D & D vs Theater

This fall I’ve been thinking about charisma. The word is loaded for me since I learned it when I was twelve. I learned it because it was a Dungeons & Dragons statistic. If you’ve never played D&D, your character has six statistics measuring your strength, intelligence, wisdom, constitution, dexterity and… charisma. The first five I knew, but had to read the description of charisma which I remember being something like “the character’s attractiveness and ability to lead other people.”
(Yes, fellow geeks, I’m sure that’s wrong but it was thirty years ago but my copy of the 2nd edition rules has long since disintegrated)
And in the game, as you pore through the 1500+ pages of rules, you find that Charisma is the sad unloved statistic. Everything else helps you memorize spells, inflict damage, dodge arrrows… you know, survive. Charisma? Charisma helps you be charming, and only in a narrow set circumstances. The only character class who needed it was the Paladin, who is sort of a smug, uptight, beautiful holy warrior. (That character class was so insufferable that thousands of players around the country spontaneously created a new class, the “anti-Paladin” as a sort of fun-to-play antagonist: super evil, terribly ugly; a glass of bitters to the Paladin-shaped glass of chocolate milk.)
But on the stage? Here in the “real” world (of theater?)? Charisma is the heart of the performative experience. Here, it is the statistic.

“Revelatory!” – Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune

First off, our co-production with Nora Dunn, Mythical Proportions is extending to October 20th. Nora has a long screen and film history. Initially, I was excited to co-produce her one-woman show because I thought it was a subtle and nuanced piece of dramatic writing far distanced from the usual celebrity show-biz tell-all tale. But here’s the thing: reading the play and experiencing it are two different things. When Nora is performing it, in our intimate space, there is a papable connection between her and the audience. We’ve had numerous people stop by the box office on the way out the door to buy return tickets for the following week!
And that’s the power of charisma. The ability to arrest our attention and to draw us in. It’s what we want from the stage: the performer to reach out across the darkness and immerse us in the experience. I really believe it’s the uniqueness of acting as an art form. It’s why I wanted the spaces at the Wit to highlight the immediacy of the room. In a 100 seat house, there is nowhere to hide. No artiface can be sold. Or, at least, no audience will buy it.
And we want to buy it. We want to spend time with Nora Dunn or Kate Black Spence or Linda Reiter or Lance Baker. In pretty much any context. We held our Solo Salon two weeks ago with Lance and Nora to discuss the challenges and rewards of solo performance and it was one of the funnest conversations I’ve ever had about the work. Many thanks to all of you who were able to attend.

I’ve also been thinking about charisma because we just completed a week’s worth of auditions for our upcoming show, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England. Michael Shurtleff famously wrote “Why do we have to go through the torture of auditions? Because no one has ever devised a better way to cast. If you think of one, let me know.”
But I love auditions. I also fear them, because they always make the play leap in unexpected directions for me. I’m always sure I know what the play will be and then, bang, actors come in and change my mind.
When an actor comes in with a specific, vivid take on the role, and marries that with her native stage charisma? It’s like catnip. It changes my read of the play, because I stop thinking “is this the actor for the role” and start thinking “what does the play mean with this person in it?” Those are the moments I love, when the play starts happening to my imagination.
Plus they’re full of surprises: this time, one of the actors requested to be read for a different part, with another actor opposite reading the role she’d been called in for. From a basic tactical standpoint, this is probably a bad idea. “Read me for someone you don’t see me as and consider this other actress for my role!” But she was right. They were great together. So I’ve added an extra contract for the show and offered them the roles (at the time I’m typing this, we’re waiting to hear if they accept).
Charimsa + chemistry is basically my theater crack. First one’s free!
Jeremy

A story about the Traveling Salesman Problem

In Itamar Moses’ Completeness, the lead character wrestles with three things: 1) Love 2) Biology and 3) The Traveling Salesman Problem. I was drawn to this play because, in my past, I have wrestled with those same three things. Love led to my wife. Biology led to my children. But the Traveling Salesman Problem nearly got me killed by gangsters.

Here’s how it happened:

In 1992, I had despaired of being able to wait tables. I switched to temp work which I morphed into software consultancy by wildly exaggerating my technical expertise in the field of computer science. To be clear: I had a BA in theater arts. My computer skills were entirely self-taught— the result of me tinkering obsessively with my Apple IIe, and later, my Macintosh SE 30 (2 megs of RAM!). Sure, I had taught myself a smattering of programming languages and algorithmic principles, but I had never completed a single computer class.

Luckily for me, it was the dawn of the computer age, a lawless wild west. It was the kind of world where a major bank would hire a 24-year-old to write a system to manage millions of dollars of transactions. Because they had no idea what they were doing. And I could sound like I did.

So, by 1994 I had a thriving little business going. At that time, I had hooked up with a company that made mapping software. They brokered a contract between myself and a guy named… well, we’ll call him Louie. Louie ran a consultancy business that was in charge of helping bottled water and laundry companies determine optimal delivery routes for their trucks. Keep in mind that this is all years before the modern internet, GPS navigation, google maps, etc., In 1994 this was fairly new territory.

When Louie explained the parameters of the job, I thought it would be easy: route trucks. Calculate the best routes based on a series of observational data points his team had gathered about travel time, traffic, etc. Louie explained that the program wouldn’t need to tell the drivers how to get from point A to point B to point C. He just wanted to know the best routes.

"Cool," I thought, "because figuring out which roads to go on would be hard." Figuring out the shortest trip would be easy. It's just addition. There were only between 200 and 1800 stops per data set and I had access to 486 chipsets!

"This is a plan?"

Now, at the time, the way I would work was this:

A) Take the job.

B) Bill the client what I thought was a lot of money, but which I know now was actually laughably small.

C) Go to the library and/or bookstore and research up the relevant computer algorithms for the things I didn't know— there was a lot of stuff I didn’t know… optimal sorts, string processing soundex theory, etc.. The books would have a lot of math, which I also didn't know, but I would read the code and adapt it. At the time, the internet and web didn't exist, but Borders had over two dozen books, IN STOCK of these algorithm collections.

D) Code the software

So, step (A) went great. And they agreed I could have six months to write the software which was, obviously, AN ETERNITY. So, I took the deposit, and bummed around for four weeks doing very little. I thought about the problem a bit, but no good solution popped into my head. This was odd, as I could normally count on my brain to come up with at least the outline of a sensible approach.

Finally, I had to try something. So, I knocked up a quick proof of concept to generate all the possible routes and then pick the shortest one. This took about four hours to write, but when I ran it, it just … froze. I put in some debugging code and found that it was running, but that seemed to have a lot more calculation to do than I had thought. Hmmm…

Noooooooo problem. Obviously, it was time to go steal the logic of my program from some computer science graduate's book at Boarder’s Book Store. But when I browsed through the books, nothing leapt out at me. This was strange because it seemed like it ought to be an obvious and common algorithm. But I couldn't figure out how to find it. I skimmed Donald Knuth, nothing. I read the indexes of every book available looking for… something… anything that sounded plausible. No dice. Of course, what was the problem even called? How could I look it up?

A month goes by. I'm starting to get nervous. I take another month to code the front end of the application, but it still doesn't do anything like, you know, route trucks. Louie finally wants to see a demo. A reasonable request, but one I can't provide. So, I copy the code onto a floppy disk, rub that floppy disk with a strong magnet, and drop it in the mail to him. Louie calls. “The file’s corrupted. I couldn’t open it.”

“Really? That’s strange.” I say. “I’ll get another copy in the mail to you right away”

Now I'm really panicking. I have accounted for accurate distance calculations. I have researched and coded calculations that account for the minor curvature of the earth to distinguish between delivery times. BUT, nothing I code can execute in the 45 minutes allowed for the software to process all 1800 stops each and every morning for the water companies to deliver their goods efficiently.

Then, I find a reference in an index to something called the "Traveling Salesman Problem". And there's a graph on the second page showing multiple points with cities labelled with weights for travel time for a dot labelled "salesman.”

I’ve found it! “Hey!” I yell to my wife from the floor of the book store. “This sounds like MY problem…”

I buy the book ($50!) and go home to read the relevant chapter. To this day, I can still remember the first line.

The traveling salesman problem has never been solved.

Uh-oh

It's hard to describe the dropping sense of panic I had when I read that. I read the entire chapter. Yup. Never been solved. Can't be solved. There's a graph showing the NP-1 curve, which I finally understand. My code is due in one week. Louie is coming to Chicago to get it. I have SPENT his deposit, and have no other income to pay him back.

Now is a good time to mention that Louie was connected. Like gangster connected. During our time together he had taken me to a laundry convention in which he paid for everything, including the $18,000 booth fee, in cash. After that, he had me take him on a tour of the area. I drove while he pointed out the houses of retired mafia members and then snorted cocaine from the dashboard.

So I wasn’t looking forward to telling Louie that I didn’t have his software. Or his money.

What followed was a desperate four day period in which I, sleeping about 2 hours a night, managed to code something "good enough" to demo. As Elliott, the lead character in Completeness points out, the "good enough" solution is just that. Not perfect, but not bad.

So, the software was polished enough for sale but Louie seemed to be out of money.  He had a copy of the executables, but the code was put in escrow awaiting the remainder of my fee. Louie protested, claiming that my delay had cost him. Things between the contracting companies got heated. Louie then went around the lawyers to contact me directly and demand the code. I refused to give it to him without the rest of the payment. That’s when Louie called me at 2am and screamed into the phone, "You pathetic little fuck; give me my fucking code or I am coming there with an ice pick and a body bag you motherFUCKER and I and my friends will fucking waste you, scoop you up and dump you in a fucking dumpster."

Unfortunately for Louie, this was my second death threat that year (the other was from an actor who had a mental breakdown). My life in the theater had made me perfectly comfortable with people threatening to kill me.

And perhaps Louie would have. But after that 2am call, he disappeared. Really. Gone. The company that introduced us hired a private detective to try and find him with no result. The remainder of my fee and my "solution" to the traveling salesman problem are still in escrow, I believe.

And fifteen years later, Completeness is written. So, of course, I have to direct it. Because in the real world, the unsolvable problems can get you killed. But in the theater, the unsolvable problems can show you how to live.

Itamar Moses on COMPLETENESS

Here's the tidied up transcript of a phone interview I had with Itamar right after we held our first read-thru for Completeness.  --jw

Jeremy Wechsler: I know you had this really long development process because I remember you were getting ready for the workshop of Completeness when we met.

Itamar Moses:  When was that?

2009?

Yes, that’s right.  I was working on the play for a few years. The first real workshop was at South Coast Rep. at the Pacific Playwright Festival.  In May, 2010.

We spoke immediately after the workshop and we were talking about the exciting part of trying to parse statements from the artistic director.  “If we workshop it, when we produce it…?”

Right, right right!  It was originally a commission from the Manhattan Theatre Club. After that workshop, South Coast Rep was very interested but first we had to work out whether Manhattan Theater Club wanted to produce it, because as the commissioning institution they had the right of first refusal. For a while it wasn’t clear where it was going to be first, where it was going to go next.  But it all kind of worked out. 

When did you start writing it?

The commission that turned into Completeness I got from Manhattan Theater Club from as far back as, I’m going to say 2005, 2006?  The commission was from the Sloan Foundation, and they only commission plays about math and science.  I would not have taken one had it not been the case that I already had a science related idea. 

I had been thinking about the Traveling Salesman Problem already; I first learned about it in an electrical engineering course that I took in college.  I know… “You took an electrical engineering course?”

I took Electrical Engineering 101. It was one of those classes you had to take as a requirement to graduate. And people were like, “Why didn’t you take Geology 101?” (Which I did) or Astronomy 101, but Electrical Engineering 101 was a class called “The Digital Information Age.”  (The final project was to write your own web page in HTML; it was not a particularly challenging electrical engineering course.) The TSP came up as the reason why a long-enough random series of numbers and letters is impossible to crack in the context of how security works. If you run an algorithm that runs every possible combination, it seems like that should work, but in fact there are quickly so many combinations that it won’t work because it will take the computer fifty million years to try it. It stuck in my head. Maybe I liked the name, “Traveling Salesman Problem?”

I didn’t know the problem well enough to write something evocative about it but when I got offered the Sloan Commission, I thought, “Here’s my opportunity! Here’s my excuse to investigate this problem, see if there’s a play in it.”  As far back as 2006 there’s some prospectus for MTC claiming ‘I want to write about a guy who’s trapped on the Traveling Salesman Problem, not realizing that that problem is at work in other aspects of his life’, which is in some ways not far off from what the play became.

To keep it light I thought it should be a romantic comedy and should make the other subject as seemingly distant from computer science as possible: the messiest human stuff, getting together and breaking up. So that idea goes back as far as 2006.  I had a lot of seeds based on a lot of different relationships, but it never really cohered into a play. And I didn’t really hit on a structure that felt like it contained a complete play until years later when I was talking to you, 2009, and I thought, “Oh, this is the structure.” I started working it out to get it ready for that workshop in 2010.

There is such an intricacy to the structure of the end result. This love for theatrical structure is one of the things that had invited so many comparisons to Stoppard over the years.

Yeah, I’m aware of structure as a way to implement the meaning, but I like to be playful with it.

I think one of the fun things with this play is how the structure ties into both the metaphor of the problems with human relationships and eventually acts as a sort of dramatic element itself. It obviously reminded me of The Four of Us and the way it embraces theater itself as a space in which this event his happening.

The structure of Completeness­, on a dramaturgical level, the scene by scene—and I don’t want to give away the story—but the way the pairings work, the way the couples break up and get together, it’s actually not much more complicated than, Boy meet Girl, Boy loses Girl, will Boy get Girl back? [laughs] The intricacy of it has to do with the layering, like, how many things are going on at once? At any given moment a person could be saying something about romance that could apply to the science and also applies to theater. And vice-versa. So there’s this three level paralleling of everything that… is not as hard to achieve as it sounds. It only works if it follows from the storytelling. In working on a play like this I discovered that when figuring out what the next scene should be, or the next moment, what should happen next in the story should allow that layering to happen organically. What the person would legitimately say next in explaining their scientific idea or in trying to negotiate with their romantic partner, what they would actually say in the real world would be something that is layered and would have those echoes. And that’s often how I would know I was on the right track.

You talked about how you had these fragments of scenes from real life , do you keep a running notebook of dialogue snippets that you want to use?

Sometimes, usually not dialogue. There might be a sentence fragment or two that I might keep in a text document in my computer, sometimes it would just be general one, that’s like “random ideas” or sometimes it’ll be specific like “play about my family” and I’ll just throw things in there as they occur to me.  But—this is also something I should be careful about as I get older—I also have a steal trap memory for moments or dialogue, especially if something has an emotional impact at the time. I can recount entire conversations pretty accurately. What sticks in my brain, I end up using because the fact that it’s stuck in my brain means I’m compelled by it or it has some meaning or energy.

How did you come across the protein interaction part, unless you took Biochemistry 101?

I did not.  That was much harder.  But that was much harder for a more practical reason.  The Traveling Salesman Problem is a specific problem in computer science. I knew I wanted it to operate as a kind of central metaphor before I really began the play.  So what that means is: I don’t have to get a BA in computer science, I don’t have to read books on general computer science. All I have to do is make sure I understand the Traveling Salesman Problem and whatever scholarly things around that to make it work. But in trying to find a complimentary scientific focus for Molly, that was much more difficult because I couldn’t randomly select some other problem. She has to be working on something just as specific-

Right.

It would feel imbalanced. I couldn’t just randomly pick another scientific focus, I had to pick the right one.  So I had this one fixed variable, which is the traveling Salesman Problem and then this, like other unknown variable.. From the entire annals of science, I have to find the idea!

Easy!

I knew right away I could narrow it down. I knew I didn’t want it to be a really soft science. There was an early version where I thought maybe she’s a botanist, and my girlfriend was like “So the girl is doing some girl science?” And I was like, “You’re right, let’s not do that.” So I wanted it to be an equally hard science, but I wanted it to deal with real world stuff.  So I knew it was going to be chemistry or biology. Those involve math, especially chemistry. But they involve math as a byproduct or how real stuff interacts in the real world. And so I just started reading generally about biology and I came to a number of different focuses for Molly, none of which really clicked in for me.

Ultimately, I had to talk to molecular biologists.  The Sloan people were very helpful in that way. They put me in touch with the chair of molecular biology at Columbia and one of his colleagues and we went for a drink in the East Village and I just grilled him for two hours while taking notes, and that was the turning point. I could lay out to them specifically what the dilemma was. 

What I needed, first of all on a plot level, what could a molecular biologist grad student need help with from a computer scientist to get that first inciting incident going. We talked about that, and what is the cutting edge in the field. What are graduate students working on? As soon as this idea of protein interactions networks came up–as an early test you do to find what bonds with what­–I thought, “There it is.” It was one of those things where your right brain knows instantly “That’s it. That’s going to work.” Then it’s the very slow process of your left brain catching up. Why does that work? And how does that work?

So then I knew what to read about specifically. I didn’t have to learn about all of molecular biology. I could be like “ok, what is a yeast two hybrid screen? What is the end goal of all this work?” It was also useful just hear how molecular biologists talk about this work. There are certain lines in the play that are direct quotes from those two professors, like, we were talking about the eventual goal of mapping the entire protein interactome of humans and I said, “well, um, how much have we mapped?” He said, “Less and less every day.” That went right into the play. The joke that Elliot tells in the final scene, one of the professors told me as a way to illustrate their process. So it was useful to engage with them as people but also to pick their brains.

When you look at the pictures of the Traveling Salesman Problem and the pictures of the proteins, it’s amazing how similar they look.  Were you totally excited by the parallel?

Yes and no. I was super excited but I also have enough experience with this stuff to… if the audience was going to experience that parallel they were going to go to a very very deep level where no one was going to talk about or write about after seeing the play. But yes, I was excited by it because it made me feel like I was on sturdy ground. I had hit on a genuinely accurate analogy. There was a bedrock of sound ideas under the play. 

When we did the first read-thru last night, we were struck by this climactic moment that abruptly broadened the scope of their problems to a generational level. And it really brought… it unified the human scale into a larger context. The whole play has these mathematical problems that could almost model the real world but never entirely, and we see how this problem is getting mapped out to a cultural dilemma. I have been thinking a lot about my 20s. And how sucky they were. But also, how does it suck in a different way now? Your characters are rarely confused about what they’re feeling.  They’re pretty self-analytical and have have the ability to pick themselves apart without knowing any real motivating forces.

Right.

You write about this process not infrequently.  Do you think this is a generational thing?

I think its two different things. I think I am a kind of person that is able to intellectually understand something and maybe even articulate it, before my emotions have caught up. And so, that means of couple of things: one, that it often doesn’t help. You can trick yourself into thinking that you understand the problem, but until you understand it emotionally or viscerally, you don’t really understand it; you don’t know what you actually want. That’s not a generational thing. There’s a different vocabulary now, but there has always been that divide: on one side, the people who tend to intellectualize things and try to articulate them, and on the other side, people who feel something and then act.  Later, they can understand why they did it. I think there have always been those types of people.

In terms of the generational thing, I think, yeah… one of the critics in New York specifically dinged me for that line at the end. He felt the play ‘was really about Gen Y special pleading and they have some special problem but all I can say is join the club.’ To me that was a totally wrong interpretation of that moment. It wasn’t that we’re the only generation that has a hard time making sense of romance, its just we have a hard time making sense of it, in a way that’s specific to our generation. And the way you experienced that line in the reading and the way I intended it, was an opening and reaching out acknowledging all future generations are going to have a problem. That harkens to the first thing Elliot does for Molly is write a genetic algorithm where every generation learns some things, but it’s an optimization process: it acts for some goal it never reaches, And so Molly is just articulating the point that this generation is at on this curve, so its not to say, ‘well, this is really tough for us’, its saying, ‘we’re in uncharted territory’ and I think we are. Whether your approach to that is leading with your head or leading with your heart or trying to fuse the two, we’re in uncharted territory.

I always thought writing a romantic comedy would be super fun because you could pick out the previous experiences but make it turn out the way you want it to. Do you find it makes you more optimistic about love or more calculating because you have to construct the spots where it didn’t go awry?

It’s a chicken and egg question because my romantic life has calmed down and stabilized a great deal in my 30s as opposed to in my 20s. Whether I’m able to write about things that actually might seem like they might work out because I have experienced stuff that has worked better or writing about it has helped me get to that place, the answer is probably both and neither. I’m probably just tired also. I don’t know.  I definitely remember feeling the opposite in my 20s – I could write relationship scenes in my 20s about things not working, and that to write something that was working felt like I was faking it, making something up, because I genuinely didn’t believe in it. And now I feel like I get it more. Although its funny. The end of Completeness is kind of a litmus test.  It’s not clear what’s going to happen. I know what I intended and I feel about it. But I have people come up to me after the play and say how refreshing it is to see the opposite.

I think the play suggests this is their first experience of a genuine adult love affair, they had their first attempt where they could imagine a life, and we can see the fist two steps, but there’s lots left for them to work through. So – there have been two productions. When you see your plays multiple times before you cast them off to roam the wild, how different to the productions feel to you? Are there facets of the play that get pulled out in one version?

Yeah because there are always different connections in a play, a lot of which you intend and a lot of which just happen. And a different, set, different staging, different emphasis on pauses or a different actor can bring out all kinds of things.  Things like pace…  like with Four of Us there’s a fair amount of elasticity in those scenes.  There are all kinds of different ways to do it.  And different subtexts can come in, different moments can be solved because the physical space is worked differently. Something that was always a huge gimmie laugh in the last production, is suddenly not funny, because the actor is hilarious but in a different way.

In this case its one of the things the play is about: on the metaphorical level as theatre as an art form, about the relationship, and about how the relationship between a script and a live performance is the same between a computer program and molecules actually interacting in a Petri dish. A script can give you certain things and then the live event is unpredictable and certain other things can happen. Both those impulses are in me, to control everything, make it production proof, whatever that means, and do it exactly the same way, but that turns out to be a mistake because its only in not quite aiming for that that you create something that can work in all kinds of different contexts.

Do you find there is an audience that enjoys this play particularly?

Audiences in their 20s seem to really enjoy this play. Because it speaks to something that not a lot of plays speak to in quite this focused a way. Someone told me that after it was produced in New York all the second and third year acting students at Julliard became obsessed with it and started doing scenes from Completeness in their acting classes because it gave them an opportunity to play characters that thought and talked like they do.  So that’s one big sub group, but that’s not to say to that older audiences don’t enjoy the play.  There are two responses I’ve gotten from older audiences. One is ‘now I finally understand what my kid are going through, they’re creating all these relationship problems from themselves and now I finally know what they’re going through.’ Another one is ‘It’s always been this way. We had our own versions of exactly this’.  But getting that this is the next generation dealing with the same problem. And science geeks seem to appreciate it.

Yup.

Because the science in the play is accurate. And I don’t think they’re used to seeing that and also as being seen as people who sleep with one another. Which is true! Otherwise where would new scientists come from?

  

Youth and Completeness Theory

 

One of the central plot points and metaphors for Completeness is a computer science problem called The Travelling Salesman Problem. It's simply stated but currently unsolvable problem in computer science. "Given a series of X points on a graph, what's the most optimal path to visit all the points in the least amount of distance?" The problem is one of complexity, with six points a human can do it, but by the time you get to 12 or 15 or 100 points, the number of possible paths increases exponentially and surpasses the ability of even the fastest computers to solve in less than hundreds of years. I've been thinking about the relationship between the TSP and romance, as per Completeness. My obvious directing challenge is to take this highly abstract idea about our inability to accurately predict the best possible outcome and keep this small scaled and human.

 

On the one hand, the traveling salesman problem is one of certainty, but that's actually the end problem. ie, How do we know we are making the best choice? But the practical challenge of the problem is executional. How long and how many paths do I have to go down to pick a better choice? or even worse, how many choices do we have to explore before committing to a particular path? The challenges of determining even a semi-optimal series are very great because of the multiplicity of choices.

 

This is a human problem. What's the best choice I can make right now? I try to predict outcomes, but I'm actually really bad at it; in general our brains are terrible at juggling probability. When I was younger, I acutely felt threatened by decisions. In our twenties, I always felt that all these decision points got more and more risky the closer they got to reality. I picked up a weird lifetime habit of not closing cabinet doors ("maybe I'll need to return here in a moment"), and used to take 2, 3, or 4 jobs ("we'll see which one works best") in multiple careers simultaneously.

 

We're so prone to change at that age that every choice we make has a huge impact on our future trajectory, not just professionally but as human beings. I could never see forward momentum without being acutely aware of the opportunities and paths I chose not to take. I've lost track of how many times I remade myself in my twenties. It was a period of intense self-definition.

 

It's easy, now at 43 years old, to forget how stressful that process is. It was so hard that I preferred to work two or three jobs rather than commit to a specific path. At one point in a single year, I was directing a professional play, writing another, adapting a third, rehearsing a high school musical, writing mapping software, designing catalog software for Playboy, doing Oracle Database Administration, learning Java, starting a small business, and making wedding preparations.

 

Insane.

 

But having to reverse course has always seemed dangerous to me. Less about the lost time (more of a consideration now), but the sense that I would be unmaking part of me that I had created. This was a persistent illusion up through my mid-thirties. How much of myself was invested in maintaining possibilities, of finding the best possible future, of solving the Hamiltonian, travelling-salesman NP problem of my life.

 

And this is the challenge that Elliot and Molly face. To find for themselves what is enough even as they learn who they are. To find mastery in a world without any possibility of certainty. And ultimately, to move from reason to faith. Because that's where love always begins, a deliberate sacrifice of certainty for possibility.

 

This feels like the human motion of the play, this back and forth uncertainty between Elliot and Molly as they try and negotiate an actual love affair as adults instead of children. They have been taught that they can solve the trickiest problems with intellect and analysis. When analytic certainty eludes them, they anxiously cast about, convinced that it's going wrong, that it isn't right. That the next opportunity will bring certainty and not foil their intellectual capacity to discern the best path. But like the Traveling Salesman, it's the very hunt for that solution that eludes them.

 

Love might be blind, but it's damn certain it can't do math.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Is Marketing Shows a mug's game? The problem of choice in Chicago Theatre.

A Note: I'm in "state of the industry mode", with TCG about to start in a week and our very own Chicago Theater (anti-) Conference coming August 3rd. So if you're bored by numbers and marketing talk, skip this 2,200 word blog post. :)

Mortar Theatre recently published an interesting question on their blog, "Where have all the audiences gone?" There has been a lot of conversation in the last 24 hours about this issue and I have some interesting data points, and some possibly totally unfounded opinions on this subject.

At the Wit, we have also seen a recent drop off starting this spring in ticket sales volume. This is across companies in our space, and, working only with those companies that have run previous shows in our building where I have attendance data, there is a 28% drop off in paid attendance averaged across all such companies between this spring and the previous spring. Perversely, attendance this fall was up 30%, so annual attendance for the theater season is about even across all our companies.

So what can we make of this? I am currently tempted to ignore it as a single data point about recent attendance this spring isn't statistically meaningful. And as the companies have wildly differing marketing budgets and strategies, I am also tempted to disregard the individual sales tactics (but not entirely, thus this blog post) and look for more macro conditions.

Of these, of course, I know almost nothing as I'm not a sociologist or economist or statistician. I will note that this spring has been remarkably pleasant by Chicago standards, without the usual looney shifts into freezing winds or constant rain that typified spring for the previous three years. Maybe the initial turn into warm weather in March depressed many sales around the city. I can attest that daily sales dropped by 30% as soon as the temperature rose above 72 degrees. And we're well air-conditioned.

So maybe part of this is because it's nice out and Chicagoans' evening entertainment options dramatically expand whenever they can set foot outdoors without risking hypothermia.

But I don't think that's the whole story. So we called 400 customers of the Wit for a phone survey. The selection criteria was that they had to have a) seen a Theater Wit-produced show in the last 12 months), and b) not visited the Wit for at least three months. ie, we were trying to survey our previous more frequent visitors and find out where they went. Did we piss them off? Did they have a bad experience? Can/should we do something different?

On the long list of things I'm not, a poller is one of them, so I wasn't really sure how to formulate the questions without saying plaintively, "what happened? why don't you come back?" so I boiled it down to five questions:

1. How did you enjoy the play you saw last here?
2. Have you recommended the theater to anyone?
3. Is there anything we can do to improve your experience next time you come?
4. How many shows do you attend a year?
5. Have you heard about our current production of *Tigers Be Still?*

Out of 400 calls, we collected 60 responses. And the response was amazing. Of those 60 people who picked up the phone, the response broke down as follows:

1. Did you enjoy your show? 89% "loved it" 8% "liked it" and 3% "thought it was ok or a little disappointing" (I"m artificially collating all these responses because we just wrote down their comments rather than giving them a scale). I call that a win. By and large, the patrons at our space seem happy with the product quality.
2. Is there anything we can do to improve your experience? 98% were very complimentary about the building and the staff and the entire experience. We had a few negative comments, one about the house management, one about the long line at the bar, one request for both "larger productions" and "more experimental plays" and one request to "babysit my kids!" Which I would totally do if we could figure out the logistics and licensing. :)
3. 100% of the people would recommend our theater to others.
4. On average, our respondants attended 8 shows a year.
5. 38% had not heard of *Tigers be Still.* 62% had.

Other data points: about 40% of those surveyed are on our email newsletter list. Of those surveyed, they attended Theater Wit an average of 1.25 times in the twelve monthsOk, so here's what we know. Theater Wit has an customer approval rating HIGHER THAN APPLE COMPUTER. Any number of small businesses would kill for that kind of relationship and response from their customer base. It's a tribute to both the building and the programming that I'm really proud of. So we should probably be valued at at least a billion dollars, right? Why not?

And, if the average person sees 8 shows a year, and we know that at one to two of those are at Theater Wit, we're pulling that person in for at least an eighth of all their annual theatergoing visits. So, is the problem that there aren't any more people who want to attend? Doubtful.

Here is the real question I think we answered in our totally non-scientific survey:

Almost 40% of our "most-likely to attend" audience hadn't HEARD of *Tigers Be Still.* Why not? Here are the macro levels of our marketing plan for the curious:

1. Facebook ad placement, approximately 300 clickthroughs over six weeks.
2. Six weeks of theater loop/newsletter/metromix placements
3. Eight weeks of print display ads, primarily Tribune
4. Postcard drop to 2,200 patrons.

What I like about the "haven't heard" part of the question is that it removes the "convinced you to come" part of the marketing from the equation, which is a separate concern.

Everyone we called at the minimum recieved a postcard addressed to them. Half of them get our newsletter which talks about it every 2 weeks. We did not ask about their media consumption habits, so that's all the information. But regardless, if 4 out of 10 people hadn't heard about our current show, that means… something.

It might mean that all our marketing is totally ineffective. That it is so forgettable that people see it and dismiss it. But it might also mean that people are subjected to a ton of advertising messages and that we would need to spend more money to break through the white noise. I also think that media channels have become so fragmented that we're now spending money to reach 100 people on Facebook where we used to reach 50,000 in the Sun Times.

Of course, we can spend more money on advertising. We have a 100 seat house. How much advertising can we do before we exceed the capacity of the venue to sell tickets? Where would that money come from, etc.

I don't doubt that a $10,000/week marketing campaign could, with the right creative, sell out our house. But we'd spend more money buying the attention than we could realize in ticket sales. And this is the problem with marketing shows for the small houses that are so emblematic to Chicago's theater scene. Any gain we might get from improving the messaging is incremental at best; a breakthrough campaign has a financial distribution barrier that outweighs the potential transformative benefits.

So, what are we to do? If we don't advertise a show, no one knows about it. Even with advertising, there is no magic formula to pull in audience. And yet, we also know that people are paying attention. Our city always has little breakout shows, some of which are due to a 4-star Tribune review, but many of which are just good performers for that theatre. Word of mouth, a particular play at a particular moment, etc. are our most performant and least-controllable tools. And neither of them answers the question, "how do we get people in the door to start with?"

Is it the rapidly-old "supply-demand" trope that says Chicago is oversaturated and so deserving product can't find an audience? That's a part of it, but I just don't buy audience exhaustion in a city this large. Besides which, if the audience was truly exhausted, we wouldn't be seeing new people come through our door all the time. One of our members has subscriptions to seven theaters. One of our phone respondants said he sees about 100 shows a year! (I dropped him from the average as a clear outlier). Every year, about 20,000 people come into Theater Wit who have never been here before. That's not a over-extended audience. That's a vibrant marketplace.

So we need to think about what conversation we're having with our audience through direct and broadcast marketing channels. Maybe selling plays is the wrong thing to be selling.

"Alison" commented on Mortar's blog, in part saying:

Totally agree with so much here! My husband and I love theatre and hardly ever patronize smaller companies – usually only when a friend is involved. For me, I am SO overwhelmed in life being pulled I all directions that shopping around for a company to support or even a show to attend is hard… I feel pathetic saying “make it easy for me” but, well, there it is.

 

This really hit home for me. There's something true in what Alison says about the multiplicity of choice as a detriment to theater. Not in the tired old "supply-demand" economics front, but in a human psychology front. The problem with 80+ plays on a particular weekend is primarily a selection issue. I strongly recommend everyone take a look at "The Paradox of Choice," a TED talk by Barry Schultz:

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

If you aren't video patient (I'm not), Schwartz discusses that a multiplicity of choice provides a barrier to both consumption and satisfaction. The question becomes not "what should I see?" (difficult to answer in Chicago), but also "how can I figure out the *best* thing to see" (an impossible question to answer). Frustration leads to passivity and a lot of activatable audience like Alison miss out.

And what tools do we as an industry provide to help people make this impossible determination? Realistically, a few sentences, perhaps a paragraph at most. Sometimes it's an edited review, or a blurb in print, or a link on a listing/aggregation site.

Occasionally it's what fits on a postcard, or the first paragraph of an email.

Or a top ten list with four words.

And don't talk to me about video, I've seen my videos and your videos, good and bad, and also looked at the YouTube viewing statistics for them. It's not pretty. If the Goodman Theatre can only get 1,200 views with a star-studded, professionally produced video with Brian Dennehy and Nathan Lane, I'm not spending the money to play in that space until I have a *really good* idea. And, honestly, who is going to watch two dozen video previews in Chicago to make a determination? In that amount of time, that prospect could see an entire freaking play.

If there's a supply/demand factor at work, it's a "attention vs. time" problem. I would argue is a new factor of modern life and no good whining about it. On one hand, we can make so much more information available to the public. On the other, the public can't actually consume it.

So, I am now considering the idea that marketing shows needs to be a relatively minor part of our outreach. What do the most successful theaters in town have? How do they get that attention? Because believe me, It's not actually with money. Goodman and Steppenwolf have the exact same problem about communication bandwidth and audience attention that we all have. They have better tools and larger staffs, but also higher requirements for return. Timeline is similar, although scaled down accordingly, but hugely successful and a great model.

What Timeline and the other mid- to large- size theaters have built is trust. Not in a particular show, but in their identity as a whole. Consistency is a part of it, but so is time. This is probably Mortar's biggest problem. They're new. Right Brain Project is new. The Wit is new.

This is our challenge: enhance and build trust while helping audiences cope with the multiplicity of choice dilemma. It was when I first heard Schwartz' talk that I seriously considered our membership program, which is designed specifically to change the choice question and encourage people to find new companies and artists. I hope we will encourage trust through our own production standards and our curatorial interest in the companies that use our facility.

This next season, we're going to spend a lot more effort marketing the entire experience of coming to Theater Wit, and not focus on just our own shows. I believe that we can help everyone have stronger attended shows and find new audiences. We're going to talk about opportunity and Chicago's theater artists and experimentation and the joys of an evening out and uniqueness.

But in this city? In this millennium? Marketing just a show? Heartbreak awaits.

 

What's real on stage?

This last week a theatre/journalism firestorm erupted when This American Life retracted a rebroadcast they did of Mike Daisey's monologue, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs. TAL discovered that not all of the events described by Mike had actually happened to him. When questioned by the factcheckers, Mike then lied about a number of the specifics. TAL then broadcast an hour-long retraction, which focused on an interview with Mike about why he lied, followed by a sequence on Foxconn manufacturing from a NY Times reporter.

Much has been twittered and blogged about Mike's personal culpability, the impact for political theatre today, etc. A lot of discussion has circled around his intent. I think we can only guess at what Daisey was thinking or what the future holds for him and this piece. Most of the socialsphere seem to agree that the widespread impact of Mike's powerful piece has now been dramatically undermined. Some have suggested that he can't perform at all anymore. The latter position seems more tied to journalists and tech bloggers than theater practitioners as they are contextualizing Mike's professional sin in the context of professional journalism.

But of course, context is everything. There is a sequence in the TAL retraction show where Mike asks to return for a followup interview. In this post-interview, Mike says that he stands by the work and believes in its power and reality, and that his key mistake was lying to translate it into the journalistic context of a Public Radio broadcast. I believed this, but it's also the sequence that seems to stick in the craw of many people I've talked to.

And here's the interchange that stuck with me so strongly (from the transcript):

Mike Daisey: ... I stand by it as a theatrical work. I stand by how it makes people see and care about the situation that’s happening there. I stand by it in the theater. And I regret, deeply, that it was put into this context on your show.

Ira Glass: Are you going to change the way that you label this in the theater, so that the audience in the theater knows that this isn’t strictly speaking a work of truth but in fact what they’re seeing really is a work of fiction that has some true elements in it.

Mike Daisey: Well, I don’t know that I would say in a theatrical context that it isn’t true. I believe that when I perform it in a theatrical context in the theater that when people hear the story in those terms that we have different languages for what the truth means.

Ira Glass: I understand that you believe that but I think you’re kidding yourself in the way that normal people who go to see a person talk – people take it as a literal truth. I thought that the story was literally true seeing it in the theater. Brian, who’s seen other shows of yours, thought all of them were true. I saw your nuclear show, I thought that was completely true. I thought it was true because you were on stage saying ‘this happened to me.’ I took you at your word.

Mike Daisey: I think you can trust my word in the context of the theater. And how people see it -

Ira Glass: I find this to be a really hedgy answer. I think it’s OK for somebody in your position to say it isn’t all literally true, know what I mean, feel like actually it seems like it’s honest labeling, and I feel like that’s what’s actually called for at this point, is just honest labeling. Like, you make a nice show, people are moved by it, I was moved by it and if it were labeled honestly, I think everybody would react differently to it.

Mike Daisey: I don’t think that label covers the totality of what it is.

Ira Glass: That label – fiction?

Mike Daisey: Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important.

Ira Glass: I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’

Mike Daisey: I really regret putting the show on This American Life

I don't know how "normal" a worldview is. I do know that one of the most essential qualities of the theatre is the core dichotomy between artiface and humanity. There is an implicit assumption of the suspension of disbelief in the theater. When a gifted actor sobs on stage, he/she is actually crying. With genuine feelings, honestly expressed. AND we are being lied to. We want this; we need it. An announcement at the top of the show that "this is fiction" changes the experience. Even if we know it is fiction. (I think there are other ways to accomplish this besides a disclaimer, of course.)

I saw the show at the Public a few weeks ago, and choked up in the now infamous "It's a kind of magic" scene, which is an amazingly effective moment on stage. I thought a lot about this. Was the power of the moment solely due to my perception of it as literal truth? That certainly punched it up; it made the scene inarguable.

But, if I knew the scene was fiction, how would it have felt?

On the one hand, I would have been given an escape hatch if the moment was too painful. On the other hand, I’m in the theatre to have that emotional experience. Would I have taken that hatch, and how much does the piece rely on an implicit “documentary” authority? A friend I saw the play with said the experience was ruined for her. She felt that the specific call to action of the piece made it expressly political theater (which she normally avoids) and felt that him acting as a reliable witness was the key thing that made the play work for her. Interestingly, she identified the touching the iPad scene as fictional but was unbothered. She is actually upset about the contextual wrapper around the event which owes a lot to its airing on public radio.

My experience was different. I went back and listened to the broadcast. I thought the moment was still powerful. Even knowing it was fiction, it brings these tensions of ownership and privilege and indebtedness and responsibility together in a powerful moment. Even fictionally. This is the second show of Mike’s I’ve seen, and what I’ve admired in his work was his genuine passion, and how it creates a storyteller’s joyful excess in the room that can be as offputting as it is engaging. (For example, a side rant during the performance of Agony suggested that genuine theater was actually happening and that most of us have never seen it before. That distracted me for several minutes, far more than the possibility that every event I was hearing about may not be literally true, even if it was emotionally true.)

Because that’s the license we grant the theater. The ability to emphasize, distort and color life to help us focus on a deeper truth. It is, ironically, also what This American Life does so well every week. TAL edits its work very brilliantly to create emotional impact. Because of its position on Public Radio, it must be excruciatingly careful in its editing to walk an ethical line. They are as manipulative as any piece of theater; it's why I love the show. To compensate, they must insist on total factual accuracy. No one, including Mike, argues that his piece didn’t cross TAL’s journalism lines. Again, context is everything.

Agony has also been called to question by Mike’s inclusion of a meeting with a worker poisoned with Hexane gas. (This is a factual event, it just didn’t happen to Mike.) One of the challenges that Mike has in constructing a monologue is the question of immediacy, what he calls "unpacking the narrative complexities." His pieces always cast himself as the core character. Is this transposition inappropriate for the theater? Of course not. Anyone who’s tried to do anything on stage knows that the theater is about immediacy. Things have to happen to the people in front of us, without that, there is no kinesthetic response in the audience, and we don’t experience it in our hearts and minds.

Ira calls Mike out for being “hedgy” but I think that response is ingenuous. Radio journalism gets its power from hearing information first hand. This is rarely an option for the live theatre. Ira may assume that If someone on stage says "this happened to me" that it is an experience functionally identical to what happens on This American Life, but I don't think they are the same. At all.

But of course, the piece was billed specifically as "non-fiction" at several venues, so I have huge sympathy for Ira and my friend, who described her post-revelation experience as "having been Fox Newsed." On the other hand, the piece did make her care, and she still does. She's just angry about the delivery mechanism. If she had been taken to a play "based on real events" rather than "non-fiction" her experience would have been more positive. She could have owned the insights in the piece rather than feeling manipulated into it. Perhaps no label should have been applied, allowing the audience to build their own beliefs. Who knows?

Despite these errors, Mike created a vivid and exciting piece of theater. Like him, I might regret its broadcast by TAL, but I think it's important that we not throw the baby out with the bath water.

What I thought was most effective about The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs was the way the piece conflated the larger questions of global manufacturing and workers’ rights with our own personal relationship with that technology. The piece was more personal than polemic, and its core question was presented intimately and theatrically. Daisey made me consider my relationship to these distant places as a consumer. I'm typing this on an iPad. I might never use one again without thinking of the human effort required to create this object. And that is a truth, theatrical and factual, that can't be erased by controversy.

 

New Year’s Resolution

Every January we emerge, blinking like naked mole rats in the harsh light of day from the holiday season. Every Christmas, the building is packed and this year was particularly dramatic, as not only did 3,500 of you come to see Santaland Diaries (a new record), but Spring Awakening, Silent Night of the Living Dead and The Reindeer Monologues were at near capacity for the last two weeks of December. Add the two repertory works performed by the striking Noemi Schloesser from Salomee Speelt, and I half expected to return to a smoking crater in the ground when I opened up the building on the 2nd of January. And we weren't the only ones near-living at the Wit, some of our members were here every weekend in the month of December just to see everything.

But of course, the holiday season passes and we're all supposed to take stock and consider our resolutions for a new year. My track record for personal New Year Resolutions is only about 50/50. The things I'm interested in at the beginning of each year tend to fall by the wayside as I chase new, shiny dreams. But the theater can make some resolutions as well. We've been in full operation for about 18 months, and I do think it's time to make a resolution or two. Here's our first:

Figure out where we are going. All of us.

This one is top of my list. And it comes directly our of our history, so a little examination of the past is probably useful in looking ahead to the future.

One of the key design decisions I made when organizing Theater Wit was that it was a theater with a space. I've written about why I feel that's critical for a theater. And then we, well, did it. Now, building out a space is famous for totally commandeering a theater's resources and energy. Mike Daisey talks, to great effect, about how making buildings destroys the integrity of producing organizations. In his gripping solo piece, How Theater Failed America, he has a fantastic story about how the pressures of running a large institutional theater permanently changes the type of work that can be presented there, often relegating the very art that created the institution to a small studio space ghettoized from the mainstage.

Now, I saw Daisey's piece one week after we opened our new theater. Which, in retrospect, was just as well, since it would have FREAKED ME OUT. But I think, in the spirit of our new year's resolutions, it's worth looking back at our first eighteen months and see what happened.

The biggest advantage we've realized is in gaining freedom to program. Far from changing or restricting our programming, having a home has enabled me to persue our artistic mission more truly. When we shifted from place to place, we spent all our effort telling you where we were, instead of telling you about the work. Settling down has enabled me to focus on our play selection, our deepening relationship with some of today's most important playwrights and tuning our work for a specific impact in a specific room. I feel much more freedom to offer work that isn't specifically "marketable" or has a great elevator pitch or tag line, because you, our audience, are coming to our shows much much more often.

I think some of this is directly attributable to the space and our new operations, where we did some counter-intuitive things.

• We shrank. We had been producing in a larger house. The material costs of our productions shrank by about 18% and our rental cost dropped by about 20%. We put that money directly into performer salaries and adding preview performances which has allowed us to improve the quality of our work tremendously.

• We shared. The model of our new building was always based around a shared space that other companies could rent and produce entire seasons in. More importantly, we resolved not to finance our own productions with rental income from the theater space. This was a risky strategy because we didn't know if we would get lost in our own space. And it entailed a huge investment of time and money without direct recompense. How do we best support work by other companies while still maintaining a direct relationship with you, our audience? So we decided to share the audience as well. We started programs like the FlexPass and Membership cards to actively encourage our audience to explore other companies' work. Again, we run these programs at cost so we don't profit financially from them, but we deepen our audiences' relationship with us and the visiting companies simultaneously. We redesigned our website to help audiences find the amazing variety of work produced in the building. And it seems to be working. Last season, twenty five thousand people came to Theater Wit. Three thousand of them attended shows by two different companies. A growing number of members attend our theater two to three times a month. Single ticket sales for our own shows are increasing 15% show over show for the last eighteen months. This year, 18,000 people have come to the Wit in the last three months.

• We stopped discounting For our own shows (we don't impose any pricing practices on renting companies), our new ticket model releases tickets to each show in blocks, starting at $18. Once the $18 tickets are sold, the next block goes on sale for $24 and so forth and so on. I wanted to ensure that prices were egalitarian while still making sure we kept ourselves operationally afloat. Rather than subject people to a crazy hunt for discount codes and discount ticket mailing services and sites, anyone can see any one of our shows for a low price with a reservation far enough in advance. And members get to see multiple plays even cheaper if they wish. We do still release tickets for same day sales at the HotTix booth to support that community of theatergoers and the League of Chicago Theaters. We also offer discount tickets to students under 25 at the door. Apart from that, there are no special offers, no deals. And both audience size and revenues have increased since we started this policy.
  
  
• Bring ticketing in house. The current trend for theaters is to outsource their ticketing systems to third parties. We wanted you to talk to our own staff about all the shows, and we also wanted to get rid of aftermarket ticketing fees. This has taken a huge effort of time and money, but we can now staff a box office by someone who's actually eaten at the restaurants he recommends, who's seen the plays, etc. And we can do it without charging you facility fees, service fees, credit card processing fees, renovation fees, etc.

When I look at the company's history over the last seven years, I see so many of our decisions made in response to a key operational concern: We're making a space. From the conception of our company, starting with a home base was a given. This affected a huge range of decisions, from frequency of production to type of programming. It's hard to over-estimate how critical the long-term plan of building a home was in every aspect of our operations.

Now, of course, we have a home. And, unlike most of the dire warnings about how space confines you, having the physical building completed is wildly freeing for us. We have a much broader range of options available at every turn. The loss of the build-a-space priority (and the gain of have-a-space) has multiplied our options immeasurably.

But all this means we have to refocus as an organization. We are refocusing on our mission, our values and our artistic sensibility, and we need to do it company-wide, from the board down to the interns. Here are the questions we are looking to answer this year.

What is Theater Wit?

Who are we and what do we want to become next?

How does our space and our programming enhance our community of theaters? of audience?

I can't answer those questions in a bubble. So, we are doing some formal strategic planning sessions with the staff and the board. We're also just sitting at the bar and hashing these questions out. And we are going to our audience and other theaters and finding out what they have to say. Heck, I'm going to this blog, so if you have any ideas about these questions, sound off in the comments. I'd love to hear from you.