Sacred Spaces

 from Judson Jones, Artistic Director

So this post is a bit like the stew I made this past week: It’s a little bit of this and a dash of that. But I promise you there’s a rhyme & reason to it.

While spending time with family over the holidays, Christa & I found ourselves in the tiny town of Winona, Texas and ended up taking a tour with some family through the old forgotten high school. Winona is a small, sleepy town of around 582 people. I seem to recall dating a girl in my youth from Winona (or perhaps it was Mineola). Anyway, we were walking through the abandoned hallways when we came to the auditorium, now filled with debris, discarded desks, and dust of years past.  I love high school theatre. I'm not sure why exactly. Perhaps for the same reason I love watching high school football: You see a lot of mistakes and a lot of missed opportunities, but there's so much heart. As I walked through the old theater, you could almost see the audiences of the past. Hear their laughter. Feel their suspense. I sat in one of the old wooden seats and strained to hear the heartbeat of the old place.  You just don't see auditoriums like this anymore. Everything has become so utilitarian. Art, by itself, is no longer enough to deserve its own space. Art now has to be art-and. These once magnificent sanctuaries have been replaced by Cafe-toriums and the like. The works of Shakespeare aren’t enough. It can’t be just Horton Foote. It has to be Horton Foote and a Fiesta Station. Sorry. Wasn't my intention to get on a soapbox.

Back to the auditorium. I made my way through the space, across the stage—most of the boards rotted away by time—and found myself in the wings, right outside the dressing room. This is such holy place for me. I stood there, staring at the closed door, and could almost smell the pancake makeup. I thought of how many young actors must have stood there…waiting for the moment. The call for places has been made, but the opening music hasn’t begun yet. You hear the audience just beyond the curtain, people are rushing around, there’s electricity in the air that is palpable…and then there’s a pause. A beat. A divine moment. Everything goes quiet…and you breathe it in. This may not be the Nederlander, but to these magnificent souls it might as well be. As I stood there I thought of the countless students that stood in that same sacred spot. And I felt them. I felt their hopes and dreams, their passion, their love, their nervousness, their joy. And I cried. By myself. Just stood there and took in the moment.

Saturday night Christa and I went to see the Harold Clurman Laboratory Theatre Company’s production of Imagining Heschel at the Stella Adler Studio—a production I highly, highly recommend seeing before it closes on February 11^th. I was again reminded of the holiness of the theatre: to see actors pouring out their very hearts and souls for the audience; to experience a designer’s work as it folds into this world that will become your journey for the time you are there; to hear the words that a playwright has labored over, sometimes for years, to make sure that every word, every bit of punctuation is perfect and needed; to realize a director’s work, the hours of planning and pacing and doubting, all in the hopes that this piece of art connects in some real way with those present. Oh, it is something to be revered. For me, there’s no other place like it on earth.

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Straight Furrows

 from Judson Jones, Artistic Director

I spend the majority of my time at my desk. If I’m not at the theatre or in a meeting or teaching, that’s where you’ll find me. I keep a fairly neat desk. I try to keep a fairly neat desk. I have a stack of plays I need to read, another stack of legal pads with lists of things that I need to get done (some of them are even checked off), an assortment of sticky notes to remind me to look at my legal pads, a cup of coffee that will remain there and mostly full throughout the day, and two pictures. One of my wife and me when we were around 23 years old living in Tyler, Texas; we’re young, ready to take on the world, and I have a full head of dark hair. The other of my great-grandfather and two great-uncles in Idabel, Oklahoma taken sometime in the early 1930s; they’re genuine, stalwart, and robust.

Over the past several days, a story about my great-grandfather, Pap, has continually crept into my mind. My mother once asked him, after spending a day watching him plow the fields, how he made his furrows so straight. He simply replied, “I keep my eyes on the end of the row.” I think about that simple statement and what great truth it holds.

With all that goes into running a theatre company—going from board meetings to production meetings to finance meetings, making phone calls, sending emails, union negotiations, grant writing, drafting budgets, readings, rehearsals, hikes in rent, good reviews, bad reviews, fundraisers, etc. etc. etc.—it can be easy to all of a sudden look up and think, “Where the hell am I ?! How did I get here?” You no longer recognize your mission statement and you’ve forgotten the reason you started the thing in the first place. You took your eyes off the end of the row. You took what you thought was a detour and now you’re on a completely different track altogether. We see this happen all too often.

Perhaps this is why I keep these pictures on my desk, specifically the one of Pap and my great-uncles. It’s a constant reminder of that simple truth. As we look to our busiest season yet, and as our company continues to grow, we promise to stand by our mission and our core beliefs, to keep our eyes on the end of the row. And know that at the center of all that is our commitment to you, our community.

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How Sausage, er Theatre, is Made

from William Franke, Director of Development 

Recently I was listening to the podcast of THIS AMERICAN LIFE, episode 241: "20 Acts in 60 Minutes." I really enjoyed this particular episode, not only because it was a radio show inspired by a theatre company (the Neo-Futurists), but also because one of the 20 stories made me think about the magic of theatre.

About halfway through, at the 34:16 mark, they share a story from Jim Bodman, Chairman of Vienna Sausage Co. in Chicago. I recommend listening to the whole story but briefly: Bodman tells the story of how the company built a brand new, state-of-the-art facility in 1970, replacing their old factory, which was actually a warren of buildings on Chicago's south side that was built up by gradually buying up buildings over the course of 70 years, until the factory complex occupied an entire city block. Once they moved into their fancy new digs, however, they faced a problem: the hot dogs weren't coming out the same. They didn't have the same distinctive red color or desired snap. They couldn't figure out what was wrong, since the ingredients, spices, cooking time, everything was the same.

After a year and a half, they still haven't figured it out...until one night, when some guys from the plant are out at a bar, reminiscing over drinks about the old days in the former plant. They start talking about Irving, a fixture at the old plant who knew everyone, whose job was to take the uncooked sausages to the smokehouse. But, given the "Rube Goldberg" layout of the old factory, it took Irving half an hour on a circuitous route to get from A to B. And they realized: Irving & his trip was the missing secret ingredient.
 
With apologies to Christa Kimlicko Jones & any other vegetarians out there, this story of how the sausage is made got me to thinking about how theatre is made. No, not (just) that it happens over drinks in a bar, but also how, once the house lights go down, and the lights come up onstage, and the first words are spoken, something magical happens, and it's easy to forget all the many ingredients—all the people who come together to make it happen; all the hours spent designing, rehearsing & discussing; all the ideas that get thrown out, tossed around, tossed out or modified; all the paperwork that has to have i's dotted and t's crossed; all the collaboration—that go into making that magic. (Scott O'Brien, our Resident Composer & Sound Designer, keeps telling me that you don't want to show people how the sausage is made, but if you want to take a peek at how we've made it in the past, you can check out our YouTube channel.)

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