Part 4: Laughter is the best medicine…

If you want to be a professional creative writer in the Bahamas you are going to have to be some kind of playwright. It really is that simple.

Poetry is currently back in fashion, but in its raw form, on the page, or performed at small events, open-mike style, it will not make you any money. The only way that poetry can make you money in the Bahamas is if you package it as a play.¹

My good friend Ian Strachan wrote a fantastic novel, Gods Angry Babies. Arguably, the best Bahamian novel ever written. The book was published by a reputable international firm and you can find it in libraries around the world. In ten years, and I kid you not, he has made a total of $1,500 off of that book. For the mathematically inclined thats about $150 a year. Which is about a ten dollar phone card and a twelve ounce soda each month.

Kids, think long and hard before you say you want to grow up to be a Bahamian novelist. And lets not begin to talk about short stories. Larry Smith of Media Enterprises, reportedly the largest book distributor in the country, says that a Bahamian best seller moves about 200 copies per year. Yes, 200.

The only way that you can make money in this country off of a book is to take your story and repackage it as a play. And as was mentioned all the way back in part 2, you can make money off of plays in the Bahamas, but you will probably also need to be some kind of producer, or at the very least, work with somebody who will fill this role for you.

To the best of my knowledge, the closest we have come to having a professional creative writer in the Bahamas, who does his own thing, is Michael Pintard.² And guess what, he is a playwright… Well sort of.

Now I have seen three (ok, four) of Michael Pintard’s productions and I am not sure that they are actually plays in the strict sense of the word. Please note that the following is not necessarily criticism, but more along the lines of simple observation.

All of the Pintard productions I have seen hardly have any underlying narrative. Put simply, there is no story. There is no development of characters or otherwise, no climax, no denouement. Election 2002 was a collection of loosely related skits while both “Men Talk” and “Women Talk” functioned more like collaborative stand-up comedy routines. Because there is no underlying story, there is also no way to really be sure when the play is over other than observing the lights and the curtain.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, and I must stress that it is only a bourgeois armchair critic such as myself who even cares about such trivialities, I believe that it is safe to say that Michael Pintard is the Bahamas most successful playwright. We are talking about “the Pintard System” after all.

How has he done it? Remember the first principle of the Pintard system is to know your market.

For plays this means that you have to make a play that the majority of Bahamians would want to see.³ This means that you have to write a comedy.

I don’t see much getting around this point. Number two and three behind Pintard on the all-time Bahamian box office charts are probably the grizzled veteran, James Catalyn, he of the annual “Summer Madness” extravaganzas, and Terez Davis, the creator of Dynamite Daisy. The three of these artists deal almost exclusively in comedy, and surprise, surprise, they are also the most successful.

It is also perhaps, no surprise that they are also among the most maligned theatre practitioners in the country. Clever, witty comedy is not easy to pull off, while slap stick and over-the-top antics are generally far easier. I have seen one of the myriad “Summer Madness” productions, and I can testify that for the most part, it was over the top. While I have never seen one of her productions, I only have to look at “Dynamite Daisy” to know that it is somewhere beyond over the top. Pintard’s work is generally more witty than slapstick, but it seems to me that he delivers the laugh-per-minute ratio that the audience wants.

No more drama…

But you, as a self respecting and serious playwright, want to go for drama and social commentary. You wish to create real theatre!⁴ Good for you. Just remember that the Dundas theatre on Mackey Street has 334 seats and costs $1,000 per night for you to rent.⁵ Let’s say the rest of your expenses are another $2,000, including props, sets and some kind of stipend for your crew, tickets, posters, marketing etc. So, let’s say that we are talking $3,000 in overhead per night. If you are selling those tickets at $20 a pop you need to pack 150 people in the theatre per performance to break even. However, if you sold all 334 tickets for a performance you can gross somewhere around $6,700.

In a related aside, theatre tends to be more back loaded than film. What I mean by this is that you tend to end your run with a larger crowd than when you started. If word of mouth spreads a positive vibe about your play through the community, the people will come. So, you might need to hold on a while in the hopes that the audience will eventually show up.

Now, if you can sell a show out (or come close to it) not only will the production pay for itself, but it would also put a sizable down payment on your next production and maybe even give you something to live off of in the meantime. In essence you would be well on your way to what I call ‘viability.’

If you want to do theatre in the Bahamas as more than a hobby, I imagine that you will need this kind of return on your investment. i.e. selling out more than half of your shows. Now, the way I see it, you can make your job easier or you can make it harder. You can work with your audience or you can struggle with them.

Maybe if we had actual producers in the Bahamas, people who produce plays for a living, they would have figured this stuff out long ago. From what I have seen, when it comes to local material, the producer is usually the playwright, or is a good friend or family member of the playwright.

If we had producers, you, the aspiring playwright, would show them your wonderful, artsy drama filled to the brim with metaphor, message and meaning, he would look it over, grunt, hand it back and ask you to make it funny. But because these objective capitalist-type people don’t exist, writers go and find some way to produce their own material.

Remember the second principle of the Pintard system is Know what you are doing.

Is Michael Pintard himself, aware of what he is doing? Having seen most of his plays myself, I can attest that his productions display a canny grasp of what the audience wants. He knows that he is targeting his material to a popular audience and they are, in this sense, laser-guided. And guess what, the audience magically appears.

I believe the average Bahamian playwright sets out to make ‘art’ first, and to turn a profit second, then they wonder why their play does not make “Election 2002″ types of numbers. Whether they succeeded in making art is of course, debatable, but their failure to make money is all too real.

Don’t get me wrong here. I am not saying that dramas can’t make money in the Bahamas. According to a limited sample I conducted of theatre practitioners in the country it seems that you will most likely break even, or perhaps make a modest profit.⁶ However, you are unlikely to make enough money to fund your next production or give yourself some kind of living wage unless you produce a comedy. In other words, the more serious your production is, the harder you will have to work to fill the seats.

This series is not about how to win a pultizer, we are talking about how to make it in the Bahamian marketplace.⁷

Why so serious…

None other than Derek Walcott said that “The theatre is a crass business, and money is better than medals.”⁸

Now Walcott has himself some pretty nice medals. One of which is the Nobel Prize in Literature. The man is widely regarded as the greatest poet alive. Now, he also writes plays,⁹ and Walcott has it in him to write a people-pleaser when the mood hits him. For example, his “Beef, No Chicken” farce is a perennial favorite in Trinidad. However, he has not taken his own advice to heart often enough.

I was in Trinidad to witness an abridged version of his play “The Haitian Earth” that he also directed. This was at a conference on the 200th anniversary of Haitian Independence, and there was a distinguished group of academics, intellectuals and writers in attendance. We were all excited to see the play and the enthusiasm was evident in the line up to get into the theatre space.

Then, after 20 minutes, we all went to sleep.

So, with an ABRIDGED version of his play, Derek Walcott put a crowd of INTELLECTUALS to sleep. This is an amazing achievement in and of itself. Yes, I am telling you that Edwidge Danticat fell asleep in a Derek Walcott play about Haiti. I saw it with my own eyes. This is NOT the type of achievement you want to put on your resume. Imagine if you tried to run that play in Nassau, showing it to a random Bahamian crowd? It is this sort of thing that would give a producer nightmares.

Rule of thumb: If you want to bore people to death, join the lecture circuit.

In conclusion then, if you are trying to make your career in the Bahamian theatre more than a hobby, and you feel you must write a tragedy, make it a Tragicomedy. If you have this burning passion to write a drama, please, I beg you, make it a dramedy. Make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh, make ‘em laugh.

Know what it is that you are doing. I really can’t say this often enough. If you really want to be a Bahamian professional creative writer and some fantastic idea for an tragic drama comes into your head, please invite your inner producer to have a look at it. Give that producer your elevator pitch and watch the look on her face.

Then put that idea in a drawer for another day and wait till an idea for a comedy shows up instead.

*****

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT —>The point® is this:

• Playwrights are as close as we have come in the Bahamas to having professional creative writers.
• If you want to join this elite circle, you must write plays that can draw enough people to fill a theatre almost every night.
• Bahamians come out for comedies. So write that.

The Pintard System takes a (two or three month) break as the writer gets back to his real world which means he needs to finish his (way too long now) thesis. It has been a genuine pleasure talking with you and sharing ideas. Thanks for the fun! I believe there are another four parts to go in this series… so when I come back we should have a lot more to talk about.

Keep on commenting, posting and sharing in the meantime.
Peace.

1. To be clear, I am speaking about what I call ‘viability’ money here. Which is how can you make a living wage off of your creative work. Read the definition in part three. [↩]
2. Yes, it is true that Pintard does not make all of his income off of plays. I still maintain that he is as close as we have come. Yes, Terez Davis might be somewhat of a better model, but Pintard is decidedly secular, while Davis markets herself (not exclusively) to a Christian audience. As cynical as I am, I don’t think I can in good conscience recommend that you become some kind of evangelical if that is not your thing. Thus we shall stick with examining Pintard. I believe the Christian and the secular are two separate, but related, markets in the Bahamas. More needs to be said on this, but later. I could also talk about Myles Munroe here. He has sold a ton of books, but he does not write fiction. He is also a red herring type of writer and we can’t possibly expect to analyze what he has created there on Carmichael road in this series. The aim is for reproducible effects. I believe that the Pintard System is reproducible, BFMI is not. UPDATE: This footnote has been reworded for clarity. [↩]
3. Make is probably a better word than write here, because writing a play is like drawing the blueprint for a house. You are only half way there. [↩]
4. UPDATE: I should add that these things are not mutually exclusive. I believe that comedy can just as easily be ‘real’ theatre, and social commentary and be just as ‘artsy’ as anything else. What I am talking about is crafting your work to your audience, and I am assuming that you want to reach a large audience of Bahamians. If not, then carry on… [↩]
5. The new Performing Arts Centre has even more seats, 600+, but I am unsure of the rent for this facility. [↩]
6. Thanks to all those who responded to my inquiries. [↩]
7. UPDATE: Again I wish to stress that the two are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps you can do both! [↩]
8. This is from his essay “What the Twilight Says“ [↩]
9. Poetry and playwrighting are joined at the hip, see Shakespeare, William for more on this [↩]

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Art, Musings, Reviews, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.