Parabasis

For Those Of You Who Like Sarah Kane

I would just say that if you do like her work. There's a virtual treasure trove of material to be found on You Tube including her one foray into television, "Skin" . I haven't watched any of it yet, but if you all happen to find anything you think is worth checking out, let us know!

Open Letter to the New York Times

To Whom It May Concern:

In the Spring of 2007, when the larger theaters here in New York announced their seasons, I was quite excited.  For the first time in a long time, Playwrights Horizons broke with its usual practice of producing new plays by its established stable of playwrights to bring us new works by exciting younger voices.  The Public's season features amongst other things the premiere of The Brothers Size, a play from an important new American voice, featuring a cast of unknowns.  New York Theater Workshop's season contains amongst other things rarely produced work by Beckett directed by theatrical Titan Joanne Akalitis and the return of both Rinde Eckert and Ivo Van Hove.  Smaller companies like 13P, Soho Rep and Target Margin have put together ambitious programming of interesting, unconventional works. Off-Off Broadway remains a treasure trove of interesting unconventional work and undiscovered voices.

I mention this because much of this work is going on currently, and yet the Times' second-string theatre writer in his column today- with his trademark arch condescension and mock-playfulness that masks the contemptuousness of his point of view- mentions none of this.  Instead Charles Isherwood, one of the most powerful writers on theatre in the business, devoted his column to reinforcing the idea that Broadway-- whose spectacles he regularly derides-- is the only game in town.  I wish this were an isolated incident that I could protest, but it is not. It is merely the latest in a long series of writings by Isherwood that show his contempt for theatre in New York City.  The time has come for the New York Times to either fire Charles Isherwood or reassign him off the theatre beat.

First off, I am  offended that the Times would publish in its theatre section an article by a theatre writer that is so clearly contemptuous of the various theatrical riches that New York City-- supposedly the American theatre city-- has to offer.  This represents an ongoing attitude at the Times that myself and many of my fellow theatre practitioners are infuriated by.  It seems that only theatre that can afford advertising in the Times' pages has any value to most of its reviewers (Jason Zinoman, and some of your freelancers being notable exceptions).  Although I understand you probably don't view it as such a quid-pro-quo, the correlation between advertising dollars and column inches is dismaying to those of us who care about the harder to discover gems here in New York.

Second, it's clear that Isherwood doesn't really like theatre all that much.  That attitude is betrayed by the above article, and it is betrayed by the large body of work that Isherwood has amassed at the Times.  Recently  he compared 13P- which represents an attempt by writers to remake in some small way the theatrical landscape by seizing the means of production- to a softball team. The condescension and suspicion with which Isherwood greets each new play he sees (especially those by uncovnentional and not established playwrights) has provided plenty of fodder for blog posts that I wish I didn't have to write.

Third, Isherwood is a vacuuous and uninteresting writer. He prefers being clever to being incisive, and venerating himself as a writer over looking at the work he has been tasked to see.  And his "think pieces" at the Times- one of which is represented by this column- are usually stuff that has less thought behind it than the average post to be found on the internet on various theatrical blog sites.  Isherwood's idea of serious commentary is to criticize Cherry Jones for being miscast, say that the Coast of Utopia is dull, or talk about how great it is not to go to the theatre.

I recognize that this letter will probably have no effect other than to hurt my own career, and although I worry about that, I cannot allow it to stop me from speaking out about issues that I care about in the art form that I have devoted my life to.  Isherwood is a serious problem in New York City theatre, and his contemptuous attitudes towards unconventional, smaller, non-star-powered and newer work will only help conservatise the theatre scene in what is supposed to be the trail blazer of the theatrical landscape. Given the amount of power your writers have as "arbiters of taste", you need to show more responsibility in whom you dispatch to critically evaluate work.  Continuing to employ someone who has such obvious contempt for the medium he's supposed to be covering is inexcusable. Michiko Kakutani would not keep her job if she wrote articles about how great it is not to read. There's a reason why the Times hired film critics like A.O. Scott and Manohla Darghis instead of vitriol factories like Armond White. Just because theatre is a less prominent art form than film or literature does not mean it is not deserving of the same respect.

Sincerely,

Isaac Butler

UPDATE: More responses from Adam and Jaime.

Questions, Conflicts, Trials and Errors...

First off, before delving in, I'd just say that this post is entirely a response to / examination of this really great post from Leonard about A Question of Impeachment. In it, Leonard repeatedly raises issues of groupthink and preaching to the converted that I think are worth looking into. 

Longtime readers of this blog will know that I don't always have a big problem with preaching to the converted.  After all, converts are the ones who show up to Church.  Hopefully you get the converts whipped up enough, and they'll bring their friends. And then you convert their friends and the cycle continues.  This is how an audience for work- whether that work be Richard Foreman or Creflo Dollar- gets developed.

The Right in America has proven itself much much better at organizing than the Left, which should be both shocking and shameful, given the Left's history with Unions.  I think it is worth looking at some of the things they've done that have made them successful, so that we can learn some appropriate skills and lessons.  One thing I've noticed is that you never hear Conservatives worry about people preaching to the converted.  They worry instead about getting more converts.

Lefties, on the other hand, worry incessantly about preaching to the converted.  And I worry on some level that there is a strand of self-loathing to that, another version of Groucho Marx's famous line I don't want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.  In other words, the people who agree with you on some level don't really count.  But if they don't count, how are we supposed to organize anything, or gain any kind of strength in numbers?

That being said, this kind of organizational strength can get out of control.  And that's when it crosses the specific line that gets people quoting 1984 (as Leonard does on a few occasions in his post).

So here's my first question... What is that line?

To me, that line is the conflict line.  When a group cannot handle or brook conflict within itself, it's in serious trouble.  This means that part of organizational and group development has to center around how to both have conflict constructively and grow using conflict. 

The second thing Leonard raises that I'd like to respond to is this:

I do understand that this was a political inquest, a legal fantasia for the purpose of re-activating already-active political fighters. But the Culture Project, in my view, has a responsibility to set a higher bar. Let them provide mythical Bush and mythical Cheney a mythical defense to let a mythical jury (the very real audience) arrive at mythical conclusions. Each side's arguments can be strong and must be unafraid; evidence must be unquestionably germane. Let the case not be a slam dunk. Let its results not be a fait accompli. Without true suspense, this is not theatre.

This reminded me a bit of a conversation I had recently about Omnium Gatherum, a play I actually quite liked.  Lots of people are very critical of it--particularly of its preaching-to-the-converted-ness.  After all, the play (in which a dinner party literally in hell contains stand-ins for various thinkers and attitudes in America who discuss 9/11 related issues) has nothing but obvous contempt for the right wing viewpoint represented by the Tom Clancy stand-in character.  My response was (and remains) but after 9/11, there was no place in the media one could go to to have a conversation like that.  No one was willing to put on a bunch of leftist voices and let them debate various issues.  The debate being had was (and still to some extent, is) between center-right voices and extremist right voices. In that wider cultural context, Omnium Gatherum was fulfilling an important civic function-- keeping alive attitudes that were being glossed over everywhere. As to whether it worked as drama or not, I guess that depends on what one thinks is required to say something worked as a stage play.

So I feel a bit conflicted about what Leonard is talking about here.  On the one hand, I absolutely agree with Leonard's desire to see a trial "the American way" as opposed to "a kangaroo court, a third-world, democracy-mocking injustice system that Americans were once trained in their civics classes to disdain". And as I said in my post yesterday, I'd be interested in seeing a debate about whether or not the Iraq war was illegal, as opposed to a discussion that assumes it is.  I'm guessing that it was this aspect of the event (the lack of debate) that lead Leonard to compare it to the Two Minutes Hate that Orwell describes in 1984.

But (here's the other side of the conflict) I worry that this ignores the broader context that this event is happening in.  In Orwell's 1984, the Two Minutes Hate is unleashed by the overwhelmingly powerful majority against a minority so powerless it might as well not exist.  It is used not to cause any real substantive change towards the minority's power (they have none and might not even exist) but rather to control the majority and keep them in line. A Question of Impeachment, in terms of a national cultural conversation, is a gathering of minority voices who are not even heard within the opposition party. The event's tagline They took it off the table so we put it on stage is a direct reference to House Speaker (and "San Francisco Liberal") Nancy Pelosi's claim that impeachment was "off the table" for the Democratic Congress. And this power dynamic necessarily changes the nature of the event.

Furthermore, because what we're talking about are views that are basically verboten in mass culture, perhaps there is less of a need to present the Case For Bush (or at least the Case Against Impeachment) because the entire rest of the culture is making/assuming that case already.  We walk into the room already indoctrinated against the idea of impeaching Bush, and already informed (if we watch cable news anyway) of the Right's viewpoint.  That is because that viewpoint is the viewpoint of the dominant culture.

In this context, is it necssary to re-present that view that we already know?  (This question can of course be flipped around and say "in the context of us all thinking Bush should be impeached, is it necessary to present a case for impeachment at all?" and I recognize that). 

So I guess what the question really comes out to is... what is the nature and purpose of the event? Is the purpose to provide succor and ammunition to those who seek Bush's removal from office?  Is it to try him for the specific articles? To open up a larger discussion about whether or not impeachment will work to stem the tide of Corporatism and its sister poison Militarism that threatens our nation? Leonard certainly seems to have come away from the event confused on this very question. Perhaps the blogosphere's further forays into the event over the next few weeks will help sort it out.

And of course the follow up question is... what do we want the nature and purpose of the event to be? Leonard's already stated his idea-- a real mock trial of Mock Bush and Mock Cheney.  I'm not sure what I want it to be, but then again, I haven't been there in person. Yet. We'll certainly have more of all of this next week, when we actually attend AQOI, but in the meatime, these questions will have to do...

The Rights! The Rights!

(Apropos of this post from George Hunka on the Guardian Arts Blog... )

Part of the ongoing mythologizing of Sara Kane is that her work is seldomly done in the United States because it is too intense/dark/whatever for American Stages.  This is only part of the story.  . What I've heard from artists who have tried is that Kane's estate is quite cautious about allowing people to do her plays. Given the initial reception they had in the UK, that's not particularly surprising. Yes,  there are probably plenty of mainstream theaters who have absolutely no interest in doing her work because it is too intense/dark/whatever... I would say I have no interest in doing it because I think it's poorly written, but I understand that amongst many people I know and respect, that's an unpopular opinion.  I also know from people who have tried (and a couple who have succeeded) that getting the rights to do her work ain't the easiest thing in the world. I believe Soho Rep-- which is producing the US Premiere of Blasted soon-- faced similar issues with Martin Crimp's Attempts On Her Life; when I ADed it, I remember being told it had been a lengthy process to get the rights, because it was a US Premiere (the previous productions had been in academic settings if memory serves).

I myself had some experience with this during First You're Born.  FYB was the US Premiere of a not-controversial-at-all Danish Comedy.  It still took us years and a chance connection between one of the actors and one of the translators  for us to get the rights. If that connection hadn't been discovered, the play would still be unproduced. Correlation, however, is not causation.  That FYB remained unproduced for some time does not necessarily mean that people were afraid to produce it. It just means they were unable to.

I think it may have something to do with the prominence of a  Premiere.  We really like debuts and premieres and such in our culture, and put a lot of stock in them.  A friend of mine recently did what should have been the World Premiere of a play (he was doing its first professional production) but he had to call it The West Coast Premiere so that theaters in the East might be more interested in Premiering it, which would be the most likely circumstances whererby they would produce it. It also probably has to do with the level of importance of the artist, and given Kane's legendary status, it wouldn't surprise me if one has to convince the Kane Estate that they are worthy of premiering her work. That was certainly the case with First You're Born.

Perhaps that didn't happen in this case with Soho Rep.  I have no idea. But it's important to remember how far (and how fast) Soho Rep has grown in the public estimation.When I interned there in the summer of 2000, few outside of NYC had heard of it. Since then, they've been credited with propelling the careers of Richard Maxwell, Melissa James Gibson, Young Jean Lee and Adam Bock amongst others.  When Daniel Aukin stepped down, it was metioned in New York Magazine.  Sarah Benson's ascension as Artistic Director has gotten a lot of press attention.  They're one of the highest regarded theaters in town. Deservedly so. So it might be a bit of a different story for them now than it even was when I did Attempts on Her Life.

Anyway... enough wild speculation.  This is all a way of saying that these things are quite complicated, as legality-related and legacy-related issues tend to be, and it doesn't necessarily follow that America as a country has  had no desire to do her work.

Echo Chamber Watch

I found the follow text message conversation from yesterday hilarious because of how conforming-to-stereotypes it is:

ME: Naomi Klein's new book is great but emotionally tough read.

HIM: Cool. I am finishing Susan Flaudi's The Terror Dream, which is also pretty full-on.

Things I Agree With

Dana Goldstein edition.

... adding... I also wonder at the fascinations some people have...  Of all the things having to do with race in America right now, out of all of those issues... why would someone make it their passion to look at the connection between race and IQ and figure out whether whites are genetically smarter than blacks?

A Question of Impeachment: Article 1

UPDATE: A webcast (with video!) of the event can be found here

And Leonard Jacobs provides a detailed (and smartly conflicted) take on the evening here.

Last night was the first event (After the opening night party/film screening/extravaganza) for The Culture Project's A Question of Impeachment. The assembled unveiled and discussed...

Article I: Initiation and Continuation of Illegal War. Participants include Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright, Elizabeth de la Vega, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ray McGovern, Larry Everest, and David Swanson. Performers include Kristen Johnston, Willie Garson, Nana Mensah, Chris McKinney, Courtney Esser, and Scott Cohen.

I'll keep updating this post as more stuff comes in, but in the meantime, The Culture Project has their own liveblog of the event itself which can be read here.

UPDATE: Some random thoughts from me.  First off, I was not able to attend last night's panel discussion, because of a pre-existing commitment, but I will be at all of the others.

Looking over the liveblog, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of discussion of the actual Article of Impeahcment but rather discussion of the idea of impeachment itself.  This is probably due to the fact that this is the first event of the series, but I wonder (and perhaps those who were there last night can tell me) if there was much discussion about whether or not Bush had, in fact, initiated and continued an illegal war and in what ways.

I write this for a very specific reason: I believe that America's conduct during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has certainly been frequently, even systemically illegal. I am unsure, however, that the war itself was illegal (for the record: I opposed the Iraq war vehemently from the beginning and waffled on the War in Aghanistan).  So I would absolutely be interested in talking about that.  I'd especially be interested in talking about that with people better versed in domestic and international law than myself. Given that this is something I'm unsure about, maybe such a thing would help get me some clarity.

It seems the evening assumed a specific viewpoint in its audience which from a dramaturgical perspective, is a tricky risk to take.  (Digressively here... I felt the same way about Young Jean Lee's Church which seemed to assume that I had particular attitudes both about religion-- that I didn't like it-- and my own life-- that it felt shallow and hollow to me. Those people in the audience I knew who felt both of those ways were profoundly affected by the show.  People I know who didn't conform to both of those things including myself respected the show greatly but did not seem as affected by it).

I don't mean this necessarily as criticism so much as observation.  Reading the live blog, it seems the event was mainly  focused on the prospects and idea of impeachment and widespread social action itself.  Once you accept this, there was a very interesting conversation about impeachment that happened last night at The Culture Project, with some debate about what it means and why do it and whether to do it etc.  So here are somethings I was stuck by:

1) What's the matter with us?    Many of the panelsits hinted at a question I've been thinking about.  Which is not so much about apathy as about ineffectualness or complacency.  Namely... we might think Bush and Cheney should be impeached (I certainly do) but very very few of us are doing anything about it.  The Democrats have coopted our political anger and passion to make it about 2008 as opposed to about the fundamental question of what kind of country do we want to live in? Meanwhile we seem to be in an odd activistic limbo-- the old ways of protesting (big ole marches, for example) don't work. But suggest something larger or different-- a general strike, a collective nonpayment of our taxes, impeaching the President-- and people immediately go that'll never work, it's preposterous!  It's as if we've accepted that things are going to go a certain way but also want to get upset about this thing we've accepted. I say we because I feel this way too.  Maybe the Left has just really truly lost in this country and the only thing we can do is start getting organized for the future. I just worry it might be too late by then. (Allan Bushman addresses this at the end when he says we just have to try a bunch of shit and see what works and what doesn't. I think that's a pretty good idea, we just have to accept the fact that we're going to fail a lot and not get demoralized by that)

2) Impeachment as a tool / The Stakes  I think McGovern's point about the stakes of this impachment thing is well taken.  The Bush administration seems hellbent on going to war with Iran. Impeaching Bush and Cheney is a way of stopping it. It might not work, but it is a possible way to stop Bush going to war.  Intersting.

3) Paralysis... A Good Thing? This leads me to a point I've heard a few times... the problem with impeaching Bush and Cheney is that it would paralyze the Government and put us through another long slog/difficult time.  To which I think (especially after reading the live blog of this event) my reaction is... so?  We're in a very difficult place as a country. I would argue, we're in the midst of a long crisis that started somewhere around September 12th of 2001.  I don't necessarily think-- especially given how much fucked up shit it is doing-- that paralyzing our government and spending some time looking at what we've done over the past few years is really such a bad idea.  Joe Biden seemed to offer that he wants to wait until they're out of office and then prosecute them and throw 'em in jail. The panelists explicitly rejected this idea.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts.  There's a lot in there to unpack, so why not take a gander at it (the link is at the top of this post) and let me know your thoughts?

Kindle Spiel

UPDATE: Welcome Ezra Klein readers. I read Ezra Klein's writing daily and link to him at least twice a week, so I'm flattered by the attention. This is Parabasis, a blog for progressive politics and discussion of theatre and other cultural matters.  Poke around a bit, if you feel so inclined, and leave a comment or two. I hope you enjoy.

Count me as ambivolent about this whole "Kindle" idea.  Ezra Klein makes the pro case here.  And I understand.  There's a very compelling pro case to make.  After all, the Amazon-designed device 

...lets me flip through a few hundred titles seems like a sound idea. Moreover, the ability to annotate, and highlight your text, then export the finished product, could be near revolutionary. I mark my books up already, but the marks remain in the margins, and are hard to collect, and sort, centrally.

Which is all well and good.  If you have to read a lot for work and keep track of relevant passages of things you've read.  But it seems that for average readers, and for people who read primarily for pleasure... well... the Kindle is going to be unsatisfying.  And I can say this having never seen or touched one.

Why will it be unsatisfying?  Because it's not a book.  I don't mean to be conservative here, but the simply fact of the matter is that there's something about books that just works.  It's not that explainable, so it's hard to try to phrase it as a counterargument, but here goes.  To paraphrase something my younger brother said in the comments on this blog... the book is one of humankind's perfect inventions... like bread, or the wheel (or, I'd argue, cheese). You might be able to improve on its design but you can't fundamentally change the thing.  It's perfect as is.  It's survived as a human invention for a truly shocking amount of time. As sentimental as this sounds, I just don't think that many people really want  to cuddle up with their electronic reader and delve into  the latest from Henning Mankell.

And this is very different from the iPOD.  The iPOD does not fundamentally change the way you listen to music by, for example, abolishing headphones and beaming the music directly into your brain.  It just changes the way you organize and buy your music.  The Kindle fundamentally changes the way you read by replacing a book with a square of plastic with a glowing screen. This makes  the experience quite different for both your eyes and your hands.  I think Jeff Bezos might be underestimating the power of books and how much they matter to the power of reading.

UPDATE: In related news, Picador may soon get rid of publishing hardcover books.  This is something that I'm in favor of, restricting hardcover book printing to a smaller number of archival copies. Why am I in favor of this? Because currently, many good books get ignored because they're only published in paperback, so I think this might level the playing field a bit.  Also, I wouldn't mind moving to paperback books that were themselves printed on sustainable paper, like Cradle To Cradle, which is printed on very thin sheets of recyclable plastic.

Quest for Greatness

Spoon continue their quest to become my favorite currently-recording artist by covering one of my favorite songs of all time.

Crank this shit up and enjoy.

Holy Crap! Pun Intended!

A reader sent me this slideshow of photos from the Creationism Museum, and I'd just like to say I find it a lot more scary than I do funny.

Matt Freeman, Awesome Guy

With such trenchant, near genius thoughts as these I can only assume that Matt Freeman's tenure writing for the Guardian Arts Blog  is close at hand.

Interview with... Hal Brooks

Hal Brooks is currently directing the regional tour of Nilaja Sun's Obie Award Winning No Child..., having directed the show's critically-lauded run at both the Barrow Street Theatre and Epic Theatre. He also directed the acclaimed Off-Broadway hit and Pulitzer Finalist Thom Pain (based on nothing) by Will Eno at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Soho Theatre in

London

, and the DR2 in NYC. Other productions:  Lee Blessing's Lonesome Hollow  (Contemporary American Theater Festival), "MASTER HAROLD" ...and the boys (Weston Playhouse), Don DeLillo's Valparaiso and Will Eno's The Flu Season (rude mechanicals), Sharr White's Six Years (Humana Festival), Rinne Groff's What Then (Clubbed Thumb), I Am My Own Wife (Weston Playhouse), Intimate Apparel (Southern Rep). Craig Wright's Lady at Asolo, and James Braly's Life in a Marital Institution.  Hal is a recipient of the 2007-2009 NEA/TCG Career Development Program for Directors.

Coming up, Brooks will be helming Reverie Productions’ production of Chilean writer Ariel “Death and the Maiden” Dorfman’s Widows, a dark magic-realist dramatization of his own novel.  In Widows (which will perform at 59e59), a small village has been occupied by a military force for some time. All adult men in the town have been disappeared.  Dead bodies begin washing up on the shores of the river which runs through the town.  The women of the town claim the bodies as those of their husbands, brothers, fathers, sons, even though the bodies are so disfigured that they’ve become unrecognizable.  This poses a whole host of difficulties for the play's characters--  the women of the town and the military officers tasked with keeping them in line. The original novel had to be reset from

Pinochet-era

Chile

to post-WWII

Greece

in order to be published in Dorfman’s home country. The dramatic version has no specific country as its setting, and demonstrates Dorfman's penchant for lyrical and intense imagery and language.

Hal

Brooks

and I had a short conversation about the project and about his career via e-mail.  Hope you enjoy the results:

IB: It’s quite a journey from Thom Pain to a magic realist epic with a Shakespearean-sized cast. Is there a difference for you when you direct a show on a different scale, or does your job remain pretty much the same?

HB: I always think the job of a director is twofold: honor the intent of the playwright, and tell a good story (or tell a story well) so in that sense the job remains the same. I think in terms of scale, Widows obviously presents huge challenges: a cast of thousands, and budget of hundreds. And Thom Pain presented huge challenges too - how to tell this difficult story full of anguish (and pain) and humor and humanity to an often uncertain audience every night (but isn't that always the case?). Widows will require much more preparation, and I will be on my game logistics-wise and organizationally, but truly there can also be something, dare I say it easier when there is more than one person on stage? There's inherently more dynamism, which makes my job somewhat easier. My god, I am gonna regret writing that.

IB: You’ve been freelancin’ up a storm in recent years, what has doing more work in that direction been like?  How do you find the projects you want to do when you don’t originate them?

HB: When I did [Don] Delillo's

Valparaiso

a few years back, we had a nice Times review and I got a lot of nice meetings out of it. Tim Sanford advised me to "find my writer". And then I met Will Eno - and I felt I had found my writer. But truly, as much as I would work with Will anywhere, anytime, realistically I need to keep working when I cannot direct his work - so I've modified Tim's advice to "find your writers". I am always on the lookout for new voices - and so I am constantly reading new plays, meeting writers. When I get offered work-for-hire, I've got to find my way in. As for finding work, my agent Val Day does a great job of introducing me to new writers too. But I think there is no real method for finding new projects outside of reading, staying connected to the playwriting community, and continuing to do work that inspires you


IB: What drew you  to this specific project?

HB: Judy Bowman, the casting director, recommended Reverie and Colin Young to me. He and I sent a bunch of scripts back and forth - and this one is a play he's been dying to produce. I read it, felt scared, and said, sure.


IB: Widows has had a very very long journey from its initial novelization to its

New York

premiere, including at least one draft co-written by Tony Kushner. Are there any further changes being made to the text?

HB: This is not the same text that Kushner was involved with - but comes with Kushner's blessings. This play has gone through several iterations. I believe it started with a dream Ariel had, then a poem, then a novel. This may be more or less the third incarnation of this play. There used to be a narrator in an earlier draft. But this is the version that has been seen around the world of late.


IB: So. Um. You’re White and from the

United States

(as far as I know) and, although the play never quite comes out and says it, Widows is very clearly about

Chile

and the Mothers of the Disappeared.  Did you have any concerns about authenticity going into it? Or any of the other artistic concerns that we talk about when addressing multicultural work?

HB: It is true: I am white. I have no concerns about my being "authentic" or of the world of the play - no more than I did when I directed Nilaja in NO CHILD, or Urbaniak in THOM PAIN. And as for it being about

Chile

or the mothers of the disappeared, Ariel has not set this in a specific locale and really wants this to be universalized (if that's a word) - the setting is never clear - and some of the names are obviously South American (Fuentes) while others are perhaps Greek influenced (Kastoria). We are casting multi-ethnically in order to stress the universality of the situation of the play.

IB: How do you enter the worlds of the plays you direct?  Are there specific steps you take to immerse yourself in the text?  Are those different for each play?

HB: I read the play a lot. I try to find its relevance to my own life - and connection to it. For

Valparaiso

, that was an easier step: it seemed to be about celebrity, but actually it was about a man who had lost a sense of self. I had been working at several dotcom jobs during the late 90s and had really lost a sense of who I was - and this was my way back into the world of the theater, and a sense of self. For me, my way into this play is the scene at the end with the grandmother and her grandson. As much as the play is about I try to connect that moment to my own life - and where I'd stand. I get fairly bookish before going into a rehearsal room - so plan to read, watch films, make an image library of it.

Also, I have a nice advantage of being able to talk to a living playwright. I love that.

IB: People might not know this but.. you are also a blogger!  How do you use your blog? How do you feel being a blogger fits into your work as a director?

HB: I think you and three other people are the only ones who know I blog. I am told - and I have no way of verifying, that I am one of the few directors who blogs on the process. For me, it's a bit about just keeping a journal. I imagine it is as interesting as watching the proverbial paint dry. I think the one thing about it that fits into my work is it allows me to keep a certain equanimity about the proceedings.

IB: You wrote on your blog recently about the EPAs for the production. Do you find EPAs useful at all? Are they a system that you’d do away with in an ideal world? And if so? how do we find the good unknown artist?

HB: I think I wrote that I had horrific dreams after the EPAs. There was this one guy who just really seemed like a vicious cannibal - and he directed this wholly inappropriate monologue to our female producer. And it was disgusting.

It makes you really depressed and after seven windowless hours, it was just exhausting.

We did bring in three or four people into our regular auditions - out of 150 or so...so...that's like two plus percent? Is that good?

We have a few really tough roles to cast (the grandson and the grandmom) and I really thought we'd found our grandson out of the proceedings. But she (that's right, she) was not up for the prospect of playing a boy - which I think happens to her a lot... which I know was a bummer for me.

EPAs are hard for everyone, and you just want to say to tell the folks to bring in better choices. I kept thinking to myself "Do they really think I want to hear this?" A poem about World War One? Someone screaming at the top of their lungs? Over-the-top misogyny?

On the other hand, it really is a chance for someone to get noticed, who might otherwise not get noticed since they have no representation yet.

IB: You’ve worked on a broad range of material, including lots of new work and revivals.  What is the difference for you between the two? How does working with the writer in the room compare to working off an already-published script like Master Harold?and the Boys?

HB: The only difference to me seems to be that you've got to make certain choices and assumptions as if the playwright were in the room with you. The main challenge of working with the writer in the room is finding a way to run the room, while knowing that the guy/gal who wrote the play might have the answers - but that you might be the best person for a variety of reasons to answer the questions. I think actors sometimes want to get the answer from the playwright - because he's/she's there. But often times a playwright, having written their work, tapping into their unconscious might not have the actable answer...or they might. It depends. I love it when a writer doesn't know the answer. It makes the whole room freer, I think..

I always want to make the play "actable" for the actor, so even though you might know why a playwright has done a specific thing in the script - you have to convey that to an actor usually from the viewpoint of their character, rather than from a more dramaturgical standpoint.


IB: Do you think of yourself as having an aesthetic?  If so, how would you define it?

HB: My aesthetic is changing. If you'd have asked around the time of Thom Pain, I'd have said. I really like the existential, abstract landscape stripped-down language plays. You know those: Beckett, Albee, Eno, Delillo -that school. But since Six Years at Humana (a well-made play) and No Child, I can definitely feel my aesthetic changing, my skills stretching: the uproarious standing o's that Nilaja received made me realize how acceptable the feel-good play can be, especially when it's magically portrayed by one dynamo.

IB: What made you choose directing?  Did you come from a different theatrical perspective originally?

HB: When I was an undergrad actor at Yale (and a theater double major with history, at least at first) - friends told me I should direct. But I had no idea how. Or what. And then again at grad school, I was told I was a "smart" actor - which I think was a backhanded compliment. Still, I had no idea how to direct. But then at ACT (where I trained as an Actor), I had a genius acting teacher/director: Jack Fletcher. Jack is the son of one of ACT founders (Allen Fletcher) and just has a way of connecting actors to material in a way that makes sense, that honors the writer and the actor, and felt like what we were doing was the most important thing - crucial matters of life, death, and empathy. One of the main principles at ACT, which is obvious and simple and a revelation, was that the most important person onstage is your scene partner. Applying that to the basic 10 questions (given circumstances, obstacles, actions, objectives, etc) was the epiphany I was looking for. I finally felt like I knew how to run a room, to talk to actors the way I'd wanted to be talked to as an actor.

Then I read Delillo's Day Room and was ready to go. It remains the greatest directing experience in my career - the first: a bunch of classmates, in a studio, throwing something up on a weekend...

IB: What are you looking forward to most with this production of Widows?

HB: I cannot wait for tech - to see how the darn river will look. Also, we are reconfiguring the space, THEATER B at 59 E. 59th as an alley - so that'll be cool to see.

IB: Any pearls of wisdom you’d like to share with the next group of up-and-comers?

HB: Find your writer(s). Hang in there.

Not Good

Strike talks break down... Broadway cancels performances through this Sunday.. Grinch to reopen... that's the news from the New York Times, anyway.

I'd be interested to know-- although clearly we'll never learn-- what specifically the talks broke down over...

Quick Comics Questions

Okay, so, having never read Love and Rockets (I know... I know) I picked up Maggie the Mechanic which collects the first five years of Jamie Hernandez' contributions to the series.

Can I ask... is there a point when it starts to get good? And is it okay to skip the earlier stuff to get to that point? I'm in the midst of this bewilderingly dull serialized story about Maggie going to a sci-fi African jungle to repair a spaceship and... well... it's really really boring and shockingly loquacious for a comic. The previous story (the first of many dubbed "Locas Tambien") was really quite charming. But I'm worried I will miss important stuff later if I don't keep with it. Anyone got an opinion on this one?

Welcome, "Question of Impeachment" Folks

UPDATE: For coverage of Article One, Click here.

Hello there.  My name is Isaac Butler and this is my blog Parabasis. My two main topics historically have been theatre and politics, although the blog has grown a wee bit more digressive over the last year. As the Culture Project continues to ask A Question of Impeachment, I've been asked to be the Official Blogger for the ongoing event.

What that means is that I'll be posting a weekly table of contents of coverage on AQOI that'll be happening in the blogosphere.  Most of this coverage will be written by theatre bloggers such as myself.

If you'd like to have a look around this blog, please feel free to do so, and leave a comment should you read anything you want to respond to.  And if you want to visit the old Parabsis site, feel free, although it's really quite old.

Politically, I'd say I come closest to being a Democratic Socialist, with an  interst in social justice. Theatrically, I'm a freelance director who focuses primarily (but not solely) on new work. 

Here's some politics, culture and impeachment stuff to look at, if you're so interested:

(1) Back in January 2006, Elizabeth Holtzman called for the impeachment of President Bush in the Nation.

(2) In June 2007, Bruce Fein made the "Conservative case" for impeaching Vice President Dick Cheney for Slate.com

(3) Seredipity has a quite good web-based table of contents for why we should impeach Bush

(4) What is impeachment? Let Wikipedia explain it all to you. Ditto the movement to impeach Bush.

(5) Several of the panelists at AQOI have written for Harper's Magazine. Here is the magazine's quite delightful website.

(6) Jason Grote is a playwright and blogger whose work I greatly respect.  Here and here are examples of some of his work for Comedy Central.  Here is a great example of one of his impassioned rants about the state of our country.

(7) Two other theatre-and-politics hybrid bloggers you should probably check out are playwright Matt Freeman and director Mark Armstrong, the latter of whom is recently back from a sablogical. I just made that word up.

(8) Two bloggers who will be covering events for us are James Comtois and Leonard Jacobs. They both write primarily about theatre, although Leonard also keeps us well abreast of Arts Advocacy issues and writes occasionally about politics as well.

(9) As for my own blog, I've written recently about politics and art.  Here I write about the quixotic quest for Conservative Theatre.  I also recently wrote a four part post called "Our Moment" about politics, culture and art.  Part 1 is here, part two is here part three is here and part four is here.

Thanks, Jaime

Jaime unearths a chart I had been looking for for like two weeks. Go over to her place and check it out.

Short Political Thought of the Day

Ezra Klein writes:

I think some attention, however, should be paid to the downsides of a Giuliani ascension, which strike me as, if anything, more important than the upsides of an Obama presidency. The moment Giuliani wins, the newspaper's of the Arab world will be flooded with the translated quotations of Norman Podhoretz ("If we bomb the Iranians, as I hope and pray we will..."),Daniel Pipes("The Palestinians are a miserable people...and they deserve to be."), and Giuliani's many otherassociated crackpots. It would be a catastrophe for our image, and cement every wavering Muslim's belief that America has durably embraced a hateful, imperialistic, anti-Arab foreign policy. (emph. mine)

I would argue that, were Giuliani to be elected President of the United States, the truth of the matter is that as a nation, we will have "embraced a hateful, imperialistic, anti-Arab foreign policy".  Or really, reembraced it following eight years of Bush.  It's not a perception thing in the eyes of fence sitting Muslims, but rather objectively demonstrable fact.

Jon Robin Baitz is my hero for the day...

This article on Isherwood (via Adam) is excellent.  I would also add to it, or rather put a finer point on it, that in my experience Isherwood is in general hostile to new work from voices unfamiliar to him, and that Thom Pain is the exception that proves the rule (and that saying that isnot meant to be a comment on the virtues of Thom Pain).

I'm also happy to see this article appear in a non-theatre website like Huffington Post. Keep up the good work, Ariana.

Just Like To say

That as Internet Time Wasters go, this one  (via Ezra Klein) is friggin' brilliant.

The Politics of "No Country For Old Men"

So following up on this post from earlier in the week, I thought it'd be a good thought exercise to look at the politics of a piece of art that (a) I liked and (b) was what some might call "apolitical", in that in did not agitate for or investigate a political issue (or did so subtly). So I chose the film No Country for Old Men which I saw last night and is... well... really, really good, a true return to form for Los Bros. Coen, and filled with top notch acting, directing and cinematography.

It is also a film that I would argue is quite small-c conservative, which is to say resistant to change, looking backwards instead of forwards, focused on a kind of lamentory nostalgia. It also questions this conservative viewpoint, which is  testament to its complexity as a work of art, but that doesn't mean it doesn't also sympathize with and embody this backwards-looking viewpoint.

In the film, Llewellen Moss (a shockingly good Josh Brolin), a hunter (more on this later) discovers the remnants of a drug deal gone bad, and two million dollars in cash in a suitcase.  For some reason, he thinks he can get away with taking the money.  He is wrong.  Soon, Anton Chigeur (a truly delicious Javier Bardem)- more force of destruction that human being- is dispatched to recover the money and kill Llewellen. Soon their cat and mouse game attracts the attention of a near-retirement sheriff played by Tommy Lee Jones and a killer (played by Woody Harrelson) hired by Stephen Root to track down and take out Chigeur.  Antics ensue.

The film pits the old against the new, and finds the old heroic and the new terrifying in rather explicit ways. Tommy Lee Jones, the soul of the film (and oh! how soulful!), begins the movie in voice over lamenting how back in his daddy's day, sheriffs didn't even always carry guns, they didn't need to.  In pretty much every scene Jones appears in , he in some way mourns the passing of the old to the new, even asserting at some point that once kids stopped calling their parents "sir" and "ma'am" the world went to hell in a handbasket. How, he asks over and over again, are we supposed to fight the new terrors of the modern world?

Chigeur represents those new terrors.  As Harrelson puts it in the film,. Chigeur isn't amoral-- he has principles "in his way", they're just the principles of pure destructiveness.  And in the film's most overt act of symbolism, Chigeur's method of killing is itself a symbol of modernity. Chigeur's favored weapon is an abbattoir gun, an air powered metal rod that kills on impact and leaves no shell (since it uses no bullet).  The history of the abbattoir gun is laid out (uncoincidentally) by Jones in a monologue (once again) about the changes from the old to the new. That Chigeur's other weapons look like something out of science fiction (a shotgun with a silencer on it??!!) is probably not coincidental either. Chigeur is like the hounds in Farenheit 451- pure terrifying modernity made manifest via technology. Chigeur destroys everything he touches.  He doesn't seem to enjoy this-- part of the beauty of Bardem's performance is that he always seems to be on the verge of crying with either infinite sadness or spiritual  ecstasy.  It seems that destruction is his lot in life, one he accepts with a kind of religious devotion.

Chigeur's target (that's Brolin's Llewellen Moss) is himself a symbol of the old ways.  He's a hunter, like Chigeur, but his target is game, not people.  Unlike Chigeur, who uses a tracking device and a series of cars, he tracks his prey traditionally (on foot).  He doesn't communicate with his wife.  He's the strong, silent type. He is as much an archetype of the old west as he is a human being (much like Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain).

Where the film gets its tragic resonance is from its unremitting hopelessness in the face of progress.  The world will keep spinning on its axis, but that doesn't stop the film from despairing at it. Jones' gaze backwards into the past can't stop the present (and the future) from occuring, even though he'd clearly like it to.

The chaos of the future is, unfortunately (and to the film's detriment) represented frequently by hispanics, who in the film only appear as criminals (and in one sequence, a mariachi band) despite the movie taking place near (and at times across) the Mexican border.  I could not help but think about the latest fervor about Mexican immigration currently consuming the mental energies of Lou Dobbs, the Republican Presidential candidates, and the New York State Senate. I sort of can't really dicuss it further without ruining the movie, and some who have seen it might disagree with me, but I couldn't help but feel that part of the past that Jones is lamenting is... well... a whiter past. Perhaps this is because when Conservatives (big C this time) talk about the simpler, better time of America in the 50s etc. what they are really talking about is the simpler, bettter times of a segregated America when their white dominance was secure. They might not see it that way, but that "simpler, better" time was built on a foundation of racial prejudice and race-and-gender-based exploitation.

As the film points out itself, the good ole days Jones longs for didn't really ever exist.  That doesn't stop Jones-- and the film-- from longing for them.  In a way, this fantasy nostalgia is an even more conservative prospect than longing for a real past that actually existed.  After all, if we have fallen from an idea we can never get back to, how much more delicious the idea becomes. And how much more powerful. The past exerts a powerful gravitational pull on the characters in the film-- even Chigeur realizes it, even if he thinks the past is just another word for a story that ends with your death.

Watching the movie was a curious experience for me.  On a formalist level, the movie is pure cinematic gold. It is one of the most suspenseful films I've seen all year, the violence in it is terrible, unglorified, and brilliant. Chigeur is a terrifying, relentless villain. The Coens show that both their versatility and their virtuosity remains almost unmatched amongst modern filmmakers.  But I disgreed both philosophically and politically with the viewpoint of the movie.  That didn't harm my enjoyment of it but it's an odd dual space to be in as an audience member.