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At a SITI Company Christmas party, I was sitting on the floor next to Jason Hackett, a great friend of the Company who had recently joined the SITI Board, bringing his expertise in marketing and branding to help our trajectory. Both of us were hunched over plates of holiday food when Jason said, “Tell me why my friends should come to see a SITI Company production.” I took a deep breath and began to speak about how our plays engage audiences with issues of contemporary interest and how they are like theatrical essays on relevant subjects. Jason interrupted me.  “No,” he said, “my friends would not be interested in any of that.  Exactly what will attract them to attend a SITI production?” I took another deep breath and tried again. I spoke about the extraordinary collaborative spirit of SITI Company and how our ensemble approach proposes ways that social systems might function in harmony together.  Again Jason shook his head.  “No,” he said, “none of this would sell a ticket.”  I was getting agitated and continued to propose reasons that might attract Jason’s friends to a SITI Company production.  Finally I blurted out, “We offer a gym for the soul.”  At last Jason smiled and exclaimed, “Yes, that would interest them.  Now I know how to talk about SITI.” 

In the hyper mediated environment that we inhabit, energizing personal and communal experiences is priceless.  The mechanism of consumer culture encourages us to celebrate the easy-to-come-by, the pre-digested, and the ready-made.  And yet energy increases in direct proportion to the engagement demanded from any experience.  Meeting personal challenges and overcoming obstacles generates power.  Engagement and involvement create energy.  We are energized and widened by experiences that ask us to invest parts of ourselves, whether our time, our imaginations, or our mental and emotional abilities. We are generally not energized by experiences that ask little of us.

I vividly remember the first time I saw the Dutch director Ivo van Hove’s More Stately Mansions, an early play of Eugene O’Neill, at New York Theatre Workshop in 1997.  The play is long, nearly four hours, and rarely performed.  At the beginning of the evening the actors walked out onto the stage, bowed to the audience, bowed to one another and then they all moved to the side of the stage to sit in folding metal chairs except for actress Joan MacIntosh who faced the audience, took a deep breath, and began to speak the initial exceedingly long monologue at top speed. I jerked forward in my seat in surprise. I was seized and challenged and I did not want to miss a word.  After a few minutes I began to hear the familiar slap-slap of seats being abandoned as members of the audience left the theater in droves.  Probably more than one quarter of the audience walked out in the first ten minutes of the play.  The rest of us remained and the ride was dense, poetic and thrilling.

It took a Dutch director to teach me yet another lesson about what it means to be an American artist. As a theater director in a populist culture, I am inclined to start easy and save the hard bits for later on when I think that the audience is prepared to deal with the challenges. But in fact an audience learns how to watch any play in the first few moments of a production.  We cast the audience. We signal how to listen; we say to them – this is what is expected of you.  And this is exactly what Ivo van Hove did from the beginning of More Stately Mansions.  His message to the audience was: “If you want to get something out of this experience, you are going to have to engage. You are going to have to invest.”

Forgive the banking metaphors but it does seem that the financial world uses powerful words:  investment, return, benefits, interest, trust, and so on.  You go to the theater because you trust the company, the artists involved or the critics. Once there, the actors ask you to invest your attention, your mind and your imagination in what they are doing.  If you do not invest, you will not enjoy a return.  Appreciation is accrued, multiplied by investment, trust and patience. The investment has the potential to create interest.  Interest generates even more interest. Appreciation is accrued.  You receive a return. You receive a dividend.  You become a beneficiary.

SITI recently performed Room, our one-woman show based largely upon the non-fiction writings of Virginia Woolf, at the Women’s Project in New York City.  Each night I watched the audience enter the theater to find their seats.  Amidst them, brightly lit, sat Ellen Lauren, her back erect and her focus towards the stage.  As the play began, Ellen stood abruptly and said to the assembled, “Good evening.” Then she stepped up onto the stage and began what at first sounded like a lecture and then transformed gradually into a poetic symphony and a cry of the soul.  I felt empathy for the audience.  In this production, Ellen blatantly asks up front for investment from each individual audience member.  Without that investment, the audience would receive very little.  With the investment, Ellen could guarantee a compound return.  The soul and the mind of each audience member willing to invest in the evening expanded in the heat of the demands of engagement.

Encountering obstacles and challenges require a person to expand in particular ways in order to encompass the specific demands.  At a classic gym, for example, the investment of energy and focus in meeting resistance guarantees the expansion of muscular size and strength. London taxi drivers have been found by neurologists to develop a larger posterior hippocampus relative to non-drivers.  The demands of spatial acuity in these drivers swell the parts of the brain that engage in spatial issues. The art experience and the theater experience, being gyms for the soul, exercise imagination, empathy, creative thinking, patience and much more.  A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real and necessary.

Addendum:  Come see SITI Company’s production of Charles Mee’s Under Construction at Dance Theatre Workshop in NYC, April 21-May 7.  This is a wild ride and an exciting example of ensemble creation.  For more information, visit siti.org.