The Nudity Continues

More nudity here on the blog today. Readers contributed some very nice and thoughtful comments on this topic, the general gist of which was that nudity on stage is cool as long as its justified. However, the criteria theatergoers use to determine what’s justified is as varied as the theatre itself. Check out their comments and you’ll see what I mean.

In the meantime, here are a few words on the subject from someone who has appeared on stage in the buff. Actor Adam Rihacek flaunted his birthday suit in playwright Stan Richardson’s short play, “Patience (Or Taking It),” which was part of Blue Coyote Theater Group’s Standards of Decency Project, and he generously offered these thoughts on the experience:

First we got the text in our body. Then we took the clothes off. [Director] Gary [Shrader] and Stan were very supportive of [actor] Alexis [Suarez's] and my decision of “when it was right”.

As for nerves or uneasiness, I only get nervous if I’m making another actor feel uncomfortable on stage. In a couple of the early nude rehearsals this happened (not by any one’s fault, just by circumstance) and it really broke my spirit. I felt terrible.

On nudity in the theatre: It should be a non-issue. People know what they are getting into. Warnings are put up for everything (smoking, adult content, strobe lights, etc.). It is, after all, just a body. We all have one.

Adam also told me, as a counterpoint to his closing thoughts above, about a student production of Doug Wright’s Quills in which he played the Marquis De Sade during his final year of college at Wright State University. It was the first and only other time he had appeared nude on stage, and apparently it caused quite a controversy on campus. The production was almost shut down because of it. You can read more about this here and here. My thanks to Adam for the links.

Writing About An Elusive Art - Part 2

As promised, here is the second part of my discussion with Isaac Butler about reviewing directors. Part 1 generated some very interesting responses, especially from my nytheatre.com colleague Matt Johnston, which I will respond to soon. For now, however, let me share with you more of what Isaac has to say: 

Q: When you read a review of something you’ve directed, what do you want to get out of it?

A: Well, I should say that I think the proper way to think about reviews is as marketing tools first, and as records of experience second. I’ll take these in order. In the first sense, all you want to look for is what sentences can I pull to put in an e-mail that’ll make people want to come see the play. These are called pull-quotes, as I’m sure most of your readers know. I don’t care if people are ruthless about this.. This is the dance we’re dancing, the game we’re playing. Aritists and reviewers are using each other, it’s an exchange, so of course we should try to get as much out of our end of the exchange as possible, right?

Also, keeping focused on the marketing end helps keep you sane because a review is, ultimately, simply the record of one person’s experience of the play. That’s all it is. And in that case, you want to look at it and figure out what you can learn from it. With volume of smoke, I solicited a lot of opinion, good and bad, about the show. So when your review came out (largely positive about the directing, mixed-to-negative about the script), it was one voice added to a mosiac of impressions about the play, many of which agreed with yours, and many of which didn’t. And then learning as much as possible from this larger tapestry– if I may use so cheesetastic a word– become the goal.

What we absolutely cannot look to reviews for is any kind of validation or measure of success. Those you have to find and define on your own. I know from In Public that if you look to reviews for it, it’ll drive you batty (and make you insufferable!). When we were doing In Public, it got really good reviews and positive audience feedback. And when the Times review didn’t come for days and days, I went a little crazy. Once it finally wasn’t going to run I was able to look back at what I was doing and go oh, I was looking here for validation. How mad! And it was mad. Also, our constiuency as artists needs to be the audience, not reviewers, not artistic directors of major institutions whom we want to get jobs from, but the audience right there in front of us.

Q: Are there any general things about your work that you hope the reviewer picks up on?

A: I hope my work changes enough project to project that there wouldn’t be a consistent thing beyond what’s going to go into my answer to your next question…

Q: How would like to see reviewers write about directing?

A: In an ideal world, reviewers would’ve read the script before they came and saw the play. I think that way they could see how much of what’s going on is based on choices (not all of which are made by the director, mind you). I would like reviewers to see and report on the choices made vis-a-vis bringing the script to life on the stage. Because, as I wrote on the blog, doing a “transparent” kind of job on a play is itself a choice. As is doing something more “high concept”. Was that choice appropriate for the play you’re watching? Reading In Public, for example, I think you’d expect a production that was more naturalistic than where that show ended up. And you know we disregarded a few stage directions, and created moments were more abstract etc. George was there for all of it, it’s not like we were purposefully going against his thoughts on the play. But I feel for those people who saw the more naturalistic workshop, or had only read the play, seeing our production of it was a bit of a different experience.

So what can we do that we don’t live in that ideal world? I don’t know. Directing as a discipline hasn’t been around very long. It’s still fairly ad hoc and oddly undefined in a lot of ways. So reviewing it is tough. But I think if reviewers thought of themselves as critiquing the production instead of just the script, we’d be in a better place. Even if that meant the directing still wasn’t talked about, but there was more focus on the acting and design.

Also… just to be clear: it’s not that I want the focus that’s going to writers to be going to directors (or more specificaly, me). In traditional text-based theater, the text is really super important, and I appreciate that. I just think it’s in an extreme place right now that puts undue pressure on the script for the choices of the collaborators making the play. I think it’s helped contribute to an environment in which people are very scared to do plays that are unknown commodities.

As you can see, there’s a lot of good fodder here for thought and debate. I have a few responses of my own, but I’m going to let them percolate a little bit longer before serving them up. Check back with me in a day or so.

In the meantime, however, I want to thank Isaac for sharing for his thoughts and ideas with me (and for using the belly-laugh-inducing word, “cheesetastic” - Isaac, you may use that one on my blog any time you like).

Your turn to weigh in, dear reader. Let me hear some more of your responses.

Writing About An Elusive Art - Part 1

One topic that keeps coming up over here at nytheatre.com HQ is how to write about a director’s contribution to a given show in a review. My colleagues and I continue to scratch our heads over this one. Writing about the art of directing can be one of the hardest and most elusive things about theatre reviewing. Even those of us who have directed struggle with it. Personally, I know what goes into directing a show, but it differs from person to person and from show to show. How I do it won’t be the same as how someone else does it. And one’s level of involvement with certain elements can sometimes vary from one project to the next, as well as one’s level of personal and emotional investment. As a reviewer, there’s really no way of knowing who came up with that piece of blocking, or whose decision it was to make the set do that cool little thing, without actually being in the rehearsal room. I can only draw conclusions based on what’s on stage. By that time, it should all theoretically be flowing into one seamless whole.

So, I decided to look at this issue from a different point of view: what do directors want to get out of a review? Constructive artistic criticism? Good blurb copy? Both? Neither? I thought I’d get a director’s take on it, and asked Isaac Butler for his two cents.  Isaac is a gifted and inventive director who has helmed such projects as Clay McLeod Chapman’s volume of smoke, and In Private/In Public by George Hunka. Isaac also writes a passionate and thought-provoking blog of his own called Parabasis (which can be found on the ol’ blogroll).

Isaac was good enough to answer a couple of questions about this, but prefaced them with some preliminary thoughts that called for a blog entry of their own. Here’s what he had to say:

Michael,

These are surprisingly tough questions, given how basic they are. Part of the problem is that the director’s contribution/role in the whole thing is in general almost completely disregarded, not out of malice or anything. Generally, I think it comes from a lack of understanding. Andre Bishop once told the Lincoln Center Director’s Lab something that I quote on my blog a lot, namely, Look, a lot of people don’t understand what you do. They think if the actors spoke quickly and articulated well and the set changes were pretty that a play was well-directed. When I was at Playwrights Horizons, we’d see reviews of plays that had been remounted, that had been panned in their original production, and the reviewers would talk about how great the rewrites were. The script hadn’t changed. The director had. (That’s obviously paraphrasing.)

Unfortuantely in reviews now, I think we’re moving even further in the same direction. Now we’re not just disregarding directors, we’re disregarding basically everything other than the script. So a review’s entire focus (unless the play has a real star turn in it) is on the script. The reviewer critiques the script as if he or she were reading it. And then what you get is a series of one-offs that look like the following (Tell me if this looks familiar or not, maybe you’ve even written them yourself!):

The cast is uniformly excellent/good.

The actors try valiantly to save Martin Crumblebottom’s script. The stand-out in this effort is Melissa Fakelastname.

Briskly directed by…

The set, by XYZ draws on ABC to evoke TYL.

And on and on and on. These one sentence mentions, where the rest reads like a book report.

This is a problem. I think even our dear, beleaguered writers would like the focus to be more on the production as a whole. Acting, writing, design, directing, they all affect each other.

Interesting stuff. And, yes, such one-offs as he mentions do look familiar. However, whether or not I have ever indulged in the use of any, only the nytheatre.com review archive knows for sure.

I’ll have more with Isaac tomorrow. But, don’t let that stop you from adding your two cents on this subject right now.

In Memoriam: Lynn Michaels & Kitty Carlisle Hart

I’m a little late getting around to this, but I’d like to take a moment to mark the passing last week of two great ladies of the theatre: Lynn Michaels and Kitty Carlisle Hart. I didn’t know much about either of them before last week, but it turns out there was plenty to know.

Michaels was a key figure in the original indie theater movement back in the 1950s. Her debut as a producer was Bertolt Brecht’s The Private Life of the Master Race, adapted by Eric Bentley, which went on to receive of the very first OBIE Awards from the Village Voice. From there, she opened and ran the St. Marks Playhouse, which presented such works as The Blacks by Jean Genet, Deep are the Roots, and Leroi Jones’ The Slave/The Toilet. And, starting in 1969, the venue become the home of the then newly-formed Negro Ensemble Company for nine seasons.

Today, Michaels may be most famously remembered for converting an old hat factory into what is now the Ohio Theatre. She was also the founder and artistic director of the Open Space Theatre Experiment, which presented festivals of new work, including James Lapine’s Photograph.

Artistically speaking, Kitty Carlise Hart couldn’t be further away from Michaels, but her devotion to the theatre was just as fervent.

She was a performer whose career spanned every medium. She starred opposite the Marx Brothers in their classic 1935 film, A Night at the Opera. From 1956 to 1967, she was a celebrity panelist on the popular television game show, To Tell the Truth, with other such luminaries of the day as Johnny Carson, Polly Bergen, and Don Ameche.  Her Broadway debut came in 1933, in the operetta, Champagne Sec; her final Broadway appearance came some 50 years later, in the 1983 revival of the Rodgers & Hart musical, On Your Toes. In between, she appeared in several other Broadway productions including the musical White Horse Inn, Agnes DeMille’s production of Benjamin Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, and Anniversary Waltz, a play directed by Hart’s husband, the legendary writer-director-producer, Moss Hart. She even made her operatic debut at the Metropolitan Opera House, in a 1967 production of Die Fledermaus.

Hart was also a diligent arts philanthropist who served on the New York State Council on the Arts from 1971 to 1996, including 20 years as its chairwoman. Her advocacy for bettering women’s role in society led to her appointment as chairwoman of the Statewide Conference of Women. Later, she served as a special consultant on women’s opportunities to New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.

In 1988, Hart testified in Albany to a legislative committee investigating complaints that NYSCA had funded gay-oriented projects. Her response? “We fund art. We don’t fund anyone’s point of view.”

In one obituary of Hart’s, I came across a quote that seems to suit both her and Michaels. It came from a 60 Minutes interview with Marie Brenner, author of Great Dames: What I Learned From Older Women, in which she offered her explanation of the term “great dame”: “A great dame is a soldier in high heels…They lived through the depression. They lived through the war. They were tough, intelligent and brassy women.”

‘Nuff said, eh?

Words Of Wisdom

As he already detailed in his blog,  Martin and I attended an event at the Italian Cultural Institute last week kicking off the upcoming publication of NYTE’s newest book, Unpredictable Plays, an anthology of 28 plays by the Italian playwright, Mario Fratti. It was a lovely event at which Mario spoke passionately about his love for the theatre and the necessity of nurturing and encouraging new playwrights. He is the kind of person I call “a lifer”: someone who is devoted to both the art of theatre, and its continued growth and health. He said many inspirational and insightful things that night, two of which I’d like to share here.

On the art and craft of playwriting, Mario told the audience, “Playwriting is one-third autobiography, one-third history, and one-third imagination.” Personally, I feel that many of the plays that have moved and challenged me the most all contain these three qualities in abundance.

In addition to being a playwright, Mario is also a theatre critic himself, covering the New York theatre scene for several European newspapers. When asked why he did it, he answered, “We all go to the theatre with great hope in seeing a masterpiece every time.”  I won’t presume to speak for any of my other reviewer colleagues, but, for me, I know Mario’s words perfectly sum up the reasons why I do it, too.

nytheatre mike au naturel (almost)

Some more thoughts about nudity on stage with a firsthand story of my own.

Several months ago, a friend of mine asked me to audition for a show she was producing. The role she had in mind for me required the full monty. At first I was surprised, then flattered, then intrigued. I didn’t know if I had the guts to do it, but was fascinated by the potential challenge. I imagine that wearing one’s birthday suit in front of a theatre full of people requires some serious concentration and composure. Not to mention how the audience’s reaction to such an event colors one’s performance from night to night. And then there’s the whole vulnerability factor. In a word: eek.

It turned out to be a moot point, however, because I ended up not auditioning: a scheduling conflict I knew I had during the show’s run prevented me from accepting my friend’s invitation.

Here’s the thing, though: before declining the invite, I told several friends about this opportunity, and they all said the same thing: “Yeah, Mike, that’s great. I hope you get it. But, if you do, I’m not coming to the show.” It seems they were uncomfortable with the thought of seeing their platonic buddy au naturel in person.

To which I thought to myself: what’s the point of doing a show you know no one will come see?

So, here’s my question: how do you feel about the idea of seeing people you know on stage in the buff? With the increase of onstage nudity here in Gotham, I suspect it’s a growing concern for some, while for others I imagine it’s no big deal. Let’s talk about it, shall we?

In Memoriam: Roscoe Lee Browne

Today I’d like to take a moment to note the passing earlier this week of veteran character actor Roscoe Lee Browne. He died of cancer in Los Angeles on April 11 after a long and distinguished career. If you think you don’t know him, I say that you do. As is often the case with character actors of his stature, people didn’t recognize his name as often as they recognized his face.

Not to mention his voice. His was a rich, mellifluous voice that could be both authoratative and soothing. Once you heard it, you never forgot it.

What’s he got to do with indie theater, you may ask? A lot. Like many of today’s indie theater artists, Browne toiled away at a number of survival jobs - including college professor, and wine company salesman - before turning to acting in 1956. He hit New York just in time for the original indie theater movement of the 1950s and 1960s, appearing in the original New York productions of The Blacks, Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright, and The Ballad of the Sad Café, as well as the New York Shakespeare Festival (known today as The Public Theater) productions of Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Troilus and Cressida. He appeared in Danton’s Death for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center (now known simply as Lincoln Center Theater), and even hoofed it up with Tommy Tune and Twiggy in the Broadway musical, My One and Only.

Browne’s final New York stage appearance came in 1992, in the original Broadway production of Two Trains Running by August Wilson. My mom was fortunate enough to see his performance, and it has stayed with her to this very day.

Like most people of my generation, I was introduced to Browne through his voluminous film and television work. There were the guest spots on numerous television shows: All in the Family, Maude, Soap, Benson, and an Emmy Award-winning guest spot on The Cosby Show. He also worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Topaz, and narrated both Babe movies.

I will always remember Browne most of all for his supporting turn in the 1972 film, The Cowboys, in which he played opposite none other than John Wayne. As Jedediah Nightlinger, the wise, disciplined cook who helps supervise a cattle drive full of inexperienced young school boys, Browne proved to be one of The Duke’s sturdiest and best sidekicks. We won’t see his like again.

Airplane! The Fundraiser!

The discussion about indie theater fundraising continues today with a look at Impetuous Theater Group,  who are gearing up for their next production, The Chronological Secrets of Tim by Janet Zarecor. When it came time to think of a fundraising event for said production, the gang at Impetuous came up with an attention-grabbing idea: a live, one-night-only stage performance of the movie Airplane! I asked my fellow nytheatre.com colleague Josh Sherman, who is also the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Impetuous, to tell me how they came up with this one. He was gracious enough to send me the following response yesterday afternoon, a few hours before the start of Airplane! The Fundraiser!:

With a fundraising event for Impetuous, we always try to think outside of the box and surprise our audience base a bit.  We have freedoms with fundraisers that we don’t have as much with our traditional play season and we like to broaden our scope, stand out a little bit. 

But the short answer is that we also tend to come up with our best ideas while drinking beer, which explains Airplane! The Fundraiser! 
We found this postcard lying around Urban Stages with this dude on it playing the guitar to a little girl who looked remarkably like the dying girl named Lisa in the Airplane! movie.  The dude on the postcard looked just like Brian “Ducky” Smallwood, an Impetuous member and we were like, holy cow, how funny would it be if we performed Airplane! live.  The whole company loves the movie and the more we talked about it the more we thought, hey we really could pull this off.  We cast the whole thing in about fifteen minutes with people we’ve worked with, dug up a transcript of the movie on Google, watched our DVDs a zillion times and gave it the greenlight.  We brought in Jason Zimbler (who directed our second piece, Office Sonata) and he and I brainstormed on how to frame watching the movie in a theatrical context.  We have a pre-flight crew (and an original pre-flight script written by ITG member Janet Zarecor and ITG staffer Taylor Shann) that will prep the audience and get them revved up for some fun audience participation and tell them that their in-flight movie is Airplane!  Fifteen ITG staff and family members will play all the roles (reading off of scripts and the subtitles) while we have a live pianist to provide underscoring and a foley artist to do some sound cues.  Our rehearsal time hasn’t been massive but we’re excited to go up tonight.

Our first fundraiser was a rock & roll fundraiser at Siberia starring Lisa Jackson & Girl Friday.  We had a comedy night with a great sketch troupe out of Boston who I knew from a conference called the Late Night Players, and Devil’s Dance Belt opening with long-form improv at our Impetuous house bar, Limerick.  We’ve had an open mic night at Chashama, our 47:59 Festival is a fundraiser in and of itself (three years running), and Regression Night was a great idea to have real actors perform embarassing pieces written before you turned 19 (more formal than the popular Mortified bit, but similar in theme).

We at ITG just think there’s a lot of different ways that people spend recreational dollars, and that our challenge is to keep coming up with new ideas to get people entertained and to keep them coming back to future Impetuous projects.  Plus, it’s too much fun.

Sounds like fun, indeed. A very inventive idea from a similarly inventive theatre company. How can you not love people who like do to good theatre and throw good parties? Am I right?

Let’s keep those fundraising stories coming, people. I love reading them, and hopefully you do, too. So, you know what to do: light it up!

Showin’ What Their Mamas Gave ‘Em

There seems to be a proliferation of nudity onstage these days. I feel like I have seen more exposed flesh onstage in the last six to seven months than I have in all the rest of my theatergoing life. What is up with this? I think it’s a very interesting development, indicative of relaxing social mores, and people (both artists and audience members) being more open-minded about sexuality, among other things. Frankly, I’m surprised I feel this way because, until recently, I usually found onstage nudity to be frightfully distracting. It would take me right out of whatever show I was watching, and I would sit there wondering “Should I look at that person?”, “Are they cold?”, “Do their parents know they’re doing this?”, etc. Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who felt this way. A few recent examples indicate that theatre practitioners are sensitive to such audience discomfort, and are willing to make oogling the actors more palatable for everyone:

• In Boomerang Theatre Company’s September revival of The Ugly Man by Brad Fraser, the play’s teenage heroine gets massively turned on after a hired hand on her family’s ranch rips her shirt open and wipes the blood of the person he’s just murdered all over her breasts. Yeah, it was a pretty shocking moment, but more so because of the new information it revealed: namely, the up-to-that-point unknown sexual attraction between those two characters, and their kinky little turn-ons. The nudity turned out to be essential to the plot (and a little chilling, as well).
• Blue Coyote Theater Group’s December production of Standards of Decency Project featured a lot of (mostly male) appendages and genitalia flapping in the wind. The point of this project was to explore and challenge conventionally held views of morality and obscenity, and it was interesting to see that no matter how far the nine participating playwrights pushed the envelope, they barely made me (or the rest of the audience) cringe. Which I would say was a good thing. Why? Because, to me, it shows that our collective standards of decency are pretty broad and inclusive. Even the most potentially offensive play of that evening - Matt Freeman’s “What To Do To A Girl,” in which a male teacher at an all-boys school veers dangerously (and unknowingly) close to objectifying a naked young woman he is using as a study aid for his class - struck me more as humorous social commentary than anything else.
• The recent revival of Heather McDonald’s Dream of a Common Language by 3Graces Theatre Co. also featured male and female nudity, but of a much more ”tasteful” variety: art modeling. Again, crucial to the story because it is necessary for the artist’s work (in one instance), and essential in brokering the peace in a brewing gender/equality war (in another instance). In that aesthetic context, the actors’ birthday suits seemed positively harmless.

It seems to me that artists are finding ways to present onstage nudity that go beyond (but might still also include) pure titillation.

What are your thoughts on this? How do you feel about seeing live beefcake at the theatre? Do you like it or hate it? Could you take it or leave it? Do you think there’s more of it around now than there used to be, or am I just imagining things? Give me the scoop.

breedingground Crawls For Cash

So, I thought I’d start the new blog out with a talk about that most vexing of indie theater subjects: money. I know I’m always thinking about it, and I imagine you are, too. Indie theater companies certainly are. In an attempt to keep their coffers full, more and more companies are coming up with new and inventive ways to raise funds.

Take, for instance, breedingground productions, an interdisciplinary multi-arts company that is gearing up for its Spring Fever Festival, which they describe as “a 3-week festival of work by self-producing artists, anchored by breedingground’s own theatre production. SFF is produced every 2 years, and categories are Performance, Video, Installation, and Groundwork: works in progress.”

Pretty ambitious and financially demanding. How does one even begin to think about paying for something like this? Well, my friend and colleague Tomi Tsunoda, the founder of breedingground, has come up with quite a unique solution - the Crawl for Art, in which company members crawl a certain distance on their hands on knees through the streets of Park Slope for every dollar pledged. I asked her how she came up with this idea, and here’s what she told me:

It’s always been one of breedingground’s major goals to decrease our dependency on private donations and grant funding. As much as possible, we try to manage our work to be self-sustaining. Usually, we’re able to do that — the only exception remains our largest budget project, the Spring Fever Festival. When we were gearing up for SFF 2005, we knew that we wouldn’t be able to put together enough in private funding to make it happen, so we threw a big benefit party in June of 2004 to kick off a fundraising campaign. It was good fun — we had great bands, at a great bar, with schwag and really fun activities. At the end of the night, when I sat down to count up our money, we were $300 in the hole. It was one of the most deflating and helpless producer experiences I’ve ever had. The second I finished counting, I decided that we’d just thrown our last benefit party.That summer, we brainstormed our little hearts out to think of ways to get people to give us money. We went through a lot of options, most of them involving us doing something horrible or humiliating that people would pay to see us do — drink or eat disgusting things, let people throw things at us, etc.

The people most likely to give us money are our audience and peers, the people who already love us and our work, who want to support us. Unfortunately for fundraising purposes, most of those people can’t donate more than a few bucks at a time. However, they’re all people willing to toss out a buck or two for a really good cause if it’s also a really good idea, or a really good joke, or both.

So a pledge drive seemed to make the most sense. But we couldn’t imagine anyone giving us money to walk or run or anything normal like that. So we decided to crawl — aside from being sort of ridiculous, the idea of getting down on our hands and knees to earn the money to do our art was just too good of a metaphor to pass over. We mapped out a route through our neighborhood in Brooklyn that hit most high traffic areas and that ended at a bar. The week beforehand, we went out with sidewalk chalk and advertised The Crawl all over the streets.

The whole thing costs us about $200 in postcards and chalk. We got kneepads, gloves, and bottled water donated from local businesses, whose names we chalked on the sidewalk all along the route. We took in about $2,000 in pledges, $300 of which we collected as we were crawling from people we passed on the street, $1-3 at a time — it’s amazing how far a sense of humor will go. We would chalk out how many feet someone had paid for, then Crawl it for them. Little kids would ask their parents for another dollar bill, so they could make us Crawl again.

The effort was successful enough that we decided to do it every year. We realized that it has several things going for it — 1) The overhead is so low, it’s almost impossible not to make money doing it, 2) It’s a hell of a lot more fun — you spend the day outside acting ridiculous with your friends and meeting people 3) It’s excellent publicity — it attracts attention, and it’s an opportunity to hand out postcards to everyone you pass who asks what the hell you’re doing, even if they don’t give you any cash. 4) It’s weird, and we become a unique public spectacle — people laugh when they hear about it, they want to know who we are when they see us coming, and we become “those Crawling people” to our neighbors. It’s good branding that keeps us in the public eye as a creative team at the same time that it raises money, and 5) People can donate as little as a dollar and still feel like they helped out, and they don’t even have to leave their apartments to do it.

The best part of it for us, I think, is that it feels good to be able to go out and make the money ourselves by being ourselves, and by doing something that is as much a creative project as everything else we do — rather than sitting in front of a computer composing a grant application or an ask letter.

Pretty clever, huh?

breedingground’s next Crawl for Art is coming up on Saturday, April 21st at 11am. Tomi and her colleagues will crawl 3 feet for every $1 they raise. Their goal this year is to crawl 8,750 feet. For more information, including the route they’ll be taking, click here.

I would love to hear more stories about the many different ways indie theater companies raise money. Do you have a story to share? Let me hear it.