Hey all,
Hope youâre having a great Tuesday!
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First, a few quick notes on some things that inspired me this week.
Tonight I saw The Farwell, which was wonderful. I recommend you see it if you get a chance. It just set the box office record for best theatre average this year, which may or may not be a meaningless statistic, but itâs a really great story.
Last night I saw an inspiring DIY variety show at the Magnet Theatre called Maaad Late!. The idea was that the whole thing was an improvised late night talk show, complete with a special guest and musical performance. While the show was funny, it actually moved me more than anything else: to see regular people get up and talk about whatâs going on in their lives (in the special guest bit), and especially the musical performance, in which De La Cruz brought a dancer named Soundcloud who he found performing on the subway to do his first ever gig and tell a bit about his story. Itâs maybe silly, but it made me happy to be in New York, and happy to be a human.
Something else that made me happy to be a New York human this week? Seeing people talk to one another and cooperate during the Manhattan blackout â itâs amazing how, even without traffic lights, people actually find a way to make it work. We didnât devolve into anarchy. (Something that made me less happy? Our performance of A Strange Loop getting cancelled.)
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My partner Mari is in a show opening at the Corkscrew Theatre Festival in NYC this Thursday. Go see it!!
Notes from the week
Pleasure as an organizing principle
The world under capitalism deals with pain as its organizing principle:
The organizing principle of the modern world is pain. Avoiding it, yes. But also trading in it, taking refuge in it, and using it to justify our actions. Pain has so many uses. Why would you ever give up such a versatile tool?
What would it mean instead to re-frame our organizing principle to be around pleasure? I loved this article by Tiago Forte that asks that question, summarizing the work of activist adrienne marie brown (whose books I have now bought and started reading).
Brownâs new book is Pleasure Activism: âUltimately, pleasure activism is us learning to make justice and liberation the most pleasurable experiences we can have on this planet.â Itâs so far an invigorating and provocative read.
Itâs made me think seriously about how much of our world is centered around pain, ideas like you must suffer for work and that sacrifice is inherently goodd. Thereâs a lot to consider here, and I havenât fully unpacked it.
But it made me think back to that viral âHow Millennials Became the Burnout Generationâ piece, which is an excellent read if you havenât read it:
Why canât I get this mundane stuff done? Because Iâm burned out. Why am I burned out? Because Iâve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it â explicitly and implicitly â since I was young.
Tech, social media, student debt, the cult of optimization, etc has made us think that we need to be on the clock 24/7, always working, always suffering. How can we lift away this pain and move towards pleasure?
Uptown/downtown, Broadway/Off-Broadway worlds continue to meld
With the announcement that Jeremy O. Harrisâ Slave Play (directed by Robert OâHara) is going to Broadway, the trend of the uptown/downtown wall being torn down continues, following a Broadway season that produced the work of Heidi Schreck, Daniel Fish, Taylor Mac, and Young Jean Lee. I also wrote about this in May.
I think this is really big news for theatre, and a potential encouraging sign for its future. Jeremy and the producers are subsidizing 10,000 tickets to make them available for $39, which to be honest I donât think is cheap enough, but is a start. (It also doesnât change the fact that, for some absurd reason, you can buy a âpremium ticketâ for $227 for the show.) There have been also âgrassrootsâ efforts to subsidize that $39 ticket price on Twitter for anyone that wants to go, which is an interesting thing Iâm seeing pop up more and more online. (And is made more potent by Jeremy and the showâs popularity on social media.)
And while Iâm a fan of Jeremy and Robert and the play, itâs important to remember that the show was not at all without its critics. Thereâs a lot to unpack. But the marketing for the Broadway run is really pushing that Wesley Morris quote that itâs âthe single most daring thing Iâve seen in a theater in a long time,â which is about as good an endorsement as you can get.
Maria Striar on ticket prices, recycling sets and making it happen
Great interview with Clubbed Thumb Artistic Director Maria Striar in The Interval (RIP), a company thatâs been killing it for a while but has recently made a bigger name for itself with What the Constitution Means to Me and (to a lesser extent) Plano.
Itâs really important for us that itâs ambitious, but low stakes. Thereâs a calibration of shoot for the moon, donât be lazy, donât be unambitious, but also donât be scared, donât hedge your bets. You can try something out and if it doesnât quite work, weâre all going to be okay.
We are very good at doing a lot with a littleâŠYou can take somebody elseâs leftover set parts, and you repurpose your own set parts, and you do all kinds of clever, thrifty things that require a little bit more scheming and engagementâŠThere is part of me that is so deeply downtown-y and scroungy and really hates waste. So I like that back and forth of using resources, as long as within the parameters of not wasting peopleâs time and not clipping peopleâs wings. The set budgets for Clubbed Thumb canât cost more than the artistic. People first, stuff second or third, down the line.
I think the most important thing is striving to pay people. It is so expensive. The city is so expensive to live in. Everything you can do to put money in the hands of young artists or other types of theatre practitioners is allowing the presence of this form in this city to continue. I feel like that is my highest priority. I also feel like itâs really, really important to keep ticket prices low. I canât tell you how many people showed up for the 25 dollar rush tickets. And how many people tell you they donât have money for a 20 dollar ticket.
Plainly put: even $20 can be too much.
New York Theatre Workshop continues to crush it
NYTW announced their full season, which includes a production of Three Sisters starring Oscar Isaac and Greta Gerwig and directed by Sam Gold, Celine Songâs Endlings directed by 24-year-old Sammi Cannold and featuring a 4,000 gallon water tank, and a new play by Martyna Majok directed by the amazing London-based Rebecca Frecknall.
NYTW has their problems as well, like any Off-Broadway institution, but they have consistently been doing great work for many, many years, and I imagine one or more of these productions will become a major hit and/or transfer to Broadway. They continue to be one of the institutions in New York that I am most excited about. (But they need cheaper tickets, and a more easily accessible rush system â theirs is a total mess, but thatâs not a unique problem.)
What What the Constitution Means to Me Recouping its Broadway Capitalization Means to Me
Constitution made back its money on Broadway, which is another very positive sign that downtown theatre sells on Broadway, and that the old-world thinking of âhit-makingâ is pretty much dead. The internet has made it so that audiences are able to discern more clearly what is great and whatâs not â they donât want to be merely spoon-fed âentertainmentâ in the classic Broadway sense.
Of course, there are also lots of holes in this argument. Tickets are still too damn expensive. This play has a simple set and small cast, so is not exactly expensive to produce, and just now made its money back after a relatively long run. (Which indicates that producing theatre is just too expensive!) And as usual, so much money being tied up in any one show (and this is peanuts compared to other, larger shows) does have quite a sickening feeling to it, and itâs tied to a deeper, systemic money problem at American theatreâs very core; that is, an existential crisis of participating in a capitalist market economy.
Thinking critically about staging gendered violence
A very good conversation in Howlround about the perils of staging gendered violence (specifically the nunnery scene in Hamlet), and the nature of trauma.
What is the purpose of staging and showing such explicit violence? Is this a shorthand for thinking about moral flaws? Is staging violence a way of saying the perpetrator of violence suffers from mental illness? Is it just saying, âRather than actually considering other aspects of the text, weâre going to use a moment of violence as some other way of showing internal struggle or personal turmoil or emotional conflictâ?
They also discuss Nanette:
Jess: That makes me think of Nanette, the Hannah Gadsby special.Â
Emer: Yes!Â
 Jess: Part of what sheâs doing is unraveling the idea that you need to subject yourself to violence in order to ease tension.
End Note
art by Kyutae Lee.
Iâm working on formatting for this newsletter. If you have any suggestions on what you like to see the most here, please let me know. I love putting this together, and Iâm trying to figure out which parts of it have the biggest impact. Thanks!
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-Gus