Tiassa
03-10-08, 10:38 PM
Source: The Stranger (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829)
Link: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829
Title: "The Empty Spaces", by Mike Daisey
Date: February 5, 2008
It is an interesting contrast. On the one hand, Mike Daisey looks at the issue as, "How theater failed America". Indeed, that is the title of a show he opened in Seattle last month. I, on the other hand, look at it the other way around, how America failed theater. And I would go so far as to assert it's fair. Daisey wrote a piece for The Stranger last month considering the tragedy of what has happened to theater in the United States:
When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show. To use a sports analogy, theaters have gone from a local league with players you knew intimately to a different lineup for every game, made of players you'll never see again, coached by a stranger, on a field you have no connection to.
Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Literary departments have blossomed over the last few decades, despite massive declines in the production of new work. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater.
The biggest reason the artists were removed was because it was best for the institution. I often have to remind myself that "institution" is a nice word for "nonprofit corporation," and the primary goal of any corporation is to grow. The best way to grow a nonprofit corporation is to raise money, use the money to market for more donors, and to build bigger and bigger buildings and fill them with more staff.
Using this lens, it all makes sense. The worst way to let the corporation of the theater grow is to spend too much on actors—why do that, when they're a dime a dozen? Certainly it isn't cost-effective to keep them in the community. Use them and discard them. Better to invest in another "educational" youth program, mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin, lifeless paste that any reasonable person would reject as disgusting, but garners more grant money.
Every time a regional theater produces Nickel and Dimed, the play based on Barbara Ehrenreich's book about the working poor in America, I keep hoping the irony will reach up and bitch-slap the staff members as they put actors, the working poor they're directly responsible for creating, in an agitprop shuck-and-jive dance about that very problem ....
(Daisey (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829))
When I was younger I remember discussing something about newspapers with my father. I think it might have been a spread for the bra sale at some department store polluting the A section of the News Tribune. Somebody, he reminded me, must pay for the newspaper. After all, you don't think the quarter you put down for a newspaper covers everything, right? That lesson struck home again in the late nineties, when I heard an interview with a Chicago reporter fired in a row over organic milk. The advertising money at stake was from a tri-state dairy board: Don't f@ck with our cows! Or, earlier in the nineties, I suppose, when Redbook's woman of the year was a professor from Harvard, and a spat developed when Revlon threatened to pull their advertising because the woman on the cover of the magazine wasn't wearing any makeup.
As a writer I'm juggling competing concerns in the effort to develop a story for publication. One part of me says to write for art's sake, to tell the vital story. The other part, which is being injected artificially, reminds that in order to get published in the first place, you have to be able to grab editors and publishers with something compelling, and that usually means simplistic and sensational. A writing advisor told me to develop a love triangle. He wasn't "feeling" a female character in the story. Well, duh. That was my point. My female characters should be more than mere sex interest. They should be ... oh, I don't know, full-fledged characters?
But subtlety doesn't sell. Rather, the advisor pointed to a certain dynamic on the page and said to develop it. And while it certainly was possible to read it that way—nor, really, do I object to that aspect—it feels weird throwing it so blatantly at the reader.
But it worked, to a degree. The advice I got from a publisher focused on an entirely different aspect of the story and characters.
The point being that the institutionalization of literature limits a story's potential. Corporate worries about how much a project profits have led over the years to narrower expectations among the audience. Formulaic stories are comfortable for many readers; quality is becoming a consideration of how you manipulate a limited number of tools. The farther one strays from the basic formulae for various genres, the greater the risk.
In the end, ambition and focus narrows. Few writers make a living outside the institutional rules. And this seems even more apparent in theater. I remember three plays that came to prominence during and have generally outlasted the 1990s: Roosters ("It's so authentic, what with the chickens walking around the theater and all"), Six Degrees of Separation ("Well, Will Smith is good, but there's something more authentic about seeing the play"), and Lips Together, Teeth Apart (sorry, no "authentic" joke for this one ... I think the word was "refreshing", which may seem strange for a meditation on death, but there you are). Perhaps this says something about the breadth (or lack thereof) of my theatrical familiarity, but people are willing to spend for tickets and then a bunch on drinks at the local comedy club while more deliberate forms of theater struggle. This isn't because playwrights have all undertaken a race to be the literary equivalent of minimalist painting or Phillip Glass. Rather, at least as Daisey would tell it, it has to do in large part with the business of theater, and the attitudes and expectations used to sell the idea.
Jack Cady once wrote that if we did away with art, the trains might still run on time, but something would be missing from our humanity. And this is what artists struggle to express when fighting back against the censors and prudes and philistines. Still, those who would silence art for its ability to unsettle the perspective might find an unlikely ally in the soulless mechanisms of corporate calculation. Theater has failed America by falling into a pattern of essential artistic cowardice, searching for an illusion of tangible security. In other words, theater has failed America by becoming so damnably American.
____________________
See Also:
Daisey, Mike. "Excerpt from How Theater Failed America". TheStranger.com. http://www.thestranger.com/extras/audio/mikedaisyhtfa.mp3
Link: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829
Title: "The Empty Spaces", by Mike Daisey
Date: February 5, 2008
It is an interesting contrast. On the one hand, Mike Daisey looks at the issue as, "How theater failed America". Indeed, that is the title of a show he opened in Seattle last month. I, on the other hand, look at it the other way around, how America failed theater. And I would go so far as to assert it's fair. Daisey wrote a piece for The Stranger last month considering the tragedy of what has happened to theater in the United States:
When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource: They ship the actors, designers, and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show. To use a sports analogy, theaters have gone from a local league with players you knew intimately to a different lineup for every game, made of players you'll never see again, coached by a stranger, on a field you have no connection to.
Not everyone lost out with the removal of artists from the premises. Arts administrators flourished as the increasingly complex corporate infrastructure grew. Literary departments have blossomed over the last few decades, despite massive declines in the production of new work. Marketing and fundraising departments in regional theaters have grown hugely, replacing the artists who once worked there, raising millions of dollars from audiences that are growing smaller, older, and wealthier. It's not such a bad time to start a career in the theater, provided you don't want to actually make any theater.
The biggest reason the artists were removed was because it was best for the institution. I often have to remind myself that "institution" is a nice word for "nonprofit corporation," and the primary goal of any corporation is to grow. The best way to grow a nonprofit corporation is to raise money, use the money to market for more donors, and to build bigger and bigger buildings and fill them with more staff.
Using this lens, it all makes sense. The worst way to let the corporation of the theater grow is to spend too much on actors—why do that, when they're a dime a dozen? Certainly it isn't cost-effective to keep them in the community. Use them and discard them. Better to invest in another "educational" youth program, mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin, lifeless paste that any reasonable person would reject as disgusting, but garners more grant money.
Every time a regional theater produces Nickel and Dimed, the play based on Barbara Ehrenreich's book about the working poor in America, I keep hoping the irony will reach up and bitch-slap the staff members as they put actors, the working poor they're directly responsible for creating, in an agitprop shuck-and-jive dance about that very problem ....
(Daisey (http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=503829))
When I was younger I remember discussing something about newspapers with my father. I think it might have been a spread for the bra sale at some department store polluting the A section of the News Tribune. Somebody, he reminded me, must pay for the newspaper. After all, you don't think the quarter you put down for a newspaper covers everything, right? That lesson struck home again in the late nineties, when I heard an interview with a Chicago reporter fired in a row over organic milk. The advertising money at stake was from a tri-state dairy board: Don't f@ck with our cows! Or, earlier in the nineties, I suppose, when Redbook's woman of the year was a professor from Harvard, and a spat developed when Revlon threatened to pull their advertising because the woman on the cover of the magazine wasn't wearing any makeup.
As a writer I'm juggling competing concerns in the effort to develop a story for publication. One part of me says to write for art's sake, to tell the vital story. The other part, which is being injected artificially, reminds that in order to get published in the first place, you have to be able to grab editors and publishers with something compelling, and that usually means simplistic and sensational. A writing advisor told me to develop a love triangle. He wasn't "feeling" a female character in the story. Well, duh. That was my point. My female characters should be more than mere sex interest. They should be ... oh, I don't know, full-fledged characters?
But subtlety doesn't sell. Rather, the advisor pointed to a certain dynamic on the page and said to develop it. And while it certainly was possible to read it that way—nor, really, do I object to that aspect—it feels weird throwing it so blatantly at the reader.
But it worked, to a degree. The advice I got from a publisher focused on an entirely different aspect of the story and characters.
The point being that the institutionalization of literature limits a story's potential. Corporate worries about how much a project profits have led over the years to narrower expectations among the audience. Formulaic stories are comfortable for many readers; quality is becoming a consideration of how you manipulate a limited number of tools. The farther one strays from the basic formulae for various genres, the greater the risk.
In the end, ambition and focus narrows. Few writers make a living outside the institutional rules. And this seems even more apparent in theater. I remember three plays that came to prominence during and have generally outlasted the 1990s: Roosters ("It's so authentic, what with the chickens walking around the theater and all"), Six Degrees of Separation ("Well, Will Smith is good, but there's something more authentic about seeing the play"), and Lips Together, Teeth Apart (sorry, no "authentic" joke for this one ... I think the word was "refreshing", which may seem strange for a meditation on death, but there you are). Perhaps this says something about the breadth (or lack thereof) of my theatrical familiarity, but people are willing to spend for tickets and then a bunch on drinks at the local comedy club while more deliberate forms of theater struggle. This isn't because playwrights have all undertaken a race to be the literary equivalent of minimalist painting or Phillip Glass. Rather, at least as Daisey would tell it, it has to do in large part with the business of theater, and the attitudes and expectations used to sell the idea.
Jack Cady once wrote that if we did away with art, the trains might still run on time, but something would be missing from our humanity. And this is what artists struggle to express when fighting back against the censors and prudes and philistines. Still, those who would silence art for its ability to unsettle the perspective might find an unlikely ally in the soulless mechanisms of corporate calculation. Theater has failed America by falling into a pattern of essential artistic cowardice, searching for an illusion of tangible security. In other words, theater has failed America by becoming so damnably American.
____________________
See Also:
Daisey, Mike. "Excerpt from How Theater Failed America". TheStranger.com. http://www.thestranger.com/extras/audio/mikedaisyhtfa.mp3