Superfluities Redux

by George Hunka
Artistic director, theatre minima

A Theatre Surrounds a City:
Vienna's Burgtheater


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Tuesday, 15 December 2009

On not going to the theatre

I 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-form criticism on more general dimensions of theatre. And I've been able to confine the content of this blog almost exclusively to those critiques.

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/practitioner faces, however, becomes more aesthetic than professional. The more kinds of theatre you see, the more you become aware of the theatre that you're not seeing, and the deeper the familiarity with the history and aesthetics of the form the more acute becomes the dissatisfaction. At the same time, this dissatisfaction becomes more precise. When the critic turns from review to theory or longer-form criticism, his expression becomes more precise as well. This leads to necessary exclusions the more exact his vision of the art becomes.

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.

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Tuesday, 16 October 2007

The Wooster Group: Ghosts in the Text

In 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:

My first experience with The Wooster Group (and these days, and given the technological wizardry for which the group has become known, it might be more accurate to call it an "interface") occurred on a cold winter night in late 1983 or 1984. The play was L.S.D. (Just the High Points), the group's reinterpretation of Arthur Miller's high-school stand-by The Crucible. Before entering the group's small 99-seat performance space, The Performing Garage, on Soho's Wooster Street, I thought I'd known The Crucible, but at the end of the 90 minute performance, I re-emerged into the cold night air realizing that, until that performance, I hadn't really known it at all.

I don't think my experience was unique. I had, unfortunately, seen a radically shortened version of the original three-part L.S.D., but enough of the original was left to allow some of that original production to shine through. Director Elizabeth LeCompte and the cast (which included original Wooster Group members Ron Vawter and Spalding Gray, along with Kate Valk, who joined the group as a seamstress a few years earlier) put Miller's text through a variety of twists and turns, staging it at a long conference table reminiscent of the 1950s-era HUAC hearings that had served as one inspiration for the play; and Valk's black-faced Tituba impressively drove home just that metaphysical hysteria that gripped the original Salem witch trials, its other obvious inspiration. It may, for all its inversions of Miller's own realist dramaturgy, have been the most loyal interpretation of the original text that had been produced until that time.

I also discuss several later productions of The Group, including House/Lights and The Emperor Jones. You can read the entire essay here.

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