a poor player

Dunkirk NY – Christmas is a different kind of holiday without young children. The energy and vibe is much different, far more mellow. Perhaps the only reason I am writing now is because I am looking for something to do.

Ann Marie and I do almost all our shopping on line now. One huge Amazon order takes care of the boys, who are now at the stage where video games dominate the horizon (they bought their own XBOX360s). Books and DVDs round out the situation there. My daughter, who celebrates solstice rather than Christmas, gets a check and some small item (a webcam this year). A little bit of local shopping with local businesses and artisans does the rest.

Our family traditions are few but consistent, yet even those saw some changes. We always wait to trim the tree until after Brian’s birthday. The tree is much smaller this year, and we did not go to cut it down, but rather bought it pre-cut, and without the boys with us. The weather had been harsh, and we had only a small window of non-snowy weather in which to get the tree (not to mention live trees were scarce around here for some reason). Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – My annual solstice post:

Goethe’s final words: “More light.” Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that’s been our unifying cry, “More light.” Sunlight. Torchlight. Candleight. Neon, incandescent lights that banish the darkness from our caves to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier’s Field. Little tiny flashlights for those books we read under the covers when we’re supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Lead kindly, light, amid the encircling gloom, lead thou me on, the night is dark and I am far from home, lead thou me on. Arise, shine, for thy light has come. Light is knowledge, light is life, light is light.

Chris in the Morning, from the television show Northern Exposure.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0g94xZx9ZVs&rel=0]

(UPDATE – They made it, of course. Over $400K in contributions. You can read about it here.)

Shakespeare Santa Cruz - "The Glen"

Dunkirk, NY – No doubt I will be expressing a minority opinion here, but in my estimation the bailout of Shakespeare Santa Cruz is, in artistic terms, equivalent to the government bailout of Wall St. I do not approve.  Why, you may ask? Well, think of every reason you can as to why you might not agree with the Wall St. bailout, and you’ll begin to see the interesting parallels between the two situations (note: facts taken from the San Jose Mercury News article linked above):

• Wall Street firms spent years living large off other people’s money and selling products which appeared to be producing profits but were in fact just running the company more and more into debt. SSC lived for years off the subsidized largesse of the University of California-Santa Cruz, and went 500 large in the red from their 2008 season, which added to an already-existing $1.15 million in debt. The $300K it needs is the equivalent of the university’s subsidy, which UC-SC said it could no longer provide because of its own budget troubles.
• Wall St. is pretty much populated by rich white people. I’d be willing to bet the audience and artistic staff of SSC consists of well-off white people. Bailing out the institutions of rich white people has become quite trendy among the trend-setters  in the USA today. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – The NEA has put out a new brochure which I am sure everyone will be commenting on in the next few days. Since it is late, here is my “instant analysis,” with some deeper analysis upcoming.

From the introduction by outgoing NEA Chairman Dan Gioa:

There is one significant and persistent problem facing American theater—attendance for spoken theater has steadily deteriorated. Since 1992, the percentage of the U.S. adult population attending non-musical theater has declined from 13.5 percent to 9.4 percent.
As these trends worsened in the last six years, even the absolute size of the audience has declined by 16 percent.
These audience declines do not seem primarily dependent on high ticket prices. Audiences appear willing to pay higher prices for events they want to attend. Although further research is needed to explore the issue, the audience drop-off may be more related to issues like lower media coverage, declining arts education, and expanded in-home entertainment options rather than ticket price.

I wouldn’t argue with any of that, but I would add that what the chairman fails to take into account (and what the report utterly fails to address) is that the product offered does not engage the average audience member. See this post from Colin Mitchell’s Bitter Lemons blog for further discussion. It’s something I and Scott Walters and some other old coots have been saying for some time now. Until American theatre artists start writing about something other than themselves and get back in touch with the world outside of theatre, people will not come. We need a better product, a more accesible product. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – Take a look at this article (yes, I know, it’s written by David Brooks, but look anyway). Then take a look at this article in the Chicago Tribune. When you merge the ideas expressed in them, do they perhaps point to new possibilities for what the regional theatre scene in this country could become under such conditions?

And you know what? I’ll give this idea (which I’ve had for a long time) out for free to whomever wants to run with it. The next great location for lives theatre is shopping malls. Here’s the business plan: Hire as many fresh BA/BFAs right out of undergraduate school as you can find. Put them on full-time payroll for maybe 25K-30K with some health benefits. Make them do it all; cycle their work between technical and performance. Do children’s theatre during the day, a place where parents can drop off their kids for maybe 45-60 minutes while they do some quick shopping without them. A few evenings a week do some straight theatre or light musical theatre for older patrons who want to shop late, have dinner, maybe see a show. Other evenings when the kids hang out in the mall, get them involved in producing their own shows, and have some comedy/improv nights for them. Franchise the idea in malls across the country like McDonald’s.   People aren’t in downtown urban cores anymore. They’re in suburbia at their local malls. So go there! -twl

Dunkirk NY – The weekend gave rise to a seized back. The pain was, at times, exquisite yesterday. Each little movement of the hand or arm produced a feeling of paralysis, as if I was never going to experience movement between my shoulder blades ever again. Two doses of prescription-strength ibupropen and a shower using all the hot water in the tank produced some small relief. Today brings a forced day off, but since it is finals week and I have no final to give today, nothing is amiss. The pain is not as great today, but still lingers.

The weather is also grey, gloomy and rainy – a rather typical Western New York winter day, actually. As I write this the temperature is beginning to drop, from a high of 52˚ this morning to the current 43˚. Darkness, of course, comes early now, with sunset (Ha!) scheduled for 4:45 this afternoon.

On top of this, more sobering news about the health of two colleagues: one with prostate cancer, one with colon cancer. Both of them have had their cancers caught early enough for good treatment via surgery, but it still brings one down to earth a bit, and suspicious of one’s own back pain.

All this amplifies the feelings within me that the world is growing far too large and complex for me to work well within it anymore, particularly theatrically. I am now beginning to feel this more and more acutely as I work with student actors. I finally have to acknowledge that there is a vast gap between how I view theatre and how my students view theatre. Whether this gap can ever be fully closed will be the question I will have to answer in the coming semester. Continue Reading »

Fredonia, NY – I had occasion over these past two days to go digging into one of my file drawers, and I came up with many things, but ultimately not the particular piece of paper I was looking for. My files, of course, contain material which in some cases dates back 20 years. In the early part of my career I used to find inspirational messages or quotes from my various reading sources and post them on my bulletin board. I thought I would share a few of them here.

A Calvin and Hobbes cartoon with the following dialogue:

Calvin: They say the world is a stage. But obviously the play is unrehearsed and everybody is ad-libbing their lines.

Hobbes: Maybe that’s why it’s hard to tell if we’re in a tragedy or a farce.

Calvin: We need more special effects and dance numbers.

Or this quote supposedly from a high school term paper on Abraham Lincoln:

On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theatre and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John WIlkes Booth, a supposedly insane actor. This ruined Booth’s career.

Tommy Lee Jones explains his success as an actor:

I’m always on time, I don’t kick the furniture, and I don’t cry when it ain’t my turn.

This from Robert Edmund Jones:

It is easy, of course, to understand why there are not more good actors on the stage today. The métier is too hard. This art of acting demands a peculiar humility, a concentration and dedication of all one’s energies. But when an actor moves before us at last with the strange freedom and calm of one possessed by the real, we are stirred as only the theatre can stir us.

From a spoof written by Selma Wassermann in 1984 on why Michaelangelo Buonarroti was not granted tenure at Lorenzo DeMedici University:

In the Faculty, it is not important that you, yourself, be engaged in artistic endeavors. It is far more important that you spend time writing about how others should become artists. This you have failed to do.

A little piece about teaching from Paul Collins:

A teacher who had taught school for many years was counseling a young teacher. “In every class,” she said, “there will probably be a pupil who will argue with you. Your first impulse will be to silence him, but don’t. He is probably the only one listening.”

And finally, the dialog from a Jules Feiffer cartoon accompanied by drawings of a scruffy painter:

My art exposes your commercialism. Your overindulgence, materialism, acquisitiveness. Your greed, your narcissism. Your corrupt ethics, your morality. I dedicate my life as an artist to the free expression of my contempt for what you are.

Fund me.

So it goes.   -twl