12/17/07

Last night I played a game of football - water polo-style with the New York Giants. Their coach wore a yellow slicker and hat and called plays from a World War I airplane (the kind with the enormous propellors). The plane turned into a ship when the water rose too quickly in the third quarter. I think this could mean that I’m overwhelmed. Dream Moods (http://www.dreammoods.com/dreamdictionary/) says: Water is the living essence of the psyche and the flow of life energy. It is also symbolic of spirituality, knowledge, healing and refreshment. To see a raging flood with its muddy debris, signifies that you will have much unsettling occurrences and tribulations in life. Your repressed emotions may be overwhelming you. If someone could fill in the meaning of the New York Giants, I might sleep better. I was losing the game and the crashing of waves kept waking me in a panic, but not stirring me enough to tell my body to move to the sofa or get the dog to calm me.

 12/18/07

I’ve been spinning in the anxiety of a water-polo-football-airplane/ship-hurricane/flood-holiday-winter-wonderland dream for two days now. Is it needing to close on sponsors for Shipwrecked? Is it holiday preparations that do not interest me in the least, yet need to be addressed. Is it the mortgage, utilities and medical bills, the check engine light that has been on since August, and the paycheck that can’t support any of it? Is it the avoidance my my mother’s request for advice on how to mask the empty places at the holiday table - there used to be so many chairs and the cane sags where they sat for so long - but they’re not coming back now. Or is it needing to find a way to catch up on a decade of no sleep - or rather a decade of actually being asleep but getting no rest? Is it this new language I need to learn or the 23 X 30 foot trench I need to dig, but can’t because it has frozen over? That plane from the dream kept crashing into the places I wanted to stand and the water eventually froze so that I could walk over it - with trepidation.

12/19/07

There’s play and competition, then overwhelm and the spinning, there’s trying to find a place to stand where it’s safe - but it’s always too cold. The referee jumped plane - then ship - and stopped keeping order. He changed the rules of the game - the tradition of it - and here I am at 2:00 am, baking a new version of what was once my ex-husband’s favorite dessert. I realize that in the last year I’ve had to find a new way to do everything - a new twist to tackle it alone and make it truly mine, a new strategy and the strength to ask for help, a new method to build a healthy community around me.

We (at LWT) have been so focused on a new vision - a new strategy revolving around community - perhaps the overwhelm, the team, the game, the coach , and the pilot/captain of that plane/ship have been sitting at the back of my thoughts laughing as I try to articulate their strategy. Are we ready internally for the crashing of waves? Intellectually, it is natural to embrace this new vision, but what will our bodies and our psyches do when we hit a spin and the referee becomes a deserter? Do we know what it will take to make it real - and then comes the overwhelm. 

Building a new tradition - especially when so many existing and powerful ones are in place - takes every bit of emotional, intellectual, and physical strength you have. It takes the attention of a new lover, the compassion of a dear friend, and the patience of a spider to remain still when things are crashing and spinning and filling with water around you. It takes careful analysis of what hasn’t worked, what has gone terribly wrong and why, and even an analysis of what you’ve managed to choose that happened to be the right direction. It takes a mercury sence of humor that rises and falls with the heat of something new and the chill of the unknown or unforeseen challenge. It takes food - home grown and cooked in your own kitchen so that it is enjoyed and appreciated to the fullest when shared with others.

Are we ready for this? I mean truthfully prepared, each and every one of us? Does it matter? Regardless of whether we’re ready, the game is in play, the storm is here, and it’s cold outside. I can only speak for myself to this new vision of LWT and these new traditions I am now crafting. I will play fiercely, I will fight, I will still feel the overwhelm and learn to walk immediately after spinning. I will bake this new version of the dessert that was my ex-husband’s favorite - and he will not get to enjoy it, but I’m sure it will show up in Development one of these days. In the dream, the plane/ship never stopped moving forward, no one (not even the New York Giants) succumbed to the water or the cold, now we just need to find the safe place to stand.

I was sitting in a Board meeting the other day, and we were hashing out some important issues, when our “working dad” spoke about the idea of filling 100% of our houses every performance as a goal. What a genius! No, seriously, that comment struck me as a particularly profound and inspiring idea. We are so used in our industry to playing below capacity, especially when we come to budgeting, and we have to realistic, so we project for houses that are indeed way below capacity. And in the process, we translate our current reality to be an unchangeable fact. So, it follows, that at some point we forget that consistently full houses were the goal from day one.

Its both interesting and useful for me, to take it back to the most simple and obvious of notions, because they are the ones we tend most easily to forget, or at least to take for granted, at which point we have effectively forgotten. So the question is perhaps not, how do we earn enough income from a show to remain viable as a theatre, but instead, how do we fill each and every one of our houses, while making sure we make enough money to stay alive. I see this as a subtle but important distinction, and perhaps one that will help us stay important and sustainable as an art form. But what do I know? These are just some thoughts. I’d love to hear what people think. Here’s a picture of the La Scala opera house to perhaps motivate some inspiration.

The train-ride into New York is my best script-reading time: the trip in one direction–just shy of two hours–is the perfect ammount of time to read a full-length play at performance speed, so I read one script going down, one script going back, and maybe one while I’m there just to feel extra-productive.

On this day one year ago, I quit smoking. It was time. I knew it was time. So I did it.

20 years, that’s how long I smoked. An as-much-as-2-packs-a-day smoker. $60 a week, give or take a sale. Ultra light 100’s, didn’t care about the brand. I was a fixture on the front dock, puffing away as a result of stress, or perhaps boredom. That was me, one year ago.

Now I will admit, I loved smoking. LOVED it. I loved it for all the romantic and rebellious reasons, for the rush into adulthood it provided as a kid, for the coolness of it. I could be the aloof kid in high school who was too cool for the girls to talk to, playing hooky for a smoke. I could be the noir-ish mystery guy lighting up in a crowded bar and contributing to the smoky atmosphere (literally).

Then reality arrives …. Sleep apnea. Extremely severe. I was a stroke candidate, it was so bad. My tonsils are huge, my uvula was redundant, so they had to go. Frankly, the pain was so bad for the first three weeks after surgery, that you might as well have put a “Stupid” sticker on my forehead if I had kept smoking.

The biggest obstacle? Routine. I could tell you how many smokes I could do in a 15 minute break, or the ride home. Heck, I knew how many I could get in just from walking from Mainstage to Stage II. (Five, if I walk slow and puff fast.) I had to break a 20-year routine; I had to change me. That’s rough, folks.

So for anyone looking to quit, here’s my best advice: you’ll know when you’re ready. There’s never the perfect time to quit, there’s never the perfect reason to quit. But you, and only you, will know when you want to stop. No lie, it’s a commitment, and it’s hard. But you can do it. And you’ll know the right time. I was there.

And now, I’m a former smoker. Not a non-smoker, a former one. I live with that realization each day that I decide that I don’t want to start again. There are days I miss them, and there are days I can’t remember the feeling of being a smoker. I concede that there may be the day I return to it. But today, I reflect on my past-smoking self and all that it gave and took away from me, and I move forward.

Not bad. Not bad at all.

~M*

For those of you who may have missed this in yesterday’s NYT… Click MORE for the text in it’s entirety, or click HERE to go to the NYT site.

Op-Ed Columnist
The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us
By FRANK RICH
Published: October 14, 2007

Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in the Iraq war. The longer we stand idly by, the more we resemble the “good Germans.”

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Every week, usually on Thursday, I return home to visit my parents and catch up on the lives of my family. This week, my mother gave me an envelope to me and Dan, from my 8 year old nephew. It contained his Christmas list. Here’s what it said, verbatim, as he wrote it ….

“Dear Uncul Matt & Dan
I wold like to give you my crismas list a little suner.
Go to toysurus.
Police car & police station.
that’s all that on my list. pick out other stuff to.
from Zack.”

I love this kid.

~M*

I realized this morning that I haven’t posted in over a week.

Actually, I came to a similar realization when it hadn’t quite been a week, and then again when it was just a week, and then again twice before I finally logged on to post.

For a moment I felt guilty.

But THEN I realized that, in shirking my posting duties and subsequently reflecting on the experience, I wasn’t being lazy or busy, but rather was looking for a perfect opportunity to comment on what seems to be this season’s overarching theme: denial and accountability.

And we who do theater know very well that SHOWING something is better than talking about it.

So rather than write a post the length of a dissertation about denial and its manifestations (and anyway, Eric already wrote something eloquent for the offstage guide) I decided to exemplify it instead. That–and not dramaturgy for THE PRICE or Prayer for my Enemy talkbacks or laundry or the fact that loading the blog website causes my laptop to freeze–is the reason why I haven’t posted recently.

Objects and their function as meaningful signifiers of a different time, place, and culture is something that has been on my mind for a while now.

1) Today, I received a package I had sent to myself when my family moved from Singapore to India. It was big and heavy and I asked Eric to give me a ride in his car to pick it up. So we’re pushing this gigantor box out of the post office in a gurney and when he asks me what it contains, I realise that I don’t know for sure. It’s a bunch of journals, and yearbooks, and pictures, and picture frames, and candles, and other girl stuff. Eric thinks I should throw it away. He sounds like my mom. But he’s wrong. Because in some ways, the objects describe who I was. And when I look at them every six months, or a year, or two years, I remember who I used to be and it sometimes makes me cringe but it also makes me smile. What Eric, and my mother, are suggesting is that I should treat them exactly as they are-as objects-and get rid of them. But they are not objects. They are markers, signifiers, and a function of something so much deeper. Of memory, and contemplation, and self. Through them, I create my own biography and my own history.

2) Today was also the first rehearsal of The Price by Arthur Miller, directed by Gordon, the theatre’s Artistic Director, and stars-as one of the staff pointed out-the Mayor of New York from Ghostbusters (there’s a piece of pop trivia for you). The play is set in the attic of a well-to-do man who was ruined in the depression, and has now passed away, and features the conflict between his two sons as they deal with the different choices they have made in life, and the consequences of these. We also meet an antiques dealer who comes and appraises the objects, putting a price on them, which becomes a further source of conflict between the brothers. And it struck me that here was another example where objects were not given the respect they were due.

3) Finally, I was reading this article on the BBC website which you can see below. Here’s the link if you’d prefer to go directly to the page: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7010036.stm. It’s about this place that takes all this lost luggage from planes and trains and sells it on to other people. It’s a good place to find a bargain, but I have to tell you, the thought of people rifling through my stuff to buy it at a cheap price, when my intention was never to sell it makes me feel queasy inside. How can people be so blasé about the story this object could be telling? It gets wiped of all its old meaning and starts a new, and one could argue, that the original owner may just have lost a small part of themselves. Perhaps I’m going too far. Perhaps the original owners don’t care at all. And perhaps I shouldn’t be so worried about a story to tell about myself into posterity.

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Hello all.  First a brief introduction: my name is Jacob Stoebel and I am the Resident Education Fellow here at the Long Wharf.  I am a director, teacher, educator, and mime (no joke on the last one, ask me more about it).  This is now my second year here at the theatre, last year I served in the position of Education Resident.  People who come to the Long Wharf might also see me behind the bar in the lobby, working my second job as part of the front of house staff.One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about in the education department is funding.  A significant portion of our funding comes from very generous grants from philanthropic organizations, who support, among other things subsidy for students to come see our plays for a reduced rate, or if circumstances permit, for free.

I’m very passionate about subsidy for the arts, particularly ticket subsidy (simply put, the cheaper the ticket for audiences the better).  I could spend hours talking about the subject with you all, which I hope to do sometime.  But for now I have some questions for all of you:

To what extent should ticket subsidy be available for theatre going audiences in America?  W/hat is an acceptable price for a theatre ticket?  Should all theatre be free?

Secondly, does ticket subsidy cause complacency in audiences?  That is to say, if audiences can see a play for free or very little money, would they value the play less?  What do you all think?

Jacob Stoebel