Is Your Story Big Enough?

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Contributed by guest blogger of the week, Lanie Zipoy.

In Michael Margolis’s new book Believe Me: Why Your Vision, Brand, and Leadership Need a Bigger Story, he asks, “Is your story big enough?” Last night, the entrepreneur and executive coach led a thought-provoking discussion at the Off-Off-Broadway Community Dish, a consortium of independent theatre companies with a great listserv and delicious bi-monthly meetings. The organization gets its name from the mouth-watering potluck cooked by its members (Marielle Duke’s broccoli and cheese crescent rolls were a big hit) and the accompanying discussion about awide range of issues affecting OOB. Founded in 2002 by Zachary Mannheimer, the group is now led by Boomerang Theatre Company’s Artistic Director Tim Errickson and Amanda Feldman, Lark Play Development Center’s General Manager.

Throughout the evening, Margolis asked the million-dollar questions – ones that we as a community need to diligently answer every day.

“What is Off-Off-Broadway’s cultural contribution?”
Every one of the 12 members in attendance had a different answer to this question. Our contributions are as varied and diverse as the hundreds of OOB companies currently producing work in the city. As a community, we also make a significant financial impact on the city, offering jobs and supporting local businesses.

Gideon Productions’ Sean Williams, however, observed that OOB companies’ strength lies in the singularity of vision, each company’s ability to push its worldview.

“What is the bigger story?”
Margolis emphasized that OOB as a community and individual companies must develop their brands, the unique stories that connect the community and the companies to audiences. He suggested keeping three factors in mind:
(1) The Past – the origins of your company/community. How, why and when was your company/community formed?
(2) The Present – the ethos of the company/community. What are the qualities and ideas your company/community stands for?
(3) The Future – the cultural contribution of the company/community. What value does your company/community add tothe world?

“What is the contract with your audience?”
Margolis stressed that audiences today want authenticity and intimacy. Companies should be open and honest in their marketing efforts and represent productions with integrity. Also, OOB’s smaller venues may be assets when reaching potential audience members. The immediacy of the stage is a selling point, offering a dynamic experience for the audience.

I was really struck by the audience portion of the discussion. I firmly believe that the greatest story ever told is not the one you’ll see on stage. Instead, it is the 40-word blurb you write about your production, the marketing image you choose to represent your upcoming show, and the connection you make with the most important person to any theatrical endeavor: the audience member.

I have the greatest respect for playwrights, directors,actors, and designers as well as the beautiful alchemy of creating a theatrical piece. Theatre, however, is most magical when it is a call and response between the artists and the audience.

In 2010, I challenge us to tell a bigger story, to build our individual and collective audience bases, and to strengthen our community’s identity. I would love to hear any ideas about how we can accomplish these goals.

For more information on Michael Margolis, visit http://www.getstoried.com, and to join the Off-Off-Broadway Community Dish, check out http://www.communitydish.org.

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Introducing...guest blogger #2!

A huge Thank You to Jeffrey Keenan for inaugurating guest blogging over here at Full of IT! Offering great advice from a new, original perspective has us off to a great start for 2010 - thanks, Jeffrey!

We're proud to announce next week's guest blogger: Lanie Zipoy! Lanie's first post will be Monday, January 11.


Lanie Zipoy has worked in the Off-Off-Broadway community for over six years as a producer and publicist. She produced Mac Rogers' Universal Robots, which was named the 2009 Best Off-Off Broadway Play by the Independent Theater Bloggers Association and received four 2009 New York Innovative Theatre Awards nominations. She has served as the publicist on Thoroughly Stupid Things (Outstanding Playwriting Award, FringeNYC 2008) and Jesus in Montana (Outstanding Solo Show, FringeNYC 2005). Her clients include Ground UP Productions, Hip Obscurity, The Production Company, Theaterlab, T. Schreiber Studio and Wide Eyed Productions. She is currently producing a revival of Caroline, or Change for The Gallery Players, opening January 30th.

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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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