Obies Follow Up - Reflecting after the 2014 Awards

So the Obies were Monday night, and the trend that I discussed in my last blog post continues.  In general, approximately 90% of the work rewarded has budgets of $250,000 or more, though the calculations are a bit complicated this year for reasons I’ll get into.

Before I go into that, I do want to mention, as I did last time, that these posts are not meant to denigrate anyone involved, especially the award winners.  I saw and enjoyed a few of the shows honored, and they were all good shows created and performed by talented people.  I know a few people who were on the awards committee this year, and I know their hearts are in the right place.  And I am very fond of Obie chairman Michael Feingold as a critic, I think he did much good over the years.

Which in many ways is what is inspiring me to write.  I think that we all can become prone to a certain sort of narrowness of vision over time that leads us to lose sight of the broader picture.  In this case, many of those serving are frequently working with (or reviewing) the people being honored, and it may be hard to realize that a large and important part of the downtown theater scene is mostly being ignored.

Ironically, this is exactly the part of the downtown scene that most benefits from the awards.  To many receiving the awards on Monday, the award served as a bit of a (deserved) ego boost, but had little or any impact on their career.  But it is the lesser known shows with the smaller budgets that have the artists who truly need the recognition.  And of course, that was the purpose of the Obies to begin with: to recognize those who haven’t been seen and recognized by the mainstream.  In those days, the mainstream was simply Broadway, and the small budget shows were much fewer in number.  Now Off-Broadway exists mostly in the upper middle class of theater budgets, and yet it still persists in looking up at the upper upper class and saying, aren’t we poor?  Meanwhile, the lower class, or even the lower middle class is mostly ignored.

Do we really have to reflect American society that directly?

In regard to Monday’s Obies:  There were 20 awards given to shows, some with multiple recipients.  I face a problem with these calculations about how to group them.  The World Is Round received 3 awards, but they seem to be grouped together.  The Octoroon’s playwright, Brendan Brandon-Jacobs, won a playwriting award that also covered his work on Appropriate.  However, cast member Chris Meyers also received a separate award.

So if you group the awards as Playbill does, you find yourself with 20 awards.  However, the listing on the Village Voice website seems to indicate 26 awards.  The reason the difference creates very different calculations is that two shows, This Was The End and The World Is Round, fall under the $250,000 threshold.  So the result is that either 2 of 20 (10%, right on the average) or 4 or 26 (a surprising 15%) of Obies this year went to more moderately budgeted shows.

Close to the border, I suspect, is NAATCO’s production of Awake and Sing, for which Mia Katigbak won an award.  I am counting it as over $250,000, because of the size of the cast, but I could be wrong there.  Please feel free to correct me if you have contradictory information.

I will also mention $250,000 is a very high threshold.  I have never done a show with a budget over $100,000, the closest I’ve come is around $80,000, and that was officially Off-Broadway (astoundingly little for an Off-Broadway show, but nonetheless…).  With the in kind contributions my theater company has received from the venues/co-producers, that budget has reached a little over $100,000.  I know many, probably the majority working downtown who have never passed the $50,000 mark.  I actually assumed at first the budget for The World Is Round (a show I saw and loved) was over $250,000, but some investigation revealed otherwise.  Good job on their part.  I wasn’t able to discover what support BAM provided that wasn’t on that official budget, but it was a show that easily could have broken the $250,000 barrier regardless. [UPDATE: That includes BAM support]

So, using the more generous assessment, here are the updated totals for the Obies over the last 5 years:

The Public 18, Signature 10, Playwrights Horizons 9, Soho Rep 7, Manhattan Theater Club 6, New York Theater Workshop 5, Lincoln Center 4, Rattlestick 4, BAM 4 (3 of which are for World Is Round), Foundry 3, Ripe Time 3 (also credited for World Is Round), , Elevator Repair Service 2 (both times at The Public),  Classic Stage Company 2, HERE 2, Incubator Arts 2 (counting Three Pianos, on stage at NYTW at that point), Manhattan Class Company 2, St. Ann’s Warehouse 2, Theatre for a New Audience 2.

And those which have won a single OBIE in those years:  Alliance Francaise, Ars Nova (Natasha & Pierre, which had moved to a commercial production), Atlantic Theatre Company, Barrow Street, Baryshnikov Arts Center (Fela, which had moved to Broadway), Bushwick Star/The Debate Society , The Chocolate Factory, La MaMa (Good Woman of Setzuan, moved to The Public), NAATCO, Partial Comfort, Pig Iron, The Play Company, Primary Stages, PS 122, Second Stage, Punchdrunk, 3LD Art + Technology Center (as part of Under The Radar), Transport, Vineyard.

In terms of budget: out of 96 awards, 84 went to shows with budgets definitely over $250,000, 5 were definitely under (3 for World Is Round), and 8 were in the gray area for me (including Awake and Sing).  So the percentage of lower budget shows is between 5 – 13 %.

I would remiss to write all this without suggesting some solutions.  First, a larger Obie committee.  Quite frankly, I think it is unfair to ask to few people to see so much.  There are a number of qualified possibilities, and the number could be doubled, at least. And for those new Obie members: select people who are part of the true independent theater scene.  Second, a clear way to contact the committee and let them know about your show.  Yes, if you have the right press agent who knows the right people to contact, it can be done.  But the contact should be published on the website, and the committee should be announced, as early as possible.  Finally, and most importantly, there should be a commitment from all the judges and the Obies as a whole to seek out those smaller shows.  To see things that you may know nothing about.   I know it’s not all going to change overnight.  But a commitment that, say, 33% of the awards will go to lower budgets shows is not impossible, by any means.  And that commitment in itself will inspire the judges to seek out new work.

It’s not easy.  In response to my earlier post, I had a few people ask me privately, what should I go see?  Here’s my honest answer: Like everyone, I live in my little bubble.  I can tell you about my friend’s plays, some of which are very good.  And occasionally I am drawn to something outside of that bubble. I recently saw Then She Fell, which I thought was amazing (and never won an Obie), but that show has received a fair amount of recognition, which is why I knew about it to begin with.

I do know some of the places where you can find those shows.  Some of them have won an Obie (or two) over the last five years, but considering the number of Obies given and the number of shows at these theaters (which have much busier seasons than the large institutions), most of the shows never get seen at all.  I know, because I have worked at a lot of them (as I warned, of course, it is my friends I know about).

So go to The Ohio, HERE, 3LD, La MaMa, The Brick, Dixon Place, Abrons, The Secret Theatre, The Chocolate Factory, Metropolitan Playhouse, and all the other smaller theaters about town.  And not just when Taylor Mac or Black Eyed Susan or a downtown luminary is performing, do it when a possible future downtown luminary is performing as well.  For my part, I pledge to look beyond those theaters and really try to seek out interesting shows I would not know about, to look at the tiny reviews with only a paragraph or two devoted and think, could that be interesting?

New York is a busy place.  It is hard to see even my friends' work, plus those few shows that have received enough buzz to make them interesting to me.  To venture into the great beyond?  It takes time, and it takes effort.

So I am asking a lot, I know.  But I am asking it because I think it is important.  If you are in any way in a position to influence future awards, please consider it.

How the OBIES are failing New York theater

Let me start by getting one thing out of the way.  I have never won an OBIE.  I doubt that I have ever been considered for an OBIE.  In my 20 years plus of working in downtown theater, I don’t believe anyone from the OBIE committee has stepped foot in the theater for any play I have written, directed, or produced.

So any screed against the current state of the OBIE Awards (and let me make no bones about it, that is what this is) should be read with the knowledge that I, of course, have a personal stake in it.  But if this were pure sour grapes (and I have at times eaten of that fruit), without any implications beyond myself, I would confine myself to my own private 3am anxieties about my life/career and leave it at that.  However, I do think my experience with the OBIES reflects a greater problem with the awards in general, and that is why I am choosing to address it.

I wouldn’t care, of course, if I didn’t think the OBIES were important.  This is the 58^th anniversary of the award, which originally was created to offset the idea that Broadway was the only place interesting and valuable can happen.  That very important work was being done in smaller theaters, with smaller budgets, with fewer commercial interests.  That in fact this is where the heart of theater lay, where the greatest theater could bloom.  The OBIES were the first to embrace the Off-Off-Broadway movement and give an equal weight to those productions.  They have gained their status through good work and high ideals.

And like many esteemed institutions of over fifty years, they have gone to pot, borne down with the weight of their own success.  Somewhere in them is the kernel of that original ideal.  But it is buried, deeply buried.

That is not to say worthy work, inspiring work, does not get recognized.  It does.  I am friends with some OBIE winners, and well do they deserve it.  I would not wish to denigrate anyone’s achievement.  But the awards now have become largely about one thing:  celebrating the achievements of those in institutional theater, perhaps a step below Broadway in budget, but nonetheless work that is highly recognized and highly touted without the help of an additional award.  It has become about the status quo.

Let us examine the awards, by the numbers.  In the last four years (I chose four instead of five because the last four were easier to research, and with the OBIES coming up Monday, I’m hoping to fill out the roster), these are the theaters which have won multiple OBIES, from the most to the least:

The Public 13, Playwrights Horizons 8, Manhattan Theater Club 6, Lincoln Center 4, Signature 4, Soho Rep 4, Foundry 3, Rattlestick 3, Classic Stage Company 2, HERE 2, Incubator Arts 2 (counting Three Pianos, which was actually on stage at New York Theater Workshop at that point), Manhattan Class Company 2, New York Theater Workshop 2 (also counting Three Pianos), St. Ann’s Warehouse 2, Theatre for a New Audience 2.

And those which have won a single OBIE in those years:  Alliance Francaise, Ars Nova (Natasha & Pierre, which had moved on to a commercial production), Atlantic Theatre Company, Barrow Street, Baryshnikov Arts Center (Fela, which had moved to Broadway), Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bushwick Star/The Debate Society , Elevator Repair Service (at The Public),  La MaMa (Good Woman of Setzuan, moved to The Public), Partial Comfort, Pig Iron, The Play Company, Primary Stages, PS 122, Second Stage, Punchdrunk, 3LD Art + Technology Center (as part of Under The Radar…not sure who main funder was…), Transport, Vineyard

Perhaps more tellingly, of 72 productions, I would say 63 unquestionably had budgets over $250,000, 2 probably were under, and 7 fall into the gray area for me.  My guess is less than 10% regardless.  I base that calculation on my years of working as a producer and occasional GM for different levels of production.

So what does all that data tell us, besides that The Public has been winning an incredible number of OBIE Awards.    In the multiple awards category, there are two champions of the indie theater scene, HERE and Incubator Arts.  Wonderful.  Among the others, Bushwick Starr, La MaMa, 3LD, and PS 122 are all represented.  Very happy to see it.  And by implication The Ohio, where Pig Iron put on Chekhov Lizardbrain. One of my favorites.

But it is not enough.  Under 10% with a budget under $250,000 is not enough.  And that is a conservative estimate, for most of these institutions have multimillion dollar budgets to sustain them that don’t even get figured into the production cost.  These are not the productions that the OBIES once endeavored to honor, productions that would be overlooked without the scrappy little awards from a scrappy downtown rag called The Village Voice.  These are highly established theaters with the budget to have themselves be seen, regardless.  The OBIES may be an extra feather in the cap or a moment of downtown cred, but you can find those same productions at the Drama Desk or the Lortel awards.

What the OBIES have done on in the past and can do, could continue to do, is to recognize the small theater productions that it first purported to promote.  And I don’t mean via the $1,000 grants that do sometimes go to small, deserving companies.  I was extremely joyful when Metropolitan Theater, which does quality work on a tiny budget, won their award a few years.  But they have been working over 20 years themselves, and it is telling that they were given an award that should by right be given to the smaller, newer companies.  But since Metropolitan had never been recognized before, the award came, well overdue.

One main reason is that the awards are a closed system.  Only a few judges are chosen, often reviewers who are only being sent to the bigger productions to begin with.  There is no easy way to invite judges in advance, nor any indication that the judges are encouraged to seek out and find the smaller productions.  The awards themselves have become star studded, competing with the Tonys in the recognition value of its presenters.  Here is Anne Hathaway!  Here is Cyndi Lauper!  Here is Meryl Streep!  They too are participating, many of them are eligible for the very same award, by dint of the fact that they chose to perform in a play with a budget of $1,000,000 instead of $5,000,000.

But I will embrace the stars.  I will even pay the $20 I am now asked for as the OBIES turn more into a money making machine and less into a celebration of downtown theater.  I will do all that if I know the names and the money are also being put towards a good cause, finding the seeds of new exciting theater and promoting it.  And I don’t mean as the exception, almost by accident, when it stumbles across a show that has received just the right amount of buzz to draw in a judge or two.  I mean consistently, as a statement of purpose.

I still believe the OBIES are capable of it.  I want them to be capable of it, because frankly no other award has the name recognition to have the same clout.  So perhaps this is no more than a plea, a call in the wilderness.  Come see us in the wilds of indie theater.  There is good work.  There is also plenty of terrible work.  But every so often, there is life-changing work.  If only it could be seen and recognized.

UPDATE: Please read more thoughts (and possible solutions) in my follow up post

20th Anniversary Memories: Audience

Dan Leventritt, Václav Havel, and Scott Simpson after Havel visits the performance of Audience at the Havel Festival

I have directed Václav Havel’s play Audience twice.

The first time was as part of a double bill, which included Slawomir Mrozek’s Striptease.  It was my first production in New York, and I was not only director, I was stage manager, set designer, lighting designer, costume designer, tech crew and  box office.  The second time was as part of the Havel Festival, and Havel himself attended.  The first time the translation was by Vera Blackwell, and I had found it in a big stack of Samuel French scripts and taken a liking to it, somewhat at random.  The second time the script was by Havel friend Jan Novák, who had been commissioned to translate all of Havel’s Vaněk plays for the festival.  The first time we averaged about eight audience members a show.  The second time we had a relatively full house every night.

Both times, the Brewmaster was played by Dan Leventritt, who seemed to me to be made for the part. Dan’s performance in 1992 stuck so strongly in my memory that I knew I wanted no one else to play the part in 2006.

Audience, for those unfamiliar with it, is a two-hander that introduced the character Vaněk, an alter ego of sorts for Havel.  Like Havel, Vaněk is a playwright who is forced to work in a brewery because the government has declared that he can no longer work as a writer.  I have written a little about the character in my essay that introduces the book The Vaněk Plays (you can find that essay here)

When I first directed the play, I was new to New York. I borrowed money from my father and brother to rent a black box theater for two weeks, but had no money for any other aspect of the production.  We rehearsed Audience in Dan’s apartment on the Upper West Side, where I and the actor playing Vaněk, Moni Damevski, crowded in around a small table.  Fortunately, a small table was about all the play demanded.

Simultaneously, I was directing Striptease with an actor I knew from college, Jason Katz (who now uses the name Jason Harris), and an actor who had appeared in my New Jersey production of Artist Descending a Staircase, Peter Brown.  Both became good friends.  They were game enough to follow me into a little empty space I found that seemed unoccupied, somewhere in midtown.  After a couple of rehearsals, we found out why it was abandoned, when men in protective suits came in and told us they were there to remove the asbestos.

The set included a table (which I found in the theater) and two freestanding doors.  I created the lighting on my own one night during what I loosely called “tech week,” running between the light boot and climbing up ladders to approximate some very basic cues.  I recorded a toilet flushing and used some Michael Nyman music as our only sound cues, except for the mixtape I made for preshow and intermission.

A day before we went up, there were still no doors.  The morning before the first performance I called my friend Mike Nuzzo.  “Can you please help me?” I asked.

 

“Sure,” he said, always game to assist.  “Maybe tomorrow?”

“Curtain is in eight hours,” I said.

He drove in from New Jersey with two doors, and with the help of a little wood from Dykes Lumber, we somehow got them to stand.  When the actors arrived at 6pm, they expressed surprise that we had been able to set up the doors at all.

My brother David, who besides being our major funder/cheerleader was a stagehand/puppeteer for Striptease (there were two giant hands that needed manipulation), came in and learned his part in the hour or so remaining.  Then we opened.

Fourteen years later, at the Ohio Theater, Václav Havel sat in the audience and watched Dan and our new Vaněk, the wonderfully talented Scott Simpson, perform the show.  Afterwards he congratulated Dan and Scott, and I introduced him to our terrific stage manager, Taylor Keith, and the rest of our staff.

It was another small theater in New York, but it was a long journey between the two productions. And I am proud to say, Havel was pleased.

Václav Havel's Vaněk Plays: Audience, Protest, Unveiling, and Dozens of Cousins

Theater 61 Press is releasing five new books of translations of Havel's plays (The Havel Collection)    Here is one of my essays from the collection, about The Vaněk Plays. The website for Theater 61 Press (put up just last month) includes a number of other essays from the collection.

Who is Vaněk? He is an alter ego for Václav Havel, though, like most of Havel’s alter egos, he is an exaggerated reflection of one aspect of the writer. He is a theatrical construct, a foil whose own presumed moral purity inspires his fellow characters to justify their moral breaches. He is a symbol of the struggle against Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime, first employed by Havel, then by Havel’s friends, and even appearing in Tom Stoppard’s Rock n’ Roll (and my own Velvet Oratorio, written to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution).

I first encountered Vaněk during my freshman year in college. I found Audience in a stack of plays at the local library, and I was immediately drawn to the work. I was passingly familiar with the political situation in Czechoslovakia, but the play brought home its human dimensions to me. What struck me at the time was the empathy Havel had for the Brewmaster. The final monologue truly brought home the fact that it is not only the dissidents who struggle within a totalitarian—or rather, as Havel put it, post-totalitarian society. It is also the seeming collaborators, forced by the structure of their society into their roles.

The Vaněk plays (along with all of Havel’s work) were banned in Czechoslovakia when they were first written, but that didn’t prevent people from performing them in their living rooms, copying them surreptitiously as samizdat (illegal, faded copies of banned work), or even recording them on vinyl. These surreptitiously distributed plays helped create Havel ’s reputation, which in turn made him the natural leader for the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

The plays were clearly based on events in Havel’s life, including his own experience in the brewery in which he worked, once working in a theater was no longer an allowable option for him. On the underground recording of Audience made during the Communist years, Havel himself played Vaněk, while his friend Landovsky played the Brewmaster. One year later, Landovsky would go on to write a Vaněk play of his own.

I have directed Audience twice, first in 1993, then in 2006 during Untitled Theater Company #61’s Havel Festival, in which we produced all of Havel’s work. Though removed from the time and place that first inspired their creation, neither Audience nor the other Vaněk plays have lost their power. They all succeed in telling a very universal story about the ways in which we are all susceptible to moral compromise, about the way our own actions can contribute to the very same problems we protest.

The most recent of Havel’s Vaněk plays, Dozens of Cousins, is more of a short, modern epilogue to Unveiling. It is published here for the first time. Despite being set in the post- Communist era, we see the same tropes, the same lying and pretense that are echoes of his earlier work.

One of Havel’s core ideas in his philosophical essays is the concept of “living in truth,” that each small compromise we make with the truth leads to larger compromises, until it snowballs into a society-wide epidemic in which lying becomes the instinctual path. It is a danger in any society, no matter what the government. We all need a Ferdinand Vaněk to keep us honest.

20th Anniversary Memories: Artist Descending a Staircase

For our 20th anniversary season, I and other company memories will be writing about all the shows that span those 20 years.  An overview of those productions is on our (newly revised) website.  

In August 1992, in a small art gallery called Emmaus Soho West, a theater company began.

It began for one reason.  I had just graduated from college, and I wanted to direct a play.  I was interning at New Dramatists in New York and living at my parent’s place in Westfield, NJ.  The internship was interesting at times, with occasional brushes with celebrity playwrights (and plain old celebrities).  And I found the New Dramatists library a very happy place to spend some time.  But I wanted to do a show.  It seemed simple enough.  I needed a venue, a script, and a few actors.

Our oldest family friends, the Jaffes, owned the perfect place: an art gallery located in Springfield, NJ.  New Dramatists offered free rehearsal space, and a space to hold auditions.  Since it was an art gallery, I decided to put on an obscure play about art, Artist Descending a Staircase, by one of my favorite playwrights, Tom Stoppard.  Sam French told me the rights were available. I placed an ad in Backstage.  The actors arrived.

I remember the first two actors who walked through the door very well.  The first was a talented actor named Henry Pincus.  The second was an even more talented actor name Peter Brown.

Things had started out well.

From there the auditions went downhill.  I remember a recent Japanese immigrant struggling to pronounce Stoppard’s dialogue, and the disappointment with which he heard the news that he would not be appropriate.  I remember meeting an actor who I literally thought would attack me in mid audition.

Ironically, I ran into him a year ago.  He has his Equity card now.  Perseverance.

I eventually had additional auditions in New Jersey.  The cast only needed four actors, and eventually, I gathered them.  Then Pincus dropped out.  More auditions.  A cast.

I should mention one other important member of the nascent theater company.  My friend, Mike Nuzzo. He helped run the auditions.  Eventually, he would record the sound cues, help build the set, sell the tickets—he himself was a filmmaker, and now I was cashing in all my chips from the help I had given him.

When sending info for listings in the Newark Star Ledger, I was asked what the company was called.  I didn’t know.  I called my friend Daniel Coble for suggestions.  Something related to being in an art gallery, I said.

“Untitled Theater Company?” he suggested.

Sounded good.  Untitled Theater Company #62, I told the newspaper.

In rehearsals, I tried to use acting exercises I had been taught in college.  Most of them seemed fairly ridiculous, but I was still trying to direct the right way, rather than the way that seemed natural to me.  But still, a good script, at least a couple good actors, maybe some clever ideas and decent blocking, some chairs, an ad in the Newark Star Ledger, and we had a show.  Simple.

It almost killed me.

I borrowed chairs for the audience from a nearby temple.  Mike and I built a light booth out of circuit breakers, and placed a chair next to it on a block build to display sculpture.  My stereo and his speakers were our sound system.  I gathered props and put them on display (My idea was that a prop from each scene would be on exhibit in the gallery, the most noteworthy of which was an authentic victrola I had borrowed from a friend.)

But the biggest challenge was the table.  There was a beautiful, handmade wood table that belonged to the gallery which I had made part of the set.  It looked wonderful.  But it was heavy.  And the actors who had to carry it on and offstage (offstage being a balcony/fire escape) felt that perhaps we should just rent a regular goddamn table.  One of the actors, Mr. Brown, spoke for the company.

“Also, we really shouldn’t charge on opening,” he said.  “Since we’ll be working with the table for the first time.”

I caved. I rented a new table.  I called the first show a preview and made the five-dollar entrance fee optional.  Harmony was restored.  But going home after that final rehearsal, I collapsed in despair.

“I never, never want to do this again,” I told Mike.

We opened the next day.  It was a great success—and not just with my grandmother, who declared she would attend every single performance (which she did).  Despite our preview night and low ticket price, I actually made money—about $80.  And the audience seemed genuinely enthusiastic.  Due to word of mouth, our final performance was sold out.

Well, maybe one more time, I thought…

While loading out of the gallery, I knocked over a display dummy.  It smashed a small window.  Replacement cost: $80.  So much for making money in the theater.

Zen and the art of publicity (how I became my own theater publicist)

I am my own publicist.

This is a relatively modern phenomenon.  It began, really, during Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  For about 15 years I had used a variety of publicists, some skilled, some less so.  When you had one who was very enthusiastic about a project, it could make a big difference.  Many, however, took the money, sent out the emails, and never bothered to attend the show.  And they are, as a whole, a major show expense, usually 5 – 10% of the overall budget.  Sometimes they have even been more.

So I started to break down what a publicist does.  Three things.  One, they give time.  They spend the time to call, to follow up, to write a press release, to do all the things that a publicist does.  Definitely, it the middle of production, you don't want that extra stress.  Two, they give expertise, in terms of publicity strategy, experience writing a press release, etc.  And three, and most importantly, they give access.  Publicists never gives out their contact lists, and for good reason.  They have spent years accumulating those contacts.  And most people not only don’t have the contact info, the would not be able to find it.

With Androids, however, I realized a few things.  One was that, in 15 years of working in theater, I had actually met a lot of the people who work in journalism.  Before Androids, I was finding that half the press came through my own contacts.  There were still a lot of people I didn’t know, but on the other hand, the more I did publicity myself, the more I would get to know them.

Two, I wrote press releases as well as many of the publicists.  Not that mine were perfect either, but I had seen enough that I had a sense of what worked.  The best and most revelatory exercise in writing a press release I had learned years before, when Kirk Bromley helped me write one for Richard Foreman’s My Head Was a Sledgehammer, which was playing at Nada.  I had taken a workshop on writing press releases that had been helpful, but he broke some of the rules I had learned.  We got great press.  I realized that the rules of press releases that I had heard were less relevant than the main goal of the press release: interest the reviewer, or the editor in the project, however you can.

Three, was that Androids was an interesting project in itself.  I knew that it would get press, whoever sold it and however it was sold.  With a less interesting project, it wouldn’t matter if I had the best publicist in the world.  Hopefully, with Androids, I would do.

So I contacted every press person I knew and started asking for emails, phone numbers, etc.  Some I was able to get.  Some I needed subterfuge to get.  Many publications guard their phone numbers carefully, and even the names of the editors are less than obvious.  You need to find the name.  You have to find the number.  And often, the publicly listed number won’t lead you to your goal.  After a year and a half of doing publicity, I’m still finally finding ways to contact some of the most elusive of the reviewers.  In one case, I had to call a California office, ask for a random employee, pretend I had made a mistake and meant to call someone else in New York, then offhandedly ask for the number—and thus I got the number the New York office had refused to give.

Funny thing is, once I actually reach the reviewer/editor, all I really need to do is make sure they get the press release.  In that way, I am less than a salesperson than a publicist.  In rare cases, I have seen a publicist truly push a show.  But alone, I don’t feel comfortable about pushing myself.  So I depend on the press release to do the talking for me.  Which, with Andorids, it did.

Simultaneously, Tom Berger, my assistant at the time, went for the blogs and the indie theater review sites, which don’t have quite as big a firewall.  But still, they required time and effort

How did it turn out?  For Androids, very well.  We got major papers in, we had a lot of blog reviews, and we sold out.  For Pangs of the Messiah, it was less exciting—but we still got some major publications to see the show: The New York Times, Time Out and Backstage  all dropped by.

In fact, it's gone well enough that I have thought about hiring myself out as a publicist, at times.  After wall, all these contacts I've gathered over the years are worth something...

And for Lathe of Heaven—well, we’ll see.  We’ve had some promises of reviewers, big and small.  But you never know till you get close.  Fingers crossed.

And for future projects?  I don't know.  There's still the time factor, I don't even know how I manage the time.  Someday, I may revert to having a publicist again.  But for now, I'll see how it goes.

The Tao of Adaptation

            What is the essence of The Lathe of Heaven?  This is my third stage adaptation of a science fiction novel, and I have adapted and translated numerous other works (I connect the two, in my own work, for all of my translations have been adaptations of sorts as well).  My first question is always what is the essence, and my second is, how do I convey that essence theatrically?

            I tend to think that the essence lies in the ideas that behind the content—not surprising, as I run a Theater of Ideas.  Obviously, Taoism is a major influence on Lathe, the title is based on a (somewhat mistranslated) Chuang Tzu quote, and in the novel Le Guin punctuated the chapters with other quotes from Taoist sources.  Buy beyond mere quotation, the ideas of balance, of nature, of inaction versus action, of the value of uncertainty—these are all Taoist ideas.

            So I knew I wanted to drop those ideas in, with a minimum of exposition and a maximum of emotional content.  Music seemed the obvious medium.  The poetic, elliptical nature of Lao Tzu’s writing seemed very much to lend itself to the style of art music that our composer, Henry Akona, often enjoys writing.  So I used Le Guin’s translation of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching as a major inspiration for the lyrics. And stillness while in motion—what better way to convey that than a static set, put in motion by video images?

            Music and video also answered a practical matter, the complex question of how to portray a dream onstage.  I wanted a set that was a canvas, on which dreams could be painted by video, and music that evoked dream logic and implied a connection to something beyond itself.

            I was particularly drawn by the idea of uncertainty, especially in a work like Lathe that references one of my favorite topics, neurology.  I have been reading a lot about our irrational, neurological imperative towards certainty (I particularly recommend Robert Burton’s On Being Certain).  As Haber says in the play, “The brain craves certainty,” and indeed we are drawn to those who seem to possess it.  How long would a political candidates last if, when asked for a cure for the economy, they simply shrugged their shoulders and said: “I don’t know.  I don’t fully understand money, and I certainly don’t know for sure what to do about a recession.  I don’t think anyone does, and only fools pretend to.”

            And yet, what true, justifiable certainty do we possess on any topic?  Is the answer then to struggle for understanding, or simply to realize that some of the most important questions we have don’t have any knowable answers?

            The belief in our own ability to understand and solve these unsolvable questions has led humanity down many paths, one of the more extreme being failed utopianism.  It is those with the greatest convictions who often can do the most harm.

            That, at least, was my initial connection into this work, and when I found that, all else flowed. The word “flowed “of course evokes water, one of the symbols used often in Lathe and in Taoism. And indeed, when I am connected to a work, it can sometimes feel like a I rafting through a river of words, not exacting guiding the raft but learning how the river moves and how best to look elegant while keeping my balance.

            I hope I will manage to look elegant.  Though I would be thankful if, at least, I can keep my balance.

Ursula Le Guin, Kickstarter, and The Lathe of Heaven

One of my favorite peculiar benefits of working in theater is that I have had the opportunity to work with artists I have admired from afar.  Ursula K. Le Guin is an author I admired even as a child, for I began reading her Earthsea trilogy (it was but a trilogy then...) at the age of nine.  Little did I imagine at the time that one day I would be adapting one of her books for the stage (we present The Lathe of Heaven in June at 3LD), corresponding with her, and flying out to Portland to meet her so that she might, graciously, help on our kickstarter campaign.

This is especially kind of her, knowing, as I do, that she hates the whole idea of kickstarter.

For me, it was a wonderful excuse to meet her in person, to visit her home, and to interview her.  The interview was for the kickstarter video, but of course it gave the opportunity to have a structured conversation about The Lathe of Heaven and her work as an author.  I have to say, I was in no way disappointed.  My only regret is that the kickstarter video allows only a small part of the interview to be shown.  She was charming, good-humored, and sharp in her responses, much as I would have expected.

Her house was cozy, complete with cat and her husband Charles, who was equally welcoming.  Afterwards, we had lunch and visited the Japanese Gardens, along with another guest who was adapting The Left Hand of Darkness for a small two-person production in Japan.

And my nine-year old self has to stop and marvel, as we strolled past the waterfall, the flowers, and the sculptures, that here I was, not only spending some time with the author of the Earthsea books, but discussing my plans for our production.

Anyway, the kickstarter campaign is up and running, and we have entered rehearsals!  More updates from the front soon.

Truth, Fiction, Theater, and Journalism

I am angry with Mike Daisey.

I am not angry that he lied in his show.  I am saddened by that, saddened both for him and for the integrity of his worthy cause, the working conditions of the workers in China. I am saddened that his shows, for me, will now no longer have any power, for Daisey’s artistic work depended on that sense that you were hearing a personal, true account, told artfully.

What I am angry about is that, in an effort to save himself, he threw theater under the bus.

When caught in his lies, Daisey’s defense was, what I do is not journalism, it is theater.  His implication is that theater has different standards for truth, even when it purports to be factual.  That it is OK to lie onstage, even when you are telling the audience what you are speaking is the truth.

Ira Glass brought Daisey back on his show in order to remedy the breach of trust between This American Life and the NPR audience, brought about by their failure to fact check.  Daisey, apparently, has no similar compunctions.  He is willing to implicate all of us who sometimes try to tell the truth onstage, the factual truth, in his lie.

I understand, of course.  I have lied.  I have lied when telling a story, not even deliberately, but because it’s quicker and easier, and hey, it’s close enough.  I have struggled to tell documentary fact onstage, and I have been forced at times to resort to fiction.

In a writing class, I recently gave my students an exercise.  Take down a conversation verbatim, I said, and we will perform it like a play.  They did.  Afterwards, I quizzed them—who had actually written down what was said word for word, and who had fudged and filled in—to make the dialogue flow, or to make it funnier, or to cover up an embarrassing moment, or just because it was actually hard to remember and note the exact words.

Every single one of them had fudged.  Every single one of them had lied.

(..and here, am I lying?  One or two claimed to have told the truth, but reading the dialogue, I didn’t believe them…so was what I just wrote a fudge or a lie?)

I have also been interviewed and written about in a number of different papers, including, on several occasions, The New York Times.   I have to say, not once was the article written exactly factual.  Sometimes the journalist has tried and failed, fact checking but still missing some important details.  Sometimes the journalist hasn’t even tried.  And often, the journalist has wanted to tell a story of his or her own, and skewed the facts to fit into that story.

Is it conscious?  Is it deliberate?  Probably not.  But it is consistent.

Right now, I am General Managing a play called The Soap Myth, a play dealing the question of fact and fiction.  In it, historians reject a certain possible truth about a detail of the Holocaust events, because they feel that even the slightest doubt give deniers power.  When we all went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage downtown, one of the curators was asked, when a journalist writes about what you do, do they ever get it right?

No.  Not once, I was told.

So the truth is elusive.  The truth is hard to define.  And sometimes, even with the best of intention, one lies.

And then there are other times, when one makes the conscious decision to lie.  And rationalizes it.  And tell oneself it is the truth, not because it is the truth, but because it feels like the truth.  Because even if the facts don’t fit, they should fit.  So, it’s not actually lying, is it?

It is.

It’s also very human.  I am not angry at Mike Daisey for being human.  I am angry that his rationalizations will injure the whole field of documentary fiction.

Those denials, those rationalizations, are also very human I realize.  I am holding Mike Daisey to a high standard, perhaps an unfair one.  A higher standard than most of the journalists I have encountered.  That is not despite the fact that he works in theater.  It is because of it.

Remembrances of Václav Havel

Sometimes, you are lucky.

William Niederkorn and Václav Havel

Sometimes, the man you meet is equal to the man you imagined.

I don’t remember the first time I heard Havel’s name.  Perhaps during a news broadcast.  Perhaps when I read Martin Esslin’s Theater of the Absurd.  I do know that I had read and fallen in love with his work by college, and I was overwhelmed by the idea that an absurdist playwright led a revolution and became the president of a nation.

His play, Audience was the first I directed in New York, the first New York production of my theater company.  For twelve years after that, I admired him from afar.

Then I came up with idea, called the Havel Festival.  My idea was, we would do every play he had ever written.  People now knew Havel the politician so well, I wanted to remind them about Havel the playwright.

I approached his agents.  We scheduled it for his 70^th birthday.  By lucky chance, Gregory Mosher was planning a residency for Havel at Columbia at the same point, which meant he would be in town for the full length of the festival.

Havel with the cast and crew of The Memo

He came.

I met him for the first time at a reception being held by Columbia for his arrival.  I remember chatting with Oliver Sacks, another hero of mine, as I stood about four feet away from him, waiting to shake his hand.  Havel turned and graciously shook my hand.  I tried in the noise to introduce myself, and he nodded pleasantly, but seemed too tired to pick up exactly who I was.

Halka Kaiserova, the Czech consul general, explained it to him.  Suddenly, he beamed.  You don’t know what it means to an author, when you do all of his work, he told me.  Thank you.

I saw him at various functions over the next few weeks, and he would always greet me with a beaming smile.  He assured me he would be coming to see the production of the Memo I directed.  Some others, too, he said at the time, though I wasn’t sure what he meant.

Robert Lyons, me, and Havel at The Ohio

When he arrived at the Ohio Theater, he was surrounded by flashing cameras and attending by an entourage of secret service and dignitaries.  The flashing cameras didn’t affect him.  He was used to it.  He assured me his secret service members knew how to behave in a theater and would not disturb the production.

I remember when I watched him laugh.  It was early on, a small visual joke I had put into the script.  I sat anxiously in the back row and watched him with great relief.  And he kept on laughing, all show long.

He came back again, soon after, to see his plays Audience (which I had remounted) and Protest (directed by Robert Lyons, who runs the Ohio).  He was loved them both and was particularly taken with the actor Richard Toth, who appeared in Protest.

Havel and his wife Dasha with cast/crew of Temptation

He came back again.  And again.  And again.  Till he felt like a fixture in The Ohio and The Brick, where many of his other plays were being produced.

Throughout, he exuded a genuine warmth and a genuine enthusiasm about the work.  We had some celebrities who participated in the festival, but he was not impressed by celebrity.  He was as gracious and giving to every actor as he was to Kathleen Turner or Dustin Hoffman.  He did not care whether he was in a small theater or a large one.  He cared that we cared about the writing.  And we did, deeply.

Henry Akona, me, and Havel

On the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution he came again, and listened as Trey Kay’s band, Uncle Moon, did a tribute to the Velvet Underground.  He brought Madeleine Albright with him and they sat in the tiny Brick Theater and drank and celebrated with us.  At one point he same to the microphone and made a speech in Czech.  Halka Kaiserova translated:

Havel with Trey Kay of Uncle Moon

“There is no place I would rather spend the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.” It was in a small theater like The Brick where the revolution started, after all.

Havel and me at Joe's Pub

We were able to spend the last evening of the Festival at Joe’s Pub together, as Uncle  Moon played again, and Havel regaled me with tales about Lou Reed and his early experiences in theater.  As we sat together it suddenly occurred to me anew that this was a man who I had idolized from afar, whose ideas and writing had changed a whole country.  But now, he felt like an old friend.

We saw each other occasionally after that.  In London, in Philadelphia, in Prague, and most recently in Brno, when he flew me out the see a production of his newest work (or his reconfigured old work) The Pig.  Somehow, every time I saw him, I suddenly had this fear that this time, I would be disappointed.  This time he wouldn’t live up to the ridiculously high expectations that I had for him.

Havel in Brno (in sunglasses) watching a production of Audience

But when he saw me and welcomed me with a beaming smile, those fears melted away.  For Václav Havel was more than a great leader and a great writer and a great thinker.  He was a true and kind person, who lived the philosophies he preached.  He was the man who would beam at me every time he saw me.  He was a friend.

I will miss him very much.

Playing Dreidel with Judah Maccabee, a Hannukah play: the intro essay

My new book, Playing Dreidel with Judah Maccabee (a Hannukah play), is out and available!  For those who want a sneak preview, here is the intro essay to the book:

            Who was Judah Maccabee?

            What was his world like during the time he led a war to take the temple back?
            How did that war become a holiday celebrated by lighting candles, playing dreidel, singing songs, eating latkas, and giving presents?
            When I decided to write a play about Hannukah, I started thinking about the fact that I never really knew the answers to any of those questions as a child.  I knew that Judah Maccabee was a hero, and that his name was mentioned in a few songs.  And I knew he had something to do with getting the temple back.  But beyond that, I didn’t know or really wonder much else.
            So who was he?
            Judah Maccabee lived in a time when most Jews believed that Judaism could not be practiced outside the ancient temple. Yet the temple had been taken away, so those Jews found themselves unable to observe Jewish rituals in the way they felt those rituals should be observed.
            This was before there were rabbis, or the Talmud.  The seeds of the rabbinic movement perhaps started in those days without the temple, but it would take 200 years for that change to truly happen.  In Judah Maccabee’s time, 165 BCE, there were only priests, and priests needed the temple.
            As far as Judah Maccabee was concerned, the survival of the Jewish religion was at stake.  In essence, Judah Maccabee was a soldier, a man driven to lead a rebellion against his Hellenistic rulers because he believed that otherwise, his religion would be destroyed.
            What is remarkable is that, against all odds, he won.  He regained the temple.
            Then, 200 years later, the temple was destroyed.
            So why the celebration?
            According to the Book of Maccabees, an eight-day celebration was held after the altar was rededicated.  This may have been a belated celebration of Sukkot.  There is no mention of lighting candles, or even the miracle of the oil lasting.  But in some ways, perhaps, the Maccabean celebration of their victory could be considered the first celebration of Hannukah.
            It wasn’t until 250 years later, after the destruction of the Temple, that we can find a passing mention of the holiday (just known then as “The Festival of Lights.”) And it was 600 years before instructions about how to celebrate Hanukkah appear in the Gemara (part of the Talmud).
            So perhaps Hanukkah is a reminder of what the Temple once meant to Judaism, rather than a simple celebration of a victory. After all, the menorah deliberately resembles the Eternal Light, a seven-pronged golden candlestick that once stood in the sanctuary. And the story of the oil lasting is certainly another reminder of days when the Temple was the center of Judaism.
            But the dreidels, the latkes, the songs, the presents: they all belong to a different, more modern tradition. A tradition that would be almost incomprehensible to Judah Maccabee if he saw it.
            Would it even feel like the same religion, I wondered?
            That was the question that inspired me to write this play. The answer I came up with involves a common theme, a theme that I feel connects Judah Maccabee’s battles with more modern Jewish struggles.
            In the end, there is no way to truly know who Judah Maccabee was, or what he would think of our world and Judaism today. When grasping at the tiny bits of information that still exist about a man who lived over two thousand years ago, all one can truly do is imagine. I based my tale on facts, but I also based it my own imaginings. Judah Maccabee the character may or may not be anything like the real Judah Maccabee who lived over two thousand years ago. But this is how I imagine him.

Director's note for Pangs of the Messiah

Theater is about building up and tearing down.  It is the most ephemeral of art forms, not just because it only exists live and in the moment, but because it must be literally destroyed after every production.  I have spent weeks upon weeks of 18 plus hour days building a set, only to have to tear it into nothingness when a production is over.

I hate the destruction.  I hate creating something that’s beautiful, that’s mine (or more correctly ours, as theater is also about that collaboration), and then having to demolish it at the end.  I know it will happen, from the time I begin creation.  But when that moment of destruction comes, it hurts.

How much more would that destruction hurt if it were the home I built, that I had lived in for 40 years?  Or my family had lived in for 200 years?  Or 2000?

The West Bank settlers are people who, for the most part, are living out their utopian philosophies.  They arrived believing that they are fulfilling a mission both political and religious, that they are bringing the Messiah and redemption by their very presence.

Some, probably most, still have that utopian hope.  But regardless of what might have brought them to the West Bank initially, houses that have been built cannot easily be destroyed.  It has happened—even recently, during the disengagement from Gaza in 2005.  But it wasn’t easy then, and should the West Bank settlements be abandoned, it will almost certainly be harder.

It seems fitting that one of the sticking points in the struggle for peace is about a much more ancient land dispute.  For if the Messiah is to come, it is believed, a new Temple will have to built, and it will be built on the Temple Mount.  Right now, another building stands there: the Dome of the Rock, built originally in the 7^th Century on the advice of a former rabbi who had converted to Islam.  This too was both a political and religious act, and the relationship to the ancient Temple was no coincidence.

But whatever the circumstances under which the mosque was built, it is now a fact.  It is an incredible building, representing the work and beliefs of people going back nearly 1,400 years.  It is another utopia, one in which only those of the Muslim faith are allowed.

The Messiah waits for the rebuilding of the Temple because the wound from that destruction from 2000 years ago still hasn’t completely healed.   Here in New York, we are only 10 years away from the destruction of the Twin Towers.  That was enough to start a war or two, for us.

When this show is over, some pieces of it will disappear into storage.  And some will be destroyed forever.  It is expected.  My own utopian vision allows for it; I believe in the power of theater, and I know that part of that power lies in its ephemeral nature. 

But if I believed that the destruction of my set would also mean the destruction of my utopia, the destruction of my ability to work in the theater, I don’t think I could bring myself to allow it.  No matter what the general good.  No matter how strong the arguments for it.  I would not allow it.

Even if someone else’s utopia was destroyed instead.