Feb 27, 2009
Tom Waits for No Man
A truly odd, awkward appearance on Fernwood Tonight, complete with uneasy laugh track (h/t Jimb Fisher).
Prophetic Brit(s)
A colleague just pointed out this Newsweek piece by Jeremy McCarter, which I missed at the end of last year. He makes the case for Caryl Churchill's Far Away, written in early 2001 and seen in New York in 2002 (and in a stark, effective production I saw in L.A. in 2004), as the defining work of the Bush years:
As McCarter notes, more than any specific parallels, it's the play's po-faced surreality that makes it feel eerily prophetic, and McCarter's comment about the Bush years, "Almost by the month, things that once seemed barely imaginable became all too real," immediately put me in mind of arguably the era's defining pop album (released on the eve of Bush's election), also courtesy of an unsentimental Brit: PJ Harvey's New York-inspired Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, with its indelible line, a mix of horror and wonder, "Things I once thought/Unbelievable/In my life/Have all taken place."
Come to think of it, that line still reverberates post-Bush, for good and ill. And I have the sinking suspicion that Far Away, alas, will always seem close to home.
The story, like the decade, begins on a deceptively placid note. A girl named Joan tells her aunt that she can't sleep. Joan has heard shrieks, ventured outside and found people tied up in a shed. Aunt Harper assures her that her uncle is only trying to help the detainees, but the lie doesn't work. "He was hitting a man with a stick. I think the stick was metal," says Joan. "He hit one of the children." Before the brutality has been explained, Churchill skips ahead a few years. Now a young woman, Joan works in a shop designing hats so huge and ornate they'd make a pimp self-conscious. They are worn, we soon learn, by scraggly prisoners who are paraded before fashion judges on their way to execution. In the final scene, Churchill ventures even further into deadpan science fiction, as Joan and Harper discuss the shifting allegiances in a weird war that rages all around them. "The cats have come in on the side of the French," Harper reports. "The Bolivians are working with gravity," says Joan.
As McCarter notes, more than any specific parallels, it's the play's po-faced surreality that makes it feel eerily prophetic, and McCarter's comment about the Bush years, "Almost by the month, things that once seemed barely imaginable became all too real," immediately put me in mind of arguably the era's defining pop album (released on the eve of Bush's election), also courtesy of an unsentimental Brit: PJ Harvey's New York-inspired Stories From the City, Stories From the Sea, with its indelible line, a mix of horror and wonder, "Things I once thought/Unbelievable/In my life/Have all taken place."
Come to think of it, that line still reverberates post-Bush, for good and ill. And I have the sinking suspicion that Far Away, alas, will always seem close to home.
Feb 24, 2009
Taste Tests
Critic-O-Meter is rocking, if I may say so myself. Shows covered just this week include include TFANA's Othello (B+), Sheila Callaghan's That Pretty Pretty; or The Rape Play (C+), Mabou Mines DollHouse (A-), Leslie Lee's The Book of Lambert (C-), Richard Foreman and John Zorn's Astronome: A Night at the Opera (A-), The Bridge Project's Winter's Tale (B+), and the Civilians This Beautiful City (B). March is going to be an even busier month, so brace yourself for midterms.
Feb 23, 2009
Testify
Over at Critic-O-Meter, early reviews for the Civilians' This Beautiful City are pretty mixed. I saw it last week myself, and pretty much loved it, but then, I have to own up to a personal bias: I'm a sucker for anything that treats religion and/or spirituality with circumspection, humor, skepticism, and wonder. Indeed, though I'm a liberal Christian myself, and I do recognize some Christian-right modalities from an evangelist-adjacent upbringing in Arizona-fried Missouri Synod Lutheranism, I'm especially drawn to what might be called the respectfully secular view--the fascinated, un-smug, clear-eyed attitude I sense in Julia Sweeney's Letting Go of God; in Jona Frank's new photojournalism book about Patrick Henry College, Right (a great narrated slide show is here); in This American Life's famous "Heretics" episode (h/t Amanda). It's the kind of curious, engaged approach I watched Cornerstone Theater Company employ around L.A. in the early aughts in its ambitious Festival of Faith.
The Civilians' new show fits snugly into that genre, and if it adds little new content to the heated American debate over religious intolerance and sexual identity--the show's almost inevitable backbeat, given the political climate and the incredible windfall of the Ted Haggard scandal breaking while the Civilians were on the ground gathering material in Colorado--it nevertheless adds several indispensible voices to the chorus. And it does so in the Civilians' signature style: Anna Deavere Smith-style journo-monologues trading off seamlessly with sung soliloquys that exalt or eulogize a emotional state, a character, a tangle of themes. It's an odd, intoxicating blend, and what's quite striking is the bumpy ride it offers a New York audience: The night I saw it, laughter greeted some of the praise-worship elements, only to be silenced by the cast's earnestness; a few righteous anti-evangelical blasts delivered by Brandon Miller roused intense "right on" applause, while similar affirmations on the other side were met with either skeptical silence or titters.
But a different kind of silence, the pin-drop kind, enveloped a few sneakily moving monologues performed by Emily Ackerman: One by a confused young Christian woman with a complicated past, a huge heart, and a chilling imagination, and another by a fiercely self-possessed trannie whose yearning for God, despite what's been done to her in God's name, is palpable and undeniable. To me, this sort of multivalenced portrait is theatrical catnip--or, to keep in the spirit, theatrical manna.
R.U.R. Now (Or Have You Ever Been)
I was lucky enough to catch Mac Rogers' engaging, unapologetically genre-ific Universal Robots, inspired by Karl Capek's R.U.R., when it played at Manhattan Theatre Source a few years back. Because you can't keep a good robot down, and also because Czechs rule, it's baaa-aaack, and this spread in New York is a nice extra push.
Feb 20, 2009
Brits, Jews, Protest Art
I don't relish wading into the electrified waters of the Israel/Palestine conflict, or pronouncing on the similarly thorny issues of political art vs. agitprop. But the subject of Caryl Churchill's Gaza-incursion-inspired playlet Seven Jewish Children, and the prospect that the New York Theatre Workshop is considering staging it, has led to a lot of blogospheric chatter that I feel compelled to add to.
Starting at the end, Time Out's David Cote doesn't care much for the Churchill play, available in its entirety online, and uses this opportunity to offer a sweeping diss of the late-20th century British political theater of Pinter, Barker, Bond and (latter) Churchill, even including some plays Cote says he somewhat likes. "Often they think they’re being so shocking and complacency-shattering when in fact they’re just fuming over their own sense of powerlessness and outrage," he writes.
I share some of his misgivings, but I think David may be too sweeping here. I would make a distinction between Churchill's brief, nearly blank-verse Drunk Enough To Say I Love You and the new Seven Jewish Children on the one hand and her incisive, haunting plays, even as late as the eerily prophetic Far Away, on the other; and I would make a similar distinction between Pinter's late plays, as politically explicit as they may be, and his execrable later poems and borderline-unhinged political rants. At best, these blasts of outrage can be seen as a kind of crude protest art (what some more dismissively call "agitprop"), which is any artist's birthright and prerogative but which, thankfully in these cases, constitutes neither the foundation nor the tarnishing of a serious artist's reputation.
To move into more fraught territory, the question begged by a play titled Seven Jewish Children, in which characters without names talk in short, polyphonic bursts about how to explain Israel and its actions to their children, is: Is it anti-Semitic? I hate the way criticism of Israel routinely gets shut down by spurious charges of anti-Semitism (Yglesias is my hero on this point), but critics of Israel do themselves no favors when they themselves conflate Jewish identity with Israel's actions. I'm not a big fan of analogies because they're imprecise, but imagine if Lynn Nottage had given her Republic of Congo-set Ruined the title "Black People" or "Black Women." That would be ugly and off-point; I think Churchill's conception is similarly crude and ugly (at least in part because her title is not off-point).
Still, I'm not willing to throw the baby (bona fide plays, political and otherwise) out with the bathwater (in-the-moment protest art). In fact--to get to back to the notion of NYTW staging Seven Jewish Children--I wouldn't "throw out" the bathwater, either, just cherish it less.
UPDATE: Brit blogger Andrew Haydon has the most comprehensive non-hysterical take on what's wrong with Churchill's play (h/t Superfluities):
Starting at the end, Time Out's David Cote doesn't care much for the Churchill play, available in its entirety online, and uses this opportunity to offer a sweeping diss of the late-20th century British political theater of Pinter, Barker, Bond and (latter) Churchill, even including some plays Cote says he somewhat likes. "Often they think they’re being so shocking and complacency-shattering when in fact they’re just fuming over their own sense of powerlessness and outrage," he writes.
I share some of his misgivings, but I think David may be too sweeping here. I would make a distinction between Churchill's brief, nearly blank-verse Drunk Enough To Say I Love You and the new Seven Jewish Children on the one hand and her incisive, haunting plays, even as late as the eerily prophetic Far Away, on the other; and I would make a similar distinction between Pinter's late plays, as politically explicit as they may be, and his execrable later poems and borderline-unhinged political rants. At best, these blasts of outrage can be seen as a kind of crude protest art (what some more dismissively call "agitprop"), which is any artist's birthright and prerogative but which, thankfully in these cases, constitutes neither the foundation nor the tarnishing of a serious artist's reputation.
To move into more fraught territory, the question begged by a play titled Seven Jewish Children, in which characters without names talk in short, polyphonic bursts about how to explain Israel and its actions to their children, is: Is it anti-Semitic? I hate the way criticism of Israel routinely gets shut down by spurious charges of anti-Semitism (Yglesias is my hero on this point), but critics of Israel do themselves no favors when they themselves conflate Jewish identity with Israel's actions. I'm not a big fan of analogies because they're imprecise, but imagine if Lynn Nottage had given her Republic of Congo-set Ruined the title "Black People" or "Black Women." That would be ugly and off-point; I think Churchill's conception is similarly crude and ugly (at least in part because her title is not off-point).
Still, I'm not willing to throw the baby (bona fide plays, political and otherwise) out with the bathwater (in-the-moment protest art). In fact--to get to back to the notion of NYTW staging Seven Jewish Children--I wouldn't "throw out" the bathwater, either, just cherish it less.
UPDATE: Brit blogger Andrew Haydon has the most comprehensive non-hysterical take on what's wrong with Churchill's play (h/t Superfluities):
Like Churchill’s last play Drunk Enough To Say I Love You, the playwright’s politics are worn so baldly on the play’s sleeve, that the ersatz experimentalism of the piece’s form is lost in a mire of lecturing. We all get it. We’re not being made to work at complexity, we’re being told that something is bad. Ultimately, Seven... is a very quick theatrical trot through an opinion most of us have heard rehearsed a thousand times before. If Churchill really wanted to shake us up, she’d be putting the Israeli’s point of view. In the current climate, that really would be revolutionary.
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