Flux Theatre Ensemble

by August Schulenburg

One of the moments I love in Dog Act is when Vera, pretending (or is she?) to be the deity Wendy, explains to her new Scavenger followers why the Vaudevillian has a protected status in the world of the play:

"You are treading on the hem of a great mystery. I will say this, my children, listen thou well. The vaudevillian is the repository of all that was and all that may be. She is the key. She is translator of our souls. More than this, more than all, listen thou, dear scavengers: she is that rare and precious pearl lying in this dark, drear, perilous sea: she is entertainment."

Note that Vera/Wendy climaxes with "entertainment", not "art." Yet in the usual ranks of righteousness, Art is seen blazing pure at the right hand of the deity, while Entertainment perniciously capers on more pandering planes below.

Wading into dangerously semantic estuaries, I think there is a useful event horizon to find between Art and Entertainment; a boundary that is fluid and dependent on context but real and important all the same.

This boundary emerges from the idea of cognitive dissonance, a theory discussed in depth in this excellent podcast interview with Carol Tavris, author of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts. I believe this idea of cognitive dissonance is at the center of the difference between art and entertainment.

The short version is that once the our brain believes something to be true, it has a profoundly difficult time in changing that belief. In fact, it actively curates experience to protect a pre-existing belief from any evidence that contradicts it, leading to the saying, "Believing is seeing."

As Tavris says, "Once we have a belief, we see the information that will confirm that belief, and we stop seeing what we don't want to see, don't expect to see, have no wish to see; that's the blind spot in how we perceive what other people say and do, (and) how we evaluate our own behavior." Our brain does this automatically, and it takes a great deal of mindfulness to even notice that it's happening.

This mindfulness, this deliberate courting of doubt and uncertainty, of trial and error, is best embodied in the scientific method; but as Tavris explains, the scientific method runs directly counter to the momentum of the brain, which prefers to simplify the complexity of experience through perceiving only that which reinforces pre-existing patterns of belief, even if those patterns are harmful.

I believe that the difference between art and entertainment is simply the amount of cognitive dissonance we are required to engage in by the work. When a play reinforces pre-existing patterns of thought, that comfortable feeling is called entertainment; but when we are forced to hold new, potentially uncomfortable truths in our minds - truths that may require us to change what we believe - that friction is called art.

With this definition, the boundary between art and entertainment is fluid and depends on social context. As accepted norms differ from culture to culture, a play may very well be entertainment in one culture and art in another. A production of A Midsummer Night's Dream can be entertainment but it can also be art, depending on how much cognitive dissonance the production decides to illuminate within that deceptively pleasing play.

It may be that what we recognize as genius is simply the manifestation of a cognitive dissonance that persists across time and culture. Certain works of art never lose the searching edge that destabilizes what we think we know, and creates within us the possibility for change.

In our mission, we talk about transformational theatre, and Isaiah recently wrote a powerful post of how that manifests itself in our staging choices. Our work explores how to harness that searching edge of cognitive dissonance, as dizzyingly uncomfortable as it can sometimes be.

I believe this frame also underscores the importance for funding the arts. It's natural that entertainment would be profitable: we love being told that our beliefs are right and just and we should keep on keeping on. But we need to be challenged, to court doubt and uncertainty, to look at belief as a process and not a destination, to value curiosity as deeply as faith. We need the searching edge of art to continue to evolve as social, moral creatures.

But, hey, that's just what I think right now. I'm not holding onto any idea too tightly. We never step in the same river twice. Doubt is my faith, so bring the change. Read the full story

In a recent game of chess, I felt the pull of the weird intuitive current that I usually only feel when writing plays. It was mid-game, and all of a sudden I knew which direction my pieces needed to move without actually knowing the exact moves I needed to make. It felt very much like the muscle that takes over in playwriting when a certain amount of momentum has been achieved, and I follow that intuitive current wherever it wants to go.

So I was thrilled when reading a Scientific American article that described this process in the mind. The Secrets Of The Expert Mind looked at how chess experts analyzed a board in contrast to amateur players. Among their discoveries:

• Statistical formulas of skill predict the outcome of games with remarkable reliability
• Good players examine more possibilities than weak players, but great players examine better possibilities than good players
• Grandmasters do no better than weak players at general tests of memory, while doing remarkably better at chess-specific tests of memory
• Random positions on a chess board are much harder for grandmasters to analyze than positions achieved through authentic play

As a result, theorists believe that chess mastery is learned through effortful study, the 10,000 hours of practice rule, and not through innate ability. Further, this mastery manifests itself in an ability called "chunking" which directly connects to my thoughts about writing plays.

Humans can only contemplate five to nine items at a time. Chunking is the capacity to pack information into hierarchies to get around this limitation. Says the article:

"Take the sentence 'Mary had a little lamb'. The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speaker of English, this sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.

In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of informaion, because the pieces can be placd in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as a "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside", tgether with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain", and thereby cram the entire position into five or six chunks...Simon estimated that typical grandmaster has access to rouchly 50,000 to 10,000 chunks of chess information."

It is not a far leap to replace chess strategies with narrative strategies. My experience of writing Jacob's House in two days convinced me that the ideal way to write a first draft is as quickly as possible. Otherwise, it is like playing a chess game over several weeks, a few moves a day, with the overall heat and feel of the whole lost.

But of course, it is very difficult to write effectively that quickly. The Lesser Seductions of History took me a very long time to reach a credible first draft, in large part because it employed very difficult, complex narrative strategies I'd never used before. And this brings us to another key point of the study:

"Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but 'effortful study' which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time."

After truly finishing The Lesser Seductions of History, I found it much easier to write credible living drafts of Dark Matter and Jacob's House very quickly. I think this may have something to do with the challenge of writing Lesser Seductions expanding my capacity as a playwright, so that I was able to better analyze the 'chunks' of narrative strategy, making the first draft more of a downhill slope of a thousand slaloms than a cross country trek of slow and deliberate choices.

Looking at my journey as a playwright, I notice a similar pattern: a play of difficulty that stretches my capacity as a playwright, followed by one or two plays that come easy. Night and the Maiden leading to Carrin Beginning, Riding the Bull and Kidding Jane leading to Good Hope, Other Bodies leading to Honey Fist.

Lately, I have felt that capacity accelerate, and I believe it is directly connected to Flux Sundays. This is for two reasons: one, I am forced to write more frequently than I ever have before; and two, I am seeing my work staged in front of an audience on a weekly basis.

I highlight that last sentence because I think it is so critically important. Writing plays that are never staged is like playing chess with yourself. You'll learn something, but that growth can in no way match the growth created by actually seeing your work staged.

So I take away from this the importance of continually writing plays that stretch my capacity, as well as plays that allow me to synthesize that growth; and to get the work on its feet, where real experiential knowledge lives. Flux Sundays does that, and allows us to create that opportunity for other playwrights and artists we believe in, and to learn from each other.

As the article says:

"Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest 'natural' chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it."

Are there other playwright who have experienced this feeling of growth in capacity? Or do we really believe that inspiration is solely the gift of some capricious fairy that may or may not settle on our shoulder as we face the blank page? Read the full story

In February, I posted about about the dimensions of character in an oh-so-accessible post entitled A String Theory of Character. Simply put, that post explored the idea that richness of character is determined by the directions in which the meaning of a single action can resonate. When a one-dimensional character acts, the meaning of that action is simple. When a multi-dimensional character acts, the meaning echos in a number of often contradictory directions. The action is simple, the meaning is complex.

A hopefully simple example: a man blinds himself. Without the context of dimensions, it is simply a violent, incomprehensible act. But as the man is a king, the act takes on political dimensions. As he is a man of destiny, the act takes on metaphysical dimensions. As he is an infamous mother lover, the act takes on erotic and familial dimensions. And as is he is a genuinely good and supremely confident man, the act takes on moral dimensions, too.

A single act that echoes in many different, often contradictory, dimensions. And what goes for richness of character goes for the world of the play, too. One of the first questions I think about when approaching a play is how many dimensions are present? In how many directions can a single act echo?

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a supreme example: there is the meta-world of the theatre itself, the fairy world, the political/legal world of Theseus and Athens, the world of the lovers, the mechanicals, the play within the play that combines them all; each of those with its own set of moral, physical, and emotional rules, each with their own language. I also believe there is a seventh dimension, one of transcendence, touched through Bottom and Titania's union; working on the play I sometimes felt the dim shape of an eighth dimension hidden in the relationship between Puck, Oberon, and the world of shadows.

And when the play is done right, and all seven + dimensions are open, an action in the play can echo in seven different directions, so the reconciliation of Oberon and Titania is a reconciliation of magic, law, love, of the play itself, of theatre; and an end to the possible union of human and divine that their discord created. You could argue the dimension of gender adds an entire, more painful dimension to this reconciliation, as Oberon has won her love back in a misogynistic way. Additionally, the dimension of loss, introduced to the play through Titania's love for her dead Votress, adds an ambiguous note to the reconciliation, as who can say if it is good or bad that she has moved on from the memory of this woman she loved so much?

It may seem strange to consider a dimension of loss on the same footing as a dimension of law, but we are interested here in the directions in which meaning can move.

A Midsummer Night's Dream may be the supreme example, but Flux is drawn to plays that are multi-dimensional in this way. Jacob's House, our upcoming production, has at least five dimensions: family, as the siblings gather to interpret their father's will; memory, as they argue over the slippery legacy of their parent's actions; manifest destiny, as the lives of their parents seem to have stretched over the course of America's bloody history; hunger and fullness, and how ideas of morality wrestle with primal hungers; and divine blessing, as the characters deal with the gift and curse of being touched by the divine.

A single action in Jacob's House, if we do our job right, will echo in at least these five directions, and so a series of very simple things will happen, but what they mean will move to an increasingly rich ambiguity that is Flux's home turf.

It has always seemed to me that plays the obscure the story, and make the journey unnecessarily difficult to follow, are playing a shell-game where confusion masquerades as complexity, and vagueness is made up to look like ambiguity.

I've always been drawn instead to stories that take me down a road I know well, to a room I'm familiar with, to a door I've seen before, but when I open the door, I realize I don't know the road or room or door at all, and I'm falling in darkness, and just when the light above has almost dwindled entirely, the play hands me a pile of feathers and says, 'quick, make these wings'.

What plays do you think have that richness of dimension? Read the full story

This question is the title of the 5th chapter of Outrageous Fortune, TDF's new book profiling the the life and times on the new American play. As part of Isaac's blogging group, I'm writing about Chapters 1, 5, and 6. My thoughts on Chapter 1 are here.

I share my Chapter with Scott Walters of Theatre Ideas and CRADLE fame, and in some ways, he has been writing his eloquent response to the issues addressed in Chapter 5 for years. This frees me up to be more personal in my response, but first, a brief overview.

Chapter 5 acknowledges that all of the issues addressed in previous chapters stem from a dwindling audience of diminished passion. The NEA's ironically titled "All America's A Stage" report shows that the percentage of Americans who attended a nonmusical play over a twelve-month period fell from 13.5 percent to 9.4 percent between 1992 and 2008.

And according to the interviewees of this book, the audience that remains is increasingly conservative in their taste. They do not want plays of formal innovation, cultural difference, complexity, or ambition.

Artistic Directors believe that playwrights are increasingly writing for themselves, drifting away from the concerns and interests of their audience. Playwrights believe there is a different audience out there, but theatres don't know how to reach out and retain them.

The idea of an artistic home once again is proposed as the solution: playwrights writing for specific audiences, audiences following the long term arc of playwrights.

Additionally, several conceptual shifts are recommended: audience should shift to community, product should shift to process, and marketing should shift to contextualizing. These are all ideas that have been advocated for here and elsewhere; and much of my chapter partner Scott's work has been to advocate for a uniquely local approach to artist/audience engagement. I look forward to reading his response.

I'd like instead to focus on a more theoretical question underlying this chapter: who should playwrights be writing for - themselves or the audience? And if the audience, who should be in that audience?

That's why I do theatre: to make life stand still, to make of the moment something permanent, to strike an unexpected match in the dark. I want to know the meaning of life.

And because I suspect that meaning is fluid, experiential, communal, and contradictory, I make theatre instead of novels. Fluid, so the meaning must happen in real time. Experiential, so the meaning cannot be summed up as anything less than the full sequence of events. Communal, so the meaning isn't fully realized until struck by a variety of perceptions. Contradictory, so that no single experience can be the sole proprietor of truth.

My audience is anyone who shares a hunger to know that meaning, and shares a faith that the communal act of play can illuminate it.

In recent posts, I've talked about my increasing conviction in the importance of the audience's role, and therefore the importance in developing that long term, collaborative relationship between an audience of diverse perception and an artist.

In other words, I write for an audience in order to write for myself; to take a collective grasp of that old question and for a moment, make life stand still here.

Flux has tried to create the kind of home for artists described above through our Flux Sundays development process; and we have opened up that process to our audience through our Have Anothers, Food:Souls, Fore:Plays, and this blog. We are trying to build that community of seekers to take that collective grasp through the obscured cotton-wool of life:
Read the full story

If the audience is as important as the actors in making a play work, why don't we spend as much time casting an audience as we do casting a play?

A backdrop for that question:

This weekend, I was lucky enough to observe the American Voices New Play Insitute at Arena Stage's convening on black playwrights. I was there on behalf of my goodly employer TCG, live tweeting the event @tcg and hashtag #newplay. Also make sure to check out Parabasis, Mission Paradox, 99 Seats and the New Play Blog for some in depth analysis of the event later this week.

At the convening, a playwright was discussing the impact of a racially charged joke early in her play on a primarily white audience. They froze, afraid to laugh; but as marketing tactics paid off and the audience diversified, black audience members who laughed at that moment gave the white audience members permission to do so, too.

What this example illuminates is the potential for a diverse audience to echo and enrich a moment on stage through the conflict and confluence of their different perceptions. You are aware not only of the meaning of the moment on stage, but of the meaning of your response in relation to rest of the audience. And this doubling of awareness and meaning doesn't necessarily distance you from the story, but makes it more visceral and immediate.

For more on how an audience's perception affects a play, check out these recent posts on A Different Case For Diversity, Let Me Down Easy, Quantum Darwinism, and More On Presence.

Which all leads us to the question: if the composition of an audience is as essential to a play's alchemy as the make-up of the cast, why don't we pay as much attention to casting the audience as we do to casting the play?

Obviously, I don't mean holding auditions for audience members; I mean considering the composition of the audience as carefully as we do that of the cast.

So who needs to be in the audience for the play to be fully heard?

Who is the choir for this play to preach to, and who is the power this play needs to speak truth to?
Both that power and that choir should be in the room together.
Who is this play about in the community? Are they represented in the audience?
And who in the community doesn't know about the people in this play?
Because they should be in the audience, too.
What are the conflicts in the play? Have all the sides of that conflict represented in the house.

Now, a theatre can only fit so many people, and we only have so much time in the day. But another take away from the convening was the power and necessity of reaching out to local partners who can advocate for you within the communities that the play needs present.

And with the aid of social media, we don't need to guess at who our audience is and how they think. We can ask. We can discover the complex and unique perceptions of our audience without relying solely on the blunt tools of demographics.

I could be very wrong: it could be our best way is to appeal to a devoted niche from an ever more fragmented culture.

But when I think of the audience I want to write for, act for, and sit in; it is an audience of diverse experiences united in focus, multiplying the power of our mutual awareness through our different perspectives.

Now, how do we make that happen? Read the full story

Here are my 12 wishes for theatre in the new year:

1. An Online Audience/Artist Community: This is #1 because it makes almost every aspect of #2-12 more possible.Whether it is the Audience Engagement Platform or something out of Project Audience, the goal is to connect audience, artist and institution in a robust arts-centric online platform that allows a diverse, vibrant field to find allies, collaborate on mutual opportunities and challenges, share best practices, develop increased audience ownership through a more transparent process, and leverage this revitalized online community to achieve real world goals.

2. A Truly National (Local) Theatre: The invaluable work of Scott Walters at CRADLE (the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education) seeks to create a truly national theatre that serves not just not the coasts and population centers, but exists as a right of every American community. Until every citizen has access to a theatre that empowers it's local community, we will continue to experience political resistance to the arts as an essential part of our democracy. His work with CRADLE emphasizes geographic diversity, local stories, and the empowerment of community members to engage directly with their own creativity, and theatres like Cornerstone, Appalshop, Double Edge, and Mo'olelo serve as examples. I think that #1 could greatly increase the efficacy of #2 by connecting underserved communities directly with artists in oversaturated areas.

3. New Models of Sustainability: The model of corporate hierarchy that currently dominates the internal structure our major theatres, and the framing of theatre as a charity equivalent to feeding the hungry, have both come under increasing scrutiny. The new models of sustainability proposed by Stolen Chair's CST, Chris Ashworth's "Process is the Product", and New Leaf's Partnership Model re-imagine the audience/artist funding relationship as more sustained and reciprocal; and the Ensemble model of companies like Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble give example of a more flexible, horizontal, and holistic internal structure. For companies to thrive in wish #2, they are going to need to consider the models of #3.

4. El Sistema for American Theatre: The Venezuelan economist, activist, and musician Jose Antonio Abreu founded El Sistema as a model for arts education in 1975, and it has since grown into an internationally recognized engine for social change. Focused on providing a rigorous classical music education for students of poor socioeconomic background, El Sistema has shattered the perceived elitism of classical music by transforming the lives of its participants, improving attendance rates, dropout rates, crime rates and launching the careers of artists like Gustavo Dudamel. While an American theatrical version of this would (and should) look different, I believe theatre can have an equally transformative effect on education and community; and without a sustained nationwide commitment to arts education, Wish #2 may never have the support it needs to flourish.

5. Increased Diversity: The debate inspired by Arena Stage's Defining Diversity conference has flourished online, and projects like 50/50 in 2020 have set clear, achievable goals for more a more equitable, inclusive field; but this is an old discussion, and diversity sometimes feels like theatre's favorite stationary bike; we love working up a sweat, but we're not going anywhere. My hope for the new year is to see a clearly defined persuasive argument for why diversity in theatre matters; a model for which kinds of diversity we need to prioritize; a comprehensive demographic study of where we are now; a clear and tangible goal of where we'd like to be; and an inclusive strategy to cross that distance. This Wish is intimately linked to Wishes #1, #2, and #4; in fact, I'm not sure lasting diversity can be achieved without a truly national (local) theatre, empowered arts education, and the kind of online community that could provide real time metrics of progress and foster self-selected cultural connection.

6. Indie Theatre Repertory: While this Wish is local, I'm sure other communities experience the difficult transition from one union contract to the other, and the resulting lack of traction and growth opportunities for smaller companies. This wish is detailed here and here, and I'm hoping to make some progress with it in the new year.

7. Idea Bank: In talking with people about Wish #6, I found out that a similar idea had been proposed years ago, and this unknown recycling of ideas continues because the field has no central warehouse. It seemed for a moment this might happen over here, and perhaps Google Wave (or Wish #1) will make this achievable; but however it happens, a platform for storing, improving, acting and following up on the field's ideas and conversations is essential.

8. Assessing Cultural Impact: Wish #8 belongs to point 3 of a 5 point proposal made by Arlene Goldbard at the NET Summit in June:

How would our cities be different today if policy-makers had brought imaginative empathy to the cultural lives of the neighborhoods emptied out to make way for new sports stadiums, performing arts complexes, freeways and downtown ghost towns? We would emulate the law that requires us to assess possible environmental impacts of regulations, interventions and projects, and begin to assess cultural impacts in hope of ensuring that decision-makers consider the well-being of communities and their cultural fabric before approving plans.

Here here.

9. Bridging the Amateur-Professional Divide: Linked to #2 and #4, I talked about this unnecessary divide here, and the gap in adult arts education funding here. Simply put, if no one is playing baseball in their own backyard, they're a whole lot less likely to watch it in yours. Empowering a community to a lifelong connection to their own creativity is essential, and the divide between amateur and professional is increasingly damaging to the health of the field.

10. Embracing More Critical Voices: The Indie Theatre field owes a great debt to nytheatre.com, offoffonline, the Clyde Fitch Report, the folks at Show Showdown and all the newly flourishing critical voices online. For little to no money, these critics soldier into productions that otherwise might find no coverage, and a few do so with more clarity of thought and generosity of purpose than their mainstream brethren. And yet, we still look to the mainstream press as the ultimate gatekeepers of quality, even as we increasingly don't connect with their criticism. We need to engage with all reviewers, but especially those mentioned above, as equal partners in the process of improving the field. That means actually engaging with reviews rather than using them for pull quotes, and reading and responding to their work even when it isn't about us. We can't complain about the outsize power of a few reviewers without also empowering the many.

11. Improving Quality: This is especially true now, when the latest NEA report shows participation in the arts dropping, and we must confront that unseemly elephant called Quality. Just because it is very difficult to define quality doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. I talked about the difference between quality and value here, and we've tried to host a conversation here about what makes theatre work through our Exploding Moments series. Internally, we've added aesthetic feedback to our production post mortem, and I think we need to go much further with that process. All the noble goals espoused above and on this blog count for nothing if a play is boring.

12. Partnering with Science: Readers may have noticed a more scientific bent to this blog of late. This comes from my increasing conviction that science and the arts are natural allies. The increasing pace of breakthroughs in neuroscience, genetics, and physics are revealing how theatre functions in the mind, even as they are rewriting the meaning of what it means to be human. On a more short-term practical level, augmented reality pulls the connectivity of the internet into our local world in ways that may offer profound opportunities for theatre.

So, what do you think? What are your wishes for the theatre in 2010? Read the full story

In this blog post we're going to fly from quantum mechanics to Darwin to theatre as quickly as possible, using only links and the single engine plane of my mind, so hold on. Ready?

One of essential differences between classical and quantum physics is probability. At the incredibly small Planck level, particles are neither here nor there, but a probability wave of both, a superposition of states. When observed, this wavefunction collapses into the familiar one location/state of classical physics (perhaps you've heard of our hapless feline friend, Schrodinger's cat). But the probability wave is real, and the physics that surround it incredibly accurate and exceedingly strange, giving rise to quantum entanglement and theories of parallel worlds.

The process of wavefunction collapse, and the obscuring of the bizarre quantum world, happens through a process called decoherence, which I talked about in theatre terms here. The actual process of decoherence remains uncertain. But in this process lies the answer of how our observable classical here-not-there cause-and-effect lovely world emerges from the quantum weirdness.

Physicist Wojciech Zurek came up with a theory based in an unlikely source: Darwin's theory of evolution. The probability wave of the quantum world insists that a particle is both here and there until it is observed; Zurek believes that observation is a kind of selection, whereby the particles that interact with the probability wave select the location/state that is most useful to them, aka, the fittest; and then deliver the information of that state into the world; and though other particles may interact with the wave in a different location, they are overwhelmed by the process of selection that says this particle is most fit here, not there.

Two beautiful things about this idea: the first is that the probabilistic nature of the quantum world does not collapse, as if the superposition of states was some foreign magical universe; but rather we only see the fittest version, based on a process of selection below the Planck level. The second is that if correct, the framework that underpins all of life's astonishing diversity is theoretically connected to the way the universe moves from possibility into being.

Pretty enough, but what on earth does this have to do with theatre?

Recent posts have wrestled with my fear that Presence, the essential difference of theatre to other narrative communal arts, isn't an essential enough difference to make up for its shortcomings. But here, with quantum Darwinism as a model, we have a possible conceptual framework for why the live audience/actor experience matters.

In theatre, the actor is the probability wave, and the audience is the force that pressures each evolving moment into the fittest choice. No matter what a rehearsal process has been, a play will inevitably move towards what an audience wants; as many a despairing director returning to a long run discovers. An actor makes a choice, and if enough audience members connect viscerally with that choice, a current runs from house to stage and changes the way that actor plays; they hold longer for a laugh, or go further with a big choice, emboldened by that current of yes.

In this feedback loop, an audience is shaping the performance in a way that is fundamentally Darwinian; choices that fall flat, arcs that don't work, will quickly find extinction as the play evolves under the selective pressures of the audience. In The Empty Space, Peter Brook bemoans a production that played with beautiful detail in one country, only to becomes coarse and simplistic in another; but really, the production was doing exactly what a play should do - evolve to meet the present moment.

When we say a great actor has Presence, what do we mean? What do we mean when we say In The Moment?

I think we mean that a great actor's performance is like that probability wave of quantum mechanics: it is both here and there, a superposition of possible states; until, acted upon by the pressures of the audience's perception, that possibility crystalizes into a choice; and if that actor is very good, we keenly feel the the current of that feedback running through each moment we make together.

So in this way, theatre is more than the observation of a human moment; it is the practice of shaping it. In this framework, the audience is participatory in more than just passive terms; they are the essential pressure which gives the play life.

And in this way, theatre is linked not only to the evolution of life; but to each present moment crystalizing out of quantum possibility into the only world we know.

A play is possibility, then the pressure of perception making the present, then the past. Read the full story

Exhibit A: Your partner walks into your bedroom to find you watching porn on your computer. Your partner's reaction may be pissed off or turned on, or merely indifferent.

Exhibit B: Your partner walks into your bedroom to find you watching several people having sex on your bed. In this scenario, indifference seems less likely of an option.

Why? Presence.

And as silly as those exhibits are, understanding why that difference is important is essential to articulating why theatre is important. Is theatre important for what it is, or what it does? What seems like a semantic question is a little slipperier than that.

Two weekends ago at the Defining Diversity conference in DC, Taylor Mac talked about the nostalgia people have for their narratives, how difficult it is to let certain beloved narratives go. He was referring specifically to traditional narratives of marriage, but for me the question expanded to theatre itself.

Is theatre essential? Or is it just a beloved narrative that we're all hanging onto as (according to the most recent NEA study) our audiences dwindle and move on? Are arts practitioners, as Fractured Atlas Adam Huettler puts it, in the typewriter business? Typewriters now have nostalgic value for what they are, but have little value for what they do.

So if theatre is important for what it does, it may eventually be completely replaced by film, video games, or holograms; because if the good that theatre does can be mass distributed for less cost and greater good, theatre is a vehicle of nostalgia, and we are the last followers of Zeus.

But if theatre is important for what it is, that difference lives in Presence. And I think the difference between Exhibit A and B is that, while we're just watching in both, we are also participating in Exhibit B; because we're not witnessing an artifact indifferent to our existence, but participating in a shared moment, unique in time. Our watching matters.

Does it matter enough? Does that difference between A and B justify holding onto a medium manifestly less efficient than the media of mass distribution? Most of the traditional arguments for theatre completely ignore what it is in favor of what it does (education, local business enhancement, community building) ignoring that there may be many more cost effective ways for a community to accomplish those tasks. And when we do discuss Presence as essential, it usually is presented as an unquestionable virtue. Well, it is to us. We so love our nostalgic narrative of sacred theatre.

But that narrative is increasingly foreign to a culture where story is as free as air, and virtual connection only a click away. When our culture cares about Presence, it is usually celebrity Presence, which owes more to the power of other media than to theatre. The case for theatre as an enduring human activity can take many forms, but it must have this question of why Presence matters at the root.

Or we'll be left with Exhibit A, and go on clapping uncertainly at the end of movies. Read the full story

Rereading Harold Bloom's book on Shakespeare, The Invention of the Human, I was struck anew by this passage on page 56 regarding the uniqueness of his characters, excerpted here:

"Instead of fitting the role to the play, the post-Marlovian Shakespeare creates personalities who never could be accommodated by their roles: excess marks them not as hyperboles or Marlovian overreachers, but as overflowing spirits, more meaningful than the sum of their actions...characters who are 'free artists of themselves' (Hegel on Shakespeare's personage's), and who can give the impression that they are at work attempting to make their own plays...they give the sense that all plot is arbitrary, whereas personality, however daemonic, is transcendent, and is betrayed primarily by what's within...And they are never reduced to their fates; they are more, much more, than what happens to them"

Bloom goes on to list some of the characters he believes are "free artists of themselves"- Hamlet, Iago, Edmund, Lear, Rosalind, Edgar, Falstaff, Macbeth, Cleopatra - and will spend much of the book unpacking this central idea. And though I don't always agree with his particulars, I agree wholeheartedly that some of Shakespeare's characters have a vitality that seems to overwhelm their plays.

What recent characters have that vitality, that overabundance of life, that makes them "free artists of themselves"? Please post your suggestions in the comments, and read on for three suggestions of my own.

I think Meredith in Viral is my most recent example. We only receive hints of her past, but her actions in the present flood our imaginations with the things she might have done. Meredith gives you the feeling you are watching only the final play in a sequence of the many plays of her life. Alternatively amused and repulsed by this latest play she finds herself in, there is an awareness and vitality (ironic for a suicide) that makes her different from the other characters, who while compelling, seem to belong only to one play.

Everett from Rattlers is another: almost from the beginning of his long scene with Ted, he knows he is talking with the likely murderer of his wife; and yet he plays with this man for a long time before revealing what he knows. He is possessed by a relentless self-awareness - he sees through everything, especially himself - and refuses to properly participate in the revenge drama he finds himself in. Instead, like a twisted mirror of Rosalind courting Orlando, Everett disguises what he is, finding a surprising intimacy with his enemy.

Marco in Pretty Theft also seems like he's just left a different play, and will move onto the next after this one. Unlike Joe and Allegra, beautiful creations who belong completely to their play, Marco's negative vitality transcends it; his extreme powers of perception pierce everything but the void in himself.

Allegra meeting Ted seems bizarre; but somehow I can clearly imagine a scene where Meredith, Marco and Everett meet in some dive bar in Texas (and woe to the bartender!) What other recent characters have that kind of play-transcending vitality? Post 'em in the comments!

The reason I'm wondering is I think there's a link between this kind of vitality, and the adaptability of theatre, mentioned in this post:

"The greatest plays are also the most adaptable; there is something in them that allows for so much multiplicity of meaning that they are not bound to their cultural time and place. Each group of audience and artists that plays a play shift the meaning to fit their our own unique needs of the moment, while at the same time engaging with the legacy of past productions."

I think that's especially for true for plays with characters like Rosalind and Everett, Iago and Marco, Meredith and Hamlet. Their sheer size means there will always be room for a new interpretation; we will never quite be done with them, or as Bloom might put it, they will never quite be done with us. Read the full story

Three interesting things regarding the brain and how we tell stories:

The Transcendental Social: A Denmark study that found that praying to God activated regions of the brain associated with talking to a friend, reinforcing a theory linking religious faith to theory of mind, the idea that our capacity to imagine the intentions and thoughts of other beings was a defining cognitive evolution. In other words, our capacity for empathy may have led directly to our capacity for faith.

This led anthropologist Maurice Bloch to coin the term Transcendental Social:

Uniquely, humans could use what Bloch calls the "transcendental social" to unify with groups, such as nations and clans, or even with imaginary groups such as the dead. The transcendental social also allows humans to follow the idealised codes of conduct associated with religion.

"What the transcendental social requires is the ability to live very largely in the imagination," Bloch writes.

"One can be a member of a transcendental group, or a nation, even though one never comes in contact with the other members of it," says Bloch. Moreover, the composition of such groups, "whether they are clans or nations, may equally include the living and the dead."

It's not a big leap to imagine how theatre connects to the ideas above: the evolutionary need to live in the imagination as a means to develop empathy and balance individual desires within a social framework lives in the practice of theatre. The Transcendental Social may be a direct result of the cognitive evolution of what Arlene Goldbard calls Imaginative Empathy, and an essential part of the relationship of democracy and theatre.

Twitter and the Global Brain: Dean Pomerleau wrote a fascinating article about how Twitter is beginning to mirror the way our brains create meaning. Basically, the way synapses develop relationships is similar to how tweeting, retweeting and following moves information through Twitter. Dean suggests ways that Twitter could mirror our brains even more, reaching a semi-autonomy that would lead to something approaching a global consciousness.

This is an imaginative world, the Transcendental Social, on an enormous scale, with information moving and relationships developing organically in real time. However, this world lacks the Presence of theatre, and it is an open question if true Imaginative Empathy is possible without presence. This may be the essential question theatre needs to ask if it is to survive in a future where connection and story are only a click away.

The Baboon Skull: Michael Finkel's article for National Geographic about the Hadza of Tanzania gives us one possible answer. The Hadza are one of the few remaining true hunter-gatherer societies left. They practice no agriculture, have few possessions, they don't have wedding ceremonies or funerals, they don't practice any codified religion, they don't celebrate birthdays; they hunt four to six hours a day, and spend the rest in relative autonomy, in stark comparison with our over scheduled lives of social obligations (the article makes clear their challenges, though, trying to avoid romantic notions of what is a difficult existence).

But they do have theatre, and it is undoubtedly a theatre of Presence. Here is an edited account of Michael's version of a story told after a successful baboon hunt - read the whole thing here:

With the baboon skull still in the fire, Onwas rises to his feet and claps his hands and begins to speak. It's a giraffe-hunting story—Onwas's favorite kind...Onwas elongates his neck and moves around on all fours when he's playing the part of the giraffe. He jumps and ducks and pantomimes shooting a bow when he's illustrating his own role. Arrows whoosh. Beasts roar. Children run to the fire and stand around, listening intently; this is their schooling. The story ends with a dead giraffe—and as a finale, a call and response.

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas, holding out his hands.

"Yes!" shouts the group. "You are a man."

"Am I a man?" asks Onwas again, louder.

"Yes!" shouts the group, their voices also louder. "You are a man!"

Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.

It is always dangerous to infer too much about a different culture, particularly from a second hand account. But the article does remind me of the importance of Presence to story, how it passes on the essential meaning of experience, how often our theatre fails to thrust forward that baboon's skull, and how exciting it is when that call and response reminds us what it means to be human. Read the full story

I want to write a little about how the scale of the way we remember and forget is changing in our culture, and what that might mean for theatre.

A few things recently caught my eye: the discovery and subsequently rapid spread of Vivian Maier's photography. Unknown as a photographer in her lifetime, John Maloof acquired her negatives at an antique auction. He discovered 30-40,000 stunning pictures, many of which had not even been developed. He has been putting her work online, and admiration for it has been rightfully spreading.

I happened upon Vivian's work via Twitter, around the same time that GeoCities and its 38 million user built pages disappeared (though efforts exist to preserve that information).

These two examples are a way of saying that because our culture can remember more deeply it can also forget more completely. We need to examine what this shift in cultural memory might mean to theatre and its role as carrier of cultural meaning. What is unique about the meaning theatre creates?

Saying a play isn't theatrical is like saying a Cabernet doesn't taste like grapes. But certain wines take advantage of the unique strengths of their terroir, and so it is worth considering what is unique in theatre's terroir. This is especially true now when our cultural meaning exists in a relentlessly evolving and expanding conversation online; when story is as common as air, and nearly as free; what essential meaning is left for theatre to carry?

Here are five aspects of theatre's terroir I've been thinking about lately:

1. Narrative Experience: This one is old as the hills, but worth remembering: theatre provides meaning that is irreducible from the experience of its story. In our current ocean of stories, this does not make it unique, however; and its cost in time and effort make this reason increasingly less persuasive.
2. Presence: Almost as old as Narrative Experience, the power of theatre "actually happening" has been held up like a talisman against film for years. Usually, it's simply stated that theatre is better because the actors can hear you, but why is that better? If a bad house decreases the quality of the playing (which happens), isn't it better to quarantine the art from outside influence?
Or, if the ability for the audience to affect the performance is important, shouldn't that make video games a more essential medium, where the audience's will is the performance? And for those who laugh at that, read this New York Times article about the next generation of video game designers who are dedicated to using what is unique about their medium to create meaningful art.
Yet any reckoning of what is unique about theatre must absolutely decide why presence is so important.
3. Four dimensions: Live performance exists in four dimensions, and while it's that third dimension that (unless you're wearing 3-D glasses) is the most noticeable difference between theatre and film, it's that fourth dimension that is most important. Film, breaking our experience of time's arrow, is the same played backwards and forwards (though perhaps harder to follow played backwards). You cannot reverse a play; the egg doesn't unbreak; the water doesn't pour itself back into the pitcher; this particular Hamlet will never speak of Ophelia's orisons in quite the same way again.
This is perhaps where Presence becomes important; the way we change the actor's performance as we both journey down the one-way street of time makes a theatrical performance significantly more like life than the two dimensional experience of film.
4. Multiple perception: In our recent interview with Rachel Cole at InDigest Magazine (not yet out), Lesser Seductions director Heather Cohn reminded me of something essential about all theatre that was especially true of our play. Theatre allows of a multiplicity of perception that is not possible (sorry, split screen) in quite the same way in film.
This is for two reasons: simultaneous action and symbolic potential. Because there is no camera to force an audience's eye, their particular journey through each moment of the play will be unique. In a play like The Lesser Seductions of History, where the characters' journeys mostly unfold at the same time, this is especially true.
Secondly, because theatre is not a literal medium (meaning that with film and video games, you are seeing the actual event, whereas with theatre, dance and the written word you are seeing a representation of an event), meaning can be created through the use of symbols. A light bulb dangling from a ceiling represents a year of the 1960's, and when lowered to the stage, becomes the circle of the moon. The light bulb has a literal meaning, and over time, accrues symbolic meaning as it is used to represent different things in The Lesser Seductions of History. And because everyone's imaginative response to these symbols will be so different, symbolic potential greatly increases multiple perception.
5. Adaptability: Theatre is a cockroach. Where film and video games need fancy equipment to exist, theatre exists anywhere there is a stage, someone walking across it, and someone watching (thank you, Mr. Brook).
Additionally, theatre adapts to the place and time where it is played, changing meaning like a chameleon blending in to fit its surroundings. The greatest plays are also the most adaptable; there is something in them that allows for so much multiplicity of meaning that they are not bound to their cultural time and place. Each group of audience and artists that plays a play shift the meaning to fit their our own unique needs of the moment, while at the same time engaging with the legacy of past productions.

SO! If you're still with me, the question remains: in a time where each evolving moment of cultural meaning exists online; and both factual and experiential knowledge are only a click away; and conversation happens across thousands of miles in real time; what does theatre have to offer?

Using the five aspects above, I think the four-dimensional narrative experience of a play, influenced by the mutual presence of artists and audience, creates a multiplicity of perception and adaptability of purpose that makes it an ideal vehicle for a particular kind of cultural meaning: the practice of human compassion.

Lofty? Not at all; poodle and chimpanzees do it. Like all social animals, they play to learn how to live together, and though we fancy ourselves infinitely more complex, the root need is the same. And because theatre remains the form of play closest to our experience of life, it remains essential.

So while I am thankful for the extraordinary powers of the internet (he says while blogging after all) to share information and foster conversation; I still believe that theatre is needed to pass on the compex cultural meaning of the practice of human compassion. Read the full story

Two recent breakthroughs in neuroscience seemed worth reporting in the context of our work in theatre:

1. The over expression of a single gene, NR2B, caused a rat to remember things three times longer than her kin.
2. Individuals with a greater expression of a gene that regulates oxytocin score 22.7 higher on tasks that measure empathy.

Empathy and Memory: two qualities of personality central to the work we do in theatre, both linked in part to the expression of single genes, both now capable of being altered in our quest for self-improvement.

Of all the significant challenges facing theatre over the next 50 years, this is the one of the most interesting: if our capacity for empathy and memory are genetically enhanced past a certain line, will we need theatre as a cultural carrier of meaning and agent of empathy? If yes, will a new kind of enhanced theatre replace what we currently believe are masterworks of enduring beauty, reducing Shakespeare's work to drawings on cave walls?

And even if that kind of cognitive evolution doesn't happen, the moral questions regarding neuroscience need to be played out in the arena of theatre, or we will be like the playwrights of Universal Robots, handed a discovery with moral implications past our readiness.

On another note, are there plays that you've seen lately that are breakthroughs in our understanding of empathy and memory? They don't need to necessarily be directly about them, but find new ground for how we think about them. I'd like to believe that Rattlers and Pretty Theft both explored new territories of empathy: for Rattlers, how grief distorts our capacity for empathy; for Pretty Theft, how beauty does the same. And I think that The Lesser Seductions of History explores how we remember, both as individuals endlessly revising our lives, and as a culture, rewriting the meaning of the past to suit our present (in this regard, it is directly connected to Our Town and Universal Robots, two plays mentioned as kin that do the same).

One case that might be too metaphoric to make is that theatre is as much a laboratory of human behavior as the sciences, and as such, deserves funding for research that may lead to both dead ends and breakthroughs. But for that to be true, we would need to have some actual breakthroughs in how our theatre explores human consciousness - what have you seen that's breaking this kind of new ground? Read the full story

Adina Levin has a fascinating post building on a theory of Dave Weinberger's called The End of Information, The Return of Conversation. In it, Adina persuasively argues that Information - who has it, who doesn't, and how it is distributed - is no longer the primary mover of our culture.

Now it is Conversation, through the form of social media, that is in the driver's seat. Rather than engaging the world through Information obtained from a single reliable source; the world is increasingly understood through the context of Conversation. Comments on blogs and Facebook, tweets and retweets, Google Wave and Wikipedia are more than just crowd sourcing information; they represent a fundamental values shift in perception. Asking the question, and hosting the conversation, have primacy over providing a single answer.

In her excellent recent post The Future Of Politics Is Mutual, Hannah Nicklin issues a call to arms for the creation of an open sourced WikiPolitics, something my friend Matt Cooperider has been advocating for at Open Government NYC. As Hannah argues, the structures of social media are ideally suited to creating a more open, participatory democracy.

What does this mean for theatre? Primarily, it means that if you claim to want Conversation, it can't simply be your old Information dressed up in social media's clothing. Flux is taking steps towards this by directly soliciting feedback for The Lesser Seductions of History, but this is only a start. As WikiPolitics and Open Government movements increase the access and leverage of engaged citizens, we must encourage a similar level of direct and meaningful conversation with our stakeholders. What theatre companies are doing this well? Please post any good examples in the comments field; especially those that move beyond using new media as a platform for old content, and instead let their audience sit in some meaningful way at the table where decisions are made. Read the full story

We're in tech and two weeks have past since my last rehearsal report. Here's what I've learned and been thinking about:

-The Golden Thread: I've always liked this phrase from Steppenwolf, though I'm repurposing it considerably here. The continuity of the audience's attention, that golden thread, is never unbroken even in the best play; but every detail of production must strive towards keeping it whole.

-The Game Of Inches: And I do mean every detail. Every nuance counts to maintaining that golden thread. Reblocking an actor into better profile - a matter of inches - can maintain it. Cutting or adding one line can make a difference.

-Long Distance Runner: But this is hard, because sometimes the number of little fixes can be so overwhelming that it seems that an entire scene or act isn't working. Sometimes that's true; but more often than not, it's that string of little moments failing that create the illusion of a larger disaster; and like a long distance runner, the company must travel the distance from dead to living theatre one step at a time. Always, always, we must fight off that exhaustion and solve each break in the thread.

-The Exchange Rate of Time: Not all time in a play is created equally. A minute of stage time at the start of the play weighs less than a minute at the end of act 1, so that an action that might hold an audience's attention 15 minutes in will fail utterly to do so 1 hour in. A cut or addition of 5 minutes to the beginning of an act is equal (more or less) to a cut/addition of 30 seconds at the end.

-Snowballing: The only thing that allows a play to survive the increasing weight of time and sustain an audience's attention is the momentum of the unbroken golden thread. Like money earning interest, an action that starts small can roll down the hill of a play and gather such momentum that it can easily hold a fatigued audience's attention. This is one of the great challenges inherent in subplot (and the chief difficulty of Lesser Seductions); actions introduced halfway through a play have less time to gather momentum; and can actually halt the forward momentum of a central action.

-The Church of Want: This is an old thought worth rethinking in this context. Almost always, when the thread breaks and momentum stalls but the staging is right and the pages are necessary; the fault returns (as it so often does) to the actor not knowing what they want. Then, like a list of biblical plagues come all the old actor evils: the sawing of the air with the hands, the pause to work up tears, the pacing like a seasick sailor, the sentimentality, the breaking up of the rhythm of the line so it sounds "natural", the playing of mood, the barely audible sincerity or the scenery rending screaming; indication station, all aboard.

We're getting closer and closer to maintaining that golden thread with The Lesser Seductions of History, and last night, Jake, Michael and Candice especially took huge steps forward in driving their parts forward with that church of want. But the structure of the play makes momentum difficult to achieve, and the margin of error in this play may be smaller than most.

Have you bought your tickets yet? I hope so, and once you've seen the play, I'll be posting an open thread for audience reactions to the play. Can you tell I'm excited to share it with you? Read the full story

I will try to talk about decoherence, a quantum process, without falling into incoherence, because I think that this process is connected to how our play The Lesser Seductions of History works.


(Two caveats: posts like this are hindsight peaks under the hood of a process that is mysterious to me as it instinctually happens; and none of these theoretical posts count a whit if the characters don't have some dirt under their fingernails).

Here is a lovely quote about decoherence and entanglement from my recent issue of Scientific American, talking about the bizarre things that happen in the world of quantum physics:

In the most distinctive such effect, called entanglement, two electrons
establish a kind telepathic link that transcends space and time. And not just
electrons: you, too, retain a quantum bond with your loved ones that endures no
matter how far apart you may be. If that sounds hopeflessly romantic, the flip
side is that particles are incurably promiscuous, hooking up with every particle
they meet. So you also retain a quantum bond with every loser who ever bumped
into you on the street and every air molecule that ever brushed your skin. The
bonds you want are overwhelmed by those you don't. Entanglement thus foils
entanglement, a process known as decoherence.

If it wasn't for decoherence, we'd be able to notice all the mad quantum connections; how a change in our existence would instantly affect those we are entangled with, however far apart we are. If we were like electrons, we'd put on a blue shirt, and suddenly our brother miles away would also be wearing blue.

Maybe you see where this is going - a play strips away the entanglements we don't want so we can see more clearly the entanglements we do. By keeping the decoherence at bay, we're able to examine the connections that do matter to us more closely. This happens in every play structurally, but in our staging of Lesser Seductions, it happens literally.

Because most of the play involves overlapping scenes with all of the characters on stage most of the time; opportunities for entanglement abound. Our first priority is clarity: tracking more than one story unfolding in time is difficult, and much of our work is making sure the simultaneous action strengthens the play's energy, rather than diffusing it. This may be our singular challenge in the show.

BUT! It is also our singular opportunity, and many exciting moments exist for us to have one moment on stage echo across the literal divide and subtly touch the life of another character - moments of quantum entangelment like:

-Martha driving up from Alabama makes a joke about sad songs "my baby left me and my Daddy died"; and then Lizzie in Texas stands to deliver her father's eulogy.
-George at a dive bar storms away from his sister and crosses by Isaac who is on his roof; and in that moment, Isaac remembers he needs to meet George, and breaks away from his wife.

These are just two moments of many in the play - I nearly wrote more before realizing they gave too much away - but one of the gifts of the stage is characters can share literal space but be many play miles away; be acting in the same moment, but play years apart. And so the actions of the characters can mirror quantum entanglement and transcend space and time.

And that's exciting to me, because I do believe these scientific ideas that seem so far beyond our every day experience are actually deeply wound into the fabric of our existence; so much so that we don't always see how these quantum uncertainties and elegant relativites touch the way we experience time, space, and all the fascinating lovely scary things of this world.

Thoughts? Anyone experience this in other plays, or in life? Read the full story

Readers of this blog will know I am an avid amateur of science, and unfortunately prone to drawing metaphorical conclusions from theoretical progress. This post will be no exception.

Listening to VS Ramachandran's 2007 TED lecture on what 3 unique kinds of brain damage reveal about the mind, I was especially struck by his work with Phantom Limbs and Mirror Visual Feedback (MFV) therapy.

I was familiar with the phantom limb, the sensation some amputees have of feeling the presence of their amputated limb or organ. I was unfamiliar with the experience some amputees have of a paralyzed phantom limb; a painful, cramped sensation that causes its sufferers years of significant discomfort. Ramachandran believed this is because the mind sends commands to the limb, but notices no results, and so through Hebbian Learning the sensation of paralysis is created, and can not be turned off.

Ramachandran's solution was to jolt the phantom limb out of paralysis with the ingenious visual stimuli of a mirror box. He had an amputee move their remaining arm within the mirror box, which created the illusion that the amputee's missing (now mirrored) limb was moving, and the phantom paralysis disappeared. The pain was gone. Even though the patient knew this was just an illusion, the visual stimuli, called Mirror Visual Feedback, was so powerful it released a phantom clench that had caused them pain for years. Ramachandran's solution is a balm to sufferers of this phantom limb paralysis.

Perhaps you see where this is going. There are some traumas that burn a pattern into the brain more emotionally complex than the loss of a limb, that are narrative experiential in nature, and so would require Mirror Visual Feedback of that narrative experience to release their phantom pain.

Theatre is the mirror box of experience (we know because Hamlet tells us so). And knowing that mirror neurons allow us to experience the actions of others as if we were acting ourselves, I wonder if one of the functions of theatre is to heal our minds from patterns of loss; that through empathy, we see our phantom actions mirrored, and feel our pain released.

This is like catharsis but not quite the same; I remember feeling this experience most keenly myself watching A Moon For The Misbegotten at PSF. Deep regrets and patterns of loathing I felt were somehow released from their clench watching Jamie Tyrone find unexpected forgiveness.

What do you think? Has the mirror box of theatre ever released you from a phantom pain? I think our upcoming play The Lesser Seductions of History may mirror the narrative experience of abandoning, or suffering the consequences of committing to, a particular kind of hope... Read the full story

Does anyone know other plays that work this way? I'd love to see more of them; that such a basic shift in how we experience the world is missing from the dramaturgy of contemporary plays cannot entirely be blamed on the immutable demands of playwriting structure.

Read the full story

“The awful, terrible act of his dying was, he could see, reduced by those around him to the level of a casual, unpleasant, almost indecorous incident…and this was done by that very decorum which he had served his whole life long.”

–from The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolostoy

"Since you're already planning to take your own life, there's something you can do that will make a lot of lonely people very happy."
-From Viral, by Mac Rogers

"I built up this little fantasy for myself. That she suffered. You know? That she knew she was going to die and she couldn’t stop knowing it. And she tried to find peace in the lord, but she was too scared. I saw her laying on the asphalt in a pool of her own blood there knowing she was going to die, like a train was headed for her and she couldn’t get out of the path. And I almost couldn’t live thinking she suffered like that."
-From Rattlers, by Johnna Adams

“How can they still have war?”
It took me a few seconds to leap across the conceptual gap between the highly personal and particular conversation we’d been having and this eternal conundrum.
“They couldn’t,” I told her, “if they felt the loss of each life the way you are feeling this one."
How could that happen? How could those who make and profit from war be given the opportunity to experience the fullness of loss created by their enterprise?
-From Arlene Goldbard's talk at the NET Summit

(Cheery start to a post, no?)

First, go see Gideon's production of Mac Roger's Viral. There are liable to be some spoilers in what follows, but it's a play worth much discussion. Here I want to talk about how it mirrors The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, and how these works, and Johnna Adams Rattlers, serve as one possible answer to Arlene's question.

For more on The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, go here. Done? Then let me add that reading this novella my Freshman year of college was a shattering experience. The terror Ivan feels at the certainty of his death and the waste of his life haunted me for weeks. The uneasy truce I'd made with my own mortality years back was broken, and I felt again, keenly, the size of loss in a single death.

Viral is a mirror of Ivan Illyitch: where Tolstoy gives Ivan a Christian rapture, Mac gives Meredith a secular redemption; where Ivan runs from death, Meredith runs towards it; where Ivan's death causes his estrangement from his community, Meredith's draws her into one; where Ivan's dying is linked to spiritual awakening, Meredith's is linked to sexual awakening.

Both stories, however, do not sugar coat the terror of death, sought or not; and both make the audience feel the full and final loss of a single life. It is their unyieldling focus, and there is no refuge of sentimentality to soften the blow.

Why? Why shatter that truce with mortality and open our mind to that terror and pity? Because these plays stand in direct opposition to the way death is portrayed in our mainstream culture. Heroes stride through fields bloodied with faceless villains; detectives stoically unravel violent crimes with those who bear the loss treated as scondary characters; grandparents are carried off by flights of angels all singing "it was their time". Death and murder are portrayed as necessary, even heroic, parts of life; and little time is spent with the nameless, faceless dying; unless of course, they die with violins and a twinkle of wisdom in their eye.

It's no wonder - it feels better to think of death and murder as necessary - but only one of them is inevitable. In our urge to take the sting out of death, our stories have taken the sting out of murder, and war persists as an inevitable and heroic thing:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."
-Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

History bears out the Judge's claim. But maybe the imaginative empathy I experienced through Viral and The Death Of Ivan Illyitch, those experiences that make me seemingly incapable of watching action movies without uneasiness and pain, maybe they can (as Arlene believes) actually save us.

Which brings us to Rattlers, Johnna's play that feature two men dealing with the death of the woman both loved more than the world itself. The quote above comes too late, of course - the murderer finds the remorse of empathy only after the fact - only when he is alone with her dead body. And maybe that's what we need more of in the theatre, painful as it is - plays that take all the wounded and dead together and put them in the room with us; so that we cannot escape witnessing their question.

This is not a license for bleakness - far from it. Rattlers and Viral only work because they are filled with humor, light and hope. Nor am I calling for an end to action movies. But we cannot deny the extraordinary power the stories we tell each other have over our actions. And right now, I think we need more stories like Rattlers, Viral, and The Death of Ivan Illyitch.

So go see it! Read the full story

I had meant to post a link to Arlene Goldbard's talk at the NET Summit in San Francisco some time ago, but time keeps on slipping, slipping. However, now is still as good a time as any, maybe more so after posting Ellen McLaughlin's commencement address on the twin births of theatre and democracy.

Both are concerned with art's role in civic life, and both engage with that concern by widening the possible/necessary in exciting ways. Read together, they offer one compelling answer to the question of value I raised here.

Here is an excerpt from the talk to tempt you into going to her website and downloading the whole thing:

"Now it’s up to us to apply this knowledge to the problem of national recovery and the challenge of building a humane, sustainable civil society right here in the United States. Now is the time for a radical re-understanding of the social role, the critical importance, the public interest in creativity, specifically artistic creativity. We can close the gap in understanding that has prevented so many people from seeing that artistic and cultural creativity is not just a nice thing to have around, and a really special amenity when you have the resources to invest in something extra, but a necessity for recovery, survival and sustainability.

How do we do that? We have to begin by enlarging our own thinking, speech and action. I estimate that I have been in about a trillion conversations, read about a billion arguments, that end in the slogan, “support the arts.” Accustomed to long-term deprivation, conventional arts advocates tend to think small, focusing on saving the tiniest government agencies, on hoping not to lose too much more this time around. Many conventional arts-support arguments are silly; for example, the “economic multiplier effect” of buying theater tickets: people who go to the theater may eat in a restaurant or pay to park their cars, they may have a drink after the performance. Each additional expenditure multiplies the economic impact of a dollar spent on tickets. That’s the economic multiplier effect, and, yes, it all adds up to jobs. But so what? Going to a dog show or a football game or lady mud wrestling has the same economic impact. And that’s one of the strongest conventional arts-support arguments! After decades of this stuff, conventional arts advocates have worn themselves thin stretching a point, with almost nothing to show for it. Adjusted for inflation, even the recently expanded 2009 NEA budget is worth only a bit more than half its value in 1981, the year of Ronald Reagan’s first budget cuts.

In a time of economic crisis, when people are worried about surviving, when it is hard to fund schools, housing and medical care (but still not so hard to finance war, unfortunately), arts support arguments become even more half-hearted and desperate, and therefore even less effective. You don’t need me to tell you what’s happening to your own organizations and your own communities right now. I am reminded of the dream of right-wing crackpot Grover Norquist, who said, “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” That is what has happened over the last three decades to the arguments for arts support, which are circling the drain as I speak.

The remedy isn’t more shrinkage but the opposite, to think big. Conventional arts advocates claim art enriches, beautifies, expresses and entertains. These are important social goods. But the elephant in the room right now, the large, unacknowledged truth that we had better hurry up and shout from the rooftops, is that in a uniquely powerful way, art can save us.

Does the grandiosity of that assertion make you uneasy? Just give me another ten minutes before you make up your mind whether to listen to your uneasiness or to your hopes."

Read all of it here - and it's worth the read. Read the full story

Recently, my friend (and amazing playwright/actor) Ellen McLaughlin sent me the commencement address she'd written for the students at A.R.T. This address came out of their collaboration on Ajax In Iraq, a harrowing play about the trauma of the Iraq war mirrored through the story of Ajax.

The address itself looks at the twin births of theatre and democracy in Athens, and how the gift of empathy from the former enabled the creation of the latter. For me, it further articulates some of the ideas living here, and continues the difficult work of talking about value begun here. It is an eloquent, moving call for theatre makers to consider our essential responsibility to civic life.

The address is 15 pages in total - it begins with words specific to the occasion, and ends with contextualizing the central ideas within the opportunities of our current political climate. I have excerpted (with her permission) pages 4-11, which constitute the heart of this particular agon. Please read and respond with your own thoughts!

"Don’t forget that when you’re feeling flattened and thinking why oh why did I choose this ridiculous, humiliating profession? Remember what you’re really part of when you’re engaged in a life in the theater. Times like that, you might find it heartening to think about the Greeks, because they basically came up with the profession you’re entering into, and while they were at it they came up with, well, Western civilization. And they did it at about the same time, in the same city and with the same hammer and nails. Theater seems to have come first, but not by all that much. The city of Athens birthed two extraordinary local creations: democracy and theater. And essentially she gave birth to them as twins. Coincidence? Probably not, as anyone who has ever worked in the theater can attest. Theater, like democracy, by definition can only be done in collaboration. Both must be responsive to the needs of the moment, and they happen in the present tense. Both are done on the breath, in public; both are dependent on speech and the mysterious human grace of empathy. They must happen right now, in front of us, and we all share the same air.

The Greeks didn’t come up with the rudiments of theater: ritual and storytelling. Remnants of early Greek civilizations show us what we see everywhere in the beginnings of human societies: people dancing and singing, often in groups, telling stories and talking about gods and heroes. The innovation happened when one particular singer or speaker--tradition has named him Thespis--became what we must call the first theater artist when he turned from the people watching him and spoke to another person on the stage, who could then respond in kind. Something momentous and essential to theater was created in that moment: dialogue. Greeks called that splitting of voice in dialogue or debate the agon, and once they’d invented it,
they fell head over heels in love with it. Ultimately, they would use the agon for everything and everywhere, from classrooms to courtrooms to halls of government, but its first home was the theater, and there it defined the form. Without agon or dialogue, what’s happening on the stage may be many things, but it’s not theater. It’s ritual, it’s storytelling, it’s one voice speaking one authoritative truth to a passive audience. It’s a useful form, and we need it. (I need it right now.) But it ain’t theater. Because when dialogue enters the world, something profound changes in the dynamic with the audience. I like to think that when Thespis broke all the rules and spoke to another actor, everyone watching sat forward for the first time, and they’ve been sitting forward ever since. Because suddenly they had a job to do. Much would be asked of them. Theater, like democracy, makes demands. We, as an audience, have to do more than show up and get our orders. Theater turns an audience into citizens instead of just spectators. With the advent of dialogue, the truth no longer belongs to any single speaker. The truth must be found in the exchange. An audience has to follow the agon, the debate, enter into a sympathetic understanding with one speaker and then another, try out each position in order to discover what’s really going on. It’s confusing. There are times when everyone seems to be right, just as there are times when no one in the forest of voices is saying what needs to be said and it’s everything we the audience can do not to warn the actors on the stage or comfort them or just yell at them for being so blind to the truth that would be apparent to them if they were only sitting outside it as we are, listening to the agon and watching the mess onstage.

This is what theater looks like, but it’s also what democracy looks like. The theater teaches us that the validity of ethical principles, beliefs, and laws must be debated in full view of everyone concerned, in the open air of the public space. Theater teaches us that the struggle to make sense of things is what we are here to do. And we must do it together if we are to do it well. It is our work. And we do it in public.

There is a kind of brilliance to the light in Greece that you don’t find elsewhere. Something about the angle of the sun. Things are simply more visible there than they are anywhere else. So it’s not surprising that Greek thought is filled with notions of visibility and hiddenness.

Ajax himself, not exactly an introvert, has a speech about how it is inevitable that all things will come to light eventually. For the Greeks this was not just an unavoidable truth, it was something of an injunction. “Know thyself” was the singular command and warning of the Delphic oracle, after all. Whether we will or not, the truth insists itself. It wants to be known.

Our natures are mysterious and terrifying. We all know this. There is a personal darkness we are familiar with inside us, even if we have never had to stare it in the face. We can shut it deep within us, but we’ve heard it thumping around in there on quiet nights when we are alone with the worst of ourselves. We all need help with that. The Greeks had this rather outlandish notion that if we could see ourselves from the length of an auditorium, look at ourselves outside ourselves, as played by actors, doing the awful things that we, human beings, know we are capable of doing, and suffering the worst that we can imagine, we might be purged of our own darkness by the terror and pity such experiences in the theater provoke in us. It’s not surprising that theater festivals were frankly religious events for the Greeks. That ancient notion that there is a spiritual component to what happens in theaters won’t strike this crowd as odd, I trust; there’s a reason so many here have chosen this profession. We’ve all felt it, onstage and off, that transformative thing that can happen as we watch actors, those intimate, necessary strangers, acting for us and as us out there in the merciless light.

What are actors after all? You are the spelunkers. The rest of us are standing in the open air above the ground, trying to guess at what’s beneath our feet—all that scary unfathomed darkness and intricacy and danger. Playwrights come up with maps of what we can make out of the hidden terrain beneath, but we give them over to the actors because actors are the ones who will strap on the headlights and throw the coiled ropes over their shoulders and go down into the deeps for us and thread their way through that blackness to find out what’s really there. We call them actors because they act for us. They venture into other selves and show us what they find. There are bumper stickers that say something like, “Got freedom? Thank a soldier.” I would suggest we campaign for a bumper sticker that says, “Got self-knowledge? Thank an actor.”

Of all the things the Greeks teach us, perhaps the most essential for our purposes today is that there are worse things than failure. If I could give you only one piece of advice today it would be to live by their example and risk failure. Just look at those plays. Look at the size of what they are grappling with—they’re sounding the depths of what it is to be human; time and again, the dilemmas they pose just seem impossible to contend with, yet they take them on. These are plays of astonishing ambition and they never cease to humble me and inspire me to reach farther and risk more as an artist. Why not try to address the hardest things? The alternative is to make nice, neat plays that offend no one and do nothing much because they don’t attempt anything much. Why not risk failure and try to make, well, art? What is stake other than the size of my soul?

Finally, I want to talk about empathy. The Greeks didn’t invent it, but with the creation of dialogue, they came up with a form that demands it and makes a home for it. With the invention of dialogue, an audience can move freely from one mind to another on the stage, entering different perspectives and judging their validity by holding them one by one against our own hearts. We must empathize in order to make sense. I have to put myself in her shoes, then his, then hers, and through that radical spiritual exercise I arrive at a new understanding of the world that I simply can’t reach when such demands are never put upon me. And the Greeks don’t make it easy for you. Often the characters who at first glance seem to be obviously in the right, or out of it, become figures of ambiguity or disturbing familiarity and pathos when we bring the force of empathy to bear upon them. Hundreds of years of use and scholarly analysis of these plays and still they defy reduction. They work an audience hard and wrack our hearts as we feel through them, searching for ethical balance as we struggle to find it in our own lives.

But that’s what civilization asks of people. It asks them to work. Civilization doesn’t let us get away with waiting passively to be told what to think. We have to engage with dialogue and connect with one embodied truth and then another and another. With the invention of dialogue, I realize that your pain is my pain because I am free at last to feel it. And as a participant in the world, as a citizen in this civilization, it is my right and my duty to feel it.

It is the act of empathy that teaches us how to be civilized. It is the act of empathy, which the invention of theater taught the people of ancient Greece, that makes civilization possible because it makes democracy possible. If you can learn, through the theater, what it is to leap empathetically out of the tiny circle of your own needs and concerns and enter into the souls of those apparently different from you, then you realize that the sufferings and desires of others are like your own. In theaters, we feel through the human dilemma together, in collaboration and breathing the same air. Here and now, we learn to make it up as we go along with this new knowledge of the connection between us.

It’s a strange profession you’ve chosen and no mistake, this alchemical business of what happens when one actor on a stage turns to another. So remember that when you engage in making theater, you are engaging in the business that began it all.
You are making civilization."
-Ellen McLaughlin, excerpted from her 2009 Commencement Address to the students A.R.T. Read the full story