Theater For The Future

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around my tumultuous last few weeks. Lots of rescheduling, working, and wrangling, and with some unexpected time on my hands in the coming months, my wife and I finally booked those honeymoon tickets we’ve been pining for. Update/Sidebar: Holy crap, I did it again. Periodically I’ll have these fits of fatigue where I am compelled to actually count back in my calendar and let myself have the slowly dawning realization… Today marks the 66th (and GASP! Final) day of work in a row for me - yes, that’s straight through since Jan. 2nd, and no, it doesn’t include my many half-days off. So forced time off is often an extremely healthy thing in my book. My worst stint was the 157 days of continuous work a couple years ago that culminated in that vacation where I proposed. To my wonderful wife. My extremely patient and loving wife. I’m certainly not complaining: Baseball been berry berry good to me, and I’m looking forward to some refocusing time. And since they’re in my tribe, if you’re in need of a good electrician, TD, Equity SM, or Non-Equity SM in the next couple months and can shell out a real fee to keep them working, I have some pretty stellar names for you.

So while that dust settles, I’d like to remind all you theater producers out there that now is the time to get in on the Chicago Theater Opening Night Calendar, as theaters begin to pick and announce their opening night dates for the coming season. Again, the point of the project is to first prevent unfortunate conflicts that prevent critics from seeing your opening night. The fortunate side effect is hopefully that your show will be promoted to the folks looking through the calendar.

A debt is owed (again) to Rob Kozlowski’s assiduous chronicling of every season announcement that’s crossed his inbox. His summaries are a great read, and for theaters they’re a great starting point to grapple with the all-important Context of What’s Going On In Other Theaters this coming year.

As far as the calendar goes: I’ve got some insight into when the Goodman opening night dates land in previews, but not even those dates are chosen yet; likewise with ATC, whose season announcement fired off a month ago like a starting pistol, but still has not announced the precise schedule. I’ve been able to deduce both Steppenwolf and (I think) House dates, but of course no information is as accurate as from the horses’ mouth. Also on there for next season are Theater Seven and Silk Road, who are on different semester schedules, and in Silk Road’s case is coming up on their halfway point.

Know something I don’t know? Let’s hear it. And happy Open Season Selection, y’all.

Update: Don Hall is right, even if his title is wrong. If you love your job(s), it (they) will keep you strong and energized and creative. I’m living proof. Though if I love my job anymore, I’ll just be posthumous proof.

While the Chicago Opening Night Calendar project is chugging away, adding a few shows each day, I’ve dove head first into the actual production work that I’ve been carefully procrastinating on this month. The ideas are still bouncing around, but the time to execute them using the glorious tubes of the interwebs is running dry for the moment. That’s cool, right? We’re cool. Baby steps.

Some thoughts bouncing around this week:

- Our new sound intern at the Goodman is from the realm of sound, but is brand spanking new to theater. It’s been really fun to see him open his eyes to the possibilities while watching the process behind Shining City. It looks like he’s really falling for it, which is really great to see. Yesterday, I put the Opening Night Calendar to the practicality test and used it to find four shows - all in previews or early in the run to help his wallet - that showcased the variety of Chicago theater to a newbie with an appetite. It’s been a great reminder for me personally just how much is out there, and we’re not even done yet. Thanks to new adds Point of Contention, Theater W!t, Speaking Ring, Stage Left and Live Bait for being early adopters and Kris Vire and Rob Kozlowski, who both drove some traffic to the project over the weekend.

- Read this totally kickass analysis of why, systematically, the music industry is slowly drowning itself, and what other industries can do to avoid a similar fate.

- A spectacular cross-blog conversation on the importation of actors to regional venues has popped up here and here and here. I am grossly under-informed on the topic, or I’d join in. From my vantage point in the storefronts and even a great deal of the larger theaters, I see a lot of great local working actors, which makes me happy, and the imports don’t often last. I know it’s a major issue, and as Marc Grapey and David Cromer would say, we designers don’t have to deal with the import issue as much while we chew our bon-bons from atop our great piles of cash. Again, though… cross-pollination is a good thing, so if we can encourage it to actually happen and maybe balance the trade deficit a bit, we might be able to pump out a little lemonade from the situation. It’s losing actors to LA and NYC and other regions that I dread, but getting them to visit every so often is good for all. So while I have little to add, I think it’s pretty neat that the arguments are being refined right where you can read them, add to them… and now you can do something about it.

- The discussion of international theater festivals in the last post led me to try out a few great online resources, including the Chicago History Database which is operated by a history-minded English professor from Valparaiso University and assisted by Chicago Reader critic Albert Williams. The site’s mission is to track the founding, disbanding, archival materials, and key membership of all theater companies in Chicago, big and small.

The process of finding information on a now defunct cultural institution, the Chicago International Theater Festival, which last convened in 1992, proved to be more difficult and speculative than I would have thought. And finding information like this, which is key to a developing artist’s career and theater’s development. I think in Chicago’s scene there are a number of theaters that travel the same path as long-gone theaters because of a lack of institutional knowledge and community memory.

After all, one who does not learn from the past is doomed to repeat it. (Institutional Memory is one of those things that I mention at almost every company meeting. I’m a die-hard supporter of saving and processing the past and present for the benefit of the future in any organization.) Difficult and history-changing tasks like opening a new space or organizing an international theater festival leave traces of extremely valuable information and lessons that can be passed on to other theaters, or used in the pursuit of city law reform or improving public support. Plus, why do something twice when you can do it once?

Can you tell that I’m justifying the need for another crazy group collaboration project? It’s so crazy it just might work. (I’m so crazy I need to get to work.)

So the scarcity of institutional knowledge in storefront theater got me thinking: Just as our system for managing our collective scheduling might be insufficient to maximize the potential of Storefront Theater in General, how successful are our current methods for knowing just what work is being done in town right now, and knowing what work has been done before we even got here? Armed with that kind of cohesive knowledge, could we more easily notice trends, and use the lesson of the past to benefit the entire storefront community?

Like any possible project, it was time for me to survey what’s currently out there and what exactly was dissatisfying about it. Institutional knowledge certainly exists, it’s a question of where is it being stored, and who is storing it. There are a number of Chicago listing sites that also provide some insight into the wide kaleidoscope of the Chicago Theater Scene. The lists I was able to find when I first moved to Chicago just happened to be the ones with the top Google results: Centerstage’s largely comprehensive list of theaters unfortunately is usually quite out of date; Illyria’s Chicago Theater Homepages lists most current companies’ websites, but hasn’t been updated since February 2007; and Chicago Traveler has a good hit count but is by necessity driven by commercial interests. Other more recent sites try to get the list right, including a formidable recent attempt (powered by php, of course) by Theater in Chicago’s attempt to dynamically map every theater in Chicago.

Why are there so many lists, none of which are comprehensive? There’s several divergent motivations at work here for taking on the task of creating a comprehensive picture of the entire Chicago scene and the network of artists that work together to create it. The first motivation is pure Metromix: The commercial value of providing a listing service to audience members, and these sites are positioned to get the web browsing public to spend top dollar on glossy entertainment. As such, they leave out some of the younger companies and often do not update the information on even the mid-sized companies on a regular basis. Why not? Well, because that’s an overwhelming amount of information that changes almost daily. It may be valuable information, but it’s not valuable enough to these organizations to justify a full-time employee to seek the information out.

Another possible motivation? Positioning your site as alternative media source. You can easily feed your site’s content by the press releases of small companies eager for attention. Both Theater in Chicago and Centerstage position themselves as alternatives to larger media outlets that provide a different kind of coverage. It’s debatable how effective and sustainable those strategies are given the recent collapse of the Chicago Reader, and there’s a key problem with the information contained in almost all of these listing sites: Accessibility. These are all listing sites managed by lone gunman webmasters, who you need to email and rely on to have your information go public. The biggest problem with this strategy (and the working strategy of my Calendar project, for that matter) is the editor-in-charge off in a room somewhere that you need to know about and have access to in order to get your data published. It’s a lot of work to create a completely standalone site, and when you’re done, you need to work out how to cut out a chunk of the market share of the people looking for this information. When you’re talking about theaters who are so young they don’t really understand the context of the theater scene they’re operating in, how can anyone expect one of these listing services to ever be definitive repositories of our history and our progress?

So I realized that what I was really longing for was an improvement to the current Theater in Chicago Wikipedia entry. Wikipedia already has that kind of market share, and it’s going to be one of the obvious sources of information for the forseeable future. The entry is duly based on the definitive Richard Christiansen book, A Theatre of Our Own, but the list of theater spaces and companies is woefully incomplete. Some of the highlights of the ghosts of theaters past (Organic, but no Wisdom Bridge?) Anyone can add both their theater’s entry containing historical information like founders, artistic staff, production history, and mission, and they can also make their presence known in the greater context of the community in the main article. And anyone can edit (and hopefully not vandalize) to provide some measured balance to the whole picture, and create something worthwhile for history and public context. Most importantly, talent that is young, new to town, and wanting to see where they might flourish could easily see a more complete picture of the pieces that make up the world’s most vibrant theater scene.

Community projects move mountains. Many hands make light work, and by making the projects simple (post your theater and the theaters you remember on Wikipedia, everyone!), you can create big, intricate knowledge and labor bases that can help a lot of people with challenges we may not be able to imagine. This principle can be applied to any number of tasks, goals and dreams that seem unreachable now. If everyone in the neighborhood builds a park, everyone in that neighborhood will be able to enjoy that park.

So I’m gonna get on that… and you theater managers and activists should be proud enough of your young history to record the important points in the Wikipedia article yourself. Some savvy theaters have already done this - the history page shows updates from Boho and Sansculottes, for instance.

I’ll be getting on that right after I get these seven shows open. Because, well,… meta, real work, I’m in trouble.

Back to work!

It’s nice, when you set foot into country that you haven’t discovered yet, to know that others have been treading the paths ahead of you and noodling with the same kinds of problems….

In order to better educate myself about what’s out there, what’s being discussed right now and what different voices are already engaged in the discussion, I’ve subscribed to about a gajillion blogs from Chicago (including most of the available myspace blogs that us storefronters have been using to, New York, several other strong theater regions in the country, and most enlighteningly, several international theater blogs. I’ve been reading up on the past few months of activity, and it’s promising, especially the burst of activity that’s begun in the past few days. If you’re operating a storefront theater right now, it’s definitely worth your while to get in on the discussion and consider the possibilities.

To that end, if you’re already interested in the topics of this blog, I’m sharing the blog articles from other authors that are just utterly brilliant or taking a different approach to the topics I’ve been discussing and thinking about, and sharing them in a digest feed - You know, for the future. You can read the digest of the latest articles in the sidebar, or you can subscribe to the digest feed in your own blog reader.

Two blogs in particular have great voices and a deep desire and strategy to explore solutions to the every day challenges of creating theater as a living. Mission Paradox takes a creative and practical approach towards theater marketing, and Theater Ideas by Scott Walters thinks very strategically about how to best take on some of the biggest threats to theater as an industry and as an art form. Check out Scott’s post on the importance of considering trust when building an audience, which I also discuss here. They are definitely must-reads if one of your New Years resolutions, like mine, is to be more engaged with the entire theater community as well as our little local pockets of glory. There’s a lot of great stuff out there, and it’s inspiring - and strategic - to connect and discuss openly with people you wouldn’t otherwise connect with in the theater community.

Speaking of the entire theater community, thanks to the folks that are participating in the Chicago opening night calendar project… upcoming shows are both on the public Google calendar and on the sidebar. Go team!

THE CHICAGO THEATER OPENING NIGHT CALENDAR

NOTE: As the idea of a calendar has taken off, there are two other calendars that contain more data than this one. As such, I’m putting this calendar on hiatus (unless you contact me with a strong need for a subscribable calendar for your google calendar, ical, or other service!)

PLEASE use these resources in planning your next season! It’ll be good for all of us!

I’ve created this public Google Calendar as a way to help Chicago theaters coordinate their opening nights and special events. You can see below to add your theater’s events & opening night schedule, or subscribe to this calendar using Google Calendar or iCal, and a number of other web-savy calendar tools.

(if the calendar isn’t loading properly, click here to see a standalone version.)

HOW TO ADD YOUR OPENING NIGHT OR SPECIAL EVENT:
1) If you deal with multiple theater companies and would like a hand in editing this data long term (yeah, super users!) I can share the calendar with you and you’ll be able to make changes to ANY event on the calendar.

2) For most theaters, especially those already using Google Calendar or a compatible calendaring service, simply create your event (including your show’s webpage URL, the address of the venue, and the date and time of the PRESS opening of your show or event, and invite calendar@nikku.net as a guest., or invite any of the calendar administrators.

3) If none of the above work for you, we still would love your info. Just send calendar@nikku.net an email with the same information - Show Name, Date & Time, URL, and Address - and I’ll get it up there as soon as possible.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE TO THE CALENDAR:

Through Google:

Or Subscribe in iCal with this link

or Subscribe to the XML feed

I will also keep the calendar permanently located on this page, so if you prefer to do things the old fashioned way, just bookmark this page and open it up when you’re planning your next theatrical event!

I was reading through Rob Kozlowski’s Christmas Wishlist for Chicago Theater and I was struck by Item#5:

Make every Chicago theatre company work with each other to make sure they don’t share opening nights. Critics want to see your shows. They really do.

Everyone - EVERYONE - I’ve talked to on every side of the theater community about how Chicago Theater works, Opening Night conflicts and the lack of cross-theater company coordination is always on the complaint list… it’s usually one of the first things mentioned, since it seems so easy to accomplish.

Well, no time like the present, right? Let’s get this DONE as part of our collective New Year’s resolutions. I’ve created a public Google Calendar for this purpose (see below to subscribe and post your own theater’s information!), but in the spirit of collaborative transparency and getting the ball rolling, I’m going to include the thought process behind the strategy.

Getting even a quorum - let alone a majority - of theaters to use any sort of half-baked system is difficult. There’s a number of possible strategies to make something like this work and get past the hurdles inherent in how the community does and doesn’t talk to each other. The best example of how difficult getting theaters onboard with a common system is the fact that the League of Chicago theaters already has such a calendar that not enough people know about, let alone use. In fact, the first I’d heard of the calendar was in doing the obligatory google search during the writing of this post. Apparently Rob and several other friends who work all the time in LOCT member theaters had never heard of the calendar, so that tells us something about how well it is utilized. I think this is because there are a couple of downfalls of the the League’s solution to the problem, which I’m hoping a Google Calendar-based system will alleviate.

1) This needs to be dirt-simple, and something that everyone has access to (or even something they ALREADY have access to)

Google calendar isn’t exactly dirt-simple, but it is something that a large section of the theater community either knows how to use or can learn easily with benefits beyond just being able to read this calendar. Edited to add some additional how-to info to help theaters add their dates quickly and easily, see bottom of post

Also making this simple? This calendar is just for this one thing - You tell me your dates, and I’ll tell you mine. However, it can also be used for several ends - feel free to include your venue’s address and your show web page since this is public and Google-searchable. We may eventually be able to find hard-core theater goers subscribing to this calendar to see nothing but opening nights (or opening weekends), which could be a huge boon in the ongoing effort to get people to see a show early in the run and generate word of mouth. No promises, of course, but like any web tool: the more people use it, the more results.

2) The system needs to be both totally accessible and reasonably free of abuse. If every theater company in town can’t update their information, it won’t work. If a single theater company or user floods the calendar with off-topic or useless information, the system will cease to be trusted, and user enlistment will dry up, making the information stale and unworthy.

This is a little harder to achieve with Google Calendar, and will probably have to work itself out with time and more users. Adding an event to a public calendar is fairly easy. The simplest method is to send your opening night info to an editor, like me (any other volunteers?), and we’ll post your event on the calendar. Since overlapping fundraisers have also been a problem for most theater companies, I’ve made the calendar for one-night-only opening nights and special events. But keeping the calendar well-edited is a further challenge. The basic principle that I believe in is: the more honest users who are able to edit the information, the more trustable the information. With that in mind, I can give editing privileges to any member of the theater community who wants to help keep track of this information. Ideally, we’d have a representative from every theater company able to edit their opening nights.

But this opens up some difficulties with editors not playing nice with each other. Wikipedia’s travails with both commercial spam entries and entry vandalism in recent years with web research have greatly publicized both the need for group editorial guidance and simple self-restraint. I figure, when a problem child theater decides to post every single night of their run, we can come down with some gentle and then more firm editorial guidance. Or, we start with fewer editors and encourage individual theater companies to post their opening nights by sending invites to those theater editors… a little more complicated, but the goal here is rock solid, trustable data at all times.

3) The system needs to offer a subscription service.

Subscriptions? Check. Google Cal is designed on group collaboration principles, and also can send updates to your local Outlook or iCal applications. As information changes, you know those changes, and it’s always online so all it takes is a quick web lookup while you’re planning your season schedule. Also, if you use an online calendar on a regular basis, a subscribable calendar will tend to remind you of its existence on a regular basis, and will avoid the fate of the dusty League calendar.

4) Everyone needs to know about it. Even if the information is complete because I’ve done some research and posted some other theater companies’ opening nights just to have some good info there, this calendar will really only do any good in the spring to summer when theater companies really start nailing down firm dates for their season.

That’s up to you, dear reader. I’ve got my people, and I’ll be letting them know. But let’s make the information good, the system trustable, and tell our friends who can use this info.

This is also the perfect first step towards strengthening this cross-company dialogue I mentioned earlier - and that Kris Vire celebrates in his Performink Year-End Wrap up (thanks for the shout out, Kris!) I don’t mean to harp on the League in this blog post, by the way - they offer a lot of underutilized services to small theaters, and I applaud their efforts a lot of the time. But sometimes I think they don’t get the concept of leveraging the resources they have to achieve bigger results, and this is definitely one of those cases. And frankly, I don’t have the personal resources yet to make Chicago known as an international hub of the Theatrical Art, and I’d rather they focus on solving that problem rather than this kind of ephemera.

My big New Years resolution this year is to explore more behind-the-scenes work that I can do to strengthen the community as a whole, so I think monitoring how we can use web tools like blogs and google calendar in increasingly collaborative ways will be a big part of making that dialogue happen. I hope you’ll join me.

New how-to information: After troubleshooting the way Google Calendar works the adding of events to a public calendar, I have a pretty simple solution worked out for most folks. Follow the following steps:

or Subscribe to the XML feed

Happy New Year, and happy calendaring.

Thanks for the link fix, Michael