Why it's Hard to Care About Sony Pulling The Interview

I feel like I should have an opinion about this Sony-The Interview ridiculousness. My thoughts on it are a contradictory jumble that shifts every time a new bit of information is released.

First -- and I say this without having seen the film, and I know I'm making a big assumption here (based on the Rogen/Franco movies I've seen) -- I wish this controversy were about a better film.
I've been home with the flu for several days and I've been rewatching some episodes of Freaks and Geeks. Rogen and Franco are brilliant on that show; both so clearly talented. They were given excellent writing and sure direction, neither of which they seem to have had much of in the intervening years --  which is not to say I think they are bad writers or directors, I'm just not sure anyone is requiring them to try very hard. It seems like they've been allowed to run amok and improv to their hearts' content and spend millions of dollars making ok entertainment when I know full well that they're capable of being amazing. So I resent them a little bit. I'll be open about that. They're contributing to the mediocrity of film, and no one is stopping them. Except maybe now they are being stopped, by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons.

Second: The Interview is going to do just fine when they figure out how to get it into the hands of the public. Way more people will go see it now because of this international "incident." It's the best  marketing strategy since The Blair Witch Project (even if it's unintentional).
*I'm hearing now that Sony has no intention of releasing the film in any form, partially because they've been fighting the streaming of films prior to theatrical release. Is this true? To not release the film in any fashion is incredibly stupid, and cowardly, and bad business. It makes me wonder what sort of dirt the hackers seized. 

Third: Of course they had to pull the film from theatrical release. Films play in malls, and it's the holiday season. And people need to feel safe going to malls to shop. It doesn't matter if there's a credible terrorist threat or not, if people think there might be a credible threat it will affect the economy and no one's going to let that happen. Even if someone comes out with proof that the North Koreans (or whomever) have no way of actually carrying out their threats, many people will still be afraid. America has a culture that thrives on fear. (A culture that Hollywood helps cultivate, by the way.) Most Americans would rather be afraid and stay home than be principled and leave the house. Then people don't shop and the economy suffers. The terrorists really do win if they hurt the economy. So I do understand why, at this point, canceling the theatrical release makes sense.

Fourth: So this is the part about freedom of speech. And art. Except I fear we're not talking about art, we're talking about two rich white guys goofing around. And I'm not yet convinced that they're really being silenced. I suspect people will still see this film. Because people now want to see this film. So is it about caving to the terrorists? Are we letting them win? That depends a bit on what Sony does next.






Will this keep studios from making, buying, or promoting a serious film about North Korea? That's possible. That would be a shame. Is it a bad precedent to cave completely to cyber terrorists? Yes, it seems like a bad precedent to not release the film in any form.

I don't know if there's a real threat, or if Sony just doesn't want their personal information and their scripts available for public consumption. Are there North Koreans who have infiltrated the US and will bomb our movie theatres? Would anyone who came to infiltrate the US from North Korea not see within days how fucked up North Korea is? Is the North Korean government really like al Qaeda? I don't know the answers to these questions. So it's hard to know how to feel about it.

What I do know is that if the film industry actually made, bought, and marketed films for grown-ups the way they did back in the 90s -- if they acknowledged that it's an art form instead of constantly trying to prove it's not -- I might care a lot more.

My Not-Shitty Birthday

I’ve had a remarkable number of people call me today, email me, text me, and send me Facebook messages wishing me a happy birthday. (Which I appreciated so much.) I had a few people ask me how my birthday was going, and I think in each case I said, “fine.” I didn’t quite know how to answer because, “it doesn’t suck!” seems like a weird response, but it’s what I was thinking. A couple people saw my Facebook birthday wish about answering old emails today and they told me I should let the work wait. And I understood that sentiment even though I felt so much better to get some work off my plate. It’s been a good-but-busy summer, and I’ve had very little time to myself, so getting work done was actually a bit exhilarating. Definitely a relief.

So here’s the thing about my birthday being “fine.” A year ago yesterday my mother had major surgery on her lungs. I woke up the next morning on my birthday vomiting with one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had. Last year my birthday sucked. A lot. And while a lot of good things happened for me in my 43rd year, a lot of not-good things happened too. My mother almost died from a reaction to chemotherapy. My son missed six weeks (not consecutive) of school because he had walking pneumonia and other tenacious viruses. I injured myself last September in a yoga class, and it took PT and chiro and being really careful with myself for about 7 months to not be in pain all the time. I went on a very restrictive diet to try to get rid of my migraines, giving up almost every food that I love for three months (and some things permanently). I cried in grocery stores looking at aisles full of items I could not eat. I worried about my mom. I worried about my son. I thought I might never be pain-free after this stupid yoga injury. I was so stressed all the time that I couldn’t really enjoy teaching the way I usually do. That was hard. All of it was hard.

Today I woke up without a migraine. So right there, before my head came off the pillow, I was thankful for that gift. The stupid restrictive diet works wonders (read "Heal Your Headache" by Buchholz if you or someone you love is a headache sufferer), and I’ve been mostly migraine-free for over nine months. Special thanks to my dear friend Emi Clark for shoving that book into my hands and saying, “Just read it.” My pain from my stupid-yoga injury is gone. For a while I couldn’t walk three blocks without my hips hurting. Now I can walk/run/climb mountains for miles and feel no pain. (Well, ok, my right pinky toe currently hurts a bit from being maimed by the puppy-in-law two weeks ago, but mostly no pain.) These things are gifts. HUGE gifts. My middle-schooled aged son let me kiss him in public today without yelling at me. That is a gift. I have a play going into rehearsal next week. That is a gift. I got to go to the lakefront twice today! Once for a walk on my own and again later with my boys for a quick trip to the beach. These are gifts. But honestly, the biggest deal is that my mother came over tonight for dinner and she was feeling really good for literally the first time in a year. I could not have asked for a better gift than that.

There was cake. I got lovely presents. I ate veggies from my garden. I answered some of my work emails. I had positive thoughts about my appearance. I had a quiet dinner with my family. On paper it doesn’t sound like a monumental birthday. A bit low key. "Fine." But I am acutely aware of how different things could look. So much has gotten better since a year ago. Sure, a lot of things got worse first, but I am so grateful for the turn around. And so grateful for the perspective and clarity I’ve gained. My birthday wasn’t just “fine.” It was decidedly not-shitty. That may not sound like something to aspire to, but it is. It really is.

Is Shakespeare the Problem?

Several months ago I started working on a new stand-up bit about whether it's harder to be a female comic or a female playwright. I concluded that it's harder to be a woman playwright because as a lady comic no one is going to say to me, "You know Mia, we love you and we think you're hilarious, but we can't book you next month because Shakespeare's in town." That doesn't happen in comedy. There are so, so many men out on the comedy scene, but once they stop breathing we women don't compete with them for performance slots any more. But in theatre, the dead guys never go away. In fact, in some instances they get a lot more work than the living playwrights.

So I started wondering: How much is Shakespeare the problem? I say in my set that Shakespeare is the most produced playwright in the United States every year. And I knew it was true, but I wanted hard numbers. I have believed for a long time that theatre people's desperate devotion to the classics is silencing so many new voices and new stories. But how many dead playwrights, composers, and lyricists are produced every year compared to living ones? And what is the gender breakdown? A month or two ago I went onto the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) website, chose the 2012-13 season, and started compiling data. I took long breaks because it's tedious fucking work. This week when The Kilroys announced their fabulous and necessary list (thank you, ladies), I thought, this seems like a good time to put the stats out there, so I finished going through the data and this is what I found:

In the 2012-2013 season, TCG theatres reported that of all the plays and musicals they produced
60% of the credited creating artists were living male playwrights/composers/lyricists,
21% of the credited creating artists were living female playwrights/composers/lyricists,
12.5% of the credited creating artists were dead male playwrights/composers/lyricists who are not Shakespeare
5.5% of the produced plays were written by Shakespeare
1% of the credited creating artists were dead female playwrights (predominantly Lorraine Hansberry.)

*I created a spiffy pie chart to go with the stats above, and if I ever figure out how to import it, I will!*

It should be noted that if Dickens had written a stage adaptation of A Christmas Carol he might actually surpass Shakespeare. I didn't count, but it's mind-numbing how many productions of that story go up every year. It should also be noted that productions of Shakespeare comprise 30% of all productions of classics (if one defines classics as pieces written by artists who are no longer with us). It's undeniable that Shakespeare is the most produced playwright in this country, living or dead. I didn't do individual numbers on any living playwrights this go around, but when I did a different study of the 2007-2008 season this is how the most produced living playwrights measured up to old Bill:
Sarah Ruhl - 23 productions
Martin McDonagh - 14 productions
Jeffrey Hatcher - 13 productions
Theresa Rebeck - 8 productions
William Shakespeare - 136 productions (and that time around I didn't even count Shakespeare productions at theatres that had Shakespeare in their name, so there were likely a couple dozen more).

There's no way to dispute that Shakespeare has a disproportionate amount of stage time. I would argue that when any one voice is heard so very much, other voices are being inevitably withheld from the public. Modern, living, talented playwrights are being silenced because of what I call the Cult of Shakespeare in this country. I have a big problem with it.

BUT if we look at the 2012-2013 numbers we can see that even if we stopped doing classics altogether and gave all of those slots to living women playwrights/composers/lyricists, we would still not achieve gender parity. That would indicate that in order to represent equal numbers of men and women playwrights/composers/lyricists in the American theatre a minimum of 10% of the men would have to step aside,... but that's not actually how the numbers work.

As it turns out (and I didn't track the specific numbers on this) it is far more common to have multiple men creating a collaborative project than it is to have multiple women do the same. Most of the musicals that came up meant at least three hash marks in my notebook under "live men." I counted number of people credited/receiving royalties, not individual projects, because there was no way to do the latter and include composers and lyricists. But this trend of men collaborating and women working individually was true for the 2012-13 study and for the one I did for the 2007-08 season. One can assume if you counted only the number of female-created projects vs. male-created projects the numbers wouldn't be quite so skewed, (though men would definitely still be more produced than women), but you also would need a third category for projects written by people of both genders.

Also, in each category I created there was a relatively small number of artists getting a significant percentage of the productions. For instance of the 28 productions credited to dead women at least half were A Raisin in the Sun. (And one wonders if that's merely a reaction to Bruce Norris' Clybourne Park.) Both Tennessee Williams and August Wilson accounted for between 15 and 20 productions each in the "Dead Guys" category. It's similar with the living playwrights: a handful of names pop up over and over again. It's the flavor of the month phenomenon. We've all seen it; many of us have experienced it. Writers become the cool kid for a season or two and every theatre in America is producing the same seven writers' plays. This is a problem of people not trusting their own opinions and not trusting/conditioning their audiences to except work they haven't heard about in the New York Times or recall from their youth. Theatres play it safe by doing old stand-bys and anointed plays because they're afraid of losing money. We all know it, but I think it's bullshit.

I think there are ways to spread the wealth around so that more voices are heard, but it will require that artistic directors and managing directors and boards stop being lemmings.  The Kilroys just published a list that says, "Look! Look at these fabulous, important plays by all these women writers that no one is producing! They've been pre-screened and pre-approved for you!" I hope ADs take advantage of it. But I also hope we acknowledge that there are hundreds of male playwrights out there who are also not being seen; so many plays by writers of both genders that get one or two productions and then vanish, discarded like some deflowered 19th century ingenue. I don't know about Tennessee or Bill, but I have to think August Wilson would gladly sacrifice a couple of productions of Fences if it meant that Jonathan Norton's Tidy List of Terrors or Marsha Estell's Heat could be produced instead. Shakespeare would probably love that his plays are still so popular, but I'm guessing that he'd be appalled by what a small section of the population actually attends the theatre these days.

Going to the theatre is an act of faith for the audience. We-the-theatre-makers are asking a bunch of strangers to come sit in a dark room and trust us, but we don't even trust our own opinions? We're asking them to take a risk, but leaders in our field won't? Going to see a new play is an act of quiet bravery: the audience puts their minds and emotions into the hands of some artists for a few hours and they just see what happens. I swear the only time I'm still excited to see a play is when I know almost nothing about it beforehand. I haven't read reviews or an early draft. I don't read my program. And when the lights go down a thrill goes through me because I have no idea what's about to happen... on stage or inside of me. It's like going on a rollercoaster blind-folded. 

We are a country of thrill-seekers. It should not be so hard to get audiences on board for an adventure. But I don't think the thrill-seekers believe that theatre has any adventure. In their minds it's old and stodgy and full of plays they got tested on in high school. Today's programming is directed at the converted: the Classics Cultists and the people who believe everything they read in the New York Times. But if we want our audiences to grow and we want theatre to matter we're going to have to do better than that. And we're going to have to start with what plays we teach in high school English classes. If we want new generations of kids to become theatre-goers we have to let them know that there are characters on stage that look like them and sound like them. They're going to need to feel included, not alienated if we wanted them to show up. And that means teaching new plays, by men and women, by people of color, by the LGBT community. It means teaching people that theatre is something that is happening now, not 400 years ago. It means making it seem possible that their voices too can be heard if they choose to write a play one day. But how can we convince them of that when most of our voices aren't being heard and we're the "working professionals?"