It's a rainy, cold January afternoon in San Francisco and two floors up in the control room of Coates' cavernous performance theater I'm sitting in front of a television screen looking at a tape of his latest work, The Nowhere Band. After a brief run here just a few weeks before, it was assailed by the critics and closed early. But Coates, who's sitting with me, doesn't want to talk about the critics, at least not yet. A short, rotund man of 41 with a full, Puckish face, a goatee, and a mane of gray-blond hair, Coates wants to talk about how the production, besides engaging in some Stoppard -- like intellectual gymnastics about quantum physics -- a topic Coates became fascinated with -- also revealed some of the places where theater and cyberspace can meet.
That meeting point is a locus of the Information Age which in the American theater only Coates has explored in any systematic way. What Coates wants to do, of course, is explore his beloved "alternative dynamic drama," of which he's been a pioneer since the late 1970s. That is drama between what he terms "the impossible and the inevitable." And that, says Coates, competes favorably with all the narratives about the good guys versus the bad guys. "I like to create worlds that exist outside the artificial corporate commercial culture," he says, squinting into the television monitor.
The Nowhere Band had its world premier in Tokyo, Japan last October 6 at the Art Sphere Theater. It began its run at the George Coates Performance Works Theater (GCPW) in San Francisco, of which Coates is the Artistic Director. GCPW is located on McAllister Street in the Civic Center within blocks of the infamous Tenderloin Red Light district. The 300-seat theater is a former neo-Gothic Methodist cathedral originally built in 1929 that was sold to the federal government and in October, 1990, occupied by Coates' company. He renovated it at a total cost of around $2 million -- and still it looks like it needs work. The most striking feature of the interior space is the 85 foot high vaulted arched ceilings.
The control room, which holds dozens of slide projector machines, numerous personal computers, a bevy of Silicon Graphics SGIs, and a souped up Sun Sparc 20 which functions as a server, looks down onto a balcony, the location of some 144 seats, and then onto the main seats.
Coates' publicity release describes The Nowhere Band as being a "music-theater fantasy of a magic bird that teaches people to fly." The story is far more complicated than that of course. The intellectual conceit, hence his nod to Stoppard and Jumpers, taps quantum physics. There is a band and it does perform throughout the production. (Lyrics by Coates, music by his long time collaborator, Marc Ream). The band leader, played by Kurt Reinhardt, has a dream in which a little girl, played by Coates' angelic-looking and amazingly composed five year-old daughter, Gracie, comes back from 10 billion years in the future with a disturbing bit of news: the universe is far older than the experts think and is about to come to an end.
As the band leader grapples with that ordinary bit of existentialist business, the band plays on (mostly conventional rock) and a variety of striking images are projected onto a semi-transparent screen behind the stage. Glasses handed out in the programs, when donned, create a 3-D effect. It is certainly busy. But there isn't much more narrative than that, which I'm sure is what so rankled the local critics. Says Coates, cutting the scribes some slack, yet also defending his effort: "It's unfair to ask critics to use a discursive tool, written words, to decode that quality of nature, quantum reality, which is a causal experience. This is as close as I can get to making the world on a quantum level available to us while we're awake."
Well, not everybody missed such subtleties. "We had a lot of physicists show up," he says with a chuckle.
To anyone even remotely familiar with the Internet, how Coates tapped into cyberspace, both before and during the production, is fascinating -- as to whether it worked as theater is another matter. Coates knew little to nothing about the Net before he began this production, but he learned fast. More importantly, he was completely open to using the Net, live, and on-line, in the performance and finding out how that would yield for his "dynamic drama."
The resident Net expert at GCPW, Mike Hauser, set up a World Wide Web home page (http://www.georgecoats.org) for the company and put out a casting call for people to become on-line members of the band. They got 10,000 hits on the home page the first day. Prospective band members had to play an instrument. One of the first chosen was a man in Adelaide, Australia who just happen to play the Bulgarian bagpipes. That went well with a cast member whom Coates' had planned to sing Vox Bulgaria.
In all, four on-line band members were cast. When the performance begins, it goes on-line via a high-speed T1 line and courtesy of a "CU-SeeMe" video-conferencing technology developed by Cornell University. The on-line band members appear on the large screen chatting with the band leader and then later play their instruments on cue.
There are two technical drawbacks, here, however. First, the limits of bandwidth mean that there's a one second delay in the image, so it appears slow and choppy. Sound also doesn't transmit well over the Net, so their voices, and music, had to be piped in over a telephone hook-up and amplified into the theater.
Still, the appearance of all four faces up on the screen, when linked with the notion that this space on the stage has become a part of that space, namely cyberspace, is somewhat arresting. But a notion doesn't always work as theater. Still, there's no question that for Coates the process of getting there and being there is worthwhile. And where is there? Nowhere, of course. "They exist in places that aren't really there," he explains. Hence, the title of the production, The Nowhere Band.
More gymnastics? Yes, in a sense. The band is clearly there. Indeed, by putting four of its members on-line and projecting their images, what Coates has done is expand our notion of the meaning of space rather than deconstruct it enough to warrant the label "nowhere." Which is what the Net is about, after all. Anyone who's been out there enough browsing the Web experiences a feeling of expanded horizon, not a sense of indefinite, let alone erased, location.
But Coates doesn't let the conversation wander too far in that direction. He's sensitive to the charge that he's merely playing with a new technology for the sake of showing that he knows how to use it -- that it has no real reason for being in theater. Coates never forgets that he's a dramatist. "These are tools as extensions of human desire, of character," he says. "I've always been expanding the tool pool for my characters to search with. I started with human bodies and sticks and we were amazed and full of wonder about that, then it was using light with cages and fences and screens and creating interference patterns. It's the manipulation of geometric space."
Coates' dramatist roots run deep. His mother sang for the USO during World War II. Born in Philadelphia and raised in Rhode Island, Coates quit high school, then studied acting in New York and in 1969 moved to California. He was drafted for the Vietnam war in 1972 but refused to go. Instead, he joined the National Shakespeare Company and then later the Blake Street Hawkeyes, a Bay Area legend in experimental theater -- and that was before Whoopi Goldberg joined the troupe.
His last acting job was with the Magic Theater in 1979. At that time, Coates turned to directing. He claims to have started doing multimedia shows as early as 1977, but it wasn't until his 1980 The Way of How that he put himself on the theater map. That show toured the world. It's been a long, slow, but certain movement to ever more advanced and interesting technology ever since. Are/Are was followed by Seehear, Rare Area, and in 1988, Actual Sho, a large-scale music-theater production that performed at the Kennedy Center Opera House in Washington D.C. and to sold out houses around the world. The Village Voice talked both about its "brilliance" and its "delirium."
In 1989, Coates, realized that there was something inevitable, for him at least, about working with computers. He formed the SMARTS program, or Science Meets the Arts, as a way to bring together cutting-edge computer science and avant-garde performing arts. Another way to look at SMARTS, albeit a tad cynical, is to see it as a vehicle by which to get high-tech companies to donate their equipment and money for Coates to use in his productions. Seen in those terms, Coates has been enormously successful. He gets their toys, free of charge, to stretch and fulfill his artistic vision, and they get a) patron status in the arts community and b) to feel less like nerds.
NASA Ames, Apple Computer, Inc., Intel Corp., and Silicon Graphics, amongst many other high-tech firms, have all been involved with his company. In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Coates a $175,000 challenge grant for SMARTS, followed by $210,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and $150,000 from the James Irvine Foundation.
With that kind of technological firepower behind him, Coates' productions quickly found the media spotlight. Right Mind at Performance Works (1989) and the Architecture of Catastrophic Change (1990), both seemed to prepare him for Invisible Site which showed first at the SIGGRAPH '91 graphics convention, and a year later as the Virtual Sho at his San Francisco Theater.
With Virtual Sho, Coates seemed to be engaged in a struggle to reconcile man and machine. His prior productions were criticized for having something of a "cold canvas" which suggests that character had lost ground to technological marvel. With Virtual Sho, however, it was clear that he knew he had to resuscitate character, and was lauded for it by the critics.
In 1993, he stepped further in that direction with Box Conspiracy: An Interactive Sho, a satirical send-up of one family's life with interactive television in a futuristic age of 5,000 channels and the fully wired world. This nod to conventional theater paid off at the box office -- and slightly ticked off some of his corporate sponsors who don't look kindly at such cynicism.
It might seem odd, therefore, for Coates to follow-up with the far less accessible Nowhere Band. Not to him. "Instead of churning out five shows a year with a four week rehearsal period for each, and the hope that at least one will be successful and pay for the four flops, I put all my revenues into one production and rehearse for four months to ensure that it is the most developed piece of work I can stage."
Coates looks at his watch. Throughout the interview a tape of The Nowhere Band has been playing on the television. (By the way, he won't send out tapes. He insists you have to see it to get the full, and correct, impact.) Three hours have passed. It's 5:30.
"I've got to go," he blurts, standing up and examining his watch. "I've got to write a scene in half an hour for a meeting at 6."
He was half way out the door when I told him that our daughters have the same name -- Grace -- and are about the same age. "There's a lot of history in that name. Grace Jones, Grace Slick. . ."
Spoken like a true entertainer.