Parabasis

Interesting Interview with David Adjmi

Can be found at Tablet, a new website about modern Jewish identity.

Our Long National Nightmare is Over!

Norm Coleman concedes!

I Think That's What My People Call "Chutzpah"

Netanyahu offers to freeze settlements! Uh, except for the fact that:

• It's only for 3-6 months

• It's conditional on a bunch of shit that's going to happen

• It's not actually a settlement freeze, as it doesn't include anything currently being constructed or the entirety of East Jerusalem

In other news, I'm offering you all a free sandwich. The following conditions apply:

• You must walk to my office in midtown to get the free sandwich

• I will only be giving out free sandwiches until 2Pm

• You must give me five dollars for the free sandwich.

RIP Pina Bausch

Sad news. Read about it here.

Today's Must Read

August Schulenberg's On Quality, Value and Criticism, which can be found here. It's long, and difficult to exerpt, so let's just say it's an attempt to begin a conversation about artistic quality amidst all the talk in the theatrosphere about models, getting the younguns in etc. The basic premise, and I agree with it, ist hat we don't spend a lot of time talking about artistic quality because it's... well... tough to talk about something so subjective. So Gus tries to get the ball rolling.

There's a lot in there, and I hope he writes more on each point, I just want to quickly address for myself something he says when talking about critiqueing each other's work:

But how do we imagine ourselves within another company when it is so difficult to critique work within our own? Flux has annual and post-play post-mortems, but they focus entirely on the process of producing, not on the quality of artistic decisions. And this is, of course, because feelings get hurt. And yet we must improve the quality of work, and we can do that best by talking about it.

So how do you talk about it within your company? Do you use the Liz Lerman Critical Reponse Process? Do you just say the ugly truth and wound each other terribly and then recover over beers to do the whole thing over again, like Valhalla? How do you do it?

I can't speak from the perspective of being within a company, because I'm not, but I'll just say that in discussions with theatre artists of my generation I hear-- and share-- a great deal of discomfort if not outright disillusionment with the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process. If anything, many I talk to think it's basically used these days as a way to avoid having authentic conversations about work. And many playwrights I know are made incredibly uneasy by it, because they basically feel like people responding to their work are, essentially, hiding what they really feel about it in an effort to make the process work.

When I receive notes from people as a director, I expect them to be both direct and considerate. Both of those are important. We have this weird association in our society between honesty and assholitry. A good example of this would be Ethan Hawke's character in Reality Bites. We all know the type-- "hey, man, I'm just being honest" when in fact the value of honesty is used to basically be inconsiderate and cruel. Fuck that, I have no patience for that shit, you can tell the truth and not be a dick about it.

You have to ask yourself when offering an opinion on something-- why am I saying this? What goal do I have with this note? If your goal is to actually affect the thing you're talking about for the better, than you must on some level also be concerned with being heard.  If you aren't heard, by which I do not mean the sound waves pass out of your mouth, vibrate the air and are received into the ear where they're translated into signals in the brain but rather someone actually takes what you say and considers it honestly and discusses it with you, than what you said doesn't matter. A lot of people say shit to just say shit. It's a pervasive problem.

If you want to be heard, you have to give feedback in a way that allows it to be heard. And that way is going to change in a way that's contextually dependent on who you're talking to, where, around who else etc. Which is why I think the Liz Lerman Process feels a bit off to me... my conversations with Dan Trujillo, a writer I've worked with many times, co-produced work with, acted with, directed his material, acted in his material etc. are going to be very different with my conversations with Gus about his work, given that he and I have (sort-of) worked together once, and both like each other but aren't close friends.

And there's another problem, which might be subject to another post, which has to do with the lack of honesty in our responses to each other, the common problems of thinned-skinnedness and taking things personally etc. This is why, as I think I said in an earlier post a year or so ago, i don't tend to offer my opinion on people's work (to them anyway) unless they ask me, and then I try to respond honestly. If they dont' indicate they want my opinion, that's okay, there's usually others who do and I can talk about it with them.

Stunning

Stunning might not be the best play I've seen this year, but it's certainly the most exciting. Even the parts of it that are problematic are problematic in fascinating and exciting ways. And the first act is just fucking flawless. Stunning, even. And Cristin Miloti is amazing.  Go see it. It just extended until the 11th.

Blogroll Awesomeness

Hey Guess what?  We just added a bunch of blogs to the ole 'roll due to reader suggestions. Thanks for writing them in. If you've got more, keep 'em coming!

On The Dearth Of Female Critics...

Tom Laughlin, in the comments to an earlier post, writes:

Amidst all this talk about discrimination and sexism in American theatre on so many levels, I'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts about the relative lack of female theatre critics and bloggers. I went through your blogroll this morning, and my unscientific poll revealed that 29 of the bloggers listed are male, 12 female (one blog is a male/female partnership, but even though the male seems to write more I gave it to the female). And apparently all the blogger/critics who write or have written for the NYC press are male (Cote, Jacobs, RWK, Teachout, Isherwood, etc.). Since the internet is open to all, why is this particular phenomenon happening? I'd be interested in your take on this matter. TIA. -twl

(First off, forgive my acronym ignorance, but does TIA mean thanks in advance? thai initiative accumulate? torridness is awesome?.. it took me the better part of amonth to figure out what RTWT means, it's just something I'm bad at)

Anyway, it's a good question. I should just say my own blog roll is a really bad determinant here, as I would gladly and freely admit I have a terrible blogroll. I hate updating it. I basically only add new blogs to it when people e-mail me to ask if I'd add them to the blogroll. Every four months or so I think Today is the day I redo my blogroll! And then I never do it.  So if you're a blogger wondering why you're not on my blogroll, I apologize in advance. E-mail me if you want to be on it at parabasisnyc[at]gmail[dot]com if it really irks ya and i'll put you on it.

i don't know, in other words, if there's a dearth of female theatre blog writers. most of the ones i read are, now that i come to think about it, by men.  i don't know if that means that most of the ones being written are by men, but it's also worth differentiating between blogging and being a paid critic. For the part, anyone can start a blog without anyone else's permission or hiring them to do it.  If there are fewer female (or Black or Asian or anything else) bloggers on a particular subject, it reflects something different than if there are fewer female critics at daily newspapers. 

As to the other point... there are very few female first string critics in this country, and the point's been raised a few places (most recently on a dramaturgy listserv discussion of the gender bias study).  In New York, there's Elisabeth Vincentelli and Linda Winer (for the Post and Newsday respectively) that I can think of off the top of my head. Some places-- like Backstage-- I'm really unclear who the first stringer is. 

Many places have female second (or even third) stringers or regular freelances. Clearly, this is an issue. And, like the race of critics issue, it probably has some impact on the shape of the theatre scene. But I think, just like how beauty magazines both promote unreasonable beauty expectations of women and take advantage of those already existing expectations to make money, it's a pretty circular issue.

I agree, fwiw (what does that mean? five wookies inside Waziristan??) that this is a problematic state of affairs. i don't know what to do about it necessarily.

Theatre as Case Study?

If you're someone who is interested in workplace discrimination, equal employment opportunity, bias and affirmative action issues (as I happen to be right now) theatre makes for an interesting counter-factual case study. Why? Because there aren't class-action lawsuits against theaters fort discrimination.

I'm not suggesting there should be, but it's interesting to think about it in this context. In many other industries, there have been big ole class action lawsuits, it's one of the main ways that employment discrimination laws get enforced. But not theatre.  To more Conservative thinkers, claims employment discrimination is overblown and we are an overly litigious society.  The idea put forth is that what discrimination does exist is the cause of a few bad actors and the more mundane stuff can be solved by giving "everyone a fair shot" (by which they mean eliminating affirmative action), punishing the few people who are truly bad and have negative intent and working the other stuff out on a more peer-to-peer level.

Well, here we have the American Theatre (not the magazine, obviously, the theatre system) which is not only staffed by well-meaning liberals (the exact kind of people who should be trusted to voluntarily enforce equal opportunity rules) but doesn't have to deal with those pernitious, poisonous lawsuits, why not study it to see how that whole diversity and equality thing is working out?

I would guess that the end result would be a rather good example of how intentions don't really matter when it comes to discrimination. Or, to put it another way, that even though our theaters are largely staffed with well meaning liberals, there's still entrenched, institutionalized discrimination, discrimination of effect rather than cause.  I might be wrong about that, that's just my guess of what such a study would show, but I have a feeling ultimately the evidence would point to the fact that we need more than good intentions to create equality and diversity.

NYTimes on Female Directors

In the midst of the American Theatre's Institutionalized Sexism discussion, here comes the Times with a piece about how it's been a (relatively) good year for female directors.  Check it here.

I Want To Make Something Really Clear

As a follow up on everything we've talking about here...

I don't hate institutions. i don't want them to go away. I don't want to blow them up. I want them to do their jobs better and in ways that are healthier for theatre in America.  I also want to be taken seriously by them, both as an artist and as a thinker.  I am not on any level a revolutionary, I'm a reformer. And, ultimately, I'm a pragmatist.  I do think that having big, even pie-in-the-sky ideas is a good thing, but I am ultimately concerned with how can we most effectively make things better in this country for theatre, and some of those changes have to come outside of theatre entirely (This would be the arts advocacy part of what I do), changes from funders or civic leaders etc. And some of those changes have to come from within theatre.

I was thinking some more about David Dower's post that I link to below... And where I said that institutions, should they choose to act for the good could have larger impacts and where I felt the burden was on them. I want to give one example:

One major problem facing theatre right now is the lack of opportunities for actors of color.  It's one that I feel very personally, and one I am committed to working to solve.  I don't think I've directed a play (other than The Last Five Years, but I was a replacement director on that) since 2003 that didn't have at least one actor of color in it.  Great, so there's a personal thing I can do to help make this slightly better.  Personal Virtue, as its called, is important. It's important to have Cap And Trade and for people to use less energy. It's important to have better regulations w/r/t agriculture and for people to eat less meat, and eat organic food.  (For more on this, read Michael Pollan'sa paean to personal virtue here).

But at the same time, it's worth noting that while it's important on some level that I work to cast actors of color, it's also very important that larger theaters that can give actors more money, more exposure and different opportunities work to cast more actors of color. So while I myself am making my personal casting decisions, I'm also looking around at the all-white casts (and all-white seasons) of theaters and complaining about it because I think it's scandalous (or should be).  Doing both of these things is important.  One is an example of looking up from my desk and trying to do what I can to affect change in theatre using the means I have control over.  The other is most definitely not. But they're both valuable.

Stunning

I just saw Stunning at LCT3 last night and I really really dug it. Not that it's perfect or anything, but you really should go see it if you get the chance. It just extended for two weeks, so there should be tickets on sale.  

Just to follow up from that last post and talk about something good that institutions are doing... One really positive recent development here in New York has been the creation of smaller theaters within larger theaters.  LCT3 and Roundabout Underground are both great initiatives. The Public is trying to do a lot of showcasing of work that's not sort of part of their official season.  There's SecondStage Uptown which on a taste level, I like the least, but it showcases work by up-and-comers etc.   It seems to me that the idea of the "second stage" is entering a kind of 2.0 phase with the above that's exciting. 

A Good Post From David Dower

Can be found here, in which he talks amongst other things about the positive value of institutions. I hope I've been clear here over the past couple of weeks that even when discussing what so frustrates me about institutions, I recognize the positive value that they can have. I just think it's worth understanding them and their (perhaps inherent) drawbacks as well.

I think most of the post is really good stuff, but I have to part ways with it around here:

The point, in my view, is missed and as a result, an opportunity lost. The issue is not locked boxes for actor endowments or blowing up the buildings or turning more artists into administrators or whatever zero-sum proposal-du-jour causes a mini-stink in the blog and theater presses, (again, in my view). It is about a collective failure of the field to marshall all our abundant resources around rational models of working together to advance the form. 

The idea behind, say, endowed chairs for actors is about more effectively marshalling "our abundant resources" around a rational model of working together to advance the form.  The idea of funding people over buildings is that the previous way of doing business is not a rational way of working together to advance the form. David may disagree with this for whatever reason, but to dismiss it as beside the point is to miss what the point of it is. 

Then David asks:

It is a new day for so many communities and industries in this country. Perhaps we can make it ours as well.  Can we stop grinding the same old tunes, working the same list of complaints, move beyond the competitive frame, and start moving purposefully toward effectiveness as a field? Can we celebrate and engage successes, even if they aren't our own? Can we look up from our own desktops and beyond our own immediate horizon to find the things that need to be done and set about doing them?  And share what we discover in the doing? 

To which all I can say is... Sure, yes, I would like that.  I think most theatre bloggers would like that. In fact, I think there are a lot of ideas that have been generated on theatre blogs over the past five years that would be interesting and worth trying out.  I think a lot of people involved in the peripatetic theatre communities would like that and have tried generating some intersting work, models, theories etc. In fact, the ideas that David is so quick to dismiss in the earlier quote are all examples of that.

The point, ultimately, of this post of mine about how separate different kinds of theatre have gotten was to argue that they should be less separate.  But here's the thing, and here's where I think David and I might disagree.  I don't mean to sound like a victim here, but the burden of action is on the institutions. They have the money, they have the power, they have the press coverage and they are what represents "theatre" to the public eye.   I think that smaller theaters and independent artists also need to be doing the things that David is talking about, but it's worth noting the amount of impact their actions are going to have is going to be greatly reduced if larger theaters aren't also trying to answer David's questions with "yes".

Some are, and deserve enormous amounts of praise.  But some are simply attempting to hold on to their fiefdoms (or empires, depending on size) for dear life.  I think the reasons why they're doing this are understandable (again, I don't hate all institutions or anything) but it's worth talking about when it happens. When you direct a show, you don't only give positive feedback, when you talk about solving something, you have to talk about what you're trying to solve. 

I can't help but feel that David is essentially arguing that people should stop complaining about what institutions are doing wrong, recognize the things they do right and move forward with trying to affect positive change. But I can't help but feeling that only doing that would lead to perpetuating the status quo. Positive change that I enact at the Red Room on a tuesday night at 10PM does very little to affect our industry. One of the things institutions need is people outside of them fighting with them a big to keep them honest. I think successes need to be recognized, sure, but there are some systemic problems with our industry, and they have to be discussed. 

If Scientists Wrote Titles...

The studies i'm reading up on for my job tend to have titles like:

Implicit Bias Among Physicians and its Prediction of Thrombolysis Decisions for Black and White Patients

or

The Consequences of Race for Police Officers' Responses for Criminal Suspects

This lead me to wonder what might happen if scientists wrote titles for plays or novels.  What might they come up with?

I remember Dan Trujillo, back when he blogged, joking about how to plot summarize Hamlet for a press release (his answer was something like "A Danish Prince debates who to kill for three hours, kills everybody.") Anyway... consider this a comment-thread post...

How would scientists title your favorite plays and novels?

I'm thinking The Impact of Fate On Royalty and Incest in Ancient Thebes for Oedipus. 

or What Are The Relationships Between Tennis, Entertainment, Depression and Drug Addiction in Post-Modern Consciousness for Infinite Jest.

But I'm sure you can come up with some better and much funnier ones.

Michele Bachman... The Gift that Keeps On Giving

It's really awesome for Democrats that this person is an elected Republican and a rising public voice of the party.  I mean, it's amazing. She starts with some maybe-reasonable privacy concerns (how do we make sure that census data stays private) and ends up with... well, just watch it. If I was ACORN, I'd want this person as my enemy.  I like how they use the term "ACORN" like it means "UNITED SATANIST ORGANIZATION":

Michael Jackson, RIP

I find myself in a very strange place, emotionally speaking, about the death of Michael Jackson. I loved Michael growing up, Bad when it came out rocked my world. My older brother had the coat and the glove and I thought that made him the coolest cat on Earth (the image is less funny when you remember that my older brother is black).  

But it's odd... I'm not sad because we'll never get a great Michael Jackson album or song again. That wasn't going to happen anyway, he was deep into an artistic decline he was, all hopes aside, clearly never going to get out of. His ability, in other words, to enrich the world through his creativity will be unharmed by his death. And there's the whole possibly-being-a-pedophile thing.

I think what makes the death of MJ sad to me is that he almost certainly died very unhappy and, from a mental health standpoint, deeply unwell.  That all the money in the world couldn't fix his broken childhood. That, like with David Foster Wallace in a weird way, his immense gifts were not ultimately the source of any kind of redemption for him.

I'll also say the way the Don't think twice/Do think twice WOO! in Billie Jean puts three against two is masterful. And as delightful as the huge gestures in his songs are, those little grace notes, those mini moments of mastery are part of what set him apart as an artist.

More on the Gender Bias Study

One of the (unwitting and female) participants in the study is raising some methodological issues on a theatre-related listserv. Anonymized money quote:

... First, the samples were incredibly short.  I remember being asked whether or not I thought the characters were likable, and thinking, "How the hell do I know? They each have, like, three lines."  The samples were not proofed for spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors-- not the deliberate kind, btw; after all these years, I can surely tell the difference-- and that made me, as it always does, grumpy.  That, in combination with the shortness of the samples, made me conclude that these were in all likelihood very amateur scripts.  The shortness is relevant because the samples weren't even close to long enough to get a feel for the arc of the play, the characters, or even to adequately assess the quality of the writing, errors aside.  I had very little to go on.  I know and like the writing of the women whose samples, as it turns out, I was reading, and, in retrospect, the samples, in my opinion, did not reflect the quality I'm used to seeing from them.

Additionally, we were asked to rate how likely we were to slot such a play and how much we thought our company and marketing people would be behind it, but we were never asked why we thought those things.  I would have appreciated being able to-- at the very least-- choose from a list of things detailing why we were interested or uninterested.  "Wouldn't fit in our theatre space" and/or "No roles for our resident actors" are honest, practical answers that complicate the idea of gender bias in assessing interest.  This is different than "It sucked," which, of course, is very prone to biases of all sorts.

I remember also being asked how well we thought this or that script fit our company's mission, but never asked what that mission was or why we thought it would or wouldn't fit.  Some companies, my own included, have very specific missions that eliminate certain scripts regardless of quality.  This score must have been included in the aggregate, and I think the honest answers would complicate the notion of gender bias. Many of us surely rated some scripts very low in this category for reasons other than quality, just as some would surely rate them higher
for reasons other than quality.

The writer also mentions that she recommended a female playwright, namely Sheila Callaghan, to the people doing the study. She also mentions that she's generally supportive of the efforts behind the study and is not dismissive of the idea of gender bias in theatre, but simply would like to see the study redone with better methodology.

I personally wish, having looked over some of the study, that they had had more theatre people involved in devising it. A professional theatre person would've told you that doollee at its best is roughly as reliable as the low-end of wikipedia, and someone with some experience in the institutional dramaturgy world could probably have filled them in on how to design the gendered submissions in a more real-to-life way.

That being said, I certainly don't think one e-mail to a listserv invalidates the study, and I think that at least in general terms the bias study still seems sound and it does back up the facts on the ground in terms of the fate of female playwrights today.

The Only Thing I Have To Say About the Sanford Thing (For Now, Anyway)

There appears to be no worse job in American Politics than Religious Right-annointed up-and-coming star in the Republican Party.  First they went gaga over Palin and then.. she turned out to be a disaster. Then they went gaga over Jindal, an dhe turned out to be the love child of Mr. Rogers and Mr. Burns. Now Sanford and... he flames out really dramatically. What's next?

Riddle Me This

i don't get the press' obsession with right wing failures. Newt Gingrich never represented a coalition broader than a small area of Georgia, and he left office in disgrace, yet they constantly go to him for his opinion. Joe Scarborough is a failed congressman from Florida, but he hosts a show on MSNBC. DIck Cheney is asked for his opinion all the time, and the american people neither trust nor like him.
 
And here we have newsweek asking Robert Bork his opinion on Sotomayor. Why?
http://www.newsweek.com/id/202874

Bias! (The Strange Convergence)

I did happen to mention right before the Emily Sands gender bias study dropped that I was doing a big freelance writing project about implicit bias, right? Specifically w/r/t race + its impact on electoral politics and criminal justice?

In case I didn't, the big freelance job I've been working on has been around those issues.  And lemme tell ya, it's fascinating. A lot of my job revolves around reading these academic studies and then writing them up in layman's terms, and then interrelating them, finding the ways they're in conversation with each other etc. 

I can't wait 'til the web component goes live (probably in a couple of months) so I can write more about this stuff. Anyway, I just wanted to point your wayto this quick note from 99 about bias, where he explores what some of the roots of the female-to-female implicit gender bias might be.  It's interesting and perceptiv and I think it's worth noting that the value of the "why" question when it comes to bias is, in social science, public policy and law circles, controversial.  Legally, in the United States, the reasons why discriminiation occurs don't reallyy matter. The Civil Rights Act, for example, compels employers to hire minority applicants even when it is more expensive to do so and the Americans with Disabilities Act forbids employers from hiring discrimination based on worries about affording the accomodations necessary for disabled people, to take two examples of so-called "rational discrimination". 

As we try to reform the cultures of theaters, of course, speculating and investigating the "why" matters, I'm not dismissing 99's point or anything. It's just interesting to suddenly be coming at this bias issue from all sides of my life.