Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
Superfluities Redux |
A Theatre Surrounds a City: |
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Friday, 13 November 2009 End of an eraApparently it's official: Richard Foreman will close the doors of his
Ontological- As Andy notes, the OHT's Incubator program may take over the space full time then, though we'll have to wait for further news on this. Posted in /Dramatists/Richard_Foreman Friday, 13 November 2009 Two posts and a newish blogSPECIAL 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:
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 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- 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:
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- Posted in /Miscellaneous Friday, 13 November 2009 On difficulty and ideas in the theatreA few days ago Matt Trueman's "Can theatre be too clever for its own good?" appeared at the Guardian theatre blog. As usual, the headline doesn't quite do the piece justice, but Matt discusses "how much theatre can expect of us, its audience" — a broad question, maybe too broad. Matt's main point is the shared cultural presumptions of an audience and a theatremaker, but perhaps the issue goes deeper:
In which case one must ask: what about difficult or surprising ideas, ideas that undermine what the audience member may or may not bring with them into the theatre in the first place, ideas that beggar easy communication? In this case, incomprehension may lead to new insights. If the theatre is merely charged with telling us what we already know, what place imagination? What is accessible to Matt may not be accessible to me, and vice versa, and this is dependent not only on our cultural knowledge, our schooling or our individual philosophies, our preconceptions and prejudices, but on our openness to new theatrical experience — or music, or plastic art — as well. Asking artists to cater to both of us, as he points out, cripples the artist. But this is the fallacy in considering an audience as one large mass rather than a collection of individuals. To answer the post's question with a simple uncomplicated "yes" is to guarantee a simple uncomplicated theatre that tells audience members what they already know, and this is not what we ask of art. Howard Barker's response in the poem below is "no" — and not a simple, uncomplicated no, and it has to do with more than mere cleverness. The poem is the first prologue to The Bite of the Night, and though I believe I've posted it before, it's worth remembering:
Posted in /Dramatists/Howard_Barker |