EXTRA CRITICUM

How Zoom Forced us to Build Back Audience Better (One Unmuted Microphone at a Time)

In the Spring of 2020 as a pandemic rose to take center stage, theatres everywhere shuttered in the face of clear evidence that crowding indoors with hundreds of people could cost us our lives. 

So, what did we do, ever-resourceful artists that we are?

For the most part, we took our theatre to the Zoom box. 

Only pretty quickly I noticed a problem.

Several times during the first 7- 8 months of Pandemic Pause I found myself attending a reading of a play written by a friend who I know to be extremely talented.

Yet the plays felt stale.

Without exception these Zoom readings of new plays were falling flat. Hardly a moment felt alive. In fact, I'd argue, plays were being killed by the Zoom platform.

Why?

It took me a few weeks before it suddenly dawned on me.

The Benefit of Our Doubt (or: Dear Writing Contest Judge)

Dear Writing Contest Judge:

Before you open the document to encounter my submission, a few words of advice, one writer to another:

If something appears to be, at first glance, bland or flat or without context, hang in there and how about you give me the benefit of the doubt that I might see what you see and might be placing this or that in your way, coming between you and the central purpose of the piece for a reason.

And if you feel the central purpose of the piece is not 100% crystal clear, consider the possibility that this writer may prefer his audience do a bit of the work rather than spoon feeding them his thesis sentence stuffed into the mouths of his main characters.

And if you find one of my characters to be deplorable, perhaps even unspeakably so, and it makes you sick to have to consider this kind of evil, let's remember to remind ourselves that the writer is not the character and the character is not the piece and, thankfully, neither is the reader nor the writer so they can both expect to safely fall asleep at home in their own warm cosy beds tonight long after the final moment of disturbing theatre has passed.

Sometimes what first appears to be a mistake is no mistake at all. All good things come to those who wait.

Oh, and if at the end of my piece you are disappointed with how it all turned out, please consider the possibility that an unsatisfying ending is not necessarily a bad thing. 

And if you doubt this assertion, I have a two-word rebuttal:

Hedda Gabler.

Finally, please know that if in the end you find my craft and creative spark to be lacking, I guarantee you this: I did not set out to do poorly. I tried. Very hard. Nobody sets out to write a monumental piece of crap.

So please, whatever you do, I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't crap all over my... crap.

Sincerely,

The Author of Entry #3627

Written on the final day of tabulating scores for the 2nd annual Hear Me Out New American Monologue Competition. Finalist Winners' Pieces to be performed at the Labor Day Festival & Awards Ceremony. HearMeOutMonologues.com

No Words. Helen Levitt's 1948 Silent Film: In the Street Gets a Gorgeous New Score by Ben Model

Helen Levitt was a friend of the family but I only met her maybe 5 or 6 times. As it turns out she was best friends with one of Mom's close friends, also named Helen. Well, these two Helens were often falling out of love with each other and so we only saw Helen Levitt rarely. But I remember studying with astonishment one of her books of photographs of New York City street scenes. What I immediately loved about her pictures was that there was so much richness of the human experience in every shot yet they were framed and angled in a way that did not dictate how I was to feel. Like life, these photographs did not prejudge. There was room the breathe.

Take a look at this marvelous moving picture which really works a lot like her still photographs do. 

 

Our pasts -- recent and distant -- collide on E. 4th Street

Members of New Opera Theatre Ensemble (the opera company I founded in 1988) have been meeting once a week for an hour via Zoom ever since the pandemic arrived. During the hour we spend together online, we often improvise musical etudes. One great byproduct of the pandemic has been reconnecting with this bright brilliant endlessly inventive musical family that I've missed but that now live scattered here and there. Pictured clockwise from upper left: Vicky Pittman (Keene, NH), Mary Ann Lanier (Northampton, MA), Jon Rosenthal (San Francisco, CA), Roland Tec (New York, NY), Merle Perkins (Boston, MA), and Sylvie Stewart (Nashua, NH).

During Pandemic Pause, I've been consciously pushing myself to get out of my comfort zone artistically. What does this mean for Rolando Teco? Well, I've always enjoyed performing to a point but I do suffer from exaggerated stage fright. Sometimes my performance anxiety grabs hold of me mid-morning and doesn't let go until the moment I'm taking that final curtain call at night. It's one of the many reasons I never seriously considered acting or performing music as a career. The nerves (mine, to be exact) might've consumed me.

To a degree, the safety of the barrier that is Zoom by way of my laptop has let me experiment in this arena more than I might be comfortable doing otherwise.

Anyway, when the first email from Gaven Trinidad came in inviting folks to participate in a virtual open mic co-hosted by New York Theatre Workshop and Poetic Theatre, I didn't immediately move on as I might have were it any other year. Let me pause here to observe that just about 6 months before the pandemic hit my friend Yvonne Delet and I had gone to a Moth Slam at Housing Works and I'd put my name in the hat to tell a story. And I was a bundle of nerves. The beer I had did little to calm me. They pull the names out of the hat at random and throughout the evening. When the first name was called that began with an "R" I almost choked from fear. "Don't call my name, please don't call my name" I heard myself whispering.

But then an interesting thing happened. 

They called my name. And in that moment when I registered that they'd said "Roland" I was filled with an unexpected emotion.

Joy.

And I got up and told my story and it went well and I was runner up and when I got home, I grabbed a big 5x7 pink index card and scrawled on it in Sharpie: 

As nervous 
as I was, the moment they called
my name, I was
T H R I L L E D

A Year in Your View

It's been a year of connecting storytellers with audiences, a culmination of my own searching for a way to reach through the screen of my laptop and only connect.

Yesterday as Suzanne Bachner and I rehearsed my own monologue for Monday's presentation, I realized that the piece itself, Danger Round This Corner, is really the perfect artistic expression of what I've been struggling to achieve for myself and provide for others ever since that day in March 2020 when suddenly the world was told: 

Go home.

In record time there was an ad that appeared on TV for Bright Star Care that sought to spin the pandemic into gold for the home care industry. 

 

 

The grim truth of this period of protracted isolation and dislocation from the rituals of community has been what it has uncovered at the core of our social isolation. When so many of the distractions of life spent on the go were stripped away, many of us found ourselves reassessing the value of our relationships. Which connections have we been willing or eager to invest in from the privacy of that space behind our screens?

The answers were hardly ever what we expected.

In Danger Round This Corner, I play a man at odds with his adult siblings, adrift during pandemic, finding that he has somehow crossed a line he did not know was there who finds himself adrift and without a port in this storm. 

In the Spring of 2020, the future for playwrights looked grim because playwrights unlike almost any other creative artist develop and thrive in a symbiotic relationship with their audience. Removing the audience from the life of the playwright is akin to depriving a plant of water and light. It may start to wilt. And if enough time passes, its ability to return to its former fullness recedes into oblivion.