Category Archives: New York Times

A comfortable night at the theatre with the New York Times

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Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

Ben Brantley of The New York Times.

From Ben Brantley’s “The Joys of Feel-Bad Drama,” in today’s New York Times:

Still, more than three decades after it was written, [Wallace Shawn's] Marie and Bruce …  continues to make many people recoil. And that’s because it is the opposite of a feel-good play. It’s a feel-bad play. That means it lacks the emotionally redemptive features of other works with similarly bleak worldviews: the catharsis of classical tragedy, or the outsized, blazing pessimism of Strindberg’s plays of marital warfare or the exquisite, compassionate lyricism of Chekhov and Tennessee Williams’s melancholy dramas. …

Similarly, we still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style. If you’re going to say something nasty, or flout taboos, say it with satire or poetry or larger-than-life passion. The Book of Mormon, this season’s hot-ticket Broadway show, makes fun not just of Mormonism but pretty much all religions, and it has a relentlessly foul mouth. But it is also a classic feel-good musical. Even the dark, violent Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, Rajiv Joseph’s new play about the war in Iraq, uses the artifice of comedy to keep us at a distance.

The last show at which I sensed the kind of unease I felt among the audience of Marie and Bruce was the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted several years ago. This British drama imagines an England in the grip of an internecine, nobody-wins civil war (inspired by accounts of the Balkan wars), and everybody in it behaves about as badly as people can. Unlike Marie and Bruce, Blasted is a shocker. It features acts of rape and mutilation. But it shares with Mr. Shawn’s play a hopeless view of humanity that goes way beyond cynicism. …

At a time in the theater when anything goes (to borrow the title of an old comfort-making musical now being revived on Broadway), making audiences squirm isn’t easy — and perhaps not even desirable. …

Brantley may be offering that last clause (emphasis added by myself, by the way) as a rhetorical gesture to spur further conversation. Or perhaps not; it is hard to tell whether Brantley is speaking for himself, or if he is speaking for what he considers to be the mindset of the audience (a mindset which, to grant him the benefit of a doubt, he may not himself share).

Classical tragedy, Strindberg and Williams are all found to be “emotionally redemptive” (whatever that may mean, whoever is to be redeemed, whether it’s the characters in the play, the dramatist or the audience), but Shawn and Kane apparently fall short of this laudable goal. In this, the conservative quality of contemporary theatre is to be found: the need for catharsis far outweighs any discomfort which might be created in the spectator, lest the spectator be expected to take that discomfort home with him. Regardless of the headline on the story, there seems to be very little joy in what Brantley characterizes as “feel-bad” theatre. The catharsis of classical tragedy was a social convention as well: the haste with which so many Jacobean and Elizabethan tragedies seek to tie up any loose ends bespeaks a fear that the tragedy has unleashed ungovernable energies that can’t be tied together in Aristotelian closure: the ending, the catharsis, is imposed, not organic to the dynamics of the drama.

As Mr. Brantley says, “We still expect the theater to abide by certain conventions of style.” Indeed; it is expected to behave with propriety, to refrain from exploration beyond those formal and topical limitations; a theatre work must be a “classic feel-good musical” or adhere to the “artifice of comedy,” however much its energies may lead it astray from these apparent virtues.

I was speaking the other day to a friend who has seen more — and written more about — theatre over the past several decades than I possibly ever could hope (if that’s the word) to do; I wager she’s also got Brantley beat by quite a few miles as well. “I don’t go to the theatre for fun,” she told me. “If I want to have fun there are plenty of other things I can do that are far more fun than the theatre. I go for a walk or I watch TV or almost anything else.” The theatre should be a place that opens us to those “undesirable” recognitions that are denied to us by the television or film or music that must appeal to a far broader audience. Its intimacy makes it the pre-eminent arena for the searing investigations that the best theatre offers. But indeed, they do not close at the end, but should remain open: open for us to bring to our homes, to consider both our selves and our place in this world. And this, it must be said, is a talent at which Kane and Shawn excel.

I’ve written in the past on both Sarah Kane (here) and Wallace Shawn (here).

Jason Zinoman on the 2010 New York Fringe Festival

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UPDATE: A Fringe administrator and Jason Zinoman trade comments at Matthew Freeman’s post on the issue. (Matt’s latest work, Brandywine Distillery Fire, created with Michael Gardner, will open the fall season at the Incubator Arts Project in September.)

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“Complaining about the Fringe … is part of its tradition,” says Jason Zinoman in today’s New York Times about the annual New York International Fringe Festival, which is just ending its 2010 edition (along with its transatlantic counterpart, the Edinburgh Fringe). His thoughts are especially pertinent; Jason is perhaps the New York Times reviewer most familiar with the downtown theatre community and has a reputation for balanced and informed judgment, so when he complains, it’s notable. A few of his notes on this year’s festival:

As I have visited much more audience-friendly Fringes in Edinburgh and Philadelphia, however, the New York International Fringe Festival now appears needlessly bland and poorly organized. It also does no favors for the reputation of downtown theater. We deserve better. …

When you present 200 productions that are quickly put together, there will be bad work. I may have had poor luck this go-round, but over the years the kind of bad shows at the Fringe has changed. They are now usually failures of ambition and imagination as much as craft. … What I worry is that while Off-Off Broadway throbs with energy, ambition and the finest low-budget experimental theater scene in the world, you would likely never know that from attending the New York International Fringe Festival.

The full text of Jason’s article can be found here.

Openings: Ben Brantley on That Face

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In the comments section of yesterday’s post on the New York opening of Polly Stenham’s That Face, Aaron Riccio wrote that its New York reception “[doesn't have] anything to do with the Enron divide, though. This isn’t a symbolic or showy production; it’s a dismally effective glimpse at how illness affects a family.” Well, hell, Ben Brantley thinks it does, in his New York Times review of the play today:

That Face created a sensation when it hit London several years ago, moving quickly from the Royal Court Theater to a West End run. The excitement was generated partly by the youth of its author, who was only 19 at the time. … That Face also opened at a time when the newspapers were full of lamentations about the sorry state of British youth, and it was a good moment for a “blame the elders” play, written by an enterprising younger person.

As the recent Broadway failure of the West End smash Enron reminded us, the tastes of London and New York theatergoers are not always in sync. And Manhattan audiences may be less eager to embrace That Face, especially the cripplingly self-conscious version directed by Sarah Benson. …

Perhaps Ms. Benson, who did a smashing job with the New York premiere of Sarah Kane’s Blasted, is trying to tone down the play’s more flamboyant aspects, the better for us to see the wounded souls behind the fireworks. But without a Martha who tears up the stage, the play starts to look like a series of unconvincing poses, a problem compounded by the stiffness that can afflict American actors doing posh British accents.

Don’t blame me; I didn’t start it, though perhaps given what I mentioned about accents in my post yesterday I should set up shop as a prognosticator of New York Times theatre reviews.

I’m not sure what’s more condescending about this review: Brantley’s call for a “moratorium” on plays about crazy moms (though he doesn’t seem to have a problem with those who sing, as his admiration for Gypsy and Next to Normal attests) or his recent explicitly parochial disdain for new British plays, especially by teenaged playwrights with a bone to pick with their parents.

Brantley is right that the mother-child relationship is a central thematic element in theatre, as it is in the other arts, for it is central to human experience. When mental illness and class issues infest this relationship, drama arises, as it should; perhaps Brantley believes that, only at a safe historical distance (Medea, Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Glass Menagerie to name just three plays), it becomes more palatable, even amusing and entertaining when the mad mother is Ethel Merman. It is neither, either on stage or off. Which just makes me more interested in seeing That Face, though my time and my $75.00 must be spent when I’m not at my day job in raising my growing family and buying diapers.

It’s fine that he didn’t like the play; but perhaps he should have just left it at that, instead of providing more grist for the blogospheric mill, as it likely will.