Another “Edgy” Crumudgeon?

Jim Rutter likes to stir things up in the theatre community. I suspect the tone of his post Broad Street Review: An encouraging trend: Theater for grownups might generate a few irate replies from some of Philadelphia’s small and mid-sized theatre companies. I’d prefer if it stimulated some necessary discussion about what Philadelphia theatre audiences need (which can be risky to produce) versus what they want (usually a much safer bet).

Though I was not as sanguine as Rutter about the Lantern’s New Jerusalem, I can’t deny that it had a powerfully captivating affect on the audience the night that I saw it. As we slog through a period where our public discourse has been reduced brief declarative sentences (“Drill, baby, drill!” “We are the 99%” etc.), a play that actually encourages thought is a valuable cultural resource–something Philly actually needs. The unbelievable success of the Lantern show (see J. Cooper Robb’s article) suggests that at least some large portion of the local audience agrees with my assessment.

As I mentioned in my recent post , there is plenty of Philadelphia theatre that is merely entertainment in a hip, dark, “edgy” wrapper. Perhaps “intelligent”, “challenging” and “profound” will become the new marketing buzzwords that will replace “edgy” and “provocative”. If effective marketing buzzwords shape the audiences’ expectations of what they will see, then I certainly hope that’s the case.

10 Ways to Save Philadelphia Theatre, Part 1

Philadelphia isn’t widely recognized outside of the region as being a major US theatre center, despite the fact that the city is home to dozens of professional and semi-professional theatre companies. In this two-part series, I explore five issues Philly theatre artists must address in order for Philadelphia to become a world-class theatre city.

1. Philly theatre artists have to get over New York.

Recently, a local niche theatre company was invited to participate in a niche theatre festival in New York. The artistic director of this company was ecstatic that the company had been written about in the New Yorker, and notified his mailing list. It was a performance listing, without a description, mentioning only the performance dates, the name of the play, and the director.

This is a company known locally for doing high-quality plays with excellent local talent, usually to critical acclaim. They deserved a review or a feature story, but they are from Philadelphia, so who cares? There is a huge amount of theatre in New York, and much of it is crap. New Yorker theatre is already obsessed with itself, and the rest of the country buys in.

Philadelphia theatre companies only chance of achieving a national reputation is by bringing work to major metropolitan areas outside of New York, where their it will actually be noticed and reported on. Philadelphia theatre needs to get over it’s New York inferiority complex and push itself to the rest of the nation, and the world.

2. Philly’s most successful companies need to actively nurture small-theatre activity–not just rent them performance space.

The Arden Theatre Company initially got its start when the Walnut Street Theatre allowed its young and spunky founders access to space and some resources for their first year running. InterAct Theatre Company initially benefitted from the support of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. These two companies were an important part of the Philadelphia theatre renaissance that started in the 1980s and is in full-flower today.

When was the last time any of Philly’s most successful companies offered time, space or mentorship to Philly’s theatrical up-and-comers, or proven small companies? The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis has made it’s secondary stages available to smaller promising local companies, promoting these efforts as co-productions. The Steppenwolf in Chicago does the same. These relationships are cast as collaborations, co-productions and mentorships, not rental agreements.

If large theatre companies want to draw younger and/or more diverse audience members, they should bring local theatre companies that have those audiences into their spaces during dark times or after hours, at the very least.The benefits are obvious. Large companies get to market themselves as being sensitive to the needs of diverse audiences. Small companies benefit from the association with more established companies and their home performance spaces. Through mentoring and supporting small companies, the biggies also help to develop a stream of young, hungry potential interns and employees for their production, marketing, education and development departments. It’s a win-win for all involved.

3. Get over being “edgy”.

The desire to appear provocative is a pose. The need for theaters to take risks is not.

Look at the marketing materials of Philadelphia’s most successful small theatre companies, and you will see a lot of darkness. Popular productions from recent seasons include sexual abuse, rape, horrific violence and pedophilia. Meanwhile, major social issues relevant to the community, such as race relations, economic inequality and political divisiveness have little or no place on area stages.

As much as Philly audiences seem to be titillated by violent and sexual content, there’s nothing particularly risky about giving it to them. It’s much more risky to challenge an audience’s core beliefs and push them, through performance, to reexamine what they take for granted in their every day lives. There is plenty of theatre in Philadelphia that is merely entertaining. More often than not, “edgy”, “provocative” or “challenging” are adjectives that Philly companies use to make “entertaining” sound subversive.

4. Make the Live Arts Festival year-round, and stop the unfair competition with the Philly Fringe.

It’s long past time for Live-Arts and Philly Fringe Artistic Director Nick Stuccio to stop pretending that he has any interest in the Philly Fringe. Though these two institutions were once intimately intwined, they are now perpetually in competition for audience and media attention, to the detriment of both independent theatre producers and Philadelphia’s role in national and international performance communities.

In my opinion, the Philly Fringe is the time when local theatre companies do their most interesting work, and when local audiences are most willing to take risks. The Live Arts Festival, at its best, is an opportunity to bring important performing artists and companies from around the nation and the world to Philadelphia audiences. Both festivals have necessary roles in the heath of the Philadelphia arts community.

The Philly Fringe needs to be completely organizationally separate from Live Arts so that it can serve the needs of the independent theatre producers that make it all happen. The Live Arts Festival should present programming year-round, instead of competing directly with the Fringe Festival each year.

The private and corporate funders in our community need to recognize that these are distinct organizations with different goals and needs and stop subsidizing the Live Arts Festival with grant money that is intended to support the Fringe Festival.

5. Philly theatre companies should collaborate more and compete less.

Ask almost any local artistic director how to succeed in the Philadelphia theatre scene, and they will tell you to identify your niche and define your theatrical brand in such as way as to make your company seem independent and unique. The reasoning goes that the size of Philly audiences is small, and so theaters must compete for their attention. The niche model is also increasingly reinforced by granting organizations and funders, who push theatre companies to define themselves on the basis of their “unique contributions to the community”.

While niche-marketing may make sense from a branding perspective, it also fosters a background level of unfriendly competition among local theatre companies, both for audiences and funders. All of this doesn’t stop these companies from doing the same sorts of work at the same time. Both EgoPo Classic Theatre and the Lantern Theatre Company produced Beckett festivals during the 2009-10 season, for example. Does Philly really need two competing Beckett festivals?

To counteract this unhealthy competition, Philly theaters must collaborate and co-produce much more frequently. There have been a few worthwhile efforts towards this end in the last few years. EgoPo has reached out to other local companies to co-produce readings of plays related to their expressionist- and Tennessee Willams-themed seasons. In the 2010-2011 season, the Lantern Theatre Company, Theatre Exile, Amaryllis Theatre, Act II Playhouse, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Inis Nua participated in what was billed as the Philadelphia Irish Theatre Festival.

Festivals represent excellent opportunities for local theater companies to cross-market, attract press coverage, woo funders and build audiences–and Philly audiences seem to love them. The festival model of cross-promotion is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t typically lead to true artistic collaboration between companies. In the festival model, theater companies do the shows they were planning to do anyway, independently of each other, then figure out a strategy to package market those productions jointly.

Fully seven local companies have produced/are producing Jewish-themed productions this fall, all independently of each other. Of all the local media, it appears this was only significant to the Jewish Exponent (Theaters Do Jewish, by Michael Elkin). Couldn’t at least a few of these companies communicated with each other about their upcoming seasons, pooled their resources, and collaborated in some substantive way?

99% Find First Voice On Stage

Why Haven’t More American Theatre Artists Engaged with the Divisive Issues Facing the Country Today?

In a year filled with political divisiveness and wide-spread public outcry over economic inequality, it’s astounding to me that American theatre artists have been largely silent. New York’s The Civillians staged an Occupy-themed cabaret at Joe’s Pub in the prestigious Off-Broadway Joseph Papp Public Theatre. The piece is called Let Me Ascertain You: Occupy Wall Street. Here’s how the company describes the piece:

The Civilians’ artists are downtown talking to the 99% about the current demonstrations, our government, the economy, and the future. Hear the stories straight from the tents in Zuccotti Park in the first Civilians’ cabaret of the season. They’re investigating the thought-provoking and unexpected, the infuriating and hilarious, the communal and the personal stories of this large and ongoing display of discontent. Don’t miss this one-night-only cabaret performance of monologues and songs in The Civilians’ unique style created from the interview material, giving voice to the people and examining the current exercise of democracy that will mark our nation’s history.

[From Joe's Pub]

The Civillians’ performance was based on verbatim transcription of interviews collaged into monologues and songs. Documentary theater has often proven to be powerful int the past (the frequently-produced The Laramie Project is one enduring example). I think this is an excellent start, though America’s theatre artists need to do better. Since the early 1990s, political theatre has been extremely rare in the United States. The current political and economic climate presents an amazing opportunity for the American theatre to prove it’s relevance to the culture at large.

Many in the American theater community have sympathy for the goals of the Occupy movement. I see supportive posts from my theatre-industry friends around the country on Facebook constantly. How do we go beyond sympathy for the protester’s goals and use theater to create a place where Americans can confront the major issues of the moment and engage actively in discourse about solutions?

From my own experience witnessing the Occupy Time Square protest, it seems that Occupy protestors could benefit from some effective theater on the streets as well (see my earlier post, Occupy Broadway!). Will the American theatre community at large be willing to put aside its current preoccupations, whatever they may be, and jump into the heart of what matters to the great majority of Americans at this crucial moment for American democracy?

For more information about The Civillians’ project, check out Occupy Wall Street goes Off-Broadway in the Washington Post, posted Oct. 20 by Peter Marks.

Streaming videos of the performance can be viewed here.

Watch Now, Tweet Later!

Is the immersive performance experience a cultural paradigm that is losing its potency?

Across the country (and the world), traditional performing arts institutions such as the Dayton Opera and the Carolina Ballet have been promoting “tweet seats”–discounted tickets and even special sections for techno-hipsters to tweet and live-blog about performances while they are going on.

These organizations are desperate to attract younger audiences, and see tweet seats (I grit my teeth even typing it) as a way to “engage” future subscribers. They see it as the ideal marketing tool for the social-media generation.

The theory: if you can only get younger people in the theater, then surely in time they’ll want to pay for full-priced tickets and eventually become subscribers and…donors!

Lovely.

Has anyone considered that the more attention an audience member spends responding to the performance as it happens, in writing, on a tiny screen, the less “engaged” they will be with the actual performance?

A tweeting or live-blogging audience member is reporting on the performance, perhaps even interacting with others who are reporting the performance–but those are separate experiences from being immersed in an artistic experience which can and should command their attention.

And what about the experience of other, non-tweeting audience members? Ron Evans of GroupofMinds.com recommends hiding tweeters (Twitteratti? Twittics? Or just Twits?) behind the rest of the audience, so that regular audience members are not aware of them. Of course, the performers will likely be unable to avoid seeing all those faintly glowing faces looking down at the back of the auditorium…

At the same time, he advocates for alerting the non-Twits that the activity is going on, and encouraging them to participate in the future. The current best practices that are being proposed in his blog and others suggest that this behavior can be contained and controlled so that it doesn’t interfere with those who are actually “engaged” with the show. This may be true–and it may result in useful viral marketing–but it doesn’t address the essential aesthetic issue.

As a director, I believe that every moment of an audience’s attention is precious. I am in the business of interacting with audiences through compelling live performance experiences.  I and my collaborating theatre artists spend hundreds of hours of effort and anxiety to make every second of the performance worth watching.

To the marketers:

It is not enough that the audience just shows up.

It is not enough that they are paying attention some of the time.

To the “audiences of the future”:

Real people with real skills are doing real things on a stage in real time, and that is worthy od your undivided attention.

You chose to come. Experience it now, talk (or tweet) about it later.

Thanks to Steve Cott for his “You’ve Cott Mail” newsletter, which inspired this post.

Occupy Broadway!

Occupy Wall Street Protesters Make Broadway Debut in Times Square

My wife and I had come to New York to celebrate our 1-year wedding anniversary by seeing a show–The Adams Family , featuring the still attractive but not-very-talented Brooke Shields. Those tickets were $75 a piece from TKTS.

We also had front-row seats to a much larger Broadway spectacle. Unbeknownst to us, Occupy Wall Street had decided to make their debut on the Great White Way on Oct. 15, in the heart of Time Square. That show was free.

Their performance was just beginning as ours was ending. To be honest, we missed the big event–3000 or so protesters hemmed in by police barricades while thousands of tourists tried to get the shows they’d paid exorbitant fees to see. We did catch the overture, though–about 20 protestors carrying various band instruments over their heads, weaving through an expectant crowd. Cardboard signs started to pop up amidst the masses sporting vaguely anti-capitalist slogans from a variety of niche political activists. We went to dinner.

But not before I shot a bunch of pictures.

It’s not unusual to see tourists actually photographing the massive digital billboards surround the area which flash and transform constantly. They are photographing the adds! How messed up is that?

For the protestors, their signs and slogans became the foreground message and theme that contrasted, often ironically, with the massive commercial messages in the background. I’d argue that this was a theatrical act–a public

performance set in what many view to be the center of American theatre. I’m not convinced innate theatricality of the occupation was evident to its organizers, however.

It turned out that The Addams Family, though far from a great show, was more entertaining. Except for a bit of jaunty music and some group chanting, nothing memorable–or entertaining–really happened. The Occupy movement had managed to get a lot of attention, but squandered an opportunity to put on a truly memorable show.

They need a couple of dozen dedicated theatre artists in their ranks to them how to make their protest into good political theatre. As Broadway debuts go, I’d say it was less than inspiring.

Luna’s “How To Disappear…”: The Good, the Not-So-Bad, and the Ugly

The run-up to this year’s Philly Fringe Festival has been stimulating and exhausting for me. I’ve created sound designs for The Arsonists (IRC) and How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found (Luna Theater), and I’m directing The Frogg Prince by Joy Cutler, part of the Zacherle show, The Undead.

How to Disappear was the greatest challenge of the three, because it’s a play that wants to be a movie, desperately. Director Greg Campbell harbors a secret desire to be a filmmaker, and decided to make video projection a crucial, comprehensive and organic component of his concept for the play. The sound, likewise, had to be pervasive, suggestive, often intrusive. Nearly every scene is underscored by ambient backgrounds, including various kinds of static and feedback, sounds of rain and sea, or the ominous rumbling of passing trains.

One thing I discovered in this process is that Video, on stage, is an incredible attention whore (at least it is when created by the freakishly talented Michael Long). It was difficult for me to keep up, to say the least.

Since the play opened one day in advance of the Fringe, there have been a number of local critics in attendance. The reviews have been mixed, though they tend to prefer the acting (especially of lead David Stanger) and the design of the piece over its script.

As for my own personal ego gratification, two of them actually mention my sound designs, something that rarely happens in reviews. Audiences tend to take sound and lights in a production for granted, and respond most directly to the more concrete design elements–sets, costumes, and increasingly these days, projections. Though I got a sentence of props in two of the reviews, the moody, expressionistic lighting of Andrew Cowles received nary a word. Which is a criminal oversight, as far as I’m concerned.

Here are excerpts from and links to the 3 current reviews, the Good (Ronald Comer, Stage Magazine), the Not-So-Bad (Jim Rutter, Broad Street Review) and the Ugly (Tobi Zinman, The Philadelphia Inquirer). Take all with a grain of salt. Most importantly, see the show and make up your own mind!

Stage Magazine Review :

“…Special mention must be made of Michael Long’s creative use of a large upstage screen upon which various scenes relevant to changing settings throughout the play are projected. This technique substituted for actually building three dimensional scene sets, which would have been exceedingly troublesome given the small stage available. Accompanying this use of projected imagery is a well-coordinated collection of sound effects designed by Aaron Oster…”

Broad Street Review Review

“…Kennedy’s script nearly wastes Aaron Oster’s slick sounds and Michael Long’s spectacular set design of video projections and stills— among the best utilization of multimedia I’ve seen in Philadelphia (Long could become small theater’s affordable answer to Jorge Cousineau)…”

Philadelphia Inquirer Review

“…Gregory Scott Campbell’s direction emphasizes the non-realistic elements of the play, and creates sets out of slide projections, but these inventions merely strain to generate interest which this play simply doesn’t provide…”

Ouch.

The amazing Mike long made two short promotional videos for the show, for which I composed music. Check them out here and here.

HOW TO DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY AND NEVER BE FOUND

By Fin Kennedy

Sept. 1-18, 2011

Tickets: $20

Luna Theater Company

Playground at the Adrienne

2030 Sansom Street

Philadelphia, PA 19103

www.lunatheater.org

The Dawning Era of the E-Script?

I recently became the proud owner of a Nook Color e-reader. My first plan was to an Android operating system on it and transform it into something akin to a larger version of my now-obsolete iPhone 3G. I could put textbooks on it for the fall semester, meaning I would have to schlep about 10 pounds less between campus and home.

It turns out I really enjoy READING on it, and I’m no longer eager to convert it into a more multifunctional gadget.

The convenience of the thing got me to thinking about potential applications in the theater.

The other night, I was sitting in a meeting with a group of playwrights, part of an upcoming project in development for Luna Theatre Company. The scripts that the writers had been working on had all been circulated electronically, and nearly everyone in the group had brought laptops along with them. As we were getting down to business, I looked up to see that nearly everyone at the table was separated from each other by their respective screens. What had been an intimate, face-to-face creative meeting suddenly felt like an impersonal office chat held between isolating cubicles.

When it came time to read the writers’ work out loud, I closed my laptop and picked up the paper copies I’d printed. Looking around, I could see that everyone else at the table had done the same thing. Instantly, the feeling in the room changed. The meeting again felt theatrical: live, spontaneous and interactive. Both a laptop screen and a piece of paper interfere to some extent with face-to-face interaction and communication. Why did we all instinctively choose to read aloud from the printed page when we wanted to act?

Because the page apparently interferes with face-to-face communication less than the screen–or at least in more acceptable ways. It can be repositioned more easily, it doesn’t create a fixed physical boundary, allows for easier eye contact and often more freedom of movement for the reader (important, even though we were all sitting down). We could also keep either or both hands free to gesture, as opposed to being dedicated to an arrow key or touch pad.

In short, laptops suck for physical engagement with a play text. Yet increasingly, scripts are exchanged and developed electronically. Every new script I’ve read for a theater company or festival in at least the last two years has come to me via a PDF file of some kind. The current crop of e-readers and tablet handle PDF and Word files–can the era of the e-script be far behind?

Here’s a list of what I see as 8 advantages of the e-script:

1. Actors would be able to select/search for their own lines and cue lines much more efficiently.

2. An e-reader is easier to hold than either a stack of full-sized pages or a Samuel French acting script (though far more calamitous to drop on the floor…)

3. E-scripts could be instantly available in usable form for last minute auditions.

4. E-scripts can be highlighted on screen, no marker required

5. Directors and playwrights can send their cuts or script changes directly to actors, even in rehearsal

6. E-scripts could even include links to images of blocking or set diagrams

7. Actors could enter rehearsal notes directly into “notes” fields in the script itself

8. Actors and directors can look up troublesome words quickly and easily with built-in dictionaries (a real boon for classical texts…)

I’ve already witnessed acting students deliver monologues with smart phones in hand, scrolling through their lines. When will professional actors, directors and playwrights catch up?

Honky-Tonkin’ Irish Style in Inis Nua’s “Pumpgirl”

Every now and then, in the process of designing sound for a show, I get to explore whole musical cultures I didn’t even know existed. Inis Nua’s production of Abbie Spallen’s Pumpgirl (directed by Tom Reing) is one of those opportunities.

The play is set inthe southern part of present-day Northern Ireland, and it turns out that American-style country music has been popular in that region since the mid-1970s. Which makes sense, if the world that Spallen creates in the play is accurate. In the South Armagh of Pumpgirl, faithless, hard-drinking men careen recklessly through the emotional lives of their disenchanted wives and lovers like stock cars in a sexual demolition derby. If that isn’t country, what is?

Thanks to some initial research by dramaturg Carrie Chapter, I was able to locate a whole bunch of Irish country music–hundreds of songs available for purchase on Amazon.com. I know that I’m showing my age whenever I admit to being amazed by what’s available on the internet, but seriously, after about 2 minutes of searching, I’m able to sample from 30 years of mostly good Irish country that sounds like it was recorded in Nashville. Even the vocals sound %100 American. Standouts include Philomena Begley (think Tammy Wynette) and Mick Flavin (somewhere between Lefty Frizzel and George Jones).

For me, the best American country songs are story songs. The musical and thematic territory of country music isn’t exactly vast. What matters is the cleverness of the language–the wordplay in the way that the same old stories are told. Clever and evocative storytelling (in and out of song) is something the Irish have been doing for thousands of years.

There’s a kind of historical payback going on as well, in that many of the early antecedents of what became country music are directly traceable to ballads, reels, and other music from the British Isles that came to America with the colonists.

Taking a cue from the playwright, the sound design also includes quite a bit of Glen Campbell’s music from the ’60s and ’70s. I’ve never really been a fan, mainly because the production style crosses well over the line into grocery store muzak. At it’s best, though, Campbell’s music speaks to yearning and regret, the basic cause and effect of all the lyin’, drinkin’ and foolin’ around at the heart of the typical country music narrative, and in the lives of the play’s fully-realized characters.

Pumpgirl itself would make a pretty good country song. It’s already an often hilarious and heart-rending play.

Pumpgirl runs January 11-23, Tuesdays through Sundays at Amaryllis at the Adirenne, 2030 Sansom Street, Philadelphia, Pa.

All seats are $20, general admission. To purchase tickets, click here .

For more information, go to http://www.inisnuatheatre.org/current.html

Props from the Artblog

This is a favorable response to the Philadelphia Artists’ Collective’s stellar production of The Duchess of Malfi, for which I did PR photography and graphic design. It’s part of a longer article, well-worth reading, about the sudden wealth of classical theatre in the Greater Philadelphia area over the last year or so. Bless them, they gave me a photo credit, which many of the local papers and online outlets neglect to do.

Ensemble in The Philadelphia Artists’ Collective’s The Duchess of Malfi. Photo by Aaron Oster.

Looking back at productions now closed

John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, presented as the first full production of the two-year-old Philadelphia Artists’ Collective–rightfully, the talk of the theater community with its ingenious staging at Broad Street Ministry and astute focus on writing, acting and direction. This came as near to perfection as anything I’ve ever seen.

[From Shakespeare is evergreen in Philadelphia – solid entertainment for insecure times]

The Dark Heart of Wall Street on Philly Fringe

Droit du Seigneur: Comedy for an Economy in Crisis

My current directing project is the Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company production of Droit du Seigneur, a highly articulate one-act comedy of ideas by Paul Parente. The piece is set in a swanky New York restaurant, where two Wall Street types go head to head over the future of class, corporate culture and the American Way–and an amazingly good bottle of Chateau

Margeaux. The audience will be right in the thick of the action, seated at tables and sipping wine served by the waiters who play a surprising role in the unfolding drama

The show is a real departure for CCTC, which is known locally primarily for producing summer productions of classical plays in Philadelphia-area public parks. What makes the play “classic” is the nuance of Parente’s rich language, and the scope of the ideas the piece explores. Subtle manipulations and overt slights make up most of the action of the play– The real drama is in the dialogue. With the collaboration of my gifted, veteran cast (Derick Loafman, Nick Martorelli,Ted Powell and Jerry Puma), I’ve been able to find compelling drama in the biases of the characters and the struggles for status they clothe in clever conversation.

Beyond the deft use of language and the novelty of the ideas presented, the piece is ridiculously topical. After the Wall Street bailout, the petty princes of finance are achieving huge profits and receiving extravagant bonuses, while close to 10% of Americans remain unemployed. The sense of entitlement and invincibility of the Wall Street elite is at the heart of the conflict in Droit Du Seigneur. The piece delves deep into the psyche of the minds behind Goldman Sachs etc., and pushes the logic or rapacious capitalism to absurd, yet somehow logical limits.

Droit du Seigneur is being produced as part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Performances: September 14-18 at 7pm, with additional shows September 17 and 18 at 9pm.

Location: The Lantern Lab at the Lantern Theatre, 923 Ludlow St., Philadelphia, PA 19107

Click here for directions.

Tickets: $15, including complimentary refreshments.

Fringe Box Office: http://www.phillyfringe.org/details.cfm?id=13278