From AM New York:
Terrence Howard, who performed on Broadway last season in CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, is being sued for $5 million for allegedly assaulting Andrew "Tex" Allen during the play's rehearsals. Specifically, the lawsuit accuses Howard of repeatedly punching the plaintiff in the face.Maybe I've just spent too many hours in really boring rehearsal rooms, but I just find that a hilarious scene to imagine.
"Some theater people are shivering with fear that their jobs are about to disappear. Unfortunately, they won't get much sympathy from anyone else on Broadway. That's because they're newspaper drama critics, those once all-powerful arbiters who, with a vicious turn of phrase, could close a show, humiliate an actor, bankrupt an investor. Now they're in danger of being shut down themselves, done in by declining circulation, shrinking arts coverage and that dreaded rival who's usurped their power, The Blogger."
Of course for Michael Riedel (author of the above, in case you couldn't tell) "The Blogger" amounts to some guys on All That Chat.
But sobering news indeed that such familiar names as the Star-Ledger's Michael Sommers and Peter Filichia, as well as our friend Eric Grode, formerly of the late NY Sun--are all out of jobs now. (Some voluntarily. Sommers, reports Riedel, took a buyout--as are so many journo's these days.)
Here's a wistful statement from Sommers that pretty much captures the changing times:
"We were all misled," says Sommers. "I thought I was going to be George Sanders. [i.e. Addison DeWitt in All About Eve.] Then I found out we don't get invited to the parties. There's no glamour anymore. During the stagehands strike, my editors had me standing on the sidewalk at 2 a.m. getting quotes."Hey at least they had someone on the street covering the strike. But in the old days, the paper might have actually had a theatre reporter (or two!) in addition to the critic. It's now a one-man beat, if that.
"A review is the only kind of editorial you're going to get for an off-Broadway play," the publicist says. "But for a big musical or a play with a star, the critics don't matter at all."This confirms the obvious recent trend of "critic-proof" hits, like "Little Mermaid" and "Grease." In fact, given the concurrent rise of "praise-proof" flops on the drama side ("Journey's End," "Well," "[title of show]" and even, to an extent, "Passing Strange") dare we come to the conclusion that print critics are mattering less and less on Broadway in general?
The indispensable Americans for the Arts have just announced a merger with the Business Committee for the Arts. Together they will form what Crain's calls "the largest such group [arts advocacy] in the private sector."
I guess that's somewhat reassuring, going into a Recession.
Still, check out this stat referenced in the announcement:
“The private sector’s relationship with the arts has shifted dramatically in recent years,” said Robert Lynch, chief executive of Americans for the Arts. “Despite recent modest gains in overall giving, the market share of private funding for the arts is nearly one-third less than it was in the early 1990s....”Remember when those NEA cuts started way back when and the justification was that the private sector would pick up the tab?
"I receive a very handsome salary and worked 35 years to get it,'' said [Andre] Bishop of Lincoln Center Theater, who drew no salary when he began working at tiny nonprofits in the 1970s. "The idea that because we're nonprofit we shouldn't earn a decent living is ludicrous. We're the CEOs of a company with a budget of about $35 million."Isaac thankfully points us to an detailed survey by Bloomberg's Philip Boroff of Artistic Director salaries. While Isaac's right that he and I and others in our beloved "theatresphere" were on this story months ago, it's still nice to see someone throwing their full journalistic resources at it.
I have a friend who works for a theater.[...] He had to fight for a standard of living wage increase last year because the theater has run deficits for years. Okay, understandable, we have hard times, you care about your company, you make sacrifices. But... and I'm sure you've already guessed what the kicker is here... they're building a multimillion dollar new space. Even though they're arguing they can't afford to pay their staff a decent wage. And it's not like they're saying "hey, included in this capital campaign is a wage increase for you guys, so just hold on, its coming". They're saying "we can't give you this because times are tight".The "theatre failed america reference" indeed refers to Mike Daisey's polemic against--among other things--the increased overvaluing of real estate over people, of management over artists.
[...]
This is yet another way that theater has become america. We expect those at the bottom to take huge sacrifices and remain in it for "the love of what you do" or because "it's a good cause" while people at the top make significantly more money. And in theater, that significantly more still pales in comparison to what they'd make managing companies of the same size outside of the art form.
How does the little Pearl Theatre mount all three Sophoclean Oedipus plays in one evening? How does your intrepid reviewer survive said evening, and live to tell about it? In 250 wds, no less?
Find out here. In this week's Time Out.
Bay Area critic/blogger Chloe Veltman has been airing some worthy questions about TCG's annual "Free Night of Theatre" promotion, just recently passed. Here she interviews Theatre Bay Area's Brad Erikson about the impact on that scene. He's quite bullish, citing:
According to the online survey of 2007 Free Night patrons required when they made their ticket reservation, the program continues to attract a significant number of people who fall into non-traditional theatre participant categories, including infrequent theatre attendees, young people, less educated, non-white and those with lower household incomes.I have yet to participate. What's y'all's sense of how it's going?
--Specifically, 77% attended a theatre they had never been to before, 42% are under age 35, 26% have less than a college degree, 27% are non-white, and 33% have combined household incomes under $50,000.
The Public's latest plan for spicing up the Delacorte next summer?
"The mission of Soderbergh in the Park has always been to bring Soderbergh to the masses," Fletcher said. "And that includes even his more inaccessible material. Those who are skeptical will be pleased to find that many of the traditional Soderberghian themes are present in Ocean's Twelve: anger, betrayal, despair, the travails of cool wealthy people who plan crime capers, and brotherhood."Okay, fine it's The Onion. But almost fooled ya, huh?
"Soderbergh is never easy," Kline said. "I remember when I first saw Ocean's Twelve. I didn't get why the jokes were funny, it was way too long, and the plot was so incomprehensible that I nearly walked out of the theater."
"But since then, I have come to appreciate the scope of the piece," he added. "Though I admit that even after extensive study, the ending still remains a mystery to me."
I'm waiting for "Schizopolis: The Musical!" myself.
Anchorage Daily News, in their continuing Palin muckraking, has delved deeper into the exact purported agenda and philosophy of the Governor's religious heroes, like Pastor "Witch Doctor" Muthee: a little something they call Christian Nationalism.
Extreme Christian Nationalists not only believe that the United States was founded as a Christian nation but that its institutions should be run entirely by fundamentalist or evangelical Christians. They believe they have a mandate to purge our institutions of "humanists" who believe that humans are in control of their own destiny, progressive Christians and non-Christians. They believe there are seven areas of society that must be controlled, the so-called Seven Mountains Strategy: church, family, education, government and law, media, arts and entertainment and business.Well at least someone's got an arts policy.
That is, if you're a New York City theatre artist who frequents the land of AEA Showcase Codes.
New York Innovative Theatre Awards conducts this study now every year. So if this is your community, be a part!
And show the rest of the city that you're not just gadabout amateur theatricals.
After hoping for a stand-alone building downtown, looks like Signature Theatre is finally sealing the deal on a complex of three spaces on the lower floors of an under-construction luxury Times Square hotel.
Oh the byzantine world of NYC real estate....
In this week's Time Out I review the Keen Company's revival of The Fourposter.
I usually hate when people say this about old plays--but, I'm sorry, this one's a "chestnut."
At least in this production.
Right on the heels of the big Steinberg playwriting prize (subject of much debate here), turns out the Mellon Foundation has been spending the last three years studying the playwright's predicament and come up with a new program.
Their findings apparently were news to the funding community:
It turns out that developing plays is not the problem. Producing them is. New playwrights often get stuck in “workshop hell,” as Ms. Ragsdale put it. Supporting playwrights directly and creating long-term residencies at theaters were among the recommendations that emerged.Well who could blame them. Since "play development" was probably all they were hearing about from theatres in the 90s.
Roadside Theater, in Whitesburg, Ky., in the heart of the coal-mining region of the central Appalachian Mountains....which creates dramas based on the region’s people and history, received $1 million to develop new audiences for live theater, Dudley Cocke, its artistic director, said, and to bring stories about the working class to the stage. The group has gone to other cities to help local writers. A new musical, “Betsy,” on which it collaborated with Pregones Theater in the Bronx, is to open on Nov. 19.Who knew?
While NYU apparently gained all the approval it needed back in May for its compromise revised plan for developing the site of the historic Provincetown Playhouse, a protest was staged yet again today as the demolitions are about to begin.
The University's response:
Right. The theatre's not going to be demolished, just the building!John Beckman, a spokesman for N.Y.U., said the criticisms were unfair....“We are preserving the cultural significance of the site by preserving the four walls of the Provincetown Playhouse — which will continue to be a theater space when the project is complete — and building around them,” he said.
Mr. Beckman also said that Mr. Berman’s group was trying to inflame public opinion in a misleading way by distributing fliers that said the playhouse was going to be demolished. “It is simply untrue, which they must know,” he said.
This season Lincoln Center Theatre (with its "LCT3") is joining the Roundabout in running what is effectively an Off-Off Broadway blackbox for new plays. Huzzah.
This is definitely a promising development--especially when the tickets for these venues are kept separate from the subscriptions and limited to about $20 a pop. These are the kinds of conditions that allow, say London's Royal Court theatre, to premiere and nurture new writing in their famous "Theatre Upstairs."
But another necessary factor to make this work is devoting the company's best resources to even this smallest of productions on their slate. And picking plays that really benefit from the A-list talent only they can attract. Otherwise what's the point. We have plenty of independent producers and small companies renting cheap black boxes as it is.
Case in point: LCT3's debut show: "Clay." "Clay" is essentially a solo performance piece by a writer-actor (or writer-rapper? rapper-actor?), Matt Sax, who already performed it at two prominent Chicago companies, About Face and Lookingglass. I saw "Clay" and was very impressed with Sax as a performer. But I couldn't shake the question: did Lincoln Center Theatre really need to produce this? I imagine "Clay" would fare no better or worse in a two-week independent run at the Ohio Theatre, say, or on Theatre Row. Aside from the extra design-element frills LCT provides here, the show--again, at its core a show for one man and a mic--seems eminently producible on a low budget.
Ironically I ultimately found the LCT3 staging over-produced. At least, for the good of the material, which I don't believe supported the set's needlessly plush curtains and towering finely-detailed backdrop. All I really feel like saying about "Clay" is that the way to see it would be in an open space, at a 10pm show, with booze in the seats. Sax's whole frame for the piece, indeed, is a concert--and that's exactly what this production does not feel like. The sleek 42nd St. Duke theatre is a tidy blackbox with a rigid proscenium seating arrangement. So you don't really feel like putting "yo hands in da air" (as Sax beckons us to) when you're physically prevented from even seeing the audience around you.
If "Clay" were truly staged as a concert--with tight dramatic interludes bursting out of that form--then Sax would really impress us as a rapper with a rare playwriting sensibility. As it is, he seems more like a mediocre playwright who really does know how to bust some rhymes!
In sum, yes, I think "Clay" was not a great choice to launch this well intentioned series. But no so much because of its inherent quality. (Experimenting with new writers, after all, does entail some aesthetic risks.) The problem instead is that "Clay" does not uniquely benefit from a Lincoln Center production. Oh, there's the added publicity, of course. Which is considerable. (It's not just a better production budget LCT offers--it's the marketing budget.) But I guess I'm still enough of a purist and idealist to believe that when good work happens in this town, no matter where, word does get out.
No, the reason it doesn't really benefit from LCT's sponsorship is that it did not require any new actors, director, or, I assume, substantial re-writing. You had the playwright as the sole actor, the original director, and the piece had already been performed in two professional productions.
I don't think the best use of these new spaces is for remounts and imports.
Not having seen last season's "Speech and Debate" at the Roundabout's analogous wing (their "Underground" space) I can't verify if that was any better. But I was encouraged by some remarks about their vision for the program in a recent Variety piece about it by Sam Thielman.
Haimes [Roundabout AD Todd Haimes] and producer Robyn Goodman, who curates the series, launched Underground on the theory that promising young playwrights would have a better shot at success if they got an initial boost in the form of a low-profile, high-budget production. Name actors, professional designers, hot directors -- all the things you can't get if you're performing in a loft downtown.Emphasis added. Yes, it's the combination of "low-profile" and "high budget" that a company like this can uniquely offer our emerging writers. And, yes, that does involve a willingness to lose money.
There's a reason few other companies can do this: The ratio of seats to production budget is a precise one, and most companies that produce in spaces the size of Underground (62 seats) have to choose between underfunding their productions or closing in the red.
However, Roundabout is a larger operation than most. Rather than run the theater on a shoestring, Haimes and Goodman decided to amp up production values, keep tickets under $20 and let the theater's operating budget absorb the cost -- but that cost is a deficit of at least $200,000, even if every seat for every perf is sold.
Hey, I'm not out to make saints of the Roundabout. No sir. But I do think this is the only way to go if you really want to make a "third space" (or for the Roundabout, 4th? I lose count) viable and truly valuable to the artform.
The acclaimed Minneapolis troupe has now sold its space. Thankfully it's landmarked so the exterior should be preserved.
But, hey, Minnesota-area theatricals--come be vultures!
In preparation to vacate the building, Jeune Lune will hold a rummage sale Nov. 15-16 to sell costumes, set pieces and other items accumulated since 1978. About 300 theater seats will be sold too.Given the company's eccentric clowning aesthetic, I bet there's some neat pieces in them trunks.
The Times has a neat web-graphic feature on the new space-age TKTS complex in Duffy Square.
My question is, I still don't get what the stairs are for! Is the line really going to wrap around...and up???
Also while I've been gone...
The arguments continue over why the new $200 Grand playwriting mega-prize from the Steinbergs went to someone who's already one of the most propserous American dramatists.
As you may recall, Tony Kushner was selected by the select committee to inaugurate this uber-Pulitzer--slash--lifetime achievement award explicitly because of his already "high profile" status, thus ensuring good pr for the prize itself.
Michael Riedel has devoted not one but two columns to fuming about the perceived insularity of this.
They could have given the $200,000 to a young, unknown playwright, one who might be even more hard-up than Kushner. But instead they made the bold decision to select a writer who has only two Tonys, a Pulitzer, an Emmy and an Olivier Award on his shelf in his Upper West Side co-op.
As Zabel said, "We wanted to make a splash!"
Did they ever! They got a stand-alone story in the Times, which hardly ever covers the playwright (only 56 mentions in 2008).
I am 74 percent certain that getting a plug in the Times wasn't a factor in selecting Kushner.
Buried in the Mimi press release is the news that in 2009 some "emerging" playwright will get $50,000.
That's a nice gesture, but let's be honest: You can't "make a splash!" if you give money only to obscure writers who really are struggling
Interesting point that about the Times coverage specifically. Perhaps. But I suppose even I have to give them enough credit to consider it newsworthy if an organization gave even an unknown writer that much money.
The Mimi [as the award is called], which hoped to "make a splash!" by enriching Kushner, is throwing a big party later this month at Rockefeller Center....If they can give Tony $200,000, think of how much they'll spend on hors d'oeuvres.And remember, private philanthropy is all the assistance the theatre's going to get for a long while.
One reader asked me a fair question the other day about my plugging of my publications on Amazon:
I suspect you have a deal going with Amazon for every book referral and, though I appreciate the need to cover costs and make a buck, recommendations to such a destructive behemoth sit oddly with the tone of this blog. Perhaps you might include "and/or from your local independent bookstore" each time?Duly humbled. Indeed, signing up as an "Amazon Associate" (as many blogs and websites do) does entitle me to up to 5% of proceeds from any sale of any item bought at Amazon when clicked through from the links posted here. Hence, yes, I am shamelessly hoping for that $10 gift certificate every 8 months or so that accrues. (I've gotten two so far. So thanks, readers!)
Hey, I love Campbell Scott. And he rarely, if ever, does theatre in NYC these days.
But I only wish The Atheist (at Culture Project) were a worthy vehicle for him. For those of you who've gone and seen it already, I'm sorry I couldn't warn you earlier.
You see I already reviewed it. In 2006! In a much lower-profile production.
Nevertheless NYT gave the (Irish) playwright the star treatment.
If you think Scott truly has redeemed this material, though, do pray tell! I just felt it was a perhaps talented foreign playwright cynically trying to "go American." And ending up with something tame and dated.
Also while I was away...
I did a quickie for Time Out on the now-closed Oh What War, at HERE.
I was interested going in. It was by many of the Banana Bag and Bodice people whose promising "Sewers" I had seen a couple of summers ago. But this was disappointing.
Again, show is gone, but you can check out some cool clips at least on the HERE site.
70s British badboy director Ken Russell is making his New York stage directing debut...at the Soho Playhouse? With this show???
Thank god for those vanity projects--they're what's left of commercial Off Broadway.Tony Award nominated actor Keith Carradine (The Will Rogers Follies, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Nashville, Dexter) returns to the New York stage in the premiere of Anthony Horowitz’s acclaimed thriller, MINDGAME.
Ken Russell, the celebrated director of the films Tommy, Women In Love and The Boy Friend, makes his New York stage directorial debut with MINDGAME.
When a writer of pulp crime novels gets an interview with a notorious serial killer he believes he has snared the coup of his career. But when he arrives at the asylum, he finds nothing can be trusted, not even his own eyes. Through a series of lies, manipulations and memories, dark secrets are revealed. Why is there a skeleton in the doctor’s office? Where did the raw meat in the fridge come from? What is the nurse so afraid of? And most importantly, how does one get out?
I blog before you now a married man and an bonafide PhD "candidate." So, now that those milestones have passed, on with the blogging!
First, let me publicly and profusely thank all my fearless (and peerless) guest bloggers since August: Abigail Katz, Chris Mills, Brook Stowe, Steven Leigh Morris, and the good Dr. Cashmere. It was a pleasure to log onto the site as merely an observer and read so many different voices for a change. So thanks to all for keeping the conversation(s) going, on so many different fronts.
Now that I've returned, let me get the important business out of the way. Some plugs!
While my blogging life may have been dormant these past eight weeks, haply it's been a good period for me on other publishing fronts, seeing some long-gestating projects come to fruition.
-I'm proud to make my debut in the "Best Plays" series with an essay surveying the 2006-2007 Off-Off scene. So check it out if you want to revisit such golden oldies as Hellhouse, God's Ear, breakthrough work by Young Jean Lee and Thomas Bradshaw, the rise and fall of companies such as EST, Jean Cocteau Rep, and much, much, so much more. As it has since, oh, 1920, Best Plays also offers comprehensive stats on the season, production lists, and, in this edition, insightful essays on the actual best-play selections, including: David Cote on Blackbird; Michael Feingold on Spring Awakening; Charles Isherwood on Dying City; Charles McNulty on Frost/Nixon; and Alisa Solomon on Passing Strange.
(Much thanks to editor Jeffrey Eric Jenkins for the gig, and for asking me back for the next volume, wherein I'll be profiling Horton Foote's Dividing the Estate. So if you have any good resources on Foote or the play, please do send them my way!)
-Best Plays is a great buy at just $20-$40 on Amazon. I wish I could say that about my other recent hardbound publication, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol 341: 20th Century American Dramatists. But, hey, for a 421-page reference book I say at $250 it's a steal! Such is academic publishing--which also accounts for how such a book could take a decade to produce! (I've been involved only for the last seven years.)
Basically it's an encyclopedic collection of lengthy essays I edited profiling various modern US playwrights: including biggies like Tennessee Williams, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson; relatively overlooked icons like Marie Irene Fornes and Adrienne Kennedy; historically though seldom revived writers like Theodore Ward and Mae West (yes, that Mae West); and more recent contemporaries like Anna Deavere Smith, John Patrick Shanley, Eric Bogosian, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Charles Busch. I myself wrote the introduction and contributed a big fat piece on Clifford Odets, which I hope is the most comprehensive succinct narrative of his life and work you can get in one sitting.
I forgive you if you'd rather spend the two-fitty on a "premium" seat to 13, but if you're on a campus that has a library, perhaps you'd be so kind as to request its reference section order a copy. (After all, that's who it's really for.)
-A little while ago I got to interview Civillians AD Steve Cosson for a profile in Stage-Directions magazine, which came out in September. This was during their "Paris Commune" at the Public, which I got to sit in on an early rehearsal for. The performance itself--more or less a workshop in the Public's Lab series--was very, very promising, so I hope someone has the guts to stage it for real. The piece descrives both that piece and their "Beautiful City" which finally comes to NYC at the Vineyard in January. (Meanwhile, guest-blogger Steven reviewed the LA production while I was away.)
For a blogger used to the instant gratification of the internet tubes, waiting for all that dead tree material to finally come out sure was a drag! But, hey, now it's for the ages, I guess.
Nice to "see" you again, readers. Back to regular blogging soon....
by Steven Leigh Morris
As a kind of complement (and compliment) to Abigail Katz's lovely post on Wednesday, I point to the last show I saw in L.A. before spending the weekend in New York.
Jay Sefton wrote and performed in his one-man autobiographical show, “The Most Mediocre Story Never Told” at a small theater near Melrose and Fairfax called Meta Theatre.
It's the remarkable tale of an unremarkable young guy struggling to tell his life story in a one-man- show for reasons that he doesn't fully understand. But perhaps by telling of his youth in Philadelphia, and his humiliating performance as Christ in a Catholic school production of the Passion Play, he will discover the reason that he's on the stage recounting his adventures as a child actor, stooping in a “fairy robe” to wash the feet of Christ's disciples.
A personable and charming actor, Sefton flinches at the special effects – stage smoke and roving spotlights -- that open the show, as though he's the star of a rock concert. Sefton points out how these theatrics were suggested by some one-man-show expert who makes his rent by shaping the stories of would-be actors into a serviceable performance. The bells and whistles really aren't necessary, the actor demurs.
“I looked up 'story' in the thesaurus, just to see if I had one, and most of the words had something to do with not telling the truth. Fable, yarn, gossip, rumor, legend. There are other words there too. Anecdote, chronicle, but there is a whole subsection called lie. As an actor we hear, 'Just tell the story. What’s the story? I am just listening for the story. You are a storyteller.'”“Where are these stories? Where do they really exist? And who am I without them?” Sefton asks in his show. The last question loops back to Abigail's implication that if you want to feel poverty, try living without art. The broader question that Sefton doesn't ask is, Who are we without stories? And an economic crisis does nothing to change the answer to that.
by Abigail Katz
By Steven Leigh Morris
NPR had an interesting piece over the weekend on Christopher Hampton's adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull – which opened last week on Broadway. The English playwright admits his knowledge of Russian derives from one-year's study in high school, which is why he feels unqualified to call his version a translation.
So in order to construct his play, based on and inspired by Chekhov's play, Hampton says he sat with a Russian who guided him through the piece.
"What we're looking for is to really try to fathom exactly what Chekhov's intentions were and to reproduce them," Hampton told NPR's Robert Siegel. "To make the audience laugh when he wanted them to laugh and to make them cry when he wanted them to cry."
Hampton goes on to explain how he listened to the Russian and counted “the number of words in a sentence in order to meter the language” for his English version.
There was a personal delight in reading this, after seeing the Sovremennik Theatre's taut, muscular production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard in Moscow this past summer.
There's a line almost halfway through the play, when Madam Lubov Ranevskaya, co-proprietor of an almost bankrupt provincial estate, takes a hard look at the manservert, Fiers, who's been working in the household for many years.
“How old you've grown, Fiers!,” she observes. Fiers is deaf, which explains his line, “I beg your pardon.” Lopakhin – a merchant in-residence – pipes in, to Fiers, “She says you've grown very old!”
In Julius West's translation, Fiers replies, “I've been alive a long time.” Other translations have the line as, “That's because I've been living for a long time” Either way, the line gets a mildly amused laugh, or some smiles that enthusiasts can say reflect the essence of Chekhov's languid comedic “atmosphere.”
But in the Russian, Fiers replies with only two words, four syllables -- “Shivoo dolga.” In Moscow, the line elicited a roar of laughter, like a punch-line from a play by Neil LaBute. The line, and the production itself, were far closer to Chekhov's affection for vaudeville than to the kind of ruminative albeit humorous metaphysics that form the pervasive tone in most English-language productions of Chekhov's full-length plays.
In neurologist Oliver Sacks' collection of clinical essays, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, there's one short story called “The President's Speech” in which two groups of patients afflicted with brain disorders listen to a speech by Ronald Reagan.
One set of patients has a kind of aphasia that prevents them from comprehending the meanings of words, and the ligaments of logic that connects thoughts. Sacks observed in them, however, a compensatory, accelerated capacity to comprehend what people were saying through their visual and aural signals
The other set of patients suffered from a kind of agnosia that prevented them from reading any of those subtextual and contextual signs, yet they benefited instead from an advanced ability to cut to the meanings of the words, and to the lines of logic that connected them.
Both groups of patients complained that the speech made little sense. The aphasiacs remarked that the president's facial tics and speech patterns struck them as fakery, while the agnosiacs homed in on the fallacies of logic that peppered the president's economic policies. Meanwhile, much of the world beyond that clinic, a world containing people with fully functioning brains, was fooled into embracing the wisdom of economic policies that have been impoverishing us since since the early '80s, but only now are they fully crashing down around us. Those with brain deficiencies seemed to get the problem almost thirty years ago.
It's probably obvious by now that this recollection was spurred by yesterday's presidential debate, and the impediments that block us from easily recognizing the layers of deception that come with both performance and argumentation.
It makes a case for Ionesco and his Absurdist ilk, who argued that language was close to useless when it comes to comprehending core truths of who we are, what we're doing and what we need to do in order to improve our condition. Language, however, is pretty good for expressing when we're too cold, hot, hungry or horny. Then again, the chickens in my friend's back yard can do that too, with just a few cackles.
Maybe Christopher Hampton was really counting cackles on the page, and "adapting" them to the stage, in order to streamline the music of a playwright from across a sea and a century. Perhaps we, too, are only capable of receiving it as though a blanket of obfuscation. Perhaps it's not really a language barrier at all, but a more fundamental failure of intelligence and perception.
by Abigail Katz
By Steven Leigh Morris
On the evening before his production of Madama Butterfly returned to L.A. (at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion), Robert Wilson addressed an assembly of students, faculty and a few invited guests at the Bing Theatre on the USC campus.
In rumpled black jacket and trousers and soft black shoes (over a white shirt), the designer-director walked onto the stage and stood still, and in silence, for about five minutes – eliciting a few awkward giggles, but mostly a kind of hypnosis.
When he eventually spoke, which he did for almost two hours, he sometimes stopped, mid-sentence, and froze, for longer than the standard attention span usually tolerates – either to gather his thoughts, or to make a point about the standard, diminishing attention span.
TV and even theater, he noted, contain a rhythm of stop-start-stop-start. Quick bursts and cessations of energy. “No no no no no no,” he squealed in a falsetto, chiding, as though speaking to children.
Because each movement of music, each motion of gesture is connected to the preceding movement or motion. Animals understand this. They remember through their muscles. For this reason, he, explained, beginning actors must first learn how to stand on a stage in silence, and then how to walk across a stage, like a cat.
“When we're aware of the movement, the line continues. . . Proust said he was writing the same novel. Cezanne said he was always painting the same still life.”
This is why in Wilson's marathon performances, he feels no qualms about audiences leaving after an hour or two and returning later, or not. Because unlike in Shakespeare, a missing act, or hour, doesn't render a Wilson event diminished or incomprehensible.
Nor does he start with words, he explained, complaining that American and British theater is burdened by a pathological dependence on words and sounds. He starts with silence. Only in silence can anything be understood. Sometimes he devotes entire scenes to the sculpting of light.
His presentation was part lecture, part autobiography. The history of Robert Wilson and his work has been well documented, but coming from the man himself exposed both the narcissism and brilliance that's led to alternate realities onstage – or, from Wilson's perspective, the reality of his designs that exposes the alternate reality of our lives and more traditional entertainments.
(So as not to ignore the stage design, the set included a projected image of a pair of old shoes, in duplicate, which yielded to Wilson's designs from epics ranging from The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin to Einstein on the Beach.
Wilson shares with neurologist Oliver Sacks an adulation for the penetrating insights coming from those with senses and brain function impaired – the deaf, the autistic, whose comprehension of the world is, by necessity, more animalistic and consequently more true, and therefore artful. Much of his presentation was an homage to two such men (one he met as child) who participated in the creation of his works and understood them innately. They were, for Wilson, a window onto the world of his art. When he recorded the utterances of one brain-damaged, autistic child, he discovered that the sounds, when inscribed onto paper, formed a sculpture that had the form of a perfect geometry, while the sounds we use to exchange what we think are lucid ideas are comparatively erratic.
“If I had gone through Yale and studied theater,” he said, “I would not be making the kind of theater I'm making.”
by Abigail Katz
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