All of meme. Meme, myself and I. Auntie Meme. Do, re, meme, fa, so, la, ti do. I meme of Jeannie.

I could go on. And on. For hours.

I won’t.

One of the more interesting entertainments to arise from the spread of social media is the propagation of memes, perhaps more commonly known as hashtag games, in which someone suggests a theme or topic on Twitter upon which people spin sometimes endless variations, spreading far beyond the circle of the person who began it.  ‘Meme” itself is not a new-fangled internet word, although it has entered the popular lexicon only recently; the Merriam-Webster Dictionary dates its coinage to only 1976. I rather like the definition given by Dictionary.com, which mixes both culture and science: “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes.”

Last week I wrote about the collaborative nature of Twitter, suggesting that we were collectively writing a script of modern life. It is surely an absurdist script, with characters who come and go without warning, constant footnotes to the text (links), and we choose what portion of the dialogue we wish to see or engage with (by following or blocking). Well if the totality of Twitter is the ultimate “devised work,” then memes are its laugh lines.

Memes allow everyone to be their own Groucho, their own Stephen Wright, or even their own Oscar Wilde, if they aspire to be truly great. They can even be their own Milton Berle (for you young ‘uns, an early TV comic often accused of pilfering jokes), since in the elaborate Venn diagram of Twitter, your followers may not have a significant intersection with meme aficionados, and you can claim ownership of good lines with relative impunity.

Just as I enjoy my role in the multi-faceted online play that is Twitter, I adore the idea that Twitter gives voice to closet Neil Simons everywhere. No sooner do we see an appealing hashtag than we throw ourselves into the writer’s room of almost any sitcom you can name, even the fictional writers room of 30 Rock, itself dreamed up and punched up in a real-world writers room, like some Russian nesting doll. We work to one-up each other. We can all be the class clown, except there is no one to silence us except our own self-imposed censor or waning creativity. Quite remarkably, those that play seem to offer only positive reinforcement, namely the prized “re-tweet”, the greatest honor is when that retweet comes from a great comic mind like meme master Michael McKean (of Spinal Tap and A Mighty Wind fame). Our bad jokes are buried and forgotten, but our good ones live on in the timelines of others.

I like the idea of memes as passing on our genes, since our desire when we engage in this word play is to insure the propagation of the idea, so that its comic DNA is passed from reader to reader. The bravest among us even try to be patient zero, proffering the idea, the appropriate hashtag and a few choice examples to get things rolling. In the past few weeks, I undertook to start two memes, the mildly successful #theatreinhell, which sought ideas for the worst possible theatrical offerings with which one might be punished for eternity, and #broadwayhurricane, puns on plays and musicals to accompany the arrival of storm Irene, which took off like a shot and was zinging around the internet more than 24 hours after I started it.

Yes, I take some small pride in “going viral,” even if most of the participants had no idea who established the game. I was the progenitor of laughter for some people, even long after the idea had gone beyond my active participation. In each case, the jokes were read alone, but everyone who saw them or contributed to them were united as an audience, making rapid connections in ways that only the internet can.

I’m not suggesting that memes have anywhere near the importance of, say, the manner in which news travels instantly and internationally via social media these days. As I said earlier, these are merely our one-liners, our word-play, our absurdist thoughts expressed and disseminated digitally, scattered across a much larger script of our interests and obsessions. There is something Darwinian in the way the best succeed as others fall on deaf ears (or perhaps blind eye is the more apt metaphor), but in the gentlest sense.

Is it utter frivolity? Perhaps. But the creative minds of the Reduced Shakespeare Company (@reduced) turned to Twitter last week to “crowdsource” a joke for their newest opus (I endeavored to help, rather obsessively). Perhaps since the internet makes it impossible for shows to go out of town in order to be out of critical scrutiny, the new alternative might instead be to test ideas via social media, in plain sight. Yes, it may spoil the joke for a handful, and risk having some stolen by the Uncle Milties who troll our timelines, but how wonderful to invite collaborators we don’t even know into the creation of work we hope they might ultimately attend and enjoy.

As the arts look for ways to engage their audiences, they rarely use humor. Even when we promote comic work, we tend to take ourselves too seriously, yet memes prove how humor can spread. It’s something we would all do well to take notice of, and perhaps begin to employ. Tweet humor, and the world laughs with you, and becomes your friend or follower. Tweet dully, and you tweet alone.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website

You don’t know me.

You may think you do. After all, if you read my blog, follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, ask me a question on Quora, join my circles on Google+, you know a number of things about me. You certainly know of my devotion to theatre, my love of film, my enthusiasm for social media and my predilection for jokes and puns. You may have watched or listened to me on the podcasts I did while with the American Theatre Wing. We may have exchanged messages of varying lengths on these topics, you may have been kind enough to thank me for some of what I have done. But for the majority of you reading this, you haven’t met me and don’t truly know me.

I have a wife, but do you know her name? How many siblings do I have? Who are my closest friends? What are my political views? What are the jobs I wanted but didn’t get? Which are the employers who wanted me, but to whom I said no? Who did I date before marrying? Was my heart ever broken? What experiences have resulted in my most profound sense of loss?

Mind you, I’m not taunting anyone, nor am I trying to discount what we have together. If you if are research inclined (or stalkerish), you can find the answers to many of these questions online (in some cases, with photos, for your amusement). My point is about – like most of what I share – social media and theatre.

I have about 3100 Twitter followers and about 550 Facebook friends (hello, everyone). I have no idea how many people have watched me on “Working in the Theatre,” listened to me on “Downstage Center,” or god help me, watched me in a judicial role on Cupcake Wars.  But as a result, most of you know the me I want you to see, the me I want to be. I am in control in a way I am not in face-to-face human interaction; there are many deleted tweets and blog passages that were in danger of going too far.

Social media offers us a particular opportunity to be the best version of ourselves, if we choose to use it for such a purpose. As someone who has always retained a sense of awkwardness in certain social situations (even though it may not be apparent), social media affords me the chance to say only what I want to say when I want to say it. I can edit it as necessary and, if I’m quick enough, even delete it before it really gets out. It gives me the means to gather an ever-widening circle of people with common interests, with whom I can talk, joke, or debate, if I choose to do so. And I can withdraw whenever I wish, to the insecurity of real life, ironically enough.

I have said more than once that I was drawn to theatre in high school because, while I wasn’t shy, I thrived on the experience of being in plays since I always knew what to say next. Someone else had worked out the conversation and all I needed to do was deliver the lines and if I did so with what passed for 17-year-old skill, I could achieve the desired result, particularly laughter, which is my drug of choice. As I grew older, and genuine talent was required, I stepped aside, seeking a life in which I could be of service to those who wrote the words and music, spoke and sang the lines, who could produce the desired effect.

Social media has given us all the opportunity to be on stage. What is Twitter but an ongoing play where brief thoughts must be translated to words? Isn’t it an extended improv exercise, or a perpetual, immersiveSleep No More (with much more talk but without all the running and sweating)? Aren’t blogs our monologues, rarely spoken aloud in our own voice? Perhaps they are our inner monologues, depending upon our topic, and how much we choose to share.

I often read comments from people pondering, discussing, hoping that social media and theatre will converge in a manner which produces a whole new experience, for artists and audience alike. But I think that social media is theatre already, a set of artificial worlds which we choose to enter or not. It is not cute like SimCity, it is not as visceral as L.A. Noire, it doesn’t burn calories like Wii Sports. We can choose anonymity, pseudonyms and avatars behind which to hide, but that defeats the purpose. It is a world much like our own, although we can banish those we find objectionable, by blocking or unfriending them.

To join, enjoy and benefit from the never-ending story playing out in social media, we must be some simulacrum of ourselves, always in the moment, always open to whoever may join the scene. By joining, we brand ourselves as exhibitionists, putting ourselves into the spotlight for others to enjoy or judge. But we are part of a team writing a script, billions of words every second, and though we know there are countless scenes playing out elsewhere, we are always in our own, or choosing which to observe. And it’s all being saved on hard drives around the world, perhaps to be played out again someday.

The quote under my high school yearbook photo was apt then, as the star of high school plays, and remains apt today, as a figure of minor recognition in a certain field. It is drawn from Kurt Vonnegut’s novelMother Night, the story of an American spy whose true identity is never revealed, and so he lives in hiding, reviled as a Nazi sympathizer. “We are what we pretend to be,” wrote Vonnegut’s protagonist. “So we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

My name is @hesherman. What’s yours? Let’s play.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website

“You’re gonna have to learn your clichés. You’re gonna have to study them, you’re gonna have to know them. They’re your friends.”

Though I rarely seek it out, I frequently find myself watching the television sports report during the 11 pm news, typically after Jon Stewart completes his guest interview and before Letterman begins. Not being a sports enthusiast, I marvel at, and on behalf of the arts, envy, the nightly recounting of all of the day’s games, interspersed with chats with the players. The interviews amuse me, because they say – and I don’t think I’m exaggerating here – absolutely nothing. Either someone is saying that they’re going up against or have just gone up against a tough team and either the speaker’s team did the best they could or pulled together and showed the other guys what for. Screenwriter Ron Shelton suggested that this speaking without saying a thing is something players are taught, resulting in the quote above from the film Bull Durham.

Arts organizations don’t have it so lucky. There’s no arts slot on the nightly news that has to be filled, regardless of how little news there may be. While most newspapers retain arts coverage, the “news hole” continues to shrink and pop culture is now lumped with the unfortunately named high culture, so the competition for space only increases. Even when we’re the home team, we’re competing for space with every other home team in our community, as well as with national stories about everything from a new avant-garde musical composition to Japanese manga compilations.

As a result, the arts always have to have “a hook” to get journalists interested, and simply doing a good play or ballet, having a good conductor or director, isn’t enough. Often, the media looks to arts publicists to find the hook in order to pique their interest, and that’s certainly the job of any good press rep. But we don’t have it handed to us like sports, or like funny/cute animal videos from anywhere in the world.

Assuming the baited hook has been taken, our artists then have to participate in an interview and often have to be observed (and recorded or photographed) at work. But unlike sports, where the photos are taken from many yards away, or the interviews conducted in locker room haste, arts subjects often sit cheek by jowl with their chroniclers, and may talk for 20, 30, 60 minutes or more, depending upon the reporter’s needs. There is a forced intimacy that immediately influences the experience.

Now I don’t want to suggest that this is bad for the arts, since we need all the attention we can get. But it does force our artists into a situation where they have to make statements and claims about their work, typically in advance of the work’s completion. Let’s not forget: an actor or director might do six shows in a year, an author a new play every year or every other year, while in baseball there are 162 games a season. So for the interview subject in the arts, each interview carries much higher stakes, and the desire to please the reporter and to prove interesting and worthy of their attention is a razor-sharp, double-edged sword.

On the plus side is the attention and space given to an articulate subject, which grows even greater if a dash of controversy is tossed in, intentionally or not. The downside is that in the case of major coverage, everyone who subsequently chooses to see that work has the artists’ words echoing in their heads, and the audience then gets to judge whether the artists succeeded or failed at their own goals, rather than viewing and processing the work discretely, with only one’s own reactions at play.

For those who follow theatre, there is no greater example of this than the recent New York Times story on the new production of Porgy and Bess at the American Repertory Theater, which featured several members of the creative team candidly spelling out what they hope to achieve and why in a reworked version of the classic piece. Given splashy play by the paper in the Sunday Arts section, still the holy grail of arts publicists in a diminished print universe, the story surely set the phones ringing up in Boston where the show debuts. But as we know, it also set keys a-tapping here in New York, where four days later, the Times released a letter from Stephen Sondheim which took the interviewed artists to task for their perspective and their approach. The phones may well have rung even more thereafter, but there is now no question that a significant portion of the audience for the show will view it through the prism of both the creative team and Mr. Sondheim’s criticisms.

I don’t want to enter into that fray, especially because the team at A.R.T., Mr. Sondheim and the Times reporter are all people I know, respect and like. I use this only as an example of the actual dangers of arts coverage, the risk when claims are made and innovations detailed, but also of the perceived necessity to sell art by revealing its secrets, even when that may work to a piece’s ultimate detriment.

Since the arts cannot get coverage without a strong hook, we must be careful how we bait it and what happens once we catch something. We don’t have the luxury of speaking in cliché, but at times it pays to tantalize rather than reveal, and let the work speak for itself, so our own words don’t become tools by which we are filleted.

P.S. Thanks to Eric Grode for surfacing the Bull Durham quote.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.

Among the entertainments and distractions wrought by Twitter are the propagation of memes or hashtag games, in which a topic is tossed out for the masses, from which to wring endless variations, almost always humorous. For example, yesterday, in honor of the weekend’s number one film, folks were spinning comedy on #FailedApePitches, to which I contributed such classics as “Macaque of the Red Death” and “She Wore a Yellow Gibbon.” You need a taste for low wordplay and bad puns to enjoy the majority of these efforts, which spread virally; I am often motivated to churn out a half-dozen in a few minutes when the mood strikes me, to my own endless amusement.

But amidst the puns, I employed Twitter’s hashtagging for a higher-aimed colloquy yesterday as well. Having spotted a feature about the 100 Best Closing Lines of Books, which I thought was very clever, since we mostly hear about book openings (“Call me Ishmael,” anyone?), I decided to toss the subject out to the Twitterverse, but for plays and musicals, of course, not books.

This did not become a viral sensation, nor did I expect that it would. But what struck me from the responses was how many of the closing lines moved me, immediately prompting my recall of one or more productions of the quoted play, taking me back to the feeling I had as the lights dimmed or suddenly went out on those lines. It only took a handful of words to reanimate the theatergoing experiences for me, and for a couple of hours, it proved a most intriguing avalanche of reveries, prompted by the memories of others.  The playwrights’ final words held enormous power.

What also struck me was how open ended the lines were in so many cases. I was not being sent words of finality, but words that seemed to lead on to yet another story, or perhaps more accurately yet another chapter in the story. Even with plays that I knew to leave audiences sad and even despairing, the final words usually offered some hope to the characters, and to us in the seats as well. This seems to have been what people took away with them.

And so I would like to offer you a limited selection of the final lines shared with me by others, and a few I chose myself, to see whether they have the same effect on others that they had on me, both at the theatre and in the scroll of tweets.  I find them hypnotic, optimistic and comforting.

“Greetings, Prophet. The Great Work begins: the messenger has arrived.”

“I think maybe heaven is a sea of untranslatable jokes. Only everyone is laughing.”

“When we’re 45, we can be pretty fucking amazing.”

“What will we do ‘til spring?”

“Blow out your candles, Laura.”

“Oh, how I do love birthday cake.”

“Years from now…when you talk about this…and you will…be kind.”

“Come you giants.”

“Ready, old friend? Courage.”

“Yes, let’s go.”

“You that way: we this way.”

“Everything in life is only for now.”

“We shall rest.”

“You get a good rest, too. Goodnight.”

“We’re free and clear. We’re free.”

“So many possibilities.”

“Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you. I absolve you all.”

“Not annoying! Not annoying at all!”

The quotes are from, in order: Angels In America: Millennium Approaches, The Clean House, Uncommon Women and Others, Take Me Out, The Glass Menagerie, Crimes of the Heart, Tea and Sympathy, Jerusalem, Man of La Mancha, Waiting for Godot, Love’s Labour’s Lost,  Avenue Q, Uncle Vanya, Our Town, Death of a Salesman, Sunday in the Park With George, Amadeus, and On The Verge. If the quotes are imprecise, it is because I didn’t have the resources to check each and every one.

My thanks to everyone who contributed; you can see the complete Twitter chain by searching on #beststageclosinglines. For those who would enjoy this as a quiz focused on musicals, my query yesterday prompted one from Chris Caggiano, and it can be found on his blog here.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website

Sometime in the 1970s, the once ubiquitous gossip columnist Rona Barrett began reporting box office grosses during her regular appearances on Good Morning America. Prior to that, such statistics were available only to readers of Variety, long the entertainment bible (and perhaps to Hollywood Reporter readers as well, though as a teen I only knew of Variety). What she unleashed was a revolution in entertainment reporting, in which the general public began hearing about weekly grosses for the movies, detailed Nielsen television ratings, volume of record albums (later CDs and later mp3) sold weekly, even the Broadway box office grosses. Across the country, what was once industry information became popular fodder, so much so that the movies manage to get press out of projected box office tallies on Monday, actual receipts on Tuesday and projected receipts on Thursday and/or Friday. Entertainment became about “the numbers.” (Ironically, in this same period, as Variety shrank, Off-Broadway and regional grosses disappeared, even for those in the industry.)

A successor to this awareness came courtesy of Amazon.com, which hourly updates every book’s sales rank, and while the number is based on relative sales and does not reveal the actual count of books sold, it has proven fascinating as well. For authors of newly released books, it’s like crack. Ask anyone you know who’s had a book published. If they don’t admit to checking their Amazon numbers frequently, they’re lying.

But “the numbers” have taken an interesting turn in these burgeoning days of social media. First, it was simply how many friends we have on Facebook (thereby diluting the true meaning of the word ‘friend’ for much of the world), then how many followers we have on Twitter. Most social media platforms provide some comparable measure, and in doing so, set up a competition among users.

We’ve learned just today that the numbers can be gamed, for a while at least: Newt Gingrich’s million Twitter followers turned out to be highly inflated, as the vast majority of them proved to be fictitious accounts created solely to aid those who were collecting numbers across Twitter; others were bots that automatically follow people, often in an effort to get them to click on highly suspect or even dangerous links.

The next step in social media numbers has been the emergence of services that seek to rank users influence in social media across platforms. Klout may be the best known, Peer Index is gaining recognition, and they’re proliferating: Twitsdaq, Twitalyzer, TwentyFeet and Tweetstats are among the many seeking to rank you (and get you to subscribe to their “premium,” paid analytical services). There are also reports that in some industries, employers are beginning to look at these rankings when considering candidates for jobs.

Why do I recount all of this? Because while we may not yet have bar codes tattooed on our arms or the backs of our necks (choose your own dystopian vision) , we are ourselves being reduced to numbers, our worth being determined by our online activity, with little leeway for vacation, illness, or simply the demands of everyday life.

I’m being hyperbolic, I hear you cry. Yes, of course I am. But once out of college and past the arbiter of class rank, we have been judged solely on our achievements. Perhaps those on Wall Street could be judged by earnings, or film stars on their quoted payday per movie, but the people and organizations involved in creating art were judged qualitatively and subjectively, not quantitatively by some unknown algorithm.

I have fallen prey to this insidious practice and its lure of achievement by rank. I am weaning myself from it, although only two weeks ago I took part in a series of e-mails with PeerIndex because I was convinced that their data on me was wrong (in fact, it was, and my ranking has been rapidly rising ever since). I shudder to think that, had I not caught this and some prospective employer decided to check up on me, I’d be viewed as a social media failure. But I’m now controlling the impulse to check my rank on all of these services daily, or to seek new tools of measurement, though I’m not about to forgo them completely (hey, Klout is sending me a $10 coupon because I’m influential enough to sample a sandwich company’s new pulled pork offering).

But I worry about numerical assessments of effectiveness, especially if social media becomes truly ingrained in the national psyche, and it’s certainly well on its way to being lodged there. Having worked in a field where the primary goal is qualitative (read artistic) achievement, albeit with budgetary and audience measures, we may begin to be judged not just on what we put on our stages or produce as individuals, but as influencers or the influenced, those who lead and those who follow.  Now we don’t just hope for a maximum number of stars from a critic for our shows, or the greatest amount of money we can raise, we are being personally quantified, compared and scored.

During my years at the American Theatre Wing, I would often, when discussing The Tony Awards and its peers in film, TV and music, make reference to a fascinating book entitled The Economy of Prestige by James F. English. Boiling the book’s thesis down with utter simplicity, it explores the process of awards-giving for artistic achievement, and how that process will always be imperfect because by comparing, ranking and choosing a “best” among works of art, we are forcing those works out of the creative realm and into the language of the marketplace. So it is with social media ranking.

Klout, PeerIndex and their cohorts now dispassionately judge our organizations and ourselves daily, and their wider acceptance can only diminish our creative achievements. As a longtime fan of science fiction on the page and on film, I see these rankings and I fight against them like so many revolutionaries who fought (will fight?) futuristic totalitarian societies, and I want to shout, “I am a human being. I am a man of the theatre. I am not a number.”

Like all speculative fiction, we’re not going to know for a while what this all means, but maybe we can prevent SkyNet from becoming self-aware, stop the crystal in our palm from turning black, rebel against Big Brother. But it all depends. Are you keeping score?

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.