Mad as Hell

Uh oh.

So I just saw Network. Incredible. Incredible film. If you want a film that predicts our current entertainment situation, heck, our current cultural moment see this film. 34 years ago Paddy Chayefsky got it scarily right. Not to mention that news has become the absurdity of what the news program in "Network" becomes...my good friend Naren rightly pointed out that Jon Stewart and Colbert are rightly criticizing and making fun of this phenomenon (happening on CNN, MSNBC and god help us, FOX NEWS). I mean, is there anybody who is more the next coming of Howard Beale than Glenn Beck?

I could go on about the whole movie, but it's late and there's something that sorta terrifies me. (spoilers? maybe).

The scene where William Holden's character is breaking up with Faye Dunaway's...basically he explains to her that she's completely incapable of real human connection. She's a humanoid - like Finch's character (howard beale) says we've all become. But it goes deeper. Howard Beale says in one of his rants: None of us are human. It's the end of the human being, we are humanoids - it's the beginning of the "network". And Chayefsky gets it right - since that film we have consistently deteriorated the human-ness within us, and replaced it either with commercialized versions of ourselves (facebook) or with the models and idols of Reality television, which rather than imitate the reality on which it is based, turns everything else into Reality. (we may laugh at outliers like Jersey Shore, but they shape our culture more than we care to realize). Anyway, back to Holden. He tells Dunaway that life isn't a script, it's got real human beings in it. Well, in the end he tells her he's human, he can still feel, have good old 'traditional' emotions. She's incapable, she's been raised on television narratives, on flattened ideas of identity, that create someone extremely successful but also completely amoral to the pointing of talking about the murder of a man as if it were just a network merger, perhaps with even less zeal than that.

What does this matter? Why am I writing this on a theatre blog?

Well - unfortunately for us theatre makers, theatre relies on real human beings. The point of theatre is the presence of people onstage and other people playing the audience (sure we can play with these parameters, but after the dithyramb this is what we got). But what happens when we no longer behave like "human beings". When we are more humanoid? We get what happens now, reality tv appeals to us more, formula appeals to us more because believe it or not, I think we've lost WIlliam Holden - we can't really feel. We say we feel, we obviously "feel" in a biological sense, but any feeling we have is unfortunately conditioned by the idea of what we're supposed to feel. We're all either building melodramas or romantic comedies, or sitcoms or reality shows in our head whether we want it to or not. That's what appeals to us now...so how can we create a theatre with real people and not seem like we're playing false to those who are already playing false by playing "real"? The sad part is that the "real" is now the false, the fake the constructed. None of this is new this was made in 1976, 30 years ago.

Let's take a back track for a second, and say that slowly with our jaws agape and confusion in our eyes. That was 30 years ago. And we didn't somehow annihilate ourselves (though it was a distinct possibility and still is). So that means 30 years. 30 years of becoming falser and falser and more constructed and more separated from our own ideas or senses, but now we can't even go back before then and say whetehr these ideas were ever authentic or whether we were guided by stronger more traditional and conservative social values...and maybe that's also true. But think about it, Holden is talking to Dunaway as if she's from a different generation, but now we're all this generation. Perhaps there are outliers, but we are completley and utterly consumed, to the point where this consumption is not just old news, it's the status quo.

It makes no sense to talk about postmodern this or postmodern that, we are living in postmodernity, in a world devoid of the 'real', and when something is being "postmodern" (as in the way that some oft pretentious artists tend to use it) that's not necessarily true, it's acting 'postmodern' that is, it's imitating a social movement that once used to demarcate an idea that is now the status quo. It's inescapable...

So...um this is where we are now. So what happens now? What do you do when your theatre is incapable of real? What do you do when the crux of your art, the ontological reason for it existing somehow presupposes real flesh and blood people capable of being people - narrative as the essence of human experience, god how many times have you heard that? Except humans have become inessential, our humanity, our human-ness, has become inessential to us. How can you create naturalism, when the very bonds of our culture, the very way we conceive of ourselves is completely unnatural?

Then we are really 'acting'. The lie takes place on both sides of the stage. And perhaps this isn't a bad thing. Perhaps it is merely the madman looking at his own shadow before realizing that the whole world is thrust in darkness. Shadows don't matter.

I am being exceedingly nihilistic. Maybe the result is resignation? No, that would be easy.

I don't have answers, it's sort of a black hole. But I want to keep doing theatre? Why? Madness probably. Some light one though nothing heavy. Maybe if we keep throwing paint on a canvas we'll make a shape, learn a lesson, create something meaningful. Maybe we'll just waste a lot of paint.

Let's hope for both.

- J

rant rant rant, but we'll get somewhere i promise.

The State of the Form (not good...)

Before I go into what I think it a bit of a bummer of a post, I want to state my absolute and total happiness with what was a wonderful weekend for THE KING IN EXILE. Great turnouts, thoughtful and enthusiastic crowds, and a great chance to see this work which is challenging, entertaining, and my first foray into the intense world of downtown NYC theatre. More to come later...but after such a lovely time it's important to do some much needed reflectin. It's not great, but I hope that by highlighting what I feel to be some of the challenges before the genre that we can begin to make theatre important again (I don't know why, but thats a question for another time...).

I think we can all agree at this point that theatre is not a dominant cultural trend. To be truthful it hasn't been for a while. Here is what I think defines a cultural trend. Art, when it is a dominant (and popularly consumed) trend both synthesizes and reflects upon culture. It is in this way that you see the cross-genre influence of film, television and popular music and art on the way we think of ourselves, the way we define our generations, and the way that we make our art. The effect of films transcends its own genres, in such a way that you see their influence on everything from other popular art forms to even our dialect and the way we speak.

When's the last time you saw a theatre production having that kind of widespread cultural effect? Perhaps Angels in America may be the last one - (maybe musicals, but I'm not well versed in them and will let someone else opinionate on them).

I'm not saying that theatre has to have the same pull of reality shows, but even high/low aspects of the genre become dominant culturally. Look at the indie-music blast in rock, or the indie-film phenomenon in cinema - a movie like Little Miss Sunshine, nominated for an Oscar, featuring indie music in its soundtrack, and reaches widespread audiences. Television that is critically acclaimed such as The Wire, or Arrested Development or Mad Men or Lost, all these things as well becoming part of a national artistic narrative that theatre is not participating in.

Let's face it, when less than 10% of the American public goes to the theatre we are in crisis mode.

Instead what do we have? Rather than have a cultural art-form that participates in the national cultural narrative while also in some way constituting it, we have a cultural-diasporic form that is relatively tiny that synthesizes its own narrative, creating a group of artists and theatregoers that are increasingly invested, even while their own numbers are shrinking and being increasingly ignored by the populace. The result is higher numbers of people making theatre, a more competitive market to get this theatre made, and increasingly conservative and minimal abilities for this theatre to be made by institutions that are both overwhelmed and economically struggling.

Yep, it's dire straights. I don't mean this to be a condemnation, just a reflection, and perhaps I am being to harsh, or perhaps I am woefully uninformed, but it doesn't look very good; and judging by the blogosphere's reactions to Outrageous Fortune (I havent had time to read it), it's not a very good time to be a young playwright who creates work certainly out of the mainstream.

I know I've only talked about pretty mainstream things in this post, this is not to say follow the mainstream it's all that matters, I actually avoid a fair amount of the mainstream and spend most of my time at underground theatres...

But the problem is that even the theatrical mainstream is out of the main mainstream! The only way high-falutin productions seem to make money is when they borrow from Hollywood's thunder - (A Steady Rain does fabulously featuring two famous Hollywood actors, while classic shows such as Brighton Beach Memoirs fall flat).

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There is also the problem that both film and theatre are mediated experiences. Theatre is not.

In fact theatre requires the unity of time, place and MONEY. All this is out of an audience member's control. With something like Hulu, all of these variables can be controlled by the audience. The entertainment is provided at an audience's convenience. Even a three-week or longer run, is just an extended event. It occurs then it dissipates and if you've missed it, unless it does extremely well, you've missed it. There is no Hulu, no reruns later that night, no dvds to purchase (usually).

The problem is how do we make theatre attractive as an event, how to generate the excitement that hollywood award shows gather, or rock concerts do, how do we generate the numbers of a political rally? There needs to be a way for theatre to continue to be an unmediated experience, while at the same time participating and perhaps expanding into a mediated place, so that the participation expand beyond the stage.

I don't know. There are too many questions at this point unanswered, this is not meant to answer anything, just meant to reflect and perhaps build a way towards answers.

How do we change this? And if we can't change it (which I feel to be the case), what should theatre's purpose be. Why make theatre when we know it can't have the dominant cultural effect it used to have - why is still important? I don't know. All I know is I want to keep making theatre. Theatre is essential and important to me, and hopefully to other people, but I don't know why. All I can do is convince myself that I'm not deluding myself - then again, we entrust ourselves to the world of illusions, hard not to live in them sometimes...

- J

Return?

I have decided to return to this blog. Perhaps it is because I am finally becoming settled into what has been my new lifestyle in New York City, or perhaps because I find the theatrical situation in the city at once so dire and so inspiring.

I have returned, but no one knows I'm here. Probably because I don't really tell people about this blog, nor do I participate in blogger communities, but perhaps I shall change that.

The goal in this blog is to provide critical reflections on theatre and the state of theatre in New York City (or wherever I happen to be at the time). I feel that it is necessary sometimes to engage with work honestly and openly through linguistic expression, and I also feel that I have not reflected enough on what is happening. Something, I feel I am beginning to regret - so many wonderful theatrical experiences this year (Prelude, Lipsynch, Witness Relocation, Int'l WOW among others) that memory is already beginning to tarnish. And, as I become more aware of my fellow community, I feel that there are so many debates I want to start taking part of, and learning more about.

So here is my birth, or rebirth if you will, into a world of reflection and art! Let us commence!

best,

- J

M4M, Chashama, 3/26 (Quality Meats)

My veritable panzada de teatro continued today with a visit to Chashama and Quality Meat's fascinating production of Measure for Measure named M4M.

First the location. Chashama, like so many heroic organizations in NYC helps young artists of all kinds, by offering spaces all around the city. The spaces themselves are scattered throughout. This one, in the heart of a truly non-theatrical area, the cold, business-like tall-building and expensive-hotel laden East midtown area. Forty-second street. The theatre is next to a pret a manger, one would look at it and think it were an out-of-business store. The theatre has a storefront window (more on that later). We enter with my two friends and it is an intimate welcoming environment with free-wine. It feels as if you've entered into a secret-area (out of Super Mario 3 or Zelda) in a totally unknown world (I excuse my years of nintendo for the videogame reference). Theatre was small, a chair, a television (of course it will be videotaped) and a camera. There are two levels. On the upper level a trunk stands.

The blurb promises a melding of an S&M situation between a man and a woman and Shakespeare's oft bizarre play about sex, the law and the quality of mercy (there are actually a few about that).

As a director of an at-times bizarre and experiemental Shakespearean production (King Lear! April 23 at Goodrich Hall!!) I'll tell you this, it's very hard (as in you should not try, usually) to out-bizarre Shakespeare. One quick glance at the Wikipedia page (get a nice quick plot-summary) of the play will show you that, one quick read will convince you.

The director Meiyin Wang, a young artist originally from Singapore, infuses the world of paid, controlled sex and ritual with this play about the limits of order, and does so eloquently and subtlely, quite humorously. The male character (Ben Verzbow) makes his entrance and gives us a good 10 minutes as he sets up the camera, sanitizes his hands (multiple times) and gives us a few glances at his concentrated, nearly psychotic face.

Soon, the entrance of the female character (Mary Jane Gibson) happens on an inopportune moment where the man tries to lock himself in his trunk. He sprints out (one of many times he'll do so), and we're immediately prefaced the awkward, slightly funny, slightly terrifying relationship they shall develop.

Money changes hands, she strips (only to her normal clothes, no nudity here), instructions are delivered. And we see the anxious man hand clothing and such to the woman. He then directs her, in a very costumed garb to imitate a blind liberty statue by holding two glasses up. We see her hands tire, trying to hold it up and him forcing her to continue. We wonder when the sick sex will begin. It doesn't. An ipod is played. And one could not imagine a more Renaissance-faire schlockly Shakespearean straight-from-the community theatre production of Romeo und Juliet lute inspired, insipid guitar in some medieval mode. Large credit to Mark Valadez's excellent sound-design which provides us with this wondeful punch-line in the beginning and later, helps mimic the breakdown perfectly with electronic touches.

Almost on cue, the man, begins reciting in perfect Shakespeare the lines from Measure for Measure. He, of course plays all the men. Mr. Verzbow recites his Shakespeare quite well, Peter Hall would be impressed. The delivery however is wonderfully doubled by the intense sexual pleasure or relief that this following of order leads. This manages to mimic Angelo's nearly perverted obsession with order wonderfully and brings the world of the play together. The woman, placed as an object (literally, her arms forced to remain non-moving though they fail at that as well). Her delivery starts, stilted and startled, her confusion echoed by the initial powerlessness of the Shakespearean heroines.

The play begins to unfold, and it becomes unsure, as the plot develops whether we are in the world of Measure for Measure or the paid S&M game of the man and woman, and the brilliance is that it's both. We get thrust rudely back into the world whenever the woman over-reaches her bounds and touches him. HE freaks out in OCD fashion and runs away or screams or nearly hits her. I wish there were more moments like this - the breaking almost became too ordered. The discipline of the production sometimes hindered the ability for Angelo/Man (who also played the Duke and Claudio) to break back into pure-Man, except for those weak, being touched moments.

The camera, was also not truly exploited, used a bit, but the screen was so small it almost became a nod to multimedia rather than a true exploitation. But to be honest this is a minor gripe of a spectacular staging of Shakespeare.

The end of the play wins the most theatrical moment I've seen all year award. We reach a point of tension, she leaves, he begs, she returns, but now the tables are turned. The play really loses its point here, the weak-seeming Isabella doesn't get to fool Angelo (the play ends way before we get to the trickery in the resolution) instead the woman comes back and she is the powerful ones. Lines are delivered out of spite and necessity. The man gives the word and lets her tie him up. We think she will kill him, she doesn't, in spite of its liminality, there is still the apex of control. Cold money has calculated (once again, when he offers her more money) that this will end with no bloodshed and a measured amount of perversion. She ties him up, leaving him strung up, left to his own order.

Here comes the theatrical moment of the year - Chashama reveals its shop-self, as the woman pulls away the curtain and reveals the street. The world of the street, the world of 42nd street blocks away from UN (the global law) and across the street from the law of money and power, and men in suits leaving work or going to a bar. The set, through a window becomes long and endless and rainy. A truck's lights backlight the set. As the people walk by (and we see a good 10 or 12 people walk by) nobody notices the man who is strung up like a stuck pig, nor do they see the crowd of people watching. They keep walking, perhaps performing their own fantasies of order.

Meiying (and her partner in crime in Quality Meats Javierantonio Gonzalez) graduated from Columbia school of directing and though I'm not sure if Viewpoints was actually used in the production there was certainly a Bogartian treatment of space and silence - though not to obnoxious effect (as happens when Vpoints is overused) but rather to highlight the tension and illustrate the role of space between these two characters. The play of bodies in a tightly controlled sexualized environment made not only for great Shakespeare, but great, effective, and thought provoking theatre.

It's refreshing to see theatre that makes one conscious that the people presenting are definitely thinking about something other than themselves or obsessing over the play they are presenting - they are thinking about people, they are thinking about praxis, and most importantly they are thinking about theatre, goddamnit.

If you are in New York tomorrow 3.27 or 3.28, take an hour and see this play! Get your tickets at www.brownpapertickets.com. Highly recommended.

Kudos again for the second shakespeare(esque) play that hasn't put me to sleep (Ostermeier's Hamlet at Avignon was the first).


All the best, next up on theaterfest-new york: Richard Maxwell and the New York City Players, People Without History


- J

Das Rheingold, Met Opera 3/25

Ok.

I never realized how onerous a task this blog could become. It stares at me from the corner of the room, while I'm just innocently brushing my teeth. Alright, alright. I'll put the ace of cakes on mute.

I've seen many more shows than this since I last posted, but I will start with the Wagner I saw yesterday, and then move on to the whacked out version of Measure for Measure.

I went to the Met and had spectacular seats for Das Rheingold, the 'preface' to the Ring Cycle. I didn't have the time or the budget for a 'Ring' yet, but since Tristan and Isolde last year nearly brought my artistic self to near-fulfillment I needed to sate my late-epic German Romantic opera with slightly overly ambitious tendencies.

I don't really know what to say much about Das Rheingold. It was fabulous, but it wasn't extraordinary, but it didn't have to be it was a preface. I would sum it up as a lord of the rings with better music (much better music) and a bit more obvious anti-semitism. The nationalism bursting at the seams even as the Rhinemaidens sang so sweetly was a bit sickening. Especially since the music was reused by Hitler (i'm pretty sure it was in a Leni Riefenstahl film)...

The production was the kind of production that makes you wonder how else anybody would want to produce it 'realistically'. That was it. Gorgeous, romantic, epic and sumptuously detailed and realistic. The sets seemed to go on for miles and had this epic-nearly starwars-like haze. (do you see how many times I've used the word 'epic' so far?).

the singing, was good of course (it was the Met), but once again it was a preface, it didn't reach the ecstatic unreal heights of Tristan, but then again it didn't have to. It certainly did whet my appetite and I have to give Wagner (and Otto Schenck the director) credit for not making me at all sleepy even at 2 hours and 45 minutes with no running time. Kudos.

Moment of the opera: when Donner (basically thor) starts up a storm, one could not choose more amazing flowing extravagant strings and building chromatic swerves that brought to mind not only a spectacular storm, but a divine one as well. The effects were very cool, but the music, as oft happens in Wagner, overshadows the action. If anything it made me certain that I must find myself a ring-cycle as soon as possible (I won't hold my breath for Bayreuth).

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Machinal-Record Review (unedited draft)

Saw Machinal last night, real good production. Kudos to the actors and the design team.I had my problems with some choices/the play itself, but it was a worthwhile night of theatre, pretty raregoing in these here parts. Check it out:


We are led into the theater – no, scratch that, we are led out of the theater into the factory. Guided by the arm-signs of the 62 Center authorities into the machine-like interiors, a purple green light where the performers we never see are themselves before impregnating their souls with a role. Then we enter the theater, only we enter to find ourselves part of the factory, everything is part of the factory. Where is the Centerstage? We ask ourselves, but this is the Centerstage, it is all the Centerstage ever wanted to be.
In doing so, set designer David Morris has solved the riddle of the Centerstage and created a perfect setting for an albeit dated proto-feminist expressionistic pseudo-drama (the all too hyphenated Machinal, by Sophie Treadwell). Before, productions in the Centerstage always had to answer to the fact that the theatre itself had more personality than the design. The millions of dollars that went into the theatre became more a centerpiece than the raging artistic mind, trying to contain the monster of brick wire and stark, raving architecture. Morris does not decide to fight, he chooses to critique. Adding to where the stage has already given us the allusion of the factory, he shows modernity’s still all-too strong hold on us. It’s not that Morris uses factory motifs and brings the audience into the fray as a way of turning the Centerstage into a factory – it’s merely Morris using his visual aesthetic to show us, with a gentle nudge that it is that the Centerstage already is a factory, in theatre’s clothing (to say nothing of the wolf).
My only regret is that the rest of the production did not take this philosophy to heart. That is not to fault the production itself, it was a marvelously realized work of Expressionism that managed to keep me riveted (if a bit alienated) for the full hour and a half. The riveting aspect I feel was due to both a focused and impressively well-rounded cast, anchored by strong lead performances from Lizzie Fox, as Woman and Evan Maltby, as husband – whose anti-chemistry echoed the oppressive lull of it allTreadwell’s script in near-parable fashion tells us the somewhat true story of Helen Jones, a woman whose absolute alienation from her surroundings and frustration in life (as well as a poorly timed affair with a younger ‘rebel’ played with a charmingly dashing superficiality by Nathaniel Basch-Gould) lead her to ‘gasp’ murder her husband. It’s Lifetime with automatons. . Fox should be commended for bringing a vital humanity to a role that grates on cloying. The moments where we see her eyes light up and the inner rage step up, the cold directed scream of “I’ll kill you” to her mother; or, in one of my favorite scenes, straying from her husband accepting a rose from another man she choosed to bend and crack it, all with delicate grace, while still accepting it. I felt the tinge of character snap in that precise moment, a small but vital addition to a character that needs desperately to evolve from her sketch, and Fox does the best she can.
Director Rob Baker-White takes his cues right out of the early 20th century Expressionist playbook, narrowing down the difference between man and machine by literally putting the machines on the actors in the first scene. Many common social relations become mechanized through Treadwell’s too-structured sentences and Baker-White’s use of the vignette to show us the interchangeability of human emotions. In one particularly effective scene, while Woman talks to her Mother (Lisa Sloan, who plays a stern but loving mother better than anyone else I know) we have the playful arrest of horny townspeople pittering about; costume designer Deb Brothers further highlights their Eli-Whitneyish quality by coloring them in similar shades and patterns. In the blur of lighting one can barely tell one from the other.
One could call Treadwell’s piece feminist, in that it tries to revise the traditional narrative by casting this strong-willed, tortured woman in the main role, highlighting the nearly impossible conditions set out for her. However, though Treadwell saves us from the tendency of theatre to cast desperate maidens and strong-leading men, she still overly victimizes the Woman (to the point of near-patheticism) and when the main point of feminine power can be adduced, she almost frustratingly gives half the credit to this sort of wild-exotic Mexican-tinged fellow. The ‘liberation’ comes from an ideal postulated by a male-subject no better (dare I say interchangeable?) with Maltby’s ‘Man’. One could say we have moved on to better and stronger forms of liberation, those that require no male-bravado to spark up.
Treadwell’s play is revolutionary in terms of sound and Eric Kang’s use of it was a perfect counterpart to Morris’s set. Like Morris, Kang chooses to use the Centerstage for music rather than otherwise. His most terrfifying sound; a cross between a piano being sliced open with a sword and a chewed out xylophone comes from the playing of one of the stair-ways. Light designer Julie Seitel’s lights also bring out the quality of the theatre itself, taking some light from all the way in the top, having the grates of the catwalk reappear as patterns on the stage.
Perhaps the play was too old to be put back onstage without some of the alienation turning into curious detachment, or perhaps a more deviant choice should have been made in respect to the setting of the play (if we are on the subject of the Centerstage perhaps Williams College might have made a better setting than NYC); but these are minor ideological quarrels, anyone who desires to see an authentic theatrical experience – with all the potential that a space like the 62 Center offers, should make their way to Machinal sometime next week.

A Platonic Performance?

So, new developments. I am thinking of staging Socrates.

Why, you ask?

Well, I don't want to do it - boring style. I am not merely putting words to Plato's texts. I feel I need to try this sort of mad-directorness that Castorf is so good at and 'direct' the Dialogues to make something theatrical out of them. I will have to a) choose a dialogue, I wanted Phaedo for sheer dramatic capacity, but it's Phaedo talking the whole time and I'd have to transcribe the dialogue and that would take so long and I am too lazy. But the other stuff becomes very, how do you say...philosophical? No shit. I am trying to figure out a way to stage - or a vision with which to treat the texts that will completely subvert them. It's not so difficult - after all, if Plato's biggest problem is the dramatization that distracts from the real forms of the world, why dont we just dramatize the shit out of this play?

then again, this is work. I mean, serious - sit down with a text and have the director's cap on and a lot of close reading sort of work...goddamn it - why couldn't I have been a painter instead?

- J