Andrew Gombas in On The Y-Axis by Lucas Baisch
Content warning: profanity
The theatre is not a safe space. Consider: above, heavy, hard, and hot instruments cling to their mounts for dear life. Below, freshly painted reconstituted wood temporarily assembled by underpaid laborers in the dead of night. Around, clouds of vapor ranging from a foggy mist to a misty fog, punctuated by bouts of blinding light or pitch darkness, in which people and objects move at lightening speed. Out there, the honorable General Public and his seven colonels: Grumpy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Happy, Obliged, Latecomer, and Critic. With you on stage, professional liars in pursuit of The Truth. On your body, someone else’s clothes. In your mouth, someone else’s words. In your brain, free fall. In your heart, the most pure and sweet little song that could ever be sung.
The theatre is not a safe space, and for some unlucky lucky people, it is the best place in the world. I am not just talking about actors, but about all of us—about me—who choose and re-choose to do this unreasonable thing at inconvenient times for little to no tangible reward. Some people, after a while, stop re-choosing the theatre and instead spend their time doing things like project management or marketing or podcasts or parenting or teaching or nothing. Or maybe they choose the theatre some of the time and some of the time they don’t. These choices should be applauded because it is very difficult to leave a dangerous lover.
But for those that are in the theatre, which is not a safe space, I have a sincere wish that they leave in a better state than they entered. That the theatre not only does not injure them (which really feels like a low bar, but the world is still working on “Only have sex with people who want to have sex with you,” which is a bar that should be within everyone’s grasp, but alas…) but that the theatre can help people be better.
The best protective tool against injury is awareness. If you see the crack in the sidewalk, you’re much less likely to trip on it. Also, if you are the crack in the sidewalk, you have to be aware of that. With awareness comes responsibility, and as a director, I think that one of my primary responsibilities is sculpting awareness in my collaborators, my audience, and myself. Maybe the alchemical combination of awareness and responsibility with the addition of action is care.
This is easy to say from my place of relative privilege. But I also think that it is easy to say that you care from a place of privilege while lacking its component parts: awareness, responsibility, and action.
When I think of the wrongs that have been done in the theatre, wrongs that have injured people that I know, wrongs that I have wrought, I think of these things. I wonder why someone wasn’t aware that it would come off that way, why someone else didn’t take responsibility for their own impulses, why another person chose not to act when it was needed. I wonder these same things about myself. Often, when encountering a moment in performance that sits somewhere on the continuum between poor taste and violently offensive, I think to myself: they didn’t care enough.
Caring is good dramaturgy. You must have awareness of the systems of meaning that you build into your made-up world, stand behind them as a creator of said world, and put the whole ecosystem into motion. One a practical level: care where the chair goes, and you by extension care where the person goes. Care that the work (the people!) can be seen and heard (and felt, smelled, and tasted, if you’re working in those media.) Care that people can come to your work by removing physical, economic, and informational barriers. Caring will make you a better artist. You don’t have to like it to care about it. You don’t have to like them to care about them. Care harder, care better, care faster, care stronger, care more about the people than you do about the things. In Taylor Mac’s words, care more about the verbs than you do about the nouns. In my riff on those words: care more about the doing than you care about the done.
And,
It is not a sin to fail.
We are constantly failing.
I’m probably failing myself this very instant in three to five ways.
I’m certainly failing other people this very instant in more than five ways.
I fail our planetary future every time I use a plastic fork or drive to school because I’m running a little late or I’m tired or it’s cold outside or I just don’t feel like biking.
So what do we do?
What do we do when we fail to care well enough?
If each person, over the course of becoming an adult person, grows a certain number of fucks, and we dedicate each fuck to a certain cause or task or person until we have no fucks left, it would not be wrong to say, when said person was confronted with a certain cause or task or person that had no fucks dedicated to it, that they didn’t give a fuck.
Recommit your fucks to the theatre.
If you’re going to do theatre, you might as well give a fuck. I think you should give several. We have all seen a lot of theatre made without enough fucks given, or the fucks have been poorly distributed. It is bad. Theatre without enough fucks is way worse than theatre without enough money. If you’re feeling pessimistic about the state of The Theatre and don’t feel like donating your fucks to it when it calls, give your fucks to the people that make the theatre. They’ll know what to do with them.
Maybe making theatre without injury is really making theatre worth giving a fuck. Because accidents, missteps, microaggressions, macroagressions, misrepresentations, bad days, and injuries happen. But, wouldn’t it be better if it was a noun that injured you and not a verb?
Helping people to get better:
That doesn’t mean happier.
Or more comfortable.
Or nicer.
Or richer.
Or whiter.
“Better” is a great word because it is inherently subjective and relative. It’s slippery and personal. Delicious.
If “giving a fuck” is about craft, and I think it is, “better” is about art.
“Better” is what I get to say in the rehearsal room as a scene coalesces in front of me. “Better” is the collection of small dreams I get to have when I read a play. “Better” is the breath I want the audience to breathe in the blackout before curtain call. “Better” is my gift, from the people that made me to the people that I meet.
What I love about art and artists is that my “better” is different from yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. And yours. What a buffet of “betters” we have around this table. Lucky us.
My personal “better” looks something like this:
I want people to be together, better. The never-ending task of togethering is the pilot light of my artistic practice. Something greater than the sum of its parts is produced when people come together, when people are present with one another. This substance can take the form of a cum-by-yah nude maypole moment, but it can just as easily look like a sit-in as it can a lynch mob. This is a powerful chemical, this meaning—oop! I named it! Meaning making happens between people, and though they don’t have to be in the same room to produce it, being physically together can certainly concentrate meaning.
We live in a world with simultaneously unimaginable abundance and unthinkable scarcity. Our cultural systems teach us in many ways that other people are not invested in our individual survival, and that might be true. So we burrow into ourselves while projecting another self into the public space. We are lonely. I am lonely. I want to make theatre that gives a person a chance to do something in the company of other people that requires complicity on many levels, a balm on the persistent rash of loneliness.
There are really very few public health problems that I think I could have a significant positive impact on. In most cases, I draw the line at washing my hands and getting a flu shot. However, loneliness has been identified as a looming epidemic, under the more DSM-friendly sounding, “social isolation.” I believe that theatre is a treatment for loneliness, but not in its predominant current form.
To get theatre FDA-approved as a treatment for loneliness, two main things must happen: theatre must give audiences access and it must acknowledge them once they are present.
No performance is going to be 100% accessible, but more performances can more accessible. Working on accessibility is to remove barriers to the performance, both for the people making the show as well as the people attending it. Generally, accessibility is seen in converse relationship to disability: ramps for wheelchair users, for example. (Just a moment to note that many “accessibility” features are useful to people of all abilities. Everybody can use a ramp!) However, there is a plethora of logistical, social, economic, geographic, linguistic barriers that are in place at most American Theatre Institutions that must be reckoned with. This is not to mention a notion of artistic accessibility: is this show made for someone who already knows theatre? Who already knows this play? We really have to ask, over and over, who is this for? Because inside of that question lies who it is not for.
Acknowledging the audience has two layers. One of them is easy. THE FOURTH WALL IS PRETEND. IT IS NOT THERE. Punch a hole in it. Build a window. Shit, install some French doors. If the very foundation of your play rests on the conceit that the audience doesn’t exist, then why is it a play and why should they show up? I wouldn’t show up to a party if everyone pretended I didn’t exist once I got there. You don’t even have to have an Our Town-style meta-theatrical Stage Manager in your play, just like, have the actors look at us, not through us. They can talk to us, not past us. You’re already having everyone stand in ¾ position so that we get a nice view of all the actors crotches and you’ve choreographed the reveal of the prop so that we can see it—the step is so, so, so, little and it’s right there. The second layer of this is harder, because American culture (and also most other cultures) has taught us that some people don’t get to be people. That translates to people not getting to be people in a theatre audience—that is, given time and space to see a show that helps them understand their personhood. As theatre makers, this is our responsibility, and we need to take it seriously, because there is an EPIDEMIC.
My theatre is not a safe space, but with all the fucks I can muster, it is a place where every person gets to be a person, and every person leaves a better person. It is a place of tender togethering, of surprises that feel like plunging into a cold lake, it is welcoming and demanding, and it is care-full and failing. My theatre sees you, and then winks. My theatre wants you to wink back.
