Leaving on the Midnight Train. Or More Probably, an Early Morning Flight

This afternoon, I told my sister news which I've known to be true for almost a year, and still the telling of it made me want to double over and breathe into a paper bag.

Yes, I'm leaving New York.

That I am leaving New York has been common knowledge since I stepped foot on its concrete terrain; the idea of living indefinitely so far away from my family - especially my sisters, one of whom the self-same of the above conversation - was too difficult to even consider. I made never made any pretense about making New York my permanent home; I always knew eventually I would have to go back to the southwest, to them.

And that I am leaving soon - like SOON soon - is common knowledge among most of those close to me. Including - not that it mattered - my family:

And so, somehow, more than knowing the lease on my apartment is going to be up at the end of September, more than figuring out what to do with my cat, more than creating and systematically checking experiences off of a "New York bucket list," more talking frequently with friends and colleagues about what will happen "when I go back," this - giving my family if not an exact date then a fairly narrow range of when I'll return - makes it real.

Because, the thing is, everything else I can back out of. I can tell my friends here in New York that I changed my mind! I can find a new apartment on Craigslist! But I cannot, cannot tell my family I'm coming home and then not come home.

I've been avoiding talking about the move on this blog (and with many of my theater colleagues) for similar reasons. I want to pretend that all those shows that are coming up in the winter? I'll get to see them. And all those amazingly cool theater people I've met online and in real life? I'll get to work with them all.

But I won't. (At least not soon - there's nothing to say I won't ever come back for a project.)

I'm leaving the first week of October. It's time to make it real.

I'm excited to move to a smaller community and start putting into action some of the ideas about local theater than I've been reading about and ruminating on for the past year or so. But I'm also devastated (and maybe terrified?) to be leaving a place where the mind-blowing theatrical experiences and brilliant theater-makers and collaborators are infinitely at hand.

I'm feeling an immense pressure to make the most, artistically speaking, of the time I have left here. Which is somewhat difficult and paradoxical, given that I don't actually have a show that I'm working on. But I am still trying to make the most of it.

What am I doing? Well, first (and foremost, I suppose) I'm trying to organize a sort of weekly space for experimentation where directors can bring scenes they've been working on or ideas they've been hatching for work, or observation, or commentary from the group. The idea is in structure a bit like Flux Sundays but geared more for directors than playwrights. The motivation for creating this group is almost entirely selfish: I'm itching to explore some of the ideas and techniques I learned in the Directors' Lab for one, and for another, I still have this hatchling of an idea for a production of Taming of the Shrew that I want to play around with and see where it goes without actually committing to a production. And I want to do both these things with collaboration and advice of some of the people I've met in New York - those amazing and insightful artists I was talking about earlier.

Secondly, but not unrelated to the first, I, along with some other Lab alumni, have been noodling around with the idea of creating some sort of collective, a little along the lines of 13P to basically confront the problem that the only way emerging directors have to do work in the city is to self-produce, and to find an efficient way of offering producing support to one another. This is obviously less selfishly motivated, as I won't be around to see the fruits of my labors, but for some reason I can't quite explain, even to myself, it's really important to me to do this. To feel I had some hand in creating a more sustainable way for young artists like me to do their work - to think that I might have had this support if I stayed.

And then, of course, just seeing LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of theater. I'm determined to be so diligent that I will consider any week that I didn't see at LEAST one show, preferably two or three, a wasted week. This past week I saw Purple Rep's Ampersand at the NYC Fringe and the Drilling Company's Hamlet at Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

So there it is. Guess it's real now.

Connectivity and Possibilities

I saw Better Left Unsaid this past weekend, right from the comfort of my own couch, and it got me thinking about a lot of things.

The live-streamed play was, to put it simply, just really cool. It was a totally unique way of seeing a performance, and it was executed extremely well. The streaming was smooth and high quality, and the use of the three cameras that shot the production was engaging and dynamic, but unobtrusive enough that I never lost the feeling that that I was watching a play as opposed to another filmed medium.

The interactive features were great touches; the Twitter comments worked well, and I loved getting a tour of backstage, and watching the chats with the actors and tech people.

And, I have to admit, it was really, really nice to be able to support my colleagues from the comfort of my own home.

Watching the production ignited some flames of ideas that had been kindling since taking part in the #newplay discussions: one of the things that excited me most about the discussions about collaboration and connectivity that came out of the convening was the possibility of using new connective technology to collaborate across geographical boundaries. I touched on this briefly in another #newplay post, but Better Left Unsaid has got me considering the actual, specific ways to use this technology to our advantage as artists.

Because as exciting as internet connectivity is to me, it leaves me with a sort of conundrum. What I love about theater, what sets it apart from every other art form, is the liveness of it. There is nothing quite like actually being in a room with the art as it's being created. There's an immediacy to it, and a sense of community that is inherently lost when you put someone miles away and behind a computer screen.

It's definitely an amazing thing to join in a nationwide, or even worldwide conversation about art. But what about actual making and experiencing of the art? The question of how to reconcile the possibility of connective technology with theater's need for immediacy intrigues me, so I started jotting down some ideas.

This is all really rough - nothing cohesive or fully formed about any of it yet. But I thought I'd start thinking and sharing nonetheless.

A couple of shows I remember hearing about that have connective possibilities:

The Lysistrata Project. Does anyone remember when the Iraq war first started and, in protest, schools all over the country participated in performing Lysistrata at the same time? I remember because both my old high school and my college participated.

• What if you live-streamed all of the productions at the same time? Or had a website where you could access all of the productions at any time?
• You could coordinate with other productions in other areas to realize same artistic vision in multiple places.
• Or the opposite: connect w/ other creative teams in other places to make each production distinctly different. Or some combination of the two, e.g., certain ideas or design elements are agreed upon by all creative teams, but within the structure, a certain degree of creative autonomy? Or - each team charged assigned a different approach to design or given a different theme to explore within the same work.
• Really like the idea in general of presenting the same show in tandem across the country for the purpose of making a particular point or reaching a goal.
• Like! What if - if we were talking about Lysystrata, say - you could tweet to the White House or your representatives while you were watching it, or there were links shown (on the website, or even live too) about how to get involved. Or a hashtag, to create a dialogue, with a running account of the conversation?

The recent performance of Antigone that I read about, but didn't see where they used Facebook, Twitter and/or YouTube as the chorus.

• Imagine it was all scripted and taped, but is there anyway to use that as a connecting point? A greek chorus, say, streamed in from 12 different parts of the world?
• Relatedly, what about the possibility of exploring characters or story elements that that can be told/seen/experienced remotely?
• Or! The same story, told from two different points of view, in two different places - in both places you see one angle live, and other live-streamed, and vice versa... does that make sense?

Some other ideas.

• Two shows in repertory in two different places: the first one is live, the second, live-streamed.
• The same show, but some scenes or acts shown live, some streamed from different places.
• You could do it exquisite corpse style, where each creative team gets the script (or maybe just a portion of the script) w/ no communication and see what happens.
• Or the opposite: extreme collaboration - skyping in to one another's rehearsals - online production meetings - maybe even live actors communicating with streamed actors on stage.
• That last one - live actors communicating with streamed actors on stage - could also be applied to the idea of telling the same story from two points of view in two different places.
• Live-streamed play readings or workshop forums via Twitter.

Oh man. I didn't expect it, but I'm actually really excited about a lot of these ideas. There is definitely a project in here somewhere.

If anybody has any stories of a collaboration over distance that worked out well, or other ideas to keep building on, I would absolutely love to hear them. Or, if anybody is interested in thinking more about/putting into motion any of the above ideas, I definitely want to talk to you.