Histriomastix

Sound judgments

In 2004, Opera News hired me write articles about the Metropolitan's new production of Salome and Julie Taymor's re-envisioning of Die Zauberflote, mainly from a theatrical standpoint. And while I was thrilled to burrow through the Met's subterranean archives and see productions on its majestic stage, I'm still catching up with the thriving art form to which musicals and music-theater owes so much. So let me recommend you click immediately over to music critic-reporter Steve Smith's Night After Night. Steve's my colleague at Time Out New York, and a more knowledgable, humorous, encyclopedically informed individual you will not find. He can write with equal precision and gusto about Scandanavian death-metal and Ornette Coleman's jazz blasts, not to mention the wide world of classical, new and old. Today he posts a fantastic you-are-there report about Monday night's performance of Anthony Minghella's new staging of Madama Butterfly. I'll be seeing it myself on October 24, but Steve's impressions certainly have perked up my ears...and eyes?

Preludicrous

This Saturday at 2pm, as part of the inestimable CUNY-hosted downtown-theater celebration Prelude 06, yours truly will be moderating a panel of bloggers and MSM journalists, and those who swing both ways. Announcements have already been made on some of the participants' blogs: Garrett Eisler's Playgoer, George Hunka's Superfluities and Isaac Butler's Parabasis. Alexis Soloski, the witty and charming critic from the Village Voice, will be on hand too, as well as relatively new blogger-provacateur Steve Luber. Media arrogance! Blogging insularity! Journalistic ethics! Free beer and chicken wings! [Note: We're still waiting for approval on the free beer and chicken wings.]

Extra! Extra!

Reviews of two fine, surly satires in this week's Time Out New York: Bruce Norris' blistering The Pain and the Itch at Playwrights Horizons; and downtown hellraiser Young Jean Lee's Korean-American travesty Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. See both if you can.

Pictures at an exhibition

London's singular Theatre Museum, a nearly 20-year-old institution tucked behind Covent Garden, past throngs of tourists and buskers, is reportedly going to close. The cause is lack of funding and the TM's inability to find large arts partners to help shoulder its financial burden. According to the Royal Opera House's head Tony Hall, there's a great deal of "moral support" for the musuem, but it hasn't translated into fiduciary clout. The Guardian's Michael Billington offers his thoughts here. Unfamiliar with the funding structures or arts politics of U.K. theater, I don't know how this situation came to pass, but it's a bad sign for the stateside attempts to create an American version. Sure, we have invaluable resources such as the NYPL located at Lincoln Center (not to mention the basement archive at La MaMa E.T.C. and privately held ones), but a theater museum serves a valuable purpose of recording the ephemeral artifacts and practices of stagecraft and theory on video and in pictures. There'll always be books and DVDs that the dogged reseracher/artist can track down, but an honest-to-goodnesss Museum has a physical, social, cultural cachet that a library lacks. Of course, you may associate the museum with dust, deadness, received notions and complacency.  I visited the Theatre Museum in August 2005 in the company of London critic-reporter James Inverne, who steered me kindly through several engaging exhibitions, including one about the Redgrave acting dynasty. Dioramas, large blow-up pictures of a set designer's work, parts of sets past, video docs in screening rooms...there was a lot of excellently curated material for the theater fanatic to lose himself/herself in for an afternoon. I remember it being yet another experience that left me a yet darker shade of green when I reflected on how we do things over here.

Suffer the little children

Spent the weekend with the girlfriend (henceforward to be known as the Clarinatrix, Domestic Partner, DomPart or whatever strikes my fancy) in the Washington, D.C. area, the towns of Fairfield, Leesburg and Chantilly in Fairfax County. We went to celebrate her cousin's wedding. That part of the East Coast is unfamiliar to me, radically different from my Hell's Kitchen stomping grounds and the rural New Hampshire of my youth: Exurban sprawl, gated communities full of looming brick townhouses, multiple malls and chain stores everywhere. In short, the sort of rich, homogenized, faceless, culturally negligible whitebread wasteland that some people dare to call a "neighborhood" or "home." People really like the golf out there. I feel strangely conservative and old-fashioned when I go to such de-luxe enclaves. Give me a viewless, dark studio on a grungy city block or a sylvan nook embowering a clapboard shack that lists ever so gently. I can't have the in-between. As David Byrne once sang: "I wouldn't live there if they paid me to." This is partly my incomplete, belated response to A Poor Player's well-meaning invective against New York-centrist cultural cliques, in which he strenuously encouraged us NYC bloggers to move from the increasingly unafforable and arts-hostile city to cheaper places where locals might appreciate our talents. While I'm no longer an actor or director, believe you me I've started to feel like I could live somewhere else and practice journalism or get back into theater. Albuquerque or Sante Fe I could maybe relocate to. Seattle--there's a theater scene I'd enjoy shaking up. I'd give Portland a whirl. San Francisco is, I hear, quite adorable. But the D.C. area? From what I saw, no effin' way. Admittedly I didn't visit the actual D.C. metropolitan area. I'm aware of the many reputable theaters based in our nation's capital.

Anyway, I meant to post a little about religion, which has been on my mind ever since we attended the wedding at a Catholic Church and returned the next day and caught Jesus Camp at AMC on 42nd Street (disgusting tourist throngs, but thank the gods to be back in NYC).

On Saturday afternoon, we attended the wedding service at St. Timothy's. The church had been built, perhaps in the late '80s, in a kind of drab modern-gothic-Bauhaus style that gave the impression of a corporate compound for stunningly unimaginative but well-groomed monks. The interior was vast and oaky, although a decorator could have done wonders with the altar area (hint: lose the ferns and that tacky, overly literal crucifix!) The service itself was crushingly familiar. It brought me back to those thousands of hours I endured as boy in a crummy, cheap little church every Saturday night attending indistinguishable services by a droning priest, my ass clenched with boredom, praying fervently for the service to end. I served as an altar boy for about a year (no molestation to report which, as the fabulous Kiki DuRane might say, means I was an ugly kid). I think my venomous, kneejerk atheism is a product of the tortured boredom I experienced in church. It may also account for my love of theater, full of novelty, flash, surprise and ambiguity. Drama is the exact opposite of the inert, inculcating homogenity of ritual. Religion, as we all know, is bad theater. The more thriving religious sects--South American Catholicism, African-American gospel-driven congregations, megachurches--coopt theatrical artifice to impress the faithful. I consider that a heinous and contemptible cultural paradox or a kind of aesthetic hypocrisy. The way white metal, for example, exploits the pagan, adrenal rush of heavy metal, but grafts on Christianist lyrics. Either you sit in a cell alone with your damned Bible and believe, or you don't get God. Using the tools of the faithless to ensnare the faithful drives me into a puritanical rage. (Mind you, that's because I abominate God and clerics. But if you will insist on abasing yourself before a concept, I say to you, it shall be a severe and joyless God.)

Which brings us, finally, to Jesus Camp. Last night, as the Clarinatrix and I left the theater, we were fuming. I don't know what I can add to what reviewers have already said about this truly frightening documentary, which centers on a summer camp run by militant fundamentalist Christians, for the blatant purpose of indoctrinating kids in right-wing, creationist, anti-abortion, pro-Bush, extreme theocratic ideology. The obese, dead-eyed harpy who runs this brainwashing camp openly compares her methods to those of the madrassas, considering the warping of young mind and weaponizing of children to be a natural response to the training of Islamic youth. Which leads logically to...suicide bombing? Guess what? If Christians start strapping bombs to themselves and walking into mosques and synagogues, I think you'll see that they'll outpace even your most death-loving fanatic. It's heartbreaking to see these bright young kids--and they are extremely alert, intelligent children--being subjected to emotional manipulation. The kids are hectored, praised, bawled at and cajoled until they weep tears for aborted fetuses or genuflect before a life-size cardboard cutout of President Bush. While I'm all for kids being motivated and encouraged to express their emotions, this is despicable child abuse.

How depressing life looks out in North Dakota or Colorado Springs, the heartland where the megachurches and Jesus Camps thrive. And how the faithful seem to need to obsess over Jesus, repeating His name, invoking Him to butter their toast or roll a friggin' bowling ball, replacing the word "think" with "pray." As in, "Lemme pray about it." This is thought control at the most basic level: language. These poorly educated, self-deluded hypocrites, moreover, are reaping the fruits of science, liberalism and democracy even as they deny evolution and militate to demolish the wall separating church and state. For a secular, anti-religion atheist like myself, the view looks pretty damned scary. Ten, twenty years from now, will national elections be decided by such pious fools? These fascist boobies are organized, people. What can we do?

Tune in

My review of The Pain and the Itch for NY1 is online. You can read it or watch it on dial-up or broadband. The review airs during the weekly theater program On Stage this weekend: Saturday and Sunday at 9:30am and 7:30pm, then again on Monday at 9:30pm and 12:30am.

Extra! Extra!

Two reviews this week in TONY:

Theophilus North, adaptation of a 1973 novel by Thornton Wilder, produced by the excellent Keen Company. And a return to the New York stage by Anna Manahan (The Beauty Queen of Leenane) in the monologue-driven sibling drama, Sisters.

And from last week, forgot to mention, a book review of Frank Rich's lively chronicle-polemic of the Bush administration's manipulation of the news, The Greatest Story Ever Sold.

A quick note about the illustration above. Trifle kitschy, I know, but I'm still figuring out the proper balance of light, handcrafted elegance and humor to strike. Plus I like drawings—even silly ones. Maybe I'll commission some b&w icons to accompany certain categories.

A nod from across the pond

The Guardian's Maxie Szalwinska reports on theater blogs, primarily in NYC but also in London. She makes note of stalwarts Superfluities, Playgoer as well as neophyte yours truly. And she refers to the UK's own Encore Theatre Magazine, a gloriously bitchy and anonymous cabal of insidery piss-taking on UK theater. One small correction to Ms. Szalwinska's fine piece: It's Histriomastix, not Historiomastix. One big one: While in my first post, About time, I did express some disgust with MSM theater coverage and lauded blogs for being timely, informed and passionate, I never speculated that blogs are "where serious theatre journalism is headed these days." Those are George Hunka's words. I'm still very happy to be a full-time print man and blogger on the side. Watch those attributions, Maxie!

Field trip

It really is a shame there wasn't more media coverage for the brief but deserving run of The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. I saw it Saturday night and conducted a brief  postshow discussion afterward with composer David Lang, librettist Mac Wellman, director Bob McGrath and Laurie Olinder and Bill Morrison, who contributed video projections and film, respectively. Based on a marvelously gnomic Ambrose Bierce short story of the same name (of about 500 words), DOCAF is what you might call a phenomenological  opera. That's to say that Wellman took the few basic physical details that Bierce includes in the story--veranda, field, cigar stump, 12 slaves, flower picking, disappearance and a futile inquiry into what happened--and spins out a weirdly terrifying and baffling alternative history of pre-Civil War South. He "phenomenalizes," if you will, everything onstage, just as Richard Foreman does: Nothing is what it seems but every object resonates equally on a unified energy field. The Wellman countermythos is deliberately, even comically cryptic, but fundamentally it involves a kind of divine payback to the plantation owner via possible mystic machination by the slaves and a view of nature that is deadly hostile to compartmentalization. Historical white guilt plays a role in this adaptation of the material, sure, but that's not the whole picture. In a way, DOCAF is just a mood piece that happens to be set on a Southern plantation in 1854. And the dominant mood is dread, confusion, sorrow and an inability to choose between factual certainty and irrational instinct. Slavery, that peculiar institution, is shown to be both a rigorously rational system and an absurd abomination. Lots of layers here. The production by the Ridge Theatre was put together in less than a month but was impressively staged and performed, and Jim Findlay's attractive set did a great job literalizing the concept of a hollow or absent center: A planked square walkway had a gaping square hole in the middle, where the slaves sweated in the field. Lang's semi-minimalist music was spare, haunting, nerve-jangling and wedded perfectly to Wellman's incantatory, stringent text. Perhaps a fuller production will come to NYC someday. As for the postshow discussion, it was a bit diffuse, but Wellman was both eloquent and wryly modest and refused to fix meaning on his wriggling, shadowy words too much (he's a tyrant about opposing the tyranny of logocentric thinking). Suffice it to say, conducting talkbacks is an art I'm still learning. I'm all for preshow lectures and postshow discussions: anything to get audiences feeling more infomed & invested in the art. Next up at Peak Performance: A production of Sartre's No Exit courtesy of American Repertory Theatre.

Dance card full

The next few days will be full of extracurricular activity. First, as already posted, I'll be moderating a postshow discussion tonight for The Difficulty of Crossing a Field at Montclair State University. This exciting new work by composer David Lang, librettist Mac Wellman and director Bob McGrath is the first offering of this Fall's Peak Performance series. (First question on the list: What's the difference between an opera and a music-theater piece?) Then on Sunday I'm seeing The Pain and the Itch for Time Out New York and NY1, and later attending a benefit party at the Players Club for the U.K.'s Royal Court Theatre, which is just wrapping up a fantastic week of readings there. (I recently learned that in the '70s and early '80s the Public Theater had an exchange program with the Court; each theater brought over the other's best new shows. Why don't we still have that!?) Last but certainly not least, on Monday night I'll be reading the Narrator in Project Shaw's rendition of The Apple Cart. Also in this cast are the astounding Marian Seldes and Brian Murray, two beloved titans of the stage you may remember from Albee's The Play About the Baby, as well as Beckett/Albee. Truly, I am not worthy to screw on the lids of their respective greasepaint cans, but I'll put on the plummiest English accent and try not break down and cry in their presence. The Apple Cart (1929) is a lesser known Shaw, a lively and whimsical scrum between absolutist monarchists and spreaders of democracy. Back on Tuesday, if not earlier, with impressions of the above.