2014

Tribe of Fools’ Christmas burlesque

Well, it’s been a while since I posted.

To make up for lost time (but not, necessarily, to promise regular content in the future), I regale you with three short stories about what has developed while I was gone. I think it’s safe to say that the holidays are a bit of a nightmare for everyone. Busy, busy, busy. I went off writing in general for a month and a half. It was good timing, because Art Attack took a hiatus and so, basically, did Philadelphia theater. Not completely true! December is a month of children’s shows and burlesque for Philly. If you’re not into that, then you might as well stay home and spend time with your family. The standout was Pig Iron’s Twelfth Night, which I thought was kind of genius. Made it worth seeing that goddamn play one more time (like, the sixth?).

Here’s a diagram, for people more visual than verbal

Why children’s shows and burlesque? My theory: children’s shows because they’re lighthearted and the kids are home for the holidays. Burlesque because the rest of us are exhausted, broke, miserable, and don’t want to pay attention to anything longer than ten minutes long. And it’s easier to pay attention when there are garters and nipple tassles. I was working on an article about holiday shows which I thought would go up on Art Attack (got nixed because of the timing of their post-Philly.com-breakup hiatus). The idea was to discover exactly WHY theaters do holiday shows. My real goal was to get at the numbers behind the myth – is it true that theaters make a considerable portion of their budget off of their holiday show? How do they choose holiday shows? Etc. For it, I was interviewing people at a number of venues/companies who were, or weren’t, doing holiday shows. In my favorite (read: least favorite) conversation, the representative of one major venue kept insisting that they don’t do “holiday” shows. And it’s true, their December play, a children’s play, is not “holiday” themed or religiously oriented in any way. I don’t know why he kept insisting on this distinction, though. And he didn’t stop. He kept repeating, “But it really isn’t a holiday show.” They do two children’s shows a year, and one of them is always in December. I apologized for misspeaking, and agreed that of course his play isn’t Christmas themed, or Hannukah themed, or etc. But I suppose because I had used the word “holiday” to begin with, he was unable to converse amicably about it, and kept taking issue with my including their programming in my article at all. There’s a reason why you do a show during the holidays that’s family-friendly, isn’t there? I finally asked. Not really, he concluded, bamboozlingly. The conversation failed to move forward in any productive direction. Me = puzzled. ~~ I’m doing the theater editing for Phindie.com now. In fact, I am The Theater Editor. I’m excited, because I’m excited about Phindie. Check out all of the activity that’s been going on there in the last few days: I reviewed GHOSTS, EL ANO EN QUE NACI, CHEROKEE. Some other very talented people reviewed some other stuff (it’s all linked from the main page. Phindie has a theater calendar, too, now. ~~

I’m working on a play. I’ve written it, edited it, and submitted it to a director (the ingenious Robert Gross). We had our first rehearsal session a few days ago, and I was like, yep, he’s still a genius. MICROMANIA is about roaches. It’s about people who are obsessed with roaches, and who might harbor, in their deepest insides, some roaches.

It is, as Robert told me, about the abject as it operates upon and formulates the self. Or something like that. I’m sure that Ingmar Bergman would agree. I think it’s very good. I’m performing it as a one-man show, which means getting to play a cast of bizarre, deranged characters. The idea is to do it as part of Collage Festival, to which we have submitted the play. We won’t know until February 15. Perhaps if I link to the Collage Festival three times on this blog, it will be more likely to accept me into its 2014 Festival. The Collage Festival, presented in its third iteration this year at the CEC in West Philly, puts a bunch of contributors and artists into one space. The works bleed into one another. Unless you’re in the stage area, which is where I hope to be, and where audiences might be able to hear some sound from outside but otherwise I can torture them with nothing but my own self for forty-five uninterrupted minutes. It’s an adventure, it will be an adventure, and it’s all about roaches. I’m immensely excited.

Today in the Arts

Heyyo,

Recent articles:

Another to-do for PaperClips215 last Thursday, including this, which I’m attending tonight. Also including a link to Ellie Brown’s indiegogo, at which she’s raising $7,000 to put her SoLow show on stage. Anyone who doesn’t get how even a low budget production costs a fortune will be interested to read what she has to say there. And to give a few bucks.

I saw THE GARDEN Thursday night, Nichole Canuso’s latest show. Really delightful. Review here.

Also, an article for the latest incarnation of Art Attack, on how David Patrick Stearns is not putting forth competent work in his new job as staff theater critic.

A bit nervous about this one, because it’s the second time I’m criticizing a critic publicly. The first time, it spurred conflict with the critic I came out against. Poor Stearns is a classical music critic, why would they transfer him to theater? I’m mostly speaking against the ridiculously desperate tactics of the Inquirer. Thing is, they’re a respected news source; if they quarter-ass their theater coverage, people will still believe them. Air Bud could be their staff writer, and he’d still get hits.

Actually that’s a really good idea.

As Fringe mounts, what’s Pig Iron up to?

Well maybe I’m a bit behind the times.

I’m probably the last person to talk about Pay Up but here is my discussion: read it read it read it okay?

Thing is, I have to admit, walking out of Pay Up both my girlfriend and I were disappointed. I’m not gonna explain the show here, because so many people have, but there is a lot going on, and as an audience member, you often find yourself latching on to one element of a show to find meaning. And the one that both of us grabbed was the little shows – the eight beautifully performed little dramas, only six of which you get to see.

Well that sounds fair

Well, in the end, these are a bit sparse, even – it places – a bit predictable.

In a weird way, I think that this show is about disappointment, and anger, and irritation and impatience, and other negative emotions. Since life is a constant disappointment and irritation, we can hardly say it’s unfair. Art often attempts to create negative emotions – but the problem is that the initiated theater-lovers smile wryly, nodding to show that they get it, but only aesthetically – like a cheesy horror movie, we know what’s going on.  And the non-initiated don’t come back, or just say vaguely that they didn’t like it, but they aren’t sure why.

Give into the negative emotions, treat every moment of Pay Up as part of the drama, and you get a whole different story.

The Last Plot in Revenge

Every once in a while a show occurs which is so joyfully inventive that it’s almost too ridiculous. The Last Plot in Revenge rides that line sagely. It’s a spaghetti western, a puppet show, site-specific theater, sci-fi, a musical, and dinner theater, and at the same time it’s sneakily avant-garde and philosophical. It’s other things too, and it’s hard to talk about without actually blowing one surprise or another. If you’re in Philly, go see it. If you’re not, read my review on Art Attack.

Adaptations

Another article on Philly.com.

Quintessence Theatre, who did that Arms and the Man I didn’t like very much, produced, with the same cast, a production of Martin Crimp’s adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope.

Michael Billington gave a fairly down-the-nose review of the adaptation (not this production of it). I find some value in it. This touches on the question of why we adapt classics in the first place – the answer hopefully not being “because we can’t think of any new stories.”

Wakefulness and Empathy

Ed Swidey as Tom and Langston Darby as Haley in EgoPo’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: An Unfortunate History. Photo by Jenna Kuerzi.

A few years ago I read Anne Bogart’s collection of essays A Director Prepares, and was shocked—and a bit overwhelmed—by her treatment of concepts like Violence, Sexuality and Stereotype in the rehearsal room.

All of these concepts, she asserts, can benefit the group by being confronted rather than avoided.

In Stereotype, she describes a piece she co-created in 1991 called American Vaudeville. It was part of a three-play exploration of American entertainment history, and what they found was that in order to genuinely represent vaudeville, they could not avoid that most infamous of performances: the minstrel show.

“We did not want to comment on the material, or put a spin on it, or put quotation marks around the event,” she says. “But we did want to light a fire under the enactment of the minstrel show with our own wakefulness and empathy.”

Minstrelsy emerged from a distinctly American tradition—it could not have happened anywhere else—of people from various backgrounds coming together and satirizing their own cultures. It was such a popular standard of stage entertainment at the time that it became America’s first theatrical export to Europe, with white and black minstrel companies touring the Continental cities.

Now, the minstrel show is the iconic racially exploitative entertainment. It hearkens back to slavery and reinforces the oppressive divide between races. Also, it is so frightfully taboo that, like a collectively repressed personal trauma, it evokes powerful emotions when confronted. No one today, with good intention, would perform a minstrel show simply for entertainment.

Yet confronting that taboo, that collection of dances and gestures and costumes representative of interracial violence and subjugation, is becoming more and more frequently attractive as a way of exploring and perhaps healing a collective historical fracture.

In 2010 The Scottsboro Boys opened at the Vineyard Theatre in New York City. The play is about nine African-American boys who, in 1931 Alabama, were accused of a rape that never happened. In a manner which wraps itself up boldly in American historical racism, the story is told as a minstrel show, complete with blackface performances by the “boys” (played by African American actors).

People who had never seen the play protested Scottsboro Boys in the streets and called it out for being racist. Though it was easily absolved of these claims by those who saw it—it so clearly presented the vaudeville element as part of the very racism which was unjustly damning the characters—the very existence the minstrel show in it inflamed sensibilities across the city.

On Friday at Plays and Players Theater here in Philadelphia, EgoPo Classic Theater opened the curtain on their adaptation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The play, entitled Uncle Tom’s Cabin: An Unfortunate History once again opened the door to modern American theater’s controversial ancestry. Stowe’s pre-civil war novel has always been heatedly debated: though abolitionist to many (to Lincoln, Stowe was “the little lady who started the Civil War”), some activists labeled it complacent, and of course the South despised it and reacted heavily against it.

Nevertheless, it was immediately adapted into multiple theatrical versions, and over time became the most seen play in American history. This continued into the vaudeville years, when, with copyright laws being fairly flimsy, the adaptations strayed further and further from the source material, and Stowe’s novel was used very often as a base for minstrel performances.

Though these shows might not have intended to be racist, they represent an infantilization of a subjugated race by its oppressors, and a continued capitalization on blacks by whites, for entertainment and for money. Minstrelsy characters are cartoonish, simplistic, unintelligent and damagingly stereotypical.

The roots of these performances is explored in EgoPo’s Uncle Tom. At the very start of the play, two slavers (hot in a debate about the nature of the minds and souls of slaves) order little Henry to come out and dance for them. Henry enters with a grim, dull look on his face and slumped shoulders. He begins to dance—and his body and features animate, a wide grin illuminating white teeth, his arms swinging and his legs flashing about dexterously. The dance ends, and Henry immediately deflates, the dull, reduced posture of his servitude returning to his figure.

By showing this dynamic juxtaposition in the first scene, EgoPo reveals that they are, like Bogart, not “putting quotations” around the minstrel show, but lighting a fire under it with wakefulness and empathy.

To complicate matters for EgoPo, in January, director Lane Savadove announced that he would be using cross-race casting in his production. (So little Henry, dancing in the above scene, was performed by a light-skinned hispanic woman.) Of course this enflamed sensibilities. Savadove has stated over the last six months numerous reasons for this choice, one being that there are not enough good roles for African American actors, and he did not want to hand out slave roles to them. Yet many of the best roles in Uncle Tom are slave roles.

Another explanation, and a more relevant one, was that it did not seem productive, at this time and in Philadelphia, to show whites enslaving blacks, and that such a performance would only strengthen the divide between the races.

A number of articles sprung up questioning the choice, such as this one in the PhillyMag, or this one on the Clyde Fitch Report, and whether or not it was made simply to be “edgy”—as EgoPo describes themselves as producing “classic theater on the edge.” In the PhillyMag article, playwright Quinn Eli asks a question which, while valid enough, presumes an intention for the show which is not present: “I’ll find it difficult to absorb the image of whites in place of blacks as slaves,” says Eli. ”And I question how effective it will be for white members of the audience who won’t have to take the horror of what happened to those who it actually happened to.”

Eli’s several complaints—much more constructively put than the Scottsboro protestors in New York—illustrate our complex relationship with minstrelsy and even race relations in general. The play, he suggests, might be harder to absorb because of the cross-race casting, and yet easier as well. A play like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, according to Eli and others, has an obligation focus, first and foremost, on the horrors of slavery for the enslaved.

For Savadove, Uncle Tom’s Cabin: An Unfortunate History (which I reviewed on Art Attack here) is, rather, an opportunity to explore, collectively, the divisive and destructive history which we as a people share. For him, swapping the roles was a way to help do that. While any production of Uncle Tom’s cannot avoid the “horror”, he is not more interested in that side of things than he is in the humanity.

Several weeks ago Cate Shortland’s movie Lore showed at the Ritz in Philadelphia. The play, about the children of two SS officers in Germany at the end of the war, was remarkable in that it explored the roots of prejudice and oppression without focusing on the oppressed. Their parents imprisoned, Lore has to lead her younger siblings through areas controlled by Allied soldiers to reach their relatives’ house, and safety. She carries her parents’ hatreds with her, but is forced to accept help from a Jewish boy.

The Nazi culture is openly explored here, today, from the perspective of the oppressors. Our slave culture, while being older, is much deeper, and has reverberations which remain in the forefronts of our minds. Quinn Eli said that EgoPo’s cross-race casting “presupposes that a lot of our notions about race have changed more dramatically than I think they have.” I do hope that, over more than a century, they have changed somewhat. I hope that we are able to see one-another from a realistic, compassionate perspective. Yet the reality is that Philadelphia is one of the most segregated cities in the country, and those wounds run deep.

Just the other day

Sonja Field as Raina and Christopher Burke as Sergius. Photo credit Shawn May.

So the other day I got my first paid article of 2013 posted on Philly.com’s Art Attack . . . about Quintessence’s production of GBS’ Arms and the Man. So many things came together here, resulting in me picking up Michael Holroyd’s massive, four-volume biography of Shaw.

This article is the first critical one I’ve published in a while—I haven’t been this against a piece I wrote about, probably ever—and the reaction has been exciting. I’ve gotten more comments on this than any other piece not on my own blog, and was even called a “LIAR”—in all caps, just like that.

One thing I actually deserved to get in trouble for on this article was for saying that few companies in Philly are daring, or willing to portray people as the ugly, problematic, aggressive, cruel things they can sometimes be. While I wasn’t “lying” as was suggested, I was maybe a bit incautious here.

A desideratum is something lacked, wanted or needed.

He had money, friends, a constant stream of productive activities, and had even constructed for himself a kind of legacy; the only desideratum of his life was love. We as a culture have money, good intentions, opportunity, and aptitude; the only desideratum of our efforts is understanding.

There are many artists in Philadelphia who produce intriguing experimental work. This is where our strength lies, and I’m glad to see it. I wonder if most people haven’t seen enough down-and-dirty thoughtful classic productions to even understand that something like Arms and the Man misses the point.

I wonder, too, if our theatergoers expect to leave the theater with thoughts, arguments, and even outcries.

Recondite, adj: 1. not easily understood, abtruse
2. hidden, concealed, little known

One recondite statement in his article made the whole thing ambiguous. She enjoyed reading the blog about recondite words, so much so that she told all of her friends to read it.

I certainly don’t want to suggest that any classic production should tether itself to the author or even the author’s intentions; Shaw says in his prefaces to BTM (I don’t have the exact quote at the moment) that the author’s interpretation of the work is not always the truest or most useful one. Any production company must put their own spin on a piece, sometimes even making it unrecognizable from its original appearance. An uncareful reading of my article might conclude that I disagree.

The BWay SBoro Boys – jazz hands!

What I take issue with is the improper use of a text. If you use a scissors to hammer a nail in you risk stabbing yourself in the head; similarly, producing The Laramie Project as a rollicking comedy would be disastrous. If you’re going make Arms and the Man a farce you had better have a really good reason to do so, beside selling more tickets.

Odd twistings of purpose can be of use. The recent Broadway show The Scottsboro Boys, about a group of black men in 1931 who are accused of a gang rape they did not commit, uses blackface, minstrel shows, and reductive, stereotypical portraits of blacks in order to explore the racism which is an inescapable part of our history.

But I am decidedly against any twisting which reduces a work and discourages thoughtfulness. It is particularly dangerous to do this with a revolutionary artist.

Ad hominem is another latinate phrase; it refers to an argument which is made not against an idea but against the person who presents or represents it. In other words, every political debate you’ve ever seen by actual politicians is a brilliant and numbingly ignorant example of ad hominem argumentation.

The ‘storical SBoro Boys. They’re being advised by their lawyer here . . . who will eventually get some of them out of jail