PANEGYRIC FOR THE SALOON

There’s a lot of hand-wringing to be done about the struggle of theater to be relevant and popular in a digital age, but you wouldn’t know it if you came to an edition of the Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon (the next of which is tomorrow, so look sharp!).

Their name may imply a take-no-prisoners form of swaggering, maverick carnage, but despite all appearances the Vampire Cowboys are have pitched their tent squarely in the camp of the angels. Supplementing the great productions they stage each year and their ongoing fight workshop, the Saloon is a theater experience unlike any other, in my opinion, and one that is of great benefit to both artists and audiences: a raucous, beer-drenched monthly affair in which dozens of enthusiastic showgoers cram into a sweaty room for several hours to whoop and holler and stomp their feet for not one but SIX intricate serial narratives crafted by an astounding menagerie of incredible artists. (FULL DISCLOSURE: I am one of these awesome artists.)

Despite the immense stylistic divergences that have characterized the work I’ve seen over the past three seasons (kite-flying revenge musicals, post-feminist Catholic spook shows; outer-space high-school sit-coms), the shows at the Saloon all have a few things in common:

• They all draw from diverse pop-culture elements to create unique and strange personal mythologies.
• Each episode is made for approximately no dollars.
• Every single artist – from the writer to the director to each individual performer – seems to be having a blowout time.
• The shows provoke immediate and visceral audience reaction.
• Though each serial stands on its own, they come together in a flare of friendly one-upsmanship, with artists and companies consistently trying to top each other’s successes.
• The level of writing and conception is such that you can hop on at any time and find something to hold onto, even if you’ve missed the previous episodes.
• Each show is built upon a rock-solid framework of (ahem) Love.

Together, these attributes flip a fat bird in the face of the reigning modes of the more boring elements of American theater culture. The Saloon is not a commercial enterprise for tourists, nor is it middlebrow not-for-profit fare, nor is it avant-garde onanism. It’s the embodiment of a nascent community, one that lives in the culture of our present moment and combines the DIY aesthetic of punk with the geek’s love of genre minutiae to create something both more ancient and more cutting-edge than either: a public forum where artists are invited to experiment out loud, in real time, with ways of having fun in a roomful of people thirsty for stories.

To give them their due, the audience has much to do with the success of the Saloon. Over the course of anecdotal conversations with friends and strangers, I’ve seen that many people have arrived strictly as fans of the Vampire Cowboys or one of the participating artists/companies and then left burning with excitement for them all. The format is conducive to this – everyone wants to know What Happens Next, and the Saloon offers more cliffhangers per month than a 1930s movie matinee. Storytelling as community needn’t be confined to online chats about Mad Men and Lost – it’s something we can create right here, right now, together, in Brooklyn, with actual beer and belching for all.

Several works from the Saloon are moving on to have lives outside of it the fecund confines of the Battle Ranch, as well they should (Piper McKenzie for one is planning a multi-season rep production of our contribution, Lady Cryptozoologist, to choose an example entirely at random). But in order to do so, they will have to be translated from the rough nuggets of playmaking dug up at the Saloon into something a bit cleaner and shinier. In the end, whatever success they find won’t be a substitute for the distinct pleasures of the Saloon, which Hope and I and all of our collaborators have been so fortunate to be a part of these past few years.

And yes, of course, I’m biased – that’s the whole point, isn’t it? But seriously, come check it all out this Saturday. Here’s the rundown of the shows, all of which ROOL:

LET'S NINJA SCIENCE RANGER TEAM GET!
by Dustin Chinn (Member of the Ma-Yi Writers Lab)
directed by RJ Tolan (Co-Artistic Director of Youngblood), Qui Nguyen, & Jeff Whitted

MOTHER SACRAMENTO
by Mac Rogers (Universal Robots; Viral; Hail Satan)
directed by Jordana Williams (Member of Gideon Productions)

ENTRENCHED
by James Comtois (Infectious Opportunity; Adventures of Nervous Boy)
directed by Matt Gray, Patrick Shearer, & Adam Swiderski

HACK
by Crystal Skillman (The Telling Trilogy; 4 Edges; Birthday)
directed by John Hurley (Artistic Director of Impeteous Theatre Group)

JACK O'HANRAHAN AND THE TROUBULATION OF DOOM
by Brent Cox (The Dog & Pony Show)
directed by Padraic Lillis (Member of LAByrinth Theater) & Courtney Wetzel

LADY CRYPTOZOOLOGIST: SEASON 2
written & directed by Jeff Lewonczyk (Babylon, Babylon; Macbeth without Words)

Produced by Lex Friedman, Robert Ross Parker, Daniel Rech (Thanks, guys!)

CONFESSIONS OF A TIRESOME CURMUDGEON

As a borderline-articulate individual who adores the sound of my own adenoidal baritone, I’ve often been asked why I don’t have a blog. It’s like being handed a free megaphone, after all, and since I’m (whether I like it or not) a creature of the stage – and one that never seems to want for an extra word or eight – a blog would seem to perfectly suit my need to EXPRESS.

Well, it’s true that I have this blog, but there are several ancillary reasons I haven’t yet made more it, most of which can be boiled down to lack of time. But in my mind these pale before one unavoidable fact: I am a small, petty individual. I am jealous and peevish and begrudging. After nearly 12 years of creating and producing shows with Piper McKenzie, I have a knee-jerk tendency to view the theater world and the work of my peers through the lens of my own thwarted genius. “That should have been my opportunity.” “Why wasn’t our show called out for that kind of praise?” Et cetera, ad nauseum, ad somnium.

On the surface I’m a nice guy, and deep down I really do wish the best for my friends and colleagues, but on that middling animalistic level boiling between the hard, brittle shell of social manners and the enduring flame of human compassion, I’m an asshole. Or worse – a whiner, a glass-half-emptier, an imaginary slightee, both a bore and a boor. I’ve tried to set a rule for myself that I can’t write any Facebook status updates that are merely complaints about the surface frustrations of my really quite fortunate day-to-day existence. My Facebook friends will note that I often go many, many days without updating my status.

So this is why, to date, I haven’t made a serious go at blogging. To complain about my friends’ successes, to snipe at what I’m too dense or distracted to admit I don’t fully understand about their productions, to embark upon litany after litany bemoaning the indignities of my own creative process – who the hell wants to look at THAT? Heretofore, the world has been lucky enough not to know what it’s been missing.

As of today, the world’s tenuous good luck has been shaken. Anti-manifesto, aside, here’s what’s inspired me to blather like this: our superesteemed colleague Mr. Trav S.D. has posted an entry on his blog Travalanche that sums up much of how I felt regarding the critical reaction to our Fringe production of Willy Nilly – and he’s done it in a way that, while not giving short shrift to the disappointment engendered by such a response, manages to be dignified and idiosyncratic and funny and, in its own perverse way, optimistic. Take a minute to read it, if you haven’t already.

Trav brings up so much good stuff that I hardly know where to begin. The problems he addresses are the problems that any of us face who create theater in a city that doesn’t particularly seem to have much use for it. In particular he rails against the critics. To wit:

• You get reviewed for your marketing rather than what you put on stage.
• Critics (and often audiences) tend to treat you as guilty until proven innocent – or rather, stupid until proven smart.
• Experiments with humor are viewed as inept, failed attempts at same.
• If your work can’t be put in a recognizable bucket, it’s either disregarded or maligned.

Are these gross, unnuanced simplifications of exactly the type I’m railing against? Of course! Did the Willy Nilly critics have a point at times? Most likely! Is this the same lament that has been wailed from the rooftops by artists of every generation since there were rooftops to wail from? Almost definitely!

Despite this, the fact that we all persist in making theater despite an overcrowded and underfunded market – performing largely for fellow artists who have taken a break from bailing out our collective leaky rowboat to cheer on the deft bucketwork of their neighbors – is something that fills me with breathless awe when I’m not too busy feeling depressed about the holes I’ve volunteered to plug up myself. It’s a pain in the ass to do something for the love of it, and anyone who pretends it’s not has probably known neither love nor ass-pain. But here we are all together, and here’s Trav writing a heartfelt missive addressing these frustrations on the eve of an incredible-sounding new project, and, well, it inspired me. Can exposing my own dissatisfactions with the peculiar challenges facing pragmatic dreamers of our ilk make for interesting reading, provide value to any peers undergoing similar self-imposed trials, and – most importantly – make me feel better?

I hope the answer is yes, because this is a pretty high word count for maybe. In this age of social media (when people really shouldn’t be writing at this length and expecting people to get to the end), I don’t need to confine these thoughts to intensive conversations with Hope while she’s trying to get to sleep – I can fold them up into little paper boats and loose them upon the raging currents of the Internet!

I’ll try to write up some more screeds like this as we work on our current projects – Lady Cryptozoologist and Craven Monkey and the Mountain of Fury, both of which are desperately dear to my heart despite their relative lack of easy explanation. Perhaps folks who come to check them out – or be in them, or hate them from afar or whatever – will read this and say, “Oh. Okay.” And maybe – just maybe – I’ll actually find something positive to say in the process!

Meanwhile, best of luck to Trav and the cast and crew of Kitsch, which opens tomorrow night at Theater for the New City!