Meaning and nothingness

One of the duties of my day job is to produce short news summaries for radio broadcast. I've been doing this twice a day, Monday through Friday and a few hours on Sunday, for a year and a half. It's not good for my mental health. It's not just that the news is depressing (though it's very depressing), but the news includes a lot of people talking about things. They say stuff. And the stuff they say is nonsense. Heads of state, politicians, commentators and, God help us, the man-on-the-street, all of them have opinions and all of them talk nonsense. It's not that what they say is wrong. It's that there is no attempt to be right. Their words are merely noises—a ritualized grunting meant to communicate a simple message—usually, "give me stuff" (your vote, your money, your attention, your love). Two weeks ago, “Dr" Terry Jones, senior pastor of Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, and a group of good Christians/patriotic Americans, planned to burn copies of the Quran on September 11. Jones explained, "We only did it because we felt there needed to be an outcry against Islam, because Islam is presenting itself as a religion of peace." This is nonsense. Terry Jones does whatever he does for the press, and his followers follow for the same reason Junior High boys swear loudly on the bus in front of Junior High girls. So what I want from art has become very simple: I want you to mean what you say. I don't care what it is—Shakespeare at the Guthrie, punk-comedy at Bryant Lake Bowl, musicals, political sketches, puppet fairy tales, Kabuki-stomp-happenings—anything you want to do, I want you to do it. But I want you to mean it. It's easier, I suppose, to not mean it. Did you see Macbeth at the Guthrie earlier this year? A lot of smart, talented people put a lot of effort into…nothing. With a few exceptions (Barbara Bryne, Kris Nelson) the actors spent three hours doing lots of vigorous, but meaningless...nothing. They didn't need Shakespeare's words. They could have used the iPad User Guide as their text, and the performance would have been exactly the same. Growl, growl, growl. Weepy, weep-weep. Stare distractedly. Your turn. Three-plus hours full of sound and fury, signifying…awful. There is more drama, suspense, and humor in Sarah Palin's Twitter feed. How does this happen? I can only guess, of course, but I'm pretty sure that for whatever reason Macbeth was chosen, it wasn't because someone couldn't wait to tell that story.

The best experiences

The best experiences I've had in the theater have been when someone—an actor, a director, a playwright—couldn't wait to tell a story: Kirby Bennett with Our Town, Mo Perry and Craig Johnson with Hedda Gabler, Stacey Dinner-Levin and Michael Paul Levin with Autistic License, Fred Wagner and Sally Ann Wright with Looking for Normal. None of these are plays I would have chosen to do, but because someone couldn't wait to tell those stories, I feel like I was given a great gift just to be involved. Someone meant it. "Meaning it" takes courage and discipline. It takes a willingness to follow through and a willingness to suspend what you think things should be in order to see how things are. It takes taste and style. It takes generosity and faith in your audience. One of the virtues of the Minnesota Fringe Festival is that a lot of the people involved mean it. Some are more successful than others at communicating that, but when it works, it's great. Tim Hellendrung in Speech, playing the James Bond of extemporaneous speakers, gives into his dependence on Demon Rum. He was funny, outrageous, and strangely moving, because he meant it. Last February, Kurt Kwan played the main character's father in Theatre Mu's production of Yellow Face. He's too young to play that part. But he meant it. And he filled that character with warmth, intelligence, and love. In the future, as envisioned in Ringtone (written and directed by MinnesotaPlaylist's Alan Berks), two characters meet. They're attracted to each other and, thanks to the technology of the future, have access to an endless number of facts about one another, but they don't have any idea about how to connect as boy and girl. The actors, Anna Sundberg and Ben McGinley, turned the moment into an odd little dance of exploration and fear and joy that was thrilling to watch. Those are some of the moments from the past year where I felt like the performance meant it, where the story took off in ways that made total sense, yet were totally surprising, and where I felt I was being given a gift just for being there. In the coming year, I hope we all find stories to tell that we can’t wait to share with our audiences. I mean it.