Parabasis

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.

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.