MAKING THEATRE
Tom Key
2007 Keynote Address
Atlanta, GA

I decided that I wanted to say to you today whatever I would say, so that if I am hit by a bus on my way out of here, as my life is flashing before me, and assuming it ends with this address on Friday afternoon with the good people of Southeastern Theatre Conference, I would think, “Isn’t that good, that I had a chance to say what I really wanted to say.” Stranger things have happened. That is, I don’t want to get to the gateway of the next life and hear, “Now let me get this straight: you were talking to all of these students and practitioners of theatre and all you discussed was how theatre is good for economic development, raising SAT scores, or team-building? Haven’t you yet learned that there’s something more important than making people like you? You now will spend thirty years in Purgatory, for the thirty years that I have practiced theatre, with the multitudes of those who have spent their days whining why great theatre is impossible, that critics are sadists, that the business world doesn’t care, that every director who rejected you is an idiot at best and evil at worst, that the best theatre was created generations ago, and that the future of theatre is about as professionally and practically viable and robust as is the future for ethicists, poets and philosophers.”

I want to say that I am wearing today what I would wear if I were in rehearsal. Also, I have received a compliment on this shirt from a costume designer, and whenever I am complimented by a costume designer, it becomes sacred. This has to go with my choice of what I was going to wear today. It’s hard for men, too, you know, what I was going to wear.

I think it would be a good time to touch on my theory of acting. This is just “a” theory of acting: that it is revealing who you are, as is appropriate to the character and the script, and masking who you are as is inappropriate to the character and the script. So I am revealing that part of myself today, this afternoon, that acknowledges there is nowhere else I would rather be than with other makers of theatre, in the place where we make it – the rehearsal hall.  Usually when I am in a hotel ballroom, I am not wearing what I would wear in rehearsal, I’m wearing the same thing I would wear if I were asking for money, which is usually dark navy or black, which I find interesting. I’m not, of course, asking for money as one asks for money on the street, but because Theatrical Outfit pays me, I am often asking people for money for Theatrical Outfit so that Theatrical Outfit can pay me and about 150 other people in a year to make theatre. That’s what I’m talking about this afternoon, is making theatre.

Harry Chapin said… How many of you remember Harry Chapin? (applause)  Oh! How many of you don’t remember Harry Chapin? I’m not as old as I thought! Even if being old means I got to know Harry Chapin, I’m glad I am old.

I am so honored to be here that I prepared early, not to perform for you but to be me in front of my colleagues. I need to acknowledge at this occasion that whenever people ask me what kind of acting I teach, I am tempted to simply say, “Good!”

Once when I did Cotton Patch Gospel on a tour of the eastern United States, we performed at Appalachian State University, in a beautiful theatre there. It was packed, sold out, and a high school group wanted to meet us afterward, and this young lady in the front row of the group meeting us afterwards screamed when I came out. She said, “Oh my god, I thought Tom Key was some old guy that sent this play out. I didn’t realize you would really show up!”

So I wanted to affirm that, after the speech, I’m not going back to my “old-guy theatre office” to send out more theatre.

This is a story that I’m going to share with you today that has a beginning and middle, but I don’t know the end yet. I want to welcome you to Atlanta. I practiced this craft in New York City, Dallas, Texas, briefly in Los Angeles, and since 1986, here in Atlanta. It’s a very, very gracious and rigorous theatre community. We even have a company that only speaks plays in French. They don’t even have subtitles. And we’re glad you’re here. I want to particularly thank the Alliance Theatre for making it possible for me to come here to Atlanta in 1986 to practice my craft, and to the people of Theatrical Outfit that made it possible for me to stay, where I have been Executive Artistic Director, in my twelfth year. Two years ago we opened up a $5.5 million dollar theatre here in downtown Atlanta, but more about that later.

So I’m here to talk about making theatre: What it is, why it matters, why I make it here. I want to say first what this talk is not. It’s not a talk about how New York is better than L.A., or theatre is better than film, or London is better than New York, or the southeastern United States are better than anywhere in the world, or Atlanta is better than any other place in the southeastern United States. And it’s not about theatre being better than any other entity in the universe.

Art is about something, and the more we know about that “something,” I believe, the better artists we are. That’s the shortest justification that I can share with you to have a liberal arts approach to training in theatre. While we’re at it, I want to acknowledge that I’ll be talking about theatre as we talk about theatre in North America, Europe, Russia, South America, are accustomed to talking about it. This is not to ignore the differences and similarities between this kind of theatre and other more ancient theatre traditions, particularly of Noh and Kabuki, I simply want to acknowledge that my lack of experience and knowledge of those forms is present.

Here are some of the low points in thirty years of making theatre:

Being asked at an audition here in Atlanta for a film: “Are you local? Or professional?”
Getting a five page letter from a minister telling me, “How dare you drag the name of Jesus Christ through the mud for the profanity in that play which I just saw you in last night?”

Reading in a newspaper, a critic saying, “Although audiences seem to enjoy him in central roles, (this is about me), there does seem to be something evil behind his eyes.”

After my first foray into commercial theatre production, hearing, after the production had closed, that we were now $38,000 in debt, I personally to 27 different creditors, and this is while I’m making $315 a week at the Dallas Theatre Center.

Getting my second call from the legal department of the Billy Graham Association, because there were still posters out there nationally from someone who was a vice-president in that organization, endorsing Cotton Patch Gospel, and saying if it wasn’t removed from all collateral, that I would be sued, because the show, he had been told, was blasphemous. This was not long after seeing a Billy Graham Crusade start with the opening number and title song of Jesus Christ Superstar.

Getting a phone call from a stage manager of a touring production of Cotton Patch Gospel that was performing the next afternoon at an outdoor theatre in Montgomery, saying, “We understand that the Ku Klux Clan is implicated in the lynching of Jesus, and if the actor states this, we will have members of the brotherhood stationed in the forest around the theatre and they will shoot the actor.” And the stage manager wanted to know if I could delete the words. I’ll skip ahead to a high point: The next day it rained, so the performance was cancelled.

Looking into the eyes of someone from whom I had graduated University as I was serving him drinks at a country club, and he was starting to practice law, and having him ask me, as though I had been found naked in the downtown streets, “What are you doing here?”

Having a Christian student worker tell me, “Thank God you’ve given up the theatre, and now you can go into ministry,” and the self-imposed three year exile that I committed myself to. Of course, at the time I thought it was, that was it for theatre for me for the rest of my life. 

Receiving an e-mail from a patron, complaining about our next season, (although we hadn’t even gotten the brochure out, we were already 40% renewed), that I am still doing too many “in your face” plays. “It’s okay if they have black people, do we have to have a political message?”

Again, from a patron, in front of other patrons, complaining that the season is not working because the plays I choose have “too many words.” (audience laughter) Everybody in the room started to do what you just did, and then they caught themselves in horror when they realized that the person was dead serious.

Browsing at the drama book store in New York City, which I love to do, taking out the latest text on the history of the American theatre, and seeing that what is on the cover is a picture of a realistic set without a single actor in sight.

Here are some of the high points and firsts of thirty years of making theatre:

Building the first theatre home for Theatrical Outfit, a thirty year-old theatre company.

Creating the first professional theatre, the first theatre at all, in downtown Atlanta.

Creating the first theatre in the United States to meet the rigorous standards set by the US Green Building Council, and earning LEED certification, standing for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design.

My first audition at Shades Valley High School in Birmingham, Alabama. I don’t know if I was good, but I was very loud. (He illustrates):
          (shyly and quietly) I would like to sing … for my audition…  “Gary Indiana.”
          (singing very loudly) GARY INDIANA! GARY INDIANA! GARY INDIANA!
It was a 2,000 seat auditorium; we never used microphones, even in the musicals, and I learned that it was not projection, but intention that allowed the person on the last row to hear me. My teacher, Dorothy Walker, God bless her soul, who had a master’s from Northwestern University, called me that night, and in 1964 to get a call from a teacher was not good. However, this was life-changing because she told me that she thought I could be a professional actor and she would cast me in every play. She realized this would change my entire high school experience and I might not even be interested, but she wanted me to know that she would invest all of her training in me if I wanted to take her up on it. God bless Dorothy Walker.

My first opening night at fourteen years old, with fourteen lines in The Remarkable Mr. Pennypacker, with a temperature of 103 degrees. My mother called the director and said, “Tommy can’t come tonight, because he’s sick,” to which he replied, “That’s okay, we’ll have buckets offstage and there won’t be any problem because the character’s not sick.” And I wasn’t! Fifteen years later, we had tried three times to get Harry Chapin to see if he would come see the one-man show I had done about fifty performances of around the country, Cotton Patch Gospel, to see if maybe he would write a few songs to begin and end each act. On the final day, right before a three month European tour, in December of 1980, we finally worked out a date. The day before, I was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis, and when I woke up that morning, I literally couldn’t say two sentences without coughing, coughing, hacking, and I remembered what I had learned at Actor’s Theatre of Birmingham, that the character’s not sick. So at thirty years old, with a lot of lines, I decided I was going to go for it, and that afternoon performing for Harry Chapin in a room full of about twenty people in the Minskoff Building in New York City, I coughed twice. Afterward, he said, “I was born to write the music for this show,” and he had an idea for the opening song immediately. Eight months later he was killed on the Long Island Expressway, a month after we opened in Boston as our pre-New York tryout. Valuable lesson to learn: that the character’s not sick.

My first day in New York City. I went to the tourist information booth and asked, “Where do actors audition?” And I had a job in two weeks. I was driven to it in the back of a pizza delivery truck, but I had a job.

My first invitation to consult the thespians of Washington state, and have the Fortune 500 companies that were represented there tell me that they don’t look for business majors as much as they do theatre majors, because they are so much more adept at leadership.

To be hired by a trial lawyer to consult him on his closing statement.

To be hired by eight ministers to bridge the gap between secular and sacred, for my teaching them homily skills.

My first day with an acting theory, which I just shared with you, revealing who you are as is appropriate to the character in the script, because from then on I’ve had a compass to know why I’m on when I’m on, and why I’m off when I’m off.

My first time to go back into an audition after being rejected. They let me back in because I said before they could shove me back out again, “You didn’t even ask me if I could do a time step.” So they let me stay, and I got a job offer, but I had to turn them down because I had gotten into Equity. And the pianist motioned me over and said, “You really ought to be on Broadway,” and I said, “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea, too.” He said, “No, really, go talk to Joanna Merlin at Harold Prince’s office and say Artie sent you. So before I could get scared about it, I went, and this accessible young woman was walking through the office when I walked in and she asked, “May I help you?” And I said, “I’m Tom Key; I was just at an audition…” She said, “I bet Artie sent you. You must have a very good singing voice. Come on in. I’m Harold Prince’s casting director.” And we’ve maintained a great relationship. She actually offered me a job later. I was acting here in Atlanta, and that was because I went back into an audition after they had typed me out of a group of five because they didn’t think I was right for anything that summer.

My first day getting an Equity card. I can still remember the restaurant. It was a time where at that pier at Folsom Street in New York City, there was no other restaurant that was re-created somewhere else in a chain. And we had seafood to celebrate that – that was 1974.

My first time understanding that learning lines is the easiest thing an actor does.

The first time I went up. It was a one-man show, and I had the script on stage, and remembering lines I find is kind of like eating. Usually when they start to go, if I just wait, it’ll be okay. But I could tell it was not, and there was nothing coming. So I just walked over, looked at the script, got my place, went back, and what I learned was that everyone said to me, “We all knew you had forgotten your lines, but we could also tell that you were not bothered, so we were not bothered.” I found the net. It was okay. That’s not what the audience is coming to the theatre for.

My first time walking across the bridge at the National Theatre, and seeing Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare on the same marquee, and wondering that neither of these playwrights knew that they would end up on a marquee together, one of them 400 years later, in another civilization, in another time.

My first realization that after seeing Skin of our Teeth, I would never be the same, and that if this art form could change one life, then it has changed multitudes, and it is, therefore, a practice which is sacred and holy.

My first time to fly onstage. The response to which, from an audience member when I landed next to her, “Sweet Jesus!”

The first time I really scared a young audience member playing Scrooge, which I think every actor who plays Scrooge has a responsibility to do. I did this for three years at the Alliance Theatre and I knew I had really nailed it on that wonderful line, I said it in an incredible vicious way that particular night, “Everybody who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips ought to be boiled in his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.” And the response from a young girl in the audience was, “Get me out of here!” She won’t have to be visited by the ghosts later in life, will she?

The first time I asked for real money as an actor, and got it.

The first time I asked for real money for a theatre company of actors, directors, designers, crew and staff, and got it.

The first time I was cast in a part which was not the part for which I auditioned, and realized how I never could have played that role, and how much more fun it was to do something only I could put my mark on, because I’m revealing who I am as an actor, and there’s only one of me.

The first time I quit a show. The first time I said “no” to a request to audition. In both cases, because I couldn’t believe it. And my career continued, supported by the director who I had turned down, saying, that “Even though he will turn you down, if he commits to it, you’ll get a level of commitment that you won’t get from many actors.” And I thought I was so anxious and stressed that this was going to be the end of my career.

The first time I realized after reading Ars Poetica by Aristotle, that there is something more important than plot. I’m reminded of this phenomena in a bad review of the work of Flannery O’Connor in The New Yorker, but at the end of the review, the reviewer admitted this: “I will say (and I’m paraphrasing here) that Flannery O’Connor captures something that no other novelist seems to be able to capture. Perhaps it’s everything.” And the first time I began to realize what that was, was when I read Ars Poetica and realized that there is an element to this craft of theatre that is more important than plot.

Okay. Shifting gears, I want to make a comment on what I personally believe is our greatest challenge, not as thespians, but as human beings. At present, I think our greatest challenge is to learn to live with one another and the planet, or perish. That is, we are going to have to evolve from tribes to a world community. (audience applause) That’s very encouraging. We are going to have to make a transition from the endless entropic tragic cycle of revenge and retribution to the creative healing process of understanding, respect and reconciliation. It’s interesting to me that the word “agape” is not used by Plato, Aristotle or Sophocles. It’s a Greek word that means “love,” and it means “love” in the context that Dr. Martin Luther King, Ghandi, what Christ meant when he said, “There’s no gain in loving those who love you, it’s when you love your enemies.” That’s “agape.” It’s what Abraham Lincoln meant when he said, “Do we not destroy our enemy when we convert them into our friends?”

It’s interesting to me that there came a time when this word showed up in human language. I would submit, if it is going to be accomplished that we will transition in the centuries to come to a global community, it’s going to be accomplished through the theatre. I would go further to say that America would not be America if it were not for the theatre, because I don’t believe the same ancient culture that gave us the idea by which we govern ourselves in this experiment called America, that’s relatively young, would have been able to have given us that idea unless they had also been the same ancient culture that gave us the theatre as we know it. Why? Because this is the art form of language. It is the only time in our human experience, that we gather in large numbers, and language is center stage, with no other purpose than to convince the audience that what they witness on stage is true. It might be a musical, it might be a farce, tragedy, epic, satire, but it’s true.

By the way, I believe art is always entertaining. It will at the very least interest us, it will at the most make us wonder, think, thrill, cry. I believe that art is always entertaining. I don’t believe entertainment is necessarily art. I think the difference is in residual effect. I think that art always leaves us, either in a small way or profoundly, changed, whereas entertainment that is not art feels like it experientially, but like mood-altering drugs, the effect is gone once the event is over, and it needs more of it to replicate it the next time around.

This is part of the reason why I think we’re addicted to Aristotle’s priorities of what makes up the theatre, so that the least important element he believed is now become the most important, of spectacle.

Now you say, “Well, we gather in large numbers in our community and we might be watching image in motion pictures, we’re watching pictures that move, we might be watching dance, sports, listening to music, and these are all important events in the community, but they are not as risky or profound in their potential to change as the theatre, because language is center stage.” It’s not as risky to watch a dance concert with someone, or listen to music or watch sport, or even to watch a movie in the anonymity of a multiplex. It’s very risky to hold forth while actors are putting language center stage. If it doesn’t work, it’s a best boring, and it’s at the worst, very offensive and alienating.

Now you might say, “Well, we do gather in large numbers and language is center stage, not just at the theater,” but these are, from my observations, religious or political, or special interest in purpose. That is, we come away from these gatherings better Christians, Jews, Muslims, Republicans, Democrats, advocates for our special interest, because we’ve all agreed on certain premises beforehand, even though we’ve heard a lot of talking . But we come to the theatre from all of these different kinds of backgrounds, and yet language is center stage with no other purpose than to convince the audience of the truthfulness of what’s on stage. And therefore, we leave better human beings, better citizens. Why is that? Why does language have that kind of transformative power? On one level, just observing, it is by language saying, “I don’t trust you anymore, I love you, etc.” that families are formed, communities are built, nations are achieved, or split. It is the natural result of a certain narrative, a certain story line developed in language and conversation that resulted in planes being guided in to the World Trade Center, or bombs being dropped in shock and awe on Baghdad. Both of those events were gotten to out of the process of language. The French Revolution, the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, the right of women to vote, the Civil Rights Act, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, all of these are formed and shaped in language.

I want to thank Walker Percy for this next observation. It’s what happened in my home state of Alabama, when a young woman realized that “water” being spelled into one hand was the same thing as the cold wet stuff in the other. The significance of that event was not only did she begin to use language, but she began to function as a human being, merely because she could symbolize. Before that, she had to signal for her needs, like an animal. It was that transformative, that she became a member of the human race on a functional level, merely because she could symbolize. If that’s the significance of what happens when one person learns to symbolize, what of the impact in a community when the audiences in large numbers are realizing that the “w-a-t-e-r, the language with a small “w” being spoken by the actor, is recognized in the audience as the cold wet stuff, much in the same way that what I said evoked applause, but this is rhetoric, not theatre. That’s part of why this is so scary for me.

It’s not for nothing that a ghetto on the upper side of Manhattan is transformed into one of the great neighborhoods, not by the presence of an educational building or religious building, a government building, but a performing arts center where language was center stage.

I’m going to give a personal family instance. There was a summer about ten years ago where we went through a real crisis as a family, and there were a lot of slammed doors and tears and shouting, which we were not accustomed to. It’s kind of like we changed national temperaments, from British to Italian. And we were using our hands a lot more, but we always kept on coming back to the dinner table because we loved one another, and language was the only tool we had. It always got to a peak at the dinner table, but that’s where it was resolved, too. So I like to think of the theatre as the supper table of the community, because language is center stage. It transforms a place where four and a half million people live, to a community.

Watching Raisin in the Sun, I had just this one little experience which has happened billions of times in the history of theatre. There is a line, and I’m sitting next to an African-American man who I don’t know, he doesn’t know me, and there’s a line in that play which is, “You can’t say that, because you know what they’ll think. White people will think that we’re cutting each other up all the time.” And the audience all laughed, including the African-American gentleman sitting next to me. Now, if he had asked me directly, “Do you think we’re cutting people up all the time?” I would have lied and said, “Oh, no, I know you don’t do that.” But our laughter betrayed that we both recognized the truth of that play, and it was okay, because we were celebrating not what we have in difference, but what we have in common as human beings.

Have you ever considered how a group of well-intentioned, intelligent people can make a really bad, evil decision? I think that’s why “committee” is a pejorative term. I read a very interesting article about research on this effect. It was spurned (sic) by the frustration of trying to find what to build at Ground Zero, and what the social scientists have proved that in a small group, what will happen is not that the decision is greater than the sum total of the parts of the people in the group, but a compromise of everybody making a decision based on the lowest common denominator of shared knowledge. The study showed, if you do see a small group that makes a great decision, I’ll show you an individual that had the courage to persuade the group to his or her level of expertise and excellence. There’s a play that describes this process; Twelve Angry Men. If it were not for that one juror, a life would have been needlessly lost. Don’t we in the community need to hear, not the sound-bytes of the lowest common denominator of shared knowledge, but the brilliant wisdom of the individual voice of the playwright? As Wilder’s Stage Manager said, “No one realizes life for what it is every moment. The saints and the poets, they do some.” So don’t we need to hear their voice in language in our group in the community to make wise decisions?

Just like I learned a great life-lesson about “the character’s not sick,” I learned a great life lesson that I can’t judge a character as good or bad, and play him at the same time. And this has prevented in my life, a lot of needless judging.

When I was at the University of Tennessee, as an undergraduate, taking an American Theatre course, I really embarrassed myself and kept on asking questions, trying to manipulate the meaning of the plays into something that had meaning to me in my own personal perspective. And the teacher again was very patient with me, and took me aside, and with no shame in his voice, said, “You obviously have some strong religious convictions,” to which I proudly said, “Yes.” And this is very embarrassing to share this, but he said, “So you would like for people to hear how it is that you believe and what you think is important in life,” and I said, “Well, yes, I would.” And he said, “Well, why don’t you give others that opportunity? Why don’t you listen to others? Because if you judge a play as right or wrong, before you even see it, before you even give the playwright a chance to convince you of the truth of the situation, aren’t you asking … isn’t that….” He was so kind in the way that he did this, but I was destroyed. I got the message. And so I stopped asking all these questions and I realized… He said, “If there is something that is going to challenge your point of view, then this will just be an opportunity to strengthen it, but it might be a chance to enhance it.” (unintelligible) so that together we can symbolize, together we can understand what it is to be human.

If at all levels of human affairs it is in language that either violence begins or compassion is born, then isn’t there a better endeavor than amassing the greatest military force? Isn’t there a more persuasive hope than promoting in the spirit of certainty, a certain ideology? Isn’t it already understood that money itself can not enrich the impoverishment of the soul? Isn’t one of our greatest gifts, our most powerful hopes, our most effective actions, participating in the art form of language? Perhaps at the beginning of the third millennium the challenge of violence to one another and to our earth has never been greater. But perhaps we and our children will witness that on the stage where it is the theatre herself cast as protagonist to awaken us, to unite us and to recreate us, the curtain has only just begun to rise.

Wanna leave the world a better place? Make Theatre.

A Question and Answer Session followed this Keynote Address.

– END –

Transcribed by: Denise Halbach