Parabasis

Attention Must Be Paid

by Isaac Butler

I'd like to posit here at the outset something that the rest of this post rests on: Attention in theatre is important. Theatre, in fact, requires a different kind of attention than most other activities, because it's a sort of make believe that you (generally) only get to watch.  This should be terrible. Who wants to watch other people have fun? But for whatever reason, when it works, its magic. 

The trick of most productions is to seduce you into paying this kind of attention, doing this kind of work (for it is work), without you even really realizing it's happening. They do this in all sorts of ways, good and bad, from the riotous spectacle of War Horse (a show I hated, for the record) to the you-must-lean-in quiet of The Aliens.

I actually think paying this kind of attention is easier for chldren. Or, at least, it was easier for me as a child, because I was playing make believe all the time, so watching Philip Goodwin as the Dauphin in Saint Joan at the Folger didn't strike me as particularly weird. It was just so great to see adults doing this thing that I liked doing.

Peter Brook has this thing he talks about it either The Empty Space or The Open Door about the dreaded moment when, during a show, an audience member picks up their program to read it, and how he lives in fear of that moment, and how he wants to construct a kind of production that will hold their attention from beginning to end.

You might have guessed by now that this post is about "Tweet Seats," the absurd new phenomenon of theaters devoting certain seats on certain nights for people who want to tweet while watching their shows. This is an epic act of shooting oneself in the foot.  For theatre that is not fully attended to cannot be fully appreciated, and the attention it requires is a collective act. Theatre is created in the space between the spectator as a group and as individuals and the work being performed on stage.

I am not advocating here for quiet, docile, obedient audiences. I think there's all sorts of ways to create that attention with varying degrees of rambunctiousness, but you can't create that attention if you are stopping from watching the god damn show to look at your god damn phone. And what's more, your doing that makes it harder for those around you to pay attention.

But the Tweet Seats phenomenon (which I hope will die before it catches on any further) is a sign of something bigger, of how truly out of touch our theaters are. Because what this is all about is the ongoing efforts by theaters to get younger/hipper/whateverer patrons to come to their shows without having to change the work they do.

A few years ago (oh shit I'm old) I wrote on Parabasis about the deep, dark secret of getting younger audiences to go to the theatre. I'm just gonna quote myself here in the interest of time:

I'm going to reveal, right now, the secret to getting young people to come to your theatre and see shows. Because it's a no-brainer and I'm tired of having this conversation (For reasons that should become obvious in a second). Here's the secret:

(1) Do work they want to see.

(2) Endeavor to do it well

(3) Offer it at a price point they will find reasonable 

You know what's not on that list? Twitter. Facebook. The internets. Beer pong nights. Those are marketing channels, we'll get to how to do those better in a moment.

[snip]

Theater companies and producers for the most part do not want to do the above three things. What they want to do is do the same work and use marketing to trick younger audiences into thinking it's what they want to see.

So the next time we have this conversation... can we please have it honestly and start asking some more interesting questions, some more difficult questions?  Questions like: Do you actually want younger audiences, or do you just want their money? or Would your theater company be able to sustain itself on a younger audience base? And if not, are you just fucked? Are you just riding it out for as long as possible knowing it's not going to work out in the long run?

I don't think this is any less true than it was then. Tweet Seats-- particularly absent any real change in programming-- is just empty, gimmicky bullshit. What's more, it's insulting, the way most condescending panders to demographic groups are insulting.No where is this clearer than in the Guthrie's recent "Tweet Seats" night at "The Servant of Two Masters" where the Guthrie's twitter account asked such burning, must-be-answered-rather-than-watch-the-show questions like "Did you expect music like this?" or "How cool is the set by Katherine Akiko Day?" or "What's been your favorite pop culture reference so far?" We get it, Guthrie, you're trying to do "The Servant of Two Masters" in a way that's young and hip and show you're a happenin' Daddy-O, but nothing reeks of out of touch old man stench like someone parading around how young and cool they're trying to be. It's akin to your bald middle aged father picking you up from school in a new convertable and a 22 year old girlfriend. Or the scene in Star Trek where Kirk listens to The Beastie Boys' "Sabotage" whilst riding a hover bike.

So I have a counter proposal for theaters trying out tweet seats: Why don't you  try to do a show where both the play and the production are of such quality that someone who is tempted by their phone will want to watch from start to finish without jumping on the internet? And then, rather than sabotage it in the hopes that you can turn your audience into unpaid marketing labor for it, why don't you figure out a way to price it and market it so that the people you intended it for will want to come see it?

Art and Violence and Health Care and Misdirection

By Isaac Butler

It's ridiculous for we artists (and culture makers) to claim that art has real power when we want grant money and then turn around and say it's essentially powerless and has no effect on people whatsoever and is just stories and pretty pictures and kickin' tunes whenever someone gets mad at us about what we create.  I'm not saying there's a causal relationship between, say, Grand Theft Auto and Sandy Hook, or The Matrix and Columbine--although I can remember seeing the Matrix twice in theaters, once before Columbine and once after, the former with my girlfriend and the latter with my Dad, and finding it much more disturbing time #2 (it's also worth noting that Morpheus's postitioning in the Matrix re: the taking of innocent life is identical to Osama Bin Laden's)-- but it is worth noting at some point that a great number of narratives produced in this country for mass consumption position violence as either (a) redemptive, (b) a path to mastery of some kind or (c) both.

And at some point, we should really talk about that. And those of us who create narratives that include violence within them should think about it. 

Similarly, at some point, we should really have a conversation about access to mental health services in this country.

All of that said as a long  clearing of the throat, I'm with Kevin Drum on this one:

I know that lots of well-meaning people think that movies and videogames really are problematic, and that access to mental health in America is a scandal. And that might well be true. But every minute you spend talking about this stuff is a minute spent doing exactly what the NRA wants you to do. If you want to have any chance at all of passing gun legislation, that's what you should be talking about. Guns. End of story. The other stuff can wait.

 

Thursday Hair Blogging: Holiday Edition

By Isaac Butler

Greetings from my in-laws!  I do not understand the face I am making in thisphoto either. 

Unanswered Questions in Richmond

By Isaac Butler

Over the holiday, Carol Piersol, the co-founder and long-time artistic director of The Firehouse Theatre Project, abruptly resigned in protest of the even-more-abrupt forced retirement handed down to her by unanimous vote from the theater's board. 

When I heard the news, the story seemed, well, totally bizarre.  I've worked at the Firehouse a few times, and know Carol and some of the crew down there, and, well, it's hard to imagine the FTP without her. The FTP is to some extent, Carol. She helped found it, acted in many of its productions, her husband directed several, she ran (how strange to use the past tense) the acting classes FTP offers etc. and so forth.

The story's only gotten stranger since then. Turns out, the vote to oust Piersol wasn't actually unanimous. As the Times-Dispatch reports here, a boardmember loyal to Piersol was removed from the board the same night. A protest demanding the immediate resignation of the entire board and Piersol's reenstatement as Artistic Director drew a crowd of more than 250.  Three board members have since resigned.

You can read their resignation e-mails, as well as a good overview of the facts of the matter, at Open Source RVA.  Regardless of whether you care about Richmond or its theatre scene, it's a fascinating story of what happens when the relationship between boards and Artistic Directors break down.

Except.... well, there's still a lot of stuff we don't know and isn't being talked about publicly.  How acrimonious was the board/Piersol relationship prior to this whole forced retirement? Why did they force her to retire in the first place? The board e-mails make several mentions of some kind of executive committee plan that members of the board cooked up to help improve the operations of and grow the FTP.  What's the actual plan? Had Carol seen it? 

Whatever the story is down in Richmond, it's clear we don't have the whole thing yet.

UPDATE: So I've talked to some people (not Carol) and done some nosing around and the bottom line is... no one knows why the board ousted Piersol. The plan to do so was cooked up by a subcommittee of the Board that met in private and did not present their reasoning to the board at large. Furthermore, the (I'd argue poorly designed) by-laws of the board meant that once the motion to force Carol to retire in June was brought up for a vote, the only available options were to force her to retire immediately, force her to retire in a few months with some stipend, or the June retirement plan they went with.

Prior to this vote in December, Carol had discussed wanting to retire in five years and there had been some movement on this in September. 

So in other words... only the Executive Committee of the FTP board knows why they wanted to 

Style Weekly has also been on top of this story.  They have two articles up on it here and here. If you're really interested in the story, I recommend you check out the comments of both. This story is a capital-b Big Deal in the Richmond arts scene.  (I'll also note that there is one comment that alleges that Carol has a drinking problem. Having worked with and kept in touch with her over the years, I find this hard to believe and it is aggravating in the extreme that anonymity on the internet-- something i'm in general supportive of-- allows people to make those kinds of accusations without having to stand behind them).

One little note... The first Style Weekly article contains this little tidbit of information:

 The turnabout follows a week of public outcry after the theater company's 15-member board unanimously voted Dec. 12, with one member abstaining, to force Piersol's retirement. She was given the option to remain with the theater in some capacity until June 30. Without citing specifics, Holmes says the decision was based on management issues and a desire to mold the Firehouse into a "tier-one" organization.

I'm not entirely clear on what a "tier-one" organization is supposed to mean. The Firehouse is a TCG budget group 1 theater that doesn't even work on LORT contracts (it uses special appearance contracts). It was not even a fully professional theater until Carol put considerable effort behind professionalizing it over the last five years. The last time I worked with them I was paid a thousand dollars. If the board thought they could turn FTP into the Carpenter Center (a "tier one" venue for sure, but not actually an arts org) or some kind of regional arts center and that Carol was the only thing standing in their way, they were living in a fantasy world.

It seems to me that a better path towards building the organization  would be a more gradual transition to a new artistic director while also pushing the organization forward enough that it would be attractive to an AD who wasn't the founder. Assuming the information I've gotten is correct, I also believe that some of the issues here are the result of the Firehouse not fully transitioning from being an arts organization founded by a group of artsy friends with a dream. Piersol was working without a contract, for example, and thus could be fired without stipend or required counseling. Board by-laws that would allow a vote to go forward to remove the head of an organization without the possibility of a "no" vote are absurd. 

More on Zero Dark Thirty...

By Isaac Butler

Jane Mayer, who has forgotten more about the Bush torture regime than most of us will ever know, has a lengthy piece on Zero Dark Thrity, which she believes is pro-torture,, or at the very least, failing its moral duty by not condemning torture. Unlike Glenn Greenwald, she's actually seen the film. 

I have to say, I find this whole debate very challenging to my own thoughts and convictions about politics and art. It seems to be asking for a simpler, less rich world to demand that art that covers a particular subject take a particular stand on that subject. Yet is torture so odious that it deserves to be exempt from that? Does portraying torture without explicit (or maybe even implicit) condemnation mean a work of art has failed its duty in some way? I'd like to say no. But I wonder if in this case, with a work of art whose creators advertise it as being quasi-journalistic, the contract with society has changed. And yet, I can't fully bring myself to believe that.

Some Thoughts On Gun Control

By Isaac Butler

First off, if you want some statistics about gun control, you couldn't do much better than Ezra Klein's "Twelve Facts About Gun Control" which can be found here. He then went on to do some yeoman's work mythbusting the claim that Israel and Switzerland are places with high rates of gun ownership but low rates of gun violence (which would seem to bolster the argument that our gun violence is largely cultural in nature). Those are both worth a read.

I'm going to hand over the metaphorical mic here to a friend of mine who shall remain anonymous. I e-mailed him yesterday to ask him about gun control and what could be done. My friend is a gun collector, a military nut, and a pro-gun control lefty. He also believes-- and, over the years, has convinced me-- that much of what Democrats think is good gun control policy is basically cosmetic bullshit. 

I asked him given his views on gun control, and given the Supreme Court ruling that the 2nd Amendment provides for an individual positive right to bear arms, what could be done in the wake of the Newtown shooting to get a handle on guns? This was his reply. I think you'll note a lot of this stuff is done at the State level. So it might be a good idea for you to familiarize yourself with your state's gun control laws and work to strengthen them, should this be an issue you really care about:

Enforce the existing gun control laws and regulations.  That would be a strong start.  We have really good  federal laws against gun possession by felons, transferring guns to those with mental illness, those who abuse drugs and booze, those with records of non-felony violence, those who have been dishonorably discharged from the military, etc., etc. But prosecutions for violations of these laws aren't all that robust.  DAs will respond to incentives.  If they're incentivized to prosecute drug offenses, they're likely to plea bargain away the gun charges.  Change those incentives.

Massachusetts, California, and some other places have laws that mandate secure storage for firearms.  That doesn't strike me as the world's worst idea.

The state laws allowing private parties to transfer ownership of firearms to others without a record of the transaction is something that should be examined.  That will be contentious.

There are other places where failure to report the theft of a firearm has legal consequences.  Again, I don't see what would be constitutionally threatening.

We've done a good job of pushing down fatalities due to mis-use and criminal use of vehicles by enforcing existing laws and educating the public on how to safely operate in a world full of cars.  A similar approach to guns would show benefits.  In states where state-standardized firearm safety course are required to get a concealed carry permit or a hunting permit there are significant public safety benefits.  The Eddie Eagle program does great work educating kids in firearm safety.

And not to sound bitchy, but stay the hell away from highly technical definition-based regulations.  Banning magazines based on how many rounds they hold or weapons with certain features is flat out stupid and ineffective. It's ineffective because such regulations are invariably written by people who don't understand the technical details sufficiently to focus on aspects that actually bear on the lethality of weapons. It's stupid since you burn political capital and make political enemies - rather than converts - all for zero actual effect (because it was ineffectively written in the first place). 

But . . . you can't concentrate only on the tools.  This is a problem with people.  People are using inanimate tools to hurt other people.  Identifying those people likely to do this is challenging, but it's worth concentrating on at least as much as limiting access to tools.  

There are so many guns in circulation that you're never going to get them all under control.  You can and should try, but it'll take years even if you get serious about it.  So you have to accept that you live in a world where people do bad things with guns.  You should build your systems of protection with this in mind.  We understand that banks are inherently attractive targets to those who want to steal money.  And we proactively protect them.

But now we also understand that places filled with defenseless people are inherently attractive targets to those cowards who want to harm innocents on their way out.  Fine. We should proactively protect those places - not from the tools (guns), but from the predators (people employing guns to hurt people).  

Something to chew on with your morning coffee.

The Brewing Controversy over "Zero Dark Thirty"

By Isaac Butler

Arguments about arguments about arguments can grow tiresome right quick, so I'll keep this short:

Friend of the room Freddie DeBoer has an odd post up about Zero Dark Thirty today. He weighs in to defend Glenn Greenwald's writing about Zero Dark Thirty, a film neither man has seen:

Based on his Twitter feed, it seems he has caused a conflagration for daring to criticize the movie. The typical, and typically cheap, response is that he has no right to judge the movie without having seen it. Which would be true, were he commenting on its quality or its perspective. Instead Greenwald has a very basic point, one that is being roundly ignored: a film that has repeatedly and proudly been sold as "documentary" and "journalistic" contains a lie of profound importance. The movie, by all accounts, shows torture as being an indispensable part of the capture of bin Laden, an idea that has been roundly debunked and specifically denied by many people on the inside of the government. (Adam Serwer, with typical thoroughness and fairness, has the run-down.) To say that your movie is "a hybrid of the filmic and the journalistic," as the writer of the film did, when your movie depicts the use of torture as essential to captuing bin Laden is to tell a lie. And in a country of vitriolic anti-Muslim hatred, a dangerous lie. Whether you've seen the film or not.

(emphasis mine)

Here's the thing. I would agree with Freddie here... except, well, whether or not the film "depicts the use of torture as essential to caputring bin Laden" is not a sure thing "by all accounts". Some early reports, most notably from NYTimes Opinion writer Frank Bruni, claims that it does. 

But it turns out that torture's place within the movie (beyond that it takes up the film's first 45 minutes) is up for some debate.  Spencer Ackerman, who has seen the movie, recently weighed in with a more detailed reading than Bruni's that makes the case the film isn't pro-torture at all, that Bigelow is getting "a  bum rap." Freddie dismisses Ackerman's writing in the same post thusly:

 I think liberals want to be forced to support torture. ... That's why writers like Spencer Ackerman exist, to present the proper level of squeamishness and showy moral grappling-- to say that these scenes "can make a viewer ashamed to be American, in the context of a movie whose ending scene makes viewers very, very proud to be American"-- before the torture happens anyway. The key is to go through the moral indigestion but to eventually get to the all-American pride. There's a whole cottage industry, like that, for fretting liberals who want to get to the tough guy routine in the end.

As if that's the argument Ackerman is making. Which it isn't (the argument he's actually making is "The torture on display in the film occurs at the intersection of ignorance and brutality, while the vast, vast majority of the intelligence work that actually does lead to bin Laden’s downfall occurs after the torture has ended.") Or as if Spencer Ackerman didn't have a multi-year history of documenting and condemning the Bush torture regime. 

This seems very strange. Given a choice between a critic who has seen the work in question and one who hasn't, one should always take the former more seriously. Freddie says this distinction doesn't matter because aesthetic quality isn't being discussed.  But meaning is. And meaning is often open to interpretation, and thus requires actual engagement with the materials to discern. Freddie seems absolutely positive that Greenwald has the correct interpretation and that, sans evidence, Ackerman is acting in bad faith. These both seem curious leaps in judgment. 

I have some issuees with Ackerman's piece. He doesn't grapple with the positioning of 9/11 within the narrative, or counter Bruni's problems with same. Nor does he really talk about whether or not torture's failure within the narrative should've been makde more overt. I'm also not sure I'm going to see Zero Dark Thirty. I like Bigelow as a director but have no interest in watching someone get waterboarded. Or 45 minutes of back to back torture scenes. And, as someone who was there, I'm really really fucking sick of 9/11 and it's place in our culture and I thought once Bin Laden was dead, we'd be able to move on. How very, very wrong I was. 

But should I choose to not see the film, I also know that I am limiting my ability to talk about it. I can talk about how it is being interpreted by other people who have seen the movie, but I can't actually weigh in substantively on it. I haven't seen it, and in choosing not to see it, I've given up that right. 

UPDATE: Another lefty who has actually seen Zero Dark Thirty weighs in on the film and explains why, in his opinion, it is definitely not pro-torture.

Copyright Reform Goes Mainstream

By Isaac Butler

Hey, even Bloomberg news is getting on the IP reform bandwagon. Nice!

Insignificance and What Rhymes With America

By Isaac Butler

(This isn't a review-- how could it be, when What Rhymes With America is directed by a dear friend and former employer?-- but I wanted to write about the play anyway, and why I think it's worth seeing.)

What Rhymes With America is a play about failure, the particular failure of this American moment, and a group of people who were, at some point, possessed of the particular American feeling that they were destined for greatness.  It's a play about what happens when ambition dries up. When you tried to make it but didn't.  When it turns out you are destined for an ordinary life.

 This is often the thematic material for cruel comedy.  Think David Brent in the original The Office putting out a single, not understanding what kind of celebrity he is.  But What Rhymes With America's great strength is its nearly limitless compassion for its characters. Even though there is something ridiculous about each of them-- and plenty of comedy is made from this-- they're all fully human, and their sadness gradually becomes our sadness over the course of watching the play.

What Rhymes With America centers on Hank (played by Chris Bauer), who begins the play washed up and nearly broke. A former economics professor, he now works as an extra in opera productions, and, despite being forbidden to see (or even look at) his daughter Marlene, still believes there's some chance his ex-wife will take him back.  Meanwhile, he lives in a crappy apartment with a minifridge whose sole occupant is spoiled milk. He thinks its temporary. He's lived there for over a year.

Through Hank, we meet a fellow extra, Sheryl (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who dreams of success as a legit stage actress, and through Marlene's volunteer job at a hospital, we meet Lydia (Seana Kofoed), an aspiring short story writer who has never published anything, as she visits her father on his deathbed. Meanwhile, Marlene wanders the background of the action, attempting to compose songs on an acoustic guitar (this device, which could be deadly annoying and twee, actually ends up working beautifully). 

As Sheryl readies for an audition and Hank and Lydia go on a date, each character ends up confronting their own failure to be special, and their longing for a life that none of them can have. There's a subtle metatheatical thing going on here as well... part of the dare behind the play is that Melissa James Gibson is writing about a group of people spectacularly ill-suited to being main characters in a conventional drama. Two of them are literally extras, and Sheryl's longing for the limelight leads to a lengthy (and brilliant) monologue on this very theme at the end of the play. 

Hovering in the background of all of this is death. Lydia's dying father appears in only one scene of the play, wordless, comatose, lying in a hospital gurney, only his feet visible, yet his presense in the play is no mistake. An unspoken subtext runs throughout the work, one where these middle aged characters are struggling against their own insignificance, longing to achieve something worthwhile before they die. Lydia articulates the disappointment at realizing she will never have children, Sheryl's hunger to make it is so palpable it almost takes corporeal form.  Hank had the significance he craved, a wife, a child, published books and articles, but cannot come to grips with the fact that he's lost it. Marlene, his daughter, struggles with the realization that, contrary to what her parents-- acting like most parents-- have told her, she is average.

This could all feel-- and I'm going to guess for some viewers will feel-- like the most first world of first world problem plays. Yet for me, What Rhymes With America works and works beautifully, in part because in mines its psychological and emotional terrain with such precision and care, and in part because-- as its unfortunate title hints at-- it's about more than these four characters. In its own way, What Rhymes With America is very much responding to this political and economic moment, the moment when Americans are beginning to realize that the past reality of America-- even the recent past of the 90's-- and the expectations that it created for us as a people were illusory and is now over. This is a play for the economic crash, for the era when we'll have to start moving away from the coasts, when our expectations of the future are downsized,when our children's options will be narrower rather than broader than our own. And while, yes, these are first world problems, that doesn't stop them from being problems.

As someone who both failed in his first career (in terms of making a living at it) and suceeded (in terms of fulfilling a childhood dream) and is now embarking on a new one (writing) with all sorts of pitfalls and possibilities for failure again and finds himself having moments (one's happening right now) when the realization that he's going to die fills all available mental space and his heart races and yet uses this fear to fuel his ambition because he does not want to die having not contributed anything, because there's been great investment in him from the get-go, becuase that's the kind of ego he has on him, because he's been told that he's special, because he believes it (sometimes), because even believing it, he knows that that might be meaningless, that you can have all sorts of talent, ambition, drive, work ethic and all of it and still fail, and that anxiety keeps him up nights, or rather, makes it so that sleep is a paper-thin thing, easily torn by the clack of the dog's nails on the floorboards, or a car backfiring on the street, and then he can't sleep and spends nights staring at the television instead of working, and thinking this is wasted time, I'm almost halfway done, but cannot live like this all the time-- who could?-- and so works to calm himself, which means forgetting the whole possibility of failure thing, not to mention the inevitability of death thing, so he can get back to work, and to life, and to love, and thus feels caught in this strange looping paradox where the only way to do the thing that might bring some level of peace with regards to death and failure is to forget temporariliy about death and failure, as someone who is that kind of someone, What Rhymes With America struck the deepest of chords, let's say an E-flat major way down at the bottom of the piano, with a cello underneath somewhere, and I've been thrumming ever since.