the art of producing

In Cuernavaca, in the spring, I went to an open house at a theater called Foro La Negra. There was a roundtable discussion with a group of actors, including Salvador Sánchez, who I later learned had founded Foro La Negra, and Marina di Tavira.(1)

After the charla we were served a lunch of chilaquiles. A woman came around and cleared our plates, and we asked her if she knew the director of the theater.

“I’m the director” she said. She introduced herself as Yolanda. We chatted a moment more. I explained that I had produced theater in New York for 25 years and that I would like to work with them. Her face lit up. We talked a bit about what I could do; I stumbled through “construir escenarios, o vender boletos, no importa, cualquier que necesitan” and she replied, “You can teach us how to produce. Because we don’t know how to do that.”

I have my doubts about that. In any case, my imposter syndrome kicked in before she finished speaking. I may be writing a book about producing theater, but the interior voice says I don’t know a damn thing about it. I have no formal training in any of this; the last theater class I took was “Baby Drama” at Kenyon, when we still used whale oil to light the stage. In Falconworks’ first “big” production, Out of the Bag - probably the first one where I was listed as “Producer” - I was mostly along for the ride, getting people lunch and selling tickets out of a cigar box.

Over 25 years, you pick up some things. I got better. I also got some training in project management from my banking life, and producing theater is essentially an extremely specific and simultaneously wildly expansive kind of project management. You have an objective, a start date, an end date, a budget and a group of people who want to make the thing happen, and you sit down and start figuring out how to make the thing happen.

Probably that was more or less how the Foro La Negra people learned; maybe a similar history and imposter syndrome lay behind Yolanda’s suggestion that I could teach them how to produce. As I walked home, I reflected that whatever the case, whatever I do know, I don’t have any idea how to tell someone how to do what I did. (Much less tell someone in Spanish how to do it.)

As I walked, I got to thinking about what I might tell Yolanda, or anyone else, about how to produce theater. I started to think about what a syllabus would look like. What follows is not that syllabus; I still don’t know what that would look like. It’s more an attempt to organize my undisciplined thoughts into something like a theory.

The job of the producer is whatever it takes to make the show happen. Sometimes that’s finding money. Sometimes it’s saying, no, you may not spend that money. Sometimes it’s resolving a dispute between an actor and a designer. Sometimes it’s going to a hardware store so you can buy a coat hook for the dressing room. Once I spent all night trimming self-adhesive labels and pasting them on postcards we were about to mail because we had spelled a kid’s name wrong.

Sometimes, producing theater is just holding the damn thing together with your two hands while everyone else is in the throes of a breakdown, because they’re artists and you’re normal.

The greater challenge is, doing those things within budgets. Within limitations. The financial budget is the obvious one, and the easy one (as long as you set aside some money for “other things that are going to come up that are unexpected and totally out of our control and also totally necessary”).

More challenging: budgeting time and space. You have a certain number of weeks before opening night. You have a certain number of hours in the rehearsal room; a certain number of other hours in the performance space. You have other things to get done: build and install a set, maybe; hang lights; fit costumes for actors; meet and talk about how to hold the damn thing together or how this unexpected expense came up and we have to cut something else. You have to work out compromises with the director and the designers and the tech director. And sometimes beg the venue to break their rules, and occasionally ask forgiveness instead of permission. (And know how many times you can get away with that last thing, which is itself a kind of budget.)

That’s obvious, too.

The less obvious question, the one you learn only by doing, is: What are we capable of?

Because look, if you have unlimited money, time, space, you can do anything. It’s one of the things that makes most movies in the present age boring. With an unlimited budget for CGI, a producer can put actors anyplace in the world, at any time in history, anyplace in the universe in the future. The result is spectacular and rarely inspires wonder - it’s wonderless, actually. When is the last time you went to a movie and asked, or cared, “How did they do that?”(2)

Even in live performance, you can buy your way spectacle. You can bring in Julie Taymor and run for 180 previews and replace actors after they’re maimed by your ambitious stunts, and still open and welcome an audience, and even please some of them. None of that guarantees success, let alone great or even mediocre art.

(Reminder for those who haven't been following along: Hammett’s definition of “art” is that which requires the audience to share in the construction of meaning. If there’s meaning in Spiderman - the Broadway show or the movies - that meaning is served to audiences ready-made alongside their $10 sodas.(3) That doesn’t by itself make those the show or the movies bad. I’m an inept enough snob that I’ve enjoyed myself at many a theme park show. It just makes the production something other than an artistic endeavor.)

What are our actors capable of? What are we capable of technically? Given the set and the the lighting and everything else that we want, do we have the people capable of creating those things?(4) And do we have the other people who can operate the lights and execute the scene changes and keep costumes in order and manage a cast of ten or twelve or twenty actors. Or can we find them?

And all of this is a negotiation. Anybody can do a budget.(5) A lot of people can sketch out a project plan. But sometimes, in response to the questions above, the answer is “no,” and at other times, it may not be no, exactly, but it might be, “How are we going to do that?” Because it’s not merely a goal, it’s an absolute requirement to get to yes. To say, “We can’t do what you’ve imagined - what if we did this instead?”(6)

They like to call these “soft skills.” Which is funny, because that was always the hardest part of the job.

In my first post looking back at my years with Falconworks - the one that started this journey looking back at twenty-five years of making theater - I described the moment when the light board operator we’d found sat down at our dimmer board, completely confused. We had a lighting board with sliders. It was capable of handling levels for sixteen different groups of instruments, or if you preferred two sets of eight levels so you could fade or jump from one look to the other. Our operator - his name is long forgotten, fortunately - wanted a computer; he wanted to program cues and tap a button to progress through the show. And, yes! You can do way more with computerized cues. You can fade the light on a sixty-four count, if you want, or lightning-fast; you can jump from one cue to the next to the next without having to fiddle with a bunch of switches; if the show calls for bombs going off - as one of those kids’ plays that was set during World War I did - you can flash nice red explosions. On cue, as they say.

A programmed set of cues frees you to pay attention to multiple tasks. It helps you avoid getting distracted by the action on stage and forgetting to set your next scene, or accidentally bumping the “blackout” button and throwing everything into darkness. It should be easier.

On the other hand, those programmed cues are a challenge when a thirteen-year-old actor skips half a scene and you suddenly have to figure out where in the script they landed. You probably don’t have time to reprogram the whole board when you discover during dress rehearsal that you overloaded a circuit and need to rearrange three instruments and run them on a different channel. When your light board operator turns out to be a flake incapable of catching the B-61 bus, it’s useful to be able to turn to someone who’s not versed in programming cues and show them how and when to move a slider up and down.

What were we capable of, in the context of our “Off the Hook” program where the tech budget was about five hundred bucks, including people and equipment and gaff tape? We were capable of using our fourteen lights and four dimmer packs - one with four outlets taped off and “NO” written across them - and a board with sixteen sliders and a blackout button. We were capable of finding a young person from the neighborhood and saying, “This is how this thing works - do you think you can handle it?” We were capable of repairing the situation, and laughing about it, probably along with our audience, when things went sideways.

We weren’t, as it turned out, capable of hiring a light board operator who could work under those circumstances. For that matter, we had hired someone who wasn’t especially happy to work under those circumstances, despite her considerable skills. She was capable of a lot - way more than me, in most of the usual respects you think about when you picture a theater production - but not so capable of flying by the seat of her pants.

A still less obvious question is: What is our audience capable of?

That sounds snobby. So to phrase it better, what are we capable of presenting that our audience will enjoy and understand and come back for more of? What do they want, and what - to the extent we can know this - do they need out of theater?

Or, for a theater with a project - a mission, as the not-for-profit people say - where is the place where we meet our audience members and offer them an opportunity to grow? I guess that’s not a requirement. You can present Spiderman, or anything else that will make the audience laugh and cry and forget what they just saw ten minutes after they walk out the door. There’s a place for that - I like a good theme park show! It just wasn't what we were interested in doing at Falconworks, and my sense is it’s not what Yolanda and the folks at Foro La Negra are after, either.

This is such a challenge that I’m not sure anyone has ever figured it out. There are a couple theaters I could name that have come close, for a while. We came close, for a while, but not consistently. But it’s easy to chase ticket sales, on the one hand, and lose track of the thing that made your work interesting. Or it’s easy to chase the thing that you think makes your work interesting, and discover that what interests you is less compelling to the public than you might want to believe.

It’s not different from any other art form. Michelangelo probably had patrons saying, no, not that, just make another David. Only better.

In any case: I’m setting this question aside for the moment. I’ve been struggling with how to think about it and write about it for months now.

As usual, art can reveal the reality of producing theater better than one - or at least I - can explain it directly. The best depiction I’ve seen of producing theater - maybe the only good depiction I’ve ever seen, maybe the only work that has ever gotten it right - appears in the movie Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance). I’ve talked about this many times before; apologies if I’m repeating myself.

I obviously don’t know whether you’ve seen Birdman, or whether you remember it if you have. In case you haven’t or don’t, Michael Keaton and Ed Norton play actors at different points of their careers. Keaton’s character Riggan is self-financing a Broadway show to make his big comeback, and Zach Galifianakias plays his friend Jake, whom Keaton has brought in as producer.

Galifianakias’s Jake is holding the damn thing together while everyone else is spinning out of control, surrounded by crazy people. I mean, Keaton’s Riggan and Norton’s character Mike would probably qualify as clinically insane. But even if not, they’re recognizable to someone who’s been a producer of performing arts. 

There’s a scene in Birdman - probably several scenes, actually - when Jake is at his wits’ end. Everyone around him is bat-shit crazy and having literal fistfights and screaming at each other. There’s a drummer banging away like a ticking clock and also like a headache that won’t let Jake focus on the thing he needs to focus on.(7) He’s trying to keep both Riggan and Mike from quitting or from killing each other or from driving everyone else away, and to get the show to opening night, and it looks completely impossible.

I sat in the movie theater and thought, Thank. God. Someone gets it. Somebody understands what I have to deal with. For a moment, it made me feel normal, in the same way that I felt seen when a business owner in the New York Times wrote a column about how he decided which bills to pay in any given month.

Spoiler alert here: If you haven’t seen Birdman, rent it now and then come back.

The movie rolls on, closer and closer to opening night. Eventually we reach a scene where Riggan goes out to have a smoke during a gap in a preview performance, and finds himself locked outside the stage door. He’s wearing only a robe, which gets caught in the door and tears, and he ends up having to walk through Times Square in unflattering white briefs to get to the theater’s front door. He walks through the audience and up onto the stage in time to deliver his line, still in his underwear, pointing his thumb and finger in place of a prop gun. The audience, naturally, are shocked and amused. They take pictures on their smartphones.

And Riggan stands there and delivers his lines and plays his part with as much resolve and integrity as any actor ever has.

And so, shortly after thinking, “Finally, somebody understands,” I realized how little I understood. Every day, actors and directors go into the studio, go onstage, whatever kind of theater they’re making, and piece-by-piece strip themselves naked, and rip open the most intimate parts of themselves. They find their darkest traumas and relive them. It’s worse than that: They prepare, they create the work, knowing that they’re going to exploit those traumas by showing them off to the world. Somehow that doesn’t stop them. 

That is the great gift that that actors - any kind of performing artist really, maybe any kind of artist period, but for now actors - that’s the gift they offer. And it’s hard. Of course it makes them crazy. Of course they are unreasonable. They spend all their waking hours thinking about how to lay themselves bare - to themselves, and then to us. At least, if they’re making honest art, that’s what they’re doing. If they’re getting after the truth - some truth, their truth - that’s what they're doing. 

The job of the producer is to do everything possible to hold a space for artists to do that.

I should stop there; that's the money quote. But one more thought, and I will pat myself on the back here, just a little bit. Producing theater is hard. And there is no try.

Later in the afternoon, after I met Yolanda at Foro La Negra, my co-producer Stephanie and I were texting about Enemy of the People, how completely impossible it was, and how nevertheless we somehow made it happen. I had been looking at the pictures of the space donated for our show, which were taken maybe four weeks before opening night, and they were horrifying. Way more horrifying than I remembered.

We chatted a bit about the spectacular rabbit we pulled out of that hat. Stephanie, told me again, as she does, that I need to let go of my imposter syndrome. And then she wrote: “... what you do is a different kind of art.”

Invariably while producing a show I would reach the point where I would want to quit. It would look like everybody else was having fun, whether they were or not, while I was hustling for money or begging some government official to give us a permit, or telling people they couldn’t have a helicopter land onstage so figure something else out, and doing everything else to get the show on its feet.

Whatever that event was that made me want to quit - it was usually either some unexpected expense I was suddenly putting on a credit card, or the argument that ensued when I wouldn't put an expense on a credit card, although once it was a horse - whatever that thing was, its handmaiden was doubt.

The purpose for doing everything it takes to put on a show becomes less and less convincing the more challenges one runs into. The longer the list of expenses extends. The more frequent the trips to Home Depot become, as you no longer have the time to figure some problem out and just have to buy your way out of it. The greater intensity of your arguments with the artists creating the show - and sometimes the way they become less verbal - because each of you is wrestling with some other important problem that isn’t resolving itself, and you need to vent your anxiety on an inane topic like how to dress the box office table.

All these things would pile onto each other, and I would ask myself why we were doing all this. And I would walk out of tech rehearsal, light a cigarette, and spend a minute finding my faith again, finding the will to go back inside.

There is absolutely nothing practical about making theater. Every post I am writing about it, like every grant application I wrote, simply represents an ongoing effort to justify - I don’t know, Milton had a phrase about it. Or maybe cummings did. Or Ferlinghetti.

I would stand on the sidewalk and consider for the length of a Marlboro all those people behind me, in that auditorium, creating beauty and meaning out of thin air, firm in their belief that it mattered. I would spend every hour I was working on a show doing the worldly requirements of that completely impractical task. It was all practical shit, what I was doing; figuring out wiring and arguing with people about money and wrangling volunteers and coordinating when the rental company was going to pick up the risers. And in the back of my mind, pounding at me like Birdman’s drummer, that question: Why are we doing this?

I really still have no idea. I just know that other people believed.

The job of the producer is to do everything possible to hold space for artists to create. The art of producing is protecting the substance of things hoped for, trusting in the evidence of things not seen.

If you can find a way to do that, you can handle the rest.

(1) I wrote a sentence or two about Salvador Sánchez here.

(2) For me, probably The Matrix. You want to see a great “special” effect? Watch the opera scene from The Talented Mr. Ripley. Putting an old-fashioned theater trick in a film almost makes me think they’re commenting on something.

(3) The animated Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse excepted. Those are a joy and a blast and more full of rewards than one can comprehend in a single viewing.

(4) The old project managers’ saying “Two women cannot produce a baby in four and a half months” applies here, as does my newly invented corollary, “Only occasionally can one woman produce two babies in nine months.”

(5) Not anybody.

(6) I suspect this is where Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark went so sideways. Every account of that show was that it had a director - or someone - who was trying to achieve impossible things, demanding more of actors and other artists than they could provide, and nobody was willing to say no in a way that enabled them to get to yes. So Taymor or the someone(s) got their way, the budget skyrocketed, actors got hurt, and critics savaged the enterprise.

(7) At moments, director Alejandro Iñárritu actually put a drummer onscreen. Antonio Sánchez created the score, and then another drummer named Nate Smith performed it in the scenes - and then Sánchez had to re-play it in the recording studio to match Smith’s beats exactly. The Wikipedia article explains how they executed this. What a choice.