Venus in Fur

I spent the first part of this week in New York City for a number of things, but one of them was the Spring Road Conference of the Broadway League.  It’s a gathering where the producers of musicals that are planning to tour the country get together with people who buy the shows in all the venues around the country where those shows will (potentially) go.  It’s a great gathering of people in the theatre business, so it’s well worth going for the networking and the information sharing, but there’s another side benefit…

The producers of the shows have a big incentive to get conference attendees to see their shows.  The result is that as an attendee, you can go see a show (or more) a day.

My favorite by far this week is a play at the Lyceum Theatre called Venus in Fur. I’m not going to do a critique or a review or anything, but I’ll give you some basics and then make a point about it.

It’s simple: it’s two people and a single set.  A playwright is auditioning actresses for a part in a risque play based on an obscure Victorian-era book (which may or may not exist…I didn’t check).  He’ s frustrated with everyone he’s seen, when this brash young woman walks in who seems totally wrong in every way for the part (and she’s late for the auditions anyway and he’s about to head home), until she starts reading the lines with him, and she’s perfect.  As the play goes on, it gets weirder and weirder.  Her true identity becomes more and more mysterious and the heat between the two characters goes from cold to simmer to boil.  It’s a seriously grown-up play with a heck of a lot to like about it.

But the kicker in all this, the thing that makes it boil is the actress, Nina Arianda.  I don’t even know how to describe her performance and I’m not going to play junior critic and try.  Suffice to say that for the entire 90 minutes or so of the show, her pace never really slows down.  She’s playing a complex, screwy, multi-leveled character doing different parts as that character and she makes it feel totally organic and real.

I take away a couple things: first, as big a fan as I am of spectacle in entertainment, this show proves that you don’t NEED spectacle to dazzle an audience.

The flip side of that coin is that this play does not, in my opinion, justify the purist argument that “all you need is actors and a set so why should anyone add to that?”

Yes, actors and a set or a singer and a guitar CAN work, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best a show can be.  In this case, the actress is an incendiary device (and the actor, Hugh Dancy, does his job well too, but I think everyone would admit he’s a foil to her).  Not every show does or can have that.

Another way of looking at it is to say that every show needs something extraordinary.  Not just really good, but extraordinary.  If you have one extraordinary thing, everything else has to be merely really good.  The extraordinary thing could be anything, but there needs to be one.  More if possible.

As many as possible.  But at least one.  A cabinet full of really good, whether spectacular or purist, just doesn’t do in an age of entertainment competition like ours.

Correlation and Causality

A common mistake that humans make is to confuse correlation with causality.

For example, did you ever notice that baseball games get canceled right about the time people take out their umbrellas?  From that, I could conclude that when people use umbrellas, it causes umpires to cancel baseball games.

Wrong.  Rain causes both.  Rain is “causal” but umbrellas and baseball cancellations are “correlated.”  They happen together, but they don’t necessarily cause each other.

This is what I think when I hear people talk about arts education.  Arts education and arts consumption are correlated, in that people who’ve done something related to the arts in their formative years tend to show up later for shows.

BUT…

Was it the education or the shows themselves that caused this?  It’s quite likely to me that a parent who loves to see theatre, dance, music, even sports is the real cause of the “education” in the first place.

And why would a parent be a fan of those forms?  To me, there’s a great chance that a person is a fan in the first place not because of what they were forced to do in school, but because there was a show (or shows) that were so exciting, so compelling, so much fun that they just had to go see it and just built a habit from there.

I can’t say I know this; but I can say that the thinking around education in arts never gets past the ‘correlation’ phase, and I’m not sure it’s not the other way around.  In fact, one thing I can say for sure is that being excited and enthralled by something definitely makes people fans, both short and long term.  Not everyone, perhaps, and there might be other factors, but it definitely works.

So how about that as an approach?  The best ‘arts education’ program is one that creates exciting content that everyone would like to see.  Would be dying to see.

Imagine doing that for a generation.  What do you suppose would be the result?

Is the Power of Live Experiences Just a Trick?

Humans tend to mimic those around them, even without knowing it.  Two people talking, assuming they like each other, tend to start mimicking each other’s mannerisms and turns of phrase within just a few minutes.  Take the most banal song in the world and have 1000 people sing it slowly, like an anthem, and you might tear up, even if it’s just the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.  You may not care a whit about the fortunes of the Chicago Cubs, but if you’re at the ballpark and tens of thousands of people cheer when one of the players makes an exciting catch, which really has absolutely no relevance to your life, you have to be a great big grump not to get excited.

So are we just being played by our biology?  I remember reading (but can’t for the life of me cite this…maybe one of you can help me) a psych experiment where people were asked to identify an object’s color, for example, and it was totally obvious was that color was.  Of course, people had no trouble doing this, until they were put into a room with other “subjects” who were really confederates of the psychologist doing the experiment.  They said, for example, that an obviously green object was red.  Most people could resist saying their own (obviously correct opinion) until about 4 other people went first and said something different.  And then most people looked right at something they KNEW was red and said it was green.

I’ve noticed a couple things about behavior at theatres and in comedy clubs that I find fascinating along these same lines.  First, at a comedy club, people think the comic, if he or she is halfway decent, is hysterical.  They absolutely bust a gut laughing.  Some people laugh so hard at an average professional comic in a live setting that they hyperventilate, all in a fun way of course.  Sure, you could write some of this down to having a couple drinks and loosening up, but I don’t think that’s it.  Do an experiment and watch the same comic both live and recorded and judge this for yourself.  It’s remarkable the difference.

At theatre events, I’m even more struck by how much and how loudly people laugh.  I’m not talking about comedic theatre events.  Just plays.  Just little moments where a character utters a line that has even a shred of levity.  A non-joke you’d best characterize as “droll” sets some people off guffawing.  Things that I’m not even sure the writer intended to be funny get people chortling like donkeys on nitrous oxide.  It’s strange.

And in sports, a Tuesday night game between one team and the 4th worst team in the league, with little or nothing at stake in the standings can precipitate loud, angry arguments about who’s out or who committed a foul.  It’s irrelevant by any standard, and yet so powerful that people lose themselves in it.

But here’s the point: you could call this a trick or you could call it the power of the medium that we work in.  This is true about human nature for a reason.  Why do we mimic each other?  Why does the enthusiasm and excitement of one person make us enthusiastic and excited?  Are we just suckers for some kind of primitive group think that happened because bands of cave people needed to stick together to avoid getting eaten by monsters?

Possibly.  But is that so bad?  The tribe has gotten quite a lot bigger, and the monsters have changed forms, but along the way, we’ve managed to trick ourselves into thinking that we don’t need the tribe anymore.  We feel self-reliant and independent because we can house, feed and entertain ourselves on our own, when in fact we’re absolutely 100% totally dependent on “the tribe” for all those solitary activities to work in the first place.  We’re far more dependent than those cave people, but we feel just the opposite.

So this response that we have could be nature’s way of telling us that we need this group.  We need to stay in tune with the group because if we do, good things happen.  It feels good to stand up and cheer when your baseball team hits a meaningless home run in the 8th inning of a tuesday night game.  It feels good to laugh too loud in a group of people that are laughing.  It probably even feels good to get goosebumps over the “Gilligan’s Island” theme.  Don’t feel bad about that.  Go for it.  It’s nature’s way of telling you that you need other people.

And if you’re on the selling side of this business, remember this.  The production on the stage doesn’t just happen between the show and the individual person. It’s the show, the person and the people around each person.  In a way, that’s the real show and one of the biggest differences between being there live and just seeing what happened.

Originality, For Real

Thinking about my piece from Wednesday, I was reminded of Jordan Roth’s presentation at TEDxBroadway earlier this year.  He was one of the speakers I was most excited to have present for us and I enjoyed working with the most.  His talk was in fact even better than I’d hoped, as he talked about the true meaning of “original.”  Well worth watching during your coffee break: