RAT Intro from Eye

[The Independent Eye <bards@independenteye.org>]

Dear Friends-

	Just arrived on the RAT list, so here's intro.

	Myself and partner/mate Elizabeth Fuller are the directors, writers
& principal actors of The Independent Eye, an ensemble now in its 26th
season, though our life in independent theatre goes back five years before
that when, still believing the career was going to be in academic theatre,
we were co-founders, in 1969, of Milwaukee's Theatre X.  That outfit took
over our lives; we left teaching and began the strange life that's
persisted ever since.

	In 1974, we left Theatre X, which had grown to a paid, housed
ensemble [still have dear friends there and gone back several times to do
projects], moved to Chicago, formed The Independent Eye.  After producing a
mediocre season at The Body Politic, Elizabeth and I went full-time on the
road as a duo, performing our own work for every conceivable sort of
audience - experimental theatres, college arts series, social agencies,
churches, community groups, prisons, coffee houses, you name it.  In 1977,
we resettled to Lancaster, PA, as a green, pleasant place to hang our hats
between tours, added two actors, and continued national touring, doing
between 120 and 200 shows a year - our two kids more or less grew up
bouncing in the back of the Dodge maxi-van.

	In the 80's, we went in multiple directions.  Independent Eye had
begun to attract a following in ultra-conservative Lancaster; and we
acquired a building, began producing a full season, building a board,
becoming an Institution.  We continued touring, but it started becoming
very difficult to build the kind of work we'd done before - couldn't take 9
months, as we had with our mask/puppet MACBETH, to create one piece when
producing three more shows at the same time.  And yet we did do some good
work, and were strongly invested with the community-building spirit that's
continued to stand some companies in good stead.

	At the same time, we began to circulate some of our scripts for
outside production - had written about 40 produced plays for our own
companies before ever starting to think of ourselves as "playwrights" - and
had several plays produced at Actors Theatre of Louisville, Denver Center,
Asolo, Mark Taper, other regional theatres, a major Off-Broadway disaster
with FULL HOOKUP at Circle Rep.  And we had fun and worked with some
wonderful people.  But a world with very different values than our own.

	Around 1989, it became clear that our relative success in Lancaster
was slowly killing the heart of the Eye.  None of our board ever told me to
produce different things, but it was very clear that the work that was most
central to our mission - company-created work - was a serious box office
liability, and in that context we were destined to become a
well-established but second-rate and under-financed regional theatre
reproducing other theatres' hits.  A perfectly reasonable, noble thing to
do, but not what was in our hearts.  So we asked the board to sell the
building and help us return to our prime mission of creating new work.  And
that's what we did.

	So in 1992, we moved to Philadelphia.  The past seven years have
been extremely fruitful.  With some serious foundation money available to
us for the first time, we ran a limited season of new work at our beautiful
49-seat space in Old City, did a number of co-productions (with Touchstone
Theatre, Theater of the First Amendment, Jean Cocteau Rep, Bloomsburg
Theatre, etc.), produced several series for public radio, continued some
touring and creating commissioned work with high schools and a museum,
developed an ongoing cadre of actors, the Genesis Ensemble, who were paid
purely for developmental improvisation on new pieces.

	At the same time, we were pretty insignificant in the overall
Philadelphia theatre scene, now burgeoning magnificently.  The mainstream
theatres, I think, generally respected us as talented but too peculiar to
take seriously; while to the young "fringe" groups we just sounded like one
more boring Theatre.  But then, we've never really fit *anybody's*
mainstream.  What started to move us in yet another new direction was the
gradual realization that the reactions we got at the theatre, even to our
best work, didn't hold a candle to the energy that came from an audience on
tour.  And that our move from Lancaster to Philadelphia still didn't bring
us back to the capability of creating repertory work and seeing it evolve
over the course of years, as in our earlier touring.  So we started
thinking seriously of going full-time back to touring.  Very risky, given
the huge decline in the "markets" as we knew them in earlier decades.

	But that's what we're doing.  This summer we gave up our
Philadelphia space and about 3/4ths of our funding, moved to Sebastopol, CA
- have wanted to return to California ever since finishing my doctorate at
Stanford in 1966, - and now on tour with three duo shows - MATING CRIES,
FAMILY SNAPSHOTS, and DESCENT OF THE GODDESS INANNA, TRENTON NJ, 5:42 P.M.
And adding a new one in March, HITCHHIKING OFF THE MAP, a series of plays
about journeys.

	Practically speaking, it's pretty much a start from scratch, even
though we have our equipment, our structure, our files, and our track
record, for what it's worth.  The good side of being around so long is that
you get a certain amount of respect simply from having survived this long.
The difficulty is that you're no longer "up-and-coming," and certainly
critics, grantmakers, and theatre people in general feel that if you've
been around this long and you're not high on the totem pole, you must not
amount to much.  We've got resumes that could choke a horse, but we still
do all our own data entry, promo, tour booking, accounting, tech and
massage.

	I guess we are chronic malcontents, like the snake shedding skin to
remain being a viable snake; and every career move we've made has been to
frustrate Career.  But in fact we're incredibly "fulfilled" human beings, I
think.  Our kids are grown, and lovely, and gone.  We have wonderful
friends and lovers and fans across the country.  We have a most peculiar
spiritual lineage of a mix Unitarian and Quaker and Pagan.  We've been
having some spectacularly powerful performances.  Our marriage of 39 years
is the juiciest it's ever been, except the last two weeks when a huge bulk
mailing was followed immediately by bronchitis.  We have a house.  We have
a webpage.  Who could ask for anything more?

	But we do.  We're really working to reinvent touring for ourselves.
Work in many different styles - cabaret comedy, masks & puppets, shadows,
collage, straight realism, total audio, etc. - but all moving toward a kind
of "theatrical bardcraft," for want of a better term, looking to make
dramatic storytelling as forceful and as direct as a song.  Finding the
audiences where they are., doing one's damndest to break out of being a
commodity to the people you're playing for, and make magic.

	So we're really looking forward to see what's happening in the RAT
milieu, what discoveries you're making, what we can steal and what we can
barter for - even though my own early years growing up on the other side of
the tracks don't give me any warm feelings about rats - they were too real
to be romantic metaphor.  But what the hell, it's just art.

Peace, joy & deep water-
Conrad Bishop




Visit The Independent Eye's website
at <http://www.independenteye.org>.