Tynan's Anger

Not a bad gig after graduation for Nathan Jackson

2008-03-23T15:46:00.005-05:00

Perhaps most depressing to me, shortly after realizing that I had fewer weeks left in college than current Chicago first years have academic quarters, was realizing that no matter what job I get after graduating, it will almost certainly not compare to that of Nathan Jackson. Straight out of the Julliard, Jackson is getting his new play, Broke-ology, added to the lineup of the 2008 Williamstown Theatre Festival. The Nikos stage is designed for new plays, but most playwrights have to at least wait a few years to get a production that big. The play is getting a smaller production at the 2008 Breaking Ground Festival, run by the Huntington Theatre in Boston, which is where Williamstown artistic director Nicholas Martin is coming from. I'm not doubting that the play is worthy of the slot, but it is important to note how ridiculously good an opportunity this is for Mr. Jackson, and how extremely jealous every other recently-graduated aspiring playwright should be (as an aspiring critic, my jealousy is separate, but related).

Is It Better to Be Challenged than to Be Entertained?: Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman Theater versus Funny Games

2008-03-23T06:50:00.010-05:00

Yesterday I performed a sort of Brechtian exercise, the cultural equivalent of traveling from the beaches of southern France to a concentration camp. After seeing The Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman, a pleasant if rather bland play, I went to see one of the more jarring American movies of the past 3 years, Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Those who know me shouldn't be too surprised that I found the latter experience more worthwhile.

The Trip to Bountiful can be seen as pretty much the polar opposite of the Goodman's King Lear of a couple of years ago, a production that incidentally had a lot in common with Funny Games. While that King Lear was a challenging, thoroughly draining experience that no doubt angered some of the Goodman's more conservative subscribers, The Trip to Bountiful, as part of the Goodman's year-long Horton Foote series, is a much safer, accessible work for the blue-haired, Tuesdays with Morrie-reading crowd, with just enough literary significance to satisfy the culture vultures. Foote is something of a southern answer to Neil Simon, a populist playwright who is delicate enough to gain minor dramatic significance with a much more significant dent at the box office. Foote's relationship to Simon can be seen as a sort of parallel to Tennessee Williams' relationship to Arthur Miller.

That makes him ideal for a season-long series at one of the more prominent theater companies in the Midwest, but it also results in a less challenging show than we've seen from the Goodman of late. It doesn't help that The Trip to Bountiful, even as one of Foote's more recognized plays, is rather dull and dated (I also made the mistake of seeing it in a Saturday matinee, complete with elderly who don't seem to realize that you have to be quiet when actors are speaking). It's a play about an old lady rediscovering her country roots while escaping from the hustle and bustle of city life, a theme that was perhaps less played out in 1953 than in 2008. With a few notable exceptions (Lois Smith as the lead Carrie Watts has truly made the role her own), the performances are rather lackluster as well. The only other standout element of the show, David Cosler's excellent set design, is marred by transitions that tended to be extremely awkward. It's not a particularly bad show, it's just rather insubstantial, and it unfortunately casts doubt onto whether Foote needed a season-long tribute.

The audience interested in Bountiful is the opposite of those who would be interested in Funny Games, a shot-for-shot remake of Michael Haneke's 1997 film by the director himself, this time with a fully Americanized production. I have not seen the original, but based on chronology alone, the critique of American film violence poised by Funny Games has only become more relevant with the rise of the Saw/Hostel-style torture porn. Few films intrigued me more going into early 2008, and the initial critical response, as expected, was strongly divided. Few disagreed on the film's intentions, an exercise in draining all the entertainment from film violence and putting the onus directly on the audience as to whether to make it through the whole film. What has been heavily debated is whether the film successfully executes its premise, or whether it engages in the kind of sadism it intends to criticize.

Based on some of the negative reviews I read, I expected a lot more gore and violence than was actually in the film. Most of the violence is off-screen, and while there's certainly blood, stabbings and gunshots, there's no moments where the violence itself actually makes you cringe. While the film is certainly sadistic, I find the lack of gore to be the main reason why the sadism works for its intended purposes. It doesn't let violence be a thrill on its own, and focuses mainly on the repercussions of violence. The film is about 60% of Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Devon Gearhart crying and desperately, pathetically trying to find a way out of the situation. And unlike in Saw and Hostel, the film makes no argument for such a thing being entertaining. In the end, we're not rooting for the family to live, as Michael Pitt's torturous Paul poses to the audience early on, but we're rooting for them to die, quickly and painlessly, so we can get out of the theater and get as far away from this film as possible.

A key addition to this version of the film is an extension of the critique to our casual love of cinematic sexuality. There's a particularly disturbing seen in which Naomi Watts has to strip in front of her torturers, and she spends a significant portion of the film in her panties. In terms of performances, no one acts trauma quite like Watts (Estelle Parsons' Oscar-winning turn in Bonnie and Clyde seems childish by comparison), and Tim Roth, while somewhat underutilized, still performs excellently as the sad-sack "pussy husband."

I'm not surprised at all that the film has been a box office failure so far, and I'd actually be quite concerned if it was a hit. But by making American film audiences address their love of violence in a form as distorted as Funny Games, Haneke has without a doubt created the most important film so far in 2008, a film that's essential viewing for anyone with a stance on modern film violence, pro or con.

Relevant Links:
-For an excellent article on Naomi Watt's take on Funny Games, here's an interview with the London Times
-Pat Graham at the Reader's movie blog makes an excellent, and dead-on comparison between Funny Games and No Country For Old Men, arguing that Funny Games has the same idea as No Country taken to its natural extreme.

Purgmantonionitorio - Never Has Death Been This Hilarious

2008-03-20T20:45:00.003-05:00

So this is pretty much the funniest thing Ive seen all day. An article fro August imagining Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni meeting in Purgatory. Kudos to my friend iend Anya over at for sending me the link.

Theater nerdery delayed by sports nerdery

2008-03-20T07:58:00.004-05:00

My theater plans have been put on hold doe at least one night by the NCAA tourney, which in my mind is the one true day of sports mania that matters anymore in the U.S. (though I must say the most recent Super Bowl restored my faith in that event). There aren't many significant games to keep me from going out to the stage tomorrow night (hoping to get student rush tickets to Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman), but, tonight features Kansas State vs. USC, also known as Michael Beasley vs. O.J. Mayo. So um, yeah, theater's going to have to wait.

I'll be working (or avoiding work during the game), but to make it up to my artistic side, I'll try to finish the Osborne biography after that game's over.

Tynan's Anger gets welcomed to the (non-ethnic) Tribe

2008-03-19T17:55:00.003-05:00

Kudos to The Angry White Guy in Chicago for linking me to the Theatre Tribe, an international collection of theater blogs from just about every perspective imaginable. I hope this blog will be able to contribute to the larger network in the future. The more online discussion of theater, the better.

This site kinda went under intensive surgery during the afternoon, causing its heart to stop briefly. It should be working without a hitch now, with the notable improvement of have the permalinks of each post linked in the post title. I'll work on fine tuning it some more once I get slightly more web design competent.

I've seen no better New Yorker cartoon related to me ever

2008-03-17T00:41:00.002-05:00

Mark Cuban: A self-hating blogger?

2008-03-16T02:56:00.003-05:00

Mark Cuban's been attracting a lot of controversy in the blogosphere for his recent explanation for why he doesn't allow bloggers into the Dallas Mavericks locker room. The main thrust of his argument is that if he were to be fair to all bloggers, he'd have to let in the working in their mother's basement bloggers as well as the more mainstream ones. He is also fiercely critical of newspapers starting blogs of their own, saying it's killing their brand. Of course there have been dozens of rants on bloggers by prominent media members in the past. The main reason his argument has been so divisive, in my mind, is that it's an anti-blog column in the form of a blog post, and it's by one of the more prominent thinkers of new media in America, for better or for worse. Kim Voyner at Cinematical (full disclosure: I use to work for AOL) has an excellent if ambivalent response.

Cuban is something of a mystery to me, both as a sports fan, a movie fan, and a thinker about new media in general. At times, he can be one of the most brilliant prognosticators on media around; he saw the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube coming before anyone else did. At other times, he can be a five year old, as his reaction to Will Leitch's interview with him was straight out of grade school. In my mind, new media is increasingly gaining a more prominent role in our society, and that eventually, everyone's going to have to deal with it. At the same time, old media is still more dominant than it gets credit for, and there are legitimately a ton of exceedingly idiotic bloggers out there. The main problem is that the whole idea of community, reader-created media has never really existed to the current extent, and no one, no matter how smart, really knows how to deal with it. I'm reserving judgment on whether Cuban's argument here is right or wrong until 10 years from now, though my instinct is bloggers will have to be reckoned with at least in some capacity.

My goals for Spring Break

2008-03-14T23:44:00.003-05:00

-Finally finish the John Osborne biography, and get cracking on the David Mamet biography as well
-Rewatch August: Osage County with one of my best friends Claire in hopes of it giving her a life altering experience, as will The King of Kong
-Hopefully get a chance to see The Seagull, despiting a scheduling mishap on my end and a tepid review from Ben Brantley
-See at least one more play in New York
-Watch a Woody Allen movie I haven't seen yet
-Get started watching the John Adams HBO miniseries (starring personal hero Paul Giamatti) on Demand
-Watch the original Funny Games
-Watch one of the movies recommended in the Osborne biography

How important is David Mamet anyway?

2008-03-14T09:44:00.003-05:00

I suppose I should address David Mamet's diatribe in The Village Voice on his newfound aversion to the left wing. He is, after all, arguably the most influential American playwright of the last 25 years, and I'd argue that an introduction to his work is bound to fuck up the styling of most young playwrights for at least a few years (Oleanna pretty much permanently castigated me to critical aspirations). Still, I feel immensely unqualified to write about it, as I did not see Boston Marriage, Romance, or November. I would feel worse about this, if I didn't hear such nearly universally terrible things about the former two. The latter play had all the indications of closing the store on Mamet's career, but I think I was not the only one surprised when it got a glowing review from John Lahr and did exceptionally well at the box office (perhaps the result, as Ben Brantley put it, of being a "David Mamet play for people who don't like David Mamet.") But because I haven't seen these plays, I'll focus more on the politics and past cases of lefty playwrights gone right.

Mamet's long had indications of his right-wing leanings, even in his earliest work, which had a frank honesty towards the brutality of dog-eat-dog capitalism, be it real estate (Glengarry Glen Ross) or Hollywood (Speed-the-Plow). He also fiercely criticized political correctness in my personal favorite of his, the aforementioned Oleanna. Even when his plays were scathing critiques of the culture of capitalism, there was a sort of acceptance of capitalism's logic behind it all. The biggest indication of late, of course, has been his right-wing Israel book The Wicked Son and his rant on Hollywood in Bambi vs. Godzila. He hasn't just been a contrarian, he's been an outright reactionary. It's arguably what we've loved most about him. Now we just have direct evidence of the fact.

Michael Billington raises the absolutely worthy consideration that his dogmatic conservatism may be making him a worse playwright, as he loses the moral nuance that characterized his earlier work. He cites Kingsley Amis and John Osborne as playwrights who suffered after there newfound conservatism. As an Osborne devotee, I must raise a red flag here, because as John Heilpern pointed out in his recent biography, Osborne was always more contrarian than conservative, and he certainly never had a political mantra as direct as what Mamet has provided here. So, I guess to sum up, I'm dissappointed by Mamet, though not particularly surprised, and I don't particularly expect all that much from his later career. It was nice while it lasted.

The Umpteenth Article on America's lack of political theater

2008-03-14T03:19:00.005-05:00

You know when even The Daily Show is making fun of critics declaring the death of American political theater, the epidemic is getting out of hand. The last greatly exaggerated report of political theater's demise comes from John Longenbaugh of the Seattle Weekly, who sees the premiere of two plays from the Uzkbek (or as Borat calls it, asshole) playwright Mark Weil as an excuse for a diatribe on America's lack of political theater. He makes sure to convince people that America has no political theater by presenting ACT's director Kurt Beattle's assurance that the Uzbek plays make "no calls for workers to throw off their chains, or even the sort of superbly detailed study of politics the company gave us last season with David Hare's Stuff Happens." In other news, Longenbaugh is teaching a class in rhetoric at the University of Washington.

The most ridiculous part of the argument is the claim that "Even in its heyday in the 1930s, when playwrights like Elmer Rice, Lillian Hellman, and Clifford Odets dominated the stage, plays focused more on social criticism than full-throated cries for social change." I guess this means the cast of the Group Theatre was not yelling "STRIKE! STRIKE STRIKE!" loud enough for Longenbaugh's taste at the premiere of Waiting for Lefty. Maybe this post-Katrina take at the Cripple Creek Theatre Co. in New Orleans is full-throated enough. I also guess this means that full-throated cries for social change are more important than, y'know, actually having human characters and a coherent plot. All these years my priorities have been way off.

Seriously, though, America's lack of political theater has served the same role in the theater press that the steroids debate has in the sports press: it's an enormous, glaring concern for the press, but few other people actually care. It's a completely artificial concern, and people come up with the most ridiculous methods of criticizing it. I hate the Bush administration as much as anyone, but I have better outlets for that concern than in articles about the course of American drama. As much as I love Brecht, I'd rather just let theater be theater.

The inevitable Elliot Spitzer-"Revolution 9" mashup

2008-03-13T17:30:00.002-05:00

I was dissapointed with the interwebs this week. The downfall of my home state's governor, the only promising-looking figure of the New York Democratic Party for quite some time, introduced the name "Client Number 9" to the masses. Yet, no one did ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif sufficient job making the first, obvious mashup that came into my head: Clips of Spitzer and The Beatles Revolution 9. Some dolt even though "Piggies" would be the proper mashup track from The White Album. That's where I had to take initiative. Here's the result:

This won't get me a job, for sure, but someone had to do it.

The Holocaust film stands on its head

2008-03-10T23:24:00.002-05:00

If you're as sick as Holocaust films as I am (I was raised to regard Schindler's List as Disney Does the Holocaust), you owe it to yourself to see the Counterfeiters. It's the only Holocaust film I can think of that completely inverts the traditional structure, with a tough, no-bullshit Russian Jew subtly manipulating the S.S. to keep him and his fellow prisoners alive. There are so many ways this could have been fucked up, but director Stefan Ruzowitzky helms the film brilliantly. Who would have thought that arguably the most mature Holocaust film ever made would come from Austria? Ruzowitzky has an excellent article in The Guardian addressing the larger political implications of the film in his native Austria, as well as how he expects it to be received in the U.S. and U.K. So far the reception has generally been good, but not good enough in my mind.

Coming around on Pinter

2008-03-09T01:54:00.003-06:00

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

The Guardian Loves My Name

2008-03-08T08:48:00.003-06:00

During my perpetual self-googling (no I have NOT seen this play), I have apparently gotten recognition from the Guardian's Noises Off Blog. Kelly Nestruck at the Guardian recognized the aptness of being in theater and having the name Stanislawski, and provided free publicity for this blog. He blogs at fence.blogspot.com, so I thought I'd return the publicity favor. Seriously, my last name is turning into the gift that keeps on giving.

This whole list phenomenon is getting out of hand

2008-02-24T04:59:00.002-06:00

I understand the need for top 10 lists at the end of the year. No critic likes them, but they sell papers, so they must. But what I don't understand is providing lists when they are unprovoked, just for the hell of it. I thought this was the whole phenomenon High Fidelity mocked. Witness every issue of Time magazine of the last decade for how these things get out of hand. The only pseudo-unprovoked lists that work, in my mind, are the A.V. Club's weekly feature, which are so over the top in their specificity that they usually end up mentioning every relevant work. McSweeney's lists are a clinical study of pretension.

In any case, the most recent absurd list may top them all, and it comes from someone who should know better. Benedict Nightingale, general guru of all things British Theater and The Times's head theater critic, recently came out with his list of top 10 Hamlets he's ever seen. His analysis of what makes a good Hamlet is interesting, but nothing new. Of course, very few people will actually read his analysis, they'll skip to the list, where he not only mentions the top 10 Hamlets (out of 60) that he's seen, but gives them a numerical order (ugh). Simon Russell Beale at the National Theatre in 2000 (woohoo this blog's namesake!), who of course gives a mind-numbing analysis of the role, summarizing Hamlet as a "decent chap."

In my mind, why not go further back? Why not go to David Garrick, inventor of the famed "dramatic pause" or Edmund Kean, famous for wowing audiences in the ghost scene by spinning three times, or Richard Burbage, the man who started it all?

Onion Theater Humor

2008-02-07T08:49:00.000-06:00

There are very few things that get my juices flowing more than mainstream humor outlets making jokes about theater (one of them being jokes about hockey, as well as combining the two with Tracy Letts). So when The Onion makes a joke about theater, in the words of a threadless shirt, "I'm totally blogging that."

I seriously want to know where they got the idea for an advice column with the stage directions from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. More precisely, I want to know why I didn't get the idea first.

Enjoy, folks,

Ask The Stage Directions To Tennessee Williams' Cat On A Hot Tin Roof

New Stanislavski translation: RTFM, Actors!

2008-02-05T10:20:00.000-06:00

(RTFM means Read the Fucking Manual, for those readers over the age of 28)

One of the constant annoyances I face when I am introduced to people is that they automatically assume my name is spelled Stanislavsky. I am thus faced with the dilemma of either going into detail about how the real version of the name is the Polish version, but I'm not Polish, etc. etc., or just give them the correct spelling and say "I know, weird right?" Still, it's not a bad name to have for theater circles, and I was once even given free tickets to a show desperate to fill its house based on my name alone. So all in all, I'm about even with my last name.

Not so much for actors, to whom the most famous person named Stanislawski (or one of its alternate version) is still a constant source of contention. One of the biggest misconceptions about Constantin Stanislavsky is that he invented Method Acting, when in fact it was invented by Lee Strasberg and Uta Hagen in the Group Theater of the 1930s, who used a modified version of Stanislavsky's technique based on An Actor Prepares. Benedict Nightingale wrote an excellent review of a new translation of Stanislavski's works, including the often-ignored Building a Charachter, which was unfinished at the time of his death. Wouldn't you know it, it turns out that "affective memory" is a minor part of the original Stanislavskian technique, instead the real emphasis is for the actor to truly imagine being in that situation. That's not to say Method acting doesn't work, but that it would be better off called the Strasberg Method than Stanislavsky. Though I suppose that would mean I wouldn't deserve the nickname "Method Man" that I acquired in the Maroon office last year, a nickname that I'm quite proud of.

The Guthrie Theater gets childish

2008-02-03T14:43:00.000-06:00

It never ceases to amaze me how theater companies across the nation, even those as prominent as the Tony Award-winning Guthrie Theater, simply cannot take their lickings from the press. I understand that theater, which is more limited in appeal than movies or television, has a harder time recovering from negative reviews than other media. But that still doesn't mean that they're not in a position of public exposure, and subject to the exact same criticism as anything else in public exposure.

In the latest case of critical reactionary drama queenery, a full page ad by the Guthrie was placed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune after the paper gave their most recent production a negative review. While the ad had been "planned for months," the content, decided upon after the reviews came in, feature a near-exact copy of the positive review from the alternative weekly CityPages. The Guthrie's former Broadway marketing guru Trisha Santini had this to say:

"There was something about the way [CityPages critic] Quinton talked about" the show, Santini continued, "that I think spoke to audiences trying to make a determination. There was a way in which he framed it which was in sync with what we hoped for."

Yes, because it was the lone good review after all the other major papers' reception to the play could politely be described as sub-par?

Santini denied that the ad was out of sour grapes: "This is not getback; it's not a retaliatory strike of some sort. We don't have the luxury of doing that. And even if we did, we wouldn't do it." This is what we in the media biz call "horseshit," especially after you talked about how the CityPages critic "spoke to what you were trying to do." Ultimately, this is a black eye for the otherwise respectable Guthrie. They've turned a mild slump—one that every theater goes through—into a credibility issue. That's Broadway-level marketing right there.

Zero Star Hall of Shame

2008-02-02T03:49:00.000-06:00

One of the benefits of regularly reading The Guardian's theatre blog is the discovery of new theater blogs. Though they've seen to pop up like candy this past year, the best ones are still hard to find. Kudos to Kelly Nestruck for directing me to the West End Whingers. Specifically: they're zero star hall of "fame" which chronicles shows getting a zero star rating in the London press. As much as I will defend American theater, this type of thing simply couldn't exist in the states. For one, the little press theater gets in New York or Chicago rarely gives star ratings. And even if they do, most refuse to go lower than 1 star. It was even controversial years back when the New York post introduced the "half-star." Compared to the British press, U.S. critics remind me of the following exchange from The Critic:

Duke: Why the hell do you have to be so critical?
Jay: I'm a critic.
Duke: No, your job's to rate movies on a scale of good to excellent.
Jay: What if I don't like them?
Duke: That's what good's for.

That being said, it's still a rare entity, as even the particularly bitchy British press only had 5 inductees into the Zero Star Hall of Fame. See, we critics are not that bad, honest!

My Maroon Review of Shining City at the Goodman

2008-01-26T18:00:00.000-06:00

Published here. Chicago finally has a taste of the Irish drama that New York and London have loved for years now.

Martin and Me

2008-01-26T17:33:00.000-06:00

That's me with Martin McDonagh, possibly my favorite contemporary playwright in the world, and currently promoting his first feature film In Bruges. My interview with him will be published in the February 8 issue of the Maroon. It was pretty entertaining, so watch out for it.

The rise and fall of Mel Brooks

2008-01-23T08:15:00.000-06:00

Mel Brooks has gone through many stages of his career, from TV genius to film schlockmeister to mastermind behind one of the great musicals of the past decade. In the two former fields, he faced an embarrassing decline, and, sadly, it's looking like the same is now happening to Mel Brooks the Tony-winner. After the overwhelmingly negative response to the Young Frankenstein musical, Brooks is increasingly sounding like a bumbling old man with his own reasoning behind the critical thrashing: that critics are mad about the $450 premier seats, and in making this claim he passes the buck to co-producer Robert F.X. Sillerman.

"This was set by the producer who was too ambitious and thought the extra money might go to our backers and cast rather than concierges, scalpers and ticket brokers," Mel said.

Michael Riedel of the New York Post, never one to pass on a verbal beating, lets Mel Brooks have it for blaming Sillerman for a problem that is clearly Brooks' fault, and sadly, I'm inclined to agree.

To be fair, I haven't seen Young Frankenstein (nor do I have any real desire to do so), but I wasn't surprised when it failed. The Producers succeeded mainly because on its unflinching love for Broadway tradition. Young Frankenstein was Mel Brooks best movie for similar reasons, in that it was a love letter to classic film like The Producers was a love letter to Broadway. Frankly, I don't know that many people who had high hopes for Young Frankenstein.

But to remind us all of Mel Brooks' better musical days, I humbly submit this clip:

What's with all the Tarantino-McDonagh comparisons?

2008-01-22T01:41:00.000-06:00

Perhaps I should have expected this, but I still find it frustrating as a Martin McDonagh fan: the buzz coming for In Bruges, from Sundance and otherwise, all seems to be comparing Martin McDonagh to Quentin Tarantino (such as here, here, here and here). I guess when you're coming from a film perspective, QT is who you think of when you think of smart dialogue + violence. But anyone who's versed in McDonagh's theatrical work would find the comparison quite strange and misguided.

To be fair, I have seen In Bruges, and McDonagh doesn't fall into the trap of making it too theater-like: it's a living, breathing movie, and a good one at that, if a bit strange. The Chicago critics I saw it with were laughing throughout at McDonagh's dialog, and seemed genuinely taken off guard by how fresh it sounded. I would have been surprised if it was any less fresh.

But other than the mix of impressive banter and gun violence, the similarities between McDonagh and Tarantino end. For one, In Bruges is strictly linear, which goes against an absolutely essential Tarantino touch. There's also a distinct Cockney/Irish gangster flair to McDonagh's dialogue, while Tarantino's dialogue is as rough and tumble American as it gets. There's a macabre and surprisingly humanist touch to In Bruges. I don't need to remind you of Tarantino's lack of taste, (well maybe a little). If the film was based entirely on its trailer, I'd say the comparison's legitimate. But the trailer is deceptive; there's a lot more complexity to the film than the Shoot 'Em Up, Smokin' Aces model in which the film is stupidly being marketed.

Neil Labute hates American theater, and sounds immature doing so

2008-01-22T00:11:00.000-06:00

This Thursday I will be seeing This is How It Goes as part of the Profiles Theatre's year long Neil Labute festival. I must say, however, that I will be going into the theater with a bit of a chip on my shoulder against Neil LaBute. He recently railed against American theater in The Guardian, in a column both crudely written and poorly argued. He argues that though theater is not dying, American dramatists are "small writers in America...writing tiny plays about tiny ideas with two to four characters, so that we get produced and nobody loses any money." He also accuses American playwrights of "shying away from politics." He then comes out with this brilliant paragraph:

Let's face it, most writers are pussies. We sit back and watch the world go by, writing down the things we find funny or sad while trying to make a buck off it. We use our lives, or the lives of others, for personal gain, and we defend it by saying it's "in the public domain" or "true", and therefore OK to slop around in someone else's pain.

The fact that the same person who wrote The Shape of Things can spurt out a paragraph like this saddens me, never mind the fact that he ignores the incredible diversity and talent that's coming out of American theater. Has he even seen August: Osage County, or anything by Sarah Ruhl, Adam Rapp, Will Eno, or Jose Rivera?

Maybe he was writing the column to self-flagellate, as he notes:

On many levels, I think we playwrights are failing - and again, I include myself in this. I tend to write about small groups of men and women (friends, lovers, co-workers, family), locked in some kind of gender struggle. These are the politics that interest me, and I scour over them like Herman Melville's Bartleby sitting at his little wooden desk. In the course of a decade of writing, however, I have also tried to look at religion, race, art, national tragedy and a host of other social ills. Am I a naturally political writer? Not at all. A writer like Tony Kushner strikes me as someone far more naturally gifted at bringing the private and public worlds of his characters to life: he may be the most obvious link between the British writers I've long admired and contemporary America. But I have a capricious streak in me that likes writing about the unexpected, messing about with what my audience might want to see or hear or experience - and I think of these as positive qualities.

If you admit to reasons for not writing HUGE FUCKING DEFINING POLITICAL DRAMA, then where's the beef? It should also be noted he just mentioned an American playwright who, wouldn't you know it, rights good political theater, making his argument seem even more pathetic.

Ironically, right before I read this column, I was looking over my collection of John Heilpern essays and found a column entitled "The Anglophile New York Times." That column took issue with a published conversation of the New York Times theater critics on the superiority of British theater. Heilpern rightly called it "a vaudevillian act" that displays "a craven need to overcelebrate [British plays] at the cost of the American theater." He noted that London is constantly overripe with "old" plays and noted the lackluster quality of British transfers, especially when compared to American playwrights of the time like "Tony Kushner, the Wooster Group, Suzan-Lori Parks, Danny Hock, Ellen Stewart's La Mama, Margaret Edson, Savion Glover, Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater, or the staging of Hedwig and the Angry Inch." In short, LaBute's argument is not new, nor has it suddenly acquired any credibility.

George Hunka quickly responded to LaBute's bogus claims, and makes him LaBute look like a fool (and sounds a lot more reasonable as well). He correctly notes:

1) "In the body of his essay, though, he approvingly cites Christopher Shinn, Wallace Shawn, David Mamet, Tony Kushner, David Rabe and Amiri Baraka as fellow countrymen he admires and looked up to as a student in that hard-scrabble, tough-talking environment, the MFA program at the University of Kansas. Half a dozen for the Brits; half a dozen for the Yanks. So there doesn't seem to be any playwright gap, at least not in Neil's world."

2) "On the same day that Neil's article appeared, however, an email arrived in my inbox from a New York theatre company ironically called The Fire Department. It promoted an upcoming show, At War: American Playwrights Respond to Iraq. The show is a collection of scenes about just those larger issues of the day that Neil feels are being neglected by American dramatists. The scenes include work by Obie-winning playwright José Rivera and by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, whose devised play The Exonerated (about capital punishment in the US) was produced to considerable popular and critical acclaim several seasons back."

3) "If Neil still wants to meet me after school behind the gym, that's fine. But he's not the only playwright these days who "writes about [subjects] of some importance ... with honesty and courage." He's not even the only American playwright who does so. And I'm guessing, by the way, that Britain has its share of shitty playwrights too."

Basically, it's sad to see one of America's premier playwrights loudly and rudely denounce himself and his peers in an article that seems like it was written at 2 a.m. after too much wine and getting an email about The Little Mermaid. Let's hope this doesn't precipitate a Mamet-like decline.

Titus Andronicus Redux: Has Post-modernism Gone Too Far

2008-01-20T13:36:00.000-06:00

It's virtually impossible to do Titus Andronicus straight. Even by today's standards, the play's a bloodbath, which has led the likes of T.S. Elliot and Harold Bloom to dismiss the play as one of Shakespeare's worst. Bloom himself speculated that the best person to direct Titus would be Mel Brooks, and while Charles Newell of the Court Theater is not inherently a funny man, he's tried to honor the schlock value of the play with a production of Titus that consistently maintains a wink of the eye to the audience. Hidden in the program is the line "adapted by Charles Newell," but that credit should be taken to heart. Newell's production is staged as a banquet for contemporary soldiers performing Titus melodramatically in jest, carrying scripts and messing up cues. While the initial murders are played in jest, eventually reality overtakes the evening, as art takes over life (or what we're supposed to believe is life). Newell's Titus has as much to do with Shakespeare as a Seder has to do with Exodus.

The problem with adaptations like these, where lines are added and new dimensions opened, is not necessarily matter of Shakespeare purism. The issue is that when people go to a Shakespeare play, even one as ridiculous as Titus, they go to see Shakespeare. True, Newell will be the one judged by the production no matter what he does, but trying to revise Shakespeare outright is more likely to offend your audience than win them over. While the audience laughed at some of Newell's touches, they were mostly cheap laughs. At the end of the night, the audience left the theater feeling cheated.

The other problem is that when you compare your own writing to Shakespeare, even a young, immature Shakespeare, you're bound to lose. While not one of his best plays, Titus still has remarkable poetry and tragic characterizations, which trump Newell's additions even while being suffocated by Newell. Hence, the production feels like there's a better play to be found underneath what's really being seen.

"But look at me!" Newell says. "I'm revising Shakespeare!" Sorry, but that act is not inherently in and of itself noteworthy. The Court's production stretches the limits of postmodernism, and in doing so displays post-modern dramatic theory's inherent weaknesses: revisionism for the sake of revisionism does not make for a satisfying night of theater. When the production finally tries to take itself seriously, it's not believable. The production was clearly intently thought out, rigorously rehearsed, and features impressive technical design and skilled actors. Despite all that, it still feels lazy and insincere. There's no clear vision for the play, other than to say there is no vision. If I wanted to understand that there was no need for vision, I could have stayed at home on a freezing Saturday night curled up with a book of Derrida essays.