| THE RED AND BLACK GALA 2008!
by Jason Loewith on 4/14/2008 03:46:00 PM
Over 170 red-and-black attired friends joined us at our annual Red and Black Gala last night, raising tens of thousands of dollars for Next Theatre Company - congratulations and thanks for joining us!
A number of you have asked that I publish my comments here; please find them below!
Got a new iPhone.
Yeah, it's pretty great. Got it in August. Birthday gift. Wanted it for ages. Use it all the time. Obsessive, really. It's totally beyond phone! Calendar, notes, email, memos. Forget about stock-checking. Too depressing. But weather, camera, internet. Beautiful crystal display. IPod, of course.
And TEXTING, right? All the time. Check it out:
"Running late!" "Can't talk - at work." "Still waiting on luggage?" "Show fantastic - nice job!" "CU L8R".
Only problem is...
Seem unable to complete sentence now.
Verb-noun construction too complex.
Caught in techno-age.
Send help!
TTYL!
...
Easter Sunday, I had brunch with my friends Angel Ysaguirre and Bob Webb and assorted friends. One of them looked very worried. He told me his attention span had decreased so much in the past three years due to technology at his fingertips that he was actually frightened – he might never be able to read a book again, or watch an old movie, or have a real conversation; he might be leaving the world of human contact. He's a technogeek whose name I don’t remember because he only told me his twitter handle –
Oh, you don’t know Twitter?
Would you like to see me twitter?
(twitters)
I've just told a half million people what YOU'RE wearing.
Twitter is this crazy new thing that's described as "microblogging."
You all know what a blog is, right? I have some thoughts, I write them on my computer, I send them to the internets, and then anyone in the world can read them. It's like having a public diary with potentially unlimited readers.
I must say I've never understood the blog thing. We have one on the Next website. I use it once a week to type up some marketing-inspired "rah rah" Next thoughts... no one reads it.
But that doesn't stop other people from blogging about the most shocking things imaginable. In fact, shock value is the blog's stock in trade. I confess I've been suspicious of blogs ever since an employee sent me an email, and in the signature of the email he had a link that said something like "check out my livejournal" – one of the earliest blogs. So I went to check it out, and discovered that he was trashing me. "My boss Jason is such a pain in the ass" blah blah blah... online. For the whole world to see. This employee no longer works at Next Theatre Company.
Yeah, so I don't like blogs all that much. As a kid I kept a diary, and you know, it was PRIVATE. That’s why we had diaries. Remember the whole lock and key on the book thing? Gone. Now it's all about PERFORMING your diary for the world.
Now, I can understand blogging as performance, but 'microblogging'? With microblogs – with Twitter – you only have 140 characters in which to write a diary entry. That's all that fits on the screen. Needless to say, this puts a limit on the literary merits of the microblog.
Stymied by the texting limit, dedicated Twitterers twitter all the time. Many times a day, some many times an hour. But what does one have to say to the world in so frequent and unfocused a way? I'll tell you. As I speak to you right now, floating all over the internet, hundreds of thousands of technogeeks are telling the world things like (and these are real Twitters):
'off to coffee + a friend's bday party'
or
'Tired, sad, listening to Britney Spears again, lol'
or
'Hace mucho frio aqui!'
OK.
WHO GIVES A SHIT?
Last fall, I interviewed Bart Sher, the soon-to-be Tony winning director (he directed LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA, and the SOUTH PACIFIC that just won the award for most over-the-top NYT review last week) for this book I've been writing. I asked if traditional art forms like theater would come out winners or losers after this techno-revolution we're in. He told me this story:
One woman came up to me after a show at my theater; she's a cancer care nurse. She goes every day into extreme situations in wards where she takes care of patients at the ends of their lives and helps keep them comfortable, and monitors their care, and their treatment... she's got a very, very difficult job. And she told me, 'I love to come to your theater because, when I come and participate in these stories, whether they're classics or new plays, they fill me up and give me the spirit to go back to my job. And I bring those stories back with me.'
So she can see Skin of Our Teeth, or Uncle Vanya, or To Kill a Mockingbird, and have an engagement with other people in her community. She can learn something about her world, she can remember ideas that come from her past, she can have a little taste of transcendence and transformation. And that gives her energy to go back into the world to pass those stories on, to feel connected to other people.
I'm not trying to make it sound 'ooky-spooky', but art has a real function in people's lives. It doesn't have to be our theater. It could be going down to the Art Museum and being filled with a way of looking at the world that gives you sustenance and strength when you’re in your real world. There's a larger way of looking at the world that we must constantly keep challenging ourselves to see, through art.
...
And one of the great things about this country, about the prosperity we've achieved, is that we Americans are constantly searching out these kinds of cultural experiences. We are constantly looking for stories that reflect who we are, where we've come from, where we might be going, in a search for transcendence. Whether it's Project Runway or South Pacific or looking for Cinderella in the Sweet Sixteen, we are on a constant quest for that 'aha' moment when we transcend the real and our imaginations engage.
But what's terrifying in our techno-age is that we've mistaken stimulation for this transcendence. Because it's so available, so ubiquitous, we pursue constant stimulation, thinking somehow that stimulation will lead to transcendence. We've trained ourselves to be in a state of continual PARTIAL awareness... and the big loser in this effort is our imagination.
For example, I've caught myself watching TV with my iPhone at my side. I'm not talking about giving myself something to do when commercials come on. But to give me something to do if, god forbid, the plot of CASABLANCA begins to lag for a moment, or I'm in between special effects sequences on BattleStar Galactica… I can check my email, or look up 'cylons' on Wikipedia, or find out when Ingrid Bergman died, or how many marriages she had or whatever. Or to check the weather (again). Or find out what time it is in Abu Dhabi. And before you know it, I've watched a movie and read a newspaper and checked the weather in Abu Dhabi and I've somehow diminished my cultural literacy and imaginative power.
This is now actually proven to be true. A troubling article in the Atlantic Monthly last fall marshaled an array of recent neuroscience studies that demonstrate how multitasking ('the nightmare of infinite connectivity') is actually dumbing us down while it makes us crazy. The article explains that we've made a journey from the 'Be Here Now' motto of the 60s to 'Be Everywhere at Once' today. And that we are headed for a multi-tasking crash, or an attention-deficit recession.
I'd take that one step further and refer fearfully to my Twittering friend from Easter – in our lust for ever greater frequency of stimulation, we're losing our imagination, too.
...
Anyway, in the midst of all this, a 3 and a half hour play called AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY won the Pulitzer Prize.
HOW IN HELL DID A THREE AND A HALF HOUR PLAY EVEN HOLD MY ATTENTION?
For a time, Next theatre Company was known as the theater that produced socially provocative, artistically adventurous plays under 90 minutes. The chair of the Equity Jeff Awards was dismayed when I told her we were doing a 3-act play next year that might run 2 and a half hours.
I won't tell you which one it is because you might not come.
Hey, it’s OK, I get depressed when I hear a play I'm about to see will be more than 90 minutes and involve an intermission.
It's not just because I expect the show will be bad, either, though we get plenty of that. But because the theater – any art, any form that activates your imagination – actually demands sacrifice. The opportunity for transcendence is of greater, more lasting value than the opportunity for escape – which is the route we so often pursue – or stimulation, which is ultimately a selfish and self-reflective act.
Live performance – the theater – demands something precious, and something which goes beyond self-reflection. Above all, it demands that we stop. That we wait. And that we pay attention – for an hour, or two, or even three and a half. And if we're lucky, the result of our sacrifice will be transcendence.
I asked Mary Zimmerman, Tony-winning director of Metamorphoses, whether she has an obligation to the audience as an artist:
The audience should be engaged and rewarded for the sacrifice they’ve made by diminishing their own presence… sitting in uniform rows in the dark… and not being allowed to speak... and quieting themselves bodily... and not being allowed to eat or drink, not being allowed to answer their cellphones... for removing themselves from the world, and giving me their attention. You need to gratify, and reward, and appreciate that attention and respond to it, fulfill that promise.
Usually, you in the audience give me about 15 minutes to get to you; that's as long as you'll give up on your technology and your worries and your continual partial awareness nowadays, and if I haven't grabbed you by then, you’re lost for the evening.
But if I DO grab you, then you actually, physically, have become deprogrammed. I really believe it. Your concentration isn't split into a hundred different things. How do I know if a show is successful? I know by watching the audience from the back: because when it’s working, YOU ALL BREATHE AS ONE.
And then, if I can keep you breathing together, the last 15 minutes of the play become a GOLDEN TIME, a time when you are really open to reflection, to going beyond yourselves; you are present, you are living the poetics of the piece that we've created... and we can return you to a state of connection, to the poetics of language, to emotional truth, to visual magic… in short, to transcendence.
In my six years at Next Theatre Company, I have watched hundreds of audiences at dozens of productions to see if we've returned them to that place. I have failed, on more than one occasion. I did not repay the sacrifice you made to remove yourself from the world and give me your attention. It is a difficult, challenging thing to do with our repertoire, unique in Chicagoland.
Often we succeed, and sometimes – rare times – we succeed brilliantly. Our production of DEFIANCE earlier this season sold more single tickets than any in the past twenty years. We commissioned five new music-theater works for our last show, THE AMERICAN DREAM SONGBOOK (though I have since learned that producing plays that satirize suburbia IN suburbia is not always a safe bet). And next month, we are bringing an internationally-renowned artist, Heather Raffo, to Chicago with the help of the Museum of Conteporary art to give us the area premiere of her one-woman masterpiece, 9 PARTS OF DESIRE. I promise your sacrifice will be rewarded at that production, more than any other this season.
Oh, and there was that ADDING MACHINE thing, which is getting its cast album recorded tomorrow in New York, and which was nominated for 6 Lucille Lortel Awards for distinction off-Broadway – the most nominations of any show in the past year.
It took us six years of backbreaking work to get to this point.
Somehow, and mostly with the work of the people in this room, in six years we have transformed our humble artists’ station into a thriving and important destination for Chicagoland theater. We have taken a $168,000 budget and turned it into a $670,000. We have taken 300 subscribers and turned them into 12 hundred. We started with four board members and now have 19.
No one gave us a fortune. We didn't do it with easy-on-the-eyes musicals or heartwarming revivals or circus shows or babies and puppies and free ice cream cones or ESCAPE. Somehow, we did it – and YOU did it - with provocative, thrilling dramas, a bunch of flops, a bunch of hits, and a lot more risky pieces in between that didn't do too badly.
I'm astonished to look back at the success we've had, and I'm proud beyond measure of what we've tried to do.
But I'm no fool, and this isn't my attempt at feeding you humble pie – dessert will be here momentarily, by the way. It is the people in this room, and those like them – from subscribers and people who write checks for twenty-five bucks to foundation folks, and Board members – who have made it happen. Yes, it's true that we staff members and artists have insane commitments, and do what we love without a lot of regard for money. We sacrifice a ton.
But it's actually all done in service to YOUR commitment. YOUR commitment to having a theater in your community that takes risks, provides theatrical adventure, and stirs the soul. And demands your attention. And rewards the sacrifice as best it can. YOU believe more strongly than I do that this theater MUST have a place in your community. I'm just a traveler, passing through. But YOU have wished this theater into existence.
I asked Bart Sher how he avoids going to the 'bad place' – that place all we artists go to when we think our work isn’t worth the trouble, that no one’s listening, that the critics don't get it, that the audiences don't care... and here's how he responded:
There are a lot of people who have a lot more faith in the arts than I do. They're not artists, they're in the community: they're Boards of Directors, they're subscribers, they're people who make small contributions, who are very valiant and courageous in their belief in this stuff. So in a way, when I go to the bad place, I just have to believe in them: that they have enough belief in what we're doing, that they love the work enough, and they believe it’s important to their community. Their sense of the missions of these places and what they want in their communities always embarrasses me because it’s so much greater than mine in some ways.
You, and people like you, willed this theater into existence 27 years ago. You have willed it to become bigger and stronger and vital every year. You believe in what we do more than I can, in some amazing way.
And so this gala is all about celebrating you: your commitment to the pursuit of cultural experience that leads to transcendence. For that very rare quest, I thank you. With all my heart. I thank you for being here with me, and I look forward to seeing you at the MCA in May, and at the theater again next fall.
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