A Disreputable Setting

New York City is a ghost town.

Come to the Provinces if you're looking for adventure. You'll need to pack another hustle when you come. And some sensible ass kicking shoes.

You might end up in place like Austin, Texas. There's also one called Portland, Oregon. Someone named some other places: Pittsburgh, Montgomery, Akron, Juno, Seattle, and then there's Detroit, named by Indians or the French. In the tradition of borrowing names from English places there's Durham, North Carolina. None of these are named New York City.

Don't be embarrassed.
It’s not 1952.

Let's say you find yourself teleported the several thousand miles to Durham. This is a feasible location for the making of things: modest rent, plentiful artists, audiences suckled on a nourishing pap of NPR and post-graduate study, and miles and miles of Loblolly pines ready to be sawed down into scenery.

There's paint here too.

One thing you might not be used to is that many people say the word “Yes” here. Or “Yeah” or other unfamiliar affirmatives (see: “Awesome Possum”). You may hail from a place where empty spaces and unused props stay that way. Where people work to guard the sanctity of Anti-Art. Where every gallery features installations titled Empty Rooms/Arid Spaces.

This Wilderness is not like those places. This is a fairyland of discovery and weird shit.

Want to make a play or a movie? So does everyone else! You won't have trouble finding a parking place while you do it.

The French call them "pocket theatres" which sounds naughty, and often they are. The tickets are less than $80 but somehow there are still characters and a plot. Unless you don't like those. Some come without (see: The Short Plays of Samuel Beckett).

The tickets are less than $80 but somehow there are still characters and a plot. Unless you don't like those.

Looking for a stable gig on stage?
Two words: Cruise Ship.

Humans used to create plays in New York City and films in Los Angeles but then Evolution brought a great Frost. Or perhaps it was the Lava. Neander-Artists, locomoting upright with rudimentary cordless tools, crossed the District of Pre-Colombian Straits to the badlands West while Pro-Magnons roamed East, guided by the lights of Vegas. Pretty soon there were tribes of hunter-gatherers in all imaginable ecosystems. They developed stationary, agriculturally-defined communities, giving birth to Community Theatres where Neil Simon and Stephen Sondheim were worshipped as gods. On the other side of town churches arose and created their own entertainments that featured jubilant singing, ecstatic dancing, and the abolition of curse words. Their gods included Tyler Perry and M.A.H. (Musicals About Hats).

And it was good.
And no one was harmed in their making.

Still later a new species of crustacean evolved. Scuttling, soft-shelled Art Theatres began to appear. The glaciers had scraped some of the shale-plated stigma of experimentation away from certain profit-based landmasses. Modern tools including Ideas and Images began to replace the sympathetic magic of Pure Amusement and The Forgetting of Sorrows. The rise of the Leisure Class and Rootless Cosmopolitans allowed for work to be made that was more about the Experience than the Understandable.

It turned off a lot of people.
Most of it was terrible. Just stinky. Bad.
But a small percentage of this aberrant mutation was decent.
In fact it was pretty good.

And so you find yourself in an oasis of deep mutation like Durham. One could crow about its many signs and wonders but that would downplay its link in the dynamic chain of Creation. As this is being written (in rumpled pajamas) the Once Laudable Elements will be dead and pruned away. By the time you read this (in a time-scarred Starbucks) new, inconceivable limbs will be in bloom. This offering is already the chipped cuneiform of archaic ideas.

Durham, North Carolina.
A Disreputable Setting.