a poor player

The Antoinette Perry Award

Dunkirk NY – The Tony Awards will soon be given out. It’s the cap of the awards season that starts at the beginning of the year and goes through a succession of the arts: movies, music, and now theatre. I thoroughly dislike awards in the arts. They glorify one of the things I think has caused the theatre to become disconnected with people – the desire for recognition and fame. They also promote a certain amount of corruption. The objective of some productions is clearly to win some sort of award so as to have it make more money. I think Christopher Guest caught this aspect of human behavior most perceptively in his movie For Your Consideration.

But I shouldn’t pick on the arts alone. I live in two worlds, and I see the same thing in both. Academia is not immune from this process. While there are many academics worthy of recognition for their work, there are also many more academics who like to collect awards as résumé builders and ego builders.

Just this past week I discovered a situation on my campus which defies belief. On my campus we have several types of awards, ranging from local campus awards to awards given by the Chancellor at the statewide level. Some award-winners have been worthy, others questionable. Some probably got their awards deservedly, and some probably because they had the right connections and influenced the right people. In academia, of course, everyone will deny any hint of corruption or influence-peddling (or they will talk about in the hallways), because academia must always defend the perception that it is above the machinations of the outside world, even when such types of influence-peddling reach this level.

We will be awarding the SUNY  Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Creativity to a professor on our campus who, during the nominating process, has been “investigated” on a charge of plagiarism. The “inquiry” determined that it had all been just an “honest mistake” on the part of this professor, and determined that while a certain “similarity” may have existed between the professor’s work and that of someone else in the field, the similarity was “unintentional” and can therefore be safely disregarded. Continue Reading »

Fredonia NY – If there is such a thing as overdosing on theatre, then I think that’s what is happening to me these past few weeks. What with the two-weekend run of Romeo and Juliet, reading other people’s blogs, chatting at the <100K project, seeing an assortment of acting juries from monologues to singing to dancing to scenework, and then going to another school’s theatre graduation and listening to all their theatrical and dancing achievements – and all this time trying to get ready for my first rehearsal for The Tempest which begins this coming Tuesday, I seem not to have the time to clear my head for one second about things theatrical. My cup not only runneth over, I can’t seem to shut the tap off.

How many people, I wonder, will read that and envy my position? It’s an embarrassment of riches. In these tough economic and artistic times, when so many people are crazy looking for work in the theatrical field, I list a whole smorgasbord of events and activities, and seem to be complaining about it.

The trouble is that it’s all a jumble. I can’t sort it out properly right at the moment. Part of it is fatigue, because all this is time-consuming and wears me out. Part of it is age, as I witness young people doing their work – sometimes poorly, sometimes well – and realizing all the roles I can’t play anymore. Part of it is the numbing routine of it all, each semester playing out like the last one before it, and there seems to be no end, no change in sight. And part of it remains joy, a joy so irrational and powerful that it actually physically hurts at times.

I begin to wonder where I find my catharsis in all this. That’s the missing element. For so many years theatre played that cathartic role for me, but when it consumes me to this level and will not let me escape, it provides no catharsis for me. It becomes problems to solve, critiques to expound, feedback to throw at hungry young souls whose artistic mouths are as  wide open as a baby bird’s in the nest. Curricula to write, issues to explore, ideas and theories to absorb. This need for catharsis is primal, but I wonder where the addict goes when even the largest doses of his or her drug no longer provides the cathartic high?  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Later this morning I leave to drive to DeKalb IL and attend my youngest child’s college graduation. He is getting a BFA in Acting. It feels ironic.

I had a really good conversation yesterday with people interested in Scott’s <100K project. I’m letting a lot of things simmer as I take the weekend to travel. But there is one thing I am sure of – if I want to make time for this project, I will have to give up something, and most likely that will be my “professional” acting/directing.

I will spend some time this weekend wondering what kind of life he will have in the theatre. What city he will choose to live in, what path he will take, how long will he last. I will also spend some time thinking about what kind of art form I and other theatre artists have handed over to him. Perhaps that’s irrelevant. He will have to make his own, I suppose. I wonder how much I will be able to help him along the way. One thing I try always to do with my own students is to be vague about advice. Everything about this business is so unpredictable, so transitory, so ephemeral. What can one really say that makes any sense?

But I will also be just a bit proud. The theatre can use his energy, his drive, and his vision. He does not take things lying down, but challenges, questions, and confronts. If anybody out there has a good gig for a young artist of this type, let me know. He’ll be available around August 15th.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Democracy Now! has the only meaningful obituary of Augusto Boal I have been able to find. It’s actually a never-before-aired interview. Here’s a passage from it where Boal speaks about how he first got started in Theatre of the Oppressed:

And one day I learned that I did not know more than they did, unless in the theater. In the theater, yes, I knew more. But their lives, they knew more than I. And it happened on a day when I was working for peasants in the northeast of Brazil, and I was doing a play in which the protagonist said, at the end said, “We have to spill our blood to save our land.” And then we were all singing, dressed like peasants. We were not peasants; looking like peasants, but we were not peasants, and saying, “You have to spill your blood, our blood, to save our lands, to reconquer.”

And then a peasant came to us and says, “Well, you think exactly like we do. So why don’t you take your rifles,” because we had rifles on stage, very beautiful, colorful rifles, and he said, “Why don’t you come with your rifles, and let’s go to fight against some landowners that occupied our land. We have to spill our blood.” And then we said, “Forgive us, but our rifles, they are not true. They are fake. They are setting rifles.” And he said, “OK, the rifles are not true. They are not real rifles. But you are sincere, so you come, because we have rifles for everybody. Let’s fight against them.” And then we said, “No, we are truly artists, not truly peasants.” And he said, “When truly artists say, ‘Let’s spill our blood,’ you are talking about our true blood of truly peasants and not about yours.”

So I understood that we could not give a message to women, because we are men; to blacks, because we are white; to peasants, because we live in the city. But we can help them to find their own ways of fighting.

The entire interview and podcast can be found here.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I’ve seen many people linking to this post by 99Seats, but actually, I liked this one much better. Here’s a taste:

Theatre is missing out, in some ways, on advances other arts can make. We’re not really evolving. And that may be part of the frustration that younger theatre artists feel.

When I started thinking about this post, a few weeks ago, I was feeling a bit more down on theatre than I am right now. I actually meant to start this off saying that I was thinking of getting out of theatre, or at least de-prioritizing it in my artistic life, not for the usual “you can’t make a living” stuff, but because it can [be] so confining, artistically, stylistically, as an industry. And because it seems like the world is moving ahead at light speed and we’re still chugging along in steamboats. Because it seems like if I want to reach people and affect change in the world and get a message out, there are so many great tools to use and using them in theatre seems so impossible.

In my opinion, it’s a very perceptive view from a young artist.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I am amazed at the muted response in the media on the death of Augusto Boal. As of this writing, I cannot find an obituary on him in the New York Times or Washington Post. It seems that the AP story of his death, about two paragraphs long, is all that is making the rounds. The Theatre of the Oppressed website has a bit more on his passing. His Wikipedia entry has also been updated to reflect his passing.

Bea Arthur dies, and there are all kinds of media tributes to her. Augusto Boal dies, and there is virtual silence. -twl

Dunkirk NY – Having closed the production of Romeo and Juliet for my department, I’ve been slowly bringing myself back to a more normal lifestyle. This includes trying to catch up on stuff around the blogs. There’s a lot out there, but what has caught my attention most is the discussion between Mike Daisey and Todd Olson of the American Stage Company in Tampa Bay. I don’t really think I have the chops to jump in on this battle, but in some ways I understand the issue. It’s not much different in educational theatre.

We seem to have some sort of problem in this society trying to fix broken things. I don’t know how many items I read in the newspapers on a daily basis about what’s broken, but there seems to be so little about how to fix whatever it is that’s broken. Social Security? Way broken. Public education? Totally broken. College funding? Super-broken. Public transportation? The wheels are coming off. The economy? So broken it hurts. Theatre? As broken as anything can get.

Yet there seems to be very little will or ability to fix broken things anymore. Take educational theatre. It’s broken because it trains students for a broken profession while simultaneously breaking their personal financial situations by leaving them thousands of dollars in debt with no practical way of recovering their money. This piece of news seems not have reached theatre departments, but even if it had, theatre departments have too much invested in what they currently do to ever change.

Sometimes it’s not even a question of finding solutions. In many cases the solutions are out there just waiting to be implemented. I think it goes deeper than that. We, as a culture, seem to have a deep affinity towards inertia. We want things comfortable. We want things to be predictable. We want them to be the same. And we do not want to have to do the hard work involved in maintenance. Consensus seems harder than ever to achieve.

It’s rather like buying a new car without ever doing any maintenance on it at all beyond changing the oil. We seem to want to drive our institutions right into the ground. Rather than make the small changes (replace muffler, turn rotors) which would keep the machine running smoothly for years, we instead wait for things to fall off completely, and sometimes even when they do, we simply drive the machine without making any repair at all.

Nor do we seem capable of making adjustments quickly. One of those “inner game” ideas I like to cite is that of adjustments. In any sport you can name, one of the reasons some people or teams excel and some don’t is their ability to make adjustments. Love him or hate him, Bill Belichik is one of the greatest coaches in the game of football today because he has the unique ability to make adjustments, either with his personnel, or in the midst of a game. He is never so married to a “game plan” that he cannot make adjustments as a game is progressing, and when he loses key players, he adapts his strategies to match the new personnel he has. He seems to have the uncanny knack for understanding how small simple adjustments can affect the larger picture in a positive manner, and that’s why he consistently wins. The same goes for good baseball players, tennis players, golfers – almost any competitive activity you can name.

Theatre can’t seem to make these adjustments. Neither can education. It’s a lack of leadership, a lack of influential thinkers and theorists, but most important, a lot of independent operators who seem to insist on following the old order. Who is going to be influential enough to make artists or educators see the need for change?

What theatre needs is a to undergo a change something along the lines of Rick Ankeil of the St. Louis Cardinals. a big-time prospect as a pitcher who posted a record of 11 wins and 7 losses with 194 strikeouts and a 3.50 ERA in his rookie year 2000. Inexplicably, he became unable to throw a strike, and after Tommy John surgery and other injuries, he re-constructed himself as an outfield and hitter. In the 2008 season he hit .264, had 25 home runs and 71 runs batted in over 413 at bats. It’s all about the adjustments.  -twl