EXTRA CRITICUM

On Judgments, Intuition and Forward Motion

Recently I had to make a painful decision and remove myself from a toxic situation. Without going into too revealing a set of details, I will say it concerned a working group of individuals and one in particular who was jeopardizing the forward motion of the group in pursuit of its raison d'etre.

The experience reminded me of a simple and essential truth of pursuing a life as an artist.

The Day My Systems Failed Me. New systems often introduce new complications but if we know to expect a bump in the road or two, we can meet the challenges with confidence.

March 20, 2021. The day started out like any other. I checked my calendar to scan the horizon of the day ahead and planned my approach to various items that popped up. I admit I was surprised at how easy the day seemed and though I felt a vague unconscious question rising around the fact of this particular Friday including only one private studio session, I quickly explained it away with my usual go to: Time is elastic under Pandemic Pause.

It wasn't until evening when I got around to checking email that I discovered what had occurred.

Due to an error in the creation of an automated system for scheduling and tracking student appointments, almost an entire day of private sessions were missed. The result? Several students in my private studio found themselves logging on to our private Zoom meetings and watching the time pass as they waited for a teacher who would never show.

As my high school drama teacher was fond of saying: Not good people!

New Remastered Demo Tracks for The Curse of Batvia

I'm really happy to have finally taken the time to organize the best versions of the songs that make up the musical THE CURSE OF BATVIA so that they now live in one online playlist for anyone considering producing this silly scary and slightly insane little show. Katherine Burger wrote the book and lyrics and I composed the music. It was fun to collaborate with a wordsmith who is also a musician and shares my passion for dissonance as a theatrical spice. I'm very proud of this baby of ours. And hope one day soon it will be produced.

We're now one year into Pandemic Pause. Your laptop is your lifeline. Make peace with it.

We've now been living our lives on Zoom for a year. What does this mean?

Well, among other things, it means most of our interactions--social and professional--are governed by what the device we use to log in will and will not do. My students are playwrights, directors, actors, singers and filmmakers. All creative artists with professional goals for making important new work and sharing it with the world.

It's based on this last assumption that I offer up a few thoughts on your relationship to your technology, specifically to the device that is your portal. Because in the end, you may write the Next Great American [fill-in-the-blank] but if you can't manage to save it as a PDF and send it out into the world, well... a certain tree in a certain forest comes to mind.

1. 1. Zoom. I may have dissed Zoom in some other posts and of course I understand it's not the same thing as actual sharing of actual air space. But for now, it's what we've got. Learn how it works. Don't be the one kill-joy who arrives at the party asking where the drinks are. The bar is usually in the kitchen and the ice is usually in a bucket by the sink and glasses are set out beside the bottles. Help yourself. If you don't yet know how to mute and unmute, turn your video on and off, etc. etc. you have only yourself to blame. Zoom has not rearranged the layout of this party in 12 months. They have helpful tutorial videos at zoom.us. Find them. Watch them. Google some others. Know how to use the tools available.

WHY then HOW

If you stick with this artistic life long enough (and by that I mean years, not months) you will come to recognize that the act of making stuff up to share with the world is frequently cluttered with dashed hopes, disappointment (in others sure, but also in oneself) and days and days when it feels as though nobody, not one living breathing soul other than yourself, really gives a damn or is even aware of what it is you’re up to. Or that you even exist.

When you are making something for the world and the world doesn’t appear to care, that can feel like one hell of a lonely bed you’ve made for yourself.

But here’s the thing. The loneliness and purposelessness are transitory. They can arrive and pull you down into the darkest despair quite unexpectedly. Often with little or no warning. Thankfully, they can just as easily pick up and fly off with the next slight breeze.

When the format is the content and vice versa. (or: you'll never escape the power of proper script formatting so run if you like you fool but in the end the show will prove this truth: when it comes to script format you can run but you can't hide.

It happens every few weeks or so, at least once a semester and definitely more than once a month. One of the scriptwriters in one of my workshops has brought in pages to read and they look like this:

STAGE BARE. MAYBE A CHEST OF DRAWERS SOMEPLACE NOT TOO NOTICEABLE. ALICE ENTERS SHABBILY DRESSED. SHE'S HUMMING A TUNE OF SOME SORT.

A: Hey, Idiots! You're all still here?

L: Yeah. What you gonna do about it?

etc etc.

Or maybe they look more like proper Dramatists Guild modern script formatting with one lone and glaring exception; the writer has chosen one element among the elements we expect to see on these pages -- stage directions, character names, dialogue, parentheticals. etc. -- and has given this familiar member of the family a new way of appearing on the page. Perhaps they've decided that ALL CAPS is not enough, they need ALL CAPS AND BOLD or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC or ALL CAPS AND BOLD AND ITALIC AND PURPLE.

When I was in grad school for Music Composition occasionally one of us would bring in pages of a new masterpiece that didn't look like normal music notation. 99% of the time, whatever strange visual we were taking time to explain and debate was referring to a way of making sound that was not new. Just the approach to notating it was. One of my professors Martin Boykan enjoyed such moments immensely.