Thursday, October 06, 2005
brenda starr, girl reporter.
something you don't necessarily know about me: i am a muckraker.
back in february of 1998, i was relatively freshly out of college, living in san francisco and working on the third play i'd ever been in as a member of The Real World With No Meal Plan. it was the first of these to expose some unattractive truths about laboring in the fringe theatre world. the play was bad. the director was bad. the cast was actually pretty okay, but the theatre was a church basement. some of you who live in SFO prolly know the one i'm talking about. big red door.
anyway, the bad directing of this piece was probably the worst part of it. this guy would run a scene, and then hold, and come over and talk to each actor in turn, privately, for about five minutes. it was a seven-member cast, so by the time he got to you, there was every possibility you had already been cleaning your fingernails and playing hangman with your neighbor for most of half an hour.
plus, all he ever said was: "yeah! right! totally! except it's kinda . . . you know, more like . . . i think you're really, like, mad at him." or something similar. he was terribly fakey, in this bad ingratiating way. i think he kind of tried to date me, which was not so wrong, but i was desperately trying to sleep with this seventeen year old boy in the cast and had no time for it. and in retrospect it seemed a little oogy (the director crush, not the potential for consensual sex with a teen. the kid was hot. and now has a film career).
i think he sensed that the cast was sort of alienated from him because of his constant sucking as a director, and it bugged him. the lines of the play were hard to learn--it was very naturalistic dialogue, the kind of stuff that just dares you to paraphrase and improvise, and the writing was bad enough to make memorization a chore. late in the rehearsal period, this director instituted a series of fines for actors who missed or made up lines: when you fucked up, you had to put a quarter in a bucket.
this was sort of the last straw for me. not only were we not getting paid much--it was a $150 stipend--but i'd never heard of someone aspiring to be a professional director resorting to such daycare-level tactics. i told the guy i thought he was being really unprofessional, and he totally blew me off.
the show wasn't quite a disaster, but it wasn't any fun. very few people came. we got a bad review in SF weekly (the reviewer had the decency not to name any of us, and pinned most of the blame on the weak script) and houses were very slim. in fact, at one performance in the first week (after an exhausting series of tech rehearsals), no one showed up. ass-face director made us do the show anyway, saying that we could use the rehearsal when really what we needed more than anything was a rest and a night off.
when the show closed, ass-face had to go straight to the airport to go back where he came from. we closed everything up, and then on his way out he gave each of us $75 in cash, saying he'd "send a check" for the rest. he went back to his city without leaving a forwarding address, and of course i never heard from him again. i've been googling him once every six months or so ever since, wondering if he ended up anywhere high-profile enough that i could embarrass him by showing up and asking for my seventy-five bucks, with interest.
so recently i thought about auditioning for a small theatre just out side the metro area, one that was considering some special appearance contracts and was doing a play i really love. and the theatre had a press release up on its website saying that ass-face director, who had apparently been their artistic director for a year, had left mid-season to take another job. a job as an artistic director in the city i lived in before this one.
intrigued, i did my semi-annual google. and damned if he isn't the new head of a beloved seattle institution.
this institution--which i belove as much as anyone in seattle; it was one of the very first places i worked in that city--has had some troubled times recently, specifically regarding the former artistic director, who was a strong figure in the arts scene and respected and admired by many, if not always a faultless administrator. this former AD was the founder and driving force behind the place, and was ousted by its board for reasons which were, so far as i know, never fully explained.
and now they have the ass-face.
i talked to a reporter at the local alternative weekly. he made a lot of calls and i did some emailing and we found out that lots of people can't stand this guy. i heard similar stories about his being a pretensious ass, but it sounds like it went further. one person who worked with him at that small theatre i mentioned said she wouldn't go on record about his poor performance because she thought ass-face was a sociopath, and she didn't want to become a target. another said something to the effect of, "i just finished living that nightmare; why would i want to talk about it?"
in order to save another theatre from being a victim of the ass-face, that's why. but no one would go on record, and the story died.
i've considered writing a letter to the editor about the $75 incident. after all, i'm peeved that all those folks are chicken to speak up about this guy's true colors. but i find that i, also, am scared. i would like to come back to seattle some day. what if this guy turns out to be important? what if he's actually a good director now?
why am i such a chicken bone?
what would jesus do?
back in february of 1998, i was relatively freshly out of college, living in san francisco and working on the third play i'd ever been in as a member of The Real World With No Meal Plan. it was the first of these to expose some unattractive truths about laboring in the fringe theatre world. the play was bad. the director was bad. the cast was actually pretty okay, but the theatre was a church basement. some of you who live in SFO prolly know the one i'm talking about. big red door.
anyway, the bad directing of this piece was probably the worst part of it. this guy would run a scene, and then hold, and come over and talk to each actor in turn, privately, for about five minutes. it was a seven-member cast, so by the time he got to you, there was every possibility you had already been cleaning your fingernails and playing hangman with your neighbor for most of half an hour.
plus, all he ever said was: "yeah! right! totally! except it's kinda . . . you know, more like . . . i think you're really, like, mad at him." or something similar. he was terribly fakey, in this bad ingratiating way. i think he kind of tried to date me, which was not so wrong, but i was desperately trying to sleep with this seventeen year old boy in the cast and had no time for it. and in retrospect it seemed a little oogy (the director crush, not the potential for consensual sex with a teen. the kid was hot. and now has a film career).
i think he sensed that the cast was sort of alienated from him because of his constant sucking as a director, and it bugged him. the lines of the play were hard to learn--it was very naturalistic dialogue, the kind of stuff that just dares you to paraphrase and improvise, and the writing was bad enough to make memorization a chore. late in the rehearsal period, this director instituted a series of fines for actors who missed or made up lines: when you fucked up, you had to put a quarter in a bucket.
this was sort of the last straw for me. not only were we not getting paid much--it was a $150 stipend--but i'd never heard of someone aspiring to be a professional director resorting to such daycare-level tactics. i told the guy i thought he was being really unprofessional, and he totally blew me off.
the show wasn't quite a disaster, but it wasn't any fun. very few people came. we got a bad review in SF weekly (the reviewer had the decency not to name any of us, and pinned most of the blame on the weak script) and houses were very slim. in fact, at one performance in the first week (after an exhausting series of tech rehearsals), no one showed up. ass-face director made us do the show anyway, saying that we could use the rehearsal when really what we needed more than anything was a rest and a night off.
when the show closed, ass-face had to go straight to the airport to go back where he came from. we closed everything up, and then on his way out he gave each of us $75 in cash, saying he'd "send a check" for the rest. he went back to his city without leaving a forwarding address, and of course i never heard from him again. i've been googling him once every six months or so ever since, wondering if he ended up anywhere high-profile enough that i could embarrass him by showing up and asking for my seventy-five bucks, with interest.
so recently i thought about auditioning for a small theatre just out side the metro area, one that was considering some special appearance contracts and was doing a play i really love. and the theatre had a press release up on its website saying that ass-face director, who had apparently been their artistic director for a year, had left mid-season to take another job. a job as an artistic director in the city i lived in before this one.
intrigued, i did my semi-annual google. and damned if he isn't the new head of a beloved seattle institution.
this institution--which i belove as much as anyone in seattle; it was one of the very first places i worked in that city--has had some troubled times recently, specifically regarding the former artistic director, who was a strong figure in the arts scene and respected and admired by many, if not always a faultless administrator. this former AD was the founder and driving force behind the place, and was ousted by its board for reasons which were, so far as i know, never fully explained.
and now they have the ass-face.
i talked to a reporter at the local alternative weekly. he made a lot of calls and i did some emailing and we found out that lots of people can't stand this guy. i heard similar stories about his being a pretensious ass, but it sounds like it went further. one person who worked with him at that small theatre i mentioned said she wouldn't go on record about his poor performance because she thought ass-face was a sociopath, and she didn't want to become a target. another said something to the effect of, "i just finished living that nightmare; why would i want to talk about it?"
in order to save another theatre from being a victim of the ass-face, that's why. but no one would go on record, and the story died.
i've considered writing a letter to the editor about the $75 incident. after all, i'm peeved that all those folks are chicken to speak up about this guy's true colors. but i find that i, also, am scared. i would like to come back to seattle some day. what if this guy turns out to be important? what if he's actually a good director now?
why am i such a chicken bone?
what would jesus do?
