Apparently, ‘March Madness’ has something to do with basketball. I’d have as likely used it to describe the wild and wonderful past four weeks of my life.

It started off in Dallas with David Parr’s A Most Happy Stella, in which I played two roles and sang a jazzy version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit.’ Before even leaving Texas, I was writing for New York Madness’ latest installment of shorts, this one curated by Daniel Talbott on the theme ‘Spiritually Blue Balled’. My play God Head was directed by Roberto Cambeiro and featured Ron Bopst, Todd Flaherty, and Colleen Kennedy. That same day I began another Talbott-related project (see below) and a week later rehearsed and performed a reading of Kathleen Warnock’s lovely That’s Her Way with the exquisite Danielle Quisenberry. This Wednesday I’ll start work on Chris Weikel’s latest, Dead Man’s Chest, in which I play Captain Kidd - a pirate! (You had me at ‘Ahoy.’) And somewhere in there, That Uppity Theatre Company of St. Louis produced my Shiny Pair Of Complications and LCT published an excerpt of Jackson Heights 3am. Madness! March has been leonine both in and out, ides and all.

So, speaking of Daniel Talbott, it was just over a year ago I first wrote about the amazing work his Rising Phoenix Rep was doing with their Cino Nights new play series at Jimmy’s No.43. Inspired by the legendary Caffe Cino’s do-it-yourself aesthetic that gave birth in the nineteen-sixties to what became Off-off Broadway, the RPR team have produced some of the best shows I’ve seen these past thirteen months. Their dedication to new plays and the people who make them attracts some of New York’s most dynamic playwrights, directors, and actors, and the excitement surrounding their monthly events has made Cino Nights one of the hottest tickets in town. Everything about what they do inspires me.

And this past week I was blessed to be a part of it. I played the role of Captain Nick, a (twisted memory of a) children’s television personality, in Charlotte Miller’s favorites, directed by John DiResta. I love nothing better than being in rehearsal, except for being in rehearsal with brave and generous actors like Jimmy Davis, Addie Johnson Talbott, Seth Numrich, and Amelia Pedlow. Oh my dog, are these guys good.

Cino Nights shows are fully mounted plays, usually about an hour in length, designed, rehearsed, and teched in a single week (or less) for one performance only. So there is hardly time for ego-driven proprietary bullshit (not that there'd have been any with this kindhearted crew). Bold choices are made very quickly. The tiny space leaves no room for actors to hide. And a shoestring budget encourages innovative staging and design. It’s an amazing and potentially terrifying ride. I was weirdly calm from beginning to end. I loved being there so much, I guess there just wasn’t room for fear.

In Charlotte’s Miller’s favorites, siblings Margaret and Travis’ return to their recently deceased mother's home to clear it out but find themselves trapped there by childhood memories. It’s screamingly funny at times, but also deeply disturbing as old wounds are reopened and nightmares are revived.

Captain Nick was one of those nightmares, and I had a blast playing him. Being in a rehearsal room with a playwright as generous as Miller, a director as sharp as DiResta, and a company of such extraordinary actors was, for me, at once humbling and thrilling. I had as much fun watching the others work as I had doing any of my own bits. It was inspiring and challenging and edifying to watch the way Addie and Seth and Jimmy and Amelia worked together. It was magic. Each and all of them gave me chills, made me laugh, and inspired tears. As my fellow Texan Charlotte might say, I was just, like, ‘…gaw!’

The experience made me all the more grateful for the community of theatre people with whom I work and play, and I was already feeling pretty lucky. On this World Theatre Day 2012, I’m reflecting on what it is we do, and how far-reaching the effects may be. It seems so often that we are toiling away in anonymity or, at best, preaching to a proverbial choir. (I recently produced a show in which one performance was absolutely packed – with comps. Sigh.) But if you believe, as I do, in the power of art and the ripple effect of transformational sharing, then there’s really no show too small. Look at something like Cino Nights. That little room at Jimmy’s holds maybe 40 people - if you pack them in and don’t crowd the playing space with more than three or four actors at once. One performance. Little publicity. And yet Rising Phoenix Rep is making a noticible impact on New York theatre. It is encouraging playwrights to try new things, to tackle new subjects, to collaborate in challenging new ways. I love listening to people talk about these plays in the bar afterward – wheels turning, fires igniting. They pass it on. If you were to play Six Degrees Of Rising Phoenix, you’d soon find yourself connecting dots across the country, if not around the world.

When I started Hard Sparks, I had a lot of big ideas, and I guess I still do. I start plays with big ideas. I play characters with big ideas in mind. Like a lot of artistically bent types, I do want very much to change the world in great big ways. But when I look at the people I know who are doing it – Daniel and Addie at RPR, Ari Laura Kreith at Theatre 167,  Martin and Rochelle at Indie Theatre Now and Joan Lipkin's That Uppity Theatre Co. in St Louis... and even when I think of international companies that face challenges as immense as Belarus Free Theatre did this past year, or Theatre For A Change in Malawi, or Instant Café in Malaysia, or the premier of Doric Wilson’s A Perfect Relationship in India, or the work of slain Palestinian director Juliano Mer-Khamis' Freedom Theatre… I see that it’s all built on tiny moments. Emotional connections. Mucking in. Sharing something deeply personal on an intimate level, each of us a spark.

On World Theatre Day, we celebrate the power we share to ignite change, to empower artists, to cross cultural and geopolitical boundaries with an international vocabulary of live performance. On one hand, it’s big heady stuff. I’m dizzy at the thought of it, and awestruck by those who’ve blazed the trails I now humbly, worshipfully follow. But I am also tremendously proud to be part of something so vibrant, so alive, so irrepressibly bad-assed. It would be silly to say I love theatre, it would be like saying I love the hair on the back of my hands. Making plays is simply a part of who I am. Metaphysical DNA.

But it is right to say that I love the work and the people with whom I do it. I love rehearsal. And today of all days I am filled with love and gratitude for my fellow theatre-makers. May every month be as mad as this March.

''May your work be compelling and original. May it be profound, touching, contemplative, and unique. May it help us to reflect on the question of what it means to be human, and may that reflection be blessed with heart, sincerity, candor, and grace. May you overcome adversity, censorship, poverty and nihilism, as many of you will most certainly be obliged to do. May you be blessed with the talent and rigor to teach us about the beating of the human heart in all its complexity, and the humility and curiosity to make it your life's work. And may the best of you - for it will only be the best of you, and even then only in the rarest and briefest moments - succeed in framing that most basic of questions, "how do we live?" Godspeed.''        - John Malkovich, International Message delivered to UNESCO in Paris, 22 March 2012.

I can’t stop thinking about Locker No.4173b.

This remarkable piece, produced by New York Neo-Futurists, is created and performed by Christopher Borg and Joey Rizzolo. The pair purchased the contents of two foreclosed storage lockers last year, with the intention of writing a play based on what they found inside. Under the direction of Justin Tolley, Locker No.4173b is both the story of creating a performance piece and the tale of the people to whom the contents of its titular container once belonged.

It took more than a year to create and produce, including several months just spent cataloging thousands of items that would otherwise have been garbage. At first glance, it’s all just landfill-destined detritus. But if you look closely, as Borg and Rizzolo do, it all gets very personal. And a little weird.

The pair play cultural anthropologists, unearthing the contents of several crates of someone else’s stuff. As they piece together the stories of these strangers’ lives, they find it increasingly difficult to maintain an unbiased scientific distance from their subjects. To say they’ve opened a Pandora’s Box of socioeconomics would be clichéd if it weren’t so very true. Here’s another one: truth is stranger than fiction. The show is full of surprises, brought to light like unburied treasures. It’s built for maximum suspense. And knowing that we’re looking at the evidence of real lives, of actual people, is both delightful and unnerving. When Joey Rizzolo gives us the etymology of words ‘voyeur’ and ‘theatre’ we’re forced to look at our ourselves as well. It’s clever. It’s creepy. It is at times rather heartbreaking.

And it’s all done quite slyly. Borg and Rizzolo are really funny. There are ukulele songs. The writing is remarkably quick and smart, delivered in a style that is nearly vaudevillian. But something happens as Borg and Rizzolo delve deeper into the crated contents of other people’s lives. Their over-the-top explorer personae fade and they become more and more themselves. The lines between art and reality, always dotted, become blurred and, eventually, disappear entirely.

Which I personally love. I say bring on the Brecht. I love theatre that exposes itself as such, and insists that an audience engage on both an emotional and intellectual level. I find escapism mostly boring, and while Locker is a ride, it’s no merry-go-round. It’s not about peering undetected through a window onto others’ private lives – no kitchen table drama, this. Borg and Rizzolo get up close, look right in your eyes, and ask hard questions about what makes our lives…ours. Are we our stuff? When we’re gone, what story will we leave behind?

During intermission, I overheard a woman in the audience ask Christopher Borg if everything had actually happened as maintained during the performance. Borg explained that he and Rizzolo had set up certain rules for creating the play, including the maxim that every word spoken onstage must be true. They, like their audience, can’t have known all the twists and turns their performance would eventually take.

Locker No.4173b is playing at The Monkey West on 26th Street. The very industrial twelfth-floor space is perfect, beautifully utilized by director Tolley. It feels a lot like a storage facility, albeit one equipped with state of the art A/V gear and a great view. There is some fantastic use of film clips – a combination of stock footage and faux-vintage recent footage presented as an outdated educational documentary. It’s funny stuff, to imagine how future generations might look back at our age based on what we leave behind. But it’s also a bit disturbing.

Which brings me to the third member of Locker’s cast, Yeauxlanda Kay. She provides the voice of one of the former owners of a storage locker, reading from the journal that Borg and Rizzolo discovered there. The narrative this journal describes, and the dynamic ways in which Kay delivers it, has haunted me. I can’t say much more without spoiling it.

Indeed it’s hard to know what to say about Locker No.4173b without giving away its secrets. And it is a show about discovery. I had a surprisingly emotional response to the whole thing. I was really stirred, even choked up, in part because of the very moving story unfolding before me. But I also felt my heart swelled by the feeling that I was witnessing something special. There’s not another show out there like this one. Borg, Rizzolo, Tolley, and Kay are doing something unique. That almost never happens. It made me ache with love and pride for my fellow theatre artists.

So, while this is not meant to be a review, I must recommend that everyone check out Locker No.4173b. Not everyone will get it, or love it, or gush about it like me. But it is one of the most original and enjoyable shows I’ve ever seen – clever, timely, surprisingly moving, beautifully designed, and passionately performed.

I’m now completely captivated by the idea of Locker’s creative process. I wonder if, as a playwright, I can play spelunker as well. What if, as artists, we are explorers as well as creators? Maybe what I do, as both a playwright and an actor, is not so much making up my characters as it is uncovering them.

Instead of struggling so hard to think outside of proverbial boxes, I’m going to look deeper inside them. One man’s trash may be, as they say, another artist’s treasure.

Locker N.4173b runs through May 21st at The Monkey West, 37 West 26th Street, 12th floor. Info and tix here.

See also: Christopher Borg answers 7Questions for Hard Sparks.

I must be mad.

Completely insane. Absolutely certifiable. Starting a theatre company is risky business no matter the economic climate, but in times like these? It’s nothing less than demented. And yet that is exactly what I've done in creating Hard Sparks.

My goals for Hard Sparks are lofty (read: insane) indeed, at least by most local standards. In addition to offering high-quality productions of edgy new plays for an Off-off Broadway audience, I have three primary objectives:

Affordable tickets. I’m interested in interesting the next generation of theatre goers, young people who don’t have a lot of discretionary cash. And, let’s face it, I make art for artists. So whether I am co-producing with a company like Horse Trade as I am on Eightythree Down, or working in a great big fancy place with multiple bathrooms and everything, there will be a way for everyone to enjoy a Hard Sparks show.

Paid personnel. It’s astonishing how little and how infrequently theatre artists are paid for their very difficult work. Very often, the best paying Off-off Broadway gigs work out to less than minimum wage. Money gets poured into venue rental, festival fees, and expensive sets but the whole point of performance - live people sharing meaningful experiences - gets lost. Hard Sparks can’t pay its companies much, but I am absolutely determined that everyone in our shows get something. In addition to respect, admiration, and gratitude, I think artists deserve a bit of dignity and at least one good dinner as well.

Charitable partnerships. Now here’s where it really gets bonkers. As a not-for-profit organization, I want to partner with other not-for-profit organizations for mutual benefit. I’m talking about raising awareness of, and money for, community-based organizations working to improve people’s lives in very direct ways. Whenever possible, Hard Sparks will mount issue-oriented plays and donate a portion of box office receipts to a local CBO working on that issue.

Every time I tell someone of my harebrained scheme, they smirk. Their eyes either narrow (producers) or widen (actors) and they ask me if I have an angel, a DeMedici, a secret backer who’s as much a nutter as I am to contribute to such an obvious debacle. I don't. But this doesn’t concern me. I see miracles happen every time I walk into a rehearsal, and I have absolute certainty that these goals are obtainable and sustainable.

Interesting new works of theatre, created by fairly compensated artists, that make an appreciable difference in the local community?

Yeah, that’s just crazy.

J.Stephen Brantley
Artistic Director, Hard Sparks
www.HardSparks.com

On the last day of 2010, I came across an excerpt from a speech given by President John F. Kennedy on October 26, 1963 at Amherst College in Massachusetts, in honor of the poet Robert Frost. In this speech, President Kennedy made clear the need for a nation to represent itself not only through its strength but also through its art and as he said, "full recognition of the place of the artist."

It's a moving and inspiring statement on the importance of art to a country's consciousness and national identity. For me these are words to live and to work by, stuck permanently to my soul's fridge door.

Our national strength matters, but the spirit which informs and controls our strength matters just as much. This was the special significance of Robert Frost. He brought an unsparing instinct for reality to bear on the platitudes and pieties of society. His sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation. "I have been" he wrote, "one acquainted with the night." And because he knew the midnight as well as the high noon, because he understood the ordeal as well as the triumph of the human spirit, he gave his age strength with which to overcome despair. At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads men towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truth which must serve as the touchstone of our judgment.

The artist, however faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state. The great artist is thus a solitary figure. He has, as Frost said, a lover's quarrel with the world. In pursuing his perceptions of reality, he must often sail against the currents of his time. This is not a popular role. If Robert Frost was much honored in his lifetime, it was because a good many preferred to ignore his darker truths. Yet in retrospect, we see how the artist's fidelity has strengthened the fibre of our national life.

If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth. And as Mr. MacLeish once remarked of poets, there is nothing worse for our trade than to be in style. In free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society--in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. And the nation which disdains the mission of art invites the fate of Robert Frost's hired man, the fate of having "nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope."

I look forward to a great future for America, a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral restraint, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our natural environment, which will preserve the great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.

I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.
Robert Frost was often skeptical about projects for human improvement, yet I do not think he would disdain this hope. As he wrote during the uncertain days of the Second War:

Take human nature altogether since time began . . .
And it must be a little more in favor of man,
Say a fraction of one percent at the very least . . .
Our hold on this planet wouldn't have so increased.

Because of Mr. Frost's life and work, because of the life and work of this college, our hold on this planet has increased.

Text and recording courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Library and the U.S. National Archives.