#12 — The Employment of Failure:
Next To Last in 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing
Starting this series of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing, we noted that our motto #maketheaterlive boldly proclaimed our determination as a company, a determination that we share with so many other playwrights and theater people as seen in FB groups like Playwrights Connection, DG NJ, DG NYC, DG Philadelphia, NJ Theater Network (hey, I’m an East Coast guy) and Stage Whisper Podcast. I know our friends out at Broom Street Theater in Madison Wisconsin who in 2021 as the world was inching out of COVID co produced with us share that sentiment. In the first ‘way’ of this series, we talked about how “those terrible circumstances (of the pandemic) propelled us to realize how deep our desire was to make theater live even if we had to produce it ourselves under novel and challenging conditions.”
That motto continues to inspire us as it does other playwrights in self-producing adventures. Returning to that mission when the days to opening grow short and the faces of the team grow long reminds and revives. You should savor the mysterious milieu that is theatre with yourself this time as a producer AND the playwright. This is the world and the work that allows us to have that moment Stephen Sondheim so brilliant metaphorized in his lyric from ‘Sunday in the Park with George’, “Look, I made a hat, Where there never was a hat.”
But self-producing, we haven’t always made a hat. Sometimes what we’ve done has led to a silk purse instead and sometimes a sow’s ear. Or worse.
In other words, there are instances of failure in our experience and we maintain that’s a good thing.
Why? For years, we have followed the blog of Mike McGee because his insights lend themselves to many enterprises. here’s something that he wrote recently :
“It’s more effective to learn from failure than success. Possibly more painful, certainly more reliable. …You have to trip over limits to see that they exist. Real learning requires failure as well as success. Probing for limits takes courage that I’ve sometimes refused to summon. “ — Mike McGee
This way of thinking matters a great deal to me. in fact, I’ve written about the employment of failure. I won’t repeat all of that here; those interested can take a look at this page that captures a lifetime of learnings from the lickings sometimes taken. But theater and self-producing do bring up a few insights that are particularly useful.
You learn by doing and by making mistakes while doing — as long as you allow and enable reflection and corrections based on those errors, both forced and unforced. Or you learn by the intervention of a kind friend who requires you to reflect. I am one such case.
When I was 20 years old (2nd from left in the top photo of this post) and about to be a senior at Manhattan College in the Bronx, I became the co-producer and one of the actors in a touring production of Waiting for Godot. (Yes, that’s our original poster above.) For anyone who doesn’t know Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece, it’s about two tramps who are waiting in a bleak landscape for the personage of the title. A few other characters come and go; I played one of them, Pozzo. Basically nothing happens and the characters just talk to each other, and I know that sounds a lot like Seinfeld but not really.
I was a pretty experienced actor at that point, but I’d never done anything like co-producing a touring production. My partner in the venture also was my roommate, Michael McKeever of Philadelphia.
He asked me a number of times whether I really wanted to self-produce. He emphasized that it was not going to be easy for us to avoid a loss, let alone make a few bucks to supplement our off-campus jobs as security guards. Whether I was being daring or just being dumb, I decided to take the risk.
And I blew it.
The catalog of ways in which I failed as a co-producer was both long and varied: muffed deadlines, botched negotiations, inexact accounting, missing props. But throughout I just kept on keeping on and didn’t even acknowledge — never mind reflect upon — my errors and omissions. I could rationalize this was the summer of 1972 and I was 20 years old in New York City with all of its both permanent and transient distractions. I could state accurately that the production ran for months all over the New York City area and made money. But the point of the story is that as this co-producer, I was a huge failure, a reality that I could not evade. I did try, but being the occupant of the bottom bunk in a small bedroom where my co-producer occupied the top bunk made that yet another failure
After some weeks of uncomfortable silence, McKeever led me out of the permanent party that was our living room and down the dark narrow hallway to the chair that was by his desk. There were four of us in the apartment and only McKeever actually had a desk, which told you a lot about who was the adult in that quartet. He switched on his old-fashioned gooseneck lamp and while seeming to angle it at the production ledger managed to shine the light very brightly upon me. McKeever was — and is — very organized. So on that night at his desk, Mac had record-keeping that documented everything we had done with Godot: what ‘we’ planned, designed, purchased, contracted, performed, sold, spent over the months of the production. In one column on the right hand side written in his beautiful calligraphy, there were initials indicating which of the co-producers had the responsibility of each of those rows. He moved his finger from one line to the next — a roster of the many ways in which I had failed — looking at me occasionally to see if I would bother to protest statements such as, “Oh, that was the time you forgot to buy the bowler hats” or “I’m not sure you were there for this one: you decided that you had to go visit a girl in Queens.”
Offering denial in the face of such exactitude would only have deepened my embarrassment. I apologized, but that wasn’t what my friend sought from this encounter. At the end, he drew himself back and held me in a firm gaze while asking, “T.J., are you running your life or is your life running you?” Are you running your life or is your life running you?
Ouch.
There it was — the first lesson of self-producing — and for me of my adult life: you can’t ‘fail forward, fail better’ if your life is running you. We can’t fail forward without seizing responsibility — not accepting but seizing, embracing, owning the thing. Even in those moments when are not the designated leader or decision-maker, we still have to take responsibility for whatever the venture is or else we cannot learn from its eventual failure or success. If we can’t make that move then we should sit on the side and let someone else have the chance. Be accountable or be absent. Plan our failures; don’t let them befall us. If we want to fail forward, to fail better, we must be running our life. This is no time for heedless experiment. Failure because of risk can reward, but failure because of incompetence, inattention, or immaturity is something that should only happen once and preferably when we are young and the stakes are still relatively low. So my friend of over half a century taught me back in the garret apartment in The Bronx.
“I keep on making what I can’t do yet in order to learn to be able to do it”
Vincent VanGogh
Such advice in this ‘twelfth way’ may seem bracing, even counter-intuitive: isn't this series about the virtues of co-producing? Yes, but perhaps the most important observation is that co-producing at its foundation is about learning. And that kind of learning with expenses of all sorts and stresses from auditions to strike — and failures — isn’t for everyone. We’ve learned from mistakes in venue, casting, equipment… You name it. Be assured that at the time we were not saying, “Oh, good another opportunity for learning from failure!” BUT…
Learning Is the Foundation of Innovation; Failure Is the Foundation of Learning
Everyone has not only a right but a necessity to their particular take on how to make the theater they want and need to make. For me, I’m not going to learn much now by sending out scripts and waiting for responses from already overloaded artistic directors. Been there, done that. As my son (and gallant collaborator) Gifford Elliott recently wrote to our subscribers at my age I have already been 12 years old 6 times over. I also have privileges of time and experience for such an enterprise — two resources not for sale on Amazon.com. That makes it easier for me to choose this path of self producing. And out 13th Way will provide a host of resources to make that path smoother. Stay tuned.
