May 2010 - John Clinton Eisner

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

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

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

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 Caridad Svich, a playwright, translator, songwriter and longtime member of our artist community. She is a collaborator on many levels and a polymath. She has supported Lark’s growth by sharing her expertise in a range of subject areas, from desktop publishing to international exchange, and currently serves on the advisory committee for our U.S.-Mexico Playwright Exchange program. Caridad astounds me with her ability to set and achieve ambitious goals; she multitasks with grace, poise and evident pleasure. She recently participated in Lark’s week-long Winter Writers’ Retreat where she wrote a brand-new play in just eight days. At the same time, she is organizing a major conference, publishing four new volumes of plays from Migdalia Cruz, Karen Hartman, Chiori Miyagawa, Octavio Solis and Saviana Stanescu (the book launch is on February 26th), and preparing to travel to the Denver Center Theatre Company to see one of her own plays at the Colorado New Play Summit. Meanwhile, the same play—The House of the Spirits, based on the novel by Isabel Allende—continues its repertory run at Repertorio Espanol in New York City (check out www.caridadsvich.com).

One of the things I admire most about Caridad is her ability to balance art and activism and to inspire others through both means. In this spirit, she founded NoPassport—a remarkable artist collective that arose in response to the impact on the theater of communications technology, globalization and other modern realities. NoPassport acknowledges that we are often overwhelmed by information, distance and violent divisions among the peoples of the world—despite the internet and our best intentions. Caridad, however, is a true visionary; she looks beyond shifting circumstances and recognizes the human need to connect on a deep and personal level. In her essay, she contends that the future of the theater—and of our humanity—depends upon finding new ways to create shared space for communal dreaming. She defines “Utopia” as a place where we are able to dream with other people. In her own words, Caridad describes NoPassport as “a virtual and live forum for the exchange of work and dreams, a live network between theaters and the academy, and a mobile band of playwrights, directors, actors, producers and musicians.”

If you want to know more about NoPassport, its annual conference takes place February 26-27 at Nuyorican Poets Café (with a pre-conference event at New Dramatists on February 25th), and culminates in a celebration event in the Lark Studio. The conference—“Dreaming the Americas: Utopia in Performance”—promises to tear up our assumptions about what constitutes theater and how audiences connect to it. I’ll be there throughout. Registration is online at www.nuyorican.org

In the essay that follows, Caridad explores what makes the theater special to the interlinked communities of artists and citizens who collaborate as creator-participants in shaping and supporting our evolving culture. We look forward to reading your responses to Caridad’s thoughts—and to one another!

Warmly,
John

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

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

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.

This month's guest essayist is Maria Alexandria Beech, a translating playwright for our U.S.-Mexico Playwright Exchange Program in both 2008 and 2009 as well as an Advisory Committee member for the program. She has been an important addition to this program by keeping a close eye on how Mexican culture is perceived, misperceived, valued, and undervalued on both sides of the border. And as this year’s U.S.-Mexico Playwright Exchange came to a close, she took part in some of many conversations about how we can deepen our commitment to bringing Mexican voices and stories to audiences in the U.S.

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

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.

This month's guest essayist is Henry Godinez, the resident artistic associate at the Goodman Theatre and the director of the Goodman's Latino Theater Festival. He recently joined the advisory council for our U.S.-Mexico Word Exchange program. He and his colleagues at the Goodman have committed themselves to connecting important Mexican voices, translated into English at the Lark through a unique collaborative process, with the Chicago public through workshops and productions in the summer of 2010. In this essay, he discusses both his passion for cultural exchange as well as his dedication to moving the work along to the next stage of its journey. As the date draws near for the U.S.-Mexico Word Exchange to begin, we’re hoping to provoke conversations about partnerships—like the one Henry and the Goodman have initiated with us— that will advance new work to public awareness.We look forward to reading your responses to Henry–and to one another—and we hope you’ll join us November 21-23 to see the outcome of this year’s exchange!

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.

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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.

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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

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

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.