Performance Diary, Part 1

by Kirk Woodward

[When I started Rick On Theater in March 2009, it was in response to a suggestion from my friend Kirk Woodward, now a frequent contributor to this blog—including this post, “Performance Diary, Part 1,” and its companion coming up on 28 August.  In my first post on 16 March that year, I explained that I'd been e-mailing a few friends who used to live in New York and now lived far away.  They’d asked me to tell them what I see on the New York City stages. 

[I began copying Kirk on my reports, and he kept telling me I should try to publish them.  Since I only wrote when I saw something and I wrote about only what struck my interest, it didn’t seem likely anyone would pay me to do what I was doing.

[Kirk was working in IT at the time, so the idea of a blog came up.  He took charge of finding a suitable platform, and I almost immediately started to post.  (There are now over 1,200 posts on ROT, which has been running for 15 years, 5 months, and 9 days (as of 25 August 2024).

[Since I don’t see a show every week, I gave myself permission to fill in the intervening posting dates with coverage of other topics, mostly theater and the arts (but not always).  It became my plan to post articles on aspects of theater that most readers, especially those who weren’t associated with the professional or semi-professional stage, might not know about.

[Life in the theater is complex.  It covers a gallimaufry of fields, disciplines, and specialties.  It’s also labor-intensive, taking more time in one’s day, week, and month than most other endeavors in which people engage.  Many people, both theater folk and “civilians” (as one of my teachers referred to non-theater people—muggles, if you will), see a life devoted to the stage as more a calling than an occupation.  It’s what we do for love—to paraphrase the lines from the impassioned song in which Diana leads the dancers in A Chorus Line.

[As Kirk writes in his “Performance Diary”:

I hope this account indicates some of the many practical issues one encounters when putting on a performance, no matter which kind of performance it is.  Few things are “easy” in performing, no matter how small the show or how expert the team.

[I told Kirk, after I read both parts of his diary, that it made me reminisce some, so it obviously rings true.  I assured him that it's exactly what I want for ROT, along with the performance reports.  He chronicled the day-to-day activities of a theater pro—in Kirk’s case, a director, actor, teacher, and a little bit of a writer—when he’s involved in actual theater work.]

Between the middle of April and the middle of June 2024, I was involved in several performance events that separately perhaps wouldn’t make an entry for this blog but together, I thought, might serve the purpose, so here is a sort of performance diary for that period of time. I say “sort of” because I have revised a few of these entries after the fact. Still, between them they may suggest interesting things. I hope so.

I was surprised by how many performance events could be crammed into a short time period. I’m not always that busy! Here’s what I wrote:

APRIL 10 – Among the theatrical events I’m involved with so far are the following

1.   Love’s Labour’s Lost (hereafter LLL) - I volunteered to help the director, a friend of mine, if there was anything I could do as she directed this lesser-known play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), and she has sent me the script to see if I can help edit it so it’s short enough to be performed without an intermission.

2.   2.  The Church World Service has a program at the Union Congregational Church in Upper Montclair, where I’ve done some shows, to help Ukrainian school-age children, mostly middle and high school, to get somewhat acclimated to the US. They take language classes, visit places, all sorts of things, and they’re doing a talent show at Union Congregational Church. The theater group there put out a call to see if anyone could help prepare the show, I volunteered, passed my background check, and I’ll be working with them for two three-hour rehearsals, with the first rehearsal tomorrow.

3.   3.  A woman I know asked if I could be a reader with her in an audition she’s doing by video phone this afternoon (that item will be completed later today).

[Two of the performances Kirk Woodward staged at UCC were March Madness – An Evening of Witty One-Acts (by many different writers) and Spoon River, selections from Edgar Lee Masters’s poetry collection, Spoon River Anthology. The UCC Players is also featured in ROT posts “Religious Drama,” 19 January 2014, and “Presbyterian Avant-Garde,” 19 May 2020, both by Woodward.] 

There are others too.

APRIL 15 – I talked with the leaders of the Ukrainian project on Zoom and I told them I’d just watch the next rehearsal and do anything to help that I could. So we’ll see, but it sounds interesting to say the least.

APRIL 20 – a rehearsal with the Ukrainian students. I had originally assumed that I’d be working with children, but as I said, these are high school-age students. They themselves put together the material for the show – songs, skits, and dances. Right now it’s messy and hard to follow. The director, also Ukrainian, is doing her best to keep everything organized. I suggested a couple of things – a bit of movement in an airport scene, a grouping for a scene in a park – and urged them to speak up. It’s not my show to direct, but I hope those thoughts helped a bit.

APRIL 21 – The Exclusions are a jazz group I brought together – drums, bass, piano, melodica (that’s me), and a vocalist. All except possibly me are terrific musicians. A melodica, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a small keyboard instrument that you blow into at one end. It’s often used to teach children music. It sounds a little like an accordion would sound if you blew in it somehow.

Today The Exclusions gave a concert at Fewsmith Presbyterian Church, and in my opinion it was a success. We were well organized at the basic level and a little ragged in the details, but no harm as a result. Everybody played/sang well, and the audience, about 50 people, appeared to love it. We received suggestions that since today’s subject was “Jazz of the 20’s,” next time we should do “Jazz of the 30’s” and so on, and maybe we will. It’s a nice hook to hang songs on. We also heard a suggestion that we should do Latin, Brazilian, Bossa music. Maybe.

APRIL 24 – I finished making the requested cuts in LLL and put the annotated script in the mail. Cutting a play of Shakespeare’s is frequently done, but it takes arrogance to do it.

In making these cuts, I tried to concentrate on clarifying the plot, such as it is, and resisted the urge to cut the entire comic subplot, which seems to me to be unredeemable. Then I cut every line that I didn’t understand when I read it – not that I might not understand it if I researched it, but the audience can’t do that, and why would it be worth a director’s time trying to make a line work if it needs significant explanation?

I am convinced that it is most important that the play’s story be clear. Second in importance is the language – is a line simply functional, or does it illuminate the scene? Third in order is whether or not it makes sense; sometimes problems in that area can be fixed by updating a word or two.

APRIL 28 – For years a group of us have played bluegrass, country, folk, and novelty music at no cost for not-for-profit organizations. We’re called the Foggy Minded Boys, the Foggettes, and, when combined, the Foggy Family. The FMB are men, the Foggettes are a tight harmony group of women.

Tonight we had a Foggy rehearsal, four of us. We have several Foggette bookings but none for the FMB right now, but I wanted to revive some songs that we haven’t done since Covid – a Fifties medley, “Act Naturally,” a Flatt and Scruggs medley, a couple of novelty numbers, and so on. It was a blast.

Carlos, our banjo player, had bought a new banjo in Nashville, sold to him by the man who hand-made it, and it has transformed his playing. I said to him, “The wand chooses the magician.” I’m not sure he got the Harry Potter reference, but it’s true – this is the banjo he ought to have, and his solos were blistering, his accompaniment was solid . . . a good rehearsal all around.

APRIL 30 – I asked Marina, the director/coordinator of the Ukrainian students’ production, how their rehearsal last weekend went, and she wrote:

The kids were more prepared, they remembered their lines, but we were suffering with technical issues and our time in the sanctuary was limited. We analyzed our mistakes, fixed our flaws and awkwardness, discussed where and when to enter, exit, etc. Next time we will bring the costumes and props. Our sound playback will be ready, English subtitles for Romeo And Juliet [sic] are ready. Musical numbers are ready. We need your professional eye and precious instructions. We all missed you.

If every rehearsal accomplished that much, nobody would need my instructions, which I doubt are all that precious. Anyway we’ll see how the rehearsal goes on Saturday and what if anything I can offer the next time I’m there.

MAY 4 – my second and last rehearsal with the Ukrainian students. They had made progress in last week’s rehearsal, when I wasn’t there, and were able to do the program more or less from start to finish. Two hand-held microphones were a help, and the musical numbers, all Ukrainian songs, sounded fine if a little raw. Although the students seemed to welcome me, virtually all the conversation was in Ukrainian, and sometimes there’s be long discussions followed by absolutely no change in behavior as far as I could tell – but of course I didn’t know what they’d been discussing.

I tried to think what I could say that would be both useful and succinct, since I felt I only had one real chance to say anything, and I focused on trying to close the gaps between sections – know what’s coming up next, know where everything that you’ll need is located, jump right in and get the scene started as fast as you can. The director promised to make sure each cast member got a copy of the program, which should help with continuity.

In the evening I participated in a table reading of a new musical that a friend has written. I won’t say anything about the specifics, but, fairly typically as far as I know for a new musical, the show took a long time to read through and needs focusing and editing. The writer seemed to agree, so I hope we helped.

MAY 5 – a meeting to announce the selection of LLL as the September production of the St. James Players of Montclair, New Jersey, a community theater group that presents one play a year, usually by William Shakespeare, and to introduce the director, Sharon Quinn, who’s a friend of mine from decades ago. About thirty people attended, many of them from last year’s production of Antigone. The evening consisted of a short theater game and a description of the play by Sharon – that was all. Auditions in two weeks. This is the play I had worked on editing.

MAY 7 – a musical performance by the Foggettes. Before the Covid quarantine, we had three Foggettes (plus me on piano); after the quarantine we had two, one having moved to South Dakota. We found two new fine singers and we’ve all been working to get a real “group” going again, and I think we achieved it today. It wasn’t that everything was technically perfect (it’s never perfect), but everyone worked together and the show had heart.

MAY 10 – For several years my son Craig and I have separately been participating in simulations for a university class for social workers, in which we play predators who target seniors, and the class members, in twos, interview us, trying to figure out if we’re dangerous or not. Today we had the most participants I’ve ever worked with – twelve teams, ten minutes each, over three hours.

My goal this time was to behave more suspiciously than previously, in order to give the interviewers more reason to be skeptical of me. In about the fifth session today I was asked whether I wrote checks for the man I’m accused of exploiting, and I replied, “No, I’d never get involved in that. Checks can be traced!” I thought that was practically a confession of guilt – why else would I be thinking along those lines?

To my amazement, no one noticed the implications – I’m not sure if they didn’t hear me or felt there was no good way to exploit my statement, but in any case I was able to repeat it with two other groups, and no one commented. I was delighted – I guess my criminal instincts were satisfied.

This evening was the monthly “jazz jam” at a church in Bergen County, New Jersey. The “house band” is called Foreign Exchange, because there are many people from Japan in the band, the church, and the community. The band members vary in skill; the tenor saxophonist, Yoshi Koyama, is world-class, others – including myself – are working to improve. The leader, Michael Hinton, is an astonishing percussionist, who over his career has worked with, among others, the Grateful Dead, Liza Minelli, and Henry Mancini. In this group he plays piano. Good things can happen, and the closing number, “There Will Never Be Another You” (music by Harry Warren and lyrics by Mack Gordon; 1942), was a rouser.

MAY 11 – the Ukrainian We Are Here: Refugee Youth Variety Show gave its one performance this afternoon.  I thought of the two remarks The Art of Coarse Acting (Michael Canon Green, 1964) says you can say about a show, “Better than Broadway!” and “Nobody noticed a thing.”

But more on my mind was what Theseus says in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “For never any thing can be amiss / when simpleness and duty tender it.” The truth is, the show was lovely for what it was and for what it represented. The teenagers had written and structured it; I’d have put it together differently, but so what, it was their show.

There was one highly theatrical moment, when a singer, doing a song called “Ey Guzel Qirim,” a Tatar ballad about deaths of an indigenous people in the Crimea, began singing in the shadow and moved slowly into the light. There were dances, songs both instrumental and sung, and a funny modern-day Romeo and Juliet in Ukrainian, with a projected translation.

A representative of the Church World Service, which sponsored the program, told me that some of the cast hopes to go home despite the dangers; some don’t. All in all, I was overjoyed for them, and moved.

A curious sidenote: As I walked up to the church where the Ukrainians were going to perform, Janet, the director, called out. She was sitting on a bench with Gary, an actor, and she said, “I need you to sit on the bench” so Gary would have someone to deliver a monolog to, in another scene Janet was directing. So we sat outside and rehearsed the scene for a while. Theater happens in all sorts of places.

MAY 19 – Tonight we held first readings for LLL with a small turnout, but I was impressed that everyone handled the language well, with no exceptions. It’s true that the theater company has performed Shakespeare’s plays for about 15 years; maybe experience does count for something.

MAY 20 – the second and last night of auditions for LLL. More people came and it looks like we’ll have a cast. Some random thoughts about directors and actors at auditions:

1.      Directors make most of their initial casting decisions almost immediately on seeing an actor. Therefore they shouldn’t waste the actors’ time. The temptation is to read an actor a number of times in order to make them feel that they’ve been heard.

2.      Instructions to actors should focus on things the actors can do at that moment. Philosophical or psychological subtleties, interesting but irrelevant plot details, detailed character analysis, all are pointless at an audition unless an actor can do something with them on the spot.

3.      Why do directors ask actors to act in auditions in ways that they wouldn’t ask them to in rehearsal? Directors learn (sometimes!) not to ask actors for “results,” such as “Can you do this scene again, but this time be really angry?” Good directors (I would say) work on reasons for behavior and on what the characters want. There’s no reason they shouldn’t do the same in auditions, but frequently these often get “shorthanded,” presumably in order to see how flexible the actor is. I still object.

4.      Directors should remember that actors may bring unexpected traits and abilities that potentially can enrich the play more than the directors’ own preconceptions might. Otherwise why have actors at all? Maybe replace them with AI created replicas? (I hope no one takes up that suggestion.) Another way to phrase that idea is that directors should be alert to ideas for roles that they have not considered.

MAY 21 – the casting for LLL seems fine, and we have had just enough people to fill all the roles. I mentioned above that I thought I might be cast in the play, but I never put my name in, feeling that we had enough good people to cast without me, and I was correct. I imagine I’ll be working on the show in some capacity.

The Mental Health Players, under the auspices of the New Jersey Mental Health Association, present short scenes on mental health issues for audiences all the way from patients to psychologists, followed by audience discussion. We will have one coming up on Friday, so this morning Martha, with whom I almost always do the scenes, called and we worked out a shorter version of the scenario we were sent. We’ve done this scene (on depression – Martha is the victim, I’m her oblivious brother) before, but not since Covid.

MAY 22 – I often have the kind of dreams that people call “actors’ nightmares,” in which one dreams of appearing in a play, or some other performance situation, unprepared and confused. Last night I dreamed I was going to be the baritone soloist in some sort of oratorio. I was sure I’d do fine although I hadn’t rehearsed and I could only recall part of the first number. At the last minute I realized it might be a good idea to have the music for the piece and I started looking for a vocal book . . . .

Tonight in a Zoom class on “classic TV” led by my friend the actor Joseph Smith, we discussed Ed Sullivan, who by having no performance skills at all made a perfect host for countless gifted performers. His situation reminded me of one of the central paradoxes of acting: the more skilled the actor, the less the actor looks like they’re doing anything at all. Obviously Ed Sullivan demonstrates the falsity of that conclusion: he doesn’t do any “acting,” and he doesn’t seem like he is, either. Being straightforward and lifelike on stage isn’t “natural.”

MAY 24 – Martha and I presented our Mental Health Players scene today at a county treatment facility specializing in mental illness. Our scene went fine; the audience was made up of patients and attendants, and some in the audience were not able to take in the fact that we are actors.

I was reminded how theatrical “conventions” – procedures and devices – can become so familiar that we forget that’s what they are. The idea that we two people up there were not brother and sister and in many ways are unlike the characters we portrayed is a familiar idea for most audiences, but it’s nevertheless arbitrary, a fact seldom noticed. Some in this audience were confused and thought that in real life we were brother and sister, one really suffering from depression.

MAY 27 – a readthrough on Zoom of LLL by five of us, including Sharon, the director. A goal was to see how long the show would run, with a target of 75 minutes (in one continuous act); the readthrough took 74 minutes. In practice this does not mean the show will actually be that short, since it will contain musical numbers, not to mention scene changes, varying line readings, and mishaps. In other words, the script needs more cutting, which Sharon says she will do.

MAY 31 – a local theater company, just starting out, has now produced two new, full-length plays, one of which I saw tonight. How might one decide which was “better?” My answer: the first one gave me nothing to think about. The second had its problems, but I’ve spent the next day thinking about it.

JUNE 9 – a first cast readthrough of LLL, and it took an hour and twenty minutes, which is a good timing for a first reding. It’s a nice cast, although the difficulties in a production of Shakespeare are huge. His plays take everything a director has got.

JUNE10 – a readthrough for LLL preceded by two withdrawals from the cast, one small role and one largish one. One who quit thought the casting of her role was inappropriate, and one said to me, “I didn’t understand a word.”

People dropping out of performances happens frequently in community theater, but it happens in professional theater too (where the effects can be more complicated). The headaches a director then faces includes finding someone else to play the role and, often, having to adjust the rehearsal schedule.

Interestingly, at tonight’s reading the level of comprehension of Shakespeare’s words, at least as far as I could tell, was much higher than last night, with some actors positively comfortable in their roles and the plot seeming more and more intelligible.

I irritated myself by speaking up at least once when I should have kept quiet; I’m not directing, I’m not even acting, so shut up. I did start sketching ideas for blocking in my script, I admit it, both to keep my mind active and to see what I might come up with – not to be shared with anyone.

JUNE 14 – In tonight’s “jazz jam” I realized tonight that one thing I’ve learned is not to anticipate what I’ll play when it’s my time to solo, but just to trust that at that moment I’ll play what I’m supposed to play. “Be in the moment” is really the lesson. I want to apply that more to my acting as well.

JUNE 15 - Bone tired, I still dragged myself this evening to the second half of blocking rehearsals for LLL. I guess it was okay; I could hardly keep my eyes open. When I began this diary piece, I was involved in five different projects; four are now completed or on indefinite hold, with only LLL in the running, and I’m basically just an observer on that. But who knows? In theater anything can happen.

*

At this point the account of LLL ends, because the two-month period I’m writing about is over, and because, due to scheduling problems and vacation, I didn’t see another rehearsal for a month.

I hope this account indicates some of the many practical issues one encounters when putting on a performance, no matter which kind of performance it is. Few things are “easy” in performing, no matter how small the show or how expert the team.

The second half of this diary will focus on one production, with the aim of pointing out more of the interesting challenges one encounters in theater.

[The second half of this diary, which will be posted on 28 August, will focus on the production of two new one-act plays in which Kirk had two roles.  Kirk’s aim is to point out more of the interesting challenges he encounters while working in theater.  Please return to Rick On Theater for “Performance Diary, Part 2,” on Wednesday.]

'Yé-Yé'

 

[As most readers of Rick On Theater know by now, I lived in Europe for some years from my mid-teens till my early 20’s.  (See “An American Teen in Germany,” posted on ROT on 9 and 12 March 2013.)  My dad was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer posted in Germany from September 1962 to October 1967, and my brother and I made our first visit to Europe at Christmastime 1962—which was my 16th birthday—and we went to live with our parents the following summer when I finished my sophomore (and my brother his eighth-grade) year at boarding school in the States. 

[I began to learn German that summer—my father hired a young woman to tutor my brother and me and I got quite proficient by the time I started my junior year at an international school near Geneva, Switzerland.  (See “Going to a Swiss International School,” 9 April and 2, 5, 8, and 11 May 2021.) 

[Geneva and the Swiss Canton of Genève are in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, so, although my classes were in English, most of the rest of my school life was conducted in French.  I had only taken a year of American high school French before coming to Europe, so my introduction to conversational French started when I arrived at school that fall.  With the benefit of becoming close friends with a French teenager in Germany—his father was the military doctor with a contingent of the French army in Germany—I became increasingly fluent in French as well. 

[(The city in which both my family and the Humiliens were stationed, Koblenz, had been part of the French Zone of Occupation after World War II; France still maintained a small presence there.  The Humiliens and my folks had become friendly in the few months since Dad arrived in Koblenz, and their son, Marc, was my age.  The two of us and Marc’s younger sister Marion, who was my brother’s age, all became close friends.  Eventually, my French became more fluent than Marc’s or Marion’s English, so our conversations were mostly in French. 

[(While I spoke English at home and in class—and with my English-speaking schoolmates in the dorm and dining hall—and German around town in Koblenz, I spoke French in Switzerland with the school staff and off campus and whenever I was hanging out with Marc or his sister.)

[Living in Koblenz was different from living in Bonn, the capital then of the Federal Republic of Germany (that is, West Germany), the location of the U.S. Embassy where my father was later transferred.  There, we lived in an embassy residence compound where everyone spoke English and Dad’s office was mostly staffed by Americans (with a number of German employees, but they all spoke English as well).  But in Koblenz, where we lived until 1965, we lived in a completely German community—Dad was the only diplomatic official from the United States in the region; his small staff at his office was all German (explained in “An American Teen”), though most of them spoke excellent English.

[My family’s life in Koblenz was just about as German as it could be: we shopped in German stores, rode German busses, ate in German restaurants, went to German movie theaters (where, even if we saw an American movie, it was dubbed into German).  As far as I was concerned, this was part of the greatest adventure of my life up to that point!  I reveled in the whole experience.

[My parallel life as a student at a Swiss international school was much the same . . . except it was mostly in French instead of German—and the culture I was absorbing was French (well, French Swiss—but the distinction’s pretty much a quibble).  So, at one and the same time, I was being enculturated into German customs and French customs.  Not just the languages, but the ways of doing things—almost everything.

[I was very successful at it, as it turned out.

[Of course, we made a point of exploring—and adopting—the cuisines of the cultures around us.  While we continued to eat our favorite foods and dishes from home—Mom was a great cook—we also ate (and drank) what the Germans, Swiss, and French did, as well as other foods from places we visited.  (Mom made a terrific paella after an extended trip through Spain!)]

In the years my family lived in Europe, among the cultural aspects that we—well, I—dipped into avidly was music.  I was already a Rock ’n’ Roll fan from its beginnings in the mid-1950s (when I was about to turn 9), and when I got to Europe, the Beatles were just bursting forth in Britain and on the Continent.  I was infected with Beatlemania right off, followed by the music of the groups that came after the Fab Four. 

Not only are my first Beatles albums and 45’s European pressings—my first Beatles LP, With the Beatles, released in Europe in 1963, is a German pressing I bought in Koblenz and my Rubber Soul is French because it was a gift from Marc Humilien, both with 14 cuts instead of the usual 12 for American albums—but I still have the 45 of the German-language versions of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “She Loves You” (“Komm, gib mir deine Hand” and “Sie liebt dich”) the Boys recorded in 1964.

I also have 45’s of recordings by Sheila (b. 1945), Sylvie Vartan (b. 1944), Françoise Hardy (1944-2024), Claude François (1939-78), Richard Anthony (1938-2015), and Guy Mardel (b. 1944) I bought in Geneva.  These were the yé-yé singers of France in the early and middle 1960s—at the start of their popularity just as I arrived in Switzerland.

Though the French gave precedence to their own language, which made the French pop scene different from those of other Continental musical movements, there were several foreign yé-yé singers.  Jane Birkin (1922-2016), an English actress and singer, had a role in Slogan, a 1969 French comedy-drama film co-written and directed by Pierre Grimblat (1922-2016).  She met Serge Gainsbourg (1928-91), a singer-songwriter who had a part in the film, in 1968.  They began a relationship and Birkin moved to Paris and established her career as an actress and singer.

Gillian Hills (b. 1944) is another British actress who established a singing career in France.  She made a movie for Roger Vadim (1928-2000), Les liaisons dangereuses 1960, in 1959, and then made her first recording in 1960.  In 1963, she collaborated with Gainsbourg on his first yé-yé duet, “Une petite tasse d’anxiété” (‘A little cup of anxiety’), which Gainsbourg sang with her on French TV.

Nancy Holloway (1932-2019), one of the few Black and American yé-yé singers, arrived in Paris in 1954.  She made a tour of Europe as a dancer and settled in Paris in 1960.  She made her first record, the single of the chanson “Le boogie du bébé” in 1961 while she was making feature films, one of which was Cherche l’idole (‘Look for the idol’) by Michel Boisrond (1921-2002); Holloway played herself alongside singers Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Hallyday (1943-2017), Charles Aznavour (1924-2018), and Eddy Mitchell (b. 1942)

Françoise Hardy (whose family name was pronounced ar-DEE) and her yé-yé companions were part of my immersion into French culture when I was at school in Geneva.  Hardy, arguably the best-known “Yé-Yé Girl" of the era (she was also a fashion icon and made a few movies), died at 80 on 11 June 2024.

Her obituary appeared in the New York Times on the 14th.  Though the obit was fairly long, it never even mentioned the yé-yé singers or the European musical style of which she was an icon.  I began to wonder if the pop movement might be worthy of an ROT post.  It’s not well known, though it had influence on the Continent, in Spain, Italy, Portugal, and several other countries in Western Europe—not so much in Germany. 

(Yé-yé’s influence went beyond Europe as well.  Not only was it immensely popular with Quebeckers—whom, I’ve been known to say, are more French than the French!—but the Japanese got into the act as well.)

It wasn’t a movement in England, either (except for Petula Clark, b. 1932, a sort of honorary Yé-Yé Girl).  The Beatles were starting up at the same time, and then the other Brit Rock bands, so I don't think yé-yé had a chance to take hold there.  

(Clark was a kind of special case.  She sang in both English and French—as well as several other languages—and after her 1964 international hit “Downtown” topped charts all over the world, she also released a French version, “Dans le temps” [‘In the old days’] the next year.  In the United Kingdom, the French version charted alongside the English original, but I don’t know if it was even released in the U.S., though it was a hit in Quebec, where Clark was popular.)

I don't think yé-yé penetrated into the United States—which would account for the failure to mention it in Hardy’s Times obituary.  With Pet Clark, for instance, her connection to the pop music style was never mentioned in her PR here, I don't think.  I asked my friend Kirk Woodward, who’s a musician and songwriter himself, as well as a Rock ’n’ Roll and pop music fan, if he’d ever heard of yé-yé music.  “It’s definitely not a familiar subject for me,” he told me.

My judgment is that here in the U.S., yé-yé's not a familiar topic—even to Americans who were around (and cognizant) in the ’60s—y​et it was a significant part of my enculturation into living in Europe when I was a teenager.

The yé-yé movement was decidedly French, but it spread all over Western Europe and lasted about a decade, with influences that continued much longer.  Among its several influences and progenitors, yé-yé’s most prominent was the French chanson (la chanson française) of the 1950s and ’60s, already infused by American and British Rock ’n’ Roll.

(Chanson is simply the French word for ‘song.’  When referring explicitly to the specific genre of the chanson descended from medieval times, however, the phrase ‘French chanson’ or chanson française is commonly used.  In this post, since I’m only referring to the particular genre, I won’t always make the verbal distinction.)

The modern chansons after World War II were cabaret songs performed by solo singer-songwriters who could accompany themselves.  Think of singers like Édith Piaf (1915-1963), Jacques Brel (1929-78), and Charles Aznavour as archetypes.  The chanson of the mid-20th century was in the tradition of songs that focused on the lyrics and vocals over the melody, creating an intimacy with the audience.

Spotlighting the lyrics of the French chanson, putting storytelling and vocalizing front and center, stresses the song’s message and invites listeners in so that they almost feel as if they’re intruding on a private moment.  Chanson lyricists often strive to convey messages of significance, sometimes political, in their songs.

Even as Rock ’n’ Roll dominated the pop music of the U.S. and the U.K., as well as much of Western Europe, in France, where American-style pop music translated into French was looked down on as imitative and derivative, the French chanson, which traces its heritage back to medieval France as far back as the late 11th century, continued to dominate French airwaves.

Some of the writers and singers of yé-yé were part of both worlds, such as Françoise Hardy and Serge Gainsbourg.  American and British pop influence on yé-yé, however, shifted the emphasis to catchy tunes, but lyrics that didn’t really mean very much, like 'yé yé,' ‘la la la,’ or ‘na na na na,’ and so on.  (After yé-yé passed from the music scene, a new form of French chanson emerged, dubbed the nouvelle chanson.)

By my own observation—admittedly, one formulated by an American teenager newly arrived in Europe—this accounts for a phenomenon of the European pop music scene.  The Brits had already absorbed American pop-musical influences and after essentially copying our early Rock ’n’ Roll of the ’50s until, by the early ’60s, they were launching their chart-busting counter-offensive.

In Germany, the radios and record stores were full of American and British pop groups and solos.  (The Beatles famously recorded those two early hits as a thank-you to their German fans who had welcomed them in early gigs in Hamburg before they became internationally famous.)  

The Germans, though, were hung up on “cowboy music” at that time—not what we call today country-western music, but old-time cowboy music: Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Tex Ritter.  (The theme song from Bonanza was a special favorite.  See “‘Wild West Germany’” by Rivka Galchen, posted on ROT on 15 September 2012.)  Hence, I submit, the low popularity of yé-yé music there.

French Rock ’n’ Roll was largely French versions of American hits.  Hugues Aufray (b. 1929), for instance, had a hit with “Pends-moi” (1964; the French title means ‘hang me’), a cover of Roger Miller’s 1964 single “Dang Me.”  Petula Clark covered many American pop hits in French, including “Ceux qui ont un coeur” from 1964 (‘Those who have a heart’; Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart,” 1963) and 1966’s “La nuit n’en finit plus” (‘The night never ends’; Jackie de Shannon’s “Needles and Pins,” 1963).

In 1962, Yé-Yé Boy Claude François, known as “the prince of yé-yé” and “the king of disco,” had his first hit with “Belles! Belles! Belles!” (‘Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful’).  It was an adaptation of the Everly Brothers’ 1960 “(Girls, Girls, Girls) Made to Love.”

(Later, François experienced a turn-about.  He had a hit with “Comme d’habitude” (‘As usual’) in 1967 and then the English version became an even bigger hit in 1969 for Frank Sinatra—called “My Way.”  Does that make Sinatra a Yé-Yé Boy?)

Johnny Hallyday, a singer and actor who was married to Yé-Yé Girl Sylvie Vartan from 1965 to 1980, had hits with, among other covers, 1961’s “Viens danser le twist” (‘Come dance the twist’; “Let’s Twist Again” from Chubby Checker, 1961), which sold a million copies and got him a gold record; “Da dou ron ron” in 1963 (The Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” 1963), which was no. 1 for eight weeks; and 1963’s “Quant je l'ai vue devant moi” (‘When I saw her before me’; The Beatles’ “When I Saw Her Standing There,” 1963).

For the most part, though, the French not only preferred their own singers—but their own musical traditions.  Hence, yé-yé!

The Yé-Yé Girls, as you’ve probably gathered by now, weren’t a girl group, but a musical movement.  There were Yé-Yé Boys, too, like Hallyday and Claude François—in addition to the other singers I named earlier—but the girls, young, pretty, and stylish, were the best known and most popular.  (It probably didn’t hurt matters that the “boys” were all older than the girls by as much as a half a decade.  Hallyday was a notable exception—and he was extremely popular both as a French pop singer—dubbed “the French Elvis”—and as a movie actor.)

(The label was somewhat elastic.  Some of Aufray’s songs, for instance, are labeled yé-yé while others aren’t.  Singer Alain Barrière, 1935-2019, was sometimes considered yé-yé, but seemed to have eschewed the tag and music reviewers mostly found he wasn’t influenced by the musical style even when it was extremely popular in France.)

Okay, but what is yé-yé?

First the name.  In case you hadn’t twigged to it on your own by now, yé-yé (or, as the French write it, yéyé) is an approximation of the English ‘yeah yeah,’ a common interjection in American (as early as the ’50s) and British (by the ’60s) Rock ’n’ Roll.  (Someone counted: in the Beatles’ 1963 pop hit “She Loves You,” in which the refrain “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!” proliferates, the word “yeah” is sung 29 times.)

In February 1962, Françoise Hardy, who’d just turned 19, sang her own composition, “La fille avec toi” (‘The girl with you’), on Mireille Hartuch’s Sunday television show, Le Petit Conservatoire de la chanson.  The song, which tells the story of a woman who revisits a place filled with memories of a past relationship and encounters her former boyfriend with a new girl, begins and ends with “Yeah yeah yeah yeah.”

(In the written lyrics, the line is spelled that way, that is, in the English spelling—but Hardy sings it as “yé yé yé yé.)

After Hardy finished, Mireille (1906-96; a well-known singer of French chansons, she went by one name) asked her what the “yé yé” lyrics meant.  I couldn’t find a record of Hardy’s reply, but the term went on to refer to “a young person’s exuberance, optimism, and enthusiasm for current trends.”  Yé-yé wasn’t just a musical style, it was also a way of dressing, dancing, and wearing one’s hair—and an attitude. 

In France, it was emblematic of the Swinging Sixties.  The yé-yé artists inspired a youth culture in France, much as the Brit rockers did in the English-speaking world.  It spawned a sexual revolution and, in the words of philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin (who would help establish the new cultural influence), “a festive, playful hedonism.”

On 22 June 1963, a free concert at the Place de la Nation in Paris was organized by the French radio station Europe No. 1 (now Europe 1) and Salut les copains (loosely translated as ‘Hello, pals’ or ‘Hello, mates’), a popular music radio show.  It was expected to draw 20,000 people, but attracted 150,000 young people, who came to see yé-yé stars that included Richard Anthony, Sylvie Vartan, and Johnny Hallyday, but the unanticipated crowd degenerated into a riot known as “la Folle Nuit de la Nation” (‘the Crazy Night of the Nation’).

In an article on 7 July 1963 in the Paris newspaper Le Monde, just 15 days later, Morin (b. 1921) christened these young performers “les Yéyés,” the first time that term was used in the press, and blamed them for the blow-up at the Nuit de la Nation.  He further designated the entertainers harbingers of a coming revolt (which, in a way, came in May 1968 with the student revolt—though I don’t think the yé-yé singers had much to do with that).

(Salut les copains was started on Europe No. 1 in 1959—going off the air in 1968—and aired daily from 5 to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday.  It was a huge hit with teens and pre-teens, especially with 12- to 15-year-olds, who rushed home after school to catch the show.  Once yé-yé caught on, most of its reigning stars appeared on the program, many of them more than once and some many times.  It was sort of the American Bandstand of French radio.

Yé-yé, which arose in 1962, the year before the Beatles released their first record, was quickly dismissed as what we anglophones would call “bubblegum” because of the supposed shallow and youthful focus of their music.  The baby-boomers, though, saw that their square elders thought that the music was a facile imitation of music from abroad because they didn’t bother to listen to the originality and sophistication of the songs.

Part of the enduring appeal of yé-yé music was its subtle irreverence. Yé-yé songs weren’t as overtly political or revolutionary as, say, some of the chansons of Jacques Brel, but the composers found ways to assert the newfound independence of the young generation, though often with jingly melodies and danceable beats.

Ostensibly, the songs were about love, of course, but the teens took to them because they were also about the mundanities of life, like school and loneliness.  One of Françoise Hardy’s first and biggest hits was the self-penned “Tous les garçons et les filles” (‘All the boys and girls,’ 1962, a beautiful and melancholy song about loneliness—something of a signature theme of hers.  One of her songs from the same album, “La fille avec toi,” is a poignant exploration of heartache, nostalgia, and the painful realization of unrequited love.  Jacqueline Taïeb (b. 1948) looked and sounded like the teenage girl she was and sang about everyday subjects such as looking for her toothbrush and crushing on Paul McCartney.

The ordinariness of these subjects, however, often employed double-entendres to lead the listener to the intersection of innocence and sensuality, while allowing them to choose which path to interpret and enjoy the music.

Perhaps the best known and most blatant example of this—also the cruelest—was a song written by Serge Gainsbourg, the most prolific yé-yé songwriter of the period.  He was the composer of most of the songs recorded by France Gall (1947-2018), one of the youngest of the Yé-Yé Girls in the scene.  She released a song entitled “Les Sucettes” (‘Lollipops,’ 1966), when she was 19.

On its surface, the song is about a girl named Annie who likes anise-flavored lollipops; however, the lyrics are almost all double-entendres for oral sex, such as a line about barley sugar running down Annie’s throat.  The French word for lollipop, sucette, is derived from the verb sucer, which means ‘to suck.’  So, to a French ear, the title would be more like “Suckers” and the refrain “Annie aime les sucettes” would be “Annie loves suckers.”

Gall was a very naïve and innocent girl—France at the time was a very conservative and repressed society—and said after the song’s release that she had no idea about the double meanings.  She was mortified—and her collaboration with Gainsbourg ended.

Gainsbourg was only one of the yé-yé composer-lyricists.  (He also wrote for sometime-actress Brigitte Bardot, b. 1934, a part-time Yé-Yé Girl.)  Other notable arrangers and songwriters included Jean Bouchéty (1920-2006), Michel Colombier (1939-2004), Mickey Baker (1925-2012), and Germinal Tenas (b. ca. 1948).  While the female singers were mostly young, often teenagers, and the Yé-Yé Boys were five-to-ten years older, the writers and arrangers were mostly considerably older. 

Perhaps needless to say, while the singers, especially the girls, were criticized by yé-yé‘s detractors for the shallowness of the lyrics, the older men were not subjected to the same opprobrium.  It was surely a matter of sexism and ageism—and the fact that the writers were either the same generation as the complaining parents, or nearly so helped indemnify them, I’d guess.

The songwriters were inspired by Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” that was the backtrack for the era’s girl groups in the States, and the Beach Boys.  They added a French sensibility to the American rock and pop with elements of baroque music, exotica, pop, jazz and, as already noted, the French chanson.  This mix was all presented with swinging, catchy rhythms and carefree, escapist, and playfully risqué lyrics. Voilà, yé-yé!

The chanson’s emphasis on the lyrics and the vocalizing was retained, even though the words no longer contained the importance they had in the chansons of the earlier decades.  The meter of the French chanson takes account of the rhythms of the French spoken language and demands precise and clear enunciation and pronunciation, and this remained as part of yé-yé.  As a result, when a yé-yé singer sang one of the pop tunes the composers put out, unlike many British and American Rock ’n’ Roll singers, all the words were clear and audible over the instrumentation.

The sound of French music during the yé-yé period was irresistible, blending infectious melodies with heartfelt lyrics that resonated with a young generation seeking freedom and self-expression.  The songs were filled with youthful energy, reflecting the changing times and the desire to break out of conventional norms.  Yé-yé became a soundtrack of liberation, empowering a generation to embrace their individuality and dance to their own tune.

"Art Will Out," Part 5: Responses (continued)

 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series 

[This is the final installment of the “Art Will Out” series.  Part 5 constitutes the last two responses to Jaan Whitehead’s article from American Theatre’s October 2002 issue that examined the issues of institutionalized theater in the United States.  As you will see, below are a 2003 response article from another journal and a 2004 letter to the editor of AT.

[In the December 2003 issue, Theatre Communications Group Executive Director Ben Cameron remarked, “We were unprepared, however, for the firestorm of reaction” that Whitehead’s essay would generate.  Readers of Rick On Theater who’ve been following along with the series since I posted Whitehead’s article in Part 1 on 3 August will have had a taste of what the staff of AT reaped.

[For those who haven’t been following the series, Parts 2 through 4 were posted on 6, 9, and 12 August.  Go back and have a look—especially at the initial essay.]

“THINKING THROUGH THE AUDIENCE”

by Paul Kosidowski 

[Freelance writer and arts critic Paul Kosidowsi’s article in Theatre Topics (13.1) was published in March 2003.  (Theatre Topics is a journal published by the Association for Theatre in Higher Education.)]

Who’s there?

—Hamlet, I.i.1

 

Today, when there is the semblance of a gathered public, it is usually looked at askance by the most seminal practitioners in the theater, as it was by Brecht and Artaud, and by social and critical theorists. Such an audience seems like the merest facsimile of remembered community paying its respects not so much to the still-echoing signals of a common set of values but to the better-forgotten remains of the most exhausted illusions.

—Herbert Blau, The Audience 

When Horatio peers into and interrogates the darkness, he invokes some of the key questions of dramatic theory in modern times: Who is out there in the dark? What power do they have over me? Or I over them? Herbert Blau explores the question from a multitude of perspectives-theoretical, psychoanalytical, historical-always returning, it seems, to the tension between unity and fracture that is inherent in the very idea of theatre. Theatre begins, he reminds us, with the act of seeing itself-the gaze dividing the community into the seen and the seeing. “There is no theatre without separation,” he writes, emphasizing the essential and obvious fracture of the drama, even as every urge drives us to deny the divide and cling to the illusion of a connection and a community [Herbert Blau, The Audience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1990: 10].

While some theorists and performers ponder this separation, the theatre professionals with whom I work cling fast to this most exhausted of illusions, always seeking a kind of profound and ephemeral communication across the divide. For us, the question of “Who’s there?” is tied not only to the nature of the drama, but is inextricably linked to box office numbers, marketing matters, and the unsavory, but necessary, business of competing for consumer leisure time. Theatre practitioners are reluctant to put it in such base terms, of course, but our questions about audience are always linked to both institution and art, even if we are reluctant to let those two entities mingle and interact. If our goal is to offer a compelling theatrical experience, a near empty theatre is as great an impediment as a poorly directed play. If the mission of theatre is indeed to bridge the fissure between observer and observed, or at least to create a meaningful, if illusory, connection between the two, isn’t the audience the locus of our energy? Shouldn’t the audience be our primary concern when we shape our art and create our drama?

Of course. Yet, when a production fails, do we think of how we fail the audience, or how the audience failed us? For even as we acknowledge the primacy of the audience, our took across the divide is usually wary and perhaps condescending. The SITI Company’s Cabin Pressure—like Herbert Blau’s The Audience, which informed its dramaturgy—offered a complex meditation on the relationship between performer and audience. Yet, what I remember most from the Humana Festival production was “the audience ballet,” a hilarious dance in which the performers mimicked a crowd wrestling with attentiveness and cascading across the stage in a gloriously funny dance of fidgets and yawns and efforted alertness. We have all seen an audience “perform” like this. The divide between performer and house develops into a chasm, across which meaning or emotion cannot hope to span. Audiences can be maddening. At their most impatient and closed-minded, they are easy to dismiss as an enemy. Perhaps these audiences bear some relation to those dismissed by Brecht and Artaud. But dramaturgy will not serve the theatre if it looks askance. For as much as we need to challenge, provoke and sometimes ignore our audience, we also need to listen to them.

For me, the idea of audience has changed substantially since I left academia to become the Literary Director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. The questions that were once speculative and theoretical have become grounded and palpable. The Audience has become an audience—a collection of particular people who come to our theatre on particular evenings and come away with particular experiences. And I grew up with these people. Unlike most dramaturgs in regional theatres, I grew up with the city and theatre in which I now work*. I have been seeing productions at the Milwaukee Rep for over 25 years, and been writing about them as a journalist and critic for over ten years. Even more importantly, I knew Milwaukee, the community, our audience—and all its strengths, tensions, and faults.

* I suppose I should think about my audience here. The theatres I’m thinking about here are those most like my own-flagship theatres in mid-size American cities. In cities like New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, and Seattle, the theatre public is large enough for theatres to appeal to certain communities within cities. But in cities like Milwaukee, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, or Denver, the regional theatre must think of its audience in the broadest sense, and likely has an identification with the entire community as part of its formal mission.

However, these connections didn’t seem important when I arrived at The Rep for the first time. My ideas for the theatre had little to do with my community or our audience. Instead, I brought with me an old-fashioned, neoplatonic, “the-best-which-has-been-thought-or-said” sort of aesthetic. I wanted to bring the freshest and most innovative new playwrights to Milwaukee—the work I was reading about, the work that was being talked about around the world. I suspect I was not unlike other dramaturgs who arrive in a mid-sized city after spending two or three years in the heady environment of a graduate program (usually, of course, based on the East Coast). They have spent their time in the nerve center of the theatre world, they have forged their personal aesthetics and are ready to bring it to the American theatre. Ready to make an impact.

But to make an impact on the American theatre, individuals and institutions must begin with their particular American theatres and their audience. And that audience is likely a world away from the audiences—either real or imagined—that we have carried in our mind as we learned and developed our ideas about theatre. We are aware of our new community and aware of our responsibilities. We perhaps hear the members of our audience (and certainly observe moments in our plays that “work”), but we are more interested in bringing our aesthetic to them than in understanding their perceptions and assumptions about what they see on stage.

Perhaps the idea of listening to audiences is just too close to the idea of “giving them what they want” and all the crass populist pandering that the phrase implies. “Art Will Out,” a recent essay by Jaan Whitehead in American Theatre is only one of many examples of a call to separate “art” from concerns about our audiences. Whitehead cautions theatres against losing their artistic identities and becoming driven by “institutional needs”—in other words, programming to sell tickets rather then serve the “artistic mission” of the theatre. Interestingly, Whitehead does celebrate some theatres that put their audience first-so-called “community-based theatres” such as the Roadside Theatre of Kentucky or the San Francisco Mime Troupe-but only ones that serve non-traditional audiences. These theatres aspire “to become an indigenous part of the community, creating a theatrical voice for that community but also becoming one of its civic institutions, like schools and libraries” [Jaan Whitehead, “Art Will Out,” American Theatre 19.8 (October 2002): 35]. That is exactly the kind of institution regional theatres should aspire to become. But to do so, we need to bring the audience and community further into the artistic process, not only through theatre that speaks specifically to community stories and issues, but by listening to their desires and expectations without fear of artistic “compromise.” The division between artistic and institutional needs is not as clear-cut as we’d like to believe. And I think our theatres should seek out a place in which these two drives operate synchronistically—creating great theatre that a community will want to see.

I fear that listening to an audience-seeing a play through its eyes and listening to its reactions without condescension-is considered so perilously close to being “institutionally driven” that we often pay the idea lip service. Are we prepared to face the reality that a play that is right for us (the “theatre professional”) is not right for our audience? If the idea of community aesthetics—theatre created with its community in mind—has powerful artistic integrity for theatres like the Roadside, why is the same attention to audience artistically compromising when it happens in a regional theatre? To make our theatres truly “community based” means partially disconnecting ourselves from the national theatre culture, which can distract us from the people in our own audiences. We certainly can learn from our peers and peer institutions, but we need to listen to and learn from our communities as well. This might mean being skeptical about the play or playwright of the moment. Or it might mean embracing it, him, or her without feeling remorse that we are contributing to the “sameness” of theatre in America. Every year, dramaturgs and theatre people examine the “season schedule” issue of American Theatre, and there is the requisite speculation and analysis about the programming trends in American regional theatres. Why are a handful of plays being done in so many theatres? Why is there a paucity of new work? Which theatres stand out with adventurous and risky choices? These big—picture questions should concern us all, but they should not be the primary questions that drive our own programming choices. If we are thoughtful about our own audiences, I think the big-picture issues will take care of themselves.

How do we think about our audience? Do we consider it a fixed entity, its character and tastes so static and predictable that we know at a glance which plays will “work” and which won’t? Listening to audiences does not mean we should forego our impulses to challenge and stretch audiences, but it does mean we should think carefully about the ways plays can challenge, and how our audiences will respond (or not) to those challenges. Instead, I fear important artistic decisions about programming are made by a sort of bargaining-table bean counting: allow us to do this play (challenging, dark, unfamiliar) and we will reward you with that play (comedy, chestnut, Broadway hit).

I’m asking for a reconsideration of the “regionalism” of regional theatres. it’s related to the cautionary outcry that has been heard as major regional theatres become tryout houses for New York runs. But this isn’t about the bleeding together of commercial and not-for-profit theatre. It’s about treating a play as a community event, a work of art that is intended to speak to a specific group of people. And thinking about a season (or a series of seasons) as a community conversation. It means embracing and nourishing the variety of theatre experience, but making choices with the community in mind. I’m not interested in having marketing experts run the season planning meetings. Or for the artistic mission of a theatre to pander to the lowest denominator of audience expectations. I believe that audiences do want to be challenged, surprised, and perhaps even offended. But I do not think that challenging an audience is the same as baffling them. As artists who help shape our theatres, we need to think through our audiences.

When I talked recently to George F. Walker, the Canadian playwright, we talked about the empathy he felt for the underclass families and petty criminals that populate many of his plays. “I live in the world,” he told me. “The theatre is where I go to work,” I wonder, sometimes, if dramaturgs and other theatre professionals live too much in the theatre and not enough in the world, or at least in the world of our audiences. Most of us are trained together at the same handful of graduate programs, and then move to unfamiliar cities to start our careers. Our ideas of compelling theatre and our definition of a good play are given a foundation there, and continue to be shaped by our own experiences in the theatre as we move through our careers. But just as a playwright needs to have empathy with his or her characters, we need to have empathy with our audience, to see a play through its eyes.

[Paul Kosidowski was in his fourth year as literary director of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater.  He was a former arts critic and taught theatre history and American literature at Milwaukee’s Marquette University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.]

*  *  *  *

“ART WILL OUT: NEW PATHWAYS”

“letters to the editor 

[Zachary Mannheimer’s letter to the editor of American Theatre was published in volume 21, issue 1 (January 2004).]

In the Oct. ’02 issue of American Theatre, Jaan Whitehead raised the question: “Has American theatre become excessively institutional?” (“Art Will Out” [see Part 1]). Several prominent theatrical minds wrote on this issue, and soon a solution surfaced: “Let some talented, courageous new leaders come forward and hitch themselves to the wagon. They will be warmly welcomed into the field—and gently warned. For founding today is very different from founding yesterday,” wrote Zelda Fichandler [“Whither (or Wither) Art?”, May/June ’03; see Part 4] about young voices speaking up and asking for involvement. So where are these newfound leaders? We in the Off-Off Broadway community are here to step forward, make our voices known, contribute to this ongoing “manifesto” and declare ourselves to be the young theatre artists for whom you have been searching.

We are a group called the Off-Off Community Dish, representing a cross section of New York City’s Off-Off Broadway community. We are 20 companies strong, made up of over 500 artists, and reaching an audience base of over 10,000 theatregoers. We produce over 40 productions annually and meet bi-monthly to address issues affecting our community. We work for little to no pay, spend over $300,000 of privately raised money annually, and receive no more than 10 grants per year collectively. The average age of this group is 27, and the average age of our companies is five years. We are “the first real computer generation . . . liv[ing] with very few resources outside [our] own talent and energy,” as Ms. Whitehead puts it. We would like to aid in this process for new American theatre, and do so with every show we produce. However, we continue to go ignored, unheard and unrecognized past our modest attempts at experimental theatre.

[I could not confirm that the Off-Off Community Dish is still extant in 2024.  Many of the constituent companies named in the “Editor’s Note” at the bottom of this post no longer seem to be functioning, though several still have listed productions in 2023 and 2024. ~Rick]

Many of our plays call for a change in the status quo or change in an individual life. But our plays go mostly unseen by those who do not agree with our messages. Our audience has become a recycled cult. No longer is it enough to produce a play and expect a new audience to show up. Audience development, community outreach and children’s educational programming do not guarantee a healthy, diverse audience, despite what our paperwork may illustrate. Notwithstanding the recent altruistic efforts and findings of the Performing Arts Research Coalition [a Washington, D.C.-based collaborative project of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, American Symphony Orchestra League, Dance/USA, OPERA America, and Theatre Communications Group, supported by The Pew Charitable Trusts to improve and coordinate the way performing arts organizations gather information on their sector; 2002-04], we cannot sit down and pat ourselves on the collective back. There is much more work to be done.

In another recent issue of American Theatre (“Facing the Unknown,” July/Aug.’03), Ben Cameron [Executive Director of the Theatre Communications Group, publisher of AT] addresses his students: “Many of you are entering our field at a moment rife with questions and uncertainties. We look to you to be our leaders, finding new pathways for us all.” Well, Mr. Cameron, here are some new pathways that we have created and are attempting to implement.

Arguably, nothing can be done without capital and interest. We must re-evaluate our audience and our work. Why would most Americans visit the cinema rather than the theatre? The answer, in most cases, is simple—accessibility. Movie theatres can be found in almost every town, charging ticket prices affordable to almost everyone, and marketed to a mass audience in a way that theatre could not possibly attempt. Or could we?

That is just one of the many questions we have. Why are we theatre artists not doing what is so innate for us—collaborating? Not simply artistically, but administratively? Why are we not pooling our financial resources to market together? Moving beyond marketing, what about sharing potential finances, as in collectively applying for and sharing grants? How are we as theatre artists to make our voices known if we are not able to tour and publish our work?

Joseph Papp often repeated, “We will have to start charging admission to our free Shakespeare summer seasons if we do not have financial support from the city, privately and corporately.” This should not be the state of things. We should be able, like every other major country in the world, to have widespread funding for the arts. Perhaps we should even use the United Kingdom as a model and establish a National Arts Lottery.

We are being called upon to be leaders—given a green flag to step into the theatrical driver’s seat. Let us meet, discuss, debate and create. Let us begin a dialogue and make our collective dreams a reality. Bring us in. When we raise our hands and ask you to see our work, come and see it. Ms. Fichandler, Ms. Whitehead, Mr. Cameron and Todd London (“The Shape of Plays to Come,” Nov. ’02) all tell us to take the reins, but none tell us how. We know the what and the why—the how is what we need to know.

Ms. Whitehead says, “The new burst of energy in experimental theatre comes from the emergence of a whole new generation of artists who want to shake up the theatre world now, as their predecessors did before them.” We are that generation, standing before you awaiting your approval.

Zachary R.  Mannheimer

Producing artistic director

The Subjective Theatre Company

New York City

 

EDITOR’S NOTE: In addition to the Subjective Theatre Company, members of New York’s Off-Off Community Dish signing this letter include All You Can Eat Theatre Company; Prudenia, Inc.; Beggars Group; Smokin Word Productions; Boomerang Theatre Company; Spring Theatreworks; breedingground productions; Stages 5150; Castillo Theatre; Confluence Theatre Company; Vessel Project; and Nosedive Productions.

[In 1986, while I was editor of Directors Notes, the newsletter of the now-defunct American Directors Institute, I went to Baltimore to cover the Theatre of Nations international theater festival that took place there from 15 to 29 June. 

[(The Theatre of Nations was then a biennial program of the International Theatre Institute (ITI), an agency of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).  Its aim was to bring together theater artists and performances from all around the globe to one city for a few weeks.  I reported on ToN for Directors Notes in the September issue, but I also wrote a longer, more detailed report on the festival, the first and so far only Theatre of Nations in North America, for The Drama Review in “Theatre of Nations,” volume 31, issue 1 (Spring 1987 – T113).)

[The connection to this series on the institutionalization of the regional theater in the United States is that both ADI and ToN were attempts to do something that almost all the writers who appeared in this series, from Jaan Whitehead to Zachary Mannheimer, called for in one way or another: more communication among artistic directors and the other leaders of the nation’s resident theater companies.

[In my report on ToN in Directors Notes, I wrote, “We need to rub artistic elbows with colleagues doing different work elsewhere in the world.”  Of course, in the context of “Art Will Out,” the emphasis would be on colleagues around the U.S., because it isn’t just ideas on the art work that ADI was founded to exchange, but the running of the theaters and the solving of administrative problems.

[I went on in the report:

Director of Baltimore’s Theatre Project Philip Arnoult . . . accused American theater artists of being “criminally isolated, not only from the rest of the world, but from each other.”  American Directors, for example, do not talk to one another, asserted Stan Wojewodksi, Jr., Artistic Director of Baltimore’s Center Stage . . . .

[New York City’s] Shaliko Director Leonardo Shapiro explained that “the festival’s important because American theater is completely closed in—just like the rest of the society.”  Dr. Mohan Agashe, President of the Theatre Academy of Pune, India, expressed the same thought: “The reason we go to theater festivals is also to get input.  If you get lost in things only you are doing, you’ll run out of your resources very soon.  At some point, it’s very necessary to see the work of others.”

[In that last remark by Agashe, I would add “and hear the ideas” to “see the work.” The efforts of ADI included symposia that brought stage directors and theater company artistic directors together to talk, compare notes, and hear ideas from one another and from people in analogous positions in other fields. 

[The organization also held a three-day retreat at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Connecticut, to bring theater artists together with a “select team of experts from diverse, mostly non-theatrical fields” so that the directors and artistic directors could explore the various points of view on many topics and issues that came up in the free-wheeling discussions that followed the formal presentations and workshops.  (Many a late night was spent over coffee after an afternoon’s or evening’s session.)

[Unfortunately, ADI, for all the good it did and the promise it showed, didn’t live long enough to follow through on its successes.  The Touchstone Retreat at the O’Neill (which I attended as editor of the newsletter) was meant to be an annual event, with different guests to mix with the directors—but it was never replicated. 

[Nonetheless, ADI’s goals, even as early as the mid-1980s, were right in line with the proposals and suggestions of the theater artists who contributed to the conversation AT started in 2002.  In the days before ADI was launched, at a preliminary gathering (also at the O’Neill), A. Harrison Cromer, executive secretary of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers, the union for professional stage directors and choreographers now known as the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC), lamented, “Directors hardly ever get together.” 

[Francine Volker, a freelance director from Toronto, said, “Usually, you’re out there on your own.  You conceive an idea, but what do you do if it doesn’t work? You need to talk to somebody who could say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened to me.’”  That’s what Zelda Fichandler called for and the lack of which Mannheimer decried.  (It’s what ADI was meant to provide 17 years before, but never got the chance.)]