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.
Has this happened to you as often as it seems to happen to me?
Some friend who I respect for their taste in culture or their wisdom in general will feel compelled to recommend I watch the latest film or television show that happens to contain an apocalyptic zombie storyline and as they embark on an inventory of all that makes it a must-see they fold in this line:
Of course, it's not really about Zombies.
Recently, I started watching the HBO series, The Last of Us, which has much to recommend it but...
I find myself wondering, episode after episode, why shouldn't this be about zombies? And if it weren't, well, what would that mean, exactly?
Can you imagine someone recommending Schindler's List and offering:
Of course, it's not really about the Holocaust.
It would be jarring to hear someone say that because, for starters, it's hard to imagine a subject matter with less of a need to justify its existence. No one has to explain why the Holocaust is a subject worthy of our human attention. It simply is.
Baked into it are universal human obsessions like: freedom, oppression, hatred, violence, displacement, identity... the list goes on.
So, then, why should it be so important to the selling of a zombie drama like The Last Of Us to qualify it as Not Really About Zombies?
The most precious commodity we have as artists is our ability to see things differently. The artist looks at a pile of junk hundreds of others have absent-mindedly walked around on their morning commute and finds within it whole universes. The artist hears the same middle-of-the-road slogans we all bathe in all day every day and finds deep within them or around them or because of them new and amazing discoveries about what it means to be human.
In short, to be an artist of importance, you need a mind of your own and in order to cultivate a mind of your own it is essential that you disconnect from the prevailing narratives which grow narrower and less remarkable every day.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news kids but as far as I can tell we are living through one of the swiftest and most efficient periods of cultural and intellectual closing ever experienced in modern human history. If the Renaissance was a period of extended and unprecedented opening the early 21st Century is most certainly the opposite. In fact, it's difficult to identify even one controlling force in the construction and organization of our modern lives which does not in ways sometimes subtle and sometimes clumsy nudge our collective unconscious toward greater predictability and mediocrity.
If you care about your work, about the culture at large and about managing to carve out a satisfying existence in the Age of the Algorithm, you have no choice but to consciously choose everything and anything which might support your quirky, unpredictable, independent and often inconvenient way of looking at the world.
How do you do this?
Prioritize any input yet untouched by the Algorithms.
What do I mean by this? Whatever you feed your mind will ultimately nudge your way of thinking in this or that direction.
Here are some examples of choices you may find yourself making. Get in the habit of asking yourself how each potential use or your precious time came into your consciousness. Chances are, if mass media played a role in it at all, it will lack much in the way of nourishment for a mind that finds inspiration in the most unexpected places.
I'm not saying avoid mass media entirely. But I am saying a diet consisting of nothing but mass marketed culture will do much to mold you (slowly over the years) into an easy uncritical consumer of whatever it is the machine would prefer you consume. And, let's face it, when you accept such a bland and safe role for yourself the Algorithms and the corporations who control them will reward you immediately and handsomely. And your rewards will be widely shared via social media so as to encourage others to follow in your footsteps. Because of course, corporations are not in the business of ensuring the survival and thriving of an idiosyncratic unpredictable and less efficient culture. No, no, no. Unpredictability and inefficiency are fast becoming dirty words in the lexicon of our brave new world.
So, if you read this blog much you know that since the dawn of this pandemic I've been on a kind of OCD Mission Impossible to encourage playwrights and screenwriters--really anyone who writes scripts, who tells stories this way--to give monologue a closer look because, well... as the pandemic shutdown demonstrated so well, when the expensive and time-consuming elements associated with productions disappear and the community at large finds itself communicating via Zoom, the unique work of the playwright becomes more essential than ever.
No lights. No sets. No costumes. No stage. Yet still feels like theatre. How come?
If people are waiting for something akin to theatre (as we once knew it) to find them and move them through the Zoom box, then who is more equipped to provide this than the playwright?
After all it's the playwright who engineers our catharsis. If I am pummeled to my core at the final curtain that's because the playwright wanted it. It's the playwright who understands, perhaps more keenly and more viscerally than any of us, the bond between life as we live itand life as we wish it to be. Our refusal to acknowledge that there might be a difference between these two things has been selling theatre tickets since man discovered fire and gathered everyone around to talk about it.
The Festival of Playwrights Making Lemonade from Lemons
The 3rd Annual Hear Me Out Monologue Competition Finalist Winners will be presented over two nights this year: Nov 25 and Dec. 5.
What makes for the most compelling monologues? The same thing that makes for the most compelling dialogue. Anything that points to actual human communication.
All Dialogue is Action. We Speak in Service of Intention.
I open my mouth to speak to you. I have an agenda. Something in mind I intend to communicate with you specifically. And being human, of course, your reaction to my words as they spill out of me will never be entirely predictable... never quite what I may have expected.
Before. When I rehearsed or imagined the conversation and how it might go, I may have braced myself for resistance. Or I may have imagined my logic to be so airtight that as I plan what I'd like to say I may actually imagine any resistance simply crumbling or dissolving in the face of such powerful and indisputable wisdom. The possibilities for what we might hope for or expect or seek from others' reactions to whatever we have to say are virtually infinite.
But perfect frictionless agreement? I suppose if I were addressing a mirror, I could hope to be met with that kind of predictable assent.
The Response to Our Words is Never Predictable
The beauty of writing scripts is that, like life, they are populated with individual human beings, each with their own lived experience which continuously feeds into a set of evolving world views, ideologies, moralities, priorities and areas of reactivity. Put two of your characters in a situation in which they're both emotionally invested and there's no end to the mayhem and mischief that may ensue.
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.
This choice, I hope, sends a clear message:
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 Workshopin 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.
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.
I'm performing my latest play Wednesday nights in July at 8PM, EDT. It's a solo Zoom show because it's all about these past two years -- pandemic isolation, January 6th, social media, Zoom, fear and a social fabric's frayed edges. And believe it or not, it's also funny. Well, funny and dark. That's kinda my M.O.
Here's what audiences are saying. Oh! And if you have any intention of seeing it, you only have two more chances. Last performance is July 27th. I don't want you to miss this one and I have a hunch you might not want to either.
In 1922, an unknown composer who supported his family by working as an insurance man, did something audacious. He self-published a collection of songs he'd been writing over several years and proceeded to mail out complimentary copies to practically everyone of some importance he could think of. His name was Charles Ives and today, thanks to the efforts of another composer of a younger generation who championed his work, he is widely regarded as one of American music's greatest composers.
It would be easy to take this little anecdote as evidence that all we need in order to succeed is perseverance and a touch of audacity but the sobering truth is that of the hundreds of copies of Mr. Ives' 114 Songs that he sent out, most sat on desks and languished unopened for years, if not decades. Had it not been for the passion of the young composer Henry Cowell who made it his personal mission to get the establishment to recognize the great leaps of imagination made by the older man, we might never have heard much of this groundbreaking music.
Those of us who write for the stage do so in an environment in which the discovery of something wonderful and new is well on its way to becoming nothing short of miraculous. With virtually no meaningful governmental support of our theaters, there is no place really to which a playwright can send his or her script and be assured of a thoughtful read.
The sad truth is when you send your full-length play or screenplay to the literary department of a target theatre or the development department of an independent film production company the odds are stacked against you.
David Geffen is so maligned. And there's so much more to him than meets the eye. I highly recommend this documentary which opened my eyes to the depth and breadth of his contributions. Too often in this culture we have a knee-jerk negative reaction to bald ambition and ego. But consider what this larger than life figure has managed to do for the culture. It's inspiring.
You're having a new play read, or part of a new play. It's a script. What is a script but a tool used by artists who make theatre or film. The artists we should always consider first, middle and last as we go about our planning are of course the actors.
Because actors are reading your script aloud rather than performing the play with full production value, the reading by definition cuts many of your creative collaborators out of the equation. Set designer? Sorry. Lighting? Nope. Composer. Hell, no. Director? Not really, if we're honest. The direction of readings of new work is actually more like a hybrid of casting and stage management.
Essentially, 90% of readings -- regardless of whether they're private, in a writers workshop or public -- are carried entirely by the actors who read your dialogue aloud.
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