Parabasis

Link Grabbag

By Isaac Butler

Hey Parabasites... I've been very ill with a stomach bug, holidaying and grading my ever-loving ass off lately, and am seriously backed up on work, so I apologize for the light state of posting around here.  In the meantime, I am going to try to regularly post links to some of the stuff I discover while researching procrastinating.  Enjoy!

Theater: Over at The Taylor Trash, we have some handy words of advice for the young, aspiring theater critic. Meanwhile, Alison Croggon, one of theater blogging's OG's is hanging up her spurs. There's so few of us left now! Meanwhile, Bitter Lemons writes about a recent article in the LA Times about the recent(ish) trend for shorter plays and concludes that plays must be getting shorter because kids these days can't write and audiences are now stupider than they used to be. Comments section fury ensues.

Literature: Roxane Gay has some unkind (and well deserved) words for Simon & Schuster's new selfpublishing venture.

Grant Morrison pens an epic--and it really is epic-- smackdown of Alan Moore over at Comicsbeat.  Morrison seems clearly in the right vis-a-vis both their decades long animosity for one another and the larger philosophical questions of influence, pastiche and originality. Alan Moore's schtick has long been to create work that openly builds on and gleefully steals from previous creators and then claim that he is a sui generis genius and everyone else is ripping him off. If one applied Moore's own standards for what "original" is to Moore's work, you'd have to argue that great amounts of it is deeply unoriginal, including Watchmen, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Lost Girls and Swamp Thing. That said, Morrison goes into such picayune detail about each slight that I'll applaud you if you can get through the whole thing in one sitting.

Charles Simic is now a blogger? Yes. And he's awesome. 

UNCATEGORIZABLE: Glenn Beck is hawking a toy Obama submerged in a jar of his (Beck's) urine. I'm more surprised by the fact that he's heard of "Piss Christ." McSweeney's brings us "Artisanal Baby Naming." 

 

Nobody Likes The Guthrie's Dry White Season

By Isaac Butler

The Star-Tribune published a bit of reporting over the weekend noting that the Guthrie theater's Christopher Hampton festival was a massive commercial and critical failure that sold only approximately 50% of the available seats, received mixed-to-negative reviews, and cost so much money that likely budgets and wages for the rest of the season will take a hit.

The Guthrie's artistic director Joe Downling, lest we forget, prioritized this mini-fest of Hampton's work over programming a single work by a woman or playwright of color. And one of the rationales given at the time was that he had seats to fill.

But he didn't fill them. And the end result of this will like be further justification for more conservative, less forward-thinking, less-diverse choices.  It's maddening. 

New Essay Up: "Car Ride Lacuna"

By Isaac Butler

Hello all.

Over at Hooded Utilitarian, I have a new essay up, titled Car Ride Lacuna, about memory, forgetting, love, Hamlet, Christian Science, human failure, my Dad and the actor James Urbaniak. 

So... point your browsers this-a-way. I hope you enjoy. 

The Great Slowdown

By Isaac Butler

One of the odd things about tennis is how often dramatic changes in the sport can come about as a result of external factors that many watching know nothing about.  No where is this clearer than in the surfaces the athletes play on.

While it's a big deal-- and somewhat controversial-- within the sport itself, a lot of folks tuning in to ESPN to watch some of Wimbledon or the occasional US Open match don't know that the surfaces have been slowed down over the course of the last few years.  What this means is that they've altered and, at times, replaced the surfaces the sport is played on, making the surfaces more absorbent, which in turn makes the ball bounce slower after it hits the court, which in turn slows the sport down.

This leads to longer points and, often, more dramatic rallies. But it has also completely destroyed the classic art of serve and volley tennis, the tennis of John McEnroe and Pete Sampras. It's hard not to imagine that, in a different era, Roger Federer's relentless, beautiful angle-cutting offense wouldn't've found more regular expression at the net, for example.

I'm making my way through David Foster Wallace's posthumous book of essays Both Flesh and Not, and rereading his Federer profile for the 11th time, and he mentions a match I had never watched, the 2005 US Open final between Agassi and Federer.  I looked up the highlights, and it is remarkable how much faster the game was, even seven years ago.  Here's highlight video from that match:

 

And here's highlight video from Djokovic-Murray in 2012:

 

Now, the other major change to the sport is, of course, in the rackets. Those changes have increased the initial speed of the ball (and its propensity to bounce wildly).  These two things have made serve and volley tennis practically impossible to use as a dominant play style.  Basically, the ball is coming too fast at the person at the net, and the ball hit by the person at the net then bounces, making it slower and easier to deal with. 

One More Thought On Angels, "Great" Plays, and The State of Contemporary Theater

By Isaac Butler

Something's been nagging at me about that LA Times piece I linked to earlier this week. I have to say, once again, before I delve in here, that I actually think it's a great article. Exactly the kind of arts coverage we want. It has an interesting question at the heart of it, and instead of turning inward towards what the author believes to be the case, it goes outward into the world, using research and interviews to come to some kind of answer. It's provocative and asks some good questions, which is why this is the third post on it you'll read here this week.

The more I thought about it, though, I realized it was predicated on a kind of odd assumption. Let's roll tape (emphasis on the below is mine, not the author's):

"Angels in America" won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1993 and best-play Tony Awards in 1993 and '94 (one for each of its two parts, which opened on Broadway in separate theater seasons). It has gone on to sell more than 500,000 copies in book form. There's a fairly broad consensus that it is the greatest American play of the last third of the 20th century — and that nothing has happened in the 21st to rival it. Now that a generation has passed, it seems fair to ask whether the American theater remains equally capable in 2012 of what it brought forth back then.

Can such great voyages still exist?

Could five years, more than $2 million in today's currency and so much of an audience's time be set aside to write, develop and perform an unprecedented kind of work by an unproven playwright?

The article is proceeding from a series of linked, unspoken assumptions.  They are:

(1) That Angels is a truly great play, a mammoth undertaking that paid off spectacularly. 

(2) That nothing like Angels has come since.

(3) That this is strange and worth examining.

After all, the author asks if such "great voyages" can still exist. That still is telling. That we haven't had a new "Angels" twenty years after "Angels" provokes the question of whether we can still create such a work as a theatrical culture.

But here's my question... In the twenty years before "Angels," did we create an "Angels"?  Did we create a play that was hugely ambitious, deeply substantive, that also slipped out through the walls around American theater to touch and shape the zeitgeist?

I'd argue that the answer is obviously no.  I took to twitter and facebook to ask people if they had suggestions. And people had some good ones. Fences came up multiple times, as did Glengarry. But there was no consensus.  And given that part of Mike Boehm's defintion of greatness involves mass consensus around a piece's greatness, I think that means that we can probably disqualify both shows. Also, while Glengarry is substantive and touched the zeitgeist, it's not ambitious. And while Fences is probably a deeper play than Glengarry and, in its own way, more ambitious, I doubt that many non-theater goers would know what the hell you were talking about if you made a reference to it. 

Often, reading lists for American drama classes will skip fairly blithely from Streetcar (or Salesman) to Angels without batting an eyelash-- or perhaps witha  brief stop off to "weird" fare like Buried Child-- and this is telling. Angels in America really was an epochal moment in American theater. I think you could argue using Mike Boehm's formulation of what greatness is  that Angels was the first cannonically great play to come around in decades. I don't necessarily agree with his definition, and i think there were other great plays between, say, Salesman in 1949 and Angels in the 90's, and obviously any definition of "greatness" that leans too heavily on consensus will end up discriminating agianst works by people of color and women. 

But while we're bemoaning whether or not another Angels is possible today, it's worth noting how rare something like Angels was in its own time. That's part of what gave the show such momentum and power. We all  knew as we walked out of the theater, feeling more alive than we had in months, that we'd witnessed history being made. We felt it.

Playwright Mac Rogers on Making Large, Ambitious Plays

By Mac Rogers

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Shortly after I wrote my little bit about whether or not Angels In America could be produced today, playwright and ole china plate Mac Rogers mentioned that he had just come off a year in which he wrote and helped produce an epic science fiction trilogy.  We got to talking about it, and I asked him to weigh in here with his experiences.  Enjoy.)

Mac Rogers here, guest-blogging on Parabasis in response to Isaac's post  earlier this week on the Mike Boehm "Could 'Angels In America' happen today?" article in the LA Times. I highly recommend reading the whole article - in particular, the description of the ANGELS IN AMERICA development process is riveting - but the basic gist is: in this time of drastically reduced arts funding, could a little known playwright write - and hope to see produced - a play like ANGELS that is epic in both length and scope, with a large cast and a host of capital-I ideas? Are PITTSBURGH and KENTUCKY CYCLEs a thing of the past? Are all the plays now going to be sort of magical-realist urban comedies of manners where a painting or a math problem is a metaphor for the 90-minute problems of a cast of three?

 

I take this kind of personally. Starting in late 2010, I began writing an epic cycle of plays called THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY. The trilogy followed two generations of an American family in Florida before, during, and after an extraterrestrial occupation of the Earth. Earlier this year, my theater company Gideon Productions  produced this trilogy: Part 1 in January, Part 2 in March, and Part 3 in June. 

Is THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY comparable to ANGELS IN AMERICA in quality? Of course not, not even close. Forget shouting distance, it's not even in bellowing distance. But is it comparable in scope? Absolutely. The three HONEYCOMB plays span twenty years, involve twenty-four characters in total, and explore issues like occupation, insurgency, sexual identity, conscience, familial ties, terrorism, law, and probably some more stuff I'm not thinking of. This was not a campy show. This was, as several reviews noted, unapologetic science fiction, but it was also very serious science fiction. And as it happens, I see no contradiction between the two.

Now, to ensure that this post will be a total ego-wallow instead of merely a partial one, I'd like to tell you about the play I wrote and co-produced before THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY. It was called VIRAL. It was pretty messed up. How messed up was it? It was about three death fetishists who approach a suicidal woman to kill herself on camera for them. I thought basically no one would like this play. Instead, not only did some folks like it, but much to my surprise it was the play for which I have attracted by far the most industry attention. I had agents and directors taking meetings with me. The play was optioned for a time. So far nothing has come of this, but why this play?

Well, it had five characters. It had no intermission. It had an easily graspable - if wince-inducing - marketing hook. This twisted, creepy, clammy, bleak character study is by far the most marketable thing I've ever written. 

Because that's the market reality they teach us playwrights about nowadays. I didn't go to grad school, but this is more on the common-sense, industry savvy side of education. The regional theaters, the non-profits, the LORTS, whatever, if they have a budget for a large-cast show, they've already blown it on a Shakespeare or a musical or a Christmas show. For new plays, they want PROOF: small cast, good hook, personal rather than political/social issues, and the imprimatur of a successful run in New York City. So if you want your play produced, that's what you need to write. 

And I get it. Times are hard. Theater companies, even most of the bigger ones, aren't lavish organizations where they serve crab cakes in the break room. They're always fundraising, they're always agonizing over their seasons to make sure they can balance the risky shows with sure things. I'll never forget going to FLOYD COLLINS at a theater in Miami and seeing the AD make a curtain speech where he basically implored the audience not to leave at intermission. A flop can really hurt one of these companies. There's not a lot of rainy-day money out there. 

So for me to follow up VIRAL with a three-play epic with a zillion characters was just nuts, from a career point of view. If I had an agent, they'd tell me I was being ridiculous. And I knew it, I knew it going in, I knew it from the moment that I pitched the project to my Gideon co-producers. I knew there was basically no hope of a transfer or a second production, almost no chance that a science fiction trilogy for the stage would ever find a home in the commercial, non-profit, or regional worlds. It would cost a fortune to mount, and then how would they get their Yasmina Reza-loving audiences to even go see it? That's how badly I wanted to write THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY: I made a conscious choice to put my pursuit of a professional playwriting career on hold for close to three years. 

I knew THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY could likely only exist in indie theater, in this case as three Equity Showcase productions. Now, I'm very keenly aware - painfully so - that the indie theater and/or Equity Showcase model requires underwriting just as much as ANGELS IN AMERICA did back in the day. Not in the form of large grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, but instead in the form of a vast flotilla of extraordinary artists providing their time and talent for far less remuneration than they deserve. My company is proud that we pay a decent chunk above the required Equity minimum - it's certainly not a fortune, but it's a gesture to our performing, design, and stage management artists that their work is valuable to us - but it's only fair to say that THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY is made possible in part by a donation of great talent and hundreds of hours taken out of the personal lives of several dozen artists.

I'm willing to cede that much. If there's one way that I could think of our productions as "less than" in any way, it's that. The first thing we at Gideon would do with more funding is properly remunerate our colleagues. THAT SAID:

IT HAPPENED. I wrote it, we produced it, the three plays appeared on a public stage, several hundred people saw them, they were reviewed in a number of high-profile outlets, they were discussed, praised, pilloried, critiqued... but they happened. These were real productions. Can epic shows happen today? THEY DO. We're making them happen any way we can.

'Cause guess what? I didn't get the idea for an epic stage trilogy all by myself. I was INSPIRED, I was inspired by a wonderful playwright, an amazingly gifted colleague named Johnna Adamswhose superb ANGEL EATERS trilogy was produced by the irreplaceable Flux Theatre Ensemble in 2008. I didn't invent anything, I'm jumping on a train. 

In Boehm's article, he interviews Tony Taccone, one of the early champions of ANGELS IN AMERICA in his role as the Artistic Director of the Eureka. Taccone, now the AD of Berkeley Repertory Theatre, says:

It was just much easier to be poor back then. It feels now like you need $20,000 a year to wake up in this country, and kids are coming out of school with so much debt." Taccone said that in his conversations with beginning artists, "These kids are, like, 'I have to start my own brand,' creating tiny businesses that are not able to support you full time; you scale back your expectations to do little projects that you self-produce, to get your little niche audience, your Facebook following. The spirit of it is cool, it shows ambition and drive and creativity, but it's just so compromised. There's just a huge lack of resources that has an immediate impact on what they can aspire to.

I kinda lost my mind for a second when I first read that quote. It read to me as breathtakingly condescending. Oh, is our spirit cool? Are we showing ambition and drive, Mr. Taccone? Would you like to pinch our cheeks and buy us a creme pop? I recognize my own ridiculousness here; at 38, I'm clearly not one of the "kids" he's talking about, but that is what my colleagues and I are doing: building our band on social media, finding our audience within the budgetary confines we're dealing with. With a day or two to take a deep breath, I can see that the main spirit of Taccone's quote is concern rather than condescension, but seriously: what does he think we should do? There's not enough room for everybody in Taccone's world. Are the rest of us just supposed to go home?

I write epic science fiction for the stage. I couldn't possibly be writing in a less fashionable genre for theater. There's no money for it, and middle-aged folks with discretionary theater ticket money don't want to see it. The grants are half dried up. BUT WE DID IT. We produced it. Each part ran three weeks apiece, BUT IT HAPPENED. Not in a vacuum, in the actual world. People came to see it, reviewers came to review it, we won an award for Part 1. I'm simply not willing to accept that because it wasn't at a high profile theater buoyed by a hefty grant that it didn't really happen, or that articles like this can be published without any curiosity about what some of the smaller theater communities are up to. 

Look, this is sounding like I'm grumpy or ungrateful. I'm not. THE HONEYCOMB TRILOGY was one of the three or four most exhilarating, creatively fulfilling processes of my life. I got to work with wonderful people (including my wife Sandy, whose set designs were better than the scripts). I'm so profoundly lucky to have had this in my life, and I'm grateful every day. If nothing else ever happens with HONEYCOMB I won't have a scintilla of a reason to complain. Having completed it, I've never felt so empowered, so adventurous in my entire life. 

But when Tony Kushner says he couldn't have written ANGELS while juggling other demands, he's wrong. Read ANGELS, watch it. That's the work of an artist who is profoundly compelled. If Kushner worked a full-time job every day (as I've always done), I am certain - CERTAIN - he would have still written ANGELS IN AMERICA. He would have found a way. When Todd London (of OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE fame) says "There are a lot of writers in America writing with great ambition and political acumen, but I'm not sure many of them, especially unknown ones, have the freedom to write plays of that size and duration," he's wrong. The freedom exists. You have to pay a price, but you can do it. We're out here. We're doing this stuff that the bigger guys can't afford to do anymore. There's another side to this story.

Good Question #newplay

By Isaac Butler

Mike Boehm asks in the LA Times whether it would be possible to create Angels in America today:

Can such great voyages still exist?

Could five years, more than $2 million in today's currency and so much of an audience's time be set aside to write, develop and perform an unprecedented kind of work by an unproven playwright?

There's no simple answer, based on recent interviews with Kushner, with several key figures who accompanied him along the play's path and with longtime leaders in the field of new-play development.

The obstacles to the creation of such a play have grown, most of them say, but they're unwilling to bet against the art form's continuing fecundity and determination.

I am reminded again of Todd London's way of putting it: That we live in a time of unprecendented abundence w/r/t New Plays and New Play development and production. But it feels like scarcity. I'm not saying Angels would be possible (or im) today, but it's something worth thinking about.

It's also worth thinking about our intolerance for failure.  Prior to Angels, Tony Kushner had written the widely disliked Bright Room Called Day, which Frank Rich, soon to be amongst Kushner's greatest champions, called "fatuous".  His other major work, Hydriotaphia, was self-produced in a theater with no air conditioning in TriBeCa in the summer after he graduated from NYU and starred all of his friends.  Oh, also, he got his MFA in directing, not playwrighting.

So it really is remarkable that Angels happened.  And you know what else happend during that time? Theaters all over the country, including the ones that helped create Angels took risks on new plays that didn't pan out. That were artistic or commercial failures. That never realized their ambitions. That, well, sucked. It's not a risk if success is guaranteed.

 Kushner is not the only example of this. I remember reading a review of a double bill of John Guare plays (Cop-Out and Home Fires) that flopped on Broadway and one of the reviews ends with a sentence that, to paraphrase, says, "So yes, these plays are a disaster, but next year he's suposed to have this play called House of Blue Leaves, so hopefully that one will be better."

Writing plays is hard. Very hard. Producing them can be even harder, particularly when the plays attempt something ambitious or new. But one thing Kushner and Guare had in common, the risk that was taken on their work early on, is that it was actually produced.  Kushner took the risk by sinking his own money (I think it was $3000 if memory serves) into Hydriotaphia and directing and producing it himself.  The Public took the risk on Bright Room. Broadway producers bet a lot of money on John Guare twice, and the second time paid off. See update below.

Anyway, the LA Times piece is an interesting article.  You should check it out. 

 

UPDATE: Howard Sherman writes in to the comments below with a quick factual correctiong (this is what happens when you try to remember shit rather than look it up). House of Blue Leaves premiered off-broadway two years later. The point still stands, however, that someone continued to take a risk on Guare after a very high profile flop. 

Misreading Jonathan Lethem

By Isaac Butler

Mike Daisey brings to our attention this essay in the American Scholar trying to codify a kind of work that author William Deresiewicz calls "Upper Middle Brow":

 now I wonder if there’s also something new. Not middlebrow, not highbrow (we still don’t have an avant-garde to speak of), but halfway in between. Call it upper middle brow. The new form is infinitely subtler than Midcult. It is post- rather than pre-ironic, its sentimentality hidden by a veil of cool. It is edgy, clever, knowing, stylish, and formally inventive. It is Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson,Lost in Translation, Girls, Stewart/Colbert, The New Yorker, This American Lifeand the whole empire of quirk, and the films that should have won the Oscars (the films you’re not sure whether to call films or movies).

The upper middle brow possesses excellence, intelligence, and integrity. It is genuinely good work (as well as being most of what I read or look at myself). The problem is it always lets us off the hook. Like Midcult, it is ultimately designed to flatter its audience, approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices. It stays within the bounds of what we already believe, affirms the enlightened opinions we absorb every day in the quality media, the educated bromides we trade on Facebook. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know, doesn’t seek to disturb—the definition of a true avant-garde—our fundamental view of ourselves, or society, or the world. (Think, by contrast, of some truly disruptive works: The Wire, Blood Meridian, almost anything by J. M. Coetzee.)

Any garden-variety SAT crammer can tell you that any statement that contains "always" or "never" is likely false, and in this case, Deresiewicz makes a big mistake in lumping in Jonathan Lethem as someone who writes books that always let the audience off the hook. In fact, I'd argue that with few exceptions, Lethem's books end on profoundly disturbing, disruptive notes.

His work is deceptive, however, becuase it is actively fun to read. He's an exuberant, clever, perceptive, hip, maximalist writer.  But comparing him to other exuberant, clever, perceptive, hip, maximalist writers is actually helpful here. Lethem's books don't work like Michael Chabon's books, for example, which nearly always end on notes of redemption for their protagonists and come down firmly on the side of celebrating life.

Lethem is very, very good at subtly getting the guests in his books.   Whether it's taking his very High Fidelity protagonist in As She Climbed Across The Table and pushing him into Highsmithian obsession and self-destruciton or having Dylan Ebdus grow up to be a pathetic, self-involved jerk so haunted by the unhealable traumas of childhood that he is unable to see the world in front of him in Fortress of Solitude, Lethem's characters, the sites he creates for readerly empathy and identification, almost always end up in a bad state because of the very things that cause us to identify and empathize with them in the first place.  Even You Don't Love Me Yet, the most comedic of Lethem's novels, ends on an odd note, with the gradual realization that the protagonist of the novel is probably an alcoholic, little growth on anyone's part, and the reader realizing the novel's central relationship is likely doomed to failure. 

The book where this is the most overt is actually Chronic City, which I've written about here and here, and where the protagonist, a man named Insteadman, willfully chooses ignorance, a kind of tending of his own garden, rather than confront the difficult, shifting, self-contradicting truths he's brushed up against over the last four hundred pages. I don't think it's coincidental that Chronic City also proved the most critically controversial of his work. 

Part of the challenge with Lethem-- if you can call it that-- is that his style of writing often defaults to comedic gestures, Fortress of Solitude excepted. But we shouldn't mistake comedy with a lack of seriousness, or laughter with letting us off the hook. I think that's where Deresiewicz goes astray above. All three of his examples of "truly disruptive" work are dark and work through the mechanisms of tragedy. But tragedy is not necessarily more serious (or more accurate, or more disruptive) than comedy. 

"Cloud Atlas" and its sources

By Isaac Butler

Much has been made over the debt that the Sloosha's Crossin' seciton of Cloud Atlas owes to Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker.  Less has been made over the debt the Robert Frobisher sections owes to the life of real-life composer Frederick Delius. In the final years of his life, as he wasted away from syphilis, Delius took on the young Eric Fenby as an amenuensis. Delius was too ill to write, but could remember and sing out melodies. 

It turns out that Ken Russell made a biographical drama about their relationship for the BBC, all of which is available on Youtube. It makes for some fascinating Sunday afternoon viewing. Here's part one:

 

You can find part 2 here, part 3 here, part 4 here and part 5 here. 

 

 

 

Yet Even More Intellectual Property Insanity...

by Isaac Butler

 

Um... cake edition?  For reals?

Re: Old Wine, New Bottles

by 99 Seats

What Josh Marshall says:

The Obama presidency has led the GOP to make verboten a series of policies it either pioneered or which at least some significant segments of the party embraced. So it’s not just that the GOP is living in the ‘past’. I agree with their stalwarts that this is a sort of misleading way to put it. But the ‘Iron Wall’ policy vis-a-vis Obama has put the party in a position in which it is quite hard to play in a national (as opposed to a midterm) election.

I say this ad nauseum: conservatisim never fails, it is only failed. The post-election discussion is already hovering around the idea that Mitt Romney was a bad candidate, that the GOP needs a better standard bearer or better messaging. This ignores the basic fact: the GOP needs new ideas.

Mitt Romney was not a great candidate (though he was also clearly the best candidate of the GOP field), but, in the end, what hog-tied him was the policies. Focusing on his lack of connection or robotic demeanor downplays that people rejected his ideas. I've talked about the Romney campaign's failure in transactional politics before. I think we can expect that on a larger scale, especially as the demographics of the nation continue to shift. Lindsay Graham was right: they're not making enough angry, white men anymore. And besides angry white men, who benefits from the current GOP platform? Pretty much nobody.

Selling that, selling racial and gender resentment, with a brown face or a female face won't solve the basic problem. When people hear about the ideas, they will recoil. This isn't a problem of marketing. It's a problem of the soul. The GOP needs to search for one.

The Work Ahead

By Isaac Butler

Election nights are beginnings, not endings. It's easy to lose sight of this, given how much work and money goes into just getting your guy into office.  Elections provide much easier, cleaner narratives. Governance is messy, confusing, tedious, easy to lose track of.  

But there's a lot of unfinished work, and several serious threats on the horizon. And by threats, I do not mean from the GOP. The GOP is the GOP. They're going to do what they do. Our job in resisting that threat is to keep them from being elected, to try to keep the Senate and win back the house in two years, which will be nearly impossible. The threat in governance comes instead from the bigness of the tent of our party and the center-right bias of our media. And the unfinished work comes from our inability to push the Democratic party sufficiently to the left on several key issues.

The biggest threat, and the one that will come up the soonest (likely before Obama is even reinaugurated) is to the social safety net.  Thos threat comes not from the GOP, but rather directly from Obama himself.  The President has threatened time and again to put Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on the chopping block for a grand bargain, and, with his rhetoric of reigning in the "excesses" of the 60's and 70's, seems to sincerely believe that cutting the social safety net is a good idea.  Furthermore, with the terrible Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan as a basic model, Washington is captivated with the idea that making life harder for the poor and elderly is a winner both economically and at the ballot box. 

The only reason why the social safety net was preserved in the Debt Ceiling Debacle is that the GOP refused to take "yes" for an answer.  I'm not confident that, as we near the "fiscal cliff" the same thing will happen.  Many have said that Obama's Grand Bargain was simply a bluff, and with the fiscal cliff putting him in a much better bargaining position, he will work to protect entitlements. I don't know how many times Obama has to say that he wants to cut the social safety net before people will believe him, but here's that off the record interview he did with the Des Moines Register. He says within it that he wants to use the grand bargain and Simpson Bowles as a model for reducing the deficit, and he plans to stick by his pledge not to return to Clinton-era tax rates for those making under $250K a year. In other words, our President wants to keep taxes unreasonably low, and cut the social safety net to do it. He doesn't want to do it to the extremes of the other party, but he wants to do it.

If the Presdient fails to do this, if no bargain is met, we hit the fiscal cliff, which may send us in the short term into a second recession but also would also pull the status quo of the Federal Government far over to the left by raising taxes to Clinton-era levels and making the majority of cuts in defense. In other words, the power is actually in the hands of the progressive wing of the Democratic party here. We've elected solid progressives like Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Baldwin. We have to make sure that electing better Democrats leads to a better-acting Democratic party. And that's only going to happen if we keep the pressure on.

I cannot begin to express how excited and relieved I was by last night's results. How good it felt. I was also two sheets to the wind and eating afghan pizza in a basement in Minneapolis, but I'm pretty sure it had more to do with watching progressives win on social issues, win key Senate races and retain the Presidency.  I worry that we'll think the hard work is done, that we'll relax. Now is obviously a time for joy, but in the midst of our celebrations, let's not forget what lies ahead. 

UPDATE: Matt Yglesias has an important reminder: The fiscal cliff is not a cliff. 

Today in Shameless Self/Cross-Promotion

by 99 Seats

One of the great things about moving to a new city is making new friends. I had the very good fortune of meeting the ever-awesome Amy Spalding recently and she asked to write a little something for her ongoing Musical Theatre Monday series. (You should check out some of the other posts, too. All are grand!)

And thus I did. Fair warning: it's about grief, loss and 9/11. But it also has this, one of my favorite songs ever about a theatrical hero of mine. So there's that.

An American Horror Story

by 99 Seats

I'm a smart guy. I feel comfortable saying that. I'm a smart guy with a pretty sharp sense of humor and satire. But sometimes I miss a joke. It happens to the best of us. A piece of satire is so good, so sharp, so well-done that I miss the satire and take it at face value, the way some people do with, say, Swift's A Modest Proposal. So I'm open to being corrected. I'm hoping, very, very much that someone will tap me on the shoulder and say, "Uh, dude, it's a joke" about this piece by Jason Robert Brown. I'm fine with being embarrassed by my sheer, volcanic, thermonuclear rage at this thing, I'm fine with being shamefaced for going full-on medieval and looking like a jerk for missing the joke. Because I'd rather it be a joke. I do not want this to be earnest, honest advice to young artists and theatre critics. I do not want this to be portrait of how theatre artists are expected and allowed to behave. I do not want this piece to be true. So please, if you read this and get the joke, if you posted it on Facebook because you think it's so ironic and satritiric, please, please, please, publicly shame me. I'm begging you.

Because otherwise? This is why theatre sucks to work in, why theatre is rapidly becoming an artistic backwater and playground for people of privilege. This is why theatre criticism is being killed off by inches. This is why terrible artists are promoted and talented, intelligent people are fleeing the theatre by droves. This is what's wrong with theatre.

Go ahead. Go read it. Or don't. I can sum it up: When Jason Robert Brown was 23, he was invited to see a show by Stephen Sondheim that he didn't like. After the show, at dinner, he left Sondheim with the impression that he didn't like it. He felt terrible about this, called Sondheim to talk about it was given this advice, advice when JRB is offering up to young (and old!) theatre people everywhere:

Nobody cares what you think. Once a creation has been put into the world, you have only one responsibility to its creator: be supportive. Support is not about showing how clever you are, how observant of some flaw, how incisive in your criticism. There are other people whose job it is to guide the creation, to make it work, to make it live; either they did their job or they didn’t. But that is not your problem.

If you come to my show and you see me afterwards, say only this: “I loved it.” It doesn’t matter if that’s what you really felt. What I need at that moment is to know that you care enough about me and the work I do to tell me that you loved it, not “in spite of its flaws”, not “even though everyone else seems to have a problem with it,” but simply, plainly, “I loved it.” If you can’t say that, don’t come backstage, don’t find me in the lobby, don’t lean over the pit to see me. Just go home, and either write me a nice email or don’t. Say all the catty, bitchy things you want to your friend, your neighbor, the Internet.

Maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe someday down the line, I’ll be ready to hear what you have to say, but that moment, that face-to-face moment after I have unveiled some part of my soul, however small, to you; that is the most vulnerable moment in any artist’s life. If I beg you, plead with you to tell me what you really thought, what you actually, honestly, totally believed, then you must tell me, “I loved it.” That moment must be respected.

This has long been an "unwritten rule" in theatre, and now it's been written, I suppose, and we can talk about it. So let's talk about how dishonesty and lies kill an art form. Because that's what Sondheim is asking for: not gentle critism or encouraging words. He's asking for people to lie to him. And he's apparently lying to them. Look at the first line of the quote: "Nobody cares what you think." Except, of course, Stephen Sondheim, who invited Brown and his friend to the show, presumably to ask them what they thought. It's just that he only wanted to hear "I loved it!" and nothing else. He does care what they think...as long as they liked it.

An artform can't grow under these circumstances. And artists can't grow. It's one thing, if you're talking about a friend, someone you know, and you see a show that you don't like or that doesn't work. I know that dilemma. It is always awkward and uncomfortable. But, here's another unwritten rule: we've all settled on a series of phrases that tell that person you didn't like it without saying "I didn't like it" like "Great work!" or just "Congratulations!" And then you flee. And people know. Which is cowardly. But not as bad as the outright lying that Sondheim is encouraging.

In a culture that feeds on that kind of dishonesty, flaws in plays go unspoken of and uncorrected. Imagine a world where Sondheim asked two young, smart, talented artists what they thought and they gave him smart, cogent suggestions and he used them. Wouldn't that be better? What does it benefit the theatre to have young artists so filled with terror that they apparently can't cogently crititique a work by an artist they love, even years later. JRB doesn't indicate what his criticism were, or if they would have been helpful. He's apparently still so scared of Sondheim that he can't even name the friend he went with. How is that healthy for an art form?

How is it healthy for an artist to be a hothouse flower, so delicate and vulnerable that only warm air can support them? How does that encourage growth? We're building a community of mutual sycophancy, daisy chains of artistic blowjobs and calling that support. What this also means is that when you seek out real criticism of the work, even at the lower levels, it's nearly impossible to find. No one wants to say a bad thing about anything. Oh, we say it's because we don't want to hurt the work, but really? It's because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings and get the freeze-out that JRB got from Sondheim after their awkward dinner. Yes, part of it is the human nature of not wanting to hurt someone, but part of it is purely venal and career-focused. We don't want to close a door by being critical. So we're not.

All of this enshrines something that's even more pernicious: privilege. When access, success and career advancement are based as much on manners and social convention, the people who succeed are the people who master that, not actual talent. Telling young artists to keep their opinions to themselves is basically telling them, "It doesn't matter about the work, it matters how you treat your betters." We're just maintaining a good old-fashioned caste system. If you can't play the game, you can't play the game. People who aren't good at sucking up to the right people lose out.

This piece fills with an incandescent rage, sure. But it also makes me very, very sad. Even if it is satire (and I hope it is!), people I know and respect, some of the bravest, smartest artists I know, have been pasting it on Facebook approvingly. And this vision of an artist, above all, makes me so very sad. It's so timid and small, really. We're not talking about JRB being invited to Sondheim's house to hear early sketches of songs and then trashing them. We're talking about the opening night of a Broadway show. Yes, I know, I have had productions, you're a ball of tension and nervousness, there is so much riding on the line, all of that is true. But...you're having a show open on Broadway. Shouldn't we be tougher? Shouldn't we have a better sense of what's good and what's bad about it? Shouldn't we be conscious, clear-eyed artists who can take a 23-year old's dislike? Maybe even ask them about it? Are we really going to wither in the face of that? It says such sad things ab0ut us playwrights. Such sad things.

For an artform to be relevant, you need brave artists. You need artists who are going to look hard into the essence of human experience and talk about what they see there. And yes, bravery needs support. But it also needs feedback and criticism and honesty. If we as artists close our doors to those things, then we close our doors to growth. And the art form atrophies. Our vision closes down to spot. If all we're doing is looking for approval from our fellow artists, we're looking for the wrong things. To tell artists that's what's expected of them is a crime against theatre, if you ask me. It only breeds more nervous artists, more deluded artists, more cowardly artists who crave protection when they should be courting danger, who are thinking about safety nets when they should be flying. It breeds a theatre that isn't talking about the big things because we can't talk honestly with each other.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for Jason Robert Brown's artistry. The Last Five Years is one of the bravest, smartest, most honest musicals I've ever heard and I kick myself on a daily basis that I didn't see it when I had the chance. And I still do have a ton of respect for him and his work and for his bravery in maintaing a blog and saying what he wants to say. That's all awesome. I just think this piece is awful, absolutely awful. That's my honest criticism of it. I hope he can take it.

Now, again: maybe it's all a joke. Mr. Brown, please drop by the comments and tell me it's all a joke. I'll even leave this post up as a monument to my shame, if it is. If not, I think your piece is a monument to yours.