Censorship on School Stages

 

[On 2 May 2023, the Washington Post reported:

Following a record-setting surge in efforts to change curriculums and ban books at schools nationwide, the education culture war has now reached the stage. [S]chool administrators have intervened to nix or alter school theatrical productions deemed objectionable . . . .

[I’ve blogged about other instances of this assault on free artistic expression numerous times on Rick On Theater.  Sometimes I addressed it directly, and sometimes I address a closely related subject, such as arts funding or arts education. 

[In any event, I’ve accumulated a mini-series of posts concerning the treatment of theater and the arts in our society.  Here’s a list of the main articles in that series:

• “Degrading the Arts” (13 August 2009)

• ”The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010)

• “Disappearing Theater” (19 July 2010)

• “‘The Arts Are Under Attack (Again!)’” by Paul Molloy [Allegro] (22 May 2011)

• “Culture War” (6 February 2014)

• “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux” (13 February 2015)

[Now I’m adding a new post.  This time I’m addressing the situation reported in the Washington Post that I quoted above.  There are many such articles in the media and statements by concerned organizations such as the National Coalition Against Censorship and the International Thespian Society/Educational Theatre Association; another sample is “On School Stages, Politics Plays a Leading Role” by Michael Paulson in Section A of the New York Times of 4 July 2023.]

The modern culture war that reached its peak of intensity in the 1980s and ’90s has reappeared from time to time over the last decades.  It’s back again now with the force of a Category 3 hurricane, largely fed by the acute divisiveness of our politics, the campaign season, and the combative jousting of the candidates, especially among Republicans.

This perfect political storm has hit school arts programs with growing force, particularly high school theater presentations.  School theater has been scrutinized often for age-appropriateness, and lately, progressive and liberal students and parents have protested against plays they feel portray women and people of color poorly. 

Plays such as 1971’s Grease, set in 1959 and criticized for the way the female character of Sandy Dumbrowski changes in the musical in accordance with Danny Zuko’s preferences at the end of the musical, and Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman’s You Can’t Take It With You from 1936, facing objections that the character Penny Sycamore is dumbed-down and portrayed as a cute little lady who doesn’t address any of her issues, have become targets of sexism complaints.

In March 2021, two seniors at Hunterdon Central Regional High School raised questions about racially insensitive content in the classic 1949 musical South Pacific, selected as the spring musical, that prompted the school to change its plans for the student production.  The students pointed out issues with the stereotypical portrayal of Asian characters in the play and raised concerns related to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes at the school and across the country.

The current surge of opposition, however, is coming largely from parents and school officials on the right.  The objections are largely the same as those raised against books the censors want removed from school libraries and material they don’t want taught or discussed in classes.  The schools’ selections for productions, some chosen by the students themselves, are being rejected outright or forced to undergo bowdlerization.

In April 2007, the principal of Wilton High School in Wilton, Connecticut, cancelled Voices in Conflict, an Iraq War play drawn by the students themselves from first-hand accounts of soldiers. The cancellation was due to questions of political balance and context.  One letter was from a 19-year-old graduate of Wilton High who’d been killed in combat a few months earlier.

In February 2008, the school superintendent in La Grande, Oregon, cancelled the La Grande High School student production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a 1993 play that premièred at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company and played Off-Broadway in New York City in 1995-96, winning the 1996 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play and garnering Martin the Outer Critics Circle’s John Gassner Award for playwriting.  Picasso is a comedy-fantasy set in 1905 at a Parisian café where Pablo Picasso and Albert Einstein, both in their 20’s, engage each other in discussions about art and relativity.  Objections were raised to some of the adult themes and content, notably sexual references and simulated drinking.

In March 2014, the school superintendent in Plaistow, New Hampshire, canceled Timberlane Regional High School’s planned production of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Tony Award-winning musical Sweeney Todd (Best Musical, 1979), citing “discomfort” with the violence of the story.  The production was of a school edition of the musical Sondheim had authorized which tones down some material difficult for high school audiences and performers.

In July 2014, the administration of the South Williamsport, Pennsylvania, Junior/Senior High School canceled a planned 2015 production of Spamalot due to its “homosexual themes.”  The 2005 Best Musical Tony and Outstanding New Musical Drama Desk Award winner, based on the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is an irreverent parody of the Arthurian legend.

In October 2014, the Catawba County school administration in Maiden, North Carolina, announced the cancellation of the student production of John Cariani’s Almost, Maine at Maiden High School.  Almost, Maine, which premiered in 2004 at the Portland Stage Company in Maine, is a romantic comedy that depicts multiple love stories, including one between two men.  It was selected by the American National Theatre as one of the most outstanding regional theatre productions of the 2004-2005 season.

In October 2021, drama students at Hillsboro High School in Hillsboro, Ohio, were forced to cancel performances of She Kills Monsters by Qui Nguyen, winner of the 2013 AATE (American Alliance for Theatre & Education) Distinguished Play Award. The play, which premiered at the Flea Theater in New York City in 2011, tells the story of a teenage girl who finds her deceased sister’s Dungeons & Dragons notebook.  Among her discoveries is that her sister may have had a relationship with another girl.  The Hillsboro production was to have been of a version of the play for audiences aged 11 and up, but the schools superintendent announced, “The fall play has been canceled this year because the play was not appropriate for our K-12 audience.”

In April 2022, after the opening performance of the Turlock High School production of Be More Chill by Joe Tracz and Joe Iconis (based on the novel by Ned Vizzini), the administration of the Turlock Unified School District decided abruptly to cancel the rest of the pay’s run.  A spokesperson for the Turlock, California, schools cited “concerns that the content was too mature for a general audience that includes all age levels” as the reason for the cancellation.  Be More Chill, commissioned and originally produced in 2015 by the Two River Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, follows a teenager who takes a pill that transforms him from loner to cool.  The musical, a 2018 Off-Broadway and 2019 Broadway hit, was nominated for the 2019 Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding Musical.

In January 2023, the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, abruptly canceled a student production of Paula Vogel’s Indecent (Broadway, 2017; Best Play Tony nominee), citing sexual content.  A Duval County school district spokesperson declared that the decision was made because the production “contains adult sexual dialog that is inappropriate for student cast members and student audiences.”  Because Vogel’s play is about the 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch’s God of Vengeance, for which the producer and cast were arrested and convicted of obscenity, Indecent is a play about censorship that was itself censored.

In February, Indiana’s Northwest Allen County Schools pulled the plug on the Carroll High School production of Adam Szymkowicz’s 2017 play Marian, or The True Tale of Robin Hood, a gender-bending retelling of the Robin Hood legend, after parents raised objections to its depiction of a same-sex couple and a nonbinary character.

In March, Iowa’s South Tama County Community School District halted a performance of the play August: Osage County at South Tama County High School over fears that its treatment of suicide, addiction, and racism was inappropriate for school-aged children.  Tracy Letts’s 2007 play is a Pulitzer Prize-winner, a 2008 Tony awardee for Best Play, and a 2008 Drama Desk Award recipient for Outstanding Play.

Also in March, the Northern Lebanon School Board in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania, denied approval for a 2024 high school production of The Addams Family (Broadway, 2010-11; Outstanding Musical Drama Desk Award nominee), labeled “the number one school musical in the country,” because, the board averred, it “promotes bad values.”  The board president said, “The fundamental thematic theme, for me that I could see, was moving towards darkness, embracing death, embracing despair, embracing the pain.”

On 4 July, Independence Day, the New York Times reported:

School plays—long an important element of arts education and a formative experience for creative adolescents—have become the latest battleground at a moment when America’s political and cultural divisions have led to a spike in book bans, conflicts over how race and sexuality are taught in schools, and efforts by some politicians to restrict drag performances and transgender health care for children and teenagers.

According to the National Coalition Against Censorship, “Censorship happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their political or moral values on others by suppressing words, images, or ideas that they find offensive.” 

The First Amendment to our Constitution—Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . .—is supposed to protect artistic expression.  It’s significant, though, that the First Amendment constrains only government action—federal, state, and local—not private conduct.  State-supported (that is, ‘public’) schools, whether primary and secondary schools or state colleges and universities, are arms of the government, however.  All the examples I cited above occurred in public schools.

As I declared on Rick On Theater back in 2010 in ”The First Amendment & The Arts,” I’m fundamentally a First Amendment absolutist.  In that post, I quoted one of my favorite theater lines, from Peter Stone and Sherman Edwards’s Tony-winning (Best Musical) 1969 Broadway musical, 1776.  

The character Stephen Hopkins (1707-85), delegate from Rhode Island to the Continental Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence, declares, when asked for his vote for or against an open debate on independence:

Well, I’ll tell y’—in all my years I never heard, seen, nor smelled an issue that was so dangerous it couldn’t be talked about.  Hell yes, I’m for debatin’ anything . . .!

That’s exactly how I feel about free speech.  In this democracy, we shouldn’t be constrained from talking about anything.  That includes ideas other people don’t like.  

The only proper response to speech we don’t like is more speech.  Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941; Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States: 1916-39) wrote that in 1927 (Whitney v. California).  You don’t cut people off when you don’t like what they’re saying; you debate them.  (It’s known as “The Counterspeech Doctrine.”)

Schools and school districts present many justifications for censoring high school theater productions.  A 1 September 2022 article on Dramatics.com, the website for Dramatics, the publication of the International Thespian Society (part of the Educational Theatre Association), explains that the schools “might find the language, lyrics or actions performed on stage too mature for teenage audiences.  Or they might find the story’s explorations of certain themes or issues too controversial.”  

Students, as citizens of the United States, have a constitutional right to free speech and free expression.  A school, especially a primary or secondary school, might present an exceptional case, however, because of the ages of the audience and the participants and because the population is somewhat captive. 

Schools are charged with supervising and overseeing the appropriateness of the material to which their students are exposed.  A decision to control content in order to create a production that doesn’t raise controversy, or to suppress students’ views is, however, improper. 

While school officials have considerable discretion in controlling school-sponsored activity, there are limits when it comes to suppressing non-disruptive political expression.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1969 (Tinker v. Des Moines School District) that students have the right to wear black armbands to protest the Vietnam war, a view that was at the time highly controversial. 

Furthermore, the court observed in 1989 that “public educators must accommodate some student expression even if it offends them or offers views or values that contradict those the school wishes to inculcate” (Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier). 

The disruptive/non-disruptive dichotomy makes this a somewhat hazy issue.  The First Amendment gives school authorities some protection to limit speech that could potentially cause disruption to the school.  Legitimately, this can only apply to an actual disruption, not a fabricated one used as cover to suppress material that someone just doesn’t like.

If the script has problems ranging from bias to the examination of difficult topics, then you write or speak about alternative viewpoints; you argue with the play, but you don’t censor it.  That’s the lesson the school ought to be teaching.  Not censorship and suppression.

Howard Sherman, a national advocate against the censorship of school theater, declared in a speech to the Florida Association for Theatre Education in October 2017 that if students

have the chance to tell stories that engage with what is difficult in the world, indeed with what may be wrong in the world, alongside telling stories that bring joy and entertainment into the world, then their work in theater makes them better actors, writers, directors, designers and technicians.  But it also makes them better people and better citizens, with knowledge, gifts and understanding that will be of value to them whatever they may be in life.

The award-winning children’s writer and author of more than 30 books on education- and justice-related topics Sean McCollum has asserted:

Teens, as a matter of course, are hungry to explore and develop their understanding of complex, mature subjects of love, loss, and the harsher lessons of life.  These may be sensitive themes, but coming to grips with them is the difference between becoming an adult and remaining a child.

Done with thoughtfulness and compassion—and the leadership of caring adults—theater has a unique knack for creating a safe space for young people to do just that, as cast, crew, and audience.

High school is a peculiar community.  Chronologically, the age-range isn’t very wide, but intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically, it’s vast.  The high school population starts with 14-year-old 9th-graders, most of whom are still children, barely adolescents; it ends with 17- and 18-year-olds who are nearly adults—some are adults.  Many can vote and most can drive, go to the most restricted films, sign contracts, get married, and enlist in the military.

This makes determining age-appropriateness a challenge for school authorities, but it mustn’t be an excuse for simply closing down plays (or banning books, cutting off discussions) that touch on difficult or controversial subjects.  These ideas and issues are all around us all the time; we can’t avoid them, like it or not.  Some of them are even vital in our society.

Labeling cancellation and censorship as protecting the children is, in reality, keeping them ignorant.  It stops any discussion of hard topics, whether sexuality or bigotry or violence, from occurring.  Remember that arts in the schools are supposed to be educational experiences, not just entertainment.  If a play raises uncomfortable issues, teach to them, discuss them in class, schedule an assembly on the subjects and bring in knowledgeable and articulate people to explain the issues, give their views and arguments, answer questions.

Avoiding sensitive subjects altogether, which is what censorship accomplishes, leads to a population of ill-informed citizens.  Talking about them, especially in a scholastic environment, isn’t the same as endorsing them.  But people, including adolescents, should know what they’re accepting or rejecting.

When I taught writing in college—freshmen, so only a year older than the audience we’re dealing with here—I taught a unit on Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, which was part of the writing course curriculum.  Now, I’m not a proponent of Marxism or communism; I’ve been to both the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, and they’re not systems under which I’d want to live.  But the classes were about argument and the devices writers have available to propel their positions—and which ones play more on emotion than reason.

My point was that you don’t have to accept Marx’s conclusions—I don’t—but you should know what his line of reasoning was.  (This was the early and mid-1980s, when the Soviet Union was still ascendant.)  After all, he did manage to persuade a significant number of people around the globe.

A few years later, I was teaching 9th-grade English in a New Jersey high school.  I was new to teaching high school and, though I’d been teaching college writing for several years, my field was actually theater, and Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s 1955 play Inherit the Wind was on the curriculum.  I knew the play, and as I had a theater background, I decided I’d be more comfortable with a play than a piece of prose literature as a text, so I started there.  (Later in the year, I taught Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sun from 1959 for similar reasons.)

Now, Inherit the Wind was on the school’s approved reading list, so there was no push-back from the English Department or the school administration, but I did run into some difficulties with students whose parents rejected evolution, the subject at the center of the play’s drama, on religious grounds. 

I didn’t teach evolution per se; this was an English class, not a science class, after all.  But, as I suggested just now, I contend that everyone is free to accept or reject an argument as she or he sees fit, but one should know what the argument is, what the supporters and opponents believe, when making that choice. 

In the case of Inherit the Wind, since the play’s about whether or not a teacher in Tennessee in 1925 could legally teach evolution, and the trial in the play presents arguments for and against the constitutionality of the state law forbidding this, readers or viewers of the play should understand both sides of the debate.

I didn’t always win that argument, but I still maintain it’s valid.  Willful ignorance is not a worthy goal for a school or a society.  A mature mind questions received knowledge.  A maturing mind starts learning to do this in adolescence.  (I take my lead on this assertion from the work of the educational psychologist William G. Perry, Jr. [1913-98], plus my own observation of the cognitive development of students through their school years.)

Mind you, ‘question’ does not mean ‘reject’!  But if society’s leaders—in this instance, educational authorities—freeze the epistemological process or prevent it from happening at all, which is what censorship does, we end up with Nineteen Eighty-Four and Fahrenheit 451.

Few school authorities—principals, superintendents, school boards—are prepared to stand up to community protests over a controversial play.  Tackling controversial issues is, however, the mission of art, not least of theater; plays shouldn’t just entertain but also sometimes disturb and provoke.  

School administrators have come to expect that anything even slightly provocative will lead to complaints.  They’ve also learned that one person’s complaint—known as the “heckler’s veto,” a term coined in 1965 by law professor Harry Kalven, Jr. (1914-74)—can succeed in getting a work removed.  If those with the power to censor keep cancelling material that might spark protests, we’re going to see and hear fewer and fewer challenging and meaningful plays, books, and discussions.

Is that what we want?  Is that what our democracy needs?

[The high school stage is the largest theatrical stage in the U.S. today.  Students’ first encounters with high school theater productions are likely to be also their first encounters with censorship.  Is that what we want our young people to learn in our schools—that when we run into something we don’t want to hear, or don’t want others to hear, we shut it down?

[High school art, music, and drama programs train sophisticated consumers.  That, in turn, stimulates adventurous and meaningful art forms.  Censorship of high school theater productions rarely occurs in a vacuum and usually reflects an attitude towards other forms of artistic and intellectual expression. 

[This generates wide socio-cultural repercussions in the community.  Accepting censorship of high school theater creates the conditions for the marginalization of all serious art and the discussion of important issues and ideas.  Examining those ideas is necessary for democracy to work—for all if us, not just the few who can manipulate the system.

[Children learn in different ways.  Some assimilate information best when they read it; some need to see or hear what they’re studying; and some learn by doing, making something with their hands or maneuvering their bodies.  The arts, and particularly theater, does all these—and all of them are necessary to make a production.

[Making theater is a study in problem-solving.  Each participant will have to figure out the best way to do any number of tasks in order for there to be a show.  But the answers don’t come out of a book, and the teacher/director doesn’t necessarily have the solution. 

[Theater is an endeavor where the right answer is “whatever works”—often “whatever works for me.”  Or, “whatever works for me in this instance.”  In order to arrive at that answer, the artist or technician has to look at all the possibilities, the materials on hand, and the goal to which he or she is aiming—and then choose. 

[Studies show that students’ grades and test scores rise when they’re exposed to the arts.  The American Council on the Arts asserts that when children do arts, they’re doing not only problem-solving, but also critical thinking and learning about other civilizations. 

[In my Rick On Theater essay “The Relation of Theater to Other Disciplines” (21 July 2011), I argued that an arts experience in school, specifically theater, benefits the learning of other subjects.  My premise was:

Theater has a relation to other academic disciplines such that theater can be used to inform and enhance the learning of those other subjects.  They are cognate fields . . . .

[Diminishing that experience, diluting it by cancelling challenging productions, invalidates that cognate learning path.  The censors are hobbling their students.

[There’s one benefit of theater in the school, one that’s enhanced when the experience excites all the students’ receptors—the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and critical—of which I have not spoken.  I’ve studiously avoided it, in fact, because I argued it in another post, “Degrading the Arts.” 

[An exciting and provocative experience of theater in school, as either a participant or a spectator, builds future audiences and a citizenry that values our artistic and cultural heritage.  A student who’s been exposed to art, theater, dance, or music as a youngster and is encouraged to experience and enjoy this part of life as an adult is less likely to be sympathetic to the forces that oppose free artistic expression.]

 

"The Actors' Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City"

by Stefanos Chen 

[At the start of last month, I republished several articles on Rick On Theater about the strike by the Writers Guild of America against film and television producers.  On 1 June, I posted “The 2023 Writers’ Strike,” comprised of an interview by Geoff Bennett from PBS Newshour and a TV report by Lindsay Lowe on NBC’s Today show.  On 4 June, I ran “‘AI in the Arts Is the Destruction of the Film Industry. We Can’t Go Quietly,’” an op-ed by filmmaker, actress, and writer Justine Bateman in Newsweek. I wanted to lay out the reasons for the writers’ shut-down of the production of films and scripted television programs.

[On 14 July, SAG-AFTRA, the union representing TV and film actors, joined the writers on the picket lines when its negotiations with the producers’ organization failed to reach an agreement.  For the same reasons that I ran the writers’ strike posts, I’m now reposting “The Actors’ Strike Dims a Bright Spot For New York City” by Stefanos Chen from the New York Times of 22 July 2023 (sec. B: “Business”/”Sports”).]

Tens of thousands of behind-the-scenes workers, in solidarity with striking actors and writers, are bracing for what could be a monthslong standoff with the studios.

By day, Ryan Quinlan handles the desk lamps, sconces and chandeliers that appear in films and television shows. At night, he rents out props from his Brooklyn warehouse, like an Egyptian sarcophagus and a taxidermy leopard. On the side, he acts and does stunts.

All of that work came to an abrupt halt last week, when the Hollywood actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, with 36,000 members in the New York area, announced a strike for the first time in 43 years, in pursuit of better pay and safeguards against artificial intelligence. It joined the screenwriters union, the Writers Guild of America, which has been on strike since May.

“This shut down all of my streams of income,” Mr. Quinlan, 44, said. “There is nobody not touched.”

While Los Angeles is the epicenter for film and TV in the United States, New York has long staked its claim as Hollywood East, and the standoff is already taking a toll on tens of thousands of workers in one of the city’s fastest-growing industries.

But it’s not just actors and writers who are out of work. With both the studios and unions expecting a drawn-out battle, everyone from makeup artists and costume designers to carpet dealers and foam sculptors is preparing to perhaps go for months without working, at a time when many are still recovering from the pandemic. [Styrofoam is one of the most popular sculpting mediums for the props artisan.  It’s used for crafting 3D props and set pieces, and commercial display items.]

“For the people who are your everyday, technical workers, it’s going to be devastating,” said Cathy Marshall, the head of the East Coast chapter of the Set Decorators Society of America, a large trade group.

Even so, she and most workers in the industry support the actors’ demands, which focus in part on their contention that union members are not receiving a fair share of the studios’ streaming revenue. The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees [IATSE], a union representing more than 168,000 behind-the-scenes workers, declared last week its “stalwart support” for the actors’ and writers’ strikes.

The actors join a growing national wave of labor groups, including hotel workers, writers and delivery workers, who have demanded higher wages and benefits in recent months.

The strikes could have an outsize economic effect on New York City, where film and TV productions in 2019 supported more than 185,000 jobs, including work in ancillary industries like legal services, truck rental and food catering, according to the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment.

From 2004 to 2019, thanks in part to New York State tax incentives for production companies, the industry directly added 35,000 jobs, outpacing the citywide job growth rate.

In 2022, the latest year data was available, the average salary for jobs in the industry in New York City was $173,500, or 49 percent higher than the average private work force job, said James Parrott, the director of economic and fiscal policy at the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School. Many actors and technicians are paid well below the average, he said, and lower-paid independent contractors are not included in the average.

But with all but a handful of film and TV projects paused indefinitely, anxiety is rising.

Jessica Heyman owns Art for Film, a specialty prop house in the Brooklyn Navy Yard that brokers the rights to use art in film and TV productions, ranging from enormous paintings to children’s refrigerator doodles.

Her company provided almost all the art displayed in the headquarters of Waystar Royco, the corporate backdrop for the hit drama “Succession,” according to George DeTitta Jr., the show’s set decorator.

After a slowdown in demand that started before the strikes, Ms. Heyman said she was worried about the lease she signed for a bigger warehouse in April.

“It’s the worst possible timing,” she said. “I haven’t been sleeping much.”

A bit of help has come from superfans of “Succession” — like one client from Oslo, who ordered an abstract geometric print shown during a confrontation between the characters Shiv and Matsson — but it’s not enough.

Instead, she is looking to sublet a portion of her 3,500-square-foot space or do some art consulting work for hotels.

Until recently, the industry has also been a boon to more workaday businesses. Christina Constantinou and her mother, Eleanor Kazas, the owners of Carpet Time, a flooring store in Woodside, Queens, gradually moved from a 2,000-square-foot shop to a 20,000-square-foot showroom, thanks to film industry clients.

“Nobody wants to come to a store and buy anymore,” Ms. Constantinou said — except set decorators looking for the perfect mise-en-scène. “It’s the majority of our business.”

Her clients are connoisseurs of what she calls “beautiful ugly”: a kitschy casino-themed carpet with a playing card motif used on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”; drab linoleum tiles used on creep-of-the-week cop shows; white carpet to accentuate blood spatter.

Ms. Constantinou, who is sympathetic to the unions, budgeted for three months of slower work after the writers’ strike began in May, but fears that the standoff could stretch much longer.

“At least through Covid, we had P.P.P. loans [the Paycheck Protection Program, a business loan program established by the federal government], but we’re not in a union, and I know a lot of these small businesses are really suffering,” she said.

Helen Uffner, the owner of a 50,000-piece collection of vintage clothing, one of the best regarded in the film industry, has decided, for only the second time since opening in 1978, to close her showroom indefinitely; the first time was during the height of the pandemic.

“When we’re sitting there, and the phone only rings once, and it’s a wrong number, then the writing is on the walls,” she said.

She said she would still accept appointments made in advance. She has begun to sell some vintage accessories and costume jewelry from her personal collection to help cover the rent on her 5,000-square-foot shop in Long Island City, Queens, but expects she’ll have to dip into her savings to stay afloat.

For some industry tradespeople, the strike presents other risks. A prolonged stoppage could lead to the suspension of health care plans for some workers, whose benefits are tied to hours worked, according to a spokesman for IATSE, the behind-the-scenes entertainment workers union, which has about 15,000 members in the film and TV sector in the New York area.

The Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit aid group for industry workers, said it had given about $1.7 million in emergency grants to more than 1,000 film and TV workers since the writers’ strike began in May.

Still, for Mr. Quinlan, the electrician and stuntman, reaching an acceptable contract with the studios is worth the pain.

He comes from a long line of theatrical union members: His uncle was a cinematographer [represented by the International Cinematographers Guild (ICG), also known as IATSE Local 600]; his cousins are grips and film set electricians [IATSE]; and his father, Ray Quinlan, is a producer [Producers Guild of America; Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) represents the producing companies)] of the series “Godfather of Harlem.”

“My whole family is out of work,” he said, adding that they had hunkered down for the long haul. “I hope everyone saved for this rainy day, because it’s pouring.”

[Stefanos Chen is a real estate reporter, based in New York. He joined the New York Times in 2017 after five years with the Wall Street Journal, where he was a reporter and multimedia producer.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I am a member of SAG-AFTRA, though I’m no longer active in the industry.  AFTRA (American Federation of Television and Radio Artists), when it was a separate union representing television actors and other on-screen performers, was my parent union.  I was also a member of SAG (Screen Actors Guild) before the merger.  I became a member of Actors’ Equity in 1979.]

'The Producer and the Play'

by Kirk Woodward 

[As readers of Rick On Theater will probably know by now, Kirk Woodward, my friend and a prolific contributor to this blog (author of or contributor to 122 posts to date), including the post with by far the most views of all 1,120 since I started ROT, is an avid reader.  Many of his posts are book reports, as it were, or reports on his responses to various books on many topics.

[Well, Kirk’s back now with an examination of a relative oldie, Norman Marshall’s The Producer and the Play from 1957.  Marshall was an actor and ultimately a director with, as Kirk observes, “a sharp eye on his profession.”  He also had strong opinions about the theater in the United Kingdom, the Continent, and Russia/the Soviet Union of his day, as you’ll see.

[It’s worth noting that Kirk, among the other topics on which he’s blogged on ROT, has written a number of times on directing and directors.  See his posts “Directing Twelfth Night for Children” (16 and 19 December 2010), “Reflections On Directing” (11, 14, 17, and 20 April 2013), “Evaluating A Director” (1 March 2017), “On Directing Shakespeare” (1 March 2019), and “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” (25 June 2019).]

Reading a collection of the theater reviews of the brilliant writer Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980 [see Kirk’s post on 29 September 2021]), I found a reference to a book, just published when he wrote about it, called The Producer and the Play (1957, republished with additional material in 1975) by Norman Marshall (1901-1980). It sounded charming and although it is out of print, copies can be obtained inexpensively, which I did.

Marshall was a director with a fine career in England, directing experimental and more conventional productions, working with the Old Vic, and instrumental in the establishment of the National Theatre of Great Britain. But he has a sharp eye on his profession and he provides a balanced and sometimes critical view of fashions in directing.

The word “producer” needs clarification. When the book was written (in England, so there are differences between my spelling and his in some quotations in this article), in British theater a “producer” was what we would call a director; the usage had substantially changed by the republication of the book in 1975.

Marshall points out that for a long time “producer” was an accurate word for a director, because the same person – for example, an actor-manager, someone who both ran a theater and starred in its productions – was likely to have a big share in both functions. In any case, in The Producer and the Play it makes sense for readers today to substitute the word “director” for “producer” wherever it occurs.

The Producer is not a comprehensive history of directing, even beyond the fact that it was written in the 1950’s. It does not consider theater in the Western Hemisphere at all; Marshall said that to do so would simply have made the book too long. So its focus is on directing in Britain, continental Europe, and Russia and the Soviet Union.

Also, with the exception of a part of one chapter, it doesn’t talk much about the methods that directors use to achieve their results. It is more a book about those results, then, than about how they are achieved.

Marshall organizes The Producer in terms of large themes: the early history of directing; experiments in directing; the Russian Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) and his approaches to directing; methods of staging the plays of William Shakespeare (1564-1616); working with different theater configurations; working with playwrights; working with actors.

This concentration on themes makes the book useful despite its age, because the principles Marshall describes as he goes along can be applied to the work of directors at any time. I would describe his general line of thought as something like this (my words, not his):

Directors can be plotted along a spectrum. At one extreme are the technicians, the directors who tell the actors where to walk and stand on stage and don’t do much else. These are the “journeyman” directors who see their responsibility as “putting the play on its feet.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the director who’s a dreamer, a theorizer, a visionary. This director may or may not be able to do the practical work of getting a play on stage. [Kirk affirms that this is the same as what Eric Bentley dubbed the director with a “Bright Idea.” That term is discussed in several past ROT posts: “The Glass Menagerie” (8 April 2017; that post’s afterword includes a brief discussion of Bentley’s phrase and refers to the essay in which he coined it); “Directors You’d Rather Not Work With” by Kirk Woodward (referenced above in the foreword); “The Orchard” by Kirk Woodward (7 July 2022; another discussion in the post’s afterword)]

Marshall devotes a good deal of space to a discussion of Gordon Craig (1872-1966), whose theoretical works have had great influence but whose production designs were often impossible to achieve.

Between these two extremes, directors make a series of choices that range between carrying out the intentions of the playwright, and implementing their own ideas of how the play ought to be presented.

The effect of descriptions of hundreds of these attempts to transform plays is often comic, because a significant number of them are wild – as is also the case in our own day. The various approaches could go in two directions, toward less on stage than might be expected, or toward more, often much more. Both can make the mind spin.

Having some sort of director for a play – whether formally or informally – is, according to Marshall, a natural thing. “It is impossible,” he says, “even to get up a charade at a Christmas party without somebody taking charge and giving directions.”

But, he notes, “in the theatre, until about a hundred years ago, these directions needed to be only of the simplest kind, and did not require a specialist to issue them.” The American actor William Macready (1793-1873) astonished his casts by insisting on rehearsal, a thing they never did and over which they almost threw a strike. For decades what we would think of as “real directing” took place primarily in musical halls and “pantomimes,” elaborate British Christmas plays.

Times have changed, a process that Marshall tracks, and it’s hard to think of a theatrical production that doesn’t have a director – but Marshall’s book illustrates that given enough time, people will try anything where directing goes, even doing without it. (An example is the three productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II by the British troupe Anərkē Shakespeare in 2018-2019).

Much of the history of directing can be described, using the terms loosely, as a struggle between “realism,” a more or less literal representation of ordinary ways of living, and, for lack of a better word, “anti-realism,” which, as Marshall puts it, “should not attempt to reproduce an exact image of the locale of the play, but must seek to give the illusion of imaginative truth, not actual truth.”  

Sometimes, however, the “struggle” was within a director. The German director Max Reinhart (Germany was and remains a hotbed of directorial ideas), who lived from 1873 to 1943, worked for a realism of scenic effects, but on a gigantic scale, to the point where they sometimes began to overwhelm the plays for which they were created.

At the same time he staged plays, for example by Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), that were unquestionably realistic – although Shaw himself preferred a bravura form of “realism” influenced by opera and by declamatory activities like public speaking, Marshall writes that Reinhart

was at heart a realist – but an imaginative realist. His best productions united a modified form of stylization with a realism which was merely literal.

Not all directors on the anti-realist side were so restrained. Attempts to create an “anti-realist” theater – which very definitely continue to our day – take us toward the visionary side of the directorial spectrum, some of them pretty far toward the extreme. Gordon Craig, already cited, called actors “puppets” and dreamed of a theater that could do without them. Craig called for

An art which will exceed in stature all other arts, an art which says less yet shows more than all . . . . I prophesy that a new religion will be found contained in it. That religion will preach no more, but it will reveal. It will not show us the definite images which the painter and sculptor show us. It will unveil thoughts to our eyes, silently – by movement – in visions.

Craig was inspirational for many theater artists, but clearly the “how” of his proposal is at best extremely vague. To create a non-realistic theater, though, directors did create productions that provide plenty of examples of daring, experiment, and plain old craziness.

Marshall is not a fan of extremes in direction.  His opposition is not absolute, although he does write, “I have never been able to discover any good, logical reason for [the] extreme anti-illusionist method of production.” He describes how early in his career he worked with a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater:

At one time, in his determination to make certain that the audience was under no illusion that they were ‘spying on reality’, he removed the side walls of the proscenium so that throughout the performance the audience could see the actors waiting to make their entrances, the stage-hands standing about, the electricians at their switchboard, the prompter with the book in his lap, the furniture and props for the next scene stacked in a corner. 

What problem was this director trying to solve? Marshall writes that “I find it hard to believe that any audience ever becomes entirely unconscious of the fact that they are in a theatre watching an impersonation of reality.”  

Others, however, cared a great deal about that question. The German director Erwin Piscator (1893-1966), who greatly influenced Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), “was dressing his actors in harsh, angular costumes which were deliberately at variance with the lines of the human body, so that the players seemed more like robots than human beings.”  

Another example from a production Marshall saw, also about the work of a notable director, Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874-1940):

The actors, grotesquely dressed and made up as drolls and buffoons, somersaulted, swung on trapezes, and depicted excitement by means of handsprings and flip-flaps. Naturalistic speech was forbidden; they shouted, chanted, intoned, and chorused. The stage was bleakly lit in a glare of harsh, white light from floodlights hanging immediately above the setting in full view of the audience. As slapstick entertainment it was immensely exhilarating, though in the end one became wearied by its crudity and noisiness.

In discussing such examples Marshall makes an important point: many such instances of excess were appropriate at the time they were created, but sometimes were retained when their raison d’être had evaporated. For example, discussing a production by the German director Leopold Jessner (1878-1945), Marshall writes that

Jessner was greatly influenced by the work of the Russian [directors]. No doubt his elementary symbolism would have been an aid to the new Russian audience in the years immediately after the Revolution, but it was scarcely flattering to the intelligence of the Berliners and did great disservice to authors by over-simplifying characters and their motives.

Describing another such director, Marshall writes that

He was one of those [directors], familiar enough in England today, who feel they must ‘do something’ with a classic. Whether what they do is in accord with the author’s intentions matters little provided it is something nobody else has done with the play before.

Marshall points out that audiences simply were not always interested in experiences in theater meant to challenge them “for their own good.” Such experiences would not, and did not, last in an environment in which

the audiences, who plainly preferred those theatres where the acting was warm, human, and lifelike to those where the individuality of the actor was suppressed and the part he was playing reduced to an abstraction.

Marshall makes it clear how many of the theatrical innovations attributed to Bertolt Brecht were actually created by earlier directors, including minimalist scenery and the use of “white” lighting with visible light instruments:

Many features of [Brecht’s production of Mother Courage and Her Children] were simply the old, familiar anti-illusionist devices which the revolutionary theatre of the ’twenties used to enforce Meierhold’s dictum that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it.”

Brecht felt that more traditional kinds of staging act as a sort of “narcotic” for audiences, putting them in a dulled trance state. Marshall comments, and I agree, that

I have never seen an audience remotely resembling Brecht’s description, though perhaps they are to be seen on the first night of an excessively boring play.

One of the things I like about Marshall’s book, though, is that he is eminently fair to the directors whose work he describes. After his comments about Mother Courage he continues,

It was very like the best kind of naturalistic acting in the English theatre. It was controlled, exact, economic in the use of gesture, devoid of any suggestion of over-playing, but vividly effective.

He carries this even-handed attitude throughout the book.

His discussion of the “system” of acting, and its impact on directing, developed by Konstantin Stanislavski is fascinating because it traces the shifts and turns of Stanislavski’s thought over the years, variations that were not clarified by the books he wrote. Marshall writes that his books

Have been so much written about and talked about that it is generally believed that they were the basis of Stanislavski’s “system.” This misconception has resulted in [directors] and actors with an insufficient understanding of his teachings wasting an appalling amount of rehearsal time in woolly, confusing discussions, and using up their energies outside the theatre in irrelevant games of make-believe.

Again, Marshall roots Stanislavski’s approaches to acting and directing in what was happening in his time, pointing out for example that the “realism” of some his productions was a way of trying to make it possible for actors to perform in the way he wanted:

Stanislavsky believed that if the actor was constantly picking up and handling trivial, everyday things, the casualness and seeming unimportance of these little bits of business would not only subconsciously influence his movements and gestures but would also make him instinctively aware of the falseness of a stagey inflexion or intonation.

I could easily devote an entire article to Marshall’s insights on Stanislavski’s work. Similarly there is a book’s worth of insight in the two chapters he devotes to the many ways Shakespeare’s plays have been staged, beginning with their original productions at the Globe Theatre in London – about which we know very little beyond drawings and inferences in scripts.

After a period of neglect, Shakespeare’s plays began to be performed in “acting versions,” in which “the texts were cut and rearranged to avoid constant changing of the elaborate scenery that was now being provided for them.” This cutting and rearranging was ordinarily done by the lead actor of the production:

The English theatre was so wretchedly poor that the public had become accustomed to going to the theatre because of the star rather than the play, and they demanded to see as much as possible of the star during the evening.

Whole speeches or even scenes were cut in order to allow pageantry and spectacle. A reaction set in in the late 1800’s, urged on by the drama criticism of Bernard Shaw, instituted by the Elizabethan Stage Society of William Poel (1852-1934) and other amateur groups, and in the early 1900’s professionally solidified by three productions by the director Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946), a close associate of Shaw’s.

As the Twentieth Century proceeded, a decidedly unornamental style of Shakespeare production took over, typified by the Old Vic company, whose process Marshall describes as “Use all the bits and pieces of scenery you can lay your hands on and then fill in with curtains.”

Today productions of Shakespeare’s plays use a myriad of approaches, and as Marshall points out, “any new form of stagecraft . . . must inevitably at first seem over-obtrusive simply because of its novelty.” Costuming a play in “modern dress” instead of period costume began around 1925 as something practically scandalous, and today a play by Shakespeare may be “set” in any time period from prehistoric to light years from now.

“All too often,” Marshall writes, the director’s “inventiveness is used not to enhance the author’s meaning but merely to surprise the audience or to satisfy his own wayward sense of humour,” “a dogged determination to be original at all costs, even at the cost of the play,” in what the writer T. C. Worsley (1907-1977) describes as the “Wouldn’t it be fun (just for a change) school of production.”

Marshall devotes much of his discussion of Shakespeare’s plays to the question of how his verse should be spoken. He feels that special training is a necessity, that it is not possible simply to speak the verse in an everyday way (the prose is another story).

Regarding the famous, maybe even over-famous speeches in Shakespeare’s plays, Marshall points out that “the opera singer does not attempt to sing a famous aria in a way it has never been sung before: he simply strives to sing it better than it has ever been sung before, with “proper regard for its sense and its rhythm.” He gives numerous examples, of course, of the opposite.

I have mentioned that Marshall himself is a director, and one observation about Shakespeare production in particular that he gives is one that perhaps it might take a director to make:

The most important members of the audience at any Shakespearian performance are those who are seeing the play for the first time. These are the people the [director] should have in mind all through his rehearsals.

Marshall shows a similar kind of insight in discussing types of stages. For example, in theater-in-the-round, in which the audience is seated around all four sides (it’s not usually actually “round”) of the playing space, some plays gain by such close proximity to the audience but

There are often practical difficulties which make some plays ineligible for this sort of production – for instance, if a staircase or a window is an essential part of the action, or if it is necessary to have a high piece of furniture, or an upright piano, which would obscure the view of the stage from a part of the audience.

The quest for novelty in staging may sometimes exceed the bound of common sense. Marshall notes that

Nowadays so many hard things are said about the “peep-show theatre”, as it is often contemptuously described, that one marvels how it has existed for nearly three hundred years and that so many masterpieces have been written for it.

An ever-present danger for a director, Marshall makes clear, is doing either too much to a play in production, or too little. “The creative [director] can often turn a thin play into a rich entertainment, but he can be a menace to a good play,” Marshall writes. Concerning classic plays from earlier eras, he offers this practical advice:

So it is the [director]’s task to make the most of the scenes and characters which age has not withered and to use the rest as material out of which he re-fashions something to the taste of his audience. What he cannot profitably use, he must, whenever possible, discard.

There is a great deal more of value in this stimulating book; I have tried to provide a sampling. It continually raises the question, “What is the right way of directing?” and resists any easy answer. Directors are in a sense a mid-point in which a number of factors meet – a play, actors, designers and technicians, but also history, culture, and trends and tendencies in theater itself.

One of the excellencies of the book is that it helps us realize – and I admit I had not – that when a director tries something “new” the odds are that the director is reacting to something, responding to it. None of the remarkable oddities that Marshall describes developed in a vacuum. They were responses.

The word “new” is in quotation marks because the chances are good that whatever the director’s approach, someone has tried it before, or a version of it.

So the search for novelty is not “the answer,” and neither, necessarily, is doing a thing the way it has always been done. A director perhaps is a person who tries to do one thing well, and then the next, and so on, using common sense and anything else they bring to the experience, knowing that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.

[Even casual readers of ROT will have noticed that many of the topics covered by Norman Marshall in The Producer and the Play and on which Kirk has reported here, have also been mentioned in some of the past posts on this blog.  I won’t cross-reference them—because, first, there are too many such posts and, second, this one’s not about my opinions or other people’s, it’s about Marshall’s ideas and Kirk’s take on them—but ROTters who’re interested can spot-check the many play reports or examinations of theatrical practices. 

[The point is that Marshall focused, at least in Kirk’s reading, on many theatrical issues that continue to be present on the stages of the 21st century, even 50 years and more after he wrote about them.  I think, for example, of Marshall’s thoughts on directors who put “less on stage than might be expected, or .  . . more, often much more.”  Have a look at my reports on an Off-Off-Broadway production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from a troupe called the Pointed Stick Theatre as an example of the former set-up and Washington, D.C.’s Folger Theatre’s shipboard Much Ado About Nothing for the latter).

[In a different vein, when Kirk cited Marshall’s quotation of Vsevelod Meyerhold that “the actual world exists and is our subject; but this play and this stage are not it,” I thought of what I wrote in my essay on Tennessee Williams’s “Plastic Theater” concerning painter Hans Hofmann’s advice to his students.  Hofmann (1880-1966), an Abstract Expressionist, was an influence on Williams and he held that “an artist mustn’t simply copy nature, but must create an artistically imagined reality which requires the careful and deliberate manipulation and juxtaposition of the elements of the artwork.”

[ROTters will most likely know that I’ve posted quite a few articles on experimental theater director Leonardo Shapiro (1946-97), including both descriptions of his productions, examinations of some of his stage techniques, and, most recently, a biographical profile on him.  Some of what he did in production or advocated in his artistic philosophy aligned with some of the ideas Marshall wrote about in The Producer. 

[For instance, Kirk quotes a description of an “anti-realistic” production on which Marshall worked with “a director who could not stand the regular trappings of theater.”  I observed that Shapiro often applied to some extent many of the same techniques that Marshall disparaged, as I note in several of my reports on his productions.  Finally, in the last paragraph of the post, Kirk states that perhaps directors know “that their work will always be, quite literally, work in progress.”  This was a firm notion of Shapiro’s, who viewed all his shows as productions in progress.  A performance, he affirmed, was a “snapshot” of where the company was at that particular moment—but not definitive.

[A further note about the name of the theater profession in question here.  Max Reinhart would have been called a Regisseur, the German word for a theater director.  It’s borrowed from the French word régisseur, which literally means someone who administers, manages, organizes, or is responsible for something. 

[(The German word Direktor, from English, refers to the head of a company or an agency.  Dirigent is a more Germanicized word with a similar meaning, and is often used to mean the conductor of an orchestra or the captain of a sports team.  Despite their similarity to ‘director,’ neither word is used to mean the artist in charge of a theater production, film, or TV show.) 

[The Russians use the same French word, режиссер (rezhisser) for the theatrical position.]

Do What Ya Love

 

[When I first began to teach acting, as a grad student in the MFA theater program at what became Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in New Brunswick, New Jersey, I started telling my students, some of whom were thinking of making theater their careers, that they should think long and hard before making that commitment.

[Theater is a hard and often disheartening way of life, especially in the early years of trying to break into the business.  The shows the student actors may have done in high school and would do in college are mostly fun experiences, with plenty of rewards in feelings of achievement and camaraderie.  The people they work with are friends, schoolmates, and peers.  The directors are their teachers or graduate students in their institutions who are usually supportive and helpful, wanting to see them succeed.

[In the professional theater, that may not always be true.  Getting jobs is tough and novices frequently find themselves doing plays they don’t really like with total strangers who are into their own work and careers, and directors, producers, and others who aren’t necessarily friendly or even very nice.  The theaters are dirty, the accommodations primitive and crowded.  The auditioning process is curt, discouraging, and often unsuccessful.

[This can go on for years.  The big break the beginner knows is just around the next interview line, doesn’t come.  So I told my students that if they could be happy doing anything else that they should seriously consider going into that field.  If they could be happy being a forest ranger, a bond salesman, or a butcher—I actually knew an actor who was a butcher between gigs—it would be better than chasing a theater career that never happens.

[Only commit to pursuing a life on the stage or the screen, I advised them, if they knew that nothing else would make them content.  To make a go of that life, you have to love it.

[Perhaps the same advice is valid for any endeavor one might consider pursuing for a lifetime.  Last night, I watched PBS NewsHour, and I heard two people, in different walks of life, say this about their own lives in two unconnected segments of the show.  They happened to be aired back to back, and I’m going to post them below together.

[The first piece is an interview by arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown with a carpenter, Mark Ellison, who discovered that what he loves is to make things with his hands and tools.  He acknowledges that it took him years to become what he considers a good carpenter, and he says that no matter what field someone wants to pursue, she or he should love it and take the time to master it well.]

“CARPENTER MARK ELLISON’S NEW BOOK ‘BUILDING’
OFFERS LESSONS ON LIFE AND GOOD WORK”
by Jeffrey Brown and Anne Azzi Davenport

 [The transcript below is from the broadcast of the PBS NewsHour of 14 July 2023.]

Mark Ellison, the author of the new book “Building,” is a carpenter who knows his way around tools. But rather than a how-to book, this is about developing any kind of craft and skill, along with a few hard-earned lessons for living a good life. Jeffrey Brown has the story for our arts and culture series, CANVAS.

Amna Nawaz (“PBS NewsHour” Co-Anchor): The author of the new book titled “Building” is, as you might suspect, a carpenter who knows his way around tools.

But rather than a how-to book, this one is about developing any kind of craft and skill, along with a few hard-earned lessons for living a good life.

Jeffrey Brown has that story for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

Jeffrey Brown: An 1840s house now being restored and renewed.

Mark Ellison, Author, “Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work”: Everything you see on the outside of the house is brand-new.

Jeffrey Brown: Yes.

Mark Ellison: Every board, every stick, every brick, but made to look like that photograph.

Jeffrey Brown: A 1840s photo used to guide the work on the exterior, mandated by New York City’s landmarks preservation rules.

Mark Ellison: Whole portions of that were certainly added later than 1840.

Jeffrey Brown: Mark Ellison is doing the best he can. But who knows if this is really how it originally looked?

Mark Ellison: So, is this preservation? I’m not sure.

Jeffrey Brown: What do you call it? What is it?

Mark Ellison: In my book, I call this a paleo facsimile, because . . .

(Laughter)

Mark Ellison: Because it’s got the bones.

Jeffrey Brown: You have to laugh in the world of Mark Ellison.

Mark Ellison: We will do the same spacing, exact same thing.

Jeffrey Brown: Where the design demands can border on the impossible, and the client expectations are off the charts.

Mark Ellison: It’s a bit annoying, because if it’s really, really, really good, everybody looks and goes like, yes, of course, it should be that way.

I am like, you have no idea what it took to make it look like that. Like, you have no idea what we went through to make it so the staircase just looks like — yes, tra-la-la, it’s beautiful.

Jeffrey Brown: Staircases are indeed a signature. Ellison has gained a reputation as the master builder behind some of the most beautiful and expensive homes in New York and beyond, often for celebrities and wealthy owners who don’t want their names known.

He’s the go-to guy who can take the grand designs of architects and figure out how to actually make them. Now 61 and 40 years into his career, he’s written “Building: A Carpenter’s Notes on Life & the Art of Good Work” [Random House, 2023].

And he means any work, not just the kind he does. One word he has no patience for, talent.

Mark Ellison: If you believe talent is the main thing, you’re already on the wrong track.

Jeffrey Brown: What’s the main thing?

Mark Ellison: Work. Effort. Practice. Daily — like, not every day. You can take a day off once in a while, but studied, ritual practice, having a good teacher, having good guides, having people that can teach you how to do things without error, and staying at it.

I wasn’t a good carpenter for 15 years. It took me at least 15 years before I decided I was a good carpenter. I was competent by 20, and then it took another 20 to learn how to do the rest of what I do now.

Jeffrey Brown: Ellison took us on a tour of what, by his standards, is a rather modest project, but still an eight-figure proposition overall, side-by-side townhouses in Clinton Hill, a Brooklyn neighborhood home to mansions in the 1800s, then middle and working-class homes, and now again undergoing vast change amid gentrification.

Mark Ellison: This is what is called the primary bedroom suite.

Jeffrey Brown: One rather quirky touch, a sinking of the Titanic scene for the primary bathroom, executed by a long list of artists and craftspeople overseen by Ellison. The idea came from the owner.

Mark Ellison: When somebody really loves an idea and gets really excited about it, I will go all in to render it as incredibly as it possibly can.

Jeffrey Brown: You like that?

Mark Ellison: I like it.

Jeffrey Brown: The home will also feature a spiral staircase. Ellison started with a model.

Mark Ellison: I have to figure out how to do it, and I have to figure out how to detail it and make sure everything’s smooth and the curves and it makes sense and that it looks right from the underside and the curves are good.

It’s going to have this sort of tornado quality to it and be kind of like a vortex stair simply because of the way the geometry on this — on this side works. Like, usually, what I find is, whoever designed this side didn’t think about this side. And . . .

(Laughter)

(Crosstalk)

Jeffrey Brown: That’s . . .

(Crosstalk)

Mark Ellison: Yes. And that’s what I have to do.

Jeffrey Brown: He builds his models and does his own work in his studio about an hour north of the city in a 1905 firehouse he converted.

It’s also where he pursues his other passion, music, the one that doesn’t pay the bills. Still, he insists, developing any skill is about having the will to overcome inevitable obstacles along the way.

Mark Ellison: Anybody who has really developed a real skill, if you talk to them, 75 percent of what they will tell you about is the stumbling blocks they met on the way, and what they had to overcome on the way to doing those things.

And over time, will becomes the confidence in oneself of knowing, if I set my mind to something, I can do it. I can do it. Even if I have never done it before, I have — will gives me the feeling that I can do this thing and I will do this thing.

Jeffrey Brown: The creativity comes in how you build it.

Mark Ellison: The creativity comes from how you realize it and how well you realize it and how you balance everything. And it’s part of making it more complete and more beautiful. It’s like excellent tailoring.

Jeffrey Brown: There was a clear expectation Ellison would go to college. Both parents were professionals with multiple degrees. Instead, he chose a very different path.

And he writes of the social realities of the workplace itself and who builds in America today.

Mark Ellison: It’s dirty. It’s — you get hurt. I have been hurt many times. Carrying buckets of mortar, carrying block and concrete is done mostly by people who don’t get paid a lot of money. They haven’t been here very long. And most people who live in this country won’t take that kind of work.

If you want to know what parts of the world have the most trouble right now, those people will be on my job site in a couple of months.

Jeffrey Brown: You can see the American class structure at work.

Mark Ellison: It’s right here. And, I mean, I have taken a lot of people from carrying brooms to actually running jobs in my career. But it’s a harder thing to do for somebody who didn’t have the opportunities that I did.

Jeffrey Brown: Do you have a sense that a lot of this craft, this ability has been lost?

Mark Ellison: I think it’s less than people imagine. You have to know where to look. There are still people that take a keen interest in this in many different fields. I mean, I know weavers. I know people who weave on handlooms.

I know people who make musical instruments that rival the great musical instruments of the past. There are people that do these things, and you will find most of them sort of between the cracks.

Jeffrey Brown: Now I’m thinking about the debates in this country about education. Do you wish or do you ever advise young people to go into the kind of work you are doing, rather than go get their four-year degrees?

Mark Ellison: First off, you have to like it. This is demanding, unforgiving, sometimes painful, sometimes dangerous work.

And if one does not have a taste for it, don’t do this job. You won’t like it. But for anyone who has a taste for it, there’s an incredible need for people now who would take that route. And I hate to tell doctors and lawyers, but those of us who get really good at this make better money than they do.

(Laughter)

Mark Ellison: I love it. I still love coming to work every day.

OK, let’s look at the steps.

Jeffrey Brown: And then it was time to get back to work.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn, New York.

[In his more than 30-year career with the PBS NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues, with work taking him around the country and to many parts of the globe.

[As arts correspondent, he’s profiled many of the world’s leading writers, musicians, actors and other artists. Among his signature works at the NewsHour: a multi-year series, “Culture at Risk,” about threatened cultural heritage in the United States and abroad; the creation of the NewsHour’s online “Art Beat”; and hosting the monthly book club, “Now Read This,” a collaboration with the New York Times.

[Anne Azzi Davenport is the Senior Producer of CANVAS at PBS NewsHour.]

*  *  *  *
“A BRIEF BUT SPECTACULAR TAKE ON SECOND ACTS”
by Benni Latham

[Benni Latham’s “Brief But Spectacular take on second acts” aired on the PBS NewsHour on 14 July 2023.  The NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” segments are two-to-four-minute interviews.  The interviewer is off-camera and off-screen and there are no cutaways to reporters or interjections of questions.  The short segments feature some of the most original contemporary figures, offering passionate takes on topics they know well.  

[Latham, a former Transportation Security Administration agent, switched paths to follow her passion, and is now a happy and successful voice actress.]

As a TSA agent, Benni Latham brought lots of joy to her job. However, after a violent incident at work, she felt the need to pivot. Today, Benni has found rewarding success in pursuing her dream job through commercials and various voice acting projects and commercials. She shares her Brief But Spectacular take on second acts.

Amna Nawaz: Speaking of loving what you do, as a TSA agent, Benni Latham brought lots of joy to her job.

However, after a violent incident at work, she felt the need to pivot. Today, Benni has found success pursuing her dreams through voice acting projects and commercials.

Here, she shares her Brief But Spectacular take on second acts.

Benni Latham, Actress: In 2006, I started working at TSA at LAX Airport. I was the TSA agent that was making up songs and doing funny voices and impressions while I was telling people to take their shoes off and all that jazz, because, at the end of the day, you don’t know where these people are going, right?

If I can be the little soft part of their day in such a weird, chaotic place, then I’m happy to do that.

The circumstances that led to me quitting TSA was — was pretty violent. November 2013, an individual came into the terminal and opened fire at the checkpoint. And it was a wakeup call for me. I recognized in myself that I would rather deal with the failure of trying something and maybe not being completely successful than live regretfully wondering what if.

[On 1 November 2013, 23-year-old Paul Anthony Ciancia opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Los Angeles International Airport, killing a TSA officer and injuring several other people.]

So, at that moment, I decided I’ll take fear over regret, and I made plans to quit. I decided to try my hand at commercial acting. And then I booked my first on-camera professional commercial for Samsung, where I played a, wait for it, TSA agent.

(Laughter)

Benni Latham: Why? Because the universe has a great sense of humor.

(Laughter)

Benni Latham: When I became a full-time actress, it felt right. I felt like I was at home. I found my tribe. And my inner child is so impressed with me right now. It’s not even funny.

Some of the characters I have played include Harriet Tubman. She’s very, very solemn, very dignified, and very ethereal almost. I am also the voice of Cedars-Sinai Hospital. In fact, if you call the number right now: Thank you for calling Cedars-Sinai. For information in English, please press one.

Scared you a little, didn’t I?

(Laughter)

Benni Latham: When it comes to dealing with ethnic things, racial things, I meet people where they are and then I ask questions.

So, if someone says, can you gimme a little more sassy, I’ll give them examples, so that together we can come up with a library of terms and images that don’t necessarily rely on stereotype; they rely on character choices. Nobody really wants to be shamed when they’re trying to create art, but no one wants to lose their humanity either.

People be peopling. And you take it as it comes, because, at the end of the day, I’m already winning because I’m doing what I love. It doesn’t matter. Doing things that allow me to connect with that little girl from Compton who grew up to be a bigmouth voice actress.

My name is Benni Latham, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on second acts.

Amna Nawaz: And you can watch more Brief But Spectacular videos online at PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.

[The thing I noticed most prominently about both these interviews, from two people doing different sorts of work, was how much pleasure they so obviously got from talking about what they do.  They both seemed to have truly joyful work lives.  As the Aussies say: Good on them!]