13 Ways Of Looking At Self Producing: #1 — Look In The Mirror
As this series on 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing started a few days ago, a doleful fourth anniversary just passed: March 12th in 2020 was the day theater stopped in New York City and the rest of the country. The date is particularly memorable for our crew because we had booked space to hold auditions for our second production, GRUDGES, in anticipation of an Off Broadway run in June. We already had a few actors slotted into their roles, but we had run a notice in Backstage (always a superb resource) that yielded a marvelous array of applicants for three other characters. Then my friend and colleague, Lynne Otis, called me up on the evening of March 11th and said, ”You’re not having auditions tomorrow.” Stunned and still in denial, if not oblivious, to the enormous change a pandemic would bring, I asked Lynne how that could be. “Do you want to be the reason somebody gets really sick?” she asked as gently as you can to someone being ;particularly dense, ”And besides, the world is shutting down for a while.” Thus COVID hobbled, hamstrung, hornswoggled, and humbled our company and any other planned theatrical activity.
But in a weird way, those terrible circumstances 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 circumstances. And we weren’t alone, which is one reason why the theater community excites and inspires its members. We insisted that we would still #maketheaterlive even if it wasn’t on a stage but on Zoom
Yes, #maketheaterlive was the hashtag we introduced that same Spring for the first our three LIVE streaming Zoom productions during the pandemic. The peculiarities of the English language allow the phrase to be read in two separate ways: as a call to honor the precious ‘here and now’ aspect of theater that it should be ‘live’ and that the only way to make sure theatre continues to exist — to live — is by combining texts and performances and effects with an audience.
And we learned through the experience of producing that first play on Zoom, which NONE of us had any idea how to do, that there existed in us such a deep need to make theater live that we were not going to wait anymore for something to come out way, we were going to make our own way: we were committed to self-producing.
But we also learned that self-producing is NOT for everyone and that’s fine. That’s why this is the first of our 13 Ways of Looking at Self-producing — the one where you look at yourself and determine if you have the time and will to go it on your own. (You would not be reading this if you lacked the theatrical talent; that’s not the issue in self-producing.) The reserves of energy and ingenuity required mean that you are letting go of other pleasurable activities and paying out a large part of your psychic, physical and, yes, even spiritual resources. There’s a reason why they call it ‘self-producing’; all involved lose a big share of their ‘selves’ in the myriad demands.
In the Zoom case, this included finding microphones, lights, and props for actors who were in five separate locations! And figuring out how not to throw 99 people off the show by hitting the wrong button. (Experience is a brutal teacher.) You can see a little of the results here in our trailer or even watch the whole performance from July of 2020 at this link. Of course, lacking the face to face collaboration was unsettling; that camaraderie and quick creativity in sidebar conversations had been so wonderful in 2019 with our first Knowledge Workings play, ALMS, which was a co-production with the splendid TheaterLab and our genius friend, Orietta Crispino. But we went on to self-produce two more plays on Zoom while the pandemic screwed up our social and professional lives because we had to #maketheaterlive just as other companies large and small did as noted by Jesse Green in this NYT article.
But those were not self-produced and neither were great productions put on by Druid Theater and other Irish companies that I enjoyed. The self-producers could be found sharing ideas and tech hacks at roundtables sponsored by A.R.T/NY. Even though we were not in person at those sessions, that desire necessary to make self-producing theater feasible was evident in their voices and faces. So, Step 1 is to do a gut check on your own capacity now to start a self-producing journey that will be both rigorous and rewarding.
Why do we think self-producing is so important? If the play is just on a page or even worse still only in our heads then it is not yet living. And the future of playwrighting depends upon plays being seen and heard. (Winter Miller’s piece [@wintygram instagram] on why they self-produced No One Is Forgotten several years ago carries the same sentiment: stop waiting for someone else to say ‘yes’.)
For those who looked in the mirror and said ‘Yes, I have GOT to self-produce’ our second in this series of thirteen will appear in a few days. In the meantime, you can enrich the enterprise by asking questions here on Threads, LinkedIn, FB, or even via www.knowledgeworkings.com
