More Non-Good News

And another West Coast titan (in my mind, at least) topples: Mead Hunter, literary jack-of-all-trades I got to know at the late, lamented ASK, has been let go from his perch at Portland Center Stage. His post about his departure is bracing, though, and even encouraging:

Fact is: I haven’t been out of work, as a theater person, since 1985. Even the short gap between the A.S.K. debacle and joining the PCS company was stuffed full of freelance gigs. 24 years is a good long run. But now it’s over.

...Virtually overnight it has become a brave new world. To quote The Bard. And Aldous Huxley. And Grace Slick. What am I going to give to it? The prospect is scary, and daunting, and – most surprisingly of all – exciting. You don’t get to reinvent yourself every day.

One option for this resourceful man named after an archaic libation: his side business as a sort of dramaturg-for-hire.

Beat Down

Former LA Times stalwart Don Shirley wrote to tell me that Los Angeles CityBeat, the most recent of several attempts to create a viable alternative to the LA Weekly, is "kaput," in his words. (LA Observed had the scoop, of course, but I missed it there.) The venue provided a post-Times forum not only for Shirley, a veteran of the L.A. theater scene with invaluable, irreplaceable--well, it could be called "institutional memory," except that now he's minus an institution--but also for classical-music titan Alan Rich, whose firsthand memory of the LA Philharmonic stretches back to the Mehta days. That's value you can't put a price on--and, sadly, these days it seems no one wants to.

Popcorn Faith

Playwright Michael Sargent with Hamish Linklater on the set of The Projectionist, opening tonight in L.A.

(Photo by Erik Patterson)

No Tears

It's a really rough week at The Los Angeles Times, and things don't look much better at The New York Times, either. So this Shirky-fueled blast from LA Weekly curmudgeon Marc Cooper is particularly, um, bracing:

While a few months ago I took the pro-Times side in a Times-sponsored online debate, I now have to officially announce that I am with bored with, done with, totally finished with any more grieving about the fate of the Times -- or any other newspaper for that matter...

As I wrote last month, I am completely convinced, indeed, I am certain that journalism will easily outlive the death of its current institutions. I'd much rather concentrate on what's here and what's coming rather than dwell on what has been.

I have also argued before that we are barely in the infancy of the digital revolution. In Byte Years, the so-called New Media is about 3 days old and anyone who claims to know exactly what is or what is not in the making is lying to you.

The printing press was invented to propagate the bible. Instead it produced the enlightenment. It took a couple of hundred years to mature, but history is much more patient than we are.

...We are in a transitional moment. The old system is dead. The new is still struggling to be born. We should be rooting for the latter and not kvelling over the corpse of the former.

"That Shaking Sound"

That's how Miranda, YouTube singing sensation, describes vibrato. And just wait until you hear her instructions on how to produce it. And for a spontaneous mini-playlet no sketch comic could write or act so well, don't miss this. (h/t Robby Stamper)

Hunka Bait

Anthony Lane on the letters of Samuel Beckett. Among the pleasures of the piece for me is the reminder that, as entertaining as AL can be on the subject of film, he is that much more incisive and substantive on literature. I'm especially grateful for such (previously unknown to me) Beckettisms as "eyedew," "daymare," and the punny title Whoroscope, but also for Lane's sobering, magisterial conclusion:

The youthful worrier of these compelling letters, who suggested that “the man condemned to death is less afraid than I,” was not lying; Beckett was neither a poser nor a hysteric, and there was precious little peacetime under his mother’s gaze. But from now on he would have friends condemned to real death, and would grow acquainted with forms of human behavior to which neither of his younger selves—the home-stricken solipsist and the frowning scholar—would have an answer.

Butter Knives Out

Liberal Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg has an extensive, and very worthwhile, dialogue with his friend, Ari Roth, whose D.C.-based Theatre J will present a reading of Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children this weekend. I've posted on this controversy myself, and though I probably fall somewhere between Goldberg's and Roth's points of view, I would place the burden of proof slightly more on Roth. I found this his most persuasive line of argument:

Here's why we're doing it. The fact that, over eight pages, so many of the lines resonate not with the language of hate, but with the language of perception. Meaning she has overheard, she has seen, she has captured the language that Jews speak to each other with and that is astonishing...that makes her a ten-times better theatrical reporter than anybody I've ever seen. This is play written with extraordinary precision. She wrote a play that arrested my attention. And it has a problem title. I hate the title. It is a problem place where it ends, but it is subject to an incredible amount of interpretation. It's written with multiple characters. People argue with each other. It's not written as a diatribe. And so you have to allow for the art form of theater to have its way with her text. That is what's going to happen, that's what's happening in this rehearsal room. I struggle with the play...I don't think this is a great work of art, but I think there's a great artist doing something interesting here.

On the other hand, I liked Goldberg's blunt suggestion:

Maybe you could just get Caryl Churchill and David Mamet on a stage together with butter knives and see who comes out alive.