Why Do You Create?

The values you bring to the act of making new things is key.

“The biggest issue is price. Theater is just so expensive to see after COVID that only audiences with resources are able to participate.”

Sitting in the Duke of Perth on Clark in Chicago with three artists with real skin in the game and I had to hear their frame on things. I’ve been seeing the Chicago arts scene from 700 miles away and, of course, have opinions, but these three are in the thick of it so the perspective is extremely valuable.

There is a sense from the ground that things haven’t changed as much as it seems from the macro view which tracks with all things reported about Chicago. From Kansas one would think this city was a DMZ with its rampant crime, immigration housing issues, and the dire straits the arts scene is in.

It turns out that a DCASE (Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events) study has assessed that theater-going in Chicago has dropped 60% in the past four years. Chris Jones has written about it, multiple big and small theaters have either significantly reduced their production schedules or gone dark altogether.

“Which theaters did they talk to?” Andi is skeptical of the statistics and rightly so. The split between the big and mid-sized theaters in town versus the DYI scrappers has always been evident. She wonders if the numbers only come from those monied operations and she’s probably correct.

Over at Mrs. Murphy’s on Lincoln, I ask similar questions of a fringe storytelling impresario who makes a living teaching telling and his answer is a little different. “There’s an ideological lock on things that make audiences uncomfortable. If all you can reasonably hear are stories of trauma and that trauma is couched in identity, the whole thing becomes sort of a struggle session for guilty white liberals with money.”

COVID certainly still plays out in the Windy City. In Vegas, we got the memo that COVID was over. In Kansas, the memo was that it was all a fiction. Chicago seems less inclined to loosen that fear of the virus and the idea of sitting in a room full of possibly infected people still looms.

On air and in print, the handwringing parades by with excuses for this state of affairs. Audiences are afraid to go downtown (which only affects a handful of the biggest theaters), they changed habits due to the COVID shutdown (yet flock to live concerts and pay out the nose to do it), they’re now used to streaming entertainment and even the drumbeat of let’s blame Tik Tok.

I’m certain that all of these factors have come into play but the aspect that few are willing to broach is the question of why would anyone not involved in creating theater ever go to a show? You’re dropping money but more essentially spending time to sit in a dark room to hear a story, watch a representation of reality in a capsule form, be entertained. What’s going on in Chicago right now that offers the enticement to experience that?

Marriott Theater has been doing Gypsy. Drury Lane is doing an homage to Johnny Cash. There’s The American Dream and Sanctuary City about the plight of immigrants. The Mousetrap. Blackademics. The Last Living Gun.

For $50, one can attend American Psycho: The Musical. Little Shop of Horrors. What the Constitution Means to Me. A musical homage to Louis Armstrong. Arsenic and Old Lace (a play I performed in high school in Towanda, KS in the early eighties). Eurydice. And, of course, Hamilton.

WHY YOU CREATE LEADS DIRECTLY TO WHAT YOU CREATE

There is nothing inherently wrong about reviving Gypsy (a musical older than I am) or tributes to two dead artists or even a play first produced in 1941. Nostalgia for a certain demographic is gold although those looking for a nostalgia-hit from these shows are A) definitely not enamored by Tik Tok and B) are slowly dying off.

Why produce these shows in 2023? Money. There isn’t a great deal of artistic challenge to producing a tried-and-true musical that features a 1960’s sci-fi plot and a plant puppet but there is the potential for butts in seats. Those butts might be pushing behind walkers or sitting in wheelchairs but butts is butts.

There is nothing terrible about diving into a more diverse (re: black American) experience—in fact, it’s a net gain for us all to have a few more perspectives being produced—but the tenor of these most recent offerings seems to be educational rather than entertaining. There are plenty of shows in Chicago aimed at the social justice crowd but that crowd is face-planted into their phones and don’t need to hear it anyway because they already know everything, amiright?

Why produce these shows? To make a political point. Those few people (I’d argue at least 60% of them) aren’t interested in spending an evening in a thinly veiled lecture about the ills of society.

“…many theaters chose to program preachy shows that lectured about racial justice and other perfectly admirable causes, theatrical equivalents of diversity, equity and inclusion training. Audiences voted with their feet and went to other shows. Having failed to assure audiences that their venue was safe and having programmed plays that made the audience feel attacked, theaters concluded that low attendance was caused by online streaming and that declining subscriber rolls must reflect a flaw in the subscription model.”

Terry McCabe: Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene is shrinking. The audience isn’t to blame.

What is really on the decline in the theater scene in Chicago? Those who create for the sole act of creation. The why behind these lunatics is not fame or a living wage or awards or an opportunity to teach the audience something. The why is simply why not?

I ran into a lot of artists in town who have simply given up. People I either used to work with or were in the same circles back in the day and there is this sense that there is no place for them, that performance space is too expensive to mount anything substantial. I stroll by the old WNEP space that became an improv theater after the landlords manufactured a license and we were ousted and it is now closed. Online and in conversation the company places blame on COVID which is reasonable but now the building sits inert, empty, and without purpose.

“There just isn’t an audience for theater anymore,” says a long-time acquaintance who once was prolific and now works in a bank.

“Maybe there isn’t theater for the audience right now?”

Another friend hands me an old syllabus from my days teaching others how to produce live events. The copyright watermark is from 2004.

Assuming you have an idea of what you want to do, ask the following question:

"Why this show and not another?"

If the answer is:

"Because it'll be a hit!" (TRANSLATION: I'll make a lot of money and gain respect in the community - DO NOT PRODUCE

"So I can star in it!" - DO NOT PRODUCE

"Because it has something to say that needs to be heard. It fills a void. It'll be fun and who doesn't want fun?" - PRODUCE

This is Chicago. There is more competition for less audience than in any city in America. If your motivation is making money, you will be disappointed and discover that producing strictly for money is like any other soulless day job.

It seems my ‘art for art’s sake’ stance has been with me for a long time.

My experience has been that if you create something amazing and unique and, as some have indicated, not out price those audience members looking for something amazing and unique, they’ll show up. Not everyone because the vast middle of the road audience is content with McDonald’s hamburgers and Olive Garden but there will always be those out there seeking the new, the fresh, the unusual.

The thing about unique is that it’s risky. Those artists who embrace risk in their passionate pursuit of the different than the average fare are almost always my heroes.

When asked what his favorite composition was, Duke Ellington said, “the next one.”

This is the essence of the artistic process. When we’re in the liminal space between now and what is about to come, we’re fully alive.

Seth Godin

I feel that. My favorite book that I’ll author? The next one. My favorite experience or show I put up for people to dig? The next one. I guarantee whatever the next one is will be unlike anything I’ve done before because the artistic shark within must always be swimming.