Gus Cuddy - RSS Feed

Consolidating obsidian images as markdown images

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I'm adding a simple workflow for myself to publish micro-logs more regularly to my blog. I write these in Obsidian and copy them over to my Astro site, similar to the workflow that Tom Macwright uses. One frustration I have with Obsidian is its handling of images. When you drag in an image, it does it in the proprietary embed syntax that Obsidian uses, which is not standard markdown. Then when you copy over the markdown, images will fail to get copied over as well.

I searched for an Obsidian plugin to help solve this, but none seemed to fit the bill. I toyed with writing my own, before realizing it would just be easiest to write a simple script to fix this. My favorite way to write scripts like these these days is with Bun, which has an ingenious new "Shell" API that makes writing shell scripts a breeze, with the convenience of Typescript. With a quick and dirty regex, we can cover almost all my use cases. I also used the beloved magic-string library, which is great for modifying string indices and not really thinking about it too much.

Image files get copied over to an assets folder inside my blog folder, and then the markdown is modified to use markdown image links that point to the new files. Then we can cp this whole directory into our Astro content directory, and take advantage of Astro image processing. Works beautifully! Here's the gist:

import { $ } from "bun";
import path from "node:path";
import MagicString from "magic-string";
import slugify from "slugify";

const VAULT = "/Users/guscuddy/Mainframe";

const file = Bun.argv.slice(2)[0];

const text = await Bun.file(file).text();

const r = /!\[\[(.*?)\]\]/g;

const IMAGE_EXTS = [".jpg", ".png", ".gif", ".svg"];

function escapeParentheses(str: string) {
  return str.replace(/([()])/g, "\\$1");
}
const matches = Array.from(text.matchAll(r));

const folder = path.dirname(file);

const s = new MagicString(text);

for (const match of matches) {
  if (IMAGE_EXTS.some((i) => match[1].endsWith(i))) {
    const escaped = escapeParentheses(match[1]);
    const slug = slugify(match[1], { lower: true });

    try {
      const file = (await $`fd ${escaped} ${VAULT}`.text()).trim();

      await $`mkdir -p ${folder}/assets && cp ${file} ${folder}/assets/${slug}`;

      const startingIndex = match.index;
      const endingIndex = match.index + match[0].length;
      s.update(startingIndex, endingIndex, `![](./assets/${slug})`);
    } catch (e) {
      console.error(e);
    }
  }
}

const finalText = s.toString();

await Bun.write(file, finalText);

And here it is as a gist.

Some notes on CSV spelunking

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I made a web app to explore the They Shoot Pictures Don't They list of greatest films of all time. TSPDT fortunately provides a massive spreadsheet export of their starting list of ~24,000 films. However, the data is a bit chaotic - you get an XLS file of all the films with title, director, year, country, length, color, genre, the ranking of the movie over time, an IMDB link, and a tspdt id (a universal identifier for future versions of TSPDT). I had previously attempted this with previous years, which did not include an IMDB link --- matching movies by title and year is doable, but not as accurate as if we get a canonical ID.

Luckily, the IMDB link is huge — via the IMDB ID we can look the movie up in The Movie Database (TMDB), which is a beacon of open, free APIs that one can build on (Letterboxd uses them, among many other apps). We can get photos, credits, descriptions, keywords, and more. Just need to use the Find by Id endpoint.

In order to get our XLS file in a workable format, we have a few choices. The most direct way would be to use any spreadsheet app to convert it to CSV. Once it's in CSV, we can use D3's csvParse method to get it into a JavaScript object we can manipulate. Not too bad!

But we're left with one big problem: the IMDB Link is provided as a rich link, not just the URL. Oh, no! Why! When we export that to CSV, by default Numbers.app will just list that cell's value as "IMDb". Not helpful!

My Excel Fu is terrible, and I don't have a copy of Excel, so I fired up Google Sheets. Unbelievably, Google Sheets does not give you an easy way to do this. The best answers they gave you were to press command c and command v - obviously undesirable for 24,000 links! Google Sheets provides "App Scripts" which lets me write JavaScript to extract a link. However, this didn't work for a massive list of 24,000 films --- the tab just froze for me.

Turns out there's two different kinds of hyperlinks in Google Sheets: rich hyperlinks, with no formula, and hyperlinks which are made with a formula. Written as a formula, hyperlinks can be extracted. But as a rich link, I had to turn to the weird world of Google Sheets apps. I found one that promised to extract URLs, gave it write access to all my spreadsheets (lol), and ran it. It worked for one cell, but once again gave errors when I ran it for the entire spreadsheet.

Sometimes, when chasing rabbit holes like this, it's better to just do things the "unoptimal" way and move on rather than spend hours trying to find the perfect way. So I ended up selecting 1,000 rows at a time and just doing this 24 times to get the rich links transformed to a formula HYPERLINK(URL, DISPLAY) of sorts. Then I could write a regex to match the ID. Luckily this was trivial since the URLs were all formatted in the same way (with a trailing slash), so I could actually just call FORMULATEXT and do something like REGEXEXTRACT(FORMULATEXT(AB3), "title/(.*?)/").

With a quick download to CSV, finally... we have a CSV with the IMDB IDs.

Transforming CSV into Javascript Objects and Relational SQL

Once we have data in CSV form, it becomes a lot easier to parse and do things with.

D3 conveniently provides csvParse, which works great --- you give it some CSV as a string, and it turns it into an array of JavaScript Objects. It's typescript-friendly, as well, taking a generic of the column headers. So we can do something like this:

type MovieData = {
  "2007": string;
  "2008": string;
  "2010": string;
  "2011": string;
  "2012": string;
  "2013": string;
  "2014": string;
  "2015": string;
  "2016": string;
  "2017": string;
  "2018": string;
  "2019": string;
  "2020": string;
  "2021": string;
  "2022": string;
  "2023": string;
  "2024": string;
  New: string;
  "Director(s)": string;
  Title: string;
  Year: string;
  Country: string;
  Length: string;
  Colour: string;
  Genre: string;
  "Dec-06": string;
  "Mar-06": string;
  IMDb: string;
  IMDB_ID: string;
  idTSPDT: string;
};

type MovieColumn = keyof MovieData;

const parsed = csvParse<MovieColumn>(text);

(Btw, I generated that intial type by just copying the columns and asking Copilot to turn it into a type.)

Once we have everything parsed, we can loop through, query the TMDB API, and grab the movie. I saved all this into a SQLite database, extracted text embeddings from the overview and saved it into a vector database, but that's beyond the scope of this post.

For more, you can view the codebase, the specific CSV parsing file, or look at the finished project.

Arc Browser Act 2 (concerns)

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Not sure at all about the "Act 2" of Arc Browser as announced in "Meet Act II of Arc Browser - A browser that browses for you" on February 1st, 2024.

I'm disappointed that the company seems to be going down the AI rabbit hole, but strangely under the false guise of freedom from search engines and advertising. They present a classic "take out the middleman" disrupter energy that startups love to inhabit, as if they've revolutionized and/or democratized some core evil thing. I'm in agreement with them that Big Search™ is not good, and that Google has a monopoly on search. But AI as the answer is just... not it.
Instant Links kind of just seems like Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" with a few extra fancy language parsing features
Live Folders could be interesting, but it does seem like we just keep re-inventing RSS, but with weirder proprietary systems. Because this is just RSS, right?
Arc Explore / Search - some pretty big red flags for me.
Yes, searching for recipes and getting listicles and pages with lots of ads sucks. Capitalism sucks and that part of the web is broken because of bad incentives. Anyway, the answer to me is not to build "a new category of software" which is basically just doing a google search and then summarizing the first few web pages. The whole slick thing of "follow the money" and "we're pulling the internet into the future" doesn't add up. For one, the actual engineering of the core of Arc is still built on Chromium — instead of actually delivering competition to Google's iron grasp on the web browser. (I get that Chromium is open source, but it's still primarily a Google thing.) So the stuff about how bad Google is kind of rings false. Moreover, I do not trust LLMs to do the very important job of curation, which is so much of what the internet has moved away from with the algorithmic feed. RSS, bookmarking, blogs, forums... they aren't perfect, we don't want just nostalgia, but I'm not convinced at all that a browser that "browses for you" is the way forward.
The AI making the web page thing is strange, and the workflow they presented of trying to cook a dish felt incredibly contrived. AI has no sense of context or taste; does it know what a good cookbook looks like? Where's the joy of browsing?
Calling this a new category of software also just seems... goofy. Framing it as some historically revisionist march towards rebellious justice rubs me the wrong way, it feels like a lot of hype hype hype for what amounts to a web browser with AI features. (Weirdly there's prominently a Bernie sticker in the diner window behind Josh's head; what was the curious decision making behind leaving that in? A socialist web browser this is not.)
And this is all with ignoring the most obvious problem to the AI search thing, which is the same as most all non-personal LLM things: what about attribution? What about copyright and credit? So the AI just steals a bunch of work and gives it to you? There's a major ethical gray area that they kind of seem willfully oblivious to? I didn't see anything presented that alleviated any concerns around that. Having tried the Arc Search iPhone app I'm left with more questions than answers.
That being said — I was an Arc early adopter and have liked some of what Arc has done (though to be honest I've grown more weary of the sidebar as good UX). More web browsers is good, we need more diversity! I'm just worried about the direction they're taking with putting all their chips on AI. Some of their ideas they started out with (Easels, for instance) seemed more promising to me.
"A Browser that browses for you" is probably not going to be good for privacy.

Crisis of Worldless Individualism (Apple Vision Pro)

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here are some initial thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro, which launched on February 2nd, 2024. I have not tried it yet — I'm just speculating.

It's incredible the amount of effort we put into technology that does seemingly nothing for the betterment of humanity. Technology historically contains within it some emanicpatory potential (i.e. in my view Technology should be liberatory). The latest technological developments are not emancipatory, unless it's framed only from the cruel perspective of liberating us from the ugliness of our own consciousness. There's some libidinal psychology here going on; the Apple Vision Pro allows us to further repress the mysteries of our unconscious.
Marc Andreessen has spoken about 'reality privelege' when he talks about the virtues of the metaverse. No matter how hard we try, we just can't seem to materially lift people out of poverty. We swear — there's just no solution, be pragmatic. The most practical thing is instead to give people reality distorting goggles that transport your sense of self and space/time and consciousness. Not quite another world — but rather an eerie sense of worldlessness.
Reality Distortion: When you strap on the AVP, Apple wants you to not enter a VR world like the Oculus, but to be able to spatially compute through your existing surroundings. But the early reviews point out the video passthrough on the Apple Vision Pro (AVP) is not perfect — it often has trouble with light. (Hm.) What you're seeing is a simulacrum — a projection of your world captured on camera and sped through to your eye senses at a high-speed refresh rate. This is a fascinating and philosophical technical decision (or limitation); like the shadows in Plato's cave.
You'll notice that Apple, in their presentation, never uses the terms Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), or the Metaverse. Instead, they seek to push the term Spatial Computing. Spatial computing feels very much in line with tools for thought land.
No longer is computing confined to rectangular screens, our eyes all day struggling as they stare at two dimensions trying to unlock a third or even fourth. There are certainly compelling ideas here.
Interestingly, Dynamicland and Folk Computer are also exploring a kind of Spatial Computing. But they do it through real physical objects: paper, blocks. Grounded in the real world. Bret Victor famously ranted against the limitations of glass screens. While there is exploratory potential to augmenting your surroundings with computing, doing so on a closed-off, individual headset — as opposed to being with others in space — and waving your hands, manipulating air... seems suspect.
I haven't tried it yet, but how satisfying is it to type on an imaginary keyboard, your fingers wiggling through some limbic space-time continuum? Does it feel good to pick up the edge of a window, with no tactile feedback, and resize it?
Apple Vision Pro is too expensive to worry much about its immediate impact, but I have worries that AVP will be like the Walkman for consciousness. It will lead us into a cold individualism that removes us from the world and from our community. The Walkman turned music inwards, away from the communal, into the individualized (The Walkman marked the movement of music from external to internal 20220201220251). With music, this can certainly be a nice thing. But what about with your whole vision? Projects like Dynamicland and Folk Computer are built around collective computing experiences. People doing stuff together in space. With Apple Vision Pro, you're merely looking at strange glass, fingers pointing at moons.
It seems awfully lonely in there.

The Disneyfication of Hamilton

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Hamilton has finally launched on Disney+, over a year earlier than originally slated. It's been interesting to go through the release of Hamilton all over again, five years after it premiered. 2015---and the subsequent 2016 mania---seems like a world away. A show that was universally esteemed back then---there were dissenters! but they seemed to be drowned out by Michelle Obama calling it the greatest work of art she'd ever experienced---has had its fair share of reconsiderations and critical thought over the years. The world---and culture--is in a much different place than it was.

Suddenly, however, Hamilton is back and it's a huge success---no surprise. It's driving downloads of Disney+, and interest is at an all-time high:

But times have changed. I won't re-iterate what others have written about before, but what felt like a radical reclaiming of history in 2016 now feels a bit, well, simplistic. For one, there's a type of Obama-era naïveté present when we look at Hamilton now. By heroizing the founding fathers and largely erasing their sins of slavery---even with (or, even more sadly, especially with) BIPOC playing these roles---you get a piece of pop culture perfectly aligned for white neoliberal elites. The idea that this was an artistic piece that "unified" us under its scrappy patriotism was a centrist, shortsighted myth. Fundamentally, Hamilton is a show that celebrates our founding fathers, that gives them a mostly free pass for their evils. Hell, how radical can you be when Dick Cheney loves your show?

Which isn't to erase the achievements of Hamilton, which I was obsessed with for all of 2015/2016. Lin-Manuel Miranda created a work of furiously American pop culture that is riddled with some of the same contradictions of the country itself. He himself has acknowledged that he couldn't cover it all, and that the criticisms are valid:

But it might be easier to forgive the show for its flaws if it weren't for its post-fame production path, which has turned a work of theatre not only into a hyper-capitalist status symbol of a ticket, but now a Disney-presented movie. Disney, which bought the movie rights to the *recording of a stage play *for a cool $75 million (!!), is a company that wants to convince us that it's on the "good side" of the conversation around representation and diversity (don't worry, they secured the Kaepernick deal). So while there's something perverse about seeing the Disney Logo bookend the Hamilton movie, there's something also infuriatingly on-brand about it. The Hamilton producers have been ruthless with how they've monopolized and monetized their "product" (sadly, there will be no other director's version of Hamilton for a long, long time); Disney does the same thing with its fabled "vault".

It makes sense that Disney would be able to market Hamilton to its customers. It's the perfect addition to their lineup, to sell a vision of America that has the veneer of the fresh and radical without ruffling too many feathers. They're desperate for this venn diagram of material. Because when you look inside the castle, what you see is not pretty:

I want to be clear: I do think it's great that there is a well-produced video of a Broadway show that enables millions more to be able to "experience" it at home. Theatre has a long, long way when it comes to this kind of digital accessibility. In an ideal world, every successful Broadway show should have this kind of (expensive) recording done. And there needs to be a platform to seamlessly distribute video to those who want to see! But what I find more distressing about this whole situation is that this Hamilton recording was from four years ago. It took this long to get out to people because the producers needed to squeeze every last drop of money out of this as possible, and eventually submit to the Disney Machine. This isn't a triumph for theatre and digital media; it's the unfortunate reality that rich shows like Hamilton are the ones that get this platform, and only when they participate in a racist, capitalist system that isn't equipped to serve the needs of theatre, or the needs of the young and scrappy immigrants that the show claims to be about. That's not the type of future I want for theatre or believe that art needs.

New Forms: Could film and theatre converge?

Wed, 20 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This week I saw two exceptional pieces that blended the lines between theatre and film in fascinating ways.

The first was Zia Anger's exceptional My First Film. Anger first debuted her piece as a live cinema performance that has been touring around the country since 2018. In it, Anger projects her laptop onto the theater's big screen, where she plays segments from her "abandoned" first film, speaks only through typing text into TextEdit, clicks around on video files, and interacts with audience members digitally (she asks them to leave their phones on). In other words, it's an experience that, in many ways, could translate perfectly to a live stream.

In the live stream rendition, all those elements are still there. What makes it different, however, is that we aren't amidst an actual physical audience. Instead, Anger has figured out how to expertly capture the feeling of being in a collective space with others, better than any online theatre I have seen so far. To begin with, the space in the live stream is limited: it's capped at a number I'm assuming is under 100 people. Anger would tweet about an upcoming "show" on Twitter, and spots would fill up within a day. Already, entering the stream, there is an aura of exclusivity, of this being a singular experience we are going to share in---not something pre-recorded that can never capture the feeling of "liveness".

When we enter the live stream, however, Anger immediately makes it a collective digital circle. With a soft hum of music playing, she puts a note on her screen that gives us an Apple ID to text. With Messages open on her screen, people start texting in, and we see their messages and their phone numbers. (She makes clear that you need to be comfortable with your number being shared in the space.) Anger plays short videos from her computer (actually old saved Instagram stories), and sends them live to people texting in, often writing back with short messages. She also encourages anyone who gets a text back to start texting others, creating a virtuous circle of sharing. It's actually the most connected to others I've felt in a "theatre-y" way since we lost live theatre.

Throughout the performance---which primarily covers her using her sadly lost and abandoned film to explore personal and professional trauma---we never lose the sense of this being a communal experience. There are several more instances throughout the show of "audience interaction" as well, some of which are very powerful.

While My First Film is classified as a "live cinema presentation", I'm not sure if it can really fit neatly into any category at all. It's not quite theatre, and it's not quite a movie---but it's something somewhere in between, a birth of a wholly original new form. As I've written about before, sharing one's screen is an alluring kind of nakedness and vulnerability right now, when all so many of us. seem able to do is stare at our screens. It makes sense that there is much to be excavated in the way of creating art in this realm, especially when leveraging the power of the live experience.

Richard Nelson's excellent new "Zoom" play *What Do We Need To Talk About? *creates a different kind of "theatre" experience. Nelson's latest is a continuation of his Apple Family cycle, one of the two main play cycles that he has been presenting at the Public Theater over the last ten years. It was originally presented as a Youtube live stream for some 5,000 viewers, but is now available to replay on demand. The convenience of being able to hit "play" on a play whenever you want is nice, but you do certainly lose something of the live experience---especially in contrast to something like Anger's My First Film.

Nevertheless, there is something that feels like theatre here---though it's not immediately clear what it is. As Helen Shaw writes:

In the Time Before, I tended to be a bit glib about what constitutes "theater"---I like a big tent, so I figured anything (dance, storytelling, drama) that happened in a theater counted. But now even that expansive definition seems paltry. What Do We Need to Talk About? was made for and with screens, yet it still tastes totally of theater. Maybe it's the top notes of language, or the length of engagement among the cast, or the way that the audience's own imagination is a crucial player? I'm trying to place it.

For starters, it's a piece of "digital" theatre---though can you really call it that, if it's just theatre?---that feels uniquely suited to its form. Writes Alexandra Schwartz: ""What Do We Need to Talk About?" (directed by Nelson) takes place, inevitably, on Zoom, which, for once, isn't an irritating technical compromise but an integral plot point."

Like all good theatre, *What Do We Need To Talk About? *considers carefully its form, and what it is that makes it unique. In this case, it makes use of Zoom to highlight its hyper-realism, retain a sense of intimacy, and let its terrific actors' subtle performances truly shine. The play is moving and funny, blending fact with fiction, and feels like it was always meant to be seen this way, in this moment---a mirror of our own lives.

It's interesting to consider the quality of video presented in Nelson's production; it differs greatly from video used in a lot of other theatre, like that used in an Ivo Van Hove show. Another lesson to take from the success of What Do We Need To Talk About? is that video does have a tonal quality---not everything needs to be super HD. In fact, the imperfection of webcams over Zoom helps the production---it would have a very different feel if it were all shot perfectly in high-definition.

But I still wonder if there's a way to combine the live energy of My First Film with the theatrical hyper-realism that's found in What Do We Need To Talk About?. Both feel fresh and alive, distinctive works that aren't marred by the lack of a physical, live space but instead are helped by it. They also feel on the verge of something even deeper and perhaps grander: could film and theatre---different forms, but ever intertwined---find ways to converge into an entirely new-but-familiar form that emerges from and speaks to this moment in time?

What Do We Need To Talk About? is available to stream for free on Youtube until June 28th.

Sign up for the MEMORY mailing list or follow Zia Anger on Twitter for updates on future showings of My First Film.

The Long and the Short of It

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This week, this video from Guthrie Theater Artistic Director Joseph Haj was shared a lot.

Haj declares that nothing can replace the liveness of theatre, a tradition that has been around for centuries and centuries and will, undoubtedly, be around for centuries more. I like and respect Haj and I agree with the sentiment that he expresses: there is something indestructible about theatre. The fact that it is still around shows that it is, in some way, intertwined with what it means to be a human in civilization. The long past of theatre stretches out into a presumably long future.

But is this the sentiment we need right now? I too am not particularly worried about the long-term future of theatre and live art. I am, however, worried about the short to medium term future of theaters. By Haj's own admission, theaters are not doing well right now. The Guthrie setting up a mini-season in March 2021is, at least, an honest admission that theatre is not going to be around for a while. (Broadway keeps pushing back their start date to still-unrealistic times.) But who is to say that March is going to be that much better? Nobody has any sense of certainty about any part of this situation; if the United States response continues to be disastrous, and no miracle vaccine is procured by early 2021, we could be in for a long, dark road ahead.

Suffice to say: in the short to medium term, theatre is not going to be OK. Many theaters have and will close. We need massive fundraising (virtual galas galore!), rent freezes, funding and bailouts. But we also need new ways of thinking about theatre, new ways of exploring its language. It's a medium of many things: of breath, of physicality, of metaphor. Some of those languages are certainly not replicable online; some, in new and exciting ways, may be.

To be clear: some day, we will return to theaters. It's not that theatre won't survive in the long run---it will---but that that is, in effect, a both romantic and almost defeatist attitude. It's a form of throwing our hands up to tradition, without doing any deeper interrogating into how theatre might be able to evolve. Haj is right that live theatre cannot be replaced by any video form ("we have a name for it", he says, referring to performances on camera, "that's what film is, and that's what TV is"), but it's not a stretch to say it can be supplemented (by amazing content like Playwrights Horizons POP masterclasses) and even expanded upon. We're only very early on, and we've already seen some intriguing examples, both in the sense of actual content and in accessibility. Instead of falling back on old clichés about the durability of the live experience, we need new thinking, new forms, new paradigms, new roles that old institutions might not be able to fulfill under a limited view of what theatre can be.

“Necessary” and “Essential”

Tue, 12 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

art by vicki ling

These days, there is a lot of discussion about what constitutes being an "essential" worker. (Generally, it's the most important and also the lowest paid jobs.) Along the way, there's been a lot of soul searching about what it means to be an inessential business, what processes are actually inessential, and what industries are not quite essential but "important" enough to be bailed out.

The arts have to deal with being, well, inessential. But what does it actually mean to be inessential? Surely we can't mean that all art could actually be dispensed with without any consequences? Does that mean that live theatre should be low on the priority list for saving? Art's relationship to being essential to society, in some form, has a long history. It seems to be a human need to create beauty and meaning, to self-express, to wrestle with the thorny issues and politics of their time. But can we truly say that any singular work of art is essential? I'm not sure that we can argue, ethically, that any single piece of art actually "needs" to exist; in a pithy manner, art is pointless---that is the point.

However, we live in strange times---even prior to the devastating effects of COVID--19---and many people now can't resist inscribing a movie, play, or book as "necessary" or "essential". Art is constantly evaluated for its moral quality first, and aesthetic quality second. This is not necessarily a bad thing---the merging of activism and aesthetics in the creation of art can be powerful---but the constant urge for critics to deem a work of art "necessary" (or worse, a "necessary masterpiece") can be limiting. In a 2018 piece for the New York Times Magazine, Lauren Oyler explores the question of what we mean when we call a work of art "necessary":

There are many noncomprehensive adjectives we can apply to good art: moving, clever, joyous, sad, innovative, boring, political. But good art doesn’t have to be any of these things, necessarily; what we want out of it is possibility. To call a work “necessary” keeps the audience from that possibility and saps the artist of autonomy as well. That it’s frequently bestowed on artists from marginalized backgrounds pressures these artists to make work that represents those backgrounds. Worse, it subtly frames their output as an inevitability, something that would have happened regardless of creative agency, and thus suggests that these artists are less in control of their decisions and skills than their unnecessary counterparts.

Art, in atomized form, is not necessary. Implying that it's our duty to experience some piece of art is an idealized and misguided notion. And art, in economic terms, is not deemed essential either. So, what is art? Merely a frivolity or a luxury? That doesn't feel true, either. Instead, I like to think that art is an electric jolt to culture, allowing a society to buzz and feel alive. In one sense, that work is, of course, essential---opening us to the richness and multitudes of the human experience.

But it's always worth considering deeply: what keeps us doing this? How can art coexist in a world with so much injustice? How can we read novels, go to the movies, or see an opera when there are people deeply suffering, every day, all around the world? What makes art "necessary", what makes it "essential"? I'm not sure there is a correct answer. But the tension that this consideration provides is, in some manner, necessary and essential for making good art in our times.

How to Build the Future

Tue, 21 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The Alley Theatre in Houston Texas (via)

There are several different scenarios for how this whole COVID-19 situation can play out, but two prominent ones come to mind.

The first is that we slowly start to re-open things over the course of the year (with precautions like mandatory masks), don't experience a resurgence or spike, and things approach a "new normal" baseline by the end of the year. There will still probably be restrictions on crowd size in that scenario, but it might not be as bad as we think—it depends on how much testing we do, the amount of tracking we have, and the resulting amount of data that that give us. (There are still so many statistical unknowns.) The second situation is that we start to see a spike as rural and Southern states start to re-open, we can't get our act together with testing and tracking, and we clamp down on social distancing for the foreseeable future, until we have some sort of vaccine. The latter situation probably means that any sort of large crowd—of the kind that almost all theatre would fall into—would be a no-go until the vaccine is circulated, or until things seriously start to calm down.

As we get more news every second, I go back and forth on whether it's likely that theatre will exist in some form by the end of the year (if the first scenario plays out). I think it's possible, in some partial form. But we need to prepare for the possibility that theatre as we know it will not exist until 2021 at the earliest. This isn't even to mention that many theaters are going to have to shut down because of the financial situation—already, UCB has closed all its NYC locations. I expect there to be several more large theaters to close down as well.

This time of forced pause is going to lead to a lot of introspection, both on a micro level (do I want to devote my time to a career this fragile?) and a macro level (how can we rethink everything in theatre?). Many Artistic Directors are already thinking this way:

Said Chay Yew [outgoing artistic director of Victory Gardens], “We’ve always complained about how the American theatre doesn’t work. I for one find the blank slate exciting. We either repeat what we did before or we don’t. The structure will have to come down."

Joe Haj [artistic director of the Guthrie] conceded that if the crisis “ends in six weeks, we may be much like we were before. But if not, or there’s another spike in the virus, we may need to rethink our model entirely. There’s a huge role for leadership. We need to be able to dream ourselves forward.”

It's really got me thinking: what would a truly sustainable, accessible, and scalable future look like for theatre?

There's a lot to that question. It's what I've probably thought the most about in the last year, and want to continue to develop thinking around as we move forward. What could we build? (This piece on building by Marc Andreessen was thrown around tech twitter a lot this week. Lots of issues with it but I agree with the sentiment.) Here's a quick, informal list of things to cover:

Digital Platform: The last major movement in American theatre was in the 70s and 80s, with regional theaters and off-off Broadway, a distinctly pre-internet time. Theatre has seen little to no adaptation to modern technology, outside of some small developments. What a digital platform exactly looks like for theatre is the big question, but I would want it to be something that would allow for: easier ways to raise money for theatre, easier means to access space, easier means to access audiences, and cheaper and more accessible means for audiences to find and access theatre. (Great streaming theatre, like NT Live, would be a start.)

Trans-media: How can companies become trans-media storytelling companies? Can theatre companies create content across different forms, like audio, video, immersive live theatre, etc? Digital content is, by its nature, much cheaper and more accessible than theatre.

Money: A double whammy: theatre doesn't pay its workers enough money (excepting Broadway), and it also is too expensive for audiences. This is an obvious—and huge—problem.

Environmental sustainability: Theatre's ephemerality means it often can be pretty wasteful. For how progressive theatre often pretends to be, we haven't thought enough about how to not only lessen the environmental impact of theatre, but also to engage with that issue.

How to be like music: Streaming music didn't kill the music industry. Streaming music, though it has its fair share of problems, has not killed concert attendance. Live experiences are still craved above all else. Even watching Beyoncé's Homecoming on Netflix makes you want to be there—it's one piece of a greater puzzle of the whole of music.

Marketing: We need more creators like Jeremy O. Harris, who create their own marketing in their work. Theatre has traditionally done an awful job at this, and that's why its audience is increasingly old. How can the future of theatre be marketed completely differently?

Theatre is a medium of metaphor, film is a medium of relation

Tue, 14 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Literalism is the great enemy of theatre. If I wanted to see something literal, I would go watch a period movie.

Instead, theatre is an art form of metaphors. It is not merely a visual medium. If it were, you could just have a painter make a pretty stage picture. But that's not what we're going for. It's through metaphor that we, as audiences, fill in the gaps. It's through metaphor that we come to better understand ourselves, better exercise our empathy. The possibilities in theatre are limitless when it is treated in such a way. Suddenly, every aesthetic limitation it seems to have is seen in a new dimension.

Likewise, there is film that reproduces the bland and theatrical (that is to say, naturalistic theatre)---merely aiming to be a photographic reproduction of a stage show---and then there is film that uses all the resources of cinema and cinematography---moving images, sound, editing---to actually create.

The power of film comes from the inter-relation of its images and sounds as they are cut together; images coming into contact with other images are analogous to colors coming into contact with other colors when painting. The act of creation involves moving images and sounds---capturing people, not just characters---sliced together into something that is a personal manifestation of the filmmaker's unconscious.

Which brings us to a shared similarity: both theatre and films---and all art that I know---are acts of creation, driven from the unconscious.

Merely reproducing something---whether that be theatre reproducing film (such as in a piece that doesn't understand what form it wants to be), or film photographically reproducing theatre (such as in a boring movie that just tries to film actors doing acting things)---is not art. Even attempts to naturalistically reproduce "life" are not necessarily art. Real art involves actual creation, creation that makes something that is alive. (A sink/swim test for a piece of theatre is the simple question: does it feel alive?)

There can be exceptions: sometimes the humbling, human attempt at representation can be artful. Still, I would argue that even these attempts---usually seen in grand paintings---are not aiming at exact photographic reproduction. They are aiming at a deeper realism: to portray the world as it is, not how it looks.

For example, when I look at one of Rembrandt's late self portraits (this one at the age of 63, in the National Gallery in London) I see, on the one hand, an attempt to reproduce life:

But on the other hand, Rembrandt's painting portrays the world as it is, not necessarily how it looks. The facial detail is there---capturing his older, declining face---but the rest is loose, blurry, shadowy. What Rembrandt wanted us to see was the expression of this moment on his mind---drawing focus to his aging face, seen in the same way his younger self-portraits were.

Bottom Up, Not Top Down

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I'm convinced that one of the main curses of my life is that I know more about movies than I've actually seen movies.

Over the course of the last ten years, I've created countless syllabi, read endless articles, and curated what can only be described as a quantum amount of lists of lists on the history of film. I made a plan to watch the entire They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list (itself a curation of many lists) before I was 23; it didn't happen. I thought for sure I would have at least gotten through the AFI list by now; nah. There are many filmmakers who have had a large influence on me when I've only seen one or two of their movies; for some, I've seen none. To be clear, I don't think this is inherently a bad thing. Learning to talk about experiences you've never experienced is probably an essential part of the modern age; I think this is what Pierre Bayard is getting at in his book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read. (But I'm not actually sure---I've never read it.)

But now that we're effectively in Quarantine, Mari and I have started to watch movies. Sometimes two a day! This has been my dream for so long; finally, with unlimited free time, I can surf the niche waves of cinematic universes that I've always thought more about than actually experienced.

But there is a critical difference to this newfound luck: it emerged organically, bottom-up.

I've realized that every other previous effort I've had to watch movies has been top-down: I've tried to assemble massive spreadsheets of information, and then got frustrated with my brain when it was unable to muster up the motivation to even know where to start. But starting is the hardest thing, and the most important.

I had it all backwards. The best way to start is bottom-up: doing what is interesting and in front of you, instead of trying to adhere to some grand pie-in-the-sky vision. For getting into a movie watching habit, it means actually just watching whatever you want to watch. We decided to watch Céline Sciamma's Portrait of a Lady on Fire, a movie we've both wanted to watch for a while. It's not on any of my canon lists (yet), but it was what was in front of us: a recent, acclaimed movie that has been recommended to me many times. (Keeping up with the cultural conversation is a perfectly bottom-up motivation that works.)

Watching Portrait led to a bottom-up rabbit hole. Since we liked the movie, we decided to watch the rest of Sciamma's work. This, then, connected with something we've been trying to do: watch mostly movies directed by women. Eliza Hittman's new film Never Rarely Sometimes Always was just released, and had a lot of buzz in the film world. It's $20 to rent which is a lot, so we watched her previous two movies on Hulu, It Felt Like Love and Beach Rats.

All of a sudden, we've watched a lot of movies! And it emerged organically.

I think there's a reason this bottom-up approach works especially well today. In the Information Age, where we are constantly bombarded and overloaded with new info, it's more important than ever to be able to adapt and leverage information powerfully. Old, industrial-age manufacturing processes are centered around top-down, plan-based construction: you have a vision, and you work towards it by working backwards from the vision, step by step, till you know what to do.

But in the digital age, this is far too slow. Information comes at us so fast, and things change so quickly, that trying to stubbornly stick to some long-term vision can lead to things going off the rails. We need to be quick on our feet, and the best way to do this is by starting from the bottom up. Starting from the bottom up means allowing yourself the freedom to tinker in the direction that's most interesting to you---and allowing that direction to change. It's OK to leave the end vision hazy because it's going to change a lot, and you're probably never going to get there---and if you do, it's not going to be exactly what we imagined.

I've been thinking about this more because this time of social distancing has been tough for people in so many ways. For those of us who are privileged to have a lot of free time right now, it can be easy to beat ourselves up for not optimizing every second of this time. We have been conditioned to treat time as money. Now that we have an abundance of it, it seems that we need to use it so wisely: be as productive as possible, invent calculus like Isaac Newton did during quarantine, or write King Lear like Shakespeare did.

We might even try to commandeer time itself by laying out a master plan, top-down, that we will commence on to complete our goals. (Goals that might not necessarily even be self-imposed, but that we've inherited from society.) But I think it's important to resist those urges, and instead just do what's interesting to us, right now. Letting our interests and loves guide us, letting our next projects and goals emerge organically. Trying the other way around is like building a stack of LEGOs with one brick at the bottom and a hundred at the top: pretty, but it's all going to come toppling down with the slightest bump.

Theatre in the age of COVID-19

Tue, 17 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

These are extraordinary times. What follows is a list of resources for theatre-makers, re-posted from my Twitter.

All theatre is closing down for the foreseeable future in New York and across the country. It's going to rock this industry to its core.

First, a moment for all the shows that just opened, or were set to open, which had to unexpectedly and unceremoniously shut down their runs. For most of them, probably forever. It sucks.

How are people going to get paid? How are theaters going to survive? How are we going to innovate? These are all pretty big burning questions right now. The truth is, nobody knows what's going to happen.

We're in uncharted territory for this industry. We've moved into a position where no one can predict the future with any degree of certainty, and so we've even "lost the narrative", resorting to just trying to take in as much raw data as possible.

But many theaters around the country are finding ways to film and stream their shows, with wide shots and close ups, with special permission from Actor's Equity. Some are even collaborating with BroadwayHD. A.C.T.’s productions are already available to purchase and stream — and available for the price you want to pay.

Perhaps this new form of digital accessibility can become more widespread in the future, rather than just an exception in a pandemic. But it does needs to be done right. Otherwise, people will just turn on Netflix or Disney+ instead.

And who actually gets to watch these filmed shows? Just ticket buyers? What about other people who want to check it out? Filmed theatre isn't perfect—it almost always loses something in translation. But it's a start.

"Theatre doesn’t translate that well to film, but I think you can get a sense if something works well." - director Rebecca Frecknall.

You can watch Young Jean Lee's 2011 performance of her show WE'RE GONNA DIE (which just was forced to close its new run at Second Stage) online for free

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">WE'RE GONNA DIE, directed by <a href="https://twitter.com/rajafeath3r?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@rajafeath3r</a> and performed by <a href="https://twitter.com/janellemcdrmth?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@janellemcdrmth</a>, closed early due to COVID with its last show tonight. But you can watch the low-fi version, performed by myself (as well as the version I did with David Byrne) on my website. <a href="https://t.co/rDTUp2RMtX">https://t.co/rDTUp2RMtX</a></p>— Young Jean Lee (@YoungJean_Lee) <a href="https://twitter.com/YoungJean_Lee/status/1238268661086867456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 13, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

You can also go to OntheBoards.TV and use the code ARTATHOME20 for free streaming thru the end of April. They have an excellent collection of experimental theatre, dance, music, and category-defying work.' Recs here:

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Around 60 tip-top experimental performances (incl. Okwui Okpokwasili's Bronx Gothic, the Rude Mechs' The Method Gun, and Young Jean Lee's The Shipment), all for free through April, all streaming on <a href="https://t.co/1seTBwTa20">https://t.co/1seTBwTa20</a> !!!! See one each night, keep that show-going habit ALIVE</p>— Helen Shaw (@Helen_E_Shaw) <a href="https://twitter.com/Helen_E_Shaw/status/1239237406467010561?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 15, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

But perhaps the biggest question for theatre: will artists still get paid? For many New York theaters, the answer seems to be yes. For now.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">We’re so proud to be part of such a kick-ass community with companies like <a href="https://twitter.com/sohorep?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@sohorep</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/NYTW79?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NYTW79</a> who are also committed to paying folks during our closures! Let’s roll call the other orgs we should be lifting up right now and send so much social media love. It means a lot!</p>— Ars Nova (@arsnova) <a href="https://twitter.com/arsnova/status/1238232430798143489?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 12, 2020</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

But I'm not sure how things will fare elsewhere in the country, and for smaller theaters. This is a difficult time for everyone involved. Everyone is losing work.

If you can afford it, please don't ask for a refund if you bought a ticket and the show has been canceled. Many theaters NEED this money. And if you can, donate. “There is no ‘surplus’ in nonprofit.”

We need to dig deep and find new ways to support artists and keep theaters alive. Insurance will only partially cover Broadway. Everyone else will have to be bailed out. Non-profit theaters don't have a lot of extra cash laying around, especially without spring galas.

Small and mobile theaters that don't have full calendars of programming may be able to escape alive. But even then, they are going to need a boost. Government may help, and we need to urge them to do so. But it's probably more likely to come from corporate donors.

One of the best resources I've seen for theaters and artists is the page that ART/NY is compiling. They're doing a tremendous job. All we can do right now is to help each other.

And La Mama has been sitting on CultureHub for a while now. It's a fantastic platform that aims to bridge art & technology. They are working with HowlRound to help stream select productions from the theatre community.

There's also Theatre Without Theater, which popped up on Instagram and has already started to blow up. It's a nightly 7:30pm broadcast aiming to fill the void, by featuring performances, songs, & more from the theatre community. Highly recommended.

The 24 Hour Play Festival is doing “Viral Monologues”, posting a new monologue on their Instagram every 15 minutes for 24 hours.

I also wonder how we'll continue to have innovations with audio theatre. There's a lot of money in podcasts right now, and their value is only going to increase. No one has yet "unlocked" fiction/theatre podcasts. I'd love to see a lot more experimentation in this space.

Obviously, classes are also moving online. Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus is beta-testing teaching an online playwrigint class via Zoom—open to all. As is Young Jean Lee.

This kind of innovation and new, networked thinking is going to be what's required for theatre to make it through this. We can't operate on the same old assumptions + old ways of doing things. It's a great time to re-think everything, especially around accessibility.

It's imperative that the next time this happens we can be better prepared, with a social safety net that allows people to remain afloat. Till then, here's a great list of resources for freelancers.

The bottom line: support your local theater, and others too if you can. This is going to require a collective effort to make it through this.

How to tell the truth

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Recently I caught Lucas Hnath's new work, Dana H, which I thought was one of the most stunning things I've seen in a long time.

As a piece of theatre, Dana H is shocking and sort of unreal: Hnath has cut together real-life interviews (conducted by Steve Cosson of The Civilians) with his mother, retelling her harrowing story of being abducted by a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, into a 75-minute sort of "narrative". This audio is then played for us while Deidre O'Connell (pictured above) puts in a pair of headphones and lip-syncs the entire thing, beat for beat. That's pretty much the entire show. But its effect is devastating, a feeling not like anything I've quite felt before in the theatre.

Dana H plays in interesting conversation with the Vineyard's first show of their season, Is This a Room. That show was also a piece of excellent documentary theatre based on a transcript, an FBI interrogation with Reality Winner, which Tina Satter assembled into a weird, otherworldly piece of hyper-naturalistic theatre. The actors spoke the transcript word for word—every awkward pause and cough and hm and throat clearing, every weird background noise and seeming non sequitur. What both Dana H and Is This a Room accomplish is to subvert our expectation of theatre as a medium of illusion.

Is this a room?

When we go see a piece of theatre that is going to tell us a story, there is always a layer of disbelief and illusion—which is what makes theatre theatre. In great theatre the leap we have to make is very easy, but it's still there: sets aren't real, props are merely representations of things. We get swept up in the illusion of the whole thing. But in the case of Hnath and Satter's new work, they take you out of that safe space, and into another realm entirely.

Dana H subverts our expectations of what theatre should be so hard that it is tough to even define what exactly it is doing so incredibly well. But the play knocks against our very perception of how we perceive truth, facts, art and reality---how we pick up the pieces and assemble narratives. Performatively breaking the fourth wall is one thing, but hearing a real-life story—from its real-life source—is something else entirely. (In a way, Ma-Yi's Suicide Forest, now returning for a run at ART/NY, shares a similar theme: its also about a real-life mother, and the playwright and her real mother perform in the show together.) It would be dark and harrowing—but formally simplistic—to just listen to an audio recording of Hnath's mother. But by putting an actor onstage and giving her the Herculean task to perform an entire monologue without speaking—for some, the major interpretative instrument that an actor has—we witness something else entirely: a true blending of art and reality that shakes us deeper than either could be just by themselves.

This documentary aspect of art has become an increasingly popular trend that can be deeply mined. It makes sense: in an age where social media acts as a sort of performance and mini-art-sharing, blending the lines between performance and reality, it tracks that "art" and "performance" are bringing in more of reality. We can even see this with a recent movie like the Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems, which remixes a real-life NBA game with a fictional story of a gambling jeweler, starring actors (Adam Sandler) and real people playing versions of themselves (Kevin Garnett). The effect with that movie, I found, was similarly dizzying. Somehow by inserting reality into a story it makes the stakes feel that much higher, and raises our anxiety levels through the roof. Movies are also a medium fundamentally based on illusion; by deconstructing and subverting that illusion in small or large ways, we can lose our footing beneath us.

KG

I'm increasingly fascinated by how art and reality, lies and truth, perception and facts can all intertwine and intermingle. In a time of fake news, unreliable sources of truth, and issues of believing survivors, it seems like these kinds of work can hold a grip on us in a new, entirely unexpected way.

Vulnerability

Recently I've been finally attempting to read Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle series, which is a massive six volume set that is basically one incredibly detailed, somewhat mundane, yet strikingly vulnerable (to the point of embarrassment) and addicting memoir. In the first volume, Knausgaard spends at least 60 pages recounting a single night of trying to get beer for a New Year's Eve party. It's exhaustingly thorough and detailed, flipping a microscope onto himself in a way that's somehow both cringe-inducing and fascinating.

Knausgaard's books have become a literary sensation, especially in his native Norway. His success , I think, speaks to a broader trend of blurring the lines between reality and art. As I've written about before, this is a time when we have art that is increasingly intermingling with reality and social media, to form some sort of weird triangle. Everything bleeds into another thing, and the three inform one another.

“The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is," Knausgaard says.

Presenting life-as-is in all its mundane but tremendous tragedy is not necessarily anything new. Chekhov was doing this at the turn of the 20th century. In the preface to his version of Uncle Vanya, adapter/director Robert Icke quotes Chekhov (in what I believe is his own translation):

Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are. Not on stilts. Let everything on the stage be just as complicated – and at the same time just as simple – as it is in life. People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the while their happiness is being established – or their lives are being broken up.

Something about the magnifying glass of the stage, of art, can make the regular everydayness of life heartbreaking.

But Chekhov was more subtle about how he revealed himself. Today, we can longer separate the art from the artist. It's telling that one of the most persistent recent tropes in theatre I've seen is the playwright-as-character. We have to remind ourselves that the artist is often inseparable from what we're seeing before us.

This merging of "activism and aesthetics" as Richard Brody put it in his decade in review piece, is about combining the personal and political and turning them into vulnerability. In a way, this is the culmination of part of the mission of Jean-Luc Godard and the filmmakers of the French New Wave, who saw films as being united with the lives of their creators, as well as the social and political climate at large.

In an age of hyperlink consciousness where our lives have become less and less private, the individual artist who finds new ways to explore being vulnerable will continue to be the most fascinating.

The Hidden Conservatism in Minimalism

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Philip Johnson was a Nazi, that much is clear.

The man who built the iconic minimalist "glass house" and other twentieth century architectural achievements was also a fascist Nazi sympathizer for much of his life. But this fascism wasn't separated from his work. In many ways, it manifested itself in Johnson's strict designs. Kyle Chayka writes in The Longing for Less about the glass house:

His sympathy for fascism is apparent in the strictness of the architecture itself. It’s a house built for and by a single person, demonstrating a kind of megalomaniacal possessiveness. The architect has nothing at stake in making a visitor comfortable, only himself.

Twentieth century modernism emerged in the mid century after two devastating world wars. As Chayka puts it, modernism "offered an antiseptic, ahistorical alternative to what came before it—a vision of a safer and cleaner world, with cosmopolitan equality for all who inhabited its architecture." The de-ornamentation of minimalism, in other words, was its own type of Puritanism. It enabled a type of subtle nostalgia and regressive politics.

By flattening things out, we may be able to achieve some sort of transcendence. But often we are merely hiding away from the immense complexity and entanglements of the world.

Recently, I grappled with some of the flattening that the important theatre director Ivo Van Hove does. The tides have turned against Van Hove a bit. What once went felt startlingly fresh---like a glass of cold water thrown against the face of American theatre---now feels a bit familiar and played out. At his best, Van Hove can offer spectacular and brutal visions of our inner psyches. But at his worst, Van Hove's largely apolitical work can feel removed and regressive, problematic in similar ways to Johnson's.

As expected, the reviews for his new West Side Story on Broadway are severely mixed---in the truest meaning of that word. Some were harshly critical, while others defended or lauded its perceived boldness.

Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker wrote one of the most scathing critiques of the production, one that mirrors the problems of minimalism in art. She writes:

The production is an infuriating example of what happens when a powerful style calcifies into shtick—infuriating because so much that is exciting, even revelatory, here is crushed beneath the director’s insistence on a vision that feels narrow and doctrinaire. He wants to make us see an iconic work with new eyes, but all we can see is him.

Van Hove's minimalism, now pushed to the heights of commercial mainstream in theatre, has become conservative. It's not anything we haven't seen before, and it's not anything Van Hove hasn't done already. This West Side Story has a shallow grasp of race in America, as well. In an op-Ed for the New York Times, critic Carina del Valle Schorske writes about how this version doesn't do anything to unpack the show's deeply problematic representation of Puerto Ricans:

This production also renders the Jets as a multiracial gang, concocting a fantasy world in which bigoted whites form an alliance with African-Americans against Puerto Rican migrants — a bid, in Ms. De Keersmaeker’s words, “for inclusion of the American population today.” But it’s unlikely black New Yorkers would seek (or find) security among white Americans rather than among their Caribbean, Middle Eastern and Central American neighbors. Mr. van Hove’s casting misrepresents the real solidarities that form at the margins of U.S. citizenship — and perhaps more dangerously, shifts our focus away from the enduring problem of white supremacist violence. “Inclusion” here is code for willful colorblindness.

This is a type of something I call "two-dimensional racism": when we treat diversity and inclusion as a quota to fill, as merely putting actors of color on stage without interrogating any deeper. It's not anything new---in fact, it's written into the very fabric of the show's existence. Said Sondheim before writing: "I’ve never been that poor and I’ve never even met a Puerto Rican.”

That the production is also intertwined in a gross story about one of its actors being a sexual harasser---and that Van Hove and producer Scott Rudin have defended him, despite protestors outside the theatre every night---only speaks further to the politics of this kind of production. One that has the veneer of being radical, that commercially wants to be apolitical, but that is in actuality regressive and conservative.

The Durability and Continued Promise of the Immersive

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve noticed a trend recently.

When Netflix or Disney+ play their logo animations, they end by zooming into the actual logo, as if we are falling into them, immersing ourselves in another world. Take a look:

Netflix and Disney+ present the aesthetics of immersion.

Before we can watch Netflix we must first disappear into a dream-wave of colors, entering into another universe. It's a universe where things aren’t quite so shitty, a universe in which we can curl up into, which can cradle us. It's also a universe that has algorithimically been determined to quench our thirst---well, almost. There's always the lingering promise of more, of one more bingeable episode finally satisfying our lingering needs. It's something people have been desiring for a long, long time—to escape into another dimension—and has only been escalated by some of the despair of 2020 capitalism.

Everything we consume on Netflix happens in this Netflix universe, all within that giant "N". We can see this with the company's endless social media accounts that act like real people—treating all their "content" as one universe. It's as much world-building and mythos-crafting as it is a corporate marketing strategy.

Of course, universes are becoming more popular than ever, as evidenced by entities like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Disney's huge original catalog, or Game of Thrones. Marvel realized that instead of releasing a movie every year they could release multiple movies a year, creating a bottomless pit of content for fans to constantly immerse themselves in. In 2020, Mavel will also launch two live-action TV shows on Disney+ that are apart of its Cinematic Universe, continuing to build out its world and dominate the pop culture landscape.

Disney realized that Star Wars wasn't moving fast enough, either. Instead of releasing a movie every few years, they upped it to a movie every year. And once that didn't work, they pivoted to creating the buzzy Mandalorian, which was the focal point of Disney+. Most Star Wars fans just want the world to persist. Disney decided that, to succeed in entertainment capitalism, they had to create a never-ending well of content that would let fans constantly be talking about and "living in" their favorite alternate world.

The politics of escapism

But why do we want to escape into alternate worlds at all?

It's been a fairly consistent through line in human history: we try to create worlds that are beyond our own. We construct religions, tell stories around camp fires, and make art that tries to transport us, whether implicitly or explicitly. The technological advancements offered in the 20th century, though, led to a type of immersion not seen before. Cameras allowed us to capture fictional stories that were vividly real, and movie theaters allowed the mass consumption of these immersive stories. The rise of television and better special effects led to humans falling into these other worlds on a consistent basis. But with the development of the internet, that connection and immersion became constant.

With constant connection came the ability to easily dissociate from everyday life and get lost in online worlds. We could go down YouTube rabbit holes, watch Netflix, browse forums, get lost on Twitter or Reddit, or play online games with each other. But the rise in wanting to be immersed in other worlds is also clearly a reaction to something else: some of the general shittiness of being alive in the 21st century. Much of this shittiness, to be clear, has always been there, but has only become more pervasive and "seen" by the light speed connection that the internet provides with the rest of the world. Modern escapism, then, is political: it's an attempt to escape a world which seems to be constantly on the brink of collapse. The great hypocrisy is that much of this escapism is commodified and monetized by some of the companies contributing to many of the problems in the world.

Other Examples of Immersion

Google Maps and Clunky Immersion

Here is the new Google Maps icon:

Here is the old one:

Google is a company who has always had pretty poor aesthetics. But I think it's interesting how they've designed the new Google Maps icon, because it's so static and clunky. It doesn't have any sense of forward momentum or process, like the previous rendition. The previous one isn't the most pleasing---but at least it felt like you were going somewhere. Now it's just a pin---and pins aren't very immersive. As a result, I find myself slightly hesitating whenever I need to open up Maps now.

Museum Texting

Many museums now offer texting or app services that help you learn or engage more with the art. Despite at first feeling like a gimmick, I've now realized that these are a type of immersion that a museum can offer. "Connect with our team of art historians and educators in real time as you explore the Museum", says the Brooklyn Museum. What this offers is a way for museums to try to make museum-going into an immersive experience of engagement, one that puts you in control.

Theatre is Immersive

Theatre, almost by definition, is immersive.

The success of Cursed Child, for instance, is no surprise. What fans of Harry Potter have always wanted is to live in the stories, to go to Hogwarts and be immersed in its world. By offering a two-part, six-hour play that is complete with its own sense of magic, fans are able to live in this alternate world for a while. (It's why I expect there to be a Harry Potter TV show some time soon---it seems like an extremely valuable piece of intellectual property that will be endlessly mined for profit.)

In order to experience Hamilton, the soundtrack wouldn't do. One had to be at the production, because theatre is immersive---it offers another world.

Taken beyond that, we can look at the popularity of immersive theatre. Sleep No More, which opened in New York in 2011, has remained surprisingly durable. Occupying the McKittrick Hotel, they still sell out nine performances a week, at ticket prices usually above $100. (And that's not to mention the bar and restaurant.) There is still something magical and exciting to the idea of putting on a mask and falling into another mysterious world for a night, not to mention profitable.

The Changing Tides of American and European Theatre

Tue, 11 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

A view from the bridge

A few years ago, Broadway was struck by Ivo Van Hove fever. Despite having directed productions at New York Theatre Workshop since the mid 90s, van Hove's production of A View from the Bridge broke out when it hit Broadway in 2015, following a sucessful run on the West End. Critics, like the New York Times' Ben Brantley who called it "what Greek tragedy once felt like", gushed over it. Soon, the popularity of van Hove skyrocketed. There was a feature in The New Yorker on him that featured words like "elemental" and "raw", and many articles praised his edgy, auteur vision. Soon after he was tasked by producer Scott Rudin to direct a version of The Crucible on Broadway starring Saiorse Ronan (a product of the algorithmic-type producing Rudin does, which I call The Scott Rudin Problem). Van Hove won the Tony Award in 2016 for Best Director for View, and his status as the Sexy Broadway Director Of The Moment was cemented, a quick rise to power for the Belgian-born, Amsterdam-based director. In 2018, van Hove's production of Network with Bryan Cranston premiered on Broadway. And in 2020, Van Hove is one of the few directors a producer will let dismantle West Side Story.

A View from the Bridge offered something relatively accessible for Broadway audiences, allowing us to dip our toes in the avant-garde waters while remaining in grounded territory. The production was exhilirating: more Ancient Greek drama than naturalistic Arthur Miller, which felt exciting. Sure, there were dissenters—some with uncool complaints about the aesthetic changes to our expected version of an Arthur Miller play, and others with valid complaints about the flattening out of Italian-American culture. But for the most part, Ivo was embraced as a necessary breath of fresh air for the suffocating blandness of the American theatre landscape. For some us, Ivo's work (starting for me with 2014's brilliant Scenes from a Marriage at NYTW) represented a paradigm shift in what theatre could be. Van Hove was an architect of energy in three-dimensional space. Working closely with his life partner and designer Jan Versweyveld to construct worlds of set, costume, light, video, and music (all his rehearsals start on day one with full tech), van Hove would create stunning visceral action and images that got at something essential. The ending of his Angels in America was the Angel spinning and throwing Prior to the ground repeatedly; the metaphor of the trauma of AIDs being a body being thrown down over and over was a more powerful image for some than a literal stage representation could ever be—a window into a brutal inner world. (Though, to be clear, Kushner's original ending is not literal either!) Kushner approved. In Rebecca Mead's New Yorker profile on van Hove, she writes that "Kushner says that one of van Hove’s gifts is to 'make the audience confront the failure to create completely convincing illusions—and the power of the theatre is that failure to create convincing illusions.'"

Theatre is a medium of metaphor, and literalism can be one of its great enemies. By allowing space for the invisible to emerge, theatre audience members can participate in the drama, letting their unconscious—and whatever that might bring—do part of the work. Peter Brook wrote about this in The Empty Space; Van Hove's work is nothing truly new, but it did seem to unlock something in American culture. His work honored the event-ritual of theatre, but most importantly, unlike so much contemporary theatre, felt alive.

But it's 2020 now. Attitudes have shifted a bit on Ivo and the nature of European White Men directing Euro-chic theatre. And he's not quite the theatrical darling he once was—or at least, not in the same way. Personally, I have grappled with the problematic aspects of Ivo's work and attempted to reckon with them; I still enjoy him as a director, while also accepting the problems and complexities he poses. But things that I could naively brush off a few years ago land a bit harder now. For one, his upcoming West Side Story, of course, features a performer who was fired from the New York City Ballet for sexual misconduct (and then re-hired). And Van Hove's acting ensemble at his theatre, the International Theatre of Amsterdam (ITA), is pretty much entirely white, as far as I can tell. This is the same ensemble he has been working with for decades and, to be fair, they are one of the best in the world. (Hans Kesting for life!) But this lack of diversity can't really be ignored anymore. And the same is unfortunately true with their current directors. That means that his seminal Angels in America production had white men playing Belize and the Angel, and his Othello had a white actor playing Othello. It's easy for van Hove to take a position of not seeing race, but this doesn't really fly anymore. What this model of European theatre offers is a two-dimensionalization of culture and race that, in America today, feels regressive. European white men inflicting their whitewashed vision onto a text can't help but feel colonialist today.

The tides are slightly turning against this kind of European theatre in America, though. Simon Stone's Medea, which was a critical hit in Amsterdam (at ITA) and London, was met with lackluster reviews in New York at BAM. Stone was clearly influenced by the van Hove aesthetic (though he does work very differently), and what once felt fresh a mere few years ago now feels a bit stale and played out. Stone's Yerma was so exhilirating in a madcap way—and featured such a great performance from Billie Piper—that we could ignore some of its implausibilities, and even gloss over the complexity of the cultural implications of adapting Lorca, or the thinness of the main character. (After all, it passed the biggest test of a revival: it actually did revive, and felt alive.) But Medea isn't quite there. As Helen Shaw points out in her review, the play just isn't as strong, and Rose Byrne just isn't as "distractingly good". But more than that, Shaw (and she isn't alone) sees some hidden problematic misogyny in Stone's rewriting of tragic women gone mad.

At the very least we have to acknowledge that maybe these productions are hiding or ignoring some complexities that they don't want to face, masked by minimalist designs. It's the same problem of minimalism I wrote about recently—there is something about the cleanness that can rub us the wrong way, now, knowing that there's way more complexity than meets the eye. In a funny way, European theatre—which is constantly hailed as being more "progressive"—is in a lot of ways behind new American playmaking. Sure, Berlin is doing weirder shit that is often more exciting, and certainly way more accessible. (And I confess I don't know a ton about non-English language theatre.) But our recent crop of playwrights in America have not only been excellent, but often dive head-first into the entanglement that some of these other productions ignore. (ITA, as a director's theatre, doesn't produce any new plays at all, only revivals.) In 2020, we want messiness and complexity, not flattened simplicity; I'll take the uncomforatibility in Strange Loop or Heroes of the Fourth Turning over the clean, aesthetic lines of Medea. The mess of ideas, styles, and emotions is uniquely American; when we ignore them, we prioritize aesthetics over reality, the conscious over the unconscious.

American directors are not immune, either. Sam Gold's Glass Menagerie from a few years ago suffered from a contextlessness problem, for instance. And while Daniel Fish's recent hit Broadway Oklahoma checked a lot of boxes for me in flipping the play's subtext on its head and diving into the entanglement, I don't know that it completely got there—its ending proved to be problematic and confusing for some. When can we have New York producers trust directors other than white men to be "auteur" directors? Hopefully soon; with Parasite's recent Oscar win, theatre is lagging behind in this regard. It's not for lack of great talent—I can count so many—but only for fear of giving up the white patriarcal throne that theaters tend to only trust white male directors to mess with a text. For now, we'll have to rely on the stream of amazing playwrights in America to continue to create explosive work that, in maximally pursuing the complexity of being American, lifts itself above the pitfalls of aestheticized minimalist theatre.

The Sound, the Silence, the Invisible

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Silence is becoming more and more scarce.

Last year, noise complaints to 311 in New York City reached an all-time high. Helicopters, street noise, airplanes, music, and other 21st century ambiance combine with the increasing density of cities to create a perpetual noisiness to modern day urban life. That’s why everywhere you go in the city you see people with AirPods in, trying to block out the world with more noise. (Apple’s new AirPods Pro even have noise blocking technology in a tiny, wireless package; I’ll admit that I’m attracted to the idea.) These “wearables”, as Apple classifies them, are in essence an extension of the ear, in McLuhan terms. We are replacing the noise with our own self-chosen noise, like our algorithmically verified Discover Weekly, or Michael Barbaro’s lulling voice on The Daily. If we took our earbuds out, we’d have to face the suffocating, unbearable loudness that drills into our minds, the hellish and terrifying fireball of noise that is the subway at Union Square. It can all feel a bit like we’re in Uncut Gems-land, unable to quite grab a chance to breathe. This noise is hot, direct, in-our-face.

Loud noises are not good for us. They spike stress hormones, which can lead to a host of health issues. And as cities become more dense, the noise will only get more deafening. (And will likely be worse in poorer communities and communities of color.) That’s why silence is now a luxury: only the affluent can afford space where they can be in peace. The other day I stumbled upon a new startup called “getaway”. The premise? An easily rented cabin with amenities in nature to “unplug from the daily hustle”, complete with a phone lock box. At prices around $200/night, it’s like rich camping, and reminiscent of the original American escaper-from-society-kind-of, Thoreau. But despite the faux-austerity, the attraction is clear: get me into silence, a “pure” state to re-connect.

The heat of modern loudness must be countered with the coolness of nature, of simplicity, of boredom, of quiet. Of sitting and thinking. Sure, we have bandaid solutions, like meditation “apps” that use your phone to help you meditate. But these are a bit like dealing with the devil, a slippery slope of endlessly cycling Wellness Capitalism perpetuated by Instagram and its Explore page. We don’t need more information. What people are looking for is not another app, or podcast, or ebook. It’s something far deeper.

One trait of a cool society is a capacity for nuance, which is something we, as a scaldingly hot society, do not have. But one of the best places to find nuance is in art. In John Cage’s famous 4’33, there is nothing but silence (actually rests) for the piece’s entirety. What Cage might be after is the sense of nuance that accompanies empty space, and the incredible involvement of the invisible. By reframing our perspective on music itself, we fill the invisible silence with emotion, thought, and reaction.

In the comics, there is something called the “gutter”. It’s the space in between the panels. In that space, everything that makes comics work happens: our brains take two images, and link them together into a narrative.

Try to not tell a story from these two images, from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics

The grammar of this invisible magic is called “closure”. Closure is what we do all the time, when we fill in the invisible. It makes us complicit in a piece of art: whether that’s as a reader in comics, as an audience member in the theatre, or as a listener to John Cage’s 4’33. In theatre, the invisible is many things: it’s the baggage we bring in as an audience, it’s the unspoken and repressed parts of life, it’s the spiritual, and it’s the actual act of theatre itself, which is a medium of metaphors defined by incomplete representations that require our brains to fill things in. The invisible is nuanced, and the invisible is often silent. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t heard; the best art leaves an impression on us in a deep way, such that we’re not even sure we can point to exactly how or why. That’s the invisible at work. The invisible, then, is an antidote to the noise of today.

"Build your film on white, on silence and on stillness."

-Robert Bresson

The Rise of the Influencer Individual in Theatre

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

The original Dutch production of Simon Stone's MEDEA. Photo by Sanne Peper.

Last night my partner and I saw Simon Stone's adaptation of Medea at BAM. I originally saw Stone's production at International Theatre of Amsterdam (Ivo Van Hove's theater, then titled Toneelgroep), and it has since played across Europe, including a recent successful stint at the Barbican in London. What struck me most about it is that, despite the excellent and popular Rose Byrne and Bobby Canavale playing the lead roles, the name we talked about most after was that of Stone's, its maestro. Did his adaptation work? Did its minimalist, white set adequately contain its energies, or did it veer too far into pretension?

Stone is part of a recent class of "auteur" theatre directors, along with the likes of Ivo Van Hove, Sam Gold, Robert Icke, or Daniel Fish, to name several others that have recently been produced on Broadway. Stone, Ostermeier, and TK round out those recently produced Off-Broadway. Obviously, the first (unfortunate) thing that jumps out from that list is that they are all white men. Theatre has been disappointingly regressive with how it produces its non-male directors; rarely are they given the type of platform these men have received. But auteur directors are nothing truly new to modern theatre: ushered on largely by Peter Brook, there have been many in the last 60 years (though, it should be noted, not many before that.) Brook, Wilson, LeCompte, and others rounded out the 1980s. But what has differentiated the recent class is not only their commercial success, but also their prestige as the key influencers for the production.

The future of theatre, like film and television, rests on the rise of the influencer. Film, of course, has its auteurs, both new and old, like Scorsese, Gerwig, the Safdie Brothers, Joon-Ho, Tarantino, Duvernay, Peele, Lee, Anderson, or Copolla. Some, like Fincher and Lynch, have moved into television, as well. And institutions like Netflix and HBO have dominated the marketplace of TV, while Disney has dominated content altogether. But in theatre, the rise has been more subtle. Auteur directors never quite broke through to “mainstream” until recently, and while playwrights have traditionally been the hierarchical trendsetters of theatre (think Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, or Beckett), this new class is not only terrifically diverse (in many ways), but there is a nascent leveling of the playing field between “downtown” and “uptown” work.

This idea of the “influencer director” is also in concert with the recent rise of the “influencer playwright”. These individual forces have largely replaced the predominance of collectives and, at the same time, lessened the power of the medium-tier institution. In Helen Shaw’s recent piece reviewing the decade, she notes the rise of the influencer playwright, writing that in the 2010s “one New York era faded (of experimental collectives) and another began (the Influencer Playwright)”.

When we say influencer playwright, we’re talking about someone like Lin-Manuel Miranda, who turned Hamilton into a national fever that consumed even the Obamas. We’re also talking about someone like Jeremy O. Harris, who turned the off-Broadway success of Slave Play into a Broadway run, working with Rihanna and becoming a fashion icon. Clubbed Thumb alum Heidi Schreck had What the Constitution Means to Me have similar success at New York Theatre Workshop, then also went on to Broadway and is currently touring the country. Performer, playwright and artist Taylor Mac, a long-hailed staple of the downtown scene, made their debut on Broadway last year. Playwright Jordan E. Cooper, whose Ain’t No Mo was one of the most exciting debuts of 2019, was one of the first (?) playwrights who appeared on The Breakfast Club. And Alexis Scheer’s Our Dear Dead Drug Lord had a wildly extended run at the WP Theatre, and also broke the weekly and nightly gross records for the space.

Theatre artists are influencers in the same way YouTubers or Instagram stars are: their name has become synonymous with their work. While many institutions still struggle under the weight of trying to reconcile theatre with the 21st century by insisting on the “importance of stories”, as Helen Shaw puts it, influencer playwrights and directors go on creating compelling work that people gather to see and buzz about. The unifying theme? Many of these artists create work that is uniquely theatrical, often creating situations that make audiences implicitly or explicitly involved, such as in Fairview or What to Send Up When it Goes Down; others focus on the arguments and dialogue at the core of another type of theatre, which in general appeals to an older audience.

Theatre artists that create exciting work become “brands” in and of themselves, outside the institutions that produce them. The new Lin-Manuel, Jeremy O. Harris, Annie Baker, Jackie Sibbles Drury, Will Arbery, Lucas Hnath, or Aleshea Harris are all an event that is defined by its playwright. Just as with the new Ivo Van Hove, Simon Stone, or Tina Satter. Sometimes these artists have online brands, like with the über-influencers O. Harris or Miranda. But other times the internet is contributing to discourse and buzz, like with Fish’s Oklahoma becoming known as “Sexy Oklahoma”, or with Arbery’s Heroes inspiring many online think pieces.

What does this mean for the future of theatre? It’s not yet clear. Institutions like The Public or the National Theater still prove to be extremely powerful, but even there there is a whiff of the slow dinosaur, of a bureaucracy that cannot move at the lightning speed of the internet. I expect these institutions can and will adapt, but this probably means the concentration of power among theatre institutions will lend itself to a powerful few, as with film and TV. The rise of the influencer playwright and director also bleeds into things like criticism. Critics like Jose Solis and Sara Holdren (who now works as a director) have defined themselves as unique presences amidst a sea of sameness.

And implicit in all of this is the seeming disempowerment of the individual actor. Theatre, to be clear, is a collaborative form that is constructed by many people; while there may be one overarching “artist” for a production, everyone involved is an artist who brings their unique selves to the table. As an actor, I worry about an attitude of reverence to the playwright (or director). It creates a hierarchy where they shouldn’t necessarily be one. And, after all, the only thing that ultimately matters is the actor: they are the ones on stage, who we see, who are speaking the words. But the current state of theatre lacks many influencer actors, true old school stars. Most of the “stars” of theatre are now Hollywood actors. Still, I am optimistic about the rise of influencer playwrights and directors being ultimately a good thing for theatre: the more quality work, the better.

In sports, one of the best analogies for theatre, player empowerment has been the story of the NBA in the past couple years. Movies like 2019’s High Flying Bird, directed by Steven Soderbergh, dramatize this struggle by showing that, without its players (largely black athletes), the NBA and its owners are nothing. A similar movement is happening within theatre. Strong institutions still are an important force in theatre. But without their artists, they are nothing.

The Cult of Minimalism

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

This could be anywhere in gentrified Brooklyn.

In the late 2000s, I became obsessed with a blog called Zen Habits. Written by Leo Babauta, Habits was one of the OG self-help blogs, promoting minimalism as a way of life and a productivity hack. It taught seventh grade me to wake up early, try meditating, go on runs (that one didn't last long), set your "MITs"—or "Most Important Tasks"—for the day, and declutter as a means of happiness. It spawned a spin-off site focused on being a minimalist (pre-dating the cringe-inducing Minimalists), and several books and courses. Zen Habits wasn’t alone: blogs on minimalism became an entire genre, and an important precursor to the Marie Kondo-ization of culture. Bolstered as a necessity by the 2008 recession, minimalism became commandeered as a rallying cry for hipsters, and an answer to the crass, maximalist consumerism of the 90s and early 2000s. It also became a marketing tactic and a style of reverse consumerism, often privileging (surprise) affluent white men who could "adopt" minimalism as an aesthetic, negating greed with faux-simplicity.

The aesthetic of minimalism has been surprisingly sturdy. Although originating primarily as an avant-garde genre in American art in the 1960s, minimalism has found a new home not only with the rise of ZenHabits and similar blogs, but with the age of Instagram (which itself took over the visual mantle from the Tumblr and Pinterest days). In those years since Facebook bought it for one billion dollars in 2012, Instagram’s use has skyrocketed, and with that the aesthetics of cleanliness, simplicity, and minimalism. Generally this centers around “beautiful” people, clothing, places, and architecture. Clean lines, clean colors (like white), and a supposed removal of the “excess”. Many startups have capitalized on these aesthetics to formulate a brand, usually accompanied by the same sans-serif fonts spelling out bland slogans equating buying their product or service—which “simplifies” life in some way—with more purpose. But, as we know, startups do not really simplify; the illusion of making our lives simpler has been sold to us for as long as capitalism has been around, and is the propeller that keeps materialism running. Minimalism, thus, has become a brand: for individuals, for influencers, and for companies.

What this amounts to is a suffocating sameness in design. This is evidenced by elements of culture as innocuous as book covers, or in the trends of something like interior design—what writer Kyle Chayka has deemed “airspace”—that is monopolizing cafes, AirBNBs, hotels, Brooklyn co-working spaces, and the like. It’s hard not to feel there is something political to these aesthetics. In a piece for Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson deemed the minimalism design trend as “the aesthetic language of gentrification”.

But how did we get here? How did a style of art become a grossly capitalized aesthetic, fitting in with the flattening whims of algorithms? Part of it can be attributed to the relentless drive towards optimization and profitability that technology and capitalism have wrought. This drive brings with it an oppressive noisiness, one that minimalism-as-a-cult promises to redeem (either through a podcast or ebook, or for the price of $10 a month). The heat of modernity leads to a "longing for less", as Chakya calls it. An unquenchable thirst for a more simple world, or a nostalgia for an authenticity that was never really there.

But the world is not simple, and the aesthetics of minimalism do not truly reverberate as activism. Instagram-able minimalism is a privilege, and one that cannot be separated from the maximalist chaos of the world. If you want to just live with your MacBook, great, but that computer was made in sweat shops; your Whole Foods trip is powered by one of the most powerful monopolies in the history of capitalism; your Uber home allows you convenience at the cost of contributing to environmental pollution and unethical working conditions. It’s become almost impossible to minimize our contradictions. Any minimalism is entangled with a maximalist, immense web of disgusting and complex capitalist structures. That’s why Internet personalities like The Minimalists have an air of moral righteousness that rings so false; despite the motivations for their desire to consume less being understandable, these affluent white men are able to be minimalist because of a system of immense economic inequality and violence.

It's a shame, though, that minimalism has been co-opted by marketing. Because in art, at its core, the genre can lead to the occasional glimpse of the transcendent. There is a tradition (and cliché) of minimalism in theatre ("I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage"), much of which has been beaten to death by European theatre. Sometimes this leads to sets so minimalist as to not even be there, in the case of Sam Gold's cold Glass Menagerie. And sometimes it leads to works of brilliant invention, like Tina Satters' weird and scary Is This a Room. The theatre, after all, has been thought of as a place where the invisible can be made visible. And the invisible, it must be said, is decidedly minimalist. Likewise, minimalism in fine arts, such as Agnes Martin, can be immensely overpowering. And minimalism in music need not be mere background music. Composers like Julius Eastman (a favorite of Jeremy O. Harris), have created minimalist music that is politically and culturally charged.

But some of the great works of pop culture in recent years have seen a fascinating melding of minimalist and maximalist energies. When I think back on theatre like A Strange Loop, Slave Play, Oklahoma, Fairview, An Octoroon, or Heroes of the Fourth Turning, I don't necessarily think of spare, minimalist artistic impulses. Instead, I think of creators that stuffed their work to the brim with compelling, exhilirating ideas; then, they let the strength of the invisible in theatre—the part the audience fills in—take care of the rest. In TV like Watchmen, Fleabag, or Euphoria, maximalist ideas were stuffed into minimalist scaffolding: nine episodes and done for Watchmen, two seasons of six episodes of thirty minutes for Fleabag, and eight episodes for Euphoria. And in the movie Uncut Gems, maximalist filmmaking and energy exoploded a minimalist story spine. The point isn't necessarily to cut out everything, or even to cut out all that's "inessential", or that's "excess". Sometimes what seems like excess is actually what's in the shadows or what's lurking beneath. As Werner Herzog said in an interview with GQ, "We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever—you cannot live in a house like this anymore." Shallow maximalism illuminates the whole apartment, but shallow minimalism shows just the table. The true invisible bridging between minimalism and maximalism happens when we allow the shadows to fall as they may.

I’ve grown since the days of obsessing over minimalism blogs, but I still fall victim to its trappings. It’s hard not to in 2020. But what I want to be weary of is using minimalism as a means of ignoring the hard-cut realities of society, and confusing its seductive aesthetics with any sort of real-world change. The cult of minimalism is strong, and its effects are dulling; the world does not need to be seen in Helvetica, black and white, or neatly folded squares. One can live simply and minimally without fooling themselves of its supposed importance. And one can create art that celebrates the brilliance of Minimalism, while engaging maximally with what really matters. Anything less is, to put it simply, not enough.

The Entanglement

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We live in webs of entanglements. Amidst history, society and pop culture, these entanglements live with us, whether we notice them or not.

Many entanglements are things we must constantly grapple with. As a nation, the United States is founded on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; it also has deeply rooted white supremacy, misogyny, and violence. At the movies—an art form founded by immigrants—one of the cornerstone, influential works is Birth of a Nation: the story of heroizing the Ku Klux Klan. Today, a movie like Black Panther can be an influential pro-black work, while also being an intellectual property originally created by two white men and owned by mega-corporation Disney. In music, the most influential American genres like Jazz and Hip Hop were created by African-Americans, and yet are constantly appropriated by white creators—and appear in the Billboard Charts as a result. And at the theatre, we have a renaissance of incredible, radical black playwrights, yet these works consistently are appearing in white institutions, and seen by mostly white audiences.

In an interview in Brooklyn Rail between playwrights Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Michael R. Jackson, Jenkins touched on this last entanglement:

I don't think there's a lot of conversation among black artists about their entanglements with whiteness. And how their voices are almost fully enabled because of white institutions, white kind of like audiences, white patronage, white criticism, and there's like very little interest in untangling that, or talking about that entanglement. And I just wonder what that is.

How do we live with these entanglements? Do we burn them down? Do we disentangle? Do we need to learn to live with them? Or can art put up a burning, fiery microscope to them?

Many white America simply ignore them. In a recent study from Pew Research Center, 50% of white Americans said “there is too much attention paid to race and racial issues in our country these days”. Likewise, most white Americans believe that relations between whites and blacks are “somewhat good”, whereas 40% of blacks say the same thing.

There have been numerous great plays by writers of color in recent years that have attacked this entanglement: Jackie Sibbles Drury's Fairview, Aleshea Harris' Is God Is, Jordan E. Cooper's Ain't No Mo, Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, and many more. Yet much of theatre from the director and production side have not caught up. Most theaters are vastly white, and this whiteness runs deep, often all the way to box office practices. Then there is the constant entanglement of white directors directing works by playwrights of color. (Almost 90% of directors hired at the ten largest off-Broadway theaters between 2007 and 2017 were white.) The reverse—directors of color getting to direct white writers’ work—is largely not true, as Nicole Brewer showed in Howlround. When diagrammed, this ends up looking quite literally like an entanglement (but a lopsided one):

In the case of Slave Play, Harris is tussling dangerously with white supremacy and eroticism. As Dr. Avgi Saketopoulo (a queer pschyoanalyst focusing on trauma, gender and sexuality) recently wrote in the LA Review of Books, "In contrast to works of art that portray the history of chattel slavery in the past tense, Slave Play puts its audience on a collision course with how this history pulses through us in the present." She goes on to write that "Slave Play hints at how, amid the trauma of having a body entangled with ghastly histories, projects of emancipation may take unexpected paths." Harris is exploring the entanglement of historical traumas and sexuality; while it has been divisive, it's also one of the only works on Broadway in recent years that has attacked the entanglement at all. In The Root, Harris recounted what director Robert O'Hara said: "if you’re going to see a play called Slave Play, it should cost you something, and the cost of that is the recognition of how we’re still entangled in that history."

The entanglement is not easy to escape. It can be exorcised, but will never be fully disentangled, not at least in this generation. It's the entanglement of being American: of living on stolen, blood-soaked land; of living in a system that still privileges people by the color of their skin; of wrestling with our own personal and historical legacies and traumas. And it's the entanglement of art, creators, institutions, and power. In 2020, we have to hold it all in our heads. The first step to overcoming the entanglement, though, is to acknowledge that it is there in the first place.

Inputs and Outputs

Tue, 24 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

According to Lewis Hyde in The Gift there are three steps in which the "gift" (as it relates to art) can occur and move through society. First, we have the initial gift: a work of art, an intuition, a dream, or a vision that in some way deeply affects our Self, inspiring us. Then, this Gift is transformed through the self by our own "gifts", our talents, our labor. When we speak of someone being "gifted", this is the process by which those gifts are used. Finally, there is the finished work: a new gift. The whole process can be boiled down to more reductive terms: input leads to transformation leads to output.

I've been thinking more and more, as this year draws to a close, about how our inputs inform our outputs. And how, more than ever, we need to ensure we have high-quality inputs. In this age of information overload, our input can affect everything from our health to our creativity to our inner peace.

Information is like food. If you have too much low-quality, crappy food, you will get sick. It's a similar thing with information. We need to focus on having more nutrients and less junk. If you stumbled onto a buffet of food you wouldn't think of "food overload". Instead, you would identify that some things would be bad for you, some things would be OK, and a few things would be great. With the endless buffet of the internet, it's important to pick and choose. (And of course, indulging in junk food once in a while is also a wonderful treat.)

Most people have access to an incredible amount of information. But it can be difficult to sort through it all if you don't have strong filters. Strong filters---which never come through the algorithmic glaze of AI-curated playlists---enable perspective, which is one of the most valuable resources in the internet age. The ability to step back amidst the mountain of inputs, and offer perspective on what actually matters. This perspective is a type of output.

It's essential to remember that creative output is tied to input. Sebastian Junger wrote that "writer's block just means I don't have the ammo". Junot Diaz said to "read more than you write, live more than you read." Whenever I'm stuck, I look at my inputs: what am I consuming? Am I scrolling through Instagram and fiddling with web games all day? Or am I reading great writing, going to theatre and movies, walking through art museums, listening to inspiring music? There's a huge difference there.

I loved what music and culture writer Ted Gioia said on a recent podcast episode:

If you don't have good input, you cannot maintain good output. The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn't care about what books you read. Your boss doesn't ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn't ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consumed.

But I know for a fact, I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That's why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I'm a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.

Which brings us back to the gift. In order for our own "gifts" (whether they be writing, acting, composing, performing) to be working, we need to be open and receptive to the possibility of new gifts to make an effect on us. And that means paying attention to what we pay attention to: ensuring we're exposing ourselves to new things, broadening horizons, consuming high-quality inputs. It's not always easy to do this---Spotify playlists, for instance, are a feedback trap, basing what to recommend you based on what you've already listened to. In an endless echo chamber, how do you discover something truly new? By stepping outside the algorithmic trap, following intuitions, swapping recommendations, and seeking out new, exciting art and experiences.

The richness of the full human and artistic spectrum is incredible. But in order to create new things we need to be in touch with serendipity, by exposing ourselves to high-quality inputs.

In 2019, We Wore Masks To Hide Our Trauma

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In thinking about 2019, I keep thinking about the masks. The mask hides something. ("People who wear masks are driven by trauma," Laurie Blake tells Angela on Watchmen.) It morphs our identity into something else. In looking back at the pop culture in 2019, this was a year we obsessed over trauma and the masks---both literal and figurative---we wear to cover it up.

Watchmen is the most blatant example of this: a show that was concerned with investigating the mythos of the mask and the violent trauma of white supremacy. Perhaps the biggest strength of the show was how it enabled its black lead characters "to mold history in ways their ancestors could not", as Victor Luckerson wrote in The New Yorker recently (spoilers in that link!). It didn't just traffic in trauma for exploitation; it actively engaged and tussled with this trauma, attempting to make its own new, justice-seeking myths. In the end, while some masks were a necessity for its black heroes, the deep, generational trauma of racial injustice will not be healed with hiding, as Will Reeves tells his granddaughter in the show's finale: "You can't heal under a mask. Wounds need air."

But the exploration of masks and trauma didn't stop and start with Watchmen. In Bong Joon-Ho's massive hit movie Parasite, there is a different kind of mask. A mask that hides a deep and twisted political trauma, buried underneath itself. In Jordan Peele's Us the mask is ourselves; similar to Parasite, it buries something dark and sinister. In Succession we saw the hyper interrelation of wealth and trauma, and the many perverse masks used to cover it up, generation through generation. In Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne's character dies over and over as a type of mask, repressing her own deep, embedded trauma. In Fleabag's second season, Fleabag grapples with the trauma of womanhood and grief, meeting a hot priest along the way who sees through her mask: her constant use of the fourth-wall as a means of fictionalizing and dissociating from her own reality.

In the fantastic short documentary Ghosts of Sugar Land, the interviewees wear cheap Party City masks to protect their identity as they talk about their childhood friend who was radicalized and joined ISIS; the masks are literal, hiding the trauma of being Muslim in America.

And in Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, the legacy of traumas in America, especially as it relates to interracial relationships, are laid bare; the mask—which may be one of healing, or not—is sexual.

Theatre has been an especially potent interrogator of trauma and the masks we wear. But it's also been a problematic one. There is a legacy in theatre of white audiences paying to see stories about people of color suffering; in many theatre's season, the "diversity" play is one of violence. Asking actors—especially women of color—to embody this violence and suffering for a white institution has a nasty feeling to it when it is not handled with care and delicacy (and let's be real—it's usually not). In this case, the historically oppressed characters are defined by their trauma; they aren't allowed to escape its confines. But in the last year or so more incredible works by writers of color were finally being produced; often, these plays have grappled with trauma in anarchic ways, subverting white audience expectations and defining themselves on their own means. In works like Michael R. Jackson's A Strange Loop the trauma of black queerness is explored, but not reduced to consumable terms for white audiences (I fully admit the show was not made for me); instead, it's a story largely about the main character facing his parents. As Wesley Morris wrote earlier this year, these plays are "responding — with anger, social acuity and structural chaos — to psychic devastation and national trauma, making roommates of today’s dismay and 400 years of horrors".

As a nation, we have immense collective traumas that have left unbearable traces. And as individuals, we all have trauma passed down to us or that we experienced ourselves. It can only be repressed for so long before it comes shooting up to the surface, whether that be through a scary memory triggered by a seeming danger, or a country electing a blatant white supremacist. So much of the art I experienced this year was concerned with wrestling with these traumas and the masks we use to hide them. Some were just pointing to these buried things to make sure we have our eyes open; others (often the best ones) were attempting to heal. As we move forward into 2020, I hope as a culture we can continue to normalize the interrogation of trauma, and the necessary healing that follows.

To be alive: not just the carcass

But the spark.

That's crudely put, but...

If we're not supposed to dance,

Why all this music?

"To Be Alive" by Gregory Orr. (Orr accidentally killed his younger brother in a hunting accident when he was 12.)

Criticism and Making are not opposites. They’re the same thing.

Tue, 10 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Godard directing Breathless. (Source: Raymond Cauchetier)

There's a pervasive and incorrect mythos surrounding criticism and making that they are opposites.

As the cliché goes, nothing is more feared by the artist than the deadly critic. We think of the two as enemies, as opposite sides of the spectrum: creativity is building things up, and criticism is tearing them down. This idea is pervasive and sometimes violent, like when Michael Keaton's character in Birdman assaults a farfetched critic (a scene applauded by many). Memes like "Let People Enjoy Things" demonize critics as joy-killers. But criticism is not about nit-picking and tearing down. It's about thinking critically. Media consumers who meme away criticism are scared of disagreement, and are often repressing a criticism that they recognize but are defensive of. They also might not have realized that it's perfectly possible to enjoy something and be critical of it at the same time. As Sara Holdren wrote in her brilliant essay on being a critic and director, "plays aren't frogs, and taking one apart won't kill it."

Perhaps what scares people most about criticism is the articulation. It's incredibly difficult to articulate ourselves, and an inherently political act to do so. (As Anne Bogart says, "one of the most radical things you can do in this culture of the inexact is to finish a sentence.") But articulation and thinking-things-through is an act of creativity and building, not of destruction. It requires immense energy, vulnerability, and thoughtfulness; the result, if it is good, is a new way of thinking---not just an offering of an opinion.

Criticism and Making are often complementary processes, with the first leading to the second. Sometimes, as is the case with cultural critics like Wesley Morris, Jenna Wortham, or Hilton Als, criticism and making are one and the same. Many of the most iconic theatre directors throughout history (Peter Brook, Harold Clurman, Anne Bogart, to name a few) were also writers of theory on the craft---in effect, criticism. Criticism is a way to interrogate why something works or doesn't, allows us to wrestle with media and art and reconcile it (or not) with our own personal histories, ideologies, and tastes. This, in turn, makes us smarter creatives.

The classic example of critics-turned-makers is the French New Wave filmmakers. Truffaut, Godard, and Rivette used criticism as their own film school, writing and debating for the magazine Cahiers du cinéma, and using their hyper-intellectual and impassioned analysis to launch their own careers. (Truffaut dropped out of school at 14 in order to watch films; the three would spend all day long reading books and watching movies at their local cinema.) As Richard Brody writes in his book Everything is Cinema:

Their method—the one that Godard himself undertook, at age nineteen—was criticism. It was a singular method, which served two purposes, revolutionary and didactic. Godard and his young film-lover friends were learning how to make films by watching films; they were giving themselves a conservatory education at the Cinémathèque and the CCQL. By writing about the films they saw, they did two things: they elaborated and refined their ideas about the cinema, in anticipation of the day when they could make films; and they created for themselves a public identity that would get them the chance to make films.

Criticism can be a launching pad, a form that allows space to think clearly and decisively about art, politics, philosophy, the personal—and how it all interrelates—and which teaches one about the making of art, rather than the reversed and dated view of the critic as the teacher, the lecturer. It happened in the 50s and 60s in Paris, and it is doubly true in the age of the remix. Ex-Critics like Andy Greenwald are now making TV Shows; Cord Jefferson started as a journalist and cultural critic, and now writes for Succession, The Good Place, and Watchmen (he co-wrote "This Extraordinary Being", one of the most acclaimed episodes of the year); Jeff Jensen was a TV critic (noted for his Lost recaps) and now writes for Watchmen; Ta-Nehisi Coates went from blogger to essayist to writing for the Black Panther comic series and his first novel. The list goes on.

If there's one thing that writing The Curtain each week this year has taught me about the relationship between criticism and creativity, it's that it's all connected. I know writing and thinking critically about theatre, film, and other art has honed my taste and made me smarter about the make-up of things I like. As I work on other creative projects, I know that this refinement of my ideas carries over.

"Criticism" isn't a dirty word to be afraid of anymore. Instead, it’s an essential mindset to embrace. It's become an indispensable part of navigating the crowded landscape of art and media, and become inseparable from the actual act of making. In 2019, we’re all critics.

Cultural Nostalgia is Toxic

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

It seems that our culture, in all different forms and paths, is obsessed with nostalgia.

Hipsters seek out vintage clothing and vinyl records; Trump speaks not only of Making America Great Again but of the glory days of things like football; Quentin Tarantino made a movie that glorifies powerful (and abusive) mid-century white men in Hollywood; we constantly romanticize the aesthetics of earlier decades, each with a type of happiness: the 70s, 80s, 90s, and now, even the 00s; the just-launched Disney+ seems to have an entire vertical integration strategy of monopolizing nostalgia. It comes from all directions: the left, the right, from above, and from below.

But cultural nostalgia, especially when it comes to art, is toxic. Romanticizing the past is a way of repeating the past---a past filled with racism, injustice, inequality, and genocide. When we allow nostalgia without any form of interrogation, we are dooming ourselves to a society and culture that repeats its same mistakes, over and over, in a cycle of mimetic violence.

I see this type of nostalgia all the time when I go to the theatre. It is sometimes hard to spot, a sly devil that sneaks up unsuspected, but it haunts a lot of contemporary work. Huge hit plays like The Lehman Trilogy offer a view of the past that implicitly nostalgizes the emancipatory myth of capitalism and ignores slavery; Hamilton, for all its strengths, does something relatively similar. These pieces (and they aren't alone) aren't explicitly nostalgic, but they both offer a reductive view of history and the fabled idea of American optimism as being something we can collectively unite over, as well as a disavowal of the icky parts of our past.

This is how disavowal manages cognitive dissonance: it means conceding the existence of slavery, while refusing to believe that it has anything to do with the story you are telling; it means willfully pushing slavery to the edges of your consciousness and being saved by the logic of exception Such stories try to have it both ways: for their heroes to be representative Americans, while erasing the vicious ways in which they truly were representative. The fact that everyone was doing it is not a defense, it merely measures the scale of the crime

-‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery by Sarah Churchwell

These works romanticize instead of interrogating, and in that way they offer bland, status-quo, neoliberal politics---and thus appeal to both rich conservatives and liberals (as did both Lehman and Hamilton).

Meanwhile, this lack of interrogation is present in not just the content of new plays, but also in the aesthetics and presentation of old plays and stories. When you go to a revival of a classic in the US or Britain, you can generally expect to see textual fidelity, a reverence of the past, and a devotion to getting the period costumes and accents just right. In other words: a dead, museum theater piece. Little attention is paid to investigating how the story can be excavated and contextualized for the current time and place; it's as if directors forget that theatre is always in the present tense---which is its great strength.

https://twitter.com/MattAndersonNYT/status/1172416708901883904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

This lack of deeper thinking and introspection---the shallow presentation of classics "as they were meant to be staged"---is, likewise, political. As a form of complacent nostalgia, it's the same feeling responsible for Brexit, Trump, or the departure of Emma Rice from the Globe.

If you just let a play speak, it may not make a sound. If what you want is for the play to be heard, then you must conjure its sound from it.

-Peter Brook

In a workshop I attended with director Robert Icke, channeling Peter Brook, Icke coined this idea of the "spirit" versus the "letter". When making a revival, which are you being faithful to? Many reactionary thinkers believe that being faithful to the letter---as, say, with literally believing the bible---is the "truer" version, and that anything else is "director's theatre". But theatre is not just about words, but about the energy in space that those words and actions enable. Often, if you were to recreate old plays to the letter, you would be vandalizing the spirit.

The pretence that there's a neutral version of a play, that you could do what Sophocles intended, is so obviously ridiculous. It's exactly the same impulse that has brought us to Brexit. There's a poisonous nostalgia that says you're committing an act of vandalism if you don't do the Sophocles as Sophocles would have wanted it. To do that, I'd have to do it in ancient Greek. You're not asking for the original, you're asking for a safe, culturally mandated version that has no deep relationship to the original, just to a performance tradition.

- Robert Icke

I loved Robert O'Hara's stunning production of A Raisin in the Sun when I first saw it in Rochester in 2012 (it recently had another iteration at Williamstown), but it's not faithful to the letter. Instead, it hits on the spirit: it's intentionally provocative, which stuns us when we're expecting to see something we've seen before.

Of course, there is going too far on the spirit side of things, into the realm of Universalization. There's an argument to be made that white "avant-garde" directors have had a poor history of flattening out the richness of a play, especially when it comes to race and diversity. I don't want Ivo Van Hove to direct August Wilson because it's "universal". This universalization is another type of politics that is a different form of disavowal: for instance, the terrible history of white writers in the 19th century suggesting that wage slavery was worse than chattel slavery, thus trying to rewrite bondage into a universal condition. White directors may label a play by a person of color as universal in the attempt to justify their insertion, which can lead to a host of microaggressions and bad politics.

The solution, then, is not to universalize, but to always interrogate. In both theatre and movies, boring revivals, simple sequels, and nostalgia-filled reboots are not the answer. Instead, we must forge new paths forward, update old stories spiritually, and never turn away from the work of deep introspection, both personal and collective, about our own histories and traumas, and the ways in which we perpetuate political myths of subtle violence.

The Age of the Remix

Tue, 19 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

art by Anxo Vizcaíno

We've been watching the new HBO adaptation of Watchmen, created by the fascinating Damon Lindelof, which re-centers Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's comic around white supremacy in America (and specifically Tulsa, Oklahoma). It features a diverse writer's room, including playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (An Octoroon) as a Consulting Producer.

Recently, I wrote about the pervasive, damaging nostalgia that is dominating so much cultural discourse. Watchmen is the perfect example of a work of art that sticks a bomb into that nostalgia and blows it up. I really admire the audacity to take the most acclaimed comic of all time and to "remix" it (in Lindelof's words) into something new. Like I wrote about, it's capturing the "spirit" of the original, if not the "letter", and in that process is wrestling with the problematic aspects of the comic, and subverting some of its more regressive tropes, all while retaining what made that comic revolutionary.

What makes the show an even more successful remix is that it's not just solely messing with the original Watchmen text, but also other texts: the musical Oklahoma in its first episode, and the text of American history itself. (It is a show, after all, very specifically about Whiteness.)

I've been thinking a lot not just about the show but about the very idea of remixes as being an essential part of our culture today. They offer a subversion of Nostalgia, a chance to reuse the past for the present day. Remixes, sonically, are relatively modern---they originated in the late 60s in Jamaica. They reached new heights with the rise of the internet and services like Limewire or Bit Torrent. Today, the internet is essentially one big remix. (More on that later.)

Meanwhile, beyond the musical meaning, the history of art is also the history of remixes: Shakespeare is the most famous remixer of all-time. Almost all his work is, in some way, a remix of myths and stories, the political and the personal. There really is nothing new under the sun, just new ways of seeing.

Remixing can even be empowering, as is the case with Lil Nas X "appropriating" country music for "Old Town Road" and subsequently releasing a remix with Billy Ray Cyrus after being kicked off the Billboard Country chart. (The irony being that the history of the Billboard Top songs is generally the history of nonblack artists appropriating black music, an example of the negative side of remixing.) Writes Wesley Morris:

A black kid hadn't really merged white music with black, he'd just taken up the American birthright of cultural synthesis. The mixing feels historical. Here, for instance, in the song's sample of a Nine Inch Nails track is a banjo, the musical spine of the minstrel era. Perhaps Lil Nas was too American. Other country artists of the genre seemed to sense this. White singers recorded pretty tributes in support, and one, Billy Ray Cyrus, performed his on a remix with Lil Nas X himself.

This form of cutting, synthesizing, adapting, and remixing is also the basis of the digital age. For instance, the internet is non-linear, fractal, and psychedelic. It's held together by the hyperlink, which is the most elemental idea the internet has. It also represents an entire shift of consciousness: the hyperlink has become the basis of how we receive information today, how we interact with it, and how we think about it. Everything is connected with another thing. We can follow rabbit holes, just as our brain does. In a way, we are synthesizing and "remixing" information that we consume and piece together, rather than just linearly reading a book or newspaper.

The digital age also provides the practical tools for remixing content: editing movies, chopping up audio, and the ability to make things move slower, faster, backward, whatever. These tools are what enabled someone like early Kanye West to be a successful producer, based on his ability to re-contextualize old soul records. But almost anyone using social media remixes in some form (especially with more aggressively creation-focused media, like Instagram or Tik Tok), applying filters and edits and songs to original content, slapping in pictures, or passing along memes.

But while remixing happens all the time online, it's also the basis of so much great art. Great art re-contextualizes its sources and inspirations, connects with contemporary politics and worldviews, and also represents a personal and authentic examination of its maker's life. With all those threads dangling together, it produces something "new". (Only for it to be remixed again in the future.)

We live in an age where we too, as human beings, have to hold many dangling threads together in our heads. The complete totality of existence that is being alive in 2019 is overwhelming: all the information being constantly plugged into our ears and eyes and brain, the knowledge we are constantly on the brink of self-annihilation and environmental ruin, the constant fight against injustice. But so too must great art hold everything in its head at once: its implicit and explicit sources and inspirations, its central myth, its political and personal context. And when a piece of art is able to hold all of that in its grasp, remixing its sources with that of the world, it also appears breathtakingly original.

The Unprofitability is the Point

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMT

In a recent interview with The Guardian, playwright Annie Baker said something that stuck with me: "I like theatre because it's so unprofitable."

In the past, this is something that has bothered me. Shouldn't theatre do a better job at selling itself? (It actually should---but that's for another essay.)

Baker is embracing the unprofitability of theatre as something that makes it stand out in a capitalist culture that only values the bottom line, and something that makes it essential (though misunderstood). The truth is, there's not much place for art---especially of the analog variety---that is unprofitable. (That's partially why in the UK and Europe, the arts are subsidized.)

But even if, as in some cases, the art is profitable, this profitability is not the point of art. Instead, the unprofitability is the point.

In Jenny Odell's new book How to Do Nothing, she quotes surrealist painter Giorgio de Chirico:

In the face of the increasingly materialist and pragmatic orientation of our age...it would not be eccentric in the future to contemplate a society in which those who live for the pleasures of the mind will no longer have the right to demand their place in the sun. The writer, the thinker, the dreamer, the poet, the metaphysician, the observer...he who tries to solve a riddle or to pass judgement will become an anachronistic figure, destined to disappear from the face of the earth like the ichthyosaur and the mammoth.

In other words, a future where anyone who dares to create something that is unprofitable is beaten down and ostracized by society. That future, more or less, is now---a world in which linear technological optimization, disruption, and profitability replace anything that is inefficient, analog, poetic, or unprofitable.

Manifest Destiny, Neoliberalism and Techno-Utopianism as Titans of Profitability

What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest--destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious. Such "nothings" cannot be tolerated because they cannot be used or appropriated, and provide no deliverables.

-Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

There is a pervasive myth in the culture of Silicon Valley that Technology is, by nature, Good. It standardizes, levels, and innovates, delivers exorbitant profits to its founders, and supplies new (shitty) jobs to the economy. As someone who considers himself an optimist when it comes to technology, this can be a tough pill to swallow: innovation---especially profit-driven innovation---is not necessarily positive.

For instance, when Gutenberg invented the Printing Press, there was a revolution in the ways information was transferred. (This story is not so clean cut in actuality---there were several different iterations of printing before Gutenberg---but, like Steve Jobs, the entrepreneurial Gutenberg is the one we remember as iterating on and popularizing a technology.) This revolution enabled books to be reproduced ad infinitum and literacy to spread (gradually). But the paradigm shift of movable type---that is, the mass production of a repeatable commodity---is the basis of the assembly line and 20th Century industrialism: a set of practices that caused immense violence and injustice. We can't directly blame Gutenberg for Henry Ford, but we can ceaselessly question the idea that technological optimization is always the Good path forward.

Meanwhile, enabling the spread of mass information comes with misinformation---a problem we are acutely familiar with now, as well. So while Gutenberg's revolution empowered many important voices, it also wrought fakes and frauds and racists and white supremacists. Just as with Facebook, the idea of the gatekeeper having been eliminated is not quite telling the full story. The gatekeepers merely shifted from monarchists and aristocracies to powerful individual white men like Zuckerberg or Gutenberg.

When 21st Century startups were founded, important and immensely consequential decisions about free speech were made with a quick click of a mouse, under the dumb guise of optimism. After all, who wants to think that their platform of "free speech" will become a ground for radicalization and real-world terrorism?

"I remember thinking, People in government, on the Supreme Court, are way smarter than me," Huffman [founder of Reddit] said. "So, if something's not illegal to say under U.S. law, why should I make it illegal to say on Reddit?"

-The Dark Side of Techno-Utopianism

These tech bros---now and throughout history---have the ingrained belief that there is an inevitable march forward of history, that Silicon Valley must change the world. It's the same idea as Manifest Destiny, of colonization: that this marching and (man-)spreading is not only justified but inevitable. That everything needs to be "disrupted" or appropriated. That stillness, maintenance, and quiet are weeds to be rooted out by algorithmic loudness.

Loud and Quiet, Profitability and Unprofitability, Markets and Gifts

If you've ever walked around New York City or taken the subway, it's impossible not to notice that it seems like almost everyone has AirPods or other headphones in their ears these days. As I write this from a cafe, everyone here has headphones in. And I'm as guilty of this as anyone else: for the last year, I've pretty consistently had to wear AirPods as I'm commuting or walking around Manhattan, lest I feel naked and alone.

It's as if everyday life has an unbearable loudness to it that we must all attempt to distract ourselves from by creating our own private space through our headphones. And this isn't necessarily literal loudness---though it certainly is in NYC---but a loudness of media and technology and distraction. So we pump podcasts and NPR and Spotify Discover Weekly into our ears, on top of the world's loudness.

But all this noise is doing something to us. One argument is that audio is largely a high-resolution media---meaning it's in our face, giving us information---and that this is affecting our brain circuitry. Our brains are getting more and more wired to expect to be saturated by information-dense, non-participatory noise, whether it's via podcasts, Youtube, talk radio, or just background music. Meanwhile, these changes have led to our society moving away from nuance and openness, instead electing a president who thrives off discriminatory, closed-minded and racist soundbites.

Our urban ecosystem---stoked on by startups and a podcast boom---is so loud, pervasive and Hot that it mutes our senses from distinguishing the subtler, Cooler shades of nuance. There's no more room for quiet, no more room to think.

Which gets us back to unprofitable art.

Unprofitable art is, in capitalist terms, useless. But more than that, much of analog art requires some level of nuanced thinking, is "Cool" and participatory. We actually must engage with it, rather than it coming directly to our ears.

It's no wonder, then, that this sort of art is unprofitable. Our culture is primed to rebel against slowing down in any way. But I also think, like Annie Baker, that this art is more important than ever, and in as much danger as ever. Great art is not defined by its profitability, the lure of capitalization, or the push and pull of markets. Instead, it is a gift.

In Lewis Hyde's seminal book The Gift, he lays out the idea of a gift economy:

That art that matters to us---which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience---that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price.

Great art that "revives the soul" is not found in the perpetual march of technology, or the Heat and loudness it brings. It's not maximally optimal, easily marketed, or simplistic. Instead, it's complex, nuanced, patient, Cool, and participatory. It's poetry, it's painting, it's theatre. It's weird and surprising. It comes from dreams and doing nothing. It's a gift. The unprofitability, not the profitability, is the point.

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Unconscious

Tue, 29 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

One of the main drivers of all great artists throughout history is not money, prestige, or helping people. Instead, it's to bridge the space between the conscious and unconscious worlds. To get the voices out of your head. To achieve some sort of quiet.

Art that comes from the unconscious also gets at a deeper mystery, for audiences. Mystery allows both our System 1 Brain---the quick thinking one---and System 2---the slower, effortful one---to operate in full. Sometimes it can seem a work isn't clear, when it's actually just provoking disagreement from our own unconscious --- our deeper, slower brain that we haven't yet reconciled with.

The deeper you go, the more you expose and reveal, the more you pull from the raw and embarrassing stuff deep inside: the more compelling and also mysterious the art. Art that burrows towards a deeper truth, that in its central conceit mirrors the mystery of life and consciousness itself --- that feeling of being anything at all, instead of nothing. This, as far as I know, is true in pretty much every form: visual art, music, movies, theatre, literature, etc.

Shallow introspection leads to shallow art. Or, in the words of David Lynch: "Little fish swim on the surface, but the big ones swim down below."

What does it mean to create from the unconscious?

Life is not simple. It's filled with weird abstractions, ambiguity, complex patterns, and violence. For artists, the way through is to trust the unconscious, which is to say develop some sort of intuition.

For instance, as an actor, any attempt at conscious planning of "what's going to happen" will result in deadly, stilted performance. It may be able to fool some people on the surface for a short while, but soon audiences will realize that the work isn't in touch with the deeper layers of the human experience. In other words, it was created from the conscious, not the unconscious.

But what does it exactly mean to create from the unconscious?

For one, listening. Says Greta Gerwig:

"I spend a lot of time **listening **to what my characters are trying to tell me about who they are, and they're always telling you. It's the mysterious part of writing, where you have all this craft and you spend all this time making it as good as it can be, and then at the same time, your unconscious knows more than you do, and you have to keep that channel open."

The strange thing about listening to the unconscious, of course, is that it doesn't really speak, because it is ancient. Instead, it operates in images, metaphors, pictures, and dreams. The job of the artist is to translate those into work.

I always say, 'Write in a trance and act in a trance.' You don't want to think consciously about what you're putting on the page.

-Mike Birbiglia

Unconscious in Theatre

In theatre, the tradition for space and design has been a neutral open platform, all the way back to the Elizabethan stage. (This is why it bothers me when people talk about empty spaces in theatre being some sign of pretentious modernity.)

These neutral, open, almost "incomplete" designs, coupled with great writing, allow for our unconscious brains to fill things in for us. (See: the designs of Hildegard Bechtler.) They invite us in, rather than consciously telling us everything and shutting our unconscious out. It's just like with acting and all art, in that way: they can't be so literal and conscious-brained to stay on the surface. When theatre hits these marks---is truly vulnerable---it has a lightness and a feeling of being "limitless", as playwright Jeremy O. Harris and director Danya Taymor put it in a podcast for Vineyard Theatre.

It's an arena where the visible and invisible meet. Where we lay down the burden of consciousness for a bit, and see our own inner worlds laid bare.

Ghost Stories

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 00:00:00 GMT

The history of theatre is littered with ghosts and spirits. From Hamlet to ghost lights to Ancient Greeks to contemporary plays, theatre has always explored the nature of here and there, life and death, reality and unreality. They are one of the most used and accessible tropes there is.

But ghosts surround us all the time in life, too. We speak of "getting ghosted" when we don't get a response from someone, as if they have disappeared into thin air. When we re-visit our home town after being away for months, we are haunted by ghosts: stores and buildings that have closed for an uncertain amount of time; memories of that street in the night; old songs that used to play on the radio. (There's that scene towards the end of Before Sunrise, when the streets and locations that seemed so magical in the night suddenly look so mundane in the morning light — those too have ghosts.) Walking around New York City, you are surrounded by the ghost map of your experiences in the city, mingling with the ghosts of the city's history. It might seem that ghosts and nostalgia are the same, but I don't think they are: ghosts visit us, whereas nostalgia is a feeling, often unhelpful, that we get and indulge.

Of course, ghosts are also the most basic common unit of the fall classic: the scary movie.

Scary movies and scary television have had quite the renaissance in the past few years, with more "artistic" and "prestige" efforts behind them, supported by the likes of Netflix, A24, or Jordan Peele. Movies like Get Out, It Follows, The Witch, It, Hereditary, Us, A Quiet Place, or the 2019 Bong Joon-ho international hit Parasite. TV shows like Stranger Things, Twin Peaks, The Walking Dead, Black Mirror, or American Horror Story traffic in scares in different degrees as well.

The broad revelation for many of us was that ghosts and horror speak to our current climate perhaps more clearly than any other genre. In a world on the brink of collapse in many different forms, in a white supremacist country, stories that speak to both the obvious and repressed horrors of 21st century civilization feel, despite their fantastic or supernatural elements, like truth.

But while ghosts have been around theatre forever in different forms, you're hard pressed to find truly scary theatre. Shakespeare's bloody works, like Macbeth or Titus Andronicus, are not really "scary" by today's standards, though certain productions can amp up the violence. The problem has a lot to do with scares being a micro form: the movie or TV director can control where we look. Theatre, however, cannot: the eye sees what it wants to see.

Earlier this year, however, I saw what I thought was perhaps the most successful scary theatre piece I've experienced (Lucas Hnath's The Thin Place at the Humana Festival, which starts soon at Playwrights Horizons). And since then, I've experienced several pieces I would classify as horror theatre, ranging in form and success, but all speaking to something deep and true. It seems I was wrong: there is room for scary theatre, and it's often even scarier than movies.

The Thin Place succeeded, for me, in part because of its consideration of theatre in three dimensional space. The fact that theatre exists in a room—and that there are many qualities to this room, as its lit by various lights—is such an obvious one that we sometimes forget that the most exciting theatre finds a way to sculpt energy in the space. Space is something that films cannot quite capture, in a visceral sense. Whereas at the movies we're seeing pictures laced together, in theatre we're not seeing pictures at all: we're seeing bodies and words and energy in space.

Will Arbery's explosive and terrifying Heroes of the Fourth Turning also uses space and darkness, with a prologue that forces us to strain our eyes to see what's going on. Characters disappear into shadows, literally — it's not a trick of the camera — and we half expect a ghost to pop out. Instead, we're treated to sounds: the disturbing resonance of a real gunshot, and a horrifying screeching noise that a character says is from their generator.

Arbery's work, though, is a different kind of scary: while it does use horror tropes, it's more of an intellectual horror piece, in the literal sense. As a group of conservatives gather in Wyoming, we see incredibly specific and fully drawn out characters spit out some of the most revolting right-wing ideas New York liberals can hear. The sensation I felt was an odd mix of fear, anger and sadness I've never quite felt in a theatre before: like my blood was actually boiling. The scariest part, besides that these ideas are real and exist and people believe them, was how hyper-articulate and smart the characters are: they have such conviction that they are right, even as they argue and fret over the nuances and types of conservatism, quoting philosophers and literature, that you feel like your own ideas about the world are being assaulted. There's no liberal character there to save you from these ideas, and the conservative characters aren't cartoons. When they speak of the "war" that is coming, it's as eerie and frightening as anything I experienced in Bong Joon-ho's new movie Parasite. And there's something magnetic and unnerving about plays that exist in real-time, building tension as we don't know formally how they will unfold.

Heroes has been a bit of a polarizing show: on the one hand, it has been embraced by conservatives and catholics who finally feel "seen", and on the other hand it's been hailed by liberal critics as being a nightmarish horror play. Arbery is transposing his own catholic conservative upbringing to the stage in a work of incredible vulnerability — but it's been fascinating to see how different people interpret and experience the play in wildly different ways.

In Alexis Scheer's new play Our Dear Dead Drug Lord, ghosts and a seance are again on the table, like Hnath's Thin Place. While I couldn't ultimately vibe with the production completely, it does offer a thrilling ghost trick in its final twenty minutes that was surprising and exhilarating. These sorts of tricks that break our expectations of what theatre is supposed to be are always the most exciting; they are what make theatre unique — if a production is innovative enough, anything can happen. And that uneasiness and uncertainty is scary.

The State of the Audience

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, some crazy things happened that shook theatre twitter to its core.

As I understand it:

Rihanna (!) came to see the downtown hit Slave Play on Broadway, in previews, but...
She was running late, so they held the show for her. After the show started...
She texted on her phone three times (!!)...
To the playwright, Jeremy O. Harris (!!!), who was watching from the back. Who texted back (!!!!).

A debate arose online over whether or not Rihanna should be shamed for her phone use. (And a smaller debate over whether we should hold the curtain for a celebrity. But when Dionysus is coming...) Harris---who has defended phone use in the theatre before---took a stand once again:

Can phones and theatre co-exist?

To answer that, I think we need to examine what exactly the state of the audience is in the 21st century.

The Role of the Audience

It's difficult to overstate how connected we are to our phones. We touch them over 2,600 times a day, and for many of us they pretty much never leave our side. The reality is that we have a whole new generation of digital natives: young people who grew up with the internet and digital devices as central to how they interact with the world.

The other reality, of course, is that the majority of American theatergoers are old and white. Many still have an old world mindset about the preciousness of theatre, insisting that it should feel less like a party and more like a funeral.

This alienates young audiences who don't know what the point of theatre is (why would you want to attend a funeral?), and is further exasperated by boring theatre that caters to old, rich, white New Yorkers (I'm thinking of two NYC institutions in particular that shall not be named).

But this is not entirely a new issue, of course. Brecht wrote about it all the way back in his 1926 essay "Emphasis on Sport":

"The demoralization of our theatre audiences springs from the fact that neither theatre nor audience has any idea what is supposed to go on there. When people in sporting establishments buy their tickets they know exactly what is going to take place; and that is exactly what does take place once they are in their seats."

When people go to a sports game, they know exactly what to expect: amazing athletes performing at their best, hopefully a dramatic game. Along the way they can get out of their seat, use the bathroom, go buy food and drinks, use their phones, and generally be rowdy---all things that are extreme no-nos in theatre.

Concerts are the same way. People know exactly what to expect: their favorite bands playing their favorite music. And if they're lucky, often a lot more than that (think Beyoncé's legendary Coachella performance, or Kanye's Yeezus tour). Because let's be real: many concerts are way more exciting than most theatre. As Robert Icke points out in an interview:

My friends pay a fortune to see Stormzy or Beyoncé --- but you don't come back from seeing Beyoncé saying, 'I was kind of bored'. She always delivers. Theatre loves to talk about its 'right to fail' and I sometimes think that can be used as an excuse for lack of rigour.

Concert attendance is going up, despite streaming music.

When young people go to theatre, they often have no idea what to expect. Are they going to be yelled at or shamed? Are they going to be lectured about the good old days? Or are they just going to be bored?

How often can a young person of color go to the theatre, on average, and say that their experience has been reflected on stage? Can the stage reflect the audience, and the audience reflect the stage? Because right now, it's not the case.

The Unbearable Whiteness of the Audience

Playwright Aleshea Harris recently expressed something on a podcast that has stuck with me:

"I go to the theatre a lot and feel like I'm ease dropping on a conversation that has nothing to do with me."

To be non-white in many theatre audiences is to be---and feel---alone. (This, of course, was the genius of Fairview.)

The oppression of whiteness infects every area of theatre, at every level. It goes from the top---producers and executives---all the way down to the audience. It leads old white people to suspect young brown and black people in the audience for being troublemakers for using their phones, or laughing too loudly. (Even though when a phone goes off in the theatre, you can almost guarantee it's an old person's.)

This is why it's so god damn exciting that Jeremy O. Harris has announced that Slave Play, upon the challenge of musician Kelela (!), is doing a performance dedicated to an all black audience. By inverting the balance, the gaze of the audience---and what the show amounts to---takes on a different, much deeper meaning:

Theatre Etiquette

Jeremy O. Harris appeared on Buzzfeed's AM2DM last year, explaining why he doesn't frown on digital natives checking their phones at the theater.

His point: are we actually pushing away a whole new generation of young theatergoers because of stupid rules?

When I see young people from public schools on a field trip attend the theatre for the first time, the first thing they are told repeatedly and strictly are the rules of theatre: no phones, no talking, no loud noises, no getting up. Violate these and you are a bad audience member. We will kick you out. It's such a violent and oppressive introduction, that it's hard not to see why many young people don't go to theatre after that.

But why such etiquette? After all, house lights are a relatively recent invention. And everyone knows that Elizabethan audiences were the most rowdy!

(To be fair, I actually disagree: I do think the largest barrier is price, but I also fully support the point Ybarra is making.)

When I attended the opening of Coriolanus at The Public's Shakespeare in the Park earlier this year, I was yelled at by an old white man at intermission to put my phone away. I asked why. He said because it was turning my brain into mush. Into mush!

What are people so afraid of? Short attention spans? I don't buy it. Young people have so many options of entertainment, that a casual check of the phone doesn't necessarily mean they are disengaged. (And if it does, it's usually because the show is boring.)

Are phones the biggest enemy of theatre? Nope. Boring, expensive, white theatre and the excessive etiquette that targets young people of color is way more of a threat to theatre's survival.

Envisioning a new era of theatre audiences

It is always the popular theatre that saves the day. Through the ages it has taken many forms, and there is only one factor that they all have in common---a roughness.

-Peter Brook, The Empty Space

Theatre is not supposed to be precious. It's supposed to be a little rough around the edges.

Slave Play---which is selling very well---feels important. It could, in its own way, redefine what popular theatre means. Popular theatre in New York usually means old and white and expensive---all attributes that Slave Play actively is trying to subvert. It's the show that Rihanna is going to. It's the show that is diversifying Broadway audiences. And it's the show whose playwright is welcoming the roughness of young people using their phones during it.

There are other examples of theaters trying to redefine popular theatre with contemporary roughness. The Yard in London, which is a cross between risky theatre and nightclub, is one:

The theater's hip, edgy work attracts an unusually young crowd: 70 percent of the audience is under the age of 35, according to Mr. Miller. And it is breaking down the boundaries between watching a play, hanging out with a beer and raving till 6 a.m. "Audiences are cross-pollinating," Mr. Miller said. "We're creating a new theater audience, who see that it can be as invigorating as dancing in a club."

I'm sure there are many other examples out there.

In the end, I don't think theatre can afford to be so high-brow about how it brings in young audiences. The important thing is to get people into the room, engaging with theatre in a new way, whatever that means.

Besides, no matter who is in the audience, the height of theatre remains the same: to build a bridge between the normal world of the audience and the drama on stage, between the conscious and unconscious, revealing an entire invisible world that we never knew existed, yet was right before us, the entire time. And then, in a moment, it disappears. You had to be there.

The State of Criticism

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Recently, New York Magazine theatre critic Sara Holdren announced she was stepping down from her position to pursue her main interest: directing theatre. In her short two year stint Holdren was a force, re-invigorating theatre criticism for many theatre artists in New York.

While it's sad to see her go, she began to open the door for me to what truly great theatre criticism can be: not only putting work in its proper context, but making the reader a better, more rigorous artist.

This is not something the New York Times theatre section does, despite being perhaps the most powerful force in theatre in New York City. That this dictatorial position is held by two aging white men with questionable taste is another matter.

I'd like to explore what the state of criticism is in theatre and art today, how it can be improved, and what the future might look like.

The Critic's Job

"One of the most radical things you can do in this culture of the inexact is to finish a sentence."

-Anne Bogart, And Then, You Act

Criticism is not just an opinion. (Though it is that, too.) Criticism is deep thinking about a particular piece of art, what its successes and shortcomings might be, and how the work might fit into a larger context.

Good criticism is active, in the political sense. It doesn't just assert a positive or negative judgement, but considers it as connected to everything. In critic Richard Brody's book Everything is Cinema, on the work of Jean-Luc Godard, he considers what it means to approach Godard's work:

If everything is cinema, then approaching Godard’s vast work in any meaningful way necessarily means being prepared to deal with everything: politics, art, philosophy, history, nature, beauty, lust, torment, money, love, and the random element.

I believe that this approach is appropriate for almost all art. And while he writes this sentence as specific to Godard, Brody's reviews reflect that he uses "everything is cinema" as a lens for considering all film.

In the 21st century, this goes beyond just cinema. Everything is theatre. Everything is art. The great cultural critic Wesley Morris considers this in an interview:

I feel like I’ve always approached criticism with a degree of morality, right? Like, not as a moralizer, but just as somebody who wants to make sure that the culture we’re getting is at least morally aware of how it’s functioning. My goal as a critic is... mostly to connect the work to what’s happening in the world, and in making that connection, there’s a charge that happens. You can call whatever that charge is—connecting art and works of mass culture to social movements in politics and whatever is happening in various parts of the world and the country—a kind of activism.

With the internet enabling a sort of hyperlink consciousness that sees everything as being interconnected, one can start to see some of the implications of this. On the one hand, no piece of art exists in a vacuum, now more so than ever. And on the other, art and culture and media are becoming synonymous words to cover the vast spectrum of things that can be considered: theatre, movies, TV, music, literature, online content, essays, podcasts, and more. A 21st Century critic finds it more and more difficult to just "stay in their lane".

Cross-pollination is a good thing, especially for theatre. The more writers who don't work exclusively in theatre who then write about theatre, the better. Theatre—as cinema, as all art—can encompass everything.

So when Wesley Morris—who started as a film critic—writes about theatre, it is unquestionably a good thing:

But occasionally, a play ends and nobody really knows what to do, because it just took an audience to outer space, to the center of the earth, to this new electric zone that knows what’s wrong with this country and isn’t afraid to personify it, laugh at it, behold it. Even though the work may take place at hospitals or in the presence of a shrink, it doesn’t care about comfort. It’s haywire, rude, blunt, poetic, self-reflective, sexually unpredictable, emotionally catastrophic, exhaustively acted, intelligent, searching and unafraid.

In that sense, perhaps we should retire the somewhat loaded and old world word "critic", and just call them "writers". It's worth a consideration. (However, to avoid confusion, I will still refer to someone who thinks and writes about art critically as a "critic" for the remainder of the essay.)

Scarcity of Viewpoints and Atheist White Male Aesthetics

There simply aren't enough theatre critics.

An extreme power law operates within theatre criticism, where 95% of the power comes from the New York Times, and especially its two lead writers, who are white men. Not only is this frightening for obvious reasons, but there's also just a startling lack of alternate viewpoints. And having one singular person of color as the tokenized critic representing all theatre made by people of color is not enough:

The thing that I want to see more of in general is more critics of color, more women, but also just more critics. People keep thinking: They hire one black critic who will finally have a black voice on the matters of black theater in America. I promise you, if you have seven black critics sit down to see Fairview, Sugar in Our Wounds, and Pass Over, they’re all going to say a different one was the best one

-Jeremy O. Harris

Sites like Show-Score are helpful in some respect in democratizing theatre opinions, but I don't think it solves the problem of deeper, considered criticism.

What made Sara Holdren such a potent critic was that she also is a true theatre director, having gotten her MFA from Yale in Directing. She is a powerful example for what the future of theatre criticism should look like: theatre artists choosing to write more about the form, furthering the discourse and displacing the power of the Ben Brantleys in this industry.

Holdren explores this antiquated idea of criticism and making work as being at odds with each other in a brilliant piece in NY Mag:

The hawkish divide between theater making and theater writing is a relatively recent development, driven, I think, by two pretty simple factors: money and fear. Frankly, we need more theater practitioners writing about the form. (Think about it: Virtually all book critics write books of their own.) But we still tend to separate the study of theater from its practice, and we still don’t take the latter entirely seriously: I can support myself writing about theater full-time, but I can’t support myself making theater full-time, and nor can the majority of the brilliant artists I know.

In a world where the internet has turned almost everyone into a content creator of some kind, we need to think of writing about the form of theatre as a byproduct of making theatre, encouraging a more symbiotic link between the two.

The lack of critics should also not be conflated with the lack of diversity in critics, which is its own issue worth exploring.

Theatre still vastly under-represents women and writers of color, as counted by The Dramatists Guild:

Worse: the works are often only critiqued by white people. But we need to consider not only the limitations of these viewpoints (and often also the bad writing), but also the paradigms under which people view and are "judging" the art. In a terrific essay by Donja R. Love considering this very issue, Toni Morrison is quoted:

I don’t like to find my books condemned as bad or praised as good, when that condemnation or that praise is based on criteria from other paradigms. I would much prefer that they were dismissed on or embraced on the success of their accomplishment within the culture out of which I write.

Often these white critics are not only not practitioners of the form, but are a world apart from the culture and paradigms being explored. They don't make any effort to see their own shortcomings in that regard. Instead, they fall back on what Quiara Alegría Hudes deems "atheist white male aesthetics".

Conclusion: Envisioning a new future of criticism

If I had one wish for American theater, it would be that we wrench it from the suffocating maw of television, that we pursue both complex content and structures worthy of that content, that we dedicate ourselves — as makers, as watchers, as producers and artistic directors — not to the false courage of the issue play, but to the real courage of theater that defies formula, that provokes wonder, and that balances rigor with joy, joy with rigor, in its quest to reshape the spirit and electrify the heart.

-Sara Holdren, "Theater Review: The Good Intentions of American Son"

Bad theatre criticism only contributes to the slow death of an aging art form. It continues the dominance of the boring and shallow and dead New Play, rather than prodding the form forward into the deep and complex and new. By celebrating mediocrity and demonizing risk, bad criticism allows bad plays to take up space that could be occupied by more daring and form-expanding work. And by applauding uninspired "issue plays" that preach to the choir and allow gentle, homogenous patting-on-the-back from audience and producer alike—instead of calling institutions out on their bullshit—they contribute to the deadening racism that permeates our industry and nation.

There are, however, efforts out there to remedy the lack of good theatre criticism. 3Views on Theater is a new project from The Lillys, a pretty A-list team of theatre artists. The site has yet to launch, so we'll see how much it can do, but it has promise.

Critic Jose Solís has been fighting the grassroots fight to diversify criticism and audiences for some time now. He regularly tweets out that he has an extra seat for a show he's seeing, and wants a POC to have it for free. Even more than that, he has recently started a new theatre website for critics of color. And his efforts have led to doubling the amount of voting members of the Drama Desk. In a culture that still privileges white male voices as the most authoritative, these efforts do give hope:

Art and the Unconscious

Tue, 25 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

There are some things in this world that cannot be explained. Deep, dark mysterious things. Things that stem from some ancient unwaking origin, drifting in the netherworld between sleep and somewhere else. Things that exist in the far reaches of the unconscious.

Our brains cannot quite understand these things. Consciousness is not enough. Instead, we repress our un-understandings and fears and traumas deep into the depths of our own unconscious.

Sometimes, we have to put down the burden of our consciousness. Rationality and logic can only get us so far. You can't always take the analytical position.

This is why people turn toward things like religion and art.

We experience art not to connect with the literal-minded, rational side of ourselves, but to connect to something far deeper and more uncertain. Great art must come from the unconscious so that we, as an audience, can put down our fears and make the leap into that unknown.

Otherwise, we’re left wondering: what’s the point? Where’s the deeper mystery at play here?

Hyperlink Consciousness

Tue, 14 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Mediums are the message. They contain within them a shift that forms a new consciousness.

For instance, pre-language society was an aural, interwoven experience not dependent on the specialization of the eye. Then one night some thinker sat in a cave and thought the thought that some things can represent other things. From this imagery emerged. So too did language and the written word, which became an extension of this idea of representation. This shifted us from an aural people to a visual people.

From the written word many things followed very quickly. Things like civilization.

Much later, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press and movable type would shift our consciousness once more, accelerating our shift to a visual society, and encouraging literacy. From movable type so too did nationalism (seeing the vernacular) and the industrial revolution (books as a repeatable commodity) evolve.

The Telegraph began yet another shift, towards a new electronic age of increasing paradoxical connection. The communication technologies of the 20th century — TV and phones, in particular — expanded this closeness, while also distancing us physically. Marshall McLuhan predicted in the 1960s that we would turn into a technology-enabled global village, restoring our sensory balance by once again becoming all-inclusive.

The Internet is this global village, which has once again become the medium that is the message that has shifted our consciousness. With the introduction of the hyperlink, we have a whole new way of thinking, a generation of internet natives growing up on the notion that consciousness, knowledge, everything is a web of interconnected things, but not necessarily dependent on the physical world of things you can touch and move and smell. In a way, this recalls pre-language society, only in a different realm.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this hyperlink consciousness, and what it means for the future of art. Maria Popova of Brainpickings writes in a way that is everything at once, her blog connecting every thinker to another thinker, and her book Figuring jumping from thinker to idea to everything to idea. It’s a style of writing informed by the Internet’s shift in thinking.

The qualities of good theatre

Tue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

These days, it seems like you often hear about theatre's inevitable demise at the hands of the internet, that it's merely a luxury.

But I don't think my love of theatre has any element of nostalgia or clinging to a dying medium. I fully believe that theatre is one of the most important mediums even in 2019, and can continue to thrive.

After all, theatre has been around forever. It's one of the purest and oldest forms of storytelling. It was dancing around campfires under the stars, it was the formation of Greek democracy, it was the choice of the most prolific writer of all-time in the English language.

Things that have survived for this long usually have survived for a reason. They have something essential to them, are inextricably linked to our human condition.

But I also understand why people distrust theatre: because most of it is bad. In this age, television and movies are, on average, probably better.

So theatre must prove itself every night. It must offer something you can’t get anywhere else.

Because at its best, great theatre offers an experience that is totally unique. It is exhilarating and brutal and breathtaking and magical and communal. It is where we go to experience our collective unconscious lived out, where we see the mythos of our inner worlds laid bare, where we experience catharsis.

So what are the principles of great theatre? What follows is a list of ideas I've developed over the years. It is not at all exhaustive, but it is a start.

Principles

Great theatre makes you shake.

Pretty much all great theatre makes you shake in some way. It grabs you and moves you physically, whether that's in laughter or horror or grief or discomfort. It leaves you feeling different than before, even in some undefinable way.

Great theatre is not boring.

There’s no more room for boring theatre. For the price of the ticket to one show, you can have months and months worth of unlimited movies and TV shows, many of which are better than most theatre. The opportunity costs are just too high.

So theatre needs to raise the bar by creating truly compelling live experiences. It needs to be wild and electric and alive and great, an experience that proves itself worthy of the investment in time and money. It needs to be more dangerous than anything you could get in your living room. And it can never, never be boring.

Great theatre is an event-ritual.

With the ubiquity of the internet, live experiences can differentiate themselves. Theatre is one such experience: immersive, lucid, and a jolt of light and energy.

Great theatre can often confront us and make us uncomfortable. But the discomfort we experience when we go to the theatre is different than the discomfort we experience when going to the movies. There is something to it that cannot be explained, and it's to do with its event-ritual nature. Wesley Morris, a Pulitzer prize winning critic who writes primarily about film, has started recently writing about theatre:

But occasionally, a play ends and nobody really knows what to do, because it just took an audience to outer space, to the center of the earth, to this new electric zone that knows what’s wrong with this country and isn’t afraid to personify it, laugh at it, behold it. Even though the work may take place at hospitals or in the presence of a shrink, it doesn’t care about comfort. It’s haywire, rude, blunt, poetic, self-reflective, sexually unpredictable, emotionally catastrophic, exhaustively acted, intelligent, searching and unafraid.

Because theatre exists in one place at one time, it acts as an old fashioned ritual, with real live people. Why do people go to Coachella, Bonnaroo, and Burning Man every year? Because they hunger after these singular experiences. Watching them on your computer is not the same, and almost everyone recognizes this. We are after something more. They are rituals in the way theatre is ritual, where we gather together as human beings in a collective experience. They make us feel alive and human. They have always been a part of us. And they will never be replaced.

Great theatre is always now.

Great theatre does not belong in a museum. It exists in the moment it is created and then disappears into the ether in those same moments, a special, singular creation between audience and performers. It is an experience you would not have at any other time, and not from any other art form. You have to be there. In this way, theatre is the great art form of now.

The audience is always participating in the creation of theatre, because theatre only happens when the audience comes in. An audience, in the moment, fills in with their unconscious brains the metaphors the play is presenting. Which gets us to our next point.

Great theatre is metaphorical, not literal.

Literalism is the great enemy of theatre. If I wanted to see something literal, I would go watch a period movie.

Instead, theatre is an art form of metaphors. It is not a visual medium. If it were, you could just have a painter make a pretty stage picture. But that's not what we're going for. It's through metaphor that we, as audiences, fill in the gaps. It's through metaphor that we come to better understand ourselves, better exercise our empathy.

The possibilities in theatre are limitless when it is treated in such a way. Suddenly, every aesthetic limitation it seems to have is seen in a new dimension.

Great theatre considers three-dimensional space.

Great theatre considers every nook and cranny of the space, what the spatial relationships mean, how things move, and the visceral metaphors that can be explored through this unique trait of theatre versus two-dimensional narrative forms, like film and TV.

Theatre, in a way, is the sculpting of energy in a space. As playwright Simon Stephens wrote: "I like hearing my plays in a language I can’t understand because it reminds me that our work is not in writing ideas but orchestrating energy."

Great theatre has a reason for existing.

Why is this particular play being done right now? If a production doesn't have an answer to that question, it's dead on the spot.

For revivals, what was the energy of the first production? How can that energy be adapted to the present? And who needs to perform and see this play now?

Does this play mean something to the world we're living in? Are people in the audience seeing themselves on stage? Can we reflect relevant ideas to the world?

A corollary: I believe great theatre exists for more of a reason than just politics. Theatre is inherently political, but if a play is made solely from politics, it’s often just boring. Worse, it preaches to the choir, instead of reaching a wider audience, like it could through a different medium.

Great theatre is uniquely suited to the form.

Why should people go to the theater at all anymore? With so many other means of narratives, what's so important about this story being a play?

There are many new plays that simply don't answer this question. They seem to have been designed to be bad TV, instead. They take the hacky parts of television and combine them with the stage, which obviously leads to dreadful theatre. Many of these plays continually gets produced because many of these are "Issue Plays", i.e. plays that try to tackle a hot-topic issue (like race) and thus get programmed by clueless old white men who want to feel woke. (They are usually written by white people who want to be writing for TV.)

Theatre should not be something that it is not. If it tries to be television, it ends up being a pale imitation, existing in a netherworld of plays that aren't quite sure what they are. In the words of theatremaker and critic Sara Holdren, these shows "neither take joy in the possibilities of their own form nor respect its demands."

Great theatre reaches for the transcendent.

In some way, all great theatre reaches for the transcendent, the invisible. It often does this through metaphor, and through being uniquely theatrical.

We are looking for a bridge from the known to the unknown. From conscious to unconscious. From here to there. From sleeping to waking. Theatre can be this bridge. Through some miraculous means, it must reach beyond itself.

Great theatre is vulnerable and naked.

"The closer we move towards the true nakedness of theatre, the closer we approach a stage that has a lightness and range far beyond film or television." - Peter Brook

True vulnerability on stage is breathtaking and dangerous. Performing is a courageous act, because it involves risk.

Raw life, in all its natural tragedy, is spellbinding on stage. Vulnerability, warts, intricate sadness, embarrassment. We are seeing actual, real-life human beings struggle, in all their bizarre complexity.

Many productions set actors up to act with quotes around them, which causes a barrier to go up between us and them. They act “Anger”, “Sex” and “Power”, instead of Anger. Sex. Power. Great theatre takes off the mask. [^1]

Great theatre cares about the audience.

Theatre should be rigorous and smart and complex, but great theatre never loses sight of its audience. It should be completely unpretentious in its ability to be enjoyed, understood[^2], and grappled with.

Would a young person who has never seen theatre enjoy this show?

Great theatre gives actors ownership.

As an actor, I am very skeptical when anyone uses the term "directors' theatre" in a disparaging way. I tend to enjoy bold directorial visions.

But, simply put: the most important thing in theatre is the actor. They are the art form itself.

Everything else in theatre revolves around the actors, is serving the actors, so that they can have moments of pure existence on stage.

Theatre is the only art form that appears and disappears in the moment. So the actors must own every second of it, because it is they who are doing the creating of it in the moment.

When actors are given complete ownership, you get performances of raw intensity.

There should be no writer -> director -> actor hierarchy.

This isn't to say actors can direct themselves, or that divas are permitted—only that great theatre takes its actors seriously, puts them on equal footing with the writer and director, and allows them to fly.

Great theatre is original.

The most important thing to remember is that there are no rules, including these ones.

Great theatre often creates its own genre. That's what Annie Baker did: "Be incredibly vulnerable, but not necessarily confessional. Invent your own genre. Don't try to look smart."

So much of theatre is passed-down-upon wisdom, much of which is bullshit. There is no correct way to stage Hamlet. You don't have to open with dry ice and a goofy ghost.

Great theatre is not easily summarized. A great, original show is more than just a byline. It is an experience that cannot quite be put into words, because it is something new entirely.

[^1]: This isn't to discount Brecht. Some of my favorite productions are able to blend Brecht's intellectual distance with the raw nakedness of emotion in theatre. [^2]: Understanding on a basic, intuitive level, at least. Audiences don't need to understand every little thing, in a literal sense.

Live and crafted, recorded and raw

Wed, 01 May 2019 00:00:00 GMT

I've been thinking about podcasts and theatre a lot, and how they interrelate. I have a theory about their paradoxical relationship.

I started listening to podcasts in high school. Most of them weren’t very slick, just a couple people talking into microphones. The form has grown and evolved since then, with many successful shows having a slick finish. But it also strikes me that many of the most successful podcasts (like Joe Rogan or Marc Maron) are still just people having conversations into a microphone.

And I think this notable, because it’s something podcasts are great for.

Sure, I do like podcasts like Serial, or This American Life, or Reply All. Narrative podcasts with a bit more “oomph”. There will always be a place for them.

But recently I was listening to Comedy Bang Bang, one of my original favorite podcasts. And I realized that what they do on that podcast — great comedic actors doing great character work, playing wildly on the imagination — only works because of the form. I like the TV show, but it is a qualitatively different type of experience. In a podcast, your brain fills in the rest. You imagine these ridiculous characters having these ridiculous conversations, and you go with it. On TV, a medium that can struggle with being too literal, you don’t get that. You don’t get that when you know it’s crafted and you can see everything.

And via podcast, you feel a type of intimacy. The relationship is warm. I feel like I know all these people on CBB, despite not having seen any one of them live. But I know their comedy, and I know their laugh, and I laugh with them. When I listen, I feel like I’m having a secret conversation with them, even though I’m obviously not. (And I think this is different from the radio of old — podcasts feel more intimate)

This is also why I don’t really like live episodes of podcasts. I don’t want to hear other people responding. I want to own this experience myself, I want to be the sole arbiter. So it can be frustrating, and somewhat dissociating, listening to a group of other people respond to what have, up to this point, jus been voices in your head.

It also speaks to this idea of the “ritual economy”. CBB has put out at least one new episode every week for as long as I can remember. I know they are going to be there for me. I don’t listen to every episode. That’s not the point. The point is that I know it’s there, and I know I can trust them. That, coupled with podcasts’ intimacy, is very powerful.

So recorded podcasts, I think, are best left raw. I don’t want to hear prepared comedy on a podcast. I want to hear something raw that is improvised, making it all the more wonderful to drop in on. Because, like most people, I listen to podcasts while doing other things, like commuting or doing laundry. So I actually don’t want to have the laboriousness of preparation weighing me down. I don’t want to feel like I need to listen to every word or I have missed something. (This is part of why audiobooks frustrate me.) Instead, I want the podcast to play fast and loose, allowing me to zone out for a minute and drop back in.

On the other hand, the inverse is true with theatre.

Theatre is live. It wants to feel improvised, but it actually wants to be totally crafted.

That is, theatre needs to impress me. My favorite theatre often starts with what seems like a raw, empty space, seeming to show that a production doesn’t have any tricks up its sleeves. But then it pulls out tricks anyway. For me, this is what THE THIN PLACE and HOW TO DEFEND YOURSELF did at Humana. As Simon Stone puts it: “show the audience how impossible an idea is, then do it right in front of their eyes”. I want to be swept away and have a guttural, emotional experience. Theatre is its own, completely unique experience.

So while theatre is live, it should be rigorously prepared. And while podcasts are recorded and prepared, they should feel live and raw. Recorded and raw, live and crafted. It’s an idea I’ve been thinking about.

But this is why I believe podcasts and theatre are perfect corollaries. Together, they form a great barbell -- two extremes (quick and dirty digital podcasts on one side, slow and labor-intensive analog theatre) -- for a young theatre company.

Two-dimensional racism

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

In theatre and film there is a common case of what I call two-dimensional racism. This is the sort of optics-based casting that is simply meant to check off casting people of color like there's a quota to fill. There's no depth to this diversity --- it's purely two-dimensional.

Of course, two-dimensional racism is often well-meaning. Old, white theatre-makers want to feel progressive, want to congratulate themselves for the great work they're doing by having a diverse show. And yet, the make-up of non-performers in the theater is generally a homogenous sea of white.

The issue runs deeper than just optics, and deeper than just theatre and film. As Rembert Browne tweeted when ESPN fired Jemele Hill: "espn wants black faces not black minds".

The same is true for so many theaters. They want the feeling of diversity without doing any of the deeper work, without facing the systemic problems that run from the roots, not from the leaves. They look for brown and black faces to make themselves feel better, to present themselves as diverse---but not to rock the old and white boat too much, please. Fact is, that boat is still the dominant mode of thinking and perception for most theaters.

Worse, two-dimensional racism is often mixed with lazy directing choices, as if having people of color in a show will solve its problems, absolve the play of any issues it might have, do all the heavy lifting for them. It's a signaling device that arguably does more harm than good when combined with a lack of rigor.

Think things through. Make good choices that consider complexity and depth. White supremacy is not tackled by shallow, white thinking.

Write and act in a trance

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This comes from Mike Birbiglia's podcast episode on Tim Ferriss' show a while back. I was reviewing some notes on that episode, to see how Birbiglia uses journaling.

He drops a few goldmines on his creative process:

My minimum is three hours; I’d stick myself in a coffee shop with no internet and no email, no anything. If it’s going well, I go up to five hours and if it’s not going well, I just end at three hours. I try to do 7 a.m. I try to write before my inhibitions take hold of me. Because I’m an actor, as well, I always say write in a trance and act in a trance. You don’t want to even think consciously about what you’re putting on the page.

I've talked about creating from the unconscious, but Birbiglia expresses it really nicely here. Get yourself into a trance in the morning, and start putting things down. Before the demons of inhibition and rationality can get to you.

Mamet (I know) writes about this in Three Uses of a Knife:

Artists don’t wonder, “What is it good for?” They aren’t driven to “create art,” or to “help people,” or to “make money.” They are driven to lessen the burden of the unbearable disparity between their conscious and unconscious minds, and so to achieve peace.

This "trance writing" is what I do and recommend with morning pages, which I learned from Brian Koppelman: each morning, wake up and write three long-hand pages, stream-of-consciousness style. Around the 1.5 page mark, you often hit a "truth point", where you kind of run out of bullshit to write about and end up getting to some deeper parts of the subconscious.

I like that he also mentions acting in a trance, though he doesn't expand on it in the interview. The idea is one I strive for in my acting: to not really think about it too much. Do the work, then let it move through you, bringing yourself and all your experience onto the stage as well. It can be quite an exhilarating trance, and you often know if you aren't in it (usually it's because the demons of rationality have come to your shoulder and let you know that you are on stage acting in front of people, and it is really a ridiculous thing to be doing).

There's one more thing in the interview I really like a lot:

Don't waste your time on marketing, just try to get better. ... It's not about being good; it’s about being great. Because what I find, the older I get, is that a lot of people are good and a lot of people are smart, and a lot of people are clever. But not a lot of people give you their soul when they perform.

This is the same idea I discussed in "Getting good". Worry less about getting seen, focus on learning and doing and getting great at what you do. Acting and writing in a trance is a good start.

The theatre-church fallacy

Fri, 23 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I hear this analogy often used, that theatre is akin to church. A place where we go to experience collective catharsis. And it's the only place, besides church, where we go to do that. Which makes it vital. Or something along those lines.

But I think there a couple problems with this comparison.

The first problem is that it's a little too precious. I fear us romanticizing theatre too much, convincing ourselves of the mythical and poetic Goodness of the form, rather than just making good theatre. Equating a night at the theatre to a religious experience might make us feel good, but I'm not sure it's very helpful if the theatre is still bad.

But the bigger problem? Well, the comparison is actually a little too accurate, and that's not a good thing. People forget that for many of us, church is really boring! Many people go out of a sense of obligation, not for the thing itself. They go to feel worthy, to say they have gone to church. And then, for the next hour or so, they are politely bored.

This is the same idea with theatre: people go to feel "worthy" for having experienced "culture". They go to theatre out of a sense of obligation, and they expect to be politely bored for two hours. This is deadly.

In both theatre and church, the highs can be ecstatic. There really can be collective catharsis, in both cases. But more often than not, it's just not the case.

The comparison is a little too easy. It lets us off the hook. Instead, we need to use more rigor for theatre, investigate it to its core. Yes, it is indeed a place of collective catharsis, a weird ancient ritual that we enact every night. Sure, yes. But the bigger problem? That ritual is often very fucking boring.

The church-theatre analogy makes us feel all nice, as if we're performing something holy and sacrilege all at once. But it actually is dangerous, lest we become another fossilized ritual obligation.

Content vs accessibility

Sun, 18 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This is another thing I wrote a while back. It has some good thoughts:

Is the problem with theatre in its content, or its accessibility?

These are two different things, and we confuse the two. Sometimes, I hear that theatre should be more like Netflix or HBO. While I actually agree with this, it is a sort of broad comparison. Because Netflix does two things, and they do them extremely well: provide great, captivating content, and make it easy to access.

Theatre does both of these things not very well. They are two separate ideas and each needs to be worked on separately.

Content

The first is to create more captivating content for the stage. This is obviously a subjective thing, but there is a twofold problem I see here: plays not being uniquely theatrical, and plays having us turn off the critical brain.

Two people talking is not uniquely theatrical. Maybe two amazing actors talking is, but by itself it's not. A play should be a play for a reason, and not a film or tv show .

Theatre should be compelling from the get go. With Netflix, you can turn on a new series and get sucked in without knowing much. You don't need to turn off any part of your brain. The content is so good that you want to watch it, feel like it rips your guts out or makes you shake with laughter each time.

With theatre, sometimes there's some work the audience has to do, to turn off a part of their brain that's like "ok, this is a play, I need to lower my expectations a bit“. But this lets the audience off the hook. Anyone should be able to go to a production and be immediately engaged, not feel like there’s some mental hump they need to get over to be engaged.

Accessibility

A major problem in theatre of course is accessibility. Once you have a Netflix account (or your roommate’s password) all you need to do is click a show and start watching. With theatre, there's so many barriers. First is price. Then there's the actual act of the distance of going to the theatre. There's putting on clothes. There's reading about the play. There's trying to find a good play to see.

The accessibility is low. The barrier of entry is far too high.

This is a tougher problem to fix in some ways, I think, than the content problem. New York has certainly failed at this almost inconceivably. Broadway is ridiculously inaccessible, though there are some definite steps to make it better. Student rush ticket policies usually aren’t terrible, and apps like TodayTix are actually helpful in nabbing tickets. (But it’s still way too expensive.) What, exactly, are we paying for? When I can watch something on Netflix that is better written, more diverse, more exciting?

The only conceivable way I can think of theatre not dying off (in a proverbial sense — there will always be an elite class who gets off on being politely bored) is for prices to lower, and accessibility to be greatly improved. That means more outreach, more workshops, more effective, exciting education programs, cheaper tickets, etc.

I admit that’s a difficult and larger thing. For a theatre who is doing an amazing job at this, look at Almeida Theatre, who has an "Almeida for Free” festival for under-25s to see their productions for free, and includes all sorts of incredible workshops. (It “sold out” pretty instantly, but that’s because of its unbelievable value. And this should be proof that this approach works.)

Creating amazing content and improving accessibility should be the ultimate duty to all people that make theatre right now, if theatre wants to survive.

Theatre and time

Sat, 17 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Theatre is our most potent exploder of time, because it is the only art form (and I include dance, music performance—-any sort of performance on a stage) that includes a commitment of time from both audience and performer.

We are witnessing time over the course of time. In all its ugliness and impotence. The contents of a play may jump around time, be non-linear or take course over the span of several years. But we sit for those 90 minutes, those two hours, and we watch. And we're watching time—real human beings move through time.

Theatre is always now, and the best theatre takes full advantage of this. The best theatre excavates the space between then and now—the tension at play between this present moment and the contents of the play, and all of us in the room together, an experience that will fade away shortly, into nothingness, like all time does. The best theatre juggles all that.

The best theatre deals with time.

Good theatre runs smooth

Thu, 15 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I have this theory that you can pretty accurately judge if a play is going to be good from its first moments. The lights go down, maybe some music comes in, and that's the most exciting part: you have us. For a moment you think, "this play might change my life": the excitement of the play starting, another world emerging. It's stuck with me since my childhood as my absolute favorite part of the theatre. Then the lights comes up, and you realize: Oh. No. This is not going to change my life after all. I almost always feel let down.

It takes a lot for a play to regain that magical feeling. It's rare that a production can lose me in its first moments, and end up being a great experience. (It does happen, though!)

Now, some directors might devote too much time to getting that first moment right, and then let the rest of the play fall through the cracks. You don't want to have an explosive first moment and then let us down the rest of the time.

Instead, you want to hook us, and have the whole thing run smooth.

Daniel Kahneman introduces this idea of System 1 and System 2 thinking in his seminal book Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is our quick brain, the intuitive brain that can't help but fill things in. And it is essential to theatre. In theatre, we make gestures, use metaphors---we don't literally reconstruct. Our quick brain fills it in. System 2 is our slower brain, the deep thinking brain, involved in analysis, sure, but also doubt and uncertainty and reasoning.

In those first moments of a play, you can't ask us to use System 2. You've lost us already. The beginning should feel smooth, to ease us in. It should be a cascading series of System 1, intuitive brain activity. Think 3+2 equals...(five, your brain can't help fill it in), not 1617.3*313.86 equals...(uh, let me pull out my calculator, hold on -- carry the one...).

Where System 2 does come in, I think, is as the play deepens, and excavates whatever question it is asking. Great drama often gives us paradoxes, two right answers, which System 1 is not equipped to answer. Instead, System 2 must engage to help us reason through the difficult questions the drama is asking of us.

Aesthetically, however, I believe in smooth theatre. Not too smooth -- I don't want it spoon-fed to me, I don't need gross commercialism, I don't want to be condescended to, I'm not looking to "turn my brain off". But I do want to be excited and riveted, and I believe the best way to get there is through System 1. When I start to have to use System 2 to keep engaged in the beginning, it can quickly become Deadly Boring. It's a balancing act---you have to engage System 2 so that the play can deal with deep subject matter, but you need to use the drill of System 1 to drive to the heart of the matter. (And ideally, the heart of the matter offers us deep-seated questions and feelings that our Slow Brain will mull over for days.)

I think System 1 applies to acting, too. Some actors put us at ease, in a good way. I can let my guard down a bit, because I just feel comfortable with them on stage, comfortable in their hands, ready to go with them wherever they are going to go. Other actors make me nervous. My theory is that they are having us engage System 2 to deal with their performance. Something is off, it doesn't feel right, and it makes me nervous. I can't completely fall into the world of the play, because my brain is just not completely going with the story.

I'm going to expand on this theory in future posts. But the basic idea is that, when theatre functions with an aesthetic that has System 1 in mind, it flies. We fill so much in. We don't need to see everything literally. Give me a minimal set with the right props, pieces and gestures to help me reach for transcendent ideas, and couple it with real, thrilling acting that I can trust enough to fall into. (An exciting play and clever staging doesn't hurt either.) That's when it all comes together.

On textual fidelity

Wed, 14 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Peacham Drawing

The original production of Ibsen's A Doll House caused quite a controversy. People were shocked by its empowering ending. Near-riots ensued.

But if you were, in 2018, to literally replicate this production (for argument's sake in NYC, but really anywhere), it would be a complete disaster.

Many conservative thinkers think they are being more faithful to Ibsen by trying to be completely true to the literal letter of the play, including doing whatever it takes to get to "how it was" when it was it was first done. These productions involve period dress, stilted acting and accents, and a general feeling of Deadness. But while these productions might be staying true to the letter, they are completely vandalizing the spirit.

The spirit of the original Doll's House involved controversy and shock, a feeling of disquiet and uncertainty. (This is why Ostermeier ended his with a shotgun.) If you put up a production that bores us to tears, you simply don't understand the play.

This, of course, isn't even to mention that every production of Ibsen we do in English is, in some way, an adaptation. It is shocking to me how much fidelity some theatre artists have to a stodgy translation of Ibsen or Chekhov from the early 20th century. These are the worst of the worst, academic translations that barely worked then but ring completely false to our ears now. We need to find what the original electricity was, and try to convert it for today. Here's director Robert Icke direction his sensational production of Aeschylus's Oresteia:

[This production] is faithful to the spirit rather than to the letter of the original thing. And the spirit is more important, because what we don’t have is a 458 BC audience; we have a now audience, and my responsibility is to keep them captivated and interested. I keep giving this analogy to everyone of adaptation being like a plug adaptor. So you’re standing in a room and your hair’s wet, and you’re holding a hairdryer. You try and plug it in but it doesn’t work. You can try and hammer it in if you want but you’re still going to have wet hair. You’re confident that the thing you’re holding in your hand, the old thing you’re holding, can dry your hair, if only you can get the energy present in the room into the old thing. That’s what it’s like with an old play sometimes...If I can find a way of reworking the way it connects with the room so that it comes alive, suddenly it feels like it felt in 458 BC again, one hopes.

In adaptations, we will never get it totally "true". This is part of the beauty of theatre---it takes place now, in this place.

Even Shakespeare realized this: just look at the famous Peacham drawing of Titus Andronicus -- Shakespeare realized that modern dress, and the spirit of the thing, was more important than the literal letter (i.e. literally setting it entirely in the Roman Empire).

Theatre and scarcity

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

These are some thoughts on theatre and scarcity I wrote a while back. I'm posting them again because I think they're interesting.

The micro: actors are not scarce

Here is a list of things that are scarce in theatre:

Good ideas.
Visionary playwrights.
Visionary directors.
Visionary designers.
Visionary marketers and theatrical innovators.
Transcendent performers.

Here is a list of things that are not scarce:

Actors
Bad theatre

So what does this mean, exactly?

A few things:

There are too many actors, and particularly too many merely okay actors.
Theatre training needs to focus on making theatre, not just acting. One person may lean towards performing, but they should be encouraged to write and direct and design and create.
The most important thing that is scarce is good ideas. Producing the same old shit in the same old way will get theatre nowhere. Hamilton was a good idea. There are many young playwrights and directors with good ideas. We need more good ideas.

The macro: productions are scarce

If we take one step back and look at the macro perspective of theatre, the thing that is scarce is the actual production. A production is singular. A movie is plural. A movie is mass produced and can, theoretically, be seen at any given time an unlimited amount of times by an unlimited amount of people in an unlimited amount of places. Theatre exists in one place, at one time, and is seen by a limited number of people. Hamilton exists only one at a time. If it’s 4pm on a Monday, Hamilton is not happening. There is no way you can watch it. Theatre is not on demand.[^1]

The same is true with Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. I admire the incredible guts it takes to take the most popular franchise in modern Western cultural history and put its latest entry on the stage. How insane! Again, we are faced with theatre's blessing and curse: its inherent scarcity. The new Harry Potter exists in one place, at one time. That creates a sense of magic and wonder. But, as we have seen, it also creates sky-high ticket prices because of supply (one) and demand (infinite). Thus scarcity is a double-edged sword.

But the incredible thing about Hamilton that helped contribute to its success is it has a form of easily accessible digital media that is plural. The soundtrack gives you a partial experience of the show. Is it as good as the live thing? No. But as far as soundtracks go, it is really, really good. In fact, it’s probably the most complete experience you can have from a musical soundtrack. You get the whole story (the action is mostly described by the words, different from almost every other musical that focuses on a sort of expressionism) and you get pretty much everything, except for the visuals. In Hamilton, with a 2.5 hour soundtrack, this is a heck of a lot. So it is possible to listen to the soundtrack like one would listen to an Audiobook, almost, and get a full experience. It is different than the production. The production is scarce. But it is an experience. And this experience makes you want to actually go experience the full experience.

Case study #2: with the new Harry Potter, we have the singular (the production) and the plural (the script). This is probably the most mass-produced, best-selling play ever, right? Again, you are getting a portion of the full experience by reading the script. People that read the play expecting the full experience are sure to be disappointed, but what you get instead is a different sort of partial experience. (Marketing the play in book form as the 8th installment is a bit misleading. The 8th installment can only really be experienced by seeing the play on stage.) What if we were able to garner excitement about productions by having a mass-distributed, non-scarce form (capitalizing on digital media) like Hamilton and Harry Potter have?

The future, and survival, of theatre rests on our capability to tackle, and leverage, its scarcity.

[^1]: Taped/streamed shows are an interesting idea, but are beyond the scope of this post and will be touched on in a later post. For now, I will say that they are still just an approximation of the experience. Few would argue that theatre can only be experienced at its fullest in a live setting, for anything else defeats its very definition.

Category of one

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

If you're interested in writing a screenplay, you may have come across the slew of books that attempt to teach you how. (Like Save the Cat and its many hydra heads it spews out.) Most of these books propose a sort of formula that, actually, is ancient lore and embedded into our psyches, probably by some Jungian madness, don't you see. Save the Cat even offers the Ten Movie Genres, that every screenplay must fit into. The formula and genre is followed by every great story, and every story ever can be mapped out with the formula.[^1]

But the amount of truly great, memorable screenplays that have spawned out of reading these books is...how many? I'm not sure that data is readily available, but I'm willing to guess the number is relatively close to zero.

Following a formula makes for bad art. And putting your story into a "category" or "genre" can be a very slippery slope towards Boredom.

Annie Baker offers this advice for young writers:

Be incredibly vulnerable, but not necessarily confessional. Invent your own genre. Don't try to look smart.

The best screenplays, the best stories, the best art defies categorization. If it can be neatly summed up into a sentence, there's a good chance it's not that great. If it can be easily categorized, there's a good chance it's overflowing with clichés. The experiences of Annie Baker's plays cannot really be pinned down: they are their own thing, their own genre (each one!) that she invented. There are certainly influences and similarities to other writers (like Chekhov), but there is no tidy box that the plays can be put in. Each one is a Category of One.

This is a classic "Law of Marketing", but the truth is it applies across businesses and theater companies and art. How can you invent your own genre, your own category? Because that's where the good stuff lies.

Don't follow a formula. Resist easy and lazy "categories". Instead, make your own.

[^1]: If it's not obvious, I'm being sarcastic. It should be no surprise that those who can't write screenplays write books on how to write screenplays. To be fair, there is a massive market for this kind of thing. All you need is a pithy title (i.e. The Nutshell Technique) and a promise (i.e. this is the secret information 99% of writers don't know). But it's important to remember the advice of Derek Sivers, that “if information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs," and that we should be suspicious of advice from people without skin in the game.

The audience matters

Sun, 11 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I've noticed that there is a certain trend for some directors to "not care" about the audience. I understand where the impulse comes from, but I think this is a big mistake.

For one, audiences are very smart.

If an audience is bored during the show, it's probably not their fault. It's probably because the show is boring.

Could you put this in front of 16-year-old you and have them be totally engaged and enjoy it? Or would they feel secretly repressed shame for not understanding what's going on, feeling it's their own fault?

There is, of course, a balance to be struck. You don't want to condescend, or "dumb down"---but we also mustn't blatantly disregard what an audience would feel, how they won't be able to fully see or understand this part, or how this part will simply be a waste of their time.

It's an exceptional thing that an audience is giving you: their attention, for 90 minutes or so. And yet how many productions abuse this privilege? We should make good use of their attention by actually making something they will enjoy, because the audience matters. A lot.

Who says?

Sat, 10 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

It is tradition, the accumulation of experience, the ashes of memory, that make the mind old. The mind that dies every day to the memories of yesterday, to all the joys and sorrows of the past---such a mind is fresh, innocent, it has no age; and without that innocence, whether you are ten or sixty, you will find God.

-- Krishnamurti

Krishnamurti is offering deep insight into how to live, but I think this applies to art, as well, and reaching towards transcendence.

When staging classics (and also new plays), there's a tendency for directors to fall back on old ideas.

Sometimes, we don't even realize we're falling into these ideas.

For instance, why does every production of Hamlet start with dry ice and a boring ghost? Why are Goneril and Regan usually dressed in leather and made into villains from the first scene? Why are you casting a white actor here, or a cis male actor? Why is this a staging that we've seen a million times already? Why is this a naturalistic set?

To make great theatre, we need to look at everything with fresh, innocent eyes. To wash away the "ashes of memory".

Who says it has to be done like that?

Who says verse has to be spoken like you've been taught in grad school, to make us really understand you "get" how verse works? Who says this needs to take place in a theatre? Who says they need to be pretty? Who says you can't just rewrite an old play to have it make sense to 2018 ears? Who says you can't re-arrange the music? Who says it needs to be done in period dress?

Really, there are no rules. We don't need the same production one more time, just because one old white dude many years ago decided that's how it's supposed to go.

You can see examples of "who says" in film and TV: David Lynch, for instance, does not give a single damn about what's "trendy" in prestige TV and movies -- he sees things with fresh eyes (to be fair, sometimes to the detriment of accessibility). Or in the third season of one of my favorite shows, The Leftovers, they switch up the music that's played over the opening credits each week: who says a TV show's credits can't change up and be creative? (This is among many, many other "who says" moments in the show.)

When we make theatre and other art we need to always question assumptions and easy, lazy choices, consistently asking ourselves: who says? Blow off the doors to passed-down-upon-wisdom, enter into the unknown, and make something truly original.

Live -> read -> write

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Some notes on the creative process:

When Junot Diaz was asked for advice for aspiring writers (after giving a grumpy answer), he responded: "Read more than you write, live more than you read."

I think this is really good advice for creating work, and a good reminder to get out and live.

(A great playwright I just worked with yesterday also had similar advice: don't go to undergrad for playwriting. Instead, go out and live and experience things and talk to people, real people.)

Then, you should be reading: reading even more than you write.

Annie Baker echoes this advice, that the living -- in all its ups and downs, wasted days, shittiness and realness -- is so good for your art:

That’s something I tell my students: This period is so useful. Being sad and going out on terrible dates and having horrible breakups and then having a shitty job and then quitting the shitty job and then wondering if you shouldn’t have quit the shitty job and then getting a new shitty job that you get fired off of after six weeks, it’s all so good for your writing. I remember a few years ago was when I was just writing a play and not doing anything else in my life, and I wasn’t cheating on anything with playwriting, and suddenly I was like, “I don’t know if I can do this. I think maybe I have to be cheating on the thing I’m supposed to be doing with playwriting.”

She also is a writer who doesn't write every day -- instead, she reads and reads until she needs to write:

The stage picture comes out of the books I was reading, and then leads to more books which leads to more books. I feel with writing, so much of the time, I don’t know how to tap in and be spontaneous and alive on a daily basis. So I don’t write every day. I’m just not disciplined, and I can’t be in the groove most of the time. I feel like I’m in the groove ten days a year or something. But with reading and research, I feel like I have this incredibly instinctive pleasure-driven process that ends up working out for me and inspiring me. It’s almost like a maze, like I know eventually I’ll hit the heart of my play if I read enough books.

It also is similar to Paul Thomas Anderson's advice: "When writing ain’t working, research. When research ain’t working, sleep."

Remember, the best writing and art comes from the unconscious -- it's so important to have processes beyond just trying to force something that isn't happening.

So you could sum it up like: live, read, sleep. Then write and repeat.

Daylight

Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This is a very simple idea that I discovered courtesy of Austin Kleon. It's helpful if you struggle with trying to do too many things, or get overwhelmed by work, or get sad in the evenings.

Deal with problems in daylight.

That's it. In general, after dinner, put the day away, and don't think about it too much. You did what you could. Let yourself relax, and go to sleep. Solve the problem in daylight, and with some fresh air. It's much better that way, and it makes you happier. (In my experience.)

As an actor, sometimes you are performing in the evening. But I try to make this the last thing I do: entering into another world. Before that I've put the day away, I've done what I could, and then after the performance, you de-compress and go to bed.

Daylight has a very special power. So does night time, but it's a different kind of power, and not one for solving problems and doing work. (But that's for another post.) So be sure to make use of daylight.

Don't make art in terms of 'taking risks'

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

"You don’t come back from seeing Beyoncé saying, ‘I was kind of bored’. She always delivers. Theatre loves to talk about its ‘right to fail’ and I sometimes think that can be used as an excuse for lack of rigour.”

<cite>-- Robert Icke</cite>

Many people fetishize risk. Take chances! Take big risks! We're addicted to theatre and art that feels "risky".

Artists should, of course, take risks. But risk for risk's sake -- or, risks that are not properly thought through -- makes for boring art.

The best art, in all forms, take breathtaking risks. But to its creator, it is not a consciously derived risk. It is simply the way it had to be; it is personal expression, perhaps mixed with some bravado.

Beyonce is a perfect example of this. Her Coachella concert, for instance, was a stunning live show that reached deep into the unconscious with incredible force and clarity. There were "risks", but they were all completely bulletproof, completely thought through, completely her.

Great art does not simply "take risks" as if it's something you just decide to do to fulfill a quota. Instead, it makes bold choices with confidence and clarity.

Clarity doesn't mean that everything needs to be explained -- that would mean every David Lynch film would fall under the category of "pointless risk". Instead, clarity can be equated with a certain sense of rigor and confidence.

Lynch is just making art the only way he knows how, personal and weird and disturbing. He creates from the unconscious. But he is actually creating with immense clarity from the unconscious -- his decisions are rigorous -- which is why his films are so effective.

Thus, great art that "takes risks", is actually accessing the unconscious regularly, and with great clarity.

We could even phrase it as a pithy formula, like: Great Art = Unconscious + Clarity.

If I consciously decide "I'm going to make risky art", I will be working from the conscious, and it will be patchwork.

The art you can make is the art only you can make. It's always you. Make bold art from the unconscious, and strive for clarity and rigor. The rest is kind of BS.

Ripples

Tue, 06 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Water is so much more fine and sensitive an element than earth. A single boatman passing up or down unavoidably shakes the whole of a wide river, and disturbs its every reflection.

<cite>-- Thoreau's Journals</cite>

When I vote, I think about ripples in the water.

It's easy to think your vote doesn't matter. That I'm already living in a Blue State, so I might as well not vote. Or that other people will vote instead.

But every action you make---every thought you think---sends out ripples, like the boatman passing down the river.

If you think your vote doesn't matter, that means other people also think their vote doesn't matter. If you show apathy, that means other people are showing apathy. It ripples out.

And let me be clear: I'm not being new-agey here. I actually believe this pretty firmly.

What we do has consequences. What we think leads to what we do. It's important to take this seriously, because, as human beings on this planet called earth, we are all connected in a sort of unified tapestry. When we think hate, when we act on hate, we send out ripples. When we think and act on love and strength and committment, that ripples out too.

And it happens in ways you could never even imagine.

And of course, there's really no such thing as not voting. As David Foster Wallace pointed out:

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

<cite>--David Foster Wallace</cite>

By being apathetic and not voting you are not only causing negative ripples in your concentric circles of influence, but you are letting the bastards win.

So, please. You should vote.

Theatre should be theatre, not television

Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

It's no secret that, for the most part, television is way, way better than theatre.

The shows are more diverse, more exciting, more deep, and more accessible.

And yet, a lot of people making theatre seem to have taken the exact wrong message from this.

Instead of making theatre better -- playing to its unique strengths, excavating old material or daringly pushing the form forward -- these artists seem to have taken all the bad, hacky parts of television, and tried to incorporate them into theatre. Somehow, these plays are generally a poor imitation not of great television (HBO), but actually of bad television (Law and Order). This, of course, leads to dreadful theatre, but somehow continually gets produced -- probably because these tend to be the "Issue Plays", i.e. plays that try to tackle a hot-topic issue (like race) and thus get programmed by clueless old white men who want to feel woke.

This is a trend that will destroy theatre.

Theatre is about drama. Theatre is about catharsis. Theatre is primal. It should not be something that it is not. If it tries to be television, it usually ends up being a watered-down version of something that wasn't very good to begin with, to which old white people in the audience say "HM" to very loudly, and then walk out patting themselves on the back for (supposedly) expanding their worldview.

Television is very good at what it does. Often, it's writing and dramaturgy and structure bests most plays.

And yet, theatre is still essential. But you have to do what's essential about it, not do everything it is not.

Sara Holdren, our best new theatre critic, perfectly articulates this in her absolute evisceration of the new play American Son:

There’s nothing remotely theatrical about this play, no reason for it to be a play at all — save that we retain a kind of anxious cultural cachet about drama. Putting something on stage seems to aggrandize it, make it more serious-minded and more luxurious, closer to opera than Netflix. But the truth is that contemporary plays like American Son are simply imitations of the shows on Netflix — or, in this case, NBC — and pale ones at that, because unlike our age’s spate of fascinating television, these plays want to be something they’re not. They neither take joy in the possibilities of their own form nor respect its demands... An advocate for American Son might argue that it’s important to have this story out there, but the facts of this story are out there every single day, and they are neither remedied nor rendered more terrible than they already are by being run through the mill of a hacky play.

She also quotes the late and great Maria Irene Fornes:

You can’t do something relevant unless you do it from your heart. And audiences … would stop pretending they are doing something relevant by going to the theater … There would not be writers writing plays by formula. Nor would artistic directors choose plays by formula. Nor would audiences think that they know the ropes and look for signposts to help them pretend they understand something that is only a signpost. This pretending gives but a shallow satisfaction and ultimately creates a distaste for theater.

Fornes and Holdren are spot on. Make theatre from the heart, make it personal, make it exciting. Don't try to coldly Calculate Relevance, because the results will kill everything great about theatre.

Saturdays

Sat, 03 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Saturdays are for dreaming.

I like to turn off the screens as much as possible. I turn my phone on grayscale.

Then I do other stuff.

Read books. Write in a journal. Go back to the page. Draw. Create something.

Get outside. Breathe in fresh air. Take weird photos.

Make up plans. Scribble them out. Take stock.

Listen to some music. New music. Old music. Weird music.

Think about all the good things in the world. And think about all the terrible ones, too.

And the people and the birds and the trees and everything.

....

...

And then, after you've taken some time away, re-enter the matrix. (And when you do, don't forget to vote.)

Procrastination

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Procrastination gets a bad rap.

In an age of hyper-optimization and productivity apps and tweaks and hacks, we demonize procrastination. It's the devil! Rise and grind! Do do do! Procrastination, after all, has an inverse correlation with productivity, which is the golden ideal of capitalism.

But I don't think procrastination is that bad. Paul Graham has written how there's good and bad procrastination -- some of the world's great thinkers and inventors and artists are terrible procrastinators, who procrastinate on busy work to do important work:

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I'd argue, is good procrastination.

John Perry has written a famous essay, also, on what he calls structured procrastination -- a "technique" I use all the time.

And Nassim Taleb, in typically bombastic style, has written how procrastination is a sort of natural BS detector:

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad—at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

I largely agree with all these points, but I want to expand on them with my own thoughts of how I think about procrastination.

See, I'm a Grade-A procrastinator. I put things off all the time.

And the way I see it, there are two reasons for procrastination:

Your natural instinct is telling you that this work is inessential and can be forgoed, or:
Fear is manifesting itself as procrastination

Now, obviously, there are things we can't procrastinate forever on. We have to do our taxes, pay the bills, and run errands eventually.

But often there will be something I'm putting off, and when I think about it, it's because it's really not that important. I try to trust my instincts and my BS detector.

If you develop good habits, procrastination is actually useful. For instance, I might read a great book or watch an old movie instead of responding to a medium-priority email. Which is better? Hard to say, but it's not like I'm wasting time by reading a book. (On the other hand, if you procrastinate by surfing Instagram or playing mindless video games, as I sometimes do, then you're not spending your time very well at all.)

Indeed, masterpieces of art have come as the result of procrastination, as the result of simply fucking around while you're "supposed" to be doing something else.

And it goes the other way: if you're writing or creating something and you're bored with it, what makes you think it's going to be different for people consuming it? Your procrastination is actually a really good sign that you probably need more excitement in your work.

But you need to ask yourself: Am I not doing this because I'm afraid?

Because sometimes we will trick ourselves into not doing something, but really we're just afraid to do it. (I can usually feel it in my heart. Journaling helps with this.) And I would argue that that type of procrastination is something you really need to be on the lookout for -- it is corrosive, and defers dreams.

But don't demonize or beat yourself up over procrastination, especially if is the good kind. Who knows what great things might come out of it.

The allure of intimacy in theatre and podcasts

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 00:00:00 GMT

One of theatre's great traits is its intimacy. We're in a room with people - mostly strangers - sharing in an experience that will only be experienced in that room, in that moment. It can't be replicated by any other form, right?

Sort of. But I actually think podcasts are the other form that has the most alluring intimacy, and a surprising crossover with theatre.

Sure, podcasts are very trendy right now. Everyone has one.

But many people think podcasts are old hat -- aren't they just internet radio? -- and in a way, yes, they are.

But what makes podcasts different from the radio of old is that they are mostly listened to by individuals on earbuds, or alone in the safety of a car on your commute to work. It's different than gathering around a radio to listen to the 6pm evening news. You're choosing exactly who you want to listen to, and then they actually enter into your headspace -- the place where you go to be by yourself to sit and dream and think.

So there is actually a startling intimacy to podcasts that shares something with theatre. And I think theatre needs to find more ways to plug into it. It seems to me it's the perfect digital form for an analog medium that desperately needs a way to spread itself digitally. Audible is already onto it. Gimlet's fiction podcasts are excellent, and other companies are producing quality work as well. But there's a world of opportunity out there for more innovation in the theatre/podcast crossover.

Intimacy is alluring, it's sexy. It's what will keep calling us to theatre. And it's also, strangely, what podcasts have to offer.

Theatre aphorisms, part one

Wed, 31 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

This is a collection of aphorisms on making theatre. In the future, I will better organize them.

The number one rule of theatre is do not be boring.

Theatre is always of the now. That is: the setting can be 1507; the time is now.

Verse is an underlying structure. But there are no rules… it's like your life playing out across the 'structure' of time. (Icke)

The nowness and analog-ness of theatre are its great advantages. This is why, if properly excavated, theatre will never go away.

Museum theatre: period costumes, dead accents, a production we've seen 1000x times. It belongs in an archival museum.

Theatre funny: things that are funny only to old white men who chuckle loudly in the dark of the audience

Theatre fun: when the people on stage are having “fun” but the audience is not in on it. This is excruciating to watch, and an increasingly trendy way to stage classics.

The tension between being American and performing an English play, for example, is not to be ignored. Rather, it's the whole point: it's what makes it unique.

'If theatre were half as good as HBO, we'd be hitting gold' - Simon Stone

We let theatre off the hook: most of it is phony melodrama with no real stakes or drama.

Study cinema, great television, a Beyonce concert, an exciting sports game: notice how they are never boring, how they are tense and keep you hooked, sometimes for three hours. When was the last time that happened to you in theatre?

"Theatre-makers" talk a lot about the right to fail, but it might just be an excuse for lack of rigorous thinking. (Icke)

Theatre is the great medium of metaphor and symbol. People forget this, and make literal-minded work that should have been put on film.

One great way to grasp a metaphor is through the visceral use of three dimensional space.

If you're afraid that mic'ing actors will ruin the authenticity of the form, it's almost certain you have bigger problems: you probably make boring theatre.

A play should be an event.

We both under and over estimate peoples attention spans these days. “Social media is killing our attention spans!” Maybe. Yet people line up to see a 6 hour Harry Potter show, or a 6 hour Angels in America, or the 3 hour Hamilton or a 24 hour Taylor Mac show. Theatre, as an event (if it is earned), will hold people's attentions. Or, it should be able to - just as people binge whole seasons of Netflix shows in one night. But an 80 minute play, if it is Deadly Boring, can seem like forever...

When the lights go down, you think: is this going to change my life? And then the lights come up and you realize, no, it's not. Those first moments are so important. Most theatre you can tell if it's going to be good or bad within the first 60 seconds.

Great writing and directing, to not be boring, doesn’t have to be large and bombastic. All you need is raw life, in all its natural tragedy, revealed on stage. You need vulnerability, warts, intricate sadness, and embarrassment. When we see that — truly, not faked — it is breathtaking. We are seeing actual human beings struggle, in all their bizarre complexity.

You, as a human being, are more complex than any character ever written. A character is lines on a page. A human being is a human being.

The space between wildness and discretion, danger and safety is where clarity lies.

Period Dress, most of the time, is merely a lack of imagination.

Drama is essential; primal. It interrogates to the core better than anything else, when done right.

Theatre is sculpting energy in a space.

Cut to the bone: what's the essential question we're exploring here? How can we best excavate it? Truly thrilling productions start there.

Acting should be a physical feat -- intense and often exhausting. This seems like it puts more work on the actor, but it doesn’t, because this style of acting is more fun, more addicting, more exciting and makes actor’s lives more meaningful. For examples of this, check Toneelgroep or Schaubühne or Rob Icke. The same actors work with the same directors, despite -- no, because -- of the demands.

Many actors act with quotes around them, which causes a barrier to go up between us and them. So instead of “Anger”, “Sex” and “Power”, try Anger. Sex. Power. Act it for real, not the idea. Take off the mask.

Good drama is simple and primal and truthful. See: Yerma.

But to be great art it must reach for the transcendent.

A lot of truly great art offers a reflection of its own medium.

A good test of great drama: it makes you shake.

Theatre can be an empathy machine.

The brutal truth: theatre does not do funny very well. If you want funny, turn on Netflix and watch a sitcom or stand-up. Seriously - they have mastered the form. Comedy is better suited to TV because comedy is a micro art form that relies on timing. The style of humor on The Office signaled the generational shift. Theatre is much too broad for most comedies. (I can’t wait to be proven wrong on this, by the way.)

If I wanted total 100% accuracy, I would go watch a movie. You’re missing the point.

Theatre and church are pretty similar, actually. In both cases, people generally go to feel worthy of going, and politely bored. And in both cases, the best experiences are transporting and transcendent.

Don’t use music as a lazy choice to set a mood.

In general, don’t make lazy choices. This is hard, and means thinking through every decision, including the decisions you didn’t even know you made. (Why do Romeo and Juliet have to be male and female? Why do they have to be pretty? Why does this need to happen in a proscenium? I’m not saying there’s a correct answer to those, but we must question everything.)

We use our unconscious brains to fill things in in theatre and create deeper meanings. That’s why taking literal things out is often way better than adding them in. There’s a reason why Ivo Van Hove and many great directors default to a clean aesthetic combined with raw, real emotion from actors.

Theatre can be in two places and times at once. It can stage the invisible minutiae of memory. Find things that theatre does uniquely well.

Getting good

Tue, 30 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Maira Kalman's Grand Central, one of my favoirte paintings

"The formula for success: TALENT + ENERGY" ---Derren Brown

As an actor or writer or director or artist, you really have two things you can focus on: your art and your career. Derren Brown writes that this is his formula for success: talent plus energy.

Brown is being tongue-in-cheek about there being a "formula", but what he means is that these are the two variables you can control --- success itself is not quite under your control. The only way to be happy is to focus on things under your control. (This is the basis of Stoicism and his book Happy.) Therefore, focus on developing your talent and energy (i.e. putting yourself out there), which may eventually lead to success.

The secret that Brown does not touch on, however, is that most people focus on developing their career, and not their art.

Don't be the director whose only goal is to finally get into the rehearsal room. Because when you hit your goal and it's day one, you'll realize you spent no time developing your talent and you're in over your head.

Instead, our primary goal should be getting good.

Brian Koppleman, the screenwriter and co-creator of Billions, used to have a series called "Six Second Screenwriting Lessons" where he would use Vine to give quick screenwriting tips. One of my favorites:

Say you have a day job and want to be a full-time artist and you have one hour a week to devote. Spend fifty minutes making art, ten marketing, zero complaining.

Marketing --- or developing your career/energy --- is certainly important. You should be networking, sending out emails, submitting to things, making friends and mentors, and doing all the things that will develop your career.

But you can't spend all your time doing that. You shouldn't spend most of your time doing that.

Instead, we need to focus on getting good. Which means developing your art. Working on exciting creative projects. Reading and writing and going to art museums and taking in things and seeing theatre and watching old films and getting lost in discographies and taking long walks under the morning sun and evening stars. Performing and practicing and self-producing your own weird experiments. In the beginning, focusing on quantity, and letting the quality develop.

Because the truth is that most people focus on their career. They stop getting good when they leave college.

And this means that not many people are actually good.

So the secret is that, if you get really good, you will stand out. People will take notice. And this is the best form of marketing. (That old Steve Martin line has truth in it: "Be so good they can't ignore you.")

For example, there aren't many truly original theatre directors out there right now, especially in the United States. Many young directors focus on their career, and forget about their art. If you can become really, really good --- and network the appropriate amount --- the opportunities will come.

At least, that's what I choose to believe. That's why I believe in focusing on getting good as the most important thing for being an artist.

Asymmetric Risk and High Small Hoops in Theatre

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I listened to a great interview with Nick Kokonas on The Tim Ferriss show the other day. Nick is the co-founder of Alinea, one of the best restaurants in America.

Nick is interesting because he is a businessman, a former trader, involved in a field that has a lot of artistry to it. (Alinea is known for its breathtaking restaurant experience.)

Nick talks about two concepts that are really helpful to understand if you're interested in starting a theatre company (as I am).

The first is this idea of Asymmetric Risk. I first learned of asymmetric risk from the work of Nassim Taleb (who Nick talks about on the podcast). The idea is that we value things wrong all the time, because we don't think of the asymmetric payoffs. For example, we might invest in something that has a 99% chance of getting us $5, and a 1% chance of us losing $5000. If we look at it in really basic terms - the odds are so good! We should definitely invest, right?

Well, no. And pretty much anyone can see why: the downside of losing is far greater than the upside of winning. The risk is asymmetric.

Asymmetric risk can go both ways. What you want to look for is opportunities that are the inverse: their downside is limited, but their upside is huge. These can also be referred to as "Positive Black Swans", as Taleb shows in his book Antifragile:

From Taleb's Antifragile

In theatre, for example, if you can find a way to reliably produce shows that generally break even or even lose some money, but every once in a while you produce a Hamilton, you have cracked the code. You are limiting your downside (you have to make sure you're not producing a show that has huge, unlimited downside - a chance to ruin you) and keeping the unlimited upside (it won't happen very often, but when it does, it more than pays off).

Kokonas talks about this in terms of restaurants, with this stat that gets thrown around that "on average, 95% of restaurants fail within the first year." Even beyond this data probably having no basis, averages are very misleading and dangerous, a type of two-dimensional thinking. What Kokonas saw was that, in essence, starting a restaurant was priced wrong: there was asymmetric risk. Sure, maybe 95% of restaurants fail, and they lose a little bit of money. But maybe the 5% that succeed do so very, very well and last a very long time.

So this leads to Kokonas' second idea (his own), of High Small Hoops. The idea is that, if you are smart and a hard worker, you should be seeking the high small hoops, like starting a restaurant, starting a startup, or even making a theatre company. So 95% of restaurants fail. Great! That means there's much less competition if you can make it through the High Small Hoop. The challenge of hitting that hoop is the fun - it's the thing that you obsess over, that keeps you up at night (in a good way) and gets you up in the morning. If you really put all your effort into it and have a totally fresh idea, Kokonas argues, are the odds really 95% that you'll fail? Probably not.

And besides, what's a year anyway? If you can find a way to mitigate your risk so that the downside is really not so bad, then you have a pretty appealing proposition on your hands.

My theory is that the same is true for theatre. There is lots of Asymmetric Risk in theatre, and the High Small Hoops theory is very much present. Everyone and their mother tries starting a theatre company, and most fail. Most don't understand or even think about risk, and most just aren't very good. (The other important part is that Kokonas had met someone he believed was a world-class chef who nobody knew yet, and they wanted to re-think every part of the restaurant experience -- right down to why we even think candles are romantic. How many theatre companies have world-class talent and are trying to re-invent the theatrical experience? Not many.)

It seems to me if you have talent, work hard, question everything that is "standard", understand asymmetric risk, and aim for exciting High Small Hoops - that's a recipe for some modicum of success. More on this in the future.

Quantity vs Quality

Sat, 27 Oct 2018 00:00:00 GMT

I will take care of the quantity. The Great Creator will take care of the quality. --- The Artist's Way

I'm starting a daily blog. Meaning every day, I will post something.

Blogs are becoming somewhat old-fashioned. They have been replaced by Instagram and Snapchat and Twitter.

But blogs have a kind of old-school relaibility: they are simple and straightforward. I control every bit of it - I'm not giving myself over to another platform. I'm completely in control.

My reasoning for starting a daily blog is spurred on by that quote I read from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, which is a cheesy-sounding book that has many cheeseball moments to it, but that also has a lot of terrific wisdom. (In particular, morning pages - a practice I do almost every morning.)

I want to put more stuff out there. I realized I need to focus more on quantity, and trust that the quality will improve as I go. The only way to get better is by doing, tinkering, and iterating. Put stuff out there, then do it even better next time. So the only way to get better is really by starting now.

That's why, for young artists, I think quantity may be more important than quality. I know that's a bit of a controversial statement. But if all you're worried about is quality, than you may never produce anything ever. Of course, you try to do the best you can. But what's even more important is putting something out there, and then putting more stuff out there, and getting better each step along the way.

That's my hope in starting this project. Most of what I write and post about will be related to theatre and art, and some occasional posts on life in general. I'm pretty inspired by Austin Kleon's blog, so thanks to Austin. I also love reading Marginal Revolution.

Let's do this.

23

Mon, 15 Jan 2018 00:00:00 GMT

Today I turn 23. Here are 23 things I’ve learned, principles to live by.

ALIGN YOURSELF WITH TRUTH. It’s always the best course of action. Telling lies—to others, to yourself, to the world—adds up. You are always watching yourself, and when you can’t even trust yourself to tell the truth, your self-esteem starts to crumble. Simplify your life by just being truthful, in every way: in literal conversation, and in being truthful to yourself about what you want in life.
TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. Treat your body well. When you are healthy, you feel better in just about every way. You are happier and kinder and you are more creative. It’s not vanity, it’s just living fully. Give your body:
- Good food
- Good sleep
- Good exercise.
SEEK OUT SILENCE. Meditate, or have a practice that centers you in some way. Having that silence with myself is one of my favorite parts of the day, to just listen.
DROP THE NARRATIVE. We love to invent stories. We are story-forming creatures, and this is often a good thing for how we translate experiences into happiness. But we also tell ourselves narratives that are often limiting and unhelpful. Because something happened in our past, we tell ourselves that we can’t do this or that. We form a narrative where there is none; where there is just life, in all its weirdness and randomness. (Social media doesn’t help.)
BE PRESENT. I know this sounds trite, but it’s astounding how much we aren’t in the present. And before you know it, your life has passed by. I still struggle with this: when you are listening just listen, when you are watching a movie just watch the movie. Just be here now. Life has more depth that way, more beauty, more richness.
SEEK OUT HELP. See a therapist. Talk to your friends. Talk to your parents. You don’t need to do this alone. On that note…
FRIENDS ARE THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN LIFE. I’m serious. Spend time with your friends. Actively make time for them. Having positive relationships is important for your health. Not only that, but if you’re in any sort of creative field the friends you make will often be the ones who give you a job, or who you work with, or who introduce you to someone else who can change your life. And beyond all that, having fun with friends is one of the most pure joys in life there is, so much so that I struggle to find anything more essential. Your relationships are the most important thing.
HAVE A CLEAR SENSE OF INTEGRITY AND VALUES. Having a clear sense of integrity and values is essential for making meaning in a chaotic world that is ripe with nihilism. When you don’t have values, you rationalize behavior that is destructive, to others and to yourself. It’s a bad place to be.
YOUR EDUCATION NEVER ENDS. It certainly doesn’t end with formal education. (I never finished.) Education is something you’re always doing. It’s some of the most important “work” you do on a daily basis. Always be learning, always be reading, always be curious. Take classes, travel, have weird experiences. Don’t let anyone tell you you need a certain formal degree. Keep on reading and learning always.
"HOW WE SPEND OUR DAYS IS, OF COURSE, HOW WE SPEND OUR LIVES." - ANNIE DILLARD. I have had this quote taped next to my bedroom door for a long time. It sounds so obvious, but it is so true: how will you spend this day—this one, right now, today? Because the days add up to form your life. So design your perfect day. Then try to live it, as much as possible. Do your work. Take a nap. See friends. Play. Exercise. Read a book. Be creative. And on that note, when things seem overwhelming, when things seem scary and sad and like you’re never going to make it, just focus on today. Don’t worry about anything else—the past or future. What can I do today? How can I focus on just making today great? Or at least as good as I can make it? I ask myself that question a lot, if I’m feeling overwhelmed by anxiety over the future, guilt or depression over the past.
YOU CAN DO WHATEVER YOU WANT. Seriously, you can. There really aren’t any rules. You don’t need permission. This is life, not school. Use that freedom for good: write a play. Start a business. Go live in Spain.
ALL THOSE WASTED DAYS ADD UP TO SOMETHING. From Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny Beautiful Things: “When I was done writing [the book], I understood that things happened just as they were meant to. That I couldn’t have written my book before I did. I simply wasn’t capable of doing so, either as a writer or a person. To get to the point I had to get to to write my first book, I had to do everything I did in my twenties. I had to write a lot of sentences that never turned into anything and stories that never miraculously formed a novel. I had to read voraciously and compose exhaustive entries in my journals. I had to waste time and grieve my mother and come to terms with my childhood and have stupid and sweet and scandalous sexual relationships and grow up.” Your days add up to your life, but sometimes days we thought were ‘wasted’ compound in ways completely unexpected; that the debauchery with old friends and new friends might actually be part of the point, that it makes you closer and also it makes you alive.
HAPPINESS IS INTERNAL, NOT EXTERNAL. And that means it’s achievable within you. Right now. It took a really long while for me to even remotely figure this out. I used to be sad a lot. My teachers called me Eeyore. I still can be a downer sometimes. But, as long as you have your basic needs taken care of (and of course this is not a given), you can love what you have, find peace within. Because constantly chasing for the next thing that will make you happy is an endless treadmill of hedonic adaptation. It leads nowhere.
YOU ARE WORTHY OF LOVE. And, moreso, you are loved.
STOP BEING SO FUCKING BUSY ALL THE TIME. In Tim Kreider’s masterful essay “Lazy: A Manifesto” from We Learn Nothing, he writes: “More and more people in this country no longer make or do anything tangible; if your job wasn’t performed by a cat or a boa constrictor or a worm in a Tyrolean hat in a Richard Scarry book I’m not convinced it’s necessary. I know we’re all very busy, but what, exactly, is getting done? Are all those people running late for meetings and yelling on their cell phone stopping the spread of malaria or developing feasible alternatives to fossil fuels or making anything beautiful?” It’s best to cultivate stillness, and a certain amount of laziness. Do the important things in life, the work you need to do and the work you love. But for many of us we fill our lives with emails and shit we feel is necessary but is merely a mirage; we spend our time with pointless tasks and todos when the real life was always outside, grabbing a drink with friends, lounging in Central Park on a sunny afternoon, playing hooky from all the ‘busy’ duties we were supposed to be doing and realizing that when we didn’t do them, the world did not end.
FILL YOUR LIFE WITH MEANINGFUL WORK. The flip side to not being busy is that work does matter. Along with relationships, finding meaningful work is one of the most important ingredients to a happy life. It means putting yourself into something you love, whether that’s designing, engineering, performing, writing, volunteering, or whatever. It can really be anything. It means doing something that you think is meaningful and important, and being genuine in that. I try to fill my time with lots of “work”, but it’s all things I love to do and make me happy, even if I don’t get paid for it. (And when I do, we’re really cooking.) I treat a lot of things like “work”: I make time to read a lot, time to write, time to act, time to make things and produce. I love all of it: that’s the kind of meaningful work that is worth filling your life with, the kind of thing that makes life meaningful.
PAIN IS A PART OF LIFE. As much as we try to avoid it, we will suffer. This is the first thing the Buddha taught, and the dude was spot on. Instead of flinching away, I’ve found it’s best to embrace that it’s going to happen. We get upset about stupid things, feel heartbreak, fall in and out of love, get hurt by friends—and these are just some small, first world problems. But pain can make us stronger. We can grow through failure. When we open up to it, feel into it, and then reflect upon what happened: we can become just a bit better, a bit stronger, a bit wiser. But it’s a continual up-and-down process, of failing and rebounding, of getting hurt and bouncing back—the key is to make sure it’s trending upwards, from a macro perspective.
KEEP AN OPEN MIND. In the past I’ve been somewhat argumentative and closed-minded. I think I’m right and that’s that. I’m trying to become more open-minded, and radically so. So that even when I come in with an extreme bias, I try to listen. I try to keep an open mind in all ways: in life, in art, in thought systems, in politics. In that way, life is continually opening new doorways for me to explore. I don’t assume I know everything about anything. Because I pretty much never do.
KNOW WHAT THE BEST DECISIONS ARE, THEN MAKE THEM. This is from Ray Dalio, and this one I have taped to my wall. You have to, with the best of your abilities, determine what the best decisions are. And then—and this is by far the much more difficult part—you have to have the courage to make them. This is tricky, because I come from a generation that is obsessed with keeping our options open, of being radically indecisive, of letting things slide until the decision is irrelevant or made for you. Instead, MAKE MORE DECISIONS. And as you do, become better at making decisions. That gives you a better life, one that you have authorship over.
OPTIMISM IS UNDERRATED. I used to be pretty pessimistic and cynical. It’s easy to be. The world kind of seems like it might end soon, for starters. If not by nuclear war, then climate change seems a bit problematic, to say the least. And if that isn’t enough, everything we do seems to pretty much be completely insignificant on the cosmic side of things: we’re living our entire lives in the blink of an eye on a tiny ball of mud that is a speck of dust in the infinitely expanding universe. Even if humanity does survive the next 100 years, it’s almost certain we will eventually fade away. And even if that doesn’t happen, you will still die, and what you leave behind will fade away too. Nothing we do matters.

So why be positive and resilient in the face of certain annihilation? Why not give in? Because life is better when you have a deep-seated optimism. Not a surface-level, self-help, smiley version. But when you believe that we can work together as humans to make this world a slightly better place, just for the time being, and that you can make a difference: by being kind, by creating art or doing whatever it is you do. By rippling out, positively influencing the future of humanity.

I also find it's helpful when I take a step back, go to the ontological, and realize what a remarkable thing it is to even exist at all, to be alive and be able to read this and to be able to think and be conscious. Existence is a mystery, there being something rather than nothing, and we won the lottery just to be born, let alone to be born with enough privilege to read this, let alone to be born during the most peaceful and prosperous time in the history of the human race. (Despite all the horrors that still exist, for so many people.) There’s too much to be grateful for for me to be negative.

And as one final point: negativity does nothing. It will make you angrier, it will make others around you angrier, and you will act not from a place of love. Even if the world is going to end, having this essential optimism is important for a productive worldview because it makes you be able to act at all. And being optimistic leads to being kind, and being kind leads to being happier. And if we’re going to die, we might as well spend this short life being as happy as we can be.

I now try to carry optimism with me in most matters. I assume that my best growth is ahead of me and that the world will continue, that it can be redeemed. I do this because I have no other choice if I want to be able to be a productive, sane, and happy member of society. It’s not delusional—I strive to understand reality as-it-is, and I am still pessimistic about certain matters. But again, it’s a deeper thing: it’s acting from a deeper place of optimism. Not necessarily “everything is going to be alright” but “everything is going to be, and that’s alright." I should write fortune cookies.
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY. This is another radical shift I made in the last year, and it must be carefully explained, but here it is: take responsibility for EVERYTHING in your life. Yes, everything. That doesn’t mean blame. It doesn’t mean beating yourself up for things you did, or things that happened to you. It just means owning your life, really taking complete authorship over it. When you do this, something strange happens, and that’s that things start to seem like they’re more in your control. By taking responsibility for things that weren’t even our fault, it means we don’t flinch away from reality. It means not blaming, but taking things in stride and saying, “OK, this happened, what can I do about it now.” Owning our actions and their consequences. Owning everything in our lives.
TRUST YOURSELF. By this I mean trust your intuition more. Trusting your gut is actually a biological thing; we’ve had millions of years of evolution to get here, and humans have long relied on trusting their guts. In this day and age it’s easy to second guess it, or defer to an opinion you read online. But when we really listen to ourselves, really get in touch with our intuition, we almost always make better decisions, and decisions we are more satisfied with. It’s something I’m still learning.
WRITE. Writing, along with reading and perhaps meditation, is one of the great meta-skills. That is, it’s useful no matter what you do, and its value is widely applicable and compounds. I have been a somewhat obsessive journaler in the past, and I think that this can sometimes lead to us telling ourselves a narrative that is false—this has happened to me—so I wouldn’t recommend becoming obsessive about it. But I journal almost every morning and/or night, just to get down all the crazy shit that bubbles up from the subconscious. I find that when I do, I am more centered, and I get more ideas. Both of those are big wins. But diaries are also, as Austin Kleon puts it, “evidence of our days”. And then, when you do it enough, it becomes something to look forward to. Writing becomes a way to think, a way to process, a way to articulate what has been brewing around in the back corners of your brain for too long. And then, when you're ready (or not), you might try sharing some of it.

Okay. That’s 23. I hope this list expands and refines over the years. I’ve been surrounded by the most remarkable people in my life, and I hope to continue to meet new people and have the opportunity to spread more love. I love you all, and I love life.

If you have any comments or responses, feel free to shoot me an email: gus.cuddy@gmail.com.

Will social media replace art, part 2

Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

One of the most compelling arguments for the slow replacement of art with social media is that the trends of film and theatre have tended towards naturalism in the last 50 years, arcing closer and closer to getting to be real life.

With an Instagram or Snapchat story, you are capturing and consuming real life as 'art'. Is this the peak of naturalism? Watching snippets of life is addicting and compelling, and social media makes these snippets bite-sized and consumable. Why watch a 2 hour play of people trying to act natural when we can consume the real thing in more palatable lengths?[^1]

Maybe the job of theatre and movies, then, is to furiously stake its claim as being something more than naturalism. To reach for greater heights, greater feats of human creativity and exploration.

I'm not sure, though.

Hemingway wrote that "all good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened" -- but I wonder if this will hold up when the truth of social media-cum-art and the Truth of Art are laid side by side.

I want to believe art offers something more, and I think at its best it does. It offers a window to the unconscious, an examination of our collective psyches.

But I also wonder if that's not what people truly want. I wonder if all we wanted to see was others' real lives, glimpsed as they actually are, so that we can feel less crazy, less alone, and more secure in our essential humanity. And if, strangely, social media-as-art offers this better than art-as-reality ever could.[^2]

[^1]: Look at the rise of vlogs as well, essentially turning your life into an art piece. [^2]: This ignores the rather large issue of a single company owning all of our stories and profiting off of it -- that's for part 3, though.

Will social media replace art?

Mon, 25 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

I've been spending a lot of time on social media recently. (I'm taking a break till the end of the year, but that's another story.) It's kind of new to me, but I really like posting to my Instagram story. There's something satisfying in always having a little ring around your picture that indicates you are doing something.

You are living your life and sharing it. Little funny things, or cool pictures, or selfies, or insights.

But lately, I can't shake this quote from an interview that playwright Christopher Shinn gave a few months ago:

Social media - the ability to create and publish "art" from one's life, and consume "art" from one's circle - is going to further evolve and eventually overtake art as it exists today. My advice to writers starting out is, write as a hobby and choose something else as a career.

This seems cynical at first glance. But the more I interact with social media, the more I realize the truth in it.

We are beginning to turn our lives into continual performance art pieces, and social media is the document. In a culture of fingers pointing at the moon, the fingers are becoming the moon.

I don't have a good answer to this. I think it's plausible. I also think it means we need to make art -- especially of the analog variety -- with even greater clarity and intensity.

But the domination of social media is becoming overwhelming. It presents interesting opportunities: I like Twitter, and I like Instagram, and I like Snapchat. But it's also concerning, because the co-opting of the word "Stories" by Instagram and Snapchat indicates a shift into narrative. (Twitter's foray into narrative is through "Moments".) Narrativizing our lives can be a productive and sometimes dangerous thing psychologically, and an interesting project artistically. But it begs the question: as Social Media stories become more dynamic, more inclusive, more creative -- will there be a place for traditional artistic experiences outside of nostalgia?

It's worth chewing on, if only to clarify your own reason for choosing to make art.

All those wasted days add up to something

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 00:00:00 GMT

When we grow up, it seems like we have a lot of wasted days.

We spiral around doing nothing. Walk down empty streets with our heads in the clouds. Daydream. Talk to our friends about life and stupid shit at 4 AM. Stay up all night for no reason. Make out drunkly with people we shouldn’t. Write stupid poetry, scribble weird doodles, make new friends and lose old ones. Sometimes we lay in bed and just listen to music, or cry, or watch an old movie.

But there’s a secret to life and that secret is that, if you look for it, all these wasted days add up to something.

It may not be much: it may just be some important aspect of your personality, or something that gives you perspective. But it can also be larger: the friend you made at 3am can change your life. The poetry becomes a foundation for your art. Conversations you had come back into your life in weird and unexpected and wonderful ways. The experiences you share with others make up the fabric of your existence, become the things that tie us together in intimate ways.

Truth is, there is no “reason” for any of this. We’re alive for an incredibly brief period of time and we spend much of our early years just dicking around, and it’s easy to feel guilt over this dicking around.

But you actually have to have faith. Faith that it’s going somewhere. That it all adds up to something. All the pointlessness, all the stupidity, all the wasted nights. They’re actually worth something. It’s a lesson I keep learning, that nights I thought were stupid and wasted come rippling back into my life in profound and positive ways. But you have to look for it.

On daydreaming

Sat, 08 Jul 2017 00:00:00 GMT

“Idle dreaming is often the essence of what we do.” - Thomas Pynchon

Creating art means giving yourself time to dream.

It means sometimes you have to doodle. Monsters and machines and shapes.

Sometimes you have to sit and stare out the window and do nothing but watch the snow fall softly down.

Sometimes you have to take a long walk in the middle of the night and look at the stars. Sometimes, strangely, this is the deep work of being creative.

Sometimes you have to sip your coffee and do nothing but scratch some stupid poetry into your notebook. Sometimes you have to lazily flip through a children’s book.

Sometimes you have to lay back and put on a record to which you know every word, wandering through aural dreamscapes.

Sometimes you have to talk late with friends about nothing in particular, and about everything at once.

Don’t believe anyone who says daydreaming is for suckers. Sometimes, it’s the only thing to do.

It just requires two things: a sense of wonder, and patience that it all adds up to something or another.

The finger pointing at the moon

Wed, 31 May 2017 00:00:00 GMT

We have a serious problem.

In an age of memes, podcasts, and reddit, we have approached a new age of meta-ness. Everything is ironic, reflexive, or post-something.

This, in itself, is not the problem. The problem is this: the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon.

What does this mean? It means don’t confuse the people talking about the art for the actual artist.

When it comes down to it, we need to go out and create the art. Do the work. Create the moon.

Instead, we have a generation once-removed.

We are obsessed with “life-hacking” everything: optimize your time. 10x results by buying this software. Obsessed with the cult of productivity, the cults of minimalism and organization.

But it’s all just fingers pointing at fingers pointing at the moon.

Get real, turn off the internet, and start working on the moon.