Histriomastix

Around the blogs: Sarah Palin and Ariane Mnouchkine

Gee, those are two names you don’t often see in the same headline. Couple of blogs to pass the time on Monday: A preview/op-ed piece on the Guardian’s stage blog about Lincoln Center Festival and, for Time Out New York, a humor piece on Sarah Palin—possible Broadway star! Guardian piece here. Palin on Upstaged here. Enjoy.

Blogging at the Guardian: Neil LaBute

I have a  new blog post up at the Guardian this morning about Neil LaBute and his supposed split with MCC  Theater. Read it here. Playgoer speculates about the matter, which came to light on Tuesday after David Ng's blog post for the L.A. Times broke the news. I take the opportunity (and the lack of ready news or gossip) to muse on a little-discussed problem in the nonprofit world: indiscriminate green-lighting of established writers by their informal home theaters. Teaser:

But the nearly exclusive arrangement LaBute enjoyed with MCC speaks more to safety and expediency than any sort of meaningful artistic union. MCC produces American and British plays with no clear aesthetic common denominator. But why LaBute? Could it be he needs a home for the dark, "gotcha" plays he relentlessly cranks out; and MCC needs the star wattage the film director brings?

RTWT here.

PULITZER? I DON'T EVEN KNOW HER

The Guardian just published my thought piece on the race for this year's Pulitzer Prize in Drama. I hope it'll be the first of many pieces on that fine paper's website. Check it out and complain in comments below. I also wrote about the Pulitzer on TONY's Upstaged last week. Ruined (left) is the front-runner, but you already knew that. Any thoughts on what might also be considered—or what is being ignored?

ICELAND, ICELAND THE COUNTRY WHERE I QUITE LIKE TO BE

More freelance news: In the latest issue of Yale’s Theater magazine, I have a report from Iceland’s first-ever international theater festival, Lókal. I visited in March 2008 and filed the report later that month but—since the wheels of academic publishing grind exceeding slow—it hasn’t seen the light of day till now. (My earlier blog post is here.) Editor Tom Sellar did a bang-up job condensing and focusing my sprawling first draft (thanks, Tom!). The people in Reykjavik were absolutely lovely and their theater scene is varied and promising. However, given the ongoing Econolyptic horrors, I somehow doubt there’ll be a second Lókal anytime soon. The organizers of the festival generously covered airfare and accommodations for five days—for me, the Village Voice’s Alexis Soloski and my colleague Helen Shaw. A friend recently noted: “See? They pay for critics to fly over and the economy collapses.”

Binge Drinking in Middle Earth

So hey, I visited Reykjavik, Iceland, earlier this month (March 5-9) at the invitation of Lókal, a brand-new international theater festival. It was interesting. Farty-smelling water from sulphur. Wickedly expensive. Insular. Nordic. Beautiful people - if you like the translucent-skinned elvish type. Scary, depressing hard drinking on weekends. Local theater is both slick-Euro and about 15 years behind the avant-curve. Reykjavik is a small Scandy town with one main street full of overpriced boutique stores. Men who look like rugged, homicidal Vikings but turn out to be exceedingly polite. Four-dollar hot dogs with crumbled onion rings and three types of sauce…very popular. And delicious. Dank, cold, dark.

I was meant to observe and, if I wanted, report on the event. So Tom Sellar at Yale’s Theater magazine accepted a pitch. The article is now being polished by the good folk at Theater (on the stands this fall) to make me sound smart and clever. I thought I’d let Histriomastix readers check the first few paragraphs of raw copy. Much has already been cut & finessed.

AMONG THE GLOBAL VILLAGERS
Lókal: International Theatre Festival
Reykjavik, Iceland March 5–9, 2008

Primeval topography, serene people of elvish complexion, hot mineral springs bubbling up from the earth, mist-shrouded mountain across the bay…Lest the traveler to Iceland think he’s touched down in a Nordic nirvana, there is also a stink of brimstone. Since Reykjavik’s hydropower derives from a massive underground geothermal system that bores into the earth, traces of sulfur find their way into the plumbing. Your hot, post-flight shower smells like dead, fetid eggs. This noseful of flatulence may strike a newcomer as repulsive, then funny, finally part of the territory. Your hair and clothes acquire an infernal bouquet. Note, too, that putrefied shark is considered a delicacy there. So a question arises: Does the rottenness extend to the state of Icelandic theater?

This subarctic island nation measures 39,768 square miles (about the size of Virginia) of which a negligible percent is arable land. Vikings settled the volcano-formed, geyser-pocked outpost in the ninth century, commencing a long history of grinding poverty and subservience to the crowns of Norway and Denmark. During its early period, the age of settlement, Iceland was a sparsely populated speck whose fractious residents maintained order through the Althing, a tribal parliament where grievances could be aired and laws passed. The great sagas (Njál’s Saga, Eiríks Saga) emerged in this period, between the 12th and 13th centuries—prose epics full of blood feuds, mayhem and terse gallows humor. The Black Death came in the 1400s, decimating the population. From 1450 to about 1900, the land was in the grip of a “little ice age,” with low temperatures making life for the already impoverished inhabitants more difficult. In the middle of the 16th century, King Christian III of Denmark imposed Lutheranism on the country. The 18th century was a particularly torturous time, with plagues, volcanic eruptions and freezing temperatures. Even a century ago, Iceland was scarcely industrialized; two generations ago, families lived in peat huts. The 1801 census numbered 47,000. Today there are roughly 310,000 Icelanders, about the population as Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Due to its strategic North Atlantic location, Iceland was occupied by Great Britain, then America, during World War II and the Cold War. The presence of a U.S. base (where the country’s international airport now stands) was a sore point for this historically exploited but defiant people. “It’s very strange, the country was completely split on the base,” recalled Iceland’s ex-President Vigdis Finnbogadottír, who held office from 1980 to 1996. Before that, she was a leading force in Iceland’s theater scene, director of the Reykjavik Theatre Company from 1972-80. “People complained when the Americans were here—then cried when they went away in 2006. Suddenly there was ghost town out there.”

Insular pride and isolated insecurity are two intertwined dynamics in Iceland’s history and, one could argue the national character and culture. About two-thirds of the population lives in and around Reykjavik, and it’s not hard to know everybody in your field, to become a medium-size fish in such a tiny pond. Vigdis (Icelanders address one another by first name) had no previous governing experience, except for running a theatre company. “I always tell people that when you run a theatre, you have to work with artists and audiences,” the former stateswoman said in an exclusive interview at her house. “You look at human behavior from every angle—love, jealousy, greed. What better preparation to lead a country?”

Today, Iceland is a nation in transition. It sits at a tectonic crossroads, where the European and North American plates grind against each other (producing the occasional volcanic eruption and making Iceland a geological hot spot). Likewise, the county is navigating its way between European and American influences. Presently, it is undeniably modern European, with close ties to Scandinavia and Germany. But globalization and the enduring appeal of American pop culture means that Reykjavik is no longer a quaint, hardscrabble town but a burgeoning, eco-sensitive, hip and highly commercial tourist destination. On weekends, its young residents pour onto the street and pack into bars in frightening displays of binge drinking after a week of hard work. Everyone speaks English, since so few visitors have mastered the ancient Viking tongue that natives speak. It’s the most sophisticated hamlet you’ll ever visit.

So the country is stable, affluent and educated. There is a healthy theatergoing culture, but a self-sustaining experimental scene still needs to be nurtured. Iceland has not produced its Robert Wilson, its Wooster Group, its equivalent of Off-Off Broadway, or even its own exportable mainstream playwrights. Its productions hardly ever make it to the Brooklyn Academy of Music or Le Festival d’Avignon.

“Throughout the centuries, there were always influences from abroad which reached Iceland,” Vigdis said. “We’re this steppingstone between Europe and North America. We’re very isolated, but all the international streams in art, literature and theater came across the Atlantic. We have had baroque, realism, Sturm und Drang. We had it all. This is a nation of words, of language. Language is a free material with which to create.”

The newest attempt to synchronize Iceland with the world cultural clock is Lokál, the country’s first international theatre festival, which programs homegrown work alongside artists from the United States and France. This small but plucky annual event is the creation of managing director Ragnhei∂ur Skúladóttir, head of the theatre department at Iceland Academy of the Arts. Along with her partner, the playwright Bjarni Jónsson and Gu∂rún Jóhanna Gu∂mundsdóttir, Ragnhei∂ur curated the festival with artistic director Elena Krüskemper (managing director of Germany’s Bonn Biennale). In a shrewd media move, the organizers of Lokál invited four American critics (Helen Shaw, Alexis Soloski Mark Blankenship and me) and one from Germany (Jan Oberländer) to observe.

The lineup consisted of seven shows over five days. From New York came writer-director Richard Maxwell’s Ode to the Man Who Kneels and Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s No Dice; France’s Vivarium Studio presented its low-key environmental piece L’effet de Serge; Reykjavik offered three productions—Ba∂stofan (The Communal Living Room) at the National Theatre, Othello, Desdemona and Iago, and Hér og nú (Here and Now). Lastly, there was a performance by dance-theater soloist Erna Ómarsdóttir, The Talking Tree. (Ómarsdóttir is Icelandic but based in Belgium.) In addition to the performances, there was a Saturday-afternoon presentation of works-in-progress by students at the Iceland Academy of the Arts. These snippets were some of the most inspiring moments of the festival. Young students variously explored solo interactive theater, environmental happening-type performance and multimedia.

“Those students who participated are ecstatic about their experience, this being a totally unique opportunity to tap into the international scene,” Ragnhei∂ur reported a few days later. “Some of them are already talking about going to Hamburg this summer to follow up on the work of Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Vivarium Studio.” She is clearly trying to influence a new generation of young theater makers by exposing them to Western avant-garde aesthetics and theory.

“We believe that theatre—global though it may be—is essentially a local event,” Ragnhei∂ur explained. “And the concept for Lókal was born because we were curious about how theatre in other places of the world was dealing with modern life. Being an island in the Atlantic and having a history of connecting America and Europe, we believe Iceland is a very good meeting place. Here one will find a natural mixture of European and American influences. But our theatre has had little or no experience with the independent theatre scene in America, or in Europe. Reykjavík is a small but vibrant city, where you can easily focus on six or seven productions during a long weekend. Once you’re here—as an artist, journalist or a theatregoer—you will automatically be a part of the festival and the community. So Lókal is about connecting locals with locals, whether they come from Paris, New York or Reykjavík.”

A second act for Mark Twain

Here in the U.S., one of the biggest literary makeovers of the last few years was the "discovery" and reassessment of a forgotten play by Mark Twain: Is He Dead? Twain shopped his loose, baggy comedy around in London and New York, with no takers. Now, more than a century later, after the script gathered dust in a California archive, it has been edited, tightened, joke-injected and given a $2.4 million-dollar production on Broadway. The rewriter is David Ives. The producer behind it all: Bob Boyett (who has also brought over The Seafarer and Rock 'n' Roll.

Here's a story I wrote about the project for the London Times.

ALSO: In the final edit of the piece, we had to lose a nifty quote I snagged from lit-crit colossus Harold Bloom. I include it below for your brief enjoyment:

The road to theater fame is littered with the trampled dreams of novelists. For every Samuel Beckett—catching laurels for his work on the page and the stage—a dozen more tried and failed, usually miserably. In 1895, Henry James was notoriously jeered from the stalls as he took his triumphal bow for the stillborn Guy Domville; for most of his career Charles Dickens vainly supplicated the theater gods; and Victor Hugo is better known for inspiring the megamusical Les Misérables than his contributions to French drama. Don DeLillo and Gore Vidal have merely dabbled in playwriting.

No one quite knows why good novelists don’t make good dramatists. “I have brooded on this for years,” writes eminent literary critic Harold Bloom via e-mail. “It fascinates me that [Eugene] O'Neill and [Arthur] Miller write so badly. They could never have been novelists. But James, Dickens and Joyce were simply too eloquent and abundant in language for the stage. It may be that after Shakespeare the link between theater and language begins to fray.”

Writing auf Deutsche

A couple of weeks ago, playwright-director Young Jean Lee brought her wickedly irreverent meta-ethnic-heritage drama, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, to Braunschweig, Germany for the Theaterformen festival (my TONY review of the original NYC production is here). The good people at Theaterformen asked me to write an essay on Songs. I jumped at the chance to write at length about an artist I enjoy mightily. They translated it and ran it in the program. Here's what I look like in German.

Very cool, no? I think I read much more intelligently auf Deutsch. For those of you unfamiliar with the tongue of Schiller, Goethe or Brecht, here's the English version.

A race riot in the theater
Young Jean Lee explodes American racial stereotypes in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven. By David Cote

If Young Jean Lee’s aesthetic strategy could be summarized in a tidy phrase, it might be: Perversity plus sincerity. By her own admission, the 32-year-old playwright forces herself to create plays she would hate to write. That has meant composing an orientalist film-noir scenario (2003’s Metaphysic of Morals); a period drama about William Wordsworth and Percy Bysshe Shelley (2004’s The Appeal); a self-help play about the secret to happiness (2005’s Pullman, WA); and now, in Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, an identity-politics play. Lee studies the genre conventions in plays and novels, and imitates them—but up to a point. The stylistic ventriloquism inevitably breaks down as the author’s disgust, embarrassment and humor flood the text like a virus. This is where the deeply personal aspect of Lee’s aesthetic comes in: Her drama morphs from satire and parody to confessional nakedness. Then, inevitably, the play will snap back into vicious lampoon. So Lee establishes a crucial tension between her intellectual disdain for the subject and a tendency toward self-laceration.

She describes her writing tactic as one of “reversal and contradiction,” meaning that any statement a character makes about self or the world can be undermined or annihilated in the next sentence. This creates a jerky, schizoid spontaneity to the work, as if we were watching the author’s exposed id on stage: hesitant, playful, quirky, quizzical and raging. Especially raging. Lee is unequivocal about the deep reserves of anger she can muster—both toward blithely racist whites and guilt-mongering minorities. “Oh, I hate everybody,” she remarks during an interview at a downtown café in January 2007.

Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven is Lee’s “identity-politics” play. In a series of fractured, presentational scenes, she depicts a trio of Korean characters—designated as Korean 1, 2 and 3—interacting with Korean-American, presumably a stand-in for the author. Their interactions shift constantly in a series of role-playing and power-shifting games that verge on sadomasochism. At first, the Korean-American fires off a volley of racist poison. She mocks Asians as “monkeys,” “retarded” and “too evil to understand anything besides conformity and status.” Then she turns on the audience, taunting them as racists and alluding to her rage and making childish threats to enslave whites under the Korean yoke. Then, three Korean women enter in traditional dress, essentially “performing” their “Asian-ness.” They giggle, gossip, address each other with faux-Asian names and adopt an openly hostile attitude toward the equally belligerent Korean-American. A ridiculous, cartoonish fight breaks out. The only other characters are known simply as White Person 1 and 2. Aliens to the meta-minstrelsy happening on stage, these two seem to have been imported from the standard bourgeois relationship drama, a tired but recurrent genre in America. We laugh at their earnest, banal discussion of personal problems. The joke, however, is on the Koreans: By the end of the play, the whites—consumed with the minutia of their emotional lives—will take over the action.

“I wanted a dysfunctional couple to fuck up the identity-politics play,” Lee explains. “It was an experiment. I always knew that White Person 1 and 2 would eat the play the minute they showed up. Only white spectators hated it. They had this misperception that the white couple was supposed to be typically white—which they’re not. Every person of color who has seen the show has known that you could switch that couple with any ethnicity and it would make just as much sense.”

The American drama has always been the race drama; for decades, playwrights have understood the theatricality of race, and that our culture is built both on the segregation and exploitation of minorities, principally for labor, but also that it is a product of intermingled ethnic folkways. In the early days of Broadway, blackface minstrel shows were standard repertory. Eugene O’Neill tried to weld ethnic melodrama to Expressionism in The Emperor Jones (1920). There have been several tragic and comical views of race in popular American plays: Abie’s Irish Rose, Raisin in the Sun, Blues for Mister Charlie, Flower Drum Song. In recent years, race has been the prime subject for several major dramatists, such as August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks and David Henry Hwang. The clichés that have grown up around the genre include generational rifts; the crisis of assimilation; and, of course, the ingrained racism of the adopted culture. The genre is as American as apple pie, jazz and baseball.

The concept of assimilation is vividly symbolized in an early story that the Korean-American tells the audience. Her grandmother, she remembers, has a recipe for stuffed fried tofu that involves heating up tofu and oil in a pan, and at the last minute throwing in a handful of live mudfish (akin to sardines). Because the skillet is scalding hot with oil, the fish burrow into the tofu to escape, but they die there anyway. Voila—stuffed tofu. Could Lee have come up with a better way to describe cultural assimilation? Put a person in an environment where racism is intense and pervasive and soon enough, like mudfish, they too will burrow into the culture to escape the heat.

Mind you, this is just the product of an overactive critical imagination. Lee says she included the story for its exotic grotesqueness. “I got the story out of a Korean cookbook written by a white guy,” she says. “It just cracked me up. It was so gruesome. The point of it is that whole cliché of telling stories about your grandmother in identity-politics narratives. The Korean-American character is telling this story and it has to do with cooking. It’s very Amy Tan, very Joy Luck Club. I have no idea if this recipe is genuine, since the book was written by a white guy. Maybe some old Korean woman lied to him.”

The flip side to Lee’s mocking hipster tone is her masochistic streak. Songs of the Dragons opens with a video of Lee being slapped repeatedly across the face. The blows are real; Lee endured an actual beating. She described the semi-comical video shoot: an entourage of concerned friends stood off-camera armed with aspirin and a bag of frozen pees, to offer emergency medical aid. “I went into shock, which you can see on the video,” Lee remarks. “I’m just trying to keep my head up and stay focused, but you watch me losing it. I could barely feel [her friend] hitting me by the end.” What, exactly, would drive Lee to such extremes of self-abuse? “I was feeling really depressed and dating a lot of assholes,” she responds blankly.

Songs of the Dragons was rehearsed over a three-month period in the summer of 2006, with Lee bringing in scenes piece by piece, working on movement and choreography with Dean Moss (formerly of NYC performance space, The Kitchen) and consulting with set designer Eric Dyer (a member of the Brooklyn performance group Radiohole). While her approach is basically that of the auteur, Lee gives credit to her collaborators for helping flesh out her vision. What’s more, she describes the creative process as stressful. “Professionally, I’m the most confident person you’ll ever meet,” she says. “I’ve never had a moment of doubt about my career or where I’m going. But personally and artistically, it’s the reverse. Making a show is almost torture. You need such a high level of belief in yourself. So for me, it’s a constant struggle to not give up.”

Lee expresses both professional pride and personal ambivalence about the reception to Songs of the Dragons in the United States. On the one hand, the work has attracted attention from the European festival circuit and she is, for the moment, being subsidized by the commission money. But Lee says that her peers in the downtown theater world have been openly envious—even contemptuous. “I’ve had people tell me to my face that the only reason I’m getting this attention is because I’m Asian,” Lee says.

While she was rehearsing her show in New York, Lee recalls people felt they were permitted to make off-color Asian jokes, as a weird way of ingratiating themselves with her. “I do not encourage that sort of humor,” Lee says, making it clear that being racist and being a racist “ironically” is basically the same thing.

“It’s only downtown artists who do it,” Lee says. “And they’re incredibly defensive about it—as if anything they did could ever be construed as racist. For example, the impression I get of the Wooster Group is that they became incredibly angry whenever anyone accused them of racism, because of the blackface in their shows. That’s where the line in my play comes from: ‘Go to hell, you unfashionably angry minorities. This is my sophisticated critique of racism that you are too stupid to understand.’ That’s pretty much the party line of downtown theater artists. There’s an incredibly high level of racial entitlement. Since artists make a distinction between themselves and yuppies, they think they have a kind of racial immunity. That they’re coming from a place of total moral and political purity. Actually, I just think they’re a bunch of racists.”

Lee is the latest in a line of American avant-gardists whose work is partly made possible by the money and attention of European presenters. Like the Wooster Group, the Builders Association, Radiohole, Richard Foreman, Richard Maxwell and, naturally, Robert Wilson, Lee has acquired an international profile. It’s a dirty little secret of American theater that its most daring artists are subsidized by Europe. In fact, by attending Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, you are helping to sustain the American avant-garde.

Who knows if things will ever get better? Even in New York City, the cultural commissars are hostile to experimental theater, especially work as likely to confound and provoke as Lee’s. The nonprofit theater scene is deeply conservative and afraid to alienate its audience. And funding for the theatrical avant-garde is practically nonexistent. Despite the critical success of her work and her growing reputation, Lee is aware of the systemic limitations she faces. “If you want to have a play produced professionally, you need to write something that’s basically at the same level as a television movie,” Lee says. “But then, you have to cover it in what I call a special sauce of pretension. The pretension comes from heightened language, or maybe an abstract set. People want a reason to see a play rather than sit around at home. So you have to make them feel like they’re at a cultural event that is deeper or more significant than HBO.”

Ironically, if Lee’s success continues, we may lose her articulate fury and heartbreaking ambivalence to the very media that have corrupted American theater. Film and television offers are starting to come her way.

Brits, Vids and Tonys

It's not just apostasy and hellfire here on Planet Histriomastix (must post sometime on why I chose this name, especially since another blogger has posted his predictably twisted reading). I'm also in the business of shameless self-promotion! I thought things would slow down after the end of the 2006-07 season and the announcement of the Tony nominations, but theater never sleeps. Between the Brits Off Broadway festival, the Pretentious Festival, the Fringe and assorted other Off and Broadway shows who chose to open in summer, it looks to be a busy next few months.

Here are some recent doings. I penned a profile of nonagenarian Broadway book-writing legend Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof, Zorba) for the London Times here.

On Tuesday, I spoke with WNYC's Amy Eddings and read the Tony nomination tea leaves. Also wrote the station a brief reaction here.

Yahoo!'s Broadway page now includes Adam Feldman and my insoucient weekly vlogs about what we've seen and thought. Bookmark it here.

Checked out a couple of shows at Brits Off Broadway. One is definitely worth catching: The Receipt. A perfect example of how two clever lads with some training in puppetry, mime and non-traditional theater can evoke a wonderfully witty, disturbing world out of two filing cabinets, small figurines and sound effects from a synthesizer. It plays through May 27. Details here.