For Time Out this week I review Eugene O'Neill's 1920 Broadway debut play, Beyond the Horizon. A title long familiar to me from theatre history books, nice to finally see it in this Irish Rep revival.
By the way, I wrote this last week, so that "slut" line was pre-Limbaugh, I promise.
Are you sitting down? The crowd-funding site, Kickstarter, will soon be able to boast a bigger arts-funding treasure-chest than the National Endowment for the Arts.
Or, at least, so boasts its boss:
Kickstarter is having an amazing year, even by the standards of other white hot Web startup companies, and more is yet to come. One of the company’s three co-founders, Yancey Strickler, said that Kickstarter is on track to distribute over $150 million dollars to its users’ projects in 2012, or more than entire fiscal year 2012 budget for the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), which was $146 million. “It is probable Kickstarter will distribute more money this year than the NEA,” said Stricker in an exclusive phone interview with TPM.Of course Kickstarter works very differently from a federal granting agency, and basically relies on how well you can bully (I mean, encourage) thousands of friends into coughing up a few bucks each. Sullivan rounds up the debate over the claim's merits here.
“We view that number and our relationship to it in both a good and bad way.”
As Strickler explained, the milestone is “good” in the sense that it means that Kickstarter may now reach a point where it will funnel as much money to the arts as the federal agency primarily responsible for supporting them, effectively doubling the amount of art that can get funded in the country. “But maybe it shouldn’t be that way,” Strickler said, “Maybe there’s a reason for the state to strongly support the arts.”
So I'm up early today and I decide to tune into "Morning Joe" on MSNBC, and what do I see a commercial for? Manhattan Theatre Club! No, not one of those 15-second blips at the end of the commercial-reel that stations reserve for cheap local ads. A proper 30-second glossy spot that I assume is going out nationally--or at least on the East Coast (6-6:30am time slot), or just the greater metro area if that's possible.
I can't find any video online yet to post, but basically it's Cynthia Nixon telling us all how wonderful MTC is. Yes, also a plug for her star turn in Wit, but that's just mentioned along the way. (And, no, she's not bald in this one.)
Why do I find this at all interesting? Well, it seems pretty unprecedented--a nonprofit theatre company spending BIG bucks on a nationally broadcast cable news show to basically advertise its brand. (Using Nixon and Wit as a hook, their latest "product.") I don't believe the word "subscribe" is ever used, but, hey, it is almost spring, which means subscription time. While there is no 2012-2013 season yet, titles of past greatest hits (Proof! Rabbit Hole!) flash across the screen. And the "copy" is all about how you can always count on a fabulous night out at the theatre there, with lots of shots of the "Samuel Friedman Theatre" lit up on the Great White Way. (No mentioned of the subterranean Stages 1 & 2.)
But if this is a national spot it may not even be about subscriptions. It's aimed at tourists, closing with a line something like: "MTC: as exciting as New York itself!" (No comment.) Competing for Broadway consumers, basically.
So I guess I have to admire their balls, at least. 'Cause that sure must cost a lot of their precious funds.
(Anyone know how much, by the way?)
"Stage-acting, she feels, is a true test of discipline for someone who is used to flying by the seat of their pants 'in that you've got to say this here and you must put that prop there. You must turn the light on right now. That gets me because of my immature response to authority. I perceive it as an authority figure telling me, even though it's not. That's just how immature I am.'"
-Janeane Garofalo, on what it's like to make your stage debut (in New Group's Russian Transfer) in your 40s after years of standup and movies.
Pretty apt tribute to stage actors, actually.
Looks like 9-5 employed adults are finding it just as hard there as here to get a decent theatre ticket discount:
While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they should) and retirees have the time to take advantage of mid-week matinee offers, it's the average Joes – average age, average salary, average working hours – who are missing out on the chance to develop what could be a long-term passion. The sad fact is that if you didn't have the means to acquire one earlier in life, you often have little opportunity to do so in adulthood, either.And don't get me started on all-day camp-outs!
Yesterday, the fundraising website Kickstarter reached a milestone when not one, but two of its clients passed the million-dollar threshold.
I mused last year upon the opportunities here for small theatre productions (and companies) and have noticed many doing so this season. In fact, "theater" has its own category on the site so you can check out current projects there.
So my question to those doing so...How's that working out for you? Is there a future in this? Success stories? Fails? Please share!
Patrick Healy's lede for today's front-page NYT story on the 10,000th(!) performance of Phantom says a lot:
“The Phantom of the Opera” will make show business history on Saturday with the 10,000th Broadway performance of an $8 million production that became an $845 million hit. But it is also something much more. It is the musical that has come to define modern Broadway by proving the purchasing power of women and tourists, the durability of repeat business and the lure of spectacle: ingredients for success embraced by producers of “The Lion King,” “Wicked,” “Mamma Mia!” and other smashes.When he tells how much some of those initial investors have made, you can see why some monied folk still chase the Broadway dream.
While “Phantom” has prospered from unparalleled word of mouth, a show as much for sightseers as for theatergoers, its unprecedented Broadway run has hardly been a foregone conclusion. When it opened on Jan. 26, 1988, big hits were few, and roughly half of Broadway’s theaters were empty. Yet thanks to persistent marketing, strict quality control and flexibility in ticket pricing (the worst seats can now be had for only $26.50), “Phantom” survived — in fact thrived — when shows with bigger stars and better reviews brought down their curtains.
Nick Cohen in the Literary Review (UK) offers some useful ways to think about censorship in the 21st century:
We cannot puncture our own myth that we are fearless seekers after truth, even though, if we honestly owned up to our limitations, we might force society to confront the fact that modern censorship does not conform to old models. It is a mistake to think of repression as repression by the state alone. In much of the world it still is, but in Britain, America and most of continental Europe the age of globalisation has done its work, and it is privatised rather than state forces that threaten freedom of speech.
Editors are no longer frightened of politicians but of Islamist violence, oligarchs and CEOs. They worry about libel and the ability of the wealthy to bend the ear of their proprietors or withdraw advertising. But they are not frightened about leaking the secrets or criticising the actions of elected governments.
We need new ways of thinking about censorship.
Normally I find any pop culture take on theatre to be oddly distorted. But, catching up with a recent SNL rerun this weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two very funny playgoing sketches.
Yes, the one-man show has been parodied to death, but I just can't resist Fred Armisen's riff on the old cliches. ("Tommy Palmese tells his life story through characters!")
Steve Waters in the Guardian sings the praises of the short play:
So what is a short play, exactly? Is it simply defined by its length? I ask because as a form it's under-discussed and under-valued. . . a fugitive form, lacking a permanent home, rarely available on the page. Yet for all that it seems to me a very good way into any writer's work – released from the armature of plot, the playwright is compelled to invest the moment with intense theatrical energy. In those precious minutes the dramatist's toolkit of rhythm, voice and image is ruthlessly exposed. It's a place for encounters not journeys, epiphanies not ideologies. Describing the short story of which he was a master, VS Pritchett characterizes it usefully as a "glancing form of fiction (…) right for the restlessness and nervousness of contemporary life".The comparison to the short story is instructive. Imagine what contemporary fiction writers would do if they could not avail themselves of the form of the short-story--which gets them in magazines and allows them to published "collected stories" as first books. One-acts hardly give playwrights the same advantage.
For the writer too, there's a different pleasure in the short form which is well caught by the American novelist Russell Banks, who speaks of the stamina necessary to pull off full-length work necessitating a kind of "bourgeois" commitment; whereas the short story or play, is a place to experiment with form and defect from territory, where writing can be enjoyed for its own sake.
So why is the fragment so rarely seen and, like the short story, deemed commercial poison? Well, I would be the first to admit that I wouldn't venture out simply for Come and Go by Beckett – my bourgeois need for an uneven evening's entertainment rather than ten minutes of perfection is probably not uncommon. Yes, you can round up a miscellany of works under the umbrella of one event. But as a mode of theatre-going the sheer effort required in investing in multiple disconnected narratives can take its toll – not least because intensity is integral to the form and back-to-back intensity can pall.Indeed, "omnibus" evenings can be hard to sit through. (And hard to sell: Come pay full price to sit through one really good one-act, preceded by one awful one and a few so-so's. And, no, you can't sneak in at intermission.)
Something interesting happening on the Rialto right now: a number of recent Off Broadway successes will be descending upon available theatres this spring just in time for Tony Time. (That time being recently confirmed to as June 10.) Today we have definite announcements from Clybourne Park and Peter and the Starcatcher. They will join there other previously announced Off Broadway transfers, Venus in Fur and Once.
Now you'd think all these available playhouses might be a bad omen for these plucky upstarts, since they are vacant due to fizzling out of so many other unasked-for Broadway runs of small, star-less shows this season: Lysistrata Jones, Private Lives (proving Kim Cattrall is not a "star"), and Chinglish (playing to only 40% capacity last week). Not to mention the short-lived, open-and-shut case (if you will) of Michael Mayer's high-concept On a Clear Day You Can See Forever revival.
This means a lot--a lot--of capital is being raised purely to garner Tony Awards (or at least nominations) for shows that will almost surely lose money during their runs. Once has already underwhelmed critics in its downtown run at New York Theatre Workshop, making its pre-announced Broadway transfer plans seem like downright hubris. NYTW was also behind Peter and the Starcatcher--which by the way, unlike Peter Pan (recently revived over the holidays with, yes, Cathy Rigby!) is not a musical. So good luck with that.
Venus in Fur played CSC downtown last season, but the ever-gambling Manhattan Theatre Club (do not trust them with your stock portfolio) has invested mightily in its Tony-potential. Not only did they open its Broadway-venue season with this, but so hungry for more dividends off the show they are opening an extended run next month at the Lyceum. So starlet Nina Arianda must have the most powerful agent in New York, since a lot of money is going into keeping her on Broadway long enough to get that Tony that she was supposed to get for last season's short-lived, ill-advised vehicle Born Yesterday.
Clybourne Park, last year's Pulitzer-winner will certainly get some buzz. I, for one, am looking forward to finally getting in to see it after its sold-out Playwrights Horizons back in 2010. But if the producers think its provocative, discomforting exploration of racial issues is going to spur as much box office as op-eds, they just haven't been on Broadway in a while. Racial themes that are non-confrontational can still do ok; Stick Fly still unbelievably running at just 60% capacity, and Porgy and Bess just opened to strong sales and unenthused but strong-enough reviews. And while the MLK-drama The Mountaintop received bemused, head-scratching critical response, having Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett in it (and no one else) was enough to make back its investment this week with big sales and low overhead. Clybourne Park doesn't have any of that going for it.
In comparison, Lisa D'Amour's Detroit seems like it made the right call last month in foregoing initial Broadway plans and settling for a safer run at Playwrights Horizons instead. You see, it only was a Pulitzer runner-up. And, as Clybourne Park will probably show, not even the first prize counts as marquee value these days.
English playwright David Edgar has a good, long essay in the Guardian on the UK's arts funding crisis and especially the crisis in how to argue for the arts in a time of official, imposed "austerity." While his persepctive is exclusively Brit-based, analogies are not hard to find here.
He begins with some helpful history of shifting justifications for arts funding over time, reminding us how conservative elitists used to be the arts' best friends:
When it was founded in 1946, the Arts Council could justify its activities in its own terms: it was there to widen access to the arts throughout the country, as well as to maintain and develop national arts institutions in the capital. Behind the latter policy lay a theory of artistic value that you could call patrician: art's purpose as ennobling, its realm the nation, its organisational form the institution, its repertoire the established canon and works aspiring to join it. In this the council was seeking to reverse a rising tide of populism (art's role as entertainment, its realm the marketplace, its form the business, its audience mass), a goal summed up in the founding chairman John Maynard Keynes's ringing declaration: "Death to Hollywood."I think that pretty neatly sums up the polar forces most artists and arts supporters are caught between: some ideal of "excellence" or "artistic integrity" versus the marketplace and popularity/populism.While we don't think of a "heritage industry" per se in America, it is in fact a major component of our tourist industry--especially in New York City. Broadway (especially The Broadway Musical) is a big part of this city's cultural heritage. Which is why, for instance, the city had no problem rushing to the economic aid of Broadway producers in the slow months following 9/11. And now Broadway's economic bondage to The Tourism Industry appears to be its main raison d'etre.
Over the following 30 years, this view of the value of the arts came under attack, not from the market place but from artists who were artistically and often politically oppositional. In the theatre in the late 1950s, on the BBC in the early to mid 1960s, and pretty much everywhere from 1968, patrician arts institutions were challenged and in many cases transformed by those who believed the arts weren't there to elevate or divert, but to provoke.
What both the patrician and the provocative shared was a primary concern for the people making the art. During the 80s, in the arts as in so many other spheres of life, Margaret Thatcher sought to shift power from the producer to the consumer, using the market to disempower the provocative (from political theatre groups to the high avant garde) in favour of the populist. This was seen most clearly in the cluster of forms that defined the cultural 80s.[Playgoer note: think mega-musicals.] Popular in form and patrician in content, the heritage industry was cultural Thatcherism, promoting (as the then secretary of state for national heritage, Virginia Bottomley, put it in May 1996) "our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade".
In this context, the major justification for government arts funding became its contribution both to that trade and to trade in general, a case based on the mounting evidence of the economic value of the arts to the so-called leisure industries
One frequent argument for funding the arts is their role in promoting continuity with the past, community cohesion and a sense of national pride. In fact, of course, British theatre in particular has been subverting such notions ever since the emergence of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Joan Littlewood nearly 60 years ago. It is this provocative mission that sets the arts apart from the other creative industries with which they are too easily lumped (by government and opposition alike). It is not the role of advertisers, architects, antique sellers, computer game manufacturers or fashion designers to challenge the way society is run. But the arts do it all the time. As David Lan puts it, dissent is necessary to democracy, and democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which that dissent can be expressed."Support Sites of Dissent!" Now that's a rallying cry in today's congress. (Maybe if you're pitching a "Tea Party Theatre"? "Birthers' Playhouse"?)
Not theatre thankfully. But longtime (as in: long time, 28 years) Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman gets the boot. To me, he has been indispensable and, aside from Feingold, one of the few reasons to keep reading the now-gutted Voice.
How does Feingold hold on? Let's hope they just really, really like him.
IFC's Matt Singer pays tribute to Hoberman by recalling some good advice he gave students in his perennial NYU film class. Just substitute stage for screen and this is still pertinent:
On the fundamentals:
“Ask yourself the question, ‘What do people want to know about a movie that they’ve never seen?’”
On plot:Okay, I do read others' reviews. Can't help it. I'm a blogger!
“Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.”
On brevity:
“Watch for excess words. If there’s a shorter word, use it.”
On editors:
“Work with them for the good of the piece. Don’t have ego. Don’t compete.”
On interviewing filmmakers:
“If you’re thinking about it, ask them about it.”
On digressions:
“The longer the em dash, the weaker its impact.”
On taste:
“Always ask yourself why you like what you like.”
On bad movies:
“Vent your spleen. In criticism, it’s better to be angry than depressed.”
On the competition:
“Never read other critics’ reviews. They cloud your judgment.”
On deadlines:
“Never miss a deadline.”
Something about MTC's new debut Close Up Space has prompted some incisive commentary from critics on the state of new plays. While I haven't seen this particular show, I certainly find myself nodding with recognition at these notices.
Cote, Time Out:
Close Up Space is the sort of self-consciously zany dramedy in which characters are whipped into a frenzy of quirk that frees them and their actions from any burden of plausibility.Feingold, Village Voice:
I'm sad, but not from Seasonal Affective Disorder. The fall season ended with Manhattan Theatre Club's opening Molly Smith Metzler's Close Up Space (City Center Stage I), a work neatly encapsulating everything new plays do that has been making me sad for months. I bear Metzler no ill will. As with too many other recent plays, hers has some distinct virtues, but its faults outnumber them so heavily as to make theatergoing burdensome: Instead of engaging creatively with the event onstage, you expend all your energy looking for little things within it to like in compensation for its generally dismaying nature.Full StageGrade roundup here, where this seems to be the critical consensus--including the two most prominent female reviewers, Vincentelli and Weiner, in case you suspect mere male anti-whimsy bias.
I can't blame Metzler for repeating the pattern. Like all playwrights, she wants to get produced. Naturally, she has turned out the sort of play our would-be serious theaters increasingly tend to produce. They, too, strive to imitate previous successes; everybody's following the Ruhls. [Heh] The result, in Close Up Space, is a viscous mixture of sitcom and after-school special. It opens with patent absurdity, in an ostensibly naturalistic context, and ends in a glop of would-be tragic ironies. Reality, heightened or everyday, is the one thing it virtually never touches.
That's what the Chinese call our drama of sittin' & chattin' on stage. Makes sense when you come from a tradition of highly physical and visual performance.
Nevertheless, they're warming to it:
Western-style “speaking theater,” as it is known here, isn’t indigenous to China, where opera and other forms have long dominated the theater scene. But that is now changing. Festivals, like the one in Chengdu, are part of a national drive to bring a new kind of theater to smaller cities in China. Today, established festivals in Shanghai and Beijing are complemented by new ones opening almost yearly in second-tier, though still very large, cities like Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where theater has been scarce.Naturally, there's a little censorship to deal with. But another problem turns out to be audiences:
[A]udiences outside the major centers of Shanghai and Beijing are still unused to Western-style theater, Ms. Liao said. Fengchao Theater, the company founded by Ms. Liao and her husband, the director Meng Jinghui, recently toured the cities of Dalian and Shijiazhuang. “The audiences were terrible,” she said. “They talked and made and received phone calls all the way through the performance."
Remember all the buzz around Lisa D'Aamour's Detroit after its Steppenwolf premiere last year? It was a Pulitzer finalist, was published in American Theatre and was being prepped for a high profile Broadway transfer this season. Expectations were high that this would be the great August: Osage County follow-up.
Well, someone's had second thoughts:
Though at one point talked up for Broadway, Lisa D’Amour’s “Detroit,” a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in drama, will open the 2012-13 season at Playwrights Horizons, officials at the Off Broadway theater said on Monday. After positive reviews for Austin Pendleton’s production at Steppenwolf Theater last fall, “Detroit” was announced for Broadway. Instead, Playwrights will put on a new production of the five-character comedy, which zooms in on the adjacent backyards of two recovering addicts and their anxious middle-class neighbors. Anne Kauffman...will direct.Now before anyone laments (yet again) the paucity of serious drama on Broadway, let me congratulate whoever is behind this decision with coming to their senses!
Toronto's Kelly Nestruck writes up Robert Lepage's innovative idea to publish his latest play as a comic book:
Instead of publishing the script of his recent play, The Blue Dragon, Lepage's theatre company Ex Machina decided to take an entirely different route, commissioning Quebec City-based artist Fred Jourdain to transform it into a graphic novel. Now published in English by Toronto's House of Anansi Press, Jourdain's gorgeous mise en images of the play ...includes every word of dialogue spread over 176 pages of comic-book panels and cinema-inspired paintings.Perhaps Lepage's visually driven devised pieces are uniquely suitable to the medium in a way other plays aren't. Still Nestruck also makes a case for more playwrights (and play publishers) to consider it, given how reading conventionally formatted scripts requires powers of imagination and visualization the common reader is perhaps not used to:
For all but the most dedicated theatre enthusiasts, deciphering a script can be a difficult task – trying to keep track of which character is which and remembering the location in which a scene is set, all without losing track of the plot.Indeed, in this age of diminishing sales of theatre books--and publishing industry panic in general--might such an approach help at least generate some sales, or even more general interest in the theatre?
“Nothing we do sells a ticket...People on the TKTS line can’t pronounce the title, and if you can’t pronounce the title, you’re not going to see the show.”
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| Photo: Carol Rosegg |
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