Dream Log: Grunt Work in NYC Theatre

Last night I dreamed I was working in a New York City Off-Broadway theatre, something I've done a lot of in waking life. Many New York actors make ends meet, when they're not acting, by taking tickets and ushering, and so forth, in theatres. Besides the pay it's also a chance to see a show for free, and tickets can be sort of expensive.

 

In my dream it was my first time working in this particular theatre, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I was one of a dozen or so people who were given receipt pads. We were supposed to help out when the line at the box office got too long. We were all wearing the standard usher outfit: black shoes, black pants and a white shirt provided by us, with a black vest and clip-on bow tie provided by the theatre,

I started flirting with an actress who was standing around holding a pad like the one I had. Pretty soon we were snuggling and kissing. She was wonderful. Beautiful and intelligent and witty. Just made me sigh to be around her, let alone having her permission to touch her. She reminded me of a wonderful actress I knew once in real life in NYC, who, amazingly, seemed to like me a lot, and it seemed as if she and I were beginning a romance, but I managed to screw it up.

One man came in, got a ticket and went into the theatre, and then another one did, and then the show started. None of us seemed interested in watching the show, so there were only two spectators this evening, each prominent New York theatre people themselves. 

None of us standing around with our receipt pads had had to do a thing. But each of us still got paid a $20 bill. Judging from this evening, it did not seem that the show was a huge commercial hit. But I didn't know anything about it. For all I knew it might have been playing for years in that theatre already, might have made a fortune before winding down.

We were discussing what we were going to do with our newfound 20 bucks when the house manager, a beautiful young woman, looked like an actress, approached with a clipboard holding a form she was filling out, and asked each of us in turn what our major non-theatre job was, and what our biggest weakness was at that job. 

I replied that I test drove EV's for the manufacturer (in real life I haven't yet had been employed by an EV maker), and that my biggest weakness was not concentrating on what I was supposed to do. "Asleep at the wheel?" the manager asked me, and some people laughed. "No," I replied, "I haven't actually caused any accidents yet. Not that absent-minded. What I mean is that I'm supposed to be talking into a tape recorder the whole time about the vehicle's performance, comfort, user interface and so on, and a lot of the time I just forget to do that, and drive, and think about show business instead."

Some of the others decided to blow their earnings on dinner. I and the actress whom I had been hugging and kissing went for a walk, holding hands. It was a pleasant evening, brisk but not unpleasantly cold. We told each other our life stories, window-shopped, people-watched. A nice stereotypical beginning to an NYC showbiz romance. Then I woke up.

Dream Log: Love and Theatre in New York City

I dreamed that I was a young man in New York City some time during world War II, and that I had been drafted. I was one of a long line of men, most of us wearing knee-length coats and hats, moving from room to room in some enormous building full of varnished wood, as we were processed.

As a group of us were sitting in what appeared to be a lecture hall, with chairs bolted to the floor and desktops which folded away beside the chairs, I saw a women whom, in waking life, I knew thirty years ago.

Then suddenly it was the present day in New York City, I wasn't being drafted, the woman and I were still young, and we had just fallen in love with each other. She was a member of a theatre company, and got me an audition for a play she was starring in, a big-time play, a play on Broadway. I got the part.

After my successful audition I talked to an old man who had a cart on the sidewalk from which he sold fine reeds for reed instruments, mostly for saxophones. It was about the size of a hot-dog cart, and the reeds were piled up inside a glass case. Many of the best sax players in the city got their reeds from this guy, and he was wealthy, just from his income from the cart. He had long, wild white hair and a long white beard. I asked him why he never got a store and moved his business inside. He didn't even try to answer. Instead, he just shook his head and gave me a look that seemed to say: If you don't already understand why I don't want to move off of the sidewalk, I don't know how to explain it to you. It was a friendly look, not a disdainful one. Then he said, "Excuse me for a minute," and turned away and did some business with Branford Marsalis.

I've dreamed many times that I was in New York City. Many times before I lived there for a few years in the mid-1990's, and many times since. In some of those dreams the city has looked much as it does on waking life; in some other it has looked nothing at all like the real city. Last night it looked pretty similar to the real city, but much more beautiful. The architecture and the streets and sidewalks and staircases of stone or concrete were grander, and there was some sort of a sweet, mellow glow to everything. In real life the light in New York City can be very beautiful at moments, but in this dream it was even better. Better than this picture. This picture was the closest I could find to how things looked in the dream. It wasn't that everything looked expensive in the dream. It was something else:

The day after I got the part in the play, I was scheduled to attend a rehearsal which started at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and I was running late, and I was downtown, and the theatre was in midtown, about 40 blocks away, and I was moving slowly, because I was carrying two 50-pound barbells which I had just obtained somehow. The terrain between downtown and midtown was a bit hillier than it is in real life, and there were some huge outdoor staircases to be climbed, and going up all of those steps with an extra 100 pounds was really difficult. It became more and more clear that I was going to be late.

After I woke up, I realized that in that sort of situation in real life, I would just have put the dumbbells down, written them off, and got on the subway, or, if time was really pressing, hailed a cab. But in the dream, none of those things seemed to be feasible. In the dream, the dumbbells were much, much too valuable to even consider putting them down. In real life, dumbells cost about a dollar a pound, sometimes less, and scale pay in a Broadway play, if I'm correctly informed, is currently $2,034 per week.

I was an hour and a half late to the rehearsal. (And my arms and shoulders were killing me by the time I got there.) I assumed I was going to be fired. However, the next day, the woman with whom I was in love went roller-skating around Manhattan with several other actors and two skating bears. This attention-grabbing behavior signaled that I was with her, and that if they fired me, they were going to have to fire her, too. So they didn't fire me.

Before that day's rehearsal began, this wonderful woman gave me a big hug and tried to explain to me that, although my new 50-pound dumbbells were really cool and all, if I were in a situation like that again, I could afford to just let them go. She wasn't really getting through to me on that point before I woke up. Then, of course, I knew she was right.

Dream Log: James Franco in Big-Time Community Theatre

I dreamed I was participating in a theatre project in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan led by James Franco:

The project was being held in a theatre in a public high school. Mr Franco's participation, and the thronging level of activity, made it seem like big-time theatre. The peeling paint on the walls, and the dark overly-done lacquer on the wood -- the stage, the seats, the doors, the trim -- and the generally-run down appearance of the place, plus the fact that it seemed that just about anyone who showed up could participate, made it seem like community theatre. The place was run down, but the stage was big, and the house was big, with hundreds of comfortably-large seats.

This was a 14-day project, 7 days a week for 2 weeks, starting on a Monday and ending on a Sunday. The idea was to have 7 days of preparation followed by 7 different shows on consecutive nights. One of the points of the project was to demonstrate that theatre done on a tight schedule could still be good.

Mr Franco was going to give a lecture in the evening on 6 of the first seven days: Monday, and then Wednesday through Sunday. He was also going to direct 6 of the 7 shows: again, Monday and Wednesday through Sunday. Another person was going to give the Tuesday lecture and direct the Tuesday show. A group of us were sitting in the house on the afternoon of the first Monday, when Franco, to my great surprise, pointed at me and said that I was going to be that other person.

I felt utterly unprepared. Mr Franco got up onto the stage to give the first lecture. I was hoping to get a lot of ideas for my lecture from his lecture, but he was speaking into a microphone which seemed to be malfunctioning, and, sitting in the back of the house, I couldn't understand what he was saying. I kept hoping that someone would fix the microphone, or yell out that they couldn't hear, but the entire lecture went on like that for an hour and a half.

Mr Franco was thronged after the lecture, so that there was no chance that I could huddle with him and ask for help with my own lecture. I was just able to call out to him and ask when I should show up the next day, and he called back, "6 o'clock."

At first I thought he'd meant 6 AM, but -- somehow -- it became clear that he'd meant 6 PM. Nevertheless, I figured I had better not leave the theatre at all, but work overnight and hope to be prepared somehow.

But early in the morning, I realized that if my brother, mother, father and I went out to a certain Volkswagen dealership in suburban New Jersey, I would be able, with their help, to use the machinery in the dealership's garage to make 100 clones of John Goodman:

and 100 clones of Anna Kendrick:

and that these clones would be a great help in getting this job done.

On the way to the Volkswagen dealership, my brother, mother and father all made fun of me and my theatrical ambitions, saying that I was being ridiculous by still beating this dead horse at my age. When we got to the dealership, they played keep-away with the keys to the showroom.

My brother said that Volkswagens were cheap junk and that the average sticker price inside that showroom, for a brand-new VW, was probably around $6200 dollars. I said that he was mis-informed, and that no sticker price in that showroom was anywhere near as low as $6200. He unlocked the door, grinning, confident he was right, but of course he was wrong. There was no sticker price as low as twice $6200, and one was more than 10 times $6200. Impressed by my business savvy, he agreed to help me in the garage, and very soon we had built 100 flawless clones of John Goodman and 100 flawless clones of Anna Kendrick. I was able to get all 200 clones into vehicles on the dealer's lot, and we drove back into the city and were at the theatre before noon.

I just basically let the clones take over for me. One of the clones of John Goodman gave my lecture that evening. The following Tuesday one of the Anna Kendrick clones directed my play. All 200 of the clones were very helpful, onstage and behind the scenes, with all 7 plays, not just mine.

I was thronged with accolades. I told James Franco that I didn't think I deserved so much credit. He replied, "Hey, you brought the clones. You definitely deserve some credit."

Then I woke up.

The Volksbühne Berlin and Chris Dercon

I finally un-followed whats-her-name ("I'll never forget what's her-name") on Facebook, because I couldn't stand her posts protesting Chris Dercon's impending leadership of the Volksbühne Berlin any more.

Of course, she and the people who commented agreeing with her didn't put it that way: they weren't talking about Chris Dercon coming to the Volksbühne and taking over for Frank Castorf: they were talking about the end of the Volksbühne; no, the end of serious theatre in Berlin; no, the end of serious theatre, period; no, the end of the world. Besides the Facebook posts she also has attended protests outside the Volksbühne. Did she actually organize and lead these protests? I don't know. Has she worked as an actress at the Volksbühne? I'm not sure about that either.

Just in case someone doesn't know: I've never seen a performance at the Volksbühne. I've seen lots and lots of pictures of productions, and a few videoclips, and read some reviews, and read some of the plays performed there. But I've never actually been there; ergo, by definition, I don't know what I'm talking about.

My first reaction, when She Who Has Been Unfollowed began her torrent of furious posts, was that it all seemed rather overdone for what was, ironically, a rather elite affair. I was assuming a greater similarity to a theatre culture with which I am actually familiar -- big-time commercial theatre in NYC -- than there actually is. Tickets to a Broadway or Off-Broadway or even some Off-Off-Broadway shows are expensive enough to make it quite an exclusive affair. Not to mention the comps: the many tickets given absolutely free to big shots who could afford perfectly well to pay full price, because it's ab-so-lute-ly backwards.

But I figured I'd better do some research before just wading into the middle of all of that Facebook lamentation and calling them all silly elitist drama queens. And it turned out that I was wrong: tickets for the Volksbühne are much less expensive than those for a Broadway play: no ticket costs more than 40 Euros; retirees and low-income people pay about half price; and some people who qualify on the basis of need can get several tickets per season free.

My next reaction was to say that they could've taken all of the energy they'd expending being furious about something which hasn't happened yet and might be quite different than what they expect, and used it to start their own damn theatre company. And they could. But, as I continued to research the Volksbühne, I learned that, in addition to the money taken in at the box office, the state of Berlin gave the Volksbühne 184 Euros for every ticket sold in 2009, and 141 Euros for every ticket sold in 2010 (these are the latest statistics I could find). And I imagine that they get the use of that theatre building right in the middle of Berlin rent-free, too.



Okay, so, yeah, they could start their own company, but starting one like the Volksbühne might be harder than I had imagined.

So I was wrong about all of that, and drastically under-informed about how German theatre in general works, and I've never seen a production at the Volksbühne, never seen one directed by Castorf, or by Dercon. So do I still actually have a freakin' problem with the protesters?

Yes. One word which is frequently used by them when they describe the way in which Dercon is going to destroy the the Volksbühne is "international." They foresee Volksbühne productions which will be slick, safe, aimed at garnering international prizes. And no longer the distinctly Berliner theatre they love. Dercon ain't even a gosh-dang German, he's a furriner, a Belgian.

What kind of God-damned Communist objects to internationalism? Provincial Communists. That's what kind. I've never been to the Volksbühne, but I have by gosh been to Berlin, and it's magnificent, and one of the things which makes it so is its openness to the world.

The whole world.

And, and, I do believe that while some international prizes are given to slick and safe theatre productions, others aren't. So that if the Volksbühne under Dercon's leadership does win some international prizes, it won't mean that everything the protesters said was correct. Although no doubt they will claim that it does.