Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 6 - A Tidbit and an Anecdote

 A Personal Tidbit

When I do a production, I assume that everyone is whole when we start working. I don’t even want to be the director. I want everything collective, natural, organic. Best laid plans… Inevitably, one or two people break down at some point because they’re not whole (they don’t know they’re whole, that is), and the lack of a parental figure makes them feel unsafe. They not only lack someone to follow, they lack someone to blame. Convenient, isn’t it? 

When I see this breakdown start to occur, I smile kindly and wait for them to answer their own question. We all have the right answer inside us. Sometimes a problem needs a companion to work with to find a solution. Ask for one instead of pouting or breaking down. That’s called adulting. If you do have to pout for a minute, or even throw a temper tantrum, do it and get past it fast. Be embarrassed by it, and stop it next time before you embarrass yourself again and make yourself look unhinged. Take control of your emotional state. It’s not only more effective for getting things done: it’s empowering to know that you can solve it. You can self-soothe. And once you can self-soothe, you’re now capable of helping others learn to do it, too. 

Anecdote

I built a guest house in my backyard. I ordered a shed kit online and it showed up in a bunch of pieces on a pallet and now I had to figure out how to build the damned thing. I’d never built a building before. My father in-law, a very talented builder, was gracious enough to help me get the structure up. Then he flew back to Pennsylvania and I had to figure out the rest. I’d never done plumbing. I’d never done electric. I’d never put a sink in a dresser all shabby chic style before. I did it anyway. I made a bunch of mistakes. I asked my experienced friends for help which they generously provided. I looked at videos of how to do things myself. Well, a year and change later, I had a fully finished guest house with a bathroom in it that worked. I still have repairs on the thing that I don’t know how I’m going to fix when they break. I’m not some genius carpenter, I’m not all that handy. And I’m not all that spiritually enlightened, either. I freak out a little, I flail about in my head wondering if I’m screwed, and then… I just figure it out. That’s adulting, as far as I can tell.

Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 5 - Trauma

 Trauma

A lot of people who have experienced trauma in their lives are drawn to the theatre. This is largely because the theatre is a welcoming and warm home for marginalized people. Trauma causes us to feel marginalized, regardless of our pedigree, race, gender, etc…

Trauma is a cycle. Your parent or older relative, your sibling or best friend growing up did something to you many years ago that hurt you deeply. You carry that hurt around with you like a saddlebag, shifting it from shoulder to shoulder as you walk through life. The theatre gives you a little respite from its weight. You can display it in a character for people to watch, and they take the weight on for two acts or a show run. That makes you feel better, temporarily. And that’s lovely. Then the show ends and it’s back in the saddle again for you. You wonder why you need to string shows together back to back and keep playing roles that let you flirt with that trauma of yours. 

Now I’m going to say something that is going to offend some of you. Enjoy it. Relish in it. Use it. Embrace it. It’s good for you. 

Your trauma is just that: Yours. You have made the choice (not the same thing as a decision. A decision is a move against, whereas a choice is a direct action toward) to carry that trauma through your life. It sits there, in the cue, waiting for triggers to flare it up so that you can continue your story of oppression; a story that you are somehow less capable, less valuable, less viable as a human being in this life than others. A story that you need a parent, some outside force, to discipline the world who is bullying you because you are incapable of defending yourself. 

I call bullshit. 

So on social media, as is an aspect of the current epidemic we face, someone posts something that is an opinion of theirs (maybe even from a trauma they chose to carry), it may even be racist or sexist, it may be classist, even just crass, and we use their words to pull the trigger on our cued-up trauma so that we can keep our narrative going. For the record: That’s not their fault. Your trauma doesn’t equal someone else’s abuse of you. We need to learn to tell the difference between the outside world and our own psyche. We need to learn not to take personally what others say or do. Further, we must stop expecting an apology from our abusers. It’s never going to come. 

Now I’m going to say something else that’s going to offend some of you. If you need to pause for a moment before proceeding, you might want to do so here. 

Your traumatizers have forgotten about you long ago. What they did to you doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to you. 

Take your time with that. Does that make you feel silly at all? It should. Not because we are silly intrinsically, but because we acted silly in carrying around someone else’s trauma for years, decades, or most of our lives, and the person who abused us is often long dead, or doesn’t remember us or the event anymore! (If you are currently being traumatized by someone, get the hell away from them! What are you doing?) 

For whose benefit are we dragging along that saddlebag? Is it for us? It would have to be, wouldn’t it? Because it certainly ain’t for anyone else’s benefit. Trauma begets itself. It’s a cycle. Our traumatizers are victims whose trauma was so heavy that they couldn’t stand to hold onto it another second, and they thrust it upon us; and we graciously took it from them. That was really nice of us.

It’s not your fault. But you made a choice, conscious or un, to accept their offer of trauma to you. Metaphorically, they said, “Hey! My trauma is too heavy! I need you to take some of it for me!” and you replied, “Okay, sure. Gimme some.” 

Why’d you do that? Well, it depends on the circumstances, but there are many reasons why we’ve taken on the bullshit of other people and carried it for years and years for no useful purpose at all. One is that we were a child and children accept everything that is given to us. We are completely open vessels, angels who carry the burden of a life we’ve not yet lived. Our parents abuse us and we say, “that must be the way of the world. Give me more.” Another is in relationships. Our spouse browbeats us with their trauma and because of our own upbringing, we are accustomed to taking on trauma from our loved ones; it’s a natural carryover into relationships to accept trauma from our husbands or wives. We have children ourselves, and we pass the trauma torch to them like a medieval relay race to light the villages downstream: a sacred badge that must be coddled and cared for at all costs. 

Nonsense! Your trauma is yours and yours alone. You purchased it with your story of woe. That is an ego game. Play it if you want, but don’t blame others because you want to play the game. 

So, when someone triggers us by saying something that is offensive or hurtful or just plain stupid, and we light up our trigger response, what is actually happening is that we are continuing the cycle of trauma by blaming them for our abuse. We are abusing them and ourselves. 

This can be a hard concept to grasp, I know. Some of you will stop reading this essay now and call it a waste of time. That’s sad, but that’s your decision. And that’s okay. All decisions and choices are okay. There are no good or bad selections in this choose-your-own adventure. It’s all a matter of your comfortability in this life. 

All of this information is to help us move forward in making a theatre that is truly, substantively just and equitable. A Gonzo theatre, not unlike the journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, who so famously used his own character flaws to relay critical cultural information to his readership, calls us to expose ourselves in full view of the audience in order that community healing may take place. A Gonzo Theatre is absolutely impossible if members of our community shut the art form down to force us all to carry their trauma. We’re all guilty of it at one point or another. 

Deal with your trauma. Let it go. Release it to the ethers. The ethers are conscious, too, and they are happy and able to process your trauma. Give it to them; none of us wants it. We’re all busy working on our own bullshit. Start to understand the difference between decisions and choices, and your life will improve vastly overnight.

A final note on trauma and acting: Once we release that trauma, we realize that nothing anyone else says or does has control over us. Oh, it may affect us in a moment. But it never has control over us. And once we realize that it’s us and us alone who are responsible, that it’s us who holds the power over our own mental health, we are going to make great theatre. Until then, we will always be fakers, because we don’t know ourselves well enough to portray someone else. And our audiences will always know. 

Don’t give your power away to others. That is inappropriate and it’s abusive to those you are putting in the position of power over you. That’s called topping from the bottom. You can’t have it both ways: you can’t be a victim and control how your victimizers abuse you. That’s a weakness of character and it’s anathema to the practice of theatre. 

Trauma and Bullying

Some traumatized people turn to bullying to prop up their self-narrative of how the world should have gone. Bullying is simply the act of attempting to maintain a trauma narrative by forcing others to conform to the fictional universals that one has set up around their trauma. 

One way that we bully others is to use “triggers” and passive aggression to make others feel badly for not buying into our trauma narrative. 

A trigger is not a thing. A trigger is simply us using others’ words or actions (other than violence) to offend ourselves. That’s not bullying in and of itself. Someone who is triggered, and takes the time to move through and past it, is behaving in a healthy manner. It only becomes bullying once we involve someone else in our drama. Bullying occurs when we choose to tell others how to speak in a certain way, or to apologize for a statement, or to change their behavior for our triggered trauma. That’s bullying. Don’t do that. 

Bullying is to be guarded against, and we must defend ourselves against this behavior. If we don’t nip it in the bud, we will all continue to be nudged all over the place in a wild goose chase that will never yield us a bird. Those who trigger will fall all over ourselves apologizing for others’ trauma and they’ll never be happy, and we’ll drag ourselves through the mud for their bullshit. Don’t do that either. 

Likewise, the triggered among us will never be happy because we’re not dealing with our trauma, but instead are just trying to shove it at the people around us until they get the shits of it and leave us to our personal hells. Don’t do that either either. 

Simply stated: 

1. Don’t ask others to change their behavior for you (unless they’re actively abusing you). That’s being a child

2. Don’t let others brow-beat you into apologies or a dampening of your character

3. Stay away from a victim mindset (self-identified victims attract abusers. It’s bad for everyone to engage the victim/abuser dynamic. That’s a remnant of our animalistic minds which we no longer need) 

4. Don’t deliberately be an asshole. If you’re an asshole, apologize. Learn to know the difference between triggers and actual offenses

Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 4 - A Psychology for the New Theatre Overview

 A Psychology for the New Theatre

Now, this issue of safety is a sticky one. This is important. If you skimmed the rest of is blog, don’t miss this: Sometimes, under the cover of safety, we will ask others not to express themselves because it may trigger, hurt our feelings, or offend us. It must be understood that you will be offended. Sometimes. You will be triggered. Guess what? That’s okay. Sit with this for a second. It’s okay for you to be offended sometimes. You’ll live. That’s what being human is. Use it! Take that energy and funnel it into your work. You may even learn something about yourself by being offended. It could even be an epiphone for you!

And don’t take it personally.

Everything is personal. But it’s never about you. Everyone is too busy judging themselves to care about judging you. If they do judge you, they’re actually judging themselves through you. 

Judge yourself and let others do the same. 

Get out of yourself for a second and try to learn their intent. Get curious about something outside yourself. Ask questions. Feel free to express yourself and tell the person in a calm manner that they triggered you. Tell them what they said made you feel unsafe. 99% of the time, they were not trying to make you feel unsafe or offend you. They were simply expressing themselves and you used their words to trigger yourself. That’s your responsibility. It’s nobody else’s responsibility to protect your mental health. That responsibility is yours and yours alone. That’s called being an adult in a world with other people. You’ve offended people in your life and you have hurt others. Did you intend to hurt them? No! You were simply expressing your point of view and someone used your point of view to offend themselves. You understood that then… understand it now. 

You must allow yourself to go through the emotions of grappling with your triggers and your offenses. You must work through the traumas that you have acquired over your lifetime. This is the maturation process. You must learn to live with the things that have been done to you by others, and separate the actions of those who have hurt you in the past from the actions of those in your life today. More on this later.

Start doing things to yourself that move you in a healing direction. You must allow yourself the tough job of working through that discomfort so that you can grow the muscles of self-awareness and internal core strength, without which you will fail at accomplishing anything meaningful in your life, especially the building of a good theatrical production. 

While the rehearsal room is a safe space for all, it is not the place to protect your ego or your delicacies. That is anathema to the practice of theatre. 

A Word on Honesty...

A critical element of taking responsibility for yourself and your own mental health as a theatre maker is the practice of being brutally honest. True honesty is the most loving path anyone can take. It’s not that easy. 

What is easy is to blame others for how you’re feeling. It’s easy to say that someone triggered you or made you feel badly. But have you ever considered who the center of those activities is? You Felt. You were Triggered. You’re angry. It’s all about you. It is you!

Think about that for a second. Did you ask any questions when you felt like someone offended you, or did you simply get offended and walk away? Did you yell a beautiful, improvised monologue in your car that made you feel vindicated and look silly to other drivers? Did you prod your insides to learn about your triggers, one of which was tripped when So and So said such and such? Or did you just get triggered and cancel lunch next week? 

The theatre requires of its participants a brutal honesty that kills your dead puppies at the door (from a very talented director friend of mine, Ryan Parham). Your puppies died an hour before rehearsal and you brought them into the rehearsal room with you; you projected them onto your castmates and anyone who would listen. They were sympathetic at first but then, when you insisted on making them look at all your dead puppy pics on your phone, they were put off. And so you blamed them for being insensitive. You. You. You. It’s all about what’s going on in your head and heart. A brutally honest actor notices when she does this and uses athletic silence and his super-power listening abilities to recalibrate their psyche. 

A regenerative theatre requires this brutal self-reflection that questions everything, including our triggers and trauma, and even our smug wokeness. 

Honesty doesn’t just mean setting our boundaries or making sure people know where we stand on an issue that’s dear to our hearts. Honesty is actual, blunt awareness of what is vs. what you wish was. Being honest with yourself is the act of accepting what is the reality of a situation or the world or an issue, and releasing your attachment to how you think it should have gone. We’re always going to be disappointed and angry if we try to make the world around us conform to our own very esoteric, unique snowflake universal rule set. There are no universals. I am not the arbiter of good taste, nor the gatekeeper of some universal truth that everyone is just waiting with bated breath for me to tell them about. 

The universe has no opinion. There is no judging sentience that requires us to conform to its will. Leave that to the religions. Without this realization, we will always be fighting with people, failing to make deep connections with co-workers, battling the circumstances of everyday life, and making shitty theatre. An honest and regenerative theatre requires the release of anything that is outside our purview, in order that we may find concert with the greater energy that we are inextricably a part of. It’s that simple and difficult at the same time. This is what a regenerative theatre demands of us. This is indeed what survival on this planet demands of us.

In the context of the rehearsal room and just as importantly performance, honesty takes the form of an open, gentle quietude that asks for input rather than demanding to express itself outwardly and loudly. An honest theatrical reaction can only come from listening, and it will never come through a pent-up response to past trauma. Honesty requires at its core the understanding that there is no subjective truth, but that as an individual, I must and have no choice but to take my own shape, of my own design, chosen entirely by me as I do it in the moment, in a dance with whomever is there with me now. Isn’t that beautiful? Let’s embrace that! 

Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 3 - The Rehearsal Room

 The Rehearsal Room

The rehearsal room is a term that I use to refer to the space we hold as creators of theatre. Wherever it is that we prepare a performance for our audience is the rehearsal room. This room must be a safe space for everyone. Recently this has been forgotten in this movement/desire to “do better”. We’re so focused on doing better and regulating those who we perceive as unenlightened in the new protocols that we’ve made the rehearsal room a superfund site. And that will kill the theatre faster than any lack of budget or audience (or the five dollar Costco cookie). 

I’ve noticed a general cultural shift to assuming the worst intentions of our colleagues. Everyone is now a stranger, an enemy… a sinner. I’ve seen veteran members of the community and even founding Artistic Directors “cancelled” for speaking in terms that last year would have never fluttered an eyelash. This mob-style rule is inherently dangerous to our field and must be guarded against at all costs. The rehearsal room is a place where our older members must be safe to bring and express their generational norms, unaware of the new ways of doing things.

Let me expand: We must allow all of ourselves to freely express our established world views, our judgments and our prejudices so that they can be aired, discussed, debated, relieved, re-educated, sometimes affirmed, mostly unwound... That’s right. All of us. We’re not monks. Monks aren’t monks, they’re just playing them on TV. 

This is not an “all lives matter” statement. Understand that our movements for justice for all marginalized people are valid and we need our leaders to listen and make change. That’s not what I’m talking about here. We all have prejudices. All of us. We all harbor generalizations borne out of experience, and out of fear and fantasy. We all deserve to have those inconsistencies in our characters, and we have the right to work on them, or not to. In the rehearsal room, everyone is truly equal. 

It must be safe for us to be fully ourselves in the rehearsal room. If a conversation needs to take place that will educate or shift members of our community who may be behind the culture curve, those who are facilitating the discussion must be patient and kind in the discourse. There’s a tendency for us to instantly want others to understand what we understand and be perfect now that we’ve told them. Maturity is the understanding that evolution is a slow process. It requires the processing of information over a period of time that leads to epiphones. It’s like building a theatre show. It’s thick and lurchy. That’s just the way it is. 

Further, education is a two-way street. Some of our oldest community members are Baby Boomers. Some of them fought in, or fought to stop the Vietnam War. They helped to usher in the Civil Rights movement and have supported marginalized groups their entire lives. They have something to teach us as creators. They’ve participated in the most dynamic lifetime since the Great Depression, and they have something valuable to offer us. We should do a lot more listening and a lot less lecturing. The rehearsal room is the place where these conversations must be unavoidable. If an older or a less woke troupe member makes a faux pas, it must become an opportunity for dialogue, not a surprise public humiliation (as a colleague put it recently). This is absolutely critical. Approaching any actor/creator as a sinner smacks of Christian patriarchal dogma and it must be militantly guarded against in my view. Everyone has a right to be heard, and everyone has a right to feel safe. And everyone has the gawd-given right not to be a monk.

Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Part 2 - Rhetorical V Substantive Justice

 Rhetorical vs. Substantive Justice 

I have “coined” a couple of terms for use in the discussion of this topic. Use at will. 

First, definitions. 

Rhetorical justice is a justice of language. It’s an attempt to make the words that we use more sympathetic to marginalized people. On its face it’s a great accomplishment that we (for the most part) no longer use the “R” word for the intellectually disabled, or trigger pronouns for minority groups. Rhetorical justice is the way we speak in a restorative manner about everyone in our society. It’s a good little sibling to substantive justice.  

Substantive justice is the justice of action and intent. It encompasses what people are thinking and how they act in the attempt at restoring justice to all for whom justice needs restored. In a substantive justice model, we look at the intent of an “offender”, and then their words. We ask questions to learn the intent. We look for common ground. We embrace those who have wronged us and assume good intent from all. We look to improve future interactions through education and love, and we move away from the ineffective and draconian punishment paradigm. 

Currently, due either to laziness or a lack of awareness, our culture at-large, and our theatre communities, are not embracing substantive justice principles; they are instead giving almost sole focus to rhetorical justice. This is very dangerous for theatre makers. It creates a hollow infrastructure: one in which saying the proper words, using the proper style book (a style book is a hard-bound book that is produced by The Associated Press periodically to alert newsrooms to changes in socially acceptable terminology) is as important or more important than providing substantive justice. 

Simply saying the right words without substantive action is an ego-maintenance activity, and has no place in the theatre. An example is described by the buzz-phrase you’ve heard:  “Virtue Signaling”. Substantive justice is required moving forward in order for future theatre companies and creators to address issues that are salient and in need of attention in an effective, change-making way. Words beget words, actions beget actions. Rehearse as you will perform. We are performers and we must solemnly take a hard shift if we are to build a regenerative stasis for the preservation of our art form.

The nature of the theatre is one of experimentation. It’s one of endemic faulty steps and trip-ups. It’s one of constant re-education and debate. It’s an art that challenges everything: established systems, outmoded ways of thinking, the fetishism of the new, the lens itself through which the paradigm is visible, even wokeness.

The theatre must challenge everything in its view in order to function at all. Push and pull are the lungs of the theatre. There must be tension and release, the gears of relationship clunkily grinding in and out of gear, as if forging a road out of wilderness with a machete. It’s not smooth. It’s not comfortable. It’s not safe for the ego. It’s not a place for the faint of heart, nor for anyone who would want to set systems in stone. The theatre is a place of openings. It’s a living organism. It’s a flower reaching for the sun, changing direction as needed to grab the most nutrients. It’s a people outstretching their arms to the heavens, begging for something fresh, new, enlightened, nourishing. The theatre is a place for the wild ones. It is a place for explorers with no hard limits and nearly no sense of self-preservation. The theatre is a place for adventurer souls to collide in a loving, sweltering, sometimes violent dance that shows the true nature of the human condition, without artifice--beyond the presentation.  

Without the right to fuck up, theatre makers would never make any kind of decent work. We’d make things that require a laugh track: shells of shows that discuss trivial mundanities as if they were cultural earthquakes. Disingenuous tripe... the deadly theatre that Peter Brook talks about in 1968.

Toward a Gonzo Theatre: Substantive Justice and a Regenerative Practice Part 1

 Zack Preston Rouse

June, 2021

Greetings!

As a theatre creator, I have found the making process of a theatrical production to always be everything, regardless of scale. Literally, it’s inspiring, it’s heartrending, heartbreaking, breathtakingly beautiful. It’s an exercise in futility, a simple exercise, a romp, and a snooze. Theatre is life. And it’s hard. It’s insanely hard to build believable characters who breathe like real humans. It's hard to produce shows that reflect humanity in all of its immense depth and breadth. All the circumstantial, financial and psychological trappings that are endemic to our discipline have, over the years, created a kind of collective trauma in our community that needs to be dealt with. Add to this our current cultural awakening that calls us to create true equity across our society, for everyone, now and finally, and we have a tall task ahead of us. 

In order for us to move into a new, regenerative model of theatre making in our culture, it is critical we take a few steps to correct some bad habits that we’ve formed. This piece, of which this post is part one, is an attempt at outing these habits in an open forum so that they can be seen, aired out, and moved beyond. We all have these habits to some degree or another, and reading this with an open heart will be more effective than taking the stance that you’ve seen it all before. 

I’ll probably fail at my task, but the show must go on so I'll try. I’m going to be very direct and honest in this. If you are offended by something I wrote, I’m sorry. If you’re triggered by something that is in this piece, not my intent. It’ll probably happen. I don’t do passive aggression and I don’t coddle. That’s not to be mean. It’s to be efficient and effective with my words, but equally important is that it’s just my personality. I don’t do small talk very well. And I don’t walk on eggshells. I believe open, honest communication to be the most loving path. I’m sensitive and get my feelings hurt too, sometimes. We all have the right to get offended, feel the way we feel, and get over it. I wrote this piece out of love for you, my theatre community. Take that intent throughout, and any offenses should be less painful. I hope.

Oh, and I curse sometimes. I think it’s fun and adds to the color of my writing. I have tourette syndrome, and that may have something to do with my saying things in a way that is sometimes controversial. Who knows? This is my take and you can take it or leave it, in whole or in part. That’s what freedom is. 

Intro

Over the lifespan of my involvement in the making of shows for an audience (I’m 45 years old), I have seen my artistic community work diligently (almost undyingly) to become a more just, more inclusive, more egalitarian, more healthy field of study and practice. In my estimation, theatre communities are the most liberal you’ll find on the planet. They’re so liberal, in fact, that they will play with Christian fundamentalists and not judge them (except by the same standard as everyone else: did you give a good performance?). That said, there have always, as far as I can tell, been systemic issues of patriarchy, hierarchy, racism, sexism, institutionalized and change resistant phobia-maintenance… 

Theatre people are people. And we’re people in a greater society that experiences these issues at-large in built-in ways. The theatre, for how liberal a practice it is, is not immune to the character flaws of its greater culture, and we should hope it would never be, because there are no monks. As audiences we want to see ourselves on stage and screen, reflected back at us in a truthful, honest, sometimes heroic and often pathetic manner so that we may attempt, through self-awareness, to grow beyond our limits toward an ability to evolve as a species. 

Recently, we’ve seen with the necessary development of movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter, some wonderful cultural shifts. We’ve started to see a film industry by and for women. We’ve started to see a larger cultural awakening (Whitey getting woke) to the apartheid nature of our so-called democracy along race lines. And we’ve seen actual prosecutions of murderers in uniform. These are all necessary advancements in society that are now finally happening. And as humans are prone, along with these great strides has come a regrettable Newspeakianism (a kind of leftist fascism of thought a la “1984” by George Orwell) that threatens to shred the very culture that is working so hard to “do better”.

Against the backdrop of a deepening economic and climatic crisis which may render all of these progresses moot in the coming decades, we in the theatre community actively watch our greater society swirl around and through itself: a dying beast kvetching in turmoil over the soul’s lack of agency to save the body. We too feel the push to make Hail Mary maneuvers. Hell, we just want to make work in a world that ignores live theatre as if it’s the 90 year old deaf blind grandmother in the corner with a lemonade. “She’s fine, eat your cake.”

Theatre has been dying for decades. It’s the art form that nobly and tragically accepts one solitary audience member, for the show will go on. We often perform for tiny audiences, we feel dejected by it, we go to the bar and drink ourselves into oblivion, and then we go back to the theater the next night and do it again. Why?

This passion and dedication for the art form shows a resiliency in our field that is second maybe only to journalism. Whole generations of theatre makers come and go with nearly no audience for whom to perform. When I pass someone on the street and they say, “Hey! That was you in that thing I saw, right?!”, I'm ecstatic. Not because I got an accolade, but because someone came to the theatre. Does that make you want to cry? Go buy a theatre ticket, then. You can’t, you have rehearsal? I get it. 

This is the crisis that I’ve been living with for the entire time I’ve been a theatre maker. How the hell do I get butts in seats? What the hell are people willing to leave their couches for? 

So when the “Woke” movement hit my small-town theatre community during the pandemic, I became aware that a crisis within a crisis was beginning to develop. It started as a trickle. Some of my colleagues started talking about how this word or that word is no longer allowed to be used. “We use this word now because that’s respectful of this group of marginalized people. We don’t talk about that issue this way anymore. We now look at this issue through this lens or in this framework.” It’s certainly a good thing to keep looking at ways to include more people in what is truly the grand socio-self-reflective art. The more the merrier, I say! But then the trickle became a flash-flood.

Whereas pre-pandemic we were all wedged like Dirk Gently’s couch into an unsustainable yet somehow still going paradigm of Scavengerism (begging foundations to prioritize a show over a meal program for poor kids), now we’ve added to this fundamental crisis a new lexical crisis of conscience. If we naturally assumed the best in everyone, and looked at intention when judging a person’s behavior, this year-long homebound respite should have created an opportunity to make some serious headway toward substantive justice.

But alack, we are humans. The result seems to be more of a smorgasbord of intellectual cannibalism. A new lexicon of consequence (vs. intent, as Jordan Peterson discusses) is emerging out of the chaos of swirling linguistics and social media smackdowns. A lack of production and a glut of rancor is now all the community can seem to muster. Previously productive companies are hamstrung by woke protocols and are now impotent to just make the work for fear of being cancelled entirely--which they are anyway by default. 

Like all human endeavors, there are growing pains. When the term “non-traditional casting” became the new buzzword (decades ago, now), the progressive companies rightly adopted it to show solidarity with minority groups and marginalized performers: performers who were in every way as talented and passionate about the art form as anyone else, but who for issues of systemic prejudice weren’t given the same opportunities to just work as white men. “Non-traditional casting” was the OG BIPOC-friendly term in theatre circles. You knew if you were a performer from a background that wasn’t male and white, that you had a place in a theatre that was bold enough to publicly state their participation in the practice. 

Unfortunately, conjuncting the overarching current philosophy of a true crime entertainment--the lowest common denominator content that will sell the most ads (we have collectively decided that what the most people can tolerate to watch is violence and so that’s nearly all we make anymore), we now have this industry autosarcophagy taking place. This grimaced pathology of assuming the worst in each other has led to a community, already beleaguered by too numerous challenges to count, that appears to want its own total demise and is leaping toward the edge of the cliff like a peaking tweeker.

Older community members post audition notices saying that they’re using inclusive casting methods, and self-labelled leaders in the community smack them down for not using the proper wording. People pile insults onto a hapless victim who was simply trying to include everyone in the rare opportunity to be in a paid production. Debates ensue about whether it’s okay to cast a teenage girl as a teenage girl anymore, or if the girl must now be played by a member of a marginalized group to show solidarity. White, privileged company managers brow-beat the community over social media about what the BIPOC community wants and needs (Thou doth protest too much!), dissertating to such a degree as to drown out any hope of dialogue--or even just the sound of an actual BIPOC voice coming through.

My heart is broken. I watch my own community dismantling itself as systematically as the oppression it purports to make inroads against. I worry that theatre may now, finally, totally be dead, not by the hand of American Spartan capitalism as oracled, but by the hand of its own practitioners over what to call a coffee mug: it’s now to be referred to as a ceramic cylinder. “Get it right. It’s Ceramx.”

I jest as I cry. And yet I hold a glimmer of hope that we can pull something together. Like a show in a moldy basement, the dryer rumbling low during the performance. It could still open. There could still be an audience. There could still be a thing to do and see and learn from. There could still… after all of this last century of challenges, be a theatre art again.

An Actor's Greatest Moment And He's Absent For It

My greatest moment as an actor (so far) was in college. I was playing BAAL in a student production. Being a Senior, I had been very lucky and had great success getting cast in meaty roles all the way through school...so I thought I knew my shit.
Student productions tend to have very short runs, two weekends at most. So you have to get to it if you want to learn anything. I was so obsessed with acting in those days that all I did was learn lines, interpret character, smoke pot and get deep, talk shop to anyone who would listen. I breathed acting. But I have the age-old problem, like many of us, of having two minds on stage: The character's mind; and the actor's mind. The actor is constantly distracting the character and making me drop out of the moment for whatever trite thought about a lunch date or a botched audition, or worse, how cue 212 was dropped by the SM, and how am I going to change my blocking so that everyone can see my beautiful mug for my monologue.
Well it was our second to last performance, and the production was quite experimental. The student director had decided to add all kinds of artifice to the elegant, simply brilliant modern Shakespearish gait of Brecht. He cast painters and musicians in character roles, ignoring good taste and quality (in my naive college aged view). By this point in the run I had my lines and blocking so cold, all my intentions decided and re-decided and re-interpreted once again. I was on autopilot. I was doing what I think is wrongly called by many, "Phoning it in". This is a wrong term in my opinion because this is the space where the magic begins. A necessary rung on a ladder that most of us never see the top of.
Something else was at work. There was a magical dust that settled over me that night. Somewhere in the middle of the performance, I can't remember when, because, it's magic, things started getting very fuzzy. The veil began to lift for me as a performer, where it never had before, and very rarely ever did again (so far). And when it came time for BAAL to die, begging for his mommy to return him to her bosom, the most basic of all human needs returned at once after a life of incivility and relentless adolescence, rape, murder and abandonment in the name of independence (what an irony!), Zack Rouse was gone. Actor man, with all my analysis, all my judgment, all my opinion, had simply vanished, and where there had been a personality driven by ego to surpass the competition, do everything perfectly and achieve the adoration of professors and peers, given awards and told I no longer have to attend class because I'm just an ACTOR now, there was now a dead BAAL.
Blank. Blind. Empty Body-vessel. Actor.
I awoke at curtain call, which was one severe bow and an exit, to sit in a chair for half an hour, waiting while my ego returned to me. And fortunately, when I got back, I had no opinion about what I had done that night. I didn't think I was the greatest actor who ever lived. I didn't envision myself receiving an Oscar and thanking the Academy. I didn't care. 60 people watched my performance that night. Hardly world changing.
For those who are religious, I will challenge that this is what preachers are talking about. They are talking about a unification of humanity in the internal/eternal world of the "Open Vessel".
I will submit to you all that indeed, I ceased to exist for a period of time. The universe had no need for the ego identified as Zack, with its prescribed tastes and opinions. And so for a time, Zack died. And was reborn when the vessel that held this ego was finished with its job of representing BAAL.
This is why acting is not an ego pursuit. This is why acting is at its very core the spiritual and solemn endeavor to map the universe. Actors are Astronauts.

-ZR