Tag Archives: theater

When Is A Job Not A Job? When It’s In The Arts, Apparently.

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[IMPORTANT UPDATE AT THE END]

Here’s a story for you, and it’s a good one, an uplifting one in this time of constant headlines about this or that art form dying or being in yet another crisis. It’s about a little theater, a small off-off-Broadway space[1] towards the bottom of that Triangle Below Canal, a professional theatre well known for experimental work called The Flea. This little experimental theater nearly went out of business in the wake of 9/11, when Tribeca became a ruined, gray-dusted alien landscape. The Flea was only saved through a mixture of innovative fundraising and striking gold with a hit play called The Guys, a two-hander about a reporter and a firehouse hit hard by the WTC attacks that starred a roster of celebrities, ran for years and helped put the theater back on solid footing.

Now, thirteen years after the theater nearly went out of business, The Flea is thriving. Its resident acting company (called The Bats) numbers around 150 people and produces work constantly. A directing apprenticeship program helps mentor the next generation of directors. The theatre does a variety of programming with a kind of ambition—particularly where cast sizes are concerned—that no one else in town can match on a budget so small as to be almost unimaginable.

It’s a remarkable turnaround, so remarkable that The Flea has managed to raise $18 million to purchase a nearby building and convert it into a new space. The new space will have three state of the art theater spaces available to local companies to rent for cheap[2] and allow The Flea to produce more work. And so far, the plan has received rapturous coverage in the press, helping to raise the profile of The Flea even further[3].

There’s just one little wrinkle in this story, and it’s about The Bats. You know, the resident company of 150 or so early career actors? The ones the Times calls the “beating heart” of the theater? The young, hip, diverse troupe whose work helps ensure the theater is constantly full of young, hip, diverse audiences? Well, they’re unpaid.

*

Is it a problem that The Bats aren’t paid to act? It turns out that answering that question involves answering a whole lot of other sub-questions. Questions like: is acting a job? If it is, is exposure a form of payment, a kind of service in lieu of cash, perhaps? Are there mitigating circumstances that affect any of this? Does it matter that the kind of large scale, ambitious works The Bats often do at The Flea would be impossible if they had to pay their actors? Does it matter that there is the money to build an $18 million new space but seemingly no money to pay artists?

It turns out the answer to those questions change depending on who you talk to, depending on what kind of story you want to tell. The story that tends to get told about the arts leaves out labor issues[4]. If labor—and that no-no topic, pay—are brought up at all, they’re usually in the context of whether or not Broadway performers, musicians and technicians are getting paid too much, despite the fact that, as Terry Teachout discussed in the Wall Street Journal, ballooning marketing costs are largely to blame for increased ticket prices on the Great White Way.  Rarely discussed in the conventional story about theater and money is that salaries are so high on Broadway because those high payments make it possible for artists to remain in a system that, except for their brief tenures in the largest theaters, will ask them to do enormous amounts of work, often for little to no money[5].

The story we tell each other about creative work, meanwhile, is that it isn’t really a job, not really, and that you should be grateful for what you can get for it, even if other people are getting paid off of the work that you do.  This isn’t limited to theater. David Byrne recently talked about this issue and music in Salon, and Molly Crabapple wrote about it in the visual arts for Vice. Many (if not most) literary magazines don’t pay. Many major websites won’t pay for writing if they can get away with it. Hell, I am currently writing this essay about The Flea not paying its early career actors for a website that doesn’t pay its writers. I don’t always see a problem with this. Here at Hooded Utilitarian, no one, including Noah Berlatsky who works much, much harder on it than I, makes any money off of it.  HU is a labor of love (or, for some of you, hate) where we can get together and publish things we’re unlikely to place elsewhere. It’s a site where professionals do some non-professional—but hopefully professional quality— work.

There’s a term for this kind of work—professional grade labor that goes unpaid (and is thus amateur)—and that is “pro-am.” We’ve all witnessed how the internet has created an exploding pro-am writing sector. This has been positive in all sorts of ways. There is more great writing being produced every day, easily available at little to no cost for the reader. And as long as the reader’s costs are the only part of the story you’re interested in, it’s incredible.

I started working as a theatre professional as an actor in my teens. In the twenty years since, I’ve witnessed a similar explosion in the pro-am sector in the dramatic arts. Undergrad and graduate theatre programs have grown in number and size, and the number of paying jobs outside of academia hasn’t kept pace. This dynamic has both depressed wages and fueled vibrant pockets of “independent theatre” in many American cities, as artists have come together to create work for little to no money[6].

Given this reality, perhaps the right question then is… what’s the line? When does something stop being a pro-am labor of love and start being something more problematic?

In the case of The Flea, setting the boundaries of the acceptable is thorny.The Flea exists in a specific context and a specific industry. Early career actors tend to have only a few options available to them, all of them bad. They could self-produce work at great personal cost, even if they convince Uncle Shmuel and Aunt Betsy to kick in some money. They could act in self-produced work, which is something of a crap-shoot, exposure-wise. They could intern at a theater (likely for free), stuff envelopes all day, and if they are very, very lucky get someone to come to a show of theirs from, like, I don’t know, marketing. They could go to graduate school (at, again, great personal cost[7]) and, chances are, end up right back where they were only better trained and in enormous debt. Most perniciously, they could pay to take an “audition workshop” with a casting director (or just as often, a casting director’s assistant) which is really just a pay-to-play audition.

It’s a raw deal, in other words, this life of an early career actor. And it will continue being so for the foreseeable future because—and this should read familiar to any writers out there—the supply of actors so overwhelms the demand for them that the dollar value of their labor has been depressed to, essentially, zero. Given this, what The Flea provides—real exposure, free rehearsal space, frequent opportunities to get up on stage and learn one’s craft through getting work up in front of an audience, a chance to produce work, connections, a real community of fellow artists, and the opportunity to learn various ancillary skills of theater without having to pay a dime—is nothing at which to scoff.

All The Flea asks is that, in exchange for getting to be on stage, The Bats work three hours a week doing tasks around the theatre—more if they’re currently in a show since they’re benefiting more—an exchange that, when you talk to any current Bat seems to make perfect sense. It’s hard to argue that three hours of labor in exchange for the opportunity to be in shows is onerous.  Indeed, The Bats love being Bats, and don’t feel particularly exploited.

Unless you view acting in plays as labor. And how is it not labor? The Flea is charging money for people to see The Bats perform[8]. The institution is building itself based on their work. It’s one thing to accept that early career artists must be paid in exposure.  It’s another thing entirely to accept that they must be paid in exposure and that they must also pay for the opportunity in sweat equity.

That sweat equity is also problematic in ways not often discussed. Three hours is not a lot of work to ask an individual Bat to do per week. But with 150 Bats, each doing at least three hours of work for free, The Flea is picking up at least 450 hours worth of free labor per week. That’s ten full time employees worth of work. While this is clearly part of what makes The Flea able to do what it does on such a shoestring—and helps explain why, despite moving to a three-performance-space complex, they’re only expanding their paid staff by two—it has the unintended side effect of further depressing wages, setting an uncomfortable precedent for how a professional theater should be run[9].

These problems are only heightened by the new $18 million building. Practices that are forgivable amongst the scrappy are less so amongst the well-appointed, as Upright Citizens Brigade and Amanda Palmer have recently learned. Supporters of The Flea I’ve spoken with will tell you that paying actors and buying a new space are separate conversations, different stories. The Flea is currently spending around $17K a month in rent, and the new space will secure their future. Furthermore, it’s nearly impossible to raise money to pay artists properly and much, much easier to get donations for “brick & mortar” projects[10].

While I agree that the new building is necessary and am happy for The Flea’s good fortune, and happier still that off-off broadway companies will have access to three nice, clean, functional spaces at a low rental cost, this is almost too clever by half, this walling off the payment of labor from conversations about budgets, about donations, about the “public good” part of a nonprofit’s mission. It may be true that the problems of The Flea are the problems of the industry that The Flea is in. But that doesn’t mean The Flea shouldn’t show leadership on issues of labor fairness.

After all, The Flea has retooled The Bats before, to the mutual benefit of both the company and the theater. The work hour requirements for The Bats used to be higher, and the jobs more menial. The Bats used to perform in fewer shows, there used to be fewer of the Bats, and, according to current and former members I spoke to, less of a sense of community. The Flea even once charged actors a fee to audition[11], something they’d never imagine doing today. The Flea also hasn’t precluded rejiggering the program again three years from now when the new building is complete.

There are a number of changes The Flea could make that would still allow them to do ambitious large-cast projects with an excited community of performers while showing leadership on labor issues. The Flea could simply begin paying The Bats when they appear in shows. It needn’t be a large amount of money; even a stipend would send the message that the theater values The Bats and takes their art seriously. Being a Bat is often likened to a kind of practical graduate school, a training-by-doing program. Part of that training could—and should—include teaching The Bats that their art is worthwhile enough to be paid for practicing it.

If The Flea does not want to do that, they could drop the work requirement. Or they could work with the actors’ union to turn The Bats into an Equity Membership Candidacy program, a true apprenticeship[12] that ends with the actors well on their way to Union membership[13].

More drastically, The Flea could drop the 1-2 professional shows from their annual calendar and cease calling themselves a professional theater altogether.  This wouldn’t stop them from working with professional artists from time to time, particularly where playwrights and directors are concerned. The model for how The Bats work, a tight knit group of artists who do most of the work around the space including everything from running the concession stand to hanging the lights, is already closer to that of a community theater than it is to anything else. While “community theater” is a term loaded with all sorts of associations, most of them negative, it is where most Americans will go to see (or take part in) large cast, ambitious shows that don’t pay actors.

There will not be any pressure on The Flea (and other, even worse companies) to reform so long as the story we tell about art remains the same. So long as we keep telling each other that exposure is payment, that erecting a new building is the only true sign of success, and that labor issues are irrelevant, so long as we keep writing the same story, glowingly reporting the official line without digging an inch deeper, we’ll be stuck in the same place: Bigger, shinier buildings—or websites sold to AOL—with broke-ass people getting paid less and less to do the creative work that keeps them alive.

UPDATE: Since this article was posted, one of the people I interviewed for it (the one mentioned in the final footnote) e-mailed to say that she neglected to mention during our interview about The Bats and and payment that The Bats  receive a nominal stipend during tech rehearsals, since those are what are known as “10 out of 12s” which is to say, 12 hour rehearsals with two one hour meal breaks. This schedule makes it impossible for Bats to make money elsewhere, like temping or waiting tables etc. while in tech.  The stipend was introduced last year and is variable, but under $50.  This means that, when they appear in shows, the Bats are no longer working for free, which is a positive step.

That said, when The Bats are not working in shows, they are still doing 3 hours a week of uncompensated labor around the space. And I would furthermore argue that less than $50, framed entirely as  a way to make up for hourly wages lost elsewhere during tech rehearsals, is still inadequate. It is far less, for example, than the daily subway fare a Union actor is paid in a showcase production. And the larger issues of how we value the people who actually create art in our culture remain.  But it is a positive step in the right direction and reinforces my hope and belief that The Flea wants to find ways to do right by their ensemble.

[1] Off-off Broadway refers not to theater location but the kind of Union contract it uses when working with members of Actor’s Equity Association (aka Equity or AEA).  Off-off Broadway codes are for New York City theaters under a hundred seats. Off-Broadway is the designation for theaters holding between 100 and 499 souls. Anything larger and you’re in Broadway contract territory.

[2] This is no small thing. Theater space—even a 50 seat shithole—can cost thousands of dollars a week to rent, making the amount of cash young companies have to shell out to produce their work often the largest parts of their budgets.

[3] This is one of the reasons why theaters embark on building campaigns. Often the first season after a new building opens brings more audience members and donors, although I once heard a fundraising consultant say that those new donors and viewers often vanish after that first year or two.

[4] It was highly controversial, for example, when Jason Zinoman made the argument in the New York Times that the Upright Citizens Brigade should start paying at least some of its performers, given that a large and very successful institution had been built off of their labor.

[5] A union actor acting in an off-off Broadway show can make as little as daily subway fare in pay. Union actors working Off-Broadway often make under $500 a week. And that’s when they’re actually working on a show. Things like staged readings don’t always pay. And, of course, there’s the gaps between gig when actors aren’t getting paid at all.

Perhaps this is too much to get into in this space, but this is one of the many reasons why the current theatre system is set up the way it is, with larger “regional” (non-NYC) theaters hiring NYC-based actors. The theaters pay a premium for what is generally considered a more talented labor pool. Actors then make more money on the road both through higher weekly salaries and through subletting their apartments back in New York. It’s a system that screws just about everyone. Working actors pay an enormous premium to have a NYC mailing address. Local actors often won’t even get to audition for shows in their hometowns. And for audiences, to paraphrase monologist Mike Daisey, it’s something akin to going to see your hometown baseball team and finding out they’ve been replaced by a bunch of people who guested on Law & Order a couple of times.

[6] The vast majority of Portland, Oregon’s  theatre scene is made up of pro-am companies, for example. It’s worth saying that some indie theater companies take pride in compensating their artists to the best of their abilities.

[7] Nearly all graduate schools for theatre cost roughly one vital organ per year to attend.

[8] As this audition notice (http://www.theflea.org/blog_detail.php?page_type=4&blog_id=238) makes clear, performing is a lot of work in and of itself. In case you don’t feel like clicking over and reading it, this Bats production asks actors to commit to almost two months of six-days-a-week rehearsals plus two months of 5-days-a-week performances, tying up their schedule from January until May. This would, amongst other things, keep them from getting paying acting work for half of the normal theatrical season.

[9] After all, can you really call yourself a professional theater if the majority of the work in your theatre is done on a non-professional basis?

[10] Most of the money for the new building is coming from the City of New York. By comparison , the National Endowment for the Arts is legally barred from giving money directly to artists to support the making of art.

[11] According to an actor who auditioned during this time and joined The Bats a year later, in the wake of 9/11 they charged prospective Bats $25 to audition, saying that they needed to cover the hole in their budget caused by the terrorist attacks.

[12] The Bats are called volunteers, not apprentices or interns. Were the program called an internship, it could be illegal, as by law interns cannot do the work traditionally done by paid employees and more benefit must accrue to the intern than to the company they work for. These laws are on the books to prevent companies from skirting minimum wage laws, something it could be argued The Bats’ weekly work hours requirement clearly does.

[13] There are almost no professional actors in the non-profit system who aren’t members of Actors Equity Association. You cannot be a member of AEA and be part of The Bats. One Bat I spoke to loved being a Bat so much (and was getting regular acting work that she cared about) that she declined joining the Union so she could stay in the group.

Clybourne Park Is Lying To You

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Dialogue in a play is not like dialogue in life, with its artless jumbled ums and fits and starts. And it’s not discourse in smooth paragraphs of argument, either. It exists somewhere in the middle ground between those two extremes – crafted, stylized, cleaned up, with the playwright’s ideas and meaning slipped between lines of speech. And it’s not flawless communication. If Harry Potter went to Dumbledore some twenty pages in and was like, Hey I’m hearing snakey voices, do you know what might be up? then there would be no book. Miscommunication is sometimes the engine of action.

But when a play presents itself, to the audience and the world, as being about ideas, as trying to make you think about issues and problems in society, it helps if there is some semblance of discourse, if characters get to really say something. If arguments are also, once in a while, conversations.

The characters may not communicate effectively with each other, but perpendicular to their exchanges on stage, the playwright sends ideas and insights to the audience – the faltering lines back and forth on stage, and ideally something clearer from the stage to the seats.

***

Clybourne Park premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2010, opening there to nearly universal rave reviews. (Its average score, as measured by the theatre review site StageGrade.com, was an exceptional A-, with barely a negative word to bring the average down.) Reviewers celebrated the play’s wit and humor, and hailed it as a brave and important contribution to difficult (and oft avoided) conversations about gentrification and race. When the play won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the Pulitzer jury called it “a powerful work whose memorable characters speak in witty and perceptive ways to America’s sometimes toxic struggle with race and class consciousness.” It opened on Broadway this past April, a coproduction of Playwrights Horizons and Lincoln Center Theater, with the cast of the 2010 off-Broadway run intact. In June it won the Tony Award for Best Play.

(l-r): Lorna Brown, Lucian Msamati, Martin Freeman and Sophie Thompson in Clybourne Park at the Royal Court. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Clybourne Park takes an auspicious starting place for its leap into dangerous waters, jumping off from Loraine Hansbery’s classic play, A Raisin in the Sun. In Hansberry’s 1959 drama, the Youngers, a black family, struggle with the decision to move into a white neighborhood (the same Clybourne Park of Norris’ story). A future neighbor of theirs, Karl Linden, pays an ugly visit to the Youngers, attempting to dissuade them from moving, offering to buy them out at a considerable gain. Clybourne Park spends its first act in the 1959 home the Youngers have purchased. (This is signaled only through the presence of a Karl Linden who visits the outgoing homeowners to confront them about the undesirable family to whom their house has been sold. These references aren’t necessary to the play, and aren’t obvious to the average theatre-going adult if she hasn’t seen or read A Raisin in the Sun since it was assigned in tenth grade.) Russ and Bev are packing up to move out; Karl pays a visit (pregnant, deaf wife in tow) to make his case for the neighborhood’s, to his mind, preservation.

The second act takes place in the same house, but jumps to 2010, where we find Clybourne Park, the neighborhood, on the brink of a resurgence or recovery from decades of poverty and crime. This coincides, which is not to say it is a coincidence, with a white family moving into the neighborhood, and the second half of the play presents the contentious meeting between this white couple and the black couple representing the neighborhood Owners Association – the white couple plans to demolish the home from act I, now in disrepair, and build from scratch on the lot. (The same actors are in both acts, as different characters, sometimes in resonance across the act break and intervening years.) In each act, attempts at civil (i.e. coded) conversation falter and fail, tempers rise, and ugly feelings are revealed.

Revelation: ugly feelings exist.

Revelation: people have trouble talking about race.

Here is your Pulitzer for that.

***

Act I of Clybourne Park is funny – the whole play is funny – and moving, and the conversations people have are, for the most part, real. They feel realistic and something of substance is communicated – if the communication between characters is not always efficient, something is at least, most importantly, communicated to the audience. Perhaps the social mores of the Fifties help, the emphasis on civility that, for better or for worse, we’ve nowadays largely lost. Because the characters work so hard to be polite, there are actual conversations: the people involved each want something, and listen to – or at least hear – the other person’s point of view, and these points of view are communicated to the audience through gradual revelation that is tied to who the characters are as people. The dialogue is also artfully written, capturing the circuitous routes real conversations take, the false starts and interruptions. On the page and performed, it strikes the balance of real speech. The human struggle to communicate, and often the pathos of the failure to do so, is there.

Karl: Now, some would say change is inevitable. And I can support that, if it’s change for the

better. But I’ll tell you what I can’t support, and that’s disregarding the needs of the

people who live in a community.

Bev: But don’t they have needs, too?

Karl: Don’t who?

Bev: The family.

Karl: Which family?

Bev: The ones who-

Karl: The purchasers?

Bev: I mean, in, in, in, in principle, don’t we all deserve to – shouldn’t we all have the

opportunity to, to, to –

Karl: (chuckles with amazement, shakes his head) Well, Bev.

Jim: In principle, no question.

Karl: But you can’t live in a principle, can you? Gotta live in a house.

But even in the neighborly politeness of the 1950s, communication is interrupted, thwarted by the playwright’s hand. Bev is asking real, revealing questions that might lead somewhere? Karl says, “Darling, I came to talk to Russ.” And then Albert, the husband of Bev’s black maid, Francine, interrupts. And then Francine loses grip on the large footlocker she and Albert were moving, which falls thudding down the stairs into the living room scene.

Norris builds our anticipation by delaying resolution, but he does bring this conversation back around. With real live black folks in the room, Karl picks up his argument with a different tactic. He asks Francine if she would agree that “in the world, there exist certain differences.” (Polite and in her employer’s home, she demurs.) Karl asks if she would be able to find the foods her family enjoys at the neighborhood grocer’s. Albert shoots back, finally, “Do they carry collards and pig feet?” But no one else wants to confront the issue. (And the audience already knows what the issue is.) Karl goes on, politely, concerned for the family that would be different moving in – differences in worship, in recreation (“Do you ski?”), all rude and racist things to say but not anything I’m shocked to hear from a white man in 1959. Russ asks him to leave, Karl does not listen. Russ says, “Truck’s coming on Monday,” Karl presses on. And on and on and on.

It turns out that Russ and Bev’s backstory, which enables Russ to finally make Karl shut up, dramatically undermines the universality of their story. For all that the scenario follows the outlines of white flight, the specific tragic past that Norris has written for Russ and Bev weakens the connection to the issues he is trying to attack. It also provides a convenient explanation for the lack of a nearby white buyer, and for cheap sale price of the house, cheap enough for an upward-moving black family to be able to afford to move in: Russ and Bev’s son hanged himself in his bedroom, months after his return from fighting in the Korea War. As Michael Feingold wrote in The Village Voice, “the painful drama underlying Clybourne Park, often quite moving, is irrelevant to Norris’s satiric generalization; White families in the 1950s didn’t flee the inner city in large numbers because they were afflicted by tragedy, but because they wanted their kids to grow up in the suburbs. Affluence and a hunger for the new drove them out not their neighbors’ cold hearts.” So when Russ finally drives Kurt out of his home (and drives Bev to hysterical tears) by beginning to read from his son’s suicide note – Kurt, after so much refusal to listen to Russ, leaves because he refuses to listen to this – the emotional impact is powerful, but the ideological conversation has been abandoned altogether.

One would hope that that’s what second acts are for, continuation and further development of themes introduced in first acts, building tension, climax, and resolution. It may be old fashioned, by a factor of several millennia, but Aristotle is still the gold standard, and his gold standard for dramatic plot hinges on Reversal and Recognition. Something changes; something is discovered or revealed – these are the engine of satisfying dramatic action. Aristotle also describes a third aspect of Plot, the Scene of Suffering: “a destructive or painful action.” I don’t think this is the model for the second act of Clybourne Park, but it’s the closest structural analog I can find.

***

If I may pick and choose my Aristotelian conventions, I will not object to the violation of Unity of Time that jumps us, in act II, ahead fifty years to 2009. (That any theatrical principles have proved immutable over 2300 years is extraordinary; to expect all Aristotelian principles to remain equally ageless would be greedy.) It happens that Unity of Time is out the window, but Unity of Place is well preserved – we’re in the same Chicago neighborhood, in the very same house. The years show. There is graffiti under the stairs. The house’s destruction is imminent. (The mention of a koi pond among the new construction plans is meant to signal to us exactly what sort of structure the new building will be. The play communicates with its audience in code, just as the characters do with each other. A Whole Foods will be mentioned later on.)

And so the black community members, represented by a white lawyer, and the white couple represented by another white lawyer, bicker and passive-aggressively dance around issues of history and community and heritage. They go from trying to be polite to abandoning that attempt, but still nothing actually gets said. No substantial feelings or fears or desires are discovered or revealed. No one realizes or learns anything, on stage or in the audience. And then there’s some shouting and the play is over.

Both times I saw this play – in previews at Playwrights Horizons and on Broadway – the audience was with the play the whole way through. But I was angry. I was angry because it is frustrating to watch an hour-long frustrating and unproductive argument. And I was angry because this play had convinced so many people that they had just witnessed – taken part in, by witnessing – a real and important conversation about important and difficult issues. All that is actually said, though, all the audience is made to confront, is along the lines of, How ’bout gentrification? Gets people real riled up.

In a 2011 piece in The Evening Standard, Norris is quoted as saying that he wants audiences to walk into the theatre “and feel that something dangerous is happening,” and Clybourne Park cultivates this effect. People say racially charged things and well-meaning white liberals reveal themselves to be not quite as pure as they’d like to think – in act II, Lindsey employs that well-worn defense from (veiled, veiled) accusations of racism: “Half my friends are black!” But it is all an effect. Audiences feel that something dangerous is happening. But nothing ever is. It’s not that no one ever tries to defend herself with “Some of my best friends are black!” It’s that everyone defends themselves that way, and to put that chestnut on stage reveals nothing about how we think about race. A white man is nudged into telling a racist joke in front of black company; the black woman present responds with an even viler joke that turns the table on white women. The first is too long to relate, but hinges on prison rape and white men’s fear of black men’s sexuality; the second is: “What do a white woman and a tampon have in common? They’re both stuck up cunts.” And so a mostly white audience that has paid $50 or $80 or $110 per ticket hears a black woman say this, and yes, it feels dangerous. But look at the characters’ actual insights on gentrification and changing neighborhood demographics. Lena is one of the black representatives of the Owners Association. (This speech, in the play, is interrupted by several interjections.)

Lena: I have no way of knowing what sort of connection you have to the neighborhood where you grew up in? … And some of our concerns have to do with a particular period in history and the things that people experienced here in this community during that period… both good and bad, and on a personal level? I just have a lot of respect for the people who went through those experiences and still managed to carve out a life for themselves and create a community despite a whole lot of obstacles? Some of which still exist. That’s just a part of my history and my parents’ history – and honoring the connection to that history – and, no one, myself included, likes having to dictate what you can or can’t do with your own home, but there’s just a lot of pride, and a lot of memories in these houses, and for some of us, that connection still has value, if that makes any sense?

This speech not only fails to actually say anything about neighborhoods and their legacies – Norris has skilfully captured a very real way of talking so widely around a subject that even the hinted meanings are lost – but it also reveals nothing about Lena’s objections to a white couple moving into her neighborhood, which, for this play’s purpose, is a point of view the audience should be exposed to, should be made to understand.

Lena’s ends on the history and memory in the houses in the neighborhood. Although she is talking very widely around the topic of gentrification, it turns out to be surprisingly on-point, as the actual issue being debated in this act is how big a house the new residents can build on this lot. The plans have passed the Zoning Board, but the Owners Association has reservations – the house will be, they say, fifteen feet taller than the average height in the neighborhood. There is, of course, racial subtext – these white people coming in and building their big ostentatious house in this inexpensive but desirably located neighborhood, with their koi pond and their Whole Foods down the street. (If the Whole Foods predated the construction, how new can this gentrification be? And please, I call for a moratorium on using Whole Foods as symbol for yuppie gentrification and the butt of associated jokes. It’s just a supermarket.) But these construction plans are not only a pretense for the confrontation of the scene, they’re what the confrontation is actually about. Near the end of the play we get this:

Lindsey: Well, I want to say this: I want to say I feel angry. And I’m basically kind of hurt by the implication that’s been made that, just because we want to live as your neighbors and raise a child alongside yours, that somehow, in the process of doing that, we’ve had our ethics called into question. Because that is hurtful.

Lena: (calmly) No one has questioned your ethics at all.

Lindsey: Well, I wish I could believe you.

Lena: No, what we’re questioning is your taste.

Because it’s actually just about the stupid house.

This play wants us to think its about gentrification, but just as the first act pointed to white flight while really hinging on a particular and unique family tragedy, this act’s entire story and conflict and drama depend on the Owners Association not wanting the new family to build a big, ugly house. In between all that, the characters fight about race, and since a contentious issue is gestured at, well, that must be what this play is all about.

Norris may be trying to hold a mirror up to his audience’s well-meaning liberal hypocrisy but the characters are such huge jerks that it’s too easy to think not, “Oh my god, we do the same thing!” but rather, “Oh my god, look at those awful people!” The conversation feels dangerous, but looking at the people having it and gasping at their awfulness only makes the audience feel even more secure. The broad topic may be dangerous, but this play is entirely, one-hundred percent safe.

***

Clybourne Park has been produced at regional theatres around the country and in London. The New York Times wrote, “Every city has a Clybourne Park,” and this is probably true. Washington, DC has Petworth, London has Brixton, New York has, well, every neighborhood that’s marginally affordable. It has, among them, Inwood, the predominantly Dominican neighborhood at the northern tip of Manhattan that I moved to six years ago. As a single white person with minimal economic power, I am not a force of change. But add another white kid, add another, and when do we start adding up? More importantly, what does that mean? The questions that Clybourne Park fails to handle are questions I want to see discussed, because I am not enough of a conversation by myself.

In Eula Biss’ essay, “No Man’s Land,” the white residents of a “diverse” (i.e. predominantly not white) Chicago neighborhood talk of themselves as pioneers “lifting it up.” Biss and her husband, also white, move there for an inexpensive and spacious apartment near the lake, but they also appreciate (or fetishize) the diverse cultures they find around them. Her husband says, “I hope more white people don’t move here… kids were playing basketball by the school and they had cheerleaders cheering them on, and black men say hello to me on the street, and I love our little fruit market, and I don’t want this place to change.” The problem is that the change he is talking about is more white people moving in. He wants the number of white residents to be exactly enough to include him, but no more.

Biss and her husband, white writers taking advantage (not unfairly) of a neighborhood’s reputation – and perhaps its reality – to have a spacious home near a lakefront beach, want to opt out of the system they are inextricably a part of. I want to pretend that system doesn’t even exist.

I didn’t move to Inwood for culture or to pioneer, but because it was the only neighborhood in New York City where I could afford a one-bedroom and feel safe walking home from the subway at night. (What’s real and what’s imagined in perceptions of late-night safety is a question charged with racial subtext and gender dynamics but comes down to me trusting my probably prejudiced gut.) I am one white girl in a (miraculously rent-stabilized) apartment. Just as characters in Clybourne Park reassure themselves that the neighborhood they are invading was “originally” German and Irish, I try to understand things by reminding myself that, thirty years ago, Inwood was Irish and Jewish. But it isn’t now. I’m just living where I can afford to live. I try not to disturb anyone. I order dinner from the Venezuelan take-out in embarrassed Spanish. I don’t know how to think about it all correctly so for the most part I don’t think about it at all. Perhaps I’m being as unfair to my neighborhood as Biss’ husband is to their white neighbors, as wilfully blind as Lindsey and Steve in the second act of Clybourne Park. Does “I’m just living where I can afford to live” invalidate the community I’ve moved into? I just don’t know where else in the city I was supposed to go.

Biss describes a beautiful summer park full of Spanish-speaking families picnicking, Indian families playing cricket, and black teenagers lounging on benches; her landlord remarks, “The warm weather brings out the riff-raff.” Biss asks her husband to define gentrification. He replies, “It means that an area is generally improved, but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.”

There is a deep paradox in that definition. It is scarier than racist jokes.

There is one moment of real insight in Clybourne Park that is chilling. Toward the end of act I, Karl, the neighbor who is trying to stop a black family from moving to the neighborhood, explains his reasons:

Karl: I’m simply telling you what will happen, and it will happen as follows: First one family will leave, then another, and another, and each time they do, the values of these properties will decline, and once that process begins, once you break that egg, Bev, all the king’s horses, etcetera, and some of us, you see, those who don’t have the opportunity to simply pick up and move at the drop of a hat, then those folks are left holding the bag, and it’s a fairly worthless bag, at that point.

This is the one time in the play that a character expresses an unsavory opinion and cannot simply be laughed away, dismissed as ignorant or racist or nuts. Karl may be racist, he may be ignorant, but he also, if you take his logic as honesty, makes a point. And his prediction does come true. He’s right.

To let a character be insensitive, prejudiced, and right – that would challenge the audience, would force them out of their comfort zone. It would be a truly, wonderfully, dangerous act.
 
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Jaime Green writes about science, food, and theatre, usually one at a time. Once upon a time she worked in new play development; now she is a graduate student in Columbia’s MFA program in nonfiction. Her website is here.

Collage Theatre, Copyright, and the Curious Case of Anne Frank Superstar

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Sara Villegas and Anthony Pyatt as Anne and Peter.

Anne Frank and Peter van Daan flirt playfully in the crowded attic space, alternately shy and forward. They move lightly and talk softly, all to the accompaniment of a delicate instrumental on piano, guitar, flute and glockenspiel. It’s the first few notes of “We’ve Only Just Begun,” the treakly ballad co-authored by Paul Williams and Roger Nichols for a bank commercial in 1970, and later popularized in a syrupy easy listening version by Richard and Karen Carpenter. But, beyond the intimacy of the stage and among the small watchful crowd, the audience doesn’t seem to recognize it—or if they do, it’s a slight titter of recognition, and then transformation, the overtly sentimental lyrics (“We’ve only just begun/ to live/ white lace and promises/ a kiss for luck and we’re on our way/”) replaced by a soft flute that sends out echos of memory of these sentiments, the words casting delicate shadows on the moon-lit moment.

It was one strange moment of many in a forty-five minute performance filled with strange moments– 2011’s Anne Frank Superstar, a play constructed by Orlando high school theater teacher James Brendlinger, and acted, crewed and even directed (senior Cody David Price) by current students and recent graduates of Lake Howell High School. (A non-recent graduate, myself, was brought in as musical director.)

The show is the definition of high concept: The Diary of Anne Frank, set to the music of the Carpenters. Described by reigning Orlando theatre reviewer Elizabeth Maupin as “telling a sacred story through songs that have often been called kitsch,” the show was wild– and wildly successful, at least critically. The concept is almost stupidly simple, and some of the audience each night seemed prepared to hate the show, or at least mock it. After all, do “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Yesterday Once More,” and “Top of the World” really belong in a story of profound loss and human tragedy, with a backdrop of indescribable horror?

But the success of the show– and if one can gauge a show’s success by what percentage of your audience is unable to stand after it is over, this one was truly successful—was directly due to this juxtaposition, a combination that set both elements in a new light, one that seemed to change each aspect of the material. Coming out of the mouth of an adult woman, a line like “hanging around/nothing to do but frown/ rainy days and Mondays always get me down,” is at best maudlin, at worst painfully trite, especially when set on a backdrop of gooey sentimental strings and turgid playing. But out of the mouth of an expressive, and doomed, teenager, the words are transformed into something sad, and possibly true. The songs were also served by the intimate arrangements consisting of piano, guitar, glockenspiel, oboe and flute, supplied by myself, two high school students, and the cast member playing Margot.

Likewise, the story of Anne Frank herself was transformed, or at least recast—it’s become so buried in weight and solemn reverence now that its easy to forget that the girl herself was a teenager, a pop culture enthusiast who wrote, drew, danced, had crushes on boys, worried about her period and her parents, who could have done so many things with herself but was instead doomed to never move on from that adolescent state. She is in many ways the ultimate teenager, having had all of the fears of adolescence made literal in her circumstance. For Anne Frank was trapped–puberty really was the end of the world.

There are additional resonances that present themselves throughout the play, both direct and tangential, including Karen Carpenter’s own doomed life. And much of the power of the play comes from the hopeful use of those songs, so hopeful that, by the time the Nazis actually arrive, it seemed as though the audience had managed to forget that they already knew the ending to this story.

But if the jubilant “Top of the World” and the small thrills of the budding romance have caused them to forget, they’re soon reminded by the violent, silent violation of the attic, accomplished as the three teenagers enjoy strawberries in the annex. After the violation of the attic and the tearing apart of the family, the ending sequence presents Mr. Frank on the now-bare stage delivering a monologue regarding the  fate of his family, as footage of concentration camp victims inter-cut with an increasingly emaciated Karen Carpenter is projected onto a sheet held by two Nazis, to the mournful accompaniment of an instrumental of the Carpenters song “Superstar.” At the conclusion of this monologue his doomed daughter comes out one more time and touches his shoulder, to sing/whisper a few lines of the song. “Don’t you remember you told me you loved me baby/ you said you’d be coming back this way again baby/ baby baby baby baby baby/ I love you/ I really do.” He reaches back, trying to touch her hand, but she is a finger length beyond reach, led off stage by the waiting Nazis. Slow blackout on Mr. Frank, alone on the stage, and house lights up twenty seconds later. No curtain call.

It seems implausible on paper that anyone would attempt such a juxtaposition, or that any audience would stand for such a thing. But at every single performance the reaction was the same—the house lights coming up on a stunned and reeling audience, many of them still sobbing.

Here’s the thing I haven’t brought up yet, which doubtlessly many of you have already thought—the show was in every way illegal.

The Carpenters songs were not the biggest barrier—although it would be a convoluted argument, as long as we weren’t using the name or logo of the group in the promotion of the show, we would have a reasonable chance of making that portion work legally—you can, after all, perform covers of songs written by other people with simply a venue’s membership to ASCAP, and we could probably make the argument that having a repeating theater performance that happens to feature songs popularized by a certain group isn’t fundamentally different than an all-lesbian vegan Led Zeppelin cover band playing at the local ASCAP-member Mexican restaurant.

Anne Frank’s words, however, and the translation of her words on which we were relying for much of our text, were a different matter, as was the authorized play (Diary of Anne Frank), which provided much of the rest of the text. All of these elements are still under copyright, and will continue to be so for several years. (In fact, copyright in the theater is more restrictive than in almost any other field. You can, after all, read a book or listen to an album any way that you wish once you’ve purchased a copy–but to publicly perform a play one must conform to a dizzying array of limitations set out by the author or the author’s agents–usually, that every word of the play will be performed, i.e. no cuts or insertions without permission, and that the appearance, gender and even staging etc will honor the stated intentions of the author regarding the script and contract.)

It’s no secret that a certain entertainment megalith has spent the past fifty years waging a war on the public-domain, its army of lawyers doing its damnedest to insure that their prized Mouse never legally becomes the public figure that he is. But its been only very recently that the full consequences of this have really been examined in the public sphere. The kind of theater that we created is not an unknown phenomenon—it’s just rarely seen in theaters. Instead, you’re more likely to see works that collide concepts with abandon on the Internet, in streaming video—in short, in places where authorship is more unsure and its not always clear who’s neck is on the line.

And I have no doubt that a not-insignificant portion of the people reading this might think, at first blush, that this is fine—that there’s no compelling reason for such a perverse transformation, and that if there’s a law to prevent such a perversion, all the better.

But at this point, seventy years after her death, is there any person that should be able to claim the words of Anne Frank? Is there any one person that can speak for her as directly or truthfully as she spoke for herself? Who owns her words? Who owns her name?

Victoria Camera as Margot.

The show was the brainchild of high school theater teacher extraordinaire James Brendlinger, who, as a young boy in rural Pennsylvania filled scrapbooks with elaborate collages, depicting himself rubbing elbows with celebrities cut from the pages of the dozen odd magazines to which he subscribed, cut from the pages to mingle with each other, with himself—a glorious life of rubber cement living rooms and glossy paper courtship. Concurrently he filled binders with his other love, never-ending Gothic soap opera novels of his own creation, the concepts and characters lifted in the beginning from episodes of Dark Shadows and slowly over many years grown, like the show that spawned it, to monstrous proportions, labyrinthine and tawdry and tangled. (Dark Shadows itself, of course, lifted these concepts itself, whole cloth, from an array of Gothic horror novels)

But after graduating college with a teaching degree, James didn’t move to glamorous Hollywood, but to Hollywood’s hick second cousin to the south—Orlando, FL. He took a job at Lake Howell High School, which is where I met him in 1998, during his first year.

Since then he’s put almost fifteen years into well over a hundred plays and projects at the school, an incredible tally of productions. But somehow he makes it happen, with an incredible expansiveness and a desire to involve as many students as possible.

This ties in nicely with his tendencies for the grandiose, for making something as big and as bold as it can possibly be—always more songs, more choreography, more dancers and aerialists and elaborate props and staging. After graduation I occasionally contributed to this craziness, lending a hand with set design and visual conception, and eventually supplying music. Most of his plays have virtually none of the “restraint” of AFSuperstar. Most of the time they’re much larger, as grandiose and spectacular as possible.

 

One of the more recent of these provides an interesting point of comparison– a little play called SpaceMacbeth, written by (ahem) William Shakespeare.

Jordan Wilson and Cara Fullam as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth

The title and the concept were mockingly suggested to Brendlinger via an angry multiple-page letter from a theater professor from a local private college who was upset by one of Brendlinger’s earlier adaptations of Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, which featured two “sisters” in the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Like its predecessor, SpaceMacbeth is the sort of play that, by virtue of its dense bricolage, defies easy description. (it largely defied logic or common sense as well, but that’s another matter.) Rather than attempt to summarize, I’ll hit you with a few highlights–

–a live band (consisting of piano, marimba, violin, flute, oboe, guitar and drums) to one side of the stage, a thicket of mannequins to the other side, both plastic and flesh. It appears that the three witches stir up so much malice and death not only for their own amusement, but also to expand their collection of mannequins, which continues to swell with the bodies of the dead as the show continues.

–dozens (a hundred?) references to various tawdry pop-culture science fiction films and television series, ranging from the obvious (teams of astronauts and “space ninja” in mass battle), to the bizarre (tremendous flesh-eating puppets at the front of the stage to which Lady Macbeth delivers her enemies as food) to the inexplicable (previously mentioned astronauts entering the stage in march to an a capella rendition of the “Star Blazers” theme song).

–a truly berserk, yet somehow still believable, Lady Macbeth, played (and sang) to perfection by senior Cara Fullam. When she’s not busy scheming and pining after her husband, Lady Macbeth spends the first act concocting various ominous experiments, including creating giant dancing spiders with the aid of her nuclear reactor and designing some kind of sonic weapon while singing Kate Bush’s “Experiment IV.”

–At the top of act two, Banquo and the other slain men are reanimated by the witches, as drag queens. The witches explain their process, if not their reasoning, in an elaborately choreographed performance of the Scissor Sister’s “How Do You Make A Lady.” In the subsequent dinner scene Banquo teases Macbeth coyly from various places atop his giant castle machinery, batting her eyes, waving her hands and blowing kisses at the increasingly distressed king.

–Lady MacBeth’s final scene is sandwiched by two dramatic vocal performances. The first is a funereal version of Lana Del Rio’s “Video Games,” delivered as she drags herself out of bed to dispose of the evidence of the murders by feeding them to her giant pet at the front of the stage, who eats the bloodied clothing and weapons whole. She then disposes of the rest of her possessions in a similar way before dangling her feet into the edge of the pit  as her android attendants dance around her.

 

After lying comatose for several scenes as people talk about her bedside, she rises for one final song—the huge and truly theatrical “Dreams,” written by KISS co-writer Sean Delaney and previously performed by Grace Slick. Flanked by two Death’s Head creatures that emerge from beneath her bed, she stalks the stage gathering together all of her creations and attendants, so that she can kill them all in the frenzied climax of the song. “I believe in magic,” she insists, throwing her attendants into the pit. “And I believe in dreams.” At the final hit of the song she stands poised with the knife above her for a moment, before plunging it into her chest as her attendants pop up and slap the stage.

Here’s my question to you, gentle reader– does an event like this diminish Macbeth the play? Or is the play itself so strong, so elastic as to survive being bent even in such an extreme way? Is it a simple matter of repetition, that when a play has been staged ten thousand times something is broken, that it becomes untethered from some platonic concept of faithfulness and can instead be bent and chopped and rearranged at will? Or is it that certain stories or certain works of art are themselves impervious to adaptation, that the more spins one puts on a text like Macbeth, the more possibilities appear? Is it possible that so many adaptations, so many different stagings and interpretations and resuscitations have helped make the play what it is today, have in fact created that feeling of timelessness and “bottomless”ness that so many feel when they approach the material?

To my mind, a play like Macbeth has proved its durability, has proved that familiarity and exposure don’t have to distance, but can instead comfort in the face of the unfamiliar. I can’t pretend to know what audiences experienced when they saw the play, but I can remember for myself how those bits of familiar things interacted with each other, rubbed against each other, even changed each other by their proximity. And in my mind it’s in the best interest of all of our respective art forms to allow works to pass into this state, that there will be a time when these kinds of transformations will be legal after the death of an author, when the art that is capable of being made through juxtaposition isn’t outlawed, or kept from larger audiences by the will of lobbyists working for a company that was itself founded on the adaptation of public domain works.

I want to live in a world where Lady Macbeth and Lana Del Rio are neighbors, attend the same cocktail parties, sing the same sad songs, a world where a thunderous performance of Kraftwerk’s “Metropolis” is the perfect accompaniment for a blood-soaked space duel.

I want to live in a world where Anne Frank is free to sing “Rainy Days and Mondays” whenever she damn well pleases.