SlowLearner

DIVE BAR

Some other thoughts on the same subject as my cranky post below from Matt Freeman and cgeye on Parabasis. Both are correct, I think, that bloggers aren't required to do journalistic work like fact-checking and so forth. I guess what I mean by having a "journalistic response" to something means that you rigorously parse what you know and what you don't know and only base your opinions on the former. But both are also correct that without the attention this story received from the blogs, it's unlikely that the Boston Globe would have picked up on it.

I have a few unresolved thoughts on this, but I don't know what they are yet, if that makes any sense.

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Tonight and tomorrow night are the closing nights of Nosedive's superb SUBURBAN PEEPSHOW. James's playwriting over the last seven years (that's right, folks, I've been following this guy's career for seven years) has sharpened its mission to a tight focus on a nation full of people who, while feeling bored and aimless and nebulously sad, are at the same time locked up inside the noisiest, most relentless pop culture imaginable. They're numb and unhappy, but they're not even allowed the privacy of silence that would let them start wondering why they're numb and unhappy. So they drink and philander and kill and end up just where they were before. (This show IS a comedy, by the way.)

James and I have similar backgrounds, voices, and sensibilities, but he's less afraid than I am of being caustically nasty, and less concerned than I am with redemptive elements.

I don't know of any other company like Nosedive. In the whole ongoing debate about writers and directors, James and Pete have what appears to be a bizarrely low maintenance relationship, where they mostly stay out of each others' way and then go drinking later. Pete and Nosedive produce each of James's plays, regardless of length or genre or demanding elements, without workshopping or critiqueing them to death, and in return, James hangs back and lets Pete stretch out and explore the play with a bit of license.

I know that in NERVOUS BOY, the character I played became much more outgoing and engaged with the audience than he was initially described in the script, largely through little adjustments Pete made with me throughout rehearsal. I even took James aside after we opened (the only time I've ever asked a playwright a question without the director around) and asked him if Nervous Boy had become too cozy with they audience, but James seemed pretty chill about it, seeing it as the natural evolution of moving the character from an idea on the page to a reality on the stage. Pete also makes the plays wonderfully visual, with assists from Steph, Cat, Becky, Patrick on the auditory tip (sound design is particularly crucial for Nosedive shows, as concerned as they are with the never-ending presence of ambient sounds in our lives) and numerous others.

The result is a company that's been around for a long time (seven years is an eternity Off-Off Broadway), with a stable of awesome recurring members and a reputation for delivering unmediated theater every time.

A fun thing about writing for a particular director is the chance to take advantage of their strengths that you've seen displayed. I knew I was writing the curtain-raiser Trailers for Patrick, and I knew that Patrick really enjoys soundtracking and "traffic-directing" (elegantly moving a large number of actors around the stage), so I wrote a play with about a million characters spoofing that most music-dependent of forms, the movie trailer. In a way, Trailers is the most directed production of anything I've written, just in terms of elements added by the production to the script. There are frames that light up, more costume changes than you've ever seen, and an intricately detailed soundscape. At one point, Patrick even found a theatrical way to represent the split screens of 24.

Anyway, last two chances to catch SUBURBAN PEEPSHOW are this weekend. I hope I will be there for one of them. I'm having a hellishly busy couple of days, as I'm moving from Astoria to Bushwick this weekend. Does anybody know what that does for my cred? Increases or decreases?

--SlowLearner

DEFENDING THE PLAYGOER

I'd kinda like to get Playgoer Garrett Eisler's back to some degree on this Mike Daisey incident, even though I disagree with him on many aspects. Eisler is less bothered by the water-pouring aspect than I am. He's quite correct to call the act "ugly," but I feel like it goes a bit further. The guy clearly wanted to directly attack Daisey's ideas, and no one else in the group raised a voice to stop him. (Along these same lines, I would direct the same criticism at the people who threw pie at Ann Coulter.)

I also don't agree with his assessment that Daisey behaved badly in response. Perhaps he might have responded more gently if he had all the information that surfaced later, but in that moment he had the mass walkout and the hateful water-pouring moment fresh in his mind and was understandably and justifiably angry. I give him huge props as a performer for getting the show back on track.

I'm not willing to go as far as saying that Daisey's first amendment rights were violated, because that's the very definition of a slippery slope. I want people to be able to protest things, even dramatically, without being vulnerable to the accusation that they are infringing on the free speech of the person or event they're protesting. I oppose hate crime legislation for a similar reason. Crimes should be prosecuted, to my mind, not motives. The man who went on the stage (later identified as "David" by Daisey on his blog) may be morally accountable for many things, but to my mind is only legally accountable for his vandalism.

But getting back to why I'm partly with Eisler on this. As an intellectual exercise, I'm going to list all of the things we now know about the Invincible Summer incident that we couldn't glean from Daisey's original post and accompanying YouTube:

- This was not in any way a staged protest. The group had purchased their tickets that same day and knew little (far too little, as it turned out) about the show.

- The "Christian group" described in the original post were students, chaperones, and teachers from Norco High School in California, a public high school with an Amnesty International Club and a Gay And Straight Alliance alongside the Alpha Omega Bible Club.

- Daisey's pre-show announcement contains profanity. According to Norco Principal John Johnson, a teacher, after hearing this announcement, asked the house manager if the group could leave before the show started, and was told that was not possible.

- The theater in which Daisey is performing Invincible Summer is steeply raked and only has exits in the front of the house, requiring the school group to make a more aggressive and exhibitionist exit than they might otherwise have chosen to make (also causing several of them to pass before the camera, making the YouTube more dramatic).

- Most of the people who left were students who were being directed to leave by their teachers and chaperones.

Now, obviously none of these factors excuse David's actions. But they do redefine the event somewhat from our worst fears when we first heard about it, fears of coordinated right-wing attacks on edgy theater productions and so forth. And they are all things we didn't know when we were first deciding how to respond to this incident. What I admire about Eisler's response was that he approached this matter from the standpoint of recognizing that we needed to know more than Daisey originally told us. So he called ART and asked more questions.

I'm not saying that Daisey was responsible for providing the blogosphere with a journalistic account of what occurred. I'm saying that the rest of us should have had a journalistic response. Even if we weren't going to break out the shoe leather and make the calls, we should have dispassionately tried to work out what information we had and what questions still needed to be asked.

This is a crucial skill in understanding any political event. You have to break it down into what you know and what you don't know, and you can only form an opinion when you've built a minimal critical mass of actual knowledge about a situation. Garrett among the bloggers (along with Goeff Edgers of the Boston Globe) helped to build that critical mass (though he fell short in informing himself about Daisey's writing process, it seems).

After his initial posting on the event, Daisey himself began to take this journalistic approach and aggressively sought out an opportunity to speak with David. David revealed himself to be a man grappling with a level of emotional disturbance bordering on paranoia, and based on reading Daisey's second post I would say David needs a therapist more than he needs prayer just at the moment. Still, his phobic instability might be known among the other teachers and chaperones, possibly making them fearful and reluctant to interfere when he poured water on Daisey's work, knowing his self-described anger issues. Maybe not, but again - we don't know, and it's worth cutting them some slack.

Garrett Eisler has been called a "contrarian" several times throughout this episode. The more I think about the term, the more insulting it seems. Implicit in the term "contrarian" is the idea that Garrett likes to argue against the consensus no matter what his true beliefs are. The suggestion is that Eisler first canvassed the blogs, determined the majority opinion, and then concocted an artificial argument for the opposite side. By calling him a contrarian, one implies that Eisler isn't being sincere in his opinion - that he's lying. Some people have earned the term "contrarian" over long, irrational careers in the public eye (Exhibit A: Mickey Kaus), but not Eisler. I think we should stop using the term. It insults Eisler and insulates us from having to address his actual ideas.

As I said at the outset, I think David did an awful thing to Daisey, but I don't think the rest of the group did. It sucks when people walk out, it's hurtful (in Daisey's shoes, I would be devestated and not able to return to the stage for weeks), but it's their right. And even David's actions, terrible as they were, are clearly not the first shots fired in some sinister Rightwing Christofascist attack on theater. Daisey deserves our sympathy for what happened, as well as our admiration for how he handled it, but I feel like we lost out here on a chance to have a more nuanced and interesting conversation than we could have had.

--SlowLearner

DISCLOSURE

So, once a week I'm going to be contributing a roundup of conversations from the theater blogosphere to New York Magazine's new blog, Vulture. My first entry is here. (I don't think up the headlines.)

A couple of things about this:

1. I will never use this to plug my upcoming plays.

2. Unless for some crazy reason it's absolutely essential to explain an ongoing blogosphere conversation, I will never link to this blog.

3. The roundup will never be comprehensive. They only give me a few hundred words. I plan to try to link to a wide range of theater blogs, but obviously aggressive conversation-starters like Isaac or Garrett Eisler are likely to turn up more often just 'cause... well, they're often the ones people are responding to. They bust their asses to be those people. (Not that a link from Vulture will necessarily do all that much to your hit count at the moment; it just launched, so anything could happen.)

4. I'm being ridiculous writing all this. It's just a bunch of blogs. But I want to be transparent, I like everybody around here, and it'd be awesome if more people got interested in your ideas.

--SlowLearner

COMMUNITY CHEST

Isaac asks: What's wrong with preaching to the choir?

Well, the metaphor is a little problematic. It isn't preaching to the choir that's bad, it's preaching badly or lazily to the choir that's bad, either metaphorically as a practitioner of theater, or literally as a preacher addressing a choir (or, presumably, a congregation).

A preacher addressing his/her flock has a receptive audience. That's a given. Without a receptive audience, the preacher won't ever get anything across, no matter how deeply felt, carefully considered, or masterfully delivered. But a really good preacher can take a receptive choir to places they never expected to go, into new insights about their shared faith and the ways that faith intersects with their lives that they never considered before. The choir is already receptive, already has the faith, that's what's meant by their being a "choir." It's the preacher's job, it seems to me, to push their faith further, to deepen that faith and add color and shading to it, to force a more potent consideration of what faith means.

An audience that shows up to a play (God love the poor dwindling pack of them) begins every play in a receptive place. Chances are they share certain generational and socioeconomic characteristics with the playwright, director, etc. Chances are they share certain broadly defined political views with the playwright, director, etc. The makers of the play, to my mind, are therefore obligated to accept the challenge the receptive audience presents, of inquiring into their shared beliefs, and placing those beliefs in the tightest, hottest crucibles available to see if they fracture in the heat and strain or if, just possibly, they hold.

I wrote about this subject some years ago with my George Bush post, in which I put myself through a mental challenge to see what sort of useful political play one might write. Isaac talks about the need for a community of people that agree on certain things, for example, a community of people who have problems with President Bush who would like to come together to criticize him and support one another in criticizing him. Well, here's my problem with that: it presupposes that a community must be a group of people who are joined by the need to support and bolster one another's pre-existing beliefs. I don't sign off on that definition of community. I think a community can be something more. It can be a gathering place for people who challenge one another, who support one another by refusing to allow one another to become to cozy or complacent in a certain worldview. It can be an arena for people who put beliefs to the test.

Look at it another way: your relationship ends. You break up. You need friends. You need some friends who will take you out, get you drunk, and tell you that men/women suck, that your ex in particular sucks more, and that you're awesome. Then you need another set of friends who will take you home, get you sober, help you to figure out in what ways you might have been partly to blame for the failure of the relationship, and to talk you through how what you learned from the breakup will define how you will live your life in the future. I think a play needs to be that second set of friends.

What's bad about a knee-jerk anti-Bush play or any other play of that nature is the same thing that's wrong with a play that has a rickety plot or stilted dialogue or tons of verbal exposition or a dumb ending - it means the playwright didn't work hard enough. The playwright didn't push his/her thought process as far as it would go. That's what we owe the audience. The problem isn't preaching to the choir; the problem is letting the choir down.

--SlowLearner

I WROTE A FOLLY!

Well, ya can't win 'em all. But wait. Is that like The Will Rogers Follies? 'Cause that show was a HIT!

After a close reading, I think definition 4 is what she's thinking of.

But don't believe everything you read! Here's the scoop!

--SlowLearner

I WROTE AN AMUSE-BOUCHE!

Just a reminder that tonight the second weekend of performances of Nosedive's SUBURBAN PEEPSHOW commences, written by James and directed by Pete. As noted previously, Jack Asshoonivirpoztz's playlet TRAILERS precedes the main event, directed by Charles Philucifer Willis.

Kind words have been written about the production at OffOffOnline, Backstage, and New Theatre Corps. Check 'em out, then come on down! Or, alternatively, up!

--SlowLearner

UPDATE: Liveblogging the roast duck!

Yeah, theater bloggers! I don't hear those smart mouths now!

UPDATE 2: Marvin Shanken: Cheapskate? Or is it the fault of the wine!?

UPDATE 3: The raves keep pouring in!

UPDATE 4: I feel like the mystery is gone.

CHILDREN OF MEN BLEG

So I just saw CHILDREN OF MEN, and yeah, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. Alfonso Cuaron's usually quite good (with the exception of that horrible, horrible GREAT EXPECTATIONS movie), but this is like supernatural directing. Forget the flawless acting, the witty but sincere script, the gobsmacking production design - just the way he seamlessly threads visual effects into is shots, in total service to the story, makes nearly every one of his contemporaries look like a vacuous show-off.

But something nagged at me all the way through, and I'm pretty certain this isn't a spoiler:

In a world where no child has been born in eighteen years, why would there be such a crackdown on illegal immigration? If the population isn't replacing, wouldn't there be more of a competition between nations to get their hands on the largest workforce possible? Or if not, wouldn't they just not care? I'd love it if someone could clear this up for me, because it was hampering my enjoyment all the way through the movie and I feel like I'm missing something obvious. Maybe the PD James novel clears it up.

I mean, as a sci fi nerd I was also wondering things like, wouldn't scientists be working balls-out on creating AI robots, particularly child-like ones? This may seem churlish and lame, but the fimmakers did place an emphasis on the continued development of technology. But that's not as central to the movie as the immigration thing.

--SlowLearner

IT'S RAINING MEN!

I may be taking this blog down soon, as I don't seem to really so much blog, but I thought I'd alert my readers to some plays I'm going to see.

Clay and Isaac's volume of smoke has been running for a while, but I'm only just getting to it in its final week. I saw it once before, in a workshop form, and found Abe Goldfarb to be handsome. The show is really good too, but it is to some degree overshadowed by Abe Goldfarb's striking profile and hint of roguery. Tiger Beat readers should take note that this production also features Daryl Lathon and Brian Silliman!

Speaking of rogues, the pornographers and horse-thieves who make up Nosedive Productions are opening a new play by nudist and freethinker James Comtois, which is called Suburban Peepshow. This is a raucous comedy that James assures me is almost like a sequel to The Adventures of Nervous Boy and will give you the exact same feeling of uplift. James said to me, on the record, "Bring the kids!" The show is preceded by a curtain-raiser entitled Trailers by rising playwright Guy Hoonevahblogz (Dutch). Jaywalker Patrick Shearer describes struggling with Hoonevahblogz's turgid verse here and here. It runs all month.

Did someone say Tiger Beat? Daryl Boling's production of cutie-patootie Sam Shepard's Lie of the Mind opens this week at manhattantheatresource, where all the dreamiest boys are putting their plays on.

Don't believe me? George Hunka's staged reading of his new play States of Exception will be opening there on April 15th, and should be a pretty sweet way to chill after filing your taxes.

But less then a week before that, it's a boy-crazy bonanza as Matt Freeman and Matt Johnston's adaptation of ur-hottie Fyodor Dosoevsky's Dream of a Ridiculous Man plays Theatresource on the 9th and 10th.

Finally, the Vampire Cowboys' Men of Steel is wrapping up this week, and lots of folks have raved to me about it. No one's filled me in on the cute boys quotient yet, though.

--SlowLearner