But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

– Robert Frost

Does your family have a secret?

I bet it does . . .

Some secrets are discovered, some are revealed and some secrets actually die with the keeper.  But all families have them.  Some of these secrets are personal; things that a parent does not want the children to know about, for instance.  Some secrets are collective; a detail, or an event or a circumstance that the entire family is guarding from the outside world.  Whether personal or collective, a secret is a secret, and we guard them sometimes as closely as we guard our lives.  And the effect of a secret in a family can have a diverse effect on the tribe.  A secret can protect a family and it can also tear a family apart.

But humans have also demonstrated that we have a strangely obsessive attraction to the secrets in the lives of others.  The popularity of tabloid and reality television in the last decade prove that this human curiosity is not fading, not in any way.  The truth about humans:  we obsess over the skeletons in other people’s closets.

So.  Now to the fun part.

BackStage Theatre Company has a family secret.  And we are going to reveal it you.  Eventually.

For right now . . . we will drop a few hints.  Firstly, the secret itself is about our upcoming 2010-2011 Season.  Next season features an extraordinary pair of plays, a Chicago premiere and a reexamination of a contemporary classic . . . both revolving around the idea of family secrets.

And that’s all we’re saying . . . for now.

But in the meantime, we are making our 2010-2011 subscriptions available to you, and in honor of the theme of Family Secrets, we are keeping the delicious details to ourselves.  If you’d like to purchase one of our Secret Subscriptions, you can follow this link right here and with the code word SECRET, you can buy a subscription to our 2010-2011 Season sight unseen . . . at a 33 percent discount.  And you will be the first to know the details of the Secret Season as they are uncovered.

But here’s the thing.  We cannot hold onto this secret forever.  People talk.  Details leak.  We know this.  So, each time a piece of the secret is revealed, the price will go up.  And if you wait until the secret season is fully revealed, you will pay our normal subscription price.

So.  What are you waiting for?  Be the first to know.

And stay tuned . . .

“…I really feel I’ve had a great life, because of what I’ve learned from the people I knew.”

– Lemon, “Aunt Dan & Lemon”

At the end of this wonderful adventure with “Aunt Dan & Lemon”, this line is one that leaves the strongest impression, as we finish yet another chapter in the BackStage family story.

I thought about all the lines of logic and argument Lemon and Dan share with the audience, the political, moral, and social considerations and challenges Wallace Shawn presents, and the obvious “family” issues present in Lemon’s childhood.

But as I pondered how I wanted to say goodbye and what words would best convey my feelings about this incomparable experience, what I am left with is the family I gained through this production – “the people I knew”.

Matthew Reeder, Artistic Director of BackStage Theatre, and our fearless leader for “Aunt Dan & Lemon” taught me to have faith in not knowing.  To trust the unseen, the formidable “gray”, and know the truth lies within.

Brenda Barrie showed me an artist’s path that exemplified grace and poise.  Her questions or times where the journey to Dan was less clear were never larger than her quiet strength and determination.

Ron Kuzava is a warrior – an actor who never let a personal challenge interfere with finding and gloriously executing a role made for him.

Eric Paskey is fearless.  Let me tell you, this man knows how to play. He spent many nights in rehearsal owning the room and setting, then raising, the bar for fun.

Anita Deely is an actor that lives in the present – all the time.  I learned how to accept each rehearsal and performance for their own splendid individuality, accomplishment, and success – and released expectation for empty duplications.

Caitlin Emmons reminded me to see things new – from the beginning of an actors’ journey – with anticipation and excitement.  She is eager to learn and wise beyond her years as a result of her brave vulnerability.

Michael Reyes is a force of positivity.  He took each day and saw its gifts.  Our strides and growth as a family were constantly celebrated by him, and our mistakes were brushed away with love.

Jen Poulin, Heath Hays, Brandon Wardell, Tom Haigh, Joanna Melville, Elise Kauzlaric, Geoff Coates & Megan Frei created a magical world for us, and generously listened and addressed every concern and idea.  The ability these artists possess to see a world from several new lenses and then collaborate, bringing the best of each to an astonishing collective whole, reminded me of every piece’s value – seen and unseen.

Our board and donors, our staff, our subscribers – you showed us commitment and dedication in the midst of uncertainty with this controversial play.  Your championing of BackStage Theatre humbles me to be a part of such a strongly supported vision.

Part of finishing a story is accepting you’ve reached the end, but the amazing thing is that still, in my memory, what I’ve learned from the family of “Aunt Dan & Lemon” will continue on and on…

And I will be forever grateful.

Rebekah Ward-Hays

When they are staged, Wallace Shawn’s rarely-produced plays tend to garner a lot of critical praise, but John Simon, critic for New York Magazine, famously hates this play. And on a surface level, his criticisms have merit. Aunt Dan and Lemon seems to be completely unconcerned with the universal rules of playwriting. The play has nothing that might resemble traditional dramatic action, has little dramatic conflict and offers very little in the way of answers for the myriad questions it raises throughout the course of the evening.

And yet, after that very first reading nearly a year ago, I was left absolutely gobsmacked at the final page.  This play has no right to be as compelling as it is.  It has no right to succeed.

After several weeks of attempting to invent for myself a million pragmatic reasons why programming this play would be a huge mistake, I brought this play to our ensemble for a reading.  The truth is, those well-formed, pragmatic excuses were steadily losing the battle against the ghostly whispers that lingered in the crevices of my brain every time I read the thing.  The ensemble reading was, I guess, an attempt to excorsize those whispers, so I could shelf this beast and move on.  It couldn’t possibly hold up in a reading.

But of course, it backfired beautifully.  The ensemble reading was a monster.  This astonishing play was even more compelling and mysterious and frightening when it was read out loud.  What was worse, it was perfectly castable within our own ensemble and the play fit our mission like a glove and was easily producible on our shoestring budget.  It was a done deal.  There was no going back.

In the months that followed, the unanswered questions that linger around the edges of this play are still thick and palpable, and the question of its ability to “succeed” has made me question the set of parameters by which a play’s success is typically measured.  Does a piece of theatre really “succeed” only by engaging in the high drama of conflict?  Is a play “successful” only if it tells its story through riveting action?  I remember the mantra of one of my early playwrighting teachers:  ”Show us, don’t tell us.”

In most cases, I believe these Artistotlian rules of drama to be of enormous use to playwrights, and in most cases, plays with little propulsive action, little conflict and that offer very little in the in the way of stabilizing resolutions are doomed to fail miserably on the stage.  Not only are these the basic guiding principles of drama, but they are tools that we as human beings employ every day as a means to organizing our very real world.  What Shawn does by eschewing these typical rules of dramatic organization is remind us that real life is rarely lived in high conflict; that despite the constant influx of information from every conceivable source, sometimes the most dangerous ideas are passed in the form of whispers from people who are closest to us.

Come closer, this play seems to ask.  Step inside.  Listen carefully, and dare not to be spellbound.  John Simon is right:  ”nothing happens” on the stage.  But this is not an arbitrary decision.  Shawn, by asking the audience to listen deeply, seems to be more concerned about what happens in the troubled consciences and hungry souls of his audience as they are pulled closer to the heart of Lemon’s secret.  When Wallace Shawn claims that Aunt Dan & Lemon is “about the audience,” he means it.

This is going to be one hell of a journey for everyone involved.  It’s been a long time since I have felt so excited and so beautifully freaked-out before I began a process.

It is time to clench my fists and step into the dark.

This is our mission, in case you weren’t aware of it:

BackStage Theatre Company is a not-for-profit ensemble of theatre artists dedicated to the exploration of family. Through the creation of bold and eclectic productions, we question and examine what family means socially, spiritually, economically, emotionally, politically, and culturally. Our BackStage family is committed to the growth of all families.

I am constantly challenged and exhilarated by this mission.  And yes, you read correctly; I believe that this mission of this little theatre company can help to change the world.

All one has to do is to turn on the television or listen to NPR or read the titles of the books that silent commuters read on solemn trains and one gets the very clear sense that in some essential way, our national seams are loosening and we are slowly coming apart.  Politicians, religious leaders, pundits and “self-educated” talking heads increasingly see only one side of any argument and seem to thrive on sundering any consideration about the collective “we” into the bitterly divided camps of “us” and “them.”  Our great experimental nation has gone from being an epicenter of new, connective ideas, to a breeding ground for shallow, divisive political and religious one-offs that draw schismatic lines-in-the-sand and splinter our collective consciousness into paranoid camps of who is righteous and who is wrong.

What does this have to do with our mission?

Everything.

By embracing this complex mission; by considering the multifaceted idea of “family,” our mission becomes an antidote to this widening national trend of divisiveness.  By choosing this mission, BackStage has committed itself to the careful examination of the basic and initial means by which all human beings attempt (successfully or not) to connect to one another.  Despite what many of todays loud-mouthed pundits claim, the idea of family is not self-defining, nor are its values.  In fact, the reality is very different.  The American Family is becoming increasingly heterogeneous and complex.  The Family is the primary human institution, worthy of constant and careful consideration, and its “values” are dense and varied.  According to certain ideologues, the family is a simple institution with a clear, simple code of ethics.  In reality, the family is an emotionally complex and often volatile institution that constantly challenges the limits to our patience, our self-image and our capacity for forgiveness.

A family cannot be defined by its values, but it can be defined by our universal human journey within it.  We are born into the family, we leave the family, and in one way or another, we ultimately return to it. The connectivity of that universal journey has inspired the greatest mythological and dramatic explorations this human world has ever seen, and it is that journey that our mission calls us to explore.

Now, I am certainly aware that claiming that a small storefront theatre could somehow help to change the world might seem to be a grand flirtation with pretentiousness.  Well, so be it.

I have long lived with this quote by Peter Brook:

“We can talk about housing on TV.  We can talk about heaven in the empty churches.  In the theatre, we ask why it’s worth living in the house and if we want to go to heaven.  Where else can we do this?  We can talk about shorter hours of work in the weeklies and about leisure.  If  we don’t examine the living of our leisure in the the theatre, where else will we do so?  In the loony bin?”

Now is the time to raise voices, to ask big questions, to make bold claims and to stop shouting into the void.  If we have something to say, it’s time to say it. It is time to stop telling stories in the vacuum and hoping the audiences show up.

So, in honor of our 10th Anniverssary Season, I make the claim that our mission can help to change the world.

Can yours?  If so, I cannot wait to hear about it.

“Kuzava!” /shakefist!
“Schutz!” /shakefist!

Without fail that was the greeting that Will and I would share when we inevitably ran into each other at an audition/1st reading/gathering. It was like our “secret club handshake” that we had developed over our years together working on shows. We would bicker back and forth over who was chicago’s greatest character actor. Who got to wear the hat? Will or myself? We played off each other so well it was really just second nature to both of us.

I will miss that about him most of all.

Will passed away after a short struggle with Pancreatic cancer on a Monday, May 25th just days before his birthday.

Chicago lost one of it’s true stars that day. Not only was he the most solid and reliable actor you could ever hope to work with, he was beyond a shadow of a doubt, the kindest person I have ever had the honor to know. Never a complaint and always a kind word to those around him.

He taught me so much in the few short years we knew each other. That being a character actor was just as glamorous and fufilling as playing a lead. That your love for the theater and what you do will shine through every moment you are on stage and every moment of your life.

Will will be missed and our craft and community is diminished now with his passing.

Wherever he might be now, that hat belongs to him and him alone, as there will never be another like him.

Goodbye old friend.

A Midwestern boy all my life, I came to Chicago after college to be an actor. But less than two months after my arrival, I was working full time as a company manager. I refused to take the hint, and weakly pursued my acting career, until I realized that I shouldn’t. In the years that followed, I spent some time in the corporate world, started business school, and found my way back to the arts, on the finance side. I’ve been called both a “cold-souled bean counter” and a “budget god” by artists who don’t know me.  I’m also Backstage Theatre Company’s Treasurer and a Board member. So it may not be a total shock that I will be writing about the business of the art on this blog.

Fortunately for me, the business of the arts is on everybody’s mind, now, because of the R-word. Recessions wake everybody up, even nonprofits. But the dramatic stock market drops last fall brought it home like a staplegun to the trachea. Well-endowed nonprofits shivered as their assets shrank by 30% in two months. This counts for foundations, too. Foundations exist to give away the earnings on a pot of invested money, and collectively are a major supporter of arts. If that pot shrinks by 30%, you’ve got less to give away. So even organizations without an endowment, but with major foundation support, like Backstage, feel the pain.

But truthfully, the pain has barely begun. Most endowed organizations smooth out spikes or drops in invested asset values when they draw off earnings. So a sudden drop can cause an organization’s cash flow to decline more in the second year than the first, and even more in the third year…

Why am I telling you all of this?  If you wanted a tranquilizer you wouldn’t be reading this blog, now, would you?  The thing is, this magnitude of loss is not something we can reasonably expect to bounce back quickly. It will take years. This leads to a lot of conversation around “the New Normal.” It means “Oh shit, what now?” For some, the new normal is wherever we hit bottom. Other glass-is-half-full-types prefer to think of the new normal as the amount of business we will be able to sustain after the recession. Bold visionaries like to think they they will establish the new normal, and others will rally and resources will flow.

I suggest the new normal is not a point on a Dow Jones chart, nor a different theatre revenue structure (though it could include the latter). The new normal is simply a heightened level of experimentation and adaptation. Darwin’s 200th birthday combined with the onset of a recession led to an overuse of the famous maxim that evolution favors not the strong, but the most adaptable. Overused, but true.

How do we adapt? Not by crystal ball gazing to miraculously know what donor development strategy is going to work, or which untapped market of potential subscribers will suddenly be interested. If you’re planning to hire a consultant to give you the silver bullet, call me instead. I’ll work for half the price and give you the same results, and I won’t even waste your time by showing up. No magic formula. Instead, we’re going to have to try a lot of stuff, and probably fail at a lot of stuff. It’s going to be work, and there will be frustration. If it helps, we can think of it like auditioning, and stop expecting that every idea to attract donors or develop audiences will be a hit.

What else does adaptation not mean? It does not mean that we should try to be all things to all people. Read Cody Brown’s remarkable analysis of the parallels between Twitter and MySpace to get a clear sense of the danger to a company that doesn’t know its own identity. Adaptation and experimentation may require that we dig in to a little self-discovery to get a better sense of our identies, but it is no excuse for fragmenting ourselves.

We need to experiment with new ways to communicate the value that we offer to our audiences. It may be a game of “justify our existence” in the community live and online. It may be a blitz of promotional novelty or creative fundraising efforts. It may be cooperative cross-promotion with our competitors. It will probably be all of the above. Best of all, this is an opportunity for a growth spurt of innovation. Check out what Collaboraction and the Driehaus Foundation have been up to (scroll to the bottom of this page and look for the Driehaus Foundation Money Back Guarantee). Box office heresy, and a fantastic idea! More innovations like this are sure to emerge in the next year.

We should never let a good recession go to waste. We must use it to justify some sacred-cow-tipping on the business side, and we must use it to motivate structural creativity as if our survival depends upon it. Because, of course, it does.

So, what is your New Normal? Despair? Innovation?

In what ways should Backstage adapt and develop our New Normal? Any tactics that we really should have tried already?  Let us know below.

Since then, he has been timidly inquiring about the present state of the Chicago theatre scene.  His equity card is long defunct and he is carrying a ten year gap in his performance resume.  He asked if I thought he was nuts for considering a return to the stage at the old age of 35.

“Of course you’re nuts.  Don’t do it,” I told him.  ”Unless, of course, you can’t live without it.”

A day or so later, I found myself thinking about my own pronouncement.  Being the artistic director of a theatre company with very limited resources more often than not places the artist in the backseat to the detail manager.  Amongst cash-flow questions and budget resources, season planning, strategy retreats, rights acquisitions, casting, production staffing and networking, I find myself with very little time to remember why the hell I chose to do this . . . why I can’t live without it.

I can point to an onstage moment almost twenty years ago when my geeky teenage life was broken open by the first of a series of I-Can’t-Live-Without-This moments.  The moment occurred while singing the final bars of the “Moonfall (Reprise)” in the latter half of the Mystery of Edwin Drood.  Standing in the arms of a pretty teenage soprano, we blasted our untrained lungs into the darkness beyond edge of the stage.  And it was in that instant that I sensed for the first time, that perfect, widescreen silence between our final notes and the eruption of the applause.  And it was that tiny moment of pure, church-like silence that stopped me in my adolescent tracks.  To me, that silence was proof that something real and good had been exchanged between myself and the audience, and in that brief moment of silence, we had been somehow unified; sharing an experience that was full and warm and giving and true.  I felt generous and at home in that silence.  I felt I had given a small, deep gift, and that gift had been accepted with grace and humility, without the clutter of politics.  It was a powerful, deeply human moment of connection, and it spoke to something missing in my everyday encounters with everyday people.

Twenty years and two degrees later, that silence still profoundly motivates me.  And the perfect expression of that unifying silence alludes me, thank God, so I keep looking for it in the stories I choose to tell.  I tell stories in the theatre because the theatre allows a sonorous silence of unity to explode in a room full of disparate, noisy creatures.

It is difficult to talk about something that is without sound or color, something so rich and so personal.  But there it is.  It is why I cannot live without it.

So what I want to know is: Why can’t you live without it? I want to hear your story.

And as the week comes to a close, as I look out over the approaching onslaught of a whirlwind tech process, I feel charged by the lingering snaps of dramatic electricity that have slowly developed in that tiny room during these last few weeks. Despite a full-blown viral invasion that eventually compromised the health of both actors, forcing me to actually cancel an actual rehearsal (a first, ever) the story stands strong on its skeletal legs. The actors are pointed headlong into the arc of this comic near-tragedy with strong hearts and hungry instincts.

Kolvenbach’s play is a delectible challenge: a visceral two-hander about two decent, flawed men who are battling to hold together authentic lives in the shadow of a mysterious and distant father. It is a play about men written by a man concerned with the increasingly inarticulate nature of the male heart.

On a technical, structural level “On An Average Day” appears to be a back-to-basics excersize: Kolvenbach has placed two complicated characters in a claustrophobic room, loaded them with a volcanic set of given circumstances, and set them loose on each other. And yet, there is something else, something spooky and intangible that lurks around the edges of this seemingly conventional setup. Something like a strange face in an old photograph, or footsteps in an empty hallway, or a sourceless smell. Something haunted, and theatrical.

For the last three weeks, we’ve been thrashing out the story in our tiny flourescent room. In three short days, we take that story, step into the dark, and attempt to turn it into theatre.

“Memory of Water” closed this weekend. In one of the funnier moments of the play, the three sisters bicker over the reliability of a prominent childhood memory. Catherine tells the story, and Mary claims actual ownership of the story’s circumstances. Teresa confirms Catherine’s inaccurate recollection of the story. Mystified, Catherine cannot fathom this new truth. “You appropriated it, because it fits,” Mary explains. In spite of the fact that the events of the story didn’t actually happen to her, the story had become a inextricable facet of Catherine’s identity.

This is the way story infiltrates our lives. For as long as there have been stories and a campfire to tell them around, human beings have used the strands of narrative to bring order and meaning to our own lives. Stories provide us with tangible identities and ground us in a chaotic world. In the course of a lifetime, we collect the stories that float around us and put them to use. The way we use those stories says more about our identities than the origin behind the stories themselves.

At its’ core, a theatre company is simply an organized collection of storytellers. A very wise father of a very wise friend observed that the function of storytellers in a community is to unlock the grip of broken stories and to engage the community in working ones. Soon, BackStage Theatre Company will present its’ final show of the 2008-2009 Season. John Kolvenbach’s “On An Average Day” directly addresses the dire consequences of living a life within the parameters of a broken story.

We, as storytellers and as human beings, need to constantly reexamine our universal stories. To endure, a community needs new stories, and it is our job as theatre artists to tell them. These days we light our campfires from the grid and color them with gels, but we still gather in the dark to hear a good story.

“VI: You invent these versions of me and I don’t recognize myself–

MARY: I’m not listening to you–

VI: I’m proud of you, and you’re ashamed of me–

MARY: I am not–

VI: I hear you say it all the time. I’m not like my mother, I’m not. I’m like my father. Look in the mirror. Why can’t you see it? Everyone else can. Look at the curve of your cheek, look at your hands, the way they move. You’re doing it now. That’s me. I got it from my mother. She got it from her mother. And on it goes, so far back that we don’t know who began it or on what impulse, but we do it, we can’t help it–

MARY: I’ve inherited some of your gestures. So what?

VI: Don’t try and reinvent yourself with me. I know who you are.

MARY: You don’t know anything.

VI: I look at you and I see myself.

MARY: Have you finished?

VI: Never.”

This remarkable passage of dialogue, so dense with the inescapable legacies that our families imprint upon our psyches, is a paradigmatic example of the kind of thematic questions that BackStage hopes to raise. Enjoy the writing. Come see the show.