What is Good is Given Back: The Gift-Giving Circle and What it Means for the Arts

By Chas LiBretto


“The Gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him—it cannot fail…”
- Walt Whitman

“The gift must always move.” If you’ve read Lewis Hyde’s incredible book "The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World," you’ll be aware of this central, and oft-forgotten tenet of gift-giving and gift-receiving: that a gift in question cannot stand still. “As it is passed along,” he says “the gift may be given back to the original donor, but this is not essential. In fact, it is better if the gift is not returned but is given instead to some new, third party.”

This, of course, has major implications in the not-for-profit world. Legally, not-for-profits, even theater companies, are charities, and so what they create is in essence a gift to their communities. By its very nature, a non-profit takes the gifts it receives, monetary and otherwise, and then immediately puts those gifts to use and enacts its mission.

Hyde calls this the “labor of gratitude” and in a sense, it means “our gifts are not fully ours until they have been given away.” I bring this all up because, with your help, Psittacus Productions is poised to enact its mission and engage its community. Isolated academics like Harold Bloom believe the Western Canon ought to be locked away, and tell us that that the plays they’ve deemed canon-worthy should not be performed, and should be kept in dusty libraries for the perusal of scholars and scholars alone. Pioneers like the Public Theater’s Joseph Papp made it their mission to bring the Classics to the people in their purest form, but we at Psittacus are uncomfortable even with the idea of what “pure” means.

This is a down and dirty age, and we believe that the stories that have stuck with us all these many centuries are strong enough to survive experimentation. We believe it is our job to undo the “canonization” and make these stories as accessible to as large an audience as we can gather, be it by reinventing Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” as a comic book come to life, turning “Hamlet” into a police procedural, or creating a modern SF epic out of Goethe’s “Faust.” These are important stories that still say things about who We are, even in the 21st century.

When discussing cultural snobbery and elitism, I often return to Michael Moorcock, an English writer whose body of work has bounced from “genre” to “mainstream” throughout his entire career. In an interview, he states that he “writes for a reader like [himself]—who has read widely and has enjoyed a wide range of music and the other arts – but is part of a broad, common culture, not an isolated academic culture. There are…more of us than there are of them. More of us who read (or watch) Shakespeare one day and Theodore Sturgeon the next.”

Psittacus Productions feels the same way about theater audiences. Our gift, as it were, is to make the old stories entertaining and moving to as many people as we can find. We give this gift to our audience, be they the people who see us at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, or the students of high schools in East LA. Your gift will allow this to happen, and will give us all louder voices in the culture. We ask you to join us in this, the core commerce of art: the giving of gifts.

As a 501c3-pending organization, your gift is tax-deductible. Checks or money orders may be sent to:

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS, 237 S. Avenue 51, Los Angeles, CA 90042

Join us on an exciting adventure!!

Here at PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS, we are working around the clock to pull together all of the logistics and details for our premier performance of "A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT" at the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.

The Festival is getting lots of buzz here in town, and is a great opportunity to share the company's work and reach out to audiences and students alike. Still, we can't do it without the support of our friends and fans.

We encourage you to consider a tax-deductible gift of your choosing. Donations of all sizes can help, and will be acknowledged in our program and on-line. We recently received a gift at the "Prodigy" level, and a pledge at the "Genius" level.

Don't let those generous donors stand alone! Join the adventure today.

Checks and money orders to PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS may be sent to:

237 S. Avenue 51
Los Angeles, CA 90042


SUGGESTED DONOR LEVELS:

PUNDIT (Up to $25)
Grass-roots optimism and support; the lifeblood of the company.

SCHOLAR ($26 - $100)
Allows our online presence to exist, flourish, and grow.

PRODIGY ($101 - $500)
Enables a costume, set, or musical designer to plan for an excellent production.

PROFESSOR ($501 - $1000)
Provides the company with rehearsal space for one of our shows.

SAGE ($1001 - $2500)
Supports the leasing of performance space for one of our shows.

GENIUS ($2501 - $5000)
Enables the development and production of a brand new show.

MENTOR ($5001 - $10,000)
Sponsors an entire touring production; artists, travel, and accommodation.

MASTERMIND ($10,001+)
Big thinkers looking to the horizon; the future of the company.

Psittacus Productions is a 501c3-pending non-profit organization. All donations are tax-deductible. Please contact the company for further information.

PSITTACUS presents "A Tale Told By An Idiot"

@ the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival

Inspired by William Shakespeare
Directed by Robert Richmond

The Lounge Theatre
6201 Santa Monica Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038

Friday, June 18 @ 8pm
Saturday, June 19 @ 3pm and 8pm
Sunday, June 20 @ 3pm and 8pm

* * *

“Terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead…terrorism is theater.”
- Brian Michael Jenkins, Adviser to U.S. Dept. of Defense


PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS is proud to present our premier production: “A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT” at the first annual Hollywood Fringe Festival.

MACBETH is the story of a man who murders his king and usurps the throne. For Elizabethan audiences, this would have been tragic, but not unfamiliar. Today, we would consider this an act of “terrorism.” A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT uses Shakespeare’s MACBETH to explore the notion of Terrorism as Performance, and to imagine the “stage fright” that might visit the terrorist as they plan their action. A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT brings to life the shattered mental state of a Terrorist on the eve of their Performance.

Shakespeare wrote MACBETH sometime between 1603 and 1611. Throughout the play are veiled references to The Gunpowder Plot, a 1605 attempt to blow up King James, his court, and Parliament. Guy Fawkes, the plot’s mastermind, spent the night before the attempted bombing in the cellars beneath Parliament, setting up explosives, and waiting to light the fuses that would end his life, along with those of his victims. In a sense, Guy Fawkes was the original suicide bomber.

Stylistically, this play is a comic book brought to life on stage. As the story unfolds, Macbeth/Fawkes himself is terrorized by floating daggers, women walking up walls, the graphic strangling of a child, and a demonic possession. Using fragments of the original text of MACBETH, A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT is both a meditation on terrorism and an experiment in the power of theater artists to electrify an empty space.

A TALE TOLD BY AN IDIOT uses bodies, music, and light to transport the audience to a world where dream-logic reigns, and one can no longer fully trust one’s own senses.


* * *

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS Mission Statement:
• Connect with our community and share our passion for the live, in-person experience unique to the theatrical art form by producing plays from the classical canon;
• Investigate the ways in which our perceptions of “The Classical” have been altered by living in the 21st century by producing new stage and multi-media works;
• Create a laboratory environment wherein we ask the question, “What Is a Classic?” and engage our community by conducting education and outreach activities.

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS is a 501c3-pending organization. All donations are tax-deductible, and will be acknowledged in company literature. Checks or money orders may be sent to:

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS
237 S. Avenue 51,
Los Angeles, CA 90042

Nightmares of the Dream City: Why a Gift to the Arts is More Important Than Ever

O, but I seek and care!
- Theodore Roethke






By Chas Libretto

There's something inherently deranged about starting a nonprofit in the midst of the worst economic downturn since The Great Depression. One is often told that this is a “reset,” a return to simpler times, where we'll spend what we have, and no more, that the damn-the-torpedoes, no-holds-barred Credit Card-fueled spending craze will be a bizarre footnote in the annals of American history. So, with a tightening of belts, and a more protective grip around wallets, and with everyone feeling a little less willing to throw even the money they do have around, Psittacus Productions begins a campaign to procure capital for operating expenses and to fund specific projects.

But drastic times call for drastic measures, etc. etc. Feeling that a full summer schedule's programming, and a staggering amount of other irons in many other fires is not enough to fill our time, we've also incorporated into our mission a grand plan to bring arts education to the underserved and troubled Los Angeles Unified School District. Because, aside from the discomfort and tragedy the Recession has brought to working people, it also threatens the very future of the next generation, as the public schools in this city debate a proposal to eliminate all elementary school art teachers by the end of 2012.

Art teachers! In this, a city whose major export has been popular art, and whose great “wealth came principally from creative fantasies,” as author Michael Moorcock stated in a letter to J.G. Ballard. Aside from robbing the next generation of future avenues, it threatens to rob the soul of Los Angeles herself. And it threatens to murder what has become an endangered art to begin with. As Steven Leigh Morris reported in the April issue of Los Angeles Weekly, the NEA recently reported that arts attendance in the US has hit a new low, with only 34% attending an arts event once a week, down from 39% in 2002.

Moorcock told Ballard “Los Angeles has achieved the status of a mythological city, carrying a cargo of romantic dreams at least as great and various as Rome's or London's,” and he was correct, but it's a city that's now at a crossroads. More and more, it ships its major productions to Vancouver, and Atlanta, and Australia, and prostitutes its identity and purpose. Cynics would say this isn't terribly different than it's ever been, but I'd argue that the day Los Angeles washes its hands of any responsibility as a guardian of it's childrens' futures, is the day it loses its humanity completely. It's the day it actually becomes the place Nathaniel West cynically paints in “Day of the Locust” and that W.H. Auden calls “a Kingdom of Hell whose ruler is not so much a father of lies as a father of wishes.”

Hollywood is still and will always be a magnet for idealists and artists, who come here with a dream, for better or for worse. But in reaction to the red marks on its budgets, it threatens to smother that dream with a pillow in the middle of the night.

So, not to be too grandiose, we at Psittacus Productions feel we have a rather important mission to fulfill. It's one we didn't really expect to find when we decided to come out here, but it's one that feels, to us, like a better reason to get up in the morning than to go audition for a pharmaceutical commercial. If a workshop demonstrates the brilliance of Shakespeare to a young student in East LA, and creates in him or her a lifelong love and desire to patronize or perform in the arts, then we've done something.

Morris, in his LA Weekly manifesto concludes that “fighting for the arts is fighting for our humanity, and fighting for our humanity is fighting for our lives…I can't think of a more trenchant reason to be producing theater in the 21st century.”

We cordially invite you to be a part of this mission. As a 501c3-pending organization, your gift is tax-deductible, and will enable us to turn these plans into reality. Checks or money orders may be sent to:

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS, 237 S. Avenue 51,
Los Angeles, CA 90042

The Not-So-Lonesome Travelers: How Psittacus Came to Be

By Chas LiBretto

It began somewhere in the desert. We’d stayed at a motel located in a hard-hit industrial town called Deming, NM, whose apparent claim to fame is an event held in August called the Great American Duck Race, an event that is evidently exactly what it sounds like. As we drove through Wile E. Coyote country in our 26-foot Penske truck, containing just about every worldly belonging we owned, and nursed the grotesque cup of coffee, we began to discuss just what it was we’d really be doing when we arrived in Los Angeles.

For grins, we decided to name some plays we’d like to do. Shows with something to say, that we’d want to be in, that we’d want to have our names attached to. Not just endless Noel Coward revivals, or collections of ill-conceived sketch comedy routines, but things that spoke to us. Would they be new? Would they be Classics? Would they be somewhere in between? I thought Lou would be excellent as the titular character of Brecht’s "Schweyk in the Second World War," he thought I ought to dust off one of my several abandoned, half-completed scripts. We talked about Howard Brenton’s "Paul," a relatively recent play by an English socialist playwright whose work has rarely made it to these shores, a radical portrayal of St. Paul the Apostle. We proposed an SF epic that riffed on the works of Jack Vance, Mervyn Peake and Gene Wolfe, set in a far future where everything we know of life today has been forgotten into the annals of myth.

Okay, we were driving through desolate hellscapes, with no phone signals, no CD player, and needed something aside from conservative talk-radio to curtail the inevitable boredom. But really, it wasn’t such a surprise that this was where the conversation went after all those days “finding America.” My own fondest memories of working in the theater involved collective groups of artists working together as an ensemble, and most of Lou’s were as well. That one need not venture into this absurd industry on one’s own, but as a team of people who actually like each other, creating work with a common aesthetic.

But then, we’d danced around this idea for far longer than just the trip out west. We’d sat at bars, outlining a screenplay that reflected our experiences in conservatories, both as students and as teachers. I recall another time, sitting on a bench in Central Park discussing his previous company’s fallout, and being dumbfounded that a group of actors, writers, and directors as talented as those who were left jobless after all that didn’t just dust themselves off and regroup as a new collective.

And then, months later in Los Angeles, we did just that, and realized why more people don't do this. It’s easy, trapped in a truck with only one’s destination as an objective to say “we ought to start a company,” blinded to the realities of what that actually means: the endless hours of writing legal lingo, persuasive language, and budgets.

But then, there’s the occasional moment, buried in all of that hard work, that reminds one that this had to happen, didn’t it? The collective is the idea; the company is the process. It’s as much the words on form 1023 as it is the first day of rehearsal, as it is the fantasy in the truck’s cabin, looking through the road salt-encrusted windshield, at the road ahead.

Nerd Power!!!

by LB

My 20th High School Reunion happens this summer back in my hometown on Long Island. This is chilling in several thousand ways. Though I am unable to attend, the fact that it's happening inspired me to connect with the most important people in my life from that time...my theater friends.

Here is the letter that I just wrote to them. Nerd power!!

* * *

Dear Theater Friends;

What with the Class of 1990's 20th Reunion coming soon (holy crap!!), and seeing as I'm not going to be able to be there, it got me thinking a lot about our days at SHS. While things like Facebook can make every single day feel like something of a forced reunion, that's sort of a different conversation. In truth, there's nothing like a good dose of physical presence to remind us that our bodies are shaped somewhat differently now, and that more of certain people's scalps is currently visible than was the case in 1990. Don't be offended, baldies; I speak only of myself in that regard, of course.

In any event, I wanted to reach out to this group of people primarily because, and I don't think I'm exaggerating, the theater and performing arts are what brought us all together in the first place - or was, at the very least, the glue that held us together. It is with both a sense of pleasure and a sense of shame that I think about the day back in 10th grade when I put on a necktie and visited Mr. H's office in the Little Theater to "announce my availability" for "upcoming projects." Of course it is with great pride that I remember being "hired" (as I told my parents - I still tell my parents that!) to play the role of Frank Sterling in that true American classic, "The Creature Creeps." As a person who has made a living on-stage in the intervening years, I can tell you that it was easily my finest work. And that's only barely a joke.

For me, gathering with a group of intelligent, articulate, versatile...well, let's face it, "nerds" was, sort of oxymoronically, the epitome of cool. It was the first time I'd ever felt like I was a part of a community, a unique component of something larger than myself. It was the first time I was able to place myself, to define myself as a necessary part of a process. In a weird way, it was a crash course in Democracy. In our nerdy innocence, we didn't know to think of one thing as being more valuable than another, or to worry too much about the relative quality of what we were doing - it was enough that we were doing it at all. It was enough that we did it together.

This was both a gift and a curse. It was a gift because of you – the friends I made - and the excellent times we had together. It was a curse because I loved working in our suburban High School circus so much that I ultimately ran away with the circus. The experience of that is, again, probably sort of a different conversation.

Regardless, I write to you now to thank you for being friends with me at a time when I needed friends most desperately. Thank you for the gift of shelter from the buffeting surf of adolescence. Thank you for sharing your gifts in the plays that we worked on together. Thank you for being excellent people I will remember fondly for the rest of my days, whether we're in contact regularly, or if I just read about your commute or your children on Facebook. In terms of a life in the theater, thank you for ruining my life - in the best possible way!!

To conclude, I'd just like to let folks know that I've started a new, non-profit theater company...with my nerdy friends. What's that you say? Starting a non-profit arts organization in the nation's most precarious state in the middle of the Great Depression? Ha! As Monty Python taught us to say, "I fart in your general direction!!" There couldn't be a better time: the nation needs excellent theater now more than ever. In High School, the theater felt like a warm hug. And, let's be honest, a warm hug from a bespectacled bald man is exactly what you all want. Admit it.

Oh, and speaking of Facebook, the company's on there, too:
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/pages/Psittacus-Productions/353334488012
Drop by! Become a fan!

This bespectacled bald man misses you. If you're going to the reunion, have a drink for me. If not, well, still have a drink for me. In the comfort and privacy of your own home.

Support Your Friends at PSITTACUS!!

PSITTACUS PRODUCTIONS:

Suggested Donor Levels

All donations are tax-deductible and will be acknowledged in the company’s promotional materials.

All donations over $200 will be acknowledged personally in writing.

We are humbled by and grateful for any and all donations.

Please join us today at the level of your choosing.

PUNDIT (Up to $25)

Grass-roots optimism and support; the lifeblood of the company.

SCHOLAR ($26 - $100)

Allows our online presence to exist, flourish, and grow.

PRODIGY ($101 - $500)

Enables a costume, set, or musical designer to plan for an excellent production.

PROFESSOR ($501 - $1000)

Provides the company with rehearsal space for one of our shows.

SAGE ($1001 - $2500)

Supports the leasing of performance space for one of our shows.

GENIUS ($2501 - $5000)

Enables the development and production of a brand new show.

MENTOR ($5001 - $10,000)

Sponsors an entire touring production; artists, travel, and accommodation.

MASTERMIND ($10,001+)

Big thinkers looking to the horizon; the future of the company.

Psittacus Productions is a 501c3-pending non-profit organization. All donations are tax-deductible. Please contact the company for further information.