Parabasis

Things I Agree WIth

Ian David Moss edition.

Now That's Change I Can Believe In

Jindal Not Ready For Prime TIme Part II

Hey, gang, remember that story Bobby Jindal told about the sherrif and hurricane katrina and all of that? Remember the one that had him heroically standing by Sheriff Bobby Lee while Lee was trying to cut through the bureaucratic red tape &c?

Well...  Jindal wasn't there.  He made his participation in the story up:

...a Jindal spokeswoman has admitted to Politico that in reality, Jindal overheard Lee talking about the episode to someone else by phone "days later." The spokeswoman said she thought Lee, who died in 2007, was being interviewed about the incident at the time.

This is no minor difference. Jindal's presence in Lee's office during the crisis itself was a key element of the story's intended appeal, putting him at the center of the action during the maelstrom. Just as important, Jindal implied that his support for the sheriff helped ensure the rescue went ahead. But it turns out Jindal wasn't there at the key moment, and played no role in making the rescue happen...

When I said that Jindal's speech sounded like a Right Wing E-mail Forward, I was talking about tone, not accuracy! Turns out I shot a double bullseye...

Oddly Topical Typos

I got a Canadian Pharmacy Spam in my e-mail inbox today.  To get past spam filters they now use words that look like words but aren't the words they're supposed to be.

The word for "meds" they used was "media".  So the e-mail was offering to fulfill my "media needs" from a pharmacy in Canada, "no PRES necessary."

In Which We Try To Help The Google

I keep getting google searches looking for "most influential play of the last century".  The latest one of these was looking for the "9 most influential plays of this century".  But I'm pretty sure they meant the 20th, not the 21st.

And because 9 is such a random number, let's help our poor googling friend.  

What are the 9 most influential plays of the 20th Century?

I'm going to start us off, Wheel of Fortune style and say the obvious ones (I'm not saying these have to go on the list, I'm just saying their the semi-obvious choices):

The Cherry Orchard

Waiting for Godot

Angels in America

Glenngarry Glen Ross

What say you?

UPDATE: BTW in case it wasn't clear, the plays listed above aren't like my favorite plays or the ones that I want to be the most influential or anything, just four plays whose influence I see all over the play (99 for example, mentions "Fifth of July" in the comments, which stylistically is so heavily influenced by "The Cherry Orchard" as to be its like child or something; and much as I wish it weren't the case, I see a lot of plays/hear a lot of readings/ talk to lit managers who bitch about the influence of Mamet on everything).

Now *this* I Might Anticipate

But in all seriousness... how does this idea strike you?

Letting Marketing Dictate Our Responses

The Times today calls the forthcoming Bono/Edge/Taymor Spider-Man musical "widely anticipated".  Which begs the question... by whom?  I'm a comic book and theater nerd, and I'm not anticipating it. The only people I know who are anticipating it are people who can't wait for the schadenfreude when it crashes and burns.  Of course, if press people and marketing folk keep getting the press to call it "widely anticipated" than I'm sure it will be. 

Post SOTU React

Jindal is not ready for prime time. This opening bit about how we're all post-racial now sounds totally inauthentic. He sounds like a docent at the Natural History Museum, not a potential Presidential candidate.  Seriously his speech is like the Right Wing E-mail Forwards featured at My Right Wing Dad.

I didn't get to see all of Obama's speech, but he seemed to knock it out of the park. What did you guys think?

Reach Out And Touch Someone

Did you ever notice how physical our language for interaction is? Make a connection. Make contact. Finding something touching.

Is this language obsolete in the digital age?  Two of the more profound conversations I’ve had over the last week were done over G-chat.  Is it possible to find something touching when there is no chance the person you’re interacting with can actually touch you?  To be clear, I’m not slagging G-Chat or Twitter or any of it, I actually find that’s enabled me to… oh what’s the word… keep in touch with people much easier.

In Infinite Jest’s speculative (and somewhat satirical) future, over 95% of all entertainment is consumed in the home, beamed into our television sets. No one goes to movie theaters and there is no network television (Everything’s a la carte pay per view). As a result, random live events—muggings, the draining of a duck pond, five alarm fires—are huge gatherings of people.  They’re called SpecOps (Spectator Opportunities). We’re so alienated in his future, so used to private consumption of the staged, that we crave live experience of the spontaneous.

There is no hiding in theatre.  Over Gchat, you can fake an emotion you’re not having (or- even worse- pretend not to feel when you in fact do).  When you watch a film as an audience member, you are protected from the performer (and they by you).  Furthermore, editing allows film actors to hide constantly. When your scene partner is doing “coverage” you don’t have to be “there” in any real sense.

This is one of the many reasons that theatre is a hard thing for actors to do. And why it’s hard for audiences as well.  Your collective energy can’t be hid from the performers, and you can never stop touching and being touched when you’re on stage.  I wonder if, as our connections to people get more and more virtual, our craving for live experience will get greater or diminish.

Wedding Crashers, Politics, Milk

So i had never seen TWC, and Anne has a coworker who demanded that we see it. 

All I can say is I'm really quite shocked that a movie that deeply homophobic can still be made in this day and age without anyone going "er... this whole gay son who is an insane rapist and a painter might be a little problematic".  And that's not even getting started with the bizarrely shoe-horned in reaction right wing politics of the film in general.  The repartee between Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughan is pretty funny, but I really am kind of gobsmacked at the film's politics.

All the more reason why the acceptance speech from Milk's screenwriter Dustin Lance Blackwas by far the best part of the night last night.  Another backlash I don't understand is the anti-Milk backlash. It actually makes a fairly by-the-numbers biopic work really well, and it's deeply felt and well crafted and well acted (with the embarrassing exception of Diego Luna) throughout. 

Winter's Tale

I'm doing the Critic-O-Meter for Winter's Tale right now, and I came across this review in Backstage which has the following to say about the play itself:

Some dramaturgical reckoning is necessary when we begin in the land of psychological drama and segue to the world of fake bears and fake beards. The most successful productions I've seen amp up the early drama to outrageous proportions -- or simply cut most of it, turning the Sicily section into an extended prologue. You could lop an hour off this production's running time and still not come in under two, and while this would be dramatic change, you can argue this production could do with more in the way of drama.

To which all I can say is WHAT?!?!?  The first three acts aren't the problem with Winter's Tale, it's Act Iv that's the "problem" that has to be reconciled with the rest of the show.  Cutting the first three acts into an extended prologue would be a terrible dramaturgical decision, it'd be totally cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.  Four of the play's five acts take place in Sicily.  Act IV scene 3 is a pretty bold theatrical experiment on Shakespeare's part, one that's still unsettling to this day.  

It seems clear to me that if you're going to cut, it is in fact Act IV, Sc. 3 that needs the trimming.  It's the longest scene in all of Shakespeare, longer than any full act in the rest of the play and longer than full acts in most of his other plays.  It contains multiple musical numbers and complex intrigue, much of which involves characters who we don't care about who won't appear later on in the play.  Add into it that Shakespearean comedy is far harder to do well than tragedy since it relies on dated senses-of-humor, and if for nothing other than sheer pragmatism, Act IV, Sc. 3 needs to cut the pruning.

(I should also say... The first three acts of Winter's Tale are amongst my favorite in Shakespeare, bar none. There's a relentlessness to them that's still thrilling and terrifying today, and the speech about drinking the wine and seeing the spider is magnificent).

In Tech

I am in tech this week for MCC's Youth Company show (titled Back To Society).  I'm sound designing. We're almost done, just gotta get a door opening and closing and an angry sounding bell. Woot. 

Anyway, posting may be a little bit light this week as a result. I'm still going to try to keep pace, but who knows. No wi-fi in the theater this time, so that makes things harder.

Monday Morning Music

Anti-Anti-Slumdog

Count me as unconvinced by the arguments for the Slumdog Backlash.  It's a feel good movie that legitimately makes you feel good without also making you feel like an asshole. That's pretty damn hard. And Danny Boyle directed the shit out of that movie. I should also say, though, that i love Danny Boyle's work- including the much maligned, underrated Sunshine - in ways that compromise objectivity. There's a way in which he puts together images and music that really gets to me.  I actually cried during the Paper Planes montage in Slumdog.

I'm not sure Slumdog was the best movie of the year, but I don't really buy the more ideological critiques of the movie I'm seeing (like this one from Ezra Klein). 

Battlestar Blogging 4.16

If I had wanted to watch All My Childen, I'd fucking watching All My Children.  What an excruciating episode, blending together both of the show's weakest elements- Ellen Tigh and Gaiius Baltar's Lesbian Sex Cult.  Having reviewed which episodes she's written, I think Jane Espensen is really one of the weaker writers for the show.  You can't have an episode that relies on world creation when you haven't done anything to create that world, and the writers have really never been willing to do the work to create the civilian world of BSG. So now there's a Dogtown, and Sons of Aries and all this other bullcrap but it just feel inorganically stapled on at the last minute. Blech. They were doing so well, too!

Teh Stupid! It Burns!!

What subject in the arts did the Times think was so important it deserved column inches in its Week In Review Section?

British people's embarrassment with Kate Winslet's Golden Globes speech and its attendant blubbering sincerity.

Seriously. That's not even an article about the Oscars, which would be teh kinda stupid I could've dealt with in the pre-Oscar WIR section.

A Quick Thought (or two) On Celebrity Casting

Longtime readers of this blog will know that i kind of get a bug up my ass about Celebrity Casting, in particular Hollywood-Stage-Dilettante-Casting on Broadway (Jennifer Garner, Katie Holmes and Julia Roberts being the sort of Unholy Trinity of this).  

The latest revival of Guys 'n' Dolls has me thinking about all of this again in that the producers seems to have really missed the boat vis-a-vis celebrity casting.  It seems to me the goal of Celebrity Casting is to generate Press and Ticket Sales that will be independent of the quality of the show itself.  Therefore, you want like a Big Name. If you can't get (or heaven forbid don't want)  a Celebrity Name Person, then casting someone who is a Big Name in theatrical circles becomes the priority.  (John Waters quip on the Daily Show  about how when a musical opens, it's filled with theatre stars and then as its run gets longer its eventually stuffed with rejects from American Idol seems apropos here). Theatre Stars of course have the added benefit of actually having proven skills at performing on stage.

So here's where I think the producers of G+D missed the boat... Oliver Platt and Lauren Graham don't really fall into either category.  Neither of them are Huge Stars and neither of them are in that eschalon of really-well-respected-and-liked theatre performers.  It seems like a really odd choice to me. I have no idea how well they'll do in the show (although advance word ain't great) but from a commercial producer stand point it seems weird. 

Of course, I think that they are reviving G+D again while the memory of Nathan Lane and Faith Prince will be still lingering in reviewer's minds is a pretty strange decision anyway.

Some Interesting Thoughts On Brit Political Theatre from David Cote

Cote on 7 Jewish Children:

is the new play any good? Well, the pictures of the productions look antiseptic and cool, but I think this is just another case of a writer thinking they can keep their experimental bona fides while also showing how awfully topical and tough-minded they are. Moreover, there’s something about angry Brit playwrights that gets under my skin: Often they think they’re being so shocking and complacency-shattering when in fact they’re just fuming over their own sense of powerlessness and outrage. There’s something adolescent about their anger. Don’t get me wrong: I love the cool brutality of Harold Pinter’s One for the Road andMountain Language, but what political good can they actually accomplish? Do they not rather show an artist whose work feeds off of cruelty, that benefits from a kind of sadism chic? Maybe it’s just me being an American, but I’m much more impressed by the mix of humor, humanity, melancholy and outrage that goes into the political theater of Tony Kushner and Wallace Shawn. Much as I respect Pinter, Churchill, Bond, Barker et al., there’s something smug, brittle, impotent and ultimately fatalistic about British 20th-century political theater. Put it this way: I’d love for Kushner to run for the Senate, but I would have been scared shitless by Prime Minister Pinter.

I await the Hunka flame war. No no, I'm kidding.  I don't have a lot to say about this, simply because I think my experience of late-period Barker, Bond and Churchill is fairly limited, although I share Cote's love for Pinter's short political works.  But I love them because they're thrilling theatre, and probe their subjects with intensity and passion, although I also agree with their politics. 

Part of the reason I love the above-mentioned Kushner (and for that matter, David Foster Wallace) is that while the thematic content is deeply felt, there's also an intense desire to entertain and thrill the audience. There's a love for the audience there.  I feel that love for the audience, for the performer, and for theatre in Churchill's best work, particularly Mad Forrest.  It's also  worth remembering that the monologues in One for the Road are dazzling word-drunk verbal tightrope acts, and contain a great amount of humor even as the play is excruciating to watch or read.  

Now there's a danger in what I'm saying in the above, a danger that it could be misinterpreted to say all I want is the spoonful of sugar and fuck the medicine. That I want shallow entertaining work.  I don't. But I do want art to be concerned with and not hate and not have contempt for its audience.  I think that's important.  It's part of the reason I like challenging theatre (because it respects its audience and thinks its audience is up for the challenge) and get angry at deliberately incomprehensible theatre.

UPDATE: More thoughts from George Hunka on the late-period work of Churchill, Pinter, Barker et al. can be found here.

This Blows My Mind

A card trick, hosted by Adam Feldman of Time Out:

Quote of the Day

As recently as the nineteen-sixties, for reasons of history and origins, the Democrats were a stapled-together collection of Southern reactionaries, big-city hacks, and urban and agrarian liberals; the Republicans were a jumble of troglodyte conservatives, Yankee moderates, and the odd progressive. Ideological incoherence made bipartisanship feasible. The post-civil-rights, post-Vietnam realignment, along with the gerrymandered creation of safe districts, has given us—on Capitol Hill, at least—an almost uniformly rightist G.O.P. and a somewhat less uniformly progressive array of Democrats.

-- Heinrick Hertzberg