the unintentional (or intentional) mission drift that happens over time, mission drift that goes uncorrected because of principal-agent reversal. I’m too polite to name names.

This situation begs the question: “Why did Jane bother with a board at all?” Law require it of a tax-exempt organization. If she had developed a more flexible organizational structure instead of a 501c3, she likely could have recruited the assistance of her three friends while maintaining her artistic autonomy. Poor Jane.

To be continued…

Read Linda’s blog, Creative Infrastructure.

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.

Here in Vancouver, as a theatre producer, one of your greatest challenges is simply finding space. We have two major theatre companies, The Vancouver Playhouse and the Arts Club, that own their own theatres, but other than that, the 100-or-so independent theatre companies in the city all are fighting for a piece of the half-dozen theatre spaces in town.

So many have started to think outside the black box. As a publicist, I have been working for a young company, Itsazoo Productions, who specializes in site-specific, promenade-style theatre, mostly in parks, but they have done two productions in parking garages as well.

This summer, I was contracted by The Only Animal, a local indie company, to do publicity for Sea of Sand: A Play on the Beach.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Only Animal is well-known for their site-specific work here in Vancouver. Their last production, Nix: The Theatre of Snow and Ice, which took place during the Cultural Olympiad in Whistler, featured a set made of ice and snow, and the actors entering the stage via slides made of ice.

Tired of freezing their butts off, Co-Artistic Directors Eric Rhys Miller and Kendra Fanconi started dreaming of doing a play in the summer… when it was warm… at the beach. Vancouver is blessed with plentiful and beautiful beaches, so they approached the City and got permission. The play, which is inspired by the concept of memory, has been in development for several years, and has gone through a few incarnations before this final production.

Part radio-play, part film-noir mystery, Sea of Sand follows a trio of characters: a man recovering from amnesia, the wife who doesn’t want him to remember, and a woman who washes up out of the sea, a shadowy figure from their past. Memory and desire are the twin rip tides at work in this lost-and-found story. The play asks the question: what if forgetting is safer than remembering? 

There are certainly unique challenges with producing a play on the beach. They have solar-powered generators to run the computers, big tents for tiring-houses, and there was a lot of experimenting with different kinds of sunscreen. Each of the actors wears a wetsuit under their “costume”, as they spend time in the water as well as on the beach.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previous versions of the play had the actors mic’ed, but that turned out to be a logistical nightmare. So, to deal with that, Rhys Miller recorded the entire play, in the studio, like a radio play. The actors then speak their lines in sync with, and sometimes out of sync with, the playback, which is underscored by music. This makes it possible for the actors to be very far away (as they sometimes were) or even in the water without missing dialogue.

Add to that the amazing setting, and you have a very unique and highly enjoyable piece of theatre.

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.

Roll On, Strange Little Plays. Roll On.

I will start off saying this: rolling world premieres should be the ONLY way plays premiere. With consecutive and distinct productions a new play gets the essential time and community to mature rapidly, thoroughly, and cradled by friendly forces. Awww.

A play becomes itself in production, less so in readings, and even less so alone with my laptop. Alive onstage is where plays belong, become, grow, and fight for their lives. The rolling premiere of Exit, Pursued By A Bear gave me and this play the truest place to create something that I think is important, bizarre, and theatrical. Without Synchronicity Theatre in Atlanta, Crowded Fire in SF, and ArtsWest in Seattle this play would have stayed quiet and young – now its loud, proud, and rolling across the country with stops in Orlando and Dallas already made and stops in NYC and Chicago on the books.

Lessons of The Roll

The first production is always about “realizing the vision and reality of the play” – truly seeing the shape, character, logic, and functionality of the play for the first time. Synchronicity Theatre’s production in Atlanta (directed by Rachel May) did that perfectly in a 100+ seat house with a wide stage and audience raked up in risers. The amazing actors were serious troopers – diving into this play from the start with energy and intelligence. This is a no-holds-barred kinda play and they went to the limit. The play is set in North Georgia so we had a built-in safety in the form of southern-friendly audiences. This production was swift, deeply moving, and perfectly ridiculous.

The second production, about to open here at Crowded Fire in San Francisco, has been about fine tuning, cutting dead weight, asking myself the serious question like “I know the line is funny but is it worth the 5-line lead up?” and “Is this scene self-referential and awesome, or self-referential and confusing?”. This production is in a 50-seat black box space with audience on 2-sides. The very real and inherent intimacy of this space is redefining how this play works, how far we can go with the funny and the violence. Desdemona Chiang’s vision of the play is dynamic, churning, and sexy.

In between the SF production and the Seattle production this fall at ArtsWest, I may continue to tweak the show. There’s a few things I’m still waiting to see if we’ve perfected. And Arts West is a larger, wider black box thrust which will continue to push my conceptualization of what the play demands.

So.

Why Roll?

There are so many reasons that rolling premieres are helpful and necessary that I might just make us a list. Actually lemme give you some background of how Bear started rolling… and then make a list. The list will be the denouement. Or the climax. Whatever. Begin.

This play has rolled since it was born.

Exit, Pursued By A Bear started as a rogue idea had while working on another play. (That always happens to me.) It was the brassiest voice I’d ever attempted, but it felt so good that I slammed out the first ten pages (including a stage direction with the phrase “meat fort”) and then… tucked it (rolled it?) away. Actually I think I submitted it for a commission award or something, was not picked up, and then tucked it away.

A few months later I met with Amy Mueller at The Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco (I was again, working on a totally different play) and she asked what I was working on and the first thing that popped into my mind was: “This crazy feminist bear play about domestic violence. But its a comedy. So…”

So. Amy read the first 10 pages, encouraged me to finish it, and offered my a spot in their Rough Readings Series – 8 hours of rehearsal, 4 great actors, smart director, and 2 public readings.

After that reading, I immediately sent it to my friend and wonder woman Rachel May, Artistic Director of Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theatre – who immediately put it in their new play reading series happening in a month.

The dual Atlanta and SF readings/reactions to the play were really great and enthusiastic. Rachel was choosing her upcoming season. She chose Bear. And she said “I want to do a rolling premiere of this.” Synchronicity had done co-pros before with a lot of success. I was so ready to see what we could do together.

Marissa Wolf at Crowded Fire had seen the reading at Playwrights Foundation and she and I had a great talk about the play after. Her company is a collective so all the artists had to read and support the play before going further – luckily they did and actor Erin Gilley, who is actually from North Georgia (near where the play takes place), gravitated toward the lead role. So Crowded Fire included Bear in their reading series, connected with Rachel, and jumped on board to produce it next. The play was officially rolling.

ArtsWest got on board after I sent the play to Alan Harrison (who heard me babbling on about it on facebook – god bless the internet). ArtsWest had produced my play Emilie last season (a really fabulous and full-hearted production I might add) and was looking for a fresh comedy. He liked the play, I now had a relationship with his audience through last season’s production, this was in fact a comedy, and now we were rolling to three cities.

The amazing thing to me is that all of this happened because of personal connection, friendships, and previous professional relationships. These were seasoned friendships, not brand new “you don’t really know me but take a risk on my crazy play please” relationships. History helps.

Everyone asked right away if this was an NNPN project but it wasn’t. The National New Play Network rolling premiere program is totally on it though, and has helped great plays become greater. But these three theaters weren’t NNPN member theaters. So. They just made it up themselves. There was no grant involved for these theaters. None of the theaters got any money outright for doing the premiere. It was excitement about the play and excitement about producing something in a national and immediate way that got everyone on board. The only rule was to produce the play within one year of the first production. Boom. You can see why I am the luckiest lady in the land, or certainly feel like it.

Though this all might have really happened because of the play’s curious yet recognizable title referencing a seemingly cute yet actually terrifying wild animal.

THE LIST OF WHY ROLLING PREMIERES ARE GETTING TO BE ESSENTIAL

1. Plays are designed to be on stage (yeah duh), alive in actors bodies, in the company of reactive audiences. That’s new play development. Plays and playwrights need a second/third production to really understand the play’s true realized self.

2. Writing is hard. Producing is hard. Give us a break, y’all, and let’s share and develop all that thoughtful work so it doesn’t stop in one city with one audience. Rachel’s work is alive here in SF, Crowded Fire will be a part of ArtsWest. Play it forward (eeeesh. sorry.).

3. The play/production has momentum, scale, conversation on a national level now – we were even featured in American Theatre Magazine and I’m thinking its not just because of this awesome picture (awesome picture here). Its because 3 companies who’d never worked together before were converging interests and resources around a subject and play in which the believe.

4. 3+ theaters share marketing, language, twitter hashtags–specifically #prepareforbear–and this awesome site donated by Synchronicity to whoever produces the play next, prepareforbear.com. Even props were shared as our sweet dead deer is getting quite a tour of the USA.

(aforementioned travelling dead deer in action. Veronika Duerr, Taylor M. Dooley, and Nicholas Tecosky in Synchronicity’s production April 2011)

5. Playwrights really appreciate productions. We really do. We hope you like our plays. But we really hope you DO our plays. That’s the truth. And having 3 in one year of the same play is not just an honor but a lifeline to the my best creative working self. Thank you Spirits of Smart Productions.

6. All of the companies get world premieres.

7. The 2 and 3rd companies get world premieres that have had the deep benefit and lessons of a full production.

8. No matter what critics say, the play is buffered by future productions and faraway advocates to continue the play’s best journey to its best self.

9. You don’t need extra funds to do it. But that helps. In fact can we start a Rolling Premiere Fund for which anyone can apply? Huh? Yes?

10. Y’all know this is a great way to produce if you can afford/arrange it.

11. Roll on, strange little plays. Roll on.

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.

Previously in this column:

Bright Alchemy Theatre, a very young company devoted to the creation of devised work, decides to begin work on a narrative and thematic sequel to A Cre@tion Story for Naomi, which explored the world’s creation myths. We began this new process with a question: Why do we feel the need to tell stories of our own destruction? Over the last few months we have explored various apocalypse stories, blue skied ways to create zombies, and planned our own funeral. And I’ve blogged the whole process here on 2amtheatre.

So by now some of you might be thinking, “Yes, this devising process is all well and good, but when do we get around to the theatre part?”

Soon. Much sooner than I thought, actually. And if that sentence sounds ominous, I don’t really mean it to be so. It’s my deadline-fear showing. Back in October, before we had meeting one on this project—before we’d even begun rehearsals for our previous production—I applied for Bright Alchemy to be a participant in the Mead Theatre Lab Program. The program provides four or five residencies per year to theatre artists, providing access to artistic advisors and two-to-five weeks in their small black box theatre near Washington, DC’s Chinatown. Along with that program, I also submitted an application for an attached Creative Communities Fund Grant.

I was told last month that we had been accepted for both. I think I actually did a two-arms-in-the-air-for-victory move in the middle of 14^th Street when I got the call.

And so Bright Alchemy will present the workshop production—the rough, fully staged, PWYC, soliciting input from the audience production—of its newest piece at the Mead Theatre at Flashpoint Sept 23-25. And we’ll have the two weeks prior to rehearse in the space. And we’ll have the funding to bring in the designers we want to work with and ensure that we can pay all our artists.

That the committee chose this project over several dozen others, makes me a little giddy. I had never written a grant before (and now that I’m batting a thousand, I may never again). And it was a proposal for a piece that, at the time, consisted only of a process and a question “Why do we as a species feel the need to tell stories of our own destruction?” But they must have seen something worth investing in, which means I feel just a smidge of pressure to live up to that expectation. Thus the deadline anxiety.

Our latest meeting is filled with practicalities. We discuss a timeline: when rehearsals would probably start, the likelihood of a reading at the Kennedy Center’s Page to Stage Festival, etc.

I try to pin down artists. While we’ve had about a dozen regular collaborators, not all of them will be available come September. However, many are able and willing, and having a budget means being able to successfully compete for their time.

And I introduce text. The first four pages of…something. How did I get these pages? There’s an article in the latest issue of Theatre Forum that profiles DAH, an experimental Serbian theatre group. DAH takes pieces of existing text and turns them into heavily movement based, abstract narratives. The article talks about how, after the group has created all of this material, one of the directors in the group will take it and arrange it into a finished composition. Like a piece of music, but with movement and a story, though not always one that resembles the original source material.

I guess my role has been to do the same. I take what we’ve been talking about: the themes, the stories, the topics that have provoked interest, even the mood of the conversation, and translate it into a theatrical text. That text may tell a wholly new and original story, but hopefully it does so in a way that incorporates many of the ideas we’ve been discussing.

Also, hopefully, it will not suck.

As a playwright, I hate showing unfinished rough drafts. Hate it. Working with Bright Alchemy, I have had to get over that. Or at least hide the anxiety manageably well. So, in the spirit of transparency, and with the idea that as soon as people began providing feedback online about the process they became collaborators themselves, I’ve posted those pages online…here. If you have questions, thoughts, creative expletives–please spew them below.

Please. If you are a board member, artist, or employee of a theater company, understand that most people are not visiting your website because they like you, or because they want to like you. First and foremost, they are visiting your website for information. All the glossy photos, taglines, and rave reviews will not give these individuals an emotional stake in your company if you are going to waste their time by not conveniently giving them the information they seek.

The following are the basics for any theater website homepage.  A visitor to the page should be able to find them in seconds.

Address. Clearly, unambiguously: this is the street address for the venue where the show is taking place, and this is the name of the venue.

When. Dates and times. Many theater companies hide this information behind a button marked Buy Tickets, or some variation thereof. If it’s 6:20 p.m. and someone is looking at your website, it is most likely not to buy tickets but to confirm the showtime and/or location. Don’t make people lie in order to find the information they need to see your show.

Running Time. When a show begins is essential to an audience. When a show ends is also useful: a running time or end time. Imagine an overworked couple standing in the foyer of their house at 6:20 p.m., checking your website on their iPhone to tell the babysitter when to expect them home, two hours later or five hours later.

How to Donate. Blue Man Group, skip this one. (Then again, Blue Man Group, skip this whole essay: your website follows these rules already, and in Chicago you pulled in nearly $627,000 in ticket sales last week.)

But if you are a not-for-profit company, give a visitor to your website clear and immediate information about how to donate to your company—even if it’s just a mailing address. Imagine an overworked lumber baron who, sitting at his desk before a roaring fire, has five minutes to give to a charity. He momentarily thinks of his college roommate, whose niece is the sound designer for your company, and visits your website on a whim. If your site requires more than 30 seconds of time to figure out how to make a donation, that lack of clear information could cost your company a major new supporter.

Contact. An e-mail address, a phone number, whatever. Imagine the lumber baron saw your show and wants, simply enough, to thank you. Imagine the possibility of him going to your website, giving up in frustration after a minute, and moving on with his life, compliment unpaid, relationship unforged.

Quick story—this relates more to the content of that contact information than its placement on a website. I work with foundations that fund theater companies. I review proposals and see shows (often, as a representative of the foundation, looking online at 6:20 p.m. for a show’s start time). Recently, I reviewed a grant proposal from a generally healthy, artistically strong theater company that had recently undergone administrative changes. I was trying to arrange a meeting with its managing director.

The e-mail address on the application form was incorrect—the equivalent of, say, Sandbox Theater writing its address as info@sandbox.org instead of the correct info@sandboxthtr.org. The e-mail I spent 10 minutes composing was kicked back to me. Next, I called the phone number on the grant application, sat through a four-minute recorded pitch about the current season, followed by directions to the theater. When offered an option to leave a message for the company, I pressed the appropriate button and then listened to a three-month-old message about auditions for a show that had already closed. When I pressed one more option, I heard an outgoing message from the former managing director, with his personal cell-phone number for those who wanted to contact him. In this case, I finally did go to the company’s website and found the correct e-mail address on their homepage. At least there was that. (And this company does strong work—I’m rooting for them.)

Checklist. The basics—after which, but only after which, feel free to add photos, blogs, color, zingers, slideshows, exclamation marks, and sales pitches:

—Venue address.
—Correct, current, daily showtimes. (If there is no current show, tell us what is happening at your company this month, even if what you’re doing this month is taking time off until you pick your next show.)
—Running time.
—How to donate.
—How to contact the company in a way that will receive a timely response.

One more. It only takes two clicks to get from the homepage of the Lyric Opera of Chicago to its most intimate financial data. (Go to the homepage, click on About Us, click on Financial Data, and you’re there from the homepage in seconds flat.) If your company is not doing the same, why not? Would this not also inspire the impatient lumber baron to write you a substantial check? Why hide?

You get lured in with a promise of queso and get stuck with a podcast…

New York One Minute Play Festival Artistic Director Dominic D’Andrea thought he was taking a quiet trip to Austin and got caught got caught in my web.

I sat down with the Johnny Appleseed of the 60-second epic and talked about the New York One Minute Play Festival, why it’s ten times better than a ten minute play, and what it would take to get in the game.

The New York One Minute Play Festival is headed into its fifth year in original location and has begun snaking its tendrils out to the rest of the country. Committed to playwrights and their communities, the Festival has thus far served up well-over 400 plays by 186 playwrights, and those dials are going to start humming as three more iterations fire off in the next couple of months.

All that work and he got NO queso…

So, here we are. Week two and hip-deep in the initial group dramaturgy of Bright Alchemy’s devising process, which started with the question “Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own destruction?”

It’s very early, but I’m already beginning to get that familiar feeling of drowning in images and data. It’s a nice feeling. Better than the alternative. And, if it seems overwhelming, I just have to remind myself that it’s the equivalent of turning the puzzle box over and dumping the pieces out on a table. Easier to imagine the shape of things this way.

Eventually out of all this free association, themes will emerge, or loose strands of connected stories and images will eventually become themes. What free association, you ask?

Some of it is simple words or images: survivor stories; cosmic reboot; four horsemen; the final screen of a silent, black and white movie with the simple words “THE END”; 7 seals; 2012; Y2K; asteroids; trinitite, the glass formed at Trinity, New Mexico, where they tested the bomb.

A composer who saw Naomi, but did not get a chance to work on it, talks about how the play reminded him of the concept of a technological Singularity—the point where we advance technology to the point where it is indistinguishable from human consciousness. This brings up the question of whether we’re proud of our inventive nature or fearful of it, and leads back to a discussion from the previous week about how birth and destruction can go hand-in-hand.

One actress tells us the story of the Pawnee apocalypse myth, which prophesies that when the South Star finally catches up to the North star, the world will end. Which is a nice connection to Naomi, which dealt heavily with astronomy.

Another actress tells a story of riding through the Arizona desert in the backseat of a car while on a family vacation. A rainstorm turned into a sandstorm and the world became an impenetrable blood-red blur as, on the radio, a fire and brimstone preacher prophesied the end of the world.

I mention that one of the big problems I have with certain brands of Christianity is that their adherents seem to be waiting for something better rather than working to make this world a better place to live.

One actor responds to this by noting that some people want a better world and try to make it; some people want to be given a better world and try to make themselves worthy of it; and some people like the world the way it is.

But the one thought that we keep coming back to is the idea of multiple Apocalypses. That world is always going through changes and who’s to say we haven’t experienced any number of Apocalypses?

One of the concepts we touched on while developing Naomi is the difference between static and dynamic societies. Static societies are ones that do not change much from one generation to the next. Consequently, their myths include blueprints for living that a person would have expected to apply to their great-great-great grandchildren as much as it applied to themselves.

However, our society is a dynamic one. We expect the world to change drastically in our own lifetime. And maybe this is why there are so many more stories about the end of the world being written today. Because we can more easily imagine great change occurring.

Not to mention the fact that, as of the mid-20^th century, we finally have the ability to destroy ourselves entirely. That somebody now has the responsibility not to push a button, to wake up everyday and say, “I will not destroy the world today.”

Steve Beal, who got to be the triple-threat of Grandfather, Rabbi, and Voice of Coyote in our last production, says, “The world gets recreated so much during one person’s lifetime. That rate of change leads us to wonder when this is going to end, where this is going to go?”

Maybe an Apocalypse is not about an end to the world, but an end of our world; a shift in the way we see things. After which, there is a new world.. When you strip away the destructive connotation, the word “apocalypse” is Greek for “revelation.” Which means that the line between creation myths and destruction myths becomes incredibly dim.

Which, as dramatic story fodder, has great possibilities.

Also, we talked about zombies.

Wherein I blog Bright Alchemy’s devising process for its newest project.

My living room is full of artists eating baked goods and mainlining coffee. The latter is not surprising, since it’s 10:30 A.M. on a Sunday. What is surprising is that a dozen theatre-makers chose to subject themselves to this sun-drenched world while there was still sleep to be had.

Present are most of the artists that worked on our last project; a few who worked on Gilgamesh, our first project; and several we’ve never worked with before. A lot of people in the room have never met each other. Which is a small miracle, considering the intimacy of the DC theatre community. And it’s probably a good sign. Collaboration needs new perspectives, new talent, fresh brains.

After everyone is settled and at least semi-conscious, I make my pitch, which is this: Our last project, A Cre@tion Story for Naomi, started with a single central question—What is the purpose of creation myths? It ended with a play about Naomi, a brilliant 16-year old girl obsessed with the stars and struggling with how to break out of her self-imposed shell. She and her online friends travel from one creation story to another, searching for one that can help define who she is and what she will become.

I explain how I’d like our next project to be a thematic and narrative sequel to Naomi that we start with the central question: Why do we as a species feel compelled to tell stories of our own destruction? From Revelations to Ragnarok to Michael Bay’s entire canon, we are constantly killing ourselves again and again, at least in our imaginations.

I’d like to explore that question and those stories and whatever else might come up along the way. And then I’d like to take that work and use it to tell the story of Naomi 15 years down the line. I enjoyed telling the story of Naomi and her friends, and I’d like to learn more about them.

Someone talks about what they know of Ragnarok, and how a performance piece they saw dealt with the concept of a World Tree.

Someone mentions the Hindu destruction myth and Shiva the destroyer.

Another person reminds me about the myth of the Flood, which played a part in our adaptation of Gilgamesh and which might be the oldest and most widespread destruction myth.

Eventually someone brings up zombies. And rightfully so, since they are one of our many modern-day destruction myths. Someone mentions an article they saw about research into creating a real-life zombie virus. We ask her what she’s been smoking. Just coffee beans, she says, and promises to find the article for our next meeting.

With our first project, we had the narrative already laid out for us. It was just a matter of exploring what aspects of the Gilgamesh epic excited us and how to adapt it for the stage and the modern age. With Naomi, we started with a single question—one that was so big that we spent a year dramaturging and workshopping. Then I went up on a mountain and came back down with the first ten pages.

With this new project, I’m looking to walk somewhere in the middle. To start with not only a broad central question, but a very loose narrative base as well. So I tell everyone that I think I know three things about our adult Naomi, three things that I believe will help us tell a story about destruction: she’s an astronomer at an observatory; she’s married to an astronaut who is currently in space; and she’s very, very pregnant.

The idea of a pregnant protagonist sparks a discussion about how, in theatre, pregnancy is frequently a destructive force. That it destroys lives. That it can be frightening. And this leads to talk of how children have to sometimes destroy their parents, or the idea of their parents, in order to take their place.

This makes me very happy. Not the destroying parents part. But that the ideas come so freely and with such energy. We end after an hour and a half, with a plan to meet in a week, and for everyone to bring in whatever they think will be helpful to the conversation. Whether it’s an article on zombie viruses or a stolen Gideon Bible. Or an intravenous caffeine drip.

I will make morning people of them yet.

One of the great conversations that has arisen from Arena Stage’s New Play Convening is this discussion about devised theatre: what is it; who does it; why do they bother? As people started trying to answer these questions, there were a lot of passionate responses—some of them knee-jerk, some of them well-reasoned.

“Devised theatre is sexier than regular playwriting and that’s why it’s so in right now.”

“The product that comes out of devised theatre is usually inferior.”

“Devised theatre does not result in ‘plays’.”

“There’s always a random dance number.”

There was an especially large number of reactions from playwrights. Many were genuinely curious. Others reacted viscerally, defensively. The idea of devised theatre—the creation of a play where the text (words or otherwise) is not solely in the playwright’s hands—makes a lot of writers cringe.

I am a playwright. I understand this reaction. I empathize with this reaction. We don’t just tell stories, we create structure. We craft; we shape; we help make sure everything on stage is there with a purpose. This is a bitch to do by committee. If there’s not someone specific in this role, it can result in a lot of muddy, unfocused theatre. And random dance numbers.

As a playwright with a very strong artistic vision, I understand the cringing. But I also understand there are a host of devised theatre companies producing one strong, solid, sharp piece of theatre after another. You know who they are. And if you’ve been lucky enough to see their work, you know that devised theatre can result in wonderful plays.

So, how do they do it?

The problem with trying to describe a devised theatre process is that no two are ever alike. No two companies work alike; and frequently no two projects created by the same company come about in the same manner. So, how do you describe what devised theatre is in a way that is actually informative and useful?

The segue: A few years ago, I helped start a devised theatre company. It was an accident.

I was in the middle of getting my MFA from Catholic University when Ryan Whinnem, an MFA directing student and now-good friend, announced he was interested in creating a theatrical adaptation of the epic of Gilgamesh. He extended an open invitation to actors, directors, writers, and designers to meet weekly and create the adaptation together.

I had no interest in Gilgamesh, but I was working on another project involving Middle Eastern mythology, so I went to the first meeting. I did not plan to go to the second. Which proves I should not try to plan things.

Three months later, Ryan, myself, and a collection of 15 or so actors and designers had our first draft of Gilgamesh, who saw the deep. I’ve written more extensively about its creation at www.brightalchemy.com, but for the sake of this post, all you need to know is that we produced Gilgamesh at the Capital Fringe in 2008. Audiences loved it; reviewers loved it; and we loved doing it.

That fall, we started working on our next project, which would eventually become the play, A Cre@tion Story for Naomi. We spent the next two and a half years on it. Ensemble members came, ensemble members went, and somewhere during the process, Ryan said something like, “We should really give ourselves a name.”

Somebody mentioned the word “Alchemy.” I suggested adding “Bright.” Voila.

Total fucking accident.

And this past January, we produced A Cre@tion Story for Naomi at the DC Arts Center. Again, audiences loved it; reviewers loved it; and we loved doing it.

So we’re doing it again.

We do not have a dedicated space. We do not have non-profit status. We don’t even have a mission statement yet. But we have a collection of passionate theatre-makers and a process that’s worked for us twice before. And I’ve put out an open call to everyone we’ve ever worked with or has ever expressed interesting in working with us to meet and discuss our next project.

And I’m going to blog our process here at 2amtheatre. I’m going to do it for three reasons. One: it will allow artists who may not be able to make all of our workshops to follow along. Two: it will allow our audience to follow along. As I’ll explain later, or you can read about at www.brightalchemy.com, we are very much into audience inclusion. Three: it will provide a detailed, concrete example of one company’s devising process, for which I’m hoping there’s interest.

And so next time someone asks, “What the f@#ck is devised theatre?”, I’ll have an answer.

Tom Robinson (Peter Macon), Atticus Finch (Mark Murphey) and Heck Tate (Peter Frechette) in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Photo: David Cooper.

Ashland’s a snowy, somewhat icy town this weekend for the opening weekend of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. First up last night was the Bill Rauch-directed Measure for Measure, which I thought quite strong — it’s messy, bright, multivocal, layered, set in about 1975 and full of energy and complexity (almost all of those seem like Rauch hallmarks at this point).

Today, the other freelancer for the Eugene Weekly made it down in time for the opening of To Kill a Mockingbird. She’s reviewing it for the paper, but I have a few comments about the play I’ve reserved for y’all.

The book’s a sometimes-beloved classic of U.S. high school classrooms and white folks in general, but it’s not without accusations of racism. One of the most strongly worded analyses came from Stuff White People Do & was reposted at Racialicious; one of the Extremely Calm analyses of the role of Atticus came from Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker. The  OSF is aware of all of this — the fest’s publication Illuminations makes that abundantly clear. Backstage West editor Scott Proudfit wrote the notes for this play, and he has an entire section called “A daring book … and a conservative book.”

Dill (Leo Pierotti), Jem (Braden Day) and Scout (Kaya Van Dyke) review the treasures found in the knothole of the Radley tree. Photo: David Cooper.

One point on the “daring book” side says that “readers who perceive Lee’s novel as revolutionary often emphasize how progressive the novel was in the context of the 1960s’ Deep South.” Opposed to that, Proudfit writes: “Most problematcially, the novel consistently depicts white — rather than black — heroism and reflects a kind of Southern paternalism, or faith in white father figures.”

Indeed, that’s just what Gladwell wrote about. But I think this production slightly troubles those still, heroic, Gregory Peck-influenced waters. Perhaps it’s that in 2011, a couple of things seem clear — if unremarked upon openly — at least in this version: Why didn’t Atticus take a rifle with him to sit in front of the jail when he knew a lynch mob would be coming? Why doesn’t he do a better job of protecting himself and his children from the likes of Bob Euell? In addition, women like me, and I’d imagine most men as well, can’t help but find Atticus Finch’s questioning of the raped and beaten (by her father, as Atticus makes abundantly clear) Mayella Euell troubling. This production makes it all the more poignant because Howie Seago (who is Deaf) plays Bob Euell, and Susannah Flood‘s Mayella  interprets for her father. She has to interpret her story, his story, the questions he’s asked, the answers he gives. She’s tied to him with strong bonds, and she’s hurting for it.

Atticus Finch (Mark Murphey) questions Mayella Ewell (Susannah Flood). Photo: David Cooper.

Director Marion McClinton pulls strong performances from most of the cast. The three kids (above) are onstage a lot, and sometimes they’re hard to hear (Southern accents: if you’re thinking about faking them all of the time, you’re going to lose your diction & your lines). The shadow projections — I’ll find out more about those from designer Lynn Jeffries in a few days — often work, and occasionally distract from the production. But on the other hand, I wanted to be reminded that this was a fable, a fable of middle-class white folks caring about the African Americans of their community, a fable that claimed “relief checks” destroyed poor white families, a fable of Harper Lee’s childhood and her fondness for the unreachable, unknowable past.

Those are some first thoughts, anyway. If #2amt folks have staged TKM, I’d be most interested to hear about your experiences/take on this troubling/troubled tale.

And now, off to The Imaginary Invalid!

I’m really happy for Gwydion here. He’s found a situation that works for him as an artist, and I wouldn’t wish him anything differently. But as he points out so well, not every artist has the luxury of a cool company, doing work that so well complements their art.

And in the end, my own art (which, disparaging remarks about all us evil administrators aside, I can assure you is still in a state of more art than science), that of fundraising, comes down to ensuring that artists get paid a living wage or better (a concept I usually abbreviate as a living+ wage). After all, art will be created whether or not organizations exist. The bohemian lifestyle of living poor for the purity of artistic and philosophical pursuit has been immortalized by Puccini, Larson, and many others. And artists themselves make these choices for any number of reasons. Some artists don’t feel a need to pursue a professional career in the arts, rather doing it in that dreaded professional-amateur (aka “pro-am”) designation. Some folks even feel that getting paid for art cheapens it. While I find these various folks a little on the eccentric side, I respect their right to their philosophies and preferences.

But boy, does it ever make getting artists paid living+ wages difficult.

More importantly, while Gwydion certainly has found a balance that he appreciates, I am a full believer in the idea that, for most of us, a mind divided on multiple jobs cannot release the full creativity and innovation needed to make true strides in either pursuit. I know I’m a better writer on the state of arts management when I have a few hours to read, write, and edit, rather than when I’m bustling along trying to keep all my other balls in the air. My posts are better, more thought out, more entertaining, have better links and research, make more concise arguments, and might even push boundaries just a little more.

If you are a fundraiser for the arts, you must make it your job to see artists receive a living+ wage. The ones that don’t want that won’t flock to you and your organization anyways. But it becomes incumbent on the fundraisers to light the way on this important strategic goal. We must recognize, first and foremost, that our greatest asset in the arts are our people and the ideas and creativity that they bring with them.

If you and your organization aren’t committed to this ideal, then you owe it to your funders, to your audience, to your advocates to let them know that. I think the best way we can start to better get people and resources where they need to go is better transparency and better communications. There will be people that want to fund community theater or orchestra as an important neighbohood resource and part of the cultural landscape that encourages participation in the arts without making it a vocation. But as it stands, I’ve seen far too many audiences and funders that were absolutely ignorant of the situation we face in seeing our artists paid for their value. They assume we all get paid very well for their entertainment. Too often, they assume wrong.

I don’t accuse my fellow arts managers of being duplicitous by any means. But I think it does speak to the fact that we aren’t as good at communicating and taking risks off-stage as we are on-stage. It’s as if all that risk we take in art-making sucks all the risk from the rest of the organization, and so we resolve ourselves to not being able to do anything about chronically underfunded organizations, chronically un- or underpaid artists, and chronically deteriorating arts organizations that focus on the wrong investments and can’t figure out why they’re in trouble.

On January 21st of this year, my producing partners and I began previews of the first of its kind, interactive live streamed play. This was a full length production of Joey Brenneman’s Better Left Unsaid, cast with professional New York actors, staged in a small off-off broadway house in front of a live audience for a three week run. AND simultaneously Better Left Unsaid was shot with four cameras, mixed in real time and streamed live to the internet so that anyone, anywhere in the world could  see the show. The bonus for online viewers was that they could interact with the live streamed theater experience via Facebook, Twitter and chat rooms.

Producing a play is complicated. Producing a live streamed play incorporates everything it takes to produce a play and adds to that everything you need to do to produce a live television show — with the always wavering unknowns of live streaming technology thrown in to the mix. We climbed a lot of hurdles to reach opening night, almost as many to arrive at our final performance and ended our nine month journey on the highest of notes. We had over 50,000 unique viewers join us for the final three performances of Better Left Unsaid. We received virtual standing ovations from people all over the world. We proved that people will in fact pay for online video, at least if it is positioned as theater. Finally, we had the great honor, joy and sometimes nervous breakdown of launching a brand new theatrical paradigm, born of today’s technology.

Why live stream a play? Honestly there are a million reasons- the most obvious are…

- Live streaming gives theater artists the opportunity to present our work to an unlimited global audience. Today, as off-broadway and regional theaters are struggling to stay alive, the opportunity to expand our audiences beyond our local communities and across the globe could be invaluable and indispensable

-Live streaming is inherently community building. When you live stream a play you combine the excitement of live theater with the community of live streamed video events, nurturing the strong community that is the cornerstone of building a long term audience.

- Live streaming more deeply engages a wired audience in theater, without alienating theater goers who prefer the more traditional play going experience.

- Conversation goes hand in hand with online communities. People come to live streamed events to both participate in the event and to see their friends in the chat rooms, and often come back more than once. These conversations are simultaneously broadcast to Twitter and Facebook, increasing word of mouth and interest in your work.

- Live streaming platforms have a dirth of compelling quality content. Live streaming theater is a natural to fill that vacuum.

For an inaugural live streamed play, Better Left Unsaid was a perfect fit (short, two person scenes, complex but linear storytelling which would limit the technical challenges of an already very difficult project, the play’s exploration of how our lives are all connected – the perfect internet metaphor). How the project evolved from two women in a coffee shop to opening night nine months later is a story unto itself which involves a video, a Kickstarter campaign, a theater eviction, hundreds of hours or preparation, incredibly supportive families and a cast and crew of more than 25 people. I am so incredibly grateful to each and every one of them.

More pertinent perhaps to anyone who may be thinking of live streaming their own production are some of the technical challenges we faced, the stylistic choices we made and how we measured our success.

Technically, live streaming is hard. There are hundreds of individual elements that can go wrong on any given night, from mics, to cameras, to cables, to projectors to audio cues to bit rates to streaming platforms to ticketing to servers . Even when all those elements are in place and with a perfect connection sometimes the stream is jumpy, or even fails altogether. Our first weekend of previews was tricky. Slowly but surely though our stream became smoother, our sound became almost flawless, and, as our run continued, we were able to layer in additional interactive elements to our stream.

An equally challenging technical issue was how to bring our various theater, film and TV personnel together and get us all to speak the same language. An identical job title or technical term often means entirely different things in different mediums and it would sometimes take us days to realize that we were having two completely different conversations.

Shooting style is also incredibly important when translating theater to video. I have worked in online video for years and have very strong opinions as to what creates a compelling experience to an online audience. Shooting for online video is very different than shooting a film, and very different from shooting a play- which most people will agree is almost always unwatchable. We were determined that the online experience of watching Better Left Unsaid would always feel theatrical but be shot in a way that felt intimate and powerful on a small screen.

We also felt that it was integral to the audience experience that both the live theater audience and the online audience be aware of one another and of the global event that they were each a part of. Â So, we had a Director of Digital whose sole purpose was to facilitate communication both online and in the theater, we began every show with a shot of our live audience, streamed live interviews with our theater audience during intermission, and projected comments from our online audience into the theater during scene changes and intermissions. It was thrilling to hear our theater audience exclaim about a comment from a viewer in Barcelona or Australia, and equally thrilling when someone online twittered that they had just seen a friend or family member on their computer screen.

A few weeks ago Josh Cohen in an interview for Tubefilter asked me how I would evaluate whether we were successful. There are so many ways in which I can say unequivocally yes!

-We succeeded in engaging viewers from all over the world in New York theater.

- 50,000 is a pretty exciting number and paves the way for a viable business model.

- Our chat rooms were booming and many viewers came back to see the show and participate in the chat room for a second, even a third time

- Online viewers repeatedly remarked on how riveted they were and how surprised they were by how well we had translated theater to video

- We proved that people will pay for online video if it is positioned as theater, and will pay higher ticket prices than we had expected.

- We were able to produce Better Left Unsaid on half the budget of a New York Showcase, and paid our actors- a small amount- but we paid them! In addition our actors and crew each own a piece of the show, indie film style, so if we make additional money, so do they.

Most importantly, we created a whole new idea of what theater can be, and it is just the start. The possibilities of live theater and streaming are endless, from allowing your audience to dictate plot turns, to shooting different scenes in different locations, to expanding the theatrical experience across multiple interactive platforms, the list is endless (Leigh Hile started her own fantastic list in her post — Connectivity and Possibilities)

I know we are on to something here and I can’t wait to see where it leads. Is live streaming a replacement for live theater? Absolutely not. But it is a wonderful AND. The opportunities for small theaters to expand their audiences and generate new revenue is almost boundless. The chance to create more work and more money for actors is equally thrilling- and we get to invent a whole new art form along the way. Perhaps one day live streaming theater will even have a name all of its own, but no matter what we one day call it, it’s roots are unequivocally deeply embedded in the soil of live theater.

The final saturday night performance of Better Left Unsaid is currently available at at BetterLeftUnsaid.tv for a micropayment of $2.99.
Kathryn and her partners are currently developing their next live streamed project.

The New York critics have weighed in, so what’s left?

What I haven’t heard mentioned in articles and reviews about Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark is that, in 2011, for a mega-musical of this kind, Broadway is just an out-of-town tryout. Instead, the producers’ goal is to have a show that will eventually be up and running in a few dozen cities on six continents, simultaneously.

$65 million investment? As of July 2010, according to this article by Ellen Gamerman, the Lion King has earned $2.2 billion worldwide. According to the same article, citing Disney, 10% of the Dutch population saw Tarzan, in a production there. Prior to that, it ran on Broadway for 35 previews and 486 performances and closed due to poor ticket sales. A flop? According to Wikipedia, the show is still running in Hamburg, thanks in part to the leads being cast from a reality TV show, “Ich Tarzan, Du Jane.”

More than in most fields, for us theatermakers it is easy to ignore how quickly the world is changing. It is easy to forget about India, China, Japan, Russia. We work in one room at a time, one space, often in one language, and the audience is either there in that room, in that city and country, or they’re somewhere else.

It would be perilous for any corporation, thinker, artist, or economist to see New York City as the center of the world anymore. I am surprised that we have been doing so with this show. We are just the tryout. I don’t know if it will be a success in the long run (I trust Ada Grey’s review)–but, as with recent events in Egypt, if we think these previews have much to do with us Americans, we are ignoring the rest of the world, the true audience for which, especially at this point, the producers and artists are building the show.

As someone in the process of starting my own theater company, I was predisposed to take issue with Rebecca Novick’s post. It ended up upsetting me less than I predicted, but I maintain what I predicted my position would be: I’m starting my theater company, damn it.

Not that I have a choice. Directors, designers, and other staff are already on board; we’ve booked the space; things are in motion that we cannot stop. I certainly wouldn’t pause those things based on advice from a blog post. But even if none of that were the case, my resolve to do this is not affected; if anything, it’s been made stronger.

This post is a bit overdue, actually; I told myself (and David Loehr) that I would be blogging on here about the process of starting a theater company from the beginning. It turns out that a) I was too busy starting the theater company to write about starting it, and b) producing a play (or two in rep, as is the case with us) isn’t THAT much different when you’re a brand-new Off-Off Broadway company than it is for an existing Off-Off Broadway company. Sure, we have to worry about things like designing websites and getting EIN’s and developing an audience base from “scratch.” But the website is a WordPress theme, the EIN is a brief phone call, and what theater company–especially OOBies like us–isn’t STILL trying to further develop their audience base?

All of which is to say: you haven’t been missing much. If you’ve ever been involved with the process of producing a play on a shoestring budget, then you have a rough idea of what I’ve been up to. So I won’t bore you with that. What I will talk about is why we started the theater company in the first place.

Rebecca says:

“So many beginning artists find that the only way to get their work into the world is to start a theater company, and almost as many mid-career artists continue to run their own companies because there’s no other way to have the artistic freedom they want.  But in many if not most cases, these companies struggle financially, don’t pay living wages to artists or the founders, and divert energy from the true project of making the most extraordinary art you can.”

Getting your work into the world, having artistic freedom…yes, these are the reasons we started this theater company. But as far as struggling financially, or not paying living wages to the artists…how is that different from most theater companies? Yes, perhaps this feeds right into the “there are too many theater companies” argument, but the theater companies that aren’t paying artists a living wage now are certainly not going to start doing so just because I don’t start my own company. If anything, I’m happy to be able to put worthy artists to work. Sure, I can’t pay them as much as they’re worth (yet), but that hardly differentiates me from the vast majority of theater companies.

As for “diverting energy” from the process of making art: that’s true. I haven’t been writing much the past few months. But you know what else diverts energy from making art? Writing endless cover letters explaining why you want/need this fellowship or this production or this writers’ group, tailored to each organization, with mentions of their mission statement and the plays of theirs that you loved and why you’re a good fit and etc. And the majority–the vast majority, in fact–of those cover letters will come to naught. Even if you’re brilliant.

But the energy I’m devoting to my own theater company has immediate results. I’m not waiting for someone to fall in love with my plays–or for the people who ARE in love with my plays to do them. I’m taking my career into my own hands, not praying that THIS is the application to the Public’s Emerging Writers Group that will really knock their socks off. And, therefore, the work gets me jazzed and happy, rather than feeling like a chore or an exercise in forced optimism.

Rebecca goes on:

“If you’re a theater artist thinking of starting a company, or taking your project down the 501 (c) (3) path then I urge you to stop and consider alternatives.  Ask yourself whether this is primarily a way to meet your own artistic or career needs. If so, then give yourself a time period in which you will devote at least at much energy to advancing your career in other ways as you were going to spend reading that Nolo Press book on how to incorporate.  Make meetings with larger theaters to see if you can join forces, try to see if you can connect with someone else with a space, an audience, some kind of demand that you can supply.  Think hard about whether running an organization will give you more or less time to pursue your art.”

Yes, this IS a way to meet our own artistic and career needs, and we really think it’s the best way right now. Meeting with larger theaters, trying to connect with people with spaces and audiences–in other words, trying to convince the gatekeepers of Power/Resources that it’s worth it to share those things with you–these are all activities that may or may not come to fruition (and, who needs to read a book on how to incorporate when there’s Fractured Atlas?). But the chances of getting our plays produced, if we produce them ourselves, are 100%.

A one hundred percent chance of production. That’s worth the time and energy, to me. Plus, I like it. As much as it stresses me out, I like planning fundraisers. I like casting. I like marketing. I like that this whole thing is one big excuse for me to reach out to artists whose work I love and say, “I love you, let’s join forces.” Not everyone likes it as much as I do. That’s fine. They maybe shouldn’t start theater companies. I like it, so I’m gonna.

“Think about whether running an organization will give you more or less time to pursue your art.” Less, certainly. But what is the point of creating art that stays on my hard drive?

I’d rather beg someone to come to my play than beg someone to DO my play. I’d rather spend my time making a production happen on my own terms than pray that someone else will do so. This has nothing to do with my confidence in the quality of my work. My plays are awesome–ask anyone who’s seen them. And I feel certain that, if I spent as much time applying to things as I spend on my theater company, something WOULD come of it–it’s happened before, after all–and I know the same is true of my partner.

But here’s the thing… I will NEVER spend as much time applying to things as I’m spending on Purple Rep. The time I spend on Purple Rep has immediate results, it’s gratifying, it’s need-based (as in, I NEED to write this marketing blurb today or the postcards won’t be done in time for our fundraiser), so I actually put in the hours. When I have all the time in the world to apply to things, I don’t put in the hours. This is probably a character flaw, but better to acknowledge it and work around it than promise to change and then guilt trip myself for not doing so.

I happen to agree with a lot of Rebecca’s post. For instance, her advice for established companies:

“[M]ake sure that you’re offering real artistic opportunities to your junior artistic staff and take a hard look at your hiring practices to see if you’re succeeding at bringing in the next generation of artists.” – Amen, a thousand times amen.

And for funders:

“Start funding projects with fiscal sponsors and try your best to get money directly in the hands of artists.  Stop advising every arts organization to meet some cookie-cutter set of best practices before they have enough “organizational capacity” to receive funding.  And please stop demanding that every organization have a plan to exist in perpetuity.”

Again, amen.

But as for the notion that I still need to keep going through established channels because we as a sector are overbuilt…no, I don’t accept that. Because as Rebecca herself points out, we are NOT overbuilt when it comes to artists. Starting my own theater company gives voice to artists, period. Maybe we won’t last. That’s OK  with us. In the meantime, our work will go up, it will be seen, it will stop sitting on our hard drives. And then if the time comes to disband Purple Rep, we’ll have a formidable production history to our names, rather than a series of excellently written cover letters that came to naught.