As Isaac would say, read some Hunka, then read some Walters. Both, I fear, showcase two of the leading lights of the theatrosphere with their powers a bit under a cloud, but it's interesting to think about why.
George's Organums (I'm never sure is it's right to pluralize that word) are at their best when they seem to apply to a wide variety of experiences, when the reader can take the generalization in one of George's complete or incomplete sentences and apply it to an experience of their own, and judge it to be valid or invalid. The problem with the Organum series, as it has gone on, is that the feeling of a steadily building theatre minima philosophy is decreasing, while more and more there's a weird sense of specific axe-grindings going on behind the offered truisms.
I considered for a while how to respond to Organums 66-75, but finally concluded that they don't fully articulate a statement on their own. I need to know more. I don't need names named, but I need at least some kind of hypothetical scenario to understand what it means to have this particular set of thoughts grouped together, sort of like the one Don Hall offered recently in response to some of Scott Walters's developing ideas about tribes. (Indeed, if I had to guess, Scott's emerging tribe theory seems a likely suspect as the stimulus for the latest Organums, given the specific use of the word "tribe.")
For example, the Willy Loman metaphor - intended to demonstrate that theater artists want desperately to be liked - kind of runs aground when George writes, "To that end, they pretend that the night in the New Haven hotel room never happened; they insist that they are incapable of it." Now, the night in the New Haven hotel room, as I recall from Death of a Salesman, was the night that Biff discovered that Willy was, at least on occasion, unfaithful to his mother, which seriously estranged the two men.
In Miller's play, that's a pretty bad moment, one of Willy's lowest. But in the context of the Organum, which begins by identifying the desire to be well-liked as one of the principal sins, wouldn't the night in the New Haven hotel room actually be the moment of trangression which so few artists dare to attempt for fear of losing the love of the audience?
And I get more confused as I read on. How does the communitarian theater attack the autonomous self with the multivalent passion? Who makes up the lynch-mob community, and who is the lone sacrifice? And when George writes "theater artists," what subset is he referring to? All theater artists? Or only certain ones? He often posts admiring reviews of fascinating-sounding shows on his blog, so presumably he doesn't mean those theater artists in particular. So there must be a subset of ameliorists. I really think we need at least a hypothetical example to know what we're talking about here.
Without a bit more specificity and candor built into the language, I fear the Organum project overall could likely fall into a state of mission-drift, possibly becoming an oddly-formatted diary rather than a quest, which I feel like would be a shame.
Scott Walters is our other quixotically-ambitious-theater-blogger-in-chief, which is why these guys are such indispensable weekly reads. Scott is asking, How should we make theater now, given what we know, given our dissatisfactions, given our limitations - how should we live, and how should we attend to our stagecraft? I think this is a crucial line of inquiry. I think Jay Raskolnikov (one of my newest daily reads) made an unsatisfactory point when he wrote:
I have heard that there is too much competition for an audience's time now: work, movies, tv, concerts, the internet, bars. That assumes that there was no competition before the advent of film: no music, no carnies, no dog/cockfights, no bear pits, no pubs, oh yeah and there was no work before the technological age. There has always been competition for audiences, though the competition has changed over time.
The problem with this equivalency is that music, carnies, cockfights, bearpits, and pubs don't threaten theater the way that movies and TV do. Theater used to be the go-to for exciting, engrossing dramas and comedies and thrillers, for any entertainment presented in a narrative form, but movies and TV offer those same commodities in a much more easily distributed media. The decreased popularity of theater is irreversible, at least up to a point. What that means is that there's less money and less people. Which means we need a whole new economic - and possibly social - model for thinking about how we're going to create theater from now on. This is what Scott is taking on on his blog, and I don't have to agree with all of his conclusions to be riveted by the journey. He's leading the way on the most important, and most painful conversation we can have about who we'll be in a few decades.
Unfortunately, Scott has a tragic flaw, as evidenced by his post tonight. He can't control his rage when he suspects that a New Yorker may be looking down on him. What set him off tonight is a promotional blog and a YouTube video generated by a New York theater group producing a series of short plays about the Iowa caucases and the people of Iowa, which he sees as a sneering, condescending, typically New York project. And as always happens when he reaches this conclusion, he completely loses his grip on his tone, his language, his flow of thought. He writes awful things that he can't back up. Tonight's prime example:
This is the kind of bullshit I am talking about when I insist that the NYC aesthetic is not universal, and in fact is openly scornful and dismissive of experiences and lifestyles that take place west of the Hudson and in places with less than 7 million people. There is an arrogance just beneath the surface -- hell, lying right on top of the surface -- that needs to be called out by every non-New Yorker who is tired of seeing good people insulted, and every New Yorker who has even a small conscience left.
Here's some questions that I have after reading this:
1) Does Scott believe that there is a single NYC aesthetic? Or even a predominant one? Is someone on record as claiming that there is a New York aesthetic that is universal?
2) Has Scott read the scripts for any of the Iowa 08 plays? Certainly the blog and YouTube don't inspire confidence, but again, has Scott - or anyone outside the company - actually read the scripts?
3) Does Scott believe that most of the plays staged in New York thus far in calendar year 2007 sneer at non-New York cultures?
4) Does Scott believe that most New Yorkers have no conscience, or nearly no conscience?
5) Scott participates in a theater blogosphere comprised mainly of playwrights and directors, but also some actors, producers, designers, and technicians. Many of them live and make theater in New York. What does Scott know about the projects they're working on? Does he know whether or not these projects sneer at life outside New York? Does he know whether or not these projects cast an inquiring and critical eye into New York life, and into the behavior of individual artists and/or groups of artists? After all, these people are in constant contact with Scott through their blogs and comments sections; he could very easily ask them if their work contains this geographism he decries. Has he? If not, will he?
6) Also available for free on the internet is NYTheatre.com, an invaluable and meticulously maintained website detailing the shows available to watch in New York. Their list of currently running nonmusical plays is here. How many of these strike Scott as possibly exemplifying the NYC aesthetic he decries?
Scott recently mentioned in his comments section that he doesn't care for attacks on academics. I don't either. I like academics. I wish I was one. I wish I had the patience or the attention-span. When I get upset by Scott, it's not when he behaves like an academic, but when he fails to behave like one, when he surrenders to anecdotal conclusions over statistical ones - when he sees only what he was hoping to see.
I feel for Laura when she describes the toxic atmosphere that at least partially caused her to leave New York, and to some degree theater, behind over the last several years. (That comments section, I notice, contains a good question from Mr. Excitement that, as far as I know, Scott hasn't publicly answered.) I feel for her, and I acknowledge the genuine nature of her experience, but I also know it's not my experience. Over the past ten years, I have been incredibly fortunate to work with kind, hardworking, deeply inquisitive, passionate, self-critical, generous, hilarious theater artists, and I have never once even tangentially connected to a production that took a contemptuous attitude toward non-New York cultures. Of course I've worked with and dealt with some jerks, but they were the minority.
But obviously, it's at this point I have to stop this line of reasoning, before I'm tempted to universalize my personal experience onto the whole of the New York theater scene. My experience can't be said to be any more exemplary of the whole than Laura's. The only way to draw conclusions about the larger community is to, y'know, collect data and analyze it. As Matthew Freeman pointed out during the Mike Daisy fracas, theater bloggers are under no obligation to be journalists, but we are equally obligated as intellectuals not to make statements that we don't know to be true. So if we're not willing to do the legwork, we're limited as to what we can actually say.
Boy, I'm cranky, huh? I don't like imprecision any more than the man who wrote Organum 72 and I don't like insults any more than the man who wrote, "Mike, I have no objections to you engaging in a dialogue about ideas. My quibble was about civility. I consider my blog to be like having a party at my house to which you, as a reader are invited. If you were at a party at my house, we could have a heated argument about ideas, and we'd still be friends. But if you came to my house and insulted me, then I probably wouldn't invite you again. "
Am I obligated to call out Iowa 08 in order to qualify as one of the few remaining New Yorkers with a shred of conscience? Of course not - I haven't read or seen any of the plays! Perhaps they merit condemnation, but we don't know! In what world is it intellectually or academically acceptable to condemn works you haven't read or seen? Certainly the YouTube is condescending, while the blog - well, I can't tell what's happening on that blog. But I don't know if they have anything to do with the content of the actual plays. Were they written by the same writers? I don't know, and neither does Scott.
Scott's just reacting to what he wants to see. For some reason, his worldview requires there to be arrogant, smarty-pants New Yorkers snickering at him at all times while they stage their super-arty, alienated chamber-pieces full of empty shock value. (This is a particularly galling misperception on the week a play as big-hearted as The Magic of Mrs. Crowling is opening.) There's a larger context to this sort of thing, one that makes this sort of behavior more than annoying: a major tool fraudulent Republicans use to get huge numbers of people to vote agains their own interests is to hold up a straw elite as an effigy: "See those artists and journalists and writers and editors and performers and comedians over there? They're LAUGHING at you, America! Are you going to stand for that?"
I support many of Scott's core theses: theater is local, theater should be rooted in its community (while casting a critical eye on that community - "border dwellers," I think Isaac said), artists should scrutinize themselves as thoroughly as they scrutinize others, and playwrights should engage and examine - rather than immediately condemn - ideas other than their own. I just finished writing and directing a play that strived to exemplify these values. That play went up in the West Village. Yes, Scott's ideas can be demonstrated in a play in the West Village as effectively as anywhere else in the country.
I therefore call on Scott Walters of Theatre Ideas to stop insulting my community, and if he wants to criticize it instead, to bring documentation. I call on Scott to get his rhetoric under control and confront his need to believe that somewhere in the trendiest enclaves of New York City, there's an incredibly hip party to which he wasn't invited, full of people laughing at him. What I see every day are a lot of good people trying the best they can under difficult circumstances to say something useful or valuable. It really is time for this to stop.
--SlowLearner
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