Parabasis

Panel Transitions in Fun Home

So... This might be a bit into the tall weeds here, but today in prep for teaching Fun Home, I did a panel transition analysis modeled after Scott McCloud.

In McCloud's Understanding Comics, he delineates the six different kinds of panel transitions. They are:

(1) Moment to Moment: almost no time passes, very little changes from image to the next, and your brain engages in almost zero closure, it has to do no work to make sense of the image.

(2) Action To Action: A little bit of time passes. McCloud illustrates this with a shot of someone about to swing a bat, and a shot of someone hitting the ball. Again, little closure is needed.

(3) Subject to Subject: Here, a little more time is passing and the "camera" moves. So in a dialogue two-shot for example, if in the first panel it's a picture of me saying "how are you" and in the next it's your reply, that's a subject to subject transition (because the panels tackle different subjects).

(4) Scene To Scene: This is when you jump enough in either time or space (or both) that we're in a new scene.

(5) Aspect to Aspect: In this case, time stops and look in on different aspects of a scene. One way to think about this is like how Joss Whedon shoots the Buffy episode "The Body." He slows down time routinely by cycling through different aspects of a room (Buffy lying in bed, the fan cycling etc.) 

(6) Non-Sequitur: Is what it sounds like and is very rarely used.

As you might be able to tell, as we go up in number, we go up in the amount of imaginative work your brain has to do. After McCloud establishes this, he proceeds to do breakdown charts of various artist's work and the way they use panel transitions.

It turns out that most Western Comics use (with slight variations) the panel transition strategies pioneered by Jack Kirby. They almost never use Aspect, Non-sequiter or Moment transitions, and their other panels are largely Action to Action, with some Subject To Subject and Scene To Scene thrown in. Kirby's work, for example, is 65% Action, 20% Subject and 15% Scene.  

These ratios change a bit with other artists, but not that much (Maus, for example, has more scene than subject). But still, Action Transitions Are King.

Not so with Fun Home.  Here's how Alison Bechdel's panel transitions break out. The red columns are Action to Action, the Green are Subject to Subject, the Purple are Scene To Scene. Dark Blue is Moment to Moment and Light Blue is Aspect to Aspect. Obviously, there are some panel transitions that you have to just make an executive decision on, so some of this is rough, but anyway...  Check it out:

Graphing

This is a dramatically different breakdown than a normal comic book. Also, the number and percentage of action transitions shoots waaaaay up in the end.  Hopefully I'll have more to say about why this is and what the panel transition strategy has to do with both the form and content of the piece. But for now, I just thought I'd share it with you folks and see what you all think. 

Changing The Helen Hayes Awards

By Isaac Butler

One of my favorite experiences growing up was going to the annual Helen Hayes Awards.  If you might permit a piece of bragging, I started going to them because a show I was in was nominated for five of the biggees. We won one-- Best Leading Actor In A Musical-- which went to lead Fred Shiffman. I went every year after that, most of which were hosted by Pat Carroll who would always for some reason give us updates about how her children are doing in lieu of any kind of monologue, or patter, or anything that might be of interest to audience members who weren't her friends. 

Gwydion Suilebhan has a post up at his place about how he would change the Helen Hayes Awards.  These sorts of conversations are interesting because they're as much about how the theater scene has changed/grown as anything else.  Amongst other things, when I was a kid, I don't think there were enough high quality productions of new work, which is what lead to the Charles MacArthur awards combining plays and musicals into one new work category. 

Gwydion does not include (see update below) the change that most people I know would like to see-- and have wanted to see for at least fifteen years--which is the elimination of the slate of awards for nonresident productions. Really, if there are too many awards, these are the ones that need to go.  Back in the early days of the awards, before the DC scene really exploded and when they were trying to get the awards show off the ground, it made some sense to throw a sop to commercial touring productions. But it's far past time for the Helen Hayes Awards to take the rich, vibrant local scene in DC seriously enough to drop all of those categories. 

Gwydion also notes that he would like to see a new series of awards dedicated to "performance" or "physical theater" (a term he dislike for understandable reasons) largely because the company Synetic gets nominated for awards despite doing wordless, dance-like shows.  My only question is... is there enough of this kind of work happening in DC to justify an award category dedicated to it?  

Which brings me to a final point unrelated to the awards themselves:  I don't know about you guys and gals, but it seems to me that one of the things that DC could use is a venue like St. Ann's in Brooklyn or The Walker in Minneapolis (or RedCAT in LA or etc. etc. and so forth).  A venue dedicated to... shall we say... performance work, or mainstreamish experimental work or whatever you want to call it.  There should be a venue where work like L'Effet De Serge or Young Jean's work or the kind of performance work featured in Under the Radar is brought in.  I don't think any of that stuff should be eligible for awards or anything, but I think that kind of venue would be a good addition to the scene down there. Given the enormous amount of funding The Kennedy Center gets, it'd be nice if they refashioned themselves as DC's BAM instead of offering $100-a-pop celebrity studded readings of plays and the other boring work they offer.

UPDATE: I don't know how this happened, but somehow I happened to read Gwydion's post and then while writing this one FORGET THAT HE CAME OUT AGAINST THE NONRESIDENT PRODUCTIONS!  THis is what happens when you blog without coffee. 

Working Man Blues

by 99 Seats

Some big pieces of news from 99 Seats Central here. It's going to be a busy merrie olde month of May for this guy. Figured I'd throw a little shameless self-promotion your way, just 'cause.

First up, [the claque] is presenting a workshop of my play, TOGETHERNESS, at The Tank on May 2 and May 5 at 9:30 pm. It's a comedy about a pair of brothers who head off for a weekend of booze, drugging and partying at a cabin in Vermont, but find that the party girl they're expecting to find there has gone sober. Hilarity ensues. Abigail Zealey-Bess is directing and the awesome cast includes Amy Staats, William Jackson Harper, Shawn Randall and Jenny Gomez. You can get more info here. Tickets are $15 at the door and are available here. My workshop is part of a festival of great plays and events. Check it out!

But wait! There's more! Later this month, my one-act play, SCHOOL NIGHT, will be produced by the Ensemble Studio Theatre as part of their 33rd Marathon of One-Act Plays. SCHOOL NIGHT tells the story of three young people who teach each other a lesson about sex, connection and the meaning of home over the body of a dead cat in the Jersey suburbs. Abigail Zealey-Bess is directing this as well and we'll announce the cast shortly. You can go here for more info and for tickets. The show starts performances on May 20th and runs until June 18th.

In the meantime, I'll be taking all of my rewrite ideas right from this guy.

Today Now! Interviews The 5-Year-Old Screenwriter Of "Fast Five"

He knows what the audience wants. A cookie and a nap.

Thoughts On #Narrative III: In Defense Of.

By Isaac Butler

Via George Hunka  I happened to stumble upon this essay about narrative in the online magazine Exeunt, in which the “ethics of narrative” are critiqued. As I’m a few steps down this winding garden path of narrative issues, I thought I’d see what author Deborah Pearson had found so problematic about narrative. I left the essay scratching my head.

The essay begins with Pearson’s shock to find out that narrative and the self are hardwired together in the brain. This prompts her to ask “If the human need for narrative is not restricted to dramatic conventions but originates from our very sense of self, then how do we extricate ourselves from it in performance? Should we?”   Frankly, I’m shocked by her shock.  Narrative isn’t simply “dramatic convention”—although this essay is rife with term-level confusions between narrative and western conventions about narratives—it’s something that every culture everywhere has engaged in for pretty much ever.  From the Bayeaux tapestry to Sanskrit dance performance, we’ve engaged in narrative and story telling. It’s one of the universal human activities (and there’s some research that it’s not just humans that engage in it).  It wasn’t invented by Aristotle.

My answer to these questions would make for a very short essay.  The answer to both is “no, you can’t, so stop trying.” Even if the performer makes an ostensibly narrative-less work, the audience in its hunger and desire for a narrative will impose one on the proceedings. If you want to work in performance and don’t want to deal with story, go make modern dance (which, by the way, would be fine, I vastly prefer non-narrative dance to narrative dance).

Next we get into some of Pearson’s problems with narrative:

The political problems that narrative throws up are not so tough to recognize. Narratives must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They must have a “controlling idea”, one main point (moral) we can take from the series of events that have unfolded. And they must have consistent characters with easily described natures – cowardly but kind, or irrational and insincere, for example.

The problem is, none of this is true of narrative (except for maybe—and only maybe—the beginning, middle and end part). It’s true of certain kinds of narratives that hew closely to certain tropes.  There are all sorts of narratives with inconsistent, unstable characters. Characters in both Shepard and Pinter are famously inconsistent. Chuck Mee deliberately builds character through contradiction, not coherence. And even if characters are generally consistent, the part about easily described natures is simply false.  While there are plenty of great characters that can be described simply (melancholy Jacques comes to mind) there’s plenty that can’t.  Iago, for example, overtly defies simple interpretation, he rubs it in his audience’s face with his gleeful deployment of impossible explanation after impossible explanation.  Paul in Six Degrees of Separation remains a total enigma, most of Chekhov’s characters can’t be so easily put into boxes, and moving into novels, novels give the writer plenty of space to create deep, rich, surprising characters.

Furthermore, while most narratives have a controlling idea (less so in the postmodern era) the idea that narratives are supposed to have only one idea/moral, one main takeaway just doesn’t wash.  I can’t tell you what the one takeaway from Hamlet is. Or Oedipus (don’t fuck your mom?) or—looking around my bookshelves right now—White Noise or Uncle Vanya or Footnotes in Gaza or Waterland or Then We Came To The End or Sandman or Joe Turner's Come and Gone or Song of Solomon or Ma Rainey's Black Bottom even a work of genre fiction like The Blunderer.

The rest of the paragraph from Pearson is quite telling as well, as it finally reveals (sort of) what the (supposed) political problematics of narrative are:

 Narratives are psychologically comforting because they provide resolution, and often impose a logic onto a frustratingly fluid reality. As anybody who has ever had to edit a play or story can tell you, narratives are highly selective, shamelessly omitting facts and events in search of a coherent story. This is all well and good for Oscar bait – but when these rules are applied to a political situation (as in the media they often are) the omissions and cuts are real people with real experiences.

The above quote reveals that there’s a category error at the heart of Pearson’s essay.  All narrative—with all of its richness and diversity and thousands of years of history—is reduced here to “Oscar bait.” Pearson is confusing narrative with a specific kind of highly conventionalized trope-fueled narrative.  They’re not the same thing.  Furthermore, it isn’t narrative that’s “highly selective,” it’s art in general.  Narrative might do it in search of a coherent story—and I think that construction is problematic but life is short—but all art uses careful selection of marterials and details. The most abstract modern dance eschews some gestures in favor of others. Even an abstract expressionist painting leaves out certain colors, certain kinds of brush strokes. And let's not even gets started on the fact that both of those examples leave out all the kinds of stories that Pearson worries narrative leaves out. No work of art can contain everything. Art works through selection and expansion, the ruthless culling of the extraneous so that the necessary can then be exploded into sublimity. 

Then we get this odd final sentence that’s supposed to explain why narrative (as she misdefines it) can be politically problematic.  The use of the catch-all bugabear “the media” obscures meaning here.  Does she mean journalists? Or does she mean politically minded works of art like Ruined or Angels in America? Either way, again, there is no way that you can create something that doesn’t exclude something, probably something important.  What you can do—what I’d argue is the duty of both journalists and artists— is be responsible about what you omit, try to check your own ideological involvement in that decision and, if you’re a journalist, try to do follow up when possible.  The problem of leaving things out is as much a problem of time and space as it is how stories are constructed.

Throughout the essay, Pearson confuses narrative in general with the tropes of the “well made play.” They’re not the same, and as a result the essay doesn’t really question anything. Pearson is suspicious of how seductive a well-made, highly conventional story can be. And she’s right to be. It’s fun to be swept away, but we also need to be critical of the sweeping, or else we end up with hate crimes like Gone With The Wind for our classics. But that’s not narrative, that’s convention.

Ultimately, all that narrative really requires is things causing other things to happen. Causality isn’t a social construct, or a kind of meaning we impose on the world. If I punch you in the face, it’s not a comforting myth that you’ve then been punched. I’ve caused that to happen. And if in response to that punch in the face you kick me in the shins, we have a chain of causality.

 In her final paragraph, she floats an idea that’s quite popular in more high fallutin’ circles of academia, literature and performance, namely that we desire narrative out of fear, that the world is a chaotic, messy, not-understandable place, and we want a story to help make sense of it and our place in it.  Leaving aside for a moment that there are narratives that descend into utter chaos and incoherence (I just finished one, Stanislaw Lem’s Memoirs Found In A Bathtub, this morning), it’s an interesting idea, one I’m not sure if I agree with or not, frankly. Here’s Pearson’s version of it:

 Finally, I sometimes wonder if the real reason we need stories originates from the fear that our lives may never find a final resolution in any way that we will be conscious of. If this, mortality and the confusing nature of an ongoing existence, is what is really behind our desire for storytelling, then perhaps we should just see it as a neurotic quirk of the human species.

 I love narrative too much to dismiss it on these terms, but I hear and read things like this all the time, particularly from people who adhere to the “performance” tradition rather than the theatre tradition. Given that I remain a bit unsure how I feel about it, I will simply counter with another idea that a professor of mine floated the other day, one I’m still chewing over and unsure of my feelings about:

There’s a class dynamic to the above quoted approach to narrative that people don’t want to look at. Basically, since the enlightenment, we have wanted to see ourselves as having a large amount of agency to enact change in the world and decide our destiny. This is particularly true of members of the, shall we say, professional-managerial classes.

 Highly conventional narratives reject this idea. In highly conventional narratives, the protagonist is a cog in a machine that preexists her. She doesn’t have control, the rules have control. Those of us who have risen to a point where we (mistakenly) believe that institutions don’t govern the vast majority of what we do want to reject these kinds of stories because they are suffocating to us, because they remind us that we too are subject to rules and institutions that we (mistakenly) believe ourselves to have transcended.  But these highly conventionalized narratives actually reflect more honestly the experience of being, say, working class, where your choices are far more overtly narrowed by institutional realities.

 When asked about the “Shakespearean” and “Dickensian” qualities of The Wire, David Simon regularly draws the interviewers attention to the Greeks.  He says that with The Wire, he tried to reach back to a pre-enlightenment understanding of people, where they actually had very little agency to affect change.  For the Greeks, it was because the Gods controlled everything. For The Wire, the Greek Gods are replaced with large institutions.  Greek drama was also highly conventionalized. This isn’t a coincidence. Perhaps then Pearson seeks comfort in a rejection of narrative because it reifies her worldview and grants her more control.

 Again, I’m not sure how I feel about that one, but I think it’s a point of view equally worthy of thought and attention to the condescending idea that people like stories because they’re babies in need of a security blanket.

Game of Thrones, Adaptation, Women

by Isaac Butler

(spoilers, obviously about the first episode. I've read the first three books but try to keep knowledge of things to come out of this post)

So... the Game of Thrones premiere has come and gone and I quite liked it.  It's fun to see the novels come to life, and the show is dramatically compelling on its own. Let me just insert a few quick points vis-a-vis this whole project and me as a starting point: I like the books and find them compulsively readable. I do not love them with slavish devotion.  I am in general a fan of adaptive freedom, and find that things tend to get choked up when they are too faithful to the source material (see both LORT and Harry Potter).  Additionally, I am not one of those people who thinks that it's automatically a good thing for things to get adapted into TV shows or films, particular into films where (as in the Scott Pilgrim movie) the medium is poorly suited to the size of the story.

So I am not one of those people who get angry when source text is diverted from. I think those moments are telling. Scott Pilgrim, for example, was too faithful to some parts of the source material and not faithful enough to others. What's interesting about the books-- that through their expansive dive into Scott's social scene right at the point where it begins to fall apart they require you to read the books against themselves, and that when you do that they become a critique of the whole nice guy loser thing-- was lost in favor of a well directed Apatow movie with fights.

My point is simply that changes from the source material are interesting to examine, and can be an entry in for critique.  With something as loyal to the source material as GOT is, there's one scene thus far that diverges greatly from the book.  In the season premiere a (creepy but at least nominally) consensual sex scene is turned into an overt rape. For those of you who haven't read the books, I'm talking about Danaerys' wedding night with Khal Drogo.  

This is a very important change, even if it looks small. In the television show A Game Of Thrones, Danaerys stands in her wedding gown on a beautiful vista crying. Khal Drogo starts walking around her and checking her out. She cries. He says "no," she asks him if he speaks the common tongue, he again says "no," she asks him if that's the only word he knows, he again says "no," and then he undresses her, she moves her hands to cover herself, he says "no," and then pushes her down on all fours, after which she visibly winces as the camera zooms in on her face and it smash cuts to a new scene.

In the book, after the three "nos" Khal Drogo speaks to her in his language. She can't understand what he's saying but she knows from the tone that it's tender and loving and this comes as a shock. Then he undresses himself. Then he undresses her. Then there's about a page of non-penetrative foreplay done for her pleasure. Then he asks her "no?" and she brings his hand onto her and says "yes."

It's a significant change. In the book, it is meant to be the first moment when a character who has never had agency in her entire life is given a choice about something. It-- combined with a growing love that she has for Khal Drogo-- fuels her character's arc over the course of the novel. It also helps mitigate all the Savage Barbarian race stuff that's floating around the Dothraki. In the television show, it becomes the character's nadir. A character who had never had agency in her entire life is then raped savagely on her wedding night.

I've done some looking around message boards, and it seems to be that there's some subset of viewers who don't understand that this was a rape scene. To me, their point of view is easily dismissable. It's very obviously a rape scene. She doesn't want to have sex. She is forced to have sex. Last time I checked, that's rape.

Then there's a subset that believes that this actually corrects a problem in the book, namely that the sex scene is unbelievable and in a series that is as much about demystifying genre tropes as A Song Of Ice And Fire is, this is one place where author George R.R. Martin falls down on the job.  In this reading, the sex scene is the worst kind of bodice ripper sexy savage claptrap, and the writers do the work a service by rendering this scene in this way, as it's much more likely that this is how an arranged marriage like Danaerys and Drogo's would shake out.

The third perspective-- which is mine, although I recognize the validity of the one above-- is disappointed by this shift.  The scene felt to me gratuitous, exploitative and degrading of both the character and the actress playing her.  It recalled to me this interview that Rachel Griffiths did with Time Out New York when the interviewer asked her how it was switching from HBO to network television and she replied, "People will hate me for saying this, but in some ways broadcast decency standards give actresses certain protections, and I can’t say that I mind that." To take a sexual moment that is the beginning of woman realizing her agency and power and then not only taking that away, but changing it to a moment in which power is further denied her and she's abused seems to me like a poorly thought out decision.

From a narrative structure standpoint, it's also problematic. Unless they're going to change the story fairly drastically, Danaerys and Drogo's relationship is going to need to improve pretty drastically after this point. Which means they'll have to either insert new plot points, or the arc of their relationship will be bullshit. We'll have to wait and see on that score.

This whole thing reinforces a problem with post-Sopranos premium cable.  That quality = loveable male sociopaths and women either being degraded or having to appear naked or both.  t's problematic, but in an age when they're competing with The Tudors, The Borgias and Spartacus for market share, I doubt it's going away.

For the record, I very much enjoyed the show and plan on continuing to watch it.This was the one place where for me the project falls on its face. There's a great deal of sexual violence in Martin's books, it's one of the main tools he uses to demystify Tolkeinesque heroic fantasy tropes.  They're going to have to learn how to handle it in such a way that it doesn't feel too exploitative, pornographic or gratuitous. The wall-to-wall tits and added rape scene in this premiere makes me doubtful they know how to do that, or care to learn.

Again, I think it's valid as well to view the scene as a corrective to a problem in the source material. I don't agree with this interpretation, but I understand where it comes from. I've read people of both genders fall down on either side of it.  

Quote of the Day

by 99 Seats

Michael Gerson edition:

If Objectivism seems familiar, it is because most people know it under another name: adolescence. Many of us experienced a few unfortunate years of invincible self-involvement, testing moral boundaries and prone to stormy egotism and hero worship. Usually one grows out of it, eventually discovering that the quality of our lives is tied to the benefit of others. Rand’s achievement was to turn a phase into a philosophy, as attractive as an outbreak of acne.

Just a Quick Note

By Isaac Butler   

I absolutely love this blog post from Rob Weinert-Kendt and find interesting resonances with my recent post.  Check it out. 

Bereavement Rate

By Isaac Butler

Airlines assume you're conning them, go to remarkable lengths to prevent it. One asked for the name of the hospital, the name of the doctor, the name of the funeral home and its address.  And I had to call back within 72 hours of the departure time. So much for planning ahead.

There's so many words and phrases and euphemisms to handle.  For example, they don't call it bereavement rate anymore. They call it consideration rate. They might as well call it sympathy rate. Ten percent off-- you have our sympathies. Then there are all the words for the state of (un)being itself.  Even when you disregard John Cleese's litany of them in the dead parrot sketch, what are we left with?  

When I was a child and ascribed to a religion that didn't believe in death, the phrase for dying was passed on. Or in the past perfect, had passed away. There are others.  Perished, that's an odd one.  Perished.  Like we're perishable, like we're produce at some kind of overstocked Safeway, crammed in our bins, rubbing up against the Black Cherry Select Sodas. Like one day we became floppy carrots, slimy celery, brown, unappetizing brussels sprouts. 

Like we're past our expiration date.

This might seem perverse, but that term with all of it's 19th century obituary oddness is the one I choose for my Aunt. Suddenly ill, then suddenly more ill suddenly with new sudden illnesses, so many of them needing attention that the original cause for hospitalization got lost in the shuffle somehow, a mystery, the worst episode of House ever. She perished, for sure.

And I never saw her during that period, had not seen her for almost a year and a half, never saw her outside of annual Thanksgiving dinners and this happened to be the one year she didn't make it up from Miami. Nothing to feel too guilty about, although if you know anything about guilt, you'll know that it, and not God, is the real causeless cause.  Of course I feel guilt.  Of course I feel guilt over the distance, over learning of her death from e-mail. Over not going down there and seeing her.

Guilt and sadness. So pedestrian, but at the end of the day it's what I'm left with. Chopping vegetables for dinner and then suddenly it sprouts like a quick growing weed, like kudzu, like a tongue of fire in a forest and it's so simple really, this twin realization that you will never see this person again but it will take quite a long time before all of you accepts it. It will be many Thanksgivings before her not walking through the door of your grandmother's house will stop feeling strange.

It's sad, really, the way we become habituated to people. To their presence. To their appearances, their comings and goings. Elsa was a specific person with a specific sense of humor and a specific haircut, and she was lovely and grounded and funny and kind but the thing that strikes me as mourning-worthy is her absence at a dinner table.

Or perhaps it is simply that my most significant memory of her embarrasses, mortifies. And while we're at it, what are we to make of this term mortify? I was so embarrassed that it caused me to come closer to death. Do I mean that? No. Of course I don't. It seems cheap to use such a term when confronted with real mortification, with the real destruction of the strength and vitality, the essence and presence of another human being. 

I can't tell that story now. Not in public, not on the internet where it never goes away. Suffice it to say that it involves a great deal of self-loathing on my part and a great deal of comfort on hers. And that I was nine. Ish. Which makes it twenty two years since this last significant encounter, give or take an ish or two.

The bereavement rate is meant to take me on a journey to another curious phrase, the Memorial Service. A memorial being an object in which memory is enclosed. But there's no object being dedicated at this service. Instead, we will be saying goodbye.

Unless the object isn't corporeal. Unless it's a kind of vessel, a crystal cage to encase our feelings surrounding her, alive and dead, and our own feelings of life, and of death, of momentarily seeing that the former is finite and the latter on its way.

You can't feel everything all the time. It's not possible. You'll be consumed. The world is too wonderful, too horrible, too vast, too sublime. There's a reason that the Age of Information coincides with the Age of Irony. How else can we survive the worldliness of the world? We don't want to walk around a bundle of exposed nerve endings, shooting off electricity and neurotransmitters, spontaneously combusting at each headline in the New York Times, every homeless veteran we pass on the street, and the scared, hurt looks on the faces of other walking exposed nerves in human shape.

And yet.  Go too far in the other direction and you might as well be dead. You can't be fully present, can't be fully absent.  

And so ritual. And so memorial service. And so bereavement rate.

On Tuesday, we'll gather. If it's one kind of service, I'll don the kippah and the torn black ribbon. If it's another, I won't and we'll sit around and swap stories. And feel. And cry. And hopefully heal a little bit.

When we talk about these kinds of rituals, we use another inadequate word.  Catharsis.  Purging. Cleansing. As if you have burned the person out of you, as if you have bleached the walls of your heart until they gleam white and sterile, surrounding you like your teeth surround your tongue. Or worse, that you've vomited the person and your sadness, and thus you are hungry and sick at the same time.

We need a new word, new words, new meanings. If we do it right, we do not purge the person. We create a vessel, a canteen that we pour them into, that we carry with us in case we encounter a desert, so that we may sip from it and it can give us some little piece of help on a hot thirsty day. If we do it right, that's what we'll do for Elsa, and for us. 

Quote of the Day

by 99 Seats

A very hard truth from the ArtsMarket folks on the bankruptcy of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra edition:

Are there solutions to this mess? Sure. But just as the citizens of Wisconsin have learned over their season of public employee union battles, the adjustments are nasty business, no matter what side you are on. First, you have to face reality, hard and uncompromising as it is. As the old saying goes, you have to raise the dragon to slay the dragon. One of our field’s many dragons is that we want a mid-20th Century performing arts system in a 21st Century world. We don’t want the pain of recognizing that our consumer tastes, interests, budgets, and technology have so dramatically and fundamentally changed our arts consumption and behavior that we aren’t ever going back.

We’re living in a time warp of about 1975. Are we ready to live in 2011? Because if we are, and we recognize that this Philadelphia story is not a blip, we better get busy in rethinking the entire financial and operational model of the performing arts while it is still possible to restructure outside of bankruptcy court.

I Believe That's Called A Nadir

by 99 Seats

Very Small Array has made a handy-dandy chart of the Rotten Tomatoes ratings of the top-grossing films from 1950 to today, showing a couple of things:

- Um. Movies suck more now, apparently. Like a lot. There's been a clear and steady decline in the overall quality of the top movies since 1950. Interesting.

- Also: 1995? What the hell happened there? Oh, wait. That's what happened there. Jesus. What an awful year. What a terrible, terrible year.

Scratching The Surface

by 99 Seats

Thank you, Yahoo! News, for fact-checking this Newsweek cover story about the plight of the poor, downtrodden white male. I know we're about to be in a good month or two of handwringing about how to connect to these poor, unfortunate souls who are so powerless and in need of succor, absolutely devastated by the economic downturn. They have it so much worse than everyone else. We should probably have some sort of special employment initiative for them.

It's just so bad out there for a white guy. So bad.

The Kamikaze Strike

By Isaac Butler

We are used to thinking about quality as a way of ensuring memorability. Make a compelling work of art well, have something to say, say it beautifully, make it well crafted.  Tell a good story, one the reader or viewer will be unable to forget. Have memorable character names, a complex and rich conflict at the core of your narrative, show the protagonist changing (preferably irrevocably and probably for the worse) over the course of the story.  And remember to deploy your devices with, above all, good taste.

But what about the other way to do it?

Twice in the past year, I have encountered works of art that used a kind of kamikaze strike of bad taste to worm their unforgettable way into my mind.  The first is John Carpenter’s film They Live.  They Live contains two roughly nine minute long mini-epics that stand almost outside of the film.  The first—the moment after Nada puts on the glasses and sees the world for what it really is—is a brilliant piece of filmmaking, as pure as the space station ballet in 2001, a moody, contemplative bit of thematically rich, elegantly filmed, beautiful cognitive disorientation. 

This is not the segment most people remember best from They Live. Rather it is the nine minute fight between Roddy Piper and Keith David, the one referenced almost move for move in South Park’s “Cripple Fight” episode.  There is absolutely no need for the scene to be as long as it is. It nearly sinks the whole the film. It’s an extended assault on viewer good taste. You want some violence? Well here’s a shit-ton of it! We’ll give you a fight scene so laborious that eventually you tire of watching two men beat the shit out of each other… and then it will still keep going after that until you find it almost hilarious. (Note: For much more on all of this, I highly suggest you check out Jonathan Lethem's book about the film called, memorably enough, They Live and put out by Soft Skull. It's a great work of criticism and a lot of fun to boot.)

The second is in the novel Endless Love by Scott Spencer. I wasn’t a huge fan of the book (that’s a conversation for another day) but it has earned a place in reader’s minds for two reasons. First, it’s the basis for an almost unwatchable Zefferelli film (I know, what Zefferelli film isn’t borderline unwatchable?) starring Brooke Shields when she was trying to move into mature roles.  Second, it contains within it a sex scene. That’s roughly fifty pages long.  Where one of the two people involved is having her period. That’s exhaustively detailed. And where both particiapants wake up covered in crusted blood and other fluids. 

Before you think this is about squeamishness over menstruation on my part, let me just tell you, I don’t know a single person male or female, in touch with their body or not who wasn’t horrified by the sex scene at the heart of Endless Love.  Or the earlier sex scene that describes someone’s anus as both like a puppy and like a heart. And yet, I also don’t know anyone who can forget them.  I talked to a friend of mine who hadn’t read the book since it came out in 1979 but who remembered story beat for story beat what happens in the entire scene (and a lot happens in it, they have sex about six times before the woman falls asleep and the guy keeps going).

Like the fight scene in They Live, it sears itself into your brain. You can’t unread either sequence, they’re lodged there forever, and they serve as little threads through which you can access the rest of the material in your memory.  In fact, in order to be effective, both sequences assume a certain kind of good taste on the part of the viewer and then—almost like a dare or a bet—they decide to enact an all out assault on it. The work’s immortality is the prize, and if your opinion of it is the cost, so be it.

I’m curious if you can think of other examples.  Not works that are wholly in bad taste, those are common enough, but works that contain set pieces that are weaponised bad taste aimed at longevity.  I can’t, for example, think of a play that I’ve seen that works like that.  

Double Binds

by 99 Seats

Over at Culturebot, Jeremy Barker has a question:

So the question is, why aren’t more African-Americans making theater outside the traditional text-based mode? Devised theater is just one variant of contemporary performance that’s primarily in the theatrical (rather than dance or movement) vein, but from what I’ve seen, it is, even beyond strictly devised theater, rather unusual to find black artists working in these experimental, multidisciplinary modes.

He's responding to me here and to my producing partner Keith Josef Adkins at HowlRound on The New Black Fest (and he throws in some lovely shout-outs, too). Barker continues:

Those sorts of barriers are precisely where ensemble-driven theater comes from–artists tired of beating their heads against a wall, trying to get their work done, who find some like-minded compatriots and start their own companies to produce their own work. And don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying it’s easy, but there’s a big difference between waiting to be recognized and have your work produced, and fighting to make things happen. (This is, I should point out, why Adkins started New Black Fest.) I’m sure most of the playwrights Adkins and Holtham talk about have, at some point, self-produced or worked with small companies. But there’s still this glaring question of why more of them don’t deepen and develop those collaborations, rather than assuming that small work is just a stepping stone to doing the sort of big theater plays they really want to.

And this:

There’s certainly plenty of counter-examples in the theater. The AIDS crisis in the 1980s gave rise to a distinctly realist form of gay theater based on that shared experience, but Tony Kushner wound up blowing it out of the water in the early Nineties with Angels in America, and writers like Terrence McNally expanded their vocabularies well beyond traditional well-made plays. George C. Wolfe’s Colored Museum was an amazing satiric deconstruction of black realist drama in the late Eighties, but it sort of stands on its own. Mainstream African-American theater, as even Adkins notes, remains beholden to the legacy of August Wilson. But when you compare that sort of realism to the work of an African-American woman like Suzan-Lori Parks, the differences are striking. I don’t think Parks rejects the idea of an essential African-American identity, but her work does explicitly explore how identity is performed, from Venus to The America Play to Topdog/Underdog. And I suspect that has something to do with her gender, and approaching identity from a pair of perspectives that wind up conflicting, much as they did in Ntozake Shange’s best work.

It's a fairly dense article, so definitely, please RTWT. But I have quite a few thoughts to share on it.

First off, I'm not one to go in for a lot of playwright triumphalism/exceptionalism, but I don't think it's too much to say that, historically, playwrights have been at the forefront of making social change and responding to world events. There is a long tradition that holds that is the theatre artists' first duty. There is plenty of room for "art for art's sake" thinking and all, but it's not an idea that's so far afield. Yeah, I'm sticking up for my buddy, but still.

To the substance of the article, well, some of the premise is completely off. There is a long, proud, and excellent tradition of black experimental theatre. It lives in a difference place, though, than "devised" theatre or whatever term we're using for white experimental theatre. And there are artists working in that tradition right now: this season, Soho Rep featured the work of Jomama Jones, the creation/alter ego of the excellent Daniel Alexander Jones. Daniel works firmly in this tradition and in this world, devising his own pieces that are lyrical, expressive, beautiful and steeped in race and the clash of cultures. But he doesn't get the notice that an artist like Taylor Mac does. (And before anyone says anything at all, I know and respect and have deep love and affection for both of these men and I'm not trying to say that Daniel is somehow better or anything like that. I'm simply noting the disparity.) This is a wholly unscientific thing, but when Taylor or the Rude Mechs are doing work or when a British company comes to town, my Facebook thread is full of "must sees." Not so much for Jomama Jones. But it WAS sold out and extended.

What Jeremy is noticing, but can't quite put his finger on, is a truth I've mentioned before: we have a segregated theatre. Before everyone gets the vapors, I'm not calling anyone racist or prejudiced or evil bad people. I'm just saying that white theatre makers and black theatre makers inhabit very, very different worlds, with little to no overlap and with very different rules. White theatre makers usually have virtually no idea of what's going on in the world of black theatre, who's making what, where it's happening, any of that. Occasionally, a Classical Theatre of Harlem or a New Black Fest will reach the "mainstream" consciousness, but mostly, it happens in places, especially here in New York and the Tri-State area, we don't hear about.

One of the things I loved about The Inexplicable Redemption of Agent G (if you missed it, well, you missed it) was how beautifully Qui showed the dilemma of being a minority artist. You want to tell your story, you want to tell it your way, but still, no matter what the story is, the pressure is on to make it more whatever ethnicity you are, to make it more "true," even when that experience is false to you. (Trust me, this relates. Go with me.) A lot of minority artists who are into experimentation, now that having two degrees in playwriting is a prerequisite to having a career, have that experimentalism taught out of them. Some do retain it or retain some of it: Tarell Alvin McRaney, Christina Anderson, Branden Jacob-Jenkins are all using elements of experimental theatre, as are Zakiyyah Alexander, Keli Garrett, the aforementioned Daniel Alexander Jones, his longtime collaborator Sharon Bridgforth, and many, many others. Most identify as playwrights, but many direct as well. As minority artists, there's a lot less wiggle room in terms of role. It's easier to work identified as a playwright because the only time, as a director, you're getting the call, it's to work on a black play. And, as we've see, those opportunities are few and far between.

And let's not forget the historical record, some of which Rob Weinert-Kendt notes here, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kia Corthron, Kara Corthron, going all the way back to Adrienne Kennedy and Douglas Turner Ward and Ed Bullins. And let's not forget writers like OyamO,  Not all black plays were written by August Wilson or in his style. But these works are rarely revived, rarely canonized, rarely taught to anyone who isn't studying Black theatre. In fact, probably the only people who do read this work these days are young Black playwrights. It's lost history. And it's lost because of the segregation of our theatres. And because of the brain drain.

15 years ago, Suzan-Lori Parks was a downtown, self-producing, avant-garde playwright struggling just like everyone else. Now she's an institution. Maybe not as dramatic as Jackie Robinson joining the Dodgers, but Suzan-Lori winning the Pulitzer for a play that was, while more accessible than some of her earlier work, still weird and odd and distinct, that opened a kind of flood gate and put a kind of validation on that kind of work. There was a crack in the wall of the major institutions for a certain kind of work. But pretty much, that's all they were looking for. Everything else has been deemed too old-fashioned. (It's also worth remembering that a black playwright/director/artistic director is the one who put her on the path that ended with the Pulitzer. If George C. Wolfe hadn't been the A.D. of Public, would it have happened at all?)

Now, to be completely honest, there's another pressure coming from the other side, too. There is a conservative strain in the black theatre community, tied, in some ways , to the idea of being an agent for social change, and reaching a wide audience. Avant-garde theatre doesn't always do that, so some artists do feel a pressure to make their work more accessible, and, in some ways, more conventional. But that goes for a lot of folks.

Jeremy was absolutely right for calling me out about saying:

For whatever reason (or whatever combination of reasons), this work is done mainly by white artists. Or, at least, the work that gets the spotlight is the work done by white artists. Which strikes me as odd, since I know so many black artists and artists of color who are well suited to tackling work in this manner.

I wasn't really saying that I thought, which is, it's bullshit. A lot of folks talk a lot of good game about inclusion and experimentation and being good little liberals and all, but their actions don't match up. Doing this kind of "devised" work or whatever is way for them to work with their friends and pals and not have to take any flack for it (not that anyone really takes flack for NOT being integrated). No one pushes Rude Mechs to be inclusive because, well, they devise the work as a company, so if you're not in the company, you're not in the company. Being a devised company means you're free of any need to diversify your work, to reach beyond your small circle, to have a larger conversation. We can only worry about one non-mainstream thing at a time: either devised work or diversity. Not both.

Well, Jeremy, I hope this goes to answering your question and pointing in the direction of some things to look up. And I do hope we see you at The New Black Fest this year. You might be surprised by what you see.

 

Gender, Taste, Reviewing

By Isaac Butler

I think it's safe to say that there's a good way to go about pointing out how gender can shape taste and aesthetics and that way too much cultural programming-- particularly on television-- is shaped by people imagining what young men (and older manchildren) want to watch. And that this article really, really isn't it. 

An Embarrassment of Riches

By Isaac Butler

If Stagegrade is to be believed, things are really jumping right now in New York. While there's plenty of shows (Freud's Last Session, Love, Loss and What I Wore) that aren't really my thing, it appears that no matter what kind of theater you like, there's all sorts of good stuff going on right now, some of which closes tonight. 

A 22-Caliber Mind in a .357 Magnum World

by 99 Seats

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Obama is taking his cues from Aaron Sorkin. I think this is a good thing.

Obama also complained about GOP attempts to attach a bill to the resolution to fund the government that would defund women's health services provider Planned Parenthood.

"Put it in a separate bill," the president said he told House Speaker John Boehner and his staff. "We'll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don't try to sneak this through."

The president also made clear he is no fan of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP's Budget Committee chairman.

"When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant ... This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill--but wasn't paid for," Obama reportedly said.

Sound familiar? Hmm...a president making a very, very accurate, but blunt assessment of a rival in a casual setting, so it's not an "official" statement? But it helps the President's case? Especially when people are saying he's not taking the fight to the Republicans enough?

Well-played, sir. Well-played.

Just A Reminder

By Isaac Butler

Contra The Takeaway, there weren't really black confederate soldiers. Given how much research is out there debunking this myth, I'm frankly surprised that it made it's way onto a completely-credulous news segment on NPR that also treated the assertion that the secession was about slavery as somehow controversial as opposed to a fact made obvious by even a cursory reading of the secession documents of the individual states. Ta-Nehisi has much, much more on this. 

Repeating Myself

by 99 Seats

Dear President Obama:

They still hate you.

Signed,

99 Seats

Why We Fight

by 99 Seats

Over at HowlRound, my producing partner, Keith Josef Adkins, gives a pretty good run-down about why The New Black Fest exists.

We knew we wanted to include a solvency component into our conversation and programming. We knew it was important to directly engage our audiences in conversations about reshaping the look of black theater. We also knew we wanted to talk to artivists (artist/activist) and discuss ways to send theater artists into the community and find ways to support social and/or cultural organizations. We knew we wanted music from artists who were exploring new forms of musical theater—Stew, Eisa Davis, the Afro-Punk folks, etc. We also knew we needed plays exploring every experience known, from every corner of the planet. Basically, we wanted to change the landscape of American theater in twelve quick days.

You know the drill: RTWT.

Now Tell Us How You REALLY Feel...

Would that quote be the same if you put "television" in place of "advertising" and "theatre" in place of "modern art?" Discuss amongst yourselves. (via via)