I did not recognize the 805 area code but after answer my reliably spotty iPhone, I was surprised to learn it was an equity theater who wanted The Common Air for their theater in Ojai, California.  It was seventy miles north of LA, I was told by a sultry feminine voice.

I had visited Ojai once with a friend and was enchanted like most are.  The area holds a reputation for being the consummate spiritual remedy to Hollywood’s dedicated shallows.  Since when did they have a theater, I wondered as I agreed to have the show produced there.

As a child of the 70’s, I knew Ojai as the home of Jamie Summers, The Bionic Woman.  Ra-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-paaa… On my first visit, however, I learned about a superhero almost as powerful.  His name was a little less network: Krishnamurti.  He was a spiritual teacher who preached against organized religion.  He held mass retreats in the 70’s where some 15,000 people would descend on the town to hear him guru, even claiming he was neither profit nor priest.  He passed away not long ago, but his institute just outside of town still draws acolytes from around the world.  Things happen a little differently in Ojai.

There’s definitely something preternatural here: a mystical vortex that’s been drawing the enlightened to it since 1837.  Ojai means, “Valley of the Moon”, a name bestowed on it by the Native American Cumash tribe, the region’s maiden inhabitants.

Unlike most valleys on the continent, Ojai lays at the base of an east-west mountain range.  As a result, the skies produce what locals have labeled a “Pink Moment”: a startling hue of pink above the Topatopa Bluffs.  It’s impossible to take for granted, even for life-time residents.

A walk down main street can feel like an outtake from any of Clint Eastwood’s early spaghetti westerns.  The town is anchored by a distinctly Spanish-style arcade, and local architecture ranges from sunburnt Cuban to Colonial revivalism.  The number of men wearing long white beards and sandals add to the hamlets authenticity.  And patchouli, or any variation there of, waft through the airs of the farmer’s market.

And then, just past the end of the strip, on the corner of Matilija and Montgomery, is Theater 150, a jewelbox of a space with an appropriately theatrical history.  The company began in a pool hall in 1996, True West was their first production and after attending, Sam Shepard said, “Their production was one of the best I’ve ever seen.”  A decade later, the company moved into a bankrupt mortuary.  It was 2006, the same year that the local hospital closed down their maternity ward.  The local joke goes that you can no longer be born or die in Ojai.  Ironically, the theater scene is alive and well.

The morgue’s two smaller rooms are used for an office space and a cozy 50 seat theater.  The embalming room, where bodies were drained and painted, has morphed into the kitchen. And the largest viewing room has become a acoustically perfect 99 seat mainstage.

Chirs Nottoli and Debra Norton, the co-artistic directors have been drawing a high caliber of talent since taking over.

Their production of The Common Air was strong.  And their audiences responded.  People often ask about the difference between west coast and east coast audiences.  I can’t say I have found many.  People who attend plays are in general curious and engaged.  Some are even looking for a challenge.  Even in Hollywood this is true.  But there is a certain appreciation in a place like Ojai that is absent in NYC and LA.

We get spoiled in Manhattan with all the options for great nights out.  Critics in the city take pride in being unimpressed, even while lobbing expletives at playwrights like Stoppared and Mamet and McDonagh. LA’s nearly tangible desperation often clouds people from letting their guard down enough to be moved.  The feedback in that city is inevitably couched in contemporary movie and tv show examples. It’s a tragic vernacular, really.  All while they’re telling you to end it up.

Things happen a little different in Ojai.  The show hit a metaphorical sweet spot with the audience there.  They were very clear on the message of the show.  In today’s complex world, people often lose what’s real.  They have seen their share of good work pass through: American Buffalo, Fuddy Meers, Stop Kiss, I am My Own Wife, Hamlet.

Their next production might be the best of all.  It’s an original play Chris and Deb have co-written, in which the two leads, played by themselves, will be married, as a way for Chris and Deb to actually get married in real life.  Invited guests are the audience, and ticket sales are going to the theaters budget for the next year.  Like I said, things happen a little differently in Ojai.

She started it all, really; character monologues woven together to form a thematically linked performance.  She called them ‘monodramas’ and though many of them were comedic, odd regional accents and quirky behaviorisms eventually gave way to deeper observations about human psychology.  In addition to her dazzling, chameleon-like transformations, audiences were also getting a digestible dose of well-crafted social critique. 

It’s disheartening how obscure her name remains today, even with experienced theater folk, as she pioneered an oeuvre that has increased in popularity over the last 100 years.  Without Ruth Draper, there probably wouldn’t be Nichols & May, or Lily Tomlin, or Whoopi Goldberg, or Eric Bogosian or Spalding Grey, to name a few.

George Bernard Shaw was a fan.  As was Lawrence Olivier and John Geilgud. Henry James was so fond of her he wrote her a monologue of his own.  Edith Wharton consoled her after the death of her boyfriend (she was never married).  Helen Keller attended several performances with Anne Sullivan diligently tapping the text out on her wrist. “My God, how brilliant she was.”  Said Katherine Hepburn. 

Not a bad legacy for a gal who began performing in her parent’s living room.

Ruth Draper was born in 1884 into a family of high pedigree.  Her father was a surgeon and her maternal grandfather was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War and later, editor of the New York Sun.  Her choice to pursue acting did not sit well with either. 

The Industrial Revolution had pushed the classes further apart in New York and those in the upper class (and upper Manhattan) simply did not pursue careers in theater.  Touring was grueling, paid little, and prohibited proper relationships.  Most saw actors as a notch above prostitutes, which sometimes they were.  And if not, they were probably cavorting around with them, drinking late night in mixed company or philandering in the cheap seats just like they did in the galleys of Shakespeare’s Old Globe.  (It’s rumored there was more action in the stalls than on the stage.)

But the parlors and drawing rooms of estates were a different story.  The wealthy took pride in hosting cultural gatherings, and there was certainly room to do it: musicians and authors and poets were the mainstay of their soirees, and performing in a someone’s mansion was far from the pedestrian environment of a public theater, and significantly harder to get an invitation too. 

This is where the young Ruth Draper cut her performing teeth.  It was a pianist friend of her parents, and a highly respected artist in the parlor circuit himself, that first noticed Ruth’s exceptional ear for mimicry and encouraged her parents to cultivate it.  

It was only a matter of time before Ruth was captivating the salons of her peers, many of whom were up and coming patrons of the arts.  She could imitate any class of character from the Teutonic German nanny who home schooled her, to the family’s language-butchering Yiddish tailor.  She had an especially acute ear for her own kind; the educated, privileged and superficial. 

Her most famous monologue, The Italian Lesson, parodied a middle-aged socialite for gossiping more about how her Italian lessons made her erudite, than actually learning to speak a word of the language.  It was spot on.  And when heard today… alarmingly contemporary.

She also wielded a rather nasty, if not accurate, impression of her sister Dorothea.  Though she claimed not to base her characters on real people, one can only imagine the plethora of material she culled from her seven siblings.

Her peers couldn’t articulate what it was that made her so engrossing, but they lined up to see her perform.  She said of her creative process, “…If you’re completely given over to what you’re portraying, you will convince other people…”  She had not lost her youthful imagination or enthusiasm.  The popular Nietzsche aphorism (of whom she was no doubt aware) comes to mind: “Maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play.”  Ruth had “maturity” in spades.

Some critics thought she was a snob.  But it was never about social status with Draper.  It was about taste.  There were those that had a finely tuned aesthetic sense, and sought fulfillment from nuance, and then there were blockheads.  The Twenties unearthed a good bit of nonsense along with its literary highlights. And for Draper, the spectacles that passed as art were utter nonsense.  Her few visits to Hollywood left a bad impression of what “second-rate taste” looked like.

Ruth was at the height of her powers when New York entered its pre-crash golden age.  The twenties were roaring, and for every wanna-be Gatsby fighting for a seat at the Algonquin Round Table, there was a hidden gem like Ruth beginning to sparkle.  Her reputation spread quickly throughout the city and performances at parlors began to reach capacity weeks in advance.  At her busiest, she was doing forty bookings in five months, all without an agent or manager.  She would “wow” one gathering, and another would instantly materialize.  She went from one living room to the next, literally across the country.  Her hosts were a who’s who of recognizable names: Astor, Stuyvesant, Whitney, Roosevelt (yes, Eleanor).  They were epic evenings.

It didn’t take long for word to cross the pond.  Draper became a mainstay with the Royal families in Britain and Sweden.  Though not formally paid, she was sometimes bestowed with priceless jewelry.  It was a phenomenon that surprised even her.  “Another sold out night in Paris,” she would say with a sarcastic sigh.  But it was real.

Though a petite 5’ 4’’, Draper knew how to command attention.  Her portrayals were bold and convincing.  And she never pandered.  Her characters were treated with the utmost respect no matter what class they were.  She inhabited them completely, and with dignity.  The spectators felt privileged just to watch. 

She was generous with her many fans; answering mail and cultivating friendships with admirers.  After a performance, one story goes, Ruth offered two sycophants a ride in her carriage during a thunderstorm.  The fans sang her praises, and later lamented they had never heard “The Italian Lesson” in all their years of seeing her.  Draper did it for them on the spot.

Though she had many close friends, she remained single for most of her life and struggled with it in her voluminous letters.  Her vocation might have intimidated many men, but Ruth claimed she would have given it up for Mr. Right.  No one believed her.  The more famous she became, the more her schedule (which at one point toured Africa, India and South America) prohibited her from maintaining a sustainable relationship. 

One man capable of handling a girlfriend that was performed for heads of state and earning more money than he ever would, was Lauro De Bosis, an Italian poet twenty years her junior.  It was a passionate affair, but three years into their relationship, Lauro was killed while flying a small plane.  Draper would never replace him.

Interestingly, she did not perform in a theater proper until her late 30’s.  She eventually conquered Broadway, late in her career.  She was in her mid-fifties when Thornton Wilder nominated her for membership in the Institute of Arts & Letters.  Unfortunately (for the Institute, that is) the organization’s strict definition for playwright did not include monologues. 

It was a double-edged sword, to be an artist’s artist.  One 1920’s critic commented that Martha Graham, like Ruth Draper, was “condemned by the uniqueness of her talent to appear only in works of her own creation.”

She threatened to retire several times, but they were idle.  At 70, Draper had an estimated 40 monologues at the ready, some of which were over half an hour long. 

On December 29^th, 1956 after another sold out performance at the Playhouse Theatre, Ruth took a carriage uptown to dinner, and returned to her home and died peacefully in her asleep.  The funeral at Grace Church was standing room only.  Her coffin was shrouded in the many shawls she wore when bringing her repertoire of characters to life.

When your average American has a choice between experiencing a fully blown alternate universe with a simulated cast of thousands in a fantasy-action-scifi-adventure-environmental-love-story in IMAX 3D for 15 bucks, or an existentially-loaded exploration of how humans deceive themselves in airport terminals, performed by one person for 85 minutes and for twice the price, they tend to choose the former.  What gives?

What does one have to do to win back an audience?  It’s a semi-facetious question for any artist living on the planet Earth.  And one that must be confronted with courage and alacrity.

In my case, there are several elements I would have to achieve to compete with Avatar.  The first would be a larger advertising budget.  At present, I would say my advertising budget is about $36.55 a month, which is what I pay for my web connection.  Writing emails to friends from high school and church and people I just met on the subway, begging them to come see the show, has been an extremely effective campaign.  But I must cast a wider net if I am going to compete on a global scale.

Say I met a producer who really, really loved the show.  Say he wanted to work with me in getting the production to a higher level.  I simply would not bother taking his call unless he could put up 200 million dollars for advertising.

With that initial seed money, I would buy an airline; one of the financially stable ones that gets all the ESPN channels like Virgin or Jet Blue.  I would then change the name of the company to The Common Air, which is the name of the show.  It would gleam, blindingly, on every airship’s tail and wingtip.

Then, whenever someone bought a flight, no matter where they lived, there would be one of those surreptitious boxes you have to check at the very end of the purchase process, the one you don’t see at first but that the web page won’t let you advance past until you have “accepted” its terms, and it would read, in 1 point, light grey font, that every flyer must lay over in New York and see my play, price of ticket not included. 

I think this would work well, and word of mouth would not only spread, but literally fly through the air.

Another essential marketing strategy that I can’t afford at present, is to befriend more extremists.  I’m not sure where they all hang out, but from what our former vice president says, they’re all around us.  You could be one, dear reader, and not even know it.  Certainly, the swarthy neighbor next door is one, or is friends with one for shiz. 

Though it’s hard for me to admit (and I have been advised by several legal experts not to) when bad things happen in airports, it’s really good for the show!  Our best night at the Bleecker 45 box office, and my personal best show, was December 30^th, five days after the now infamous underwear bomber tried to blow up a plane on Christmas day.

Many people had seen the show, and many more had been hearing about it, and the incident rekindled, or inspired people to talk about it, and then actually buy a ticket.  “I just saw a show about this very thing!” I imagined them saying.  “It’s quite good.  And it’s in 3D.  You should go.” 

There would be a pause, and then the other person would say, “Yes.  Yes I think I will go see that topical, socially relevant show.  What better thing to do in the face of today’s shameless fear mongering and paranoia than to embrace a parody of terrorism and self-rationalization?!” 

It might not go exactly like that, but close, I would say.  And I have an ear for these things.

I would also spend some of that money on cross-promotions with the Weather Channel.  Because just as bad news about terrorists incidents is good for the show, so is inclement weather.

Whenever the Weather Channel began reporting potential delays due to bad weather, I would begin preparing myself to go straight to the closest airport.  Most normal people do whatever is in their power to avoid being near any airport in a storm.  But me?  I’ll be bolting at breakneck speed with my tech team to prepare for a performance. 

Yes, my new plan to compete with the likes of Avatar, is not to ask my audience to come out and see my show, but to bring my show directly to my audience.  This is a brilliant, brilliant idea.

I will bus my entire production to whichever airport expects severe delays and have a captive audience due to circumstances beyond their control. 

I would need two giant tour buses that have all kinds of amenities like Wilco has.  And probably a private jet, which I’d already own, because I’d have purchased an airline.  I don’t think Wilco has a jet, because Jeff Tweedy is probably all green and whatnot, but if they did, they would probably have all kinds of cool shit in it, because they have kids and who doesn’t want to keep them entertained, right?

So, say we knew that Colorado was going to get 16 inches in a day or so. The second I got my tweet from the Weather Channel about it, I’d book a flight to Denver and start doing vocal warm up. 

As the delays began popping up on the monitors, I would hire a few stranded students to start handing out flyers.  I would make them paper the bathrooms and shoe-shine stands, the bookstores and fifteen-minute massage salons.  I’d have them literally hit the tarmac with hard-core street-team tactics, cause the staff of the airport would be as stranded as the travelers.

Then I’d set up platforms in one of the really big waiting areas– one that had enough to plug 50 or so lights in.  And when delays and cancellation started pouring in, the show begins. 

For really huge storms, I could have several shows: 12 noon, 3, 6:30, 9 and a 12 midnight one for those not able to get into hotels.  I know this would be effective in getting audience; word of mouth travels far when you have nowhere to go.  And I think my audience will definitely relate to the play.

It would still only add up to a couple thousand people, but if I charge something like $100,000 a ticket, I would be competing head to head with James Cameron in no time.

Okay.  Off to befriend some extremists and pray for really bad weather.  See you at the gate.

The reason Homer created these oral traditions is anybody’s guess.  Many scholars with accents hypothesize that he was trying to preserve history before the written word had become as accessible as it was during the Classical Age (5th and 4th century BC).  Homer was a product of the Archaic Age, (8th to 6th centuries BC).  Others think that it was a way of educating the masses.  By couching ethical guidance as well as important cultural traditions in a dramatic framework, one could hold an audience, and better yet, grow it.

But it’s my thesis that Homer originated the one-person show for a different reason.  The oldest one in the proverbial book.  And that is that most of the time, working with other people sucks.

No doubt Homer gathered a group together for a rehearsal of The Iliad, and at that early meeting, when he was telling each person what their lines would be, there was immediate confusion over what exactly dactylic hexameter was.  In addition, the guy playing Agamemnon was hung over from last night’s libations to Dionysus, the woman playing Helen had already slept with three other cast members, and the kid playing Telemachus was pissed he had to wait for the end of the sequel to get some meaty scenes.

Homer hit a wine bar, sucked down a few skins of fresh pressed grape juice, gnawed a dozen or so Kalamata olives, and after spitting out the pits, said “Fuck it, I’m doing all the parts myself.”

His tone was less inquisitive than it was a veiled opinion: “Why bother with theater at all…”  He had just done an episode of Gossip Girl, I learned, and he thought his star was rising beyond participating in anything as insignificant as a stage play, even though, as I pointed out, James Gandolfini was currently in God Of Carnage and Jude Law was on the boards in Hamlet, by a popular British playwright.  

This dude was unfazed.  His view was that Gandolfini’s best work was behind him with the end of The Soprano’s, and that he couldn’t do any better than a lead in Yasmina Reza’s latest masterpiece.  He had a bit of a ponytail, this punk, and I fantasized about yanking him to the ground by it like that girl from the New Mexico women’s soccer team.  There were no referees in sight to dispense a yellow card.  And I could be out the door before he got his feet and trounced me, because in in his skinny pants, he was a good foot taller than I was.  But instead, I let the wave of anger pass.  

Perhaps it was a semi-legitimate question for a 19 year old glopped in hair gel.   Though I came up through the theater, and have an ineffable respect for it, there are many “actors” who have never done a play.  It’s a phenomenon more common in Los Angeles than NYC, but it exists here as well.  Not only have they never done a play, but they actually look down on theater.  A play is what you do when you can’t “make it” on TV or in film.  

It brings up an important linguistic issue.  Just as Eskimos have 36 different words for snow, so should we in the arts have different words for different types of actors.  If you’re an actor who has never done a stage play, and look down on it, for example, you would be called a Schmactor.  If you’re an actor who doesn’t have a Shakespeare monologue at hand, and would most like misspell the Bard’s name, you would be called a Crapctor.  And if you are an actor who landed a part on a TV show after a bad audition because your agent packaged you with the actor the network really wanted, you would be a…. lucky Bastactord.  And so on, for clarification’s sake.  I’m well into the submission process with Webster’s and will let you know my results.

I didn’t have time to explain all this to the lanky, young douchebag.  And I probably would have needed to speak through a beer bong for him to hear me.  But I did contemplate a more insightful answer to why theater, after brushing my teeth that night, or as the celebrations would have it, early morning.  In no other medium do you have such immediate reciprocity than in the theater.  It’s a lot like the difference between eating fresh fish versus frozen.  Frozen can be good, but there is something extra special about it when its not.  A certain aliveness on the tongue.  

Indeed you can make a film and screen it in front of a live audience, but the interaction is one way; from screen to audience.  What’s sacred about the stage is that the audience can actually affect the actor.  And in that way, each show is its own unique, living entity.  When an audience reacts– be it with a concentrated silence, a nervous shift in a seat, or the collective inhalation taken after a big group laugh– the actor takes it in, reacts off of it, and returns the energy in the delivery of his/her line, and over all performance.  During the first show, Ii almost dropped a prop.  I bobbled it, and made the save and then, spontaneously offered the prop to the audience.  It was unplanned, and so was the audience’s reaction.  The fourth wall had not been broken, but I was right up against it, and could feel the relief of the audience after making the save.  That moment filled me with a new energy, and I rode out the end of the monologue on it. 

There are two characters in The Common Air that speak Arabic: The Immigrant, who opens the play, and The American, who closes it.  During an early performance in Los Angeles, somewhere in the first monologue, I was aware there were Arabic speakers in the house from the reactions I heard to their native tongue lines.  It instantly affected me as a performer, in a positive way, by putting me that much more deeply into characters POV and by re-igniting the care with which these two characters address their entangled Middle Eastern identities.  That experience is far more exhilarating than the stop and go, often out of sequence, perpetually fragmented experience of acting in television and film.  

It’s probably the main reason why any of us bother with theater.  And why the tradition has thrived for so many centuries.  To experience something that is happening live on both sides.  To be an audience member and to contribute, even influence a show, simply by spectating.  That added dimension of experience is unique to the stage.   It’s why people write for the theater.  It’s why movie stars work for scale to do a play that’s 100, or  400, or 2500 years old.  It’s why you buy tickets for three times the price, and come out in the cold, far away from your “flatscreens”.  It’s why theater will never die.

Alex writes:

Whenever you produce a play, you can be sure there’ll be a confluence
of conspiracies awaiting you prior to your opening that will insure
the maximum amount of stress and anxiety and terror and self-hatred.

It’s crucial to remember that this is precisely what’s supposed to
happen!  Pre-show near-disaster is the formal protocol for all live
artistic endeavors, not just theater.  So feel validated and confident
when, 24 hours from opening to a full house of friends and loved ones,
your video feed is blurry and unreadable, you can’t direct the
site-specific sound effects to the dedicated speakers backstage, your
ticketing service is rejecting the discount code you’ve offered your
peers so they don’t get bilked by service fees, there’s a hole in the
crotch of your costume you can fix, the paint on the set is still wet
and now on your hands, your agent, manager and shrink are suddenly,
inexplicably out of touch, and the critics have officially informed
you that they couldn’t be bothered to review your work because they
have to review more expensive shows that suck.

All set!  Let’s roll.

It’s times like this for which alcohol was made.  The long tradition
of drinking in the theater dates back to the ancient Greeks.  The
Actor was Thespis, and for a while there, he was the only actors, so
casting was a cinch.  He just showed up at the audition, and got the
part.  Then they invented the Chorus, and a few more people started
getting work, and because they were all Thespis wannabes, they started
calling them Thespians.  Eventually, the union formed, and stopped
everyone from doing anything by pricing them out of producer’s budget
via payments to pension and health.

The point is, there is a legitimate historicity to artists getting
shitfaced before a show.  And getting in trouble for it.  It wasn’t
the alcohol on their breath that gave them away.  But the grape skins
under their toenails.  See, this was ancient Greece.  400 B.C.  You
couldn’t just duck into a wine bar and throw back a few cabernet’s to
take the edge off.  You had to crush your own grapes in your dressing
you, barefoot, and make your own wine.  It was time consuming, but
worth it.  And it’s where the old theater tradition of checking an
actors toenails before he hits the stage comes from.  Back then, you
would often here a producer say, “Hey Thesis, I’ll break your toe
nails if I catch you crushing grapes before tonight’s show.”   Today,
we say break a leg, as wine make has evolved to include legs as well
as feet, in grape crushing.  But it still means the same thing.

The naked truth is, anyone doing anything that requires them standing
on a stage, under bright lights, in front of expecting patrons and
critical eyes, is verifiably out of their trees to begins with.  There
is so much pressure to get it perfect.  And there is the unceasing
possibility that it could all go terribly wrong.

So in that moment, when every single element you’re responsible for
seems tangled in Gordian cluster– when it’s 3:30 am and you’re eyes
are burning from exhaustion, and one of the multiple voices howling
inside your head is saying, “Why didn’t you finish law school?”
Remember that this uncertain insanity is the very reason why the
victories are so glorious.

You love the nausea and nervousness.  You love the doubt and anxiety
nightmares.  You love the risk of the road less travelled, and the
potential of making a public ass of yourself.  Cause in the slim
chance that you pull it all off without a hitch, and the chances are
slimmer than you might think, you breathe each breath a little more
deeply, a little more appreciatively, a little more alive than you
were just moments before: those moments when you were sure there was
no way in hell it was going to happen.  So break a toenail, and hope
to see you at the theater.

Alex