We usually notice the absence of justice, not its presence. When present, justice touches us like a mild breeze. Only when we are absolutely still can we notice that it keeps us cool and comfortable. Justice is not a trophy we can brag about, or hold before the admiration of others. In the absence of justice we become cruel and mean. A low pettiness creeps onto the tip of our tongues. 

When justice is absent, we may call it injustice. We notice injustice immediately, and it treats our internals as roughly as the worst weather treats our skin.  Injustice twice corrupts: it corrupts the offender, but it also corrupts the offended. For even the mere fear of being a victim of injustice can corrupt the spirit; to avoid the possibility of injustice, we buckle, dodge, and coerce others. 

Justice might be complicated in description, but it is simple in practice. 

Justice through friendship, or not at all. 

For this reason, I prefer theater when we make it with friends. The more formal the relationship, the less satisfying I find it. Formal contracts can help preserve friendships, at times, such as when individuals promise each other a certain level of effort or resources. But on the whole, we need to want to see each other succeed; minimize each other's flaws, and maximize our strengths; we need fellow theatre-makers that excuse us for being human. 

It is not a close secret that more than one type of drama occurs in the classrooms and hallways of theater programs. Actors, though friends, compete fiercely for roles. Directors scramble for opportunities to practice their craft. Artists, often despite their own intentions, struggle to place themselves in a hierarchy of accomplishment. I've never wanted to get involved in that fray. I figure if I'm going to shallowly scramble for status, I might as well do so on a professional basis, rather than an academic one. And as of yesterday, I have never been so glad that I did not attend a master of fine arts program. Or earn an undergraduate degree in theater. 

My good friends in UT's Theater and Dance Department have offered me a lot of support over the years. Most recently, they produced THE PRICELESS SLAVE at the Cohen New Works Festival. They find themselves enveloped in a scuffle about 'main stage programming.' A similar fracas occurs in any academic  theater department, but its probably exacerbated by the unique tensions at the University of Texas. The department has two 'main stages.' One is a large, acoustically vibrant proscenium, and the other is a large, sound-sucking black box. But the department only puts on a handful of shows each year: a couple of dance pieces, and then a short list of musicals or plays. Ostensibly, all the material serves an academic purpose within the department, and also helps train the students for the professional world of acting, directing, set design, lighting, etcetera. 

To select its yearly program, the department uses a semi-inclusive process that is subject to veto from the departmental chair. A committee of faculty and faculty-friendly students informally surveys the department, and then talks out a list of shows for the coming academic year. They suggest shows that they want to see, and shows they want to perform in. Then the chair of the department looks over the list; he scratches some, adds others, and bounces the list back to the committee. Not everyone is happy with the results. Then actors audition, and 'artistic teams' are put together to work on specific productions. The process is not quite democratic, but then again, not much about art  or academics is democratic. 

While one could probably improve the selection process to better fit the department's diverse preferences, it seems that the real difficulty lies in the limited programming slots available. When there are only a handful of shows each year, the stakes are raised tremendously for each and every show that makes the slow, painful, pitiable journey to appear before  a live audience. Inevitably, the high-stakes process will leave many artists and students out in the cold. Increasing the number of programming slots (and decreasing the amount of funding each one receives) would lower the stakes. 

More aggressively, it appears a sickening waste of space that two venues in central Austin lie vacant most weekends. Increasing the number of production slots would reduce the nights when fertile ground lies fallow. Doubling the number of productions (or quadrupling) (or more) would lower the stakes, increase occupancy rates, and might even lead to more risk-taking.  The stakes are much too high for each show right now (artistically, educationally, and economically). It seems madness to continue on the current path of severely limited programming. 

Increasing the number of production slots would also speak to the interests and habits of some of the younger artists on the faculty. They prefer rough and tumble shows that take chances, mix genres, and dash through diverse landscapes without blinking an eye. They do not want to make or see clunky classical revivals that fail to match the technical achievements of Broadway, Chicago, and London, or that attempt to compete with the narrative powers of film. 

But the Old Guard in many faculties enjoys the stoic, steady and patient pace of limited programming with well-made plays. Good acting, to a certain set, means talent and training, both of which require strong material with which to play. A new, messy, incomplete play coarsens the fragile taste of young actors, whereas a masterfully written play can guide the actors towards greater heights of imagination and nuance. There is something to be said for this approach.

Still, the number of production slots must increase. Perhaps we can increase the number of performances without abstaining from producing well-made plays for the sake of 'new work.' Resurrecting the term 'repertory season' might bridge the distance between the Old Guard and New Guard faculty members, and aptly describe the policy of increased production slots. A repertory season could prejudice efficiency over perfection, craft over product, and cooperation over competition. And perhaps a repertory season might grant a lovable, forgivable and expected rough edge to the main stage productions. For the love of God, mis amigos, it is student fucking theater. In Texas. Of course it has rough edges. If you're not falling down and skinning your knee once in a while, you're probably not running fast enough. 

I began this essay with a note on injustice. I now return to that theme to look at the particulars of the season. 

This year's scruffiness began with In the Heights, a sort of hip hop musical. I dislike musicals. I suppose I get as emotionally involved as anyone else, but I dislike their cheap narrative tricks and manipulative scores. The show Les Miserables, for example, shoots an impoverished child on stage, mid-song; everyone cries; but it is a cheap ploy, and too easily staged. It is far more challenging and necessary to show the slow degeneration of life that shadows all instances of extreme poverty. But in Les Miserables, they shoot the kid. As they shoot the boy, and tears creep into my eyes, I want to punch Trevor Nunn (the English progenitor of the scene) for his vulgar manipulations. (Musicals are pornography, but for the emotions instead of the libido). 

I've been told that this particular musical (In the Heights) was chosen to speak to the growing number of Texas Latinos that attend the University of Texas. If this was the justification, I'm not sure it made sense in the first place.  The 'Heights' in the play's title refers to Washington Heights. Washington Heights is in Manhattan. Manhattan looks and feels a little different than the Rio Grande Valley or suburban Dallas, or even inner city Dallas.

When it came time to cast the play, my Hispanic friends in the department were pretty engaged with the idea. Obviously, the kids who attend a theater and dance program like to be on stage (even if it involves singing and dancing). The powers that be decided not to cast any of my friends in the play. The department decided that due to a dearth of talent within the department, they would offer several roles to actors from outside the university. 

This set off an alarm. It does not matter whether or not the alarm attested to technical instance of injustice in the minds of people casting the play--when it comes to injustice, the feeling is everything. And the casting decision blatantly demonstrated that the department was more interested in 'putting on quality programming' than developing or training the students that walked through its doors. Further, it fed a fire that burns throughout Austin, Texas--it's impossible not to notice the imbalances between actors of color and 'white' actors in this city in terms of opportunity and exposure. Supposedly, those casting the play subsequently increased the number of student actors involved in the project. But now it is too late. As soon as they made the mistake, they should have cancelled the damned musical and started from scratch. 

Of course, In the Heights is not the only play the department will perform this year. The other plays fall into a broad category that I call "shit that other people have done well, but that we can probably do okay." Our Country's Good, Dial M for Murder, Dead Man's Cell Phone.  Austin Playhouse and ZACH Theatre put on similar plays, but with big-kid actors and easier parking. Student  theater clubs also put on similar programming, but with cheaper tickets, lower expectations, and smuggled liquor. 

I have been around Austin since 2005. That's not all that long. But it's long enough to know that there have always been conflicts over these departmental shows at UT Austin. The programming has always been as flat and as warm as an old can of Coke. It is not the selection process that is at fault. A strong, autocratic leader can put together a good program. A broad, diverse coalition of voices can also (though more rarely) put together something interesting. But there must be room to fail. Increasing the number of production slots is the only way to go. 

A smaller university in town, Saint Edwards, puts on a series of four or five plays that typically resemble, in spirit, the plays appearing at UT. But I think Saint Edwards succeeds where UT fails. Why? Conditions are different. They emphasize acting over set design. They only use one black-box, and it never changes format. The theater only holds a handful of patrons at a time. Saint Edwards consistently mixes Equity actors into its productions. Saint Edwards only has a handful of students for whom they must provide roles. Saint Edwards does not allow student directors, thus granting more consistent directing opportunities to their faculty to keep their skills fresh. In short, and for a lot of unchangeable reasons, Saint Edwards puts together a program that I find more rewarding than what appears in my own forty-acre neighborhood. This has nothing to do with talent, and everything do with broader structural conditions. 

I love my friends at Texas, and I am sure that as the months go by, they will find solutions that restore the tenor of justice to their program. Break legs. I am glad I do not have to go to any of the formal meetings--I much prefer working on art outside of UT's academic boundaries. As the fracas develops, I hope to see a diverse set of productions that breathlessly move from one imaginative landscape to another. Play. Play. Play. 

Today I participated in a mid-term review for a studio architecture class. I know very little about architecture. I am aware that I prefer some spaces to others. I suppose I think about acoustic quality and sight lines when I'm in a space. I care about cleanliness, or at least some vague efforts made in that direction. And I'm probably still pretty good at coming up with inventive ways to storm a building. 

But I'm largely clueless. I was asked to attend the mid-term review because of my dual backgrounds in theater and the military. The students in the class seek to design a 'space for veterans,' that includes a few studios and theaters for artistic expression. 

A few weeks ago, the same class asked me to describe a few of my favorite spaces. I told them that I expected to loathe the museum-minded efforts to rebuild the playhouses of Tudor and Stuart England, but that the performances that I experienced at the London's Globe and Staunton's Blackfriars checked my instincts. Instead, I found these playhouses remarkably alive. The audience-actor connections forced players on both sides of the stage to actively participate in bringing about the theatrical event. The effect, in fact, was even more pronounced in these spaces than in any other situation of universal lighting. Why?

I think part of the answer comes from the beautiful use of space. It feels special to walk into the Globe. It resembles walking into a modern sporting arena, rather than a stodgy bourgeois playhouse on the West End or Broadway. If you've entered with friends, they suddenly become strangers because you've never seen them quite in this context--engulfed in carved timber and overwhelmed with spectacle. Once the play begins, the life on stage calms the senses, and the narrative restores a bit of order to the mind. But then the words take on their own life, and the journey begins again.

The shape of the theatre space also makes a difference. Below, I've inserted an image of the Owen Theatre, a part of the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Notice that it's shape resembles the wooden-U of the Blackfriar Playhouse. 

In all three of these spaces (the Globe, Blackfriars, and the Owen) the audience members can see one another just as easily as they can see the performance. Sometimes, it's even easier to see the other audience members--and this is part of the power of space. Unlike a movie theater or a darkened playhouse, I am forced to confront other members of the public, and measure our relative responses to the performance. Did we laugh at the same jokes? Do we cry? Do we stare blankly? Do we even bother to blink? Look at each other? Flirt, or scowl? These are not distractions, but rare moments of connection.

And so when surveying the student projects, I looked for theater spaces that challenged the audience in the first instance, even before the start of a performance. I looked for spaces that I would want to wander through, even if no performances are going on. Meditative spaces. Spaces that wait for words, but that are not afraid to speak back. Spaces that are not a black box, but a box built for play within a wider and unalterable world.

Should a theatre space honor veterans? Perhaps. More importantly, it should honor our shared humanity. If theatre does something good for veterans, it rekindles a sense of play, a sense of imagination. It wakes a dormant fearlessness of making friends and companions, and building a new sense of community and public sharing. 

Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. Anchor Books, 1997 [1996].

Jon Krakauer, author and outdoor thrill seeker, sensed a kindred spirit when he first wrote an article on Christopher McCandless for Outdoor magazine. In pursuit of McCandless' essence, Krakauer travelled across America, and did not stop working on the story until years after he had completed the initial piece of journalism. The resulting book, Into the Wild, was one of the most popular pieces of adventure writing of the late twentieth century. Instead of sensationalizing McCandless brief story, Krakauer offered a humane depiction of a boy in search of the love of his life: the American wild. McCandless sought a transcendental experience; he perhaps did not quite find one, but Krakauer patiently salutes his journey nevertheless.

The most famous chapter in McCandless' life began when he graduated with honors at Emory University. He promised his parents he would apply to law school, but instead he donated $25,000 in savings to charity. He then shuffled off his identity and wandered off into the American West. He lightened his load with each step, and abandoned most of his possessions along the way. He ditched his car when it suffered a dead battery (but not before hiding the plates to prevent easy identification). After two years of wandering under an assumed identity, he hitchhiked to Alaska.

Krakauer does not merely trace the steps of this journey--he interrogates the psyche and soul of every person he can find who met Chris McCandless along the way. Among others, McCandless befriended a lonely widower in the deserts of Southern California, a foot-loose romantic couple, and a Midwest machine operator. He left his mark on many, and for someone who prided himself as an isolated and independent young man, he nevertheless seemed to pursue genuine connections with many human beings. But after many adventures, he decided to try his hand at yet another. Therefore he made his way north.

In April 1992 Christopher McCandless walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness. In an age without uncharted territory, McCandless refused to carry a good map, or any navigation or radio equipment whatsoever. He forced his way into ignorance in hopes of better surprising his senses; he sought to develop an anachronistic type of self-reliance. Moving along an old miner's trail, he eventually found shelter in an abandoned bus. He read a stack of paperbacks he brought with him into the wild, with authors like London, Pasternak, Thoreau, and Tolstoy, as well as lighter stuff like Crichton. He shot and ate small game. He dug up edible roots and vegetables. He was proud, but he was also lonely, and scared. In July, he tried to leave the wilderness, but a stream that ran chest-deep in April had, in the face of an incessant summer sun, grown into a river surging with glacier rot and snow melt. The raging waters blocked his path. There was no leaving the wilderness. He returned to the abandoned bus. He grew increasingly lean, as did his margin for error. In August, he ate potato seeds that seized his system like a vice, and left him severely weakened; he could no longer digest enough calorie intake for his bone-lean body to sustain itself. He starved to death.

McCandless had survived 112 days in the wilderness. Less than three weeks later, a group of Alaskans discovered his skeletal, lifeless frame tucked into his sleeping bag and resting quietly in the abandoned bus.

Jon Krakauer's biographical essay, Into the Wild, deservingly became a best seller, and launched Krakauer into the highest order of American outdoor writing. For Krakauer pursues the story of McCandless' life and death with relentless questions and carefully carved detail. He traces McCandless' journey, not only in Alaska, but from his childhood onward.

Krakauer's Chris McCandless comes across as earnest and insistent, but perhaps not very intelligent or mature. He read deeply of the aforementioned authors, but not very broadly, and perhaps missed out on many of the most beautiful lessons that reading can offer. The lessons of empathy, forgiveness, and justice never fully captured his efforts, nor his imagination. But Krakauer uses a number of tools to show the importance of McCandless, not just as a person, but within the complex fabric of human life. McCandless epitomizes endurance and youth, naïveté and education; he stared so intently at the stars, and listened so intently to the sound of the wind shifting across the plains, that he felt himself transported far beyond the place his feet touched the ground. He moved beyond himself, and so joined the panoply of reckless wanderers that have sought self-realization in the American west.

In a particularly marvelous series of chapters, Krakauer breaks free from the narrow confines of biography and places McCandless' experiences in conversation with others who have died in the wilderness, as well as those who have barely survived. He places McCandless somewhere between inebriated self-delusion and euphoric expression; McCandless, in Krakauer's assessment, most closely resembles a young monk that chose to abstain from society as part of a vigorous test of self-worth. He may not have always been wise, but he pursued wisdom.

Near the end of the book, Krakauer reveals McCandless' vulnerability to the most universal of sensations: the shock of discovering your parent's imperfections. The recognition of parental imperfections threatened two aspects of the self. First, it upset McCandless' appreciation for his parents' model of adulthood; second, it challenged McCandless' assumed ability to achieve his own ideals. After all, if his parents could not live up to the values they taught their son, how could he possibly hope to achieve his own ideal behavior? McCandless began to disdain his parents for masking the origin of their marital relationship (McCandless' father refused, for a time, to end one marriage before starting another), and for their American materialism as expressed in houses, cars, and expectations of education. An average boy might merely fidget through a period of adolescent angst, but to a distrustful idealist like McCandless, his parents' transgressions gave him the necessary fuel to break all ties and vanish into the American landscape. The severing of all traditional social bonds eventually cost him his life, but it was a life he did not mind spending. He traded his complicated, well-to-do East Coast life for a simpler one, but the exchange destroyed him. [I wonder if McCandless is the capitalist-democratic version of Faust--instead of trading his soul for luxury, knowledge, and power, he must trade his life for simplicity and self-reliance.]

Krakauer writes with spirit and understanding; he traces the contours of McCandless' mind, as well as the terrain through which he traveled. Perhaps most importantly, the author uses his own experiences as a mountaineer to relate the essential impulses of McCandless' actions, and thus humanizes McCandless' apparently anti-social behavior. McCandless, rather than joining the ranks of mythic wanderers, becomes the brother of our strengths and weaknesses as human beings.

Is it a tragedy? Not quite. The story of Chris McCandless is something of a romance, a romance in which his love, the American west, not only failed to return his affection, but never even acknowledged his existence. It killed him without stirring a muscle.

Peter Hall, Making an Exhibition of Myself. Oberon Books, 1993 (2000).
 
Great theater directors come in two varieties. The first type possesses a genius for artistic innovation and experimentation, often aggressively changing techniques and platforms with each passing year. The second type possesses a relentless drive for making a permanent mark on the institutional idea of ‘theater.’ As such, they get behind a range of long-term projects; they cultivate the careers of particular actors and playwrights, and they build new art houses. The second sort of great theater director must be an impresario, not just a director; they possess a multitudinous vision, not merely perspective. They take chances on material with gut instinct, but follow up success with unrivaled enthusiasm—they also quickly recover from failure, for they drop a project with little chagrin and often recognize a project’s chances of success better than anyone else.

Peter Brook, John Barton, and Julie Taymor fit into the first category. Their failures are often as colossal as their successes. The wide variability occurs because they follow up a failure as readily as a success—they cannot quite tell the difference between the two.  Their successes (and failures), however, are wholly unique and often require their presence to achieve ideation, much less consummation. The first type of genius makes for an exciting theater scene, the second type makes for a historically sustainable theater. ‘Sustainability’ is a boring word, but it implies a lasting contribution to art, not just to a moment.

Peter Hall fits into the second type—indeed he defines it.

Hall came into the world in 1932, born to Suffolk parents of agrarian stock. He first attended playhouses in the shadows of the Second World War, during which time he saw many of the actors he would soon direct crossing the boards of the Old Vic and the West End theaters. Hall proved to have a gift for piano and a gift for literature. His skills eventually brought him to Cambridge, but not before serving as a post-war skills instructor in the Royal Air Force. At Cambridge, he met a young don named John Barton, and together they honed their skills in verse and play analysis. Through luck and perseverance, Hall rose quickly in the professional ranks.

Perhaps his greatest stroke of luck came in 1955 when he directed the English premier of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The actors first thought of the play as a sort of prank, but rehearsal revealed ‘much comedy and a dark seam of terror.’ The notices that followed the premier decried it as the sort of foolishness that appeared in Berlin in the twenties. But Hall, though frightened, did not give up. His friend Peggy Ramsay encouraged him to request coverage from Harold Hobson, who provided a review that ‘developed into the kind of panegyric that theatre people imagine in paradise.’

The incident concerning Waiting for Godot is telling. Hall found pleasure in Beckett’s poetic language; he cajoled intuitive and convincing performances from the actors; met with critical resistance, he worked until he found a critic that championed the play. A Peter Brook would have surely staged the play as well, but Peter Brook might have been perfectly content with the miserable reception in the press. Hall worked tirelessly to bring about not just a play, but an event. And that is the difference between an impresario and a director.

His success with Beckett led to lasting relationships with Tennessee Williams and Harold Pinter, and eventually led him to founding the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Mid-career, he began directing opera productions, especially Mozart. He then moved to the Royal National Theatre, an institution that at one time threatened the existence of his first love, the RSC. He led the National through the silliness of the Thatcher years, when Whitehall rewarded each financially successful subsidized production with threats of decreased funding—Her Majesty’s Government at that time (as in ours) treated the subsidized theaters like crack addicts crawling out of the gutter rather than as the most successful artistic institution of modern times. Peter Hall, anyhow, persevered against the foolishness and left British theater in good shape for subsequent generations. The battle continues to this day.

Hall writes his autobiography with humor and surprising honesty. He laughs at himself, as well as others. He also places key moments in British theater into wider artistic perspective. To be sure, this is not a neophyte’s guide to the world of British theater. He expects his reader to know something about British drama; without that knowledge, many of the jokes pass by with little fanfare. For fans of British theater, the book proves rewarding. For theater artists of any ambition, the book proves indispensible. Hall provides personal accounts of developing some of the most important plays of the 20th century. He ably explains their place in his own life, and the effect they had on him and on British theater in general. When a play flops, he explains why, and usually blames the artistry rather than the press.

Hall pushes against short-sighted economic logic with his brilliant and honest brand of impresario logic. “Any theatre conducts its own very efficient market research every night of the year: if no-one comes, we know we should not have done the play, for a play without an audience is communicating nothing.” His statement represents more than logic, doesn’t it? It represents wisdom, and a profound understanding of his craft and purpose. Peter Hall possesses vision, not just perspective.

“In all this muddle,” he writes of the late 20th century, “it has been refreshing to work in the arts. Art is absolute. It provides unquestionable integrity and inescapable standards.”

And that is art’s indispensible purpose—to provide an idea of the good, and to suggest its possibility through aesthetic form, however implausible its achievement might be.

The book also depicts his five engagements and four marriages, but he writes too generously to let any lasting resentment creep into the book (though his feud with John Osborne might be an exception). One gets the sense that one knows Peter Hall. He fills the text with anecdotes, and sudden dashes from one story to the next. He structures the book with rapid-fire chapters that center on a single theme, supported with a few paragraphs.

The autobiography represents a great achievement, and an essential contribution not only to the history of theater, but to the major British cultural developments of the last sixty years.