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The Full Interview with Mike Daisey
There may be no better way to infuriate those in the
theatrical community than by creating a show called “How Theater Failed
America.” In the one-man show, which recently moved from Joe’s Pub
to off-Broadway’s Barrow Street Theatre, veteran monologist Mike Daisey
makes the case that the regional theatre movement has lost its way by abandoning
locally-based, community-nurturing theatre to focus instead on wasteful building
projects.
Unsurprisingly, the response from many in the theatre has been dismissive.
In The New York Times, The Huntington Theatre Company’s Nicholas Martin
called some of Daisey’s proposed solutions, including creating endowments
for local actors that would cover salary and health insurance, “facile
and often naive,” and Kurt Beattie, artistic director of Seattle’s
A Contemporary Theatre, referred to the show as “shallow” and “inapplicable
to my theatre community.”
DramaBiz New York correspondent Larry Getlen met with Daisey in their downtown
Brooklyn neighborhood to further explore Daisey’s take on the state of
theatre today. (Note: Daisey will also be holding panel discussions about
these issues after his Barrow Street shows with participants including Eric
Bogosian and Robert Brustein.)
DramaBiz: You told the Gothamist Web site that “the principal issue
is that the theatrical establishment in America has lost sight of the values
that led to the establishment of regional theatres.” What are those values?
Mike Daisey: The primary value I’m concerned about being lost is artists
being central to the artistic process of theatre. It seems obvious, but look
at theatres—or, as I think of them, buildings that theatre happens to
happen in. The artists are not residents there. They’re brought in for
certain projects, and then immediately dismissed when the project is over.
There’s no one making art who’s inhabiting that building in an ongoing
way, so the possibility of anything new and generative coming from those theatres
is almost zero. There’s no opportunity for continuity to grow in any
theatre, for an ensemble to form its own thing.
Why do you think this change happened?
Artistic directors, by and large, were freelance directors touring the country.
They don’t have ties to any particular city, and when they come into
a community, they expect to work with the same people [they’ve worked
with on the road], not with anyone they find there. So whenever an A.D. comes
in, there’s this massive cleaning house, where what’s been happening
is thrown out. There’s no institutional memory that speaks to what does
this institution mean? If importing the artists every single time is your
core value, then what is the difference between your theatre and a performing
arts center? If they built an ensemble, I’m confident that the chemistry
and energy that develops would create better work over time, and then that
ensemble becomes something that belongs to that institution.
The transient nature of performers, and lack of institutional memory, seems
analogous to the trend toward more freelancers and less corporate loyalty
in general. In a sense, isn’t this symptomatic of what’s happening
throughout America?
Yes, but that doesn’t negate theatre’s responsibility to keep its
own house clean. The problem is cultural, not economic. Economics is the excuse
we use for not doing things. Development departments could hold fundraising
campaigns to raise money for endowments using the same model they use for
universities — endowed chairs. Protected, lock-boxed endowments for each
position, established funds, with assured salaries and health insurance. I
believe the development departments need something to raise money for, they
need goals, and right now the only goal they can imagine larger than just
“help us out” every year, which gets tiring to your donor base,
is, “Let’s build a new building.” Then your institution has
a direction for the next six to eight years, and it also allows you not to
think about, “Where is our audience? There are less people.”
What kind of response do you get from A.D.s about this “chair” idea?
I’ve talked about it for a couple of years, and the response has been
intrigued, abstracted interest. Development people at major theatres were
like, “Well, that seems to make sense, on paper.” It’s not
like any of them said, “Great Scott!” and then ran out to talk to
their board. Someone has to be the catalyst, and if they have success, you
hope things will roll forward. But resources are diminishing every year, there’s
less audience coming, and people are very fearful about the future, and that
fear makes them paralyzed. Everyone’s afraid that if they do anything,
it’ll actually be worse than doing nothing, especially if people running
the theatres are in their mid-fifties, and they’re like, “I’m
gonna retire. I’m gonna hold things together, and I don’t know what’s
gonna happen after that.”
But you do have smaller, black box theatres where artistic risks happen.
When you have less to lose, and you’re younger and more energetic, you
can take these risks. Is it maybe the case that the risks are being taken
in smaller theatres, and that’s the way it’s always going to be?
No. First, I don’t talk about the quality of work, because that implies
that if we all did better work, things would turn around. I don’t think
that’s true. The problems are deeper and more entrenched than that. But
related to that is the fact that these regional theatres are built like fortresses.
They’re literally large, and they’re impervious to communion and
communication with anyone outside their walls. I talk about the loss of community
— the community of artists in your city, in those black boxes. Right
now, the institutional theatres would cut off their own arm before talking
to those people. There is always a massive wall, and it’s made up of
pride and fear. If artists were living in that building full-time, there’s
much more of a chance there would be communion and communication with other
companies.
Over the past few decades, America has endured a certain death of community,
where the country has grown more homogenized, and people are less likely to
know their neighbors. Isn’t this just another symptom of that, the fact
that the people running these theatres aren’t thinking about community?
And that maybe the audience simply doesn’t care if theatres are more
community-based?
Actually, it’s an excellent time to be promoting something that grows
out of true community, because we’re desperately hungry for connection.
We still need to interact with other human beings. I want ensembles because
I’m imagining that different kinds of theatre would start happening,
that theatre would become more locally driven, that you’d see more new
productions by new playwrights. Theatre lives and dies by community, and the
onus is on theatre to adapt to these changing circumstances, and to make theatre
that is relevant.
But what kind of theatre would that be when entertainment for younger people
has unquestionably changed due to MTV and the Internet, and theatre has –
with some exceptions – generally not become relevant to the younger generation?
Doesn’t that tie in to why people are feeling entrenched, because older
audiences are the only ones coming?
Absolutely. We should love the people who are old with the oxygen tanks. At
least they’re still coming. They’re the core constituency, but at
the same time that’s part of the problem. You play to the audience you
have, and as your audience gets smaller, you’ll naturally program shows
that make your base happy, and it becomes harder and harder to challenge them.
It becomes a very small universe. You see it a lot on Broadway. “Fantastic!
A revival!” The phrase “revival” literally means something
that is dead will now be brought back to life. That’s questionable as
a core psychological concept.
Do you think more youth-skewing shows like “Passing Strange”
and “Spring Awakening” can help to shake up this problem?
To some degree, but I’m talking about the economic and social underpinnings
of the theatre. My concern is that if we don’t turn these institutions
in a new direction now, while there’s 15 years left before they really
start slamming into icebergs, then we’ll lose a whole generation of institutional
support. These giant institutions...I may not like the way they build giant
buildings, I don’t want them to be citadels, but I don’t want them
turned into corporate training centers either. The buildings are there now.
I’m trying to get them to shake up their thinking and pick a path, almost
any path, because right now there’s no direction. There’s no plan.
There’s no plan across the country, and there is no plan across most
of these institutions. Every year the budgets are a little smaller, they tighten
their belts, and there’s not a lot of foresight. Now may seem like a
bad time to make a course correction, but actually it’s now or literally
never.
So specifically, what are some changes you’d like to see theatres make?
I want development departments to start capital campaigns to raise money to
create resident companies of artists in the building. I would also [ask that
they] quickly assess how much of their theatre is in hock. Theatres accept
donations from large corporate entities, then pretend they come with no strings.
But inevitably these places agree to host corporate special events that happen
during the day, and on their calendars, all these days are Xed off. That means
those days are not available, and that makes the theatre a severely less functional
place.
But with government funding drying up, isn’t it necessary to take
that money?
Like I said, you have to find out how much you’re in hock. I don’t
think they see it as being in hock, but now they perceive their job as “I
have seven slots. Let’s fill them.” They don’t see their job
as, “We are the stewards of a theatre that makes art, and where we make
art is in this building, and we have the building seven days a week, 24 hours
a day.” I would draw their attention to models that work, do-it-yourself
producers who make things completely functionally, like the Barrow Street
Theatre, where we’re transferring the show to. They have at least two
shows a night, sometimes three, and they roll them one on top of another,
and there’s always late night programming. They understand that you pay
rent on a building, and you have 24 hours in a day, and they’re always
looking for ways to put more art on stage that people want and will pay for.
I would look at models like New York’s UCB Theatre. It’s fascinating
to see how they roll five shows a night in and out, and to see how they’re
full of people who are 19, and who go to the theatre filled with joy. Most
theatres would give their eye teeth to have these people in their theatres,
and it’s not impossible. There could be late night shows. With a year
of planning, even at the rate institutions move, changes could be made that
will bring human beings into your theatre. Right now, those 19-year-olds don’t
even know where your theatre is. Part of the problem is that people say they
want change, but they don’t. If everybody wanted change, then things
would be changing. I’ve toured regional theatres the last five, six years,
and there is no change happening. None. The closest is The Signature Theatre
getting their whole season underwritten by one company. I think it’s
notable that they’re a nonprofit theatre in New York. There are theatres
in cities around the country. Let them be innovators for once.
But New York is usually the trendsetter, isn’t it?
The whole point of the regional theatre movement was to make other cities
be centers of theatre. So in its failure, it’s really become a hub and
spoke system. We’re not just a trendsetter — you could argue that
New York is American theatre, which I do not want it to be. I know I’ll
get a hundred angry e-mails, but the truth is, the hub and spoke system is
the way we set it up. Everything comes out of New York. A show comes to New
York, or just emerges in New York, and if it succeeds even moderately, count
two years and then it appears all over the country. And that doesn’t
work out well for anybody. It makes it harder for innovative work to happen
in New York, because playwrights start realizing that they’re writing
for this system. I don’t know how many friends I have who have been like,
“It’s great. It’s got three characters and runs 85 minutes.
It’s gonna be great.” It totally concerns me that right now the
communication is entirely one way. Things come out of New York, they go out
to the regionals, and they die there. And we go out to these regional theatres,
and it’s like being in summer camp. “Where do you live in the city?”
“I live on 10th St.” “See you back in New York.” It gets
absurd.
But all these actors who live in New York came from other places. They
came to New York to succeed. If you wanna succeed in films, you don’t
stay in Iowa, you go to Hollywood. For theatre, you come to New York. Big
cities are hubs for most things. Even for finance—you don’t stay
in Nebraska. You come to Wall Street.
There’s a lot of truth to that, but I don’t think it speaks to the
strengths of the country, and I don’t think it strengthens theatre long
term. If everyone comes to one city, it leads to uniformity in style. Look
at Chicago. There’s just enough of an ecosystem of actors and theatres
where people talk about the Chicago style of acting. We would have that in
other cities too if we fostered it. With this idea that everything goes to
New York, you get a homogeneity, and then you ship it all back out again.
One of the other things I’m concerned about is that the failure of this
dream means that it’s on the backs of every working actor that the American
theatre system is subsidized. The American theatre system runs on the poverty
of these actors. It relies on these people to not just be poor, but to have
no hope of a steady place to live. Most of them can’t have stable relationships
because they don’t know when they’re shipping out, and they very
rarely can have children. I honestly think it’s abusive to the actors,
and I think that long term, you not only don’t get ensembles, but it
institutionalizes that actors be crazy. I work with my director, who is my
wife, and we tour together, and I thank God for that every day. That changes
the equation massively. But I don’t know anyone else who’s in that
situation.
Society has always taken for granted that if you want a life as a creative
artist, there will be sacrifice. Isn’t there a sense that if you choose
that road it’s gonna be tough, because so many people want to do it?
Creating stable ensembles is not gonna change the difficulty. There would
still be plenty of people jobbing everywhere, trying to get into ensembles.
But the people in those ensembles would be the very best people in the regional
theatre system, and today those people have nothing good to look forward to
at all. They are the best and the brightest, and they will keep working this
way until they wise up and leave theatre and go into television or film and
just abandon it. And [fixing this is] not just for their benefit, it’s
for theatre’s benefit, because theatre is gonna lose these people. They
lose them all the time. My friend Steve Bodow ran [the theatre ensemble] Elevator
Repair Service for 16 years, and he hasn’t been with them for the last
two because he’s the head writer for “The Daily Show” now.
He wanted to have a kid, make things work. That’s theatre’s loss.
But on the other side, “The Daily Show’s” last head writer
and now executive producer, David Javerbaum, just took the exact opposite
path and wrote the lyrics for “Cry-Baby.” You can compare it to
how the best New York theatre actors often wind up on sitcoms, but then often
go back to theatre. So I think it’s more of a give and take.
But we’re talking specifically about New York theatre. To make that work,
they have to not go out to any of the regional theatres. So once again you’re
talking about a brain drain where it diminishes the chance of anyone good
being anywhere in our country that’s not New York. The USA scholarship
group asked something like 6,000 Americans their feelings on art. Eighty-six
percent of Americans agree that the arts are very, very important. And something
like twenty-one percent think it is important that artists be paid well, or
at all. There’s a massive disparity. Everyone agrees there should be
art, but this idea that artists need to be starving is entirely puritanical.
It’s deeply messed up.
Do you think that attitude has seeped into the attitudes of the people
running regional theatres?
I think as more and more people in the infrastructure have the equivalent
of corporate jobs at the top, their connection to how theatre works day to
day becomes less and less. I wouldn’t say they don’t value actors,
but they definitely become more and more alien to them. They don’t get
what’s happening in that room night after night. We were at a theatre
last year where on the books the theatre was sold to seventy percent capacity.
We start doing the show, and you have, like, thirty percent houses. We go
talk to them, and it was like speaking Greek. They don’t understand why
we want to see box office reports, because actors don’t normally ask.
So we come to find out, the missing forty percent — they’re no shows.
The theatre is sold to seventy percent, but all these people aren’t showing
up because of the way the theatre is set up. One of the subscriber perks is
that if you miss a show, just call the box office, and we’ll schedule
you for another show. So they’ve done this terrible thing where they’ve
undervalued everything they’re doing. Even more freakishly, this theatre
I’m talking about, which is a major American theatre, wasn’t tracking
who was in the house. Until we brought it to their attention, no one was doing
a house count to see how many souls were in the actual house. So when we told
them there were only thirty percent out there, they were like, “Oh no,
it’s seventy percent.” And we’re like, “We’re in
there!” And what they meant was, we sold seventy percent. So the subtext
was, “What do we give a s*** it’s thirty percent? We have seventy
percent’s money.” If you’re not tracking things like what’s
actually happening in the theatre, that is not just emblematic, it’s
a shining beacon of the disconnect. You think those people are gonna re-subscribe
next year? I suspect they’re gonna go, “You know, we missed a lot
of shows this year. I think we won’t re-subscribe next year.” And
then the theatre’s gonna hire a bunch of consultants to tell them what’s
going on in their theatre. They don’t need consultants. They could have
an ensemble who’s in the theatre who could look around with their eyes
and figure out what the hell’s going on.
So do you think there’s hope for change?
I think there’s lots of hope. If I thought there was no hope, I’d
leave theatre. I think there’s hope because it’s a time of change,
because their audiences are dying. They’re going to have no choice. Some
are already trying to wake up. You can see it in these new giant complexes
they build. I love this. They often have less seats in the theatre but with
more leg room, because they’re so tired of seeing it half full every
night. So instead of fixing that problem...it’s like if no one is playing
baseball well enough, one day you just bring the walls in closer. “We’ll
start playing on a Little League field, and suddenly everything will be awesome
again.” There’s a limit to how much you can do that. But when your
audience is as old as they are, and they’re dying, change is inevitable.
So I think it’s an enormous time of possibility. I think there are going
to be some huge losses. Some very large institutions that are very leveraged
are going to collapse. Some of their buildings will survive and some won’t
— they’ll be taken over as things that aren’t theatres and
they’ll be lost to us. But some people will wake up, and I’m excited
about some of the work that will actually get a chance to be seen.
# # #
©2008 Dramabiz Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
