Just Wrought

Recovering playwright, once won a STRANGER Genius Award for theater. Now writing a bloated novel about… G-d help me! Theatre.

Tag: World Class Theatre

  • Yussef el Guindi’s Interview at HowlRound Gets me Pumped!

    Yussef el Guindi’s Interview at HowlRound Gets me Pumped!

    One of the best things about Seattle as a theatre town is that it’s small enough that you can get your arms around it.  If you care to, you can get to know pretty much everyone who is active here as an artist.  For instance, I have met Yussef el Guindi, chatted and corresponded with him, and very much enjoyed the interaction.  But thanks to Vincent Delaney’s interview of Yussef over at HowlRound, I feel like I know him so much better, and admire him all the more for it.  His thoughts on the new works scene in Seattle are fervent and hopeful without indulging in the “best-of-all-possible-cities” Pollyannaism that some successful playwrights and artistic administrators like to espouse publically here.*

    I . . . wish artistic directors were as brave as their audiences. I think audiences are much more adventurous than some artistic directors imagine. . . .

    What’s surprising to me is that you’d think the Seattle theater scene would be more open to riskier choices, in terms of choosing plays that are a little edgier, even more political. Seattle being, for the most part, a liberal city, you’d think that would be reflected in the plays selected. But perhaps more than being liberal or progressive, Seattle is also known for being very civil. We are a polite town. That politeness gene, I sense, seems to influence the selection of plays, as much as anything else. But then I’ve always felt theaters in general are inherently conservative, especially the big LORT houses. . . .

    Thanks, Yussef, for energizing and inspiring me to keep working for world class.  You being here gets us so much closer.

    * Note to said colleagues: singing desperate paeans to perfection is a particularly pernicious form of despair.  We can only have hope when it’s possible for things to get better.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Holy Fear

    Holy Fear

    More than once someone has come up to me before an opening of some play I wrote saying something like, “Oh, you’ve been doing this so long you probably don’t even get nervous anymore, right?”  My reply is always: “It’s precisely because I’ve been doing this so long that I’m terrified.  I know all the things that can go wrong.”

    In two days I will be joining the 14/48 team as an actor for the first time.  In the parlance of the Seattle’s venerable “instant theatre” festival, I’ll be a virgin, and thus forced to fetch beer from the keg for whichever veteran demands it.  The fact that I have served as a writer four times makes no difference.  Nor should it.  As an actor, I am a virgin.  I feel like a virgin.  And I have a virgin’s fears.  Or to be more accurate I should say, I expect to feel a virgin’s fears.  I just don’t feel them yet.  It’s one of the blessings of being an actor.  You really don’t need to plan that far ahead.  Actors are soldiers in the trenches. Sure, it’s their ass in the line of fire, but at least they have something to do when the lights rise and it’s time to go up and over.  A playwright, like a general, has to watch in horror– sometimes abject, sometimes surreal– from beyond the action.  Of course there is joy too, but a playwright’s joy comes only in flashes until the final curtain drops.  Until then, anything can, and often does, go wrong.

    So my 14/48 virgin actor fear hasn’t hit me yet, but I have no doubts that by the time of the first morning’s “actors’ draw”, when I find out which play I will be performing and who my director and cast-mates will be, my insides will be doing a nasty free-style crawl towards either end of my G-I tract.  And when it comes time to go onstage for the first performance, I fully expect my swollen heart to be thumping in my chest.  This is only right and proper.  It’s how human bodies process performing publically.  And it’s as it should be. 

    A healthy fear is essential to making theatre.  It is what keys us into the audience’s experience of the immediacy of the moment. If you’re not feeling it, then chances are the audience won’t be feeling much of anything.  And, alas, they’re used to that. If they want “perfection”, they stay home and watch the boob. Our fear as theatre artists fuels the whole machina ex deus that is theatre.  The audience gets off on knowing that the train can leave the tracks at any moment.  Ours is the crucible where the experiment of art is performed—not re-enacted—but embodied in flesh and sweat and spit.  If we already know we’re right— if we know from the outset that the experiment is going to succeed— then we are also already dead.  Fear is life.  Fear is holy.  And in these darkest Northwest days just after New Year’s, fear is also a much needed bolus of bright adrenaline.  I plan on nursing it until the lengthening days can take over.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Hawking Whole Theatre at “What’s Next?”

    Hawking Whole Theatre at “What’s Next?”

    Last night I joined a small but extremely energized group of theatre professionals at the second iteration of “Seattle Theatre: What’s Next?” hosted by Jim Jewell and Peggy Gannon.  I want to talk more about what was discussed and what action items came out of that discussion, but I think I will wait until Jim publishes the official minutes.  Until then, here’s a transcript of the three minute spiel that I was asked to give on what’s currently exciting me about Seattle Theatre:

    Whole Theatre

    Be careful what you wish for, sure.  But when it comes to Seattle Theater, it’s also wise to be specific what you wish for.  For a good while now Seattle’s Big House theatres have been gradually increasing the percentage of local actors they hire.  And rightfully they have then touted this change as a noble step in the direction of locally grown theatre. But let’s be honest.  We all know one of two things happened.  Either the artistic administrators of Seattle’s Big Houses all got together in a room and decided, “Hey, we should do the right thing and hire more local actors.”  Or… they all independently realized that in the current depression it was becoming cost prohibitive to fly in every actor from New York or LA.  I’ll leave it to you to decide which scenario seems more plausible.  But look, when a good thing happens it’s churlish to over-analyze the reasons for it.

    The problem is that using local actors isn’t enough.  And so when we advocate for locally grown theatre, we need to be more specific…  Whole Theatre.  Theatre that is soup to nuts local: written by local talent in collaboration with local talent.  Zero degrees of separation among everyone from the playwright to the director to the designers to the actors to the audiences. 

    Zero degrees of separation. 

    If what I am proposing sounds radical or overly ambitious, consider this: we do it all the time.  In fact, if I can brag a little, as a playwright and an actor, I have done very little in the last five years that hasn’t been Whole Theatre.  Going back to 2006, there was the Empty Space production of Louis Slotin Sonata.  When the floor needed final painting, Allison Narver was there in jeans, helping designer Gary Smoot to finish it.  I’m trying to picture one of Seattle’s Big House artistic directors doing that.  To be fair, I’m sure there are union rules against it.

    Then there was The Ten Thousand Things, which Washington Ensemble Theatre produced.  I sat in a room with the director and the designer Etta Lilienthal talking through her sketches. Later, I sat in the theatre while audience members rewrote my play one word each performance.

    And most recently there was Newswrights United producing two living newspapers, researched, written and produced by Seattleites, about Seattleites, for Seattleites.

    And of course it’s not just stuff I’m working on.  There’s the incomparable 14/48, perhaps the most consistently exciting weekend of theatre in town.  All local actors, directors, designers and crew mixing it up on plays written by local playwrights in the space of maybe ten hours, tops.

    There’s Printer’s Devil, opening yet another Scot Augustson world premiere, Shadow Odyssey in their unique committed relationship with him.

    There’s Sandbox Radio which just staged its second all original slate of short pieces, combining some of Seattle’s best actors with the best playwrights and musicians.

    And right on the horizon is Rebecca Olson’s new project Custom Made Plays, commissioning local playwrights to write for specific local actors.  I’m happy to be the playwright on the pilot play, writing for Rebecca herself and Hana Lass.

    Whole Theatre.  Theatre that hasn’t had the yummy good-for-you stuff processed out of it.  Non-corporate theatre that ain’t stale from being packaged three years ago in a theatre scene 2,700 miles away by MFA’s who have never stepped foot in your town.  Whole Theatre. Seattle’s crawling with it.  And surely it gives us the most solid shot at World Class.

    (I want to do a version of the poster that says Enjoy Whole Theatre!  Or as Shakespeare, Molière and Chekhov called it, “Theatre.”)

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Joining Averroës’ Search

    Joining Averroës’ Search

    One of my favorite stories by Jorge Luis Borges is “Averroës’ Search”.  It’s not a very good story— Borges himself admits as much in a rather tortured apology that he tacks on at the end—but it’s a story about theatre—at least in part—and since it’s one of the only times Borges, a favorite of mine, touches on the art form that I have sunk so much of myself into, the short piece has become special to me.  I can approximate how many times I have read it by counting the different colors of pencils I have used to mark it up: dark blue, light blue, purple, green.

    The story opens with the great Islamic annotator of Aristotle lamenting the frequent appearance in the Poetics of two words  that, to a devout Muslim of the 12th Century, seem to have no meaning at all: “tragedy” and “comedy”. 

    He had come across them years earlier in the third book of the Rhetoric; no one in all of Islam could guess as to their meaning….  Yet the two arcane words were everywhere in the text of the Poetics—it was impossible to avoid them.

    In the very next paragraph Averroës takes a break from his work and looks down from his balcony. 

    …  There below, in the narrow earthen courtyard, half-naked children were at play.  One of them standing on the shoulders of another, was clearly playing at being a muezzin: his eyes tightly closed, he was chanting the muezzin’s monotonous cry,  There is no God but Allah.  The boy standing motionless and holding him on his shoulders was the turret from which he sang; another kneeling, bowing low in the dirt, was the congregation of the faithful.  The game did not last long— they all wanted to be the muezzin, no one wanted to be the worshippers or the minaret.

    For me, this is Borges at his best and most loveable: a great thinker imagining a great thinker struggling to imagine a concept that, in fact, palpably surrounds him.  As many of my friends who like to argue with me point out, theatre will always survive.  You literally cannot not have theatre.  But as Borges might counter, you can certainly have it without knowing you have it.  Perhaps that’s where we are heading.  The great Argentine did foretell the internet after all.

    Recently, in a fit of frustration that so many people seemed to miss the point of my recent post about playwrights not making a living from their plays while plenty of folks make one making theatre, I recently wrote the following self-pitying status on Face Book. 

    I somehow need to find a way to harness the average Seattle theatre artist’s endless enthusiasm for arguing into an actual force for change.

    Yes, we’re all smart. We’re all well read. We all know how to attack a straw man and cleverly defend the indefensible, but at what point do we decide we can do better and then take steps to do it?

    It’s a cliché, but it always applies: if not us, who? If not now, when?

    Maybe self pitying isn’t the right description.  Maudlin?  Mawkish?  In any case, a good friend and theatre colleague blithely chimed in: “Shut up and do a show.”  It’s good advice.  Well, again, advice isn’t really the right word.  No one telling you to shut up is giving you advice so much as dictating a directive, and a rather ironic one at that, since it’s impossible to tell someone to shut up without opening your mouth.  Still though, the person who said this has a largely gentle heart, and I know he would not want me to do anything I did not really want to do. 

    With the understanding that I did not have a lot of room to talk about Seattle theatre unless I was actually making Seattle theatre, I have been pushing pretty hard on producing over the last few years.  This spring I wrote and served as executive producer for The New New News: A Living Newspaper; a little over a year before that I served in the same capacities for It’s Not the the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper.  And before that there was The Ten Thousand Things at Washington Ensemble Theatre, The Don Juan Cult Concerto at NSCC, Tuesday and An American Book of the Dead- The Game Show at Annex Theatre.  Just listing those shows makes me smile and feel tired at the same time.  Boy, have I done some shows since coming back to Seattle in 2002!

    Now it’s 2011 and I have foundered on a fact that frightens me a bit and that I need to share with you.  I don’t want to put on another show.  Even if I did, I don’t have one.  It’s just not in me at the moment.  And I don’t know if it ever will be again.  (It feels like a long moment, frankly.)  I believe this is something that every theatre artist has to face at some point.  A future with no shows.  But just like Averroës, I will be surrounded by theatre whether I know it or not, whether I want it or not.  After all, isn’t the Intiman’s colossal failure a tragedy in the truest sense?

    So, with the understanding that one earns one’s right to speak about Seattle theatre by making Seattle theatre, I need to cash in for a while and keep my mouth shut.  I will still keep Just Wrought active, and still post here, but my advocacy for Seattle becoming a World Class theatre town, and all the kvetching and posturing that goes with it, is hereby retired indefinitely.

    It is time for me to shut up, sit back, and watch the show… as produced by others.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Money isn’t Everything… or Anything

    My friend Maria’s mom gave me one of those rare koan-ish gifts of wisdom that stick with you for a lifetime, poking you at odd times as you struggle on and off to get to the core of understanding it. I was in high school, over Maria’s house for dinner, and her mom and I must have been talking about my hopes and aspirations. I said something like, “It’ll all work out so long as I can find the money to afford all the things I want to do.” Smiling sweetly, Maria’s mom said, “Oh Paul, don’t worry about money.  Money is the easiest thing in the world to get.”

    What?

    Okay. Set that notion on the table a moment so that we can compare it with what a former friend and colleague once flatly told me. “Paul, theater is an art form for the Upper Middle Class. Period. End of argument. End of story.” I remember seeing in his eyes the pride of superior conviction as he went on to explain that fundraising, marketing and, by tacit implication, programming itself must be tailored to this essential truth. Furthermore, since theatre is for, by and of the moderately to handsomely wealthy, then raising money for theatre, which was his job at a large West Coast regional theatre, was the noblest and most essential duty one could perform for our art form. 

    Now, honestly, that sounds more sensible than my friend Maria’s mom’s enigmatic epigram, right?  We are on much firmer territory with that kind of thinking, aren’t we?

    Are we?

    After all, what the hell did my sweet earlier friend’s sweet mom mean?  For the longest time I tended to interpret it prosaically. “Well, okay… everything else takes money to get.  Therefore money is easiest, since it requires one less step. Money is freeze-dried effort waiting to be reconstituted for a different circumstance… or something. Got it.”

    I guess that makes a sort of sense but only the sort that isn’t really worth much digging for. However, as the years blurred by, and most especially as the struggles for the vitality of my art form have come to a head, especially in my adopted home town of Seattle, I am beginning to suspect something lies deeper in Maria’s mom’s words.  

    All right. Let’s dig: if money’s easy and I shouldn’t worry about it, then what is it that is hard and that I should be worrying about? Maria’s mom did not elucidate. I realize now that this is because she knew I had to figure it out for myself. Happily I am beginning to believe that the alternative currency she was pointing me at is one that I, and so many of my true friends, have been blessed with to a richness. The “hard” currency Maria’s mom wanted me to find and treasure was the precious tender of ideas.

    “Oh sure,”  I hear my former friend say, “That’s great. Wonderfully idealistic and all, but without money, theatre dies. Raising money is the essential task that makes it all possible.”

    What do you think, gentle reader? If one wanted to destroy the essence of an art form, obliterate its fresh ideas and enchain it to defending at all costs the miserable back-ass-wards status quo of comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted, could one employ any more effective strategy than keeping its brightest people constantly courting the almighty upper middle-class dollar instead of trading and paying interest on ideas?

    All art is a conversation—theatre doubly so. If my former friend is telling me I can only hold a conversation with the upper middle class of the Western World circa early 21st century I am obliged to either politely ignore him, or firmly insist he go fuck himself. I want to talk with everyone everywhere and everywhen.  And I buy into this conversation with my ideas or I don’t join at all. I will not, nor will the colleagues I admire most, huddle acquiescently on the tiny postage stamp theatre artists are ceded when we are told that money is what defends us and what we must defend. 

    Maria’s mom always had faith in me when others didn’t. She is no longer in this world and I have no way to repay her for her gifts so gracious. So in honor of that fine lady, you can have this idea, and everything you find here, for free:

    Yours is the territory you refuse to surrender.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Why Omar Willey’s “Why Theater Matters” Matters

    Let’s get the over-arching irony out of the way first thing: my friendship with Omar Willey blossomed on line, through Face Book and his responses to my blogging here at Just Wrought; and had that been the extent of our relationship, then certainly a cynical dismissal of my recommending his recent essay “Why Theater Matters” would be eminently fair.  After all, he argues herein for a theatre triumphant over the distance and disaffection with which our “on-line lives” infect us.  Fortunately, our friendship has also blossomed in “real life” and real-life’s cooler cousin, theatre.  Omar comes to my shows.  Omar comes to everyone’s shows.  If you are a Seattle theatre artist and you don’t know Omar, I can assure you that your ignorance is not reciprocated.  Omar knows you.   Omar knows your work.  What’s more, Omar Willey and his colleague José Amador (whom I also have the honor of calling friend) have begun to review your work, over at the Seattlest. 

    In his essay, posted a few days ago, Omar offers an implicit explanation for his coming out of retirement (he  reviewed theatre for KCMU-FM back in the 1990’s) and again lowering his lance at our windmills.

    Simulacra. Pseudonymity. The theater … erases them. Theater restores the primacy of the human body. It restores presence. It restores the potential, the fear and the promise of the present, and gives an immediate response in the present tense.

    … Theater remains a communal experience of people, persons seeing themselves with, through and in other persons in a unique, irreproducible moment. A self, communing with other selves. Being here. Now. And never to be the same person, the same place, the same way again….  Bridging the gap between friends and strangers, the sense of a marvelous, wondrous love and beauty that restores joy to life, shared together. How easily we forget it when we do not seek it.

    This reminds me so much of a favorite quote of mine from Carl Jung that I would not be at all surprised if Omar knows it intimately.  But just in case you don’t, here ‘tis:

    …You go to the theatre: glance meets glance, everybody observes everybody else, so that all those who are present are caught up in an invisible web of mutual unconscious relationship….

    Mankind has always formed groups which made collective experiences of transformation–often of an ecstatic nature–possible. The regressive identification with lower and more primitive states of consciousness is invariably accompanied by a heightened sense of life… .The inevitable psychosocial regression within the group is partially counteracted by ritual, that is to say through a cult ceremony which makes the solemn performance of sacred events the centre of group activity and prevents the crowd from relapsing into unconscious instinctuality… The ritual makes it possible for him to have a comparatively individual experience even within the group and so remain more or less conscious.

    —Concerning Rebirth, circa, 1940

     As I understand it, Omar and José threw their hats in the Seattlest ring because they saw a dearth of earnest, careful theatre criticism, not just here in Seattle but across the country.  Of course others have noticed this drought as well, myself included.  My problem has been caring.  After over two decades of professional work as a playwright and actor, watching the importance of reviews plummet from marginal to minimal to finally negligible, I openly admit I have trouble seeing how criticism could help Seattle become a World Class theatre town.  In a recent semi-private exchange on Face Book, Omar called my hand: “… I do wonder, Paul, if you don’t think criticism is key to helping us get somewhere, then what do you think will? Or do we simply understand criticism differently? Plays written about other plays or inspired by thematic ideas from other plays–these, too, are criticism, no?”

    Let me respond now, weeks later:

    Omar, in the context of your comprehensively inclusive understanding of what criticism can be, and what it can do, yes, indeed, I believe it can help us get somewhere.  Of course, such an approach—steeped in the art form’s history but somewhat foreign to Seattle’s cultural ethos— will require leadership.  It appears you and José are stepping forward to be those happy few to rally the critical flank of Seattle’s charge forward toward World Class.  So even though I have already said it privately, please allow me to state again publically here, loudly and proudly…

    Omar, José?

    Welcome to the fray.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Mark Chamberlin: World Class Theatre Artist

    At 11:30 AM this Tuesday, Seattle theatre lost one of its leading lights when Mark Chamberlin died from injuries sustained in a bicycle accident on Sunday. Our city still has one remaining print daily newspaper, and Mark was famous enough to rate a fine obituary therein, but for my own selfish sake, I need to stand here and share my particular thoughts.

    Mark made this city a better theatre town. He did so by being an immense talent as an actor but also by being generous with that talent, because theatre is the art form wherein, by definition, nothing be accomplished alone (including mourning). Mark had a rare soulful sensibility as an actor, an enigmatic quality difficult to describe. Yesterday on Face Book my colleague Allysa Keene captured it better than I ever could:

    It’s a delicate dance to assert perspective and accept critique. It’s tricky to know when to lead and when to follow, but wisest artists don’t allow their accolades or their insecurities to eclipse the fact that it’s simply that: a collaboration, a dance. They acquiesce to all the paradoxes and graciously give their “yes.” MC, I am honored by your deference and will miss that twinkle-eyed “yes”…

    Perhaps my favorite turn of Mark’s was as Antonio in the Seattle Shakespeare Company’s recent production of The Merchant of Venice directed by John Langs.  While strictly speaking Antonio is the title character of the play, the role is enigmatic and largely thankless; and– due to its subtlety– nearly always ends up drifting into the background, until by Act IV the actor on stage becomes little more than a flexi-prop from which Shylock might draw his pound of flesh. Chamberlin, however, never ceded his ground. He made his counterparts Portia and Shylock fight for the focus that they can usually simply assume. And how did he do this?  By living and breathing on stage, deep in the life of his character.  You believed Antonio. You didn’t always know why he did what he did or exactly what he was feeling, but Mark as a consummate actor understood that it is a rudimentary performer who lays these things bare for all to read. He subsumed Antonio’s mystery and made it his own, such that you had to watch to see what would happen next. Such a simple order; and so so difficult to fulfill.

    Many people in our business, myself included, need at times to make a second show of their talent, advocating for it outside the theatre, either literally on the sidewalk during a furtive smoke, or in the bar, or, yes, on blogs like this. Mark let his work speak for itself. And he shared that talent for free with the likes of me, doing readings of new plays of mine and others’, when he could have just as easily stayed within the safe confines of Seattle’s Big Houses. The fact that Mark was rehearsing to appear as “the Goat” in New Century Theatre Company’s  upcoming production of O Lovely Glow Worm just adds evidence to the incontrovertible case for the man’s eagerness to remain on the cutting edge of theatre in this town. I understand that New Century will be dedicating their upcoming season to Mark.  By doing so, they honor not only him but all of us who had the pleasure of working with Mark or enjoying his work as an artist.

    Just recently Mark read something of mine which was part of a quarterly public evening of prose pieces written for performance. A week or so ago I was asked to submit another piece for the next quarter’s offering. I began crafting it with Mark’s voice in mind. This is just a habit I have. I start to shape words for a particular actor’s mouth whether or not I know they will be ultimately speaking them. It helps me hear the music. I have worked on the piece since learning of Mark’s death, and I am still, sadly, writing it with him in mind.

    And that brings me to what actors like Mark Chamberlin do for theatre. Beyond making plays possible by being in them, great actors make new plays conceivable by being the living suction that draws the words and stories out of the playwrights who know their talent. Mark was one of my many muses who live, and yes, die in this city. This is my selfish understanding of Mark’s inestimable loss. Muses are hard to come by. And while I have many here in Seattle, the loss of one so generous and so fine leaves me shaken and humbled and, also, strangely somehow more determined to carry on. After all, I believe that is what Mark would do.

    * * *

    PS:  Mark’s good friend and colleague Ian Bell has already set up a lovely campaign called Mark Chamberlin Memorial Bicycle Rack Project which will raise funds to install stylish bike racks in Mark’s honor in front of all of Seattle’s major theatres. You can check that out and help by clicking here. 

    PPS:  Note on the picture above: I particularly love this production shot of Mark, not just because it is from one of my favorite performances of his, Antonio in The Merchant of Venice, but also because it makes me happy to see him surrounded, as he most certainly is at this moment in spirit, by his fellow players. Plus, it shows him as what he was in real life: a cool, confident leader: an example to the younger talent of how to be a great artist, and more importantly, a good man.

    * * *

    PPPS:  Apologies to all. I decided to remove the aformentioned photo as I understand that doing so  most closely conforms with the families wishes.  PM  3/25/11 12:03 pm.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Steven Gomez Dives into the “World Class Theatre” Fray

    In my essay “World Class = Fighting Words” I argued that it is not necessary to specifically define what a World Class Theatre Town is in order to become one.

    We not only do not need to lock down what “world class” means, it would be unwise for any single one of us to try to do so. . . .  All the extremely smart Seattleites. . .  who demand something perfectly specific and quantifiable are, to my mind, like a group of outraged soda lovers storming Coca-Cola headquarters demanding: “What do you mean, ‘Coke is it?’  What the hell does ‘it’ mean?  You say you’d ‘like to buy the world a coke’?  You can’t be serious?  Do you know how much that would cost?”

    Admittedly, my dismissal of an absolute definition has never sat well with my fellows.  Like a gifted sullen twenty-something, still living in its parents’ basement, Seattle likes precision in its arguments, even when it knows it has no intention of ever acting on them.  We are, after all, a town of lawyer/coder/poet geeks.  We scored above average on our SAT’s and we palpably understand, goddammit, the difference between “Modern”, “Modernist”, and “Post-Modern.”  We should be able to put a fully logical box around any concept, including “World Class Theatre.”

    Because I continue to refuse to explicitly define “world class”, many feel free to ignore the goal as so much “sky pie”.  But not Steven Gomez.  Over at his blog, The Russians Used a Pencil, he has zigged away from the standard lackadaisical zag, and actually defined what world class would mean to his mind. 

    A World Class Theatre City does not import plays and actors for production. It predominately exports plays and renowned performers, while focusing on producing original, culturally striking work predominately from its community, rather than works from outside communities it perceives as supreme. A World Class city does not look up to other cities.

    You can see Steven Gomez’s full entry by clicking here.  Give it a read and leave him a comment.  Explain to him how you think he’s distressingly mistaken or inspiringly correct.  Bookmark him.  Bless him.  He’s joined the fray.  And you?

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Congratulations, Jerry!

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2011840351_rep12m.html

    Jerry has said often, publicly and privately, that if he landed the job of Artistic Director permanently–instead of on an interim basis, which is how he has held it the past two seasons–  he would fully engage bringing locally grown new plays to the fore at the Rep, and thus help move Seattle theatre towards world class. We happy Northwest playwrights expect he will be as good as his word.

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi

  • Jose Amador and a Damned Good Argument for the Solo Show

    Jose Amador and a Damned Good Argument for the Solo Show

    It’s a strange and wonderful world.  The very day I post my screed on solo shows and how Seattle’s Big Houses are leaning too heavily on them, my good friend and colleague publishes a completely different point of view on why the solo show serves a vital purpose in his creative life, and in the larger creative life of our theatre community.

    http://thesunbreak.com/2010/04/27/jos-amador-on-solo-performance-and-being-an-ethnic-theatre-artist-in-seattle

    Go see this show.  Lord knows, for all my bitching, I’ll sure as hell be there.  I’m thinking of going next Wednesday.  If you go that night and can prove you paid full price to get in, I’ll buy you a drink.

    Jose Amador, people!  One more reason Seattle is already World Class!

    Posted at 9:32 AM in Seattle, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (0)

    Tags: HowlRound, new play development, Paul Mullin, Seattle Theatre, Seattle Week at HowlRound, Vince Delaney, World Class Theatre, Yussef El Guindi