Bitter Gertrude

Feb 13 2013

Theatre

In the Land of the “Color-Blind”

Jai Sahai as Spango Garnetkiller in Impact Theatre’s production of Of Dice and Men, by Cameron McNary. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.

I wrote an article linked above for Theatre Bay Area Magazine’s Jan/Feb issue, and now that it’s no longer available online, I’ll post it in its entirety here.

I’ve really come to dislike the term “color-blind” casting, because it implies that the highest good is to be “blind” to race and ethnicity, and I just reject that out of hand. The highest good, in my opinion, is to both SEE difference and CELEBRATE it. Not “accept” or “tolerate”– those weak words can take a seat.

While the point of this article is race and ethnicity, I think we also need to start thinking of diversity in terms of body size, age, disability, and gender– and not just gender as in “male/female,” but recognizing the true range of gender, gender expression, and the 1000 ways in which cisgender people enjoy privileges that trans* people do not. As a cisgender woman, this was invisible to me until fairly recently. Over the past ten years (after the death of Gwen Araujo, practically in my childhood backyard), I’ve paid a lot of attention to how trans* people are treated in our culture, and while the cisgender can never truly understand, it’s crucial for us to try.

My own company is in no way perfect. Far from it. We have a long way to go with all of these issues. But it’s something I think about literally every day of my life.

UPDATE 5/20/13: Please read this account of a Filipino American actor who auditioned for a character of color, made it to the second callback, and then discovered the “Big New York Theatre” (his generous psuedonym) cast a white actor instead. It’s a great read for a ton of reasons.

“In the Land of the ‘Color-Blind'”

Theatre Bay Area Magazine, Jan/Feb 2013

As someone who‘s been producing and casting for nearly two decades, I’ve been following the recent casting controversies with keen interest.

The latest occurred at La Jolla Playhouse this past July. Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater’s The Nightingale, an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale, directed by Moisés Kaufman, was set in China but cast with mostly non-Asian actors, including white actor Bobby Steggert in the lead role of the Emperor of China. The cast of twelve included but two Asian actors in supporting roles. The backlash, led by Asian American theatre artists, was immediate and intense. La Jolla Playhouse’s Artistic Director, Christopher Ashley, eventually apologized, but initially defended the casting as “color blind.” Kaufman defended the “color blind” casting by asserting that the play was never meant to depict a “literal” China, but a “mythological” one.

During this controversy, I saw in several online discussions heated defenses of the casting of The Nightingale as ideally “color blind” and as an example of “artistic freedom.” I was flabbergasted by the initial controversy, by the defense offered by the Nightingale team, and by the arguments in favor of the casting from other theatremakers. I had assumed that the term “color blind casting” was no longer in use, and I had assumed that my own opinions about what it means to cast a white actor as a nonwhite character were nearly universal in the theatre community. I knew I needed to dig deeper, and to that end, I spoke with directors Mark Jackson, Michael Gene Sullivan, Ellen Sebastian Chang, and Alan Quismorio about their approach to this issue. I began with the term “color blind casting.”

When we cast, we consider many things: type, skill set, approach to the role, chemistry with other actors. Are we not also considering race? Are we ever truly “blind” to race? Would we even want to be?

Michael Gene Sullivan takes issue with the concept of “color blindness”: “Sometimes people will say ‘I don’t see you as Black.’ If you don’t see me as Black, you think you’ve elevated me. Somehow it’s better not to see me as Black. Why? What’s so wrong with being Black? By wiping it away, you’ve made it ‘better,’ but all you’ve done is make yourself more comfortable.”

Ellen Sebastian Chang agrees: “We can’t say ‘I don’t see color.’ Well, why don’t you see color? I see it! What does it mean to you? I see what color I am. I see what color my kid is. I see it, I deal with it all the time. Why can’t you in your casting? Why are you choosing to be blind? Even the term ‘color blind casting’—Why choose blindness? There’s something about it that has the stink of white liberal guilt.”

“I find ‘color blind’ casting to be weirdly naïve,” says Mark Jackson. “Nobody is blind to race, because race matters, and pretending like it doesn’t is no way to deal with it. That makes ‘color blind’ casting an absurd proposition, not to mention kinda racist in a cowardly liberal way.”

“Color blind” casting just doesn’t exist. Of course we see color, and when white directors assert that color doesn’t “matter,” it seems to me that they’re asserting nothing but their own white privilege. In the US, only white people can live in a reality where race “doesn’t matter.”

Race is not invisible, nor should we want it to be. Race– like gender, like size, like age– contains narrative. When we cast, that choice, whatever it is, brings layers of meaning to the production as a whole. “The audience brings a lot of connotations to the event,” says Quismorio. “If you see a white man playing a Chinese man, and we all know that a lot of imperialism happened in the past, you can’t help but look at it from that point of view.”

When a white actor is cast as a non-white character, it contains a very specific cultural meaning, and a different meaning than an actor of color cast in a role written for a white actor. A white man in the role of the Emperor of China, whether you believe it’s a “mythological China” or not, intertextualizes narratives of cultural appropriation, erasure of difference, colonialism, Asian invisibility, and “yellowface.”

“I always assume that race and gender matter, and try to make choices accordingly,” says Jackson. “The [all white] casting of God’s Plot was deliberate because it was about Puritan characters. They were culturally specific characters in 1665. Doing non-traditional casting made no sense in that context. . . . Salomania and [The Death of] Meyerhold as well—having an Asian Stanislavski or a Black Chekhov would be saying something, but I don’t know what we would be saying.”

Alan Quismorio disagrees. “I would cast a Black actor as Stanislavski, or I would cast a female as Chekhov. I’d have to ask myself why I would do it, because I’d be asked about it. It can’t just be because it was cool. If we were to do a prologue for A Pinoy Midsummer, I would cast a Filipino actor as Shakespeare. It would be saying that Shakespeare, his works, transcend color, transcend nation. It really speaks to the world population.”

Why even consider casting actors of color in roles written for white actors? “We have to be thoughtful about what ‘color blind casting’ is trying to achieve,” says Quismorio. “It’s an attempt to provide actors of color an opportunity to be cast in roles they traditionally haven’t been cast in.” Sullivan says: “Non-traditional casting isn’t about making the audience more comfortable, and that shouldn’t be the reason you came down to the theatre in the first place. The idea is to create the world onstage the way we’d like it to be. Wouldn’t it be nice if this were the way things were and everybody could be cool with it?”

Two of the main ideas behind non-traditional casting are to provide actors of color with opportunities they have traditionally been denied, and to start to approach representing them on our stages in numbers equal to their numbers in the community. There’s a third important idea as well: Casting in a way that’s conscious of color and sensitive to it is a way to frame possibilities for inclusion in the real world. So many of our steps forward as a culture in the areas of race, gender, and sexuality have been led by the arts. An emotionally profound narrative event like a play or a film can have more cultural impact than a protest, article, or lecture. “There’s a television show called ‘Once Upon a Time,’” says Quismorio, “that cast an African American actor in the part of Lancelot. When we think of Lancelot, we imagine a ‘white knight.’ Not only are we challenging what’s happening in the real world but also what’s happening in our imaginations. Ten, fifteen, twenty years from now the kids who are growing up today will know of a Black Lancelot. There are other ways of perceiving a character.” Imagining fictional characters in new ways and creating artistic space for the full range of human characteristics people of color possess, not just the stereotypical characteristics we too often see in roles written for people of color, are healthy for us both as artists and as people living in a diverse community.

Casting actors of color in roles written for white actors, however, is not without complications. “Color blind casting too often means that European-based work is reinvented so that people of color are supposed to identify their humanity with that work,” says Sebastian Chang. “’Color blind casting’ affirms that universality is in the white perspective. Why can’t we just keep developing playwrights of color? Color blind casting too often denies cultural difference.”

Sullivan says, “I would put more pressure on the playwrights. Why do you keep writing plays that deal with four white people on the upper West Side?”

“I don’t have any problem with casting actors of color in European-American plays,” adds Sebastian Chang, “I am so for artistic freedom that way and artistic imagination that way.”

What about the “artistic freedom” argument? What is the difference between casting an Asian American as Hedda Gabler and a European American as the Emperor of China? Why is “color blind casting” such a problem and “non-traditional casting” lauded? The reason is because race has meaning. It has an undeniable cultural context that must be considered when we cast. We must consider creating productions that reflect the diversity of our audiences if we want to stay culturally relevant, creating opportunity for underrepresented actors if we want a thriving theatre community, and the effect our casting choices will have on the narrative of the piece if we want to have an understanding of how our work fits into the cultural context and how it will likely be received by audiences.

When I was casting Romeo & Juliet at Impact two seasons ago, our newest resident actor, Reggie White, who is African American, wanted to do the show. I had two open roles at the time: Paris and Tybalt. Reggie is an actor with an abundance of “nice guy” energy, who exudes likeability from every pore, and captures audience sympathy the minute he steps on stage. I didn’t want an unsympathetic Paris—I believe he’s a nice guy caught in a bad situation. Reggie would have been a perfect choice for that role. Hotheaded Tybalt, on the other hand, is a stretch for an actor whose home base is “the sweetheart.” But given that both my Romeo and Juliet were white (Michael Garrett McDonald and Luisa Frasconi, respectively), how could I cast an African American as Paris? How could I stage a play where the female lead is desperate not to be married off to the Black guy? Reggie’s race would change the Paris narrative to something unpalatable. I cast him as Tybalt, and, of course, he was more than up for the stretch and his talent and versatility made his performance a huge success with both critics and audiences. In making that choice, I also considered that the party scene, wherein Lord Capulet, played by a white actor in our production (Jon Nagel), calls Tybalt “boy” several times, would take on a new, more hard-hitting meaning, and would show even more explicitly why Tybalt’s anger carries over the next day into his challenge of Romeo. In a play with so much violence from so many characters, I didn’t feel that an African American Tybalt would make a racist statement about Black male violence, but that possibility had to be considered before I could move forward with the choice. Race is always part of the narrative, and it’s our job to be cognizant of that, to consider the cultural context of our choices, and weigh, to the best of our ability, how audiences will read those choices.

Using a white actor as Othello, or as the emperor of China, on the other hand, has a very different impact on the narrative than casting a person of color in a traditionally white role. It erases the physical presence of the person of color, and intertextualizes cultural narratives of imperialism, appropriation, and invisibility. The West has a long history of casting white actors in racist portrayals of people of color, of appropriating the narratives of people of color and reshaping them through a white lens, and of shutting artists of color out of positions of importance. An American audience viewing a white person portraying a person of color will be reminded of all of these, and of blackface, of yellowface, of the history of racism with which we still struggle. These are all present in any production wherein a white actor is cast as a person of color because they are so palpably present within our culture. Again, race is always part of the narrative.

With all this complexity, how do we approach race and ethnicity in casting in the 21^st century? I think the answer is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, we should be increasing access for actors of color to roles in which they have not been traditionally cast. African American Hamlets and Rosalinds, Asian American Noras and Heddas, Latino Bricks and Estragons: we should continue to encourage these. And, at the same time, we need to actively work to develop voices from across the entire cultural spectrum and ensure that these voices get the kind of attention they deserve. All too often playwrights of color are developed to death: awarded reading after reading, but few mainstage productions at major houses. We need to continue to work towards inclusion of women and people of color in decision-making positions at larger nonprofits and in the commercial theatre.

Finally, we must continue open and honest dialogue across racial, ethnic, and cultural divides. Sebastian Chang says, “Color matters. Class matters. We wish it didn’t, but it does. It does. And it’s the human condition that’s filled with all these contradictions that we struggle with. If we would be willing to get past our fear of racism, which is a real thing, we could sit down and discuss our cultural differences, which isn’t a bad thing. So many things are just missteps of cultural difference.”

Impact's Macbeth. Pictured: Steven Epperson, Skyler Cooper, Pete Caslavka, and Casey Jackson. Photo by Kevin Berne.

Impact’s Macbeth. Pictured: Andy Pelosi, Skyler Cooper, Pete Caslavka, and Casey Jackson. Photo by Kevin Berne.

Tagged actors, casting, diversity, producing, racism

Feb 07 2013

2 Comments

Personal Nonsense, Theatre

Memorials, Narrative, and “Audience Engagement”

My gorgeous grandparents on their 20th anniversary.

Diane Ragsdale’s spot-on post about coercive philanthropy today reminded me of this post I wrote for Theatre Bay Area’s blog in May.

While I applaud “audience engagement” pieces– works created alongside the audience or that incorporate the audience as performer in some way, I still believe, strongly, in the power of traditional storytelling. Here’s the post. You can also click on the link above to read it in its original posting.

I recently went to a memorial service for a remarkable woman, Jane Lind. To say that Jane was “remarkable” or even “unique” just doesn’t cover it—she was so much more than your garden-variety “unique.” She was magical, and that is not a word I use lightly. She left an indelible mark on everyone she knew. She was unforgettable.

I’ve been to far too many funerals and memorial services, for so many different kinds of people. Some were people whose lives and personalities were more conventional, and some were more like Jane: singular, magnetic, extraordinary. Yet every memorial had one thing in common: the most memorable, important aspect of each memorial were the stories people told. At Jane’s memorial, people got up and told story after story after story highlighting her exceptional presence, her magic, her humor, her nurturing. Yes, we all nodded. That was Jane. And every memorial I’ve ever been to has been the same.

What does this mean? I can string together descriptive adjectives all day, but they are, essentially, meaningless without the narratives that created the impulse to use them.

When we die—when our physical presence has evacuated—what is left, what lives on in the minds and hearts of others, are our narratives. Our memories of others are made of narratives. We are, to others, a collection of narratives, down to the bone.

It doesn’t necessarily need to be linear narrative, or complete narrative. I can walk into a building and tell instantly if someone is wearing the perfume my grandmother used to wear, and it will stop me dead in my tracks, even after all these years. Jane’s perfume will always be Jane to me. These are small narratives—I remember being in your physical presence, and how that made me feel. And then there are the more lengthy narratives—stories that we share, and laugh, and remember.

In all this talk of “audience engagement,” and the push toward incorporating audience participation into all kinds of theatre, I can’t help but wonder if this is a good direction. Yes, audience participation events can be amazing, life-changing, deeply satisfying, artistically profound. But I still think that we, as humans, need each other’s narratives. We need to tell stories, and, perhaps even more importantly, we need to hear each other’s stories. “Tell me another story about Grammy, Mommy,” my son asked as we sat next to my mother’s grave. And I told him story after story after story of my mother—irreverent, brilliant, hilarious. That was all I had of her to give him. It was the best I had of her. And he sat, five years old, rapt.

My mother was head cheerleader at Washington High School in Fremont, CA in 1959.

We need to hear narrative, because we are all narrative-based creatures. Yes, we need to make stories together, but we also need to hear each other’s stories. That will never change. I applaud audience engagement events, but we need to leave room for, and continue to honor, traditional narrative events as well. Sometimes listening to someone else’s narrative is the only way to access that narrative, or someone who’s gone, or a unique, extraordinary moment we could never have imagined before. So perhaps we should push pause on this burgeoning idea that audience engagement as participation is the future for theatre. It is a future for theatre. But we will still, and always, need to tell stories and to hear them. That’s what humans are.

Tagged a life in the theatre, theatre

Feb 04 2013

47 Comments

Theatre

The Problem with AEA

What I wish I had been able to do this week

I haven’t posted in awhile because I’ve had a crazy busy week. Among a few other magical surprises, my company lost an actor, and it turned out that, because the show was a commission being built specifically around this actor and his particular talents, we couldn’t, hard as we tried, recast non-AEA, so we had to scramble to fill the slot with something else. We can’t use an AEA actor because we can’t afford the lowest-tier contract right now, and we’ve used up all our waivers.

And I hear all you people outside the Bay Area saying “What?!” Yes, in the Bay Area, a company only gets a few waivers to use in their first few years of existence, and then can never use another waiver ever again for any reason world without end.

Before I go any further, let me lay down a few piles of facts: I’m very pro-union. My grandfather was a forklift driver and my husband is a middle school teacher. I know what unions are for and why they’re important, and union busting is something I cannot abide. I would never cross a picket line. I think unions are vital.

I remember my mother refusing to buy grapes and making sure we knew why.

Secondly, I wouldn’t have any reason to complain about AEA if I didn’t follow its rules. I left an entire job on the table in part because I couldn’t handle willful violations of AEA contracts. I didn’t want to be associated with that, and I didn’t want to have to fight like a cornered wampa over every single contract. I could easily eliminate my problems by just violating contracts and hoping to fly under the radar (“We’ve never been caught,” I was told), but I won’t do that. For one, I think I WOULD get caught, and, much more importantly, it’s not right.

So here’s my problem: In the Bay Area, at least, AEA operates under a fundamental misunderstanding of its own market.

AEA exists in a bizarre context. There are hundreds of actors working in commercial theatre like big Broadway musicals, touring companies, and the like. These commercial enterprises would happily work these actors to death, collect wagonloads of cash from $200 tickets and 45 kinds of merch, and then pay the actors starvation wages (if that) if they could get away with it. AEA is the one thing stopping commercial theatres from using actors like human ATMs.

However, AEA also covers actors working under the nonprofit model. The 501c3 model, as it applies to the arts, exists so that arts organizations can be released from the concerns of the for-profit model– continual growth, market share, and profitability that returns income to investors. It was determined, and rightfully so, that “high art,” new advances in art, and experimental art are not usually big sellers, and that if we are to have vibrant, cutting-edge art being produced in this country, or the preservation of heritage art, we need to protect them from the vagaries of the marketplace. The nonprofit model (ideally) gives companies the freedom to stop worrying about sales, market share, growth, and profitability, and instead use grants and donations to supplement income.

After a perfunctory glance at the AEA documents library, it seems to me that AEA contracts in the Bay Area aren’t much different than anywhere else, apart from being the only place in the country without a functional waiver. (I’d love to hear from some of you folks across the country if I’m wrong about that.) Our agreements are the MBAT, the BAT, and, of course, the LORT. Theatres also use the TYA agreement and the Guest Artist agreement, but primarily, the system is BAPP (our mini-waiver), MBAT, BAT, LORT. We have 5 LORT theatres in the Bay Area. The other 300 or so of us are BAT and below, so that’s what I’ll address.

This system is, of course, tiered, but not necessarily in the way you’d think. Bay Area companies can only use a BAPP for a few years before that agreement is denied to them forever, regardless of their income. The MBAT is only available to companies that use a 99-and-under theatre, and in the Bay Area, where competition for theatre space rental for a full run of 5 or 6 weeks can be fierce (before we had our own space, we used to start booking our season a year in advance), sometimes the only space available to you shuts you out of the MBAT, again, regardless of income. The BAT is internally tiered– the salaries you must pay the actors increase each year, whether your company’s income increases or not. Once you start working under the BAT, salaries are tied to TIME, not to INCOME.

By limiting the waiver and by tying salaries under the BAT to time rather than income, AEA is forcing Bay Area nonprofit theatres into a for-profit growth model, and it just doesn’t work. A nonprofit theatre’s income is in no way guaranteed to increase year by year– nor should it have to. The point of a nonprofit theatre is the art, not popularity. If we wanted to make a bunch of money, we would all be doing Annie starring Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber.

Perfect for Miss Hannigan.

Here’s my first example: A theatre I know qualifies for the MBAT in every way except one: The theatres they rent are over 99 seats. They could afford to hire at least 5 or 6 AEA actors a season on the MBAT contract, but they’re not allowed to use it. So they can either make an all-out push to grow much larger in order to be able to afford the BAT contract and its continual increases, or they can stay non-AEA. Of course, in this economy, that kind of growth is not realistic, and why should they be forced to grow to a size that might not be sustainable for them? Solution: they only hire non-AEA actors. So that’s at least 5 or 6 AEA actors who could have been working, who instead sat home while non-AEA actors took those jobs.

I’ll use my own theatre as my next example. We’re no longer allowed to use the waiver, and we can’t afford an MBAT. The MBAT requires a weekly salary for the actor that makes the actor the highest-paid person in the room in almost every MBAT company, including the Artistic Director. We have a tiny, 59-seat theatre and we do a 4-5 show season, primarily new plays by emerging playwrights. In order to hire AEA actors regularly, we’d have to grow by about 50%. This would take years and is by no means guaranteed since we’re dedicated to accessible ticket prices, making our only avenue grants and donations. Solution: we only hire non-AEA actors. FUN FACT: I had a high-profile AEA actor call me and ask for the lead role in a show I was directing. He knew what my approach would be to the show and felt that this would be the only chance he would ever have to perform the role in that way, or perhaps even at all. I called AEA and went to bat for him, and was told no, he could not work on a waiver, and that “AEA actors need to be protected from what they want.”

But hey, now, don’t I want to pay actors? OF COURSE I DO. I would love nothing better than to pay every actor who comes through our theatre each year (about 30 per season) a weekly salary. Hell, I’d love to pay MYSELF a weekly salary. But we don’t have that kind of money.

And here’s the answer I’ve gotten repeatedly: IF YOU’VE BEEN PRODUCING FOR [X] YEARS, AND YOU DON’T MAKE ENOUGH MONEY TO AFFORD THESE CONTRACTS, YOU SHOULD JUST CLOSE YOUR DOORS. YOU DON’T DESERVE TO PRODUCE.

This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nonprofit model.

Nonprofit theatres are not necessarily interested in a for-profit growth model. We are not necessarily interested in constantly increasing our income or our market share. Many of us are keenly aware that our work, because of its experimental nature, will never sell 500 tickets a night. Many of us do work that is specifically designed for small spaces, limiting our earned income. Many of us are devoted to accessible pricing, which limits our income. Most of us do not wish to produce work specifically designed to be popular and make money, as the commercial theatre does. Again, we do not wish to produce Annie starring Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber.

So now you’re asking me, “OK, you’re not going to sell 500 tickets a night at $200 each. But what about those grants and donations for which the 501c3 makes you eligible?” Here’s what you need to know: grants and donations do NOT continually increase over time. In a difficult economy, they actually decrease. There are 4 kinds of contributed income: Corporate grants, foundation grants, government grants, and individual donations. Sometimes companies decide to halt all grants to the arts and shift focus to something else, or decide they want to focus on specific geographical areas, or are having a down year and decrease the amount of money they’re granting. Foundations can only grant the amount of money their endowment makes, which, as any investor knows, is not an ever-increasing amount. And don’t even look me in the face and say “government grants.” Government funding has all but evaporated. Individual donations are directly tied to the economy. You can’t donate to a nonprofit if you’ve just lost your job.

It’s impossible for nonprofit theatre companies to rely on an ever-increasing income. There is NO SUCH THING. Nonprofit theatres are not able to function on a for-profit growth model, despite what AEA thinks, and it’s AEA actors who are suffering for it.

Because nonprofit theatres aren’t growing on a for-profit model, and because our Bay Area AEA contract structure assumes that nonprofits theatres ARE growing on a for-profit model, a huge amount of Bay Area theatres are severely limited in the number of contracts they can afford or are shut out of AEA contracts entirely. Therefore, most AEA actors in the Bay Area work far less than they did when they were non-AEA, and, I would wager, make less at it as well. Sure, the one job they land pays more, but the non-AEA actor is working 7 jobs for every one job the AEA actor works. If you’re an AEA actor who’s a white man who can sing, chances are you’re working a few times a year, but if you’re a woman, forget it. Young white women show up to auditions by the wagonload, so unless you have a particular, hard-to-find skill, you are frequently easily cast around, and the company can save the 1 or 2 AEA contracts they can afford for that show for a role that’s more difficult to cast. If you’re a person of color, just getting considered can be an uphill climb at some theatres or by some directors. Because the pool of jobs available to AEA actors is much, much smaller than the ones available to non-AEA actors, actors of color are especially hard hit when they become AEA.

At the risk of repeating myself: when you’re forcing nonprofit companies into ill-fitting for-profit growth models, most companies (if not all) must limit the number of contracts they can underwrite each season. LORT theatres are favoring shows with small casts, something with which playwrights nationwide have been struggling for years now. In the Bay Area, the lion’s share of BAT and MBAT theatres are only able to hire a few AEA actors per show, casting the rest of the show nonunion, while the AEA actors who could have been playing those roles sit at home perfecting their Covenant abatement strategies.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So what’s my solution?

Tie AEA agreements to INCOME, not to TIME or to SEATS or to anything else. That would make the relationship between AEA and nonprofit theatres realistic, and would result in more AEA actors being hired, which is good for both the theatre companies and the AEA actors. AEA contracts could be tied to a company’s income in the prior fiscal year. If it’s under X, you work under this contract, if it’s over X but under Y, you work under that contract, and so on. Income is REAL. Imagining that money undergoes mitosis and automatically grows over time is not. Imagining that a theatre space with more seats will automatically make a nonprofit theatre more money is not. Use the real income, not the imaginary income. Work out salaries that are fair when compared to the company’s income bracket. You wouldn’t need to reduce the salaries that already exist—just allow companies a more realistic set of criteria for qualifying for contracts.

Bring the Bay Area in line with the rest of the damn country and allow waivers for companies whose financials qualify, regardless of how long they’ve been producing.

Empower your membership to decide for themselves what jobs they will take. The companies who would be using a waiver are currently not using any AEA actors at all. The companies you’ve shut out of the MBAT who can’t grow to BAT are not using any AEA actors at all. Is that better for your membership, really?

And finally, stop imagining that small, nonprofit theatre companies are all sitting atop hoards of gold, arrogantly refusing to give your actors a dime while wiping their asses with hundred-dollar bills. Most of us are barely paying ourselves. Some of us don’t pay ourselves at all. And, apart from a few bad apples, almost all of us are aching to pay AEA actors– who are our friends, people we have worked with for years, people we LOVE– a living wage. Personally, I want to be able to pay ALL actors, AEA or not, a living wage.

What’s best for AEA actors? Because it can’t be struggling year after year to get any work at all while the non-AEA actors around them are working nonstop, right? And the reason that happens isn’t because producers are dicks. It’s because we’re desperately trying to keep the doors open, and we only have so much to allocate for personnel after donations have fallen off and one of our major granting orgs closed their grants for the arts completely, and we did two new plays last year that were critical successes but didn’t sell well, and because we want to keep ticket prices affordable so our audience can stay diverse. And because we’re not working under a profit-driven growth model. And we don’t want to do The Facts of Life: The Musical! with Taylor Swift as Blair, Beyonce as Tootie, and Seth McFarlane as Mrs. Garrett. OK, maybe a little BUT THAT’S NOT MY POINT.

My point is: There has to be a better way, for ALL of us.

UPDATE: There are indeed several other places across the country without a waiver. I feel your pain, Salt Lake City and Las Vegas (and anyone else out there). I feel your pain.

SECOND UPDATE: I’m thrilled with the conversations this has started. I’m even more thrilled that we seem to be thinking of ways to come together to work within the confines of the financial reality of the nonprofit theatre world.

Comments for this article are now closed. I’ll be posting a follow-up article soon!

Tagged actors, AEA, producing

Jan 30 2013

3 Comments

Film, Theatre

Hey, Screenwriters and Playwrights: Create Better Characters

I’ve been teaching at a film school for over five years now, and working with filmmakers has been an eye-opener. I’ve learned a lot, and I hope I’ve helped some filmmakers along the way.

One thing I think screenwriters and playwrights share is the need to create compelling, honest characters, and yet it’s one of the most common areas in which I see scripts fall flat. This can be a real struggle for early career writers.

So: Are your characters boring? Oh, don’t give me that look. You know what I mean. Bland, flavorless characters; characters whose predictability could be spotted by a nine-year-old; characters that are carbon copies of archetypal characters of the past. They are all too common.

How are memorable, believable, intriguing characters made? While there’s no one right way, I can give you some pointers to help you, early career playwright or screenwriter, find your own process.

1. Imagine your characters as personalities, not as a collection of visuals.

This one is a particular issue for filmmakers. Filmmakers tend to be visual people, and I often see scripts that approach a character from the outside, and stop there. The writer knows what she wants the scene to look like, but hasn’t thought any more deeply about it than that. When you think about your characters, think in more detail about personality traits. Who is this character? Why does he do what he does? What does he want? Which leads me to:

2. Think of your characters as real people with needs and desires.

I often see characters that are treated as nothing but events in the life of the main character. Imagine your characters as real people with goals, hopes, dreams, fears. What does this person want? What does she want from the other character(s) in the scene? What is her opinion about the other character(s) in the scene, what’s happening around them, what might happen, etc? I see this particular “event-in-the-life” type of sloppy writing shine out in its fullest glory when people write women and people of color.

3. Write better women and people of color.

The amount of stereotypical, flat, and unrealistic women and people of color in film and theatre could, if turned into gold, buy every man, woman, and child who ever lived a copy of the latest version of Final Draft. It’s depressing. Even more depressing is the fact that this isn’t the sole province of white male writers. When writing supporting characters that are women or people of color, treat these characters as real people with stories of their own—feelings, opinions, needs, desires—and not just an event in the life of the main character. And here’s a thought: consider writing more pieces with a woman or a person of color AS the main character. I see much more diversity in main characters in theatre than in film, but we could use much more in both. (More stories from more diverse perspectives, please, with extra awesome.) BTW: One more hooker/call girl character and I will scream. Despite what you see in film, 57% of all women between the ages of 18 and 30 are not hookers. Crazy, right? I KNOW. Additionally, I could easily write a 1000-word blog post just about stereotypical writing for people of color. Be better.

4. People are never generic, always specific.

So stop creating generic characters. Stop throwing generic characters into scenes just to advance the narrative and start thinking of characters as essential parts of the equation of storytelling. I promise you that you can, with a little more thought, advance your narrative just as well—actually, better—with an interesting bartender as easily as a generic “bartender.” What’s more, an interesting, complex character can take your narrative in unexpected directions. Allow your characters to be specific people and see where that takes you.

5. The stronger your antagonist, the stronger your protagonist.

This one is more germane to screenwriting than playwriting, but this basic piece of advice should apply to all characters you create, whether they fall into the protagonist/antagonist structure or not. Make sure your antagonist isn’t a total screaming douchebag from the get go. It cheapens your protagonist’s eventual victory (or defeat, if that’s where you’re going). Make your antagonist a worthy opponent and the end will be much more satisfying. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious asshole (SPOILER ALERT: too late) take a tip from Shakespeare—all of his villains have some redeeming qualities, and all of his heroes have some flaws. People are complex, and if you want your characters to be believable, they must reflect that. An antagonist who has a point and makes some sense in his opposition to the protagonist will provide a much more satisfying conclusion.

6. Show, don’t tell.

Yes, I know this is the 100^th time you’ve heard this, but it’s really true. Your character doesn’t need to offload sixteen lines of exposition in the first scene. Don’t be afraid of a little ambiguity. Allow the actors some room to create believable characters with your text. Real people are sometimes indirect, are mistaken, lie. People seldom come right out and say precisely what they’re thinking. Show us the character, the relationships, the emotional journey. Don’t feel the need to load it all into the lines.

7. Pay attention to “voice.”

Characters who all sound the same are annoyingly common in scripts. Create specific character voices. Observe the people around you—you’ll encounter interesting character voices every day. Individuals have specific vocabularies, speech patterns, and ways of framing and expressing opinions. Build this in tandem with your characters’ personality traits, as they will inform each other.

My last, and most important word of advice: Follow your heart. Tell the story you need to tell in the way you need to tell it. Only you can tell your stories, so honor those stories by crafting the best scripts you can.

Tagged diversity, feminism, film, new plays, playwrights, screenwriting, women are people

Jan 24 2013

12 Comments

Theatre

Playwrights: Not Actually Slaves

This is a playwright. Playwrights are people. This particular playwright is the awesome Lauren Yee.

Why are so many people surprised to discover that you ALWAYS have to secure the rights to perform a play that’s not in the public domain, whether you’re charging admission or not? Do they think “published” means “public domain”? Do they just think they won’t get caught? Do they think schools, churches, and cafes are magically exempt? I don’t get it.

If your school, church, or theatre company needed a pickup truck (don’t we all), would you just take one you liked off the street? So why do you feel entitled to do that with someone’s play?

I don’t want to argue about copyright law. I really don’t.

So for the purposes of this post, I’m going to limit this to living playwrights.

Living playwrights are people who work hard at a job makin’ stuff. And the stuff they make are PLAYS. It’s hard, thankless, underpaid work. The number of people who actually make a living on nothing but their rights ‘n’ royalties is something like, oh, I don’t know, let’s sayyyyyyyy . . . 12. The rest are teaching, writing for TV and film, processing purchase orders, giving handies in the alley, waiting tables, and all manner of things that aren’t writing plays.

Do you like plays? I do. You do, right? OK, do you like GOOD plays? Show of hands? EXCELLENT. So imagine this: If we PAY playwrights to do the job of writing plays, more of them could quit that job at the Cheesecake Factory and just WRITE. I’m sure you can imagine how difficult it is to create quality writing after a day of being yelled at by people who think service personnel are subhuman servebots who both DESERVE and WELCOME the wrath of a frustrated middle manager failing spectacularly to impress his blind date.

It’s hard enough for playwrights to support themselves with their writing without people stealing their work. While I’m not an idiot (despite what you may have heard) who believes that closing that loophole would result in all playwrights suddenly getting a living wage, a tiara, and a case of Newcastle, making sure they’re paid for their work is a step closer to that ideal.

Let’s review:

1. Yes, it is the law (no matter what you THINK of the law) that you cannot use someone else’s intellectual property without their consent, and any play by a living playwright is that playwright’s intellectual property. It belongs to that playwright, just like her bed, her toothbrush, or her Magic cards. You are not entitled to use her property simply because you can get to it without her seeing you.

2. Playwrights DESERVE to be compensated for their work. Slavery is not actually OK. If a playwright allows you to use her work free of charge, that is a GIFT to you. If you perform her work without paying for it and without her consent, that is theft. You are not ENTITLED to her labor. She is not your slave.

3. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you perform, or what you charge. It matters not if you are the Endor Community Theatre or Patti Lupone Elementary or Our Lady of the Sacred Sound Design Church and ADR Studio. It doesn’t matter if you’re not charging for admission. It doesn’t matter if you’re performing in a cafe, or a park, or your mom’s driveway. HOW YOU PRODUCE THAT WORK doesn’t change the fact that the work is not YOURS to use without consent.

So get the rights, OK? OK.

UPDATE: Playwright Don Zolidis, who knows much more about this than I do, says his estimation is that about 50 playwrights are currently making a living from their plays alone. So more than 12, but not nearly enough.

Also: You can learn more about Lauren Yee here.

Tagged new plays, playwrights, producing

Jan 24 2013

13 Comments

Theatre

Women Playwrights 2: Electric Boogaloo

So this happened:

A blog post I thought about 20 people would read has gone viral . . . ish. Or, viral for theatre anyway. (Comparing my stats to the inappropriate cartoon my son made last year and put on reddit, garnering half a million hits in 72 hours, is just going to depress me.)

I’m enormously flattered by all the attention it’s received, and I’ve had a deluge of interesting responses, some here on the blog but most out in the innerwebs.

The response I didn’t expect, but have received more than a few times, was the defensive: But women’s lives ARE like that! Those ARE our stories! Which is a little heartbreaking. I don’t believe that any woman’s life is just waiting around for someone else, talking about someone else, and reacting to the decisions of someone else. Women are so much more than that.

The most curious responses were from people holding up extremely active characters who drive the narrative bus all through the town as examples of reactive central characters (Hamlet was one such example). The most valuable challenge came from the people who made me examine my assumptions about active vs reactive dramaturgical positionality. I’m thankful they gave me the opportunity to evaluate an assumption and deepen my understanding of it.

The best response of the bunch, unsurprisingly, came from the brilliant Lauren Gunderson, who responded to my post with an inspiring, challenging piece of writing that I think you should all check out.

My opinion is, obviously, not definitive. My writing reflects my opinions about my experiences, and of course responses from others will be reflective of their opinions about their experiences. Our responses to anything– writing, theatre, pumpkin muffins, bad traffic, the distressingly continued presence of Uggs– say as much about ourselves as they do about the thing itself. So it’s been a very valuable process for me to examine my own reaction (and imagined responses) to the people who are saying my post is valuable and a worthwhile read as well as to the people who are saying that I’m a “patriarchal tool” whose self-hating gender bias is deluding me into evaluating works of feminine genius as lacking simply because they don’t conform to a “masculine structure.” (Penis-shaped plays, amirite?)

Despite the fact that the response has been overwhelmingly positive, my first reaction to that was to zero in on the negative and think: I AM NEVER WRITING ABOUT GENDER AGAIN. I said, from that moment on, my blog was going to be about pictures of puppies in baskets, cupcakes, and my rack.

So what did that reaction say about me? To me, it said that the girl who was bullied for years in school still tries to make decisions for the adult she has become, and that’s not OK. It said that I’m still far too willing to give power to the people who want to silence me with their public disapproval. And devaluing your own experience while privileging the experiences of others was EXACTLY what I was trying to get women to stop doing when I wrote the post. So I had to take a seat and give myself a Come to Moradin talk about Having a Blog and Having a Voice.

The answer, of course, is not for me to hide, but to learn instead to take the good with the bad, develop a thicker skin, keep my chin up, keep calm and carry on, and all the other British platitudes you can think of go here.

Thank you all so much, truly.

Tagged new plays, playwrights

Jan 23 2013

7 Comments

Personal Nonsense

Ew, Gross, GET A ROOM

My handsome husband

Today is my husband’s birthday, and I can’t even begin to say how grateful I am for him. Through all of my surgeries, my chronic pain, my massive neverending self-doubt, my layoff, my ten million rehearsals, he never once wavered in his rock-solid support, love, and encouragement. I am so lucky to have him.

We met as undergrads at Cal State East Bay and dated for a few months. We broke up (entirely my fault) and eventually married other people. We made the kind of predictably poor choices you make when you’re young, and both learned the hard way that when your closest friends and family think you shouldn’t marry someone, THEY ARE RIGHT.

We never completely lost touch. I would run into him from time to time when I was a grad student at Cal and he was working in the scene shop there. (He later told me that when he saw me walking his way on campus, his heart would skip a beat, a story that melts my heart all over again every time I think about it.) A few years later, when I was teaching at CSUEB, he would bring his high school students to our (now long gone) spring Shakespeare Festival. It was at one of these festivals that I asked him to play my Dukes in the CSUEB summer production of As You Like It. I was already crushing on him, of course.

It was during As You Like It performances that we finally got back together, 16 years after our first date. We were married August 15, 2006.

He’s a wonderful man, sweet and supportive, impossibly attentive, beyond patient. We exacerbate and encourage each other’s nerdiness. He’s working the irresistible combination of tall, smart, funny theatre tech, which is my kryptonite. His faith in me makes me want to be a better person so I can deserve him. I can’t imagine what my life would be like without him. I hope I never have to.

See that TIE fighter pilot? I’m hitting that.

Happy Birthday, sweetheart. I hope your day is wonderful apart from the fact that you’re working all day and that I scheduled you for rehearsal tonight.

Oh, the show? As You Like It.

Tagged personal nonsense

Jan 22 2013

53 Comments

Theatre

A Common Problem I See In Plays By Women Playwrights. It’s Not What You Think.

Will Hand and Jeanette Penley Marker in Impact Theatre’s Toil and Trouble by Lauren Gunderson, a fantastic play by a brilliant woman with a kickass female character. Check out EVERY WORD LAUREN’S EVER WRITTEN because you will not regret it. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.

My theatre company is in heavy season planning mode, so I’ve recently read dozens of new plays. I’m always reading new plays, but this time of year, I’m reading a lot of plays, all day long. We’re making an effort to find more plays by women playwrights. We get between 300-400 unsolicited submissions each year, as well as submissions from agents and theatre professionals (playwrights, other ADs or LMs). 75% of those plays are by men, without fail. Unsurprisingly, 75% of the plays we’ve done over our 17 seasons have been by men. So we’re making an extra effort to find women playwrights and ask them to submit.

My company does new plays by “emerging” playwrights (I understand the controversy around that term, but this post isn’t about that, so let’s move on), so I’m reading unpublished plays, many (if not most) by early career, relatively inexperienced playwrights. I noticed a trend in the writing style of these early career women writers, a trend that initially confused me.

I’m seeing a significant amount of plays by women with female characters structurally positioned as the central character. However, that female character isn’t driving the narrative– she is, instead, just reactive to whatever the male characters are doing. It’s a woman sitting around wondering what to do about some man in her life, talking to her friends about some man, interacting with some man about his decisions or actions. It’s still a story with a central male character, just told from the woman’s point of view. If it’s a lesbian play, just change that male character to a female character. The structurally central female character is just as reactive.

Here’s the weird part: I ALMOST NEVER SEE PLAYS LIKE THIS FROM MEN. When I get a play by a man, the central character, male or female, almost always drives the narrative and has an active arc.

Ensemble pieces don’t change anything– they work the same way, just in the plural.

So what the effing eff is going on here? I rarely see this from the more experienced, accomplished women playwrights, but it’s shockingly common from early career women writers.

I thought a lot about this, talked about it with friends, got into a lengthy discussion on facebook (of course) about it. Here’s what I think is going on.

Some playwrights, particularly those who are new to it, are drawing heavily from their own lives and are writing central characters that are reflective of themselves. Sometimes they write plays that are about some perceived injustice they suffered (WHY WON’T HE LOVE ME? WHY WILL NO ONE PRODUCE MY PLAYS?) which can put their central character into a reactive position. But the gender difference, I think, can only be explained one way.

As women, we’re taught to be reactive– to pay careful attention to the needs and opinions of others and react immediately to them. Most women become masters of reading body language and gold medalists at empathy. Not all (of course) but most, because we’re taught that being any other way is unacceptable– at home, in the culture, in plays, films, books, TV shows. Men, however, are taught to be active, and are taught that men who aren’t– who are reactive– are not “real men.” We (unfortunately) re-inscribe this into the culture over and over and over.

Being empathetic and reactive aren’t necessarily bad things, but these received narratives of how to “correctly” perform our genders are having an impact on the way some playwrights are writing, and that impact is working against some women playwrights’ ability to tell their stories.

When you structure a play with a central character, you’re writing someone who occupies the same position in your play that you do in your own life, right? Every person is the central character in his or her personal play/film/video game, because your own life is experienced, of necessity, from your point of view. So when a woman sees herself as inhabiting a reactive position in life, she’s likely going to write a central female character as reactive, because that’s how she perceives what living as a woman IS.

When men write central characters– whether that central character is male or female– those characters are almost always reflective of the active position they’re taught to see as “normal.” Men don’t write reactive female central characters because they see an active self-perception as “normal” in general.

This is, obviously, just a guess, but I don’t know how else to explain what I’m seeing, and I’m seeing it over and over.

Plenty of women writers don’t make their central female characters reactive, but I see enough who do to make me think we should be deliberately and consciously teaching women playwrights to CLAIM THEIR OWN STORIES (the way men are taught to do from the cradle by every corner of the culture). Because a reactive central character isn’t as strong or as interesting as an active one, as women develop their voices as playwrights, I see less and less of this in their work. And of course there are some women writers who never do this. But the ones who do need to be taught to value themselves and their stories. BECAUSE THEY ARE VALUABLE.

So let me tell you now, early career women writers: YOUR STORIES ARE INTERESTING. YOUR STORIES ARE IMPORTANT. YOUR EXPERIENCES ARE IMPORTANT. YOU ARE IMPORTANT. You are important to me, to our work, to the theatre community. YOU ARE MORE THAN YOUR REACTIONS TO SOMEONE ELSE. So write that. And send it to me.

(PS to the men out there writing strong, compelling, active roles for women: Thank you. The women actors of the world also thank you. Don’t let anyone tell you that you don’t have the right to write stories for women because you don’t have “authenticity.” Jesus Timberlake Christ, do they really want there to be FEWER roles for women?)

UPDATE May 2015: For a blog post with only 22K hits, this wins the prize for being the most educational for me as a blogger. One of the most important things I learned from this early post is that the kind of people who will call a stranger an “asshole” or “disgusting” in public for something as small as a relatively unknown blog post are the most likely to be reacting to what they imagine is in the piece rather than what is actually there. I learned that the people who legitimately disagree with the ideas discussed in a post are the least likely to use abusive words. I learned that the people who legitimately disagree with the ideas discussed in a post are awesome, always making me reflect and interrogate my point of view. I learned that engaging with hateful people is always already a lost cause. I learned that I will engage with them anyway. I learned that there are dozens of theatremakers across the country who disagree with some of my ideas and with whom I would dearly love to share a pitcher of beer and an evening of lively discussion.

If you’re here for the first time, I would like to invite you to read some of my newer posts. Click around and see a little more of who I am and what I write. While comments for this one piece are now closed, I approve all comments that are not abusive, so feel free to disagree. Maybe one day we’ll get to share that beer and talk about it in person. Whether you like what you see on Bitter Gertrude or not, I genuinely thank you for being here.

Tagged dramaturgy, feminism, new plays, playwrights

Jan 22 2013

Theatre

Young Audience Members: NOT UNICORNS

Impact Theatre’s production of Romeo and Juliet. Pictured: Joseph Mason, Mike Delaney, Reggie White, Jonah McClellan, and Seth Thygesen. Photo by Cheshire Isaacs.

“THEATRE IS DYING. No young people are going to the theatre! There won’t be ANY AUDIENCE LEFT in a few years when they ALL DIE OUT.”

I hear this all the time, and it’s pharmaceutical grade nonsense. Young people come to the theatre all the damn time. I wrote this article for Theatre Bay Area in 2011. Click here to see it in its original setting.

(I just got back from my theatre company’s annual season planning retreat, so I’m doing the lazy reblogging dance instead of serving you up a fine handcrafted cold-filtered brand new blog post. One coming soon.)

******************

“How do you get so many young people into your theatre? How can we do that?”

I’ve been asked these questions over and over and over. And over. The real answer is: I’m not sure. All I can tell you is what we’ve done, how we’ve done it and what I think you can do to better your chances of attracting the 18-35 audience. Will it work for you? I don’t know. Did it work for us? Yes, indeed.

Bear in mind that you need to do all of these things, all at the same time. This isn’t a pick-and-choose situation.

1. Do the kinds of plays young people want to see.
I am astounded by the fact that some larger theatres seem to believe young people should *always* be willing to translate, and blame self-centeredness, lack of interest in culture, lack of education and general boorishness when the 18-40 crowd don’t turn out in droves for a production of Dinner with Friends or Love Letters. Yet these very same theatres won’t slot a new play by an emerging playwright for fear of their subscribers’ reactions. They expect young people to translate, and heap condemnation upon them when they don’t, but they see older audience members’ potential lack of interest as their due. (P.S. Believe me when I tell you that 65 is the new 35. Many older Bay Area theatergoers are more adventurous than you think. TRUST. Moving on.)

While it’s always a good thing to have an active interest in the stories of people not in your age group (or ethnic group, or regional group, or religious group, etc), everyone longs to see their own stories, hopes, dreams, fears, realities and fantasies reflected in honest ways. Young people are no different. The key phrase here is “in honest ways.” A play by an older playwright with roles for young actors may or may not speak honestly to your desired potential younger audience members. Some older writers write very well for younger characters. Many do not. Large numbers of young people are not going to spring for tickets to a show that portrays them as mindless, boorish assholes. Find plays that speak honestly about the lives of young people in some way.

But how do I do that, Melissa?

I’m so glad you asked.

There are over 400 theatre companies in the nine-county Bay Area. We do more world premiere plays than almost any other region in the country—last I checked we ranked third. Yet it’s very common that staff from theatres who purport to want young audiences don’t come to world premiere productions at small theatre companies. How many emerging playwrights have you read this year? If the number is under 10, you’re slacking. Impact Theatre, my company, has produced a world premiere by, and/or entirely introduced to the Bay Area, these playwrights: Sheila Callaghan, Steve Yockey, Prince Gomolvilas, Enrique Urueta, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Liz Meriwether, Lauren Yee, Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, Joshua Conkel, Trevor Allen, Jon Tracy. This is a partial list—I stuck to people you’ve probably heard of. Most importantly, we’re a tiny dog on a very, very big block. There are a wagonload of companies doing precisely what we do. Find them. See their shows. Spy on the playwrights they use. Companies like mine are your R&D department.

Find directors who can make classic plays relevant and interesting—because they are. There are directors all over the country who draw loads of younger audience members into theatres to see Shakespeare, and a bunch of them are directing at these aforementioned smaller theatres.

2. Be realistic about your pricing.
It’s always annoying to hear people say, “But they’ll spend $60 on a concert ticket! Why won’t they spend $60 on theatre?” It’s like wondering why someone would drive all the way across country to be with her beloved but not drive just as long in the hope that she will meet a hot stranger in a bar. People drop bucks on concert tickets because they already know and love the artist and have every expectation of seeing a great show and having a great experience. Condemning those people for refusing to drop a similar amount of money on a show they may know little about that will, let’s be honest, likely bore them because it’s aimed entirely at someone else, is a bit much, yes? If you’re going to condemn the under-40 crowd for not dropping $60 on your play about middle-class, middle-aged white people and their midlife crises, you should also condemn Grandma because she’s not stocking her DVD collection with $60 of Robot Chicken.

So keep your ticket prices accessible. Some companies do an under-30 rate, which, quite frankly, I’m not wild about. That 30-40 crowd is young enough to need enticing into your theatre but old enough to be on the brink of having enough money to become donors and subscribers. You want them. They’re routinely ignored and that’s not going to pay off in the long run for your audience building. Make an under-40 rate if you must. Make some performances pay-what-you-will. Make your less attractive seating areas $20 for the first few weekends. Whatever you need to do, do it.

3. Market to young people.
If you’re not active on Facebook and Twitter, you need to be right now. Learn how to use these powerful tools properly. This isn’t a social media marketing post, so I’ll assume you can figure out where to get this info and move on. The blog on your website is going nowhere unless you’re pushing it with Facebook and Twitter, by the way.

Find ways to make your outreach to young people honest and, most importantly, unpretentious. One of the main things keeping young people out of the theatre is that they’re afraid they won’t fit in—they’ll feel awkward and out of place. As my friend’s dad was fond of saying, they’re afraid they’ll “stand out like a sheep turd in a bowl of cream.” You want to make them as comfortable as possible. A big step towards that is to use your marketing to make them feel welcome. Not pretend welcome, as in, “We want to sell you tickets,” but truly welcome, like “Come over and play with us! We just got a new toy!”

Theatre is not medicine. We don’t go because it’s good for us. We go because we think it’ll be awesome. Make sure you’re approaching your marketing properly. “It’ll be awesome” + “You’re totally welcome and will be comfortable” + “We’re not stuffy and pretentious” will go a long way. Make sure you’re delivering those goods onsite as well. Nothing drives someone away from your company forever as efficiently as an undelivered promise.

And that’s pretty much it. This is what I believe has worked for us over the past 15 years. I hope it’s successful for you as well. We all need to work together to build audiences for our future as an artistic community. There’s not a single one of us that exists on an island. We’re all in this together.

Tagged audience development, TBA

Jan 16 2013

3 Comments

Culture

All right, drama queens, here are the ACTUAL 23 executive orders

I’ve been making the mistake of reading comments on news articles about this. People are going BATSHIT FUCKING LOCO.

Hey, gun-toting crazies: You might want to take a look at these before announcing to the world that the scary Black man is taking away your guns and you’re going to start an armed rebellion, mkay?

Here are the executive orders along with my commentary.

1. “Issue a presidential memorandum to require federal agencies to make relevant data available to the federal background check system.” (BACKGROUND CHECKS. Like we already have, but making sure states actually send in the damn data so we can track their convicted rapists.)

2. “Address unnecessary legal barriers, particularly relating to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, that may prevent states from making information available to the background check system.” (More about making the background checks work better)

3. “Improve incentives for states to share information with the background check system.” (Even MORE about making the background checks better– this time with 33% MOAR BRIBERY for recalcitrant red states)

4. “Direct the attorney general to review categories of individuals prohibited from having a gun to make sure dangerous people are not slipping through the cracks.” (Hey, maybe we should make sure convicted rapists can’t buy guns in all 50 states.)

5. “Propose rulemaking to give law enforcement the ability to run a full background check on an individual before returning a seized gun.” (When the cops take your gun away from you because you were starting shit at Applebee’s on a Friday night, now they get to run a background check on you to make sure you’re legally allowed to possess it. Sorry, Rapey McFelony! Everyone else– as you were.)

6. “Publish a letter from ATF to federally licensed gun dealers providing guidance on how to run background checks for private sellers.” (A letter?!?! About BACKGROUND CHECKS?!?! FASCISM AT WORK.)

7. “Launch a national safe and responsible gun ownership campaign.” (Hi. I’m Adrienne Barbeau, and I’m here to talk to you about guns)

8. “Review safety standards for gun locks and gun safes (Consumer Product Safety Commission).” (How do we make gun locks and gun safes better? ASKING THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!!11!)

9. “Issue a presidential Memorandum to require federal law enforcement to trace guns recovered in criminal investigations.” (Wait, they don’t already do this? The hell?)

10. “Release a DOJ report analyzing information on lost and stolen guns and make it widely available to law enforcement.” (Writing and releasing a report. Yeah, I agree with conservatives: sounds like CIVIL WAR TIME TO ME! NO REPORTS. And no glossy report covers, either! Those are for the gays and the libruls, right, boys?)

11. “Nominate an ATF director.” (This doesn’t count! You were supposed to do this ALREADY. What, is your laundry #19?)

12. “Provide law enforcement, first responders, and school officials with proper training for active shooter situations.” (I can see how properly trained cops, firefighters, and teachers would piss off conservatives. UNION THUGS.)

13. “Maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.” (OK, enforce the laws we already have, got it)

14. “Issue a presidential memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” (MEMORANDUM!?!? About RESEARCH? That’s almost as bad as a REPORT! GET MAH RAHFLE.)

15. “Direct the attorney general to issue a report on the availability and most effective use of new gun safety technologies and challenge the private sector to develop innovative technologies.” (HOLY SHIT A THIRD REPORT. Seriously, this is getting SCARY. Someone block off the Office Depot paper section, STAT.)

16. “Clarify that the Affordable Care Act does not prohibit doctors asking their patients about guns in their homes.” (Um, just writing that sentence does that, so, check.)

17. “Release a letter to health care providers clarifying that no federal law prohibits them from reporting threats of violence to law enforcement authorities.” (THE FUCK. Now we’re up to three reports, two memos, and a letter? TYRANNY. Don’t clarify existing law for doctors! YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST SHRED THE CONSTITUTION AND WIPE YOUR ASS WITH IT, LIBTARDS.)

18. “Provide incentives for schools to hire school resource officers.” (Wait, isn’t this what conservatives wanted? They’ve been screaming about it nonstop since Sandy Hook.)

19. “Develop model emergency response plans for schools, houses of worship and institutions of higher education.” (Emergency response training? AGAIN WITH THE TYRANNY.)

20. “Release a letter to state health officials clarifying the scope of mental health services that Medicaid plans must cover.” (ANOTHER letter? MORE clarification of existing law? THE AMERICAN EAGLE SHEDS A SINGLE TEAR FOR THE DEATH OF LIBERTY.)

21. “Finalize regulations clarifying essential health benefits and parity requirements within ACA exchanges.” (Weren’t you supposed to do this already? I don’t see how this counts. This one, along with the one about appointing the head of the ATF, are just filler, aren’t they? Was there a word count minimum for this?)

22. “Commit to finalizing mental health parity regulations.” (Ahem. See 21.)

23. “Launch a national dialogue led by Secretaries Sebelius and Duncan on mental health.” (Not a dialogue! Talking is TYRANNY and SOCIALISM and requires THINKING.)

Tagged conservative fuckery, guns, Obama

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