Non-Targeted Marketing Failure

Posted October 20th, 2009 by Sean Williams

It has been said so many times that it has almost ceased to mean anything, but we are in fact in show business, and not necessarily in that order. We have rooms full of chairs, and those chairs each need a butt, and it is up to us to put butts in those seats.

The attempts to get a butt in each seat can run a continuum from obvious, through brilliantly original, all the way down to head-scratching. One the obvious side is something like “selling a ticket to the performer’s mom”, where the butt going in that seat belongs to someone who would rather be in that seat than anywhere else in the world. On the other end, you get something like the Montblanc Campaign for the 24 HR. Plays on Broadway.

Yeah, it’s that Montblanc. No strangers to bizarre marketing ideas, these guys created a pen – a writing utensil – that costs $24,000… and then named it after Mahatma Ghandi. So perhaps it’s not so strange that Montblanc should be interested in tapping that giant revenue stream that is off-off-Broadway and their loyal legion of a couple thousand fans, all of whom desperately try to figure out how they can use the Discount Code so they don’t have to pay the full $18 ticket value.

I should say, before I get too deep into this, that I think there is a myth about the differences between Broadway and the off, or off-off worlds. It isn’t simply a matter of celebrity or access, these are very, very different audiences. When one begins working in the world of independent theater, one is speaking to a very different audience than Broadway attracts. I love the site “Talkin Broadway” and their chat room “All That Chat”, but those people are simply un-interested in black box theaters. In a similar vein, I brought one of my dear off-off Broadway friends to see “The Music Man” with me, and at the end of the show, when the cast was inexplicably on stage playing trombones and a 60 foot American flag dropped out of the ceiling, he turned to me and said, “I feel like I’m insane…”

So, while there is a difference in production values between the independent theater world and Broadway, there is also an aesthetic difference between the *writers* of each. Independent theater embraces the non-well-made-play much more so than Broadway would, in fact Broadway simply doesn’t tolerate story-telling that requires a great leap of faith.

And so The 24 HR. Plays are the perfect slice of independent theater. A group of artists gets together at 10 PM on a Sunday night and everyone introduces themselves. The writers pick a cast out of the actors and spend until 4 or 5 writing a script. The producers have an hour to make copies and to start printing the program. At 6 in the morning, the directors come, read the scripts, get their assignments and go over the technical requirements with the staff. At 8, the actors show up, and the cast rehearses all day. At 5 they start tech runs of the show, at 7:30 the audience shows up, at 8 the curtain rises and by 10 the show is over. All in 24 Hours.

I think it’s great that they are raising money by doing a Broadway show, especially since it’s going to charity, and I think it’s great that their profile is being raised by doing it. It’s also hilarious to see celebrities, who normally live in a very protected environment, step outside their bubbles for one day and see if they can’t survive.

This year, for the Broadway Celebrity 24 Hr. Plays, they have filled the playwrighting slots with celebrity playwrights – all except for one. And with that last spot, they’ve decided to invite in a playwright from the world of independent New York theater. But they aren’t gonna decide which one to invite, they’ve decided instead to have a contest.

And here’s where the makers of extraordinarily badly named expensive pens come in. Montblanc has decided to host the competition on their website. I know this because I’ve seen the website. I mean, after it crashed Firefox and Internet Explorer on this computer, I was able to access the site on my wife’s computer, but yes, I did in fact manage to get on the site.

And there we have six playwrights, all of them from our community, duking it out for your votes. These are all people who’ve knocked you out at one time or another, all the kind of men and women that have been interviewed by Adam Szymkowicz on his blog. And we’d love for any one of these people to be invited to be a part of the plays, it would be a great opportunity for them and, more than likely, will give the audience a sense of what a real independent voice sounds like.

But… WHY? The person who wins this contest will win with about 500 or 600 votes, and there will be about 2,000 votes cast for the other playwrights. And every single one of those votes will have given Montblanc a new email address, a new marketing opportunity. And each and every one of those votes will have raised the profile of the 24 Hr. Plays in the minds of the people voting.

On the surface, this seems like a win-win. You get, say, another five thousand people who are all talking about the 24 Hr. Plays and Montblanc, how can this be bad?

Well, several things.

One, when you can win a contest with 500 votes, then it becomes really easy for you to get every single one of your cousins and your parents friends to vote. All those folks in Colorado and Louisiana that want to see Cousin Carl up in New York get a crack at having Wolverine’s Brother deliver their dialogue, they’re all gonna jump in. Not a single one of those people is gonna see the 24 Hr. Plays. Maybe they *will* buy a pen for 20k, but that seems a long route to go to make that happen.

Two, there’s a dirty little secret. The website is such a piece of crap that most people who go won’t go through the incredible pain in the ass to register and vote, but those who do will figure out pretty instantly… you can login with as many made up names as you want, nobody is actually keeping track. So, the 24 Hr. Plays and Montblanc are gonna have a giant stack of emails, and a LOT of them are gonna be fake.

Three, these playwrights are members of a community that has a lot of passion and a lot of drive, but very little capital. I know this because if they had a lot of capital, they’d have their weird plays produced off-Broadway, not off-off. We’re a community that comps our blogger friends because one $18 ticket isn’t gonna save us as producers, and one $18 ticket could break us as audience members. And if the blogs don’t cover our shows, nobody will because we can’t afford to hire publicists.

The tickets to the 24 Hr. Plays are between $200 and $300. THIS IS THE WRONG COMMUNITY FOR THIS SHOW. Besides, if we had $300 laying around, you know us, we’d probably just be making a down payment on a THIRTY THOUSAND DOLLAR PEN.

Four, this isn’t creating good will. It just isn’t. I’m in this community, and we all spend the entire year supporting each other. We were nominated for FOUR New York Innovative Theater Awards, and while we were disappointed to not win any of them, we were honestly ELATED for the people who won, and we’re still huge fans of the NYIT Awards themselves.

So… for whom do we vote? Which of my playwright friends do I think should go? After all, I could spend an hour making up fake emails and voting 75 times for one of them, and since it’s such a small community here, that block could make all the difference. One of my best friends is in the running, AND HE’S FACEBOOK FRIENDS WITH PRACTICALLY ALL THE OTHER PLAYWRIGHTS. What does he do? Does he start posting reminders to vote for him?

This is ridiculous. If you were picking a baseball team and you had 30 guys, would you pick the best 8 and say, “the ninth spot goes to whomever can get the most signatures, BUT you have to collect them at this shoe store!” How do you even know the people in the shoe store care about baseball? Every customer in the shoe store is gonna get pummeled with guys begging for signatures.

I want nothing mo
re than the continued success of The 24 Hr. Plays. It’s a little bit more than that these are a company of people I admire and think are fun and good, they are actually dear friends of mine. One of the producers is one of my oldest friends in the world right now, I’ve known him since 1992. But I think they’re making a mistake with this contest.

Oh and also, nobody cares. This experiment costs nothing to Montblanc or the 24 Hr. Plays. It’s gonna suck for our little community to have this to fight over, and there will be nothing but mild disappointment for the plurality of people who voted for the loser, and for the five losers, but we produce theater in a vacuum, our entire lives have a tinge of disappointment to them.

But I do think this is an example of marketing that hasn’t been thought all the way through. As a lesson, this is just a strange idea with very little upside. If they want a voice from the world of independent theater, then they ought to simply invite someone, getting more votes than the other five finalists won’t prove the playwright’s ability to negotiate the landmines of producing under this model.

The information they are collecting won’t be useful or even truthful, in many cases, and the target for this marketing campaign won’t, in the end, be a part of the group that will enjoy the products being produced. There will be no butts in seats or pens in pockets from this, but our little community will definitely be left with a bad taste in our mouths.

Prep School

Posted October 13th, 2009 by Sean Williams

Oh my goodness…

So, someone who reads a lot of my brother’s blog responded to my “rich kids who don’t care about anything” comment by saying they didn’t *have* rich kids at their school, that it must have been my prep school upbringing.

I once dated a girl who told me “everything you know, you read in a book…”

And then, I came across a string of posts from my theater colleagues, joking about going ahead and lying in order to pretend they had MFAs so they could be taken seriously. Josh Conkel started it, but Isaac Butler and 99 Seats re-posted, and I feel like someone needs to at least clear the smoke a little bit. Or, maybe just wave a hand in the air as if that would clear smoke.

Can we all just admit when we’ve had a leg up? Why is it, when someone loses weight but they did so by taking pills, it’s somehow worse than when someone does it by dragging a tire up a mountain like Rocky in Russia? I get that there’s an *assumption* that the difficulties have built character, but they are just as likely to build alienation and bitterness.

When a young person is given a support structure and a safe environment in which to try stuff, it makes it *easier* for them to be successful, but artistically and politically (for lack of a better word). I know a lot of theater artists who are amazing, but have such a shell of hostility toward the “rich kids” that it’s hard for them to get through.

If you went to college, you got a leg up. If you worked your way through college and took out student loans… YOU GOT A LEG UP. If you have to now pay off your student loans, you STILL got a leg up.

In order to be accepted to college, you have to have the grades and the support structure in place from when you’re a young kid. You have to live in an area where the public schools are worth a damn, you have to have a life at home that has the distractions at a somewhat manageable level, you have to have parents who are educated enough to know that college is a smart thing to aim for.

I know, these are givens for most of us. But they aren’t given to most people. According to the most recent numbers, 27.7% of our generation has earned a bachelor’s degree. The average income per capita for the US is $47k annually.

So, look at those numbers. How incredibly lucky are you? I understand, you worked hard, and you totally slaved over your last play, but if you’re an average person, not even a struggling person, but an average person, then you graduated from high school, didn’t go to college and make less than 50 grand a year.

I am in love with what I do, and if I’m honest then I have to tell you, I’m basically in love with almost every person I run into who does what I do as well. Most of my friends in the theater went to really, really nice schools, many of them are on the boards of theater companies with their friends from these schools, and many of them have teachers from these schools who come and see their shows. Because a lot of them are here in New York.

I have no personal enmity whatsoever to the fortunate. I’ll be honest, I’ve been living my entire life by sitting next to the rich kids and letting them buy the drinks. I’m funny, I’m full of affection for many of the same things they are, and I’m fun to have a drink with, if somebody has access to their dad’s bank account and they’re passing around the bottle, I see no reason why I shouldn’t be there.

But I just want to remind everyone that we are very lucky to be where we are. One of my best friends came from very humble beginnings, worked his butt off to get a full ride to college, spent a year establishing residency for grad school, passed the bar and is now a fancy-pants lawyer. I know how humble his beginnings were, but he would never, not for a second, argue that he had it hard. His parents are still married, he and his sister had a well organized and disciplined family life with two extremely smart and educated loving parents. He knows he had a leg up, even while he was working his ass off.

If you’ve got an Masters, you are among less than 9% of the US population. That’s a Master’s Degree in *anything*. If you’ve got an MFA in one of the theater arts, please know that you are among a very small, very select group.

So don’t tell me that your years at NYU were a trial by fire. Mac, Jordana and I wrote and produced a musical that went up at a 350 seat house and on opening night, we were painfully aware that we HATED the show – THAT’S a trial by fire. It was our money, our writing, our professional reputation on the line. What you got, when you were getting your MFA, was a really safe environment to practice, and it probably had a lot to do with why you write so well now.

I’m not saying you were coddled. I’m saying you were supported. There is nothing wrong with that, and the sooner we give up on the bootstrap-bullshit, and work to support the generation below us, the sooner our theater will re-awaken into it’s rightful relevance. We need to get better, and that means we have to GIVE UP talking about how hard it is to achieve what we’ve achieved and start working on making it easier for everyone to do even better than us.

A confession – My parents got divorced in 1985. Before that, I had changed schools almost every year, except for a two year stint at Norfolk Academy, for 7th and 8th grade. That was the only private school I ever went to. When my parents split up, my dad disappeared and my mom had a mini-nervous breakdown, and within a year we were living in a one bedroom apartment behind a motel in Morristown New Jersey, where I began failing out of school.

I eventually ended up in Los Angeles, dropping out of high school and going to community college, where they will accept you if you are over 18. My SAT scores were high enough that after three years I was accepted to the University of Iowa. I transferred to the University of North Carolina, where I failed out almost instantly.

When I talk about the “rich kids”, I’m talking about the kids who’s parents own their homes instead of renting. I’m talking about the kids who each have their own bedroom, instead of sharing the fold out couch in their living room. And when I talk about the kids who had a leg up, I include myself, because even the desperation of our situation couldn’t take away the fact that both of my parents had advanced degrees from college, and my extended family always had money, and I was white and male. The very reason I had such high SAT scores was because I was born with a leg up, my family *spoke the language* of the SATs at home, and our culture won’t let someone like me fail.

For the three years that I went to community college, my friends there liked me a lot, except for the fact that they assumed I was a pathological liar. Because it’s impossible for someone who’s dad was a symphony conductor, who’d lived in Europe, who spent his spare time reading books instead of getting a second job, it was impossible for that person to end up at a community college.

So, let’s stop pretending that we’re all soldiers with muddy boots here, and let’s stop pretending that the MFA isn’t a fast-track to success. Yes, you still have to be good, but your MFA has given you far more than just training. It has given you support and an opportunity for exposure. Those of us without them will catch up, and, if our shows are better, then that will eventually be recognized, but its absurd to claim that your success is purely based on your labor.

It has been said that George Bush was born on third and thought he hit a triple. It’s an apt metaphor because it’s still his responsibility to score the run and he never did. Those of us born on first or second, we still have t
o score the run as well. But none of us, especially those born on third, should be claiming to be a great hitter. We need to let all of that go, and start running.

Where My Mouth Is

Posted October 11th, 2009 by Sean Williams

So let me tell you why.

(This is stream of conscious while the kid is asleep. Apologies for grammar and spelling.)

I have seldom had as strong a reaction to a television show as I’ve had to “Glee”. Positive or Negative. There are stretches of the first few seasons of “House M.D.” where I was just tickled, and there are whole seasons of “Mad Men” that are flat out breath-taking, but even these over-the-top positive reactions pale in comparison to the bile-raising that happens when I watch “Glee”.

My thought on it are actually totally disorganized. I feel reduced to something pre-verbal… When other people start talking about why they hate the show, I find myself interrupting and yelling at them, like they don’t hate it enough or for enough reasons.

Please don’t tell me that I have a remote and other channels. I know I do, obviously there is a reason that I have submitted myself to this horror. If you placed third in a the Wyoming State Spelling Bee, and you heard that everyone watched Spellbound and loved it, then it would be completely ABSURD for you to say, “I saw some of it, didn’t like it, so I’m gonna choose not to spend any more time on it.” They keep making more episodes, and my FaceBook friends from the early 90s are all watching it, I Simply CanNot Turn Away. I have to be a witness.

It has been said that the rules of the show are not being followed by the writers, which is, of course, sin number one. That’s… That’s a horrible problem, but it isn’t my biggest problem. They’ve set up a world where the cheerleaders and football players are… JESUS.

OKAY… Okay, look, I don’t know if I can do this, but seriously, when you were in high school, was the football team really full of popular kids? Honestly. TELL THE TRUTH. No, they weren’t. They might have thought they were, but you know who the popular kids were? The rich kids who got good grades and didn’t fucking care about *ANYTHING*, let alone football.

When John Hughes wrote this stuff, he was relying on a sort of Modern Jungian Symbology, and he blew holes in all of that shit. The JOCK in Breakfast Club is as obsessed with his own little shit as the GEEK is. It is mindlessly idiotic shorthand to decide that the cheerleaders and football players are cool and the glee club is a bunch of nerds, it’s infuriating.

BUT WAIT, I’m SORRY. I’m sorry. GLEE CLUB? Do you assholes even know what a glee club is? A glee club is usually men, but fine, there are glee clubs that have men and women. A glee club performs short songs, or “Glee”s that are usually about school spirit, at pep rallies and stuff. The people in this show are in a SHOW CHOIR. It’s not a glee club.

Why don’t they just make the Lacrosse team the popular kids? BUT THEN LET THEM PLAY FOOTBALL?

Oh and the gay kid. Oh for the love of GOD. Yeah, apparently, the writer of the show is gay, and, apparently, I’m NOT, so what the hell do I know, but HONESTLY. In an episode last week, the teacher separates them into boys and girls and… I almost can’t write it… the gay boy goes and stands with the women. BECAUSE GAY GUYS ARE ACTUALLY GENDER CONFUSED. It’s isn’t that they’re gay, they just KEEP FORGETTING THEY’RE WOMEN.

He’s also the one who described one of the songs as “gay” in an earlier episode. The same episode where they edit out the word “nigger”.

Right! RIGHT, YEAH! IN that episode, the teacher brings out the gold-digger song and suddenly, the room fills with a perfect accompaniment, the kids all sight-read the music perfectly, and THE TEACHER PERFORMS THE SONG.

FOR NO REASON.

I’m… I’m just gonna have to come back to that. Because it’s the greatest sin of all. I mean, I’m here, I’m ready, I could just do this, but let me throw out a quick list of utter shit in this show before I get back to the greatest sin of all.

1) The sexual politics. It’s puerile. In “The Office”, Michael Scott, of all people, just sits down an old lady and says, “look in your day, things were different, but people have sex now…” but the constant cringe-worthy assinine sexual conversations could only have been conjured by someone who has no idea what people actually do with their lives, or how they actually speak.

2) The wheelchair kid. What is his talent? From what I can tell, they’ve got the gay kid and the jock, and then every other male talent that they need to assign to someone, they give it to the wheelchair kid. He sings bass back up? He also sings perfect tenor? And lead guitar? As soon as they cover “Spoonman” by Soundgarden, you can bet who’s gonna have the spoon solo.

3) The music. I wonder if I can pinpoint *exactly* how old the writer of this show is. I gotta guess, with the constant references to mid and late 80s music as if it’s the music of *kids*, this guy has to be about five years older than I am. Anyone who thinks Journey and Billy Joel are actually on the radar, or that “Push It” is hypersexualized rap music, has to be a half generation behind me. AND I’M ALMOST FORTY.

4) Jane Lynch. She’s fantastic. But she’s in a totally different show. When she says to the principal, “My recommendation is that these children be *hobbled*.” It’s hilarious. It’s Cruella DeVille. So… why should I give a shit about the other characters? Nobody on the show can act except for Ms. Lynch, and she’s playing a Disney Villain.

5) The Performance Teacher. When a teacher wanted to perform with the show choir, it was an obvious sign of an egomaniac who cares nothing for his own choir, and who is about 2.5 semesters away from forgetting himself entirely and sleeping with one of his sopranos. This has to be one of the most unattractive characters on television. EVER.

6) The recordings. There is nothing vibrant about any musical number. It’s all recorded, overdubbed, background vocalled, auto-tuned, focus-grouped and machine-polished. This is bleeding into my final point, but high school arts can be the subject of intense and incredible emotional journeys because of the very low rate of success and high rate of humiliation. But nobody on this show can sing a wrong note. Not a teacher, not a cheerleader, not a football player, nobody.

And this does lead me to my final point.

There were people that I spent my time with who had bumper stickers that said “I can’t. I have rehearsal.” It was funny because… they had rehearsal.

In Citrus Singers we had hours and hours of rehearsal every day. When it got to be Christmas, we also had to play handbells, and our handbell rehearsals were held *overnight*. We had no choice. Every other hour of the day was spoken for, and we would sit, 14 or 15 kids in someone’s living room, running the handbell rehearsals from midnight to five in the morning. When I was running the Bass Clef bells, the Treble bells would just lie back where they were and sleep for fifteen minutes.

It’s coal-mining. It’s not blue collar work, it’s BLACK collar work. It’s *NO* collar work, while you’re running your next six hour choreography rehearsal in a tank top. It is a trudge, it’s incredibly difficult, and you can work your ass off and still be merely *good*. Or even *AWFUL*.

When I was a kid, I was at a function with my dad, a post-concert meet-n-greet with the donors. The whole place was full of guys dressed to the nines and I said to my dad “it’s so amazing to see everyone in suits and dresses”. My dad said, “Look around. The only people in tuxedos are the musicians and the waiters. And we’re the ones who use the service entrance…” He wanted me to know, this isn’t a party for the artists. We’re at work.

So, when this show makes the execrable claim that music can simply be handed out and sight-read, performance ready, that somehow the biggest hurdles to artistic success are the stock personality conflicts between show choir and *CHEERLEADERS*, that all you have to do is *want* it, and it will happen for you (regardless of
putting in absolutely no work), this is an utter insult to all of us who sweat blood trying to make a show actually happen.

You should be furious. This isn’t a celebration of what we do, because they never show what we do. In Show Choir, as in all forms of performance including Ballets, Plays, Symphonies, one of the most difficult things to do is to re-create the exact same set list or script, time after time, performance after performance, and making it fresh every time.

I’m not saying I want to watch a TV show about that. But I can say that I find it deeply offensive, and actually damaging, to us as performers. Of course people think the NEA should be cut, they have no idea how hard it is for people to create the art that they share with the world. When you watch the infantile, craven characters on Glee suddenly erupt in perfect performance, once they get over their utterly worthless dramas, it completely undercuts the people who eschew all of this bullshittery and focus instead on making a life for themselves as artists.

I hate this show a lot.

VIRAL News

Posted August 31st, 2009 by Sean Williams

Mac Rogers has been called a lot of things, but lately those things have switched from “in need of a shower” and “gains weight like a woman” to “needs to be on Broadway” and (and I’m not making this up) “genius”.

It does bring to mind the whole “if your grandmother is such a genius, why is she sitting in the neighbor’s car” comment from Parenthood, but I’m totally fine with this characterization. People have been very generous with me about this show, and as a producer I definitely get the best of all worlds. I’m not part of the rehearsal process, so I get to watch the show the same way the audience does… but I also get credit for the production. But when people congratulate me, I generally have to point out that Jordana and Mac did the real work, that I’m just on a skateboard, sorta holding on to the back of the car.

Last night, someone grabbed me when I made that joke and said, “Hang on for dear life and DO NOT LET GO.”

I’m sure, had Mac heard that, his fear of commitment would have snapped to attention, and he’d have hid under his seat.

We got a stack of good news last night. We’ve been in talks for the last week or so about extending the show as part of the Fringe Encore series, and last night, they made the official announcement. It was always our assumption that the Encore Series was reserved for shows that have a possible commercial future, so it took some time for them to convince us that our show was indeed just this sort of show.

Independent of that, the adjudicators for the festival were kind enough to award us with the “Outstanding Play” award. I really do appreciate the fact that they don’t do “best” in the festival… it has to be pretty weird for the big award shows to compare totally different performances in completely different genres and figure out who “won”, but the “outstanding” label is just a bit of a mouthful, so everyone shortens it in conversation to “best” anyway.

We’ve been really careful not to do that. It’s hard because you only get a couple of words in marketing material, but we’ve really tried to honor the spirit of the festival. In the past, we’ve referred to “Two Time FringeNYC Award Winner Mac Rogers”, but technically, it was for “Outstanding Musical” and “Outstanding Playwright” for two different productions. In conversation, I just end up saying “Best Musical” and “the Playwrighting Award”…

It’s all very heady stuff, I’m not gonna lie. But my responsibility is to continue to look at other theater, now that this is already in production, and to write about and talk about what it all means to me. I’m in Myrtle Beach for a week vacation, but I have a backlog of thoughts about the dozen or so shows that I’ve seen and have yet to write about.

I don’t claim to be a theater blogger, but I am a theater producer, and as such, it’s my responsibility to talk about other productions. I probably won’t talk about what I hate, unless doing so is constructive to the larger conversation going on in New York Theater. For the record, during this year’s Fringe Festival, I saw what I believe is the worst piece of theater I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’m still trying to decide if it would be constructive to write about it.

If you’re reading this blog, chances are you probably saw the show. There aren’t that many people interested in Indy Theater, and we sold a lot of tickets. If you saw the show, I just want to thank you, and if not, why not come?

Fringe Encore: Viral

Viral The Play

Fave’s of the Fest, For me

Posted August 25th, 2009 by Sean Williams

Now, I have no time to write this, but I’ve had no time, and I need to write *something*, so I’m stealing a few minutes while Barnaby dances to the spin cycle on the laundry machine.

I have really liked everything I’ve seen in the festival so far, and I’ve seen a dozen or so plays (plus three more today) so the fact that I’ve picked two to highlight doesn’t necessarily mean anything. These are two that just lit something up in me, for some reason, and more than feeling like they are great plays, I’m just really happy that they exist, if that makes sense.

The first is American Jakata Tales by Ed Malin. In the program, we’re told that in Buddhist cultures, often the Buddha takes on myriad different lives and shapes, that they simply invent new stories of spiritual significance, without regard for the holy texts. It’s such a lovely and freeing idea, and from the moment the show starts, it’s as if the writer was reaching across the divide and saying “Listen, we’re playing a little fast and loose with structure here, we’re gonna mess around a bit with identity, but trust me, I’m not gonna screw you. Do this with me, and I promise to be kind.”

We get stories set all over the United States, the four actors move back and forth inside each vignette, playing scores of different characters, completely skewing our expectations. By the time Satan himself admits, “Sometimes even the devil has to do good”, you realize that the show is taking us away from the theater, away from New York, even away from the U.S. (in the middle of this deeply American story) and he’s turning the room a full 90 degrees.

I just loved it, although I’m sure the director and the actors saved the script from some screwy moments. There are bad jokes that land exactly right, like bad jokes. There is almost no set, no real costumes, hardly any props, so the director and the cast has made up for it with well-calibrated theatricality. The theater itself is a death-trap, as soon as the door closes it feels like Apollo Thirteen in there with a dwindling oxygen supply, but I still walked out of the theater feeling completely invigorated.

Now, please understand, I’m not recommending this play. I know for a fact that I brought a lot of myself into this show. I have such a deep affection for the lonely and weird voice, the non-pretentious and honestly under-represented artistic point of view, when it reaches out from the pages of a strange and ugly piece of art, that I know a big part of why I loved this piece is because I could *feel* my own loneliness in my perspective. A United States that is misunderstood, being queerly picked apart by a host of bizarre characters, having been written by a lovely and strange man, and all of it being produced for an audience who didn’t seem to quite be on the same page… I was in an irrational heaven.

On the other hand, I can whole-heartedly recommend Candide Americana. I don’t want to misrepresent the show, because *all* Fringe shows look like home-made college black box shows, it’s what’s so great about the Fringe, but what this show carries with that ethos is an actual enthusiasm throughout that reminds me of the heady days when we were all in school.

When I think of Candide, the first thing that comes to mind, just before Voltaire, is Bernstein, particularly the overture. If you listen to that fantastic bit of Soprano energy, the off-kiltered banshee giggle, you’ll get an idea of what the energy is like in this production. The horrors that befall the characters in the show are constantly off-set by the gaggle of lovely people running on stage to holler out chapter titles and deliver locations and plot. It’s a focused mania, a theatrical literalness that works so perfectly when you can’t support the show with big sets and props.

The cast is without fault, with each of them embracing or distorting the cliche’s expected of their situations. The actors don’t stand out the way it usually happens at the Fringe, the entire ensemble is together creating the entire piece, it’s really a wonderfully crafted show. The direction is meticulous, it’s a complete vision, from each individual moment to the overall arc of the piece.

The writing, though, steals the show. Again, this is one of those things that might just affect me personally. For a stinkin’ commie, I am a complete sucker for an artist who’s fascinated by the character of “America”. The Candide story has been moved to the U.S., but it’s been done with such elegance. From the first moment, when Candide announces that he lives in the best possible country in the world “Bosnia”, you know this is smartly crafted.

The horrors of the Candide story have been replaced by… well, by the average stuff that’s been happening to America over the last eight years. And what is so powerful is that usually, when one says “the last eight years”, we all know it’s a condemnation of the Republican administration, but this play has no time for anything so small. This is a much larger play, dealing with the actual ideas that Voltaire (and a hundred others since) brings up.

I just loved this play. Totally theatrical, but still completely organic. Perfectly performed and costumed for the Fringe, proving a kind of flexibility that so many companies fail to embrace. Also, it helps that the “young, cute, talented men and woman” quotient is through the roof… not to be a pig, but this is just a lovely, lovely group of people. I’m so happy that I got a chance to see this, and even more happy to know it’s out there being done. Please go see it.

Look After You

Posted August 23rd, 2009 by Sean Williams

Very often, in order to find something expansive, the best approach is to make something very small. I don’t know anything about poetry, but I’m pretty sure this is the idea behind Haiku, that if you can express something within a very small structure, it can end up translating into something very meaningful for a lot of people.

Look After You is exactly that. A man is struggling with his book, a sister is working through her jobs and her dates… and at the center of the whole thing is a young woman, a photographer, who has fallen ill. Her short term memory is shot and, when she looks through the lense of her camera, it’s all fuzzy.

This fuzziness carries through the whole play. The book that he’s writing is not about the people who climb Mount Everest (there’s a mountain of information about these guys) but about the Sherpas who help them ascend. It turns out that 10% of the climbers who attempt the mountain die on their way, but the Sherpas go up and down the mountain a dozen times or more without any risk.

He’s searching for the answers through a lens as fuzzy as the woman’s camera. And always, at the root of the play, is the idea that we can’t be sure. Nothing is guaranteed. The woman’s short-term memory loss has led to her missing a couple of very important things, including the writer’s marriage proposal, and now everyone has to deal with this re-set. More than that, she could die. Just like the climbers, or the sherpas, or any of us. The chances may be higher for her, but that doesn’t actually *mean* anything, all of us still have this risk.

Designed as a full-length with no intermission, the show flies by. Louise Flory is on full exhibition here, both as a wickedly smart playwright and as a very generous actress. She’s the center of the play, the person everyone else is responding to and bouncing off of, and she does all she can to let each person run the play. In one of the opening scenes with her unbeknownst fiance, I was astonished at how much kindness she approached the characters. It’s so easy to be put upon, and he’s just glows in what could be a really introspective and downer role.

Another great standout is Lowell Byers, as the best friend and bartender. This guy is so utterly charming, so self-effacing and lovely, that it makes sense why every character opens up to him. It’s difficult to know how to reveal a story inside a play without having the characters say stuff like, “It’s just like that one time, when my father always loved my sister more than me…” but in this show, the best friend is such a sweetheart that he becomes a perfect person for everyone to reveal themselves to.

I can’t do this lovely play justice in the distracted moments I’ve stolen this morning. It is a wonderful companion piece to our play, at the same venue, in that it really focuses on the liminal state we exist in, between life and death, and the importance of embracing whatever moments we actually *have*. I would recommend this show without hesitation, I just know people who see it will like it as much as I did.

Viral Reviews

Posted August 23rd, 2009 by Sean Williams

I will write about my Fringe Festival experiences between tomorrow and Monday.

I’ll tell you this, possibly my two favorite plays, out of a great number of really good shows, have been American Jataka Tales and Candide Americana. The latter of these two I would recommend highly, I think EVERYONE WHO SEES this show will like it. The former, I’ll admit it, it might have just been me. I loved it, but you should make up your own mind.

Now, just so they’re all here, and without any pull quotes, I want to throw out the list of every review we’ve gotten for Viral. It’s my blog, I get to do this. Normally, I would be tempted to leave some of them out, but… I don’t really know how this happened, but we can’t leave any of them out.

They’re all actually… good.

We did a fun big gay musical, people were all “what?”. We did a radio play that was HIGH-LARIOUS, and the press was all, “I’m sorry, who are you?” We did a big rock musical and the press was… well, actually, it wasn’t even the press, everyone kinda hated that show…

So, we do a very small show, a very personal show, where we think it’s gonna be, maybe, twelve people who think it’s good. And that’s when people start saying “you have to see this”.

I swear to God, I’ll never figure it out.

Anyway, un-edited, here’s the list of all the press we’ve gotten from “Viral” by Mac Rogers.

Backstage

NYTheater

Stagebuzz

Show Showdown

Time Out New York

Theatermania

Greenwich Village Examiner

The New York Times (I KNOW right?)

Michael Roderick

Peter Dizozza

James Comtois

The Play’s the… you know…

Posted August 12th, 2009 by Sean Williams

Mac Rogers, whom I often refer to as “our playwright” or “my co-producer”, but who’s relationship to me would be better defined as “the best man at my wedding” or “the guy in the room who, when crazy shit happens, tries not to look at me”, has written the script for our show opening this Saturday.

Now, Mac has earned a lot of praise on our level of theater, people seem to be very excited to work with him and his talent is finally being recognized. The problem is, it hasn’t been recognized earlier, and it’s still really difficult to recognize it without seeing the script in action.

This has always shocked me. After every production we’ve done of Mac’s work, I watch the audience stagger out – astonished, elated, exhausted, and utterly in love with his writing. So, why can’t we send the script to an agent or a larger production company and get the same reaction?

Let me explain using film. In horror movies, filmmakers use what they call “negative space”. You see a woman, sweating, clutching a baseball bat, and she’s in the center of the screen, it isn’t that scary… but you frame the shot with her filling just the left corner of the screen and the whole rest of the screen is black, you sit there, straining, looking into the dark. It’s terrifying, you know something is there, you can’t stand it, and the longer you wait, the more you feel like jumping out of your seat.

This use of negative space doesn’t have to be just the frame. Harold Pinter does this maybe better than anyone, a seemingly normal conversation that is dripping with implications. The Homecoming is as close to a nihilistic horror movie as I’ve ever seen, I might have been more terrified watching this than I was watching Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But Pinter can very easily be done badly. As many of my college friend can tell you (in fact some of them put it on display). That’s because Pinter has no interest in participating in post-modern pop culture, so he not only doesn’t make it easy, he makes it difficult. His plays can read like blank scenes, all the import is the responsibility of the audience and the production. And when I say “audience”, I include the reader, if you read it, you can horrify yourself. I won’t read Pinter when the house is dark and quiet.

Now, there’s a scene in Pulp Fiction where Maria De Mederos is describing the breakfast she wants while Bruce Willis looks for a watch. It’s different than Pinter because Tarrantino gave us the scene earlier, explaining the watch, and he’s also made it clear that Bruce Willis can’t go back to his apartment. It may seem like a scene about breakfast, but the mounting tension is brilliant, the banality of her breakfast hopes set against almost certain death.

This is what Mac does, as well or better than anyone. There is a scene where two women are cleaning a room for the video shoot, talking about where pictures will sit, talking about the nicest way to frame the shot… and the whole time, while you’re watching, you keep wanting to say, “FOR YOUR *DEATH*… right? You’re setting this place up FOR WHERE YOU WILL DIE…” and then, “unless you don’t.”

All the way through the play, characters sit and fight about Italian food, or talk about distribution deals, and the whole time, you just want to know… is she gonna do it? And if she does… is she gonna tell us *why*? The more time we spend with her, the more we can’t believe they’re gonna make her do it… or even *let* her do it. And more than anything, we want to know why. Why is the ultimate not-okay thing suddenly okay for her?

Now, this is the macro-brilliance (no pun intended) to the writing, the shape of the piece, the arc of the story. It’s an hour forty with no intermission because there’s no place for an intermission. That’s how you have to go with Mac’s writing, you put the intermission where the script calls for it, and if there is none, then there is none. The play has a rhythm, like a five movement symphony, it has a structure that fits precisely as it is.

But it doesn’t mean the script doesn’t have these incredible turns of phrase. It’s one of the first things you learn when you get to act in a script written by Mac, if you paraphrase, you’re just making things harder on yourself. He actually knows what he’s doing, there isn’t a word that hasn’t been weighed and been deemed worthy. Consider just one little insignificant snip, from the middle of a scene –

GEENA: Colin’s just… when he’s in the middle of a project, he gets all intense… things’ll be different when this happens. There’ll be money coming in… we can all take a breath. Things’ll be different.

The specific words like, “project” and “money coming in” (that passiveness, as if money will arrive, not that people will be giving them money for watching someone’s death) “when this happens” (just a little thing, like a dentist visit or appointment television)… It’s all fantastic. You don’t know how badly they are drowning until Geena describes “breath” as “different” than they live now.

I don’t feel right quoting any stretches of dialogue, but there are shocking and beautiful chunks of dialogue and monologue that are heart-scraping. I’ve had the privilege of acting in several of Mac’s plays, and there are pieces of script, little stretches of English, that still sit in my head. And if they’re sitting in my head, they have to be changing who I am, they have to be influencing the way I see my life and the world.

More than that, there are scrapes of Mac’s writing that I only know from being an audience member, and those are still living in my head. In an early play, Mac had a playwright character say, “I don’t believe theater can change the world, but I think it can change one person’s mind, and I believe that person can change the world…” I’m paraphrasing because, honestly, if Mac knew I was writing this, he probably wouldn’t send me the quote. He’s that lousy at self-promotion.

I may end up apologizing at the end of every one of these posts, but this is the first time that I have served solely as producer on one of our plays, so I really am removed from the whole thing. It’s very difficult to take credit for the artistic work done inside the play when you’re sitting outside of it, just watching. But it’s really easy to become a groupie for the very thing you’re trying to sell, when a piece of art becomes as important to us as this has become. Every play is important to the people who make it, and I’m using this blog to try to explain why this one is important to us.

Stage Motion and Shape

Posted August 10th, 2009 by Sean Williams

I have been called a jack-of-all-trades, a man of many talents, a renaissance man… but the truth is I’m far more often a dilettante than I am anything positive. I’m the very definition of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, in that I know enough to pretend that I know very much, and unless I tell you that I don’t know that much, you probably won’t discover it until we’re both in a lot of trouble.

BUT, my varied and eclectic theater training, while leaving me shy of having a specific voice as, say, a director or a designer, has made it possible for me to enjoy a lot of different kinds of theater, far more than I might even think of creating on my own.

When I started acting, I was in an intensive program that ruthlessly taught the basics. For instance, when you are upstaging someone, you’re not being obnoxious during their monologue, you are actually physically moving slightly upstage so that you can look at them AND at the audience, forcing them to turn their backs and look upstage. I mention this because much of the *rest* of my theater education ignored a lot of this.

Now, I’m not gonna wander into the deep waters going on over at The Lark (although you *really* should go over and read the whole conversation, it’s illuminating), because they’re discussing something far larger, the idea of experimentation taking the place of basic construction, and in stage craft, it’s really far more fundamental. By the time I hit my fourth college, I was immersed in a crowd of brilliant mumblers, of people who had read their Uta Hagen, but didn’t know how to cheat in a proscenium, of people who were fascinated by Alexander Technique, but hadn’t learned the basic art of talking fast and loud.

In Gideon, we talk sometimes about people who know “how to deliver lines”, and it’s one of those things the separates talent from skill. In the same way, I think understanding the basic uses of the stage can separate talent from skill, and it’s fully on display with our play now heading into its opening on Saturday, “Viral”.

Too often, in an attempt to fight for realism, we fail to use the stage space to create pictures that insinuate into an audience’s lizard brains. When you put bodies in motion, and let them stop at a moment, that moment can describe the volumes of back story that you simply can’t fit into the story.

Take the following image from our tech rehearsal.

What do you see? I’ll tell you what I see.

I see the queen, the slave and the jester. I see the Queen, in repose, who is doing nothing, who is letting the life come to her. At the foot of the couch, the Slave sits, toiling, not even raising her head, not daring to look up, and to the left of the picture is the Jester, whom you can almost see with motley and bells.

I’ll go you one better, I’ll tell you what this scene means to me. It’s the Pieta, the Christ figure being embraced by the couch, and at the foot is Mary, who is almost washing the Christ’s feet. And Peter who is bowing… but not to Christ. Peter is bowing to the camera, who is recording Christ. Not enough time is spent creating these images, these tableaux, we spend so much time working towards truth, verisimilitude, that we don’t know how powerful these moments can be.

What do you see? I see a giant man fishing, and around him I see fish. The fisher stands, a full head higher than the set, and behind him two crushed guppies. More than that, I see a stack of video screens behind a tiny poison camera. Every wall, every piece of furniture, stacked like a pile of discarded televisions. Even the guppy’s shirt looks like a wall of screens.

I’m gonna try to talk about different parts of this production over this next week. In a way, I’ve fallen in love with this show in a way that I never expected to, and I’d like to share it with you the only way I know how. I hope this isn’t seen as self-celebratory, as a producer my job is to assemble teams of people and get the hell out of the way, and I really only checked in at the end of last week to see where we are. And I’m… I’m astonished. I won’t be able to talk about the show without gushing, so I apologize ahead of time.

Pro, or Re, Ductive

Posted August 9th, 2009 by Sean Williams

So, I find myself, the day after tech, with a reasonably clean inbox. And, of course, an extremely not-clean house.

Once tech has been run, once I know that we can do our load-in and load-out and we’ve got all the properties in place, the show essentially moves to the actors. The writer and the director still have a lot of work to do, there are gonna have to be cuts and pacing still needs to be pushed, but essentially, we’re closing in on the actors having the responsibility for carrying the show across the finish line.

I used to both love and hate this time as an actor. You know the show is in your hands, but the whole team is still hanging on you, metaphorically licking their thumbs and wiping dirt off your face. I never felt fully comfortable, fully calm, until we got our half hour call the day of opening. There is a thing that happens between you and an audience that can’t happen in rehearsal, a conversation, and the best of us knew how to deliver on our end. As much as rehearsal prepares you for the performance, your work has only barely begun before the curtain (if there is one) rises.

It’s strange that, as a producer, I have to work hard to conjure up feelings of melancholy for those times. I have a two fold job, I have to deliver the show to the actors (so that they can deliver it to the audience) and I have to deliver the audience to the production (so that they can respond to the cast). A story exists on the page, and a producer has to bring together the team that tells the story, and the team that listens. Half of that job is done, and the other half is almost too ineffable to quantify. It is certainly not something one can do for every production, it has to happen over many stories and many years of producing.

So, I shift back to that, fully, today. After carrying the couch into the rehearsal space, my job with them is done, and tonight I go to meet with a big group of other like-minded producers, to talk about what we’re doing, to talk about what excites us, and to talk about the two jobs.

It’s a really exciting time to be a producer on our level in New York. If you want to raise a hundred thousand dollars and produce a giant trilogy, you certainly may, but if you want to raise three grand and produce a small, important (to you) story, you can do that too. Fifteen years ago, there was no Fringe Festival… and now there are about ten summer festivals, many of them with very serious marketing and fantastic big-time production values.

It’s sad to go from 75 or 80 emails a day, from other producers, from the venue director, from the festival, from the stage manager and the director, down to having five emails in my inbox (including one from my mom!), but…

I saw the show last night at tech. I was on-book for a stretch, and I found myself trying to breathe so I wouldn’t fall apart. When we make off-off theater, we fall in love with our scripts, we can’t help it, but last night I was just transported. We’ve won some awards and we’ve had some really cool nominations, so is it possible that this might be the best thing we’ve ever produced? I certainly feel like I’m smarter and more mature now than I have ever been before, maybe we will just consistently get better and better as we go. I don’t know, I’m too close to everyone involved.

But, as the guy at the top of the pyramid (at least on this show) I have a deep satisfaction for what the rest of the team has done. Every single person has been a gigantic pain in the ass at some point (myself included), but we’re all getting better at letting that roll off our backs, and focusing on all that has gone so well. There have been times in the past where what we wanted to say was unclear, but this time, people’s opinions of the show will be based on the show, not on our lack of ability to pull off the production.

Ah…

As I wrote this blog, I got a call from the venue director, which required a flurry of texts between myself and the stage manager. It really is the thing I love most about the theater – as soon as you begin to feel magical and transported, someone will come to you with a plunger and ask you to fix the toilet. It’s a lovely parallel to life…