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The Register denies that stage direction, as presented to the Copyright Office for registration, is copyrightable subject matter…[the] Register properly refused copyright registration for Mr. Rando’s claim concerning stage direction.

So reads a Department of Justice motion from 2007 regarding the claim by a deranged Broadway director and the Society of Stage Directors & Choreographers (SSDC) that the rather common and unoriginal “choreography and pantomime” contributed to a Urinetown production be protected (and hence paid for) by other companies producing a play he happened to work on.

Whose getting Pissed on?

I suppose I am old enough now that I should not be surprised by the depravity of human beings and their actions, but I am continually amazed, newly, again and again, by the lengths that people will go to satisfy their voracious greed.

The case I’m discussing here is another case mentioned by Ralph Sevush when he spoke at the Dramatist Guild National Conference this past week.  It involves cease and desist letters sent to Akron and Chicago theaters producing Urinetown, asserting that John Rando’s rights were being infringed. To my mind, this case is an example of the most egregious and insidious of the SSDC activities.  In fact, if I were a Choreographer in that particular society I would be protesting the activities of the society for even pursuing cases that attempt to inflate the work of some of these directors to that of choreography.  Especially given the list of “creative” additions that this John Rando attempted to copyright:

• Using red scarves pulled from the actors’ pockets when they are shot to signify blood

Really?  That’s your copyrightable creative contribution?  Attempting to copyright a stage action that has been done in countless children’s theater productions, such that the number of scarves could stretch from NY to LA?  Hell, I believe that technique was used in the movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead back in 1990.  God knows, of course, how many years, decades, or centuries it has been used prior to that.

• Using the chorus to march and fight in slow motion for comedic purposes.

??? oh, I get it. ha ha.

• Having the supporting actors follow the lead actor upstage and downstage as he delivers an inspirational speech;

???

• Having a dead character speak when his final words are being communicated by a live character;

Oh, you mean, being theatrical?

• Using blue fabric stretched across the stage to symbolize a river;

Like that’s never been done.

• Using a moveable ladder and rowing gestures by actors to indicate characters rowing a boat.

Really?

I would heartily laugh at all of this if it weren’t for the presumption that Rando and his group of half-wits have actually attempted to place this crap in the legal domain and inhibit the production of a work elsewhere in the country.  In fact, as the article points out, Carousel Theater in Akron has gone out of business and who know to what extent this toxic power grab by John Rando contributed to their demise.  The needless, rapacious, voracious, and greedy lawsuit is precisely the sort of putrid sludge that is destroying this country.  I’d wrap myself in a flag and stand silently, but Rando would probably sue me for infringing on one of his stage pictures.

Now is the time when I disclaim.  I know directing is a creative activity.  I know it requires men and women with tireless energy, commitment, and the ability to marshal a tempestuous collection of variables and make them all cohere.  Many is the director I have watched marveling at their political ability with regard to handling tense and tricky situations, their command ability in getting all the variables to listen and move and perform as instructed.  Many is the director I have admired for his perseverance and fortitude in doing a scene over and over and over.  I understand that a good director can make a show or break one.  I know many directors and have found each of them to be warm, charitable, generous, funny people. People that I like being around. However, all THIS BEING SAID, directors are paid to get a script off a page.  As Sevush explicitly pointed out in his talk, directors are hired by producers to do a job.  THE STAGING of the play is THEIR JOB.

Directors (in this case) are members of a Society that PAYS them, including BENEFITS.  They are immune to the risk that writers necessarily have to take (if I write a script and no one produces it, I just spent a year or more with no result for my work). For this director to seek some sort of creative attachment to a work above and beyond that for which he has been justly compensated is flat out rapacious, unwarranted, and delusional.  It demonstrates concretely that the Tony Award and Broadway compensation was not enough: Rando needed to take from each and every future production of the show, even though he has contributed to that future production nothing, 0, zilch.  Sure, you say, but people at Carousel Dinner Theater go to Urinetown to see the Broadway show, which is Rando’s staging.  Perhaps. I might say, instead, that people go to Carousel to see Urinetown as it was created by Mark Hollmann and Greg Kotis–the LEGITIMATE AUTHORS. Rando may have won the Tony, but his interpretation of Urinetown is only possible by his interpretation of what is ALREADY in the SCRIPT.  And any director has the right to re-create that, only limited by his/her ability.

An even more egregious portion of this story is the suggestion that Rando took elements of his production from original director Joseph McDonnell’s New York Fringe production–thus making Rando a hypocrite.  Further, as Sevush points out, the action by the SSDC is so demonstrably selfish on the part of one person (Rando) that it puts other directors in a position where they will have to fight with him regarding the staging of the same play.  Talk about a vision squarely focused on the “me.”

The original copyright application sent in 2006 by Rando’s representatives “were for the sets, lighting, choreography and ‘stage directions’ for Urinetown.”  One must wonder, by this wording, if Rando wasn’t attempting to copyright the already-created stage directions in the script; perhaps even the set descriptions, presuming they’re in the script–which I would assume they would be.  I would also assume, by this application, that Rando was responsible for the scenic design and light design, otherwise he’s stepping on the territory of other creative artists who are associated with theatrical productions.  One must wonder just how much farther along it would have to go before Rando and the SSDC simply asserted that the whole of Urinetown was infact their creation and idea from start to finish!

Thank God, per the opening, the Copyright Office and the Department of Justice stepped in to say, firmly, that stage directions are not copyrightable.

Stage directions ARE NOT copyrightable.

Let’s all say that a few hundred times together.

Unfortunately, the suits in Akron and Chicago were settled.  That is, they didn’t go to court where a judgment could be reached to become firm precedent. Sevush posits and then answers the terribly depressing question: “Why were they settled?”

Sevush: “As anyone who has ever been involved in a law suit knows, litigants with deep pockets can prolong a court case, whether their position has merit or not.  And they can almost always force a litigant without deep pockets to settle a case which has become, quite simply, too expensive to pursue.”

So everyone send a happy thank you letter to John Rando and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers for their embarrassingly unabashed attempt to steal creative content that is not their own, hamstring productions of other people’s work, and for holding up (like highway robbers) productions to which they lay envious claim.

I attended a fantastic Dramatist’s Guild symposium on Saturday, September 20th, at Cleveland Public Theatre.  The symposium was about Censorship in the Theatre and was arranged and coordinated by Faye Sholiton who deserves a tremendous amount of recognition and thanks for her effort in coordinating this event.  The staff of Cleveland Public Theatre are also to be much, much thanked and congratulated for this event which was not only well-attended but of significant importance.

The “headline” guest was Ozen Yula.  For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ozen Yula, he is a playwright from Turkey whose play was not only shut down in Istanbul; but it is entirely likely that he will be the unfortunate recipient of a death threat in his home country.  For clarification, a death threat in Yula’s part of the world is not the same as the run-of-the-mill death threat one might receive in the United States.  In the US you receive a few phone calls, voicemail messages, etc., from some impotent rage-filled couch potatoes who have nothing better to do but stew around in the mess they call their life while attempting to control other people.  In Turkey, on the other hand, your photograph appears in a fundamentalist newspaper where you are listed as being a very bad person and then a few weeks later you turn up dead and your killer is never caught.

Now, Ozen Yula did conceive of and create a fairly provocative play–by some people’s standards: Lick But Don’t Swallow.  The premise is sort of like a distorted It’s a Wonderful Life or perhaps Two of a Kind if you like John Travolta, Olivia Newton John, and screwball comedies; but I digress: an angel is sent back to Earth for 24 hours during which she must save one person.  The catch? The angel is sent back as a porn star.  (Well, no one said it would be easy…)  So, the whole of the play is a male and female porn star, a camera man, and a director.  As the porn stars fuck in various positions, she blathers on about a host of issues: from famine and hunger to violence, etc.  It is clear that Yula has a droll sense of humor and is not a little irreverent.  It is quite ironic in that, given the subject matter and the handling of the content, I don’t know that this play would have a particularly great staying power in the marketplace, funny as it is.  However, now that someone want to ban the play and possibly kill the playwright (Assassination is the extreme form of censorship–George Bernard Shaw), the play will take on a degree of interest and value that it may never have had.  Like so many things, as soon as someone wants to cover it everyone in the world wants to see what is going to be covered.

So, the play was set to go up in Istanbul, Turkey (at the Kumbaraci 50 theater in the Beyoglu district of Istanbul according to Tony Brown) and due to threats, etc., the theater notified the police and asked for some protection.  At this point, the theater was shut down (even though it had just been built) due to concerns about its compliance with fire codes.  As Yula explained, this may have been coded language to remind everyone of the Sivas Massacre in 1993: where 37 intellectuals, artists, and hotel employees were burned to death by a similar breed of fundamentalist nits that continue to infest the globe in 2010.  Yula is scheduled to return to Turkey later this month and God bless him and keep him from the deranged mob that he’s bound eventually to encounter.  This is censorship in its most overt form.

Yula was surprisingly philosophic and calm about the whole thing, saying that his intent is to “hold up a mirror” to his society/culture and hopes to “help through literature” so that the poor (economically) and brainwashed masses in Istanbul can “see their lives”.  This is now his ethic of playwriting.  Yula is clearly intent on doing the same thing here as his play Don’t Call Me Fat is up at Cleveland Public Theatre right now, and addresses the American obsession with eating, obesity, weight loss, and fame–themes that Yula identified in our society by watching television!

There are all sorts of forms of censorship, but the most disturbing sort follows on the heels of the sort described above–the violent type that Yula faces–and this most disturbing type is Self-Censorship.  This form received a great amount of attention during the day as it is the kind that most people face: for a variety of reasons.  The violence that accompanies some sorts of censorship are aimed squarely at the notion of making people shut their mouths and not to say anything in the first place.  As some of us playwrights went off to lunch we joked with each other saying things like, “I want you to just shut your mouth, as my having to censor you requires too much effort” and “the sooner you learn to censor yourself the easier it will be for me.”  Ha ha ha.  But that, of course, is the idea.  The whole of censorship and control aims at ensuring that thinking is controlled and regulated.  Once thoughts get outside of the head, then there is great effort involved in stomping out the ideas that have escaped.  Other forms of censorship include indirect means.  For instance, in 1996 in Mecklenburg County (North Carolina) the Charlotte Repertory Theater was assaulted for putting up a production of Angels in America.  A local religious nit there (we have them in America too, they just kill less frequently now than they used to) objected to the gay themes and no doubt the overtly liberal bias evinced by Kushner’s politics. Because there was no method of overtly closing the production due to these themes, the nit and the Republican mayor decided to go after the production for having nudity in it.  They were unsuccessful at stopping the production, however the Mecklenburg County Commissioners later retaliated by stripping all arts funding from arts organizations in the county ($2.5 million) and continued to retaliate until summarily voted out of office in 1996. Local playwright Eric Coble wrote a play about the events surrounding this insanity entitled Southern Rapture. Other silly forms (but no less frightening in their implications) include such things as changing the advertising for the Vagina Monolgues to the “Hoo-Haa Monologues” as clearly some American’s have no capacity to think about human sexuality or the human body in any manner beyond the level of a second grader.

Other items of note.  During the opening discussion with Ozen Yula, Tony Brown moderated the interview and later a panel, which included Michael Mauldin, Head of the Dramatic Arts Program at Cleveland State University.  Gary Garrison, Executive Director of Creative Affairs for the Dramatists Guild of America talked a bit about how the DGA handles censorship issues.  Later in the afternoon, Raymond Bobgan, Executive Artistic Director for Cleveland Public Theatre gave an update on the Gordon Square Arts District planning/activities.  Later, later in the afternoon there was a panel discussion which included David Faux, Director of Business Affairs at the Dramatists Guild; Ari Roth, Artistic Director of Theater J; and Betty Shamieh, a playwright whose plays have been highly successful in Europe and translated into many languages, but have not been staged in the US, as she sees it, because of their representation of Palestinian families and issues of concern to Arab-Americans.

On the whole, this was an invigorating and exhausting day, and much glory and honor is due to those who arranged for it to happen.