a poor player

Dunkirk NY – As of this writing, there are now 75 comments to my previous post. I imagine some people may be wondering if I will have a response. I believe that in time I will, but this unexpected rhetorical storm has hit just when I am in tech week for a show in Buffalo, preparing to direct another play, and handling other matters at work. I have skimmed through most of the comments, because this blog does review comments before posting, but now the material is so extensive I will have to take more time to digest it all, more time than I currently have. At the very least, I hope you have all enjoyed your conversation with each other.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – According to The Broadway League 2010-11 Demographic Report, the Great White Way is whiter than ever. And then some.  To save you the trouble of clicking the link, here are the bullet points from the Broadway League website:

From the Executive Summary

• In the 2010-2011 season, approximately 62% of all Broadway tickets were purchased by tourists.
• Sixty-five percent of the audiences were female.  
• The average age of the Broadway theatregoer was 44 years, older than in the past few seasons.
• Eighty-three percent of all tickets were purchased by Caucasian theatregoers.
• Broadway theatregoers were a very well-educated group.  Of theatregoers over 25 years old, 78% had completed college and 39% had earned a graduate degree.
• The average Broadway theatregoer reported attending 5 shows in the previous 12 months.
• Playgoers tended to be more frequent theatregoers than musical attendees.  The typical straight play attendee saw eight shows in the past year; the musical attendee, five.
• Fourty-four percent of respondents said they bought their tickets online.
• Bullet about the female audience deleted. (sic)
• In general, advertisements were not reported to have been influential in making the purchasing decision.
• The average Broadway theatregoer reported attending 5 shows in the previous 12 months. The group of devoted fans who attended 15 or more performances comprised only 6% of the audience, but accounted for 33% of all tickets (4.1 million admissions). 

Source: www.broadwayleague.com

Given all the demographics we know about theatre in the US and westernized countries today, I think it’s safe to make the following conclusion: Theatre is primarily for white people, as both audience members and practitioners. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – My annual solstice post. Seems to me this particular year we need more light than ever.

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. Candlelight. 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.

And once again, Marilyn and her friends perform the story of The Raven.

Dunkirk NY – “The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.” – As You Like It, III.1

Tomorrow begins a stretch of time wherein I will have few days off that are not holidays. I begin rehearsal for The Hostage at the Irish Classical Theatre Company up in Buffalo. Once that opens, I will begin rehearsal for a new play by playwright and poet Red Shuttleworth, High Plains Fandango. By that time I will be performing in one play, rehearsing another, and oh yeah, teaching classes and running the department. Life eases up after Feb. 5 when The Hostage closes. Fandango runs until March 4. Then life eases up a bit. I talked to my father about all this the other day and his response was, “Well, that’s your choice.”

I find these days, though, that I have something of a love-hate relationship with being this busy. I think the reason is that I have come to believe there are many things I would still like to accomplish, but not enough time to accomplish them. Earlier today I was reading this post from my favorite scooter blog, Scooter in the Sticks. The author discusses his new relationship between his love of driving his Vespa, and his recent diagnosis of psoriatic arthritis, a potentially disabling condition. He knows he will have to adapt his riding habits and adapt to his condition. And his age.

It seems to me that the older I have gotten, the more ideas I get of what I want to do. And even as I get these ideas, the realization of how little time is left to accomplish these things is sobering. Just to give you a taste, here is the bucket list as it stands right now:

• Re-invent my department. I would love to create a theatre department that focuses much more on the realities of today’s theatre scene and less on the Broadway dream and the LORT model. My ideal would be a department that is less concerned with producing a theatre season of large-scale productions and more concerned with producing smaller pieces more connected to communities, placing students, designers and performers, in smaller entrepreneurial teams to produce these shows. I’ve sort of run out my own personal desire to put on large-scale shows.
• Start a theatre company. Really. I would like to start a theatre company in Buffalo that was composed of recently graduated Fredonia students (or any local students) and use that theatre to help them continue their training beyond college, giving them a place to practice their craft. I would specialize in new work or, better yet, bringing to Buffalo the best from the NYC indie scene. Mix in some work from local playwrights focusing on the Buffalo community. And use the students to bring in people from the community to help them produce their own work.
• Write a book on acting technique that fuses Spolin improvisation techniques with Stanislavskian acting concepts.
• Get in an RV and travel the country writing reviews of shows from regional theatres all across the country.
• Collaborate with an international artist and bring some international work to Fredonia.
• See the great sites and art of Europe. Add a walking trip to Ireland.
• Take a shot at auditioning for work on the LORT circuit. Why not?
• Retire to Chicago and hook into the theatre scene there.
• Retire to a quiet life in the woods somewhere and forget about everything listed above. Just like Shakespeare.

Of course, many of the things on this list are contradictory. Choices will need to be made. And therein lies the rub. I wonder why, at this stage of my life, these ideas are coming at me now. Why wasn’t I thinking of them 25 years earlier? Was I just so focused on being a good teacher and doing my job well that I wasn’t expansive enough in my thinking? Did living in a rural area cut me off from possibilities and inspiration? Was I so busy raising kids, earning a living, and enjoying Buffalo that all that was satisfying enough? Or am I looking into a future where I will need at some point to fill up the free time? Am I incapable of leading a simple, un-busy life?

Ah well, no sense in worrying about all this now. I’ve got a few busy weeks to get through.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Thursday night I had a chance to listen to Yo-Yo Ma in concert right on my own campus. He came as a guest artist and spent a day doing a master class with students from the School of Music, and then the following evening performed the Dvorak Cello Concerto with the college orchestra.

What was truly inspirational to me, and just as much fun to watch, if not more so than his playing, was the way he came out and interacted with the orchestra. No doubt he’s played this piece of music so many times he can do it in his sleep. So this affords him the opportunity to engage the orchestra in a way few people possibly could.

Yo-Yo Ma with the Fredonia College Orchestra

Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY - If anybody out there has a spare pair of rose-colored glasses, I would appreciate it if you would send them my way. I don’t have a pair.

They seem to be quite fashionable lately. Almost everyone I come across these days, either actually or virtually, seems to have a pair. And they seem to wear them no matter what they’re watching or reading. Politics, television, college sports, the economy, theatre – just doesn’t seem to matter. Careers are going well, every show is “outstanding” or “brilliant,” facts are polarized out of view, and all is – well, rosy.

I am really jealous of those that have them. My glasses are bi-focals with only clear lenses. They don’t even have transition lenses. I have to wear OTG (over the glasses) sunglasses when I go out because I can’t really see the sense of paying about $300 to get a pair of sunglasses with my prescription in them. I’ve tried to find the rose-colored ones in the same place I get my OTGs, but every time I go to Wal-Mart, they seem to be sold out, they’re that popular. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – Theatre is an experience. That’s the way I have come to look at the whole thing lately. I find I have so much trouble thinking about theatre as a profession or as an art form that, for me, the circle has come full round. I started out as a child participating in theatre for the experience, and it appears that I am returning to that point of view as I enter “second childhood.”

Nobody really teaches you how to age; you just go through that experience, flailing and learning as you go. But it’s clear to me that one of the benefits of becoming ever more mature is that you begin to take just about everything in life less seriously. Things just matter less and less. And so everything is just another experience, and that takes off a lot of pressure.

Examples? When I first started out teaching, it was so important to me that my students become successful professional actors. Now, I am very happy if they have a good experience while in my classes and in the department. What they become after they leave here is no longer so important to me as long as they become solid citizens, good people, and have a lot of good memories of doing theatre here. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY - 

Regan – We shall further think of it.

Goneril – We must do something, and i’ th’ heat. King Lear, I.1

As a kid growing up I was enamored of the TV series Dragnet (the 1967-70 remake, not the 1951-59 original, thank you very much). Quietly and without much fuss at all (and, to my recollection, never firing a weapon), Sgt. Joe Friday of the LAPD went about meticulously gathering the facts and, in the end, solving the crime. His catch phrase “Just the facts, ma’am” (which he never actually said in the series; it was “All we want are the facts, ma’am”) always rang out when someone on the show became emotional or tried to drag in some useless information not related to the questions Joe was asking. The facts always solved the case.

I have always based my decisions in life on trying to acquire the facts. Information has always been valuable to me. Having as much information and as many facts as possible has always made decision-making a lot easier. That is not to say that every decision I have made was easy. When the facts told me that, in all likelihood, I was not going to be a major American actor, there were clear emotional consequences. There still are. But the facts told me it was time to make a change, and so off I went to grad school. Continue Reading »

"Fisherman and The Siren" - Knut Ekwall

Dunkirk NY – Over the past three days I have been in Houston, TX on something of a fund-raising event for the university. The “big idea” being discussed involves the participation of the Alley Theatre in Houston, and so this past Wednesday I got a tour of the facility and saw a production of Horton Foote’s Dividing The Estate. It was all very wonderful. And therein lies the rub.

The actual show itself is sort of besides the point. It was just being in the atmosphere of a working theatre that got to me. The Alley is probably an exception to the state of LORT theatre in the US at this point. It is financially sound, and embarking on an $80 million renovation of its facility. It is one of only three LORT theatres in the US that employs a resident ensemble of actors and designers. Some of the Alley’s resident actors have been there for 20+ years. They have an in-house scene shop, costume shop, props shop, etc. They have a 60+ year history. They produce 11 shows in 2 spaces. They do new work – two this season. They are, in many ways, exactly what the LORT theatre movement intended a regional theatre to be.

Of course, the demographic picture of the audience is the same as it is everywhere: upper middle class educated whites. That in and of itself is part of the rub. So is the $80 million campaign for a new space – can anyone else think of better uses for $80 million than a new theatre space for UMCEW theatregoers? But the real nub of the rub was its seductive attractiveness. At heart, the Alley represents and embodies everything I always dreamed theatre could be when I was a young, aspiring theatre artist. Continue Reading »

Dunkirk NY – I don’t generally write two posts in one day (hell, I don’t generally write twoposts in one week), but today happens to be a gorgeous day outside – perhaps one of the last of this summer/autumn season – and in watching the sun slowly set from my back porch, I have to admit I am overcome with a sense of endings. The summer warmth will soon end; the days grow shorter; the leaves change color and drop; the grass no longer grows; the baseball season ends. And inthe past couple of weeks in the acting classroom, it becomes more and more apparent that I am a person stuck in time and place, and in a sense dwindling like the last rays of light.

There are a few things about my circumstance that have been pulling me up short lately. I attended a meeting this past Friday, and in attendance were myself, the dean, the associate dean, the Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management, the Director of Admissions, the Director of the School of Music and his Associate Director. Everyone except the Associate Director was in a tie and jacket (he wore a good sweater and slacks). I arrived in cargo pants that are a little too short for me, sneakers, and a slightly oversized Fredonia sweatshirt. All the adults at the table looked like adults – except me. After a 30-year teaching career in higher education I still can’t dress like an adult. Continue Reading »