Superfluities Redux
A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater
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Home > Essays Tuesday, 15 December 2009 On not going to the theatreI hope to write something about Idiot Savant before too long; the script itself has been unavoidably detained at the source for very good reasons, and the Public Theater has yet to send me photographs of the show that I requested; I don't want to write about the show without these. Patience is urged, for those who may be waiting. Foreman's production will probably be the last that I see this year.
Since January, I've been to the theatre about a dozen times in all, I
believe — I'm not an accountant so I don't keep records, and I'm not
a reviewer, so I didn't write about many of them. (Though I did write
about a
few.) I stopped writing reviews for this blog and any other outlet
about two years ago (a full list of these is here,
for those who are interested), and I can't say that I'm sorry for that. The last
thing New York needs is one more reviewer, in print or online, and
personally it has allowed me to focus on other things. Obviously I've
continued to write about theatre. Any art form is larger than the
immediate examples available on any one night in any given community, so
there's been plenty to discuss. There is theory particularly, and
longer- It was not easy writing reviews for the Times, nor anywhere else, when I did so. Not so long ago I was at the theatre perhaps fifty or sixty evenings out of the year, not a hard thing to do in New York, and I reviewed most of these shows. But critical acumen is not unlike any knife blade; with each use the edge grows imperceptibly duller somehow, and you don't realize this until, a year down the line, you want to cut a clean slice of tomato and end up with a seedy, pulpy mush. You've used both the laudatory superlatives and the snarky takedowns, then you're faced with something much better or much worse than you've seen before. And what then? Well, then the honest reviewer is obliged perhaps to withdraw from the arena for a while, to rewhet the knife or direct his attention elsewhere for a time. Even foreign correspondents are rotated out of their countries every year or so, and in America, the arts are a foreign country indeed. When I meet a dramatist or director whose work I admire, I often ask
them how often they get to the theatre themselves, and almost inevitably
they tell me that they go very little. Clearly they desire to concentrate
on
their own work, the more idiosyncratic the work, the more intense the
concentration. The conflict of interest that a critic/ The theatre writer of course has all the literary tropes and figures of the reviewer at his disposal: polemic, argument, lampoon (always of ideas or work, never of individuals, which is a waste of time), lyricism if appropriate. What is theory if not an argument, a thesis to be expressed with all the power, precision and passion at the writer's hands? A writer's words are his knives too, and he wields them with that same power, precision and passion. Perhaps away from the theatre of which he is dissatisfied, he is whetting them slowly for the more precise art. This absence gives him darkness enough, and time, and even collaborators who might catch the glint of his polished iron in the night. Posted in /Essays Home > Essays Tuesday, 16 October 2007 The Wooster Group: Ghosts in the TextIn recognition of The Wooster Group's production of Hamlet currently running at The Public Theater, I offer here "Ghosts in the Text," an essay about the Group that brings together several posts regarding the collective that ran on earlier iterations of this blog:
I also discuss several later productions of The Group, including House/Lights and The Emperor Jones. You can read the entire essay here. Posted in /Essays |