Parabasis

I Said It'd Take A Week

Before I started calling the Democrats and Obama sell-outs. Well, here we are, a little over a week later, and Obama is preemptively compromising with Republicans to open up additional areas to oil drilling and subsidize further nuclear power. Fucking fantastic.  Balloon Juice pretty much sums up my thoughts here.

I see no way that this is tactically smart. I could imagine including these measures in a Cap And Trade Bill as part of a compromise that gets more votes (guess what- it still won't get more votes from the GOP!) but this just strikes me as total POTUS fail.

Anyone got any silver lining on this one?

The Internets Are All Ablaze

About Janelle Monae's Tightrope:

Janelle Monae - New Music - More Music Videos

Your thoughts?

Quote of the Day

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

-- Rogers at KFMonkey.

Comment Feed Enabled

We now have a comment feed. Enjoy.

Cheap Thrills

By Guest Blogger Ben Owen

So I am planning on writing a piece about cartoonist and how-things-work gadgets man Dan Zettwoch, because he's awesome (even the design of his web page is awesome, and when I order a mini-comic from him the cover was screen-printed onto a section of cardboard cut from a 30-pack of ice beer (awesome)), and because I feel like he might find a receptive audience here at Parabasis, given Isaac's stated love for Zettwoch's fellow St. Louisan Kevin Huizenga. But for various reasons, laziness among them, I haven't written that piece yet.

However, in case you find your need for comics-via-theater-blog unfulfilled by that epic Kitty Pryde & Wolverine slugfest, or the link to the Scott Pilgrim trailer, here's a link to What Things Do, which I discovered this morning. It collects a startling amount of high quality comics work by several extremely talented indie cartoonists, including John Porcellino, Steven Weissman, Jordan Crane, Sammy Harkham, and Ted May (who, I think, may also be from St. Louis). There's scans of the entire contents of the first two issues of Harkham's series Crickets! And the first three issues of Crane's Uptight! And a charming Weissman story about a small bear riding a horse and then becoming a park ranger! For free! The internet sometimes seems ludicrous in its bounty. Please take a look.

(The image is "A Charm of Bees," 2009, by Steven Weissman)

Color Me Surprised

I don't mean to harp on Playwrights Horizons, but I'm surprised given their reputation for inclusiveness, that their upcoming season will be entirely written and directed by white people.

UPDATE: I neglected to mention that the season will also include only one female playwright and one female director. 

UPDATE II: Whoops, that last update is totally wrong. Apologies.

One Size Does Not Fit All

UPDATE: Playwrights contacted me to set some of the record straight. So let me correct: A Cool Dip was rehearsed for three full weeks, not 2.5 weeks. I still think that's a bit short for a thematically dense, stylistically tricky two and a half hour long play. But it's slightly less a bit short than had originally been reported.

There are many moments where the business reality of doing theatre impacts an audience's experience of the work in ways they aren't aware of.  It's not really a reviewers job to educate them on this stuff, and they're frequently unaware of this stuff too... so here goes nothing:

With A Cool Dip In The Barren Saharan Crick getting the reviews its gotten, this is a  good opportunity to ask whether or not Playwrights Horizons' model for producing, particularly in their upstairs space, is good for the work they're presenting. 

What a lot of audiences don't know when they cross into the Ford Motor Company Lobby is that Playwrights Horizons shows are rehearsed for very short periods of time, followed by a greater number of previews than the normal show and then a very brief post-opening run, with a possibility of extension.  There are certain advantages to this: It allows the theater to begin taking in money, it makes the productions somewhat "critic proof" as the worst thing that happens to a show with bad reviews is Playwrights relies on its high subscriber base and doesn't extend the show and, if you're a show that can benefit from an audience early on, having lots of previews can be a good thing.

But it's certainly a risky strategy.  By some reports I've gotten in my in box, A Cool Dip, like many of its Peter Jay Sharp peers rehearsed for less than three weeks before an audience saw it.  Less than three weeks. The standard rehearsal time for a play is 3.5-4 weeks including tech.  For a new play, particularly for an ambitious, complex work like A Cool Dip, you really need more rehearsal time than that, not less. (I don't recall how many weeks shows rehearse in the main stage space).

Circle Mirror Transformation benefited from having a cast and director who had been working on the play in other venues for some time and lucked out in that they weren't working at a theatre that replaced them all with people who had been on the OC.

You Know It's Hard Out There

When stories meant to give you hope for theatre's future just fill you with dread about how bad things are.  Case in point: this article from the Times about Next to Normal recouping. While I'm happy a small, (comparably) low budget star-less show has recouped, the story still reinforces how expensive, and thus how ludicrous Broadway producing is.

General Motors and the American Theatre

To be blunt:

Anyone who cares about issues of systemic change within entrenched institutions-- which is to say, anyone who cares about improving the American Theatre-- owes it to themselves to listen to this week's This American Life. It's about the failure of General Motors, but really, it's a parable about change, about the difficulties of change, even when change's positive improvements are demonstrably obvious.

The story itself is about a car manufacturing plant in California co-run by General Motors and Toyota, and about how General Motors' struggle  to adopt any of the lessons it learned there.

Check it out. You can download it for free from iTUNES as a podcast. I hope to have more on the episode later.

Douglas Wolk on Lady Gaga

"Everything she does is worthy of rapt attention, with the possible exception of her actual music."

He means that as a compliment, btw. Read his brief appreciation in honor of her birthday here.

Gender Discrimination, 40 Years Later

40 years after being sued in a landmark gender discrimination case, Newsweek reports on how women are doing in the workplace:  

U.S. Department of Education data show that a year out of school, despite having earned higher college GPAs in every subject, young women will take home, on average across all professions, just 80 percent of what their male colleagues do. Even at the top end, female M.B.A.s make $4,600 less per year in their first job out of business school, according to a new Catalyst study. Motherhood has long been the explanation for the persistent pay gap, yet a decade out of college, full-time working women who haven't had children still make 77 cents on the male dollar. As women increasingly become the breadwinners in this recession, bringing home 23 percent less bacon hurts families more deeply than ever before. "The last decade was supposed to be the 'promised one,' and it turns out it wasn't," says James Turley, the CEO of Ernst & Young, a funder of the recent M.B.A. study. "This is a wake-up call."

You canRTWT here. 

 The idea that theatre as in industry is a unique meritocracy where the psychological, structural and sociological factors that cause the kind of phenomena listed in this article don't apply is on its face ridiculous and naive. 

This also points to how we need a more sophisticated understanding of how discrimination actually works, how the subconscious interacts with and is reinforced by structures, and how little individual intent has to do with discrimination in the post-Civil Rights era. 

Answering a Health Care Question

SashaNaomi, in the comments to this post, asks:

For example, I don't know if "poverty line" is determined by state or county. Medicaid eligibility is done by state rather than county. So, people in NYC have to be making nearly cardboard box-living wages in order to qualify for it. All I've heard about the bill is generalizations, not numbers and specifics.

Well, as a side note to a different article, the New York Times answers her question today thusly:

Beginning in 2014, however, anyone with an income of up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, or $29,300 for families of four, will be eligible for coverage under Medicaid. For the first three years, the federal government will pick up the entire cost of these new enrollees, but the state share then gradually increases until it reaches 10 percent in 2020.

That seems pretty clear, but they only list the number for a family of four. This handy chart will tell you what the poverty line is for different groups.  Individuals need to make less than $14.4K a year to qualify.

However! As this Christian Science Monitor Article explains (as part of a series of translating the bill into plain English that seems fairly similar to what SashaNaomi was looking for in the first place) when you go to buy private insurance not supplied by an employer (because you are self-employed, unemployed or your employed doesn't offer it), you are purchasing insurance in one of these newly-created exchanges... and that purchase is subsidized as long as you make below 400% of the poverty level. This isn't Medicaid, this is Private Insurance in the exchanges.

If you get your health insurance from your employer, it's worth noting you are already receiving an incredibly generous subsidy without ever really realizing it: your insurance is deducted from your wage prior to that wage being taxed.  That means that, compared to someone buying on the individual market, you are receiving a large subsidy that they do not receive (as they have to purchase health insurance with their own money, post-taxes).  And there's more.. according to the CS Monitor "if you make less money than the poverty cutoff level, you would still be eligible for aid. The federal government will in essence guarantee that you do not have to pay more than 9.8 percent of your income for your share of health insurance costs."

For more on what the health insurance exchanges are... check this out.

Briefly Noted

This weekend, I am in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a legendarily great theatre town.  I am not, however, hanging out with any theatre people this weekend. I am instead hanging out with literature people. When people hear about my theatre background, the following conversation happens, almost word for word:

PERSON A: You know, Minneapolis is a great theatre town.

ISAAC: That's what I've heard. I have a friend who did the Jerome recently and several other friends who have lived or done work in the Twin Cities recently, and they all loved it.

PERSON A: You know, the Guthrie has a great building.

ISAAC: Really?

PERSON A: Yeah, it's a really world class building.

Never in this conversation is the work that is done at the Guthrie mentioned.  And, indeed, I get the sense that the people I'm talking to have never actually seen anything at the Guthrie.

Similarly, when I was in DC, 99 and I took a cab to our hotel and had the most amazing cab driver of all time. He showed us great buildings and talked about the architecture and history of the city.  He was at least in his mid-sixties and had lived in DC all of his adult life.  Now, this being a DC cab driver, he was of course doing this to take us on a longer route than was necessary, thus charging us nearly triple what it should cost to get from Union Station to our hotel, but that's DC, baby.

And then he asked us why we here. We said we had a theatre conference to go to.

CAB DRIVER: Oh, a theatre conference. Great! Have you seen the plans for the new Arena stage?  It's going to be great!

J: No, I actually haven't looked at them.

CAB DRIVER: It's going to be fantastic. A beautiful, a world class building!

ISAAC : Have you ever seen anything at Arena?

CAB DRIVER: No!  But I love their new building!

More Like This Please...

Two major theaters are totally rethinking their subsidiary rights policies. This was announced earlier in the week and I just forgot to write about it, due to travel et cetera and so forth.  You can read about it here.

My brief takeaway is that this is a big win for playwrights and for those who want to change the theatre system to be better to playwrights. It is hopefully the first of many concrete changes that will come in the wake of Outrageous Fortune, and I believe we all owe Todd London et al a debt of gratitude for it.

But (could you guess there was a but) it is worth saying that-- for many writers-- this is a largely symbolic victory. This is as much about sending a signal that The Public and The Roundabout want to be good homes for writers.  It's a good step in the right direction and I think symbols matter, but most playwrights make less than 20% of their income from royalties anyway. Anyone want to guess how much that percentage changes as a result of this.

I also think that this points out the limited power of non-Artistic and Managing Directors  There's a lot of pressure placed on artists to fix X problem with American Theater, and if it's not placed on them, it's placed on Lit Departments. But the buck really does stop somewhere, and that's with the Artistic and Managing Directors. And I would like as we move forward for people to stop complaining about literary managers, or board members or the development director and put the blame squarely where it belongs.  If Artistic and Managing Directors want to change their practices, they will change. These are not democratic institutions we're talking about here, but think of them as if they are.  Craig Lucas walked out of a Roundabout deal for Playwrights Horizons years ago. It had little-to-no effect on Roundabout's subsidiary rights clauses, even though he publicly stated that subsidiary rights were the reason for his departure. 

Playgoer Writes Letters

Playgoer and I have pretty different interests and tastes, but we're both united in one thing: Our mutual loathing of Roundabout and MTC.  Who says the big theaters can't bring people together anymore?!

Seriously, though, the open letter will not be denied. And might I say, if Haimes & Co are casting about for a proven regional success to import to their now empty American Airlines theater, that they should consider Lydia Diamond's Stick Fly, already playing at the Huntington, a theater they've partnered with in the past.

Things I Agree With

99Seats edition.

The Scott Pilgrim Trailer

Michael Cera still could not be wronger for the role as it is portrayed in the books-- he lacks the exuberance (and stupidity) that are essential to the original series, and the idea of him rocking out with abandon seems completely foreign to his quite small (but quite awesome) wheelhouse-- but that doesn't mean he won't end up doing a good job in Edgar Wright's film adaptation. 

The trailer certainly gives me hope. If anyone could do this movie right, it's Edgar Wright:

Correcting Myself

I recently mentioned that the year Social Security was projected to go insolvent keeps getting revised further and further back.  Well, that used to be the case, and is the case no longer. Because of the faltering economy, Social Security is paying out more than it is taking in this year, six years earlier than projected.

Social Security is still quite different from Medicare or Medicaid in that the fixes needed for its finances are not a huge deal. 

Kitty Pryde & Wolverine III: You're My Obsession

99 asks if KP&W has me reliving my obsessive tendencies:

Thinking about Wolverine and reading these comics again, it reminds me of that adolescent intensity and passion, the kind that got me buying the full set of the Handbook to the Marvel Universe to learn exactly how much Spider-Man could bench (10 tons, just in case you want to know). Isaac, is it having the same effect on you?

IN a word: Yes.

I am a person of restless obsessions. I tend to get into something. Really into it, can only talk about that and a few other things, learn lots of information about it, try to convert all my friends, alienate those friends who won't be converted, go deeper with target of obsession, eventually let obsession fade to general interest and, occasionally, contempt and disdain for things I am obsessed with.

The real case study for this obsession is one I am seriously embarrassed about: My love of the band Phish from Sophomore year of High School until the same time in College.  Yes, I collected tapes (and traded them!) yes, I went to many of their shows, usually 1-3 a year which, given my academic schedule was about all I could do. Yes, I bored many, many people to tears talking about them. Yes, I denied despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary that every single guitar solo Trey Anastasio has ever done in his life has the exact same architecture, and it's  a pretty lame one at that: noodle around and tease ever higher on the neck of the guitar without ever establishing anything approximating interesting rhythm or improvised melody before you hit the highest root note possible over and over again as the drums climax.  Yes to yes to yes.  But I loved them. I'm not even sure I could explain why. Or are willing to, in a public forum.

There's a certain kind of person who is attracted to things one can learn a lot of arcana about.  I am that person.  Comics are great for this. You can learn all sorts of information that goes way, way beyond the story you are reading.  99 references The Handbook to the Marvel Universe, which you can read about here. I had multiple editions of it, older issues from my brother's childhood, and then a more advanced three-ring-binder version that came out when I was in Junior High.  I also had the Marvel Comics RPG, which is terrible (Champions is far superior, if I remember correctly) and from which I can tell you that Wolverine definitely has super strength, damnit.

Of the comics I subscribed to as a child, one of them was WHAT IF... which is a series only for the nerdiest of comic book nerds. Basically, it takes some famous detail of in-continuity Marveldom and turns it on its head.  WHAT IF... Prince Namor Joined The Fantastic Four? is the only issue I remember. There's probably some number of people out there reading this who have no idea what that title in italics even means, or why it would be important reversal beyond the fact that The Fantastic Four would have to change their names. 

Part of the fun of comic book reading for me was delving into all of that.  Until, one day, it wasn't fun anymore. That day was the day that the X-Men got really, really hard-core into alternate universes and time travel. The day, in other words, that Bishop showed up and it turned out Cable was a cyborg from the future.  And that Gambit would, on some unspecified day, betray the X-Men and cause their downfall.

Suddenly, the amount of backstory you had to keep in your head at any one point to even basically comprehend what was going on in the saga was ludicrous. It was also decidedly not worth it, as the stories went on and on with little payoff.  Lots of ink has been spilled about how catering to the SuperFan has had a seriously deleterious effect on the Big Two, particularly as they get older and the backstory gets deeper. I won't rehash it, if you want a really good version of that argument, read Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics.

Part of what was great about KP&W is that, as it is a miniseries, almost all of the ncessary backstory is included in the book itself.  Yes, this makes for some really clunky expository dialogue, but I'm not even sure you need to know who Kitty Pryde and Wolverine are to enjoy the book on some basic level. The first four panels bring you entirely up to speed on what is going on, and there's helpful footnotes throughout. (My favorite is that it is snowing in Japan because Thor accidentally opened the Cask of a Thousand Winters or something like that in a previous issue of a totally unrelated comic).

I had never read the Claremont/MIller Wolverine that J. talks about, for example. In fact, I'm not sure how much X-Men I had read prior to picking up KP&W for the first time, because my brother's comic book collection was out of order and in four different locations in the house (we Butler kids are messy).

Anyway... I think next up I'd like to tackle whether or not the book is actually, you know, "good". And what "good" in this case, with something I have this much baggage with, could possible mean.

Over to you, J.

Seen. Raised.

I will see 99Seats' posting of David Mamet's 2005 screenwriter's memo and raise him one writer's bible from Batman: The Animated Series, still one of the greatest comic book adaptations of all time.