So when people describe my son as “bright”, I know what they mean, but I kinda ignore it and decide that what they mean is that he lights up a room. Which he clearly does. But in terms of where he places when he’s tested? It’s not great, not even good. My kid has ended up with physical therapists and speech doctors and he’s even in a special class with educators who help kids that have some developmental difficulty.

Do you see what I did there? Because nobody uses “special ed” any more, and when they do, BOY do they correct themselves quickly.

It’s the same way we all try to avoid saying “Off Off Broadway” when we talk about our plays. We aren’t defined by that which we’re not – we’re Indy Theater! Like Indy Films (except, of course, that indy films have the backing of all the major studios, usually, and there is a giant steel wall between the theaters with 99 seats and the theaters with 100…) It’s important that we make sure to clarify where we’re coming from and what we’re working with. Because… Wait. Is it?

We got the call from Barnaby’s teacher that he needed to be tested, and we were stunned. He wasn’t quite four, how could they possible think there was a problem? And when he was tested they said he had the fine motor skills of a 14 month old.

Now, this could be a big discussion on the state of No Child Left Behind Influenced Education Culture, or even on the fact that every parent either has a kid in the AP Calculus program, or their kid has profound dyslexia, there are no average children any more, but we instead just figured we ought to deal with the boy as he is. He can’t hold a pencil? Then let’s help him hold a pencil. His speech can only be understood by people who live with him? Let’s get him into speech therapy. This is where we are, and there’s no point in hand-wringing, let’s just move forwards. We can’t say “other kids are doing this, so he should as well”, we had to say, “if he speaks and is understood, then he will get to decide what is heard. If he can’t be understood, the choice is made for him.”

Every time I go to the theater, I walk in to a converted space. Because I never go to Broadway anymore, and almost never go off-Broadway, I’m walking in to a space that was conceived to sell fruit or build furniture or to serve as a living room. The costumes aren’t generally the clothes designed for the character, they were designed for every day use and then *picked* for the character. The playwright may want someone to fly, or a bonfire or a rainstorm… or even a ten foot flying alien insect to land on the roof, and the production found a way to make these things true with whatever they could find.

It matters. It’s important to know what we’re starting with. In “Diende”, the idea of Haiku comes up again and again, because the playwright was saying “when you are given everything, when everything is made easy for you, it’s impossible to find humanity. If you start with almost nothing, say 17 sounds, then the form will lead to beauty and the beauty to humanity.” (At least that’s what I decided he was saying. I should probably ask him about it before writing a blog.) We start with nothing – no support, no audience, no money, no community – and we build. I say, “we’re Gideon Productions” and ten years ago you’d say, “as in the Bible?” and five years ago you’d say, “Wait… I don’t think I’ve heard of you…” and now you say, “Um, who? Wait! I think… Hold on, who?” but that’s still a step in the right direction.

Yesterday, Barnaby came bounding up the stairs for his bath before bed, held his hands out palms down and said, “Mommy, Daddy, I’m sorry I’m late. But I was plugging in the toy helicopter so we could fly it in the morning.” After the kids went down, I went in to the kitchen and found the helicopter, sure enough it was plugged in. I called Jordana and said, “You have to see this. Actually…” and I unplugged the micro-USB connector and asked her to plug it in. She started looking at the toy and after about twenty seconds, I just burst into sobs.

Two years of occupational therapy,  of teaching him to use scissors and to pull apart play-doh and to squeeze exercise balls. Of watching him grab crayons by the fistful and color nothing but explosions. Of moving the therapeutic pencils in his hand so that his grasp was right… And now he managed to read the tiny word “charge” on the side of a delicate toy and then push in a plug the size of a ball point pen roller made square when his mom and I couldn’t figure it out.

It matters how we do it, where we start from. And we should be proud.

Clockwise from top left, the “Men of Dad’s Garage” pinups; George Faughnan and Matt Stanton (September), Kevin Gillese (December), Mike Schatz (July) and Tommy Futch (May). (photos by Stacey Bode)

But we all decided that we were working too damn hard and these shows meant too damn much for us to just hope the people who came to the last one would come to this one too. So, we went to our dear friends Tammy Oler and Ehren Gresehover who had created Stellar Engine, a company that helps with … well, marketing definitely, but the two of them have such a deep sense of community that it becomes so much more than that. We sat down with them for one afternoon (they handle huge corporations, we couldn’t possible have *hired* them) and they very quickly explained how Twitter and Facebook and social media work best, but it wasn’t the explanation of the tools that stayed with me, it was their whole-world approach that just knocked me out.

Basically, when we think of marketing, we think of advertisements, of telling customers what they want to hear. Cigarettes have to make smoking cool, because there’s just nothing about smoking that makes you want to do it if it isn’t. McDonald’s wants you to think “fun, easy, fast and young”, because the food they are selling is so terrible, and the health ramifications so dire, we’d never go. But the indy theater is in an almost unique position because the thing we want to sell is the very thing we’re doing – we tell stories. And we LOVE everyone else who’s telling stories. And our friends essentially said, “pour your energies into that.”

The combined genius of Deb Alexander (photos) and Pete Boisvert (photoshop) canNOT be over emphasized.

I can’t quote them as it’s been three years now, but the approach that has worked for us so far is essentially to look at the theater world like a bank, with a rather strange flip of your usual bank habits. With your bank account, you generally make one or two big deposits a month, and then a hundred tiny withdrawals – your paycheck goes in and then every time you hit a deli or pay a bill a few dollars drains out. Instead, in the social media world, every time you ask your friends for something, you’re essentially making a giant withdrawal, and you have to back that up with hundreds of tiny deposits of support to your friends.

For us, it’s easy – we genuinely adore the indy theater community and there are hundreds of things that we’re talking about *anyway*. If there were no social media outlets right now, then the five of us at Gideon Productions would be sitting around talking with the rest of our friends about the seven shows that either opened or closed or the dozen friends who’s shows were just accepted into The New York International Fringe Festival or  the kickstarter campaigns we are all supporting, but with social media we get to say, out loud, how much we love all this stuff. It used to be, we’d go to a show and say, “God, I loved that. I wish I could tell that one actor in the cast how good she was.” Now, we can just do it on twitter or facebook, we can actually SAY THOSE THINGS.

How is that marketing? It isn’t, in a way, because we all understand “marketing” to mean something that this isn’t. Cigarettes are Cool, McDonald’s is Cheap, Fast and Fun – these are the marketing ideas we grew up with and which we now know are just manipulations and lies. But we don’t write about things that aren’t true, the only dishonesty that we employ is that we’d all much rather sit back and quietly enjoy stuff instead of screaming it from rooftops. But I haven’t yet run into anyone who read a post on their wall about how awesome they were respond to it with, “good Lord, I wish we weren’t talking about how *awesome* I am all the time, it’s embarrassing…”

The difficult part is that we just don’t feel good about asking people to buy tickets to our show. Facebook and Twitter are closed universes, everyone who follows us or is “friends” with us does so by their own choosing, and once we’ve announced that tickets are on sale, there’s not much point in hassling people. And so we’ve set ourselves the task of creating extra-textural content, examples are interspersed throughout this blog, and releasing that into the world. We looked at all the characters and created situations where they could be featured, or reconstructed key plot point from a new angle. We’re painfully uncomfortable trying to sell our shows, but we absolutely LOVE coming up with storylines and dialogue and images for stuff within the show, so now we just create that stuff and release it.

The combined genius of Deb Alexander (photos) and Shaun B. Wilson (sweding) canNOT be over emphasized.

How is that marketing? Well, I guess when I was a kid, you’d listen to top-40 radio and hear one of the hits from a band, and that would make you want to go out and buy the album. These extra stories we’re creating… we know how to do that, so if we can keep doing that and it reminds people of the kinds of plays we make, then that’s all to the good.

Because in the end, hand-to-God honesty here, we don’t want you to watch our shows if you don’t like what we do. It isn’t like McDonald’s, we have no incentive to move these plays out of the freezer to make room for more plays. It’s live theater, when the house is packed with people who hate our shows, it’s exactly like an erection in gym class – something that’s supposed to be fun is actually just terrible. I saw a guy at a matinee of Blast Radius listening to the basketball game on his headphones, and I was like, “JESUS! How did it even *occur* to you to come here? By all means, STAY HOME and watch the basketball game, there’s no WAY these seats are as comfortable as your couch…”

So, the best marketing that all of us can do is to reveal as much of ourselves as we can. The secret of our success is that we’re just featuring the EXACT SAME THING that is amazing about every company that’s making theater. We all love doing it and we all love watching it, so the best marketing you can do for your play is “more storytelling” and the best community building you can do  is “more celebrating”. If you look at your play and think “how can I get an interview for our actors with the Times”, it just isn’t gonna happen. But if you look at your play and think “at what moment could the guy have made a different decision, to stop the other guy from taking the car…” *THAT’S* what will be exciting for your audience. And that’s what reminds people of how much they love to go see plays.

“HMPH” says this guy

Now of course, this all goes away once someone says “I was just KIDDING!” because as we know, that is the panacea that cures all. But boy were my panties twisted, and I wear several pairs just to make sure this doesn’t happen. Immediately I started an argument in my head, comparing the care of animals with the care of American Culture and my mind went off into a hazy wasteland of take-downs and devastating retorts…

- When someone says they want to become a veterinarian, do their parents suggest they also learn to teach in case it doesn’t work out?

- Do celebrities pick, as a pet cause, the suffering of young artists? Or, actually, is our industry the most absurd example of the tremendous obnoxious wealth at the top and the staggering unemployment and suffering at the bottom, where famous actors would rather pose naked in a PETA ad than fight for better arts funding that actually supports their brethren?

- Americans spend $41 BILLION a year on their pets. The annual budget of the National Endowment of the Arts is $146 million. And the amount that goes to the theater is…

BUT WAIT, this is stupid, why would I get so worked up about this? Am I really interested in getting in to a debate about what is more important, Theater or People’s Pets? First of all, it is exactly this debate strategy that people employ all the time to win otherwise meaningless discussions. “You say medication isn’t good for depression? Well neither is PRAYER! Ha! Fight THAT!” And then suddenly you’re debating something that you don’t give a crap about. I mentioned that I don’t really care about animals that much, and suddenly I’m in a corner talking about… animals? BUT I SAID I DIDN’T CARE!!!

And secondly, are you kidding me? EVERYONE loves their dog and NOBODY goes to the theater. The day that politicians have to have video of them walking into a theater instead of them sitting with their dog in front of a fire, then we can have a fair discussion.

“We say you should support the theater. We just love MUSICALS!” say these guys.

The problem is, we’re all there. When you look at your day job and think “these hours I spend, I spend them so I can rent a rehearsal room,” then you lose your sense of humor. When you accidentally say out loud in front of civilians that you wish there was more money in the arts, and someone says, “but even if you didn’t get paid, you’d still do it, right? And that’s the problem, you have no leverage,” you lose your sense of humor. When you look at the Broadway numbers and see that 280,000 people saw a Broadway show LAST WEEK, and you’re told to celebrate when you sell out ONE 70 seat house, you lose your sense of humor.

Why don’t we put a can out at a grocery store? And why is the idea so offensive to us?

I think it’s because there is so much lip service done to how noble a profession this is, that we have a tradition as ancient as *civilization itself* behind us. A group of people sitting in a circle while one of them tells a story, it’s perhaps the only thing that SEPARATES us from the animals, our ability to tell a story purely for the entertainment of our brothers and sisters. And when I say that to people, they think it’s true, their eyes light up. And sometimes they even pull out their checkbooks. But if I’m not saying it directly to you, and if the theater isn’t a part of your life, then it will be meaningless. And the idea of pulling out your checkbook is laughable. Mock-worthy.

And so, to my friends out there who roll their eyes when I get upset, I offer the pictures and words of this blog. I hope the pictures have been worth how self-righteous and annoying the blog is, and the only other thing I can add is… well, here, let my friends do it for me…

So when you go see six or seven shows a month, you can really start to understand what our community is talking about. Right now, we’re talking about sex.

This picture is almost as hot as actually watching "The Foreplay Play"

It makes sense. Even just a year ago, the culture wars seemed to focus on civil liberties and the over-reach of government, and all around us we were seeing Samuel and Alisdair and Wide Eyed’s production of “The Trojan Women” and even Flux Theater’s “Menders”. I think the noise of this was in the background when Mac was creating the Honeycomb Trilogy.

One critic claimed there was Too Much Kissing in "Blast Radius"

But now the culture wars have shifted and we’re suddenly not just talking about the freedom to be kinky or to swing or whatever it is our parents did in the 70s. Suddenly, we’re actually talking about whether or not we have the right to *birth control*. The gay rights debate is centered entirely on *marriage* instead of the right to just, y’know, go ahead and be gay and sexy. We got blindsided by cultural conservatives who want to re-argue points we thought we’d completely *won* twenty or thirty years ago.

And so, this last week gave us Blessed Unrest’s fantastic “The Storm”, and Mariah MacCarthy and her cohorts at Caps Lock Theater gave us “The Foreplay Play”. Both of these plays deal with sexual liberation, from totally different perspectives. In the latter, two couples decide to have a foursome, an idea that forty years ago was OUTRAGEOUS, but in our world now it is probably considered simply daring. The fact that it seems a simple idea hides the intense and incredible complications that go into being that liberated and open. It’s maybe best encapsulated by a moment when one of the women gets out her “toy box” with pristine handcuffs and a flog and even a hunting knife, as if their identity as “kinky” is kept neat and organized for better advertisement. But when it gets down to the nitty gritty, these couple fear real liberation, they still want possession of their partners, they still want a new kind of monogamy, and in the end the two things are simply incompatible.

The show is maybe 11% sexier than this picture.

In The Storm, we get, by comparison, a totally standard story. A husband goes on a business trip and his wife has a torrid affair, the kind of thing that, according to polls, happens fairly often. But the crushing weight of this non-specific Foreign and Historic town leads to the destruction of all involved. The most powerful statement is that the wife, ultimately, self-destructs – she is her own undoing. She can’t hide what she’s done, and she can’t live with what she’s done, and all around her, from the dicatorial mayor to the screaming old women harridans who won’t let her forgive herself, are the voices of the people who decide they are responsible for the moral lives of those around them. It’s a reminder that we may think we’ve already had this fight, that we’ve won this battle, but it carries on in all countries, throughout history.

Even in Diende  now going up at The Secret Theatre, in the far future, we still have to deal with sex and its moral implications. Two scientists begin bending the rules to achieve a truly important and noble goal and, although it’s a small plot point in a show with giant ideas, it’s not until they discover one another sexually that they truly join forces and begin to make the really big mistakes. Gus Schulenburg, by the sheer speed with which he writes plays, is one of our most constant leaders when it comes to the cultural conversation. As he showed us with Jacob’s House, he can move from the page to the stage in the space of only a few months.

The Foreplay Play and The Storm are both closed now, but Diende is still running as is another terrific look at power and sex The Runner Stumbles. And coming up, we’re gonna get The Empress of Sex and David Rabe’s An Early History of Fire, along with about twenty other plays that deal with sexuality. Because any time they try to start a culture war, we find the indy theater world is already fighting it.

1. GET HELP. There will be times when it will feel like you aren’t going to make it because, guess what, YOU’RE TOTALLY NOT GONNA MAKE IT. Fortunately for you (and me) there isn’t a single person in the history of history who made it without a bunch of help. If you meet a person who claims to have raised their kids on their own… well, think of it this way – do any of us claim that we produced theater on our own? That we aren’t all standing on the shoulders of giants?

Marlena on the set of Advance Man

Baby cloths and toys are good for a handful of months and then the baby has outgrown them. And since most of the toys have been childlaborcrafted in China and sprayed down with lead, they last forever. Someone will come to you with a giant bag of crap – take it. And then, in six months, bag it up and give it to the next hollow-eyed zombie dragging around a furious three-foot vampire. More than that, let people babysit, let them bring you food, LET THEM GIVE YOU HINTS ON HOW TO STOP YOUR VAGINA FROM HURTING IN THE DAYS AFTER CHILDBIRTH. If you really want to hold on to your pride, you shouldn’t have had kids. Which brings me to…

2. THROW AWAY YOUR PRIDE. There was a time when you checked the mirror before leaving the house, those days are behind you. There was a time when a pair of pants was *removed* if it had puke on it, and now the pair of pants with the *least puke* gets put *on*. Leave it all behind, don’t try to hold on to your old life because you will never have it again. And this is actually *good*, it will actually help you clarify the best bits of your old life. It will help your work, it will create a circumstance where you have No Choice but to follow your heart because your brain… oh your brain, she has stopped working. Someone will offer you the chance to write the libretto for the Broadway production of Shrek Three, The Shreksical, and what will happen, before you can answer, is that you will realize you ALREADY SAID NO THREE WEEKS AGO AND YOU DIDN’T CARE. Those folks who have kids and leave New York? They are FREE of regret, they are following their hearts and they are making the right choice.

You know, as a theater artist, that you have to let yourself fail and not punish yourself, you have to do the same with kids. My son lives on about 600 calories a day, mostly from cinnamon toast and you know what? He’s fine. My daughter is almost two and she still has her grandpa Joe’s hairline – so what. My neighbors think she’s the most beautiful little boy in Astoria, and I don’t correct them. If your kid is pushing six and still can’t read (OH MY GOD!! HE’S AS STUPID AS *EVERY OTHER KID THAT LIVED BEFORE “NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND”*!!!!) then know that where you might not be training him or her to be an academic lapdog, you are giving them lessons that most other kids *don’t* get. Which brings me to…

3. PRIORITIZE YOUR COMMUNITY. One of the most impressive people I’ve ever known had decided to have kids, and she told me that showing up for other people’s shows was a moral decision that she wanted her children to learn. Her children would grow up knowing that “work” meant creating art, not just sitting at a desk. She shamed me into redoubling my commitment to the Independent Theater Community, that my children would have a more profound understanding of the options for fulfillment if they saw that much of my work was designed to support the people we know and love instead of just supporting me.

(She continues to shame me every day, because I live with her. And yes, it’s UNPLEASANT.)

Barnaby carrying a box of drill bits on the set of Blast Radius

When you have spent your day trying to converse with a three year old, trying to get apple juice to the exact right temperature, trying to distinguish between the current favorite hot wheels car and last week’s favorite – when this is your day, it’s astonishing how much more it will mean to you to get to watch Ibsen or Shaw or Euripides. Most of us are just waiting for the next person to stop talking so we can get in our opinion, but when you’re hanging out all day with sociopaths, you will find yourself silently drinking in the adult conversation around you.

The best way to survive kids+theater is to treat your theater career with the same level of dignity and priority that you give to your paid work. It’s actually a good opportunity to teach your kids about volunteerism and the importance of expression outside of commercialization. Or something, I don’t know, I have dad-brain I can barely understand multi-syllabic words… I just know that I grew up with my dad always going to rehearsal and working on scores and one day, after a concert, I was at a party with the entire orchestra and my dad, still in his conductor’s tuxedo, arguing some of the finer points of either Mahler or the Cheap-Ass Chairs Everyone Had To Sit In… and I said to him that I loved the parties because everyone was dressed so nicely. My dad leaned down and said, “Look around. The only people in tuxedos are the musicians and the waiters… and both of us use the *back* door.” Art as Blue Collar politics – it formed who I am to this day.

There. That’s a good start. If you want to know more, make a casserole and come over, we can chat over Sesame Street.

I loved it. Desperately.

Moving away from Role Playing Games (please insert “Discovered Women” joke here), I didn’t really have the ability to scratch that itch for a number of years, not until I mercy-killed my acting career and started producing theater with Gideon. Suddenly, I found myself in meetings asking questions like “What are the extent of the anti-Christ’s powers within this marketing firm?” and “Is there a threshold for replacing Robot’s parts, and if so is there a specific part that houses the original robot’s identity?” and “Can a person become sterile purely from comic nut-kicking?”

Or "Do we really need a THIRD smoke machine?"

When Mac came and talked to the rest of us about The Honeycomb Trilogy, he introduced it as a piece of theater too large for our company to handle, but we basically jumped on him and tickled him until he agreed to let us at least *try*. And even though we love the characters and the epic storytelling of the trilogy, it’s the fact that we get to create the world, together, with the designers, that is most thrilling.

There are tiny things that might go unnoticed by a casual observer, or even an obsessed one. Conor wore one of Bill’s shirts in Blast Radius, and Ronnie’s pants were patched with her costume from part one. The set was designed with a flood line, where the bottom floor of the house was under 8″ of water before Abbie damned it up to save the house. And the metal structures from the first play still existed, but any particle board pieces had been destroyed with the ravages of time.

I think the socks are significant as well...

So now, we’re looking at what might have happened in the ensuing years between Blast Radius and the third piece of the trilogy Sovereign. How long has the war lasted, and how much of humanity’s previous existence has been rebuilt? When the aliens attacked, could they have destroyed every remnant of the industrial revolution, or did they simply have to bury most things and secure them away from humanity?

I had a thrill, getting to talk to Mac about how easy it would be to invent batteries, but how difficult it would be to build a lightbulb. We have burned through ten different timelines, and just as many world maps trying to trace the motion of the war, the wins and losses and the incredible toll it would take on both humans and the aliens. Ronnie and Abbie, who loved each other more than anything in the first play and were at each other’s throats in the second… where are they now? And, of course, the question we got more than maybe any other, what happened to Bill Cooke?

I’m not the playwright or the director, but I’m still the Dungeon Master. When I was at my best, back in the pre-dating days, it was when I listened hardest to what the players were hoping would happen and right now that’s what we’re doing. Every single person who asked a question or voiced an opinion -  that all went into the sauce that’s creating the third piece.

When we’re in production meetings, it’s like a second sleep for me – a second chance to slip into a dream, and when we’re all together talking about things that might seem incredibly small, I feel like what we’re actually doing is listening in on the world where all of this has really happened. When the lights come on in the Cooke home for the last time it might not seem like much more than lights going up on the set at The Secret Theatre, but we will know who built the generator and who found the bulbs. And a big part of why we will know is because you asked us.

While this may read to you as simply virtual words on an internet page, what this is ACTUALLY is a virtual bottle of champagne being smashed against an internet yacht-hull, for this is the long awaited launch of the blog here at Gideon Productions. Before you run aboard and start emptying the liquor cabinets, let us tell you what you can expect.

First of all, you can expect images.

In addition to pictures, you’ll get words! You will notice quite quickly that two distinct voices will start to emerge, even though the blog is kept by the entire company. It will be two voices because our three most effective members, Jordana Williams, Shaun B. Wilson and Sandy Yaklin, are also the shyest and the least likely to put up with shenanigans. so you’re gonna be stuck almost exclusively with Mac Rogers and Sean Williams. To extend the Yacht-Metaphor, this is a little like getting on board and being stuck in the galley kitchen with two 19 year olds that memorized those old “What’s Grosser Than Gross” joke books instead of being on the deck with all the beautiful people.

But we will have two distinct voices and you will very quickly be able to tell them apart. If something is long winded, with heavy reliance on commas (and far too many parentheticals that go on long past when the average reader will have already gleaned any possible meaning – including the occasional dash’ed dangling sentence fragment *within* a parenthetical) (and also an extra parenthetical that includes emphasized words in order to better instruct your reading eye) then you probably have a piece duct-taped together by Mr. Williams. If, on the other hand, you get a tight two paragraph update where you giggle half way through and then cry at the end, you’ve probably got Mr. Rogers.

In this blog, we’re going to discuss how we make theater, what other theater excites us and how lazy we are. All three of these topics can be discussed ENDLESSLY by the two authors of this blog. Also, we might tease one another. We might gently correct each other. One of us might write a blog that makes fun of someone who gave us a not-nearly-good-enough review, followed by a week of silence and then an apology from Sean, er, whomever wrote the blog.

Mac and Sean have tried this before, with their own personal blogs, and hopefully those blogs will continue in their own way. Word has it, now that there is this outlet at Gideon for Charming Theater Posts, Sean’s blog will become mostly about his two kids and Mac’s blog will be, almost without exception, about chili. Sean’s blog might also, on occasion, be about chili. But all of the good theater stuff, including as much insider baseball as we can cram, our favorite moments from other people’s plays, stuff we’re doing wrong and stuff our friends are doing right – all of that is gonna go here. And if we really are in a yacht, we’ll do our best to explain how we’re able to steer it through the back water bayou that is the New York independent theater world.