Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Sunday, 15 June 2008 Time MachineFar from the display ads of the "Arts & Leisure Section," today's most
significant theatre essay in the New York Times on this Tony Awards
day appears instead on the first page of "Week in Review" section. The
full-
Nor are Broadway's musicals exempt from Brantley's jaundiced eye. In re
Passing Strange and In the Heights, Brantley says, "Never
mind that hip- I honestly doubt that approving references to Antonin Artaud and Howard Barker are going to start cropping up in Brantley's daily reviews, but you know that when an idea hits the Times, it's sure to have been hovering about in the zeitgeist for some time before. For all of the youth involved in the creation of shows like these and Spring Awakening, it appears that the aesthetic is half-a-century old. Ordinarily when theatre needs new blood it looks downtown – to the Public Theater, for instance, which this week announced its 2008-2009 season. While Broadway seems to be turning the clock back fifty years, Off-Broadway is turning it back only half that much – at least, on the face of it. The new season at the Public will include new works by Stephen Sondheim (born 1930), John Guare (born 1938), Christopher Durang (born 1949) and George C. Wolfe (born 1954). There will be nods to a younger group of artists: Mike Daisey's new monologue will premiere at Joe's Pub this fall, and the Public's new Emerging Writers Group is starting its second year of activity, the products of that group to be presented in readings if not on its stages. And there will be more than a nod to new forms and content for theatre in Mark Russell's annual Under the Radar festival, much of it fed by activity that's been going on over the past few years at PS122 and the Ontological-Hysteric. This all invites a great deal of snarky cynicism about the Public's
commitment to young writers, but after all these years my knee doesn't
jerk nearly as high as it used to. First of all, young writers seem to be
getting on uptown just fine; downtown, groups like New Georges and 13P are
generating new writers and new productions on a consistently regular
basis, and these writers and productions are getting recognition and
press. Second, the names that Oskar Eustis has collected for the 2008-2009 season
represent amongst them a considerable recent revolution in theatrical and
dramatic thought for traditional forms of drama, from Durang's
post- Uptown is Brantley's beat. And it's noteworthy that his essay appears in the Times on Tony night (it's also noteworthy, again, that it doesn't appear in the "Arts & Leisure" section, where the wall between advertising and editorial appears to be as thin as those of a Bowery SRO). For all of the hype that's been attendant on shows like August and Passing Strange, it appears even to some of Broadway's most august contemporary critics that these offerings might have more style than substance – the same old soup in brand new cans. A triumph of youth-oriented marketing and the corporate/critical synergy, of course. But a failure for the unrealised possibilities of theatre and drama. Posted in /Miscellaneous |