Prosaic

A rough week at the theater: I reviewed Stephen Belber's Iraq War-themed Geometry of Fire and Shelagh Stephenson's abuse-themed Five Kinds of Silence. Even when I don't love what I see, this year I'm thankful to still be on the beat I love.

1,000 to 1

Media pundit Jay Rosen is very excited about what he sees as a future model for journalism on the Web: building reader/information networks around writer/reporters. In this bloggingheads diavlog, he's talking to Conor Friedersdorf of the new center-right online magazine Culture11, but his advice seems salient for any new media venture (indeed, Rosen has done a lot of work with HuffPo, and progressive powerhouse Talking Points Memo is the case study he eventually gets to later in the diavlog—a network he says is now "bigger than the Los Angeles Times"). The obvious missing link: any discussion of how such a new model would pay for itself. Still, some hearty food for thought to chew on.

Venue Attrition

Apologies if another writer in my bloggerhood has already posted on this new study by the New York Innovative Theatre Foundation about the fortunes of Off-0ff-Broadway venues, which I found sobering. To wit:

Over 25% of OOB venues in both the West Village and Midtown area have either been demolished or repurposed into non-performance spaces in the last 5 years

43% of all OOB venues are located in the West Side Midtown area of Manhattan

The East Village, which only accounts for 14% of the overall OOB venues, is currently presenting 30% of the OOB productions

Those stats about Midtown, the East Village, and the Theatre District are a little confusing--they seem to contradict each other, or at least to indicate that though there's a concentration of OOB venues near the Theatre District, Downtown venues still stage a disproportionate number of OOB shows.

Shay Gines, the foundation's executive director, spells it out a bit more clearly: "Over the last 5 years, we have lost 26% of the Off-Off-Broadway stages in the Midtown area. We have watched a steady decline in the number of productions that are taking place in the 'theatre district.' Even more disturbing is the fact that of the 30 Off-Off-Broadway houses in the Greenwich Village area, over 25% have already been lost and with the displacement of the theatres from the Archive Building, that percentage increases to 40%."

I imagine we'll see a more in-depth post on this from Leonard any minute now.

Don't Say a Word

Still not quite used to seeing this familiar mug in the underground. On a similar note, though I haven't (advertently, at least) heard a note of the Jonas Bros.' music, I found this mutual interview a manifold delight.

Make It a Double

I lucked out last week, covering two hotshot playwrights and finding their newest works live up, more or less, to the hype. That would Itamar Moses' baseball trio Back Back Back and Thomas Bradshaw's uncharacteristically restrained Dawn. The kids are all right.

Roubaix Baby

If Anton Chekhov were alive today, had developed a mild case of ADD and a killer CD collection, and had for some reason decided to make a Christmas-family-reunion movie set in the humble French town of Roubaix, I can say with some confidence that the results might resemble Arnaud Desplechin's vivid, utterly involving, slightly flaky, almost unavoidably resonant A Christmas Tale. I was a big fan of his previous import, Kings and Queen, which introduced me to that troubled Pan, Mathieu Almaric (currently appearing in some other moving picture show, I hear) and the beautiful blank slate Emanuelle Devos. Both have fine roles in the new film, which doesn't have quite the heady undertow of the Kings and Queens but is worth seeing for an exquisitely unsentimental performance by Catherine Deneuve, and to trip on how much her daughter, Chiara Mastroianni, looks like a blend of her parents (with a little Susan Sarandon thrown in, somehow). Bon tiemps.

Cooler Heads Prevail

Adam Feldman has an extremely thoughtful Time Out blog post about the Eckern affair, in which he deplores the furious backlash against supporters of California's Prop. 8 as counter to the inclusive traditions of the theater, not to mention counterproductive to the same-sex marriage cause. In the process, Feldman also reveals Christine Ebersole of Grey Gardens fame to be a particularly spicy flavor of wingnut (9/11 "truth" and the amero? Wow).

His conclusion:

It seems to me that in judging whether someone is a bigot, we must be fair-minded about people’s differences, however silly or repugnant we may find them. Do Ebersole’s opinions make me think less of her as a person? Yes, they do. But she has a right, up to a point, to be wrong. And so did Eckern. Those of us who disdain their views must work to change their minds and resist the temptation to merely purge them from our programs. The theater world was a refuge, in the 1950s, for actors and writers blacklisted from Hollywood. That is a tradition worth keeping alive: the decency of the left.