Open doors

I hung up the phone, having just informed my agent that no, I would not be doing the highly commercial, likely very lucrative project I had previously agreed to do, and would be doing, instead, my “new work.” She sighed. I stated that I was aware that this would probably tank my career, and that only seven people would ever see it, and that it would make about thirty-five cents, and that she needn’t worry about making any money for me ever again. . .

Making new work is a hazardous business, especially in theater, where it often seems the audience is grimly determined to see the same damn plays on an infinitely repeating loop, and actually fears new work. The risks of doing it anyway are immense. Knowing our new work may never see the light of day—or if it does, may meet with wrath and/or scorn—we risk money, time, ego, and heartache, for a piece that may ultimately not work.

But we persist – and wonder why the fuck no one wants to produce or attend or fund or support our new work other than the other people also doing new work. Is the audience lazy? Are they just dumb? Is it the culture somehow? Is it, god forbid, our fault? Are we doing it wrong? Are we simply deluded, in thinking that new work matters at all?

The never-ending seasons of established plays and ways of producing—that familiar theater experience—does reflect, certainly, a resistance to newness in theater that seems odd in a cultural context where entertainment is expected to be endlessly new and flashy all the time. But looking closer at popular entertainment, it becomes clear that that incessant newness is really just a regurgitation of the same story, repackaged, retold. Is it possible that there are only a few stories in the world, and that theater, too, is retelling them? What’s the comfort of that same story? Why are we drawn to it, and drawn to the plays that tell it?

I think it isn’t that people lack imagination or intellectual adventurousness; I think it’s that they do not trust that the story told by new work will be theirs. They aren’t sure new work will offer them the door they need to enter in.

Because there is a door in every good play through which the audience may enter the staged world. Those old plays—the audience knows them, knows how to find the door, knows how to enter into the life of the play. And they go not just because access to the work is familiar; they go because the story of the play is a story that feels, in some way, like their own. This sense of ownership is how we enter new work—it gives us that door even into the totally unknown, and tells us we are welcome. And it comes not from a simple familiarity with a given work; it comes from a sense that this story is the story, in some way, of the audience's own self and experience. Theater that works does not work by blunt force but by seduction, and that seduction is effected by showing the audience something they know. It offers the audience one thing, sometimes a very simple thing, that the audience can grip tight in its fist and, holding it, follow the actors into the world of the play.

When we create new work, we do it because we have a story to tell and a vision we believe is unique. We want to express it, and have it seen and heard, and have it matter to someone beyond ourselves. But too often we stop at our desire to have our story heard, our vision seen. We assume that it will matter to someone else, because it matters to us. But theater—all the arts, really—is (are) an exchange—an exchange of visions, desires, needs. And ultimately, it is the work that needs to serve the audience, and not the other way around.

My vision needs to meet your need. You do not exist in the service of my vision. The audience has its responsibilities as well, yes; you need to come to the work willing to absorb, engage, exchange, think, feel. But if I have created something particular to my own vision, and have not also envisioned the audience I am trying to reach, my work may be new and fresh, but it will fail.

For those of us working in the arts, that is simply part of the process—we try, we fail, we try again. But I think the failure of vision can be avoided more often than it is. We can work harder to understand what it is that our audience wants and needs. And what it needs, when it comes to new work, is a way to enter, to see the artist’s vision through its own eyes, a way to understand the story as its own. New work that works understands its audience and its amorphous, inarticulate needs. The beauty of good new work is that it has the balls to tell new stories, or old stories in new ways, but they are stories that we recognize, if only fleetingly, as our own.

How many stories do you have? When you meet a new maybe-lover, which story do you start with? What is your repertoire? Because you have one. These are the stories that are your own, and that you think will reach your listener deeply; will make them laugh or cry or fall into bed with you. They are your stories, and you tell them well. You offer your listener a door: this, you say, is where you come in. And they say, yes, yes, that reminds me of the time I. . . And you begin the exchange that is the theater of daily life.

With each lover, it is new work—because the audience is new—not because the story is new.

These stories are the ones we all tell, because we know them, and need them, and want to enter in.

New work that works is like listening to a new lover tell his or her stories. They are foreign and familiar all at once, but, above all, they remind us of our own stories. New work that does not work alienates, because the speaker is only listening to the sound of his or her own voice, and does not offer a way into his or her world.

A true storyteller—a playwright, a writer, an actor, a dancer, a painter, any artist—can tell the story so well that you begin to believe it is your own. You are drawn in, seduced. Even the strangest stories give us that one thing that we can hold as we follow the teller into their tale. And once inside that other story, we begin to see our own stories newly, know ourselves in a different way, feel the resonance of things deep in the gut that we never knew and now know we need.

New work that works is sometimes entirely foreign to us, sometimes as familiar as our own face in the mirror, but in either case it articulates something we could not articulate ourselves. It draws up a sense of our own experience that, through theater’s compression and distillation of experience, is given the intensity of impact it needs to break through.

We worry that we will not be understood, or seen. But the real risk is that we will fail to understand the people we are trying to reach—we will fail to connect—we will fail to see their need for a living, breathing thing that they can touch and feel and see. To do new work that is raw and alive is a greater risk than doing new work that “expresses” our “vision.” Because, most of all, that vision must be one that an audience can see through its own eyes, feel in its own body, know deep in its gut. Otherwise it is dead on the page, and the audience will walk away, uncomforted, uninspired, its stories left untold.❦