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Petrified
by Poetry? Put it on Stage.
by Jennifer Shook
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| If
you want to make art happen, continually, institutionally, you
learn to talk about your art in soundbytes. In the time between
floors on the elevator—or in the time it takes to pour
a second glass of wine at a party, you have to sell an audience
on your art. The soundbyte moment gives you a window to express
your passion, to infect your listener with the importance of
your work—but the soundbyte also relies upon unreliable
means…words. Words, those tricky buggers, frighten
people. They carry the weight of associations attached to them
throughout the centuries. Words like "art," ironically,
like "poetry" and "theatre," suggest a realm
that might not belong to us, that might be out of reach for
humans who ride elevators and attend parties. |
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photography
by Andrea Scher |
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Caffeine
Theatre is founded upon this paradox. That these things that
terrify us make us human. That we find our humanity through
challenge, both formal and ideational.
I recently sat on a roundtable at the Museum of Contemporary
Art of several generations of women who work in performance.
Our circling themes included making a choice to eschew conventional
financial stability for projects we find fulfilling, and seeking
collaborators who challenge and enlarge our art. Hearing so
many women with the same goals took me on a tour down memory
lane, to the time before I made myself Artistic Director of
a nonexistent theatre, and then made it exist, and then made
it Caffeine Theatre.
Young artists often find that if others are not ready to hire
them, they must produce themselves. And artists of all ages
sometimes find themselves searching for the stories they really
want to tell. I thought I was too old to start a theatre company,
that this particular rite of passage was for the newly graduated,
newly migrated. Yet five years ago, I found myself starting
a theatre company, throwing my hat into that big big ring. In
Chicago, so the story goes, every year a hundred theatres are
born, and a hundred theatres die. A hundred is an improbable
number, but it sounds good. Probably no one knows the actual
numbers, since among the hundreds of operating theatres, so
many grow and shrink and go on hiatus and explode out of nowhere.
In my case, the itch began with a handful of people sitting
in my living room reading plays. We all had other jobs (in some
cases, several jobs), but even those of us fortunate enough
to work in theatre felt like we weren't touching the heart of
our work. All those jobs meant late readings, and late hours
meant lots of coffee. For months we traded an e-mail thread
called "caffeine theatre," because we felt that we
were adding this play-reading luxury simply by force of will
and pots of strong brew.
When we took the leap of faith to create a piece together, we
realized that all along we'd been craving and cultivating the
tradition of the coffeehouse, the places where people got together
back in the olde dayes to discuss ideas. Some say that
coffee started the French Revolution, as in those coffeehouses
students and revolutionaries met and talked and dreamed over
their mugs. We weren't trying to start a revolution. Yet we
did want to reclaim the idealism of the coffeehouse community,
the open forum for conversation. We recalled Shelley's notion
that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of humankind,
and Anna Deavere Smith's dictum that "The purpose of theatre
is to continue the national dialogue." Robert Pinsky, a
former Poet Laureate, directly links poetry and democracy; as
citizens we have to compare what we know of the outside world
with what we believe inside. As Pinsky writes in Democracy,
Culture, and the Voice of Poetry: "The social world in
poetry ... is neither told about nor presented: it is, precisely,
invoked: brought into being by the voice." That's the point
of theatre—to make a group of people in a room go through
that process of matching external and internal. A group of people
who share a common experience, if only the experience of being
in the same room with the same story for the duration of the
play. It reminds us that we have partners in the world, even
when they're in the dark and looking away from us.
Before Caffeine Theatre existed in capital letters, our first
piece, Map, adapted poems from Joy Harjo's A Map to
the Next World. Map was performed only twice, in
an all-night festival called "Abbie Hoffman Died for Our
Sins." Yet it gave us permission to do something unusual:
to dive in fearlessly—no, fearfully, but without the fear
of failure—into miraculously thorny territory. To engage
the poetic in image and gesture, in word written and word spoken.
It gave us hope.
After all, we want our audiences to radiate intelligence, yet
"intelligent" is a dangerous word when applied to
a company; like "ambitious," it suggests promises
undelivered, or stretching for a moon out of reach. The words
"intelligent" and "ambitious" show up often
in Caffeine Theatre reviews. I'm never quite sure whether they're
meant as compliment or critique. We certainly found challenging
work: Sailing to Byzantium explored themes of age, the
lasting power of art, the place of the artist in society; Silva
asked how art works on the level of metaphor and association;
our production of Caridad Svich's translation of Lorca and Heaney's
take on Sophocles and H.D.'s take on Euripides all explored
the act of translation, that lens that lets us see how we see.
To return to the soundbyte imperative: a theatre company needs
a mission. A mission that is specific enough to secure a "niche"
for funders and a recognizable "brand" for audiences—but
not so specific as to limit your programming choices to ten
plays ever written.
Over time, we articulated Caffeine's mission: "With language-intense,
idea-driven performances, Caffeine explores the role of art
in society—to reclaim theatre's roots as a public forum
with the idealism of the coffeehouse community, and a return
to the radical tradition of poetry to pose questions of social
conscience and of dramaturgical form. Connecting the mind to
the ear to the heart to the voice and body, we will create,
discover, uncover, and produce theatre that embraces and explores
language—work that speaks—and that sparks conversation."
In year four of our official existence, we hired our first paid
staff member, a Managing Director. Developing professional staff
is the step that can make a company more than a collection of
goodwill parked in somebody's dining room. It was pretty exciting
to think about our ambition surviving as an institution. On
the other hand, theatres pay managing directors to ask the tough
questions like: Why do we exist? Who do we serve? How?
We had a board retreat. That's right, we have a board. Somebody
told me that when Twyla Tharp founded her dance company, her
board consisted of herself and her two cats. If true, those
cats got drafted because many states require a minimum of three
board members for a not-for-profit corporation. The observant
readers among you may notice that I have not described the process
of becoming a corporation, or a not-for-profit corporation.
Particularly observant readers may notice that my timelines
do not seem to match up. These omissions are related. It took
us over a year after Map to prove that there was no other
Illinois corporation named Caffeine Theatre, to receive corporation
status, and then to be rejected as a not-for-profit because
our "name did not suggest" not-for-profit activities.
Mysteriously, refilling as "Caffeine Theatre NFP"
worked. Then there are filing fees, recording fees, much standing
in line, and an entirely separate letter to the state requesting
tax exemption. I heard recently from a new theatre company that
they has consulted a lawyer who told them that "theatres
never get tax exemption, so don't even try." Misinformation
abounds. I'm happy to report, however, that at least two people
who answer phones for the IRS are remarkably helpful—if
you don't mind waiting on hold for 1 hour 45 minutes. Doing
all of this in the wake of the Patriot Act added further complications.
I think I sprouted five new grey hairs at the bank, trying to
open an NFP business account. Oh, and somewhere in there you
find a board, and write a mission statement, agree that the
board will meet X often, and will have a quorum of Y, and that
the board oversees the Artistic Director. I love to smile and
remind the board they could fire me, and "good luck finding
a replacement who'll do all this for free!" (They do not
seem amused by this little joke.) I have not had the honor of
meeting Ms. Tharp's felines, but I know that my own furry friends
are great for coming home to after a long night of tech, and
not so great for raising money, approving budgets, mobilizing
audiences, serving as advocates of the company, and much less
for the other things our "working board" finds themselves
doing: writing grants, hanging posters, running box office,
stuffing mailings, hauling hay bales…. See, unlike in a
large, well-established institution, where a board simply comes
to meetings and finds the cash, a "working board"
like ours essentially runs the company. Especially in Caffeine's
case, where the company has no "company," no ensemble
of actors and designers who paint and schlep in exchange for
artistic involvement. Instead, we have season-long Artistic
Associates. This way, we find it easier to keep those relationships
about art. On most days, it's a great arrangement. When I find
myself alone at the storage space and the bottom falls out of
a box of costumes onto the icy pavement? Well, I guess there
are pros and cons to every plan.
But I was recalling the board retreat. Actually, the board and
associates retreat. There I was thinking that our peculiar mission
makes excellent sense to me, because poetry gets people asking
questions, and theatre gets people asking questions, and people
should then hang out in a coffeehouse and work on those questions.
This is what makes us people citizens, better people.
Yet when we, the caffeinated, sat down in a circle and started
asking questions about ourselves, it turned out that even some
of our board members feared the word "poetry." Words,
words, words, again, and their thorny powers. Poetry has a long
tradition of posing radical questions of social conscience and
artistic form. But, like theatre, poetry has become (or at least
seems to be) the province of a thin percentage of the population.
Yet Caffeine Theatre's greatest moneymaker to date was T.S.
Eliot's The Cocktail Party, a famously "unperformable,"
densely formalist and philosophical play. Maybe we tricked them.
They didn't notice it was poetry. (Eliot's rolling over in his
grave at that suggestion, but then, the man won a posthumous
Tony for Cats, so if he still has awareness, he must
be adjusting to his popularity.) Maybe Pinsky is right, and
those rhythms are in us, in our silent woeful rocking and our
joyful jumps, in our speech and our most personal unspoken thoughts.
Maybe it's the word, poetry, that keeps poetry tucked away on
the shelf out of reach.
What happens when emotion and intellect meet in some sort of
in-between ground? What happens when they meet on the stage,
the place that is both public and private? That's what Caffeine
Theatre is about.
When the deposit is due on the space for the next show, when
the press release is unwritten and the designers don't have
contracts, when the floor needs painting, when somebody has
to go pick up the programs, it's not easy to remember why you
started this turmoil in the first place. Idealistic but overwhelmed,
like so many young companies, we ask donors and guest artists
to recognize our passion and dedication, and to support the
work that stems from it. We give long reign to our collaborators,
and offer them very meaty projects rather than a paycheck of
the size they deserve. We continue to pay all of our artists
equally, a radical method in the world of supply and demand
that touches even the arts.
We do these things because we believe in the power of—oh,
whatever it is we'll wind up calling it.
For years we've cited William Carlos Williams, a country doctor
best known for a poem about a red wheelbarrow, in his defense
of poetry:
It is difficult to get the news from poems
Yet men die miserably every day
For lack of what is found there.
Next fall we'll celebrate his 125th birthday and our fifth season
with his play Many Loves.
When Williams wrote that "everything depends" on that
red wheelbarrow, he meant that even the simplest of things are
worthy of our attention, and that the ability to pay attention
to the world is what makes us human. So maybe it's a blessing
that some questions are difficult to answer. This difficulty
keeps us engaged in the asking, and the asking is the place
where art thrives.
Still, I know what the Managing Director will say when he reads
this article: "Have you rewritten the mission statement
yet?"
Click here
to visit the Caffeine Theatre website.
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