by Megan Hanley

Just over a month ago, The Syndicate performed CIVILITY! in a beautiful, sweltering theater in the middle of August. The AC and the light board couldn’t function simultaneously, so on opening night, our intrepid stage manager Sarah Stark cut the AC 10 minutes before curtain, while director Emily Spalding hid some bottles of water in the wings. We in the cast looked at each other with more than a little trepidation, took a few deep breaths, and walked together onto a stage that must have been 90 degrees at top of show.

 

Ten minutes in, and the temperature had already begun to rise considerably. The audience valiantly, desperately fanned themselves with their programs. Half an hour into the show, I remember looking down and noticing that my forearms were dripping with sweat, even though we hadn’t yet reached any of the movement-heavy sections of the play. I don’t think I’d ever before considered the sweat glands on my forearms, but it turns out they can be quite active. I also noticed that the audience members were giving up on their fans. “Oh no,” I thought, “they’re all going to leave.” As we hurtled into the wild dance, it must have been well over 100 degrees in the theater.

 

But as the play grew more difficult to perform, I could feel the audience growing very still. The quality of their listening was different. I could feel them with us, perhaps willing us to hurry it along, but definitely there for the ride. We finally reached the end and took a bow, and I looked at my company mates; our whole bodies were drenched. We stumbled back to our dressing room, peeled off our costumes, and stared at each other in shock– whoa, that was a hard show.

 

That night, CIVILITY! felt more like a test of endurance than art. Still, I was struck by that sense I’d had of the audience really listening. “I feel like we all just went through hell and back together!” an audience member told to me, remarkably enthusiastic. My mother and aunt, visiting Chicago from Seattle (where humidity is more of an abstract concept than a lived reality) were waiting for me outside the theater. My mom gave me an opening night gift, a bag of wrapped chocolates. They had melted, and I’m not talking about going a little soft around the edges. These were tinfoil balls of liquid chocolate.

 

That night, sticking the chocolates in the freezer to solidify them, I found myself wondering: why do we do this?  Why put so much into the work, and then ask people to sit with us in oppressive heat so we can share some of that work with them? The Syndicate holds three core values: willingness to lead and follow, effort, and diversity in how we tell stories and whose stories we tell. That night we had thrown ourselves into the piece with all the effort we could muster, and we had asked our audience for a huge effort in return. They rose to the occasion. They stayed in. But why?

 

Economic theory tells us that supply, demand, and value are intrinsically linked: if supply exceeds demand, then the cost goes down; if demand is greater than supply, then the cost of a commodity goes way up. This equation seems to work quite well for a lot of capitalists, but it doesn’t quite explain what we are doing when we make a piece of theater. The effort (let’s call that the supply) that goes into to making or participating in a work of art almost always exceeds the value, as measured by tangible rewards we get back, such as money, positive reviews, or Becoming A Star.

 

That sweltering performance of CIVILITY! held within its DNA hundreds of hours of rehearsal, some of it deeply pleasurable, some of it challenging. We put in a lot of energy, not because it made anything like sense in a capitalist logic system, but because putting in effort matters to us in and of itself. I think this is why so many people choose to make art, whether or not it pays off, and whether or not it ever becomes one’s main source of income. Art can liberate us from the value system that we receive from capitalism. As Taylor Mac put it when I recently saw part of judy’s brilliant A 24 Decade History of Popular Music, “the verb matters more than the noun.” The act of doing, the effort put in, is more important than the final product.

 

That performance of CIVILITY! was an act of mutual generosity. Our audience stayed in the theater that night because they wanted to support us, to witness the effort that we had put into the piece. Truly paying attention also takes a great deal of effort, and perhaps that was what I could sense in the audience in that sweltering theater: the work that they were doing to stay with us, in spite of the obstacle of discomfort. And the company, in turn, put in months of work and care — some of it compensated, some of it not– because we wanted to gift that show to each other, to our audiences, and to ourselves.

 

The more theater I make, the more I believe that theater is a gift economy. Unlike the economic system that we usually live within here in the US, a gift economy is one in which commodities or services are freely given, without expectation or demand of a gift in return. It’s different than a barter economy (where I give you this cup of coffee in exchange for those beautiful alpaca slippers) or the current system of neoliberalism. Theater and cultural work in general do exist within a capitalist framework, but they also exceed that system. The effort that goes into making a play happen is almost always greater than the value assigned to it or the demand for the piece. But then again, gifts are given freely, not demanded.

 

I have a lot a questions about this claim that I’m making. How can we create a gift economy that does not exploit the workers within it? Can an anti-capitalist or gift approach to cultural work coexist with our capitalist system? Can it dismantle it? How am I supposed to make rent, fundraise for my work, and still have enough energy left to perform in 100 degree heat in the middle of August? And, along those lines, how do we build a gift economy that doesn’t reinforce white supremacy and class privilege? Those are questions that I’ll keep puzzling through.

 

I do know that imagining theater as a gift economy has the potential to change a lot of our relationships as theater makers. Performers and audiences could regard our time together as mutual aid. Teachers and students could practice existing outside of a transactional framework. Funders and artists asking could question the non-profit industrial complex by building up a gift economy, hopefully one that supports a truly diverse pool of art-makers. Artists collaborating in rehearsal might remind ourselves that the goal isn’t success, so much as giving ourselves and each other the gifts of time, space, and effort.
On the morning after our sweltering opening night, the heat broke. My colleague Janouke and I opened the windows and laughed hysterically as a thunderstorm cleared the air, sending rain pouring down the wooden fire escapes of Chicago. It was yet another gift.