Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.
. . . As we formulate our strategies for dismantling America’s gun culture:
A direct attack only strengthens a person in his illusion, and at the same time embitters him. There is nothing that requires such gentle handling as an illusion, if one wishes to dispel it. If anything prompts the prospective captive to set his will in opposition, all is lost. And this is precisely what a direct attack achieves.
“You haven’t shown any sign at all of respecting what I have to say or even wanting to hear it. I’m not gonna go stand under that safe.”
This from a gun-loving former Facebook friend in response to my invitation to join an on-stage conversation about how to reduce gun violence in this country. I actually get this sort of response frequently from gun lovers, because whenever they come trolling at my virtual door with whatever twisted logic their addiction has tortured them into accepting, I always invite them to join a future evening of theatre that I am planning, so they can put their counterfeit rationalist money where their soon-to-be-no-longer-virtual mouth is. I think the reason for their reluctance is related to something I touch upon in an explanation I posted here on Just Wrought about why I delete cloaked commenters:
…I know it’s considered the custom of internet country to post anonymously, but there is no tradition of it in the theatre. In the world of live performance, one says one’s words in public and stands by them with [one’s] body. So as a rule I won’t be accepting any more anonymous posts. Stand and deliver, people!
What’s particularly disappointing in the case of my gun loving former Facebook friend is that he’s an experienced— and damned talented— actor. Therefore he lacks the excuse offered by so many other trolls who claim that I have the advantage of them onstage, being show folk myself. (I suspect my friend may also belongs to that vast majority of performers who believe, sadly, that the world owes them their next show, instead of vice-versa.)
In the past few years I have produced or been a part of quite a bit of theatre that deals with the immediate and difficult issues of our times, especially involving gun violence. I’m deeply proud, for instance, that my short play “White Boy Can Take a Punch” was part of last May’s magnificently uplifting offering, Hoodies Up!: The Trayvon Martin Protest Plays. My Living Newspaper production company, NewsWrights United also covered one of Puget Sound’s most egregious gun massacres in our second edition, The New New News, staging the manhunt for Maurice Clemmons after he murdered four cops in cold blood.
Here’s what I learned from the above experiences: theatre is one of the safest places to explore the implications of real life tragedy. As uncomfortable, challenging, frustrating, even humiliating, sometimes boring, often righteously indignant or unrelentingly Leftist as theatre can be, it is also uniquely illuminating, uplifting, life-affirming and much more respectful of our many differences as citizens than nearly any other communications framework I can think of.
So my friend who claims to be so worried about the Acme safe falling on his head also knows that according to the rules of his Looney Tunes metaphor, if such should befall him in a theatre, he would instantly be able to open his eyes, stand up, dust himself off and again join his battle against his wrong-headed road runner adversaries. So he’s bluffing, essentially. My friend doesn’t really want to avoid danger, or even pain. No, he’s too much of a gun-toting tough guy to want to spare himself those risks. What he wants to avoid is humiliation. And no one who steps into the theatre for a conversation can be guaranteed to duck that. Audiences are can be harsh, and humiliation, along with its nobler twin, humility, are deeply woven into the fabric of what we offer, and what we receive in return. If one seeks, at all costs, to avoid disgrace, then one is wise to always avoid the stage, and not just when it is serving in its noble capacity as a crucible for societal discourse.
But here’s my ultimate question for my friend, and for anyone who holds the doomed gun advocate’s position: given that humiliation is an unavoidable risk of wider life, isn’t it wiser still to serve yourself an inoculation of it in the safe space that art offers? Otherwise, aren’t you running the risk, out in the big scary world beyond, of being more tempted to “protect” your point of view with that all-too-deadly, non-cartoon gun you’re clutching?
More to come.
Some say Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels was the first to proclaim, “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun.” Others say it might have been Göring or Himmler.* One thing’s for sure: once one Nazi blurted the banality, it didn’t take long for the rest of them to parrot it. Originality and wit were never hallmarks of the Third Reich. Some years later, the English satirist Malcom Muggeridge did what English satirists do best, and turned brown-shirted thuggery on its head: “When I hear the word ‘gun’, I reach for my culture.” And in case you were wondering, that’s what America needs to do next.
The United States has now fully entered the long reaping season that our gun addiction has sown. We have watched in paralyzed horror from Columbine through Virginia Tech through the Café Racer massacre, mere blocks away from my own house in Seattle, right up to and through the seemingly ultimate abomination that was the Newtown Tragedy. I say “seemingly ultimate” because we all know Newtown will not be the end, but rather only a particularly vicious chapter somewhere in the middle of a book we seemed doomed to keep writing.
I have occasionally over-indulged myself with ranting on Facebook about this national sickness, and I have almost always regretted it. Gun-loving friends (and not-such-friends) prefer to shrug and pout, posture and taunt, flicking out comebacks like, “What are you going to do? Pass a law? You think that’ll help? Good luck.” Until now I haven’t had the time, inclination or clarity to properly respond. But here goes:
No, I have limited interest in politics per se. Political solutions are necessary but not sufficient. As the gun-addicts love to remind (and threaten) us, outlawing handguns and assault rifles will merely turn gun-addicts into outlaws. (I am personally okay with that, by the way. Addicts need to find bottom.) We have to go deeper than politics to change our entire society. That’s where art comes in. Art can do all sorts of things that politics can never— and should never— hope to. Artists can and must, analyze, prophesy, seduce, synthesize, convince, cajole, ridicule, probe, scour, purge, alienate, repatriate and heal. To make that short list shorter, we must employ all the uses of art to win our country back from this insanity. We must surround the sickness with non-violent culture, like a healthy white blood cell engulfing and dissolving a pathogen.
I’ll be posting more essays as part of a larger conversation about how art can be key to disintegrating America’s gun cult. I am a playwright primarily, so mostly I am brainstorming potentialities of theatre, but I am equally eager to hear anyone and everyone’s thoughts on other creative tactics. Including gun-lovers. I love you too, sick and frightened as you are. I encourage you to join the conversation that will lead to your rehabilitation and your country’s ultimate recovery.
You need to check out D.C. playwright Gwydion Suilebhan’s brilliant new essay, “Theatrical Biodiversity”. Seriously. Click here. Take the time to read it all the way through. It’s hard for me to express how gratifying it is to see a fellow theatre artist so effectively articulate why he is joining the locally grown theatre movement. Fresh and fierce, Suilebhan’s voice achieves an eloquence that has eluded me in these discussions. Witness him bring the rigor of science to his metaphors:
In the same way that all the corn we eat in America now comes from a small number of genetic strains owned by a small number of huge agribusinesses, we now experience theater made largely by artists from a small number of graduate programs who live in a small number of huge cities…. We have lost, or may be at least losing, our artistic biodiversity.
… That’s bad for a lot of reasons. … A mono-culture (either agricultural or artistic) is vulnerable. If a new pest or blight emerges to which the one predominant strain of a crop is vulnerable, we all starve. What then might happen to the American theater, then, if it’s threatened by a similar pest or blight? Or has it already? Has the accessibility and quality and ubiquity of television and film, for example, turned theater into a “gourmet” entertainment that only a few well-heeled diners can afford to consume?
And watch him bring even more rigor to targets that take us beyond the status quo:
…In a healthy theatrical ecosystem, one that doesn’t suffer from the weaknesses of a mono-culture, at least 33% of the plays on our stages every season will be… completely locally grown. That is to say: drafted, developed, directed, designed, dramaturged, and done by people who live and work within a reasonable distance — let’s say 100 miles, since that’s the locavore standard — of the audience members who are going to engage with it.
And maybe 33% isn’t enough.… But [it] is a start. Right now in DC — a theatrical community that’s considered fairly healthy, nationwide — we’re at about half that level…. New York, Chicago, and likely LA are almost certainly higher than that, but…is St. Louis — just to pick a city at random — even close? What about Mankato, MN, or Decorah, IA?… My guess is the numbers don’t look good.
And what about Seattle? What are our numbers? And what sort of future benchmarks for locally grown works can we get ACT, The Rep, Intiman, and all the houses in smaller tiers to commit to? I think Gwydion might agree that hothouse development workshops, from which scripts never see the light of full production, don’t count as a viable or sustainable source of theatrical nourishment.
However, Suilebhan’s admonishments aren’t reserved solely for feckless, floundering artistic administrators. We playwrights come in for some rightful tweaking too:
… We need to write plays that wrestle with the everyday concerns and the specific interests and particular longings of our audiences. We need to understand our neighbors — to be among them, to be members of our communities — in order to give them what they need. (Which is not the same as what they want. We all want doughnuts; we do not need doughnuts.) We need to start writing for the family next door, not for a nameless artistic director in Manhattan.
To you status quo clingers that clutched faith that I had given up and gone permanently quiet about the necessity of locally grown organic theatre, your prayers may be getting answered ironically. Others are coming to the struggle: smarter and better spoken.
.…We’d be establishing what the biologists call semi-permeable membranes between them in order to regulate what gets in and what gets out. In effect, if we embraced a locally grown cultural development approach, the American theatrical ecosystem would become less of a top-down hierarchical structure controlled by centralized authorities and more of a distributed network of peers. Just like, oh, everything else that’s succeeding in the world at the moment.
With folks like Gwydion joining the fray, the word you are now looking for to describe progress toward a locally grown American Theatre, exploding Manhattan’s hub-and-spokes model, is “inexorable.”
I am working on a new draft of my current play-in-progress tentatively titled Philosophical Zombie Killers. I mounted a public reading of the play back in October, and after compiling a very healthy amount of amazingly cogent feedback from friends, colleagues, and general audience members, I decided that cosmetic changes to the existing script would not go deep enough, and that my best next course of action was to build the play up again from scratch. This is a daunting prospect: painstaking and awfully slow going. Nevertheless, I have been hacking at it since New Year’s.
Then a few days ago a colleague reached out to me regarding an opportunity to possibly develop the script with a very well regarded program; but I would have to get her a draft by Valentine’s Day. So I’d have to build the script from scratch but build it fast. What to do?
I started working sloppy. Instead of carefully building up the edifice from pristine newly minted parts, I occasionally go back to the old draft and grab stuff to jam into the gaps. It’s a bit like building a house using parts from the one you just tore down: a door frame here, a plumbing complex there, a scrap of tiling, that perfectly good but rust-stained claw-footed tub.
My discovery is that sometimes it’s good to get a draft down crappily, capturing the gist of your new ideas so quickly that you can’t fall in love with individual brush strokes. (See? I’m even doing it here, sloppily mixing my metaphors: “I’m building a house! I’m painting a picture!”)
There are two huge up-sides to working this way.
Of course, I could be wrong. Didn’t I just mention that this process is intoxicating? There’s always that chance the binge slips into blackout territory, and then– oooff!–what a hangover!
You’re not crazy. You’re just overdue. There hasn’t been a new episode of Sandbox Radio Live! in over three months!
Relax.
Episode Seven: Eye of the Beholder is on its way, packed with the sort of goodies you’ve grown accustomed to: plays by Elizabeth Heffron and Vincent Delaney, music by Jose Gonzales and the astounding Sandbox Radio Orchestra, my own noir-angel detective series, Markheim (word has it Sam’s due for a drop in), all tied together by Leslie Law’s expert, effervescent direction. Plus you can expect some brand new stuff like a poem by Elizabeth Austen read live by the author, or a brand new comic serial by Scot Augustson set in Seattle. (You’ll want to order your tix quick, since we always sell out.)
But before we get to all that, I need to make up for a deleterious omission. With all the crazyness of the holiday season, plus world premiering my first full-length play in four years, Ballard House Duet, I neglected my self-appointed duty of telling you the things I love about the previous episode of Sandbox Radio Live! – Something Wicked This Way (available for download here.)
“Backscatter” by Vincent Delaney
Vince never disappoints with his sharp suspenseful writing, but this turn at modern horror would make Rod Sterling go goggle-eyed. All props to the Sandbox Radio sound fx team. Give a listen and tell me they don’t make it sound exactly like an airport. (This brings up a larger fascination for me when listening to these podcasts: how the live audience participates in and fuels the recording. There’s this extraordinary recursively looping sensation as you listen to them listening to you listen to the show in the future.) My favorite character in this one had to be Big Stu. Somehow Eric Ray Anderson manages to add 300 pounds through the sheer suggestive power of his voice.
“The Back of the 358 – #7” by Paul Mullin
Not much I want to say about these since I wrote them, except maybe that Kathryn Van Meter utterly nails the drunk chick. Oh, and also, the likelihood that there will be any new pieces in this vein is slim, given how King County Metro’s elimination of the Free Ride Zone has completely flattened the floridly diverse ecosystem that was once the back of the #358.
“Muscle Memory” by Omar Willey
This chillingly smooth and nasty pastoral will captivate you into a skin-crawling reverie.
“Quinceñera of the Damned” by Scot Augustson
What do you get when Mexican kitsch culture collides with Austrian Alpine snobbery in a fairytale context? Something you can be pretty sure Scot Augustson conceived. Favorite line (impeccably delivered by the peerless Annette Toutonghi): “Gunter will think I’m a crazy clown gypsy whore.”
“The Back of the 358 – #8″ by Paul Mullin
It’s never not unnerving to have to relive my #358 adventures as staged by some of Seattle’s finest actors.
“Here it Comes” by Charles Leggett with the Sandbox Radio Orchestra
Chuck and friends rock another original blues number, this time folding some astro-physics in, cuz… ya know… Chuck rolls like that.
“The Back of the 358 #9” by Paul Mullin
Please tell me this trip is almost over. If this woman punches or pukes on me, I’m gonna be highly irked. (Favorite line {which I can say in modesty because I overheard it}: “At least in jail I get three meals a day and someone to love me.”)
“The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe
No one intones the American classics like Richard Ziman. And his sweet spot is Poe.
“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” by Paul Dukas, arranged by Bruce Monroe
A mind-crackingly original arrangement: the kind of blastingly cool cut you can only get at Sandbox Radio.
“Markheim – Episode 6” by Paul Mullin
Per custom, I’m including the script for this below the fold.
“The Back of the 358 #10” by Paul Mullin
So long shirtless drunk chick! May you find the peace that eludes your every semi-lucid thought.
“Shadow of Agnes” by Emily Conbere
I raved about Emily’s first Sandbox Radio outing, “Sound Thieves” here, but who knows? She could’ve fluked her debut success. She didn’t. This piece seals the deal and is quite possibly one of the creepiest short pieces I’ve ever heard.
Again, don’t take my word for it. Go to the podcast and listen. And then get your tickets to our brand new show, available here through Brown Paper Tickets.
I made a promise to myself a while back that if I was going to use the word “experiment” in association with my work as a theatre artist, I had to do so more like a scientist and less like some avant garde poser. As I said in my earlier post “Putting the Fail back in “Experimental”:
Any actual scientist understands that true experiments have rules and consequences. Experiments are tests of hypotheses hoping to become theories; and theories, in order to prove useful, must be falsifiable. In other words, true experiments by definition contain the possibility of failure.
I would add that good scientists publish their results whether or not they find them gratifying. And that’s exactly what I intend to do here and now regarding the experiment of publishing my play Ballard House Duet simultaneously with its recent world premiere. (I enthusiastically explained my reasons for initiating this experiment here.)
So as of this posting, here is how my sales break down by channel:
Not a data/chart nerd like me? Okay, here are my plain English conclusions:
The bottom line is I turned a profit about three eBay sales ago. I am now $19.59 richer for this experience; but based solely on the data, I would have to give myself a C +, since I moved only 78 % of my product.
Of course, it is much harder to quantify all the things I have learned from the experience, not to mention all the nerdy fun I have had. Here’s a quick list:
The best outcome of this experiment was, of course, the chance to talk about the experiment itself: to revisit the question of whether it makes sense to publish play scripts simultaneously with world premiere productions, and more specifically, whether it makes sense for a playwright to put up his own capital to do so. I would say the short answers to these questions are, “Yes, with some improvements in the process.” And “No, a playwright already banks enough when he or she antes up their play for staging.”
Fellow playwright Joshua Conkel chimed in on Facebook to point out, “…In the U.K. it’s common to get the script at the show. It costs a few pounds and it also serves as the program…. Oberon Books does it. And then of course the script goes out to bookstores and all that. It’s great!” Perhaps as Seattle grows as one of the nation’s hothouses for locally grown new theatre, it might behoove us as to explore a script sales model like the UK’s, though it should also be noted that the simultaneous publishing experiment has been run quite extensively here in decades past. Bret Fetzer explained in comments posted on my earlier blog:
The experience of Rain City Projects — which published plays in conjunction with productions for over ten years… was that when the theater promoted selling the script, it succeeded, and when they didn’t, it didn’t. The single most significant factor, by an order of magnitude, was having someone hold up the script in a preshow speech and say “This is for sale in the lobby; if you enjoyed the show, we encourage you to buy the script.” Other approaches — such as plugging the script for sale in a program ad — had a fraction of the impact of a live preshow plug.
Over time, theaters became less invested in promoting scripts. There was a trend away from preshow speeches, and even the theaters that still did them just wanted the speaker to say the essentials and get off the stage. Most of the theaters producing new plays were small, volunteer-run organizations, so there was no one to consistently make a plug for the script, and trying to educate a rotating crew of house managers about this was too much to accomplish on top of all the other stuff that had to get done. Everyone supported the idea of selling the scripts in the abstract, but in practice it fell by the wayside.
But the main reason Rain City Projects stopped publishing individual scripts was that, as these were brand new plays getting their first production, a majority of playwrights learned a lot of new things and did significant rewrites after the production. Immediately the scripts were obsolete and the playwrights didn’t want them sold or distributed….
My experience working with Original Works Publishing, eBay and Amazon Direct Publishing leads me to believe that new technologies and processes might allow theatres and playwrights to keep their inventory small and flexible enough to offer scripts, either in hard copy or electronically, such that some of the challenges Rain City Projects faced might now be mitigated.
One conclusion seems certain: folks who bought my script seem very pleased indeed to be able to own a permanent document of an otherwise inherently ephemeral experience. Theatre is fleeting, but perhaps we theatre artists could work a bit harder to bottle some of our volatile moonshine for future times.