In For a Penny: Dead Men tell No Tales

Charles Lewis contemplates the Great Beyond.

“Death Found an Author Writing His Life” (1827) by E. Hull

“I’ve got my own life to live
I’m the one that’s going to have to die
When it’s time for me to die
So let me live my life the way I want to”
– Jimi Hendrix, “If 6 was 9”, Axis: Bold as Love

Funny thing about writing a play about death: it makes you think a lot about dying. Who knew? And if you want to get technical, the play in question isn’t actually about death, but the lack thereof. Let me explain…

I’m writing the Opening Night Party play for this year’s SF Olympians Festival. You may or may not recall that last year I occasionally dedicated this column to exploring the development process of said festival. If so, you may also recall that my final entry, “A Pre-Post-Mortem”, attempted to take an optimistic look at death, a frequent topic in a festival revolving around Greek mythology. Many Greek myths look at death not as the end of the journey, but rather the beginning of the next journey. For them, death wasn’t something to be dwelt upon – for lack of a better term – as it is today. Still, they acknowledged it as an inevitability and possibly one step closer to achieving greatness.

The Egyptians are a different story all together: everything was about death. EVERYTHING. Perhaps that’s not fair – it may be more accurate to say that they were about life, which they felt continued after death. But that doesn’t change the fact that quite a lot of those lives were spent in preparation for their inevitable deaths. And when they did die, everyone took notice.

Remember, these were once decked out in shiny Tura Limestone.

So when writing for a Greek mythos fest that’s now added Egyptian gods for good measure, it’s no surprise to find death at every turn.

Except, of course, in my play. The script (working title: It’s a Fucking Dylan Thomas Poem!) is about characters for whom, shall we say, death is not a problem. No matter how much harm they inflict on themselves or each other, they never need to worry about shuffling off this mortal coil. It’s not quite a Tuck Everlasting situation, but they live lives (that they believe are) without consequence. Well, when you live your life knowing you can get away with anything, you’ll eventually ask yourself what the point of living is. And what’s the point of asking that question if you’re never going to die?

Naturally I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about dying. Not taking my own life – when you’ve known as many people as I have who attempted suicide right in front of you, it kinda puts you off the idea – but just what will or won’t be said when I’m gone. It’ll be completely out of my control, but that doesn’t stop me from contemplating what would be said, if anything at all. As I’ve been tinkering with this script over the past few months, I began to notice that whenever I’d seriously start to write notes or dialogue, a celebrity would die. (Not my fault, I swear!)

Such high-profile deaths inevitably lead to a lot of fawning eulogies, as well as some scathing posthumous criticisms. For me, the most interesting comment came after Prince’s death. With no legal will specifying the division of his $300m estate, Time asked Snoop Dogg if he’d made preparations for his family. He doesn’t. “I don’t give a fuck when I’m dead.”

As much as I disagree with the callous way a multi-millionaire refuses to make sure his family is protected once he’s gone, I have to say that I admire his response. He seems to understand the way the futility of worrying about something that will be completely out of his control. Though I don’t agree with how he does it, I like how he accepts the fact that he only has control for a finite amount of time, then everyone will be on their own.

Of course, it’s still Snoop Dogg, so he was probably high off his ass when he said it.

The problem with never wanting to talk about death is that it makes you unprepared for it. What both confounds and fascinates me about the characters I’m writing is that they’re unprepared for what life has in store when death never comes. They have to find reasons to keep living because it’s the one thing they’ll always do. What does that do to a person’s sense of health, spirituality, or ability to form lasting relationships?

I’m not quite sure, but as I keep writing, they’ll find out or attempt to die trying.

Charles Lewis III want you to celebrate life and art by contributing to this year’s Olympians Festival Indiegogo campaign. His script will be read during the Opening Night party on Sunday, October 2^nd.

The Five: It’s The End of the World as We Know It, Donate to Olympians Anyway

Anthony R. Miller checks in with a pre-“end of days” donation plea.

Hey you guys, unless you are in utter denial or live deep in the forest without any contact with the outside world (two situations I’m a bit envious toward) you’re probably scared to death, angry, or depressed when it comes to this election. Maybe all three. This blazing dumpster fire of indirect democracy has got us all hiding under our beds with a stockpile of baked beans and distilled water. So today, let’s talk about something we all agree is worth supporting: the San Francisco Olympians Festival. If you need a few reasons, you’re in luck, I have five.

Do Something You’ll Feel Good About

If you’re a Hillary supporter, you’re probably frustrated. I mean seriously, could they please do some stuff that a person who WANTS to win would do? If you’re a Bernie supporter, you’re probably crying, because you’re in the unenviable situation where you HAVE to vote for someone you’re not entirely thrilled with because if you don’t the world will end and it’ll be all your fault, no pressure. If you’re a Trump supporter, please stop reading this blog and go reconsider all your life choices. But when you donate to the Olympians Festival, you’re supporting something we can all agree is good and necessary for the world. No compromising your values for the greater good, no questioning your own beliefs, you can just donate and know you’ve done something positive.

Let’s Party in October, Because November Might Suck.

Lunchtime poll: if the country you know and love may be irrevocably destroyed in November, what do you do in October? Answer: Have an end-of-the-world party. October is jam-packed with a lot of great theatre (Terror-Rama 2 opens October 14, but I digress) and the Olympians Festival is one of the biggest events all month. So it’s time to have the greatest October ever. Donate to the festival, go to every night of the festival, and see tons of theatre. Soak it in, because there’s a good chance the entire Tenderloin will be torn down and turned into an oil field.

We Will Need Theatre after the Downfall of Western Civilization.

In a few years, when we’re all sitting in a crater around a fire, we will need theatre and the oral tradition to remember what it was like when we had running water and electricity. So donate, make this festival happen. It will produce dozens of new plays that we can re-create over and over. And since Netflix won’t exist anymore, we’re gonna need to stock up on material now.

Think Locally

If the national election has you down and feeling helpless, maybe doing something locally can help. We’re all thinking very macro right now. Donating to this festival is a way to think micro. Do something that helps the city you live in and your community. The problems of an entire country can send you running to your therapist, it’s flat-out overwhelming. So here’s a chance to make a small difference. And it may just make you feel good.

A Chance to Say Thank You

Politics aside (national ones anyway), if you are a member of the Bay Area theatre community, you are or at least know somebody who’s been affected positively by the Olympians Festival. Personally, I owe it a lot. I have written for it twice and directed once, and it provided me with chances few others were willing to give me. My skills as a writer were vastly improved by the work I did for Olympians. The play I wrote last year; Christian Teen Dolphin-Sex Beach Party, is one of my favorite things I’ve ever written. I met one of my greatest partners in crime and may favorite person to work with, Colin Johnson, through the festival. This is true for so many others. It’s not just about writing a play that might get produced somewhere else. It’s about an opportunity to meet and work with awesome people. That’s what you’re donating to, not just a festival of plays, but a festival of opportunities for literally hundreds of artists.

No matter how this garbage election goes, one thing remains true, we never stop needing the things that enrich our lives, that make us happy on a local basis. We can’t solve every problem the country has, but at least we can do something small to protect things we care about. No matter who we elect.

DONATE TO THE SAN FRNACISCO OLYMPIANS FESTIVAL RIGHT HERE

Anthony R. Miller is a writer, producer and educator. Keep up with his adventures at www.awesometheatre.org and on twitter @armiller78

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Theater Around The Bay: Yes To Crowdfunding!

Bay Area actress/director/performer Lisa Drostova recently posted this on her Facebook page. I thought it created some interesting conversation and I liked that it contributed in a positive fashion to the “where’s the money going to come from/is the age of crowdfunding over?” discussion/panic that hit in July (aka “Potato Salad Month”) and seems to have already blown over. Thanks for letting us share this, Lisa, and if you have any thoughts of your own, be sure to leave them in the comments!

I’ve been linking to a lot of crowdfunding campaigns lately, much more now that I’m a blooded Indiegogo warrior myself, and it strikes me that there are different ways of looking at them. For a long time, it just seemed overwhelming and distressing that every artist and arts organization I knew had to go hat in hand. Yes, there’s a lot wrong with a culture where billions will get spent on military equipment that doesn’t even function while people making beautiful, important work that changes lives have to hit up all their friends to pay for their projects. And as several friends have so aptly noted, artists are all just passing what funds we have around to each other.

But the other way to look at the next campaign that shows on your newsfeed–and the one after that, and the one after that–is with defiance of the system as it stands. And as an opportunity to help with something with which you might not otherwise get to be part. Because even the tiny donations actually do make a difference. You get to help build something, even if you don’t have carpentry or singing or animation skills, or time to volunteer.

No, you’re not going to get a room at MoMA named after you, or a massive million-dollar gala thrown in your honor. But I assure you that your contribution will be just as appreciated by the artist(s) bitting their nails behind the campaign, and possibly more. They are throwing you a gala in their heart. When we were fundraising the last $50K for The Flight Deck, as an admin on the campaign I could see all those unspecified donations, and who chose to be anonymous, and every single donation meant the world to me, because it was another person believing in our project. Five thousand bucks is great, of course, don’t hesitate to give that if you have it, but five is also going to make a difference–especially the way the online campaigns and their freaky algorithms and “Gogo Factor” and the rest of it work. Each contribution nudges Indiegogo, or Kickstarter, or Hatch, or GoFundMe, to push the campaign.

Which is the other thing you can do, even when you absolutely can’t donate money. Cross-post the campaigns you believe in. You might not have the moolah, but someone in your network might just be entranced by what your friends are trying to accomplish. I have donated to campaigns for people who I didn’t know from Adam’s housecat because we had a mutual friend who shared the link. And I know how very hard it is for people to ask for that help.

Which is the long answer for, yes, I am going to keep posting other people’s campaigns, whether I can donate myself at the moment or not, because I choose to see the potential for excitement versus exhaustion, and I beg your patience with me for it. I know people who are doing amazing things, and until we live in a world where artists don’t have to struggle to stay afloat, this is one small way I can support them.

Hi-Ho the Glamorous Life: Some Thoughts After a Successful Crowdfunding Campaign

Marissa Skudlarek, running on producer time.

I read Allison Page’s and Anthony Miller’s recent critiques of crowdfunding with interest, because at the time they were posted, I was running a crowdfunding campaign for my show Pleiades, which opens in two weeks.

Now that the campaign’s concluded and we made our goal, I feel compelled to chime in with some additional thoughts about the experience of crowdfunding.

Anthony mentions the idea that “people are more likely to support an all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign than a you-get-whatever-money-you-raise Indiegogo campaign,” but to me, that feels like it’s largely a rumor. (Perhaps Kickstarter is spreading this myth in order to prevent people from defecting to Indiegogo?)

Instead, in my experience, crowdfunding campaigns often fail when the perks they offer don’t seem appealing enough. Working in theater, we have the opportunity to offer a really great perk that, unlike T-shirts or coffee mugs, doesn’t cost anything to manufacture: a ticket to our play. Thus, when I see theater crowdfunding pleas that don’t offer a ticket as one of the rewards, or offer tickets only to the most high-rolling funders (say, requiring you to donate $100 in order to receive a ticket that normally costs $25), I think that the people running the campaign have been shortsighted. Your most enticing perk should be offered at a level where it seems like a good deal, not outrageously overpriced. For Pleiades, we offered a pair of tickets for a donation of $70, which ended up being our most popular perk (and our average donation was just above that, at $79).

I’m really glad that crowdfunding websites exist. Had Indiegogo or Kickstarter not been invented, I’m not sure if I would have had the confidence to self-produce a play, because I wouldn’t have known how to raise the money. And if I didn’t have the $5,000 from my Indiegogo campaign in the production budget and had to subsist on ticket sales alone, I’d really be panicking right now.

But, like Allison and Anthony and other intelligent people who are feeling a little burnt-out after the onslaught of crowdfunding projects this year, I see some dark sides, some discontents, to this trend as well. Although crowdfunding likes to associate itself with virtues like charity and altruism, I found myself becoming less altruistic while my campaign was running. It made me greedy – I checked my email more compulsively than ever, hoping each time to see an email from Indiegogo saying that there was a new contribution to my campaign.

It also made me think about the fine line between asking your friends to support your dreams, and monetizing your personal relationships. I found myself having evil, mercenary thoughts like “If only I was close friends with this person rather than mere acquaintances, if only I’d been better at keeping in touch with my friends from high school and college, they might donate to my campaign!”

There’s also a problem with the way that crowdfunding taps into the larger societal trend of Instant Gratification, and for all I know, exacerbates it. As I mentioned above, I do choose to support campaigns based on the perks that they offer – and while part of me feels like this is being a smart shopper, part of me feels like it is antithetical to the spirit of giving. I should donate to a campaign because of what it will offer to the world, rather than what it will offer to me. And I realize that I can become easily seduced by a campaign that seems especially shiny or flashy, or that gets media attention. No, I did not donate to that damn potato-salad Kickstarter, but I did donate to Amanda Palmer’s a few years ago, mostly out of curiosity and a desire to be part of the zeitgeist (I was not really familiar with Palmer’s music).

And in an instant-gratification, Instagram world of hipper-than-thou hipsters, the less-flashy crowdfunding campaigns can have a problem. It’s especially acute for campaigns that aren’t one-shot endeavors, but are yearly and recurring. The San Francisco Olympians Festival, for instance. We believe that this festival is an important part of the community; it’s been around for five years and we want it to be around for a dozen more. But for that to happen, the festival will also need steady contributions from regular donors.

Start using phrases like “steady contributions” and “regular donors,” though, and the whole thing starts to sound boring and adult and institutional. Loyalty to a cause used to be a virtue; now I fear that loyalty is seen as synonymous with naivete or dullness. Crowdfunding has made it so that anyone can ask for anything at any time; perhaps now it’s time to remember that we should be careful what we wish for.

Marissa Skudlarek is a San Francisco-based playwright and arts writer. Her play Pleiades runs from August 7 to 30; tickets are available here. And if she hasn’t used up her “give me money” karma this year, she also encourages you to donate to the San Francisco Olympians Festival Indiegogo.

 

Everything Is Already Something Week 36: The Day The Theatre Died

Allison Page gets serious for a moment. Not really.

It’s hard out there for an artist. It’s even harder out there for a company of artists. If you were a theater company, and standing in a room with a bunch of other theater companies, I would get up on a collapsible stage and say, “Everyone look to your left. Now everyone look to your right. Some of these people will not survive the next few years.” and everyone would either go “Oooooo.” or “Uh oh” or roll their eyes, or laugh awkwardly, knowing it’s true. The theater community has been shaken up even more than usual lately. Intersection For The Arts, San Jose Rep…there are more fatalities and you’ve seen and read about them, I’m not going to go on about who they are, the point is – we’re dropping like fucking flies over here. And I really hate saying this, but the more I think about it, the less surprised I am.

Remember Vaudeville? No? Oh, that’s because it’s been gone since the early 1930s. People didn’t want to consume their entertainment the same way they had been, and with movies easily accessible everywhere, Vaudeville fell out of the interest of the public.

The ONLY Theatre In Los Angeles!

In a twist of fate, movies took the same blow they had dealt to Vaudeville when television came into play. People could be entertained in their own homes for free, and movies became a less frequent event in the lives of many. With the improvements made to all-things-internet, many people now don’t even bother with traditional television and watch things directly from their computers, tablets, phones, or have the images grafted directly to their eyeballs for all of eternity, or however the hell a google glass works.

I love theater, and I don’t think it’s dead, but I do think it has moved back into its parents’ basement much to the chagrin of the entire family. I feel frustrated that it can almost never sustain itself without resorting to asking for lunch money which it then uses to buy case after case of Miller High Life.

I hate that even the most successful theater in the area, a theater with lots and lots of seats, shows and actors imported from New York and wherever else, still has to fundraise huge amounts of money (recently $100,000…a number I can’t even think about) to make things happen. But I guess that’s something that brings up a discussion about whether or not theater is both an art form AND a business (regardless of non-profit-ness). A business which requires yearly (or more frequently than that) gigantic gobs of money in the form of donations, doesn’t sound like a particularly well-run business to me. And I hate the thought of always scrambling, wondering if you’ll be open the next season, and knowing that if you don’t raise X amount of money with your elaborate Kickstarter campaign of relatively meaningless perks and rewards, that things could get very sticky for you and yours.

Maybe that sounds harsh, I don’t know. I feel frustrated with the state of things lately. I hate begging for money. More than that, I hate needing to do it. I hate that this thing that can bring a little happiness and magic to a bunch of lives all at once, doesn’t seem valuable enough to pay for itself. Obviously costs in the bay area aren’t helping anything. When I started a theater company in Minnesota, I did get a grant. A one time grant which was, I believe, around $1,000. I used it to buy a lot of basic things which we used to build a stage, build a set which could be moved around to create a different set, and generally to get things going. That’s the only grant I ever applied for. After that, I used the money earned from each show to put up the next one (supplemented by some of my own cash, for which I would try to reimburse myself later). I did that for five years. A theater company existing for five years having received only one grant? That’s pretty fucking great. But that would be really hard to make happen here. The cost of just renting the space in which to perform for a few days is more than the entirety of the grant I received in 2003.

Perform in our great new Abandoned Asylum – er – Brand New Theater Space for only $7,200 a week! WHAT A STEAL!…Extra $2,000 if you need someone to operate the light board. And you definitely need someone to operate the light board because it’s made out of bones.

When Kickstarter became a thing, artists went bananas. Finally, a great way to crowdsource funds to make your dream happen. It was a revelation. Initially I think it felt like an amazing way to make someone’s biggest, most long-awaited aspiration come to life…and now it’s everyone’s biggest aspiration THIS MONTH. So instead of feeling like we’re supporting a one-time artistic dream project, it feels like everyone wants us all to pay for every single thing that they do. It’s overwhelming. I should mention that I contribute to Kickstarter and IndieGoGo campaigns all the time. When I see a project I like, or when a frequent collaborator or friend is working on something, I donate to it. But I’m definitely starting to feel like it’s going to be too much at some point. Particularly when the numbers start ticking up and up and up. I miss the scrappy days of yore. Scrappiness is a trait I really admire in others, and something I try to exercise in my own life. The pilot episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, shot by the guys who thought it up, was made for a famously small amount of money. Depending on who you ask, it was somewhere between $85 and $200. Meanwhile, I know a guy who just tried to crowdsource $60,000 for his independent film. I’m not suggesting he should make it for $200, but I am suggesting that $60,000 might be too much to as your friends to pay for. And as it turns out, I’m right. Because his campaign was unsuccessful and his donations added up to only $5,000 and because it was done on Kickstarter, I’m assuming that means he got a whopping $0. And this was a campaign which included some moderately fancy names.

I don’t know. This feels like a time of change and uncertainty in the performing arts. I’m not sure what the next chapter holds for us. I will continue to support the projects I care about (for example, the SF Olympians Festival, which supports the work of over 100 artists every year: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/san-francisco-olympians-festival-v-monsters-ball ) but I wonder what funding for theatrical projects will look like in even two years. When will people start to feel maxed out? Is there a better way to do this? Are we making things too big, too complicated, too expensive for their own good? For their own sustainability?

I don’t have the answers, but I am working on them in relation to my own projects in the next year. I’m spending lots of time and energy trying to find a way to not spend every available dime, and to be a nimble creator of nimble things. Because, at the end of the day, I don’t have any other choice. Money doesn’t grow on fake trees even if you spend $10,000 to build them.

Allison Page is an actor/writer/director, and Co-Creative Director of Killing My Lobster. You can find her on Twitter @allisonlynnpage.