Let’s Get Vertical (Vertical)
On my own blog some time ago I wrote about smaller and regional theatres being considered “minor league” in the pejorative sense and the broken ideas around that vocabulary in a post called “Is this Heaven, No It’s Iowa”.
The happy upbeat ending for those of you too good to click through is the idea that rather than everyone trying to cram themselves into the most expensive cities on the continent to learn how to create professionally in the most expensive, least hospitable creation conditions we can muster, they find a comfortable place they like living with people they like creating with and get really good at being on stage rather than auditioning. Then rather than shipping all of our raw materials to population dense urban areas we can ship product.
I’m nobody! Who are you?
I am Michael Kaiser’s nightmare.
I don’t have an MA, MFA, BFA, JD, MD, DDS, P.E. CPA, MSCE, or HVAC.
And yet I have opinions.
Opinions unformed by the cultural canon Mr. Kaiser has professed in the past. The Canon of his Youth. Not just a dead white male canon, but the dead white male canon of his specific formative years.
Opinions I foist on a range of professional, semi-professional, and amateur theatre makers as though I had some right to their ears.
Opinions shared as though, uninformed as they are by Higher Higher Education, I feel them to be correct and will sometimes publicly defend them, even when attacked by ‘names’, or the statused.
And isn’t that the magic of now?
I get to share my opinions freely without land or title, and Michael Kaiser gets to blandly disapprove of the notion of me.