Gwydion Suilebhan

I’m very excited to be co-hosting (on behalf of the DC-Area Playwrights Group) and moderating a panel discussion/town hall meeting this Sunday, 5 pm, at Theater J on “The State of the DC Playwright” as part of the theater’s Locally Grown Festival. I think it’s going to be a VERY lively discussion — one that should interest not only DC-area playwrights, but everyone working in the new play sector throughout the city — and I hope you can make it.

The panel will consist of other playwrights who are taking part in the festival: Renee Calarco, Jacqueline Lawton, Laura Zam, and Jon Spelman. In addition, we’ve invited several other participants to inspire a town hall-style conversation with the audience: David Dower of the American Voices New Play Institute; Jason Loewith and Jojo Ruf of the National New Play Network; Becky Peters of Wandering Souls; Hunter Styles of Artists Bloc; Lee Leibeskind of The Inkwell; and Rebecca Gingrich-Jones, my co-founder/co-moderator of the DC-Area Playwrights Group.

If you care about new plays and DC theater, you probably ought to join us! I hope to see you there… and to hear whatever thoughts you contribute to this vital conversation!

As I’m writing this blog post, I’m staring at a press release that just arrived in my inbox from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Evidently, the DCCAH — which, I should mention in the interest of both fairness and full disclosure, has given me two grants and two awards over the years… and done the same for many other DC-based playwrights — has partnered with the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation (where’s the damn hyphen, by the way, in that name?) to develop a special funding program that will support local arts organizations in their efforts to bring touring productions and ensembles into DC.

It’s not that I don’t think DC residents benefit from the exposure to different worldviews that artists from other parts of the country and world afford us. I do. But are we really hurting for work like that? It seems to me we don’t have any shortage of touring productions; they’re on all the biggest stages in the city.

Now… this new program is designed to support organizations with operating budgets less than $500,000, so maybe it’s an attempt to get behind the efforts of smaller companies like, say, Solas Nua, which brings Irish plays to DC. As much as I like Solas Nua, though — and I do — I still don’t think the program makes sense.

As a city, we are (as I’ve noted on many occasions) a significant net importer of culture. Most of the stories we tell on our stages — as many as 95% of them, by some calculations — arrive in our city from elsewhere. We aren’t telling our own stories, and we aren’t sending enough work out into the world. How can that be good for us? More than anything, we need to change the import-export balance in the city. We need a fund to support the production of work by DC residents on DC stages, or the exporting of DC stories to other parts of the country. (Even in addition to the above-mentioned fund, rather than instead of it.) That would make a genuine difference.

A while back, my dear friend Patrick Kilpatrick prodded me to consider, here on my blog, the ways in which scientists and those of us who make theater might be similar to one another. I said yes immediately; as an extremely science-friendly playwright, I hoped that in thinking about the subject, I’d find at least a few similarities. You see… secretly I wish I WAS a scientist. (Don’t tell anyone. This is just between us!)  I even tried to be a physicist, in fact, when I was younger, but I didn’t have what it took. So the thought that I might actually be a “theater scientist” of some sort had me immediately tantalized.

Having admitted my biases—but unsure about how I might correct for them—I shall now proceed to attempt to answer the question at hand: sadly (for me), I don’t think we’re anything like scientists at all.

Consider the term scientist. A fair (I believe) definition: anyone who uses the scientific method to acquire new knowledge about the nature of existence. I would venture to guess that there aren’t many theater practitioners who fit this description. Oh, there may be a few folks who use the scientific method to devise new means by which a scene might lit, for instance, but in the main? The day-to-day work of theater seems very different to me.

But I had to consider the question in a slightly less abstract way, too, before I gave up entirely.

How, in practice, do scientists do what they do?

1. They hypothesize about something they believe might be true.
2. They devise experimental means by which they can gather evidence in support of (or in contradiction to) their hypotheses.
3. They conduct the experiments they’ve devised.
4. They analyze the data gathered by those experiments.
5. They write up and share the results of their work.

By contrast, how do I do what I do when I make plays?

1. I imagine a new story that doesn’t exist… one that may or may not, incidentally, observe the known laws of the physical universe.
2. I design a simulation of that story (i.e., write a play).
3. I work with others to create a variable simulation of that story (i.e., produce the play). Note: I consider the production a “simulation” of the real thing because the real thing only exists in my head; I call it “variable” because no two performances are the same.
4. I observe the effects of the variable, simulated story on audiences.
5. I adjust the simulation as desired to create different effects (though I would argue that we are only barely beginning to know how to do this) and re-run it for several weeks.

Again, very little in common. The key difference is this: an experiment is designed to either disprove or support a hypothesis. Simulations—productions of plays—aren’t designed to disprove or support anything. There is no hypothesis at all.

The bottom line, for me, is that while scientists are trying to acquire new knowledge about the universe, I’m trying to share that knowledge. I consider it my job to create new memes (not internet memes, mind you, but the real thing) that will out-compete what I believe to be some of the most destructive memes in our culture. I am, in other words, much more like the stuff an evolutionary biologist might study than an actual evolutionary biologist.

Which makes me wonder… might an evolutionary biologist have something to teach me about my work? (Or the social science equivalent: whoever studies how memes propagate?) I would like to believe that might be possible. And that perhaps by studying with such a person, I might become a real scientist after all.

Sometimes you get less than ideal advice about your work. So what? Are you just going to throw it all away, or can you perhaps make something useful out of it? That’s what I’ve been trying to do.

“Every fact of science was once damned. Every invention was considered impossible. Every discovery was a nervous shock to some orthodoxy. Every artistic innovation was denounced as fraud and folly. The entire web of culture and ‘progress,’ everything on earth that is man-made and not given to us by nature, is the concrete manifestation of some man’s refusal to bow to Authority. We would own no more, know no more, and be no more than the first apelike hominids if it were not for the rebellious, the recalcitrant, and the intransigent. As Oscar Wilde truly said, ‘Disobedience was man’s Original Virtue.”

― Robert Anton Wilson

I am beginning to think lately that the secret mission of every play I write—of everything I write in every genre—is to help people understand how the universe works.

(I’d also like to tell you the purpose of the universe… but I can’t, because I don’t know it. I also strongly suspect there isn’t one, but I don’t know that, either.)

We’ve really done terrible job of this over the last, oh, five hundred years or so. (By “we” I mean “humanity.”) Whenever scientists figure something out new and important, our first response is to execute or jail them. Or force them to commit suicide. Our track record is really poor.

For example, it took the Catholic Church several hundred years to admit that Galileo was right and atone for how it treated him. We’ve had 150 years to deal with the things Darwin taught us, and we still have a slate of GOP candidates who believe in creationism or intelligent design. We still wrestle publicly over scientifically undeniable facts about climate change, though they’ve been widely known for at least a couple of decades. What the hell is wrong with us?

Well, there are lots of things wrong with us. But the very worst thing, if you ask me, is that there are 100 million (or so) Americans who are farther behind than the rest of us, who actively resist learning what scientists uncover, and who are trapped in an oppressive culture that explicitly keeps them from learning anything scientifically new.

Lest you start mentally pointing the finger at “those people,” however, you probably ought to realize that there are countless scientific discoveries about which almost all of us are completely ignorant. How familiar are you with Richard Dawkins’ “selfish gene” paradigm, just to name one (relatively old now) postulate? Do you understand the magnificent revelations of chaos theory? How about the bizarre properties of junk DNA?

I’m not saying, mind you, that I understand these things fully myself, though I have read quite a bit about them. I’m saying that there are many immense things we now generally “know” of which most of us remain relatively ignorant. And these are things with amazing implications for our everyday lives, not esoteric bits of irrelevant knowledge. Most importantly, these are things that ought to fill us with delight and reverence and wonder about being alive!

So I’m making it my job as a playwright to help us, one way or another, understand those things: to humanize them and make them comprehensible, one way or another, on the stage.  I don’t have that long a life ahead of me, but I plan to do as much as I can over the remainder of my career. If I can’t be a scientist myself—a member of the only group that can authoritatively claim to be moving the sum total of human knowledge forward, inch by inch, while the rest of us argue over football stats and share recipes for bananas foster—I want to at least lend those folks a hand. I will be proud to have at least tried.

For decades, it seems, it was fashionable for a playwright to admire the word of David Mamet with great abandon. Everyone wanted to write like him. Actors wanted to do his plays. Producers wanted to put them on. Directors wanted to direct them. And lots of people — even people who didn’t like going to the theater all that much — wanted to buy tickets to go see them.

Some time ago, however, he fell out of fashion. Far out of fashion. He has become the theatrical equivalent of spats or an ulster: nobody wears him any more. (EDIT: And by “nobody,” I mean “the general run of non-Broadway theater practitioners.” Yes, he still gets produced on Broadway, and yes, his older plays get plenty of air time, but he ain’t half of what he used to be.)

It’s not because his most recent plays lack the boldness and importance and energy and vision of his earlier work, though I believe they do. (EDIT: Maybe it is more that than I originally posited.) It’s not that he’s “sold out” to Hollywood, though he has been quite successful there. It’s that he’s decided he isn’t a liberal any more, and that in announcing his political transformation he was rather mean about it.

People didn’t like that. I don’t like it. And I happen to believe that his political opinions are largely, if not entirely, ludicrous and adolescent.

I have to admit, however, that none of this has stopped me from finding much of value in his latest (though no longer recent) book of essays: Theatre. Yes, there were definitely moments, plenty of them, in which I said to myself, as I was reading, “This particular point he’s making is as unsupportable as his politics, and indeed seems to be inspired by them.” There were also, however, many moments — more moments — in which I thought to myself “Yes, he’s got it exactly right there, and I wish people understood.”

There are those who want to believe the world is black-and-white — those of us who, having decided to hate David Mamet because of his politics, will now decide to hate everything else he produces. You know what I think about that? I think it’s short-sighted.

May I suggest that, if you’re not one of those people, that you give the book a chance? That you read it, think about it, and discuss it with me, here in the comments? Because I really do think there are things to be learned here… even, perhaps, from the ideas we disagree with. Anyway, that’s my suggestion.

We are all well aware of the recent moves by a few larger theaters to add playwrights to their payrolls. Great stuff, right? But lately I’ve been trying to think more creatively. (That’s what we do, after all, isn’t it?) What I’ve been wondering is why playwrights aren’t on staff (or even hired as temporary workers) in a great many other places as well. Allow me to present a few highly-speculative – though I prefer to think of them as ambitious – ideas for your consideration.

Laboratory Playwrights

The budgets of most research laboratories are immense… and the struggles that scientists live through to achieve significant results can be (I’m understating here) quite dramatic. As a counter to the increasing (and corrupting) influence that corporate money has on the scientific process, why not pair playwrights with researchers?

For what would amount to a rounding error in many laboratory budgets, a playwright could get to know the members of the research team, investigate the history of the problem being studied, understand how the problem affects real human lives, and transform all that insight into a piece of theater that would help non-scientists understand in a visceral and vital way the stakes of the lab’s research. Add a bit of seed money for a production, and opening night of the resulting play could accompany the announcement of big findings… and help humanize science (and scientists) for the rest of the world.

Personally, I’d almost rather work at a lab than a theater: I’d find it invigorating for sure.

Law Firm Playwrights

Given our cultural infatuation with courtroom dramas, doesn’t it just make sense for a few dozen of the country’s biggest firms to start putting playwrights on staff as well? Each dramatist could join a legal team working on a particularly fascinating case that might reveal something poignant and compelling about American culture. Again, there’d be extensive research, ethnographic investigations, hours in the courtroom, documents to digest… and, yes, probably (more than) a few waivers to sign. But still: the resulting work might really make for great theater, especially if the staff playwright has the liberty to explore innovations in the courtroom drama genre. (I’m assuming full artistic freedom for all of these ideas, BTW.)

How many lawyers at the average firm do you think earned undergraduate degrees in English before they started studying law? I’m guessing the number’s pretty high. I’m also guessing there’d be many attorneys who’d love to have their work documented in such a creative way: willing collaborators for the endeavor. And the publicity for the firm when the resulting play opened? (After the legal matter in question has long since been resolved, of course.) Tremendous.

As for the financial question: please. There isn’t a playwright alive who wouldn’t take the job for, say, 1/5 of the average lawyer’s salary. Some attorneys bill their clients $700 an hour; there are playwrights for whom that would make an entirely tolerable weekly salary instead.

Journalism Playwrights

I know: at a time when newspapers and news outlets of all stripes are letting employees go left and right, how do I dare propose they bring playwrights on staff? I must be nuts.

Actually, what I am (I hope) is clever. You see, it’s not that the news business isn’t making ANY money. It’s just not making the profits it used to make. It’s in the process of reinventing itself, and I can’t see a reason why playwrights might not play a small role in that reinvention, too. Don’t you agree? What, are you worried about the objectivity required of a news organization? How 20^th-century of you! Are you thinking that producing news stories is very different than producing theater? Sure, but… so what? People can learn.

So, imagine this: when a news organization dispatches a reporter to cover a story of great national importance—a major hurricane, a coup, even (heck, why not?) the World Series—why not send a playwright as well? I’m thinking here of the kind of work that Caryl Churchill did to create MAD FOREST in Romania. Interviews of key players, improvisational on-the-spot script development, then time back at home to piece it all together into a coherent, producible narrative. A print news organization might just publish the resulting script; a broadcast news organization, on the other hand, could probably find a way to, well, broadcast it. Think of it as a kind of theatrical human interest story. Pretty cool stuff.

State Department Playwrights

The State Department is such a huge bureaucracy that if someone told me they already had playwrights on staff (say, in the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs), I wouldn’t be surprised. But let’s say they don’t: why shouldn’t they?

Why shouldn’t part of our country’s ongoing diplomatic efforts involve sending playwrights around the world to spend time in other countries, get to know people in genuine ways, then bring what they learned home to America to inspire the American populace? It could make us all more tolerant of and curious about and respectful of world cultures. It would help spread understanding. It would make us less likely to want to kill people who are different than we are, to be frank, because you can’t kill someone you’ve empathized with (by seeing him or her on stage). It would, most importantly, enrich our culture.

Worried about the resulting work becoming rife with propaganda? Well, fine: put some kind of ombudsman in place to protect the independence of the artists involved. Let the general public vote on the playwrights who might hold those positions, too, so that the genuinely represent the vox populi. And the best part? All it would take to make this happen is tax dollars, which just means we need to elect the right people in order to make it happen.

Playwrights Everywhere

What about playwrights in our biggest hospitals, visiting with patients and turning their struggles into stories about the way we wrestle with disease – stories that might enrich the lives (and perhaps speed the healing) of future patients? Or playwrights on staff at (for example) Target headquarters in Minneapolis, writing Twin Cities-based stories as a kind of corporate community service? Playwrights embedded at think tanks like the Brookings Institution, translating complex human and social issues into dramatic work? The more you start to think about it, really, the more it seems like playwrights might belong almost everywhere… if only we thought more creatively about how and where we work.

Dear Washington Post,

Making a good infographic is hard. You have to begin with a comprehensive, consistent, valid set of data (the info) and rely on skilled design (the graphic) to illustrate whatever narratives and insights—which are often either subtle or seemingly contradictory—are hiding in the numbers. People who do it well get paid a lot of money. The firm I work for makes them, so I know first-hand. You’ve done it well yourself from time to time, so I know you understand, too.

Speaking as a sympathetic friend, then, I really have to tell you: your snapshot of major theater venues in the Washington region is more than a bit of a mess.

Let’s look at your data first. Is it comprehensive, consistent, and valid? I’ll give you one out of three. You’ve clearly done your research (I’d expect nothing less), so the data you do have seems to be accurate.

But is it comprehensive? Hardly. You’re missing easily sixty other institutions that ought to be included in any reasonable analysis, if not more than that. I don’t expect you to capture them ALL, mind you… but you really ought to get a lot closer to 100% if you want to be reflective of the entire region. (Don’t have the resources to be fully comprehensive? Then at least pick a more representative sample. You’ve captured only the largest institutions in the region.)

And is it consistent? Your infographic’s title suggests you’re comparing venues, but a few of the institutions on your list aren’t venues at all. You’ve blurred the line between venues and theater companies, which is really problematic.

Next, let’s look at your graphics. You’ve got a timeline that indicates both the year each institution was established and its size, and you’ve got a chart that lists a variety of information about each institution.

The timeline I find particularly baffling. What, if anything, were you trying to reveal by comparing size to year of establishment? There’s nothing particularly enlightening about this element of the graphic at all: no trends, no reversals of trends, no correlations—nothing. If this is a “snapshot,” Washington Post, it’s a really awkwardly-posed portrait, I must say.

The chart, by contrast, suffers from a major apples-and-oranges problem. Alongside several raw data points, you’ve listed what I can only call “impressions”—the changes that have been made in each institution’s recent history and the nature of their programming. The information is highly subjective in both cases, which undermines the legitimacy of the infographic (and, in addition, dilutes the data).

The chart also includes one calculated data point: the percentage of each institution’s budget that comes from government funding. Finally, I would say, a potentially interesting narrative buried in the chart. What I wish is that you’d done a great deal more of this.

For instance, using only the data you’ve got in your chart, you could have calculated the percentage of each institution’s budget that goes to the top-salaried worker’s income. You could have compared average attendance to the number of full-time employees, too, to try to find a correlation there. Those are missed opportunities.

But what’s really disappointing is the data you didn’t collect: the number of tickets sold by each institution in the previous 12 months; the numbers of unpaid interns (or staff) supporting each institution; the salaries of the lowest-paid workers at each institution. You could have probably done a lot more. Think of what your readers might have learned!

Here’s just one idea. For a good while now, there’s been a healthy dialogue about the ratio between the highest-paid workers at arts institutions and the lowest-paid workers. Would that have been hard to dig up? Perhaps it would have… but I can promise you that your readers would have found that ratio highly compelling. (Well… those who aren’t in positions of power at big theater institutions, anyway.) And isn’t serving your readers what you’re really trying to do?

Yours in data visualization,

Gwydion

Nice piece on the upcoming Locally Grown Festival — of which I am proud to be a part — in Washington Jewish Week. Also, a really, really, really big picture of me. Seriously: big. Sent it to my mother a few minutes ago: she’s probably already kvelling.

The new play I’m working on (about which I will say more soon) would not be quite what it is without the support of many collaborators… including the amazingly generous designer who helped me “see” my story when it really made a huge difference. Now that I’ve experienced “design dramaturgy,” I never want to go back. Have you tried it?