Howard Sherman and Kaki Marshall, on their last in person visit in December 2019
Today, my book is published. This is the realization of a dream that I had given up on long ago. But my most overwhelming emotion today, and every time I look at the finished book, is sadness.
It would be wrong to say that I wrote Another Day’s Begun for any one person. Presumably like any other author, I wrote it for many people to read. But the person who I most wanted to read it, who I most wanted to have place it on her bookshelf, cannot.
Catherine “Kaki” Marshall was a mentor to me in my days as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am hardly her only protegee. Many kids at Penn, from the late 70s to the early 90s, would find their way to Kaki’s office, on the mezzanine level of the Annenberg Center, when she was the Associate Managing Director there, for knowledge, for caring. There was, quite literally, always an open door, unless you wanted to talk privately; I can’t recall her ever shutting anyone out for her own needs.
Having gone to Penn already in love with theatre, but convinced by many that it was no way to make a living or a life, I took stabs at other fields of interest, but none really resonated. I was most engaged with my time in the Annenberg Center, in my work study job in the box office, 20 hours each week, during my freshman and sophomore years. I joined the Penn Players, the school’s longest established drama troupe, and in two semesters, I directed two shows, staged managed one, and appeared in one. Kaki was the faculty adviser
Having met Kaki and grown friendly with her – mind you, she was a contemporary of my parents, with children of her own around my age – I was able to be assigned to her office for my work-study gig in my junior and senior years. To this day, I don’t remember doing any work beyond answering the phone. What I remember is sitting in Kaki’s office talking about theatre and constantly borrowing books from her wide, multi-tiered shelves – every book about theatre and nothing else. Because Penn had no theatre program, Kaki was my undergraduate theatre curriculum.
I also recall one particular totem on those bygone shelves: a small, square fading color photo of Kaki and Hal Prince, in swim clothes, lounging on chaises at what Kaki told me was Hal’s vacation place in Spain. Hal was one my first theatre idols and, thanks to Kaki, I met him for the first time when I was a junior – and we sat together in Kaki’s office and talked. Kaki had done theatre at Penn with Hal when they were both students, and he remained her friend until he passed away.
In those last two years of college, when I was ostensibly working for her, we grew quite close, bonded by my overwhelming stress about school and career as well as by a personal tragedy in her family. We discussed these subjects openly, and she was for me – and again, I know for others – my theatre mom. She understood my concerns and worries and interests and desires and she supported them with knowledge and perspective. Her office was less my job and more my refuge. Kaki understood my love of theatre in a way my parents, always supportive but not personally invested in theatregoing or theatremaking, could not.
On the last day I saw Kaki on campus before graduating, I vividly remember telling her that I would always keep in touch. “Oh, Howard,” she said, “so many students say that. But with time and distance, it doesn’t often happen, and you need to know that I understand and it’s OK.”
Having introduced this essay talking about my sadness, this is where you might think I’ll now tell you about drifting away from Kaki and regretting the loss of our bond. But that wasn’t the case – I did realize what I had found in her, every minute, and was determined not to lose it.
I was faithful and would call every couple of months to share my news and hear hers. I would look for any pretext to visit Philadelphia, and always include a visit with Kaki, and with her husband Joe too, who I knew to have had a similarly influential effect on his students at Temple Law School.
Most every summer, I would spend a long weekend with Kaki and Joe at their beach home on the southern Jersey shore. We never ran out of things to talk about and, aside from politics and current events, which we discussed with vigor (from the same perspective), our main topic was theatre. Since Joe passed away several years ago, I tried to call Kaki every few weeks.
Our ongoing friendship was such that she always received a call from me on her birthday, year in and year out. She never asked for it, but I know she enjoyed it, proven by a call perhaps 10 years ago. I was in England in late September, as I usually am at that time, when my phone rang as it rarely did when people knew I was traveling. Kaki’s name showed on the screen.
Given to bouts of pessimism, I feared something was wrong. I answered by saying, “Kaki, hi, is everything OK?” With a laugh she replied, “Everything’s fine. But I wanted to know if everything is OK with you?” “I’m fine,” I responded. “I’m in England, remember? Why are you concerned?” “Because it’s my birthday,” she said, “and all of my kids have called now but I haven’t heard from you and I got worried.”
She also spoke to me every year on my birthday, though she didn’t know it. I always made a point of calling on that day because I certainly never expected her to keep track of the date, not with six children and more than a dozen grandchildren, plus siblings and nieces and nephews and cousins. Every year on these calls, I never pointed out my birthday, but we would mark that it was the birthday of Hal Prince. That date is two days from now.
We continued to go to the theatre together when possible, as we had when I was a student. I can’t recall which was when, but I believe our final two shows seated side by side were Tectonic Theatre Project’s two-part The Laramie Project and The Laramie Project: Ten Years Later, which we saw on a single marathon day, and Bill Irwin’s The Happiness Lecture.
For 36 years, I would call, I would send her things I wrote and we’d discuss them, and when face to face, we would laugh together and have the kind of earnest talks about theatre that I always craved. Because of this, because of the bookshelves in her Annenberg office where I learned so much, my greatest desire has been to know that Kaki had read my book and had it on her much-reduced home bookshelf, the bulk of her theatre books having been given away years earlier.
Kaki died in August of 2020, not from the virus, but simply in the course that a life runs, and she was not ill very long. She was one month shy of her 95th birthday. It was only weeks from the time she went to the hospital until she died. We had spoken perhaps two weeks before things had started heading in the direction I had feared for some time. I feared it because my parents had both passed years earlier, leaving Kaki as my only true surrogate parent.
Earlier this past summer, I had thought that perhaps I should let Kaki read the manuscript of Another Day’s Begun, not because there seemed to be any imminent concern, but just in case anything happened. She was 94, after all. I decided against it, putting faith in the fact that all of the women in her family were long-lived, quite remarkably so. I wanted her to see a complete finished book, not simply as something on its way to being a book. It was a miscalculation I will always regret.
Countless people have influenced my life, more than I could ever thank in the book or face to face. But I most wanted Kaki to read Another Day’s Begun because she was the one person I could truly credit for fanning the flame of my theatre love and knowledge at the earliest stage. Also, while she had seen shows at theatres where I worked, this book is something that is truly mine, a testament to her support, her help, her faith in me, her love – and her understanding of me.
I cannot share this with Kaki in recognition of all she gave to me. But in her honor, her memory, and with the deep love I felt and feel for Kaki, I share it today with all of you, because she would have been very happy for us all to have a new theatre book for our shelves. And if a student spots a copy on your shelf and expresses interest, please loan it to them, because in that moment, you will do for that student what Kaki did for me, and that act honors our friendship.
Of the many criteria one might apply when considering what makes a great teacher, I think it’s fair to say that the ability to see and encourage something in a student that they do not yet necessarily see in themselves would rank high on the list. While this is probably not possible for each and every student, nor every teacher, one often hears stories from successful people about a teacher who really helped them along on their journey of education and discovery.
As I contemplate my education, it turns out that the person who did this for me was not in fact a teacher, but the cantor at my synagogue, when I was probably in fifth and sixth grades. His mentorship was not of a religious nature, however, but rather a cultural one. It was he who took me to New Haven’s art museums and talked me through their collections. He also encouraged me to try my hand at writing, some rudimentary plays all adapted, sans rights, from existing sources. He went so far as to loan me his own electric typewriter to facilitate my writing, and it was mine until it was obvious to my parents that I should have one of my own.
I don’t remember any specific lessons the cantor taught me. Rather, he was the first person to see how I responded to the arts, and at an age when I was decidedly awkward and different from the majority of my classmates, he allowed me to feel that my interests were not odd. As is the case with so much in our childhoods, this mentorship may have only amounted to a few outings, but they loom large in memory.
In contrast to this experience, the single most vividly remembered moment of my formal education came once I was in college. It was decidedly not a positive one. It demonstrated how potentially damaging the words of an insensitive teacher might be, though in my case, I largely shrugged it off, transforming it into a story of it defying authority, an anecdote I told and laughed about often.
I often tell people that I have absolutely no educational training in theatre, that all I know I have learned from experience. But there is an asterisk that I always append to that statement. While my university did not have a theatre major, there was a nascent theatre studies minor. While I didn’t pursue that course of study, I opted to take, of all things, a single scenic design course. The teacher was a visiting adjunct from a nearby university with a full theatre program; it was not a deeply practical course, but primarily a conceptual one.
This is where I should admit that I cannot draw. I am unable to translate what I see in my eyes through to my hands to create even a passable visual representation of the thing itself. I neither perceive nor judge space and distance well. When I would doodle during classes that failed to keep my full attention, everything was geometric, ordered, symmetrical. When it came to arts and crafts as a child, the ruler was my favorite tool.
So when, in this college design class, we were asked to sketch out a few ideas, to translate text into a rough setting, I was, I acknowledge, pretty hopeless. I could posit sets of boxes, rectangles and triangles; there were often layers upon layers of steps. Having read about the tricks required to suggest perspective, my ever-present lines and angle might seem to recede towards the horizon.
One day in class, as the teacher reviewed and discussed each student’s work, he came to mine and, perhaps immediately, perhaps after a bit of thought, uttered the phrase I have never forgotten.
“You have no imagination,” he told me.
In the moment, I grew angry. This wasn’t meant to be a practical course but a theoretical one. If I had known I would be judged on my drawing skills, I would have never taken the class. How dare he say such a thing in front of the other students, cutting me down so publicly.
But as it happened, the small class of perhaps eight students was made up entirely of my drama club friends, many of whom I lived with off campus. So I didn’t have to speak up for myself. I remember, in particular, my friend Leslie, who has never suffered fools gladly, putting into words all that I was thinking, with my classmates, my friends murmuring in support of her. I don’t remember how the class ended that day, but neither Leslie nor I suffered from a poor grade at the end of the semester.
For years, literally for decades now, I have retold this story in order to demonstrate what a fool this teacher had been to me, and how my friends rallied to support me no matter the effect it might have on them. I have, at times, told the story with greater detail, so much so that the artistic director of a regional theatre stopped me only partway through the account to correctly guess the name of this educator, indicating that such pronouncements were not out of character.
Now jump forward some 30 years, to 2013, when I bought my first camera in many years, a digital single lens reflex camera, which has become a beloved possession. Unless I am carrying a totebag with my computer and papers for work, my “good camera,” is almost always with me. Thanks to the nonexistent cost of taking digital photos (in contrast to my days of shooting on film), I use it to record my wanderings around New York as well as my more significant travels. I have threaded through countless New York streets capturing architectural details from earlier eras, and repeatedly visited Times Square and Washington Square to capture images of the street life there. I have had the opportunity to do performance photography, a special challenge that marries my love of theatre with the exploration of what I can preserve in the moment. I have even been paid a few times for my photos.
Now, more than 40,000 frames later, I have come to a realization: that professor was not wholly wrong. The timing of his observation could not have been worse, and perhaps it would never be constructive, but he had semi-accurately noticed something about me. But his observation was incomplete.
What I lack is a visual imagination. My thinking is profoundly verbal, whether speaking, writing, or even creating. When I read fiction, I retain all of the particulars of characters and places the author has given me, but I see nothing in my mind’s eye. I form no mental pictures. The words engage me and can be vividly recalled, even recited from memory, but I do not take the imaginative leap to invent the visual.
Yet with photography, I can frame the world before me in what I hope are inventive ways. I can see in the ever changing panorama before me details that might startle, engage or amuse me, and then in turn share that viewpoint with others. I have taken photos of which I’m very proud, but even given a team of craftspeople, I could have never invented such scenes. I am not wired to do so. It is not a flaw. It is part of what makes me, as each of us are, unique.
Some 35 years on, I no longer harbor even a wisp of ill will towards that teacher, though I hope that he learned over time how much damage he could have done to me, and might have done to others. At the same time, I worry that my own ill-chosen words have at times had a similar effect on colleagues or employees, that they remember me for verbal ineptitude or emotional opacity, and that I will never know it so that I might never make amends.
But all I can do to keep trying to express myself as best I can, whether literally or through the frame of a camera and hope that however I capture or even transform the world through my perspective, it will serve to encourage others, instead of summarily shutting them down. There are countless ways to think, to transform, to share and to imagine and we should encourage each person to do so in their own way. Failing to do so reveals only our own limitations, not those of others.
If the location of your office compels you to visit Times Square regularly, you are confronted at least twice a day (going to work and on your way home) by a crush of people, gaping tourists, perpetual construction and, of course, by opportunists dressed as cartoon characters, Marvel and DC superheroes, Star Wars figures and, here and there, barely dressed at all. The common reaction to all of this is to keep one’s head down and push through, muttering about the madness, wondering where all the people have come from and why they won’t get out of the way, and even entertaining a small incursion on the first amendment that might rid the pedestrian plazas of the tip-seeking fictional personages.
As someone who works in Times Square, I have taken an alternative perspective. I have elected to find it all very funny.
As a result, instead of looking away from the costumed hustlers, I look right at them, because at times this third-rate cosplay can offer some truly absurd tableaux. With my iPhone in hand, I record these bits of urban incongruity, posting them to my Facebook page as “Times Square Weirdness, my continuing series.” Instead of rushing across Times Square with my head down, I walk to my assorted destinations with a surveying gaze, my camera at the ready, hoping to catch Dora The Explorer dancing with Mickey Mouse, while three Spider-Men look on.
Were I a parent on holiday with children in tow, I’d likely take a less indulgent view of the situation. I have even gone so far as to offer a practical plan that might at least reduce the costumed populations (with no constitutional breach whatsoever). But in the meantime, I choose to find the whole thing deeply ridiculous and while I will not ever offer even $1 as a gratuity, and while in turn many of the “characters” quickly lift their cut-rate visages to foil my photos, I’ll chronicle Times Square Weirdness for as long as it lasts.
I should note that for all of the Elmos, Olafs, Minnie Mice and Spider-Man who appear daily (and even form packs), some characters (or costumes of said characters) appear only once or twice, never to be seen again. I guess some people decide it’s not really for them. I often wonder what happens to the costumes. But I try to save their appearances for posterity.
Jonathan Larson’s Rent at PACT in Tullahoma TN (photo by Howard Sherman)
I honestly wish I could figure out what makes one blog post a roaring success, and another a blip on the radar. Certainly the topic under discussion has some impact, but readership seems just as likely to be affected by the title, a photo, the Facebook algorithm, the timing of a tweet, what else is happening in the world, and so on. In short, I have no idea.
In looking over my most-read posts of 2015, I do know which ones took a great deal of research and time, and which were dashed off in under an hour. I know which ones were written after a great deal of consideration, and which were wholly reactive to something I read or heard. They don’t necessarily correlate to readership at all.
I am surprised by the way in which my most-read posts were grouped in the latter half of the year, with seven coming since October 29. Is there any correlation with the fact that I began regularly working out of The New School Drama offices starting in early October, in my new role as director of the Arts Integrity Initiative? I think it’s just coincidence, but it’s possible that the new environment meshed with some significant incidents to yield my most successful writing.
While it may seem paradoxical to offer up my most-read work once again, I have no doubt that there are plenty of people who didn’t read one or more of these when they were first posted, and perhaps there are a few people who would like to catch up with them now. You’ll note I’m not providing them in order of popularity, because it’s not a contest, but I can say that even within these ten, there’s a differential of some 10,000 views.
I had spoken with the leadership of the PACT community theatre in Tullahoma, Tennessee when they first began experiencing resistance to their production of Rent, but they decided that they’d prefer to try to address the opposition on a local basis. But ten days before performances were to begin, they learned of a letter in opposition to the show that was being circulated to the local clergy, and felt it was time for me to take up their cause and make it a national issue. I traveled to Tullahoma for the opening night, where I was welcomed by numerous members of the community, including the mayor, but the opposition had failed and the show played to an enthusiastic crowd. A prayer circle outside the theatre, in quiet protest of the production, drew only four people, including the two pastors who had been most opposed to the show.
Words Players Theatre found itself in the midst of a firestorm when several bog posts, mine among them, questioned their practice of soliciting plays for production with their teen actors, but saying that the director had the final word over the show, contrary to the tenets of The Dramatists Guild. I stand by what I wrote at the time, but I was troubled by the degree of vehemence that some directed at the company, which didn’t necessarily seems the best way to educate students, their parents and the company’s leadership about respect for scripts in production. I ultimately wrote a second post, trying to walk back some of the rhetoric that surrounded this situation, not just mine, by the way.
I was far from the only person to speak out against the archaic, stereotypical use of yellowface in a production of the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players production of The Mikado, but I was among the first, with my blog post going online alongside two others on Tuesday, September 15. The groundswell of reaction grew very quickly in subsequent days, and advocates against the practice of yellowface awoke three days later to find, with great surprise, that the production had been canceled. NYGASP says they will return with a reconceived Mikado that’s appropriate to 21st century America. Perhaps I’ll be writing about that in 2016.
It took three weeks after the production closed for word of Katori Hall’s Olivier Award-winning play being produced with a white actor as Martin Luther King to find its way to general awareness, but once it did, it brought great scrutiny to this production, at a community theatre based out of Kent State University’s Department of Pan-African Studies. What was even more remarkable, and remains still less known, is that the concept of having white and black actors each do four performances as Dr. King never happened – the white actor played the role for the entire run.
I wasn’t exactly mystified as to why an interview with Pam MacKinnon carried a headline that mention her collaborators Al Pacino and David Mamet, both more famous, but it didn’t seem right that the person the paper actually spoke with was subordinated in this way. Intriguingly, not long after I posted my piece, the headline was altered, removing Mamet and Pacino – but it still didn’t mention MacKinnon by name. I was intrigued to discover that in coming up with a headline, I had birthed a Twitter hashtag: #SheHasAName.
Critic offers his extra complimentary press ticket for sale, via the personals section. This one pretty much wrote itself. But I have to say that I quickly came to regret the tone of this piece, because I let myself succumb to snark precisely because it was so easy in this case. I should have stuck to the facts and let the story speak for itself. My feelings about what this critic did (or tried to do) haven’t changed, but I should have done better.
Coming on the heels of the Mountaintop situation at Kent State, this dispute over racial representation in a college production of Jesus In India at Clarion University led to playwright Lloyd Suh pulling the rights to the show. There was a backlash against Suh from those who didn’t understand, or didn’t wish to understand, what it means to have white actors, even students, playing characters of color. Statements from university figures to the press only fed the uproar. But it has led to multiple offline conversations between Suh and the professor who was directing the show, and between the professor and me as well. Suh and I will be visiting the KCACTF Region 2 festival in a few weeks where we’ll meet for the first time and discuss the issue with the college students and their professors in attendance.
After the heated dialogues that both The Mountaintop and Jesus in India engendered, on social media, in comments sections and in direct correspondence, I was moved to wonder aloud about how the playwright-director dynamic was being addressed in college training programs, both undergraduate and graduate. It prompted yet more comments and e-mails, and frankly helped me to learn a great deal more and provide the basis for further exploration. The post became the basis for a panel added to the KCACTF Region 3 festival, and I’ll be headed to Milwaukee to participate in the conversation right after the first of the year.
With Hamilton being cited as a reason why white actors should be permitted to play characters of color, I took the opportunity of a previously scheduled and wholly unrelated interview to ask the show’s writer-composer-star Lin-Manuel Miranda for his take on race on stage, both in his own work and the work of others. He was, as always, thoughtful and eloquent, during his dinner break on a two-show day.
When a community/semi-professional theatre in Connecticut staged a production that looked startlingly like a professional production that had been stage nearby three years earlier, it was an opportunity to address the issue of appropriation from other productions and what constitutes originality in directing and design. While the company in question suspended performances within 24 hours, and have subsequently restaged the show on a new set, the outpouring of anecdotes (and expressions of frustration) about productions that have slavishly copied others came pouring out. I expect to write more on this subject.
While it didn’t make the list of my ten most read posts, top on my list of posts that I wish had been more widely read is this one. Written on a day when a combination of medications for an infection laid me low and found me laying on my sofa most of the day, an array of tweets and comments roused me to string together a few sentences which were probably my only coherent thoughts until the drugs wore off. Even if you don’t read the whole post, take a look at the italicized midsection, which is what I actually wrote that day; the rest is subsequent framing.
Truth be told, this was one of my ten most read posts of 2015, but that has little to do with what I actually wrote and everything to do with the video I’d discovered and embedded, once again with framing material that isn’t essential to enjoying the video. My greatest contribution was a snappy title. But if you haven’t seen it and need a laugh at year end, this vid’s for you.
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My thanks to everyone who read, commented, shared, tweeted or wrote to me in connection with my writing this year, and special thanks to those who brought situations to my attention so that I could explore them and share them even more broadly. You all have my very best wishes for a safe, happy, arts-filled 2016.
Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts and interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.
No, I’m sorry, it’s not a blog post; it’s a press release. But if you’ll read on, I hope you’ll understand why I’ve placed it here, and indulge me this once. – Howard
NEW YORK (February 12, 2014) – The New School for Drama (Pippin Parker, Director) announces the launch of the Arts Integrity Initiative, a new project aimed at supporting and protecting the work of artists at every level of society and production. Under the leadership of arts administrator, writer and advocate Howard Sherman, Arts Integrity will not only examine and take an active role in instances of censorship and alteration of works, but also serve as a resource for the academic and professional arts communities.
The program is designed to ensure that audiences and practitioners alike have the opportunity to engage directly with challenging, vital work that reflects the very best the arts have to offer.
“As long as books are banned, creative works are rewritten, and plays and musicals are eliminated by schools because they deal with challenging issues, we need to be vigilant about protecting freedom of speech, quality education and the rights of artists,” said Richard Kessler, Executive Dean of The New School’s Performing Arts School and Dean of Mannes School of Music. “With this new program, The New School addresses the subject from multiple vantage points, developing students who understand the necessity of free artistic expression as a means by which to explore, reflect, and critique society.”
The program features new curricular opportunities for students that explore the value of free artistic expression, as well as enhanced community outreach and projects to confront the issue. These commitments will be amplified through a range of public programs to promote discourse on the silencing or manipulation of artistic works, copyright protection, and broader use of the arts as a vehicle for social engagement and justice.
Projects associated with the Office for Arts Integrity include integrated coursework in conjunction with a forthcoming Master’s degree in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship; a collective space for affected professional and community artists to raise concerns and seek guidance; an online publication chronicling challenges to artistic expression and offering original work speaking directly to those issues from within the New School community and expert outside voices; and public programs to raise awareness of the silencing of artistic works and devise strategies for mobilization of the creative and educational communities.
“Since he first picked up the anti-censorship banner, no one has been a more vocal, tireless, and effective advocate for the playwright’s right to be heard than Howard Sherman,” said John Weidman, President of the Dramatists Legal Defense Fund.
“I began doing work in this area on an ad hoc basis four years ago,” said Sherman, “and since that time I’ve increasingly found the need for a proactive resource to study and address arts censorship, supporting both academic and professional arts companies in their efforts to do work that has the greatest rewards for their constituencies. At the same time, I find more and more examples of works being altered unilaterally to appease often arbitrary assessments of what is appropriate or acceptable – or even simply appealing.”
Sherman continued, “Too often when challenges arise, those who are targeted don’t know where to turn, and I hope we’ll be able to provide those facing such restriction or tampering with guidance and on the ground resources, as well as collaborate with other organizations which share those goals, while bringing specific arts expertise to the table. In addition, our plan is to explore the roots of these issues in the arts and work collaboratively within schools and both the amateur and professional communities to develop best practices to reduce these high profile incidents over time, even as we look to explore cases that never reach the general public.”
Recent examples of obstruction of artists’ rights include the ongoing lawsuit preventing production of David Adjmi’s dark parody 3C and the unauthorized alteration of the musical Hands on a Hardbody in its Texas premiere in Houston. Recent arts censorship efforts have included the cancelations of Almost, Maine in North Carolina and Spamalot in South Williamsport, Pennsylvania; and the cancelations and subsequent restorations of Rent in Trumbull, Connecticut and Sweeney Todd in Plaistow, New Hampshire.
Howard Sherman is senior strategy consultant at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts, a position he’ll continue in parallel to his new role at The New School for Drama. Sherman has been executive director of the American Theatre Wing and the O’Neill Theatre Center, managing director of Geva Theater, general manager of Goodspeed Musicals and public relations director of Hartford Stage. He has recently been recognized as one of the National Coalition Against Censorship’s “Top 40 Free Speech Defenders of 2014” and will be honored later this month with The Dramatists Legal Defense Fund’s second “Defender” Award. His writing about the arts has been seen in such publications as American Theatre magazine, Slate and The Guardian, and he is the U.S. correspondent for London’s The Stage newspaper. He blogs at www.hesherman.com.
I created the fortnightly “American Stages” column for The Stage in London in 2013 with the mandate to cover news of American theatre news that didn’t necessarily warrant a standalone story and wasn’t being widely covered in other UK media. It gave me the ongoing opportunity to mix commercial with not-for-profit, Broadway with regional, as I saw fit, all targeted primarily at a readership of theatre professionals in the UK. Beginning in October 2014, the column became a weekly feature. Given the relatively tricky formatting of the original pieces, this pages serves as an index that will take you to each column as it appears on The Stage’s website, and will be updated on a rolling (and somewhat erratic) basis.
In the days before I married, in the days before the advent of mp3s and i-devices, the soundtrack of my life was provided by the radio. Primarily listened to while driving, I had an elaborate series of preset stations for my eclectic tastes, geographically diverse enough to allow me to travel between Philadelphia and Boston without searching for stations. Yet, in the wake of each romantic breakup, they all seemed to be a single station programmed specifically to torment me. Every time a relationship ended, popular music seemed a conspiracy – every song was either about the desire for love, the thrill of current love or the desperation of lost love. Who, I wondered, were these sadists?
Of course, the programming was the same it had always been. What had changed was my perception of it. Bereft, expressions of love were taunts; plaints of longing or loss egged me deeper into despair. “Sylvia’s Mother” could reduce me to tears. It wasn’t good.
This effect is true in every aspect of our lives, since we are emotional creatures and view everything, especially art and entertainment, subjectively, not objectively, no matter how hard we might try. For all the talk about how theatre is different every night because of the interplay between actors and audiences, the real difference is found in what each member of the audience brings with them to the theatre: a rough day at the office, a misbehaving child, an undigested bit of beef. Theatres work very hard to create an optimal situation (excepting, for some reason, leg room) for the consumption of dramatic work, but they cannot know or in any way control the many experiences which each member of the audience brings to bear on the event.
Arthur Sherman, 1974
I share all of this by way of prologue, because the effect of the day to day on theatergoing has been much on my mind for the past few weeks. Why that time period? Because three and a half weeks ago, my elderly father fell and sustained a traumatic brain injury (believe it or not, this had happened once before, just a year earlier, and he came back from it beautifully). As a result, I have been spending roughly every other day waking early, departing New York for the hospital in New Haven at about 6:45 am, arriving by 9 to speak with the attending physician during rounds, and heading back to New York by noon. Then I nap and, given the time of year, see a show in the evening.
Why did I keep up my theatergoing? Simply because that is what I do. I wanted to retain a sense of normalcy. My father had been seriously ill many times in my life, and always survived. I needed to do all that I could do for him, but for me, the less I broke my patterns, the better.
So the question is whether my response to the theatre I’ve seen in the past three weeks would have been different if my father had not been ill, if my days had been less complicated. Of course, I will never know. I have, to be sure, laughed in the theatre these past three weeks; I have not once cried. I have experienced joy; I have been dismayed and feel quite certain that I will never, willingly, see some of those shows again.
I also did something unprecedented: I walked out of a show mid-act. Was my anger and impatience at the story played out before me a true aesthetic appraisal, or did this show somehow become the repository of my concerns for my hospital-bound father? I really can’t say. I might have merely been exercising my own natural taste, since the kind usher who showed to me a door where my departure would be least disruptive tried to persuade me to stay. “It gets better,” she whispered, suggesting that perhaps others had made this mid-show journey. “Not for me,” I replied.
Was it fair for me to keep seeing shows at a time when so much was weighing on my mind? Perhaps, for the artists and my relationship to their work, it was not. But I was not about to sit home, passively watching TV. I was going to do, to the best of my ability, what I always do, which is go to the theatre. After all, the tickets were arranged, I couldn’t spend every minute with my father and even if I did there was little I could do for him. For me, keeping up the familiar seemed wisest. If I didn’t enjoy shows fully, if I can never enjoy those shows in the future because of those first impressions and associations, that is my loss and my error. But I have also been suffering from severe neck and shoulder pain for quite some time, recently diagnosed as bulging and herniated discs, so that has also influenced how I have perceived theatre over several years. I may have not given certain shows the fairest seeing because of physical pain, just as the emotional impact of my father’s injury may have clouded my responses more recently. My thoughts, my physical condition have always colored my theatergoing, so even at a time of extreme stress, I never really thought to stop.
As I write, it is four days since my father died and two days since his funeral. I was at a show only hours before he passed and I will return to the theatre, for a comedy, in two days time, with at least two more shows on tap in the following four days. I will carry memory of him as the lights go down, just as I carry with me the memory of others I have lost in all that I do. But because my dad was not much of a theatregoer, the environment will not specifically evoke him (though the play, or future plays, might). The interior of a theatre will instead signal to me that despite a loss, life goes on; after all, between vocation and avocation, I have spent so much of my life in theatres, they are familiar, comforting places for me to be, my refuge, my sanctuary. I will always carry in delight and despair, happiness and worry, and countless other feelings. And the theatre may well give feelings back to me, intentionally or otherwise. But that, as it always has, depends on me.
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Howard Sherman.
