Small Victory

In my Cliché Watch on ambiguity some months back I described Stoppard's method in The Invention of Love:

A remarkable thing about this script is the way in which information is eked out over the course of the evening. It is very clear that an entire universe exists and that all its questions have answers, and the way Mr. Stoppard controls himself as he offers this information piecemeal is essentially the “plot” of the play.

Listen to how Stoppard himself describes the playwright's art in an episode of Charlie Rose:

Now if only I'd called it a bladder...

Big Theaters

A loyal reader pointed out to me the other day how often I’ve been picking on the Goodman recently. Let me just say, I love the Goodman Theatre. When I went to see Ruined and A Christmas Carol was playing on the big stage next door, I was confronted with the amazing opportunity of Big Theaters – to reach a big audience and provide entertainment and art of the highest quality. I think we who aggressively support small theaters, the riskier work they do, and the intimacy they provide, too often forget that the true aim of all of this is just excellence. Nothing bigger or smaller than that. When we advocate for small theaters it is because we believe that they are excellent, but we can never be blind to the excellence available at bigger houses.

But when the theater is bad at big houses, boy, do we get to make fun. It reassures us that money is not a guarantee of excellence. It frees artists with less means from thinking of money as the missing piece. In fact, the danger of having too much money – and I really think this is the principal affliction of Hollywood movies – is that too much money permits lazy thinking. It’s what my dad would call playing tennis without a net. Restrictions are resources.

That said, money means a lot. Radio ads that make me feel like I’m being molested, or posters that are so airbrushed they look like a Snoop Dogg album cover are dumb. No way around it, and there’s no excuse. And when the resources of a big house are diddled into laziness and grandiosity, this is sad. I don’t believe that money necessarily makes a show bad, and also, obviously, money doesn’t make a show good. But money in the right hands, should help. At its best, the Goodman, like the other big houses in Chicago, shines as an example of this. At its worst, it should at least be mocked. And it will be.

Comments

The comments' section of this blog is a murky and uncertain place, but I really do appreciate them. I'm going to do a better job of bringing them into the light.

Color-Blind Directing?

Terry Teachout weighs in on the controversy at Lincoln Center Theater.  I wrote on 'color-blind' casting a few weeks ago, here.  Interestingly, I'm currently at work on a production of a new play, Po Boy Tango by Kenneth Lin that features two Taiwanese characters.  In the Northlight Theater's production both Taiwanese characters are played by Japanese American actors, and the show is directed by Singaporean playwright and director Chay Yew.  This is profoundly unlikely to draw any kind of controversy, and though I know exactly what the difference is, I wonder what the difference is.  

Perhaps because of the phenomenon of "school plays" and the relative abundance of girls interested in theater at a young age, I feel like our eyes may be more accustomed to women playing men or boys--as audiences of an earlier time accepted the opposite.  What is instructive about this analog is how it was at once--one assumes--used purely as a generic necessity and as a signifier.  A boy played Juliet, ah well, we understand.  A man played the nurse--hilarious.  This is a bit like the program I tried to suggest in my earlier post.  "Color-blind" casting can also open avenues for what is really "post-racial" casting, and then the opposite: casting that draws attention to or exploits the significance of an actor's or a character's race.  What does it mean to have a black Ariel in a white Tempest, or the opposite?  I look forward to watching this worked through, and I'm sure I'll continue to chew it over.

Directing, because it is invisible, is very different from acting as far as race is concerned.  Because it is creative and we live in a diverse society the largest possible spectrum of talented voices should be heard at all times.  Interesting to me, is that with the rise of the dramaturg, it is insignificant for a Director to be an expert on the subject matter.  Research will be done, packets will be compiled, copies will by made.  Depending on the production and the ambition of the Director, his/her role can be remarkably malleable.  McClinton is right that he understands better the African-American experience better than Sher.  It's unclear to me whether that's a substantive claim to be a better director.  More to come, almost certainly.

Revival and Responsibility online

My first post on this blog was a re-titled version of my original essay "The Aesthetics of Revival" which was published by the Midway Review and is now available as a pdf from their website along with the rest of the issue.  Check it out here.  (Sorry, it's a little slow.)