Reflection #3: On Access

I'm going to riff on the idea of access for a few minutes (EDIT: or seventy).

Last week, I had an interview with an awesome off-Broadway director. It was thrilling to sit in the room and talk to him for 25 minutes about the show, about his last show and about theatre in general. As I left, I thought to myself that even if I didn't get the job, if we saw each other again (which I believe is inevitable in this city) he would remember me and we would have a friendly, good interaction or even conversation. And while I didn't get the job, he left me the nicest voicemail telling me to keep in touch and that he hoped we would work together in the future.

Of course, now it's up to me to follow up on that.

This is what I do in my part-time job, which I love. I help grant access. I mailed off a contract to the (very well-deserving) girl who got the above job in question. My job is to assist in the creation and execution of career opportunities for directors and choreographers at all levels. And it's all about accessibility. How do we make Broadway and Off-Broadway and big regional directors & choreographers accessible to those who otherwise don't have a way to get a foot in the door? More than just connecting them to those directors, how do we make the process of a professional production accessible to young directors, who aren't given the opportunities to sit in a rehearsal room? How do we make the world of TV and film (and the evergrowing web-media) accessible to directors who only have experience in theatre?

Then there's access onstage.

I believe that the best plays* are accessible to everyone. Which doesn't necessarily imply they have to be universal. It just has to have a wide enough variety of characters, views or just subject matter so that, for example, a conservative watching "In the Wake" might be able to see his or herself reflected in the play (I use that example because I think there are moments that do open up access like that, although there could be more).

*I want to make sure this is distinct from theatre as a whole, as community-based theatre is something on an entirely different level which is intrinsically about access for a specific group of people. More on this later, perhaps?

I have been to many plays that I could not access because I felt as though I was not the intended audience. I wrote strongly about this feeling after seeing a play about Rwanda that was so focused on it's Catholicism that I felt entirely ostracized for my lack of spirituality. I wanted badly to be let into the play, but that door was shut to me.

In another play, I was the intended audience, but instead of being able to access the piece, I was lectured at for my desire not to stay in my hometown and blamed for gentrification as a whole. Even though I felt for the issues and the performances were incredible, I could not access the piece because I could not reconcile my personal experience with what I was being told to do.

I had a fantastic conversation with my boss yesterday about Shakespeare, sparked by a couple of important directors saying that Shakespeare should not be placed in a specific anachronistic context. I would argue that this is not the case. Shakespeare frustrates me because I cannot access the text. I have seen two productions of Shakespeare plays that I have loved, and both were set in a very specific anachronistic time, but doing so opened up the play for me. If I am able to identify the roles of the characters based on their context, I can begin to listen and understand the text. Measure for Measure still lives in my head in the 1980s redlight district. However, the key to these decisions is that they are not commentary on the context or on the script. The director of that M4M wasn't judging the redlight district dwellers, he just saw how to use the context to open up the story to the audience. Which is why (I believe) setting Shakespeare in war zones or modern political contexts is far less successful, and begets the judgment directors have towards such decisions.

Clearly I have opened up a can of worms I could talk about forever. Which ties nicely into the purpose behind this blogging every day exercise- accessing my own thoughts.

Bis morgen!