Parabasis

Adrian Chen is Outraged by Fact Checking

By Isaac Butler

Over at Gawker, Adrian Chen has the scoop on the CIA's involvement with the making of Zero Dark Thirty and it turns out-- get the smelling salts ready-- that screenwriter Mark Boal ran some things in the screenplay by them to see if they were factually accurate. Propaganda! Fascism! Joseph Goebbles!

Now look, whether or not you'd trust the CIA to tell you if these moments were accurate or not is fair game, but... well... let's roll the tape:

The much-discussed opening scene of Zero Dark Thirty features the main character Maya, played by Jessica Chastain, observing a detainee at a CIA black site as he is water-boarded and shoved into a tiny box during an interrogation. It appears that an early version had Maya participating in the torture. But during their conference calls, the CIA told Boal that this was not true to life. The memo reads: "For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique."

According to the memo, "Boal said he would fix this." Indeed, in the final film Maya doesn't touch the prisoner during this scene. The decision to have Maya abstain from the torture was as significant artistically as it was factually. Her ambivalence was a key part of her character, and critics picked over every detail of the torture scenes, including Maya's status as an observer rather than a participant, for meaning in the debate over torture that the movie sparked.

Wired's Spencer Ackerman, for example, interpreted Maya's complex relationship to on-screen torture as a sign of a complex inner life: "Maya is... a cipher: she is shown coming close to puking when observing the torture. But she also doesn’t object to it." Of course, the scene reads a bit differently if the choice was dictated by a CIA propaganda officer.

Once you strip out the register this is written in here's what you get:

The original screenplay had a scene in which two CIA officers are shown torturing a detainee. The CIA objected to this and asked that it be changed (purpotedly for accuracy reasons) to one CIA officer torturing a detainee while another looks on without registering any explicit objections ever. This lead many people  (the example he uses is Spencer Ackerman, another was Andrew Sullivan) to claim that the movie was at least tacitly anti-torture. They were, in my opinion, wrong about this, but that's less relevant here. 

So the claim here is that, thanks to CIA involvement, Zero Dark Thirty contains material that lead some people to think that the film (not the CIA, but the film) was less pro-torture. Sullivan, meanwhile, thinks this change makes the agency look better. But this seems, well, weird. The character who commits  torture begins the film as its most compelling character and ends it at a high level desk job where he faces no punishment for his actions.  The other character, played by Jessica Chastain, goes on to participate in the torture of other detainees. 

There were two other major changes. In the first, a scene where a detainee was menaced by a dog was cut, as the CIA claimed it was not part of that interrogation process. This is more troubling. As Chen notes, the U.S. routinely threatened detainees with dogs at Guantanamo and Abu Graihb and since the interrogation sequence at the beginning of the film has a kind of symbolic weight to it, including dog-menacing would make some sense. At the same time, given how "journalistic" the film was attempting to be, I can see why they would cut the scene if they were told it didn't happen. The third change (cutting a party that CIA officers throw) seems like small beer.

Do I think the extent of the government's invovlement in Hollywood is creepy? Yes. But ZD30 is hardly unique on this front. What you're left with here is that a film that was trying to pride itself on being  factually accurate e did some fact checking with a source and made changes to accomodate what the source told them. In order for this to really be the CIA "approving" of the film, there would have to be consequences to the film not being approved. 

Assumptions Shape The Narrative

By Isaac Butler

Sorry to break my long blog silence with something a bit grouchy-- especially since, well, it's my birthday-- but this morning I was listening to NPR's Weekend Edition, and they were talking about the recent news that Apple is declaring the original iPhone obsolete. It has been on the market for just six years. They will no longer provide customer support nor manufacture parts for it.

Scott Simon then said in passing, "in just six years the iPhone has gone from cutting edge to antique. That's just the pace of progress these days," before moving on to talk about whether such fast-paced obsolecense discourages us from taking "the long view."

That's an interesting question, I suppose, but  before we can even examine it, we should look at the assumptions in the above quote.  That's just the pace of progress these days makes it seem like Apple and its consumers are simply the victims of The Way The World Works. Progress here is simply a force, like gravity. 

In reality, Apple is a pioneer in forced obsolecense, in creating a world in which "progress" means new big products announced annually, many of which are actually just old the old products with just enough tweaks to require new kinds of cables or other accessories. Creating this new, hyperspeed definition of progress has helped Apple become the most profitable company in the United States. 

Apple's definition of progress has, additionally, had enormous human and environmental costs.  It has also had some benefits, but since those are more widely discussed, I don't feel the need to go into them right now.

All of this was a deliberate strategy, a series of choices made by a group of people as a way of maximizing revenue. And it worked. It's worked for long enough, and worked well enough, that it's easy to assume that that's just the way progress is these days, but that's an assumption. An assumption that ends up shaping the story (in this case by deciding it isn't one) right out of the gate.

Sam Thielman on "Matilda"

By Sam Thielman

(Once again, we are happy to have Ad Week's Sam Thielman reviewing for Parabasis, this time he shares his take on "Matilda"):

Early on in the April 6 performance of “Matilda” at the St. James Theater there came an accidental moment so perfectly of a piece with the writing of Roald Dahl that I caught my breath and just sat there gaping for a moment. Ridiculous Mr. Wormwood (Gabriel Ebert), brandishing a cigarette, barged into the delivery room where his selfish wife was fretting about having to give birth to the title character when she’d much rather be dancing the tango. The doctor brusquely informed Mr. Wormwood that he wasn’t allowed to have the cigarette in the delivery room, and Mr. Wormwood agreed that this occasion called for “a proper smoke,” produced a large cigar, and flung the cigarette into the audience, where it hit a small girl in the face.

This was sublime. I read and reread “Matilda,” and "James and the Giant Peach," and “The Witches,” and especially the utterly unloved “Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator,” both as a child and as an adult, and their total unpredictability and frequently horrifying viciousness give them, oddly, both a sheen of surrealism and the ring of truth. Here were books about a mean, hysterical world full of mean, incomprehensible people and things, most of which are very dangerous, and this, not the imaginary world of happily ever after (which most adults do not even believe in but merely hope for), is the world children know most intimately.

Admittedly, it's also important to grow out of that conception of the world, and perhaps that’s why the musical version of “Matilda” pulls most of its punches. There are two really good, intentional moments of hysteria, both straight from the book, both involving the villainess of the show, Miss Trunchbull (played with hatchet-faced glee by a wonderful Bertie Carvel). In one, Miss Trunchbull pulls on a little boy’s ears until they stretch hugely out from his head; in the other, she grabs a little girl by her pigtails and flings her high into the air. Both, not coincidentally, are the least electronically complex effects in the show.

“Matilda” is beautifully performed by its entire cast, with Carvel and Ebert its standouts as cartoonishly horrible adults; Matilda herself, played by Oona Laurence at the performance I saw, was the equal of both men despite being roughly 1/8 the size of either one, her dinner-plate-sized eyes gazing out of an angular, thin face within a vast halo of matted hair. Together, the three of them have the right of it, and they're all so good with the audience that this ought to be one of those British neo-music hall shows that have overtaken the West End in recent years—foremost among them the perfectly serviceable “Billy Elliot” and “One Man, Two Guv’nors, Richard Bean’s awesome tribute to playwright Carlo Goldoni's "A Servant of Two Masters." 

And it is very British, and very fun, sometimes—most of the adults are wicked in exactly the right way, except for the book’s sole voice of reason and thus the play’s killjoy, Miss Honey. Miss Honey is, in Dahl’s book, nice, and kind of a wimp; in the musical, she’s more or less the protagonist, or at least the stand-in for the parents in the audience, who discovers reservoirs of inner strength by mere proximity to Matilda. This is less a conceit out of a fairy tale than one out of a DreamWorks movie and any time "Matilda" tries to complicate characters or make their plights relatable, it dies a little. Moxie by osmosis is an old conceit and a crummy one—it’s also a dirty lie, as any devoted reader of Dahl’s would be able to tell you within seconds of seeing it flit across the page.

Certainly, there are dangers that come with adopting the book’s ideas as a perspective on the wider world—or, for that matter, the ideas in any other book by the author. If whoever decides these things ever gets around to naming the gifted writers who were personally the worst possible people, Roald Dahl, at the very least, will be on the shortlist, way down there with cretins like Wagner and Ted Hughes. A vicious anti-semite, a philandering misogynist, and a generally hideous bully, Dahl’s personal cruelty drove away nearly everyone associated with him, no matter how close the ties of family or finance. Indeed, after receiving yet another nasty letter from the writer in which Dahl threatened to leave Alfred A. Knopf, editor Robert Gottlieb, who had seen huge profits from “The Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “James and the Giant Peach” and “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” among others, practically kicked Dahl out the door.

“To be perfectly clear,” wrote Gottlieb to Dahl, “let me reverse your threat: unless you start acting civilly to us, there is no possibility of our agreeing to continue to publish you. Nor will I—or any of us—answer any future letter that we consider to be as rude as those we've been receiving.” Rudeness, for Dahl, was the key to his whole being, writing included.

“Matilda” is one of Dahl’s kindest, gentlest books, despite the grotesques of wicked parents and heartless headmistresses. Miss Honey is a truly good person who loves little Matilda more than anything, and Matilda has enough agency in her own life to have been taken for a feminist heroine on more than one occasion. But Dahl’s stories can’t be subsumed into traditional children’s narratives, pseudofeminist or otherwise; that is their entire point. They are about capricious death and incomprehensibility, utterly useless as exhortations to be yourself or follow your dreams or whatever else children are being instructed to do by musicals and movies. Which is wonderful, because those exhortations are mostly useless in and of themselves.

Tim Minchin has the advantage of being about as funny as Roald Dahl was and a much nicer person; I’ve seen his stand-up (which, actually, is mostly seated, since he plays the piano through large portions of it) and loved it. Some of it borders on the virtuosic, like Sam’s Mum, a song that also explains why Minchin isn’t more popular in the U.S.—about 40% of a given set is about how stupid he thinks Christians all are. His score for “Matilda” is spotty—the ballads are less interesting, but the novelty songs are uniformly excellent and the number that introduces the school, in which every measure ends with a slant rhyme for a letter of the alphabet, is frankly stunning. There’s also a song about television that opens the second act, which showcases the Wormwoods in all their vulgar glory, and it rules.

It’s primarily the libretto that causes the trouble with “Matilda.” For some reason the producers of the show didn’t see the need to pressgang a major dramatist into writing this one; check out the book credit on a recent megamusical and you’ll probably find at least a Tony award if not a Pulitzer Prize. Doug Wright of “I Am My Own Wife” wrote “Hands on a Hardbody,” cheesy jokes and all; multi-Tony winner Harvey Fierstein wrote the book for “Kinky Boots” (and also “Newsies”); hell, even “Shrek” had a script by no less than David Lindsay-Abaire. It’s not as though the Brits don’t know that a good script makes a good musical—fabulous Irish writer Enda Walsh wrote the spoken dialogue for “Once”—but Kelly just isn’t up to the task and there’s no reason he should be. He’s not yet a distinguished playwright, and musical theater is fucking hard.

So he shoehorns in some pablum about standing up for yourself and gives the story a pat ending in which Mr. Wormwood seems sorry to see Matilda go when he and his wife abandon her to live with Miss Honey. Ebert is a good actor; it’s a touching moment when he dimly realizes what a shit he’s been to the daughter he’ll never see again. 

But it’s wrong. “Matilda leapt into Miss Honey's arms and hugged her, and Miss Honey hugged her back, and then the mother and father and brother were inside the car and the car was pulling away with the tires screaming,” Dahl writes. “The brother gave a wave through the rear window, but the other two didn't even look back. Miss Honey was still hugging the tiny girl in her arms and neither of them said a word as they stood there watching the big black car tearing round the corner at the end of the road and disappearing for ever into the distance.” 

There is something utterly unique in contrasts this extreme, in this kind of disrespect for family and tradition, and those are what Kelly and the show’s producers shy away from giving us in “Matilda,” in favor of a kind of complexity of character that is familiar and not, actually, complex, since it’s shorthand for narratives we all know by heart. 

Dahl, his own heart as black as pitch, knew worse.

We Have Moved Beyond Parody

By Isaac Butler

First it was discovered and announced yesterday that austerity economics is based on an excel spredsheeting error and now Brooks Brothers is introducing a Great Gatsby collection.

I pity satirists. 

Quote of the Day

By Isaac Butler

 

.@parabasis @zinoman @wendyrosenfield I've come to fear less for theater's future than for arts journalism's, which is new.

— Rob Weinert-Kendt (@RobKendt) April 2, 2013

A Quote

by Isaac Butler

"It strikes me that what the attack on the World Trade Center stole from us is our willingness to be complex. Or what the attack on the World Trade Center revealed to us is that we were never complex. We might want to believe that we can condemn and we can love and we can condemn because we love our country, but that's too complex."

-- Claudia Rankine, "Dont' Let Me Be Lonely"

It's Too Bad She Won't Live But Then Again Who Does

By SAM THIELMAN

(Editor's Note: Once again, we're very happy to play host to a great piece of writing about theatre from Ad Week's Sam Thielman. Here he writes about the ART's recent production of The Glass Managerie starring Zachary Quinto.)

*****
The Glass Menagerie at American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Tennessee Williams. Directed by John Tiffany. Set and costumes by Bob Crowley. Starring Zachary Quinto, Cherry Jones, Celia Keenan-Bolger and Brian J. Smith.
*****

One of the glorious problems that keeps a play from a second life as a book of poetry (or most plays; I’ll give you the Greeks and the odd, rule-proving exception like Ntozake Shange) is the little differences made by context; Tom Wingfield complains about his overbearing mother and needy sister more than once in The Glass Menagerie, but sometimes he berates Amanda to her face and sometimes he sighs over Laura behind her back, and in the third, most important sometimes, he simply, sadly tells the audience how he feels. The emotional content of these very similar expressions of frustration and resentment and exasperation varies wildly across the play’s rich emotional landscape, and that is why it sucks so often.

I told a friend I was headed up to Boston to see John Tiffany’s production of this play and he made a face I’ve only ever seen before on people who are hearing about a health code scandal at a nursing home or that time you saw a roach at their favorite restaurant. The Glass Menagerie is done badly nearly as often as Thornton Wilder’s Our Town and for a lot of the same reasons; its subject matter—suffocating family relations—seems familiar; its subtext—Williams’ sad biography and Tom’s implied homosexuality—seems easy to grasp; and yet, largely because we assume those little parts are the whole of the play, its power slips away so often that we eventually come to wonder whether it was there in the first place.

Tiffany’s most interesting work thus far in a brilliant career is Black Watch, a bitter, elegiac show about Scotland’s answer to the SAS and the SEALS. I say “show” because it was so filled with dance and song that you couldn’t have properly called it a play, but it didn’t conform to the rules of musical theater well enough to belong in that category, either. When the characters needed to sing, they sang, when they needed to dance, they danced; when they needed to die, they died.

A Brit, Tiffany’s muscular approach to Williams’s first masterpiece makes all of the context physical. When Amanda (Cherry Jones) dresses her disabled, cripplingly shy daughter (Celia Keenan-Bolger) to meet a friend of her wayward son Tom (Zachary Quinto) named Jim (Brian J. Smith), she takes the little glass unicorn that Laura loves so dearly (and that everyone else ignores) off the top of its display case, which is probably 18 inches high, and sticks Laura up there so she can smooth out the wrinkles in her dress and help her pad her bra. For another play, literally putting a tragic character on a pedestal would be much, much too obvious, but Tom tells us from the very beginning that we’re seeing things not as they are, but as he remembers them.

Robert Crowley’s set, easily among the best I’ve ever had the pleasure to see, makes this point beautifully. The play’s fire escape—which is also the Wingfields’ porch, since they live in a St. Louis building poor enough to have split its apartments in two, so that one opens onto the interior stairwells and hallways and another opens out the back onto the fire escape (it’s astonishing how many productions misunderstand or ignore this detail)—diminishes upward, each successive story smaller than the one below as it ascends on lines of perspective into the flys. The apartment itself, furnished as a little oasis of period-perfect naturalism, is a pair of hexagonal islands on a still pool of black water, where a curved spike of neon sticks up like a shark’s fin, stage right. The neon lights up, and the spike and its reflection, half in this world and half in the world below, make the moon.

The play and its events, a little more simply, are a burr in Tom’s beautiful memory; an imperfection made of ugly furniture and cheap curtains and bad feelings that interrupt and deform the fantastic landscape of his mind. He tells us at the play’s end that he’s tried hard and failed to tear out this part of his life by the roots, most drastically by abandoning his mother and sister to a life of poverty or worse. “Oh, Laura, Laura,” he says, “I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be!” It’s poor poetry, but its artlessness, with Tiffany’s direction and Crowley’s tangible symbolism, gives us the desperation as itself, without mediation.

Oh, yes, there’s also the actor. Zachary Quinto may be doomed to inhabit posterity wearing pointed ears and a tight blue shirt as Spock in J.J. Abrams’ slick sequel-remakes in the venerable-but-still-not-respectable Star Trek franchise, but he seems to like the theater, which is good, because it agrees with him. Quinto’s onstage specialty seems to be a complicated kind of gay self-loathing; at the Signature Theater’s revival of Tony Kushner’s meandering opus Angels in America, he played Louis, a charming man whose partner’s slow descent into torturous death from AIDS proves too much for him, and he fucks off to mutually seduce a confused, closeted, conservative Mormon man. Quinto’s performance was excellent; he was prettier than the actor playing his partner Prior and he played it that way: on the one hand, Louis had a moral duty to stay with his decaying partner; on the other, he didn’t need that kind of grief—he could find a better piece of ass in any bar in Manhattan on any night of the week.

Tom, perhaps obviously, is one of Louis’s ancestors, and Quinto plays him with the same intelligence about the inner mechanics of frustration and anger. Quinto’s Tom hates his job in the warehouse, he hates his mother and he even hates his poor helpless sister for being so fucking poor and helpless all the time. He hates himself most of all. This is a great relief. As times have complicated for gay rights and sexual liberty in general, actors and directors working on this play have tended to play down Tom’s badness, particularly since it’s taken as read that his alcoholism is a metaphor for his homosexuality. This is infuriating for all kinds of reasons—for one thing, alcoholism and homosexuality coexisted quite comfortably in the author, whose autobiography this clearly is—but far worse is what the poor-gay-Tom-can’t-be-expected-to-suffer-like-this productions have done to Amanda.

A recent, wildly overpraised staging of this show came to town with a respected actress in the role of Amanda Wingfield and it was everything you could possibly accuse the play of being: misogynist to the extent that Amanda might as well have been a man in drag, fawning in its adoration of Tom the Martyr, interesting exclusively when neither character was on stage. When Gentleman Jim came to call, Amanda was decked out in the best dress she had and did her level best to seduce an unimpressed Jim in front of her poor, smashed daughter, a scene that was horrifying in its cruelty to Laura but also horrifying in its cruelty to the actress playing Amanda, whose skills were used exclusively to make her character an aren’t-women-disGUSTing caricature. The production’s Amanda alternated between pitiable and contemptible when she wasn’t both. I’ve heard the play’s status as “a memory play” cited as an excuse for this sort of thing but it doesn’t wash. The Glass Menagerie is a play and not a fantasy novel because Tom can’t cut out the truth of it, no matter how hard he tries, and sneering misogyny is not true.

Cherry Jones is, of course, a magnificent performer, but she’s also given the chance here to play a woman in several dimensions. If you have a copy of the play, read her dialogue: it’s not wrong. Laura doesneed to develop marketable skills or get married; Tom is, actually, on the verge of losing his job; that jobdoes provide every cent of their income. Jones, among the many Amandas I’ve seen, is the first to give the impression that she actually did entertain seventeen gentleman callers in a single afternoon, rather than an unspecified number that has grown in the telling. This interpretation makes so much more sense; Amanda is not Blanche Dubois. She is, in fact, the only character in this play who has honestly dealt with hard reality—her husband, whom she gave up everything for, left her, and she’s had a long time to think about that. Williams imagines her less as delusional white trash than as the deposed royalty of Blue Mountain, Mississippi, and Jones is rightly majestic.

Williams, who was also named Tom, also had a disabled sister, though her name was Rose, not Laura, and she was schizophrenic, not crippled. Their mother eventually had Rose lobotomized to “cure” her, and Williams had to live with not merely the memory of Rose’s disability but the horrible, human consequences of its drastic remedy for the rest of her long, long life. A friend of mine knew the two of them together briefly and described a day out with Tenn and Rose to me at one point. Suffice it to say that I’d drink, too. Celia Keenan-Bolger plays what is likely the least realistic and thus most sympathetic role in the play, and she seem to intuit that she has some room to test the limits of the audience’s sympathy. Like Quinto, she’s walking a knife’s edge; her character is both infuriatingly unself-conscious and endearingly fragile. It’s in the character of Laura that the true darkness of The Glass Menagerie becomes real; when Jim kisses her and leaves, she becomes “like all the other horses,” but, crucially, without any of the benefits. She still can’t type. She’s still not married. Her weakling brother is too much like his father and leaves the family. She and her mother will be women alone during the Second World War, and eventually, the real Rose will have a much more literal version of the procedure Laura invents when Jim breaks the unicorn.

“I’ll just imagine he had an operation. The horn was removed to make him feel less—freakish!” she tells Jim, who looks for a shining moment like he might take the unicorn’s place in the menagerie himself. “Now he will feel at home with the other horses, the ones that don’t have horns.”

As the play closes, Tom observes that “time is the longest distance between two places;” yet Crowley and Tiffany tell us that this play is suspended in time, a pair of little islands on a wine-dark sea in the middle of the Loeb Theater. Above it is the past, where the light comes from but the stairs leading up are too small to climb; below is the future: a pool of black water and the other half of the crescent moon, where the only passable segment of the fire escape leads.

“I left St. Louis,” Tom confesses. “I descended the step of this fire escape for a last time and followed, from then on, in my father’s footsteps, attempting to find in motion what was lost in space—I traveled around a great deal. The cities swept about me like dead leaves, leaves that were brightly colored but torn away from the branches. I would have stopped, but I was pursued by something. It always came upon me unawares, taking me altogether by surprise. Perhaps it was a familiar bit of music. Perhaps it was only a piece of transparent glass.”

As Tom and Amanda bicker and Laura crouches, shattered, by the edge of the little island, she gathers up the final piece of her only treasured possession—the horse that is just like all the other horses has been given away to Jim, and all that’s left is the little shard that used to be mounted on its head. And while her brother and mother shout and recriminate as though she wasn’t even in the room, she drops the broken piece of glass, or herself, or Rose Williams, into the water, or the future, where it will chase Tom until she is dead, and beyond.

Can't We Get A Treaty That Forbids Brits From Writing About American Theatre?

By Isaac Butler

Up at the Finanical Times (and not behind their paywall) Matt Trueman has a piece discussing the cultural exchange of plays between the United States and Great Britain, with a focus on what plays make it to the respective other sides of the pond and what plays don't and why. It's an interesting topic that could provide some fascinating fuel for thought, were the article itself not riddled with errors:

(1) "...both Doubt and Proof won Pulitzer Prizes, America’s most prestigious award for new plays So too did Bruce Norris’s Clybourne Park, but only after its UK premiere at the Royal Court led to an acclaimed Broadway revival. The original New York production went largely unnoticed."

Nope. This is 100% untrue. Clybourne Park was the rare show that received its New York debut and its "second production" (in DC) simultaneously and was a huge hit (both critically and commerically) in both cities. It had other productions planned all over the place by the time it closed. It received the Putlitzer the first year it was eligible. I'm pretty sure that the folks behind the Broadway production would be surprised to learn that the Royal Court production somehow "led" to their production as well.

(2) "Haydon believes [Bruce Norris'] Purple Heart struggled in the US because the Vietnam war remains too loaded for audiences."

This isn't proveable, so it's hard to argue one way or another, but it is worth saying that Norris was not a well known playwright outside of Chicago until 2006, and that, particularly in the 70s and 80s, there were many, many plays where the Vietnam war figured prominently. One of these, David Rabe's "Streamers," was revived a few years ago. I'd hazard a guess that the subject matter, far from seeming "too loaded" is actually viewed as passé. 

(3) "Katori Hall has argued that The Mountaintop, an Olivier award winner in London, struggled on Broadway because it dared to criticise Martin Luther King. "

I know that Katori thinks this, and I like her work and think that she is a geniune talent, one that I've publicly defended from unfair treatment in the press. But it is simply not true that Mountaintop struggled on Broadway because it criticized MLK Jr. For one thing, it didn't struggle on Broadway. It was a hit with a limited run that is now playing all over the country in regional theaters, where my guess is it will be a mainstay for years to come. For another, if you actually read the critical responses to the play, no one criticizes the play on these grounds. If anything, critics find the play too sentimental w/r/t its subject.

(4) "Challenging the consensus becomes doubly problematic if you’re British, as Lucy Prebble discovered when Enron’s Broadway transfer bombed, losing a reported $4m."

I'm really not sure what "challening the consensus" means in this case when you're talking about a play opening for largely left wing audiences in New York well after Enron's collapse, but either way, a cursory view of the (mixed-to-positive) reviews Enron received shows this isn't the case. 

(5)   "`Americans are still able to take their national story seriously in a way that we’re not,' says Campbell, referencing a tradition stretching from Sam Shepard and Tony Kushner. There are exceptions; Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem and Simon Stephens’s Harper Regan, both acclaimed on Broadway in recent years."

Harper Regan didn't play on Broadway and was not critically acclaimed. 

(6) Cock was not renamed Cockfight Play. It was called that in certain print venues because of the standards and practices of those newspapers. Everywhere else (Broadway.com for ex) it retained its original title. 

Looking at these errors, many of which are easily caught with a cursory google search, I'm left noticing that there's a bit of a pattern here. With the exception of #5, each one goes towards reinforcing this idea that American Theatre is a fundamentally conservative beast where timid audiences (And artistic directors) dont' want to program work that talks about the hard truths, unlike their brave, stalwart contemporaries across the pond. It's too bad that the article uncritically passes along quotes from sources -- and doubly too bad that British artists are so blinkered that they give the quotes they do-- as the subject is a rich and interesting one. 

More Intellectual Property Insanity, Scholastic Edition

By Isaac Butler

A county in Maryland wants to copyright all of its students' homework. 

Three Thoughts on Jonah Lehrer Apologizing

By Isaac Butler

(1) We should all be so lucky as to get paid $20K to apologize.

(2) Apparently, once you are in certain elite circles, you literally cannot fail. It's remarkable, really.

(3) Quick quiz: What of Jonah Lehrer's crimes against journalism wouldnt' be permitted if John D'Agata got his way? 

Just as an FYI

By Isaac Butler

Due to typepad's spam filter not being great, comment moderation is on. If you don't see your comment immediately post, that's why. I'll check the commetns box as frequently as i can. Thanks!

In News That Should Surprise No One...

by Isaac Butler

Making the rounds of the internet today is this report that less than 25% of roles on New York City stages were played by actors of color from 2011-2012. 

99 and I have been sounding the alarm on this issue for so long that I don't really know what to say. Every time this issue comes up and there's evidence that there's under representation of people of color on our stages (and in other jobs, the two are related) someone chimes in to say we need more statistics, or more anecdotes, or more something and tries to shift the debate.

I want to be all even handed right now but this is such a depressing topic for me, so I'm just going to say I'm tired of having a debate over whether this problem even exists when it seems so glaring to me that it does.

I do not believe that any role can be played by any race, there are times when racializing casting choices really does have impacts on a play and production that must be considered.  At the same time, I call on my colleagues to use this as an opportunity to reconsider how they go about casting and about picking and staffing the plays they produce.

Part of the issue here is that we love to think about the art we make as proceeding organically.  But change doesn't come without self-conscious efforts to change. Thus, making self-conscious efforts to change something about our artistic practice feels inorganic, and thus like we're forcing our art. I get it. I get that it's uncomfortable. I sympathize. I get that, for example, it's very hard for white writers to write characters of color and that there's a lot of justifiable fear about doing it wrong. But it is never going to get better if we don't try.

Right now, we have theater in one of the most diverse cities on Earth that on all levels, Broadway, Off, Off-Off and Indie is perpetuating an all-white myth on its stages. This must change. 

UPDATE: The AAPAC report also names names, which I forgot to mention:

MOST DIVERSE 

1. SIGNATURE THEATRE (46.4%)

2. ATLANTIC THEATRE COMPANY (29.5%) 

3. VINEYARD THEATRE (28.6%)

4. PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS (27.8%)

5. NEW YORK THEATRE WORKSHOP (25%).     

 

LEAST DIVERSE

1. YORK THEATRE COMPANY (0%)

2. CLASSIC STAGE COMPANY (2.9%)

3. PRIMARY STAGES (5.6%)

4. ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY (6.1%) 

5. MCC THEATRE (7.7%)        

MOST INCLUSIVE CASTING 

1. PUBLIC THEATRE (19.2%)

2. THEATRE FOR A NEW AUDIENCE (13.3%) 

3. MANHATTAN THEATRE CLUB (13%)

4. SECOND STAGE COMPANY (12.5%)

5. VINEYARD THEATRE (7.1%)

 

Weird Day In God

By Isaac Butler

First I find out that the Pope is retiring because he covered up the rape of thousands of children is in poor health, next I find out that the Westboro Baptist Church is picketing Vassar College (my alma mater) because it's one of the more gay-friendly schools in the country at the end of the month.

Make of that what you will. 

Eat Your Heart Out (Sam Thielman on "Community")

By Sam Thielman

(EDITOR'S NOTE: On the occasion of "Community"'s post-Dan-Harmon relaunch, Ad Week's Sam Thielman penned this wonderful appreciation of the first three seasons of the show. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. -- Isaac)

“Community,” at the beginning of its life, wasn’t much more than a weird little number written by Dan Harmon, a guy who’d been fired off “The Sarah Silverman Program,” which he co-created, and who was using his buddy Dino Stamatopoulos as a consulting producer/writer/bit player. To be fair, it is a hell of a pilot—witty; just sentimental enough; filled with clearly delineated characters played by worthwhile actors, one an aging movie star (Chevy Chase) and another a likable “Daily Show” comedian (John Oliver), giving it multigenerational appeal. It makes sense to greenlight it, if you ignore the simmering creative tension on the production side.

“Community” is about seven friends at Greendale Community College in Colorado, where each of them has landed by dint of some terrible mistake. Jeff (Joel McHale) is a lawyer who’s been caught with a fake bachelor’s degree; Britta (Gillian Jacobs) is an ultra-PC anti-everything activist who has realized at 28 that she doesn’t have any skills; Pierce (Chase) is a disagreeable, middle-aged, heedlessly rich septuple divorcé with no friends; Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) is a fortysomething housewife abandoned by her husband who wants to sell brownies on the internet; Annie (Alison Brie) is an honor student who had a psychotic break her senior year after getting addicted to Adderall; Troy (Donald Glover) is her former classmate, a football star who ended his sports career in an accidentally-on-purpose “keg flip” mishap; and Abed… Abed (Danny Pudi) suffers from Asperger’s and copes with the world by pretending he’s in a television show. Which, of course, he is.

There’s so much to say about “Community” that most of its evangelists make the mistake of skipping over the obvious: it is hilariously funny. In three seasons, there is not a bad episode, though some are stronger than others. The show’s writing staff is very, very gifted, especially Harmon, Chris McKenna and Megan Ganz, and when the writers craft a rare dud joke, it turns out the cast are both so individually talented and so good with each other that they can make it work on two or three other levels. When the writers and the actors are all hitting their marks together—as is usually the case—it’s stunning. My favorite example of this is near the end of season 1, when Abed has decided that he and Troy (now his best friend) need to have the college experience they’ve seen in movies and TV shows. They walk by the rest of the group to inform them that they’re being hazed by a fraternity they have no hope of pledging. “They’re making us walk around with pretzels in our butts,” Troy explains embarrassedly, “and I put mustard on mine like an idiot.” It’s a great line, but it’s ten times funnier with the combination of Donald Glover’s delivery—the “GOD I locked my keys in the car again” way he explains his decision to put mustard on the pretzel—and the look on Alison Brie’s foregrounded face, as she goes rapidly through what look like the five stages of grief over Troy’s terrible, terrible mistake. That, and the running gag that Troy likes butt stuff.

A lot has been made of the show’s condensation of various movie genre formulae into 22-minute comedies—there’s a gangster episode, a heist episode, a Western episode, a few very inventive sci-fi episodes, and so on–but what strikes me more than anything about “Community” is that it appears to have consumed and most of the films of the “Disney Renaissance” (“Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin”) and metabolized them into something altogether new and weird and excellent. Everyone in this show, after all, would have grown up on those films, and would probably be reaching exactly the moment when they discover that life is not going to turn out like a Disney movie. This—for many young people, I’d hazard—creates something of a quandary. Are your emotions really worth anything if they’re about getting turned down by the cute guy in your Spanish class or fighting with your best friend, and not about monsters and demons and long-lost loves? Is your entire life bathetic by comparison to children’s fiction? 

“Community” solves this problem by keeping the structure and tropes of kids’ movies—the handsome prince, the self-discovery, the triumphs over insurmountable odds—and radically reducing the scale. At one point, Abed teaches the rat in his Environmental Science class to respond to a song—the rat escapes, of course, and Troy won’t help him get it back, because he’s terrified of rats (“I’m not afraid. I choose not be around rats because they are unpopular. Same goes for centipedes and lakes”). Meanwhile, Shirley has trouble with stage fright in her public speaking class, the psychotic Spanish teacher, Senor Chang, enters a crippling depression over failed marriage, and Jeff struggles with whether or not to betray his friends for a good grade in Chang’s class.

None of this, frankly, is that interesting on paper, but the reason “Community” is both a gorgeous, well-wrought, hugely satisfying show and also a borderline flop is that it is zero concept and 100% execution. That is also the reason it will probably get canceled—it just doesn’t sound very good. In practice, it’s not just good, it’s transcendent: Abed has named his rat Fievel, of course, and has taught the rat to respond to the Grammy-winning love theme  from “An American Tail,” so the episode resolves in a montage of Shirley overcoming stage fright, Chang reuniting with his wife, Jeff deciding to help his friends at his own expense, and Abed singing “Somewhere Out There” over the whole thing… with Troy returning to help him just in time to come in on the duet. Against all odds and penetrating every protective layer of irony, it is a heartwarming moment. This is a show that triple-dog-dares you not to take it seriously.

“Community” has the distinction—and this is one of the ways in which it is like “The Simpsons,” to which it is frequently compared—of trying to tell as many different kinds of stories as possible. Sometimes they’re stories about Chang (the incredible Ken Jeong, whose character is no longer a Spanish teacher but is still psychotic), or about the hypercaffeinated Dean Pelton (an equally great Jim Rash), who is described, accurately, in the third season as a “pansexual imp.” Sometimes the episodes swan dive majestically off the deep end and take place in parallel universes or as clip shows of episodes that never happened or even, memorably, as one of the more compelling characters’ claymation hallucinations of the Christmas season.

About that last one—the stop-motion episode occurs halfway through the second season, and it offers a rare window into the show’s direct ancestors. It’s in the credits: one of the writers is Stamatopoulos.

Stamatopoulos will probably be lost to television history as the guy who plays “Starburns,” a student at Greendale who shaves both his sideburns into the shape of a star in an effort to give himself some kind of identity (in this, he fails miserably), but he has another, much greater achievement to his name. Stamatopoulos created “Moral Orel,” arguably the darkest and most twisted show to ever appear on television, seriously, ever. It was a sort of cross between the old United Lutheran Church-produced “Davey and Goliath” claymation shorts and a Todd Solondz movie, taking place in a Christian community called, appropriately, Moralton, which is in the exact center of the U.S. in a state called Statesota. The town’s church is in the exact center of Moralton, which is, naturally, populated by the most unspeakable hypocrites and creeps you can imagine and some you can’t. It’s a comedy about crushing, murderous depression and all the horrible things people do to be happy, and it is consummately worth watching (advice from Moralton’s priest to an unfaithful husband: “Just say two It Wasn’t Mes and three I Blame My Fathers. You’ll be fine”) for as long as you can stand it, which will probably not be long. The show aired on Adult Swim, where Standards and Practices objected to it. Let that sink in: a producer on an NBC sitcom pilot ran into trouble with Standards and Practices on Adult Swim, and the pilot got picked up. It is something that could literally only have happened on blink-and-you-missed-him NBC executive Ben Silverman’s watch. 

Every time Abed meets his evil twin in his imagination, every time we see Chang talking about his day to his new wife the mannequin leg, every time Annie throws a tantrum so horrible that Jeff tells her she’s acting like a little schoolgirl (“and not in a sexy way!”), you get the sense that Stamatopoulos is, if not behind those moments necessarily, amping them up in some way. It is comedy made by and for broken people.

A lot has been said about the show’s heart; it’s all very true. What’s also true, and less reassuring from a devotee’s perspective but somehow very comforting indeed in aesthetic terms, is that there’s a willingness among these writers to tear that heart out and eat it in front of the audience just to prove they’re not full of shit. It’s a quality only the very best TV comedies - “Seinfeld,” “Da Ali G Show,” “Arrested Development,” “Futurama” - have in any real measure, and it’s what gives me hope that the show will not merely survive without getting canceled, but will thrive. Stamatopoulos, along with Harmon, is gone from the program as of the end of the last season. Much as I love both of them, I don’t think their absence from the show will be fatal. I do think it will be nicer, gentler, and less troubling, and maybe that’s an unforgivable tragedy, but maybe it’s not. 

You’d have to have been pretty blind to the show’s progress over the last three seasons not to see that it was on a deeply serious, potentially fatal trajectory, largely at Harmon’s behest. Granted, that’s part of the show’s genius: the climactic final episode of season 1 appeared to leave absolutely no room for the writing team to move, and yet the second season is arguably the show’s strongest because Harmon manages to set up a dichotomy—will Jeff and Britta or won’t they?—and then totally ignores it for the rest of the show to no ill effect. As he raises the stakes in season 3 and the show gets crazier and crazier, however, it’s hard for him to keep it grounded in emotions that the audience might on some level share with the characters, and wherever Harmon was going to eventually end up might not necessarily have been a better place than whatever neutering effect the show’s fans—me among them—feel NBC will have on it. Here’s the thing, though: at least whatever Harmon ended up doing would have been unusual.

So if we’re going to mourn—and having seen the first two totally acceptable episodes, I think we are, a little bit—it’s probably not the show we should be crying for, but the mean, angry, hurt, unhappy part of it; that maybe-it’s-not-really-a-joke  that perfectly mirrors the smoldering pain good comedy quenches. Oddly, it’s an agony that just radiates off the show’s main character, Jeff, and it seems appropriate to close with a few of the very best lines in the series—a moment that cuts so close to the bone it makes you gasp a little bit. He’s at dinner with Abed, who’s acting friendly and relatable and indicates that he’d like to have an adult conversation, and so, right before it turns out that the whole setup is merely Abed’s riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” Jeff hits him with this: “…And I said, ‘No, that’s a girl’s costume!’  And my mom said, ‘It’s fine!  Indian boys have long hair and braids, too!’  There was only 45 minutes left to trick-or-treat, so what could I do?  I put the damn thing on, and I went door-to-door.  And everyone was going, ‘Oh, what a pretty little girl.’  And by the third house…I stopped correcting them.  I mean, why draw attention to it?  And, honestly, once the shame and the fear wore off…I was just glad they thought I was pretty.”

Laugh, you bastards.

Just a Reminder

By Isaac Butler

A man in Murray Nebraska accidentally shot himself in the hand while cleaning his gun. He had forgotten the round in the chamber. He was treated and released later today.

Over the weekend, a woman was accidentally shot in the back while driving, an Iowa gun dealer shot himself in the hand at a gun show, a 27 year old shot himself in Alabama by mistake while arguing with a teen.  Another man accidentally shot himself in the leg while using the bathroom at a Minnesota grocery store. And, as you've probably heard, a woman accidentally (but non-fatally) shot her husband at a gun range in Florida.

Sadly, for the man in Alabama accidentally shot during a game of quick draw,a 15 year old Matthew Daniels from Tennessee who accidentally shot himself with the family handgun, a man in Miami, Oklahoma accidentally shot by an unknown third party, and Marcus Williams, a 17 year old boy from baton rouge accidentally shot in the back by a friend as they played with a handgun outside, all shot over the weekend, the news isn't as good. They're all dead.

According to the CDCP, Gun deaths are set to eclipse car accidents as the leading cause of non-medical death in the United States in two years.

(Most of this is reblogged from the sad but invaluable Today's Accidental Shootings blog.)

The Strangest Dream

By Isaac  Butler

Last night on twitter, the NY Review of Books asked us to tweet them our strangest dreams. I started to tweet mine and then realized it was just too long, involved, and strange to really work in that format.  Then I remembered this morning that I had once written it down on my computer. So here it is.  It's, I'll warn you, not a happy dream:

We are in the back of an old blue pickup truck, the other captives and I.  I have just awakened from a nap. It takes awhile for me to remember I am a captive. None of us are tied up. We’re driving down a dusty country road.  Now I remember why none of us are running, one of our captors is back there with us.  He’s the man in the worn navy pinstripe suit and fedora, with the round face, lightly cleft chin and calm, caring brown eyes.

             I cannot recall why we are captives, and then I can. We have been taken hostage by a cult.  They are planning to sacrifice us as part of some religious ritual. I never see their leader, but I have a memory of him. He is thin, of medium height. He has a grey beard and long, scraggly hair down to his shoulders. Crystal blue eyes, cold and all-seeing, his mouth open in a rictus of religious fervor. He was there when I was captured, I remember, but of the capturing I recall nothing.

            The truck pulls in to a school.  It is my childhood elementary school, but I do not realize it. The school is abandoned. It is the weekend and the cult has taken it over for their ritual, the one in which we will die.  We get out of the truck and the Man In The Fedora leads us into a hallway.

            “I want you all to know, “ he says in baritone, authoritative G-Man voice, “that I do not approve of everything Our Leader does as part of this ritual.  I participate because there are things in it that I find healing for myself, and this healing is worth it to me.  You will eventually be taken into the gymnasium for the ritual proper, but everything we do, beginning with our entrance into this building is part of it and is sacred.”

            There are boxes there, filled with men’s dress trousers.  The Man In The Fedora gives us broken sea shells slightly larger than the palm of my hand. They are round but have ragged sharp edges.  They must be gripped awkwardly. “For the first part of this ritual, you must shred these pants with these shells.”  He puts his hands on his hips, revealing a holstered gun. 

            We get to work, running the stones down the length of the trousers with a steady, hypnotic rhythm. Most of the other hostages with me are women, dressed like housewives from different time periods. There is also an old man. He must be in his seventies. He looks bedraggled and terrified.  He is very thin, a few grey cornstalk wisps are all that remains of his hair.

            The trousers are distressed into half-inch wide tatters, still held together by their waste bands.  We are making speedy, efficient progress. Everyone is silent, except for the occasional worried weepy moan.  The Man In The Fedora looks so sad for all of us. He turns to the old man, who is now dressed in a wife beater and boxer shorts, socks pulled up all the way over his calves.

            “I am sorry, but when this part of the ritual is over, the next thing that will happen is that Our Leader will rape and murder you with his bare hands.”

            The old man looks at the man in the Fedora, speechless.  He begins to tremble, and then he runs towards the unguarded doors of the school.  The Man In The Fedora pulls out the revolver from the shoulder holster aims carefully and calmly, as if this is all a foregone conclusion. He fires.  The bullet explodes out of the old man’s right eye socket and he falls backwards to the ground, dead.

            The Man In The Fedora sighs discontentedly to himself. I realize that he will have to find another old man for the ritual.  I feel bad for him.

            I wake up.

 

The Crowd Shifts The Plane Lifts

By Isaac Butler

Every time the plane lifts off from MSP, it turns. We're airborne and then the next moment almost sideways.  Out of the left windows, we see the sun, out of the right, the squares and rectagles, all the regular shapes that make up the twin cities.

It's a horrible moment, really, that turn, even when you know it's coming. Or at least, it's horrible when you like me are afriad of flying.

Actually, I'm not afraid of flying. 

What I am is convinced that I will die in a plane crash.  

So the experience of flying itself doesn't terrify me.  I don't mind the sudden acceleration on the runway. I don't mind the buildings going all Mr. Rogers Neighborhood on us. I don't mind the hovering in mid-air.  What happens instead is we hit a bump or the pressure changes or we turn and I think "well, here it is, my time to die in this here plane crash."  

It seems ridiculous.

I know it is ridiculous.

Yet I always keep enough juice on my laptop to fire off a final e-mail saying goodbye, I love you, cremate me, here's who I want to speak at my funeral.

I should probably save a draft of that somewhere because once we start plummeting we'll be under 10K feet faster than you can say I crapped my pants.

I'm in my Jesus year now. I think about death. All the time, really. It's an odd moment, that time when you realize you are going to die some day. And there's little comfort to be had if, like me, you think this is it, all we get and so on. 

I find that most of the men I know who are around my age think about the fact of mortality all the time and very few of the women do. I do not know why this is the case.

But yes, death. Yes. I think about it a lot.  Cooking dinner or walking the dog or grading essays and then all of a sudden there's a flutter of my heart and a brief shortness of breath and a little moment of time is going by.  You are thirty three. Almost thirty four. There is every reason to believe that you will only live another thirty three. Or thirty four. Or far less. And what about that raised mole on your neck with the little corona of brown? Do you believe your doctor when he says it's no big deal?

And I think about those older than me. I have many friends who are in late middle age. There are, of course, my parents. 

I'm of the first generation of people trying to sort this out in the presense of the internet.  I still get messages from Facebook telling me that I should really reconnect with Patrick Lee-- dear Patrick Lee-- who died in his sleep of a heart attack all of a sudden a few months after I met him face to face for the first time when we were both drunk and giddy off of success. Our entire friendship happened online, including it's end, his death. And yet that relationship continues.  Online of course.

I don't believe in an afterlife. But I do believe our relationships with people continue after they die. Even if I understand that it's not real, it is real. Rather like race. I still have conversations in my head with a dead therapist of mine. So Facebook in this instance is playing the role of the inside of our heads. I cannot say to Patrick that I missed him, but I could post on his wall that I did. 

Perhaps it's the standing at the precipice that has me thinking about this. My book is almost finished-- or really, I should say "finished," or finishedish-- yet I have neither agent nor publisher, have not tried to secure either yet. I still have a few months left before I am a Master of a fine-ass art.  Or really I should say "Master," or masterish.  I live in two cities.  Soon I'll be living in one. 

It's the split life that has me on the planes, the plane on which I am sure that I will come to an ignominius end, almost every week. Brooklyn to Uptown, Uptown to Brooklyn. 

When we take off from New York, I touch my palm to the window. Every time.

The Beauty Of A Faith I Don't Share

The beauty of Christianity to me is its impossibility. You cannot live in this world as it is and follow Christ's teachings by almost any interpretation of them. Impossible in his day and in ours. Yet you must try. And through this trying you must slip not into self-loathing or shame or judging others but rather into love and an expansion of empathy, an understanding for the failures of others for there you are, failing right beside them.

Apologies for the Nonexistant Posting

By Isaac Butler

Hey folks.

I'm doing major surgery on the book for the next couple weeks (and have been for the last couple) and that's taking most of my writing energy away.  Sorry bout that. Hope to have more for you soon.

Attention Must Be Paid

by Isaac Butler

I'd like to posit here at the outset something that the rest of this post rests on: Attention in theatre is important. Theatre, in fact, requires a different kind of attention than most other activities, because it's a sort of make believe that you (generally) only get to watch.  This should be terrible. Who wants to watch other people have fun? But for whatever reason, when it works, its magic. 

The trick of most productions is to seduce you into paying this kind of attention, doing this kind of work (for it is work), without you even really realizing it's happening. They do this in all sorts of ways, good and bad, from the riotous spectacle of War Horse (a show I hated, for the record) to the you-must-lean-in quiet of The Aliens.

I actually think paying this kind of attention is easier for chldren. Or, at least, it was easier for me as a child, because I was playing make believe all the time, so watching Philip Goodwin as the Dauphin in Saint Joan at the Folger didn't strike me as particularly weird. It was just so great to see adults doing this thing that I liked doing.

Peter Brook has this thing he talks about it either The Empty Space or The Open Door about the dreaded moment when, during a show, an audience member picks up their program to read it, and how he lives in fear of that moment, and how he wants to construct a kind of production that will hold their attention from beginning to end.

You might have guessed by now that this post is about "Tweet Seats," the absurd new phenomenon of theaters devoting certain seats on certain nights for people who want to tweet while watching their shows. This is an epic act of shooting oneself in the foot.  For theatre that is not fully attended to cannot be fully appreciated, and the attention it requires is a collective act. Theatre is created in the space between the spectator as a group and as individuals and the work being performed on stage.

I am not advocating here for quiet, docile, obedient audiences. I think there's all sorts of ways to create that attention with varying degrees of rambunctiousness, but you can't create that attention if you are stopping from watching the god damn show to look at your god damn phone. And what's more, your doing that makes it harder for those around you to pay attention.

But the Tweet Seats phenomenon (which I hope will die before it catches on any further) is a sign of something bigger, of how truly out of touch our theaters are. Because what this is all about is the ongoing efforts by theaters to get younger/hipper/whateverer patrons to come to their shows without having to change the work they do.

A few years ago (oh shit I'm old) I wrote on Parabasis about the deep, dark secret of getting younger audiences to go to the theatre. I'm just gonna quote myself here in the interest of time:

I'm going to reveal, right now, the secret to getting young people to come to your theatre and see shows. Because it's a no-brainer and I'm tired of having this conversation (For reasons that should become obvious in a second). Here's the secret:

(1) Do work they want to see.

(2) Endeavor to do it well

(3) Offer it at a price point they will find reasonable 

You know what's not on that list? Twitter. Facebook. The internets. Beer pong nights. Those are marketing channels, we'll get to how to do those better in a moment.

[snip]

Theater companies and producers for the most part do not want to do the above three things. What they want to do is do the same work and use marketing to trick younger audiences into thinking it's what they want to see.

So the next time we have this conversation... can we please have it honestly and start asking some more interesting questions, some more difficult questions?  Questions like: Do you actually want younger audiences, or do you just want their money? or Would your theater company be able to sustain itself on a younger audience base? And if not, are you just fucked? Are you just riding it out for as long as possible knowing it's not going to work out in the long run?

I don't think this is any less true than it was then. Tweet Seats-- particularly absent any real change in programming-- is just empty, gimmicky bullshit. What's more, it's insulting, the way most condescending panders to demographic groups are insulting.No where is this clearer than in the Guthrie's recent "Tweet Seats" night at "The Servant of Two Masters" where the Guthrie's twitter account asked such burning, must-be-answered-rather-than-watch-the-show questions like "Did you expect music like this?" or "How cool is the set by Katherine Akiko Day?" or "What's been your favorite pop culture reference so far?" We get it, Guthrie, you're trying to do "The Servant of Two Masters" in a way that's young and hip and show you're a happenin' Daddy-O, but nothing reeks of out of touch old man stench like someone parading around how young and cool they're trying to be. It's akin to your bald middle aged father picking you up from school in a new convertable and a 22 year old girlfriend. Or the scene in Star Trek where Kirk listens to The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" whilst riding a hover bike.

So I have a counter proposal for theaters trying out tweet seats: Why don't you  try to do a show where both the play and the production are of such quality that someone who is tempted by their phone will want to watch from start to finish without jumping on the internet? And then, rather than sabotage it in the hopes that you can turn your audience into unpaid marketing labor for it, why don't you figure out a way to price it and market it so that the people you intended it for will want to come see it?