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Naw, if God had been clearing her throat she'd have said,
"Come in Radio Tokyo, Come in Radio Tokyo". Huh, I'm not even
sure I understand that.
I couldn't post to the RAT list before (for strange mysterious
computer reasons) and all that got fixed yesterday. I was feeling like the
strange child in a big house who stood at the window and watched all the other
children at play but couldn't play herself (or watched all the other children
throw rocks at each other, whatever the case may be).
Now of course all I want to
do is chime in on LAST week's topics -- "Foolin around with Obscurity"
and "Grad School; Expensive Sheep Pen for the Stars."
I just got out of a very expensive Sheep Pen with an MFA in
Directing. I hated it at first and felt like I had landed in the set of
the TV show FAME. I despised every moment of it and complained violently
to Chris Jeffries online. His advice to me was "Steal everything
that's not nailed down" and I tried my best. Now, in retrospect I am
glad I went. I got a lot of tools that I wouldn't have had otherwise (some
stolen, some earned). But I was also pretty darn clear about why I was
going in the first place -- and the reasons I went had nothing to do with
meeting the "right" people or making connections. I had all the
connections I ever wanted from little old Annex Theatre in Seattle Washington
and from Rat Conferences past and present. I went to learn about Meyerhold
and Giorgio Strehler and Shakespeare and Artaud and Christopher Marlowe and all
the old dead guys that we had never gone near at Annex. And I'm so
thankful I did -- RAT's of the past, all of them. And
I'm a very different director as a result.
And let me tell you this... the people I knew at Yale were
psyched by the RAT conference. One teacher, Ben Mordercai, who is a Broadway
Producer (I say that so you know just how very un-RAT like he is), made articles
about RAT required reading in his classes. Even those people working for
the Man, working for the stodgiest of all institutions recognize it is time for
radical upheaval in the way we look at and make theater. And particularly
in the way the institutions that support theater and support artists are
run. And that is what I am most interested in talking about...
Regional theater was a radical concept when first proposed by
people like Zelda Fichlander in the fifties. So, where do we go now?
What radical concept do we create that will support the creation of new work on
a large scale for the next thirty years? Maybe I'm alone, but I for
one believe that it is up to us. And, in thirty years, some new bunch of
smart-mouthed upstarts will come along and tell us we're fucked up and what
we've created doesn't work.
We need to (and I don't mean RAT, I mean us
as a bunch of theater makers who seem to live below the radar) create new ways
of making new work on a large scale. And we can do it if we believe we
can. Any sense of victimization must stop -- "they" aren't
keeping us from doing that. "We" are keeping ourselves from
doing that.
Ok now I sound like I'm about to offer you a free personality
test if you'll just step inside...
Sorry for the lengthy post. I'm just stretching my legs
(they've been cooped up in a first class sheep pen for the last three
years)
Love,
Allison
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