Parabasis

What Is To Be Done

by 99 Seats

Cheeky posts aside, I've been pretty hesitant to wade into the Guthrie 2012-13 season mess. I think that Polly Carl summed up most of my general feelings on the matter pretty well (so she gets a double link).

The thing that makes me hesistant about engaging in this conversation can be seen in various Twitter feeds and comment threads (you know where to look). After more than four years of fighting this fight, since I started blogging at 99 Seats,  well...I'm pretty tired of it. It always seems to go the same way: there's an inciting incident, there are complaints, some outrage, some Serious Questions asked by Serious People, there is pushback, there's follow-up, then it all dies down. All of the sme sides are taken by all the same people with little variation every time. And ultimately nothing changes. The bright spots happen, the work is done, they're noted, they're admired and then the bright spots are ignored, by both "sides." The bright spots keep churning until they burn out and then new bright spots, isolated, solitary, flare up. Lather, rinse, repeat.

One of the thing that's frustrating is that, superficially, we're all in agreement. The American theatre has an audience problem. The numbers are dwindling, even if the box office isn't. The cultural impact has lessened. The question that we really have to face is this: what is to be done? I came across this dialogue yesterday. It's a back-and-forth between a progressive and a conservative about income inequality. As intellectuals, the conversation hovers around the same question: what is to be done about income inequality. Both sides see that it's a problem and it's a problem with multiple solutions. How do you pick one? What do you advocate for?

I feel like there's something similar in theatre right now, but also something markedly different. I think we can all agree on the problem: an aging, increasingly homogeneous audience base that is resistant to change. How do we serve that audience base and still attract new audiences. When it comes to that part of the conversation, though, I feel like it breaks down. On one side, I think there is a vocal, engaged, committed community, advocating for increased diversity in the work and in the staffs of theatre, a greater sense of community engagement and communal obligation. On the other...well, it's harder to say, since, superficially, the "other side" gives a lot of lip service to all of those things, while resisting any actual effort to make them happen and responding with sarcasm, condescencion, suspicion and outright mockery to those who advocate for change. Joe Dowling's response to the Guthrie flap perfectly embodies that: people agitating for change are from small theatres (i.e., bitter and marginal), self-serving (i.e. careerist climbers), engaged in social media (i.e. flighty, unserious youths tapping away on smartphones). So while saying that women and people of color have a place in his theatre, he offers the smallest possible spots and seems upset that we're not all grateful. This attitude is pretty constant among artistic directors and theatre "leaders."

On the outside, there are voices that crop up on Twitter and various blogs, making the same accusations, but with more vitriol, more nastiness. But never going at the actual question: what is to be done? While I find the conservative position on income inequality to be unpersuasive, it's at least a stance. The conversative forces in the American theatre rarely seem to advocate a stance, at least anything more than a combination of "Who cares what you think?" and "STFU. You'll get nothing and be happy." If we were going to have a real Grand Debate on diversity in the theatre, I can think of a dozen people, off the top of my head to take the "pro"-diversity side. On the other? Who would really stand up and be counted? They would rather simply say, "Well, the A.D. selected the best plays possible. If they happened to be 80% by white males...well, then, you do the math."

The question of race and diversity has been a loud undercurrent in the American conversation for the last few months. Between the dog whistle (and sometimes outright whistle) racism of the GOP primaries, the Trayvon Martin shooting, the recent flap about HBO's Girls, there's been a lot of talk about how race functions in America at this juncture. As I've read piece after piece, followed discussion after discussion, something has become really apparent to me. Ta-Nahesi Coates nailed it perfectly well here:

The conservative movement doesn't understand anti-racism as a value, only as a rhetorical pose. This is how you end up tarring the oldest integrationist group in the country (the NAACP) as racist. The slur has no real moral content to them. It's all a game of who can embarrass who. If you don't think racism is an actual force in the country, then you can only understand it's invocation as a tactic.

This is larger than the movement conservatives in the political realm. There is a wide swath of this country that looks on discussions of diversity as a tactic to an end, not an actual concern for actual people, but just another kind of rhetorical dodge, a way to make a "name" for yourself or grind some personal ax. Diversity is an academic pursuit as far as they're concerned. The idea that it is a legitimate desire for justice, for fairness, born out of a deep need, that concept is alien to them. And so they go after everyone else's personal life, or career standing, or whatever else they think this push is emanating from.

I'm surprised at how well this works, how quickly the conversation becomes derailed into each perons' personal issue or background. I guess we wouldn't still be having the same conversation if the dodges and undercutting didn't work. But we do. Every few months, we go around the same maypole, holding onto the same strings, running faster and faster in a circle and getting nowhere.

I don't mean to be bitter or cynical, but I'm largely over it. Change is coming, it must come, it always comes. But it won't come from words. Just actions. This conversation may spur some change, spur some action, and that's its use. That's good enough. For me, though, I'll keep focusing on what is to be done. And try to do that.

Joe Dowling's Interview on All Things Considered (And A Brief Bleg!)

By Isaac Butler

Joe Dowling's full interview transcript for his spot on All Things Considered can be found here. There's a lot that he says-- most of it embarrassing-- that needs to be thought through and parsed. Hopefully we'll have more comment here on parabasis over the next few days.

That being said, life events and work load are conspiring to take me away from this issue and this blog.  So if I may ask my excellent, excellent readers... if you see anything in the transcipt to respond to or comment on, if you'd leave a comment to this post, that would be a great way to help keep this conversation moving forward.

 

Quote of the Day

By Isaac Butler

"It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one's own life, accept these injustices as commnplace but must fight them with all one's strength.  This fight begins, however, in the heart and it now had been laid to my charge to keep my own heart free of hatred and despair."

-- James Baldwin, "Notes of a Native Son." 

Quote of the Forever

by 99 Seats

Polly Carl says everything, ever, right here:

Art rises from the unknown and the undiscovered. Sometimes different is better if only because it makes us stop and consider languages and cultures and ideas not our own. It forces us to engage the act of translation in the encounter with unfamiliar stories. I don’t think we shell out big money to see plays only to be comforted by stories we already know—I’ve met very few audiences who would articulate this as their reason for attending theater. If it’s self-serving to crave surprise, if it’s selfish to seek the new and the undiscovered, then I embrace my self-serving nature for the sake of the future relevance of the theater.

RTWT. And then go and do likewise.

Bingo

by 99 Seats

Well. So far, the Guthrie hasn't released an official response to the flap about their 2012-13 season, but, as Ben in the comments to my A.D. Excuse Bingo post below pointed out, we did get a "response" from Joe Dowling in this local media interview he did on Friday. If you played A.D. Excuse Bingo, you came up snake-eyes on this roll. Because Joe, well, Joe went his own way. Here are some choice quotes from Mr. Dowling:

"Inevitably, people will have a point of view. You can take a snapshot of any organization at any particular period and draw conclusions from it."

"The Guthrie is not an organization that lacks diversity. We have diversity in every area. This particular thing was related to women. Well, most of the departments at the Guthrie, including some of our senior managment and, of course, we will have women in the season both as directors, as writers and, of course, on our stage."

"This is something, in my view, it's something of a self-serving argument that really doesn't hold water."

So. To sum up, as George W. Bush put it fairly succinctly: Who cares what you think? I should have had that one up there.

Quote of the Day

By Isaac Butler

One of my favorite finds over the couple of years I've been doing Stagegrade has been the work of critic David Barbour at Lighting & Sound America.  He's been in the game a long time, long enough to bring real historical background to the table, but he hasn't ossified into a hardened lump of preexisting ideas of what a play must do.  Due to the nature of the magazine he edits and writes for, there's more emphasis on design than usual. He is fair-minded and his prose is well constructed and free of gratuitous efforts to show off. He's quickly joined the ranks of go-to critics for me and I always find his opinion worth grappling with, even when I disagree.

And thus, as a bit of a provocation for today, I offer you his thoughts on the late period of Tennessee Williams's work in the midst of this very-Williams-heavy year:

Someone or other is always trying to prove that Williams' later works -- basically, everything after The Night of the Iguana -- contain, at the very least, flashes of brilliance. The corollary to this notion is the assertion that the plays were unjustly dismissed by a cadre of ax-grinding critics who wanted Williams to repeat his earlier successes. In the last couple of years, however I've sat through Out Cry, Small Craft Warnings, Vieux Carré, and The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore, and I think it's fair to say that this is utter nonsense. Rambling, morose, and lacking in any kind of dramatic construction, they are the works of an artist so crippled by his addictions and psychological demons that he could no longer communicate with an audience. In Masks Outrageous and Austere is valuable only as a barometer of how far a great man had fallen.

You can read his whole review here.

Artistic Director Excuse Bingo!

by 99 Seats

With the flap around the Guthrie's season gathering some steam and generating a bit of press, apparently there will be a statement coming from Joe Dowling and the Guthrie next week. Which means it's time for everyone's favorite game, Artistic Director Excuse Bingo!

Place your bets on which of the following well-worn cliches we'll hear:

"We chose the very best plays...regardless of the sex/race of the author."

"Our casting process will be non-traditional and open."

"We are planning to partner with other theatre companies to bring diverse work to our stages."

"We're presenting the kind and quality of work that our audiences want to see and expect from us."

"We will continue, in the future, to present the very best work for the Twin Cities' communities."

Place your bets! (Or feel free to add any other A.D. Excuse Bingo responses in the comments.)

The Guthrie's New Season Part II: Quote Of The Day

By Isaac Butler

"As for Dowling, he's working with Louise Erdrich to adapt some of her novels for the stage. He says that he expects the Guthrie to be able to stage more women's work if its proposed new building is approved. The Guthrie is in the middle of a massive fundraising campaign to erect a proposed Mississippi River complex, with a 1,100-seat thrust stage, a 700-seat proscenium, and a 250-seat studio. If the new location gets the green light, by 2005 the theater will indeed have more opportunities to present female playwrights--and even fewer excuses not to.

-- "A Woman's Work Is Never Done" by Dylan Hicks. Citypages, 2003

 

The New Season at The Guthrie

By Isaac Butler

Congratulations are due to the Guthrie for taking an early lead in the Worst Season In America prize, after winning it hands down last year.

Here it is, folks, read 'em and weep.

The season includes.... Not one person of color or woman amongst the announced playwrights or (with the exception Mark Rylance's wife, who is codirecting with Mark Rylance a play cowritten by Mark Rylance) directors in either of the two mainstages. Four plays by Christopher Hampton, only one announced co-production with any of the Twin Cities smaller groups (Which is of course where the writer of color comes in to the season)... it's pretty much a soup to nuts disaster.  

The only thing that makes it vaguely better than last season is that there are three new plays.  I mean, they're not new plays that look very interesting outside of the Almost Certainly Enhanced Mark Rylance Poetry Hour Slash Vanity Project, but still, at least there are a few things that aren't already super well known to their audience. 

UPDATE: A loyal Parabasis reader sent me this season saying it trumps the Guthrie's for boring awfulness. They are right, it does. I wonder... though... does the Guthrie's sucking up of public and foundation and private monies and its influence and power in the national landscape make its season thus more of a let down?

No Pulitzer For Fiction

By Isaac Butler

No Pulitzer for Fiction. My guess is that the literary establishment will not react to this with the gleeful self-loathing that theatre people do and instead will treat it as another sign that the Pulitzer board is out of touch or that there was some kind of interfactional squabble between the fiction judges and the panel at large.

And if this is true, there's a lesson to be learned there for those theatre writings who just can't wait to shit on the medium they cover because it didn't win a big prize. Who knows, maybe book reviewers and authors will start writing "Is The New Novel Dead?" or "Are New Novelists Just No Good Because They Don't Write Like [Great Dead White Man]" columns and prove me wrong. 

UPDATE: Just to show that I was right (write?)... here's how a critic talks about a major awards snub when they actually are deeply knowledgable about and have deep affection for the medium they cover. 

Dynamic Pricing Is Not About New Audiences

By Isaac Butler

On twitter the other day dynamic pricing raised its ugly, seductive head again, this time via the feed of the (new to me) Pitchcentral out of England.  Oddly, they seemed to be phrasing the dynamic pricing debate as if the big prolem were people opposed to tickets costing less. I'm going to quote their tweets as one string of ideas here so you get some idea of the argument:

"$800m unsold tickets in UK in 2010.  Revenue management- different customers are willing to pay different prices for the same event. Price elasticity - how sensitive are customers to changes in price? Sell every seat Vs. maximise revenue from each performance. Don't think of a cheaper ticket price as a discount. Think of it as a ticket price that can increae over time. Not sure I buy the cons of dynamic pricing for theatre. Its more about inertia and not acknolwedging the changing envrmt. Theatre is resistant to change its pricing systems. But 2 attract wide demographics u must meet them where they spend."

The problem with dynamic ticket pricing is not the one Pitchcentral is worrying about here.  The issue isn't the prices that go down. It's the prices that go up without limits. Simply put: Dynamic Pricing is not about attracting new audiences. Although it is often pitched as such, even a cursory look at how it works shows that it's designed for a completel different goal.

The missing component here is thinking about how informed the consumer is who benefits from dynamic pricing. Since ticket prices are set by demand in a DP regime, the more in demand shows cost more.  No duh, right? But the problem with using this system to attract new audiences is that these most expensive shows are the ones most likely to reach the consciousness of low information consumers. They are far less likely to hear about or want to take a risk on spending money on the less costly shows.

The problem here is that new or untapped audiences are far more likely to be low information consumers.  So a system that's set up for rewarding high information consumers and punishing low information ones isn't a system that's really set up for reaching out to new audiences, particularly when compared with things like rush tickets.

So what is Dynamic Pricing really about? It seems to me that it's about propping up the subscription model at all costs. Basically, some small percentage of the low information consumers are going to decide after getting screwed on ticket prices a few times in a row that the best strategy going forward would be to subscribe so they can lock in a lower price to shows. And indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if subscription houses that use dynamic pricing see their number of subscribers go up (at least in the short term) but it's worth thinking about all the rest of the customers who, having gotten screwed on ticket prices a couple of times, decide it's really not worth bothering with at all.

Hell Yeah! of the Day

by 99 Seats

I don't really "know" Mac Rogers (I think we've met a couple of times, traded a few emails and such, do the FB/Twitter thing on occasion), but apparently, he knows me. Like really well. Because this is my life.

So well over half of my writing time goes to procrastinating. Another half a month goes to false starts and blind alleys, where I spend an obscene amount of time avoiding the obvious conclusion, which is that I’m going to half to dump the last fifteen pages and start the whole section over again. So on a good process – on a GOOD writing process, for me – I actually fruitfully write one-fourth of the time I spend attempting to write. And with the Honeycomb Trilogy the enormity of it made it hard to focus on one scene at a time. I had a hard time putting out of my head the overall object being attempted. It scared the crap out of me, and when something scares the crap out of me, I force myself to think about it ALL THE TIME.

I'm a bit pressed for time today, so I can't give the kind of full-throated, passionate, articulate, powerful statement about my work that Mac does wonderfully here. So just, you know, go and read this damn thing. Read the holy heck out of it. And next time you think about bitching out a writer for not writing the play you wanted them to write, well, you think about this. And have a little pity, mercy and love in your heart for all us sinners.

The Future of the Nonprofit System

By Isaac Butler

I apologize in advance for how angry this blog post is. I normally try to be somewhat restrained (while still spunky!) with my rhetoric but sometimes you just gotta unload. 

Richard Dare, CEO and Managing Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic is kicking off a series of posts about the need to replace the nonprofit tax code and the system of "begging" that it has created with something else.  He hasn't outlined what the something else is yet, but his initial post is worth reading, if you can stomache it.  Personally, I had to try a couple of times to get through it because the pathological twinning of self-aggrandizement and self-pity inimical to the ruling class was on such vivid display right at the beginning of the piece:

On my first day in the nonprofit world, I was introduced as "the new suit." Short shrift indeed for the years I'd spent undergoing rigorous formal musical training. My decades of hard-won success in the for-profit sector, it seemed, had marked me with a sort taint in certain corners of the art world -- had made me seem somehow less artistically chaste than I had been considered in my younger days. After all, I must have sold out by choosing to create companies rather than compositions over the intervening span of years. And now here I was suggesting we, as artists, ought to figure out a better way to pay for what we do. What nerve. What gall.

For Richard and the other Arts CEOs out thers who voice attitudes like this, I'd just like to say this:

You have created, maintained and empowered a system in which you make a considerable salary and benefits. That system is predicated on artists not making a considerable salary and benefits. This is true even if the artists you personally hire are well compensated. (A) they are likely not as well compensated as you are and (B) their wages are depressed because jobs in their field are so scarce and thanks to the conservatory system, you keep cranking out more labor than the field needs. You profit off of all of this, off of a deeply exploitative system, regardless of whether it's intentional. 

One of the reasons why artists will participate in such a system is that they are raised to believe that what they do is noble.  Or, maybe, cool. Or, maybe, virtuous. (There are other reasons too, but let's set those aside). 

So I'm sorry, but you don't get to have all of the money, power and health benefits and also get all of the emotional satisfaction that is the main compensation keeping people in your terrible fucking system, alright?I'm sorry the cool kids didn't want to eat at your table, and I'm sure this looks to you like ingratitude from the plebes, whom you are enriching with your fucking gold-plated benevlolence, but suck it up.

Alright. (Just a quick equivocation: I recognize that basically everyone in the arts could probably make more money doing what they do somewhere else.  And I don't personally think that the antipathy that artists voice towards administrators, or the weird condescension that arts folks have towards the people who do the "dirty work" -- note the loaded phrase there-- of making the money and keeping the lights on is a positive thing. I think it's childish.  I simply also understand this rage and condescension and don't really see where the wealthy heads of organizations get off complaining about it.)

Now that that's out of the way... I actually agree that we need to rethink the nonprofit system. I think you'd have to be an idiot (or blind) not to see that the system isn't working and is on the verge of collapse. But Dare's hinted at solution-- using the nonprofit system to incubate starter groups and then at some point reach "a sustainable place where we earn our own unrestricted revenue"-- is ahistorical at best.  Patronage has always been an essential part of vibrant arts movements.  This was true in Ancient Athens-- where tickets were subsidized by the goverment and productions were subsidized by wealthy individuals-- Elizabethan England to our own post-mid-century artistic reneissance in this country.

So the question that needs to be answered is "why is here and now suddenly different?" 

 It's not enough to highlight that the Nonprofit system doesn't work. We have to talk about why it doesn't work before we can figure out how to fix the problem.

And the reason (for me) why the Nonprofit system doesn't work is because the system relied on a good faith assumption that the stewards of these institutions would abide by certain values. That the nonprofit system meant that people involved in them would think carefully about the demand that they serve the public good. What has happened is that the leading organizations in this industry were taken over (or founded by people who turned out to be) egomaniacs and frauds who wanted to build temples to themselves and thought that the 501 (c)3 tax code simply meant there was an additional revenue stream open to them to do so.    And because they did this, and because they were often the largest or most influential organizations, these maneuvers became the industry norms for what success looked like and so the incentives shifted.  And with those incentives shifting, the ethics underpinning the entire field gradually changed to be closer to the ethics of Wall Street. 

(There are, of course, not the only problem facing our field. Declining government support is another, declining ticket sales too. So is the end of the Monoculture.  So is the fact that all of our Brows are collapsing and basically no one believes that "high brow" culture is superior anymore etc. etc. and so forth.)

If we're going to solve this problem, then we need to find a way to move the arts away from capitalism not closer to it. Dare claims that one of the problems with nonprofits is that they end up chasing the almighty dollar.  But he also talks about making arts organizations self-sustaining and capable of earning their own unrestrained revenue.  Unless his solution is "therefore, arts organizations should begin counterfitting dollars," I'm not exactly sure how these two positions are going to square with each other.

BUT! This is the first in a series, so maybe there's some great ideas floating around out there that he'll get to.  And I do, honestly, appreciate people thinking hard about how to solve this problem. But when someone comes at artists trying to sell them on a bunch of buzzwords from a cut rate MBA program (entrepreneurship! unrestrained revenue! America Is Awesomesauce!) I get suspicious. 

UPDATE: Now that I've taken a few deep breaths... I think i should partially clarify the above here to say that part of the problem with all of this is also simply that many of the companies that decided to gut their missions, buy bigger buildings, move into bigger spaces, alienate their core audiences and jack their ticket prices up were also bad at business. They bought big buildings whose running costs they couldn't really afford. They built their finances assuming the real estate bubble wouldn't burst, taking their endowments and donors with them. Etc. and so forth. I don't have a problem with an organization that does excellent work and also is good at making money. I don't have a problem with organizations expanding when they need to. I do have a problem with them behaving irresponsibly, expanding in a way that forces them to change their missions, diluting themselves because they have more seats to fill etc. 

And The Chip Stains And Grease'll Come Off In The Bath

By Isaac Butler

 

Quote of the Day

By Isaac Butler

"While business and rebel-schmaltz stars alike tout self-realization, social negation and the deegitimation of traditional values, Celine's music... tends to prioritize `recognition and community' connection and solidarity.  Granted, she also promotes overwork, ambition and luxury, which is to say she's still a pop star. But in that matrix, sentimentality might be her greatest virtue.

That's a painful admission, because it implies that the shelter for oddness and dissatisfaciton that maverick art and culture have offered in my life may be self-servingly segregating and undemocratic. It pours cold water on the hope that art that insists on its quirky independence fosters critical thinking, even models social change. Art's shock tactics do clear ground for cultural shifts, but what artists foresee is seldom what society gets. Certainly, celebrities like Celine can help advertise an American Dream cover story for a destructive hegemony by appealing to widely held desires and aspirations. But the transgressive individualism of modernism's heird verges on directly emulating that destructive drive, while jeering at its victims' aspirations an desires. Maybe I have met the Ugly American, and he is me."

-- Carl Wilson, "Let's Talk About Love: A Journey To The End of Taste"

You Come At The King, You Best Not Miss

By Isaac Butler

I woke up this morning still troubled by that Hilton Als's blog post about August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, because I think it shows some serious problems with his critical practice that are worth addressing or, to put it kinder, some serious disagreements he and I have about the job and responsibility of a critic.

I should start here by saying that I actually really like Als's work as a creative nonfiction writer. His essay Buddy Ebsen, which appears in both The Believer and the 2011 Best American Essays is beautiful and powerful. His memoir The Women  is deserving of all of the praise its gotten.  But as a reviewer, Als has earned a reputation amongst his detractors for writing reviews that in no way engage the work (or artists) at hand. Instead, they really appear to be about Hilton Als, about what he happened to be reading the week he saw the show, or his private agendas.  

Enter his blog post about Ma Rainey, in which he claims a general dislike of August Wilson. This is fine, you're allowed to not like August Wilson, even if I love him. But if you're a professional theatre critic and you're talking about one of the foremost American dramatists ever, it's part of your job to engage with and respond to what Wilson's work actually is and actually does if you're going to dismiss him.  (This is one of the hard parts of being a critic, you have to engage with work you're not wild about with the same level of depth and enthusiasm most people reserve for work they love).  

And so... what's Hilton Als argument against Wilson?  That Als doesn't respond emotionally to Wilson's work:

 The black life he describes in his many, many plays is something I can recognize, certainly, but surface recognitions don’t add up to much in my book, unless they trigger emotional recognitions, which little of Wilson’s work does: I see his situations, but don’t feel them.

I'm sorry, but that's not a critique. A lack of personal emotional engagement in an artist's work is not a criticism of their work. It's his job to delve into the work and try to figure out why he doesn't emotionally engage with it, because it's also his job to figure out if this is peculiar to him (in which case, it should be noted as Als's problem not the text's  the way I've noted my own problems emotionally engaging with King Lear) or if it's something lacking with Wilson's work. 

Furthermore, Wilson did not write "many, many" plays. He wrote ten full lengths and a few early one-acts that are never performed. Edward Albee has written over two dozen plays. Arthur Miller wrote over thirty. John Guare has written almost twenty. Mamet roughly fifteen. 

This might seem a minor point, but what I'm trying to say here is that there's no evidence that Als has even bothered with surface engagement with Wilson's work. This suspicion deepens when we get to this whopper of a sentence:

 The uniformly strong cast, under the direction of Liesl Tommy—she opens the play up in ways I could not have imagined—is the first window I’ve ever had on Wilson where I have seen his intelligence at work, and not just his melodrama. (emph. mine)

Two points.  First off, I thought Als was saying before that the problem with Wilson's work is that it doesn't emotionally engage him enough. Now he's saying that the problem is it's not intelligent enough and relies too much on melodrama.  Well. Which is it?

Second: Melodrama is a specific word that means specific things.  And most of those things are not, in general, to be found in the plays of August Wilson. Two Trains Running is devoid of melodrama.  So is Joe Turner's. Seven Guitars has a murder mystery in it, but that is obviously the least of the play's concerns (the business practices of record labels are given far more real estate in the play than the central whodunit). I'd suspect that Als is talking about the heightened emotional landscape of Wilson's plays except that his one piece of evidence he gives for his melodrama point is a moment of action in the plot (Levee seducing Ma's girlfriend).  Wilson's plays do indeed have really heightened emotions, but unlike in standard melodrama, plot machinations aren't how we get there. It's simply the world of his plays.  If anything, the common complaint against Wilson is that there's too much poetry and not enough plot in his work .

But no matter. I'm not really sure Als paid much attention to this production that he so highly praises, seeing as he's gotten two characters confused:

There’s Ma’s band, of course, which includes her piano player, Irvin (the great Will LeBow), who is also the troupe’s intellectual and moral conscience: a new Negro who is trying to get these artists to understand that they’re part of a great and viable tradition, and that black American art matters. Furrowing his brow but not scratching his head, Irvin is a poet in a world where only the basest prose is spoken.

Nope, sorry.  Irvin is one of the white characters in the play. Hilton Als has somehow confused him with Toledo, the band's piano player and leader. Which makes a lot of sense as Will LeBow and Charles Wheldon look so very much alike. 

Als also seems to have missed that the four band members schematically match strategies for black advancement in the twenties.  Toledo, yes, is the New Negro intellectual.  But there's also Slow Drag (who represents the pleasure principle) Cutler (the hard work/keep your head down school) and Levee (modernist artistic advancement). What makes Ma Rainey's so wonderful is Wilson's refusal to fully endorse any of these viewpoints over the other, although his sympathy is clearly towards Toledo, the character is no saint and there are limits to his viewpoint.

And then we get the rest of this paragraph where Als writes:

 He’s an anomaly, and you feel for him because he feels so much, including his rejection by Levee (Jason Bowen), a young musician in a hurry who eventually becomes involved with Ma’s girlfriend (that’s the pat melodrama part). But the person Irvin really wants to kill—a white producer who’s exploiting them all, and who rejects Levee’s bid to be an independent artist—is of course the person he cannot kill: he’s felt a white man’s power in a segregated world before; his father was murdered by one of them. 

This is really confusing, but it's because now Als has moved from thinking Irvin is Toledo to thinking Irvin is Levee, the band's trumpet player.  It's Levee's father who is murdered for wanting too much. And it's Levee who is filled with murderous rage.

So Als seems to have finally "got" a Wilson play, except that he conflates three different characters. Of course, maybe he was watching closer than it seems, he just wrote this blog post in haste, without a playbill or, you know, the internet in front of him. But if that's the case, I'll just remind you that this is a professional theatre critic we're talking about here. 

Once you sort out the different characters that Als has conflated, you do get some perceptive writing about the play (in this next paragraph he's gone back to thinking Irvin is Toledo, not Levee):

How to describe Bowen’s performance as Levee? It is titanic. Out of his great physical beauty there rises a terrible and ugly pool of bile: racism is eating him alive. (He would probably make an unforgettable Bigger Thomas.) And, in order to save himself, he has to kill his black past—which is embodied in the figure of Irvin who probably reminds Levee of his father, and the opera of tragedy that an older black man represents. But he ends up in the jaws of white power anyway—by murdering Irvin, and thus himself.

But this is not perceptive enough to justify  the rest of this post, particularly its opening.  If you're going to go after August Wilson, you should probably demonstrate that you are at least a mildly competent spectator of theatre. 

Yet Even More Women On The Stage/Page

By Isaac Butler

I forgot to mention this earlier, but the ASME nominations just dropped. ASME is the American Society of Magazine Editors. Their awards are a big deal.  Anyway, in case you haven't heard, not one of the 25 nominations in creative nonfiction is by a woman. Not one. The categories are: Reporting, Feature Writing, Profile Writing, Essays/Criticsm and Columns/Commentary.  This is really really bizarre and shitty. Alexander Nazaryan over at NY Daily News writes a screed about it so I don't have to.

(I will say that I think the ranting against the work of John Jeremiah Sullivan in this linked piece is uncalled for.  It is perfectly possible to argue vociferously that the awards should be more inclusive without trashing the current slate of nominees all of whom are good and hardworking writers.  It's not their fault they were nominated.  Although I will also say that Sullivan's Disneyland piece, which was nominated, is kind of meh, but the pieces contained in his book Pulp Head are really, really great. I am also quite sick of seeing the word "middlebrow" as an epithet. It's generaly a sign of laziness on the part of people using it, and I'm not even sure the word has any meaning anymore.)

Hunger Artists

by 99 Seats

I don't think it's possible for me to agree with this more. Seriously. The culture that encourages and celebrates misery, pain and generally awful behavior in artists is one of the more damaging things in the arts, especially right now. It not only drives young artists to distraction and sometimes terrible life choices, it shortens the life span of artists (both the artistic life span and the actual life span), it furthers the idea that work celebrating pain and suffering is "real" and "true." It also contributes to the pressure of not "selling out," i.e. taking a job that provides support and some measure of comfort. That pressure helps keep the arts a place for the wealthy who can afford to indulge in a "poverty" life style without the, you know, poverty.

Really, folks: let it go. An artist can be a happy, healthy, whole individual. It's okay.

Women On The Stage, Women On The Page Con't

By Isaac Butler

Over at the Huffington Post, Lauren Gunderson makes the case for more roles for women onstage, something that often gets left out in conversations about gender parity in theatre. She notes, for example, that women make up 60-70% of theatre audiencemembers and buy 70% of the tickets before asking:

In any other market the majority of consumers would significantly define the product or experience. Why not theater?

I will disclaim right away that this is not about women playwrights, though plays by women represent less than 20% of the works on and off-Broadway and in regional theaters (and also in the UK, as The Guardianilluminates). I consider August: Osage County and In The Red And Brown Water plays about women though men wrote both.

This is about modern theater telling its predominantly female audiences that the human experience deserving of dramatic imagination is still the male one. In TV, this might be a top-down insistence. In politics or business we see it all the time. But in theater?

I will just briefly note that this connects back to some of the questions being raised about literature in my earlier post, where women make up the lion's share of readers but male tastes dominate.

Anyway, RTWT here. 

 

More On Diversity

By Isaac Butler

I should also say that Roxane Gay positively nails the dynamics that shape these conversations whereever they occur.  And the dance she outlines should be very familiar to readers of Parabasis:

The time for outrage over things we already know is over. The call and response of this debate has grown tightly choreographed and tedious. A woman dares to acknowledge the gender problem. Some people say, “Yes, you’re right,” but do nothing to change the status quo. Some people say, “I’m not part of the problem,” and offer up some tired example as to why this is all no big deal, why this is all being blown out of proportion. Some people offer up submission queue ratios and other excuses as if that absolves responsibility. Some people say, “Give me more proof,” or, “I want more numbers,” or, “Things are so much better,” or, “You are wrong.” Some people say, “Stop complaining.” Some people say, “Enough talking about the problem. Let’s talk about solutions.” Another woman dares to acknowledge this gender problem. Rinse. Repeat.

Literally every discussion I've ever had about diversity in theaters works like this. And I agree with Gay that it's time for it fucking stop and I agree with her that I'm sick of talking about whether this problem really exists (it does) and if it exists whether or not it's a problem (it is). As she puts it, and as I tried to map out in the earlier post "Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple."

RTWT here.