I Am The Problem

Posted April 22nd, 2010 by Sean Williams

Isaac Butler does a phenomenal job over at his blog, and he’s almost too prolific for my somewhat slower moving mind, I very often want to respond or comment, but by the time I’ve put my ducks in a row, and found a free chunk of time, the moment has almost always passed.

I’m gonna ignore my impulse to feel behind the pitch and post a response to a blog post that Isaac wrote a few days ago. In his post on criticism and reviews he said that he felt the stream-of-conscious review, where the writer fails to establish useful parameters or any kind of thesis, were the very thing that makes old media folks nervous about new media. And he agreed with them.

Now, I don’t think Isaac was talking about me, specifically, but I do think that this is exactly what I do, and I don’t actually see a lot of other people doing it, so I thought I’d take a swing at explaining it, if not defending it. I kinda feel like blogging about blogging theory is a little like writing a book about theater – it feels utterly counter-intuitive to me, but I’m gonna give it a go.

I have a marketing theory about theater that I adhere to, almost entirely because it doesn’t seem that anything else is working and we might as well try *something*. The idea is two-fold. 1) People love gathering in a place together, sitting in chairs and witnessing theater. I believe this because, despite all of the easier ways of getting entertainment and inspiration, people are still going to movies, going to sports bars to watch games, going to church every sunday – people are still gathering in chairs and witnessing a story being told. 2) What is good for any one theater company is good for all of them. A rising tide raises all ships.

So why is it so hard for us to find audience? Ken Davenport has an amazing blog where you can find really fun inside baseball about the big boys, but I am always astonished, every week, to see the sheer quantity of human beings who show up to Broadway shows. Last week? 260,000 people.

So why did Craven Monkey have empty seats at The Brick? Well, for a hundred reasons, and everyone knows their favorite fifty out of those hundred, and I think there have been a lot of creative ways to address this. But I think people just don’t know how good it feels to sit in a small theater and watch a fantastic little show.

When you’re at dinner with your family, and your dad is cracking everyone up, or you have an Aunt that is always taking off for some festival in Nebraska, or Irkutsk or something… I think a lot of people have forgotten that we have that for you. One small strange voice that can keep you on the edge of your seat, you know you can find that at a bar, or at your house at a dinner party. I want you to know that you can get it from us, too. You can come, and get your mind blown.

And you can totally get that on Broadway too, I am not one of those people who believe we have a superior product. But we have a comparable product for a tenth the investment, and people just don’t know that it’s available. Every Sunday, you’re at Church with a hundred or so other people, you catch a movie the fourth week it’s out and you’re in the theater with nine other couples, and the quality of the experience isn’t *less*.

So, when I write reviews of plays I’ve seen, I am unfortunately incapable of including a thesis or even very deep analysis. Which, actually, means I’m not writing a review or a criticism, I’m writing something else, and I don’t have a name for it. I’m trying to conjure a visceral response to being in the space, to the physical act of being drenched in a piece of theater.

My blog isn’t wide read enough to make any difference, and I am not desperate to create a marketing movement in any way, so it could be that I’m doing less good than I hope to. I have a blog, and I see theater, so those are both pluses, but I’m also pretty over-enthusiastic and I don’t really have any external training in the theater – everything has been immersion, on-the-job type educatin’, so I can be easily impressed with a turn of phrase or a performance that is clearly a rip-off of something one learns about in an MFA program. I know that sounds snotty, but I’m completely earnest here, my education is half-assed, but I try to make up for it by *showing up*, and letting people participate in the joy for what I’ve seen.

My hope is to inspire anyone who *does* read my blog to remember that spark of being in the auditorium in high school, when your friends were doing Camelot. I want my readers to get the sense that next time I go to a show, they might like to go with me. And if I’m not going, maybe they’ll go by themselves.

Misunderstanding Marketing

Posted April 15th, 2010 by Sean Williams

Over at Jamespeak, he continues to talk about some of the ideas they have been wrestling with in terms of marketing. The title of this post is not to insinuate that they’ve misunderstood anything, and God knows I don’t mean to presume that I understand anything more than the very rudimentary approaches to marketing, but one of James’ commenters is making a classic mistake.

Much of what we do in terms of marketing can’t be measured by a direct cost/benefit ratio. A twitter account takes a fair amount of time to maintain, and if you are half-assed in your approach to it (which I have been, I have to admit) then you can find yourself investing *some* time, and coming up with nothing, because the community you mean to foster just hasn’t gotten that invested in you. On the other hand, you can post twenty or so times a day, and you will find that everything that happens to you starts to fall into two categories – “Worth Mentioning On Twitter” or “Not Worth Mentioning On Twitter”, and that’s an awful feeling.

But it would be a mistake to say, “Okay, the company has a twitter account, and I spend five hours a week on it, and doing freelance work, that’s roughly $250 I would make during that time, so each week on Twitter would have to bring in 13 paying ticket buyers”. Obviously, that’s a mistake, there might be thirty weeks between productions, on our level, and none of us believes that a twitter account will sell 400 extra tickets.

And so I would argue it’s also a mistake to look at the postcards the same way. There is so little of our art that lives after it’s done, and the stuff that does live on is usually not something we can put in our hands. Jimmy’s company Nosedive has actually done pretty well recording their shows to video, but even then, you don’t have something in your hands.

If you are building a community, it’s exciting for people to have a physical reminder of the show, long after it’s done. It isn’t just the people who are *in* the show, it’s the people who *saw* the show, that get to have the postcard. There are people who collect playbills, and yet most of us just print our programs at our dayjobs or Kinko’s and hand out some folded shit to the people who come. When I’m cleaning out a jacket, or an old box, and I find postcards from shows that I saw years ago, it’s exciting. It reminds me that the company and I have a relationship that extends back for years.

Yes, the postcards end up in a landfill, a lot of them, and yeah, that sucks. I think the answer is to only print as many as you’ll actually need, and use them as a placeholder for a ticket in your mind. Give them out to people who want to see the show, send them to people that have already supported you, maybe hand them out with the programs. Let them live on in the hands of the cast and crew, and their circle of friends, but make sure they end up with the audience as well.

On one wall in my studio, I have all of our postcards framed and placed above my desk. Many of the postcards on my wall were saved from a box of thousands that ended up at the dump, and I’ve since modified my expectations when ordering. But they exist on my wall as a tangible, physical reminder of the show, in a way that the costumes rotting in my garage don’t.

Now, maybe postcards are a bad idea, I think every company has to do that metric for themselves. But when a company is doing the metric, they need to have as long a view as possible, as open a mind as possible about what the benefits could be to the company as a whole, not just to the production.

If you pay your actors $400 each, are they responsible for selling 23 tickets each? Of course not. The whole is larger than the sum of its parts, when we’re creating a play, we’re telling a story and all of the disparate parts should be handled with care and expertise. But when we’re marketing the show, we’re ALSO telling a story, and the image on a postcard is a chance to show your audience a vision, a piece of art, in a tangible and physical form. So you can’t say “this one aspect has to pay for itself in ticket sales.”

Check this out, and tell me you wouldn’t want a hard copy of this picture.

self portrait by Becky Byers, photoshopped by the brilliant Pete Boisvert

I mean, come on.

That’s just bad-ass.

The Flies Have A Lord?

Posted April 8th, 2010 by Sean Williams

Barnaby had spent a few hours in the house after school, playing with drums and cars and the rest of his incredible assortment of time wasters toys when he decided that he’d like to go to the deli and the to the park. The deli has a bunch of shiny plastic crap that Barnaby is drawn to, but not so much that he feels compelled to complain when I tell him he can’t have it. This time, though, he simply couldn’t leave unless I got him the six pack of table tennis balls. He seemed to feel it was the least I could do.

He walked down to the water, with me by his side, trying to herd the falling, blowing balls back to him when he couldn’t quite hold on to ALL SIX at the same time. I finally convinced him to put some in his pocket. His first idea, three in one and three in the other, was too logical and seemed to be working too well, so he tried to cram all six in his right pocket. Five would almost fit, the sixth would simply roll out and down the sidewalk. It finally got run over by a car, to Barnaby’s shrieking amusement. “THAT BALL IS FLAT!”

The fifth ball became a source of entertainment not only for Barnaby, but for the twenty or so people who stopped it with their foot, or bent down to pick it up as they walked up, because it simply wouldn’t stay in his pocket. Thug life teenagers and yuppies walking off their jogs were equal in Barnaby’s eye as willing participants in his ball roll. He would start running, legs kicking up sideways, and the #5 ball would pop out and roll backwards down the sidewalk, and each person who grabbed it and brought it back would get a giant “SHANK ZHOO!”

He said, as he often does in the middle of a sideways leg kicking run, “maybe let’s take a little rest RIGHT HERE!” and sat down on the side of the river.

Barnaby contemplates the RFK Bridge

We got up and crossed the street to the playground. Some of Barnaby’s friend were there, Hutch and Rory and Francis – and they were all playing together. But Barno didn’t quite know what was expected of him. He tried to hug Hutch, who is a foot taller and confused by this burst of affection. Rory and Francis were alternating between being monsters and being chased by monsters, and Barnaby wasn’t sure who was what.

There is no cruelty in children, but there is an animalistic feel. Your body has to move in the right way, a nod or a look or a sense of belonging, you have to know the cues to be able to mean something to other children. We know this as adults as well, but we look past it because we’ve devised much simpler silent communication – with our clothes and shoes and haircuts and electronics doing the talking.  With kids, they don’t notice the cut of your tailor, but they get when you’re part of the game and when you can’t quite catch up. Barnaby can’t catch up.

We get in the swings and he’s laughing like a maniac. We have a whole slew of swing games we play, and he instructs me through gobs of horse guffaws. “RUN AWAY AND COME BACK!” he screams, and I do just that, timing my approach with his waxing swing. This is maybe the one thing that has stayed consistent since he was six months old, but even this is gonna disappear soon. He’s already a little bit too large for these swings, and the mothers holding their 18 month olds give me the stink eye until I get him out.

He runs to the playground part, with the climbing forts and bridges and slides. There are teams of kids running around, not much older, but older enough that he can’t quite figure out what they’re doing. I hang back as far as I can, I want him to figure it out. As kids run past him, I can hear him shout, “HI! MY NAME IS BARNABY!”, but they don’t hear him. And if they do, they don’t understand him. He still speaks like a two year old. When a seven year old girl stops in front of him and he says, “Vat is yow nayim?”, she just alters her path slightly and runs on.

He runs up to me and asks if we can find a stick. Once he has one he likes, he heads back to the jungle gym. Instead of chasing the kids and running around, he goes from pole to pole, banging and listening to the sound. The flocks of children, using some kind of bird body language that I cant read and neither can Barnaby, swoop back and forth across the playground, and he just walks from support beam to support beam, listening to the metal gong noise as he bangs it with a stick. After ten minutes of this, he sits down and watches the river.

Barnaby finishes banging and drops his stick

Finally, he gets up and walks over to me. We head to the gate, he wants to throw his ping pong balls at the trees. Behind me, I hear that same gong noise, and I turn to see that three other kids have come over with sticks. They’re all banging on the supports, following Barnaby’s pattern. I call out to him, “BARNABY! Look, kiddo! These kids want to play with you!” He turns, looks at them, acknowledges the whole thing, and heads for the gate. He’s all done banging, he’s moved on.

When we get home, a half hour later, we only have three of the six balls we started out with. One of them ended up flat in the road, one in the drain, and one in Astoria pool. Barnaby lets me know that it’s okay. He explains that tomorrow, we can go back to the deli and get more.

Barnaby insists this is not a turtle, it’s a tortoise

New Media Investment

Posted March 18th, 2010 by Sean Williams

There are a lot of people out there who know a lot more about this than I do. Or maybe not, it’s the wild west right now, and everyone is trying to figure out the best way to use the tools at our disposal in order to get what we want.

It’s interesting, because in no other part of our social interactions do we dare be quite so brazen. As much as we might talk about “working a room”, we don’t ever stand up in the middle of a party and holler, “Listen, if you want this room full of people to do what you want, come talk to me, and I’ll explain the con!” and then wait for people to check you out. There’s something unsettling about facebook fan invites and twitter-pimping and blog-slobbing that makes one feel as if the entire environment is filled with narcissism and snake oil.

The loveliest thing about new media for me is that it has helped me overcome whatever latent shyness I might have. I know, for those of you who know me well, it seems absurd to talk about my shyness, but the fact is that I have no problem talking to anybody about anything, but I have a lot of shame attached to the idea of selling stuff to whomever I’m engaging. It’s really easy for me to sit at a party and make jokes, but it’s really hard for me to turn that into an investment opportunity, or a ticket sale.

Now, I know, this is true of everyone, but it’s really important to use that knowledge when you’re engaging in the new social media. Nobody knows how to use their friendship with you to sell a ticket to their show, or pick up a $20 investment. They need you as much as you need them, and I’m not just talking about cross-pollenation within a small subset, I’m talking about a much larger sense of investment.

A lot of people don’t care about theater. In the same way… in the same way that I don’t really care about the environment. I know, I know, it’s insane to say you don’t care about the environment, it’s the only world we’ve got, I’ve got children, blah, blah, blah, but… I just don’t. I *understand* why people are passionate about it, I’m pissed off that my kid has asthma because our neighborhood is historically polluted, but in that secret chamber inside my heart where I keep my real feelings, I just never, ever think about pollution or animal rights or whatever.

But I have a lot of friends who do care about the environment. And I’m friends with these people because I joined our local CSA, and became a core member. I have a connection, now, with a couple of local farms and 200 families in my neighborhood because I’ve chosen to invest some of my time and energy into caring about something that isn’t necessarily all that organic for me.  Interestingly, a lot of the people in the CSA are also somewhat passionate about the arts. One thing can lead to the other.

Instead of looking at cashing in on your social media investment, it’s more important that you look at how much you’re paying in. How flexible are you being, when it comes to community building? Look, I’m not saying that I’m gonna join the NRA, I’m not gonna try to be something that I’m not in order to sell more tickets to my shows, but I think it’s genuinely important to be giving BACK to the community. From a place of genuine generosity.

Is someone on facebook putting together a book club? Is someone tweeting about architecture in your town? Do you like crosswords or scrabble, because I’m pretty sure there are people doing this stuff online. Do you have a cat? Do you love small planes? Are you fascinated by the civil war? Whatever it is, there’s a community of people out there, and you can invest in that community. It’s possible to find something that isn’t your life’s passion, but which you find really fun, or really entertaining, and you can invest your time in it, even if it’s only via online media tools.

Let me assure you, there’s a huge mistake you can make, and it’s very easy to see if you’re making it. Go to your twitter feed or your facebook update page or whatever tool it is that you’re using and take a look at your posts. How many of them feel like an investment, and how many of them feel like a withdrawal? If this page was a bank, and every time you reached out to help, or to inform, or to crack up your readers was money in, and every time you asked people to help you, or to buy your stuff, is money out, what would your balance be?

Find the communities you can honestly invest in, and then do it. It’s really the best use for our social lives. If you were at a party, do you want to be known as the guy who showed up with no snacks or drinks, and then spent the whole time getting drunk and telling everyone to come see your show? Or do you want to be the guy who shows up with a hollowed out loaf of bread full of dip and a case of beer? Not only is it better to be the second guy, it’s actually a hell of a lot more fun.

Daffydills Who Entertain

Posted March 17th, 2010 by Sean Williams

I walk up to the subway, passing all the local Astoria haunts. The converted garage that’s now a coffee shop, the high-end consignment stores tucked in between cheap Chinese food and even cheaper Chinese backrubs, the dentist who’s awning is all in Cyrillic shelved next to a double-size fashion store that seems to sell only purses and belts. When I round the corner to the train, I finally have Starbucks and McDonald’s and CVS, but nussled between them are the Gaza Strip of competing glasses stores with Cohen’s Optical eyeing Odyssey Optical from across the street.

I’m riding in at 6:30, for a 7:30 reading, so everyone on the train with me is heading back into the city. Astoria, for all its multiculturalism, is mostly split into three groups – Older first generations immigrants from the countries circling the Mediterranean, parents of young kids who work in the city and mid-twenties transplants from all over the country. It’s this last group that I’m on the train with, going in to Manhattan for dinner and an 8 o’clock curtain, or a long dinner and an even longer night.

I get off at the 49th st. station right at 7 and start walking West. As I work my way through the crowd, I see all the gypsies heading into stage doors, and all the tourists taking pictures of the buildings. It’s amazing, because in an hour, the tourists will be utterly transported by the skinny boys and girls into rapturous applause, but right now, they’re staring at the jumbotron. The gypsies are walking among them, but they don’t know who they are, you can only recognize them if you’ve been among them. The area around Times Square at 7 PM is an incredible jumble, part backstage at an Abercrombie and Fitch ad shoot, and part waiting line at a Long Island Chinese Buffet.

I make my way through them, over to 52nd between 10th and 11th, where the yuppies are all in shorts, despite the weather, because they are headed to the gym. Always in couples. Probably so nobody has to deal with the homeless. I don’t deal with the homeless either.

When I get to the reading, the playwright is at the door. And when he sees me, he smiles and says “SEAN! I’m so glad you could make it!” I always get way more credit than I deserve because everyone knows I’m leaving a kid at home…

I talk to some people and then grab a seat. Behind me is a gay guy and his friend talking to two young women.

“Not MEN, honey. BOYS. None of us have problems with *MEN*, but we ALL have problems with BOYS. As soon as they’re *men*, they aren’t a problem any more… Listen, honey, let me tell you. *YEARS* ago, in the DARK AGES, I was dating the bartender at the best gay bar in Columbus, Ohio, and sure enough, that BOY gave me GONORRHEA. So, I went to the school nurse, whom I was WELL ACQUAINTED WITH, after faking a cold to get out of every damn gym class I could, and I told her what was wrong, and she was the sweetest woman, and she took me to the clinic, and I SHIT YOU NOT, the doctor in there gave me a TEN MINUTE LECTURE, the whole time *swinging* this prescription around in the air in front of me, a TEN MINUTE LECTURE on the difference between MEN and BOYS, and that *BOYS* are the ones who will give you diseases.

“The moral of the story? Don’t date *anyone* in food service. Okay? They’re all on coke and *COVERED* in gonorrhea. Oh, my name’s Michael, by the way…”

My favorite part is that the young woman knew he had gonorrhea before she knew his name.

The reading was a staggering success, and I walked away with that double sense of having spent two hours at a really well-constructed play, and that huge relief that comes from seeing a friend’s work and realizing they are actually an enormous talent.

I was leaving at 10, and I saw the same groups, the bridge and tunnel crowd streaming out the front door in dresses and suits, and the gypsies sneaking out the stage door in old canvas high-tops and brown sweaters. I always have this ache when I see these people, the ones who can afford to go to Broadway, and the ones who’ve given up so much of their lives so they can perform on Broadway. I’m sure the audience members would love to be able to write and produce the way I do, and a lot of the gypsies would love to be married and have kids, so it could be that we all pine for a chance to be one another, but I still get a low heart hurt when I walk among them, knowing I won’t ever be one of them.

On the train, I sat across from two unrelated people. All the way under the water and back into Queens, an Asian woman, maybe late 20s, sat with her portfolio next to her thigh, her jeans utterly unwashed and flecked with paint and clay. One of the most beautiful things about New York is that she might have grown up in Flushing and converted her parent’s basement into a studio, or she might have grown up in Memphis and gone to Sarah Laurence. It doesn’t matter now, all that matters is that she’s still making… *something*. And she can wear her work clothes on the subway, the same way the Wall Street guys do, the same way the construction workers do. We’re all holding on to the same pole.

The guy sitting next to her was a young, tall skinny black guy, who was practicing a piece of music in his head. He kept backing up his iPod and replaying the same phrases over and over again, and then humming and mouthing them, eyes shut. He might have been one of the gypsies from midtown, or he might be listening to something he wrote and recorded, and wants it to be a little better. Or maybe he’s just a fan, trying to own a little piece of whatever it is he loves.

I get off the train at the last stop and take off my headphones. When it isn’t too cold, I’d rather walk a little slower and not listen to music. I run into my neighbor who’s heading back in to the city at 10:30, which seems almost dangerously exciting to me. I walk back, past the converted coffee shop, where they’re having an open mic night that seems to be derailed by a bad sound system. Since I can imagine nothing better than having an open mic night derailed, I don’t offer to help.

I stand in front of my house for just a minute. My baby boy has been having trouble sleeping, and even as I stand there, I know that in three or four hours, he’s gonna wake up screaming and I’ll put him back to sleep. My wife is six months pregnant, and I know that she has managed to do yoga, but probably needs a back rub, or at the very least a foot rub.

The night is warmer than it’s been and, for just a minute, instead of feeling in-over-my-head, instead of feeling responsible for more than I can handle, instead of feeling like… the things I don’t try to fix fall apart immediately, and the things I do try to make better end up falling apart anyway… for a moment I stand outside my little boy’s window and I feel sublimely lucky.

Failure

Posted March 11th, 2010 by Sean Williams

I have tended to write about two things on this blog over the years. Theater, which has become the primary subject lately, and “Negotiating My Life”, which I haven’t really addressed very directly much in recent months. I think that talking about “Failure” is a pretty good intersection of the two ideas.

Some months ago, I insisted to a group of my friends that we have to go see bad theater. There is too much noise about how “I want my two hours back” and all that, as if a bad night of theater actually cancels itself out, that it will erase a different good night of theater. I know for me, the last truly awful bit of theater I saw, I was supposed to go to another show afterwards, but I was so enervated that I limped out of the space and took a taxi home. I think I got a cheeseburger – I was so depressed by how awful the show was that I had to eat something indulgent from my youth…

But the fact is, I went. And that terrible show has given me some tools about what it is I like and don’t like. It took me some time to figure out what exactly I hated about it, and it turns out that the offensive thing to me was the disrespect the theaterfolks had toward their audience. Once I had realized that, it clarified my opinion about a lot of the other shows I’ve seen, and it has led me to make better decisions about what I want to produce in the future.

Now, I have a lot of experience with failure. I failed a LOT of classes in high school and college. I was that enormously frustrating student who simply either got As or Fs. If I found a teacher compelling or liked a subject, I sailed through, and often these were my math or science classes, and if I hated the teacher or the subject, then I failed. Weirdly, these were often the more “liberal arts” subjects, like “English”. And “Gym”.

And when you produce a theatrical failure, it feels a lot like failing a class. Yes, you got an F, and now, maybe, you have to take the class again to get credit. I’ve produced a terrible, terrible show that utterly flopped, and I’ve had to produce a whole stack of good shows to feel like my theatrical GPA (to extend the metaphor) has recovered to a respectable level.

It’s an interesting life-view, that your world can be measured in semesters or productions. Each year is a season, each season has shows and each show opens and then closes. Your company gets seen as a measure of all that it has done. It’s different from school because you never graduate, so you really can aim for a better and better GPA as you go.

As a father, things are quite a bit different. As a husband as well. Yes, things do eventually settle into an average over the years, and you can be a good father or a good husband, but there are no semesters, no seasons, no closings. And very often, you can do the work, you can put in the hours, but it’s not that simple. You can do great work, you can put in enormous hours… and still fail.

Especially as a father. That little brain is so maddeningly incoherent, it’s so full of variables and nonsense that it’s impossible to guess what your kid may be responding to. And the very thing that you are doing to improve their lives, or to negotiate your own, may be the actual problem, but you don’t know that until the damage is done.

When you’re an actor, you can’t be TOO off-book. You have to put in the hours, then you have your lines memorized, and if they are memorized perfectly, you’ve done the work. When you’re disciplining your kid… where’s the line? Can you hug your kid too much? Can you give your kid too much freedom, too many rules, too much credit? Can you spend TOO MUCH TIME?

In the end, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done, as a father or a husband. It doesn’t matter how hard you work. In the end, it’s your happiness and your family’s happiness that matters. You can sit somewhere and convince yourself that you did all you could do, but if everyone is unhappy, then, simply, you didn’t.

It’s a horrible realization, but it’s liberating. Your children and your spouse are either happy or they’re not, they wake up with nightmares or they don’t, they want to be in your home or they hate it. It’s that simple. And you can pat your own back about how much work you do, but if it comes to nothing, then you’re doing the wrong work.

And this is where it *does* apply to theater. If an audience doesn’t respond to one of your pieces, then it doesn’t work. They either want to be in the theater watching your play, or they don’t. You can say that you did everything you needed to, in terms of marketing or writing or costumes or whatever, but if it didn’t work, then it didn’t work.

I’ve been in so many rehearsal processes where the director wanted to make sure we were sweating blood, and in the end we simply didn’t know our blocking very well, or even the given circumstances. We wanted to, at the end of the day, be able to tell ourselves that we had worked very, very hard to make this piece of theater – and yet some of our biggest successes were a pure joy to work on, from beginning to end.

And maybe that’s part of the problem. Failure comes not from a lack of hard work, but a lack of smart work. And that applies to fatherhood as well as theater production.

Craven Monkey

Posted March 5th, 2010 by Sean Williams

At the end of the show last night, Jordana turned to me and said, “This is one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long, long time.”

You will get what they are advertising. You will get hilarious over-the-top Simian characters, and fantastical story-telling. You will get to laugh and be inside the joke, you will get to be amazed at how ridiculous monkeys are and how fun a theater piece featuring nothing but monkeys can be.

But you won’t be prepared for the fact that what you’re watching is essentially a ballet. What you won’t expect are the epic themes and the incredible mythic creations. This piece is a self-mocking epic poem full of dirty jokes. I mean, it’s funny when your uncle does his monkey face, and it’s even funnier when a group of actors dress up and roll around like monkeys – but when’s the last time you saw a theater piece where an actress flies around the room like a hornet, or the main character is attacked by an eight foot octopus? Honestly, I have to go back to “Seascape” on Broadway to remember the last time my breath was taken away simply by a character’s entrance.

The choreography, fight and otherwise, is meticulous and pitched perfectly, the music is incredible. The entire piece exists in a world before language, so every moment is danced or fought or physicalized, and the company creates something that’s more organic than kabuki but more sublime than mime. There is a narrator, but I almost wonder if they could have done the piece without the narration. It wouldn’t have been as funny, and it might have been twenty minutes longer, but I would have *loved* twenty more minutes of this show.

I’m writing this on stolen time, my freelance work beckons on the other side of my kids’ pantleg-pulling, so I can’t go into the specific incredible work by so many of those involved. I just don’t have the time and it’s killing me. I can only tell you this, when Jordana said it was the best show she’d seen in some time, I turned back to her and said, “I would be so incredibly proud to have produced this. These guys are just fantastic.”

This is their website

How Real Does It Need To Be?

Posted March 2nd, 2010 by Sean Williams

There is apparently some brouhaha about the movie “Hurt Locker” and whether or not it is an accurate portrayal of bomb-defusers in Iraq, and this got me thinking about our own tiny little corner of the world.

There is a curious balance that one needs to strike when one is telling a story, because the meta-meaning is going to be sussed out by every audience member. When you watch Albee, you also know about Albee, so you start reading in to what you’re seeing, about what it might be *translated* into. But even when you’re dealing with new works by un-established playwrights, everyone is making snap distillations about the material and about it’s larger meaning.

We dealt with this a little bit with our last play “Viral”. Not to give too much away, but the story involved a suicidal character, and there was a small but vocal group who felt it wasn’t an accurate depiction of suicidal depression.

This is impossible to argue against, except to say that this is a story. We didn’t get our collective backs up about the criticism because there were different themes that Mac and Jordana were exploring, and the plot unfolded the way it did because… well, I guess because it did, that’s just how it happened. The playwright and the director, neither of them, are suicidal, and none of the actors or the production staff are either, so although we did the best we could to create an honest situation, there are those for whom it rang un-true.

I have to assume that those who leveled the criticism at the show *did* have some familiarity with suicide, and it can be particularly harrowing, when you’ve lost a loved one down that particular rabbit hole, to see it portrayed in a way that you feel is inaccurate. But the fact is, none of us can trust our memories completely, and we all experience things differently. As a matter of fact, I lost one of my closest childhood friends to suicide, and she was very similar to the character in our play, but that doesn’t make the criticism *wrong*. It means that I felt the story was truthful, from my point of view, and someone who lost a different sort of person in the same way… they just wouldn’t agree.

I do think, though, that the search for some kind of pitch-perfect truth in theater is a fool’s errand. It may be one of the greatest problems with modern theater, that we want realism and we shun allegory. “Hurt Locker” is not going to be close to some, or even most, Iraq War bomb-defusers’ stories, but does that mean the movie isn’t worth watching? Is there not something in the story that transcends whether or not it actually happened that way?

It’s the strangest thing. We all know there’s no Mordor, but we want the ship’s captain in “Master and Commander” to be wearing the exact right coat. We all know that Gregory House’s character on House is a fictional charming addict, but we’re furious when we find out that James Frey’s character is as well. I remember the uproar about the liberties taken with “Fargo”, as if the re-tooling of the story made it inferior somehow.

If I tell you a story from my life, I’m going to lie. Every story you’ve told is a lie as well. We don’t mean to lie, we’re just saying what we remember, what we took away from it. It’s why talk-therapy is so useful, even if you’re a liar. The lies you tell still tell the truth about yourself. And that’s all we’re doing in the theater, we’re telling lies that hopefully work as allegories that one can divine truth out of.

The Only State That Starts With “TEN”.

Posted February 19th, 2010 by Sean Williams

(The title of this blog is a reference to something my brother said when he was about five…)

I grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa until I was about seven years old, and I returned there for a brief stint in what many will laughingly refer to as my “college years”. While I was there, I did two shows with the Iowa City Community Theater, and actually rediscovered my love of acting. Apparently, every few years I have to give up acting and then, at some point, fall in to an opportunity that send me back out with headshots and 16 bars at the ready. My two shows at ICCT did just that, at exactly the right time.

Now, I have been trudging through theater blogs for the last month. I don’t really have an opinion about where public money should go, I feel like old age has robbed me of the ability to get too worked up about my government, and I’ve never felt like any organization, public or private, has done a lot to personally help me tell better stories, so I let smarter and more passionate people worry about it.

But I have been reading the blogotheatrosphere, and I’ve felt just crappy about it. I can’t really address the problems of big city vs. small city theater, I can’t really formulate a response to the problems facing actors and playwrights of different ethnicities, I’m not sure I even have a say in what women are doing in the theater. My exhaustion has the stink of self-congratulation, I know that, but instead of being inspired by the conversations around me, my blog has run aground. I’m capable of talking about theater, but I’m not capable of talking about talking about theater.

In the middle of all of this, I check out a blog on my blogroll called Iowa Theatre and read a review of Wonderful Town that makes me dizzy. And look at the sidebar, just see what is available to you if you live in Iowa City, IA. In the surrounding counties, there are about 150k people, who are within driving distance of these shows.

Queens County has a population of 2.3 million. And if you live in my county, you very often go to *neighboring* counties to see theater…

So, if we were still in Iowa City, we could go see Wonderful Town, with full orchestra and great sets and costumes, for $17. At Riverside Theater, also in Iowa City, they’re doing “End Days”. Dreamwell Theater, ALSO IN IOWA CITY, is doing Poona The Fuckdog, for twelve bucks. Also, coming up is The Producers and a Neil Simon play.

Sure, these shows are running for one or two weekends. But they’re running, right? The plays exist, the actors are there, and audience shows up. Iowa City has about 70k people at any given time, and there are theater companies doing standards, and doing outrageous shit, and they are all selling tickets. There are A BUNCH of theater companies. And I’m not even counting all the theater at the University of Iowa, or Cornell. Or Kirkwood Community College…

I don’t know… I don’t know that there’s an answer here. I have just felt like I couldn’t write anything because it seems like there aren’t any answers, that minority communities are disrespected, that that actors and playwrights are feeling like there aren’t any opportunities, like theater is, yet again, either dying or is already dead. And then there are a lot of people who… just… keep making plays, because they forgot to check in and find out that the whole system is totally screwed.

I don’t want to live in Iowa City. I mean, that’s not true, I *DO* want to live in Iowa City. But right now, my home is in New York, my family’s here, my friends, my whole life. But I want to produce theater as if I live in Iowa City. I want to tell my stories, have them run for as long as is sustainable, and then go back and find more scripts. If a lot of people are doing it in the middle of Iowa, then I’m pretty sure I can do it here.

Indy Vs. Broadway

Posted February 8th, 2010 by Sean Williams

Dan Dinero left me a comment on my thoughts about the Gallery Players production of Caroline, or Change, (his fantastic review here) and when I get chastised on my blog, particularly about a rhapsodic and passionately positive review, I feel like I need to pay attention. I can’t tell you what a thrill it is to have someone who cares deeply about the artistic value of Broadway theater take the time to comment on my blog. Our two worlds very often don’t intersect (as I explain later), and after visiting Theatre Is Easy I was really moved that he took the time, even if he was a bit aggressive and snarky. (What would the theater be without snark?!) (He also left the comment at about four in the morning, and it’s impossible to write a blog comment at that hour without being snotty…)

You write that independant (sic) theatre, unlike Broadway (which fulfills an obliquely “different role”), leaves one “transported and transformed.” Independant theatre provides “a revelation” and lets us “know that something is happening right here, in the same room, that we are both witness to and participant in.”

This is an extremely simplistic division- “independent” theatre does this (occasionally), but commerical Broadway does it as well. Both types of theatre can be as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as they can be midn-numbingly dull. But you wouldn’t know this, because you write that you rarely see Broadway theatre.

Dan is going on what I wrote and he’s absolutely right to hassle me into a clarification. My point of view about independent theater is muddy, to say the least, in comparison with Broadway theater, so, just on the off chance that anyone care what a guy like me thinks, let me be a lot clearer about this.

It’s a huge mistake, one I honestly try not to fall in to, to claim some sort of superiority of independent theater. We don’t make *better* plays or *smarter* plays at all. My feeling, when watching Caroline, Or Change, is that this material is utterly brilliant, the production was fantastic, and it was made available to me for less than $20. For me, that was only the beginning of the value of this production.

I have said that I don’t see Broadway plays very much. The extrapolation that I ought to not speak about Broadway plays until I “learn a little bit about” them first is an honest mistake. To clarify, I’m going on 23 years as a theater professional, and I have moved from being an avid member of Broadway audiences to being an avid member of independent theater audiences. I have done so because I feel the rewards more richly.

This is not because the plays are better. In this case, the actual play was identical, Caroline Or Change was actually on Broadway a few years back. But my play-going has a relatively simple bit of algebra to it. I don’t make enough money to afford the outrageous Broadway ticket prices… but that isn’t the whole reason. One can always find a half-price, or less, ticket to a Broadway show.

The truth is, I don’t feel that my investment as an audience member means anything to the Broadway community, and my time is extremely limited.

I have kids, I have several freelance jobs, I have a wife and I have a community that needs my support. My nights out are preciously rationed, like a Desert-Island chocolate bar. When I go to a show at The Brick, or at Here Arts Center, or at Manhattan Theatresource, I will have access to the producer, the playwright, the cast, the venue director, the press person… all of these people will be there, sleeves rolled up, hands dirty.

When I go to a Broadway show, the actual *production* is likely to be as good as anything I will see in the independent theater world. I am a witness to brilliant writing and brilliant acting, as well as incredible theatrical innovations and advances. There may, in fact, be a helicopter or a set three stories high. But my experience has led me to believe that when the show is over, it’s over. My investment in the production as an audience member is utterly overlooked by the producers.

When I go to an independent theater production, there will be no helicopter. But, comparing the best of one to the best of the other, there will be brilliant writing and brilliant acting, as well as incredible theatrical innovations and advances. And, in the very show we’re discussing, there was even a three story set. And I will very often get a personal email from the producers, thanking me for coming. Often the actors will write to me, the playwright too… many of my acquaintances are relationships made of purely mutual artistic respect.

I’m sure the same thing exists on Broadway, that Tony Kushner probably has Stephen Sondheim’s phone number somewhere. But, you see, I live in New York, and there are 300 shows going up at any given time here, and for 275 of them, the production deeply cares that I show up. And for the off-off, independent theater productions, the cast and crew and stage manager… even the *lighting designer* care that I show up. And they ask for $18 and two hours of my time.

So, if my new friend Dan is right, that “Both types of theatre can be as intellectually and emotionally stimulating as they can be midn-numbingly dull.”, then all things being equal, I’m going to continue to invest in the community where my investment seems to be paying off.

Where Dan and I agree is about the actual show. (As an interesting juxtaposition, I didn’t see the show on Broadway because it ran for four months the same summer I did my first Fringe Festival show. During that festival, I saw up to four shows a day, and wrote blogs about a lot of them. Most of the people I saw, some six years ago, I’m still associated with today, and my relationship with the Fringe Festival has become, as I recounted below in my last blog, one of the most important relationships I have in New York. Every show I saw in the Fringe Festival cost me $5. I would have had to exchange 15-20 shows for one ticket to the Broadway version of “Caroline, Or Change”.)

But Dan and I both love the show deeply. His review of it is far better than mine… which is probably because he actually writes reviews and I just talk a lot of shit. As much as he may be offended by what I wrote, chances are we both saw it the same night, (as I’ve actually gone twice now) and we were sitting in different sections of the theater, utterly transported. If you take nothing else from this blog, or his comments, please take this away-

YOU SHOULD GO SEE THIS SHOW!!