Theater For The Future

Hold your horses, I’m whisking you away in just a moment…

Or if that doesn’t seem to work, try this link….

Some brief updates from the forge:

• Tech is going well. That’s the sound playback software LCS you’re seeing there. It’s pretty sweet - it’s the secret behind the complex sonic routing of things like Disney World, cruise ships, Cirque, and, well, the Goodman.
• You have like three days left to see Vivian Girls. Run, don’t walk, to Theater on the Lake at 7pm. I’m probably going to refrain from actually reviewing work on this blog, because 9 times out of 10 I have some sort of relationship or investment in the shows that I would review, but this show stands out. Dog & Pony’s opus isn’t simply a show - it’s an entire emerging genre of performance, and whether you like the show or not (you will) you’ll leave with your head abuzz with possibility. And no, you won’t be weirded out by the masks. You’ll dig it. Scout’s honor.



• The push is on for the Chicago Theater Database. Dan Granata and I have met with a number of interested parties, and it looks like the database will be beneficial to a large number of projects - and the Chicago community at large - without stepping on too many toes. As a result, I’ve taken the plunge to learn a new web development language, Ruby on Rails to simplify the development of the database. My head is swimming right now in: rake db:migrate Lions, script/generate model Tigers, and script/destroy controller Bears, Oh:My! If you’re interested in the project and less in the building of it, send a note. Why should you care? Because data is important: it helps us learn and know things for sure. Update: No, seriously, our data is important.
• The 10 scripts are in for “Cherubs,” a theater training program at Northwestern I’ve taught at for the past five years - a program that has been formative for me as a designer and a teacher. I’ll be designing these 10 shows in July with the assistance of 160 brilliant high schoolers from across the country (and sound designer/composer extraordinaire Steve Ptacek). Preproduction for 10 fully produced repertory shows built and run by teenagers is obviously an undertaking, of course. So those scripts and concepts have started swimming around in the kiddy pool of my brain with the Ruby and the LCS.
• So, as this season prepares to comes to a close, I’m finding myself knee-deep in delicious theater smoothie. Set to frappe. I’m glad I’ve got momentum as I ride around in the blender - and a full plate of projects that I think will do a lot of good for me, us, and the kids respectively. But of course it all means that posting here will continue to be spotty through June, and then blip out entirely in July as I pull daily allnighters - kind of like that period of radio silence as you round the dark side of the moon. But never fear - the summer always has this gravitational pull that flings me back out the other side with a new kind of velocity.

Are you trying to tell me something, Theater in Chicago, with your launch of a Chicago Theater Opening Night Calendar?

I’m happy to lose that chore… but I’m uneasy about what this means for us.

I guess I am going to have to copyright my ideas that will actually generate any web ad revenue before launching them. Not that that will save me. Because this move makes me think of these guys like the Borg: assimilating all these trendy and on the face generic Web 2.0 ideas (podcasts - which they have been doing since the beginning - dynamic databases) into their site and reaping the ad revenue from being the “one stop info shop” for Chicago theater but not really generating the kind of online community involvement that will make a project like this valuable to the artists and not simply profitable. Maybe I think this about them because I don’t know them very well. Maybe we should talk.

I don’t bite - do you?

What do you chicago readers out there think? Am I off base here in thinking that they’re doing the MOST for any listing service in town, but not the BEST they could be doing? Are Theatre in Chicago’s listing services worth supporting and buying into, or do you believe that a community-driven site would have more potential?

One thing I’m positively awful at as an artist is managing my creative intake in relation to creative output. The fact that the only way I seem to be able to describe the need for a holiday is to couch it in terms like “refuel,” “intake,” and “output” should clue you in to why this may be. I think most artists are actually pretty good at this: taking time for themselves and making sure that they get enough ’soaking’ time to feed their art with life experience. I’m crap at it.

This is one reason I’m really thankful to work with music, because it inevitably flips that switch in my head to a more sustainable rhythm of life. (I keep thinking I need sound design this blog using some kind of internet radio, but that’s another story…) With my iPod on shuffle, the connections seem to draw themselves more clearly, and the work begins to flow again.

Yesterday, as I returned the gear on loan for Girl in the Goldfish Bowl - one of two shows I struck in preparation for my imminent departure to Scotland this evening - the song “One Down” by Ben Folds came on, and all the errands I was running that day were brought into perspective, suddenly and cogently - a song that he wrote to fulfill a quota of songwriting for his studio.

People tell me Ben, just make up junk and turn it in
But I never was alright with turning in a bunch of shit
I don’t like wasting time on music that won’t make me proud
But now I’ve found a reason to sit right down and shit some out

One down, and three-point-six tomorrow
And I’m out of here
One down, and three-point-six tomorrow
And I’m out of here

I’m really not complaining: I realize it’s just a job
And I hate hearing belly-aching rockstars whine and sob
‘Cause I could be bussing tables
I could well be pumpin’ gas
but I get paid much finer
For playin’ piano and kissing ass

this is one i wrote just an hour ago and three-point-six at last

Theater for the Future is on vacation for two weeks while Nick enjoys his long-deferred honeymoon.

P.S. - Finally got caught up with Writers and Victory Gardens on the Chicago Opening Night Calendar project, which means I’m just waiting on Goodman and Halcyon (ahem, Tony! - Just kidding) to announce firm dates and most of the largest theaters will be on there, for all your season planning needs. Also, I have discovered that this exists, which means that among other things the calendar will eventually be updated simply by updating the Chicago Theater Database, saving time and heartache for all. Keep sending those dates!

It’s been a week of face to face meetings for me - some planned, some by chance. I usually both dread meetings (for the butterflies that I still get when presenting with a team of collaborators for the first time - or the inevitable long to-do list that I end up with at the end) and have a great deal of excitement for them. When face to face meetings work, they generate a lot of excitement and clarity that e-meetings and phone chats and blog comments can’t even approach.

Some things I discovered within my meetings this week:

The Side Project Annual Retreat
If you’re at all under the assumption that theater artists live a life of leisure, look no further than this group of folks to shatter that illusion. This year we will produce six plays, nearly all world premieres, plus an entry for the Rhino fest and an evening of 365/365 performances and other one acts, but despite all that work (and a brand new facility that serves four or five other theaters each year - a facility operating without so much as a production manager for crying out loud) many of the company members consider the side project, well, a side project. So much so that this week was the first chance that the entire hive of TSP worker bees were able to actually sit down and get acquainted in a lasting way with our newest batch of company members.

Now retreats are quite possibly the most fun kind of meeting I think you can have with artists. It can get knock-down and drag out - typically retreats are scheduled in snow-bound ice-fishing shacks near the UP to do important work like clarifying the mission of the company and really exploring the artistic boundaries and organizational priorities for the next few years. The door is locked, blood is shed, and epiphanies are inspired.

It’s the deceptively simple process of finding my priorities that I think finally became clear for me during this particular meeting. See, I still don’t know which fragment of my career I care the most about - or at what point they all will need to get set aside to make way for a family. I’ve been trying since I started this blog to really work out something like a personal artistic mission for myself and for the life of me I haven’t been able to understand what’s been shifting in my career lately… Since the start of this season it’s been a kind of chaotic flux between outside forces and my own irrationally workaholic behavior. Some days it’s difficult for me to describe why I continue to feel passionate about my work with companies like the side project, work which more often than not gets mired in the ugliness of practical detail and disappointing attendance. Who takes out the trash, how do we keep the basement dry, and how do I keep the graphic designs on schedule with all of these other projects in the oven?

In the midst of the team-exploring exercises (”Which one of us has swum with whale”? or “Who helped castrate a bull?”), that underlying reason was drawn out with the force of conversation and articulation with other fierce-willed and sharp artists: I do it so that I can be there and assist where other people are developing their ability to articulate themselves through art. In many ways, seeing others develop is much more rewarding than seeing my own work realized and recognized. I suppose it’s the difference one would feel between growing up yourself and seeing your children grow up.

The Chicago Theater Database Project Kickoff

Okay, Kickoff: Strong word. In our first meeting last week, some progress was made, and more importantly a roadmap was developed. While Dan continues to hammer away at data collection (check out his upcoming analysis of nearly all the 990 reporting from non-profit theaters in town as an example of the power of centralized data collection); and I pound away at the structure of the thing, we’ve added Bethany Jorgensen to the mix (of the on-hiatus site FreeandCheapTheatre.com, which in days gone by hooked industry folk with - ta da - free and cheap tickets on a weekly basis).

We’re exploring how FACT and a number of other sites could eventually be able to team up to collectively power, populate, and take advantage of the database. (hint: it’ll likely be through an API that your theater’s site can take advantage of and even integrate with to lighten the load of constantly updating other listing and social networking sites)

For me, the best part of the first meeting was jumping between the conversational styles of Dan, Bethany and I - Dan shares my excitement for database design and theory, so we got to geek out a bit on the design details one of the largest projects either of us have worked on. Getting MySQL to talk through ODBC to Access is proving difficult, but hey, it could happen. Got any tips? Bethany is much more of a hands on, face-to-face community organizer (and her FACT days have proved her incredibly effective in this regard), so her approach to the project was very much human-oriented: How will we take the collected data and feed a community of actual humans who use the site to network and find great work? What kind of time will humans like us actually save once such a network exists?

Finally, I opened up the very very young and impressionable back end of the database up to a few test users today to see how she handles. If you’d like to be a test pilot, let me know! So far, we’ve all learned a lot more about the depth of theater there actually is in Chicago. It’s all incredibly eye-opening data.

There are other meetings to come: tomorrow we’ll be discussing Community Storage possibilities with a number of theaters, and in the future I’m told that USITT is floating the idea of a computer lab and design center for theater practitioners in Chicagoland. There’s season planning meetings for New Leaf, and side project, and I’ll be meeting the crew at a Middle School in the burbs where we’ll learn together what we all know about lighting and sound and why we’re doing the play “30 reasons not to do a play.” I’m glad I have a reason to keep working on them, because I’ll need it to convince all the 14 year olds that indeed there are reason TO do a play. I’m looking forward to the clarity revealed and the focus generated by being in those rooms together with all those people.

And I’m not going to lie, I’m also looking forward to dropping it all and seeing this castle in a few weeks, as I pursue that other worthy priority: witnessing the world with my wife. While we can!

I’ve caught myself many times trying to solve essentially human problems with this laptop I’m typing on right now. And you know what? Sometimes it works. We can find a lot of help we didn’t know existed on these interwebs.

And you know what else? Sometimes being there in the room or out there on the hills is the only thing that’ll do the trick.