Artists I admire: TreePress

On Friday, I had the chance to meet with Laura Fisher and Jespal Rajdev, who with their co-founder Adrienne Ferguson, started an online marketplace called TreePress. I've known about TreePress since about this time last year, when the idea was in its initial stages. I've been watching the progression of the marketplace's offerings with interest, but my conversation with Laura and Jes really solidified in my mind that the entire concept behind their online presence is truly innovative and has the potential to shift the way theatrical collaborators find one other, particularly playwrights and producers and educators.

I would encourage you to visit the site and see for yourself, and watch how it develops over the next six months. That development and the articulation of their vision over time will do a far better job than I can at explaining exactly what will happen and how its happening.  However, I do want to say that I'm #grateful to Laura and Jes for explaining the idea of RELEVANCE to me as a way to measure a play's worth, rather than simply relying on the play's quality, one of only several factors that might go into a play's selection for production. It's very easy for me or anyone else to dismiss a play based on my own impressions of what "quality" is, but there are lots of other reasons that a producer, school, or theatre might choose to do a play: cast size, distribution of lines, subject matter, message to the audience, etc. All of these factors play a role.  "Of course they do," you might be saying to yourself, but I'm not sure that all of those reasons are necessary legible or conscious in the decision-making process about a play's quality. So I'm committing to thinking about a play's RELEVANCE rather than only about a play's quality, as that might help to create an overall clearer picture of why certain plays get produced and not others. There's power in making a gut reaction more legible. That's one of things I feel like TreePress is preparing to do really well.

For helping me to think differently and more openly about plays and their relevance, for sharing their ideas with me and asking me about mine, and for innovating in a field that desperately needs it (new play development), the founders of TreePress are the artists I admire for this week.

Thinking about democracy--where does it go from here?

Andrew Sullivan's piece in this week's New York Magazine should be required reading for anyone planning to vote in the presidential election this fall. It's called "Our Democracy Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny: The Case Against the People."  Sullivan is known as a conservative political commentator, but he's also quite a complicated fellow (gay, HIV+, British-born, etc.). Regardless of how you might feel about him or any of these descriptors, his article in the magazine raises all sorts of historical and cultural questions about democracy, ideas that we should really pay attention to now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee for the Republican party, and as we inch closer to Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee.

I'm not sure that either of these candidates can or will solve the problems that Sullivan outlines in his article. And he's not the only one who's been making these points over the last few weeks. It's just that for my money, he does it in the most convincing way that I've encountered as of yet. He's essentially proposing that American democracy may very well be on its way down. Like down for the count. The case he makes is compelling based on histories both distant and recent, and I'm not sure anyone on either side of the political line is really safe.

The most disturbing moment comes when Sullivan writes that, "The most powerful engine for a mass movement is the evocation of hatred." When I think about the resonance of that statement, the depth with which it hits me in my head and in my heart, I grow very sad at what American democracy has become. Equal opportunity for all has never really taken hold, as people have continued to be disenfranchised throughout the history of America's democracy.  We don't like to think of it that way, but it's the truth. And so all of our attempts to auto correct for this long history of inequities haven't worked. They've functioned like bandages over deep wounds that just continue to fester, and instead of putting in the real time and energy necessary for the wounds to heal, we just keep picking scabs and letting infection set in. And that infection spreads, and we have a systemic situation on our hands. The hatred has taken hold, and we're having a hard time stamping it out.

I'm not sure what to do or what to suggest, other than that you should read this Sullivan article. My first baby step is to take stock, try to understand how I contribute to the points he raises, try to figure out how I might be able to re-investigate, re-understand the potentials of democracy without falling into the traps that have been laid. It's a sobering undertaking. And I have no idea what to think about the future.

Artists I admire: John Patrick Shanley

Last Saturday evening, the Program in Educational Theatre hosted a 50th anniversary alumni event featuring a conversation with John Patrick Shanley, the most distinguished alumnus of the program. Shanley is a decorated playwright and screenwriter,  best known for the Pulitzer Prize winning play Doubt and Moonstruck for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Both pieces of writing affected me for different reasons, but those reasons certainly relate to the cultures that Shanley presents. The Italian American families of Moonstruck and the Catholicism of Doubt resonated deeply with me, even though I don't outwardly appear to fit in with either of those cultures. Beyond my last name, I don't "look" very Italian, and my regular Catholic practice ended many years ago. That said, I recognized things about myself in both pieces of fiction, mostly because in his specificity, Shanley managed to show me something universal.

Shanley was interviewed for the event by my colleague Philip Taylor, and the conversation between the two men covered all sorts of territory. Some of the best takeaways from John Patrick Shanley included the following (pardon my paraphrasing):

Theatre is the place to do unsafe things safely.

I tell any writer--you have a lot of bad writing to do, so get started.

I had come not value the truth. I was too busy trying to show people how smart I was.

Trust that your truth is worth sharing.

Anything that you find embarrassing, damning, shameful is probably what you should write about.

If you have more than one character on stage, they should not be in agreement.

Find a peaceful core place to check in with yourself and figure out where you're at.

Sometimes you write something and it tells you what's going on.

After time, you get the audience in your body, and you can feel them responding as you write.

For giving us unforgettable characters for the stage and screen, for graciously sharing his wisdom with a room full of strangers connected by their love for the Program in Educational Theatre at NYU, and for continuing to write and create from a place of truth, honesty, and personal experience, John Patrick Shanley is the artist I admire for this week.

Facing the silence

I'm late on this week's musing because I had a deadline that I needed to hit that took priority. It's that time in the semester when I'm feeling tired and overwhelmed by all the tasks that come with this time of year. I'm also aware of the cumulative effect of the academic year. At a certain point my threshold for shenanigans lowers, and general crabbiness ensues.

We as a 21st century culture have lives with lots of moving parts, spheres of influence, and often conflicting responsibilities. I've been revisiting a theatre project that I worked on last year that took place on a Revolutionary War battlefield in southern New Jersey, and even though the characters in the project were in the middle of a war, I can't help but think that their lives were much simpler. Master of the Obvious is in the house, I know, but the realization lands hard for me this morning as I write this.

I'm standing at the end of a subway train car, with my back against the door, and as I look down the car at all the faces sitting and standing, I see lots of the same feelings I have: heaviness, exhaustion, lack of enthusiasm, general discomfort. I wonder if my 18th century characters, both real and imagined, felt the same feelings. And if they did, were those feelings persistent or were they fleeting? And were they more likely to look each other in the eye, smile, take time to know each other, breathe deeply?  I wonder.

I know full well that I'm addicted to information and visual stimulation. It's very hard for me to not look at my phone or a computer screen or the television. I long for my childhood when a book could hold my attention for an entire day. That used to be the norm. Now it happens maybe once every three years. That's the root of my exhaustion. Quiet contemplation unmediated by a screen almost never happens.

I used to be much worse. At least I can stand to be alone with myself now, after many years of that not being the case. But as my comfort with that alone time increase, I find myself looking for ways to just sit in silence. That's still challenging.

So I guess that's the goal. Sitting in silence. Even if it's 5 minutes. What a concept...

Artists I admire: the students in my Creating Ethnodrama class

Last evening the students in one of my classes shared excerpts of their original ethnodramas, and I left the experience feeling so proud of their work and moved by their commitment to risk taking and experimentation.

Ethnodrama refers to a playscript composed from interview transcripts, field notes, journal entries, personal memories and experiences, and/or print and media artifacts. My course is called "Creating Ethnodrama: Theory and Practice," and we've spent the last eight weeks working towards last evening's script sharings. Students established a research question and interview prompts and then interviewed people about one of two different topics: body image across gender, race, and ethnicity or online dating culture. They coded the data and then worked in small scripting groups of three or four to generate original scripts using the verbatim interview transcriptions and field notes.

Last evening we heard a ten minute excerpt from each script, and the results were fascinating and inspiring. Different interpretations of the data emerged based on each scripting group's points of view. And equally compelling was how each group chose an aesthetic framework within which to present the data. We were also joined by two arts-based research scholars, Nisha Sajnani (Lesley University/NYU) and Richard Sallis (University of Melbourne) who graciously provided additional reflections after each script reading. It was one of those evenings, at the end of a very long day, that energized me and filled me with gratitude.

For finding creative ways to embrace parameters and structure, for diving into the deep end and trusting that the life jacket hadinflated, and for sharing their fantastic ideas with me, the students in my Creating Ethnodrama class are the artists I admire for this week.