With the Blood Up

Well . . .


Scott Walters, who had mentioned he was possibly planning on posting something "really extreme," did.

Below is my response to his latest post, "Bah!" -- if you haven't read it, and want to bother continuing reading an angry response from me that should maybe have stayed unposted, please do.

I started it as a comment on Scott's blog, then moved it over to Word, then just wrote it to get it out of my system, no longer intending to post it. However, despite the calmer responses from Isaac and Matt, and Matthew Freeman and Alison Croggon in Scott's comments, Scott's own comment made me decide to post it anyway. It jumps around a bit -- I went back and edited it a bit (some of it was actually unintelligible from fury), but I decided to not edit it too much to keep the spirit in which it was pounded out.

So, Scott wanted to put out something "really extreme" to shake things up and get a reaction, he gets mine. Please make sure to read (or re-read) Scott's post (and the comments) now, then continue below, thanks . . .

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Excuse me, Scott, but who is this "we" you're talking about?

Are you a theatre artist, or just an educator? And I do mean "just."

If only the latter, don't you fucking dare call yourself "we" with me. I outrank you. I work on revolutions almost every day. You write blog-manifestos to no point other then "tear it all down," with no idea as to how to do so or what to replace it with. And without bothering to go out and attend the cell meetings, it seems. You will just bitch and kibitz from the side while we pass you by. If we haven't already (let me look again . . . oh, we have . . . bye).

I'm making fucking revelatory revolutionary art several times a year that changes the lives of a handful of people. That's enough. I want more, a whole lot more, but that's enough. You are a tourist with a typewriter.

I am not alone. There's a lot of us out here. But you don't seem to be bothering coming to see us. You're busy "reading books" and "attending conferences about innovation." Conferences about innovation do not produce innovation, they produce buzzwords for educators and business people. Those of us experimenting in basements and garages (literally!) produce innovations.

You say you then "return to the theatre." What theatre? Where? Who are you seeing on stage? How about talking about them? Specifics? There is a hell of a lot of "theatre" in this country right now, too much to talk about it all as one big "theatre." Most of it, like any art form in any time, is shit. That is as it has been and ever shall be. But the rest of us are out here, too.

I’ve gone back and looked briefly over your blog posts for this year – I believe “Bah!” is #99 since January, but I may have miscounted. My look was brief, but as far as I can tell, you have never ONCE mentioned an actual production of a show that you have seen yourself – anything you have written about specific productions has been about other peoples’ writings about those productions. You have never said “I saw this, and it made me think/feel about these things, or it didn’t make me think/feel about anything, or it made me angry that it did or didn’t do these things.” Not once, as far as I can tell.

I don't know either wing of the 'radicals" you talk about anymore. I've met them, about 15 years ago in college (where I didn't study theatre; I never have since high school). But if they continue working in theatre with either of the attitudes you speak of, they are burned out or frustrated, and quit before they hit 30. And good on that. They've got nothing to bring beyond a certain point. But you seem to believe that all us "radicals" are living in the shadow of those 50 years out of date, an attitude - yours, I mean - that is itself 20 years out of date. Your paragraphs of points about how theatre is taught (badly) don’t terribly interest me – you’re probably right, mostly – but that has nothing to do with being out here in the world making the work. That’s your world, not mine, and if you don’t believe theatre is being taught correctly today, then as a theatre educator, do your job right.

I'm sorry -- I'm out here being Kirk Douglas in Paths of Glory, in the trenches and trying to storm the Ant Hill, and you are George Macready or Adolphe Menjou back at HQ complaining that we aren't really trying hard enough and deciding to shell me and my troops from behind to "goose us on."

I want an audience for my "difficult" work (and of course I want it for the not-so-difficult-work I also do on commission or to keep my craftsman’s chops up if I'm doing nothing else) and I work hard to get my audience -- you missed one group of us "radicals" out here, the ones who are completely dedicated to the beauty and purity of our art and vision and will not compromise in the work, but WILL hustle and promote and publicize and schmooze it up as much as we possibly can to get all the audience we possibly can. Because believe you me Scott, I damn well know that my work is ephemeral -- I know that some of my best work is past and gone into the ether never to be recognized by anybody anywhere. Except for that handful of people whose lives and ways of seeing things have been changed.

And oh yes, they’re there. I’ve met them, I’ve talked to them, they’ve come back. People who’ve changed their outlook or even made major changes in their lives because of what I’ve given them on stage. Things they’ve never been given before. So I know my work has power, is something new, something different. I do indeed wish that more of the people affected by my work are not artists/craftsmen themselves – sometimes, yes, I am frustrated that I seem to be making art for other artists, but what the fuck, if it changes people it changes people, and I’m honored to see my ideas ripple out in influence throughout the work of more and more theatre artists. Termite Art will out.

If I had the kind of money for that “Neilsen” service or whatever to burn – and I don’t think I ever will – I might well go for it, not to alter the work, but to find the larger audience that would like my work as it is, and figure out how to let them know I’m out here. I want them here. If they turn out to be 28-year olds of Lithuanian descent who are blind in one eye, I’d do everything I could to find them and bring them in.

Like David Thomas says about his great rock band Pere Ubu when asked about how it feels to be a “cult” band, apart from the mainstream, “We ARE the mainstream. Everyone else is out of step.”

There’s a bunch of us out here, doing what you seem to want us to do, and for years now. Due primarily to economics, we may never rise above the level we’re at. I’ve never been able to produce a play -- and I’ve produced/designed/directed/designed 50 since 1997 -- for more than $1,200. That’s all the money I’ve had, at best. And 45 of those shows had to cost less than $500. If I had more to put in (for publicity and the like), I might, just might, have bigger houses, but I can’t, and the work is what’s important, so I have to keep doing it.

We are out here fucking, and you are a celebate, critiquing us based on your vast knowledge of mid-20th Century erotica and pornography.

The productions are ALL that matters. The rest is Monday-morning quarterbacking or bullshit.

You can be valuable, Scott. The best tourists always are, in allowing us who live in a place to see it with new eyes and decribing what they’re getting from our home, what we take for granted, or what they don’t like about it. But you are valuable only in that – when, after a few days visit in our home city, you begin to lecture us on where to get the BEST pizza here, or where they pour the BEST pint of Guinness here, you grow tiresome, and the more argumentative and repetitive you are on this, the more anger-inducing you become.

I would not spend a week in Asheville and dare to lecture you about the place. I could tell you what struck me, positive and negative. And that’s it.

Tom Loughlin, here at A Poor Player, writes a definition of “Indie Theatre” in 9 points that was extremely valuable for me in what I am doing. – I could not have defined it myself, I’m in the middle of it and can’t stand back to see the whole picture, but this summed up a great deal of what I and others are doing now. This is what the best of you tourists can do for those of us living here. It was valuable to read Tom’s words (written, as even he notes, at a distance, from reading “about” our work – and HE got it, Scott) and look around at what I and others are doing and understand how our apparently disperate viewpoints are all part of one “movement.” As with the best critical writing, it creates a context for our work. I have some more understanding of the community that I am part of from the clarity Tom brings to it – though now I look at Tom’s bio more carefully and notice that he is not just an academic, but also a working professional in the field. Ah, makes sense.

I do not entirely share the opinion of the theatre director/reviewer Harold Clurman that all critics of theatre must be professionals also working in the field to have a meaningful opinion – that’s ridiculously insular, and there are enough, just enough, who aren’t, and who I respect, to convince me otherwise. Still, the ones I respect and take most seriously are the ones who have been (or are) out here, whose writing conveys an understanding of the form as practiced, not as a theory or ideal in a book.

I have nothing against art educators – my father and stepmother, both abstract painters, are in the field. They are also working and showing. Their work is not “relevant” today. It is never going to be “popular,” whatever that means in their field. Fuck that. They work, they show, sometimes they sell, their work is beautiful.

You say you go back to “doing” theatre as you have for 30 years, so perhaps you are out there working – a quick Google search doesn’t show me any evidence that outside of UNCA you are, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect the truth.

If you believe that the big problem starts in theatre education, well that’s your balliwick. Teach better, then. But as the Helpmeet in the room states in her own dry way, while it would be nice to think better theatre education wouldn’t hurt, in the real world, theatre needs academia like a fish needs a bicycle.

I work hard. I do not appreciate having my work insulted by anyone, anywhere (not me, my work – I am unimportant in this world, I am only important in any way insofar as I make art -- my art is important). I’ve spent years doing whatever I needed to to be able to make worthwhile theatre happen, my own and other people’s. I lived in the fucking basement of a storefront theatre on Ludlow Street for three goddamn years with rats crawling around me as I slept so I could be indebted to and devoted to nothing in this world but worthwhile theatre, and you have the fucking nerve to lecture me from your ivory tower?

And yes, “worthwhile.” As I pretty much don’t like much of anything (that’s my problem), I spent several years curating shows at that theatre based on the criteria of “is this show a piece of theatre like no one else is doing -- that actually adds something to the world in some way -- that breaks some kind of ground, even if not fully successfully -- that SHOULD be seen by people -- and that deserves my efforts in fighting to GET IT SEEN.” And I was never short of shows to put in that theatre that fit those criteria.

So that worthwhile work is out there. Plenty of it. And from what I hear, not just in NYC, but in Chicago, L.A., and god knows where else (there used to be some here in Portland, ME, but I don’t see any around anymore – maybe somewhere up here I haven’t found yet).

Can we make an impact in the world? Maybe, and should I even concern myself with that, with anything beyond the audience that is in front of THIS show, NOW? We live in a society that has cleverly evolved to absorb any signs of revolution, any challenge to the status quo, so that today’s revolution is tomorrow’s television commerical. What are the options for any kind of successful “revolution” in the form? We can be termite artists, burrowing away en masse, moving through people like fish move through water. Or, if you’re going to criticize John Clancy for “tinkering” with a system that should be “razed completely” (with obviously no idea of the import of John’s attempts to “tinker” with a system that far too often hinders the actual creation of art), well, start setting bombs. Literally, really. I’ve occasionally considered the choice between art or violence in actually making any impact in the world, and have thus far chosen the former. We do enough, some of us who do this. I try to remain here, outside of society.

At heart I am an American Artist, and I have no guilt.

Okay, enough, I’m tired. It’s not worth the effort. This has been way too much time and energy spent on something other than the work. But I keep a blog to detail the craft details of what I do (there’s more than enough fucking theory out there; I make things), and occasionally bring up or show something that feeds me (which means feeds my art) in some fruitful and/or necessary way. This is not fruitful, but it is necessary.

No it isn’t. This isn’t art. If I were to be true to my beliefs right now I would make art out of this anger, not these words. Too many words. Nice job, Scott, you angered me away from art for a while.

Do you have anything to say in response, Scott? I’m not interested, unless you could actually make a work of art in response. Not just more insults and supposed “ideas.” They’re a dime a dozen, book-boy. When you go back to your job, take your students, and make a work of art about what you said in your first post. Be creative. Do something positive. If you’re going to write, write well (as you can do) about what a tourist can write about, I’ll keep reading those, your postcards, with pleasure. Don’t presume any more to tell me my job.

If you do -- one last metaphor from the Helpmeet -- you are simply continuing to think you know how food should taste because you’ve read a lot of cookbooks.

In the Cool of the Morning

For more reasoned, calmer discussions of Scott's post than mine, please visit

Mr. George Hunka and

Mr. Matthew Freeman

for non-rage-filled writings. Good on 'em.

That said, now that I look at everyone else's calm, reasoned responses, I'm glad I bothered to put the fury out there -- I was of two minds about it, and regretted it the moment I posted it. But, looking over other reactions now, I'm glad I chose the less-reasonable course for once.

UPDATED 2.40 pm: More links to other commenters on Scott's post, all of whom make at least one clear-headed point I couldn't, I think . . .

Mr. James Comtois

Mr. Lucas Krech (love the tag category, Lucas!)

Mr. Don R. Hall

and the comments on Scott's original post include contributions from Alison Croggon, Joshua James, and Mr. America himself, John Devore.

until later, best wishes,

David Bruce Banner



(cue the sad piano music . . .)

Good Lord, More

Scott's posted more -- a response to our reponses.

Lord . . .

I started a short response here, just to point people to the comments on Scott's new post, and George's addition to his original post, and, more importantly, the lively comments there, which have become akin to a chat room.

But my short response became longer and longer, as I kept reading the comments from Scott and others piling up, and my attitude kept changing, from disgusted, tired anger, to peevishness, to amusement, and with the last few comments, to just plain disgust.

It's not worth pursuing in this form anymore, but it's made me think a bit more on the qualities of school bullies and grifters (both of which I have personal experience with), and I should have more to say on that in relation to Scott's supposed experiment. Maybe I can canniballize something out of what I wrote.

In any case, most of what I wanted to say has already been dealt with in the comments to Scott's new post -- thank George Hunka, Joshua James, Don R. Hall, Ben Ellis, and John Devore (and a couple others) for that -- and again in the update/comments at George's blog -- George and Joshua, now joined by Alison Croggon (who always seems to cut to the point), continuing the good work there.

So, if this actually holds any possible interest for you any more (and I'll understand if it doesn't), check out Scott's and George's new entries and especially the comments following. Scott's responses in particular convinced me not to pursue this in the same manner -- it's pointless. Isaac also has some final comments, and the comments to his "Quick Note" are also to be looked at, if your interest goes even further.

I am now a lot happier that I posted my long rant before, however. Earlier, I had worried a little bit that I was off-base. Now I know I was not. Trying to engage in discussion with someone whose idea of of a useful intellectual exercise is apparently "Let me see . . . if I punch someone in the face, will they be angry, and will some of them try to punch me back?" is a no-starter. I thought he wasn't a troll, given his history, apparently I was wrong.