Ben Brantley's Star-Worship Blinds Him. Again.

Quoth B-Squared:

But in the self-contained universes of Mr. Foreman, which are both boundless and hermetically sealed, all performers are created equal, right? They are stylish robots, carrying out the commands of a dictatorial auteur. People don’t so much act in Mr. Foreman’s productions (which he has been creating for five decades now) as take orders, the better to embody their director’s convoluted currents of thought. The happy surprise of “Idiot Savant” is that there is, for once, an actor in the house. Mr. Dafoe, who spent many years working as a team player of the avant-garde Wooster Group, knows how to pose in a living painting where individual figures count for less than the landscape. But he also brings a star’s bright idiosyncrasy to Mr. Foreman’s wonderland and the aching throb of an energetic man in a straitjacket. There’s warm blood coursing through “Idiot Savant,” and it raises the humor and humanity to heights rarely felt in a Foreman work.

Cause lord knows, T. Ryder Smith, Jay Smith and Juliana Francis aren't actors, right?  And neither was David Greenspan when he appeared in BENITA CANOVA.  

Seriously tho, it's always been true that in the best of Foreman's work, talented actors have managed to inject his plays with real humanity, a humanity he deliberately sought to strip out of his work* in recent years by deleting the core trio of actors in his plays and replacing them with video installations.  Whether that deliberate dehumanizing of his world works for the individual viewer is up to them (I'm not a fan, George Hunka, for example, is).  But still, Willem Dafoe is not the first "actor" to appear in Foreman's work, nor is he the first actor to bring idiosyncrasy to one of Foreman's plays (honestly, are you going to try to tell me that T. Ryder Smith or David Greenspan are less idiosyncratic performers?).

What he is is the first "star" to appear in Foreman's work. And thus Brantley, who seems to be on a more openly star-obsessed kick than usual is actually able to see it. Because apparently, all Brantley sees now is stars. And yet, despite being fairly open of his love of stars and how much he's "rooting for" them, he turns around and wonders why casting directors are such starfuckers who cast out of the pages of US Weekly, showing a remarkable lack of understanding of his own place in the theatrical landscape and his impact as the lead reviewer for the Times.

Comments

[bpjc]

I'm guessing BB is not a big Hal Hartley fan . . .

[Ken]

I was at the performance that Brantley attended, and the play seemed to go over well with the atypical Foreman audience (older and grayer than I've seen at former RF shows), especially Dafoe's antics (For my money, he was much better in The Wooster Group's "The Emperor Jones", back in '97 or '98). Or maybe they wanted to appear as if they liked it, because they thought they should, because Dafoe's a star, etc.

Frankly, the play mystified me, as all Foreman's pieces do. They leave me terribly frustrated and a bit angry, to tell you the truth. I'm not arguing for the "well-made play" by any stretch of the imagination, and I hope I don't come off like a reactionary old fart (because I am in reality a hip, happening guy--ask anyone!), but I always feel that Foreman just didn't do the work necessary to make the show not just comprehensible but trackable in any way.

Every play is a series of choices for the writer. She adds this, but keeps that out. This character can say this kind of thing, but can never say that kind of thing. The story takes place here, and therefore, by definition, not there. Every bit of the picture is determined by the writer taking a position, making a commitment. But not Foreman. Everything is (or at least seems) random, nothing seems to have been a definite choice (except the design elements which are great, because they are so specific). Every line of dialogue can be spoken by any character and the effect would be much the same--in fact, every line of dialogue seems completely unconnected to the ones before it and after it. Again, I have no problem with dreamlike plays that don't observe strict logic, but there is a limit to how much I can watch when I'm being given no window into this world. And if nothing is defined, then there are no stakes. There's no reason to care about anything you're seeing (and I don't mean in a sentimental way. I'm not talking about relating to, or liking the characters--I have no need for that), because nothing seems to matter much in this world. If this thing happens, that's fine, and if the opposite happens, that's just as good.

Storytelling is about choices--they may be absurd, surreal choices, but they are choices. Foreman seems not to have made any. I know, realistically, he must have, and I'm sure someone smarter than me can map them out, but for some reason I can't see them.

[Thomas Garvey]

I agree Brantley's a starfucker, but is he really the worst one? The New Yorker critics actually seem to have the starfuckin' action cornered, to my mind.