First, what are QR codes? QR = Quick Response. They are square bar codes packed with more dense information than the traditional bar code you recognize, and are most often linked to a website. If you have a barcode scanner app installed on your smartphone, with the click of your camera, these codes will automatically open your web browser to the linked website. Still confused?

Take a picture of this code with a QR reader app on your mobile phone, and it will lead you back to the 2amt front page on your phone. Go ahead, try it. We’ll wait.

They’ve been in use in Japan for more than a decade, but have only recently gained steam stateside. A few weeks ago, Devon spotted one on the N train in NYC on a poster for the Freelancer’s Union.

In theory, a QR code saves you time from having to type in the numbers and letters of a website address. As we spend more of our time glued to mobile phones (with sometimes difficult to maneuver keyboard touch screens), this is no small feat. It also provides a bit more mystery for the user. If I can read your website address, I probably have a pretty good idea about the content I’m going to find there. If your website is called www.goodbooks.com, I don’t expect to find a video of a lion or a discount ticket to the Lion King there. If instead I’m taking a photo of a square with a bunch of black dots, I have absolutely no idea what kind of website is going to appear in my browser. This sense of secrecy can be a valuable motivator for action.

Why should an organization use this?

If you plaster a QR code on a bus shelter poster, a magazine ad, or a post card, and provide the user with something useful, say a discounted ticket or a secret behind-the-scenes video, on a unique landing page, you can exactly track its impact.

(You know those annoying freescore.com commercials with Ben Stein? Yes, they use different URLS on different stations and different times. For example, freescore20.com. That’s just another way of them tracking which commercials are making the most impact. Let’s say freescore20.com might have gotten a lot of traffic, but freescore30.com had more conversions.)

Why should a patron scan this?

Mashable agreeably writes that one of the most important questions is “why should I scan this?”

And they’re right. Why should you? If it’s just to get a link to your homepage, why should they fire up an app rather than typing in www.abctheater.org. The challenge is to make the QR code worth the five-second-firing-up-the-scanner-app effort. You have to provide the scanner with something unique. Something worthwhile.

So how are people using them?

• At conferences, instead of handing out business cards, snap a pic of someone’s name badge for all of their key details, all conveniently imported directly to your address book.
• At museums, libraries, and grocery stores, to provide more in-depth coverage of many different items, all in close proximity.
• On bus stops, when you routinely need time-dependent information. Or on pieces of mail, when you routinely need location-dependent information.
• On billboards or TV commercials when you might have only a few seconds to grab the information.
• On posters, to simplify the “click stream” of the information you’re trying to find (compare the ease of snapping a photo, with the complex instructions on the right)
• To highlight the history of a particular object or location
• On signage, to be language-agnostic/foreigner-friendly
• On buildings and real estate signs, for more information about the property
• As art (via graffiti, gardening, and yes Travis, even cupcakes)

And, scavenger hunting

Try this code. It will lead you back to Talkbackr.com on your phone. You can create a custom QR code for your event pages at Talkbackr now.

Back in January, Devon wrote a post on a Foursquare scavenger hunt. Unlock enough badges themed to a production and users win free tickets to a show.  Foursquare just hit 100 million check-ins. Location-based apps are getting big. And QR codes can and will play into this trend.

A couple of months after Devon’s post, Marc commented on the site: “what if we can combine this Foursquare scavenger hunt with QR codes? Make it some kind of ‘National Treasure’ or ‘Amazing Race’ type of deal. Hide some QR code in locations where people need to check in with Foursquare. Each QR code then has a clue for the next location. The last location could hold some final clue that you need to text or call in to receive some kind of major prize…”

Now, The Boston Globe and the Smithsonian Institution have already built scavenger hunts. They used a new app on the scene, SCVNGR. Where the simplicity of Foursquare is just checking in to a location, SCVNGR allows you to instigate challenges, do an activity, solve a riddle, or, as you guessed it, scan a QR code.  SCVNGR encourages you to build your own “treks.” The app is free, so anyone with an iPhone or Android-powered phone (2.1 and above) can participate. They offer a handy style guide to building a trek.

Although you can have your scavenger hunters follow a particular path and order, realize that all locations are known in advance. At each location, the hunters will do a task: answer a quiz question, scan a QR code, take a photo, you name it. Each completed task comes with points, and people can compete with their friends.

Think of a collaborative Chicago storefront theater scavenger hunt, perhaps sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, or an Austin theater/ bike scavenger hunt sponsored by the Bicycle Sport Shop. Rather than one organization trying to pull this off, reach out to your entire network for support. Consider weaving the story of your production into the story of the hunt.

The Logistics of QR codes

You’re going to need to create the QR code:

• Kaywa is dead simple
• Goog.le allows you append .qr to any Google short link
• Stickybits, while still a traditional barcode, simplifies the process to a $10 book of stickers

Then you need to be able to “read” the QR code:

• Most Android and Blackberry phones have the functionality built in
• Popular apps for iPhone users are i-nigma and QuickMark

And you’ll want to consider the type of content you’re encoding. There’s a limit to the number of characters or bits per square inch of QR code, but could include a URL (and therefore any manner of multi-media posted online), email address, telephone number, vCard contact information, geo-tag coordinates, iCal invitation, or just about anything else you could capture in under roughly 5,000 alpha-numeric characters—even the text to a postcard play.

More mobile marketing

Augmented Reality apps offer another innovative approach to mobile marketing.

One well-known app is Layar. Here’s a great video of augmented reality at a music festival. Marc would love to see the Chicago History Museum recreate the Columbian Exposition in augmented reality… imagine staring through your phone at the White City, circa 1900!

Google Goggles is another AR app. It’s basically visual search; take a photo with your camera and Google does a search for it, whether it be a product, logo, landmark, or building.

The Future of QR Codes

Don’t get us wrong, QR codes are not mainstream. But now that you know what they are, you’ll likely start to notice them in your neighborhood. QR codes are a high tech bit of gadgetry with a very low cost of implementation. While they currently appeal to a small subset of the population, it’s not hard to imagine that five years from now they will be embedded in our daily life. Why bother with all that typing when all you have to do is snap a photo. Why not append digital information to a physical object. Why not impress your audience with a bit of futuristic wizardry.

What if, in other words, artistic directors had to choose plays without knowing the names of the people who’d written them – or their genders, their ages, their races, or whether they had  MFAs or not (let alone where those MFAs were earned)?

Whose plays would get produced?

Before you answer, let me paraphrase a story from Malcolm Gladwell’s very compelling and much-discussed book Blink.

For many years, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra was a no-girls-allowed he-man club. They literally didn’t have even a single female musician. In fact, they didn’t even audition female performers out of a misinformed belief that men were – get this – inherently better musicians: a belief that, sadly, used to be prevalent at orchestras around the world.

One day, however, they accidentally invited a woman named Abbie Conant to audition. It was a clerical error that quickly got out of hand.

As it happened, because one of the other candidates they were auditioning was a relative of the conductor, they seated each performer behind a screen so that nobody knew who was who – which meant, of course, that nobody knew Abbie was a woman when she did her thing.

Her audition was a rousing success – so much so that the evidently-misogynist conductor, upon hearing her play, cancelled the remaining auditions: “That’s it,” he announced very loudly, “We have found our new orchestra member.  Send everyone else home.”

The resulting conflict – which took years and untold legal fees to resolve – completely transformed not only the Munich Philharmonic, but the entire classical music sphere. More and more, orchestras began to adopt the behind-a-screen audition process, and in short order – a couple of decades – every orchestra who used it became gender-balanced. The “men are better musicians” theory was dead.

So… back to plays and playwrights.

A great deal of attention has been paid of late – and rightfully so – to the fact that plays by men vastly outnumber plays by women on Broadway (and elsewhere). What do you think would happen to that balance if scripts were always considered without names attached to them?

The question could be asked about ethnicity as well, couldn’t it? And maybe even age? Or how about city of residence? What if an artistic director had no idea whether a particular playwright lived in New York or in Hays, Kansas?

Thanks to Outrageous Fortune, we learned about a significant bias toward the work of playwrights who have emerged from a small subset of the country’s MFA programs. Do you think their work would be produced as often as it is if it had to be submitted blindly?

I suspect, without knowing for sure, that things would change significantly… and for the better. Work would be judged on its own merits. More stories by women playwrights and playwrights of color would enter our national dialogue, which would be an immeasurable gain. Playwrights would make different decisions about which MFA programs to enter – and whether to enter them at all.

So why doesn’t every theater start doing this right now? What are they afraid of? Are there case studies from theaters that have tried blind submissions that would illustrate how they worked? Are there any problems that need to be considered?

Why shouldn’t we transform our industry, the way the world’s orchestras seem to have transformed theirs? What are we waiting for?

Kris Vire, theatre editor at Time Out Chicago, is the moderator. The panel includes Bilal Dardai of The Neo-Futurists and New Leaf Theatre; Eric Ziegenhagen playwright, director, consultant to the Richard Driehaus Foundation; Rebecca Zellar, artistic director of the GreyZelda Theatre Company and David J. Loehr, artist-in-residence and co-producer with the Riverrun Theatre Company and editor of 2amt.

And if you happen to be in Chicago, come on down. It’s at the Edinburgh Stage, 2003 S. Halsted, which is also home to the Fringe HQ and box office. The event is free to the public and even includes a light brunch.

Here’s the official description of our panel discussion:

What is 2amt? Thinking outside the black box. It began as a conversation online that grew to include theatre artists, companies and patrons from around the world. It’s a hashtag on Twitter: #2amt. It’s a website: 2amtheatre.com. And it’s growing into so much more…

That’s great, but what is 2amt in practice? It’s a place to ask questions, share ideas, preach to the choir. Better yet, it’s a place to find other choirs you didn’t even know about. It’s a conversation that’s been described as “the verbal equivalent of Red Bull on crack.” It’s a jumper cable for your creative side. 2amt encourages communication, cooperation and collaboration.

And now, you get to see it in action, in person, live and in 3-D. No glasses required.

Find out how 2amt works and why you should join the conversation.

Be there, aloha.

I propose you harness that same Box Office power. I’m not saying it’ll be easy. I’m not saying it’ll be quick. I’m not saying that I’ve done this yet. But right now, it’s what I’m working on with my meager resources, and you don’t need much to get started.

And no, I’m not saying go out and drop a bunch on money on popular IP and create a derivative play. Most of us can’t afford that and aren’t interested even if we could. This is good. This is where we start.

We start with a blank slate.

I’m talking about new work here. Let’s create a world. From Scratch. Let the play be one piece of the world you develop. Let your imagination run wild and take your time. Our goal is to build a world. As you’re developing the characters, the world and the plot. Experiment with small self contained snippets of content. Polish things that work during play development and put the output on a schedule. Start telling the story. You don’t need money. You aren’t mounting a full production. Not yet. You’re creating the small pieces of the puzzle that will become the world your play inhabits. Now share those pieces. Post your short stories on a blog. Create short character sketches in video form. Start sharing them on YouTube. TELL A STORY. Tell it as you create it. Share your passion for the work you’re making. And of course, target that content, get it out to as many people as possible.

Once you’ve got an online audience base and you’re getting close to actual rehearsal and production time, maybe you want to run an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) to get those interested really invested. Get them invested and make them your advocates. Those who are invested in your world will crave deeper immersion, and now your show is the ultimate pay-off to the journey you’ve been taking them on already.

By intelligently, and creatively sharing your process, you’ve now created a good piece of IP. There is now an audience out there who will talk about the opportunity to reach out and touch your world, to share a space with you and your actors. Yeah, maybe your brand recognition’s no Spider-Man, but your piece is no longer just another play. There’s some name recognition. And better yet, this process means you’ve fleshed out a full, immersive world and set your new play up for success. Not only locally, but potentially globally. (You’re getting 1000s of hits from Paris, Texas or Limerick, Ireland? Maybe it’s worth a trip!)

So here’s my proposal. Don’t just write/produce/devise a new play. Build a new world and loose it upon ours. Do it incrementally and make the live performance your premium content. Build a world and invite others in. I don’t have the hard proof yet, but I guarantee it.

Build It, and They WILL Come.

We might be a little light on descriptions this week as we’re in Chicago for the Fringe, with both a production and a 2amt panel, about which more in a minute…

Howard Shapiro on what’s brewing
At 2amt, we’ve been developing a plan (which we introduced in public at the Chicago Theatre (anti-) Conference) for a model theatre space, an affordable and simple plan for communities and theatre companies everywhere. The Philadelphia Live Arts Festival and Fringe has come up with something along these lines, the Live Arts Brewery, which will remain in place after the festival.

Megan Berry on your twitter strategy
Are you tweeting about your lunch? Do you reply to people? Are you just talking about sales and deals? Do you advertise your theatre production in conversations where it won’t have any impact? Maybe you should rethink your Twitter strategy. Here are 10 simple signs that you might be doing it wrong.

Emily Molitor on getting aggressive with passives
It’s hard to know who’s actually paying attention to your marketing. You can stick posters around town, put postcards in every cafe and bookstore, you can plant your online flags in the social media, but how do you know that anyone’s watching? Yes, we takl a lot about interacting with your online patrons, but what if they don’t interact? Check out this report, which points out that the majority of people checking you online are simply watching. Can you build a community from these users? What do you think we’re going to say…

Paul Botts on firm foundations
We’re into lists today. Here are ten common mistakes arts groups make when seeking grants. You might think they’re common sense, you might think they’re obvious, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to fall into some of these traps.

Rocco Landesman on the spot
In an interview with Mary Abbe, Rocco Landesman talks about his work at the NEA, how theatre initiatives are working (or not) and his whirlwind tour of the Minneapolis-St. Paul arts scene.

Anne Bogart is firing my neurons
“In the theater when fully engaged, the audience is not passively watching what is happening, rather is active, neurons firing.” This should be obvious–this should be the kind of engagement we strive for in every performance–but Anne Bogart takes us deeper, showing us how the neurons fire and how mirror neurons react to what we observe.

Katya Andresen on the same old same old
Older donors give more. So should we stick to the tried and true, the same old fundraising tricks and events? Not necessarily…

Peter Panepento on the new old new old
Speaking of which, social media usage is growing, and the largest growth has been in people ages 50 and up. The curve is even more dramatic in those 65 and up. What does this mean to us? It means that we can still keep the focus on donors that tend to give more AND continue to use social media in new ways to reach them. That’s called having your cake and eating it, too, even if you have to run a Kickstarter campaign to get the cake in the first place.

Paul Bignell and Matthew Bell on the oldest spoiler alert
Wikipedia has let out the secret ending of Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap,” the longest running play in history. Sure, the play’s been running forever, but there are people who still haven’t seen it. (There are people who think the mousetrap was really his childhood sled.) Should Wikipedia delete that part of the entry, or should it stand?

2amt on the stage in Chicago
And just in case you missed the link on the front page, we’ll be streaming our “2amt in the 3rd Dimension” talk live from the Chicago Fringe Festival tomorrow morning, 11:30 am et, 10:30 ct, thanks to the #newplay channel at Arena Stage. Be there, aloha.

Perhaps I am a mis-creation
No one knows the truth there is no future here
And you’re the DJ speaks to my insomnia
And laughs at all I have to fear
Laughs at all I have to fear
You always play the madmen poets
Vinyl vision grungy bands
You never know who’s still awake
You never know who understands

-Dar Williams “Are You Out There?”

There was a pointed question at the #2amt session at the Chicago Theatre (anti) Conference last week as to what quantifiable things have come out of this tempest in a teapot. A fair question (if early for our 7 months) but lord knows that’s not my goal. The relationships here are my ROI and whatever I am able to create though those relationships are net profit.

But in truth there is something measureable in those relationships. There is a tangible vibration of agreement through the differences that delineate our experience, and a willingness to reach out a hand and help other members of this tribe wherever they are because we understand that somehow we are linked. It is that vibration that frees me to whisper my dreams and wonder if there isn’t a way to make them real. (If I could find the spot where truth echoes. I would stand there and whisper memories of my children’s future.) I have long had a desire to see the theatre education model in the United States reformed and I think that we can offer some help with that in our own little way. I want to start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…

We know in our bones that there is something about the way we educate our future theatremakers that is out of step with the way theatre is made. Those of us outside the Educational Infrastructure have little power to change that. What we can do is speak the truth about the world outside of academia and seek to offer “continuing education” to any who want to listen.

My theme for the day?

The enforced separation of specialized “technical” and ”artistic” students from the beginning of their education creates artificial boundaries between disciplines and shorts future theatremakers and the field the creativity that comes from fully empowered creators who later specialize in an area of their choice. In my Utopian ideal I want my designers to speak the same language as directors. I want my electricians and carpenters to be as widely read as my actors. There of course needs to be eventual specialized education but we branch too early (in the curricula I have been exposed to) and there ends up being an artificial (and unnecessarily acrimonious) separation between “artistic” and “production” staffs.

To those of you still in school, here are five books that some #2amt folks felt were essential theatre theory books. Keep an eye on the comments section as well because they’re going to add more.

[note: these are not affiliate links,
if you have the funds please support a local theatre/arts bookstore]

The Empty Space: A Book About the Theatre: Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate

Peter Brook
This selection was almost unanimous. It isn’t a guide book so much as a exhortation toward something more. It’s a surprisingly quick read even on top of your already burdensome course load.

Yet when we talk about theatre this is not quite what we mean. Red curtains, spotlights, blank verse, laughter, darkness, these are all confusedly superimposed in a messy image covered by one all-purpose word. We talk of the cinema killing the theatre, and in that phrase we refer to the theatre as it was when the cinema was born, a theatre of box office, foyer, tip-up seats, footlights, scene changes, intervals, music, as though the theatre was by very definition these and little more.

The Dramatic Imagination: Reflections and Speculations on the Art of the Theatre, Reissue

Robert Edmund Jones didn’t “invent” modern set design but he sure did evangelize it. Brilliance associated with brilliance amplifies any message. A member of the Provincetown Players and collaborator with O’Neil, his thoughts ranged far beyond set design and are useful to any theatremaker. (and what state was he from?)

As we work we must seek not for self-expression or for performance for its own sake, but only to establish the dramatist’s intention, knowing that when we have succeeded in doing so audiences will say to themselves, not, This is beautiful, This is charming, This is splendid, but–This is true.

Backwards & Forwards: A Technical Manual for Reading Plays

David Ball created a handy technical guide to give you a method for working through all the plays we’re going to recommend for you in the future, It’s not as revolutionary as those first two, but reading a whole mess of plays will go down easier if you have a framework for analyzing them.

Towards a Poor Theatre

Jerzy Grotowski is the least universal of these five. Towards a Poor Theatre is circuitous and poetic in it’s exploration of what exactly constitutes the raw unaltered state of “Theatre” and “Acting”. There are lots of things about his discussion of a Poor Theatre that will frustrate a designer, but I think there is immense value in examining the necessary roots of the theatrical form (especially in reaction to the screen) before we flesh out its bones.

I am a bit impatient when asked, ”’What is the origin of your experimental theatre productions?" The assumption seems to be that "experimental" work is tangential (toying with some "new" technique each time) and tributary. The result is supposed to be contribution to modern staging – scenography using current sculptural or electronic ideas, contemporary music, actors in- dependently projecting clownish or cabaret stereotypes. I know that scene: I used to be part of it. Our Theatre Laboratory productions are going in another direction. In the first place, we are trying to avoid eclecticism, trying to resist thinking of theatre as a composite of disciplines. We are seeking to define what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle.

History of the Theatre

Brockett and Hildy
Not the book I was taught theatre history from, but easily the most readable volume on theatre history I’ve ever touched. I’m sure you have coursework in theatre history at your revered institution, but it can’t hurt to read up a little more. It makes it considerably less tedious than your standard 8AM survey history class

I urge you to fill the comments with other books that would populate a theatre curriculum you designed. Please refrain from adding plays just yet as that’s a separate post, but what other books would you insist be read on entering college to give every student a firm hold on the vocabulary of the Theatre you would like to see built?

I also encourage you to give examples of theatre programs that you think are doing an exceptional job of broad theatrical education across disciplines. Let us know how they do it so the ever present discussion about relevant educational models can eventually be more focused.

Why do events? Events are good opportunities to get face-time with your supporters, friends, and constituents. Meaning, it’s a good time to thank them, to learn about them, to deepen their desire to support. And benefit events are also about asking these people for money. But, remember, you can ask people for money in a variety of other ways so why do an event? Keep in mind what makes an event different from a letter or phone call or post-show drink.

There are 3 main types of events: Fundraisers, Benefit/Galas, and Cultivation Soirees.

Fundraisers: akin to bar or house parties.
Bar parties often have smaller budgets than benefits and are”easier” to put together. If you do a bar party, make it more profitable with a small silent auction, a 50/50 or other raffle, contests, games, or any other ingenious idea you come up with.
House parties are hosted, targeted gatherings where guests are asked in a very personal manner for their partnership. This is often used for special initiatives or donors who can make a significant contribution. Though, a MAJOR donor should be taken to dinner or something more personal.

Benefits. Galas. Benefit Galas. Whatever you want to call them, these are once per year major events many organizations do. The budgets for these are often bigger. They show off what your company is made of. A good benefit takes 6 months to a year of planning. They are usually organized around a central annual theme or show. There’s often a live and silent auction, raffle, entertainment, music, drinks, food.

Cultivation Soirees: These are thank you events. They are meant to cultivate future support by recognizing and rewarding the present donors for their partnership. Most theaters like to connect these to their art and will use open rehearsals, tech rehearsals, first rehearsals, opening nights, or readings as the anchor.

Here are my insights.

1. Theaters do lots of events and they and their donors can easily burn out. So, be very choosy about what you do. And know, every show is effectively an event so tie your goals into them if you can. That’s why theater is different than other organizations. Maybe you have a benefit show w/ post-show party instead of planning a whole separate event.
2. Do what’s right for your organization. And maximize your resources. If a benefit seems like too much, don’t do it. If you can raise what you need to in something less formal or that only requires some wine and cheese, do it.
3. HAVE FUN! Events should be a good time for everyone involved.
4. Themes that can be repackaged every year tend to make the planning process easier.
5. Awards. Honor someone. Hopefully it’s someone who matters in your community or to the success of your org.
6. It does not matter how awesome your event is. If no one comes, it’s a waste of time and resources and can easily dash your hopes. So, I recommend taking a different approach to the process…

PLANNING A WELL-ATTENDED EVENT

Most people start planning an event by talking about the theme, the food, the venue, the format, the invitations, the auction, etc. All great things. But, I say, talk first about your goal, the date, and who you want to attend.

After picking the date, set your goal for how many people you want there (be reasonable). Then, get half of those people committed to attending up front. Have everyone in your org or involved on the event committee make a list of 10 people they want to invite (this number will change based on your size and goal). Then do the following:

* Call that person. Tell him/her an organization close to your heart is having an event (insert date) and you’d like them to put it on their calendar and attend. Ask them if that seems plausible. They are going to know what it costs. Tell them.
* You want them to purchase their ticket ahead of time and need to reward them for doing so. Here are 2 options: either buy the tickets at full price and get 2 more to give to friends they think would enjoy learning more about the org (this will not cost the company money, but rather include 2 more bodies that can enhance the event) or purchase 2 discounted tickets and call it a day. Recognize that you are asking them to plan WAY ahead, so they will have up until 2 weeks before the event to cancel if they need to. Assure them they will receive reminder emails beforehand.
* Ask them how they would like to pay – send in a check or do it online.
* Send a follow-up email with the link or to whom and where to send the check
* If they haven’t purchased in 7 days online or we haven’t received a check in 10, follow-up with them. Once payment is received, send a confirmation email.
* Add them to a special email list that updates them on the event happenings. In the first, thank them and ask them something about themselves, like what their favorite part of going to an event is or if they’d like to get more involved in planning. You can incorporate some of their ideas into the planning.

You can of course invite more later. But to have direct confirmation of at least half of the desired number of attendees before you even start planning would be a real boon to the event. A few other things would happen:

-Buzz would start building EARLY
-It would inspire the planning committee
-You would be more likely to reach your goal or even surpass it, making all the blood, sweat and tears well worth it.
-The planning committee and Board and other key constituents would not get so caught up in making things happen the last six weeks that getting attendee commitments becomes the last thing on their lists.
-Save money on paper invitations
-If someone is committed well in advance and you get them excited leading up to the event, they are more likely to attend.

That’s what I know. We are going to try this for an event I am helping plan at American Blues Theatre. I’ll let you know how it goes. And if you try it at home, please tell me about your experience.

2amtheatre Talk at Chicago Theatre (anti) Conference from KBH Media on Vimeo.

It’s a fun talk (as I recall) and should whet your appetite for this weekend’s 2amt in the 3rd Dimension talk from the Chicago Fringe Festival, which we’ll be streaming live…

The Audience on your next project
Looking for feedback? Here’s an application and website developed directly from conversations on the #2amt stream on Twitter this week. Talkbackr, designed by Brian Seitel. Check out the first actual Talkbackr review from Kate Foy. We’ll be posting the full story behind the program’s development very soon.

Kyle Cassidy on printer malfunctions
What do you do when your printing company decides they don’t want to print your promotional materials? Photographer Kyle Cassidy created a series of photos to promote the upcoming production of Cabaret at A.R.T. in Boston, featuring Amanda Palmer. (In case you forgot, we love Amanda Palmer.) Click through to find out what happened when the production’s program got to the printer.

Kris Vire on what you’re doing next weekend
Chicago gets its very own Fringe festival next week, and Kris Vire of Time Out Chicago gives us a preview. Part of the festival includes a special panel discussion about 2amt featuring myself, Eric Ziegenhagen, Bilal Dardai and Rebecca Zellar, moderated by Kris. It’s free to the public at the Edinburgh Stage at the Fringe HQ, 2003 S. Halsted, over in the Pilsen neighborhood, Saturday, Sept 4th, from 10:30am to 12pm, now complete with free light brunch. Looking for more about the Chicago Fringe? Check out how the festival came to be from the Chicago Reader.

Karen Greco on greatly exaggerating
What’s the easiest way to get attention? Magazines know. Look at this month’s Wired cover above. (Quick question. Where are you reading this? Well played, magazine, well played.) So when you advertise a live performance with the phrase “live performance is a dying art,” aren’t you being a little disingenuous? Karen Greco wonders aloud about the rumors of its death and whether or not this kind of exaggeration is a good idea or not.

John Paul Titlow takes us to Flowtown
When Devon Smith points out a trend or an article, I pay attention. (And so should you.) When she cries, whoa, full stop, read this now, I listen. This is what we’re reading this morning. Flowtown imports your email list and breaks it down by users’ social media usage and profiles. What do you think about that?

Adam Thurman on the $600 question
Since everyone keeps bringing up the question of how to market their work with what they don’t have, why not take a deep breath, shut the hell up and read Adam Thurman’s post on why you should concentrate on what you do have. Thing number one: creativity. If you don’t have that, you might just want to go home.

Erica Orden on making an impact
An opera lover and trustee with the Metropolitan Opera has designed a new, weekend rush ticket offer and, in the process, becomes a lovely model for modern philanthropy. Why? Because she felt that offering lower priced tickets and building younger, newer audiences was more important than buying the naming rights of a performance space. Brava!

Gus Schulenberg on reading your compass
One of the most thoughtful theatre bloggers out there, Gus steps back and takes a wider view. Are we a mirror of the world as we see it? Or are we a hammer to help shape and temper it? Are we as an art form pointing in the right direction? He’s not so sure.

Jason Zinoman on the defanged fringe
Instant recipe for a molotov cocktail. Call shenanigans and say that a fringe festival is mediocre. (That or ask whether you should spell it “theatre” or “theater.” Feh.) Jason Zinoman doesn’t ask whether or not the New York City Fringe is mediocre, he starts from that premise and goes forward. But before you get all hot and bothered–I can hear you breathing out there–put the bottles and the lighters down and check out RVC Bard with maybe a broader view of the NYC Fringe.

Erick Schonfeld on gaming SCVNGR
Over on the twitter stream, you may have heard some of us talking about a mobile app and game called SCVNGR. Some of us are beginning to use it to create experiences for our audiences, sort of a loose scavenger hunt with smaller games and tasks at various locations in and around our communities. Draw your patrons into your sponsors’ businesses, get them to collect items or cards, perform tasks or games, reward them with points or tickets or what have you. Have them send photos or video of themselves performing the tasks, build your community between theatre, patrons and sponsors. Sound daunting? Read this article and see how simple it can be.

Ken Davenport takes the prize
Better yet, Ken gets a cape and we all win. Yes, theatre can and should be a thrill ride. That’s the easy analogy. So Ken steps back and finds six other things to learn from a trip to Six Flags. How can we engage our audiences, entertain them and continue to entertain them inside and outside the theatre itself? Broadway is not a theme park, but it can be a hell of a ride. (See? Easy analogy.)

Hugh Hart on the Klingon original
A group of science fiction fans at the Zeebelt Theatre are going to stage the first original Klingon opera in the Netherlands next month. (Link is in Dutch. Google Chrome can translate it for you.) Good idea? Crazy idea? Does it matter? Is it fun? Most likely. Does it speak to an audience that wants it? Apparently. At least it’s not the Klingon Hamlet.

Lois Dawson on the apparent existence of cupcakes
If you’ve followed the #2amt tag over on Twitter for any length of time, you’ve probably seen a lot of references to cupcakes. What does that have to do with theatre? Nothing. But we do love cupcakes. Got a problem with that? (Well, okay, Travis Bedard does not believe cupcakes exist. He might be right.) This week, Lois Dawson travels to Havana by way of Damon Runyon and Frank Loesser to discover an original, the Rum Soaked Vanilla with Dulce de Leche Cupcake. Or individual serving of cake, pace Bedard.

It’s a rare luxury because of the one thing that particular theatre has that most small companies don’t: the budget allowance for three skilled technicians to devote three days to cleaning and maintenance.  It’s a beautiful space, too–the kind of space where a theatre artist who works out of storefronts and basements could easily look around and think, “Well sure, that’s alright for them, but we don’t even have gear that’s worth maintaining!”

That’s where I’ve got to speak up.  As a freelance designer and technician, I’ve fought my way through piles of broken, rusty lighting instruments and battled consoles that required a punch in the DMX socket while holding your mouth just so before they would remember a cue.  I’ve run lights for shows while mice ran over my feet.  I’ve jury-rigged shutters and screwed instruments into the ceiling where there was no pipe any number of times–in fact, I expect to do it again later today.  If you’re reading 2AMt, you’ve probably done that kind of thing, too.  I’ve run into those situations even in theatres with nationally-recognized names.  I know it gets exhausting: the tiny storage closet where everything’s jumbled and you can’t find the hardware you need even though you know it’s in there; the ill-lit backstage corners you’re afraid to look into because you just know it’s gross.  You learn to ignore it.  That’s small-theatre life.  We can’t snap our fingers and have our ceilings rise 10 feet and pipes magically appear where we want them.  We may fill out grant applications all year and there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to trade our PAR38s for even one SourceFour.  But we don’t have to resign ourselves to crap equipment and gross spaces, either.

No, most small companies can’t afford to pay their technicians a respectable hourly rate to take apart, clean, and organize their gear.  But find some way to do it.  Can you offer a similar stipend to the one you give for a technician working a show?  Can you come up with some kind of perks to trade for their time?  You may find that you’ve got techs who will happily do it for nothing if you’ll only provide them the supplies they’ll need.

Why put in that kind of effort and money?  Because you can’t afford to buy a new lighting instrument when a stitch in time could have saved your old one.  Because of the time that can be saved troubleshooting a problem during tech because you know it isn’t a bad cable–because you know all of your cables work.  Because you’ve got pride, even though you’re small, and you want to show it to your audience.  Because you want potential donors to know that what they give will be cared for.  Because good technicians are worth their weight in gold, and you want to show them that you value what they do by making it easier for them to do it.  Because you want those technicians to be personally invested in your space and your equipment and your shows.

Cultivate pride in your space and equipment, humble though it may be.  It’s an investment that will pay off in more ways than just the peace of mind of knowing your lights will turn on when you need them.

They each started with three bullet points, which quickly intersected, split and fissioned into a multi-dimensional Venn diagram of funding, administration, management, and premise-checking.

Christy said:

1.)  Leadership matters.

If funders don’t have faith in the abilities of the artistic and managerial leadership of an organization, regardless of the mission, they are not going to fund the company.  Which leads to …

2.)  Infrastructure (meaning a company’s administrative staff) matters.

It can be tempting in a small company to have actors and designers tag-teaming on administrative tasks, but it is important to remember that passion for the mission of the company does not necessarily translate into administrative acumen (although it sometimes does).  If a particular individual within your company is not up to the administrative task before him or her — even though it is awkward, even though it is hard – it is in the enlightened best interest of the company to see if that person can better serve in another way, or to delegate the responsibility elsewhere.  It can be painful to send an artist packing from his or her administrative rounds, but it becomes a question of what is more important: not bruising those feelings or cultivating the company.  In the long run, and often in the short run, it is hurting the company to have an eager, enthusiastic but ill-equipped individual doing the job.

3.)  The context of an organization matters.

Christy asked “Does what we’re doing matter? Is it really distinctive within the community?” She said it is important to get the “30,000 foot view” of the community, to understand where one’s organization fits into that community and to consider whether it is where one wants to be.  Funders will look at this, and therefore so should we as individual artists and arts organizations.

Paul said:

1.)  A lot of what you think you know about fundraising is wrong.

“You’re operating from an old premise if you think an education outreach program is going to get you grants,” Paul said.  He went on to say that funders are now often suspicious of education programs if they suspect that the initiative is being created solely or principally because it will win grant money.  “Hard experience has taught those foundations that this is a big warning sign of organizational sloppiness, lack of focus, or desperation.”  If the program is integral to a company’s mission, that is one thing, but if it feels tacked on with a sticky agenda, it is not likely to serve the company or attract the funding.

Paul reminded us, too, that something on the order of 81% of donations come from individual donors, not from institutional funders, so we might want to tailor our funding strategies accordingly.  While also remembering that strategies and tactics vary for each type of donor, so don’t woo a foundation the way you might an individual giver of large gifts.

He advised reviewing his article on ChicagoArtistResource.org, here.

2.)  Theatre people often accept myths, folklore as truth.

Paul talked about how we have a tendency in the theatre (and I would add, in the world) to do things the way we do them “because that is how we’ve always done them.”  He exhorted us to get data.  “Is your marketing strategy working? What part? What works? How do we know?”  Jeremy Wechsler chimed in with an anecdote about sampling his way through the components of his marketing strategy, dropping one element for one show, dropping a second one another time around, as a way to explore what was effective and what was simply expensive.  He learned that “a [Chicago] Tribune display ad gets you no more results than one little box ad.” That mighty little box ad is a whole lot cheaper than the display ad, but it is received wisdom that we need the display ad, because … because … because … wait, why is that again?

3.)  Open your eyes.

This felt like an important corollary to item #2 on Paul’s list: challenge your received ideas and cultivate a clear understanding of your organization’s strengths and weaknesses.  Review the way you market, manage, lead, and rehearse “with polite skepticism,” Paul said.  I particularly like the polite part, but the idea of checking one’s premises and thoughtfully checking the premises of one’s collaborators, partners and organization seems like a very good idea.  One might come back to doing some aspects of the work in the same way, but at a minimum, one is likely to gain a richer understanding, perhaps some nuanced revisions to approach.  And it is just possible that logic-based, fact-based reexamination will yield surprisingly effective new ideas.

Again, Jeremy Wechsler provided an example: Theatre Wit conducted a cost-benefit analysis on maintaining costumes, props, set pieces in storage for later use vs. building / shopping afresh and discovered that for them, it would be much less expensive to stop paying to store materials on the off chance that they would use them again in a few seasons.  So now they don’t.  When a show closes, everything goes (to charity, to whomever wants it, to the curb), and they save enough money to fill a small wheelbarrow (which they don’t have because they don’t store props anymore).  They save money by building and shopping anew.  I wondered about the environmental impact of this strategy, but that’s my issue, not necessarily Theatre Wit’s:  they may well post on craigslist or freecycle so that their discards can be reclaimed.

As an Artistic or Managing Director, Paul and Christy agreed, it is your responsibility to educate your Board about truth versus mythologies within our industry because the Board is not generally comprised of theatre practitioners, and may be even more susceptible to theatrical folk wisdom.

Finally, Paul put in a word for the Cultural Data Project, a “groundbreaking project [that] gathers reliable, longitudinal data” for the arts.  It is also his baby.  In keeping with Paul’s exhortation to ‘”get data”, the CDP will help arts organizations do just that.  “Surveys are a mushy basis for decision making,” he said, and the CDP will give theatres a lift in attaining that 30,000 foot view.

I am grateful to Christy and Paul for making the time to share their insights with those of us at CT(a)C over the weekend as well as for their demonstrated devotion to the theatrical community; I hope that the 2am community finds their thoughts helpful / useful / inspiring as well.

Modern editors of Shakespeare make a lot of decisions about, dare I say, what to print or not to print.  And while there is a growing awareness of the performative in the scholarly community, editors are still rarely, if ever, practitioners.  It behooves us as practitioners to understand what our editorial brethren are up to so that we can make informed and theatrically viable choices about precisely what story we want to tell.

There is a philosophical approach that the ‘text is sacred’ for some actors and directors working on Shakespeare.  Whenever someone says that to me, I want to know which text, exactly, they perceive to be sacred.  Because, in many instances, the play isn’t the thing; it is several things, with lots of fingerprints on it, identifiable and otherwise.  In addition to Shakespeare himself and the members of his theatre company, the King’s Men, there were also scribes, such as Ralph Crane, who prepared copy that was used in printing the plays.  Crane had his own set of preferences about how the text should be laid out, from entrances (he tended to list everyone who would eventually enter the scene at the beginning, instead of wherever the actual entrance might occur in the playing) to punctuation.  There were also the men, known as compositors, who set the type in the printing house; the last time I checked, scholars have identified as many as eight different compositors who set some portion of the First Folio.  A couple of them were very good at their work, although they each had their own ideas about spelling and punctuation, and a couple of them were sloppy; one of them was probably an apprentice.  Sacred indeed.

Many times, we have only one copy of a play, such as Much Ado About Nothing, Measure for Measure or The Winter’s Tale, which were printed for the first time in the First Folio (the eponymous ‘F’ of the collation line).  The Folio, if you are unfamiliar, was a collection of most of Shakespeare’s plays in one large volume; the project was engineered by John Heminges and Henry Condell, two of Shakespeare’s fellow players in the King’s Men.  Collecting a bunch of plays in an expensive volume was nearly without precedent at the time, but we should be grateful that they took the time to do it, because we’d be without such stuff had they decided it was too much effort.

Sometimes we have a play that appeared in quarto (essentially, the Elizabethan equivalent of a paperback) at some point during Shakespeare’s lifetime; if there was only one quarto, we might just call it ‘Q’.  If, as in the case of Hamlet, there is more than one, scholars will refer to them as Q1 (published in 1603) and Q2 (published in 1604).  And here’s the thing: there are variations from text to text of the same play.  In some cases, there is one word here or there which is different, and that is called a textual crux. An example of this is in the line “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt”: in Q1 and Q2, the line reads, “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt,” and in F, we find, “O that this too too solid flesh would melt.”  So actually, it doesn’t appear anywhere as “sullied flesh,” but many editors have decided that this is most likely what was intended, and that, essentially, a typo occurred when the type was being set for Q1 and Q2.  However, Q1 and Q2 are wildly different texts , so it is surprising that the same typo would occur twice, even if the folks in the printing house were working from a marked up copy of Q1 when they set Q2.  (There is a book-length study lurking in this sentence, possibly two.)  My point is that “sullied” and “solid” mean different things; one suggests that Hamlet is filled with loathing, either for himself or for all of humanity; the other reflects the durability of the human body.  If the actor explores each option in rehearsal, he’ll find that one or the other is more dramatically compelling for him, gives his iteration of Hamlet an extra degree of specificity.  So if you know how to read the collation line, you can make more informed choices about the text.

Textual cruces are significant mile markers of which to beware.  Also important are occasions when two authoritative texts of the same play are very different from one another, with whole chunks of dialogue added or subtracted.  This happens with Hamlet, as I have mentioned, and also King Lear, among others.  The modern editor makes a choice about which text she will use to create her edition, and while that information is always recorded somewhere, many actors and directors don’t know to look for it, and wouldn’t know what it means if they found it.

Several years ago, a friend of mine was playing Albany in Lear and he told me he was having a hard time figuring the character out.  I asked which text the production was using.  He said the director has selected the Arden, second edition.  I told him that the editors of the second edition had conflated the text, which essentially means that they had taken the best bits from the 1608 Q and the best bits from the 1623 Folio and mashed them together.  Okay.  Mash is inelegant, and the editors were thoughtful in their work, but the prevailing notion was ‘we don’t want to miss out anything that Shakespeare actually wrote, so let’s combine them’ without giving practitioners guidance on how the two versions of the play are different from one another.  The best scholarship on offer now suggests that King Lear was thoughtfully revised, probably by Shakespeare, but possibly by someone else in the company, between the printing of the play in 1608 and the printing of the play in 1623.  The character of Albany is one of a few who are purposefully altered from one script to the other, and if one combines both texts, one will end up with a character who is at sixes and sevens with himself.  As John Jowett, one of my tutors at the Shakespeare Institute, has written, “The two-text King Lear revealed editing itself as a variable and perhaps even arbitrary activity.”  When I explained this to my friend, he said he’d rather keep all the lines than have a character he could discern.  Oi.  Woe betide the audience that sat through that production!

The Arden third edition is now publishing each extant text. If you understand what they are, you can look at the Arden editions of Hamlet Q1, Q2 and F, and decide for yourself what story you want to tell; you can look at Lear and give poor Albany a deeper consideration.

I am nearly all out of blog post and I haven’t even started on editors adding stage directions to the text; I’ll just recommend here that one consider stage directions with a thoughtfully jaundiced eye.  In that same Arden, second edition, a stage direction read Lear draws his sword.  He does? According to whom?  Drawing a weapon really changes the energy in the room, kids.  This stage direction isn’t in the Folio; it isn’t in the quarto and, in that edition, the only way you would know that is if you took the time to read the collation line.  If the stage direction is simply what that particular editor imagined might happen, he is inadvertently reducing the possibilities.  In the Arden, third edition, the general editors have started to signpost these kind of editorial interventions more clearly, so a stage direction that is not authoritative, but which seems like a frightfully good idea to the editor will usually find itself encased [in square brackets].  Again, though, if one is not aware of that, one might give it undue weight or importance in staging the scene.  It’s in full-sized type right there in the middle of the scene whereas the collation line is in that tiny font at the bottom of the page; that stage direction is psychologically so much more available, so apparently the thing to do, in its large type.

Actor and directors perform ephemeral acts of criticism and interpretation through their productions of Shakespeare’s plays, so learn how the editors have, intentionally or otherwise, interpreted the text before you got there.  Call them on the worn library carpet.  Make your own, informed, dramatically compelling choices when it comes to textual cruces, stage directions and performance scripts.

If you want to delve more deeply into the world of editorial intervention (as indeed, who does not?), I recommend Fredson Bowers’ article “Why Apparatus?”, which appeared in the journal Text 6, pages 11-19;  Stanley Wells’ Re-Editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader; and Michael J. Warren’s “Repunctuation as Interpretation in Editions of Shakespeare,” which appeared in the journal English Literary Renaissance 7, p. 155-169.  Also helpful is John Jowett’s “After Oxford: Recent developments in textual studies,” in International Yearbook 1, pages 65-86.

For a good overview of all matter of early modern printing issues and the ways in which the plays suffered interference within and immediately following Shakespeare’s lifetime, you might start with Richard Proudfoot’s Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon or with Stanley Wells, et al’s amazingly comprehensive William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion.

A few years ago, the Intentional Theatre Group commissioned me to write a short play for the Midtown International Theatre Festival.  The IT Group had decided to produce Daniel McIvor’s NEVER SWIM ALONE, but his (terrific) play wasn’t long enough to fill their festival slot.  Rather than abandon the extra minutes, they asked me to think about McIvor’s work, let it inspire me, and then write whatever came to my mind in response, with the caveat that I only had so many minutes to play with.  (I think it was 20.)

The resulting evening of theater was wildly successful.  The IT Group earned Best Production from the festival, and the woman who starred in my solo one-act – CRACKED – won Best Supporting Actress.  Critical plaudits aside, my impression is that audiences really enjoyed the contrasting stories.  It gave patrons more to think and talk about after the evening was over, and it also created a sense of surplus: having purchased a ticket to see only one show, they were nonetheless granted a chance to see two.

What the evening brought to my mind were the short subjects that used to accompany virtually every movie shown in every theater in the world, even as recently as my early childhood: newsreels, cartoons, or sometimes short features – and sometimes more than one of the above.  These were high-quality pieces of art, at least some of the time, and in some cases they were even more entertaining than the full-length features they preceded.  They were certainly worth getting to the movies early for – unlike the insipid advertisements and movie trivia we’re forced to sit through today.

What I’ve been wondering ever since that festival is why theaters don’t do the same thing.  How hard would it be to stage a short curtain raiser – ten minutes or so – before the show begins?  Let’s think first about what would make it difficult, and imagine a few ways around the problems.

Obstacles Become Opportunities

First, there’s the question of resources: producing a second play would tax a theater’s already stretched budget.  Rights, a set, salaries, and so on – as we all know, it adds up quickly.

But what if the rights question weren’t really that intimidating?  Personally, I’d settle for a small figure to have one of my short plays produced that way – I did, in fact, with the IT Group.  What young playwright wouldn’t think of the opportunity as a way to get her work out in front of an audience – a stepping stone toward production of a full-length?  In the months since the end of the Midtown International Theater Festival, furthermore, CRACKED has since gone on to two other productions, one in Chicago, another (forthcoming) in the Minneapolis area.  Opportunities abound.

Think of the possibilities with regard to scenic design, too.  Naturally, you wouldn’t want to make use – at least not always – of whatever set the full-length play would require… but what if curtain-raisers were written (again, as mine was) to require minimal-if-any sets?  Again, costs would be minimal… and the constraints might actually inspire great creativity.

As for salaries: is it that much of a stretch to imagine that the cast and crew for the full-length might just consider the curtain-raiser just, you know, an extra scene to memorize/block/direct/light/and so on?  And not ask for a bigger paycheck?  Okay, perhaps it is… but maybe the unions in question might be willing to be flexible, at least somewhat, if only to offer additional creative opportunities for their members.  I can imagine the curtain-raiser being cast, for example, from among the actors playing smaller roles in the evening’s full-length.

While I may be pipe-dreaming here, I do maintain that there are always inventive ways to overcome resource limitations.  And if I am pipe-dreaming… so what?  So we raise more money to cover the costs of the curtain-raiser.  If we give our audiences more, they’re likely to show up in larger numbers… so maybe increased ticket sales would help offset the costs.

(There’s a future post in there somewhere, BTW – I fear we have a culture of scarcity in the theater.  What if we inculcated a sense of abundance instead?  Sigh…)

So what do folks think?  Is this a serious possibility to be considered?  Are there obstacles I haven’t thought of?  Has anyone tried this recently?  If so, what was it like?

Firstly, the Minnesota Fringe Festival is big — really big, and it’s growing. It’s been about for 16 years, and this year offered 169 shows in 15 or so venues around the Twin Cities, producing somewhere around 876 performances. Back in 2006, the show sold about 44,189 tickets; this year, they topped 50,000 tickets.

It’s evidence that there is an audience for new theater. It doesn’t hurt that the shows are part of a huge event, and that they are short (they must, necessarily, clock in at under an hour), and relatively cheap (Fringe shows cost $12, with discounts for seniors, students, children, and, this being the Twin Cities, listeners of Minnesota Public Radio). You’ll hear once in a while that new plays are a tough sell, and that audiences aren’t really interested in seeing work they are unfamiliar with; the Minnesota Fringe Festival has repeatedly demonstrated that, within the right structure, audiences are eager to see new plays.

Some of these shows will go on to have short runs in the Twin Cities, although few at established theaters; in the past, they have tended to set up shop in Bryant-Lake Bowl, a cabaret theater in a bowling alley. Increasingly, I have been of the opinion that theaters are especially bad at preparing for success — it used to be that if a play were successful in a limited run, it would quickly be moved into an unlimited run, and just allowed to play for as long as it could find an audience, which, if it was something like “A Chorus Line,” was 6,137 performances. But there aren’t many established Twin Cities theaters who watch the Fringe, prepared to swoop in and offer a run to a successful show, and there aren’t many Fringe producers who, upon enjoying a hit at the Fringe, then move it into another space and give it a proper run. This has always seemed like a pity to me; new plays should not have the lifespan of a Mayfly, especially when they’ve already proven they can find enthusiastic audiences.

And the new plays that appear at the Fringe are unusual, to say the least, especially as the Minnesota Fringe Festival is unjuried. There are a lot of one-person shows, and storytellers, and the like, which is nice, because those are the sorts of things that often have a hard time finding a performance space and an audience. Additionally, the Fringe is a place where producers feel free to let their nerd flags fly — the number of zombie and robot-themed plays this year was rather spectacular. I can’t speak to how good these shows were, as I did not attend any, but science fiction and horror themes aren’t often explored in mainstream theater, and the Fringe sometimes seems like a glimpse into an alternate universe, where these are the dominant themes of new playwrighting.

Interestingly, the biggest sellers of this year’s Fringe Festival were, for the most part, created by people who did not come up through the usual channels. The Pioneer Press published a list of the top-selling productions, and they are dominated by work produced by Twin Citians whose primary background is in comedy. “The Damn Audition” is the work of Joe Scrimshaw, who has been writing full-length plays for a half-decade or so now, but who started as part of a popular comedy team with his brother Josh; “Speech!” is the product of Mike Fotis and Joe Bozic, who collectively are known as the improv team Ferrari McSpeedy; “The Princeton Seventh” starred and was spearheaded by Ari Hoptman, a comedian, and costarred Alex Cole, also a comedian; “A Nice Guy’s Guide to Awkward Sex” was not only written, directed, and starred Ben San Del, a local stand-up comedian, but was set in the world of stand-up comedy and used stand-up comics to flesh out the cast. I saw all of these plays, and, from my perspective, every single one of them worked as theater. These were not comedy routines moved to the stage, but were works conceived of as plays; in fact, San Del’s play was the only one that felt somewhat immature theatrically (understandably; it’s the first script he’s ever written; even then, it didn’t feel all that clunky). The remainder displayed a great deal of theatrical sophistication, and “Speech!,” in particularly, is the sort of thing I can easily imagine taking over a theater space and running for years.

This is worth noting, especially considering that Todd London and Ben Pesner’s book “Outrageous Fortune” revealed that increasingly playwrighting has become something of a career track that is only open to writers who graduate from a handful of prestigious programs. In fact, I have started to wonder if people who might not have previously put their creative energies primarily into playwrighting aren’t instead gravitating toward comedy, thanks to the almost instantaneous opportunity to get their work in front off an audience. Stand-up comics, as an example, can get up at any of a dozen open mics in the Twin Cities, while improv comics have abbreviated training programs (the Brave New Workshop in Minneapolis offers a year-long course, as an example), and then it isn’t too hard to put together a troupe and find a stage. Compare this to the process of playwrighting, in which any single play can take years to find a production, and half of all plays written by mid-level playwrights never get produced at all. And we shouldn’t be surprised when these comics produce work that is at once well-made and crowd pleasing, as they have an advantage over other playwrights in that they constantly get to test their material before live audience, and refine it based on audience reactions.

It’s possible, based on the Fringe, that tomorrow’s world of theater will mostly be satires of science fiction themes created by stand-up and improv comics. And, truthfully, based on what I saw at this year’s festival, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

Mr. Jeff Haslam still thinks people are unhappy with him because he commented publically not because of what he said. If you are at all close to Mr. Haslam I would ask that you pull him aside and mention that content matters. Your defense in a case like this can’t really be “well they hurt my feelings so I hurt them back” and “I have free speech rights.”

But high school slap fight on the internet aside, my interest is in what would drive someone, a grown adult with responsibilities no less, to vent his bile publically, consequences be damned. The reviews he’s responding to aren’t raves by any means but even in their moderate  complaint they generally  exhibit the disappointment of high expectations not an evisceration. (None rise even to the level of being accused of boring a baby say) 

It seems to me the answer, in looking at the defenses he offers, is that he is suffering from the bunker-itis I talked about at the Devised Work convening.

Mr. Haslam talks about all the martyrdom that we all feel after our umpteenth show in a row. We go from production meeting to rehearsal to bathroom plunging to box office to show to bed and there’s never enough hands and never enough money and then some pretentious woman and her icky friends wants to JUDGE me?

We tend to lock ourselves into the pods we travel  with and the project we’re working on and the communities we’re in without ever taking an opportunity to stop and look around a bit. There are only these 12 people and these 3 shows and this theatre and maybe a coffee shop. No one understands everything I do for this shop/theatre.town / city / country / art form / existence.

When you are the only person in existence responsible for something the pressure gets unbearable.

Find a way to let go of that pressure.

For me, the internet is my perspective giver. No matter how hard I’m working? I’m not working half as hard as Dan Granata is for instance. I have it pretty good. I have good folks around me and people who are going through what I am going through along with me.

Where can YOU go to get that? Is that something your local Arts Umbrella provides at monthly meetups? Do you volunteer at a charity for perspective or maybe you have a sister company or two?

You’re not alone. How do you prove that to yourself and avoid a meltdown?

The joke.

Man goes on vacation, leaves his cat with his parents. A week later, he comes home, goes to pick up the cat. And his dad says, “Sorry, son, the cat’s dead.”

“Jesus, Dad, you couldn’t have broken it to me gently? When did this–”

“The day after you left.”

“Jesus, Dad! You could’ve called, said, ‘the cat’s on the roof and she won’t come down,’ maybe the next day, ‘the cat fell off the roof, she’s at the hospital,’ and then, then, maybe I’m prepared.”

“You’re right, I’m sorry, son. I don’t know where my mind was.”

”It’s all right, I’ve had the cat for a long time, but I’ll…I’ll be okay. Where’s Mom?”

“Son, she’s on the roof, and she won’t come down.”

The post.

It’s been said that an advertisement needs to be seen seventeen times before it sticks in the viewer’s mind. I don’t know if it’s quite that high–it sounds like a marketing guru’s wishful thinking, especially nowadays–but nonetheless, repetition primes the pump. It’s why we see logos everywhere, why we hear familiar jingles over and over, why brands often revive older campaign slogans and songs.

But I’m not here to talk logos or branding today. I’m talking about warming up your audience.

Think about it. A stand-up comic comes out and does a set before the taping of a sitcom or a talk show. A series of movie trailers eases you into the movie-going experience, and not incidentally promotes upcoming films. Even pre-show music at your theatre can–and should–set a mood, a tone, it should connect to the show the audience is about to see. The American Shakespeare Center features live music themed to the production for just that reason. The Neo-Futurists come out before their “Too Much Light…” show to explain how the show works, they get the audience to practice participating. Really, what they do is get the audience shouting and cheering before the show’s even started. Their warm-up is essentially a prologue. And I started this post with a joke.

What else can we do to warm up an audience ahead of time?

Let’s go back to the movie trailer example. Yes, the trailers before a movie set the mood. Maybe you could do a scene from an upcoming play before a show. That might be fun. But what else do movie trailers do?

They prepare you for the films they’re advertising. The best ones don’t give away spoilers but tell a story in themselves, just enough of one to pique your interest and hopefully get you to come back to see the rest. They’ll give you certain details to watch for, moments to set up your expectations. Maybe, the film will take that expectation and twist it around to surprise you in the film itself. Either way, they’re warming you up.

Even the joke above is about preparing the audience for the whole story.

So how does this work for a theatre company? More and more theatres are filming trailers for upcoming shows and putting them up on YouTube or Vimeo. The Playwrights Center has also been developing trailers for scripts. Some of them are quite good, some of them less so. The more filmic, the less effective, because you promise too much to the audience. It can be a lovely trailer, but if it’s too disconnected from the play on the stage, it could backfire.

Some of the best theatre trailers out there are by the National Theatre in London. Take a look at the National Theatre’s YouTube channel, which has a selection of trailers from the last few years.

Two quick examples. First, Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Tom Stoppard’s Every Good Boy Deserves Favour.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They’re elegant in their simplicity, they don’t promise too much, and they don’t give away much if any of the plot.

But I know what you’re thinking. Do they work?

The trailer.

At my own theatre company, Riverrun Theatre, we’ve produced “A Night in November” by Marie Jones several times now. It’s a lovely story about a Protestant man in Belfast discovering the depths of his own bigotry and finding redemption by running away to watch the World Cup in New York in 1994. We’ve travelled with the show and produced it for all kinds of audiences. Because our city has a chapter of the Ulster Project, we’ve also performed it for several groups of teenagers visiting from Belfast over the years.

Each audience is different, any theatre producer knows that. But there’s a sharp difference between an American audience and a Belfast audience with this play.

The show is two acts with an intermission, the incidents in each beautifully balanced. But act one ends with our hero in a dark place. Act two is where he finds his redemption and bounces back, so to speak.

First time through with the teens, there was no preparation. By intermission, a number of them were angry, wanted to walk out. Some of the characters use what in Ireland would be strong language, some are downright insulting. It can be a depressing story if that’s all you see. But the teens stayed for act two. When the play ended, they all vanished. We thought they’d left, either angry or annoyed or else scheduled to within an inch of their lives–they have a month and it’s pretty tightly organized. All we knew was, they were gone. Turns out they’d gone back to the stage door to wait for our actor; when he emerged, they swarmed him, loved the accents, loved the story.

Second time through, we did a preshow talk, we had a study guide, we did a private performance for them with a post-show discussion. Intermission was more relaxed, and the end of the show had much the same reaction. They were better prepared.

I know what you’re thinking. How do you prepare a typical audience? You’re not going to get them into pre-show talks or study guides, and there’s only so much you can do with your website. Who even knows if the audience reads a tenth of what you put on your site?

Here’s the trailer from our most recent production. After, I’ll describe the shift in the audiences’ reactions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This time around, at the top of the show, the audience heard the music from the trailer. They recognized it and knew the show was starting. They recognized the first line of the play, which is paraphrased in the trailer. Of course, the intermission leaves our protagonist in the same dark place as always.

But this time, instead of being quiet or glum, they were eager for the second act, because they knew there was a change coming, and that it was “for good.” Or, specifically, “for the good.” They were primed for it. They didn’t know what it was, how it worked, when it was coming or what would happen after the change, but they were excited. And as thrilling as that second act can be, the audience this time around was that much more engaged and happy by the end, jumping to their feet at the curtain call.

The play is the same, the performance–which was excellent–is essentially the same, but the audience had a hint of what to expect.

In case you’re wondering, that trailer took approximately one hour to make, using Adobe Premiere, Illustrator and Audition.

The trap.

Last week, the New York Times profiled an upcoming production of Deathtrap in London, specifically highlighting the trailer. They note the production values to “rival anything to come out of today’s Hollywood horror movie machine.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

The post then notes:

Watching this trailer won’t give anything away, but it will make you wonder why more Broadway plays can’t be this creative, resourceful and contemporary when it comes to promoting their shows.

Except for one tiny detail. This trailer gives everything away. There’s no need to see the play if you’ve watched this, because you know who’s there, why they’re there, what they do when they’re there, how they do much of what they do. You know there’s betrayal within betrayal, there’s a crossbow that–following Chekhov’s rule of guns–will be fired at some point, and you know that no one is who or what they seem. There’s little or no surprise left to the show itself except for minor mechanics of plot. And again, by being shot in a more cinematic style, it promises a look and style that can’t be duplicated by the actual experience. Even worse, it manages to seem both filmic and claustrophobic at the same time.

Compare that to this, an earlier trailer for the same production.

Click here to view the embedded video.

What does this trailer tell us? Two people are trying to kill each other, which you could guess from the play’s title. Everything is centered around the typewriter, and you have the one line: “A play to kill for.” Unless you know the show already, you might assume that refers to the play itself, not a plot point. You have a clever little story between the typographical characters, which clues you in to both the thriller and the comedy aspects of the script. Smart design, good concept, half the length and no dialogue.

This trailer doesn’t tell you a thing you wouldn’t already know, yet it’s put you in the right mood for the show.

Cue typewriter bell. Ding.

The punchline.

There’s no reason why we can’t be creative, resourceful and contemporary. By all means, we should use every tool at our disposal to attract the audience. But we need to use them well. A good trailer should pique the audiences’ interest and warm them up. It should give them just enough information to grab them and prepare them for what they’ll see.

It should leave them wanting more.

Speak softly and carry a big stick. – Theodore Roosevelt

Before we begin, if you haven’t already, read a cautionary tale about comments by the artistic director of Edmonton’s Teatro La Quindicina and then his explanation of those comments.

I can wait.

Are you back? Okay.

There’s a difference between earnest defense and hissy fit.

Nobody is saying Mr. Haslam doesn’t have the right to defend his company against a reviewer or a blogger or, well, anyone.

Nobody is trying to censor him or remove his original comment.

Much as he’d like to frame it as such, this is not a question of free speech.

It’s a question of respect.

If you work in theatre, you’ve gotten criticisms, both just and unjust, reasoned and glib, fair or unfair. It goes with the territory. Some of us can shrug them off and keep going. Others can’t let them go.

Having read the reviews that “hurt his feelings,” I see mild criticisms that aren’t meant to deter you from seeing the shows in question. On the contrary, these are comments from longtime patrons who’ve been supporting the theatre. They are, at worst, constructive criticism from the average theatregoer. And in the grand scheme, they are few and far between.

But fine. Whatever. It doesn’t really matter what the reviews and blog posts said.

What matters is how Mr. Haslam reacted to them.

He chose to react to what he saw as personal attacks by retaliating in kind. Let’s look at his original comment for reference.

You come across as snotty and arrogant. I absolutely despise your pretension that you are “a reviewer” in any professional way. In fact every time I read one of your posts I think “I am not smitten with this weird women like her icky friends seem to be. I wish she’d stop subscribing to my theatre company, because she seems like such a pretentious doof. I wonder if she knows that her endlessly stuck-up self-important little reviews are deeply offensive to those of us who bust our buts for next to nothing to bring a little entertainment to this distant northern city? I wonder if she knows that her crappy 19 bucks goes to less than 40% of what it costs to pay all the artists she isn’t always smitten by? Do us all a favour lady. Write about food and take your entertainment dollar elsewhere.

Bad enough for an actor or another employee to have reacted that way, especially in a public forum. But the theatre’s artistic director?

Every interaction you have with the public–especially in a situation like this–reflects on your theatre company.

Once more with feeling, because I can’t stress this enough.

Every interaction you have with the public–especially in a situation like this–reflects on your theatre company.

That’s why it’s important to have good social media guidelines for your theatre company.

If he had reacted earnestly and honestly, noting that he felt the criticisms were petty, unwarranted or hypercritical, that would have been fine. If he had asked for more of an explanation or tried to open a genuine dialogue about them, again, he’d come out looking like a rose.

It doesn’t mean he has to like the blog posts or the bloggers, their friends or any of their opinions, but by reacting calmly and intelligently, he could have “killed them with kindness.” Or, as my mother would say, “Smile and heap coals of fire on their heads.” He could have shown a little respect, he could have shown his theatre company was willing and open to engaging and interacting with its community.

Oh well.

He’s absolutely correct when he says he’s within his rights to have said what he did.

Freedom of speech means you can shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

Common sense means you only shout it when the building’s actually burning.

It’s a shame that most people aren’t going to look for a larger context. Most Edmonton theatregoers are only going to hear the artistic director of a theatre telling patrons he doesn’t want them or their “icky friends” to come back, he doesn’t want their “crappy” money.

But there’s more at stake than the paying customers and the 40% of the budget they bring in. This is also going to be seen by all the sponsors and granting organizations that provide the other 60%. Certainly, his board is going to hear about this from every angle.

I can’t imagine any of them will be too impressed by his idea of audience development.

Besides guidelines, we also felt it necessary to be clear on our goal for this social media outreach. This is what we determined:

The overarching goal of all our social media outreach is to spread the word about what a fantastic organization this is and the passionate, compelling work that goes on in the Playhouse, office, classrooms, and on the road. Also, to engage in conversation about who we are, what we do, why we do it the way we do, what we are learning, how much fun we are having, and what is going on in the industry.

After a lot of conversation on Twitter, I’ve decided to post our guidelines here. Let me know what you think and feel free to pass on anything you find useful.

These guidelines were compiled with help from the guidelines of Intel, as published in Engage! by Brian Solis, and Time Warner Cable, as published in the Fast Company article, “Corporate Social Media Policies: The Good, the Mediocre, and the Ugly”.

Social Media Guidelines for the American Shakespeare Center

We are excited about the potential for engaging our current and potential audience through social media. The connections made possible through blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other social networks allow for a more direct conversation with all the people who love us already and those who would like to hear about us. We hope that you will want to join us in these conversations and we want you to feel prepared when you do. Below are a few guidelines to help everyone engage in a way that supports the brand values of the American Shakespeare Center: serious fun, life-long learning, community, and great language.

Transparency is vital. Whether you are communicating on an official ASC channel or not, please know that you represent the American Shakespeare Center. It is best to include a mention of your connection in your profile and also mention it when posting comments on blogs that are related to what we do.

Private vs. Public. Don’t publish confidential or other proprietary information. Anything having to do with legal, internal personnel, or confidential financial matters should never be discussed outside of appropriate internal communications. Follow copyright, fair use and financial disclosure laws.

Write what you know. Stick to your area of expertise and provide unique, individual perspectives on what’s going on at the ASC and in the world.

Learn from others. Use the web to find out who else is blogging or publishing on a topic of particular interest and cite those individuals, including links to their work.

Ask before you speak. Don’t cite or reference clients, partners or suppliers without their prior approval. When a reference is made, where possible, link back to the source.

The web is a permanent record. Items posted online will likely be indexed by search engines and copied by other sites, so it can remain public and associated with you even if the original post is deleted. Post with care.

Be professional. Treat others with the utmost respect in your conversations. Ethnic slurs, personal insults, foul language, or conduct that would not be acceptable in our offices should not be used.

Give the benefit of the doubt. Most everyone is doing the best they can with the knowledge they have. Please assume that they meant no ill will until proven otherwise and then see the next guideline.

Avoid the trolls. Refrain from engaging in heated discussion and use good judgment when expressing opinions that may pose a potential conflict. Do not post angry comments or attack individuals engaging in the discussion. If someone attacks you, reply politely and disengage.

Play nice. Do not insult or disparage ASC, its productions or offerings, or any fellow employees, even if specific names are not mentioned. The same goes for other theatres or “competitors” of any kind.

Proof your work. Knowing that the web often takes on a more casual tone, please remember that language is part of the bedrock of our mission. Read it over before you post and keep in mind the writing guidelines Ralph put together.

If it gives you pause, pause. Please don’t post something that you would not say openly to a room full of patrons, donors, and strangers. If you are about to publish something that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable, stop and think. Ultimately, what you publish is yours, as is the responsibility. Also, do not alter previous posts without indicating that you have done so.

This post was originally published at Amy Wratchford’s blog and reprinted with her permission.

We all know some of this, but not all of us − even in the ‘let’s bash through it’ 2am air − see the extent of the problem, so my goal here is partly to plumb the depths.  Tony Adams and Margo Gray helpfully inform me that 81% of the plays produced in Chicago last season were written either by a man or by a partnership which was predominantly male.  On Broadway, women write fewer than one in eight plays.

In a June 2009 article in the New York Times, Patricia Cohen profiled a study written by economics graduate student Emily Glassman Sands, which explores gender bias in the theatre, and finds it to be multi-focal, complex and filled with surprises.  Among the findings were that female artistic directors often hold female playwrights to a higher standard than they do male writers, and also that “Plays and musicals by women sold 16 percent more tickets a week and were 18 percent more profitable over all.” Here’s the link to the article, and to a .pdf of Sands’ study:  http://nyti.ms/cBb9jL

Theresa Rebeck has written hilariously and powerfully about gender inequity in the Guardian (http://bit.ly/bkSTse) and elsewhere, poking fun at ‘The Year of the Man’ on Broadway while wondering which year, precisely, wasn’t.

Stage-directions.com posted an article on August 6^th: the Los Angeles Female Playwrights Initiative (www.lafpi.com) has commissioned a study to collect information about productions and workshops by female playwrights in Los Angeles over a nine-year period (2000-2009).  (The cut-off date for adding one’s project to the study is August 15, 2010, by the way.) “Once the LA FPI Study is complete, we’ll be able to use the results as a tool to raise awareness and create change,” said Jennie Webb, a founder of the group.

In April, I heard Alan Rickman speak at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and almost in passing, in the middle of discussing his late arrival to directing, he mentioned that “of course is it much more difficult for women” to have careers as directors.  I had already figured this out through diligent, uh, field work, but it was a little electrical shock to hear it tumble so genteelly out of Alan Rickman’s lovely mouth.  Oskar Eustis has said, “It’s harder for women playwrights and directors, because it’s harder for professional women in the United States.” When I was a little baby director, freshly arrived in the Big City, I attended a “Women in the Theatre” conference; with trepidation, I approached a female artistic director for whom I had great admiration and asked her advice about how to proceed.  “Get yourself a mentor, and make sure it’s a man,” she said.  She told me that a woman would likely view me as a threat, ever younger, ever prettier.  I was rattled by her crisp assessment, but as I have moved through my career, I have found her advice has resonated more richly than I would have wished.

In another article in the Times, playwright Gina Gionfriddo said she had been told that her characters were unlikable. “I wonder if Neil LaBute hears this,” she said, locating a vibrantly kicking double standard. The article goes on to say that Gionfriddo “suggested that women’s plays often do not resolve as conclusively as those by men, and that they do not follow the Aristotelian model of drama, which makes directors uncomfortable.” (http://nyti.ms/cWCaZC) But one can hardly say with accuracy that most writers of either gender adhere to an Aristotelian preservation of the unities at this time.  Marsha Norman, Wendy Wasserstein, Kate Moira Ryan all compose a theatrical beginning, middle and ending;  Caryll Chuchill doesn’t out-odd Harold Pinter.

So gender inequity is a problem for female playwrights, for female directors, and to be clear, for female designers (particularly if their discipline is not costumes), female carpenters, and female electricians.  (It is also a problem for the male playwrights, directors and designers, but I’ll come back to that in a bit.)  Curiously, the coin often gets flipped to some extent in the administrative offices, where women are regularly Directors of Development, Marketing, and Education. Yet the majority of Managing Directors and Artistic Directors in theatre, dance, opera, and at symphonies are men.

It is poignant to me that as I am drafting this post, Elena Kagan has been sworn in as the fourth female Justice on the Supreme Court.  Hurray!  But why, in 2010, are we still at a place where it is so important to keep count? And, by the way, that makes the gender distribution on the court a unequitably elliptical 2:1.

One might think that we in the theatre would be further along the road to gender equity because we are in the business of exploring human behavior and examining our society’s fault lines. We’re making progress, but, like the larger society in which we tell our stories, we’ve a long way to go to get to parity. Do we need to ‘raise awareness’ of this issue? (Tangentially, ‘raising awareness’ is one of those received phrases in our culture that makes my teeth itch; with respect to Jennie Webb at LA FPI and others who use it, the hazy linguistic vagueness of the phrase suggest that almost as soon as you’ve told me your issue exists, we’re done, because I now have greater awareness.) And once we raise awareness, whatever that means, then what?

What do we do?  How do we move in an authentic way towards gender equity?  Are we in the theatre, as Oskar Eustis suggest, in line with the struggle that professional women face throughout our society?  And if we are, don’t we want to be the makers of custom?  What if you have a company dedicated to the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries?  What if your company is tiny and you do two shows a year:  are you obliged to make some politically correct obeisance by picking one male playwright and one female, one male director and one female, as if you were stocking a theatrical Noah’s ark?  In discussion over dinner last night, my husband suggested that preferring the female to the male in two otherwise equal candidates is its own kind of discrimination.  He may be right.  But is it a discrimination that moves us toward a more egalitarian theatre? And would that make it okay?

One hopes that theatres are choosing the plays which best serve their missions, and are hiring the best artists to realize the plays in production.  Each theatre, like each person, has its own personality and priorities when selecting a season; it seems less than artistic to ask for a quota to be fulfilled.

We all, every last one of us on this earth, want to be heard.  We want to be seen, to be recognized, to be known.  If I am not allowed to tell my story, if I only get to listen to other people tell their stories, that can help me to become one helluva listener, but it is not the same as participating fully in the conversation.  We in the theatre want to tell stories, to entertain and to challenge our audiences to think in new ways about what is familiar, to experience emotional and intellectual epiphanies.  Don’t we want to challenge them, to challenge ourselves to embrace the richness of multivocality?

Tell me what you think.  Let’s keep talking about this, not to raise the dreaded awareness but to keep examining the situation from as many angles as we can, in the hopes that we will, wherever we stand, enrich our understanding and come up with solutions that move us towards actual parity, in the theatres, in our communities and in our larger society.

In today’s podcast, we’ll hear from some of the playwrights who attended the JAW Festival at Portland Center Stage, including Rob Handel, managing director of 13P, and Jason Wells.

Then we visit the Toronto Fringe Festival with playwright Alison Broverman.

Finally, Rebecca Coleman talks with Jeremy Banks, who’s been touring across Canada by way of fringe festivals and documenting his travels at Fringetastic.com.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, please click here to open our page in iTunes.