Computers and Actors, Part 2

 

[This is the completion of “Computers and Actors,” a collection of articles about the increasing use of computer graphics and digital animation in film and even on the stage to enhance and even replace live actors.]

“ART MIMICS LIFE AND ANDY SERKIS”

[The article below was published in Screen Actor: Screen Actors Guild Magazine 45.3 (Summer 2004).  Screen Actor was a predecessor of SAG-AFTRA magazine, the current member publication of the union formed by the merger of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (AFTRA).  (Before the merger, the TV and radio union put out a magazine simply entitled AFTRA.)]

The story of Andy Serkis should leave every actor with two nuggets of inspiration: One, the notion that computer-generated  animation will soon eliminate the need for flesh-and-blood actors is nonsense. And two, the next time you’re offered a role that seems like it’ll limit your true talents, remember it could lead to artistic genius.

For Serkis, his journey to understanding these acting revelations started about four years ago when he answered a phone call from his agent. 

“Are you interested in doing three weeks of voice-over work for The Lord of the Rings in New Zealand?” the agent asked Serkis. “They want you to play a character named Gollum.”

The English-born actor hesitated.

“There must be 12 proper acting parts for that film,” Serkis said a bit sarcastically. “Can’t you get me something decent?”

It’s not like Serkis wasn’t intrigued or eager to work, but he was a veteran of stage and screen. He had a broad range of talents and skills to display. And despite reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, Serkis had never even cracked the Rings trilogy.

He voiced his concerns, but it was his wife who ultimately convinced him that inside that seemingly routine voice work was a rich, complicated character just waiting for life.

“So I met with Peter Jackson when he was casting in London,” Serkis said. “I was impressed right away.” Serkis admired the bearded director’s vision for the entire trilogy—and more specifically, Gollum. “He told me he wanted it to be the most actor-driven computer-generated character that’s ever been,” Serkis said. “He said we need to give him a heart and soul, so we’re going to use an actor.”

Jackson loved Serkis’ take on the tormented creature and offered him the job. But that still didn’t eliminate the actor’s apprehension. What exactly was he getting himself into?

“I was quite scared,” Serkis admits. “The notion of a computerized character did worry me.” Turns out, Serkis’ concerns were unwarranted. By now you know the rest of the tale. Three weeks would turn into four years as Serkis performed alongside Elijah Wood and Sean Astin—then found his likeness cropped right out of the film thanks to the magic of performance capture.

Although some may consider having your likeness erased from one of the most popular movie trilogies of all-time [sic] (except in [. . .] The Return of the King where he appears as Smeagol), Serkis says this job gave him a chance to perform some of the purest acting he’s ever done.

“It reminded me of the stage,” he says. “You still have to create the character. I still had to find that human emotion and that psychology.”

And what about the detractors who believe a character like Gollum may signal humans getting pushed out for pixels?

“Screen actors are manipulated all the time,” Serkis says. “The film is cut, it’s edited, music is added in behind.”

No matter what the medium, there must be a connection between actor and audience. And it’s no coincidence audiences made such a connection to Gollum. It’s because he is real after all. Thanks to Andy Serkis, who sums up performance capture technology like this: “I really think this is a fantastic new string in an actor’s bow.”

[Andy Serkis (b. 1964) played the performance-capture role of Gollum using motion capture acting, animation, and voice work for all three of the Lord of the Rings films (2001, 2002, and 2003) and in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012).  He went on to appear as Kong in King Kong in 2005; Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), and War for the Planet of the Apes (2017); Captain Haddock / Sir Francis Haddock in Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin (2011); and Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens (2015).

[The movie website IMDb describes the technical work through which Serkis and the Lord of the Rings films’ creators crafted his character:

“Gollum” was the collaborative team’s effort around Serkis’s work in performance capture – an art form based on CGI-assisted acting. Serkis’s work was an interactive performance in a skin-tight CGI suit with markers allowing cameras to track and register 3D position for each marker. Serkis’ [sic] every nuance was picked up by several cameras positioned at precisely calculated angles to allow for the software to see enough information to process the image. The images of Serkis’ performances were translated into the digital format by animators at Weta Digital studio in New Zealand. There, his image was key-frame animated and then edited into the movie, Serkis did have one scene in “The Return of the King” showing how he originally had the ring, killing another hobbit to posses[s] it after they found it during a fishing trip. He drew from his three cats clearing fur balls out of their throats to develop the constricted voice he produced for “Gollum” and “Sméagol”, and it was also enhanced by sound editing in post-production.

Serkis spent almost two years in New Zealand and away from his family, and much of 2002 and 2003 in post-production studios for large periods of time, due to complexity of the creative process of bringing the character of “Gollum” to the screen. Serkis had to shoot two versions for every scene; one version was with him on camera, acting with (chiefly) Elijah Wood and Sean Astin, which served both to show Wood and Astin the moves so that they could precisely interact with the movements of “Gollum”, and to provide the CGI artists the subtleties of Gollum’s physical movements and facial expressions for their manual finishing of the animated images. In the other version, he’d [d]o the voice off-camera, as Wood and Astin repeated their movements as though “Gollum” were there with them; that take would be the basis for inserting the CGI Gollum used in the released movie. In post-production, Serkis was doing motion-capture wearing a skintight motion capture suit with CGI gear while acting as a virtual puppeteer redoing every single scene in the studio. Additional CGI rotomation [the technique in which animators trace live-action movement frame by frame] was done by animators using the human eye instead of the computer to capture the subtleties of Serkis’ performance. Serkis also used this art form in his performance as “Kong” in King Kong (2005), which won him a Toronto Film Critics Association Award (2005) for his unprecedented work helping to realize the main character in “King Kong”, and a Visual Effects Society Award (2006) for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Motion Picture.

[Serkis has also been featured in his performance-capture personae in video games based on his films.  Before his success with performance-capture work, Serkis appeared in traditional acting roles on TV, in film, and on stage; since Lord of the Rings, he’s continued his career in those fields.  Serkis made his film directing début with 2018’s Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle, which included considerable performance-capture work and CGI.]

*  *  *  *
 “VIRTUAL SUPERSTARS?: THE PROMISE AND PERIL TO REAL ACTORS”
by Mark S. Lee
 

[Lee’s article about digitized actors replacing live ones was published in the same Summer 2004 issue of Screen Actor as the one above about Andy Serkis’s performance-capture work.]

In New Line’s Simone [see also “‘Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors’” in “Computers and Actors,” Part 1, 4 October], a director used a digitally created “virtual” star to replace a “temperamental” actor. Marketed with the catchphrase “A Star Is . . . Created,” the film opened to less than stellar box office.

Although Simone was a fantasy, studios are working hard to make it real. New Line’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and The Return of the King prominently featured “Gollum” [see “‘Art Mimics Life and Andy Serkis,’” above], a digitally animated character created by special effects artists from the performance of a real actor. Universal’s Hulk [2003] starred a digitally created humanoid creature in the title role. DreamWorks recently entered into a “film sampling” agreement in which new story lines and actors would be inserted into existing motion pictures to create “entirely new entertainment.”

As these films demonstrate, digital technology creates both opportunities and dangers for real actors. An actor in theory could have her appearance digitally altered to make her appear 18 to perform in a high school comedy, or 25 to play a romantic lead, or 75 to play a character role, regardless of her real age. Height, weight, physique, all could be digitally manipulated. Actors might consider creating and retaining a library of their own digital images, poses, etc. for such purposes.

However, the same technology could make real actors obsolete. It could allow studios to create completely virtual “actors” such as Simone. Or, it could force actors to compete with themselves or deceased actors by allowing studios to superimpose images of famous living or deceased actors on an unknown who actually performs the role, or on photorealistic animated characters. New detective stories starring a virtual “Humphrey Bogart,” or new sex comedies starring a virtual “John F. Kennedy” and “Marilyn Monroe” could be in our future.

Surprisingly, it might be legal to make such films without the permission of the depicted actor or his or her estate. Unfair competition case law gives actors certain rights, but producers might avoid liability for such claims by simply providing a disclaimer. Defamation law would rarely apply to fictional works and could never protect the deceased. SAG’s Basic Agreement has a “reuse” provision that might protect actors when covered footage is used in the digitization process. SAG also has been heavily involved in strengthening state “right of publicity” laws, which prohibit unauthorized commercial exploitation of an individual’s name or likeness in certain circumstances. However, statutory or judicial exceptions to those laws involving fictional works would make recovery at best difficult, and at worst impossible.

A new federal law that protected actors’ ability to control how their image is used in digital “performances” is the best hope of protecting actors’ ability to pursue their livelihood. Absent such legislation, unauthorized uses of images in motion pictures, television programs, music videos, or Internet websites are likely to increase.

While much work remains to be done in this area, Screen Actors Guild has been successful covering certain “motion captured performances” through both direct bargaining with producers and through the arbitration process.

[Mark S. Lee is an intellectual property litigator in Los Angeles who has represented Tiger Woods; Elvis Presley Enterprises, Inc.; the Estate of Frank Sinatra; and others in unfair competition and right of publicity litigation.]

*  *  *  *
“DEAD STARS, ALIVE AGAIN; YES, MARILYN MAY FALL IN LOVE WITH VIGGO”
by Stuart Klawans
 

[Klawan’s “Dead Stars, Alive Again” was published in the “Week in Review” section (sec. 4) of the Sunday New York Times of 1 August 2004.]

THE visual arts, wrote the French critic André Bazin [1918-58] in 1945, have “a mummy complex” – they spring from a desire to preserve the human body from decay.

The power of film, Mr. Bazin argued, is that it embalms more completely than any previous medium, preserving not only anatomy but movements and sounds. We tend to think of film images as real, because the person who was preserved must have been present before the camera.

The funerary aspect of Bazin’s theory got a boost last week, but his case for realism took a dive, with reports on how computer technology has resurrected Sir Laurence Olivier, who died in 1989. A combination of manipulated archival film footage and fresh soundtrack dialogue will give Olivier a role – speaking lines he never spoke and making gestures he never made – in a new movie, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow,” scheduled for release in September [14 September 2004 for the Hollywood premiere; 17 September for the rest of the U.S.].

“I haven’t seen that many movies with Olivier recently,” the movie’s producer, Jon Avnet, explained in an interview, “which is part of the reason why I thought this was pretty cool casting – that, and the fact that he’s a great actor.”

This is not the first time that a dead actor has been exhumed. For Carl Reiner’s 1982 comedy “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid,” special effects allowed Steve Martin to play scenes with Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney.

[A week after the publication of this article, the New York Times issued a correction of the statement above relative to the timing of the death of James Cagney: “While his image as a young man appeared in the 1982 comedy ‘Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid,’ he did not die until 1986.”  Bogart, however, had died in 1957.]

In 1991 Bogart and Cagney, and Louis Armstrong [1901-71] for good measure, appeared with the singer Elton John in a Coke commercial.

The dead stars were essentially cutouts, limited to a repertoire of existing filmed gestures. In the meantime, digital technology was evolving toward the creation of wholly digital actors, who could do anything they were told and would never demand a roomier trailer.

So far, digital characters have not fared well. The 2001 thriller “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” with an all-digital cast, and Andrew Niccol’s satire “Simone” (2002), about the first virtual actor to become a celebrity, were box office disappointments [both films are discussed in Part 1 of this post].

But what if the technologies for reanimating dead stars and for creating digital actors could be merged? Researchers have been working toward that end since at least 1987, when Swiss scientists premiered “Rendezvous à Montréal,” a short film featuring digital versions of Bogart and Marilyn Monroe [1926-62].

The reanimation of Olivier in “Sky Captain” seems to be a further step in this direction.

When asked if he had freed his virtual Olivier from a set of prerecorded gestures, Kerry Conran, the writer-director of “Sky Captain,” said: “Our needs were very specific, by design. Within those limits, however, we did create a scene that Olivier never performed, so anything is possible.”

Mr. Avnet put it another way: “We created a different performance of sorts through motion capture, modeling and computer-generated imagery. Could you create a completely new performance with what we have today? It would be pretty demanding. But clearly, the future is coming fast.”

But the implications are anything but clear. “How do you protect imaginary humans? Can they have their own right of publicity?” asks Joseph J. Beard, a law professor at St. John’s University, an expert on copyright and trademark law, including the postmortem rights of digitized celebrities.

Mr. Beard notes that a patchwork of laws governs the use of dead actors’ images.

“California protects the images of celebrities for 70 years after death [see Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act in “‘Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors’” in Part 1], which is the same as under copyright law,” he said. “New York, on the other hand, does not have postmortem protection. So Bogart, who died as a resident of California, has state protection, and Cagney, who died as a domiciliary of New York, does not.”

The situation will only grow more complex, Mr. Beard said, if virtual actors gain artificial intelligence and become autonomous.

What if a virtual actor that looks and sounds like Olivier, and has a temperament to match, gets into a dispute with a rival Oliv[i]er simulation that is competing for the same roles? What if the interests of both these cyber-actors conflict with those of the rights holders to the original Olivier’s image?

The more pressing question for audiences may be the fate of the actor’s soul. We are accustomed to think of the greatness of a performer as an expression of individuality. But when Olivier is no longer captured on film but manufactured on the computer, perhaps in multiple versions, we lose the very thing that art was supposedly preserving: our point of contact with the irreplaceable, finite person.

For Mr. Avnet, that’s no problem. Noting that “Sky Captain” toys nostalgically with dated 1940’s Hollywood images of the future, he says: “What holds this film together is its celebration of movie history. To me, Olivier is perfect casting, because he embodies that history.”

[All these articles were published before the advent of deepfakes, the computer technology that allows someone in an existing image or video to be replaced with someone else’s likeness with sufficient exactitude to deceive viewers.  Wikipedia reports:

There has been speculation about deepfakes being used for creating digital actors for future films.  Digitally constructed/altered humans have already been used in films before, and deepfakes could contribute new developments in the near future.  Deepfake technology has already been used by fans to insert faces into existing films, such as the insertion of Harrison Ford’s young face onto Han Solo’s face in Solo: A Star Wars Story [2018], and techniques similar to those used by deepfakes were used for the acting of Princess Leia in Rogue One [2016].

[Combined with the techniques mentioned in the articles in “Computers and Acting,” deepfakery will only make it easier and more convincing to create virtual actors in the mages of deceased or aged celebrities, or simply to “cast” digitized—and compliant—avatars of living (and working) actors.  Disney, it seems, has already begun to work in this area—and I wouldn’t count on them to be reanimating Mickey and Donald!]

Computers and Actors, Part 1

 

[I’ve recently finished posting a series of articles on Rick On Theater on theatrical design and technology from a Special Section of American Theatre (see “Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design,” 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, and 24 September).  In my introduction to the first installment, I referenced an article I wrote called "Theater and Computers," posted on ROT on 5 December 2009, shortly after I started this blog.

[Now, as a sort of companion post to “The Magic Of Design,” I’m posting a small collection of articles dealing with the interface of actors and acting with computers, CGI, and computer animation.  Some of this is straight-up fascinating and intriguing, but other aspects and implications are daunting—especially to actors.]

“DREAMING THE IMPOSSIBLE AT M.I.T.”
by Philip Elmer-Dewitt
reported by Robert Buderi/Cambridge 

[In "Theater and Computers,” I affirmed that the impetus for writing that post had been an article I’d read decades earlier in Time magazine “that reported on a new computer program, developed at MIT, that let playwrights test scenes on screen without hiring actors and a stage.”

[That report was “Dreaming The Impossible at M.I.T.” by Philip Elmer-Dewitt, which appeared in Time on 31 August 1987—and I’m posting it now on ROT as a sort of predecessor to the AT series, which is almost 30 years newer than the Time report (and six years newer than my own take on Elmer-Dewitt’s discussion).]

In the Media Lab, the goal is to put the audience in control.

What if television sets were equipped with knobs that let viewers customize the shows they watch? If they could adjust the sex content, for example, or regulate the violence, or shift the political orientation to the left or right? What if motion pictures were able to monitor the attention level of audiences and modify their content accordingly, lengthening some scenes while cutting others short if they evoke yawns. What if the newspapers that reach subscribers’ homes every morning could be edited with each particular reader in mind – filled with stories selected because they affected his neighborhood, or had an impact on his personal business interests, or mentioned his friends and associates?

There are a lot of “what ifs,” but none of these is mere futuristic fantasy. All of them, in fact, are the goals of research projects now under way at the Media Laboratory, a dazzling new academic facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lab’s unique mission is to transform today’s passive mass media, particularly TV, into flexible technologies that can respond to individual tastes. Because of advances in computers, says Nicholas Negroponte [b. 1943], 43, the co-founder and director, “all media are poised for redefinition. Our purpose is to enhance the quality of life in an electronic age.”

Two years ago [i.e., September 1985], when the lab first opened its doors in Cambridge, Mass., the announced intention of “inventing the future” seemed like an impossibly vague undertaking. But Negroponte has made believers of much of the corporate and academic establishment. Bankrolled by more than 100 business and government sponsors, he has filled his $45 million facility with a group of 120 gifted researchers that includes some of the brightest and quirkiest minds in computer science: Marvin Minsky [1927-2016], dean of artificial-intelligence research; Seymour Papert [1928-2016], disciple of Child Psychologist Jean Piaget [1896-1980] and a leading advocate of computerized education; Alan Kay [b. 1940], one of the most influential designers of personal computers.

Some of the projects are still in the visionary stage, but several investigative teams have come up with working products and prototypes. In many cases, research relating to electronic media has led to spin-offs that could have wide applications for both individuals and businesses. Consider the following:

⏵The lab’s Conversational Desktop is a voice-controlled computer system that acts like an automatic receptionist, personal secretary and travel agent – screening calls, taking messages, making airline reservations. “Get me two seats to the Bahamas," says Research Scientist Chris Schmandt [b. 1952] to his computer. “When do you want to go?" replies the machine. 

⏵NewsPeek is a selective electronic newspaper made of material culled daily from news services and television broadcasts. By sliding their fingers across the screen of a computer terminal, viewers can ask to see lengthier versions of particular stories, roll selected videotapes or call up related articles. The computer remembers what it has been asked to show and the next day tailors its news gathering to search for similar stories. Says Associate Director Andrew Lippman [b. 1949]: “It’s a newspaper that grows to know you.”

⏵The lab has developed the world’s first computer-generated freestanding hologram – a three-dimensional image of a green Camaro sedan suspended in midair. Unlike most holographic images, which are put onto flat photographic plates, the Camaro is recorded on a concave plate and projected into the air by laser beams. The hologram was designed with funding from General Motors, which still painstakingly builds scale models of new car designs out of clay. In the future, GM and other automakers may be able to use holograms to see what a car will look like before it is actually manufactured. Eventually, such images may be made by laser-age copying machines for a few dollars apiece.

⏵In the field of fine arts, the world-class music research center in the lab has already produced the Synthetic Performer, a computerized piano-playing accompanist. The system not only plays along with soloists but also adapts to changes in their tempo and cadence without losing a beat. The project is part of an ongoing effort to explore the mysteries of harmony and composition by teaching music appreciation to computers. 

Negroponte began raising funds for the Media Lab in 1980 with the help of Jerome Wiesner [1915-94], former M.I.T. president. The two men sought out publishers, broadcasters and electronics manufacturers whose businesses were being transformed by the advent of VCRs, cable television and personal computers. Then they hinted broadly that the faculty at M.I.T. knew precisely where all this was headed. Money came in from such leading sponsors as IBM, CBS, Warner Communications, 20th Century Fox, Mitsubishi, Time Inc. and the Washington Post. Sponsors can send scientists and other observers to the Media Lab and make commercial use of any of the facility’s research. Though many of the projects may never yield commercial or educational applications, only one company, Toshiba, has failed to renew its funding.

Visitors to the lab, a sleek four-story maze of gadget-filled work areas, are assaulted by strange sights. In a 64-ft.-high atrium, 7-ft.-long computer-controlled blimps may be flying overhead -- part of a project to develop stimulating science activities for elementary and high schools. In another area visitors encounter computers that can read lips. After spending three months at M.I.T. last year, Stewart Brand [b. 1938], the counterculture guru who originated the Whole Earth Catalog [1968-71], was impressed enough to write a flattering book titled The Media Lab, which will be published next month by Viking Press [September 1987].

But the lab’s high-tech razzle-dazzle masks plenty of serious business. Investigators are experimenting with new forms of teleconferencing. One idea involved projecting video images of individuals onto plaster casts of their faces. The resulting “talking heads” were so lifelike that people using the system felt they were "meeting" with colleagues who were actually in another city. A major effort is also being made to enhance computer animation. Assistant Professor David Zeltzer [b. 1949], building on research he started at Ohio State, is developing new ways of simulating human figures and movement. One application would allow playwrights to see just how scenes would look without having to hire live actors to try them out.

                                    David Zeltzer’s ”Skeletal Animation System,” ca. 1982

Within the Media Lab there is a lurking fear that the research might prove too successful. Some of the scientists, who point to TV’s mesmerizing impact, worry about creating new media so powerfully seductive that they might keep many viewers from venturing into the real world. Minsky, for one, has given that a lot of thought. “Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good,” he told Brand. “It would be the end of everything we know.” Yet he and his groundbreaking colleagues seem more than willing to take that risk.

[Philip Elmer-DeWitt (b. 1949) is a writer and editor and was Time magazine’s first computer writer and for 12 years its science editor.   He produced much of the magazine’s early coverage of personal computers and the Internet.  He retired from Time Inc., which he joined in 1979, in 2008 and is currently writing a daily blog about Apple Inc.

[I’m sure all you ROTters caught the comment that exercised actors—and even directors and designers: the statement in the last sentence of the penultimate paragraph reporting on the work of David Zeltzer, the expert in computer graphics and 3D animation.

[As you might imagine, Zeltzer’s now-primitive computer theater was seen as the nose of a very scary camel inside the tent.  If playwrights figure they don’t need actors, directors, and designers to see their work come alive, what might ensue?  (Imagine: holographic actors performing on a CGI set being reviewed by robot critics!  Oy vey iz mir!)  We could all be out of business permanently.]

*  *  *  *
“MOVIE STARS FEAR INROADS BY UPSTART DIGITAL ACTORS”
by Rick Lyman
 

[The trepidation I recounted among actors in the face of the MIT experiments Philip Elmer-DeWitt reported in the article above is evident in Rick Lyman’s New York Times article on 8 July 2001, “Movie Stars Fear Inroads By Upstart Digital Actors.”  Computer animation had advanced considerably in the 14 years since the Time magazine report.]

Aki Ross, a versatile young actress who stars in a movie to be released this week, rakes slender fingers through wind-rippled hair. The light contracts her pupils and glistens on sweat-streaked cheeks, as her eyes sparkle with the eerie illusion of intelligence.

It feels eerie because Aki is composed only of pixels, and she is created and manipulated by a computer animator who works his mouse like a weaver at his loom. Aki makes her bid for stardom as the heroine of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within,” a fully digital film to be released on Wednesday [11 July 2001] by Columbia Pictures that is loosely based on a popular series of video games [Final Fantasy, a role-playing video game developed by Square Co., Ltd., in 1987].

“The eyes are one of the single biggest things that make people alive,” said Andy Jones, the animation director. “We’re moving the eyes around to make the character seem like it’s thinking and feeling for itself. Like there’s a soul.”

In Hollywood, many people believe digital production and distribution will revolutionize the way movies are shot, edited and sent to a multiplex near you. Already, the computer has made it possible to convincingly recreate ancient Rome and a dogfight over Pearl Harbor. Until now, just about all that has remained beyond the computer’s grasp has been the actor’s realm: too nuanced, too human, too unknowable for the animator’s skill.

But with movies like “Final Fantasy,” filmmakers are beginning to create photo-realistic computer characters that, at least in fleeting moments, will try to convince the audience that actual humans are on the screen.

It is called photo-realistic animation, and “Final Fantasy” promises to carry it further than any movie has.

Not everyone is overjoyed.

“I am very troubled by it,” said Tom Hanks, who does not like to think that his carefully chosen roles and hard-fought performances can be tampered with by after-the-fact computer auteurs, or that someone might make unwanted use of his digital self. “But it’s coming down, man. It’s going to happen. And I’m not sure what actors can do about it.”

The specter of the digital actor – a kind of cyberslave who does the producer’s bidding without a whimper or salary – has been a figure of terror for the last few years in Hollywood, as early technical experiments proved that it was at least possible to create a computer image that could plausibly replace a human being. But as “Final Fantasy” makes its way into theaters – the first of what promises to be a string of movies trying to put this challenge to the test – many wonder if the threat is as real as it once seemed, or if it simply takes computer animation down a fruitless cul-de-sac.

“I believe that I have used more digital characters than anyone,” said George Lucas, whose Jar Jar Binks, a virtual character in [1999’s] “Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace,” helped raise concerns in Hollywood. “But I don’t think I would ever use the computer to create a human character. It just doesn’t work. You need actors to do that.”

Steven Spielberg put it even more succinctly: “It’s a nonissue.”

But this has not alleviated the concerns of actors like Mr. Hanks, who are suspicious of the ways their images could be used in photo-real computer animation. And the Screen Actors Guild, which has closely monitored the use of digital actors since the emergence of Jar Jar Binks, says it will do so with even more vigor as photo-real characters actually begin to appear on the screen.

At Harbor Place, a new skyscraper on the downtown Honolulu waterfront, where Square Productions [a subsidiary of Square Co.], famous for its trend-setting video games, has set up a filmmaking division, the computer’s aquarium-blue glow filled a small cubicle on the 16th floor. It is as close to halfway between Tokyo and Hollywood as you can get without treading water.

“There is a Japanese saying that comes from the art of dollmaking, a sort of catch phrase, that the face is the life of the doll,” said Hironobu Sakaguchi, a celebrated Japanese video-game creator who is making his feature-film directing debut with this movie.

For now, it is impossible for computer-generated films to be made without actors. Actors are often used to capture the movement of characters, and as yet, no one has been able to figure out how to do without the voices of actors like James Woods, who personalizes the quasi villain General Hein in “Final Fantasy.”

The greater concern is not that digital actors will replace movie stars – even the most optimistic projections of the technology put that prospect far in the future – but that the technology may make it easier for the unscrupulous to make improper use of actors’ images (or of digital creations that are strikingly reminiscent of celebrities).

So far, the most significant legal challenge came in 1999, from Robyn Astaire, the widow of Fred Astaire [1899-1987]: she sued the Fred Astaire Dance Studios for using images from her late husband’s films in advertisements. Her suit failed, but she took her case to the California Legislature, which passed a bill [Astaire Celebrity Image Protection Act, 1999] making clear that the rights to celebrity images remained with the heirs for 70 years after the celebrity’s death.

Columbia Pictures showed about 17 minutes of “Final Fantasy” to some entertainment writers in the spring, and has only recently begun to screen the finished film for industry audiences. Many who have seen parts of the film have reacted with a mixture of astonishment and disappointment. “When it works, it works,” one rival studio marketing executive said. “And it works more often than I thought it would.”

[According to the movie website IMDb, due to the poor box-office performance of Final Fantasy, the first computer-animated motion picture with photo-realistic characters, Square Pictures announced its withdrawal from the film business in October 2001.]

Since 1982, when computer-generated images [were first used in entire sequences*] in a feature film with “Tron,” a not-so-secret goal of many computer animators has been to create convincingly lifelike human characters. Many have even dreamed of using the technology to bring long-dead stars back to life or, more intriguingly, to create virtual images of a performer in youth and then graft that digital skeleton over the shape of that same actor, now middle-aged or older. The prospect delights many directors, who dream of an endlessly pliable performer whose work can be digitally tweaked to generate exactly the desired effect.  

[*statement adjusted pursuant to a correction that appeared in the New York Times a week after this article was published.]

“Filmmaking is always going to be a collaborative art,” the director Ron Howard said. “But we are getting to the point where the director will have even greater control over the look and feel of the film, even down to the individual performances.”

And producers can see the benefits of a performer who requires no salary, no days off, no coterie of agents and publicists, one who could be called into service at any time to promote or endorse anything, with every nickel going into the producer’s pocket. The topic will be explored intriguingly in “Simone,” a film currently in production for release in 2002 from the writer-director Andrew Niccol (“The Truman Show” [1998]). Al Pacino plays a movie producer whose star storms off the set. He responds by secretly replacing her with a digital actress. (The filmmakers are being coy about whether Simone will be played in the film by a live actress, a digital one or some combination of the two.) The problem is that he succeeds too well. Simone – Sim One, get it? – becomes an overnight sensation, and the producer must prolong the illusion that she is an actual person [see also  “‘Virtual Superstars?’” in “Computers and Actors,” Part 2, coming 7 October].

[After seeing the photo-realism of the computer-generated actors in Final Fantasy, IMDb reports, the producers of Simone (styled on the poster and in advertising as S1mØne) started to lean toward the idea of having Simone actually be a computer generated actress.  However, after opposition from the Screen Actors Guild (now merged with American Federation of Television and Radio Artists to form SAG-AFTRA), arguing that replacement of actors in all movies would be the next logical step, the idea was abandoned.  Ultimately, Simone was played by (human) actress Rachel Roberts.  The film received mixed reviews from critics and was considered a minor box-office hit.]

The technological tools that might allow computer animators to create convincing digital actors would also give producers and directors the ability to alter or augment a performance, whether the actor likes it or not. In the climax of [1997’s] “Contact,” the director Robert Zemeckis wanted a long, emotional close-up of the star, Jodie Foster, as she stared into a visionary Eden beyond the stars. But in the last few seconds of the best take, one of Ms. Foster’s eyebrows involuntarily twitched upward, Mr. Zemeckis explained. “So I just went in and moved the eyebrow,” he said.

While this instance falls far short of actually reaching in and creating a performance out of whole cloth, it certainly points in that direction.

“I know Tom is worried about it,” said Mr. Zemeckis, who has frequently collaborated with Mr. Hanks, including on the Oscar-winning “Forrest Gump.” In that 1993 film, Mr. Zemeckis used what were then the latest digital tools to implant the actor’s image into actual historical scenes, though not to alter Mr. Hanks performance.

“But I’ve taken to making digital scans of all of the actors in my movies,” Mr. Zemeckis said. “I know some are worried about what uses will be made of it, but think of what we could have – complete digital versions of actors at various stages in their life.”

Many of the biggest leaps in computer animation are introduced at Siggraph, the annual gathering of the nation’s computer graphics and animation specialists. One of the most talked-about efforts of recent years was a film shot for Seattle’s new rock ’n’ roll museum. [The Artist’s Journey: Funk Blast, 2000; the museum, now called the Museum of Pop Culture, was the Experience Music Project.] The film appears to be a performance by a young James Brown. But it isn’t. The filmmakers cunningly superimpose the performance of the current-day Mr. Brown, who is 68, over a digital skeleton of the performer as a young man. [Brown died in 2006 at age 73.]

“The next hurdle, the next step, will be a soliloquy or a dramatic performance,” said Joshua Kolden, who worked on the James Brown project. “It won’t be long.”

But it will be trickier, he and his colleague Andre Bustanoby agreed, because people are accustomed to the signals that tell us whether someone is sincere, threatening, flirtatious, sober or plain off his noodle. “The problem with human faces is that you get just a little bit off, and it immediately becomes very disturbing,” Mr. Bustanoby said.

Eventually, if animation technology and artistry continue to improve, it will be possible for directors to reach deeper into a filmed performance – doing more than simply unarching an eyebrow. If preview audiences didn’t like the ending where the hero died, it’s easily fixed. And cheaply, too. The hero can just be digitally resuscitated and sent off into a virtual sunset.

“The advantage of computer-graphic actors is that they don’t do any complaining,” Mr. Sakaguchi said. “The vision I have is to take the characters that we have in this movie and basically help them be viewed as real actors and actresses. And so, we sort of become a talent agency.”

Well, exactly.

Once the goal of creating a photo-real human character is reached – if for no other reason than to show that it is indeed possible – many computer animators believe that the next generation of animated films will move away from photo-realism. Already, many projects under way are tending toward a warmer, almost impressionistic look.

“Once you sit down in front of that box, it’s infinity in there,” said Neil Eskuri, who was the digital effects supervisor for Disney’s [2000] “Dinosaur,” a hybrid of photo-real computer animation and live-action footage. “Given enough time, you can make that box do anything.”

*  *  *  *
“THE ANCIENT ART OF KABUKI MADE NEW, WITH COMPUTER ANIMATION”
by Micheline Maynard

[In that same 2009 post, I cited as an example of the collision of computers and theater a kabuki production by Koji Orita.  From the “Circuits” section (sec. G) of the New York Times of 2 May 2002, here’s a report on that experiment in computer graphics for the stage.]

KOJI ORITA was looking for a way to stage a kabuki play that tells of a mythical creature who escapes from a river and becomes the companion of a bumbling fisherman. He found his solution watching the movie “Terminator 2.”

Inspired by the computer graphics techniques used to turn Arnold Schwarzenegger into a cyborg, Mr. Orita created an animated creature that sang, ate and conversed onstage during the play, “Aki No Kappa,” performed in March at the National Theater of Japan [9-24 March 2002; the first time in Kabuki history CG animations were used in a performance].

The show was a milestone for kabuki, a 600-year-old art form in which men play all the parts and the sets and the acting style are guided by tradition [see my post “Kabuki: A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” 1 November 2010]. “We wanted to show an audience that we could create a new type of play, even within the old arts of Japan,” said Mr. Orita, who has been a kabuki director for 30 years.

“Aki No Kappa” had won a competition for new kabuki plays in 1982 but had never been staged. The script did not call for the water creature, or kappa, to be seen by the audience. It was meant to be imaginary, like the giant rabbit in “Harvey.” But Mr. Orita wanted it to be visible to the audience, like the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father.

Years before, Mr. Orita had visited the Universal Studios theme park near Los Angeles, where technicians explained special effects techniques used in movies. But the kappa could not be filmed because it had to react to the other actors onstage. Mr. Orita began scouting in Tokyo for computer technicians familiar with real-time motion systems, which combine three-dimensional computer graphics with animation to make characters that can move and speak.

First, the theater’s art department made a detailed drawing of the kappa. The picture was scanned into a computer and translated into a series of mathematical calculations.

Mr. Orita, meanwhile, selected an actor from the Kabuki Company to play the kappa offstage. The actor was wired with sensors at 12 key joints on his body. The sensors fed movement data into the computer, which transmitted it to matching points on the cartoon version of the kappa. The information created a hologram that was projected on a 67-inch screen. Each time the actor moved, the kappa moved, too.

Getting from concept to live performance required some ingenuity and cooperation from the cast. It was the first time the computer experts had worked with kabuki actors, said Mr. Orita, who called the play “a test case.” Despite the complexity of the task, he said, the addition of the kappa required only one more day of rehearsal than other plays.

Along the way, the computers occasionally froze, leaving the kappa in suspended animation. And more than once, an error message was transmitted to the screen instead of the kappa. When that would happen, an actor would jump in front of the screen, arms outstretched, as if to keep the audience from seeing the mishap.

The play’s three-week run was glitch-free and almost a sellout. And Mr. Orita says the kappa will come back to the National Theater. He plans to use the kappa and its wife and child (who are not depicted in the play) as the virtual guides for an interactive kabuki education center that the theater expects to open next year. [In 2003, the Traditional Performing Arts Information Center opened behind the National Theater.]

Mr. Orita said that computerized characters were likely to appear in future kabuki shows. Already the technology is more refined, meaning that actors will not need to be tethered to sensors, he said. He believes that the animated characters will someday be able to move and speak on their own.

The new methods have enlivened an ancient tradition, Mr. Orita said, providing new proof that “kabuki is a performance art that is very much alive and kicking.”

[It’s one of the attributes of kabuki that alongside its ancient and codified acting and production practices, called kata, it allows for and even welcomes modern techniques—although computer animation is by far the most radical adoption of which I’d ever heard.

[In addition to “A Trip to a Land of Dreams,” I have one more kabuki article on ROT: “Grand Kabuki (July 1985),” a review of the 1985 performances of the Tokyo company at the Met, 6 November 2010.  There are also some reposted pieces from other authors on the subject: “Two Kabuki Reviews (2014)” by Charles Isherwood (New York Times) and Joan Acocella (New Yorker), 20 January 2018, and “‘Kabuki: Inside the Japanese Artform with its Biggest Star, Ebizo’” by Jon Wertheim (60 Minutes), 1 May 2020.]

Kenneth Tynan

by Kirk Woodward

[For the serious theater student, especially those of us who came of intellectual age in the second half of the 20th century, the name Kenneth Tynan represented something important.  William Goldman’s The Season, his account of the New York theater scene of 1967-68, is chock-a-block with quoted comments from Tynan’s reviews.

[Tynan wrote perceptively—and literately—about “plays, personalities, problems and ideas” of the world of theater in England and the U.S. (and nations beyond), but he also influenced the theater of his time.  It should be noted that “his time” was the post-war years of the middle of the 20th century when the theater and, indeed, all the arts were changing into “modern.”

[In other words, the influence he wielded on the culture of the 1950s and ’60s lived long past his early and untimely death at 53. 

[According to Tynan’s second wife, Kathleen (1937-95), playwright Tom Stoppard said at the critic’s memorial service that he was “the product of our time . . . but our time was of his making.”  According to the editor of Tynan’s writings on theater, he influenced the evolution of the whole of post-war theater in Britain.  I don’t believe he was being hyperbolic. 

[I think ROTters will find Kirk Woodward, a generous contributor to Rick On Theater, has captured some of that in his profile of Tynan.  The writing of this post was inspired, I believe, by Kirk’s reading of Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings, selections of Tynan’s reviews.]

Kenneth Tynan (1927-1980) flashed like a meteor through the performance world. He would hate that simile, because he was a stylish, impeccable writer.

He was born in Birmingham, England. His middle name was “Peacock,” and he learned after the death of his father that the man he knew as “Peter Tynan” was also “Sir Peter Peacock,” who had a completely different life and a large family in another city.

The theatricality of this situation seems almost too remarkable, something that one would find hard to believe in fiction. However, Tynan appears to have been “theatrical” from the start. Paul Johnson (b. 1928) describes in his invaluable book Intellectuals (Harper, revised 2007) how, at Oxford,

when the new term opened, I was an awestruck freshman-witness to his arrival at the Magdalen Lodge. I stared in astonishment at this tall, beautiful, epicene youth, with pale yellow locks, Beardsley cheekbones, fashionable stammer, plum coloured suit, lavender tie and ruby signet-ring. . . . He seemed to fill the lodge with his possessions and servitors whom he ordered about with calm and imperious authority. . . . At Oxford he dressed in princely style at a time when clothes-rationing was still strictly enforced. . . . He thus restored Oxford’s reputation for aesthetic extravagance.

Peacock indeed! One might expect such a flamboyant character to be a wastrel or, at best, a dilettante. On the contrary, Tynan had a career that, considering how young he died, was remarkably full. He acted a bit, apparently competently.  He directed a great deal, but then felt he had failed. He wrote screenplays, at least two of which were produced (Nowhere to Go, 1958; Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, 1971). He became theater reviewer for the London Evening Standard, The Observer, and, in the United States, The New Yorker, for which he also later wrote a celebrated series of “Profiles.”

As a reviewer he was extraordinarily influential. He championed the plays and directorial approach of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and did a great deal to popularize them. He also promoted the “angry young man” drama Look Back in Anger (1956) by John Osborne (1929-1994), with the result that the play had an enormous impact on British theater.

He then in 1963 became the Literary Manager for the new National Theatre of Great Britain, serving in that capacity alongside its Artistic Director, Laurence Olivier (1907-1989), until both of them stepped down in 1973, and, in that capacity, he was involved in the selection of some 70 plays for the company’s repertory, most of them successful and many of them daring.

Tynan was also the initiator and producer of the erotic revue Oh! Calcutta! (1969), which perhaps not everyone would count as a great achievement, but which ran for a remarkable number of performances in its original production and in revivals.

Part of Tynan’s creed, in fact, was to attack what we might call “Puritanical” attitudes, both about sex and about language. He spent a great deal of his energy on this project. An important result of his effort, and the efforts of others, was the end of government censorship of the theater in Great Britain under the Licensing Act (1737), through passage of the Theatres Act 1968.

A personal word about Oh! Calcutta! I have a copy – no idea where it came from – and I have tried to read it once or twice, but I simply cannot stand the thing. It seems to me to prove conclusively that sex in plays can be an important component – Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) would agree – but only in a context of characters, which I can’t find in Oh! Calcutta! at all. Of course it’s a revue rather than a play, but I doubt that that makes much difference.

In any case, Tynan was definitely no dilettante – he had a profound effect on the theater of his time, and by extension, on ours. It is well worth the effort, if that’s the word, to look at his theater reviews and writings. First, however, we should note that simply as a writer – just as a person who puts words down on paper (in his time) or whatever – he was superlative.

He never got over his fondness for puns – really good puns, to tell the truth:

            (Of the reviewer George Jean Nathan, 1882-1958)

Admittedly, we all make mystiques.

(On a week in which two separate productions of Richard II opened)

An embarrassment of Richards.

            (On a boring play involving a cat-killing)

Another distraction [from the ennui of the play] might be to work out an appropriate epigraph for Tabitha: the best I could summon up was: “Home is where you hang your cat.”

The selection assembled in Kenneth Tynan: Theatre Writings (Quite Specific Media Group, 2007) reveals, in its early entries, a writer determined to demonstrate how widely he has read, and his prose is self-consciously overripe. As he goes along, he modifies this tendency.

Even from his earliest reviews, however, he has the gift of letting you see what he sees. It is tempting simply to quote him at length. Here for example is the first paragraph of a review from 10 April 1953:

The present revival of The Wandering Jew [by E. Temple Thurston, 1879-1933] is one of the most reassuring theatrical experiences in years. Have we really progressed so far? In 1920 the play survived 390 performances; today not a line of it but rings flat and false.

Notice how in that quotation the little word “survived” prepares us for what’s coming. We see that he had no difficulty identifying failure; it is no wonder he was feared as a reviewer. He could also write ear-perfect parodies, as in this review of the musical Guys and Dolls (1953):

What happens next but The Sky gets bopped by religion and shoots craps with Nathan and the boys for their immortal souls. And where do the sinners wind up, with their chalk-striped suits and busted noses, but at a prayer meeting in the doll’s mission house, which hands me a very big laugh indeed.

One sees him in 1954 drawing battle lines against what he considers the mediocrity of the English theater:

The bare fact is that, apart from revivals and imports, there is nothing in the London theatre that one dares discuss with an intelligent man for more than five minutes. Since the great Ibsen challenge of the nineties, the English intellectuals have been drifting away from drama.

Unwilling to put up with this state of affairs, Tynan, like George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) before him, resolves to cause tumult:

I counsel aggression because, as a critic, I had rather be a war correspondent than a necrologist.

He selects the theatrical “causes” he will champion and fights for them fiercely.  First Brecht:

A Brechtian, let me explain, is one who believes that low drama with high principles is better than high principles with no audience; that the worst plays are those which depend wholly on suspense and the illusion of reality; and that the drama of the future will be a wedding of song and narrative in which neither partner marries beneath itself.

Then came Look Back in Anger by John Osborne, and the “realistic,” “angry young man,” “kitchen sink” drama that followed:

Look Back in Anger presents post-war youth as it really is . . . . I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger.              

And he was greatly encouraged by the English Stage Company at the Royal Court, which had produced Osborne’s play and others in the same vein:

To an extent unknown since the Ibsen riots, it has made drama a matter of public controversy. It has buttonholed us with new voices, some of them bawdy, many of them irreverent, and all of them calculated to bring gooseflesh to the evening of Aunt Edna’s life. It has raised hackles, Cain laughs and the standards of English dramaturgy.

(“Aunt Edna” was the imaginary audience member for whom the playwright Terrence Rattigan, 1911-1977, said he wrote.)

He noted that the English stage presented almost no satire, and very soon after was delighted by the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe (1961 in London), the bellwether of the astonishing wave of British satire that brought us Monty Python’s Flying Circus (on the BBC from 1969 to 1974):

Future historians may well thank me for providing them with a full account of the moment when English comedy took its first decisive step into the second half of the twentieth century.

And, from first to last, Tynan campaigned for the creation of a National Theatre, which did take place, as noted above, in 1963, and for which Tynan became Literary Manager.

Tynan did not, however, champion the “Theater of the Absurd” in general, although he highly praised Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), first staged in London in 1955 and widely considered the supreme example of that approach. In his review of Godot, he wrote:

I care little for its enormous success in Europe over the past three years, but much for the way in which it pricked and stimulated my own nervous system. It summoned the music-hall and the parable to present a view of life which banished the sentimentality of the music-hall and the parable’s fulsome uplift. It forced me to re-examine the rules which have hitherto governed the drama; and, having done so, to pronounce them not elastic enough. It is validly new, and hence I declare myself, as the Spanish would say, godotista.

With respect to the genre however, he criticized

the pessimism that has driven so many young writers in Paris and New York to declare that true verbal communication between human beings is nowadays impossible.

Of “The Chairs” (1952, first performed in London in 1955) by Eugene Ionesco (1909-1994), he wrote:

This world [of the play] is not mine, but I recognize it to be a valid personal vision, presented with great imaginative aplomb and verbal audacity. The peril arises when it is held up for general emulation as the gateway to the theatre of the future, that bleak new world from which the humanist heresies of faith in logic and belief in man will forever be banished.

He and Ionesco carried on a lively newspaper debate, which can be found in Ionesco’s Notes & Counter Notes (Grove Press, 1964), a collection of writings well worth reading. (I have written about Ionesco elsewhere in this blog [“Eugene Ionesco,” 2 July 2013].) Tynan posits Ionesco as the “messiah” of a new school of playwrighting. Ionesco denies such an intention and slyly suggests that Tynan may be the one looking for a “messiah.” A hit, a palpable hit.

[I have posted several reports on productions of Ionesco plays on Rick On Theater: “Rhinoceros,” 15 October 2012; “Three Ionesco Plays (2004),” 17 July 2013.  ~Rick]

Interestingly, he did not embrace arena staging (“theater in the round”), which one hears periodically touted as a superior way to present plays. Tynan calls it

a method which overrates the importance of ‘intimacy’ in the theatre and, by citing the circus as a vindication of its creed, overlooks the fact that of the two most exciting things that happen in a circus one takes place behind bars and the other hundreds of feet in the air.

I can’t help comparing Tynan’s writings on theater to those of Eric Bentley (1916-2020), about whom I have written elsewhere in this blog [“Eric Bentley – An Appreciation,” 4 December 2012; “Eric Bentley On Bernard Shaw,” 3 December 2015; ]. Tynan in general provides closer descriptions of particular productions and performances than Bentley, who is typically more focused on play than players.

Both Tynan and Bentley hoped for careers as directors. (Bentley actually directed Tynan in a production of Him by E. E. Cummings, 1894-1962.) Both lost confidence in their ability to direct, but the loss appears to have hit Tynan harder – his second wife, Kathleen Tynan (1937-1995), wrote that “One of the saddest things about Ken was that he really wanted to be a director more than a writer – much more . . . .”  

Still, his directing experience informs his writing, and makes it possible for him to suggest, not just generalities, but specific important aspects of performances that actors might even want to fix. For example, evaluating Laurence Olivier as King Lear, he writes:

He gave a moderate Lear at the New [Theatre], built up out of a few tremendous tantrums of impotence . . . and an infinite run of cadenzas on his four most overworked tricks: (1) the stabbing finger; (2) the jaw and eye movement; (3) the ceaseless fits of wrestling with his cloak, like a tortoise with claustrophobia; and (4) the nervously nodding head.

By all accounts, actors feared Tynan’s criticism. From this distance, however, and not being the performers involved, he does not strike me as brutal, like, say, John Simon (1925-2019), but candid and precise [see “‘Moron! Vermin! Curate! Cretin! Crritic!!’: John Simon (1925-2019),” 28 November and 1, 4, and 7 December 2019]. One almost always feels, “I understand what he’s talking about.”

Tynan is certainly more the literary stylist than Bentley. For me, however, comparing, for example, both writers’ description of a Paris theatrical season, Tynan is informative but not revelatory, while I find new insights in Bentley’s account (in the collection In Search of Theater, 1953) every time I read it.

The difference may be that Tynan is genuinely a reviewer, and Bentley is genuinely a critic. To put it another way, Tynan is brilliant about moments, but Bentley is even better about movements. Tynan believed that a review

is a letter addressed to the future; to people thirty years hence who may wonder exactly what it felt like to be in a certain playhouse on a certain distant night. The critic is their eyewitness; and he has done his job if he evokes, precisely and with all his prejudices clearly charted, the state of his mind after the performance has impinged on it.

I do not agree completely with this job description of the reviewer (in which he calls the reviewer a critic), but in any case Tynan lives up to it. He writes fluidly and leaves you no doubt as to what he’s describing. He is a first-rate reporter – albeit one with ideas and an attitude.

Tynan today may be as well known for his articles about performers, collected in Profiles (1990, Random House), as he is for his reviews. According to his son, Tynan proposed to write an autobiography (which he did not live to do), and

A major theme of the book, . . . will be attempts – as journalist, propagandist, and impresario – to celebrate talent and make more room in the world for it to flourish.

This intention is interesting, because, as I mentioned, Tynan had a reputation as a fearsome reviewer, but Profiles could have been titled Appreciations. Without exception the 50 pieces in the book focus on what makes the subjects of the profile – all of them in the performance field except a couple of early friends – remarkable.

Tynan was not shy and he got around, and he knew all but a handful of the people described in Profiles, among them C. S. Lewis (1898-1963, under whom Tynan studied at Oxford), Orson Welles (1915-1985), Miles Davis (1926-1991 – Tynan loved jazz and knew it well), Lenny Bruce (1925-1966), Noel Coward (1899-1973), and, surprisingly, Greta Garbo (1905-1990). He may have been an intimidating reviewer but in Profiles his genuine interest in people shines through.

In the longer profiles in the book (most of these were written for The New Yorker), Tynan spends considerable time with his subjects, and the results are notable. In particular, he accompanied the unpredictable actor Nicol Williamson (1936-2011) as he prepared and finally managed to deliver an evening of selections from plays for President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) at the White House. The account is unspeakably funny; I wish I could quote it all, as Tynan struggles, largely without success, to keep pace with Williamson’s erratic behavior and insecurities.

In fact, Tynan is frequently funny. One example out of many: describing a production in which Orson Welles uses a fake nose, Tynan writes:

Sir Laurence Olivier began his film of Hamlet with the statement that it was ‘the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind’. At one point Mr. Welles’s new appendage started to leave its moorings, and Moby Dick nearly became the tragedy of a man who could not make up his nose.

And he can be delightfully aphoristic:

A playwright is a man who can forget himself long enough to be other people; and a poet is a man who can forget other people long enough to be himself.

A melodrama is a play whose author is more interested in the impact events are having on his audience than in their impact on his characters.

Comedy, perhaps, is merely tragedy in which people don’t give in.

Ancient tragedy puts the question: ‘How are we to live?’ Modern tragedy asks: ‘How am I to live?’ That is the vital difference.

It is Ireland’s sacred duty to send over, every few years, a playwright to save the English theatre from inarticulate glumness.

You cannot persuade an audience that people are related simply by making them call each other bastards.

Those who devote themselves to making silk purses out of sows’ ears are in duty bound to go the whole hog.

Nothing is more crucially stupid than to deride the artistic achievements of a social class because one deplores its historical record.

I once defined a critic as a man who knew the way but couldn’t drive the car.

Theater doesn’t give its practitioners happy endings; it only gives good moments. For all his brilliance – or perhaps because of it – Tynan seems to have been in varying degrees dissatisfied with his life. Like the rest of us, he could only impose his will on the world so far. He was a lifelong heavy smoker, exasperating a congenital lung condition, and died absurdly young at 53.

Still, if there is a recurring theme in Profiles, it might be said to be, “Make something of yourself,” and that he did.

[Kirk disagrees with what he quotes Tynan as saying that “a review ‘is a letter addressed to the future,’” but I find it spot-on—especially from the perspective of the research I’ve often done to reconstruct productions.  I’ve used reviews a lot as a resource for production descriptions—even little details that I can compile from several notices.  In that sense, the reviewers are my “eyewitnesses.” 

[Many reviewers see themselves as theatrical consumer reporters.  When I was researching “The Power of the Reviewer—Myth or Fact?” (23 and 26 January 2011), there were several surveys in which theater journalists were asked how they saw their jobs; “consumer reporter” was a very popular answer

[When I shared this remark with Kirk, he responded: “No contradiction here, except that even Tynan wasn’t just writing for the future, he was also writing for tomorrow morning.”  I see my performance reports for Roger as a record of what I experienced.

[I’ve always considered the play reports on ROT as a kind of record of what I saw.  That’s why I do the review round-up and the backgrounds of the plays and productions and the profiles of the playwrights.  When I write about a theater or company I haven’t covered before, I do a description or profile of that, too—to get it on the record.  None of that usually appears in any review (which is why I don’t call them that!).]

"Design & Tech: The Magic Of Design," Articles 8 & 9

 

[The final two articles on the AT series on stage design and technology are largely about recognition and invisibility—and both use Broadway’s Tony Awards as the context in which to examine these issues. 

[In her article, Pamela Newton spotlights costume designers, though her points, and those of the artists she interviewed, can clearly be applied to set, lighting, and sound designers as well.  John Gromada has a somewhat different point to make with respect to sound designers, and I’ll have more to say about his article below. 

[As I have throughout this series, I suggest that ROTters make a point of going back and reading the foregoing seven articles in this collection.  None of the nine pieces depends on any of the others for comprehension; they all cover different aspects of the arts and techniques of theatrical design of production. 

[The result, though, is that the Special Section of the AT design and tech issue taken as a whole provides a panoramic view of stage design and tech, one of the least-well understood facets of play production among most theatergoers.  (I have already admitted that theater tech has always eluded my grasp.)  This is a good opportunity for readers who haven’t been following along to see what the design and tech fields are all about nowadays.

[To remind you all, Articles 1 through 7 were posted on 9, 12, 15, 18, and 21 September.  You can read the five posts in any order.]

“THE BROADWAY SEASON WAS DIVERSE OFFSTAGE TOO, NOT THAT YOU’D NOTICE”
by Pamela Newton 

[Newton’s report, which wasn’t published in AT’s print edition, was posted in the website on 7 June 2016 as part of the feature “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,”]

The invisibility of stage designers cuts both ways: They lack for recognition (see this week’s Tonys [Sunday, 12 June 2016]), but they can also build diverse careers—if they get the chance.

NEW YORK CITY: The Great White Way has never been as ill-fitting an appellation for Broadway as it was this past season. Shows all along the district have presented a wonderfully diverse range of voices and experiences, from The Color Purple [10 December 2015-8 January 2017] to Allegiance [8 November 2015-14 February 2016] to On Your Feet! [5 November 2015-20 August 2017]. And this is all happening under the giant shadow of Hamilton [Broadway: 6 August 2015-Present], with its rapping founding fathers and a cast that is almost entirely African-American, Latino, and Asian.

Amid a panoply of directors, playwrights, and performers of color, it is easy to overlook that this [2015-16] is an unusually diverse season for designers as well. Emilio Sosa, who is black and from the Dominican Republic, designed the costumes for On Your Feet! Riccardo Hernandez, who is Latino, did the costumes and sets for the Gin Game [14 October 2015-10 January 2016] revival starring James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson. Toni-Leslie James, a black costume designer, channeled the 18th century for Amazing Grace [16 July-25 October 2015], the short-lived musical about slavery and the eponymous Christian hymn. And this season there were two costume designers of Asian descent at the helm of high-profile shows: Anita Yavich for the revival of Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love [8 October-13 December 2015] and Suttirat Anne Larlarb for the Sara Bareilles-composed musical Waitress [24 April 2016-5 January 2020].

You may not see this backstage diversity reflected on Sunday’s Tony Awards broadcast, though, since only two designers of color employed this season were nominated for Tonys: Clint Ramos for Danai Gurira’s Eclipsed [6 March-19 June 2016] and Paul Tazewell for Hamilton, both for costume design. (Ramos also designed the set for Eclipsed.)

[Ramos won the Tony for Best Costume Design of a Play and Tazewell won for Best Costume Design of a Musical.  All the 2016 winners and nominees are listed on the Tony Award website at https://www.tonyawards.com/nominees/year/2016/category/any/show/any/; there’s search engine at the top right that allows you to go directly to the various design categories.]

Tazewell, a black costume designer for whom this represents a sixth Tony nomination, is excited not only about his nomination, but also about what shows like his say about the current state of Broadway.

“The possibility has opened up for a new way of telling a story, presenting an idea, presenting a musical,” he says. “It’s no longer as interesting to see a Broadway musical served up in the usual way.”

This is Ramos’s first Tony nomination, and even as he celebrates the diversity among this season’s design pool, he bemoans that designers aren’t more visible to the theatregoing public.

“There were quite a number of designers of color this year, but you don’t see us,” says the designer, who is of Filipino descent. “It’s hard for us to get any attention. A lot of people ask, ‘Where are the designers of color?’ And I always say, ‘We’re out there! We’re just as busy as other designers!’ But we work behind the scenes, so we can’t get as much attention as the people onstage.”

Although it is par for the course that designers of all backgrounds stay out of the spotlight—and many of them prefer it that way—Ramos thinks this invisibility exacerbates the diversity problem in design. Though there has been no demographic study about designers on Broadway specifically, a recent study from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, which surveyed 1,000 cultural nonprofits, found that out of 346 theatre designers polled, 81 percent were Caucasian (the percentage was the same for the 1,676 technical/production staffers polled).

“There is a dearth of young artists of color going into design for the theatre,” says Ramos. “And part of that is because they don’t see themselves in it. I never saw people who looked like me. I was never exposed to them. I had to seek them out.” It creates a vicious cycle, he explains. “How can we address the problem when we can’t attract young artists of color into the design field?”

The answer may be to start at the institutional level. Cecilia Friederichs, the national business agent of United Scenic Artists, a union for designers and scenic artists, says that the stage design field is having a conversation now not only about racial equity but gender disparity as well. Apart from the category of costume design, women are woefully underrepresented in all categories of USA’s membership. And according to a study released last year by the League of Professional Theatre Women, men Off-Broadway outnumber women in all backstage disciplines save for costuming and stage management. The union has formed a diversity committee this year to address both gender and racial equity in theatrical design, and plan out action steps to promote both.

Still, on the production end, small changes can be made to highlight more of the creative team beyond just the directors and writers. Ramos believes that designers’ names should be included in the publicity materials for shows.

“It’s important that people see my last name there,” he says. “Because I think young artists will see a last name like that and think, ‘Oh, there could be a place for me there.’” He cites a trend about 20 or 30 years back that saw some female lighting designers using only their first initials and last names to increase their chances of getting hired in a male-dominated field. “I understand. They wanted to even the playing field. But I think it also didn’t serve a lot of women designers because it masked the reality.”

Tazewell believes that a big part of the burden for fostering diversity falls to the people at the top. “It will take forward-thinking producers and directors asking designers [of color] who are just great designers period,” he says. “Inviting them to design Shakespeare, inviting them to design Ibsen, inviting them to design a musical that’s all showgirls and sparkles.”

Tazewell’s résumé also includes a number of African-American-centered productions, which he is proud to have been involved in. But to him one of the great frustrations for designers of color is being told that they “should be working on a production that is specific to a diverse story.” It’s ironic, considering that audiences never see the designers. “There is no reason for Broadway or commercial producers to distinguish between designers of color and white designers,” Ramos says. “Unlike with casting, we have the benefit of the fact that it doesn’t really matter what we look like. If the design is good, it doesn’t matter.”

In this sense, Ramos suggests that the invisibility factor goes both ways: It may be harder to see designers of color than actors, but it’s easier to hire them based on skill—that is, if you can find them.

Over at United Scenic Artists, the diversity committee is working to address the disparity by urging established designers of all backgrounds to hire and mentor assistants from a more diverse pool. Explains Friederichs, “We’re interested in getting involved in encouraging people to choose assistants in a way that fosters a growth of diversity.”

There are also hopeful signs on the national level. Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco, for example, provides grants and professional development to Bay Area designers and technicians under the auspices of its Ignite Fund, described in its official wording as having “an eye toward supporting the plurality of race, culture, class, gender, and age in our local design and technical community.” And Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.[,] has an internship and fellowship program for designers, technicians, and administrators, named after Allen Lee Hughes, a black lighting designer who has worked at the company since 1969.

Ramos also cites the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as two companies that, in his experience, have made it part of their core mission to attract diverse theatre artists. The Guthrie offers internships and a job fair for artists on and offstage. OSF offers a fellowship and residency program, called FAIR, for theatre practitioners, including designers.

In spite of the headway being made on Broadway and beyond, though, it remains to be seen whether this season was an inspiration or aberration. There have certainly been other years when Broadway has offered daring fare and showcased underrepresented groups: Take 1996, when the proto-hipster musical Rent [29 April 1996-7 September 2008], August Wilson’s Seven Guitars [28 March-8 September 1996], and George C. Wolfe’s black history musical Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk [25 April 1996-10 January 1999] (with costumes by Tazewell) were all up for Tonys, and many thought it heralded a new age. But the next year it was back to the safety (and predominant whiteness) of A Doll’s House [2 April-31 August 1997], Chicago [14 November 1996-Present], and Titanic [23 April 1997-21 March 1999]. (Notably, there was a Broadway revival of The Gin Game that year as well, starring white actors Charles Durning and Julie Harris [20 April-31 August 1997].)

Both Ramos and Tazewell maintain a cautious optimism toward the current moment. “I think if you asked people of color, most of us have a guarded sort of stance,” says Ramos. “We think of it as a blip, something that may not happen again.”

“I am hopeful that this is the direction we’re moving in,” says Tazewell, “but history has proven that there’s a pendulum. The pendulum I think will start to widen, start to open up more possibilities, but it is bound to shift back, because that is the nature of the beast.”

Ramos pointedly cautions that the work is not over. After all, this has been a notably diverse season for designers only in relative terms.

“We’ve certainly made strides in terms of diversity on Broadway,” he says. “but for designers and people who work backstage, it’s still not as diverse as we want it to be.” For him, the key is to take the present momentum and keep on moving forward. “If we in the American theatre are really invested in diversity and the breadth of human experience, then it is imperative that we populate our industry with more designers of color who, just by the nature of who they are, offer a different worldview, with a different body of experience.”

[Pamela Newton is a freelance writer and college writing teacher living in New York City. 

[I don’t know if the diversity issue had progressed among theater designers in the ensuing five years since Newton wrote her report, but it occurs to me, reading “The Broadway Season Was Diverse Offstage” that the same points the author and the artists to whom she spoke make above are equally valid with respect to artists with physical handicaps—and I’d bet that they meet with the same discrimination and invisibility that women and artists of color have.]

*  *  *  *
“TONY, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”
by John Gromada

[Gromada’s article, published in the “Opinion” feature of the print issue and posted on 6 June 2016 on the website, is a protest, born of disappointment. The Tony Awards on Sunday, 12 June 2016, omitted the contributions of sound designers.  The absence screamed loudly for Gromada, who had campaigned to have sound design added to the award categories; it was included in the 2008 awards.

[Gromada was nominated for the award himself in 2013 for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful, but the next year, he saw the Tony committee yank the award away again.  What he couldn’t know when he wrote his article, though, was that the Tony Awards Administration Committee would relent and on 24 April 2017, would announce that the sound design awards would be reintroduced for the 2017-18 season.

[I’ve decided to run Gromada’s argument anyway, even though the reinstatement renders his main point out of date, because the article is still an important examination of the problem theater design artists have fought since stage design became part of the theatrical landscape: lack of recognition.  As you’ll read, the work of designers is either overlooked entirely or considered the realm of technicians and craftsmen, not artists.

[That’s just among other theater pros like producers and directors; among theatergoers, the work is often not even noticed.  (I read a lot of reviews when I write my performance reports and it’s clear the review-writers don’t know what to say much of the time when it comes to the designers’ contributions.  If the reviewers mention them at all, it’s a few words at the end of the notice, almost as if they felt obligated to say something.)

[I said at the start of this series that I took several design classes in grad school in order to learn more about that part of the business.  That put me in a position later as a director to appreciate what designers do for a production—which goes far beyond making pretty pictures or sounds.  They also solve problems, smooth over glitches, and enhance the drama—or comedy—of the production in ways that actors, directors, and even playwrights never could on their own.

[And I never made the mistake of feeling that what they do is anything less than an art.  So John Gromada’s other point is right on target.  As Linda Loman said in another context in Death of a Salesman: “Attention must be paid.”]

The absence of sound design categories at the Tony Awards screams louder each year.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of my professional career in the theatre, where I’ve had the good fortune to make a life designing sound and composing music for numerous productions, many of them on Broadway. I have been privileged to receive one of the highest accolades in the theatre for my work: In 2013, I was nominated for a Tony Award for designing the sound for Horton Foote’s The Trip to Bountiful [23 April-9 October 2013].

Unfortunately, I am one of the few sound designers who have been recognized, or might ever be recognized, by the Tonys for their work; the following season was the last the awards were given. That’s because the American Theatre Wing announced that they were eliminating the Tony cate­gories for sound design, relegating any recognition in that area to the occasional special Tony.  [The Tony Awards Administration Committee made the announcement on 11 June 2014.] The reasons were enumerated in The New York Times: “Many Tony voters do not know what sound design is or how to assess it; a large number of Tony voters choose not to cast ballots in sound design categories because of this lack of expertise; and some administration committee members believe that sound design is more of a technical craft, rather than a theatrical art form that the Tonys are intended to honor.”

Suffice to say, the decision was an incredible blow to me. And I was far from the only one: The afternoon of the announcement, I started an online petition asking the Tony administration committee to reconsider, thinking that if I could get 1,000 signatures, it might persuade the committee to change their minds. In an hour, I had 1,000 signatures; in a few hours, the numbers grew to 5,000, then 10,000. In a week, more than 30,000 people from around the world signed the petition—including luminaries like Hugh Jackman, Stephen Sondheim, [director] Diane Paulus, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

People from all disciplines expressed shock and dismay. What the Tony committee saw as a simple administrative adjustment demoralized thousands of people around the country who felt as if their role in the theatre had suddenly been invalidated. For so long we had fought for respect and recognition for our art. After many years of lobbying, we were able to get Tony categories for best sound design—one for plays and another for musicals—established in 2007 and implemented for the 2008 ceremony. It seemed that the battle was over. The Tony Award was the last of many hurdles our profession had faced in gaining respect, visibility, and the potential to make an adult living. Or so it seemed.

Getting sound design recognized as a legitimate career and art form has been a long and arduous process. In the late ’90s, we were able to convince United Scenic Artists [the union for artists and designers in the entertainment industry] to represent us, marking a major step for our profession. For the first time, working sound designers were able to have employer-based health insurance and could look forward to a pension upon retirement. And we began to close the pay gap between the fees we received and what other designers made, meaning that to make a living we no longer had to do twice as many shows as our colleagues just to get by. We could spend more time, energy, and thought on any given production, and maybe, just maybe, even think about supporting a family while engaged in this business we love.

Sound design is now such a necessity that most major theatre graduate programs in the country offer sound design MFAs, turning out scores of young bright designers looking to make a living in this field.

Meanwhile, most of the other major awards, in New York and elsewhere, have added sound design categories. When the Tony Awards joined in the trend, it was a monumental validation. As a nationally recognized and televised event, the Tonys finally gave us access to the highest level of visibility available to a theatre artist, and the potential to turn that visibility into a sustainable career. A designer with a Tony, or even a nomination, can command higher fees and respect, and use the honor to leverage all sorts of opportunities.

Now that opportunity for recognition is no longer available to us. The manner in which the categories were eliminated, and the way it was explained in the press, gave the impression that some kind of mistake had been made in adding sound design categories in the first place, as if previous sound design winners didn’t truly deserve their awards because, after all, Tony voters never knew how to judge what we do. I was told that many people on the Tony administration committee believed that sound design was nothing more than a matter of “Can I hear them?” and that to justify the continuation of the categories we would need to change that perception.

Of course, we had already jumped through all of those hoops back in 2006 and 2007 during the process to establish the categories—a process that included months of lobbying, education, and gentle persuasion. In 2006 after a preview of Lisa Kron’s Well, which I had designed sound for, producer Liz McCann [1931-2021; she died this past 9 September] came up to me and said, “John, I love so much what you’re bringing to this production. I think you should win a Tony Award!”

I responded that many in the theatre community shared her opinion that there should be a sound design category. She then offered to begin a process to make it happen. The conversation expanded to include several of my sound design colleagues, representatives of our union, and members of the American Theatre Wing who valued sound design and understood our place as partners in the process. Our allies on the committee shepherded the idea through the byzantine and opaque political process that shapes Tony Awards policy. They arranged for an education session in which David Budries, head of the sound design program at the Yale School of Drama, spoke to committee members and Tony nominators about what we do, and what to look for in judging sound design.

What Budries told them is that sound design is a discipline that defies concrete definition, and that it’s often best when it’s not noticed. Still, any perceptive theatregoer is equipped to vote on excellence in sound design. All it takes is simply to think a bit about what you’re listening to. It doesn’t take any more special knowledge than it takes to judge lighting design or orchestration or even costume design. Listen to the design and think: Does it serve the play and production? Is it distinctive in some way that is unique while helping tell a story? How does what you’re hearing make you feel?

Admittedly, we generally aren’t used to thinking about the sounds we hear, because sound is processed in a very different part of the brain than visual stimuli. Sound works on the unconscious, animal parts of our brain; we’re often not aware that it’s happening or what kind of effect it’s having on us. That’s why it’s both so potentially powerful as a design element and yet so easy to overlook.

Some heard and understood what Budries said, but others reportedly found it hard to break out of the traditional notion of what constitutes theatrical design. To them, design is what they can see, not hear, and sound design, as far as they could tell, was simply about making things louder. Still, after more than a year of work lobbying and gathering endorsements from theatre industry leaders around the country, we had enough support that when a vote was finally taken to establish the sound design categories, it passed in 2007.

I clearly remember that day; a producer on the committee called me excitedly with news that the motion had passed. There was no better evidence that sound design had finally come of age than the American Theatre Wing recognizing our art with a Tony Award.

For us sound designers, being considered for a Tony Award was a long-awaited vindication of an essential concept: that we were an integral part of the theatre world, and have been making invaluable contributions as artists to productions on Broadway and across the country for a very long time.

I first learned this myself 30 years ago in 1986, when I made my professional and Broadway debut designing the transition sound and music for Jonathan Miller’s production of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey. I was 22 years old and a senior at Duke University, where producer Manny Azenberg had brought the production to try out. I had spent nearly four years at Duke doing this thing called sound design, inspired by Jeff Storer, a charismatic teacher/director who had thankfully steered me away from acting and into this relatively new discipline, where I could perfectly combine my musical ability and my love of theatre.

That semester I was doing an independent study in music composition that included work with one of the very first samplers—an expensive and rare instrument that few had access to. While in rehearsal with the show, Miller discovered that he needed some kind of music or sound to tie together the different scenes in his production and indicate the passage of time, and there was no time to bring someone in from New York to execute it. Friends who were interning on the production steered him to me, and I soon found myself in a room with Miller, who hummed for me examples of the tone-like music that was in his head. Overnight I composed a little sound score of pieces that pleased the director; they made it into the production and onto Broadway. Though a modest contribution, it was part of the glue that held the entire piece together. And I actually received a paycheck for it.

After Miller trusted me to compose transitions for his productions, I arrived in New York at a time when directors were just beginning to clue into the possibilities of sound, and there seemed to be a shortage of sound designers approaching productions as artists. I found myself working with forward-thinking directors—JoAnne Akalaitis, Michael Greif, Anne Bogart—and veteran designers, including [scenic designer] Ben Edwards [1916-99], [lighting designer] Tom Skelton [1927-94], [costume designer] Jane Greenwood [b. 1934], and [lighting designer] Jennifer Tipton [b. 1937]. They treated me as an equal member of the design team and understood how my work complemented theirs and how aural elements could be used to tell a story. And my skills were enough in demand that I was able to cobble together a living among Off-Broadway nonprofits, resident theatres, and a Broadway production or two most seasons.

In 1990, I found a home at the Public Theater during Joe Papp’s last year, where I composed the sound score for Grief’s landmark production of Machinal [25 September-25 November 1990] and won an Obie for it. I’ll never forget the thrill of being at my very first awards ceremony, feeling surrounded and embraced by a community of theatre artists. At that ceremony, and the others that followed over the years, I felt like I was part of a family of people all trying to make a go of it in this crazy collaborative business. What these awards have said to me is: We value you. You are part of the family. We understand and appreciate the hard work you are putting into our art.

That’s why in 2013, after having designed sound or composed music for 35 Broadway productions, it was so satisfying to finally gain validation for all those years of work from the Broadway community in the form of a Tony nomination for my work on Michael Wilson’s fine revival of The Trip to Bountiful. I understood the Tonys as a high-visibility marketing tool, but still thought that at their core the awards were about recognizing excellence within the Broadway family, a family that I have long felt a member of. As I partook in all the Tony events leading up to the ceremony, I sat at luncheons and cocktail parties with actors and producers and other designers with whom I’ve worked for years, and listened to members of the American Theatre Wing and Mayor Michael Bloomberg [in office: 2002-13] talk about how important theatre artists are to the life and economy of the city.

Most importantly, I felt I was part of a community. Had I won that year (my colleague Leon Rothenberg won for his sound design on The Nance [15 April-11 August 2013]), this is part of what I would have said in my acceptance speech: “Thank you to all of you out there for embracing me and my work as part of this Broadway family for so many years. I feel most privileged to have been able to make a life of this, creating art with you all. Thank you for listening. And thank you for your continued support of sound designers as part of the Broadway community.”

A year later, after learning the categories were taken away, I was speaking with a colleague on the Tony administration committee, asking him how this could have happened. He told me, “I’m so sorry. You guys were just beginning to come into your own.”

Just beginning? I thought. Haven’t you been paying attention to what we’ve been doing all these years? We’ve been here for decades. A sound designer’s job isn’t just to set the volume on the microphones. It’s to convey the world of a play or musical to the audience’s ears; it’s creating and structuring sounds that underscore text, choosing or composing music to facilitate a scene transition, or making the orchestra and singers sound as good as they can, even to the rear mezzanine.

And when sound designers are not recognized at the Tony Awards for our efforts, it sends a very clear message: that what we do isn’t creative, that we’re not true theatre artists, that we are a disposable member of a production’s team. All because a group of people won’t take the time to understand the creative and necessary work that we do. Somehow the voters for other notable awards—the Drama Desks, the [Lucille] Lortels [New York Off-Broadway], the [Laurence] Oliviers [professional theatre in London], the Jeffs [Joseph Jefferson Awards, for theater produced in the Chicago area], to name a few—have figured out how to determine excellence in sound design. Tony voters, of which there are more than 800, sell themselves short when they think they’re not equally equipped.

As Lin-Manuel Miranda said in a recent Rolling Stone article, “Set designers sculpt with physical materials, lighting designers sculpt with light, and sound designers sculpt with sound. They are responsible for your aural experience at a Broadway show,” adding that we create “literally the sound of Broadway.” It’s about time Tony voters learned how to listen.

[John Gromada (b. 1964) is a Tony-nominated sound designer and composer. He has designed 37 shows on Broadway and numerous works Off-Broadway and regionally.  He’s won many awards both in New York City and around the country.  Gromada also works in film, television, and radio.]