The great Minnesota theater pro-am

Knight riders

It seems like only yesterday that I was attending the ceremony announcing the winners of the 2014 Knight Arts Challenge. And now, here it is already: the finalists for round two have been announced. Among the 61 applicants who will move on to the next stage of the process, you will find a number of theater and performance proposals, including a flamenco flash mob, a retelling of Romeo and Juliet set in St. Paul with Montagues and Capulets replaced with Garcias and Vangs, another attempt at the Fringe Festival putting up a satellite festival in St. Paul, a "mobile comedy container", another edition of Bedlam's Big Lowdown, a nighttime lantern parade with puppets, and a show whose description says it is "drawing parallels between the Reconstruction era and contemporary racial oppression with a new production that combines figure skating, Afro-modern dance, live vocals and Ida B. Wells’ speeches."

This is the second of three years the Knight Foundation will pony up dollars for this program, so if you didn't get selected, or you just plain forgot to submit this year, you have one more chance in 2016. In the meantime, good luck, finalists. May that sweet grant money be waiting for you on the other side.

Words, words, words

Words. What do they mean? Do they have immortal definitions that defy the passage of time, handing down precious information to us in a straight lineage back to the gods? Or are they ephemeral fragments of gibberish plucked from the random hoots and howls of our ancestors and saddled with the sad expectation of any sort of meaning?

I ask this question because sorting out the meaning of two words has become a heated conversation in the theater world lately.

Those words: "professional" and "amateur".

At first blush, you might think this is a silly argument. These are words that have definitions in the Oxford dictionary, for crying out loud! It's not like trying to figure out what the hell "bae" means. (And I don't know why we're having that argument, either. It's obviously a multinational defense contractor based in Britain.)

Jonathan Mandell's recent review of Show for Days (yes, the one that Patti Lupone stopped to steal a man's cell phone, and, no, we are not getting back into the cell phone debate again) quickly turned from actual criticism of the show into an examination of how "professional" vs. "amateur" has evolved in show business.

The textual literalists in the world will tell you that one means you are paid and the other means you are not, but this stance means willfully ignoring the fact that English is a slippery bastard of a language, and it will not be pinned down. From the moment we made this distinction between different groups of theater types, we started overlaying ideas of merit derived from our capitalist tendencies. "Professional" became associated with "quality" and "amateur" was conflated with "middling", because, as good little consumers, we know that a quality product means financial success (despite the continued existence of Dominos).

You can see this set of quality definitions encoded in AEA's current Ask If It's Equity campaign, which insinuates to audiences that Equity touring shows are quality because their actors are professionals (strangely ignoring the fact that an Equity touring show still doesn't guarantee much of a paycheck). But, because the English language despises clarity, we turned those monetary and quality definitions of "professional" and "amateur" back on themselves again, and now we have actors who do unpaid community theater describing themselves as "being very professional" (when they actually mean to say "being a very smug jerk") and critics decrying a paid actor's performance as "amateurish" (when they actually mean to say, "I am such a smug jerk").

In an article following Mandell's review, Rob Weiner-Kendt wrote an American Theatre Magazine article attempting to rescue "amateur" from being a slur about an artist's quality and instead kind of ended up leaving it as a slur about an artist's dedication:

"By my lights “professional” and “amateur” have always referred to a distinction between artists who are serious about their work and dedicated to it as a trade and a craft, and those who are doing it chiefly (and blessedly) for fun."

The erosion of an artist's ability to even make a living wage has taken with it our ability to make bright line distinctions between "amateur" and "professional" in the theater world. It's not like this a new revelation. (See for example this 2008 article, which proves both my point and my ability to command a Google search) But, because of all the baggage associated with these terms, I personally stopped using them. I don't mean to admonish you if still insist on sorting these terms out (making sure, of course, that the one with the prestige is the one you apply to yourself); I mean to suggest that instead of quibbling over which rock is heavier, you might consider just setting them down and getting on with your work. (Whether someone's paying you for it or not).

The hour is almost upon us

Soon, we will drop right into the vast grey area between "amateur" and "professional". This Thursday, the Minnesota Fringe Festival roars back to life. For ten days, all the disparate parts of our theater scene slam together into this wacky, shambling behemoth of a theater festival, and I can't wait.

If you don't know where to begin at the festival (because, let's face it, 174 different shows is really impossible for your mind to comprehend at once), pick up any local paper or magazine with an arts section this week. If you haven't already read coverage of Fringe preview performances, get ready for a slew of starter guides, previews and must-see lists. Odds are pretty good that at least one of your actor friends has shared one of these articles with you, because it mentioned their show.

Next week on News and Notes, I will give up all pretense that any other theater news matters to me at that moment, and will instead focus entirely on the Fringe experience from the inside. I will be deeply embedded, taking an in-depth look at what's going on at the Fringe; which is to say that I will gladly reprint any drunken comments you give me at Fringe Central.

You oughtta know

Hey, playwrights! Do you want to know what directors are looking for when they're sifting through your plays, along with the thousands of other submissions they receive? Here's some free advice from local directors Michelle Hensley, Joel Sass, Leah Cooper, Peter Moore and Jamil Jude. Does that answer your questions?