"Heartbreak" in Queens

Pamela Segall and Laurel Green in Heartbreak Help, Cast Theatre, Hollywood, 1996. Photo by Ed Krieger.

Some of my happiest theatregoing days came in the mid-1990s at Hollywood's tiny Cast Theatre, watching the deft slacker comedies of Justin Tanner, which at their best--and they were seldom less than very good--played a bit like a poppier, less lugubrious, California-fried Mike Leigh. Zombie Attack and Pot Mom were his long-running hits (and no, I'm not the only who thinks the creators of Weeds owe Justin a percentage), but my favorites were Teen Girl and Happytime Xmas. The high point of Tanner-mania was an eight-play repertory extravaganza that ran for months in the fall of 1994. I saw nearly all of them at least twice. I later had the chance to work with and get to know him as part of the Evidence Room's late-night serial The Strip, and Tanner's uncomfortably autobiographical Oklahomo! was the last play I saw in L.A. before my move to NY in 2005 (it will return as a late-night offering at the Celebration this fall, I've heard).

The struggle of his fans in the 1990s--my internal struggle, at least--was to appreciate that what he was doing at the Cast was an end in itself, and thus worth wallowing in while it lasted, which is why I returned so frequently to that welcoming beer garden. But it was hard to resist the feeling that "success" meant productions elsewhere, and indeed Tanner has made some stabs outside his backyard. There have been a number of NY readings, and longtime fan and muse Laurie Metcalf did get Pot Mom done at Steppenwolf. But Tanner remains mostly unknown outside of L.A.

One sign that might be changing: On Sept. 24, the Astoria Performing Arts Center in Queens is doing a staged reading of Heartbreak Help, Tanner's warm four-hander about a women's spiritual retreat in Joshua Tree, which in its original production starred Pamela Segall (yes, the voice of Bobby Hill) along with longtime Tanner regulars Laurel Green and Ellen Ratner.

I'm going to try to make that reading. And it got me thinking: Which New York theater would be a good fit for Tanner? His sensibility falls somewhere roughly between Adam Rapp and Nicky Silver; he may not seem edgy enough for Rattlestick, but he may be too gritty for Second Stage. It would take a place like Playwrights Horizons or the Vineyard or the New Group to go out on a limb and produce him.

In an ideal world, of course, the Signature Theatre would be doing a season of his work. But a reading in Queens is a start.

And Now for Something Completely Different

I love that even a monosyllabic Neanderthal puppet can call out a bad pun.

The NEA/United We Serve Call, Ctd.

So another journalist, Arts Journal's CultureGrrl, reports that she was similarly creeped out by a recent United We Serve conference call--not the same one that Patrick Courrielche questioned last week, in a tendentious blog post on the right-wing Big Hollywood site, but with a similar tenor. She writes that the call was initiated and led by Kalpen Modi, associate director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, and that Modi "sought to rally the artworld troops behind President Obama's call for Americans to engage in public service." She goes on:

It's a worthwhile objective, to be sure. But government exhortations for artists to join the United We Serve brigade makes me more than a little uneasy. Many, if not most, of our most important and influential artists and cultural institutions are impelled by self-driven creative imperatives, not external political ones. That's the way it SHOULD be.

She reports on the call:

During last week's conference call (on which I was a lurker, after a waiting period rendered nearly unendurable by our being a captive audience for three clunkers from Kenny G's "Greatest [or Worst] Hits" album), there was much talk of finding ways to "get the arts community engaged in a sustainable way" and "leveraging federal dollars" to get artists and cultural organizations involved in social-service projects.

Americans for the Arts, whose president, Robert Lynch, played a leading role during the conference call, has launched a United We Serve arts website, where you can "share your story" on how "arts make change happen." Among the highlights: "The Ultimate Happy Hour at Gap, Inc." and the "United We Serve Arts Idea Kit."

Interestingly, she adds that Modi started the call by saying that his colleagues from the NEA and the NEH (the National Endowment for the Humanites) were "tied up in meetings and couldn't participate, as had been planned." She asks: "Could it be they were having second thoughts about commandeering their constituents for this political adventure? We can only hope so."

Please. While these conference calls do sound genuinely cringe-worthy and bone-crushingly boring, only a conspiracy theorist could believe that a public conference call with communications flacks from federal agencies talking about "raising awareness" of "social service" projects portends a freedom-crushing Dept. of Propaganda. Again, Courrielche has provided no evidence that the NEA plans to depart from its charter and fund anything political; a guy from the endowment inviting artists to participate in the United We Serve program is a separate thing.

Now you may, like a certain constituency on the right, feel that the White House's calls to civic service are an effort to indoctrinate a new Hitler Youth and/or to create some kind of civilian army to take away Granny's guns along with her Medicare. It makes perfect sense, then, that Courrielche has taken his case to the court of the half-wit moonbat Glenn Beck:

(My favorite quote is Courrielche's: "Big Hollywood is an art community." Well, that's one way to put it.) Not to get into the weeds here, but the excerpt of the conference call played in that clip, with its allegedly ominous talk of finding "safe" legal language in which to have this "brand-new conversation," seems to be about finding a legal framework for putting government initiatives on Facebook and Twitter--a portion of the conversation that Courrielche conveniently left out of his story, and which is arguably a different matter than the sort of sinister extra-legal conspiracy to subvert the NEA's charter he was implying.

That said, I still haven't heard back from Yosi Sergant at the NEA regarding this matter. I'll keep trying and let you know what I find out.

Race on Broadway

I don't just mean the new Mamet play with that title, coming in December. I've noticed something else about the upcoming Broadway season: A striking number of productions, culminating with Mamet's, deal with the specter of black-white racial tension. And all of them are written by white authors.

Consider:

1. Tracy Letts' Superior Donuts, which follows a white donut-shop owner in a gentrifying black neighborhood in Chicago.

2. Ragtime, returning after only a dozen years off the Main Stem. As many have already noted of this Washington, D.C.-originated revival, this musical seems to resound even more strongly and bittersweetly in the age of Obama.

3. The musical Memphis, by Bon Jovi's David Bryan and Joe DiPietro (the Toxic Avenger team), which intertwines the town's landmark status as a civil rights hotbed and the cradle of early rock 'n' roll with an interracial love story.

4. Finian's Rainbow, whose main plot isn't about race per se but whose commercial prospects have always been a question mark in large part because of the weird subplot involving a white Southern Senator, a racist who is magically turned black—though the current production has cast two actors of each race to portray this transformation, in the past it was often done in blackface. And in any case, this subplot is part of the show's larger satire of backwards American attitudes.

5. And finally, Mamet's Race, which will be certain to put an exclamation point on this mini-trend.

Outliers and exceptions include Fela!, Bill T. Jones' show about the African musical icon, and the Dreamgirls revival, coming not to Broadway but to Harlem's Apollo Theatre. (And if the long-threatened White Noise, a musical about a white supremacist pop group, ever makes it to Broadway, this would only add to the count of shows about race from white authors*.)

This glut of shows-about-race comes amid a relatively good year for black theater artists overall, at least Off-Broadway: The show of the year has inarguably been Lynn Nottage's endlessly extending and Pulitzer-winning Manhattan Theatre Club hit Ruined. And such major upcoming productions as Lincoln Center's Brokeology and the Tarell Alvin McCraney Brother/Sister trilogy are nothing to sneeze at.

The larger backdrop is that a few months ago our first black president and his wife attended August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone on Broadway. More recently, though, the promise of a post-racial era wilted a bit, with the Skip Gates incident and with some of the more extreme criticisms of the president (the ridiculous Glenn Beck “racist” flap). Obviously race is a topic about which we’re still too easily worked up, and coincidentally—since none of these works, except perhaps Mamet’s, were written with the current political climate explicitly in mind—and quite improbably, the Great White Way is offering a through-the-looking-glass reflection of this odd, querulous racial moment.

*I originally wrote that White Noise has no black folks in it at all, which it didn't when I saw it a few years ago. A commenter has set me straight: It's been rewritten to include four black characters.

Signs of the Times

I'm not proud of feeling it--that familiar blend of paranoia and schadenfreude engendered by the spectacle of the so-called "Tea Parties" and the astroturfed town hall meetings on health care reform--but I troll Media Matters out of morbid interest as much as the next guy to get my occasional Fox-froth fix. (Speaking seriously, and optimistically, I think this carny-sideshow approach may have won Republicans a few news cycles but may end up costing them the larger battle.) But I couldn't resist this gallery by Jonathan Ligon (you have to log in to Facebook to see it), in which the recurring joke is that xenophobes and English-language-only advocates seem to have a self-discrediting habit of misspelling. The photo above, though, is something else entirely--proof that maybe there really is some creative thinking left on the right. UPDATE: Just as I posted this, I saw some serious Turing news. Amen to that. (h/t Daily Dish)

Up Is Down...

...when the Adorno-hugging George Hunka links approvingly to an article on the Limbavian fever swamp that is Big Hollywood.

I'm looking deeper into this as I write, but the facts so far are this: Filmmaker/marketer Patrick Courrielche was invited to participate in a conference call on Aug. 10 by Yosi Sergant, the NEA's communications director, to talk about involving artists in the United We Serve program, a volunteer initiative of the White House that seems pretty unimpeachably decent and civic-spirited, and whose agenda is described in pretty anodyne language: "to help lay a new foundation for growth, focusing on core areas of the recovery agenda - health care, energy and environment, safety and security, education, community renewal.” The email invite goes on to say: "It is time for us as artists, producers, promoters, organizers, influencers, marketers, tastemakers, leaders or just plain, cool people to join together and work together to promote a more civically engaged America and celebrate how the arts can be used for positive change!"

Though the email invite clearly came from Sergant's office, the NEA is mentioned only as a co-host of the call*, and Courrielche shows no proof that the NEA steered the discussion or plans in any way to direct resources to a specific policy agenda. At most, he shows that the p.r. guy for the NEA was part of a conversation about how artists can get involved with United We Serve, a program run by the Corporation for National and Community Service, and he accordingly invited artists to join him. That may sound a little too cozy, perhaps, but it's a far cry from demonstrating that the National Endowment for the Arts is planning to fund art to advance the government's agenda.

But, in a touch worthy of Glenn Beck, Courrielche closes by quoting, but not attributing, what he says is the call's wrap-up salutation (italics his), "This is just the beginning. This is the first telephone call of a brand new conversation. We are just now learning how to really bring this community together to speak with the government. What that looks like legally?…bare [sic] with us as we learn the language so that we can speak to each other safely…"

For the record, obviously the NEA shouldn't be in the business of funding art that advances the political agenda of its funders, and I would be opposed to any policy that did so, explicitly or tacitly. I do wonder, though, why Courrielche is the only participant in the conference call to have come forward to talk about it, and I further wonder why he produces just one apparently damning quote from the entire call.

There's more to find out here. I've put in a call to Yosi Sergant to ask about the NEA's involvement in United We Serve, and to find out what else was covered in the conference call. Stay tuned for more.

*Until Hunka's comment corrected me, I mistakenly wrote that the NEA wasn't referred to in the body of the email.

Photo Challenge

Name this couple. (Hint: It's a Shakespeare production at the Goodman some time in the last century.)