White Director, Black Play.

I was going to post this Playbill article a few days ago and attempt to start a discussion about the politics of a white man directing an August Wilson play on Broadway.

The Pioneer Press did it for me.  And they did it better, because they were able to get some actual quotes from real live theater folks:

“If this meant that everything was fair game —- if it meant that Marion (McClinton) would get to direct ‘Cherry Orchard’ at the Guthrie, that would be one thing,” [actor James Williams] said. “But that’s not what this means. This is another way of saying that the dominant culture knows more about us than we know about ourselves.”

Personally, I don’t think the question is whether or not Bartlett Sher can direct the play.  He’s a talented director, and he’ll do his homework, and they’ll have top-notch actors.  It should be pretty good, and it should be worth seeing.  The issue, of course, is access — if Lincoln Center won’t hire a black director to direct an August Wilson play, what will they hire a black director to do?  I get that Sher is the resident director, he’s on staff, he’s done big things for them before, and I get (and kind of think it’s great) that he’d want to direct a Great American Play to follow up his Great American Musical (South Pacific) — and it’s wonderful that Wilson’s work is considered to fill that role.  But if the door doesn’t open for directors here, where does it open?

This all connects to another issue that I’ve avoided here, but I’ll bring up now: the first production by Lincoln Center’s new developmental arm (LCT3) was a hip-hop play — which is great.  I’m all for hip-hop theater busting through to the big time.  There are too many of us who have been banging away at this for almost a decade now to continue to be shut out of big-time houses.  But it wasn’t Eisa Davis,  or Full Circle, Bamuthi, or well, me: it was Matt Sax.  Who happens to be white.

Now look.  Many of the really exciting hip-hop theater artists out there are white (Baba Israel and, of course, Danny Hoch come straight to mind).  And I’m only passingly familiar with Clay — I wasn’t able to get over and check it out.  I’m not saying that it’s not a worthy play — it very well could be.  I have no beef with Matt Sax.  He’s a young artist working with hip-hop — it’s a good thing for his work to get done.

But.

This is hip-hop theater’s “big break?”  And it’s not someone who has been part of the genre’s rise?  And it’s not a person of color?  LCT doesn’t have season “slots” really, but if we can’t get in with this slot, where do we get in?

That’s a bit of a digression, but it’s speaking to the same idea.  The issue is access.  If white folk want to direct August Wilson, that’s great.  If white folks want to do hip-hop theater, that’s great.  But there are tons of very talented directors (and writers and actors and…) of color who should be getting the chance to do Shakespeare or kitchen sink relationship shows or Tom Stoppard (and women doing plays by men, and…) — it’s got to go both ways.

Arts Audiences, Defined Broadly.

Interesting article here about how we define arts audiences.  The basic idea is that more people are involved with the arts then we generally count, as things like photography, social dancing, and cultural events are all art forms, even if they don’t take place in the traditional institutional spaces.  I think that part of our job as Arts Leaders and administrators is to tap into these forms and use them to get them into our spaces.  The Brooklyn Musuem (full disclosure: I currently have an office there, though I don’t work for them) did a photography exhibition called Click earlier this year where Brooklyn residents took the pictures and voted on which ones would ultimately be shown.  That’s the kind of thing of which I’m thinking.  If you’ve seen Welcome to Arroyo’s or The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, you know that I like to explore non-traditional art forms in my work as well.  (Yes, I do consider both hip-hop and professional wrestling art forms; in fact they’re two of the most important and uniquely American art forms that exist, right along the American Broadway Musical.)

I’m reminded of my experiences teaching in Cleveland a few years back.  I’d go into a new classroom, and I’d ask “how many people have ever been to the theater before?”  In grade schools with predominantly African-American student bodies, maybe 30% of the hands would go up at that question.  I’d ask what they’d seen, and I’d hear things like Shakespeare, children’s plays — the kind of shows you’re dragged to in school, things that seem like high culture (even if the term high culture isn’t something you’ve ever heard).  But then…I’d ask who had ever seen a Madea play (Madea being, of course, the protagonist of many of Tyler Perry’s plays), and over 80% of the hands would shoot up, full of excitement.

It’s all about perception.

How Theaters Can Save Themselves (link)

As I write this, I have read only the first item on this list from the Pacific Northwest’s awesome awesome The Stranger, but I agree with it wholeheartedly.  I will now live blog my reading of their blog post (it’s an article really, but go with me, people), which is certainly a first for this blog:

5:49: Anyone who calls for a moratorium on Shakespeare is aces in my book.  Yes, the plays are impressive.  But we’ve seen them already.  Are they really that much better than other classics?  I actually think I wrote about this a while back (in my Hamlet post), and I’m glad to read it more eloquently stated here.

5:51: I disagree with point two, but largely due to my current situation: it sucks to have a theater in, say, Denver refuse to do your work because you’re giving the “world premiere” to a theater in Miami.  I do understand and agree with the fundamental premise here though.  The union stuff is right on: I can’t develop plays informally with the great actors I know because Equity won’t let them.  It’s tricky.

This sentence is unfortunate though: Playwrights: Quit developing your plays into the ground with workshop after workshop after workshop—get them out there. It’s rarely, if ever, the playwright’s choice to continue to develop a piece forever.  We want productions.  We can’t self-produce everything…and we shouldn’t have to.  None of us are turning down productions to do an additional workshop.  It just doesn’t work that way.

5:56: Theaters need to do more work.  Absolutely.  Smaller productions, less bells and whistles, keep your spaces lit as often as possible.  Make it so.

5:57: Getting young people into the theater is my pet project.  These suggestions aren’t the way to do it.  Do not go broke trying to force young people into your seats…because you don’t have to.  Do some plays by/for/about young folks.  Get ethnically diverse.  Use music.  Use the internet.  Challenge your audience–and yes, you can do this without scaring away your older folks.

6:00: This fish is good.  So is the broccoli.  And the avocado.  I’m very happy for the Brooklyn Trader Joe’s.

6:01: Child care.  Brilliant.  This speaks to the fact that too much of the theater world views arts education as something different than art itself.   Art is education.  Even lowbrow art is education.  Marry the two.  Marry the two.  View the theater as a community space.  Love this idea.  Love it.

6:05: Yay, Neko Case!  Yay, Chicago!  Yay, artist housing!  I think the thing that theaters can specifically do here is to ensure that guest artists are well-housed when working with you (big shouts to Victory Gardens).  I’m not sure how much more political a not-for-profit is even legally allowed to get (you can’t exactly take sides when you’re getting money from the government–and yes, this too is a problem), but issues like the basic human dignity due to artists are vital for public institutions to stand behind.

6:09: Build bars.  Punto.  For theaters not to encourage drinking is ludicrous.  Shakespeare’s audiences had sex during shows.  Look what it did for his work.  That’s only a partial joke.

6:11: Audience participation is an awful term, but an engaged audience is what theater is all about.  I don’t like having one night of overt reactions (especially if you’re not doing old chestnuts: who can shout out favorite lines to a world premiere of something?)–I want reactions all the time.  But here’s the thing: if you do work that encourages overt reaction, you’ll get it.  If you do Rabbit Hole, which don’t get me wrong, is a very good play by a great writer, you can’t expect an audience to talk back to the stage.  And you shouldn’t expect that.  How do you encourage a loud, riled up, crazy audience?  Give them loud, riled up, crazy works.

6:15: Expect poverty?  Horrible advice.  Artists provide valuable services, and we work hard, and we deserve living wages not for “having talent and a mountain of grad-school debt” (and man, do I have a whole effing mountain range of debt); we deserve living wages because we contribute massively to the economy, to the collective psyche of the nation, and to the day-to-day happinesss of the populace.  Art needs to be valued, and it does need to be valued economically, at least on a basic level.

6:18: Grad school is a tricky subject.  Obviously, I see value in it–I’m finishing my second MFA as we speak.  I also see the value in just going work.  But here’s the thing: the art world, the culture world, the theater world, the world world, they demand new skills and knowledge.  Grad school can help on that front.  In fact, I’ll argue that even folks who don’t go to grad school should be participating in some kind of ongoing schooling, just to stay up on everything that’s going on out there.  What I see as I go through my MFA program this time around (after seven years in the field in various other positions) is that there are a shocking amount of theater professionals who are failing their institutions and their art because they haven’t done their homework.  And it’s a problem.

It’s a great article, folks.  Required reading, I’d say.

So Hamlet.

I’m not sure I have a whole lot that I want to say about the Shakespeare in the Park production of Hamlet, but I did say I’d come back and write about, so let’s see what comes out. And I guess that this is as good a place as any to get started: I don’t think I like Shakespeare.

Now yes, I respect Shakespeare and his works. I see great value in his work being produced and read and studied. But here’s the thing: I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw Shakespeare that wowed me. Hell, I don’t know that I’ve ever seen Shakespeare that wowed me. The work is the work and the words are the words and there’s a lot that’s impressive about it, of course, but does it still strike me as great theater? Rarely, if ever.

Now granted, I’m pretty particular in what I like onstage, and my tastes tend to run to works that are (a) relatively accessible, (b) containing some kind of young person energy, and (c) by or about contemporary folks, especially folks of some kind of color (and maybe in another post I’ll write about how insufficient that phrase feels to me, but how I can’t think of anything that better expresses what I’m trying to say). Shakespeare, no matter how you slice it (fitting choice of words for the last scene in this production), no matter how you jazz it up and reimagine it, is none of those things.

And yes, there is a timelessness to Shakespeare’s work, and I understand the idea of universality, and Shakespeare is important because he speaks to everyone, and it’s not about race or creed or color, or even about specific issues, because the plays are about big themes, big ideas–I get it. I understand the argument. And I believe the argument, up to a point. I think kids should be reading Romeo and Juliet. I think Iago is the baddest dude on the theatrical planet (although watching Hamlet again reminded me of how evil Claudius really is). I’ve even seen a really good production of Cymbeline (at the Pearl, many years ago) that spoke to Shakespeare’s effectiveness as well as any production I can remember.

But I mean, seriously. Enough.

Enough for me, at least. Part of my problem is structural–Shakespeare’s plays are five acts, and they climax in weird places. The main character dies, and we’ve still got speeches left to be told. We spend big chunks of time on subplots and disconnected thoughts that don’t do it for me–not that I think neoclassically and want unity of time, place, and action, but I do want continuity and connection and steady forward movement. That’s not what Shakespeare’s game plan was. He’s got a different pace (and really, all classical theater does, and really, all theater that is of its own time–that is, all good theater–is operating at a pace specific to its time period. It’s written for its audience, not an audience 400 years later), a more languid pace at times, more about language and poetry, which is all well and good (I mean, I write 1000 word blog posts about punching monkeys, so you know I’m not afraid of language), but really, seriously, enough already.

So that said (545 words before getting to the point), any production of Hamlet is starting out in a hole with me. I’d rather be seeing a production of a new play. And yes, I understand the economics, and that Shakespeare sells tickets, but that doesn’t change my personal preference. So that’s the hole any production has to dig itself out of with me: proving why this show needs to be done now. And I can’t say that this particular production made itself feel especially essential to me, even though I certainly didn’t hate it, and probably even kind of liked it some, if not many, levels.

What I definitely liked was, maybe surprisingly, all the TV actors. Sam Waterston was hilarious, Andre Braugher is a bad ass still, and Lauren Ambrose is, as we previously discussed, one of my favorite actors ever. They all brought good natural feels to their roles, regardless of how small those parts might have been. But Hamlet obviously lives and dies with Hamlet, and I’m not sure how I felt about Michael Stuhlbarg (and I haven’t read the Times article on him yet, which might provide some insight into how he approached the role). His Hamlet felt kind of legitimately crazy–not putting on airs to lull his enemies into submission before attacking–and I think that it hurt my overall connection to the show. It’s an interpretation, of course, a choice in acting and directing, and it’s completely legit as a choice, but I couldn’t help feeling that if Hamlet felt less crazy, then Ophelia’s legit madness would feel more tragic, and everything else would fall into place to have more of a moving impact.

But honestly, I’m not sure I even agree with what I just wrote.

(NOTE: I wrote this post a few days ago.  Since then, I have read the Stuhlbarg article in the Times, and didn’t find much of anything to change my view.  Then today, Brantley’s review came out, and I can’t say I disagree with any of it, really.  The moment he’s referring to did indeed inspire a reaction from me, one of those verbal “huh.” things you make when you appreciate an impressive beat.   And the “actor, direct thyself” bit — I couldn’t agree with that more.  In fact, I think I predicted a version of that line in the review as soon as I saw the scene.  It was hard not to see it coming)