UPDATE: Teresa Eyring’s From the Executive Director column is now online at the American Theatre site. Mike Daisey has responded with a rebuttal at his blog site. As one of his points, he scrutinizes Ms. Eyring’s unfortunate title, the same item that had struck me as the most egregious in her piece.

Ms. Eyring’s title takes one’s breath away. If it were called HOW THEATRE WILL SAVE AMERICA it would still be defensible, if a bit sweeping—it could fantasize about a nearly unimaginable future when theater will reach out from the stage and save all of America from corporate greed, the military-industrial complex, racism, sexism, and human nature itself by reshaping America.

That’s bold. But Ms. Eyring takes it a step further and uses the past tense—HOW THEATRE SAVED AMERICA—informing us that the work is done, the wars have been fought and that we actually live in a glorious utopia right now, one that has been created by the American theater. If one didn’t know better, one might think it is an attempt at wit—a shallow attempt to play off of my title for comic effect, ignoring the actual meaning implicit in the words I’d chosen.

It is a shockingly poor idea to make such an assertion in the title, unless the essay that follows brings some serious arguments to bear, and this is the third problem with the piece. HOW THEATRE SAVED AMERICA, PART ONE chooses to accomplish this goal not by grappling with any of the arguments in my monologue, but instead displaying examples of theaters that are working within their communities as a kind of proof positive that theater has saved America. It specifically cites one example at length, describing the work of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble.

I find it reaching to claim that one company from a town of 12,000 in Pennsylvania, however wonderful they might be, contraindicates the larger story of the arts infrastructure in a country of 300 million….

Ms. Eyring ends her piece saying, “And this is just the beginning of how theatre saved America.” The implication is that we will see a great deal more of her argument in Part Two. I do hope that this response will make her think more judiciously about the title for the second half of this article, and I hope some of the criticisms I’ve raised may be addressed in its contents.

*****************              *****************

In the July/August issue of American Theatre, executive director of TCG, Teresa Eyring, has written a counter argument to Mike Daisey’s monologue How Theater Failed America. Her Pollyannaism about the state of regional theatre is probably a major part of her job description but the title of her piece, How Theatre Saved America, Part 1, rings almost as parody answer to the serious failures of regional theatre that Daisey’s monologue brings into discussion. And she probably wishes she had heard the news of Theatre de la Jeune Lune’s closing before the magazine went to print. On that point, I’ll be interested if she edits this opening paragraph to her argument in the online version of the “From The Executive Director” page when it’s posted tomorrow.

“While permanent acting ensembles are indeed a rare commodity at major U. S. theatres, typically ignored—even by the popular monologist Mike Daisey in How Theatre Failed America, which ran Off Broadway through June 22—is the array of ensemble companies working across the country. What about, for instance, the long standing acting collaborations of Minneapolis’s Theatre de la Jeune Lune…”

For more discussion about Teresa Eyring’s column see Scott’s and Dennis’ Letters to the Editor.

I received some insightful and referenced comments from the dramaturgs on the LMDA listserv concerning the use of the N-word on stage and the struggle of our current production to present it. But interesting how even within the context of a discussion of the word itself, there seems to be a taboo against typing the full six-lettered word nigger onto the digital page, as if not only any utterance, but also any “publication” of the word would easily transcend the intent of the writer.

One dramaturg references a scholarly study, Randall Kennedy’s Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word, abstracting a quote that highlights the power of the word and points to why it’s an apt candidate for presentation and study through theatre or other modes of public discourse.

To be ignorant of its meanings and effects is to make oneself vulnerable to all manner of perils, including the loss of a job, a reputation, a friend, even one’s life.

I recently read a related short but insightful blog post referencing an e-mail exchange between cultural critic Greil Marcus and art journalist John Rockwell that provides additional insight to a zeitgeist that seems centered on the parsing of words.

Words, the Arts and the World

Months back Hillary Clinton (or was it Bill, or another primary candidate?) attacked Barack Obama as a mere purveyor of words. Obama (borrowing, it turned out, from his friend Deval Patrick, governor of Massachusetts) responded that words do count, words mean something important. Without too great a stretch, I want to extrapolate that idea to arts journalism, and the need for same.

Recently I had an e-mail exchange with Greil Marcus, who was editing an entry on “Porgy and Bess” that I had written for a Harvard anthology. The last issue to be considered between us was whether in one sentence “African-Americans” or “blacks” worked better.

I finally decided I didn’t much care, ending with “Let’s move on to curing cancer, solving world peace, electing Obama and like that.” Greil replied: “Don’t you realize that the right choice between “blacks” and “African-Americans, whatever it is, is the SAME THING as curing cancer, solving world peace, and electing Obama? Where’s your sense of proportion?”

Point taken. Words do matter. Even the words, the futile scribblings, of arts critics. Take away words, take away critical commentary on the arts, and the arts lose something crucial to their creation and, especially, their reception. So think of that the next time you set out to solve world peace, arrogantly indifferent to mere words, or the arts.

Crossposted at International Culture Lab.

NYC friends, please stop by to say hi and for a bubbly toast to Charles.

The Avant Yarde is located in a four-story private artists’ residence in the landmarked area of Brownstone Brooklyn. The site hosts artist salons, art potlatches, and commissions and installs temporary sculptures throughout the year. Avant Yarde proposes an alternative to the traditional performance and gallery space, attempting to position the exchange and experience of art outside the confines of the market while also examining conventional notions of public and private space within the community.

Curators: Russell Busch, Katie Merz, Paul Benney, Nick Fracaro, Gabriele Schafer

Avant Yarde accepts proposals for installations and sculptures on an ongoing basis. Write to avantyarde@intlculturelab.org

Current Installation

Big New Fountain by Charles Goldman

Opening reception: Thursday, June 12th from 6pm to 9pm at 214 Dean Street, Brooklyn.

Past Installations

Artist: Jason Gandy

What’s Up With That

Boat Mystery Solved!

Plays are part and parcel of their productions. Zeitgeist, site-specific elements and the actor/producer’s explicit talents and ambitions all inform the reality.

Does the “event” of the production have any historical importance to theatre or the world? The “audience” of this event is not something that will be measured at the box office or necessarily in popular success.

Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Chekhov’s The Seagull both premiered in 1896 to disparaging audiences. In most ways contrary to one another, both plays went on to become important seminal works.

Imagine being the dramaturg in 1896 commissioned to champion these plays into historical importance. Your work with the playwright would have nothing to do with “the script” and everything to with the “signature” production and its aftermath. Perhaps that would mean engaging Jarry in his lifestyle of drunken anarchy and talking pataphysics late into the night. Or perhaps, more soberly, coaching Chekhov not to express his loathing for Stanislavski’s performance as Trigorin and encouraging him to consent to the newly founded Moscow Art Theatre as producer of his plays.

Although none of us will likely be involved in such historically significant productions as these two, we need to approach each script and production with an expectation that the event will capture the Zeitgeist of its locality. Same as the local hero is more vital to the community and our lives than any American Idol could ever be, theatre is most potent when striving to be specific and relative to the ambitions of its particular family, kinship, and tribe.

In my practice, being a dramaturg means also being a producer, so I am often collaborating as diligently on PR as I am on analyzing or collaborating with the artists on the script and other production design elements. Finding an audience is not synonymous with achieving a box office. Stardom seeks and produces fan-dom, but theatre seeks a more engaged and critical participation from its audience. So PR should be as centered on the dramaturgy of a new script as the production is. Similarly to how a production might put out a casting call seeking specific actors for specific roles; the audience sought should also possess a particular and detailed character.

SlowLearner and DevilVet have suggested a public production process both as it fits within this realm of promotion and as civil discussion point in the theatrosphere on aesthetics. I am not convinced that we are actually interested enough in each other’s artistic processes that we will closely read one another’s posts and comment in depth, but I have been publishing part of my dramaturg’s protocol and other collaborative aspects of our ensemble’s process at our theatre’s blog in hope of such an interaction from fellow theatre peers.
Design Proposal/Collaboration
The Big Suit
Gestus for characters

In his series of posts DevilVet aptly asks: Is It Worth the Risk - Documenting Creative Process.

The primary risk of course is that any public representation will negatively affect either the process itself or the future relationship between working peers. The secondary risk is that because any documentation necessarily highlights only certain aspects of a production, the reception of the work by critics and audience will be prejudiced by this prior representation.

The new play we commissioned from an Austrian playwright was written for a specific ensemble of four actors. The play has already been performed before an audience in Germany and America, in both languages, but in our October mixed-language production in New York, we have begun exploring the script at a more complex level than previously, deliberately employing certain facets of Brechtian performance and production techniques.

I am especially interested in the dilemma posed by one particular word in the script and production. The N-word from an actor/character on stage reads differently in Germany than America. By “publishing” our ensemble’s deliberation in this, I am perhaps unduly highlighting an element in the script that may have relatively minor significance to the overall production, but could easily generate a controversial debate.

The N-word is probably the most politically potent word in America today. Of course that potency is mostly diffused if its utterance arrives on stage only from within the crippled psychology of a particular character. But it speaks to the power of words in our social relationships, that even within the safe haven of “it’s the character saying it, not me”, Roger as actor has been struggling to spit it out in some “natural” way. If the N-word were taken out the safety box of naturalism and employed as gestus, the whole of the production would need to struggle with its presence.

I put this question of the N-word in front of the private/public list-serv of dramaturgs of LMDA. I have received private email on the dilemma from the listserv but no one has yet answered in front of others. This speaks to the volatility present in any discussion of the subject. (Update: Meanwhile a few ‘turgs have braved comment but the aura of taboo surrounding even the mere discussion of this subject in public remains strong.)

The potential for the theatrosphere is that it not just supplements the criticism, review, documentation, and other theatre-talk of print publication, but supplants and leads toward a new representation of our art that has a more in depth and interactive relationship with our peers and audience. I appreciate the various Chicago bloggers (Paul, Tony, Don, Bob) taking the lead and exploring the most difficult and complex new relationship posed by artists reviewing/commenting on other artist’s work or process. There will be no easy answers or codified rules in this new relationship to our work and our peers.

Crossposted at International Culture Lab.

I have noticed that I am beginning to develop a new relationship to blogging. I am finding my comment writing in others’ blogs just as challenging, if not more so, than the writing of my own posts.

I have taken partial lead on this from Mac Rogers. The SlowLearner is also slow on blog postings but he is often present in comment sections of the theatrosphere with his pointed questions.

I have been thinking of the comment sections of the theatrosphere as the subtext to the hyperlink exchange of blog posts.

“Subtext can be a way for the creator of a work to relay ideals, principles, controversial relationships or political statements without alienating viewers or readers who may balk at the ideas or even reject the work.”

For some time now, I have been exploring the theatrosphere as a “fictive reality” that contains both a Rat Sass persona and the “real” nick, as much as the real Nick can actually present himself. In the comment sections of other blogs, my persona shifts slightly, like a chameleon altering skin color to blend into its environment.

So I find myself writing and editing my comments more deliberately in belief that the “real” conversation of the theatrosphere is being propelled and directed from there.

The below is my recent comment at Angry White Guy that feels like a bookend to a long conversation thread I have been participating in, and often instigating or reviving, through various comment sections. It began at Don Hall’s review of a Greyzelda production, traveled over to Praxis, then over to Trailing Spouse Blues, back to the big brawl at Don’s again, then a post at Rat Sass, and then another one. If you look at the dates of these posts and comments you will discover that this conversation has been going on for over a month now. I admire and appreciate both Rebecca and Don for their stamina. It must have been emotionally trying to be constantly thrown into the defensive as the subjects of this important discussion.

Punk Ethos and Writing

…but in the world of punk, if it sucked, you got punched in the face or had a beer bottle thrown at you. In this FaceBook Nation of ours, the call for more civility and more constructive approaches is exactly the opposite of a punk ethos.

Exactomundo. And the punk zines were part and parcel of that ethos which led the way to the zine scene of ‘80’s with its aggressive and belligerent style of writing. The zine movement segued into the argumentative writing and discussion found on Internet listservs of the ‘90’s. All of which leads to the blogosphere. What people call “snark” today is actually the nth generational manifestation of this alternative zine writing style.

Those bloggers calling for more civil or politically correct talk are often Johnnies Come Lately to writing; their blog is their first attempt to actually write anything other than their very proper high school or college papers. But writing school papers was work. So instead of writing, blogging has become more like transcribed talk. This discourse style believes that just by keeping its schoolboy etiquette, its patter will somehow be elevated into something of value. But there is a vast difference between spewing out one’s opinions and honing one’s thoughts into ideas that could impact on the mindset of a reader. So the Snarkless Marks’ antagonism to an uncivil tone is also their envy of any crafted or edited writing.

Blog posts/comments are as public as our art is, but generally the writing is treated cavalierly…“throwing in my two-cents” on this or that “Question of the Day.” Such pandering to one another for innocuous comments effectively lowers the common denominator of exchange and is infinitely more destructive than any “discussion tone.” So it’s no wonder that anytime anyone actually attempts to write in the theatrosphere with deliberation to create effect (as most of us actually attempt to do with our art) an episode of Sturm und Drang is likely to develop among the chit-chatters.

The relationships in these social networks in FaceBookNation (including the theatrosphere) are based on weak ties when compared to peer production. We give no quarter when practicing our art, demanding full passion and commitment from collaborators. If we practiced blogging with just a fraction of the ardent assurance we practice theatre, every day we would rehearse yesterday’s text, honing out our dishonesties and trivialities, not our incivilities.

Numerous verbal fisticuffs have erupted recently in the theatrosphere. The discussion surrounding Don Hall’s review of Greyzelda Theatre’s production has been particularly volatile.

It is unclear how this gag order from a Cook County judge in Chicago will be enforceable on bloggers as far away as Australia but just its existence adds a chilling effect on future discourse in the theatrosphere.

Chicago bloggers directly under the jurisdiction of the court order include Devilvet, GreyZelda, Paul Rekk, Don Hall, Trailing Spouse Blues, Nick Keenan, and Jay Raskolnikov.

I’m not sure how this court order really effects me or other bloggers in the rest of the theatrosphere, but until the legal ramifications are fully explored, it is probably best all theatre bloggers cease posting or commenting directly on this subject.

Read the full article of this case “He said; She said: A Dialogue That Never Happened” and the recovered ghost comments in the Financial Times.

Dramatists Guild War poster circa May 2008. 40 x 29.

A drowning playwright points accusingly. This is one of a large group of posters, warning against vicious and personal reviews of regional theatre productions, many of which are being sunk by critics before achieving their Broadway runs. These types of posters are also being displayed in regional theatre lobbies, theatre audience bars and restaurants-wherever there is danger of critics, reviewers, or other saboteurs attempting to initiate dramaturgical discussions before a production is ready for prime time.

Actors Equity War poster circa May 2008. 28 x 22.

A group of injured and shocked actors in a life boat rowing away from their critically savaged production. Central to maintaining a deluded sense of self worth and a duplicitous social facade of camaraderie, the PR Cliques’ broadcasts attempt to limit talk about productions in both the public and private arenas of American life, especially at theatre barbeques. The graphic designs of these “loose talk” posters are usually strong and eye catching using bright colors for impact.

Girl Bloggers Guild War poster circa May 2008. 40 x 29.

Attempts by progressive members of certain PR Cliques to bring women bloggers into the testosterone charged theatrosphere to “civilize” the conversation met with only limited success. Turns out that women often can be bigger “fuckwits” than men.

The PR Clique Wise Guise Nicks War poster circa May 2008. 40 x 29.

Careless Talk, Uncivil Talk, Anonymous talk, Preview Review Talk, Rehearsal Talk, the NPAC talk before the NPAC talk, and the Mike Daisey TalksAfter™ Mike Daisey talks. Talk, talk, who’s got the talk in our new FaceBookNation?

Elegy (with Advertisement) Struggling to Find Its Hero

It was a century in which we touched ourselves in mirrors
over and over. It was a decade of fast yet permanent
memories. The kaleidoscope of pain

some inflicted on others seemed inexhaustible
as the positions of sex, a term
whose meaning is as hybridized as the latest orchid. Terrorism

had reached a new peak, and we gradually
didn’t care which airline we got on, as long as the pilot
was sober, and the stash of pretzels, beer, and soft drinks

remained intact. On TV, a teenage idol has just crawled, dripping wet,
from the top of a giant Pepsi can, or maybe I imagined it,
flicking through channels where the panoply

of reality shows has begun to exorcise
the very notion of reality, for both the scrutinized actor
and the debilitated viewer who becomes confused and often reaches

into the pastel screen for his glass, while down Broadway
sirens provide a kind of glamorous chorus
for this script of history where everything is so neatly measured

in miles, pounds, or megabits. How nice it would be
to drowse in the immeasurable. How nice
it would be to escape.

                                    And there’s a wobbly marble bench
                                           beneath an out-of-focus tree on the Web
                                                I like to occasion my body with.

How brief we’ve become in our speed
I think. How fast the eternal.
How desperately

we need a clearing, a place
beyond, but not necessarily
of nature. And the rain

was so deep the entire forest smelled of stone, then the sun
broke, burying the long shadows
in gold. And the wounded

king woke in a book long since closed, and the princess
came to in a bed so large
she could never leave. How desperately

we need a new legend, one with a hero, tired
though he may be. One who has used
business to give up

business, one who has bought
with his heart what we
sold with ours.

I appreciate Leonard Jacobs’ scrutiny of ethics among his peers, but in threatening my and other bloggers’ independence in writing, he offends. He alienated himself from me when he predicated a lunch date on whether I would or would not tell him what I was going to write after attending a certain Bloggers Night.

San Francisco Bay Area-based theatre critic Chloe Veltman has published a “preview review” of Beckett’s Endgame currently running at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She does this at her lies like truth theatre blog, part of the high profile ARTSJOURNAL website.

For this same infraction of writing a preview review, Leonard Jacobs is still throwing little digs at critic/blogger George Hunka. Eight months after the fact! From just last week, here’s Leonard’s short post with the long title .

This Talkinbroadway.com Policy Surely Doesn’t Apply to George Hunka

Read about TalkinBroadway.com’s new policy on certain kinds of posts here.

So we have to expect that Leonard will hype his ethical outrage once more over this latest dastardly deed of a preview review. However, it’s unlikely he will adopt the same Hanging Judge Roy Bean persona with his peer Chloe Veltman that he did against hapless George Hunka.

Beyond being the only “Law West of the Pecos” in the theatrosphere, Leonard is also a journalist and national editor at Back Stage. So an obvious question: is all his hysterical huffing and puffing around this issue in the theatrosphere ever going to amount to an actual article? Doesn’t such an important matter demand a more deliberate journalistic approach?

Leonard and Back Stage would now have to do more than take to task an individual blogger/critic, they would need to challenge the journalistic ethics of ARTSJOURNAL for hosting Chloe’s blog and publishing this preview review. We can only wish for such an exceptional event as having two prominent publishers openly debating the ethics of reviews and criticism of theatre within the new digital realm.

Instead expect the continued attrition of the old rules without any real examination by the journalists most affected. And stay tuned for Judge Jacobs’ next tempest in a teapot as you read here the historic first ever “legitimate” preview review of a major New York performance by a blogger/critic.

What’s Beckett Without The Laughs?

When Mel Brooks said, “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die,” he probably had the plays of Samuel Beckett in the back of his mind.

These words came flooding back to me last night after I experienced a preview performance of Beckett’s Endgame at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Director Andrei Belgrader’s production features an all-star cast: the movie actor John Turturro as Hamm, The Sopranos regular Max Casella as Clov, revered stage actor Alvin Epstein (who, among other things, originated the role of Lucky in the American premiere of Waiting for Godot) as Nag, and Broadway legend Elaine Stritch as Nell. Even though the production had some vivid moments, it lacked one element crucial to the successful staging of Beckett’s full-length plays: humor.

My heart nearly broke during the poignant exchanges between Nag and Nell. Epstein and Stritch cut such frail figures. They act their parts like sighs. There is also a note of terrible sweetness in their eulogizing about the past.

Casella and Turturro are at their best when angry at each other. Casella’s fury is particularly engrossing. He seems utterly worn down and at the very end of his rope with his life as a reluctant caregiver. Clov’s moments of vengeful mischief against Hamm are similarly powerful. I had always assumed that when Clov tells Hamm “there are no more painkillers” he’s telling the truth. But Casella made me think that he was playing another practical joke on his awful boss. Standing, twisted on stage with a small round jar in his hands and a glint of malice in his eye, Casella suggests that he might be telling a lie.

But — at least in preview — the 75-minute production drags and ultimately fails to help me connect with the tragedy at its heart, probably becauseBelgrader doesn’t seem all that interested in exploring the play’s vital streak of vaudeville comedy. The last production of Endgame I witnessed, by Cutting Ball in San Francisco, played up the slapstick elements. This made the audience painfully aware of the cosmic joke that underpins human life as viewed through aBeckettian lens. I only cracked a couple of half-hearted smiles at BAM last night, whereas belly laughs were required.

By angel I mean shaman I mean crazy fuck.

But these human souls who speak in tongues with an ancient voice go mostly unheard today. That’s because most flesh has transformed in recent years into its new function as portable media player.

On the subway trains the riders all believe their iPods are unique to their identity. But mass communication is becoming mass transportation is becoming mass media. And the mass no longer hears its flesh, its tongue. Their identities have been mediated and melded into an alien being that is no longer of their body.

“Man is estranged from that with which he is most familiar.” More true today than when Heraclitus first said it in 500 B.C..

The world is still magic. Riding the subway to visit Gómez-Peña these last two nights I have opened myself to the mystery again. I wonder if I can stay here. The border town is a very dangerous place full of crazy fuck half-breeds. I have my art form, but it’s often not enough in this realm.

The old man kept glancing at me out of the corner of his eye but no one except me would know this. Everyone else in the train car would understand the old man simply to be shouting and wagging his finger at the youngblood with an iPod in his ears.

“I don’t stink. What are you saying, that I stink! I can buy more bathtubs than you got fingers! That bitch don’t know nothing, saying that I stink. ”

Youngblood keeps lip-synching to his iPod, either unaware or unconcerned.

“I used to do some sports. If a team is doing bad for awhile, you can say the team stinks. But I don’t stink. I don’t know what you are talking about, me stinking.”

The old man pauses in his speech, winding his head around in small circles, preparing to deliver his next sentence. He speaks in a resolute manner.   “The way I feel today, I just may take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

I am the old man’s audience. I have the only eyes in the train that dare meet his.

“Yeah, the way I feel today I just may walk across that bridge. Call me Tarzan, bitch. Pound on my chest and make the big leap.” He starts to rhyme and time his speech. “Don’t be getting in my way… not today.. I’m here to play. I can take the bus or take the train… or walk, I’ll get there all the same. I don’t stink, bitch.”

I nod to him. I know the controlled fury and bravado necessary to survive in this border town. I also know that bridge he will need to continually cross between here and there. He gets off at the Brooklyn Bridge stop. I continue north. That is, norte, to Spanish Harlem.

The last twenty-some years gentrification has worked over the neighborhood at Lexington and 103rd. It is still El Barrio but my stroll to Fifth Avenue is a cakewalk. I have been the Art Whitey so many times in so many neighborhoods in this city, that I am hyper aware of the gaze that can often settles on me simply because of my skin color. As I approach the group of young Nuyoricans shadow boxing with one another at the corner of the project at 104th my being begins to transform. I begin to call the Tarzan up into my flesh and the crazy fuck grace of god up into my mind. I have been here before, hundreds of times, and survived. I’ll do it again. But no worry. The kids don’t even notice me.

I really need to get out of my house more. It’s a whole new city.

The theatre at the Museum holds a few hundred and is full when I arrive. House lights are on but Gómez-Peña is already on stage behind his card table full of props. Well, not really props, but a bottle of Myer’s Rum, and other containers of spirits, elixirs, and magic lotions that GP is ritualistically applying to himself. He is costumed both as a Mexican senorita and a Conquistador, so it is unclear whether he is preparing himself to go to war or make love.

The house lights go down and GP steps out into the stage light incanting in an ancient voice. He sprays an aerosol can into the four directions as he intones each of their names solemnly in Spanish. The mist reflects the stage light in a magical way.

I know what he is doing. He is pulling that Tarzan crazy fuck grace up into his flesh. He needs to speak in tongues tonight. He needs to speak in truth. He is facing his audience now with his spay can in his right hand. He raises his left fist into the air as if in a show of defiance and solidarity. But he then quickly sprays himself in his left armpit, and the magic spray of his ritual is reduced now to just a can of underarm deodorant. The audience all laugh, except for me, because GP is looking at me out of the corner of his eye. The old man is talking to me alone. We are the only ones in the room who hear and understand the Gringo Lingo of this song.

“I don’t stink. I don’t know what you are talking about, bitch. The way I feel today, I just may take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

On the subway to see the lecture yesterday I was part of the captive audience in the train car. The goofy looking homeless guy was pulling a small kid’s wagon. He seemed to be speaking in tongues, but then a moment later, he started singing in tongues. Sweetly, insanely. He was an angel after all. I knew that only later. I knew that only after he had left the train.

If only I could find his performance again. I would attend the second time with more attention. If only that homeless alien of human society from the A-Train could schedule himself to a certain time and place as Guillermo Gómez-Peña does. I would learn from just his presence in our shared close room.

I would learn why that cruel god has put flesh on these wandering souls and commissioned them to speak and sing to us.

Have you come just to witness my mind at work?

His friends seem to call him GP.

GP walks on stage. He is wearing a Mexican woman’s black dress, a high heel shoe on his right foot, a macho trucker boot with a silver buckle on his left foot.

The only difference between a madman and a performance artist is the audience.

We are his captive audience. The small room at NYU is as crowded as the rush hour train car that brought me here.

My life now is walking the border between enlightenment and illness. I explain to a nurse who is charged with my care what I do for a living. She only half believes me, the other half of her knows for certain that I am insane.

I became a poet instead of a criminal or a shaman. Those were the three paths offered to me. Art has allowed me to act out my anti-social tendencies.

I cross the border without documents just to make a point.

I think back at the homeless angel on the subway train. He had stopped speaking in tongues when he reached my section of the train. I was in the center of the train, where the conductor operates the doors and such from that little cubicle. The cart the alien was pulling was full of little packages. The sign on it read Free Gifts for the Homeless. He was an angry angel now. Fuming. The wagon was suddenly too heavy for him to pull.

“No! No! You can’t have any of it! It’s all mine!”

The wagon weighed a ton now. But he had to keep pulling it.

“It’s all mine! None for you!”

The conductor was calling the authorities now. But it was too late. The alien had already exited with his wagon of gifts.

How many performance artists does it take to screw in a light bulb? I have no idea. I left after the third hour.

The art world is full of compromise. No one really believes it was your choice to be inconsequential. I am the existential wolf that went to sleep one night and woke up the next morning atop a New York skyscraper. I live in a community of difference, temporary retreats with howling outsiders. I long for my peers. I am the lone wolf howling at the moon, longing for his kindred pack. I would run with you. I would lick your wounds at night while you licked mine. We each have 45 scars from our art. Let’s count them again. We have no health insurance but we have each other. We are old soldiers in an eternal war, abandoned on the field, alien to all but our own.

Testing. Testing. Testing. This is the sound of my voice rehearsing. Blah. Blah. Blah.

Yet I would learn to speak not as performance artist but as that angel who spoke in the subway. He was a fellow traveler on the pilgrimage. We each cross borders, the three of us. GP, the subway angel, and me. We are the poet, criminal, shaman. I would follow him, the leader, the spirit, as audience and participant, but they have replaced our imaginations with fear.

Since Nine Eleven I have been obsessed with hope. Today one third of mankind lives away from their homeland.

No human beings are illegal.

I carry this heavy wagon of gifts. The audience is a captive one. They stare at me. I am obsessed with hope. I believe there is a place for everyone.

Almost everyone.

Visit the Wicked Wiki of the West behind this YouTube video and find more resources including history of presentation, suggestions for usage, and links to downloadable versions.

From text of Did You Know? 2.0

Did you know?
In the next 8 seconds . . .
34 babies will be born.

Name this country . . .

• Richest in the world
• Largest military
• Center of world business and finance
• Strongest education system
• Currency the world standard of value
• Highest standard of living

Great Britain. In 1900.

2006 college graduates
How many 2006 college graduates in India speak English?
In 10 years it is predicted that the number on English speaking country in the world will be . . .
China.
Who would have predicted this 60 years ago?

Did you know?
According to the U.S. Department of Labor
1 in 4 workers has been with their current employer less than one year.
1 in 2 workers has been with their current employer less than five years.
The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learners will have . . .
10 to 14 jobs . . .
by their 38th birthday

Many of today’s college majors didn’t exist 10 years ago

• New media
• Organic agriculture
• e-business
• Nanotechnology
• Homeland security

What will they study 10 years from now?

Today’s 21-year-olds have:
Watched 20,000 hours of TV
Played 10,000 hours of video games
Talked 10,000 hours on the phone
And they’ve sent/received 250,000 emails or instant messages
More than 50% of U.S. 21-year-olds have created content on the web
More than 70% of U.S. 4-year-olds have used a computer
Years it took to reach a market audience of 50 million

Number of Internet devices in 1984: 1,000
1992 - 1,000,000
2006 - 600,000,000

Did you know?
We are living in exponential times
The first commercial text message was sent in December 1992
The number of text messages sent and received today . . .
exceeds the population of the planet
The Internet started being widely used by the general public in early 1995
1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. in 2005 . . .
met online
Revenue for eBay in 2006: $1.7 billion
eBay was founded in 1996
There were more than 2.7 billion searches performed on Google . . .
. . . this month

To whom were those questions directed B.G.?
(Before Google)

MySpace Visitors
More than 230,000 new users signed up for MySpace . . .
today
If MySpace were a country . . .
it would be the 8th largest in the world
YouTube visitors since September 2005

Did you know?
There are more than 540,000 words in the English language . . .
about five times as many as during Shakespeare’s time
More than 3,000 books were published . . .
. . . today
The amount of technical information is doubling every two years
By 2010, it’s predicted to double . . .
every 72 hours
Third generation fiber optics has recently been tested that push 10 trillion bits per second down a fiber
That is 1,900 CDs or 150 million simultaneous phone calls every second
It’s currently tripling every six months
The fiber is already there, they’re just improving the switches on the end . . .
which means the marginal cost of these improvements is effectively . . .
zero

Nearly 2 billion children live in developing countries
One in three never completes fifth grade
In 2005 the One Laptop per Child Project (OLPC) set out to provide laptops to these children
The first shipments should be in mid-2007
Kids who have never held a textbook will now hold the world
And be connected . . .
to you
Predictions are that by the time
children born in 2007 are 6 years old,
a supercomputer’s computation capabilities
will exceed
that of the human brain
And while predictions further out than 15 years are hard to do . . .
a $1,000 computer
will exceed the computing capabilities
of the human race
what does this all mean?

We are currently preparing students for jobs and technologies that don’t yet exist . . . in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

Did you know . . .
There are students in China, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, and the USA who
[graphic switches from: remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create, communicate, collaborate]
on projects
every day
Ask Your Kids: Are you doing this in school?
Ask Your Principal: How are you helping my child become literate in the 21st century?
Ask Your School Board: Are you providing the resources and training necessary to prepare students to be successful in 21st century society?
Ask Your Elected Representatives: Now that you know all this, what changes should be made to current education legislation?

What’s your vision?

Did you know . . .
The original version of this presentation was created for a Colorado (USA) high school staff of 150 in August of 2006
to start a conversation about what our students need to be successful in the 21st century
By June 2007 it had started more than 5 million conversations around the world
And now that you know, we want you to join the conversation
Visit shifthappens.wikispaces.com

(Hat tip to Sasha Anawalt at ARTicles)

Crossposted at International Culture Lab.

Somewhat under the radar, internationally acclaimed brujo-poeta, theorist, and performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña returns to New York for two evenings.

The Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics and el Museo del Barrio present two evenings featuring Guillermo Gómez-Peña. After more than four years away from New York, Gómez-Peña brings back his unique style of performance-activism and “theatricalizations of postcolonial theory.” In his books, as in his solo shows, he pushes the boundaries still further, exploring what’s left for artists to do in a post-9/11 “repressive culture of censorship, paranoid nationalism” and what he terms “the mainstream bizarre.” These programs are presented in connection with El Museo’s current exhibition, Arte. Vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas, 1960-2000 and the Hemispheric Institute’s EMERGENYC program.

AN EVENING OF SPOKEN WORD ROULETTE AND CRITICAL THEORY WITH GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA
Tuesday, April 22, 2008, 7:00 - 9:00 pm
New York University
Jurow Hall, Silver Center,
100 Washington Square East
Admission: Free

Guillermo Gómez-Peña will present a lecture at New York university in which he will examine the role of artists working against the backdrop of war, censorship, cultural paranoia and spiritual despair. In his lecture, Gómez-Peña will ask: What are the new roles that artists must undertake? Where are the new borders between the accepted and the forbidden? Is art still a pertinent form of inquiry and contestation? This lecture will be the inaugural public event of the institute’s EMERGENYC and Hemispheric New York programs.

EL MEXORCIST 3: AMERICA’S MOST WANTED INNER DEMON
Wednesday, April 23, 2008, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
El Museo del Barrio
Teatro Heckscher, 1230 Fifth Avenue at 104th Street
Admission: Free

In this performance, Gómez-Peña assaults the demonized construction of the US/Mexican border-a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minutemen, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities. To this effect, the “border artist extraordinaire” uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and activist theory as subversive strategies. In this journey to the geographical and psychological outposts of Chicanismo, Gómez-Peña also reflects on identity, race, sexuality, pop culture, politics and the impact of new technologies in the post-9/11 era.

(Hat tip to Caridad Svich NoPassport.)

Crossposted at International Culture Lab.

New York Theater Review 2008 Officially Greets the World

Tonight Friday, April 11
at Drama Book Shop
250 W. 40th St.
Manhattan
6-8pm

Editor Brook Stowe will be reading from the bloggers interview section of the journal in-between performance excerpts from the plays. The NYC bloggers interviewed are Blindsquirrel Bloggings (aka Johnna Adams), Obscene Jester, sharkskin girl and Tweed (aka T. Nikki Cesare & Steve Luber), The Playgoer (aka Garrett Eisler), Jason Grote (aka Jason Grote), and your friend Rat Sass. I’m commuting from my day job, so I’ll be there a little late, around 7pm. If we haven’t met, and you’d like to say hi, I’ll be wearing a camouflaged RatSass t-shirt.

Be There or Be Square!

What the rant and the whine have in common is their self-righteous attitude. Exhibit A: Rat Sass. This attitude allows the speaker to pose as victim to something supposedly out of his/her control. Sometimes this mind-set is attained through self-deceit, other times through deliberate hypocrisy or bravura, but usually elements of all are necessary to achieve such a judgmental stance. Of course in order for the rant or whine to find popular acclaim, the content of the message also has to be based in truth. Not so difficult a task. We are all both victims and perpetrators in this system of our own creation.

The Rant

Our friend Scott Walters has been one of the premiere haranguers against commercialism in theatre. In justifying his need to rant, Scott once compared himself to the Howard Beale character in the movie Network. And no doubt the occasional tirade serves to delineate the Us/Them dichotomy necessary to establish his tribe model.

But Scott has fallen off his game of late. Much like the Howard Beale character at the Network who abandons his populist message, Scott also seems to have dropped his Angry Prophet persona. Instead of fire and brimstone denunciations of the hypocritically exorbitant artistic director salaries at regional theatres, Scott ends up grumbling disjointedly, comparing general managers of a grocery chain to directors of regional theatre.

Scott needs to retrieve his old rant against Nylachi theatre before it becomes a whine.

The Whine

The Starving Artist is practically a Jungian archetype ingrained in the collective unconscious of many artists working today. So Jaime Green’s turn as the poor theatre worker, along with her whine at producers to lower ticket prices, is lauded by much of the theatrosphere. This Us/Them dichotomy allows an easy self-deceit where all the wrongs occurring in theatre culture are perpetrated by someone other than Us; i.e., those in control of “the system.”

Jaime has set the affordable ticket price at $20. But as Matt Freeman points out in the comments, productions by Independent Theatre under the Showcase Code cannot charge more than $20, so what Jaime is really whining about is not being able to afford a certain kind of commercial or popular theatre. Instead, Jaimie could support the theatre that does charge the ticket price she considers fair. There is no lack of such theatre. Last year there were over 1,000 Showcase Code productions. Jaimie could also become active in all the discussions and meetings around town concerning the Showcase Code reform where most of the producers organizing those discussions are pushing for an increased ticket price.

Of course the most active and productive action Jaime could take to remedy high ticket prices is what so many of her peers are already doing on the backs of their day jobs. If you really want theatre with affordable tickets, produce it! However, the nonprofit theatre producer that Jaime works for is the Off-Broadway Manhattan Class Company and when visiting their web site and seeing the $59 ticket price for their current production, I was going to suggest that Jaime stuff her blog post into the suggestion box at her workplace. But then I noticed that MCC is offering a $20 discounted price, “available to ticket buyers under 30, two hours prior to curtain.” This new information prompted me to reread Jaime’s post and its opening paragraph again.

Earlier this week I took a lunch break from work (lunch breaks not being a common thing, for some reason, in nonprofit theatre offices) and walked a few blocks west to another theatre’s box office. At the box office I handed over $40 (well, that’s what the debit card I handed over was charged) for two tickets to an off-Broadway show, which usually cost at least $60 each.

The Pitch

Could Jaime’s blog post be less a whine and more an advertisement for the ticket price policy of the Off-Broadway quasi-commercial theatre for which she is working and supporting?

The MCC box office and whatever box office that is a “few blocks west” are each acting as much like two competing neighborhood filling stations in a gas price war as theatres. Jaime claims that “the reliance on ticket sales for income cripples artistic risk-taking, but that’s another thing entirely.” I think not. Theatres like MCC earning half of its 2 million dollar yearly revenue from its million dollar box office are likely also only earning half claim to their status and mission as “nonprofit” and “charitable” corporation. Star casting, mediocre but popular scripts, and many other common denominator choices necessary to develop a sellable product are all hand in glove reasons why theatre is losing its citizenship in the community it was meant to serve. Theatre should be a process of transforming community into audience and then back into community again. What theatre is becoming instead, in many instances what it has already become, is competitor for fandom and the enterntainment dollar.

I hope the recent scrutiny in the theatrosphere of nonprofit theatres continues. Unlike private corporations, the revenue and expenditures of these are part of public record. That’s because it is not the executive and artistic director with six figure salaries who owns these theatres. And it’s not the marketing director, or even the board of directors, who own these theatres. The public itself owns these theatres.

There should be nothing unseemly in examining the salaries of our public servants. As citizens we need to make value judgments on our nonprofit theatre workers similarly to how we make judgments on our police, sanitation, and public park workers.

No doubt that as assistant literary manager of MCC, Jaime can claim partial title to the Starving Artist archetype from which she whines. But the theatre position of literary manager she hopes to inherit one day through her youthful internship has a salary of $54,000. Nothing dishonest in such a salary; it’s almost equal to $57,000 salary of the city sanitation worker, and $7,000 more than the actor lucky enough to find 52 weeks work in a year under the top tier Off-Broadway contract.

Scott is pitching his tribe model, Jaime is pitching her Off-Broadway model. And I’m somewhere in the middle of the two, ranting and whining about the disrespect “the system” affords my independent theatre. But Us and Them are all sitting at the same big American Dream table at dinner. And the split is not between us, but down the middle of each of us. We’re all hoping for our piece of the pie for desert.

SlaveCity, 2005 – ungoing

SlaveCity can be described as a sinister distopian project which is very rational, efficient and profitable (7 billion euro net profit per year). Values, ethics, esthetics, moral, food, energy, economics, organization, management and market are turned upside-down, mixed and reformulated and designed into a town of 200.000 inhabitants. The ‘inhabitants’ work for seven hours each day in office jobs and seven hours in the fields of inside the workshop, before being allowed three hours of relaxation before they sleep for seven hours. SlaveCity is the first ‘zero energy’ town; it is a green town where everything is recycled and a city that does not squander theworld’s resources.

OUR FAILURE

Theatre has become as stale as our language, our lives. We use the word “seasons” in theater in the same fashion we use the word holiday as replacement for Holy Day.

Christmas is now the Xmas season. We acquiesce unknowingly. X-ing out the abstinent Christ with the Santa bag of toys. That merry, merry tidings-of-comfort-and-joy time that produces more suicides than any other.

Once was the earlier pagan ritual celebrating the winter solstice. Theatre was born within such a place and time. Newborn hope and promise of the renewing cycle sheltered within a manger, surrounded only by witnessing nature and a few select wise men. Theatre would be such a pilgrimage of wise men following their star into the night of a distant land.

Bah-humbug! It’s time to pay the rent. So theatre “seasons” are built around the adaptation of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. No surprise that this cash cow has insidiously become a kind of sacred cow to the bottom line of most regional theatres. And all the Brave New Works that the pandering Christmas Carol was meant to support are instead proving themselves true bastard offspring. Playwrights’ texts also acquiesce unknowingly. X-ing out all but the bag of toys, adapting to the market in a perpetual workshop of their text into a product ready to be launched.

Nowadays the King’s Men need only to cater to the groundlings for sustenance at Broadway and other venues. The regional theatres are incorporated as not-for-profit, yet their true king is related to the same bottom line and commodity exchange as that of commercial producers. So the theatres find themselves in a compromising position to their missions, all of which emphasize service to artistic health of the region and “the community.”

Regional theatre choses productions to keep and build the subscriber audience who buys the season ticket. Neither truly box office nor community, this audience is an odd breed of groundling who has taken on the airs of patron. Aging out of existence but still catered to as if he were king, Pantolone, his money pouch hanging limpless beside his genitals, waddles into his box seat at Geezer Theatre.

Geezer: an old fart-some harmless, toothless, witless, pointless guy the world passed by a long, long time ago; and who knows it, and who has kind of stopped trying. Except that Old Fart is a solitary condition, while Geezer is a group identity. Where there is one, there will be many. Geezers gaggle in geezer groups, gabbing the geezer credo that the world is out of step, and that the geezer is its lost and proper center. For every geezer is at heart the Old Pretender-feckless and vengeful, nostalgic, deceitful and vain.

Now it is surely no surprise that a theatre which has sold itself almost exclusively to geezers should have become a Geezer Theatre. Each year, as TCG balefully notes, the Geezer Theatre’s subscription audience gets another year older. But the looming actuarial crisis is nothing next to the soul death of a theatre which, in pandering to the geezer, has itself become a geezer. Impotent, truculent, and profoundly self-satisfied, the Geezer Theatre doesn’t really mind that at this point it is talking largely to itself.

OUR PROMISE

We strive to make our audience synonymous with community. Yet for a community of limited means, roles become reversible within the partnership, and theatre in a real sense becomes the patron. Theatre is first and foremost a gift. The theatre citizen has chosen a life in theatre over a career in theatre.

Fellow peers engaged in the creation of theatre become the truest audience, like the spouse who witnesses in personal detail the struggles of our life. We are an ethical as much as an aesthetic enterprise. We rehearse our “to be or not to be” not in order to better act on stage, but to better live within our community.

We summon our audience one by one in the same way we invite our friends, family, and neighbors to a barbecue. We cook and prepare our theater in the same manner as we host and share our homemade meals.

We are the Potlatch gathering of an ageless tribe.

OUR HEART

Audience is this creative accident of one’s life and time on earth. As I age my significant others begin to die off. Yet my dead parents and others remain my primary audience, full subscribers, partners in the attempted articulations of this flesh.

As I climb onto the stage as priest/victim up the side of the pyramid, the rehearsed breath readies its speak. Wet word poised as deed on the lusty lip. I seek the tongue-tied Word as Flesh. I wish not to be understood, but known. I meet my four peers at the summit where we become one with the fifth. The fifth is always there, never there. As element, as god, as the theatre of our making.

Carved from its captivity, the still beating heart is raised high. The groundlings stand in awe. But they are not the audience. My parents’ parents have risen up within the blood of my raised heart. And the Seventh Generation has gathered just beyond the living to witness Deeds, the Doer, and Words, the Speaker.

I am here for you, my love, as always.

***********************************************

This post is part of a Theatre Think Tank initiative. Please read the related posts by other participants in today’s effort. I’ll list below the other blogs posts on “the value of theatre” as I read them:

Theatreforté
An Angry White Guy in Chicago
Theatre Ideas
Theatre Is Territory
The Next Stage
Bite and Smile by Joe Janes
A Rhinestone World
That Sounds Cool
On Theatre and Politics - Matthew Freeman
Never Trust Your Pet With the Devil Vet
Theatre For The Future
Jamespeak
Mike Daisey
steve on broadway
Jay Raskolnikov — half hillbilly, Demi-Culture
The Mission Paradox Blog
Parabasis
GreyZelda Land
Que j’ai rêvé
Midnight Honesty at Noon
Carmi Neighborhood Watch 

Our current project with Theater Rampe Stuttgart in Germany commissioned a new script from Austrian author Andreas Jungwirth. Outside Inn examines how capitalism has infiltrated into the most personal parts of our lives. In the passage below the character Paul, inheritor of the “family’s” business, relates a conversation in which his father-in-law, the legendary corporate CEO known as “the German,” explains where “we” are going next.

“Kalowski has been silent the entire time. Suddenly he asks me to listen. Kalowski explains how wars make it possible to make a lot of money. Iraq, Afghanistan. But that it was also possible to make very large sums of money. We’re going into Iran. Iran – ? That’s impossible. Kalowski says nothing’s impossible. That I should remember that from here on out. After our return to Germany, it would be my job to develop a strategy for circumventing EU guidelines.”

I was thinking about this when watching a new music video now available at youtube and a growing number of sites. It appears to be a kind of video trailer for a DVD documentary that Ralph Nader and Patti Smith teamed up to make from their Democracy Rising Peace Tour (see description below). As Michael Lithgow at Art Threat points out.

This seems to be increasingly an integral part of U.S. politics, no doubt in part because of the phenomenal success of will-i.am’s Barack Obama video “Yes we can” which has been downloaded over 6 million times and links the Obama campaign with a who’s who of cultural literati.

Patti and Ralph look good together. They are the dream team for El Presidente and Veep of the always present and disruptive alternative rebel nation in this country. Ralph words “The way to respect the troops is to get them out of there and bring them to safety” are intercut with Patti’s rock drone at microphone “Awake from your slumber. And get ‘em with the numbers.”

“Awake From Your Slumber” brings together two visionaries: citizen-activist Ralph Nader and punk poet Patti Smith, in a powerful dialogue of war and peace. Touring together as the Democracy Rising Peace Tour, Ralph and Patti make the case against the Iraq war and the corporate takeover of our democracy. Produced by the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, AWAKE mixes image, music and spoken word to strip away the facade of political lies and reveal the annihilation of civilization, war profiteering, the unseen dead, and the unheard cries of motherhood. “Awake From Your Slumber” is history lesson, poetry reading and rock concert. Above all, it is an inspiring, mesmerizing, and deeply moving call to action, showing the power of the people to make change.

(Crossposted at International Culture Lab blog.)

In the early ’80’s we were living in the alternative theatre and punk scene in Toronto. Headquarters was at the Cameron. Paul Sannella was both bartender and owner. He managed and ran the place (not) exactly as the tribe model Scott at Theatre Ideas has been proposing. Michael Hollingsworth and his theatre Video Cabaret lived upstairs.

Odd duck waiter at the Cameron was artist Andy Paterson. Something Andy said still haunts and hunts me now some 25 years later. Our Marat Sade crew were primo punk distrupters back then and Andy got so pissed at my shenanegans one night he said, “Nick, why don’t you do everyone a favor, and just commit suicide.”

So Andy had called my bluff of punk nihilism and shut me up for one night, forcing me into deep thoughts on the meaning of my life and art. Both in terms of money and rowdyness, Paul always allowed our ragtag Marat Sade tribe and others to run an open tab at the Cameron. We ran an after hours place a block down on Queen Street and after 1 a.m. we gave the Cameron House tribe the same open tab. Mike Nightmare and the Wild Things along with Zero provided the music for the Marat Sades. At the Cameron House one of the music staples was Handsome Ned.

Ned built his legend with his Cameron solo shows. He’d roll downstairs from the tiny room he lived in over the bar, first holding court in the Cameron’s front room and then sliding to the back for his shows. The upper three floors housed an impossible artists’ community in the 18 or so rooms that were “rented,” actually traded, to visual artists and musicians whose artwork or songs filled the dilapidated public house below.

Molly Johnson, Holly Cole, Big Sugar’s Gordie Johnson, visual artist Tim Jocelyn, playwrights Deanne Taylor and Michael Hollingsworth were just some who benefited from the creative landlording of Cameron owners Herb Tookey, Paul Sannella and Anne-Marie Ferraro, who also lived in the rooms among their tenants.

Molly Johnson performed her own reisdency-for-rent, the Blue Mondays shows, which launched the then art-rocker into her jazz career, at Tookey’s suggestion.

“We all shared one bathroom, and the bath tub was up over the back room stage,” says Johnson. “I’d have my bubble bath while Ned did his matinees, and I could just see him through a hole in the floor for the drain pipe.”

Unlike at the recent reincarnations of the Drake and the Gladstone further along Queen, the old-time drinkers who inhabited the Cameron before the artists arrived weren’t booted out. Crusty types like Cameron regular Carl Johnson just became part of the mix, and when Ned sang classic Hank Williams or Tex Ritter songs in the back, what was new to the young crowd was familiar fare to the bar’s senior citizens, who were often Ned’s biggest fans and harshest critics.

The story Paul relates about the “ten ants” happened after our theatre had already moved to New York. Of course this type of tribe could only live on the fringe or underground of a large urban center like Toronto. Likewise our Marat Sade tribe which produced its theatre and life style out of the patronage of the after-hour scene of a large city. Such a lifestyle and theatre model is probably much different than the one Scott envisions in Independence, Missouri. For those interested I have written about the model and lifestyle of the Marat Sade tribe in an essay Theatre Pas Muraille. It was a fun and famous time for all of us. But fame within the punk ethic is the perfect counter to Nylachi’s notion of fame and fortune. Culture all looks like Kultur from the punk perspective. Although there can never be a revolution, there can be a constant rebellion against the values that the dominant culture promotes.

When people describe Queen Street at the time, words like “community,” “village” and even “oasis” come up. There was a freedom in being so off the radar, and bands weren’t competitive with each other. They were all striving, but not fighting, for a piece of the pie, because there was no pie on offer.

In preparing to write this post I was googling for that famous quote from that famous artist who had famously examined the nature of fame in all his work when I found a press release which contained the quote.

The collection is designed to pay homage to the collective iconography of both the Levi’s® brand and Andy Warhol’s famed pop-culture art. The collection leverages Levi’s® great fit in jeans and jackets and is embellished with imagery reflective of Andy Warhol’s more famous artwork and sayings such as: “Fashion wasn’t what you wore someplace anymore; it was the whole reason for going.” The collection will be available at super-premium retailers and will debut in spring 2006.

Warhol Factory X Levi’s® Marilyn Jean Jacket

COLOR: DARK BLUE - $400.00

The classic trucker with Warhol Factory X Levi’s® collection details — a Marilyn patch topstitched on the front and the same famous image painted on the center back panel. Shoulders have a retro-look wash and wear; all edges are lightly abraded. A subtle pattern is screen printed inside. Styled with handwarmer pockets and side tabs. Closes with signature Warhol buttons. Country Of Origin: Imported.

I would feel stupid wearing above jacket, slightly “gift wrapped” myself, even though I had worn a similar beat-up trucker vest jacket back in the Toronto days. More than that though, the $400 price tag of the above jacket represents a week salary at my primary day job. I am in the league with all those Chicago theatre bloggers (Don, GreyZelda, Bob, Tony, Nick) who have their day job as the chief patron of their art. In working with rat theatres I found the day job to be the primary patronage system of most of the independent theatre produced in this country. Most often box office, grants, and other forms of patronage are able to cover the production costs of theatre and perhaps a small stipend to the artists, but little else. Members of the ensembles all have day jobs and often it is this interconnection with the “real” world of commerce that the theatre finds its true support.

The “retro-look” is a way of packaging and selling something that no longer really exists. I was thinking about this in relationship to the recent article in the Times that examined the trend of regional theatres toward spending millions on building gargantuan new facilities. This is money being spent, regardless of denials, not in support of local artists but in the house meant to attract national talent.

And it’s true that the building boom, particularly among the aging lions of the regional movement, is partly about creating whiz-bang “destination” theaters that will attract national talent. (Also, younger audiences.) But the companies say they are doing this to enhance or recapture their mission, not discard it.

At the same time they seem to be making pre-emptive statements about their centrality to the culture. In the last two years alone the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis moved into its new $125 millionJean Nouvel home overlooking the Mississippi River; Arena Stage in Washington broke ground on the $120 million Mead Center, designed by Bing Thom; and the Dallas Theater Center, in the city where the regional movement arguably began, started buildingRem Koolhaas’s Wyly Theater, part of a cultural complex pegged at a Texas-size $338 million.

“You either grow or you die,” said Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s artistic director.

Quotes from Mike Daisey’s How Theatre Failed America are used throughout this excellent article. Mike’s observations pulled out of the Us/Them framework serve well to show how not just the regional theatres have lost their direction but theatre culture itself has.

Fandom is different than audience is different than community. Theatre can function as a counter to the Dominant Culture as it searches for its audience and community. Or not. The whole of theatre culture seems content to relax now into its new design model that Kultur is prepared to offer it. The Destination where aging baby boomers squeezing their fat asses into “relaxed fit” Levis can mingle with hip new youngsters in retro-look jackets. And “all edges are lightly abraded” to give illusion of something that has actually been worn and lived in.

.

The Playgoer is worried that “Rachel Corrie” Buffered in Beantown may be pointing to a troublesome trend developing in theatre.

He his talking about the “contextualization” of the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie by the New Repertory Theatre in a preview report on the production in the Boston Globe.

[New Rep] had originally planned to pair “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” with the one-act “To Pay the Price,” about the late Israeli Army hero Jonathan “Yoni” Netanyahu. But after the Netanyahu family heard of the plans, it asked that “To Pay the Price” be pulled from the lineup, deeming the two plays incompatible.

Forging ahead, New Rep replaced “Price” with the solo show “Pieces,” written and performed by an Israeli-American, Zohar Tirosh, about her experience serving in the Israeli military in the mid-1990s, when peace seemed like a real possibility. The company is also surrounding the two works - staged in its 90-seat black-box space - with related panel discussions,talkbacks, readings, and films, including the Oscar-nominated documentary “Promises.”

The New Rep’s producing artistic director, Rick Lombardo, says that this mini-festival on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not part of an effort to deflect criticism of “Rachel Corrie,” but is instead the result of nine months of planning and dialogue that he and his staff engaged in with various communities, from the Arab Anti-Defamation League to the American Civil Liberties Union to the Jewish Community Relations Council.

Of course this was very similar to the approach that New York Theater Workshop’s artictic director Jim Nicola had wanted to take in presenting the piece. He was roundly criticized and unjustly accused of censorship for postponing the production to accomplish that goal.

Garrett is right-on in his observation that, “Isn’t it funny that this approach has not been advocated for plays on any other issue?” But I think he is off in his concluding observation and fears of a new trend.

But look: we don’t see this approach taken with plays of any other subject, do we? (Or so far, of any other plays!) So obviously we don’t need to worry about this becoming a trend, right? Or do we…

As Jeremy Gerard reported at the time of the controversy, “Rachel Corrie” was not the first play on this issue that was postponed to await “contextalization.” There was nothing new or trend setting in the approach that NYTW was attempting and what is scheduled to happen now in Boston.

In the U.S. this season, an off-Broadway company, the New York Theatre Workshop — probably best known as the group that developed “Rent” as well as TonyKushner’s “Homebody/Kabul” — was to have presented “Rachel Corrie.” But artistic director James Nicola announced last week that the production was being “delayed” while the group considered the best way to “contextualize” the play. Translation: People are complaining that presenting this work gives a bullhorn to Israel’s enemies, and that makes us very nervous. So we’re going to see if we can render “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” toothless or, barring that, postpone it and pray really hard that the problem eventually just goes away.

Papp’s `Storytellers’

That’s what Joe Papp also may have hoped when something similar happened to the founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival and overseer of the Public Theater. In the summer of 1989,Papp abruptly canceled an appearance by a touring Palestinian theater troupe. El-Hakawati (“The Storytellers”) was slated to perform “The Story of Kufur Shamma ,” the tale of a Palestinian refugee’s return to his long-deserted village 40 years after the birth of the modern state of Israel.

As with “Rachel Corrie,” protests erupted. Somewhat more transparent than Nicola, Papp simply announced that he’d had second thoughts. Since he had never presented a pro-Israeli play, he told the press, “it just seemed inappropriate” to produce “Kufur Shamma” as his first statement on such a hand grenade of an issue. Thinking he could buy time as well as support, he promised to present the play within a year. In fact,Papp, already dying from cancer, never did produce “Kufur Shamma.”

`Contextualizing’ the Play

When it opened later that summer under a different producer’s banner, no protests ensued, and the review by a third-string New York Times critic referred only obliquely to the earlier controversy, thoughtfully leaving Papp’s name, and that of his theater, completely out of it.

Interesting that Garrett points to Wally Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, a controversial play which premiered at The Public also in the late ’80’s, as evidence of a play that didn’t need to run for cover when confronting the unpleasant.

So by running for cover behind as many “diverse views” as possible, we deprive the theatre of that special frisson that can only come from confronting the unpleasant. Even if it is “wrong.” Think of that ending from Wallace Shawn’s Aunt Dan and Lemon, for instance, where the heroine leaves us with an atrocious monologue justifying Kissingerian ethics on warcrimes, assassination, and such. Now imagine someone coming out after the show having to explain to you, “Now boys and girls, that was justa play. We don’t really think that.”

However, as Jeff Jones points out in his smart essay On Geezer Theatre, although Aunt Dan and Lemon did not exactly run for cover, its author Wallace Shawn did invent his own special species of buffering or contextalizing to frame the play.

The really curious thing about Shawn’s play-and the best evidence of the theatre’s provinciality in these matters-is that the author felt it necessary to add both prologue and epilogue explaining at length how one could write (and read) a play which didn’t unambiguously reflect the beliefs of the playwright.

The epilogue that Jeff Jones references is an essay that Wally Shawn wrote as addendum to the published text of the play. The prologue refers to a peculiar act of contextalization by the playwright who was also an actor in the original ensemble.

At the original production of this play at The Public in 1986, there was reportedly such a vocal and disturbed response from some in the audience that Shawn wrote an essay “Notes in Justification of Putting the Audience Through a Difficult Night at the Theater,” and handed it out to the audience.

Garrett found it a preposterous notion that someone would need to explain Aunt Dan and Lemon with a statement like “Now boys and girls, that was just a play. We don’t really think that.” But in reading the “written prologue” passed out to the audience, the playwright Shawn seems to be accentuating exactly that very simple reality of “it’s just a play” to his audience, so as to guide them into the correct reception of the play and afterthoughts of the experience.

A play represents a self-enclosed little world for the audience to examine. It’s an opportunity to look objectively at a group of people, to assess them, to react to them, and to measure oneself against them, to ask, “Am I like that?”

The politics of reception are complicated. Both playwright Shawn and artistic director Nicola were similarly attempting to manipulate audience reception. Nicola’s action like Shawn’s should be labeled production dramaturgy, or perhaps even public relations, but not censorship. To do so trivializes the fact that real and dangerous forces of censorship do exist in the world. Jeremy Gerard does exactly that when he suggests that even threats of violence should not give producers pause.

Another person Nicola might turn to for guidance is Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theatre Club. When Meadow announced plans to offer “Corpus Christi,” a TerrenceMcNally play suggesting that Jesus might have been gay, she faced demonstrations and threats of violence. So she and executive producer Barry Grove canceled the production, briefly suffering the very