Posts Tagged theater

My heart breaks a little every time I hear a fellow theater artist claim that theater isn’t worth paying for.

Yes, I consider some productions overpriced. But I recognize that as a personal valuation: I know what I want and need from an evening or afternoon of theater, and I know or can extrapolate from past experience that a particular production or company won’t give it to me. I likely wouldn’t go to these shows even if the tickets were free, while their fans might argue that no price is too high for that experience. I assume that, for other shows, our positions might be reversed.

About other shows I’ve said, “That production is worth every cent they’re charging for it, but I can’t afford it right now.” I suppose I’m making a value judgment there, as well: for some shows I rearrange the monthly budget or tighten the purse strings to make it affordable, and for some shows I don’t. Again, though, I make those decisions on a show-by-show basis. And I stand up and cheer for approaches like Pay What You Can nights, sliding scale tickets, Mixed Blood’s Radical Hospitality and Walking Shadow’s economic accessibility tickets–concepts that continue to increase the availability of theater to us struggling plebes.

But I feel devastated when a person–any person, but especially one who write plays they would, theoretically, someday like people to pay money to see onstage–indignantly declares, “$X for a play? I can’t believe they expect anyone to pay that!” I don’t care whether X=$15, $50, or $500. I object to the argument that theater has an upper limit of worth, above which any reasonable person should simply refuse to pay.

It’s a fine needle, keeping theater accessible across the income range while simultaneously providing theater companies with enough money to remain solvent. But I like to think that, so long as we all acknowledge and celebrate theater’s inherent worth, we can thread it.

Between my Il Trovatore post and this one, you’re going to think I’m some sort of raving opera fanatic. This is untrue! I’m just a woman who loves a couple operas (is that a word? “Opera” is already plural; maybe more than one opera is just “opera”), has passing familiarity with a handful of others, and once in a great while remembers to turn on her radio for Met broadcasts. And has had a lot of coffee this morning (not actually sorry about that).

But last night I did a thing! Of awesomeness! Which was awesome! I went on a date with a very special lady: myself. I took myself to dinner at a hole-in-the-wall “Asian fusion” restaurant near work (”Asian fusion” goes in quotes because, as near as I can tell, that phrase means they serve both Thai and Vietnamese food, which I think a lot of places do and just don’t label it because they think us gringos [what's the Thai or Vietnamese equivalent of "gringo"?] are too dumb to know the difference. Which, OK, we often are). My date and I shared a plate; it was very intimate.

Then we betook ourselves to downtown St. Paul to watch the Minnesota Opera’s world premiere of Doubt (can I say I was at the world premiere? This is the world-premiere production, but it was the third performance, so I wasn’t at the world premiere. It’s all very complicated. And overcaffeinated). Whatever! My date and I were practically in each other’s laps for much of the performance, and she held my hand during the second act.

I enjoyed Doubt, which I wasn’t sure I was going to, because I have Personal Issues with opera in English. Certain conventions of the form only work for me if I don’t know what’s being sung. But this one, by composer Douglas Cuomo, based, of course, on John Patrick Shanley’s play, works well dramatically. The music isn’t the most…operatic ever–I doubt anything in it will go in a collection of “best loved arias”–but the instrumentation is spine-tingling, and the dramatic tension balances on a near-perfect knife edge.

But! I really want to talk about Denyce Graves! Denyyyyyce Graaaaaaves! I have had a nerdy opera crush on Denyce Graves! for approximately forever, I believe since I first saw her in the Sesame Street Capitol Christmas special (don’t judge). Here was a funny, gorgeous woman with a voice that turned my knees to jelly–and she was singing with Muppets! Anyone, and especially a world-renowned opera singer, who can take themselves lightly enough to sing with Muppets is A+++ in my book. Realizing that Denyce Graves! is in this production catapulted me from “Maybe I’ll check that out” to “THE TICKET. NOW.”

Here is what I learned: Denyce Graves! carries a bubble of gravitas everywhere she goes. It’s a personal force field of class. If anyone were to try to tackle-hug her (not that anyone would even think of doing such a déclassé thing! ::shifty eyes::), I bet they’d bounce right off, and Denyce Graves!’ dignity wouldn’t even be ruffled. When she came on stage, I wondered for a split second why everyone hadn’t leapt to their feet in thunderous applause out of sheer joy at the sight of her. And then I realized! The gravitas shield! We were all classier people just by her presence in front of us! That’s a superpower, that is. Denyce Graves! is a superhero. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

My date got a little handsy when she dropped me off at home, but I’d still like to see her again. We have a lot in common, and she didn’t mind my schoolgirl crushing over Denyce Graves! How long should I wait to call so I don’t seem desperate?

As some children learned Der Ring des Nibelungen from Looney Tunes, I learned Pagliacci and Il Trovatore from the Marx Brothers. In fact, I can’t imagine giving any kind of a crap about opera were the Marx Brothers’ 1935 classic A Night at the Opera not one of my all-time favorite films. Of course, as a child, the opera itself didn’t speak to me; I just laughed at Harpo Marx playing peek-a-boo with the cops between dancers’ legs during the Anvil Chorus. Only when I rewatched the film as an adult did I begin to thrill to the dirge-like inexorability of the Miserere and the haunted freakout of “Condotta ell’era in ceppi”, to realize the power of this work without Marx brothers stampeding like crazed elephants through its arias.

Confession: although Il Trovatore has long been one of my two favorite operas (sometimes my very favorite, sometimes supplanted by Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann, depending on my mood), and I’ve listened to it more times and from more productions than I can count, yesterday’s Minnesota Concert Opera performance was the first time I’ve actually seen it on-stage in any form. The performance transported my by turns to rapture and agony. Rapture because no recording, no matter how good, compares to being there in person. Even in a stripped-down concert format, interactions between the performers (not to mention the sassy way tenor Hugo Vera flipped pages) and the fact of being surrounded by people who love this opera (or opera in general, or another opera lover) as much as I do and wanted to be there, connected me to the story in a way I’d never experienced in all my listens. Agony because, in public and surrounded by performers and fellow opera-lovers, I had to act like a grown-up and not do any of the inappropriate things I might in the privacy of my own home, like swooning during the Miserere or chanting “Boogie, boogie, boogie” at mezzo Colleen Brooks during “Stride la vampa” (I confess I couldn’t stop a quiet giggle at the point where the overture would have turned into “Take Me Out to the Ballgame”, and I did swoon a little during the Miserere, under the guise of leaning on Leora’s shoulder). That, I suppose, is the price I pay for meeting this operatic masterwork via watching Harpo Marx climb a backdrop.

This morning I was struck by a recollection of my junior year of college, when Il Trovatore played as part of the Met’s Saturday broadcast schedule. I’d planned to listen in my room while I studied for finals, but my best friend and I were going through a strange period of separation anxiety, and he convinced me, with little arm-twisting, to listen in his room. I’m not sure where the disconnect happened–whether when I said “my favorite opera” he pictured something other than opera, or if he simply didn’t think through the fact that he’d invited me to fill his room with 3.5+ hours of full-throated Italian melodrama–but I will forever treasure the dumbstruck look on his face when Ferrando and the soldiers appeared on the scene.

In contrast, yesterday I was again awed and humbled by the amazing woman I married. I’ve hauled her to a few opera in our years together, but when a woman with little interest in opera, suffering from a migraine and still in a lot of pain from recent back surgery, braves freezing rain and Metro Transit just because this is my favorite opera, I am reminded how incredibly fortunate I am to have such an amazing person in my life. I know she doesn’t do it for payback, but I still owe her big-time. Maybe some pajamas with really big buttons.

Once again, we have smacked down. Theatre Unbound’s 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown was a success, as always, and a blast, as usual. We all counted ourselves lucky with the year’s common elements:

an object whose name no one wants to say
sudden lust for an inanimate object
line of dialogue: “Yes, due to liability issues”
stage direction: Exit, pursued by a bear
an award

My writing partner was the extremely funny Heather Meyer. We got on like a barn afire and were quite tickled with our final product, “Fourth Quarter Net”, which goes a little something like this:

Six points down with ten minutes left in the game, the Accounting Bears are within striking distance of the Purity Paws Organic Dog Food Company Spirit Athletic Award. Department head Victoria, convinced she’s one failed performance review from ouster, is laying on the team bonding pretty thick. Bored Jennifer can’t wait for the game to be over so they can hit the bar. Heartbroken Monica wants closure from her ex, who’s on the opposing team. Sweet, naive Hillary, the perpetual benchwarmer, has big hoop dreams. Sam, the 16-year-old intern coaching this band of misfits, has her own intimate reasons for wanting to win that Crystal Paw Print. As the clock winds down, the team pulls to within one point. When error and injury force Hillary onto the court, has her moment of glory finally arrived…or are the Bears seconds from ignomious defeat?

As usual, we were gifted with a phenomenal team. Director Meg Greivell and cast-members Charla Marie Bailey, Heather Burmeister, Catherine Hansen, Victoria Pyan, and Mickaylee Shaughnessy found all the funny Meyer and I put into the script and, thanks to some brilliant physical interpretation, a lot of funny we hadn’t even planned. By the time the play reached its inevitable conclusion (”Exit, pursued by Bears.”), I had purt near laughed myself sick.

I always enjoy watching how the different teams interpret and incorporate the common elements. This year, the “Exit, pursued by a bear” element in particular elicited a lot of creativity, including pursuit by gummi bear, bear hat, and (my personal favorite) a guy named Barry.

Thanks as always to all of the creative, hard-working, and dedicated good sports who pull together year after year to make the Smackdown such an incredible experience. I think we are all a credit to the awesome power of Twin Cities theater women.

Last night, Leora and I attended the Workhouse Theatre/Flower Shop Project production of But Not for Love, by my friend, mentor, and dude-what-makes-sure-I’m-writing-regularly, Matthew A. Everett. It’s a very good play. If you’re looking for something to do this afternoon, you could maybe go see its last performance at 2:00.

The play centers around a double wedding: Eleanor to Roland; Eleanor’s brother Ephram to her old civil-disobedience buddy Patrick. Roland and Ephram, reluctant activists at best, struggle to reconcile the intimate expression of commitment they believe weddings to be with the media circus theirs have become. Meanwhile, outside the church, Patrick’s brother Jacob leads a rabble of increasingly agitated anti-marriage-equality protesters. The play does an excellent job of exploring one aspect of the marriage equality debate.

It also made me angry. But that’s not Everett’s fault. Nor the play’s. It’s society’s fault. Stoopid society.

All the characters in But Not for Love are Christian. Most of their arguments for or against same-sex marriage are rooted in Christian scriptural and dogmatic interpretation. That’s fine; given the relationship structures of the play, only two characters could conceivably have been otherwise, and only one wouldn’t have made it a very different play than Everett was trying to write.

But thinking and talking about the play on the way home was, for me, a hop, skip, and jump to thinking about how much of the real-world debate around marriage equality and the marriage-restriction amendment on the Minnesota ballot come election day has been framed in terms of Abrahamic morality. “The Old Testament says this.” “But the New Testament says that.” “Allah commands this.” “But Jesus did that.” And that was when I got angry.

I realize that the majority of religionists in the U.S. are Abrahamists. Adherents of the Big Three monotheisms will have to examine their consciences and decide how they will choose to deal with any perceived incompatibility between their faiths and our rapidly changing society. This is valuable, noble, important work. Know what it’s good for? Deciding if your denomination will ordain LGBT clergy, or if your congregation will perform or recognize same-sex unions. You can do that, for your denomination or congregation, and no “political correctness police” or “gay-agenda activists” will swoop in and force you to toe some horrifying secular humanist line. The First Amendment has this nifty Free Exercise Clause, which says the government doesn’t get to interfere with the exercise of your sincerely held religious beliefs.

Know what this soul-searching isn’t good for? Making any sort of law regarding the rights of U.S. citizens. The First Amendment has another thing called the Establishment Clause, which says the government doesn’t get to favor one religion over others in its lawin’. No matter how fervently you (or your congressional representative) believe homosexuality is an abomination before G-d, or Jesus fought for the underprivileged, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster touches everyone with His Noodly Appendage wink wink nudge nudge, it should have no place in our Constitution. A great many Americans (and Minnesotans) do not adhere to your religion and should not be forced to live by its rules. Yet so many blithely carry on debating this issue primarily on the basis of which version of the Bible they think we should be reading.

Yup. Angry.

Go see the last performance of But Not for Love, if you can. And vote on November 6. Vote your conscience. Your conscience. And, please, whether your YHVH, your Jesus, your Allah, your Buddha, your Lord Shiva, your Athena, your Zoroaster, or your Flying Spaghetti Monster condemns or supports marriage equality, voter ID, or the local Soil and Water Board candidate, leave them outside. One to a voting booth, please.

“Try that line with more anger.”

“Bigger there. More frantic energy.”

“Let me see you own this conversation.”

Watching actors rehearse inspires and humbles me. Good actors are fearless. Try one reading of a line, one gesture or bit of business to go with it. Doesn’t work? Out it goes, and try something else next time. Does work? Keep it for now—but stay open to the possibility that something even better might come along next week, or tomorrow, or the next time you run the scene. I know a very small number of authors who write with a similar sense of abandon, but most of us play our art safer.

On Saturday, I had the honor of seeing a scene from my play Election Cycle staged as part of TEASE Twin Cities. Arranged by local actresses Erin Denman and Victoria Pyan, TEASE was a one-night showcase of short works and excerpts from longer works by emerging local playwrights. Being part of it was a gift.

The Monday before the performance, under the suffrage of director Anya Kremenetsky and actors Lana Rosario, Charla Marie Bailey, and Anna Olson, I attended my scene’s second rehearsal. Again, humility and inspiration. Every time they ran the scene, they tried something different. A gesture. A pose. A pause. Some things stayed; most were ruthlessly culled.

This scene depicts the first meeting of two characters who will become romantically involved. A lot of other things happen in the scene, as well, and given the straitened timeline and the fact that the TEASE audience wouldn’t see the development of the relationship, the team decided not to focus on that aspect of the meeting.

But there was a moment. One time through, one of the actresses crowded right up behind the other and delivered a crucial line practically into her ear. Low and intense, like a lover. The other actress froze, the character uncertain whether to lean back or run away and clearly unaccustomed to uncertainty. It was a perfect interaction, encapsulating everything these characters would become to each other.

Unfortunately, the second character’s response to that line is about the first being hysterical. Unless I wanted to be That Playwright who rewrites a scene mid-rehearsal to fit the blocking, that emotion didn’t work with the line.

The thing is—though maybe I’m biased because I both wrote the play and saw that amazing moment—I felt the echo of that interaction in the scene as performed on Saturday night. It was like making a martini by swirling vermouth around in the glass and then pouring it out. The reading was gone, but the emotion, somehow, remained.

That’s why we as artists need the courage to try everything we can imagine in our art. We throw it at the wall to see what sticks, but even what doesn’t stick is still there in echo, informing everything that comes after.

Folks who live in the Twin Cities or follow our theater goings-on are most likely aware of the recent Guthrie Theater diversity kerfuffle. For those of you who don’t, here’s the recap: when the Guthrie Theatre, perceived by some to be Minnesota’s most powerful and influential professional theater, announced its 2012-2013 lineup, it escaped no one’s notice that the plays are almost entirely written by white men, directed by white men, and starring a lot of white men. Criticism raged on both sides, with detractors arguing that the Guthrie is out of touch with the Twin Cities population and theater tastes and Guthrie artistic director Joe Dowling claiming that plays by women and people of color don’t put butts in seats. I could spend hours on the chicken-and-egg debate here, but my purpose isn’t to reopen those wounds.

I mostly bring up the Guthrie debate to provide contrast with a call for script submissions I read yesterday. It was for a small theater in a small South Dakota town. Two lines from the call particularly caught my attention:

The community is not racially diverse so non white characters are a challenge to cast.

This audience is intelligent but not necessarily sophisticated. A majority of the audience will not have attended professional level productions and will struggle with edgy material.

First off, theater in a small Midwestern town, kudos on your honesty. In theater, “Know Thy Audience” is every bit as useful a maxim as “Know Thyself”–if not moreso.

Second, I am really, truly impressed that this theater is taking a chance on new scripts in the first place. Having grown up in an area not that different from this one, I know that most of our theaters were risk-averse. Even the one that had a reputation as being “edgy” seldom did anything riskier than Tomfoolery, the Tom Lehrer revue. New plays can be a huge, gut-clenching risk for a theater in this position, and I salute them for trying it, rather than reaching for the seventeenth revival of Picnic or Our Town.

Third…well, dang. “Non white [sic] characters are a challenge to cast.” “A majority of the audience…will struggle with edgy material.” I think the people of this theater may not be giving their townsfolk the credit they deserve, but for the moment I’ll take their word for it. At moments like this, I appreciate the Twin Cities more than ever. As rancorous as the Guthrie diversity debate grew on both sides, I take comfort and pride in the fact that we had the conversation at all. How amazing to be part of a community whose demographic and artistic diversity is so great that we demand that our entire artistic community celebrate and reflect it. What a privilege to live and art in a place that begs us to share our unique voices, rather than begging us to keep those voices to ourselves.

Freshwater Theatre has a script submission call up for “Better or Worse”, their fall production about the shifting landscape of marriage. Several members of my playwrights’ group are writing pieces for this or have submitted already and are encouraging the rest of us to do likewise. I want to do this. I have Strong Opinions about marriage; it seems right up my alley.

And yet I am stymied by the vastness of the subject. Marriage! That’s a huge, huge playground. Even the additional information I’ve gleaned about the sorts of things Freshwater may be most interested in almost makes the playing field bigger, because it opens up the whole of history. It’s like trying to pick up a sand dune with my fingers: every time I grasp at it, it slips away.

Several ideas have floated through my mind, each one more bizarre than the next. One keeps coming back. It is not, ironically enough, about same-sex marriage, the matrimony-related issue on pretty much every Minnesotan’s minds these days. Still, maybe it’s the teacup that will let me hold at least a bit of the ocean.

I have a confession to make. Although, if you ask me about my writing, I’m likely to list “playwriting” first, I go through extended stretches where I don’t “do” theater much. I don’t just stop writing plays; I stop going to them. Sometimes lack of funds hinders my theater-going endeavors; sometimes my tendency toward hibernation keeps me in the house.

Then something happens–a new job, a new play-going buddy, a change in the weather–and I’m in the audience again and picking up my script-writing quill again. I remember: Oh, yeah. I love this. I’m always confused by how I could’ve let myself forget.

I’m in one of these theater renaissances right now. What has struck me this time is the vastness of the gaps in my foundational theater knowledge. I blame, somewhat, my alma mater. I majored in English, and at that college at that time, this meant English prose (or poetry, to a lesser extent). If I’d wanted to study drama–its history and styles, its guiding lights and greatest disasters–I would have fared better as a drama major. But I didn’t fall head over heels for drama ’til my junior year, when it was a little late to switch majors. Of course, having been out of college for ten years at this point, my continued ignorance is no one’s fault but my own.

But I’m catching up. Public libraries and Project Gutenberg are blessed things. And what a gift it is to be learning these things, to have these vistas opening for me. New paths unfold before me. Which one(s) shall I step onto?

I thrive on deadlines. If I’m honest, they’re the only way I really get things done.

I’m told I’ve been this way most of my life: my kindergarten teacher used to complain to my parents that, when she gave us an assignment that was due at X time, I would figure out how long it was going to take me (Y) and then keep doing my own thing until exactly (X-Y) time. Without that end-point looming, I can dither and dawdle like nobody’s business.

And there’s no deadline like an extreme deadline. Like, say…co-writing a ten-minute play in eight hours. This January I will participate in my seventh Theatre Unbound 24:00:00 Xtreme Theatre Smackdown. I love this event, but I sometimes have trouble explaining to people why I enjoy it so much.

Turns out, all I needed was - you guessed it - a deadline. In this case, the deadline of a preview article by Aisle Say Twin Cities’s Sophie Kerman. I think I finally managed to articulate what makes this event so great for me. Please do tell me what you think.