The Plays of Max Sparber

GOODBYE TO THE OLD, HELLO TO THE NEW

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Wed, 11 May 2011 05:22:16 PDT

This site, The Plays of Max Sparber, is now an archive of writing and a resource for older works by the playwright Max "Bunny" Sparber. If you are interested in his newer work, written under the name Bunny Ultramod, you can find it at Ultramod Plays: Fast, Cheap and Out of Control.

YOU ARE THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN THEATER

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 14:31:42 PDT

We’re about to experience an epochal change in American theater. It’s been coming for a while, and you can be co-owner of its future. We’re coming out of a period of extraordinary conservatism, which seems to universally be understood as a reaction to both an increased institutionalization of American theaters (especially non-profit American theaters) and the aging of their subscription audiences. But this seems to be in a sort of death spiral, as the audiences are starting to literally die off, and are not being replaced by a new audience.

Many of the artistic directors of these theaters are now nearing retirement age. Other theaters swap out their artistic directors every decade or so, just as a matter of course. And you could take one of those jobs. Yes, you. Because the people who are most likely to get plugged into those positions are the people who can figure out how to rebuild the audience for American theater. If you can sell seats to a younger audience, you’re going to control the future.

Because the same impulses that caused these theater institutions to retract to artistic conservatism in the 90s and onward will now force them to try something radical. Two decades ago, they had an audience, and they had to hold it. Now, once again, they have to build an audience. And they are buggered if they know how to do it. Nobody really seems to. They throw parties for people aged 20-40. They offer lower ticket prices. They have cookouts with the cast. They set up Facebook accounts and run ads on popular blogs. Does any of it work?

Who knows? I’d say we have about a decade before the system really starts breaking down, and suddenly every American theater goes into a total panic. That’s a decade you have to prepare for the moment. I am predicting what I’m going to call the “Easy Rider” moment, and I’m calling it this because, in 1969, when “Easy Rider” came out, it was the moment when the American studios felt most desperately out of touch with American youth. And then the independently produced “Easy Rider” made $19 million dollars, and suddenly the studios threw up their hands and turned over the keys to the studio to the longhairs, many of whom still run things -- Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Brian DePalma, etc.

I’m giving us a decade, and we have that time to figure out how to reach the kids. How to turn them into theater audiences. And it won’t be by doing things through mainstream institutions -- revolutions never happen that way. It will be through bold, relentless experimentation. With themes. With venues. With outreach. With casting. With how we charge for plays. We have a decade to play around. Somebody will figure it out -- theater is, after all, a medium that is forever dying and being reborn, just like Dionysus, its patron god. And that person, and those who follow them, will get to take charge when the institutions start feeling that they may be crumbling, and flail about for their saviors.

It could be you.

AGAINST PERMISSION

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 13:14:26 PST

I guess I’m still a spoiled child in a lot of ways, but I don’t like having to ask permission for anything. And that’s what we typically do in the arts. As playwrights, we send off our scripts and wait for somebody to decide they’re going to let us have a production. As actors, we audition for roles, and hope somebody lets us up on the stage. It’s endemic to the arts. Artists submit to galleries. Directors apply to work at theaters. Artistic directors consult with boards. And everybody turns to sources of money, begging permission through grant applications, or from private donors. In the end, it’s often not even all that clear who has the final say of yes or no, although I suspect whoever has the most money gets the biggest say.

I suppose I wouldn’t mind these gatekeepers of culture if they demonstrably prevented bad work from getting made and championed great work. I see no evidence of this. In fact, having witnessed the arts funding process, and the process by which art is selected, it’s been my experience that all sorts of extraneous factors dominate the process. Art is not a meritocracy, and, really, how could it be? We don’t actually know what is great and what is terrible in the arts. We are creatures of idiosyncratic tastes, and we’re in a medium where there cannot be objective absolutes. Art is good because people collectively decide it is. It’s bad because people decide it isn’t good. The very things that we think we can point to as objectively bad -- amateurism, shallowness, cliche, plagiarism -- have all been deliberate choices by some very intelligent artists, who have successfully used it to make art. Art constantly looks inwards, asking what it is and challenging whatever definition it locates. And it should.

But the trouble with this approach is that it means a lot of art falls outside what others are willing to invest in. A play that doesn’t act like a play is going to have a hard time finding a theater to produce it. An actor who doesn’t act like an actor is not likely to be cast. I think it’s a little easier to engage in this sorts of explorations in the world of fine arts, in part because many artist are perfectly capable of making the art themselves, and only need ask permission when it comes to displaying the art (and, even then, there are plenty of ways to show art that don’t involve begging a gallery). The fine arts also benefit from a century of restless experimentation, and so challenging the norm is expected, and celebrated, in contemporary fine art. But theater is a collaborative medium. It’s not enough to just write a play, it must get produced. It’s hard enough to get a play produced that behaves like a traditional play; if you start getting really outre, you’re mostly going to be on your own. I think this model encourages a sort of conservatism in theater, and discourages innovation.

A permissionless world
We’re at a time when traditional gatekeepers are collapsing everywhere else. It used to be that if you wanted to make a movie, even a short one, there was an economic gatekeeper in place, in that the equipment was quite expensive. Beyond that, once you made the film, there was the issues of finding a place to show it, and, if you wanted a larger audience, finding a distributor.

These things are all still in place, but the Internet has created an alternative. Nowadays, you can make a film digitally, edit it yourself, and place it online, without needing anybody’s permission, and at minimal cost. Every 10 minutes, users upload 24 hours worth of videos to YouTube. Some are only seen by a handful of people. Most are seen by several thousand -- about the average audience for the entire run of a play in a black box theater. Some are seen by millions, or tens of millions, or, in the case of a video of a child biting another child’s finger, 245 million times. There have been YouTube filmmakers who have moved on to careers in mainstream filmmaking, and there are a surprisingly large number who make a living from putting films on the site and claiming a percentage of ad revenue. It has completely bypassed the traditional gatekeepers of culture, although YouTube has some gates of its own.

Similarly, the Web has given quite a few writers a place to publish without having to go through the traditional gatekeepers of the publishing world. The variety of platforms writers can use just keep expanding, from blogs to sites that let you self-publish books to Kindle. This has happened with music as well: It’s become extremely inexpensive to make music digitally, and extremely easy to distribute it online, and nowhere in this process do they need to beg anybody for permission to do so.

It seems like we are, for the most part, in a permissionless world. This has generated an explosion of creativity. Of course, there is a lot out there that is ephemeral, or bewildering, or unchallenging. But this is to be expected -- according to Sturgeon’s Law, 90 percent of everything is crud. But if you have 10 pieces of art, by his metric, you have one that’s worth a damn. If you have 100 pieces of art, you have 10 that are worthwhile. And if you have 1 million, you have 100,000 great pieces of art. Art benefits from there being more of it, and suffers from creating a gatekeeping system that guarantees less of it.

We are the children of the revolution
This fact can be quite threatening to established gatekeepers, who benefit from a sort of manufactured scarcity. There’s a real fear that there is a limited amount of audience members out there, and limited funds for making art, and we’re better off if we limit the pool of people trying for these audience members and this money. I don’t buy that for a second. This is precisely what American theater has done for a half-century now, and it has produced dwindling and greying audiences, playwrights who cannot make a living from writing plays, and an endless parade of plays that all sort of look like other plays, many written by a handful of people who all graduated from the same half-dozen colleges. I suppose if your the sort of person who makes this sort of play, American theater is going to seem just right to you at this moment. Most of us aren’t.

I’m not going to argue mainstream theaters must change how they do things and create some sort of YouTube model of making plays. Even if I thought they should do this, they’re not going to listen to me. And even if I thought they should do this, I don’t think they could. They’re beholden to the existing model. They have salaries to pay, and a mortgage to pay for, and an audience that may be dwindling but isn’t likely to appreciate their theater suddenly upending an existing model in favor of another one. No, they are what they are, and what they are is an institution.

But I’ll be damned if I am going to spend the rest of my life pleading with these decaying institutions for permission to do my plays. I don’t want to create theater that consists of people begging each other for opportunity. I want to see a type of theater where any significant need for permission ceases to exist. It’s just the modern way to do things.

This is why I have been writing plays that can be produced for almost no money. It’s why I write plays that don’t require a theater space to be performed. It’s why I don’t require that people pay me to do many of my plays, or get my permission, or even ask me. Screw that. That’s all we have in theater now, and we need less of it. We need to invent mechanisms by which anybody can make a play and produce it. We need to figure out ways these people can get an audience for what they do. Because these people are us. We’re the ones who make theater. Let’s start doing it on our own, without asking anybody whether we have permission to do so. Who are these gatekeepers anyway? As far as I am concerned, they’re ghosts, haunting us from theater’s past.

And what are we? We’re star children. We’re anarchists. We’re rock stars from Mars. We’re the future, if we want to be.

NOTES ON FAST, CHEAP & OUT OF CONTROL 1: BEING TERRIFYING

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 05:31:57 PST

Because I have been writing plays that I give away, sometimes with Coco’s assistance, I have been feeling a great freedom to make these plays as terrifying as possible, in a way. You always pay to do art, in some way or another. I am not going to ask for a fiduciary relationship; I will, instead, ask that you do something frightening, or impossible. These plays in the Fast, Cheap and Out of Control series sometimes feel as though they have the quality of a dare to them, and I don’t think that will go away. Instead, it will probably increase.

I like theater to be a bit of a dare, or something of a prank. I was once asked if I ever wrote a play I was a little afraid to have produced, and I answered that I think we should always try to write plays we would be a little afraid to have produced. But now I think I was wrong, at least in terms of my own writing. I don’t want to be a little afraid of my own plays. I want to be terrified of them. I want the idea of producing the play to fill people with a genuine concern. Will there be arrests? Will there be riots? What will become of my reputation?

The balance to this is that I also try to write plays that are instantly appealing, at least to me. These may be plays I would be terrified to have produced, but they are also plays I desperately want to see. I did a production of “Sleaze Book Club” a few months ago, and my mother showed up for it. The play involves a group of performers reporting on pornographic paperbacks they have read, and I was reporting on something called “The Pimp Wore a Dress.” I have always tried to be a gentleman around my parents, who have hardly ever even heard me cuss. So I was petrified about describing the details of one of the most hideously pornographic books I have ever read before my mother. At the same time, what great theater! So I made sure to introduce her, so that others could appreciate the spectacle. There have been hints that somebody in Minnesota will soon be doing "Basement Porn Party," and I am chomping at the bit to see it.

I suppose I think the things that frighten us are worth exploring. We tend to create rather safe experiences of terror -- horror movies, for example, which, by the fact that they have been categorized into a genre, are, in some way, minimized. Further, these films tend to abstract our fears, by creating metaphoric substitutes for them. These can be really terrifying, but you rarely watch one and think, good god, what if my mother knew I was up to this? Could I get fired for participating in this? Will I be arrested as I leave the theater?

Of course, you probably won’t, no matter what you're seeing. Art itself is a sort of genre, and it’s surprising how much you can get away with when something is labeled art. But, then, you might find yourself slapped in irons. Performers and audiences have been arrested in the past. It happens once in a while. And what a thrill!

Every so often, art should feel decidedly unsafe for those who see it, and those who make it. It used to be that you knew something was worth a damn if there was a chance of the theater getting raided -- or, for that matter, the bar, or the bathroom, or the bookstore. I like art where the people onstage have dared themselves to do something they are afraid to do, and you have dared yourself to see something you’re afraid to see. And sometimes these dares aren’t worth it, and I am not sure that I will produce dares that are worthwhile, although I will try. But sometimes you try something that you find quite frightening, and, once done, you discover you love it.

I had a dream once. David Bowie came up to me at a party, joined by his wife, who, in the dream, was not Iman, but a very tall, very pale, disinterested woman who looked like David Bowie. In the dream, David Bowie knew me, and he made romantic overtures toward me, inviting me to join him and his wife in bed. I did not know what they would expect of me, or if I could produce what they expected. I could not imagine enjoying it, and seriously considered the likelihood that I would be injured by the experience. The whole scenario filled me with horror. And yet I knew I couldn’t refuse. How could I go through life not knowing what I had missed? How could I live, having refused this opportunity?

I want my plays to be the equivalent of David Bowie and his nightmarish dream wife propositioning you at a party. It’s a tall order, but we have to shoot for something.

DOES WORKSHOPPING A PLAY REALLY HELP IT?

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:18:50 PST

Quite a few years ago, at a theater conference, I heard Mark Lamos, Artistic Director of the Westport Country Playhouse, declare that in his experience, no play has ever been improved by the workshopping progress.

This seemed a rather cheeky thing to say at a conference that was, fundamentally, a workshop for new plays, but nobody followed up on it. Perhaps they just thought, well, it’s one guy’s opinion. Although, in fairness, that guy is a Tony winner, was artistic director of Hartford Stage and has directed at the Public Theater, Lincoln Center, and the Guthrie. So he’s just not any guy. Or perhaps nobody wanted to entertain the possibility that the workshopping process, which has become fundamental to the creation of new plays, and which generates massive grant money for intuitions that support new plays, is really not that great a process.

I don’t have anywhere near Lamos’ experience. But I have participated in workshops for more than a decade, and had a dozen or so of my own plays go through a workshopping process. And, to an extent, I agree with Lamos --although I do think there is value in workshopping, which I will get too shortly. But let me start with my criticisms.

The workshopping process, as it is done now, developed in literary circles and has been moved, almost without changing it, to the world of performance. We do a staged reading, yes, but that will never give a sense of how a play will work onstage. Mostly, we respond to a play as a literary entity, but plays aren’t that. And we tend to look at a script as a flawed thing that can be fixed by literary fixes: by writing more, or better. But there is much about performance that defies language, and there is much about theater that works on the stage but not on the page.

Admittedly, there is a certain type of play that can benefit from the workshopping process. A well-made script, in the classical sense, can be helped. These plays are like little wind-up watches, and somebody with a good literary sense can offer suggestions for making the mechanisms work cleaner, and clearer. But, the truth is, I think a good play is generally going to be made better by actually getting it on its feet and performing it far more than by staging a reading and guessing at what may work and what may not. A play really benefits from a few productions that don’t quite work, far more than they benefit from a staged reading and some feedback.

And some plays are workshopped forever. I’ve seen plays that have been through dozens of workshops over a decade or more, and I think this isn’t especially productive. I suppose there are artists who can return again and again to the same play over years and years and years, and that this will be a valuable exercise. I don’t know many who can. It doesn’t take too long before we’re no longer the sort of person who would write what we once wrote. I could no more go back and revise an earlier play of mine than I could revise somebody else’s play. My interests have changed too much, my approach to theater has changed too much. I don’t need to fiddle with work I have already created, I need to make new work.

Another complaint I have with the process is the assumption that art is perfectible -- that it can be tweaked and teased and prodded, with the help of intelligent outsiders, until it is the very best play it can be. I am not convinced I believe this. Sometimes suggestions from others can be useful, when you’re up against a wall and you need some ideas for how to progress. But often they’re an imposition of somebody’s aesthetics upon your own. I once worked for a designer who would take her employees designs and completely redo them from scratch, insisting that the other designer had mucked up the project. She was confronted by one of her employees, a very good designer, who patiently tried to explain that she had simply come up with an alternative solution to a design question he had also solved. Further, her approach was simply different, not better. She responded with scorn: “If you can’t see that my design is better in every single way than your, I don’t know what to tell you.”

Admittedly, this is an extreme example. But it’s worth remembering that suggestions provided during the feedback part of a workshop are just other people offering their ideas of how to tell a story theatrically, and it should not be assumed that their suggestions are inherently better than yours.

There are, I should say, some plays that are just fundamentally broken. These certainly won’t benefit from workshopping. And some plays seem like rough drafts of the eventual play they will become, and it’s possible they will be helped through workshopping. But I think it is equally possible that the process adds in a lot of extraneous opinions when what the playwright really needs is to get the play up on its legs and see where it works and where it doesn’t, based on their own sense of what should work in a play and what shouldn’t, and based on whether an actual cast can produce the theatrical experience they are trying to create, and whether an audience responds in the way they envision.

That’s what’s really useful, although it means you’re asking a theater company to produce a play that still needs work. Tony Kusher did this with The Guthrie when he wrote “The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures” for the Guthrie, which he revised even as they were a week away from opening. Few theaters will be as patient with you as The Guthrie was with Kushner -- after all, most of us don’t have Pulitzers. But I think Kushner was right, that this is the way you make a play, and this is the way you know if it works or not. I don’t know if there is any way to get a commitment from theaters to approach new plays this way; I doubt it. In some ways, I think workshopping is a sort of hedge-betting, and one that actually makes money -- in the form of development grants -- for a theater, while producing a rough draft of a play might lose the company money, and keeping it in previews for a long time is expensive and tends to annoy critics, as has happened with the Spider Man musical. Which may be one of those plays that is fundamentally broken anyway.

But I mentioned that I think there is value to the workshopping process, and I think it is this: While it may not help any specific play, I think it can help a playwright. Plays themselves can only improve somewhat, but playwrights can improve immeasurably. I once saw Erik Ehn respond to a play with a magnificent investigation into the play’s themes, and his only comment was that the playwright should think about whether he wanted the play to be about ideas or about plot. If it was to be about plot, the playwright was forever going to be running down a twisting rabbit hole, and this might ultimately be futile. But the themes were there, and they were fascinating, and worth investigating.

Now, I don’t think this was especially useful advice for that specific play. As it was written, it was about plot, and was caught in that rabbit hole, and to recreate it as a theme piece would involve rewriting the whole play. But it’s enormously useful advice in writing the next play. It’s a question worth asking for any writer: Is this to be a play about plot?

I think the feedback we get from workshops might be a great benefit in this way: They may not do much for the play that has already been written, but, imperfect though the feedback may be, it offers a playwright plenty to chew on, and can profoundly affect the next play they write. And I think this is how I am going to approach workshops, when my work is being responded to, or when I respond to somebody else’s -- that the point of this is not to make a single play better, but to make a playwright better.

And “better” isn’t even the right word here, because it also assumes that a playwright is perfectible. No, not “better.” But richer, and more mature, and more in control of their tone, and their voice, and better able to tell the story they want to tell. I want to tell people “Don’t worry about this play. This play is written, and it is what it is. But, for your next play, I think what you may want to think about is this, or this, or this other thing.” I want to hear that. And then I can either take the advice, or reject it. Either way, it will have helped clarify my own thoughts about what I wish to do. And, better still, it will, one hopes, result in another play.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, February 21, 2011.

WRITING TRANSITIONS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:16:48 PST

It’s always been seen as a sort of truism in design that if you want to know the skills of a designer, you look for the little details. If it’s a newspaper layout, as an example, you check out where the page numbers are put, and how headers are placed, and if there is a line that divides a photo cutline from the text below it, and what sort of line, and how big it is. The printer’s devil is in the details, I guess, and having done editorial layout for three years, I agree. A careful designer knows the value of well-used ligatures, and what an interpunct is, and why you want to avoid klempen and plenken. It’s a million little things, but all contribute to the readability of a printed item.

It’s the same way in playwrighting. And I mention this because I have been reading a lot of plays lately that get the big details right -- plotting, dialogue, characterization -- but simply ignore the smaller details. Stage directions seem to be an afterthought. There is very little description of physical action. There’s very little description at all, probably because designers and directors tend to toss that stuff out. And, the truth is, if they can toss it out and its absence doesn’t affect the play, it probably didn’t need to be in the script. But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother writing these things. Instead, we should make sure that, when we do write them, they contribute to the script in such a way that excising them would be unthinkable.

I’m going to focus on transitions here, because it seems to be the part of playwrighting that has been most thoroughly abandoned. A vast majority of the plays I read -- and, in fairness, that I have written -- don’t have transitions at all. Scenes just end. Lights go out, lights come up, and we’re in a new scene. And, for some plays, this will be the best way to transition between scenes. It’s not especially theatrical, though, and mostly seems inspired by the sudden cuts in film and television. It’s my opinion that there are very few circumstances when theater benefits from being like film and television; it benefits most from being like itself.

Shakespeare, as an example, was a playwright who loved abrupt transitions, but they often had a logic to them. In “Julius Caesar,” as a famous example, the title character suddenly turns away from Calpurnia, with whom he has been discussing death, to ask a servant “What say the augurers?” It’s a significant shift, with Caesar literally moving away from one character to start a discussion with another, but the transition moves from a meditation on death to a look forward, at Caesar’s own assassination. Particularly in Shakespeare’s later work, he preferred these abrupt sort of transitions, and freighted them with irony, or portent, or commentary.

Mainstream theater has tended to like to break up scenes into discrete units -- lights dim between scenes, and curtains close between acts. Some of this is, I think, a decision based on convenience -- especially if there was a big set change afoot, and you were working on a naturalistic play, it didn’t really do to have the audience see properties being moved around by stagehands. But this is just one choice. Brecht eliminated transitions altogether, but liked to have the audience see people moving sets about and changing costumes onstage, as it contributed to his desire to constantly remind the audience that they were seeing a play. Sixties plays often made use of a sort of soliloquy as a bridging device between scenes -- its’ extensively used in “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg,” where the narrator, Bri, will often turn to the audience and speak directly to them while one scene transitions into another behind.

If its not a naturalistic play, a transition can be a scene in and of itself. Keep the lights on and make a fuss out of moving furniture, or changing clothes, or swapping out cast members. Have your playwright or director remain onstage and offer notes between scenes. If you’re doing an especially angry play, invite audience members onstage to smash parts of the set that are no longer needed. Have one scene start while another is still going on, so they overlap. Interrupt the action with a dance number, or a song, or a poem, that helps bridge one scene and another. Have fun with it.

Take a close look at your script and ask yourself if the best way to transition between scenes is to just type END SCENE ONE and then start a new page and type SCENE TWO. Sometimes it will be. But if you really dig, there may be another way to transition, one that the play itself suggests. An inventive transition can go a long way toward giving a play its own character, and involves the audience in a way that a simple blackout wouldn’t. And it’s a mark of the care you take with your writing that you have really thought about what transition would be best, rather than just cutting the action from one scene to the next, and letting a stage manager figure out how to get all of your props offstage before the next scene starts.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, February 16, 2011.

ON SUBMITTING SCRIPTS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:14:49 PST

One of the biggest challenges for playwrights is figuring out who to send their scripts to. Having done this for a while, I’m temped to say, send it to people you know, don’t bother with anybody else. It’s consistent with my experience. I once sent out a script I wrote -- and a very popular one, one that has been praised by the New Yorker and the New York Times -- to every single theater in America that seemed appropriate. I included its production history, its plaudits, and links back to my Web page, where potential producers could see the whole play as a Flash video. I would guess I sent it to three dozen theaters. It cost me a small fortune in stamps. I heard back from one theater: Thanks, no. From the rest, silence.

I don’t imagine this is uncommon, but David Lindsay-Abaire says you should just send your scripts out, just keep sending them, again and again and again. It’s what he did, and he has a Pulitzer, so I defer to his judgement.

However, there are some theaters I think I can safely say that you shouldn’t bother with. They’re going to claim that they are interested in reading new scripts, but that’s not true, not entirely. Sure, they’ll look at anything sent by an established playwright, or anything that comes from an agent. But if you’re like most American playwrights -- unagented and mostly unknown -- they’re going to throw your script on their transom heap and never get around to reading what you send in.

Here’s a few things to look out for:

1. They don’t have a literary department. Unless you’re directed to send your script directly to a titled employee who is part of a literary department -- even a one-person literary department -- there is a good chance the theater has nobody specific reading new scripts. They may use volunteers to do it, which is a risky proposition, because those volunteers may not be especially good readers, and they may infrequently be available. The theater may just leave it up to the artistic staff to read the script, when they get around to it. And they probably won’t get around to it.

2. They tell you it will take a year to get back to you. It’s especially bad when they also don’t accept simultaneous submissions. This means they are asking you to take your work off the market for a year, until they finally get around to reading it. And they won’t get around to it.

3. They don’t produce new plays. Take a look at their past few seasons, or their upcoming season. Do you see any new work produced, or work by a new playwright? No? Then there is almost no chance they’re going to do your piece, even if they accept submissions.

If you write short fiction as well as plays, as I do, the contrast between the submissions process is stark. Magazines that publish new work have an online submission form, detail explicitly how they want their stories submitted, tell you approximately how long it will take to get back to you (usually a few months), tell you how much you can expect to get paid, and tell you approximately how long it will take for your piece to get published. And once you submit you will, in general, get an email saying that your submission has been received.

I have never seen a theater website that does this, except with playwrighting contests and conferences. Most theaters still only accept printed plays, which is ridiculous. Most do not have a submission process listed on their web site, and, if they do, it will be stingy with details. And there is a reason for that: Most American theaters, whatever they claim, are actually not interested in producing new work.

There are some that do look at new work, and actually produce some of it. Stick with those theaters. Don’t bother with the others. You’re wasting your time and money. I’d say you’re wasting their time as well, but I don’t actually believe they spend much time on your script. Only about as long as it takes to put it on top of a filing cabinet and forget about it.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, January 19, 2010.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR SCRIPT IMPOSSIBLE TO UNDERSTAND

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:13:05 PST

I’ll be reading 20 or so plays in the next week, and have already read a dozen. It’s a dubiously pleasurable undertaking. These are submissions to a theater conference I participate in, and I am one of the first readers to winnow through everything that comes over the transom. Some of it is dazzling. Some of it is workmanlike. And, any of you who know Sturgeon’s Law can guess, 90 percent of it is crud.

I don’t mind it, really, although I spend a lot of time moaning when I’m actually doing the reading. There’s something encouraging about the fact that so many new writers try their hands at playwrighting, and that so many old writers keep trying, despite failing so definitively and so repeatedly. I don’t know what they expect to get out of playwrighting. There’s no money in it. Your audiences will be small. At least writing for television provides a steady paycheck and you might get to meet Tori Spelling. Who do you meet as a playwright? Local actors? You can do that just by going to a nearby bar.

But it’s a grand form, and I’m glad that people still try it, even if I wonder if they might be delusional. Good for them. If it wasn’t for the delusional, there would be no theater at all. And I want them to succeed. Every single one of them. I don’t care what they write -- I just want them to succeed in telling the story they want to tell, in the way they want to tell it. And there’s something exciting about seeing unpracticed writers trying to script a play. Plays can be so challenging. Just getting somebody in and out of a room is a hurdle, and one that’s easy to fumble on. Writing a scene in which five people must take turns talking, each having their own agendas, each forwarding a plot in their own way? It’s like that non-Euclidean geometry that H.P Lovecraft used to write about, which would drive people made just by seeing its broken lines.

As a result, a lot of the plays I read end up being incomprehensible. This is not such a bad thing -- incomprehensibility is a valid theatrical choice. However, with most of these plays, I don’t think the authors meant for them to be incomprehensible. It’s really a problem of translation, in that they know what they want us to know, but they don’t have the language to tell it. Deciding what the audience needs to know and when they need to know it is one of the great challenges of playwrighting. Tell too much too soon, you’ve frontloaded a script with exposition, and you’ve probably embarrassed yourself by having characters tell each other things they already know. Deny the information for too long and it starts feeling like a cheat. I can’t tell you the number of plays I’ve read where everybody in the play knows something, but they won’t let the audience in on it, and so they say things like “This reminds me of when daddy … well, you know.” “Oh yes, on that awful day when he … well, you know.”

I say to heck with it. Incomprehensibility is the bolder choice. Just make sure you’ve decided to be incomprehensible, instead of doing so by accident. The audience might throw chairs or set fire to the theater, but so what? There’s a noble tradition of that in theater, and it’ll probably get you some press and eventually an Off-Broadway production. So here are my tips on being incomprehensible. On the other hand, if you want your play to be understood, you might consider doing the opposite of this:

1. Jump around in time. You’d be surprised how many scripts include in their stage directions something like “5 years later.” I love this, because the audience can’t read the stage directions, and often there is nothing else in the script to indicate any time has passed. Don’t even bother to put it in the stage directions. Just have the play boldly leap around in time and don’t bother to tell anyone. This is even better when you make extensive use of flashbacks, or, most challenging yet, run an entire play in reverse chronological order.

2. Write an entire play as a way of getting back at your ex-lover. This is generally accomplished by having the main character represent you and you antagonist represent your ex-husband, or a girlfriend who jilted you, or something similar. This would muck up a more traditional play, because usually you’d want the two characters to have their own competing agendas. But there is a beautiful simplicity to this, in that both characters have the same goal: The protagonist needs to yell at the antagonist, and the antagonist needs to be yelled at. If you are an author of exceptional skill, try to write the whole thing without telling us anything about either character except what their relationship is to each other, and make your complaints as general as possible, such as “You never respected me,” or “You were kind of a bad man.” Don’t muddle this up with specifics -- that’s just pandering to the audience. Heck, just call the man “man” and the woman “woman.” Even better still, couple this with my next suggestion:

3. Set the play in no specific place. No, I’m not talking about establishing some sort of representational, limnal space, like the universes inhabited by Beckett’s characters. I’m talking about setting the whole play in a white room. Or a blackened stage where the characters are occasionally illuminated by spotlights. If you really must set it someplace, make it as general as possible: a hospital room, a living room, a hotel room. Remember, if you’re trying to confuse your audience, lack of specificity is your friend.

4. Have everybody talk exactly the same way. This especially useful if that style of speaking is unnatural and mannered. You’re going to be temped to distinguish the characters from each other by one quirk. One smokes, for example, and the other is bitchy, and one is really pompous. If you must do this, drop it midway through the play in favor of having the characters resemble each other. This is where not naming a character becomes important. Even if she stops chewing gum, I might remember that a character is named Cindy. But if you’ve just called her Girl 3, you’ve got me. And, by that, I mean you’ve lost me.

5. Have too much plot. The real trick to this is to have most of the action take place offstage, and to make it very, very complicated, and then have the characters attempt to explain it to each other. If you really want to make this work, make sure that at least one of the offstage actions makes no sense, if you really think about it. But make sure you’ve embedded it into the text of the play as being absolutely essential. So you’re going to have to explain why it actually makes sense. And then you’ll think about it some more, and realize your explanation raises as many questions as it answers. So provide new answers. Here’s where you can get caught in an endless loop of trying to justify your script. Trust me -- a lot of this sort of stuff is far more perplexing than a little of it. Dazzle your audience with too many explanations and sooner or later they’ll give up, and then watch as your Fringe page starts filling up with reviews. Sure, they won’t be good, but while one bad review might drive audiences away, 40 will cause your show to sell out.

Enjoy your runaway hit!

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, December 2, 2010

ARE WE GIVING NEW PLAYS THE OPPORTUNITIES THEY NEED?

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:09:56 PST

I’d like to talk about something that may not be possible. We may have boxed ourself into a corner and then painted ourselves into a box with the way theater is done noways. But I’ve increasingly come to think that American theater has gotten so good at just scraping by that they are totally flummoxed when they succeed at something. And they have so thoroughly planned for just getting by that they are stuck with that plan. And this may be perfectly good for the institutions themselves, which, after all, just need to keep on putting plays to justify their existence. But I think it’s very bad for new plays, which often need time to attract an audience and develop a reputation.

New plays have greatly diminished runs nowadays, thanks to the way contemporary theater, especially nonprofit theater, is structured. The season is usually mapped out well in advance, and the calendar is relatively inflexible. A popular play might be extended a week or two, but any more than that and it starts eating into rehearsal time for the next production. Compare this with for-profit theater, which has typically backed a single horse and then rode it until it collapsed. There’s great risk in this, of course -- one expects that the Spider Man musical, if it doesn’t breach its current dam of discontent, will be remembered as one of Broadway’s more spectacular flops, and the thing cost somewhere in the vicinity of $40 million. But, then, the with this structure, a producer has a financial incentive for giving a play a fair shake. With nonprofits, there isn’t the same sort of “this has to make it or we’ll go broke” urgency, and so a play that does poorly can just close its doors after three weeks and it’s on to the next one. Never mind that many of what we now consider classic 20th century theater would never have made it if the curtains fell after three weeks. Most of the audience walked out on “Waiting for Godot” on its U.S. debut at the Coconut Grove Playhouse. Albee’s “The Zoo Story” was rejected by American producers and he produced it himself in Germany. Joe Orton’s “Loot" outraged patrons and critics; it was seen as a flop. Some of these plays benefited from later productions, but this isn’t often the case in American theater nowadays. As Todd London and Ben Pesner’s book “Outrageous Fortune” points out, nonprofit American theater are mostly interested in new plays if they can debut them. Once a play is premiered, it may never be performed again.

But plays also benefited from catching the zeitgeist, and theaters used to be prepared to take advantage of this. Nowadays, if a play enjoys an extended run in the Twin Cities, it will tend to be an audience-pleasing sort that is pitched at the suburbs and placed in venues that are intended for long runs -- and this is not a criticism of plays such as “Triple Espresso” or “Nunsense,” which are perfectly enjoyable pieces. But more challenging plays with potentially smaller audiences can also enjoy long runs. Landford Wilson’s “The Madness of Lady Bright,” which had the audacity to dramatize a drag queen’s emotional breakdown in 1964, ran for 200 performances at Cafe Cino. Why? Because it caught with audiences, and cafe owner Joe Cino decided just to let it run until the audience lagged.

It’s going to be very hard for a new play to attract an audience when it has a lifespan about as long as a mayfly, but, even when it does, and third week ticket sales are through the roof, how many theater companies are in a position to do anything about it? And what is the benefit -- sure, they could scrounge up some money, find an available venue, and continue to run it, but even if the show continues to sell out, ticket sales only cover 40 percent of a non-profit theater’s costs. For every week the play continues to run, the company would be in the position of having to cover 60 percent of the nut on their own. We’ve found ourselves in a strange situation where having a hit play might actually cost a theater money. And while this might not necessarily be a problem for the specific institutions of theater, who can, after all, continue to make due by rolling out season after season of play after play, having long-running new plays are vital to the development of a robust playwrighting community. The Playwrights’ Center here in Minneapolis has about a thousand members. Conservatively, let us imagine that half of those members write one play per year. How many of those are produced locally? And how many enjoy productions of longer than a month? How many Minnesota-scripted plays have enjoyed more than 200 runs? I can name a few: “Triple Espresso,” “How to Talk Minnesotan: The Musical,” and perhaps “Church Basement Ladies.” Without minimizing the accomplishments of these plays, this does represent the Twin Cities theater community in a limited way.

I don’t have a solution to this. I am not prepared to tell institutions that they must change a successful business model -- or, at least, one with which they can remain vaguely afloat -- in favor of an untested business model that might cost them money. Who would benefit? I would, as I am a playwright, and I think American theater would benefit, but playwrights always think American theater would benefit if people like them did better. I do know that I, and other playwrights, don’t benefit from the current system, which seems designed like the Carousel in the movie “Logan’s Run,” in which people are set adrift in a machine that fires laser beams at them, and told they might survive it and prosper, but none ever do. I don’t know that any of us playwrights have anything to contribute to American culture that is of any lasting value. I also know that, with the current system, we won’t find out if we do.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, December 23, 2010

ON DIALOGUE

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:07:57 PST

I would be curious to go back to the 1940s and read the rejected submissions by fledgling playwrights from the era. I am curious about dialogue. Perhaps wrongly, I imagine the rejected plays to either exhibit a failed version of the wit of Wilde or Coward or the stylized working-man oration of Odets. Done badly, neither would be much fun to read (unless they failed spectacularly), but I find myself curious because I read the rejected scripts of our era, and the dialogue in it seems to be trying to sound like nobody at all.

There aren’t many genres of theater where dialogue is unimportant, and many in which it is paramount, with theater functioning as the staging of language. And yet I find myself reading script after script in which the dialogue doesn’t do much of anything besides carry a spear. Every spoken line is written in a strangely character-less style, with everybody expressing themselves precisely the same way. And it’s not merely that every character in a play talks like every other character in that play. Every character in every play sometimes seems to speak like every character in every other play. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re rare, even in plays that actually get produced.

I don’t know what we’d call this approach to dialogue. North American Neutral? Exposition Standard? But I can identify its features, or lack thereof. It shows no regional variation. It shows no variation based on the education level of the character, or their cultural group, or their class, or professional experience. Its primary feature is that people say precisely what they mean, without ever being circumspect or masking any subtext. And it relies on precisely two tricks: When people get emotional, the dialogue gets choppy, and when they are not being emotional, the dialogue tends to use a lot of sarcasm. And this is a very familiar approach to dialogue: If there is more emotion, it’s the language of the television drama, and if there’s more sarcasm, it’s the language of the television sitcom. I believe that contemporary playwrights still read plays by other playwrights. I also believe that many of them demonstrate that television writing is their primary influence -- not just in dialogue, but in things like transitions and even plotting, which I may detail in a later article.

The uses of dialogue
For now, let’s stick with dialogue. I suspect many playwrights use dialogue for one function -- to tell the audience what they need to know. And that is a function of dialogue, yes, but a rather limited one. I’d like to offer some suggestions for expanding the role of dialogue.

Firstly, in general, character shows itself through action, not dialogue. It is very possible to claim you are one thing but through your actions show yourself to be something else. When we rely on dialogue to communicate only the facts of a story to our audience, we take away the possibility of deception, and self-deception. We end up with a theater in which every single character is a reliable narrator of their own experience, and the truth is that this is just not a very interesting approach to theater. Liars are interesting characters. So are characters who deny certain truths to themselves. Almost the entirety of 20th century theater relies on lies, secrets, and untold or unacknowledged truths. Our stage dialogue should never be more truthful than the character that expresses it, except for those moments in which a liar accidentally tells the truth, or is forced to, which generally falls at the climax of a play.

And don’t limit this to just one big lie. People tell little lies all the time, for convenience, or out of habit, or out of a lack of knowing the truth. People hint at things rather than say them outright. In the real world, when people fight, they’re often fighting about something unacknowledged. Whatever they think they’re fighting about, it’s something like a shadow puppet show, masking the real complaints. Because the truth is that people are extraordinarily bad at knowing why they’re angry, and they’re even worse at excavating the truth, which can be painful or embarrassing. Why should our stage characters be less circumspect? Why should their hidden truths be less painful or embarrassing?

What dialogue reveals about character
Beyond the question of what is being expressed, there is also how it is expressed. As I mentioned above, dialogue tells us all sorts of things beyond the facts of a play. Here’s a brief list of some of what is expressed by dialogue:

Regional origins: Somebody from New Orleans is going to express thing differently that somebody from Los Angeles. A neutral ground in the street to one is a median to another. A banquette is a sidewalk. A parish is a county.
Ethnic, religious, and cultural origins: Somebody who was raised Jewish is more likely to make use of occasional Yiddishisms than somebody who wasn’t. A Mexican-American is more likely to make use of Spanish. Somebody raised within an Evangelical household will have access to certain Biblical idioms that somebody raised atheist probably won’t.
Class and work experience: Theater people are more likely that anybody else to reflexively say “break a leg” rather than “good luck.” A sous chef is likely to use certain words related to work that a college professor isn’t, and vice versa. Many professions have their own language, and it is useful to know the jargon, the shorthand, and the technical language of your character’s job.
Educational experience: I would discourage the idea that characters with more education use language better than than characters without, but they typically use language differently. We develop our linguistic sophistication in the environment that produces it, and so while a jailhouse lawyer and somebody who has studied contract law might be equally verbose, they’re probably going to express themselves differently.

Other uses of dialogue
These are just a few of the ways language marks who we are, often unconsciously. There are many others. Our use of language can point out our sexual preference, what our hobbies are, what fraternity we belonged to, and even medical details -- both stammerers and people who lisps sometimes are cautious about the words they use, and avoid words that are likely to expose their speech disorders. Dialogue can show people’s maturity level: An adult who still makes extensive use of the same sort of slang they used in high school may be showing stunted emotional growth.

To complicate this, there is also something that linguists call “code switching.” The fact is, we don’t have one manner of speech, we have many, depending on who we are with. A typical example would be somebody who typically speaks in a distinctive cultural way when within their culture, but switches to a more neutral voice when out of their culture. People who speak African American Vernacular English, as an example, or Spanglish, or speak with a strong rural accent, may try to make themselves sound in a manner that they think is appropriate to whatever environment they are in. And we all do this, to a certain extent -- we make different language choices around our parents than our friends, and around our bosses than our coworkers. Why would we do this in life but not onstage?

And this is just addressing language from a naturalistic perspective. The truth is, characters in plays don’t have to talk like real people. Depending on the type of story being told its sometimes better if they don’t. Many genres of theater call for a heightened or stylized use of language. You’re not going to have characters in a fairy tale speak like American stevedores from the 1940s (although you could; that might be an interesting choice). Plays set in alternate worlds might decide to invent language to represent that. Children’s plays might be written entirely in rhymed couplets. And even pieces that are superficially naturalistic might choose to make idiosyncratic use of language. I can think of two Westerns, “Warlock” by Oakley Hall and “True Grit” by Charles Portis, that reinvented the language of the Old West into something that feels inspired by the King James Bible, and it works for the stories they are telling. The Coen Brothers adaptation of Portis’ book maintains much of the book’s language, which isn’t surprising, as the Coen’s have always had a taste for unusual dialogue.

It’s worth it if we playwrights develop our own taste for dialogue. People spend as much time listening to a play as they do looking at it. Let’s give them something worth listening to.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, December 30, 2010

ARTISTS AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:19:21 PST

We’ve just had our new year, and some amazing work has entered the public domain. The complete works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, as an example. And his contemporary, Nathaniel West, who worked with him in Hollywood and died the same year as Fitzgerald. The term of a copyright in the U.S. is the life of the creator, plus 70 years. Fitzgerald and West died in 1940. And so it is -- welcome to the public domain, dear “Gatsby.” Welcome, “Day of the Locust.” This is an especially exciting prospect for playwrights and theater companies -- it provides a multitude of works that can now be performed or adapted freely.

Or, at least, that was how it was supposed to work. In fact, these works, and millions of other lesser-known pieces, will not enter the public domain. Not until 2019. This was the result of a piece of legislation called The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The act, named after the singer-turned-politician who authored it, effectively froze the public domain until 2019 for any piece created after 1923. The act is sometimes pejoratively called the Mickey Mouse Protection act, because it saved Walt Disney’s mascot from becoming public property; The Disney Company, as you might imagine, was one of the companies that most aggressively lobbied for this act.

Never mind that Mickey Mouse was actually the creation of Ub Iwerks, and was based on drawings by Hugh Harman, and might have been based on a toy from the era. And never mind that Walt Disney himself borrowed extensively -- and, at times, exclusively -- from the public domain to make his films. Just to demonstrate this, here’s a partial list of Disney films whose original works would not have been in the public domain under the Bono Act: “Pinocchio,” “Song of the South,” “Treasure Island,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Looking at their filmography, an overwhelming majority of their feature-length works have been based on work that is in the public domain -- a trend that continues to this day, with “Treasure Planet” and “The Princess and The Frog” being two recent examples. And yet, to protect their iconic mouse, they have helped shut down the public domain from receiving new works. Never mind that an overwhelming majority of these works are orphaned creations, with nobody knowing who made them, nobody claiming ownership, and nobody profiting. For the want of a mouse, the kingdom was lost.

The importance of the public domain
I would like to make a case for the importance of a robust public domain, and why we, as artists, have a special debt to the public domain. Because things like the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act are often presented as existing for the sake of artists. They’re there, we’re told, for our good, so that we can continue to make a profit off our work throughout our life, and our children can also enjoy the benefits of our good work. And, for a very select few, this will be true. A handful among us will produce a work so popular it continues to generate money over the course of our life, and after our death.

For most of us, though, this won’t be the case. We’re not the Noel Cowards of the world. We’re lucky even to get half of our plays produced during our life, and even then, statistically, they will only be produced once. For most of us, this talk of endless rewards for our work is a bill of good, less likely than a lottery win. Who benefits most from a frozen public domain? Big corporations, who can continue reaping profits from a very small body of work long after the creators have died, and who have never shown much interest in paying out to anybody else. Does Disney still pay the family of Ub Iwerks for Mickey Mouse? Do they pay the family of Lewis Carroll? Jules Verne? No -- in fact, Disney had a protracted legal battle with the family of E.H. Shepard, the illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh, over royalties from work made with the bear’s likeness, which they allegedly repeatedly failed to disclose. There may be examples of individual families that have benefited from the Sonny Bono act. I have scoured the Internet and failed to find mention of them, though.The act was funded by and benefits corporations, and any benefit an artist gets is incidental, and sometimes must be sued for.

But, then, what’s the harm? It’s a good question, but I think the fact that it must be asked demonstrates just how little regard there is for the public domain, and how little discussion there is of it. But we artists have a special debt to the public domain. None of us are sui generis -- we are all products of the culture that produced us. Even when creating our own work, we make anew what has been created before us, many times, by artists that preceded us. They gave us the language we use, the narrative structures we employ, and the genres we work within. To a greater or lesser extent, all writing is rewriting. And, with great frequency, it’s to a greater extent. We rewrite Greek myths. We rewrite old folk songs. We adapt older stories. We’re especially a remix culture now, but to some extent always have been. “Hamlet” was based on an older work. “Romeo and Juliet” was lifted from “The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet” by Arthur Brooke, written in 1562, a scant 30 years before Shakespeare wrote his script -- in contemporary terms, Shakespeare was a plagiarist. And “West Side Story” rewrote Shakespeare, and so it goes.

The history of copyright
But, then, copyright laws are quite a new development. Once upon a time, the moment you created a piece of work, it entered the public domain. This is the way of things for most of the history of humanity, and the first copyright laws weren’t enacted until the 15th and 16th century. And were they created to protect the earnings of artists? No they were not. They were created to support a monopoly of printers. Even at its start, the copyright was there for corporations.

This is not to argue that extending the copyright to artists was a bad thing. But do you know what the original copyright law in the United States was for a newly created piece? Fourteen years, and it could be extended another 14 if the author was still alive. The early logic for the copyright was similar to the logic for a patent -- that an inventor was petitioning the government for a legal monopoly on something. The government was willing to provide that monopoly, but only temporarily. The repayment for this was that, eventually, the monopoly would end, and the work would be extended to the benefit of all humankind. The U.S. Constitution has consistently been interpreted as supporting a copyright only to encourage creative works for the public benefit, and the public benefit takes priority over private value.

Additionally, in the beginning, you had to register for a copyright, and had to identify the copyright on your creation, or it entered the public domain. And once it was in the public domain, it couldn’t come back out again. Not anymore. Now a work is copywritten at the moment it is created and remains so until 70 years after the creator's death. And if you don’t know who the creator was? Orphaned works are still protected by copyright. You could probably grab an illustration from an old magazine and nobody would sue you, but no publisher is willing to take that chance. And so it is that it is almost impossible to properly access most of the work of the 20th century, despite it being ownerless. Shakespeare could use a 30-year-old piece without fear of prosecution, and, up until 1970, so could anybody. Now, nothing that predates 1923 is available to us, unless it accidentally already entered the public domain.

And there are two examples of this that demonstrate how valuable the public domain is, both from the world of film. Both “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Night of The Living Dead” accidentally went into the public domain (the former has actually achieved what is usually impossible and returned to private ownership). Without “Night of The Living Dead” being completely free to draw from, we would not have had access to one of the only new monsters of the late 20th century -- the Romero-styled zombie. This creature, which Romero could rightfully have sued to keep from appearing, in his conception of it, in later films, instead continues to generate new work, including work from Romero himself. We might not have had the recent AMC series “The Walking Dead” were it not for a goof in the copyright process that allowed “Living Dead” to slip into the public domain.

As for “It’s a Wonderful Life,” without work derived from it and from another public domain piece, “A Christmas Carol,” we wouldn’t have Christmas. Well, we might, but it wouldn’t be the same. These two pieces serve as the ur-text for 80 percent of theatrical Christmas presentations, and, as anybody who runs a theater can tell you, without those seasonal shows, most theater companies would go broke.

The future of public domain
We’re not likely to reverse the Sonny Bono act, and so be it. If we’re among the fortunate few to have work that continues to make money after our death, our children, and our children’s children, and their children’s children, will continue to profit from it. This is probably good for them, although I’ve never seen any evidence that having money that you did not personally earn has a salutary effect on one’s character. It’s probably bad for art, as children of artists have been known to destroy their parents’ art, or limit access to it -- take James Joyce’s son as an example, who has done both. But we’re stuck with it, thanks to the man who wrote “I Got You, Babe” and a company that wants to control the rights to a cartoon mouse.

But these things are worth thinking about. Because Mickey Mouse is due again to enter the public domain in 2023, and there will always be other works of art that corporations wish to keep making money from, and there will continue to be legal pushes to extend copyright indefinitely. And, as artists, we’ll be told that this is being done for our sake, to protect our interests, never mind that we’ll be long dead, and our grandchildren’s grandchildren will be long dead, by the time anybody is again able to access our work.

We’ve drawn from the public well. We make our art thanks to the people who made art before us, and whose work we can access freely, and adapt, and interpret, and revise. We owe it to future generations to pay back into that well. We are the future of the public domain, and we must be its stewards and protectors, or we are its thieves.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, January 3, 2010

THEATER AND CHAOS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 13:01:22 PST

This is going to be an odd thing for me to say as a playwright, but at times I dislike scripts. And I’ve worked as a performer in the past, and found I prefer the first rehearsal to the final performance. As a critic, I often enjoy sitting in on the process of making a play more than I enjoy the final product. But, then, I also prefer the way a building looks before it is finished, when its structure is exposed. There’s something about the process of making things that I find very exciting, and I always feel that it’s a bit of a pity that the way we typically do theater masks that process.

This approach, at its worst, feels to me like the creation of a waxworks exhibit. The big questions of a play have been fully explored and settled, and, if the audience is to see anything new being investigated or discovered, it will be something small or finely nuanced. A play will change during its run, yes, but I have found that these changes tend to reflect a growing steadiness, an increasing certainty about what the dialogue is, how it should be said, and how the character feels about the lines they are saying.

There are a lot of forms of theater where this is probably the best approach. Naturalistic plays, as an example, are not really intended to tip their hats that they are plays. It’s for the best to hide the process of making the play, because the whole point is to pretend that it isn’t a play at all, but instead we are miraculously looking through an invisible wall at a group of people who are perfectly unaware they are actors at a theater.

And even with forms that predate Naturalism, it’s probably for the best to approach it as it’s often been approached -- set dialogue, rigorous rehearsals, unwavering blocking, etc. But it’s not the only approach, and I’d like to explore some examples of performance that are thoroughly unsettled. And let me begin by explaining, quickly, why I enjoy this sort of performance.

Every night a different show
Firstly, and most of all, I think one of the real and distinct pleasures of live performance is that every single night you see it, you will see a performance that will never be replicated. This makes live performance significantly different from, say, film or television, where a rerun of an episode will be identical to one broadcast previously. Gathering a small group of people together to share an experience that is unique and cannot be repeated generates an enormous intimacy, a sense of being part of small group that is experiencing a shared event, and one that won’t be experienced in precisely the same way again. This is something that theater does as a matter of course, but mass mediums rarely attempt, and I think it is occasionally valuable to highlight this fact.

Secondly, for my tastes, one of the real pleasures of art is the act of discovery. But each step of the process of creating a play tends to remove more and more discoveries. The actors go from being introduced to their dialogue to memorizing it. They go from developing their characters to setting their characters. Certain themes in the text become highlighted, other themes get pushed to the background. A blank stage that still contains the possibility of becoming anything becomes a set, and suddenly, in place of possibility, we have a specific environment. The way most modern theater is created, if the actors are still having big discoveries on the night the play opens, the play might be in trouble. And, for many plays, this is as it should be. The audience still gets to discover the play for themselves, and a really good performer can believably mimic the experience of discovery right along with the audience. That is what most plays are nowadays -- actors pretending to experience the play for the very first time.

We all discover the play together
But it is possible to create structures in which the cast and the audience share the experience of discovery, either for part of the play or for the entire thing. There’s a theater troupe called the Improbable Theatre Company, who have been to town a few times thanks to the Walker Art Center. They’re probably best-known for their work on the musical “Shockheaded Peter,” which was created, in part, using improvisation, but quickly settled into a play that could be duplicated from night to night. However, they have done other work that is considerably less settled, including a piece called “Spirit,” which played here about eight years ago. A certain amount of the story was preset, telling the tale of three brothers and a war. But the play’s three cast members structured the story in such a way that it could constantly be interrupted, and often was, by the cast having actual conflicts with each other, and then finding ways to resolve those conflicts. They’re also responsible for a show called “Lifegame,” which sought to create an entire play out of the experiences of an audience member, who was interviewed onstage. The play was improvised around the details the audience member shared during the interview, and then, as I recall it, ended with the company imagining the death of the audience member.

Another theater troupe, Gob Squad, likewise creates plays out of structured improvisations. The Walker brought their play “Super Night Shot” to Minneapolis a few years ago, which was a rather dazzling exercise in creating a story on the spot. The play’s cast members took the roles of a filmmaking team, and, an hour before the scheduled showtime, went out into the streets with cameras and a few set tasks. They were to publicize the movie, scout locations, find a love interest, and end with an onscreen kiss. At the end of this, they were rushed to the performance venue, past the audience, who were given noisemakers and streamers and told to cheer their entrance. Then, in the theater, they edited together all of the footage on the fly, revealing the movie they had just created. Gob Squad will be back in town this week, performing a show called “Kitchen” that sounds as though it is similarly unsettled. Inspired by a short film by Andy Warhol, also called “Kitchen,” except that the cast has never actually seen the film. Instead, they spontaneously attempt to recreate the film, based on the little they know about it, what they know about Warhol, what they know about the cast, and what they know about the ‘60s. (I should mention, quickly, that have also written a play based on “Kitchen,” titled “chelsea (from a to b and back again),” that was produced by Omaha’s Blue Barn Theatre just under a decade ago.)

Unmoored theater
It is also possible to take a fully scripted play and knock it off its moorings, as it were, so that no two performances will ever be alike, and the play changes significantly from night to night. The best example of this that I know of is a play called “The Race of the Ark Tattoo,” written by W. David Hancock; it enjoyed an excellent production here by Joel Sass’s old company, Mary Worth. The play takes the form of a flea market, and every item on sale has a story associated with it, all from the life of a former foster child named P. Foster. The stories are told in the order that the items are assembled, and they reveal -- and conceal -- a longer narrative. Some nights one part of the story will be told, based on the chosen items, and another it will be different items and a different part of the story.

Although she’s primarily identified with improvised comedy, rather than traditional theater, Jill Bernard’s show “Drum Machine” is a piece with the plays I’ve described, in that she improvises a fairly complete musical on the spot. Bernard will also take time to explain what she’s doing, when appropriate: I saw one performance when she gave a Chinese character a New York accent, and explained her reasoning to the audience. Specifically, she felt it was impossible for her to do a Chinese accent without sounding racist. It’s not often shows actually stop themselves during their performance to explain how they are made and the reasoning behind these decisions; in this context, it was delightful.

Of course, shows will sometimes become unsettled by accident: A line will be flubbed, or there will be some accident onstage, and suddenly the cast will find themselves winging it. And, with unexpected frequency, these moments don’t hurt a show, but suddenly send an electric charge through it. In other shows, certain bits of stage business will take on a life of their own, finding themselves expanding and getting revised every single evening; this is especially common in comedies. In their way, it’s these moments that make live theater genuinely live. We’re no longer seeing actors mostly duplicating what they’ve done the previous performance and the performance before that. We’re seeing them do something they’ve never done before. I know things like this throw some people into an absolute panic, and those people might be the ones who should stick to a more settled way of creating live performance. For most tastes, these moments are some of the most exciting I have experienced as an audience member, or as a performer. I’d like to see more plays that use these as a starting point, rather than something to avoid.

First published in Minnesota Playlist, January 10, 2010

THE ARTIST AS CRITIC

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:51:31 PST

It’s been a long time since Jayne Blanchard. Those of you with long memories might recall the Pioneer Press critic, especially if she cast her notoriously sharp eyes on a play you were in. You may not, however, remember the circumstances of her termination from the Pioneer Press, which were complicated and eventually involved a sexual harassment lawsuit. I won’t delve into the full details, although some of them are available in this City Pages story from 1997. Suffice it to say, a large number of the reasons given for her termination involved a conflict of interests: she had produced a play and then written about the experience.

It’s always been hard to maintain the wall between critic and artist. Although we typically think of them as very different animals, the truth is that there is a long history of playwrights working as arts reviewers, including Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. Even when this hasn’t been the case, it’s hard for there not to be a chumminess between critic and performer or artist -- it’s a small beat, and you see the same people over and over again. And theater people tend to be pretty friendly and attractive, so it’s awfully hard to fasten a wall between artist and critic and have it stick.

But nowadays, there hardly seems to be a wall at all. Sure, some print newspapers will try to maintain the old standards, insisting that the newspaper pay for tickets, and some critics will try to force distance between themselves and their subjects. But there aren’t many of these left. The budgets for arts criticism have shrunk, although interest in the subject probably remains about the same. And so even newspapers have found themselves hiring stringers and freelancers who actually work in the field they are writing about. Local actor/director Zack Curtis, as an example, used to write about theater for The Examiner online. Bill Corbett has written about theater for City Pages. Director John Townsend has expanded his longtime gig as a theater critic at Lavender Magazine to include freelance work with the dailies. Playwright and actress Sheila Regan regularly writes about the arts for a variety of local publications.

And things have gotten less formal on the critical side as well. Daily Planet arts editor Jay Gabler is about as chummy with his subjects as it is humanly possible to be. 3-Minute Egg producer Matt Peiken likewise has friends throughout the performing arts community.

And there’s me, of course, whose always had one foot in both world, having worked as an arts critic for almost precisely the same amount of time I have worked as a playwright and performer. And, at this moment, I’d say most of my friends are members of the performing arts world.

Pitfalls and benefits
I’d like to take a moment now to discuss some of the benefits of this, as well as some of its potential pitfalls. We’ll start with the pitfalls, which are easiest to discuss:

This sort of critic/artist cross pollination can lead to overwhelming conflicts of interests. It does not serve the needs of an artist or an audience to have a critic who is primarily a cheerleader for the local arts community. One of the traditional roles of the critic is to act as an entirely impartial respondent to a piece of art. We may not agree with their opinion, but we know them to be thoroughly scrupulous in expressing that opinion. And, without an impartial response, there is a risk of criticism just becoming a wing of the promotions department of an arts organization. And even the appearance of a conflict-of-interests has historically led to charges of impartiality, which is why some critics will not see their subjects on a social basis.

I’ve wrestled with this. It’s especially poignant now, as I tend to prefer only to write about subjects that interest me, and so it will be pretty rare that I produce a really scabrous review. As I figure it, audiences have no trouble steering clear of bad art, and there is so much interesting art out there that I prefer to point them in that direction. And my relationship with the local performance art community is so thoroughly muddied that I must includes extended full-disclosures in every piece I write. I have been fortunate to land a gig where this isn’t a problem, as my column for MinnPost is built around a conversational, insider’s look at the arts. But, as Mencken once said, in order to maintain credibility as a critic, sometimes you have to raise the black flag and start slitting throats. This can be very, very difficult to do when you’re writing about people you care about.

Additionally, if you’re a theater person who has gone into writing criticism, there’s the possibility of making enemies. “I feel I’ve burned quite a few bridges by writing snarky reviews about plays done by theater companies I at one time would have liked to work with,” Sheila Regan told me. “Being a theater writer has pretty much been disastrous for my acting career, but at the same time I’m really more interested in creating independent, experimental work (as opposed to acting professionally in mainstage productions), so I will continue to do that.” Local creators of the arts can be a pretty forgiving group, but forgiveness only goes so far.

Despite this, I think this breakdown between critic and artist was inevitable, and is, ultimately, a net plus. The biggest benefit is that arts writing is at its best when written by somebody who actually knows about the arts. There’s a long and sullied history in the press of sports writers and beat reporters being pressed into arts writing because nobody else will do it. They’ve never participated in the making of a performance, and so don’t know what goes into it. And they often don’t have much of an education on what they’re reviewing. Notoriously, an Omaha critic once left “Waiting for Godot” during intermission, not knowing there was a second act. He wrote a piece about how Beckett’s play has nothing to say to modern audiences. And, who knows, maybe he was right. I like Beckett, but I also like “Auntie Mame,” and that’s a play that genuinely has nothing to offer modern audiences. But his case would have been more credible had he stuck it out for the second act.

Two schools of criticism
I suppose there are two schools of criticism. The first, which has historically been the preferred one, is that the critic is the audience’s representative at a play. This critic need know no more than a typical audience member might, and can therefore fairly represent the audience’s experience of the play. This critic doesn’t need to know anything more than what happens between the moment a curtain rises and when it falls. And this is certainly fine for popular arts. Anything extra you know about “Mama Mia,” as an example, may be too much. But the arts have never benefited from an ignorant audience, and 20th and 21st century art, in particular, has demanded an audience that is willing to self-educate. The fine arts, for example, no longer see a single painting as being a complete and discrete piece. It helps to know the artist’s philosophy, or the genre they are working in, or if the piece is part of a larger collection. In this world, the role of a critic is, in part, to act as a sort of tour guide to an audience member, providing context for a piece of art.

For this sort of critic, all sorts of things are important beyond what occurs between the rise and fall of a curtain. The process that goes into making a piece of art becomes very interesting. The social world of the artist becomes quite important. A larger knowledge of genre, or arts philosophy, of artistic movements, becomes vital. And this is a very hard thing for a former sportswriter to just jump into. If you want this “tour-guide” sort of critic, it helps to find somebody whose background is in the arts. They generally can communicate pretty well in writing, as we at MinnesotaPlaylist have repeatedly demonstrated. After all, artists are often well-educated, and, especially in the performing arts, communicating clearly and well is an essential skill.

I suspect we’re going to see a lot more critic/artists down the road as print newspapers keep tightening their budgets and less-traditional online news sources start to come into their own. My suspicion is that the end result of this will be a better-educated and more adventurous audience. I hope this will be the case, anyway. There is, of course, a risk that criticism will become a form of advertising, with critics writing only to promote their own work or their friend’s work. God knows this is a real possibility: If there is one thing the Internet has proven, it is that it is quite good making spam.

That would be a pity. Because we are filling the ranks of arts critics with people who know about the arts, love them, and are skilled at communicating their nuances. This should lead to a golden age of arts writing, instead of a golden age of self-promotion.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, January 17, 2010

POP-UP THEATER

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 12:47:48 PST

There’s been a lot of talk lately about something called “pop-up theater,” or, since most of the talk seems to be taking place in the United Kingdom, “theatre.” The idea is pretty simple, and certainly not especially new: Instead of producing a play in an established theater venue, you instead produce it somewhere unexpected.

Often the chosen locations comment on the play. The Young Vic, for instance, did a play called “The Container” that dealt with refugees entering England on the back of a truck. The play was produced in an actual shipping container. But pop up theater doesn’t have to be so literal: Art darling Banksy debuted his documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop” in a 150-seat theater, that was built in an unused tunnel under Waterloo Station, billed as London’s “darkest and dirtiest” theater.

One suspects this is because London is so darned expensive. Rather than deal with the cost of maintaining a year-round theater space, or even renting a theater space for a few months, performers are just grabbing whatever corner of London they can for the run of a show, setting up a makeshift lighting kit, and hightailing it out of there when things are done. And this is why I’d like to discuss the fad, although I should take a moment to point out its antecedents.

It's not especially new
This is similar, of course, to Off-Off-Broadway. In part for financial reasons, Off-Off-Broadway rejected New York’s established theater spaces in favor of churches, cafes, and other nontraditional venues. But Off-Off-Broadway quickly morphed into small black box spaces -- they developed their own sort of permanence, while pop-up theaters are intended to be short-lived. And pop-up is similar to site-specific work, except that site-specific work is typically, well, specific to the site being used. The work is built around the space, and may not make sense elsewhere.

Nonetheless, this is a trend that has a lot of history. Heck, back in 2001 or thereabouts, Skewed Visions produced a show at the Fringe called “The Car” that took place in an actual car, driven around the city. Our own Alan Berks helped create a series of short plays performed in area bars, and his last Fringe entry was produced in an art gallery. Off-Leash Area produced their play “A Gift from Planet BX63” at a series of garages last summer (I wrote the dialogue for that show), and Michael Sommers has actually built a traveling theater on the back of a bike just for the purpose of transporting shows to neighborhood venues. The Walker regularly brings performances that take place outside their theater. I think the name “pop up theater” appeared, not because it’s a new trend, but because there is so much of it all of a sudden.

Why it's worth talking about
But I think it’s especially worth considering now, especially in American theater. We suffer from a dearth of new productions nowadays, and the book “Outrageous Fortune” by Todd London and Ben Pesner identified a number of reasons for this, and one of them was the institutionalization of non-profit theater. A large number of small American theater companies maintain their own theater spaces, and, as a result, a large percentage of their budget goes into paying rent. Even without the space, there’s a great need to spend money to support the institution year-round, including paying salaries. And just as you cannot serve both God and Mammon, it’s quite difficult to make maintaining an institution a priority and produce financially risky new work. There’s a large disincentive, in fact, to experimenting. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible, of course -- new work does get produced, and a lot of it is quite risky. But the amount of this work that debuts every year is passingly small.

Pop-up theater offers an alternative financial model. If you do a play project-by-project, rather than maintaining a company year-round, and you see almost anyplace as a potential venue, you pare back on production costs dramatically. Even renting a theater space can be quite expensive -- you may not need to maintain it 12-months a year, but somebody has to, and they’re going to charge enough to cover that, as well as make a profit. But there are an endless number of cheaper rental spaces, and free spaces, in any city. Performer Ann Magnuson, in what may be one of the earliest examples of what we now think of as pop-up theater, took over the elevator in the Whitney and sang along with the elevator’s Muzak soundtrack for five continuous hours. I have my own example, which I’ll mention briefly: I have a play titled “Sleaze Book Club,” which is just that -- a group of actors get together and provide book reports for mid-20th century pornographic literature they have read. The last time I produced this, we simply requested a room at the Central Library downtown, telling them we were an actual book club. Which, in a way, we were. Total cost of the venue: $0.

Pop-up theater for playwrights -- and others
It’s especially useful for playwrights to think about writing for pop-up theater. We tend to write plays with the idea that they will be mounted on a traditional stage, but odds are against us on this -- most mid-level playwrights will only get half of what they write produced, and, even then, it will only enjoy one brief production. The solution to this, as playwright Mac Wellman likes to tell people, is to produce your own plays. But this is often economically unfeasible, as playwrights may not have the capital to rent spaces and lighting kits and seats and whatnot. Individual playwrights don’t have access to grants in the way institutions do, and they don’t tend to have their own non-profits, so they can’t solicit money the way institutions do.

But pop-up theater can bring the cost of a production down to a manageable level. And this is worth considering for anybody involved in making theater -- not just playwrights. Independent producers can potential do more or riskier work, and even performers can take the reigns in producing work that they are interested in, rather than waiting for a theater to put on a play that they are appropriate for.

Really, it’s just a matter of finding a location that is willing to serve as your venue -- and you’d be surprised how many places are available for free. Bars, for instance, are often willing to set aside a night for a performance, as it is to their benefit to get a certain number of people into their space to buy drinks. If you can find a nonprofit to act as an umbrella organization for your production, people are often willing to donate unused office spaces, or storefronts, or other commercial property, for the length of the run in order to be able to write off what they would have made in rental. Simple lights kits can easily -- and cheaply -- be rented from audio/visual businesses, often for under $200 per week, and under $100 for a weekend. Folding chairs can likewise be rented. And there you have it -- a theater space, for as long as the play lasts.

And there’s an even cheaper option, although it’s riskier: just take over a space, perform a play, and get the hell out. It’s what the underground rave scene used to do in Los Angeles, and it’s a very appealing option for a certain type of theater. There’s an especially odd group called the Surveillance Camera Players who would produce short scenes directly into security cameras. More famously, Improv Everywhere deliberately chooses unlikely and surprising locations for their performances, and don’t even let their audiences know that they are about to see a show. It will just start, in the middle of a Starbucks or subway station, and, a few minutes later, be done.

It’s been quite a long time since Shakespeare told us that all the world’s a stage. This is an especially good time to take him too literally.

Originally published on Minnesota Playlist, January 31, 2010.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER'S PLAY “SLEAZE BOOK CLUB” AT CENTRAL LIBRARY, SEPTEMBER 3, 4:30 p.m.

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 07:00:43 PDT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: MAX "BUNNY" SPARBER'S PLAY “SLEAZE BOOK CLUB” AT CENTRAL LIBRARY, SEPTEMBER 3, 4:30 p.m.

MINNEAPOLIS -- Max “Bunny” Sparber, a Minneapolis playwright and former City Pages theater critic, whose the New York Times called “raw” and “gripping,” and who the New Yorker praised for his “intelligence and sheer talent,” brings his self-assembling play "Sleaze Book Club" to Minneapolis's Central Library.

“Sleaze Book Club,” consists of performers -- actors and non-actors alike -- providing self-written book reports on tawdry paperback pornographic novels found at adult bookstores, along with a dramatic reading from each. At the end of the play, audience members are assigned books of their own to read. And that’s it. That’s the entire play.

The play is the first of what is intended to be a series of self-produced projects by Sparber which he has dubbed “self-assembling theater.” Instead of writing scripts, he writes directions for the assemblage of a play, of sorts, constructed by the actors themselves out of found material and based around the self-organizing rituals of everyday people, including drag shows and group sex sessions. Each of these plays examine when people abandon privacy, and each are deigned to be performed without rehearsal, so that the resulting play unfolds itself in front of the performers at the same moment as the audience. No performance is ever to be repeated, no two performances will ever be the same, and the play violates the usual approach to theater, in which the process of creating a play is masked and the moments when the cast discovers the play are lost in the rehearsal process.

These self-assembling plays are part of a larger experiment by Sparber and his occasional writing partner, Coco Mault, called Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. These are pays designed to be performed on a microbudget, in found or squatted locations, and Sparber and Mault provide the scripts freely to anybody who wishes to perform them,
without expectation of licensing fees or royalties; they don’t even expect to be informed when a play is to be performed, but instead ask for some sort of documentation that the play has been performed. More about these plays can be found at
http://www.maxsparberplays.com/2010/06/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control.html

Information about “Sleaze Book Club,” as well as a larger downloadable digital version of the image for the play, can be found at http://www.maxsparberplays.com/2010/07/sleaze-book-club.html

The premiere production of the play occurred August 6 as part of Storefront in a Box; video from the premiere can be seen at http://www.maxsparberplays.com/2010/08/sleze-book-club-performance-august-6.html

WHAT: “Sleaze Book Club,” a play by Max “Bunny” Sparber
WHEN: Friday, September 3, 4:30 p.m.
WHERE: Central Library Mark E. Johnson Conference Room N-202, 300
Nicollet Mall Minneapolis, MN 55401
HOW MUCH: Free

Playwright Max “Bunny” Sparber can be reached for interview at maxsparber@gmail.com or 612.217.1234

FILM'S GREATEST PLAYWRIGHTS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 14:51:55 PDT

Here's a partial list of some of my favorite onscreen playwrights. All have in common that their plays are both somewhat terrible and utterly irresistible, and also that the playwrights are horrible misbehavors. This is not necessarily what you want out of real playwrights -- although I will always prefer imaginative misconduct over drab politeness -- but they do remember something that every dramatist would do well to keep in mind: people are always more interesting when they are misbehaving.

Max Fischer of Rushmore (1998): It’s likely that 15-year-old Max Fischer is not a very good playwright. Played by the then-17-year-old Jason Schwartzman as a boy with ambitions well beyond his capabilities, the snippets of scenes we see from Fischer’s plays are confident collections of cliches, such as his all-child version of "Serpico," which has a pint-sized version of Al Pacino crying out “I can't wear a wire! They're feeling me up every day!” -- a line that sounds cribbed from a thousand cop films. But what Fischer may lack in originality, he more than makes up for in reckless staging, especially in his climactic Vietnam drama, "Heaven and Hell," which features actual explosions onstage and requires audiences to wear ear-protection. This all tends to make him a bit insufferable, but at least he manages to be entertaining about it. In one scene, boozily confronting Luke Wilson, he seems unimpressed by the man’s Harvard credentials. “And I wrote a hit play. And directed it,” he says, shrugging. “So I'm not sweating it, either.”

Director Wes Anderson seems to have a taste for playwrights as characters -- in his next film, "The Royal Tenenbaums," he cast Gwyneth Paltrow as one, albeit one who hasn’t written a play in quite a long time. She finally does, at the end, based on the events of the film. “It ran for just under two weeks and received mixed reviews,” narrator Alec Baldwin tells us.

Jeff Slater in Tootsie (1982): Sydney Pollack’s film about a perfectionist New York actor who dresses as a woman to get a role in a soap opera is filled with little jabs at the neurotics that populate the dramatic arts. Naturally, the script, by the sitcom M*A*S*H’s creator Larry Gelbart (himself a Broadway playwright), gives the Dustin Hoffman’s titular character a playwright roommate, Jeff Slater. Sydney Pollack smartly cast Bill Murray in the role, although left him off the opening credits, for fear the former "Saturday Night Live"-castmember’s reputation for juvenile comedies would color the film. But Pollack also let Murray riff in the role, improvising dialogue, including a long party scene in which Murray holds court in the kitchen, where his self-absorbed soliloquies cause the room to rapidly clear of listeners. “I wish I had a theater that was only open when it rained,” he says, and later adds “I don’t like it when people come up to me after my plays and say ‘I really dug you message, man; I really dig your play, man.’ I cry.”

Edward D. Wood, Jr. in Ed Wood (1994): It’s rather hard to believe Bill Murray doesn’t have more of a background in the legitimate theater -- at the start of his career, he took the stage with Second City and National Lampoon, but that’s it. I mention this because of the three films I have written about so far, Murray has been in every one, including "Tenenbaums" as Paltrow’s cuckolded husband. He’s also limns one of the first characters we meet in Tim Burton’s biopic "Ed Wood," playing the floridly theatrical Bunny Breckenridge. As the film opens, Murray, dressed in an ostentatious white suit, paces in the rain outside a leaky Hollywood playhouse, where a play called "The Casual Company" is listed on the marquee.

The play is by the film’s title character, the notorious filmmaker Ed Wood, played by Johnny Depp with Errol Flynn’s dashing but a lunatic’s lack of self-awareness. Wood has virtually no talent at all, and his play includes a ghost on a battlefield who release a live bird, saying “I offer you mortals the bird of peace, so that you may change your ways and end all this destruction.“

The play is a flop, of course (getting the early review at a coffee shop, Bunny barks out “What does that old queen know? He wasn't even there!”), and, from that point on, the film leaves the world of theater and enters the world of low-budget poverty row filmmaking, where Wood would make his dubious mark, and the bizarre world of regional television, from which Wood drew his remarkable casts, including wrestler Tor Johnson, horror movie host Vampira, and fraud psychic Criswell. This motley assortment is supplemented by one legitimate movie star, albeit one whose career is long faded: Bela Lugosi. Lugosi is played by Martin Landau, whose irritable and ultimately pathetic portrayal netted him a well-deserved Oscar. When Ed Wood and Lugosi meet, they quickly bond -- but it’s not just over a shared love of horror, but a shared love of theater. “You know, I saw you perform ‘Dracula.’ In Poughkeepsie, in 1938,” Wood tells the old man. “ Eh, that was a terrible production. Renfield was a drunk!” Lugosi responds. Unfazed as always, Wood continues on: “I thought it was great. You were much scarier in real life than you were in the movie.” Lugosi considers this a moment. “Thank you,” he says.

Barton Fink in Barton Fink (1991): Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen were reportedly inspired by playwright Clifford Odets’ miserable experiences in Hollywood when making this film, and their stand-in for Odets, the anvil-haired and self absorbed title character (John Turturro), shared Odets’ ego and tendency to author grandly themed meditations on the experience of the common man. In fact, it is one of these plays, “Bare Ruined Choirs,” that catapults Fink to Hollywood, and the dialogue in it is overearnest: “I'm blowin' out of here, blowin' for good. I'm kissin' it all goodbye, these four stinkin' walls, the six flights up, the el that roars by at three A.M. like a cast-iron wind. Kiss 'em goodbye for me, Maury! I'll miss 'em -- like hell I will!”

Arriving in Hollywood, Fink discovers that nobody seems to actually be familiar with his playwrighting, although they have a sense that he’s good at dealing with stories of common men, so they put him on a wrestling picture. And, from here, things deteriorate, especially when Barton’s neighbor down the hall in the grotesque Hotel Earle gets involved. The neighbor is Charlie, played by John Goodman, and, this being a Coen Brothers film, it probably won’t be long before Charlie starts screaming and violence erupts. Before the chaos breaks out, though, Fink has the opportunity to lecture an unappreciative Goodman about his dramatic theories. “Don't call it new theater, Charlie; call it real theater. Call it our theater ... Who cares about the Fifth Earl of Bastrop and Lady Higginbottom and - and - and who killed Nigel Grinch-Gibbons?”

“I can feel my butt getting sore already,” Goodman responds.

As Fink’s world disintegrates, he becomes more obnoxious, even going to a USO Hall on the eve of Pearl Harbor and arguing with soldiers about who gets to dance with the girls. “I’m a writer, you monsters!” he snarls. He taps at his head. “This is my uniform!”

He gets a sock to the jaw for his pains, and probably deserves it, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for somebody who eventually produces a wrestling script called “The Burlyman.” The first lines of the script put us right into the action of the play, and it’s obviously stolen from his own Broadway play:

FADE IN
A tenement hotel on the Lower East Side. We can faintly hear the cry of the fishmongers. It is too early for us to hear traffic; later, perhaps, we will.

Peter Bretter from Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008): Peter Bretter doesn’t start out as a playwright in this film -- no, he’s the soundtrack composer for a miserable television police procedural. As his career and his romance collapses, however, and Bretter flees for vacation in Hawaii, we discover he’s always had a hankering to write a puppet musical about Dracula, and has already written at least one song, which sounds, according to rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, in a role he would reprise in "Get Him to the Greek"), like “a dark, gothic Neil Diamond.”

Apparently Jason Segel, who wrote the film and stars in it, actually wanted to create such a musical -- he’s somewhat notorious on the set of his long-running sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” for launching into the entirety of “Confrontation” from “Les Miserables” with costar Neil Patrick Harris. And it’s a pity the musical never happened, because its climactic scene is shown in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it’s an bravura act of stagecraft, including a cast of hundreds (all puppets), graphic onstage murders, a spontaneous birth, and streamers exploding over the audiences. Segal needs to get himself a storefront off Hollywoood Boulevard and mount this thing. It would run for years.

PERFORMANCE DATES FOR "A GIFT FOR PLANET BX63"

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 04:28:35 PDT

Tickets: Suggested donation of $5-$15
Reservations Required. Call 612-724-7372 to reserve your seat!

FULL TOUR SCHEDULE:

Aug 21-22 | 7:30pm | 4152 Colfax Ave. S, Mpls, 55409

Aug 27-28 | 8:00pm | 17210 County Rd. 47, Plymouth, 55446

Sept 3-4 | 7:30pm | 7316 Cartisian Ave., Brooklyn Park, 55428

Sept 10-11 | 7:30pm | 3612 33rd Ave. NE, St Anthony, 55418

Sept 24-25 | 7:30pm | 1419 Washington Ave. S, Mpls, 55454

Oct 1-2 | 7:30pm | 718 6th Street SE, Mpls, 55414

Oct 8-9 | 7:30pm | 12935 Vermillion Ct. NE, Blaine 55449

Oct 15-16 | 7:30pm | 1587 Skyline Path, Eagan, 55121

SLEAZE BOOK CLUB PERFORMANCE, AUGUST 6, 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 19:45:28 PDT

A performance of my play self-assembling play Sleaze Book Club, represented by photographs and an edited audio recording. Performers include myself, Coco Mault, Courtney McLean, and Audrey Callerstrom.

NSFW audio!

SLEAZE BOOK CLUB PREVIEWED IN TC DAILY PLANET

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 11:18:04 PDT

Here is what Jay Gabler of the TC Daily Planet has to say about my play Sleaze Book Club:

Friday, August 6

Under the radar: "Naughtybilly" band Courtney McLean and the Dirty Curls have no time for sly euphemisms: their songs start right off with lines like, "I wanted to fuck my cousin; I did not know he was my cousin." They're in residence this week at Storefront-in-a-Box, and tonight sees the premiere of jugblower/playwright Bunny Sparber's "self-assembling" play Sleaze Book Club, in which audience members play the part of book club members discussing vintage pornographic novels. To be followed by the erotic and open use of a mic. (JG)

DIY THEATER: EVERYPLACE IS A VENUE, AN INTERVIEW WITH IMPROV EVERYWHERE'S CHARLIE TODD

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 08:19:52 PDT

The New York based Improv Everywhere has done a lot of stunts in their nine years of existence; they provide pranks without victims, in unexpected locations, offered up without warning or explanation, and then they are gone. Loosely related to flash mobs, which started a few years later, Improv Everywhere tends to offer up something a little more complex and puckish than the spontaneous dances or pillow fights that tend to define flash mobs -- for instance, Improv Everywhere brought famous Russian playwright Anton Chekhov back to life to perform a spontaneous reading at a New York bookstore, and then sign copies of his plays in Union Square. The group's founder, Charlie Todd, discusses the theatrical origins of Improv Everywhere, the group's remarkable ability to turn almost any environment into an opportunity for performances, and Improv Everywhere's larger audience online.

* * *

I'm quite interested in theater that moves outside of established venues into cheap -- or free -- performance venues; Improv Everywhere is rather extraordinary in that it, for the most part, treats the whole world as a potential performance venue. Are there lines that you draw? Are there places you have been temped to do a mission, but decided against it, because of the location?

I'll probably never do a mission on an airplane. We did a project at JFK airport a couple of years ago, but it was in the baggage claim area so things weren't quite as tense as they are in other parts of an airport. I was still a little nervous security might give us a hard time filming, but no one bothered us. It helped that we just looked like normal people welcoming a friend home (the catch was we were welcoming a stranger home.) My friend Evan Roth did an unauthorized art project with the TSA, which I thought was both brave and awesome. (Read more about it here.) A bank is probably another location I'll never stage something in. We released our Star Wars Subway Ride video a few weeks ago which features Darth Vader riding the train. A couple of weeks later, coincidentally, a man robbed a bank in Long Island wearing a Darth Vader mask. So there are super high security places I'll probably always avoid. It just wouldn't be worth the trouble. Although we did get 700 people to line the Brooklyn Bridge together once with no permits or permission.

Similarly, are there missions that you specifically picked because of the location? Instances where you said, for instance, I really want to do something on the subway -- I know, let's take our pants off! What are the sorts of things you think about when picking a location for your missions?

I'm a big fan of doing things that are site-specific. Our best missions could only occur in the particular location we've chosen. High Five Escalator is probably the best example of a site-specific Improv Everywhere event. The setting itself inspired the concept. Suicide Jumper is another example. I came up with that idea because I stumbled upon this strange four-foot tall ledge. We do tend to do lots of projects in the subway, though I'd say most of them are not particularly site-specific. The fact that they are on the subway can sometimes be arbitrary -- we just love the subway because it has a captive audience, great light, and a controlled climate.

On a broader note, I'd like to ask you about pranks as theater. Your background is in theater, and you currently teach at Uprights Citizen's Brigade, as well as having your own improv projects. How much do you think about Improv Everywhere -- and, in a more broad way, pranking -- as a form of theater? Your version certainly contains elements of theater, in the the agents are in character, and there is a certain dramatic structure to your missions, and they are targeted at a large audience whose primary experience is as audience, rather than victim, as is often the case in pranking. Was this deliberate on your part? How much has it been informed by your background in theater?

I started Improv Everywhere just a couple of months after graduating from UNC Chapel Hill with a theatre degree. I had moved to NY to be an actor, like many of my college theatre friends. I quickly became frustrated with the theatre scene in NY. Broadway tickets cost $100 and the audiences all had white hair. Off-off Broadway productions were $15 and the audience was mostly made up of friends of the performers. Producing off-off Broadway shows seemed like a tremendous undertaking with very little reward. As I was trying to figure out how to get involved with theatre, I played a prank with a friend at a bar that changed my life. I got excited about the idea of staging theatrical events without a stage. A bit later I saw my first show at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and was completely inspired. The place was packed, tickets were $5, and the crowd was young and full of life. I instantly knew I had found the place I wanted to study and hopefully one day perform. Most of the senior members of Improv Everywhere were classmates of mine at UCB. Everyone at UCB was more than willing to get involved with my antics.

I do think comedy is an art form. Improv is an art form. Well thought-out pranks are an art form as well. Practical jokes, fraternity hazing, or mean-spirited revenge based-pranks probably don't qualify as art or theatre, but I think most complex pranks do. In so far as our work features individuals creating a false reality through acting and there are people watching and being effected by it, I think what we do is definitely a form of theatre. I'm also not really that interested in labels or definitions. I don't care if I'm called an artist, prankster, comedian, etc. Terms don't matter. The projects we do speak for themselves.

I'm also quite interested in the online aspect of this undertaking -- a lot of theaters, and other performances, are struggling with how to make use of the Web, but Improv Everywhere seems to have a natural affinity for the Web. Where did the idea of filming your missions and posting them online come from? It seems to be that it is your online presence that has really brought you a huge audience -- is that accurate? And what are some of the considerations of filming and editing; for instance, you don't seem to include flubs in your videos. What is the reasoning behind this, and what are you trying to represent about Improv Everywhere in your videos.

I think one of my first thoughts after the very first prank I staged in NY was, "Oh man I wish we had filmed that." From the beginning, I've felt it was important to document our work. Our pranks are ephemeral. There is no text left behind. If they are not documented it's almost as if they didn't happen. They only exist as tall-tales from those few who happened to witness it. Part of the fun is for the new audience (online) being able to watch the original audience react to the event. The audience's reaction and interaction is part of the event itself, and it should be viewed by others. By presenting our work online our events are viewed by millions of people rather than dozens.

I think it's very difficult to capture the magic of theatre on tape. It's inherently a live experience that you enjoy communally with other audience members. It's a shared experience. Improv comedy is even more difficult to capture on tape. So much of what is funny about improv comedy has to do with being there in that room and being a part of it. Good luck explaining to someone what was funny about an improv show -- it's like trying to explain your dream to someone. Certainly there have been examples of great documentation of famous theatre productions, but I still bet those who saw it live would say it doesn't compare.

When we edit together video documentation of our projects, we certainly try to put our work in the best light possible, but I think the videos are a pretty honest representation of what went down. Often we'll showcase things that went wrong in photos on our site or in an outtakes video. The behind-the-scenes video for our Star Wars project has a pretty hilarious mishap in it. We also don't really view anything as a "mistake" or "flub." It's all part of the experiment. We don't know how things are going to go -- and that's the improvisational nature of what we do. We might get the cops called on us, someone might freak out, it might rain. You never know what you're going to get, but it's all part of the story we're creating.

PRESS RELEASE: NEW PLAY “SLEAZE BOOK CLUB” AT STOREFRONT IN A BOX, AUGUST 6, 8 PM

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:48:04 PDT

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: NEW PLAY “SLEAZE BOOK CLUB” AT STOREFRONT IN A BOX, AUGUST 6, 8 PM

MINNEAPOLIS -- Max “Bunny” Sparber, a Minneapolis playwright and former City Pages theater critic, whose writing the New York Times called “raw” and “gripping,” and who the New Yorker praised for his “intelligence and sheer talent,” is about to debut, for one show only, a new play as part of the Dirty Curls Storefront in a Box week.

The play is titled “Sleaze Book Club,” and consists of performers -- actors and non-actors alike -- providing self-written book reports on tawdry paperback pornographic novels found at adult bookstores, along with a dramatic reading from each. At the end of the play, audience members are assigned books of their own to read. And that’s it. That’s the entire play.

The play is the first of what is intended to be a series of self-produced projects by Sparber which he has dubbed “self-assembling theater.” Instead of writing scripts, he writes directions for the assemblage of a play, of sorts, constructed by the actors themselves out of found material and based around the self-organizing rituals of everyday people, including drag shows and group sex sessions. Each of these plays examine when people abandon privacy, and each are designed to be performed without rehearsal, so that the resulting play unfolds itself in front of the performers at the same moment as the audience. No performance is ever to be repeated, no two performances will ever be the same, and the play violates the usual approach to theater, in which the process of creating a play is masked and the moments when the cast discovers the play are lost in the rehearsal process.

These self-assembling plays are part of a larger experiment by Sparber and his occasional writing partner, Coco Mault, called Fast, Cheap & Out of Control. These are plays designed to be performed on a microbudget, in found or squatted locations, and Sparber and Mault provide the scripts freely to anybody who wishes to perform them, without expectation of licensing fees or royalties; they don’t even expect to be informed when a play is to be performed, but instead ask for some sort of documentation that the play has been performed. More about these plays can be found at http://www.maxsparberplays.com/2010/06/fast-cheap-and-out-of-control.html

Information about “Sleaze Book Club,” as well as a larger downloadable digital version of the image for the play, can be found at ttp://www.maxsparberplays.com/2010/07/sleaze-book-club.html

An open mic for erotic diary entries, short stories, and poetry, will follow the performance.

WHAT: “Sleaze Book Club,” a play by Max “Bunny” Sparber
WHEN: Friday, August 6, 8 p.m.
WHERE: Storefront In a Box, 2441 Lyndale Ave S., Minneapolis, MN 55405
HOW MUCH: Free; donations accepted

Playwright Max “Bunny” Sparber can be reached for interview at maxsparber@gmail.com or 612.217.1234

Photo credit: Max “Bunny” Sparber

A THEATER IN YOUR GARAGE: OFF-LEASH AREA

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 16:06:52 PDT

Paul Herwig and Jennifer Isles, the founders and creative force behind the Twin Cities' Off-Leash Area, made the unusual decision a number of years ago to convert the garage behind their house into a performance space. They offer up one performance their annually, and typically do a different performance in a more mainstream space. Despite the fact that you have to drive to their house in south Minneapolis and wander around to the back yard to get into the space, their garage shows are regularly reviewed by the local press with the same seriousness they would give a production in a mainstream theater, and their shows frequently sell out.

I have worked with the company three times as a playwright, twice in the garage, and I was attracted by the fact that they had created an opportunity for themselves to produce original work without having to seek permission or rent space, and they do it at a fraction of the cost of a mainstream play. And, besides being a Ecole Jacques Lecoq-trained actor, Herwig is an award-winning set designer, and is capable of creating extraordinary, puzzle-box style sets in this tiny space. This fall, Off-Leash will take A Gift for Planet BX63, a play I created in collaboration with them, to other garages throughout the Twin Cities and their suburbs, proving it is possible to create theater almost anywhere. I decided to take a moment to ask Herwig how the garage came about:

How did that idea come about to convert your garage into a performance space?

When Jennifer and I first met I was talking at length about my desire for autonomy, for self-reliance, an idea to which she responded with equal strength and conviction. So much of being an artist is about relying on that grant, or that connection with a peer, the schedule of the rental venue, whatever it takes to enable you to do what you want to do, and I was more than tired of being at the whim of a grant application or an after-show party conversation. There was also the financial aspect – to get to the point of having your own space takes a long, long time, and when it comes it’s a double-edged sword: you have freedom, but you have to pay the mortgage and taxes – you have to fill the seats to pay the rent. In our situation there’s only one mortgage, and we could do whatever we want – we could design and approve our own tech rider! However, this doesn’t mean we don’t want our own space outside the garage – but how big and how to do it without compromising your fundamental artistic vision...that’s the current question!

When did you decide to convert your garage into a theater?

When Jennifer and I moved into our current home as renters, the landlord, who lived below us, showed us the garage for some reason or other, and our immediate unspoken and simultaneous reaction was: Hey, this is big. We could do shows here. This landlord, who was a great guy, sold us the house two years later, and exactly one year after that we did our first garage show.

What was the process?

I had the time and (somewhat) the skills to create platforms and such, and we used some dyed bed sheets for curtains from a previous show. We just sent out a small postcard and honestly didn’t care how many people showed up, although we hoped for someone! We had gotten to know Polly Carl at the The Playwright’s Center a little bit personally, by having rented her space a couple of times already, and she told us that she had an old fader board and 8-channel dimmer pack that the PWC was unloading, and she sold them to us for a very reasonable price. The lighting instruments were “tin-can” lights, which required only household flood lights, and a 15-amp fuse, with everyday extension cords.

How long did it take to convert the space?

I suppose it took me one month to build the platforms, and set everything up (picking up folding chairs from the thrift, hanging conduit pipes for the curtains, etc.)

About how much do you reckon it cost, and how did you raise funds for it?

Setting up the garage for the first time probably cost us a few hundred dollars (and untold amount of unpaid labor), which we paid for out of our own pockets, like many of the early productions we did even at other rented-venue places. I can’t tell you how many thousands of dollars of day-job hourly-wage funded projects we did. Once we did a fundraiser for insulating the garage, and got about three quarters of the cost for materials, and I and one of our board members put it up. Otherwise, we made it happen by making money to pay for it.

Let's discuss the physical details of the space: How many can you seat?

We can squeeze in 40, but 35 is most comfortable.

What sort of lighting set-up do you have?

Including the half dozen “tin-can” lights from PWC, I spent a day re-wiring twenty or so track lights I got from a demolished store, cut up some pound-sized coffee cans to make gel frame holders, and spray painted them black. We also have around forty pars, fresnels, and elipsoidals we bought on the cheap from other theatre’s estate sales over the years, but we don’t use those in the garage – they blow the fuse. Paul Epton rigged the dimmer pack to “plug in” to the garage outlets.

What is your sound set-up?

An old one-disc CD player and speakers from the Savers thrift store, where we buy approximately half our costume and prop stock (as well as 90% of our own personal clothing – except for underwear and socks!)

What can and can't you do in the space? For instance, can you sell tickets, since your garage isn't zoned as a commercial area?

We did not hide what we were doing. We contacted the local police department, SAFE officer, community council, etc and told them what we were doing and asked what we needed to do to continue doing it. They all thought it was a great idea, which was a relief. They told us that we just can’t exchange money hand to hand, and cannot “sell” alcohol (for the post-show time in the backyard). Essentially, it’s a private party to which everyone who comes must be invited. Our immediate neighbors think it’s great, and have come to see shows, and the others have decided to ignore us, it seems. Otherwise, production wise, we can do absolutely anything we want, as long as we don’t endanger the safety of the patrons and performers. We can screw anything anywhere, paint anything we want any color we want, and are totally free.

Is there a certain tme when you have to pack it all up and send everybody home?

One of the beauties of the garage is that it’s intimate, but it’s also pretty enclosed, so we try not to do shows longer than 75 minutes. The local neighborhood curfew for noise is 10pm, so we do shows at 7:30 or 8, have our social time, then are closed down by 9:30 or 10.

What sort of reactions have you gotten from people the first time they visit the space?

Everything from: “I can’t believe you do that in a garage,” “I completely forgot that I was in a garage”, “You do more with your budget than the Guthrie does with it’s toilet paper expense,” “You not only met but far exceeded my expectations,” “I couldn’t believe that a garage could be a viable space to see art,” and on and on! I think people sense very viscerally the empowerment we feel, and the fact that the shows we do are so developed and organic, because we live and work in the space as we create the work we are presenting. If we could seat 150 in our garage, and have room enough to dance (since dance is at least half of what we do in terms of space needs – hard to dance when there’s a garage door railing 7ft above the stage!) we’d never rent a space again!

BE NOTORIOUS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 06:18:15 PDT

I know, I know, punk is dead. It’s been dead or dying since the first teenager put a safety pin through his or her ear back in the 1970s. Crass declared it dead all the way back in 1978 on their album The Feeding of the 5,000, and we’re now at a time when a lot of actual punk rockers are dead -- Sid Vicious with no small amount of spectacle in 1979, Joey Ramone in 2001, Dee Dee Ramone in 2002, the same year Joe Strummer died of a congenital heart condition. Malcolm McLaren passed away this past year. And this is a small sampling -- a complete list of dead punk rockers would be an ominous undertaking, and a frequently depressing one. Punks tended to die with less style than they lived; I suppose we all do.

But so what if punk is dead? Punk borrowed liberally from garage rock music, which enjoyed a brief explosion in the Sixties and then burned out just as quickly. Punk also borrowed from the Situationists, a small group of artistically inclined radicals and revolutionaries who managed to inspire one great riot in 1968, the May wildcat strikes in Paris. So every movement borrows from the past. We are all, in our way, cannibals.

We playwrights have never really gotten our chance at punk rock. Sure, there have been playwrights who would have made brilliantly decadent rockers -- Joe Orton springs to mind at once. And punk has had its influence on theater. But I’m not talking about playwrights who borrow the themes of punk rock, or write plays with punk rockers as character. I am talking about playwrights stripping theater down to the equivalent of three chords, offering up on-the-cheap-DIY productions in garages and basements, and then misbehaving as entertainingly as possible in public.

It’s not for everybody, of course. Some people want to spend two years writing a play, they want it workshopped for three months, they want that play produced in a reputable theater, they want a name cast, they want a shot at respectability. They’re welcome to it. I wish, instead, to address myself to playwrights who want a shot a disrespectability. And here are my suggestions:

First of all, realize that you’re a public figure. The past few decades have seen playwrights sort of hidden away from public view. Sure, sometimes workshops of our plays are open to the public, or theaters will offer talkbacks for audiences when you have written an especially depressing play about some public issue. We’re treated as sort of reedy creatures who type away in our rooms and think very long and very hard about things, and maybe some are. But the playwrights I have known, and I include myself, have just as frequently tended to be total lunatics. I sometimes wonder if that’s not why we’re sort of hidden away, placed at the theatrical equivalent of that table at weddings where the drunk uncle is put next to the angry cousin who might try to disrupt the best man’s toast.

If you’re that sort of lunatic, take it public. It hasn’t hurt Courtney Love, and it won’t hurt you.

Firstly, is that how you’re dressed? We’re not businesspeople, and we’re not blue collar workers. We are society’s outliers, and one of the few advantages of that is we get to dress however we want. Rock and rollers figured that out a long time ago, and so we barely look twice at the collection of leather, tattoos, teased hair, and bad makeup that your average rock and roller brings into a room. Well, let’s go one better. If you’re a playwright, there is a good chance you’re some sort of a freak. Highlight that through your clothing choice. Ransack an S&M store and show up at your premiere in a leather face mask. Tear apart a bag of clothes from a thrift store and reassemble it using duct tape and a needle threaded with dental floss. Dress in bright red tuxedos, or dress like a space alien. It’s been too long since David Bowie looked like he had just fallen out of a passing space ship, and it’s probably time a playwright tried their hand at it. We’re theatrical people, god damn it; why do we tend to look like slobs? We should be a walking billboard for the theater we make. People should look at us and know we bring something outrageous to the table. Hell, Oscar Wilde used to have professional costume designers create his costumes, which were so gaudy by Victorian standards that he was constantly mocked for it. But Wilde wasn’t just a dandy -- he knew that a little bit of outrage is great box office. Next time you see a production of The Importance of Being Earnest, keep in mind that it wasn’t just the dazzling dialogue that made it a sensation -- it was Wilde’s cape and soft hats.

But you can't dress outrageously and not act outrageously. And my guess is, if you’re like most Americans, your impulse is toward lunacy, and you constantly thwart that. We’re a nation of maniacs masquerading as squares, and we playwrights should not feel bound to participate in those conventions. Joe Orton used to write angry letters to the press about his own plays -- now there was a man with a head for self-promotion. We can do as well.

You may be tempted to use drugs. That’s up to you, but keep in mind that drugs can affect your artistic output, so try to be appropriate. If you write about sex, maybe poppers are for you; there is, after all, a reason they have been popular in the gay underworld for decades now. If you write angry plays, maybe Bennies? It worked for The Who, after all. LSD runs the real risk of causing you to write psychedelic theater, which can either be hilarious or terrible, often both. So choose wisely.

I know, I know: I shouldn’t be suggesting people use drugs. So many people are so bloody awful at them, and wind up jumping off roofs or dying miserably of hepatitis. Steer clear of the stuff if it’s not for you. There are all sorts of other ways to make yourself a spectacle.

Sex, for instance. It’s free, it’s fun, and we get to do it because we’re adults, but you publicly stray into more avant garde territory here, tongues will start wagging. Write essays about the most outrageous sexual thing you have ever done for some erotica blog. Get photos taken of yourself line dancing at a lesbian club. Let an especially terrifying Craigslist ad, perhaps involving cock and ball torture, get traced back to you. Release sex tapes of yourself and claim an assistant stole them. But make sure the tapes are hot -- god, the last thing we need is more boring amateur porn. Have three-ways with groupies. If we are to be rock and roll stars, it’s going to be expected of us, and groupies work hard for it, and deserve it.

Artistically, it might be time to dive deep into punk's most important legacy: DIY, doing it yourself. You could spend your life sending off scripts to theaters and waiting years and years for them to finally decide to do them, or you can just mount the play yourself. And the advantage of this is you don’t have to write to anybody’s specifications -- just write what you know you can afford to do. Theater can be awesomely inexpensive to produce, especially as there are all sorts of free places to perform in any American city. We don’t need to put our plays on a stage -- set a play in an alley and then just go ahead and take over an alley. It will cost nothing, and the bottle gang of alcoholic hobos will appreciate the free entertainment. We’re in a recession now, which means most American cities are cluttered with derelict building. These are all potential stages. Sure, there might be some legal issues involved in trespassing, but, then getting arrested for the sake of art is a tried and true way of attracting attention. I’d suggest performing in a park, as they are free and open for the public to use, but you run the real risk of running into a Shakspeare troupe, and that’s never fun.

Hell, this is rock and roll. Rent out a hotel room and trash it. That’s your show! I’d pay to see it, and you can use my ticket money to buy the hotel a new television. Take over a bar if you like. Trust me, if you can bring a large enough audience, they’ll underwrite it, just to have people drinking beer. Crash conventions -- they’re always looking for entertainment, and if you adapt some slash science fiction stories to the stage, you’ll be in demand at every science fiction convention in America.

And what of the plays? You’re not going to make much money anyway, so write them fast. Don’t worry about them being perfect. Don’t even worry about them being art. There are plenty of people struggling with just the perfect word and just the perfect scene transition. We’re the punks here. Our goal isn’t to write a perfect play, or even a meaningful one, but a spectacular one. Steal text from the web -- there’s a noble tradition of this sort of theft, and it’s called “found text.” Write in a frenzy and glue your text together almost at random. When William Burroughs did it, it was called “cut up.” As long as you can find an existing, and artistically respected, example of your approach, you can be as fast or as wild as you like and call it your aesthetic. This shouldn’t be an excuse to do bad work, by the by. But I stand with Oscar Wilde in that the only sin is to be boring. Don’t shoot to make a masterpiece. Shoot to make something you would want to see. More than that, shoot to make a piece of art you’d be afraid of. Ask anything of your actors, if you want to see it in a play. Ask for nudity. As for live sex acts. They can always say no.

And actors? There’s a lot of them. Put an ad on Craigslist and they will line up outside your door. But, when possible, I argue that you should flesh your cast out with non-actors. Build your plays out of glorious freaks. This is not polished theater, and its imperfections can be seen as a sign of authenticity, so find the most authentically imperfect people you can. Are they going to be bad at acting? Some will, so write plays in which bad acting is a bonus! A badly performed line of dialogue can be infinitely more entertaining that a well-performed one. We’re not after the exquisite here, we’re after the memorable.

And finally, and most importantly, publicize everything you do. Send out press releases constantly. They’re easy to write, and the American press is just lazy enough to print them exactly as written every so often. But go beyond that -- have your own Web pages and Facebook pages and zines and self-published books and whatnot. Put all your plays on your Web page. Put videos of your plays on your Web site. Put videos of your arrests on your Web site. How else is anybody going to know what you’re up to, and they’re going to want to know. You’re a star, aren’t you?

ORGY

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 22:05:26 PDT

SYNOPSIS: The cast interviews real-life orgy enthusiasts and then performs monologues based on the interviews; once the monologue is completed, they assume sexual positions and play audio samples from pornographic record albums.

HISTORY: This play has yet to be produced.

COMMENTS: This script is part of Coco Mault's and my Fast, Cheap & Out of Control collection of scripts: Royalty free scripts written quickly in a sort of mania, and intended to be produced anywhere for almost no budget at all. At the moment, we require no royalty or licensing fee for producers who wish to produce this script, and no permission is required; we merely ask that we be informed of the production, and given some sort of physical documentation of the event.

DOWNLOAD a copy of Orgy here.

To read the script, you will need a copy of Adobe's free Acrobat Reader program. Download it here.

ADDITIONAL MEDIA: The play requires pornographic audio recordings. Thanks to the Dinosaur Gardens blog, here is a selection of simulated sex narratives that originally appeared on 8-Track recordings from the 70s.

MINSTREL SHOW PHOTOS

noreply@blogger.com (Max Sparber) — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 05:39:07 PDT

A photoset of images from past productions of Minstrel Show, or The Lynching of William Brown. Warning: contains an actual image of the William Brown lynching.