Archives for 2008

I saw Dawn Upshaw perform on stage a few nights ago in Berkeley. Now household chores will never be the same again. The mezzo-soprano performed Gyorgy Kurtag’s Kafka Fragments at Zellerbach Hall under the auspices of Cal Performances, a series of 40 short, atonal vignettes for solo voice and violin based on snippets from Franz Kafka’s diaries. As Upshaw sang against a back drop of moody, black and white video projections, she washed dishes, scrubbed the floor and did the ironing among other thing. I don’t think I have ever seen such intensity radiating from a singer.

The power of the performance partly stems from the contrast between Kurtag’s austere yet gut-wrenching musical settings and the slack-jawed everyday-ness of director Peter Sellars’ mise en scene. Upshaw and violinist Geoff Nuttall appear on stage dressed in drab, homely clothes — the extra-large plaid shirts and baggy jogging bottoms that most people wouldn’t be caught dead in outside of their own homes. They move their own props around — in this case, an assortment of plastic buckets, sponges, mops and other cheap household cleaning equipment. They move with a mixture of unselfconscious ease, as getting on with their own stuff at home, unobserved. The effect of this makes us feel rather like voyeurs, peering in on someone’s most private moments.

But the music operates in another realm entirely. Kurtag demands a great deal from his performers. They use the extremities of their ranges. They jump all over the place and make their instruments purr, shriek, coax and moan. They engage in lyrical duets only to remove themselves entirely from each other and suddenly appear bitter and lonely. Upshaw infuses every single note with emotion. By the end of the Fragments, she looks completely depleted — fragmented, even. And we feel the same way.

Productions that are specifically geared towards a local audience can swing two ways. Because such shows tap into the regional knowledge, culture and concerns of a particular locale, the relationship between what’s going on on stage and what’s going on in the stalls can be very powerful. Stand-up comedians often emphasize regionalism to great effect as it builds warmth and a common basis for comedy. On the other hand, audiences can also get a bit bored with work that reflects themselves and their direct environment too closely, especially if the artist is simply telling theatregoers stuff about their surroundings and lifestyles that doesn’t shed any new light on what they already know.

The latter is the case with the latest incarnation of Blixa Bargeld’s long-running global performance project, The Execution of Precious Memories. Since 1994, the postmodern musician (who is best known in his native Germany as the founder of the experimental rock group Einsturzende Neubaten and in the US as guitarist with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds) has sporadically created a series of performance pieces based on the specific cities in which they are staged. The project started out in Berlin. Between 1994 and 2001, Bargeld collaborated on pieces in Osaka, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Yaounde, Stockholm, London, New Delhi and Krakow. The show in San Francisco, which played last week at Theatre Artaud, represents the first Precious Memories production since 2001 and the first ever in the US.

Bargeld has lived in the Bay Area since 2001 so he has quite a bit of local knowledge at this point with which to create a work that reflects the lives of local residents. Certainly his entrenchment in San Francisco life is beautifully reflected in his choice of collaborators for the piece — the experimental dance company KUNST-STOFF and the six-member new music ensemble, Nanos Operetta. Nanos Operetta’s live musical score is the most riveting thing about the project. A combination of fierce percussion, strident strings and shimmery accordion, the ensemble-composed soundtrack does more to capture the eclectic spirit of San Francisco than all of Bargeld’s vague, husky-voiced ramblings about the impact of 9/11 and his favorite local haunts.

In a way, Bargeld occupies a bit of a no-man’s-land in terms of his relationship with the city. Because he’s lived in the Bay Area for seven years, he no longer has the freshness of perspective of a tourist. But he hasn’t lived in the region for long enough to be able to really get to grips with San Francisco’s soul. Thus, the production mostly conveys a fairly superficial and standard image of what the city represents to the world and what it means to its residents.

I’m curious to know if Bargeld actually lived in all the cities in which he previously created shows or whether he just visited them. It would be interesting to explore all the pieces in the Precious Memories cannon to date to find out whether being an outsider or tourist inspires a more intriguing artistic take on a city’s culture than being a permanent resident.

I got back from Europe last Wednesday night. Normally after I travel long distances, I try to give myself a few days to catch up on sleep before hitting the theatres, cinemas and concert halls. Turning up to see a show jet-lagged doesn’t do me much good, and it hardly helps the artists or fellow audience members if someone’s slouched in their seat and possibly snoring.

But owing to an unfortunate confluence of deadlines and truncated production runs, I’ve found myself in performance venues every single evening since I returned from my trip, bar one. (All I could manage that night was to slurp some soup and, at 9pm, crawl gratefully into bed.)

Seeing shows on jet-lag isn’t ideal, but many culture lovers and professional critics do it anyway. So having lately become rather proficient at the art of experiencing art when my body’s internal clock is on the other side of the world, I’d like to share a few tips on how to make it through a performance without doing damage to one’s health, upsetting the people on stage or annoying fellow audience members.

1. Call ahead and see if you can get seats near an exit. I say this not because you might want to leave early, but because theatres are pretty dark, and therefore sleep-inducing, places. By sitting near a door where, generally speaking, a little light filters in, you stand a better chance of staying awake.

2. Eat a light meal about an hour beforehand. Don’t drink more than one glass of wine. Red wine, in particular, induces zzzz’s.

3. Have a cup of coffee or black tea after your meal. Repeat during intermission if necessary.

4. Keep a pencil and paper handy. Even if you don’t generally do this when you go to the theatre or there’s nothing in particular to write down, try to take notes at least sporadically throughout the show. Staying “active” throughout a performance rather than simply sitting there passively and letting the stuff happening on stage wash over you helps you to keep your eyes open.

5. If your clothes are slightly uncomfortable, you’re more likely to stay awake than if they’re very loose like pajamas. So wear tight jeans. But not too tight — you don’t want to constrict the blood flow to your legs so much that they go numb and/or you faint.

6. Bring a friend who isn’t afraid to poke you if you nod off.

I never understood the fascination that special/traveling exhibitions exert upon museum goers. What’s the fun of lining up with hundreds of people (and, in the case of many art institutions, paying a premium) to spend a few hours in a packed, overheated gallery straining to see a bunch of paintings over people’s heads when you can enjoy the museum’s permanent collection in relative quiet and spacious ease?

The pleasure I get from permanent collections isn’t just to do with the fact that I don’t like crowds. A traveling exhibition might be full priceless masterpieces or provide art lovers with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see the entire gamut of works by a famous painter or group of artists. But it’s the permanent collection that reveals the true character of a museum. So I don’t often bother with special shows. More often than not, I’ll make a beeline for those dimly-lit, whispering enclaves where fewer people go and an old, uniformed guard sits snoring quietly in a corner.

It doesn’t take long to find this hallowed spot in the Beyeler Fondation. I visited this cozy, Swiss museum located on the outskirts of Basel a couple of weeks ago. It was a rainy Tuesday and the place was packed. But happily for me, few people were interested in the permanent collection. They were all there for the museum’s special exhibit of Venetian landscapes, Venice: From Canaletto and Turner to Monet. I shouldered past the thundering hoards and soon found peace among the museum’s airy exhibition halls.

Gallery owners Hildy and Ernst Beyeler built up their world-class collection of works by 20th century masters over a period of 50 years. The collection, which currently comprises around 200 works, was first publicly exhibited in its entirety at the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid in 1989. The opening of the Renzo Piano-designed Fondation Beyeler in October 1997 provided the Beyeler Collection with a public museum. The museum includes works by modern masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, Rousseau, Mondrian, Klee, Ernst, Matisse, Newman, Bacon, Dubuffet and Baselitz as well as a few objects from Africa, Alaska and Oceania.

What’s breathtaking about the museum is the relationship between some of the art works on display and the space itself. An entire room devoted to Monet lily pad paintings is offset by sight of real lily pads in the pond just outside the wall-length windows. Even on the dull, wintry day that I visited the museum, the link between art and nature seemed beguilingly porous. A huge square room with high ceilings made for the perfect setting for four enormous Anselm Kiefer canvases including the dizzying 1997 cityscape, “Lilith”. I felt cowed by their imposing dimensions and barren atmosphere.

My very favorite part of the Beyeler Fondation’s collection is the weirdest-looking Rodin sculpture I’ve ever seen. With her earthy limbs akimbo, Rodin’s bronze “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” looks like she might explode off the pedestal. The work is one of the most kinetic sculptures I’ve ever seen. My heart beat faster ever time I came close to the bronze statue. I visited her four times that afternoon and each time I got the same result.

I felt so invigorated by the time I had breezed my way through the Beyeler’s permanent collection that I found myself with energy to spare. So I decided to tackle the Venice exhibition anyway. I did my best to enjoy the carefully curated selection of paintings, but I didn’t stay for long. There was always someone breathing down my neck trying to get closer to the canvases. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds before feeling pressured to move on. If only I could break in one evening and prowl around the exhibit in the moonlight on my own time.

It’s not unusual to come across people in California think that the state should secede from the rest of the country. Until yesterday evening, however, I’d never heard of a group of Californians who want to secede from the state.

But in light of the recent madness surrounding Proposition 8, namely the state’s decision following the November 4 election to overturn a previous verdict to recognize same-sex marriages, America’s longest-running queer theatre company, Theatre Rhinoceros in San Francisco, has decided to secede its main stage from the state of California.

The 2008 Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) award-winning company (and a producer of generally great, or at least frequently interesting, work) has decided to undertake this plan in order, according to a media release, “to create a safe/legal space for Married Same-Sex couples in the State of California.” The company is marking the decision with a secession ceremony tonight, Friday, November 21 at its space in The Mission district of San Francisco.

Here is the company’s proclamation, written by artistic director John Fisher:

For thirty-one years our Mainstage has been a space of hallowed ground for Same-sex couples and it cannot continue as such if it does not recognize Same-sex Marriage. In recognition of the thousands of queer lives portrayed on our stage and the thousands upon thousands of queer people who have inspired, witnessed and been inspired by those lives, our Mainstage must secede from the State of California. The Board of Theatre Rhinoceros and I therefore declare our Mainstage seceded ground and proclaim our theatre an extraterritorial state that recognizes, encourages and condones Same-sex marriage. A “plaque of secession and proclamation” will be unveiled on Friday, November 21, 2008 at 10.00 pm, immediately following the performance of 100 Years of Queer Theatre. Come and raise a glass in recognition of this event and the eventual triumph of same-sex marriage over the forces of repression, exclusion and intolerance. Admission is free and open to the public.

If I make it to the ceremony, I’ll report back about the event. Regardless, I think it’s a bold move on the company’s part. Even if it seems like a bit of a publicity stunt (and let’s face it, the more hype surrounding Proposition 8, the better) I’m very glad to see such a prominent member of the local arts community taking a stand in such a deliberate, public and creative way. Let’s hope the authorities sit up and listen.

Newsflash! Fisher just sent me the following thoughts about his company’s decision:

“This is a publicity stunt, but not for the theatre. It’s a publicity stunt for same-sex marriage. I can’t imagine why anyone new would come here to see a show because we seceded. Our audience is loyal and dedicated, they’ll come regardless – but in talking to them every night at the show I hear that they’re angry and upset and suspicious of their neighbors. They want — they expect — some sort of statement of this kind from every queer organization. So we secede. It was a board member’s idea. I loved it. It’s also a way of making a statement without demonizing a certain group of people. There’s a lot of hate speech out there about who as a group is responsible for getting the proposition passed. I think that’s all spurious. The fact is something bad happened and we all need to clearly align ourselves with the cause of righteousness. America was created as an action of civil disobedience when we seceded from Great Britain – we didn’t secede from certain people in Great Britain, we seceded from the nation as a whole to express our dissatisfaction with the governing agency as a body. This expresses clearly our disappointment with the State (and the state) of California.

Also, we’re only seceding from the State (which hasn’t provided us with funding for a decade) not with the City or the Country – the City has always been generous in its support of our work and the country, well, don’t get me started but I don’t want the Feds in here with their shot guns. Right now the only people the State can send after us is the highway patrol.

And it’s all in fun. We will not, like the 1776ers, defend our theatre with blood. It’s not that dramatic, it’s theatrical. It’s a statement, like a march or the proposal that all gay people not go to work one day – it’s meant to make you think about the contribution of a place like Theatre Rhino and the people who make it happen. Usually we’re proud to be a part of this great state, and we want some love back.”

I also asked Fisher why only the main stage of Theatre Rhino had decided to secede. Why not the whole theatre? Here’s his response:

“Again, we want to protect ourselves from too much legal action – it’s an out. That was the board’s suggestion. If anyone comes after us we can run out into the offices which are still legal and claim CA citizenship. Also, I think of the Mainstage as extraterritorial sanctuary, like Cathedrals of old. I tell the audience that if they’re ever being chased by the Yes on 8ers they can run into the theatre for safe haven. I think the Mainstage is entitled to that, given all the same-sex positive stories it’s husbanded over the years. (Or wifed, as the case may be.)”

I’ve just been on a business trip to Basel, Switzerland. I didn’t think I’d have the time to take in any of this lovely, small city’s culture during my workaholic week-long stay, much less catch a recital by Andreas Scholl, one of my favorite vocalists in the entire world.

Turns out the German countertenor spends quite a bit of time in Basel: he teaches at the Schola Cantorum in the city.

If I had realized this beforehand I would no doubt have tried to wangle an interview with the great man, no matter the craziness of my work schedule. As it was, I felt incredibly lucky to be in town to hear him perform. I’m a Scholl groupie and proud of it too. Some of Scholl’s students were present atthe concert. I heard them talking excitedly in English to a couple of
middle-aged women (who may well have also been professional singers or singing
teachers) outside the church where the singer was about to perform.

The gig was wonderful because of the intimate setting and format. My previous experiences of going to hear Scholl perform live have always been on the large scale. I’ve heard him in 1000-plus seat concert halls and opera houses, often with full or chamber-sized orchestras.

This time, however, the singer was performing a series of 16th-17th century English songs by the likes of John Dowland and Thomas Campion such as “I Saw my Lady Weep” and “Have you Seen the Bright Lily Grow” and numbers from his Wayfaring Stranger album (a fabulous collection of old Anglo-American folk songs like “Down by the Sally Gardens” and “Black is the Color”) in the smallish Leonhardskirche with just a lutenist/guitarist (Crawford Young) to accompany him.

Scholl’s ringing tone, feeling phrasing and pristine intonation were all present that day, as was his dramatic delivery of some of the songs. What was missing from the performance, though, was the singer’s usual gusto. Scholl gave the impression that he was feeling low and tired. Instead of standing while he sang, he mostly sat next to Young on a stool. This helped to create the casual and cozy atmosphere of the gig, but it made for a rather contained performance that lacked true communication and
electricity.

What was also curious was the selection of songs. You can always count on Dowland for melancholy. But the singer seemed determined to avoid anything genuinely upbeat. Lost love, wretchedness and death permeated the repertoire from “In Darkness Let me Dwell” to “I Loved A Lass”.

The final song, a long strophic dirge entitled “Lord Rendall”, made for the most peculiar recital climax I think I’ve ever
witnessed: I couldn’t believe that Scholl picked a song about a guy being nagged by his mother on his deathbed to send his audience off. Thankfully, he stuck in the more feisty pirating ballad, “Henry Martin”, which shows off the singer’s warm baritone chest voice as well as his trademark countertenor, as an encore. If Scholl hadn’t sung that encore, I think I would have left the church feeling very puzzled indeed.

Forget about haunted houses this Halloween. This year is marked by the arrival of a much more awesome structure: the walking house.

A few days ago, I read about this amazing-looking construction designed by architects and engineers from Copenhagen and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beyond the fact that a prototype of the residence, with its cobweb-like black frame, looks slightly like the lair of an evildoer, the newly-designed concept really has nothing to do with Halloween. But it’s such a wonderful concept that I just had to blog about it.

Built on six hydraulic legs that can walk, the house is perfect for evading floods. The 10ft high home is solar and wind powered and can stroll at walking pace across all terrains. It has a living room, kitchen, toilet, bed, wood stove and mainframe computer which controls the legs. The pod took its maiden perambulation around rural Cambridgeshire at the Wysing Arts Centre in Bourn in the UK last week. Here’s a piece about the house from the UK’s Daily Telegraph. I wonder if the concept could one day be applied to concert halls, cinemas, galleries and theatres? That would be a real coup.

In other news, I’m traveling to Europe on Monday and will be gone for a few weeks. I’ll be writing again upon return. Until then, dear readers, I’ll wish you a happy Halloween and a misty and mellowly fruitful fall.

Theatre critics sometimes pop up as characters in plays, and like dentist characters in movies, the portrayals are rarely if ever positive. Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound and Ira Levin’s Critic’s Choice are cases in point.

The other day, I had the unusual experience of seeing myself (or, rather a weird version of myself) portrayed on stage by an actor in a local theatre production. Even though Sleepwalkers Theatre‘s production of a new play March to November lambasted me, my writing and (predictably) the theatre critics profession in general, I rather relished the experience.

As a blog post I penned back in September testifies, I was completely baffled and very intrigued to hear that the San Francisco company had decided to create a play based on a column I had written about political theatre back in January for SF Weekly.

In the column, I urged theatre companies to create plays about politics that didn’t just preach to the choir and massage liberal theatre goer egos, but rather shook up lazy lefty thinking. Sleepwalkers’ co-founder Torre Ingersoll-Thorp responded in an unusual way to my article. Instead of just sending me an email like most of my readers do, he wrote a play about a young playwright caught between wanting to set the world on fire by creating politically incendiary work and grappling with the realities of her complicated personal life.

The play features a theatre critic by the name of Clarence who works for a San Francisco alternative weekly called the SF Standard. In a further thinly-disguised move, the Standard is embroiled in a lawsuit with its chief competitor over anti-competitive ad sales practices — a bit of trivia which echoes the current real-life situation between SF Weekly and The San Francisco Bay Guardian in real life. The main plot springs from the playwright’s feelings of annoyance at and admiration for a column written by Clarence about political theatre — which, according to Ingersoll-Thorp, mirrors his own mixed reaction upon reading my my article back in January. Furthermore, the play quotes freely from my text.

I immensely enjoyed and appreciated seeing the ways in which Ingersoll-Thorp grapples with the issues that arose from my article, even though sitting through the play was a bizarre experience. Even though the drama has its flaws (the themes need refining and drawing out and there’s a little too much navel-gazing going on) it makes some interesting points about the vexed role of art as a revolutionary tool and, most significantly, the relationship between the political and the personal.

I was also amused by the character of Clarence the critic, who is quite a sweet chap at heart even if he dresses in drag (a voluminous and ill-fitting wedding dress) in the final scene of the play, has a rather unprofessional relationship with the principle playwright character, and has to deal with disgruntled artists whose work he’s been less than complimentary about in the past saying things about him like “you hijack artists’ futures every week with your column,” and “critics should be lined up and shot in Union Square.”

I’m truly flattered by Sleepwalkers Theatre’s riff on my essay. Ingersoll-Thorp has taken the ideas and run with them. With a bit of refinement, he might actually have an unusual play about politics on his hands. My review of the production is out in this week’s issue of SF Weekly.

There’s something so refreshing about turning up to catch an Oakland Opera production. Instead of putting on a cocktail dress and walking into a grand, old wedding cake of a building in the heart of San Francisco as is the case with any visit to the Bay Area’s flagship opera presenter, San Francisco Opera, one stands in line with a load of mostly casually dressed people down a barren, windswept back alley before being ushered into the large, empty warehouse of a room that serves as Oakland Opera’s current performance venue.

Sadly, the pieces I have experienced by the company over the last year, though interesting (e.g. the company’s recent production of the unfinished Duke Ellington opera, Queenie Pie) in general haven’t lived up to the thrill I’d like to feel for experiencing opera beyond the stuffy conventions of the mainstream civic opera house.

The company’s current double-bill of one-acts by Igor Stravinsky — Histoire du Soldat (which isn’t really an opera at all in the sense that there is no singing) and Renard demonstrate the highs and lows of producing opera on a shoestring. The company’s heavy-handed version of Histoire equated the no-frills opera experience with amateurism. But the capering, circus- and burlesque-infused Renard brilliantly showed off the potential of performing operatic works in an unconventional way.

The main problem with Oakland Opera’s Histoire is the company’s decision to “update” Stravinsky’s careening Faustian tale about a soldier who sells his soul to the devil. Reset during the current Iraq War, the production features one of the most banal and daft librettos I’ve ever heard. Rebecca Lenkewicz’s doggerel-infused text reminds one of a second-rate Dr. Seuss book with couplets like “Thank you for your care / I’ll tell her to let down her long, long hair.”

Thankfully, the second half of Oakland Opera’s program, Renard, makes up for the deadening, maddening experience of the first half. This time, the company wisely sticks to Stravinsky and Robert Craft’s original libretto which tells the story of a group of fighting barnyard animals. The sung performances are robust and characterful. The circus and burlesque performers imbue the work with a lively, debauched energy. I especially loved watching a bunch of burlesque dancers clad in yellow stockings and white feathers, bustles and corsets impersonate a bunch of battery hens. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a strip scene set in a farmyard before. Funny and interesting, if not exactly kinky.

I couldn’t help myself. I tried really hard to stay awake. It wasn’t like I hadn’t slept the night before or had eaten a heavy meal prior going to the theatre. Yet I could barely keep my eyes open during Laurie Anderson’s latest appearance in Berkeley.

The veteran experimental performance artist performed her latest show in front of a packed house at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. And though many people cheered and have the performer a standing ovation, all my addled brain and heart could do was lament how often artists with big reputations can get so much funding and earn such unabashed adoration for essentially resting on their laurels — or, in this case, lauriels.

Anderson has been a great artist. I was thoroughly engrossed by her Songs for Amelia Earhardt, which I caught in New York a few years ago. And “O Superman” continues to make a potent statement about the onslaught of technology and humanity’s accompanying sense of fear and loneliness more than 25 years on.

But Homeland, Anderson’s latest work condemning life in America since the 9/11 World Trade Center attack, is static, repetitive and incredibly predictable.

The most maddening thing about the production is Anderson’s almost Seinfeldian approach to riffing on the minutiae of our daily lives in this country. Her trundling, ominous-bassed, extremely long songs cover such themes as the embarrassment one feels standing in the security line at the airport with all one’s belongings on display and oversized Victoria’s Secret models ruling the world from billboards. This material has been picked over like carrion thousands of times by performers over the past 7 years. If there’s anything new to say about such things (which I doubt) Anderson certainly doesn’t add anything to the debate.

The dullness of the show’s content is further compounded by Anderson’s habit of beginning each sentence with “and”, the repetitiveness of her pseudo-ironic lilt and the flat nature of the staging. Anderson is joined on stage by a trio of musicians — a keyboard player, a bass guitar and a cellist. The only aspect of the mise-en-scene which changes over the course of one-and-three-quarter hours are the lights, which seem to vacillate through every color in the spectrum. If only my response to the piece could have been as varied as the lighting design.

The show felt like a complete throwback in terms of style and lacked any kind of new perspective on world events. It must be challenging living up to decades of high repute as an artist. The money comes in and the houses are full. But masses of funding and standing ovations don’t necessarily breed innovation.

Since posting some thoughts about the 2008 Free Night of Theatre  on October 16, I have received some valuable responses. Thank you all for writing in.

Brad Erickson, executive director of Theatre Bay Area, which oversees Free Night in this part of the country, got back to me at the end of last week with direct feedback to points I raised in my blog post as well as a report containing some interesting information about this year’s event. Thank you, Brad. Here are some of Brad’s thoughts in response to issues I raised in my blog post:

Chloe: I’m puzzled by one thing: the Free Night doesn’t seem to be a one-night stand anymore; theatre-goers can now get free tickets to see shows over several weeks. In the Bay Area, for instance, free tickets can be used to see events from October 3 to November 7.

Brad: Even the very first year, here in the Bay Area, Free Night was more than one night. While the idea of one night where theatres everywhere threw their doors open for free was wonderfully catchy, in reality schedules didn’t sync up. Some shows were still in rehearsal, others were closing, for others it was opening night, and so not appropriate for Free Night. We wanted to accommodate as many shows as we could, so in that first year, we expanded the dates to include a good month of performance options. This was advantageous to theatre-goers as well, since not every person is going to be available on any given night. Starting that first year, and continuing on, we have had theatres offer tickets on more than one night. This upped the total number of tickets available for us to give away, and made it less risky for the theatre companies to give away sizeable numbers of tickets (ACT holds the record of 800+ tickets given away – that was to three different shows over a number of nights – including two mainstage productions and one at Zeum). In the past two years, we have actively encouraged companies to consider multiple evenings for the free tickets, for the good reasons I mentioned a moment ago.

Chloe: While the generosity is admirable, I’m wondering if it might dilute the punch of the campaign? There’s little point in declaring October 16 2008 a Free Night of Theatre if every night between October 3 and November 7 is equally free.

Brad: Yes, which is why October 16 does not appear on any of our marketing material here in the Bay Area. In other cities (like New York), October 16 was used a focal point, or launch day, with performances beginning on that evening and proceeding over a few weeks. So, in NYC, and other regions, October 16 did have real significance.

Chloe: From a marketing perspective, I wonder if extending the dates in this way is a good idea? If people know they only have one night to see shows for free, they might jump into action more readily than if they’re able to say, “well, I can go anytime over the next few weeks, so I’ll just wait and see how my schedule pans out before organizing a trip to the theatre.”

Brad: Any interesting point. One innovation we tried this year (and that was utilized in Chicago as well) was rolling release dates for new tickets (ours we offered every Wednesday in October, excluding the final Wednesday). We did find that tickets were not snatched up with the same frenzy as before. So people, knowing more tickets would be released the following week, were doing some online shopping. We are hoping this means there will be more real interest in the shows selected, and that will cut down on no-show rates (no-show rates for smaller, less-known companies and shows could be a problem. With well-known companies and shows far less so).

Chloe: And how does offering free tickets on multiple evenings affect the economic situation of the theatre companies involved? It’s not like any of these organizations are rolling in money.

Brad: Theatres in the Bay Area have been extraordinarily enthusiastic about this program, year after year, because they understand it to be (for them) a very cost-effective way of attracting first-time patrons to their theatres. How much do companies spend on advertising? And what is the ROI? Here is a program that has proven to work in bringing in brand-new people to theatres – the most difficult to reach of audience members. Theatres in the Bay Area participate in the campaign at an exceptional rate. Of the 600+ theatres participating nationally this year, over 100 are from this region (out of 120 cities nationwide). Of the campaign’s total ticket count of 55,000, over 7,000 are from our theatres. Our theatres participate to such a degree because they believe in the effectiveness of the campaign.
National numbers from TCG:
–32 Managing Partners
–Over 120 cities participating in 27 states
–656 theatres presenting over 1,700 performances
–Approx. 56,000+ tickets are now being offered.

Chloe: I’m also curious to find out whether handing out free tickets over the past few years is really helping to build new audiences or whether people are just taking advantage of the free offer and coming to see plays just once rather than repeating the experience at other times during the year.

Brad: Shugoll Associates, (a Maryland-based market research company) has measured the success of Free Night since its inception. To quote researcher Marc Shugoll, “I have never seen a more effective audience development initiative.” The skinny is: Free Night audiences are remarkably diverse. They do not look like the stereotypical theatre-goer (that is, middle-age to older, white, and affluent). They are younger, they are ethnically diverse, and they come from a broad range of income brackets. They look not all that different from the Bay Area itself. And they come back as paying customers. Within six-nine months of Free Night, half of the Free Night folks attend another performance, and pay. They go to the theatre more often than before, and they attribute their uptick in interest to Free Night.
2007 Statistics:
–398 participating theatre companies presented more than 600 performances offering more than 30,000 tickets.
–According to the online survey of 2007 Free Night patrons required when they made their ticket reservation, the program continues to attract a significant number of people who fall into non-traditional theatre participant categories, including infrequent theatre attendees, young people, less educated, non-white and those with lower household incomes.
–Specifically, 77% attended a theatre they had never been to before, 42% are under age 35, 26% have less than a college degree, 27% are non-white, and 33% have combined household incomes under $50,000.

I sometimes forget just how crucial a role context plays in experiencing a work of art.

I was reminded of this fact just the other day when I went to the cinema to see a special benefit screening of Jessica Yu’s documentary Protagonist, screened at the Grand Lake Theatre in Oakland as a fundraiser for Walden House, a substance abuse treatment non-profit based in California. A friend of mine, Joe Loya, serves as the organization’s media relations coordinator. Joe is also an author and journalist. Furthermore, he happens to be one of four male interview subjects whose story is told in Yu’s documentary.

Protagonist covers the journeys of four grown men from innocence through revelation and extreme behavior and eventually to catharsis. Joe grew up in an abusive Mexican-American family. His mother died when he was young and his father took out his anger on Joe and his brother. Joe grew up to become a hardcore and rather sadistic bank robber before winding up in prison and eventually, upon release, becoming a writer. Mark Pierpont, a fervent evangelical missionary, fought for years to repress his homosexual impulses. He did everything he could to lead the battle to “cure” lesbians and homosexuals before realizing that he could no longer hide his true nature. He went on to become a gay nightclub performer. Hans-Joachim Klein, a German and the only non-American interviewee in the film, rebelled against his Nazi-sympathizing father and became one of Europe’s most wanted left-wing revolutionaries of the 1970s. Then there’s Mark Salzman, Yu’s real-life partner, whose arc follows his obsessive martial arts training and years spent under the influence of a monomaniacal martial arts guru. Eventually Salzman, who is a noted memoirist, turned away from the guru and launched on a literary path.

When viewed as part of a substance abuse benefit, the film looks like a story of simple redemption, of bad guys turned good. I found myself feeling that Salzman, as the only person who hadn’t lived an extreme life in the sense of stabbing his father in the throat with a kitchen knife, handling firearms or changing his sexuality, was the odd man out.

But reading reviews of the film written by people who saw it under different circumstances demonstrates a much wider spectrum of possible interpretations.

Writing in the Village Voice under the headline “Women are from Mars; Men from Greece,” for instance, Lisa Katzman writes about Yu’s exploration of male behavior and its relationship to archetypes from Ancient Greek drama (the entire film is framed by stick puppet enactments of works by Euripides such as The Bacchae.)

Andrew O’Hehir’s review for Salon, by contrast, concentrates more on the film’s structure.

The film seemed uneven to me, yet thoroughly intriguing. I think I’d like to see it again. Next time, perhaps, with the members of a male self-help group, a bunch of feminists or a group of Greek or literary scholars.