Money Lab: The cost of being an artist

One of the things I am interested in exploring in Money Lab is what is the personal economic cost of being an artist.  In other words, I want to compare people of similar education, age and background, and see how they compare to other (non-artists) from New York City.  I am limiting the current exploration to the boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx because--well, because I have some data that applies, and going further at this point seems a bit overwhelming.

This will obviously be a limited and unscientific survey (not having the skills to create a true one), but I am hoping it provokes some thought and consideration. Interestingly, Dance NYC had a somewhat corollary survey that is much more developed, specifically of dancers age 21-35.  You can find it here.

Their survey shows how New York dancers truly struggle economically.  Which of course confirms my personal bias, which is to suspect that being any sort of artist costs big wagons full of money.  That comes partly from being from a family of lawyers and comparing my income to theirs.  And Partly from seeing almost all the intelligent, accomplished, educated artists I know struggle for money.  And partly from...well, it must.  C'mon.

But how much?  Can we find a dollar amount per year?  And is that dollar amount the value of art?  I can claim, as I have, that I did not know the cost when I first decided to pursue theater.  But eventually it dawned on me.  And I made a conscious choice to continue.  So in a way I have decided to spend most on my potential income on the one thing that has meant the most to me.

Somehow, realizing that I made the decision makes me feel a bit better.   Would I make the decision again, in college, knowing what I know now?  I'm not sure.  But on the other hand, I can't image a life without theater.  So, maybe...

Money Lab: Food or a flower, what is the value of art?

In honor of Money Lab, I will be posting a series of blog posts about economics and the arts.  Here is my first, examining the question of the basic value of art.

I was taking a cab the other day, and my cab driver asked me if I had any good ideas to help the world. He was collecting.

I work in theater, I said, so all my ideas are about theater. But I do think art can help the world.

He scoffed. If you were starving, he asked, what would you like? Food? Or a flower?

This reminded me of another incident. Some years ago, Soutine’s bakery on the Upper West Side had promised the theater company a free cake for a fundraiser. The day I came to pick it up, the owner reneged. I didn’t understand it was for a theater, she told me. I thought it was a non-profit.

It is a non-profit, I said.

No, she said. Something that does good. Like cancer research. I can’t just give a free cake to anyone who asks.

That conversation dwelled with me for a while. The nature of non-profit theater is that it depends on donations. Personal donations, foundation grants, and government grants, which are a sort of donation from everyone’s tax dollar. Why do we deserve it?

I can say that without it, the world would be lacking. Only the commercial work could survive. Difficult work that examines ideas or advances the art form wouldn’t exist. The world would be a much duller and less joyful place.

To me.  But then again I’m not starving.

This is how I responded to the cab driver: I just directed a play called The Last Cyclist, written in a concentration camp. The people, all the actors there were starving. The play criticized the Nazis, and some of them risked their lives by even rehearsing it. Most of them were murdered. But then, in that moment, they felt alive. Art is a need, a basic need, dating back to the cave drawings. It helped them feel human when they might have been reduced to pure animal needs.

He was not convinced. Yes, sure, it was a distraction. But they would have been better off with some bread.

He went driving off in search of someone with better ideas.

20 years, 200 photos

A compilation of photos of our work over the last 20 years, made for our anniversary party.  Made the midnight before, which perhaps explains the misspelling of "anniversary"  The voiceover from a moment of our presentation in 365 plays at The Public, read by Henry Akona.

20th Anniversary Memories - Eddie Goes to Poetry City

An additional memory. Jenny Mercein was in a number of UTC61 shows in the late 1990's... Here are her memories of the first, Eddie Goes to Poetry City. George McGrath, pictured left, a veteran of many UTC61 productions, recently passed away.

George McGrath and Stephen Waldrup in Eddie Goes to Poetry City

There's a Picasso quote that goes something along the lines of, "I spent my childhood trying to paint like an adult and my adulthood trying to paint like a child." Or something like that... In any case, when I think back to doing Eddie Goes to Poetry City with Edward Einhorn and UTC61, that quote comes to mind. Oh my goodness, we were so young and SO FEARLESS! I had worked with Edward on one small ten minute play when he asked me to do this Richard Foreman play at NADA. I studied Foreman in one of my theater studies classes in college, so I jumped at the chance.When I learned of his concept that I would play both Marie and Estelle, I didn't bat an eye. Sure, I would have to get in a fight with myself and slap myself on stage. Sure I'd have to simulate sexual acts in a tiny basement theater with my parents in the audience. Why not!

Julia Martin and Jenny Mercein in another
UTC61 production, Sweeney Agonistes

Edward (and Ian Hill and so many other of those wonderful collaborators from the early days on the Lower East Side back when Ludlow Street and the surrounding areas were filled with theaters and not fancy restaurants) asked me to do all sorts of crazy things and I just did it. We all did. Maybe we were too young and inexperienced to question whether or not we "could" or "should" make such wild choices. We just went for the ride. Edward cast some wonderfully fearless actors, especially the late, great George McGrath, who taught me lessons that continue to resonate today. Now, when I get scared confronting a role, or I find myself in my head judging myself, I try to think back to those days in the (yes, rat-infested) basement at NADA with Edward and the crew and just go for it! Marie and Estelle would expect nothing less.

20th Anniversary Memories - more Fairy Tales of the Absurd and a treat...

This is the final memory in the series. You can also read about this show in the blog post by Uma Incrocci. Please join us at the 20th anniversary party on Sunday! 

Ian Hill, Peter Bean, John Blaylock, Celia Montgomery, and Uma Incrocci

In 2004, I brought Fairy Tales of the Absurd Off-Broadway. The show consisted of three one-acts: To Prepare a Hard Boiled Egg, a monologue by Ionesco, translated by me, and performed by Peter Brown. Tales for Children, based on short stories by Ionesco, adapted by me, translated by Karen Ott, and performed by Celia Montgomery, John Blaylock, and Uma Incrocci. And finally One Head Too Many, written by me, and performed by all of the above plus Ian W. Hill. It was a children's play, with actors and puppets and an absurdist sensibility that appealed equally to adults. It originated in the Ionesco Festival, played the Fringe, and then moved Off-Broadway.

Every time I told theater veterans that UTC61 was going Off-Broadway, they had one piece of advice:

Uma Incrocci, John Blaylock, and "Josette"

Don't.

The budget you have is unrealistic, they told me. I had raised over $60,000, but they told me it would take $200,000 at least. For a four week run, with five actors, in a 160 seat theater, with an Equity agreement. Not possible.

I would probably give someone the same advice myself, now. But at the time, I ignored it. The Pearl Theater was giving us a good deal on the theater. Since we had done the show in the Fringe, and before that we had done pieces in the Ionesco Festival, rehearsal time would be at a minimum. I had an almost free rehearsal space in my brother's building. My talented assistant, Glory, had found me a crack team of interns that would handle all the little stuff. I was going to ask every friend I knew to volunteer to help. And I myself was planning to take on as many jobs as possible: director of the whole evening, writer of one play, translator of a second, adapter for the third, producer, general manager, company manger, production manager, chief marketer, chief worrier.

John Blaylock. Uma Incrocci, and Celia Montgomery

When it was done, we had put up a full production that felt like Off-Broadway. We had done it on budget. We had received a rave from the Times (twice, actually, including the children's section review from Laurel Graeber), and nothing but good reviews all round.

We also often played to houses that were only a quarter full. And many publications waited till the last week to reserve, then realized there wasn't time to go to print. We lost a lot of money. I worked nonstop for months, and felt so exhausted I couldn't move.

I saw my show on the board of TKTS. I got some of my actors into Equity. I brought the people who I had been working with for years through the Off-Broadway process.

And it was a damn good show.

It was worth it.

Post script, of sorts: A special treat. When we were doing The Ionesco Festival, Peter Brown (he was Brown then, since he wasn't in Equity yet), traveled from theater to theater doing the monologue I translated, To Prepare a Hard Boiled Egg. It had never before been translated into English, and it remains one of my favorite little Ionesco bits. You can hear him here, in this audio recording:

20th Anniversary Memories - Unauthorized Magic in Oz

The houses from Unauthorized Magic

Rarely do I get to feel like a rock star.

However, with one small production, a toy theater piece called Unauthorized Magic in Oz, I did.

Unauthorized Magic was a rare instance where I crossed my children’s books with my theater.  It was created for Great Small Works’ Toy Theater Festival, at St. Ann’s Warehouse.  It existed in two small but beautiful houses, built by Barry Weil and Berit Johnson and based on Eric Shanower’s illustrations of my Oz books.  Unusually, I performed a role, along with fellow cast members Tanya Khordoc, Barry Weil, and Talaura Harms.

The experience with Great Small Works is a great one.  There is a new Toy Theater Festival coming soon (featuring frequent collaborators Tanya Khordoc and Barry Weil’s play, Secrets History Remembers), and I highly recommend it.  We were in an evening with Brian Selznik’s play about Christine Jorgensen, which I loved.

The audiences oohed and aahed appropriately at the puppetry flourishes, but the Oz references escaped many.  Then we were asked to bring the show to the Munchkin Convention, the East Coast gathering of Oz fans being held in Princeton, New Jersey.

An audience full of Oz fans, many of whom had read my books (Paradox in Oz and The Living House of Oz), was a very exciting event.  They were enthusiastic about and responsive to every reference.  Eric, and the publisher David Maxine, also had a chance to see the work.  If a play ever had its ideal audience, it was then.

Tempus fugit!  Tanya Khordoc puppeteers.

Later, we brought the show to the Looking Glass Theater, and it received a wonderful review from Laurel Graeber at The New York Times ("exquisitely ingenious!").  But having an Oz audience who knew my work so intimately was really my ideal experience.

You can see a performance on YouTube—not, I think, the same as in person (and that particular show had definite glitches), but still, worth checking out, especially if you are a fan of Oz!

The Tragedy of the Village Voice

The Village Voice introduced me to New York theater.

In 1990, when I was a college student, I saw the first show in New York that was somewhere other than Broadway. It was well beyond Broadway—in the Lower East Side, in a tiny venue called House of Candles, produced by the Independent Theater Company, one of the originals in what many of us now call indie theater. I went because I had read a short blurb in the Voice, and they were producing one of my favorite shows, Ionesco’s Rhinoceros.

The cab driver that picked me up at Penn Station refused to drive me all the way to the theater. “Why do you want to go into that neighborhood?” he asked. “I’m seeing a French absurdist play,” I told him. “Drugs,” he concluded. He let me out at the corner of Houston and 1st Avenue.

When I came to New York, the Voice was the one publication I was sure to read to know what was going on in downtown theater (and the downtown art scene in general) It was more important to me than the Times. I didn’t always agree with Michael Feingold, but I always respected and enjoyed his reviews and the fact that he valued deep critical analysis. But the Voice was not just Feingold, it was a host of reviewers engaged with downtown theater: Charles McNulty, Alissa Solomon, Alexis Soloski, Jorge Morales, and the many freelance reviewers (like my friend Trav SD) who covered the independent theater scene.  I am grateful to them all.

And of course there was the OBIES, the awards ceremony seemingly made to celebrate that scene. Thank goodness, I thought, we have an advocate. The OBIES championed the lesser known but valuable artists such as Richard Foreman, Vaclav Havel, Ellen Stewart, and all who struggled to create art without a giant budget. Foreman told me that the only reason he survived as an artist is because of one Voice reviewer who continued to believe in his work. This is for us, I believed.

The Voice was the first paper to review my work, back when I directed a show at Nada, just around the corner from House of Candles. The Lower East Side was slightly more respectable, by then—cab drivers would drive in, though the nightclubs and hipsters hadn’t yet arrived. It devoted a full page lead article to my first downtown festival, the Ionesco Festival, at a time when few other publications bothered to cover it.

In fact, thanks to Joe Holladay, the Voice sponsored the festival, as it did my next two festivals as well, providing advertising at a very discounted price because they believed in the importance of the work.

A few years ago, suddenly people started getting fired. It started with editors. Then freelancers. Then some prominent names, such as Hoberman in film. Dance was cut out altogether. The Voice stopped reviewing my shows. It stopped reviewing almost any small budget show. The one remaining working reviewer was Michael Feingold, and one man with one column can only review so much. He covered the major productions, but downtown was forgotten.

But I knew the rot had crept in earlier. Because, frankly, the Voice had lost its way. It had lost its identity. Even in the OBIES, which I attended at first enthusiastically, I realized that the ceremony had been transforming to one of glamour and big budget self-congratulation. Occasionally a true downtown artist would slip in, and the recognition would be well deserved and deeply needed. Metropolitan Theater, Peculiar, The Ice Factory. But rare was the show financed under $250,000, and the majority of the work came from theater institutions with multimillion dollar budgets: Manhattan Theater Club, The Public, Roundabout, Classic Stage Company, New York Theater Workshop. Soho Rep seemed small and scrappy by comparison. Movie stars gave out the rewards and often movie stars received them. It has become not so much a celebration of Off-Broadway as it was of Little Broadway.

I have been thinking for a while about talking about what’s wrong with the Voice, why it has lost its way, and what it can do about it. How it can regain its spirit. Its name. It is called The Village Voice. The voice of Greenwich Village, from the time when the village was the home to bohemian artists. What is it the paper now? What has it become?  Who do they expect the readers to be, when it has lost its identity?

I write now even though I suspect it is too late to have a rallying call. The Times reports two chief editors have quit rather than fire the five (of twenty) staff members demanded. On Michael Feingold’s page appeared a status report: “It looks like I may need a job.”

Am I writing an obituary for a once great paper? Perhaps. The OBIES are on May 20. I wasn’t planning to go, I had given up on the spectacle, and I’ll be busy in tech But maybe there’s one last chance for the voice of the village to be heard. Fellow theater artists, if you do go to the OBIES, if by some reason you know an uptown star that will be handed a piece of paper giving him or her downtown cred, it’s time to speak. It may be past time.

New York has too few reporters left that care about the smaller theaters. Recently, I wrote about the demise of Backstage. That was sad. This is a full on tragedy.