Helen Shaw at TONY's Upstaged blog, which I highly recommend, takes note of my back and forth with Mr. Olson here.
Personally, I find that both fellows need to take a “Getting to Yes” seminar or maybe do some conflict-resolution work—
This deal keeps getting worse all the time! First I had to balance a budget, then I had to reform the entire system in order to balance the budget equitably...but now I have to attend a communications seminar? Conflict-resolution work!? Next we'll have to work a potter's wheel together ala GHOST.
I think it's worth saying that Olson's tone was matched by my own in our official back and forth, but we've had emails aside from this correspondence and beyond it that are quite civil. I think the distance between our positions is actually not all that great—we both love theater, we both want theater to thrive, etc.—but like many ideological battles, the devil is in the details.
Daisey points out that Olson selectively quotes from his responses, but then Daisey himself is employing tactics that deliberately ratchet up unproductive tension.
Maybe...but all too often I think we don't recognize that tension isn't automatically unproductive. The artists of the American theater are locked in a power structure that doesn't allow them voice. Giving voice to their arguments for why theater needs to change, not only for their sake but for the sake of the work itself, demands tension.
Still, both are passionate, and the debate leaps thrillingly across lines that are usually firewalls.
I would agree with that, and I'd say that this tension is one of the reasons that the debate has been leaping the usual boundaries...and when you talk about issues in ways they don't normally get discussed, and have direct, engaged confrontations with people you disagree with, tension will inevitably rise.
That doesn't mean it's all unproductive, or that it's negative. Out of this conflict can sometimes come growth and change...and I know that without tension and conflict passion dies, and change slowly hardens to become impossible.
1:28 PM
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