With just several hours before our fifth Lab, I find myself juggling a chaotic handful of emotions about the event, the project, and its future.  I’m eagerly anticipating what we will see tonight, but also dismayed at how many artists, though excited and interested in the project, and specifically the “Ritual” challenge, will not be participating.

I’m still quite excited about the enormously creative theatrical sketches the Lab has produced, but I find myself rather desperately seeking ways to help the lab “get legs.”  How can we get more artists involved?  How can the Lab be more of a tool and an arena for artistic experimentation?  And how do we share this?  How do we get people, artists and general audience, excited about attending the Lab?

I pose these questions to you, whoever you may be.

Artists: what do you want from Lab aimed at promoting theatrical experimentation.  If the Lab were [insert idea here] I would be so damn excited and inspired, I would yearn to be a part of it.

Audience types: If the Lab were [insert suggestion here] I would mark my calendar weeks in advace in order to witness the experimentation, and be part of the following discussion.

I always say it: the entire LAB series is an experiment in itself.  We’ve done some initial tests, and perhaps a few results to analyze.  But I want some more cooks in this kitchen.

How do we grow the Lab into something we need to do?  How does it become a ritual important enough to engage in monthly?

What do you think?

I just read this great little article by Tim Etchells about their creation process in The Gaurdian.

He certainly speaks to what we’re trying to accomplish at The Building Stage with our mission that “theater is made, not written”.  The Building Stage certainly doesn’t claim to be the only theater company creating in this manner, but the tradition of having a script and doing a play remains the majority of theater work. 

The sort of work Tim Etchells does, with his company Forced Entertainment, which is in England, is incredibly innovative and fascinating.  Most creators of work outside of the script/rehearsal paradigm are the ones making the most exciting work in the world.  That’s not always the case, but I believe that the work that is pushing forward theater as a medium is from people who are experimenting with process and creation.

I think Byrne would dig the way we’re tackling the Ring Cycle!  And we’re gonna do it with considerably less that $32 million!  (They’re staging the Cycle over two seasons!  We do it in a day!)  Check out his post here!

Two stand out quotes:

Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys.

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces.

More images from the LA production are here.

I’m not very good at talking about how I make theater.  I realized this at our most recent Lab event.  For this Lab, I took a Billy Collins poem about seeing a “Wonder of the World,” and made a scene about a girl trying to bring her doll to life.  During the discussion, I was asked, “When did it turn into a piece about a doll?”  I had no idea how to answer this.

Even now, with the benefit of time and editing, I’m still not sure I could sufficiently explain how I tend to create for theater.  What are my tools, or my developed skills?  I don’t think I’m the only theater-maker who might have a tough time with this, especially if we were trying to explain our creation methods to a non-theater person.

Why do we have a hard time talking about how we create?  I find this an interesting and important topic of inquiry.

It got me thinking of a RadioLab podcast.  (We at the Building Stage love to use RadioLab as a jumping off point…)  Now, it isn’t one of the brilliantly produced, hour long episodes the boys at WNYC are famous for.  Instead, it’s Robert Krulwich’s commencemnt speech at Cal Tech.  In it, he tries to convince the future scientists to take the time and effort to explain their work to non-scientists.  Doing so, he says, will protect science, and promote free thinking.  (Have a listen, it’s a marvelous speech.)

Now, I would like to make a similar assertion about how we talk about making theater.  I assert that Theater desperately needs artists who are able to coherently explain how we create, and why our creations are important.

It seems to me there is a reluctance to really explain our creation process.  Are we afraid of giving away secrets?  Or that our creation tactics are too nuanced or intuitive to be able to explain?  Maybe we suspect even we don’t know how we do what we do.  Maybe, we don’t think audiences would be interested.  I bet they will be.

So much of our effort at the Building Stage is devoted not only to the product we create, but to the process of creating.  It’s one of our core values!  “Made, not written.”  I think making the effort to clearly explain our methods for making theater will prove really beneficial, especially in two ways:

1. A more informed audience will be able to further engage with our creations.
2. By forcing ourselves to pay close attention to how we create, and putting the effort into being able to explain this, I think we’ll further develop our creative abilities.

SO, I’m going to be working on this!  I think it’s a worthy venture, and I hope others might join in on it.  These thoughts also seem to be at the heart of our Lab series, and I’m looking forward to using that as a venue to further investigate this topic.

If you have thoughts on this, as either an artist or patron, I’d love to hear them.  Join the discussion.  Help us shape the way we talk about how we make theater!

Reading through these recent posts by Blake  and Joanie, I found myself thinking about the same thing: Peter Sellars, discussing Othello.  In this video he talks (enthusiastically) about what this 400 year old play shows us about our world today.

Though Mr. Sellars had initially hated Othello, seeing in it a plot he could not relate to, and just an opportunity for famous actors to strut their stuff, he has come to some fairly lucid connections between world of Othello and America, now.  And I think this connects to the reason it’s important for us to keep reimagining and rediscovering classic plays and operas.

Whether it’s Othello or Don Giovanni, these works were not created for us.  They were created for the audiences of the day.  Can you imagine Tracy Letts writing a play intended for an audience in 2392?  Ridiculous, right?  (Though, maybe entertaining.)  I think it’s just as ridiculous to re-stage these works in a way that mimics their original presentation.  This isn’t making theatre, or entertainment, or art.  It’s making museum pieces.  Relics.

Plus, Sellars points out that, over the years, these classics gather a ton of baggage.  Everybody reads Othello in high school.  And everybody has a preconceived idea of what these stories are about.  And often, we aren’t looking into the plays for what is there, but instead, we’re looking for what we think should be there.   And of course, that’s what we find.  Old, dead stereotypes.

I find it exciting that, in directing Othello, Sellars very definitely asked ‘what does this play say about today?’    And ‘What can we learn from it?’  It seems he was trying to shake all the dust and stereotypes loose of the play, so he could present the parts we can still hold onto today.

A recent Shotgun Players/PS 122 production of Beowulf, 1000 Years of Baggage, had a similar aim.  Their stated intention was to examine “not only the events of the poem itself (heroes, monsters, retaliation, underwater battles, horses, swords) but also academia and the history of criticism that has sustained and stifled the poem for years.  At the heart of the piece is the question of how art survives criticism, as the character Beowulf attempts to reclaim the purity of his tale.”

I think the same written text must yield a very different PLAY as it travels from one country to another, and from year to year.  And this seems honest.  And exciting.  Something to embrace, rather than scold.

I think of purists, shaking their fingers at modern retellings of old stories.  But what’s pure about a fossil?  These plays and operas weren’t meant to feel old and distant.  They were supposed to be exciting, surprising, fresh, and powerful.  These intentions are what we should hold onto.  We’ll just have to use very different tools to achieve them today.

I was struck yesterday when I read this article on the New York Times about stage directors re-envisioning opera.

He posits that the problems in re-imagining opera often come when they feel like they are only halfway going there, that they aren’t going far enough to make the work truly visionary, only putting it in a new setting.

I think that this is an interesting point, but it also makes me wonder: what is the point of “updating” or “re-envisioning” an opera?

The opera world suffers from having a limited repertoire. Not that new operas aren’t written, but they seldom make their way into the rep, aside from a few John Adams and a handful of other composers. Because I’m not a classical music expert, or even much more than a dilettante, I can’t address that issue. But I can say that I agree, the operas that we do perform over and over are great. I love them as much as the next guy. But it is this constant barrage of the same Mozart pieces that create the need for directors to re-envision them. Because the operas aren’t new, the productions need to be new.

What becomes frightening in this to me is the director’s need to be “new” to have something exciting to show with an old text. Sometimes, I think the problem comes from the director placing a new “concept” on a production that perhaps doesn’t really fit, or hasn’t been thought through from each detail of the piece, to see if it works…so on the modern, neon set, the performers are acting out the scenario just as it was on the painterly realism set. When directors are pressured, as I think they are in opera, to be new for new sake, the result will often be trite and undeveloped.

Now, there’s a big difference in that, and in a director being inspired by the music or text to go in a direction with the opera that might be new, but it’s just what they see, and they follow that trail of bread crumbs down a really exciting rabbit hole. This is why I think that theater directors are good for opera. Not that they always get it right, but I believe that at least from this theater director who does opera’s point of view, I would work in this way. And I would come up with something new, something fresh, but not because I’m trying so hard to…because that’s what would come out.

Maybe we don’t need to try so hard. Maybe we just need to create art that is true to ourselves.

And how is this relevant to The Ring Cycle? We’ve taken the opera out of our opera. We’re doing a massive re-envisioning of what the form of the opera even is. And why? It seemed like it was a really exciting thing to do. It excited us, and we can only hope that it excites everyone else too. We’re being true to ourselves as artists. I hope that opera fans come and see our show. I hope that it will point to new things in the opera that they haven’t noticed before. I want Wagner fans who have seen the ring to discover new pieces in it, and to enjoy that experience, and maybe bring that back with them when they travel to LA next summer to see the opera cycle again.

I’ve got nothing against new. I just want it to be true.

Chris Jones recently wrote about the Broadway production of “A Steady Rain” in his blog on the Chicago Tribune site.

This play, written by Chicago playwright Keith Huff, premiered at Chicago Dramatists in 2007. It received rave reviews at the time and transferred to a commercial production at the Royal George. Now, the play is set to open on Broadway starring some rather famous Hollywood actors. And it’s raking in tons of money despite still being in previews.

The point of Chris’s blog post seems to be the promotion of Chicago theater, and maybe even the encouragement of Chicagoans to see more work in the city. His claim is that while you could pay $134 to see the play now, you could have seen the “same great Chicago play” two years ago for a fraction of that price. While I think I generally agree with Chris’s goal (which I assume to be an argument against needing Hollywood stars to sell the public on seeing theater), I highly disagree with the statement that this is the same great Chicago play, nor is it the “Broadway transfer” he states.

The director is not the same; the actors are not the same; the lighting, costume, scenic, and sound design are not the same. The size of the theater is not the same (and therefore the relationship between actors and audience is also changed). The only thing that is the same is the script.

So… is a “play” simply the script or is it the production? Clearly, a production is greatly driven by its script, and a poor script most often will yield a poor production. On the other hand, a great script only occasionally yields a great production. The details of how that script is brought to life and presented live in the theater are not incidental. When you plunk down your money to buy a ticket, and enter a theater, what is the “play” you are going to see and experience? All of the details of the production, including the script, go into making your experience.

Having seen neither the original Chicago production nor this new Broadway version, I can’t even pretend to say that one is better than the other. But I can say with certainty that they are not the same “plays.” This is theater, not a class in dramatic literature. “Hamlet” is a great text, but I guarantee we’ve all seen some terrible productions of this play.

The reason this stirs me up is that it is tied directly to the philosophy behind the Building Stage: “We believe theater is made, not written.” This belief is not against the value of great writing for the stage, but rather it is an acknowledgment that the script only makes up a fraction of what the audience experiences when they go to the theater.