Gee I wish I could tell you, but then you might think you don’t need to come to The New New News: A Living Newspaper, and that would be so so wrong. Because you do need to come. We open FRIDAY! Book your reservation now so you you too can get a taste.
Category: Current Affairs
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On Institutional Arrogance
Seattle has already lost the print edition of the Seattle PI and the … The Empty Space. We need to fight against the Darwinian trend of saying that only the strongest survive, and take action against the slow erosion of the cultural tapestry of Seattle. We are a city that prides itself on its intellectual acuity.
Kate Whoriskey
Artistic Director of the Intiman TheatreI am often accused of arrogance. The aspersion does not bother me much. I try to remind everyone who will listen that the last thing they should be looking for in a playwright is reticence. Dramatists can be wrong—often are— but after all boldly framed public dialogue is what we wright when we write. Institutional arrogance, however, is an all together different, more heinous sin. My recent work blurring the line between journalism and theatre with NewsWrights United has opened my eyes to the prevalence of this poisonous phenomenon in both fields.
Back in June 2010, at a panel on monetizing on-line news David Boardman, the Managing Editor of The Seattle Times, made a stunning statement about the recent death of his former competition, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “The reality is: it’s not like something was lost.” This is not the first time someone at The Times has gone out of their way to kick the corpse of The P-I. If you choose to watch the video (Boardman makes his remarks at timestamp 52:50 in the video provided below) you will notice that the journalism insider panelists barely blink at Boardman’s chilling dismissal of Seattle’s longest running daily newspaper. In fairness, they might have been reluctant to register the churlishness of one in the rare position to offer them a paying job in their chosen field. (As a playwright I have long since been liberated from this kind of fear, since no artistic director is willing to pay me, or any local playwright, at a rate comparable to even what an Equity actor makes, let alone a living wage.)
The Seattle Times survives through the idiotic exigencies of fate. It could have easily been the other way around, and in their hearts they know it. The jury remains out on newspapers. So “Fairview Fanny”, as The Times is traditionally nicknamed, would do well to watch her step in the cemetery lest she dance into her own grave.
The chasm gapes even wider and closer for The Intiman Theatre, one of Seattle’s three Big Houses. In a recent email to everyone in their database the Intiman made it clear that unless a half a million dollars is raised by the end of March, and then another half million by September, the theatre will cease operations. In the business, we call this a “shoot-the-puppy” campaign: a deeply desperate move, fraught with risk, but also deeply arrogant. At its core the implicit message is:
Our survival matters so much that you should overlook our ineffectuality, our malfeasance, our self-dealing, our cowardice and even the very arrogance of this plea. We matter more than the artists we underpay. We matter more than the audiences we fail to reach. We matter more than the smaller organizations you will not be supporting so that you can help us survive, because we must survive and you must pay now for nothing more than the chance to watch us live another day.
Allow me to honor the clarity of Intiman’s ultimatum with some clarity of my own: I hope they die. I hope they do it soon and with a minimum of suffering. And most of all I hope they do it without siphoning precious funds from the rest of us who make theatre in the Pacific Northwest.
In her note on the Intiman’s blog which I quoted at the top of this post, Artistic Director Kate Whoriskey invokes the ghosts of The Empty Space and The P-I as if she actually suffered their loss instead of showing up on the scene quite recently and long after those beloved institutions succumbed. She merrily previews the upcoming season: “I will be directing my husband in The Playboy of the Western World,” assuming we would be delighted by this nepotism. She must imagine we were similarly delighted when we learned that she had been hand-picked for her position by her predecessor Bart Sher without any input from the community, the patrons, and very little, it seems, even from board “Without the Intiman, will we be as strong?” she implores in closing. And all I can think of is the Lone Ranger joke. He and Tonto are surrounded by a band of Apaches. He says, “Looks like we might die here, old friend.” And Tonto replies, “What’s this “we” shit, Kemosabe?”
Seattle theatre is alive and thriving. Buy me a beer and I will name you at least 100 theatre organizations in Western Washington more deserving of your donation than the Intiman. For now I will give you three for free and attempt to tier them to your tastes:
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If you like raw gusty innovative new stories which actually take place here now in Seattle, then support the project for which I currently serve as Executive Producer, NewsWrights United. We are world premiering our second edition The New New News: A Living Newspaper this Friday. Our ticket prices are considerably more affordable than the Intiman’s. If you can’t make the show, you can still support us here. (I don’t hate our odds of surviving past September.)
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If your tastes are more conservative, but you still want to support a smaller endeavor; if you love the classics and want to see them done with verve, talent and bold new insights, support Seattle Shakespeare Company. They have a production of Three Penny Opera coming up that I am itching to see, since it’s by my favorite German playwright and it stars one of my favorite undersung Seattle actors, John Bogar. You can donate to Seattle Shakes here.
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If your tastes are still more conservative, and/or you are rich enough to consider such smaller theatres beneath the consideration of your largesse, give some money to A Contemporary Theatre. The day before Intiman sent out its desperate plea, its fellow Big House downtown announced that for the second year running it had booked a budget surplus. You can donate to an already healthy ACT here.
All three of these organizations prove that at every level of operations we can do better than what the Intiman has been doing. We know this in our hearts. What we do not know is if the Intiman can do better than what the Intiman has been doing. I tend to doubt it, and that is why I believe it is time to let it die.
Please do not misunderstand me. The shuttering of the Intiman represents a loss nearly as terrible and irrevocable within Seattle’s cultural ecosphere as the loss of the P-I is within Seattle’s journalism world (Mr. Boardman’s fear-born callousness notwithstanding). I will not dance on the Intiman’s grave. But I will also not be a party to keeping the institution on life support past the time of its viability, especially when doing so means diverting funds from theatre arts organizations that have been more successful in reaching and expanding their audiences, like, frankly, NewsWrights United, Seattle Shakespeare Festival and ACT.
The Intiman has been arrogant for a very long time. If Kate’s note is any indication, they have no intentions of improving their tone-deaf messaging. They want you to believe this current crisis was the fault of one lone mismanaging scapegoat. But as Michael Strangeways pointed out on the SLOG comments board: “Brian Colburn… didn’t steal the money, or spend it. Years of overspending and waste and the laziness of the Board has led to the woes of Intiman. It wasn’t one man/woman, but many, including fair haired child Bart Sher.”
Losing the Intiman will be a tragedy, but we will survive. We can even hope to be a better community for it in the long run, if we guard against institutional arrogance. We need to remember that artists matter more than institutions, that audiences matter more than funders, that plays matter more as works of art than career stepping stones. As Mark Handley, author of Idioglossia, remarked on Face Book:
I’m too much of an evolutionist to take this seriously. Every one of the theaters that produced me as a young man are gone, squeezed out by creeping provincialism. People seem to think that this is ALL (read: $60 ticket, NY director, LA actors) or NOTHING (as in: nothing, gone, kaput, out of business) is the way to go… *sigh*
So yes, harsh as it sounds: please let the Intiman die with dignity. Its time is done. In its place, let’s build something new, local and accountable. We actually already have the pieces in place for that. The Intiman will not live to see the promised land, but if Kate Whoriskey is serious about making Seattle her home– claiming its unique triumphs and defeats as hers too– then perhaps she will still be living here when we finally grow into a “world class” theatre town.
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Seattle Channel Video can be played in Flash Player 9 and up(Above is full video of the panel discussion “Town Square: Revenue Models in the Changing Media Landscape” from which I referenced David Boardman’s glib remarks about the death of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. If you dare, surf a little past the Boardman quote and you can see me holding Publicola’s Josh Feit’s feet to the fire on his equally glib Pollyannaish assessment of arts coverage in the current environment. If you decide to watch the entire event, you will witness the nearly monolithic patronizing attitude of the panel (David Brewster excepted) to questions from an audience who is clearly not buying their uniformly optimistic outlook. Oh, journalists love the concepts of honesty and transparency, as applied to others.)
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#WAshooting on the Airwaves
Seattle’s NPR affiliate 94.9 KUOW will be running an interview with me and Jeremy Richards about a story NewsWrights United stages in The New New News: A Living Newspaper about the Twitter coverage of the 2009 Maurice Clemmons manhunt, now infamously known as the “WAshooting Feed”. The segment will air on the radio on Saturday, February 12 at 12:06 pm PST, but the sneaky tech-savvy listener can access it now and forever at “Tweeting the Manhunt”. I welcome your thoughts. (But I already know that I talk to fast.)
The show itself premieres on Friday, February 18, in West Seattle at Olympic Hall at South Seattle Community College. Advance reservations can be made here.
We will also be delivering the “paper” to North Seattle (click here) and Capitol Hill (click here) locations. Don’t miss it!
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Maurice Clemmons is in the Air
Over the last 48 hours on-line news sources have exploded with fresh stories about Maurice Clemmons, the prematurely released Arkansas felon who, on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, 2009, walked into a coffee shop outside Tacoma, Washington and murdered four Lakewood Police officers as they drank their morning coffee. Clemmons then led law enforcement on a two-day wild goose chase throughout Western Washington before being shot dead in Seattle by a lone cop. In those two days it became clear that local journalism would never be the same, not in Seattle, not anywhere.
It is this very urgent transition which we cover in our latest production The New New News: Living Newspaper, investigating the on-line reportage of the Clemmons Manhunt in a section we call “#WAshooting” after the Twitter hashtag used to track tweets concerning the ongoing chase. We are fairly certain that our upcoming opening, (Friday, February 18) has exactly nothing to do with the recent rash of articles about Clemmons, but we welcome the renewed interest in the case nonetheless, and not just because it might cause the curious to check out our show. The story of Maurice Clemmons will not go away, nor should it, because its implications affect the future of Western Washington, U.S. national politics and the nature of journalism across the globe.
Certainly the once-and-possibly-future presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is hoping we forget about Clemmons. While Governor of Arkansas, Huckabee granted clemency to the 8-time felon, who otherwise would have been incarcerated until 2015, in part because Clemmons claimed in his application that he came from “a very good Christian family.” (One need not wonder what Huckabee’s decision would have been if instead “Muslim” had been the adjective modifying the subject of that clause.)
Likewise, it is not hard to trace a deterioration of relations between Western Washington police and the communities they serve since Clemmons’ murderous rampage. Had Maurice never left his Arkansas prison would Seattle Police Officer Ian Birk have given Native American wood-carver, John T. Williams, more than four seconds to put down his carving knife before shooting him dead?
We will never know the answer to that, but we do know with certainty that active crime investigations will never be covered the same anywhere in the future. From now on, journalists, law enforcement, regular citizens, and yes, even criminals, will all be privy to instant information, some of it deeply flawed or downright false, as it emerges on Twitter or whatever tool we will be using to share data. We examine this fundamental shift in The New New News. I could tell you how, but really, I’d rather show you. The first copy drops on West Seattle’s doorstep a week from Friday. Why not order your “subscription” now?
Cross-posted at NewsWrights United: The Blog.
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NewsWrights’ Awareness & Fundraising Event – How’d we do?
NewsWrights United held its first ever awareness/fundraising event, Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? this past Monday night. After taking a few days to recover, I thought it was high time to take a look at how we did.
Goal 1: Raising Awareness
The Excerpt Reading
The evening’s kick off entertainment came with Dawson Nichols’ staging of the first scene of our working script for upcoming second edition of our Living Newspaper: The New New News, featuring the inestimable talents of Robert Agostinelli, Shawn Belyea, Khanh Doan, Amy Love, Joseph P. McCarthy, and our own Wes Andrews. It is rollercoaster fun for a playwright to watch talented professional actors read, after very little rehearsal, words one collaborated to wright. One moment you stand horrified helpless witness as they mangle laugh lines you crafted and treasured so dearly; the next moment thrill blossoms again as they find whole new laughs you never expected or designed. Shawn Belyea embodied the definition of a professional actor– versus, say, a very talented and eager amateur– when he managed to wring the biggest laugh of the night out of losing his place in the script.
The Panel Discussion
Our Consulting Producer, Tom Paulson, ran this discussion of the current state of journalism, with such local luminaries as legendary sports columnist Art Thiel, new media maven, Monica Guzman, Mark Higgins, Metro Editor for The Seattle Times, Brendan Kiley, Theater Critic and Features Reporter for The Stranger, and Chris Grygiel, coordinator of political coverage for the Seattle P-I.com. Personally, I found this panel discussion the most exciting portion of the evening. Tom pointed hard-hitting questions at everyone in the room, and not one of the panelists shied away from answering frankly, a rare occurrence, as you would know if you have attended similar discussions in the last couple years. Journalists have been very leery about hashing through the woes of their industry. For a quick rundown of the various points-of-view represent, I cannot do better than the rundown provided by Jake Ellison over at Seattlepostglobe.org, which you can check out by clicking here.
One moment seemed to leap out for nearly everyone in the room. Several good friends gave me their feedback in the days after and nearly all of them specifically mentioned the earnest and well-argued exchange between Art Thiel and Brendan Kiley regarding the definition of a journalist. Is it, as Art argued, an expert in a certain field or, per Brendan, an aggressive novice? One friend clearly felt Brendan played the wrong-headed asshole in the debate; the other friend, however, remarked on how freaked out he was by what he viewed as Art’s vehement defensiveness. To a playwright this sounds like magic. When you can produce something on stage from which different audience members can draw diametrically opposed notions of who the villain was, then you are most definitely cooking with gas.
GRADE FOR AWARNESS RAISING – 95% – “A”
Goal 2: Raising Funds
Of course, the second and co-equal goal for Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? was to raise additional funds for our upcoming second edition: The New New News: A Living Newspaper. We did that, posting a considerable surplus for the evening, but we could have done it better. We are a new organization and still learning out how to do the all things we need to do to survive and thrive. We will get better at this.
GRADE FOR FUND RAISING – 82.7% – “B-minus”
And now to you . . .
Because we continue reaching for our support goals, I would like to ask you right now to consider joining the NewsWrights team as a supporting member. We have a wide spectrum of levels at which you can join. I ask you to consider coming on as at least a “Cub Reporter” for a donation of $25.
At the $50 level you will be listed in our program as a “Columnist” and in recognition of your generosity, you will receive, while supplies last, a limited edition Seattle P-I ball cap just like the one you see Artistic Producer Dawson Nichols smartly modeling in the photo to the right.
At the “Desk Editor” level, representing a $100 gift, you will receive two hats, plus two reserved seats to any performance including one of our three opening nights, as we deliver the paper to Seattle’s doorstep in three neighborhoods: West Seattle, Capitol Hill and Northgate.
At the $1,000 “Media Mogul” level you will receive all of those perks, plus coverage of any local story you want by NewsWrights United, because we, like certain cable TV news operations, can clearly be bought.
Finally, if all you can spare is $10, we would be deeply grateful to have you join our team as a “Newsie”.
The bottom line is we want your support– any support– because your support represents your “buy-in” to our mission, and that keeps us strong both fiscally and spiritually. So please consider joining us at whatever level you can. It’s as easy as clicking on our trusty upside-down NewsWrights Support Fedora, below. It will take you to our Shunpike donation page.
Thank you so much for filling our hat with your support!(Also, if you have not already done so, please consider “liking” our Face Book page here. For now, it is the very best way to keep track of our doings and some very evocative discussions around current journalism issues. )
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Watching the Sausage Get Made with NewsWrights United
Nine out of every ten public play readings are exercises in vanity. Despite what we may earnestly espouse about “works-in-progress” or “rough first drafts” we playwrights tend to avoid sharing our work in anything other than what we judge to be the highest states of perfection. I am more guilty of perpetrating this soft con than most, because arrogant ass that I am I tend to think of my plays as perfect even when they manifestly are not. The reason playwrights deceive the audiences of play readings like this— not to mention the theatres that host them —and quite often ourselves as well— is simple: we do not usually want your helpful feedback, no matter how earnestly we plead to the contrary. We just want to showcase our plays and convince theaters to produce them. Alas, at that latter goal we nearly never succeed.
NewsWrights United will be doing something completely different at 7pm this Sunday night Oct. 24 at North Seattle Community College’s Stage One. We don’t need to convince anyone to produce the second edition of A Living Newspaper, titled The New New News. We will be producing it ourselves in February 2011 with the g
enerous financial support of 4Culture, Vulcan and individual donors like yourself. (You can click and pledge on our handy upside down donation fedora if you care to give us an early boost. )The proto-script we will be reading Sunday night is a big hot mess, full of great local stories about the current crisis in journalism, but also riddled with yawning narrative gaps, inconsistencies and dramaturgic sacred cows begging to be sacrificed. We actually do need your feedback and suggestions for how to make the play better. If you join us Sunday night, instead of hearing a polished, polite and, frankly, boring “audition reading” you will be participating in a process much more akin to the 10 a.m. “front page meeting” at a major newspaper like The Seattle Times when the editorial staff first starts to choose and shape the major stories they will be covering in the next day’s edition.
Like theatre is supposed to be but almost never is at, say, Seattle’s Big Houses, this reading of The New New News: A Living Newspaper will be messy, ardent, relevant, and fun. But perfect? Not so much.
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He said He was Going to Do It, and Apparently He Did
CRAIG: The human sequence is only the beginning. Next we gotta do the chimp. it’ll be easy since it’s 90% the same as the human anyhow.
Then I want to shotgun everything in the human digestive tract; a cubic meter of Sargasso sea water, the Amazon rainforest, the entire globe. I’ll take Sorcerer II and circumnavigate, shotgunning samples as I go. There’s an infinity of questions to be asked, but we don’t even know the basics, like what friggin’ lives out there.
I want to build an artificial genome from parts. A whole new life form and see if we can make it work. Doctor Frankenstein eat your heart out.KELLIE: Sounds like you might get that invite to Stockholm after all.
CRAIG: Screw it. They only give you a million dollars anyway.
KELLIE: What would make you happy then?
CRAIG: Happy? If I could be the first to synthesize life, I’d be happy. . . for a while.
When I wrote those words five years ago, I never doubted even then that Venter would accomplish his seemingly impossible goals.
J. Craig Venter is a playwright’s dream. A real-life Faust, a gigantic brain attached to an even bigger mouth, a brilliant bio-tech Muhammad Ali. It was a pleasure to build The Sequence around his race with Francis Collins to decode the human genome. Now he’s apparently booted up a whole new life form from parts, just like he said he would, both in my play and in real life.
New York Times: “Researchers Say They Created a ‘Synthetic Cell’
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The Colbert Nation Meets The 10,000 Things
Stewart Brand was on The Colbert Report last night, mostly talking about his conversion to the notion that nuclear energy is a viable option for getting human beings out of the current environmental/energy crisis; but at ~4:30 in the time code Colbert asks him about the Clock of the Long Now.
The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Stewart Brand Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News I first met Stewart Brand at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, after a staged reading of my play The Sequence produced by the Magic Theatre. To my later shame I had no idea that this was the founding publisher of The Whole Earth Catalogue and the originator of one of the first and most famous electronic bulletin boards, the WELL. My friend and mentor Richard Rhodes introduced us, we chatted briefly about my play , then Stewart handed me his card and informed me he was building a clock in the desert that will keep time for ten thousand years.
People say a lot of strange things to me after readings, but this rated easily in the top ten. I went home to Seattle, ordered his book The Clock Of The Long Now: Time And Responsibility from the library and proceeded to learn more about this project. By the time I had finished reading I was hooked.
The brainchild of Brand, composer Brian Eno, and supercomputer inventor, Daniel Hillis, The Clock of the Long Now is intended to provide a counterpoint to today’s “faster/cheaper” mind set, promoting instead “slower/better” thinking by keeping accurate time for 10,000 years: ticking once a year, booming once a century and “cuckooing” every thousand years. The very act of contemplating how to design, build and maintain such a device forces everyone involved to re-think their relationships to time, technology, community, culture and the planet. How should the clock operate given its unprecedented life-span for a machine? What should its power source be? Should it be located far enough from the mainstream of civilization to avoid any possible concomitant destruction, or close enough to allow its significance to be absorbed by normal people? Should the clock require “winding”, or should it be able to hum along through the millennia with no need for human interaction at all? These questions and many others are only just beginning to be wrestled with, as the full-sized clock’s construction has not yet begun.
Soon after reading his book I contacted Brand and offered my services as a playwright, explaining that theatre, while ostensibly foundering in today’s high-tech culture, is nevertheless one of humanity’s most robust and enduring art forms: perfect for accompanying a clock through the millennia– introducing and illuminating “deep time” ideas to audiences, while also evolving itself through the epochal duration. Brand and his fellow Long Now board members decided my proposal had merit, and charged me with assembling the wherewithal and funds to conceive, draft and produce such a play. In other words, they loved the idea, but were not about to draw precious resources away from the Clock’s construction. Eventually I landed a grant from the City of Seattle and Washington Ensemble Theatre offered to produce the play based on some early pages. In May of 02008 the first 19 ticks of The Ten Thousand Things were performed. (You can learn more about The Ten Thousand Things, and even purchase a digital copy of Tick 19 here.)
To follow is a short excerpt. I will buy a drink for the first person to spot one of the “ticks”. There’s at least one in there. Maybe more. (WET production members are ineligible, though heck, I’d happily buy any of youz guys a drink, too.)* * *
PLAYWRIGHT: People have been predicting the imminent end of the world since the beginning of the world.PRODUCER: I’m not just people. I’ve made a few fortunes predicting stuff. Trust me: we’re toast. a few decades tops.
PLAYWRIGHT: I can imagine even you being wrong now and then.
PRODUCER: You’re right. Assume I’m wrong. Tell me about your play.
PLAYWRIGHT: Forget it.
PRODUCER: No, really.
PLAYWRIGHT: No, really, forget it.
PRODUCER: Stop. I wanna know. I really am asking nicely.
PLAYWRIGHT: Are you?
It’ll be a clock.PRODUCER: What? The play?
PLAYWRIGHT: Yes.
PRODUCER: The play will be a clock.
PLAYWRIGHT: Yes. From the beginning I’ve known that the play has to change though the ages like the clock. It can’t just stay still, frozen in time while the clock ticks on; but how does the play change? At first I thought it changed with time.
PRODUCER: Isn’t that how all things change?
PLAYWRIGHT: Well, yes, but hear me out. At first I thought it changed in ordinary time, time like a clock keeps, ticking like a clock ticks..
PRODUCER: Okay.
PLAYWRIGHT: But after a lot of false starts and blind alleys I’ve come to realize that the play has to keep time like only a play would or could.
PRODUCER: And how is that?
PLAYWRIGHT: It has to keep theatric time.
PRODUCER: And what is that?
PLAYWRIGHT: Well, in the theatre, time only passes in front of the audience. No audience, no time. So I decided a very simple solution. The play ticks once a performance.
PRODUCER: It ticks.
PLAYWRIGHT: Yes.
PRODUCER: Explain that please.
PLAYWRIGHT: It ticks a word.
PRODUCER: It ticks… a word.
PLAYWRIGHT: Right, and if, say, the play were exactly ten thousand words–
PRODUCER: Sounds long.
PLAYWRIGHT: Actually it’s only like a third of Hamlet.
PRODUCER: Okay–
PLAYWRIGHT: And a single word changes every time it’s done, then the theatric clock ticks ten thousand times, just like the actual clock chimes once a year.
PRODUCER: Okay. And who changes the word?
PLAYWRIGHT: Anyone.
PRODUCER: Anyone?
PLAYWRIGHT: Except me.
PRODUCER: Anyone except you?
PLAYWRIGHT: That’s right. An actor, the middle, an audience member, the light board operator– I don’t care– anyone.
PRODUCER: Except you.
PLAYWRIGHT: Except me.
PRODUCER: Why except you? You wrote it.
PLAYWRIGHT: That’s the beauty.
PRODUCER: I’ve seen prettier.
PLAYWRIGHT: What? It’s perfect. Something will happen. Then something different. For a little while I’ll even get to watch, maybe. Who could ask for more?
PRODUCER: You’re willing to just hand over a huge amount of your work to someone, everyone, else to change.
PLAYWRIGHT: That’s basically what playwrights do anyway.
PRODUCER: More’s the pity. They’ll obliterate you.
PLAYWRIGHT: It’s only one word at time.
PRODUCER: Yeah, like Chinese water torture, they’ll take you apart.
PLAYWRIGHT: I’m hoping they won’t.
PRODUCER: But they will. That’s what actors, bananas, audience members, board ops, other people do. Trust me.
PLAYWRIGHT: Stop saying “trust me.” It’s a bully’s trope.
PRODUCER: Okay, let me ask you this: what happens if some one comes along and purposefully tries to ruin your play?
PLAYWRIGHT: You know? I think I might want them to purposefully try and ruin my play.
PRODUCER: All right. What if– worse– they make mundane, meaningless changes, simply for the sake of honoring your demand that they change it?
PLAYWRIGHT: I think I want them to do that too.
PRODUCER: What if they wind up not caring at all?
PLAYWRIGHT: And that would be so different from now how?
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Misha Versus Joe
It is a long-standing fantasy among show people to perpetrate a “turn-about” and review the reviewers, but really, if want to do what you do best, stay at your own level and not sink to mere criticism, the proper “turn-about” for stage folk is to stage the critics. That is exactly what we did here.
Misha vs Joe from NewsWrights United on Vimeo.
Misha Berson, Theatre Critic for The Seattle Times was not happy with this portrayal and made her displeasure clearly known to all of the producers including myself. Others, especially ex-staffers for The Seattle Post-Intelligencer complained about how we savaged their former colleague, Joe Adcock; but I completely disagree with this appraisal and I suspect Joe might too. For me the piece lands clearly on a final note of love. The genuine pain I felt upon Joe’s departure was not shared by many in my community, but I have to hope this is because they did not know him very well, or care to. One Big House artistic director reportedly remarked on learning of Joe’s retirement: “Ding dong, the witch is dead!” I suspect that same AD will feel the same when/if I finally leave town, dead or alive. I say, be careful when casting anyone as the witch: for all you know, many may picture you surrounded by ugly flying monkeys. For my part, I want to dance with the Big House witches, not wish them dead. I wish my dear witches would wake up. And I am determined to do everything it takes to make that happen.
I have seen how theatre gets covered in other towns Seattle’s size. I am glad we have Misha and Brendan Kiley and all the others. In the current crisis of journalism, every critic we lose is an irrevocable loss. Alas, I suspect Misha does not feel the same about me. After all, playwrights are a dime a dozen, and happily we do not depend on the survival of any one institution. Formidable is the power of nothing to lose. At this ripe moment in the history of our art form, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
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So long Howard Zinn!
Thanks for telling the stories that were better, fiercer, truer and
ultimately nobler than the ones we were otherwise being told about this
countryI owe An American Book of the Dead – The Game Show to you. I had heard rumors of the Salted Wife, but your A People’s History of the United States gave me the historical resources that proved it wasn’t just a ghost story. It’s just one of the tales I lifted.
Here’s that section for you, Howard! You did well. May we live up to your example.
The Bardo of the Salted Wife
BARDO VOICE: Oh free and bravely born, having died and failed to grasp the clear light of reality, which is nothing but thine own nature most true, thou art entering now into the Bardo of the Salted wife.
Be not distracted. Be not afraid or attracted. Whatever strange terror might become thee here, repeat these words:(As the Bardo Voice speaks the following, the words flash on a screen.)
BARDO VOICE & AUDIENCE: “Although the clear light of reality dawned upon me I was unable to grasp it, and so I must wander here. Whatever visions appear now, I must accept them as the reflections of mine own nature most true.”
BARDO VOICE: Behold, she stands before thee. Born in Bristol and bred there, she sails for the New World in Sixteen Hundred Ought Nine.
SALTED WIFE: All I ever wanted was to sail the Ocean Sea.
BARDO VOICE: Pitching and plunging over an angry Atlantic.
SALTED WIFE: All my brothers are sailors. All my girl’s life, to ride the waves is my only wish, my only hope. I make no bones about this to the man who takes me as wife and takes me across. ‘Tis an even exchange. My body and the brood it will bear him buys this journey, not my soul. The English, so says he, can only claim this land with womanhood. New subjects to the crown do not flower from the mere mud. The female sex itself is the soil of this New World.
BARDO VOICE: Jamestown.
SALTED WIFE: The moment we land my only hope is for us to fail and sail away. Seems likely enough: squalid huts crouched inside ramshackle fort, savages culling us one by one when we stray too close to the forest which holds us forever in its suffocating shadow.
Oh, perhaps tomorrow we’ll ship for some place else. Or better still perhaps we’ll just keep sailing round and round and round this wonderful globe Columbus found.BARDO VOICE: It was a hard winter, 1609.
SALTED WIFE: Hard.
BARDO VOICE: Bitter.
SALTED WIFE: Dark.
BARDO VOICE: Contagion.
SALTED WIFE: Starvation.
Who’d’ve thought that in such a terrible time I’d find my love for my husband.BARDO VOICE: The livestock went quickly.
SALTED WIFE: Too quickly.
BARDO VOICE: So the pets became livestock.
SALTED WIFE: But they only lasted a day or two.
BARDO VOICE: Then it was the rats and mice and worms.
SALTED WIFE: But they weren’t enough.
BARDO VOICE: Leather, bark, grass, feces.
SALTED WIFE: Become hungry enough, and suddenly the world surrounds you with food.
(A man appears out of the shadows and moves toward the Salted Wife.)
BARDO VOICE: A few settlers prayed perhaps God would forgive them if they secretly dug into a few of the fresh shallow graves.
And another… well another had yet a fresher meat in mind.SALTED WIFE: Isn’t that strange. I never loved him, not a jot, until one night it all changed, the moment he kissed me on the neck with his razor.
(The man reaches up and slits the woman’s throat. The front of her dress runs dark with color.)
BARDO VOICE: Be not afraid. Be not attracted. Beings in the bardo often do not realize– as thou dost, as thou must– that they are dead.
SALTED WIFE: Now my love flows from me with such force that I doubt that I could staunch it if I tried.
BARDO VOICE: He took the rump first, the most obvious meat.
(The man starts to carve the woman into shadows.)
SALTED WIFE: He pays me so much more attention now.
BARDO VOICE: Then he worked his way down the legs: first the thighs, then the calves, then boiled the feet for a bouillon.
SALTED WIFE: He caresses me so tenderly.
BARDO VOICE: He made bacon of her back; rubbed her ribs with salt.
SALTED WIFE: And looks after me so carefully.
BARDO VOICE: Packing what was left of her in a hogshead cask.
SALTED WIFE: It’s strange. Something has certainly changed. But I can’t put my finger on it.
BARDO VOICE: Because she has no fingers. He’s gnawed them to the quick and crunched the bone open to suck the marrow.
By the time his fellow survivors grew suspicious of his queer vigor, all they found of the Salted Wife was her head.(Tight pin spot on the woman’s head.)
They killed him of course. And thou canst hardly doubt they let him go to waste.
SALTED WIFE: With my husband’s love, I dream anything is possible. Now I am sure I could become the mother of a nation.
(The Salted Wife disappears.)
BARDO VOICE: Thou hast journeyed past the Salted wife. Go now. Leave this Bardo quickly. But know thou never canst forget her, for she is nothing but thee.
(Lights fade to black . . .