The Mirror up to Nature

Tweet This! I'm on a Panel on Tweeting in the Theater

2012-01-26T15:41:00.002-05:00

Monday night I'll be on a panel about the recent phenomenon of Tweet Seats.

The panel is sponsored by Arts in America and will be held at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

Other panelists will include:

Julie Hennrikus (StageSource)
Robin Abrahams (Boston Globe's "Miss Conduct")
Matt Heck (Boston Symphony Orchestra)
Nick Peterson (Central Square Theater)
Thom Dunn (Huntington Theater, Musician and Playwright)

As a bonus, my lovely wife Amanda and several others will be performing in brief, humorous sketches that attempt to dramatize tweets.

The event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited. Go here for more information.

Hope to see some of you there.

My Twitter Play - Inspired By Recent Events

2012-01-24T13:42:00.000-05:00

The Neofuturists sponsor a Twitter Play assignment every week. This week's assignment was "Write a one-tweet play that features an Apple."

Don't Mourn The Loss of Mainstream Critics

2012-01-23T13:39:00.000-05:00

After all, in this Internet age of the citizen critic, for every loss of a voice like the Village Voice's J. Hoberman, we have the rise of a whole chorus of folks like The Reply Girl!

New Official Newt Gingrich For President T-Shirt!

2012-01-21T21:38:00.001-05:00

Not really. This is just leftover merchandise that capitalized on CBS's failed series Swingtown.

Movies About Money

2012-01-11T15:06:00.000-05:00

As promised, at my film blog Gate Dimension, I've listed nine hit films from the last 30 years that look at money in more than a cursory way. Most all of them are flawed, some are even middling, but all were popular.

Let me know what you think.

Movies, Money and Class

2012-01-10T22:05:00.001-05:00

Tom Garvey, writing in The Hub Review,tries to sort out our current culture's fascination with Downton Abbey. In his contemplation, he gets into theclass/race issue:

"A series like Downton Abbeywould be unthinkablein America, even on cable - and even though a very close parallel would bepossible in, say, a Manhattan co-op. There's a doorman there, after all,and of course a janitor, and many maids and nannies and au pairs tendingthe privileged few who reside within its walls. You could do an American Upstairs,Downstairs in the Hamptons, or on Beacon Hill, or in Kennebunkport or anynumber of other American enclaves.

And yet it never occurs to us to produce such a show. We don't evenreally allow ourselves to ponder it."

At the end of his post he poses a question:

Can you think of a successful popular novel or movie in thelast generation that has been driven by economic concerns, as half of Dickensand all of Trollope and much of Eliot is? If you can, email me!

An interestingquestion, and I have thought about it. More to come!

More Statistics That Are Useful for the Race and Theater Discussion

2012-01-07T19:52:00.001-05:00

When Tom Loughlin first posted a lament over the latest Broadway League numbers at his Poor Player blog, I doubt he realized the firestorm he was kindling.

Indeed, the comments on that original post are cresting over 60, and several other blogs, most notably Parabasis, have been quick to really lay into Professor Loughlin. His post has been called "offensive" and he has been declared an "enemy" and "disavowed" by some.. Yikes.

Today, 99 Seats (Playwright J. Holtham), one of the most vigorous critics of Loughlin's argument, laid out a post on Parabasis entitled OK Then, Lets Really Talk About It. In this post he points out the trouble with the original premise of trying to extrapolate a whole lot about the culture of races and their attitudes towards theater attendance and participation from Broadway League numbers.

Indeed, this has been a common thread through the discussion up to this point.

I'm sure others have been doing this as well, but my first instinct, even before the whole thing blew up, was to take a look at the National Endowment for the Arts research - specifically their periodic Survey of Participation in the Arts. Most all of their reports are available for free in PDF form.

However, the most interesting report, (and relevant to this discussion) is the report entitled: Beyond Attendance; A Multi Modal Understanding of Arts Participation:

As far at the attendance figures go, all the reports pretty much confirm the Broadway League statistics that Tom Loughlin cites.

Here is a graph from the latest Survey of Participation in the Arts in 2008:

Next is a graph from the Beyond Attendance report, looking at the Rate of Attendance based on demographics. Which gets a little more specific.

And, lastly, (I thought this was an interesting one,) This graph looks at the participation by demographic in the Creation of art.

In this graph, African Americans actually participate more in performing in non-musical plays.

Interestingly enough, the NEA reports talk very frankly about differences in attendance rates by race. Here is an example:

Generally, significant differences were observed across the demographic cohorts for arts-creation activities, as reported in Table 7. In other words, different arts-creation activities appeal to different groups of people. Although seemingly obvious, this general fact reveals interesting sub-results.

(...)

Some arts-creation activities seem highly correlated with race/ethnicity and might be part of cultural traditions and heritage. The highest rate of participation for African Americans across the creation activities encompassing the performing and visual arts is 10.3% — for “singing with a chorale, choir, or glee club or other type of vocal group.”Although the survey’s sample size for American Indians is too small to determine whether their participation rates are different from those of other racial/ethnic groups, they do appear to have the highest rates of participation for painting, drawing, and sculpture, for pottery and jewelry-making, and for weaving and sewing. If one subscribes to a philosophy of equitable access, and if one accepts that certain forms of arts creation are more likely to engage certain ethnic groups, then one can reasonably infer from the SPPA that investments in specific types of activities among distinct communities (e.g., supporting vocal music activities in predominantly African American communities) are likely to improve cultural equity.

Anyway, just thought I would throw this out there. As I said, the reports are readily available and very interesting reading.

David Wheeler RIP

2012-01-04T23:58:00.001-05:00

The Boston Globe confirms that David Wheeler, long-time director at the American Repertory Theater and founder of The Theatre Company of Boston, has died.

David was a great fixture on the Boston theater scene and directed many memorable productions at the ART, and his tenure at the Theatre Company of Boston from 1960-1975 reads like a who's who of 70's acting talent. Stockard Channing, Al Pacino, James Wood, Paul Benedict, Blythe Danner and many more luminaries acted in his productions at the Charles Playhouse. Some productions later moved to New York.

His production of David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel starred Al Pacino and played on Broadway.

On a personal note, David was my directing teacher and his wife Bronia was my first acting teacher. Through their classes I met the people with whom I would start my theater company and David encouraged us.

This meant a lot to me. I was less than a year out of the Army, with no real theater background. His wealth of experience in the American theater was almost inconceivable, and, yet, he treated every student or member of the Boston theater scene that he came in contact with as a colleague.

I remember him asking me about the Army and I told him what it was like, he said, "you should write a play!" And so I did. (Here's a review.) A few years later I got my first IRNE nomination for Best New Play.

The video is from the first rehearsal of David's production of No Man's Land at the A.R.T. in 2007.

A Poor Player Takes a Hard Look At Perennial Numbers

2012-01-04T08:36:00.002-05:00

Tom Loughlin, who blogs at A Poor Player, throws out a stark post after reviewing the latest Broadway League and NEA numbers. (83% of Broadway tickets to plays were purchased by Caucasians.)

After years of reading these statistics he comes to the following conclusion: "Theatre is primarily for white people, as both audience members and practitioners."

It is a more thoughtful post than that declaration might make it sound, (if you know Tom's blog you'll know what I mean,) and remember that his thoughts come after looking at the same data in report after report.

For instance, he points out that Buffalo is 38% African American, but out of the 20 theater companies listed in the area, only 2 are African American companies, and one barely produces.

Theater, Loughlin suggests, as practiced in the mainstream today, might not really appeal to other racial demographics in significant numbers. Heck, it barely appeals to Caucasians in significant numbers.

This is not to say that other races or ethnic groups do not have theatre or do not enjoy it. But the particular form of the scripted written work as interpreted by actors in a linear story-telling fashion seems to be one that has interested western Caucasians for a long time, and apparently continues to do so for a certain demographic slice of white people as a whole.

Now am I not arguing that non-whites do not enjoy theatre and participate in it. Of course they do. But statistically speaking, on the whole, non-whites simply do not appear interested in the art form as defined above. No other race or ethnic group charts in double digit percentages either as audience members or practitioners of “legit” theatre. The question that really needs to be asked to probe these numbers more carefully is whether or not these low numbers are the result of institutional discrimination, or simply general disinterest in the art form. I suspect many people will want to believe the former, but the numbers seem to indicate that perhaps the latter is closer to reality. One aspect of this question that needs serious consideration is the economic inequality question, but even that may reveal that whites are more willing to sacrifice economic hardship to see and do theatre.

A Brief History of John Lahr and All-Black Productions of American Classics

2012-01-03T01:10:00.002-05:00

Terrence Howard & Anika Noni Rose in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

John Lahr, theater critic for The New Yorker, just posted a roundup of the Best Theater of the Year on that publication's Culture Desk blog.

He begins with a wish list for Santa:

Santa, baby, next year please: can we get Arthur Kopit’s brilliant “Discovery of America” on the boards? Will you deliver—I’ve been asking for years now—a few good sets of lyrics in musical shows which aren’t movie retreads and which carry appropriate intellectual weight? And no more infernal all-black productions of Tennessee Williams plays unless we can have their equal in folly: all-white productions of August Wilson. And, since I’ve been a good boy, could I get more bravery from producers and from playwrights to take the theatre beyond sexual politics to the soiled workings of the public realm? Is more thought, more visual excitement, more joy too much to ask?

It seemed strange to me that he would single out the race reversing of Williams' plays into his end of the year wrap-up for a year that didn't include a high profile all-black Tennessee Williams production. Although there is the upcoming Broadway-bound production of A Streetcar Named Desire with Blair Underwood and Daphne Rubin-Vega, which I guess he is trying to trip out of the gate.

Lahr didn't even review the 2008 Broadway revival of Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , which starred James Earl Jones and other famous African American actors. Hilton Als covered the production for the Magazine, and wrote only a few sentences dealing with the color-blind casting, summing it up with: "Race plays as much or as little a role in this revival as you want it to." Ben Brantley in his New York Times review was even more dismissive of any problems the race reversal might present. And he pointed out that the director, Debbie Allen, had nudged the period feel of the production enough to leap frog it past the era of Jim Crow.

However, John Lahr did review Yale Rep's 2009 all-black staging of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman for the New Yorker. He opened that notice with black playwright August Wilson's 1996 condemnation of the "folly" of presenting just such a production.

Lahr based his criticism of the casting on the larger themes related to the time period in which the play is set:

Loman is a monument to envy and its hate-filled agitations—all pluck and no luck. His outraged bewilderment—“What’s the mystery?,” “What’s the secret?,” “What happened?”—is predicated on the notion that abundance is there for the taking. This sense of expectation and entitlement was simply not shared by African-Americans in 1949. “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity . . . that you were a worthless human being,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962, in an open letter to his nephew. “You were not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.”

And the specific time period is apparently what also got Lahr's goat about that all-black Cat on a Hot Tin Roof production from the previous year.

On CUNY TV's Theater Talk, Lahr appeared with Elizabeth Ashley to discuss the production, which he admitted he had not seen, yet.

Here is his opening gambit concerning the casting (at about 17:00 into the video):

The "mendacity" of the play... Big Daddy, this is a man who has 28,000 acres of the most fertile land west of the Nile. Now, okay, those 28,000 acres of fertile delta land - that wealth - that was built on the backs of slavery. That is the omnipresent, unspoken central sin under which this whole elaborate structure of society, manners, wealth has been built. It's all been built to cut out, to block out, to not see...to actually alibi this unspoken, but omnipresent thing.

His contention is that an all black production actually robs the play of this layer of meaning and that there is a trickle down effect. Elizabeth Ashley actually argued for the production in a way that intrigued Lahr into promising he would see it. Her point was that black family structures and white family structures in the deep South of that time were intertwined "psychologically" and mirrored each other in some respects.

7 Small Films of 2011 That Stayed With Me

2012-01-02T17:17:00.000-05:00

1. The Trip

"Everything's exhausting when you're past 40."

Two British stars take a trip to the North of England together in this Michael Winterbottom project that was edited down from a BBC series.

The Trip is a long form improvisation with a spinecreated around the imagined (or real) middle-career and middle-agedmalaise of the actor Steve Coogan. Divorced, in the middle of abreak-up with his American girlfriend, Coogan calls his friend Rob Brydon, acomedian and impressionist, to accompany him on an all-expense paid trip tovisit restaurants in the North of England for a magazine piece he has beencommissioned to write by the Observer.

Their talents are on full display with Coogan playing broodyand barely amused to Brydon's optimistic, playful needling. Several of the movie's centerpieces involvethe two men dueling with their impressions of iconic stars such as MichaelCaine or Sean Connery. These can go on for a bit, but one of them will always hiton something deeper in their own relationship as friends or the other's career.

The pair travel through the desolate, but beautiful moors andend up in the Lake Country, while the deeper themes of time passing us by andthe desperation to make some type of mark on the world start to presentthemselves more clearly. Finally, thetwo are walking in the footsteps of immortal poets like Coleridge andWordsworth, but rather than things getting burdened with too much pretension,the biting humor of Coogan and Brydon constructs a sturdy engine fueled withjust enough gallows humor to keep us moving along.

2. Bellflower

I wasn't sure what to think of this film once it finished,but I was feeling many things. Bellflower is a rambling interestingly-shot trip through depression, jealousy and anger as couldonly be properly filmed by the twenty- something renegade filmmakers who madeit.

Evan Glodell, the director and writer, puts himself in thelead as the slacker Woodrow who spends his time fixing up a muscle car namedMedusa. He also tries to build theperfect flamethrower with his friend Aiden. Their shared buddy fantasy is that they will be prepared for an imagined Road Warrior-type apocalypse. However,after Woodrow gets mixed up with a new girl, he and Aiden's lives become verydifficult, very fast.

Flawed, but with a raw artistry and vision,there is no doubt that these guys have something here, but what it is, I'm afraid I or any critics I have read elsewhere can't describe fully.

3. Another Earth

Yes, the science fiction elements are shaky of course. If you have seen the ads or the poster for Another Earth, youwould know that an identical planet to the size of the Earth would create allsorts of gravity issues if we could see it looming in the sky like that. Bestseen closer to the fantasy end of science fiction (think Twilight Zone) MikeCahill's film is really about coming to terms with ourselves as we are, withall of our history and finding a way to move forward.

Earth's citizens become aware of another planet, one thatseems remarkably similar to their own, drifting closer to them Thisunleashes the imagination of woman who caused afatal car accident that derailed her promising young life, (she was on her way to an MIT scholarship) and wrecked thefamily of another man. She tries to find a way tosomehow make retribution.

One can easily forgive some of the science flubs, but thecredibility issues with the young woman's strange plan to make amends seems abit more outlandish than the huge doppleganger planet that hangs in thesky. However, the haunting tone and thecamera's love of the beautiful Brit Marling, (also a co-writer onthe film,) makes for a hypnotic experience.

And the first contact of our NASA with the sister organization of that otherEarth is a spine-tingling sequence matched only by the finale, which is closestthing to the chills I received when I first saw some of the classic Rod Serlingmasterpieces.

4. Senna

Know nothing about NASCAR and even less about Formula Oneracing? Then you actually might want to check out this documentary about Senna, Brazil's legendary Formula One racing champion.

An aggressive driver on the track, Senna is portrayed as a gentlerand more contemplative man out of the car. Though the film doesn't hide that he was an intense character, he comes across as humble and self-aware. While he obviously dated some of the world'smost beautiful women, the filmmakers seem uninterested in his romantic life andonly fleetingly feature his family. Thepolitics and rules of the international governing body of Formula One racingprovide the obstacles and Senna emerges as a pure competitor who must somehownegotiate his way through this thicket to the championship, despite sometimes beingthe best driver. Unfortunately, the movie becomes a little bit of a hagiographyin this area, with only a hint of Senna's own infractions.

With the high decibel roar of the exclusive Formula Onefootage to serve as a pillar, the story eschews the static documentary conventionof the talking head, and Senna instead uses actual period interview audio and a fewvoiceovers to thrillingly recreate the fast rise and short life of this athletedying young. Senna was killed in anaccident at the age of 34 and the footage taken from his racing car allows usto be right next to him until the very moment of his fatal collision.

5. Buck

A kind of serene twin to Senna, the documentary Buck shows us another man was born to be the best at what he does. Rather than Senna's high octane pace, this film ambles along and waits until its lastmoments to throw you.

Buck Brannaman travels the country running training campsand seminars for horse owners. He is a protege of a famous horse trainer whowas the inspiration for the novel The Horse Whisperer, which was made into a moviewith Robert Redford. Buck himself servedas a consultant on that film, and his own horse was used for many of thestunts.

With beautiful sunsets and mountain vistas as a backdrop, director Cindy Meehl gradually reveals Buck's past. His brother and he were young prodigies who performed rope tricks aroundthe country, managed by their increasingly abusive father. Buck's gentlenessand understanding of horses is almost magical, but the film has an ace up itssleeve that leaves the sage cowboy and the audience off-balance.

6. Five Days Gone

Playwright Anna Kerrigan made her first feature film byscraping together 60,000 dollars and securing an interesting location - a largeestate out in Western Massachusetts. Five Days Gone starts in a New York City bar as two sisters, who never knew each otherexisted, meet for the first time after their successful father has recentlydied.

While one sister, Camden, grew up with her father and all the money thatthat entailed, Alice, played by the writer Kerrigan, grew up poor, never reallyknew her absentee Dad and doesn't seem to really care. Camden and herreluctant husband, invite Alice and her boyfriend to stay for a weekend at the family estate, recently inherited..

A few days on the grounds of the house, and a slow tensionbuilds, with hints of Chekhov or Turgnev (Kerrigan admits these are herinfluences.) The sparks come a little too slowly and there are someinconsistencies in the characters that seem engineered to create some neededconflict. However, the performances ofKerrigan as the skeptical Alice and Brooke Bloom as the nervous Camden, keepmoving the film into the territory where it is at its most interesting: as a tentativecoming of age story about family and class.

Five Days Gone Trailer from Anna Kerrigan on Vimeo.

7. God Willing

Remember that 60 Minutes piece years ago about the JimRoberts cult? You know, the sketchy church that seduces away bright young college studentsinto a Spartan, separatist lifestyle that prohibits them from ever talking tothe their families again and has them riding bicycles and eating out of garbage cans?

Well, that cult still exists and is as active as ever. Only now, bereaved family members who havehad children seduced into the organization can connect with each other overthe internet. As a network, the familiescan run surveillance on the nomadic cult if they suddenly pop up in a metroarea. They share photos online so thatfamilies can see if their sons or daughters are hiding out in the houses thecult members rent.

Filmmaker Angeline Griego followed this group of familymembers closely, and her film, God Willing, documents the attempt of one woman in particularto make contact with her daughter. Itis as suspenseful as any Hollywood thriller - the cult has been known tocompletely blow town at the slightest hint they are being watched.

As they circle theirtarget, the family members talk about what they know about the cult and abouttheir loved ones, some of whom have been out of touch for decades

God Willing - Trailer from About Time Productions on Vimeo.

Tweet Seats - Just Another Realignment in Shrinking Arts Coverage

2011-12-28T17:30:00.000-05:00

In this morning's Boston Globe, an article appeared which has Facebook on fire with condemnation.

Apparently, some theater companies are trying to find ways to assimilate the lifestreaming creative class into the quiet of the performance hall.Or at least that is one way you can read the article.

Indeed, the outrage in the comments following the Globe piece, and on Facebook, focuses on the obvious potential disturbance of lighted smartphones and the accompanying tapping sounds on touch screens or keypads. The technological barbarians, it would seem from reading these statements, are at the gate! And theater organizations, beaten down by a seige-like convergence of dying older subscribers and disinterested younger demographics, appear to be willing to hand over the keys.

However, it seems that what this story is really about is the continuing decline of arts journalism and theater coverage. Finding the normal conduits of reviews and advertising in the Arts and Entertainment sections of traditional mainstream media outlets shrinking, an arts organization might imagine that the prospect of anybody who can bring a "following" of 10,000 people or more would be enticing. The official twitter account of the Boston Globe Arts Section has only 4,808 followers.

For instance, a desired demographic for many theater companies in Boston might include people who read Slate, Salon, Huffington Post...Gawker? Try finding consistent coverage of local theater at those addresses.

Twitter can solve that problem to a certain extent in that the service hits the desired demographic and can function simultaneously at a local and global level. Though a new problem arises in the fact that the feed quickly consigns tweets, providing that they aren't posted on a blog or some other location, to the archives. Twitter's search function only gives results from a certain time period anyway. The term "yesterday's newspaper" was never as relevant as it is today.

Theater companies are, of course, trying to exercise control of the situation. The authorized tweeters will most likely be hand-picked to provide the type of tweets the Globe used as examples from the Palm Bay Orchestra production of Madame Butterfly: “Cio-cio san is telling it like it is! #pbobutterfly’’ This is the type of thing that many theater companies might tweet themselves, some already do.

Some companies, like the Boston Ballet and the Huntington are taking a reasonable path, which mirrors the way many theater companies approached us bloggers "way back" in like 2005, or so.

This spring, the Boston Ballet plans to give carefully selected social media users free seats.

“The tweeters themselves will be culled from our social media forums based upon some criteria - strong writing skills, strong following, and a level of professionalism in their correspondence with us prior to the performance,’’ e-mailed spokeswoman Mariel MacNaughton. “They will be provided with informational packets prior to their visit to the theater and, once in the theater, can tweet from their seats prior to the performance, during intermission, and postperformance.’’

I don't think we have too much to fear from glowing screens for now. Although I should say that I have already encountered several smartphone-sized incidents of the "indiglo effect" over the past year or so. Now that fewer patrons are wearing watches, a particularly long performance produces larger illuminations when a restless theatergoer needs to check the time.

A Christmas Video From My Elusive Friend

2011-12-23T00:24:00.003-05:00

Actually, that's me as the elusive Lord Somerville. The video was shot and edited by Brad Kelly. That's my voice as well.

We made a couple of these for the Somerville Community Access Television station.

It is made for the local audience so things like the subway shuttle buses being instituted for the weekend won't make much sense, unless you are trying to get to the Actors Shakespeare Production of Merry Wives of Windsor in Davis Square.

Jacob Marley awaits the audience for our 4th Trolley Christmas Carol today.

2011-12-19T11:46:00.001-05:00

Jacob Marley awaits the audience for our 4th Trolley Christmas Carol today., a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Ornamental Self-portrait

2011-12-15T23:41:00.001-05:00

Ornamental Self-portrait, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Occupy Boston Will Face Eviction - Follow the Livestream

2011-12-09T00:04:00.002-05:00

Watch live streaming video from occupyboston at livestream.com

Guirgis Likens Production of his Play to a Minstrel Show

2011-12-08T13:49:00.004-05:00

In case you haven't seen it, yet, playwright Stephen Adly Guirgis wrote an e-mail to the Hartford Courant about seeing the Hartford TheaterWorks production of his play: The Motherfucker With the Hat.

Guirgis has been making people aware that the casting process may have excluded Latinos from auditioning for characters that were specifically written to be Puerto Rican. Apparently the director had pretty much pre-cast the two lead roles with Caucasian actors he knew from New York University.

Guirgis's reaction to the production is, well...

The experience of being in the theater and watching two Caucasian actors pretending to be Latinos for an audience compromised entirely of Caucasian theater goers was disturbing and surreal to me. I felt like I was in a time warp. I honestly felt like I was witnessing something that I had only read about in history books(...)what I saw felt to me very nearly a minstrel show.

Read the whole Courant article here.

First Time I've Done Live TV -Local Access

2011-12-06T23:01:00.001-05:00

If you wandered past Channel 3 on your TV tonight in Somerville you saw the unexpected. And probably laughed! Can you spot the non-actor? This is the closest I'll ever come to being Lorne Michaels., a photo by BradKellyPhoto on Flickr.

My friend Brad Kelly produced a live, hour- long show for Somerville Channel 3 tonight.

My wife Amanda and I helped by writing many of the scripts and we had some funny actors from around Boston to help out.

That's Amanda as the Blonde anchor and I played a liberal pundit on a political cooking show.

It was the first time I had done a live television show. It was very interesting. We didn't have a lot of notice about it, so many of the scripts were made on the fly and we would strategically place them around set just in case.

It was a blast. It will rerun throughout the month and then will go online.

"Where Be Your Jibes Now?" - Hamlet at UC Davis

2011-11-26T13:10:00.001-05:00

"Where Be Your Jibes Now?" - Hamlet at UC Davis, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Sondheim On Critics

2011-11-21T00:19:00.003-05:00

Stephen Sondheim isn't as terrified of the internet as Michael Kaiser.

Heck, Mr. Sondheim finds a certain optimism in the passion of the online exchanges about theater, even in internet theater chatrooms.

This from an excerpt, (in the Guardian,) of his upcoming book:

For me, a good critic is a good writer. A good critic is someone who recognises and acknowledges the artist's intentions and the work's aspirations, and judges the work by them, not by what his own objectives would have been. A good critic is so impassioned about his subject that he can persuade you to attend something you'd never have imagined going to. A good critic is an entertaining read. A good critic is hard to find.
Then again, to a certain degree, good critics are no longer necessary to find. The phrase "Everybody's a critic" has taken on a universal cast. The internet encourages people to share their opinions with the world. In the theatre, the buzz created by chatroom chatters has become increasingly important to a show's reputation before it opens. There are thousands of critics tapping away their opinions to whoever will listen – so who needs a paid pontificator to tell you what your opinion should be?
Showbusiness chatrooms reveal that the need to criticise is insatiable. They also reveal that there are still people who are enthusiastic about the theatre, who want not only to go, but to talk about what they've gone to. The diffidence and short attention spans that pervade so much of our culture were nowhere evident in the lively chatrooms I looked at, although I soon learned not to keep logging on for the same reason I learned not to read my reviews: every group of compliments about my work that started me preening was soon peppered with potshots that unpreened me. And for every piece of thoughtful observation about other people's work, there was a piece of mean-spirited snottiness – some of which, I regret to say, made me laugh and wish I were young enough again to participate in those kinds of exchanges.

Is There a Theatrical 1%?

2011-11-17T13:46:00.003-05:00

Scott Walters, over on his Theatre Ideas blog, publishes the first in what he is promising to be a multi-post series called "Occupy Lincoln Center."

His first post is a comparison of the income inequality issues raised by the Occupy Wall Street movement to the disparity of contributions and grants in the nonprofit arts arena:

At the end of October, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy issued a report entitled Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change. Holly Sidford, who wrote the report, researched philanthropic giving to arts organization across the US. What she discovered is as disturbing as the Occupy Wall Street facts about income disparity. Sidofrd found that nonprofits in the arts with budgets over $5M, which she says represents just 2% of all arts nonprofits, receive 55% of contributions, gifts and grants. Let's break this out in the way we did with national income above.

If there were 100 nonprofit arts organizations dividing a million dollars, it would look like this:

2 organizations would split $550,000 ($275,000 each)

The remaining 98 organizations would each get $4591

The ratio is a about 60:1

In other words, the income disparity between nonprofit arts institutions is nearly twice as bad as the income disparity in the economy as a whole. If the arts are supposed to hold the mirror up to nature, it is a magnifying glass.

You can read the whole post here, and add your comments if you like.

Back in 2006, I wrote about a similar thing here on this blog. I looked at the sizable gap between the top and bottom of the Mass Cultural Council's grantees in the Theatre category.

The three top recipients:

Huntington Theatre Company $52,000

North Shore Music Center $52,000

American Repertory Theatre $42,330 Things drop off precipitously after this.

The Western Mass summer companies get a nice change, (Williamstown-$31,790.00 Shakespeare and Company $25, 120.) but then we start going down almost completely into the 4 digit territory.

I understand spending has been cut drasctically, but consider the ratios:

The combined grants to New Repertory, Lyric, Merrimack Rep,Company One, Speakeasy Stage, Sugan, Theatre Offensive, and Stoneham Theatre company.... $35,350.00!

All those 8 companies combined, get far less Mass State cultural money for theatre than the Huntington, ART and NSMT get individually.

Just to make things little more concrete, the $2000.00 grant Company One gets would not even pay the rent for one of their runs as Resident Company of the Boston Center for the Arts.

I had written about a very similar thing back in 2006. I looked at the sizable gap between the top and bottom of the Massachusetts Cultural Council grantees in the Theatre category: I went to see how things are stacking up today, but it might take a bit more digging. The Mass Cultural Council's website makes finding the data a bit harder now. They don't archive it there and the info for the current year is listed by county rather than statewide by category.However, it looks like most of these numbers hold very much where they were five years ago. Company One now gets $3000 instead of $2000, etc. And Sugan and few others no longer exist. Now, as then, I'm not really sure what to do with those numbers.

The Flavor Graveyard

2011-11-17T11:07:00.001-05:00

The Flavor Graveyard, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

On the tour of the Ben and Jerry's Factory they told us that the worst flavor disaster might be Sugar Plum, which was so bad that distributors sent it back by the truckload.

In fact, pigs wouldn't eat it and most of the stock had to be incinerated.

I took this photo in the Flavor Graveyard, which is the final resting place of beloved and little known retired flavors.

Michael Kaiser's Grandfather is Scared of the Internet

2011-11-14T11:04:00.007-05:00

Today in the Huffington post we find another lost column by Michael Kaiser's grandfather. It is nice of Mr. Kaiser to type these up for us, as they were probably handwritten before word processors.

Kidding aside, this time the screed is about the scariness of online critics. I'm not kidding, he uses that word.

In theater circles alone one can visit talkingbroadway.com, broadwayworld.com, theatermania.com, playbill.com and numerous other sites. Many arts institutions even allow their audience members to write their own critiques on the organizational website.

This is a scary trend.

While I have had my differences with one critic or another, I have great respect for the field as a whole. Most serious arts critics know a great deal about the field they cover and can evaluate a given work or production based on many years of serious study and experience. These critics have been vetted by their employers.

Anyone can write a blog or leave a review in a chat room. The fact that someone writes about theater or ballet or music does not mean they have expert judgment.

The problem here, and one that I've talked about for almost ten years on this blog, is that Kaiser conflates EVERYTHING out there into one big scary Internet monster. And then, unsurprisingly, can't even fully articulate what makes it so scary.

Meanwhile, the Pulitzer Prize winning play Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris is making the regional rounds. Its New York run garnered it a solid A- on Stagegrade, and most regional critics have pretty much confirmed that grade. The play also looks to be going to Broadway.

But if you are interested in two interesting regional dissents you can find them only online.

Don Hall, The Angry White Guy in Chicago, saw the Steppenwolf production:

The result is that none of the second act characters have anything to say. They're all very two dimensional and the tension is non-existent. If Act One was Norman Lear, Act Two was like ZOOM meets a bad SNL sketch. Each character is assigned a position and then shrilly pontificates it throughout. There are virtually no class distinctions (everyone in Act Two is affluent upper middle class) and the issue of race is forced. Further, one of the games in this act is a volley of competing racial jokes (might've worked if any of them had been genuinely funny because then the indictment travels to those in the audience laughing at them - but they weren't funny, just blunt).

With the first act so smart and pointed, the second act deficiencies make the play feel a bit like a squandered opportunity. Sure, the message that "The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same" is fine but we know that already.

And Boston's own Tom Garvey at The Hub Review recommends the Trinity Rep production, but also finds problems with the disparate halves of the play:

What bothers me about the exercise here is that it's simply beside the point; there's interesting cultural work to be done, based on Norris's premise, but the playwright refuses to do it. That the white family knows a nasty joke about black people, and the black family knows one about white people, doesn't really tell us all that much about life in the millennium.

(...)

Clearly there's a lot there to unpack, but Norris can't be bothered - and why? Well, I imagine because it might make his play truly controversial. And he doesn't want that - we're all supposed to agree in the theatre, remember? The playwright is expected to pour his scorn onto somebody else, somebody who isn't actually in the audience. So Norris diverts his action into shared laughter over outrageous dirty jokes. He parodies "hysteria" a second time, but refuses to dig beneath it, into its actual causes.

Just don't tell Michael Kaiser's grandfather. It's scary out there.

Blurring of Criticism and Publicity

2011-11-13T21:38:00.005-05:00

What is an arts journalist anyway?

Many news outlets have critics who double as arts reporters, but most daily newspapers separate the duties of reviewing and reporting.

Of course, the arts beat isn't the same as the city desk or the Middle East bureau, and so it isn't as if lives are at stake. However, sometimes tax dollars, city planning and policy direction are affected by institutions falling under the jurisdiction of the arts editor. These are the cases for which numbers must be dialed, documents must be examined and shoe leather must be applied.

Then there is a large expanse of column space that is shared, sometimes equally, by reviews and publicity.

What functions do the Arts pages of a newspaper provide if not to tell readers:

A.) What is going on.
B.) Whether or not what is going on is worth their money and time.

It is usually easy to distinguish between and aesthetic assessment and a publicity piece, but sometimes it is trickier.

Take, for instance, the opening paragraph of this New York Times piece from last week about the new Theresa Rebeck play Seminar opening on Broadway next week. The play stars the actor Alan Rickman.

ARTISTS in general, and writers in particular, as everybody knows, tend to be sensitive creatures who receive criticism like body blows. So there’s considerable theater-of-cruelty entertainment in watching four fledgling novelists cringe beneath the blistering stares, scornful dismissals and disdainfully curled lips of Alan Rickman.

It reads very much like a lede for a rave review, no? Read on into the second paragraph, and you are told more about the plot. Then it is revealed that the play is in previews, and only after that do you finally get a quote from the playwright, Ms. Rebeck. In what follows there are other review-like sentences as well.

What a score for the Seminar P.R. team!

In all seriousness though, it did make me think about the blurring of the lines between marketing and aesthetic assessment.

As the online presences of arts organizations grow, will in-house created content slowly evolve to sound more like objective reviews?

Nantucket Harbor

2011-11-08T13:17:00.001-05:00

Nantucket Harbor, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Our Kickstarter Campaign is So Close To Success!

2011-11-03T16:02:00.002-04:00

The film I co-wrote screened at the Houston Comedy Film Festival last night and is on at the the Red Rock Film Festival later this month.

Our Kickstarter campaign to raise money to offset the costs of the festival circuit has been underway for a few weeks. Thanks the the generosity of people we are getting close to our goal.

We are entering the final days and any amount will help. Thanks to loyal Mirror Up To Nature readers who have already contributed!

Zombies Make Great Kissers

2011-10-30T17:00:00.003-04:00

My friend Erik Rodenhiser offers his services. Erik is owner of the Griffen Theatre in Salem where I spend most of my waking hours during October. We are coming down to the wire on Halloween season.

Just a Little Busy In Salem Today!

2011-10-23T00:02:00.001-04:00

Yeah, it's just a little busy today in #Salem. Here's the line outside our show., a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Occupy Boston Crackdown

2011-10-11T02:16:00.003-04:00

Below is a video of the start of the Occupy Boston crackdown. The people being seized are Veterans for Peace, who put themselves between the protesters and the police.

Wedding arrival at the Crane Estate - Castle Hill - Ipswich, MA

2011-10-10T08:38:00.001-04:00

Wedding arrival at the Crane Estate - Castle Hill - Ipswich, MA, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

A Large Scale Foursquare

2011-09-25T23:29:00.001-04:00

Where I'm at! Our film plays at the Pawtucket Film Festival This Afternoon!, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Me at the Pawtucket Vistors Center for the screening of our film at the 12th Annual Pawtucket Film Festival

Big Weekend for Our Short Film

2011-09-23T18:02:00.003-04:00

The short film I co-wrote with my wife Amanda and made with some good friends is playing at two film festivals this weekend!

The Oblique Sector is an official selection of the 2011 Atlanta Underground Film Festival and we'll be screening on Saturday night at 11:30PM.

And, a little closer to home, we will be screening at the 2011 Pawtucket Film Festival in Rhode Island on Sunday, September 25th at 3:30PM

Boston Theatre - Friday Roundup

2011-09-23T11:39:00.005-04:00

(Dan Roach in Next Fall at Speakeasy Stage Photo by Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo)

Last Chance

Exquisite Corps' production of Trout Stanley makes its way upstream and then closes this weekend.

The audience centered performance piece How Much is Enough; Our Values in Question ends its questioning Sunday at Arts Emerson.

The journey must end for The Journeying Ways, which is a co production of Charlestown Working Theater and Whistler in the Dark. They are presenting The Bacchae and The Odyssey in repertory, but only through Sunday.

The Boston Experimental Theatre Company closes the curtain on its rare production of Albert Camus' The Misunderstanding at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Ongoing

Next Fall , Speakeasy Stage Company's season opener, continues at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Huck and Tom keep floating down that Big River at the Lyric Stage Company.

The crazy kids at New Rep still won't pay the Rent and they've extended their stay.

The Hartford stage production of Arthur Miller's The Crucible keeps the accusations flying.

Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, a play about an acting class in Shirley, Vermont continues at the Gamm Theater in Providence.

The Huntington Theater Company looks like it is on its way to a hit with Candide!

Catfish Row keeps in tune at the American Repertory Theater's production of The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

The captives are still being held in Merrimack Repertory's Production of The Persian Quarter, a play about the Iran hostage crisis.

Trinity Rep's production of His Girl Friday keeps the wisecracks flying.

Sherlock Holmes keeps on the case in Central Square Theater's production of The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Television Melodrama With A Classical Music Twist

2011-09-19T13:59:00.007-04:00

The digital streaming service Hulu is allowing me to catch up on some Korean shows.

I served as a Korean linguist for the U.S. Army in Korea for years and got hooked on some of the dramas on television then. In fact, as part of our training at the Defense Language Institute, we watched the famous Chil Tu (Jealousy), which is considered the father of the modern trendy television soap in the R.O.K.

Currently, I am enjoying a very popular show from 2008 called Beethoven Virus. The plot revolves around the formation of a new philharmonic orchestra out of what is essentially a community music festival.

At the center of the drama is the handsome, volatile, but genius conductor Kang who is famous for walking out before performances because his orchestras are not ready to play. "I would rather offend this audience by cancelling than offend Brahms!"

Through the manipulations of a public employee for the Arts and Culture Ministry, (also a competent violinist,) Kang finds himself helping conduct an orchestra of mostly amateurs for a public music festival.

In this process, he meets a young police officer who plays for the community group, but is clearly a prodigy. Shades of a Mozart/Salieri musical rivalry hit the edges of the story, along with a love triangle involving the lovely violinist who is clearly attracted to both men.

However, the main reason to watch the show is to marvel that a popular television show could be so clearly about the place of classical music in the culture. The episodes explore such issues as how classical musicians make a living, the politics involved in public art subsidy and the music itself.

For instance, an older player explains to some of the younger hopefuls that a state sponsored musician will make 1300 a month. They are flabbergasted at how low that is, but he reminds them that they can tutor on the side and they will be eligible for a small pension because they would be government employees.

And who can resist a show in which the climax of an episode hinges on the proper execution of a musical notation in the William Tell Overture?

The conventions of these Korean shows takes a little getting used to. As anybody who has watched Asian horror movies probably knows, the more blatant sexier elements of, say, American television programs are replaced by daydream-like moments, complete with some cloying pop music.

In Beethoven Virus, though, these moments are just as often about an attraction to great music. As in the photo below where the young prodigy's mind drifts from traffic duty to orchestrations.

Who Wins the Playwright Money Matchup?

2011-09-15T13:56:00.005-04:00

At least as far as Broadway grosses are concerned.

A post over at The Youngblog shows an interesting way to look at the "success" of certain playwrights over history using the The Broadway League website.

Check it out here.

Boston Theatre - Friday Roundup - Storrow Bridge Safe Edition

2011-09-08T23:56:00.011-04:00

All the U-hauls have left our narrow streets, and the students will soon learn which bars they can get into on which nights.

This year, nobody won the Storrow Pool, which is a bet on when, exactly, a new college student will peel the top of his or her U-haul off on the Storrow Drive overpass. (See photo above.) No students harmed the bridge this year. However, a lumber truck did flip there a few days later.

So let's take this as a signal that the new theatrical season is officially underway! Indeed, most theaters are moving into high gear. The mid-sized and larger houses are sporting big musicals to usher in the Autumn winds.

And next week will add even more productions to the list, including the official start of ArtsEmerson's sophomore season, the opening of Speakeasy's new show and the return of Whistler in the Dark's production of The Bacchae.

Get out and see some theater. You're already behind!

Opening

A stripper, a Scrabble champion and a city dump all figure in Exquisite Corps' production of Trout Stanley which opens at The Factory Theater

New Rep presents the musical Rent out in Watertown.

Get your newsroom patois ready as Trinity Rep opens their production of His Girl Friday.

Leonard Bernstein's operetta Candide makes its bow at the Huntington Theatre Company.

You can sit in on the acting class of Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation at the Gamm Theatre in Providence.

Sherlock Holmes is on the case and hot on the trail of The Hound of the Baskervilles at Central Square Theater in Cambridge.

Last Chance

The Fighting Over Beverly will cease this weekend at Gloucester Stage Company.

Ongoing

Huck and Jim keep traveling on the Big River at the Lyric Stage.

The witch trials continue as Hartford Stage presents Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

The American Repertory Theatre chugs into its near-sold out run of The Gershwin's Porgy and Bess.

Theatrical Mindset List

2011-09-07T19:57:00.003-04:00

Using the template of the famous Beloit College Mindset List, Howard Sherman has quickly put together a Theatrical Mindset List over on the 2AMT blog.

It is, in his words, " an unscientific traipse through the mindset of the theatrical class that will graduate in 2015, but who only started their journey of higher education in the theatre in the last week or so."

Below are a few of the entries:

2. Every theatre ticket they have ever bought or used at a professional venue has been in some way computer generated.

4. They’ve never seen the world premiere production of a Stephen Sondheim musical on Broadway.

8. Rent has always been in production somewhere in the world.

11. Edward Albee has never been out of critical favor and only infrequently produced.

20. Ben Brantley has always been the chief theatre critic of The New York Times.

21. Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton and Ralph Richardson have always been deceased.

If you have more to contribute, go ahead and post them over the 2AMT site.

Another Badly Drawn Homily From Father Pike...

2011-09-07T15:00:00.002-04:00

Split Decision on Bess's Broadway Run?

2011-09-07T08:24:00.002-04:00

The New York Post has a blind source column about the inevitability of the Broadway transfer of the American Repertory Theatre production of Porgy and Bess.

Michael Riedel reports that the Gershwin estate will have a big say.

For me, the more interesting part of the article is the power play between critics and producers/investors.

This "Porgy and Bess" mess is indeed a tricky one for the estates, the producers and the investors.

On the one hand, they'll be ceding too much power to Sondheim and the critics if they scrap the show.

"They'll do real harm to the title," says a veteran producer. "If the estates do not approve the Broadway run, they're basically saying Steve Sondheim is right and the only way to do 'Porgy and Bess' is to do the original -- a full-length opera."

Other producers believe the show should come in just to spite the critics.

"OK -- it's not my money -- but if they close, they're giving the critics way too much power," one says. "And we've finally gotten to a point where the critics don't necessarily have make-or-break power in New York anymore."

Apparently, Ben Brantley's New York Times review was a little unexpected for some involved in the production.

Arizona Critic Banned From Dinner Theater!

2011-09-03T02:13:00.006-04:00

On the Stage Door Phoenix blog, theater critic Kerry Lengel of the Arizona Republic is sad, (sort of,) to report that "the workload got a little lighter."

Apparently, a local dinner theater had enough of negative reviews and sent off a dispatch to the editors:

“After receiving a very tough review of ‘Seussical' earlier this year that we feel was taken out of context and the recent omission of our theater in the Fall Arts Preview, the Prather family has asked the editors and Kerry Lengel of The Arizona Republic to no longer review our shows...Although we respect Kerry's opinion of the shows we produce, we can no longer afford unjust criticism of the time, talent and energy it goes into producing professional live theater year round in Mesa that employs hundreds and entertains thousands."

Here is Lengel, who seems more amused than outraged:

In theory, I could test the Broadway Palm's resolve by buying my own ticket and daring them to toss me out, but that is definitely not my style, and the theater is, after all, a private, for-profit company. If a major player like Phoenix Theatre or Arizona Theatre Company, which receive government funding, tried to ban the newspaper's critic, our reaction would be very different. But as a matter of general practice, if a local theater does not wish to be reviewed, I am happy to honor that preference.

Great Shots from Film - Eternalized

2011-09-02T18:38:00.004-04:00

A tumblr blog with iconic little shots made into animated GIF's.

So often we have to either play and replay our favorite shots or moments from films. Or we have to observe the cinematography in still shots. (I collect some on my blog Gate Dimension.)

Gustav Mantel has put together quite a gallery of "cinematoGIFs". A few of them have actually been my movie shot of the week over on Gate Dimension.

Below is an example from the 1972 film Solaris.

For more examples, check out the whole tumblr blog, If We Dont, Remember Me.

Below is one more:

Bit tip o' the hat to Jim Emerson.

Nantucket Sentries

2011-08-31T23:07:00.001-04:00

Nantucket Sentries, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

The Annual "Eat Your Theater Vegetables" List: 2011-2012

2011-08-31T14:27:00.002-04:00

Instead of penning a memoir about how I spent a year seeing classics of the theater and learned how to get a book contract, I thought I would just post my annual list of canonical theatrical productions.

This list is not risky, but remember that it is being compiled by a man whose job in the military was making sure he never engaged the enemy.

We all have those shameful admissions, you know the ones I'm talking about, don't you? You hate all over Flaubert, but have never cracked the spine of Madame Bovary. You were supposed to read at least sections of The Illiad in high school, but you got the Cliff Notes instead, (younger readers may have even rented Troy, starring Brad Pitt as Achilles.) A DVD of Citizen Kane still sits in the shrink wrap on your bookshelf, and you downloaded the MP3 album for Don Giovanni, but you can't remember on which drive it resides.

This list is for you!

The ephemeral nature of theatrical productions provides added challenges to the already fragile self esteem of the cultural poseur. You can, of course, pick up a copy of The Misanthrope by Moliere, but it may be years before a production will come to the area. If you miss that one chance, your guilt may eat away at you for another five years.

Fear not! Below is a list of Boston area productions of canonical theatrical works that are coming up in the 2011-2012 season.

Some of these are very rare, indeed. For instance, Porgy and Bess is not produced all that often. However, some are staples of large and small theaters, (The Crucible, Chicago, A Streetcar Named Desire,) but if you haven't seen them, you probably should.

The emerging playwright of this list is Euripides! Boston audiences will see three stagings of his work in the upcoming season. Two of these will be by Whistler in the Dark.

Audiences will have two chances to see Anton Chekhov's Three Sisters, although the production at Yale Repertory Theater is subtitled "A New Version by Sarah Ruhl".

I have also included a new play on this list. Performing artist Laurie Anderson is an influential part of the late Twentieth century American theater and her new piece Delusion is at ArtsEmerson this fall.

So, here it is.

August: Porgy and Bess by George and Ira Gershwin at American Repertory Theatre

September: Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett at Boston Conservatory

September: The Crucible by Arthur Miller at Hartford Stage

September: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard at The Footlight Club

September: His Girl Friday by John Guare, adapted from The Front Page by Ben Hecht/Charles Macarthur and Columbia Pictures at Trinity Rep

September: Candide Music Leonard Berstein. Lyrics Richard Wilbur, Book by Hugh Wheeler at Huntington Theatre Company

September: The Bacchae by Euripides at Whistler in the Dark

September: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov (Translation Sarah Ruhl) at Yale Repertory

September: Delusion by Laurie Anderson at ArtsEmerson

September: The King and I by Rodgers and Hammerstein at North Shore Music Theatre

September: Tiny Kushner; An Evening of Short Plays at Zeitgeist Stage

October: Chicago by Kander and Ebb at MetroStage Company

October: Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill at Emerson Stage

November Mabou Mines Dollhouse at ArtsEmerson

November: Lend Me a Tenor by Ken Ludwig - Longwood Players

November: The Balcony by Jean Genet at Boston Conservatory

November: Noises Off by Michael Frayn at Quannopowitt Players

November: Ain't Misbehavin' at Lyric Stage Company

November: A Doctor in Spite of Himself by Moliere at Yale Repertory

December: The Imaginary Ivalid by Moliere at Boston University School of Theatre

January: Fen by Caryl Churchill at Whistler in the Dark

January: The Play About the Baby by Edward Albee at Equisite Corps Theatre

January: The Real Thing by Tom Stoppard at Salem Theatre Company

January: Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn at The Footlight Club

January: Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller Arlington Friends of the Drama

February: Medea by Euripides at Actors Shakespeare Project

March: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom by August Wilson at Huntington Theater Company

April: Boeing, Boeing by Marc Camoletti at Trinity Rep

April: Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill at New Rep

April: The Miracle Worker at Wheelock Family Theater

May: A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams at Vokes Players

May: Anything Goes by Cole Porter at Longwood Players

May: Trojan Women by Euripides at Whistler in the Dark

May: Private Lives by Noel Coward at Huntington Theatre Company

June: Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov at The Footlight Club

So I should say that there is always some debate about this list. Some plays were enormous hits in their times, but maybe aren't really canonical, (as you can tell, I'm using that term loosely.) For instance, Bell, Book and Candle is on at Hartford Stage next Spring, but is that frothy Broadway smash of the 1950's really essential viewing? Then again, I have included the sexy farce Boeing, Boeing at Trinity Rep. I am not a fan of The Play About the Baby, but it is one of the few Albee plays on offer this year. Tony Kushner is not really known for his short plays, but when else are you going to see a whole evening of them, like you will at Zeitgeist Stage this fall?

The companies presenting these works range from large to small, and from professional to community to student. While I cannot, of course, vouch for these particular productions, I can say that all of the companies listed have done great work in the past. Boston has some of the oldest community theaters in the country, and you will often find some of hottest fringe actors from downtown at Arlington Friends of the Drama or at the Footlight Club in Jamaica Plain. In fact, directors from Boston's best professional companies are called upon to helm productions at the local universities.

By the way, I don't include Shakespeare on this list, because it goes without saying, I hope.

So, there it is, and let me know your thoughts, or clue me into anything I've missed - the comments section was invented for that kind of thing.

Lake Placid Wedding Guests As Hurricane Irene Approaches

2011-08-30T23:41:00.001-04:00

Lake Placid Wedding Guests As Hurricane Irene Approaches, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Oak Bluffs, Grand Illumination.

2011-08-26T18:50:00.001-04:00

Oak Bluffs cottages fully lit for Grand Illumination., a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

In Case You Missed Church - I Made This Little Capsule Review

2011-08-16T11:11:00.001-04:00

Boston's Publick Theatre Goes on Hiatus

2011-08-15T15:39:00.007-04:00

(Photo Credit Mark Simpson)

The Boston Globe has the story.

Artistic Director Diego Arciniegas is stepping down.

“It became clear to me that I needed to move on,’’ said Arciniegas, 51, who stepped down in tandem with Publick Theatre Boston producing director Susanne Nitter. “This is something we spent a lot of time talking about.’’

Both Arciniegas and Nitter will remain on the Publick’s board to help with the transition - a process that, he said, might entail spending a year or two interviewing candidates and redefining the theater’s mission.

The Publick, under Diego's leadership, has had some high times (Design for Living,9 Circles) and some troubled times (Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which resulted in a conflict with the playwright Edward Albee ) in their recent years of residency at the Boston Center for the Arts.

As an organization, The Publick has weathered quite a few financial and executive shakeups. Both those columns were shifting in the sand a number of years back when Spiro Veludos made his departure. The Publick survived.

This seems like purely an artistic departure - the statement to the Globe insists that the Public is doing fine in the economic downturn. However, the final part of the statement does leave the future of the company a little ambiguous.

Last summer, the Publick's outdoor stage at Christian Herter Park (Photo above by Mark Simpson) served as the home of the ever-extending run of the Orfeo Group's The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged.

Citrusy Somerville Houses

2011-08-13T18:13:00.001-04:00

Citrusy Somerville Houses, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Mitt Romney's Shopping Aisle Reading

2011-08-11T20:48:00.003-04:00

"Corporations are people," - Mitt Romney in Iowa today.

The T Plays - Now a Tradition

2011-08-09T17:03:00.005-04:00

Mill 6 Collaborative seems to have hit the sweet spot when it came up with its playwriting challenge called The T Plays.

Tomorrow night marks the opening of the third annual run of this unique mini-festival.

Seven Boston-based playwrights boarded the MBTA last Saturday morning, and by that night they had to have a draft of a ten minute play to hand into the festival organizers.

Within a week, the plays are staged with some of Boston's best fringe directors overseeing some of the Hub's talented actors.

Wondering what it's like for a playwright to be under such pressure? John Greiner-Ferris, one of the participating writers, chronicles the experience on his blog.

For those who have never attended before, I would advise getting tickets early The Factory Theater is a very small venue.

Boston Theatre - Friday Roundup

2011-08-04T18:28:00.009-04:00

Opening

The Orfeo Group opens their production the 2007 Olivier Award-winning play Love Song at the Charlestown Working Theater. As a reminder, Thursday nights are free of charge at Orfeo.

Stephen Deitz's Shooting Star, a tale of lovers reuniting, starts a run at Salem Theatre Company.

The Sound Of Music will be heard starting this weekend at the Reagle Music Theatre in Waltham.

Last Chance

Tracy Lett's paranoid fantasy Bug keeps getting under the skin of audiences at The Factory Theater through Saturday night.

Gloucester Stage's production of Last Day will see its last day this weekend.

Ongoing

The Office star Mindy Kaling's comedy Matt and Ben about the early days of the Good Will Hunting boys continues at Central Square Theater.

Hit the Boston Common for your free outdoor Shakespeare fix with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's production of All's Well That Ends Well.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead continues to play alongside Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at the Roxbury Latin Summer Festival Theater.

The Arabian nights keep spinning on at the Boston Center for the Arts as Company One's production of Jason Grote's 1001 plays on.

(Photo Credit: Eric Laurits.)

Boston Theatre - Friday Roundup

2011-07-28T17:07:00.005-04:00

Opening

The paranoid, claustrophobic play Bug by Tracy Letts will be infesting The Factory Theatre, courtesy of Flat Earth Theatre.

Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well opens on the Boston Common this weekend. Commonwealth Shakespeare Company's production is free to the public, but get there early for a good seat.

The Bard will also be opening at the Roxbury Latin Summer Festival Theater. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night will be paired with Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, which will be directed by New Rep's Bridget O'Leary. More information is in this Wicked Local article.

Carl Danielson's Unreliable Narrator production company brings the musical comedy Our Hideous Future to the Arrow Theater in Cambridge.

Last Chance

Over at New Repertory Theatre The World Goes 'Round, but only until Sunday!

Outside the Wire, a new play about the difficulty soldiers have reintegrating into society after tours overseas plays through tomorrow. (Video above.)

Ongoing

Those two local boys who've made very good in Hollywood get the satirical treatment in Matt and Ben at the Central Square Theater.

1001, Jason Grote's fast and furious re-telling of the Arabian Nights, keeps on spinning its web at the BCA

Gloucester Stage continues its production of Last Day.

OK Go Is At It Again...and this time with Pilobolus

2011-07-27T15:26:00.003-04:00

For an even better experience, go to Allisnotlo.st

And Yet Another Early Performance of Winehouse

2011-07-27T12:23:00.001-04:00

Gives you chills...

One More Way to Remember Amy Winehouse

2011-07-27T02:14:00.002-04:00

ACT In Seattle Institutes Another Pricing Option - Pay What You Can....Every Show

2011-07-21T11:26:00.007-04:00

Here is a little snippet of a Seattle Post-Intelligencer story back in 2003 about A Contemporary Theater (ACT) when it was on the brink of closing the doors:

"We choose to look at the theater's problems not as some unsurmountable monster mountain," Rappoport added. "We instead see these as a series of challenging hills we can get over, chunk by chunk. If we can amass a half-million dollars over the next few months, we can build momentum for the next chunk. We hope that when the big people see that the community wants this theater, then they'll come aboard too."

Before it can mount its next season, the theater needs to raise donations and pledges totaling $1.5 million, said Sheena Aebig, co-president of the board.

The 25 board members of ACT already dug into their own pockets and came up with $150,000 in donations to keep the theater operating. Another similar donation by the board members is expected to be part of the current support efforts, Rappoport said.

Eight years later ACT is still around, and news comes this week that they are instituting a pay-what-you-can rush ticket policy. By the way, that offer is for EVERY show.

Here's a short piece in the Seattle Times:

"We've talked with people in the community and there's this perception that theater is unaffordable," said Harley Rees, ACT's membership and audience-services director. By allowing patrons to name their own price at the box office, "we're just removing another barrier to coming to see a show."

According to Rees, ACT is not acting out of desperation, and the theater is doing relatively well in the current economic climate. He said sales of season subscriptions and ACT passes are up from last year.

But there are still unfilled seats. And, Rees noted, "In these tough times, a lot of people are struggling, and we want them to be able to see live theater. I think people need it more than ever these days."

This new policy is in addition to the theater's flexible membership option, which functions like a theatrical Netflix. If you pay a monthly membership, you can go to ACT shows as many times as you want. If you bring a friend, they get a half price ticket.

The Stranger's Brendan Kiley points out in the Slog that the announcement is close on the heels of a pretty heated discussion on theater costs prompted by another recent Slog post dealing with an ACT show.

How to Be a Playwright - Or... Why Would You Want To?

2011-07-18T12:31:00.006-04:00

Two posts making the circuit today.

Both of them are about being a playwright in the Big Apple.

On HotReview, Barbara Hammond talks about the sacrifices one makes to keep at the stage writing game in New York City:

Learn how to cut your own hair. Adjust to Duane reading glasses when you really require a prescription. Take on boarders (don't call them roommates after thirty-five) to pay your rent. Find a way to earn your living in a way that is dignified, fulfilling and completely flexible to the demands of your writing (warning: bartending has a shelf life that diminishes with fertility). Give yourself one more year before you go to Los Angeles. Again.

Meanwhile, playwright Matt Freeman has a prescription of his own:

For me, what can I say? I work in an office. I've worked in offices since 1999. Temp work, permanent work. Currently, I actually have an office that overlooks the Governor's Island. I have a tie. I have business cards. I have a company Blackberry. I'm fine with it. In fact, I like where I work - they do good things here. I strive for success as a playwright, whatever that may mean. I'm undaunted by setbacks, I have publications and reviews, I feel like I have the respect of my peers. I aim for bigger stages, think big, believe in my talent and the importance of perseverance. I don't see myself wearing a tie forever, and I won't lie, there are mornings I wake up and look in the mirror and go "Again? Really?"

Then again, I've lived on next-to-nothing and let me tell you: it's fairly uninspiring. I didn't find it freeing and fun. I found it to be a constant weight on my mind and chest.

In the spirit of this soul searching, I would recommend a recent tongue-in-cheek column by New York Times editor Bill Keller, in which he asks: Why the hell would somebody want to write a book?

Every month, it seems, some reporter drops by my office to request a leave of absence to write a book. I patiently explain that book-writing is agony — slow, lonely, frustrating work that, unless you are a very rare exception, gets a lukewarm review (if any), reaches a few thousand people and lands on a remaindered shelf at Barnes & Noble. I recount my own experience as a book failure — two incompletes, and I’m still paying back a sizable advance with a yearly check to Simon & Schuster that I think of not as a burden but as bail.

But still the reporters — and editors, too — keep coming to sit in my office among the teetering stacks of Times-written books that I mean to read someday and to listen politely to my description of book-writing Gethsemane, and then they join the cliff-bound lemmings anyway.

How's that for an aggregation? I'm expecting HuffPost will be calling to offer me a job any minute!

Terry Teachout on Tony Kushner

2011-07-14T11:27:00.009-04:00

Several bloggers, among them George Hunka at Superfluities Redux, have linked to a Terry Teachout essay in this month's Commentary.

Teachout, after seeing, (or enduring, as he might say,) An Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Captalism and Socialism with Key to the Scriptures posits that Tony Kushner's early mega-success of Angels in America had more to do with timing and proper politics than the perfection of the actual work.

However, the real thrust of his piece is to present evidence that Kushner's early triumph combined with a continued indiscriminate praise of his work may have rendered the playwright incapable of discipline in his writing.

Had Kushner trimmed away the proliferating subplots of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide and concentrated ruthlessly on this theme, the results might well have been as exciting as the best parts of Angels in America. Instead, he has drowned it in a sea of rampant verbiage. The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide runs for three hours and 40 minutes, far longer than the average modern-day production of the longest of Shakespeare’s plays, and it does not profit from that added length. Most of the characters are talking machines who often sound like robotic replicas of one another, and the play’s promiscuous use of overlapping dialogue renders much of the second act all but unintelligible to boot.

Like all genuine artists, Kushner writes not as he should but as he must, and his diffuse discursiveness is undoubtedly in part a function of his temperament. Still, the success of Angels in America seems to have confirmed Kushner in the belief that the iron law of economy that governs traditional theatrical storytelling does not apply to him. Not only is The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide enervatingly long-winded, but his last full-evening play, Homebody/Kabul (2001), was an even longer monstrosity in which a genuinely provocative discussion of Islamic fundamentalism and its discontents was buried beneath an incoherent mélange of domestic melodrama and arch drawing-room comedy.

The length complaint is a hard one to parry in any duel, whether between artist and critic, or critic and critic. To be fair, I know it isn't the whole of Terry's essay, but it makes the rest of it a little harder to contemplate.

I guess I can't defend the actual length of Kushner's plays. How could I? They are long. In fact, they are very, very long. They are, when compared to most dramatic writing, exceedingly long. I will have to concede this.

Are they unnecessarily long? A harder question to my mind.

I will leave the debate over The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to those who have seen it. (It may be a while until we get a production of that play here in the Boston area.) However, I have seen three productions of Angels in America over almost 15 years, and my appreciation for that play grows with each experience.

While I'm open to suggestions that certain scenes or exchanges could be trimmed a bit, I'm not really on board with Teachout's main contention when he reviews Kushner's works.

The idea that Angels in America or Homebody/Kabul are really three or four plays that should be separate nights of theater, each standing on their own, is hard to support. Even Teachout keeps admitting that one of the major attractions of Kushner's work is the very scope and ambition of each project.

Kushner recently revealed that he is looking to write more for television.

In an interview in TimeOut New York, (an interview that spawned a lot of blogospheric reaction about the ability of a playwright to make a living wage,) Kushner said the following:

I make my living now as a screenwriter! Which I’m surprised and horrified to find myself saying, but I don’t think I can support myself as a playwright at this point. I don’t think anybody does. I’m going to start work on developing a series for HBO, because I’m naturally given to episodic stories of considerable length. And I won’t have to listen to complaints about how wordy and long my work is if you can watch it on your telephone on the subway: You can make it conform to your day as if it were a book. For people who write in long form, like me, that’s of serious interest, and I think we haven’t really taken that in yet. In a way, film and television are in the same sort of traumatic trance that print journalism is. The technology has outpaced our comprehension of its implications

So, maybe Kushner, contrary to what Teachout is suggesting, has indeed been able to hear those criticisms.

Attending the Nantucket Film Festival - The Basics

2011-07-11T13:20:00.002-04:00

It was almost a year ago that we started making our comedic short film The Oblique Sector - a kind of homage to The Twilight Zone crossed with a comic cautionary tale about internet dating. I wrote the screenplay with my wife Amanda and made the film with our good friends Director Jason Reulet and Director of Photography Brad Kelly.

We finished the editing process just in time for the late deadline for the 16th Annual Nantucket Film Festival. We were overjoyed to be informed that we would screen as one of only 17 shorts in the program this year. The Nantucket festival prides itself on its focus on writing and storytelling, so our acceptance was a source of special pride for me.

What's it like to be invited to a prestigious festival? Well, it can be very stressful at first, if you don't have the pieces already in place. In our case, we had literally just come out of the editing room with the finished product, and suddenly we had less than two months to get ready to attend.

Fortunately, we have enough friends and colleagues who have gone this route before and who could advise us on what we needed to do. Here is just a select list:
1. Have a website.
2. Create an engaging trailer
3. Choose stills from the film
4. Get a good publicity photo and bio for the director.
5. Generate a quality exhibition copy of the film.
6. Poster, Postcards, Business Cards and other marketing materials.
7. Press releases.

All of these things involve decisions, time and money. So you can imagine that the lead up to the festival felt a little crunched. Along with these elements ,we also needed to organize a screening for the cast and crew, and begin the process of submitting the film to other festivals around the country.

Now, with those things accomplished, we were ready to hit the island!

Independent filmmakers probably tie in rank with theater artists for net worth, which makes visiting Nantucket a very pricey proposition. Short film directors screening at the Nantucket Film Festival must find their own accommodations. Mirror readers will probably guess from my occasional photographs that Amanda and I are fortunate enough to have family on Nantucket. However, the rest of our team needed to acquire some form of housing. This came through with the generous offer of a beachside house at a sharply discounted rate, allowing our director, producer and director of photography to enjoy our world premiere and share in the perks that attending the festival offered.

Another factor that makes attending this festival on the island of Nantucket especially hard is the fact that it's...well...on an island. You can't drive a car there, which puts the damper on the time-honored festival strategy of getting reservations at a cheap Best Western outside of the city limits. For the Nantucket Film Festival, you are left with only two options: flying or ferry.

About a month before the festival I saw anEversave deal on Hy-Line ferry tickets to Nantucket - 2 first-class round-trip tickets for 50 dollars. I shared this with the rest of the crew and several of us pounced on it. When taking the ferry, you also have to factor in the cost of parking your car for days in a paid lot on the mainland. These lots can run anywhere from 12 to 17 dollars.

Normally, getting around on Nantucket is relatively easy. There is a pretty good shuttle bus service, and, if the weather is conducive, a bicycle can get you where you need to go. However, darting about to screenings, parties and events during a film festival can prove challenging. Brian Williams, a member of the Festival's Board of Directors, joked at one event that trying to get around to the various venues was like using the Underground Railway.

For instance, many films are screened at the 'Sconset Casino which is about a 15 minute drive from downtown Nantucket. Public transportation often won't cut it if a screening is running late and you need to get to the other side of the island in under ten minutes. Having a car is a bit extravagant, but will make your experience of the festival a lot better. Young's Bicycle Shop gave a us a great rate on our rental car because we were filmmakers attending the festival, and they were also gracious with our drop-off and pick-up schedule.

Dining regularly on the island is almost out of the question. Restaurants are very expensive - even burgers can sometimes cost 11 dollars. One of our first stops was the grocery store to stock up for the week. Although, there is some relief for filmmakers as the festival's receptions, parties and events often provide free food and alcohol!

So, what about those perks, anyway?

The festival gives you an artist pass to use along with your tickets to screenings and events. You get one artist pass for your short film. Since several of the principals involved in our film were attending, we shared the pass and divided up the perks.

First, you receive tickets to screenings. Nantucket does not classify artists as pass holders when it comes to tickets. In other words, your artist pass does not entitle you to just sort of show up at any screening and enter with the patrons and sponsors, sans physical tickets. Your tickets to movies must be pre-selected and you will receive them when you first check in at the administrative office. One of your advantages is that you get to select your complimentary tickets before they go on sale to the public. I would advise any short filmmakers attending the festival to do this - certain screenings sell out very quickly once festivalgoers can buy them. We ended up very happy to have procured our admissions early.

As an artist, your free ticket priveleges do not include the opening and closing night films, nor do they include certain special screenings. If you want to attend these special films, you need to purchase tickets. I would highly recommend doing this as I found many filmmakers attend these programs, and the directors of these films are very approachable afterwards. Don't wait until you get to the festival to purchase these or you will end up on the rush line.

Of course, you also receive complimentary tickets to your own screening, and the festival programmer was very helpful in getting a us a couple of extra passes since our whole crew would be attending.

Next, you also receive admissions to a few of special events that are unique to this festival. Late Night Storytelling is a Moth Story Hour-type event in which authors, movie stars and Nantucket natives tell stories based on a theme. This event is hosted by Anne Meara and it draws an audience of celebrities. There is also a Screenwriter's Tribute, which this year honored Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby). And there is the All-Star Comedy Roundtable and the "Morning Coffee With..." panels. We received tickets to some of these events as well.

And, lastly, there are the parties and receptions sprinkled throughout the week. You get a couple of passes to each of these events and the festival provides a complimentary shuttle to some of them. Be prepared, the staff and guests of the Nantucket Film Festival party hard with great food and nice venues! These soirees are fun and they are attended by just about every luminary that is on the island. This is a festival where you not only meet Paul Haggis, but you run into him numerous times.

Next, I'll put up a post up about what our whirlwind time was like, and how our screenings went!

Shakespeare is Looking Scarce...At Shakespeare Festivals

2011-07-08T19:22:00.009-04:00

John Moore of the Denver Post looks into the the interesting statistic that "only 37 percent of the productions offered by the 10 leading Shakespeare festivals in North America were written by their namesake."

He talks to some of the leaders of several of the festivals. It seems some of these artistic directors are struggling with anxiety over changing demographics.

That's the perpetual challenge every artistic director at every theater faces: how to turn young people like Merrily Hill Smith into lifetime patrons. She's 34, a savvy theatergoer and a Denver Center Theatre Company subscriber. And she admits it: She just doesn't dig Shakespeare.

"I love going to the theater, but I don't get excited about Shakespeare," she said. "Sometimes it's hard to follow, and I like to see more contemporary shows I can more easily relate to."

She called the Denver Center's "Ruined" "the best thing I have seen in my life." Her favorite Shakespeare play is "A Midsummer Night's Dream" — and she's not alone. The Denver Center's February staging was seen by more than 20,000, second only to last season's "A Christmas Carol." At May's Denver Public Schools Shakespeare Festival, 114 of the 400 short scenes performed by students were from "Midsummer." Colorado Shakes' 2007 staging remains the biggest-selling production in Artistic Director Phillip Sneed's four years in Boulder — "and by a huge percentage," he said.

Puck and company are clearly the gateway for turning young theatergoers on to Shakespeare.

But, as the article points out, you can only do so many productions of Midsummer.

H/T Playgoer

The Andrew Sisters Re-Mixed

2011-07-07T12:17:00.004-04:00

Today, Tom Garvey reviews Stoneham's production of Sisters of Swing: The Story of the Andrews Sisters.

Back in 2007 the pop star Christina Aguilera did a rearrangement of the Andrew Sisters's famous hit "The Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company C." While the lyrics are a little raunchy, the video is a hell of a lot of fun. And at the end of the track, according to Wikipedia, Aguilera holds a High E for ten straight seconds.

How Long Until The Shaggs Hit The Regional Circuit

2011-07-04T12:03:00.004-04:00

Last week, two of my fellow bloggers were latecomers to the new musical play The Shaggs: Philosophy of the World, which just wrapped up a run at Playwrights Horizons.

Boston playwright John Kuntz was in New York and caught the play, while New Yorker Rolando Teco saw the penultimate performance and praised it on the Extra Criticum blog.

Both enjoyed the play very much, and both wondered why the play didn't find more success. Indeed, The Shaggs wound up with a C+ average over on Stagegrade.

It seems that reviewers posting mixed to poor notices believed the material was a bit too depressing. This dreariness, in their opinion, overwhelmed the quirkiness that many of the positive notices praise. Some just thought the idea of making a musical based on supremely untalented musicians yields just the kind of results you might expect.

I have to say, I've heard very positive things from word of mouth about the show. Hopefully, as John Kuntz muses, we'll get a chance to see it here soon enough.

Can An International Festival Boost A City's Profile?

2011-07-03T01:40:00.005-04:00

Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune takes a look at Toronto's Luminato Festival which just concluded:

But for all the lofty artistic aims spoken at Luminato, which claims to be the largest multi-arts festival in North America, one message here rings the loudest and the clearest: This festival was created to promote its home city and build its cultural prestige around the globe. Or, as the manifesto of the co-founders puts it: “to shine Toronto's light on the world and the world's light on Toronto.” You can't say it much clearer than that.

Surely, there are several lessons here for Chicago, a city that desperately wants to improve its international reputation and currently minimal share of foreign tourists. According to figures from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Chicago's share of international visitors to the U.S. actually shrank between 2009 and 2010: from 4.7percent to 4.5 percent, a share already below that of much smaller cities like Boston. In 2010, Toronto attracted roughly 2 1/2 times as many international visitors as Chicago.

(Photo of Toronto by Ilke Ender)

ArtsEmerson By The Numbers

2011-07-03T00:44:00.004-04:00

Right on the heels of the American Theatre article assessing the Diane Paulus transition at the American Repertory Theatre, The Boston Globe takes a look at ArtsEmerson, Robert Orchard's bold new initiative with Emerson College.

Aside from falling short of filling the black box for some of the more experimental pieces, the numbers looks pretty good for the initial season. However, there is one set of numbers that seems to surprise quite a few people:

There is one number from ArtsEmerson’s first season that Orchard called a “kind of mind-boggling revelation.’’ It comes from ArtsBoston’s Big List, a collective mailing list used by 40 area nonprofit arts organizations.

An analysis of ArtsEmerson’s audience found that 65 to 70 percent of its audience members did not appear elsewhere on the Big List. In other words, Orchard said, ArtsEmerson is the only one of those 40 organizations with which they have a relationship.

To Orchard, that means he is building and widening the Boston theater audience rather than, as he put it, “stealing from’’ other companies.

Read the whole article here.

Diane Paulus - Full Steam Ahead

2011-07-01T13:43:00.004-04:00

In the new issue of American Theatre, Chris Wallenberg has a pretty lengthy article on the transition and transformation of the American Repertory Theater under Diane Paulus.

The article doesn't gloss over the criticisms she faced, although it also doesn't dwell on them. He does get a quote from Robert Brustein, the former Artistic Director and Founder of the A.R.T.

Brustein, for his part, says he believes that Paulus should have the space to spread her wings and pursue her own agenda as artistic director. In an e-mail, he praised her achievements: "Diane has been doing some remarkable things at the ART, and has managed to attract a whole new generation of spectators, primarily through the use of music (often rock-oriented) in her approach to classical plays and new work.... The most interesting thing about Diane's work is its unpredictability. A single season can be a cornucopia." He also commented, "It is true that Diane possesses a more populist aesthetic than previous administrations of the ART, and her work is sometimes less an alternative to Broadway than an extension of it. And, personally, I regret the loss of our permanent company of actors. But it is also true that as private and public support for theatre declines, many previously partly subsidized institutions are seeking out other forms of income in order to survive."

The final dismantling of the resident company seems to be a particular thorn in the side of Brustein and others. But the truth of the matter is that, under Woodruff, the resident company model had already been largely de-emphasized. An ensemble that had once numbered as many as 12 in the '90s was reduced to 4—Derrah, LeBow, Karen McDonald and Remo Airaldi—who were cast in three to five shows per year. "I didn't inherit an acting company," maintains Paulus. "The policy at the theatre was that there were certain individuals who were getting work—but they were not on salary. If ART really wanted to have a repertory acting company, that would have been another agenda."

Watch Out for the Script Cops!

2011-06-29T17:33:00.000-04:00

Our Movie Premiered Last Week at the Nantucket Film Festival

2011-06-27T09:34:00.001-04:00

The scene outside the Starlight Theater on Nantucket before our @obliquesector movie premier. #NFF2011, a photo by BradKellyPhoto on Flickr.

This shot is by my friend Brad Kelly - also our Director of Photography.

Postcards have arrived!

2011-06-17T15:58:00.001-04:00

Postcards have arrived!, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Via Flickr:
Postcards for our film The Oblique Sector arrived today! They look great.

Check out our film's website at www.obliquesector.com

We'll be at the Nantucket Film Festival next week!

Herzog Reads Parody Kids Book - Can't Make It? Well...

2011-06-14T16:16:00.006-04:00

From Indie Wire:

Werner Herzog has lent his voice to Adam Mansbach and Ricardo Cortés’ infamous children’s book “Go the F**k to Sleep.” His reading will debut tonight at the New York Public Library, followed by a conversation about children’s sleep deprivation and insomnia between Mansbach, Cortés and Paul Holdengraber, the NYPL’s director of LIVE.

You may not be able to make it to the New York Public Library tonight, but if you haven't seen it, below is wonderful parody YouTube video of Werner Herzog reading Curious George:

Caldwell Titcomb, RIP - Boston Theater and Music Critic

2011-06-13T23:35:00.002-04:00

Word reaches us from Bill Marx on The Arts Fuse blog:

It is with great sadness that I write that Caldwell Titcomb, a great friend of Boston theater and music, a dear friend of mine and of The Arts Fuse, passed away yesterday of leukemia at the age of 84. He had been in ill health for many months, though in keeping with his deep professionalism he posted the Classical Sampler for The Fuse until December, 2010.

Some Posts You May Have Missed

2011-06-12T12:34:00.003-04:00

Tom Garvey on Teatra Zar's limited engagement at the Charlestown Working Theater:

American theatre doesn't really do "raw" anymore. In fact I can't think of a professional show I've seen in the last oh, five years or so that dared to flaunt its vulnerability, much less its rough, warts-and-all humanity. Or one that risked looking long and hard at the dark places within us without the props of adolescent bravado or alienated chic (or, in fact, cultural or literal amplification of any kind).

But somehow the Poles have clung to that defiant ideal, long after the American theatre has forgotten all about Grotowski, artistic community, and (eeek!) poverty.

Bill Marx at the Arts Fuse on the recent departure of Dance Critic Deborah Jowitt from the Village Voice. Jowitt's editor wanted her to write more balanced reviews, thinking that most of her critical output was limited to things she liked.

There is an interesting complication. Jowitt, I suspect, sees criticism as a necessary means to support dance as an art form. She doesn’t challenge Park’s characterization of her reviews, and her vision of criticism as a means for encouraging analysis rather than judgment is a respected part of the history of arts criticism. For some important critics in the past, the purpose of criticism is to illuminate, educate, and engage audiences, not risk turning them off. Generally, the most powerful supportive critics have used their writing to fight for art that they felt was being unfairly neglected by mainstream culture—the rhetorical strategy is to make audiences aware of the difficult talent on the margins, to explore the compelling value of art that, because of moral or stylistic reasons, puts off audiences who, given sufficient understanding, would see what they were missing.

On Howlaround, Hal Brooks interviews playwright Annie Baker, (Boston recently saw a festival of her plays.)

HAL: What are your hopes for the American Theater?

ANNIE: That theater artists start reading more.

Ben Yalom, in preparation for a convening at the Dramatist Guild Conference, throws out an important question:

This convening arises from a belief that, as a field, we have serious difficulty having useful (and sometimes hard) conversations about the quality/excellence of each other’s work. We do this fine, at the bar, without the artists present. But how can we have more useful and constructive conversations?

We need to improve the quality of our work. We make constant demands of audiences, of funders, and more. To have strong arguments for the worthiness of the time and money of these various constituencies, we need to raise the bar. And to do so, we need as a first step to be able to talk about quality: What is excellence? And how can we strive for it? How can we have better conversations to encourage and inspire one another to aim higher?

On Superfluities, George Hunka posts a video

On the eve of the Tonys, it’s a pleasure to be able to offer “The Critic as Thinker,” a Philoctetes Center symposium from 27 October 2007, that features two of these fine critics, Eric Bentley and Robert Brustein, as well as Stanley Kauffmann, as they survey both their own careers and the changing landscape of theatre in the post-war era. Roger Copeland moderates the discussion, which traverses a wide variety of topics, including the original reception of The Playwright as Thinker, the newspaper review as consumer guide, the disappearance of the middle-brow play (this to my mind is alive and well, but let it pass), Marxist politics, and the alleged responsibility of Frank Rich for the decline of American theatre.

David Mamet Seems To Enjoy Holding Court Now

2011-06-11T12:56:00.004-04:00

This time for the British Financial Times reporter John Gapper.

There isn't much new in this interview. However, I get the feeling Mamet seems to be enjoying this attention he is getting for his recent conversion to conservatism.

Here, the famous playwright is asked by the reporter if anyone disputing Israel's land claims and believing in reallocation to the Palestinians is anti-Semitic:

Uncharacteristically, Mamet hesitates slightly as he starts to answer and I wonder if he will back down, or at least hedge his answer. "Well, at some level ... listen ..." He throws his head back and looks briefly at the ceiling before emitting a grunt of relief as he abandons caution.

"Yes!" he exclaims. "Of course! I mean you Brits ... " He smiles ruefully. "I love the British. Whatever education I have comes from reading your writers and yet, time and time again, for example reading Trollope, there is the stock Jew. Even in George Eliot, God bless her. And the authors of today ... I'm not going to mention names because of your horrendous libel laws but there are famous dramatists and novelists over there whose works are full of anti-Semitic filth.

As far as artistic content, this interview has only a few lines regarding any theory or advice.

Unlike his pretty ridiculous theories about acting, Mamet is always succinct, understandable, (though pretty obvious,) and workman-like when he offers up tips about dramatic writing.

Case in point:

I take the opportunity of having this master craftsman in front of me to ask about writing. He commences by defining where others go wrong. "Anyone can write five people trapped in a snowstorm. The question is how you get them into the snowstorm. It's hard to write a good play because it's hard to structure a plot. If you can think of it off the top of your head, so can the audience. To think of a plot that is, as Aristotle says, surprising and yet inevitable, is a lot, lot, lot of work."

For more reading, here is a roundup of two theatre blogger reactions to Mamet's recent statements about liberalism and conservatism.

Don't Blame the Boards So Fast When Theaters Fail

2011-06-09T16:35:00.004-04:00

In response to Brendan Kiley's Seattle Stranger piece about the Intiman Theater's collapse, Jeremy Barker, writing at Culturebot, questions the very popular meme of the moment: bad boards are the main culprits in some of the recent arts organization financial failures.

As regular readers know, one of the things we’re skeptical of here at Culturebot is “Big Ideas,” of which they arts has far too many, and unfortunately, I think that blaming boards has become the new “Big Idea” in the current moment, with so many institutions at every level facing crippling financial challenges. When an institution finds itself in collapse, someone has to be blamed, apparently. Sometimes it’s the artistic director (who spends the budget like he’s using an ATM card till he hits the overdraft limit), now it’s the board (for not saying no sooner). The unspoken assumption is that, in all cases, the institution itself was inherently good and needed to be preserved, because, apparently, it served and would continue serving its function well. But not only is it ridiculous to always assume that the institution should have been saved (they fail for different reasons, after all), but I can’t help but wonder if, in fact, it’s not sometimes good that they fail.

(...)

...maybe the Intiman just needed to close. At a certain point, its debt load was so high that continuing to operate would have required (and, if they re-open, will) lesser works, skimpier budgets, and therefore quite likely lesser achievements, because so much money will be spent servicing past deficit-funded operations. That the crisis at the Intiman hit in the current economy is predictable: slowed ticket sales and less charitable giving finally meant that it couldn’t meet its current obligations as well as covering the previous year’s deficit. Like a Ponzi scheme, to which the model bears some resemblance, it only collapsed when the in-flows were insufficient to cover the outflows, which were building up over time.

But if we actually believe in the Intiman’s achievement, as I think we should, then maybe it’s just a sign that the cost of accomplishing that was higher than potential revenues. They had a good run, but if they can no longer credibly meet the expectations of either the artistic community or their audiences, they should stop, because what’s the argument for them to be sustained through paying out for diminishing returns?

Read the whole thing here.

Theater Boards - A Delicate Balancing Act - More on Intiman Closing

2011-06-08T12:49:00.002-04:00

This week we have seen the closing of another theater - Florida Stage.

Right on the heels of this, we have Brandon Kiley's article in the Seattle Stranger in which he tries to get at the bottom of the Intiman closing, but finds few people willing to go on the record.

He is able to draw some conclusions though:

The board/staff relationship is fundamentally flawed. Boards do too much or too little. They either don't raise enough money to keep an organization going or complain that they don't feel enough sense of participation. Sometimes the board members don't even attend the performances of the organizations they're ostensibly there to oversee and support. (That was a problem at ConWorks and Giant Magnet.)

Sometimes board members try to apply the lessons they've learned in the business world to their arts organization, typically with disastrous results. "The board is there to support us in doing things that don't make sense in the business world," Czaplinski said. "Putting weird art onstage is not going to make you a lot of money, but boards are there to help you do it anyway, because we enjoy it and we value it. And if we have a show with naked people onstage and the public gets riled up about it, it's an opportunity for the board to do some arts advocacy."

"Nonprofits are creatures of market failure, by definition," Linzer concurred. "They're nonprofits. But some board members try to transfer their experience in the corporate boardroom to the nonprofit boardroom, and it's like they went to the wrong boot camp." It's presumed on too many boards that if you're wealthy, you must be smart, and if you're smart, you can tell a theater how it should be more like T-Mobile

How to Deal With Texters in Movie Theaters

2011-06-06T23:37:00.001-04:00

The Alamo Drafthouse, an independent movie theater chain in Texas, created the following PSA to run before R-rated movies.

Oak Bluffs Edge II

2011-06-05T12:28:00.001-04:00

Oak Bluffs Edge II, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Old style post office boxes at Alley's General Store, Martha's Vineyard

2011-06-03T18:45:00.001-04:00

Old style post office boxes at Alley's General Store, Martha's Vineyard, a photo by arthennessey on Flickr.

Missed the Boston Theatre Marathon? Recaps Available...

2011-05-27T09:39:00.005-04:00

Unfortunately, I had to miss the Boston Theatre Marathon this year. I've directed and performed in the Marathon in different years, and I have also sat through the whole day as an audience member many times.

If you missed the event, in which 50 ten minute plays are performed all day long at the Calderwood Pavillion, make sure you put it on your calendar for next year.

In the meantime, Larry Stark has put together his play by play observations over at the Theater Mirror.

Also, local playwright Patrick Gabridge sat through the entire festivities and has posted some of his thoughts at his blog The Writing Life x3.

The Globe's short review of the event by Sandy MacDonald is here.

This year, the Marathon included a day of staged readings of full length plays that they called The Warm Up Laps.

More on Mamet's Conservative Conversion

2011-05-26T15:30:00.000-04:00

There are two posts out there that call attention to some interesting paradoxes in David Mamet's new found conservatism, which is outlined in Andrew Ferguson's piece on the Pulitzer Prize Winning playwright in The Weekly Standard.

In that piece, as you can read here, Mamet credits the catalyst of his conversiion to an examination of the dichotomy of playwright Bertolt Brecht's personal life and his theater work.

Rob Weinhert-Kendt, writing on his blog, The Wicked Stage, wonders why Mamet didn't use a couple of targets closer to home:

The more I think about it, the more this feels like a bit of sleight of hand. Is Brecht really a relevant "father" for Mamet? Why not tackle two influences closer to home, like, say, Arthur Miller or Harold Pinter? Mamet owes each a huge debt as a dramatist, and both were men of the left. Not card-carrying Communists who eagerly submitted to living in a Soviet client state, mind you, just garden-variety lefties (with Pinter, by the end, representing a particularly thistly variety) who, while critical of Western democracies and capitalism, lived reasonably happy and productive lives within them.

Why, I wonder, wouldn't Mamet apply his newfangled rightwingery on two forebears so much closer to him aesthetically than the German epic poet? I can't say for sure, but I can venture a guess.

Read the rest here.

Meanwhile, George Hunka, writing at his blog Superfluities Redux points out some hypocrisy in Mamet's newfound embrace of the free market as the cure for the theater's woes.

All well and good — and quite consistent with Mamet’s recent turn of thought. On the other hand, if Mamet accuses Brecht of hypocritically biting the hand that feeds him — well, physician, heal thyself. If it were not for this non-profit, state-subsidized theatre, it’s unlikely that Mamet would even have a career, in the theatre or anywhere else. Almost all of his early plays were premiered in non-profit and state-subsidized institutions — American Buffalo received its mainstage premiere at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 1976, The Water Engine at New York’s Public Theater in 1977, and Glengarry Glen Ross in 1983 at the mother of all English-language state-subsidized theatres, London’s National — well insulated from the demands of the marketplace (at least then, in those happy days before regional and non-profit theatres sought to become more and more like their commercial cousins). So we await a statement from Mamet repudiating these earlier “pseudodramas” of his.

Boston Theatre Marathon Twitter Feed

2011-05-22T16:56:00.005-04:00

I added a Twitter feed to the top of my right column.

It is comprised of tweets from the Boston Theater Marathon today.

Theatrical Avant Garde - What is it anyway?

2011-05-22T12:32:00.005-04:00

The Village Voice interviewed some theater artists about what Avant Garde means today, or if such a thing even exists:

Nick Jones, Playwright

Anybody truly radical is probably working on the fringe. And by the fringe, I don’t mean Downtown; I mean outside of theaters entirely, in contexts where no one is pursuing a career, and there are no reviewers (and possibly no audience). There is a huge DIY culture of performance in the United States, and it’s probably the closest thing to avant-garde that exists, in that it’s beholden to nothing and no one.

Mike Daisey, Monologist

Does a theatrical avant-garde still exist? I can think in the space of three minutes of a whole list of things I could say from stage when the lights come up at my performance this evening that would result in a riot: an exquisitely detailed, loving description of how I recently raped a child who was asking for it, an honest accounting of how pleased I am pissing into my lover's mouth. Over time you find how words can can still achieve disruption but be less outré—the right epithet, landed precisely, a choice or unchoice image that opens up the subconscious.

You can read more from such artists as Rude Mechanicals, Elevator Repair Service and Young Jean Lee here.

Over at The Playgoer blog, Garret Eisler has some thoughts on the Voice's collection of quotes:

Indeed, is the term still appropriate? "Front ranks" of what? Are weirdo artists necessarily always "ahead" of everyone else? As for "experimental"--what's the experiment? (And what's the "result"?)

Many of those surveyed say it all basically comes down to taboos and norms--i.e. breaking them. But I'm not sure the main difference between something you see on Broadway and something at St Anne's Warehouse is that one might have more naked people or audience participation than the other.

And breaking one set of conventions doesn't mean you don't have conventions of your own. A performance at Dixon Place might ignore some taboos--but aren't there a different set of rules in their place? A moment of unabashed sincerity or tearjerking sentimentality for instance, might be pretty "rule breaking" at a Radiohole or Wooster Group performance!

An event with no rules is not necessarily "edgy" theatre--it's actually not theatre.

He ends with a pretty funny quip about Richard Foreman.

Boston Theater - Off to the Races...

2011-05-21T21:13:00.007-04:00

Tomorrow, Sunday, May 21 is the Boston Theater Marathon. Bring a bag lunch and get a good night of sleep before you head to the Calderwood Pavillion.

The full lineup of plays is at the Playwright's Perspective blog.

Have fun, and don't lose your seat.

Mamet - Is The Conversion Complete?

2011-05-21T15:47:00.006-04:00

I am sure there will be a lot of discussion about Andrew Ferguson's article "Converting Mamet" - a recap of the various steps in the movement of playwright David Mamet from the liberal mindset to the conservative one.

Ferguson writes that in Mamet's new book, The Secret Knowledge:On the Dismantling of American Culture, the Pulitzer winning writer reveals that a close examination of Brecht's personal conduct provided a catalyst for his own political transformation:

For most of his career Mamet revered Brecht too: It was the thing to do. The reverence came to an end when he finally noticed an incongruity between Brecht’s politics and his life. Although a cold-blooded—indeed bloody-minded—advocate for public ownership of the means of production and state confiscation of private wealth, he always took care to copyright his plays. More, he made sure the royalties were deposited in a Swiss bank account far from the clutches of East Germany, where he was nominally a citizen.

“His protestations [against capitalism] were not borne out by his actions, nor could they be,” Mamet writes. “Why, then, did he profess Communism? Because it sold. . . . The public’s endorsement of his plays kept him alive; as Marx was kept alive by the fortune Engels’s family had made selling furniture; as universities, established and funded by the Free Enterprise system . . . support and coddle generations of the young in their dissertations on the evils of America.”

(...)

And then Mamet thought some more, and looked in the mirror.

“I never questioned my tribal assumption that Capitalism was bad,” he writes now, “although I, simultaneously, never acted upon these feelings.” He was always happy to cash a royalty check and made sure to insist on a licensing fee. “I supported myself, as do all those not on the government dole, through the operation of the Free Market.”

He saw he was Talking Left and Living Right, a condition common among American liberals, particularly the wealthy among them, who can, for instance, want to impose diversity requirements on private companies while living in monochromatic neighborhoods, or vote against school vouchers while sending their kids to prep school, or shelter their income while advocating higher tax rates.

For more of a context, you can start with Mamet's now famous 2008 essay in the Village Voice, "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal"

In that essay, he informs us that he started thinking about these political things at the time he was writing his play November.

Some critics and writers examined the play in the context of Mamet's self proclaimed conversion. Here is Robert Volicky writing on Hotreview:

This is not to say that the man can't say exactly what's on his mind and own it as his personal "truth," but his most recent work for the stage does not wholly reflect his alleged retreat to the ancient binarism of "reason/faith," "tragedy/perfectionism." Even his pairings (reason and the tragic versus faith and the perfectionist) are deceptively rigid and at odds with one another. Mamet's conscious effort to reason his position in the world--also common in his other essays and prose works--reminded me, here, of Arthur Miller. Miller's theorizing about his works never quite matched what his plays were doing. The theorizing often fell short of the works' depth and breadth.

But unlike Miller, who would refer specifically to his plays, Mamet does not explicitly apply his new political thinking to November. The essay works as an implied context within which to think about this play, and also to reconsider his complete canon. If the reader decides to map Mamet's thinking in March 2008 onto November, then so be it. The trouble is, such thinking would align the author's allegiance with his character President Smith, the corrupt executive running for a second term.

Path to Chilmark Pond

2011-05-09T15:51:00.001-04:00

Path to Chilmark pond. #Vineyard, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

We're Going to Nantucket! Our Film is an Official Selection!

2011-05-02T11:27:00.004-04:00

The short film I co-wrote with my wife, Amanda, and made with some friends is an Official Selection of the Nantucket Film Festival!

We are extremely excited as this was our first submission of The Oblique Sector anywhere, and it is an honor to be appearing at this premiere festival.

I'll get back to theater posting soon, I promise, but between our film and volunteering and attending the Independent Film Festival of Boston this past weekend, I've just been living at the movies.

Our Movie Is Finished! Boston Small Theatre Meets Film!

2011-04-25T11:13:00.006-04:00

Some of you may have noticed over the past six to eight months that I have been working on a film.

I co-wrote the screenplay with Amanda.

Well, it is now finished and we are in the process of sending it out to film festivals!

You can check out the website I created for our little short comedy film - The Oblique Sector.

Those of you who follow the Boston theater scene closely might want to check out the trailer for our movie.

Featured in the film are actresses familiar to local playgoers - Amanda Good Hennessey, Elisa MacDonald and Eliza Lay.

The film also includes Jason Reulet, who was one of the founding members of my old theater troupe Essayons Theater Company and Erik Rodenhiser, owner of the Griffen Theater in Salem, MA.

On a side note: I am proud of the website, which is the first I have created - I used the free Google Sites with a custom domain. Let me know what you think of it if you get a chance.

Happy Easter!

2011-04-24T11:14:00.001-04:00

100_5488, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

You Can Watch the Human Centipede Musical

2011-04-11T15:41:00.002-04:00

Remember I posted this picture a few months back?

Well, the musical actually happened and now you can watch it online at You Tube.

Merchant of Venice - A Most Important Play

2011-04-10T21:55:00.003-04:00

Ian Thal has an interesting post about the Merchant of Venice production that closes today at ArtsEmerson.

Many argue that of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet is the greatest work of literature in the Western canon; I contend that while The Merchant of Venice may not be as fine a dramatic poem, it may very well be the most important; for the text is a disturbing portrait of European civilization; In many ways bridging the difference between medieval antisemitism based in theology and superstitions about Jews and the modern antisemitism that presents Jews as people yet a dangerous people: it underlines that antisemitism is "the oldest hate" and something intrinsic to Western civilization.

Tom Garvey also reviewed the production and his post is followed by an interesting discussion in the comments section.

Straw Bath on an Island Farm

2011-04-10T20:49:00.001-04:00

Straw Bath on an Island Farm #Nantucket, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

I'll Miss You, Mom.

2011-04-05T13:49:00.001-04:00

Scituate-20110403-00048, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

My mom passed away a few days ago. This was one of her favorite places.

Sand in Scituate

2011-04-03T22:10:00.001-04:00

Scituate-20110403-00053, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

When Will Boston Know It's A World Class Theater City?

2011-03-30T12:23:00.007-04:00

That was one of the questions headlining a Stagesource Boston Theatre Conference a few years ago.

The comparisons to Chicago, Seattle and Washington D.C. were made frequently in the breakout sessions and in the chatter in the lobby.

With ArtsEmserson exploding onto the scene this year, and smaller companies doing, quite frankly, some amazing theater (i.e., Whistler in the Dark's Tales from Ovid last fall, it seems like maybe we have arrived.

I didn't attend last month's Boston Theater Conference, but I was able to follow on Twitter. A bit of the conversation involved creating a Boston Fringe Festival, which might be a great step.

However, there is something a little weird about the recent Independent Reviewers of New England dustup in which Tom Garvey resigned from the IRNE committee under alleged pressure from a small number of companies.

Although, I feel strange writing "alleged" since somebody claiming to be Kati Mitchell from the American Repertory Theater pretty much outright confirms a lot of Garvey's story in a comment to his blog.

If you aren't caught up to speed on this, I think Ian Thal has a great post, with the relevant links, over on his blog today.

I agree one hundred percent with his closing paragraph:

But the bigger story is: pro-Garvey or anti-Garvey, this is being discussed on the telephone, by email, and in face to face conversations amongst theatre people, but no one in the local theatre press is covering this story either in print or online. Would the press be so quiet if something similar had occurred on the theatre scene in New York? Chicago? Washington, D.C.? Seattle? Minneapolis?

The behind-closed-doors nature of this is what makes it a little depressing.

If this were to have happened in Chicago or Seattle, wouldn't Brendan Kiley or Kris Vire at least have something to report on it?

If Don Hall or Tony Adams were to have a problem with a reviewer, I would most likely imagine them to publicly state their objections and openly pursue an agenda like this - perhaps with an open letter to the theatre community.

(By the way, I by no means want to put actions into the character of, words into the mouth of, or thoughts into the heads of these people I mention. I am just going off my years of following all of them.)

Of course, it is must be pointed out that the rival theater awards committee in Boston, the Elliot Norton Awards, has included writers for the Globe, Herald, Phoenix and other mainstream and alternative outlets. So it wouldn't be entirely surprising if they didn't care.

On a tangent to this debate, there is a unique question that comes with the rise of the independent online reviewer that I may explore in a future post. What is the appeals process? There is no editor at the Hub Review to whom a company can reach out. They must address Tom directly. One recourse a company may have is to deny the writer comps, which even Tom has expressed is entirely within their rights and in some ways understandable.

In other words, press comps are an instrument of the marketing and public relations department. If you consistently get unsatisfactory reviews, terminating the relationship with the writer makes a certain amount of economic sense, right? "Hey," one might imagine the P.R. rep saying to the reviewer, "what are we paying you for?"

Another step would be to deny the writer admission at all - which takes it up a notch.

Robert Morse - Singing Live...

2011-03-28T13:10:00.000-04:00

Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors - When Love Goes Dark

2011-03-25T22:09:00.007-04:00

After reading the Henry VI/Richard III cycle, I almost felt guilty reading Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare's first comic play, (although certain scholarship thinks it may be his earliest play.)

The plot moves like lightning and the dialogue is brisk. It is one of the Bard's shortest plays, and one of his funniest.

The comedy is farcical and hinges on the confusion of the identity of twins. Shakespeare doubles the laughs by providing two sets of twins, servants and masters.

But I notice more and more that Shakespeare seems not just to write with thematic structure in mind, he seems to think in imagery and themes.

The play starts with a sentence of death, a stranger in a strange land facing a punishment for simply being from the wrong place. Shakespeare is to play with the themes of finding and belonging throughout the play, examining it from every angle.

When Antipholus of Syracuse lands in Ephesus, where he too could be punished under the laws against citizen's of Syracuse, he finds his predicament causing reflection:

Antipholus of Syracuse: He that commends me to mine own content
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.
I to the world am like a drop of water
That in the ocean seeks another drop,
Who, falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds himself:
So I, to find a mother and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

Here in this land though, he finds himself in a situation in which a home is pulling him and he receives gifts from strangers.

On the opposite side, Antipholus of Ephesus finds that he, who has fought nobly for his country and has a thriving estate, is now turned out in the street. In the end he is resorting pleading for justice.

One of Shakespeare's great themes is unrequited or dying love. Think of the great masterpieces Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado, Hamlet, etc. People suddenly changing in front of their lover's eyes. Where there was love, now there is none.

Is there nothing more frightening than the thought that one who loves us will change, that they will not recognize in the same loving way?

Antipholus of Syracuse, finds himself in his twin's house, talking to to his twin's wife Adriana, he does not recognize her and his ambiguity is piercing to her.

Adriana: Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown:
Some other mistress hath thy sweet aspects;
I am not Adriana nor thy wife.
The time was once when thou unurged wouldst vow
That never words were music to thine ear,
That never object pleasing in thine eye,
That never touch well welcome to thy hand,
That never meat sweet-savor'd in thy taste,
Unless I spake, or look'd, or touch'd, or carved to thee.
How comes it now, my husband, O, how comes it,
That thou art thus estranged from thyself?

I also notice that by starting with a death sentence, Shakespeare can expand his theme by making life itself a strange and temporary land, and he examines how the debts we owe limit us within its borders.

Here is a funny exchange between Dromio, one of the servants, and Adriana:

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: No, no, the bell: 'tis time that I were gone:
It was two ere I left him, and now the clock
strikes one.

ADRIANA: The hours come back! that did I never hear.

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: O, yes; if any hour meet a sergeant, a' turns back forvery fear.

ADRIANA: As if Time were in debt! how fondly dost thou reason!

DROMIO OF SYRACUSE: Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he's
worth, to season.
Nay, he's a thief too: have you not heard men say
That Time comes stealing on by night and day?
If Time be in debt and theft, and a sergeant in the way,
Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day?

Wanted - Good Curators

2011-03-24T17:49:00.003-04:00

Ian David Moss, over at his Createquity blog, has weighed in on the Supply/Demand conversation that has been continuing across the blogosphere. His post takes on the idea that there is too much supply.

Moreover, the phenomenon of oversupply—or, put another way, hypercompetition—is far, far bigger than the nonprofit arts sector. It affects industries ranging from video games to smartphone application stores, Facebook, cable TV, and yes, blogs. In many ways, it is existential in scope: our brains and lifespans are not built to withstand this onslaught of choices. The supply of artists, arts organizations, and even capital may increase with relative ease, but the supply of time in the day, last I checked, remains pretty constant.

So to me, the conversation we should be having is not about reducing supply. Instead it is about defining the responsibilities of cultural institutions to provide stewardship for a world in which supply of creative content is exploding and will never shrink. In this era of infinite choice, there is a desperate need for guidance as to how we should allocate the precious few hours that we have to experience something that will feed our souls, make us think differently, or incur a hearty laugh. In other words: for curation. We need someone to listen to, watch, and view all of the chaff so that we can confine our own time to the wheat. But quality curation-that is to say, curation that results from independent, original research and informed, critical judgments-is not just good for us as consumers. It’s just as important for the artists.

Read the whole thing here.

Workin' 9 to 5... and writing plays

2011-03-24T17:28:00.003-04:00

This New York Times profile of Sharr White, who has a play opening at the MCC Theatre this week in New York is interesting considering all of the discussion around Mat Smart's post on the Howl Around blog this week.

Practicality is a common theme for Mr. White, who lives in Cold Spring, N.Y., with his wife and two young sons. When he’s not shuttling around to see his works produced in cities like Chicago, Louisville and Seattle, he works full time as a fashion copywriter, an occupation he credits for keeping his wordsmith skills up to speed.

“Sharr’s not isolated in a room with a candle,” said Hal Brooks, who directed Mr. White’s Iraq War drama “Six Years” at the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville in 2006. “He gets up, writes, goes to his day job, comes home, raises a family and writes some more.”

Though I am an artist/writer who for most of my life has had to work a 9-5 or more, I have never really thought of it as any type of distinction. I think that there are great plays written by people that have other careers (W;t) and obviously there are great plays written by people who are solely writers.

If you read on in the article you will find that Sharr has an MFA, but it is NOT in playwriting.

Between Gallery and Theater

2011-03-24T16:11:00.004-04:00

Brendan Kiley of Seattle's Stranger visits the Fry Museum to see the Degenerate Art Enslemble's attempt to merge installation and performance:

For weeks before the opening of the exhibition, Frye curator Robin Held and Kohl stressed to me in interviews that it was not supposed to be a collection of relics and artifacts from previous performances, but an experience in its own right, a distillation of the DAE aesthetic into a museumworthy show.

(...)

Kohl has spoken about how the manipulations of theater and the manipulations of a gallery are different. Theater is fast, he explained — stitching on a dress can be provisional, details can be shellacked over, and if a costume splits or a thing breaks, a little tape can hold it together until the end of the show. "But in a gallery, people get up close and examine things," he said. "So we wanted to feature the work of the artists we've worked with for years* who've mostly been in the background and bring them up to the foreground."

Though overall, Kiley is not really sold, he believes one piece is very successful. It is a sonic installation called The Tuning Nest

(Photo by Bruce Tom)

Gray Skies and Black Tree

2011-03-24T15:50:00.001-04:00

Gray skies and a tree like black electricity, originally uploaded by arthennessey.

Critical Quip of the Week - Ouch!

2011-03-23T23:09:00.003-04:00

Centered on the pharmaceutical and behavioral travails of a quarreling couple's only child, Distracted is a two-hour birth control pill. If Dr. Snip, the famed vasectomist, were to hitch his wagon to the latest culinary craze and open a "pop-up" clinic next door to ArtsWest, and if he worked late enough to catch exiting male theatergoers, he'd have to auction off appointments, so robust would demand be for on-the-spot sterility.

-Mike Seely of the Seattle Weekly, reviewing Lisa Loomer's Distracted