Parabasis

Three Pieces of News (One About Me)

First, Mead Hunter has, sadly, been laid off (along with other staff members) from Portland Center Stage.  Mead writes about it here. Mead is one of the many people I've met through blogging that I am honored to call a friend. We've met in person exactly once, when I went out to PDX and he gave me a tour of PCS. His love of the theatre and the theater he (until today) worked for were both evident from the start.  That Mead is leaving both (At least in a professional capacity) is definitely a loss. He seems pretty sanguine about the whole thing, but it makes me quite sad.

Second, Sheila Callaghan is leaving Brooklyn for LA on Sunday to start work on The United States of Tara. Crazy! (In oh so many ways). You can read about it here. I hope she keeps finding time to write plays!

Finally, I forgot to mention this on Friday, but I got the SDCF Observership for Coraline at MCC.  It's been a show I've been looking forward to seeing ever since it was announced, so I couldn't be more stoked to actually be involved in it.  There's so many artists working on it whom I admire-- Leigh Silverman, Christine Jones, Jayne Houdyshell, Stephen Merritt, David Greenspan etc.  As an Observer my job is somewhat amorphous (I am sort-of an assistant), but I'll be in every rehearsal. As rehearsals are six days a week during the day, blogging will probably decrese around here a bit, I'm going to try to blog either before or after rehearsals as much as possible, and might be bringing on some co-writers.

Parallel Conversations

Similar to our discussion of the value of MFAs, I give you "Just Don't Go" a two part article about the fruitlessness of going to graduate school in the Humanities.  Here's a taste (emph mine):

Most undergraduates don't realize that there is a shrinking percentage of positions in the humanities that offer job security, benefits, and a livable salary (though it is generally much lower than salaries in other fields requiring as many years of training). They don't know that you probably will have to accept living almost anywhere, and that you must also go through a six-year probationary period at the end of which you may be fired for any number of reasons and find yourself exiled from the profession. They seem to think becoming a humanities professor is a reliable prospect — a more responsible and secure choice than, say, attempting to make it as a freelance writer, or an actor, or a professional athlete — and, as a result, they don't make any fallback plans until it is too late.

Part one is here. Part two is here.

These are both tip of the ole hattola to a new (to me) blog called Gerry Canavan. 

Your thoughts?

... adding, let me just say that I don't know how i fall out on the whole advanced-degree thing.  I've applied for MFA programs in the past, so clearly there's been times when I wanted to go, or at least wanted to explore going.  I certainly think the way they've become increasingly a career requirement is not so great, but i certainly don't fault people for wanting to go and get them. 

I Don' Think David Hayter's Doing His Film Many Favors...

...In an open letter attempt to boost the sales of Watchmen at the B.O., David Hayter writes:

All this time, you’ve been waiting for a director who was going to hit you in the face with this story. To just crack you in the jaw, and then bend you over the pool table with this story. With its utterly raw view of the darkest sides of human nature, expressed through its masks of action and beauty and twisted good intentions. Like a fry-basket full of hot grease in the face. Like the Comedian on the Grassy Knoll. I know, I know...

You say you don't like it. You say you've got issues. I get it.

And yet... You'll be thinking about this film, down the road. It'll nag at you. How it was rough and beautiful. How it went where it wanted to go, and you just hung on. How it was thoughtful and hateful and bleak and hilarious. And for Jackie Earle Haley.

Trust me. You'll come back, eventually. Just like Sally.

Might as well make it count for something.

In an apology appended to the letter he writes:

 I am certainly not advocating violence against women of any kind. My sole intent was to reference one of the most complex, controversial and interesting issues in the story imho -- The nature of the relationship between Sally and the Comedian, and likening that complexity to some people's reaction to the film. It was meant more in the spirit of speaking to those who are truly entwined with the heart of the story -- A horrific act, that ends in a love story. I sincerely apologize for any offense.

I think the issue here is less that I felt that he was advocating for violence against women (which I think he pretty obviously wasn't) but rather that he was glibly using an attempted rape scene in his movie as a metaphor for how awesome his movie is. 

The Difference Between Difficult and Offensive

Reader Marilyn helpfully provided a link to this article in the Nation by Alysa Solomon and Tony Kushner discussing Seven Jewish Children.  The article gets at something that's been gnawing at me for awhile (and not just about this play) and puts it into eloquent words. Namely, that there is a difference between something being difficult or painful to hear and something being offensive (in this case, anti-semitic).  A fuzzy and precarious line? Sure! But we should be careful not to avoid the former in trying to eschew the latter.  Here's Solomon and Kushner:

Though you'd never guess from the descriptions offered by its detractors, the play is dense, beautiful, elusive and intentionally indeterminate. This is not to say that the play isn't also direct and incendiary. It is. It's disturbing, it's provocative, but appropriately so, given the magnitude of the calamity it enfolds in its pages. Any play about the crisis in the Middle East that doesn't arouse anger and distress has missed the point.

The now-rote hysteria with which non-Israeli criticism of Israel is met--most recently dismayingly effective in quashing Chas Freeman as President Obama's nominee to chair the National Intelligence Council--has a considerable and ignoble record of stifling opinion and preventing unintimidated, meaningful discussion, in the cultural sphere as well as in the political. The power of art to open us to the subjectivities of others is especially threatening to those who insist on a single narrative. Hence efforts to shut down exhibitions of Palestinian art all over the country, most notoriously, perhaps, in 2006, when Brandeis University officials removed paintings by Palestinian teenagers from a campus library exhibit, "The Arts of Building Peace."

[snip]

There are passages, particularly in an ugly monologue near the play's conclusion, that are terribly painful to experience, especially for Jews.

It's difficult to imagine that the author didn't intend to court outrage, whether or not she anticipated its ferocity. This imputes nothing to Churchill of the mischievous or sensationalistic. Her play's political ambitions are at least as important as its aesthetic ambitions. Moreover, it would be disingenuous and, in a sense, a betrayal of Seven Jewish Children to insist upon a calm, quiet reading or hearing free from the voluble passions it has enflamed. The fury that rises up around this conflict, and the cowed silence that is that fury's inevitable concomitant, are simultaneously the object and subject of the play. It's an incitement to speech and an examination of silence; in its content and through its inevitably controversial reception, it describes what can and cannot be said.

Read the whole thing, it's worth it. Anyway, one of the interesting distinctions they make here is between something saying something about Jews that Jews might not enjoy hearing and someone saying something anti-semitic.  I think we're in general trained to see those two things as the same. But they're not.

When Churchill says that she considers it a matter of "fact" that a historically persecuted people have become persecutors, that's not anti-semitic. It is, however, difficult to hear. It's a direct challenge to a lot of fundamental stuff about Jewish identity and our history.

I think in general it's a good thing that we attempt to be respectful of one another that, particularly when dealing with people who come from a history of oppression, we try to not use the power dynamics to our own advantage. And that we make a good faith effort not to be boneheaded.  But there is a difference between that and keeping silent for fear of causing offense.  Moreover, by conflating (in this case) anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, defenders of Israel's actions are specifically trying to get people to silence themselves for fear of causing offense.

But again, there's a difference there. This actually reminded me of some of the debates that Scott Walters and I used to have about the content of plays, and to what extent challenging one's community is a worthwhile goal. I think one of the ways he and I ended up talking past each other in that debate is that I was talking about saying things that might be difficult to hear, while he was talking about saying things for the purpose of offending people. I don't think at the time we really realized we were talking about two different things. But they are different.

Monday Morning Music

More Seven Jewish Children Coverage

This time from the Washington Post. Peter Marks certainly seems to have attended a provocative evening of theatre. I also find it interesting that Seven Jewish Children is apparently so (insert word here... powerful/hateful/dangerous/provocative/stupid/anti-semitic/reductive/brilliant/searing/terrible/controversial/whatever you want will do but whatever it it is so that) that it has to be surrounded by:

(A) A speech twice its length from the artistic director about his conflicts in putting on the piece

(B) THREE separate response plays written in a parody of its style expressing contrary viewpoints

(C) A professor who was saved from the Holocaust by fleeing to Palestine to rail against it

Does that seem a little extreme to anyone else? I don't think having other plays expressing another viewpoint is bad. I didn't even find the Corrie counter-programming bad on principal if it was handled well, as it seems to have been in this case. But when roughly one sixth of the performance is the title show and then five sixths of it are things arguing against it...that just seems a bit extreme to me. Clearly, conversation came out of it,  but 

I was also wondering, anyone who was there, or Peter Marks, if you're reading: Were the actual issues of Israel and Palestine discussed? Everything in the article is about the play, I'm just wondering if the whole conversation was about the play or not?

More Strange Seven Jewish Children Coverage

This time from Bloomberg. The coverage is mainly an opinionated summary of one performance/discussion of the show at NYTW.  Like me, the writer's "baloney detector" goes off when work is overly contextualized and thus somewhat "defanged".  And he has some interesting things to say in charting his own reactions to the piece (he's not a fan, but there's clearly something about the intensity of the writing that he finds appealing).

But there's a strange part of the article where Jeremy Gerard discusses the post show conversation thusly:

As fodder for a public forum, however, it was a dud. The “conversation” was led by Laura Flanders, a feminist writer and cable television host who made an unconvincing stab at neutrality (“It’s really a play for all of us”) before urging the conversation toward a pro-Palestinian point of view. She was abetted by an audience plant, identified as “Connie,” who helpfully described the U.S. as “the most rapacious empire the world has ever seen” and Israel as “an unsinkable aircraft carrier for U.S. imperialist policy” as if she were reading the menu from a nearby restaurant in Alphabet City.

Trying to be charitable here for a moment, I'll just assume that Gerard chose his words poorly and that his editor didn't catch it.  How else to explain describing someone in the audience as a "plant" when there's no evidence to back up the assertion?  Calling Connie a plant (and putting her name in scare quotes) makes it seem as if Laura Flanders and NYTW put her there for the purpose of speaking out for a specific point of view, something I highly doubt happened.  Furthermore, her having prepared remarks to say during the Q+A doesn't make her a plant; people do that sort of thing all the time.  Another question begged is... if she is a "plant", who planted her there and to what end?   

Describing her in such terms with no evidence to back up the opinion and then putting her name in scare quotes is a way of delegitimizing her opinion, because it makes it seem as if she's somehow being dishonest as opposed to expressing her viewpoint.  And this leads me to wonder... would Gerard use the same terms to describe her were she not expressing the beliefs she expresses?  Perhaps so, but it's odd to see such an evaluation of someone without any evidence provided to back up the assertion.

The Hazards of Love

The Decemberists are moving backwards in time.

This isn’t necessarily a surprise; Colin Meloy and his band of merry musicians has always been backward-looking in the best of ways, appropriating verbal styles, ideas and images from yesteryear with aplomb.  Castaways and Cutouts and Her Majesty The Decemberists both followed similar templates.  Sounding as if Edward Gorey had commissioned Belle and Sebastian and Morrissey to write him an album together, both were filled with ironically deployed macabre images of sunken ships and dancing ghost fetuses.  They were largely lovely twee affairs, with hints at grander ambitions with the jammed out, almost-Phish flavor of California One/Youth and Beauty Brigade, the straight up oceanic sprawl of Shanty for the Arethusa and the grandiose and increasingly anarchic Odalisque and I Was Meant for the Stage.

As they switched labels and embraced a larger following, Meloy et al.’s ambitions for their material have similarly grown. The songs have gotten longer, the narratives more elaborate, the lyrics thornier. Running along side of this has been music that has moved backwards from the mid-90s to take on classic rawk riffing and early prog complexity.   It is in both of these spirits that The Decemberists have created The Hazards of Love, a rock opera/song cycle that takes its lyrical cues from Lord Byron and musically is deeply embedded in territory charted by The Who, Led Zepplin and (especially) Jethro Tull. The end result is an album about a love triangle in a mythical forest that you can air guitar to. This album may prove a line in the sand some of The Decemberists’ fans are unwilling to cross, but I admire it even if it is not entirely successful.

The Jethro Tull comparison is actually particularly apt here. Like Tull, The Decemberists started with a first album that explored some of the possible directions the band could take, only to grow increasingly literary in their ambitions (or, to detractors, pretensions) and increasingly rock-oriented musically.  And both groups released as their fifth album sprawling, narrative-based concept albums.  In Tull’s case, it was Thick As A Brick, a forty-five minute long song that changed musical styles while impressionistically tackling themes of war, class and memory.  For The Decemberists, it’s The Hazards of Love, originally conceived as a musical, now rendered as a seventeen-song album. As a theatre blogger, I was sent a copy of the album to review because of its somewhat theatrical nature.

Unfortunately, the album does not really work as a self-contained piece of narrative art.  It feels ultimately like a musical that’s missing its book. Careful study of the lyrics reveals the rough shape of its story, which I’m pretty sure is something like this: A young virginal woman named Margaret rescues a wounded fawn. It changes shape becomes a man and a sexual encounter (level of consent unclear) ensues.  Margaret gets pregnant and runs away to the woods (the child born of this pregnancy is never mentioned again in the piece as far as I can tell). There she meets William, who falls in love with her. They have some amorous songs, and William begs his mother the Queen the freedom to love Margaret, which she, having rescued him from the “world of men” is not particularly happy about. A Rake enters the narrative.  The Rake, having married once and murdered all of his children, now is all about abducting beautiful women and thus captures Margaret.  The Queen reenters and reveals that William was the Fawn (I think?) and that she’s grateful to the Rake for removing the temptation from William’s life.  William is not so sanguine about the whole affair though and beseeches the water to let him across to rescue her, promising the water his life in return.  He rescues Margaret (the ghosts of the Rake’s dead children come and take him to the afterlife) and then they get married and drown.

There is no way to figure out the above story just from listening to the album. It takes a lot of re-listening and quite a bit of reading of the lyrics before the plot really begins to take shape, and even then on a narrative structure level, the thing doesn’t make the most sense in the world. Many of the relationships between the characters are underdeveloped. Further confusion arises from the choice to have the male roles all played by Meloy, while the female roles are split amongst several guest vocalists. Not that working to appreciate art is a bad thing, but I’m not sure that having figured the story out my appreciation of the album is much deeper.

Musically, the album is straightforward in its classic rock appropriations. There’s nary a sea shanty in sight. The title track establishes a musical motif straight out of The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes (or even Bon Jovi’s Dead or Alive) while the Queen’s two appearances push the album into Heart territory.  The organ riffs that bridge various musical moments recall Jethro Tull while the bombastic guitar of Chris Funk routinely calls to mind Led Zepplin.  The album’s lone single The Rake’s Song recalls Cat Power’s Free beefed up with propulsive near-tribal drumming, a screaming chorus and fuzzy bass work.

Of course, the idea that there would be a single for The Hazards of Love is kind of absurd. Amongst the greatest joys of this album is that it is an album. It has a cohesive vision, an experiential arc (even if it doesn’t quite have a narrative one), and thematic resonance.  This might make it quaint to some in the age of MySpace, but frankly, I think it makes the effort noble.  Many musicians and songwriters lament the Death of the Album; few actively try to resurrect it.

Several of the songs also work on an individual level, even if doing so is beside the point. The Rake’s Song is both hilarious and hideous to listen to. It features some of Meloy’s cleverest lyrics (I bow down at the twin-alliteration of: “I was wedded and it whetted my thirst/Until her womb started spilling out babies/ Only then did I reckon my curse”) and more of his trademark macabre humor, punctuated by the band shouting “All right!” three times after each verse.  Musically, Annan Water with its mix between pulsing accordion and mandolin, droning hurdy-gurdy and strumming acoustic guitar is a shimmering, aquatic marvel. On the final track, as William and Margaret slowly drown and sing of their love, the album floats away into alt-country territory, trading Jenny Conlee’s muscular organ work for pedal steel, banjo and what the liner notes refer to as “Nashville guitar”. 

The Hazards of Love is, ultimately, not the Grand Statement it sets out to be. For one thing, as with many of Colin Meloy’s more baroque lyrical journeys, the piece lacks much in the way of deeper meaning.   For another, it does not quite land as a narrative work.  It is, however, quite gorgeous, the best sounding Decemberists recording since their first album.  The frequent appearance of dropped-D acoustic guitar, the warm, rich production work and the frequent appearance of vocal harmony all lend it a kind of elegance that smartly makes the album very approachable even as it asks a lot of the listener.

While it does not quite succeed at its ambitions, it’s refreshing to listen to an album that is so upfront about having ambitions in the first place. For all of their storied irony and twee genre quotation, The Decemberists remain passionately dedicated to following Meloy’s restless imagination and relentless creativity, and in The Hazards of Love, this journey has lead them to an uneven but ultimately rewarding work.

Jeffrey Goldberg and Ari Roth on "Seven Jewish Children"

Jeffrey Goldberg debates his friend Ari Roth's decision to do "Seven Jewish Children" at Theatre J.  Here's the interview between the two. I personally want to know Goldberg's list of the eight playwrights living today who are better than Caryl Churchill.  

I do want to point out one thing Goldberg says right at the beginning, because I think it's a good example of the lengths Zionists will go to use accusations of anti-Semitism to shut down debate:

I think she moves into an area that she has to know has this very, very terrible historic resonance. It's associating Jews with the spilling of innocent blood. She knows what that means and I think it kind of feeds into, obviously, the very worst and most dangerous stereotypes about Jews. How they revel in non-Jewish blood. 

Churchill didn't "associate" Jews with the spilling of innocent blood, that actually happened. An army made up of Jews at the behest of a Jewish state (support for which Zionists like Goldberg have been equating with Jewish identity in general for years) went and spilled a whole shitload of innocent blood. Israel's incursion into Gaza had an extremely high civilian death toll count (and an extremely high percentage of casualties coming from civilian populations).  What Goldberg is saying here is that by bringing that up, and by noting that Zionists were proud of Israel's actions in Gaza (and many were, and publicly demonstrated pride and "solidarity" during the conflict) Churchill is perpetrating the Blood Libel. Well, I'm sorry Jeffrey, but Zionists don't get to conflate Zionism with Judaism, applaud and explain away the blockading and enforced starvation of a people and then cheer on an invasion in which hundreds of civilians die unnecessarily and then turn around and say "if you call us on it, you're an anti-semite".  

Is Churchill's eliding of Zionism and Jewishness in general problematic?  I feel a little torn about this. When I first read it, it didn't strike me as anti-semitic at all. Several of my commenters, however, took issue with the conflation in the text between "Jewish" and, essentially "Likudnik" as the play goes on.  I think that's worth exploring and discussing. Particularly since there's all sorts of interesting questions that come out of that: Is Churchill playing with and cleverly exploring the Jewish/Zionist conflation that Zionists frequently use in an interesting way, or is she saddling all Jews with the guilt of Israel's actions? As a Jew, I feel a certain responsibility for actions taken in my name and for my supposed "defense" and to speak out on them, is that any different? What does it mean to be a Jew in the age of Israel? How much are we still "a people" and what defines that? 

Quote of the Day

Bush, famously, described his first budget by saying, "It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it." Indeed it was, and did. This isn't. There are no numbers. Let me repeat that: The Republican budget proposal does not say how much money they would raise, or spend. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a "budget" as "an estimate of income and expenditure for a set period of time." This is not a budget. It talks about balancing the budget but doesn't explain how. It advocates tax cuts but doesn't estimate their costs. It promises to cut programs but doesn't name them. The threat going around the Capitol is that some impish Democratic chairman will ask the CBO to try and score the Republican proposal.

-- Ezra Klein, here. The GOP now behaves like its the cast of a leftist satire of the GOP in a Fringe show or something.