Shakespeare's Audience (book)

A couple months ago I met with a professor of mine, it was the first time in over twenty years we had been in each other’s company. He looks the same, though he was much younger than I am now when he was my director, theater history professor, and curriculum advisor. His hair was thin then, and it is the same now, whereas mine is just gone.

Dr. William Faricy Condee is today Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University. During my time as an undergraduate I spent sophomore year in his theater history class (for which I read absolutely nothing) and I took a course of his on theater architecture. I also like to brag that I am the only person at O.U. Ever to be directed by the good Doctor twice, as a sophomore in The Marriage of Bette and Boo, and as a fifth-year in the world premiere of The Hanged Angels by W.R. Smiddie.

Condee's expertise is in theater space. He has written two books, Coal and Culture: The Opera House in Appalachia (Ohio University Press, 2005) and Theatrical Space: A Guide for Directors and Designers (Scarecrow Press, 1995) in addition to numerous articles on the subject.

The architecture course I took was a summer course, so I and a classmate were the only actors in attendance, with a dozen or so “others” who were complete to fulfill liberals arts credits. Condee impressed we two to make a few points abut the relative importance of space. He chose a scene from a translation of the original Medea, and the "Gentlemen Caller" scene from The Glass Menagerie, and asked us to perform each in a small, windowless office in the basement of the T-Com Building, and by the light of a candle. The Tennessee Williams piece played quite well, but we were never loud enough the suit the Doctor for Euripides.

Then we took the class to Peden Stadium and we stood at the fifty-yard line and performed both scenes again.

One way to look at is is, you have to consider the space when choosing which production to mount. But the more basic observation, though not obvious to me at first, is that these plays were written for their intended spaces. Nobody wrote intimate plays in Ancient Greece (that we know of) because they were producing work for the “theatron”.

Currently I am tossing ideas around my head for a new play about The Globe playhouse, the theater for which Shakespeare wrote his plays. This is why I finally, at long last, got in touch with my mentor. That’s a lesson, kids. Stay in touch with your mentors.

On the date in question, last April, Condee had an hour to spare and I had a lot of really, uh, super questions prepared … like, what effect did the space have on Shakespeare’s work?

He said, “I have no idea.”

That was like, the best question I had.

However, the hour passed quickly, as I told stories from the past twenty years, to kind of justify my existence, and he gave me a bibliography. He strongly recommended Architecture, Actor and Audience (1993) by Ian Mackintosh, and also Shakespeare’s Audience (1941) by Alfred Harbage, among others. It was this second that I went through rather swiftly, for though it is an academic investigation into the demographics of the audience for the Globe theater, it is charmingly written, easy for the layman, full of facts but also colorful details.

I did begin the Mackintosh book, and now intend to finish it. The view from the Globe “tiring house” and stage is very different from that of its audience.

“Their builders succeeded in getting as many people as close as possible to the actor without jeopardizing the actor’s primary task of communicating with every spectator, however distant.” - Mackintosh, p. 10

Such was the feeling I had a couple weeks back, standing on the stage of the Hanna Theatre, upon the thrust stage. I was leading a small tour through the all the Playhouse Square theaters, and as is my wont, began in the massive 3,200-seat State Theatre and concluded in the intimate 550-seat Hanna.

Looking out, from the edge of the platform thrust (the only such professional stage in Cleveland) I had the sensation that the balcony was leaning towards me, a feeling at once emboldening and vertiginous.

LOWIN
Planted upon this scaffold,
A swaying sea of ragged heads at my feet,
I feel twenty hands high.
The eyes of merchants without number,
Men of means within the galleries,
So close that I could slap the wig off of a lord.
Slap it right off. Not only with my words --

FLETCHER
My words.

LOWIN
-- But with my mitts. That close.

David Hansen © 2014

Early estimates (dating from early last century) of the size of that crowd were based on modern fire codes or a basis of contemporary seating, one which includes seats. Those scholars suggested the Globe held around 500 as well. Since that time, we take into account the fact that those in the pit stood, fire codes did not exist, and that even the galleries were packed. A contemporary account suggest a number as high as 3,000 but was probably two-thirds or half that. That is still an awful lot of people in an intimate space.

One of the things I truly enjoyed about Harbage’s book is that it dispels certain points of conventional wisdom, and in doing so honors the Elizabethan people, and the reputation of Shakespeare himself.

When speaking of Shakespeare’s audience, the opinions of members of the clergy are often quoted, those who despair at the den of sin and vice represented by the theater. In this case, they are speaking specifically of the building itself, and not the content of the work.

Harbage’s careful examination of contemporary accounts provides no indication that more crimes took place in a public theater than anywhere else. If anything, it indicates the opposite. He could also find no indication that those who publicly warned against the attendance at the theater actually ever went there themselves.

Of the private theaters, they said nothing. When the working class were priced out of attendance, and only those who could afford could attend, apparently everything was copacetic within the hall. But Shakespeare did not write for those houses, he wrote for the Globe. And Shakespeare was and is the more popular playwright.

As Harbage puts it, “The difference between Shakespeare and (John) Fletcher is, in some inverse fashion, the difference between a penny and sixpence.”

The documentable fact is that Shakespeare was popular in his own time, and very popular. The conclusion based on the assumption that those in the higher (more expensive) galleries were erudite and intelligent and those in the pit a mob of cat-calling thugs is that that Shakespeare wrote part of his play for one class, and part for another.

But that would make as little sense then as it would today. The so-called “groundlings” were intelligent, they were trained professionals, craftsmen and apprentices, and most likely regular theatergoers. Listening to plays was something they (unlike you) did very often. They were self-trained in hearing, in listening and appreciating.

William Shakespeare was successful because he wrote everything he wrote for everyone.

To be continued.

"Shakespeare's Audience" by Alfred Harbage
Columbia University Press, 1941

"Architecture, Actor and Audience" by Ian Mackintosh
Routledge, 1993

Creative Workforce Fellowship

Cuyahoga Arts & Culture is reviewing the role of individual artist funding as it relates to its mission. CAC’s board will discuss this topic at its September board meeting. There will be no Creative Workforce Fellowship application deadline until Cuyahoga Arts & Culture has completed its review.                                 - Community Partnership for Arts and Culture, June 6, 2014

 The Creative Workforce Fellowship has been suspended.

As an honored recipient of a fellowship in 2010, I would like to make clear my deep appreciation for the opportunity this award provided me in pursuit of my work.

The award means money, to be sure, which means freedom. Freedom to take time from my regular work (for which I must thank my employer, Great Lakes Theater) to engage in research and travel, which resulted in several new works.

New writing materials (which I still have and use and care for) continue to facilitate my work, four years on. 

I had the opportunity to experience more plays, from immersive house performances to Broadway productions of award-winning works and everything in-between.

Most, most importantly, however, was how this fellowship changed the way I think as a professional artist, living and working in this region. Prior to my CPAC fellowship, I was fortunate to produce one work a year, or every two years. 

Since 2010 I have had five plays produced, two solo performances remounted, one play published, one production in New York City, another in California, one of my scripts has been produced in high schools across America, another in England, and also a fully-realized workshop of a sprawling, large-cast play I had always hoped to create, and will someday beat into submission.  And the work continues.

All this, in addition to having joined the Dramatists Guild of America, increasing my production with the Cleveland Play House Playwrights' Unit, participating in the development of a Broadway-bound play script (as an actor) and all the several shorter works I have provided to companies across Greater Cleveland.

I used to say I write plays. Now I am a playwright.

Cuyahoga Arts and Culture has a very important job ahead of them, in educating the voters of Cuyahoga County how an unqualified success their organization has been. No one I know questions how fortunate our region has been for this remarkable funding. We are the envy of arts communities around the nation.

An important part of that success, however, has been the individual funding provided through the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. A shortlist of fellowship recipients include nationally recognized artists as playwright Eric Coble, fashion designer Valerie Mayen and dancer David Shimotakahara. (Complete list available here.) Their work has been fostered through this program, also, to the benefit of our larger community.

I will make sure the CAC board has heard my opinion prior to their September board meeting. Please be sure they hear yours as well.

Breaking Point (1989)

This entry is adapted from a piece originally composed in Spring, 2008. The source material for the work that is the subject of this piece was a comic strip I created for The (Ohio University) Post for two quarters in early 1988.

In spring 1988 (before the strip concluded) Scott K. asked for material to use in his radio production class. I adapted the original short story for which I created a character named "Kael" -- something I wrote freshman year -- into a brief script for his radio production class.

The story involved Kael and a mysterious woman named Carolyn with whom he was "psychically linked." Yes, very romantic. I wrote a paper on astral projection senior year in high school and used a lot of the business I picked up during interviews as the basis for my nonsense.

Scott produced the piece which featured himself, Ben D., Monique W., Andrea W. and myself. Kael was played by a friend of Scott's whose name I forget, but I remember his face (which you cannot see in this picture) because he was the drummer in The Humbert Humberts in Springfest series of strips.

Photo: Does the pose look familiar? See below.

As my junior year progressed, I became increasingly obsessed with my comic, which was cancelled without explanation at the end of the school year. I decided to propose a studio production of an adaptation of the Carolyn story, crossed with the Bob/Barbara series for Spring quarter, 1989. So, in addition to performing on main stage in a small role in Romeo & Juliet and a core acting requirement of a Shaw one-act with an MFA director, I was offering to not only write, but direct my first play at O.U.

The faculty actually called me in for a meeting - just me and all of my professors and advisers, where they told me they didn't think I could manage this. I told them I could. Somehow I convinced them. I do not know how.

Having almost suffered a nervous breakdown in fall 1988, this turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to my psyche. I had little sleep, but I spent all my time dedicated to these three productions (skipping Elvis Costello at Mem Aud!!!) learning how to take effective, ten-minute naps, and just having absolutely no social life whatsoever. It kept me out of the apartment, in which the atmosphere was entirely toxic at this point, and that was a good thing, too.

My friends were sick of the strip. When the play was accepted into the spring playwrights' festival, one said, "Good, good. And then will you drop it?"

Did I deserve that? Of course I did.

Promo photo by Sal, which was duplicated on stage for pre-show (see below.)

The play takes place during the same period as the strip - spring 1988. I even incorporated some text from the practice strips I did in 1987 as a flashback. Our cast consisted of fellow school of theater people like David L. as Simon, Nancy F. as Cheryl, and Jill C. as Barbra and Carolyn. That's right, one woman played both love interests because all women are the same woman ... except Cheryl, who is just a doormat. This was something I became embarrassingly aware of during this process, my inability to write women.

We also met some non-theater majors who always wanted to try acting, like Jon M. as Wilson (a big, TALL, imposing Wilson) and the unbelievably awesome Ron C. as Bob. Scott appeared as Roger, which was fabulous because he not only did the best impression of himself, but he also played guitar between scenes in "The Tavern" with drummer Keith H., who we all met through the radio program Sunday Progressions on WXTQ.

And finally, casting Kael. Originally I had promised to role to a good friend. But I discovered very late in the game that due to his poor studies, he had been banned from performance for the year.

Photo: Final dress, from left: Drummer Keith, Ron heading to front door, Brendan on couch, Jill and Jon at right. Note Keith's Church T-shirt.

Instead, a friend suggested Brendan M., who I had met at School Kids Records. Not an actor, Brendan was quiet and unassuming, and not at all the type I would have imagined as the lascivious twerp from the strip. He was sweet, slinky, and game.

Keith and Brendan met through this production, and shortly afterward formed the band Bingo Smith, for which Brendan played bass.

The most important member of the team was my stage manager, Maiharriese. I'd never had a stage manager before. I didn't know what they could do for you. She took full responsibility for assembling a team of artists to do the tech work, which shocked me because I figured I would be doing all of that because, well, who else would?

I was a junior. In the theater department. I still had no idea how these things worked.


The space was what was used to be called the "Little Theatre" in Kantner Hall, which was a tiny, proscenium stage with a working curtain and fifty seats fixed in position facing the stage. In the early 90s it was remodeled into a proper, fully-flexible black box, much more suited to a professional theater school.

The big question was whether or not anyone would see it. Sure, my fellow theater chums would, and that might be enough. There was no money to be made, these were free performances, open to anyone, it's a school, after all. But few outside our community generally attended these studio productions, if they even knew about them.

Opening night, Sunday, May 14, attracted about half a house. That was good. But the next day, there was a photo in the A-News of Brendan as Kael lying on the floor from an overdose of muscle relaxants. That afternoon, we had to turn people away.

For what was supposed to be our final performance on Tuesday, there were enough people in the courtyard to fill another house. And so we were given permission to announce an additional performance the next afternoon.

None of this suggests the show is any good, just that there was real publicity for it. Even THE POST was caught off-guard, reading in the A-News that a comic strip from their paper had been turned into a play. They sent a photographer for the final performance and I got an interview out of it, after the show had closed, which was a delightful vindication.

In addition to directing, which I was terrible at (pacing was really slow) I did all the graphic designs myself ... stand-ups of the characters, the Peter Gabriel and Cure posters, The Tavern logo, all life-size. I remember working on the floor of the Little Theater, by myself, listening to Oranges & Lemons, Three Feet High and Rising, Disintegration and the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ. Vanessa's costumes were just perfect in spite of her working against the fact that so many of my characters wore nothing but jeans and white T-shirts. Bob's chino-commando outfit was particularly brilliant, and Ron wore it so well.

By the time it was through, I guess I really was ready to "drop it." And I had made it through the most taxing quarter of my career at O.U. getting As in every course - except R&J for which I got a B+ because I missed one costume call. Or because I am a terrible actor. Who cares, it was twenty-five fucking years ago.

Through Facebook I have managed to reconnect with many of the original company members.

Brendan died of Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in 1997.

Lysistrata (2000)

Shannon McNamara, Arthur Grothe

Photo by Anthony Gray

"The version of Lysistrata you are about to witness comes at a time of particular economic strength in this country. The United States is not at war. People are making a lot of money, and nobody's losing his life on foreign soil. So, can Lysistrata only be performed when things are good? Is its original daringness never to be experienced by theater audiences again? Where is the radicalness of this play? What makes it worth seeing now, under these conditions?"

- David Bell, Lysistrata, Then and Now (Bad Epitaph production program)

In 1996, I picked up a copy of Aristophanes' Lysistrata at ABCDEFG Books in Camden, Maine. This edition was translated into verse in 1924 by the noted Australian Jack Lindsay, with illustrations by his father Norman Lindsay. One of the original hardcovers, this was exactly the kind of smutty book that would have been found indecent and its transmission through the U.S. Post illegal under the Comstock Act of 1873.

And this wasn't even the original. While Lindsay père created line drawings that are delightful and racy, featuring a collections of male and female characters naked or mostly naked, all actual genitalia are either (in the case of males) cast in dark shadows or (in the case of females) erased. You may interpret such censorship as you will.

The text of Lindsay fils, however, goes through an even more bizarre transformation. Reading it, I wasn't immediately compelled, for example, to produce it for the stage. It wasn't very funny, and though the sexual humor was apparent, it was so tame as to be virtually uninteresting. Later I found a paperback of Lindsay's translation that was published in the 1960s, and learned he had bowdlerized his own work! His original text, as published without fear of censorship, still includes innuendo and puns rather than outright obscenity ... but they're better.

The last major notable production of Lysistrata in Cleveland was the legendarily pilloried production at the Cleveland Play House in late 1970. That production was actually produced at a time America was at war, but as Tony Mastroianni reported in the Cleveland Press, "This is an anti-war play, basically, but it is difficult to find the message under all the sniggering and archness."

Cleveland Play House, 1970
Photo by Tom Prusha

Both he and Plain Dealer critic Peter Bellamy delivered the production a one-two punch the day after it opened (Bellamy called the production, "perverted" and "obscene") and reservations didn't merely dry up, people were calling the Play House to cancel. In what may have been the shortest run of any professional production in Cleveland, Lysistrata at the Play House had three performances and suspended the run.

Our new company, Bad Epitaph, was maintaining a streak of strongly-received productions. I had an idea at that time that we would produce a classic in the Spring and something contemporary in the fall, as far as we could take that. Having produced a Shakespeare as our inaugural production (Hamlet) I didn't want to return to the Bard again for as long as possible.

I found Lindsay's verse translation to be clever and funny, but possibly a little inaccessible to a modern audience. However, reading other, more recent translations, I realized that this was its strength. For example, the translation the Play House used thirty years earlier was by Douglass Parker, written in 1964, and that should tell you right there what went wrong. A jazz aficionado, Professor Parker strains to be hep and obvious with his sex jokes, and the entire script reads like an extended comedy sketch from Playboy After Dark.

But what is Lysistrata, anyway? Is it an anti-war argument, the purpose for which Aristophanes wrote it in 411 BCE? Is it one big sex comedy? Is it an Ur-feminist text, championing the strength and power of women? Or is it exactly the opposite of that -- as Mastroianni pointed out in his review, "What the Play House production misses in emphasizing the obvious is the underlying story of women desiring to resume normal domestic relations."

Lysistrata can be seen as a conservative piece of work; the women are refusing to have sex with their husbands until they abandon unending war and return home.

Also, at this point in history, I was only recently married, and my wife and I were making plans to have children. So my interest in staging a happy celebration of marriage, sex and procreation was also very personal.

Shannon McNamara, Alison Garrigan, Elaine Feagler
Photo by Anthony Gray

Director's Note:

There is no private domain of a person's life that is not political, and there is no political issue that is not ultimately personal.
- Charlotte Bunch

The Greeks invented Democracy, built the Acropolis, and then called it a day.

- David Sedaris

Bad Epitaph's production of Lysistrata opened on May 19, 2000, and it was very successful. The Plain Dealer called our production, Helter-skelter and often hilarious, the Free Times a high-spirited and campy romp, and Scene Magazine christened it that summer's first joyous work.

By closing night we were sold out - oversold, actually, adding more and more seats. That fall Bad Epitaph received a nomination for a Northern Ohio Live Magazine Award of Achievement, based largely on the success of Lysistrata. But that is the end of the story, not the beginning. 

I recently read over my notes from the rehearsal period, and learned some very important lessons that I had forgotten.

Christopher Bohan, Jennifer Wiech
Photo by Anthony Gray

My apprehension over producing a sex comedy were great. As a rule, sex just isn't funny, it's embarrassing. Case in point, the movie Exit To Eden, based on one of Anne Rice's soft porn novels. Director Garry Marshall wanted to make a gentle comedy that adults could enjoy together, but when it appeared the movie he was making wasn't going to appeal to anyone, he threw in a caper subplot (entirely unrelated to Rice's work) and cast Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd as detectives. What was merely cheesy swiftly became crass.

One of the few exceptions to this rule is The Tall Guy featuring Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson in the funniest sex scene every committed to film. And I've seen The Room.

I must have been inspired also by my recent experience performing in The Compleat Wks of Wllm Skhspr (abridged) at Beck Center. When Roger Truesdell cast two of the funniest men in Cleveland, Allen Branstein and Nick Koesters and then chose me to round out the trio, I thought he was insane because I am not funny. The experience was a crash course in what funny is or can be, and I took a (un)healthy dose of the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink ethos of the Reduced Shakespeare Company and thought I would try it with this 2,400 year old Greek comedy.

The production company was solid, Don McBride build to order an Acropolis that doubled as the set from Laugh-In, with balconies and shuttered windows that open and close. Ali Garrigan - our Lysistrata - designed contemporary costumes, and Brian Pedaci the numerous ridiculous props, some of which he procured from places like Chain Link Addiction.

I had invaluable assistance from my dramaturg David Bell (who provided all sources below) who provided not only a bottomless well of theater history, but was also my confidant during the darkest parts of the rehearsal process and was very insightful as to what was not working and reminding me what was.

And, of course ... it was a musical! As we assume, the ancient Greeks used song to convey strong messages, and so did we. Following my suggestion that this story plays itself out everywhere, all the time, our composer Dennis Yurich shaped Linday's verse into the lyrics for eight songs that were Goth, rock, ska, country, even a nod to the Andrews Sisters.



Of course, what everyone really remembers is the nudity. I know artists who have strong, negative opinions about nudity onstage, that it breaks down suspension of disbelief in a way that nudity on screen does not. Frankly, I think the opposite - that film celebrates unhealthy body types and calculated audience response in a way that a live naked human performing in a play does not.

That doesn't mean I wasn't eeked out by casting a play where I was asking actors how much they would or would not disrobe onstage. I knew from experience in other productions that it was best to be very specific up front, and to set a date when we would commence "show conditions".

Clyde Simon, Alison Garrigan
Photo by Anthony Gray

My rehearsal journals remind me how horribly self-conscious and unfunny everything was proceeding through the month of April. I was positive I was going to drop a large turd onto the stage of Cleveland Public Theatre (the company which we had made a healthy arrangement to perform) until the first of May. 

May Day we played the scenes where the men and women stripped to fight ... and suddenly the show was ridiculous! Not dirty, just happy, funny stupid, which is pretty much how we rode through the rest of the experience.

In addition to his praise, Tony Brown also called the show "sloppy", and it was literally sloppy, with buckets of actual water dumped onto Nick, Chris and Rob as they scurried around in jackstraps fitted with brightly-colored erections. Our Lysistrata came onstage for the interval with a mop. Opening night, one other writer for the Plain Dealer sniffed, "Well, it's not Aristophanes." There were also more than the usual backstage pranks throughout the run, some which during any other production would have been brought up with Human Resources.

By and large, it was a festive, funny and inoffensive anti-war play. Just before we really needed one.

Sources:
Revival Ruins Greek Play by Tony Mastroianni, Cleveland Press, Dec. 5, 1970

'Lysistrata' at Play House Plumbs Depths of Vulgarity by Peter Bellamy, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 5, 1970
Photo of Ronald Greene and Myriam Lipari as Kinesias and Myrrhina, Cleveland Press, 1970 (date unknown)

Revelry Abounds In Bad Epitaph's Version of 'Lysistrata' by Tony Brown, Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 22, 2000

Rowdy Romps by Amy Bracken Sparks, The Free Times, May 24, 2000

Greeks Bearing Gifts by Keith Joseph, Scene Magazine, June 1, 2000

Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest

Excited student playwright encourages excited acting troupe to take goofy selfie.

The evening we concluded the Love In Pieces project, I was floating, delighted with work well-done, executed with joy, talent and energy by an ensemble of colleagues and friends, both old and new. Most of all I was relieved and overcome by the satisfaction and praise of she whose opinion I was most concerned about - the playwright.

Desiring to share my happiness, I posted the following status update before attempting to actually go to bed:

However, not five minutes later, this response was posted:

What? Oh, yes! Not the playwright I was thinking of at that moment, but of course! People come and go so quickly here ... it wasn't barely more than twenty-four hours earlier I and a number of the same artists employed in Love In Pieces were participating in the annual Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest, produced in collaboration with Great Lakes Theater.

Spontaneous Tom by Emily Buttita

Last year was my first curating this event, which another part of GLT's annual free, Surround programming. The outreach tour (e.g.: Seven Ages, Double Heart) is another. Truth be told, most of the hard work is done by our LCCC contact professor and their students, working for a semester on an original script. For some students this is their first experience writing a script, this year there were more than one teenagers who had advanced past high school and were already beginning their college experience at LCCC.

For our part, Great Lakes holds a competition in early April, a panel of judges evaluate the work and choose winners who receive a cash prize, and traditionally the first place winner gets a staged reading performed by actors from our residency program.

This year we had a new partner in Daniel Cleary, who did an awesome job in bringing out good work from his student writers. There were several readings in class and revisions before the competition, and our judges were impressed by the work. As the assignment was to create ten minute lays (or something close to it) we decided to stage the first and second place winners, for an evening which was still something less than an hour, even following a post-performance talkback with the awarded playwrights.

The Cracks In Our Foundations by Krista Price

Our acting company of five rehearsed for two hours prior to the performance, one hour per each fifteen-minute performance. You might think that is a lot of time, but it really isn't. What is required is to make what theater people like to call big choices, and by that I do not mean something like overacting, but starting out with something preconceived, and just going for it.

Walking through each piece, I would just stop the actors, give an opinion on what I thought was really happened, we'd go back a line or two and continue. Or I'd just say something that reinforced what was already going on, but make it more obvious. We had little set, few props, it was all about the words the students had written.

You walk into an empty space and hope that the process, that the afternoon and evening will be enjoyable. And the work moves smoothly, we had a record audience of over fifty - friends, family, fellow students - and each of these pieces were received very enthusiastically by the audience. They were each funny, but also affecting. They played even better than they read.

It is at times like this that I am (again) truly grateful for the professional company I keep. Young, enthusiastic, entirely "game" actors with little ego and a lot of focus. And on this night I also learned there are few things so joyful as learning a playwright - or two - is happy with the way you interpreted their work.

Complete information on the 2014 Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest

Nine Inch Nails @ The Agora

Trent Reznor

Twenty years ago today Nine Inch Nails played the Agora.

This was a dam-bursting moment. Maybe six people in Cleveland noticed when Pretty Hate Machine was released in 1989. In the months and years that followed, as the record gained recognition and momentum, the people of Cleveland began to claim Trent Reznor as one of their own (he's actually from Pennsylvania.)

The radio station The End trumpeted the impending release of Broken in 1992, but then never played anything from it because, as DJ Maria Farina told me, it wasn’t “radio-friendly”. However, no one could ignore The Downward Spiral, and it was universally lauded when it was released March 8, 1994.

Except in Cleveland, where Scene Magazine queried, “how many times can you rhyme ‘hole’ with ‘soul’, after all?”

“All this nihilistic, self-loathing, misanthropic, suicidal posturing is getting to be a bit much, Mr. Self-Desruct. Either jump or come in off the ledge.”
- John Soeder, Scene Magazine

Rolling Stone would eventually rate the album as the 32nd best of the 1990s, between Dylan's Time Out of Mind and The Slim Shady LP. But, you know. Opinions.

The day tickets went on sale for NIN’s first concert in Cleveland since they broke nationally, due in large part to their performance in the original Lollapalooza in 1991. The Agora sold out in less than ten minutes. I didn’t have a job and so was on the phone (because that’s how we used to order tickets) and bought two moments after the lines opened, unaware of my great fortune.

Opening acts include an entirely forgettable warm-up who I remember had some kind of non-lesbian, girl-on-girl thing, followed by a terrifying, horse-faced clown in a tall, pointed witches' hat who began his set by reciting the Wondrous Boat Ride poem from Willy Wonka. That would be the first time I had seen or even heard of Marilyn Manson.

Diana and I had arrived early enough to get great seats in front, you could see the band perfectly over the crowd on the floor. The place was completely packed by the time the headliner began their set, and what little moshing had started during the opening acts got crazy.

I think I stayed in my seat until they played Closer, and then I couldn’t handle it anymore, I wanted to be down there, not sitting. I gave Diana a little apology, handed her my glasses and shoved my way onto the floor.

 Set List 5/9/94

Pinion
Terrible Lie
Sin
March of the Pigs
Something I Can Never Have
Closer
Reptile
Wish
Suck (Pigface)
The Only Time
Get Down, Make Love (Queen)
Down in It
Big Man With a Gun
Head Like a Hole

Encore:
Dead Souls (Joy Division)
Help Me I Am in Hell
Happiness in Slavery

Once upon a time (because I cannot speak for today) being in a mosh pit was not actually dangerous. Maybe I’m kidding myself. But pushing and jumping and picking people up and moving them around is a very exciting way to enjoy a loud, fast concert.

First time I did what your father used to refer to as “slam dancing” was seeing The Replacements at Mem Aud in 1987. At one point I was body surfing and suddenly they were all gone and I landed flat on my back. About a half a dozen hands reached down and helped me right back up - wind knocked out, suddenly upright. Dizzying. Transcended. Stupid.

[tangent]

The Agora show was my penultimate mosh pit. My last would be exactly eight months later, when against my own better judgement I attended NIN's return to Cleveland at the behemoth CSU Convocation Center on January 9. I ran into Diana and her co-workers, and that was awkward. She had moved out a few days earlier. Previously, I was a svelte, 25 year-old member of an underground theater troupe. Now I was 26 and gaining weight, waiting tables in a chain pizza restaurant, and getting divorced.

Exiting the pit that January in 1995, I had a bad feeling in my abdomen. Two months later I would have a hernia operation. Limping out, I stopped an old lady, incongruous in the surroundings, but recognized her, and assumed she must be a friend of my mother's.

"Oh, hi!" I shouted. "Good to see you!" She blinked her eyes at me, blankly. I had made an error. That was Jane Scott.

[/tangent]

At the Agora show, Reznor did not say much, if anything, between numbers. At one point he asked, "Anybody like Scene Magazine?" The audience response was comically uproarious. Then he added, "Yeah. I like to wipe my ass with it."

Scene's Pete Chakerian reviewed the show as the success it was, however.  Reznor "seized the crowd" and "stalked the stage with reckless abandonment."

"You could just smell the sweat in the air ... the rest of the evening kept the same breakneck pace ... Spectacular ... Reznor started tearing up the joint."
- Pete Chakerian, Scene Magazine

If the editors were embarrassed by the gushing of their critic, they tried to make up for it with a photo in the gossip column featuring a fluffy-haired Reznor with his former 80s synth-pop trio Exotic Birds with the caption, PRETTY Hate Machine.

After just a few songs I was back, seated with Diana … the first song in the encore left me shocked and confounded, because I knew every word of the song and couldn’t for the life of me know from where. NIN had recorded Dead Souls for The Crow soundtrack and like a lot of other folks my age we had “discovered” Joy Division in 1988 when they released a singles collection (more nerdy shit: This is why it makes sense that they are playing Love Will Tear Us Apart in the party scene in Donnie Darko.)

What lingers is the memory of a girl in the mosh pit who was near me for just a moment. She shouted, OH FUCK because she’d dropped her cigarettes, I saw them on the floor about to be dashed to bits when I threw out an arm and shoved this big guy to one side, she didn’t miss a moment but swooped her hand down and caught her smokes.

She threw an arm around me, kissed my face and intimately screamed, “I LOVE you for that!”

Song of Spider-Man (book)

The first thing you notice, opening the book Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical In Broadway History, is a black and white photograph of several famous people. Bono, the Edge, Julie Taymor (if you are the kind of person who knows who she is) and then ... who the hell is that guy? Tall, awkward, bespectacled, in a frumpy suit jacket and jeans, totally out of place with these arbiters of cool.

That would be Glen Berger, the playwright. Or in musical parlance, the book writer, or because when this picture was taken, the show still belonged to Taymor, he was to co-book writer. He is also the author of the book, and stumbles his way through through six years of Broadway history, a sympathetic enough character, except he left me wondering where beneath spineless dithering lay the cunning professional who managed to surf the corpses to this production's eventual conclusion.

I never cared about Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark one way or another. One CLE theater colleague and Facebook friend (you know who you are, Moritz) was obsessed by this production, recounting every misstep which for a time seemed to be daily. I do believe his concern was for the health and well-being of his fellow Equity performers ... but there was a lot of internet glee had at the show's expense. Whatever. Lots of Broadway shows are terrible, I didn't feel the price-tag could necessarily have made it any worse.

During FringeNYC last summer our stage manager Diana went to see Turn Off The Dark with her family, and said it was the greatest theatrical experience she had ever seen. No exaggeration, that's what she said, she was over the moon about that show. I had my doubts, but I didn't see it, did I? It is like Ishtar, most people who mock it haven't seen that, either.

But I did rip through this book pretty fast. Maybe that is because Berger writes for a lot of PBS children's programming. There is a major plot hole, however, about a quarter of the way through, where what seems like an ordinary, large-scale Broadway production goes from an exciting project, entirely on-track, to suddenly a media-hounded piece of garbage, hæmorrhaging cash. Like, somewhere between the end of one chapter and the beginning of another, this just happens. This is long before the injuries start.

For a lark, I checked out the soundtrack from the library. I was curious. And most of it is really good -- which is even more surprising when you know I find U2 to be kind of irritating. But the song Rise Above actually got me a little choked up. Boy Falls From the Sky was also quite affecting. And Pull The Trigger is kind of ... fun-kay.

I wish I had gone to see this show.