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Guthrie Announces 2012-13 Season

Guthrie Theatre’s Debt to Women & Diversity

Joe Dowling Responds to Criticism of Guthrie’s Season

And here’s a few from other sources:

Polly Carl in HowlRound: A Boy in a Man’s Theatre

Tad Simons on The Guthrie’s Woman/Race/Facebook Problem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z35muSllISg

[Bonus: here's a link to the NYT interview with Marin Ireland and Sarah Benson about the challenges of playing in Blasted.]

And here’s some context from my blog for Playwrights’ Commons.

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From mikedaisey.blogspot.com –

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Here is an excerpt from an interview I gave to Seattle radio host Luke Burbank about a year ago:

Burbank: “How do you reconcile telling a good story with also trying to get the facts right and when do you decide what is the more important goal?”

Daisey: “Oh, well you know what I’ve found over the years is that the facts are your friends, like if there’s ever a case where I’m telling the story and I find the facts are inconvenient, 9 times out of 10 it means I haven’t thought about the story deeply enough. I really believe in this because the world is more complex and more interesting than my imagination. So the world is full of really fascinating things. You have so many tools on stage as a storyteller. Like, any time you want something to happen, you don’t have to pretend it happened and lie, you can use a flight of fancy, you can say, ‘I imagine what this must look like.’ You can say anything and you can go in whatever direction you need to go, but be clear with the audience, but be clear with the audience that at one moment you’re reporting the truth as literally it happened, and another case you’re using hyperbole, and you just have to be really clear about when you’re using each tool. No, for me it’s not actually that hard if—and this is a big if—if you’re pretty scrupulous about not believing you know the story before you see it.”

Thanks to Chris Hayes for finding this exchange. I’m putting it out here because I think it very succinctly sums up the rules I have for myself about how I create my monologues, and in so doing, I think it also makes clear where I fell short in The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

I use the word “truth” a lot in my work. These words from the opening scene of How Theater Failed America come to mind:

Some of you are hoping tonight that the rarest of things will happen: that someone is actually going to tell the truth.

And so should I. Because that’s what I’m looking for—every time I come back to this place, and all the places like it. Looking for the truth: that rare, random descent, like a feather across the back of your hand.

I will be humble before the work.

Panelists inlcluded: writer-director Steven Cosson of the Civilians (This Beautiful City), playwright-performers Jessica Blank (The Exonerated) and Taylor Mac (The Young Ladies of…), and critic-reporters Peter Marks (Washington Post) and Jason Zinoman (The New York Times).

Listen to the audio of the event at 2amt.

The barest attempt at a backstory of events: Concurrent with Mike’s effort to bring attention to the plight of Chinese workers in Apple factories, the mainstream media was also digging into the story. (A huge investigative series appeared in The New York Times, for instance.)

Ira Glass of This American Life (TAL) saw TATESJ and asked Mike to adapt an excerpt for a full-episode broadcast, which he did in a piece called Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.  It was one of their most popular episodes ever (888,000 downlads, and 206,000 streams). It brought enormous amounts of new attention to Daisey’s work, and to TATESJ in particular. Daisey was invited to appear in various major media outlets to talk about his experiences in the Foxconn plant (as he detailed them in TATESJ), including Bill Maher’s show, Nightline, and the Op-Ed page of The NYT.

TAL, which holds itself to high journalistic standards, did call out certain moments of the original broadcast for lack of factual corroboration. That was on January 6th. On March 15th, TAL dropped the bombshell that they were retracting the episode —  an unprecedented move on their part — because, as Glass said, “Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.” It also put together an entirely new episode detailing all the factual problems, and featuring interviews with Daisey about his motives.

Then all hell broke loose.

I’ll link below to a selection of the vast amount of coverage this has sparked — much of which is outraged, some of which tries to probe the assumptions about fact-based-art and where our moral/ethical responsibilities rest on that spectrum. Most interesting to me is the distinction between theatre and journalism, and what happens when the artist steps off the stage.

(I’ll add that Daisey has made a point over the years of picking extended and detailed fights with critics, sometimes reveling in bringing their perceived stupidity  to light. A few of the the dancing-on-the-grave flavored posts from the past few days feel mildy influenced by this.)

I feel so conflicted. I believe that art does not have a responsibility to fact. But I also feel like when it leaves the stage, there are other expectations that can’t be ignored. As James Carter notes, “Mike has a two-line disclaimer in the Playbill for The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs in all caps: THIS IS A WORK OF NONFICTION. SOME NAMES AND IDENTITIES HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE SOURCES.” The accusations against TATESJ go far beyond changing names to protect sources.

{Sidebar: I am particularly miffed at one of Ira Glass’ points in his confrontation with Daisey, and I take issue with Glass totally separately from the circumstances of TATESJ. I otherwise think Glass is pretty smart, but in the retraction episode from this past weekend, he says the following: “I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says ‘this happened to me,’ I think it happened to them, unless it’s clearly labeled as ‘here’s a work of fiction.’” IS this the normal worldview? Someone on stage in a theatrical work says “this happened to me” and you take that as unmitigated truth? REALLY?  …For a really great example of this exact artistic issue, see Young Jean Lee’s We’re Gonna Die. Lots of personal monologues, probably lots of people who thought when she said they’re true that they happened to her. But they didn’t. Does that make her show a lie? No, I don’t buy that.}

…Anyway.

Here are the links. I’m sure there will be more to come.

From Mke Daisey:

Mike’s first response

Mike’s second response — audio from the prologue he added to the final show of the Public Theater run on March 18th.

Mike’s third response

Mike’s talk in Georgetown on March 20th — his first long-form response

From the Theatre:

Polly Carl, editor of HowlRound.com, and part of the American Voices New Play Institute

Howard Sherman, former director of the American Theatre Wing and current arts pundit

Alli Houseworth, former Marketing Director of Woolly Mammoth Theatre, which developed TATESJ

Holly Hughes, a lesbian performance artist and member of the “NEA Four”

From Popular Media Outlets:

Mark Oppenheimer, in Salon.com

The staff of Salon.com

From Gawker Media

James Fallows in the Atlantic

NYT’s David Carr on Theatre Disguised as Journalism

Transmedia on Daisey

Apple’s Steve Wozniak on the media explosion

AND SOME VERY CURRENT EVENTS IN RESPONSE:

- A theatre company in Louisiana that had scheduled a run of TATESJ after Daisey had released the script, has to figure out what to do in the wake of the TAL retraction.

- Theatre artists in New York put together an emergency panel called Truth in Theatre for March 22nd at the Public Theatre, which just closed a run of TATESJ on the 18th. (PS: That link just above is really worth reading.)

I work for The Civilians (The Center for Investigative Theater) in Brooklyn, New York (www.thecivilians.org) and we have a semi-theatrical, semi-activist opportunity that I thought might be a cool thing for many of you to do (or even just contemplate doing). The Civilians create, almost exclusively, work based upon interviews taken from real people who find themselves in a particular political or social circumstance of controversy or interest. Over the past several months we’ve been interviewing protestors and activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve had two cabaret-type performances of monologues derived from those interviews at Joe’s Pub in New York but envision a broader, less “fee-for-service” type of theater to reflect the quality of energy of the Occupy movement itself. So we’ve devised this interactive theater program called Occupy Your Mind, wherein we’re inviting artists of all types (even artists still in the artistic closet!) to engage in the work that The Civilians do regularly, to interview Occupy activists near them, and ultimately to share their video-recorded, performative interpretations of that work with the world, online.

If this project piques your interest, I’m happy to speak to you more about it. And, perhaps as important as your own interest, if you know of other people – friends, colleagues, students – who you think might also share a genuine interest in this endeavor, please pass along this information to them, and hopefully they’ll be a part of future conversations. I’m really excited about this project and the prospect of it blurring the lines between the performed and the performer. Before I get absorbed completely by critical theory, I’ll leave you the website:

http://www.thecivilians.org/programs/occupy_your_mind.html

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or Steve Ginsberg, the Chair of the Occupy Your Mind Project, at occupy@thecivilians.org. I hope some NoPassporters might find good reason to participate with us in the Occupy Your Mind Project!

Sincerely, Jay Stull  // jstull (at) gmail (dot) com

ArtsEmerson

- Sugar by Robbie McCauley: Jan 20-29

- 69 South (The Shakelton Project) by Phantom Limb: Feb 7-12

- Ameriville by Universes: March 13-18

- The Andersen Project by Robert Lepage & Ex Machina: March 24-April 1

- Café Variations by Charles Mee/SITI Company: April 13-2

Company One

- Hookman by Lauren Yee: March 23-April 14

- Articulation: Illuminated by ARTiculation: April 20-May 5

- Love Person by Aditi Kapil

- The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kris Diaz

Boston Center for the Arts

- Bread & Puppet Theatre: Attica; Man of Flesh & Cardboard; Man=Carrot Jan 23-29 (use code BPFLYER2012 for discount)

Lyric Stage Boston

- Superior Donuts by Tracy Letts: Jan 6-Feb 4

- The Tempermentals by Jon Marans: March 30-April 28

Whistler in the Dark

- Fen and A Number by Caryl Churchill: Jan 20-Feb 4

SpeakEasy Stage

- Red by John Logan: Jan 6-Feb 4

- Next to Normal by Tom Kitt: March 9-April 7

New Rep

- Art by Yasmina Reza: Jan 15-Feb 5

Huntington Theatre

- God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza: Jan 6-Feb 5

- Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom by August Wilson: March 9- April 8

- The Luck of the Irish by Kirsten Greenidge: March 30-April 29

A.R.T.

- Wild Swans by Alexandra Wood: Feb 11-March 11

- Futurity: a Musical by The Lisps: March 16-April 15