Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater

Thursday, 12 November 2009

Two posts and a newish blog

SPECIAL TREAT: Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee in the following clip from All the President's Men. "Goddammit, when is somebody going to go on the record in this story?" comes at about 6:45 in:

Like the film itself, Robards is terrific. It's John McMartin as the Foreign Editor who delivers the short but almost Shakespearean soliloquy on the Watergate case ("It's not just that we're using unnamed sources that bothers me ...") after the editorial staff meeting.

I had the distinct pleasure of seeing Robards in The Iceman Cometh in a Broadway revival in 1985 and meeting him following his performance in You Can't Take It with You in 1983. He was a great, gracious representative of the theatre (as was his costar, the beautiful Colleen Dewhurst, who admittedly charmed the hell out of me) — something that doesn't count for much these days — and an unparalleled performer. Many thanks to Matt Tallmer for those introductions.

In lieu of a longer piece, pointers to two interesting posts on the blogosphere, the first of which takes a certain rhetorical tendency to hyperbole and exaggeration on the blogosphere itself to task. RAT cofounder and International Culture Lab's resident dramaturg Nick Fracaro, whose Rat Sass has been dark of late, identifies a new rhetorical gesture, which he calls "TalkWriting," common to the blogosphere:

We read about print publication shrinking daily. Along with this decline in the medium, old-school objective art journalism is also disappearing. We are entering a new era of personal, subjective theatre talk-writing. This new genre of journalism doesn't appear to have inherited the same protocol and/or ethical standards of its predecessor.

In the TalkWrite establishing itself in blogs, the distinction among fact, hyperbole, rumor, and opinion is a fluid one. Although there are a handful of critics, most of the theatre bloggers identify themselves as artists, with the largest percentage being playwrights. So as this genre of writing becomes more pervasive, it will be interesting to note how the historical dyad of Artist/Critic will suffer the changes.

Nick goes on to discuss two examples of TalkWriting relating to the O'Neill Center's open submissions policy and the case of Chicago critic Hedy Weiss some years ago; you will find all the relevant links at his post.

As he notes, "the distinction among fact, hyperbole, rumor, and opinion is a fluid one." True, but there remains a distinction; if one does not have facts to hand, one can't merely invent them, and those facts to be verifiable must be assigned to some kind of authoritative source. Although Nick is primarily discussing bloggers, it must be said that some who have come to the medium from the print world have engaged in an identical "TalkWrite," apparently feeling that the electronic medium may be held to a different set of standards. (But perhaps I'm wrong. A recent New York Post column by Michael Riedel about the closing of Brighton Beach Memoirs relied on three anonymous sources with unsubstantiated allegations, and those who have seen All the President's Men will undoubtedly be reminded of Jason Robards' Ben Bradlee yelling, "Goddammit, when is somebody going to go on the record in this story?" And even then, Woodward and Bernstein went to the trouble of corroborating their allegations through confirmations from three different reliable — and I stress reliable — sources.)

Hyperbole is a different matter. As a rhetorical device, we'd have no poetry nor fiction without it. But in expository prose like an essay, a piece of criticism or a blogosphere post, it comes ridden with dangers for those who wield it unwisely. Recently Isaac Butler wrote in a post about subjectivity in criticism:

I have a feeling that Scott [Walters], like myself, is left pretty cold by Continental European Directors Theatre, which comes from a totally different set of conventions and traditions and ideas of what theatre is for (and is largely, to me, garbage). But the BAM crowd eats that shit up like it's a banana split.

I call this out not because of any animosity to Isaac (Scott will have to speak for himself on this attributed opinion) but because it's only one recent example of the all-too-common unsubstantiated judgment that can be found on the blogosphere, whether from critics or artists. He's entitled to his opinion, of course, and I suppose we can nod our heads and assume we know what he means. But lacking specific examples we really don't, and "Continental European Directors Theatre" covers a broad swathe of very different kinds of work. If Ben Brantley or Charles Isherwood (or Helen Shaw, Jason Zinoman, Elizabeth Vincentelli or Leonard Jacobs) were to write, "Downtown New York theatre comes from a totally different set of conventions and traditions and ideas of what theatre is for (and is largely, to me, garbage). But the PS122 crowd eats that shit up like it's a banana split," they would be pilloried, blogger or print critic, and rightly so. (Some bloggers would be glad to lead the mob.) And not because it's a subjective judgment call, but because, in its lumping widely diverse work into one pile of "that shit," it does a disservice to the work itself, the people who create and enjoy it, and may speak to a lack of familiarity with it – a familiarity which, for a serious theatre worker or critic, may not be essential but would contribute to the body of experience that informs critical acumen towards others' work as well as one's own. And, if I were Vallejo Gantner, I would be chary of inviting this critic to shows at PS122, which have apparently been prejudged.

Nick's post is here and worth a read; a welcome revival of an often dynamic blog.

Across the seas, Chris Goode of Thompson's Bank of Communicable Desire has come up with one of those dark night of the soul essays to which we are all prone once in a while. Chris is an indefatigable theatre worker whose work I do hope to see one day, though he himself, in the black evening, sometimes doubts he'll want to do any more:

... those of us for whom the possibility of using theatre as a broadly anticapitalist locus are (as leftists always are) split down the middle, between those for whom everything — including theatre — is basically hopeless, but who suppose theatre is a good place to describe that hopelessness; and those, like me, for whom that hopelessness has not yet been conclusively and terminally proved. As I've said here many times, my work is premised on the fact (and I think it is a fact, and a trustworthy one) that not all the results are in yet.

For the most part, I find I have the stomach for this, knowing that it's hardly different to any one of a number of decent — and not futile, and not wholly negligible — quests towards this distant socialist utopia or that just-about-imaginable social turn towards anarchosyndicalism. But it necessarily implies a long view, a sense of the "long now," in Stewart Brand's useful phrase. And that long narrative, that long trail of birdseed we're pecking at, is really horribly incompatible with this kind of hand-to-mouth rhythm in which I'm living, in which trying to think about the longterm — something I've been doing rather more having had this year, for the first time, the experience of health problems — is a humbling and demoralising experience. There are, of course, lots of us in the same boat, but in the middle of the night it's really individually lonely and it makes everything else, everything more immediately personal, seem hard to trust.

Indeed. And this not from a sweatily ignored worker in the theatre mines but from a very busy and highly regarded artist whom the Guardian has called "one of the most exciting talents working in Britain today." I wonder how much of Chris's despair is grounded in that Utopian vision itself: as one ages one sees the spires of Utopia continue to retreat towards the horizon, but a lack of hope – for culture, for art, for the world – refocuses the attention upon the landscape at hand, more than worthy of theatrical exploration, so long as one doesn't fall into the trap of optimism or pessimism. Beyond hope or hopelessness, it is the present work that counts, and no one can tell to what it might lead.

And speaking of the Guardian, I want to point to Matt Trueman's blog, Carousel of Fantasies, which I came across only today, nearly two years after its debut. Matt is a regular contributor to the Guardian's theatre blog. His long-form review of the Little Bulb Theatre's Crocosmia is a fine introduction to his prose: "Accordingly, perspective slides and the children's actions slip from kooky to coping mechanisms. The nauseating niceties of their parents become the mistaken whimsies of a child's eye view muddled with faint, fond memories." Hyperbole or not, I don't know. But good writing regardless.

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Long-form theory and polemic
95 Sentences About Theatre (2007)
Organum I (2006-2007)
Organum II (2008-2009)
Critique of Tragedy (2010-continuing)

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Samuel Beckett 1
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Je Suis Sang
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