Wrath of the Smartphone

Turn, turn, turn

As you, the painfully hip readers of Minnesota Playlist, already know, the hot trend in the Twin Cities right now is getting new leadership for your theater company. Darling, absolutely everyone who's anyone is doing it. Have you thought about getting your leadership changed?

In the meantime, let's welcome one more cool kid to the block: In the Heart of the Beast now has a new executive director. After going through a financial crisis last year, the company worked with interim executive director Catherine Jordan to get itself back on firm footing, and have now brought on long-time arts administrator Corrie Zoll and his majestic beard to help run the place.

After the Outrage

Last week on News and Notes, we talked a bit about the extreme ire being flung at Words Players, a small educational community theater group in Rochester, MN, for their admittedly poorly-worded call for submissions for their festival of new works. After some bloggers ripped this call for submissions apart, the hashtag #playwrightrespect became the rallying point for all sorts of theater types to hurl angry invectives at Words Players. In other channels, comment sections and in messages sent directly to the organization, invective quickly turned to opprobrium, which then became vituperation, which then morphed almost immediately into vilification. In other words, much of it was just needlessly mean.

As I said last week, I see all this as more punching down from the theater community, which is righteously ganging up to beat the crap out of a tiny organization with no money, connections, power or influence. For a while, it looked like no one else was going to stand up for Words Players besides an opinion writer in the local Rochester Post Bulletin, until I saw that Travis Bedard at 2am Theatre wrote the most humane and insightful thing in this discussion so far: "On Being Right".

I don't normally mark any of the things I post here as being required reading, since this is the internet, and I know you'll get distracted by a picture of a cat before you get a paragraph into anything; but Bedard's piece is important. (It was good enough to get Howard Sherman, one of the bloggers who got this whole thing rolling in the first place to rethink how he handled it. Seriously, don't scroll down any further on this page until you've clicked on that link and read the whole article. It's not long. I can wait. Seriously, I've got half a bottle of whiskey left here. Take as long as you like.

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Done? Good!

Now, any time that anyone in the theater world starts organizing groups to bully some other powerless person or group that just didn't know any better, go back and read that again, and remind yourself: (1) "Our being right doesn’t make our every action right." and (2) "We’re on the same team."

So, keep that in mind as we plunge forward into the next wrath-inducing section:

Not the sounds of silence

OK, theater world, we get it: you don't like the cellular telephones.

Benedict Cumberbatch is begging you not to use them to film him in Hamlet. Lin-Manuel Miranda will ban you for using your phone. Patti Lupone will confiscate them when she hears them. And Ben Kingsley will straight-up murder your phone if you dare to let it go off in his presence.

And now the Wall Street Journal is telling me that these insidious devices that do nothing more important than conveniently connecting the entire industrialized world together have infiltrated our rehearsal rooms! Oh my god! The call is coming from inside your studio!!!

While the stars can afford hunker down in their technology-free bunkers, the rest of us would probably get punched in the face repeatedly for smashing a stranger's phone. As I've tried to say before, this whole "smartphone" thing seems to be a trend that's got some staying power, so how are we going to deal with it in a way that doesn't involve pissing off our audience by destroying their devices?

There have been many attempts to leverage these electronic doodads as critical parts of the performance. See, for example, This Is Not A Theatre Company and their Ferry Play. The "play" is more like a radio drama, but timed to the schedule of the Staten Island Ferry so that you experience it as you ride. Chicago Shakespeare Theater had a similar concept in Since I Suppose, which gave audiences a plot-driven walking tour of Chicago.

Of course, you can argue that this is all just gimmicks and tricks and not "real" theater, since "real" theater should have people sitting in a quiet room sharing a sense of decorum and grandeur and respect for the, um, I don't know, tradition, I guess? Or is that church I'm thinking of? But Lyn Gardner at the Guardian is suggesting that the problem isn't the phones themselves, but our expectation that theater can only exist in respectful silence.

Emily Gastineau has a recent article up over at MN Artists pondering what it means to perform for people whose attention is being fought over constantly. While she doesn't prescribe any solutions, she does reiterate the change that has happened in our audiences since our devices made "entertainment" so easy to access: "Viewers are no longer looking for an antidote to their boredom, but a qualitative break in their daily overstimulation."

So maybe the answer isn't banning cell phone and destroying other people's property. Maybe the answer is offering people an actual experience beyond "you sit there while we entertain you and also you shut up."

So, let's all go out and get our own personal dance pieces. You'll definitely remember that.