Around the theatre web for Feb 24th…

Long one today…

Tony Adams is discussing theatre critics and the role they play, as well as asking which critics/publications carry more weight, as it were:

The beginning, middle and end are barely related–the beginning having little to do with anything. The middle is stronger, but Hayford seems more interested in the play that should have been written, as opposed to the one that is being produced. Saying” Had Dresser aimed for a semifarcical work­place comedy he might have ended up with a serviceable play. ”

This flaw is exemplified at the end with:

Perhaps Dresser’s biggest miscalculation comes in making both women white, native-born Americans, thus eliminating any hint of the real-world racial and ethnic politics that characterize the housecleaning industry. In most parts of the country that workforce is overwhelmingly African-American, Latina, or eastern European, and women often become trapped in this low-paying, disrespected work by racism, immigration problems, or a lack of English proficiency.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that the play is set in coastal Maine town. And while Hayford correctly points out that in most parts of the country the workforce is different than that seen in the play, coastal Maine is not an extraordinarily diverse population next to Chicago.

I found similar problems with a Time Out Chicago review of a show set in Texas. The reviewer complained:

Here we are in the South. Not the Gothic, Deep or New South; no, it’s the remembered and wished-for South of the early 20th century, where stand-up characters grapple with universal issues in comforting, homespun accents, eliding the troublesome issues of the past while reaffirming small-town virtues about which even Thornton Wilder had doubts.

Now, this is amusing, as The Reader said:

Horton Foote is all southern, no gothic. Search all you want, you’ll find no buried child in the garden, no skeletons of inconvenient ancestors in the family closets. Which is exactly why his characters feel fresh and unlabored. He doesn’t ask that they stand as proof that those who live their lives away from the grit and glare of urban centers are just as dark and compromised as their city brethren. But neither does he coat them with a false sheen of nostalgia for simpler times. Foote’s warm, funny, plainspoken characters, heroic in their own quiet ways, provide a welcome relief from the hothouse grotesques beloved of so many other chroniclers of small-town southern life.

The Reader also recommended the show, while Time Out gave it just 2 stars (out of six). Now, I am all for giving a show a bad review if you think the show is bad, (and personally, I like the show) but the only reasoning given for any complaint in the Time Out review seems to be that it didn’t show the South in a bad/guilty fashion, or that it wasn’t the show the reviewer wanted to see. This is a badly written bad review, which would be understandable if there was a strict word limit. However, the full Reader review is half the length of the full Time Out review, and gives a better overall feel of the show to the person reading it. The Time Out review makes the reader ask, “Ok, but why?” to each charge the reviewer makes, but they never get an answer.

John Clancy pulls out his 2001 slam against Steppenwolf and its imitators on his blog:

The best of this theater, like the best of American culture, achieves a Steinbeckian simplicity, an immediacy and a power we recognize intuitively. Plainspoken truth and a celebration of the endurance, courage and decency of the human spirit, coupled with a heart-breaking, bleak beatification of the loner, the misfit and outcast, these things can appear and vanish in much of our theater like the ghosts of the American night. But usually we see the worst of our culture, a loud, leering, dim-witted aggression and a sense that violence is in itself somehow both inevitable and vaguely romantic.

This translates to the stage as actors with little or no control or interest in their physical and vocal instrument, directors emphasizing mood and attitude over thought and objective and writers with their feet stuck firmly to the killing floor, afraid or unwilling to spread their wings and try to fly. We should remember that Thornton Wilder and George S. Kaufman and Elmer Rice were three of the prototypical American playwrights. We should remember that Dos Passos and Odets allowed working-class characters to breathe a lyricism that rarely rang hollow and always reached beyond the grim desperation of their circumstances. We need to stop romanticizing the vulgar and vulgarizing the romantic in our theater and our heritage.

While I get his point, much of this reads like someone who writes WB/CW (or whatever they are now) sitcoms complaining about how opera is dragging down television.

Even closer to home, BackstageJobs.com’s own Nick Keenan has been working with the League of Chicago Theatres to develop the Chicagoplays Wiki. This site allows Chicago theatres a place to “exchange resources, connect with other companies and discuss topics of interest along with easy access to important forms and documents.”

Nick has this drive to help everyone. Hopefully others will catch the spirit, too, so Nick won’t get burned out.

The Playgoer asks why there are few (if any) resident playwrights at theatres any more:

…I found especially valuable Norman’s comments on the importance of the Steppenwolf relationship with Tracy Letts–something sadly unheard of these days in New York and indeed much of the country.

I like what this play represents: a life-long association of a writer with a group of actors and a theater. This is why Shakespeare wrote so much, he had a whole gang of actors waiting to do his work.

The Humble Nailbanger discusses living life in a fog:

There are a few different methods for creating fog in the studio or on stage, but they basically break into two main camps, both of which are fundamentally different: the chemical, and the natural.

The chemical involves “hazers” or “smoke machines,” where the operator plugs in a bottle or some sort of concoction that creates smoke when you add heat or somehow manipulate it. There’s a lot of downsides to the chemical method….they smell. Actually, they stink. And, well, they’re chemical. Not to mention that night after night, hour after hour of living with that smell…being hit with it when you strip off your clothes right before collapsing into bed, you can learn to hate it really quickly, and come to question the possible hazards and downsides even faster than that.

I also want to heartily recommend (and I’ll get it in the side links soon) Resources for Emerging Arts Leaders. Very good reads, and very interesting even for those of us not serving as leaders of arts organizations. Heck, especially for those of us that are not leaders of arts organizations. Check out this blog and begin understanding the issues faced in the administrative offices.

Butts In The Seats wonders if the dumbing of the US populace should force theatres and arts groups to dumb down their marketing and productions, or rise to the occasion to promote intellectual pursuits to mainstream society:

The latest chapter in this discussion making rounds of the talk shows and newspaper reviews is Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason. You can read a review here or watch a pretty good interview with a transcript with Bill Moyers here. Much of her focus seems to be on how active anti-intellectualism is causing people to essentially renounce their roles as citizens of the US.

But while some of the examples Jacoby discusses are worthy of some consideration, what she says isn’t as important as the whole concept of people actively not caring that they aren’t familiar with basic knowledge about the world around them.

Finally, my son managed to be mentioned and pictured on Chicago’s New Leaf Theatre Company blog (and no, Nick had nothing to do with it).

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Chicago, General, around the theatre web, audience, critics, technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.