Opt In

My parents were just at my home in Chicago for a weekend as our family came together to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. It was a lovely weekend but per usual I managed at least one inappropriate social contribution. As we were sitting around the breakfast table one morning my dad said something about there being no great singers since Mario Lanza and my mom started a sentence with “Movies today….” I erupted with something along the lines of “Don’t you think it’s time you two joined the twenty-first century?” Of course, often my rampages directed at my family are related to other frustrations and in this case that comment was a direct result of something gnawing at me about working in the theater, especially that branch we call “big institutional theater.” So sorry, Mom and Dad, that I took it out on you.

When I was running the Playwrights’ Center in Minneapolis, one of the many mistakes I made as a leader was choosing not to opt in to learning anything I didn’t think I had to learn. My reasoning was what I’ve heard from many artists in leadership positions—I have enough on my plate. For me this failure to opt in was usually related to technology, it was something I thought I could live without understanding. I accepted that I needed to be functional, even capable, but don’t bother to show me the “how” of it; my mind would shut down. And so the second apology in two paragraphs goes out to Kevin McLaughlin who supported this bad habit for many years at the Playwrights’ Center.

But what I learned about my bad behavior, after I decided to correct it, was that by choosing not to opt in I had done at least three unforgivable things:

1. I ceded power over the messaging of the organization to others in the organization, and by doing so, lost a handle on the relationship between my personal vision and its public articulation.
2. I perpetuated a profound misunderstanding of what it took to make the “how” of technology happen. For example, I would say “Let’s start a blog” and then sit back and wait, expecting a blog to appear in the next hour. Things we don’t know how to do, that we are in power to authorize others to do, don’t seem like a big deal. I was always frustrated by how slow things were moving and thought I could do it faster—except I didn’t know how to do it!
3. I perpetuated the notion that leaders know less than their minions “on the ground.”

Social Media and the Culture Wars Revisited
My observation of how opting out manifests in a lot of theaters results in what I would call the new culture wars. The young and savvy know how to send out the message of the organization. An army of interns is behind the Twitter feed and the Facebook status updates. They are choosing what articles and video your theater links to, they determine the question of the day to pose to your audience, while those higher up the food chain do the “important stuff”—make theater.

These aren’t just generational culture wars though they sometimes look that way. They are also culture wars rooted in creative hierarchies, where the real conversations about art and finance supposedly happen behind closed doors, and the aspiring and energetic think about cool blog posts and innovative audience engagement strategies, but feel perpetually left out of the interesting work.

Institutional culture is stagnating inside of large institutions. There, I said it. Mom and Dad, you’ve got to join the twenty-first century!

Because in twenty-first century culture guess what?

We all have access to the means of production. We can all make art. We can all write blog posts. We can try our hand at just about anything.

What would true cultural transformation look like? How might we create relevant institutions—hip, savvy, and culturally forward-thinking?

And the aspiring, energetic, technically savvy, and wildly creative minds swelling our big regional theaters have something important to tell us about institutional culture, and if we’re not careful, if we don’t listen and pay attention, they’re going to take their big ideas elsewhere.

And I have to respectfully disagree with the recent New York Times post “The Elusive Big Idea” that argues we’re in a “post-idea” age where information has supplanted thoughtfulness. I’ve never been inundated with more good ideas and never have they been so accessible, but will we take the risk to implement these ideas?

As artists and participants in artistic institutions, we’ve smugly thought ourselves to be always on the righteous side of the culture wars—but have we become the very thing we fought against? Have we become the risk-averse people we so despised when Mapplethorpe was the biggest threat to our way of life? Is institutional transformation now the very biggest risk?

Times They are a Changin’
Rocco Landesman, in his now famous talk at the Arena Stage Convening in January, talked about the formation of the regional theater model, rooted in a countercultural moment of the 1960s. Our founders were about creating something new, not perpetuating the status quo. Our roots are in cultural transformation.

What would true cultural transformation look like? How might we create relevant institutions—hip, savvy, and culturally forward-thinking?

I’ve made myself nauseous talking about risk and new work. I’m not sure I even believe it anymore—I mean, really? Putting on a new play is risky? When I think of risk, I think of raising children, or changing jobs, or moving across the country. Risks are things that make us profoundly uncomfortable because they’re unfamiliar. If, as a theater artist, you even bothered to get out of bed in the twenty-first century, well, I find it hard to believe that new work is your version of risk. If that’s the case, you might as well just lie back and pull the covers over your sleepy head.

But here are some risky ideas institutional theater might consider if they decide to opt in to the twenty-first century:

No One Likes to Clock In
We manage time differently today. Work and personal time bleed into each other as we all have access to our work email on our smart phones. We no longer need to go into the office from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to be effective at our jobs. And we work in the theater, for god’s sake! Many of us have late nights in the theater and are then expected to be around for regular work hours.

There was a time when regular work hours were a necessity for everyone, but that time has passed! Consider throwing out this model and building a work culture on the understanding that everyone’s rhythm is a little different; that work place flexibility could lead to a more productive culture. That creative people value creative time. That most people don’t maximize creativity in a cube. That generations who have always worked plugged in know more about the need for flexibility than those who have spent a lifetime clocking in.

Hierarchies Suck Creativity Dry
I’ve never found hierarchies to be representative of the actual value of individual workers. In other words, some of the best employees might be in administrative assistant jobs, while some of the most ineffectual are in director positions. But generally, the directors stay and the best admin assistants look for more respect elsewhere. And so institutions perpetuate themselves at the top while workers are interchangeable at the bottom.

What might a disabled hierarchy look like?

What if artistic directors spent an hour or two everyday on Twitter and Facebook, interfacing with audiences while interns practiced persuading the marketing department of a more effective ad campaign for the season? What if a managing director made travel plans for a visiting artist while the company manager attended the next TCG Conference? Guess what?

Everyone likes to feel important in their work and this doesn’t just mean thanking those lower on the totem pole for their service. It means recognizing that in the small theater companies many of us came from, we’re all in this together and that most of us didn’t choose the corporate model on purpose!

In this new century, transparency makes hierarchies, well, more transparent. Technology makes expertise more widely achievable. If I reject your submission to HowlRound, then you can publish it yourself. If your ideas gain currency, so will your expertise, and the hierarchy of publishing, for example, rests on a precarious precipice—the kingmakers are on tenuous ground.

One can either cling to the precipice or redefine the conversation and the hierarchy.

If I reject our submission to HowlRound, then you can publish it yourself. If your ideas gain currency, so will your expertise

Pay Disparity Just Kind of Sucks
No one likes to think their contribution to a value hopefully shared by a community—the theater—is so much less important than someone else’s that their pay is ten or twenty times less than a co-worker. But we are very comfortable with this in big institutional theaters.

Alienated Labor Shouldn’t be a Value of Leadership
If it’s true that the regional theater model was founded in a mindset of countercultural fervor, then my guess is that a lot of the founders read a little bit of Marx along the way. Those of us who have, know that alienated labor, “where each individual functions not as a social being, but as an instrument,” can have its problems.

Most of us choose to make art as a living because we are unwilling to be cogs in the wheel of production. We believe we have a creative contribution that relies on the possibility of self-determination and experiencing firsthand the eventual fruits of our labor.

Having been around a lot of big theaters over the years, around a lot of employees of big theaters, around my partner’s former life in the corporate cube, I can only say I’ve never met a happy cog in a wheel. Never.

This is why leaders have to know how to do things they would rather not take the time to learn. Because when they enter the turning of the wheel as a mechanical part versus the instigator forcing rotation, they learn invaluable lessons about the difficulty of life as a cog.

Regularly inhabiting the lives of those we lead will change how we lead.

A New World Order
The twenty-first century is here in full force. Let’s not wait for the revolt of those further down the chain of power. Many world leaders would warn us to take heed now.

In the same way that we have embraced the conversation about the importance of new work this past decade, let's embrace new ways of working. Let’s risk new models of organizational culture that parallel our creative impulses inside the rehearsal room. This will reverberate in ways that I believe will not only build new cultures but make new stories possible for the theater.

Almost everyday I talk to aspiring theater artists, seeking desperately to inhabit the rooms of privilege I’ve been lucky to enter over the years. I’m personally convinced those rooms have more space, but if there are limitations to acknowledge, then let’s find a way that the rooms surrounding those rehearsals rooms are just as compelling to live in.

So I say opt in. Opt in to a twenty-first century way of working and creating that requires a serious shift in relearning the “how” of organizational culture, diving into the backend structure where the code is being written that will define the day-to-day functionality and the public messaging that will ultimately define your theater.