Histriomastix

Editorially yours

Three weeks ago, I ran a profile of Brooke Berman, whose latest show, Hunting and Gathering, closes next Saturday at 59E59. One of the intriguing angles of the story was that Ms. Berman freely drew on her absurdly peripatetic life to tell this story of four young folks in New York trying to find a stable home. She spoke about her trials and tribulations as a perennially homeless playwright. Life imitating art and all that. Here's the story.

Yesterday I checked out the Times theater page and came across this 1800-word Janie-come-lately piece.

What else can I say, but (in my best Stephen Colbert voice):

YOU'RE WELCOME, NEW YORK TIMES.

Three weeks might seem like an eternity in the news cycle, but this weekly elephant never forgets.

Elocution lesions

In my irresistible urge to syncretize, I could say that my three reviews in this week's TONY are all about language and power.

Pygmalion—which features a bold and textually scrupulous performance by the sparky Jefferson Mays—is a prickly, funny, sad, wistful work about language as social-advancement tool (in addition to fashion and manners). David Grindley's lively revival for the Roundabout Theatre Company is as fine and faithful a take on a Shaw play as I've ever seen.

Also produced by the Roundabout (nice week it's having) is The Overwhelming (pictured above). J.T. Rogers's international thriller about the Rwandan genocide was just as wrenching and exciting on stage as it was to read. Languages multiply in the taut, harrowing script: French, English, Kinyarwandan, Spanish. Not understanding the local tongue is the metaphorical and actual problem faced by the American protagonists. In a theater scene virtually devoid of serious political drama comes this bracing, skillful, scrupulously researched portrait of Americans abroad getting a brutal lesson in history and geopolitics. While the 1994 genocide that put Rwanda on the world map remains an international problem that deserves study and healing, what's interesting about The Overwhelming is that, in some ways, Rwanda then is the exact opposite of Iraq today. Rather than a country in which the U.S. became deeply, militarily involved and lost lives and treasure, Rwanda in 1994 was a country no American knew about, cared about, or would lift a finger to help. The play has been faulted for lacking "art" or persuasive human dynamics by some critics, and a close study may yield point-by-point criticism, but I found both the play and the production wonderfully thrilling and effective. Its very existence on the landscape is a sign of health for theater of substance and conscience. Not robust health, but some health. (My NY1 On Stage review will be broadcast this weekend.)

Lastly John Jesurun's free adaptation of Sophocles' Philoktetes is a play about many things, embedded so deeply in the hypnotic, trippy, sticky, collaged, multivalent text, that I'm still parsing them days later. Comradeship, war crimes, honor, sickness—those are a few. But Jesurun tells his story in a silky, smoky, fragrant language that will leave you agog. It left the Times reviewer with nothing to say, except to reach for facile references to TV shows and sweeping, cynical generalizations about "avant-garde clichés." No one says you have to like this sort of experimental theater, but such lazy, ill-informed reviews are just embarrassing for a paper that is supposed to have some level of critical maturity and seriousness. Jesurun has been a respected artist on the scene for 25 years, both for his multimedia experiments and the strange power of his lyrical stage writing. The Times review was written with a palpable distaste for theater and a fear of appearing to take unconventional work seriously. Just imagine if such an attitude were held by its music or art critics.

Last but not least: a box on Ellen Beckerman & LightBox's intriguing new consumption-themed piece Milk 'n' Honey.

All this and freelance on the side. Yes, I've been very busy.

Art for Critic's Sake

Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, reportedly one of the most ambitious and exciting new American dramas to come down the pike in a long time, is bound for Broadway. Hooray! I recently had dinner with Scott Morfee, who runs Barrow Street Theatre and brought over Letts’ previous works, Killer Joe and Bug, and he raved about A:OC. Morfee could be the last Off-Broadway commercial producer in this town with guts and taste to match. Thanks to him, the Civilians’ brainy, touching Gone Missing is enjoying a long run at Barrow Street.

I can’t wait to see Letts’ play.

But wait, what’s this Charles Isherwood wrote in the Times on August 13, 2007… After comparing the play’s pill-popping, bile-spewing matriarch to Albee’s Martha, O’Neill’s Mary Tyrone and Williams’ Amanda Wingfield, he puts on the brakes toward the end of an otherwise enthusiastic review. After a few good strokes of the chin, quoth The Ish:

Mr. Letts is as yet more a skillful entertainer than a true visionary or a dramatic poet. August: Osage County is a ripsnorter full of blistering, funny dialogue, acid-etched characterizations and scenes of no-holds-barred emotional combat, but I would not say it possesses the penetrating truth or the revelatory originality of a fully achieved work of art.

Spoken like a true cultural arbiter. Still, let’s pause and rescan. The play “does not possess the penetrating truth or revelatory originality of a fully achieved work of art.” Really? So…it’s not art? Is it at least a fully achieved piece of entertainment? What is the difference? If, in 50 years, no one has written a large-scale family drama that is better than A:OC, will it be upgraded to the ranks of fully-achieved art (FAWA)? Is Isherwood speaking as a newspaper reviewer of 2007 or a cultural commissar from the distant future? Where does he park his time machine?

I wonder how often Isherwood’s Tony-named colleagues—Scott and Tommasini—review a new movie or symphony and go out of their way to assure the reader: Well it’s no Citizen Kane or Beethoven’s Ninth, but pretty good! Do reviewers in other fields even bother with this sort of hierarchizing humbug? What proprietary, red-velvet-rope-fondling arrogance. What laughable, bean-counting, pompous equivocation. Such antique snobbery is beneath even pre-ratatouille-munching Anton Ego (and I say that as a Neo-Snob). In closing: If you ever catch me issuing such vapid, flatulent dicti, kick me in my fat ass.

Unless, of course, I’m putting my personal stank on a genuine FAWA.

UPDATES: My counterpart at Time Out Chicago Christopher Piatt weighs in on the canonizability (or not) of the play. And Jaime, who has read the script, exults.

Tony wrapper-upper

Yeah the end of The Sopranos was pretty cool. Disjunctive nonclosure establishing—in one grand telecommunal implosion—perpetual individuated narratives in the minds of the viewers. David Chase gave each and every viewer a personal fuck-you and a gift: You finish the story. However, the Tony Awards broadcast wasn't altogether lousy, either. I thought the Spring Awakening number was ecstatic fun, there were no heinous upsets and the pacing, writing and jokes, compared favorably to past years. Early this morning on WNYC I did a quick phoner with Soterios Johnson. Last night I worked the red carpet. Video here and blog reflections here. Later this afternoon more Time Out New York On Demand post-Tony wrap-up then on to NY1 for more of the same. Yes, I am a media whore and yes, I'm looking forward to some peace & quiet so I can finish this and this.

UPDATE: The Tony postmortem airs on NY1 tonight at 9:30. Also on that channel's website you can read/watch my reviews of A.R. Gurney's mad-WASP dramedy Crazy Mary and Neil LaBute's unexpectedly effective new shocker, In a Dark Dark House.

Initial Nielsen returns from last night's Tony Awards are not, as was pretty much expected, too great. Still, Playbill reports, "the three-hour event's 6.24 million total viewers did help CBS win the overall evening in the ratings." Only in TV could more than six million viewers be construed as a failure. Sounds like a constituency to me. Yes, The Sopranos reach 13 million and basketball even more, but 6 million is a healthy segment of the American population. Until PBS, HBO or some other station starts regularly broadcasting musicals and plays, it will be hard to say that Broadway has a national audience. And yet, each year, millions of tourists come to the city and spend millions of dollars to see shows. Millions more participate in theater in regional houses, or their local equivalent of Off-Off Broadway or in community theaters or college and university venues. Theater is a national art form, even if it’s not on TV every week in a coveted time slot. And guess what? It's Monday, June 11 and Tony Soprano is figuratively dead. But the Tony Awards, and American theater, are very much alive.

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!