The second line of Chris Jones's two-line Theater Loop post this morning, about the latest extension of David Cromer's outstanding A Streetcar Named Desire at Writers' Theatre (my review here), is quite the tease: "And given the critical acclaim enjoyed by the show, a remount somewhere other than Glencoe would hardly be a surprise."
Now maybe he meant a transfer into the Chicago city limits, which would be terrific. But given Chris's predilection for New York transfers of Chicago work—and Saturday's glowing review by Charles Isherwood of the New York Times—that's where my mind went. And I panicked.
As Writers' executive director Kate Lipuma tweeted to me this afternoon, the company is "exploring everything" when it comes to a further life for Cromer's Streetcar. For the sake of argument, though, let's assume we are talking about New York. My feelings about New York transfers of Chicago shows are complicated.
I think there’s definite value in the cultural exchange between our cities’ theater scenes, which are quite different both practically and philosophically. At this year’s TCG conference, which just concluded here in Chicago on Saturday, the frighteningly smart Jonah Lehrer gave a keynote speech. One of his many complicated but well-illustrated points involved the higher creativity that’s been observed in cities, which may be attributable to the higher rate of random encounters—“bumping into people on the sidewalk.”
To borrow from something Tony Adams tweeted at me earlier, maybe there are sparks in the sidewalk-bumping theater artists do on the metaphorical highway between New York and here. As Kerry Reid’s recent PerformInk piece illustrates, it is possible for some theater folks to make a multi-locational life, and to find the impermanence enriching.
And I’m all for the positive attention that Chicago theater has received and that’s seemed to pile up in recent years, when such productions as August: Osage County, Adding Machine, Our Town, Graceland, A Steady Rain, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity and Superior Donuts have made the move, with varying degrees of involvement from the Chicago artists with whom they started. Lots of nice things have been said about those Chicago artists in the New York and national press because they went there, which is lovely.
But when we send our artists, particularly our actors, to New York, oftentimes they don’t come back. I’m thinking here of Our Town’s Jennifer Grace, Superior Donuts’s James Vincent Meredith, Chad Deity’s Desmin Borges. That’s why I worry about the hypothetical prospect of transferring Cromer’s Streetcar—for which the high-profile reviews have all praised its strong, all-Chicago cast—moving there. Do I want Stacy Stoltz and Matt Hawkins to receive broader notice? Absolutely. Do I want that if it means I don’t get to see them on Chicago stages again anytime soon? Thank you, no.
A number of out-of-town critics have praised Chicago as America’s real theater capital over the last several years. What if, instead of continuing to export our stuff elsewhere for praise and dollars, we embraced what London’s Michael Billington, Toronto’s Richard Ouzounian, New York’s Terry Teachout and others have written and sell ourselves, not New York, as said theater capital?
If Cromer’s Streetcar deserves more viewers—and it surely does—why shouldn’t they come to Chicago to see it? Instead of courting the Scott Morfees and Jeffrey Richardses of New York, maybe Gigi Pritzker’s ready for another go at producing theater in Chicago after Million Dollar Quartet.
As Alan M. Berks notes in the first installment of his TCG report from the Twin Cities, one of the unofficial themes of Chicago's TCG conference was the awesome, non-hierarchical nature of Chicago's theater scene. Mayor Daley said a lot of great things to the nation's theatermakers Saturday morning, as he did to the city's press a couple of weeks prior when marking the tenth anniversary of the downtown theater district, in the presence of NEA chair Rocco Landesman, about the value of theater and other arts in building a world-class city.
So what if, instead of continuing the New York–centric 20th-century model, we make our city a theater tourism destination? With others so willing to call Chicago the real theater destination of North America, wouldn’t it be great if we embraced that label ourselves? What if theater audiences actually had to come to Chicago to see Chicago-style theater?
I spent a long weekend in New York last week, binging on plays. I saw a mix of Broadway and (more) Off Broadway, with no particular agenda; I saw Our Town at the Barrow Street Theatre, just to see how it translated after I'd seen it twice at the Chopin. I caught a gaggle of gay plays simply because they were all running at the same time—when I read Patrick Healy's NYT story on Monday, I was surprised to discover I'd just accidentally seen three of the mentioned plays in 36 hours. I didn't see everything I would've liked—with more time or in different circumstances I might have gone for McDonagh's A Behanding in Spokane or the current Radiohole offering.
I've been asked repeatedly since my return last week what was the best thing I saw? The truth is I liked all five shows I took in (I'm rarely so lucky), but if pressed I have to say the most satisfying show I saw was MCC's production of The Pride, the lovely, challenging British import by Alexi Kaye Campbell that took a complex assessment of the gay experience over a 50-year span.
And I keep coming back to a line from Campbell's Playbill bio, as it relates to that whole Outrageous Fortune business (remember two months ago when I promised we were going to talk about that?).
It's this that I can't seem to get past:
Alexi Kaye Campbell…became an actor and worked extensively in theatre, film and television…His first play, The Pride, was on at the Royal Court Theatre in London in November 2008 for which he received the Critics' Circle Award for Most Promising Playwright and the John Whiting Award for Best Play.
His first play…was on at the Royal Court. Now I don't know a lot about Campbell, and as this is a blog post intended to stoke a conversation that gets back to Outrageous Fortune rather than being the last word, I'm not going to do a lot of research right now. But, grain of salt, I do know his partner Dominic Cooke is the current AD at the Royal Court.
Setting that aside for a moment, though, and for the sake of argument, can you imagine a major American institution saying to a playwright, "Oh, this is your first play? We like it, let's produce it!" rather than submitting them to the commission/development/workshop cycle?
The closest American analogue I can think of right now is former actor Tarell Alvin McCraney, whose The Brothers Size was picked up by the Public before he'd finished his Yale M.F.A. and whose Brother/Sister Plays cycle is currently running at Steppenwolf.
Keeping in mind that I was blown away by both McCraney's tryptych at Steppenwolf and by Campbell's play at the Lortel, I welcome your comments about their quick trajectories and the slower journeys that most new playwrights face, and how the different approaches in the U.S. and the U.K. affect them.
I'm still in the process of reading the TDF study; since it published on December 22 (seriously?! who does that?), my copy arrived at the office during our holiday break and I didn't lay hands on it till Monday. But in reading it, along with all the discussion that's been going lately on about the issues it covers (whether explicitly linked to the book or not; I'm thinking back at least to the Twitterpalooza that surrounded last month's Defining Diversity convening at Arena Stage), my mindgrapes are swirling with all sorts of strong and often conflicting ideas and emotions. I don't think I can quite make sense of it all yet, and I'm feeling a bit defeated tonight by a rough day/week, but I just wanted to say for the record:
We're gonna talk about this.
As you were.
(P.S. to any New Yorkers reading this: You lucky so-and-sos, you get to see Chad Deity.)
Oh, hey. I haven't forgotten you. I'm still here, though I'm definitely more there and there right now.
I actually have a post percolating in my head for here that came to me over the weekend; the only question is when to find time to write it. Guess I just wanted to pop in and say I haven't forgotten this place.
In my other few seconds of spare time this week, I'm trying to decide what to be for Halloween. Any ideas?
Last Wednesday, I got a call from an editor at the Guardian asking if I'd be interested in contributing a post about Chicago theater to their Stage blog. They were looking for a quick turnaround in a week that was already very busy here; factoring in the time difference, I had to dash this thing off over a couple of very late nights.
It did feel a little odd to me that I ended up using our current New York exports as a way in, especially given what I'd just written here. But for an audience at the Guardian that has up to now only been reading about theater in London and New York, it seemed like a convenient introduction to why they need to keep up with Chicago theater as well. I think I made a pretty good case. This may or may not become an ongoing thing; let me know what you think.
I should be writing my Under Milk Wood review right now, but just wanted to quickly acknowledge that the Equity Jeff Award nominations were announced tonight. You can read the full list at the Jeffs' site or at the TOC Blog, where you'll also find the latest helping of They Wuz Robbed. I considered switching up the format of TOC's response, but people seem to enjoy TWR—it's a true fact that at least one person has said they'd prefer a TWR mention to the actual nomination.
I was rushed in putting the post together today, and I'm already thinking of more I could have included: What about James Schuett's Tempest costumes? Hanna Dworkin for Picnic? How does it make sense that Ensemble is the sole nod for Scenes from the Big Picture? And I'll keep coming up with more. But I mean it when I say that the Jeff committee got a lot of things right this time around. I personally missed some of the most-nominated shows (Drury Lane's Miss Saigon, TimeLine's Not Enough Air), but I'm glad to note the committee didn't nominate much from shows that I did see and had lukewarm feelings about.
And more importantly, they made a number of good calls that I might not have expected: A double nomination for Tanya Saracho, Jake Cohen for Steppenwolf's Up, Taylor Mac for solo performance, Levi Kreis for Million Dollar Quartet, Spencer Kayden as the only acting nom for Don't Dress for Dinner. (And I'll just say that it's…interesting, if not perhaps a little cruel, for them to nominate one of the kids who played Noah in Caroline, or Change and not the other. Suddenly the Billy Elliot compromise makes more sense to me.)
Your thoughts are welcome, either here or at TOC (though it might make the most sense to consolidate the discussion over there).
I'm reading with some fascination the comment debate on Chris Jones's review of Route 66's High Fidelity, which opened Monday night. I was there, but I'm not reviewing the show for TOC, so I'll leave my own opinions of the show aside until John Beer's review hits on Monday. But the bedrock of the comment by "allison" that kicked off the conversation, and some of the comments that follow, deal in what I consider to be fallacies about a critic's job description; they also address some of what I talked about in my post here earlier this week. Not that he needs it from me, but I feel compelled to defend Chris a bit.
Allison says:
chris, theatre in this country is suffering right now. you are a chicago theatre critic. by your own words "america's hottest theatre city." you are supposed to support and encourage theatre in this town.
Bullshit.
Part of what a Chicago theater critic is charged to do is to support and encourage good theater in this town. It does no one any good to encourage bad theater. A while back I was cornered at an opening by an administrator of another theater company who berated me about a bad review I'd written; this person used a variation on this trope and a number of its corollaries, some of which Allison also employs: these people worked so hard on this, other people in the audience were clearly enjoying themselves.
The absolute WORST thing we can do as critics is to be soft on a show we didn't enjoy because people worked so hard on it. As other commenters at the Trib have noted, if we put the hard sell on shows about which we have significant reservations, what happens to the audience members who fork over their money based on our review and find themselves with the same reservations? How much harder will it be for us to convince those same readers to take a chance on trusting us again?
Being supportive of and constructive about Chicago theater is something I personally strive for, and I relish having an ongoing dialogue with the theater-makers of Chicago and the larger world (which is, after all, what this blog has largely consisted of). But in my reviews, I'm primarily a servant of the general readership, and I have to give them my honest opinion. (And often my honest opinion can double as the best constructive theater-maker criticism I can impart, even when it's What were you thinking?) As for that fallback about how everyone else was having a good time: Transformers 2 is on track to be one of the biggest box-office hits of the summer. Does that mean Roger Ebert should have gone easier in his review? No. His readers expect his measured, subjective opinion, just as Chris's readers, and mine and every other critic's, expect ours.
To get back to my post from the other day, Allison seems particularly upset about the Trib's star rating (2.5 out of 4! Not actually bad!!!), which is something the paper only recently adopted. To answer Andrew's and Evan's comments, as well as some I received on Twitter, I find the star system reductive whether it's base-four, -five or -six, and I'd rather do without it at all, as TOC did for its first 15 months or so. I'd prefer the content of the review speak for itself, which is why I've lately stopped posting the stars on the web section front, so online readers are at least forced to click through to the words before they can see the snap judgment, which I often spend more time worrying about (and which, as Allison's concern attests, draws too much attention to itself). As long as we're stuck with them, though, I'm happier with the five-star scale than the Spinal Tap six. Your thoughts?