Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
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January 29, 2010
Sixty Five and Older
The Guardian asks: are audiences just too old?
Walters is particularly angered by the assumption that just because an audience is old, it’s reactionary: “Those people in your audience who are currently 60, the ones who get hammered as ‘conservative’ and ‘unimaginative’? They were born in 1950, which means they were graduating from high school in 1968. Maybe you’ve read about 1968 ... it was the year America was on fire.”
The real reason why older audiences are not so interested by some younger writers, he suggests, is because they’ve seen it all before.“Being shocked isn’t that big of a thrill anymore,” he writes. “Tell us something important about life. Something with some depth and complexity. Something with some heart and soul, some deep understanding.”
Walters’s attitude is a refreshing counterblast to a society that often seems in thrall to the cult of youth. But as Isaac Butler argues, it’s not entirely fair. Butler describes how one artistic director he knows did some market research into the baby-boom generation – people who are now 60-plus – and what he found shocked and depressed him: “Boomers, by and large, dislike surprise,” writes Butler, “which is why many previews now intentionally ruin the plots of movies. Boomers are among the least loyal of customers and it takes very little to lose their business etc.”
Full article here.
August 12, 2009
Economics of the Curtain Call
Chris Jones doesn’t like the money-back guarantee policy that came with Collaboraction and Teatro Visto’s El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman:
I hope the money-back guarantee dies a quick death, never to return. It’s not that I’m opposed to money-back guarantees in general—I recently took Home Depot up on a similar offer. But a piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech [offering money back at the end of the show] is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres.
It’s a bit like watching an actor leap down from the stage and start clearing tables. Those in the audience know about economic realities, but it still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to see those who bare their souls for an audience’s edification and enjoyment have to stoop to such things.
And although I had my problems with “El Grito del Bronx,” which I did not recommend, no reasonable person could have failed to see the effort, heart and craft behind that show. Nobody was making much money. Indeed, this wasn’t about the making of money. Demonstrably, this was a very personal endeavor on the part of everyone involved. Any thus I think anyone demanding a refund was being unreasonable.
Chris’s aversion to the money-back guarantee (and it does, understandably, seem to be a visceral aversion for him) reminds me Nicholas Ridout’s study on curtain calls—the social exchange at the end of a performance where the actors emerge to accept the applause of the audience. Ridout, a British performance theorist, writes about curtain calls as an economic exchange, but an exchange founded on gift-giving, which seeks to cloak its commodity-values in a social ritual
The audience is trying to figure itself as the recipient of a gift. Its applause is a paradoxical return, because it wishes to establish a relationship in which excess is preserved, in which the economics of exchange are somehow suspended. It wants to feel something extra, garner some ‘affecting surplus’ from the encounter…. A further indication of the affective force of the desire for this experience of the gift might be adduced from the sense of disappointment felt by an audience when actors do not take a curtain call at all. Applause that is offered, but no, as it were, accepted, with good grace, fails to satisfy, because it deprives an audience of the gain it has set out to win for itself through the gift of applause. (p. 165-6)
Is El Grito‘s money-back guarantee the same as receiving, say, a gift receipt with a birthday gift from your friend? Are you offended when the gift-giver says: “If you don’t like it, you can exchange it”? What if your boss says it? What if your child says it? I suppose it depends on the social configuration. For Chris, the appearance of actor Eddie Torres to offer the audience’s money back was a disruption, an offensive disruption, of a social pact, like forgetting to take the price tag off of a sweater you give to your mother. It’s tacky, it’s a faux-pas, it ruins the meaning of the act, to expose the economics of your gift. Ridout again:
...in the theatre the repudiation of the curtain call tends to signify a conviction that both actors and audience share something in their reasons for attending that transcends the theatre, and with it the comparable triviality of the market economy. (p.166)
On the one hand, my instinct is to agree with Chris that, no, theater is not a light fixture. On the other hand, to ignore the ways in which the theater we produce is a commodity bought and sold on a very particular marketplace leaves a lot out of the whole picture. Sure, American theater artists put in a lot of extra unpaid time because they love their craft, but that doesn’t mean that money, what little money there is that circulates in this industry, doesn’t have a very real effect, not only on theater workers but on the way we experience the work, too. It’s a tension, it’s a tension. A lot of my friends in theater ask themselves: what’s the tipping point where I stop giving my free labor to this company/director?
Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique ends with a comic scene depicting the actors dividing up the money from the night’s proceeds (curiously enough, the scene is cut from the Tony Kushner adaptation we’re staging early next year). Not to go all Marxist on Chris Jones, but if we can raise consciousness about what it is we do here, won’t our audiences be richer for it? My sense is that if we take a challenging piece of theater to an audience and say, “Look. We’re predicting this isn’t going to make a lot of money. It’s long/weird/offensive/unpopular/confusing/uncomfortable. Despite that, we’re convinced that it’s worth your $32 and two hours of your time. Please join us,” then audiences will come along for the ride. If a money-back guarantee can make risk more palatable, then let’s go for it.
(Source: Nicholas Ridout, Stage fright, animals, and other theatrical problems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
August 6, 2009
What I’m Reading
-The Complete Plays by Georges Feydeau
-Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow by Leon F. Litwack
-Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs by John Grazian
-A Dybbuk by S. Ansky, Translated by Tony Kushner
-The Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness by Kay Jamison
-Orpheus Descending by Tennessee Williams
-The Man Who Turned into a Stick by Kōbō Abe
July 21, 2009
Rooftop Construction
When this old world starts getting me down
And people are just too much for me to face
I climb way up to the top of the stairs
And all my cares just drift right into space
On the roof, it’s peaceful as can be
And there the world below can’t bother me
Let me tell you now
When I come home feelin’ tired and beat
I go up where the air is fresh and sweet (up on the roof)
I get away from the hustling crowd
And all that rat-race noise down in the street (up on the roof)
On the roof, the only place I know
Where you just have to wish to make it so
Let’s go up on the roof (up on the roof)
At night the stars put on a show for free
And, darling, you can share it all with meI keep a-tellin’ you
Right smack dab in the middle of town
I’ve found a paradise that’s trouble proof (up on the roof)
And if this world starts getting you down
There’s room enough for two
Up on the roof (up on the roof)
Up on the roo-oo-oof (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, baby (up on the roof)
Oh, come on, honey (up on the roof)Everything is all right (up on the roof)
July 20, 2009
Le Voyage Dans La Lune
Forty years ago, an American man landed on the moon. But the French got there way before us:
That’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune, created in 1902 by Georges Méliès. It’s remarkable to see how film in the early century was produced in such a theatrical, proscenium-conscious paradigm. Méliès himself was a former stage magician at the Theatre Robert-Houdin in Paris.
