A Fool and His Money...

One of my favorite Tom Waits' lyrics is "There's a sucker born every minute/ You just happened to be comin' along at the right time". It makes me maliciously delighted each time I hear it. Alas, we all have our moments of playing the fool. Sometimes for better reasons than others.

Producing a tiny show in NYC is the ultimate act of foolishness. The odds are against you and the audience for small shows is so much smaller than you could possibly imagine. It is like pulling teeth to even get your friends to cough up $10 to support you while you get your sea legs. To be fair, your friends know that most things produced on this scale are usually so esoteric they want to shoot themselves or in such bad taste they want to shoot you. They're just too polite to tell you that. Well, I am lucky because our show is actually good. But no one will really believe that until they see a third party review. Rumor has it, we'll be getting one soon and if we do it will mean a longer life for our little show.

Small is not always bad. I do lean toward a poor theatre as my personal aesthetic, mostly for practical reasons but also because I do truly think that the theatre needs to separate itself from the slam bang spectacles of over stimulation that we've become accustomed to in this culture. No one is coming to the theatre- but people are out there searching in these troubled times. They are searching for solace and looking to religion and spirituality to make sense of their world and there is no reason that the theatre can't play a part in that sacred dance. In fact, I think it is vitally necessary that we strip away all pretense and acknowledge what the theatre truly is. The theatre is NOT film. It should stop pretending to be so. I never understood the idea of bringing movies to the stage (regardless of the fact that I have participated in one of these efforts- much to my own personal shame). It makes sense to make movies out of plays. To do so is to take a piece of material to a wider audience. To bring film to the stage is to limit the scope of a cinematic story and bring it to a much smaller, niche audience. This does not compute. Plus it just speaks to the producers' inability to take risks or say anything of any immediate relevence.

Theatre has the ability to be nimble. It has the ability to be immediate if we don't bog it down with unnecessary pyrotechnics and splashy numbers designed to compete with the cinema or television. Plus those flashy things raise the cost of a production so high that it becomes cost prohibitive for the general public to see it. If a regular citizen, such as myself, wants to go see a Broadway (or increasingly even an Off-Broadway) show they would have to save up to see one. Maybe they could see one once or twice a year. That doesn't seem quite right to me. The flash and need for profit have made a commercial theatre that is flaccid and without any real social or political weight. I would argue that social and political relevance is preciesly the role of theatre. Or it should be. Theatre should be about something. Anyone (and I say this both with excitement and trepidation) can put up a show in 4-6 weeks. There should be more theatre about NOW. But there won't be until producers grow some balls.

Now, I also have a problem with not-for-profit theatre. Not as a concept, because for a long time I thought that was definitely the way to go in order to have a viable company. Now I am not so sure. There are a lot of fingers in that not-for-profit pie and an awful lot of opinion about what is being said or done. This also seems to be a severely limiting force in the theatre. With these forces in place, it certainly seems that the theatre going public is being offered an awful lot of nothing.

Don't write me and complain that I am over simplifying because I know that I am. I know I am being general and that there is good work going on all over the place. The only problem is, I can't afford to go see it and I know there are plenty of others in my position. So, I have offered a really good show and a good price and it is still like pulling teeth to get an audience. Everything is a bit of an uphill battle, isn't it?

Of course there is no courage without fear, no profit without loss and no victory without challenge. I am not so jaded as to believe that the struggle is not worth the effort. In fact I believe the struggle is all we've got and we had better get a taste for it because it isn't going away any time soon.

And I wouldn't want it to.