Engage! Enrage!

David Cote threw down a bit of a gauntlet last week on TONY's blog. I have still been recovering from The Honest-to-God True Story of the Atheist as well as trying to be in a concentrated pre-production process for my next show (watch this space!) and starting up work again on that race in American Politics project (in other words making money so I can do theatre) and so it's all been a bit hectic.

But as the piece has been making the rounds of the theatrosphere, I finally think I have some things to say about it.

First off, in case you haven't read it yet, here's what Cote has to say in his "wishlist" for the American theatre:

5. Bloggers: Engage/enrage
This item will generate noise (and that’s the point): I wish bloggers would mix it up more. Does it take a Rachel Corrie fiasco to generate heat? The theater blogosphere has been dull, insular and quiet lately. We need more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights. Not just self-promotion, obscure manifestos and production diaries. And here’s hoping for a new breed of long-form critics worth reading.

There are a lot of posts out there responding to this point. And posts responding to responses.  As always, 99Seats has great stuff here and here. Moxie the Maven responds here. Gus Schulenberg at Flux responds here. Rob Weinert-Kendt has brief words about it here. Matt Freeman here. 

Here's how i feel about this... I am not someone who enjoys argument for it's own sake except about matters of taste. For some reason, I somewhat enjoy argument-as-sport about things that there can never be any real resolution about.  I can find that very fun. Think the guys in the record store in High Fidelity. For example, Abe Goldfarb and I argue about movies constantly. Because we enjoy it. But to me, part of what makes it enjoyable is just the kind of going verbal-chess-with-bazookas quality of it.

When I'm writing on this blog, I try to-- for the most part-- contribute substantively to conversations when I have something to say. So if I'm engaging in an argument about something, it's generally for the purpose of trying to convince someone, or to at least actually express something I care about.  

Some writers really enjoy the white hot intensity of a fervent argument for its own sake. I am not one of them.  Many writers who I respect are. David is, in my experience, one of them. So is Mike Daisey. So is Don Hall. It's fun to them.  It's less fun to me. 

It's especially hard for me to engage on that level about theatre. For reasons 99 talks about in his posts. I want to expand on this a little bit.

Let's say that I want to write a post attempting to engage/enrage and enter into a knock-down drag out fight about New York theatre.  At this point, in order for me to do this, I would probably have to end up attacking someone who is at most 2-3 degrees removed from myself.  I've been writing about and engaging in the NYC theatre scene for awhile now and everyone knows everyone and I'm not exactly at a point in my career where I can afford to go pissing people off willy-nilly.  So my choices become: attack a peer (or their work) or attack a larger theater (or their work). Shit where I live or fuck up my career.  Those are the choices. Don Hall has different choices because he has largely created a community and work environment that he's happy with. Mike Daisey did How Theater Failed America after becoming a prominent solo artist, not before. David Cote is the head theatre guy at a major NYC magazine.  I am a director and a writer at the beginning of my career. My position is very different.

Not being an idiot, and not enjoying bad either/or scenarios, I tend not to post blog posts that will fall into those categories. It's not that I don't think about those things, or have those conversations with friends.  To give one example: A major off-broadway theatre put up a play earlier this year that was clearly unfinished and not ready for production on a script level. Everyone who saw it that I talked to knew it. Several of the people I talked to about it were bloggers.  But we talked about in a bar. Not on the internet. I don't really want to go slagging off a show where the director and light designer were both friends of mine to the end of...what, exactly? It's not like the theater's lit manager is going to write in in my comments and engage with me on the issue of their shitty new work program that does plays that aren't ready for prime time. For what it's worth, I tried to corner their lit manager at the TCG conference so that I could ask him about it, but couldn't find him.

Anyway, the point is is that I have to think at least a little bit strategically here. So this blog won't always say all the shit that goes through my head.  Every now and then I gotta hold back. 

I also think the local-ness of theatre does to some extent handicap these sorts of conversations. Mac Rogers (in an interview in which he says some incredibly flattering things about yours truly) puts his finger on it here:

The hard part is that theater blogging is the weirdest and most contradictory genre of blogging there is. It's a publicly and internationally available exchange of ideas over events that can only be experienced locally. Isaac can host a debate on Watchmen on his blog, but not on the awesome and actually kind of important Dan Trujillo play he just directed, 'cause only local people can even see and experience the Trujillo play. We can't know what Travis or Alison or Don Hall would have thought. They could all read the script, maybe, but not share the event. It's hard to write in a mass media platform about a local, site-specific event. People are still figuring out how to share what they do.

And this makes the conversation that much harder.

I'll also note that, because he asks for heated engagement, Tom Loughlin decides to once again play the Non-NYC Victim Card here:

There is, of course, a subliminal, subconscious pecking order in the blogosphere (in case you hadn’t noticed), which places those people blogging in NYC about NYC theatre (indie and otherwise) as those people who are blogging about the “real” action in theatre. Like most sociological phenomena, it wasn’t consciously created; it just came to be, rather like gender bias. So no matter how much we attempt to “engage and enrage” with the bloggers of NYC, no one there is truly going to take anyone outside the city seriously if we make any suggestions about theatre or how to reform it. I mean, when was the last time you read about a panel on theatre bloggers and theatre blogging which had as one of its participants a blogger from outside NYC? Bloggers like myself who blog outside the realm of NYC are even more on the outside than someone like 99 Seats.

There's some right and a whole lotta wrong with this paragraph. I agree that there is a subliminal pecking order in the blogosphere to some extent, and that it arose somewhat organically. I don't think it's only NYC-based, though. I think the Chicagoans are also given quite a lot of weight.  And I do believe that theatre in New York Skewed and I think that's problematic, I've written about that many times here. However, there's a perfectly mundane reason why theatre blogging panels don't tend to include non-NYC writers... they don't have budgets.  The most I've ever been paid for a panel appearance is $20.  The last time I was on a panel, I was paid in books. The subjects of the panels also tend to be New York Centric. The last one I was on was about The New York Times and the Internet and New York Theatre Coverage.  

Furthermore, David Cote is editor of theatre a magazine called Time Out New York not American Theatre, there's really very little reason why he should be writing in TONY about theatre outside of New York (FWIW, I think AT could do a better job of moving away from an NYC focus).  

I should also pause here to note that I try to keep abreast of what's going on in DC (my home town) to the best of my ability, and as I am traveling for a regional gig this winter, I'll be trying to do more to document the scene there.  Also, I do write about regional theatre for The Drama League, but that writing doesn't appear online and I can't legally reproduce it here. My researching regional theatre seasons does occasionally lead to blog posts here such as "Here Come The Rock Solids". 

Then we get this whopper of a paragraph:

The biggest problem with NYC theatre – one Mr. Cote fails to mention – is that it is doing nothing more than perpetuating the notion, held by the nation at large, that theatre is, by and large, a gay art form written by effete, white, upper-middle-class liberal types who are concerned largely with musicals and with plays where whining characters can’t look up from gazing at their navels long enough to get a real life. It has nothing to say to anyone outside NYC or its own practitioners. It is, furthermore, wholly unconcerned with communicating with ordinary people about national problems such as high unemployment, recession, Wall St. terrorism, unending and useless wars, government secrecy and illegality, racism, poverty, or other national ills (unless, of course, we can turn these topics into a musical). If it does do this, it does so only in a way its own practitioners can understand. It believes we should all be watching 7 hours of Les Ephemeres.

It's kind of hard to respond to vague jeremiads (particularly ones that might not be sincere, but I'll take the bait, what the fuck why not).  First off, I really hope Tom didn't mean to argue that we need to purge teh gay from American Theatre to make it popular again.  Second,  I think there's some stuff in there I might be sympathetic to (i don't like watching irrelevant theatre for upper middle class types that has nothing to say, for example). But it's hard to respond without any kind of examples (outside of Les Ephemeres, which doesn't really fit the description of the work Tom doesn't like. 

Third, here's the season for Playwrights Horizons this year. Two plays tackling race from very different perspectives, one about retribution during WWII, two plays that might qualify as the kind of thing Tom's talking about, maybe, and a coming of age musical.  Lincoln Center is doing a play about female sexuality and gender and an African American family drama.  The Public's season has amongst other things Mike Daisey's show about the economic meltdown, Tarell Alvin McCraney's ambitious Brother/Sister Plays which couldn't be further from being about upper middle class white people (although Tarell is gay, so that might fuck it up, I dunno).  Oh, and a new play by Suzan-Lori Parks. Goodness knows, she hasn't tackled major issues like race, abortion, welfare, gender, sexualized representations of African Americans, war or the calendar recently. Second Stage has a new play by Anna Devaere Smith about the human body. MTC's season looks kinda lame and navel-gazy,I'll give you that.

So there's a lot of heat and not so much light in Tom's post, perhaps even intentionally.  But that's another reason I tend not to enter in to these kinds of things, or anyway question their worth.  If the argument isn't going to move the conversation forward, than it's essentially just a dick swinging competition, and those get tiresome. Even if they are good for hit counts.

Comments

[Josh]

Wow.

Tom Loughlin's post just made me growl like a rabid raccoon at my desk. Congrats, Tom!

He was ABSOLUTELY suggesting that the theater purge gay content to become more popular. What's worse is that he did whilst simultaneously suggesting that gays belong to some kind of privileged class. WTF! I'll remember that the next time a thug calls me a "faggot". I'm lucky!

Then, in the next breath, he goes on to write that we should be producing more plays about racism. Double WTF!

I guess some social ills are more popular than others.

[Tony]

How would this tie into your post from last week about overdue dark confessions? or What are you clinging to?

Is it possible to critique people you may someday work with,(or work with)? Or is the fear of provoking people leading you to censor yourself? (I hope that's not the case.)

I think there's more options available than shit where you live or fuck up your career, but how do we get past vague jeremiads and arguments-for-arguments-sake if we're scared to include specifics because it may step on someone's toes?

[devilvet]

Chicago Rules!

[Tom Loughlin]

Hi Isaac,

I don't want to drag you into further debate, since you're too classy a guy, but I do want to say three things for the record, if I may.

First, it seems that in all the references I've found to my Engage!/Enrage! post, no one has included this paragraph, which immediately follows the excerpt you quoted:
I’ll leave the reader to decide whether or not I am actually serious, just being sarcastic, blowing professorial smoke, playing devil’s advocate, re-casting myself as an ancièn terrible, or just being a curmudgeonly pain in the ass. Your call.
Language, of course, is an imperfect medium, and often without knowing the person personally, it's hard to attach specific intent to someone's use of language (which was why Socrates was so adamantly against the invention of writing). I think, though, that in any discussion of what I wrote it's important that this paragraph be included for context. Someone who reads only the "enraging" statement in isolation on someone else's blog would have to assume I could only be serious. I've never specified my own intent, but left the reader with choices, all of which are possible.

Secondly, if the opportunity ever comes up again, I would be willing to pay my own way to be on a blogging panel. Indeed, given that it's a panel, I might even be able to get my university to pay my way (academic institutions love to see these sorts of credits), and I would do it for free. I would not expect any payment of any sort, as I realize blogging is a relatively new art form and such events have no budget. I am very fortunate to be at a stage in my career where paying for a JetBlue flight to NYC from Buffalo is not a great hardship.

Lastly, just to let your readers know, I do have an open comment section on my own blog. They are free to growl there and not necessarily take up your digital space.

Be well, Isaac, and continue to fight the good fight! -twl