As the deadline loomed for this new "Elements of Style, Minnesota Edition" blog entry, I found myself suffering intrusive thoughts about the lyrics of Foreigner’s “Double Vision.”
Not “Feeling down 'n' dirty, feeling kinda mean,/I've been from one to another extreme,” though that’s a fine sentiment, and always appropriate in my case (a case once described by a frustrated-comedian psychiatrist as “manic depression without the upside”).
No, my thoughts were of “Fill my eyes with that double vision,/No disguise for that double vision,/Ooh, when it gets through to me,/it's always new to me/My double vision gets the best of me.”
"Double Vision" hangs around all over our Minnesota Style, smoking those funny cigarettes and giving smaller kids the eye, and it sometimes makes me feel “kinda mean" too.
Live Bait. Gourmet Coffee. Theater.
I’ve always thought maintaining a double vision, getting away from your main vision and having a sideline of some kind, was a risky strategy. I mean, doing great theater is demanding enough to require both hands and all your attention. Isn’t it?
Around our house we have a joke inspired by the small stores you see along the roadside in Northern Minnesota, rustic looking little places advertising the oddest combinations of things: Cappuccino, videos, and live bait. Beer, nude dancing, and water heaters. Wood saunas, notary public, and martial arts instruction.
I’m sure they do it all great, but—call me old-fashioned—I’d prefer to pass on the live bait place and get coffee where their idea of branching out is carrying some tea bags.
Don’t get me wrong; I love a good Doppelganger story. (I’m even plotting one right now, a movie, but don’t call your local cineplex and demand it yet. Don’t worry, I’ll Facebook you all every single step along the way, so you don’t miss it.)
Three Women by Robert Altman, or Bergman’s
Persona, or
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, even
Single White Female, for Christ’s sake, I’ll watch any of that stuff. And so will you, and you, and the tall guy in the back with the funny eye. To judge from how persistently the same story keeps getting told, audiences can’t get enough of that double vision.
Things that are at one and the same time something else seem to appeal to humans in an almost sexual way. In fact, I suspect the preference for the two-in-one may have shadowy sexual origins, but I’m not going there, man. I’ll just note instead that everyone loves
The Transformers.
Dr. Jekyll makes plays, Mr. Hyde gets grants
So there are lots of good and obvious reasons to try it. As growth strategies go, a secondary vision allows an arm of the theater to focus on highly grantable public service programs (social and educational) or even easy-to-sell programming, like actor training for the kids and adult learning/business applications of theater ideas ("Shakespeare for MBAs").
You can even stick strictly to producing plays and still launch a second identity. Just pick something off the seventh grade required reading list, schedule shows during school hours, and hire somebody to direct the bus traffic for the next twenty years.
If you really hit it big in theater terms and get your own building (which almost nobody seems to have done for the last fifteen years or so), those reasons become even more compelling. Take the Guthrie. Please. I mean, it’s cool having those three big blue stages to put up whatever you want but imagine the sheer quantity of stuff required to keep those stages occupied.
I know, very many of you reading this would gladly make the sacrifice and put something up for them, but that’s the thing, they don’t want to produce JUST ANYTHING, but sooner or later, that’s the direction they’re going to be pushed in, all those happily successful theaters with their buildings, in the dark of night when those stages are whispering, “Feed me. Feeeeeed me.”
Even if programming doesn’t turn into a problem, there’s still space you could be making money from, staff who have spare time, artists who NEED an extra gig. Really, the same pressures exist for tiny theaters who rent their spaces, but the building just ups the ante.
It’s an existential question: what is a theater for all those minutes and hours and days when a play isn’t happening?
William Faulkner said, “It's a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can't eat for eight hours; he can't drink for eight hours; he can't make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work.”
True that. Especially the drinking and making love. And Faulkner tried too, with the drinking, at least, so he knew.
My double vision gets the best of me
The Double Vision strategy for Minnesota theaters looks like a key component for longevity. I look back on lots of small theater companies that did plays spectacularly well: Eye of the Storm, Brass Tacks Theater, (the old) Actors Theater of Saint Paul, The Cricket, and on and on, great theaters, focused on their seasons, with no secondary thing, and now they’re gone. (Not every single-minded theater doing great work has expired—Frank Theater keeps on rocking thus far.)
Lots of good things come from these secondary businesses. I can’t deny it. And I’m not going to catalogue and critique the entire short bus full of theatrical stepchildren in town and trace their pernicious influences back to their parent theaters. I’d just like to issue a fine Minnesota whine here. Sometimes I look at our mid- to large-theater institutions and ask, in a wheedling, passive-aggressive tone, “What is that hanging off that tail? Is that supposed to be a dog there?”
What works
To conclude on a positive note (which I personally NEED to do right now, thanks for asking), I want to point out two theaters that do the double, but do it so great I have to point them out as wholly, purely, exquisitely, good at it.
Penumbra,
celebrated elsewhere in this issue, manages to produce not only straight programming that totally rocks, but also (among lots of other programs I have no knowledge of) a
Summer Institute that seems to be producing a stream of graduates seriously focused on theater as a tool of social change. I’ve run into a bunch of young theater artists who have been profoundly influenced by the program, and are not only out there planning to change the world with theater, but are super freaking jazzed up about the idea.
I really hope they do.
Then there’s
Ten Thousand Things. I want to give them a special lifetime award for best Double Vision. They’ve made what’s usually the secondary thing into the primary thing, taking bare-bones theater to audiences with little other exposure to the arts: audiences in homeless shelters, prisons, and community centers, inspiring in the process not only crowds of people who can use some beautiful and intelligent entertainment, but also the artists who work with them—many of whom have told me through the years that working with the company was a life-changing experience.
So their SECONDARY thing is doing great shows for the general public. A nifty trick. And one they seem very careful to keep balanced in favor of their real mission.
Go Twins!
