Green Spray Paint

A quick post, because I can barely contain my excitement! Rosebrand is advertising eco-friendly spray paint! It's part of a small line of other environmentally responsible theatre products.

Check it out here!

You can't always get what you want...

I wonder what would happen to a Broadway show if its budget was capped? Would we lose the concept of the spectacle as we know it? It was actually John McCain who gave me the idea when he proposed to ease our national debt by freezing all government spending. Although this probably would not be beneficial on a national level I think the same idea applied to Broadway productions would heed a positive result. The gears do not stop turning when you tell a true artist “No.” Instead they turn harder and faster. Artists may not like limitations, but we like challenges. Creating theatre is about overcoming challenges and solving problems; it shouldn’t necessarily be easy. If we pulled a McCain on Broadway, we may not be able to go with our first instincts. We would be forced to think creatively and our productions might turn out to be even better. Although perhaps, when you consider the projected $40 million that Julie Taymor requested for Spiderman the Musical in contrast to a continuously plunging governmental support for the arts, Barack Obama’s concept of “spreading the wealth” might be an even better idea.

Now is not the time to increase Broadway’s budgets. Broadway has been stuck in a sort of artistic lull for awhile now, but more money is not the answer. Bigger budgets are leading to more expensive tickets, and the coveted student rush seems to be slowly fading away. Patrons are paying almost $200 a ticket to sit in a plush seat while our economy steadily crumbles down around us. These are prices that most students and artists definitely cannot afford to pay. The most expensive ticket to a performance that I’ve ever purchased was $85 to see the Rolling Stones because I wasn’t sure they’d all live to tour again.* It was truly a matter of life and death. There are a handful of productions currently on Broadway that interest me, but I just can’t bring myself to pay those prices. What we’re in need of now is theatre that will engage and enlighten us without leaving us completely broke. Smaller budgets and lower ticket prices will fill the houses and diversify the spectators. They will eliminate the idea of elitist theatre that makes bohemian shows like RENT and In the Heights so ironic.

You must be thinking that I’m crazy. Theatre is finally being massively funded, so I should just shut up, right? All of us complain about having insufficient budgets, anyway. I know I do. Well, this is a gutsy statement for a designer to make, but I think we should start rethinking the way we physically create theatre. It is incredibly difficult to be both a theatre artist and an environmentalist. The conventional way of producing theatre is not only expensive, but quite wasteful. I shudder to imagine of the greenest of green theatre, a literal interpretation of Brook’s concept of the empty space, but maybe it’s time to start thinking of ways to reduce the theatre’s carbon footprint. Blogger Mike Lawler has some simple suggestions on how to get the green theatre revolution started.

For all artists out there who are skeptical, I am confident that we can still create beauty on a budget. The spectacle may no longer be found in elaborate scene changes, trap doors, and flying actors, but something a little subtler…like leaving the theatre and realizing that I still have enough money for dinner. If I learned anything from Mick Jagger, it's that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you nee-eed. Yeah.

*They’ve toured three more times since I saw them. None of them died, but Keith Richards did fall out of a palm tree.

The Hyper-Narrative and You: The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedy of the Postmodern Direct Address

The Postmodern Hyper-Narrative occurs when a character in a play changes from directly engaging other characters, where they are living out the action of the play, to directly engaging the members of the audience, where they begin to describe all the action we are no longer seeing, as though someone were reading me a fictional first-person, past-participle narrative. This form of storytelling in our Theater has emerged from the crumbling specificity of the Postmodern Self-Reflexivity, which in turn stemmed from Brecht’s Epic Theater. And while Brecht certainly had good intentions (and I full-heartedly agree with having a consciously political theater), I fear the specific artistry of the Theater has been lost along this path into the Hyper-Narrative by not trusting in our audiences or demanding more from our artists.

Not to say there do not exist plays in which a Hyper-Narrative style works. Shakespeare perfected Dramatic Irony through use of soliloquies – an active form of Hyper-Narrative allowing characters to explore and externalize inner conflict. But more contemporarily, Roberto Aguirre-Sacassa’s The Mystery Plays, while maybe not a great play, handles this style in a very functional manner: Thematically, Joe Manning of Act One’s The Filmmaker’s Mystery and Abby Gilley of Act Two’s Ghost Children are alone in their respective journeys, making the use of Hyper-Narrative apropos to the storytelling. And the actual moments of hyper-narrative are reserved solely for the protagonist of each act, allowing them to work through their internal conflict externally with the audience, rather than explaining to the audience what conflict they would have seen had they been watching a play. Oh, wait…

And that is where the Hyper-Narrative of other plays fails the Theater – as in Disco Pigs, where most the story is told rather than lived, yet the brief moments of character interaction are so raw and beautifully compelling, or in irksome Postmodern productions like Outside Inn that lose purpose with Hyper-Narrative clutter, like the incessant use of multimedia that has nothing to do with the story being told. I am worried the artists behind these pieces are catering to an audience they expect to be inactive and unintelligent. Yes, the myth of an MTV generation is real (with the mouth’s of my coworkers filled with homophobic jokes and pop-culture references), but that will not change, our audiences will not Grow, if, in our Theater, we are not expecting anything of them – reading to them as though they are droning idiots rather than living with them hoping for that spark of emotional connection. And why are we reading to them? The audience has come to the Theater! – they can read a book in the comfort of their own home, can’t they?

This side of the Postmodern has let loose the canon of non-specificity. “Why?” doesn’t seem to be a very easy (nor important) question to be answering these days, as I watch books be turned into movies be turned into musicals with famous rock bands be turned back into movies. Of course, I admit as an artist my own difficulties with the question, but I am not so sure “why?” bears the same depth and meaning in the face of a $40 million price tag dangling on a Broadway budget. This causes me great concern for what others may think being an artist really means.