Full color issues are available for $4 at Sagebrush Cafe in Quartz Hill, CA, at plays and events by Antelope Valley Thespians, or by contacting Nalin Ratnayake at quantumcowboy@gmail.com.

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Essay and Photos by Nalin A. Ratnayake
February 2011

The sight of the 1909 Wright Flyer through the falling snow is enough to send my mind racing.  We take so much of modern life for granted that it is hard to imagine sometimes how far we have come in so little time.

The first controlled flight of an aircraft lasted a shorter distance than the wingspan of a modern 747 airliner. Yet just over a decade from that moment, the first fighter aircraft took flight over the battlefields of the First World War. Less than fifty years from that from the Wright’s first flight, humanity broke the sound barrier, for the first time traveling faster than the very air could move out of the way. Roughly a decade after that a man flew fast enough that gravity couldn’t pull him back to earth; John Glenn reached 17,500 mph to orbit the Earth. A decade after that, the Helios solar probes screamed towards the Sun for high-speed sensor flyby’s at upwards of 150,000 mph. The list of movement milestones in flight could go on.

It’s a cold, snowy February morning outside of Dayton, Ohio. I am on temporary assignment to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base for a combustion modeling training course, as part of my duties as a research propulsion engineer for a long-standing Antelope Valley institution. The last eight years of living in Arizona and Southern California have dulled the winter sense I gained from growing up in Boise, Idaho… now I really have to think as I attempt to navigate unfamiliar roads in my rental car through the ice and snow and fogged-up glass.

The security personnel are friendly and talkative, despite the early hour and chilly conditions. They tell me to pull over into the visitor control area. As I wait inside while they look up my information, I gaze out the window at the marvelous sight of the 1909 Flyer which now captivates me.

My papers and clearances are in order, and the two-striper at the visitor control desk attempts to hand back my badge along with my visit authorization. But I am still staring out of the window, oblivious. Finally, a 2nd Lieutenant also checking in gently taps me on the shoulder to get my attention. Embarrassed, I thank them both and exit visitor control, walking as if in a trance towards the cause of my distraction. In the glass of the door I see the two-striper’s reflection rolling his eyes as the lieutenant smiles.

The 1909 Wright Flyer, the world's first powered military airplane, just outside Gate 1B of Wright-Patterson AFB.

In this age, it is easy to get caught up in the technology. This machine went faster, higher, farther, or more cleanly than this other machine. Progress and advancement is beautiful, for sure; you will be hard-pressed to find an engineer who would say otherwise. Yet I can still appreciate the simple elegance of the now-primitive innovation before me.

Though obsolete to modern eyes, the impact of the Flyer’s seminal moment can be felt in almost every aspect of modern life.  Two bike shop owners from Dayton, Ohio flew in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17th, 1903. The aftereffects of that day, enabled by aerospace technology, have allowed rapid transit of people and goods around the world. Our satellite system has made possible everything from GPS to the internet, weather forecasting, cell phones, climate monitoring, military reconnaissance, and celestial observation. Our cars are now safer because we went to the moon; the machining technology required to accomplish the most difficult thing we could imagine at the time did not exist, and so we invented it.

For the first time in centuries of dreaming of it, humanity flew. The benefits of that foray into flight diffused into all branches of manufacturing technology.

As these thoughts blaze through my head, standing in the cold and staring at the 1909 Wright Flyer, I realize that my life serves as a poignant example of how much of modern society incorporates transportation.

In just a few days, my life has crossed paths with so many different forms of transportation, blended together into one seamless weekend of visiting my family in Northern California and heading off to Dayton for the training.

From my hometown of Quartz Hill, I was dropped off at the Lancaster train station by my roommate in her car. I then boarded an Amtrak Thruway bus towards Bakersfield, the southern train hub of California’s central valley.

For those who look back on the Greyhound heyday with equal measures of nostalgia and nausea, I assure you that Amtrak’s modern thruway system evokes more of the former than the latter. Yet you certainly do meet all the types on mass transit — part of the fun, if you ask me.

The driver, a white ex-Marine sergeant, was talkative and tried to make conversation by telling us about himself and asking us where we were headed. A retired black steel worker with a grayed beard smiled and spoke of his daughter, about to be married in Fresno. A Hispanic farm worker mumbled in broken English of seeing his brother in Corcoran after five years. A woman of seemingly mixed race was on the way back home to Redding after taking care of unspecified personal affairs in Lancaster. And I, the South-Asian research engineer, was headed to Sacramento and then on to El Dorado Hills, to visit my parents.

Mass transit is the great equalizer — joining the lives of people from every corner of the American fabric, who may never meet otherwise.  We are in motion together for a brief time – by a bus route or those twin threads of steel we call rail lines. Movement is about connection, about people, about life.

The Wright Brothers Memorial, Dayton, OH.

Those who pass through the Bakersfield train station will always note a large, marble globe which is suspended on partially submerged gimbals. The globe appears heavy, impossible to move. Yet through engineering artifice, even a small child may impart motion to this orb, and rotate the earth to see the various oceans and continents etched into the black stone. Carved in the base are the words:

Riches through knowledge. Knowledge through travel. — Edward J. Hogan.

Movement, motion, travel — all of which ultimately result in experiences which make for a better-rounded, globally aware, and culturally conversant individual. I was very fortunate to have had the opportunity to travel at a very young age with my family, scattered across the globe. It is now a need inextricably embedded in my soul – I travel abroad or to someplace new every year.

After I rode the Amtrak #713 San Joaquin northbound from Bakersfield to Stockton, I transferred to another thruway bus which connected me to Sacramento. After my visit to my parents, I flew from Sacramento through Denver to Dayton, after which I picked up a rental car and made my way to the hotel.

And the next day, finally, here I am with that same rental car — standing at Gate 1B of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, checking in for a combustion modeling class which will enable better research methods of propulsion, which then, of course, will impart motion to vehicles in a ever more efficient and effective ways.

Movement is how I define my life.

My work is about movement, requires movement and enables movement. My escape from work is movement, in the form of travel. The machinery that allows me to communicate with family and friends around the world relies on movement for its very operation.

The journey of my being, the movement I impart, and the motion I experience, physical or otherwise, will take me to places of which I could never dream today — such is life.

T.S. Elliot said it best, in his poem “Little Gidding”:

 We shall not cease from exploration
 And the end of all our exploring
 Will be to arrive where we started
 And know the place for the first time.

No matter where my journey may take me, I will always be grateful for monuments like Wright Flyer. They remind us from whence we came, and make where we are and where we are going all the more poignant.

The novelty of a new environment was tempered by the discomfort of uncertainty as I boarded the train to the city center. “Did I get on the right train? What if there is some procedure for train-riding I don’t know? Did I do the train-passenger secret handshake?” The most ridiculous of concerns passed through my mind as I let the world slide by the windows, eased only slightly by another passenger asking me if I knew where a certain stop was – at the least I didn’t look too far out of place. A little more at ease after paying the conductor for my ticket – at least I wouldn’t be thrown off of the train now – I settled back to consider my purpose here.

Too pragmatic to simply let myself have a much-needed adventure, I gave myself a pass with the justification that by attending a conference in my area of academic interest I would make connections useful in my graduate studies. On a deeper level though, I had simply reached a point where I needed a new and difference experience. The stress of finishing my undergraduate studies had taken its toll on my morale, and a subconscious need for variety and escape had pushed me to an uncharacteristic spontaneity.

“Center City Philadelphia,” the voice of the conductor woke me from my reverie. Stepping off of the train and into the night the voices nagged at me again, darkness and sleet joining in now, questioning my wisdom in coming here. Banishing them with thoughts of how pleasant it was to be able to hop on a train with remembering my stop as the only concern. I stepped down to the platform and began looking for an indication of where the subway was, I wandered through the station attempting to orient myself when suddenly the doubt, concern, looking for the subway, all of it evaporated. As I stepped through an archway the ceiling vanished into an immense abyss above. The magnificence of thirtieth street station had me in awe, I had never seen such architecture before. I half expected to see clouds gathering in the upper reaches of the room. I was struck not just by the size – I had been in plenty of large hangars – but the careful adornments of the building, the ornate and polished floor, and elaborate molding. It seemed unreal that this could be a public building – perhaps my imagination was not off so far in envisioning the “east”.

Reluctantly pulling my eyes away from the grand building, I returned to the suddenly very mundane task of finding the subway. Leaving the grand terminal for the subway station, my thoughts were once again focused on navigation by the sleet, now pouring down in immense quantities. Fortunately I quickly found my way, and after only minor confusion in navigating the ticketing rituals was seated. The now-familiar uncertainty once again confronted me, was I sure of the right stop, could I hear the annunciator well enough? In the process of checking my directions for the umpteenth time a rather obvious realization came over me: my change of location was merely a catalyst. The objective of my travel was lose myself, my troubles, and my routine – and in doing so find something fascinating, real, and important.

I had touched that realization only minutes before, basking in the experience of 30th street station, but foolishly banished it with pragmatic concerns. Now renewed and embraced, the realization was completely liberating. Suddenly I didn’t care what my stop was – I would make it to the hostel eventually – I only cared that I made the most of what I saw and experienced. Without the stress I easily found the stop and my way to the hostel (yet another new experience to add to the list for this trip). Emboldened by my recent realization, I soon set off again, though with no destination. I set off not on some path I had pre-ordained for myself, but in search of what the now snow-hushed city could teach me if I but listened.

Bear in mind that I am not a theatre professional. While I have perhaps 12 years of amateur experience in community theatre, ranging from acting, tech, improv, directing, producing, and various workshops… I am really just an engineer with an abiding passion for the craft. I have no formal training in anything theatre or business.  So, if some of these lessons seem self-evident to more experienced theatre professionals, well, that’s why. I’m just a guy who realized that the kind of theatre I love to do is not being done enough in this community, and thus decided to roll my own.

Also, I don’t claim to have necessarily done any of these correctly or successfully yet. They are, in some cases, lessons learned from actually making the mistake; in other cases, they are simply observations or philosophy that I have come to by thinking of hypothetical situations. A couple at least are principles I have held from the beginning.  In every new situation, you will probably have to figure out how any principle is practically going to apply; maybe sometimes it will be impractical, and that’s where your creative leadership needs to come in.

So here we go, and not necessarily in any particular order of importance:

1. MAKE YOUR AUDIENCE PART OF THE CREATIVE PROCESS. Show them the process leading up to the production, take them behind the scenes, give them access to the ideas and perspectives actors and crew at every stage of the production, and allow them to openly discuss, debate, question, and explore the work. Your audience members are not merely your customers who show up and make an isolated purchase, they should be your community and thus deserve long-term inclusion and interaction, even when they are not in the theater.  They’ve got to be rooting for you even throughout the production process, and then they will feel invested in what you are doing.  Which brings me to….
2. COMMUNICATE. In this age, it is essential to be able to reach out to your audience, fans, supporters, and company electronically, directly, and often. There is no excuse to not have a blog, Facebook Page, Twitter Feed, and a media-rich website… and not just to have them superficially, but to update them often and use them effectively. Learn to use them well, or be left wondering where your young audiences and members have gone.  It takes a significant chunk of time and a genuine desire to connect; if you can’t bring either to the table in this context, my bet is that your theatre company is slowly starting to seem irrelevant.  Don’t know where to start? Check out Dave Charest’s blog for “wicked smaht marketing tips for nonprofits”. I follow the guy religiously on Twitter as well (@DaveCharest).
3. HAVE A CLEAR VISION. Why are you even here? What is the goal of your work? Why should the community care that you are doing what you do at all?  Simply saying “we are here to do theatre”, and even being good at it, is not good enough. What kind of theatre, for whom, and for what purpose? Why is this kind of theatre needed specifically by your target audience, and how will your approach to creating it evolve when conditions change?  The Vision should be completely independent of your resources, assets, people, audience size, the economy, or the nature of your theater space.  It’s not the HOW, WHERE, and WHEN… its the WHAT and the WHY.  This applies to the company as a whole, as well as to individual productions.  Oh yeah, and make sure everyone down to the janitor has buy-in.  You may be able to ride for awhile without a clear Vision if times are good. But when the tide changes, everyone from the public to people in your company are going question why you exist in the first place. If you can’t succinctly answer the question in clear and personal terms, again my bet is that your theatre company is slowly starting to seem irrelevant.
4. EXCITEMENT IS NOT VISION. It’s not talent either. Nor is it responsibility or integrity. Don’t confuse excitement with an ability to implement.
5. ULTIMATELY, IT’S ABOUT PEOPLE. As Colin Powell says in his leadership principles, you can make all the plans, bylaws, and procedures you want, and you definitely should for the sake of organization and structure, but at the end of the day those plans will succeed or fail solely on the quality of the people involved. “Quality” here means much more than just raw talent or experience. Indeed, having a variety of experience levels, backgrounds, theatre histories, and preferred production methods is going to generate the right kinds of positive debate and experimentation within the group.  Passion for the craft, a genuine desire to learn and grow through the art form, and a personal investment in our Vision and what we stand for are far more valuable to me than an impressive theatre resume.  You can always develop people in skills they don’t have, but its much more difficult to deal with a lack of character, passion, or motivation. As long as everyone involved keeps a healthy respect for each other and buys into the same overarching Vision, intelligent debate is healthy. However….
6. KNOW WHEN YOU NEED TO PISS PEOPLE OFF. It’s going to sound cold and ruthless, but if you are not pissing some people off, you are probably not being a responsible leader OR artist. Leadership is not a popularity contest.  On the business side, let’s be frank… for all their excitement, talent, and good faith, some people can be very ineffective at a particular role.   The challenge for the managing/producing director is to then remove these people as efficiently as possible from these positions, while still maintaining morale and personal rapport. That doesn’t always work well at all. In fact it’s usually kind of messy. But, at the end of the day, as managing/producing director you must act in the best interest of the company; if the sacrifice of good graces that this sometimes takes is not worth it to you, then remove yourself from your position instead. Any in-between endangers what you stand for. And while internal differences and constructive debate leading up to a decision is what keeps an organization sharp, once a decision or policy is made (always in light of the Vision), that decision needs to be implemented by everyone as if it were their own. And if not, well… there is always going to be “the drama of drama”; but when sniping and pettiness begin to create divisions and drag down morale, remove those responsible, regardless of their talent or effectiveness.  Whatever they bring to the table is simply not worth the spreading negativity.  Enforce this through positive influence wherever possible, not negative pressure, particularly when working in a volunteer organization.  Think about it this way: if an offending person buys into your company Vision and you can make a reasonable, considered argument as to why this needs to happen based on that Vision, then they should (perhaps reluctantly) agree. If they don’t buy into your company Vision, they shouldn’t be in the company anyway. Harsh perhaps, but true. And on the artistic side, intelligently pissing people off brings me to…
7. PRUDENCE IS THE ENEMY OF RELEVANCE.  I can’t sum it up any better than in an LA Weekly Stage article that I have bookmarked. Just read that.
8. BALANCE STRONG CENTRAL LEADERSHIP WITH INDIVIDUAL DISCRETION. Push tactical authority down to the lowest level that makes sense, which in most cases means the people actually doing the task. They probably know how to do it best, and if they don’t, they are the best able to experiment and figure it out, so give them the resources to do it and get the hell out of the way! Strategic level things on the other hand, such as the company vision, overall policies, how we treat each other and our audience, what is expected, why we are here, etc… these need buy-in from every member to be credible, but they should be centrally enforced and managed, transparent, and held with no exceptions.
9. DON’T ASK ANYTHING OF ANYONE THAT YOU WOULDN’T DO YOURSELF.  And demonstrate it. Even if you aren’t the best person for that task, you should be willing to do it if needed. Especially in a volunteer organization, in the event that no one willingly wants to do it, if it needs to get done, you’re the one who gets to do it anyway!
10. THE TROOPS CAN’T RALLY TO A FLAG THAT ISN’T THERE. No matter how bad things get, how contentious the divisions, now grim the balance sheet, or how negative the reviews, the commander in the field must be the very face of confidence and optimism.  Acknowledge problems head on, openly discuss mistakes, and above all don’t lie… but do not ever let your personal sense of failure or hopelessness spill over to those who look to you for leadership. If you’ve written off a production in your head, see it to the end in a professional manner anyway, even while planning how to do it better next time. If a risk goes badly, document the lessons learned.  But stay positive. Give your actors the pep talk after the horrible press, get in the trenches with the crew member that keeps messing up, and lead the charge to address the impossible curveball that just came up and looks ready to sink the project.  If you give up on your people, your people will give up on you… and once they do, it is next to impossible to muster the credibility to get them back in good spirits.

So there you go. Ten things that I don’t necessarily do well myself, but that I’ve slowly come to target as general principles by which to abide.  As I learn and grow with the company, I am sure some of these will change or at least get tweaked a bit. Maybe the list will grow longer, who knows. But for now, I think this is a pretty good summary of the lessons learned notes in my Producer’s Notebook this first season. Here’s to many more seasons to come!

And the lift, how did it enthrall

But flow separation

Caused much aggravation

For the tail did nothing but stall

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Some background – with only a semester left in my undergraduate career the only thing separating me from graduation is a few measly credit hours…and this trivial experience known as senior design. An experience of discovery if there ever was one: take five clueless college students, add sadistic design requirements, an impossibly short time schedule, and shake well with coffee – the result is (one hopes) an airplane that not only flies but is superior to the work of students from universities all over the world. As one could guess by now, the culmination of the past semester of work, our self-administered “final,” a test of our design did not go quite as planned. In a shocking revelation, the more you know the less you know. Putting technical details aside for a moment however, this is a perfect opportunity to reflect on the value of things going pear-shaped, something that we (or at least I) do far too infrequently. Bizarre as it seems, one should almost be thankful for the times when one’s knowledge and experience falter, for it is these instances which allow us to improve ourselves. The value of being wrong is certainly immediate – we surely won’t make the same mistake again soon – but it also reaches deeper.

When we are confronted by the limits of our knowledge (or what we thought was knowledge), we are forced to take a step back and evaluate what we “know” and why we “know” it. There is certainly a humbling effect when we falter, and our faith in ourselves and our collective understanding of the world can certainly be shaken. While such far-reaching effects are unlikely in such a trivial failure as my group experienced this week, humans face this time and again in our grandest works – bridges fall, societies collapse, and our collective mastery of the world and ourselves is revealed as hubris. Such experiences are uncomfortable - for a species whose survival has long been predicated on our mastery of our surroundings it is naturally frightening. From another perspective however, these events bring us exciting new possibilities. I shudder to imagine a world where we’ve figured everything out – while humans have an insatiable desire to understand our world, we are like dogs chasing cars: if we ever succeeded we’d be purposeless.

Each failure is an opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of our world. There are countless new developments, waiting to change our world forever, simply lacking some gap in our understanding to be remedied or overturned in order to proceed at breakneck pace. We often hear cited the role of serendipity in science – how one lucky thing going just right set off a revolution, but little mentioned is the serendipity of simply being wrong.

Little consolation is this to anyone (especially to those of us facing a problematic tail redesign), but perhaps with some work we can view failing and ignorance, once exposed, as exciting opportunities for improvement. With some thought and effort we may even become thankful for our foibles.

Great concert in the black box last night, featuring Laura Tsaggaris. I can’t convey how freaking cool it is to have one of my favorite musical artists play in the black box theatre that is built into my house. Pretty sweet. Well, the upshot is, I heard a lot of beautiful , thought-provoking music, and also had a great discussion with Laura before and after the concert about our respective artistic philosophies.

Over a beer and sizzling fajitas at Don Juan’s, we talked about striking the balance between “putting yourself out there” as a performer versus creating art solely for oneself. Because yeah, as a musician or as an actor, dancer, whatever…. you are basically asking people to stare at you for a couple hours. An object – to be admired, detested, analyzed, critiqued, displayed, and commented on.

On the other hand, if what is created is not personal and designed solely for consumption by others, it fails to be genuine; the beauty of art yields to the packaged superficiality of entertainment.  True art, of any medium, must come from within and convey an element of the artist’s own humanity. Yet, taken to the extreme, too much focus on the self in art can make it selfish, incomprehensible, or irrelevant.

I believe that the arts have a duty, a service to perform; to make all of us as human beings reflect on our shared humanity – to provide an insight into the human condition.

Genuine reflection on, and emotional connection to, the soul of humanity requires a personal approach. The art must be honestly motivated from within, or it will fall flat. But in addition, the completion of the art is knowing that it is appreciated and absorbed. The apprehension of a work of art’s effect on one’s fellow human being.  Beyond the in-the-moment joy of creating art, I think that the realization, or even just the hope, that the art has brought someone somewhere to a greater understanding of themselves or others is the true return.

Is that a utilitarian view?  To measure a work of art’s worth by the effect it has on our fellow human being? Because the arts are an expression of who we are as humans, this argument then becomes dangerously parallel to stating that the value of a person is tied to the value of that person to society. In the same manner that we must accept a fundamental, if unquantifiable, worth of every person (even if we don’t like them), then must we similarly acknowledge a fundamental worth to anything that anyone calls art (even if we don’t like it)?  Unresolved questions for me.  But I’ll keep thinking about it.

Bottom line, Laura’s music really made me think. She is a musician who writes from her soul, and is willing to let us share in it, for whatever it’s worth to us. She is confident in what she means by her music, but remains open to each individual’s personal relationship with what she creates. She takes joy in seeing her work affect others positively, but holds on to creating art that comes from within.  There are musicians, and there are musical artists; it was an honor to host this example of the latter category in our black box.

Photos and a podcast with sound clips are posted on the AVT blog.

And don’t worry, I totally got some studying in as well.