the week of june 7 - 11, 2021
the summer of scam
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this week in scams: pioneer theatre & christopher massimine, or a stephen glass of our own
The Salt Lake Tribune reported earlier this week that Pioneer Theatre managing director Christopher Massimine exaggerated or fabricated large portions of his résumé. (As of Friday morning, Massimine was still employed and on “approved personal leave”, but Pioneer named development director Diane Parisi as “acting managing director”.)
An investigation by Adam Herbets with local news outlet Fox 13 revealed the following:
Massimine claimed to hold a bachelor’s & master’s from NYU; Fox 13 confirmed “in under five minutes” that he never received a graduate degree.
His résumé also lists sprawling advertising, television, gaming, and film credits, from leading award-winning Old Spice, Coca-Cola, and KFC campaigns, producing Jersey Shore and a Paris Hilton reality show, and developing high-profile video games in the Resident Evil and Final Fantasy series. These are all false or can’t be confirmed.
Massimine allegedly received the 2019 Humanitarian of the Year Award from the “National Performing Arts Action Association”, an organization that doesn’t exist.
This one’s my personal fave: Massimine claims he received an “honorary key to the city from DC” in 2020. (The last person to receive one was actually DC native Dave Chappelle in 2017.) Massimine used public university funds to pay for a trip to DC to receive this honor.
He also commissioned several pay-to-publish articles and “executive interviews” to self-promote himself as a “thought leader” and back up his résumé. (I want to note that these online outlets — notably GrindSuccess and Influencive — sound like fake websites on Law & Order: SVU but unlike Massimine’s credits, they are real.)
The University of Utah confirmed it hired well-known firm Management Consultants for the Arts to identify potential candidates and perform background checks during its 2019 search. MCA was paid $35,928 for these services — a real waste of money that could’ve been given to me, a person who does more rigorous research on her Tinder dates. (Give me a man’s first name and a vague job title and I can be three years deep in his ex-wife’s Instagram in under ten minutes.)
After gleefully devouring this news on Monday, I revisited Jia Tolentino’s essay “The Story of a Generation in Seven Scams” from her 2019 collection Trick Mirror, which charts the rise of scamming as the definitive millennial ethos, and explains why we love to freebase stories about con artists:
“[Scammers] can be reconfigured as a uniquely American folk hero—a logical endpoint of our national fixation on reinvention and spectacular ascent. Stories about blatant con artists allow us to have the scam both ways: we get the pleasure of seeing the scammer exposed and humiliated, but also the retrospective, vicarious thrill of watching the scammer take people for a ride. The blatant scammers make scamming seem simultaneously glorious and unsustainable.” (Trick Mirror, p. 182)
The theatre industry is also in the midst of a sea change — the regional theatre game of thrones, the financial ramifications of a year-plus shutdown, the calls for anti-racist action and accountability — creating ideal conditions for scammers. Maria Konnikova writes about this state of vulnerability in her book The Confidence Game:
“Cons thrive in times of transition and fast change, when new things are happening and old ways of looking at the world no longer suffice. That’s why they flourished during the gold rush and spread with manic fury in the days of westward expansion. That’s why they thrive during revolutions, wars, and political upheavals. Transition is the confidence game’s great ally, because transition breeds uncertainty. There’s nothing a con artist likes better than exploiting the sense of unease we feel when it appears that the world as we know it is about to change. We may cling cautiously to the past, but we also find ourselves open to things that are new and not quite expected.” (The Confidence Game, p. 9)
Scamming is an American artform, with its own echelon of the celebrity. Recent high-profile grifters — Fyre Festival, Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey, The Real Desperate Housewives of the college admissions scandal, all of Silicon Valley, and the Trump presidency — and the competing podcasts, prestige films, miniseries, and bestselling books documenting their crash and burn dominate the media landscape.
Massimine’s exploits don’t reach the high-octane heights of Fyre Fest, or the audacious fraud of Holmes. It’s a familiar story: white man fails upward into a 200K salary and leadership role, assisted by corporate incompetence and a résumé woven out of red flags. But Massimine’s rise and fall also illuminates the grim reality of organizational power structures in theatre, and how, as Tolentino says, “scammers are always safest at the top.”
online & audio theatre
Native Voices at the Autry’s Festival of New Plays starts streaming June 15th at 5PM PDT. The first reading, K’kali by June Thiele (Athabascan/Yup’ik), is “a magical modern tale of a queer Indigenous artist who wrestles with her culture, identity, relationships...and perhaps a real-life monster.”
Warehouse Theatre in South Carolina premieres Long Story Short: 9 Short Plays from the Longest Year of Our Lives from June 11-14. The nine commissioned pieces were written by Marco Ramirez, Kristoffer Diaz, Bekah Brunstetter, Dorothy Fortenberry, Cammi Stilwell, Paul Grellong, Janine Salinas Schoenberg, Donald Jolly, and Avery Sharpe.
JuCoby Johnson’s short audio play Revelations premieres June 13th from Playing On Air. The Goldie E. Patrick-directed play follows a Black trans woman (one of my favorite DC artists: Lady Dane Figueroa Edidi) returning to her hometown of Minneapolis during the summer of 2020 to reconnect with her father (John Douglas Thompson).
2021-22 season updates
The O’Neill Theater Center announced its in-person and virtual line-ups. Playwrights Conference developmental projects include Nick Malakhow’s Affinity Lunch Minutes; Keiko Green’s Exotic Deadly: Or the MSG Play; Carla Ching’s Revenge Porn, or The Story of a Body; and Dave Harris’ Watch Me.
The Alliance announced its 2021-22 season. The Atlanta theatre’s line-up includes Phillip DePoy and Kristian Bush’s new musical Darlin' Cory (directed by Susan V. Booth), Lydia R. Diamond's Toni Stone, the world premiere of Lloyd Suh’s Bina's Six Apples, and the world premiere of Kendeda winner Eliana Pipes’ Dream Hou$e.
The Guthrie announced its 2021-22 season. The season includes the national tour of Heidi Schreck’s What the Constitution Means to Me (directed by Oliver Butler), Lavina Jadhwani’s adaptation of A Christmas Carol, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun (directed by Austene Van), The Tempest (directed by Joe Dowling), Lynn Nottage’s Sweat, and Kate Hamill’s adaptation of Emma (directed by Meredith McDonough).
The Goodman announced its 2021-22 season. The line-up includes José Cruz González’s American Mariachi (directed by Henry Godinez); August Wilson’s Gem of the Ocean (directed by Chuck Smith); Christina Anderson’s the ripple, the wave that carried me home (directed by Miranda Haymon); Doug Wright’s Good Night, Oscar (directed by Lisa Peterson); Adam Rapp and Jamestown Revival’s musical The Outsiders (directed by Liesl Tommy); Cheryl L. West’s Fannie, The Music and Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (directed by Godinez); Mary Zimmerman’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci; and Jocelyn Bioh’s School Girls (directed by Lili-Anne Brown).
Boston’s SpeakEasy Theatre announced its 2021-22 season. Projects include Adam Rapp’s The Sound Inside (directed by Bryn Boice), Aziza Barnes’ BLKS, Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things (directed by David R. Gammons), the musical Once on This Island (directed by Pascale Florestal), and Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance (directed by Paul Daigneault).
A.R.T. announced its 2021-22 season. The season includes tap dancer Ayodele Casel’s Chasing Magic (directed by Torya Beard); the world premiere of Whitney White’s Macbeth in Stride, the first installment of White’s five-part commissioned series excavating Shakespeare’s women (co-directed by Tyler Dobrowsky and Taibi Magar); Silkroad Ensemble’s Phoenix Rising; the world premiere of the music theatre experience Ocean Filibuster (created by PearlDamour, written by Lisa D’Amour with music by Sxip Shirey and direction by Katie Pearl); the Broadway-bound revival of 1776; and the world premiere of The Arboretum Experience, created by playwright Kirsten Greenidge, musician Tim Hall, choreographer Jill Johnson, and director Summer L. Williams.
NYTW announced its 2021-22 season and select projects for 2022-23. The upcoming season includes Whitney White’s filmed theatrical experience Semblance, Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City (directed by Rebecca Frecknall), a new project from Kristina Wong (directed by Chay Yew), the world premiere of Aleshea Harris’ On Sugarland (directed by Whitney White), and Somi Kakoma’s Dreaming Zenzile (directed by Lileana Blain-Cruz). 2022-23 plans include Clare Barron’s adaptation of Three Sisters (directed by Sam Gold); Victor I. Cazares’ american (tele)visions (directed by Rubén Polendo); Liliana Padilla’s How to Defend Yourself (co-directed by Rachel Chavkin, Padilla, and Steph Paul); and Inua Ellams’ The Half-God of Rainfall.
(Every time I see a new Whitney White project announcement, I think, “Hell yes” and also, “Does this person ever sleep?”)
