What is Theatre Anyway?

Nothing gets my blood more riled up than thinking about the state of theatre, or rather the state of the discussion of the state/future of theatre. In the grand scheme of things, I generally see three sources of discussion on this topic. It comes from marketing/PR/Audience development, artistic directors and institutional thinkers (TCG, American Theatre Wing, etc), and writer/directors. The marketing people are the least connected to the practice of theatre and their thinking is usually geared toward facile analysis of audience trends and metrics for measuring the success of theatre. While I believe that it is important to consider the stated desires of audiences and to track how they spend money, it is important to remember that most audience members have no idea what they want until you give it to them (call it the Steve Jobs corollary), so it makes for less than useful diagnostic and programmatic thinking. Institutional types are fascinating because they take for granted the infrastructure of not-for-profit existence, such as governance boards, development costs, grant writing, etc. It's hard to take their thinking seriously since it is constrained so thoroughly by existing conditions. Given the circumstances, it's like being asked to create a brand new totally revolutionary budget car - you can't do it. You still end up with at least two doors, a steering wheel, an engine, four wheels at the corners, etc. You can still do amazing things within the constraints and it can still be productive to re-visit what you can do (there is a world of difference between a Kia Rio and a Tata Nano after all). Unfortunately, non-profits have much less room for experimentation because experimentation requires failure. A distressing fact about the future of anything is that it involves quite a lot of failure to get there, which commercial producers know and institutional producers experience, but only at a cognitive distance, because failure as an institution is much more painful than failure as a company, for a multitude of reasons. And, if you ask a writer/director about theatre, the odds are very good that you are going to get a spiel about words, bodies in space, and/or stories, which is all very well in theory. 

What I rarely see are production professionals, whether production managers or TDs or other production supervisors, talking about the future. In lighting, there are companies looking to sell new products, for example, but no one is attempting to sell a different business model. This is distressing because, while theatre at its barest essence is bodies in space (and words are optional), major not for profit regional theatres are not theatre at its barest essence and that is where people make a living in theatre (albeit a meager one most of the time). So how can we talk about the future of theatre, if we consistently leave out of the discussion (either in content or as participants) the people who actually make theatre happen.

This is baffling considering that well over 80% of my job as an electrician directly relates to the product my theaters put on stage. How is that not relevant? Forever left out of the discussions of the state of theatre is the fact that artisans such as myself are absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of theatre. It is incredibly sad that playwrights and other creatives don't get their financial due. Hell, as an electrician, I am better off, purely as a theatre worker because I don't need another job, outside of theatre, to sustain myself. I even get some benefits (which cause my wages to stagnate, but hey, that's true for everyone). I think the truest fact about the state of not-for-profit theatre today is that too much of the entire structure of not-for-profit theatre is not dedicated to the act of theatrical production. Too many theatres in this country are arts advocacy groups with theatres attached.

TCG does outstanding work as an organization dedicated to understanding the state of not-for-profit theatre in practical terms. Their most recent Theatre Facts broke down the overall budget for all reporting theatres and it is a very interesting chart.

The first thing that strikes me is that it does not break down easily into accounting for the cost of a show (which tells you that the people reading this document didn't need to know what part of the budget goes to production, which is fascinating). A couple things stand out as well. First, theatres spent more on marketing than on physical production (11.8 to 7.9). It costs more to advertise shows than to build sets. Second, and this will surprise precisely no one who has had wrangle a stage into becoming a set, facilities (and insurance, etc) themselves cost more than all physical productions. In many ways, New York's commercial model makes the most sense: be a producing company or be a theater owning company. You can only do both well if you work at enormous economies of scale. Owning your own space, especially if that space needs constant work, is a huge burden. Third, a bare majority (54%) of expenses are related to personnel (theatre is and always has been labor intensive) It is the breakdown of the expenses that is scary. 18.5% of that 54% went to artistic, 13.9% to production, and a whopping 20% of personnel expenses go to the administrative side. Some of those artistic payments must be to designers and directors. If you were to fold those expenditures into a budget for "shows" and include only those relating to actually mounting productions, what does that amount to? A back of the envelope calculation leads to something like 33-39% of expenses actually making it to the stage. It's not surprising then that it feels like production is left out of all these discussions. This is reflected all too often in the physical situation of the theatre. How many of the theatre's employees actually work on the stage, or even near it? How many times have you been in a full staff meeting where it was obvious that you have no contact with over half of the theatre's employees? Is it any wonder that theaters lose their way?

There is a sense in the non-profit world that being like a business is a bad thing, or at least, an irrelevant thing to an arts group, but this is wrong. Arts groups need to be like more like businesses in at least one way: they must learn to focus relentlessly on the product. Marketing will not save you, if you have a bad product. Innovative audience engagement will not work, if you have a bad product on stage. I would argue that the subscription model is deeply flawed because it keeps theatres thinking about the season as the product, rather than each individual show. It is no longer tenable to think this way and every piece of news about single ticket sales proves this point over and over again. The season is not the product, but a product line and each product in the line has to be at a certain level of quality. And yet, production is consistently undervalued and underserved at the macro level. If you want to start thinking about the future of theatre, I would start with the show itself. Like the man said. "The play's the thing."

What's a Plot Hole Anyway?

Let's just get the spoiler alerts out of the way. I am going to frankly discuss major plot elements of Prometheus and Mass Effect 3. I hope the title of the post has already suggested that I would do this, but you never know with people.

So, why write about plot holes? The occasion for these thoughts comes in the context of BioWare's June 26th release of the extended cut of Mass Effect 3, a move prompted by waves of fan unrest about the original ending. I don't think you can emphasize enough how crazy this is. The average budget for games like Mass Effect starts at $18 million. Mass Effect 2 seems to have cost in excess of $40 million. Forbes reported that BioWare's other big game, a Star Wars MMO called, wait for it, Star Wars: The Old Republic, cost over $200 million. We are talking insane money. It would be like fans forcing George Lucas to reshoot the ending to Revenge of the Sith (you know, if George Lucas gave a crap about what fans think). That is the scale of the revolt over Mass Effect 3's ending. The original ending was so unpopular that many people turned to Indoctrination Theory (that's just one of so very many links, Bing it or Google or whatever neologistic search term works for you) as a way of "making sense" of the ending.

I know that many of you do not give two craps about Mass Effect 3 and its millions of fanatics, but I think this brings up fascinating conundrums with the psychology of narratives. I'll come back to Indoctrination Theory (that's a different link to BioWare's own forums) in a bit, but before I lose all of my audience, let's talk a bit about plot.

The most basic metaphor for plot is that of a continuous line that connects event A with event B. A plot hole can, but does not have to, occur when there is a discontinuity in the line, either a small gap along the line, or the absence of a line altogether. Emotionally and intellectually satisfying plots invoke known sets of rules for cause and effect that are consistently applied over the course of a text (movie, book, game, whatever). That all sounds great in theory, but in practice, two problems occur. The first is that if the line you paint between A and B is too glowing, the plot becomes exceptionally dull. Sure everything is cohesive, coherent, and all that, but it's also too obvious. Games do this all the time (as do movies, of course), but games are enjoyable despite the narrative hand holding because you actually have to do something yourself to move the story along. The immersiveness of the narrative experience makes even the most banal plot interesting (at least, for a time). The second is that, in the most interesting stories, as in real life, the only truly consistent set of rules are those of the physical world, and we don't understand those very well. That means that people behave randomly, or irrationally, that expected and/or probable events don't occur and improbable ones do. This shouldn't really be a surprise because satisfying conclusions to plots involve the overcoming of obstacles and the resolution of conflicts. In writing circles, you will often hear things like "plot is conflict" and "a story where everyone gets exactly what they want is totally and utterly boring." In other words, there will always be discontinuities in good stories. It's a bit like Gödel's incompleteness theorem: in a mathematical system of sufficient power, there will always be a statement that says, in effect, this statement cannot be made in this system (a great book on the subject, if you want to follow up).

So, discontinuities in story are nearly omnipresent because most texts worth talking about avoid the glowing plot line problem and complex plots inevitably leave something out (even in video games that take 35 hours to complete). I'm sure that I haven't said anything that you don't already know. What I find fascinating, is the response to these gaps and discontinuities. When does a gap become a plot hole? I think this is almost entirely bound up in the viewer/reader/player's eyes. Not entirely, because a gap becomes a plot hole when event A and event B aren't related by the same narrative rules at all. Even surrealists like Dali find an underlying set of rules to go along with the regular rules of cause and effect they seem to be breaking. But when you break your own rules (like having a vampire frolic about in daytime even though that should kill them), you have certainly created a plot hole, which is a short hand way of calling something a mistake. It's like a plot typo. This is clearly an error, a mistake, a sign of a lack of quality.

But then there are movies like, I don't know, Prometheus (see what I did there?). There are a lot of things in Prometheus that are simply not explained, but that is not sufficient to call it a plot hole. Is it a plot hole that Weyland and David seem to have already contacted the Engineers, but still somehow utterly failed to understand the message? Is it a plot hole that David still needs to dope one of the scientists with the black stuff to see what happens, even though he knows how to open the canisters and what to expect in them? Does he expect Elizabeth Shaw to have sex and get pregnant with the alien thing? Why exactly does he do it? To me, this is all a bit of a Rorschach test. The gaps are deliberate and explanation is totally lacking. It isn't a plot hole then, nor is it a sign of poor quality, but rather, it's an actual attempt to mess with your mind as you struggle to assemble the pieces. It's more of a carefully drawn dotted line with precisely placed gaps than poor penmanship.

A more glaring example of something like a tradition plot hole happens at the end of Prometheus. An Engineer is taking off with a ship full of biological weapons, and the captain and crew of the science vessel crash into the Engineer to prevent him from escaping. You see the necessity of it, you understand why it is happening, but Sir Ridley didn't spend a whole lot of time developing the idea that the captain would take such action. It feels abrupt as a result. It's a discontinuity again and that raises the possibility of a contradiction in the rules. But since we don't actually get all the information, it is impossible to say whether the rules were contradicted or not, because we don't know the rules and we don't know all the events. It's entirely possible that this is just lazy and sloppy writing, as some believe (Ed. who knew Forbes had all this gaming and movie content, right?), but if you like Sir Ridley and Damon Lindelof (whose work on Lost could fill several more posts about plot holes and rules), then given their track record, it was probably done on purpose and not lazy at all. The difference is essentially one of perspective and it says so much about the nature of plot and perception. And that's why I find the response to Mass Effect 3 so very very interesting.

To be sure, Indoctrination Theory (no need to bother with a link this time) is infuriating as well as fascinating. Without getting too much into the Mass Effect (hereafter, ME because I am lazy) universe, the essence of it is this. The main character of the ME series is Commander Shepard. You have spent the past approximately 100 hours (if you played all three games) working to save the galaxy. You have overcome incredible odds and you stand in this giant spaceship face to face with epic decisions that all end with you dying, but also help you save the rest of the galaxy. You make your choice. You watch the results unfold (including a neat little tag with a character called the Stargazer voiced by none other than Buzz Aldrin) and you feel gipped. Gypped? Cheated, whatever. The choices are crappy. You, I mean, Shepard always ends up dying, and you don't even get to see what happens to the rest of the crew. You spend some time thinking about it and you decide, it's too improbable, large parts of this last conversation don't quite fit. It makes more sense, to you, that offending conversations never actually happened, not about the galaxy anyway; they are a metaphor. Shepard doesn't really make those choices for the whole galaxy, but for him/herself, as they lay dying on the battlefield (in the ME argot, Shepard doesn't just die, but gets harvested by sentient machines in a process called, and I hope you can see this coming, indoctrination).

In short, ME3's ending was so dissatisfying to a large number of people, that they dreamed up a theory that preserved the rules of a science fiction universe as they understood them, that allowed them to ignore the parts of the ending that contained too many discontinuities for them, but in the process sacrificed the entire emotional and narrative of arc of the rest of the series (remember at least 100 hours of gameplay) all in the name of "making sense." (at no point in the series is it every suggested that what you are doing, isn't actually happening, this isn't Silent Hill). That's like re-imagining Return of the Jedi as an hallucination in Luke's mind after Vader hurls him down the shaft into the second Death Star as the Rebellion dies with him just to avoid the chubchub song and Hayden Christensen's ghost. It is absolutely fascinating that in a game where you have seven to ten different races of aliens, faster than light travel, space ships of all shapes and sizes, energy weapons, psychic powers, and fully self-aware AIs, threatened by a race of sentient machines whose sole purpose is to harvest organic life and the part you don't buy into is the explanation of those sentient machines motivations by some kid of energy avatar. To me, this totally brings into question the nature of the phrase "to make sense of." But the power of narrative is such that, thanks to its inherent discontinuities, it is possible to create a completely different set of stories from the voids in the original story thanks to some fundamental urge and subconscious need to order a story into something actually satisfying, at least to you. It's stuff like this that brings me back to literary criticism over and over and over again: it isn't just the content of a work that is an endless source of interest, but the form of it, and the form of the response within ourselves. Hell, at some point, I must have done it as well, told myself an alternate story rather than accept the one I was given. (Hmm. I wonder if I am doing that with Prometheus. Nah, I'm definitely right about that one.) It's all a part of how we take control of stories. Once they're out there, they doesn't belong to its creators anymore. And we do some crazy stuff with them, don't we?