Histriomastix

Tracy Muthafuckin Letts

Haven't seen Tracy Letts' August: Osage County, but I'm certainly looking forward to it…despite allegations of it not being a fully achieved work of art.

In the meantime, enjoy. Hoo boy. This is fun stuff. Hat tip: Matthew Freeman.

So Histriomastix, what should I see this weekend?

Glad you asked! There’s plenty of fine New York theater that deserves your attention. My picks, in order of when they’re closing:

The Other Here Quirky, delicate, funny strangeness from Big Dance Theater. They gently mash together Japanese folk culture, Okinawan pop and found text from an American convention of life-insurance salesmen. The result? Lightly ironized “Orientalism” with an undercurrent of sadness. Wonderful performances and choreography by Annie-B Parson. Plus, Heather Christian’s too-brief songs will drive you mad with rhapsodic pleasure (she sounds just like Regina Spektor). Full review here. At Dance Theater Workshop through Saturday.

100 Saints You Should Know Reviewing Kate Fodor’s acutely touching slice-of-life about finding and losing one’s faith, Ben Brantley at the Times likened it to a Lifetime TV movie. That was a terrible, disrespectful misrepresentation of a well crafted, finely observed human drama. As a raging atheist, I could have foamed at the mouth that Fodor was being a liberal religious crypto-apologist, but her portraiture work and gift for dialogue is just too well shaded. Love Jeremy Shamos’ sexually miserable priest. The Scrabble-game scene between him and his mother captures perfectly the child who has evolved beyond his parents, yet still longs for approval. Read my colleague Adam Feldman’s lovely review here. At Playwrights Horizons through Sunday.

Have You Seen Steve Steven? I just saw Ann Marie Healy’s creepy, 70-minute comedy last night and found it fascinating, scary, deeply sad, obliquely truthful and a bit perplexing. Go see it. In a nondescript “Midwestern McMansion,” a teenage girl and her parents prepare for a dinner party with neighbors. The girl seems disoriented; she doesn’t remember a boy who is supposed to be her childhood friend. Her parents burble and babble. Pauses impregnate. A next-door neighbor insinuates himself into the house. The language rides a line between Ionesco’s idiotic iterations of bourgeois chatter and Edward Albee’s coded, menacing banter. This is a play about growing up and away from your parents, even as biology and social networks try to squeeze you into their mold. It’s about the horror of uniformity and the instability of memory. It’s about the dark underside of a child’s defensive imagination. I related deeply. Charles Isherwood did not. In his sometimes perceptive but callow, condescending review, he found little to encourage in this play, or Anne Kauffman’s superb production for 13P. He claimed it had nothing really to say about human beings, which is untrue. (In case you haven't noticed by now, he has severe taste and tone problems.) Feingold at the Voice was more encouraging, but he adopted a schoolmarmish tone and suggested the talented Healy go back to school. I will admit that the last section of the play—when it veers into heavy Ionesco territory and then ends on a note of ambivalent cosmic resignation— is problematic. I feel like it might have been a large, disturbing play about Americans and their families, but settled for being small and odd. Too few reviews I've read note that the play is more than an exercise in language games and atmospherics: There’s a deep, philosophical vein of intense sadness running through it, perfectly captured in Stephanie Wright Thompson’s pretty, neutral face, beginning to cloud over with self-doubt and fear. The Playgoer has a smart, corrective review here. Aaron Riccio proved similarly sensitive and Helen Shaw gives the show its due in TONY here. At the 14th Street Theater through October 6.

American Sligo Speaking of fucked-up families, you will not have more down-and-dirty fun than at Adam Rapp’s pro-wrestling-as-a-metaphor- for-father-son-dysfunction. Rapp proves again what a good director he is, and the play is full of great one liners, banter, bickering. Dad’s a hugely fat pro wrestling legend. Son is a malicious cokehead. Son #2 is a fat layabout. Aunt is on antidepressants and won’t shut up. Then there's Bobby, a jittery freak of superfan. It’s all very Shepard. I’ve heard Rapp wrote the play expressly for the amazing cast, and it shows. Those brilliant actors are: Guy Boyd, Marylouise Burke, Michael Chernus, Megan Mostyn-Brown, Emily Cass McDonnell, Paul Sparks, and Matthew Stadelmann. Does the play end on a gratuitous bloody note that feels right and wrong at the same time? Yes. Do we want to get to know these characters more? Yes. Are there huge leaps of faith you have to make with the plot? Yes. But there’s lots of fun to be had at this grungy frolic. My review is here. Rattlestick Playwrights Theater through October 14.

Sorry I forgot our anniversary...

So. Late August, around the time of my last post, I forgot to make the customary observance about having maintained a blog for one year and what I've learned and experienced as a human being and so forth. Part of the reason was sheer bloody inertia. I was experiencing the combined excitement and fear of a new fall season and the mountains of freelance work—besides my pressing TONY duties—I'd have to devote energy to. Then, after the seasonal panic subsided, I surfed around to other blogs, procrastinated some more and still felt bored and anxious and void of thoughts.

Not that you asked, but, well...

Truth is, I'm darned tired! All this reviewing, essaying, deadlines, seeing Clarinatrix concerts, seeing stuff just 'cause I should.

Then there's that whole, you know, being a frustrated writer in an, um, creative sense. That sort of raging against shadows takes lots of free time.

I still kinda feel like this:

Anyway, if you missed me, thanks!

Here's some stuff:

I'm Facebooking now.
I've got an essay on Conor McPherson's spine-tingling Shining City in this.
I reviewed McKellen's King Lear recently here and on NY1.
Tomorrow at 6:30pm at CUNY's Graduate Center, I'm moderating a Prelude ’07 panel on how/why playwrights and downtown companies aren't properly represented at our major nonprofit institutions. It took Elevator Repair Service 16 freaking years to premiere a play at an Off-Broadway venue (New York Theatre Workshop, this spring). What is up with that?

Brotherly love

If you happen to notice a sudden drop in avant-garderati scenesters this weekend, it’s no surprise: Today the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival kicks off. It’s the curated companion event to Philly’s Fringe, and features a mouthwatering lineup of stuff you might have already seen in NYC… as well as shows you may never see here. Most notably, Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz, a seven-hour uncut, verbatim theatrical rendition of The Great Gatsby. This underground classic (first seen in workshop form here two years ago) has toured the world and the country, but due to a rights issue (some fool is trying to make a musical of it), is forbidden from being produced in NYC. So your best—maybe only—chance to see it is by taking a 90-minute train to the City of Brotherly Love. That’s what I'm doing Saturday—and it’s a sure bet the audience on Sunday will be crawling with Gothamites. On Saturday, I'm catching Philly-based Pig Iron Theatre Company’s deconstruction of Measure for Measure, called Isabella. Other worthwhile productions include Young Jean Lee’s lacerating, wicked Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven and the Wooster Group’s mind-blowing staging of The Emperor Jones. You never saw them? Well, now's your chance.

Freaks and Greeks

Charles Mee's Iphigenia 2.0 has divided the critics. Some, whom I greatly like and respect, have strongly disliked Mee's postmodern rewrite of the Euripidean tragedy. Others have been tepid or mixed. But don't listen to them! Believe the guy I sit next to:Adam Feldman, who mightily loved the production at Signature Theatre Company, the first in a season devoted to Mee. I wholeheartedly second Adam's review. This is a dynamic, inventive, thrilling staging of a jagged, urgent text. It jumps. It crackles. The set, costumes and lights (by Blythe R.D. Quinlan, Anita Yavich and Scott Zielinski) alone are enough to get the blood pumping. But the performances are all excellent as well. Tom Nelis (with whom I trod the boards back in 1997 in Richard Foreman's Pearls for Pigs, and who you can see above about to sacrifice the amazing Louisa Krause) makes Agamemnon a study in decaying dignity. And who knew that Kate Mulgrew could do postmodern so well?

My profile of Mee in TONY is here, for those of you not familiar with his work. Get down to the Signature, which is keeping all tickets for the run (not the one-week extension in October, mind y0u) an affordable $20. I think Tina Landau did a fantastic job with this show, delivering a smart, cohesive production that looks more like something you'd see at New York Theatre Workshop or American Repertory Theatre in Boston than midtown Manhattan, where the theatrical modes are basically naturalism or garish Broadway spectacle.

UPDATE: My esteemed colleague (and editor) Elisabeth Vincentelli also has good things to say about the show. Yes, we are Mee fans at TONY.

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.

Extreme unctuous

Over at TONY, there are some Fringe festival reviews, tied into the cover story on race in NYC. Also, my review of the supremely bland revival of Grease. A fourth-rate revival of third-rate kitsch, miscast and toothless. Painful is the word. Teaser quote:

Perhaps you’re wondering which is worse: Grease the reality-TV talent competition or Grease the Broadway revival? Considering that the stage show didn’t cause spontaneous bleeding from my eyeballs, I guess the technical winner is the live option. But it’s live only in the sense that Victor Frankenstein might use. At least the small-screen abomination had commercial breaks, so I could mop up the blood. To change channels at the desperate, synthetic bore on display at the Brooks Atkinson, your only hope is a self-induced coma or cataleptic fit.

Disobedient, but civil

Yesterday afternoon I spent a fun couple of hours with the anarcho-aesthete neoyippie utopian nanorevolutionary cell CAFF (Cheap Art for Freedom; aka Collective Anarchist Freedom Fuckers), hanging mock warning signs through Tomkins Square Park. Mostly I used my cellcam to document the attractively designed signs. It was funny how I felt a twinge of fear and preemptive guilt when my bumptious friend Matthias (who designed the signs) suggested I help. One of the CAFF members asked me, "When's the last time you left your comfort zone?" The query stumped me. I could quip every time I see a Fringe show, but that's not true. The last time I broke the law was when I furtively smoked on an elevated subway platform. $75 fine. And I don't smoke anymore. Anyway, here are the some pictures of their/our work. They're practically the only record, since about a two hours after, when we came back from a delicious Indian meal on East 6th, all the signs had been taken down. Lex longa, ars brevis. I'm checking out CAFF's further adventures this afternoon in Washington Square Park.

Let Them Eat Art

Anyone who reads Histriomastix knows that it ain't a political blog. (Let me clarify: Although I have written about political theater, or the lack thereof, on Salon, and critiqued religion, I'm talking about informed commentary on Events of the Day.) Unlike Isaac Butler and Matthew Freeman, I don't go anywhere near political issues—not because I don't have opinions, but because I don't have the time, research or vocabulary to express them. Which is, come to think of it, a lot like not actually having political opinions. Ahem. Nevertheless, I do have a friend who is quite engagé. My childhood buddy and personal role model-peer: Matthias Regan, PhD in literature from University of Chicago, the town he calls home. Matthias is a poet,essayist and fierce indefatigable collagist and visual artist. He is cofounder of the Rubba Ducky Press. You can see a sample of his work above. He is also a proud, wildly creative activist, and part of a group called the Cheap Art for Freedom Collective. Said group is in town this week and you really ought to check out what they're up to. In my less-dyspeptic, less-misanthropic, more constructive moods, I think of this sort of grassroots creative activism as the sort of thing I'd do if I moved out of the city to spread the gospel of secular aestheticism. Keep on reading.

The Cheap Art for Freedom Collective
(otherwise known as the Collective Anarchist Freedom Fuckers)
are coming to NYC!

We will be staging various events in & around the city during the week of August 19-25. For details on times and locations, call 831-776-8038.

Our projects will include:

1. Iraqi Ground Zero
We will be making a memorial to the victims of U.S. aggression in Iraq. We are hoping many people will join us in this endeavor, so have written up an announcement: please distribute it as widely as possible:

IRAQI GROUND ZERO MEMORIALS
Washington Square Park
Wednesday 8/22 3PM-EVENING
The Cheap Art for Freedom Collective will be coming to New York in late August. Among our projects in the city is one that requires your help. On Wednesday, 8/22, in Washington Square Park, we will be constructing memorials for Iraqis killed as a result of the U.S. invasion. After 9/11 New Yorkers constructed thousands of ad hoc memorials for family members, friends, neighbors, and fellow New Yorkers who died in the attacks. Small, homemade memorials—"candles, flowers, teddy bears, the names and images of the dead and missing”—appeared all over the city. We believe that similar memorials should be erected for some of the more than 500,000 citizens of Iraq killed since the invasion more than five years ago.    Part of the pain experienced by a nation at war stems from our awareness of the suffering caused in our name. We ask you to share this grief with us by joining us in Washington Square park to construct memorials for the dead on the other side of this war. Any items you wish to contribute will be welcome. A memorial can be as small as a candle and as large as a monument; it can commemorate an individual or an event, such as the Fallujah massacre of November, 2004. The CAFF Collective will be constructing several memorials—large and small—beginning at 3:00 pm on Wednesday afternoon. Please forward this invitation widely.

The rest of the events will be taking place throughout the city at various random locations and times:

2. DIY T-Shirt Stencil Party in the Park (or some other excellent place)
We will be celebrating the DIY spirit Cheap Art by inviting passers by to create their own t-shirts using paint and stencils. A number of stencils with encouraging and admonishing messages in English and Spanish will be available.

3. Counter-Recruitment Events
We have "The New Yorkers' Guide to Military Recruitment in the 5 boroughs" and will be creating counter-recruitment counters at various offices. Look for flags, banners, and giant cardboard reproductions of patriotic squirrels.   

4. I (Heart) NY Posters & Art Lines
The original campaign was part of the neoliberal take-over of a city made attractive not by Disney but by centuries of countercultural production. To celebrate this, the CAFF Collective will be pasting I LOVE NY posters featuring quotations and addresses of some of the cities best-loved radicals, including Emma Goldman, Allen Ginsberg, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the Tompkins Square Squats, the first birth control clinics in the world, and Dorothy Day's Catholic Workers House. At the addresses of these radical people and institutions, we will erect free art lines commemorating the spirit of rebellion that made New York what it is today…or at least what it used to be!

5. Free Art Lines
We will be giving our silk-screened t-shirts, posters, Each One Teach One pamphlets, and cardboard sculptures away for free at sites across the city. Expect to find lines in various neighborhood parks, at farmers' markets and at Coney Island.

6.  Freedom Free Culture Jams
These 11x17 signs that mimic "no parking/zoning signs" call attention to the loss of everyday liberties in America at large and the city in particular. Look for them to be wheat-pasted, stapled, and otherwise plastered all over the city.

Fringes hither and yon

In case you didn't know, TONY is covering the New York International Fringe this year in a novel fashion: We've conscripted dozens of staffers--from interns to our editor-in-chief--to see a show and write it up. Bookmark this page and return often as new reviews get posted. In next week's print edition, we'll be running other reviews. And if you don't give a flip for FringeNYC, give Jason Zinoman's piece on the Edinburgh Fringe a read. He gives a glowing notice to a new play by Enda Walsh. This Irish playwright's bedbound--a wonderfully gruesome, vicious father-daughter drama--was inexplicably presented by the conservative Irish Repertory Theatre in 2003, then I never heard of him in NYC since. How I envy Jason Z his assignment. As I said before, the Edinburgh model is what FringeNYC should emulate: A world-class theater festival that is carefully curated, plus hundreds of small stuff in five boroughs. As opposed to the careerist, metastasized showase it seems to be now.