EXTRA CRITICUM

Where you make your art can make a world of difference.

I've been spending August away from home co-producing one of my own plays. And I have to say I'm noticing what a difference it makes when you're working in a place where most people you bump into actually do agree with the following statements:

Life is better with art.

Therefore we should all support the people who make it.

In fact, things have been going so swimmingly well here that I've been asked by some of our crew not to reveal the name of this city for fear it may lead to even more overcrowding and the kind of housing shortages that turn great amazing cities into... well, San Francisco.

Here are just a few examples of what I'm talking about:

Flour, water, yeast. Never Lose Sight of the Essential Ingredients.

We're in the home stretch of a Kickstarter campaign to raise 2/3 of the production budget for my play, What We Get to Keep. And, frankly, it freaks me out. I've never had this sort of a public, social media driven metaphorical gun to my producer head before. I ran a non-profit for a decade. I raised hundreds of thousands from investors for two indie films. There were always rules around who we could ask, how we could ask, how much we could raise.

But you know what was never the case til now?

It was never all happening out in public online with every dollar raised tracked, announced, applauded (or not) online for all to see day and night until one day me, my project and all my collaborators would be shoved into one of two columns:

SUCCESS                     OR              `    FAILURE

I  keep trying to remind myself of one of the most important lessons learned during the pandemic shutdown.

In Memoriam: Dr. Nechama Tec

I think I was 9 or 10 yrs. old when my mother, the sociology professor, revealed herself to also be a Holocaust survivor. It was then that, as she described it, her memories began to stir requiring her to sit down to write what would become one of the most important Holocaust memoirs, Dry Tears.

Dry Tears focused on her experiences in Poland surviving the war by passing as Christian, assuming a false identity as she and her family were harbored by Polish Catholic families. 

Anyone caught assisting Jews under Nazi occupation was risking death. And the Germans were serious about this. 

Following her memoir, mom followed her curiosity. She wanted to understand who these people were who risked everything to save the lives of complete strangers. And so she embarked on what would become her life's work, uncovering examples of altruism under the most extreme circumstances. And her next book, When Light Pierced the Darkness was the culmination of a decade of interviewing rescuers and survivors about their experiences. She was an unusually sensitive interviewer. Her colleague, Professor Joel Blatt, with whom she taught a Holocaust course at the University of Connecticut remarked recently that she was the best answerer of student questions he'd ever seen. Because "Nechama was able to intuit the deeper questions that lay beneath a student's question and she never let them go unaddressed."

 

Juggling has its place. But for artists the risks are great.

The other day I had to have a conversation I've had many times before. And yet, as I answered the phone I dreaded the call because in this instance it was coming from an old friend, an actor I've worked with many times, someone I love and enjoy and have nothing but good will toward. Still, he was calling to tell me that another project, one he sees as somehow bigger or more career-enhancing would potentially disrupt his participation in a collaboration with me that was already underway. 

They Tell Us to Say Yes to Everything. But Should We?

He was asking for compromise, for me to adjust our production schedule to allow him to say yes to both rather than no to the other project.

We've all been there. You're working on what you're working on when out of the blue some shiny new opportunity presents itself, seductively calling to you to drop what you've been doing and turn your attention to this other thing, this newer thing, this shinier thing which you start to suspect may just be the ticket you've been waiting for: that one transformative project. The catalyst for taking your career to a whole other level.

The only problem with this thinking is that careers don't work that way. 

The Myth of that One Golden Opportunity... it's a myth.

Has anyone in the publishing or media industry ever asked Amazon to include quotes from actual reviews by critics?

A friend recently sent me a link to the Amazon streaming page for my first feature film, All the Rage. At first I was surprised by the choice of image they'd selected. But it didn't take me long to notice that out of 5 stars my film is listed as having earned only 3.5

And, look, 3.5 stars ain't bad... unless you know that in most newspaper reviews the film got 5.

So in that context, I'm thinking: What happened?

Of course we know what happened. Not unlike a Roberts Supreme Court decision, the facts on the ground may not have changed one bit. Only the referees are different. Amazon merely posts the average of all the consumer posted reviews to the site. 

Consumer-Only Reviews Support the Amazon Narrative. Amazon is God.

From one perspective—the business interests of a platform eager to remind us of its own hegemony—the choice is sound. No need to look beyond the feedback posted directly to Amazon by consumers just like you. Because as long as there's never a need to leave the site to help choose your next purchase, it gets just a little more awkward to argue with the fundamental Bezos belief: There is nothing for you beyond the walls of the kingdom.

But You Want Help Picking the Best Movie to Watch. And Consumer-Only Aggregates Are Not Very Helpful at All.

What Do You Most Need From Your Next Script Reader?

You Need Them to Forget They're Reading.

You want the reader of your next new thing to almost forget they're reading a script and embark on an emotional journey with your characters as defined by your structure. Of course it's true. Reading a script in silence will never carry us to the emotional highs and lows of lives in conflict portrayed by actors while we sit cloaked in darkness.

Nevertheless, experience tells us that professional gatekeepers are only going to advocate to their colleagues on behalf of work that moves them.

No one stirs up the courage to knock on the studio head's door for a moment propelled by an intellectual notion. No. We find it in ourselves to suggest to colleagues "this script must be produced"solely as a result of our having been moved.

The Next Best Thing to Being There

For anyone who's ever submitted an original screenplay or stage play to a writing competition or a producing entity you know that the few days just before you hit SEND and the following weeks or months of waiting can be kind of excruciating. There will always be little things you worry about getting just right and elements of your storytelling that you hope will appreciated by the reader(s).

A Thousand Cuts Death by Social Media (06-08-23)

 
What changes when we ignore the impulse to post?

To access all the previously published posts in this weekly series, click the Social Media category in the right hand column. NB: Posts that appear to be fine

 

Last week I shared one striking observation from the first 7 days of 2018 when as an experiment I decided to completely abstain from Facebook. That when the impulse to post to social media is not immediately attended to, the thoughts we just let lie have a way of expanding, collecting connected ideas and developing into stuff of far greater significance and impact.

But as I asked last week: Why should we care?

There are at least two angles from which you might consider the question of posting to social media vs. keeping your thoughts to yourself at the initial moment you first notice them.

1. The Impact on the Thoughts Themselves.
2. The Impact on Your Thinking in General.

Radiolab's 'Right to be Forgotten' Reveals an Avalanche of Disturbing Evidence: Something Fundamental in our Humanity has Started to Come Undone.

The Question for Those of Us Who Might Find this Alarming is: Are We Too Late to Claw Our Way Back to the Core of Who We Are?

 

 

And I have to say, since this episode aired in 2019 we've only drifted further ... Now, in an effort to encourage more of you to listen to this episode which I think is very important to know about, I'm going to leave this post to just this. The link plus a couple somewhat provocative statements. 

 

Perhaps if you listen to this episode you will find a minute to post a comment here either arguing or clarifying my point by pointing to your own observations about all this. And we can start something akin to a sort of dialogue, though not dialogue in the strictest sense of the word because dialogue demand that two or more speakers are fully present for the natural human back and forth to occur. 

Think about text messaging, even email exchanges. Not dialogue. Not by a mile. What do you suppose might be lost in this trade off -- we'll all stop having extended conversations and limit our communication to about a hundred characters hastily typed on a screen. 

 

Dispatches from a Troubled World

The five monologues we'll be presenting for you Monday are a rather eclectic bunch. Now that we're starting each Some1Speaking evening with a song performed by a singer-songwriter of heft, I invariably have some sort of a conversation or email exchange with the songwriter to try and select a song that will complement the collection of characters and struggles on display in the hour of Zoom mini dramas. 

This month as I described the five wonderful (and so richly varied) plays (and they really are short solo plays) to Anke Summerhill, I found myself landing on this:

Dispatches from a Troubled World.  But I don't know if that quite captures it.

A Thousand Cuts Death by Social Media (06-01-23)

Beginning June 1, 2023 (and continuing with a new entry posted here each Thursday) I will be publishing a long and winding essay building an argument (brick by tiny brick) for a global decoupling from social media. It is my conviction that our very survival depends on it. And  this series is my earnest attempt to convince you as well. I want to be absolutely transparent. I have no skin in this game, no business relationships of any kind with any of the platforms. Although this first set of entries begins with Facebook, this is not an argument against Facebook specifically but against every single platform that appeals to our human need for connection and exploits that need without concern for the detritus and misery it leaves in its wake. If you find these arguments persuasive I hope you'll keep coming back for more, feeling free to post your thoughts in the comments and share the posts with your friends. It is not lost on me: the irony of asking for help sharing via the platforms a clarion call for all of humanity to reject these very platforms. But tell me, how else is guy with an idea and no marketing budget to get the word out? In the end, long after you and I have said our last goodbye, I'm sure of this: word of mouth will always be the most powerful way for ideas to spread: when one person looks another in the eye and says: "Trust me." Thanks. - RT

A Thousand Cuts Death by Social Media:
Intro to the Experiment

 

The Weight and Force of a Simple Black Book Given with Love

I was treading water through one of the darkest times of my life when I really didn't know if I would ever make anything again. And my ex-boyfriend Andrew Altenburg bought me a present for no reason other than a desire to simply remind me that I was loved.

The gift was this simple black notebook, beautifully bound inside a black vinyl cover, about 100 pages of loosely ruled paper. 

No big whoop, right?

Au contraire!

The gifts we're given in life are always wrapped in one way or t'other and Andrew's gift of this notebook (or journal, as some would call it) was wrapped in his explanation of its purpose. I paraphrase:

I'm giving you this book of blank pages so that you will have one place in which to jot down all your dreams for the future. Any time you have an idea for a project you might someday like to undertake, jot down your thoughts right here.

Jennifer Garner Social Media Controversy Should Be Heard as an Alarm. A Mass DeCoupling is Long Overdue

My InBox lit up with this eye-catching headline from Medium yesterday::

Jennifer Garner Can Fuck Right Off

Normalize Calling Out Child Abuse Even When Hot People Do It

The piece goes on to attack Jennifer Garner for the recent revelation that she does not allow any of her three children to be on social media. The author labels Garner's embargo as "child abuse" which I think is a bit over-the-top. I mean, even if you disagree with the parenting choice, it feels like calling it "child abuse" is a stretch.

By this logic, would we then call Mormon parents who forbid their children from drinking alcohol and caffeine child abusers by virtue of the fact that they've cut their kids out of a life experience commonly shared by everyone else they'll meet when they go to college? Is the parent who decides that their kid will not be joining all the other kids on a Spring Break trip to Florida because she doesn't want her children to set foot in that state also a child abuser?

The Difference Between a Consumer and an Audience Member

A friend who is a Tony voter (Yes, I'm that old.) recently sent me a curious text. It read:

Want to see a Tony show June 1?
Trust me. You'll love it cause I'll choose it.

After a brief impulse to press her to reveal which show she was inviting me to, it occurred to me that if I could set aside my ego and my pride which whisper meaningless nothings like: 

You are too important a person with limited hours
in the day to waste an entire evening on
some sub-par work! What if it's something empty and
 heartless and tedious? You'll never get those hours back!

On the other hand...

If I thought about it differently, it is a unique kind of openness we feel when we sit in the growing darkness as the house lights fade and the show is about to begin. Blissfully ignorant of what this thing we're going to witness is about or possibly even what its title might be...

Name America's No. 1 Underwriter of the Arts

At last night's session of this year's Self-Production Boot Camp (for members of the Dramatists Guild of America), I posed a loaded question I never tire of asking because the responses I get always offer new insights into the current state of our culture.

We were in the middle of a session on fundraising when I interrupted the flow to pose a question that I don't think enough of us have ever even considered. 

Who is the greatest subsidizer of the Arts in the United States?

The Zoom room echoed with the sounds of stunned (stumped) silence. So, put another way:

From which sector does the mother lode of Arts underwriting come from?

One of the things that's most thrilling about teaching Self-Production Boot Camp is that I get to swim in the current of where the newest work is taking shape these days. The motivated, focused and endlessly inventive creative artists who are drawn to even consider the possibility that they could (or maybe even should?) produce their next new work give me hope for a better future. 

And so when Wednesday comes around I always look forward to those 90 minutes when I get to absorb as much of their optimism and ambition as I wish.

I'm excited to share another Zoom-based monologue from the pandemic

So, I'm kind of on this roll. Or kick. Or something. I don't know. I've been writing and performing monologues about the past couple years of pandemic insanity... written specifically for the flat rectangular stage that is the Zoom box. 

And I'm loving it.

Somehow it feels like Zoom is the perfect sandbox for me to play in when exploring various aspects of what the hell we've all just been through. 

I first presented one of these in August 2021 when I premiered Danger Round This Corner at Some1Speaking. And it felt cathartic creating a character who felt as stuck as I did—albeit in different ways unique to him—in a new reality defined by pandemic isolation. And because we always have the audience unmute in the Hear Me Out Black Box  it was seriously fun performing and riding the waves of laughter. 

Then, this past summer I gave several performances of A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored, for which I'm now writing a companion piece to be performed in person. But Nagging was also Zoom-site-specific. And I had a blast trying to make a 55-min. monologue feel more like a dialogue with the small audience gathered each night.

Monday I'll present my latest Zoom monologue, Tag, which begins when a sort-of-ex shows up unannounced in this guy's personal Zoom meeting. Join us if you're free. I'd love to hear what you think.