Superfluities Redux
On culture and theatre, by George Hunka
Friday, 16 May 2008
"Of the giving of many prizes there
is no end ..."
(Apologies to the author of Ecclesiastes 12:12)
(See entry for 19 May)
A highly selective, prejudiced look at a few upcoming productions, along with other items of interest:
Sunday, 18 May: The MCC Playlab Series continues tonight with a staged reading of Sangeet by Ranbir Sidhu. Sidhu's play, "a comedy without manners," is a poetic exploration of multiculturalism in Margaret Thatcher's London, focusing on an ex-strongman from India, a male nurse who leans toward euthanasia for some of his more borderline patients, and their children. Sidhu's plays (I've read this one and True East) are physically and linguistically explosive meditations on race, sex, shame and guilt, uneasy and complex approaches to uneasy and complex questions – a staged reading may not pass along the physical dynamics, but certainly will demonstrate the linguistic. It's free and open to the public; a wine and cheese reception will follow. At Baruch College's Engelman Recital Hall, 25th Street between Lexington and Third. The reading begins at 5.00pm.
Monday, 19 May: Wherefore theatre criticism in New York? John Heilpern of the New York Observer, Jonathan Kalb of HotReview.org and Alexis Soloski of the Village Voice each respond to the question during the panel discussion "New York Theatre Criticism" at the Segal Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, tonight at 6.30pm. It's free and open to the public; more information at the Segal Center Web page here.
And it's unlikely to run very long; Soloski, at least, will be heading downtown later tonight – as one of the judges of this year's Obie Awards, which will be handed out this evening at Webster Hall, she won't want to miss the ceremony to be hosted by Elizabeth Marvel and Bill Camp. You can watch the ceremony yourself during the first live Webcast of the event; more information at the Obies Web page. And keep an eye out for me; I'll be there too. Though I must promise to keep shtum on the evening itself; what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, as the commercial says.
Tuesday, 20 May: Also this week from the MCC Theater is the world premiere of a new play from the controversial (and my erstwhile correspondent) Neil LaBute, Reasons to be Pretty. LaBute's new play is the third in a trilogy (the first two parts were The Shape of Things and Fat Pig) about America's obsession with physical beauty and the warping effects this obsession has upon American men and women alike. Reasons to be Pretty runs through 5 July; more information here.
Wednesday, 21 May: Something about the Greeks has gotten into
the water (or, more likely, the wine) over at PS122. Following La Femme est Morte, the Shalimar's current
production about Phaedra, Oedipus is in their sights now. The Pan Pan Theatre
of Dublin is offering up Oedipus Loves You, beginning tonight at
8.00pm and running through 1 June. "Pan Pan's punk rock sensibility
strikes a fierce chord in this savvy update of Sophocles' classic drama of
the ultimate dysfunctional family. ... Oedipus is still counselled by the
wise Tiresias, but the sightless sage is now a Freudian analyst and
ex-
Posted at 8.08 am in /Openings
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
But not for long, if the grosses and the response of the vox populi critics are any indication:
Caryl Churchill's 1982 Top Girls had its Broadway premiere last week, and New York Times critic Ben Brantley gave the play a thumbs up. But apparently the "pre-opening buzz ... was mixed." ... The Times sent some poor staffer with a tape recorder to the Biltmore Theatre to get on-the-spot reactions from audience members who left after – and during – the performance. The recordings were duly posted to the Times' web site; the six responses were decidedly mixed. A few loved the play, a few hated it, and a few were puzzled. So it goes.
What this might or might not mean for the future of
non-
UPDATE: On a somewhat related note, Terry Teachout of
the Wall Street Journal considered this year's somewhat uninspiring
Tony contenders a few days ago, and noted the narrow
Broadway-
Would that the Tony Awards would tear down the wall that separates Broadway from Off Broadway! Alas, that will never happen, because the awards are presented by the American Theatre Wing in collaboration with the Broadway League, a trade association whose members are in the business of persuading the public that Broadway is the be-
all and end- all of American theater. The truth, of course, is that the real artistic action is to be found Off Broadway and in America's regional theaters. One of the finest of the latter, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, is receiving this year's Regional Theatre Tony Award, the sole occasion on which the Tony nominators deign to acknowledge what everybody who cares about theater already knows, which is that Broadway today is less a center of serious artistic endeavor than a theme park for well- heeled tourists.
Read Terry's full post here.
Posted at 10.40 am in /Guardian
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
"Art is the lie that tells the truth." Much as many would like to place emphasis on the last word of that statement, the simple, unadorned, unqualified direct object of the sentence is "lie" – that is, artifice, as in "art." Whatever truth value may inhere in the experience of theatre, it inheres ex post facto and not within the experience itself. Similarly, there is no "magic" in theatre; if we are to insist on precision, we must insist on art's status as illusionism, as something of this world and not beyond it. In citing the experience of art as supernatural, we deny responsibility for it, and our reaction to it. Theatre is discipline, nothing is accomplished there through the mere wave of a wand. We react through our bodies, in which our souls inhere.
The idea that art is magic or truth is more destructive in the realm of
explicitly political theatre, for explicitly political theatre, more than
any other, insists on its own validity, its own truth-
The art of theatre is a cold hard thing at its heart. It is a
knife-
Yesterday at the theatreVOICE blog, Daily Telegraph theatre critic and University of Strathclyde professor Mark Brown considered the performances of the Free Theatre of Belarus, which was awarded a special Europe Theatre Prize for "stand[ing] up bravely against the repression of one of the ugliest regimes in Europe." Admirable, of course, and the award had the support of Vaclav Havel, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Michael Billington, among others. Witnessing the productions of the FTB, Brown reports, "There was widespread suspicion that the award was a purely political gesture." Brown concludes (and the conclusion is worth quoting at length):
[Howard] Barker, detested though he is by a shamefully large number of people in English theatre, is entirely right when he asserts that a play has no "use." A play is not a spanner, not a blunt instrument, but (it should hardly have to be said) a work of imagination. [Which is not "magical" either in its most profound sense. – GH]
There is nothing revolutionary in the self-
satisfied posturing of the David Edgars and David Hares of this world. The courageous work of the Free Theatre of Belarus irritates, sometimes possibly threatens, their regime, but it offers little to the wider world of theatre. The truly revolutionary implications of theatre emerge in work which, without sentiment and moralism, brings us face-
to- face with the realities of human existence, raising us above the infantilising mediocrity of our day-to-day culture. We find that in the Greek tragedians, of course, and in Shakespeare, at his best. We find it too, if only more English directors and critics could bring themselves to admit it, in Barker.
Brown's entire post, titled "A Play Is Not a Spanner," is here.
Other material:
Organum II (in progress)
"95 Sentences About Theatre" (Prolegomena)
Posted at 10.11 am in /Organum
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
Gallery: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe
Originally posted 10 January 2006.
Manet's large 1863 canvas was first exhibited in the Salon des Refusés (along with James McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl and work by Monet and Cézanne), where it was summarily snubbed by Napoleon III as well as by thousands of other attendees of the Salon next door; Le Déjeuner also is often considered the first work that can be truly called "modern art," having obsessed Picasso when he first saw it in 1900. It is one of the very first pieces of "art about art," it is said, defining an avant-garde, and also a demonstration of the ways in which theater is about 100 years behind the other arts. Most theater, anyway.
Manet worked from a classical source of inspiration, specifically the
grouping of three characters at the right-
It's very hard to say, too, how these two distracted gentlemen can be unaware of the very bright and prominent nude sitting next to them (though if they're academics, this is explained quite well), introducing eroticism: more, it's an eroticism that implicates us. Quite unprovocatively, the woman is the only person in the painting who seems to be looking at anyone in particular, and that person she's looking at is us, the perceiver. By being nude, perhaps voluntarily so (she seems unconcerned and not frightened, her clothes, a hat and a dress, in a small pile next to her), she is the unadorned human subject at the center of the painting. She is very brightly lit, the brightest subject in the painting, and the way that perspective works here she is the clearest. Her face, too, is the most detailed, the most clearly depicted of the people in the painting: she has individual identity, unlike the men. The perspective itself is one of the first intimations of Impressionism; as you look into the distance of the painting you see that the background fades, becomes two dimensional, even; smudges and blocks of color.
Given the rather goofy disinterest of the two men and the fetching but somewhat more distant (and for my money similarly erotic) woman in the background, the subject of the painting is no longer the story it tells or the characters it depicts, for these are ultimately unsolvable mysteries, but the relationship between the viewer and the painting itself. The nude invites the viewer into the world of the painting, first by inviting questions as to the situation the painting seems to depict, but finally by drawing all of our attention to her. In that imaginative world we ourselves participate in the mystery of the event of the picnic, her own mystery. Because she is neither nymph nor goddess, though, she is approachable as well. She welcomes us.
Well, she does, so long as we don't turn away from her, as Napoleon III and so many of the attendees of the Salon did nearly 150 years ago. The Manet painting has survived the years as calendar art as well as a controversial album cover which reproduced Manet's masterpiece and ran into considerable legal trouble itself (the female nude, singer Annabella Lwin, was 14 years old at the time the picture was taken). But, despite its status as a classic of 19th-century painting now, it's important to remember the outcry, the accusations of obscurity and social insult that were hurled at the painting when it was unveiled at the Salon des Refusés, the same insults that are hurled at so much avant-garde art today. Said a critic at the time of the Manet painting:
A commonplace woman of demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth. These latter look like schoolboys on a holiday, perpetuating an outrage to play the man. ... This is a young man's practical joke – a shameful, open sore.
The only thing this critic seems to have left out was how ... well, boring it is, which would be the ultimate insult today.
Although the Salon itself was filled with depictions of nudes, it was Manet's that rankled – unidentifiable (though clearly of contemporary origin), unashamed, inviting. And ultimately without the certainty of narrative or historical identity.
What does all this have to do with theater and drama? Well, one of the things it points out it is how far our drama is behind the other arts, about 150 years behind painting in this case. Most of our drama is still playing with Victorian narrative form; as much as there are jokes around the edges of it, "playing with form," that form is not abandoned nearly as much as Manet abandoned conventions of narrative and allegory in 19th-century French painting. But there's more, too: there's the emphasis on light and shadow, rather than shape and detail; and, of course, the implication of the viewer. Manet's nude challenges us to enter the painting, accepting the impossibility of interpreting it, of assuming that if we do so it will grant us meaning. It doesn't. Foreman, too, places people on the stage, staring out at us, inviting us into that world, and we too can reject that meaninglessness, if we wish to do so. But the sensual pleasures it offers in our entering the world of the painting, without preconceived notions, can be revolutionary in changing our way of seeing, as Manet changed the art of painting.
POETRY: A poem by Natalie Scott, "Victorine or Naked Woman in Manet's Le Dejeuner sur L'Herbe," was published in the October 2004 issue of the British poetry magazine South.
Posted at 8.47 am in /Organum/Gallery
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Tuesday, 13 May 2008
Quotes: Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin
A perennial suffering has just as much right to find expression as a victim of torture has to scream. For this reason it may have been wrong to write that after Auschwitz poetry could no longer be written. ...
The concept of a resurrection of culture after Auschwitz is illusory and senseless, and for that reason every work of art that does come into being is forced to play a bitter price. But because the world has outlived its own demise it needs art as its unconscious chronicle.
Theodor Adorno
Only for the sake of those without hope, has hope been given to us.
Walter Benjamin
Posted at 8.27 am in /Quotes
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