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Anyone know whathappened to the soundtrack to the Glass/Wilson collaboration Monsters of Grace? It featured some of my favorite Glass music in a long time and for some reason, the soundtrack has never been released. Anyone know what gives?
UPDATE: Never mind, it just came out on CD nearly a full decade after the piece had its premiere!
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Republican Presidential Candidates: refusing to take questions from non-whites. How can people claim with a straight face that the Republican Party (not necessarily its members, but the Party itself) isn't the party of racism and hate?
How often do you find yourself actually willing to question your beliefs and opinions? What conversations, environments, arguments etc. are successful in enabling this?
Someone in the comments asked what I thought about Black Watch, which I saw on opening night with my mom. It honestly left me feeling very conflicted. On the one hand is the extreme quality of its showmanship, the way the director so tightly choreographed every moment, and the way Black Watchblends and mashes together the essense of many different kinds of theatre (from realism to physical theatre and clowning to multimedia work) in a way I haven't seen since Simon McBurney last touched down on these shores. And there's the acting, which I'll get to later, which was (with one exception) superb.
But I didn't love it, for the basic reason that it left me completely unmoved despite its subject matter (and this is important because it clearly wants to leave me emotionally deeply affected). I was not alone in this, and I think three things are to blame. One of which has to do with a change in the production's context, one has to do with the production itself and one has to do with us the audience.
I'll start with the first. In The Open Door, Peter Brook constantly talks about context. It's one of the parts of the book I found the most compelling. Brook makes the case the on some level context really is everything. What is the context of a show? Who is the audience? Where? He tells a story of an Iranian folk theatre company whose "show" is transferred from a village to a Grand Theater House, losing everything vital about it along the way. The show was the same, the house for the show was wrong. I forget who it was who said the first thing you do when directing a play is cast your audience (perhaps it was Clurman, actually) but that speaks to the same point.
So with Black Watch the issue is that much of the main punch of the play has to do with the dissolving of the Black Watch itself. I imagine were I in Scotland (and were I more militaristic or nationalistic than I am) this would mean something to me, but I couldn't care less about the dissolving of a military regiment, no matter how long and storied its history. Not only that, but I got the sense from the production that the controversy surrounding the dissolving of the Black Watch was quite a big deal in Britain. I would guess, were I British, I'd already be versed in this controversy and it would mean something to me. Also, the play presents it with little information, assuming you're somewhat familiar with it. It wasn't until half an hour after the play was over when I though ah, I get it, the real tragedy of the play is that the regiment is broken up after all they've been through!
The second point has to do with the production itself. Simply put, Black Watch was one of the more overtly manipulative productions I have seen in a long time. As theatre confronts and works to incorporate the cinematic, one of my worries is that we'll take the more manipulative and audience-distrusting gestures of the medium, and Black Watch does this full force. This is in a large part due to its use of very present underscoring throughout the show, which existed as a kind of guide (or bludgeon, really) for the audience's emotional experience. Want to feel tense? Let this electronic beat with low subwoofered drone lead the way! Want to feel moved? Here come the strings. For me as an audience member, when I sense a director trying to hard to force me to feel a certain way, my rebelling kicks in. It's almost like I refuse to feel what they want me to out of spite. Such was the case with Black Watch.
The third reason is one I fear. Which is to say... maybe we've just heard so much tragic shit about Iraq that we're a little inurred to it. I don't know if that's true or not. I hope it isn't, because the cost of this war to our humanity is already bad enough without also diminishing our capacity to look it square in the eye and feel what it is doing to us.
Still, though, I'd definitely recommend it if you get the chance, if for no other reason than its staging and acting. Part of what is so great about the show is that you have these actors doing tightly choreographed, not particularly naturalistic staging, while demonstrating emotional truth and believable acting at the same time. Seeing both of these things unified is rare and worthwhile.
Jason Grote, to help you get to know his play 1001 a bit better, has created a whole world within the web, including easter eggs, blogs from the main characters of his play and more. Check it out here.
Breach is a good rental, a compact, tense little thriller starring a truly ferocious Chris Cooper and a surprisingly tolerable Ryan Phillipe. Oh, and it has some minor performances by Gary Cole, Bruce Davidson and Dennis Haysbert, who are always fun to have around. Laura Linney plays Tense/Serious Laura Linney (as opposed to the other character she occasionally plays, Frazzled/Endearing Laura Linney). Anyway, rent it. It's a good movie to sit at home and eat popcorn to.
What do we mean when we say a play (by which I mean a production that we've seen, not a script we've read or heard) is good?
An "undercover investigator" shuts down a play-- likely because he didn't receive free tickets to it. Yep. It's that weird. Check it out. This is via the now-returned Leonard Jacobs. Welcome back.
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