Theater For The Future

The most important thing about theater that I learned from designing web applications (or was it about designing for the web from theater?) is that you have the most fun and the most insight when you build the thing, not when you share it. But if you don’t share it, it’s like never building it in the first place.

Less fun is communicating the message and context of that work so that others can enjoy it – it’s a bit awkward to boil all that delicate and detailed work down to what is often an uncomfortable three-sentence pitch.

And even less fun – but oh so rewarding – is learning to choose an appropriate vehicle for your message.

In the press release for Roell Schmidt’s play The Rotogravure (opening Jan 16th at the Atheneum), the marketing team explains:

Leading up to the opening, Chicagoans are hosting dinner parties to spread the word about the multi-media production that begins with the line “Helen was rarely asked to dinner parties.” This community approach to building awareness about the premiere began in November 2007 with a discussion of The Rotogravure at a dinner party of artists and theater-lovers. Several of the guests were inspired to host their own dinners which have in turn led their guests to host additional parties.

And, helpfully, these dinner parties were also filmed and released on the production’s website.

Now before I get all distracted by debutante ball rules, owl bric-a-brac and OC-inspired finales, I should say: there’s a lot I like about what “The Roto” is doing here. I totally get behind the impulse to create a solid audience base for your show by building an intimate and comfortable word of mouth campaign (in this case, by throwing around a dozen virally structured dinner parties). And a year out actually isn’t too far in advance for such a campaign, especially if you politely refrain from sending out the press releases until a more reasonable time frame. The meet-up format is popular – because it’s about real human connections – and it should be our first crack at a different approach to getting non-theater-goers to giving theater a try.

If there’s anything unsavory here, you might be able to pick it up from my phrase “viral dinner party.” I don’t think these folks are aware of the voyeuristic awkwardness that watching someone else’s party inspires. Plus, with a camera crew in the room, it must have been very difficult to find truly spontaneous moments and burgeoning friendships. That’s one of the reasons I’m sure the stellar editor for these video promos had to focus on emotion-lifting music and perfectly timed quick cuts rather than lingering on the more human-driven confessional moments that we almost get to:

Aww, man. Look at all those people having fun. I want to throw a party now. I love sharing in the joy of confession, trust, food, and comraderies. But that leaves us with a big problem – after seeing these videos, I’m not exactly sure that there is a show that is being promoted or what it would be like.

This promo effort doesn’t pass the newly-coined “Adam Thurman Really Shiny Hammer Test. It uses new media, in this case, video, as a message dissemination vehicle for a community-driven word of mouth campaign, but doesn’t actually craft a clear message to put in that vehicle. I had to rely on four pages of website and getting the press release in my inbox to put all the back story together, and I’ve probably got a lot of the details wrong by this point.

“The Roto” does point us towards a possibility, however: these videos are a record that people were convinced, through a community-building experiment, to risk it all, commit to seeing this play, and discover why the themes of the play – community and the “banishment of loneliness” – are important to them. They were shown that the conversation inspired by theater can – and should – extend beyond the bounds of the theater and the play. They were convinced to have a stake in the play, and found new friends to go to the show with, before seeing the play. That’s amazing, and more amazing is how this group might end up continuing to get together and make theater and other community-driven arts a part of their lives.

The video, however, doesn’t capture that transformation – to steal a line from Mission Paradox, the moment this group of people connect over a central idea – it captures images of meals we didn’t have, laughter we didn’t share, stories we don’t understand, and people we never get to know in the course of the promotion. We are lead to believe that the moment happened, but it doesn’t prompt us to make the same leap. This dinner feels like a fading photo album rather than a neighborly call to action.

My theory here is that for theater to effectively harness the power of new media – which is a key strategy in the effort to develop a broader audience that appreciates what we appreciate in theater – theaters need to treat their communications like miniature plays. New media promotions need to have self-sustaining stories, characters, and even miniature, cohesive designs. Just as there is a “world of the play,” there is a “world of the promo,” and the same rules apply – if you want people to hear your work, it has to be clear, well-crafted, and it must both set up and then obey its own rules.

The Rotogravure’s parties may well be an example of a really interesting and potentially lucrative word-of-mouth strategy for a particular kind of audience – one that has been arbitrarily isolated from the positive experience of theater-as-community and is now ripe for being re-connected to theater. A dinner party promotion like this is a vehicle for discussion that will undoubtedly create more true fans of theater than 1,000 pounds of postcards.

But inviting a camera crew to that promotion to spread the word may be an inappropriate engine to power that vehicle. Like putting a space shuttle rocket on a sensible hybrid compact car.

Now that would be a fun viral video to see.

If you’ll excuse me, I think I need to plan a party.

My posts are what happens in the tight spaces between gigantic comments on other blogs.

We’re over at Don’s place today, as he sets off a first volley of discussion about real, working city & theater partnership models that should be proposed and refined and shopped to new and changing political administrations: right now.

Basically, the argument goes: the government will get more bang for its art-supporting community-organizing buck by supporting lots of small, local programs rather than a few massive ones. Here in Chicago, we have examples of several arts support programs in a microcosm that quickly pokes holes in arts admin ideology with healthy doses of arts reality. So the programs that have survived are often quite instructive, and we lay them out on the table for you.

Brilliant stuff, and I can’t think of a more apropos subject for the arts in an economic crisis. How do we serve the community, stay alive and vital, without being a burden?

Over at Theatre Ideas, self-described theatrosphere lurker E. Hunter Spreen lays out what he thinks makes an interesting and inviting public conversation.

1. Tony/Chuy pose a great question.
2. Tony frames it in a way that is open and without pre-judgment as to what the “right” answer is, so genuine discourse is possible.
3. All input is considered and responded to when appropriate. People aren’t being *talked over* (ignored). Even I stopped lurking and wanted to join in.
4. People aren’t commenting just to comment.
5. People are invested in the conversation and curious about the question. Not commenting just to comment.
6. The core group of bloggers (from the Chicago area) communicate well with each other. Differences of opinion don’t devolve into personal attacks, though there may be good natured ribbing.
7. They don’t take themselves too seriously, so they make it fun to participate in the conversation.

I am framing this on my wall.

Cross-mentioned at the Chicago Theater Data Blog, natch…

New Features in the Chicago Theater Database Today! I’ve turned on a number of aggregating counters that will be used in future sorting functionality, but for the moment I’m having fun seeing who exactly are the busiest artists (weighted to benefit the most prolific playwrights), companies, venues and most-produced plays in the existing and evolving online census of Chicago Theater.

Lots more analysis to check out about the Chicago Theater scene – and thanks to a number of our contributors who have been knocking off a TON of history and program input projects in the past few weeks.

Let me direct your attention, especially all you feed-readers out there, to the little green widget in my sidebar that I have labeled “Big Ideas”. This is, in my humble opinion, a feed of some of the most mind-blowing thoughts on infrastructure and analysis on the theatre web. It is culled from a hundred or so blogs that I read regularly, and “Big Idea” status is only conferred on most enriching content out there. And you can even subscribe and save yourself all that work if you so choose. So enjoy.

That said, two special mentions today for folks I don’t normally link to:

Scrappy “Jack” John Clancy reposts his essay on the rehearsal process, which reads as fresh as a lime soda. Though, as a designer, I have to take issue with the idea that it is “Best to forget about the play entirely during technical rehearsals and leave the poor actors alone.” But of course, he’s mainly talking about managing actor energy, not a director’s energy. Good stuff.

And if you haven’t read Dark Knight Dramaturgy yet, (the amazing Chicago expat Dan Rubin, who is now in the literary department at ACT), today’s the day to start. Dan’s posts are nothing short of illuminated in general, but he begins a series today on effective strategies and resources for playwrights to get their works included in some of the most high-profile festivals in the country. Knowing Dan’s approach to literary management (Dan was both dramaturg for New Leaf’s Girl in the Goldfish Bowl and assisted greatly during the Goodman’s Horton Foote Festival), I can say with trust: he’s your man on the inside.

This post in particular is a must-read for all you underproduced playwrights out there.

Why no bloggy bloggy? Because everyone in the THEATER-LOVIN’ WORLD has been over at Tony’s Joint, sittin’ on the sofa, talking about good work, bad work, content vs. form, and To MFA, Not To MFA, that is the Quandry.

It’s some very interesting food for thought, and if you’re a habitual theatrosphere lurker, it might be a nice and reasonably safe place to test out that $0.02 you’ve been dying to spend. The whole conversation is illuminating some new approaches to a theater-and-blogsophere disconnection problem – perhaps what our world needs now is more face-to-face and in-depth discussions of theater and why we love it and why we need it and how to make it better.

Along the same lines, thanks Tom and Dennis for your insightful and useful comments on my “Here’s a To Do List for Us” post. For those of you reading outside of Chicago, I don’t think anything truly bad (maybe just periodically disappointing) can happen from a locally-driven organization that connects the idealism of the TCG Mission (or any national-scale vision) with an on-the-ground grassroots infrastructure. It gets people talking and doing, and reconnected to other people that can help. The League of Chicago Theaters is a fairly established version of idea here in Chicago, but it’s so both ubiquitous and awkwardly-funded here that its grassroots aren’t always showing anymore. When it does connect theaters to programs that help them, it has proven incredibly successful, and you bet I’m thankful they’re working on our side.

Here’s a follow up on the impetus behind the conversation about new sound technology and how it is implicitly affecting the audience over at the Reader – and why discussions like that matter right now to theaters, to schools, to everyone with access to the internet.

Will Richardson at Web-logged busts it all open for you with advice about integrating digital technology with education from George Lucas, of all people.

“We need to get kids asking ‘why does that happen?’ as opposed to ‘why am I learning this?’”…

“The system falls apart around innovation. This is going to happen because there is a disease out there called digital technology. It is going to change education. All we can do is run out in front of it and guide people along.”

When George Lucas calls digital technology a disease, well now, that makes me sit up and ask “Why does that happen?”

Tagged like a theater-lovin’ virus by Laura, I now give you: 7 Strange things about me.

1.) After learning a whole bunch of French in Junior High, then living in northern Japan for three months when I was fifteen, then majoring in Japanese in college, then visiting nearby Montreal and Nova Scotia periodically, every time I try to speak French I end up using French nouns and Japanese verb conjugation and noun-first verb-last sentence structure. “Ma francais wa totemo hen neeeeee…..”

2.) As a child and young teen I would explore the ditches and basement holes of my father’s construction business, talking to myself. During those afternoons, I created a complex sci-fi narrative of a world called Lycinthia, a desolate desert world run by a corrupt military-industrial complex, in which elite pilots harbored fugitives in robot ships called “walkers” dozens of stories tall – kind of like walking skyscrapers. This would later turn into a couple short stories, and has led to my inability to keep a pair of jeans clean for longer than a few weeks.

3.) I lived next door – literally, next door – to the only private Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian-style residence in New England – and worked as an intern in the only Frank Lloyd Wright-designed theater in the country – and worked on a prominent play about Frank Lloyd Wright in the past few years. This is what I have to say: As a person of above average height, I have nearly killed myself on that guy’s stairs more times than I can count. I hate that diminutive bastard.

4.) My pets have historically been named after Wizards: Merlin, Gandalph, Archimedes (you know, the “Eureka!” dude and also the owl from Sword in the Stone), and Nimbus (which was actually accidental. He looks like a puffy, fat, grey cloud. I read the Harry Potter books later.)

5.) I get profound episodes of deja vu, which freak me out. I enjoy a little mystery in my day.

6.) I am a geography nut. After getting obsessed with the Galapogos Islands as a kid, I got a big old atlas and proceeded to memorize every capital of every country that existed at the time. My favorite places on earth are the exposed granite peak of the Perpendicular Trail in Acadia National Park, the onsens of Hanamaki, Japan, and Armadale, Isle of Skye, Scotland.

7.) I once got so annoyed when I was 12 or so that I couldn’t find spices in my mother’s kitchen that I alphebetized the entire kitchen. As in: Spatula, then Spoons, then Sugar. In order. She was concerned.

Tag you’re it (it’s hard to find untagged folks now that Rob K. has tagged everybody): Dan, Marsha, The Chainsaw, and Mr. B.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I think I need to get around to calling that therapist already.