A Blog About Theatre

For the last eight months I have been writing Notes From The Future and posting it episodically within this blog, because this is currently the only blog I have to my name. Obviously there's a bit of a conflict between the name of this blog (Rinky-Dink, Adventures In American Theatre) and Notes From The Future, which is a story about what happens to love when earthquakes, monsters and time travel get in the way. Or maybe it's a story about a couple of idiots who clearly chose the wrong path. And maybe I'm writing about Veronica and myself with unflinching clarity, or maybe I'm making myself far more attractive in print than I actually am. I'll never tell. What I will say is that I've hit a bump in the road.

Perhaps 'pothole' is the better word. Either way, the three of you who read regularly will have noticed by now that I have pulled over. The engine is off – in fact, it's cool to the touch. There's still gas in the tank, oil and water unmixed in their appropriate receptacles. But I am on my back under the car, staring at the complexities I've created and very, very aware that a) certain inconsistencies are about to trip everything up and, b) I will begin directing The Three Musketeers in late February. It's kind of like when I know I need to be up early in the morning and I therefore cannot sleep: I know I need to keep working and finish this damned thing (I even have notes on what comes next and how to end it), but it would appear that I have something-or-othered, and as a result I am thoroughly somethinged.

Part of it is health-related, and I won't bore you with details, but that's distracting. The other part is having to work at home. I don't know how people do it. The only time I can get work done is late at night, but working late at night = sleeping all day, which fucks my sleep schedule. It's 11:06 pm as of this moment, and I have to complete, edit, and post this blog within the next hour or fuck up the deliciously normal sleep cycle I've finally managed to regain after New Year's. I would love to drive up to Solano College every day and write in the Adjunct Faculty Office. But 120 miles round trip with gas prices what they are and things and such and pennywhistles among sandpipers, o the unmitigated profligacy of it all.

Another issue I'm having is with Blogger/Blogspot itself. While it has undergone some changes that are definite improvements, it seems that none of you can easily comment, no matter what I do to the settings. Not gonna lie: I totally love comments. That's why I practically beg for comments every time I post a link to my blog on Google+, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I recently met someone who is so obsessed with NFTF that she has read it in its entirety – twice! Never a word from her, alas, and she's just the person whose comments I'd love to have. Imagine my frustration when everyone tells me they try to comment, but the blog won't let them. Or it's prohibitively difficult. (I am assuming a high level of intelligence among you, dear readers, because I've noticed that smart people like my writing. Which of course means you're all geniuses. Would you care to celebrate this revelation with bonbons au gingembre? Join me in the escritoire!) There are several other venues I am currently considering and my current favorite is WordPress. It's a poor artist who blames the tools, but let's be clear: words are my tools, websites are the galleries in which I currently display my work.

Now, when I started this blog, I was thinking that I would use it to catalog my pithily unrepentant observations about theatre as it currently stands and as I've experienced it in the SF Bay Area and other regions here in the Western United States. Some of my stuff is just that. Oliver in Idaho, a series originally written from the trenches of the exact production described, was first shared via the blogs on MySpace. But MySpace is now the weed-choked, crack-vialed lot several blocks away where they shoot various scenes for The Wire, because the world, to quote Roland of Gilead, has moved on. O alas, it has indeed.

So, why haven't I continued to write directly about my experiences since 2006? Simple: I chickened out, took a job working for my Dad, and promptly fell of the face of the earth. After that, every show I did felt like a blessing that I couldn't endanger. Were I to write candidly about a poorly-written original musical, for example, there was a danger that the librettist, lyricist or producer might get wind of it. And since none of them had any idea that the show was poorly-writ, blah blah and etcetera. Instead, I concocted fictionalized versions of the productions in which I was involved. I had fun writing them, and when I go back and re-read, I am always a little saddened that they've never gotten much attention. I think parents must feel this way when they have awkward kids. “I love you, honey. And you are pretty. You are. You just … need to not be ugly any more.”

Recently, however, I had a chance to discuss my blog at some length with a couple of people. One was my brother-in-law, first initial J, who feels that I spend too much time writing about street names in early episodes. Fair enough. I don't know how much that thought will affect the eventual form the blog takes, but I appreciate the feedback. And if that is his only critique, I'll take it! My sister Hillary, on the other hand, wants me to cut every single reference to theatre. She probably only told me this because she had had some cocktails at our older brother's 50^th birthday party, and I truly do appreciate the response.

Because it got me thinking: am I writing too much about theatre within NFTF? I think she may be right: I might be a little heavy-handed with the Carol Channing references and Nathan Lane inflections. But I justified it, each and every time, with a glance at the title of the blog: Rinky-Dink, Adventures in American Theatre. I thought to myself (quasi-consciously), “Ah, this gemlike little quatrain about Sondheim vs. Styne is just the thing to justify this blog about time travel being published under a theatrical label. This will satisfy the theatre junkies who are so avidly – yet SILENTLY – reading my blog! Perhaps this will draw them into the light of day? Perhaps – dare I hope?! – just perhaps my cogent observations about the current state of affairs in mediocre regional theatre will be just the thing to get people commenting!”

Nope.

So I'm laying here under my blog, with hot inspiration dripping on my face and the smell of burned potential strong in my nostrils, and I'm thinking. My need to write about Theatre must be fulfilled. My youngest sister is so bored with my writings about theatre that she skips – actually skips – whole sections of it whenever I lean in that direction. What to do? Socket wrench? Shot of whiskey? Both? I'll take three, thanks, and then stare at the page some more. Meanwhile, I may just have to create a new, separate blog, somewhere else. Transfer NFTF over there, and maintain Blogger as the home of Rinky-Dink, as that association seems cemented in both the spiritual and the literal senses.

It's four minutes after Midnight. This blog is unfinished. Notes From The Future have yet to arrive. I am bracing myself for three comments followed by thunderous silence. Thus my writing career mimics almost exactly the shape of my theatrical career. Lesson learned:

Location, location, location.

Why Direct?

Over time, I have come to think of the actor as a shaman. Taking on a role, putting on another face, transforming oneself in order to instruct, dazzle, enchant, delight, terrify: this is all the sort of thing that would have brought the Inquisition knocking. And rightly so: it is also exactly what the shaman does in her work, opening doorways to another world, opening the eyes of her fellow humans, changing people and changing the world.

If the actor is a shaman, what, then, is the director? It is my belief that the director must also be an actor, fully trained in acting, singing, dance, combat, dialects, everything on the actor training menu (full design training would be nice, as well); with full command of all of the theatrical arts, a true director, ideally diversely adept, would also be a true Adept, a Magician, a Wizard, a Sorcerer.

I draw a distinction between shaman and Adept for the purposes of this discussion: in many minds, they are one and the same -- and who am I to say that this or that shaman is not also an Adept? -- but for the purposes of this discussion, an Adept can be seen as the master of many disciplines, while the shaman can be seen as the master of a subset thereof.

My early theatrical training, composed largely of my time at The Boston Conservatory in the mid-late 1990's, was made up almost entirely of the exact opposite philosophy: there is no such thing as magick, there is only Art. Focus on the Why in Art and you will have the key to any project. I want to make it clear that this was incredibly useful training and still is, to this day. I believe that it is important for undergraduates to develop calluses from walking on the shards of their shattered illusions -- thus enabling them to travel as far as their dreams can lead them.

My time in Boston was one of darkness wherein I lost my way and my connection to the mystical. It was only upon my return to California that I was able to find that part of my soul again -- but the discipline instilled in me from my undergraduate training gave me a new and potent approach to everything I do, particularly my pursuit of Adeptitude in both spiritual and theatrical work.

Since then, the shamanic and Adeptic nature of acting and directing have only increased in clarity; each project I take on presents new and powerful challenges from which I learn new and powerful lessons. What becomes startlingly clear to me are those other artists who simply do not understand these things, and whose approach to the work is thus hampered. This leads to hackneyed, theatrically deadly productions: a Dracula that is not scary, a musical comedy that is not funny, a season that is not interesting.

Unfortunately, one cannot simply walk up to another director and spout, "Wow, your work suffers because of your lack of understanding of the shamanic/adeptic connection to theatre!" I suspect that the initial, undergraduate training must be strict enough and strong enough that it forms an Adamantine skeleton supporting anything else layered on top of it. To be clear: I am not saying that a shamanic/adeptic approach to theatre is the only one. In my opinion, there is an undeniable connection, but it's anecdotal. This path will not work for everyone, and, frankly, each theatrical explorer must cut her own path into the forest of adventure; following another artist's trail only leads to ashes and shit.

Play the Ink

What do you do as an actor when you begin to think about your character's past, their origins, their family, their morning, their evening -- basically everything that happens before and after we see them on stage or on screen? If you have an imagination, if you have an inquisitive and active mind and if you are playing the part, isn't it ultimately up to you as the actor to devise a complete picture of whatever content you choose?

What do you do as a director when you think about a character's past, origins, family, everything that happens before and after we see them on screen or on stage? As the director, every last detail is in your control. Shouldn't you map every single thing out for the actor and tell them how to play it? Shouldn't you make them do the role the way you see it? Shouldn't you direct and guide them into the performance that you see as best fitting the role, the play, the production?

If the answer to the majority of these questions is "Yes!" -- as many actors or directors would tell you -- then we are at an immediate impasse: the answer cannot be yes to the actor's questions if the answer to the director's questions is also yes, because the director, in theory, ultimately decides. But if there is a disagreement and the director forces the actor to bend to directorial will, the actor may always have a shard of splintry grudge in her heart over being forced to play the role one way, when she feels deeply that it ought to go down a different path.

Similarly, a director knows when an actor is ignoring their direction. Well, a good director knows; a director who deals in direct (pun!) communication, clear choices and intelligent staging knows when an actor is pretending to forget because there has definitely been clear, calm discussion at some point during rehearsal about what, precisely, is going on in this play. So when the actor "forgets" repeatedly to use the double-take or to cross down left before the witty riposte, the director knows that the actor doesn't like what they were told to do. Hopefully, it is a situation in which the director can talk to the actor and they can work it out. If it is not, the director is better off giving the actor the benefit of the doubt and moving on to the next project with cloudless hindsight: actors' egos are strange, fragile things more slippery and potentially destructive than the Hayward fault.

Rehearsal is the place to work these details out. And the actor and director must approach the work with an equally open mind. Truly wonderful things can happen as a result of open collaboration, and it is exciting to see what magnificent works arise from bright minds applied to potent work in fertile artistic ground.

But.

How do we know which approach to take, and when? What is to stop me, as Oliver Warbucks in Annie, from choosing to play my role as an ardent Nazi sympathizer and soulless war profiteer? My name, after all, is Warbucks. It is clear that I made my money in World War I, I am bound to have multiple contacts in Germany, it's in my best interest that the United States be at war with someone, the President of Germany appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany on January 30 of the year in which the play takes place (1933), so this is all quite possible.

The specific math: I am 37, so I play Warbucks as 37. If it's 1933, then 37 years ago was 1896. So at age 23, it was 1919, the perfect timing for my having made my first million by age 23, as stated in the script. [Pure inference: Being such a business- and work-oriented fellow, I am probably a Capricorn. Many Capricorns -- or people with Capricorn Ascendants -- tend to feel unwanted, so getting into a business that everyone in the world wants (weaponry) is going to be very satisfying to me.] None of this prevents me from choosing to make Warbucks a Nazi sympathizer. There is the fact that I invite Judge Brandeis to my house on Christmas Eve to officially adopt Annie, but I could justify that by saying I'm rubbing a Christian holiday in the face of a prominent Jew. There's nothing disproving this in the script, and imagination can justify anything.

What if a director disagrees with this? How do they go about dissuading me from this viewpoint? What if the director thinks that I am instead the inheritor of a vast fortune from a dead uncle whose attorney had to search Hell's Kitchen for me in order to execute the Last Will and Testament? Again, there's nothing in the script to say that this is not the case, and imagination can justify anything.

Aren't both points of view equally valid?

Possibly.

Is there some kind of yardstick, either universal or specific, that one can use as actor or director to figure out the true path of any character?

Yes.

It's called the script.

Specifically, the ink. The script can spark all sorts of ideas, and any number of approaches can arise therefrom. However, in Playing Shakespeare, Janet Suzman advises us to, "Play the ink." This means play what's there, play what's written and what can be directly supported by other ink in the script.

In other words, what Oliver Warbucks had for breakfast this morning does not matter unless the scene is about what he had for breakfast this morning. And the scene should only be about this morning's breakfast if that somehow advances the plot. If there's no breakfast mentioned, it's not playable.

An actor who spends time playing unwritten deep upset at past events is wasting everyone's time and her own most of all: why spend a play focused on one tiny detail of a character's past when the character's current focus is the now and the immediate or long-term future? Yes, the past is part of the tapestry. But it's only playable if it's written. And while Warbucks never says he is NOT a Nazi sympathizer, he also never says that he is. And if the character never says it, and if there is nothing in the ink of the script that clearly, directly states it, then it is not true and cannot be played.

We play wants.

We use tactics to get what we want.

We play these tactics with life-or-death stakes.

Whether or not we get what we want defines the degree of our emotional reaction to the situation; in other words, Emotion Is The Sweat Of Action. Play like your life depends on it -- literally, you will die if you do not get what you want -- and when you win or lose you will feel what you should in that moment. It's natural, it's organic, it's economical.

An important caveat: where you were just before you walked in and where you were going when you entered the room are, of course incredibly important. They are part of your arc, part of your path. In a well-written play, this is clear. But these are things to know, not to play. Only action is playable. Just like in hide-and-go-seek, we run for base as though we will die if we are tagged. To run for base as though thinking about the scary clowns of youth or the rhododendron behind which we were just hiding is precisely the path to losing the game.