Theater For The Future

First of all, a thrillingly honest perspective today from Dan Granata on the old inter-community feedback question, and the specifically difficult challenges facing performers on that front. Also of note is that funny way that theater lifers seem to get a little cracked as they hammer away over the years. This hit me most of all as I’ve been making steady moves this year towards becoming a Chicago theater lifer, for better or worse. Who knows if that’ll stick over the next decade, but sometimes you just see when you’ve arrived home, and it’s time to go “all in.”

Can you hear the ground shifting?

Two recent announcements made me check my seismograph.

The first was the League of Chicago Theatres’ announcement of the finalists for the second ever Emerging Theatre Award, which is awarded to theaters that “have been in existence at least 3 and no longer than 10 years, and have demonstrated artistic excellence and fiscal responsibility in business practices.”

This years’ finalists are:

ADVENTURE STAGE CHICAGO
DOG AND PONY THEATRE
SILK ROAD THEATRE PROJECT
THE GIFT THEATRE
T.U.T.A.

And the deadline for voting is in one week, February 1st.

Yes, no New Leaf, but that’s cool. We’re going to be a much better candidate next year, that much I can say, and this is a solid list of finalists. It’s really great to have another grant in town, this one specifically to be used to enhancing a theater’s marketing presence in the company. It’s even BETTER that this has been organized as a community-offered grant, with League member theaters offered a vote in the process. The one criticism of the award that some leveled in its first year was that it went to the House, which seemed to be a theater that certainly met the criteria but didn’t really need the marketing help. Even more eyebrow raising was the possibility that the award was being used to provide Broadway in Chicago with cheap artistic labor to produce the next blockbuster Broadway hit (not a bad thing at all for storefront theaters with a marketable product, but check out this Parabasis article on the potential ramifications of the increasingly common practice of enhancement. Which is essentially generating or even test-driving a for-profit production in a non-profit theater. *SpArrOw*. Excuse me, did some one cough?)

Happily, I think this list allows me, at least, to put to rest any doubt I had about the program.

So who would I vote for? Well, I’ve only had the privilege of working with Dog & Pony, and I’ve directly seen the work of Silk Road. I’ve talked in depth with company members and freelancers who have worked with every theater on this list, so I know at least a bit about how each company works. So I’m aware of the excitement surrounding each company. So then for me it becomes a question of: Which of these theaters is best for the community at large, and who could use the help the most?

For me, that becomes a tossup. I see Silk Road as one of the only theater companies in town creating theater for and about a huge and underserved demographic in the population. That’s important work which brings new audiences to theater, and I think they do an amazing job with it. (Merchant on Venice was one of the most delightful shows of the year this season). On the other hand, Silk Road’s upcoming partnership with the Goodman means they have several developmental and marketing hands pulling them up already. And thanks to designer Andrew Skwish, their marketing materials are already the best in town. THE BEST.

Dog & Pony does really gutsy work that really excites me. From Jarrett Dapier’s stagings of the works of Sheila Callaghan, who I think could prove to be one of the most gifted playwrights of our generation,to Devon DeMayo’s balls-to-the-wall promenade project As Told By the Vivian Girls (a nine-room exploration of the works of eccentric Chicagoan Henry Darger) to be staged at Theater on the Lake later this season. This is also a theater company that has strong relationships with the city and potentially has the infrastructure for big growth along the lines of Redmoon that brings a new audience to see other storefront shows. But what they don’t have is money and a strong enough brand to carry that growth. I think if you want to invest in a company at a time where it could make all the difference, Dog & Pony’s your company.

This is not to slight TUTA or The Gift. They’re fine companies that value their artistic staff well and are true to their missions, but I don’t see them building communities on the scale of Silk Road or D&P, and I think community-building is what will eventually help us all. The Gift, in particular, already has a particularly savvy marketing plan, an ensemble of savvy movers and shakers, and friends in high places (check out their list of close artistic advisors) that are serving them well, so I’m not sure if their need is as great as some of the others on the list. I’m sure they make a great-looking candidate for Broadway in Chicago, of course, and their need is definitely greater than the House’s.

The one theater on the list that I feel a little queasy about is Adventure Stage Chicago. Not because of the work they do - I’ve heard it’s great, and many of the artists working there are excited about the company. I also think a healthy children’s theater has been really important to the overall growth of the theater scene here - the work being done by the well-funded, well-managed, and city-supported Chicago Children’s Theatre is some of the most exciting work I’ve seen for any audience in recent memory (we still sing songs with glee from A Year with Frog & Toad up here in the Owen booth). The tricky thing about ASC’s candidacy for this award is that they aren’t necessarily “emerging.” I don’t know much about ASC, which means I don’t know how completely they reformed from the preexisting Vittum Theatre, which had been in operation for over a decade. (I’d love any enlightenment from all you commenters out there). Was it simply a mission change or is it an entirely new theater and new staff that is capitalizing on the existing Vittum brand?

All told, it’s a good list, and I’m excited about this annual award again. I think it’ll be a great opportunity for industry folks to really get to know all the great theaters in town and get some positive cross-pollenation going.

I told myself this would be a short blog post, but I need to also mention the other announcement that came in the mail today… The Jeffs are auditing their brand.

and don’t forget the

In a letter to Chicago theater companies, the Jeff Committee announced the results of a preliminary Brand Audit process (conducted by Patricia Heimann & Associates and Peak Communications) which will be followed up with more discussion and feedback from within the organization and throughout Chicago.

New Leaf went through a complete brand overhaul a few years ago, and when done right rebranding isn’t just about a change in logo. It’s like organizational therapy. It means focusing some inter-organizational scrutiny on the entire process and culture of how the Jeff committee works and how it is perceived in the community. It means refocusing the mission and removing the bad habits that sometimes develop when you’re trying do something crazy in scope - like providing the valuable service of seeing and evaluating very nearly EVERY show in Chicago. It looks like one of the big things on that agenda is finding a way to introduce a little more organizational transparency:

Because Committee members are positioned as judges with the power to influence success or failure of a performance, respondents want to know the selection criteria for judges. Respondents felt they should be informed how committee members are selected, the committee’s extended relationships and define more fully the committee’s overall role in the theatre community.

Given what folks have been saying about the odd lines between theater practitioner and theater evaluator (see Dan’s final paragraph), I think that improving organizational transparency is a FANTASTIC step. The kind of step that makes me want to hug the Jeff committee members one at a time. Because it’s not going to be an easy road.

It goes to show that public discussion of perceived problems helps address those problems. Duh, nice insight, Nick. Making your voice heard is the first step in creating common techniques and public policy that creates solutions. Developing solutions that are both reasonable and new creates value for everyone in the industry. As Dan says and David Alan Moore backs up, our chosen profession has a way of making reasonable people leave the discussion, and that’s a clear hurdle to building a more healthy community culture. I feel the burn too, and it’s a battle with myself to keep writing and designing and periodically checking in with myself to make sure my actions aren’t making things more difficult for the other folks in the boat with me.

At the end of the day, the Jeffs are us - committee members are picked from theater practitioners and appreciators in the community - and they already have a record of serving the community that far exceeds the record of organizations like the Tonys. Their institutional health and vigor should matter to us, and we should help them to make their vision and mission clearer and more achievable. The better our process for quickly recognizing quality work being done in town, the more our fair city can be seen by the rest of the world as a place where that quality work is nurtured. And that will mean that there will be more quality work to go around for us to work on and for our audiences to enjoy.

A big thanks to TOC, Kris Vire and Chris Piatt for the shoutout in today’s Time Out Chicago. For those of you checking out this blog because of the article, welcome, and I hope you enjoy the discussion.

I’m writing from the tech table at the Goodman’s kickoff production for the Horton Foote Festival, Talking Pictures, with sound designer extraordinaire Richard Woodbury, sound guru Dave Naunton, and intern Dan Schrek, so I thought that it’d be appropriate given the bump to acknowledge the people that help me through my wack-ass schedule with their own work, input, and support –

My teachers and students.

In theater, everyone’s a jack of all trades. You’ve got to be in order to survive. There’s so very little money in theater that you sort of develop a habit of carrying lots of buckets (or spinning plates) to capture as much value as you can from each experience.

And then you give away those nuggets of wisdom like trading cards.

But it’s not always a happy garden of cooperative flower-bunnies. I recently had my young & angry side brought right out front and center by another blog post discussing a theater company in town particularly infamous to industry folks that is currently throwing my good friend into massive personal debt by refusing to reimburse him for expenses. I tiraded against this and related incidents, publicly, and I wasn’t the only one.

Now I know the consequences of tirades in an industry this small. I have been told once by someone in power, an artistic director of a LORT theater, actually, (no, not in Chicago) “If you do this, you’ll never work again.” And the type of person who would say that doesn’t deserve their power in that moment. There are just those folks out there that I think don’t get it, who end up scared and entrenched in a system they think will protect them, who tear down something because they don’t yet understand its potential value. And as far as my lapse goes, sometimes we tear something down because we feel powerless - we attack it to serve the almost crocodilian need to feel dominant again. When the young & angry side in me gets thinking about reconfiguring the world to serve social justice, I know it’s over - my brain has shut down and I’m in it for the kill. So after getting it out of my system, I’ve come to realize that in the case of theater, it’s pointless to simply tirade against the injustice that exists in the industry. Now I believe in justice, but I also know the value of practicality, and we’re talking about a tiny industry here. It’s pretty easy to single out a delinquent party and throw out some blame in their direction, but I don’t think that those kind of tirades ends up solving the problem for the next guy or gal. What could solve the problem is a sea change that flips the industry on its cute little bunny ear. Why would that work? Because both the delinquents and the bellicose are dinosaurs - they’re fighting each other to come out on top of an old system. Nothing we can do will save them, because the ecosystem that supported them is crumbling. But there are new ecosystems at work now. It’s the tiny bunnies that will survive the next evolutionary crisis. We are agile, responsive, and we reproduce early and often.

Teaching is what stopped this cycle of envy and despair in me. In my first class, I felt a new fear - the fear that if I indulged my own adolescent railings and beliefs in class, I would shut out my students’ ability to explore material for themselves. It forced me to do nothing but open doors. And that’s when I realized that helping other people open their doors generated a ton of creative energy in myself.

And here, back at the tech table, is when Dave whips out his iPhone to show us the latest features in 1.1.3, including the new (ooooooh / ahhhhh) geo-positioning feature. Richard and I are in a debate over the relative merits of two MIDI sequencers, Apple’s Logic and MOTU’s Digital Performer. Richard shows me that DP can transpose the transition music into any key (he likes the sound of the Phrygian mode). I try to do this with Logic and discover about 17 new features I hadn’t dreamed of before today (but alas, no Phrygian transposition). I show this to Dan, and in the process of even telling him what I’m doing and what we’re doing, I learn and clarify four new bits of knowledge myself. And it turns out Dan knows Ableton Live, which I’m going to need to learn from him at some point. The student has become the teacher.

And it’s not just us hypergeeks in sound land. We swear that we can hear the actors while they hold, static on stage while the director and the lighting designer craft a look, and they are discussing podcasts and the relative merits of various popular sound technologies. More importantly, the constant feedback and sharing of knowledge and insight in the room is creating a new understanding of what’s actually happening in the room. This is the first Owen show performed entirely in the round, and the actors and director and designers and production team are all learning and sharing information about how that’s working. What’s remarkable about this room is that the feedback and information is flowing in almost completely positive and constructive ways. In telling each other what we see, we both redirect and continue the momentum we’ve built up. We learn the world better ourselves without shutting other possibilities down.

Talking Pictures has some oddly resonant themes that I can see leaking into (and from) our thoughts and conversations in the room - the public craves an advance in technology, entertainment delivers that advance in technology, and the advance in technology seems to both destroy lives and offer dangerously exciting opportunities. I think we’re seeing this combination of fear and opportunity a lot in a lot of fields today because of the leveling force of internet technologies. There’s a great deal of paradigm shift and fear in the air… Will the argument over new media kill television and film, are ipods making us all deaf, will digital downloads kill the music industry, is there a need for news in a world populated by bloggers, does user-driven content disable a common public dialogue and exacerbate philosophical divides between us, and will all of this shift lead to a big cataclysmic recession? These are all related questions, and the answers will prove that the questions didn’t even matter.

And yet, we can continue to teach and learn from each other. We can look out for each others’ flow and keep our mutual momentum going. This isn’t just frilly feel-good work, this is about opening connections. This process of checking in, of bouncing ideas off each other, of collaboration - that’s the process that the internet was built on, and the process that will yield the most rewards in the future. I couldn’t have completed my sound design for Bilal Dardai’s Contraption without the assistance and input of Stephanie Farina. As she learned my style of programming, it taught me to refine my style of programming and use her set of ears with mine to make something more compelling. Without that teaching process, it just wouldn’t be the same design. I wouldn’t have developed any sort of fearlessness in my work without a simple lesson from Smith College playwriting prof and Taoist master Len Berkman: “Always start with a bad idea. Then you won’t be afraid of that your ideas are bad. You’ll know they are.”

We need each others’ help to get big change in motion, and that means passing torches and being able to trust others to teach us and help us redirect our own adolescent prejudice. I wouldn’t know about half the things I know about how sound works in theater if my students hadn’t asked those questions that started with “How do you do….” I wouldn’t have become a confident artist capable of making strong choices if my teachers hadn’t turned to me and said, “Okay, what would you do here?” Do this for others, and you’ll see - feedback comes quicker, stronger, and more effectively.

Building a better community, a community that works better, begins with a very simple step:

“Hey, check this out! Look what I can do with this…”

So, What did you learn today?

Winters are a bitch.

It’s cold as hell, and we have it easy. Try walking outside sometime and looking up into the dead, empty treetops on your street - you’ll probably notice clumps of leaves and twigs, high up near the top.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s your neighborhood squirrel’s home. They’re sqwunched up in that little ball of insulation, shivering through wind, snow, sleet and freezing rain.

The fact is, some animals make it through the harsh winter, and some don’t. But the squirrels do what they can to make sure that they make it.

There’s been some pretty disheartening news from storefront theater this week both Live Bait and the Bailiwick are in danger of collapsing and closing their space’s doors. I wish I was surprised, and I wish this wasn’t an annual tradition, just as predictable the new crop of newly-budding storefront troupes pop up just after graduation.

I’m not a social darwinist, but there’s something that fixtures like Bailiwick and Live Bait could have used to protect their institutional assets to fend off the climate change of a rapidly shifting cultural demographic: An infrastructure that is closely fitted to their institution, lightweight, simple, and powerful.

What do I mean by saying something that impetuous? Let’s look at Live Bait. According to the article, and consistent with what I’ve seen there, the problem isn’t money, it’s time. For over twenty years, the Live Bait space has been run by a husband and wife duo and often a third or fourth management overhire. This is just not enough people to sustainably run a mini-rental house. Trash piles up, strikes aren’t completed, repairs need to be made, bills need to be collected. Sharon Evans and John Ragir have put in their time and they deserve a change of focus and time to focus on their personal creative endeavors. The problem for the institution has been finding like-minded folks that they could trust to delegate the work. Now there’s no one who can run the ENTIRE theater infrastructure for them - from the minutiae that I mentioned to maintaining board relationships, filing taxes, and making long-term planning decisions about the building itself - and that’s like having no theater infrastructure at all.

Mission Paradox outlines the importance of valuing your own time in his blog this week, and I couldn’t agree with that sentiment more. But building your theater infrastructure doesn’t have to mean refashioning your organization in the image of the Goodman or Broadway in Chicago. It simply means using the resources you have at your disposal to build yourself a home that will last through the long dark winter that your organization will inevitably face.

Resource 1 - Your people. Build trust and a common vision with your company. Sustainable organizations don’t rely solely on the input from a single leader. Teach everyone in the company as many skills as possible. Encourage each others’ growth, value each others’ time, and only bring on folks into your company that are in it for the long haul. If you’re an individual thinking about joining a company, think about that long haul. Be honest with yourself, and each other, and you’ll find a lot more energy in that honesty. Earn each others’ trust and check in with each other to make sure you all stay happy. It’ll be okay if someone needs to leave someday - if what you’ve built together matters, it’ll keep going if someone needs to pursue other endeavors.

Resource 2 - Your stuff, your place, your home. These are the twigs that are around you. If you used a prop bucket in your first five productions, you’d save that bucket, wouldn’t you? Try not to rent something twice when you can own it once. Bigger ticket items in this category are things like your space. Don’t get a space unless you have deep pockets and a plan for using it, and the people power to keep that use going.

Resource 3 - Your audience. Build them up. Talk to them, a lot. Talk about your organization like you care about it. Build your organization so that you DO care about it, so when anybody walking on the street asks about your theater, you know what to say, and you know how to excite them and convince them in that moment to come to every show you do for the rest of time. Include your board in this category - share what you do with people, and they will want to help you grow it, because you’ve let them own a piece of your success. If you treat donors like audience and audience like donors, you have a simple relationship with everyone, and you’ll still be getting those donations. You’ll get those donations by caring about what you do, and letting the world know that you care.

Resource 4 - Your time. None of this stuff does anyone any good if you burn out. Burning Out on theater is a wasting disease killing our industry. Here’s the real secret to building infrastructure that will help you avoid that fate. You don’t need complex box office structures and subscription series and mailings and cold calls to your phone list unless the STRUCTURE of your audience and your organization demands those solutions. Remember, our world is changing pretty fast these days, and these are old solutions to old problems. You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by listening to your audience and recognizing what they’re actually responding to, not what you think they’ll respond to. You don’t have to search far and wide for effective innovations that save you time - Just build your strategies and procedures well, test them, measure them, and make sure they still make you happy after you’re done with them. Make those strategies and procedures as simple as you possibly can without sacrificing their effectiveness and quality. Put joy into your process. I’m serious - if you have a hard time enlisting your company members to run the box office or come to strike, make those tasks fun. Write funny box office manuals. Throw a strike party. Then, you’ll all have energy to keep it going and enlisting other folks that will help you keep it going.

Notice how money isn’t even on this list? Money is water. You don’t just need water, you need a big bucket so when it doesn’t rain for a while, you still have something to drink.

And even if they’re cold, don’t pet the squirrels. They’ll make it.

I visited Bev a few days ago, for the first time since right after the accident.

Bev Longo had been our stage manager at New Leaf for our production of Accelerando two seasons ago. Bev is an accomplished MFA director who had worked as an assistant with Lookingglass, taught for years, but was having difficulty getting reconnected with the theater scene in Chicago and at that point was really interested in doing anything. I know her because she’s also the aunt of Lilly West, my counterpart sound operator for the Albert stage at the Goodman, who helped arrange the whole collaboration. Bev was quietly focused and almost religiously respectful of the theatrical process, and we desperately needed a capable stage manager, someone who would shepherd the project and help it grow. She sort of ended up as a mother figure for the show - running sound and projections in addition to the myriad props presets and stage sweepings and note taking that goes with stage management. She certainly was the central culture rock for the cast, and remains good friends with several folks, including New Leaf regular Tiffany Joy Ross. We hoped that she’d be interested in continuing our relationship with us at New Leaf by directing one of our upcoming shows, and indeed Bev was involved in the casting process for last season.

For a couple reasons, that never ended up happening, and it took me a while to understand why she ended up leaving the directing project suddenly, and with little explanation. Eventually, through much discussing with Lilly, I learned that Bev had a dream of starting a theater of her own, a dream that compelled her to focus her energies on her own work and not the often compromised collaborations with teams she couldn’t always trust. At the time, I didn’t understand and to be perfectly honest, didn’t trust that “go it alone” impulse, but now it’s something I’m beginning to feel a bit more myself. That need for complete trust and focus is strong when you really believe in your own work - when you decide to put all your eggs in that basket - and I think with where New Leaf was at the time, we couldn’t offer her that kind of complete support of vision that she could trust to the ends of the earth, which meant the time had come for her to forge her own path.

Bev was arranging space for her first Chicago production, I believe, when she was hit by a CTA bus at the corner of Belmont & Clark, on August 31st. She landed on her head and spend the next three days in a medically-induced coma. Life has a way of wiping away the petty drama when you least expect it.

Correction from Lilly: Bev was only medically comatose for about three days, which is when I saw her the first time, and the remainder of the three weeks was simply her stillness in recovery and from morphine and other pain killers. For those of you who have experienced a friend or relative with a head injury, this is a big difference - the longer a patient is comatose, the smaller their chances of recovery.

I don’t know why I stayed away so long. Maybe it was seeing her in the ICU, asleep and bandaged. Even though I knew whatever bad blood or disappointment may have existed between us didn’t matter to Bev anymore, I somehow still carried that idea around. I thought that if she had bad feelings about her time with New Leaf, I didn’t want to reawaken those memories with my presence. I tried to help Lilly with just being a sounding board, I suppose, as the family dealt with the massive change to their lives and the innumerable crazy things that happen when families need to come together again to cope with a big change. I didn’t even know what I could do for Amanda, Bev’s daughter, who I didn’t know as well but who had been suddenly thrust into the completely overwhelming situation of being the caregiver of her mother, and therefore needed all the help we could give. Bev eventually woke up from the coma, and like most head trauma cases has to go through a very long recovery process, which so far has involved three four very capable and dedicated care institutions (from Lilly: Illinois Masonic, RIC, St. Joseph’s, and now the Imperial. I wanted to include them before but didn’t have the details in front of me) Slowly movement returned, then some speech, then some sentences with mixed up but somehow still evocative words (When she was asked where she got hurt, instead of “I was hurt in my head” she jumbled up the words and said “I got hurt in my soul.”) Then, some memories came back, and the ability to read and write soon returned as well. In the last four and a half months, Bev has retrained her neural pathways from almost scratch, while retaining many of the long-term memories of her adult life.

This is truly one of the greatest battles we can face as human beings, as creatures - a journey back through our mind, finding our way to our body and our words after the old well-worn path has been lost. In that journey, you have a memory of your old mind and yet you cannot find it… the whole house of cards has fallen. The cards are still there, of course, but Bev has to put them together again, one by one.

I knew I was being childish about the whole visiting thing, so while we were working on Shining City - which is a play that really resonates with those that have suffered a similar loss in their family, let me tell you - I finally said to Lilly, let’s go. During tech, whatever, I wanted to see how Bev is doing. And I finally did.

As we walked into the room, I didn’t expect the constant laughter. From Bev, from me, from Lilly. Bev has changed, of course - her scars, her mind, but her heart is the same - wide open and excited to be alive. I say her mind, but I should be more specific - details are mixed up, like memories and vocabulary, but her cleverness and even wit are still there. Bev thrives on company, but Bev is the first person in her boat that I have ever heard of that still knows how to work her audience. When she can’t remember a word, she uses tricks to try to improv her way through. She’ll read voraciously to jog her memory… when she can’t remember the word for potato she’ll sneak out her printed menu from dinner and say “Oh, we had 1 starch for dinner.” And then she realizes that she’s goofed, and laughs with you. It’s hard, yes, but I also see it as downright inspiring. She is living, and engaged fully with her life, and she has a second chance.

She sat us down first thing and told us something, which coming from Bev is a very promising sign:

“Did you know… I was talking with Amanda, and… I didn’t realize before, but I almost died!” She walked us through her scars, with excited and eager eyes, and told us of the injuries and the surgeries that caused them, as pieces of the puzzle that she’s been putting together since she woke up. For the first time, her short term memory has improved to the point where she is now retaining her recent past, and discussions from a few days ago. And she tells her new stories with all of herself - hope and joy and wonder and self-deprecation.

Bev began writing in a journal the other day to help herself remember. Her written words are that tool she can rely on. It’s a tool that her sharp human mind can use to repair itself, survive and thrive. In her bedside table she reads and rereads her MFA dissertation, amazed at her own work and remembering bits and pieces of emotional detail, especially the signatures on the front from her advisors - “These are the people who liked me so much, they wrote it here.” Her dream from the last year of starting her own theater and directing again has resurfaced with a vengeance. She wants to write a play about what she’s been through, what she’s going through, what she will go through. She is writing with the purpose of remembering who she is, and her writing already reveals that she has a rich inner understanding that she cannot express yet through her damaged speech centers.

“I wanted to live, but I couldn’t.”

We’ve been talking at New Leaf about what it takes to write with your whole soul… Writing and creating with all the language that we possess, not just our words - our music, our dancing, our faces, our hearts. We’re trying to open up a new possibility of engaging with our work - going after the work and the themes that resonate with us from a multi-disciplinary approach. Intellect, Empathy, Touch, Music, Shape, Color… all our languages. Bev has always understood this kind of trust and completeness that you need to have in your own work. And she still has that trust that the work will help her through today.

I learned a lesson yesterday. I guess i knew it before, from my own experiences with teaching and stories of Theater eureka moments like Parabasis’, but I have never seen it and felt a calling to it as strongly as I did when Bev read me her journal two days ago. Theater, and the tactics of engagement that we use in the theater, can save your life. That’s why theater is valuable and worth fighting for. Theater and the crafting of theater can give us all purpose, and hope, and a reason to keep plugging away through overwhelming adversity. It can codify our stories and help us remember the things that matter. But you don’t get to compartmentalize the experience, and you don’t get to do it halfway - clapping politely, and forgetting the experience on the way to the parking garage. It’s an experience that changes you. It’s the hardest work you can do - opening up new neural pathways. And that means it’s not just the words on the page, it’s in the eye contact and the touch - in the connection. It’s acknowledging that we have an impossibly long journey ahead of us, and choosing to take that journey anyway, because we take it together.

God bless Bev Longo. She is one strong woman.

By listening to the Broadway in Chicago Podcast, otherwise known as the “Bi-monthly Have You Seen Wicked Yet? Podcast.” I don’t know why I torture myself.

But it does give me leave for my own moment of blatant self-promotion. You know, for balance.

We have just ramped out a new New Leaf Blog which we’re going to be using to open up our rehearsal and development process a bit to our audience.

Also, I challenged myself to my first same-day podcast for New Leaf’s first rehearsal of Girl in the Goldfish Bowl (which was a few hours ago). You can check out said podcast online here and of course subscribe through iTunes.

I’ll clean up the html tomorrow and make sure the dang RSS feed is pinging properly. For tonight, I rest contented.