An Open Letter to My Six-Month-Old Son

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Jeff Lewonczyk.

 Dear Dash,

By the time you are old enough to read and understand this, it will embarrass you terribly. I console myself with the fact that I’ll have embarrassed you many times by that point, and that there will still be much more embarrassment in store before this thing is over.

So I wanted to talk to you about the fact that you’re a theater child. We’re hoping against hope that, after a childhood playing with your toys and doing homework in the corner during rehearsals, surrounded by actors, props, costumes, giant puppets and forms of make-believe held together with spit, glue, tears and more glue, you’re going to rebel by joining the football team, heading to business school and becoming an investment banker. This would be great, as it would ensure us support during our twilight years, but I remain skeptical about this projection. 

Putting aside the fact that producing theater is more detrimental to your mental health than your most junked-up, home-cooked bootleg amphetamine derivative, thereby rendering one unfit for serious work, there’s always the possibility you might LIKE theater. Even though you’re barely six months old, you’ve already been to several plays, and you’ve cried about it less than many grownups I know. You’ve sat through readings and rehearsals, load-ins and load-outs, production meetings and cast parties. Maybe this is early exposure will prove to be a vaccination that will give you immunity; we can only hope.

However, there are also negative signs. You’re a “people baby,” thrilled to meet new people and spend time in crowds. You interact spontaneously and with great bravado, like a natural-born actor. You have a keen eye for whoever’s paying attention to your antics, and somehow you always manage to know when there’s a camera pointing at you. You throw yourself around like an acrobat, and you’re already displaying a penchant for verbal gibberish. This sets a poor precedent.

However, it’s the reaction you provoke in other people that bodes particularly dark tidings. No one has yet complained that we’ve dragged you into a theatrical context – on the contrary, our friends and collaborators seem to love having you around. You energize us all with your youth and promise – two things theater folk can’t seem to get enough of, regardless of the physical age of the person presenting them.  We’ve brought you to not one but TWO NYIT Award events – this year’s nomination party and awards ceremony – and all we got were smiles and goo-goo eyes, as if you somehow BELONGED there. Shirley Knight passed you in the lobby and said, “Welcome to the world, little one.” You’re doomed.

The fact is, since we’re talking about so-called “indie theater,” the circumstances are even worse than they would be if we were straight-up professionals. If we were jobbing gig to gig, or if we were working in a big theater with lots of bosses and stuff, we probably wouldn’t be able to drag you into all of our projects. But by self-producing, we call the shots, and if that means you’re not part of an art form – you’re part of a community. And community is way harder to wash out of your hair than a mere profession (or gum).

If you end up discovering as you grow older that you’re a theater person like your parents, don’t blame us entirely. Sure, there’s probably a genetic component – but the real culprit here is Society. Any perverse subculture that allows people like us to continuously mount fictional shams for the applause of deluded crowds and then drink excessively in celebration deserves to discover that its children have been corrupted by the same disease they can’t muster the willpower to overcome. Any group of people that doesn’t turn parents like us in to the government but rather encourages and coddles children with songs and stories and kisses rather than stern lectures about the world economy deserves to spawn dreamy-eyed fools who claim to see realities that may or may not actually be there, and to rave about these realities to their fellow man without any guarantee that they’ll be understood or even listened to. In a word, artists deserve to have artists.

So if you end up exhibiting a propensity to write down your conversations with your imaginary friends, well past the age when it’s considered normal to even have them – if every night at story time you insist on reading Goodnight Moon to us and asking for notes afterward – if, instead of simply playing with your action figures, you tell people you’re “blocking them” – well, we have no choice but to go along with it. As much as we’re hoping that you’ll turn out to be someone rich and powerful and important, we’re already resigned to the fact that you might turn out to be just like One of Us. But don’t worry, son – I promise we’ll love you anyway. No matter how embarrassing we are.

Sincerely,

Your Papa

If You Meet Shakespeare on the Road, Kill Him

 

 

 

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Jeff Lewonczyk.

No, this is not a Shakespeare truther post – I’m pretty sure the guy wrote his own plays, whatever the director of Independence Day and the Godzilla remake might think about it. And either way they’re brilliant plays, duh. No, my issue here is that we see too damn much of him – that he is, in fact, a crutch that needs to be kicked out from under our goldbricking world-historical/literary armpit so we can actually get on with the important work of walking for ourselves.

Ahem. Let me stress that the only reason I find his plays “overrated” is that NOTHING should be rated that highly. Many of them are great, and the ones that aren’t still have great stuff. He’s contributed mightily to the language, and he makes a fine reference point for all English-speaking people. But to elevate one man’s talent so high above so many others is to deify him, and that does no one any favors. There have been many other fascinating playwrights in history, but we get one production of one of their plays for every three Macbeths and five Midsummer Night’s Dreams.

Having lived in New York for 12 years and seen so many productions of As You Like It that the title no longer applies, I have a proposition: a five-year moratorium on productions of his work. By all means, teach him in high-school English classes and have students perform under the auspices of academia. But a reliance on his talent and reputation by practicing artists – especially though not exclusively those at the indie level – is doing him no favors, and, more importantly, it’s doing us no favors.

For Shakespeare himself, I feel that the constant flogging of his work has bled the spontaneity and freshness from it. When you go into a production saying, “This interpretation had better teach me something new about the play,” something has gone wrong. In the best art, experience comes first and analysis (a very likely distant) second. So many layers of received opinion and re-re-re-quoting have accrued on Shakespeare’s work that it’s hard to see what’s really there. A five-year break (which I only propose lest people scoff even more violently at 10) can allow them to breathe, wash up a bit and return to us refreshed.

In terms of ourselves, the problem even more stark. All I can think about is how much new stuff artists would be able to create if they spent less time bowing to the Bard. We’ve all done our requisite Shakespeare show: Piper McKenzie’s second production out of college was The Tempest (in which I enjoyed the youthful folly of directing myself as Prospero), and we did a show called Macbeth Without Words a few years back, which can’t exactly be said to exist outside of the original play’s shadow. But one could argue that these were closer to educational experiences than the creation of bold new work.

The cranky old man in me (who takes up about 72% of my body mass) thinks that this correlates with the overall addiction to nostalgia afflicting our culture at large. Take a look at what goes viral on that amazing enabler of communication the Internet, and you’ll see that a large majority consist of various pop-culture tropes and images from our childhoods that have been chewed up and spews back out like so many crumbs from Cookie Monster’s throatless mouth (see what I did there?). Most of our new bands sound like they were recorded in the ‘80s. Many new movies are remakes of movies from 30 years ago. Even in my own work, Theater of the Arcade: Five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage (which mashed up arcade games with famous playwrights, like Donkey Kong and Tennessee Williams – as backward-facing a concept as possible) got much more interest and attention than any of my other work to date.

There was a time, a century or so ago, when artists were obsessed with the future. “No more masterpieces!” bellowed a deranged Antonin Artaud, and the speed-loving (albeit Fascist-enabling) Futurists staged crazy cabarets of ultra-short plays that tried to stay a step ahead of a fast world they knew would only go faster. An unfair blanket statement I can make about my generation is that we’re fixated on the past – not simply the historical past (which artists have always proved can be fertile ground for talking about the present), but the recent past – our own pasts. Seriously, is there really that much left to say about Star Wars? And what about the example of Facebook – the most efficient tool to date for wallowing in our own prior experiences, where every format change gets us in a violent froth before it even has a chance to sink in? We obviously long for the stability and safety that society seems pretty hell-bent on denying us.

I’m not exempting myself here (as can be attested by my repeated listening to the retro-New Wave pleasures of the new Cut Copy album and my fierce anticipation of the re-released work of my childhood hero, Uncle Scrooge creator Carl Barks). And I’m not naïve enough to think we can escape the past. But let’s fight it. Let’s jump it, knock it sideways, steal its valuables and leave it to bleed in the alley. Let’s steal a car and drive off the road as far as it’ll take us. Who cares if we hit a tree? Who cares if we crash into a house? Let’s drive out where there aren’t any trees or houses, and see how we fare. Let’s strive to find not only new ways to talk but new things to talk about. If we go far enough, we’ll come back full circle and find the spot where the future meet s the past. Which is good – the past is still the future if we don’t know about it yet. Terra incognita exists in many directions. But something that other people have seen and read and hashed out to death for centuries – maybe it needs to be left behind for a little, to give it a chance to get overgrown and dangerous again.

Okay, so fine, I’ve clearly set up Billy Shakes a bit of a straw dog here – if anyone can handle it, he can. The same applies for plays where people sit in a living room talking about their lives, or the same old musicals, or whatever else. It’s just that, in our current culture, producing such plays – or anything that, regardless of its provenance, has “been done before” – isn’t as risky as putting our own voices and visions on the line for all the world to see and sneer at. As one educated, nostalgia-driven, artistically-inclined solipsist to the thousands of others out there: Let’s get a move on!

Theater Is Not a Gadget

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Jeff Lewonczyk.

 

 

Back in the 20^th Century, when I was a freshman in college, young and bright-eyed and smarter than I’ll ever be again, I determined that the art of theater was facing one of two possible fates.

On the one hand, it could become the art of the decadent upper class, for whom the physical presence of actors and costumes and sets would be an expensive novelty unavailable to the teeming masses of the Information Economy, who would be basically plugged into computers all day as they languished, nearly lifeless, in fetid, windowless work-warrens while the owners of their “labor” made sport with fellow living creatures in astonishingly appointed pleasure-palaces, as if proximity to fellow humans was an unprecedented indulgence.

In the other scenario, more post-apocalyptic than dystopian, theater was the last art form accessible to these same teeming masses as they scrambled to squeeze the last few precious resources from the blighted environment around them. Theater’s the only medium, after all, that doesn’t require any materials – all you need is one or more people, and a location. (Okay, fine, oral storytelling and poetry also fit that bill, but once they’re performed aloud, aren’t they theater?) It would be the only form of community and distraction available to these godforsaken wanderers as they tried to rebuild civilization from the junk of its wreckage.

Well, here we are, in the 21^st Century. I’m older and dumber and less optimistic, and it turns out I was completely wrong about my eschatological daydreams – because apparently they’re BOTH right.

I’m sorry, but no matter how crowd-friendly and tourist-courting it is, any medium whose most “accessible” exponent charges more than $100 a pop for a couple brief hours of manufactured experience is approximately as populist as a diamond-encrusted foie-gras spoon. The intellectually humble corn-pone musical is equally as elitist as the most esoteric grand opera at this point.

And yet theater-making has, by all accounts, grown exponentially. There are more productions, performers and companies than ever before. In a city as unrealistic as New York real estate is always going to be an issue, but there are all these legends of artists retreating to the once-unthinkable horizons of Buffalo and Detroit and the like, where the authorities will apparently pay you to take the land away from them provided you promise to put out the green-glowing radioactive chemical fires at your own expense. You may not be able to attract a mass audience out there, but theater’s not a mass medium – if you want to use this brave frontier as a stage for telling stories through performance, then goddammit, who’s going to stop you? Or, to stretch the issue, take a look at Occupy Wall Street: people actually putting their physical presence on the line in order to create a narrative with resonance among all the people who observe it – sounds pretty theatrical to me.

I think the reason for this simultaneous decay and abundance (which is just another way of describing life, in the end) is that, at its core, theater is one of the most humanistic things you can do with your time. And I say this as someone who thinks the Internet is really, really cool and promises to change the way we live even further than it already has.

The thing is, I sit around all day on a computer looking at things and writing things, and, most nights, I go home to sit around in front of a different computer looking at and writing different things. I often whine, inwardly or externally, when I have to drag myself out to go see a play or a performance of some sort – even one featuring my closest friends and loved ones. And you know what? It’s a damn good thing I make the effort. I’m not going to go so far as to say that theater saves your soul, but yeah, it probably does. It forces you to be with other people, watching people do people things. It’s sort of like this bounded-off liminal space where people get together to be human. Which means that it’s often boring, embarrassing and infuriating, but also funny, surprising, inspiring and balls-out weird, no matter how hard it tries to pretend otherwise. Like (natch) you and me.

And the best thing is that it’s still available to all of us, any day of the week, without having to pawn our future for it. And it may be expensive to make on one level, but on another level, all you need is a street corner, an audience of one and a will to do it.

[POSTSCRIPT – Here are a couple of books you should read: You Are Not a Gadget, by Jaron Lanier, and The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian. They’re fascinating looks at what it means to be human in a world of technological ascendancy, and they’re great resources for people chained to this most analog of art forms.]

The Unfashionable Middle

Contributed by Guest Blogger of the Week, Jeff Lewonczyk.

Today I’m going to start with a few bold, indefensible statements on the nature of American life that I feel relate to the theater, in order to indulge my prejudices, provide a moment or two of entertainment in the midst of your hectic day, and maybe – just maybe – learn a little something along the way.

So, America hates the middle. Of anything. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the founding of our nation was so recent, and remains so vivid, and that this in turn allows us to imagine our various apocalyptic scenarios with the same tender clarity. Everything in the middle’s just crap, a long downward slide – not good enough to be mythic, but still failing to earn the nobility of tragedy.

Or, to cast it in economic instead of historic terms, just look at the current plight of the middle class. Singularly unloved.

When F. Scott Fitzgerald said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” he was speaking at a time when most plays had a three-act structure. It’s not that there’s no ending or second chance – it’s that there’s no middle. We prefer to skyrocket from origin to demise without slogging through the sticky, clingy day-to-day stuff that constitutes, you know, life.

And then you have the theater. On the one hand you have the (mostly mythical) successful commercial theater. Sure, everyone’s struggling there too, but they call it LEGIT for a reason. People are getting paid! To dance around and sew things and turn on lights and stuff! And occasionally someone makes real money from it! And in America, we all know that, unless you’re making money from something, it’s not worth taking seriously.

Then you have the other end of things. The world of codified rebellion, of Art That Is Important. There’s some money here, too – not nearly as much, and it doesn’t come directly from consumers but indirectly, through taxes and contributions from rich folks who see fit to funnel 0.01 percent of their wealth into the arts. In terms of content, we see work here that is bolder and riskier, that doesn’t feel the need to cater to an audience’s desires or expectations. This is a world that hinges upon Who You’ve Studied With, Who You’ve Worked With, Who Your Influences Are. The work can be broadly defined as “experimental,” but, even though it exists on the other end of the scale as commercial theater, it has its own conventions and precedents and hierarchies. Because it is Serious, it is also defensible. (It is also, in practice, about exactly as mythical as successful commercial theater.)

And finally, you have the rest of us. Over the past few years working as an associate director for The Brick, I’ve taken to referring to the world where many of us live, work and play as the Unfashionable Middle. We have neither the pedigree nor the profit to regularly captivate the attention of, oh, say, the New York Times. We’re too edgy for the audiences that seek brand-name escapism, yet we’re not difficult or self-referential enough for progressive minds to pat themselves on the back for understanding our work. Even when we’re doing bang-up, peer-approved work, we still struggle to get other people interested in what we do. We can be snidely derided as “community theater,” but what a horrible state of affairs it is when those two words together have such negative connotations! But the truth is, we’re also halfway between the “community theater” stereotype and the other stereotypes here. We’re hard to categorize, neither fish nor fowl.

And, considering how few people are spending money on theater at the first place, we’re at a double disadvantage. We’re like a sock-puppet sideshow in the parking lot outside the Zeitgeist, begging people’s pennies to share a few minutes in a darkened tent with us when they’d rather be standing in line outside staring at the manufactured dreams flashing from the Jumbotrons or smoking in the corner reflecting with bitter knowningness that it’s all a sham and the only thing waiting for them when they cash in their ticket is… nothing.

Wow, I just wrote that. Sorry. Anyway, the point here is: the extremes are mythical. And, more importantly, they’re boring. The Unfashionable Middle – that dark, dusty tent between the believers and the non-believers, the haves and the have-nots, the professionals and the amateurs, the past and the future, the easy and the difficult, the known and the unknown – that’s where we live. The extremes don’t contain room for experimentation or surprise – anything you add to an extreme automatically mitigates it and reduces its extremity. Whereas the middle is infinitely accommodating. The middle isn’t a dull, boring puree – it’s a thriving place where unexpected combinations occur in unprecedented amounts, where fish and fowl combine to create a new genus. It’s where things are actually what they are, instead of being inferior versions of other things.

And, as I don’t need to tell anyone reading this particular blog, in the theater it’s where the most interesting things are happening. Some of us will creep along the continuum towards one end or the other, and that’s fine. But I don’t think we should fight the Unfashionable Middle - I think we should embrace it. I also don’t think we should institutionalize it – I think we should acknowledge it.

We’re not inadequate to the needs of the extremes: the extremes are inadequate to OUR needs. We don’t need pedigree, and we don’t need profit. We just need to keep doing what we’re doing – creating work that doesn’t fit in the boxes, and conducting our live and business in ways that don’t have easy precedent. America’s never going to care anyway. It’s just another abstraction. And who needs an abstraction when we have us? 

Guest Blogger of the Week: Jeff Lewonczyk

Thanks so much to Clay McLeod Chapman for his great posts last week.

We are so very happy that this week's guest blogger is Jeff Lewonczyk.

Jeff Lewonczyk (writer) is Co-Artistic Director of Piper McKenzie and Associate Director of The Brick. Recent creations for The Brick include The Bubble of Solace (for the Comic Book Theater Festival, which he also executive-produced); the collaborative exquisite-corpse style playwriting project Piper McKenzie’s Dainty Cadaver; the children’s holiday action comedy Bethlehem or Bust (which is published by Playscripts); Theater of the Arcade: five Classic Video Games Adapted for the Stage, a hit at both The Brick and FringeNYC 2011; and the mythic fight comedy Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury. A graduate of Bard College, he is married to his partner and collaborator Hope Cartelli, and is most proud of their most recent creation, Dashiell Carter Lewonczyk.