New Media Investment
Posted March 18th, 2010 by Sean WilliamsThere 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 WilliamsI 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 WilliamsThere 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 WilliamsDan 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!!
Producing In The Fringe
Posted February 3rd, 2010 by Sean WilliamsWe have shorthand for most things here at Gideon Productions. We have a codephrase for enthusiastic but under-educated producers, we have shorthand for just-out-of-college playwrights, we have shorthand for meta-meta-META-jokes that we ourselves barely get… but our most useful shorthand is “After You, Dear Alphonse”. This is an example of our producing style, where we find ourselves always in the position of downplaying expectations and holding doors and generally bringing our more Southern charms to the down-n-dirty indy theater scene.
Because of the way we are, it’s difficult to pretend to be experts at anything, but when it comes to the New York International Fringe Festival, we’ve done enough things wrong, and enough things right, that I feel like I can at least speak about the event with some *experience*, if not expertise. I’m writing this as a companion piece to James’ great self-producing series which, if you haven’t visited, you should.
We have been in the festival on four separate occasions, winning three major awards at three different times, and in addition to that, I’ve acted in two *other* productions in the festival, so you can at least be assured that everything I am telling you is supported by experience, and only suspect because of my somewhat limited intellect.
1) You could end up with a great space for a fraction of the money. For instance, our shows have gone up at The Lucille Lortel, The Soho Playhouse, the Bleeker St. Theater (formerly The Culture Project), and The Harry Du Jur at the Henry St. Settlement. Yes, these are all off-Broadway theaters, and our only cost was $550 to The Present Company. As a point of reference, The Soho Playhouse costs $7500 a week to rent, and we ran there for two months (including the extension)
2) Publicity is enormous, at a fraction of what it would normally cost you. Fleet Week was reviewed by the NYTimes. Hail Satan was covered by David Cote in his blog. Viral was reviewed everywhere. Again, the only up-front cost is the fee to the Present Company, although they offer bargain basement rates on extra publicity through Ron Lasko at Spin Cycle. If you decide *not* to pay Ron, he still works for you by publicizing the entire festival.
3) You are now associated with a festival that has a proven track record. Urinetown, of course, but that’s the bases-loaded home run, there are a hundred other success stories and a thousand word-of-mouth stories associated with the festival.
4) You are getting in bed with extremely decent people, and that should not be overlooked or under-appreciated. Elena Holy is as good a person as you’re gonna find, not just in the performing arts, but in any industry. There is a dignity to the festival, overall, a home-grown, artist-first approach that doesn’t exist everywhere in the city, and when you are *in* the festival, you know this. I’ve produced all of our shows, but Mac Rogers wrote them, and I know that Elena, as fond as she might be of me, has a great deal more fondness for Mac. He is the artist, I’m the administrator, and that actually makes me even more fond of *her*.
5) The community will support you during the run of your show, and if you live here in New York, it will support you long after the show has closed. Last night, at a reading hosted by KEF productions, I ran into the director of a fringe show I acted in in 2004. We gave each other a huge hug. When you work inside this festival, you are afforded the opportunity to associate with hundreds of other independent theater producers and artists from around the world, and, if you choose, those relationships will last as long as you cultivate them.
1) We’ve lost more money on these successful runs than we have producing on our own. Yes, I said you can save a lot of money, but there’s no point in saving money when you’re making theater. These have all been high-profile shows, so we have done the best we could to get a great cast and take care of them. We’ve had Tony Nominees in our shows. That means, we rehearse in midtown, at the same location the whole time, we pay everyone *more* than the Fringe asks us to. We pay for the extra marketing and publicity, we actually send out the postcards and pay for the canvassing.
Also, because the houses have all been 175-350 seats, the place feels empty if your standard 32 people show up. And when the house *feels* empty, it will give you the sense of the show not being worth seeing. It’s live theater, it isn’t a streaming video, you HAVE to get the house filled. So, if you don’t blow your wad on publicity, you’re a fool.
2) Yes, the festival has had successes, but that has led to a backlash. We were a bunch of punk indy producers when we did our obnoxious gay-rights musical, and the most common criticism was that we were “trying to be the next Urinetown”. Simply because we were part of the Fringe Festival. For the record, we were, in no uncertain terms, NOT trying to be Urinetown.
Because of some of the past over-the-top crazy shit that has gone up in the festival, it’s very difficult to make a sober production resonate. David Cote, though he very much liked our show “Hail Satan”, and even though he stated that he hadn’t seen very much in the festival, still eye-rolled and shrugged the whole thing off. Of course, as an indy producer, you will be used to the established guys rolling their eyes at your shows anyway, so this won’t be a shock.
3) The festival is NOT your show. The festival is the festival. This festival has been marching along for YEARS, producing more than 200 shows a year, utilizing the skills of thousands of people and although they love you and really do cherish the work you’re doing, but it’s a bit like the way you feel about your own mitochondria. The publicity and press arm is going to focus on making sure the festival continues to succeed, and that is what they *should* be doing. You have to fight for your own artistic voice to be heard, the festival is not going to fight for you. The more you give them, the more you will get in return, but know that the money is easier, the venues are better, but the work is actually a vast upgrade on your time and energy.
4) You get less than 2/3 of the ticket price. It’s closer to half, when you consider all the free tickets and fringe passes. So you have to sell twice as many tickets as you think you do. Everyone in the union gets in free, so don’t think you’re gonna sell out on the backs of the actors who love you. Our budget is usually around seven grand, half the ticket price is $7.50… that math is pretty easy. To break even, we’d have to have a thousand people come to the show.
5) The benefits I just mentioned are fleeting. Most people *in* the festival don’t go see other shows *in* the festival. There are too many shows, and too many of them are terrible. This is by design, and if you were to complain to the decision makers about the overwhelming impact of the festival, they would say, “tough. That’s how we like it.” If there are 200 shows, and each show has 20 people involved, that’s four thousand people. But, if 20% of them see five shows each, that’s eight hundred people seeing four hundred shows. That’s two audience members per production. And believe me, that’s a pretty good average.
The only way to get your head above water is to keep treading water and let the rest sink. This isn’t a competition, but there is simply no shortcut to “having been there a while”. You may think the money and the publicity is enough to make a difference, but it simply IS NOT.
As an example, we sold out five shows and had a sixth added at the Lortel. That means, we had about 1700 people see our show “Fleet Week”, and in the program was an ad for our next production, going up at the end of October. We messaged the same people who saw Fleet Week and did the same publicity… and we sold about 175 seats. Total.
6) A warning – if your show sucks, it will still suck. We’ve produced four shows in the Fringe Festival, three of them won awards. No amount of festival support or our mother’s love could have done anything for the fourth. There’s no secret to this, if your show is terrible, people will know it’s terrible. A lot of people will know it.
It remains a shell-shocking experience for us. There is nothing quite like writing, producing and paying for a show that you don’t want to watch…
1. When submitting to the festival, put your artistic foot first. Lead with the show, not with the management, not with the stars attached. Let them know what the show is. When they read a fun script, they get excited, but when they call the number on the script and they get a literary agent from Abrams, the producers start feeling like you’re gonna use the festival as an out-of-town tryout, and that’s not what they want.
2. Larger houses mean larger expectations. If you’re accustomed to producing for a 55 seat house, be prepared to find 187 seats *staggering*. When “Viral” was extended, we were excited for about three minutes, and then we looked at each other and said, “we have a thousand more seats to sell, and everyone we know has already come…”
3. Get your marketing materials to them as early as possible. Whatever date you’ve set for it, get it to them a month before that. When you get your acceptance letter on May 15th, have pictures ready to go.
4. Sell out one show. Focus all your energy on selling ONE NIGHT, not the whole run. As soon as one show sells out, a giant sign goes up saying “August 17, 9 PM show, SOLD OUT” and you’ll sell even more tickets. In other words, if you can sell 130 tickets, try and get everyone focused on buying on the same night. If you’re looking at the presales, and your list looks like this “127, 8, 2, 7, 11″, then you’re doing it right.
5. Use it as an opportunity to raise the market awareness of your company. If you decide to make a company for a one-off, the Fringe Festival might not be the right place for you. It’s half the money and twice the work, and if you’ve done the work and lost the money, you should work on capitalizing later.
As a post-script, the Fringe Festival has made us. There’s no other way of looking at it, our success is in no small part because we have a symbiotic relationship with the festival, and it has worked really well for us.
Caroline or Change
Posted February 1st, 2010 by Sean WilliamsI am breaking a bit with my own self-imposed rule on this blog. I never meant for this to be a review site, I go and see plays and then come here and tell you about them. In the end, I assume that the decision about whether or not you want to go is up to you. I’ve decided that I’m going to try to do more than that today.
If you have any level of investment in New York Theater, established or independent, you need to go to the Gallery Players production of Caroline or Change. Please go, you will be glad you did, and you will kick yourself if you miss it.
Pictured (l to r): Daniel Henri Luttway and Teisha Duncan in The Gallery Players’ production of Caroline, or Change. Photo by Bella Muccari.
Broadway shows fill a need that’s different than the one independent theater serves. Our job is more like church. What we want, when we walk into a theater, is to be transported and transformed. We want a revelation, and we want to know that something is happening right here, in the same room, that we are both witness to and participant in. That is why, in the past, I’ve always been frustrated when independent theaters try to produce (or worse, re-produce) what has just been on the stage on Broadway, so I walked in to this show with a little bit of low level trepidation. What was given to me was, put simply, the very best that Broadway has to offer, married to the very best of independent theater. It was an astonishing performance, reinvigorating and inspiring, a reminder that we may all be looking for the same thing.
Because of the nature of this story, the entire production is on the shoulders of the talent on stage, so I have to start with them, rather than a discussion of the ideas in the play.
Daniel Henri Luttway plays the young boy Noah, and his awkward adolescent physicalization is married to a perfect sure-footed musicality. At first, I was nervous that the score would be too hard for such a young performer but, of course, I totally forgot once he negotiated some of the more angular and elegant vocal lines. His counter-part in the other family, Elyse McKay Taylor as Emmie, is really fantastic. It was hard for me to get a handle on exactly how young the daughter is supposed to be, the actress could easily pass for anything from 17 to 25, but her ability to handle the role erased the question. If Caroline is the soul of the play, Emmie is the heart, and in the role, Ms. Taylor is just the epitome of beauty.
Frank Viveros, who plays the dryer and bus driver (yes, he plays the dryer) is astonishing. I don’t normally try to justify my opinion with background, but my father is a symphony conductor, my mother is a composer, we grew up with Vince Guaraldi sleeping on our couch and Beverly Sills eating enchiladas in our dining room. I worked for twenty years as a music producer, I’ve recorded something in the neighborhood of a thousand different singers and, in my career as a theater producer, I’ve seen countless hundreds of productions. Mr. Viveros is among the top five voices I’ve ever been in the same room with. I can’t over-hype him enough.
Pictured (l to r): Marcie Henderon and Teisha Duncan in The Gallery Playersí production of Caroline, or Change. Photo by Bella Muccari.
The real miracle, though, is Teisha Duncan. Obviously, everything I write here is filtered through my own life experience, but at the beginning of the evening, after she started ripping through the title character, I thought, “oh no… she’s not gonna make it.” I’ve got a musical theater resume a mile long, and I know when someone is blowing their wad too early. By the time the second act began, it began to dawn on me that her talent wasn’t that of a wayward theater gypsy, that I was in the presence of something really singular. And then, she has a piece of music that leads to the end of the play, a sort of Gethsemene moment, and only minutes in to it did I realize that I was sitting there, mouth agape, hands over my eyebrows, in the presence of greatness. The explosion from the rest of the audience when her number ended was so authentic, so communal, that it reminded me what theater is meant to be.
Now, it’s not a perfect production. I felt like they did the best they could with the role of the grandfather, and the younger kids are both serviceable. With theater on this level, it’s tough to find age appropriate actors over fifty and under 20, and the fact that they did as well as they did is pretty spectacular. The pit band was also at times wonderful, but the strings, in particular, were just awful on occasion, and with music like this, sour notes on the violin could have been deadly, had they not been so well-ignored by the talented cast.
But the majority of the production is a wonder. Supported by a simple, elegant and articulate set, with a faded twenty dollar bill filling the lower playing space and three levels of homes and porches all suggested with steps and frames, the direction is phenomenal. The show spins by, for all its suggested languidity and there isn’t a wasted moment or piece of set. This is a show where the moon has a role, and sings a duet with a washing machine at the end of the second act, and the director has taken this Tom Robbins-esque absurdity and made it a David Eggers work of staggering heartbreak.
The play itself… I came home and started sending emails. Look, if you’re reading my blog, then chances are, you’re like me. You like to go see theater, but the $85-$145 tickets on Broadway are a once-every-four-years kind of thing. And even then, you’ve TKTS’ed it, or you’re standing in the back. And you don’t care, because you’d rather go see something insane at The Brick or Here Arts Center than to go see Mamma Mia or Shrek.
And so a lot of my friends have given up on the musical as an art form. What can a musical even do? This is the answer. The plot for this piece is simple. A Jewish family moves to Louisiana after the wife dies and the husband re-marries her best friend. Their son, Noah, misses his mother, hates his step-mother (despite her best intentions) and has found an unwilling soul-mate in their maid, Caroline. In an effort to teach her son to value his money, and without realizing how deeply insulting it is, the step-mother tells Caroline to keep whatever change Noah leaves in his pockets when she does the wash. Caroline has four children of her own, and the small change in this boy’s pockets can actually change her life.
That’s really it. I dare you to write a play about that and make it interesting. You can’t, because not enough happens. That is why musicals are so important. And the fact that this musical makes the argument for the entire art-form is why it’s so important, and why, no matter who you are, you should see it.
If you think that modern musicals are all sung-through Sondheim rip-offs with no tunes, come see this show. If you think musicals are all plot-then-song, plot-then-song, plot-then-song, then come see this show. If you think that there are no productions worth seeing for $18, this show will change your entire worldview. If you think there is no talent outside of Actor’s Equit
y Association, PLEASE come and see Teisha Duncan. If you think Tony Kushner needs to be done in a million dollar production to work… my God, you need to see this show. No one flies, no one delivers biblical verse, nobody even talk about Jesus… but toward the end of the show, Caroline says to Noah, “that sadness you have inside you? I have it too, and it never goes away”, and it is somehow one of the most hopeful and uplifting things that I’ve witnessed in a year of shows.
I’ve said we shouldn’t compare ourselves to Broadway. Well, maybe we should. Maybe we can do it better, for less money, and have the stories mean more. Maybe we’re better than them *at their own game*. They probably had a great string section in the Broadway production, but would that be enough to charge seven times the ticket price? I wanted to compare us to church, but maybe it isn’t necessary. Caroline, in the second act, says she needs to go to church, but then she stands in her front yard and tells us a story. Maybe we don’t need the church, what we need is the story.
I know that’s true for me, and if you’re wondering if it’s true for you, you should see this show.
Teaser Cow
Posted January 29th, 2010 by Sean Williams
For the first time this week, my evening contained an actual performance piece that I could talk about here, instead of a reading or some other kind of not-ready-for-publication work, and it was a welcome change. Last night we saw Teaser Cow by Clay McLeod Chapman , who’s play Commencement would have been a top five pick for me last year (if I was organized enough to do such things.)
When I see two disparate pieces like this, I’m fascinated by the ways in which each succeeds compared to the other. Whatever else may or may not be in either of these scripts, there is something there that allows actors of great talent to absolutely glow. In Commencement, Hannah Cheek delivered a master class, a tour-de-force of brilliance, and last night’s show gave me a handful of similarly brilliant performances.
For context, the play is a very clever combination of the treatises inside “Fast Food Nation” with the myth of the minotaur. Greece is now a modern city packed with burger shacks, all licensed by the same family (instead of “McDonalds” they are “Minos Burger” joints) Minos is given a cow that he won’t sacrifice, so the gods infect his wife with the desire to mate with it, which creates the minotaur. Their daughter is now a disaffected youth, her boyfriend is Theseus, who’s hellbent on bringing down the Fast Food Empire. Daedalus creates the titular Teaser Cow, and then engineers cheaper beef and test-tube food, the Minotaur is used as a kind of Ronald McDonald stand in at children’s parties, and there is also a haunted midwife working behind the scenes of the family drama.
Sorry, I just hate the part where everyone discusses the plot.
Especially in a piece like this. The plot is loose, perhaps too loose for some, and there are a lot of moments that function more as theatrical ideas than they do as standard story-telling. Chapman has woven in wonderful chunks of language that constantly recall and insinuate the larger themes, little things like Ariadne saying “My dad would have my hide if he knew…” when she’s in the middle of a cow farm. Thankfully, the director, the brilliant Ianthe Demos and the actors knew not to lean on any of these lines, and even though the play is drenched with this language, Demos keeps the action moving and the world just exists *through* the words.
In the end, Fast Food Nation is almost a call to arms, and I believe that what Chapman was doing with this piece was to use the warnings of our forefathers as a tool to discuss a real problem in our current world. Religious teachings aren’t meant to be literal, despite the idiocy of many in America’s Christian Right, and the Greek Myths are meant to be parables. When we talk of Atalanta and the apples, we’re talking about rebellion and female archetypes… we’re not actually suggesting you risk your life in a foot race, armed only with apples.
The Minotaur myth has an awesome elegance to it in this context. Daedalus created a labyrinth in the original myth and, in this story, he discovers that cows can be fed corn mixed with protein from their own blood. Which will lead to Mad Cow disease, which creates… long strings of protein in the brain, a sort of labyrinth. In one really beautiful turn of phrase, Ariadne is talking to her younger brother and she reminds us that cows are essentially peaceful and vegetarian, that the minotaur didn’t have a taste for blood “until we fed it to you…”
It’s bold and it is brilliant, but for me it didn’t fully work as a piece of theater. I wanted more story, less myth, I wanted to spend all my time with the characters that this company created, and less time dealing with the ideas. It could be that I’ve already read “Fast Food Nation”, but the occasional wanderings into agitprop, while always a little thrilling, actually slowed my investment in the actual story. I see this not as a failing of the script, but rather a preference of mine. I like to be shown everything and told nothing.
But make no mistake, this is a passionately created production, from top to bottom. From the fast-food clad employee handing out menu-programs at the front door to the incredible grease-grime that covers the lower two feet of the set, this is a lovinlgly crafted work of art. Mike Riggs’ lighting design and Kay Lee’s costume design are visible and invisible, piercing and mollifying, outrageous and functional, each when they need to be. James Hunting’s set is transporting. If you think that you’re tired of seeing plays where they use two benches… just wait. At the end of the play, you’ll look back on this set and shake your head. Whole worlds are created with a few well-constructed tables and a brilliant cast.
That’s, of course, how you know you’re dealing with a fantastic director. There is a different feel to an ensemble company, and the nearest I can compare this to is Flux’s recent “Lesser Seductions of History”. There is no way to fake the intimacy and trust that an ensemble of actors can create, under the guidance of a strong leader with a great eye. I’m particularly heartened that, in both cases, the directors are women (as is the case with our company). I know that women playwrights are under-served, but if the plays are written by men, I’m glad to know that they are being created on stage by women.
The entire ensemble was really strong, but I want to mention a few actors by name. Gregory Waller, as Minos, is marvelous. He had the perfect balance of entitlement and self-loathing that comes naturally to kings. Jim Kane is credited with “The Royal ‘We’”, but he plays the kid-hating Ronald McDonald stand-in. This is a part that can be done badly in a hundred ways, and Jim plays the brilliant edge of every choice. It’s astonishing to see a character-actor in an over-the-top part play each moment so simply – he’s in a play that is drenched in hamburger, he’s wearing a cow costume and he hates kids, so how did he manage to twist my heart? It was fantastic.
Now, I’ve made it a habit of assuming that you, the reader, know that I know some of these people and that this is a blog, not a review site, and that we’re all friends and blah, blah, blah… But Sarah-Jane Casey is a person that I was good friends with, maybe ten years ago, and we’ve just sorta lost touch. We were in a class together, and I thought she was fantastic, but lives happen and we all go about our own stuff…
When I recognized her in the play last night, I was actually choked up with pride. She is just so good in this play. I was utterly transfixed by her, throughout. She is the mother of the minotaur, the queen, the matriarch, dealing with the fact that the whole world knows she screwed a bull to create a monster, and yet… it’s her baby. That monster is her child. She is erotic, throughout, and yet never trashy, she’s feminine but never weak. She is an open vessel, utterly emotionally nude. It’s a wonderful, wonderful performance.
In the final analysis, I can tell you this – I read Fast Food Nation and avoided fast food and meat… for a while. After being reminded of the book’s contents (and the meat’s contents) I’m gonna go back to avoiding it
again. Had I not read the book before, I would be inspired to read it now. In the same way that “Lesser Seductions of History” made me look at the Obama Presidency in a different way, “Teaser Cow” has reminded me to think before I eat. And if a piece of theater gets into your hindbrain, you have to consider it a huge success.