The Theater Lives in the Young

It is (very) early spring and the time of the year when fortunate youth in many high schools are investing their energies in competitive theater. As in many states, the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild encourages and supports theater with its annual round of competitions. I have been fortunate to have judged festival presentations for many years, and truly have been astonished at many, many of those forty-minute productions.

I'm aware that there is tremendous investment that these students and their teachers carry in creating and presenting their work. As judges, we are kept well away from all that, but see only the final invested expression of all their anguish of creation.

It's no walk-in-the park for judges. We see eight or so, 45-minute productions in a day, and we take every spare minute to try our best to say useful and helpful and encouraging - but artistically and intellectually honest - things about each of the eight or so works we see before us in the long day. We look like 1940s reporters dashing back to our computers (now) to write lots of profound things, rank performers, catch a bathroom break, and be back in our seat with a clear head in twenty minutes. We spend the lunch hour desperately trying to catch up, refining our observations and trying gently to frame some advice. In the 1980s we wrote in longhand with one or two carbons. The writing room held three really intensely focused judges, often around the same table. Electric typewriters were made available in the late 1990s and some judges brought their own portables, but many judges continued to longhand the responses. Today we have a computer station and a prescribed template to fill in our thoughts. It's faster and more efficient, with a chance to write more. Our assignment also is more refined with expectations for observations on particular points.

Only after the awards ceremony are the judges available to directors when they pick up the written critiques for their school. But there's not much basis for conversation. It's been a long day for everybody.

The circumstances of the festival are very measured and obsessively observed. There are strict rules about time limits and run length, and the strike and setup times in the swing between performances. All of the students remain captive for the day and must be counted in the school's section of the theater before each of the performances and activities.

The organization requires that new and past judges attend a development workshop each February. Part social and part useful, the meeting is to review the rules and changes, discuss goals, share approaches and receive a pep talk. While I found it annoying to give up an additional Saturday (for which we were paid), I had to admit their value.

I have been fortunate to judge the festival in all its three rounds of elimination. My preference has been for the initial round, when I feel that my comments will be most considered, both by those who move on and by those who don't. At the intermediate level, only the winner moves on, and the rest have heard all they care to. Both are one-Saturday commitments. The final state round is a four-day affair, held in Hancock Hall in Boston, and judges are sequestered incommunicado in a Boston hotel for three nights, ushered everywhere by handlers. Throughout the festival at all levels there is real investment in keeping the judges away from all participants until the awards are given at the end of the day.

All of the performances I saw at state level were interesting, challenging, first-rate works of theater. The critique there is much different. Since all of the performances are excellent, the response is not about the principles, but more about imagination and commitment to sophisticated choices, deftness in the refinement and execution, and ability to astonish. And ultimately, why this one is better than that.

It's been a real pleasure for me over the years to see and critique these festivals. I've seen much theater that is exciting, imaginative, and very adept. But most importantly, in every case I've seen young people really invested in craft and collaboration, creating something artful together.

Scenemaker
February, 2014

Astonish Me

With apologies to critic John Lahr, who wrote an excellent volume of discussion of the new approaches to the theater in about 1970. What theater experiences will stay with you? I will remember many, but I think these did something important to shape and affirm my understanding of what theater is and can be as an aesthetic adventure.

A Fernando Arrabal in a studio at the University of Kansas. 1970s

Lansdowne street club. 1990s

Wings of Desire at American Repertory Theater. 2000s

Ryan Landry's M at Huntington Theater. 2013

No. 1. In graduate school at the University of Kansas, in the early 1970s, there was a kind of intensity of work going on that I barely understood at the time. Theater in America was undergoing tremendous change from the Broadway model. A graduate student whose name I don't remember did a studio production of a play by an intense Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal, the title of which I also have forgotten. I only remember the experience of the play, whereby I first understood that theater had a real intensity that was much deeper than text. I became aware of the idea that theater did not really have to be ABOUT anything, except its own experience. I still retain mental images of that spare, dark production and an intense, mysterious, emotionally charged hour or so, that had nothing to do with the stuff of mysteries or horror movies.

A broken statue in a yard in Halifax
provokes wonder and curiosity -
Out of context, unexpected, incomplete.

No. 2. In the 1990s, a younger couple took Diane and me to a club in Boston, across from Fenway Park on Lansdowne Street, named after the surrealist photographer Man Ray. Many details escape me over the twenty years since, but it was a new way to think about theater. We arrived shortly before ten o'clock and it was the usual loud, clubby dance-trance music with decor that suggested dark pocket-like dance rooms, shot with energetic, shadowy lighting. After about a half-hour, the music stopped, lights came on and the crowd moved toward a large open corner of the floor with a five-foot high platform against one wall. A couple uncolored, unartful spotlights illuminated this stage. Within a few minutes, skits began of bawdy parodies of fairy tales, with actors in outrageous, comedic sexualized costumes. Dialogue was shouted. There was no curtain or wings. Costumes were emblematic and satyrical. Props were handed or thrown in as needed, mistakes were applauded, people pushed each other around to the position they needed to be onstage, and everybody had an hilarious time. Maybe two or three such skits transpired, and then the crowd gathered around a giant pinata, lowered in from the ceiling. Patrons were given swings with a stick, and it finally broke, spilling condoms, sex toys, and other unidentified merchandise over the crowd. A few minutes later, the music began again, the lights dimmed, and the dancing went on. I realized that theater can thrive where it has vitality and imagination, and an audience that wants to invest in it. I would later see this kind of performance as the clear legacy of European cabaret in the 20s and 30s.

No. 3. In 2006, American Repertory Theater mounted a production of Wings of Desire, a stage version of the story that was the film (not a stage version of the film). The story is about an angel that falls in love with a mortal and descends to become mortal to be with her. It was staged in association with a theater in The Netherlands, and was shaped by director Ola Mafaalani in the European metaphoric style. The production was open and full of actions to provoke thought, association, surprise, and wonder. The play began in the dark with four dimly lit large columns of sand pouring from the grid. It was difficult to identify what they were, and it went on for many minutes, eventually filling the stage floor with piles of sand. With lights up, two male angels in modern street clothing sat on the roof of a food vendor's wagon as aromas of fried onions filled the theater. They were discussing one angel's infatuation with a mortal and his choice to join her. He descended from the cart, and the play progressed with representations of common life and its trials, which he observed. Throughout the performance, his mortal love was a dancer entangling and dancing in a long swag of bright fabric suspended from the flies, an inversion of the earthbound-mortal - celestial-angel dichotomy. As I recall she never touched the stage until the end when they met in an embrace. The stage was open to the walls without draperies.

No. 4. In 2013, an impressario of those Lansdowne club events above had studied theater and developed his chops as a writer, and created one of the more interesting nights in the formal theater in my experience. Ryan Landry participated in the Huntington Theatre's playwright development programs in association with Boston University. They gave him a season slot at the Wimberly, their South End second theater, where the Huntington stages their new works. Landry took the basic story line and characters of the 1931 Fritz Lang movie thriller "M" and rewrote it. In his production Brecht and Pirandello met Man Ray (artist and Boston rave club) big time. all structured around a rich vocabulary of pop and old movie references, loaded with iconic surprises, cheesy cartoon imagery, giant props and wonderful metaphors. Shouted dialogue, broad gesture and obvious takes and gags, all at a break-neck pace almost leaving one breathless by the end. The plot moved from the "M" deviant into a serious "Six Characters" hook that made it all make sense. In the end the eraser of a giant pencil from the flies took out everybody, including the author, except the last two characters who exited out the back door of the stage to end the play.

These have not been all of my theater highlights - I have many others in the 300 or so productions I've seen over the years. Certainly these have enriched my life immeasurably.

Engagement

Engagement

I've been thinking about how different designers are in the theater, compared to other people involved - notably the director. No big revelation - we frequently refer to the difference in perspective. But it's another dimension of recognition for me.

First, I've been an actor and director in other lives - before I became a designer. So it's not like I don't get it, the act of directing is very social. The act of designing typically is not - at least for me.

The difference became evident at the retirement tribute for a long-term (40-year) faculty member who directed at least one production a year in the program, and sometimes another off campus. There were many, many testimonials by former students about his guidance and friendship, arising out of the very social nature of the production experience. To be fair, he also had some experience as a gaffer and a little lighting design, but his overwhelming relationships were forged in the process of directing productions. In the academic environment, those relationships also extend to other classes.

I was thinking about what was important to those students. For them the relationship was forged in the collective, informal give and take of the rehearsals, when the director must engage the actor, teasing out the best expression and forging a collective dynamic in an ensemble. With young actors, this engagement is very personal. The engagement is with the personality and psychology of the actor.

In the production experience, my mind is really elsewhere and my connections are less engaged with the actors - or even the technicians. I'm thinking about the mechanics of the stage, certainly, but really about line and mass and color and light and sound. About period and style, context and meaning, nuance and things that will make differences nobody will notice. Along with the director I also think about facilitating the movement of the play and the life of the moment - the impact and experience of the moment.

Glass Menagerie in Sketchup

For technical directors there is the team engagement of the production crew. It is an important collective activity at the beginning level, and there is great pride in achieving Herculean feats of production. But it is intended to be out of sight, known only to those involved, and actually prized for not being evident. The engagement isn't at the same interpersonal level as the director and the actor. It's about shaping the work, doing the job well, and making it happen on time.

At least this is true in the educational environment. In professional work, directors can be more demanding of actors. Actors know how to go about the creative process of the role, and they know the shorthand of directing. Give them goals and they know how to get there. The director can focus on getting the metaphor just right - the expression and timing of it all. Designers and technical directors assign tasks to trained technicians who focus on doing the job.

But the love affair of former students with my colleague was genuine. He had done things that shaped their lives in a good way. That is something to be applauded.

Scenemaker
8 May 2012

Animal Crackers

The end of the academic year is just over the next hill, and those of us who teach are steeling ourselves for the final push.

.....

I had several paragraphs of whining here, which I have deleted. How can I whine about the greatest job in the world!

It is opening night for our final production of the year, and this year it is The Glass Menagerie. It is an unusual choice for a major production in a program such as ours, because there are only four characters. Of course, everybody knows Tennessee Williams' somewhat autobiographical piece. It is heavily taught in classrooms because it has such relevance to personal development and frustration with family constraints and values. There is a huge amount of critical material and curriculum guidance for this piece available online.

Our production is really unusual in an attempt to realize Williams' stated intentions in a technical way. In our production the interior of the apartment is completely behind a white scrim, for which we had to install a separate truss proscenium frame. Text and images are superimposed upon the action in the apartment. Current lighting and projection technology makes it possible to do what it seems Williams had envisioned in writing the work. The action in the apartment appears clear but slightly hazy and distant, as if in memory or a dream, as Tom states. The original production abandoned the scrim and much of the projection because the technology wasn't up to the aesthetic in the 1940s.

For us this means a great deal of light control. There is hallation off the lighting instruments above and behind the scrim that casts a slight haze on it. Even the bright aisle lights are a problem. And there is a really tricky lighting problem in a candelabra scene. How do you light people behind the candelabra and cast their large shadows on the walls, without lighting the candelabra itself and casting its shadow? Our lighting designer did achieve it well.

In addition there are narration scenes on a fire escape outside the apartment, and access to the fire escape is from below, from our orchestra pit. Add the need for powerful equipment for bold enough projection and wireless mics for actors behind the scrim to be heard well in a large hall. It's easy to understand why most productions of this play are more simply realized.

....

Back to whining.

We always end the year with a major theater production such as this, which means the student work to be graded piles up while I focus on making the show happen well. Sadly, most feedback to the student at this point is moot - it won't be read because it has no future utility - except to argue a poor grade.

Meanwhile, the appeal of large blocks of potentially free time are a magnet for meetings and work groups.

There is little wonder we see commencement come around with mixed feelings.

Scenemaker
20 April 2012

Student Work and Tutorials

On this last day of spring break I'm gathering my resources to return to classes. It's been a busy quarter and I've had less time to post.

Our student-mounted productions transpired well. Lysistrata, Aristophanes' 5th Century BC anti-war comedy, played well. The play is still outrageous with prosthetic phalluses, costume jokes and bawdy gags that predated all Christian modesty. The show alternated with the musical A New Brain, very well sung and played. Each had its accommodations to the small 28'w x 18'd thrust playing space, but they worked, playing in rotating rep for three performances each.

Lysistrata was directed by a graduate student who had not directed before, but she pulled it together and learned a great deal. A busy area director was brought in for New Brain, which is all sung and was heavily rehearsed by the music director. It was good to see new student faces in these shows. A member of the shop staff designed the Acropolis facade for Lysistrata. I put a curtain in front of it for New Brain and the director provided projections.

We move now into Tennessee Williams' Glass Menagerie. A full-auditorium production, although we are limiting seating to the center section. The director is doing the play through a scrim, which means viewing angle is important. I found in researching the design that there is a tremendous amount of material about the play online, probably because it is a standard on many high school reading lists - right up there with Hamlet and MacBeth. I'm sure one analysis I read far exceeds the length of the play. We'll give the show a first-rate production, since with only 4 characters there can be such focus on acting (not that the 20 other acting majors are happy about that cast size). With a couple daytime performances and lots of school tickets, we can afford to pull out the stops.

Guys & Dolls setup

I spent my break updating tutorials and templates. I have developed them for things that my students need to engage and learn -- most requiring some sophistication with technology. There isn't enrollment or class time routinely to teach them well, but my production students require this background. These include templates for formatting a stage manager's production script, for an Excel lighting hookup and for Vectorworks CAD drawings in our theater, tutorials for common graphics applications and mechanical perspective drawing, and process manuals for stage management and designing lighting. [Find these at http://www.dirksdesigns.com/ddc/ald/tuts/index.html They are all my own copyright, but some rely upon the contributions of others. They are free to use, but please give credit.]

As happens, some of my former students, many who intended only to be actors, have found their way into positions where they need to return to these materials.

When you teach in a largely liberal arts based program, you understand two things (at least): 1) There are so many legitimate program requirements there is little room for both exploration and concentration. 2) Almost everybody is an actor until they learn their opportunities, affinities and limitations. By the time they comprehend them they have missed the chance to develop with depth as a designer and/or technician at the university. Often they find their way later into production work, often in the schools, and too often make it up as they go.

In New England there also is a lot of community theater, much parent-supported high school theater, and numerous people involved who "took a course in college." There also are English (and math) teachers pressed into guiding productions for competition who never had a production course. Beyond that, some former students discover after they leave us that they prefer the opportunities for creative contribution in production work, and they want information and guidance they missed or need to review.

There are books, but they're usually too general, and who goes there any more? I post my materials for all these folks.

Scenemaker
11 March 2012

Finding the Edge

I have the annual pleasure to work with my theater design and production students at the American College Theater Festival for our region. The ACTF is a 4-day festival of theater work in college and university theater programs held at a university in each of 8 regions. We're fortunate to have a geographically small region in New England, though I sometimes wonder what we trade for such travel convenience. We took a dozen students, supported by institutional grants.

My acting and directing colleagues spent a lot of time watching and coaching performers through their acting competitions while I spent a day in the room of design displays. I listen to critiques of student work - particularly my own students - but otherwise I hang out, talking about the displays and the work with other faculty, while balancing a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other. It's my time to assess what we're teaching and what my students are achieving in relation to other programs.

My students did well enough for their experience and I hope they will be energized for more opportunities in the design and technical crafts, stage management and other production activities. There was excellent work on the tables and it is such a help for our students to see the character of the programs and the work of other schools. We'll hope for a bit more engagement, a bit more energy toward making their own educations competitive. My design and tech students often come home more focused and energized.

I'm both proud and a little embarrassed to say I was around in the early days of the ACTF, back in the 1970s. In that more precarious time I once slept in my car to attend. I have participated almost annually since, sometimes with a participating production.

The learning at the festival is important. In Kansas and Nebraska things like theater - the academic and serious kind - were a good deal further apart than in more urban parts of the country. A few places, like my University of Kansas and the University of Iowa were consolidating the avant-garde and new scholarship on performance. They participated actively in the national conversation that grew with the work of the National Endowment. But unless you lived right there, it was a long drive. That annual ACTF gathering of theater faculty, students, and guest artists was critical in knitting together the study of the practice of a highly fragmented art form. Typical academic conferences are about anything but practice.

The art of it all is critical, but commercial theater design organizations have a strong orientation toward technology, and that is a continually moving target. They use anything that will make them competitive. They increasingly meld the work of related art forms and incorporate every cost-efficient practice they can. Designers, technicians, and managers are moving among many modes of live and recorded entertainment, all with their own special conditions. The practice of one influences the practice and the artistic perspective of others as artists and technicians move among the modes.

Hand-drawn work documents once had a focus on energy, art, clarity, and acceptable accuracy. Clarity, accuracy, speed and distribution have won out over expressiveness in production communication - it mostly exists in my sketchbooks and quick diagrams. The technology allows greater precision, greater detail, more repetition, more distribution and more capacity for collaboration. I still move a pencil on a page to shape ideas, but it all moves quickly to the computer. Younger designers may make that move earlier than I do. I still decorate my doodles.

The festival work I've seen in the last decade or so seems much less adventurous than it once did. There are times of change - pregnant events, evolving aesthetics and reactions to reactions. This is not that time. We seem to feel we have a handle on it.

After years of edginess, there may be a sense of "that's been done." Today's edges seem calculated and stylish. For our students in today's culture there is great pressure to earn, and that narrows the conversation. Commercial competence and versatility is required. If that's a trend it's a sure sign that the edge has moved on.

I'm always looking for the edge. Of what, I'm not really sure. It's out there, everywhere. Wayne Gretzky had the right idea. I'll just keep trying to skate to where the puck is going to be.

03 Feb 2012
Scenemaker

Designer Library 5: Illustrators 29

Illustrators: Society of Illustrators 29th Annual of American Illustration. Society of Illustrators, Watson-Guptill Publications. New York (1988) Or any of the subsequent annual volumes.

My last choice of five books I have found most valuable for design is the annual of prize-winning illustration by the American Society of Illustrators, now up to the 52nd annual. These quality print editions on coated stock are not inexpensive, but well worth the $45 from the Society of Illustrators. Times, styles and artists evolve and change, but this 25-year-old 1988 book and my 12-year-old Illustrators 40 seem to be the most thumbed. I find that prowling these collections of prize winning publication art are a useful step in resolving a design.

As designers we find inspiration and sources wherever we can. The reading of a script and its visual interpretation is influenced by its context in the life of the moment. We have our own history with the script and its story, and with many associations already made. We also have a context for the new production that has a cluster of requirements of varying importance. Those requirements are both tangible and aesthetic, both limiting and freeing. And somehow our design must arise within these boundaries of production practice to meet the aesthetic goals.

There are highly imaginative, creative artists whose original brains may reach and grasp fully original possibilities. My sense is that it doesn't come as easily as it appears for most of us. Lightning strikes the prepared mind, to mangle a metaphor, and such collections as the Illustrators Annual are about possibilities. We can see the work of other artists who have found imaginative and artistically profound ways of vividly communicating the ideas of the text through imagery and art.

Fine art also has its value for inspiration, as does architecture and film and other art forms. Historic, geographic and other factual material is critical in developing a design for any production, but it is the art forms that shape an artistic attitude, and deliberately and creatively embody ideas in sensual terms. Illustration is an art of intentional statement.

The Illustrators Annual is over 600 pages of prize-winning illustration divided into sections for book, editorial, and advertising publication. In addition there are hall-of-fame tributes to important illustrators that place the current work in a stylistic context, and there are agencies showing work by their artists and illustrators. It's all in high quality full color art print.

The Annual is a wealth of stylistic ideas. Color qualities and combinations. Stylistic approaches to line and shape. Visual senses of texture. Any and all forms of abstraction. Fresh ideas of balance and proportion. Ways to illustrate particular objects and people. Qualities of mood and tension in imagery. Evocation of our experiences with other illustration and art forms. And so on.

These images typically seek to communicate more literal concepts than high art does. This work intends to create a strong, specific connection to the viewer's references and imagination. In many cases, these are literally the scene designs for the text. They illustrate an object or idea by implying a narrative about it.

Every illustration image is incomplete. It challenges viewers to substantiate the idea through their own experience. Every image provokes a question about its subject, while conveying intensive clues to the way one is expected to respond. Many illustrations tell a fragment of a story that the viewer is led to complete. Even what appears to be pure design is full of narrative impulse. Illustration design builds upon a wide world of associations - with real and fictional experiences, with demons and fears, with aspirational identities, with intrigue and suspense, or with beauty and life.

This is the world of the stage and the province of the drama. Illustration is a frozen moment of theater - an artful expression of drama. Theater is the history, present and future of the moment. Illustration is an abstraction of an entire story that theater plays out in time. It is a rich resource for theater. We are in the same business.
___________________

I hope this list of best books has been of interest. Upon reflection when writing, I noted that they are older than they seem to me. I'm not sure if it is meaningful - the list isn't intended to be limiting. Perhaps this list suggests and argues that there are books of value and that it continues to be worthwhile to have resources in hand, not only on a screen.

Scenemaker
November 24, 2011
Happy Thanksgiving