how I spent my Sunday...

Though the UK is in almost every way a much more secular country than the US, Londoners seem (much more than New Yorkers) to observe Sunday as a "day of rest."

Lots of shops are closed and we've learned that you're better off not trying to get anything done, since everyone is probably at home perusing one of the numerous Sunday papers (or, indeed, perusing more than one) or watching the EastEnders "omnibus" (during which all of the week's episodes are repeated in one two-hour marathon).
Perhaps the nicest Sunday tradition, however, is just to hang out in your local pub, a tradition that, for two weekends running, Sergio and I have whole-heartedly embraced. We're lucky in that our new neighborhood offers two very comfortable 21st century pubs to choose from, replete with hip locals, free Internet access, and (most surprisingly of all)... decent food! Last weekend, we went all-English and had a full "Sunday roast" at the White Hart, complete with roast beef, horseradish and Yorkshire pudding. And the vegetables were actually crisp!

This Sunday consisted of four hours of highly productive playwriting at one pub, followed by a relaxed evening of emailing (and blogging) -- with a pint of Guiness in hand -- at the other.
So, here's to many more Sundays at the pub! Cheers!

the same but different

You might not know think you've ever heard of the playwright Wallace Shawn (one of my favorite writers), but you've definitely seen him in one of his innumerable cameo roles in movies and TV:

In an essay entitled "Myself and How I Got into the Theatre," he addresses the differences in theater-going culture on either side of the Atlantic:

And who were the theatre-goers? In my country they were a small group, altogether, because theatre in the United States has simply never caught on in the way it has in England or on the European continent, for example. Those enormous respectable crowds had never gathered in the United States, the way they had in so many European cities, to watch the plays of Ibsen or Racine. The habit simply had never been formed. For most people in the United States, the issue of theatre just didn't arise. And for those who, somehow, had gone so far as to see a play or two--well, the experience had left most of them rather nonplussed. Having been exposed extensively to the rival storytelling mediums of television and film, most of my fellow-countrymen found it frankly rather peculiar to pay extra money to attend an event in which the faces of the actors could barely be seen, and where you had to strain to hear what on earth they were saying (despite the fact that they never stopped shouting, even when standing right next to each other).

As a newly minted graduate student in a playwriting program, I've had occasion to think quite a bit recently about those differences in theatrical culture. What are they all about? What's the difference between theater in the US and the UK?

Well, first of all, I would argue that the kinds of things you can see in the UK, you can also see in the US and vice versa. All of the problems afflicting Broadway these days (jukebox musicals, half-baked movie adaptations) can also be found in the West End. Sometimes they are literally the same productions (i.e. Wicked, Jersey Boys) or other times they're English versions of the same formulas that American producers have been using (there are stage adaptations of Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Shawshank Redemption as well as the forgettable English film comedy Calendar Girls on now in London).

Similarly, if you know where to look, you can pretty much find in New York the same kind of gems that you can in England: great Sheakespeare, interesting new plays, devised work created by experimental collectives, etc.

The difference, I would argue, is related to the situation that Shawn describes above. It has to do with the audiences. In New York (and the US in general) we have a much more stratified theatrical environment. You have your Broadway audiences, your non-profit subscriber bases, the cultural elite who go to the Lincoln Center Festival, the hipsters who go to see things downtown and in Brooklyn warehouses. But these strata of theater don't seem to be part of the same community and few members of the general public (i.e. people who are not theater-makers themselves) would be found in all of these places.

What's amazing to experience in London is that there is indeed a "general public" for theater. If you look at the programming at the National, an institution whose mission is to represent the nation, you see classics, you see plays by the heavy-hitters (Stoppard, Hare), you see inventive shows aimed at young audiences, you see multi-media and devised work. And lots of these same productions go on to tour the nation (which is, admittedly, easier to do in a comparatively small nation).

Theater education and "community-based" theater is also much more widespread here, which may also explain how a broader audience is developed and maintained. Many major UK playwrights (people like David Edgar and Mark Ravenhill) work with various different community and youth groups to create plays that somehow interact with the community. There is a thriving culture of small theaters outside of London that develop new work and draw in local audiences.

What I'm getting at is a structural difference: there's a more diverse eco-system here in the UK. If the West End were to shut down due to a stagehands' strike the way Broadway did a couple of years ago, no media source would send its chief theatre critics (as the New York Times did during the Broadway shut-down) to review museums and concerts, as if to say that there was no theater worth paying attention to than the commerical mega-shows. Everyone in England knows that there's much more to their theatrical culture than the West End.

My Times gripe is revealing: with more newspapers over here writing about theater, and none of them dominating the market, you have a broader marketplace of critical ideas, more room for different kind of work to be championed and recognized.

And this whole circumstance results in another quite significant difference, one that was mentioned to me last night by an actor who had worked in both countries: "In London," he said, "an actor assumes he's getting paid for his work, unless he hears otherwise. In New York, he assumes that he's not."

There are different funding structures here, which help support less obviously commercial work. The Arts Council has certain requirements for subsidized theater, which is part of the reason why so many institutions and artists do community-based work. (And every citizen, including unemployed actors, gets nationalized health care.)

To get back to Shawn's remark, with which I opened this post, theater in the UK is just a bigger deal than it is in the US.

I don't mean to paint an overly rosy picture here. As my course continues and I have more contact with theater administrators and literary managers, I will learn more from the inside about how things operate here. Having worked in community-based theater in New York, I'm eager to see how the English do it.

At the moment, though, with so much theater to see and to think about, it feels a bit like a bounty of riches.

proper documentation

A friend we're staying with suggested yesterday that the English are so good at depictions of dysptopian futures in books and movies like "1984," "Brave New World" and "Brazil" because of their daily experience with British bureaucracy.

After our experience trying to open a bank account, I would tend to agree. For the past two weeks, I've visited 4 different branches of Barclay's Bank and been told many different things about what type of account we're eligible for and exactly what documentation was needed. Some folks said we could get a cheque book, others that we couldn't. Some said we needed to wait until after we'd officially enrolled in school, others that we'd need a utility bill sent to our London address. On Thursday, Sergio was told he had the right information but that it needed to be on letterhead and I was told that I had all the correct documentation but that it needed to be printed on one piece of paper!!

Yesterday, a bank representative finally accepted our applications... requiring only two documents that had been in my possession since my arrival in the UK.

One doesn't want to generalize, but I think it's telling that the customer service representative who finally helped us and laid out the what we needed in a clear manner was a transplanted American. Sure, she had a plastered-on smile and a slightly overbearing manner, but she was informed, competent, and took responsibility for telling us what we needed to know.

Sigh.

Now we just have to wait for the applications to be approved. Keep your fingers crossed!!

notes from underground

In comparison to the New York subway, London's Underground has many obvious advantages:

• Regular service
• Clear signage and pre-recorded announcements
• Good integration with overground rail
  
• A generally polite ridership

All of these qualities ought to combine to offer a pleasant and effective commuting experience, so why is it that I find riding the Tube to be utterly exhausting??

For starters, I think it has to do with the layout of the system itself. Have a look at the NYC subway map:

Because of the shape of the island of Manhattan the lines are predominantly vertical, thus the effectiveness of the express train (a concept unknown in London), which allows you to travel long distances quickly. Coming in to Manhattan from the outer boroughs you might ride for a long time, but you're likely to be on the same train for a while, which allows for enjoyable experiences like long, uninterrupted reading.

So far, traveling a comparable distance in the London Underground has generally meant switching lines two or more times. If you look at the map of the Tube you'll see that the amorphous, un-planned layout of London requires a much more intricate system of interlocking lines:

Furthermore, switching from one line to another doesn't simply mean stepping off the platform and waiting for another train to come along -- it has generally meant exiting the train and entering a labyrinthine series of tunnels, passageways, stairs and escalators before one gets to the other line, then riding for three stops and doing it all over again. Some of the lines feel so far underground that I wouldn't be surprised to end up in Fraggle Rock!
The Tube website says that there is one continuous length of tunnels that goes on for 17.25 miles!!! On several of my journeys, I've felt that I've spent more time walking through these underground passages than I have on the train itself.

Other unpleasant features:

• The trains are not air conditioned
  
• The ceilings of cars on the Tube slope in, increasing one's sense of claustrophobia
• They are upholstered with tacky fabric that looks like something off of the Fung Wah bus
  
• The cars seem to be narrower, meaning that two people cannot stand abreast in the aisle between the seated passengers
• There is virtually no noise or conversation EVER on the train or platform

For some, that last quality might be seen as an advantage, since New York trains can often be so noisy that one finds it impossible to concentrate on anything. In my experience, however, the crush of people and sounds -- the chaotic rhythm of the New York subway system -- tends to have a propulsive effect. It hurtles you forward, sending you out into the streets with with a driving momentum that helps you get where you need to go.

By contrast, the experience of riding the Tube seems to consist mostly of people walking through corridors or riding on escalators in orderly lines. Despite the overall cleanliness of these passageways (or perhaps because of it??), there's something creepily Orwellian about the experience. On me it produces a draining effect, a sapping of energy.
My commute from Brooklyn used to be a good 45-60 minutes into the city, but I always looked forward to it. The Tube website estimates that my new commute from the apartment to my school will take only 28 minutes - but with two transfers. What kind of effect this journey will have on me when completed two times a day remains to be seen....

money matters

My mind has been cluttered recently with exchange rates and transaction fees, as I'm stuck in a kind of financial limbo. I can't open a UK bank account until I'm officially enrolled in school (next week) or am officially in residence in my permanent address (next month). In the meantime, I'm faced with the odd situation of possessing money in one denomination and being obliged to spend it in another.

In addition to their divergent values on the world exchange, however, there's another difference between the dollar and the pound: who's on them.

I was struck the other day by the fact that the historical figures depicted on the 10 and 20-pound notes are two influential theorists: Charles Darwin and Adam Smith, respectively. Both native sons of Britain (though, apparently, Smith is the first Scot to be depicted on a banknote), but also rather polemical figures. I'm pretty sure that attempts to put comparable persons onto American notes would be met with vociferous protests from the extreme right and left. Over here, they hardly seem to raise much of a fuss.

[It's worth noting in passing that there's a new movie about Darwin opening in the UK on Sept. 25, a seemingly by-the-numbers biopic starring Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connelly -- residents of Brooklyn, I might add. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the film hasn't found an American distributor.]

Much of what a society values can be seen in whom it decides to put on its money. It's striking that all American notes depict political figures, mostly Presidents. Hamilton was the first Secretary of the Treasury, which seems fitting (and which finds its parallel in Britain's placement of Sir John Houblon, the first Governor of the Bank of England, on their 50-pound note). Benjamin Franklin, of course, never held elected office but is closely associated with the founding of the nation.

Looking at our currency, one might get the impression that only men in government have contributed to American history. Sure, Lincoln deserves to be there but what about Frederick Douglass, Harriett Beecher Stowe or Harriett Tubman? The British 5-pound note currently features a woman previously unknown to me named Elizabeth Fry, whom Wikipedia describes as a Quaker prison reformer. To my knowledge, the only social activist ever depicted on an American monetary unit was Susan B. Anthony (on a coin no one likes to use, the silver dollar!) and that was discontinued after two years.

In America, we tend to restrict the commemoration of non-governmental cultural figures to pictures on postage stamps, though in our Internet age almost none of us deal with stamps with any regularity.

What thinkers and activists ought to go onto US currency? Who are our Smiths, Darwins, and Frys?

Martin Luther King?

Milton Friedman?

Earl Warren?

Harvey Milk?

Jane Addams?

Who you pick says a lot about what you consider your country to be.

the customer is always right

Watching Obama's health care address on the Internet last night (admittedly a few days late), I was struck, though not surprised, that the following remark drew some of the largest applause from both sides of the aisle:

My guiding principle is, and always has been, that consumers do better when there is choice and competition. That's how the market works.

Nothing proves your American bona fides like extolling the virtues of the free market, even if you're a liberal Democrat trying to reform our health care system. I rolled my eyes a bit while listening to that, feeling slightly left out of the general enthusiasm for market-based competition.

And then I did the laundry.

Having been away from Britain for a number of years, I'd forgotten certain things, such as the fact that nearly all the clothes dryers I've encountered here don't fully dry the clothes. They come out almost dry, but still distinctly damp. I'm not talking about one particular clothes dryer but rather Every. Single. One.

This situation seems to be widely accepted by English people, nearly all of whom seem to own a steel-frame drying rack upon which they hang these slightly damp clothes after they come out of the dryer, so that they can fully dry.

As an American, my natural response is to ask, "What's the point of a machine that only does part of the job that it's supposedly designed to do??" Why use an electric dryer at all, if you're just going to hang the clothes out (in the middle of the living room) to let nature finish the job? The charitable explanation is an environmentally conscientious one: weak dryers use less energy. So, in the interest of saving the earth, we invent crappy machines?

In New York, I and the people I know are given to casual remarks about how great everything is in Europe, with their single-payer health care and their fuel efficient cars, trying to distance ourselves from a certain strain of particularly "Ugly Americanism." Over here, though, I find myself again and again wanting to sound that very note, complaining about bad customer service, about shops that aren't open all night, about bad engineering.

Why does the toilet always need to flushed twice?

And, while we're at it, why are the toilet and the shower in SEPARATE ROOMS??

Most visitors to the UK will confirm that the problems I've identified are prevalent across the nation, in a majority of habitations and a majority of cities and towns. Does it have something to do with everything getting destroyed in the Blitz? War time rationing? Whatever the cause, it seems that your average Briton does not have this ingrained mania for customer satisfaction. He or she is more than likely to just put up with a less than ideal situation and make do.

Growing up in a land of air conditioning and free refills, even the most liberal among us have developed an attitude that we should be able to get what we want when we want it. Our way right away.

Obama's analysis of the American character is feeling pretty spot-on.