I am on a plane flying home from two concert gigs in Texas. We played Houston first and then with a travel day in between we did another one in Richardson. Richardson is north of Dallas and, within a very short time given the current growth, it is just going to become part of Dallas.
We end up playing in all sorts of places that make me think, “uh-ho…” Anytime we venture into the South or, indeed, into Texas, my first thought is always to worry about how red it’s going to be.
The truth of the matter is that we always play cities of a certain size for an audience largely of fans who know who Patti LuPone is and are aware of her leftist politics. People who attend Broadway series concerts tend to be educated and they tend to have some money. Even in the deepest red states, urban areas lean further to the left than they do in rural areas. It might be because many of the issues facing us as a society are easier to see in their most concentrated forms in a densely populated area.
I played Houston back in the 90s during my Phantom of the Opera touring days. We were there for some months during the height of summer. When I say it was hot, I mean that it was HOT. Temperatures routinely rose to over 100 degrees. I am not sure I have experienced humidity before or since that could match it. Walking outside every day, was like being hit in the face with a hot wet washcloth.
You would never know that Houston was a thriving metropolis by walking the streets. There are some stores and offices at ground level, but for the most part the place seems deserted. Venture down a staircase, though, and suddenly you are in a maze of tunnels rife with stores, restaurants, and doctors’ offices. The city’s downtown is completely connected underground. It’s not as crowded down there now as it was before the pandemic, but it’s still buzzing.
Montreal has a system just like it, but instead of the heat, they try to avoid the cold. For the same reason, you can get anywhere in downtown Minneapolis without ever going outdoors. Everything there is tied together by a web of above-ground walkways stretching between buildings.
When I go to a new city, wherever I am, I look for graffiti and street art. If you want to know what people in a place are thinking you look at what they feel compelled to scribble or post anonymously on a wall. That’s how the voiceless make themselves heard.
Walking through Houston on the day we got there, everything I saw that had been painted or glued along the streets was left-leaning. There were huge painted mural portraits of the Obamas and Civil Rights leaders. Other artwork simply urged people to vote. The comments I saw on stickers and the Sharpie remarks on light poles were decidedly un-Republican.
Houston is a strange city in that the rich and poor seem to live next door to each other rather than in separate communities. There is an extremely well-endowed museum called the Menil Collection that has a remarkable trove of art. I took a walk to the museum from the hotel we were staying in, which happened to be the Four Seasons. We tend to live well on the road.
It was about a two-mile trek anchored on both ends by bastions of money. Between those two wealthy points were more homeless people than I have ever seen in one place before – including in the Tenderloin in San Francisco.
Modern multi-million-dollar homes enclosed by steel fencing stand next door to abandoned boarded-up buildings that could be meth labs. There would be a short stretch of money, then another short stretch of extreme poverty, followed by a little area that looked comfortably middle class.
They all seem to have figured out how to live together despite the disparity. It can’t always be peaceful. While there are no underground passageways when you get beyond the radius of central downtown, I still didn’t see anyone of means out walking. My guess is that the rich get into their cars, open their gates, and drive out, and shut the gates behind them.
Dallas, on the other hand, is not mixed up in that way. Downtown is all steel, glass, and concrete. It is rolling in cash. Wherever the impoverished are, I didn’t see them. We stayed in a luxury resort kind of place just north of downtown. I saw no graffiti anywhere. It didn’t look as if any of the people there had anything to complain about. I am sure that there must be areas that look less gleamingly brand-new, but we never got to those. Instead, we were surrounded by shiny, uncalloused comfortable white people who looked as if they’d never been outside in their lives.
They all looked Republican.
To be fair, they all looked like old-school Republicans. The people my friends and I used to be able to have debates with and eventually agree to disagree. Nobody we encountered in Dallas was wearing a red hat or, indeed, looked as if they’d ever consider owning one. They all seemed perfectly happy getting sloppy drunk in the non-descript bars from the drinks they were being served by people of color.
Disparaging someone for their party affiliation has become the new racism. Not that the old racism has gone away, but this new version of it has sprung up. The right and the left disparage each other these days with the same casual dismissiveness that my grandparents’ neighbors in Virginia used to use towards anyone who wasn’t of Northern European ancestry. I am as guilty of it as anyone.
I think if anyone could truly explain to me why a whole political party can so blithely embrace the chaos, greed, and pathologies of the various people they promote, then maybe I would be less likely to engage in the bashing. As it is, I cannot see past the hypocrisy of the millions of people who seem hell-bent on tearing our political norms to shreds. If I thought they were fighting FOR something, maybe it would be better. At least they’d be driven by something. As it is, all I see is their desire for wanton destruction without a plan.
In my experience, most of the people we’ve encountered in theatres across the country have been left-leaning liberals. The redder the state is that they live in, the further left they seem to go. Not all of them, mind you. There are always a few sullen older crew members everywhere we go that I immediately sense I shouldn’t get into a political discussion with. For the most part, though, those in charge seem to know why they are there: hat-making as in, “Look, I made a hat.”
There are far easier ways to make a living. If you’re running a theatre, you’re working hard. You’re often thanklessly toiling away simply to tell stories that try to expand our understanding of who we are and what it is to be human.
I don’t know of many institutions across the country dedicated to artistically exploring the issues of the right. Certainly, if you venture into, say, Branson, Missouri, and places like that, you’re going to end up encountering some purely Christian theatres. For a lark once, a group of friends and I went to a huge multi-million-dollar extravaganza in Branson about Jonah and the Whale complete with the Lord’s Prayer as an overture. As remarkable as the technical wizardry surrounding the whale was, we only made it to intermission.
Those places are the exceptions, though. For the most part, theatre attracts those of us who, in life, have been “other” in some way. Whatever that may be has made us all run off and join the circus looking for a place to belong. We are a community of people of all shapes and colors and sizes, who, at heart, are fundamentally the same. I would venture to say that the more conservative and repressive one’s background is, the harder it must be to break away from that to live a life in the arts. If anything, the lefties I’ve met working in the reddest of states might be even further to the left than I am.
You can’t judge all Russians by Putin. You can’t judge all Palestinians by Hamas. You can’t judge all Israelis by Netanyahu. You can’t judge all Americans by our former president. You can’t judge everyone in a red state by whatever idiot their neighbors have chosen to send to Congress. We have a say in our governments but when you get right down to it, we are not our governments.
To be a politician means learning how to compromise. You take two steps back to take one bigger step forward. A good politician, like our current president knows how to work the system to get legislation passed. A bad politician like Marjorie Taylor Greene only knows how to throw a sledgehammer into the machinery and bring it all to a halt.
There must be people in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district in Alabama who are completely mortified by her. Do they pretend they’re from somewhere else? When we were traveling overseas during our last President’s term in office, we used to say we were Canadian just to avoid the discussions. How many people have I met in all my travels who have misrepresented where they are from for fear of being judged based on their elected officials?
Near the Menil Collection in Houston is a very small chapel that was designed in the 1970s by a team of well-known architects. I had been there once before during my Phantom run, and I wanted to see it again. Outside it doesn’t look like much of anything at all. It is a light-colored brick multi-sided building with no windows and a plain black door.
Inside, it is one of the most peaceful places I have ever sat in. The octagonal walls are plain unpainted cement. Rough wooden benches are arranged around the center and a central spire lets light in through white geometrical slats. On each grey wall is a Rothko painting.
Instead of his usual paintings with their vast fields of oranges and reds, these are all a deep charcoal black. The more you look at them the more texture and depth you see. None are the same. They draw you in. Each of them is like a whole cosmos unto themselves.
The room is not just quiet, it’s tomb-like. Entering, it feels like you are suddenly wearing noise-cancelling headphones. The real world becomes a distant muffled place, and you float endlessly between Rothko’s various eternities.
Outside, there are people fighting for their lives and people who are wondering whether they should have another drink. People fight. And argue. And hurt each other. Democrats and Republicans keep digging their heels ever deeper into their home turfs.
Inside, there is just silence and infinity.
I like Houston. For better or for worse, it feels like a real place. Dallas doesn’t seem like anywhere at all. Houston has what life has – high highs and low lows. It’s worn and frayed and has been well lived in. Some of it is just plain falling apart. Dallas, on the other hand, has cleaned everything up, blunted the extremes, and renovated itself into a pristine cold uniform blandness.
In either case, the people in both places are like people anywhere. Some are good, some maybe not so much. Some are smart and empathetic, and some, maybe not so much at all.
I need to remember to stop making assumptions about the people I’m about to visit. I’m almost always dead wrong. There are always people everywhere, even in the least likely places, standing up for what they believe in and fighting the good fight. A very good place to find those people is inside the walls of a theatre.
Ever since I’ve been old enough to choose where I want to live, I’ve ended up in places where the people who think like me are in the majority. I’ve gone into a business that’s accepted me for who I am and even celebrated some of the parts of me that might have kept me back in the greater world at large. In some ways, I’ve probably taken the easy way out.
I’m not brave enough to move to Texas to add my voice to the struggling minority, but I sometimes wish I was. That takes some courage. “Though she be but little she is fierce,” as Helena says of Hermione in Midsummer.
Before we dismiss the folk living in places with lousy leadership, it might be good to know that among them is a whole army of fierce little people fighting for what they believe in by simply carrying on.
We aren’t booked into anywhere red for a while. When we are, I’ll need to remember that.
It is 25+ years since I was last in Houston. I never knew about the tunnel system. All I saw of it was a growth that made Los Angeles look as centralized as San Francisco.