Category Archives: Other places

Other places

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I have mentioned Randy Gener’s critical work on this blog in the past, and I’m glad to be able to point the way to Mr. Gener’s own Web site, in the theatre of One World, which recently underwent a redesign. I have a very high regard for the work of Mr. Gener, a former senior editor of American Theatre magazine and the winner of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2007-2008, and am glad to see that it is now appearing regularly on the Internet through this blog; recent entries have included items on “rasaboxes” (a new form of theatre training developed by Richard Schechner), Lynn Nottage’s play Ruined, and a unique look at Pina Bausch and photography. Mr. Gener holds himself to a high standard in this long-form journalism — perhaps a model for young theatre journalists — and he provides an extraordinarily broad perspective on world theatre.

His blog comes to my attention on the eve of the eighth anniversary of Superfluities Redux (1 October marks its formal birthday) and engenders some brief thoughts about the theatrical blogosphere, which has, over those eight years, evolved to a certain extent. Mr. Gener’s blog, a showcase of his own individual work, is a bit of a throwback to the first generation of theatre blogging, in which individuals took advantage of the new medium to develop their own thinking in common with others (the comments sections of blogs have always been a central feature of the form, differentiating them from print journalism and encouraging conversation). But with age comes change, and eight years defines several generations in the Internet age. The second generation of blogs was more collaborative in nature (Leonard Jacobs’ Clyde Fitch Report and Time Out New York’s “Upstaged”) and exploited the overhyped potential of the new medium; these did not last long, eventually undermined by their own attempts to generate controversy and more numerically significant readerships through bluster and insult. Over the past year or so, a third generation has emerged: Arena Stage’s Howlround and 2AMt, the first theatre blog to be based on a Twitter feed, appear to have been indirect responses to the controversies engendered by Outrageous Fortune, the 2009 book that elevated doubts about the relevance and structural integrity of the American theatre to a screaming pitch. Groupthink can be just as insular and exclusive as individualthink, to coin a clumsy phrase, and when under the aegis of an institution like an “American Voices New Play Institute,” runs the risk of becoming yet another institution that keeps some individuals out and others in.

While the first generation of bloggers may have appeared to be solipsistic to a fault, this third generation beats them by far. These blogs are written by various individuals speaking to other various individuals within the profession, a form of inside baseball to which neither of the first two generations were immune. But those first two generations also presumed a general readership, not merely a readership among dramatists, directors, designers and performers, a presumption which this third generation does not share. A glance through the posts at both of these blogs indicates that the role of these journals is to circle the wagons in a sense, and both demonstrate a fear that theatre continues to lose its audience — they both assume from the outset a culturally, politically and socially instrumental role for an art form which, at its best, mitigates against social instrumentation in seeking to touch the individual spectator. What is lost too in this third generation is the individual voice, a voice defined in the first generation by the maintenance of these blogs by individual writers exclusively.

So Mr. Gener’s individual voice then is again welcome, as is that of British critic Dan Rebellato, author of the fine 1956 and All That, whose Spilled Ink blog just opened recently and featured a few days ago a fine post on the individual playwright’s responsibility (and the abandonment of that responsibility in some cases) for the “dramatic shape of the evening.” Despite the obituaries being drafted for the medium by those with their own careers and egos to promote (“I can’t think of any blogger but myself who is unafraid of courting controversy,” writes the author of that draft death notice), Mr. Gener’s and other blogs are still taking up the slack that print journalism is leaving behind. Parabasis, one of those first-generation blogs, has announced an upcoming “special issue” on the late American playwright Lanford Wilson, which will feature essays and remembrances, a project which may not have a potential outlet anywhere but on the Web. And just this morning I turned to my Google Reader to find this excellent post by Alison Croggon on Shakespeare’s politics as part of a review of a production of Julius Caesar, in which she writes:

As Shakespeare can demonstrate, theatre is a powerful simulacrum of the political. Indeed, politics is often pejoratively described as “theatre”, mostly by people with little interest in theatre itself: if politics is mere “theatre”, then it is considered to be with without meaning, a dumbshow of empty gesture that has nothing to do with “reality”. There is, however, a profound relationship between politics and theatre: theatre, as a conscious simulacrum of reality, mimics how politics itself is a show of simulacra, a series of simulations. Politics is a primary maker of simulations that stand in for reality, claiming to be the thing itself, and which at last infect the real with their own reality. Another is art.

You won’t find this in your local paper either, and I’m guessing not in too many of these third-generation theatre blogs. But it is written, as Mr. Gener’s journalism and criticism is written, not merely for the practitioner but as a thoughtful bridge from an art to a spectator, doing the best that criticism can do. And it remains in the blogosphere. I’m delighted to still find it here, as healthy as ever, and to offer a little of my own.

Other places

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On The New York Times‘ (“We don’t just report it. We are it,” goes the current advertising slogan for the newspaper, which is deserving of a post in itself — “People will think what I tell them to think,” Charles Foster Kane once said) “ArtsBeat” blog yesterday, reviewer Jason Zinoman discussed “the meaning and purpose of bad reviews”: “Of course, fairness is important in criticism. Critics are human and a negative review can go off the rails and veer into cruelty and personal attacks. The temptations of the witty put-down are real, and when it comes to the Fringe, seeing five shows in a day can also play a role. We should take our responsibility seriously. But I would rather live in a theater culture where discussions about plays can get as contentious (and occasionally rude) as those about politics.” In the comments section to this essay, I respond, “It’s not so much a matter of whether a critic who gives a bad review to a show has a vendetta or seems to engage in abuse. It is, however, a matter of whether or not the reviewer has the thoughtfulness or the knowledgability to render such a review valid. Especially with plays that seek to extend the form, the critic should be able to differentiate between a bad play and those which do not yield their pleasures as easily as others.” The contentious and rude review often enough calls attention to itself and the reviewer, not the play and the artist, which does a disservice to reader and artist alike. It also might serve as a cover for ignorance. The same can be said for rude and contentious political arguments, for that matter, whether from Noam Chomsky or Ann Coulter. True, sometimes readers find these reviews fun — but that’s only to cater to the lowest common denominator. Perhaps in a world of 140-character Tweets and Facebook status updates, this is to be expected, but the serious reader should want more than this, the serious critic or reviewer should want to write it, and the serious arts editor should want to publish it. That such criticism and reviews can be provocatively and entertainingly written is proven by the writings of critics from George Bernard Shaw to Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and many  many others. Mr. Zinoman’s full post is here.

There has been some comment this week on Charlotte Higgins’ “Arthur Miller: Why America lowered the curtain on his reputation” in today’s Guardian. It is more or less a report on a speech that Miller biographer Christopher Bigsby gave at the Edinburgh international book festival; the second volume of the biography was recently published in the United Kingdom. I myself find it doubtful that Miller’s political reputation plays any role in the reception of the dramatist’s late work in the US; the fault lies in the poor quality of the plays rather than the politics of their author. Perhaps, to turn the transatlantic telescope the other way round, it’s Miller’s political reputation that leads to the higher esteem in which the British hold his late drama and not whether the plays themselves are any good. Terry Teachout’s obituary for the dramatist, which appeared in the Wall Street Journal and seems to be the focus of some of this comment, is here. For what it’s worth, I share several of Mr. Teachout’s misgivings about Miller’s plays, even his most celebrated: “I expect that Death of a Salesman will continue to hold the stage, though not because it is beautiful or intelligent or provocative,” he wrote in 2005. “It is, rather, sentimental, and sentimentality always goes over big in the commercial theater, so long as it’s disguised as realism. More important, Death of a Salesman has a coarsely compulsive power that somehow manages to mask its aesthetic deficiencies, or at least render them momentarily palatable. That’s the mystery of theater: It’s all about what works, and like it or not, Death of a Salesman works. But it’s no Lear, just as Arthur Miller was no Shakespeare, and anyone who thinks otherwise is as lead-eared as he was.” In short, it was his ear, and not his politics, that crippled him.

Other places

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Once in a while, it’s worth linking to other online theatre criticism publications, and not only to confirm that the Internet in some ways remains a last bastion of serious long-form dramatic criticism and theory for the general reader. Jonathan Kalb’s Hot Review, founded in 2003 and periodically updated, has a more US- and NY-centric feel; the current issue provides essays on Daniel Radcliffe in Broadway’s How to Succeed in Business … and one by Mr. Kalb himself on Tony Kushner’s latest work. On the other side of the Atlantic, Exeunt, established only last year, offers a recent piece by Simon Thomas on Ibsen’s early play The Vikings at Helgeland and a report on a gallery installation from director Katie Mitchell.

“The emergence of the internet provides the critic with an opportunity to engage the community — that is, audiences and artists — as never before,” Steve Capra writes. “Its participatory nature will revitalize criticism as a discipline. It will lead to enhanced relationships, allowing the critic to shape both audience taste and the theatre itself.” Much of this remains to be proven (I excerpt this from his much longer essay “Criticism and Artist Engagement,” which provides a more extended context). Mr. Capra’s essay appears in Critical Stages, the Webjournal of the International Association of Theatre Critics edited by IATC president Yun-Cheol Kim. The new issue itself (which takes as its theme “Censorship in Disguise”) demonstrates the breadth and depth of many print theatre journals — but here, for free, not locked behind a paywall. Its editorial staff consists of writers and editors from around the world, including Randy Gener, Mark Brown, and Patrice Pavis. As Mr. Kim noted in his introductory words to the first issue of the journal in 2009:

Critical Stages will reach out to theatre practitioners, audiences, and general readers, whom we critics have somewhat isolated from our inner circles of critical discourse with a communication-unfriendly writing style, particularly since we were inundated with, and fascinated by, post-modern or post-dramatic theories of theatre. I firmly believe that the most important function of theatre criticism is — and should remain — to generate interest in the theatre arts in society. And that interest cannot be generated by our inaccessibly esoteric, equivocating critical language. Interest can be aroused only through interesting writing — and by “interesting” I mean: 1) the criticism that is practiced is accessible — or even journalistic, if you will; 2) the criticism has academic depth in its analysis and reading; 3) the criticism has literary value in itself, in both style and creativity; and 4) the criticism conveys our whole theatre experience and connects it to our daily lives. With all these in mind, Critical Stages will seek more and more ways to ensure that theatre and theatre criticism thrive to their fullest extents by reaching out to the world and generating social interest in the theatre.

Along with Mr. Capra’s article on criticism, there is an associated essay from the late George Jean Nathan, “The Critic and the Drama: ‘Aesthetic Jurisprudence.’” Highly recommended; I leave you with the first paragraph of Nathan’s lovely essay, which applies to any critical discipline, but perhaps describes qualities most lacking in the superficiality, snark, egocentrism, celebrity obsession and cultivated ignorance of contemporary American theatre journalism:

Art is a reaching out into the ugliness of the world for vagrant beauty and the imprisoning of it in a tangible dream. Criticism is the dream book. All art is a kind of subconscious madness expressed in terms of sanity; criticism is essential to the interpretation of its mysteries, for about everything truly beautiful there is ever something mysterious and disconcerting. Beauty is not always immediately recognizable as beauty; what often passes for beauty is mere infatuation; living beauty is like a love that has outlasted the middle-years of life, and has met triumphantly the rest of time, and faith, and cynic meditation. For beauty is a sleepwalker in the endless corridors of the wakeful world, uncertain, groping, and not a little strange. And criticism is its tender guide.

Recommended Reading: Exeunt

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I don’t believe that I’ve linked to the on-line magazine Exeunt before; I’ll make amends today, in lieu of a Friday video.

Founded in 2010 and edited by Natasha Tripney and Daniel B. Yates, Exeunt is a British on-line theatre and performance journal which seeks to “refine and redefine the notion of quality criticism” and “recognise that much of the best theatre writing exists on the web. To document the changing role of the critic, from guardian, to curator, to scheduler, to filter, to friend.  To show that far from undermining the profession, the web’s multiplicity of voices, schooled in various experiences, is a catalyst for theatre criticism’s renewal,” according to the About page of the journal.

Several recent articles are delightfully contrarian — I point to only two. “The Necessity of Narrative?” by Deborah Pearson, a curator of the Forest Fringe festival at Edinburgh, questions the ethics of narrative itself, warning that it may be born of fear and insecurity rather than a happily innate human desire to amuse and be amused:

I sometimes wonder if the real reason we need stories originates from the fear that our lives may never find a final resolution in any way that we will be conscious of. If this, mortality and the confusing nature of an ongoing existence, is what is really behind our desire for storytelling, then perhaps we should just see it as a neurotic quirk of the human species. A kind of coping mechanism or security blanket. In a world where our desire for story (through history and the media) has edited out so many lives, so much suffering and joy, is it theatre’s place to pull the security blanket out from under us to expose an actual truth? Or is that just sloppy story telling?

You can read the full essay here.

Second, Exeunt recently ran a three-part series of essays by dramatist Arnold Wesker in which he dissected the rise of directorial interpretation at the expense of the dramatic text, mused on the distinction between show business and art, and finally offered “A Defense of the Word.” A brief passage from this last:

I warm to abstract art, whether on canvas, in stone, or in architecture; but I cannot sit through two or three hours of abstract drama where characters without words speak to me only in simple terms. I am a complex being in a complex world. I require the power of words to formulate thoughts that help me stumble through a complex life. Theatre-without-words tells me only that spring can bring joy, that kindness can melt hard hearts, that all we need is love, that war is evil. It cannot detail the conflicts of interest that lead to war so that I can make judgements, nor can it heart-achingly explain why war sometimes may be needed to combat evil. Theatre that tries to communicate simple thoughts in images or action without language is finally a theatre of primary emotions. At its best theatre-without-words may arouse admiration for skill and imagination, at its worst it may mislead by omission, and in leaving out so much risks dishonesty. In spreading thin its specificity it becomes kindergarten theatre.

All three essays are excerpted from Wesker on Theatre, published last year by Oberon Books — but I wouldn’t have known that if Exeunt hadn’t brought the book to my attention.

It’s now quite rare for new journals or blogs about theatre to be launched; much of the attention and energy has gone into proprietary systems such as Facebook and Twitter. But the Web is open and accessible to all, not only those who subscribe to those new corporate services. The Web remains the most effective source of long-form writing on theatre. Say the editors, “As paywalls and paid-apps steadily enclose, [we try] to return a sense of editorial optimism to the free-web. That far from Babel, the free-web represents the best opportunity to present a networked, dynamic, cultural resource.” The journal Exeunt is worth a moment — or several moments — of your time.

Other places

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On 2 November Alison Croggon posted this rare interview with Australian dramatist Daniel Keene, who currently has two plays running simultaneously in Melbourne (Life Without Me at the Melbourne Theatre Company and The Nightwatchman at St. Kilda’s Theatre Works). Keene is rarely produced in the U.S., despite his reputation and the availability of his texts in this Salt Publishing volume; I wrote about Keene’s work earlier here. Among his comments are these on mortality and the theatre:

It is as if the performance shares the mortality of its audience. This fact is in itself a metaphor (which may in fact lead us back to “all the world’s a stage”). If to grieve is to acknowledge our mortality, then the theatre can be the place where that acknowledgment is made manifest, where we can, literally, experience that acknowledgment as an emotional, intellectual and physical event in time and space.

Mr. Keene also rather unwittingly plugs the title of my new book, due from EyeCorner Press in January. Bonus points if you can find it. …

Bastard, the first part of Pavel Zustiak’s trilogy The Painted Bird loosely inspired by Jerzy Kosinski’s novel of the same name, opened last night at La MaMa ETC’s Ellen Stewart Theatre for a run that extends through 21 November. Earlier work from his Palissimo company, especially Blind Spot and Weddings and Beheadings, were unusually expressive and sensual pieces, and no doubt this will be just as inspirational. More information about Zustiak’s Painted Bird project is here. …

Nothing to do with theatre, and everything to do with theatre: While I was away in Santiago, the November elections turned the House of Representatives over to the Republican Party. Earlier this week, former war correspondent and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote about the election results in his column “A Recipe for Fascism” at Truthdig. It is, like his coruscating book Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle published last year, unsparing in its analysis of the cultural dysfunctions that have led to the current catastrophe, finding fault in both the Tea Party right and the progressive left. He especially notes the left’s surrender to the ideologies of the post-capitalist corporate state:

The corporate state, unchallenged, continues to turn everything, including human beings and the natural world, into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse.

All sides of the political equation are lackeys for Wall Street. They sanction, through continued deregulation, massive corporate profits and the obscene compensation and bonuses for corporate managers. Most of that money — hundreds of billions of dollars — is funneled upward from the U.S. Treasury. The Sarah Palins and the Glenn Becks use hatred as a mobilizing passion to get the masses, fearful and angry, to call for their own enslavement as well as to deny uncomfortable truths, including global warming. Our dispossessed working class and beleaguered middle class are vulnerable to this manipulation because they can no longer bear the chaos and uncertainty that come with impoverishment, hopelessness and loss of control. They have retreated into a world of illusion, one peddled by right-wing demagogues, which offers a reassuring emotional consistency. …

The liberal class, which remains rooted in a world of fact, rationalizes placating corporate power as the only practical response. It understands the systems of corporate power. It knows the limitations and parameters. And it works within them. The result, however, is the same. The entire spectrum of the political landscape collaborates in the strangulation of our disenfranchised working class, the eroding of state power, the criminal activity of the financial class and the paralysis of our political process.

If the liberal class remains rooted in a world of fact, there is a fact which it continues loathe to recognize; Hedges points it out in Empire of Illusion:

Obama is a product of this elitist [educational and political] system. So are his degree-laden cabinet members. They come out of Harvard, Yale, Wellesley, and Princeton. Their friends and classmates made huge fortunes on Wall Street and in powerful law firms. They go to the same class reunions. They belong to the same clubs. They speak the same easy language of privilege, comfort, and entitlement. The education they have obtained has served to rigidify and perpetuate social stratification. … Our power elite has a blind belief in a decaying political and financial system that has nurtured, enriched, and empowered it. But the elite cannot solve our problems. It has been trained only to find solutions, such as paying out trillions of dollars of taxpayer money to bail out banks and financial firms, to sustain a dead system. The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.

Hedges’ more recent jeremiad can be found online here. …

Hedges’ book has a profound indebtedness to Theodor Adorno’s The Culture Industry; after Hedges’ darker moments, it will be worthwhile to close with Adorno’s notes in Philosophy of New Music on the late quartets of Beethoven, a part of that culture which has been banished from the larger arena of public discourse as well:

The caesuras … the sudden interruptions that more than anything else characterize late Beethoven, are those moments of breaking free; the work is silent at the instant when it is left behind, and turns its emptiness outward. Not until then does the next fragment attach itself, transfixed by the spell of subjectivity breaking free and conjoined for better or for worse with what preceded it; for the mystery is between these fragments, and it cannot be invoked otherwise than in the figure they create together. This sheds light on the paradox that late Beethoven is called both subjective and objective. Objective is the fractured landscape, subjective: the only light in which it glows. He does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissociation, he tears them apart in time, in order, perhaps, the preserve them for the eternal. In the history of art, late works are the catastrophes.