That’s the picture Jan Kott paints in his essay The Kings, discussing Shakespeare’s Chronicles plays (the term I prefer to Histories, as they aren’t, exactly).  He writes mostly of Richard III.  Reading it tonight, with the bits and slivers of the Republican debate that I caught from Twitter floating through my mind, I find it chilling.  Men of power, smiling and being villains, plotting and lying, betraying one another.

And while all this goes on, sometimes, we see a street in the city.  The citizens talk.

“When clouds are seen, wise men put on their cloaks…”  (Richard III, II.iii)

In the end, the kingdom is worth less than a horse on which to escape.

My name is Jax Steager, and I am a professional theatre designer and technician. I started doing scenery and lighting in high school. I took some time off to join the Air Force, and then I went to Loyola University New Orleans for a BA in Drama, and to San Francisco State University for an MFA in Theatre Design & Technical Production. Currently, I am a company member of two small professional theatres, and I do freelance design and tech work around the Bay Area. I am also master electrician at a venue that hosts theatre, dance, and concerts. In a given week, I might have meetings and produce a light plot for a Shakespeare play in a small theatre, run lights for a rock concert, spend time maintaining my lighting and sound equipment at the venue, and lay down dance flooring for a ballet. Also, during the summer I run a venue for theatre at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest performing arts festival. I co-founded that company, and I designed both of its theatres from audience seating to the lighting rig.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention a day job. I don’t have one. Some of you probably have parents who don’t want you to major in theatre because you’ll have a hard time getting a good job. They’re right: you’ll have a hard time getting a good job. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. There are lots of other arguments for studying the arts, too. The world needs people with cultural understanding, with compassion, with a sense of adventurousness and the capability to imagine new things and make them happen. Artists make the world better, whether they end up paying their rent with their art or not.

Steve asked us, his friends, to write a few things to you about what it is to be a professional theatre artist. I’ve got a few thoughts for you. Here they are:

Be reliable. Be organized. Get the best calendar system you can figure out, and be religious about it. Show up on time. If you double-book yourself, own up to it and fix it immediately. Seriously, just being reliable is half of getting hired in this business. Maybe more. If you say you’ll do something, do it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a genius, if you can’t bother to show up on time your phone will stop ringing.

Be humble. So you’re an amazing actor, or you’re a hotshot with moving lights. Tell you what: somebody out there is better than you. But more important than that, everyone is better than you are at something. Find out what it is and learn it from them! Inquisitiveness is a virtue. Humility is a virtue. Being really nice is a virtue.

Be nice. Performers: be appreciative of your designers and crew. They’re making you look good, and they’re keeping you safe. Designers and technicians: be appreciative of your performers. They are the reason you’re here. Seriously, rivalry between performers and technicians is stupid. Don’t badmouth each other. None of us can exist without the others.

Read plays. All the time. All of you. I’m looking at you too, lighting guys. There’s nothing about a GrandMA console that means you shouldn’t read plays. Technology isn’t the point of theatre. It’s fun, but it’s not the point. Flashy-flashy isn’t everything.

Here’s the very best thing I have to tell all of you. The most important thing for an artist, especially a theatre artist–be it playwrighting or directing or acting or theatre design–is to learn everything you can. If you’re considering a major in theatre, chances are some of you are looking at BFA programs. Probably nothing sounds more appealing than to study nothing but theatre. I understand that. But I want to encourage you to consider liberal arts programs as well. No matter what form of higher education you choose, or if you choose not to go to university, it’s essential that you learn everything you can about everything you can.

Maybe you can’t see now what physics has to do with theatre. Maybe you don’t want to waste your time that could be spent memorizing lines studying philosophy instead. But the best artist is a well-rounded artist, who can draw understanding and inspiration from lots of different places, who can reach out into other areas. A theatre artist needs breadth.

Good night and good luck…

Don’t get me wrong: I love my technology.  There are a lot of little machines in my house, machines that help me do my job, machines that store unfathomable amounts of information and music and give me the capability to connect with the world in ways unimaginable two generations ago, or even one.

Nonetheless.

I saw a play tonight, Paula Vogel’s Desdemona, that took place in a washer-woman’s world.  Linens.  Linens were central to the life of a woman, once upon a time.  In some places, in some women’s houses, they still are.  Not in mine.  But there’s something that squeezes the heart a little about lines upon lines of linen, in natural-dyed hues, hanging to dry, held with the sort of clothespins that don’t even have springs.  Washed in a wooden washing-tub.  Carried in a wicker basket.  Things made of wood, of clay, of metal, of cloth.  Elemental in a way that a home containing an “entertainment center” and piles of things made of polyester and plastic can never be.

Someday, perhaps, the modern world will collapse.  Someday the survivors will need to know how to preserve food, how to bake bread and brew beer, how to sew and knit and craft things from leather and clay and wood, how to sharpen a knife, how to repair things of value, how to build.  I like to imagine that some theatre people might be just the slightest bit ahead of the game.  We are people who make things, after all.

Amazing feeling yesterday, opening the first box of printed season brochures and holding in our hands the manifestation of our collective willpower, my partners and I.  The fact that we’re in this building at all is a testament to the resourcefulness, expertise, and pigheaded persistence of this team.  We actually are making real the dream born three years ago in a leaky-roofed old stone church a mile from here, where two Brits and two Americans decided we could do it and we should do it, together.

We’re just at the beginning of this adventure, still.  In the garage there awaits a head-high pile of stage decking and a big pile of box truss; downstairs there sits a row of flight cases.  It’s mind-boggling, really, having a thing that has been made of emails and websites suddenly be made of stone and steel.  Gives me something to consider while I build.