Letter to the Editor - Does "Scoundrels" Offend?

Posted by Bruce Miller
In this morning's Times-Dispatch, under the headline "Mocking the disabled isn't funny," a gentleman named Miles F. Johnson wrote a thoughtful letter, excerpted below:
"I saw Dirty Rotten Scoundrels now playing at Barksdale's Empire Theater and wonder if I saw the same show the reviewer, Julinda Lewis, did. She wrote in the Times-Dispatch, 'I laughed so hard and so often during this musical comedy that my face hurt.'

Personally, I found the scene regarding brother Rubrecht to be offensive. Scott Wichmann portrays a man who is mentally and physically challenged. The word 'chromosome' is used in the dialogue, suggesting that Ruprecht's problems are congenital. Anyone with such challenges is not funny and certainly not a subject for laughter. The authors, by including this scene, exhibited total insensitivity regarding these challenged folks and their families.

I know this is a musical comedy, but expecting the audience to laugh at Ruprecht is, well, inappropriate. Am I a stick-in-the-mud? A wet blanket? Does grouchy, old curmudgeon come to mind? Perhaps, but when you see the show, ask yourself: 'Is the character, Ruprecht, really funny?' Think about it.

Miles F. Johnson
Richmond"

This letter struck a chord with me. My first "career" was in special education. For four summers in high school and college, it was my privilege to work at Camp Baker for developmentally disabled children and young adults. I began as a junior counselor, then a senior counselor, then creative arts director, then assistant camp director. During each of those summers, I lived for ten weeks with some of the most loving, creative, inspiring individuals I'll ever know. It's not an exaggeration to say that those summers changed my life.

Later, I worked for a year as a teacher at the Developmental Training Center. The reason I left Special Ed as a career was that I was unable to distance myself appropriately from the children and young adults in my care. I took all of their challenges home with me. I wanted to solve problems I couldn't solve; offer cures and corrections when none were available. The pressure wasn't healthy for me.

When I read Mr Johnson's letter, I thought it was appropriate and represented a thoughtful and reasonable point of view. I didn't think he was a "grouchy old curmudgeon"--the phrase he uses. I thought he was a loving, thoughtful advocate. Clearly we hurt his feelings with our production, and I deeply regret that. I take his criticism to heart and thank him for it. He makes an excellent point, and I'm sure he is not alone in feeling the way he does. God bless all loving, thoughtful advocates. I hope I'm one of them.

Having said that, I think there is another point of view that is equally valid. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is about two con men, one skilled and one ridiculous, who do any and everything in the course of 2 1/2 hours to achieve their dastardly, silly ends. It is clearly a comedy without a serious bone in its body. The musical does not ask nor expect the audience to laugh at a disabled person. In fact, Scott Wichmann does NOT portray "a man who is mentally and physically challenged." Scotty portrays a dirty, rotten con man who pretends to be "a man who is mentally and physically challenged."


I'm not trying to split hairs. I'm trying to explain why I and, I believe, most people feel comfortable with Dirty Rotten Scoundrels--why we don't feel like we're laughing at people with disabilities.The musical asks the audience to laugh at the two central flim flam men, both of whom are occasionally tasteless, crude, insulting and inept as they go about their business of conning women out of money. It doesn't give away anything substantive to say that at various points, one of the two antiheroes pretends to be a wheelchair-bound veteran, an Irish priest, a royal prince, a sadistic Austrian psychiatrist, a Spanish real estate tycoon, a mute, a psychologically damaged contestant in a nationally televised dance contest, and, yes, a wacky, misfit brother.

The brother, Ruprecht, is not referred to as "disabled." He is described in song as follows:

Every royal family, by its nature,
Has a sort of price that it must pay.
Every noble lineage has
One loose gene-
Small as a molecule,
Flitting 'round the family pool.

It's the sort of thing
One sees in Appalachia
Or in the odd inbred bichon frise.
It really can be such a
Nasty stain on the escutcheon
When a wisp of DNA
Begins to fray, then goes astray.

Caligula had the tempre,
The Hapburgs had the chin.
George the Third went cuckoo-bird
And Nero had that violin.
Richard, you'll remember,
Had the hump and the withered limb.
The Bushes of Tex
Were nervous wrecks
Because their son was dim.
But look what happened to him.

Alas, our family also carries a bit of a curse.
But darling, it could be a great deal worse.

Ruprecht is a character that the other characters make up. He exists only as part of a scam. The characters in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels offend everyone in sight. That's part of what makes them dirty and rotten. It's their outrageousness that is funny, NOT the people they offend.

One could argue persuasively that the current style of comedy trends purposefully toward the irreverent (think Jon Stewart, South Park, The Book of Mormon, Spamalot, Avenue Q, etc). Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is clearly in sync with that trend.

When our production offends kind, thoughtful men like Miles Johnson, I'm very sorry. But it is not our intent to offend. We're offering a light summer comedy, crude and tasteless as some of the characters may be. Most audiences are laughing their hindquarters off, as mentioned in our five rave reviews.

Last year we produced The Sound of Music; this coming Christmas we'll be doing My Fair Lady. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels is not one of these classic American musicals. It adds a welcome variety to what we do. It's contemporary and silly. It is also, arguably, fresh and funny.

We hope all audience members will enjoy the show in the spirit that it is written and presented.

--Bruce Miller

Legislators Propose Elimination of Arts Funding

Posted by Bruce Miller
I'm absolutely heartsick about today's news from the House Appropriations Committee. Here's a letter I've written to the T-D. I have no idea if it will run, so I'm printing it again here. PLEASE fax or call your legislators ASAP. Legislator contact information can be found on the web at http://legis.virginia.gov/1_cit_guide/contacting_my.html.

Editor - Times-Dispatch:

The House Appropriations Committee is proposing the elimination of the Virginia Commission for the Arts. I have been the artistic director of Theatre IV, The Children's Theatre of Virginia, for the last 35 years. In an effort to create significant cost efficiencies, the staff of Theatre IV also has managed Barksdale Theatre for the last 8 1/2 years.

As a nonprofit administrator, I have always been trained to speak publicly only of success. With regard to this new proposal, it would be irresponsible for me to pretend optimism when I know first-hand the certain disaster that will follow the passage of such misguided legislation.

Every day, Theatre IV and Barksdale, two of our state's most exemplary nonprofits, deal with the fact that Virginia historically and consistently funds the arts at a level lower than any state in our region. We continue to serve over 600,000 Virginians annually, despite the fact that the legislature eliminated direct funding of arts organizations four years ago, and over the last two years has already reduced indirect funding (through the Virginia Commission for the Arts) by 30%.

In the last 16 months, Theatre IV and Barksdale have eliminated 6 positions and have plans to eliminate 2 more (20% of our lean work force). We have reduced salaries by up to 17%, cancelled company contributions to retirement plans, and increased the percentage of health insurance premiums that must be paid by the employee. To adjust to the eliminated positions, many on our staff work 80-hour work weeks just to keep our nonprofit companies alive.

The elimination of state funding to the Virginia Commission for the Arts will cost Theatre IV and Barksdale Theatre an additional $190,000 per year. That will mean the elimination of seven more jobs. Despite all our best efforts, we will not be able to operate under these conditions.

What the House Appropriations Committee is proposing is the elimination of the nonprofit arts infrastructure that tens of thousands of hard-working Virginians have taken decades to build. Hundreds of jobs will be lost. The economic repercussions will not be positive; they will be disastrous.

To avoid causing lasting harm to economic development, education, tourism and quality of life, please ask your legislators to oppose the current proposal of the House Appropriations Committee.

Sincerely,
Bruce Miller
Artistic Director, Theatre IV and Barksdale Theatre

Standing Up for the VCA

Posted by Bruce Miller
This morning's Times-Dispatch contains a regrettable editorial. At the top of the column on the left of the Editorial Page, under the heading "State Budget - Hard Times," the scribes at the T-D outline Virginia's currently woeful budget projections (a direct effect of our nation's recession). In response to these financial challenges, the editors write:

"Spending cuts are problematic: Much of the (Virginia) budget is driven by mandates and necessity. But there are agencies whose functions are not crucial to the commonwealth. Some possibilities:

--The Virginia Tourism Authority;
--The Virginia Economic Development Partnership;
--The Virginia Department of Business Assistance;
--The Virginia Department of Minority Business Enterprise;
--The Virginia Commission for the Arts;
--The Virginia Cooperative Extension and Agricultural Experiment Station;
--Assorted museums."

I'll let others speak for the agencies they know about. I cannot fail to step forward for the Virginia Commission for the Arts. I know first hand how well this agency is managed, and what vital and essential support it provides to all the nonprofit arts organizations in Virginia.

What frustrates me the most is that these misguided words from the editors of the T-D come after a year in which all of Virginia's Non-State Agency Funding was eliminated entirely. Non-State Agency Funding is the political pork that was traditionally awarded to arts organizations and other nonprofits above and beyond the objective funding of the VCA. Eliminating Non-State Agency Funding reduced total arts support in Virginia by hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Barksdale and Theatre IV received a total of $45,000 in Non-State Agency funding in 2006-07, and $0 from the same pot in 2007-08.)

Cuts of this size are devastating, even for a nonprofit organization of our size. It's not like we have $45,000 sitting around unused. Exacting additional cuts to our and other's VCA funding seems unthinkable to me. I believe it would be exceedingly reckless--perhaps even life-threatening to many nonprofit organizations.

Currently Barksdale and Theatre IV each receive $112,500 annually from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, representing about 2.5% of our overall budgets. Our two nonprofit organizations currently receive $44,455 from the Greater Richmond Consortium, which allocates support from the localities of Richmond, Chesterfield, Henrico and Hanover, representing considerably less than one percent of our overall budgets.

For the sake of comparison, let's look at our neighboring state of Maryland. In the Old Line State, major nonprofit arts organizations expect to receive approximately 7.5% of their budget from the state, and an additional 7.5% of their budget from local governments. If Barksdale and Theatre IV were located in the Baltimore area instead of in Richmond, our public funding would equal approximately $750,000 per year, or roughly $480,000 more that we currently receive in public funding from the Greater Richmond localities and the state of Virginia.

All the other nonprofit theatres in town fare worse than we do in terms of actual dollars received in public support, but, in most cases, better than we do in terms of the percentage of their budget that is covered by public funds.

One of my favorite Theatre IV Board members, Phyllis Galanti, has an email address that begins with "NoWhining." I'm ashamed to admit that I can be an inveterate whiner, and so I keep Phyllis's email address hanging above my desk, just to remind me to keep a stiff, and frequently buttoned, upper lip.

But I believe that editorials like the one that appeared this morning do the public an injustice by suggesting that the activities of the Virginia Commission for the Arts, and, by extension, the work of all of Virginia's artists, are not "crucial" to the people of Virginia. Trying not to whine, but nonetheless determined to present forthrightly the facts of the matter, I've written the following Letter to the Editor. The letter may or may not make it into the venerable T-D, but I think it's important for all of us who love the arts to know the facts and fight for the survival of essential, objective arts funding in the Virginia budget.

Editor, Times-Dispatch:

Like you, I believe Virginia’s “hard times require hard choices.” They also require informed thinking. In your discussion of possible budget cuts, you list the Virginia Commission for the Arts as an agency “whose functions are not crucial to the commonwealth.” I disagree. For the people of Virginia, the VCA is not only crucial, it’s a conservative investment.

The Virginia taxpayer contributes only 81 cents per capita to the VCA, making Virginia 33rd in the nation in terms of state arts appropriations. This taxpayer support earns for our state $719,000 in matching funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. With these limited resources, the VCA provided essential funding in 2007-08 to 743 grantees, sustaining over 500 nonprofit arts groups and bringing arts education to 3.3 million Virginia students. In 2000, an independent study found that the economic impact of the arts in Virginia exceeded $1 billion per year.

Not everyone enjoys theater, music, dance, the visual and/or literary arts. But those who don’t appreciate the value of the arts must not be doing the math. The arts build community. They also attract major corporations to Virginia; provide thousands of jobs; make possible Virginia’s principal child sexual abuse prevention effort; bring free-of-charge smiles to legions of Alzheimer’s patients; enhance the instruction of science, math, English and social studies in our schools; and infuse the Virginia economy with millions of dollars from out-of-state touring.

Because of historically low funding, Virginia’s arts industry has been in a precarious state for decades. Like parks and libraries, arts organizations are irreplaceable threads in the fabric of a healthy commonwealth. Cutting funding for the VCA would not help balance Virginia’s budget. It would decrease overall revenues and make Virginia’s financial challenges even worse.

Bruce Miller
Artistic Director, Theatre IV and Barksdale Theatre

I hope all of you will join me in standing up for the Virginia Commission for the Arts. I'm not engaging in hyperbole when I say that, should the state decide to make additional cuts to the VCA, many nonprofit organizations, including Barksdale Theatre and Theatre IV, would find it difficult to survive.

--Bruce Miller