Parabasis

Anything Is Possible

Matt Freeman has an interesting post up asking about arbitrary vs. intentional choices in theatre:

Is it possible that an arbitrary decision by the creative team and a decision with some complex thought behind it...can look exactly the same? And does it make a difference, really, to the audience member? Does how a decision is arrived at inform what we see?

Can we sense the arbitrary? Or do we just assume that everything we see onstage was put there with a rigorous sense of purpose?

It's an interesting series of questions question that provokes some interesting comments.  I suppose my answer to the penultimate question is "sort of". We can notice things that feel arbitrary, but we're not hounds snuffling out rabbits here, we can't ever really tell if we're on the right scent.  

What I've realized in thinking about Matt's question is that it really depends which department of a creative team you're talking about. Oddly enough, this realization came while reading the latest issue of Kevin Huizinga's GANGES, in which Glenn Ganges tries to go to sleep and his mind wanders all over his neighborhood and consciousness.  There was a point in it where I thought to myself "Anything could happen in the next panel,". Anything, that is, that can be drawn.  Huizinga is the artist as well as the writer. He has complete autonomy on Ganges. There are no collaborative cheques or balances. If he wanted Glenn to die halfway through the second page and make the issue suddenly about Wendy, he could. He's messed with this sort of stuff before-- Glenn has a kid in one book, and is childless in the next, the plots of most of Huizinga's Ganges material have little to do with each other etc. 

Anything Huizinga wants to happen could, there are no rules other than the ones he creates, and he doesn't even have to follow those.  Some comics artists, in fact, pointedly don't follow the rules they set down for themselves.  Grant Morrison's Invisibles was completely illegible to me because of the lack of and perceivable rules. At any moment, any arbitrary thing could happen, and thus nothing that happened had any stakes and it was impossible for me to ever get my bearings in the series. (Other readers think The Invisibles is mind blowing, as my dad would say, "a difference of opinion is what makes horse racing").

Theatre is not comix, however.  Creators don't have sole control. First off, you can't do literally anything on stage. I mean, you could have someone come out and read a stage direction that a dragon comes in and eats everyone and expect the audience to use their imaginations, but I don't think that counts as actually doing it. There's this whole cheques and balances system that exists due to the nature of collaboration.  Some of this comes from positive social conventions about how collaboration is supposed to work, the need for mutual respect etc, some of this comes from implicit threats inherent in the process-- the writer can always pull the rights to the piece, the director can always walk off it, the actors can always not do as they're told once the play is in front of an audience and so on.

Anyway, the question of arbitrary choices changes depending on which part of the production team you're talking about.  An arbitrary-feeling choice in the text is very different from, say, there being a pointless dance interlude right before Hal says "I do. I will" in Henry IV, Part One, which is also different from an actor doing some pen-clicking schtick that may or may not relate to their character.

Some of what we do is art and some is craft, and quite a bit of the art part (at least on my end) is guided by instinct and taste.  That's the dirty truth of it.  To paraphrase DCI Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect 5, "I only know one way to work a case, and that's through instinct and hard work". I'm not one of those directors who plots out the blocking in advance or who knows immediately upon stepping into the rehearsal room exactly what they want (nothing but love for those who do).  For me, the rehearsal process is really a process, and as much work as I've done leading up to first rehearsal, the first pass of blocking is largely instinctual.  When did the actor want to move?  Where is my attention flagging? What blocking image feels right? Etc. It's only after first run-through that the craft part, the "hard work" part kicks in, just like how in writing an essay the first draft is feeling one's way through the material, thinking aloud on the page and the second draft is when it gets its shape. 

The revision step is also where the choices that don't add anything, or don't work get taken out.  But the ones that remain have fairly instinctual/arbitrary reasons for being there in the first place. They might not have completely arbitrary reasons for staying in, but they're origination is as much instinct as anything else. 

When I hear the term "arbitrary" used, and when I use it myself, it's only ever meant as a negative criticism. It means a choice whose relationship to the moment/play/text/production cannot be fathomed and detracts from the overall experience of the show.  And i only ever use it to describe directorial choices.

In reality, though, there's a satisfying sweet spot between the rational and the inspired.  When art is too rational and over-crafted it begins to feel schematic and suffocating, but when it's completely based on what an artist wants to do, with no rules surrounding it, it's generally a bewildering experience. One of the first things I do in a rehearsal process is try to create some rules for myself so I don't go completely off the rails. Whenever I personally discuss "concept" (ugh that word should be stricken from the theatrical language) what I mean is the set of rules I'll be obeying to keep myself in check.  The audience's perception of these rules isn't really the point.  That volume of smoke, for example, is performed by a group of ghosts retelling their stories was far more important for me in thinking through design and blocking choices than it was for the audience in understanding Clay's text.  Similarly, with MilkMilkLemonade I didn't care that the audience understood the play to be a nightmare the main character was having after eating some bad chicken one night. I don't think I even told the actors that's how I thought of the play, but it helped me navigate my choices in it.  One run through, for example, Josh and I looked at each other afterwards and said "everyone is being too nice to Emory right now".  I was able to arrive at that because of the nightmare rules I had made up for myself. They didn't allow a version where people were overly nice to Emory, even if I could see how that version might work in a different production.

Quick Announcement

This weekend, Arena Stage and Georgetown University are holding a convening on Diversity in the American Theatre.  You can read all about it here. I, along with a few other bloggers, have been invited to attend and participate as well as "cover" the conference for this blog.  I suppose you could call this is a "blog junket", as the convening is picking up the tab for my travel and housing.  Matt Yglesias gets to go on blog junkets to Switzerland. I get to go on blog junkets to Georgetown.  I think maybe I should start just writing about politics...

Seriously though, I'm grateful to the folks at Arena for bringing me down, because otherwise I couldn't attend and, as Parabasis readers probably know by now, diversity in general and in the American Theatre in particular is a subject near and dear to my heart, and my day job revolves around issues of racial bias in American life, so this convening lies at an interesting intersection between my artistic life, this blog and my current employment.

Linkage!

-- I couldn't agree more with this Gawker post about NYC subway service that Mike Daisey reblogged. To quote Tony Harrison... This Is An Outrage!

-- Andrew Haydon at the Guardian wonders about the sorry state of theatre photograhpy. In New York, major production photography is almost entirely done by one not-particularly-interesting photographer, which I always find kind of dismaying.

-- Andrew Sullivan shares with us (and fisks)  the GOP's Ten Commandments.  These aren't a joke, these are  the actual Ten Commandments for Republicans. Violate two of them, and you lose your funding. Meanwhile, Democrats are allowed to threaten to filibuster the President's top legislative priority without fear of anything happening to them at all.

-- I read a Harper's article awhile ago making the case that one of the reasons why US schools performed so poorly compared to their European counterparts had little to do with funding and more to do with expectations, namely that schools are expected to provide all sorts of social services (basic medical care etc) that the social safety nets of Western European social democracies take care of.  Anyway, this article in the WaPo talks about how now schools in some areas are, basically, feeding kids that can't get food elsewhere. 

-- As a loyal Buck's Rocker, I don't think I'm allowed to congratulate Stage Door Manor for having campers in the Thanksgiving Parade. So, uh, I won't.

-- Do you follow Urbaniak's twitter feed? You should, it has the most hilarious hashtag memes around. 

-- If you want some good evidence that Obama's trip to China was not, in fact, a failure, here's a good place to start. 

Are You Kidding Me?

French pseudo-intellectual Bernard Henri-Levi, in HuffPo:

The decision to free Roman Polanski is a wise decision...  At this very moment, I am thinking about Emmanuelle, his wife. I am thinking about his two kids who saw their dad's name ignominiously dragged through the mud. I am mostly thinking about him: Roman Polanski whom I don't know but whose fate has moved me so much. Nothing will repair the days he has spent in prison. Nothing will erase the immense, unbelievable injustice he has been subjected to. Nothing will take away the hysteria of those ones who have never stopped pouring contempt upon him, hounding him through hatred and asking for his punishment as if we were living the darkest and most ferocious hours of the McCarthysm era all over again. (Emph Mine)

Bizarrely enough, this isn't a parody. It didn't appear in The Onion. This is something someone actually wrote.  What's so weird about it is that it assumes agreement on the part of the reader, as if all decent, like-minded men and women know that being forced to serve out your sentence after drugging and anally raping a child is an "immense, unbelievable injustice".  It just seems... peculiar to me.  Are people (including your truly) perhaps a little over the top in their pilloring of Polanski?  Perhaps, but most of the time (at least on my part) it's a reaction to his defenders, who say completely ludicrous things like the above.

The last sentence is particularly eggregious. Polansky isn't being arrested for anything having to do with his art. Nor is he being arrested for any political beliefs. McCarthy has nothing to do with it. He raped a child and then fled a very brief prison sentence.

Bill Sparkman's Death Ruled A Suicide

Bill Sparkman, the census worker whose dead body was found tied to a tree with the word "Fed" scrawled on it, apparently staged his suicide to appear like a murder, according to the authorities. As one of the people who believed Sparkman to be murdered, and believed it to be the end result of the anti-government sentiment whipped up by Michele Bachman et al, it's worth saying that in this case, I was wrong about that and rushed to judgement.  I still think the anti-government sentiment of the Tea Baggers is dangerous, particularly when mixed with the rather toxic racism that the Republican party likes to stir up and then (im)plausibly deny.  But neither of these factors contributed to Sparkman's death and thus my posts referring to him were in error.

Thanksgiving!

I'm headed down to DC (And then to Richmond) today for Thanksgiving at my grandma's.  Thanksgiving is, as some of you may know, my absolute favoritist holiday ever, even though it meant sitting through the boringest church service on Earth as a kid (the only official holiday Christian Scientists celebrate with a religious service is Thanksgiving).  

This year, as in most years, I'll be down in Richmond at my grandmother's house, seeing almost all of my family, eating a ridiculous amount of food and then trying to stay awake on the drive home.  And I'll be being grateful.  It's been a good year for me in a lot of ways, and I have a lot to be thankful for.

As always, one of the things I'm most thankful for is this blog and its readers.  I started this thing over five years ago when I was so full of stuff I wanted to say, and so lacking in an outlet that I was really depressed and would spend much of rehearsals talking about things that had nothing to do with the play.  Out of this frustration, my blog was born, and I'm really grateful for that. I've met some of my closest friends through this blog, can trace most of my directing work directly to it and it's helped turn me into a writer, something I greatly enjoy and am enriched immeasurably by doing.

TO those of you who read this blog regularly: Thank you. To those of you who take the time to comment on stuff on this blog: Thank you. You've helped me grow in ways you couldn't possible imagine. 

I have an exciting announcement when I'm back, which will be Monday, although I might peak my head in before that. In the meantime, have you gotten your tickets to Meg's New Friend yet??

Charles McNulty Considers The Strassberg Legacy

Really interesting piece from Charles McNulty on Lee Strasberg, the Method, and the growing fortunes of the Strasberg Institute, now run by Lee's non-actor son and non-actor third wife. Give it a read. It even has  a quote from Ron Van Lieu, who many consider the greatest acting teacher in America, dissing them.  What's that you say? Theatre Journalism that's not just hagiography?  Why yes!

One odd thing about the article is that McNulty is only able to find one actor who praises Strasberg and his particular version of the Method, and that's Estelle Parsons. And even she gives the qualification that it was useful to her because she had already developed technical chops in touring and commuity theater.  Is this because McNulty couldn't find anyone younger than Parsons who is similarly recognizable and would praise Strasberg? If true, doesn't that in itself say something about the usefulness of the Method as taught by Strasberg's heirs?

(To come clean: I have pretty mixed feelings abou the Method, as I think all people do, the stuff that's outwardly-focused I find very useful and is essentially the backbone of much of American theater. The much of the stuff that's inwardly focused-- particularly the use of personal memories which as far as I can tell is widely considered passe at this point-- may be privately useful to some actors but in my experience drives them into a kind of solipsism that makes them impossible to act with or, at times, direct effectively.)

The Best Thing I've Seen All Day

The Best Thing I've Seen All Day

Attention Music Geeks

Composer Geoff Smith has invented a piano that allows the tuning of notes to be changed quickly and on the fly, allowing for the microtuning necessary to play other cultures' music.  Full story with fascinating video here.

Is Dreamgirls Being Graded on a Curve?

I did the Critic-O-Meter of Dreamgirls today, and it's a very curious crop of reviews.  Many of the reviews are largely negative on a sentence-to-sentence level, but end up recommending the show. At not even grudgingly recommending the show. Enthusiastically recommending it. Elisabeth Vincentelli's review opens with the sentence "And I'm telling you: You are going". And then immediately launches into calling the show cheaply made, poorly orchestrated, and lamely designed on a set level. Later in the review, she knocks the choreography, one of the lead actresses and the projections before giving it three out of four stars.  Hers is one of several reviews that do this. There are three things I can think of that are going on here.

First is simply that people genuinely love the original material. It's hard not to be seduced by Kreiger and Eyen's watered-down-Motown-schtick. I was quite taken with the film the first time I saw it (and flat-out despised it by the end of viewing #3) and Kreiger's music especially does a good job of distilling what is easily loveable about 60s soul in much the same way that the soundtrack to The Big Chill does. And he provides lots of opportunity for great singers to really cut loose (too many, if you read Brantley's take), which is pleasurable regardless of the quality of the material. (My own problems with the show I covered ina  preview post, but they're largely book-related... the shows relationship to the real Motown story makes it impossible to appreciate on its own terms, but it gets that story wrong again and again and again largely because the story of the Supremes isn't hugely interesting, particularly when compared with the story of the Temptations, who should probably get a jukebox musical of their own some day).

Second is the resonances of doing the show at the real location of its opening and closing numbers: the Apollo.  As any good reader of Peter Brooks The Open Door (or fan of site-specific theater) can tell you, location matters! All is context!  The right context can lift a mediocre show to the rafters and provide it with resonances the production doesn't really earn on its own.

Finally, tho, and the real reason I suspect this is going on is that it's a "touring" show. Many of the reviews say actually say this... "oh, this is good for a touring show". In other words, a touring show doesn't have to be as good as a Broadway show, which I guess I understand (although I think really a show is either successful or it isn't to some extent).  But I don't think that makes sense with this particular show.  Dreamgirls has a Broadway director, a Broadway design team, costs Broadway prices to see, is being managed by a Broadway general manager and is produced by John Breglio, who produced A Chorus Line on... wait for it... Broadway! That all of this Broadway talent couldn't make a lower budget work should be a serious knock against their creative skills.  That Robert Longbottom is "a hack" (to quote one review) who doesn't have enough imagination to make this musical work on a constrained budget with constrained touring logistics is a problem. etc. and so forth.

Travel Day

I'm off to Richmond Virginia today to go to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and attend the reopening of the Lewis galleries. No posting for me today, sorry!

The Shuberts Expand Their Power

I was a little surprised to read Patrick Healy's solely-positive coverage of the Shuberts continuing to expand their Broadway monopoly that appeared in today's Times. Given that roughly 50% of commerical theatre folk hate the Shubert Org with the passion of a nova, I don't understand why the article contains not one singly negative comment about their new arrangement with Frederick Zollo and Robert Wankel which, as this photo indicates is pretty much the definition of Shady Backroom Deal.  So now the Schuberts get to control the ticketing, the venue and get to give shows they invest in preferential treatment in their spaces? And there's nothing even vaguely troubling about this? Look, these are the guys who force producers to use their ticketing system* and then charge the producers to see information about their own customers it can't be that hard to find someone who is less than sanguine about them expanding their tentacles of influence further .

Similarly, while I understand that its a trade magazine, the Variety piece (by Gordon Cox) should probably contain some discussion of the implications of all this as well.

*(just a question: wasn't it illegal when Microsoft simply bundled Office with Windows 3.1?)

Places to Take My Kids On Vacation In The Future When They Exist

Oxford's proposed Museum of Storytelling! Hells to the yeah!:

From Lewis Carroll's Wonderland to JRR Tolkien's Middle-earth, CS Lewis's Narnia and the parallel universes of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, Oxford has played host to some of the UK's most enduring literary creations. Now a £2.5m donation from an anonymous private benefactor means the first steps have been taken towards the creation of a museum dedicated to storytelling in the city.

The Story Museum has existed online for the past four years, holding events across Oxfordshire and running storytelling pilots in schools, but the donation enables it to start constructing a permanent home in Oxford. It has just signed a lease on Rochester House, a Victorian building a stone's throw from Christ Church College – where many scenes in the Harry Potter movies are filmed – on Pembroke Street. It now needs to raise a further £11m to transform the building into a museum, which will aim to attract 100,000 visitors a year when it opens in 2014.

I don't see why a museum dedicated to Story and Storytelling should be solely a children's museum, frankly. But ah well, I'll take what i can get. Here's the website for the web-only museum if you're interested.

Don't Ask, Don't Give

I am joining Josh and a bunch of other hardened progressives in taking the Don't Ask, Don't Give Pledge. You can do it here, if you are so inclined. What's the Don't Ask, Don't Give pledge?  It's simple...:

I pledge not to donate to the Democratic National Committee, Organizing for America, or the Obama campaign until Congress passes, and the president signs, legislation enacting the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT), and repealing the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

It's important to note that the pledge still allows you to donate to individual candidates, just not to the DNC itself.  The only way to have power with a poltiical party is to have a resource they want and need to work against. I knew that gay rights stuff was probably going to be slow in coming, after all, Obama is pretty cautious, as his half-a-loaf position on gay marriage can attest.  But still, it's time to turn off the spigot a little. I'm sick of politicians hitting people who want gay equality up for money, using the Republicans as the bogey man and then not fucking doing anything.

An Additional Thought on the Director's Hand

A thought exercise I find helpful for spotting the director's impact on a show goes something like this:

(1) Assume the script is good and "works". Think through the production you've just seen.

(2) Assume the same script is bad and "doesn't work" Re-think through the produciton you've just seen.

I've found this really helpful for training my eye and mind to see a director every when they're trying to be invisible. This is particularly true when it comes to the tone of a production. 

Spencer Ackerman On Criticizing Friends On The Internet

In re: the conversation 99 started yesterday... Spencer Ackerman responds to people who feel he went too soft on a friend of his whom he disagreed with:

I don’t think my take on the piece was equivocal at all. Eli certainly didn’t see it that way, and we have the email back-n-forth to prove it. But I thought I steered away from gratuitous comment bashing the piece, and criticized what I thought went a bit far. And that’s really what the heart of the criticism is: would I have opened both barrels on a piece like that if a friend of mine hadn’t written it?

Well, in all honesty, probably, yeah. But that shouldn’t make me beat up on my friend. It should give me pause for when I go all-out on people who aren’t my friend. There should be one rigorous standard — no euphemism, no pulled punches, no intellectual sloppiness, but no unfairness either. Doesn’t mean I have to treat bad-faith arguments as good-faith ones, nor does it mean this blog can’t have fun. It certainly doesn’t mean this blog can’t have friends

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck Get Crazy

Watch on full screen. Trust me:

"Kill Jews" Update

It turns out, Gothamist is already on the case.  These two posts round up what we know about the mysterious scraps of paper with "Kill Jews" written on them. 

If anyone else finds any "Kill Jews" papers, please write in to parabasisnyc at gmail dot com or post in the comments to let me know. And make sure to call the NYPD Hate Crime unit and report where and when you found them. Thanks.

Another One Bites The Dust

This time, it's DC's Catalyst Theater.  Rumors of its demise had been circling over them like vultures ever since they didn't announce a new season or update their website for several months.  Now the Post confirms it: They're done, largely done in by a move to a larger space right when the economy blew up.  Also in trouble? The space they moved to, The Atlas in NE DC:

Meanwhile, Atlas itself has been struggling in the economy, according to Scott Kenison, the arts center's chief operating officer. "We've done what most companies have done," he says. "We cut back everybody's hours 20 percent . . . because we didn't have anything happening. Nobody was renting the space. . . . This fall, our season is very bare. All these companies sort of convulsed from the economic situation of the last year and sort of withdrew to regroup."

RTWT Here. Last year I was talking with an artistic director down in DC who told me that companies in DC come and go in waves.  Many companies will start at the same time, many of those will go out of business, and a few will remain.  For example: Everyone knows Woolly and Studio, but does anyone remember that there was a DC Playwrights Theatre? It was one of several companies (along with The Source, Stage Guild and a few others) that started at the same time.  It's gone. The Source's name still exists, but it's run by completely different people and has changed hands (and ownership) several times. Many other companies from that same wave no longer exist.  There's been another wave: Rorschach, Forum, Catalyst, Synetic etc. in DC. Some of those will survive, some of them probably won't.

We have a longevity bias in American Theatre that privileges lasting as long as possible. While it's sad that a good company is shutting its doors, I'm still not convinced that measuring success by years in business is a healthy thing in the arts.  Maybe more companies should go under and there should be more changeover.  Not every band is U2, after all. Some bands are like Liquid Liquid; they release a couple of awesome EPs and an album and then go bust. 

It was ultimately a bad business decision (upgrading to a larger, unfamiliar venue right as the economy tanked) that did Catalyst in. When you make bad business decisions, you occasionally go out of business.  I don't mean to be heartless about it, it's sad when your company doesn't work out and I feel for the Catalyst people. Ultimately to the DC scene (or any scene for that matter) the problems at Atlas are far more troubling.  Companies come and go, space is much harder to replace.