a poor player

Dunkirk NY – There has been a lot going on around Fredonia lately, and it has kept me from getting anything on the blog in the past week. The first week of school always seems to catch me by surprise, and although this time I felt ready, there was still a lot to deal with. Here is the list in summary:

• Bathroom remodeling. This came about suddenly, and so my wife and I caught up in the whirlwind of ordering all the new fixtures and accessories for the project.
• Combat class. I decided to try to take another item off the bucket list and attempt to get the SAFD certification in broadsword. This means I take the stage combat class taught by my colleague Ted Sharon every Tuesday and Thursday. This adds a class to my teaching schedule, and I have to move in it. Soreness and fatigue will be the order of the day for a few weeks.
• TACT. The Theatre Arts Curricular Transformation site is almost – almost – done. Just some small things to check before I announce it to the world. This is a co-project that Scott and I are trying to get off the ground in an attempt to get the word out concerning the need to change theatre curricula across the country.
• College of Visual and Performing Arts at SUNY Fredonia. The creation of a new College of VAPA is being discussed by the entire campus faculty, and I have been trying to help bring that about.
• Middle States – this is actually winding down, but I do have to stay alert.

But the biggest thing happening this weekend is the visit by Qui Nguyen and Robert Ross Parker from Vampire Cowboys to our humble campus in Fredonia. And let me tell you, the students and I are having a good time! We are getting the opportunity not only to have a workshop in unarmed martial arts combat by Qui, but he has brought with him his latest play, Alice in Slasherland, and he and Robert are doing their first read-through of the play and they are using the students to begin workshopping the production and getting ideas. The play is opening March 18th and running until April 10th at their home theatre in Brooklyn NY.

What’s really exciting about having Qui and Robert here is that these two guys built their theatre from the ground up based on their own aesthetic and artistic sensibility. That’s exactly what I want our theatre students to see and to see more often – people who didn’t go chasing after someone else’s brass ring, but made a brass ring of their own. They write about the things they like and that interests them, they produce fun, unique shows that bring people into the theatre who otherwise would never go, their shows sell well, and they’ve given themselves and their ensemble of artists a theatrical home in which to continue to develop their craft as an ensemble. I don’t think you could ask for more, and I do think that this is precisely the message all theatre students need to hear.

So check out a few of videos from today’s work, and hopefully I’ll be able to show you some totally exclusive previews of Alice after tomorrow!  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I had a completely different post in my head earlier today and over the last few days, and then just before lunch today I read the news on the Supreme Court’s decision on Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission. I do not generally write about matters political, but to me, the ramifications of this decision are so far-reaching, that in the deepest recesses of my mind I fear that this post may be one of the last I might ever be able to write without fear of political reprisal.

The combination of Scott Brown’s Senate victory in MA combined with this Supreme Court decision paves the way for this country to be overtaken by corporate interests in a politically-bought coup d’etat. I am willing to venture that inside of 50 years, national and international corporations, with the power the Supreme Court has handed them today, will have bought enough Senators, Congressmen, a President, and through their purchased President, a compliant Supreme Court, to be effectively running this country. The virulent residual hatred and suspicion of diverse and free thought that motivates the Tea Party constituency in this country is perfect fodder for corporations to easily manipulate. Conservative intellectuals will do the best they can to spin the “freedom and liberty/First Amendment” aspect of this decision, but the facts on the ground will eventually reveal the truth – that this decision robs the American people of their democratic freedoms. Companies with billions and billions of dollars at their disposal are ready to fund candidates who will appeal to the most base instincts in the electorate, and then manipulate them to vote in favor of every law or regulation they deem necessary to keep corporate America reaping in ever larger profits at the expense of the same poor slobs who voted for their puppet candidates. Continue Reading »

(This post originally appeared on January 15, 2007.  -twl)

This is the federal holiday marking the birth of Martin Luther King, but I celebrate it as “They Killed All My Heroes” Day. It’s a day for me to remember and honor all the political figures I admired as a young boy who were assassinated while I grew up. The roll call:

• Medgar Evers – June 11, 1963. I have no recollection of the actual event, but I came to know how he was assassinated as I became older and more familiar with the civil rights movement. The NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi, he was shot in his driveway after a number of threats on his life and a molotov cocktail thrown into his garage.
• John F. Kennedy – November 22, 1963. The first of the “big three.” Mr. Monoco, a huge man and much feared by us all for his gruff manner, came bursting into our 6th-grade classroom completely distraught and red in the face. “They shot the President,” he screamed, and then had us turn on the TV that was standing in the corner of the room. Walter Kronkite broke the news to us. I was a member of the School Safety Patrol, a group of kids charged with being crossing guards when school let out. When I took my post that afternoon I could do nothing else but lean my head on the “No traffic Past This Point” sign and cry for 20 minutes.
• James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner – June 21, 1964. The three CORE volunteers in the Freedom Summer of 1964 whose murders were the basis of the movie Mississippi Burning. I learned of their story early in high school as I began to learn the music of Simon and Garfunkel and their song He Was My Brother.
• Malcolm X – February 21, 1965. His assassination was all over the New York newspapers. I recall not liking him much because I thought he was for a violent solution to issues of race, and because he disagreed with MLK. I read his autobiography four years later and remember being very impressed with it. It changed my opinion on his contribution to the civil rights movement.
• Martin Luther King – April 4, 1968. The second of the “big three.” I don’t recall hearing the news immediately, but I do recall awakening for school the following morning and hearing the news reports coming in on the radio. His eloquence captivated me, as did his stance on non-violence and Vietnam. He was a major influence on my decision to become a conscientious objector and war resistor. I recall the images of the Poor People’s March on Washington. There was so much hope in his tone and so much pride in those who listened and spoke.
• Robert F. Kennedy – June 6, 1968. The third of the “big three.” Again, I awoke to the news on the east coast that morning as my radio alarm clock went off. All I wanted to know was who won the California primary (I was pulling for the junior Senator from NY). My first response was “not again!” I had viewed Bobby as the first politician I knew who really was serious about earning the votes of the poor and impoverished. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa long before it was fashionable to do so. He and MLK started off a bit suspicious of each other, but eventually worked for the same goals. His assassination came so hard on the heels of MLK that I truly thought the country was going to fall apart.
• Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, William Schroeder – May 4, 1970. I include the victims of the Kent State shootings because the entire event grew out of political protests by unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia while facing an armed National Guard. It was the spring of my senior year in high school, and I was preparing to go to college myself. I had applied for conscientious objector status and was exploring local groups like the Quakers, Fellowship for Reconciliation, the Catholic Peace Fellowship and the War Resistors League. I was nervous about going to college, because in the aftermath of Kent State I thought they were going to come after all student protesters the same way. I had an escape route planned for Canada should I have needed it.

By the time I got to college that fall, things began to slow down, protests were minimal (were people afraid? in hiding?), the draft was converted to a lottery system (my number was never called), and the war was clearly being lost. By the time I graduated, the war had only one year to go, civil rights had been largely achieved under law, I had discovered theatre, and Van McCoy would record The Hustle a year later as well. It was over. I spent three years teaching about peace and justice issues in a Catholic high school in Queens, but it had all become passé already. With no more heroes left, there seemed nowhere to turn, and those who were still alive (H. Rap Brown, Bobby Seale, Dan and Phillip Berrigan et. al.) were seemingly ineffective or past their prime. The “numbing of America” had begun.

So happy “They Killed All My Heroes” day to all of you. Let it be remembered on this day that the poor are still oppressed, the weak still downtrodden, the innocent still slaughtered, and the warmongers still in charge. I only hope that there will remain an earth that the meek would even be willing to inherit. -twl

Dunkirk NY – Last night I happened to catch the 1957 David Lean epic The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s one of those movies that, the older you get, the better it becomes. Towards the end of the movie, as he surveys the sunset from his completed bridge, Col. Nicholson (Alec Guiness) say the following:

I’ve been thinking. Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day that I’ve been in the service. Twenty-eight years in peace and war. I don’t suppose I’ve been at home more than ten months in all that time. Still, it’s been a good life. I loved India. I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But there are times when suddenly you realize you’re nearer the end than the beginning. And you wonder, you ask yourself, what the sum total of your life represents. What difference your being there at any time made to anything. Hardly made any difference at all, really, particularly in comparison with other men’s careers. I don’t know whether that kind of thinking’s very healthy; but I must admit I’ve had some thoughts on those lines from time to time. But tonight… tonight!

Somewhere within my conscience exists the perception that what I do with my life on a day-to-day basis is essentially trivial. Three things have brought that home to me over the past few days.

The first is the earthquake in Haiti. No doubt all human activity seems trivial when stacked up against a natural disaster of such proportions, but as with Katrina and the Indonesian tsunami, I have a difficult time coping with the notion that a life in the theatre – or in academia – is anything but trivial compared with the work that is being done and will be done by human service organizations and NGOs in re-building Haiti. Being able to correctly scan Shakespearean verse is of no practical value to a child with a broken body.

The second are the mounds of statistics I have been seeing lately concerning the condition of theatres and theatre artists. When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

The third is related to the Kwai quote. Unless you know the movie, what you miss from reading the quote out of context is the underlying irony of the situation. The character, Col. Nicholson, has built this bridge while a prisoner in a Japanese POW camp in SE Asia. He has managed, under almost impossible conditions, to get his men to erect a magnificent feat of engineering, a bridge across a narrow gap in the river. He completely loses sight of the fact that he is aiding and abetting the enemy by building this structure, focusing instead on the achievement itself and its future as a monument to Western civilization in the face of hardship. The quote takes place on the evening before the bridge’s opening. He is entirely unaware that a British commando team has been dispatched to blow the bridge up.

I am also nearer the end of my career than the beginning. I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to do theatre, and I’ve spent a lot of time training others how to do theatre. At the climax of the movie, Nicholson mutters to himself “What have I done?”, and his last act is his dying body falling on the plunger that blows up the bridge. I can’t help but wonder – is that a plunger which I see before me?  -twl

Dunkirk NY – I am in something of a lull at the moment. I’ve mostly been doing a lot of reading, gauging the atmosphere, if you will. Winter is here with a vengeance, as it has been bitter cold with over a foot of snow on the ground. I watched all the NFL playoff games over the weekend, and when I do that, I always feel like a slug afterwards. Those who know me say my biggest flaw is an inability to relax. Mostly, I agree with that, but whenever I try to relax, it seems my thoughts tend to wander towards things that make me restless. Perhaps in the near future some of what I am musing on will find its way into a cohesive post. But for now, I actually am content to lull about, try to keep my feet warm, sip coffee, and observe the snow-covered landscape out my window.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – After having read this guy out in Seattle, I am beginning to think that perhaps, just perhaps, the idea of localized theatre is gaining some traction in the blogosphere. Mr. Mullin’s voice is powerful, and it will be quite interesting to see how far he gets. I really look forward to the rest of his essays. It’s also instructive to read the comments. I think there is a huge collection of artists out there who desperately want a localized theatre movement to succeed, and the comments seem to reflect that. Of great consequence to me is the fact that he produced one of his plays in concert with a small theatre department at a community college run by a good friend of his. More collaboration between theatre departments that have the facilities and playwrights that have the plays is something I continue to dream about.

I was particularly taken with the contrasts drawn between localized and globalized theatre. He uses a quote attributed to the incoming AD of Seattle Rep, Kate Whoriskey, as a jumping-off point for his discussion about locally grown plays. He also has a few words to say about the NYC-centric attitude infecting his regional theatre scene. You want some money graphs to whet your appetite? Here are two:

Many of my local playwright colleagues have utterly given up on our Big Houses.  When a friend who works for one recently warned me that I risk being blacklisted by his theater for mouthing off like this,  I mentioned it to Scot Augustson, another local playwright  whom I particularly admire.  He replied, “Oh Paul, how would any of us ever know if we’re being blacklisted by them or not?”  Scot’s right.  And as much as good friends have cautioned me about these essays, it is time to be honest and realize you cannot burn a bridge that doesn’t exist.

Of course there are plenty of blocks on the long road to home grown.  Over the next few years it will be important to hold accountable the artistic leadership at what we Seattle show folks call the “Big Houses”, namely the Intiman, ACT and the Seattle Repertory Theater.  These juggernauts love to  pay lip service to new works, but when you dig beneath the surface of their “new play initiatives,” you find they consist almost exclusively of importing established talent from  New York rather than fostering much at home…. That said, sometimes I feel stupid that I haven’t yet given up.  But I haven’t.  And here’s why.  Those Big Houses essentially belong to us, the citizens of Seattle and the surrounding  region.  We fund them through our attendance and through our generous patronage: direct giving, public arts funding and  donations from the corporations for which we work.  We also support them through our cheap labor as actors, designers and administrators.  They will respond to the demand for locally developed plays.  So long as we make the demand.

Nice stuff, IMHO.

Everywhere you turn these days, the concept of localization has traction. I like to drink localized beers (Yuengling, Southern Tier Brewery, and even the occasional Genny), I buy only New York State wine (Johnson Estates, Bully Hill, Konstantin Frank), and when I want a hamburger, I am more likely to go to Sullivan’s Charbroil than to Burger King. During the late summer months I feast on local sweet corn and vegetables, and I can even get localized buffalo burger if I want (not to mention sides of beef, free-range chickens, brown eggs, etc.). Right now I am trying to get in on a new local coffee roaster who has a limited clientele at the moment. Not everything in my cupboards or refrigerator is local, but a significant portion is, and I like that. Hopefully more and more people will begin to think in these terms about their art, and if we keep getting more traction, theatre can take advantage of this by replacing the decaying regional/globalized model with the regional/localized model. Today, right at this moment, I begin to think that’s possible.  -twl

(h/t to the recently outed 99Seats)

Fredonia NY – I am taking some time to clean out my office files from the 20-odd years of junk they contain. In doing so, I ran into some material I used to post on my bulletin board outside my office from time to time. I thought I would share this particular one from David Mamet, as it seems to be in tune to my recent ruminations. It is from his 1986 lecture at Harvard Decay: Some Thoughts For Actors, and is included in the book Writing in Restaurants.

Things grow over time. We do not conceive and deliver in the same instant; we cannot take in and give out at the same time. There is a time to accumulate and a time to disperse, and the final disassembly is decay, which takes place so that new life may begin….

The problems of the world – AIDS, cancer, nuclear war, pollution – are, finally, no more solvable than the problems of a tree which has borne fruit: the apples are overripe and they are falling – what can be done? The leaves, coincidentally, are falling too, just at the time when they are needed most; and the tree, already weakened, is being weighted down with ice, and the very sap which might sustain the valiant fight to keep life in the tree is draining. What can be done? What can be done about the problems which beset our life? Nothing can be done, and nothing needs to be done. Something is being done – the organism is preparing to rest.

We, as a culture, as a civilization, are at the point where the appropriate, the life-giving, task of the organism is to decay. Nothing will stop it, nothing can stop it, for it is the force of life, and the evidence is all around us….

Now, what about your job?….

….that job is to bring to your fellows, through the medium of your understanding and skill, the possibility of communion with what is essential in us all: that we are born to die, that we strive and fail, that we live in ignorance of why we were placed here, and that, in the midst of this, we need to love and be loved, but we are afraid.

-twl

Dunkirk NY – I feel constrained this morning to clarify the difference between institutional decay and people working within institutions. One of the dangers of aiming any sort of criticism at a particular institution that it can appear that you are simultaneously criticizing the people working within the institution for being a part of that process. “Guilt by association” is a real danger whenever it comes to discussions concerning the the relative merit of any organization or the quality of its contribution to the culture.

As an example, one can point to the current national debate concerning health care. You will find very few people who believe that the current mode of health care delivery in this country is not broken. But you will find many people within the health care system who disagree as to how to fix it. You will find that some people are engaged in the debate so as to protect their vested interests in the current system, and you will find some people are engaged in the debate so as to produce deep systemic reform. Caught somewhere in the middle are the health care providers – doctors, technicians, and, I’m willing to bet, particularly nurses – who struggle on a day-to-day basis to provide quality health care to their patients. Most of them are probably people who sought careers in health care because they genuinely wanted to be able to help people and save lives.

So let me make something clear: while I do believe that the current institutional form of theatre in this country is a model I do not believe in, and one that I do not believe promotes the best that theatre can offer to American culture, I also do not believe that the majority of people working within this system are not working to deliver and promote the best theatre they can. The “baby in the bathwater” metaphor I’ve used to title this post is, to me, as clear a metaphor as they come. Hard-working theatre people represent the baby; the bathwater is a combination of the current state of Broadway and regional theatre, and, in my opinion, the dominance of careerism within that system. Throw out the bathwater; save the baby. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – It is a steel-gray New Year’s Day morning here in the bowels of Western NY. I can’t tell if the sun has risen or not yet. Later this afternoon and into this even we expect some lake-effect snow. You have to be pretty hardy to live up in these parts. I think my hardiness is beginning to wear thin, though. I am sure I need to go outside later this morning and take a walk. Even 20 minutes outdoors can relieve the cabin fever a bit. I do not know how we ever got to the point in western civilization that determined that the first day in January, right in the first third of winter, should be the time of the season to celebrate a new year. Perhaps it continues to be a remnant of that hunger for light.

New Year’s Day brings with it that sense of things changing. I have been taken lately with this article from the NY Times Arts Blog about “Plays That Changed Your Life.” There have been some amazing comments from readers. I am not sure about this, but I think the comments get recycled somehow, because in perusing the list this morning I noted there were only 6 pages of comments, and when I first posted my own comments there were 7 pages, and mine now do not appear. So I think there have been many more than the web site would lead you to believe.

What this list attests to, I think, is something we all should continue to aspire to – creating theatre that has the power to change lives. We live now in a culture that emphasizes careerism; that is, we are more focused on how what we do in our lives advances our career. Many of us fall victim to this kind of thinking too often. We become more concerned with how our decisions and actions will affect our careers, and less concerned with how the development of our art can change lives. Continue Reading »