Community Perspectives: Riffing with John Clinton Eisner

September 2010-John Clinton Eisner, Lark Producing Director

2010-09-16T10:42:00.025-04:00

REINVESTING IN OUR COMMUNITY

By John Clinton Eisner

At our annual season launch potluck event this week, we talked about home and community. This subject is on our minds right now partly because the Lark is moving to a new and improved space in December. The design process for this real estate project has engaged us in many exciting conversations with artists and other stakeholders as we’ve explored the best means for meeting the needs of a growing constituency and an evolving role in the theater field as a proponent of new and unheard voices. One of the most rewarding outcomes, as far as I am concerned, is the reaffirmation that the Lark’s core values are safe in the hands of our community. In discussing subjects ranging from the electrical system to floor coverings, committee participants have never become distracted by the smoke and mirrors of architectural possibility but have focused like a laser beam on our mission and vision.

It is enough to make my eyes well up with tears to hear a roomful of people deeply concerned about the disadvantages of having a “fancy lobby” because it might unreasonably raise the expectations of an audience about to see a work in process. I remember a member of one group grumbling, “I think people should just arrive at the Lark, not at some shiny lobby.” Naturally, these brainstorming sessions have informed the planning and design for the new space; but this processing time has also renewed our consciousness of the values that have shaped us and made us who we are. In this moment of transition, as we move to a new and better home, our community has reasserted its commitments to the ideals of free expression, self-determination, collaboration, inclusiveness, innovation, respect, trust, and joy in the creative process. I had been worried that a real estate project might distract us from our goals, but it turns out that our ranks are full of watchdogs and whistle blowers who keep us true to ourselves.

Our space planning sessions have inspired us to reinvest in our community. As we’ve grown—as more artists come to us with new challenges and as we have taken on broader responsibility for facilitating a range of collaborations—we’ve simply run out of room for people to “drop by.” Once upon a time, Lark community members could simply show up to read a script, wait for their next appointment, or meet a friend, but then our institution grew to a point where all the extra space was needed for programs and to squeeze workstations for staff and interns. The idea that we will have community space again when we move is critical to our mission of connecting to our neighborhood as well as to artists from around the world for whom the Lark has become an important destination.

In addition to building a physical home where our community can gather to plan and work, our commitment to reinvesting in our community this year manifests itself in a variety of related strategic priorities:

We support artists as agents of change in the world through an enhanced staff that now reflects our program structure. Simply put, we have put a qualified staff member in charge of three core areas of Lark activity: Andrea Heibler was promoted to the position of Artistic and Literary Coordinator, in charge of “Scouting and Assessment;” May Adrales has moved from a two-year prestigious TCG New Generations Future Leaders Fellowship at the Lark to her new position of Onsite Program Director; and Lisa Rothe joined us most recently, this past winter, as Director of Offsite Programs and Partnerships, overseeing international exchange, our Mellon-funded collaboration initiative called “Launching New Plays Into the Repertoire,” our university partnerships and more.

In addition, we consider our fundraising mandate unique in the field in that our development department is not only charged with seeking operating funds for the organization but fellowships and stipends that allow artists the time they need to do their work. We have a strategic interest in growing our fundraising staff and its professional skills in order to meet the twin challenges of securing long-term financial stability for the organization while providing direct services to artists seeking creative freedom. Financial stability means a broader base of donors, a growing board, wider recognition in society, a healthy reserve fund, and an “opportunity” fund that allows us to invest, as one of the nation’s leading “think tanks for the theater,” in new voices and underrepresented communities. Success will also mean raising the bar for artists economically and setting an example in our culture for the value of artists’ work. That is one of the reasons that our four year-old Playwrights’ of New York Fellowship is so important to us and to the field at large.

We are also committed to facilitating collaborations and partnerships locally, nationally and globally through our Mellon-funded collaboration program that aims to advance new work from the Lark to multiple productions as well as through partnerships with theaters and universities. For instance, we have created a Playwriting Camp in Transylvania with a university partner in Romania as part of a brand new graduate writing program that allows emerging writers in post-communist Europe to gain skills while creating translations of works by U.S. writers that are being produced over there. Similar Lark initiatives are taking place with partners throughout the U.S. and in countries like Mexico, Colombia, Russia, the Philippines and the Netherlands. The fact that all three Pulitzer finalists last year wrote their “breakaway” plays at the Lark is connected to the idea that most plays—and playwrights—will succeed as a result of multiple productions and multiple “homes.”

We believe that audiences are as much a part of the creative process as they are the market for the ultimate “product.” Our focus is on deepening relationships between artists and audience members within the context of the development process. Audiences that understand and appreciate the growth of unique works of art become the best champions and sponsors of new work in a free society. In fact, like public education and public health, the idea of public culture relies on the everyday participation of ordinary citizens in the creation of work that engages them in meaningful civic dialogue. We explore this relationship with audiences both on site at the Lark—in every program that we offer (even at roundtables where the audience may only be comprise of two or three people)—and offsite on college campuses and in regional theaters where we assess the evolution of each play at the same time as we examine its relationship to each unique community.

Of all our strategic priorities, it is the area of access, inclusiveness, and diversity that is most important to the Lark’s identity, to the space we are creating now, and to our future. In a world that has become entirely interconnected through financial systems, the media, migration and the environment, to name just a few factors, it is the Lark’s primary mission to listen for new voices, to help fragile ideas come to light, to support the recombination of stories and cultures to reflect new manifestations of society, and to bring people together in peace around the stories that convey their values and heritage. While I am proud that several of the plays that have been nurtured at the Lark recently are moving to Broadway in the near future, bringing diverse stories to a mainstream audience, it is really in the Petri dish of “what if” and “I’ve got a crazy idea” that the real work of the Lark is accomplished.

Over the summer, I read John Carey’s book What Good Are the Arts? This book, by a noted English cultural critic, stirred up significant controversy when it was published in 2005. After the book came out, Carey noted that its most contentious passage was his definition of a work of art as “anything that anyone has ever considered a work of art, though it may be a work of art for only that one person.” He elaborated further, “The reasons for considering anything a work of art will be as various as the variety of human beings.” The difficulty, as Carey sees it, is “to find convincing arguments with which to oppose someone whose idea of a work of art differs from your own.”

It is Lark’s job to make space for madmen and madwomen who push to open up the boundaries of our world and make room for change that is needed. The change for which we prepare will be the outcome of our investment in individuals, their idiosyncratic voices, and a community that is nimble enough to amplify their creative visions in life as well as art.

2010-07-23T11:24:00.011-04:00

June/August 2010 – John Clinton Eisner, Lark Producing Dir ector

WHERE THERE’S A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY, THERE’S STRENGTH

By John Clinton Eisner

The world is becoming more interconnected every day, adding new complexity to our lives which we may choose to ignore or to accept as a challenge that will make us stronger. These changes are happening in media, technology, manufacturing, banking, farming, environmental science and energy production, and many other fields. Fueled by the global economic downturn, I’ve observed that activism is increasing and communities seem to be organizing themselves to collectively address shared problems. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has certainly raised new questions about government and corporate accountability, and this man-made disaster has forced huge adjustments in people’s lives, impacting the global economy and our assumptions that interest groups take time to seriously consider the long term consequences of their actions. Articles such as Time Magazine’s “The Global Warming Survival Guide” (on the web at http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1602354,00.html) are increasingly pervasive and demonstrate a renewed interest among individuals in making a difference on a personal level.

Obviously, there are many constructive strategies for pursuing a sustainable and peaceful future in a global society, and the internet has helped to make us aware of a vast array of ideas and initiatives taking place as part of an unstoppable wave of global innovation which will affect our lives in ways we can only begin to predict. With so many people organizing around so many issues, however, the root challenge, as far as I can tell, is how effectively people will talk and listen to one another. What does it take for us to receive information and to process new ideas in the midst of crisis? How will we do this in a globalized environment that involves many languages and cultural differences?

Culture and the arts are critical to this function, not simply for the outcomes that delight and inspire us but also for the creative process that the arts ignite in artists and audiences. Art—and theater in particular—is where we play out the consequences of our choices and where we learn to understand others. To feel for them as we feel for ourselves. It is the rehearsal hall for life. I don’t think that much change in the world will be possible, at least without violence, if we don’t focus on developing honest communication that builds trust, quality education that leads to intercultural respect, and a capacity for imagining ourselves in other people’s shoes.

I work at the Lark Play Development Center, where we help talented theater artists write and advance new plays for the theater. But, for me, our real purpose is to organize people—artists and citizens alike—into laboratory groups to learn how to collaborate. If our society is attempting to imagine the world in new ways, can we learn to take advantage of the creative process that artists have always known in inventing worlds of their own, and the laws that guide them? In the face of so much global misunderstanding, can we use the arts as a way to invent a vocabulary with which we can describe our versions of a desirable future to one another and find ways of playing them out?

One of my most significant discoveries over the past ten years is that the experience of art is only partially contained in its performance. The truth is that the intersections between artist and audience are often fleeting and arbitrary, sometimes awakening the mind and senses but just as often resulting in disappointment. This experience is very much like any relationship I’ve ever known that is complex and rich and requires passion and commitment. These relationships are remembered as a series of important moments—performances, if you will—and, whether these moments denote admirable or despicable behavior, they live in our memories and tend to outshine the spaces in between. We hold onto the narrative of our lives by celebrating these moments at parties and documenting them with photos and clippings.

But if I shift my perspective a bit, I observe that the space between the milestones is real, too. The experience of preparing to do my best, calling upon inner resources, growing in my capabilities, and learning how to collaborate with new and different people is what I do daily. It is what many of us do daily, whether we work in the theater or in another field. It is where creativity really matters, certainly as much as it does onstage under the lights. This is true of the surgeon, whose skill seems to be tested in surgery but is actually only the outcome of a lifetime of personal and professional development. Performance, while important, is only a small corner of a tapestry woven out of human creative experience. Performance as an end unto itself is, I believe, a selfish act of showing off, like an unwanted child who is forced by his constrained environment and the selfishness of others to demand the attention he has been denied. On the other hand, performance as a moment in a continuum along the process of discovery is a way to include others and to grow.

I feel this personal conviction about the importance of creative environments more than ever right now. I am flying home to New York City from my most recent visit to Transylvania. My 14 year-old daughter Hannah is traveling with me, and we are exhausted and elated at what we’ve learned about ourselves during our 11-day journey in Romania. Hannah joined me, along with a delegation of Lark playwrights—Michael Bradford, Brian Dykstra and Saviana Stanescu—to work with artists and students in the city of Targu Mures where the population of 150,000 is roughly half Hungarian and half Romanian with a few other ethnicities and languages thrown in. We worked with a dozen students who had translated plays by Michael and Saviana into both languages. Brian led a hip-hop workshop as part of his process of developing a new play in that style. We led multilingual playwriting workshops with Master Degree playwrights at the Theater University at Targu Mures. Hannah took video footage of discussion and dialogue, frequently punctuated by laughter and occasionally witnessing moments of true epiphany. Hannah also took an afternoon off to bake cookies with one of her new friends, the daughter of the university’s director. If anything was understood by all participants by the time this convening was over, it was something about the difference between a “teaching environment” and a “learning laboratory."

These two paradigms are distinct from one another, and they define something that is at the core of my own beliefs and my faith in humanity. An environment created by respect and trust, in which every participant expects to learn something new, is the most effective crucible for change because it fuels confidence and creativity. The gentle and appreciative inquiry of a learning laboratory, in which the creator is viewed as the expert and not the student, is, ultimately, far more rigorous and effective than more rigid forms of teaching that don't take into account that what we expect of the next generation is to take responsibility for the world in which we live. This fact is obvious when you consider how much better we are able to hear other people, and to be heard, when sharing is the primary goal.

June 2010 – Jordan Seavey and Tommy Smith: Defining Success as Journey

2010-06-09T15:59:00.013-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This blog focuses on what our community members at the Lark Play Development Center have to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Each month, we invite guest essayists to share their perspectives on the role of live theater in the twenty-first century and what the field has to offer society as a whole.

Our guest essayists this month are Jordan Seavey and Tommy Smith. Jordan’s CHILDREN AT PLAY was included in Lark’s Playwrights’ Week in fall 2007 and subsequently produced by CollaborationTown, a New York City theater ensemble co-founded in 2003 by Jordan (www.collaborationtown.org). He is an imaginative and prolific playwright and theater maker who recently joined the Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater. Tommy was recently named the recipient of Lark’s fourth annual Playwrights of New York (”PONY”) Fellowship (http://www.playwrightsofnewyork.org), He, too, is prolific and has taken an active role in producing and promoting his own work throughout his career. He is a graduate of The Juilliard School’s Playwriting Program, a recipient of the 2008 E.S.T. Sloan Grant, and the 2008 Page73 Playwriting Fellow.

Both playwrights are “on the rise.” They have fought hard to create their own opportunities whenever and wherever possible. Writers like Jordan and Tommy cannot truthfully be characterized as “emerging”—they have accumulated impressive bodies of work and have an abundance of good stories to share about their lives in the theater—but they still struggle for financial resources and to find an audience. This is a topic I have discussed frequently with Matthew Paul Olmos, my co-worker at the Lark and our Communications & Marketing Manager, also a playwright on the rise, and we were excited to engage Jordan and Tommy in a conversation about their careers as well as their visions of success when the four of us met recently at a restaurant near the Lark.

We wanted to know what was on their minds, as artists who had demonstrated such tenacity and resourcefulness in pursuit of self-defined success. We wanted to know what they had learned so far about the paths they had chosen, what they thought they could share with others about what they had learned, and where they were headed. Based on our conversation, they agreed to write personal essays for the Lark’s blog and we decided that it would be valuable to publish them in the same month.

In fact, I have been thinking a lot recently about the idea of success and what it means to me, to the Lark as an institution, to the artists we serve and to the field. When you think of success in black and white terms, its binary opposite is failure. Our fear, in the creative process, is that nothing exists in the space between success and failure, that we will have nothing to hold onto in this middle space, and that we risk life and death with every step we take. In the face of so much recent cataclysmic failure worldwide—and I mean failures of enormous scope like the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, financial collapse in global markets, and chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan—I have developed a new appreciation for the idea of small, incremental successes, the stones we step on to cross the water to the accomplishments we seek on the other side. These are the kinds of successes that are achievable by us all, that are the result of careful and thoughtful planning, and that usually add up to results of consequence. Though the steps may be small, they require imagination, big vision, generous communication, tenacity and huge heart. I root for these successes every day, in the rehearsal room, for my kids at school and in my life.

Naturally, I’m not the only one in history to have ruminated on the meaning of success. At our end of the season celebration last week at the Lark, I shared a few expert perspectives on the subject with the assembled members of our community.

Thoughts on this issue include deep thinkers like Swami Vivekananda, Indian spiritual leader of the Hindu religion and disciple of the famous 19th century mystic-saint Sri Ramakrishna of Calcutta, who said: “Take up one idea, Make that one idea your life—think of it, dream of it, live on that idea. Let the brain, muscles, nerves, every part of your body, be full of that idea, and just leave every other idea alone. That is the way to success.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet, lecturer and essayist (and the subject of a new play by Rob Ackerman that is being developed at the Lark), said: “To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children… to leave the world a better place... to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Albert Einstein said: “If A equals success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.”

There are the politicians and policy makers:

Winston Churchill said, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

And Colin Powell, more earnestly, said, “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work, and learning from failure.”

And, of course, there are the humorists:

Mark Twain stated, “To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”

Oscar Wilde quipped, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.”

And Lily Tomlin observed, “The road to success is always under construction.”

All these ideas about success are pretty consistent, I think: real success is something internally defined.

Real success is the capacity to connect the things you do to the journey you want to take.

That is a hard idea to process in a field and a society that defines success by awards and box office grosses.

I think this connection between vision and the steps that are necessary to take to achieve it is our core value at the Lark, and of the community we attract.

I think that Tommy and Jordan, who began their journeys some time ago, are continually refining their plans and goals, learning lessons at every step and building a working knowledge of the unique territory they have each chosen to traverse.

I hope that their personal reflections, and their significant successes, will engage and inspire you. We look forward to reading your responses to Tommy and Jordan—and to one another!

Warmly,
John

DRAMATISTS: SLEEPING IN THE DEAD CAT’S ROOM
By Tommy Smith

There’s your life and then there’s your art.

Most people I think who are artists would agree with that statement.

I think some artistic practices are exempt from this rule, though.

And I think playwriting is one of them.

Some other world always occupies you, or you hear dialogue on the street and codify it as dialogue instead of conversation.

You use aspects of your own life to privately inform fake situations; every artist does this to some extent but playwrights often forgo the artifice of fiction and place the actual situation in the mouths of actors.

I have lost friends over this.

They say, That’s me.

And I say, How could that be you?

And they say, Because that’s a conversation we had.

And I say, That’s an actor speaking memorized dialogue that I wrote down in a computer after I thought of them in my head, alone in my room.

And then even if you patch it up, there’s always this weird glitch in the relationship, and sometimes you think of how Eugene O’Neill must have felt with that draft of Long Day’s in his drawer for all those years, rubbing his chin at the thought of his family members ever catching a glimpse and seeing, somewhat, what Gene really felt.

I know playwrights who have to hide what they do from their parents.

They don’t invite them to performances.

Because it would be weird, wouldn’t it, if you were a fifty-five year old man and you’ve lived in the Suburbs for the last twenty years and then you come to the city and find a journeyman actor who may have and most likely appeared in an episode of Law & Order – you find him onstage saying things that sound like the things you say to a young girl/boy who looks like your son/daughter?

I would probably have the same reaction.

Or boyfriends of my female playwright friends who get all huffy at the fictional boyfriend summarizing a long-dead fight and later they’re staring at the ceiling in bed, hour three of the rekindled argument, and they have nothing left to say to one another so they follow the passing car lights on the ceiling.

Playwrights are encouraged to bring their personal life onto the stage, and I guess what I’m talking about is the phenomenon of the resulting interpersonal fallout that sometimes happens when you’re a playwright and you’ve decided to present fictional versions of real life encounters for other people to see.

There’s also the monetary concern.

Playwrights are not known to have money.

A journeyman actor friend of mine said to me:

Playwrights can make a killing, but they can’t make a living.

Killing:

Neil LaBute, Yasmine Reza, David Lindsay-Abaire.

A music professor of mine said to me while we were listening to Yanni play in the background at a coffee shop that no one should ever make fun of an artist who has found a way to build an audience around what they do.

Living:

Everyone else.

You start to develop a story around your life.

Mostly you’re framed by how you haven’t died yet.

How haven’t you died yet? people say.

And you shrug your shoulders and say, Not yet.

The story of most playwrights involves the laundry list of sacrifices.

My playwright friend spent over a year on her friends’ couches while living out of a backpack.

Another had a mental breakdown after harsh criticism, and could not write for a year.

Another suffered from a deteriorated mental state brought on by a combination of sleeping aids and alcohol and began to hear voices coming from a radio, experiences which he used to fuel his next artistic project.

Another got sued for harassment by two of his former best friends for using material from their friendships.

Another became a dominatrix to support her writing.

I have yet to find a playwright who does not, or did not regularly, smoke marijuana.

Joe Orton’s lover hacked him to death.

The multiple pill bottles of Tennessee Williams.

Spaulding Gray.

It is not exactly a healthy lifestyle, and it is definitely anti-social, and as I’m writing these very words I’m thinking about all the things I have to do today, and really I just want to keep sitting here at this desk, remembering things I wanted to say to people later in another form.

We can talk about the odd jobs.

We can talk about teaching or temping or waiting or getting snatched up by a product placement job in the television industry.

It’s all a distraction from getting back to the desk, away from everyone, in the globe of your own impulse.

I was talking with another playwright friend and on the fourth or fifth glass of Trader Joe’s we expressed our disinterest in attending rehearsals or responding to what we wrote in any way and us realizing simultaneously also that the great majority of playwrights really have been reclusive since maybe very young, as we were all kids who preferred to keep ourselves holed away in a corner instead of playing with the thronging mass, writing in our College-ruled notebooks on the bleachers.

--

You write what you know but everything’s that written is fiction.

Three years ago, I was sleeping in a dead cat's room in Prague when it struck me: Why the hell am I doing this?

I had traveled to the Czech city to produce a show of mine.

We designed piece so that the performer could perform the show and I could run the tech, making it a two-man operation that was easy to tour.

Through the hobo theatre network, the performer had landed a free apartment in the outskirts of the city.

This made the production possible, as we could pay ourselves if our lodging was free.

At the foot of the apartment was a strip club that was actually a whorehouse masquerading as a strip club.

When we got upstairs, our billeter showed us our room.

This is where the cat used to live, he coughed into his collar.

The cat had died last month.

Our billeter hadn't cleaned the room since the death.

Huge balls of cat hair hid themselves in corners, like lost western tumbleweeds.

The dried out water dish sat sadly next to a food dish with a remaining few bits of kibble.

As is customary in situations like this, we thanked our billeter profusely for his generosity and hunkered down.

When everyone in the apartment was asleep—four other people lived there aside us two, a common lodging situation in Prague—we started to clean the room.

Jetlagged, hungry, with tech at ten the next morning, we managed to get the room in an acceptable state to get to bed by three.

Staring at the looming water spots on the ceiling, I started to think of all the people my same age who were sleeping in their nice apartments.

Did they have to hear the ambient sounds of johns fucking prostitutes in the Czech night?

Is this what a normal life looks like?

A phrase popped into my head:

You’re always camping.

I camped a lot as a young kid because that’s the sort of thing you do if you grow up in the rural peninsula of Northwest Washington State.

The idea is that you’re going to pretend like you can live with only the possessions you carry on your back.

You start to think of what you actually need in life.

What you need to survive.

And often these things are intangible, they are qualities of observation, ways of relating to danger, tactics for survival.

If you’re an artist, and especially if you’re a playwright, you’re always camping.

You forage for shelter.

Food.

Companionship.

And after the fire’s built and the tent’s popped, you look up at the stars.

You might get lucky sometimes, you might fall into a good situation every now and then but your eye is always on the door, wondering when you’ll be on the other side of it again.

No one supports the life of the playwright except the playwright.

In terms of employment, the closest relevant analog is the profession of a phrenologist.

No one talks about the quality of life as a playwright, so I guess what I want to say is that I’m really proud of the people who do this still in this day and age when everything points against doing it, your very survival is constantly put into questions be recessions and new technologies and better employment and misunderstanding and artistic dry spells and the inability to mesh conflicting schedules with your lover or retirement, what’s retirement?

I was saying pretty much those words to a friend of mine.

We were in the heat of an argument about the lack of funding in this country blah.

His music device was on shuffle.

A male voice with a deep twangy accent, an inspirational speaker, came on.

This is what he said:

Keep at it. It’s such a tricky business. You want to do your art but you’ve got to live, so you’ve got to have a job, and then sometimes you’re too tired to do your art. But if you love what you’re doing, you’re going to keep on doing it anyway. I’ve been very lucky. Along the way there are people who help us. I’ve had plenty of people in life who’ve helped me go to the next step. And you get that help because you’ve done something, so you have to keep doing it. So much of what happened to me was good fortune, but I would say, try to get a job that gives you some time. Get your sleep, and a little but of food, and work as much as you can. There’s so much enjoyment in doing what you love. Maybe this will open doors and you’ll find a way to do what you love. I hope you do.
--

THIS PLAY REALLY DESERVED A LONGER LIFE
By Jordan Seavey

So spoke Lark actress Jennifer Dorr White, who tackled multiple roles in my play CHILDREN AT PLAY, the most recent fully-produced piece by my company, CollaborationTown.

I describe CollaborationTown to people as a small nonprofit theatre company that creates ensemble-based new work collaboratively. By "collaboratively" I mean any number of things—from group-devised collage pieces to a play of my own lone writing which I receive input on collaboratively from company members even when mounted and produced in a more traditional way—and by "small" I mean... really small. We work on a shoestring budget and, in fact, have also been so insular and company-based that CHILDREN AT PLAY was the first time we worked with an entirely new "outside" director and professional actors who were also new to the company. (This was partially due to necessity as it was the first time we produced a piece that required actors older than those in our founding members' peer group.)

Now, when I think of Jennifer's comment with my cynic/realist hat on, I think, "Sure, the play 'deserved' a longer life but I'm a young, emerging writer and this production of this play was, ultimately, probably just a stepping stone (albeit a significant stepping stone) in the development of what I hope to be a long career, and of course, at the level at which we produced it and with our limited resources, it couldn't have continued much further." But when I think of Jennifer's comment with my optimist hat on (compared to the other, this hat's a clunky fit on me and so often gets relegated to a hook on my bedroom wall), I think, "Goddamnit, you're right, Jennifer! This play DID deserve a longer life—in fact, it probably deserved a better, more supported production. What if I could be part of a theater community that actually embraced risky, exciting-if-flawed work by unknown or very early career playwrights?"

I've been thinking a lot about the very true cliché that writing a play is like bringing a child into the world, so I've been thinking a lot about what kind of world I'm bringing my children—my plays—into.

CHILDREN AT PLAY received the best kind of mixed reviews—the ones that liked it really liked it, and the ones that didn't really didn't. That, to me, is a sign of good theater—it's polarizing, it rubs a fair number of people the wrong way, and it's about subjects people would prefer not to watch in plays. It was not reviewed by The New York Times, despite our reputable press agent and the fact that we had a well-known downtown actress with a bit of a cult following in a lead role. I know this was most likely a blessing in disguise—aborting my baby is unquestionably the more humane choice when faced with sending it naked and vulnerable into many critics’ arms. Yet there is also a sort of cult of playwriting which many of us find ourselves criticizing and complaining about—while, at the same time, trying hard to break into. And I, for one, can honestly say it is not the low-level fame that comes with being a high-level playwright, nor the (possibly kind, probably horrid) reviews I'll eventually get in the Times that attracts me to it. Rather, it's that I write plays to

1) be mounted, and be mounted as fabulously as possible, and

2) share this fully-realized vision/version of my play with an audience of as many people as possible.

I write for a/the community and, while a small community is meaningful, a large community can be life-changing. As of this writing I am in the midst of self-reflection about both my actual work and my career, so I don't have lucid answers to many of my questions. But I agree with Jennifer, so one thing I know is that I don't ever wish to hear "This play REALLY deserved a longer life" again, after killing myself to produce something of which I am so proud.

To that end, a major piece of advice I'd give to younger playwrights who are self-producing and/or running a theater company is this: get a good, hardworking, reputable press agent, and get her/him early on. I think that's one way in which we've been quite naive as a company; we believed we could do our own marketing, and we did it for years. And for the most part had remarkable luck doing so. But we could've gotten much further much faster with a solid liaison. What do I regret least? Well, having six plus years under our belts as a company certainly helps our press agent promote us more, as opposed to promoting a group 6 months out of undergrad. Part of me feels silly devoting a large portion of this essay to "hire a press agent!" but we're promoting our children after all. Some children enter the world less privileged than others and vice versa. And while, for many of us playwrights, our children lean toward the poverty-stricken, one basic tenet of education (as it were) is to invest in someone who'll get your child the attention it deserves. Actually, I don't feel silly saying that; I feel silly that such a big part of theater in 2010 New York City is who's heard of you and how they heard of you—but that's not something I can change right now, so get thee to a press agent.

Doing everything ourselves—marketing very much included—taught me a hell of a lot, however, and not only in terms of myriad practicalities. It taught me about what it is to take responsibility for the art I'm making. It's almost like I extended my undergrad theater training for six extra years; in my undergrad training (which was also primarily focused on creation-by-ensemble) I felt like I owned every aspect of every detail of every choice we made. I think this sensation can dissipate all too quickly in the real world and, in a way, I feel that running my company in a “lo-fi” way has made me really own my choices and, in turn, my art. It's funny that I'm seeking to have my writing produced by larger companies than my own, where many artists and administrators unknown to me increase the chances that said writing might be compromised. But again, I think CollaborationTown has begun teaching me a sort of concrete assurance in my work, and how to communicate.

That's my second big piece of advice to emerging playwrights—collaborate. Playwriting is a notoriously solitary career—but theater is famously collaborative, to the point of being infamously social, and ain't that grand? Take advantage of the fact, find people with whom you work well interpersonally and artistically, and run with them. Really. Grab their hands and run together side by side for as long as you have breath and/or don't kill each other. I'm an only child, and the surrogate sisters and brothers I've forged (forced?) relationships with through art have become my family in a fairly literal sense, and taught me most everything I know about human communication on both personal and artistic levels. One's work deepens so incredibly when it's being shaped, dramaturgically speaking, by collaborators you know intimately, share a common vocabulary with, and have worked with on previous process after previous process.

Because even if you're working on a new play with a single author (i.e. yourself), receiving dramaturgical feedback from those people means you're building said play based on the building blocks of past play experiences past.

Whether or not you, fair reader, have gone on a journey through this rambling essay is a whole other question, and one that probably relates quite directly to its quality.
However, we write at least partially to go on a journey ourselves—right? And I'm discovering I have. Do I think CHILDREN AT PLAY deserved a longer life? Yes, but perhaps analyzing the reasons why it wasn't meant to be is beside the point, fruitless especially if they're bigger things I can't directly change right now. The question becomes this: Would I trade a longer run for a production which I had less of a hand in, artistically? The answer is, simply: Absolutely not.

May 2010 - John Clinton Eisner

2010-05-07T14:54:00.017-04:00

Spring is When Things Bloom
By John Clinton Eisner

Spring has arrived in New York City—the signs are everywhere! Warm rainstorms are followed by cool days of sunshine and blue skies. Hay fever descends on some of us as pollen swirls out of the park and accumulates in small, pale green snow banks where the sidewalk meets the sides of the buildings on my block. Overcoats have disappeared and new spring fashion blooms with color amidst the customary gray tones of the city.

At the Lark, spring has also sprung. Winter jackets no longer hang from the backs of chairs. The hallways of our building—a beehive of theater activity--are filled with young actors warming up for summer stock auditions. Our interns have grown confident and extremely effective in their jobs—and our staff has come to count on them—just in time for the semester to end! So, staff member Anna Kull is already interviewing interns for the summer and the fall. Meanwhile, everyone is in planning mode for next season, busily tracking artists’ projects, confirming collaborations with our partners, budgeting and raising necessary funds before the fiscal year ends on June 30th. And we are preparing for our Annual Year-End All-Company Celebration Bash on June 2nd.

The seasons, taken together, are, in and of themselves, occasions for reflection and assessment and they help me to establish a rhythm and a structure within which to set goals, establish effective processes aligned with those goals and measure progress towards a stated outcome. But each season, considered separately, embodies very distinctive characteristics. Spring, to my mind, is a time for shedding layers, stretching unused muscles and renewing our commitments to life and work. The cycle of life encoded in the seasons is the yardstick by which we measure progress—individually or, as in the case of the Lark, institutionally.

As I contemplate the Lark’s journey this spring, I see a major shift in our capacity to support playwrights far beyond the early stages of developing their work by helping them to play a hands-on role in advancing their own project to one or more productions. We are beginning to see a real leap in the way Lark-developed plays are recognized locally, nationally and globally and there have been some exciting breakthroughs in pursuit of our mission to bring unheard voices into significant public awareness. This month, for instance, four new writers have moved into a higher level of visibility as a result of two major awards recognizing works created at the Lark. One of these plays, Katori Hall's "The Mountaintop," a beautiful imagining of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last night alive at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, won “Best Play” at the Olivier Awards for its run at London’s Theatre 503 and its West End extension, and is now heading to Broadway. “The Mountaintop” was developed at Lark over a two-year period from conception to completion. Katori is Lark's third annual Playwrights of New York ("PONY") Fellow.

In addition, all three of this year's Pulitzer Prize finalists in Drama are Lark writers—Kristoffer Diaz, Rajiv Joseph and Sarah Ruhl—which means that they wrote the plays that first earned them major attention in Lark-supported programs. And two of the finalist plays (Diaz' "The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity" and Joseph's "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo") were themselves written at the Lark! All this on the heels of last year’s OBIE and Lucille Lortel awards recognizing Lark’s service to the community and our “body of work.”

But, as all members of the Lark community know, our bread and butter is not the flashy stuff. While we have helped bring many playwrights to prominence, what matters to us is not the commercial potential of the plays we support but the vision of the artists who have found a home with us. We are, at heart, a community-based organization and we depend upon friends like you who have experienced our work and believe in our mission to nurture innovation and welcome risk. I think that Lark's process for supporting playwrights is unique in that it capitalizes on each writer's idiosyncratic voice and vision and protects them from outside influences until their plays are quite fully formed. This commitment to the "long haul" is why I think the work that is created at Lark is so often rich and distinctive. It is important to note as well that Lark receives no royalties from the plays that are created here. The reason is simple: the moment we choose work based on an expectation of financial return--if we speculate upon what will be a "hit" or not--we stray from our mission of supporting original and unheard voices and opening up access to the theater for new communities. For similar reasons, we don't produce work ourselves (though we help producers get to know writers and to form collaborations to advance ambitious plays). Because playwrights can't "get a production" at the Lark, they don't need to impress us or please us. They can write however they want.

In this moment of spring tranquility, I feel excited, energized and ready to move forward. A spring breeze is dancing through the window. I hear the Cinco de Mayo celebrants downstairs at Cancun, one of our playwrights’ favorite haunts. I am preparing my itinerary for a week in Romania this month with David Henry Hwang, Arthur Kopit, Theresa Rebeck and Saviana Stanescu, followed by a week in Moscow scouting out new opportunities for American playwrights. I hear laughter in the other room where the staff is organizing May’s impossibly tight program schedule: Franco-African playwright Koffi Kwahule will be in residency with playwright/translator Chantal Bilodeau at work on the seventh play by Kwahule to be translated at the Lark “That Old Black Magic,” directed by Lucie Tiberghien; all five of our Playwrights’ Workshop fellows (Michi Barall, Madeleine George, Katori Hall, Sarah Treem and David Wiener) will be presenting work they’ve developed since last fall; David Henry Hwang is preparing for a workshop of his new play “Chinglish” in collaboration with the Public Theater; and Mark Lutwak of Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park will be in residence to work with Arlene Hutton on a new commission they commissioned through a young audiences initiative funded by Macy’s.

The projects rise up just like the daffodils, and they are just as wondrously beautiful! I hope your spring is full of reflection and possibility as ours!

Warmest wishes,
John

April 2010 - Colin Greer

2010-04-08T11:55:00.010-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This blog focuses on what our community members have to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Each month, we invite a guest essayist to share a unique perspective on the role of live theater in the twenty-first century and what the field has to offer society as a whole.

Our guest essayist this month is Colin Greer. In addition to being a playwright, poet and essayist, Colin has been President of the New World Foundation since 1985. He is the author of many books on education and social justice and chairs Lark’s Board of Trustees. Early on, he was an assistant to Peter Brook. His full bio can be found at newwf.org.

More than any other influence in my life, Colin changed the way I see theater and its possibility. The Lark has become a special place of process and inquiry—a true platform for creative expression and experimentation—as a consequence of more than a decade of deep dialogue with Colin about the relationship between theater and society and the role of playwrights and their collaborators as leaders, visionaries, and the formers of new vocabulary to describe a changing world.

We look forward to reading your responses to Colin—and to one another

Warmly,
John

THE POWER OF INQUIRY
by Colin Greer

I recently saw Stephen Schwartz (who is most widely known for his musical “Wicked”) interviewed on Channel 1’s “On Stage,” talking about how he experienced the “meanness” of Broadway and the much more “creatively comfortable” world of regional and not-for-profit theaters which are ideally driven by a non commercial mission. I resonated with that point because I have found myself increasingly bored on Broadway and excited and stimulated off-Broadway. So I am interested in what the non commercial mission brings into play that engages me.

As I think about this mission, I am reminded of Paul Woodruff argument in his book The Necessity of Theatre. He finds this mission in what he calls “active theater,” which he sees as deriving from and constituted by ritual reminiscent of religious origins. My own interest is less in theater as ritual and more in theater as epistemology: what I would call a “theater of inquiry” based on dynamic processes of investigating human experience rather than as a force working simply in the interest of tradition and continuity. For me, active theater is a way of knowing. When I sit in on Lark roundtables, for example, it is entirely fulfilling as an exploratory process. In the next phases of a play’s development, that exploratory dynamic continues as we deploy the senses of touch, hearing, vision, and imagination brought into service of reflection, understanding and open inquiry.

What do I mean by a theater of inquiry?

1) Theater happens by collaboration: Without fixed rules on how we actually choose writers, directors, actors and audience, theater is always an experiment in participation and encounter.

2) What we present: The end product is a result of creative inspiration that seeps in from the world is then coddled and mashed, caressed and molded to give shape to a reality.

3) Appreciative distance: Living in other people’s hearts and minds helps us to find our shared humanity, which pushes some of the normal boundaries of human interaction. When writers and actors explore and express, audiences are invited to enter imaginatively into the lives of others.

4) Groundlessness: A play is always in transition as it is developed in readings, rehearsals, and performances. And, after a run, the same play can be quite different in a new circumstance with new people. Entering a terrain where things have permission to fall apart and fragments are allowed to re-gather is the rich territory of discovery we enter as we attach, detach and re-attach during the journey of creating a play.

5) Tradition: A play requires an intense willingness to pay attention to and to question a great repertoire of established explanations. By taking part in these new areas of experience, we weave in and out of theology, psychology, philosophy, and law, without a fixed point as we engage the complex realms of social conventions, family customs and personal desire.

6) Shock: Through circumstances and character, theater can fracture “now” and ask us to test living in a new space. To re-design the world, or as Heidegger put it (in his article “The Origin of the Work of Art”) is “to speak out with the design of a world in mind” and to challenge dissociated routines, empty conversations and inertia.

In presenting theater as an epistemological activity I don’t mean to be one more philosophically inclined former academic claiming it as another particular philosophy among other philosophies. For me, “active theater” serves because its inquiry processes, in contrast to philosophy’s dedication to expression via concepts and verbal definitions, stem from its use of image and live symbolic expression. By coming alive through both personal and interpersonal voice theater engages me in the complex integration of my inner and outer experience.

March 2010 - Daniella Topol

2010-03-05T11:12:00.006-05:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This blog focuses on what our community members have to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Each month, we invite a guest essayist to share a unique perspective on the role of live theater in the twenty-first century and what the field has to offer society as a whole.

Our guest essayist this month is Daniella Topol, a New York-based freelance theater director (formerly the Lark’s Artistic Program Director) whose recent work shows both her dedication to fresh new voices and the breadth of her relationships to theaters in the field: Nicki Bloom’s "Tender" (Summer Play Festival), Susan Yankowitz’s "Night Sky" (Power Productions/Baruch Performing Arts Center), Leslie Ayvazian’s "Carol and Jill" (EST), Caridad Svich’s "Instructions for Breathing" (Passage Theatre), Jakob Holder’s "Housebreaking" (Cherry Lane), Trista Baldwin’s "Forgetting" (Workhaus Collective) and "Sand" (Women’s Project), Sean Hartley, Kim Oler and Alison Hubbard’s "Little Women: the Musical" (Village Theatre), Judith Thompson’s "Palace of the End" (Epic Theatre), Sheila Callaghan’s "Dead City" (New Georges), Stanton Wood’s "Snow Queen" (Urban Stages), and Susan Bernfield’s "Tiny Feats of Cowardice." Current directing projects include Sheila Callaghan’s "Lascivious Something" (Women’s Project in association with Cherry Lane), Susan Bernfield’s "Stretch" (People’s Light and Theatre Company), Maria Irene Fornes’ "Sarita" (Fordham University), and Sheila Callaghan’s "Water" (or The Secret Life of Objects), a multi-media epic about floods.

Daniella approaches play-making from multiple perspectives. She is an imaginative director, visionary producer, and thoughtful humanist. She balances vision with steely determination. She knows how to work collaboratively with people of all stripes to discover, with them, the essence of what they need to know—and makes that knowledge and the credit for its discovery theirs. She is a diplomat through and through, but always honest, outspoken and direct. You can count on her word as well as on her good taste. Just ask anyone who has ever worked with her—or for whom she has worked—and they'll concur.

In the essay that follows, Daniella considers her own struggle to bring her vision and exceptional critical capacities to the table without stepping on other people’s toes and to fully participate in the creative process throughout the stages of play’s development. To my mind, she is exploring the treacherous frontier that exists between all collaborators—a landscape of complex ideas and inexpressible emotions that requires careful listening, trust, respect and, finally, conviction, to navigate successfully. Daniella asks the question that finally confronts every artist in any collaboration: “What is the essential role that I can play to shape the work at hand?” Or, more specifically, “Why am I working on this project with these people?”

We look forward to reading your responses to Daniella—and to one another!

Warmly,
John

Taking the time to imagine...
by Daniella Topol

Developing new work is such a tricky thing for directors! We don’t want to invade the writer’s process of discovering his/her play but we want to be there to support, respond, and question how the play is progressing. We want to be present and loyal to the writer and his or her vision, but cannot be naïve in presuming that we will be the one and only person to bring the project in hand to fruition. What is a director to do?

A few years ago, I was developing a musical that was commissioned by a fairly large and well-known musical theatre organization. I had worked tirelessly with the writing team on the dramaturgy of the piece. For YEARS. Now it was time to plan for the production, including choosing a director. The producing theater had high-profile candidates on their short list. Fortunately, the writers were advocating for me. However, when the theater asked them why they wanted me, they could only speak to my contribution to the dramaturgy on the piece. In all of our work sessions, we had never discussed what the production I would direct would look like. To be perfectly honest, I hadn’t actually ever thought about what my production would look like or feel like. The piece had never seemed “ready” enough for me to include my vision in the conversation. What followed was an “interview” of me by the writing team where I outlined how I would direct the production. I bristled at the idea of interviewing for a project in which I had been involved for years but I went ahead and did it. We soon realized that my vision of the piece matched theirs (not surprising, but still affirming), but, sadly, the production was cancelled when the theater closed its doors because of the economic downturn.

While the whole process of settling on me as as the project's director turned out to be a moot point, I learned a valuable lesson. Why not take the time to envision a production at every stage of developing a play?

Supporting the dramaturgical development of new work is NOT directing new work. Of course we all know this. But sometimes, in the early stages, it feels the same. Maybe directors should carve out more time to imagine what our ideal world premiere would look like, feel like, and move like. What is the ideal space? Who are the ideal designers and actors to realize this vision? If we take the time and space to imagine in this way, even in the very very early stages, we can then discuss what we imagine with the playwright and find out if we share a common vision for the trajectory of the piece. The director’s role then moves beyond simply responding to the script and working “in service” of the playwright. If directors only work dramaturgically or as facilitators in the early stages of a play’s development, why should playwrights then advocate for us to direct their actual production? Who wants to hire a facilitator to direct a world premiere? Who wants to hire a director that has just been “in service” to a playwright?

I am not implying that directors should not do whatever they can to realize the writer’s intention. I am only saying that a director’s work developing new plays could be much more proactive than just responding to what is on the page. We can take the space and time to conceive and imagine the possibilities of a production at every turn. We can make sure to created a rehearsal room filled with a spirit and a theatricality that not only explores the text but also the possibilities of how the text can best be realized in space. We can discuss our vision, ideas and impulses with the playwright so that every step in a play's development is part of a larger vision of realizing an ideal production.

My favorite part of being a director is when I know I have an upcoming production and I can scheme, dream, and plan for it with the playwright, designers, and producers. Why not start that process in the early stages of a play’s inception? Worst case scenario, we scheme and dream and the play does not ever get the world premiere production that it deserves, or it does, but with another director at the helm. Both of these scenarios can be heartbreaking for a director, but, was it really so bad to take the time to imagine?

February 2010 - Caridad Svich

2010-02-04T13:07:00.015-05:00

Considering Utopia
by Caridad Svich

Find yourself in a hotel room in Utopia, Texas overlooking the cypress-lined Sabinal River. Consider the expanse of sky and the relative ease of the rivers current. An image of a perfect society emerges in your mind, where the metaphysical space that encompasses language, history, morality and sexuality is in harmonious, hopeful balance. Here in the small room in the middle of seeming nowhere, considerations of beauty, love and social change dance on an open stage liberated from the concerns of globalization, neo-liberalism and terror. Today, you think, is beauteous pretend and play. Tomorrow will be another day. But the more you look out of your hotel room and scan the limits of Utopia, the more the Texas sky calls you to action, to, in effect, give up pretend, and get on with the reality of life. And yet, what if your job is to pretend, and indeed, to play?

In the collective no-space shared between audience and practitioners, expressions of utopian desire abound when we walk into and take part in the theater laboratory. In the Here of shared literal and metaphorical space, dreams of new societies are imagined, constructed and dismantled, liberated from the constraints outside the demarcated space of deep play. Theater and live performance retains its dangerous potentiality, in part, because it posits a shared space of dreaming for society. Running counter to theater’s multidimensional, utopian impulse are the anti-utopian modes of hierarchy and exclusivity inscribed in its economics, forms and institutions (especially of bourgeois theater). Thus, if you are committed to a utopian practice after the onset of late capitalism, where do you go to dream?

In Utopia, Texas, the modest Main Street runs through the center of town, and talk of fishing, hunting, gardening, cycling and swimming tends to dominate the conversations overheard on the street. There is some talk of art and occasionally of photography, but very rarely, if ever, of live performance, unless the subject is of a local or national pop, country, or roots band playing in a town or two nearby. Theater, in other words, is something of a curiosity and best left to the local kindergarten or high school play. How odd it is to pretend to be someone else? Odder still to want to do that for a life’s journey.

I’ve been writing plays and theater pieces for nearly twenty years. Sometimes I can’t even imagine what compelled me to consider the strange utopia of the stage as the most exciting embodiment for my stories. I often ask students to describe the first live performance they say that truly made an impact on them. Most of them speak of moments when they were on stage for the first time in their local kindergarten, elementary, middle or high school and often how they delighted in singing, dancing or some combination thereof. Occasionally, some of my students will talk about a show their parents took them to see for a special birthday or graduation. Often, the show was a Broadway musical or a touring production of a Broadway musical. One of my students said to me the other day without the least bit of facetiousness that the Disney Corporation probably had had the greatest impact on his imagination.

If you write for the theater, invariably, you know you’re writing for what is likely a limited audience. The collective no-space of play rarely can accommodate thousands or even millions, unlike the non-collective space of film, which doesn’t even require an audience to complete its experience. A piece of film runs on a loop and it matters not whether someone is watching, but a play really cannot truly exist and vibrate in the resonant space of performance without the presence of the audience, even if it is an audience of one.

What happens, then, when you build a dream in virtuality? In 2002 I wanted to expand some of the experiments I’d been conducting through the creation of online texts with multiple authors into something less tangible and yet hopefully as utopian as the making of a theater piece. I reached out to a band of twelve colleagues in the field to see if they’d like to be part of a virtual, national collective called NoPassport. I said “Let’s play with words and music. Let’s see what mind of word-songs we can share in the free digital utopia of e-mail and the internet. The space we inhabited for about a year was mutable, quirky, offbeat, passionate, adventurous, bold and intimate. We posted pieces for live performance, we wrote texts together, and we performed live in venues such as Tonic and the Bric and even wrote a manifesto entitled “Dirty Thoughts About Money.” In 2003, I curated a symposium at INTAR Theatre in New York City about the state of U.S. Latino/a playwriting. My goal was then to simply gather voices from across generations and also from across the country. Not just the Nuyorican voice, but the Southwestern, Chicano, Afro-Caribbean, Cuban, Western, Southern and hybrid voices that make up the vast, complex, multivalent shelf where U.S. Latino/a writing is placed within the larger American voice. A symposium turned into a jam session and the jam session turned into a call for a hub, a network, a virtual place where we could always meet, jam, riff, rant, advocate, mentor, debate, and play. Suddenly, the band of 12 became a band of 500 and counting and NoPassport theater alliance was in action.

Since 2003, we’ve staged roundtables at universities and theaters across the country, convened for three national conferences (2007-2009) hosted by Frank Hentschker and the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City, published eight titles of new plays and translations, and sprung a spoken word arm mischievously called Hibernating Rattlesnakes, that has performed at the Nuyorican Poets Café and Telephone Bar, respectively, over the last year. I can’t even imagine what kind of utopian dream was being conjured when I put out the invitation to play back in 2002, but I do know that a virtual space was transformed by the living, breathing, thinking bodies and minds of a critical mass of practitioners, scholars, and fellow dreamers.

It’s 2010, and next month on February 26 and 27, we hold the fourth national NoPassport theater alliance & press conference at the Nuyorican Poets Café. Much of the last six months I’ve been in the not-glamorous trenches of scheduling, grassroots fund-raising, curatorial meetings (with co-curators Daniel Banks and Daniel Gallant, and with editorial team advisors Randy Gener, Otis Ramsey-Zoe and Stephen Squibb) and logistical copy-editing, or what is otherwise referred to as: Prep. But what is Prep? And how does one prepare to build and confront a dream? How does one enter a space of Utopia? As a playwright (and in my parallel careers as translator and editor), I find myself constantly negotiating the difficult, complex terrain of utopian desire(s). Much of my writing for the stage in particular addresses the shifting political and emotional geographies of characters left behind by their societies or caught in the rigid hierarchies of non-utopian states. I write hybrid, Latina/o, Anglo, Black, Creole, Asian, Indigenous, transgender, bi, queer, straight figures who often are not labeled or categorized, and do not want to be either. I’ve always thought the most amazing thing about writing is the fact that you can enter any Body, that are you always as a writer Another at one and the same, and that the political freedom of writing is charged with the profound borderless-ness that the creative act requires and demands. In effect, the lack of passport, the No Passport, where the bounteous beauty and chaos of creation lives, regardless of the kind of story (genre) you’re writing or its subject matter.

As founder of NoPassport theater alliance & press, I’m also negotiating my role as citizen of the Americas and the world with my role as an artist. A speech I wrote, for example, on legacy and revolution at the 2009 Conference made me think about how I was going to then actually put forth some of the ideas and challenges I presented in the speech in my own work for the stage and in addition, the kind of dialogue I wanted to sustain and nurture with my ongoing, unofficial band of collaborators. When I created, on commission from Mark Wing-Davey and NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, the new play Rift, which centered, in great part on the subject of human sex trafficking, this past December, I was ever mindful of the space of emotional risk in which I was placing my actors, director and design team. Working off of a loose Joint Stock-inspired model, and therefore a model that at its core had been built around utopian, non-hierarchical collaborative practice, the process of making Rift was an act of working across many borders and boundaries, including ones that become instilled in us as artists sometimes in regard to matters of form and content. What does it truly mean to dream a space of radical utopia, for example, when you’re creating work within an institution that has its own set of hierarchies and boundaries?

I find the utopian desire and the shared experience of live performance and the space of possibility and transformation that it calls forth, at its best, to be as honest, flawed, raw, strange and beautiful as life itself. I recognize the deeply collaborative, intertwined nature of the work we all do in the theater, and how community is and can be sustained with simple acts of grace and the joy of playing, despite the considerable hardships that can pose themselves financially on those of us, many of us, in the starving class. I’m invariably surprised by the imprint left on a shared experience long after the experience itself has become worn into memory, how, in effect, the spaces of play invite us to re-consider our daily lives and our interactions with our fellow citizens on this planet. As the Texan sky bears down on a hotel room deep in the heart of Utopia, I wonder at the fact that when we Pretend and Play, real things, real transformation, can happen.

Caridad Svich

January 2010 - John Clinton Eisner

2010-01-13T10:37:00.005-05:00

Top Ten Ways to "Think Lark" in 2010
by John Clinton Eisner

Last year in this blog, we focused on what Lark community members had to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. We invited a guest essayist each month to share a unique perspective on the role of live theater in the twenty-first century and what the field has to offer society as a whole. I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to our brilliant 2009 essayists—May Adrales, Alex Beech, Henry Godinez, Chisa Hutchinson, Rajiv Joseph, Margarett Perry, Theresa Rebeck, Saviana Stanescu, and Andrea Thome—who provoked and prodded our imaginations in a year of political change and economic uncertainty and helped the Lark community stay true to its mission and vision.

Because these blogs have been so fun and productive, we will continue to run them in 2010 starting next month. In the meantime, here is a grain (or ten) of New Year’s inspiration—OUR TOP TEN WAYS TO "THINK LARK" IN 2010:

10. Talk about what excites you, not what doesn’t.

9. Listen carefully and speak your opinion honestly and respectfully when it is genuinely sought.

8. Take a moment to reconsider your position if you don’t get the joke.

7. Take a playwright or a theater artist you admire to lunch.

6. Think big. Set your own goals and define your own success.

5. Don’t beat a dead horse. Don’t rewrite a play to death. Don’t talk a play to death.

4. Go see a play or theater event that you would normally dismiss as “not your thing.”

3. Be prepared.

2. Take five minutes to be a part of the conversation: comment on a blog, respond to a listserve…

And the number one way to “Think Lark” in 2010 is…

1. Travel to new places whenever you can, even in your imagination.

Happy New Year!!

December 2009 - Maria Alexandria Beech

2009-12-02T14:50:00.008-05:00

We look forward to reading your responses to Alex’s thoughts—and to one another in the Lark blog.

Warmly,
John

Let's Not Use the Word “Mexico"
by Maria Alexandria Beech

As a child, I almost drowned in Mexico. No one told us that the beaches in Acapulco could be deadly, and I got trapped in a fish net. That experience cut short our vacation, but left me impressed with the mystery of the country’s indigenous roots, and colonial remnants such as bull fighting.

In 1997, I returned to Mexico for a fiction workshop but, after sharing long conversations and tequila shots with Cuban American playwright Irene Fornes, I abandoned fiction for playwriting. Irene’s proposal was simple: your characters are people. Ask them questions and listen. That decision changed my life, not only because it re-directed the course of my work, but because it opened a world of possibility to me, the possibility of theater.

That summer, our Mexican counterparts in Taxco were writers like Oscar de la Borbolla, who had written THE DAMN VOWELS, (Las Malditas Vocales) a work he said nearly drove him crazy because he had used only one vowel in each of its five stories. (Los locos somos otro cosmos is my favorite because it protests the treatment of patients in an insane asylum.) Another writer had set his play in a rocket inhabited by a little girl and an astronaut. Yet another had written a poem about chairs. It seemed the Mexicans were synthesizing their rich culture with events around the world, engaging in a conversation with history, science, global literary trends, and with each other. Their work felt fresh and important to me, like looking through a magnifying glass for the first time, and by experiencing their literary impulses, I became excited to follow my own.

However, when I returned to New York, I found little trace of Mexican theater in my “comparative” literature classes at Columbia. I learned that when it came to non-US theater, mainstream New York (and academia) was interested in the Greeks, Romans, British, Irish and French, and writers such as Chekhov, Ibsen, Calderon de la Barca and Lorca but there was little focus on contemporary writers from other regions. One artistic director told me that writers from other countries “didn’t have an audience.” It was accepted that limited audiences existed for different styles of theater. Furthermore, some perceived that if a play didn’t have an audience, then creating a new audience could prove too risky, especially since it often entailed devising unique marketing strategies. Ignoring the work of certain regions seemed dangerous to me because it seemed to tell artists (and their cultures) that their art wasn’t important or relevant, and that blocked the dialogue and exchange that was elemental if we were going to progress as a civilization. It was also troubling to me that even though Mexicans and Mexican Americans made up a significant portion of the population, few theaters were producing their stories.

After attending one Beckett and Chekhov production after another, my yearning for unique international stories became palpable, and I always remembered the magnificent work I had heard in Mexico. (When films such as 21 Grams, Pan's Labyrinth, Babel and others surfaced on our movie screens, images of Mexico’s artists at work and play came to me since I knew these films reflected a vibrant creative community.)

When Andrea Thome called me one year ago to participate in the exchange program at the Lark, I jumped at the opportunity to revisit Mexico’s talent. I was hired to translate THE CAMELS (Los Camellos), by Luis Ayllon. THE CAMELS is about a poor family that is hired—and trapped in a theater—to act out their lives on stage. Paid by the word by a producer and goaded by the public to show their worst behavior, the family members insult and degrade each other and compare their lives to soap operas. In an era when we exploit individuals and families for entertainment—almost as a way to avoid taking responsibility for our own lives and actions—this play felt urgently relevant. It wasn’t a play about Mexico; it was a play about the world. The other plays in the exchange program were equally stunning. Ernesto Anaya’s THE MAIDS OF HONOR (Las Meninas), translated by Migdalia Cruz, brought us painter Diego Velasquez whose denigration as an artist made him yearn for a position in the court. This play spoke to our era in which art—and artists—are defined by commercial viability. In fact, all the plays presented universal themes but in unique settings (ie, a boat, a mariachi park).

This year, the plays were equally provocative. I translated HITLER IN MY HEART (Hitler en el Corazon) which explores different perspectives of the death of a soccer star (inspired by the death of Spanish soccer player Antonio Puerta). The play is about how an oppressed, alienated culture uses celebrity to search for meaning, finding it only in annihilation—which is why the play shares its title with the Antony and the Johnsons song. The other plays included Quetzalcoatl Puddle, about a love triangle on a futuristic beach where sunlight is rented by the hour and people struggle to hold onto love as a way to understand reality; Gourmet Homicide: or the fine art of Murder, in which upper class friends kill as a hobby and as an absurd way of bonding; and A Lover’s Dismantling: Fragments of a Scenic Discourse, about couples who fall in love and then into regret, presenting two ways of seeing the world: imagination and memory. Once again, I experienced the universality, originality and magic of Mexican theater. It didn’t surprise me that for the second year in a row, the public readings were jam-packed with a diverse and curious audience, some excitedly discovering Mexican theater for the first time.

Following the US-Mexico program last month, and despite the tangible enthusiasm among both its participants and its audience, troubling discussions surfaced regarding the next steps for the translations. Did the plays present themes that would interest a New York audience? Who and where was the audience for these plays? Should the program’s name (US-Mexico Exchange Program) include “Mexico” or would that turn people off?

Keeping in mind that most of the people talking about these issues care deeply for the survival and propagation of these works, I consider these questions important and worthy of discussion. Regarding whether a “New York audience” would find the plays thematically relevant to their own lives, I wondered how many of us had personally encountered a woman pondering the sale of her cherry orchard. Yet those of us who admire Chekhov understand that THE CHERRY ORCHARD explores cultural and ideological tectonic shifts that many have experienced. Even if its plot doesn’t speak to our specific experience, its rich subtext about changing power dynamics and loss resonates with us. Besides entertaining an audience, couldn’t the theater bring new and important minds and imaginations to the service of a world in great need of new thinking and innovative solutions? Was the issue thematic relevance, or was there a cultural misconception at work about the ability of Mexican writers to create universal stories? To explore that question, it is important to try to understand how many people in the U.S. perceive Mexican writers, or better yet, how they perceive Mexicans and Mexico. There is no other way of tackling the question.

It’s not hyperbole to say that the United States is living one of the most racially charged moments in recent memory, and that much of its racism is aimed at Mexicans. Despite a powerhouse economy with a GDP of about $770 billion, Mexico’s endemic poverty has sent millions to the U.S. to look for income and security. Prominent in our zeitgeist is the plight of undocumented immigrants who often face trying living and work conditions. Many Mexicans we encounter in New York form part of this subculture of undocumented workers, and our news media is saturated with images of Mexicans crossing the borders, often running from vigilantes such as the Minutemen. Our news is also flooded with Mexico’s massive drug trade and ensuing violence. In the U.S., commentators realized they could draw ratings by inciting hatred, and did so with relish; and U.S. politicians also fanned the flames of discord, convincing Americans that undocumented Mexicans were taxing the health and educational systems, and taking jobs away from our labor force.

Mexicans have also been complicit in shaping our perceptions of their country. Its most popular entertainment export—soap operas—gives us melodramatic depictions of its wealthy and poor, caricatures that don’t reflect the country’s rich cultural identity. In addition, its world-class tourism industry has succeeded in exploiting our own clichés of Mexican culture by offering us sombreros, margaritas and mariachis. Where is Mexico in all of this?

Besides recent remarkable exceptions in Mexico’s disjointed film industry—which faces its own challenges—there are few ambassadors of Mexican culture capable of drowning out the negative images of Mexicans that permeate the United States. Of course, art connoisseurs know the names of visual artists such as Gabriel Orozco, Arturo Rivera and Ximena Cuevas, and music lovers know Federico Mendez, Victor Rasgado, and Alondra de la Parra. But there is a misconception that the elusive “theater audience” won’t fill theater seats because they don’t know Mexico’s theater, and this may explain why many decision makers from some of the leading theaters in New York and around the country have not yet taken part in the Lark’s exchange program… (though the presence of at least twenty decision makers this year shows that those perceptions may be shifting.)

It’s evident that the theater has the power to unite cultures. International exchanges have the potential to tear down walls and build bridges. I’ll never forget when one playwright looked around the room at the Lark last year and said, “This trip has completely changed my perception of Americans.” Since he is a well-regarded theater artist in Mexico, I can only imagine how that shift in him will influence the stories he tells. At its core, and this may be scary for many, an international exchange holds up a mirror to two cultures and shows us that we are all the same, that we cherish and mourn the same things.

Even though I didn’t drown that summer day in Mexico, a part of my soul stayed there, and I yearn for the day when Mexican plays are published and produced here.

November 2009 – Henry Godinez

2009-11-05T13:48:00.013-05:00

Warmly,

John

HOW VOICES FROM ACROSS THE BORDER CAN SPEAK TO US
By Henry Godinez

A couple of years ago I was blown away by a hauntingly beautiful new play called Our Dad Is In Atlantis, a modest play that manages to conjure up a kind of mystery and magic I associate with that legendary underwater country yet set within the context of a brutal reality facing thousands and thousands of people every day—not in some hidden corner of the deep blue sea but in the parched deserts of our own continent. I was deeply moved by its stark intimacy, by its heartbreaking humanity. Today I still cannot even speak of this play without experiencing a very real emotional kinesthetic response. Our Dad spoke to the experience of undocumented people willing to risk everything to improve the lives of their loved ones, human beings, actually young brothers in this case, who suffer unimaginable hardships in the struggle to maintain the most fundamental of human truths and rights, a family. Sadly, through the ignorant efforts of pundits like Lou Dobbs and organizations like the Minutemen, the general public in our country has become desensitized at best, hostile and racist at worst, to the rights even of children. When I read Our Dad, it humanized the nameless, faceless people we know die in our deserts every day and that yet our society often manages to vilify or ignore. That unassuming little play felt so immediate, so vital and so urgent, that I knew it must have come from a different perspective, and indeed it did.

Upon discovering the play’s origins in this country—the Lark Play Development Center’s U.S.-Mexico “Word Exchange”—I was captivated by the idea of how this program identifies some of the most gifted young artists in Mexico today, largely unknown in the U.S., and brings them together with bilingual artists in New York City during an annual residency focused on developing stage-worthy translations and lasting interpersonal relationships. Under (Our Dad is in Atlantis at the Theatres at
45 Bleecker, a co-production with Queens
Theatre in the Park. Photo by Carel DiGrappa)

the direction of Lark playwright Andrea Thome, this program, has created a groundswell of activity that is propelling Mexican voices into the U.S. theater scene and, reciprocally, opening up opportunities in Mexico for a broad range of writers from the U.S. I have become a member of the program’s advisory council and am excited to join the company that will assemble in New York in November.

To me there is nothing more important in the theater than telling human stories: stories that have the potential to change the way people view the world in which they live. A great deal of the work that I do is based on the conviction that we as humans share far more similarities than differences; to me that is the future and to me that generally demands some perspective. There is something especially poignant about the plight of those two young boys in Our Dad when you consider that the story is being told from the perspective of the Mexican experience. These are not only voices we haven’t heard, they are voices we haven’t heard from that side of the border. The future demands more than simply our projection of what the rest of the world is thinking and feeling. That nearsightedness was typical of the way our nation viewed the world for the first eight years of the twenty first century. It seems to me that the more direct communication we have with the world in which we live the less potential for misconceptions, prejudice and fear.

As part of the artistic collective at Goodman Theatre in Chicago, I have the privilege of championing underrepresented stories of the Latino experience, generally told by the wealth of exceptional Latino writers that we have in the U.S. Now what the Lark exchange has done is broadening the chorus of voices by creating opportunities for collaboration, connecting exciting Mexican writers like Javier Malpica with talented Latino writers like Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, and the reward is a gem like Our Dad is in Atlantis. Coming from a Cuban immigrant family of ten children it’s probably no wonder that I am drawn to collaboration; it was nothing short of a survival skill for me, but it’s also what I love about the theater. So when the possibility arose of extending the output of the Lark’s exchange program into the context of the Goodman’s biennial Latino Theatre Festival, it seemed a natural and undeniable opportunity, a way to help great stories survive. The intentions and potential rewards are twofold because even as we showcase voices mostly unheard in this country we are simultaneously inviting new audiences into our theaters to hear them. What’s wonderful is that these new audiences come to hear their own stories told in one of the great cultural institutions of Chicago, along with traditional Goodman audiences that come to hear stories other than their own that impact their lives, and they experience those stories together as that unique community we call audience.

Still, the real value lies in furthering the developmental work of the writer—which takes place at the Lark hand in hand with the translation process, and with unflinching, fierce commitment. In this period of economic downturn, it is the development of new work that suffers most, let alone non-mainstream work, because we are a society of consumers and we want product not process. It is precisely at these times that it’s most important to not withdraw to safe and recognizable corners of our existence. Audiences are changing and if we are to keep the theater vital and immediate, the stories we tell must be inclusive. All of us at Goodman are so excited to help move these important, newly-translated works forward through a series of readings and conversations that we will offer during the Latino Theatre Festival this coming summer. It is especially fitting to be initiating this collaboration this summer because 2010 celebrates the bicentennial of Mexican independence and the centennial of the Mexican Revolution—both events that strove to address challenges of the present for the benefit of the future of those that were historically marginalized. A revolutionary idea like the U.S.-Mexico Word Exchange merits a presence in just such a celebration because perhaps through collaborations with organizations that share common goals, like ours, we too can begin to confront the challenges we face today by helping to insure that more unassuming but urgent plays like Our Dad have an opportunity to benefit our future. Perhaps in this way we can begin to create a future were we celebrate our similarities instead of capitalizing on our differences to promote fear, misunderstandings and prejudice. That’s the kind of revolution I’m interested in waging.

About Henry Godinez:
He has directed numerous productions at the Goodman Theatre, Signature Theatre, Portland Center Stage, Kansas City Rep, Chicago Shakespeare, Victory Gardens Theatre, and Apple Tree Theatre. He is co-founder and former Artistic Director of Teatro Vista, an Associate Professor at Northwestern University, and has served as a site evaluator and panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. He is the recipient of the 1999 TCG Alan Schneider Directing Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the Lawyers for the Creative Arts. Born in Havana, Cuba, Henry has a profound interest in plays about the immigrant condition and that express the experiences of marginalized communities in America, including Latino voices, and has directed significant productions of plays by such notables as Luis Alfaro, Eduardo Machado, José Rivera, Regina Taylor, Luis Valdez and Karen Zacarías.

October 2009 - John Clinton Eisner

2009-10-09T14:49:00.005-04:00

The Island Swim
by John Clinton Eisner

When I finished writing this essay, I realized that it had gotten very personal. I have been struggling recently with some grave doubts about the efficacy and inclusiveness of our cultural institutions, including our theaters, and, not so coincidentally, my own sense of worth as a practitioner and artist. Throughout my life, I have been kept aloft and energized by a sense of joy and wonder at what people can accomplish when they set their minds to it. Joy and wonder, leading to inspiration and action, are tightly knit together as important aspects of my personal life, and I was drawn to the theater as a vocation for this reason. Ralph Waldo Emerson said that “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,” and I have always seen enthusiasm—from the Greek entheos, “having the god within”—as the spark that sets off the creative process from which I have always derived sustaining warmth. My tendency is to expect the best of people—not the worst—and my experience is mostly that we all step up when others believe in us. But recently I have felt a bit defensive and self-conscious about my joy and wonder, as though my emotional response to the world is somehow out of joint—a bit too large, a caricature, like Carol Channing’s smile or the tail that wags the dog. I have always been enthusiastic about the power of theater to connect people through stories of common experience, but these days I don’t think that we, collectively, are fulfilling our potential in reaching out across cultural and ideological lines to find true points of contact, and I think that we have practically shut ourselves down to possibilities for change.

My conversations with peers tend to focus on common concerns like “Risk-taking in the arts,” “Sharing resources through collaboration,” and “Reaching new audiences through new media.” While these issues are well worth discussing and central to the survival of mainstream theater as we know it, I think there are more fundamental questions lurking below the surface that we are generally unwilling to ask because we might not like the answers: “What do we actually mean by ‘risk?’” “How do we define ‘success?’” “What attracts people to the theater?” “Who do we want in our theaters?” “What must we sacrifice in order to succeed?” The answers to these deeper questions are game-changing. If we were to reframe our assumptions about theater’s role in society—how it is underwritten, who makes decisions, and why it is important—the institutions that we have long considered cornerstones of our culture might topple. Naturally, this line of inquiry extends beyond arts and culture to a broader spectrum of social institutions in education, religion, social justice, science and health care, national security, and more. The theater, as usual, is merely a metaphor for something more universal.

Having embraced a commitment to “change” in the last election, are we afraid of a vacuum? We asked for change, but, having cleared the old furniture from the room, we seem uncomfortable with the empty space we have to fill, and ambivalent about setting new directions and dividing power fairly. During my lifetime, we’ve adapted to the touch tone telephone, the fax, the microwave oven, and recycling; but are we brave enough as a society (are we brave enough as arts institutions?) to open the doors of opportunity to everyone—democracy at its most basic level—and, in the spirit of free expression, invite a more broadly diverse community to redefine our culture in practice and purpose? Can we find the joy and wonder in entering into new, cross-cultural conversations, difficult as they might be, before they happen anyway, perhaps more violently, outside the realms of art and play? Change is happening in the world, there is no doubt about it. Demographics and wealth are shifting, often violently. Now, more than ever, we require vision, on a huge scale, to shine a light on where we are going. But, even more important, we must acknowledge that big dreams are not accomplished overnight like in the movies, but in tiny steps, with great effort, as part of a community. This may be the one thing that people in the theater know better than anyone else, because we invented the concept of “rehearsal.” We know that no matter how much we look forward to opening night, it takes a lot to get there if we want to succeed on our own terms.

I love the theater because it celebrates very small moments in which individuals come to recognize the truth that allows them to change. Somehow, perhaps counter-intuitively, these small moments, the pivot points in people’s lives, seem to pack more of a wallop than big events and spectacle ever can. Anyone who has seen a Pulitzer prize-winning photograph understands this principle. Good politicians know that one good human story gets more votes than all the statistics in the world. Small things can be intense and powerful, and we are well aware that good things often come in small packages. But small, purposeful steps taken in a clear direction are different from small gestures disconnected from real intent, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. How can we get “on task” again? How can we let go of the artificial commercial “metrics” that have dominated our recent and misguided era of profligacy, and look for measures of success that lead to success and growth for people’s spirits as well as their stomachs?

When I was a boy, growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, I spent three weeks each summer at YMCA Camp Manito-wish in the North Woods where I was exposed to opportunities and challenges that were not available to me at home. I learned to chop wood, cook over a fire, respect the wilderness, and rely on my peers. I fell in love with the older woman who was in charge of the sailboats—a college student with kind, blue eyes—though, at the time, I am sure I imagined that my infatuation was a secret from her. I shot bows and arrows and fired guns, which, for me, was a massive act of rebellion: my father, an active protester of the Viet Nam War—a doctor who worked for the U.S. government but refused to cut his hair during Nixon’s entire tenure in office and was prolific in writing lengthy protest letters to various members of Congress—would not permit even a squirt gun in the house (I had to hide mine in the bushes in the front yard). I swam and ran and climbed all day and fell asleep early at night, exhausted. At twelve, my favorite activity at camp was the canoe trips we’d take into the wilderness, often for a week or more. Strangely, the best part of those trips, to me, were the portages—the sweaty, hellish, brushy, buggy slogs between pristine bodies of water which we’d undertake laden with gear. I preferred to carry the canoe, which was nearly as heavy as I was, rather than one of the bulging canvas packs. I’d fasten on the yoke, awkwardly flip the canoe onto my back, and stagger down an overgrown path, sometimes a mile long, my bony shoulders blistering from the weight and motion, counting every step to divert my attention from the pain, loving the calls of encouragement and admiration from my peers. I felt a sense of glorious accomplishment as I lowered the canoe into the water on the other side, even if I’d had to stop a few times along the way.

I am profoundly fortunate for these wilderness experiences that taught me many things about myself. I faced my fears, walking alone in the dark woods at night; I recognized my limitations, sighting with my weak eyes through a rifle’s scope or swimming through murky water without the benefit of my glasses; I grew to value the freedom that open space celebrates; and I was part of fortunate community of peers who were learning about themselves in the same way, growing stronger and self-reliant in relationship to nature and the world. Many people never experience the glow of joy that I felt each time I lowered a canoe into the water after a long, hard walk—a joy I still experience in my imagination when I travel back in my memory 35 years. It is not as though my life did not contain hardship; it did. My father suffered from manic depression in a time before effective drugs existed to manage his condition. He filled the house with his love, except for the times when he could not climb out of a dark despair I could not begin to comprehend, and eventually took his own life. It is funny, though, that despite the size of his mood swings, I think it was my father who taught me the value of patience and determination in pursuit of big dreams. Perhaps his manic depression forced him to embrace a strategy of moving forward by incremental steps, of fighting little battles one at a time on the way to where he wanted to be. At any rate, I distinctly remember coming home from camp at the age of 12 and that my father stopped what he was doing and listened to me attentively as I described how I’d carried that canoe on my shoulders. It is an important memory to me because, for a moment, I saw myself in his eyes, the child growing fast into adulthood, choosing the path to walk and the burden to bear, over whom he had little control but a great deal at stake.

I have learned in life that it usually takes a long time to create something wonderful. I have also learned that patience and persistence are elusive skills that pay off immensely. And it takes big vision to imagine change, to describe a different way of perceiving something even before it exists. And pursuing a vision, accomplishing bits and pieces of it a step at a time, creates joy. And joy infuses us with the desire to see it in others, which is itself another kind of vision of the future.

The funny thing to me is that when we get stuck in a rut, we tend to run around in circles trying to justify why it is important to stay there. As a species we are resourceful and can adapt to change—that is the hunter-gatherer-adventurer in us—but we also have the nesting instinct that compels us to settle down and make ourselves as comfortable as possible within any given circumstances. Change is a gamble much more significant than financial risk as it is tied to our identity and sense of purpose as well as to our fortunes. It isn’t just that the theater industry is stuck in a rut, but that we could do something about changing our circumstance if we chose. We could try to listen to more new voices and work with each other to encourage others to do the same thing. It would be kind of wonderful if people actually came to view the theater as the platform for free discussion that it was founded to be in ancient Greece.

I heard the legendary performer Tony Bennett interviewed on the radio a few days ago and he made a case for the role of the arts in society that stopped me in my tracks. Bennett, 83, believes that America grew strong as a nation because we valued the pursuit of individual vision and achievement—that is to say, excellence—and that its current decline, with respect to wealth, education and culture, social justice, and other social indicators, stems from our shift to valuing quantity over quality. Automobiles, for example. No matter how many cars we produce, how big they are, or how many we sell, it doesn’t make America, or Detroit, a better place simply to increase productivity and dominate the market. The only thing that will make a difference is the goal of making those cars better, for the right reasons, which is really more like art than commerce. Bennett says the only pathway to excellence that civilization has ever invented is the arts. The arts are the guiding beacon and central metaphor for the pursuit of truth. Through trial and error, risk-taking, rehearsals, and a vision of how we’d like the world to be, we agree to a set of common values that we can count on. Thank you, Tony Bennett, for reminding me that our faith in what is good, in each song about love, in the story of a child growing into an adult, are the things that matter, and we should attempt to do them well!

There is a tiny island across from Camp Manito-wish, about a half mile away on the other side of Boulder Lake. The island is covered by a tangle of birch trees and brambles and, at the top of its steep embankment, just enough flat space for a small tent and a campfire. I’ve visited it from time to time in a canoe with my 10 year-hold son, Jake. Over the past several years, my family has joined me in late August for “family camp” at Camp Manito-wish. That my family recognizes the importance of this place in my life is very moving to me, and I am grateful to them. Anyway, this past August I swam all the way to the island and back. A year ago I didn’t think I could do it—or would attempt it. But I practiced a lot and did it after all. It was fun. I never thought I would do the island swim, and now I plan to do it again. Maybe you want to join me?

September 2009 - May Adrales

2009-09-04T12:52:00.006-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER,
LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This year, we’re focusing in depth on what Lark community members have to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Every month we are inviting a guest essayist—theater artists as well as people from fields outside theater—to share a unique perspective on some important strategic questions we’ve been asking ourselves lately about the purpose of live theater in the twenty-first century, what the field has to offer society as a whole, and what we can learn about how to shape the theater of the future.

May Adrales is an accomplished director and producer who has been part of the Lark community for nearly 10 years. She joined the Lark team in November 2008, after several years on the artistic staff at the Public Theater, as a recipient of a two-year New Generations Future Leaders Fellowship awarded by Theatre Communications Group with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon and Doris Duke Charitable Foundations. May splits her time at the Lark between hands-on work in the studio and deep thinking about the relationship between theater-making and civic engagement. She is contributing to the Lark’s capacity to support new ideas in the theater while helping us to open pathways among and between communities that have not customarily used the American stage as a forum for sharing their concerns and perspectives.

May is not alone in this pursuit. She is collaborating closely with eight peers in TCG's New Generations program across the nation who are also developing new visions and models for the theater’s role in America’s future. Her peers included Linda Bartholomai at The Play Company (New York City), Julieanne Ehre at the Goodman Theater (Chicago), Rodrigo Garcia at Teatro Vision de San Jose’s (San Jose, CA), Alison La Rosa at The Cleveland Play House, Vijay Mathew at Arena Stage (Washington, DC), Rehana Mirza at New Georges (New York City), Antonio Sonera at Miracle Theatre Group (Portland, OR), James A. Williams at Pillsbury House Theatre (Minneapolis). Together, they are dreaming of, writing about, and advocating for closer connections between theater and the communities they serve. In her essay, May asks us to reconsider our most fundamental assumptions about how we relate to art and the creative process.

We look forward to reading your responses to May–and to one another!

Warmly,
John

THE AUDIENCE IS THE ARTISTS' RESPONSIBILITY, TOO
by May Adrales

Imagine a world in which the profound words you heard one night at the theater were repeated back to you in a conversation months later. That somehow that string of words had found its way from the writer’s imagination, to the lips of the actor, to the ears of someone who remembered them and spit them out into the world in another new context on a new day, long after the play’s run was over. It has happened before. Shakespeare’s phrases still color the English language today—so if you are "fashionable," or have a “spotless reputation,” or if you have gone “full circle,” or if “the world is your oyster,” you can thank Shakespeare who coined those expressions.

Pretty difficult to imagine that a writer could have that kind of impact today. But it must have been pretty unimaginable for Shakespeare, too, because the Elizabethans had only recently invented the printing press which suddenly made wide distribution of new ideas more possible than ever before. With so many new modes of communication available today on the internet and in the airwaves, and a relish for the written word no matter how truncated (i.e., nm if u dnt lol @ my gr8 tweet), you would think it’s even more doable now.

How did Shakespeare’s language weave its way into the vernacular of our culture? Can we continue to reinvent our language to serve our culture’s evolving needs? Will the theater play a role in this process?

Many present-day theater makers, like me, believe that our artistic vision is important and relevant to the society in which we live. We dedicate our lives to the theater; we believe that it is a medium that can affect, move and touch people’s lives, even inspire change and new ways of thinking. But when we consider the proportion of Americans who actually attend the theater regularly, (about 9.4 percent of the U.S. adult population in 2008 ) we have to question theater’s relevance. It is difficult to imagine how the beautiful words penned by present day writers would ever catch fire in our language.

What concerns me is how I can help to strengthen theater’s role in society. Is there a different way of thinking about how to drive audience demand? We can’t expect that audiences will arrive at the theater in droves based on a few email blasts, a Facebook fan page, or a few pay-what-you-can-nights. We have to build a deeper movement around the work that we do. We must engage with our community in a deeper and more profound way and weave theater into the very fabric of our culture.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing and despair about declining audience numbers. Producers wondering, “What will drive audiences?” Pushing to choose cash cows like A Christmas Carol to guarantee ticket sales. But imagine a world in which it wasn’t the type of theater that drives audience demand. That you didn’t have to produce well-known dead playwrights and popular musicals to save your bottom line. That we began to invest in building a broader audience base—bigger and more ambitious than our current producing models allow.

Imagine if theater was more like fashion, music or sports—you might gravitate to or like one designer, musician or sports team over another, but you are aware of all the major players. Because all the players are an integral part of the popular culture, part of the daily conversation. Movements are created not just by the final product, but by the buzz, excitement and anticipation of the very event. What if each performance of theater was simply part of a larger, more participatory conversation with theater artists and the community at large? What if advocacy and audience engagement occurred throughout the process, not simply around the final product?

Change starts with the artists themselves. What if artists advocated for their work directly to the communities that would be changed most? That artists passionately articulated a vision of their work with the aim of rallying a community of people behind the work? What if they partnered with organizations, community centers that had direct links to the community they were trying to reach? And a domino effect occurred—more people, more communities talking about and advocating for the play.

What if there were fewer barriers to experiencing the theater? What if you could read a brand new, never-been-produced-before play for free on-line? So those that can’t afford the subway or a plane ticket to New York to see the show for its two-week in a small downtown theater could experience the work anyway. Or even better, you could see a simultaneous live broadcast at your home computer? Or share the experience with a large group at a screening in a park or movie theater? Think about the movements that would create—passionate fans organizing theater clubs, rallying around writers and their plays, writing impassioned blogs, quoting memorable lines in daily conversation, tracking the writers’ progress on-line, advocating for their work in their own communities.

These new goals would require institutions to change how they think about producing—and how they define success. That it’s not always about how many butts are in the seats, but how many people in our society are affected by the work. What if we counted in our audience figures those who are reading plays, watching videos about them, engaging in conversations about the issues within those plays and following the work of artists, even without having set foot in the theater? Would that make the work any less valid? It doesn’t mean that live theater will cease to exist, but hopefully it will play to full houses. The mounting excitement around the plays may lead to audiences full of theater-newbies who are chomping at the bit to see the live performance of a play by Lisa Kron, Katori Hall or Rajiv Joseph, instead of something someone may do if there were free tickets.

What if producers of theater made their process completely transparent? What if rehearsals were broadcast on internet radio, interviews with the creators were podcast? What if conversations and dialogue were generated about the theme and content of the play in a series of blogs, roundtable conversations? We invite our audiences to participate in deeper more thought provoking ways than writing a check or buying a ticket. We also help them understand the process of making theater itself, a process that is foreign to most.

To go a step further, what if people were deeply invested in the “major players” of the theater, like in sports? What if the process of casting were open and public? What if we knew about the process of actors auditioning for various roles so that people could be invested in their favorite actor’s success? This kind of transparency is scary to imagine (would it become Theater Idol?), but I think transparency allows for stronger and more respectful communication. It opens the dialogue not only between the actors and the creative team but also with the community at large. My colleague Vijay Mathew even went as far to suggest at the Baltimore TCG conference in June that producers should make their play selection process completely transparent. That producers should make it public knowledge what plays they were choosing from and why? And through that process, communication between writers and the producers became even more respectful and open, rather than closed door and seemingly random.

Funders and granting institutions would then have to rethink their strategies to support this change. Say they expanded their granting to support innovative audience engagement strategies? What if they diversified their funding to support more artist residencies in non-theater institutions? Imagine the conversations between a group of resident artists and leaders and experts at a think tank organization like the Council on Foreign Relations? What if every local government in America hired a full-time resident artist in a community, whose job was simply to create art in that community? Imagine the difference that local theater artist would make within that underserved community. Imagine the impact of theater if this happened all over this country.

Are they these ideas do-able? Sure, but not without some serious advocacy, sheer will and determination, and community building. I falter a bit as I write this as I think about my own show which had its first public performance last night and will have its last performance on September 26th. On September 27th, the set will be long gone, the actors will have dispersed, and I will also be starting rehearsals for my next project. Seems difficult to create a movement in the midst of such a hectic schedule. But now is exactly the time for me to work towards the world I imagine and write about it. By starting to think about audience engagement in my own creative process, rather than leaving the challenge for the marketing department to wrestle with alone while I work in an isolated rehearsal hall and direct the play.

Our society needs artists’ vision and theater’s spirit of collaboration now more than ever. So we must respond with more effective ways to engage our society in a deeper, more profound way. We must redefine who the “audience” is, and be bold about engaging people not normally considered within our reach. Make theater truly accessible. Open the doors, allow people to become stake holders in our art and our vision.

August 2009 - Theresa Rebeck

2009-08-03T12:06:00.017-04:00

Warmly,
John

CAN CRAFT & CREATIVITY LIVE ON THE SAME STAGE?
by Theresa Rebeck

Recently, John Eisner asked me how, as a playwright, I reconciled my passion for structure and historically more traditional elements of craft with fidelity to the inchoate and poetic essence of the creative impulse.

I was honestly startled by the question. John is smart and reasonable and he spends a lot of time thinking about theater and theater artists and questions of how theater can remain a lively and important element of the American culture. So when he wondered how I reconciled craft and creativity I had to take it seriously even though the question kind of made my head want to explode. It has always seemed to me that the instigating impulse is something messy and internal and that a playwright’s job is to take that messy internal moment and build it into a stronger and more complex and dynamic version of itself so that it can sustain itself, on a stage, with actors, in the light of day. It’s like being a gardener: You have a seed; you add water and dirt and light, and you have a plant. You have an idea, you add structure, and you have a play. That’s not reconciling a conflict, that’s art.

Not so much maybe. Last summer I was talking to Rajiv Joseph about the overt disdain I sometimes hear come out of people’s mouths around the whole notion of structure. He agreed, noting that “people are really down” on anything that seems like it might be “conventional.” The suspicion is what John’s question suggests it might be—that craft somehow presents a compromise to some essential voice, and that purity of expression actually needs to detonate tradition for it to be authentic.

I do understand that artists of integrity can disagree around this question of aesthetics. I recently served on a panel with the exceptional Constance Congdon and Mac Wellman. Connie and Mac spoke passionately for the need for originality and the exploding of expectations that can prove the groundwork for provocative writing. I spoke passionately on behalf of story and character and forward motion. I think at one point we got a little annoyed with each other, but that really was only once during a workshop that took place over four days. Mostly we shrugged and agreed that sometimes it’s hard to know what to tell a young playwright who’s got a kind of interesting mess on his or her hands and theater is a weird business no matter how you slice it and we’re all in this together. They’d we go off and have cocktails.

But there are real questions around this conflict, if that is indeed what it is. Steven Dietz wrote to me a couple of months ago, noting that when he was just a wee beginner of a playwright, people praised his “experimentation.” But now he feels that at that time he just didn’t know how to write a play. This is my worry, honestly: In the current environment, when young writers are being encouraged to stay away from anything “conventional” are we perhaps falling in love with a kind of playwriting that frankly just doesn’t work? Are we judging too harshly plays that do work? And how does the audience fit into this discussion? Does it?

There is a class issue at the core of this discussion which I think frankly never gets named, and that centers on the question of audience. Several times I have heard wonderful theater artists complain about how stupid the audience is. Usually that statement is tangled in a larger discussion of why that particular audience didn’t particularly enjoy an especially experimental piece of theater. I also hear a lot of people complaining because while all us intellectual and hip theater artists are so busy running away from what may or may not be conventional, audiences are pretty much running toward it. Up in Dorset, Vermont, where I hole up in a little farmhouse during the summer, there’s a fantastic little theater which produces wonderful work, the Dorset Theater Festival. They started out their season this year with Jack Gilpin starring in Conor MacPherson’s St Nicholas; it was a terrific night of theater, but didn’t sell many tickets. Just last week, however, they opened The Hollow, by Agatha Christie. This production is a boffo hit; they’ve sold more tickets to the Agatha Christie play (staged with dazzling panache by artistic director Carl Forsman) than they have sold to any production of any other play in the last three years.

Does that make the audiences in Dorset stupid? I’m sure there are plenty of theater artists who would say, well, it doesn’t make them smart. On the other hand, these are not people who just stay home all night and watch television, or go see bad movies about idiots blowing up airplanes. These are people who got in their cars, drove to the theater and paid $45 each to watch three full hours of some pretty hilarious Agatha Christie. They laughed and clapped and had a great time, and I’m pretty sure they will come back and see another play at the Dorset Theater Festival soon. I suspect all the actors who were in that Agatha Christie play thought those audience members were smart enough. I suspect Carl Forsman and the merry band who are up there trying to keep that theater alive up there in Dorset don’t think those audiences, or Agatha Christie, are all that stupid either.

There are always questions inside questions. Who is theater supposed to serve? Why do we do it, anyway? Do we write for audiences, or do we write for ourselves and our community? If we are convinced that the purest forms of theater—the ones that honor the original and mysterious impulses in the heart of the playwright, and ask that the playwright find the most original and “unconventional” theatricalities to express that impulse—then do we need audiences at all? Why do we get mad at audiences for not flocking to theater which doesn’t interest them because it doesn’t care about them?

Do we think that theater is art only if people don’t understand it?

Can art be serious and popular at the same time?

Is the idea that craft and creativity are in opposition perhaps mistaken? Isn’t it possible that they are the yin and yang of storytelling? Isn’t it possible that greatness in theater embraces both?

July 2009 - John Clinton Eisner

2009-07-01T10:36:00.013-04:00

15 YEARS OLD AND STILL GROWING

It is July and the beginning of a brand new year at the Lark. Our program cycle begins and ends in the balmy, contemplative breezes and soft rainstorms of summer in New York City. For that reason, I am reclaiming this space—occupied for the past five months by various artists and thinkers in the Lark community—to share a few thoughts about what we have accomplished this year and where we are headed.

We turned 15 this past year, and experienced our most visible growth spurt ever. A group of key stakeholders planted the seeds for this success over a decade ago through their clear vision, thoughtful goal setting, careful planning, and a mission and vision that still meets a critical need for deeper and more productive collaborations in a diverse and changing world.

Our accomplishments this year include the first round of “Launching New Plays into the Repertoire” (an initiative that brings playwrights and artistic leaders together to plan multiple productions and deepen community engagement), exponential growth in our partnerships with organizations to support new voices, our largest grant ever ($500,000 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation), and two major awards (Obie and Lucille Lortel)—not to mention a litany of Lark-developed plays that landed at theaters across the globe. I am moved by the scope of our impact in the lives of playwrights and the communities for which they write, but it is you, our family of artists, funders, board members and friends, who have brought us to this place.

Despite these successes, our challenges are significant. In the coming year, we need to be resourceful and disciplined in order to maintain our momentum and to grow. We need to apply energy to board development, building a broader financial base, community engagement, deepening our artistic core, and stabilizing physical and human resources. We count on all of the members of our community to help us move forward and grow stronger. Times are tough, but the new economic and social structures that are coming into place challenge us to think deeply about the purpose of live theater in the twenty-first century, to explore what the arts have to offer society as a whole, and to propose new ways to shape the theater of the future.

Along with many other changes taking place in society, the theater field's focus has recently returned to placing a stronger value on “process” and “partnership”—two hallmarks of the Lark’s mission and vision. Our work advocating for and actively practicing these ideas, along with others, such as promoting internationalism, bringing unheard voices to the forefront, and levying freedom of expression, has been a material part of a new and promising relationship forming between the arts and society—away from culture as "product" and moving towards a more active, holistic and multi-dimensional role for the arts. This new reality was stunningly present at last month's Theater Communications Group annual conference in Baltimore, which seven Lark staff and board members attended. Almost every session acknowledged this shift of focus, this new recognition of a deeper purpose to the art we make, and it felt good to know that the Lark, with many others, has been at the cutting edge of this change. At the same time, change in the field means that we must consider how the Lark itself must change to focus on new challenges.

As we move forward, I anticipate that the Lark will deepen certain aspects of its programming while looking beyond existing programs to what comes next. Some programs will remain central to our activities—those programs that support intimate and in-depth collaboration “in the studio” and among people of different backgrounds and traditions—while other functions may be taken up by independent producers, partner theaters, universities, and entrepreneurial artists, allowing the Lark to move forward and to innovate. Our job is to exist where the newest thinking is happening, where we can help make real risk seem approachable, where artists look out across open and uncharted territories of the imagination and lead us into our future by creating new vocabularies to describe it.

The Lark exists as a departure point for artistic growth and cultural inclusion, but also as a steady partner to the artists who have found a home in our community and the theaters and other organizations that have banded with us to make the value of the whole exceed the sum of its parts.

The impact we have had on the field, and on society, has been made possible because of your participation in our work, and I thank you for your active commitment and support as we take a deep breath of warm summer air and dive into another year of creative exploration. In the coming months, we will hear more in this blog from artists we know and respect and social innovators who are showing us new ways to view the world, and I look forward to sharing reflections of my own as I travel from city to city and into the creative territory of our studios here at home.

As always, let me know your thoughts, ideas, dreams, and concerns about anything that has piqued your interest here.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director
http://www.larktheatre.org

June 2009 - Rajiv Joseph

2009-06-01T16:20:00.002-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

Rajiv Joseph was appointed in 2005 as a Playwright Fellow in our Playwrights’ Workshop, led by Arthur Kopit. It was in the Workshop that he began to put together the pieces of his play Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo which has just opened to critical acclaim at Center Theater Group in Los Angeles. In the following essay, Rajiv reflects upon the juggling act of writing a play that speaks to his own vision and experience while embracing the experience of collaborating with actors, directors, translators and widely divergent communities. Rajiv has had a chance to see his work performed not only in English, but in Spanish and Romanian, in the U.S. and outside its borders, and, as a consequence, has learned a great deal about his writing and its impact on different audiences. We look forward to reading your responses to Rajiv–and to one another!

Warmly,

John

Spies Like Us by Rajiv Joseph

So the other day I was on a Transylvanian morning TV talk show. It was like Northern Romania’s answer to "Regis and Kelly," except in this case, Regis was a chain-smoking dude with a beard who read the news directly off of his laptop, and Kelly was a beautiful, tall, blonde, 22 year-old woman who never spoke. She literally never opened her mouth. But she did provide a nice visual contrast to the host, which is probably why their show is the most-watched morning TV program in Târgu Mureş.

I was there to talk about my play, Animals Out of Paper, which was opening at the Ariel Theatre and was translated into Romanian by Sorin Rusa and is now called Animale de Hartie. The director of the play, Gabi Cadariu, sat on the couch with me and acted as the translator between me and the chain-smoking, bearded host. The host asked some questions, read some news, and, at one point, started reading horoscopes for the day right off of his laptop. When he got to Gemini, my sign, I asked Gabi to translate for me. Gabi thought about it and then paraphrased and said, ”Choose your words carefully.” I still think he must have made that shit up, because it seemed a little too apropos. Considering he was translating. And I was there talking about my play, which was translated. And that, two days earlier, another play of mine opened in Los Angeles in which one of the characters is a translator in a story that is about, well, translation.

It was a crazy week, what with two openings in two different countries, and in both cases, one could see the evidence of a huge amount of Lark-based contribution. My play ”Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo,” which opened at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in LA on May 17th, is a play that has been developed extensively through the Lark, beginning in the fall of 2005 with the Playwrights’ Workshop and extending since then with a roundtable, studio retreat, Barebones® production and a co-production with the drama school at SUNY Purchase. Animals Out of Paper, produced last summer by Second Stage Theatre, was first drafted at the Lark Workshop at New York Stage & Film in the summer of 2007, and also benefitted from a roundtable reading.

This was the third time the Lark had sent me to a foreign country. I always feel like a spy when I’m on Lark business abroad. John Eisner usually shows up at midnight in some random train station, we go to a bar, he asks me what contacts I’ve made, what information I’ve gotten, and then he gives me a list of people whom I should call in Bucharest. I don’t know them, but they are expecting me. This is how the Lark works: Playwrights as spies, plotting to bring together theaters and people and cultures and ideas.

John, like all Master Spies, seems to be everywhere at once, and was also at my opening in LA, so it was useful to chat with him in Romania about that experience. I had lived the previous two months in LA, going to rehearsals, working with the cast and director Moises Kaufman, and basically re-writing every night. After nearly five years of development, I had foolishly thought that the script was locked and set, before rehearsals had even started. But this was not the case. As it turns out, when you have a bunch of brilliant people like Moises, assistant-director Jimmy Maize, dramaturg Pier Carlo Talenti and my crackerjack cast poring over every last beat of a play, questions are going to rise up... and every time I rewrote one moment of the play, other things would unravel. This turned out to be a very good thing for Bengal Tiger.

I’m homesick right now for my little Oakwood apartment in Marina del Rey where the theatre put me up. It’s coroporate housing, the place feels like a hotel, but after all the late nights of re-writing, re-thinking, nervousness, frustration and elation, I look back on that place and see it as this little cove of creative energy. And I realize that those two months of working on this play in LA were the culmination of five years of Lark development. And now it’s ready, it’s ready to begin it’s life as a play, and I’m going to miss that time in my life when I was working on it.

By the time I got to Romania, I was exhausted and a little emotionally ragged. In good ways, but still... my parents and their entourage had descended upon LA for opening, as well as all of my college buddies. The play had opened, it was a beautiful production, everything I might have wished, and before I could catch my breath, I was in Transylvania, picking John up at a random train station and then we were in a bar, drinking, and talking about contacts and information and the strange media blitz that accompanies the opening of a play in the fantastic town of Târgu Mureş. Like how, for example, I was to be up very early the next morning to be a guest on the Transylvanian version of Regis and Kelly.

The production of Animale de Hartie at the Ariel Theatre was stunning. Tiny origami cranes were placed on every seat of the theatre as gifts. The actors were phenomenal, and I had the curious and wondrous experience of being able to watch my play performed in a language I do not understand. I felt I was learning new things about the play every two seconds. Gabi’s direction was inspired and it seems that the audience really loved it. Again, I was transported back to those early days on the campus of Vassar at our New York Stage & Film retreat, with my fellow Larkees, hearing the words for the very first time. And I thought about how much those words have changed with every re-write, and now, how they’ve changed even more, into something utterly foreign, and yet familiar.

A party followed the opening and the food was bread with pork lard smeared on it and paprika sprinkled on top. I am telling you, this is the perfect post-opening-night food. Sorin, my translator tells me you can substitute sugar for the paprika if you like your lard a little sweet. Either way, it’s good stuff. Crack open a couple of beers and you are good to go.

May 2009 - Margarett Perry

2009-05-05T17:09:00.000-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

Margarett Perry, a core Lark artist for over ten years, describes in the following essay the conditions that she feels have been most useful to her in supporting playwrights in developing new plays. She believes that the theater is most alive in the presence of the audience, and that it is in front of an audience that playwrights learn the most about their plays. Here, she discusses some of her experiences working with playwrights—over the course of several early productions—to support a natural and vital process led by the playwright, towards a deeper, more fully realized script.

We look forward to reading your responses to Margarett–and to one another!

Warmly,
John

Practice Makes Process
by Margarett Perry

For a freelance director like me, the challenge of new plays is not only to convince theaters to produce them but also to create an environment in which the work can grow. Over the course of the past several years, through my work with the Lark Play Development Center in New York City and the Kitchen Theatre Company in Ithaca, I have arrived at an understanding about the process of supporting playwrights that is healthy, productive, and provides the time and space necessary for the play to become what the playwright envisioned.

A good example of this process was my collaboration with playwright Brian Dykstra on Clean Alternatives. Our work on this play for over a year, and in several runs, taught me just how much new plays develop on their feet, in front of an audience. Although Brian and I had heard several drafts of the play in roundtable readings at the Lark—a helpful format where actors perform the text unrehearsed and then discuss the experience of the play with the author—it wasn’t until we were in rehearsal and performing the play that choices could be made at the deepest level. Changes came out of discoveries about how the play worked in front of an audience during the course of its run, and from going back into rehearsal to try new things before it went back into production again. Returning to the rehearsal room after encountering an audience is an incredible experience. New progress is possible because we have much more information about how the play actually works. During our final run of Clean Alternatives at the Kitchen, actor Mark Boyett, who had been with the project from the very beginning, said, “I want to give all the people who saw our show in its earlier productions their money back!”

Rachel Lampert, Artistic Director of Ithaca’s Kitchen Theatre Company, saw the play and decided overnight she wanted to produce it. While we were preparing for the Kitchen production, Clean Alternatives was also invited to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it would perform first. The hitch was that, in Scotland, the play was limited in length to 90 minutes. We had to cut 25 minutes from the script and make it work without an intermission. This was a painful process, but we didn’t want to miss the opportunity to go to the festival. Brian began cutting and I arranged for the show to be remounted again at 59E59 where they were hosting the “East to Edinburgh Festival" as a way to help American companies warm up for the stressful festival environment. We went back into rehearsal for three weeks and ran the new version at 59E59. It was a tighter show, but Brian felt it was missing some of the humor and character development.

Nevertheless, the short version was very well received in Scotland—we won a Fringe First Award—but, after playing it for a month, we still felt it was incomplete. And so, before heading up to Ithaca, Brian developed yet another draft, restoring some sections from the original script while keeping some of what he had learned through the process of cutting and from the three runs so far. We were thrilled to have another three-week rehearsal process at the Kitchen with this next version of the script. Even at this point, Rachel Lampert encouraged us in her “meet and greet” welcome speech to think of our time at the Kitchen as a continuation of the development process. Even though there would be an opening night, she said we should never feel we had to stop working on the play. I had heard similar words from other artistic directors, but it was clear that she meant what she said. This was backed by her invitation to stay in Ithaca for the entire run—an unusual opportunity for a director—so that I could observe the production and continue working with Brian. I knew we wouldn’t be able to rehearse with the actors after opening, but there is always so much to learn from the audience—especially if the playwright and the director are in the house.

Not every circumstance allows for this kind of sustained partnership between director, writer and actors. And so when I began to work with Carlo D’Amore on his solo play No Parole, I decided to work with the Lark to begin the rehearsal process in advance of our official rehearsal dates at the Sacramento Theatre Company. Carlo and I met periodically over the six months leading up to the first day of rehearsal in California. We scheduled three Lark roundtables, with small invited audiences, separated by six weeks of work on the script, as well as some basic rehearsal sessions. After each roundtable, we discussed what we had learned and what changes Carlo wanted to make. I began to understand the shape of the piece and how it was affecting the audience based on my observation of people in the room and their response. During each stage of this process the play leapt forward. The week before we left for Sacramento, we held a more in-depth version of a roundtable in which Carlo performed for a larger group of people. The process was invaluable. It allowed us to head into our first rehearsal with confidence in the script. It also convinced us that some of the changes we had been discussing were necessary and would make the production more powerful.

Following my work with Carlo, I decided to apply this early discovery process to my next collaboration with Brian on his play, A Play on Words. Brian had begun writing the play in the Lark Playwrights’ Workshop, but it didn’t really flourish in that format so Brian began working on it in a series of roundtables where he could hear the entire play in front of a small group of actors and friends. And so prior to our rehearsal period in Ithaca we met several times reading and re-reading the play. We scheduled a Lark roundtable in February, just a few days before heading up to Ithaca to begin rehearsals. This was incredibly helpful because we were able to see how the comedy worked in front of a small audience and it had a significant influence on our understanding of the play’s tone as we began rehearsals.

Even with all of this development work at the Lark, it wasn’t until the third preview of A Play on Words that we realized that we needed to trim several sections to support the shape and build of the play. Brian cut almost 20 minutes (in little nips and tucks) during previews. The feeling in the house the night we executed the cuts was remarkable. It felt like a different play. Once the play was running for about two weeks and the comedy was really cooking, Brian felt that the ending needed some tweaking. After some discussion with Mark Boyett, who was also acting in this production, they tried some changes during a performance and the payoff was exciting.

Yesterday we went back into rehearsals for A Play on Words because it’s going to be at 59E59 Theaters as part of the Americas Off-Broadway Festival. As we started to talk about all the little changes we wanted to make based on our discoveries at the Kitchen, I couldn’t resist reminding Mark Boyett that the last time we went back in to work on a play like this, he wanted to give everyone their money back. We laughed, but I know we’re all gleeful at the thought—as the artists involved you can only hope that you are continuing the work and making discoveries and that you feel that those discoveries matter.

In all of these examples, the writer also performed in the production and was able to stay connected and make changes that allowed the play to evolve. More often, the playwright does not have the opportunity to stay with the production beyond opening night. Nevertheless, seeing how a play works—or doesn’t work—in front of an audience is at the core of how we learn about it. Commercial Broadway producers understand this and have traditionally developed shows through out of town performances during which the director and writer continue to work on the production before moving to New York City for several weeks of previews where their work continues through opening night. But non-profits can seldom afford to keep the team together long enough to provide this development opportunity. And so I am continuing to explore new ways to approach this challenge so that all new plays can benefit from this sustained period of focus.

In my three seasons directing at the Kitchen I have continually witnessed the audience’s role in this collaboration. The Kitchen encourages people to come early in the run and—if they come to one of the previews—they are invited to come back to see the show again for free. During the preview talk-backs, the audience is made aware of their role in the creative process and many of the subscribers return to see the production several times. At a Meet the Artists event during the final week of the run of The Two of You, there were about 25 people who had seen the play three or more times. Wow. This group of clearly understood that a play grows and evolves in production, and that every night is unique. I’ve left many shows on opening night only to hear from my cast how much better it got during the run—maybe not so much better that you want to give everyone who saw it the first week their money back, but you get the idea.

Margarett Perry is a director and producer in theater, film and television. Perry was the Producing Artistic Director of Access Theater for six years where she directed and produced numerous plays and world premieres. She is an Artistic Fellow at the Lark where she has worked with many playwrights and has produced the Playwrights' Workshop with Arthur Kopit. She received her MFA in Directing from Southern Methodist University, and is a Drama League Directing Fellow alumni and a member of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers.

April 2009 - Chisa Hutchinson

2009-04-08T10:36:00.000-04:00

INTRODUCTION BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This month’s essay is by Chisa Hutchinson, a theater artist who has recently moved back to New York to focus on playwriting and is enrolled in the Graduate Dramatic Writing Program at New York University. We know her because she submitted her play She Like Girls to the Lark in 2006 while she was still teaching at a school in California. It is a beautiful and passionate play about high school kids in the inner city, and about the consequences of love and life choices, and it was selected for inclusion in our annual Playwrights’ Week festival and was further developed as a BareBones® production at the Lark directed by Kristin Horton. It was a conversation with Tina Howe, whom she met at the Lark, that encouraged her to return to graduate school to focus on her writing, and, almost immediately things started to change in her life: she got into NYU, she got a good literary agent, and she received commissions from the Atlantic Theater and the City Parks Foundation.

We are delighted that Chisa is a part of our community, attending the work of other writers and sharing new work of her own from time to time. She is a powerful and hungry writer with clear ideas about how she would like to see the world change. She has an enormous and generous spirit, an overwhelming sense of fun, penetrating intelligence, and a desire to connect with audiences from communities that she knows would benefit from having theater as a part of their lives. In the essay that follows, she discusses how she understands her evolving role as artist and teacher in relation to her community and her belief in theater as a platform for telling stories that especially honor and include Americans who have been marginalized, in part, through their lack of connection to culture and the arts.

We look forward to reading your responses to Chisa–and to one another!

Warmly,

John

To Make A Contribution,
You Must First Exist
by Chisa Hutchinson

Maybe you know that person who came out of the womb quoting Shakespeare. Who wrote a play in five acts at the age of six and had an informed, well developed opinion on the absurdist style at ten. Yeah. I’m not that person. In fact, I didn’t even see a legit theater production until I was in high school. It wasn’t that I didn’t know about theater. I saw the commercials for Cats. It’s that I grew up in Newark, New Jersey (before the New Jersey Performing Arts Center existed), and my family had more pressing things to spend money on than theater tickets. Like food. And bail. And rent. And food.

Then, at fourteen, I got a scholarship to a swanky private school. The school had— along with a field house, a dance studio, and a theater— an art gallery where the work of a photographer who takes pictures of the poor was once exhibited. There was one picture in particular of a woman sitting next to a huge hole in her wall. One of my classmates, who was standing right behind me as she looked at this picture, asked in astounding earnest, “Ew, why doesn’t she just get that fixed?”

This girl. I knew what she got on her Chemistry test that week, about her obsessive devotion to Dave Matthews, where her family summered (yep, it’s a verb, too). But she didn’t know that people like me— people with my background and my circumstances and my struggles—even existed. I saw her almost every day, but she didn’t see me. She didn’t see me in that picture.

And this is why I write plays.

I want to validate people who get too little validation. I try to write plays about things that matter to them to let them know that they matter. I have two plays slated for production right now, both of which are about kids from the inner city. She Like Girls, which was developed at the Lark, is being produced in the fall by Working Man’s Clothes Productions. We’re planning a benefit performance to support a shelter for gay kids who’ve been disowned by their families. The second play, Dirt Rich, was commissioned by the City Parks Foundation and will be presented—admission-free—at four outdoor sites around the city this summer. The idea, of course, is to bring theater to people who’d love to see it, but who, after all, have more pressing things to spend money on than theater tickets.

There is another idea, too. A subtler one that has implications beyond whether or not people can afford to come see a show. In my experience as both a student and a teacher of theater, I have both felt and seen the impact that art can have on the drive of a human being, even one who is not particularly interested in art. As a student, for example, I was taken to see two powerhouses, August Wilson and Robert Brustein, debate the issue of color-blind casting. I remember thinking, “Now here is something that affects me. They’re talking about me up there!” Back when I still acted, I’d been cast as everything from a Theban princess to what was supposed to be a middle-aged, male, Jewish radio host. While I enjoyed the challenge and was flattered by the vote of confidence, I worried that my audience must have been thinking things like, “Why is Antigone black? Is it some sort of statement?” or “Couldn’t they find an actress who looked more the part?” or more to the point, “Couldn’t they find a play that would be more appropriate for this girl?” When I heard Wilson’s call for more stories actually about people of color, I knew what I had to do. I was practically catapulted out of that hall into the world of playwriting.

Of course, I know that broadening the spectrum of dramatic narratives isn’t exactly a job I can do alone. Which is why I teach. Right now, I teach creative writing at a free after-school arts program in Brooklyn. Before that, I taught creative writing with NJ SEEDS, the very same program that got me my scholarship. Before that, it was high school English and theater at private schools very much like the one I attended and, before that, SEEDS again. I’ve been teaching since I was eighteen years old. I’ll probably keep teaching for as long as the universe will let me. When producing entities begin to view artists of color as more than ornaments, when institutions that reward creativity decide that it’s okay to give a prize to an Asian writer two years in a row if the writing is just that good, I want to be sure that my students are ready, their voices strong and distinct, their hearts full-to-bursting with purpose.

I recently got an email from a former student. She’d read about me in the SEEDS newsletter and wanted to let me know that she remembered me and the (race-appropriate) monologue she performed for the theater elective I taught back when I was still an intern with the program. She’s now an investment analyst at the World Bank/IFC. Obviously, I can’t exactly take credit for that. The fact that she was a brilliant student with an inhumanly strong work ethic might have more to do with it than anything else. But the fact that nearly a decade later, she remembers the exact monologue she recited one silly summer and felt compelled to let me know… well, that’s got to count for something right?

Here’s my theory: people with access to art—both as audience and as subject—tend to have a sense of entitlement that makes them better equipped to succeed in the world. Seeing yourself or someone you know on stage, seeing a house that looks like it could be your grandma’s in a painting, even hearing your name in the refrain of a song (I’m still waiting for that one) can go a long way to make you feel like you belong in the world and can contribute to it. Totally underrepresented people, on the other hand, lack the sense of entitlement and confidence they need to fulfill their potential, whether as business magnates, technology whizzes, or playwrights. They are simply too invisible to feel essential and society totally misses out on what they might have to contribute. Makes me wonder how many Sakeenahs, Seong-Euns, and Soledads out there have something to offer the world and don’t know it. You can bet your sweet, culture-loving ass one of them makes an appearance in my next play.

March 2009 - Saviana Stanescu

2009-03-06T11:37:00.000-05:00

INTRO BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER, LARK PRODUCING DIRECTOR...

This year, we’re focusing in depth on what Lark community members have to say about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Every month, we are inviting a guest essayist—theater artists as well as people from fields outside theater—to share a unique perspective on some important strategic questions we’ve been asking ourselves lately about the purpose of live theater in the twenty-first century, what the field has to offer society as a whole, and what we can learn about how to shape the theater of the future.

Most of all, we hope that you will read these essays and take part in our online blog conversation with us so that we can begin to get a sense of what ideas are in the ether.

This month’s essay is by Saviana Stanescu, a playwright of global stature whose work and perspective are particularly resonant for American audiences now. Saviana arrived in America the week before 9/11, which has, I think, had a significant impact on the stories and themes she has explored in her plays since then. She was a Fulbright scholar and award-winning Romanian playwright who completed the MFA program in Dramatic Writing at New York University where she now teaches. She has developed a number of plays while in residency at the Lark, in our Playwrights’ Workshop and in other programs—and several have gone on to critically-acclaimed productions. She is a core member of the Lark community who, three years ago with the support of a TCG New Generations Grant, created Lark’s American-Romanian Theatre Exchange program.

Saviana’s singular voice, clear vision, humor, and profound understanding of the human condition, as well as her professional discipline, prolific output and ability to work as a member of a creative community, are some of the reasons why she is making a unique and essential contribution to the field of theater and to society. In this essay, she contemplates her journey from child of communist Romania to revolutionary artist to global citizen, and her experience in America since she arrived here one week before the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. What she sees, from her vantage point between two cultures, is hope for the future.

We look forward to reading your responses to Saviana–and to one another!

Warmly,
John

®Evolution: Topdogs, Underdogs, Slumdogs - unite!
by Saviana Stanescu

Let’s face it: global diversity and interconnectedness can’t be ignored anymore. Even the Oscars were more global this year, pouring awards over Slumdog Millionaire and acknowledging classy Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, German and Japanese filmmakers, and a French man-on-wire, among others. Moreover, President Obama gave us the green light and a nudge to finally debate race, class and gender issues in the open—a vital act for any society attempting to be truly progressive. In this blog, I will add to the mix my personal experience and a little slice of subjective East-European history. All wrapped in my belief that we still need strong socio-politically aware playwrights, deeply invested in the stories they invent.

We are all constructed by the stories we tell and the stories we are told. Yes, nowadays powerful moving pictures and digital images are very rapidly able to tell a compelling and widely distributed narrative. But nothing can compare to that shared live experience, with roots in ancient ritual, which performers and the audience breathe together during a live theatrical event. However, the time for only one paradigm in playwriting has long passed and we recognize diversity not only in social terms but also in the way we tell our stories. After Shakespeare, August Wilson, Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco, Lorca, Genet, Koltes, Grotowski, Pirandello, the Greeks, African performances, Balinese dancers, Japanese Noh, Chekhov, In Yer Face Theater, devised, multi-media, site-specific, cross-ethnic, feminist and queer performances, surrealism, expressionism, post-dramatic and environmental theater, etc., etc, we can’t only rely on the linear cause-effect plot-driven way of telling a story. It ceased to be only about unity of time, place and motivation long time ago. Aristotle is dead. And if he was still alive I bet he would have honored the diversity we achieved in dramatic forms and tried to document it in a serious theoretical way.

The unity of time, place and action might be obsolete in the theater, but in life we still share the same place—the Earth—along with the same time and action of going through our human journeys. Nevertheless, we are at different stages in our lives, we have multiple needs and dreams, and specific local circumstances shape our daily routines. Dramatic living and dramatic writing are interconnected but one does not necessarily lead to the other. There are great playwrights who never experienced hardship but are able to tell a powerful story about people and places burdened by trauma. And there are writers who went through a lot but feel the need to employ gallows humor, to invent parables or fairy-tales aimed at helping people escape their gritty reality. There are playwrights who need to provoke and shout stories in your face, forcing the audience to feel the proximity of the violence they watch on television or in thrillers. And there are dramatists who are still exploring the forests of traditional family relationships, while others write about dysfunctional or alternative families. And the list goes on and on. I wish mainstream producers would become more aware of this variety (in form & content) of stories longing to be shared with audiences. And of the impact that a playwright’s vision and imagined world can still have on people. Theater is not just entertainment but education too. Let’s not underestimate the spectators. The desire to continuously learn is embedded in our genes. We can choose to be ready to question and shake old beliefs and paradigms, and explore the Other.

In America’s patchwork society (a phrase that many, like Obama , favor over the classic “melting pot”), the exploration of the Other translates—more often than not—into an un/conscious form of segregation. Yes, people are willing to lend an ear, an eye—from time to time, on a break from their busy daily schedules—to the concerns of other racial/class/gender/sexual/ethnic groups. But they still seem to see each minority in a pink or black box, with a red or yellow or purple label. It’s easier to look at those boxes when time allows, to store them -for free :) - in the basement of your mind. It’s harder to integrate all those voices in the “garden” of your front yard. It’s easier to condescend and look down at those guys, while feeling superior because you looked, at least. It’s harder to accept that sometimes they are more sophisticated than you are or have more interesting things to say, even if they are poorer or of a different color or have an accent.

At this point, my personal hi/story kinda feels entitled to kick in :) - I am a product of communism—or so I once believed. I spent my formative years under the totalitarian regime of Ceausescu. I learned that all people are equal but—as the joke goes—some are “more” equal than others… Growing up, I realized that words were not always telling the truth even if they were declaimed with conviction on the National TV. I learned what propaganda, censorship and hardship meant but also that, despite everything, your mind can and must be free and your thoughts can reach unexpected heights of knowledge and understanding. And I became convinced that that was the role of the artist in society: to be able to think and express what other people couldn’t. To awaken their sleepy consciousnesses through her/his creative power and imagination. To be subversive. I believed (and I still believe) in the Arts as our means of redemption and tool for creating a healthier society.

My school years passed with good grades and mandatory work in factories and in the field. Years with shortages in food and electricity. Years with my mom waiting in line for milk and bread. Years when Romanian television showed 10 minutes of cartoons followed by hours of political propaganda. BUT ALSO years with books, intellectual conversations, dance lessons and… American television Westerns and series like Dallas Ewing Oil Company. So we could see how rotten capitalism was. Rotten or not, we were fascinated by it. Got our nicknames from Dallas in elementary school. I was Sue-Ellen (Linda Gray) while all the other girls wanted to be the pretty Pamela (Victoria Principal). Yes, hard years in terms of food, electricity, heat and money but full of family love and close friends. The years of my youth. Bitter and sweet. With dates that began with the phrase: “Come to my place on Thursday, my parents are not at home and I have hot water from 4-6 pm!” :)

When the revolution came in 1989, I was there, in the streets, with my fellow students, shouting: Down with the Dictator! The blood, the wounds, the corpses ceased to matter in our collective euphoria: things must change. And they did. I started to work as a reporter in the new free press. My first assignment was to write about pulling down the big statue of Lenin. I worked as a journalist for 10 years, I published books of poetry, I wrote plays, I even became a TV talk-show host. A new and never expected “VIP” life—like Paris, London or New York! A second-hand or, rather, third-hand Hollywood-like glamour. But I had always wanted to experience things first-hand…

So I got a Fulbright grant to study in New York in the fall of 2001. I was in my early 30s. My life was starting again. “New York, the center of the theater & performance world wants me there. What else can be better? This is not the golden dream of communism, but my own super-golden dream. And I’m widely awake!”

I arrived in New York a week before 9/11 and my world was shattered again—along with America’s. For the next eight years I worked hard to be able to tell my stories in English and to be an honest witness to what was happening to people like me, caught in that inbetween space bridging two cultures: the immigrants, the “aliens.” We might have “extraordinary skills” (as my visa states), but we just want to have an ordinary life, to feel that we are fully accepted here.

When people let me down, the City cheers me up—and I feel that I belong here, to this New York that I saw wounded so deeply in my first week on American soil.

Recently, I learned a new slogan: Yes, We Can. Finally, a slogan I could believe in. This wonderful thinker and orator, Obama, made me trust the idea of a political leader for the first time in my life.

And a funny thing: after being required to declaim Marx’s slogans in Ceausescu’s Romania in a mechanical empty way, people are handing me flyers on the campuses of Columbia and NYU that “shout” Revolution and Marx is back! I google Marx and there they are: all the quotes that I knew. But in English. And the funniest thing is … this time I really understand his points. I’m not sure that we need a new revolution, but an evolution towards truly accepting and appreciating various voices, people and stories, we definitely need.

So… my new imaginary friend is Karl Marx. We go for dinner together and have lots of hot debates. He wants to be the man of my dreams. I tell him that my dreams got kinda shattered. He speaks about class struggles, I talk about my struggles. I like it when he talks about the women’s status being the measure of progress in society. Actually he talks about the “fair sex” and then he makes this silly joke: “the members of the fair sex, the ugly ones included, ha, ha”. I tell him he’s sexist, he replies: you’re beautiful. Oh, well. Who can resist that? OK, now he got me on a weak spot, I start rolling my eyes and flirting, wishing I had a push-up bra to make my breasts look “revolutionary”… But he mentions again that freedom is only the consciousness of necessity, turning me off. I reply that freedom is just another word for nothing else to lose. He doesn’t like that. You cannot treat freedom so lightly. I don’t, on the contrary, but I still believe in spontaneity and impulse, this thing with necessity doesn’t really ring true to me. Well, that’s why you’re poor, he looks down at me. You are not able to get organized, you don’t know how to make a profit, you only live on the payment for your labor, yes, arts, theater, teaching – labor. No profit. You are a proletarian. Workers of the world, unite! Religion is just an opiate for the masses. Revolution is the only solution. Oh my God. Here I am again. Where I started. A sexless member of the proletariat. With a new revolution on the horizons. Really? I thought my life was in some sorta evolution. It turns out that it only recycles in a loop. Loop-loop-loop. History repeats itself, Marx says: first as a tragedy, second as a farce—and this time I agree with him. Am I ever gonna break this tragicomic circle? He smiles for the first time. He gives me a hammer. He turns into Brecht and tells me that art shouldn’t be a mirror of reality but a hammer that shapes it. Wow. That’s quite a lot of pressure on a poor artist like me. Am I—are we—gonna manage to shape any reality? Maybe. Stay tuned.

February 2009 - Andrea Thome

2009-02-02T15:11:00.000-05:00

INTRO BY JOHN CLINTON EISNER...

This month’s essay is by Andrea Thome, the director of Lark’s annual U.S.-Mexico “Word Exchange” and a translator, actor and playwright in her own right. She came to the Lark eight years ago as a fellow in our Playwrights’ Workshop program, and quickly became an integral part of our community. Her vision of inclusiveness in theater, her artistry and intelligence, her good judgment, and her passionate connection to the people with whom she works are qualities that have contributed to the Lark’s ethos and the way we function as a culture. Equally, her bilingualism, her comfort traveling in and among cultural enclaves in New York City and elsewhere, and her open heart and mind have given her a unique perspective on what it means to be an American—and to define America for future generations.

Her belief in theater’s limitless possibilities to bring people together from many different backgrounds is such a match for the Lark’s mission and vision, that it was very important to me to ask Andrea to share some of her thoughts with us this month.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

HAIL TO THE MUTT!
Essay by Andrea Thome

“Writing in two languages at once cannot be literature,” a respected and veteran Cuban novelist once told me in Havana. We had asked him if he considered the writing of Cubans living in the U.S. to be Cuban literature. “Literature,” he insisted “is the highest, purest expression of a language. When you mix languages, the result is mediocrity.” To him, bilingual writers like me had to follow one narrow path to its greatest heights, keeping the road clear of linguistic litter.

But what if the language you think in and speak doesn’t spring from one clear source but, like a river, flows from different streams? Even my supposed “first language,” Spanish, mixes Costa Rican, Chilean and Spanglish waters. Learning English and Spanish almost simultaneously made me aware—even as a kid—that no language is pure and no language alone carries the whole truth.

Growing up bilingual in the Midwest, communication was a daily challenge that required not just choosing the right words, but attuning myself to gestures, tones of voice, and the invisible webs of habit and history that made people behave differently in Wisconsin than they did in Chile. Even choosing which language to use in describing an experience affected the meaning of that experience. Saying “Me gustas” to someone you had a crush on meant admitting that they had an effect on you, but telling him “I like you” made you the active, confident one. Being restricted to one language frustrated me. For instance, there’s no good English translation for “ubicarse.” To find a place for yourself? To understand where you are, enough to fit in? Maybe gringos had no need for that word.

So I told the Cuban novelist: my words are born from two parents, English and Spanish. Each has sculpted and structured my perceptions, but neither one alone can chart my mental geography. Their interaction has created a third, multi-voiced language that shapes my thoughts and carries them out into the world. Wouldn’t the utmost expression of this language count as “literature?” And wouldn’t this literature, then, be multilingual too?

The writer wasn’t convinced. Did he, like an anachronistic believer in the myth of racial purity, believe that mixing two “pure” languages degraded both (and, soon enough, the whole culture)? It seemed that in his eyes, my linguistically mixed-breed, mongrel form of writing had no more chance of attaining the status of “literature” than a street dog had of winning a purebred dog show—or than a mutt had of becoming president.

Perhaps it’s just another generation speaking. One which thinks that purity—of language, of culture, of this idea of “race”—actually exists.

My family and I watch Obama on the television. “Why would you want to call yourself a mutt?” asks my aunt, a 76-year old Austrian woman who married into my Dad’s muttilicious family of Costa Ricans mixed with Germans, Mexicans, and Ecuadorans. “Mutt is offensive.”

Is it? I think it’s playful, candid, strong. To her generation, a mutt is someone who doesn’t know who her parents are. A bastard street dog. But, it seems to me, the mutt herself knows where she comes from. Perhaps the only ones uncomfortable with the mutt’s blurred parentage are those obsessed with classifying her—people who believe, perhaps, that a dog (or a piece of writing, or a playwright herself) whose breed can’t be classified has no value. How do you sell it, for instance, when you don’t know what kind of dog it is? And how do you sell a play when it’s so…crossbred? Multiethnic? What do you even call it? Is it American, or hyphenated-American? Should you slot it into your season’s one ethnic slot? And what if it speaks (oh no) in an “other” language? At what point do we feel comfortable enough to accept multiple languages, cultural references, the simultaneous existence of differing experiences of reality as…us?

When I discovered theater, I found a language that felt whole because words were just one form of translating a moment. And when I moved to the Bay Area, with its polyglot, multilingual theater community, including a remarkable variety of Latino-founded groups, I finally felt free to start writing, in all my languages.

Theater is inherently multilingual. So many different vocabularies coexist onstage and must work together to create one integrated experience. This, to me, is life. In theater, every act of language—verbal, physical, musical or visual—structures reality in different ways (just like English structures my thoughts differently than Spanish). Not only are we allowed to communicate using more than just one language—we’re required to. Theater acknowledges that reality is multidimensional, and that only by seeing through many sides of this prism do we even approach the experience of living.

So why do we still hang on to limited ideas and classifications? Each time a play by a Latino/a writer is not considered within the categories of All-American plays or “plays for a general audience,” we regress to living within a paradigm that values “purity.” Living not only with the delusion that Latinos aren’t American, but that American-ness doesn’t contain some Latinidad, that English contains no Spanish and Spanish no English, and that American culture hasn’t been shaped and affected by Latinos (and Native Americans, Africans, Asians, and more…) since before this nation officially became a nation. Thousands of words in the English language are derived (or imported unchanged) from Spanish. And I would like to ask that old Cuban writer if, in his quest for linguistic purity, he plans to expunge from his vocabulary over 6,000 Arabic words that help make up the Spanish language—including words as “Spanish” as “guitarra” and “Hola” (which probably comes from “Allah,” like the classic “Olé!”). Many roots come together to create a language, and no language—or culture, or art form—stays the same as it grows despite the best efforts of La Real Academia Española or Arizona lawmakers.

So, can we honor the messy integration of our brains, minds and languages as they are? Can we open spaces where people can engage their whole selves in the joyful, difficult work of making theater—our necessarily multidisciplinary and wonderfully polluted form? Ironically, my colleagues and I have often found it necessary to create spaces specially focused on Latinos not only to produce our work (the 2008-09 Off-Broadway season includes ZERO plays by Latinos) but also to make theater in an environment where we don’t have to fit someone else’s exotic (or limited) idea of a Latino writer. No one at INTAR has called a scene I write “magical realism” just because it contains Spanish, nor do they use words like “hot,” “urban” or “rhythms” in advertising a play. These spaces are necessary and nurturing, but they shouldn’t be the only place we’re free to be artists in all our complexity.

For that reason, I love working on the Lark’s annual U.S.-México Playwright Exchange because it creates that rare theatrical space where I can exist in all my languages. I love watching and listening to the Mexican and U.S. playwrights’ messy attempts to negotiate each others’ language, their gestures, the rediscovery of certain words and the creation of others, the way a third language emerges out of the interplay between their different national and mental vocabularies. Bonds of alliance are born this way, when we have to fill in the gaps of understanding by creating our own shared, intimate language. And isn’t it this what makes us write plays? This striving to find forms, to communicate verbally or nonverbally with all the tools of language we have at our disposal, trying like madwomen to achieve the almost impossible task of bringing the wordless to life on stage?

It’s a challenge to be responsible to our multiplicity. Not only the multiplicity in ourselves, but also the multiplicity of the larger planet we inhabit. Maybe that means not just looking at the seemingly disparate parts and connections within us, but also examining the ways in which no culture, nation or society lives fully independent of another. Or humbly learning and writing about people completely unlike us, or seeing a play in a language we don’t understand—even without super-titles. It might mean stepping out of ourselves and embracing the artistic freedom that brings. Or, simply, taking the responsibility to think and write about the world. These worlds.

In Latin America, there is a word to describe the cultural, ethnic and linguistic mixing—of indigenous, African, European, and, more recently, Asian and Middle Eastern migrations—that produced modern Latin Americans: “mestizaje.” Somos todos mestizos. In this America, then, at this time, let’s embrace what my friend Marlene Ramírez Cancio calls our “Muttizaje.” Let’s acknowledge the linguistic/artistic/ethnic/cultural/spiritual miscegenation within us, so that no one is asked to emphasize certain characteristics or deny others in order to be classifiable. Let’s change the paradigms that established the categories. Or, maybe, let’s just stop trying to classify. Hail to the Mutt in all of us.

The ‘Why’ of Theatre in the 21st Century by John Clinton Eisner

2009-01-08T14:01:00.000-05:00

I’ve noticed that when a group of experts in any field get together, they tend to talk about the “how” and not the “why.” From what I know, the participants in the Manhattan Project didn’t spend much time pondering the ethics or implications of the bomb they were assigned to make. They focused on the “how” and they made it. I don’t mean to imply that a rationale hadn’t been constructed by others at the time to justify nuclear technology or even the bomb itself. That rationale was very clear and well publicized. But my understanding is that the question of “why” was discouraged among the scientists.

I know that this observation is not revolutionary, but I’ve been thinking about this idea of the “how” and the “why” a lot this year in the wake of collapsing financial markets and escalating political tensions. I think about Bernard Madoff and all the others in the financial field who were given the go-ahead to generate an illusion of wealth and then assigned the mission of figuring out how. Even in more bland terms, I think about the mandate we’ve given Silicon Valley to generate the best software or Starbucks to produce the most consistent cup of coffee. If you give talented folks a job and a deadline, it is amazing how far they can go. Until they come up against the real question: “Why?”

I see in these examples a very definite pattern of behavior firmly rooted in the American psyche, though I am inclined to believe that it is not limited to Americans but resides more generally in human nature. This pattern is tribal and involves a form of unilateral decision making that brooks little dissent once a course of action has been set. It makes sense that this behavior exists, really, in that its impulse is the preservation of social order through a centralized power structure. In this model, the chief assigns the troops a military objective, for instance, like securing territory or developing weapons capabilities. The chief provides the rationale, and the troops (i.e., the “experts”) carry out the task without question. However, history has demonstrated again and again that the problem with this pattern is that it invariably leads to irreconcilable conflict and the tribe’s—or nation’s—demise.

And just because this behavioral pattern is a tendency, it doesn’t make it right. Even if our very genes and social codes pull us in that direction, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider—and pursue—alternative patterns of behavior. This is the challenge of creating a better and lasting democratic society.

In a democratic society, decision making is ongoing, re-assessable, and permeates the process. In fact, the concept of “process” is essential to democracy and any society of inclusiveness that strives for positive social change. If we make the hard choice to truly embrace democratic society, we will need to learn new and more complex communications strategies than the ones that served the old tribal system. We will need to look for different metaphors for behavior than those of war and dominance.

I suggest that the places for us to test drive these new patterns of behavior—that our future survival will require—is in fields like education, the arts, sports, and international relations. All we have to do is open our eyes to see the examples that already exist. For instance, no one knows how to channel primal human energy in productive ways like a kindergarten teacher. And nothing gets closer to solutions for community development than the nurturing of talent, the making of art, and the celebration of local voices.

Or, if you are familiar with the Lark, you may know that one of the basic building blocks of our process is the roundtable. A roundtable is a very flexible format, usually a gathering of a few actors and friends with a director and playwright who come together at the playwright’s request to hear a new piece of work and to support the playwright in setting goals for bringing the work to the next level. At the Lark, the playwright represents the very idea of free individual expression and leadership capacity.

I sometimes think of the roundtable as the DNA of the Lark because its very simplicity supports our core value that the playwright is author and determiner of the direction of her/his project. Somehow, the format keeps people’s feet on the ground while encouraging imaginative response—all under the author’s control.

While it is a cardinal principle at the Lark that we don’t “fix” plays—we believe that only the author knows enough about the geography of the play to guide its growth—we have observed that creativity rarely occurs in a vacuum and that healthy discussion generates genuine enthusiasm for compelling work and opens up avenues of inquiry that might otherwise be ignored.

The most powerful aspects of the roundtable is not only that it brings together a circle of supportive collaborators but, at its best, represents a circle of diverse perspectives. At a roundtable, it is the job of each participant to try to see through the eyes of the other people at the table and to support the creator with rigor and respect. When it succeeds, a roundtable instills in its playwright the calm clear voice of “why.”

2009 is going to be a time for all of us to think more deeply than we have in recent memory about where we’re headed as a society and the tools we’ll need to get there. Starting this year, the Lark is planning to use the idea of the roundtable for larger conversations with Lark community members and people from fields outside the theater. We are interested in understanding more about the “why” of live theater in the twenty-first century, what the field has to offer society as a whole, and what society can tell us about how to shape the theater of the future.

The bulk of this community roundtable project will be led over the next two years by our TCG/New Generations Leadership Fellow, May Adrales, for whom the relationship between theater and community is a critical and passionate interest. In addition, we will be inviting guest essayists share their unique perspectives about the use of theater in a rapidly globalizing society.

It is my belief that the theater plays a critical role, especially at times like these, in shaping our values and establishing a stronger sense of community by providing a forum where different ways of thinking can safely intersect. The theater is a laboratory to examine human behavior as we encounter it in the imaginative world of the artist’s creation. It is through the eyes of our artists that we will see and know the future.

That is why the Lark has invested the last 15 years in playwrights—in the unheard voices of the newest playwrights, the newest ideas of the most established playwrights, and differing perspectives of writers from many cultures and countries—all gathered around the table at the Lark. Through our careful attention to teach individual voice, we are investing in leadership, inspiration and a renewed sense of community, direction and purpose.

ON SOLID FOOTING AND LOOKING AHEAD

2008-12-01T12:22:00.001-05:00

During times like these, when the value of everything from mortgages to barrels of oil is in question, it is natural for a person like me, who works in the arts, to question the worth of my efforts and the impact of my field as a whole. Certain age-old ironies are not lost on me. For instance, during prosperous times, when we are flush and comfortable, and have more leisure to appreciate our cultural heritage, and more resources to invest in expanding the boundaries of thought and possibility, it seems hard for many of us to imagine that the arts will really change our lives much, if at all. And when the Dow Jones drops and we can really use some inspiration and a little help readjusting to societal realities, along with fiscal ones, when words like “hope” and “vision” abound and the arts regains its footing as a window to truth and a foothold for innovation, we begin to take our investment in them more seriously, despite the fact that resources are scarcer.

As 2008 ends and we look ahead at what will clearly prove to be both an historic and challenging year in 2009, I am profoundly gratified by what the Lark has been able to accomplish in its 15 years of existence—supporting unheard voices and underrepresented perspectives, in the most basic and effective ways, in boom and bust—and proud beyond measure of our team, the impressive and diverse community of artists we serve, and the citizens with whom we engage in our audience. At this critical moment, as we leap together into an unknown future, I hope you join me in feeling good about the Lark’s efforts to encourage artists’ creativity and to dive deeper into new realms of human experience and humanity.

As we look to the future, we are recommitting ourselves to the core values in our mission—creating space for unheard voices and new ideas and preserving a nurturing environment of trust and respect—while turning new attention to promoting innovative partnerships and collaborations here in New York and beyond. With our core mission values at the center of our efforts, we have begun to turn our attention towards connecting the success of the artists we support to the world beyond our intimate community. Because we have established a successful platform for free expression by playwrights, we are increasingly focused on creating a safe and effective space for theater decision-makers to come together in different configurations and form multilateral partnerships that advance playwrights and their plays into a reinvigorated repertoire.

There are two ways we are doing this that I’d like to share with you. First, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded us $500,000 to “create a movement” around three Lark-developed plays: the first is Lloyd Suh’s AMERICAN HWANGAP, with scheduled productions at three U.S. and one foreign theater. Secondly, Lark’s was one of seven proposals selected for Round I of the NEA/Arena New Play Development Program: together with Mixed Blood Theatre in Minneapolis, InterAct in Philadelphia, and Fourth World Theater Lab in Bulgaria, we will commission a work by early-career playwright Aditi Kapil whose LOVE PERSON—also developed at Lark—is a nominee for the Pulitzer.

We are proud of the increased role we are playing in providing access to the arts for artists and the communities they serve, for the space we give our artists within which to grown and thrive, and the impact we are having on society—both through the new repertoire we are helping to develop and through the grassroots engagement of non-theater folks in important “surround” conversations that accompany the development of new work at the Lark. Whether you are a playwright, a theater artist of some other stripe, or a person in another field entirely, we welcome you into our community and hope that you will spend as much time as you can with us in the New Year!

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

COLLABORATING, NOT COMPROMISING, AND TRANSFORMING OUR WORLD

2008-11-11T12:21:00.002-05:00

Central to the Lark’s mission is our work with artists from different countries and cultures. Over the years, I’ve traveled abroad to work with playwrights and theater makers in order to better understand how they see the world and express themselves differently than I do because of the unique vantage point of their geography and history. I’ve observed, too, the complex relationship between each of the nations I’ve visited and the visions of artists who call that nation their home. I am as intrigued by the surface stereotypes of national identity, and our tendency to want to simplify the world around us, as I am by how social and political themes provoke gifted artists to respond in individual ways. Certainly, a successful playwright reflects the truth of her country’s experience—and her own—back at its citizens, and the resulting dialogue is inextricably linked to that particular culture. But after my most recent trip to Romania last month, I noticed something new in the way the creative process differs from culture to culture. This is not strictly an observation about Romania, but about the creation of art in general. Something like a theory is forming in my mind (though it is way too early to call it by that name) which I will think about and test in the coming months.

Here it is: it occurs to me that every process we implement—everything we do—is a reflection of how our societies and families are structured. This is true even of how we make our theater. Freud saw this congruence in repeated patterns of behavior within his field of psychology. And I think that, similarly, in the creation of our art, we trace and retrace the patterns of our social structure, both to reinforce what is comfortable and to name our fears. In Romania, for instance, it is hard not to notice that the nation’s theater is guided—really, driven—by charismatic stage directors at the expense of significant participation by many other theater artists. This structure in Romanian theater makes absolute sense to me; Romanian society, haunted by the specter of a long and brutal dictatorship, returns again and again to explore—in its art and in the way it makes its art—the relationship between authority and submission.

Romania is by no means alone in this pathology. The reenactment of social oppression within the creative process exists as strongly, though differently, in other former communist countries, in “emerging democracies,” and in the United States, where, despite our self-characterization as a democracy, we have long suppressed the value of individual freedoms in favor of commercialism and entitlement. Concentrating power in the hands of a few people, whether in a monarchy, dictatorship, church state, or corporate oligarchy, makes for a sense of security and stability if not equal rights for citizens. Concentrated power comes at the expense of individual creativity and the many innovative solutions to critical challenges that become available in a society that is fundamentally democratic.

We are in a rut and need to change. Are there new ways of creating and developing works of theater that don’t rely on power struggle, but instead on trust, respect and the fundamentals of true democracy? Might it even be possible to influence new directions in society and politics by supporting a wide variety of creative processes in the art we make? Can the notion of working together—collaborating, and not compromising—transform our world?

On the eve of a Presidential election that will stand as a marker for change, no matter which candidate is elected, the Lark is poised to ask some very important questions about the role theater will play in America’s future and about the relationship between the very ideas of creativity and community. If you’ve followed some of the Lark’s happy accomplishments recently—our $500,000 Mellon grant, our special selection for new play innovation as part of a new program of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arena Theater, our Booth Ferris Award to support more aggressive fundraising for artist compensation and fellowships, our TCG/New Generations mentorship of a future leader for the theater—you will get a sense of the kind of infrastructure that we are working to create so that artist of all stripes can come together to imagine brave new worlds and bold new ways of bringing these worlds together.

The idea in therapy, of course, is to identify the unhelpful patterns in one’s own behavior in order to be in a position to make a change. Can this concept be extended in larger ways, within our communities, to track pernicious patterns in the fabric of our social and political landscape and, through the creative process, transform them? It is an immense task, like energy independence or universal healthcare, but I think that change is possible if we begin today.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

ROOTING OURSELVES IN THEATER

2008-10-01T12:20:00.001-04:00

Societies everywhere, like the individuals who come together to form them, tend to desire a clear sense of identity and purpose. People don’t spend so much time thinking about these things on sunny days. But on bad days, whether it is simply gray and rainy or a natural disaster has struck, people suddenly feel the need to have a mission they can lean upon, a place to go, a ritual they can perform when there is nothing else to be done. It is healthy and natural for societies to look to their minds, memories and imaginations to explain the unexplainable, and this tendency in people and communities to want to root themselves in a better idea of their identity, to provide a context for good and evil, to offer space for hope and comfort in despair, is one of the origins of the theater.

Whether we’re talking about America as a whole or a community of monks in the mountains of Tibet, societies strive to establish a set of values and an interpretation of their own history that will underpin the actions they take internally as well as with respect to the wider world. Often this happens in reverse. None of us is unfamiliar with the notion of a society that seeks to justify questionable or controversial actions—say, going to war or damaging the environment—by reinterpreting history, adapting old rituals to new purposes, or, in essence, restating its mission.

When a society gets as complex as ours—with as many cultural, spiritual, philosophical, historical, aesthetic and intellectual components struggling to find a unifying rubric—it becomes more difficult to explain why bad things happen, why some people have more than others, and what kind of social equation has the capacity to benefit the most people. I thought about this a lot last week, during our 15th annual Playwrights’ Week event. That was the week that the stock market suffered its largest drop in history, Congress was paralyzed by politics and the public didn’t have a clue what was happening—either to its wealth or sense of national identity. Lots of other bad things were going on, too, as usual, but the economic crisis was causing all the experts to stutter and flip-flop as they tried to right the boat and explain the complexities of what was happening in simple terms, which, it turns out, they couldn’t. The world is just not simple enough for one paradigm to be enough to explain it all. Newtonian physics can’t explain many of the questions that Einstein asked, nor does the bible explain how to solve world hunger. It is naïve and dangerous to expect that the multidimensional global challenges we face today can be understood and overcome without opening our eyes and ears to what we don’t yet know, in new ways. “Look for a solution out of the box,” the saying goes; trite as it is, a saying is a saying because there’s a lot of truth to it. To me, history’s biggest lesson is that we’ve successfully met challenges in the past though education and open minds.

So, during Playwrights’ Week I was thinking a lot about the difference between the experience of an audience member who came to only one or two of the 11 plays that were featured and my experience seeing them all. I would never expect most people to commit themselves to seeing 11 plays in six days, but I know what it meant to me to be able to see 11 freshly printed snapshots of the world superimposed as a single complex organism. Each separate piece, to me, seemed to mean more because of the presence of the others. And because I also attended many discussion sessions that involved all of the playwrights meeting to talk about their work, I got the feeling, for a few moments at least, of having my finger on the pulse of humanity. Right now. In this moment in history.

Most people had a wonderful experience of Playwrights’ Week seeing one or two plays selected from among the many options that were listed on our colorful Playwrights’ Week postcard, with its distinctive cover image (designed by Jeff Jackson) of the earth cracking open like an egg and lots of words and ideas splashing out into the world. They really knew what they were choosing, too, if they had shown up for the Playwrights’ Week’s launch event, “Meet the Playwrights,” which was hosted spectacularly by literary agent and connoisseur-of-playwrights Morgan Jenness, and was like sampling a flight of wines from 11 regions, both domestic and international. Participating writers read aloud small morsels from their own works-in-process with the wonderful humanity that only an author can plumb.

But there were a few other people, like me, who put their lives on hold for the week and experienced Playwrights’ Week as total immersion. This was true of the 11 participating playwrights and many of the directors. It was true of our staff, of course, and there were others there, too. Because the launch event was so seductive, alluring, charming, disarming, inspiring, and profoundly intimate, it encouraged a number of people who intended to see nothing to get more immersed.

“Total Immersion” people at Playwrights’ Week exist in a state of literary-social-cultural-historical intoxication, attending two readings a night, eating out between shows, and hanging out with playwrights at bars. They put a lot into it as Total Immersion requires significant energy and focus. It can feel a bit like a stint in a sweat lodge, including, on the one hand, profound insights and spiritual growth, and, on the other hand, disorientation and disturbing dreams when you go home each night after seeing two plays. And even the plays themselves are moving targets: each play in Playwrights’ Week is, in the playwright’s own estimation, not yet “finished,” still seeking to find itself. The purpose of Playwrights’ Week is to support writers in setting their own goals to deepen and strengthen their work. Taking in 11 plays in six days which was not for the faint-of-heart.

There was MIDDLEMEN by David Jenkins, almost prophetic, literally performed on the day that Lehman Brothers fell and Israeli playwright Motti Lerner’s frightening and compact political thriller, BENEDICTUS, about high-stakes negotiations between an Iranian politician and an Israeli arms dealer, followed by a multinational panel composed of the people who had commissioned and nurtured this controversial play. Ismail Khalidi’s TRUTH SERUM BLUES shared an American perspective on the Middle East, in a play originally developed as a high-tech one man touring show ambitiously transformed for Playwrights’ Week into the moving and ruefully funny inner monologue of a torture victim at Guantanamo Bay—in a technologically unadorned five-actor ensemble piece. Later, we saw Dano Madden’s IN THE SAWTOOTHS, in which the audience became a troop of eight year-old girl scouts getting advice about taking a camping trip from three young Idaho men, followed by Allison Moore’s SLASHER: a funny, campy, but ultimately dark take on gruesome horror films exploring America’s shattered value system, family dysfunction, and brutality between men and women. James McLindon’s FAITH centered on a 13 year-old boy, obsessed with Christian martyrdom, who meets a real but ambivalent angel in the Walmart parking lot, and WILDFLOWER by Lila Rose Kaplan looked at adults—and teenagers—in arrested emotional development that has stunted their capacity to truly love or accept another’s love. THE TWELFTH LABOR by Steven Gridley also looked at love and responsibility, what it means, whether a mentally retarded woman is capable of parenting, and when a parent has the right to make decisions for a grown child. THE NOISEMAKERS by Mark Borkowski was cruelly funny, exploring the breakup of a couple beset on both sides by family insanity, including a father who insists that his carpenter son crucify him in front of assembled guests. CHARM by Kathleen Cahill was a funny, fictional and poetic take on the life of feminist Margaret Fuller, a person with a powerful vision of the future, an unshakable sense of fairness and justice, and a hunger to live in her body even though such sensuality was considered an enormous social threat at the time. And finally, Lina Patel’s SANKALPAN was a unique and ingenious version of THE THREE SISTERS so perfectly adapted to India in 1904 that the universal themes of love, power, justice and happiness glisten freshly and originally in the air, as though it had been blessed by Chekhov who could have never written this play himself.

With this injection of images and ideas, I lived in a nearly hallucinatory state for seven days, and am finally coming out of my blissful immersion in ideas, feelings, thoughts, images, and imagination. While each play was remarkably satisfying as an individual experience, they collectively presented an amazing gallery of artistic expression, historical perspective, and vision for the future.

Not that I recommend a theatrical binge like this, but there is something important about understanding the role of theater in society as something of continual and continuous value, an ongoing conversation between artists and audiences, and a platform big enough for all of us to stand on and reach for the stars we can see together.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

LETTER FROM GUADALARA

2008-09-01T12:19:00.001-04:00

The church bell announces that it is 7:00 a.m. I am in Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco, México, and, although the sky is still pitch black, a parade of commuters’ headlights stream by my hotel window on the Avenida Mariano Otero and the hillsides in the distance gleam like diamonds with the lights of the awakening city . It rained again last night, in this mile-high city of nearly five million inhabitants, sending cataracts of water crashing down from the mountains and transforming the traffic-filled streets into churning rapids. I traveled upriver to my hotel last night from the workshop on “contemporary playwriting” that I’m leading here, amazed at the torrent around me and glad to be in a high-riding van, but the driver only shrugged and smiled when I snapped a photo with my cell phone. Even in the dark, I can tell it is still wet out there by the swoosh that accompanies the rumble of traffic, but I am sure it will be dry, bright and hot again by the middle of the day when I plan to take a walk around the historic town center before the van picks me up for today’s workshop session.

I am in México this time on the invitation of Aurora Cano, an actor, director and producer who leads a bi-annual festival called Drama Fest. Every two years, she invites artists from one other country to work with Mexican artists to create work and learn together, and to expose audiences to international audiences and exciting readings and productions. Her formula is unusual in México: she invites artists from another country to work in México City and the capital of another Mexican state. Two years ago, it was Germany and Pueblo; this time it is the U.S. and Jalisco. Cano was seeking playwrights, directors and workshop leaders, and ultimately created a fascinating program that included works and artists from México City, Jalisco and the U.S., including “Opus” by Michael Hollinger, “The Piano Teacher” by Julia Cho, “Yellow Face” by David Henry Hwang, and “Desaire de los elevadors” by Alberto Villarreal and directed by Tea Alegic.

During my two weeks in México, I am teaching two week-long workshops that focus on the creative process of playwrights, and I am having the opportunity to see some wonderful work, renew friendships, meet new people, and think more deeply about the intercultural work we do at the Lark. Although I’ve been to México City quite a few times in the last half dozen years two organize and implement the Lark’s growing international playwright exchange program, this is the first time I’ve traveled to another region and I am very excited about my visit to Guadalajara and getting a better sense of the country as a whole. Although we have set our programs up with institutions located in México City, which is a magnet for the arts in México, the Lark’s mission is very focused on democratizing and decentralizing our reach for new and unheard voices, and so I have relished the opportunity this month to spend two weeks—in two Mexican cities—working closely with theater artists to share skills and perspectives on playwriting and theater making.

Guadalajara is small compared to México City’s population of nearly 19,000,000, but it is the second-largest city in México. The city was founded in 1532 as part of a vicious campaign of conquest by Nuño de Guzmán (whose cruelty against native populations appalled even the Spanish authorities and he died in jail in Madrid) and it supported Hidalgo’s independence movement at the end of the 18 th century. Today, the state of Jalisco leads the nation in producing corn for tortillas, is the center of tequila production, and the home of the musical mariachis, the horsemen called charros, the hats called sombreros and, in fact, the Mexican Hat Dance itself. We drive past the factory where they produce the “cervesa mas fina”—Corona, of course, and we at first confused the smell of the brewery with melting chocolate—on our way to the workshop which takes place at the University of Guadalajara, the nation’s second largest. Interestingly, the day we arrived a coup took place at the university: the chancellor was forcibly removed and replaced by a new chancellor by a phalanx of faculty and students and there are demonstrations in the streets. Clearly academic politics exists everywhere.

My workshops have been wonderful, surprising, happy experiences. Although I put a great deal of thought into what I wanted to do in the workshops, and how they should be structured, there is nothing like intercultural exchange to encourage innovation. Every day was a new adventure, weaving together three strands: making work and sharing it, talking about work and the creative process, and sharing information about the difference, large and small, in the cultural contexts of México and the U.S. The diversity of the participants has been amazing! My groups have been comprised of the young, the old, the struggling, the jaded, the passionate, the experienced, and the neophyte. One man, who is not really connected to the cultural infrastructure of México at all, is an engineer who has run a theater for workers for nearly 30 years. He writes, directs and acts in plays for a passionate audience that he describes as “simple”—but the work he is creating—something like Dario Fo, but with a particular Mexican twist—is anything but simple, and it is very funny. Another writer, an actress, has created a work about a Mexican immigrant in Toronto and her ultimate collapse of identity—also very funny. And, naturally, there are much darker, Latin, stories about love and betrayal, and a real awareness of the power of actors to bring the written text to magical life. One thing these artists share in common with those in the U.S. is a need to connect with a community, and a need for answers about where they can go to make their work, finish it and see it produced. But they are making it happen. When I asked the group to tell me the aspect of the Mexican theater of which they were most proud, they all answered in unison that Mexican theater artists have the heart and the passion to succeed against nearly impossible odds.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

FINDING TIME AND SPACE WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT

2008-08-08T12:17:00.001-04:00

A few weeks ago, 15 Lark artists were packing their suitcases for a week in the country on the glorious and woodsy campus of Vassar College for our annual playwrights’ retreat in partnership with New York Stage and Film.

Then the phone call came: there was a stomach bug on the loose in the dorms that, though short-lived (it reportedly sped through the human metabolism in 36 hours), was observed to be unpleasant. The local authorities in Poughkeepsie insisted that all of the students attending summer programs on the Vassar campus return home at once and no new people (like the 11 writers, two actors and two facilitators from the Lark) were to be allowed to come. Thankfully, our colleagues at New York Stage and Film were able to convince the powers-that-be not to cancel their production schedule. Miraculously, only one NYSF staff member had suffered from the bug (and was already up again) and the threat of contagion seemed limited to the campus dormitories. It was agreed that the audiences attending NYSF shows in the theaters themselves would be safe.

There was something mildly exciting about this quick change of plans. It all felt like the opening scene of a Hollywood summer release disaster film that you know will not end well. I don’t know about anyone else, but I privately imagined my own encounter with the disease, the sweaty palms and dull eyes, the highway full of Red Cross trucks and state troopers, a massive toilet paper shortage, and all the suffering playwrights and theater artists whining and shrieking. It seemed like a good idea not to take the risk.

But something had to be done, and fast. The 15 Lark artists bound for Vassar had been setting artistic goals and laying the strategic groundwork for weeks to be able to take full advantage of the weeklong artistic Nirvana they had been promised and were expecting. Visions of sugarplums had danced in their heads along with images of modern college athletic facilities, sloping green lawns, a tranquil arboretum, mixing with the artists from other companies and the happy college interns, hanging out at the Beech Tree bar, time to think and to write, and lots of peace. And every day a two our block of time to share work and reflect: a daily deadline that was enough to push things along and get the blood pumping, but still low-key. A sense of personal space and time, where the only obligation that anyone had to feel was to herself. Now all that was gone. Tabula rasa. How could we come up with a solution that could jibe with people’s expectations?

Naturally, we couldn’t. The only thing we really had going for us was that we had kept everyone from suffering a very unpleasant 36-hour intestinal upset. More a glass half-empty than half-full. Amanda Berkowitz, our Company Manager, was amazing and rescheduled the retreat in our own overcrowded facilities here in New York. She invented all sorts of ways of spicing things up and provided lots of snacks. And Catherine Coray and Sturgis Warner, the retreat facilitators were truly inspired leaders. They spoke eloquently and kept everyone’s “eye on the prize.” I thought of the “wooden ‘O’” speech in HENRY V, and appreciated that the Lark’s mission is really about managing expectations and rejecting the muse of fire as long as the creative inspiration alone could suffice. Still, I was kind of depressed because I thought I had disappointed everyone and I realize now that I skulked about and felt a bit sick to my stomach for 36 hours even though I was nowhere near the Vassar campus.

But then I began to notice something: each day, the group seemed to grow tighter, closer, just as though they were upstate in vernal isolation. The pages kept pouring in and I could see the frantic eyes of the staff as they rushed copies of new-minted scenes down to the room where the group assembled each afternoon. And everyone was hanging out afterwards, or, occasionally, running off to the NYU library to write a scene they had to get down on paper immediately. There was laughing, and, when I joined the group to see the work myself, there was unbelievably amazing creativity going on. And a lot of love. Everyone was listening to and supporting one another, challenging one another to do their very best, and feeling good about it. They had set aside a week of their lives to focus on their own creative lives—and to be with one another—and they were following through on it, even in a scrappy New York rehearsal studio with a groaning air conditioner.

After we popped the champagne at the end of the week, took some photos, and talked about how we’d all been affected by our Manhattan retreat, people just wanted to hang out and be together. And they did.

As the summer winds down, I hope you’ll find the time and space to design and implement your own retreat—whether it is just a few hours long, or an entire week—and that you are able to experience as much renewal and growth as our Vassar campers did even when they didn’t get what they expected.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

COURTROOM DRAMA: WHAT I LEARNED WHILE PERFORMING MY CIVIC DUTY

2008-07-01T12:16:00.001-04:00

Anyone who has spent time with me during the past two weeks knows that I have been on Jury Duty. Naturally, I complained endlessly about the inconvenience it caused me. My whole schedule was disrupted, I got behind in my work, and I had to stay up late at night to catch up. My friends and family were polite about it: they listen with apparent rapt attention, but I could see their eyes darting nervously ab aout the room, looking for anvenue of escape or an opportunity to change the subject, as I droned on about the stress of it all. Whining is de rigueur when a New Yorker is compelled to head downtown for such civic service, with the caveat that lunch in Chinatown and Little Italy can ease some of the pain and indignity.

Deep inside, however, I have other, different and opposite feelings about Jury Duty. To tell the whole truth, the experience excites me. First of all, it is a change of pace: new people, new venue, a new responsibility. Next, there is something wonderfully reassuring in knowing that, as a citizen, I am fully qualified to do an excellent job as a juror. Finally, I feel a combination of pride, delight, wonder and terror in performing an act so fundamentally essential, so profoundly spiritual, and so incontrovertibly American. To tell the truth, all of my courthouse visits as a juror have felt this way. Whining aside, I think that serving on a jury brings out the best in people—it certainly does in me. It presses me to be more straightforward with myself about what I know and don’t know, and it requires me to express myself honestly and articulately to my peers. Even when it gets emotional and jurors become irritated with one another because—well—no two people think or feel alike, the experience is exhilarating and, to my mind, redemptive.

The case on which I just served wasn’t particularly sexy, nor was it critically important in the big picture of social or criminal justice. It was interesting enough, though, and involved a melee with a machete in an uptown neighborhood and the contradictory testimony of a passel of marginally reliable witnesses who bore something of a latter-day resemblance to characters from the Damon Runyan stories that inspired the musical Guys and Dolls. While they spoke truthfully for the most part, as far as I could make out, the men’s testimony seemed influenced by testosterone and the women’s by a jaded and slightly irritated fatigue which manifested itself in inaudibility. A typical exchange between attorney and witness: “Is that when you graduated from heroin?” “No! I graduated from high school!” The witnesses were often painfully anxious and defensive, from the neighborhood bully to a policeman who testified that he had never read the Police Guide, which contains policy and procedures for arrests and evidence-gathering. When asked how he knew that he was performing his job correctly, he replied, “when I do something wrong my supervisor yells at me.”

Basically, the story is this: the neighborhood bully/drug dealer, a 42 year-old man who was born on the same block where he still lives with his mother and sisters, and who has a rap sheet a mile long, was habitually picking on another guy he apparently doesn’t like: “He never showed me no respect and, like, would spit on the ground when he was near me—which I took for a provocation.” One day the other guy (the man who spits) buys a big knife and publicly wields it, in peacock fashion, as if to say, “Stay away, or else!” This was unquestionably the wrong thing to do: the bully (whom we come to know affectionately as “the complaining witness”) is incensed. He robustly threatens the guy brandishing the machete, explicitly and colorfully describing where he intends to place it when he gets hold of it himself. He proceeds to attack the guy who has the knife, and is, unsurprisingly, stabbed accidentally through the ribs and one lung. Nevertheless, he is enraged and persists in attacking the startled knife-brandisher. Bleeding and screaming invectives, the bully chases the guy with the knife up five flights of stairs. He is followed by every kid in the neighborhood as he tries to kick in the man’s apartment door. The girlfriend of the guy with the knife, along with most of the neighbors, calls 911 to stop the riot. The police come, handcuff the bleeding bully to a gurney (he is resisting arrest), and take him to the hospital. The police don’t request a search warrant and never recover the knife, and fail to get any useful testimony at the scene. Most of the crowd disappears into the woodwork and the few kids who are tapped to give testimony fail to remember much of importance in the Grand Jury or when they testify for us. The case has as many holes as Swiss cheese, and, ultimately, we find him not guilty on two counts of assault and we spend nearly three more days deliberating a weapons possession charge before failing to reach a verdict—mostly because there is so little evidence to go on.

I have to say, most of us on that jury felt absolutely terrible because we couldn’t reach a verdict on a measly misdemeanor. We were wracked by guilt because the 12 of us couldn’t buckle down and agree on how to speedily administer justice in a situation that clearly involved illegal brawling and lawlessness. And the judge was fantastic! He was smart and funny, and he managed the case brilliantly—never wasting a moment of our time. Still, we couldn’t seem to get the camel of evidence through the heavenly eye of justice’s needle.

In retrospect, I understand two important things. First, finding the defendant guilty requires that all 12 jurors believe beyond a reasonable doubt that he actually committed those crimes. Our “hung” jury was itself testimony to the fact that we could not unanimously agree to this outcome. The system of presumed innocence had worked, even though the process of deliberation had been painful: reaching an impasse meant that individuals and factions of the whole group had to agree that they had irreconcilable differences with one another—that they could not agree on the truth as it was presented to them. Second, I have pulled back from my narrow focus on a single case about a knife fight in Harlem in order to see the big picture. There are many layers to this broader frame for society. For instance, long before the trial took place the police failed to gather evidence to present a viable case. The police department had failed to adequately train the officers on the scene to do so. Arguably, the police force is underpaid and undervalued. Many of the people in the neighborhood are the victims of a drug culture, which is itself caused by poor educational resources and a lack of job opportunities. The community in which this riot occurred is full of people who do not feel respected by the society in which they live, and are struggling merely to survive. This community is deemed unworthy of investment, and therefore it is unlikely to amount to much for itself or for the rest of us. These and other factors are what caused the alleged crime in the first place as well as the social structures that made it inevitable. This experience for me is an affirmation of an entire process we must all take part in on a daily basis if we want our society to have deep, intrinsic value. We need to take a closer look at where self-respect begins; at how we can assure that knowledge and justice are understood as virtues; where we accept individual responsibility for ourselves, our communities, and our environment; and the role of democracy and freedom in our culture.

Naturally, this makes me think of my job at the Lark where I work with many unheard voices trying to tell their stories in the theater. I have begun to see that each play that we work on at the Lark, and every show I go to see, is not unlike the isolated trial in which I just participated. My courtroom trial declared a man innocent of a crime, but implicated me in a much more complex understanding of justice, systemic failure, and the need for social activism. Can each piece of theater that I make or observe bring me to the same place of connection to society—and anxiety about my culture and its values—that my Jury Duty has afforded me? I hope so.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

FOLLOWING THE PATH TO FUTURE THEATER AUDIENCES

2008-06-01T12:14:00.001-04:00

Spring is awards season in the theater world. With the exception of the New York Innovative Theater Awards, which are presented in September to members of the “Indie” theater community, most every event that recognizes, honors, or encourages excellence in the theater field is happening about now: the Drama Desk and Lucille Lortel Awards, the Obies, the Outer Critics Circle Awards, and, of course, the Tonys. And dozens of other awards are being proffered all around the country, as buds appear on the trees and the earth springs back to life. It is the perfect time of year to reflect back upon the work of which we are most proud before turning our eyes to the future and the important challenges ahead.

The recognition associated with these awards encourages talent and enterprise, sets public standards for excellence, and is helpful, ostensibly, to the marketing folks faced with the daunting task of creating audiences for the theater. However, I can’t help but harbor a few feelings of unease each year during awards season, as I sit in the audience at various ceremonies to applaud worthy prize winners, because there is an elephant in the room that I can never quite ignore even in my earnest joy at celebrating the accomplishments of my peers. These doubts of mine are nothing new to theater insiders, and they itch at my consciousness. I worry that the public’s general sense of the scope and responsibility of the theater is that it has shrunk to nest comfortably in what is commonly called a “boutique niche” and has lost its broad impact on society. I fear that we are becoming too insular in our profession, too isolated as Americans in the world, and too unambitious about where our work reaches and whom it touches. I quietly despair that the inspiration and vision of our artists, inventors and entrepreneurs are seen as mere “luxuries” in a market economy that increasingly measures success using the bottom line rather than the high bar. Deep within me, though, I have an unshakeable conviction that every person matters, that every choice we make is vital, and that the people of the world are interconnected locally and globally.

At the Lark, I spend lots of time with playwrights who don’t know where the plays they write will be seen and heard. And I can’t promise them much because the infrastructure that currently exists serves too few people at too high a price to provide opportunities to enough good playwrights or to give access for audiences to precious new ideas. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I’ve come to describe as “public outreach networks” within different fields. In the U.S. theater, for instance, the most developed public networks are audiences for Broadway, Off-Broadway, and the regional theater institutions in many major cities. But there are many other existing networks connected to other industries: journalism, education, law, social justice, security, the military, music, science, and many more. How can the value of the work done in all these fields find new intersections that will reverse the sense of drift and isolation that many people seem to feel nowadays?

I can only enter into this conversation with my own knowledge as a theater professional. The vital perspectives of playwrights, and the stories they tell, have historically influenced our society at many levels, both directly through live audiences and indirectly through the dispersal of ideas and images to the public through the media, the cultural and educational sectors, policymaking, and elsewhere. For example, every boy and girl tragedy on TV or the Hollywood screen is drawn in some way from Romeo and Juliet, and every newspaper account of a double suicide evokes that play as well; politicians frequently borrow language from playwrights like Shakespeare and Kushner; and the U.S. Constitution itself is built on principles established in Greek drama. However, as the post-internet public becomes more segmented, organizing itself into highly-refined social networks and interest areas, many industries, including the theater, are challenged to find new ways of reaching audiences and customer bases by tapping into and mobilizing these “networks.”

The Lark, along with the rest of the theater industry, currently faces many challenges such as the lack of funds to pay artists adequately for their work, rising productions costs and ticket prices, and commercial and political pressures on artistic content. Perhaps the greatest challenge of all, however, is the segmentation of the theater audience into interest-specific social networks and the field’s growing disconnection from a wide and diverse public. When a playwright, new or established, delivers a work that might once have been considered to have universal appeal, the play rarely receives multiple productions (if it is produced at all) and is unlikely to become widely known. Sometimes “cross-over” marketing is employed to attract subject-specific audiences, to temporarily align the social network that identifies itself as “theatergoers” with another, subject-specific social network. For instance, many mathematicians have been persuaded to attend math-based plays like Proof or Copenhagen and citizens with social justice concerns are attracted to The Exonerated. Even though marketers have made audience segmentation a science, these splinter-marketing strategies backfire in terms of retaining audiences because they attract people to what they know already rather than bringing them to the theater to experience the art form itself.

How will we choose to confront the challenge of the theater’s growing disconnection from a wide and diverse public? How can we establish meaningful, long-term intersections with existing networks in other fields? I am curious to reach outside of what I know and to learn what challenges people in other fields are facing, how isolated they feel (which I suspect they do), and whether their customer and user networks are also shifting. What if the theater community chose to come out of isolation, meet new people in other fields, and take a more interdisciplinary approach to understanding the public outreach challenges currently being faced in other fields like news and media, science, health care, or social justice? I feel certain that there will be reciprocal benefits to outside industries and their networks as they intersect with the unique visions of our playwrights and exposure to their creative process.

At this moment of reflection and renewal, I look back proudly on a successful season that was made possible by a ferociously tenacious community of artists. But I am also looking at the road ahead. I want us to discover new ways to address the challenges that separate and distance people that are prospective theater lovers, and the Lark hopes to start by bringing theater practitioners together with key players in other disciplines in order to discuss and discover new modes of connecting our varied user networks to one another and increasing the effectiveness of public outreach and engagement for all parties. In fact, if you have thoughts or questions to add to this topic, feel free to email them to me at john@larktheatre.org. It is a wonderful dream to contemplate as another summer begins!

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

GROWING PAINS: REACHING FURTHER, DIVING DEEPER

2008-05-01T12:13:00.001-04:00

At the Lark, we think about the artistic growth of our company in two distinct ways. The first, probably the easiest, may be described as “broadening.” Broadening expands the involvement and diversity of participants in our programs and the number of projects that we support. This kind of growth is important because it is about opening doors to new ideas and new worlds and is one of the critical functions that theater performs in our society. These activities allow members of our community to see quite a bit of the world, hear lots of stories, plunge into brand new adventures, and wrap their minds around a wide array of experiences.

The second kind of growth may be called “deepening.” If broadening is compared to dating, then deepening is about committing to a relationship, learning from it, and making it work. Deepening, in a certain respect, is what begins to happen after a series of successful dates have occurred and respect is established, goals are agreed upon, and new ideas are imagined and tested collaboratively. Deepening involves setting clear priorities and developing more sophisticated communications tools. It involves a deeper investment in a project or a group of collaborators, and increased stakes. One of the most the most meaningful aspects of the theater to me is how it intensifies – and, yes, deepens – my experience of the world.

As the Lark continues to develop artistic programs, raise funds, build staff capacity, travel to find new voices, and stand behind those we already know, we are constantly balancing these twin notions of broadening and deepening to achieve growth, to sustain ourselves, and to impact the world around us in the ways consistent with our mission. However, this tension between two kinds of growth is not unique to the Lark, but also applies to every nonprofit and commercial institution concerned with achieving its mission. The idea also applies to every individual’s personal growth from the time we are children and throughout our lives. And, finally, this dilemma about growth integral to the much wider framework of the arts in society and how we struggle with the challenge of connecting people to their communities, and to a rapidly globalizing world, through culture.

In the larger context of the American theater, then, there is a similar tension between two dynamic forces that guide the industry’s growth in order to provide access to more people and to strengthen the quality of artistic work overall. On the one hand, the principles of democratization and decentralization, which are core components of American ideology, have led to the expansion of theater to communities all across the country and to the establishment of our regional theater network. More Americans than ever before are connected to local arts communities that generate indigenous art and there is a thrilling new interplay between locally-developed work and work “imported” from other arts markets. On the other hand, as theater artists have spread out around the country and are less concentrated in New York City, there is, at least temporarily, a diminution of regular interactivity among the most skilled members of the field. Once upon a time in New York City, the majority of American theater artists could see each others’ work, discuss it, riff on it, and grow from their close interaction. Today, as part of the process of decentralizing the art form, artists in the regional theaters are more isolated from one another than in the past and rely more on the internet, theater journals, and long-distance travel to stay aware of new developments in the field. Because the most talented arts leaders are so thinly spread across the country, the members of the field bear an increased burden for making a “case” to their constituencies for the existence and value of the art they create and for the funding it requires.

A couple of years ago, along with Lark colleague Daniella Topol, I attended a two-day workshop presented by National Arts Strategies on the subject of “Creative Alliances.” N.A.S. is an initiative of the Harvard and Stanford University Business Schools that supports deeper thinking by arts leaders, and we attended this event in order to learn more about ways of partnering with others. There, we became aware of a concept known as “cluster economics.” According to the website of the Economic Development Administration at the U.S. Department of Commerce, “Industry clusters are geographic concentrations of competing, complementary, or interdependent firms and industries that do business with each other and/or have common needs for talent, technology, and infrastructure.” This idea has been around for a long time and is based on concepts developed by British economist Alfred Marshall around 1890 and significantly expanded upon by Harvard economist Michael E. Porter in 1990. Notable examples of business clusters include the California and French wine industries, Detroit’s auto industry, Connecticut’s insurance industry, northern Italy’s fashion industry, Hollywood’s film industry, gambling in Las Vegas, and Silicon Valley.

Although economists generally agreed that clusters had been critically important to many fields in creating competitive advantages, many economists imagined that clusters would become less important with the advent of the internet, improved transportation, and globalization. Not so. The success of Silicon Valley and similar high tech corporate communities throughout the world has proven that clusters are still important – partly because geographic proximity is still useful on the manufacturing end of the market, but more so because competitive advantage is sustained only through relentless improvements to the producer’s product and organization. Porter states that clusters impact competition and create competitive advantage in three ways: by increasing productivity of the companies based in the cluster; by driving the direction and pace of innovation, which underpins future productivity growth; and by stimulating the formation of new businesses, which expands and strengthens the cluster, forming a virtuous circle or positive feedback (Kuah, Adrian T.H. “Cluster Theory and Practice: Advantages for the Small Business Locating in a Vibrant Cluster.” Journal of Research in Marketing and Entrepreneurship. Volume Four, Issue 3, 2002: 206).

To understand what cluster economics has to do with theater, and because innovation is one of the Lark’s primary concerns as a research and development institution in the theater industry, let’s focus on the innovation end of things for a moment. Let’s imagine a café in Silicon Valley where four creative thinkers from the computer industry are gathering for a few hours to chat about what’s on their minds. During their time together, this casually convened “think tank” will share dozens of out-of-the-box ideas about technology innovation. Most of these new ideas will be abandoned after the group has poked holes in them, of course, but one or two ideas may stick. The solid ideas that survive the group’s intensive scrutiny will generate dozens of more refined ideas, and these ideas will be brought to the table the next time the group gets together at the café. Not only will these four people, and the companies for which they work, benefit from this in-depth analysis, but many of the most unproductive ideas will be more quickly identified and eliminated before valuable resources are unnecessarily expended on them. In addition, from the start, this brainstorming of successful ideas will include cooperation strategies to link partner firms within the cluster. Similarly, clusters in the theater have supported healthy innovation and artistic growth in the theater industry. Great theater minds have met – and have been created – at the Algonquin Roundtable, Elaine’s, Sardi’s and at numerous other hot spots. With the expansion of the theater beyond Broadway and New York City, some of the competitive advantages of clustering have been temporarily lost. We have broadened the theater industry very successfully, but perhaps we can learn more from the business world about deepening the theater industry by reengaging in successful cluster strategies to support innovation, cooperation, and community engagement.

A related challenge is that this national proliferation of resident theaters has raised the exposure of new or controversial ideas that may seem threatening to many communities not yet prepared for change or ideological friction. While the theater business was safely confined to New York City, bands of artists touring around the country were little more than a temporary curiosity or cautionary example. But as new clusters form in other American cities, the ideas they develop – and the artists developing them – become part of the local scene and need to be dealt with on a daily basis. It is clear that the direction the American Theatre has taken during the past century, broadening its national presence while supporting democracy by providing a platform for free expression, has constantly encountered resistance. As new clusters are born, and as they deepen and become truly integrated into local culture, communities are becoming more engaged in the arts – though often this progress seems to take one step back for each two steps forward.

America ’s widespread network of regional theaters is to a large extent the outgrowth of two large-scale arts movements during the twentieth century. The first of these national expansions was the creation in 1935 of the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal initiative by the Works Projects Administration during the Great Depression. Hallie Flanagan, appointed as the leader of the FTP, described this program in her essay, “Democracy and the Drama,” as representing “…the new frontier in America, a frontier against disease, dirt, poverty, illiteracy, unemployment and despair….” However, Roosevelt’s New Deal immediately came under fire by those who believed that it represented unwarranted federal involvement in many aspects of American life, eroding State’s Rights and long-held values of individualism and self-determination. These critics were also concerned about the threat to America of fascism and communism which was on the rise overseas, and so, in 1938, the House of Representatives established the Un-American Activities Committee to safeguard against unwanted political influences. The Federal Theatre Project, which championed free speech and marginalized populations (believed to be susceptible to the influence of malevolent foreign interests), was a prime target for the committee and the FTP was decommissioned within a year. Nevertheless, theater pioneers, like Margo Jones in Dallas, Zelda Fichandler in Washington, D.C., and Bill Ball in San Francisco, kept their shoulders to the grindstone to deeply connect theater to their respective communities.

The second growth surge of the resident regional theater movement came in the wake of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society, when the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ford Foundation joined forces in the mid 1960’s to expand the nation’s cultural infrastructure. This ambitious effort supported the construction of huge new arts centers, created fund streams for individual artists and companies, and supplied generous challenge grants which provoked new levels of private philanthropic giving that has become a critical component of the current not-for-profit model. This second national arts movement declined during the “culture wars” of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, when Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina led a campaign to impose content restrictions on federally funded arts projects which ultimately led to widespread elimination of support for individual artists. When the money moved away from the artists and into the hands of professional managers and board members at institutions, what had previously been a substantially artist-driven movement quickly became a market-driven business focused more on pleasing consumers than on creating art. As we face mounting economic, political and social challenges today, we are confronted by the bald fact that the arts culture we may desire to enable meaningful social advancement is not fully supportable by a market economy, and that we are in need of new and innovative approaches to funding the arts and allowing freedom of expression.

Both of these twentieth century movements were launched by the impulse to democratize and decentralize the arts in America. Each effort was connected to deeply-held convictions, rooted in the American experience, about the importance of entrepreneurship and individual free thought, the value of locally-generated art, and the broad distribution of talent that could make it just as possible to encounter meaningful art in Nebraska as in New York. This impulse to grow and serve the interests of a broader American public, by supporting the idiosyncratic genius of as-yet-unheard leaders, remains central to the psyche of the American Theatre – and the Lark – and is the force that drives many of this country’s best practitioners to create new work despite rising commercial and political pressures. However, I think that we have spread ourselves out quite enough for the time being. Our next job is to hunker down and go deeper into our own communities, to grow our roots, to seek meaning in the local impact of theater, and to celebrate each cluster’s unique attributes. Just as a child experiences growing pains when her bones grow faster than the muscles that connect them, we are experiencing new challenges in meeting the access needs of our artists and audiences while deepening the quality and relevance of new work that is being creating in many communities around the country.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

TRANSLATING THE MEANING, AS WELL AS THE WORDS

2008-04-01T12:11:00.000-04:00

A new play from Mexico is running this month in a New York City co-production by The Working Theatre and Queens Theatre in the Park. “Our Dad is in Atlantis,” by Javier Malpica, was translated by New York playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas as part of the Lark’s annual “Word Exchange” partnership with the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts. This poignant road story of two young boys trailing their immigrant father to the U.S. was featured at the TCG National Conference last summer and at the National New Play Network’s showcase of new works in the fall. It is also scheduled for publication in an upcoming issue of American Theatre Magazine and is on the desks of many decision makers at theaters around the country. As I think about this project, and the many other international plays at the Lark this year that bring people from different cultures together, it is clear that we have learned a lot through our work on translating dramatic works for the stage.

One of the most important lessons I’ve learned personally is that you can make no assumptions when you sit down at the table to work on a play in another language with a playwright from another country and culture. At the Lark, we work through the play line by line, beat by beat, with a team that includes its original author, a translator who is also a skilled playwright, a director and actors. It is not enough to translate the language for the meaning of the words alone: you must first understand what the language of the play means within its original cultural context in order to derive an acceptable and relevant equivalent in the destination language. Further, you have to develop a clear sense of how the action itself may mean different things in different cultural contexts.

We’ve seen many examples of translation misunderstandings during the ten years the Lark has been involved in international artist exchange. For instance, we set up a roundtable to examine a draft of a translation of a play by Hong Kong author Candace Chong who was visiting New York on a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council. We were reading the play around the table, and everything was going along fine. It was a play about a pair of young lovers thwarted by their families and, naturally, images of Romeo and Juliet wafted through my mind. Then along came a scene where the man gave the woman he loved a 100 dollar bill, folded, origami-style, into the shape of a heart. Whew! What happened? I had missed some kind of sharp curve in the play, and now the man was cruelly insulting the woman by presenting her with such an expensive little green heart. Why was he treating her as a prostitute? Was the heart green because he was jealous of somebody? I readjusted my take on the play, however, and we read through to the end. In the discussion that followed about the relationship between the characters, Candace was shocked that her intention wasn’t clear. She explained that, in her culture, a 100 dollar bill was pastel-pink and worth hardly anything, a trifle. The character’s gesture was not one of contempt, but of courtship, and I had to again reframe my entire take on the play.

I think this kind of cultural misunderstanding happens more often than we think in the process of translation. I distinctly remember the first time we held a “simultaneous translation session” with a play by Argentine author Jorge Goldenberg, led by Lark’s international program pioneer, Michael Johnson-Chase. There were seven bilingual New Yorkers around the Lark’s roundtable, each, by chance, hailing from a different Spanish-speaking culture. Not a page went by that we didn’t have to stop to clarify idioms that actually existed, with vastly different meanings, in the seven cultures represented around the table.

I love this experience of having my eyes opened to the true meaning of an image or moment, when the context shifts swiftly into focus and everything becomes suddenly clear. It’s like falling for a well-crafted practical joke that you have to admire in its wit and execution, or the breakthrough moment of understanding a terrific pun. For this reason, I prize the never-empty grab-bag of revelatory and frequently amusing cultural surprises that the process of translation is all about.

Perhaps even more important to me is what I’ve learned from the translation process about how I encounter plays in my own language—people with whom I am more likely to share a cultural context and common idiom. Even though I think I understand where the writer is coming from, it is not necessarily true. I’ve solved this problem by asking more “stupid” questions about things that I might have formerly considered obvious. Ironically, many playwrights make the same kind of assumptions as I have that they are on the same page with the people who read or see their plays. I’ve come to the conclusion that translation is part of every discussion between two people. Even when you ostensibly share the same language, meanings can be elusive. Taking the time up front to get things straight makes a big difference in any relationship that we hope will endure. That’s why there’s got to be a little of the translator in all of us.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THE PLAY’S THE THING—BUT NOT WITHOUT THE PLAYER

2008-03-01T12:09:00.001-05:00

As the leader of a company that is dedicated to playwrights and the advancement of playwriting as an art form, I struggle constantly to define for myself what does or does not constitute a play. I remember some of the plays that turned me on to the theater when I was very young: a bold and vibrant Mother Courage at the Guthrie Theater; a beautiful, simple Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company; an adaptation of The Iliad (in football motif, with The Odyssey as a halftime show!) by the National Theater of the Deaf. I know how these plays made me feel, and I continue to look for ways of experiencing those feelings again. But I also know that what’s most important in life—and art—is to keep one’s eyes open to new possibilities. So I try to avoid “rules” about what makes a play good, or what makes it a play at all. I think that this decision has helped me to enjoy theater a great deal more than I might have otherwise, which is a good thing as I see a great deal of theater throughout the year.

One thing I do know about theater, however, is that, at its most basic, it is a live art form. Simply put, theater requires that one group of living people (the actors) perform for another group of living people (the audience). There are lots of other qualifiers that can go in different ways, but I don’t know how you can get around the idea of “liveness” in the theater. This amazing notion of “liveness” was introduced to me by a staff member at the Lark, Anna Kull, who is also an actor. She took a course in college that dealt with this intriguing subject of "liveness"--a course I very want to take myself The topic came up when we went together to see the Wooster Group’s Hamlet at the Public Theater, and we were both struck by the fact that the extreme amounts of technology that were applied to the production did not in any way diminish the accomplishments of the actors on stage. It was thrilling to see how this contemporary production celebrated the live actor as much as I imagine Shakespeare intended his play to do in the first place.

All this is to say that I think it is important to remember that playwriting is an art form that only comes to life when actors put the words in their mouths and the action in their bodies. Playwrights who have trouble with this concept are seldom happy when they hear their plays read or see them onstage, while those who write to put actors in control of the theatrical event find themselves in seventh heaven when they see their work. For that reason, we consider the actors who work with us at the Lark essential players in the process of making plays and supporting playwrights.

To better understand the relationship between actors and the playwright’s process at the Lark, we have explored this idea in two ways. First, we’ve worked with a fascinating group of actors, called “Circling the Drain,” who are asking lots of questions about the role of actors in the creative process. We’ve attended “Drain” convenings and recently had the opportunity to host a think-tank session that brought members of this group, the brainchild of Olympia Dukakis, together with Lark playwrights to talk about their most exciting and frustrating experiences in developing new work. We have also taken the time to reach out to a number of the many actors who are part of our community in order to listen to what they have to say about their experiences at the Lark. It has been gratifying to open up this conversation and to learn that many of them find their time with us particularly rewarding. It has also been helpful to know what about the Lark is important to each of them. I am exciting to share some of these actors’ ideas about the Lark, which are listed below. Please read and enjoy what they have to say, and join me in celebrating their participation in the playmaking process—and in gratitude for the extraordinary power of “liveness” (thank you, Anna, for broadening my vocabulary!) that the theater brings to our lives.

Here is what some of our actors have told us about their Lark experiences:

LYNN COHEN: “Working with the Lark provides the rare—and enriching—opportunity for an actor to take an interactive role in the vital process of creating new works for theater.”

MARIA-CHRISTINA OLIVERAS: “We get to jump in, make bold choices, discover and experiment all together to help illuminate and clarify the text—we're not just plugged in to a predetermined structure or form. The work is truly collaborative and we're involved in all phases of development. What emerges is a vital forum of actor, director, dramaturge, theatergoer and playwright—a community dedicated to developing and telling these playwrights’ great stories.”

JESSMA EVANS: “Being an actor at the Lark is wonderful because it really is about the play you are getting off of the ground. This makes acting a pure joy because it's collaborative and stimulating. I've learned so much about my own craft from watching playwrights work through theirs. I always feel like I just got a great massage when I leave the Lark!”

BRIAN DYKSTRA: “Acting at the Lark is more than just a terrific opportunity to keep your teeth sharp. It is a workout that flexes first choice or first impulse muscles and rewards daring.”

ALOK TEWARI: “Because everything is geared towards the playwright, in some ways there is less pressure on the actor. Put that together with the lack of pretentiousness at the Lark and you have a safe place to grow and play. I haven't been to too many places where the overriding mission—to serve the playwright and the theater—is as clear as it is to the people who gather at the hallowed studios of the Lark on Eighth Avenue.”

HARRIET D. FOY: “ For me, the Lark is a great place to network and keep my acting chops sharp. I always look forward to Monday night workshops because I can't wait to see how the playwrights have altered their plays. The environment is very open and encouraging to all participants. It is also great to work on a play that you might not ordinarily be cast in.”

HOON LEE: “The Lark has created an environment that feels much like a gym for actors like me. To me, the company is an idealist's dream: a place that recognizes the fundamental need for the subordination of commercial concerns in order to prioritize artistic achievement, trusting that the merit of the work will lead to its own reward, cultural or commercial. It is an example for any artistic institution and any individual artistic pursuit. The relative ease with which Lark playwrights share their work is also an object lesson for any actor. As much credit as actors are given for laying themselves on the line in auditions, I cringe at the thought of what writers must go through in allowing a group of strangers to read highly personal work that they've just set down.”

ANDRES MUNAR: “From my first day, I was made to feel indispensable: A conduit for the unique process at the Lark. I feel appreciated, respected, needed. I can't tell you what a difference it makes for an actor to feel that kind of confidence. It means the work is unencumbered, expansive, free.The dialogue between writers and actors is also unique to the Lark. We tend to live in a theater culture where the reins are handed to the director and sometimes we over-think ideas in that process. It is interesting to talk to writers directly, who almost always have a way of opening things up by simply talking and being themselves. 939 Eighth Avenue is a place where I always feel welcome.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THE “PLAYLAB” PHENOMENON

2008-02-01T12:07:00.001-05:00

From the granddaddy of playwright sanctuaries at New Dramatists to the National Playwrights Conference born nearly two generations ago at the O’Neill Center, playwriting centers and play development labs have proliferated and spread nationally and even globally. Wherever they spring up, they dig deeply into their communities to provoke thought and theater on a grassroots level and to work together to lead alliances and collaborations that move the best work forward in brave new ways. Every time I have the opportunity to sit down with the Lark’s peers at the Minneapolis Playwrights Center, Sundance, the Playwrights Foundation in San Francisco, New Dramatists, the O’Neill, and others, I am simply amazed that these organizations emerged separately around the same principles of supporting individual voices and engaging disconnected communities through theater. Isn’t is strange and wonderful that different people in different places responded to their environments and arrived at similar conclusions, like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace reading Malthus and theorizing about natural selection?

By any and all measures, the play lab institutions are playing a major role in shaping the field and re-involving the public in the creative process and in the theater. They—we—are opening doors to new voices and new thinking in ways that are not possible for institutions where marketing concerns frequently take precedence over artistic vision. We are training emerging playwrights to become leaders and supporting recognized writers in reaching further and diving deeper. Theaters and their audiences benefit directly from our work at very little cost. Perhaps most important, we are building diverse and sustainable audiences through the intimacy of the creative process in a laboratory setting.

I think that it is critical to understand that the emergence of the play labs themselves has been a natural response to the rise of institutional attitudes about the theater that have made generative artists, such as playwrights, mere cogs in an assembly line to manufacture saleable theater experiences that, in turn, are marketed to audiences of consumers. With all due respect to the artists and entrepreneurs who pioneered the regional theater movement in the high hope of democratizing and decentralizing the theater in America, the net result has been often, though not always, a kind of “Walmartization” of the art form and a protectionist consolidation of financial resources around branded artists, artistic properties (i.e., plays), and affluent audiences. As a consequence, a roadblock has persisted between many artists and institutions and between many institutions and various sectors of American society. It is urgent that we restore a direct route between artists and their constituencies even if it means reconfiguring our infrastructure to make that possible.

The play labs arose as artist-driven collectives to reclaim the theater from the commercial sector, within which I place many of the major regional theaters, and challenged the motives and practices of these larger, less flexible institutions. Strangely, the play labs have also sought to rediscover the entrepreneurial resourcefulness and individualism of old-time Broadway producers who strove to create singular and compelling works of theater outside of existing formulas. The terrible truth is that, while it would be incredible if there were ways of writing and producing theater that were both effective and efficient, the behemoth and often patriarchal structures that currently exist fall prey to the same corporate pitfalls that IBM tripped over in the 1990’s; in an attempt to preserve its infrastructure, IBM clung to its comfortable and simplistic views about selling technology while Silicon Valley adapted to a changing society. I am convinced that the “call for change” that is echoing across America and along the campaign trail these days, which emanates from every social and political sector, is actually a desperate cry for new language and fresh expression to articulate what is going on in the world right now and light the path ahead.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THREE! TWO! ONE! HAPPY NEW YEAR… RIGHT… NOW!

2008-01-01T12:06:00.001-05:00

Something about counting down to midnight on New Year’s Eve has troubled me all my life. Even before globalization existed as a commonly understood notion, I had always been anxious about the fact that the New Year starts at different times in different parts of the world.

It isn’t fair, I thought as a young lad, if we don’t start the year at the same time. Who gets to make the first resolutions, and will those people stay awake long enough to learn about the resolutions made by people in other parts of the world? Of course, when I was a child we really only dealt with different time zones when we were tuning in to live television on one of the three networks that existed before cable, taking a long flight on an airplane, or waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. Now, however, I consider the relationship between time and geography just about every moment of every day. Say I call Alina in Romania: will she still be in the office or should I try her cell phone? Or, hanging up the phone, I consider how awfully groggy David sounded when we just spoke and I remember—oh, no!—he is in Hong Kong this week and I just woke him up in the middle of the night on a relatively inconsequential matter. Progress and globalism have introduced whole new realms of faux pas to be avoided. When I was a child, the world was a distant curiosity for most of the people I knew; now we’re wired to the entire space-time continuum. If, back then, from my perch in Madison, Wisconsin, I was conscious and a bit resentful, for the briefest of moments, of the New Year arriving first in New York City before rolling casually in our direction like a plume of second-hand smoke, I am constantly aware of global interconnectivity these days. It’s like I have a row of clocks on the wall inside my head set to the times of all the world’s major capitals.

Please don’t misunderstand my powerfully sentimental feelings about New Year’s Eve itself. I truly enjoy the celebration and the ritual, raising a glass to friends and family, singing “Auld Lang Syne,” and lining up a few well-intentioned resolutions. I’ve been to a few wild and extravagant parties, I’ve stayed at home for blissfully quiet family time, and one time I went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean from a snowy beach, emerging bright red like a newborn baby and gasping for breath. I love all that! New Year’s Eve as a local event, among friends and family who consider their lives a shared journey, works beautifully for me. It becomes more complicated to celebrate New Year’s more globally. Ownership becomes fuzzy. Does the year belong to New York City, Las Vegas, or Hollywood? Must people, say, in Africa and Asia accept the year “branded” by America, like factory seconds with the imprint of previously articulated resolutions about the dissemination of democracy and wealth?

Confronted with so much exhausting competition, we may allow our most fiercely idiosyncratic and wonderful dreams to fade along with our confidence. Like the visions of political candidates corroded by too much market research, honest and personal New Year’s resolutions are difficult to formulate, much less carry out, in the cross-breeze of conformism. For all the grandeur that technology and television bring to New Year’s Eve as it rolls around the globe, accompanied by the chipper commentary of pretty newscasters and the market-testing of pop music, and for all my earnest belief that it is possible for people to hold hands around the globe and make the world a better place, the experience of New Year’s Eve television, to me, is fundamentally simplistic and inauthentic. I think that’s why the holiday leaves so many lonely people maudlin and depressed.

Perhaps it is because I am a creature of the theater, or a child of the Apollo space program, that I have always been captivated by the drama of the countdown. A momentous event is given its power to a large extent because of the countdown ritual itself, leading up to the launch of a space ship, for instance, or the silent rush of a curtain going up at the start of a play. The countdown is just about the simplest and most magical dramaturgical tool ever invented, creating suspense by accelerating our impressions of mounting danger as we hurtle towards the point of no return, together, like the clock running down at a football game. The very action of counting down brings people together around the idea of perfect synchronicity and completion. Most of us recall learning to count down on the playground, our volume and intensity rising, our voices merging as one, as the count gets closer to zero, followed by the inevitably satisfying rebound on the other side of zero: “Blastoff!” or Happy New Year!”

Such collective rituals for experiencing the movement of time seem to me to be an innately human way of acknowledging our own mortality and celebrating the power of community. When millions of us witnessed the New England Patriots in a record-breaking game against the Giants on December 29^th, for example, we were first exhilarated by the race against the clock and, then, deeply moved in the moment when we recognized that history had been made. Even the losing Giants embraced the Patriots in their accomplishment. This experience was thrilling to everyone because it was local in nature, despite the size of the television audience. On television you could sense and appreciate the emotional intensity in the stadium, even if you couldn’t actually feel it the way you would have if you were there in person.

On Christmas Eve, my 12 year-old daughter and her chorister colleagues sang in the beautiful service at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. It is the last Christmas Eve service that they will sing with the choirmaster they know and love, who, after more than 20 years in his position, has been dismissed by the church’s administration for political reasons that have rankled the choristers and their parents. Johnson Flucker is a charismatic man of six and a half feet, passionate, musical, kind, a strong disciplinarian, and full of jokes and magic tricks. I love the fact that this musician’s passion is magic! The day before, he had given special Christmas gifts to all the children: wrist watches with colored leather bands. He cried as he handed out the packages, though he tried hard not to show his sadness in front of the children. We parents bit our lips and cried, too, and the children recognized the intensity of the moment and the importance of the ritual. On Christmas Eve, it is my impression that they sang more beautifully than ever before. But what really got to me was how, as the minutes ticked away towards midnight, all the children kept comparing the time and adjusting their watches, and, at the exact moment that they agreed was midnight, huge smiles spread across all the children’s faces and outward to the rest of the church. They owned the moment and all that it meant, and no atomic clock anywhere in the universe could have made the moment more significant.

My musings on the New Year have led me to my own heartfelt resolution for 2008, which is to take more time this year to contemplate and celebrate the power of what is local, to cherish my family and community, and to nurture the magic of theater’s incredible intimacy. While theater is, for me, an important platform for free expression and untold stories, connecting communities all around the world in our hopes for the future, it is most importantly a small place where people gather to be with one another, to plant the seeds of trust, to admire and honor talent, and to move outward into the world with a message of peace.

It is tradition in Jewish pedagogy that young children are asked to name the most important moment in Jewish history. Was it when God spoke to Abraham on the mountaintop? Or when Moses received the Ten Commandments from God? Or when God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape to the Promised Land? The answer is now: now is the most important moment in history.

Happy New Year to all of you!

John Clinton Eisner

Producing Director

A CASE FOR PHILANTHROPY

2007-12-01T12:04:00.001-05:00

As you might imagine, the staff and Board at the Lark is very focused on fundraising right now. It is nearing the end of the calendar year, so people are turning their attention to their financial positions and what that means in terms of charitable giving and the tax incentives for doing so. While opportunities for philanthropy are by no means limited to any single time of year (the Lark’s fundraising team is always busy!), December is the definitive month for annual giving. Year-end tax deductions are a critical reason for this yearly rhythm, but there is an emotional component as well. December is when a lot of people think a little bit more about the whole idea of “giving.” Cultural traditions like Thanksgiving, Christmas, Chanukah, and Kwanzaa are deeply concerned with generosity and gift-giving as expressions of love, family ties, friendship, and faith, and these holidays are themselves linked to even more primitive rituals associated with harvest blessings, seasonal cycles, sacrifice, and renewal. Even on a secular level, the notion of freedom and fairness in America can take on an almost spiritual dimension. This combination of tax incentives and social responsibility has formed a powerful philanthropic culture that is virtually unique to the United States and its non-profit institutions.

Philanthropy has become the lifeblood of freedom in America. In a society where so many experiences are valued in economic terms almost exclusively, philanthropy has the mission of supporting activities that have other kinds of worth. There is no easy way to place a dollar value on peace, spirituality, education, social justice, good government, and the arts. When we delude ourselves into thinking that the ticket price of a play in any way represents the meaning of a work of art—whether to each individual audience member or to history itself—and weigh the cost value of attending that play against competing consumer opportunities, we have surrendered to the tempting but false assumption that our increasingly complex society can be adequately measured and understood through the language of economics alone.

Philanthropy in its very essence does not respond to market principles except to deny them sovereignty by elevating and celebrating the larger principles of liberty, equality, brotherhood and sisterhood. Philanthropy supports the idea that strength must exist in institutions that care about people as much as money. I believe that the future of the arts and sciences, medicine, environmentalism, foreign relations, and all such studies that are imperative to the survival of the human race and dependent on the cultivation of new ideas by the next generation of young thinkers, is dependent upon how we can deepen and expand our culture of philanthropy. The strange irony, however, is that philanthropy depends upon individual entrepreneurialism, a healthy and wealthy market economy, and a secure democracy to build an ample resource base to be distributed for the social good. I believe that there exists enormous untapped wealth in our society to invest in philanthropic models capable of stimulating the development of new ideas and, consequently, additional wealth.

The Lark depends almost exclusively on philanthropy to stay alive and pursue its mission. Ninety-five percent of our revenues are derived from contributions, from a broad base of supporters, with scarcely any revenues from ticket sales or other earned sources. Because our individual and institutional donors support us financially for the purposes of performing our mission—to identify new and unheard voices and perspectives, support their growth, and foster partnerships that advance these voices to public awareness—we do not need to prove the worth of our organization by succeeding in simple commercial terms. We can take bigger risks, make longer leaps, and measure our success not only by how many people come to see us, but also who comes, why they come, and whether we have been able to form a sustainable community.

We seek philanthropic dollars to sustain and grow the Lark’s mission, but, at the same time, we are committed to making a stronger case for supporting a broad-based, grassroots matrix of creative institutions like ours. This starts by understanding why people give to us already and developing strategies for deepening our relationships with them throughout the year—not just in December.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THEATER AS A PLATFORM FOR FREE EXPRESSION

2007-11-01T12:00:00.000-04:00

The First Amendment of the Bill of Rights is widely considered to be the cornerstone of American democracy, guaranteeing basic freedoms of religion, speech, press, assembly and petition. Nevertheless, the extent to which citizens may exercise these freedoms is the subject of continuing debate.

Some believe that individual expression should be entirely unrestricted, while others are uncomfortable with laws that allow pornography, nudity, flag-burning, hard-core lyrics, or hate speech. Motives for limiting free expression vary widely—from shielding the powerful from criticism to defending moral principles from degradation. History is full of instances where political leaders—in the name of preserving social order—have curtailed free speech as a tactic to weaken opposition and manipulate public opinion. When the rights of free speech are suppressed, it is more difficult to disseminate alternative perspectives and critical responses—things the public needs to make informed decisions in a democracy. Under such circumstances, fear starts to take its toll on public debate. “Different-ness” becomes a liability, and even the court of public opinion turns against individuality and complex social thought. Like lobsters slowly cooking in a pot, it is easy to remain unaware that the water is getting hotter and hotter until it is too late to act.

Both in the U.S. and abroad, artists have historically played a leadership role in preserving free thought and expression, especially during times of civil unrest, reactionary social policy, and fear. The theater—perhaps the world’s oldest arena of free speech—remains a particularly vital forum for expressing, amplifying and re-conceiving ideas, questioning prevailing values, and illuminating the human condition.

The very controversy that arises when a play is produced—or even proposed for production—tests the limits of free expression in our society. In January 2007, a Missouri high school cancelled its production of The Crucible in the wake of pressure by local Christian fundamentalists who claimed that it showed Christianity in an unfavorable light (54 years after its Tony award-winning Broadway triumph!). When Terrence McNally’s Corpus Christi was produced at Manhattan Theatre Club in October 1998, dramatizing Jesus and the Apostles as gay men living in Texas, angry protesters planted themselves in front of the theater, bomb threats were received, metal detectors installed, and the theater company considered canceling the production. Religious objectors decried the play as blasphemous and some critics questioned its artistic merit. But the issue that predominated was whether the author had a right to express his ideas or the theater had a right to present a play that distributed those ideas. Another recent play, My Name is Rachel Corrie, drawn from the diary of an American woman killed by Israeli soldiers in Palestine, provoked a firestorm when its New York City not-for- profit producers cancelled its 2006 opening—an action many believed was motivated by fear of economic reprisals from donors averse to the expression of pro-Palestinian views. Each of these events is a sobering reminder to artists and citizens that the right of free expression is a constant struggle.

In recent years, the theater has also played a critical role in challenging despotic regimes and supporting freedoms in emerging democracies. In communist Romania, dissident voices found a strategy for discussing the political situation through theater that was based on reinterpretations of the classics. Romanian theater artists filled their work with pointed clues (which they called “lizards”) to guide audiences in interpreting classic texts as metaphors for current social affairs and to keep alive a kind of subtle resistance through a collective understanding of the madness that surrounded them.

In one pre-revolution production of Twelfth Night at the National Theater in Bucharest, the actor playing Touchstone earned a huge laugh from the audience when, looking for eavesdroppers, he ran his fingertips along the underside of a table searching for a hidden microphone. At about the same time, Ion Caramitru (current artistic director of the Romanian National Theater) played Hamlet in a famous production that skillfully compared the “rotten” state of Denmark to Ceausescu’s despotic regime. When communism fell, Caramitru was the first person to announce the people’s victory over the airwaves. The public knew Caramitru intimately—he had kept their hopes alive through his work in the theater.

Recent history holds many such examples of theater serving as catalyst for positive social change and the orderly transition to democracy. Vaclav Havel, elected president of the new Czech Republic in 1993, is a leading intellectual and moral force in Eastern Europe whose social and political philosophy was formed through his work as a dramatist, poet and essayist. Havel’s plays explore the absurd relationship between social conditions and the indirect language used to describe those conditions. His courage to speak out landed him in jail frequently, but spawned new ideas and encouraged dissent, paving the way for an entire movement that eventually prevailed against communism. His essays support a tradition of democratic and liberal thought, though to Havel, the form of government mattered less than the moral injunction for individuals to speak freely and according to their conscience:

“It has been our absolutely basic historical experience that, in the long run, the only thing that can be truly successful and meaningful politically must first and foremost—that is, before it has taken any political form at all—be a proper and adequate response to the fundamental moral dilemmas of the time, or an expression of respect for the imperatives of the moral order bequeathed to us by our culture. It is a very clear understanding that the only kind of politics that truly makes sense is one that is guided by conscience.”

— Havel upon receiving the Open Society Prize awarded by the
Central European University in 1999, trans. by Paul Wilson

Latin America , too, presents many examples of artists graduating to political power and fostering freedom. This extensive list of names includes Homero Aridjis, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Octavio Paz, all of whom have served their communities as artists, journalists, and public servants. Such dissident voices are often in a position to bring about positive change once they have attained positions of power. Aridjis is one of Mexico’s foremost poets and novelists, an environmental activist, an ambassador and a former president of PEN. Paz is a Mexican author, diplomat and political conservative who stands fast for the role of literature in fostering free expression. He described writers as the “guardians of language” and poetry as the “secret religion of the modern age.” In a 1976 poem, Paz conveyed his idea about the power of language to express the unique perspective of the individual:

Between what I see and what I say
Between what I say and what I keep silent
Between what I keep silent and what I dream
Between what I dream and what I forget:
Poetry

More and more, we are struggling to resist censorship and challenges to free expression. Our local and national forums for honest dialogue and debate are easily corrupted by economic influences, complacency, and the politics of fear. But there are many ways to create an inclusive society through grassroots arts activism, especially using the theater as a stage for the public sharing of ideas. We can enrich and diversify the pool of practicing artists in our country by reaching into Diaspora, international, and other minority communities to include their voices in mainstream society. We can encourage theater artists to explore new and untold stories that trigger vibrant discussions about individual liberties and foster unifying conversations.

The cultural majesty of the globe is served when we work mindfully to value and protect the freedoms that support individual expression. It is a commitment to discourse that leads to understanding and appreciation for the differences as well as the commonalities of varying cultures and traditions. In a moment of such potential for global sharing, it seems critical to build a culture of shared values that celebrate the traditions of many places and perspectives. The community of nations can come together peacefully and productively, and with a clear and proud sense of self, through genuine communication. And with support, the theater—an art form in which this kind of cross-cultural communication has historically taken place—can continue to grow.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO BUILD A NEW REPERTOIRE

2007-09-01T11:59:00.002-04:00

I have seen a surge of exciting and original plays during the past few years. I suspect this increase is at least partially related to artists and communities grappling with the meaning of 9/11 and trying to glean some sense of it all. Artists are responding to the nation’s crisis by reaching out for new ideas and perspectives, and institutions are responding by supporting diversity initiatives and expanding their processes to support the creation of different kinds of new work.

But despite all the good work that is taking place, institution-by-institution, too little of it is having lasting impact and staying in the repertoire. Perhaps because we live in a “disposable society,” where we drive SUV’s and eat out of throwaway containers, we have become content to invest in works of art for its immediate gratification without thinking about the future. The creative process has certainly become more disjointed, isolated, fragmented. Writers travel between institutions without a coherent plan, subject to different agendas at different theaters, subsuming their own goals just to be giving a little attention and the possibility of a production. Even when a project is given the extraordinary benefit of a successful developmental workshop with a talented and committed community of artists, and blossoms into something wonderful, what next? What universal strategies exist to connect that work to project-specific theaters and communities that will benefit from it? Or when a writer is given a rare and amazing production opportunity at a respectful theatre and learns the valuable things that only a production can teach about a play, what next? How can this experience connect to other meaningful steps in the life of a play or a playwright? At festivals and play development programs around the country, industry people are often invited to “look and buy” but seldom to take part in a larger discussion about the visions of playwrights or collaborative models to advance work in ways no single institution can alone. Why is this so?

Unless these separate pieces come together in an integrated strategy for advancing the work in innovative ways, we will not fulfill our collective potential to support the vision and leadership of great writers, ensure their contributions to a lasting cultural repertoire, and connect them to a widening audience through the continued lives of their plays.

Sadly, I don’t think that institutions are working well with one another. There are few short-term incentives to do so, and the costs associated with creating and sustaining partnerships are high and seldom built into budgets or staff assignments. In my opinion, partnerships fail more often because prospective partners have underestimated what it will take to create a viable relationship—not because the project was a bad idea. I meet regularly with artistic directors at theaters and I usually bring this up with them. Typically, they find it very awkward to discuss. Understandably, this discomfort revolves around the question of how artistic or executive decisions will be made. Frequently, I am told collaborations “undermine leadership” and can “ruin a play.” “Doing things that way means that some leaders are going to have to let others leaders make important decisions,” one artistic director recently said to me. She continued, “Some of them aren’t going to like that.” And in all the anxiety about who gets to be in charge, the role of the playwright, the visionary, is lost.

Another artistic leader I spoke with relayed a litany of disappointments that his major regional theater company experienced in its recent co-production with a slightly smaller theater company. He reported that the scenery was not as good as something they would have built in their own shop; the casting was off, and so forth. When I asked him how the post-mortem had gone, he looked surprised and said that there had not been a post mortem – or much of a planning period in the first place. The companies’ leaders had never really come to the table together, and, when it was over, they had simply “walked away” without looking back.

These comments illustrate what I think is today’s biggest deficit in the cultural sector, the business world, and the political arena—not just the theater: that people are not motivated to pool resources to create shared success. I also believe that organizations must aggressively explore the notion of “community” for purposes that go far beyond selling tickets alone, but for the larger purpose of creating a culture that defines who we are as a society espousing free expression and diversity as core values. Only then can we truly say we respect and stand behind playwrights and other artists, and care about who is—or is not—coming to the theater.

Theater, with its roots in democracy and its proven capacity to show truth to power, is especially allied with the idea of individuality and free expression. That may possibly be theater’s greatest gift and the reason it has always been a crucible for powerful ideas and social movements. But theater is also about collaboration. It teaches us how to work with one another in small groups during the creative process and in large groups during productions. It teaches us about taking responsibility and relinquishing it, leading and following, teaching and learning. And in today’s rapidly shrinking and infinitely complex world, we are more reliant than ever on the idea of collaboration for our very survival.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THE COURAGE TO TRY SOMETHING NEW

2007-09-01T11:56:00.001-04:00

Have you ever been to YMCA Camp Manito-wish in the north woods? It is not too far from Boulder Junction, Wisconsin, up there near Lake Superior, about 250 miles north of Madison, where I grew up. It is a 90 year-old wilderness camp, and it proved to be a formative experience for me when I went there as a boy.

My family and I traveled there in August for “family camp” and took a brief break from the rest of the world. On our way up and back, my 11 year-old daughter complained, “It is in the “middle of nature!” She is a self-described “city girl,” and she is right about that. It is beautiful, challenging, and far away from everything; even cellular technology has not yet conquered it. The only thing Camp Manito-wish asks of you is that you try something new while you are there. They understand that the true meaning of “frontier” is the place you travel outside your comfort zone in order to grow wiser, stronger, and more fully connected to the world.

During my time away from the office this August, I’ve thought long and hard about what it means to grow in these ways. Staring at the full moon reflecting on the lake one night, I considered how I might challenge myself to try something new in my life. I thought of the artists we work with every day at the Lark, and how much I take for granted that they will regularly take big risks – and how impatient I am when they play it safe. Growth means change, and change means letting go of something comfortable and to take the risk of trying something new. For me the very idea of “risk” conjures images of two-fold failure. First, I worry that adding something new will rock the boat and jeopardize what is running smoothly. Second, I don’t like to look stupid in front of other people and the clear inevitability of failing publicly in my first attempts at something new always holds me back. A favorite teacher of mine used to describe this condition as “a paralysis of integrity.” The beauty of a place like Camp Manito-wish is that everyone is constantly trying new things. Consequently, people seemed to grow right before our eyes – like a series of time-lapse photos of a flower blooming.

It struck me that although I lead a cultural institution that supports writers – and, more importantly, the thought process, critical activities, and community necessary for their success – I have taken surprisingly little time to reflect upon my own experiences at the Lark. For over a decade I have observed the creative process in hundreds of iterations but have never set aside the time to synthesize what I’ve learned and to write it down. Moreover, these ideas about “process” are not isolated tools to help artists create and partner institutions to succeed in interacting with audiences. Process goes beyond its direct application in the studio or the auditorium and can be applied to much larger social challenges like ‘trust,’ ‘collaboration,’ ‘leadership,’ and ‘freedom of expression.’ Perhaps this was the “something new” I could try in the coming year: to provoke a larger conversation about the ways in which we support – or even value – creativity and, secondly, to look for some original ideas about the Lark process and to write about them in order to make a stronger case for the Lark’s role in the cultural ecosystem to funders, partner institutions, and the community at large.

The next afternoon, I spotted my daughter storming my way from where the sailboats were kept. She was fashionably dressed, wearing her ladybug-shaped pendant watch on its faux-gold chain, her best Converse sneakers, and other favorite accessories. She was dripping with lake water and furious. It was a windy day, and she had gone out in a tiny butterfly sailboat with her mother – something neither of them had ever attempted before. Naturally, they had capsized – twice – into the frigid waters of Boulder Lake. My wife, Jennifer, had gamely taken on the Manito-wish challenge to try something new, but, somehow, my daughter had not understood the risks involved. Later, Jennifer described for me the look in Hannah’s eyes as they plunged into the lake – a combination of horror and betrayal. At this moment, though, Hannah was furious with me for having brought her to this miserable place where she was now going to have to bear the shame of failure. I could say nothing to help, but, by dinner, the compliments were pouring in: “I hear you tried sailing!” “Got wet, huh?” “Doesn’t it feel great to try something new?” Hannah was now among the initiated.

On our drive back home to my mother’s house in Madison, Jennifer said something that surprised me: “Isn’t it interesting that the camp you attended when you were 13 years old had so much influence on your life that you subconsciously recreated a similar environment at the Lark? Isn’t the Lark based on ideas you learned at camp as a child about trust, excellence, and the importance of community?” In the silence that followed, Hannah thought about this and nodded in agreement.

My thoughts keep returning to what Jennifer said to me in the car on the way back to civilization, about my grafting ideas I learned at camp in my childhood onto the culture of the theater company I later helped to establish. I am intrigued and delighted by my unconscious effort to recreate a place where I felt comfortable enough to try new things, and I am beginning to see that the Lark is flourishing so gloriously because I am not the only person doing this. Like a really good potluck supper, the people who come to the Lark’s table are willing to share the very best of themselves and to challenge each other to try something new. Big or small, each new step is a choice we make about standing still or moving forward.

Every program at the Lark is about creating an environment that encourages artists to enter new frontiers and to define the experience for themselves. And we’re always trying new things. For instance, this year, inspired by a visionary member of our Board, we’re launching a brand-new national fellowship program called “Playwrights of New York” (“PONY”) which provides a gifted young playwright each year with a comfortable midtown apartment, a generous living subsidy, and the full program support of the Lark. This prize is one of the largest of its kind in the world, and I hope it will leverage similar fellowships here at the Lark and elsewhere. We’re also excited because we’re having our Broadway debut this fall, along with the phenomenal playwright, Theresa Rebeck whose Lark-developed play, MAURITIUS, opens in October at the Biltmore in a co-production of Manhattan Theatre Club and Boston’s Huntington Theatre where the show ran last year. Both are the thrilling consequences of a series of courageous steps into unknown territory.

At the core of its mission, the Lark is about the process of growth: as an individual, as an artist, and as a community. It has always been my conviction that when we grow and change in small ways we invent the models necessary for larger growth and change in society. Every time a playwright conjures up a world that is true to itself, that actors can fully inhabit, and that audiences can care about, I know that there exists in the world one more example of the good that people can do if they set their minds to it – and of how risks are worth taking.

I am going to consider these ideas carefully this year, and look forward to engaging you and other Lark community members in an ongoing conversation about the process of trying new things and learning from them, and about applying these lessons more broadly to our lives. I invite you to join us as often as you can at the Lark this season and to share your responses to the ideas I will explore in this column throughout the year.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I’m also training to do the “Island Swim” at Camp Manito-wish next summer. That is where you swim across the lake and back early in the morning and then get a lengthy standing ovation from the cheering families at breakfast. Want to join me?

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

A PLATFORM FOR FREE EXPRESSION

2007-08-01T11:53:00.001-04:00

The late theatrical director and innovator William Ball, who founded the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, charged his artist colleagues with the awesome social responsibility of speaking truth to power. I remember him speaking to a group of us once, insisting that "the most deplorable events that have transpired in human history can be explained by the mere fact the people are more afraid to speak in public than they are to die." Bill Ball knew that even in societies where freedom of expression is considered a fundamental civil right, most people prefer not to "muddy the waters." Furthermore, he recognized that the political, social, and economic costs of speaking out against injustice are burdensome, and, consequently, injustice frequently goes unchallenged. He started America's first conservatory for actors partly because he loved the theater, but also because he knew that social engagement, critical thinking, and public debate require constant drill and practice. Ball saw the theater as a bastion of democracy and a training ground for its champions. His "soldiers of the theater" employed clowning and comedy far more persuasively than the young men of that time were using mortar and shells in Viet Nam.

The Lark's work is also about getting back to the basics of public discourse by using theater, a political forum since the Greeks, as a platform for open discussion. At the heart of our mission is an affirmation of the individual playwright's role as community leader and as fulcrum for the principle of free expression in society. As the globe gets smaller, we see fresh opportunities to bring forth voices from a wider network of communities and to tap into the creative power of more individual artists than ever before.

We aim to bring truth back to political discourse by giving space and credibility to the true voices of citizens as a counterweight to media manipulation and the unrealistic reliance on technology to solve social problems. The human network is the flipside of the information revolution; what cannot be improved through computers, technology and specialized systems is human contact and the trust that it engenders - and theater is at the intersection of contact and trust. Theater, therefore, helps us to focus on each individual's life and the power of local community, and enhances a conversation about democracy that can only happen in person. We, at the Lark, are in the process of creating a global network in order to ignite social change and prompt political discourse by going beyond mere news and analysis of world events and seeking more dynamic interpretations of meaning through the very intimate prism of theater - a practice that has enriched the world, and the language we use to describe it, for millennia, from Aeschylus and Shakespeare to Chekhov, Shaw, Miller, Kushner and an explosion of diverse writers who now need our support in order to be heard.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

MAKING THEATER SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY

2007-07-01T11:27:00.000-04:00

In his “I have a dream” speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. rebuked the nation for its failure to measure up to its own standards: “ I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’” King envisioned a better world in which freedom would be universally applied: “This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’ And if America is to be a great nation this must become true.”

King helped us see that wherever we are, there is still more to do, and that we cannot rest until it is done. His exercise of free speech, while unpopular with some Americans, was his right as a citizen.

As the media has become a conglomerate, however, expressions of honest vision like King’s have become increasingly rare. Hardly any politician will venture out on a limb, and, more to the point, it is often difficult to raise the money necessary to get behind alternative voices.

For that reason, I believe that the theater plays a significant role in the future of American democracy. Grassroots theater, in particular, has the capacity to preserve the strengths inherent in a multicultural society, to teach trust and collaboration, and to develop new thinking that addresses the issues of the day. Projects that are successful in one locality can be held up as examples in another. Wildly successful projects will prove themselves as they gather stakeholders and enthusiastic audiences.

A little bit of history about recent developments in American theater is probably useful here. The regional theater movement in America grew first out of the vision of Hallie Flanagan, a theatrical producer, director, playwright and author who was hired in 1935 to create the Federal Theater Project as part of Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration established to provide jobs to unemployed Americans during the Depression. Flanagan’s vision was to bring theater to the great majority of Americans who had never experienced it and to create new works in geographically-diverse parts of the country that were relevant to people in local communities. In 1938, Flanagan was brought to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee over concerns about the “content” and “messages” of the theater that was being produced and the Federal Theater Project was closed in 1939.

The regional theater movement began again in 1947 when Margo Jones founded Theater ’47 in Dallas, Texas. Though touring shows did exist at this time, there were no quality professional American theatre companies outside of New York. Jones believed in the decentralization of theater. She wanted her art to exist all across America, beyond the realm of commercialized Broadway. She reasoned that if she and her collaborators succeeded “in inspiring the operation of 30 theatres like ours, the playwright won’t need Broadway.”

In 1965, the National Endowment for the Arts was formed and along with the Ford Foundation was responsible for a new infusion of capital to support a growing network of regional theaters around the country. Of course, the condition for granting this money was that the theaters had to form Boards of Directors that were composed of local business leaders who would, ostensibly, be more responsible for managing the organization’s funds than the artists who had fostered and developed the regional theater movement.

This was probably the most critial moment in the movement’s history: at the same time that the financial capacity of the theaters was increased, the decision-making authority of the theaters’ original leadership was curtailed. In most cases, a Board President or senior staff person unfamiliar with the art form was put into a position to alter the artistic direction of the company. This was the moment when the regional theater movement stopped being about a vision of free expression and broad-ranging representation of American’s voices and became part of a commercial network that would ultimately be bent to serve Broadway and the film industry instead.

Insisting on fiscal responsibility is always a good thing. But the regional theater movement was built upon a larger principle than merely producing theater that generated a consistent bottom line from ticket sales. It was created to achieve an expanded dialogue with American citizens, wherever they lived, to give the most talented among them a vibrant platform for the expression of new and dissenting ideas, and to revitalize the theatrical repertoire so that people in the future would understand our experience. Lorca said it best: “Theater is the memory of a society.”

Under these circumstances, we are failing to achieve Margo Jones’ dream of a world that is free of the commercial constraints of Broadway; instead, we have ended up with dozens and dozens of smaller Broadways, each one subject to the wheeling, dealing and speculating necessary for survival under the current economic model. In the face of ever-increasing costs, these mini-Broadways have no more chance for success than the real Broadway in New York, and they are limited in how they can collaborate because they have been placed in direct competition with each other.

Theaters compete tooth and nail for local and national funding based on their individual records of success which usually entails the complete “lock-down” of plays and projects that might someday move on to Broadway or the movies. The regional theaters have, in some respects, become the tombs for extraordinary works of art and expression that may (or may not) have received a premiere production at one theater for three to six weeks and will never be produced again. Furthermore, there are almost no incentives for theater companies to produce second, third or fourth productions of plays because the economic model doesn’t currently allow for it and because there doesn’t yet fully exist a culture of trust and collaboration among theaters nationally and globally. It also makes sense that a play that will be embraced by several artistic directors, each responsible to their own constituencies, is likely to be more universally relevant and engaging than a play that cannot gather this kind of support.

This is where the Lark can make a difference in the world. First, we exist to open doors to new voices and keep them open. In an ideal sense, democracy’s main strength may be that it draws upon an entire society to enlist its leaders. If the democratic view of the world assumes that talent is as likely to occur in one citizen as another, then it is natural to conclude that the talent pool will increase as we give more citizens the chance to be heard and acknowledged.

Next, the Lark spends its days creating strategies to galvanize local communities around the important ideas of emerging and established writers who are striving to reach for more. Like the democratic process, the Lark’s process allows for dissent and open discussion, for consensus-building, decision-making, action and reassessment. Always the door remains open, free expression is encouraged, and the relationship between the individual and society is nurtured and deepened.

And, finally, we are committed to developing models for connecting successful local work to a global network. If the Lark is truly able to lead the field as “a mobilizer,” to provoke and support the creation of innovative new work on a local level and bring artists and institutional leaders together as part of a growing collaborative network of theaters, universities and community outreach organizations, we can change the face of theater in America and the world and give back to the regional theaters what they have lost as cultural institutions. We can expand every individual’s opportunity to be heard and, at the same time, ensure a new repertoire of innovative, rigorously developed works of theater that will achieve global distribution.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

THE SHAKESPEARE RULE AND THE NELSON PRINCIPLE

2007-06-01T11:06:00.002-04:00

My very earliest challenges as a young director during the 1980’s were plays by Shakespeare. I was part of a group that started an outdoor Shakespeare festival in an area of New England where most of our audience had, at that time, never seen a play at all, much less a Shakespeare play. We were categorically not surrounded by Shakespeare experts; there was no one to tell us what the scene was about or what the words meant. The actors and I had to figure it out on our own, and we learned if we’d gotten it right when the audience came. Even when it didn’t work, it never occurred to me that there was a problem with the play that Shakespeare wrote. The burden was on me and the actors to discover the secret key to every scene, to follow the labyrinth to the treasure in the center of the play. The joy of Shakespeare is in the searching and the discovery, in the long meanderings down myriad passages of meaning, in the collaboration with one’s artistic traveling companions, and the ultimate triumph of grasping something true and good to share with an audience.

At about the same time, I started a program in the local public library where actors could read a new play aloud each week for an audience of community members. I had everything I needed for this: a gorgeous and intimate public space; a company of actors (Shakespearean actors, no less!); and a network of friends who knew lots of up-and-coming playwrights. I think it was the freshness of the entire enterprise in that tired and economically-depressed region of the country that helped this festival catch on. Audiences flocked in crazy numbers both to see the Shakespeare and to get up close to young writers in our “Plays in Progress” program.
I noticed right away, however, that there was a difference in the way people responded to Shakespeare on the one hand and new plays on the other. Due to my enthusiastic but sometimes misguided direction of the Shakespeare in the early days, audiences were occasionally confused about what was going on. Their response to this confusion about a moment in Shakespeare was to accept it, to bear personal responsibility for not understanding an idea that was, perhaps, too large to be comprehended all at once, and to focus fully on the next scene. No one questioned the playwright, not Shakespeare, though sometimes they questioned the acting and the direction; usually they bore the burden themselves.

The experience was completely different with the new plays. If audiences didn’t understand the play right away, or if someone had the slightest idea of how to make the play better in his or her estimation, audience members would not hesitate to prescribe, proscribe, re-scribe or pronounce their own solutions to challenges they perceived in the play they had just experienced. I am the kind of person who believes that people are generally good, with benevolent motives, but what could explain the conflict that arose so predictably after each play reading? I was in charge of facilitating these discussions, and, while the experience was new and exhilarating for everyone, I observed that the playwrights often felt diminished and discouraged afterwards. This had not been my intention at all, and I wracked my brains to figure it out. The answer, of course, was staring me in the face from across the park, where the Shakespeare was playing.
Here is how it goes: we expect Shakespeare to know what he is doing. He is a four hundred year old authority and a font of wisdom and truth. Done right, his plays are amazingly entertaining, emotionally engaging, and stunningly complex. We are reverential, perhaps overly so at times. However that isn’t how we think about the living, breathing playwrights who write contemporary plays. We feel we know as much about life and the world as they do. We have a thing or two to say about what they write. And, of course, we have the best of intentions; we only want to help.

This is when I formulated my “Shakespeare Rule” for talking about new plays. What if we at least pretended that every new play we approached was as perfect as a Shakespeare play? How would we talk about it differently, if we assumed that it contained everything it needed already to succeed and that the burden was on us to penetrate its meaning? What if we gave full credit to the author, whether the play works or not? What if we listened more carefully to what that author’s particular individual voice is trying to say instead of bending its meaning to suit something we already know? This was a completely different way of thinking about plays for me – and very difficult at first. But the results of this approach are very clear. Either we grow to fully understand the play as it was conceived and written by the playwright or – we don’t. We spend time discussing what the author created, not what she or he didn’t. We allow ourselves to feel uncomfortable in the presence of new or even flawed ideas. And we come to honor the leadership role that artists play in inventing the language necessary to describe and shape the future.

The Shakespeare Rule is why I was so inspired by the Laura Pels Foundation Keynote Address delivered by Richard Nelson on April 9, 2007, at the annual meeting of A.R.T./New York. Mr. Nelson speaks fervently about the necessity for taking the playwright’s leadership role seriously:

"…I am not saying that a playwright should avoid and ignore comments and reactions to his work, quite the opposite. But I am saying that our mindset toward playwrights should be this: 1) the playwright knows what he is doing, 2) perhaps the play as presented is as it should be. So that the onus for change is not on the playwright but on others, on the theater. And the theater is there with a full array of tools to support the playwright as he or she attempts to improve upon his or her play. How to improve a play should be the domain of the writer, with the theater supplying potential tools, a reading say, or a workshop with clearly delineated goals. These are tools that should evolve out of a need, as opposed to being a given."

For those of you who want to read the whole speech, here is the link.

As for me, I have given Mr. Nelson’s recent words a prominent place in my thoughts. I have labeled it “the Nelson Principle” and it resides in my library next to “the Shakespeare Rule.” I’ve made lots of copies to share with the playwrights we work with, in case they haven’t seen it already.

John Clinton Eisner
Producing Director

Community Perspectives: Riffing with John Clinton Eisner

September 2010-John Clinton Eisner, Lark Producing Director

June/August 2010 – John Clinton Eisner, Lark Producing Director

June 2010 – Jordan Seavey and Tommy Smith: Defining Success as Journey

May 2010 - John Clinton Eisner

April 2010 - Colin Greer

March 2010 - Daniella Topol

February 2010 - Caridad Svich

January 2010 - John Clinton Eisner

December 2009 - Maria Alexandria Beech

November 2009 – Henry Godinez

October 2009 - John Clinton Eisner

September 2009 - May Adrales

August 2009 - Theresa Rebeck

July 2009 - John Clinton Eisner

June 2009 - Rajiv Joseph

May 2009 - Margarett Perry

April 2009 - Chisa Hutchinson

March 2009 - Saviana Stanescu

February 2009 - Andrea Thome

The ‘Why’ of Theatre in the 21st Century by John Clinton Eisner

ON SOLID FOOTING AND LOOKING AHEAD

COLLABORATING, NOT COMPROMISING, AND TRANSFORMING OUR WORLD

ROOTING OURSELVES IN THEATER

LETTER FROM GUADALARA

FINDING TIME AND SPACE WHERE YOU LEAST EXPECT IT

COURTROOM DRAMA: WHAT I LEARNED WHILE PERFORMING MY CIVIC DUTY

FOLLOWING THE PATH TO FUTURE THEATER AUDIENCES

GROWING PAINS: REACHING FURTHER, DIVING DEEPER

TRANSLATING THE MEANING, AS WELL AS THE WORDS

THE PLAY’S THE THING—BUT NOT WITHOUT THE PLAYER

THE “PLAYLAB” PHENOMENON

THREE! TWO! ONE! HAPPY NEW YEAR… RIGHT… NOW!

A CASE FOR PHILANTHROPY

THEATER AS A PLATFORM FOR FREE EXPRESSION

IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO BUILD A NEW REPERTOIRE

THE COURAGE TO TRY SOMETHING NEW

A PLATFORM FOR FREE EXPRESSION

MAKING THEATER SAFE FOR DEMOCRACY

THE SHAKESPEARE RULE AND THE NELSON PRINCIPLE

June/August 2010 – John Clinton Eisner, Lark Producing Dir ector