As part of the Fringe Festival, we ACRs have to load in the venue, and Julie, from Look After You rode in with me today with both our sets. We were talking about why we produce, and what we produce, and Julie was very passionate about new works. I found myself saying, “the longer we think we have to compete with television and movies, the more we try to create linear, sofa entertainment, the faster we’re gonna kill theater…”

It’s an interesting juxtaposition for me, after having seen the execrable 500 Days Of Summer. That movie is telling a story about a young man, able to see only his own beauty and perfection who loves a sociopath and, through no fault of his own, is left by her. Lyric Is Waiting is the story of a man, all too aware of his own ugliness and imperfection, who loves a woman that is actually sick, and through his own selfishness and weakness, he enables her to the point where she literally suffocates.

The second story is more honest, more sincere and far more interesting. The fact that some people have found Lyric to be confusing at all speaks volumes about how little we’ve come to expect from our theater experiences, and how hard we are no longer willing to work. A man comes out on stage, breaks the fourth wall, and his first words are about having a dream… and then we spend about 75 minutes going through his dream with him. It’s very simple to follow.

And it’s a thrill ride. Before I get too far into this, I should quickly say that this might be the most perfect cast I’ve ever seen. We have a saying in musicians’ circles, that “talent is a given”, so the fact that all four of the actors in this piece are a phenomenon isn’t what is so startling. It’s the uncanny perfection of their physicalization, the fact that each actor looks *exactly* right for each character that is astonishing. Particularly since they found Joe Masi, a behemoth of a man, to play the embodiment of mental illness as bigfoot. It’s a testament to the director and the script that he found a way to find such singing pathos as a Yeti.

Lori Prince gives a tour-de-force performance. I normally don’t do this, as readers of my blog know, I always leave out the scene chewer because when I was acting, I always found those parts to be far easier than the smaller tiny moments I would have to play when I *wasn’t* biting the set… But Lori is just sensational. It felt like the part was written for her to play. She seems to find a way of neutralizing the unnatural aspects of insanity and simply finds the truth in her character by pushing each logical moment to its illogical conclusion. It’s a marvelous performance.

I have a two year old waking up in six hours, and tech rehearsal tomorrow, so I won’t be able to say enough about this piece. Also, I can’t quote parts that I loved because my memory isn’t good enough, but let me try to describe one beautiful moment.

Lyric is finally trying to throw bigfoot out of her life. She screams and tells him he stinks, and when he begins to explain that it’s earth and animal smells, she says, “No, it’s fear.”

Bigfoot says that fear is what we are, men and monsters. That fear is all we have, it’s our natural state. Lyric wants assurance that fear can be erased, and bigfoot says it can’t. She finally asks if love will erase it, and he answers, “no”.

It is a stunning and powerful moment, especially for the men in the audience who might secretly know that fear is what moves us, fear of death or loneliness, of being misunderstood, or worse – of being known, fully. But it is made even more beautiful by the simplicity of the actors delivering the lines. And the fact that the “no” comes as an answer, directly after the question. It isn’t set up as a grand theatrical gesture, this piece of truth is given to us as information.

It’s times like this when you can be utterly transported as a theater person. The right actors, the right writer, being guided by the right director, performing in the right costumes on the right set, lit perfectly and the whole thing rings a tuning fork in your heart.

Great work has been done for you in this show. It will require you to pay attention to even the smallest moments, and… it’s a play, you don’t get to eat popcorn. But you should go, if you invest anything more than a passing interest, you are going to be richly rewarded. It’s a marvelous piece of theater.

There is a moment in 500 Days of Summer, among many other moments, that I found uniquely frustrating. For some reason, perhaps because the writer and director had run out of cliches and decided to steal the “interview on love” sessions from “When Harry Met Sally”, the movie switches to Black and White and the four male characters we’ve met speak directly to the camera about love.

The boss quotes one of his greeting cards and then says, “And yes, that’s from one of our greeting cards. Just because I didn’t write it, doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” And the audience laughed at this jackass.

That’s right. An actor, in a movie, delivered lines written by the writer that seem to imply that when one is quoting from another writer, one is a cloying idiot, falling prey to the lies that our culture tells us about love. There are few things that make me more uncomfortable or irritated than a writer who mocks those that don’t get “writers”, as if there are those who think great thoughts, and those who mis-use or mis-quote those great thoughts for their own purpose. Maybe the only thing worse than saying that as a writer, is saying it while employing every single cliched, overused technique already in fashion. I don’t ever need to see this particular story told again.

Here are some other things I no longer need to see in movies, TV or theater.

1) Marveling at the idea that greeting cards are written by people other than those who purchase and give greeting cards. This idea is so manifest, and such a worthless joke, that to comment on it is to insist that this very pedestrian realization is something you find remarkable… an insistence that proves how easily impressed you are by the simplest ideas.

2) Kittens, when used to express emotion, are cloying. The poster of the hang-in-there kitty has been an ANCIENT JOKE since the late 80s. When Office Space commented on the “case of the mondays” annoyance, there were two levels to the joke, and the *first* level is that the joke need not be commented on.

3) Scenes of emotional significance occurring during a rainstorm, especially when it involves people running in the rain to make up with someone they’ve wronged. Rent every movie from 1981 to 1996. I believe Coppola never made a movie without employing this, and he’s made a lot of movies.

4) Great looking people discovering love at first sight with other shockingly gorgeous people. I’m sorry, did Zooey Deschanel break up with you? Console yourself with this –

5) A man using his movie/TV show/Play to get back at women for not loving him enough. Specifically, making a piece of art that shows a woman behaving repulsively toward a man, even though that man is charming, funny, small, beautiful, free of wrong, easily hurt and above reproach.

6) Characters explaining their opinions of love based on their parents’ divorce. Do you really think you can get away with “I don’t believe in love, my parents split up”? Have you ever met another human being? Almost everyone’s parents are divorced, and the ones that aren’t barely tolerate each other, human reaction to that is as varied and divided as our reactions to the existence of the Grand Canyon.

7) Junk food as a short hand for depression. If someone showed up at my liquor store in a bathrobe and purchased a pile of twinkies and cheap whiskey, I’d pull that person aside and say, “Listen, this is an advertisement for depression, this isn’t actual depression. My guess is, you aren’t having a single real emotion at all. You haven’t ‘given up’ or whatever it is you’re trying to broadcast, when you go somewhere in public in a bathrobe, YOU ARE CELEBRATING yourself.”

8) People talking to themselves in the mirror. Have you done this? Seriously, if anyone reads this, and they can say to me, honestly, that you’ve looked at yourself in the mirror and rehearsed a phone call or psyched yourself up, if you’ve ACTUALLY done this, then I want to hear from you. Because I’m DONE with this. I’m not talking about when you’re high, everyone has watched their eyes dilate in the mirror when they’re high. I’m just so sick of this cop-out, the whole-hearted belief that the audience won’t know what’s going on unless the actor speaks out loud to himself, and he can’t possible do that in a mutter, sitting in a chair, he has to do it conversationally, in a mirror.

9) The explosion into song after sex. This is one of the only moments done so well in the movie that I wasn’t in actual pain, but can we just stop this? I get it, when you finally have sex with the girl of your dreams, it’s much like musical theater, but do me a favor… Don’t shoot the scene. Spend two years, find a group of like minded people, and create a two act musical that expresses what you’re mocking. See if you can do it. You can’t, and this short hand is repulsive.

10) Telling me that popular culture is all lies. Particularly when you do it in one of the most lucrative forms of popular culture. You don’t get to write a love story, make it into a movie, and insist that it’s not a love story and that movies are all lies.

11) Recycling my own memories back to me, especially by using characters who are too young and too stupid to have my memories. I did fall in love with a girl who loved The Smiths. It was 1985, and we were both 15. And I thought she was the love of my life. The Smiths broke up in 1987, when the actors in this movie were 6 and 7 years old. He sings The Pixies at Karaoke? They broke up in ’92, when these actors were 11 and 12. Now if I were to sing “What A Fool Believes” at Karaoke, it wouldn’t make any sense. That song came out when I was 8.

And, don’t actually PLAY the end of The Graduate. That was its own movie, that made its own points, and meant a lot to a lot of people. I saw a play some years back about a group of guys getting together after several years, and four minutes of the play was them singing an 80s song. Not referring to it, or even singing a single refrain, THEY SANG THE WHOLE SONG. Let’s make a deal, if someone else has already made a movie or written a song that makes your point, then find a new point to make. It’s done.

12) The rube best friend. Exhausting. Why does every man boy spend their time with shitheads who don’t share their sensibility, their sense of humor or their understanding of the world.

13) Assholes hitting on girls at bars. Huge aggressive meatheads, coked up and slightly drunk, behaving like total assholes at a bar. Look, this barely ever happens. The truth is, it isn’t one little rare special man who is scared of love in a sea of brutes and assholes. Theses guys who spend all their time at the gym and have to get drunk to talk to girls? YOU THINK THESE GUYS *AREN’T* THE ONES SCARED OF LOVE? I didn’t like these guys either, in high school, but then we all GREW UP. I spent a lot of time in bars in my youth, me and all my friends. The genuine assholes weren’t the thick yuppies, they were the pretentious screenwriters who thought they were better than everyone in the bar because they *felt* things. The coked up yuppie woman-hater is a trope from the 80s, the last time it made sense was in “The Wedding Singer”.

This is the popular kids’ misunderstanding of loneliness. Lonely guys go to bars and try to talk to pretty girls. And a lot of them are kinda ugly, kinda bloated, and have to put on an air of invulnerability to get up the nerve. When I see a guy with too much hair product, who’s gone to a bar alone and gotten drunk, my heart breaks for the guy. When you try to make him out to be an asshole, it makes me hate the writer.

(pant pant pant…)

Now, I
‘m old, I have a kid and I’ve been married forever. Love is a very blue-collar thing for me, it’s something that occurs with an enormous amount of work, and it has nothing to do with anyone’s big beautiful blue eyes. And I speak from experience, both my wife and my son have big beautiful blue eyes.

We don’t love someone “essence”, we love what they *do*. Yes, we can lust after beauty, but we don’t exist in a vacuum, we aren’t items. If you are loving and kind towards someone, that will effect how they behave towards you. The world is not full of people who behave randomly, we AFFECT one another.

And… okay, let’s say we don’t. Let’s say we have no effect on each other, and that a woman can simply treat a man with utter disregard for how he feels or how he behaves. My conclusion is that this woman is a sociopath. And, frankly, I’m not interested in art that makes an argument that a person’s actions get no reactions. Where the characters simply, after much sturm and drang, have no affect on one another.

It isn’t interesting to me, that people love each other for a mystical reason that has no bearing on who we are or what we do. And more than being boring, I think it’s a lie, a self-congratulatory, immature lie. With the little amount of sleep I’ve had in the last two months, I can’t believe I spent those two hours awake and being lied to, instead of asleep and watching my dreams.

We bought our home with some cobbled together gifts, my wife’s stellar credit, and a sub-prime mortgage which she then wisely got us out of. We got the best house we could, which is to say, it’s largely a piece of crap. But it’s our piece of crap and we love it a lot. I have heard alcoholics use the phrase “I’m the piece of shit the world revolves around”, which is such a masterful use of English – I’d like to offer up “This is the piece of crap that I love” as perhaps a less beautiful, but, to me, more useful, turn of phrase.

In any case, I was having a drag-down with the missus a few years ago, and she was in the middle of gently pointing out that, despite my promises, and despite the four year time frame since we bought the place, I still haven’t finished remodeling a single room. I interrupted her and said, “So, you’re saying it really doesn’t matter how hard I try or how much I work, all that really matter is what I accomplish, right?”

Now, as I said it, two things simultaneously occurred to me. One, that isn’t at all what she was saying and two… YES. Welcome to being a grown-up. It actually *doesn’t* matter how hard you’re working, all that matters is what you accomplish.

It’s a tough pill to swallow, particularly for someone like me. I have very few unexpressed thoughts – hence the blog, the facebook, the twitter – and I need to get some credit for stuff long before it comes to fruition.

But nowhere is this more apparent than in the theater – particularly with actors. It seems that simply speaking loudly and pretending is totally insufficient to most MFA acting grads, they’ve got a whole system of things they need to do in order to generate a performance they’re happy with.

Oh man, I loved writing that paragraph, even though I know it’s unfair. I mean, acting, like any art form, does require an enormous amount of work, and all of that work is for naught if you don’t have any talent or if you’re in the wrong piece for your mindset – it’s a really scary set of circumstances, and an actor can hardly be blamed for doing everything he or she can to regain some control. But my problem with actors is similar to my problem with cops, it takes a certain kind of person to be drawn to that lifestyle. (And I should know, as much as I might claim to have retired, there’s no-one who exhibits that mindset more than I do.) But I realized a long time ago that if you keep a journal in character, if you lose or gain twenty pounds, if you plot your gestures or sleep in costume… you still might give a lousy performance.

And, sadly, the same is true of producing. We’re doing a play right now and, in the end, after the thousands of dollars and months of man-hours, after the writers have written and the directors have directed and the audiences have watched… after all of that, the overall consensus might simply be “I Just Don’t Get It”.

That is fair. It might not feel fair, but it’s totally fair. If they didn’t get it, then the work you put in it doesn’t matter. In a way, if they don’t get it, if your piece fails to instruct or reach an audience, it’s a success. Think of it this way – we all have strange thoughts, secret fetishes, bizarre streams of logic that appear like a fever dream. We all speak languages that only we understand, but every once in a while you speak that language and a handful of people get what you’re saying, and if it’s the right handful of people (or the *wrong* group)… then you end up making a play.

If nobody gets it, it’s just proof that you’ve told a very small, very specific story. Maybe it’s only you and five or six of your friends who would ever understand. But you have to tell these kinds of stories, you have to make it as small as possible because when you speak in that language an outsider hears it and understands it… *that* is when theater is at its most magical. *That’s* when you have a chance at something universal.

So, how can we deal with the knowledge that all of this money and all of this work may be for nothing? It’s a total cliche, and I hate writing it because it’s a total groaner, but in the end the work has to be for the sake of work. We try things, on both a micro and macro scale, because we love the art form. The journey, I shudder to admit, is in fact the destination. The time before the show opens, that’s *real time*, it has value. The work you do off stage, the marketing, the producing, the fundraising, it all has value, it is worth doing *in and of itself*.

I look to my friend Jonathan, who is a poet. He got his masters in writing poems, he’s been published, he runs a magazine that publishes people, he’s the real deal. He can’t worry about how many people will get his work, he can’t wonder about reviews. His world, hard to believe, is even smaller than ours. At least there are community theaters in most cities, doing Arsenic and Old Lace and Neil Simon. If Jonathan did four weeks of reading Torquato Tasso, he’d be doing three and a half weeks by himself.

For him, the act of writing is what the writing is. Putting pen to paper (or finger to keyboard, I suppose) is the thing he does. For us, it’s this, this fundraising and set-painting and script copying. I’m not saying one has to love it… but I do genuinely believe that if one doesn’t, if the only joy is in the play going up and being embraced by audiences and critics… then there is very little possibility for joy.

All of this that we have to do, the nonsense, these little crappy jobs… Not to get all Robert Fulghum, but when I look at my theater company, I have to say, “This is the piece of crap that I love.”

Now, to address the hot button issue from David Cote’s Time Out New York Blog

5. Bloggers should flame –

That’s not what we’re here for. We aren’t here to talk about how much everyone else sucks, or how much we suck. We can’t grind axes on these pages, we just can’t, and the truth is, we absolutely shouldn’t.

That’s not to say we can’t begin to instruct each other on what works, but we have to establish a language to do that. It’s beginning to happen on various blogs, we’re starting to discuss not the *quality* of what has been produced, but the *effectiveness*, and that’s an entirely different thing.

I’ve mentioned on here before that there are a few things that turn me off in live theater, but these things are pet peeves. I don’t like stage violence very much because it either looks fake or it looks real, and the real stuff makes me worried for the actors. I don’t like nudity for the same reason.

But there’s no point to that in a blog, the point would be to discuss the effective *use* of stage combat or nudity, or whatever other tool the team is using. There is a red special focused upstage right… do I know why? Does it help with the story? The entire cast is twenty years younger than the roles call for… why? Is there a point being made?

I read a review of “Music Man” at Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where they talked about the non-traditional casting of Marian as a black woman. The fact that she was a black librarian in the middle of Iowa at the turn of the last century actually FEEDS the story, it expands it.

This is what blogs can do that reviewers (save the example above) tend not to. We can do long form conversations about what and why. I can tell you how much I loved Matt Freeman’s Glee Club, but better than that, I can keep talking about it, I can keep tearing apart the performances and the script cues, I can re-visit it and, even better, Matt can explain or defend or even say, “I didn’t plan that, it just worked, but now that I know that can happen, I’m gonna use it next time…” That’s because we can write on each other’s blogs, he can use HIS blog to tear apart and rebuild *my* play, and on and on.

A critic has a responsibility to his or her audience to let them know what they’re getting themselves in to. That includes, I believe, taking each production as its own entity, while not completely ignoring its context. Mr. Cote was incredibly kind to our Fringe show in 2007, but seemed continually shocked that it was in the festival. We’ve now had four shows in the festival, we *belong* here because we *are* here.

A theater blogger’s responsibility is to our work as a tiny lever in our community’s culture. We owe our criticism to one another, and, only to the extent that we are also one another’s audience, the audience. We won’t get anywhere tearing in to each other, getting our backs up and using our blogs to defend the work, which, in the final say, has to stand on its own regardless of what we say. We don’t owe each other our ire. We have a responsibility, instead, to further the conversation.

David Cote is a theater professional and a critic for Time Out New York. He also is, sorta, kinda, a blogger. He’s written a piece about his 10 ways to “fix” New York theater, and most of it is really smart and really grand.

Point by point…

1. The Public should expand – Totally.
2. Off-off Broadway should unionize – I’m down. I’m cool with unions.
3. Non-Profit Heads should retire – That’s fine, I don’t really care either way.

4. Fringe Festival should curate –

I have a lot of problems with the festival, the same ways I have a lot of problems with my family. I can describe the very ways that it works and doesn’t work, I could make you a bullet-point sheet of the strengths and weaknesses, but I’m doing that as a member of the community for the last five years. It’s an evolving process, the festival is different now than it was ten years ago, it’s even different now than it was *three* years ago.

Now, I’m all for having a more curated festival. You are running the risk of seeing some very rough stuff every year when you head downtown. You are also gonna see some strange and amazing plays, and it is worth while to check out *both*. When you have a load-in and load-out of 15 minutes, then every production company has to look at their show as if it’s being done in a children’s library, where all you have is actors, costumes, maybe a couple of set pieces, and a great script.

There aren’t gonna be blood spurts, there won’t be cool lighting and sets and costumes, these show are all in their rawest forms. And that’s good. It means you get to see, at its most basic level, what an actor, a writer and a director do, removed from all of the other tech elements. If you hate most of what you see, then you have to admit just how much of the rest of it is important to you.

Now that’s my only quibble. Cote calls the festival “trivial and craptastic”. 200+ shows a year, for 13 years, over 2000 productions, a lot of them moving into rep or off-Broadway, and he feels okay calling it “trivial”. This is one of the smartest critics in New York, it’s hard for me to believe that he didn’t choose these words carefully.

5. Bloggers should flame more – More on this later.

6. Subscribers Explore. Yes, after calling the Fringe Festival “Craptastic”, Cote goes on to berate the audiences for not allowing themselves to be captivated by difficult or strange works. It’s not that I disagree with him, but it’s strange to me that an audience member should shut up and try harder when they’re buying $180 tickets to the Met, but the $15 ticket to the nonsensical dance piece at the Flamboyan isn’t worth anyone’s time.

From our perspective, way down here in downtown (which is strange to write since a lot of us live in Astoria and Inwood now…) is that if you’re gonna have the balls to charge outrageous prices for tickets, it’s your responsibility to educate as you express, that you should spend the energy and time making the pieces work for your audiences. Shit, we’re charging nothing, and we don’t expect our audiences to get everything we do without a little help.

I mean… usually that help is “beer” more than “theatrical post-graduate classes”, but still…

7. Architects Build – Okay, I’m cool. I doubt this is gonna save theater, but I like cool buildings.

8. Signature- Hire Wallace Shawn – OH HELL YEAH! One of our greatest playwrights in America. Without him, we wouldn’t have Mac Rogers. And by “we”, I mean “Me and a couple hundred of our friends”.

9. Composers be more innovative – I agree with this entirely, as I’m sure my friends would be shocked to hear. I’ve written the music for four full musicals, as well as a bunch of other stuff, and I’m a hopeless Pop apologist… but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I could do more, and do stranger. I’ve always written to a deadline, which is the life of the freelancer, and so I’ve never had the opportunity to do an expansive strange score.

More on the blog comment later today.

Many of us are humiliated, on some level, to be the one who has to sell the thing. The thing itself has some value, and the person who gets to invent the thing has one value for it, the person who gets to create the thing has another, and the person being asked to buy the thing may have a vastly different idea. After all, Warhol’s Soup Cans were originally sold for $100 a piece, and that dollar amount was probably wrong in *everyone’s* mind at the time, one way or the other.

But to be the middle man is a little bit embarrassing. You have to say to the inventor and creators, “I’m gonna be asking for less than you want, and I’m gonna have to tell half-truths and generalizations to get people to buy it for even that much…” Then, you have to swallow your own passions and prejudices, and go to the market and stand on a box and say, “Well, you’ve got trouble! And that starts with T and that rhymes with P and that stands for … well, in this case, “Play”, and do I have a play for you!”

But it isn’t all crap. In fact most of it *isn’t* crap. I believe that if you’re doing it right, you never have to con or cajole, you simply have to reveal your enthusiasm. The only time you have to lie is if you don’t actually have enthusiasm for the thing you’re selling, if you don’t actually believe in it.

Two things have happened in the last 24 hours that illustrate this point. Our fundraiser last night went off like gangbusters, although we had a hard time actually raising a ton of funds since “anyone directly involved in the show” got to come in for free, and that’s, like, 50% of the people we know. But two representatives of Rabbit Hole Ensemble came to our party and I got to spend… I don’t know, about half an hour with them.

But we talked about theater. Now, we’ve been bouncing around cross-promoting our shows, but last night we were talking about being in love, and it turns out, we’re all in love with the same thing. We *do* want to sell our shows, we *have* to, we’re not idiots, but we weren’t talking about ways we can raise our profiles or get reviewed or listed or blogged… all we wanted to talk about was other people’s shows, stuff we loved, stuff we wanted to do. In the theater.

Now, our company cross-promotes with a lot of other companies, but this special relationship is one that we’ve developed with only a couple of others, where we recognize a love of the same sort of things. It’s an organic thing, we can’t really *make* that happen. And, of course, we still advertise, we still hold fundraisers, we write to our facebook groups… We pimp the shows, that’s the dirty truth. But given a couple of drinks and a cool night on a Brooklyn roof and we drift to how much we love each other’s work, and how much we love the theater.

The flip side of this is the facebook message that I got a few hours ago. Another person in the festival sent a message that I’ll paraphrase here.

“You should come see my show.

I know, a lot of people are telling you to come see their show, but this invitation is something you should separate from all the other shit you’re getting. This isn’t like every other show.

When you see me, off in the corner, thinking to myself, it’s this show that I’m thinking about. This is my heart.

Come see it. It will blow your mind.”

This is someone that I had pursued to do some cross-marketing because I liked the idea of his show. I no longer want to work with him at all. The lack of generosity here, the assumption that most of theater is shit, but he actually loves his play… it’s stunning.

Why do you think we do it? You see, your assumptions about what the rest of the world wants says a lot about your own motivations. You think your show is different because when you go see plays, you don’t care about what anyone is doing, and you have to assume that they don’t care either. So, you must think we do it because infamy and riches are right around the corner.

Let me make this completely clear for anyone who thinks this is a possibility – THERE ARE NO RICHES. THERE IS NO FAME.

And if you don’t respect live theater, then please, make the move to L.A. *earlier* rather than later. There are a giant stack of actors who are in New York, but secretly have no interest in doing live theater, they want to do TV and film. There’s WAY MORE of that in L.A., and your disrespect is a drain on our community.

When you’ve had a few drinks and you’re on the roof of a converted car repair shop in Brooklyn, do you want to stand by yourself and muse on your own greatness, or do you want to hang out with me and Emily from Rabbit Hole and talk about how much we love other people’s plays? Because the drinks and the conversation – that is as rich as you are gonna get here.

All the marketing is pimping, we know that. But we may as well pimp than do nothing. If it’s a difference between selling 40 seats a night and 140 seats a night, then the pimping is worth it. But if you think that we don’t value the work because we spend some energy boiling it down to a palatable message for the masses, then you’ve misunderstood the size of the masses and the importance of what we’re doing. The world barely notices what we do, but to us, it’s the world.

It’s a small group, with a lot of mutual admiration and respect. If you don’t have that, then there’s a whole wide world out there for you to explore your genius. Maybe you can make it on BroadWAY. But the off-off world, and The Fringe Festival in particular, is probably not gonna have what you’re looking for.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWKEXeI3Tjk]

The subtitle of today’s post is “How we were almost nominated for an award, and then weren’t, and then, actually, we were…”

We’ve been making plays for pretty close to ten years now, and we’ve had some people who thought we were doing really good stuff. Not a *ton* of people, but some people. I’d say, we’ve had a “fair number” of people who were fans of our work. A boisterous and somewhat modest group who like our shows and who, truth be told, aren’t actually all that boisterous, and “modest” might be overstating it.

A handful.

I’m gonna go with “a handful” of people have really liked what we were doing.

The problem, of course, is that we’re the bastard step-cousin of the entertainment industry. Whereas other people are stunned that their TV show got picked up by SpikeTV, or that they managed to make a movie for under five million dollars, we begged for 30 grand from investors and parents and friends, and made plays for TEN YEARS on it. The first time we sold out a weekend of shows, we were beside ourselves, we thanked the audience during the curtain call.

There were, of course, 54 seats. And that weekend had two shows.

So, yeah, we’ve been toiling in basic obscurity for a decade, but the truth is, we’re all toiling in obscurity, so it doesn’t matter. The guys who are just knocking shit out of the park, the Vampire Cowboys, the Flux Theater Ensembles, the Theatresources, all of these guys mean a *TON* to the people I hang out with, but are actually unrecognizable to most of the people who live in New York and say they love theater. We’re all still excited to sell out 54 seat houses, as long as we get to tell our stories.

But the obscurity can get a little sad. When you introduce yourself as a theater producer, and then you have to explain what that means, it can get exhausting. When someone tells me they are a landscape architect, I don’t have to have the very idea of “gardens” explained to me, but I find myself having to explain what “off-off-Broadway” even *is* to people. It sometimes gets a little old.

But, we do try to honor one another’s work as best we can. Mostly, this is done over drinks, in person, but the beauty of the internet for us is that we can all publish and talk about each other’s work *here*, and almost in real time. We can even have a dialogue that exists above and beyond the actual show. I wrote about how much I loved Infectious Opportunity, and Gus Schulenburg actually took it a step further, finding a moment in the show and interviewing those involved to find out how they achieved it. Meanwhile, James, who wrote the play, was reviewing Fight Girl/Battle World. It’s a fantastic round robin we’ve got.

Now, in a scintillating rainbow of fresh air, the New York Innovative Theater awards came along to validate the whole thing. I think it took us a couple of years to even realize that these awards were talking about *us*… we are so completely unaccustomed to anyone celebrating the work that we’re all doing in shabby basement theaters and in converted store-rooms. We were like, “Best Choreography? You mean… You mean that amazing Japanese gymnastic routine where they knocked over part of the set and we all freaked out… they’re getting an award?” It’s just too amazing to put into words.

We co-produced “Universal Robots” at Manhattan Theatresource in February, and we were holding our breath to see if maybe Mac would get nominated for Best Playwright. We really thought it might, we just loved the script so much, and it seemed like everyone just loved the script and… well, it would mean the world for us to get some recognition for Mac after ten years of toting that barge and lifting that bail.

Most of it, I must admit, is that I love Mac deeply and I think he’s really coming in to his own. He’s written three plays in the last four years that deal with humanity and the wavering definition of a person’s soul… and although that sounds like heavy stuff, he’s done it with office comedies and high action sci-fi thrillers. My affection for him as a dude, as the best man in my wedding, is beyond measure, but my love for his work is in line with the obsessions that I’ve had with various writers through my life. For me, he’s in line with Kafka and Tolkien and Tom Robbins and Stoppard and Churchill. It’s a personal obsession, I don’t mean to say he’s as good as these writers, simply that he means as much to me.

And then we found out… we’d gotten FOUR NOMINATIONS. Including “Best Play”. I nearly shat myself.

Now, here’s the funny thing – how quickly a person can go from being gobsmacked at the honor of being nominated to being annoyed that he isn’t getting enough credit.

There was a mistake. Somewhere, in someone’s computer – a computer full of “auto-fill” and pull down menus and nonsense, a tiny clerical error was made. Mac called me on my way to the awards ceremony last night to tell me.

MAC: Hey dude, there’s some bad news.

ME: We weren’t nominated? Dude, I don’t even care, as long as you got nominated, that’s all that matters.

MAC: No… No, wait, listen, no. I was checking the list to make sure you were on it, and they were all “Oh, is he with Dark Brew?” And I was like, “What?”

ME: Who’s “Dark Brew”.

MAC: Right. I said, “Who’s Dark Brew”, and they pulled out the program. Apparently, all of Universal Robots nominations are listed as a co-production between Manhattan Theatresource and “Dark Brew Productions”.

ME:…

MAC: They’re gonna fix it in all the literature, it’s just a typo or a weird mistake somewhere.

ME:…

MAC: And I don’t get how this could have… I mean, everyone’s doing tons and tons of shit and…

ME: There’s NO WAY that Lanie fucked that up, she was on the phone with you when she wrote it.

MAC: No, I know. I’m sure Lanie got it right, I just… I have no idea what happened.

ME:…

MAC:…

ME: Dark Brew, huh?

MAC: That’s what it looks like.

ME: Man, this is so *us*.

MAC: (laughing) Dude, we can just use this from now on. Like, when something awesome is about to happen, and then something weird happens right in the middle…

ME: We can be all “Ah man, we got DARK BREWed”

MAC: “Ah, shit, that is some DARK BREW you got there…”

ME: “Dude, taste this. Taste this brew – This brew tastes friggin’ DARK.”

FADE TO BLACK

So anyway, it became the joke of the night for the Robots crew, who were incredibly kind in letting me horn in on their celebration. When you’re a back-seat producer, it gets tough to stand around with the actors who slavishly created one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever witnessed and pretend that you were even 1/10th as involved. Pete Boisvert, the guy who made our VIRAL site, offered to build us a “DARK BREW PRODUCTIONS” website, with links to all our other shows.

And, really, it is *us*. Not “us”- Gideon, but “us” the off-off scene. Two years ago, one of the shows at Manhattan Theatresource, directed by Daryl Boling, had been nominated for an award, and Daryl’s company name (using his initials) was “Dark Brew”. The NYIT group is a MASSIVE undertaking with hundreds of man-hours put in, and I’m sure someone pulled down the menu and inserted what they had from their database. Have you seen the list of shows, how many they had to see, how many adjudicators they had running all over New York fo
r months and months, all in an effort to shine a little bit of light on what we’re doing?

The beauty of it for me is that it took the piss, a little bit. I had a vision of myself walking around with a pimp cane and a fedora, getting my ring kissed (yes, this was a vision from when I was 24 and had no idea what producing theater actually means) but once I got there…

Last night was just beautiful. The love that everyone in our community has for their embattled brothers is the kind of love that can only occur in this atmosphere. I found myself elated by all the success that SoloNova had last night, even though I’d only met the woman who runs the thing ONCE. I was so thrilled for shows like Lee/gendary and Stomp and Shout (an’ Work It All Out), even though I hadn’t seen them, the crowds with them were amazing and the production photos made me furious that I hadn’t gotten to the shows.

It can’t be like this when you could score a 20 million dollar deal if you win the Oscar. There’s very little on the line except for the respect and admiration of the rest of our dwindling but engaged community. I’ll be honest, I was proud to be executive producer of “Dark Brew” last night, as well as Gideon Productions. I could say I was all smiles just to be in the room, but the truth is, I was mostly just so grateful that there was a room for us all to be in. The awards matter, simply because they are one more step in the greater conversation.

My brother Steve is a brilliant, brilliant guy, who has very often had to carry around the label “curmudgeon”. Sometimes, he’s even been labeled a “misanthrope”. These are the kinds of labels that are tossed around pretty easily, and are almost always wrong. My other brother Ian wrote a great blog on the misuse of the word “narcissist”, and I think “misanthrope” should get a blog of its own as well.

(No, no… there wasn’t any sense of irony that he wrote a blog about the word “narcissist”. At this point, trying to argue that blogs are narcissistic is like arguing that email is making us less literate, or that TV is bad for you. It’s a boring, old canard, easily shot-down, celebrated by idiots who think easy thoughts and then pronounce them loudly.)

(Yeah… there probably should be some mention of irony when a guy like me gets mad at “idiots who think easy thoughts and then pronounce them loudly”…)

But anyway, Steve was talking about advertising. He’s one of those guys who rails against advertising and calls almost all mentions of things for sale “SPAM”. This makes me a little bit impatient because… to tell the truth, I’m selling something that I think people will like if they try it, but which people are extremely reticent to even try.

I have a fair number of friends who don’t even go to my shows. *Friends*, who have either been in plays in the past or who currently are working in the theater… and they just don’t come to the plays. It’s because they think they’re not gonna enjoy themselves. They think the seats will be small, the room will be hot, they don’t get to pause or fast forward, there won’t be any sports, they can’t eat snacks and they don’t get to talk shit during it.

I know this to be true because Fleet Week sold a lot of tickets, and it defeated most of the above arguments. The seats were good, the room was air-conditioned, they got to watch people running around dancing, (a sort of sport), and the show was so loud that people could actually talk shit during it. Still, it took more effort than sitting at home watching The Bachelor.

So, I have to sell something that people think they don’t want. The truth is, when they’re in the theater, they’re gonna like it, I believe that. Nobody walked out of Universal Robots wishing they had their time back, and that space was NOT comfortable. The story sustains, live theater has a quality that can’t be replicated.

So I asked Steve why he hates advertising so much. We’re a nation of consumers, and if there was no advertising, we wouldn’t know what to buy.

Steve’s point of view was really illuminating, especially as it concerns social media marketing. He sees it as a series of deposits and withdrawals. Every time you put up an update that makes people happy and laugh, you’re making a deposit. Every time you put up an update that gives people insight or information, you’re making a deposit. When you ask people to buy something, even just tickets to your show, you’re making a withdrawal.

His point is that you have to make deposits that are equal to the withdrawal, at the very least. Even better would be to make *more* deposits than you do withdrawals. And this works really well for Twitter and Facebook and stuff, where you can actually answer people’s questions and link to blogs and articles and stuff, long before you ask those people to take a leap of faith with you.

It’s interesting because the Lexus IS Convertible has a series of commercials called “Live a Little”. Now, a Lexus is basically a Toyota engine inside a shitty car, that designed to be pretty cute and very expensive.

Two Different Girls Lexus Ad

So, they’ve got nothing to sell you. This car is just like every other crappy expensive trashy car.

Running Lexus Ad

This one is hilarious, the guy is soaking wet and you have no idea why. At the end, he drives off and he’s being chased by about 50 guys who want to kill him. What did he do? Something awesome, that’s all we know. Lexus can’t make a deposit, so they made a bunch of really funny 30 second films that we’d enjoy watching.

And in the new media world, this is actually pretty easy. I have a lot of enthusiasm for the world that I live in, I genuinely love going to see other people’s show, and I genuinely would rather *everybody* produce really awesome shows than have to see shows that aren’t very good because people missed out on some easy tricks.

I spent my whole life as an actor wishing I was producing. I spent hours working with the TDs and the producers, asking them about marketing, asking them about the best ways to spend money, the best artistic choices. I still know about 10% of what I need to know to do a good job, but I LOVE IT when I see other people kick ass. If it’s possible for me to do anything to help, it feels like more than just a “deposit” on my brother Steve’s model. It feels like when you make your own dinner with your own ingredients – it’s a small thing that most people aren’t gonna even notice, but it feels like it’s improving the health of your world.

I hope that I can keep making withdrawals, which is what I feel like I’m mostly doing. All of the deposits I’m making feel like I’m making up for lost ground, like I’ve had some overdraft protection that I’m now paying back (if you don’t mind me extending the metaphor to the breaking point.) But I do feel better about making deposits into this particular world, as opposed to the pittance I put in as an actor. It’s enormously satisfying.

I wrote to my friend Seth and said, “Are you gonna be there on Saturday? I really want to see you guys (even though I don’t want to see the play) and I just wanted to see if you’d be there.” When he replied, “If you don’t want to see the play, then maybe you shouldn’t” I realized that what I wrote was a little bit shitty.

But look, if I lie to my friends, I’ve lost the only currency in which we deal. I tried to explain it to him, saying “If you were playing Jesus in Godspell in Des Moines, I would fly to Iowa to see that, but I don’t necessarily want to see Godspell in Des Moines”, and I think he got what I was saying. There are three or four people that I love deeply who are members of GroundUp Productions, and I felt compelled to see their show, no matter what show it is.

“Barefoot In The Park” isn’t even an old warhorse, it’s just Neil Simon’s somewhat innocuous and terrifically dated play. I saw it on stage when I was twelve, and then I saw it again when I was about seventeen. And again when I was about twenty seven. Also, I’ve seen the movie several times. And I saw the filmed version of the stage play on HBO. And I’m fairly familiar with Neil Simon’s work, having had it slipped into my artistic diet the way manufacturers of chewy snacks sneak palm oil into my belly.

I didn’t dread going. I’m a whore, I love the theater, it’s like church for me. Every time I walk in to a theater, I’m closer to what other people describe when they talk about God, so there’s no way I could dread it. But something happened. When I walked in and sat down in the theater… suddenly, I was actually pretty excited. And for several good reasons.

One) If you call Neil Simon a genius, I’m not gonna argue with you, but if you try to tell me that Travis Mchale is *NOT* a genius, then you’ll have a fight on your hands. Unless you’ve done what I’ve done (and many of you have) then you’ll have no way of understanding just how magnificent a job he does. He’s responsible for both the sets and the lights, and I can tell you what happened when I walked into the theater at Manhattan Theatresource… I felt like I was in the one bedroom apartment in a fifth floor walk-up. I could feel the sun coming through the skylight.

I just simply don’t know how he does it, how the company does it. I have designed and built many of the rooms in my own *house*, and I know how to look for seams… and there are none.

We’re in a whole different world here, with off-off theater. If you throw a bench on stage and tell us it’s a couch, we buy it, completely. We have NO DOUBT that it’s a couch. So… how do they get miter cuts on their ceiling molding? How do they have a functioning sink on stage, how do they MAKE IT SNOW THROUGH THE SKYLIGHT?

It’s an aesthetic vision that belies the actual motivation behind the company. They are building their company with the longest of longviews, re-creating well established scripts for the patrons that find that exciting, but they are managing to do the actual *work* with a microscope, with out a single nail out of place.

Two) There is a bell curve that happens for most artists. Most of us begin with great enthusiasm and very little skill, and end up with enormous skill and very little enthusiasm. An actor gets this in spades, unfortunately – it’s no wonder that Aldonza and Fantine are such compelling female characters, they may be the closest an actress gets to playing herself – and by the time a person has the maturity and skill to really perform, they’ve often exhausted their own patience.

In this play are two stunning performances by actors that we normally don’t get to see on our humble stages. Eric Purcell is wonderful as Victor Vellasco and Amelia White is pitch-perfect as Mrs. Banks. She comes in to see her daughter’s new apartment, and it is the most wonderful stretch of acting… we *know* she hates the apartment, but she genuinely tries to convince her daughter that she *loves* it. And White doesn’t give a hint of a knowing look, not one. She looks in her daughter’s eyes and tells her she loves the place without a single askance glance at the floor or ceiling (all of which would have been for our – the audience’s- benefit)

When finally, after a drunken night of nonsense, the two of them begin to actually talk about growing old… there might not be a more honest piece of theater going up right now. You need to see this, you won’t be more than twenty feet away when they do it, and it’s a small piece of depth and civility in a city who’s theaters are over-run by roller skaters and French revolutionaries.

Three) My friend was at the play, sitting in the other audience bank, and heard the man behind him say “OH! Right! You know what else we’ve seen by this guy? LOST IN YONKERS! That’s this same guy!”

If you don’t know Neil Simon’s work, this is the quintessence of what he does. “The Goodbye Girl” and “I Ought To Be In Pictures” get really heavy with the one-liners, far more so than this does, and the great stretch of plays based on his own growing up are perhaps his masterpieces, but this play will teach you why the man is a genius, why we should all spend a minute or two at his knee.

And you won’t find a better production. World class performances inside a brilliant theater space… and it’s even one step better than that. The show is set in the same neighborhood (roughly) as it’s being performed. Geographically speaking, it might actually be the closest production ever to the fictional brownstone it’s set in. To hear them complain about the skyrocketing rent and the utterly insane neighbors, when there are actually neighbors UPSTAIRS FROM THE THEATER who are probably complaining about their skyrocketing rent and the insane theater company downstairs putting on a Neil Simon play… that’s pretty fantastic.

Go see it. You’ll be glad you did.