Ken Davenport Bait

I know he's been busy putting together TEDxBroadway, but how did the industrious blogger at Producer's Pespective miss Jonah Lehrer's interesting piece about collaboration, in last week's New Yorker? It's right up Ken's alley, which is to say Shubert Alley.

Though billed as a debunking of the "brainstorming myth," Lehrer's piece is actually more about what kinds of collaborative environments actually do produce the best results. A key example at its heart is a study by Northwestern's Brian Uzzi, who analyzed decades of Broadway musicals in terms of what he calls the "Q factor," or degree of interconnectedness among the creative collaborators. Uzzi found that the most successful musicals, both critically and commercially, were created by teams with an "intermediate" Q factor, or a moderate level of social and professional familiarity—i.e., a mix of folks who'd worked together before and thus had a useful shorthand, plus fresh voices who added something new and/or challenging to the group. Uzzi noted that musicals in the 1920s, for instance, though they produced reams of great songs, were predominantly quickie flops, a deficit he blamed on a too-inbred Broadway scene, or, in his terms, “When the Q was too high, the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation.” But when the Q was too low—when a show was essentially a collective creative blind date—the show suffered at the box office (though how this explains Spider-man I don't know).

Uzzi's North Star of success is West Side Story, in which the titans Laurents, Bernstein, and Robbins welcomed the newbie Sondheim. My only quibble with that example is that, as has been amply pointed out since, West Side Story was only a modest success on Broadway, and it wasn't until the film version that the work was commercially and critically certified as a knockout (wrongly, in my minority opinion).

In any case, insert pithy lesson about how to make your show better here, and you've got a ready-made post for Ken Davenport's blog (which, in all seriousness, is a model of the form).

Clean "Talk," Dirty Reviews

The post-Tina Brown New Yorker has not been known for its squeamishness (am I the only one who vividly remembers the awkward shock of that hilariously severe Tilda Swinton nude photo spread of nearly 20 years ago?), so I was shocked in reverse to see the way a recent Talk of the Town handled Rick Santorum's infamous "Google problem":

“If Rick Santorum wants to invite himself into the bedrooms of gays and lesbians (and their dogs), I say we ‘include’ him in our sex lives—by naming a gay sex act after him.” [Dan] Savage, who has a long history as a bigot-baiter and civil libertarian (he started the “It Gets Better” project), pounced on the idea. He announced a contest, and readers wrote in with suggestions: “How about calling condoms ‘Ricks’?” In the end, Savage’s readers came up with an unprintable definition. If you have not yet Googled “Santorum,” take a deep breath first.

Readers at risk of hyperventilating over the finer points of sodomy got no such warning when they cast their eyes across Hilton Als' recent review of Thomas Bradshaw's Burning, which featured an extensive, hard-to-miss script excerpt about the distinctive pleasures of anal sex with black women, or when they surveyed John Lahr's exceptionally hostile review of The Book of Mormon, in which he seemed to take special delight in verbatim quotes of the show's most shocking language, including a script excerpt that begins with the immortal line of the Ugandan mission's show-within-the-show, "My name is Joseph Smit’. I’m going to fuck this baby."

I know every double standard cuts both ways; am I saying I'd rather have the New Yorker be more consistently filthy? Not necessarily. But this contrast between the demure smirk at the front of the book and the no-holds-barred frankness of the boys in the back pages is striking. Interesting, too, that this transgressive impulse seems to be the exclusive provenance of the magazine's theater critics; I don't recall Alex Ross or Anthony Lane or Peter Schjeldahl cutting loose like this, even in quotation. To each section its own rules, I guess—and it may be true, to mangle a conservative shibboleth, that when it comes to criticism an editorial policy governs best that governs the least.

Link Sees

A start to a busy week, post-Queens move, means more quick hits out the gate:

• Mike Daisey breaks through the Ira Glass ceiling and apparently gets through to Apple brass.
  
• Terry Teachout's lovely tribute to composer Morten Lauridsen, with whom, true to form, I only became familiar by singing with the NYC Master Chorale.
  
• StageGrade not dead.
  
• Some of the best crowd-source blogging the medium has ever seen, with the intensely compelling follow-up here.
  
• Hunka's farewell to theater blogging?

On the Rebound

My friend and colleague Molly Smith Metzler had a really shitty Christmas: She got a bad case of mono just as her long-anticipated and star-studded New York debut, Close Up Space, got a bad case of bad reviews.

Just a few weeks later, her health on the mend, she was in Costa Mesa, California, to rehearse her other big play, Elemeno Pea, a caustic comedy of class envy which I saw and loved last June at Humana. That production proved she's better, and deserves better, than the Close Up Space reviews would indicate; with any luck, and the right cast under South Coast a.d. Marc Masterson, Elemeno Pea will again show the world what she can do, and the American theater will hold onto her sharp, funny voice.

At least, that's the hope behind my Los Angeles Times feature on the play.

Heading for the Hills

After from a six-month sublet in Cobble Hill, Greenpoint, Brooklyn has been my New York home since early 2006. I moved here with my then-girlfriend when our relationship was shaky, and we were the only non-Polish residents in our six-unit building.

How much has changed: She and I are the married parents of an irrepressibly bright, sweet son, and the 'hood has become overrun with young non-Poles like ourselves (and much younger); the ratio in our building is now just 1/3 Polish. The area has become so gentrified, alas, that we can't afford the extra space for our growing family. So tomorrow we move to Forest Hills, a lovely Queens neighborhood where we'll have a slightly bigger shoebox to call home (and Oliver will at last have his own room).

That happens tomorrow, which means today is our last day in Greenpoint. There's a lot to say goodbye to, from Paulie Gee's to Cafe Royal, McGolrick Park (above) to McCarren Park (this neighborhood used to be Irish), Grumpy to Karczma. Nearby Williamsburg was the site of my first New York Times review assignment (at the Brick) and my first New York solo gig (at Pete's Candy Store). Above all, and honestly the hardest thing about leaving the hood, is our scrappy, warm little Greenpoint Church, which has been an extended family to all of us. That last affiliation provides us with at least the excuse to return once a week to the neighborhood that's been the only home our family has known in this world.

The rest of the week, we'll be busy making ourselves a new home. Regular blogging will resume shortly.

Quote for the Week

"The experience of watching Jerusalem confirmed something in me I’ve suspected for some time. In life, I may be a progressive Christian, but when it comes to the theater, I’m a complete pagan. In life, I want to align myself with the peacemakers. I want to educate myself about the injustices in the world and address them in whatever ways I can. But when I go to the theater, I want something more than an ennobling education. I want to be knocked on the side of my head with the mysteries of the universe; I want to explore the wild and the wooly terrains of myself that I keep a lid on in polite society; I want to fuck strangers and fear God and poke my eyes out with a needle."
-Catherine Treischmann, answering the accusation that the Christian characters in her own plays are "yokels," on HowlRound

Beth Mettle

photo by Walter McBride

One of the first reviews I wrote for Back Stage West back in 1993 was a slam of Control Freaks, a lurid and seriously flawed attempt by the playwright Beth Henley to reach way outside her usual metier and do something attention-gettingly radical (my colleague Tom Jacobs liked it better than I did). In fact, Henley had for some time been trying to punch her way outside the box to which she'd been consigned by her early successes, Crimes of the Heart (essentially her first full-length play, which nabbed her a Pulitzer before the age of 30), and The Miss Firecracker Contest—to be specific, the quaint-and-dainty-Southern-lady box, a profoundly condescending stereotype that sells her best work short, but one she's been unable to shake, not least because neither her attempts to run from it nor her post-Crimes Southern plays have been up to her best work (though I think Abundance and The Lucky Spot deserve another shot, and I would pay serious money to see David Cromer direct any of her work, particularly Crimes).

All of which made me very interested in The Jacksonian, her newest play, which bows at the Geffen Playhouse in L.A. next month. Remarkably, it marks her first premiere at a major resident theater in the town she's lived in for 30 years now; it's also the first play set in her own hometown of Jackson, Miss., and set during a particularly ugly and volatile time there (1964). I'm a terrible judge of plays on the page, so I can't say whether this extremely disturbing, intermittently funny new work is her best since Crimes of the Heart or not. But with its verbal and physical violence, and its undercurrent of fatalism, it's certainly a departure from the mostly-unfair stereotype of the quirky-sweet Beth Henley. As director Robert Falls puts it in my new New York Times feature on the play, if nothing else The Jacksonian returns to Henley's Southern territory, but with a new fearlessness he credits to her howling-in-the-wilderness period.

Alas, I won't be able to see the play, but with any luck—and the insurance not only of Falls' participation but a cast that includes Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Bill Pullman, and Glenne Headly—this won't be the end of the road for The Jacksonian, or for Henley's lopsided career.