Several days ago, Alan Jacobs (@ayjay@hcommons.social) published the following in a post entitled “Reorientation":

In times of social and political crisis, especially when new and often contradictory bulletins are arriving on our ICDs (Internet-Connected Devices) at a second-by-second rate, you and I need to step back. We need the relief. But at the same time, it is impossible, for me anyway, not to think about what’s happening. Just saying “I’m not going to read any more about this” is an inadequate response; it has a tendency to leave me fretful and at loose ends.

What helps is to read works from the past that deal with questions and challenges that are structurally similar to the ones we’re facing but that emerged in a wholly different context.

The idea of choosing works that are structurally similar to what’s going on, is an approach that uses literature, not as an escape, but rather as a means of achieving emotional distance for contemplation. I was reminded of how vaccines work by injecting a small amount of the disease into the body in order to allow the autoimmune system to strengthen itself. The works Dr. Jacobs has chosen for this moment includes Psalms, Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, and Machiavelli’s Discourses.

I’ve been trying to figure how I, as a theater historian with a background in dramatic literature, might follow Dr. Jacobs' lead. One work that sprang to mind immediately is Alfred Jarry’s bizarre and outrageous surrealist play, Ubu Roi (1896), whose central character, King Ubu, “is an antihero – fat, ugly, vulgar, gluttonous, grandiose, dishonest, stupid, jejune, voracious, greedy, cruel, cowardly and evil.” Another possibility: Sophocles' Antigone, which seems fitting as a portrait of a tyrannical ruler whose reaction to resistance is brutality (although Jean Anouilh’s version, written during the Nazi occupation of Paris, might supplement the original Greek version). And finally, Friedrich Schiller’s 1804 drama, William Tell, about an individual’s resistance in the face of inhumanity, and the moral questions that arise from his resistance.

Jacobs concludes:

This practice of breaking bread with the dead in times of crisis offers a threefold reorientation: - Emotional, because it gives you a break from people who are continually trying to stoke your feelings of anger and hatred; - Intellectual, because in comparing past situations with ours you get an increasingly clear sense of what about our current situation is familiar (and therefore subject to familiar remedies) and what unusual or even unique (and therefore in need of new strategies); - Moral, because, as Aragorn says to Éomer, “Good and ill have not changed since yesteryear; nor are they one thing among Elves and Dwarves and another among Men. It is a man’s part to discern them, as much in the Golden Wood as in his own house.”

Well said, Dr. Jacobs, and many thanks for providing me with inspiration to think differently about my reading. I think it might be wise to add to my list a re-reading of *Breaking Bread with the Dead” as well.

The theater is in desperate need of original ideas, but publishers like Palgrave, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press are so focused on soaking academic libraries that they price their books beyond the reach of those who need these ideas most. This is one reason why I am planning to make available several of my theater books online for no charge. I was considering Pressbooks, but at $12/month for each book, I’ll be looking for alternatives. Anyway, charging almost a hundred bucks for a 300-page KINDLE BOOK is absurd.

“Although Bohr was not religious, he once pointed out that paradoxes were a fixture of religious parables and koans because seemingly contradictory statements were needed to breach the gulf between the human and the spiritual realms. “The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer,” he said. God, Human, Animal, Machine, by Meghan O’Gieblyn

This reflects pretty well what I mean when I talk about theater (or the arts) and spirituality or even religion. Theater historically has always had it roots in religion, noi matter what culture you begin with, and no matter how secularized it has become over the millennia, there still seems to be a single chord of the transcendent sounding somewhere in the background.

It seems to me that, as human beings, we need images, we need parables, we need paradoxes in order to remind us about an aspect of reality that transcends the everyday, or even is the foundation for the everyday. As a culture, we may have embraced the “immanent frame” (cf A Secular Age by Charles Taylor) in our daily life, but I think all of us in the back of our mind are aware of a transcendent lurking somewhere. And we can sense it powerfully, even indirectly, through the arts.

I just recently watched a mini-documentary on YouTube about the making of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and for some reason I found myself thinking about the high transcendent stakes of that film. It seemed almost Greek in its scale, and at the same time, an odd retelling of the story of Jesus. I found myself imagining a film of, say, the Book of Mark with a young Jack Nicholson as Jesus and Nurse Ratchet as the Romans, and how that might affect our idea of Jesus' affect on his culture.

“Nathan Lane and Laurie Metcalf to Star in Broadway ‘Salesman’ by Michael Paulson, The New York Times | Joe Mantello will direct the next revival of Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” opening in April at the Winter Garden Theater.”

COULD WE PLEASE GET THESE PEOPLE A DIFFERENT PLAY ANTHOLOGY??? How many more productions of Death of a Salesman, The Glass Menagerie, and A Streetcar Named Desire. There are other plays, people!

When I left to take the dog for a walk this morning, I discovered a small, heavy box on the front porch. I hadn’t remembered ordering anything scheduled to arrive yet, but when I opened the box I found ten copies of the 3rd edition of my textbook, Introduction to Play Analysis! I’m delighted with this new edition, which really is a complete revisioning of the original. None of the analysis process is changed, but I’ve always felt as if the book would benefit from a demo of the analysis process “in action.” So we included the complete text of Susan Glaspell’s classic short play Trifles, and at the end of each chapter I applied the ideas described to the play. Thanks to some careful but ruthless editing, the new book is less than 20 pages longer than the original, so Waveland Press (a great publisher – thank you Don Rosso) was able to sell this edition with only a slight increase on the previous list price. I’m looking forward to seeing how it is received.

I had a dream last night that my wife has insisted I share because it is so complete and plotted. I must say, it is unusual for me – I don’t usually have dreams with stories. Anyway, here it is:

I dreamed that my wife's aunt owned an island estate, and she asked me to help her because she wanted to sell it and she was having a meeting with a bunch of high-powered lawyers and realtors. When I arrived, the house was filled with said lawyers and realtors, but as I wandered the house and grounds I also found that the house was being used by a Very Famous musical playwright as a rehearsal space for his next major musical. One room was filled with costumers sewing elaborate period costumes, in another the choreographer was rehearsing a dance number, in another the orchestra was rehearsing with the singers, and in another scenery was being built. None of the people were talking to each other, and as I wandered through the rooms and hallways it was clear that nobody seemed to be working on the same play, but instead every artist was following their own inclinations and paying no attention to creating a cohesive production. I became increasingly angry and frustrated at the waste of time and money, and the lack of actual artistic thought.

Suddenly, there was one of those shift in scenes that sometimes occur in my dreams. The cacophony of the production continued, but the scene was now in a Broadway theater. Different groups were scattered across the multi-leveled set, talking and singing and dancing and laughing and creating a scene of total chaos. Suddenly, in stomped a character who stomped to center stage and shouted "Shut up!" Nothing -- the chaos continued. "SHUT UP!" Again, no change. At the top of his lungs: "SHHUUUUUUUTTTTT UPPPPPPPPP!!!" Suddenly silence fell. Somebody shouted, "What?"

The character said: "Thank you for your attention. I have been hanging around this production process for a while, and it is clear to me that this is going to be a disaster." General hub bub. Quiets down. "People come to the theater to hear a story. I have read the script, and there IS a story in there, but it is being buried inside of all kinds of fat and gilt and spectacle to the point where the story is being completely lost. That's why I've been sent to take over."

"You? Who are you?," someone demanded to know. The central character turned, steely-eyed: "I'll tell you who I am after you tell me who you are." "The director," he said. "Former director," the central character said. Commotion. Then: "So who are you?" "Me? I. Am. The Dramaturg."

Silence. Another voice: "The Dramaturg? What the hell does a dramaturg do?"

"What does a dramaturg do," the Dramaturg repeated calmly. "What do you _think _ I'm going to do?..."I'm gonna save the fucking day."

Suddenly, the voice of a TV announcer says "Get your tickets to the smash Broadway hit, _The Dramaturg_ by going online at DramaturgonBroadway.com..." The orchestra swings into a song.

And....dream.

Michael Rushton informs us that “Freakonomics Radio has a new three part series on the economic landscape facing live theatre. Part One is here, and Part Two is here, which, as a supporting act in an episode with Lin-Manuel Miranda, has me trying to coherently explain cost disease in the theatre, where it comes from and its implications. Part three will come next week, but if I say so myself it is a really informative series so far.”

I haven’t listened, and am not certain that I can stomach it (the presence of Lin-Manuel Miranda as a spokesman for theater, which he hasn’t done for years, kind of sours it for me). Still, might be worth a listen.

When I went off to the CUNY Graduate Center to get my doctorate in theater history/criticism/literature, I wrote to Bonnie Marranca, the co-founder and editor of Performing Arts Journal offering to volunteer to help out in any way was needed. I had been reading back issues in the library at Illinois State University, where I was working on my masters degree, and I was inspired by the vision for the theater that Marranca and her husband, Gautam Dasgupta, put forward issue after issue. I was amazed when I received a letter back from Bonnie offering me a job as an Editorial Assistant. I arrived in the late summer of 1989, and I remember sitting in the office discussing the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and event about which I was more skeptical than they were. As usual, they were right.

I worked there mornings for two years. My knowledge of the New York avant garde, much less the European version, was very much lacking, and I am afraid I appreciated only in retrospect the people who showed up at the PAJ office: Robert Foreman, Robert Wilson (whose office was just a few doors down the hall from PAJ), Maria Irene Fornes, and many other artists and intellectuals. Bonnie and Gautam were always discussing some new idea, and I tried to soak up what I was hearing. But I was also, at the time, interested in structuralism and Marxist theory, and not as tuned into the more literary tradition in which the worked. At the time, Bonnie was in a historical and pastoral phase in her writing, in which she published Hudson Valley Lives: Writings From the 17th Century to the Present and American Garden Writing, which were decidedly not theatrical.

After two years, I returned to Illinois State to begin my teaching and administrative career (while struggling to write a dissertation that I had to abandon and then start over entirely). But I have always looked back fondly on the time I spent in the Varick Street office.

So it is with some sadness that I happened up the announcement that the final issue of Performing Arts Journal had been printed, and Bonnie had retired as editor as of Fall 2024. I’m glad that she and MIT Press did not continue publication after her departure – there are some institutions that should not be passed on to the next generation because to do so would be to move in a different direction from the original impetus and end up being a contradiction.

Here is an interview with Bonnie Marranca, published by MIT in January of this year, in which Bonnie evaluates the impact of Performing Arts Journal. The interview is called “Saying farewell to PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art with editor Bonnie Marranca," and it is worth a read. You can also watch the interview here. I was particularly taken with her description of PAJ’s main competitor at founding, The Drama Review (TDR), and how they differentiated themselves from that journal.

Well done, Bonnie – 48 years as editor is an amazing feat. I hope you can enjoy your Hudson Valley home.

“Recently, I read this essay by Robert Porterfield, an aspiring actor who founded a theatre company in Abingdon, Virginia. The company called Barter Theatre is apparently the nation’s longest-running professional theater, except I’ve never heard about this theater until now.”

This was written by a 20-something theater person. It’s not their fault that they haven’t heard of it–nobody mentioned the Barter Theatre to me, either, when I was their age. In fact, it wasn’t until I had a doctorate and was well into my career before I discovered it independently thanks to Todd London’s anthology An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, an amazing anthology filled with such stories. It could be a starting point for learning about other European, African, and South American theaters that are operated on an entirely different basis than theaters in the US.

The Barter Theatre was formed in a small town (Abingdon, pop 3005) in Virginia in the depth of the Great Depression, and it got its name from how people bought tickets. The people who lived in the area were mostly farmers, and they had a lot of food and nobody to sell it to because prices had dropped so low. So they’d bring eggs, or a chicken, or a pig, or jam, or cheese to the box office and trade it for tickets to the show. The produce and animals were then shared among the people who did the plays – theater artists who, in New York where the number of Broadway productions had gone over a cliff, would otherwise have been standing in the breadline waiting for handouts. Instead, they were doing plays and eating well in a community that otherwise lacked entertainment options. The founder, Robert Porterfield, said “There were two kinds of hungering…hungering in the body and hungering in the soul. I wanted to bring together the actor who was hungry in the stomach and the people I knew best, the people of the Virginia highlands, because I had a hunch that they were hungry for ther spiritual nourishment the theater could bring them. I thought they were hungry enough for it to pay in the vegetables and chickens and jam they couldn’t sell.”

People told him that it wouldn’t work, it couldn’t be done; he did it, and it worked. And while eventually (and perhaps sadly) they later shifted to a cash basis, the theater still exists and is thriving.

Students, in my opinion, need to hear this story and stories like it (there are many, many more just as innovative), but most theater programs don’t include them anywhere in their curriculum, which is a damn shame. A semester-long course could be devoted solely to London’s anthology – I know, because I’ve done it many times myself. While American Theater Magazine publishes an article by a theater professor who says that students need to learn more about the new demands of getting a job in the traditional New York theater (websites, video clips, etc.), I believe that they should be receiving information about how other theater artists have created vibrant and innovative artistic lives outside of that dehumanizing environment.

I don’t know. Maybe I need to do such a course on-line.

(This post is the result of writing I’ve been doing on my personal project.]

I’ve been reading Ivan Illich’s 1970 classic Deschooling Society and John McKnight’s The Careless Society. I’ve admired the ideas of these two people over the years, but it wasn’t until recently that I discovered that they actually knew each other and that McKnight was greatly influenced by the time he spent with Illich. Reading the two books side by side (not literally!), it is clear you can draw a line directly from Deschooling Society to The Careless Society. It is probably more accurate to say that McKnight’s asset-based community organizing, as outlined in [Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community’s Assets]((https://search.worldcat.org/title/36708153) is the how-to to Illich’s why-to. McKnight focuses on determining a community’s _assets _instead of its deficits; not what does it lack, but what does it have; not what can be done _for_it, but what can it do for itself. The goal is to allow the community to do for itself, rather than call on a “professional” to do it for them.

This feels right to me. It feels empowering. And the reason it feels empowering is that it is relying on what and who are to hand to shape their world. Nobody has to be professionally trained, nor do they need to have the latest gear to make everything all ooh-shiny.

There’s a guy my wife watches on YouTube who calls himself the Bike Farmer. He has a bike shop in Wisconsin and he posts videos of him fixing old bikes he’s rescued. He has a phrase he often uses–“Good enough for who it’s for”–that I think applies here. It isn’t that he’s proposing sloppy work and bad stuff–“good enough for government work”–but rather that most people don’t really have the need for all the bells and whistles. What they need is to get out on the road. But YouTube (or PeerTube) is jampacked with how-to videos showing you how to make or do something or repair something yourself. People helping people. And while, as with everything online, there is some pressure to “monetize” their videos, most people make videos because they like sharing their skills.

My friend Tom (@apoorplayer) recently posted a video he found and PeerTube that was a song called “Shitty Gear.” The Toronto musician, whose name isn’t used on the webpage that I could see, writes “it’s me playing various lower quality instruments in an effort to demonstrate that you can make okay music with inferior equipment.” And the song is really good! And I definitely “vibe” with that idea, and I think McKnight would too. People have lost the understanding that they can often make what they need themselves from materials that they already possess or can get cheap. Instead, they think in terms of the “best” (meaning “most expensive”), and if they can’t afford the best, then they do nothing at all.

This is true for theater people. How many years do young people spend waiting tables, going to auditions, and working in the theater only intermittently, when the amount of money they are spending could be used to create their own theater where they and their fellow artists can actually do the work they want to do. They don’t need the most expensive lighting and sound equipment, or a scene or costume shop; they don’t need to spend a bunch of money on marketing; they just need to do the work. Do a show in your apartment, in your back yard, on the library’s stage, in the church basement or senior center.

Look around at your neighborhood, at your friends, and see what assets you have available, and then build on that. In many ways (and I just realized this), my previous two books, Building a Sustainable Theater and DIY Theater MFA are built on this concept of asset-based organization. You don’t need the institutionalized approach – just do the work!