As I thought about whether to move the RT Inner Circle to Patreon I had to stop and think about everything I'd been producing, presenting, performing or hosting over the past few years.
Would the offerings stack up and strike all of you as worth it?
Patreon offers artists a reliable revenue stream (albeit a modest one) by inviting members of the artist's sphere of influence to make a monthly financial contribution to the general health and well-being of the artist and by extension everything they create and offer to the world each year.
It's a tiered model so, those most casually affiliated contribute something you may hardly notice. In our case we set the lowest tier at a $3 monthly contribution.
$3 per month amounts to a little more than $.09 a day. Hopefully anyone who has found joy or value of any kind in any of my workshops or the Hear Me Out programming won't hesitate to join us.
I decided to simply keep the three existing benefits of RT Inner Circle membership as has been the case for free for all these years: subscription to the semi-monthly RT Inner Circle e-Notes, priority notice of contests and other submission opportunities and the exclusive RT Inner Circle Comp Ticket promo codes which allow you to pay zero at many of the online events I host.
That thing you were getting for free all this time now has a $3 price tag but no one is going to force you to jump on board. You can choose to continue in the RT Inner Circle without signing up on Patreon but I really hope you'll seriously consider enrolling at Patreon, thereby contributing to a community that chooses to honor the value of what I've been making happen for people with a small outlay of cash each month.
It's never simple when something you've been getting for free is suddenly protected by a Paywall. I remember the first time I clicked to read an article in the New York Times online only to be suddenly asked if I had paid for a subscription. It felt like a betrayal.
That's the last thing I want to make you feel. So, if you wish to remain in the RT Inner Circle and avail yourself of certain opportunities, announcements and bits of professional advice contained in the e-Notes and on the YouTube channel, no one's going to be policing you, waiting to stop you.
But, some of the things I've been giving away free of charge, like Wednesday Gathering, for example, have never been free of cost to me. So, in order to continue to drop in on the occasional Wednesday, all we ask is that you set aside $36 a year for the privilege. I hope you'll agree that that's negligible compared to what it means to you to know that the gathering is here. Because of course, the Wednesday Gatherings are not a writer's workshop, like the Roland Tec Online Writers Workshop in which an instructor (me) has carefully constructed a course in order to result in a specific result (your completion of a specific goal for your work over a six month period).
As I said, before launching on Patreon, I thought it might help for me to make a comprehensive list of all the things I'd offered the community since the start of this pandemic.
Here's what I was able to remember:
Continue reading "The Roland Tec Inner Circle Transitions to a Patreon Membership Tier" »
If you're one of the dozens of folks who've emailed in frustration at not being able to locate a project, deadline, video, schedule or anything else related to a Roland Tec enterprise, you're in luck. As of today, you need only ever remember one address.
The Summer of 2022 has been full and fraught. I'm not sure why I imagined it would be smooth sailing to produce and perform my own solo show while producing the third Hear Me Out Monologue Competition.
There were signs of cracks in the foundation as early as May when I started to receive evidence of logistical details getting lost in emails between me and various others who make this thing happen. Entire emails went missing.
Sometimes those I'd written.
Sometimes those I was supposed to have read.
I've been told (Hello, Gary!) that I have too many email addresses.
I know this is true. Yet seem unable (or unwilling?) to address it.
I'm hearing anecdotally of other breakdowns in communication on so many fronts that I'm beginning to suspect we're all just suffering under a collective case of Pandemic Fatigue.
I was thrilled when A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored got a very positive review from our first critic. Others were lining up to see for themselves.
And so we added performances and decided to extend through September 7th.
And then I got sick.
And have barely been able do much more than sleep, eat a bowl of cereal and sleep some more. (Rinse & repeat)
Performances of my show were canceled. And some of you know how much this one has meant to me, possibly cause it's the first thing I've managed since March of 2020... But... If the actor can't keep his eyes open...
Having lost about two weeks in our production schedule on the monologue competition, I've finally heard the universe which seems to be playing the same tune all summer long this year. And the tune is:
Slow down. Take a breath. What's the hurry?
So, this is all to announce two important scheduling changes.
Please update your RT Inner Circle status to be sure not to miss any of this.
Any American who's had the chance to live overseas will tell you that when compared to the friendships typical of most other cultures, American bonds are wanting. When it comes to forging meaningful nourishing relationships we are quite possibly the worst. James Baldwin wrote about this a little bit when living in Paris he came to understand that much of the emptiness and mistrust of others he had always assumed to be uniquely characteristic of the Black experience was in fact a fundamental truth sewn into the whole cloth of American life.
Morgan Jenness, the literary agent who most defied all the usual stereotypes of the business, tells a moving story from her early days when she was working in the literary department at the Public Theatre. During a particularly stressful and disheartening period she heard that Mother Teresa was scheduled to make a visit to New York and suddenly felt compelled to speak with the her in hopes of resolving what was feeling more and more like a moral crisis of faith around her chosen career path.
On a whim she found herself traveling uptown sixty blocks to wait on the sidewalk in front of the Indian Consulate hoping that the odds were good that the spiritual leader's itinerary would bring her there at least once. And, as would prove true for Jenness again and again and again over the years, on that day, her intuition served her well as she looked up and came face to face with the tiny woman she knew she needed to consult.
In a flurry, she heard herself describing a lack of meaning she'd been struggling with that gnawed at her because she deeply wanted to make a life of meaningful work and was starting to doubt whether theatre could possibly compete with selling everything and traveling to India to be of service however she could. Just feeding one human being at a time, no matter what the sacrifice.
Mother Teresa (herself a brilliant creative thinker) had an unexpected response.
https://rolandtec.medium.com/i-wrote-a-show-to-capture-this-moment-53cdd0d955fa
originally posted to Medium.
Attention Extra Criticum readers: If you do click through and read this piece on Medium, please consider taking a moment to follow me, post a comment, clap at the end or highlight text. Engagement really helps. Thanks!
My new play A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored (which I'm currently performing on Wednesday nights) grew out of the January 6th insurrection. My last film, We Pedal Uphill was my very personal attempt to make sense of the climate of fear which seemed to take root in this country in the months and years immediately following the September 11, 2001 attacks. The first play of mine that was produced in New York, Bodily Function, grew out of an offhand remark made by a midlevel corporate executive about workplace morale and bathroom breaks. The comment was delivered casually, almost cynically over a brunch with friends in Boston. Maybe the fact that the man who made the comment was not a friend of mine but rather a friend of friends, kept me from asking a pointed follow-up question. And so for weeks afterward I was haunted by the values behind his remarks. And eventually found my way to a play about a woman who has reached the pinnacle of success in her career yet somehow finds herself not quite feeling what she always imagined she would.
For whatever reason, there usually is some kind of thorn or confounding riddle at the center of the scripts I write. I'm drawn to the details of how human beings cope. We are uniquely creative and optimistic animals most of the time and how we manage to overcome, work around or stumble through life's towering obstacles is, I think, where the most vivid storytelling lies.
So it shouldn't have surprised me to find that my latest play, A Nagging Feeling Best Not Ignored has left some audience members feeling a kind of emotional whiplash. The piece is a kind of attempt to capture something of the tenuous relationship to truth and reality we find ourselves swimming in these days. And so the man at the center of the piece is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator.
It's difficult to know what to believe as he leads us from one assertion to the next, not much of it able to be held by the same single reality of one person's life.
It turns out that after an hour of very dark laughter, distortions of the facts of our reality and the tension of an audience holding one man's future in their hands through their vote at the end of the show, people need a few min. to process what they've just been through.
And you told us as much in the feedback offered online after the first three performances.
Post-Show Process Conversations Led by Leading Thinkers in the Fields of Psychology, Government, the Arts, Sociology, History and the Law.
This week's sold out.
But we've just added a bunch of additional dates to the schedule so if you weren't sure you were going to get in to see this unique live solo Zoom show, visit the website today and you may be in luck. The schedule has been expanded to include Wednesday nights from now through September 7th.
The following videos feature just some of the raves that have been pouring in from audience members at our first few performances.
Continue reading "A NAGGING FEELING EXTENDED THROUGH SEPTEMBER 7, 2022" »
In March of 2020 mankind was thrust into a new paradigm. With virtually every aspect of life squeezed, stretched and stuffed into shapes that many found virtually unrecognizable, the essence of what it means to be human was called into question. And change was all but inevitable.
Change can be painful, frightening, frustrating and uncomfortable. And so for the better part of two years everyone has to some degree found him or herself wrestling with uncertainty and a gnawing question regarding all our life choices pre-CoVid_19.
Opening 2 min. of the February 7th reading to an invited audience.
This has left us at once hungry for human connection (as the oxygen of life) and wary of it. We have found ourselves surprised by our own behavior. How many friends have expressed the same confusion regarding an acute loneliness and yearning for human connection coupled with an inexplicable paralysis when it comes to returning phone calls, emails and text messages. How odd it has been to observe oneself letting 2, 3, or more days sail by while phone messages or emails went unreturned even as we wished for nothing more than the back and forth of a chat with a friend.
Zoom is the perfect architecture for this moment.
Continue reading "Why my next play had to be a solo show performed on Zoom." »
Here's what Patrick had to say about the 2021 Festival Theme: Borders.
For at least twenty years I’ve been carrying around a character and a story I didn’t know how to tell. A close friend who’s a physician told me about a patient of his (anonymous, of course) whose life ended in tragedy, and tragically alone, because her children refused to believe the illness she complained of was anything but a cover for alcoholism. Since then I entertained the vague notion I’d write something about her someday — which became the day Roland announced the theme of the next Hear Me Out Monologue contest would be “Borders.”
Watch Mulcahey's winning monologue as performed by Alley Mills at the 2021 Hear Me Out Labor Day Festival & Awards Ceremony.
As we enter Year 3 of the early 21st century pandemic, it's understandable why we might all long for nothing more than a life outside... outside the walls of Zoom.
The last couple years were dominated by stories of loss -- loss of income, loss of job security, loss of essential routines, loss of friendships, confidence and, of course, the worst loss of all: loss of life.
But scattered here and there, tucked behind and alongside the wreckage lie some unexpected gifts.
Continue reading "Don't Throw Our Baby Out with the Bathwater (or: Why We Still Need Zoom)" »
For too many years I held onto a childish myth about show business that cost me dearly.
The myth goes something like this:
The truth is: there never has been, nor ever will be a show, book, movie, song, or other cultural commodity that soared to popular success without the tender loving care and devotion of its original author. The fact of the matter is there never will be another living soul as fiercely loyal and devoted and confident of your original work than you. And the sooner you get comfortable with this fact of life, the easier life as an artist will be.
You see, we can waste an awful lot of time and energy waiting and hoping and wishing and praying for someone (anyone!) to show up one day displaying the same absolute confidence in the importance, the beauty and the power of your work that you do.
Once you stop holding your breath with your ear to the wind waiting for a sign, the sooner you'll be able to see and hear the genuine and more objective enthusiasm for the work that many among your team come by honestly.
For this reason alone, you should resist the temptation to convince yourself to sit out the necessary and time consuming process of figuring out a path to bigger and more passionate audiences for each particular work.
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