Things, arranged.

The Stage and the Soapbox

The plays we have held as classics have one thing in common: the theatre as a metaphor. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to Tennessee Williams to Carol Churchill and beyond, great playwrights have understood that the power of theatre lies in the imaginative. A few people on stage, an artificial world, language and story all wrapped in a larger metaphor of human experience. Even Brecht, with his alienations and direct political messages still used metaphor: the chalk circle, the city of Mahagonny, etc.

What happened?

Most of the time when I attend the theatre these days, which I admit is not often, I am usually blasted with a polemic, didactic and rather obvious set of statements couched as theatre.

Identity politics drama and social issue plays are actually extended blog posts (like this one) intended to convince of something I already understand: racism, sexism, intolerance are bad.

I get it. Do you have anything original in mind?

Also, it seems like the audiences at these shows are the sung to choir of the cliché. They nod knowingly and embrace the stuff going with a strange sort of "we are with you, we get it" cultism.

Don't get me wrong: I'm about as leftist as they come, somewhere just to this side of Ché Guevara on many issues. However, the liberal soapbox that is the typical stage event makes me embarrassed to be a liberal.

Do the artists putting on the play, which is expensive, difficult, laborious and unprofitable not realize they are speaking to an ever shrinking club of enablers? There is no one's mind out there in the audience that needs changing. It's all your friends, Facebook and actual, who are egging you on. You are hollering into an echo chamber.

Where are the playwrights exploring worlds that provoke my imagination? Where is the stagecraft that transforms a simple setting into a universal symbol? Where are the stories that touch my deep human need for myth, fable, folktale? Also, why are you yelling at me?

If the theatre continues this slide towards becoming a very small soapbox, it should come as no surprise that most people have no use for it. Netflix is so much better and a lot less expensive.

Theatre has always had a special set of elements that make it a unique art form: a live event where imaginative forces touch on powerful themes through language and images that can only occur in real time.

I'm still seeking that kind of theatre, but I seem to mostly find reductive, badly staged, predictable and polemical theatre in my home town of Seattle.

Waiting for Godot is a pretty good play. It's two guys and a tree. It's also a powerful metaphor for the human experience.

I wish more theatre makers appreciated that. 

The Studio Seattle

After decades as a professional director of television and theatre and university professor of drama, I am now embarking on a new venture.

The Studio Seattle is a place where actors can go deeper, challenge themselves, explore more and improve their craft with a focus on getting actors ready for the real profession.

There is a vibrant and dynamic acting community in Seattle, but there is a dearth of instruction from teachers who have actually worked at a national level. I'm talking prime time television and nationally ranked professional theaters along with top-ranked MFA actor training programs.

I've been there. I know what it takes. 

If you are interested in taking your craft to the next level, check out The Studio Seattle's workshops and classes. And yes, I have a blog there about acting, too.

Because there is no substitute for real experience.

We all live in Plato’s cave now

Recall that in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the prisoners are shown shadows on the wall created by firelight and diffuse sunlight. These shadows are created by those who aim to distract and deceive. After a time, the prisoners accept that the images on the wall are reality itself.

Indeed, should one of the prisoners be freed and led into the true light of day above, they would be painfully blinded by the sun and desire to immediately return to the familiarity of the cave.

It doesn’t take much to see ourselves as those prisoners, gazing intently as we do at our mobile phones, tablets and computer screens, Facebooks, Twitters and Instagrams. It doesn’t require a huge leap of imagination to envision outselves as gaping cave dwellers as we switch from FOX to CNN to MSNBC to SNL to Oprah to HBO to NETFLIX and back again.

Our reality is the reality we consume for most of our waking life. It is a manufactured reality in the age of convergence where fiction, fact, fake news, entertainment, headlines, commercials, causes, spin and ratings all blur into one great miasma of non-stop images and sounds.

For me the most important aspect of Plato’s allegory is the notion that the prisoners actually prefer the shadows on the wall to reality. It is far less painful and far more entertaining.

What then should those of us do that are willing to endure the harsh sunlight in order to better ourselves in the long run? We will have to engage the parts of our minds that have been atrophied over time and by those who prefer we not think too much.

Critical thinking. Slow thinking. Dialectical reasoning. Semiotics: understanding the difference between a Sign and The Thing Itself. Recognizing who and what is to gain when a new shadow is presented to us in the cave. Seeking elusive objectivity. Resisting the urge to seek the lowest common denominator. Embracing complexity. Living with uncertainty and doubt. Denying extremism and polarization. Exalting learning. Valuing intelligence. Knowing reason.

These once lauded attributes are becoming rarities in the 21st century as more and more of our reality becomes digitized, pixelated, commercialized and profitized. I can attest to being a first hand witness to the extinction of whole mind thinking. For 12 years I taught in higher education as a tenured professor who always endeavored to inform every subject I presented to students with a caveat: develop the tools so that you can make up your own mind. In order to do that, develop a mind first. Learn how to think critically. Most of my students simply wanted to know what was on the test and how the material being presented would help them since employers never listed having a whole mind as a job requirement.

Thankfully, a small percentage of my students came to believe that thinking critically was important. Perhaps one day they will come and lead us out of the cave and into the sunlight. If it hurts too much and we need to crawl back inside, we can always return to our virtual reality and lose ourselves by spending too much time writing and reading articles online.

Fast Food May Days

 

On May 1 2018 some people decided to petrol bomb a McDonald’s in eastern Paris.

It was the 50th anniversary of the famous student May Day riots of 1968, which was a turning point for French cultural, political and economic thinking. The May Day events of 1968 were begun by students. Workers, unions and their supporters joined. President Charles De Gaulle fled the country, and when he returned he dissolved parliament and called for new elections.

It’s hard to say who burnt the McDonald’s. They wore masks and are called the “black bloc” by authorities. It’s doubftul students were involved, because most of them really like McDonald’s. Same with workers and union types. They eat at McDonald’s often.

The Paris riots were a level up in violence from May Day demonstrations past and those that took place in other parts of the world.

Why is the “black bloc” so angry at McDonald’s?

There is the symbolism of attacking a global capitalist enterprise that pays low wages and has no regard for the health, safety, culture or well being of the countries in which it chooses to open stores.

There is the resistance to the seemingly inevitable corporatization of the globe, where sameness and lowest common denominator goods, products and services come with a heavy dose of crassness and shallow profiteering.

There is the highlighting of the wage gap and working conditions of poor workers who increasingly feel like lifelong serfs.

However, the so-called “black bloc” seems to be less concerned with messaging and more interested in provocation. That’s what you do when you are an anarchist. You don’t actually want to promote anything, you just feel a deep passion for tearing things down.

Maybe that’s unfair. Maybe the poor of the world need events like May Day to remind us all that poverty, disaffection and dissilussionment are very real. Curiously, a watershed work on global poverty by Bourguignon and Morrison proposes that fewer people on earth live in “extreme poverty” than ever before in human history.

(Our World in Data: Global Extreme Povery by Max Roser and Esteban Ortiz-Ospina https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty)

Perhaps the May Days of out time are not about highlighting, resistance or symbolism. Perhaps they are about visibility. Perhaps they are about the deep human need to be acknowledged as existing. Perhaps the target of the petrol bombers on May 1 2018 was the singular, greedy eye of the a corporate cyclops, who obsessively counts its sheep and guards its cave with covetousness. Perhaps the petrol bombing was a kind of heated stake driven into the eye of this global cyclops. An act of literally “sticking it to The Man.”

As Norman Mailer wrote in his 1974 Esquire article on the graffitti phenomenon: “Perhaps that is the unheard echo of graffitti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apolcalypse less and less far away.”

(Test Pressing; Esquire magazine, March 1974 http://testpressing.org/2012/06/esquire-the-faith-of-graffiti-norman-mailer/ )

Did you know that the French name for the Big Mac is “Le Royal”? Did you know that the first two names McDonald’s tested for the Big Mac were “The Aristocrat” and “The Blue Ribbon Burger”?

Vive la revolution and one Happy Meal, please.

The Extinction of the Whole Mind

After over a decade in the halls of higher education, I am leaving the world of tenure and academe as an associate professor of the dramatic arts. There are many personal reasons I have departed such a secure and coveted position, the most important one being that I am continuing to evolve and grow as a human being and want to apply my experience and skills with story to writing full time. What is disheartening about my departure from many valued colleagues and students is how the American university is becoming a place of de-evolution and shrinkage.

De-evolution in the sense that after the financial crisis of 2008, a new era of austerity, economic expediency and specialization has gripped the academy. Shrinkage in the sense that instead of enriching minds and enhancing the essential citizenry of our next generations, the academy is undergoing a narrowing and shallowing of education that will, in my opinion, come to haunt us soon in the 21st century.

Renaissance, Enlightenment, America as a Democracy of Informed Citizens. Noble sentiments that were major the themes of the past many hundred years of western civilization. When the twentieth century was dubbed "The American Century" by some, one of the key proofs therein was the dynamic transformation of our society that was a direct result of a broad based, world class and accessible university education in each of our fifty states.

However, today's public universities have been commoditized, politicized and legislated into something strange. Let us list here just a few of the more bizarre and existential conundrums facing today's universities:

* Seats to the highest bidder: Chronic budget cuts and a demand that universities behave in a more "entrepreneurial manner" by increasingly vocal stake-holders have led to a disproportionate level of foreign and out-of-state students who pay premium tuitions displacing local students. In-state students, some with exceptional academic qualifications are being turned turned away. They don't pay very much tuition. Universities that try and quota enough seats for local students face enormous budget shortfalls as a result, with no relief due to forced tuition increase caps. So much for the noble intentions of the land grant state university movement.

* Silo-ed departments competing with each other for student credit hours to get a slice of the ever shrinking budget pie must increasingly "popularize" their curriculum in order to attract students. The result is a dumbing down of curriculum to the lowest common denominator. Student credit hours mean dollars. Therefore, butts in seats by any means necessary. Hence, the Impact of the Hong Kong Kung Fu movie and Sex, Drugs, Rock n' Roll become two of the most populated entry level classes for incoming freshman in the Humanities department. Welcome to higher learning in America circa 2018.

* Credit pressure on students to specialize early and remain committed to one narrow track of study: competitive programs demand specific pre-requisites, and deny the student any real opportunity to explore other areas of knowledge due to heavy credit loads. The result is a collapse of the very essence of "universal" knowledge. Instead, students are tracked into ever narrower fields of specialization to feed a voracious economy. Know less, study harder, graduate and embark on a career as a human widget.

* The culture war wasteland: Today's university is a battleground of polarization, narcissistic identity politics and "us" versus "them" thinking that reflects much of our current wider culture, but is exacerbated by a fractured, isolated and limited world view which is the by-product of over specialization. There is little possibility for real learning when there is no light, space or air for an idea or argument or concept to be presented without the threat of retribution or lawsuit.

I could go on, but these are a few of the top factors that have rendered our universities impotent and ineffectual. When the ability to consider both sides of an argument or issue is lost, when the idea that a well educated, well informed citizen is a better citizen for a democracy is disregarded for expediency, when the belief that a narrow mind is of greater value to a society than a whole mind is advanced by those who wield power, then we have come to a dangerous time in history.

Finally, just so you don't take this article as the post-professorial whinings of a frustrated academic, consider this: in one of the most fascinating and challenging research projects I ever engaged in at the university, I tried to help Amazon's human resources people in Seattle solve a problem with their college recruiting programs. The problem was that Amazon had a seemingly limitless number of college applicants who could fulfill their technical, logistical, computational and industrial needs, but they have been struggling to find college graduates who could become future leaders; students who could think critically, solve problems, imagine creatively and see the bigger picture. They were looking for whole minds. I hated giving them the bad news:

Unfortunately, we just aren't educating a lot of those in these times. They don't seem to be in much demand.

Ragged Claws

 

 

 

Here at the bottom of the sea

Silent sirens and mystery

Caverns of chorus vaulting high

No need for anything dry

 

Here at the bottom of the sea

A pair of ragged claws is me

Sunken bodies drifting by

Mermaid sings a lullabye

 

When I did sail the great wide ocean

The wind was my map and chart

Chasing dragons on the horizon 

A moral compass was my heart

 

On the shore a flag was flying

The battlements were steel and grey

Storm warning signs arriving

Live to fight another day

 

On the shore her voice was calling

 

Though lovers be lost

Their love shall not

 

Can’t forget the song she sang

 

Though lovers be lost

Their love shall not

 

 

The Cost of Doing Business

“When gun violence becomes commodified as content by the media, we consume it rather than experience it. As a nation, we’re dead to it now. Despite our momentary hysteria, we’ve pretty much compartmentalized gun death, random mass shootings in particular. Consequently, we live in a country that seems to agree that 33,000 gun deaths a year is an acceptable price to pay for our unique, constitutionally guaranteed access to firearms.”

 - Gregory Gibson, New York Times, Sunday February 18, 2018

The Sameness of All Things

 

The date is February 4th, 2018.

The event is the National Football League championship gama, AKA The Super Bowl.

The moment is when a Dodge Ram advertisement airs during the broadcast.

The ad is a collage of images of the Dodge Ram truck, supported by the voice of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his iconic speech about the nature of 'Greatness'.

The message is clear: The Dodge Ram truck is equivalent to an entire race striving to overcome incredible historical, political, social and judicial oppression by embracing personal greatness.

In this moment, the long and tragic road America has been traveling, where everything, everyone and every aspect of American life becomes a commodity reaches its final destination as a place where only the bottom line exists.

We, as a nation, now agree that everything is the same, and everything that is the same is also for sale.

Totalitariam regimes and empires of the past have been overt about their insistence that all that exists has some fealty to the dominant power structure. Rome, The Soviet Union, pre-capitalist China to name a few of the well known. To render unto Caesar what is Caesar was to acknowledge who really owned everything. To serve the state and the party was the patriotic duty of every Soviet citizen. To declare unwavering commitment to Chairman Mao and the Communist Party was to be an upright citizen.

Now, in early 21st century America, to accept that persons, bodies, lives, thoughts, politics, deeds, ideals, principles, beliefs, cultures and all else are indeed commoditites in service of profit and power is to be a patriotic American. 

All the faux hashtag "movements" that inundate our lives, all the identity politics and culture wars that inform our existence are simply the by-products of this commodification phenomenon. The most vivid example of this is those in Hollywood who have allowed themselves to be bought and sold as products now wearing a certain color or lapel pin to awards shows where their self-commodity narcissism is celebrated on television by America. 

The question now is: whence goeth a nation when everything has been sold?

Time

 At the end of Ridley Scott's 1982 classic sci-fi film BLADE RUNNER, we hear a voice over as we see a vehicle heading towards a dystopian horizon.

"I didn't know how much time we had. Who does?"

In 2017, the Film BLADE RUNNER 2049 was released.

That's 25 years after the first film, which is set in a dystopian version of 2019. The story of the new film takes place 30 years after the original.

The original film was based on the Philip K. Dick book DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? That book was written in 1967 (published 1968), 15 years before the original film was made.

There is a lot of numerical symmetry going on here. Or is there?

We mark millennia, centuries, decades,  birthdays and year ends as if the dates and numbers hold some power or indicator of a greater truth. This is a uniquely human trait. We also see patterns,  cycles and symmetries in numbers and days. 

According to the tarot, a reading does not portend future events or explain past experiences; instead the cards present us with a pattern or canvas upon which we impose meaning, should we choose to do so. 

We are who makes meaning out of the pictures before us.

Time is a kind of picture: we look back, look ahead and act accordingly. We can remember the past, we can imagine the future. We can live in the permanent now, although this is becoming a more difficult task in our “what’s next” culture.

How then, shall we decide what to do next? Like travellers along a road, we walk along and take in the signs around us. Some of the things we encounter have meaning: another person, a task to be done, the people we care about. Some of the things we encounter are more enigmatic: a murder of crows, a sudden change in the weather, the coming of night. We consider,  contemplate and consternate.

And then, as if all of sudden, we turn off the path and walk towards unknown destinations. 

It’s Time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Actors Guide to Human Nature

This may be off putting at the beginning, but bear with me...

Understand that all humans are inherently: Selfish, Stupid, Lazy.

Humans will always prefer to gain as much as possible while knowing the least and doing as little as possible.

Understand that the sources of all human desire are: Acquisition, Rivalry, Vanity, Power.

From philosopher Bertrand Russell: the need to have more, have more than another, be self-centered and seek leverage over others.

Understand that the hidden causes of human actions are: Fear, Guilt, Shame.

Humans are afraid of what they do not understand and will always be motivated to avoid or attack what they fear, or will pursue actions based on a fear of what others and their own consciences may judge them as. Humans carry guilt over who and what they have done, and endeavor to suppress it. Humans are ashamed of their own actions that are the result of their true nature and will try to dispel this.

Understand that the human circumstance is: Denial of all of the above.

Humans will always deny all of the above because it is simply too hard to face the truth of who and what they are.

Understand that the singular human capacity that counters this situation is:

LOVE.

From Jacques Derrida: after all is understood about humanity, there is hope because we have the capacity to love, which is the only human trait that can help a person rise above their condition.

None of these concepts are to be taken as cynical or pessimistic. They are simply attributes of a sentient being that is trying to find the “best” way to survive and thrive in the world. The capacity to love allows a human being to care more about something or someone outside of their experience, thereby raising the possibility of recognition, acceptance, examination and choice.

These choices then become human actions.