Tag: Brendan Kiley

Better Dead, But Rich’ll Do

March 5, 2015

I don’t even have a dog in the fight that Brendan Kiley’s pulled me into here, but I think I might have to rent one.
Me on Face Book yesterday
* * *
Before I retired from theatre nearly two years ago I liked to write essays about the art form’s problems (“On Institutional Arrogance”), and what made it great, (“How Can I Talk About the Borrowers?”), but I never did manage to write all the essays I wanted to. By the end, I had a whole file full of titles I would never flesh out. I even wrote an essay about that (“Surplus Titles”). One of my favorite leftovers was “Better Dead”, under which I intended to provide an explanation to the uninitiated that despite the image they might hold in their minds of playwrights being central to the making of theatre in modern America, the fact is, our absence is the usual and preferred state of engagement, and if we can manage to be dead, preferably for a long enough time that our work is in the public domain, then we are even more popular among our non-playwriting theatre colleagues.
(more…)

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
The Early Scoop on The New New News

February 24, 2011

The early news on The New New News is in… and it’s good!
In Mónica Guzmán Preston’s post over at Intersect, “My favorite moment from the @newswrights play ‘The New New News” (a meta- media laced headline if there ever was one), she describes:
… one of those moments in storytelling where, in ways you couldn’t have predicted, disparate elements of narrative and meaning all come together.
For this longtime fan of the much misunderstood mass microblogging service, it was fantastic.
I am one NewsWright who is delighted that Monica enjoyed the show, especially since she helped us so much in the early phases of our research, suggesting leads, pointing us toward whole new stories to run down, inviting us into her “meet-ups”. We do wonder, though, if she recognized herself in any of the characters.
* * *
Jose Amador, at the Seattlest says:
There’s nothing about News that’s passive, or simple; very little that is formulaic… which is unusual and welcome in an age where everything can and will come to you. At the end of the night… one is rewarded with an excess of interesting thoughts about the world we inhabit….
* * *
And then The Stranger’s Brendan Kiley chimed in. He hasn’t seen it yet, but that doesn’t stop him from recommending it:
….[NewsWrights United] put together The New New News—about the rise of local blogs, how the Seattle Times got a Pulitzer Prize for its readers’ Twitter coverage of the Maurice Clemmons manhunt, and what happened to Art Thiel when he started his own blog and had to get tangled with selling his own ads. Judging by their last effort and the seriousness of their material, The New New News should be scarier than the ersatz Mack the Knife.
* * *
I particularly enjoyed Rosemary Jone’s interview at Examiner.com because it gives NewsWrights United’s Managing Producer, Jim Jewell a chance to say why he believes in the work we do.
Right now, theater looks to me like newspapers in the 90’s, watching changes all around them and somehow believing themselves above the change, too venerable to fail. We spend too much time in the theater talking about what theater is instead of actively engaging the form and deciding what it will be, and we aren’t too far from the crisis newspapers have found themselves in: failure to evolve.
* * *
So what does all this good news for NewsWrights mean to you? Well, for one it means that if you had hoped not to leave Capitol Hill to see the show, you better order your advance reservations soon. We have only one week at the Erickson, and it starts tonight. The following two weekends will be staged at Theater One on the North Seattle Community College campus (advance reservations for those performances here).
Of course, you can always risk walking up because we always hold back a quantity of pay-what-you-can seats. You just have to ask yourself, are you really cheaper than the majority of your Capitol Hill neighbors? If so, show up early. All evening performances start at 7:30 pm. The matinee is at 2 pm.

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
Shakespeare Would Hate Us

February 1, 2011

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned to a friend of mine that I was thinking of auditioning for The Wooden O this year, since for the first time in a years I won’t be on vacation during their run. My buddy, who happens to be a Seattle firefighter, but whose wife acts with the O on occasion, trotted out a taunt he likes to tweak me with: “But Paul, you hate Shakespeare.”
He bases this facetious conclusion on a challenge I proposed some years back calling on all Seattle theatres to self-impose a Shakespeare hiatus for one year. Brendan Kiley, Arts Editor for The Stranger, picked the idea up and wrote about it here. I still genuinely believe this would be a grand and beneficial experiment, but not because I hate Shakespeare—quite the opposite. As a playwright I flatter myself that I understand the man’s genius better than most of the directors and actors who worship so sycophantically at his altar for all the wrong reasons.

“It’s the language that makes his plays so exquisite.”

“No, it’s his sumptious, multifaceted characters.”

“No, no, it’s the tradition, the chance to etch one’s mark on the living canon of performance.”

It’s all bullshit. Shakespeare was a great—yes, even the greatest—playwright for one and only one simple reason: he wrought great plays. All the rest is just so much makings. You might praise a chef for her choice of ingredients, but you wouldn’t claim them as the reason for her genius. A year without Shakespeare would help us gain some much needed clarity and distance from the material. We would come back to it ready to attack with refreshed hearts. And it would also get us off his cash-cow tit for long enough to taste a little bona fide self-sufficiency. Hell, we might actually miss Shakespeare. That currently unfathomable notion alone would make a break worth it, wouldn’t it?
Never mind. I already know the answer. It was shouted at me and Kiley at the Seattle Theatre ShitStorm back in 2008. And it has been shouted just as fiercely upon every subsequent mention. “Never! We will NEVER stop staging Shakespeare. Not for a year. Not for a month. How dare you!? You and the rest of your modern playwright ilk are not fit to wipe the soles of his pointy shoes.” The level of vituperation one encounters upon even suggesting a breather from the bard naturally calls a paraphrase of one of his more famous lines to mind, “Methinks the status quo doth protest too much.”
Yes, American Theatre literally worships Shakespeare. And I have to laugh, because I am pretty sure he would have hated us.
Shakespeare was a playwright, poet, player and proprietor, in equal measure, despite our hindsighted emphasis on the first of those four. He made plays to make money and he made a lot of both. He would hate our precious process of endless workshopping plays to an early death on dusty shelves. At the Globe you worked the problems of a play in performance.
He would hate that people more often read his plays than see them.
He would hate, or not have been even able to comprehend, a system in which playwrights make plays for performance in cities far from where they live, for less than it costs them to create, for the narrowest sliver of society.
He would hate that so many modern American playwrights have never acted and never produced, have never done anything in a theatre except watch silently from dark seats.
Since he shared them, he would sympathize with the milquetoast middle class aspirations of most American playwrights—“I just want to have a house and a family and make the same kind of money as my friends I went to college with”— but he would grow to hate them eventually. Shakespeare may have envied his social superiors, but he also knew at his core he was better than them.
He would not hate that we kiss the asses of our benefactors and patrons, but he would hate how poorly and surreptitiously and self-loathingly we do it; almost never managing, as he did, to flatter and skewer with the same loaded lines: floating sublimely above, then suddenly crawling at them from beneath, being everyone and no one at the same time with such stunning success that even today reasonably sane and educated people entertain themselves with the pseudo-intellectual dalliance that he did not even write the plays which he so clearly did.
He would have hated the MFA system for generating new viral spores of actors, playwrights and directors when there isn’t enough work for the ones already in the system.
He would have hated the advent of the auteur director, smothering the natural brilliance of his plays with their dense cloying concepts.
He would hate that artistic administrators make the decisions about which plays get done, instead of a consensus of proprietor/players, all sharing the ownership of the theatre, and thus the risks and rewards.
And most of all, he would hate our necrophilic prejudice for his plays, even the poor ones, over anything new, even the good ones. As the consummate playwright, he would want us to love the living writers as much or more than the dead.
So, yeah, I’m pretty sure if Shakespeare were alive today he would hate us.
And he’d be writing for television.

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
NewsWrights’ Awareness & Fundraising Event – How’d we do?

November 19, 2010

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. )

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
Better-Late-Than-Never Breaking Press for “Journalism: a.WAKE.ning?”

November 15, 2010
Extra! Extra!
As luck and irony would have it, all the press for Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? is breaking late, fast and furious. Here’s a rundown of what came across the wires this weekend:
The Stranger
- The Gist: Ain’t these playwrights adorable thinking their journalists?
- The Pull-quote: “Panel discussions are, by definition, deadly dull.” (“Well, gee, thanks, Brendan!” Please also note, Kiley promised to start a fist fight. Let’s see if he walks his big talk.)
- The link: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/11/12/the-playwrights-think-theyre-newspapermen
The Sunbreak
- The Gist: NewsWrights is promising one free drink: a shot of rye or a glass of champagne, depending on your personal prognostication for the future of journalism.
- The Pull-quote: “I may just stay sober,” playwright Paul Mullin told me on the phone. “I don’t know which way it’ll go.”
- The Link: http://www.examiner.com/theater-in-seattle/no-better-time-to-produce-theater-seattle
Seattle Theatre Examiner
- The Gist: Now is exactly the time to gamble on locally grown new plays.
- The Pull-quote: “The previous golden age of American theater was smack-dab during the last Great Depression,” said Mullin. “We must not sit around on our hands waiting for the rich to pay us to make art for them. The rich don’t need our help and they will not share our vision. We need to make art for the people who are suffering in these drastic times, and let the chips fall where they may. We need to enter the fray.”
- The Link: http://www.examiner.com/theater-in-seattle/no-better-time-to-produce-theater-seattle
Late buzz is better than no buzz at all, and we are grateful for it.
So if you haven’t already bought your tickets, don’t feel bad but DO IT NOW! Click HERE to make your order at Brown Paper Tickets, or if you’re feeling lucky and pressed for time, buy them at the door.
Either way . . .
We’ll see you tonight!
Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
At Least One of Our Theatre Critics is also a Journalist

November 5, 2010

Brendan Kiley just broke some more substantiated details on the crisis at Intiman Theatre over at The Stranger’s Slog.
So my question for The Seattle Times would be, where was Misha Berson on all this?
There’s an old joke about the Seattle ethos of crippling “niceness”.

In Chicago, the car behind you will honk as soon as the light turns green.

In New York, the car behind on you will honk exactly one second before the light turns green.

In Seattle, the light can cycle through green yellow red… green yellow red… green yellow red… forever before anyone will discover that you’ve keeled over dead of a heart attack.

So, was Misha just going to wait until a press release was pushed out? Or should our only surviving daily newspaper step up and occasionally do some shoe-leather arts reporting without solely relying on the story the perpetrators choose to tell us?

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
Get your Tix Now for the Journalism/Theatre Event of the Year

November 4, 2010

Tickets just $20 at Brown Paper Tickets.
Monday November 15, 2010 – 7:30-9:30pm
The Upstairs Gallery above Theatre Off Jackson
NewsWrights United is throwing a party. What kind of party is up to you.
Do you want to toast the rebirth of journalism, or drown your sorrows at its untimely demise?
We’ll start your evening with a complimentary glass of champagne or shot of rye (toasting or drowning?). Visual art and installations, complimentary hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar await you in the gallery.
We’ll offer up a preview scene from our upcoming Living Newspaper, The New New News, and highlight the evening with a panel discussion on new media and journalism moderated by NewsWrights producer Tom Paulson and featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning P-I political cartoonist Dave Horsey, Monica Guzman of Intersect.com, Publicola‘s Josh Feit, local sportswriting legend Art Thiel, The Stranger theatre critic Brendan Kiley, and Chris Grygiel, coordinator of political coverage for the P-I blogs.
Get ‘em now before the all get got!
Tickets just $20 at Brown Paper Tickets.

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
As Predicted, the Spin Begins . . .

April 30, 2010

. . . and I could’ve predicted the source of this first spin too, had I really cared to.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/04/29/pay-for-play-the-response

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
The Seattle Rep and the Fifth Avenue Take a Walk on the Sleazy Side

April 28, 2010

I will be honest: although I always hope for the best, I never really expected the Big Houses here in Seattle to have some sort of Road-to-Damascus conversion and start doing the right thing. I always assumed they would continue to offer safe and staid programming and promote it with safe and staid marketing techniques. So when I read in this week’s Stranger that the Fifth Avenue was paying for coverage on KING 5 TV’S New Day Northwest without making it plain that the coverage was sponsored, I was actually genuinely shocked. And I have to confess, it gave me a bit of pleasure, because I honestly did not think that, given their tepid programming, the Big Houses could ever possibly shock me again.
Folks, this story will get spun by the culpable spinners. Those of us who are appalled by this supremely less than ethical behavior will be branded as naïve and bitter; but this is exactly the sort of thing the Bush Administration tried to pull.

…the White House, … spent taxpayer money to produce local TV-news segments advocating policies of the Bush administration. The Government Accountability Office condemned these paid-for “news” segments as “covert propaganda,” but the White House instructed agencies to ignore the GAO findings.

“As a former journalist, I’m horrified to be compared with the Bush administration,” Larson said. “This isn’t a news program—it’s an entertainment program.”

If the Rep and the Fifth cannot see what they did was wrong, then they have no business offering us art that purports to be honest, edgy, and untainted by corporate equivocation.
***
PS: Brendan Kiley suggests here that all the Big Houses, plus the little ones like WET, too, owe him back pay for covering them, but I would further suggest that NewsWrights United covered the Seattle theatre press in last fall’s It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, so perhaps they in turn owe us a little som’n-som’n. Granted, I wrote about Misha Berson and Joe Adcock. (You can watch the video here. ) and left out Kiley, because, let’s face it, he’s just too boring. But Brendan? If you’re willing to make me an offer I’ll happily write a play about how you wrote an article about how the Fifth bought buzz and convinced the Rep to join their ethically dubious enterprise, for what I can only imagine was what they saw as the high-ground cover the Rep could offer them if the shit hit (which it did). Forget cover, Big Houses. Your cover is blown. Get started living right, or get started dying. There are no longer any in-betweens.
PPS: A year and a half a go The Stranger gave me a hunk of change for being a “Genius”. Obviously, this is a bogus award, the sole purpose of which was to get me to push traffic over to their website. So go, damn you, go! I don’t want them asking for their money back!
PPPS: I hate loving The Stranger, but given the connect-the-dots drawing of Mohammad they ran on the front of this issue, how can I help my damned self.

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons
Misha Versus Joe

March 25, 2010

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.

Posted at 7:52 AM in Locally Grown Plays, Seattle, The Sequence, Theatre, Theatre News, Towards a World Class Theatre | Comments (8)

Tags: A Contemporary Theatre, ACT, Brendan Kiley, Dwayne Clark, John Langs, Patronage, Paul Mullin, playwrights, playwriting, Theatre, theatre patrons