Round-up of Changes in Lansing Theater

I've been writing a lot lately, just not blogging very much. There is definitely a lot going on in our theater community, and not just because the new fall season has started. In the past several months, we've witnessed some pretty major changes:

(And I was about to use a bulleted list, but that screws with some people's readers, so I'll number the list and beg your pardon for the lack of pretty formatting.)

1. Kristine Thatcher's contract as Artistic Director was not renewed at BoarsHead.
2. Shakespeare on the Grand replaced Sunsets with Shakespeare as the summer outdoor Shakespeare company. Led by Lindsay Palinsky, Rita Deibler, and Tod Humphrey, they are associated with the Lansing Civic Players.
3. Len Kluge died.
4. Bob Gras died.
5. Lansing Civic Players announced that it was canceling its mainstage season and launching an Underground LCP Black Box season while they regroup and raise money.
6. The Renegade Festival in Old Town continued to grow by leaps and bounds and was an exciting event this summer.
7. Merrill Wyble died.
8. Paul Riopelle was hired as BoarsHead's interim artistic associate.
9. All-of-Us Express Children's Theater merged with the City of East Lansing and is moving into the Hannah Center.
10. John Neville-Andrews resigned as the Artistic Director of the Michigan Shakespeare Festival.
11. Kristine Thatcher announced the formation of a new professional theater company.

Things are changing fast around here. It's exciting times for the theater community.

I'm hoping in the next week or so to blog about a wonderful conversation I had with Jeffrey Sweet about theater and theater journalism. I also want to get a book he recommended and possibly share things from there.

In the mean time, if you're looking for theater this weekend, here are some of your options:

• An Evening with Mark Twain at the Ledges Playhouse, Capital TheaterWorks
• Things You Shouldn't Say Past Midnight, Creole Gallery, Peppermint Creek Theatre Company
• Beau Jest, BoarsHead
• Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pasant Theater, Michigan State University
• 70 Scenes from Halloween, 168 Black Box Theater, Gannon Building, Lansing Community College
• LCP Underground Grand Opening, LCP Firehouse (Reservations required--Saturday only)

I'll try to remember to come back tomorrow and stick in links for the Beau Jest review, the Rocky Horror picture show and 70 Scenes preview. Some of the other stories are no longer available online.

R.I.P. Merrill Wyble

Merrill's obit is in today's paper here. It had to be cut far more than Bob's did, so I'll put the whole thing here. Granted, with the shrinking news hole, I'm glad they were able to get as much as they were in the print version of the newspaper.

On Aug. 29, the Lansing theater community lost another of its long-time members, the third since the beginning of July.

Merrill Wyble, age 80, died Saturday evening of complications arising from a colon infection. While he’d been ill for several weeks, he was recuperating and had been expected to be released from the hospital when he had to have an emergency colonoscopy Aug. 28.

Wyble was preceded in death by Spotlight founder, director, and theater critic Len Kluge on July 1 and director, actor, and teacher Robert Gras on Aug. 20.

Wyble, who retired in 1991 from the law firm, Church, Wyble, Kritselis & Robinson, PC, where he was a senior partner, was an active volunteer for Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, Community Theater Association of Michigan (CTAM), and local theaters. Wyble was a prolific actor who appeared on stages at Lansing Civic Players, Riverwalk, BoarsHead, and Peppermint Creek. His final performance was in Riverwalk’s “Born Yesterday,” in the fall of 2008.

Winifred Olds, who along with her husband Wes and Betty White breakfasted with Wyble every Saturday, said that Wyble had slowed down a little in the past couple years.

“He decided to do smaller parts and to stick close to local theater—Riverwalk and LCP,” said Olds, whose husband Wes had a room at the hospital next to Wyble during his final illness. “We always went to Starlight Dinner Theater together—Merrill, Wes, Betty, and I. We always sat at the same tables so we could talk about the plays.”

Starlight’s Artistic Director, Linda Granger, said that while Wyble was skeptical about the viability of a dinner theater, he came to support it with his active patronage.

“What to me is most memorable about Merrill is that he spoke his mind,” Granger said. “I admire that in people and he was also the first to admit if he was wrong. He told me that my dinner theater would never make it and sent me a nice email some time later saying more or less, ‘I was wrong.’ When Judy Such, his girlfriend, was alive, they attended every single play in the Lansing area. After Judy passed away, Merrill kept going to all the local theaters. He was a regular customer at Starlight and I would see him at LCP or taking tickets at Riverwalk.”

Wyble’s volunteer contributions were many. He served several years on the board of LCP, participated in the Worship Arts team at Good Shepherd, and served on the board and several committees for CTAM.

“He was a good lawyer,” Olds said. “There was a time when he served on the board of LCP that a letter on his letterhead sometimes moved mountains.”

With CTAM, Wyble and his partner of many years, Judy Such, helped to organize retreats at Boyne Mountain and traveled around the state as adjudicators to help develop other community theaters.

“Community theater was his great passion outside of his profession,” CTAM board member Joanne Berry said. “He had a wit and charm about him and a genuine concern for people that drew others to him. He tackled many jobs having to do with community theater with great gusto. You could always depend on him to get done whatever had to be done for the organization.”

Berry said she is certain that people will be remembering and toasting Wyble at their Cadillac conference in late September.

Pastor Roger Straub said Wyble had been attending Good Shepherd for the past 20 years.

“He was very active in a number of areas in our church,” said Straub. “One of the things he brought to us was his interest in theater. He was an active part in the Worship Arts Group, whose purpose was as a group to enhance worship in a number of creative ways.”

Wyble’s eldest son, Rick Wyble, spent much of the last several months with his father. He said his father caught a cold at one of the nursing homes where he volunteered and it attacked his colon.

“He got through the first bout, but when it came back, he was too weak to handle it and became resistant to the antibiotics they were giving him,” Rick Wyble said.

He said that during the past few months in the hospital, he got to hear stories from his father about when he served in the army in Germany and first passed the bar exam. Rick is the oldest of six children and three step-children. Merrill Wyble is also survived by 14 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.

The memorial service will be at 11 a.m. Friday at Good Shepherd with visitation an hour before.

“He was very specific on how he wanted it done,” Rick Wyble said. “He left us a letter of what he expects and how it will be done. There was one line in there that, ‘There will be no wailing or gnashing of teeth. It should be a joyous occasion.’”

Rick Wyble expects there will be a large turnout at the service as his father had made friends in many different circles.

“That’s one of the things he enjoyed most after he retired,” Rick Wyble said. “He was able to do everything. It gave him time to social network. He was very active at church, at theater. He got involved in mall walking. He has a circle of friends there, a circle of friends at theater, a circle of friends form his office, another for his family, and another from church.”

As the news spread of Wyble’s death, members of the arts community began their mourning and sharing memories.

“He will be greatly missed,” said Granger. “It saddens me that in the past two months we have lost three men who have been so pivotal in building and sustaining community theaters in the Lansing area.”

R.I.P. Bob Gras

While writing obits were one of my first assignments in journalism back when I was still in junior high and high school, it isn't that common for an arts writer to have to write them. Nor was it common for me to know the people about whom I was writing.

In the past several weeks we've lost two giant in local theater: Bob Gras and Merrill Wyble. I knew, respected, had worked with, and liked both of them. Writing not a tribute, but a feature obituary for them was tougher than I thought it would be.

The obit on Bob Gras appeared last week here. Merrill's obit will appear later this week.

I'm going to once again take advantage of my blog to "publish" that which had to be cut because of space. The cuts are from various points in the story--not from all one place, so I'm just going to reprint the whole thing here.

On Aug. 19, the Lansing theater community lost one of its stalwart supporters and creative drivers.

Robert Gras, age 69, died from complications of acute leukemia after being on life support for more than a month. A retired Eaton Rapids Public Schools English and drama teacher, Gras is survived by wife Linda, children Robert Gras and Cassandra Gras, and two grandchildren.

Gras performed for community theaters throughout the Lansing area and led the drama program in Eaton Rapids schools. He was a driving force behind Riverwalk’s Black Box theater. In 2009, he performed in the final Black Box production at the Creole, “Substance of Fire,” for which he won a Best Lead Actor Thespie from the Lansing State Journal and a Best Lead Actor Pulsar from the City Pulse.

“Bob hadn’t been onstage all that much in the last few years because of his back condition,” said Bill Helder, the director of Substance of Fire. “Seeing what a good actor he is reminded people of some of the earlier things he had done. Bob really could do everything. Before he developed his back problems, he could design sets and build them. He was a super director and was wonderful to be on stage with.”

Former students Terry Jones and Wendy Fall both spoke highly of his teaching and how he inspired them.

Jones first met Gras 38 years ago in 7th grade when his teacher introduced them. Gras promptly cast him in a high school production.

“In the years after that, we formed quite a bond,” Jones said. “I was cast in every show that he did. I always got the lead if it was a non-musical. If it was a musical, I got the dominant non-singing role.”

Then during Jones’ senior year, Gras overruled the music teacher and cast Jones as Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” Jones lost contact with Gras until 1990, when he was cast as the title character in the first show that Gras directed at Riverwalk—Tartuffe.

“He went from teacher to mentor to friend,” Jones said. “He was a good guy. He knew his stuff.”

Fall said she still benefits from the motto Gras constantly repeated in his English classes: “Eschew obfuscation.”

“He wanted us to be precise,” Fall said, saying he was vigilant about removing all unnecessary words from their essays. She also said that he lit a passion for Shakespeare and great literature in his students. “He would get up and read it in his big booming voice with all his theatrical talent. It was incredible. When you’re a high school student, Shakespeare doesn’t make a lot of sense. But when he read it and brought the text to life for us, it was never the same. That was his particular talent.”

Playwright Eileen O’Leary described how Gras championed her new work, fighting to get its world premiere launched at Lansing Civic Players in 1999.
She had sent Gras a copy of her play “The Siege of Ennis.” He read it and wanted to direct it. At first, the LCP board resisted, saying that the financial risk of a new work by a new playwright was too great.

“Bob Gras told them that if they didn’t let him direct ‘The Siege of Ennis,’ he wasn’t going to direct any other play,” O’Leary said. “So they relented and put it on. I had never had anyone do anything like that for me before. He championed it and he put his neck out for it.”

O’Leary said that the production was gorgeous. She also said that she saw the financials after the show—and it made money.

“He was a real class act who would stand up for what he believed in. I thought he was fantastic,” O’Leary said. “He didn’t know me, but he liked the play and he didn’t want anyone to not allow him to put it on for a reason that was just financial. It was a wonderful thing to do for someone no one knew. Most people don’t stick up for others like that. He was amazing.”

Gras’ support continued to be inspirational to O’Leary. “I kept writing plays and I probably would have stopped writing because I was sort of at an impasse.”

Helder, who first met Gras during “The Crucible” in 1993 at Grand Ledge’s Spotlight, said Gras’ death is a real loss for Riverwalk.

“He really had taken the black box under his wing. He was the director of the first show in the black box at the Creole and starred in the last show. There is a certain symmetry there,” Helder said. “He was scheduled to open our first season in the new location with a Chekov piece.”

The Chekov piece has now been canceled.

“To the general public, (Gras will be) most remembered for the number of really solid shows that he directed,” said Helder. “He will be remembered as the kind of director that could direct everything: from a crazy farce like Noises Off to something like Hedda Gabler and on to something like Under Milkwood, which is really poetry on stage. He will be remembered for the variety of things that he could and all of them well.”

Renegade Festival

Last night's time at the Renegade Festival in Old Town was a reminder of why I love theater so much.

Live theater matters not just because of what occurs on the stage, but because of the community that it builds and the creativity and hope that it inspires. The population of Lansing may keep it from qualifying as a "small town," but anyone strolling through Old Town last night would have enjoyed the small-town feel of community with the cultural opportunities of the city.

On a personal level, after a summer that has been challenging (to say the least), it was uplifting and inspiring to be once again immersed in the life I love and surrounded by the amazing people that make Lansing an incredible place to live. You really don't have to look long or hard to find people who are creative, compassionate, intelligent, interesting, and caring.

Thinking about a new policy

I'm thinking about adopting a new policy. I may, in the future, refuse to agree to off-the-record conversations when the organizations refuse to keep their word about the release of information. I will act with integrity with information that I am given, but I do expect others to have that same degree of integrity.

Thankfully, most theater people and organizations in this community have a very high level of integrity and have shown sensitivity and honor. It's easy for me to expect people to keep their word because the vast majority of people in town do.

Chicago Thinks We're Crazy

The theater community in Chicago thinks we're crazy for letting Kristine Thatcher go.

While I work on composing the blog entry I'm working on about Gov. Sanford and "A Clean House," I'd encourage you to go read this blog here and the comments that were left.

Pondering Riverwalk’s the Dead and Lost Loves

Despite my plans, I did not, in fact, get to any shows this weekend. However, with my son still out of town, I did get some very high quality time in with Richard—the kind of time that every marriage should make room for once in a while.

On Sunday, I took a long walk, enjoying the beautiful day and found myself thinking back to Riverwalk’s production of James Joyce's The Dead. One of the beautiful things about great shows is how they stick with you and continue to give you things to think about long after they are done. The Dead had such beautiful imagery, language, music, and themes, that they’ve continued to resonate with me and to occasionally stroke my thoughts with new ways of looking at them.

The Dead is a memory play, but the memories central to the play are less those of the narrator and more those of the narrator’s wife. So why not have the wife be the narrator? That was the fascinating layer that my mind played with on Sunday. Joyce invites us to ask what we would do if faced with the narrator’s circumstances—what do you do when your love of a lifetime is flush with remembered love and filled with tears over the loss of a past lover, one who disappeared decades before?

This is where Doak Bloss’ choices and Mary Job’s direction was truly brilliant. For it was as much the facial expressions, the movements on stage, and the lighting as it was the words of the script that showed the husband’s choices. He was pained that the love he thought was exclusively his belonged in part to a memory. Yet, the love for his wife was so great that he did not berate her. He did not turn her pain into a betrayal of him or of their marriage. He didn’t try to exorcise the ghosts of the past, but rather, went and held his spouse so that they would not be alone during the haunting.

Would their marriage be the same afterward? Joyce doesn’t tell us, but if I were to believe the interpretation presented, I would say no. Neither person nor marriage would ever be the same afterward, but they would likely be better.

Free Theater this Weekend

June has been the month for free theater--and one of the best months in Michigan to do the outdoor theater thing.

Richard, Dominic, and I caught "Leading Ladies" last week at MSU's Summer Circle. It was quite the riot. I enjoyed it when I first saw it at Starlight last year and it was fun to see it again with the different interpretations.

Summer Circle closes its season this weekend with "Kid Purple" and the late-night shows of "Clevenger's Trial" from Catch-22. I'm especially curious to see what they're going to do with the latter.

Mid-Michigan Family Theatre is performing two one-acts at their home in Frandor this weekend. They're doing Pied Piper and Dick Whittington and His Cat. I'm planning to take some kids to that one this weekend, though my own is still off at his grandparents.

Finally, I very much want to see Our Town at Lansing Community College. It's got a stellar cast and it's one of those classic shows that I've only ever seen once.

If you're in town, treat yourself to an outdoor show--there is something about the non-contained environment that makes for a truly special experience.

Learning Courage from my Father

At the risk of turning my theater blog into a journalism blog, I’m going to make yet another entry that is more about journalism than theater, though it doesn’t abandon the latter theme. Also, with Father’s Day right around the corner, it is, perhaps, timely.

One of the things that has been very comfortable about being a performing arts columnist is that I’m mostly writing stories that my sources want to have told. People get angry at reviews, they rarely get angry at previews (except when I get something important like a time or a date wrong).

Like most people, I prefer to have people pleased with me rather than angry with me. However, I also learned a long time ago that such desires cannot be a driving force in good, moral decision making. How did I learn this? Many ways, I suppose, but what sticks out to me is one of my family’s stories about a choice my father made.

My Father’s Example of Moral Courage

My dad was a career journalist, one who was inspired (like many in the field) to enter the newspaper business because he wanted to make his community a better place. He graduated from college and immediately took a job as a community editor for a suburban Detroit newspaper.

This was during the Vietnam War, though because he had just graduated from college and was looking to pursue a master’s degree, he had received a draft deferral and his draft number was such that it wasn’t likely to come up yet for several years.

One of the early stories he covered were grand jury proceedings of a city politician who had hired a hit man to kill his opponent. The politician was furious at the coverage and brought a libel lawsuit against my father, seeking damages of $1 million. Eventually, the politician’s lawyer pointed out to his client that when it comes to libel, truth is an absolute defense and he was going to lose his suit as my father’s coverage had been accurate and truthful.

So the politician took another tack. He was chair of the draft committee in the community and changed my father’s number so that it would come up immediately. My parents were married on a Saturday and on that Monday, he received his draft notice. The politician took great glee and boasted about what he had done to his buddies in a local bar.

NEA Fellowship Instructor: “Be Brave. Be Specific.”

One of the things I’ve observed in the recent coverage of BoarsHead and the board’s decision to oust Kristine Thatcher, is that most of the public commentary has come from people out of town. Locally, people have opinions, but few are making any sort of public statement (with some notable exceptions).

I understand why this is the case. People locally have much more to risk, especially if they wish to work in a field that has very little opportunity in the best of times. I’ve had my own moments of paranoia—for while I myself have very little at risk in covering this story, I recognize that I could be jeopardizing opportunities for both my husband and my son. That thought pains me a great deal as I am a wife and mother before I am a journalist.

However, I have my father’s example to put that in perspective. My dad, by choosing to do the right thing, put his very life in jeopardy. Because he accurately and faithfully covered a story that needed to be covered, my brother and I might never have been born. I am faced with no such choice. Compared with the choices that my father made, mine are easy.

Listening Skills are Critical to Both Reporting and Reviewing

Michigan State University's J-School does a great job of training journalists—or at least, it did when I went there, I'm not sure what the program is like now. There was an emphasis on always getting facts correct (any factual error—even a typo in a proper noun—meant your grade on that assignment was an immediate 1.0), and a demand that you take a variety of classes so that you could be knowledgeable on a variety of topics. You had to take courses in English, history, economics, plus an emphasis that was different from all of those (mine was Russian). You were limited in how many journalism classes you were allowed to take because they wanted to make sure you had a broad knowledge base. We were also strongly encouraged (it might have been required, I can't remember) to get practical experience through internships and other methods.

Learning to Listen

The one thing that got very little attention was reviewing. While I was assigned book reviews while interning at the Grand Rapids Press, I don't think I ever had a class assignment in which we had to write a review or where we even talked about how to review. Those were skills I had to pick up through practical experience through the course of my career. Looking back, I would now encourage J-schools to make review writing a mandatory course. Why? Because being a good reviewer develops the same skills that are essential to being a good reporter and they are the softer skills that can be hard to teach—the skills of listening, of setting aside one's own ego, and of being patient.

When I first started reviewing, I would try to critique my experience from the very beginning. When I was reviewing a book, I would start taking notes while reading. When I did restaurant reviews, I tried to memorize as much of the menu as I could and would be thinking about what I was going to write from the very first bite. When I started reviewing theater, I would spend half of the show thinking about how I wanted to write the review based on what I was seeing. It was while doing the latter that I finally figured out the flaw in this approach. This "pre-writing" kept me from hearing the story. Because I was mentally engaged in my story, I wasn't hearing the story that was being told to me. I had to learn to discipline my thoughts so that I could be open to what was being performed and to fully experience the work before I started critiquing or figuring out what I was going to write. It is only after a show is over that I let myself begin the process of critiquing—of evaluating how well the story was told and whether the choices made helped or hindered what appeared to be the director's vision. It is afterward that the mental work begins—not during the show. It's also why I almost never take notes during a show—it distracts me and gets me focused on what I think I want to write later and not on the story that is being told to me.

Reviewing Skills Transfer to Reporting

When a few weeks ago I found myself again reporting, I discovered that those skills have made me a better reporter than I used to be (of course, years as a ghost writer and a researcher haven't hurt either). Being objective as a reporter doesn't mean that you don't have an opinion, but it does mean that you have to truly listen to each source you're talking to without pre-judging or pre-writing. It wasn't that I didn't have an opinion on the story that I was covering, but I did have to set that opinion aside and lock it safely away into a compartment of my brain. It meant that every person I spoke to I needed to truly listen to and try my hardest to understand what they were saying, what they wanted to communicate, and to hear their angle of the story. It meant being open and not asking only the questions that would tell the story I thought I wanted to tell. It meant not determining what the story was until after I had the information. It meant giving each person every opportunity to present their information so that when I did write my story, it wasn't a story that reflected my opinions but one that represented the facts as I was able to find. It meant being willing to have my opinions changed by what I learned—to go the extra mile to hear each side of the story before doing the hard work of shifting through each fact and each source's information.

I have my own distinct taste in theater. There are some types of shows that I like more than others. However, if my readers are able to discern my personal taste from what I've written in a review, then I've failed in that review. My personal likes and dislikes are irrelevant. What is important is the informed, disciplined opinion on whether the show accomplished what it was meant to accomplish. Was it a good show? A good script? A good performance? Those are the things that are worthwhile to write about. My likes or dislikes are merely a matter of egoism—which is why, frankly, blogs exist. In a blog, I'll reveal my likes and dislikes. This is one of the main reasons that I insist that what I write in my blog is not a review—because it does not meet professional standards for a review. I hope it is interesting to read and that it might spark a conversation about theater, but it is not a critique in which I am attempting to objectively evaluate the art that I experienced.

The same is true with a story. You don't cover the theater community for any length of time without forming an opinion about what is going on. Years worth of observations, conversations, and events help to inform those opinions. However, when reporting on something that is taking place in the theatrical community, those opinions cannot be what drives the story. Just as in a review you present an opinion supported by specifics, a news story presents events with facts and specifics that explain those events. Yes, reporters still interpret, but the interpretations must be completely divorced from their egos.

Being Respectful

I've noticed that many novice reporters take great glee in being rude to sources—they consider that rudeness is necessary to ask tough questions. They thrive on controversy and scandal. I was never comfortable with rudeness nor do I expect that I ever will be. I used to think that would hinder me as a reporter. Twenty years later, what I've learned is that the opposite is true. I can write a better story when I go in to each interview with an open mind and a willingness for each source to be able to tell his or her story and to be receptive to what I am being told. I need to treat each person I interview with respect and fairness. After the interview is done, I can sit with it, listen to it again, think about it and compare it to other information I have. After the interview is done, I can begin the work of interpretation and reporting knowing that I haven't pre-judged the information that I've received. I can search for the way to make the story as balanced as possible so that multiple sides are presented and given appropriate weight. Does that mean being naïve? Absolutely not. But it does mean that the filter doesn't get applied before the information is received.

I've devolved into a lecture on journalism when really what I intended with this blog entry was to share what has come as a discovery to me—that the approach I learned to effective review writing is an approach that works equally well in the very different product of news writing.