Lessons
Ode to My Summer House Guests
Saturday, June 26th, 2010 | Lessons | No Comments
Fruit Flies in the Kitchen
Spiders in the Bath
Ants in the Living Room
I hope summer lasts and lasts
growing up: my ten year college reunion
Sunday, June 13th, 2010 | Lessons, Personal | No Comments
this weekend marked ten years out of college.
i returned to Brandeis with trepidation.
i planned on spending most of my time visiting with two current friends and two old friends.
the two current friends are lovely, intelligent, beautiful women who have become close to me since graduation and the birth of my child.
the two old friends are my most favorite roommates. Sazz and i were placed together as freshman and were only parted for one year while i studied abroad. Fuzz and i were in the same orientation group and somehow managed to drift into friendship. by the time we were seniors, the three of us were bunking with three others. and the six of us were golden. bizarre but golden.
a couple who showered together and squeezed into each others tiny twin size beds for shared sleep.
a gay man who made me laugh so hard i cried and who shared philosophical conversations with the boys in the dorm that went far over my meager understanding of philosophy.
my roomie of old, who taught me how to live a social life, love all things glittery, and painted my nails for the first time in my life.
my buddy from oh canada who could zed with the best of them and showed me that to change the world can be as easy as opening your mouth and talking to a stranger. in my eyes, he is fearless.
senior year. a year of parties, drama (on and off stage), impatience, and love. i remember it most fondly of my three years at Brandeis because of my dear roomies…and the hope of moving beyond the walls of campus.
college and i were not the best of friends. i remember very little from books which is not surprising since i wasn’t always in class nor cared enough to study much. this is what happens when an overachiever ends up in courses far too easy to be truly venerated or far too boring to be loved. but i made it through. with honors, no less.
and now it’s ten years later.
i spent a tiring day schlepping my child around campus to show her off to the masses.
i spent an evening dancing with my two favs, arms swinging wide, hair flying, sweat dripping. i danced like i haven’t danced in years. i remembered what is was to dance with people i love.
and then we walked.
and then we talked.
it was grande.
and now, i guess, i can call myself a grown-up.
To Do Good Stuff
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 | Lessons, Personal, Women in Theatre | No Comments
Mama: Okay, I’ll sit with you for three songs and then I’ll run downstairs and get my computer and sit in the big chair and work while you fall asleep.
Avi: What work?
Mama: I’m designing a postcard for my theatre company and I have to finish it tonight.
Avi: You go to the theatre?
Mama: Yes, I own a theatre company. We don’t have a building yet, but we are a company. I’m the boss.
She giggles and I smile.
Mama: Is that funny?
Avi: Yes. She giggles some more.
Mama: But you know what we do? We hire women and girls. We help them become better theatre artists, and stronger leaders, and change the world.
Avi: And Do Good Stuff.
Mama: Yes, And Do Good Stuff. Just like….do you remember who’s birthday it is today?
She points to herself and smiles slyly.
Mama: Martin Luther King, Jr. He was a great man who changed the world.
Avi: Why do we say it’s his birthday?
Mama: Because he was a great man. He worked very hard to help all people be treated well, no matter what color skin they have. And we want to remember him so we always celebrate his birthday.
Avi: And he was born this day?
Mama: Yes.
May we all remember this birth that changed the world, honor the women and men who continue and broaden his work, and honor the births of new movers and shakers.
IRL vs. Web 2.0
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | Lessons, The Meaning of Art | No Comments
My business life consists of two polar opposites.
A – Driving hither and yon to talk over tea with theatre artists of all types. Today I met with a Stage Manager after first meeting with a couple of administrators. Sunday, I met with a playwright.
B – Composing my life, eco-events, and theatrical processes in approximately 140 characters, witty copy, and interesting comments.
A – IRL
B – Web 2.0
A – This is all new to me. I am inherently shy. I lead well, but only when no one else steps up to the line. Striking out into the world means speaking eloquently, being myself, pausing, breathing, relaxing, honoring, and meeting some pretty damn fine people that I otherwise would have passed on by.
B – This is all new to me. I write. Now I get to stretch my writing skills. Now I have to read a gazillion blogs and tweets and articles to keep up. Not to mention the how-to books. I know a lot people, but I don’t know what they look like.
I think I like IRL better. But it is only through Web 2.0 that I have been able to fully begin to explore what it means to be actively engaged in meeting people and creating sustainable mutually beneficial relationships. Because reading others ideas, writing my own thoughts concisely, representing an idea in an image, this has been part of the process of finding me so that I might step out my door and seek others.
But, this leads to much deeper questions: with all the marvels of web 2.0 do we do what I have done? Use what we’ve learned to step out into the world? Or do we use it as an excuse to step away from people we face in order to tweet to the people we follow? Can the two worlds really be married?
In a sense, I feel like many communities in the U.S. are facing what the theatre faced with the advent of film: A new medium that can either snuff the real or make it stronger. I vote for it making us stronger, which is why I’ll keep racking up the mileage and coffee shop bills to talk face-to-face with all the very cool people out there.
Quite O’rwhelm the Senses
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | Lessons | No Comments
The side effect of beginning a new project, any project really, is that it is constantly buzzing through my head.
If I’m not trying to figure out what to tweet or write in the e-news, or remembering who I need to follow-up with, or write a thank you note, or which chapter I’m on, I’ve got visions of Hamlet running through my head.
Every few months, this culminates in a day with a single thought running on top of these buzzes: curl up in a ball. curl up in a ball. curl up in a ball. curl up in a ball.
But I don’t. I forge on. I sift through the to-do list, I patiently explain to my preschooler why screaming is not an option, I call and make appointments, I fold laundry, I scrub things, I research and comment and tweet and compose emails, and I sift through the to-do list yet again.
And the day ends with stress nightmares and I wake up with a stomachache.
And then I shut everything off for a couple of days. Everything. I ignore emails. I don’t listen to messages. I shove away the list running through my head. I sew and go for runs. I go on adventures in life.
And after a time, I’m ready to go back and forge on again.
This time, I’m back. But I don’t feel ready. I’d like a few more days.
Maybe it’s the end of summer on top of it all. Family vacations are over and Avi will be starting school next week. My personal fiscal stress rises to five alarms about this time of year with several impending birthdays and the holiday season approaching with nary a penny saved.
So the challenge this week is to forge on and take the time, all at once.
I don’t know if it’s possible, but my sanity depends on it.
Risking Innovation Day 2: The Glass Proscenium
Sunday, August 16th, 2009 | Lessons, Political Action, Women in Theatre | 1 Comment
Now that I’ve recovered from NYC induced sensory overload, I figure it’s high time I gave you a full wrap up. Let’s revisit Day 2, previously shared only in nutshell form.
The Glass Proscenium: The Current State of Women in Professional Theatre.
As I wrote in my last post, Holy Panel! The women included (forgive me if I miss anyone, I’m pulling this list directly from the conference schedule): Natka Bianchini (U. of Maryland-College Park), Jill Dolan (Princeton), Sara Warner (Cornell), Leigh Fondakowski (Tectonic Theatre Project), Nadine George-Graves (UCSD), Julia Jordan (freelance playwright/director), Sarah Lambert (Tectonic Theatre Project), Esther Kim Lee (U of Ill, Urbana-Champaign), Lisa Merrill (Hofstra), Priscilla Page (New WORLD Theatre/Umass Amherst), Sheri Wilner (freelance playwright).
Before I re-cap, I went and double-checked the meaning of “glass ceiling.” Looks like it was originally coined by Wall Street 20-odd years ago. It, as I remembered correctly, refers to the “unofficial” and “invisible” policies and non-policies that prevent women from gaining top positions, climbing career ladders, and receiving equitable wages. Since then, the phrase has been modified to fit various sub-cultures and minorities. The term “Glass Proscenium” does, indeed, seem fitting in a theatrical setting.
We started out by getting to hear Emily Sand’s recent thesis presented by her. This was well received, as expected, and I, personally, was thankful for it. I’m not an economist so when I went to read her thesis and look at the slides (when the original NYTimes articles covered the story) I felt a little lost in the numbers. I also had questions about the inherent flaws within arts studies due to the nature of judging art itself. This answered a few questions for me and opened the floor to some interesting comments from panelists.
First of all, there are two beginning theories accounting for WHY fewer plays written by women are produced: Human Capitol (Fewer plays are written in the first place and submitted to theatres.) and Discrimination (Gender bias prevents the production of plays written by women). Second, she used doollee.com to find some basic statistics about playwrights, gender, and the gender of characters in plays. According to Sand’s findings, women are more likely to write about women and they make up for it by writing about fewer characters. First of all, the stats at Doollee are far from a complete picture of women playwrights (which she admitted as a potential flaw) and secondly, to assert that they “make up for it” by writing plays with fewer characters is placing an assumption on choice. That’s probably grounds for yet another study.
Sands sent out 4 different scripts–and here’s what I was most curious about–written by established playwrights of both genders. My original thought when I read the study was “women and men write different plays; how does she account for that artistic factor?” It was nice to hear that she did. She included an unpublished script by Pulitzer Prize winning author, Lynn Nottage, who is a woman and black. The rest you can glean from articles: they were sent out with fake names to 250 theatres along with 18 questions concerning economic viability, audience likeability, artistic quality, etc. The results included clear stats that plays perceived to have been written by women, although considered equally artistic, were deemed as “lower overall quality” and with “poor economic prospects.”
There is no qualitative or quantitative evidence that audiences prefer plays written by men, but apparently artistic decision-makers are making that assumption. She continued to posit that scripts with male protagonists did far better than scripts with female protagonists. And she concluded with the poorly received quip “You may be better off trying to disguise your gender.” A well-placed line that hit home all to well and felt like salt poured into our existing scratch marks.
Esther Kim Lee responded:
She’s been taking informal surveys from women playwrights and of 51 submissions was able to use 49 playwrights to gather some additional information. Aged mostly 36-45, only one had a play produced on Broadway. Their success has an “upside version of what we perceive as success,” most plays had been produced at colleges and local community theatres with the least number being produced off-Broadway. Which led into self-perceived questions about how certain items had affected their careers as playwrights: 45% said gender, 38% race, and ethnicity was even higher than gender (sorry, no percentage was provided). She interpreted these findings to suggest that these playwrights were interested in finding a community in which to create their art.
She continued to ask about the importance of various items, of which she shared a few: the gender identity of the audience was the least important, 60% said the diversity of audience is important, 50% said a Broadway production is not important to them. Finally, 65% said it is not advantageous to be a minority when writing about which she shared many quotes which followed along the lines of it initially giving them an advantage based on being trendy but “when the novelty wears off” the Artistic Directors lose interest.
When these 49 women were asked to look at Emily Sand’s study, the responses were two-fold: 1 – “I’m not surprised” and 2 – “I’m not interested in mainstream Broadway productions.”
Here’s where I should interject and note that Sand’s study includes another part about economic impact. Because it is virtually impossible to get a hold of economic impact data from regional and small theatres which are by nature and definition non-profit, she included an economic impact study of Broadway. So, the ability of women playwrights to create revenue was based on Broadway productions. This is important to remember because it meant raising the question, “What IS the measure of success for women playwrights?”
Priscilla Page responded next:
She did even more informal questioning, gathering entirely qualitative anecdotes and opinions from women on FaceBook. She raised the initial doubt concerning using Broadway as a basis for measuring success. The doubt as o the effectiveness of Doollee.com as an accurate stats tool. As an example of success, Lynn Nottage just won the Pulitzer Prize for Ruined, and yet it continues to run on off-Broadway not Broadway. Furthermore, her company, New WORLD Theatre which produces 60% women-led projects just had its funding pulled.
Julia Jordan chimed in:
Plays about war and rape written by men are on Broadway, why shouldn’t Ruined got to Broadway?
Based on Sand’s Study: if these are the numbers here in NYC [with women's plays on Broadway bringing in MORE money in LESS amount of time] why wouldn’t you think they match up elsewhere?
“Women are submitting to theatres that produce them.” So it’s impossible to determine whether there are fewer submissions by women at theatres because they don’t bother submitting to places that don’t produce them. [That last sentence is mine, not Jordan's.] Agents only want to represent writers who make money, so they are unwilling to represent women playwrights which means they can’t get produced or published. [Furthermore, I just discovered from a colleague that most regional theatres no longer accept scripts that are not represented by an agent. So, if an agent won't take you on because women aren't produced, you can't get produced to convince an agent to take you on. Self-perpetuating circle.]
Plus some TCG facts I didn’t know: Of the most successful plays in the past 10 years, 70% have female leads AND 70% of Pulitzer Prize winners have female leads.
Nadine George-Graves came next:
“This leads to many questions…tend to dance around speculating about reasons..” How about we cut to the chase and say, “This is what’s happening. What do you think?” This statement came with a collective chuckle of relief. Personally, I felt like we’d been doing a lot of dancing and not much action-taking. Action-taking beings with frank dialogue. She suggested we combine personal data and hunches to make “provocative statements that aren’t polite.”
She continued to suggest: Let’s look at history and see what’s happened in the past? Male playwrights can make the excuse that they “don’t write women well” but we can’t make that excuse and chose to write more about men anyways. As an historical example she noted that the first black professional baseball players had to be better than their white counterparts to be taken seriously. On Broadway, there’s still an “old boys network” and women don’t benefit from mentorship opportunities because of this. And the word she repeated the most? Hegemony. Hegemony. Hegemony.
Finally, she asked us, What are NEW avenues of intervention. Ah Ha! Here’s that Innovation theme finally cropping up.
Sarah Lambert continued the success discussion:
Is it “making a living”? And yet, how many playwrights actually make a living at writing plays? What are the stats on how many men versus women are making this playwriting a living? And how many of them are “independently wealthy”?
Sheri Wilner changed the focus:
She referred to an ad by a now defunct theatre company that invited women to bring their female friends along for a free ticket, which allowed their male friends to “opt-out” of women-centered plays. Is this a good thing for production, or detrimental to allow men to get out of watching women on stage?
Personally, I’m not sure this really applies. Considering we had already visited the fact that 70% of the most successful plays in the past ten years had female leads which means male audience certainly are watching women on stage instead of “opting out.”
Here’s where we finally started to head towards action…
Lisa Merrill suggested:
Let’s look at unconventional places that account women in history. Women have not been recorded in history due to its being considered non-essential. We need to find their stories in gossip, letters, and journals.
How internalized is sexism and gender bias: The assumption of the universality of the male story.
She is “inspired by groups who raise questions.” like “How do we get invested in working against our own interests?” [She's referring to the above statements about self-perpetuating circles of catering to agents and assumption-laden producers and artistic directors.]
Susan Zeitler continued the action refrain:
Can we look at youth data? Since we know we have it?
And “How do we develop these young audiences to not replicate our current adult gender issues?”
Julia Jordan chimed in again: “Women are prophesizing that people will be discriminatory to protect their economic self-interest.”
Jill Dolan:
Finally, we get a response to the NYTimes coverage of Sand’s thesis which picked up on the anomaly that it appears as if female artistic directors are more likely to turn away plays written by women. She points out that they included this fact and expounded it into a “women hate women” theory: it’s all our fault that we don’t produce ourselves. When, in fact, most regional theatres are NOT headed by women. The artistic decisions are being made by men so this media statement does not hold its own when looking at the theatre industry as a whole.
[Don't worry, folks. Almost done. Yes, this 90min discussion was long, fact-filled and very powerful. My post does not do its dialogue justice.]
“How can we keep it visible to people?” Continue the discussion so it doesn’t fall by the wayside and then is “found” again in five years…as if gender bias in theatre is a new problem that’s never been tackled before. Cultural presumptions about gender, race, etc still exist even with new national dialogue thanks in majority to the respective races of Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama.
How can we generate more stories?
“We have to work on all sorts of levels to make ideology change.”
Priscilla Page:
“We are responsible” for adding our work to history and “documenting oneself.”
The Panel stated:
We guess 80% of the people at this conference are women.
————-
As you can see, the discussion ended up focusing on Playwrights, but their challenge is our challenge. In fact, our challenge is not just one of theatre. Just today, the NYTimes put out another article on women, this time about women in military service. We started this fight a long time ago and we’re not there yet. We are far further along than when my mother was 30 and when her mother was 30, but how much farther can we get by the time my daughter is 30? What will the gender landscape be in 27 years?
And, where can you find all those female playwrights?
Your first job is to search locally. Just ask. Start conversations and find out for yourself. Welcome your doors to writers who are not represented by agents. Make a concerted effort (goal, even) to create a season that is made up equally of male and female playwrights.
For a list of emerging playwrights, you can check out the archive for the Jane Chambers Award run by the Women in Theatre Program.
Next Up:
- Writing About Theatre Practice
- Risking Theatre for the Very Young – Art, Education or Experimentation?
- Risking Innovation in Directing Training: A Presentation of Manifestos on the Academy’s Approach to Training Directors for the Future
- Enhancing Teaching and Learning through Theatre: Support for Model Programs; Research Findings; and Collaborative Opportunties
Fundraising: Learning the Ropes
Friday, July 17th, 2009 | Lessons, Projects, The Meaning of Art | No Comments
I am shy.
I don’t like calling people I don’t know.
I don’t like calling people I do know.
I don’t like walking up to a stranger and trying to start a conversation.
The thought of having to deal with insurance companies and cable companies who want money I don’t owe them practically makes me puke.
And yet, I’m an actress who rarely gets stage fright.
And yet, I’m currently trying to raise close to $30k for the opening show of GAN-e-meed.
None of this really adds up: until I had tea this afternoon with an old friend and was reminded how much I love improv, and how I learned to settle the jitters by putting on a character, leaping on to stage and just talking. How I learned that failure is okay. How I learned that listening is okay too. How I learned that the people around me, for the most part, want me to succeed, and as long as I remember that, I’m okay.
After this nice reminder (not to mention a really nice visit with a really nice gentleman) I headed over to betahouse for a mixer/orientation for The Awesome Foundation. As far as I can tell, a bunch of friends now numbering an even dozen have all gotten together and created a foundation. Every month they take in applications for Awesome Projects, chose one lucky project of awesomeness, and hand over a $1000 grant. Their definition of Awesome? Hard to tell. They eventually admitted that they have 12 different definitions of Awesome, but it did also come down to innovation, community involvement, and a finite ability to accomplish something. The application process is through the use of online text fields: no budgets, no back story, just 500 words to sell them on your project. This is exactly the kind of innovative way, particularly in this–as they say–”economic climate” the community should be getting together to create opportunities. Very awesome indeed.
So, I walked in with my improvisational groove on and let it be known that I, too, had an awesome project. I met several of the trustees and a whole bunch of other applicants with their own awesome ideas. I think I actually had more fun finding out about their projects than pitching my own. However, I also took away some great lessons on how to pitch an idea well.
- Start with a hook, just like writing. Something clear, concise, and easy to understand. Make sure the hook leaves them wanting to ask for more.
- Know your facts and use them.
- Make sure your audience is ready for facts before you use them.
- Don’t be afraid to tout your own credentials when asked and be able to do so concisely.
I also gave myself a pat on the back because I brought my biz cards and handed them out with abandon.
So, I’ve got me some new tools, I’m feeling good about developing these–sorry to be repetitive–development skills, and I may, indeed, actually be able to pull of raising this massive sum of money. It will be very worth it.
SerahRose
