Reader Wrights

View from the Writer's hut

You know, sometimes all the effort to sit here in my jungle hut, with monkeys on treadmills generating electricity and four wives hounding me to go pick fruit or something useful, is just worth it.  That's especially true when I get great email from readers that let me know I'm having some effect on the world, that is just a four-day canoe ride through dengue-infested backwaters away.

Ever see African Queen?  That scene where Bogart and Hepburn are swarmed by mosquitoes?

Like that.

Anyway, I digress.  I blame my 20-year-old newest wife who is picking my nits and getting me rather frothed up.

So, reader email.  That's where we were a moment ago.

We received this email from long-time reader and supporter R.F., while he was attending a luau on Malibu beach, I think:

Hello Bernard:

I hope you are well, safe and prosperous. Your blogs are a blessing, and I wouldn't know where to start if I were to comment on them.

When Henry the 8th criminalized the Roman Catholics my Irish ancestors were rounded up and shipped off to the penal colony of Australia as convicted sheep thieves, along with thousands of other young Irish men that were at the time "kicking up their heels" or as they say nowadays, existential threats. So I might have inherited a dissident gene or two as a result, and that might be why I like your blogs so much.

As you did I tossed out the TV decades ago, but I watch movies (and I have several thousand in my library). I love movies and analyze them for the content that influences the feelings. I watch the background as much as the foreground mis-en-scene, listen to the the music, and watch for metaphors, allegories, symbols and other triggers and effects.

Of course this drives any family members crazy because I will lurch for the remote to stop a film at odd moments to replay scenes while they are trying to become immersed in the story. My analytical approach always seems much more entertaining and rewarding to me than what others seem to get out of films. I believe movies are an extension of theater and wayang, and movies, theater and wayang are often used to guide society--in pre-Facebook times of course :-)      Wasn't The "Gospel of John" a perfect model of the Greek 3 act play? The last act has the curtain drawn symbolizing the hereafter. (please comment if that is correct). "The Third Man" takes us around in a full circle just like life does. "Chushingura" seems liken to the Bagavad Gita issue of duty in conflict with honor, (possibly a reflection of your father's inner conflict.) A flood of examples comes. Your message is clear, but I must limit this note. 

As with theater and films, in your "Sorcerer's apprentice" blog you remind me that politics is another of the "glamours" as defined in the Maleus Maleficarum. A spell, an illusion causing people to see things differently from what they are. Hence, to cast a glamer is to cause a visual deception. (--wickisomething or other) 

This can be proven: when the glamour fades that scraping sound we hear in the middle of the night are the neighbors in the confines of their garages scraping off Clinton, or Bush, or Obama bumpers stickers. In the forthcoming reboot they will replace them with the newest glamour of Hillary or Trump or whoever bumper stickers.

Thanks for the blogs.

Sorry for the momentary pause there.  The tears running down our cheeks shorted out the "good" laptop and electrocuted the monkey.  Had to put wife #3 on the job and whip out the antique laptop.

It's letters like this that keep us going.  And we love that our readers are intelligent and well educated.  We even had to use the rotting copy of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 1948 edition to understand half this stuff.

Of course, we knew about Botany Bay from watching Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, but the rest of it, well...

We have a massive movie collection too!  All sorted by genre, writer, director, lead actor, even director of photography and editor.  And yes, the film format is a direct extension of the proscenium, or picture frame stage, which is about 2,300 years old.  The psychological effect is of an invisible "fourth wall" that allows the audience to observe the action without being a part of it.

One of the best theories I've ever found (and am still looking for again) for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, was that the "monolith" represents the picture frame, whether stage or screen.  It's dimensions are almost exactly the same as 65-mm film frames, and the narrow depth represents the bare reality of the third dimension in film.

Thus, by extension, Stanley Kubrick was creating a magical working on the audience, through the picture frame, showing us (and bringing us along) an alchemical transformation of anyone who participates in the process (watches it).

All great works of art are transformative.  In fact, one cannot call something art unless it transforms.  That is the whole point.  And yes, there are dark arts and light arts: people who vomit on canvass, and Leonardo da Vinci.  One crushes the spirit, the other elevates it.

I agree with R.F., analyzing the magic makes for a much richer and enlightening experience, at least for me.  In some way, it is also a protection from the magic.  By understanding how it is done helps me maintain a mental distance from its effect.

I would rather watch Citizen Kane a thousand times, than a thousand lesser movies.  When the craft is performed at its peak of skill and artistry, it is truly magical.  Would you rather have one da Vinci or Rembrandt or a thousand Warhols?  Think with your mind and spirit, not your investment portfolio here.

At any rate, you see what happens now when we get great letters like this.  We start thinking (finally?).

Many thanks to R.F., both for reading and for sending us the occasional brain-bombs.  We save these things and dust them off on rainy days, you know.

And thanks to all the readers.  We had our second-best month ever in July, with an average of 800 hits per day, and this past weekend was the most heavily trafficked ever, with over 3,000 hits in two days.  Somebody out there likes us.

Don't forget to pass on a link to your friends and enemies.  You can hook up with us on half a dozen "social media" outlets to keep up with our doings, the archives date back seven years and over 1,000,000 words, and there's some great stuff coming, including events in which you can participate.  So keep tuned.

Onward through the fog!

And yes, the photo at the top is the view out our writer shack deep in the jungles of Borneo.  Ish.

Dream Merchant, Part 2

Interior Design: Benoy, Tech Design: Phil Soden

In the previous installment, I detailed some of the technical issues involved in constructing and starting up Indonesia's first, for-profit arts and entertainment center.  I detailed some of the major issues involved with folks who have no cultural or technical background in Western theater arts trying to build and operate an international venue.

As noted, there is a large cultural gap between Indonesia and the Western theatrical tradition.  At the moment, there are only two venues here that operate like a Western-style venue, one built in the Soeharto days with 500 seats and the Ciputra Artpreneur with 1,200 seats.  There are three in the planning phases, as well, that are significantly larger with rumors that one of them will be dubbed the National Theater of Indonesia (near Bandung), though it will primarily be a concert hall by design.

What this means is that there are very few people with the experience to operate this kind of venue, and there are no such things as Stagecraft classes and industry-specific lighting, sound and electrical training.  This presents a major problem by itself when it comes to staffing, operating and maintaining a venue such as the Artpreneur.

Even more profound is the lack of a "theater culture."  In the West, concepts such as "seasons," "corporate grants," "sustaining memberships," and government agencies that support such things have been around for centuries.

In Western culture, the "social season" begins with the onset of Autumn and has been well established since at least Victorian times.  It is ingrained in such things as theater seasons, teevee seasons, summer blockbusters and winter dramas.  Many Westerners may not even be aware of it, though their lives are frequently dictated by it.  That's how ingrained it is.  From Labor Day to May Day, certain colored clothing is faux pas, certain activities get shelved while others begin, even menus start to shift.  This is driven in part by changing seasons.

In Indonesia, there are only Wet and Dry seasons.  There is no winter and the culture here has never incorporated habits such as storing food and fuel, having different wardrobes that are temperature based, and so forth.  Thus, things such as teevee seasons are imported concepts here.

Western style theater is based on more than 2,000 years of development, beginning with religious adaptations of the lives of the gods to West End and Broadway, spanning a dozen countries that all added their own tastes and conventions to what we now know of as theater arts.

In Indonesia, performance began in a similar way, with ritualized presentations of religious themes, but developed in entirely different directions.  Shadow puppets, slapstick, adopted Chinese and Japanese theatrical forms and the like merged into a much less technical and simpler entertainment industry.  In recent years, the massive Broadway musicals have gotten worldwide attention because of their spectacle, and Indonesia is part of that, but it is a foreign style that is being laid over an existing framework and in many ways, they are incompatible.

Another major difference with the West is that there are no government agencies that promote the arts or offer annual grants to venues to offset the cost of production.  In Indonesia, venues and production companies sink or swim based on their ability to sell tickets, generate ancillary income and secure corporate sponsors.  The idea of private philanthropy, at least as far as the performing arts go, is unheard of, so donations are non-existent.

Into this environment I stepped, suggesting things like selling naming rights for various things within the Artpreneur, such as "Buy A Seat," or custom floor tiles with family names on them.  I also tried to suggest getting corporations to sponsor the venue rather than particular events, asking agencies such as the Jakarta Tourist Bureau to promote the center.

I was told that supporters and donors were akin to asking for charity, and rich families (such as the owner) don't do that.  I was told that corporations don't understand sponsoring venues, because no one had ever done it and so they didn't have a model for how that worked.  Also, the owner didn't want anyone else's name on the venue.  I was also told that government agencies expect to be paid for their support and didn't do such things as part of their missions.

So, I proceeded to develop a cafe and theater bar for the venue as a means of income.  I spent eight months concepting, designing layouts and crowd flow, gathering corporate partners,  I had reached the point of baning out contracts with the owner's approval all through the process.  When I projected that the bar alone would pay all the negative costs of the venue operations, even after the partners got their cuts, the owner decided that it should all be run by the family, which had (again) no experience in such things.

In addition, I could not convince anyone to sponsor or pay for a full season of shows.  Why was this important?  Well, on one hand you have one show, and the other hand you have 12.  When you go to promote these shows, one the one hand you are paying about $100,000 to promote one show, and if it fails, you are stuck with a rather large bill (the average Broadway musical costs about $300,000/week plus venue costs).  On the other hand, you pay about $100,000 to promote 12 shows, and if one fails, a hit with one of the others makes up the deficit.  Obviously, amortizing costs over a full season and hedging your bets with a variety of offerings makes much more sense.

Furthermore, as with multiplex cinemas, the venue rarely makes its money from ticket sales.  When you are lucky, the tickets sales pay the negative costs of getting the show.  The profit comes from ancillary income, such as snack bars and other such things.

At this point, it was apparent to me that I was in no way going to be able to use the tool set that I have in the way that I know how to use them.  The technical side of the operation was severely compromised, but I could make it work.  However, without the tools I needed to make the center profitable, I was hamstrung.

It is possible to make theater and art venues profitable without tax money and donations.  It is done by combining business models from several different industries into a coherent revenue stream.  Take away any of those tools and it becomes increasingly difficult to earn the income necessary to maintain and operate such a complicated enterprise.

There are seven major systems in an arts and entertainment venue like the Artpreneur.  If any one of them fails, shows come to a dead halt and/or people die.  Not only do they need to be installed and operated correctly, they need constant scheduled maintenance to spot problems before they threaten the smooth functioning of the venue.

At the owner's insistence, budgets were cut in the wrong places, thus compromising the technical operations.  The owner further prevented or hampered the ability to generate revenue streams that would support the center and make profitability possible.  In this case, I decided that my presence was no longer necessary.  After all, I was hired because I knew how to build, operate and generate profit from such an operation.  Since two of the three functions were handicapped by my employer, there was no need for my expertise.

Sure, I could have stayed and drawn a paycheck with the lofty title of Executive Director, but I have too much integrity for such meaningless existence.  In addition, I could not in good conscience operate a venue that I knew was compromised and could possibly endanger life and limb if it wasn't handled in a very precise way with hours of advanced training and certification for the technicians.  I was not willing to risk my reputation for safety, even for a cushy paycheck.

I do have one legacy that will likely never be matched.  So far, Beauty and the Beast is the only show to have earned a profit at the venue.  That was the only one that I negociated and promoted.  Obviously, it's not as simple as, "Hey, kids!  I have a barn, let's do a show!"  The modern Western theater is highly complex with audiences demanding more and more dazzling special effects.  This requires absolute perfection in operating a venue to ensure the safety of the technicians, actors and audiences.

Oh, and I'm happy to report that no one suffered a lost-time injury during construction and start-up under my leadership.  'Tis better to have integrity than a cushy paycheck, I think.

Dream Merchant, Part 1

Your faithful reporter at right at press conference

See Part 2 here.

One of our long-time reader/correspondents, Mr. P. in Thailand, suggested that I post a sort of Lessons Learned from my experience building the Ciputra Artpreneur, which is Indonesia's first private, for-profit cultural arts centers.  Never one to turn down a faithful reader if I can help it, read on, McDuff!  You will want to brew up a pot of strong coffee for this one.  It's going to be long.

The Ciputra Artpreneur is the latest destination cultural arts center in Jakarta.  It is located in Kuningan, South Jakarta at Ciputra World 1, part of a three-phase multi-use development that includes malls, hotels, health care, apartments, park areas, a convention center and other amenities.  Once complete, one could almost spend their entire life there with no need to explore the world at large.

The Artpreneur is located on the 11th floor above Lotte Shopping Avenue and is comprised of three levels totaling 3,000 square meters with half of it being a large gallery/expo area, an art museum and a 1,200-seat proscenium theater.  It is owned by the Ciputra family, as is the entire development, and adjoins the Raffles Hotel, which is Jakarta's first so-called 6-diamond hotel (personal butlers optional).

I was the Executive Director for Operations for the Artpreneur and oversaw the construction and start-up of the center, including bringing the first-ever Broadway musical to Indonesia (Disney's Beauty and the Beast).  You may have noticed that I used the simple past tense, and thereby hangs a tale.

The first show we held was the largest collection of Kurt Wenner's work ever assembled - 11 pieces taking up the entire 1,300 sqm of the exhibition space.  The place was not finished and work schedules were shifted to night in order to accommodate the show.  It wasn't my first choice to host the show at the time, since we were well behind schedule, but it was a great show and meeting Kurt was a real pleasure.  Having the general public running around in what was essentially still a construction zone, though, had me doing my best long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

The greatest number of problems I encountered on the project were directly related to cultural differences.  Nothng of this kind had previously existed in the country and Indonesian's are not particularly concerned with safety and standards.  Since I have never had more than a paper cut on any project I've ever done, I was determined not to start now, and spent an inordinate amount of time running around wailing and gnashing my teeth about safe working environments.

A major cultural difference is that Indonesians do not like directness.  It is an affront to them and it makes them feel as if the person being direct is angry.  This fact leads to meetings that are interminable.  They start late (no Indonesian is ever on time), involve a lot of small talk and useless chatter, and no one ever gets passionate about anything.  You can imagine the fun when a hot-tempered Irish-Texan walked into this mix.

At any rate, the construction update meetings were all-day affairs, with at least one or two meals being served in the process.  However, I was deeply frustrated because the actual business at hand was no more than an hour or two.  One day, I finally had had enough and told everyone we were going to have a meeting ex-pat style.  We finished the primary business in 45 minutes, with an additional hour of break-out meetings to address specific problems.  This was down from 8 to 10 hours.  I am not sure how offended anyone was, but I was hugely relieved.  Meetings after that were significantly faster and more productive.

The construction had languished for nearly two years because there was no one involved who had any clue as to how to proceed.  From the moment I stepped in until we hosted the owner's 83rd birthday party was eight months.  That means it went from a dark, dirty, mosquito-infested hell-hole to a mostly functional art center in one-third the time it took to get to the hell-hole phase.

The first major problem I faced when I came on-board was that no one had been following ISO standards, thus as-built drawings were virtually non-existent.  This was a major headache because the contractor had re-positioned air-handling units into the audio booth, had not built out the sound-proof wall according to spec and had made a hundred modifications that were not documented.  I spent the first month walking around with a massive roll of drawings trying to catalog all the changes.  This was vital in order to know which things could pass and which had to be fixed.

The big wrench in the works was that the local contractor had never built a theater or museum, and was making changed based on lack of knowledge of the specialized uses and needs for these kinds of places.  He would cut vital systems to save money with no concept of why they were designed in the first place and absolutely no experience to guide his judgement.

This led to a number of big yelling matches in which I demanded partial demolitions to back up and start again, making sure the second time that things were correct.  Out of a (I assume) genuine desire to understand, the contractor constantly asked me "why."  I tried my best to educate him and his team, but after several months, and a fast approaching deadline, I finally lost my cool and said that I never wanted to hear "why" again.  Just do what I say and be happy with it.  I will worry about the "why" part.

This problem was exacerbated by the fact that the owner really had no idea what they had gotten into.  Thinking that most of the really expensive stuff was just over-engineering, it caused a great amount of consternation when I informed them that they could not bring major shows into the center without meeting certain criteria, including a very expensive rigging system, an even more expensive lighting and sound system, and so forth.  But these were the easy battles.  The big one was yet to come.

Remember I said the Artpreneur was on the 13th floor?  It is surrounded by a parking garage with two enormous spiral ramps leading up from ground level.  The only way to get anything, including a Broadway show, onto the stage was to drive everything up the ramp to the 12th floor, off-load it and hand-carry it up a bank of escalators, through the theater lobby and onto the stage from the audience (house).  This, frankly, wasn't going to fly.  I gave the owner a choice: either you settle for hosting lecture series on the stage, or you need a lift system to get the equipment and scenery from the ground to the stage door.  To give you an idea of the scale of the problem, Beauty and the Beast travels in 12 x 40-foot containers that were never going to fit on the spiral ramp, and the only lift that came anywhere near the stage was just big enough for about eight adults.

This led to a six-month battle because the cost of retrofitting a heavy lift system was considerable, but the entire goal of the center was moot without it.  One day, while enjoying one of my frequent smoke breaks to calm my temper down, I was standing at the spiral ramp when I had a true "eureka" moment.

I proposed fitting a 3.5-tonne lift into the center core of the spiral ramp.  This would get us to the 11th floor, which was 11/13ths of the problem solved.  Later, after very long hours of examining drawings, I found a hole between the beams and columns that would perfectly accommodate another 3.5-tonne lift to go from the 11th floor garage to the 14th floor, directly behind the stage.  This system would require significant demolition and expense, but there was no way I could do what I had been asked to do without it.

Turns out, the lift system was completed less than 24 hours before Beauty and the Beast arrived, and had yet to be tested and commissioned the last time I checked.

The next major issue was the orchestra pit.  Keep in mind that the bottom of the pit was the ceiling for the museum, which houses the largest private collection of the now-deceased artist Hendra Gunawan.  Being a ceiling, it has a greatly reduced load capacity, as well as a number of beams running through the pit smack in the middle of where all the lift gears should be.

For those who don't know, orchestra pits have a number of purposes.  First, they provide a place for a live orchestra that is well below floor level in order to mute the sound and prevent the music from overwhelming the voices.  Second, the pit lift provides a means to raise and lower equipment from storage areas beneath the stage (road boxes, etc.).  Third, it provides additional functionality for things like special effects or an extended apron in front of the grand drape (convenient for hosting 2 shows at the same time).  Without a mechanical lift, one function (storage) is lost, another is reduced (muting) and the third is severely hampered by requiring complex scaffolding and manual labor for the remaining functions.

Because the pit floor is also a ceiling, we lost 2 tonnes off of the loading capacity that was specified.  We lost a full 65 cm off the depth, meaning the orchestra would be much louder than it should have been.  The ability to provide a thrust area in front of the drape was all but abandoned.  And most of the special effects applications I can think of are lost.

These are just a few examples of the many construction and engineering problems I faced.  Others included the rigging system, halon system, UV-reduced lighting, and oh so much more.  Most were solved or at least reduced, but the outcome was strictly dependent on the owner's willingness to purchase the needed equipment and specialized services to correct the issues.

In Part 2, we'll look at the more interesting and intractable problem: cultural.  How does one create a culture that does not exist?

Oh My God!

A White Russian is a drink intended to be served layered.  The Patron is the one who is responsible for mixing those layers, not the bartender.  This is one of those little-known facts of life that should, but often fails, to guide our conscious lives.
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There is a common image of the artist as a bedraggled loner ensconced in his studio (artists are always male in the common mind).  Whether the artist is a writer, painter, sculptor, or whatever, he is moody, disheveled and teeters uncertainly on the cat-walk of sanity.

The writer sits alone in his rat-infested flat above a whore-house with red neon light screaming unheeded warnings across the walls of his mind.  There is a single lamp spilling unnecessary light on the termite-eaten desk.  He hunches over an Underhill Upright - upright referring to the writer, not the machine - a bottle of squalor stands guard at his right hand as he bangs out veiled autobiographies to an uninterested world.

The painter lives alone in a dingy, cavernous room with wooden planks for flooring.  Alone, that is, unless he has just sold a painting and can pay a local night butterfly to pose nude - nude is on purpose, naked is not - while he dispassionately outlines the curves and ignores the scars.

Painters have beards, writers do not.

Amidst these land mines of solitary creativity and psychological case studies, there is one art form that stands out as unique in all of art history.  It is the single art form that thrives on socializing and public adulation.  It is the one art form in which mental instability is paraded and glorified, rather than castigated and clucked at.  It is the one art form in which there are job descriptions and career paths, and whose jargon has invaded the natural landscape of communication.

The theater.

I hear you...what about the military and pro sports?  Those are destructive, not creative, and the mental illnesses on display are not favored in polite society.  A soldier or a linebacker cannot quote Shakespeare and Ionesco, nor can he distinguish between the five conventional plots.  Most certainly, these Cretaceous outcasts could never understand the deus ex machina, though they pray fervently for just such a thing.

No, in the theater, there are educated and erudite folks who just happen to like taking off their clothes for money in acts that require no consummation.  These beasts of the boards know the subtleties of body language, they rehearse for hours to place just the right inflection on a syllable, they thrive on the praise and applause of their peers, and most of all, they live for the blood-screaming immediacy of the theater.

There is no other art form in existence in which a happenstance assemblage of artists, technicians and machines must work in perfect synchronization for two and a half hours every night to create magic.  And there is no other art form in existence in which the consumming public expects that magic on demand.

Image a gaggle of art lovers hovering around a painter screaming nightly for a new masterpiece.  Or how about stuffy readers seated in the flat of the writer awaiting their due on time and on cue.  You would more likely receive cacophonous hissies about the vagaries of the creative muse, than steamy dressing rooms choked with anxiety and pheromones, and full of painted liars ready to offer their souls for your applause.

Yes, in the space of time that most of us slough off on the couch in front of the TeeVee, this group of highly suspect human beings emote to the point of leaving a physical residue on the stage - not just actors but crew as well.  In a quiet moment, if you listen very hard, you can hear the Stage Manager having a cow in her corner backstage.  She has screamed every curse and epithet known to humankind trying to push the talent onstage.

Pulses are pounding, the hairs on the nape of the neck are standing erect, pupils are dilated - just another night in the theater.

Before and after, the entire company gets sauced.  Before to calm the nerves and focus the fear - nay terror - of stepping in front of an audience.  After because the thrill of the moment and living in the eternal now is something humans are ill-equipped to survive.  Ram Daas would be envious of the showman's life: there is no future or past, just now.

That is why persons of the theater are so prized among the lesser artisans of film and TeeVee.  In those bastard arts, only the stage-trained and tempered can hold up under intense pressure and deliver identical performances time after time.  "I'm not an actor, I'm a movie star," roared Peter O'Toole's character in My Favorite Year.  He spoke from the heart in that singular line.

The theater is a mystical place.  Great brotherhoods are forged in 10 short weeks, though they fade just as quickly.  Indeed, the stage has produced some of the greatest talents ever to emote a catharsis.  Even their deathbed scenes are truly of note. 

The great Victorian actor Edmund Keene is still quoted "on the boards" for his Earth-quaking last thought as he expired, "Dying is easy...comedy is hard."

Perhaps the uninitiated will not remember Wilfrid Lawson, but there is a tale of Titanic proportions among theater folk:

Sir Lawson met an old friend on the street after a long absence.  They retired to a pub for a long list of courage.  At one point, the friend suggested they take in a show, and Sir Lawson said there was a show up the street that was "fair".

They stumbled their way over to the theater and, with luck, were able to get two tickets in the back of the house just moments before the curtain rose.

As the show went on, the friend remarked, "Seems a bit slow, old boy."

To which Sir Lawson replied, "Hold on, it will get quite a bit more interesting in just a moment."

The friend inquired, "How so?"

"Do you see that woman on stage there?" said Sir Lawson.

"Yes," came the reply.

"When she finishes dressing, I'm supposed to enter," he hissed.

Such incredible toying with the Eternal Now are not possible in film and TeeVee.  They are edited out.  Theater is immediate and gut-real.  There is no "cut" and do-over.  There is only NOW...

Film and TeeVee people are known for drugs and overdoses.  That doesn't happen in the theater.  The high from just one tiny show is so overwhelming that there are only two answers: one, the orgy, and two, drinking heavily to bring you down.  Theater people don't need drugs, they live the greatest of them all - NOW.

 In Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he noted that one could look into the eyes of a traveler and see how far they were from home.  When Arthur looked into Ford's eyes, he was nearly thrown from his stool.  This was a metaphor not for aliens or travelers, but for theater people.

We know each other across time and space, no matter the distance or medium.  We can look into each other's souls and know that both of us have stood upon the threshold of Time and touched the Big Lie at the center of the Universe.

Theater is a unique and wonderous thing.  There can be no other experience like it, for even the shamans know theater.  It is the deepest of all human experiences, which is why audiences crave a taste, though they dare not step into that abyss.

Theater has no rival.  It is mystical in a way that no solitary artist will ever experience, for ultimately he cannot share his experience with anyone, even those looking at his tints or brushstrokes.  Only those who have journeyed to the Center together and survived can ever share the Mystery that is theater.

That is why the very stitching of culture uses the lines from the stage.  That is why the undergarments of God are the Costumes of Ages.  That is why even the Universe uses make-up to show us her best face - though we call them flowers or so other appellation.

Once you have tread the boards, you cannot see the world in the same drab way that the rest of humanity envisions it.  Once you have played on the Far Side, nothing less will suffice.

As Shakespeare himself noted, "The play is the thing in which we shall catch the conscience of the king."

Theater is dangerous and should be handled with the utmost of care.  Those who toy lightly with it are bound to receive radiation burns.  The older the play, the deeper the magic.

Can you name a single work of art that is more than 2,000 years old?

I thought not.

But the Greek plays and the Roman plays are still produced today, as fresh and alive as they were millennia ago.  They don't need restoration because they have not faded.  They don't reside in a single place but are available to anyone anywhere at any time.  Theater IS immortality.  Shakespeare is just as relevant now as he was 400 years ago.  So too Aristophanes and Thespus, Ionesco and Wycherly.  The past lives in the eternal NOW, and it is connected to the future, because at some point those great plays will be produced long after we are dead.

Show me a Mona Lisa that can achieve that.

Oh, to tread the boards once again and live in the immortal moment for just one second longer.

Human, meet thy true god...