Looking Back at 2017

For the last several years I've been using this website as a kind of portfolio to collect together my creative projects (to be honest, that's pretty much the only point of this website). I have also been doing a little year-in-review deal over for a while (here's 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016). So, here’s what happened in 2017...


Most of 2017 was occupied with my new role as parent. My wife and I brought a beautiful baby boy into the world on December 30th of last year. Obviously, adapting to my new role as a dad took priority over any creative pursuits. So here's a slimmed down look at the handful of theatre and other artistic things I managed to fit in.

In February, I released my play Raspberry Fizz on Kindle. It is the final work in a trilogy of ebooks of short stage plays that I now have on Amazon. Perhaps someday I will collect them together into a paperback edition.

The bulk of the year was just being cozy and domestic. Not until the fall did I get back on the map, so to speak.

In early August I had two plays in the One-Minute Play Fest produced by Kitchen Dog Theater. I went to see them. They went over pretty favorably.

I took my show Robert's Eternal Goldfish to Fresno, California for a two show weekend at an event organized by my friend Grant. It was titled Seattle-to-Fresno Mini Fringe. I had an epic beard.

Me performing Robert's Eternal Goldfish in Fresno

In September, for my birthday, I started a podcast called the Cultivated Playwright. I released nine episodes over the rest of the year ranging from reflections on Sir Peter Hall, minimalism, Dan Harmon and improv comedy to how Thor Ragnarok fits Goethe's Three Questions of Criticism.

In December I participated in Nouveau 47 Theatre's A Very Nouveau Holiday (my fifth time in as many years). This time I had a ten-minute play about a bear that refuses to hibernate and instead works in a coffee shop. It was called Langdon, The Seasonal Barista. It went over very well.

Emily Faith, Robert Long and Monalisa Amidar in Langdon, The Seasonal Barista

I directed Langdon as well as Jonathan Kravetz's Mr. Crispy. Kravetz's play was a sci-fi tear-jerker that deals with a failed screenwriter endlessly reliving his final night with the song-writing friend he had an infatuation with, through the use of a mail-order robot. It had a great premise, but definitely was not in line with the current zeitgeist, with a controlling male protagonist who self-indulgently manipulates a "female" robot to replay one of his memories/fantasies over and over again. 

It was fun to get a chance to direct again, especially my own work.

Charles Ratcliff and Cameron Casey in Mr. Crispy

That's about it. 2017 was a slow year for the ole theatre career, but exciting in a larger sense. I love being a dad, though it has caused a great amount of reflection on where I want to go from here on out and what I genuinely want to accomplish. 2018 should, hopefully, be filled with more balance and more creative endeavors.

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My so called life on Bike Soccer Jamboree Episode 46

I co-host a podcast called Bike Soccer Jamboree. In the most recent episode my fellow co-host, Jeff, interviews me about my career and how I came up in the theatre. Give a listen. Link below.

Listen... HERE

Hearts Not Eyeballs

[via: http://www.flickr.com/photos/deathtogutenberg/ ]

Earlier this week I finished Austin Kleon's new book Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered It is an excellent collection of many of the ideas he has previously discussed on his blog and tumblr. It is filled chock-a-block full of ideas large and small about getting your work out into the world.

One of the headings caught my attention right away. 

Last year, I posted about how a friend of mine gave me unsolicited advice about courting press in order to increase the butts-in-seats ratio at all costs. This led to a heated discussion where I tried my best to explain my long-term outlook on not growing an audience, but nurturing a community of supporters and patrons.

I was delighted to get to the part in Kleon's book shown above. He starts off by writing...

"Stop worrying about how many people follow you online and start worrying about the quality of people who follow you."

I'm mentioning it here because it totally reaffirms my quality over quantity approach to evolving a network of patronage. Kleon is referring to people following online, but the sentiment is similar. And it doesn't just apply to patrons. In includes colleagues, poterntial employers, and a myriad of other supporters. 

Hearts not eyeballs, indeed.

If you are creative person who produces some sort of art, then the book is totally work taking a look at.

Looking Back at 2013: My Year of Making Things

I had a broad swath year as far as creating new art. I didn't do any really big projects (unless you maybe count DRIBBLE FUNK 380 for sheer ballsiness or DINOSAUR AND ROBOT STOP A TRAIN for imaginative awesomeness), but looking back, I covered a lot of ground. Here's a look back...

In January I did a PrintBomb Project, hiding my print "Anything Is Possible"
in a bunch of places at the flagship Half Price Books 

In February I directed student actors in a student-written one-act at Tarrant County College

Read my short piece BURDEN OF A LIGHT BLUE SHIRT at Austin's No Shame in March.

In March I also attended the Staple! Expo and sold a few (very few) of my books and postcards

In April, FUN GRIP played the Improvised Play Festival at Austin's Hideout Theatre.

Participated in Rover Dramawerk's One Day Only! XX, a 24 Hour Play event.
An event I founded in 2000. My play was SHARK BITES AND SIDE EFFECTS.

In April, I also saw my commissioned play CARTER STUBBS TAKES FLIGHT put on in a wonderful production by Denton's Sundown Collaborative Theatre, directed by Tashina Richardson.

In May, I taught a solo improv workshop as part of the 2013 Big Sexy Weekend of Improv
for the Alternative Comedy Theatre.

In June I premiered my play DINOSAUR AND ROBOT STOP A TRAIN at the 2013 Festival of Independent Theatres. Next to CHOP, this play is what I'm most proud of from all of my theatre work to date.

Lower East Side memories

July 1999. Me outside Expanded Arts on Ludlow, the Lower East Side NYC

It is cold and dreary outside. I have spent the whole day inside, cleaning, cooking and playing on the Internet. Because of the freak Texas ice storm, my show of RASPBERRY FIZZ that was originally scheduled for tomorrow has been cancelled. Though the actors, Ruth and myself might be able to make it down there, I hypothesize little to no audience, so I called it. I'm hoping to reschedule.

The weather and my challenges with small-scale theatre enterprises has made me nostalgic today and I sit here remembering back to my younger days as a theatre artist.

In 1999 I lived in New York City. I visited the first time in late 1998 and then returned when one of my plays received a staged reading by Reverie Productions at Walker Space Theatre (the home of Soho Rep) in Tribeca. I stayed throughout 1999 and I returned to visit in the summer of 2000. I went back to live there in the spring of 2001 and stayed until September of that year. At the New York International Fringe Festival that year, where I was producing one of my own plays, I met some organizers of a festival in Austin called the M.O.M. Fest. The full name was Mind Over Money Theatrical Festival. Finding out I was a fellow Texan, they invited me to participate in it, which was going up at the beginning of October. I flew out from La Guardia and home to Texas the night of September 10, 2001. The intention was to rehearse a revue-style show based on thematically-linked pieces from a sketch comedy troupe I was a part of and then return to New York three weeks later. That return did not happen. The next day, some airplanes hit some buildings and I got stuck in my hometown. I, essentially, started all over again career-wise once I found myself back in Texas.

Lower East Side... you can see at the corner at the end of the street - at Ludlow and Houston - is the famous Katz's Deli.

That time period in New York was magical. In the summer of 1999 I directed my own play, an early work called RED PAJAMA BLUES at a small store-front theatre on the Lower East Side called Expanded Arts. Located at 85 Ludlow Street, the space literally opened up to the sidewalk out front. I was told it had been a Chinese brothel before a guy named Robert Spahr and his partner Jennifer Pias converted it. I believe it could seat maybe 40 audience members at a time. They also did "Shakespeare in the Park(ing) Lot" in an empty asphalt expanse across the street every summer. The guy I had the most contact with at Expanded Arts was a flannel-shirted dude with a scruffy beard named  Jerry McAllister. He directed a lot of those parking lot Shakespeare productions. My play was part of an annual festival called 94 Plays in 94 Days. In that same theatre, two years before, Joe Calarco had premiered his show SHAKESPEARE'S R & J which went on to an Off-Broadway run.

The Lower East Side was a hotbed of small-scale theatre activity in the late 1990s. Across Delancey Street, a block further north on Ludlow one was waist-deep in Aaron Beall's off-off-Broadway empire. Within rock-throwing distance of the corner of Ludlow and Stanton one could hit one of Beall's venues - all small and divey to a fault. There was the Piano Store (which I rented a basement room in for rehearsals), Collective Unconscious, the backroom at the Pink Pony Cafe and Todo Con Nada (which everyone just called Nada). I met Beall once in the offices of the Piano Store. He has at his zenith in the summer of 1999. An impresario known for taking the lion's share of the box office split for his operations, Beall and his empire imploded a short time later when his Pure Pop Fest went up against the New York International Fringe Festival (which he had helped start) and failed horribly.

This anonymous black basement space used to be Todo Con Nada, a semi-legendary storefront theatre space that thrived in the 1990s

A short distance away was the The Present Company Theatorium, a comparatively large space that was the home of the New York International Fringe, which started in 1997. It had been a former automobile "chop-shop." The area was still semi-dangerous with crack dens, prostitution and illegal pawn shops. There was also other performance venues, a place called House of Candles and another called Surf Reality, I believe, in the neighborhood. Seriously, I think that area bordered by Allen, Ridge, Houston, and Delancey streets had around a dozen venues operating, all open to rental by small groups.

The whole scene was more grunge than Grotowski. It was filled with artists and soon-to-be-artists. All the artistic directors seemed to have Ahab-like intensity and fanaticism. The hundreds of shows that were put on were definitely of the experimental ilk. Ian W. Hill lived in and managed Nada. Playwrights Trav S. D., Brian Parks, Carolyn Raship and Kirk Wood Browley were some of the emerging artists at the time. Future semi-household names such as John Leguizamo, the comedian Reno, and Blue Man Group all presented at Nada. Actor James Urbaniak and Drama Dept. director Randall Curtis Rand started at that time on the Lower East Side. As did the Target Margin Theatre and the avant garde Elevator Repair Service. Eccentric elf-eared humorist Reverend Jen's Anti-Slam played weekly. The interactive docudrama Charlie Victor Romeo was a hit of the downtown scene. The modesty of the Piano Store was deceptive, but among the hits it fostered were Fun Box 2000 and The Donkey Show. I seem to remember Richard Foreman's Benita Canova playing across from the Piano Store (I don't remember what it was about, but I do remember the lead actress wore a sexy school girl outfit), but I'm not sure if I saw it there or at St. Marks. Radiohole started up around this time. Beall himself put on Faust and Hamlet festivals before his Pure Pop Fest debacle. 1999 was also the year Urinetown put the New York International Fringe Festival on the map.

Collective:Unconscious Theater at 145 Ludlow in 1997

All the theatres have closed by now. The area has undergone quite the gentrification/
hipsterization that is common at a lot of formerly awesome areas (think Williamsburg, Brooklyn). In neighboring areas one can still find Big Cheap Theater. Just north in the East Village, one can catch shows at the Horse Trade trifecta: the Kraine, the Red Room, and the St. Marks Theater. But on Ludlow Street, everything has changed. The area transformed into a mini-Soho during the boom years of the fin de siècle. Upscale boutiques, chic hipster bars, and nightclubs have replaced divey independent arts venues.

I look back on this time and place in my past and realize, indirectly, it has had a huge influence on me. I knew at the time I was, even peripherally, part of something special, but the residual effects are what have stuck. 

I was steeped in independent theatre. Folks like producers Beall and John Clancy (over at The Present Company at the time) were obsessive about theatre. They approached it with a craftsman's diligence and a certain grubby magic. They were capitalistic, but not commercial. Individual voices and novel approaches were valued. New work was welcomed, especially high-energy, bare-bones, intellectually engaging and terrifically contemporary. The Lower East Side in those years when I was there (1998-2001) was the indiest of indie theatre, the kind that is independent to a fault. And I ate it up.

The Present Company Theatorium at 198 Stanton Street, between Attorney and Ridge, ran from 1998 til 2003

The kind of theatre I did and continue to do is of this ilk... weird, funny, a bit experimental, a bit satirical, but hopefully still appealing and accessible to mass audiences. Even the way I have formatted my theatre company harkens back to these indie theatres of the late 1990s. My hope is that the new venue, the Margo Jones Theatre, that Audacity is based in, will be this sort of place, too.

And here's the deal. I really barely grazed it. All told, this made up just a few years of my life, but my memories of the LES happened to me while I was young. I was just starting out on this adventure called "a career in the theatre." Everything seemed more intense and jam-packed. Back then, everything happened fast, it seemed, and the experiences were in the form of concentrate. I know this because now I am older and not in such a damn hurry.

I try to go back sometimes, but it is never and will never be the same. I have returned five times for the New York International Fringe Festival. Despite the fancy name, when I first went in 1999, I experienced it as a messy, dirty, punk-rock party. That was the epitome of the Lower East Side theatre experience in a nutshell. I went back last year to the New York International Fringe Festival with my solo show CHOP and it was nothing like that. It seemed like the word fringe should be taken out of the title. Too many rules, too much red tape, too much sprawl, too much bureaucracy, too much expense. I look at FringeNYC now and it looks like an institution. A big, unwieldy, out-of-touch, overly-commercial institution. I looked at the kids working the FringeNYC in 2012 and all I thought was, "my god it looks so dull" and "just loosen up and stop going by your damn handbook, we're making theatre here" and "poor miserable bastards, you'll never know the fun and horror of what it used to be like". 

And it is not just that I'm older now. Sure I'm not the same. But neither is it. But as I write this, it occurs to me... I guess to look backwards from time to time can be, in a small way, a reminder of how we look forward.

John Golembeski

John Golembeski 1944 - 2013

As an undergraduate student at the College of Santa Fe in the 1990s, I had a work-study job in the library on campus, the Fogelson. I also worked at the computer lab off and on. To get to either of these places, I often passed a gentleman standing outside on a smoke break at the top of the steps out in front of the library. His name was John Golembeski. 

John spent most of every day in the library. He was on a mission. He was in the process of reading 1000 books over ten years. While I knew him he was closing in on the 900s. He smelled of Camel cigarettes and seemed vaguely crusty. He had bad teeth. He was always wearing the same denim jacket, the pockets filled with small note pads where he had scrawled countless notes. He always waved or nodded as I passed by. After I had spoken with him a few times he would wave and say "Keep up the thinking..." He could converse on nearly any subject imaginable. I was not the only student he talked with. He would start up a short conversation with anyone who approached him, and since he took multiple smoke breaks throughout the day, he spoke with a wide array of people.

John was homeless. He did odd jobs for the physical plant at school and I think he slept in a storage closet, especially when it was cold outside. He sometimes was around campus pulling weeds or planting flowers. Sometimes he would disappear for a while, when he got burned out on the reading. He did a lot of traveling. He told me once he had hitchhiked all across the country. A student journalist once asked him about this and he said he had been to 49 of the 50 United States and most of Canada.

He told the interviewer that he had been "exposed to different lifestyle levels." He had once worked at the top of the food chain, he had been middle class and now was concentrating on his reading. He felt if he needed to he could elevate himself "back to the top."

He took his reading seriously and when not outside smoking and talking, he was sitting reading thick books at one of the well-lit study cubicles on the ground floor of the library.

I lost track of him after I graduated. I went back to CSF (now called the Santa Fe University of Art and Design ) in 2010 and looked for John. The librarians didn't know who I was talking about. I lost track of him.

I have thought about him many times since I left Santa Fe. He was sort of an inspiration. He had stripped his life down to the barest of essentials for such a simple goal... knowledge. When I think of my liberal arts education I think of John. He gave up everything to build that holistic, broad foundation of knowledge. The resources were there and he utilized them. 

I recently learned that he passed away this past summer. I mourn his passing. He was a truly unique guy.

Here is his official obituary (with one correction by me)...

John E. Golembeski, 68, died Sunday, Sept. 9, 2013, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Junction, Colo. 

John was born Oct. 15, 1944, to Anthony E. and Josephine Kevlinsky Golembeski in Holyoke, Mass. After high school John worked with his parents doing clothing manufacturing.

He later got into landscaping, where he ran a landscaping business. John became a groundskeeper at the University of New Mexico [College of Santa Fe] before he moved to Moab about 15 years ago.

Everyone in Moab knew of John. You would see him rain or shine, cold or hot walking around wearing that big puffy coat.

At John’s request, cremation has taken place and he will have his ashes scattered in Massachusetts at a later date. A simple gathering to remember John will be held in Moab at a later date.

Source: Moab Times-Independent - John Golembeski 1944 ~ 2013

Oh, Ambition...

In one week I will attempt to perform a six hour and 20 minute long improvisation, alone on stage.
This is a crazy idea. What drove me to think this would be a good idea?
My stupid ambition, that's what.
I have had a great deal of ambition, but it has not been a steady stream. Whenever I’ve had an idea most of the time I've found myself bound and determined to achieve that goal, or at least to give it my best try, and usually I have some fun in the pursuit. Well, the fun comes either in the pursuit, or in the success of completion. The best is when it comes as part of the process, when I am fulfilled by simply being immersed in what I sought to do.

In remembering back over the ambitious ventures that I’ve gone after earlier in my life, I can kinda pinpoint one factor that allowed me to pursue my endeavors with such vigorous ambition. That factor, I think, was that I felt I had nothing to lose.
Nothing to lose. What a powerful motivator. It single-handedly kinda removes all fear from any ambitious idea. The disgusting truth, one that I’m so ashamed to admit, is that having “nothing to lose” is a luxury that has faded as I've entered further into adulthood.

As I inch closer and closer to the milestone age of 40, I’m so increasingly annoyed with the fact that I do, in fact, have a few things to lose. I have grown aware and precious with my process. I want. I want to make projects better than the projects that came before. So now there is the danger of sliding backwards, of wasting time, of being found out as not as good as I had hoped I'd be.
Ambition has a double edge. That gap where the nothing-to-lose once was can also prevent the move to bigger things. It can be an impediment to ultimate success.
Also, as I grow older I value other things in life, besides artistic success. I have a wife now, and as close as I can muster to a day job, and bills to pay and so on. I have responsibilities. I value my family, my friends (small circle that it is), travel and so on.

So my struggle, now, is figuring out how to balance these other points of value into my life with making theatre and art . I have never been one to only make art as my absolute priority, but time is passing and... and...

Historical Artistic Significance

So I have been thinking lately about the theatre and visual artists I admire... the ones from history both far and near. I have been trying to reason out what they all have in common as far as how they rose to prominence. I mean, what makes a playwright (well, any theatre artist, or, well... artist) important, and therefore, remembered? The exact formula varies in every case, and to be sure, there is no definitive recipe, but typically a person of historical artistic significance has some combination involving several things (probably not all, but most) :

• some combination of the skill, talent and originality of their practice
• A substantial masterpiece or work that is representative of their oeuvue
• a compelling personal biography, often tying them in with their time and place
• their presence in important venues, festivals, anthologies, etc.
• their popular appeal
• Or their critical/ academic appeal 

The most influential artists hail from every period, school, and movement. They can be Old Masters like Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere or Goldoni, trailblazers like Jarry, Beckett , Brecht and Wellman, or solid contemporary (or near contemporary) scribes like O'Neill, Miller, Churchill, Shepard or Mamet . The history of theatre is long and offers many examples. And this doesn't even touch on all the iconoclastic non-playwrights like Garrick, Bernhardt, Irving, Craig, and so on. All are indisputably important, but they each took very different paths to entering the canon.

More often than not, I believe, an engaging life story is a key part of the mix. Christopher Marlowe, for instance, was hailed during his tragically short lifetime, so besides being considered a talent to rival Shakespeare, he is most remembered for his death. Marlowe was stabbed in the eye in a bar brawl under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Marlowe is also tied to his time and place: Elizabethan England.

To take a non-playwright as an example for a moment, Edwin Booth's narrative is almost like a play itself. From a volatile theatre family he rises to success until his brother assassinates Lincoln. Edwin Booth must then make the greatest comeback in history. His appeal to theatre history  is like the appeal of fine artists to museum goers and collectors alike - it has always been bound up with the artist's personal story. 

This story often epitomizes the romantic narrative of the doomed genius. From the world of art lets look at Vincent van Gogh’s biography. Though markedly more tragic since he never received recognition during his short lifetime, his story has likewise become inseparable from his incredibly popular and visionary paintings. Another example: Caravaggio, an aesthetic rebel in his time who has become one of the quintessential Old Masters, was notorious for getting into bar fights and died in exile at age 38 after killing a man in Rome.

Is it necessary to have insanity, disaster and the aura of doomed genius? I'm not convinced that the artist's personal narrative must include tragedy and death, but it must be compelling. A little struggle in the story is not a bad thing. It should be pointed out, one's personal narrative is often left to the whims of history, rather than self-constructed by the artist his or herself (with key exceptions, of course, such as Alfred Jarry, Andy Warhol, etc.). However, this emphasis on the artist's life story seems to have a lot to do with the artist's place in history. For every Edwin Booth there is a Lawrence Barrett (now nearly forgotten 19th Century actor-manager).  

Affiliation with a revered movement or time period can often boost an artist’s status. When we hear Elizabethan we think Shakespeare. Alfred Jarry is indistinguishable from the pseudo-science he "invented" called Pataphysics. Taking a page from more contemporary writers, Mac Wellman is the banner-carrier for New Language playwriting that rose up out of the early 1990s (though it is hard to tell if he'll end up being really historically significant). Spaulding Gray influenced a whole generation of sit-at-table monologists telling personal stories directly to audiences from simple outlines.

Sometimes, one-hit-wonders make their way into history books by sake of time and place or specific movements. My beloved Edmond Rostand wrote several plays, but it is his CYRANO DE BERGERAC that launched him into history books. His movement was neo-romanticism and the time period and place was tremendously important. That he wrote it in Paris in the 1890s (fin de siècle, post-Franco-Prussian War, post-Commune, the Belle Époque, in the midst of homegrown anarchist terrorism and the civil unrest of the Dreyfus Affair) is not a small reason for that play's almost impossible impact. That his anachronistic CYRANO stands out in a Europe neck-deep in Ibsenesque Realism should also not be over-looked.

In art, Georges Braque kept at Cubist painting throughout his career, and is indelibly associated with it, even while his friend Pablo Picasso continued to evolve, becoming the quintessential modernist genius. Initially labelled a fauvist, by the end of his life Matisse explored the furthest reaches of color with his paper cut collages and laid a path for many, many artists that came after him.

At the same time, many artists become marked as important specifically because their work stands out from any movement or classification. In this category, you have Samuel Beckett, with his tackling of the ultimate mystery and despair of human existence combined with his biting comic, and cathartic, humor and sparse staging. Also, see Rostand's CYRANO DE BERGERAC above. 

Speaking of CYRANO DE BERGERAC, it must be pointed out that most artists have at least one work they are most known for, often the jewel of their oeuvre, their masterpiece. CYRANO was Rostand's biggest hit and the cornerstone of his legacy. Despite being a successful novelist and Pulitzer-prize winner for her early 1930s play ALISON'S HOUSE, Susan Glaspell is most remembered for her one-act TRIFLES. Of all her work, TRIFLES appears in countless literary anthologies as a representative of early feminist literature and is ultimately what she is remembered for.

Alfred Jarry will always be known for UBU ROI. Tennessee Williams will be known for STREET CAR NAMED DESIRE. Shakespeare will be known for HAMLET. In art, Edvard Munch is known for his painting The Scream.  Matisse will always have The Dance. Van Gogh will be remembered most for Starry Night. Duchamp will be known for Fountain. These are their masterpieces.

Work must be seen and experienced. Art in a drawer never makes an impact. At some point in nearly every artist's career, they find their audience... those few or many who respond intensely to the work.

Upon being seen, the work is ultimately judged in two ways: by the audience itself and on a critical or academic level. Ideally, an artist will make work that garners positive attention from both, but it is not necessary. Beckett's work, for instance, has been critically celebrated by scholars, academics and theatre theorists for decades, but is it accessible in a popular sense? Arguably, no, not by a long shot. On the other hand, comic playwrights like Neil Simon, David Ives and Christopher Durang were hugely popular as audience favorites at their peaks in the 1980s, but have been considered lightweights by critics and theatre practitioners. Sadly, these three have fallen out of the fickle favor of popular taste in recent times as well.  

Hand in hand with an audience, artists of longevity found some sort of critical or peer-driven acceptance as well. Playwrights like Sarah Ruhl and Annie Baker are favorable of late, due to their hard work, luck and most chiefly nice positive critical response and peer acceptance. Every few years, the theatre community as a whole kind of makes an unwritten contract, an agreement to acknowledge several  individuals as having "arrived." This is not a promise of longevity or lasting importance, but is a step in that direction. At some point, the field kind of "accepts" an artist "into the fold." Even Shakespeare stopped being a struggling writer at some point and started performing for royalty.

This critical and colleague acceptance often comes from exposure through high profile theatres or festivals. Mike Daisey was doing okay with his monologues in Seattle in the late 1990s, but his performance of 21 DOG YEARS at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2001 really launched him as the national-touring act he is today. 

For fine artists it is important group shows or winning solo exhibitions. Basquiat was a street kid doing his rather obscure SAMO grafitti (tellingly, in the gallery neighborhood of Soho) until the Times Square Show group show in 1980. That along with a lengthy profile in Art Forum magazine are what really launched his career.

To conclude, the importance of a theatre artist (or any artist, really) is an impossible thing to gauge and notoriously difficult to predict. Some may remain consistently popular, like Moliere, while others reemerge after their oeuvre is re-appraised, such as Witkacy or Kleist. Whatever the case, the artists who continue to rank as most important always offer some combination of biographical intrigue, market desirability, institutional support, critical praise and a distinctive, visionary aesthetic.

A blast from the past...

So, back when I was an undergrad at that wild and desolate hotbed of creativity, the College of Santa Fe, I participated in a number of student films. Even though I was a theatre major, I took a bunch of film and video classes. I just found an old DVD of some of these old projects (one of the first DVDs someone burned for me... before that everything was on VHS). I was able to upload one of the student films I had acted in onto YouTube. I am pleased with my performance, even after all these years. Also, I am reminded that once, like we all were, I was young... and had hair...

On Being a Multi-Disciplinary Artist

" I began to think of myself as a product for sale as opposed to an artist with a unique voice. 

- David F. Chapman, Specialization and Its Discontents

David Chapman wrote an essay for HowlRound back in 2011 about his experiences venturing into solo performance. He had been trying to establish himself as a director in New York for years and was reluctant to identify himself publicly as a multi-disciplinary artist, thinking it would somehow diminish his momentum as a director.

It is a great essay exploring why many artists settle into a single interpretive role in the theatre and how exhilarating and perhaps uncomfortable it can be to take control of your own artistic voice.

I returned to this essay recently after a brief conversation I had with a local Dallas drama critic. She had returned to see my play DINOSAUR AND ROBOT STOP A TRAIN for a second time. I was glad about this, since the opening night performance she had seen was the first public showing and, of course, the piece has become better and better with each performance for subsequent audiences. We got off on a line of conversation about how many local theatre artists don't see themselves as instigators of their work, but merely guns-for-hire who perform or direct or design for whatever they may drift into.

I mentioned that in 2009 while on a cross country road trip from Texas to Winnipeg I read John Southworth's book SHAKESPEARE THE PLAYER. It centers in on Shakespeare as an actor in his own company and in his own works. It reaffirmed a notion I had abandoned in my early days as a theatre artist... a single artist can drive the vision of a piece of theatre from idea to production and be a part of all the stages of that process. I had abandoned it because it seemed pretentious. I was a young artist and there seems to be a special ring of criticism hell for a young artist who has the presumption to wear more than one hat. The world is not looking for a new Orson Welles. So, I stopped being in the plays I directed or wrote.

It was only when I drifted, in earnest (beyond some small, tentative early attempts), into solo performance with CHOP that I shook off the old worries about how I would be perceived. 

Perhaps it is age, but I care less and less how I am perceived as the maker of the work and more and more preoccupied with how the work itself comes across.

I am about to return to solo performance with my newest piece about a man haunted by an eternal goldfish and I am excited to continue to play in that sandbox of multi-disciplinary work.

World-Building is a viable option

James Kochalka, The Horrible Truth About Comics

I'm filled with ideas lately. Maybe it was the cruise.

Either way, I've been thinking about how I create art lately. After the delightful process of putting together the appetizer-size play RASPBERRY FIZZ, I was struck with two thoughts...

1.) I am one of those folks that is not progressing the culture since I am as guilty as the rest of my generation of making the past a fetish. As outlined in this Kurt Andersen Esquire article.

"For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

~ from Kurt Andersen's "You Say You Want a Devolution?" Esquire Jan. 2012 

Illustration by James Taylor

 

2.) I have always gone about my art, particularly comics and plays (and improv to a large extent) in a linear fashion. Even when I play with the linear structure, it comes from a basis of story-telling... events happening over time that effect each other. Only recently have I started to think of how open the process of art-making could become if I was creating a space, instead of exploring sequential events over time.

Besides just being aware of the first point, there is not much I can actively do about it.

For the second thought, though, I stumbled upon a great essay by Dylan Horrocks called The Perfect Planet. In it, he talks about "world-building" as another approach to making art. 

Worth a read if you're looking for inspiration, too.

Looking back at the 2009 DirectorsLab Chicago

Two years ago, this month, Ruth and I were participants at the DirectorsLab Chicago. We had a great time, sitting in panel discussions, participating in workshops, seeing shows and doing a lot of networking. We stayed with the awesome Matt and Kim Lyle, who run Bootstraps Comedy Theatre and were comped into seeing shows at Steppenwolf.

Highlights included:

* a Commedia workshop with Larry Grimm. I let out my chaos in the clown work and recieved an informal "If you ever move to Chicago, you got a place to work..." from Larry.

* Visiting the Russian Tea Room and sampling vodka flights...

* Seeing a Modigliani at the Chicago Museum of Art and re-enacting scenes from Ferris Beuller's Day Off.

* Attending (twice!) Lookingglass Theatre's production of ARABIAN NIGHTS, directed by Mary Zimmerman. It is still in the top five best productions of theatre I have ever seen performed.