Have to break away from theatre for a moment because this is beyond important.

Congress has overwhelmingly passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA S.1253), a bill which has sections included that will enshrine in law the ability for any American citizen to be detained in the USA and held in detention INDEFINITELY without any right to a trial or hearing. I don’t care if you’re conservative or liberal, Republican, Democrat, Tea Party, Libertarian, staunchly independent, or full-on anarchist this is not what our country was founded on. In fact, it’s the opposite: 235 years we rebelled against exactly this kind of tyranny and now we’re enshrining it in law.

As I mentioned, this bill has been passed by Congress and sent to the White House where President Obama has every intention of signing it into law. I don’t know if it’s too late or not, but if there’s any hope of convincing him to veto you MUST act now.

I just sent the below email to the White House, and I urge all of you to send something similar. You can do so yourself by clicking here.

****************

Dear Mr. President,

I am writing to urge you to oppose, in its current form, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The bill requires the military to handle certain suspected terrorism cases that belong in the civilian justice system. It also makes indefinite detention without trial a permanent part of US law, and keeps all Guantanamo detainees — even those cleared for release — locked up indefinitely with little possibility of release.

If enacted, sections 1031, 1032 and 1033 of the NDAA (S.1253) would:

• Make indefinite detention without trial a permanent part of US law. As proposed, section 1031 expands detention authority beyond what is authorized by the laws of war and creates a system of indefinite detention without trial that may be used by this and all future administrations.

• Require military custody for a category of terrorism suspects apprehended in the US, regardless of the status of a civilian law enforcement investigation. The proposed bill would require the military – not the police, the FBI or the Department of Justice – to handle the criminal investigation. As proposed, section 1032 severely encroaches upon professional law enforcement at both the state and national level.

• Enact permanent and virtually insurmountable restrictions on the ability of this and future administrations to send Guantanamo detainees home or to third countries. Provisions of section 1033 would apply even to the scores of detainees already held for years without trial and cleared for release. It would force the administration, for example, to continue to hold a Guantanamo detainee simply because they were from a country of an accused terrorist.

Current provisions in the NDAA bill are inconsistent with American values. They will also hinder US counterterrorism efforts by stripping civilian law enforcement of the crucial role it plays in gathering actionable intelligence and apprehending terrorist suspects. These provisions directly affect law enforcement yet the Senate Judiciary Committee has not even screened the bill.

I urge you, Mr. President, to veto this bill.

I am a liberal who tends to vote Democrat, but if you don’t veto this bill, in no uncertain terms, I will not vote for you or any other member of Congress who voted in favor of this bill ever again. This is a travesty of “law.”

Sincerely,

Timothy J. Lord

Where: Times Square by the red stairs, between 46th and 47th streets, along 7th Ave, New York, NY

On Dec 2nd at 6pm, hundreds of performers and artists will occupy a privately owned public space in Times Square with 24 hours of non-stop free performances.

In recent weeks, we have seen a push to tramp on our rights to public assembly, public space and by extension democracy itself.
In response, we join a global struggle from Tahrir Square to Davis, California with occupation as a form of creative resistance. Rather than oppose something, we are using public space to create a more colorful image of what our streets could look like, with public performances, art, and music in once vacant corporate, bonus plazas. Through this movement, New York re-imagines itself as a work of art, rather than a retail shopping mall. With capitalism gone mad, foreclosures increasing, and bank crises consuming whole communities, we are signaling through the flames that there is another way of living. Join us.
Occupy public space. Reclaim democracy. We are all part of the show! and the show must go on!

TEXT LOOP Location release!!!!!:
To join the sms text loop for location updates:
send a text to: 9072446426 with yourfirstname yourphonenumber with no dashes or spaces

it should look like this:

to: 9072446426
your name 5555555555

Sign our Manifesto online here: http://www.change.org/petitions/mayor-bloomberg-and-the-citizens-of-new-york-city-join-the-creative-resistance-occupy-broadway

THE SCHEDULE:

6pm Rude Mechanical Orchestra Meet at Duffy Square and lead to location
6pm-7pm carnival performers for opening ceremonies- Kate Brehm puff on stilts, magician, hoopers, Juggler unicyclist, clowns
6pm-7pm Ben Shepard MC Welcome, manifesto, First Amendment
6pm-7pm Reverend Billy sermon
ongoing from 7:00 PM WashMachine Productions
7:00 PM THE FOUNDRY THEATRE
7:15 PM The Civilians
7:30 PM The NY Labor Chorus
7:45 PM Penny Arcade
8:00 PM Dzieci
8:30 PM Five minute song interlude- Beau Borrero
8:35 PM Hungry March Band
9:00 PM HERE Arts Center/ Kristin Marting/ Jenny romaine MC
8-10 or 10-12 TBD short pieces Adam Ende Puppetry
9:30 PM Urban Research Theater company
9:30 PM tiana hemlock 7 min dance
9:50 PM Great Small Works
10:10 PM Jay stolar
10:30 PM The Living Theater
11:00 PM Bread and Puppet Theater/ Reno MC
11:30 PM jandthe9s
12:00 AM Mike Daisey
12:30 AM Kenny Wollesen’s Sonic Massage
1:00 AM Dramatic Karaoke
1:00 AM Descent Artists- Gravity
1:30 AM Jesse Ricke 5min, UZIMON 10min, Tent Peg Theater 20min
2:00 AM Corporate Scary ghost stories
3am-5am The People Staged
5am- sunrise Kim Fraczek and tango dancers at dawn
7:30 AM Consensus Dance Jazzercise
8:00 AM OWS Puppet Guild
8:30AM reed mcgowan puppets
9:00 AM Open mic/ peoples staged
9:30 AM General Assembly
10:00 AM Aaron Landsman from Elevator Repair Service
10:30 AM Project Girl performance
10:30 AM Antigone
11:00 AM Tony Torn Family Show!
11:30 AM Radical Faeries and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence morning ritual
12:00 PM Music Working Group
1:00 PM Kathleen Chalfant and Elliot Crown
1:10 PM Marina Tsaplina solo
1:20 PM Elliot Crown – Occupy Clown show (w/Marina, Mike deSeve, Elliot)
1:30 PM Marionette -Cosmic Bicycle Theater
1:30 PM Lopi LeRoe’s student Debt performance piece
2:00 PM The Yes Men
2:20 PM THE TEAM
2:30 PM Iron Falcon
3:00 PM The Big Bank – A Musical
3:20 PM Adam Rapp one act and 10 min plays
4:00 PM Heelz on wheelz
4:15 PM April Yvette Thompson, Jessica Blank
4:30 PM Carlo Alban/Spanish songs-juggling
5:00 PM Judith Sloan, Yo Miss!
5:20 PM Yolanda Kay, Neo-Futurists
5:40 PM grand finale!Rocha dance/ Church of Stop Shopping sing the First Amendment
6:00PM END!

If you are in the Theatre, so to speak, whatever that means to you, you must believe in one simple principle, whether you’re a Beatles’ fan or not:  I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

For whatever reason, you may not care to hear that.  It’s a fact, though.  Without that simple axiom, theatre makes no sense.  No matter how much, or little, one clings to Aristotle’s aesthetic principles, it is impossible to justify or examine the incredible expenditure of labor and talent that theatre requires without acknowledging the obvious fact that I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.

We have more in common than we don’t.

We live in a body politic, and every decision I make affects him and whatever you do affects her and whoever you are informs who I am and we all live in a a vibrant biosphere.

This is the moment in human history for which the theatre was born.  We can deal with this.  We were built for this.  We have several millennia of cultural history to inform us, and we have been the laboratory for the social contract for as long as we collectively remember.

We are the original People’s Mic.

We have a responsibility to our neighbors, our fellows, our cousins.   If we are telling any other story at this moment, we are lax in our responsibilities to our neighbors, our fellows, our cousins.  The future of our art is (justifiably) dim if we do not embrace this moment as our own.

Theatre is a movement.  It exists only in the present.

There are facts we cannot avoid.

I go to see a play. House opens. I walk in. I’m essentially onstage. But there’s no one there. There are chairs off to my right. So I and everyone else entering the theater go to those chairs, pick the one that’s right for each of us. I sit down, open my program, glance at the stage, wait for the show to begin. It begins. There’s a play happening in front of me. And I’m bored out of my skull. This is in part because I think it’s a bad play. It’s well-acted, badly directed, and the design is entirely forgettable. But this is not why I’m bored, not really. I’m bored because all I can really focus on is one of the most basic theater-going principals, something we’ve all lived with our entire theater going and making lives: that gaping divide between the stage and the audience.

Why is it there?

"Get me outta here! Ican'tstaaandit!"

And no, I’m not being flippant. Really think about it. Why is there still a divide between the stage and the audience? I guess the simple answer is, “Because there was always a divide. From the time of the Greeks to the contemporary world, it allows the audience to understand that this is a heightened world, a simulacrum–”

<shut it, scholar. step aside.>

That’s all well and fine, and I love tradition too. (Seriously. Ask my mom how I feel about Christmas traditions.) But I can’t for the life of me understand why we’re still keeping the audience separate from the play. Not that that’s what we’re trying to do, but that’s what it feels like. We live in an age where I can carry whole universes of entertainment around with me. At any time I can turn on my computer and have access to pretty much any song that’s ever been recorded. I can watch TV shows old and new, stream favorite movies at the drop of a hat and all while chatting with friends who are watching the choose your own adventure variety show that is YouTube.

Everything I want, whether it’s pure entertainment (yes, I’m looking at you, True Blood), or riveting, thought-provoking drama (RIP The Wire) is accessible via a barely 5 lb. machine that I can carry with my left arm. And if you know my left arm, you know that’s saying something. But I go into the theater and even if I’m sitting in the front row, I feel like the stage is a world away.

Now part of this is definitely connected to the fact that the way we receive stories as a technically-saturated society is changing radically and quickly because we are, in fact, surrounded by so much media wherever we go. And now I’m watching a play and I can’t get the close-up that eliminates the need for the long explanatory monologue, but that’s not what I’m asking for. The thing that keeps theater vibrant and relevant and dangerous is the fact that it’s happening live in front of you. Seems an obvious observation, but from the way plays are too often being produced today, you’d almost think it a revolutionary concept. In a world where you can essentially choose your own content, who wants to go to a play, be forced to sit in one place and feel like you’re being ignored because there’s an invisible fourth wall between you and the shit you’ve come to see?

Our age of instant, on-demand, DIY media has torn down the wall between audience and producer. It’s why even network television–especially network television–has been forced to innovate and take risks. But in the theater keep doing the same things in the same ways. Or we look for ridiculous answers to distract the audience from realizing that they’re bored.

“Let’s design elaborate, moving scenery that appears to move on its own. And throw in some video while we’re at it!”

<n.b. all you automation and video folks out there, I’m not decrying what you do. rather, I’m pointing out how directors seem to love to throw up smoke screens to disguise really long (and usually unnecessary) set changes. guess what. it’s a dodge. we’re still out here, still bored, still feeling left out of the party.>

My idea then: innovate by getting back to basics. The first theater was some Neanderthal creating shadow creatures on the cave wall and doing all the voices. That is the quintessential live, communal, storytelling experience–It’s why ghost stories at sleepovers are still popular. (They are, aren’t they?) And what do these two events have in common? No audience, no stage. It’s all one. Invite them in, make them a part of it. And I’m not talking about crazy experimental plays, nor am I saying that every play should include direct audience participation if only because the experimental, environmental world is already doing that. No, let’s do conventional plays in unconventional ways.

True Stories.

My friends at Chalk Rep in Los Angeles are already doing this (though I would challenge them to go further with it).

For “We declare you a terrorost…” at SPF 2009, we redirected the audience away from the door that clearly led to the theater. Instead they were greeted by dour-looking, severely dressed individuals who communicated only with rudimentary gestures to tell the audience where to go, and before they knew what was going on, they were onstage, surrounded by the characters they were about to follow for the next 75 minutes and being viewed by their fellow audience members who had just gone through a similar experience and were now reverted to role of spectator.* (I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that watching the audience cross that stage wasn’t my favorite part of the night.) Ultimately, the audience ended up where they expected to: with that gaping chasm between them and the stage, but I really feel that they came at the play differently for having had to cross that gap.

So don’t close up the wall with our English dead. Tear it down I say. Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone. And you too, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this (fourth) wall.

*I have to thank Niegel Smith for coming up with the alternate entrance idea. He’d probably try to deflect and say it was the team’s idea, but first and foremost it was his. I didn’t realize at the time just how much of a revolution he was stirring up inside me.

-Carl Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious

In all of the bloviating and grandstanding about the country’s very real unemployment crisis and the awkward silence about its constant shadow, hopelessness, the Arts remain unmentioned outside of the usual ever-tightening concentric circles of artists and administrators.  Our crumbling bridges must be repaired so goods may be delivered.  Our children must be educated in clean, modern schools to become engaged, informed, discerning citizens.  The American Theatre, too, is an economic engine and the key to a functioning democracy.  Somehow the President overlooked it in his address to Congress.  It’s hard to blame him.

do you see what she sees?

Maybe it’s because of what we call our work.  “Play” does not bring to mind the enormous amount of expertise and labor leveraged into a single performance.  If only people could feel the buzzing intensity of a technical rehearsal.  If only they could see an actor’s bruises.  If only they could see the designer’s ink-stained hands and clothes.  If only they could watch an intern fall twelve feet from deck to concrete on a way-too-late night, and greet her the next morning as she sorts gels with what is now her good hand.

The growing trend of blogging from backstage and tweeting from the rehearsal rooms is a tear in this veil, but it is tightly packaged and reeks of marketing.  While the conversations we have are rooted in the implicit value of theatre sprung from a total immersion in its very real financial, physical, and psychic costs, the audience (not just the anticipated percentage, but the totality of potential audience, which is to say:  everybody) remains largely unconvinced that there’s anything going on other than the exchange of currency for spectacle and entertainment.

****WARNING!  FIRST PERSON SINGULAR VOICED ANECDOTE!********

Years ago, I was an understudy in a production of Noises Off.  Rather than have the set rotate, the audience was ushered, by yours truly and the rest of the understudy gang, to pine bleachers that had been built “backstage” in what was basically an in-the-round set-up.  One night a woman sat on the bleacher and clutched my sleeve.

-Excuse me, I have a question.

-Yes, ma’am?

-How much did this cost?

-Excuse me?

-Because it seems as though that (pointing to the set) costs as much as this (eyes rolling towards the pine) and my ticket was $XX.

As it happened, I had spent the summer working over-hire for the scene shop.  I’d picked up the wood from the lumber yard.  I had, in fact, personally belt sanded every inch of those hundreds of yards of pine. (Incidentally, this is how I learned that I’m allergic to pine.  Thankfully this is no great loss to carpentry)  I had a pretty good idea of what the backstage cost.

-Eleventy billion.

-Pardon?

-It cost eleventy billion dollars.  Enjoy the second act!

This was maybe ten days after September 11, 2001.

In her defense, she had been told by the president that it was her civic duty to spend.  Value as commodity clearly superseded value as communal joy.

*******TRUE STORY***********

Were the audience invited backstage, or into the rehearsal hall, perhaps they would understand that Theatre is Labor (and art.  yes, art.  but not until the audience arrives), and Labor has intrinsic value.  Backstage is a safety concern, to be sure, but the rehearsal hall is one of the safest places on Earth.  Nothing should happen in there that wouldn’t or couldn’t happen onstage.  If we invited the audience to truly see us fail, pick ourselves up and then fail again, maybe they’d see the value we see.  Maybe they’d always be part of the conversation.  They would probably return the favor.

Is it enough to de-mystify the value of the work?  Of course not, but it is a necessary step if the Theatre is ever to become a part of the national discourse.  For Theatre to become Infrastructure, it must be defined by its engagement with the very real and very immediate concerns of not just the idea of who the audience may be, but who the audience could be, and what they care about.

According to the 2010 census, 15.1% of the country lives in poverty.  That’s 46.2 million individuals with something on their collective minds.  That’s a population that would rank 27th in the world, between the total populations of Myanmar and Spain.

Can the American Theatre at the very least be perpetually discursive about the topic on everyone’s minds?  Can it ignore the elephant in the room?  If our Theatre is not directly addressing the crises in our audience’s lives, what are we talking about?  and for whom?  and how does it relate to that elephant?

Should there suddenly be a slew of Grapes of Wrath productions?  Should the dust be blown off of Odets?  Possibly, but the daily tragedies and absurd farces of contemporary life are fertile theatrical ground in their own right that demand attention from the generation living them.  If the American Theatre is to be a part of the national conversation, it must offer itself as a forum to explore and engage the critical issues of the moment.

Of course they can. This decision is not the disease, it’s symptomatic of our collective incapacity for empathy. When money is what passes for speech, and corporations are mistaken for people, how could we expect otherwise?

If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

But money is not speech, it is coercion. We exchange it to compel others to share their goods or services. It entitles us to treat others in a negative way and to expect positive behavior in return. It is very easy to yell at some poor worker in a call center because they are not themselves, they are the corporation for which they work and you have an economic contract with that corporation. It’s simpler to not even say “hello” to the doorman or the barista or the gas station attendant because they are, in this model, the door-opener and the coffee-maker and the cigarette-dispenser. They are furniture.

The Theatre is, or should be, or could be if we just let it, the opposite of all of that. It is a place which does not function if anything you see is identified as other, and is at its best when the other is recognized as self.

Here’s where it gets dangerous: If you recognize yourself in the other, how does it change your politics? Is it possible to cut off someone’s unemployment benefits when you think of the meals they or their children might have to forego? Would you be able to stand the barrage of images from the several wars if you put yourself in the shoes (if they have any) of anyone there? Would it be conceivable that a person might tell another person how to live? to love? to die?

The very foundation of theatre, the actor-spectator relationship, is based on the ability to share in the thoughts and feelings of others. It is theatre’s most basic unit, and it is in direct opposition to the notion that a corporation is a person, or that you can put a cash value on speech.

"You can not possibly hope to stand up to my superior-- Hold please. I need to reboot my OS."

Adam Leipzig is a film producer in Hollywood, né LA theater person, and he writes an interesting article here about why theater continues to be a part of the human experience. Hadn’t ever thought of the technology v. humanity argument in this way before.

And don’t miss Ellen McLaughlin’s comment. What she’s talking about…that is bloodinthestone.

To my mind, engaging in dialogue is what most people actually want. We take up arms against enemies because we are angry, we want justice. But in the end what does violent justice bring us? Some sense that “justice has been served?” “Wrong has been righted?” Maybe. But who can look at the end of the play which gave us that famous soliloquy–where, in the end, everyone we care about is dead, and an otherwise absentee character finally arrives to tell us that all will now be set right–who could experience all that and feel happy? If that were your life, if you were living it right now, could you look at the results and find fulfillment? Justice may have been served, but do we understand why so many had to suffer before we reach that point?

Too abstract? We got bin Laden. Is your life today better than it was? Safer? Did it justify the deaths of so many soldiers? so many civilian Afghanis? And I ask this seriously. I’m not trying to say one way or the other whether we’re better off or not, because I genuinely struggle with this question myself. As an individual, I’m a pretty staunch pacifist. I hold few higher than Ghandi & MLK. But my heart leapt when I heard that we got bin Laden. I think on other icons of “evil men”–Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Innocent III–would I rejoice at their violent deaths? Probably. I watched Inglorious Basterds and tittered at the fantasy of Hitler dying such an ignoble and painful death.

Is there anything wrong with this kind of response? No. It’s animal. As a friend of mine would say, it’s our “lizard brain” at work–millions of years of evolution expressing themselves. But it’s fucking candy, not nourishment, because we are more than our lizard brains. And I don’t mean some Rousseau v. Hobbes dichotomy where we have evolved beyond the primitive. Too easy, too binary. No, sir, we live that dichotomy every day. It’s always with us, the ancient lizard living in symbiosis with the civilized human. Our own minds are live as dialogue: instinct v. logic. An old theme, but a true one: Dialogue is the human condition, and there are seldom, if ever, any final answers. The only constant in that interior world is inconsistency. Back & forth. So, to my mind, we have to embrace that. As theater artists we have to choose that–we have to choose not to pick a side in our work. In our lives…

Motherrrrrrrr Fuuuuuuckererrrrrr.......

The thing is, once you open yourself up to dialogue, it’s hard to buy into any worldview that isn’t plural. So, I guess, in the end I do choose a side. But it’s not Republican v. Democrat; Conservative v. Liberal; Us v. Them. It’s the open mind v. the closed mind; plural v. singular. That’s kind of a singular way of thinking, but fuck it. The closed mind needs to be destroyed.

In fact, those minds must be fucking eradicated.

Not the lives attached to them, I’m not calling for armed rebellion–remember, I’m a pacifist. I don’t care what close-minded individuals do with themselves. But their opinions need to be removed from the greater dialogue because they’re not engaged in it. They’re speaking in true monologue. They’re speaking to hear themselves speak. And that leads nowhere. The rest of us are trying to live WITH ONE ANOTHER.

So fuck those close-minded fucks. And vive la dialogue. Vive la révolution large d’esprit.
.

he never said it had to be in a building.

This is true. We [now(then)and always] are vagabonds, waiting.

The playwright only asks us for a tree, a country road (a term which has several meanings, and depends entirely on the country, n’est-ce pas?). Evening. Nature, or a fervent imagination, provides.

We [etc] rehearsed at any available tree, at every available tree. Bored office workers on lunch breaks idled at a distance while the homeless crossed freely in and out of an increasingly undefined playing space. Someone tried to tell us that we needed to “move along”, but we pointed out that we were only vagabonds, sitting by a tree and talking amongst ourselves, waiting.

Rehearsing in public kept preciousness at bay. Giving anything less than everything became impossible if we were to keep the increasingly diverse and understandably skeptical crowd from interrupting. Attention must be earned, not implied.

(stay tuned for pt.2)