I'm Stuck

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Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Jeffrey Keenan.

I’m stuck.

Seriously.

I’ve known about this gig for Shay for months—honestly, since last year’s successful first week.  But in typical Jeffrey fashion, I decided the best approach to this—and frankly, every aspect of my life—is to essentially wing it.  To trust the winds of inspiration will come blowing up my skirt at just the right moment to take me and my keyboard soaring over the Off-Off-Broadway landscapes below, offering questionable entertainment and insight into how one produces ancient, live theater in this new digitized media age.

But right now, I’m stuck.  The only wind blowing around my skirt is exit only. The only inspiration I’ve felt in the last week is the fellatio scene in the BBC series Skins that I plowed through on Netflix last week when I was home sick with the flu.

So I’ve decided, right here and right now, that THAT is going to be my topic: the flu, and how my recent brush with mortality is somehow in any way relatable to producing on Off-Off-Broadway.

Not so much the persistent body aches, the delusion-inducing fevers, the chills and quakes or the persistent hacking as your lungs try to leave your body, but the rather adult idea that all of that fun—all of that lost income from not going to work, all of the pain and sleeplessness, all of the discomfort and monies spent on marginally effective over-the-counter remedies could have been avoided with just a little tiny bit of planning known commonly as the flu shot.   (This should be good—go pop some popcorn or grab a bottle of wine.  If nothing else, my flailing should be comical to watch.)

Firstly, there is nothing flimsy about me at all.  I’m 6’3”, shoulders like a bison, legs that could best be described as Bunyonesque, and I weigh slightly more than one of those two-seater Smart cars. I am a robust man.  Nothing as small as flu virus, shaped in my mind like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, would have the power to bring me to my knees!  That takes something much larger and far more powerful—like a European tourist in chaps and armbands on the roof of the Eagle.  His name was Andreanus and he made my New Year’s Eve quite the memorable experience—just ask Ron Bopst. 

I digress.

Had I taken the threat seriously, I would have chosen to be inoculated and marched into a Rite Aid, or a Walgreens, or a Duane Reade, or a CVS, or any one of the thousands of pharmacies that litter the streets of New York and gotten poked by a well-meaning pharmacist—a much more productive poking than any other I may have referenced preciously in this post. Or to that end, gone to my physician and had him or one of his staff members do it.  I realize that I’m quite fortunate to have a physician (and insurance) in this economy, but even for those who don’t, the $20 or so that it would cost to get a flu shot off the street is definitely worth it.

How does any of this relate to producing?  How is my “mewling and puking” supposed to translate into inspirational, beginning-of-the-year, ‘throw your chin to heaven in affirmation of your gifts and purpose to mankind’ advice?

(Twenty points to the first person to correctly identify the Shakespearean reference in that last paragraph.)

Plan.

PLAN.

Recognize that regardless of what you THINK you know, you can NEVER be prepared for everything.  UNLESS you have PLANNED to prepare for everything!

Talent is easy.  Type “dancing parrot” into YouTube and you’ll get more examples of talent than you’ll ever, ever need.  But planning is much more difficult.  Planning requires a maturity and patience that separates the merely inspired from the truly driven.  Planning teaches you humility by demonstrating exactly how much you don’t know.  Planning saves you money, saves you time, saves you effort and saves you embarrassment.

And planning, should you bow your head and allow yourself to learn from it, will teach you that given the option between new gloves or a flu shot, go with the damn flu shot.

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Guest Blogger of the Week: Jeffrey Keenan

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Please help me welcome our first blogger of 2011, Jeffrey Keenan.

Jeffrey was our very first guest blogger and we are happy to have him kick start 2011. You can check out Jeffrey's 2010 blogs:

Get Yours!

Everything in My Life is Big

I Love Cher

The One That Almost Didn't Happen 

Don’t let that fresh “new year’s smell” go to waste!

In the seven years between 1997 and 2004, Jeffrey Keenan wrote, directed, produced and/or acted in over 30 professional theatrical productions in and around Washington D.C., including The Shakespeare Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Olney Theater Center, and the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in addition to refounding and leading in 1997 The Actors’ Theater of Washington (currently Ganymede Arts), to explore and investigate the American GLBT experience. In those seven years, Mr. Keenan’s productions, actors and designers were nominated for numerous Helen Hayes Awards and national Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Awards. His productions grossed more than $1,000,000 dollars in theaters never larger than 125 seats. The Washington Post once called him “perfection.” In the summer of 2004, he tired of consistent poverty so he sold out. He now works for a Manhattan law firm making more money than he’s ever made before in his entire life. He had the great good fortune to move to Manhattan four years ago and was honored to be asked to write the 2006-2008 New York Innovative Theater Awards shows. Mr. Keenan is thankful every day that he lives in a city with so many incredibly diverse and creative theater artists and he wants some of them to hire him to direct again for those moments when he's not rolling around in his piles and piles of cash.

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Don’t let that fresh “new year’s smell” go to waste!

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Jeffrey Keenan.

Today is my last post and this has been an incredibly fun week of Guest Blogging for y’all here at the New York Innovative Theater Awards blog.

If advertising slogans are correct, producing live theater is sort of like joining the army: It’s the toughest job you’ll ever love. No, it’s not feeding displaced refugees from Afghanistan, and it’s not serving the poverty and disease stricken of Haiti, and it’s not digging a well for the thirsty children of Sudan, but it’s a way of keeping your humanity intact. It’s a way of checking in with the collective unconscious while hanging out with your friends and exploring the whys and wherefores of being human. It allows you to stretch your creative muscles and begs of you deeper compassion and communication skills. It opens up worlds that you might never be able to travel to otherwise, and if you’re really, really lucky, people applaud when you’re done.

Allow yourselves to make mistakes but ALWAYS be sure to learn from them. Don’t be afraid to make your friends and families get involved, but ALWAYS make sure they know how much responsibility you’re giving them. See everything everyone does. Read every single Shakespeare play (except Timon of Athens and King John—those are real stinkers).

Surround yourself with incredibly talented and smart and beautiful and motivated people. If you, yourself, are none of those things, become them. You really only have to believe it to make it so.

Money is the worst excuse possible to deny yourself ANYTHING—certainly throwing a show together. Can’t afford a theater? Find a bar who wants the business. Can’t find a bar? Use the largest apartment you can cajole out of your friends. Invite the most talented people you know to sit down and read a play together. WRITE SOMETHING.

Perhaps I’m not as strong with encouraging action as I am at taking it, but I hope for those of you who’ve produced something theatrical, this emboldens your resolve. For those of you considering producing something, I hope this pushes closer to your goals. For those of you who wonder how the hell I got this gig, I’m right there with ya! Let’s go have a drink and talk about something else!

2010 is still in its infancy after the horrible gestation period that was 2008 and 2009. Don’t let that fresh “new year’s smell” go to waste! Make up your mind to get involved. You have nothing at all to lose.

Thanks again to the New York Innovative Theater Awards Foundation and their amazing Executive Producers: Shay Gines, Nick Micozzi and Jason Bowcutt, and Morgan Tachco for all their help, support and thoughtfulness, and Christopher Borg for allowing me to shamelessly use him as blog fodder.

Here’s to a very productive year ahead!

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The One That Almost Didn't Happen

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Jeffrey Keenan.

I don’t wish to sound too self-important, but if it wasn’t for me, Christopher Borg would still be slingin’ hash in some two-bit restaurant in a sketchy neighborhood of Washington DC.

I only mention that little tidbit of information because Christopher Borg yesterday insisted that I, as this week’s guest blogger, relate the story to you of how his break-out solo show—Dan Butler’s The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me—nearly didn’t happen.

After the trial-by-fire that was my first production, learning to be both producer and director for the first time at the same time, I didn’t relish the thought of donning both of those caps for my second show. Subsequently, I’d met and agreed to work with a man in Washington who was brilliant at telling you exactly what you wanted to hear, sometimes even before you knew to ask the question. We’ll call him Ted.

Ted’s job was to more or less act as the production manager. I’d pay for everything and make all the final creative decisions and Ted’s job was to execute it. I was the architect—he was the engineer. And we were both very excited about the prospects of what this relationship was going to allow each of us to accomplish individually as well as a team. The sky was the limit!

I had been worried that a one-man show was going to be pretty boring with just one guy (especially someone like Borg) standing alone on a stage talking for two hours. And having built an entire 30’ wide metropolitan apartment on stage for my previous show—complete with a functional working kitchen, patio deck with sliding glass door and furniture to fill the whole thing—my next show was going to have to be pretty spectacular to outshine the last.

At Ted’s urging, he and I designed a very involved and modern set incorporating ten different levels with video screens and live cameras to incorporate not only live footage as each performance played out, but also to create multiple videoscapes that would run simultaneous to the monologues giving them greater depth of meaning we thought, and wider visual appeal. Ted’s undergrad degree was in video production so he easily convinced me that he could not only create all of these videoscapes but he could easily tech them into the show as well. Envisioning this clean, sleek production, I was only too happy to give Ted all of this responsibility so I could focus on the other aspects of running a producing theater company.

The morning we moved into the theater to begin building and installing this ultra sleek and modern set, Ted didn’t show up. The theater was only about a half mile from my apartment, so I was there bright and early to let the various delivery guys load in about a half ton of wood for the platforming and all of the electrical and video equipment for the spectacle.

Ted, I eventually found out, had literally left the country overnight. His father had unexpectedly fallen ill in Africa and in a fit of blind concern, Ted up and flew half way around the world without telling anyone. In his possession at the time were all of the design plans, all of the costuming, all of the props—everything we had been working with or planning to use for the production because at the time I didn’t have a committed rehearsal or performance space in which I could store anything. And as a producer, Ted was adamant that he wanted the responsibility and control associated with owning and producing a show.

I was apoplectic. We were approximately 10 days away from opening a show I’d been advertising and selling tickets to for months and I suddenly didn't have a single production element I’d been planning on. I couldn’t cancel the show because every single dollar I had (and quite a few that I was counting on getting) were tied up in the show, so I sat down with Borg and tried to figure out what to do.

Ultimately, we did exactly the opposite of what we’d planned. I convinced all of the vendors from whom we had purchased or rented equipment to return to the theater and pick it all up and Borg and I embarked on reblocking the whole piece. We didn’t use any set at all—just the bare brick walls of the existing stage complete with heating ducts, electrical box, and old, boarded up windows. My lighting designer’s plot was no longer applicable, so we spent two long days in tech redesigning the lighting. The only set piece we used, as trite as it sounds, was a solitary coat rack on which hung all of the new costumes that Borg and I threw together at the last minute to try and create thirteen distinct and believable characters.

We somehow got the show open, and four long days later, The Washington Post ran a review on the front page of the Style section, complete with a picture of Borg as the drag queen from the show. It was an out and out rave. And as might be expected, one of the more congratulatory aspects of the review remarked on how amazingly effective simple staging can be to highlight good writing and great acting.

The Post did make one mistake though: the phone number listed to buy tickets was actually my home phone number. That telephone rang non-stop for three straight days. It was heaven and hell all at the same time.

I would never advise anyone to willfully scrap an entire design concept at the last minute, but I can’t underscore strongly enough that less is almost always more. Focus your time and money on your actors—there’s no better way to spend it.

Question of the Blog: How do you create spectacle with no money?

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I love Cher.

Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Jeffrey Keenan.

I love Cher. The reasons are many and varied. I’m a homosexual: that’s one. She sings catchy tunes: that’s two. Bob Mackey’s gowns: uh, ok, that’s still one. The movie Moonstruck: that’s three. Longevity: that’s four.

I also like Cher because her name is a homophone: a word pronounced the same as another but one that differs in meaning, whether spelled the same way or not, i.e., "Cher" and "share."

Sharing is brilliant idea when it comes to producing local and/or economically conscience theater.

The first crossover hit of my short but illustrious career as a producer in DC was with the locally written show Courting Chris. Courting Chris was a sort of Cyranno de Bergerac meets Will & Grace—perfectly timed for the culture and very, very funny to boot. Sam Schwartz, Jr. principally wrote the piece, but he was also my “Creative Other” at the time. Whenever I was directing his work, he would attend nearly every rehearsal sharing ideas on character and staging, and likewise, when I asked for rewrites, he would invite me work on the text with him. We shared those responsibilities.

The initial theater for Courting Chris was a tiny, 50 seat house in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Washington DC, far removed from the theater centers downtown and in the northwest quadrant. Small shows had been happening there for years, mostly as neighborhood or community projects not aspiring to great heights. But Courting Chris was a different show: new, topical, well written, funny… the audience and first-round reviewers all agreed.

The Theater Alliance under whose auspices I was producing Courting Chris, an organization that has since gone on to become one of the most highly respected small theater companies in Washington DC, at the time was a tiny little thing. Once the reviewers and word-of-mouth had sparked huge interest in the show, there simply wasn’t the space or time available in that little house to accommodate the crush for tickets.

The Church Street Theater in DC at the time was a rental house. 150 seats in a charming nineteenth century former girls' school gymnasium that had for years acted as a neighborhood playhouse. Luckily, it also sat smack dab in the middle of the “gayborhood,” just off of 17^th on a picturesque little street north of downtown.

Church Street needed a show and my show needed a venue. Because of scheduling vagaries, we lost two of the four actors in the intervening weeks, and we spent a hectic pre-opening two weeks rehearsing new actors and retooling the show to fit in to this much larger and more accommodating space, but we opened mid July to a resounding flurry of glowing reviews.

A typical show in DC runs for 4-5 weeks. This show ran for fifteen. And Mr. Schwartz was nominated for his first Helen Hayes Award for best new script.

Before I’d hung up the reins after seven years of producing and directing in DC, I had produced theater in eight different venues across the city and had co-produced shows with at least five different organizations. In each case everyone involved benefited because each of us was willing and able to do the requisite work. And all of those relationships evolved out of friendships and professional respect.

Cher was particularly amazing in Moonstruck. But she wouldn’t have glowed half as brightly if Nicholas Cage hadn’t been there to absorb and reflect her light. If I do say so myself, they “Cher’d” the screen together brilliantly.

Question of the Blog:
With whom could you co-produce?
What do you bring to the table?
What do you need?

For a review of Courting Chris, click here.

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Everything in my life is big

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This post was contributed by guest blogger of the week, Jeffrey Keenan.


Everything in my life is big. My first apartment in New York City was (is) a two-bedroom in Chelsea. My personal (and amazing) recipe for Macaroni & Cheese easily feeds six people (unless one of them is Jason Bowcutt and then it feeds, um, well, only, um, Jason Bowcutt). A single pair of my pants alone could easily house as many as three different Vietnamese families.

Everything in my life is big.

The first show I produced so many years ago began production with a budget of nearly $30,000. At the time, being a naïve, first-time producer/director, I assumed that amount was entirely logical. Hell, I’d heard that some Broadway shows were costing into the seven figures back then (the mid 90s) so $30K was a drop in the proverbial bucket.

Except that I didn’t have $30K. I didn’t have anything close to $30K. At the time, I was working as that pathetic voice you’d get in the morning when you called to complain that your Washington Post landed in a puddle and was unreadable, or you were going on vacation and didn’t want newspapers piling up outside your front door, or perhaps the damn thing didn’t even come at all. I was that shlub you screamed at at 6:30 in the morning. And for that wonderful abuse, I was paid $12 an hour.

Not having the capital to throw at the show from my own life (I'm from very humble beginnings in rural Ohio: Dad, a pastor; Mom, a substitute teacher), and having no formal training in business (I got a BA from one of those small, pricey private Ohio colleges for which I’m still paying back loans), I did the only thing I could: I decided to pay the damn thing off on the back end.

A business decision like this would only be made by a very, very stupid person or an incredibly optimistic one. Luckily I qualified as both. "Paying on the back end" is the process of using the profits of the show to pay for it. If you can't immediately see the flaws in that plan, send me an email and I'll enumerate them for you. The first show I produced in DC was called Party: an amusing one-act excuse to get seven naked men together on stage.

DC was, and still is, a rather conservative cultural town and no one at that time had ever seen seven penises gathered in one place at the same time outside of DC’s notorious gay strip clubs and the occasional Republican Congressman’s house party. It was my fervent belief that the impressively sized gay population of DC would support theater if it A) made them laugh and B) made them hard.

Turns out I was right.

I started advertising the show six months from its opening date. I begged, borrowed and stole from everyone I knew to get the barest minimum of cash together to put a deposit on the theater and to buy the materials for the set. I believe I didn’t pay rent on my apartment for three or four months prior to opening (luckily, one of those impressively sized gay DCers happened to be my landlord). Another friend had just started an event ticketing company and he was anxious for clients so I signed him up immediately. With the ticketing work and patron care spoken for, I concentrated on publicizing and producing the show.

The DC gay press let me set up business accounts to charge my full and half page ads, one of which I ran every single week three months prior to opening. I convinced The Washington Post to do a news story about this young, gay upstart (me) bringing liberal gay theater to DC. I got local bars to promote the show and pay for personal appearances of the cast. During the gay pride march of 1997, I convinced one of the buildings along Dupont Circle to allow me, just for the day, to hang a huge promotional poster of my mostly nude cast that could be seen for blocks. I borrowed a friend’s sports car and rode the scantily clad boys through the parade route handing out thousands of postcards. And somehow, the show opened to a sold-out house on a Friday in late June.

The first check I got from the ticketing vendor the following Thursday was for nearly $18,000. And we were sold out solid for the first six weeks. The show ran a total of fourteen weeks before we closed it for another show already contracted to come into the space. It grossed a total of just over $160,000. And in Washington DC in 1997, I paid my actors $300 a week.

Never let anyone tell you it can’t be done. While this story reflects a lot of luck and a huge amount of hard work, it’s still ample evidence that there is no reason on the face of this earth why you can’t work to make your shows happen. Money is a minor obstacle. Faith in yourself is a vastly larger one.

As a betting man, I’m pretty sure you can do it. If you’re willing to do it. (And you have enough actor friends who don’t mind getting naked.)

Question of the Blog: How important do you think audience response is to your goal?

Coming Soon: Rough Waters Ahead!

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Get Yours!

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This post was contributed by guest blogger of the week, Jeffrey Keenan.

True story: My great grandmother on my father’s side was a dime-a-dance girl in Akron, Ohio in the first blooming seasons of the industrial 20^th Century. The family spoke of it in hushed tones years and years later with discern because Grammy, as she was then called, was not going gently into that dark night and seemed to be getting more and more out of hand as each successive year was ripped from the calendar.

Grammy, from my five-year-old perspective, possessed an indomitable spirit and an irrepressible personality. She could make all the family adults blush with embarrassment and concern announcing to the assembled grand kids that it was time for Penny Grab! Penny Grab was a game where Grammy would produce a HUGE mason jar of pennies which she would dump into her lap and we grandkids would nearly kill each other trying to claim as much coinage as we individually could. We would all hover on our knees like salivating hyenas mere feet away from Grammy as she would eye each of us with a knowing, anticipating grin. Finally, she yelled “Go!”

We lunged at her lap and grabbed and scooped and hoarded as many of the coins as our little pointy, diggy hands could get. I don’t really remember Grammy’s specific reaction to this game—thankfully, I was too busy grabbing at the bounty of her booty to recall any raised-chin, closed-eye, languid smiles—but I remember my parents and grandparents suddenly drawn to other pressing pursuits whenever Grammy pulled out one of her jingling jars.

Both of those pieces of information about my long-dead paternal Great Grandmother I share to illustrate a pretty simple point: Get yours. Grammy did her part for the war effort in 1919, and she made good money as an uneducated, second generation Irish immigrant with lots of hungry mouths to feed. Sure the neighbors talked: It was unseemly! How unladylike to sell one’s favors and personal attentions to strangers! In the night, no less?! And how close they stood!

It taught both Grammy and me (though my epiphany happened much later) to not give two hoots about what those neighbors and the church ladies thought about how one conducts one’s personal affairs, be they actual affairs or something else entirely. Grammy eventually married a man who drank too much and occasionally beat her, but they had three strong boys, all of whom got good jobs in Akron’s flourishing early-century rubber industry. One of those boys, George, married a plain and sturdy strong-willed Catholic girl called Lillian (my grandmother) who he also would occasionally beat, but they managed three boys (and a girl) of their own, one of whom was called Richard, my father, who never told me any of this but luckily told my Aunt (the aforementioned girl) who had great fun filling me in at Dad’s funeral. He’s been dead for nearly 30 years now—the Keenan men are not known for their longevity—but I’m glad to have this little snippet of family history to keep in my sentimental back pocket.

None of this, I know, has anything to do with End of Year funding issues. To that topic I resoundingly announce I have nearly no earthly idea how to help anyone. Why are you so broke at the end of the year? Did you not plan well enough? Did you overspend? Did you financially over commit? Were your revenues substantially smaller than anticipated? Did your entire Board resign, empty your checking account and treat themselves to brunch at Five Points in the Village?

Take a tip from my irrepressible Great Grandmother who didn’t have problem-one inviting her grandchildren to feel her up even as she was entering her 100^th decade of life: Be ashamed of nothing. Once you truly come to understand and embody that mantra, there’s not a single thing you can’t do or dollar you can’t earn. And please don’t automatically assume I’m suggesting every red-blooded Off-Off-Broadway artistic director in New York start posting Craigslist ads for discrete, affordable hummers in various bar bathrooms around the city (though that’s not necessarily a bad idea), I am suggesting that you re-examine your ideals and your goals and your commitment to the same. How badly do you want this? Your answer to that question will determine your next steps.

Question of the Blog: How badly do you want this?

Coming Soon: Ideas to Raise Money Not Involving Oral Sex

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Weekly Guest Bloggers in 2010

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We are so excited to introduce a new program. Each week we will invite a member of our community to be a guest blogger. They will post at least one blog (but they can post as many as they like) and respond to your comments and questions.

Our very first guest blogger will be Jeffrey Keenan. A prolific theatre artist and good friend, Jeffrey has seen it all and done it all.


In the seven years between 1997 and 2004, Jeffrey Keenan wrote, directed, produced and/or acted in over 30 professional theatrical productions in and around Washington D.C., including The Shakespeare Theater, The Kennedy Center, The Olney Theater Center, and the Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in addition to refounding and leading in 1997 The Actors’ Theater of Washington (currently Ganymede Arts), to explore and investigate the American GLBT experience. In those seven years, Mr. Keenan’s productions, actors and designers were nominated for numerous Helen Hayes Awards and national Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) Awards. His productions grossed more than $1,000,000 dollars in theaters never larger than 125 seats. The Washington Post once called him “perfection.” In the summer of 2004, he tired of consistent poverty so he sold out. He now works for a Manhattan law firm making more money than he’s ever made before in his entire life. He had the great good fortune to move to Manhattan three years ago and was honored to be asked to write the 2006-2008 New York Innovative Theater Awards shows. Mr. Keenan is thankful every day that he lives in a city with so many incredibly diverse and creative theater artists and he wants some of them to hire him to direct again for those moments when he's not rolling around in his piles and piles of cash.

Jeffrey will be blogging about year-end funding concerns, a topic that affects us all.

Please check back January 4 - 9 to read Jeffrey's blog(s), join the conversation, share your thoughts and maybe discover something new.

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