Best Script Page Ever

From Hotel Torgo, a shambling documentary about the making of the epic Manos The Hands of Fate

Hanging Specters

"The word 'Africa' is not uttered until deep in the second act of Hurt Village, but the continent hangs like a specter over Katori Hall's new play at the Signature Center. The African-American Memphis ghetto that gives the work its title is, if anything, a satellite colony, where the inhabitants have formed their own warring tribes and are united by customs and music the outside world simply cannot understand."
-Matthew Murray's review at Talkin' Broadway

This kind of deep insight into a work's dramatic heritage opens up whole new vistas of critical consideration that hadn't even occurred to me. Like:

"The word 'Israel' is not uttered at all in Glengarry Glen Ross, but that long-contested homeland hangs like a specter over David Mamet's play. The real estate office where aging salesman Shelley Levene struggles to survive is, if anything, a battleground where land takes on symbolic, even spiritual value in ways the outside the world simply cannot understand."

or

"The word 'Ireland' is not uttered at all in The House of Blue Leaves, but that mythic isle hangs like a specter over John Guare's play. The Queens suburb where the Shaughnessys play out their dangerously dysfunctional marriage, against a backdrop of Catholic shame and a terrorist bombing, is, if anything, a satellite of old Erin, a land of absurd poetry and deep-seated conflict the outside world simply cannot understand."

It's almost like every playwright's ancestral country of origin provides a readymade cultural/dramatic template with which to view their work.

Mind accordingly blown.

Play at home!

Quote for the Day

"There are only three kinds of scenes: 'fights, seductions and negotiations.' " -Mike Nichols, quoted by Riedel today

Flesh-Eating Chekhov

Most of the time the press releases I receive can also be located somewhere online, but some of the smaller theaters that send info to American Theatre aren't quite at that level of information coordination. So I'm pleased to share this exclusive, which just came into our inbox yesterday, reprinted in full and without comment:

This upcoming fall Kennedy Theatre in Honolulu will present the present the world premiere of Uncle Vanya and Zombies by Anton Chekhov and Marcus Wessendorf.

Blurb for Uncle Vanya and Zombies:

Society has collapsed, Honolulu is a wasteland, and zombies are roaming the island O'ahu after a recent accident on one of the nuclear submarines off Pearl Harbor. To increase their ratings, a major network has turned the Kennedy Theatre into a television studio for their regular broadcasts of their new reality show Masterpiece Theatre and Zombies. The contestants on this show not only have to act in a classical play but also to survive its performance to win a flight into a "safe zone" or coupons for food no longer available to regular civilians. The major challenge for the contestants is to stay in character and get through the performance alive while fending off zombies released into the arena by the popular host of the show. After the peak ratings of last month's The Tempest and Zombies, the producers have decided to go for a classic example of realism this time, Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (1897).

Uncle Vanya and Zombies will be performed at Kennedy Theatre on November 9, 10, 16 and 17 at 8pm, on November 18 at 2:00pm.

President's Day Links

Not that these are presidentially themed...

• Bad reviews as a potty-training tool? That's one way to put them behind you.
• Smash superfan sez: Don't watch it tonight.
• Looking for some good news after reading Charles McNulty's justly impassioned jeremiad? Jason Loewith of NNPN obliges.
• Don't try to sucker John Simon with no cute-dog-and-old-movie nostalgia.
• The dramatic-end-of-play-set-change: hardly new, always worth noting.

The Full McNulty

I don't agree with every particular in Charles McNulty's big, bold, fed-up editorial on the artistic leadership void at SoCal's major resident theaters, centrally the Old Globe and Center Theater Group (for one thing, giving Robert Brustein the last word, with a weird swipe at "Red-state self-interest," is unfortunate). But it's the best, most forceful articulation of a theme McNulty's touched before (and his predecessor tackled from a slightly different angle), and more importantly, it eloquently and urgently organizes a lament I've been hearing almost since I started covering theater in the early 1990s: that nonprofit resident theaters have lost their way, that their work doesn't reflect their communities/the zeitgeist/anything other than commercial motives, that they're too focused on New York, both as a validating destination and as a programming guide, etc. A related argument, about the increasing commercialization of nonprofits, particularly in New York, has surfaced on blogs, most notably Parabasis. But as far as I've read, McNulty is virtually alone in the American press in sounding this alarm this way, and for that he deserves huge props.

Indeed, McNulty doesn't just talk in generalities, he names names. And apart from the sheer professional and critical stones that takes, what's striking about it, given the way I've rapped him in the past for focusing too much on larger theaters (and yes, theaters outside of SoCal), is that it proves he doesn't focus on the larger theaters because he's in love with their work but because he's passionate about the non-profit mission they should be serving, and that he cares enough to give them this tough-love reminder of that.

When I reflect on my own experience of this problem, I have to confess that it's never fired me up, except on a personal level (seeing one artistic leader go and disliking his successor, let's say). I guess it's because my expectations of large nonprofit theaters have never been that they do particularly risk-taking or groundbreaking work; though I'd love to see them do it more, I also understand that they have to keep their doors open in a hostile funding environment. You could probably say my relative indifference on this matter is a sign of how much I've internalized the everything-for-profit ethos of the last 30 years (and really, the resident theater movement we're talking about is only about 50 years old, so how long were the halcyon years, really, if indeed there were halcyon?).

But I think something else is at work, too: My focus and energy has simply been elsewhere for most of my theatergoing and journalistic career. It's been on smaller theaters, tiny incubators of talent, idealistic self-producers, scrappy ensembles; and in the cases I've been excited in a similar way about work at larger resident theaters, it's been the exception more than the rule, as when CTG's Kirk Douglas Theatre put on Michael Sargent's The Projectionist in its lobby. I don't mean to say I've never seen great work at the Taper, South Coast, La Jolla, the Old Globe, and the NY nonprofits, but I simply never understood it to be aimed at me, my tastes, or my income level. (The bright-line exception to this has been the idyllic but far-from-sleepy Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where even the hack work is touched by a special light; it has as much to do with the intense audience-artist rapport as with the high standard of work there.)

Lest I sound like I'm down on the very resident theater movement for whom I work, I should add that the tensions elucidated in McNulty's column have been on aired and explored at the TCG conferences I've attended, and that among the most encouraging things I saw at the one in L.A. last year is the presence of kindred spirits: artists from that under-sung theater town and from other beleaguered-in-different-ways American cities bonding over common problems of development (audiences, new work, and fundraising), creative risk vs. sustainability, and common dreams of challenging themselves and their audiences to face the present. When I take my focus off the ever-frustrating Big Kahunas, from Roundabout to the Taper, and think of the work being done by troupes in the broad mid-range—places like Woolly Mammoth, the Public, Playwrights Horizons, or in L.A., places like the small-but-hardy Boston Court—I'm more encouraged by the picture that forms of risks being taken and audiences being served—audiences, I might add, that include me.

RTWT.

Thursday on the Links

• Harrily We Roll Along.
  
• Against the paranoid style in criticism.
  
• So Godspell is doing Santorum jokes now?
• 1-800-Flowers epic fail (I post because it happened to me, dear readers).
• Spacey: Ham what I am.