Alright, I’ve had it and I’m not keeping it to myself anymore.

It seems that not a day goes by that a news item appears one place or another announcing that someone famous is considering/acquiring rights/contemplating/dreaming about creating a Broadway show or being on Broadway. Yesterday it was Kara DioGuardi saying she was thinking about writing a musical. Today it’s the manager of The Eagles saying that they’re exploring creating a musical out of the band’s catalogue. I have little doubt that you can supply your own example of this type of evanescent project with about five seconds of not-so-deep thought.

Perhaps I should be happy about this development. After all, it suggests that well known figures in the entertainment industry see a connection to Broadway as something valuable, a charm they can embrace to legitimize their efforts in other fields. I mention Broadway specifically in this case because I do not hear people saying that they dream of writing a show for their local regional theatre.

Ironically, there are famous people who have done or are doing just that, modestly and earnestly. Jeff Daniels founded his own theatre, The Purple Rose in Michigan, and regularly writes plays for production there, despite his Hollywood fame. Bruce Hornsby wrote a musical called SCKBSTD that premiered at Virginia Stage. The estimable team of Stephen King and John Mellencamp will see their musical Ghost Brothers of Darkland County materialize at The Alliance Theatre this spring. I’m excited about these.

But it’s the unfounded announcements that worry me. Someone goes on a TV show to promote some project or product and suddenly they’re accumulating theatre cred merely for thinking about joining our community. As if that’s not bad enough, their utterance is amplified by the media, who already think putting on a show is about as tough as mounting the high school musical (abetted by Glee, where every rehearsal is pretty  much a polished performance).

There used to be a corollary to this, which a former boss of mine referred to as “producing in the column.” This referred to the practice of less-than-top-line producers announcing projects in hope of making it into the once essential, now long-gone, Friday New York Times theatre column. But many of these productions didn’t yet exist; the producer planted the item to see if people would call expressing interest, and only go forward if their call sheet was sufficiently filled. Back then, the item appeared for a day, and sank out of sight. Today, these items are endlessly repeated, and archived, via the Internet. They spread like a hardy weed, even after they’re abandoned.

I’d like to issue a simple challenge to the media, both theatre-oriented and mass appeal: every time you feel compelled to elevate a musing into a production, you must take the responsibility of checking up on that show at six month intervals. If it comes to pass, terrific, keep on covering it. But when it fades into the woodwork, write something equally as prominent as that very first mention making clear that the project is off, and in many cases, never really was. I’d also add a penance for falling for these largely transparent p.r. stunts: each time you’re gulled, write about a show by a playwright or composer you’ve never written about before, or a theatre company that has never been able to get space from you. And I’m including every outlet that simply regurgitates wire service copy.

You see, there are countless theatres and writers who are actually working at the task of making theatre every day, and they can’t get any attention for their efforts – which exist in the corporeal world. A friend just told me the tale of working at a theatre where the artistic director was nearly in tears of joy over the appearance of a local news crew, for the very first time in memory. But why were they there? Because in the recent storm Irene, a large tree had fallen and blocked entrance to the venue.

I don’t wish to seem harsh to my journalist friends, who likely resent those occasions when they are thusly ill-used. I understand that celebrity sells and that you’re often being pushed, against your own wishes, to report on those who have achieved fame, be it through talent or outrageousness. All I’m asking is that you don’t play into their p.r. machines just because they utter the words “Broadway,” “theatre,” “musical” or “play.” Wait until they write one or are cast in one. Then I don’t really begrudge them the attention. I know what sells. But don’t let these Harold Hills sell you instruments and lessons until they know how to play theselves. Write about the people who are serious about making theatre.

Trust me, there are so many stories to tell.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.

A couple of weeks back I stumbled upon Beloit College’s annual “Mindset List.” Every year since 1998, a faculty member and a (now former) administrator at Beloit have collaborated to assemble a list of cultural and historical touchstones that the incoming freshman class would take for granted, having never known life without them, or be entirely unaware of, having never encountered them, depending upon the example. It is at once a fascinating, informative, amusing and sobering look at what the average 18-year-old might know (unless they are avid historians), in contrast to the received knowledge of those of us who are, well, let’s just say more senior by a few years.

As always, my mind turned to theatre. What has the average undergraduate embarking on a theatre course of study absorbed (or not) during their lifetime through first-hand knowledge? So I have drafted my own “Theatrical Mindset List.”

It is less rigorously researched and time-specific than the lists of Beloit, since I have no intention of producing it annually. I have taken the liberty of assuming that while the list pertains to people born in approximately 1993, no matter how much they might love theatre, their awareness of what was happening in the field couldn’t have possibly come before they were five years old. Consequently, I’ve allowed myself considerable leeway. If some prodigies were precociously cognizant, then they should have gone to college sooner.

So here is my brief, unscientific traipse through the mindset of the theatrical class that will graduate in 2015, but who only started their journey of higher education in the theatre in the last week or so.

1. Tony Kushner, Paula Vogel and August Wilson have always been major, award-winning playwrights.

2. Every theatre ticket they have ever bought or used at a professional venue has been in some way computer generated.

3. Disney has always been a theatrical producer.

4. They’ve never seen the world premiere production of a Stephen Sondheim musical on Broadway.

5. The Phantom of the Opera has always been a long-running Broadway hit.

6. They’ve never seen the world premiere production of a Jerry Herman musical on Broadway (and they’ve never been able to see Carol Channing on Broadway as Dolly Levi).

7. A woman winning a Tony Award for directing is not a breakthrough achievement, although it remains a rare one.

8. Rent has always been in production somewhere in the world.

9. The block of 42^nd Street between 7^th and 8^th Avenues in New York has always been a tourist attraction for families.

10. Les Miserables and Miss Saigon have always been popular musicals.

11. Edward Albee has never been out of critical favor and only infrequently produced.

12. Audra MacDonald, Matthew Broderick, Donna Murphy and Nathan Lane have always been Tony Award-winning actors.

13. At no time could they see the original production of a smash hit Neil Simon play.

14. They’ve never been inside the theatre where My Fair Lady premiered unless they attended church there.

15. They never had the opportunity to see the original production of A Chorus Line on Broadway.

16. Of all of the Tony Awards broadcasts they’ve watched, only one emanated from a Broadway theatre.

17. They’ve never seen a production under the leadership of David Merrick.

18. They’ve never seen a show at an Off-Broadway theatre called the Circle Repertory Company.

19. Elton John has always written for the musical theatre.

20. Ben Brantley has always been the chief theatre critic of The New York Times.

21. Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Ralph Richardson have always been deceased.

22. Theatrical productions have always begun with announcements to silence cell phones, pagers, beeping watches and unwrap candies. (Yes, this is unverifiable, but doesn’t it just seem this way?)

Startling to realize some of this, no? The older you are, the more startling it gets. Perhaps you can think of a few other examples of major changes, achievements, or losses in theatre before or during the mid 90s that the freshman class of 2011-12 might take for granted, or never had the opportunity to experience. I hope you’ll add them in the comments section.

In any event, it’s important to remember that before college, our knowledge of theatre, for the most part, begins when we began going to the theatre, or performing in it (and we didn’t all necessarily do both). For our college students, and for our interns and young staff, there is a divide, and it’s our job to bridge it.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.

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.

The inquiries, mostly via Twitter, are cordial, casual and polite. “Let us know what you think,” they ask, in response to my mentioning what show I’ll be seeing later that day. “I loved it,” they say, “Hope u do 2.”

Until three weeks ago, I had a standard answer to these conversational inquiries about Broadway shows. I would say that given my role at the American Theatre Wing and The Tony Awards, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to voice my opinions one way or another. People respected that, and often seemed sheepish about having asked. I’m sorry if I undermined the very point of social media by refusing a reply, by being anti-social.

Now I have no cover, so to speak. But I’ve decided, at least for now, to maintain my policy in a general sense. I have been known to send effusive tweets over Off-Broadway or regional work that isn’t in Tony contention and I’ll still do so, while saying little about Broadway work, since I retain a Tony vote. You might ask whether pointing out what I go to see isn’t waving a red cape if I’m staying mum about my ultimate opinion; that’s a fair charge, but I do it mostly so those who have come to know me online will not think me solely a Broadway baby and develop a sense of the range – and limits – of what I see.

Keeping one’s opinion to one’s self is hardly the operative ethos of Internet intercourse. Indeed, many see the Internet as the perfect medium for broadcasting their opinions on a wide variety of subjects, whether or not they have any educated basis for such opinions.  Despite that cavil, I have often applauded the means by which the Internet has afforded every individual a broadcast voice, via Twitter, Facebook or countless other applications.

Too often I’ve seen this populist medium used as the platform for virulent versions of what professional critics do in the conventional media: declaring a show worthy or unworthy, attacking artists for offenses current or past, saying whatever comes to mind because there’s no editor or editorial standard to which they must adhere. More than once I’ve likened social media to the early days of broadcasting, and that’s still true, but in so many cases it also resembles the Wild West, with its language closer to Deadwood than to Oklahoma!.

We all know that strong, highly opinionated voices get attention and that is proven daily in the polarized messaging that passes for political conversation.  This cannot be the language for the arts. I worry that in trying to make a name for oneself in the online media circus, people seek to be as provocative, as snarky, as incendiary as they can be in order to stand out from the crowd, generating more page views, more retweets, more +1’s than the next commentator. While they may in fact do so from a place of passion about the art of the theatre, their actions, their writing, serve it poorly, since their negative hyperventilations serve only to promote or define themselves, rather than prove of benefit to anyone involved in the making of art.

Now don’t misunderstand me – I am not anti-critic, whether old media or new. I admire and maintain cordial relationships with a number of fairly prominent critics, and enjoy their insights regardless of whether I agree with them or not; I bridle only at those who seem to take pleasure in their pans. Unfortunately, it is those latter critics who the newly enfranchised prefer to emulate.

So, some might say, why don’t I use the internet to become the critic I hope all should aspire to be? There are several reasons, but one is perhaps the most important: conflict of interest. I have been working professionally in theatre for some 30 years, and so it is relatively rare that I see a production where I do not know some artist (in some cases many artists) involved in the production. For me to take on the role of critic now (even though I did so in my collegiate years) would create an impossible dilemma: either I risk offending people who I admire, enjoy and even love (since no one’s work is always impeccable), or I would have to lie to readers, making the point of my taking on a critic’s mantle completely hypocritical.

God knows, I have opinions. Most people can tell that within minutes of meeting me, and certainly those who know me have heard my thoughts about the many shows I see, often at length. But what I say in relative private is measured for each individual who hears it; I rarely dissemble, but I do omit. Social media simply doesn’t afford that degree of narrowcasting and personalization.

I am happy to engage in discussion and debate about theatrical topics, and Twitter and blogging have afforded me that opportunity, far beyond the circles in which I travel here in New York. I’m pleased to enthuse about remarkable aspects of works I see, without necessarily offering a blanket opinion, for broad public consumption. I’m most pleased when I can add a few obscure facts or personal reminiscences to discussions of theatrical work that I spot in the endless stream of online opining.

But what did I think of this show or that? Is my thumb up or down? Unless I’m enthusiastic and the show lesser known, I’ll remain silent or nibble around its edges only, as contrary as that is to my nature. I will not be a cheerleader who loves indiscriminately, but if I cannot say anything nice, as my mother taught me, I will not say anything at all. Readers can read into that silence as they wish. Theatre doesn’t need more people saying what’s wrong with it. I’d rather be someone who reinforces all of the things that are so, so right.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.

As a result of fairly assiduous Twitter use, I have a very respectable score on Klout. However, now that Klout is about to start factoring in FourSquare activity, I have begun “checking in” these past few days, though I registered at least a year ago and find it somewhat juvenile (Badges? I don’t need no stinking badges). I am one of the select 10 million (an oxymoron to be sure) who has secured a Google+ account, however thus far I have made but a single post, comparing the coming Facebook/Google+ wars to the VHS/Beta wars of some two decades ago. I make only the occasional Facebook post, but at least I no longer restrict my friends to those I met in school. I keep up on LinkedIn, but only connect to people with whom I have genuinely worked, to maintain the integrity of the platform. My PeerIndex score is lousy, due I believe, to a tech error (reported, unresolved) that leaves out the vast majority of my Twitter activity. I’ve largely given up on Quora, because the questions being posed in the areas where I have some expertise are predominantly: a) subjective, b) silly and c) reminiscent of the Monty Python “How To Do It” sketch which offered simple instructions on things like how to be a gynecologist. I captured one of the free Spotify accounts earlier this week due to a car company promotion (I already forget the brand, and I don’t own or intend to buy a car anyway), although I have listened to only a single song.

Enough?

Let me also remind you that these are all personal accounts, as I’m in a job transition. So all of the above is either building my personal brand, providing fun as I decompress from a series of stressful jobs, or completely wasting time that I could be using more productively.

If this is what I’m facing, I can’t help but wonder how arts organizations are wading through the developing, churning world of social media, since every week seems to produce a new site or app designed to revolutionize how we relate to each other, be it as individuals, businesses & patrons, artists & audiences, and so on.

Traditionally, arts organizations haven’t been early technological adopters, largely because of a lack of internal expertise and the high cost of entry. I am old enough to remember Hartford Stage’s first fax machine (a wonder), first computer network (so much better than electric typewriters), first Mac and desktop publishing software (which we discovered didn’t actually design things for us) and first computerized ticketing system (somebody else’s headache, but terrific). But that technological adoption, in the latter half of the 1980s (e-mail became a standard while I was at Goodspeed Musicals), seems slow by the standards of today.

One significant factor in today’s more rapid adoption is that of cost. The most prevalent tools of communication at the moment, many name-checked above, are free. If you’ve got a computer and internet access (and for real convenience, a smartphone as well), you’ve pretty much got what your organization needs to jump into the fray.

But the challenge is deciding whether to do so or when to do so. Certainly if a promising new service appears that requires you to secure your company’s name from squatters (remember the domain name rush that characterized the spread of the internet itself?), it should be done right away. But beyond that, there needs to be a certain amount of wait and see.

If your organization has an in-house IT department (now the norm at large not-for-profits), there are probably one or more technologically savvy individuals forever lobbying every department about a new tool that can make their work more efficient, from the newest in collaborative CAD programs to online donation systems. Development, marketing and p.r. departments are watching social media in particular, both to give the organization an edge and to show the public that the organization has an edge.

But it has generally been acknowledged that just as freedom isn’t free, neither is social media. The cost is one of time and brainpower: does the organization have someone on staff who has the conceptual and technical savvy to figure out how to best use the cascading platforms? Can the organization afford to give over a portion of the time of an existing staffer to that pursuit, or to hire someone to focus exclusively on this area? Is the cost-value equation favorable for being active and meaningful on multiple platforms? What is the ultimate goal for the organization?

I am hardly the first person to pose these questions. Indeed, my Twitter feed is bombarded by advice — and solicitations to pay for advice — on how to best utilize these resources. In fact, I’m pretty stunned by the number of people who proclaim themselves as social media experts or gurus, in a field that is, in terms of widespread awareness and usage, maybe six or seven years old. I’m not being dismissive of true experts and explorers, as I’ve spoken with some very shrewd folks, but just as companies paid a fortune for their first websites because the practice of building them was so new, I fear the ratio of people with true insight to those who merely post a lot on Facebook poses risks for less sophisticated groups who feel they may be missing an important trend.

So I want to offer a single piece of pragmatic advice about adopting a new platform or, as the once dominant MySpace has shown, when to abandon one. That advice is to analyze, in a full organizational survey, why you’re doing it. What do you hope to achieve? Can the platform conceivably do what you want? Has it reached a tipping point where more than just first-adopters are playing with it?

As an aside, I should say that in most cases, the leaders of large organizations are ill-equipped to make these decisions, because they haven’t the time to understand these new forms of media themselves. They know how to search on Google, they can click on the link for a funny YouTube video, they may have a personal Facebook page, but their jobs don’t afford them the time to delve deeply into these areas. Indeed, I fear that many of them feel they are above it; at a recent LORT conference, I did a show of hands survey of managers asking how many knew their organizations were using social media, and how many had their own presence. Many hands appeared for the first question, but few remained up after the second. Yet these platforms are not just “for the kids,” and they certainly shouldn’t be relegated to intern-level responsibility, as is so often the case. This will change over time, as succeeding generations will take social media as simply the norm, not innovation.

Social media, like it or not, is transforming how people relate to each other, to the businesses they frequent and the organizations where they participate and which they may support. It is ignored at its own peril, but it is also embraced, if not with danger, then with caution.

While adopting a child is significantly more profound on many lives, adoption of social media platforms demands some marginally equivalent level of self-scrutiny and awareness. Otherwise, your organization will find itself making errors in public perception and in allocation of resources. And as we’re learning again and again, we post, tweet and share at our own risk. If a twitter revolution can ostensibly bring down a dictator, think what could happen if you use it wrong – or it turns on you, like an ungrateful child.

P.S. Those who found this essay online probably find it to be obvious, or old news, precisely because you’re far enough into the social world to be ahead of the thinking herein. But perhaps you have some discussion to provoke within your organization, or someone to persuade. Maybe this can help.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.

It’s a great word. “Embargo.” It seems to come from a different age, or a world in which brinksmanship over major issues comes into play. Oil embargo. Trade embargo. But it’s alive, if not exactly well, in the relationship between the media and those that they cover.

In the past 36 hours, there have been some very interesting comments on Twitter via #2amt about “embargoing” reviews of arts events. The primary participants have been Trey Graham of NPR, Peter Marks of The Washington Post, Alli Houseworth from Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Nella Vera of The Public Theater. As a “recovering” publicist, I’ve lobbed in a few thoughts as well, but I though the issue was worth more than a few 140 character salvos.

In brief summary: there has been a longstanding “gentleman’s agreement” (pardon my patronymic) between arts groups and the media that cover them that while productions may be seen by the press in advance of the official opening at designated performances, reviews will be embargoed for release until that official opening occurs. This has been in place for some time, although it is not theatrical tradition from days of yore – it is something that has been in place in the U.S. for not more than 50 years and is, I believe, an even more recent phenomenon in England.

Social media has upended this polite détente (as has, perhaps, Spider-Man, but for this discussion, let’s declare that an anomaly and move past it), since we now have personal media platforms that allow any audience member to broadcast their own opinions immediately upon exiting a theatre, if not during the performance itself. So the major media, with more traditional roots, finds itself either days or weeks behind in reporting on a cultural event while the court of public opinion renders verdicts left and right, or they have to report on that very public opinion before issuing their own.

Marks has commented that he is precluded from tweeting his opinions in advance of his review appearing; Frank Rizzo of The Hartford Courant was tweeting his thoughts on a show at the Williamstown Theatre Festival the very night he saw it, although in that case it was the press opening. There’s obviously no industry-wide practice and every outlet is formulating its own approach.

I should make clear that none of these journalists are sneaking into preview performances to which they’re not invited. They are respecting whatever preview period the company or producers have requested; they just chafe against having to wait, either out of professional courtesy to an externally imposed release date or an internal policy which dictates adherence to the print date.

I also need to state my belief that the performing arts do not truly come alive until they’re before an audience, and I believe that artists should have a reasonable amount of time to work on their creations in front of an audience (yes, a paying audience appropriately advised as to the show’s inchoate form) before opinions are rendered. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like have certainly made it impossible to completely manage such a protected environment and that’s just a reality of our world; to rail against it is foolish and unproductive. The question is whether major media (old or new), with its vast reach, should play by the old rules, or adopt the “embargoes be damned” attitude that the public has unknowingly employed.

For arts groups, one rationale for the embargo has been to achieve a “roadblock” effect with their reviews – a great many come out on the same day, having a better chance of achieving traction in the public’s mind. But as members of the press will often say, they are not marketing arms for the arts, but reporters or writers of opinion, so why must they adhere to a marketing or press plan? Frankly, so long as journalists don’t start writing about works of art before they are acknowledged to be complete, this practice may have to fall under the weight of the populist-driven social media.

As for tweeting a mini-opinion in advance of a full review, I have to say I don’t think that serves anyone. If the public, as some posit, want only bite-sized chunks of information, then critics are playing into their hands and hastening their own demise. After all, if you know a review is pro or con, will you necessarily look for a more nuanced appraisal a day or two later? Will the craft of reviewing at long last be reduced, in all arts, to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach popularized by Siskel and Ebert? Does anyone want reviews to be nothing but capsules, star ratings or a little man and his chair?

I must confess to puzzlement about how much the traditional media is approaching social media. Instead of using it to deepen its own coverage, since website space is less dear than newsprint, and the reach unfettered by geography and logistics, some papers undermine their own print versions in their race to populate a Twitter feed. The New York Times, inexplicably, shares virtually all of their Sunday arts coverage through Twitter two or three days before the Sunday paper is out, rendering the section old news by the time it appears fully online or (yes, I’m old) on my doorstep.

I will say I’m intrigued by critics like Marks or the prolific Terry Teachout, who will actively engage with their readers on social media, breaking down the ivory tower mentality cherished by critics only a generation ago. The idea that critics will interact with individuals, and perhaps artists, in a public forum, is tremendously exciting to me, and may well be the best thing to happen to artist/critic relations in many years. Indeed, might early tweets result in critics getting feedback and perspective before their final verdict is rendered?

As for the embargo: I think it has begun to crumble and that erosion will only accelerate as every single person who cares to becomes their own media mogul and true stars of the medium begin to achieve influence akin to that afforded by old media. I say, as long as the artists’ work is done, let’s be happy that the press is so eager to cover us. But I caution the press not to be so eager to adopt the new paradigm that they undermine themselves, leading to ever-briefer, ever-more-marginalized assessments of artists’ work.

This post originally appeared on the 2amtheatre website.