‘Drawn From The Cold Hard Mouth
Of The World’: The ‘Lucky’ 13th Way Of Looking At Self-Producing
Apologies for those of you out there suffering from triskaidekaphobia but installment thirteen will be the finale of this series as foretold a month and a half ago in the introduction to 13 Ways of Looking at Self Producing. In installment # 8, I referenced the playwright Robert Anderson and his habit of keeping a homemade sign above his writing desk that read, ‘Nobody asked you to be a playwright.’ That sentiment helps me to laugh at myself when the going gets semi-tough. So, I’ve paraphrased it in the image above to point out the unsolicited nature of these observations.
Likewise, nobody asked me to share this knowledge of self-producing theater that was gained as Elizabeth Bishop suggested ALL knowledge is gained from “the cold hard mouth of the world”. But I did and the reaction has been satisfying. Of course, as Helen Vendler said, “I write to explain things to myself.” So, this initiative enriched me as well. But… it’s time now to actually go back to my own self-producing; there’s another play to write (as always) and there’s HONOR due to run at the Gene Frankel Theatre come September 18. Yes, self-produced but with tons of help this time.
Reflecting on the series so far, a slight some concern did arise as to whether these notes besides being engaging and coherent also be original. But that’s unlikely and a fool’s errand: what we learned with eight productions surely was already comprehended and communicated by other theater-makers. After all, a quick search on Amazon can get you to this book, Produce Your Play Without a Producer: A Survival Guide for Actors and Playwrights Who Need a Production by Mark Hillenbrand that came out 23 years ago!
More recently, Kathi Carey wrote a pretty cool book entitled Cast Yourself: The Actor’s Guide To Self-Producing. And Teddy Hayes, who is also the author of the Devil Barnett series of mystery novels, penned The Guerrilla Guide to Producing Theater. But if you’re near NYC, the Garden of Eden of theatrical knowledge awaits your visit and has a relevant shelf…
Yes, The one and only DRAMA BOOKSHOP lots of books just on theater producing at The Drama Bookshop that you can buy and read. Please buy them and don’t just sit there reading them because we need The Drama Bookshop to survive. (Again, I’m writing from a New York centric attitude. What can you expect from some guy born in the Bronx? ) Here’s some photos of what you can read.
The 13th Way of Looking at Self-Producing is Garner what other people can tell who have specific experience in this subject, and The Drama Bookshop is one magnificent portal. (NOT a portkey, which we know can make its user “uncomfortable, if not downright unpleasant, and could lead to nausea, giddiness, or worse”) One book available at Drama Bookshop that is especially rewarding is How To Be A Multi Hyphenate In The Theatre Business by Michael Kushner who hosted several season of a very informative podcast on this same subject. There’s a rather substantial preview of the book at this link.
Reading all of these lessons and ideas represents a method of collection of knowledge that is accessible to all of us. (We’ve already talked about networking, which would involve conversations on the topic for those how prefer absorbing talk to inhaling mountains of text.) A simple search on Google or another engine will reveal a host of other observations relevant to this topic. Here are some examples that we sampled:
Anna Nicholas (her very nifty blog is here) published a whole series on self-producing on LinkedIn. In this post, Joanne Fitzgerald discusses the steps she took to produce her own script, and the lessons she learnt along the way. John J. King through the excellent HowlRound platform offers excellent experience earned advice here and also here (HowlRound also had a piece on the subject by John Greiner-Ferrris.) Ken Davenport has provided lots of good info and counsel for a long time. Gregory Crafts shared his ideas eight years ago here but I find them evergreen. Anthony J. Piccione gives weight to both the possibilities and obstacles of self-producing. I love the spirit of Cate Cammarata in her take. This is not exactly equal time, but Corey Atkins opines sincerely on Why You Should Avoid Self-Producing on The Playwrights Realm site.
There’s none of us who can say resources don’t exist to augment our knowledge of and practice in self-producing. More examples:
Essentials of Successful Self-Producing 2022
From Theater Resources Unlimited
Essentials of Self-Producing
The World of ‘Self-Producing Theater.’
A YouTube Video on The Topic
We just signed up with On The Stage to do our ticketing for the September run of HONOR and they are a great and generous resource on such matters as cost-effective marketing strategies and tactics for engaging the audience. Shout out to Mary-Kate Offenhauser there for shepherding our organization in to that fold.
But it’s time to get going on your self-producing. Opportunities like Zoomers , which is sponsored by NYCPlaywrights are there but this is the time for you to catch one of them. Sarah Bernhardt said that “The theatre is the involuntary reflex of the ideas of the crowd”, but there’s no reflex unless you attract that crowd. And that may require at this point in your artistic odyssey self-producing.
All of us in a sense are already self-producers. A few may be collaborating — I did so with Joe Queenan for four plays — but even then we batted the script back and forth in spates of individual work. And there is another meaning: you have to produce your ‘self’, the person that gets the work done. Zadie Smith reminded me of this in a recent piece, Dance Lessons for Writers
“Writing, like dancing, is one of the arts available to people who have nothing. “For ten and sixpence,” advises Virginia Woolf, “one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare.” The only absolutely necessary equipment in dance is your own body… You are on a stage, in front of your people and other people. What face will you show them? Will you be your self? Your “best self”? A representation? A symbol?”
What is the core of this best self that you must produce? I’ve come to believe that one of the most important things that you must show ‘them’ is that you are serious. My accountant (we’ve been friends for 40 years since my first self-produced show) alluded to this one day when he said how important it was not to have anyone think that self-producing was a hobby. That’s not to disrespect hobbies, but rather to elevate the pursuit of theatre to a vocation, “a strong conviction that it is one’s duty or destiny to follow a particular profession, way of life, course of action”
Leonard Cohen wrote that “You’ve got to be serious about what you do. And you’ve got to understand the price you pay for frivolity or just for greed…it’s a very high price, especially if you’re involved in this sacred material, which is about the human heart and human desire and human tragedy. If there isn’t some element of seriousness in the training of the artist or in the atmosphere that surrounds the enterprise, then this shabbiness grows and eventually overwhelms it.” Those of who think of making theater as a chance to touch the ‘sacred’ can only answer ‘Amen’ to Leonard.
This pursuit is certainly not about the money in my experience. One of the recent innovations for so producing that we ourselves used during the pandemic era is Crowdfunding. Well that mechanism worked marvelously well to get our actors compensation during a time when almost no actors were working, it’s not going reveal that street paved with gold to financial success for the playwright self-producing. As Freddie DeBoer noted recently in the context of self-publishing:
“Almost no one who tries to make it in the crowdfunded economy succeeds, whatever the medium or genre they work in. …But the source of that failure is that the public has a finite appetite for creative work, tends to mostly like the same things, and doesn’t have time in the day to be discovering new artists all the time.” Ouch and Amen.
All of us will do well to recall the kind of advice that Neil Patrick Harris received as a very young actor from Steven Bochco: “the industry is like surfing”, which means that you will wait a long time for a good wave, possibly get upended even then, and never receive a guarantee of riding the big kahuna.
But enough of the advice. There’s soooo much advice out there, And the best way to use it is as a level of your spirit as well as a brace your spine when you are in the thrust and undertow of the churning work of self-producing. So if it’s going to be that way then follow rule number one of Chuck Wendig (who offers lots of good advice about writing in general): Write the thing you wanna write. Now. Amen, amen.
Do so and then #maketheaterlive because you must. And if along the way, you gain some useful knowledge, please share it as we have tried to do in this series. How will you know if it is useful knowledge? We want a poet, an exalted member of a hardy daring tribe of self-producers, Elizabeth Bishop, to have the last word
“It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”
The entire series of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-producing is here
The entire series of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-producing is here
