May 7, 2014 | Theatre,

A Constructive Look at RED-EYE to HAVRE de GRACE

 

At ArtsEmerson, we love a good a conversation. Presenting a wide stroke of work from around the world means many varied voices and styles come across our stages– an aspect of the organization that is simultaneously a strength and a challenge. One of our patrons, David Kaplan, experienced the experimental Edgar Allan Poe action-opera RED-EYE to HAVRE de GRACE when it played the Paramount Mainstage in the middle of February. He did not enjoy his experience. But Mr. Kaplan took it a step further and began a dialogue with ArtsEmerson including his criticism of the piece. Here’s what happened…

On the Tuesday following the performance, Mr. Kaplan sent the Box Office this e-mail:

Hello,

I attended Red-Eye last week and received your email requesting feedback on Facebook.  My feedback is constructive but not positive, so I thought it best to write to you directly.

I love experimental theater.  The problem is that experiments don’t always work.  For me, Red-Eye was just an incoherent mess with lots of furniture being dragged around the stage.  (Compare the scene change choreography in the A.R.T.’s fabulous Witness Uganda.)  Maybe the piece would have worked better in a small black box space.  Maybe if it was just a 55 minute piece.  Maybe if the “Ranger Steve” introduction was tightened to the point where it didn’t get boring and leave the audience wondering when the show would begin.  At the end, I gave polite applause; the woman next to me did not do even that.  I looked around, and we were not the only underwhelmed members of the audience.

Arts Emerson’s “welcome” address also needs to be rethought.  No disrespect intended, but the lengthy “thank you for coming” and “thank you to our sponsors” is amateurish and the stuff of community theater.  Professional houses get on with the show without a lengthy energy-sapping speech.  Performing arts companies from the Metropolitan Opera to the A.R.T acknowledge sponsors in signage, programs and brochures.  The Museum of Fine Arts doesn’t make visitors listen to a speech before letting them in the door.

Lest you think I’m just hard to please: Mies Julie was an unforgettable night of wonderful, powerful theater. The Colla Marionette’s Sleeping Beauty was enchanting. Previous Arts Emerson productions I’ve seen have also been excellent. This evening simply fell short.

Thank you for listening.

David Kaplan

 

On Wednesday morning, ArtsEmerson’s Assistant Box Office Manager, Jamie, responded to the e-mail:

Hi David,

First off, I am sorry that Red-Eye didn’t meet your expectations. But we do greatly appreciate constructive feedback like this. I will be forwarding your email along to our Director of Artistic Programming, David Dower. He may be in contact with you as he also appreciates this sort of feedback. We very much enjoy having members who aren’t afraid to reach out after a production and we look forward to continuing to have a dialogue with you.

Sincerely,
Jamie

Over the following weekend, David Dower was able to respond to Mr. Kaplan’s constructive comments and continue the dialogue about RED-EYE: 

Mr. Kaplan–

Thank you for writing with your thoughts on Red-Eye. It is always challenging to learn and adjust to the experiences of our patrons in the absence of conversation. You do us a big favor by speaking up. While everyone here appreciates unambiguous praise, we learn more from thoughtful criticism. And ArtsEmerson is a learning environment. We are a young organization, we are working in a set of venues not traditionally programmed in this way, and with a range of work not otherwise regularly seen in our community, so evolving the organization together with our audience is part of the job right now.

By the way– while I appreciate your sense of constructive criticism being best delivered in private, we don’t fear an open conversation with our audience. I, personally, like it when the blog shows a range of audience responses to the work. It reinforces, I think, the fact that we are dealing here with art, and a live art at that, one which is really created anew between the artists and the audience each night. Responses will, importantly, diverge. And it is my hope that we can start to discover ourselves as a community as much through our different experiences as through our similarities.

Some responses to your responses to Red-Eye, offered in the spirit of learning each other:

You saw the piece on its first performance, I believe. Thursday night, yes? Because the company had been working in changes all day, they were running through it for the first time at that point. I, too, felt the messy edges of it– the transitions especially had an air of panic and a tinge of slapdash quality that undermined them as performers and blurred the lines of their intent. The performers felt it, as well. They spent the whole day on Friday rehearsing those transitions to get them inside the aesthetic voice of the rest of the piece. You may still have found them unsatisfying, but you would have at least experienced them as confident and intentional.

The audience response was an interesting one for that show. As you will see on the blog there are many who had a powerful experience at the performance they saw, including several commenters from the Thursday show. At each performance, though, there were stark divisions- with a big percentage standing each night, and an equal sitting perplexed at their reaction. We had many people see it more than once- especially area students.

The curtain speech is a conundrum here and I greatly appreciate your response. On that night I was very aware of the edge of panic in the cast, and I wanted (misguidedly, in retrospect, I think) to take some of the steep edge off what they were about to do– perform a piece without benefit of a full run-through. I was hoping to invite the audience into the spirit of our place– we make the space here for artists to continue to develop their work, on purpose, and at some considerable difficulty. I felt a bit like I had put them in harms way by scheduling a performance on their first full day on stage and was, neurotically, trying to compensate. You are not alone in calling for a clean start without the patronizing tone of a welcome speech!

From our perspective, in general, we are trying to help build a sense of full comprehension about ArtsEmerson among our audiences and we sometimes experiment with the curtain speech as a means of accomplishing that. We are a new beast in the culture here- not quite A.R.T., not quite Broadway Across America, not quite ICA, but with elements of all of that. Over and over we find in conversation with people that they cannot describe us and that they are coming despite a sense of not knowing what to expect. The most common sort of response we get is: “I almost didn’t come because I didn’t know what it was, but I am glad I did.”

The issue, for me at any rate, is to help people grab onto the notion of the “unexpected” as precisely what they value about us and how they speak of ArtsEmerson in their daily lives. I am working on a theory that we live in a time and in a place where it will take our expectations of the order of things being upended if we are going to come to a new place of strength and possibility in this era where the old narratives have dead-ended. It sounds pretentious. It is very ambitious. But I am hoping that ArtsEmerson’s presence in our midst helps promote the sense of “out of the many, one” that is imperative if we are to find our unity in a majority minority time.

So, I hear you on the curtain speech being the wrong place to try to advance that story. And I agree we don’t do ourselves any favors asking people for money at the same time. We will keep working on this challenge. And, I assure you, I won’t be stepping in front of an audience again with the goal of lowering the risk the artists are taking– that felt bad to me and to you both!

I have perhaps over-shared here. If you are curious about any of this and want to unpack it, I would be happy to spend more of your time… I have a sense that you are seeing us clearly and I value that tremendously.

Meanwhile, thank you for your support!

David Dower

 

And Mr. Kaplan had a thoughtful response for David to continue the conversation:

David,

Thank for your thoughtful and candid message.  You were quite correct: I attended the Thursday evening performance of Red-Eye.  Your point about the stark division in audience reaction was absolutely right.  In fact, the woman I mentioned in my original email who sat motionless at the end was accompanied by a man who leapt to his feet in applause.  I hope they discussed the difference in their reactions on their way home!

Far from feeling that you’ve over shared, I’m privileged to have an insight into the extent of your artistic vision, integrity and passion.  I applaud what you’re doing for Arts Emerson.

Thank you again, and I’m very much looking forward to Man in a Case later this week.

Warm regards,
David

And there you have it! We LOVE getting to hear about your individual experience at the shows and getting to have conversations like these. You can interact with us here on the blog with the “What did you think?” posts, on Twitter @artsemerson, on our Facebook page or by shooting us an e-mail.

We look forward to many more conversations with you!

 

Daniel Jones is the External Affairs Assistant at ArtsEmerson: The World on Stage.