Parabasis

Brad Pitt, Actor

It starts with the voice.  It feels lower than it should be, perhaps digitally altered to pitch shift it down. And then there’s the articulation, or lack thereof, as if he’s half-swallowing the words, or as if he doesn’t really care whether you can make them out.  The voice is almost never raised—you’ll never see him screaming in the rain—but it can take on a sternness, a sharpness.  Even then, it won’t go up in pitch.  Brad Pitt has a middle-C, and he won’t climb above it.

Then there’s the face. Etched with a few more lines than when he took Gina Davis’s virginity and money in Thelma and Louise. It's a bit hangdog too.  If he weren’t a movie star with a movie star’s body, he’d likely have jowls by now. His face is made out of circles, the wide ones of his eyes, the sockets of his jaw, the perfect one that surrounds his mouth.

The face is also a wall. There are things going on beneath it, but you’ll never be completely sure you know what they are I used to think he was a bad actor, untalented. Capable of grandiose gestures, yes, capable of deliberately unnatural character work in 12 Monkeys, but seriously, a dramatic actor? Really?

I was wrong.  It isn’t that he’s a bad actor, it’s that he’s an opaque one. Whether by choice or by specificity of talents, Brad Pitt is not going to reveal himself to you onscreen, ever. The movies of his that succeed are the ones that know this and use it to their advantage.

Opacity in performance—an acting style in which the subtext of a character is present but kept secret—is made possible by film. Without the close-up, the reaction shot, the bit of closely observed business, keeping secrets from the audience is difficult. I know of only two actors who regularly pulled this off on stage (James Urbaniak and T. Ryder Smith). Film enables it, but our preference as audiences is always for revelation, to be embraced (or at least charmed) by a performance rather than held at a distance by a man presenting an unsolvable mystery.

Pitt’s mode of performance is a stark contrast from most of his contemporaries.  Michael Fassbender, for example, is a largely transparent beast.  Watching Shame or A Dangerous Method, you know precisely what’s going on with him at all times. This transparency is not always for the good of the project. Shame would not work without it, but as soulful as Fassbender is in A Dangerous Method, the script is so subtext-free and on the nose that the project could’ve benefited from some holding back.

Ryan Gosling, the other major actor of the year, attempted to vacillate between the two modes with less success. Testing out his opaque chops in Drive, he simply appeared to have no subtext whatsoever, a blank that rendered the film’s soundtracked assertion that his character is “a real human being/ and a real hero” absurd. He was neither. Drive was at its best when it treated The Kid as a slasher movie monster thrust into the role of a B-movie action hero.  In its final moments it mistook him for Christ, and the love interest plot line never felt more than a comment on de rigeur genre mechanics.

One of the few actors who can successfully move between transparency and opacity is Gary Oldman.  He seems as comfortable reveling in the campy extremity of his 1990’s work as he does in the arch super-restraint of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a film in which his ice-coldness as a metaphor for the dehumanization of the cold war, contrasted against a more traditional—and failed—romantic hero played by Tom Hardy.

Pitt is not as versatile a performer as Gosling or Fassbender, but when he is used well, there’s an undeniable power to his work.  Nowhere is that better demonstrated than in The Tree of Life, which casts Pitt against type as an overbearing, abusive, broken father in mid-20^th Century Texas. Even before we know this about his character, however, Pitt’s performance is terrifying precisely because it is inscruitable.  We see that lurking beneath the surface is something waiting to get out, but cannot tell what it is. He won’t show it to us.  He looms as an actor in the way many fathers loom in the lives of their children, as unknown and unknowable forces, frightening because they are a secret.

Moneyball-- which Pitt produced-- does not use him as well.  The screenplay and director Bennett Miller do a good job of deploying flashback sequences (with a different actor) to reveal the shades of desperation and bitterness, allowing Pitt to invest fully in the gruff, no-nonsense exterior that serves as a cover-up.  The film stumbles, however, in its attempts to show Pitt’s home life. He’s never going to be convincing as a loving father; in today’s world, doing so requires a level of openness and intimacy that he will not show on screen.

Pitt best performances—in The Tree of Life and Fight Club—are in roles where his character is enacting someone else’s subjectivity. In those cases, his mysteries are the film’s mysteries, his lacunae the gaps in the protagonist’s own understanding of the world. Our ideas of what good acting is and what acting is for—the revealing of a character’s inner mysteries to the audience without over-indication—arose at the same time as the flourishing of psychotherapy, a practice that promised similar revelation to the client. I write this not to denigrate either—conventionally good acting and therapy are  both marvelous things—but simply to note that there is an understanding of the world (if not a kind of ideology) embedded within our preference for transparent acting.

Given that, I’m grateful there are a few performers out there demonstrating a different truth. That we, at times, are unknowable to each other and to ourselves. That humans are a complex mystery. That sometimes solving that mystery is impossible. That behind a wall can be another wall. 

 

A Brief History of Karaoke

by 99 Seats

Last night, I read in The Soundtrack Series, a monthly reading series of people talking about songs that mean something to them. I had a great old time. This is the piece I read. Here's the song that inspired it.

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            First, let me apologize. “Drops of Jupiter” is a terrible, terrible song by a terrible band and I’m sorry that I’ve inflicted it on you, even for a few seconds. God, I hate this song. When I hear it, I go back to the late ‘90s, a time when music like this made the world safe for douchebags. I blame Train and Matchbox 20 and Nickelback for the Bush years. It was all their fault. Train made music for people who thought that Dave Matthews was too deep. And “Drops of Jupiter” is their crowning achievement. God, it reeks of the late ‘90s with its sophomore in college journal lyrics and references to Tae-Bo and “the best soy latte that you’ve ever had.” (That’s an actual lyric in the song. An actual lyric.) Lord God, I hate this song.

            But. The Soundtrack Series isn’t about your favorite song. It’s about a song that reminds you of something, of a time in your life, a particular moment that something happened. Besides reminding me of beefy guys in dirty white hats, this song does remind me of something else, someone else. I hate to say it, but I don’t remember his name, if I ever really knew it. I can’t say we were friends or even that I ever spoke more than five sentences to him ever. But when I hear this song I can see him: the guy in the wheelchair who sang it every week at the Dutch Cabin’s karaoke night. Usually in a black t-shirt and black pants. Soul patch. Spiky, moussed-up hair. He tore into this song, week after week, in a clear, strong voice. That’s what I think of when I hear this song: karaoke at the Dutch Cabin and how, oddly, it led to everything that came after.

            Let me back up. Like Steve Perry sang, I was raised on radio. Pop music has been a part of my life since before I could walk. I grew up on a steady diet of disco, reggae, Motown, rock, blues, you name it. Music, particularly pop music, was a constant. And I was the kind of kid who learned all the words, sang along with every song. I even choreographed complicated dance routines for the delight of literally no one but myself. Seriously. Leave me alone with the Footloose soundtrack for an afternoon in 1984 and you would get an entire opera acted out in my parents’ bedroom. I was that kind of kid. If it takes 10,000 hours to get good at something, by the time I was thirteen, I was aces at listening to the radio. Easily. I watched MTV, I listened to Z-100, I recorded songs off the radio on my boom box and I sang along. All the time.

            There was one little problem. I couldn’t really sing. Not so much. I learned that the hard way: in chorus in the 7^th grade. 7^th grade is the place where you learn your limitations. Usually in public. And learn them, I did. I learned that while I sang with gusto and passion and, most of all, volume, I did not so much sing with proper pitch or tone or, most embarrassingly for the only black kid in school, rhythm. I didn’t screech or anything, it wasn’t that. It was just that opened my mouth and noise came out. Not singing so much. And especially not choral singing. See, I had a loud voice that was really neither bass nor tenor (“baritone” was a word I’d never heard) and all my body wanted to do was sing the melody. As a member of a middle-school chorus, the goal is to blend, blend your voice, blend your tone, and sing the lovely harmonies. I was wired for pop music, so I was wired for the melody. Harmony, that’s what the Pips sang, what those other Supremes sang. I wanted to sing the melody. That didn’t really work for chorus.

            Still, I persisted, staying in chorus all through high school, singing in the high school musical. I think I gave Larry Silverman, our music teacher, fits. I know I gave the other students’ fits. I remember one time having two seniors singing my part literally into my ears during one rehearsal. My voice would not comply. My senior year, we did Pippin as the musical and I played Charlemagne, Pippin’s father. That’s a part that is mostly talk-singing, like Rex Harrison’s part in My Fair Lady. (We got any musical theatre fans in the house? Good.) Basically, I couldn’t screw it up. The one harmony I had to sing, I sang after my character had died, curled up in a ball, behind some baffling on the set. So that worked out pretty well.

            When I went to college, I focused on writing and put my performing days behind me. I mean, in 1991, it wasn’t like there were a lot of chances to go out in public and sing popular hits in front of people. Sure, this thing called karaoke existed, but it wasn’t widespread. I’m sure it’s a shock to the Youth of America in attendance to learn that there was a time when karaoke wasn’t everywhere. But there was. That time was 1991 to about 1996. When I was in college. But when I moved back to New York, the karaoke barrier had been broken and it was a whole new world.

            Karaoke for me, in those days, was this: I would be hanging out with my friends, doing…something. Watching a ball game. Watching a movie. Having dinner. Celebrating someone’s birthday. At a house party. There would be drinks. There would be more drinks. It would be late. And get later. And then someone would throw it out there, just casual-like. “Hey, maybe we should do some karaoke?” And the response would be insane. That was the BEST IDEA EVER AND WE HAD TO DO IT. So we would. We would pile into a cab, a sweaty bunch of 20-somethings and go across town to the East Side (none of us would ever actually hang out on the East Side, I mean, come on..) to Duet, a karaoke joint. This was the karaoke box. It was private, it was safe, it was also BYOB. We’d cart in cases of beer and bottles of whiskey and dial up the songs of our youth. “Hang On Sloopy” was a surprisingly big crowd-pleaser. Since we were all Jersey-raised, Bon Jovi would make an appearance (or three) and we’d finish with a rousing rendition of “Born To Run.” And by rousing, I mean, five drunk guys shouting at the top of their lungs at 2 in the morning. In the box, karaoke always devolved into punk rock. It was awesome.

            Around this time, in the other part of my life, I was working in a theatre, a small, struggling theatre in Hell’s Kitchen. We were talented and passionate and the theatre had a long storied history. But we were practically in the Hudson River at the end of, at the time, probably the sketchiest block in Manhattan. We did what we did there, but no one really noticed. We were kind of like the Amish of the New York theatre scene: a people apart, with our ways and traditions, hostile to outsiders and the uninitiated. I wouldn’t go so far as to say “cult,” since there was no Kool-Aid (or sometimes heat), but it was, in some ways, a theatrical karaoke box. We trundled in our own stuff and had a great time, but it wasn’t really public. I worked there, as an intern, an artist and a staff member, for nearly a decade. It was a place I was valued, a place where people knew me. And then I left, and joined the rest of the world.

            The rest of the world was a company called New York Stage and Film which produced plays and readings on the Vassar College campus every summer. If my old theatre was the Amish, Stage and Film was a megachurch, Saddleback or something. They were totally plugged in, connected to, well, everything and everyone. My first summer there, I suddenly found myself rubbing elbows with people I’d seen on TV, on Broadway, in movies. Jill Clayburgh gave me a ride. I had Tony-winners calling my cell phone. I helped Broadway directors through emotional breakdowns. I was essentially the kid from the sticks who gets called up to the majors. And every day, well, it was kind of like being back in 7^th grade and learning my limitations in public. Did I belong here? Was I going to get sent home? Sooner or later, they were going to figure out that I was a fraud, right? I mean, obviously.

            If you know Vassar or Poughkeepsie, you know that there aren’t a lot of places to hang out around there. In fact, there are basically two. The Beech Tree Inn was the fancy joint with the good food and the pricey drinks. That was where the stars of stage and screen would hold court. Going to the Beech Tree was like going to the office; I was still on the clock. But then, there was the Dutch Cabin. The Dutch Cabin was a Mexican restaurant. Don’t ask me why. But it was. And it was a dive bar. I guess, during the school year, it’s a very college-y bar, but in the summer, it was clearly a townie bar. It was filthy, always. They had absurd beer specials, like this: one night a week, they had $5 pitchers of Sam Adams. But the pitchers were these half-pitcher things, so people just walked around drinking right from the pitcher. Awesome idea.

            But they also had karaoke. After a few weeks of putting in my time at the Beech Tree, I needed something different. Something else. I didn’t do karaoke nights, I was a karaoke box guy, I was used to being somewhere safe, with my friends, where it didn’t matter that I couldn’t really sing. That was good. But…eventually, you get drunk enough and there you are. At karaoke night. At the Dutch Cabin. And it is AWESOME. There’s one guy who does thrash metal. Every week. Without lyrics. The karaoke guy just has the track and the guy does it. There were the usual drunk girls, singing “Don’t Stop Believing” (this was before it was the Most Ubiquitous Song Ever and it was still ironic and fun). And there was the guy, the guy singing “Drops of Jupiter” so seriously. So well. It actually didn’t sound like such a shitty song when he sang it. It kind of meant something.

            I went a few times and discovered something. I discovered that my 10,000 hours of listening to pop music had paid off: I knew every song. I knew every word to every song. Every weird, obscure ‘80s pop hit, I knew it. Karaoke was born in the ‘80s and there is no other decade of music that suits it. It’s an unholy marriage of one-hit wonders and music made entirely by computer. It ran in my veins like little white corpuscles of synth. I was built for this. Because I could sing harmonies. I knew all the backing tracks, all the little grunts and shout-outs from the backing band. All the patter in the Springsteen songs. A bunch of us would go and sit where we could see the lyrics on the screen and sing along. When the person was too drunk to actually remember the song, we filled in. It turned karaoke into a communal thing. It all became our karaoke box.

            Once I started, I couldn’t stop. I did two summers at Stage and Film and went to Tuesday night karaoke both summers. I met a girl the second summer and karaoke definitely played a part. In life, I’m shy, awkward, especially around women I like. But on karaoke night? Something happens. The guy, the Drops of Jupiter guy, I don’t know what he did with the rest of his week, with the rest of his life. But I know he was there every week for something. And so was I. So I wooed at karaoke night, I won at karaoke night. But it was just a summer thing. When the summer ended and we both went home, the romance ended. I say it was because we never went to karaoke again.

            When I came back to my neighborhood, I discovered that a local bar had started a karaoke night. So, of course, I went. And there, well, a lot of things started. But that’s a story for another time. For now, I’ll leave it with this: sometimes people ask me if I sing. When they do, I say, I karaoke. It’s not the same thing. It’s as cheesy as “Drops of Jupiter” to say it, but karaoke is where I really found my voice. Even when I lost it.

God and The Tree Of Life

By Isaac Butler

I finally got around to watching The Tree Of Life today and I loved it, but I mainly loved it for its contradictions and incoherences, for the ways it cheats around some of its core questions. Oh and this is spoiler city below, so be warned.

Those core questions are the same core questions of the source text for the quote that begins the film, The Book of Job from The Bible.  The Tree of Life is not the only recent film to draw on Job, recently there was A Serious Man from the Coens. But while the Coen brothers were content to use a couple of plot points from the Bible as yet another staging ground for their now de rigeur nihilism (mixed with a new ingredient of Jewish self-loathing), Malick completely drops all of Job's story and instead takes both the text's central questions and its ultimately unsatisfying answer.

Those questions revolve around the problem of suffering and why God allows it to happen. Job-- a righteous man-- is afflicted by God with a series of torments (the death of his children, the ruination of his business, boils etc.) as part of a bet God has going with Satan. (Keep in mind that in the Jewish tradition, Satan is a temptor angel rather than the Devil). Rather than losing faith in God, Job begins to question him.  Job knows that he is a righteous man and thus knows that his torment is unjustified. Why, he asks, do bad things happen to good people? Does divine justice exist? And if it does, does it make sense?

Job is visted by several friends who declare that divine justice does exist and therefore Job must've done something wrong, even if he doesn't know or believe he has. After a period of time with Job and the chorus arguing back and forth (some theorists advocate the idea that Job is a lost Greek Tragedy, but that's a post for another day) God finally appears in a whirlwind.  His answer, which supplies The Tree of Life's opening quote is "Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundation?" Like a good Jew, God answers Job's question with another question and then proceeds to list all the ways that He, God, is really awesome and totally not grokkable by human kind and not to be fucked with.  Job apologizes. God restores Job and then goes to Job's friends and tells them that Job was right, that he did nothing wrong, and Divine Justice is sometimes a bit capricious.

I am an atheist. And I love the Book of Job.  I love that the Bible contains something this contradictory to so much of its message.  I love how weird the Book of Job is, and I love that its answer is essentially unsatisfying, its central question and answer are ones that any belief system that believes in an all-powerful deity must reckon with. 

The Jewish and Christian faiths differ on their approach to Job (painting with broad strokes here).  Believe in the Jewish faith and tradition in no way necessitates believing in a solely benevolent deity. While God is great, and blessed, and to be thanked for choosing the Jews, for delivering us from bondage, for creating light and wine and all sorts of other things, God isn't necessarily benevolent. Understanding God as benevolent would, after all, be admitting that one knew God's true nature and on some level, as the Book of Job teaches us, God is unknowable. He is to be feared as well as loved, not understood. Thanking God for delivering us from bondage necessitates looking away from the fact that God allowed the bondage to happen in the first place and there are plenty of prayers that offer a bit of fear mixed in.

Actually, at times (particualrly in Exodus) the God of the Hebrew Bible is not unlike Brad Pitt's character in The Tree of Life: stern, controlling, inscruitable, perhaps capricious, at times abusive, needing His children to constantly declare their allegiance and love to him and yet capable of enormous gestures of affeciton, generosity and love. And let's not forget that Pitt's character, like God, has a plan for his children, one they are at times incapable of understanding no matter how hard he tries to explain it.

This is why the rage the film (and Jack, its protagonist) feels towards the father slips very quickly out of its mortal coil and touches God himself.  In constant whispered voiceover, God is interrogated. Why is Jack's brother allowed to die? Why is an abusive father allowed in God's universe? Why isn't Jack's dad killed somehow?  Does God love humans at all? 

The Jewish question of Job: Does divine justice really exist? (or exist in a way that is comprehendable by humans?) switches instead to a Christian one: is the suffering of the world compatible with the idea of a benevolent God? 

The problem with the Christianizing of Job--the inflection of this question with the idea of goodness on God's part (as opposed to power)--is that it makes it impossible to answer the question "yes" persuasively.  It appears in order to answer it yes, you have to cheat or change the ground rules. (Keep in mind, this is simply from an atheist's perspective, I'm not trying to argue anyone out of their faith and I have deep respect for people of faith, but I do think that one should be honest about their worldview on this stuff). 

And this is exactly what the film does.  It cheats all over the place before changing the gounrd rules of the conversation. 

It cheats both acutely and pervasively.  As in Job, God responds to all of this questioning in The Tree of Life by taking us back to the very origins of the Universe, showing us creation up until the extinction of the dinosaurs and its here, in the film's most widely derided scene, that we're treated to a Velociraptor that decides for no reason other than its own sense of conscience to spare some napping prey.  The portrait this moments paints of the universe and life is remarkably unpersuasive (a friend of mine called it "a load of hippie bullshit") and its almost immediately contradicted by an asteroid coming and wiping everything out anyway. It's the one moment of consummate failure on the part of the film.  Aesthetically, intellectually, compositionally, the moment doesn't work. The dinosaurs look worse than what you'll find in a garden variety console video game, and it's hard not to laugh at the idea of a raptor deciding in a moment of Grace that it doesn't need dinner after all.

On the pervasive end, there is, well, the way the film is shot.  The Tree of Life is ostentaciously beautiful. Image after image arises in the film that will make you weep. This isn't just beauty for beauty's sake, even if this is a Terrence Mallick film. The beauty is part of the film's philosophical investigation. Again and again, we see moments of suffering and pain, along with moments of joy and bliss, of violence and degredation, of wonderment and epiphany, of music and painting, of light and dark, or dresses and water and water and water. All of these moments are gorgeously shot, impeccably put together and again and again the film returns to the idea that the beauty and wonder of the world is argument enough of God's existence/greatness/benevolence/grace.

But here's the thing. The world we are seeing is constructed by its director/writer to constantly underscore its beauty.  The actual world around us doesn't have Mahler playing in the background. It isn't shot during magic hour. It isn't impeccably groomed by a legion of set dressers and costume assistants.  It is, instead, a giant, big, beautiful, terrifying, sloppy, fucked up, amazing mess. The Tree Of Life takes place within a rigged Universe. Like high school physics, it ignores wind resistance because taking it into account would queer all of the equations.  The beauty of the world of The Tree of Life is Malick's not God's, just as the plan of Signs is M. Night Shyamalan's rather than the almighty's. 

At the end, the film changes the ground rules of the benevolence/suffering question in exactly the way Christianity does: it invents Heaven. Just before the film's conclusion, Sean Penn-- playing an adult Jack who is so haunted by his childhood that he can barely funciton-- is granted a vision of the afterlife that gives him his first moment of peace.  It's a heaven on a beautiful beach, where Jack is reunited with his childhood visions of his parents (with Dad given an inner peace he was unable to attain in life) and siblings (all alive) and self wandering under a perfect, loving sun. Shortly afterwards, the film ends, returning to an image that is possibly curtains, possibly a womb, possibly God and possibly the beginning of the Universe. 

This is the benevolence and justice that Christianity promises.  God is, indeed, good, so long as you're willing to play the long game, so long as you're willing to accept that you won't get all the evidence for the defense until after your death.

It is to the film's credit that it takes its questions of suffering and the divine seriously, that it refuses to rest on simple bromides, that it is a real and pure and complex investigation of a belief system. It's an investigation that reveals to me the flaws and problems of that belief system, but I'm pretty sure that someone who devoutly ascribed to a Christian worldview would find their perspective reified by it.

 I suspect that there isn't a One True Reading of this film. There's something prismatic about it, impossible, reflective of the viewer.  Not because it's ultimately empty the way a "serious" Coen Brothers film is (or the way The Dark Knight is in its examination of its central political questions) but rather because it burrows so deeply and sincerely into its subject matter that what it ultimately brings back from its voyage is a chest full of contradicitons, because few questions worth asking  have only one answer, particularly the ones that fuel a work of art. 

He Really Is Just So Dreamy...

By Isaac Butler

Sigh...:

 

 

Were I A Republican...

By Isaac Butler

I'd be pretty furious about the fact that Mitt Romney actually lost Iowa and may very well be about to lose South Carolina, but the elites in my party and the media refuse to treat him as anything other than the presumptive nominee.

I'd also be pretty furious at how transparent the newsmedia is in their loathing of Mitt Romney, given the purported values of impartiality they are supposed to adhere to.

I know that as a Democrat, I'll end up benefitting from both of these things, but neither of them are good for Democracy.  Romney is going to get the treatment that Gore did leading up to the 2000 election (remember Earth Tones?) and it is, simply put, unfair and image rather than substance based and all sorts of other things that shouldn't be part of how we choose our President.

Today is Martin Luther King Junior Day

By Isaac Butler

Longtime Parabasis readers probably know that my two favorite holidays are Thanksgiving and Martin Luther King Junior Day, the first because it enshrines gratitude as an important civic value and the second because we take a day to honor a man who stood for remaking our country in the image of our better angels rather than our lesser demons. 

As you (hopefully) have the day off from work, why not take a few minutes and read King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail," one of greatest pieces of rhetoric in the English language, right up there with Mark Anthony's funeral oration in Julius Caesar:

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

Or you could listen to King's "Mountaintop" speech, the final speech he gave before his death (here's the third part of it, where he talks about "a dangerous unselfishness"):

 

 

You're Invited

by 99 Seats

As I've written about here and, well, everywhere, one of the problems that our field faces is that we're deeply segregated. The work done by artists of color and the communities that support them are largely invisible to the white theatre community. The most common response I get when I bring this up is that you didn't know about the work, you weren't invited, you didn't think it would have anything to do with you.

Well. You're invited. Tomorrow night, the 2012 edition of The Fire This Time Festival kicks off. You're invited. There's a panel on casting (which, in the wake of the Motherfucker with the Hat dust-up should be interesting), a ten-minute play festival, and readings of six new plays by accomplished, talented, intriguing writers you probably haven't heard of. But you should.

Theatre can't exist by cutting off its nose to spite its face. We need each other, need to connect our audiences and our work. Making other artists, administrators, audiences, theatre makers and lovers the "other," it isn't going to make theatre stronger. We add by adding, not dividing. So consider yourself added.

Homes

by 99 Seats

I do love that.

Over at the HowlRound blog, the constantly amazing Todd London writes about building a home for artists. It's a really, really lovely piece, so check it out, if you haven't. He has a great list of things to have around to make artists feel at home, but really, the last one rings super-true:

16. To make an artistic home for others, you have to make a place of love for the art in others.

(Not that I don't love snacks.)

We talk a lot about the field, about the work, about quality, and sometimes about the lack of "great" plays. We talk about the Edifice Complex, rant about money spent on administrators not artists, about enhancement money, about money, money, money and how it gets spent. But we don't talk a lot about how one builds a home for artists. Or why. It's easy to say why in abstract, but in specific, what do you get?

So let me tell you a story about what happens when a theatre makes real room for artists, real room for the love of the art in others.

I haven't talked a lot about Rob Askins' play Hand to God because, well, it felt weird. Rob is a friend and the theatre that produced it is my own artistic home; I'm deeply involved. I knew going into it that it would hard to be objective about it so I wasn't going to try. But in the conversation about how building a home can build better plays, there's a lot to talk about.

Hand to God is Rob's second produced full-length play. And it's a pretty great play. But don't just take my word for it. At the end of February, it'll be returning for another engagement after a successful extension of a successful run and there's talk of more. It's pretty much an unqualified hit, loved by audiences, well-received by critics, everything a theatre could want. It's also just plain good, smart, funny and engaging. How do you get there? By making a home for artists.

Rob is an alum of Youngblood (as am I) and, as I mentioned above, they produced another play of his a couple of seasons ago: Princes of Waco. It was a good production, to be sure, but it certainly didn't receive what you could think was a rousing welcome. Some nice notices, talk of Rob's promise, but that was about it. (Rob, if you're reading this...sorry if I'm dredging up bad memories.)

In most cases like that, the theatre would simply move on. Thank Rob for a nice production and say, "See you when you have something else." Maybe do a reading of his next play or something, but mostly get back to looking for the next thing, the next writer and move on down the line. It's understandable: there's only so much money, only so much time, only so much energy to be given to any one artist. There are only so many production opportunities and theatres need to figure out how to optimize those. I'm not faulting anyone for operating this way. It makes sense, really. But what happens if you don't?

Rob became an artist member of E.S.T. (as am I) and started work on his next play. He worked with some of the same actors he'd worked with in the past (E.S.T. also produced a short play of his). He wrote work specifically for them, and worked with them on it over the course of more than a year. E.S.T. doesn't have a lot in the way of resources these days, still re-structuring after the double-whammies of the loss of its founding Artistic Director and the economic downturn, but they invested in Rob with what they had: time and space. Rob got time to work on his play, to work with his actors and director and deepen his play. The theatre didn't invest in the play, just in hopes of getting it ready, but they invested in Rob and made space for him to work.

And what did they get? A great play. The process of getting there matters. Really great plays take time, they take support, but what they really need is a home. The same goes for great artists. Homes are what we need. Todd does a good job of showing us how it's done. Swing by E.S.T. in a few weeks to see what it gets you.

Women and Public Office

By Isaac Butler

So.  The United States is ranked 91st in the world in terms of gender diversity in our national legislature.  Part of the reason for this is what we would call in the arts low levels of participation (fewer candidates are women to begin with).  Rather than jumping to some kind of obvious and hilariously insulting conclusion about this like, oh, I don't know, that women simply are naturally better suited to not having powerful elected positions and thus just don't have much interest in it, someone actually decided to do some research.  Here's what they found (courtesy of Kevin Drum):

1. Women are substantially more likely than men to perceive the electoral environment as highly competitive and biased against female candidates.
2. Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s candidacies aggravated women’s perceptions of gender bias in the electoral arena.
3. Women are much less likely than men to think they are qualified to run for office.
4. Female potential candidates are less competitive, less confident, and more risk averse than their male counterparts.
5. Women react more negatively than men to many aspects of modern campaigns.
6. Women are less likely than men to receive the suggestion to run for office — from anyone.
7. Women are still responsible for the majority of childcare and household tasks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

You can read the rest of the study here.

Containing And Expressing Wonder

By Isaac Butler

A week and a half ago, I posted a short piece about Lawrence Weschler and how he seems to have a well-cultivated state of wonder. Reading more of him has gotten me interested in how that wonder is expressed to the reader.

Let's take, for a moment, the first sentence-- just the first sentence!-- of one of Weschler's essays to see how it works.  Well, let's take the title first: Splendors of Decaying Celluloid: On Bill Morrison's Decasia. Alright. So already with the word "splendors" there's some signals being sent the reader, "Thar Be Wonderment Ahead." The title could've been "On Bill Morrison's Decasia." That's a pretty classic essay format title, given that Montaigne, the father of the modern essay, titled each one with "On." The "On X" title stretches from there through to modern writers like Joan Didion and Geoff Dyer. But no.  We start with Splendors.  

Anyway, on to the first sentence. And boy is it a doozy:

One day a few months back, a close-cropped, sweet-natured, looming hulk of a young man named Bill Morrison tentatively poked his head into my office and mentioned that a mutual friend had suggested that I just might find his predicament of passing interest.

Woah.  Take a moment and read it again. Woah. So I think it's fair to say that the prose here is expressing a certain level of excitement at the story he's about to tell you and the essay that results from it.  But how do we know this?  What is going on here that conveys the excitement on a construction level?

One of the ways this setence works is through being over-stuffed.  There's many much simpler ways to construct this first sentence. He could've begun in scene essentially and say "Bill Morrison stuck his head into my office; he needed my help."  He could've gone with "One day, a man I'd never met named Bill Morrison came into my office looking for help."  These are all much simpler, and don't convey the excitement. 

But the jam packed-ness doesn't end there.  For example, the first chunk of the sentence situates in time (sort of).  But he doesn't say One day or Last January or anyhting like that.  He says "One day a few months back," later on, Bill Morrison doesn't say he needs help he doesn't say "a mutual friend pointed him to me" or some such, he instead "mentioned that a mutual friend had suggested that I just might find his preicament of passing interest." This is part of what is meant when people use the term maximalism. The extra words help convey a sense of the splendor that is to come. Subtextually, the signal to the reader is "the thing I'm about to tell you, dear reader, is so fucking awesome that I'm going to need a whole ton of extra words to talk about it."

The sentence's overall construction has one independent clause and one dependent one, with that dependent one itself containing  a little subordinated moment ("that a mutual friend ahd suggested that"). The sentence is somewhat rangy and complex, in other words. Compare this to any Joan Didion sentence and you'll see what i'm talking about.  But academic papers also have complex sentences. Technical manuals also often do.  What makes this complexity a sign of excitement is the colloquial grammer and word choice ("a few months back," e.g.). 

And then there's the word choice.  Let's look at how he describes Bill Morrison again:

a close-cropped, sweet-natured, looming hulk of a young man named Bill Morrison

So again, we have some extra words ("of a young man named,") but that's not where the energy comes from in this moment. The energy comes from the adjectives.  All three of them include repurposed verbs.  He doesn't have short hair.  he's close-cropped. He's not nice, he's sweet-natured-. He's not tall, he's a looming hulk.  Weschler also knows his comedy rules, the first two adjectives set up a patter, the third one inverts it, which gives a little subconscious, likely unnoticed thrill to the reader. Later on in the same sentence he says "of passing interest" instead of "interesting," again using what a verb-ish adjective. Reading more Weschler, I've noticed this technique used all over the place. Whever he's truly stoked about something, the adjectives start including verb-ish constructions in them.  

There's also the specificity and activity image-painting of the verbs.  One tip you're taught as you learn to write is to punch up your drafts by circling all passive voice, to be verbs and adverbs and trying to take as many of them out as possible.  This is all to make your language more specific and active, obviously.  "Is" does nothing for the reader.  Weschler's clearly internalized this idea, as Bill Morrison didn't enter his office but rather "poked his head" and he didn't say something, he "mentioned" it.  

These are not the only strategies one could use, and they're part of what sets Weschler and his prose style apart form others.  Let's look now at a few sentences of Annie DIllard, from the first paragraph of "Total Eclipse":

It had been like dying, that sliding down the mountain pass. It had been like the death of someone, irrational, that sliding down the mountain pass and into the region of dread.  It was like slipping into a fever, or falling down that hole in sleep from which you wake yourself whimpering.  We had crossed the mountains that day, and now we were in a strange place—a hotel in Central Washington, in a town near Yakima.  The eclipse we had traveled here to see would occur early the next morning.

Dillard's essential point of view in the world is far darker and ecstatic than Weschler's-- her states of wonder are closer to the knife edge of madness-- and you can see that in these sentences.  It's all about discombobulation. The first sentence is inverted. You don't find out what it's about until the very end and the comma pauses you for a microsecond in a moment of mystery.  Furthermore, the essay is called "Total Eclipse" leading you to believe this moment that is like death or like a dream is the eclipse.  But no.  The end of the paragraph reveals that we are actual temporally situated twenty four hours earlier.  

This might lead you (As it lead me) to wonder what the hell just happened? You will keep wondering it.  At no point do we find out why they slid down a mountain pass, or why it was like death or what the fuck, really, most of that first paragraph is talking about. You are disoriented, it's a little moment of madness. Given that the central event of the essay is a total solar eclipse that drives Dillard insane for about ten minutes, this is an apropriate way to convey the kind of ecstatic wonder that she specializes in.

And then with her, we have a totally different word choice strategy.  Dillard's verbs and very, very, simple. Like Didion, she uses a lot of "to be" verbs and when she strays from "to be" she often strays onto other fairly familiar and normal verbs.  She then-- again like Didion-- uses repetition as a kind of lattice work within her paragraphs.  Here the first three sentences all begin with It + To Be + Simile.  The first two are identical (It had been like) the third slightly changes it up, taking out a word and thus accelerating the motion of the paragraph.

The effect of this repetition and stripped-down word choice is to throw a spotlight on the images.  The first tw0 setences all of similes (dying, the death of someone [else]) the third has two similes, the first short, the second long and much more detailed. This double-simile is another Dillard speciality. Here the perspective of the world is one in which it is so awesome that it must be explained through simile, so over-powering that-- much like the sun itself-- it cannot be looked at directly.

One last contrast... let's go to the maximalist mack-daddy for a moment and check out David Foster Wallace.  I am writing this while being away from home, so the reason why I'm using these examples, is that that's why I have on me.  Like Weschler, Wallace uses colloquialisms to convey his sense of excitment-- including the classic Wallace construction "And but so anyway"-- and the footnotes and ranginess and willing to digress for which he is justly famous conveys the sense of a brain firing in so many directions at once it threates to burst out of the page and punch you in the face with its contemplation. 

But another strategy he uses is hyper-detailing (Nicholson Baker is even more famous for this, but I have none of baker's work on me):

Here, Wallace describes in a fake-memoir part of The Pale King of leaving home and going to a bus station to begin his new life as an IRS man.  This is all one sentence:

I most definitely was not offered any kind of family ride to Peoria, though I may have gotten a quick lift to the bus station, which in Philo comprised one corner of the local IGA parking lo, which was not all that far but would have been ghastly to walk to wearing my three-piece courderoy suit in the gluey humidity of pre-dawn (which, in the lower Midwest, is also one of the two prime times of day for mosquito activity, the otehr being dusk, and mosquitoes there are not just a nuisance but serious business indeed) while carrying two heavy suitcases (this was a couple of years before the sudden advance of someone in the luggage industry realizing that suitcases could be fitted with little wheels and telescoping handles so they could be pulled, which was just the sort of abrupt ingenious advance that makes entrepreneurial capitalism such an exciting system-- it gives people incentive to make things more efficient).

Okay. That one's a doozy, much of which I won't unpack right now in terms of structure etc. because I recognize I'm probably already trying your patience. (Your welcome, BTW, for sparing you the diagramming of that above Dillard paragraph that I did).

So we see some Weschler-type stuff going on there, pumped up on steroids. The number of different clauses is pretty spectacular. What starts out as a sentence about getting a ride to a bus station ranges very far indeed, into the humidity and mosquitoes of the midwest (100% true btw) and advances in suitcases.  It's the latter one of these that I want to zero in on.

I've often described the pleasure of Wallace's writing as being in part due to the sense that he is struggling to get things 100% right.  There's a kind of "but wait! there's more!" energy to his writing.  The above demonstrates how he does it on a sentence level.  Wallace didn't need to tell us the suitcases didn't have rollers. We know this because he's carring them.  But not only does he tell us they don't have rollers, he tells us rollers hadn't been invented yet.  But he's also not content that we know the kind of suitcases he's talking about, so he has to then describe them (telescoping handles etc.) And he then connects this simple thing (suitcases) to one of the themes of his book: the conflicted nature of capitalism which is, on the one hand, a wonderful engine of change and innovation and on the other a terrible machine dehumanizing us and destroying the social contract we all enter into.

Wallace's ranginess gives some sense of the excitement, but the hyper-detailing is part of it too.  Sometimes, he goes too far, obviously, but the idea that someone needs you to understand this moment in such specificity that every tiny detail counts helps give the overall moment a sense of urgency and gravity.

Weschler doesn't hyper-detail. There's plenty of detail. But very seldom will he stop time to give you lots and lots of extended description.  There's a sense that his energy is forward motion. He wants to keep moving and moving and moving. The Decasia piece was also written for a mainstream magazine while The Pale King is a novel, so audience and form is part of this as well, although Wallace often does the same things within his essays, which might be why several of the essays published in Consider The Lobster originally appeared at a fraction of the real length.

An Idea Worth Talking About

by 99 Seats

I was browsing through the internet and hit upon some stats on gay marriage. Iowa legalized same-sex marriage in 2009. One year later, 815 Iowa couples married there, out of 17,884 heterosexual marriages, rougly 4% (there were a number of out-of-state marriages). In other states, the stats aren't as rich, but they paint a similar picture. The rate of gay marriage lags the rate of straight marriage by a pretty wide margin.

After decades of fighting for equal marriage rights, a small burst after local legalization is rarely sustained and soon drops to very low levels. I think, given that, it's safe to assume that marriage is primarily of interest to heterosexual couples. Gay people seem not to be interested in committed, faithful, monogamous relationships. And given that, you have to ask: should we continue to support those efforts? Years of investment hasn't provided a significant impact, so we have to question it. It may be difficult to admit, but given the long history of marriage among heterosexual people and the lack of a corresponding tradition in the homosexual community, I don't think we can avoid asking the hard question: do gay people want monogamy?

*******

Now, obviously I DO NOT AGREE with any of the above statements. Not in the slightest. But this is the argument that Tom Loughlin is making. There are various folks popping up in the comments and other places saying that it's wrong to call his post racist or bigoted, that by calling it that we're stifling debate and conversation and that, while he's using faulty stats, the underlying questions are legitimate. Art Hennessey at The Mirror Up To Nature has posted a bunch of stats from the 2008 NEA Arts Participation Survey. The usual types, offering support for Tom, have chimed in, implying that these stats support Tom's post. They also say that by pointing out issues with Tom's use of stats and reasoning, Isaac and I (though he's only posted one brief post about this) are stifling debate and leading a witch hunt. I have some things to say about all of that.

First, it's really important to note there are two different aligned conversations here. No one is disputing that that there are low levels of participation in "mainstream" theatre by people of color, both as audience and as artists. They are often lower than population representation. Tom uses a very incomplete set of stats, Art offers a larger set, but none of this is news. For some, like myself, it's a matter of concern. For others, not so much. If it's not a matter of concern for you, more power to you. I don't care about your reasons why or why not. If you want to tell me that it's not a matter of concern for you and give me some reasons, I'll happily engage you. But I don't have to "disprove" your point, when you're talking about how someone enjoys something or whether a group of people "likes" something or not. We can talk about behavior and context, but not about intention. How do you disprove that an entire group of people likes an entire art form? How do you prove that?

Secondly, though, what I and other find offensive about Tom's post is that he doesn't just say that he doesn't care, he says that, based on the incomplete stats, it's easy to assume that black people aren't interested in theatre. In his post, he implies, pretty heavily, that he already thought this, but felt guilty and uncomfortable about saying it. If Tom already thought that black people just don't like theatre and then found stats that appear to confirm that, that's a real problem. My problem with that is separate from the discussion about participation rates.

Stats are simply numbers. Interpretation is what matters. In Tom's interpretation, the stats mean that black people don't like narrative theatre. That's the only reason he presents. On its face, it's making assumptions about an entire racial/ethnic group on the basis of a small sample. He's not pointing to a poll of black people saying they don't want to go to theatre. He's interpreting the activity of a group based on his belief about their intentions. It's a best bigoted. But especially since he's a white theatremaker and essentially encouraging other white theatremakers to abandon efforts to diversify their stages and audiences, it becomes racist. Do I think Tom is a racist? Honestly? I don't know him that well. We've tussled over similar issues before. That post espouses a racist position. That's how Tom chooses to intrepret the stats.

If you reject the premise I outline above, look at Tom's post again and think about your own prejudices and assumptions. If context matters, if the history of homophobia and oppression matters, if other larger societal factors come into play on gay marriage, why not on black participation in theatre? Why is it primarily due to a lack of interest? Why would a lack of interest even enter into it?

If you find one offensive, or poorly argued, or ignoring obvious facts and clear realities, and the other one reasonable, think about why. That's really all I ask.

The Pale King Readthru: 66-129

By Isaac Butler

Whew! Big chunk to talk about today, in a less summary fashion below:

 

QOTD

By Isaac Butler

From The Pale King:

I had an idea I'd try and write a play... It would be a totally real, true-to-life play. It would be unperformable, that was part of the point. This is to give you an idea. The idea's that a wiggler, a rote examiner, is sitting poring over 1040s and attachments and corssfiled W-2s and 1099s and like that. The setting is very bare and minimalist-- there's nothing o look at except this wiggler, who doesn't move except for every so often turning a page or making a note on his pad.... it's just a regular desk, so you can see him. But that's it. At first there was a clock behind him, but I cut the clock.  He sits there longer and longer until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they just start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start. This was the idea-- I told me stepmom all about it, it was going to be a realistic play.  Except I never could decide on the action, if there was any, if it's a realistic play. That's what I tell them. It's the only way to explain it. 

Okay, then. Let's Really Talk About It

by 99 Seats

All right. L'Affaire Loughlin, as Isaac has so aptly dubbed it, continues apace, with the comment thread approaching 60 comments. Some are thoughtful, some are angry, some are prideful, some are downright obnoxious. Needless to say, there does seem to be fair amount to discuss here. My own anger and frustration has largely subsided and I'm seeing things a bit cooler. I feel like, okay, if we want to engage in an actual discussion here, about actual things, let's do so. Can we? I hope we can.

The essential heart of this conversation is this, The Broadway League's report on Attendance Statistics. We're all working from the same thing: the excerpts from the Executive Summary posted on the Broadway League's site (the full report is available for $25, but so far, no one appears to have purchased it and read it, including myself). The excerpts published list this statistic:

Eighty-three percent of all tickets were purchased by Caucasian theatregoers.

That's all we're ALL going on. There's little to no context to that, no indications of which shows were attended by whom (a season that included two plays by a writer of color, but several shows - The Motherfucker With The Hat, A Free Man of Color, The Scottsboro Boys and Sister Act - with people of color in significant, leading roles). All we know is that 83% of the Broadway tickets were purchased by Caucasian buyers.

Well, we do know a couple of other things, though. 62% were purchased by tourists, NOT NYC natives (though with no information about where they were from), 65% were female, 78% held at least a college degree. These give us a better picture of the Broadway audience. If we're going to say that theatre is meant for the main Broadway audience, that leaves men and the non-college-educated out of it, too. But, because Tom sets aside any of that context, let's set it aside as well. And let's focus on the single assumption that Tom draws from the one statistic:

Given all the demographics we know about theatre in the US and westernized countries today, I think it’s safe to make the following conclusion: Theatre is primarily for white people, as both audience members and practitioners.

He then provides a little more context and offers a definition for "theatre:"

But then the question came to me – is it so bad to admit that theatre is for white people? White western culture has, for better or worse, risen to a dominant position in this multicultural, heterogeneous society that has evolved in this country, and because of that fact alone it is subject to criticism and the push of upward mobility from cultural forces below (at times rightfully so). But perhaps it’s just worth the few seconds it takes to stop and  consider the idea that white people, like any other culture or race, deserve to have a culture and forms of art that they enjoy and that is reflective of their values and history. Theatre, as it has evolved from the Greeks, seems to be one of those cultural art forms that people of white European descent have enjoyed for a long time (and the majority of them enjoyed it until the advent of mass media). And that, in and of itself, is OK. Isn’t it?

This is not to say that other races or ethnic groups do not have theatre or do not enjoy it. But the particular form of the scripted written work as interpreted by actors in a linear story-telling fashion seems to be one that has interested western Caucasians for a long time, and apparently continues to do so for a certain demographic slice of white people as a whole.

Emphasis added. And, once he's given this context to this assumption, he asks these questions:

The thing about having a passion for something like theatre is that you really, really want to share that passion. It is difficult to accept that statistically many people out there simply don’t share your passion for or interest in theatre. They have other things they enjoy doing more. When we talk about audience development, isn’t that what we are trying to do? Get people who are fundamentally uninterested in our passion to share it with us? Statistically that doesn’t seem to be working so well, particularly among the young. Perhaps the time has come to say that theatre is what it is – an art form for older, well-off, educated white people. Nobody else is truly interested in it at the moment, because the numbers do not indicate any support for the art form beyond this small slice of the American demographic profile.

(Again, emphasis added)

So. It largely boils down to, "Since theatre is only enjoyed by older, educated white people, why do we bother trying to get other people interested?" Which is a question we can discuss, in some ways. But we can't discuss it without dealing with some contexts, history, and clarifying some terms.

What most of the reaction has been focused around is the statement that "Theatre is primarily for white people." Even if you want to say that "scripted, written work interpreted by actors in a linear story" is a defnition of "theatre" or even accurately represents what appears on Broadway, the only theatre truly under discussion here, can anyone really make the argument that this holds true? Even if you want to say that Noh theatre or Bunraku puppetry aren't what Tom is talking about, how, besides origin, do they not fit?

In the comments, it's brought a couple of times why we can't call theatre a "white" art form, when rap and hip-hop are "black" art forms. I think that's an imprecise comparison at best, given the history of both most Broadway entertainments and most rap. Actually, I'd say given anything in this country. The main entertainment on Broadway is the musical and that owes quite a lot to both white and black artists and audiences over its history, not to mention Jewish artists and Latino artists and Asian artists. The same can be said for rap. I, for one, have never and do not think of rap or hip-hop as a "black" art form, only created and enjoyed by black people. Its history owes too much to artists of all colors and anyone who knows a single thing about hip-hop would agree. It's equally reductive and incorrect to say the same thing about Broadway.

You can argue that "dialogue" theatre comes out of a European tradition and that's not far off. But, like many things that came from a European tradition, when it hit our shores and our patchwork country, it was filtered through a thousand lenses and experiences and came out different. I simply don't see how, in good conscience, you can say that, as an art form, theatre is only for white people. History and reality would completely refute that. That is why I get angry about this. Because if you take a second and actually think, and not just act on your own biases and prejudices, this would be apparent. It should have been apparent to Tom.

You can have any opinion you want, obviously. If you're of the opinion that theatre is for white people, go right ahead and have that opinion. I won't stop you. No one can. You can write all you want, think it, say it to your friends. It's your opinion. If you want to have that opinion and say that's born out by facts in evidence, and it's not, you can't expect people not to note that. And if you want to have that opinion and not have people say that it's racist, well, that's another matter. It is. It's not stifling conversation to call a spade a spade.

Anyway. To the actual question at hand, which is, why is Broadway so white? Tom does throw a bit of a sucker punch in the mix, in his attempt to prove that the lack of attendance for Broadway has a racial origin, and talks about the "lack" of black theatres, based on two lists he could find. So why is Broadway so white and why are there so few African-American theatres. (I will stop for one second to note that, apparently, other minorities don't rate or count here; theatre is FOR white people, therefore it's NOT for black people, but other minorities...who knows? Tom doesn't seem to care.)

Again, context matters. And the work matters. As I noted above, the 2010-2011 Broadway season, the season under discussion, featured two writers of color, neither of them African-American. It featured two high profile productions of plays that centered around African-Americans, both created by white artists and both carrying some controversy (A Free Man of Color and The Scottsboro Boys) and one play with a prominent role played by a well-known African-American actor (The Motherfucker With The Hat). If I were an African-American ticket buyer (let's just imagine that I am), and I wanted to see something that reflected my life, would I look to Broadway?

Also, let's deal a bit with expectations. In 2010, white Americans represented 63% of the population. African-Americans represented 12%. Should our expectation for what is largely considered a "national" theatre be that far off from the expectations of the populace? We can't really use the NYC stats, because the majority of the Broadway audience is not from NY. What should the goal be? Absolute parity? To be honest, I'm not sure what the answer is there. I'm in the camp that wants greater participation of minorities in the arts, but I'm also trying to be realistic about the ultimate results. What results would convince Tom that minorities are interested in theatre? What did he expect?

In this kind of discussion, it's very easy to rely on anecdote and "observation." "I was here and I saw this." "I run a theatre and I saw this." Without context, without knowing the work and the communities, we start talking past each other pretty quickly. The old saw is true: anecdote is not the same as data. But data also means nothing without context.

As to the "lack" of African-American theatres, there are a number of factors leading to that reality. Oregon Shakespeare's Claudia Alick raises many of them in her comment here. A smaller, poorer donor base, competition from larger institutions that have poached talent, in addition to having longer histories, begun, largely in an age where, in many parts of the country, creating an African-American company would have been difficult, to say the least, programming that's considered "niche" and only of interest to your minority group are just a few. And yes, historic discrimination, under-education and a lack of exposure to the arts also all factor in, when you look beyond simply who goes to theatre and who doesn't. Theatre attendance doesn't happen in a vacuum.

The ultimate question is why. The answer is, for me, and for a lot of people, obvious: because it's important. Because we do love theatre and want it to reach as many people as possible. Because, ultimately, we believe passionately in the power of theatre to change the world for the better, if only more people were exposed to it. Because we do a disservice to our country, to the whole of the human race, by folding our arms and saying, "Well, those people over there, they're just not going to get it and they never will." What's the purpose in that? What's the endgame?

I'll be very, very curious to revisit this conversation next year, when prominent productions by three African-American women have been produced on Broadway (plays that very much fit the definition of "dialogue" theater). If the demographics are the same, well, maybe we do have something to discuss. If they've changed...will Tom change his tune? We shall see...

My Quick Thoughts On L'Affaire Loughlin

By Isaac Butler

I pretty much fully agree with and support the two posts 99 has written on this one. I haven't written about it more extensively because... well... even a cursory read of Tom's post on this issue reveals that the whole foundation is shoddy. Yes, the conclusions he comes to are offensive, but even before we get there, we have the spectacle of someone taking some numbers about Broadway and breathlessly rushing to apply those numbers to the entire landscape of the American theater.  But that doesn't work. Statistics about Broadway don't scale. Broadway is a totally different beast.  Hell, I'd argue statistics about one city don't even scale to another.  Washington, D.C. has a large black middle class. Portland Oregon doesn't. Their theater scenes are going to approach the racial diversity question differently because (Amongst other things) they're responding to different market forces. 

 

More Sh*t White Theatremakers Say

by 99 Seats

In the comments to the post below, Scott Walters weighs in:

When I read Tom's essay, I knew it would be controversial, and allow a lot of people to thump their breasts in outrage. But it amazes me how easy it is for people to thump, and how hard it seems for them to do anything that might change the status quo for the better. Tom and I have been putting statistics out there year after year showing the problem, and everybody nods and then goes back to figuring out how to use Twitter better. Any suggestions that might lead to change is greeted with "concern" or dismissal, because change might "hurt" some people or institutions that people aspire to, or worse might impact our own career. But those statistics that Tom puts out there aren't made up. So we have two options: accept them as permanent reality, or do something that leads to change. And my experience is, for all the chest thumping, people lack the courage and desire to change anything.

There is a documentary called "The Essential Blue Eyed," which revisits the teacher who did the experiment with her elementary school students where blue eyes were embued with all the negative stereotypes usually applied to African-Americans. At one point in the documentary, she is addressing a gathering of teachers, and she says, "Stand up if you would like to change your white skin color for black." She waits -- nobody rises. She then says, "That means that you know what's happening, you know it's wrong. So why aren't you doing something?"

So yeah, the quotation asks you to do something. Something more than sighing and expressing your oh-so-enlightened sensibilities. So let's see it. Let's see a suggestion for change that actually is radical enough to address this imbalance. Let's see YOU suggest something, instead of simply picking the holes in the ideas of others.

There is an essay about race and privilege that defines "prejudice" as something that happens at the level of the individual, and "racism" as something that happens at the level of the system. It is possible to benefit from racism even if you aren't prejudiced. That's where we're at now: we have a theatrical system that is racist, elitist, and urbanist. The author says there are three categories: "active racism," "passive racism," and "active anti-racism." Active racism is exemplified by the KKK and others who actively do racist acts. Active anti-racism are people who seek to intervene and actively counter-act racism. And Passive racism are people who don't do anything racist, but they just go along. The analogy is to the moving sidewalks in airports: racists walk fast forward, anti-racists walk fast backwards, and passive racists stand still but are moved along by the escalator. The latter is what most theatre people are -- passive racists/elitists/urbanists. And until they get off the schneid, then Tom's analysis is spot-on.

So, Scott, you know I have a fair amount of respect for you and your work. But I'm calling bullshit on this. Absolute, obnoxious, pointless, self-aggrandizing bullshit.

What have I been doing? This. This. This. For the last two years, it's been my pleasure and honor to help build a theatre collective that is actively connecting black artists with a black audience that is dying for theatre. I have watched our audience and impact grow. I've seen, actually seen, with my own eyes, the impact we have had. That's what I've been doing. It's one of the reasons my posting here has been light. I haven't been talking about the changes I want to see. I've been making them. So before you get up on your high horse, open your eyes and see things beyond your narrow, narrow sphere. People are working, working rather hard to make our theatre stronger.

They exist. In droves. I've seen them. I've met them. They've asked me for more work, more plays, more great theatre. No, they're not going to Broadway, because Broadway is showing them nothing about their lives. That's what theatre is for, right? To hold a mirror up to nature. If it's not doing that, why not go?

What  Tom did does not. It does nothing to make theatre in this country stronger, to move the ball forward. And it is not controversial, brave or insightful to say that theatre is the province of white people only. It's racist. Period. And if you can't see that, you, my dear friend, are one of those people on the escalator, blindly going through life without actually looking around.

If Tom had said, well, poor people don't really go to Broadway, therefore theatre's not for them and we should stop trying to create theatre for them, you'd be up on your high horse. But no, he just confirmed for you something you think is possible: that black people just don't get theatre. It's their fault. Not yours. So forget them. Leave them to their physical sports and their hip-hop, while we live the life of the true mind. Oh, we don't mean to say that they're not smart enough to understand and appreciate Shakespeare...but they're not.

The people I know, black, white, Latino, Korean, Chinese, Filipino, Jewish, mixed race, they're all working their asses off, trying to make better theatre, make stronger, smarter theatre. You know who's in the way? People who think like you and Tom. People who think that theatre is really only reserved for a certain chosen few, whether they're chosen by wealth, location, education or race. It's all the same prejudice. It's rank and that's what's killing our theatre.

The other reason I haven't been posting a lot is because I just plain got tired of having this fight. Tired of trying to explain that diversity is important to people who clearly don't actually give a crap about racism or equity or diversity. Tired of people like you and Tom and others, who stick your fingers in your ears and ignore any evidence that shakes your worldview. When people try to confront you about it, you accuse them of being careerist or urbanist or elitist and reject it. You're no better than climate change skeptics. The world is falling apart around you, but you don't want to actually do anything about it. Or rather, you just want to help people who look like you. Everyone else can burn.

If Tom had actually raised a question or started a conversation about modes of theatre, about cultural changes, or even about the effectiveness of marketing to people of color, then we could have a conversation. He didn't. And so we don't get to have a conversation. We're just yelling at each other. I didn't want to get angry about this, but, congrats, Scott, you made me angry. Hope you're happy. And before you even say that you weren't talking about me, you came here to say it. You posted it here. Not on Twitter. Not on your own blog. Maybe you're talking about someone else. But you were talking to me. Okay? So this is what you get back.

Sh*t White Theatremakers Say

by 99 Seats

So. This hit my inbox this morning, both from a friend and in the always useful You've Cott Mail.

Oh, boy.

Well, as you can imagine, I have some things to say. I left a comment, as did a lot of other people. Lots of good thoughts there. Most of them focus on Tom's use of Broadway Stats. Obviously using an extremely small sample like Broadway to extrapolate not just to theatre in general, but to an entire race is very very very very very very very problematic. That alone basically undercuts his entire premise. But there are larger problems.

You know...ordinarily, I would have launched into this with my usual flame-y self and hurled the four-letter words with abandon. But, honestly, I'm pretty tired of that. This thing just makes me sad and kind of depressed. It makes me depressed that Tom wrote it. It makes me depressed that someone will read it and think, "Yeah, maybe we should ask that question." Or read this and think I'm saying we shouldn't question why so few people of color attend Broadway shows or what effect our marketing is having. I'm not. But then again, Tom isn't asking a question, he's making a statement.

He couches it as something that makes him feel queasy and uncomfortable, but it's got "a certain reality." Basically we all know it's true, but we don't want to say it. That's the part that makes me really sad. It's sad to think that white theatremakers think this is their bones. It's depressing and makes me wonder why I'm doing the work I do, bringing a community that loves theatre and wants to see more of it to theatres that are looking to build their audiences. It seems like a waste of time.

I know it's not. But that's what it feels like.

For the record, of course, black audiences and black theatres have had as long, as varied, as influential and important an impact as black artists. Let's just talk about the history of minstrelry, the Chitlin Circuit, the work of the Black Arts movement and the Negro Ensemble Company, just to name a few. Yes, the number of theatres is dwindling, but that's true all over. When a Shakespeare theatre closes, no one says, "Well, Shakespeare is just history." Even from the B'way stats that Tom notes, the majority of ticket buyers are women. Why not assume that men are just not interested in theatre and therefore no effort should be made to reach out to them? Tom doesn't make that leap. Of course not.

In the face of the facts of history, Tom simply asserts that our theatre is the result only of the influence of Europeans on our culture, ignoring the hodgepodge, one out of many nature of our country. All of that is wiped away. You can't make that argument without purposefully overlooking huge swaths of our history. It's almost like he started from his conclusion and didn't really even bother to make any arguments about it. It's simply evident that a low number of people of color in attendance can only mean a lack of interest. The plays produced mean nothing, the expense means nothing, nothing means anything except Tom's gut knowledge that black people are uninterested in theatre. So why even engage? I honestly don't know.

Tom, if you do want to engage and try to dig deeper, please do. I think you'll learn a lot.

In a similar vein, this has been making the rounds. As far as I'm concerned, it hits the nail on the head. It's sparked a lot of discussion and back-and-forth, which has been lovely, illuminating and complicated, good and bad. In the good column, there's this. When I think about all of this stuff, this part makes me feel better, because enlightenment is possible. I love this:

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I think that white people (or some white people) don’t want to have to feel responsible or something. It has to do with guilt and with people thinking it is somehow easier to make yourself a victim than to take ownership over the huge problem of institutionalized racism in this country. People refuse to recognize their own privilege and deal with it. It makes me so angry and so sad. Because really the best way to deal with that kind of guilt is to fight against its cause and to work for social justice and social change.

That makes me feel pretty okay. Let's start there.

The Pale King Readthru: Sections 6-8

The next few bits of TPK unpacked for your reading pleasure:

Assumptions of Bad Faith

By Isaac Butler

This Michael Feingold review of Close Up Space has been making the rounds as he uses the show as an opportunity to pontificate on what's bothering him about The Kids These Days With Their Whimsy And Their Ipods And Such:

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.

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. 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. (emphasis mine)

Feingold, of course, has long been a Ruhl skeptic. He panned The Clean House and Euridice and gave a lukewarm review to Ruhl's In The Next Room (Or The Vibrator Play), her most conventional work, so it makes some sense that the playwrights greenlit in her footsteps are ones he would also be skeptical of / hostile to. I in no way begrudge him that. Cuteness and whimsy can be used well (as a way of getting deeper into a subject in a disarming way) or poorly (as a way of avoiding the actual subject matter at hand and conforting one's audience).  I personally felt that Euridice, or at least the Yale Rep production of it (I've been told something was lost along the way to Second Stage, even though it was the same production) did a good job of using whimsy to probe loss and grief, but I'm not a huge fan of her other work.

What I take issue with here is the statement I've bolded above, and that is the assumption that playwrights are somehow working inauthentically and in bad faith in order to get their work produced. This kind of lazy accusation gets bandied about a lot both by critics (on the record) and artists (off of it) when talking about work they dislike. I'd just like to ask that we all refrain from doing it.

There is no evidence that Molly Smith Metzler perverted the dramatic vision she was trying to realize to satisfy the whims of the market. None. And until there is, people shouldn't accuse her of writing a play in a particular way simply because she wants to get it produced.  If you must ding someone for their cynicism, ding the theater that programmed a bad play because it bore some stylistic resemblence to the kinds of plays that have been successful in past seasons. But even then realize that you're making an accusation sans evidence and maybe proceed a bit more cautiously.

If there's some reason why the play feels cynical and inauthentic, talk about that. But then the burden is on you to describe in specifics what your evidence is. Criticism is partly a form of argumentative writing, and as we all learned in high school, you're not supposed to make assertions you can't back up. 

Open Letter To Political Commentators

Dear Political Commentators,

You all know that Rick Santorum is the latest in a line of not-Romney's to experience a brief surge before the onset of public scrutiny causes him to crater. This has happened before to Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Ron Paul.  There is nothing happening right now to suggest that Rick Santorum is any different.

Because of this, might I suggest that you stop tieing his popularity to specific policy proposals or, really, anything specific about him?  This has nothing to do with him. This has to do with the Republican party not being happy about Mitt Romney, the "presumptive front-runner" who has yet to top 25% of Republican voters in any poll.  

When you talk about how his blue collar background appeals to voters, or how surely they're now taking a look at him becuase of his debate performances, or maybe it's about how Baby Jesus Hates Gays and Uteri, you just make yourself look stupid. Rick Santorum's appeal has nothing to do with Rick Santorum in the specific. He's just the latest extreme right winger to grab the attention of voters.

This is not to say you shouldn't take Santorum's positions seriously. As the guy who came in a bare second in Iowa, I say you should definitely examine them and publicize them and discuss them and unpack them. But don't claim they have anything to do with his appeal. They don't. 

A couple of weeks ago, you were talking about how voters were drawn to Gingrich's professorial demeaner and intellectual bearing. Now you're talking about how they like Santorum's working class plain spokenness.  You were talking about how voters are drawn to Ron Paul's anti-war stances, now you're talking about how voters are drawn to Rick Santorum's America First bellicosity. Either voters are fickle to the point of multiple personality disorder, or you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.  My vote is on the latter.