Theater For The Future

Hey.

Are you a Director in Chicago?

Are you a Playwright in Chicago?

Are you a Performer in Chicago?

The CTDB happily announces a new feature this morning: a list of companies that accept your submissions, how to contact them, and, as always, links to more detail about each company’s history and mission.

This is cross-posted over at the CTDB Blog.
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Good luck today, everyone.

Always remember that the key to skillful execution of any project is to keep the scope human-sized.

Humans are capable of amazing things, and they have limits. If you are hitting your limits, find more humans who care about what you’re doing. If you can’t find more humans, bite off a smaller chunk of project and save the rest for later. Be honest with your limits… so honest you laugh, so honest it hurts a bit.

I say this now because of a general feeling I’ve been picking up from my friends and my wife and the blogosphere as we enter a time of great change and great uncertainty. People in the theater walk of life are leaving jobs or eyeing new ones and seeking to maintain some level of security and happiness in the face of very alarming changes.

All social problems are human-sized at the root. No bigger. This is what we can learn from theater.

I watched this movie today (so late, such a crime). I really do think that Our Town might be the perfect social issues play, and this movie might just prove it. See it. It will kick your theater-loving ass.

We must all remember to do something human-sized that matters every day.

I would love to know: What theatrical skills or tools or techniques have you used to solve a problem (big or small) or make someone’s life easier or better - outside of theater?

OMG OMG OMG!

Chris Biddle, local improv gunslinger and Victory Gardens staff member, just shilled in a kind of amazingly personal way for Radio Lab, using his true-to-life story of how the mind-warpingly awesome podcast became a pivotal moment in a recent romance - as a riveting 15-minute pledge drive speech.

The story is one I share. Radio Lab will make you fall in love again with being human.

Also, TOC this week has picked up on the fact that Radio Lab is actually theater - or at least a very theatrical kind of storytelling - on the radio. New media crossover, anyone? Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich are two folks to emulate in their mastery of taking complex issues in the sciences and humanities and breaking them apart like a juicy pomegranate, making their shows both digestible and rich. I’ve got my tickets for the Radio Lab appearance at Victory Gardens on Monday, where they will perform their documentary on the various guerrilla radio performances of War of the Worlds through the decades, right after my all-nighter changeover moving MDQ to the Apollo.

And holy cellists from heaven, Zoe Keating will be there to play live, tense, underscore.

I. AM. GOING. TO. DIE. FROM. HAPPY.

(seriously. do not miss this show.)

For many reasons, I think that one of the best stabilizing skills you can invest in for your personal theatrical work and the work of your company is learn a base competency in creating new media - Internet based graphics, web experiences, podcasts, and YouTube-ready video. In the coming decades, not having these skills is going to be increasingly crippling as students who were born with these skills emerge from their collegiate training grounds onto the storefront scene.

One of the reasons that there have been so many union vs. corporate battles over New Media is that the form is so young that most artists were slow to begin to speak the language. But when we do speak the language, we’re better able as artists to control the form. And the form needs help - there are many more folks out there capable of creating a video and posting it online than there are who can make that video say something.

I can’t tell you the number of times daily that having skills related to creating new media has been directly helpful to my work in theater. This kind of goes without saying on the theatrosphere, I know. But it’s a freelance income source compatible with any kind of artistic lifestyle that shouldn’t be ignored.

As my work with Marshall Communications continues to demonstrate to me, having strong new media savvy is much more rigorous than simply getting a website up. It’s about learning to talk about your work and even display your work through new media formats in a way that doesn’t distort your message. It’s about being ready as a theater company to invest and reap the rewards of having ancillary skills and equipment.

Some of the skills I think every theater company needs to have in its bag of tricks, whether it is in-house or through a friend:

Graphic Design (including the industry-standard Adobe CS3 suite)
PHP / Joomla / Ruby on Rails Dynamic Web Programming (for blogs and quick updating of web sites)
Video Production (for archives and promotional materials)
Podcast Production (for readings, promotions)

I’m happy to announce a periodic series of posts that I think I’ll actually be able to keep up on a regular basis (because this stuff is so darn exciting when it’s done right!): the Theater Media Roundup. I’ll be sending out previews and reviews of some of the most successful theater-generated videos, podcasts, sites that promote the work of theater artists. If you’ve got something that you think is changing the way you talk about your show to an audience, send me your stuff!

Right off the bat, let’s mention something already talked about several times on this and other blogs: The Mammals and the DevilVet’s innovative play-as-graphic novel project. Check it out, Sid.

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In the Roundup Today:

YouTube Video promotion for The Gurney (at Strawdog, opening November 3)

What’s great:
For an independent theater project, this has some great polish. It borrows heavily from the white-flash / disconnected preview styles of The Ring and 28 Days Later (so it also inherits some of their baggage), but it also relies on more simple effects like that final disconnected voiceover so it is also genuinely and simply creepy. Best part? It’s specific enough about the story line to have some truth in advertising. You know what to expect at the show itself.
Can you hear that great sound design? Good timing, balanced perfectly with the vocals, and well-buttoned. Perhaps we have veteran sound designer Joe Fosco to thank!

What needs work:
Knowing creep-out movement queen Tiffany Joy Ross as I do, there are some shots of her that could use a bit of editing snippage to really reinforce the disorientation and fear that they’re going for. The timing of the surgical mask and final shot are working brilliantly, but less clear are the more awkward shots of her curtsying like a zombie and “Take this”.
Not knowing the script, I can’t really say that this is what is going on, but one habit of theater artists creating their own promotions is that they try to stick too religiously to the story of the play, rather than creating a stand-alone teaser story for the promotion itself. Maybe this is what is going on here?

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Video Trailer for The Christians, independent movie written and directed by playwright Stephen Cone, and produced by Split Pillow (who shares some staff with the Side Project Theater Company)
(Screening on November 7th, 7:45 at the Gene Siskel Film Center)

What’s great:
The core story of the film is made really clear without giving away too much or being too obnoxiously direct. Cone has always been a master at negotiating human stress in religious dramas, so I’m not surprised that he fares well in the often disheartening task of creating a trailer. This trailer represents his storytelling sophistication well.

Also, check out how well the silence is used, especially in the beginning of this trailer. There’s this sort of sinking sensation you get in the first few moments as hectic shots are accentuated with a close silence… that snapping sound that echoes out and bookends the trailer is exactly the right tone - like the tide going out before a tsunami hits.

What needs work:
Was that a hanta virus-laden explosion I heard? I get the many reasons not to show the devastation of the apocalyptic event in question - it’s a film (on an independant budget) about people and the faith that drives them, not about sound design - but the sound effect itself for what appears to be the catalyzing moment for the plot doesn’t match the ominous portents of the rest of the trailer. The tsunami I mentioned above should be the equivalent of a balloon overflowing with anxiety bursting apart. It sounds instead like the Jolly Green Giant farted in a dumpster.

Fun Fact:
The Christians happens to have been filmed on location in TJ Ross’ apartment. I keep expecting her to walk by these folks with her surgical mask and offer them some of her deliciously creepy hors d’oeuvres.

Our ongoing experiment with the TCG Free Night of Theater at New Leaf is going so well it’s hard not to draw some very quick and dirty predictions about storefront theaters’s viability in the face of an economic downturn. Some things we’re finding (and I’ll let the rest of the Box Office staff at New Leaf give more detail here in the coming days):

* Most people - sorry, most theater goers - don’t realize that storefront theater exists. And, at least in our experience, they’re excited when they discover the art they already love being done in tiny, intimate spaces.

* Most theater goers don’t realize that storefront theater can be excellent. Because we tend to be experimental and/or developing artists, storefront work doesn’t have a consistent quality other than that intimacy. But there are shows that are hands down excellent in that grab bag, and we’re nearly always intimate, and we’re comparatively cheap, storefront theater becomes a no-brainer entertainment value. Human contact in a time of economic hardship is at a premium. We offer close-camera human experience.

* When patrons get past these two hurdles, and like what they see, they have an exciting reaction: Ownership. They feel they have discovered something secret that now belongs to them and they seem to be more excited to tell their friends about the experience than a regular patron would be. Since storefront theater publicity is often built primarily on word of mouth, this is potentially the most valuable patron experience we could ask for. Of course, the data isn’t in on how these patrons comparatively follow through in spreading the word - we won’t know that until the end of this season at least. But by greeting new patrons with a goodie bag of season information, 2-for-1 tickets and a lobby atmosphere that is more real, genuinely friendly, and built by a community than our big-box theater cousins (all because we’re not paid - we LOVE to be there) we’re hopeful on this front.

So what happens when everyone is worried about going broke? Well, we tighten the purse strings. But that doesn’t mean we stop living their lives. In the case of dining, instead of going to fine cuisine, people opt for Olive Garden. Or they take that chance on that local dive.

So, the prediction: Most of us have already seen how the downturn has made grants dry up quickly as foundations scramble to secure their assets and make larger and more flashy large-scale donations that don’t benefit small theaters. If storefront theater can make the case, this could be a year where as theater goers flake off from their big-house big-ticket subscriptions they take a low-risk chance on the work being done in storefront venues. And if the work is good and the experience is good, they might just stick.

But timing is everything. The election, necessarily, will be sucking all the oxygen out of the local and national news cycles right on through November 2nd. I’ve been talking with several theater companies trying to promote their shows right now (hell, I’m one of them), and my advice to them is: Save your energy, wait, and hit hard after the big election come-down.

After then, theater-going groundhogs everywhere will come out of their Cable News comas and want to be a part of life and collective imagination again. Be ready with your best work, your comparatively cheap tickets, and your comfiest chairs. Communities are built from your neighborhood out.