Frank's Wild Lunch

As Planned

2012-01-05T16:29:00.000-08:00

After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don't you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?

-FO'H

Another thing

2011-11-29T07:59:00.001-08:00

I found hilarious about John Lahr's review of Seminar was this little statement he makes with the utmost confidence:

Rebeck's clever commercial entertainment contains just enough truth about writing workshops to keep an audience of non-writers interested. Of course, no professor, no matter how vainglorious or vitriolic, would ever come to class as unprepared as Leonard: his judgments are based on a cursory reading of a few pages handed over to him on the day, which he proceeds to digest and to toss unceremoniously on the floor. This is the preposterous Broadway version of a writing class.

I don't know what kind of creative writing classes Lahr has been in, but I've been in writing workshops with writers of varying degrees of success, and it always seemed like the more impressive a writer's resume was, the less prepared he bothered to be, for whatever reason. Of course, the bulk of my experience is playwriting, which gets the easy rationalization that the text is better heard than read. Why should we bother reading outside of class? That was even asserted to me by my advisor when I was preparing to teach in grad school. He was looking out for me, as I was carrying a full course load and doing rewrites for a play about to go into rehearsals, but still.

I can't remember if that was before or after that time we had to call his home phone from class to remind him that he had to teach us that day.

Okay, that was an easy punchline. I'm being too hard on him. He was not the least prepared of my "mentors." Not by a long shot.

This one was likely the most. She read our stuff before meeting with us. I always appreciated that.

Sherry

2011-11-28T08:46:00.000-08:00

Adam has an interview with one of my favorites, Sherry Kramer. Here's a good excerpt:

Q: Tell me, if you will, a story from your childhood that explains who you are as a writer or as a person.

A: Well, I guess the time I was doing in high school doing Dramatic Interpretation is probably a slice of essential DNA about me as a writer and a person. I was on the debate team, and you went on buses to cities in your state and region to compete, it was sort of like Sex 101 for nerds, really, you stayed over night in hotels and learned all kinds of things. I was never a great debater because I tended to make my facts up and I’m not by nature a compelling liar, but you also could compete in Dramatic Interpretation, which was acting scenes and monologues.... [O]ne year I decided to do comedy instead of drama, and I picked the scene from Othello where he strangles Desdemona. When you do interp, you play however many parts there are in a scene, so that meant I had to strangle myself. I thought this was hilarious. I also knew I had to do it absolutely straight, or it wouldn’t be funny. So I did it. As seriously as I could. A little 7 minute scene, and at the end of it I strangled myself. Then I did Othello’s lines, did a little bow, looked up at my judges: three theatre teachers from tiny towns in rural Missouri. You know that moment in The Producers (the film) when they look at the audience’s faces after Springtime for Hitler? And their mouths are all open down to their knees, they’re so horrified? That’s the way those three judges looked.

Click here for the rest.

I'm loving the reviews

2011-11-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

of Theresa Rebeck's new play, Seminar, which seem to be fawning and condescending at the same time. How the show pulls that off is beyond me, although with that cast I'd happily find out. Alan Rickman and Hamish Linklater go without saying, but Lily Rabe is one of my new favorites after being one of the best things about All Good Things, and I recently discovered that I can watch her on TV all the time now in American Horror Story, alongside Jessica Lange. A name that shall henceforth be printed in italics if I have anything to say about it. Imagine my glee; thank you Ryan Murphy!

Digression aside, my favorite review of Seminar is John Lahr's in The New Yorker. Here's the best passage:

[Alan Rickman's character] Leonard, or so he tells us, was at Yale with Robert Penn Warren: "He was ruthless and religious about sound. . . . If the sound wasn't there, there was no discussion." (As it happens, I was at Yale with Penn Warren, and this description of him is bushwa.) It says something about the robustness of Rebeck's characterization and her humor that she makes you want this claptrap to be true.

It's only online to subscribers, but here's a link to the abstract, etc.

I wandered over

2011-11-20T20:20:00.000-08:00

to the MOCA Pacific Design Center for Hedi Slimane: California Song this afternoon. The photos are all gorgeous, but a highlight was the security guard explaining the unusual installation of the first floor to me. He approached me and asked, "have you figured out the puzzle yet?" When I said no, he helped me put the pieces together. Somebody should promote him to docent.

The other highlight was the second floor room. The guard told me I could take photos if I didn't use a flash, so I snapped a couple of the floor-to-ceiling projections upstairs. The picture doesn't do it justice, but here you go.

Interesting article about Other Desert Cities

2011-11-04T19:16:00.000-07:00

in the LATimes yesterday. I'm mostly posting because of this passage--

Baitz doesn't encounter any such problem in "Cities," which leaves no psychological stone unturned in telling of a Waspish Palm Springs family during a Christmas homecoming. Transferred from Lincoln Center's Mitzi Newhouse Theater and directed by Joe Mantello, Baitz's former life partner and his frequent theater collaborator, "Cities" offers a full-color portrait of guilt, blame and, occasionally, redemption.

--only because I'm amused by the phrase "former life partner."

There's all this

2011-11-02T21:02:00.000-07:00

good theater in L.A. right now that I'm actually not in a position to call good because I haven't seen any of it yet but I want to see it because I think it's going to be good so--

Charles Ludlam's Artificial Jungle closes this weekend. I hope there are tickets left.

This House of Gold looks crazy.

Monkey Adored should be interesting.

Seeing Next Fall tomorrow.

And let's not forget Bring it On!! I'm not kidding. I'm totally there next week.

Joan Didion

2011-10-30T09:51:00.001-07:00

has a new memoir coming out, and there's a nice profile of her in today's LATimes. Here are some of my favorite bits--

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live," she begins "The White Album," then undercuts the sentiment almost immediately: "Or at least we do for a while." Implicit in those lines is a recognition of the fundamental friction between the shaping impulses of literature and the chaos of the world. "It's just a tension you never resolve," Didion explains, eyes pale, unwavering. "I think I was writing 'Democracy' [her 1984 novel] when it came to me that, as well as I might describe the palm trees, it wasn't going to get me anywhere."

[...]

"All I know now," she declares there, "is that writing … no longer comes easily to me" — a statement that echoes her admission in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" "that there is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke." The more things change, in other words, the more they never do.

And so, on this Thursday afternoon in her living room, Didion continues to work it through. "Let me try again to talk to you directly," she writes in "Blue Nights," speaking to her readers as if the book were a kind of intimacy. And: "I tell you this story just to prove that I can." There it is, that push to tell, to observe, and then the deepening: "That my frailty has not yet reached a point at which I can no longer tell a true story." Here again, Didion is triangulating, positioning herself, commenting on the inability of narrative to sustain us even as she invokes it just the same. Or, as she puts it, surrounded by all her familiar photographs: "I didn't think I'd get through this book. But I did. You always do."

Read the whole thing here.

ANYWAY,

2011-10-16T12:25:00.000-07:00

exAngelus has 3 more readings, with the next one TONIGHT. Jessica Abrams' one-woman show, If I Look This Good, Why Do I Feel Like Shit? is being read by Lindsay Frame. Here are the details.

Psychic Visions Theatre
3447 Motor Ave, Los Angeles, CA

All readings start at 7 p.m.
The readings are free, though donations will be gratefully be accepted (and will help Psychic Visions with their impending moving costs).

Next week we have Pat McGowan's Fathoms, directed by Laurie Woolery, followed by Tira Palmquist's Ten Mile Lake, directed by Joshua Wolf Coleman on Sunday, October 30. Skip the Halloween parties and come see what we're up to.

I wrote this post

2011-10-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

several days ago with the intention of publishing later that day and completely forgot! Should've scheduled in advance.

I read at the West Hollywood Book Fair on Sunday morning (10/2/11), which went well, even if it was so early we didn't have much of a crowd yet. Here's a picture taken by Jim Arnold, another reader there.

I read an abridged version of the extended version of my essay, "The Indie Rock Tastemakers of Heber Springs, Arkansas," which originated on this very blog. After that I went with a monologue from make a whisper. It was a good time, as well as a nice excuse to spend Sunday morning in West Hollywood with JW, who finally has Sunday mornings free to goof off with me.

A highlight of the morning was seeing the stunning views out of the new library. I hung out at the homo-centric booth to hear my friend Corey read, and then JW and I went to first MOCA, then the ONE, the National Gay and Lesbian Archives, which has an amazing show up in West Hollywood now called Cruising the Archives as part of the Pacific Standard Time business. Go check it out if you can. This link has some of my favorite images and objects from the show, but you have to go so you can see JW's favorite, a caftan from the 70s sold out of Ah Men! on Santa Monica Blvd.

So much for

2011-10-16T11:05:00.000-07:00

daily blogging. I took a yoga class on the first Monday in October all about autumn and new beginnings and it was prescient and calming and then I threw myself into my new writers collective's first big public event and a new job and a fill-in part-time thing as well. The momentum has felt good, if a little frenzied. Hopefully I'll get back to yoga and dial it all down a notch or two.

The first of

2011-10-04T09:49:00.000-07:00

ExAngelus' Month of Sundays readings was a big success. It was my play, too, so maybe I'm biased. But I was pleased. Of course I took no pictures because I never think to do so, but take my word for it.

The play is currently titled make a whisper, and it started in 2008 as a full-length play-within-a-play that's equal parts elegy for Elliott Smith and frustrated love letter to Los Angeles theater. Back then it was called Forgetting, and it was unwieldy and problematic and full of way too many scenes and characters. After the first reading, another writer suggested that I must've written this because I "needed to get it out of my system and move on to something else." And thanks to that and other withering critiques, that's more or less what I did, even though I persisted for at least a few more months of rewrites in hopes of proving that critic wrong.

Just for kicks I started looking at it again this year. I was surprised to find myself still fond of some of the writing in it, and distance made me a little ruthless about cutting it down to a long one-act. I'm pleased to say that I'm not even all that embarrassed by it anymore. I wish I had kept in touch with that writer so I could've invited him to the reading. It's still a little messy, and it's weird and brief and probably a failure (to paraphrase one of my characters), but on Sunday night the actors killed it and the crowd laughed a lot.

Come check us out again this Sunday for a reading of Psyche, by Meghan Brown.

I told myself

2011-10-04T09:35:00.001-07:00

over the weekend that I'd try to update the blog at least once a day this week, and I'm already off my game. I even had time yesterday but I just didn't do it.

The reason I told myself this is because my last day at my job was Friday, freeing me up for a week before I start my new job next week. I'm very pleased about all of this, as you can imagine, but for this week I'm just trying to enjoy the city and being off work. It's been rare for me to have a decent amount of time off in Los Angeles with no friends or family in town to entertain.

So yesterday I got some writing done in my neighborhood and then went to yoga in the middle of the day. Today I'm at the bar at LAMill in Silver Lake, which, in spite of all the other laptops and people grinding away on scripts or other projects, feels a little too formal for me to settle in with legal pads and headphones and grind away for a couple of hours. So here I am on the blog. The coffee is great, though.

I had some business going on a couple of days ago. I'll write about that in a bit.

This Sunday

2011-09-28T22:52:00.000-07:00

is turning out to be a big day for me. I'm presenting my writing in two different venues, starting in West Hollywood at 10am and ending in Culver City at 7pm.

October 2, 10am, homo-centric at the WEHO BOOK FAIR.

I've recently been expanding on an old blog post from FWL called "The Indie Rock Tastemakers of Heber Springs, Arkansas," and submitted it for publication. I've been working with an editor to shape it up. We'll see how things proceed with that, but in the meantime, I'm reading it in West Hollywood this Sunday during the 10 o'clock hour in Booth B35 at the West Hollywood Book Fair.

West Hollywood Library & Park
625 N San Vicente Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA
www.westhollywoodbookfair.org

October 2, 7pm, A Month of Sundays Play Reading Series, ExAngelus at Psychic Visions Theatre, Culver City.

I've begun a new writers group with some fellow southern California playwrights. We're called ExAngelus, and we've put together a reading series. I'm kicking things off with my new comedy, which is equal parts elegy for Elliott Smith and tribute to the folly of producing live theater in Los Angeles. Strange combo, I know; come check it out and tell me if it works. It's called make a whisper. I've got some of my favorite actors in Los Angeles involved -- Brian Rohan, Mark Slater, Andrew Hamrick, Marnie Olson, Edward Alvarado, and Sasha Harris -- and it's at my beloved Psychic Visions Theatre.

Psychic Visions Theatre
3447 Motor Ave, Ste A
Culver City, CA

Come check me out this Sunday!

tUnE-yArDs

2011-09-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

are getting me through this week. Thank you Merrill Garbus.

Maurice Sendak

2011-09-21T14:45:00.000-07:00

on Fresh Air just about made me cry last night, y'all! Here's a taste:

Sendak says that he worked on Bumble-ardy while taking care of his longtime partner, Eugene Glynn, who died of lung cancer in 2007.

"When I did Bumble-ardy, I was so intensely aware of death," he says. "Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did Bumble-ardy. I did Bumble-ardy to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live as any human being does. But there's no question that the book was affected by what was going on here in the house. ... Bumble-ardy was a combination of the deepest pain and the wondrous feeling of coming into my own. And it took a long time. It took a very long time."

There is serious

2011-09-04T08:41:00.001-07:00

comedy and serious tragedy occurring on the Westside right now. I got to see both this weekend and I recommend both.

SITI Company's The Trojan Women at The Getty Villa is elegant and severe, gorgeous in the Villa amphitheater, with a stunning performance by Ellen Lauren as Hecuba. It's still in previews but I doubt they'll mind me gushing about it. Here's the LAT preview that ran last weekend about it.

And at the Geffen we have The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity by Kristoffer Diaz, in a production that brings together original players from the Chicago and New York productions. It was a Pulitzer finalist last year -- I like its print ads announcing it as "Pulitzer Prize LOSER" -- and it's easily the coolest thing I've ever seen at The Geffen. Loud, brash, and heavy on spectacle, it's engaging and ingratiating, with much to say about about American identity and exploitation. Also still in previews, but, since it's rare I ever get to things I want to mention while they're still in previews, here you go.

Here's the Geffen's trailer for the show.

Furious about

2011-09-02T10:21:00.000-07:00

this.

The Bilerico Project has a good breakdown of the legal issues regarding the gay panic defense in the McInerny trial. Here's a good excerpt:

it was clear that the defense was banging away at a gay panic defense, suggesting that King's sexual "advances" were the trigger for McInerney's actions. But there are certain things we are not prepared to accept as a "reasonable" provocation. The fact that someone hates people of a particular race or ethnicity, for example, is not generally accepted as "reasonable" provocation. It might have actually acted as a factor that provoked the defendant, but our law does not consider that as a reason for diminished responsibility. A defense lawyer would not be allowed to make such a case, ask questions insinuating as much, or argue it to the jury. It is also clear that, had King been a girl that McInerney had killed because he didn't like her sexual advances, such an argument would also be deemed inappropriate. And yet, such an argument happened just now in the Larry King case, and the judge said nothing and did nothing to stop it.

As a side note, there was much hullabaloo about a law passed a few years ago in California against the "gay panic" and "trans panic" defenses. However, it was nothing more than a law requiring a jury instruction that the jury shouldn't consider the victim's personal identity, including, among others in a long list, sexual orientation. That's a meaningless law as demonstrated by this case. Jury charges can be pages and pages long and simply stating that one should not take the victim's sexual orientation into account is meaningless in the context of a trial such as this. Of course they took Larry King's sexual orientation into account. How could they not, when the defense presented 100 witness and weeks of testimony about Larry King's sexual orientation and the judge allowed it? The law that's needed is a law that says that evidence pertaining to a victim's sexual orientation or gender identity is deemed irrelevant and prejudicial, and therefore inadmissible.

Read the whole thing here.

A good article

2011-08-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

about the L.A. area premiere of My Name is Rachel Corrie is here.

A few things

2011-08-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

Bedtime Stories was PACKED last weekend. It's a hot mess and I'm in it tomorrow night and next Saturday in my underwear. Details here. Come see.

I'm trying to plug the show at least a little more frequently on here thanks to ETC at Fierce and Nerdy, who scolded me for not keeping my blog more up-to-date or something like that. Her blog is far more regularly updated, including timely Project Runway recaps by our friend Zack Bunker (or Zacki, as our longtime readers might recall), and guest-blogged this week by Monique King Viehland. Hi Monique!

Speaking of, Project Runway is so boring this season even last night's bitchy episode put me to sleep. And yet it's just about my only appointment television going right now. I don't know if that says more about me or television, but there you have it.

I determined last night that I am in love with Don Lemon. Anderson WHO???

I'm going to see a friend tonight in The Underpants down in Long Beach. Yay Long Beach. Who wants to meet me at Pistons after?

I finally got my ticket to see Blackbird at Rogue Machine. I've been meaning to for a while but they tend to extend and I put things off. Steven Leigh Morris's column in this week's LAWeekly helped me focus. Of course I could only really swing closing night, so by the time I'm into writing about it, the thing will be donesville, but better late than never.

This post is very old school FWL and I'm totally okay with that.

There was one audience member

2011-08-19T15:35:00.000-07:00

at Bedtime Stories two weeks ago. I kept meaning to write a blog post about it but I've been prone to distraction lately, so I'm just getting around to it now.

So there was one person at our performance on August 6. It was my first night to go on with the short play I wrote and directed. The lone attendee was a guy who came the weekend before and had so much fun he came back a second week in a row. If we were to have only one guy in the audience, he was a good person to be that one guy. And he didn't leave either, which made us even more grateful.

Since he'd already seen the show, we decided to do an abbreviated version of it. We only did three scenes, with all the actors sitting in the house providing the rest of the audience. All the other actors were really excited about seeing me go on in my play. So that was one of the three.

Things went well enough; I had to make my scene partner stop once and back up because I got a little lost in it. I'm a real pro that way. We got through it though.

After that we embarked on something we called "My Drunk Theater," since the cheap wine started to flow earlier than usual amongst the cast. We put names in a hat and picked them to go into random scenes. I played a housewife in lingerie tying up her husband with neckties. It was great fun.

We had a few more in attendance the following weekend, so we actually did the whole show. I go on tomorrow night, I'll be in at least through August 27, and possibly through September 2. Who knows? Maybe we'll just do it every weekend as an excuse to hang out and get a little sloppy with each other. That seems to be the tradition at Psychic Visions. Doesn't that sound fun? Come check us out.

Happy about

2011-08-19T12:13:00.001-07:00

this.

Real post coming up

2011-08-16T19:54:00.001-07:00

In the meantime, here's "Blood Makes Noise" in a church! I went on a brief Suzanne Vega youtube spree and found this. I love how the guitar sounds in the echo-y acoustic.

I also love this.

2011-08-10T10:32:00.001-07:00

Stephen Sondheim on The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess, directed by Diane Paulus and with new scenework by Suzan-Lori Parks.

The article by Mr. Healy about the coming revival of “Porgy and Bess” is dismaying on many levels. To begin with, the title of the show is now “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess.” I assume that’s in case anyone was worried it was the Rodgers and Hart “Porgy and Bess” that was coming to town. But what happened to DuBose Heyward? Most of the lyrics (and all of the good ones) are his alone (“Summertime,” “My Man’s Gone Now”) or co-written with Ira Gershwin (“Bess, You Is My Woman Now”). If this billing is at the insistence of the Gershwin estate, they should be ashamed of themselves. If it’s the producers’ idea, it’s just dumb. More dismaying is the disdain that Diane Paulus, Audra McDonald and Suzan-Lori Parks feel toward the opera itself.

[...]

What Ms. Paulus wants, and has ordered, are back stories for the characters. For example she (or, rather, Ms. Parks) is supplying Porgy with dialogue that will explain how he became crippled. She fails to recognize that Porgy, Bess, Crown, Sportin’ Life and the rest are archetypes and intended to be larger than life and that filling in “realistic” details is likely to reduce them to line drawings. It makes you speculate about what would happen if she ever got her hands on “Tosca” and ‘Don Giovanni.” How would we get to know them? Ms. Paulus would probably want to add an aria or two to explain how Tosca got to be a star, and she would certainly want some additional material about Don Giovanni’s unhappy childhood to explain what made him such an unconscionable lecher.

He goes on. Quite a bit, in fact. Read the whole thing here.

I love this.

2011-08-09T16:29:00.000-07:00

It's a 1st-person profile of one of my favorite Arkansas actors, Natalie Canerday. Here's a good excerpt.

The best acting advice I ever got came from two people. The first was Dr. Rosemary Henenberg at Hendrix, who used to always tell us acting students, “Don’t make it happen, let it happen.” It applies to a happy life as well as acting.

The other great advice came from my L.A. agent, the late Wally Hiller. I’d been out visiting L.A. to shop for agents, check out apartments and such and was about to go back to Arkansas for Christmas. I told Wally I’d be moving out there after the first of the year. He told me to enjoy my holiday and to call him if I had any questions. Then he said, “Don’t dye your hair blonde, don’t get your tits done, and, for God’s sake, honey, don’t lose that accent!” It’s been the best advice ever.

Read the whole thing here.

This may come

2011-08-02T17:16:00.000-07:00

as a surprise, but a little play that I wrote continues to perform every Saturday night for the next three Saturdays. It's called "3 A.M. in the Morning," and has been going strong almost every Saturday (we took a break for 4th of July and one for Carmageddon) since May 13. May 13 was actually a Friday, but we did two shows that weekend mainly so we could perform on Friday the 13th.

Anyway, if you haven't seen our show yet, it's called Bedtime Stories. It's a definite romp with some truly lovely people onstage and running lights and sound. And if you come to one of the performances this month, you're in for a special treat.

Check out the details here.

Fierce and Nerdy on self-producing

2011-08-02T17:14:00.000-07:00

It's apparently kind of a dumb thing to do.

Amy Winehouse

2011-07-28T23:39:00.000-07:00

Bob and I were in one car, Brandy and the Jennys were in another. Parking was going to be a disaster. We were all trying to get to Coachella in time for Amy Winehouse. She was only a little on my radar at the time thanks to some NPR story I'd heard saying she was about the best thing to come out of South By Southwest that year. I'd heard a snippet of "Rehab" and knew she was all the rage, but I had no idea how crazy Brandy was to see her.

I think Bob predicted it; we'd beat the girls there because he had the better parking pass. I remember running to get to the tent and Bob laughing, saying, "Brandy's going to miss her and she's going to be so pissed!" We got to the backstage area and watched her set from behind; I could see only her skinny frame and her tall rat's nest of hair. The sound was never that great behind the stage but I could hear how deep her voice was. I could hear the response too. People were loving her.

Brandy and the Jennys got there right as she was wrapping up, I think. Brandy was devastated, but as we walked away from the tent, Amy walked right past us, a tiny, wispy mess of a thing. Brandy pointed at her and her eyes went big. Just there for a second and gone.

Lucian Freud

2011-07-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

Thursday afternoon I responded to a call for a last-minute replacement for the July occurrence of homo-centric's reading series. I was deciding what to present and reading over one of the two or three personal essays I have collecting dust on my hard drive when I saw news on the internet that Lucian Freud died. It made me want to want to write up something new for the occasion, but I didn't have the time. So I figured I'd do it here.

It must've been February 2003; I only know this because of the internet, although I wonder if I was keeping a journal at the time. I was invited to see a Lucian Freud retrospective by someone who shall remain Nameless. Nameless had flirted with me a little during a party the previous Christmas in someone's house in Beverly Hills. I didn't know that many people, so I was a little over the whole experience. Nameless made a bee-line for me as I was standing around awkwardly, sipping wine and wondering about leaving. The southern accent charmed me and made me feel comfortable; I wasn't all that attracted to him, but he was flirting and he was near my age. He seemed like a friend worth getting to know, at the very least.

We kept in touch and he offered to take me to a member's opening at MOCA for the Freud show. He had been given the tickets by a friend and didn't really have a clue what we were going to see, but I did. I remember reading about Freud for the first time when I lived in Houston, curious about a show there and miffed at myself for never getting it. I gladly accepted the invitation.

Nameless came to my place and then insisted on my driving. He didn't have clear directions on how to get to the museum, and since I had been in town less than six months, I was still relying on my Thomas Guide to get around. All the while he was changing course and telling me to turn and merge and exit at the very last possible second because he didn't really know where he was going, he was also complaining about how my driving was making him nervous. At one point I think I said, "I would've been happy for you to drive, Nameless. But you didn't. So." I can't remember if that shut him up or not. Probably not.

During one of these last minute merges and lane changes, I scraped up against someone in an SUV. The accident seemed minor, even before we got out of the car to inspect. When we did, we were confronted with a mute man of what appeared to be Middle Eastern descent. He inspected his car carefully, seeing what were surely scratches at best. Nameless and I stood uncomfortably, waiting for him to issue a verdict on my driving record. Even though he wasn't even driving, Nameless was the one who finally broke the silence with a classy question:

"Do you speak English?" His southern accent seemed suddenly thicker as he said it.

The other driver just scowled and nodded. I simultaneously laughed nervously and said "Of course he speaks English!"

Even after that misstep, the man graciously said "Don't worry about it," and let us go without trading info. Nameless was all but inconsolable after that point from the time we got back into the car until we arrived at the museum. I'm sure I repeated at least once, "You could've driven. But you didn't. So--" I'm not sure if he was bright enough to intuit the unspoken "SHUT THE HELL UP," I intended to communicate.

When we got to the crowded gallery, we rounded the rooms too quickly, looking at all the pictures while making room and finding room for ourselves in the midst of all the well-dressed party-goers. I tried to make the most of it, commenting to Nameless about the heavy, textured application of paint, the odd use of color, trying to engage with Nameless about what we were seeing. Anything I know about art and viewing art is more or less self-taught, so I just like to talk about what I see. I assumed at some point he would start doing the same, but he parroted everything I said. It was like moving around in an echo chamber. He exhausted me. If this was a date, there wouldn't be a second one.

I feel like a snob writing this. That said, I wouldn't actually become completely annoyed with Nameless until some time later, when I would learn enough about him to be justifiably turned off by him. At this point I guess I was just irritated. Displaced southerners aren't automatically kindred spirits. Sometimes the shared accent just isn't enough.

I made it back to MOCA on my own to see that show a second time. Freud's paintings are too demanding, too fascinating to let the trappings of a crowded party and bad company distract you from them.

Belated other Outfest post

2011-07-20T15:34:00.001-07:00

I'm pretty sure you'll get a chance to see this one in some sort of release or on DVD. You should. It's lovely.

Outfest: Shut Up Little Man!

2011-07-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

The other San Francisco documentary I saw was Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure, about the underground phenomenon of Peter and Ray, the screaming elderly alcoholics of the Lower Height in the 80s, one gay and petulant, the other homophobic and also petulant. The movie's an exciting and disturbing story, but what impresses me the most is how tough the filmmakers are on their subjects, Eddie and Mitchell, two middle-aged men who have spent much of the past 20-odd years cashing in on the (mostly) surreptitious recording of their two very sad old drunken neighbors back in 1987. To this day you can buy copies of Peter's and Ray's death certificates for 3 bucks a pop on their website, shut-up-little-man-dot-com; when asked about this in the film, Eddie discussed the importance of art to be challenging. Okay then.

It's a fascinating movie not just because of the odd story, but because of the ways Eddie and Mitchell both justify their own exploitation of Ray and Peter and defend the material against others who would more casually exploit (translation: profit from) it. In their defense they also spend some time seeking out the men, wanting to make a connection, seeming to look for the depth and humanity that their recordings don't capture. They recount an evening prior to filming when they sat down with Peter and offered him some money from the record company that was cashing in on his rants. The event apparently ended with Peter trying unsuccessfully to trick with them. An inverse example is given by a man eager to make a movie about Peter and Ray who needed Peter to sign a release; he got what he needed by making out with the old man. There are a lot of layers of exploitation to peel away here. Seems nobody's off the hook in this one.

Mitchell and Eddie's meager attempts at investigation in the time-line of the filming feel necessitated by the cameraman following them around. They also center on the puerile. When they finally get in to talk to Peter and Ray's friend Tony, the only living connection they can find (massaged with a 6-pack and a bit of cash), the first question out of Mitchell's mouth is about whether or not the two bickering men had sex. They get great footage out of Tony in spite of themselves, and it's not because Ray and Peter did or did not have sex. It's because Tony admits that he would gladly desecrate Peter's grave if given the chance.

Peter was cruel. So were Tony and Ray. These aren't nice people. Maybe they deserve to be exploited. Mitchell asserts as much by saying that screaming so loudly you keep your neighbors up at night means you're asking for it. He does have a point. And it is funny to listen to these old tapes of decrepit lushes going at it, at least for a minute or two, when it starts to get really pathetic. But what is it that we're expressing by laughing at them? The same cruelty they inflict on each other? Amazement at their cruelty? And is it permissible to exploit people just because they're jerks?

All of that is clearly on the mind of the filmmaker, but that self-justification is too. The constant ways we compromise and capitulate, the ways we lash out, the ways we live with ourselves. Peter and Ray and Tony did. And now Eddie and Mitchell. The documentarian who dramatizes dark, spooky, blurry altercations between two bloated, slobby actors playing Peter and Ray as he plays the tapes of their screaming at each other. The audience who laughs and passes judgment while ignoring their own hypocrisies, while lying to themselves and others about any number of things.

Heavy stuff. It's a good movie. Check it out.

Outfest and We Were Here

2011-07-14T18:10:00.000-07:00

I usually write about Outfest about this time every year, and I have been seeing a fair amount. I've still got Hit So Hard at the Ford, my third documentary, on schedule for tonight. There's late night flick I want to see on Saturday but I haven't bought the ticket yet. Anyone want to go?

So far so good on my picks this year. I've only really disliked one movie, and it was more of an embarrassment than a downright miserable experience. In other words, it was typical trashy GLBT film festival fare with some decent eye candy. Generally speaking, I'm pro-eye-candy.

Everything else has been interesting to excellent. Even though they've started this strange 5 at 5 series for documentaries, screening several documentaries at 5pm on weekdays at a reduced price and making it impossible for folks like me with day jobs to see them, I've still managed to see two extremely strong documentaries, both of which should get theatrical runs of some sort, so keep an eye out for them.

The first was We Were Here, about San Francisco during the onset of the AIDS crisis. It's mainly a talking-head doc, but the subject matter is of course intensely rich. The filmmakers introduced the movie as a "love letter to San Francisco," which it definitely is. My only quibble was with their use of footage from a very Los Angeles film, Silverlake Life, The View From Here, to show scenes of the physical devastation AIDS waged on its victims. JW and I both regretted not asking about that during the Q&A, but the tone was so reverential and laudatory, I for one didn't want to sound like a party pooper. My favorite remark from the audience came from a young guy right behind me who was hardly reverent, but still gushed; he thanked the filmmakers for the history lesson because he said he "doesn't have time to read And The Band Played On. I wanted to ask him, "Why, are you too busy making your way through Proust?"

Happy 85th birthday

2011-06-27T16:07:00.000-07:00

to Frank O'Hara.

Here's the text:

Fantasy
by Frank O'Hara (1926-1966)

(dedicated to the health of Allen Ginsberg)

How do you like the music of Adolph
Deutsch? I like
it, I like it better than Max Steiner's. Take his
score for Northern Pursuit, the Helmut Dantine theme
was ...
and then the window fell on my hand. Errol
Flynn was skiing by. Down
down down went the grim
grey submarine under the "cold" ice.
Helmut was
safely ashore, on the ice.
What dreams, what incredible
fantasies of snow farts will this all lead to?
I
don't know, I have stopped thinking like a sled dog.

The main thing is to tell a story.
It is almost
very important. Imagine
throwing away the avalanche
so early in the movie. I am the only spy left
in Canada,
but just because I'm alone in the snow
doesn't necessarily mean I'm a Nazi.
Let's see,
two aspirins a vitamin C tablet and some baking soda
should do the trick, that's practically an
Alka
Seltzer. Allen come out of the bathroom
and take it.
I think someone put butter on my skis instead
of wax.
Ouch. The leanto is falling over in the
firs, and there is another fatter spy there. They
didn't tell me they sent
him. Well, that takes care
of him, boy were those huskies hungry.
Allen,
are you feeling any better? Yes, I'm crazy about
Helmut Dantine
but I'm glad that Canada will remain
free. Just free, that's all, never argue with the movies.

In the midst of all this

2011-06-22T19:59:00.000-07:00

conversation, it seems we missed this. The Wicked Stage linked to it and I'm just reading today. Michael Ritchie in conversation with Theresa Rebeck about programming the three theaters of CTG. He talks a lot about a switch from a subscriber model for the Kirk Douglas Theatre to the Douglas Plus programming that's been going on. Here's a sample quote:

We were sitting around in a staff meeting and it wasn’t me saying we’ve got to come up with Douglas Plus. It came up from me, pounding my fists on the desk saying fuck subscribers. I’m so tired of subscribers. They drive me nuts; they’re strangling me; I hate them. I don’t care how good they are; I don’t care how much money they bring in. Fuck subscribers! And someone there at the table said well if we’re going to fuck them we should tell them we love them first, and we should figure out a way that we can fuck them but they stay anyway. How could we have it all?

There's a lot more good stuff in there, including his defense of one of my favorite shows he's done there, The Black Rider.

I got a little

2011-06-22T18:42:00.000-07:00

theater fatigue by Saturday night by the time I was seeing my second show of the day, Brewsie and Willie; I have no idea how these TCG people or critics or more hardcore theater junkies than I am managed with so much going on. I only saw 5 shows! I could've seen a lot more if I'd had the time. Of course I also fit in the new X-Men and Super 8, so it was a lot of sitting in dark theaters last week in general.

Okay, full disclosure: For those who might wonder why I'm suddenly all-RADAR LA-all-the-time, I don't like to consider myself press and I generally refuse comps when I am occasionally offered them. I was excited about RADAR LA when I heard about it and I'm generally a fan of REDCAT's programming so I did agree to write about the festival when asked by a friend to do so. I received comps only to Brewsie and Willie; I paid for every other ticket for myself and for JW. I probably don't even need to say this but I need a jumping off point to write the last of these posts about the festival so there you have it.

Over the course of this festival -- and of course Fringe, on which I'm still waiting for recommendations, by the way -- the media onslaught has been impressive. Between engine28, all the theater critics, and other online coverage, there's plenty of writing to be found on the experience. I often find it hysterical; if anyone were to suggest L.A. doesn't have a supportive theater press, this week they are seriously wrong. Throw in the panels and the controversies about the panels and so much other mess and it almost makes the performances seem secondary to so many assertions about the relevance of the performances, the town, the "conversation."

In the midst of all this "conversation," I wonder if all of it is actually able to connect with an audience outside of the people participating in the local events. It's as if the entire experience is encased in an echo chamber. All of southern California's theater establishment is screaming "WE EXIST! WE MATTER!" And then the theater journalists are doing their own version of that too with their pop-up website and their inserting themselves so forcefully into the conversation. Arts journalism is still relevant! Writing about theater matters! Theater criticism matters!

Maybe this is all a good thing and it's reaching the national theater establishment because of the CTG Conference and national press coverage -- thanks to Julie Taymor's New York theater soap opera -- and maybe that matters too. I do wonder if it's reaching general audiences. But then again, many are quick to point out that the Spiderman story is the first theater news to reach general audiences in decades, so maybe that's too much to ask.

There was a big international theater festival this weekend. I saw a decent portion of it. Some of it was compelling; some of it was tedious. Brewsie and Willie was somewhere in between. It runs through this weekend; it's an auspicious if flawed first show by an industrious new group. They're probably going places.

The one that stood out was The Method Gun. It runs through this weekend and is worth seeing.

It stood out because, of all the shows I saw, it was the one that was most significantly engaged with its audience. Neva was a reasonably close second, but everything else, even as it occasionally addressed the audience, seemed so obsessed with its own process, or in the case of Brewsie and Willie, with the effort -- of its acting, of its "conviction," of its attempt to activate a rich, resonant, but dramatically inert text and give its period trappings an avant garde spin.

Amarillo purposely abstracts its own subject matter to bring universality to the human suffering that's forgotten in the illegal immigration debate. In the process they make a fitfully moving work with moments of messy beauty. But an abstracted one. Easy to watch. Easy to watch from a remove.

The Method Gun begins its show by asking every member of the audience to summon up a favorite mentor, connecting their very loose, sloppy, too-clever conceit immediately to the audience's own experience and history. They counter-balance formalism with conversationalism in direct address. They take great pains to bring the audience on their journey with them. They're not content to be in conversation only with themselves, or with the handful of theater establishment types, or critics, or other theater nerds out in the audience. The only show of the weekend that I recommended to everyone I know who likes theater is The Method Gun. I recommended it to showqueens, to garden-variety theater-goers. Maybe theater-folk would get it more, with the satire of acting ensembles and methodology and the Streetcar business, but I like to think that its accessibility is even wider than that.

Conversation is okay, and I guess self-justification is often necessary. I just want to see good, engaging work. And I guess I want to write about it sometimes too, when I feel so inclined.

JW and I

2011-06-18T14:09:00.000-07:00

met at the new used bookstore across the street from the Alexandria Hotel downtown last night and I looked through the drama section for cool old hardback editions of plays I wanted to own but all I saw was Alan Ayckbourn and then I looked for this Edmund White memoir that I was thinking of buying a couple of weeks ago before Kevin started quoting me salacious anecdotes about Robert Mapplethorpe that had me super curious but I didn't find anything I wanted so I turned to look instead at the kind of boringly dreamy bearded guy at the door who could've been one of those East Side sexually ambiguous hipster types you see at Akbar or could've just been waiting for his girlfriend and it turned out the latter was true but that was okay because I still liked his beard and his pleasing paunch and I turned my back for a second to look at a display I'd missed and when I turned around he and his girlfriend were gone and JW asked me if I wanted to get a beer and I said sure and we ended up at The Gorbals for a quick pint before wandering over to see The Company's As you are now so once were we which is in this strange theater with stadium seating and JW told me a story about waiting in the lobby for me to deal with tickets and some guy asking him if his wife dragged him along and he corrected him and said "no my boyfriend did" and I scoffed at such heterosexism with a chuckle and finally the play started and I fixated on the cute comic redhead partly because he was cute and partly because he reminded me of an old friend from school days and I also thought of Ireland and hobbling around Dublin when I was studying abroad after just breaking my toe but refusing to let it stop me from seeing the sights and then I got confused because they were both in Ireland in the play and apparently right outside the theater and then my mind wandered and I started to sigh a lot and I wondered if I was giving off a bad energy because I felt like the redhead was delivering his whole schtick to me as if trying to win me over because I was really spoiling the mood for him and I could hear everyone else in the theater laughing but I wasn't really amused and I thought of Joyce who I know they were inspired by but I thought of Woolf and Mrs. Dalloway and mostly I thought of Frank O'Hara who wrote his Lunch Poems about the pedestrian suddenly invaded by memory and all of the poignancy of those feelings and then I don't know why but I thought of Walt Whitman and his Leaves of Grass and I thought of this blog and how I recently made light of it by posting the Youtube clip of a song from Whitman and then I wondered how I was going to write about this play because I wasn't really all that immersed in it and I tried to refocus but I saw all these actors working out their play about themselves and for some reason it just drove me completely inward as you can see from this writing so I came up with this whole idea that I would just write a post kind of like this where I went stream-of-consciousness and wrote about writing and about my present and my past and the living and reliving of it but it felt kind of gimmicky and maybe hackneyed and then I realized I was missing the play's one big idea which was something about POV and the present co-existing with the past onstage which is of course also life and that was all fine but I still missed my old redheaded friend and I wondered about that bearded guy and why people automatically assume everyone in the world is heterosexual and what I was going to write about and what we would order when we got back to The Gorbals for our dinner reservation and whether we should walk or drive the few blocks to 6th and Grand for the birthday party we were attending after dinner and then the cast was bowing so I did the polite thing and applauded and felt like applause was okay because I was more or less having the same experience in my seat that they were depicting onstage.

DO NOT READ

2011-06-17T09:47:00.000-07:00

Charles McNulty's review of The Method Gun in the LATimes. Unless you plan on skipping it, that is. He gives away the whole show -- THE ENTIRE SHOW -- with mild condescension and thin analysis. You deserve to be surprised by all that is meant to be surprising about this show! Have fun with it. Go see it.

So far

2011-06-16T18:28:00.000-07:00

at RADAR L.A. I have seen Neva (Monday night) and The Method Gun (Tuesday night), both of which were radical and familiar in their ways, and both of which offered a lot to think about. I found myself linking certain themes in the pieces as I watched The Method Gun; it was nice to let one inform the other, as it brought out themes that were definitely present in the script but not necessarily dominant.

Neva, a show set in 1905 about Chekov's grieving widow, Olga Knipper, has a lot of big ideas to offer, and it does so with stark minimalism. I went to the first Radar mainstage (if there is a mainstage) show at REDCAT on Monday night expecting a big visual experience, so to see the exact opposite -- three actors on a small platform lit by a single floor lamp that looked a lot like a space heater -- was a surprise.

I loved that about it, actually. And I also felt a little distant from it, but I picked back row seats in the hopes that the Spanish supertitles would be easier to navigate while watching the actors. In the past I have seen non-English performances in REDCAT and felt lost in them, unable to concentrate fully on the language or the actors. This experience wasn't much different, particularly because the intimate staging in simple lighting all but demand you sit as close as possible. If you speak Spanish, go for it and sit on the front row. I think you'll have a great time.

Still, the combination of pathos and humor is nicely Chekhovian. There's also subtle subversion in the writing, beginning with a consciously stiff approach to exposition from the actors, and continuing on through some funny predictions about the future that serve to highlight social excess and decay. The closing speech is a knockout, too -- an angry rant about revolution, calling out theater as dead, shit for the bourgeoisie, sitting comfortably in their chairs playing at emotions while the poor starve outside their doors. I want to see the show again, mainly for that speech. It feels true, it feels ironic, it feels like the tension between the folly and necessity of art just explodes in your face.

In the context of all that is rumination on the recreation of experience through drama. As Olga insists on her fellow actors helping her stage the moment of Chekhov's death, quibbling over details, trying and failing to get it right, the audience laughs at the characters' failure and frustration. I found it really moving, though; the genius has departed, leaving them all desperate to preserve their fleeting last moments with him. Talk about folly and necessity. Tragedy too.

All this rings loud and clear in The Method Gun, as we catch up with another group of actors struggling to continue after their resident genius has departed. It's viewed through a sort of excavating lens, as actors from Austin theater troupe Rude Mechs play investigators getting to the bottom of the disappearance of eccentric acting guru Stella Burden while also playing the roles of Burden's students in the 1970s, trying to put on their modified version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

There's something about the controlled introduction of danger into the performance experience here, as well; it connects back to Neva in an interesting way. I'm not sure exactly what Rude Mechs is getting at with it -- well, I have some ideas -- but it makes me think back to the contemptuous way Neva's young actress/revolutionary chastises audiences for their "suffering as entertainment." This craving for emotional engagement -- to be moved, to be scared, to feel danger -- it's obviously a human impulse and I'd argue that both Rude Mechs and Teatro en el Blanco are exploring this idea. It's just interesting to be scolded for it in one show and titillated by it in another.

I don't want to over-analyze The Method Gun, because one of its charms is both its ability to surprise and its juxtaposition of loosely structured amiability and precisely choreographed ritual. I read a review of this show when they did it in New York in March who compared them to Wooster Group. I was reminded more of Elevator Repair Service in their ragtag energy. I suppose they're all connected somehow, but of the three Rude Mechs is by far the most accessible and ingratiating to their audience. Rude Mechs just really want you to have a good time. They want to toy with your expectations, they definitely want to make you think, and they want to engage with your own history of loss, your feeling adrift. The meta-theatrical approach becomes an excavation of the ephemerality of performance, of relationships. And of the symbiotic nature of the ensemble. And of the geniuses that have wandered in and out of our own lives.

Try to see

2011-06-16T12:31:00.001-07:00

The Method Gun at the Kirk Douglas in Culver City if you can. It's great fun. I'll write more about it in a bit.

I'm excited about RADAR L.A.

2011-06-13T21:07:00.001-07:00

and I'm seeing lots of it this week. Most of it Saturday. I think I might actually collapse from theatrical exhaustion on that day, but I'm seeing Neva tomorrow night and The Method Gun on Wednesday, so I'll have some thoughts about those, hopefully.

I also know Hollywood Fringe is going on right now but it's all too much, there are so many options, the website's out of control, I don't know what the hell to do about it. I need some guidance. And I'm not talking about you filling my inbox with press releases. I'm talking about you people telling me what I need to see. Put it in the comments, find me on Twitter, write it for me on your own pages. I don't want the solo shows, I don't want the ethnic humor, I want the epic, the ridiculous, the heavy shit, the edgy shit that's going to give me nightmares. Bring it.

Got back from Ojai

2011-06-13T21:05:00.000-07:00

on Saturday after attending a concert of George Crumb's song cycle, Winds of Destiny, sung by Dawn Upshaw. JW and I really liked the Crumb evening at the Green Umbrella earlier in the season, so this was a must-see/hear.

The difference between the Green Umbrella concert -- a moving concert presentation of folk hymns called The River of Life, among other things -- and this weekend's concert was, for better or worse, Peter Sellars.

The southern California music establishment loves Peter Sellars. I suppose the world music establishment does. But for one who sees a lot of stuff around town, it gets a little repetitive seeing his same approach time and time again. I've posted about this before, both jokingly, and more seriously.

Lately every time I see a Sellars staging I witness something that could be profound, tough, and meaningful if the experience hadn't been reduced so much by Sellars' literal, political didacticism from the stage before the performers set foot on it. No one hesitates to hand him a microphone so that he can explain his stagings to the audience before we're given the opportunity to experience them for ourselves. And even then he's usually paraphrasing his own director's notes from the program.

In last weekend's example, George Crumb set new music to familiar American war anthems like "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again." His compositions are unusual and haunting; a timeless commentary on the horrors of war is obvious in the juxtaposition of text with ominous, percussive instrumentation. The effect is made specific by dressing Dawn Upshaw in fatigues and directing her to appear to relive combat scenarios as she sings. The effect is made trite by the director reciting statistics about female soldiers and PTSD before presenting the program. It would be one thing if there were actual confrontation in Sellars' delivery, but it's all too civilized for that. Just enough liberal concern to feel prescient without actually being challenging.

And I don't mean to suggest that PTSD isn't an issue that merits serious treatment; I just think Crumb's music is far more expansive than Sellars' agenda. Even Sellars' own staging was more expansive than his agenda. But his lectures direct the audience's focus in a way that's detrimental to his own work.

And what about that expansiveness? What about myth and mystery? What about trusting your audience to make interpretive connections in your work? What about valuing the role the audience plays in discerning meaning, even supplying its own as it relates to its own experience?

Still, I adored Crumb's songs, and they were powerfully sung by Upshaw. Other than the music itself, the highlight of the evening was a conversation with George Crumb about the work with both Sellars and pianist Gil Kalish. This followed Sellars' explanation of his staging, and was full of both Sellars and Kalish trying to pin down Crumb on a topical explanation for his stark musical settings of these songs. "You composed these in '03 and '04. How did the events of that period inform the work?"

Crumb seemed to have absolutely no interest in explaining his work's content in the way that they wanted him to. He talked about Bartok, he talked about Mahler, but he never really explained away his music. I have no idea why, but I like to think that's because he doesn't want to dictate meaning to the audience.

RADAR LA

2011-06-08T18:49:00.000-07:00

is coming up, as you may know. There's a lot to check out, but I'm particularly excited by the following shows--

Teatro en el Blanco: Neva

The Company: As you are now, so once were we

Rude Mechs: The Method Gun

CalArts Center for New Performance/Poor Dog Group: Brewsie and Willie

Moving Arts: The Car Plays: L.A. Stories

Fleur Elise Noble: 2 Dimensional Life of Her

Steve Connell and Sekou Andrews: The Word Begins

I will likely not get to all of these, but I might just try. And there are plenty more interesting shows on the list. Check here for more info.

I used to read

2011-06-07T07:38:00.000-07:00

and link to L.A. lit blog The Elegant Variation a lot back in the early days of this page. I guess its author, Mark Sarvas, is losing his blogging steam. His latest post is from May 31, writing about a change in his approach to his own page, and spends some time contemplating the relationship between bloggers and their commenters.

In recent weeks I’ve read a number of posts at lauded sites, sites I admire, written by folks I like, and I’ve been, well, dismayed at how lousy they can be. But that’s nothing, in and of itself – we all have our off days, we’ve all written things we probably would like to take back.

What I found more troubling was the chorus of commenters who would invariably leap in after each post declaiming its virtues. And I’ve come to believe that perhaps the problem with the internet isn’t that it gives voice to every crank with a keyboard and a broadband connection. No, it may be that the insidious thing is the insularity of the waiting chorus of those who champion mediocrity, who validate self-indulgence or unoriginal thinking.

I've commented and lurked around enough arts and theater blogs over the years to relate. And I guess since I'm a blogger with no regular commenters, I'm just, what? Unchampioned mediocrity? Oh well.

I celebrate myself, then!

Where this "I'm not a gay writer" thing

2011-06-06T22:53:00.000-07:00

gets problematic for me is that Albee's method of defiance indirectly legitimizes everything the establishment insists on. And by establishment I mean critics, taste-makers, literary managers and artistic directors, and anyone else who would create or act according to a hierarchy of value based on the subject matter of a work and its relationship to the majority. I can't relate to a gay play because I'm not gay. We can't do a gay play because it won't sell.

This is why it's Mart Crowley and not Edward Albee who gets the distinction of writing one of the most important, pioneering gay plays in theater history with Boys in the Band. A play that both steals from Albee's most famous play and dares to take for granted a specific gay experience while transcending it at the same time. Maybe Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? rates higher on the "major American play" scale than Boys in the Band. Maybe that even means something. But Crowley did something that Albee did not. Maybe he stood on Albee's shoulders while he did it, but Crowley's the one who did it.

Of course Albee has plenty to say about that, too. In a recent documentary about Boys in the Band called Making the Boys, he laments that the first major gay play was too negative and damaging, something our friend Criticlasm wrote about a couple of months ago--

It's tiresome to hear him talk about how damaging a play that was actually written by a gay man about gay men as real people with real feelings (at a time when no one did that) when he hasn't written a single play about gay men EVER, ostensibly because it's too what? Constricting? Bitter because people have tried to pigeonhole him as a gay playwright when he didn't want to be categorized? Yes, writers should write what comes out of them in whatever form, but for him to criticize someone who actually put it out there as a gay man when he's never done it just rubs me the wrong way.

And of course Albee has written gay characters before -- The Goat and Three Tall Women (which Criticlasm goes on to mention) among them, and, most subversively in The Zoo Story, a play that is as confrontational as it is indirect about its gay protagonist. I wonder how he would've progressed if he hadn't been embraced by the establishment and awarded a Pulitzer for that play. To me it seems his most rebellious play. The fact that he felt a need to stage as preamble a domestic scene with the strait-laced Peter four years ago, while residing at the revered post of the Greatest Living American Playwright, only shows the weight he gives to the establishment in his worldview.

But then again, it also reinforces the theme he introduces in The Zoo Story -- a confrontation between the civilized, the establishment, and the savagery it wants so desperately to suppress. I mean, it is his major theme, isn't it? There is subversion in that. Maybe he's no Genet, but then how many audiences have actually seen a production of The Screens? So I guess it's no surprise this confrontation plays out in his rhetoric about being a gay writer.

Just as an aside,

2011-06-06T20:52:00.000-07:00

one thing worth noting is that he has a far less complicated relationship to class and race in his writing. His milieu is almost exclusively the white upper middle class. One could argue color-blind casting would partially solve that, but race is not a major theme in his writing that I'm aware of. There's The Death of Bessie Smith but it's about a white hospital. As for class, is there another depiction of a working-class story in his writing than Ballad of the Sad Cafe? Something that is his original material?

Albee's

2011-06-06T18:42:00.000-07:00

been saying this sort of thing for decades, but I do find it interesting that people aren't exactly putting up with it this time (although Bilerico calls it the "most boring controversy ever"). It is a bit rich to accept an award as a pioneering gay writer with a speech that denounces the recognition as ghettoizing, but Albee does, and always has had, a point with this. It's just a complicated one, and it seems more outmoded with every new insistence he makes.

He's exactly right that gay writers do get pigeonholed in ways that straight authors don't, but there's also something problematic about policing your subject matter to appease those who would pigeonhole you. He says something to the effect that he doesn't want to limit his reach as a playwright by writing exclusively about gay subject matter, but that presumes that straight audiences are automatically alienated by gay themes, something that seems less of a concern as time goes on.

But then I don't really think he's talking about audiences. I think Albee has plenty of faith in theater audiences, or else he wouldn't have been so challenging for all these years. I think he's talking about critics (and by extension the press), who, like it or not, work to define and identify trends for audiences.

All these years later Albee still brings up that Stanley Kauffmann article from 1966, "Homosexual Drama and its Disguises." It was a critic with a limited understanding of Albee's work and his intentions that attempted to reduce him to a type, even as he avoided writing directly about gay characters and gay subject matter. He had good reason to be irritated about this, and I'm sure it was a battle he fought constantly.

(And of course this still happens; just look back to the Ramin Setoodeh article in Newsweek from last year for a related example.)

For those who don't know about the Kauffmann article, the gist of it is that Kauffmann argued that gay playwrights were writing gay characters masquerading as straight in plays like Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, plays which, he more or less argued, portrayed a toxic portrait of marriage and humanity. The funny thing is he actually suggests gay writers come out with their material so they can show themselves honestly, but of course his main purpose for asserting this was far more conservative -- he wanted the gays to stop messing around in the straights' territory.

And that's where Albee's main point of contention lies. He says it in that LAMBDA speech: "A writer who happens to be gay or lesbian must be able to transcend the self." Of course this is true, but I'd remove a bunch of that text and just say "A writer must be able to transcend the self." Period. Albee would still agree with that. He even elaborated on it in the NPR interview I heard this morning, rightly asserting that authors shouldn't be expected to only write about their own race, sexuality, gender, etc. So he's spent his career refusing to be pigeonholed. I don't blame him for that.

More on this in a bit.

You have one weekend left

2011-06-06T12:31:00.000-07:00

to get to the best 99-seat show I've seen in Los Angeles since I don't know when. I saw House of the Rising Son this weekend; it's a big success on all fronts. It's an unapologetically gay play that played quite well to the mixed house I was in on Saturday night. Edward Albee's way isn't the only way, it seems. But more on that a little later.

Five name authors!

2011-06-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

They have NAMES! Can you believe that?

JW and I went to

2011-05-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

Art in the Streets at the MOCA Geffen Contemporary on Monday, which was more or less a mob scene. It's a giant bombastic mess of a show and is often quite entertaining, too. I didn't really care much about all the reverential art museum seriousness of it; I just liked all the wild colors and the great photographs.

Most popular seemed the Banksy and Shepard Fairey installations. That was all well and good because it made more room for me to linger in the room full of Keith Haring subway chalk drawings, all faded and fragile and amazing.

Everybody was taking pictures so I joined in the fun. Aside from the chalk drawings these were my favorite objects in the show, presented unremarkably in a case in one of the first rooms of the vast space.

Enlarge this next one if you need to; you'll be able to make out Andy Warhol's phone number.

Christopher Knight wrote an interesting article in the LATimes about the show over the weekend. There's a lot to consider in it; check it out here.

100 Saints

2011-05-29T09:32:00.000-07:00

There's a nice profile by Rob Weinert-Kendt in the LATimes on Kate Fodor today. It's on the occasion of a local production of her play, 100 Saints You Should Know. I saw a workshop of the play at Steppenwolf in 2006 and I'm hoping to see it out here as well. I really admire the script. Here's a nice quote from the article.

"The thing people always ask playwrights about any play is, 'What was the inspiration?'" Fodor says. She credited a playwriting colleague with providing a useful answer. "She said it's not so much a fact or a character — it's a shape, and then the facts of the play have to start to fill that shape or that form or that movement. It's spatial somehow. So this play was this movement of these two bodies: Theresa moving away from something, and Matthew moving away from something, and both moving toward what it seems to them the other person has."

Read the rest here.

Multiple Choice

2011-05-24T14:43:00.000-07:00

Pick one of the following:

A.

B.

C.

D.

For the correct answer, come check out Bedtime Stories this Saturday at Psychic Visions Theatre.

Avant-garde?

2011-05-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

Playgoer turned me on to this Village Voice article asking several NYC theater folk about the current state of the avant-garde. My favorite quote is from Taylor Mac.

The rule and taboo to break is our egomaniacal desire to be thought of as new, our amnesia in regards to actual history, and our fear of theatricality.

Read the whole thing here.

Spending my Sunday

2011-05-22T10:40:00.000-07:00

with Jonathan Richman. I love it when he starts to dance.

I like this

2011-05-19T12:20:00.000-07:00

quote from E. Hunter Spreen in her interview on Adam's blog. It's relevant in light of what I posted the other day.

There's this idea that if your talent or ability doesn't express itself when you're young - like in your twenties, then you are hosed. When I was in my twenties I could barely feed myself and make it through the day. I was a mess. But there's this idea about success and what that means and what it looks like and how it happens or doesn't and what that means for you and your artistic life if you're going to have one. And even though we don't see or hear as much about the exceptions, they are out there and they are making work. Have you heard about Marta Beckett? She's an actress/ballerina who runs the Amargosa Opera House in Death Valley Junction. She's out there in the middle of the desert making theater on her own terms. What she offers may not be your taste, but she has been performing and running that space since 1967. She's in her eighties now and still performing. She is such an inspiration.

Read the whole thing here.

Such a

2011-05-17T17:16:00.000-07:00

good read this is! Here's a good (but not the best) quote.

When the show went to No. 1 in December 1988, ABC sent a chocolate “1” to congratulate me. Guess they figured that would keep the fat lady happy—or maybe they thought I hadn’t heard (along with the world) that male stars with No. 1 shows were given Bentleys and Porsches. So me and George Clooney [who played Roseanne Conner’s boss for the first season] took my chocolate prize outside, where I snapped a picture of him hitting it with a baseball bat. I sent that to ABC.

In which I'm reminded of This Recording

2011-05-17T13:32:00.000-07:00

I love this blog, and started clicking around on some old posts. I found this from last fall, which features a Q&A with Faulkner and some Ole Miss students. It's lengthy and full of great pictures; below is what seems most relevant to me of late.

Q: How do you find time to write?

WF: You can always find time to write. Anybody who says he can't is living under false pretenses. To that extent depend on inspiration. Don't wait. When you have an inspiration put it down. Don't wait until later and when you have more time and then try to recapture the mood and add flourishes. You can never recapture the mood with the vividness of its first impression.

Q: How long does it take you to write a book?

WF: A hack writer can tell. As I Lay Dying took six weeks. The Sound and The Fury took three years.

Q: I understand you can keep two stories going at one time. If that is true, is it advisable?

WF: It's all right to keep two stories going at the same time. But don't write for deadlines. Write just as long as you have something to say.

Q: What is the best training for writing? Courses in writing? Or what?

WF: Read, read, read! Read everything - trash, classics, good and bad; see how they do it. When a carpenter learns his trade, he does so by observing. Read! You'll absorb it. Write. If it is good you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out the window.

In regards to

2011-05-16T11:28:00.000-07:00

SLM's writing in this week's LAWeekly, part of me feels like we've gone over all this before, as I mentioned in the earlier post. My perspective on it has changed somewhat, which is definitely something I can write about.

I think it's self-evident to anyone who follows trends in American playwriting that there's a very small, constantly shifting list of who's hot and who's getting all the grants/fellowships/commissions/premieres/awards. It's easy to find this frustrating as a playwright who is not in that lucky position, but it's also worth pointing out how few of these names there actually are at any given time. Some go on to Broadway and bigger awards, and some don't. It's just like any other creative industry, just with fewer powerhouses with the ability to help make these playwrights' careers. And with more than one company or development organization having last-minute fundraising drives to keep from shutting their doors, I wouldn't be surprised to see the number of commissioning theaters grow even smaller still.

And the older I get, the more I understand just how hard it is to be successful at a creative endeavor, at least in the sort of narrow way we view success as a culture. Let's face it, your average American can probably only name about five playwrights at all, living or dead, and being on that list requires a level of success that is reserved for our most canonically dead, white and male. Narrow the field of those surveyed to people who actually care about and see theater and you might get more informed answers -- maybe they know who Kushner or Suzan-Lori Parks are, or they saw a student production of a Christopher Durang play in college -- but you still are talking about major and majorly successful writers here.

And then you get people like me. I read Adam Szymkowicz's interviews to learn about playwrights I'm not yet familiar with; I actually know personally several living and working playwrights with varying degrees of success; I read and see a lot of plays and I am mildly obsessed with knowing who's doing the hot shit, who's overrated, and who may or may not be the next big thing. And it's obvious to me how successful all of these writers are.

Creative industries are stuck with this kind of unfair hierarchy -- we idolize the "greats" and assume no one else matters. L.A. is full of insanely talented actors working day jobs, and they deserve to be taken as seriously as the superstars on the covers of magazines. And think of all the filmmakers you've never heard of who have completed edgy movies that are making the rounds of film festivals across the globe. You may never even see their flicks, but how amazing is it that they pulled that off?

So yeah, maybe it is disappointing that I can count on one hand the number of hot playwrights getting all the grants by (possibly risk-averse) theater companies going with known quantities or maybe glomming on to who's already getting attention. But that's not the only way success should be measured.

I'm just starting

2011-05-13T11:17:00.000-07:00

to get back in the swing of things and Blogger goes down! Rats. I'm still going to work on something in regards to that SLM article. Stay tuned.

Also, come see my show tonight and or tomorrow! I'll be there! The whole evening is pretty funny. One of the plays is called "Anal Highway 3." Need I say more?

SLM on Rajiv Joseph and new American plays

2011-05-12T09:28:00.000-07:00

Steven Leigh Morris writes about Rajiv Joseph's new play at the Alley Theatre, The Monster at the Door, using it as a jumping-off point to discuss the realities of American new play development (something he does often and I've written about before -- here, for example).

His piece brings a lot to mind, beginning with my fond memories of going to the Alley back when I lived in Houston (and he gets at the theater scene later in the article). The most potent, challenging stuff is about how new work gets on major stages. I have more to say on this; for now, see below for the big quotes.

There's a small cadre of playwrights whose works, like salmon, swim along national byways through New York City and around the regions. They are The Selected, receiving a kind of Good Housekeeping seal of approval from sundry dramaturgs, most of whom graduated from the Yale School of Drama and other institutions of its ilk. And suddenly, their plays are being developed in the New Play fortresses such as the Sundance Theatre Institute and at South Coast Repertory's Pacific Playwrights Festival and the Alley Theatre's New Play Initiative in Houston. Names from the latest generation of The Selected that roll off the tongue are Annie Baker, Sarah Ruhl and Rajiv Joseph.

These are good playwrights, worthy of support, and the mechanism for their support has been in place for decades. In Joseph's case, it resulted in a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, being premiered (via a $90,000 National Endowment for the Arts Outstanding New Play grant) by Center Theatre Group at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2009, before being reprised the following season by the same organization at the Mark Taper Forum, across the city.

[...]

All of which suggests that the new play development system in America's regional theaters involves a kind of collaboration among theaters and granting agencies to support playwrights, perhaps more than plays. That South Coast Rep, for example, not only presents new works by the same playwrights over and over, but also presents so many projects in its Pacific Playwrights Festival that were commissioned before they were written, further exemplifies this syndrome.

Fascinating plays occasionally do emerge from this systematic model of encouragement, and there's an argument to be made that a promising writer should be supported through thick and thin, as a university might invest in a brilliant scholar or inventor, or the way major movie studios used to invest in their stars. But there should be no illusions that the market for new works in the theater has an open door. It is, fundamentally, a kind of literary aristocracy, much in the way that financial services — and their extended industries, from debt services to home mortgages to default swaps — are run by the policies of an elite few.

In case anyone's curious,

2011-05-11T15:39:00.000-07:00

here's what I've been doing for the past 5-6 weeks.

More on Justin Vivian Bond

2011-05-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

I've written a little bit before about trans issues in media, which makes me appreciate Justin Vivian Bond's response about v's New York Magazine profile. If anyone's in a position to be heard calling people out on this sort of thing, it's Bond.

I’ve seen several comments in various places alluding to the misperception that I was upset with New York Magazine for not using my preferred pronoun (or as Carl put it in the article faux-noun) “v”. I was neither offended nor surprised. What I was offended by was the tone and what I consider to be extremely aggressive gender policing throughout the story. Within the first three sentences I was referred to as “he” seven times. The second paragraph flat out called me a “cross-dresser” and used buzzwords like “arch”, “grandeur’, “the gay condition”, and incorrectly stated that my audience consists of “mostly gay men”. It was like reading some sort of pulp gay exploitation fiction from another era. My “hyper-vigilant” hackles were up.

[...]

I know this is said quite often but as far as I’m concerned it can’t be said enough. If it weren’t for certain drag queens and other gender variant individuals lots of gay white middle-class asses would be lots less comfortable and the landscapes of their “inner lives”‘ might be even more dim.

[...]

[T]his was supposed to be about my professional life. Instead it became a sensationalistic profile in which a cisgendered gay man and his editor sought to put a transgendered person in their place, maintaining their position of patriarchal privilege, proclaiming to be “supportive” while presumptuously trying to explain me to people who are supposedly even more ignorant than they.

Read the whole thing here.

The highlight

2011-05-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

of my weekend was easily Mark Morris Dance Group's L'Allegro il Penseroso ed il Moderato at the Dorothy Chandler downtown. I sang in the tenor section for this piece in Houston about 11 or 12 years ago. To this date one of my few paid singing gigs. I wasn't really able to see much from the pit in rehearsals back then; singing it this afternoon had me all emotional throughout. Just gorgeous.

Sorry

2011-05-04T00:20:00.000-07:00

for the radio silence. I've been swamped lately. Mostly with good stuff. I'm directing a short play of mine called "Three A.M. in the Morning" at Psychic Visions Theatre in Culver City. Our evening of plays opens on Friday the 13 and I hope you all come and see it. Here's a link to more info, but see below for the details.

COMING SOON!
Our Impending Doom!

That's right - Psychic Visions Theatre is going to be bulldozed in the name of "Progress."
Sad as we are, we have gathered together a rag-tag group of artists to present our final play series before the bulldozer comes and levels our lovely little space.
Please join us for our last little show - your ticket sale will help us fund the arduous journey of finding a new home for our artistic endeavors.

Bedtime Stories
Opening Night Reception
Friday May 13th @ 8 pm
Saturdays @ 8 pm
May 14th - Bulldozing
$15

Location:

3447 Motor Ave, Ste A

Los Angeles, CA 90034

310.535.6007

10 sexy short plays
In a bed
15 sexy actors
In and around a bed

come get in bed with us!

THE STORYTELLERS: Eddie Alvarado, Elisabeth Blake, J. Boyer, John Bozeman, Jennifer Chun, Jennifer Erholm, Michael Geary, Jeffrey Johnson, Suzie Kane, Nathan Lucas, Caroline Marshall, Tracy Merrifield, Joseph O’Connor, James O’Leary, Marnie Olson, Frank Potter, Brian Rohan, Cory Saucier, Shane Savanapridi, Erin Treanor, and Kyle T. Wilson.

My favorite song

2011-04-13T23:23:00.000-07:00

from tonight's show at REDCAT, performed last year in New York. Something by Bambi Lake called "Golden Age of Hustlers."

And while I was surfing I found Bond singing "Were You There?" with Taylor Mac. Since we're coming up on Holy Week I thought it appropriate. Enjoy the brilliance. And the nice arms on the cellist.

Excited for

2011-04-13T15:10:00.000-07:00

Justin Vivian Bond tonight at REDCAT. In preparation I found a link to a nice new Out Magazine profile on Bond's Twitter feed. Here's my favorite quote--

Tilda Swinton recalls introducing “a longhaired, nail-varnished, impeccable, treacle-voiced Justin,” to her 4-year-old daughter. “My daughter asked me, ‘Is Justin a man or a lady?’ Before I could speak, she answered herself, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ ”

Read the whole thing here.

There's a new Chloe!

2011-04-01T07:45:00.000-07:00

Also

2011-03-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

Lanford Wilson. I liked Criticlasm's post about him so I thought I'd link here.

In grad school we read Talley's Folly and my professor had boxes and boxes of the published manuscript, since he worked at Circle Rep for a while. I was one of the unlucky ones who didn't get handed a signed copy.

Playwright Robert Patrick keeps a blog of Caffe Cino pictures and has a slideshow for Wilson; it includes old programs and other images. It's worth taking a look.

Of course

2011-03-23T09:41:00.001-07:00

Virginia Woolf?, but I think I like her in the early ones with Montgomery Clift the best. Both so sad and young and beautiful.

Patti.

2011-03-22T08:02:00.001-07:00

Patti!

2011-03-22T07:07:00.000-07:00

Kevin sent me

2011-03-14T18:34:00.000-07:00

this commentary by Bret Easton Ellis about Charlie Sheen that has me tickled. Here's a sample:

In getting himself fired from his hit TV show Two and a Half Men, this privileged child of the media’s sprawling entertainment Empire has now become its most gifted ridiculer. Sheen has embraced post-Empire, making his bid to explain to all of us what celebrity now means. Whether you like it or not is beside the point. It’s where we are, babe. We’re learning something. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

(For extra context, a little more explanation of this whole Empire/Post-Empire dichotomy he's so insistent on is here.)

Anyone who read Rules of Attraction will spot the reference in that paragraph, which strikes me as funny; Ellis surely gets the sad irony in referencing his almost 25-year-old novel while ironically commenting what's so very "now" about everything that's so very "now." Is he being playful and self-deprecating here? Is he rubbing our noses in how ahead of his time he was? I can't decide if he's a genius or merely self-indulgent. Reading Imperial Bedrooms last year makes me think the latter is true. Looking over his Twitter feed -- yes, I follow him on Twitter -- only confirms it. From October 2010:

I'm tired of the debate: "Freedom" is the best social-realist novel written since I started publishing books. Rock and roll. Deal with it.

I went on a brief Bret Easton Ellis bender last year after reading Less Than Zero for the first time. I still don't know if I like it or not, but it's certainly hard to dismiss. I unapologetically LOVE Rules of Attraction; after finishing it I was stoked to read American Psycho but lost patience about 50 pages in. I'd like to get back to it one of these days. Imperial Bedrooms is definitely a ride, but much of it rings false. Then again, that also seems like the point.

Maybe, but Ellis's willingness to level critiques as scathing as they often are only sets him up for closer criticism. It's also incredibly easy to claim one is too Post-Empire to care about such Empire obsessions as "restraint" or "authenticity." As a defense it's pretty meager.

But then I guess suggesting such a thing makes me super Empire.

The comments of this article are entertaining, as well. Seems like a lot of people like to attack Ellis; I suppose his writing is confrontational enough that it demands a passionate response. My favorite comment, from someone named msw444, is more measured, though:

This is an interesting article, but lacks the caring lick of humanity. It basically tags Americans as the audience who cares more about Reality TV, than we do about meaningful values and human pain ...

And with that the commenter has unwittingly stumbled onto the meaning of the whole thing. As well as, from what I can gather, a great deal of Ellis's prose.

Gay "Issues"

2011-03-11T09:58:00.000-08:00

There's interesting conversation going on at Parabasis; I thought of commenting but I'd rather write up a new theater post over here since I haven't done that in a while.

Jeremy M. Barker over at Culturebot writes about contemporary plays feeling like essays, with the following quote serving to help illustrate his point.

[G]iven the homogeneity of the typical theater artist and audience, we know that a play that starts off about war will have something bad to say about it, that a play that engages with gay issues will be pro-gay. (Someone please name me the last big pro-war or anti-gay play you saw professionally produced.) In this typology, the “narrative,” which is essentially the entire play being produced, exists to narrate a series of points that makes the predictable ending impactful, which we charitably still refer to as catharsis. This is why I generally don’t like contemporary playwriting.

I'm going to write about this from my perspective as a writer who often works in gay "issues," although I think that word is dismissive and problematic.

To reduce a play's gay characters and themes to "issues" and writing about the predictability of such plays not being "anti-gay" suggests an author is required to justify the writing of gay characters and themes the moment he or she sets out to write them. We're not required to argue for the legitimacy of gay themes and characters; we can just write them. If that means they are pro-gay or that our plays are about "issues," then so be it, but I'm under the impression that gay people exist independently of whether or not we can be reduced to a dialectic by people who have opinions about our rights and our behaviors.

I can empathize with a frustration about a propagandistic, nostalgic or overly sentimental presentation of gay themes and characters when supported by a strong argument for gay politics or empathy towards gay people in the writing, but I'm also empathetic to how strongly people feel a necessity to communicate those messages in their writing.

I do also feel challenged by that reality in my own writing. I bristle at the didactic in gay-themed plays, or in plays that present a view of coming out or sexual awakening that seems alien to me. In fact my most recent play was written in part as a reaction to that, as I so often find crowd-pleasing gay theater completely unrelatable to my own experience. I understand its purpose and function, and I might even laugh at some of the jokes, but I much prefer the ambivalence and mystery of truly human stories, which is something I think Barker and I can agree on.

However, I don't understand how conceiving a writing project with an idea one would like to convey automatically guarantees the product will be essayistic. Then again, I'd more accurately describe my process (in the event that I do start with theme over character, place or story) as being interested in exploring an idea rather than merely conveying one. I'm also not actually sure if I ever have started with theme first.

Barker's still exploring his ideas himself; you can check the Parabasis link above and look at the comments for more of his writing on the matter.

Hey Joni

2011-03-10T19:42:00.000-08:00

JW had 91.5 Classical KUSC on the radio this morning and after yawning my way through Carmina Burana I was surprised to find a string arrangement of "Urge for Going" by Joni Mitchell, which made for a most serene breakfast, and segued into a great youtube spiral while I was brushing my teeth and dressing. Check out what I found.

Several years ago

2011-03-10T18:17:00.000-08:00

I wrote a blog post wondering how a heinous crime like the brutal murder of Scotty Joe Weaver and wondering why it wasn't more widely reported.

I don't expect the brutal murder of a young trans woman named Marcal Camero Tye to get widely reported either, but it should be. It's heinous and appalling and I get really tired of these kind of stories coming out of my home state.

Read about it here. The article is interesting also because of issues in reporting trans stories in the media, which is a constant issue in these stories.

I saw Heartbeats

2011-03-05T22:04:00.000-08:00

today at the Sunset 5 and I'm a little obsessed with 21-year-old star/director/writer/editor/costumer Xavier Dolan as a result.

LATimes had a feature about him and the movie in today's paper, so I skipped finally seeing The King's Speech and went to his movie.

Much of it is lush and gorgeous, to the point of being ridiculous. Dolan says something interesting in a youtube interview I found; it goes something like--

I think the visual is as shallow as the love it portrays.

I almost saw his first movie, I Killed My Mother, last year at Outfest and now I could kick myself for skipping it.

Just as a bitchy/funny counterpoint, I did get tickled by a comment on youtube about him; it goes something like--

here in canada we don't hate him because he's gay, we hate him because he's a narcissist hipster.

That may be true, but if so he's a narcissist hipster who got two movies into Cannes in 2 years by age 21.

Okay I have to end with this, because it's kind of how I feel about him right now. And it's from Yekaterinburg.

Queer Harding University

2011-03-03T18:06:00.000-08:00

I'm overdue for a new post, and luckily Joe.My.God tipped me off to a controversy brewing in Searcy, Arkansas, that merits our attention.

Harding University is a conservative Christian college affiliated with the Church of Christ, and some of its LGBT students have begun publishing an anonymous 'zine writing about their struggles in life and at school. It went live online and the college responded by having the site blocked as pornographic.

Joe points the way to this post, which is a nice personal essay about the univerity and its discrimination against LGBT students; it also contains a great summary of the contents of the 'zine.

The university responded recently to the controversy, which is reported here.

One can argue the seeming illogic of attempting to be openly gay in a private religious university that openly preaches and teaches an anti-gay message (the New Yorker has good things to say about that), or the university's First Amendment right to preach and teach that message.

What's important to me about this is that Harding is, like most organizations (not to mention governments) that discriminate and advocate discrimination against LGBT people, using its power to silence those people's expression. They're working actively to deny them their voices, to make them invisible. The authors of the 'zine make clear that they will not tolerate it in the first piece, a letter addressed, "Dear Harding:"

We are not asking anything from you. We are here to tell you we exist and will not be silenced.

Hurray for them.

Read some of the 'zine if you get a minute. As political as it (rightly) is, it doesn't read like a screed. It is a presentation of a lot of young people in difficult positions as they earnestly struggle with their faith, attempting to be themselves in an environment that is hostile to them.

Happy

2011-02-15T19:08:00.000-08:00

New PJ Harvey album today.

Seven Devils

2011-02-05T20:27:00.000-08:00

Seven Devils Playwrights Conference is doing a fundraising push to keep the annual event running. They've been developing work by countless playwrights in all stages of their careers since 2001. They need a little more than 6k by March in order to have the conference this year. I'm giving some money and I'd encourage others to do the same.

Check their Facebook pagefor more info.

Click here to donate.

I got to see

2011-02-02T16:35:00.001-08:00

Circle Mirror Transformation last week at South Coast Rep before it closed. It has gotten plenty of press and attention, and I've already written about Annie Baker a few times on this page. That makes it relevant to my readers and myself, of course, but I've hesitated writing about the performance, in part because it was closing, but also because, well, I don't know why exactly. Something made me want to leave it alone.

The first thing that strikes me about the play is how it seems to resonate with some of the more substantive writing I've done on this page over the past couple of years. I don't exactly know if avant-garde is the right way to describe Baker's writing (possibly The Aliens more than Circle Mirror Transformation), but one of the pleasures of CMT is how well she manages to sneak story into what is seemingly a play where very little happens from a dramatic perspective. Of course, a lot of big things happen, which is why the ending appears to have an emotional climax (I'm thinking of the last counting game, for those who've seen or read it), even when there's not a traditional dramatic build.

And although there's not a traditional dramatic build (and trust me, there really isn't), there is no shortage of formalism at work, particularly with regard to repetition. There's almost a musical quality in the way motifs (the games) are introduced, interrupted, extended, then finally completed in the climax. It's thoughtfully, artfully structured, regardless of how unfamiliar its structure might feel to those used to the conventions of the well-made play.

And as I've pointed out about Baker in the past, it turns to realism to innovate the form and create something that does feel experimental. I really don't think it is. If it were truly experimental, I don't think it would be performed at South Coast Rep, or any other of the dozens of theaters that are going to do the play this year. I do think it's innovative, and I admire it for that reason, but this is not a wildly divergent piece of theater. This is not something that smashes the rules with a hammer and redefines the performer/audience relationship. It may challenge, or even frustrate expectations, but it's working within timeworn traditions here. None of this is a criticism of the work or the theaters that perform it. If anything it's a criticism of any audience (or critic) that would reject it as something too foreign to their experience of what a play is to attempt to engage with it.

I wouldn't say that was a problem on the performance I attended. The audience seemed to respond well enough to it. There was laughter and even a gasp or two. I did have a guy sleeping next to me, but that's not so much rejection as passivity. Or sleepiness. I get sleepy too in plays. Good ones, even.

All that said, the play does raise a lot of questions for me, but I guess these arise as much out of the specifics of this play as they do out of a curiosity about the artist's impulse. I don't really know why Baker's chosen to give the audience such minimalism (I don't know if that's an apt description but I'm going with it). It does seem at least in part due to a pleasure in upending audience expectations, or at least a personal pleasure in moments that do so (in a recent LATimes feature, she descibes a long beat with an empty stage as one of her favorite moments in the whole play with no explanation). Is that the whole point? And if so, is it short-sighted of me to find that unsatisfying?

Perhaps. But then I don't really believe that the play is merely an exercise in style and formalism. If it were, Baker wouldn't bother to let us in on so much of the characters' emotional lives. I don't think the events of the play point with great directness and clarity to its ending, however strange and moving it might be. Okay, maybe they do a little, but if so, there's no great revelatory catharsis to the moment. Then that's something I don't think Baker's interested in giving to the audience either. What she does give is a visceral allusion to what might be the most popular "experimental" play in American Theater, Our Town. That seems appropriate on a couple of levels.

I think I've figured out why I didn't want to write about it after I saw it. It seems a puzzle to me, and one that I'm not sure wants to be finished.

Went to see

2011-01-29T10:15:00.000-08:00

Les Savy Fav at the Echoplex last night, which was worth the price of admission for their cover of "California Uber Alles." Now I'm on a Dead Kennedys youtube spiral.

Tibor de Nagy

2011-01-21T14:25:00.000-08:00

K at Jimson Weed Gazette sent me a nice review in the NYTimes of the 60th Anniversary art show going on at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. The show is a collection of several of the major mid-century artists who intersected with (and painted) many of the city's poets. See below for an excerpt.

[Larry] Rivers...introduced Jane Freilicher, a recent convert from abstraction to still life and landscape painting, to the gallery, along with the magnetic [Frank] O’Hara, who had a menial job at the Museum of Modern Art but was clearly on the ascent. O’Hara, in turn, brought in the poets John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch — the three had overlapped at Harvard — and eventually attracted a legion of young disciples, including Bill Berkson, Barbara Guest and Ron Padgett, to the scene.

And a scene it was: amorous, rivalrous and incestuous; at once an avant-garde and — much like the New York art world at present — an avant-garde in reverse. Poetry was pushing into prickly new territory, while art was revisiting old ground, although with some new moves. What made the situation at Tibor de Nagy distinctive was that almost everyone was collaborating, artists and poets alike.

Remember the context. This was the high moment of Abstract Expressionism, with its image of the heroic artist battling his way alone toward some existential sublime. Set that image against another: O’Hara and Rivers, lovers at the time, sitting knee to knee as they worked on a series of jointly made lithographs, each adding drawings, jokes, notes to friends and poems like valentines.

Or consider the poetry books coming out under the Tibor de Nagy imprint, among them Mr. Ashbery’s first collection, with drawings by Ms. Freilicher, and O’Hara’s 1953 “Oranges,” with hand-painted covers by Hartigan. These weren’t weighty tomes. They were pretty pamphlets, so thin and fragile as to be all but invisible on a library shelf.

Read the whole thing here.

I just read

2011-01-20T21:34:00.000-08:00

John Lahr's review of Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities. It's available only to subscribers, so I can't link to it, but I have to share my favorite sentence.

Is there any living actress who pisses from a greater height than Stockard Channing?

Romulus Linney

2011-01-15T21:10:00.000-08:00

died today. First playwright I ever met, way back freshman year at Hendrix College. He showed up for a playwriting workshop when we staged his play, Unchanging Love. I was a lowly freshman, so he didn't pay much attention to me. Still, I appreciated his seriousness, as well as his foul mouth. Rest in peace.

I love her.

2011-01-15T21:08:00.000-08:00

Annie Baker in the LAT

2011-01-15T09:10:00.001-08:00

There's a nice profile of Annie Baker in the Sunday Calendar section. Her play, Circle Mirror Transformation, opens this weekend at South Coast Rep. The article's online now. See below for some good excerpts.

Baker's writing needs to be performed — "I don't think my plays really work on the page" — but with a tricky balance of precision and spontaneity that helps imbue everyday language and gestures with deeper meaning. (It's no wonder she loves Chekhov.) Her characters have trouble expressing themselves — a common malady, insists Baker, who listens to what people really say and leave unsaid. "When I was 18, I hid a recorder under the table during conversations. It was revelatory." When she writes, she records herself reading lines and then refines, hoping to eliminate the "authorial hand."

"I'm very interested in silence," she says. "And, more importantly, in what happens when people aren't talking on stage. I'm interested in letting actors play and do things between the lines. And in slowing everything down. There's a moment in 'Circle Mirror' where the stage is empty for 30 seconds. It's one of my favorite parts."

[...]

"I'm not being modest when I say I really didn't believe 'Circle Mirror' would find an audience," she says. "Of all my plays, I thought it would be the least successful. It's an elliptical fragment play with a lot of offstage action and silence. While I find that exciting, I wasn't sure anyone else would. But I honestly think if you write what you want to write, people respond to it."

Read the whole thing here.

A letter

2011-01-14T09:35:00.001-08:00

Re: an interesting essay at LA Stage Times by a husband-and-wife producing team, John and Lynn Pleshette, discussing why they produce British plays. They seem to have stumbled into it "by accident," after their searches for compelling new plays led them back to British authors. See below for a pertinent quote.

But we really wanted to do something new for LA audiences. And American. We started searching for an American play. We soon learned, however, any play done successfully in New York is nearly impossible to option for a small theater in LA. The playwrights and their agents want to hold out for the Geffen, the Taper, the Douglas or South Coast Rep.

Dear John and Lynn,

I would like to offer you a list of names of ambitious local playwrights with hard drives full of unproduced work that I'm sure would love to collaborate with you, should you ever again take up that quest for an American play. I mean that in earnest. I most certainly am not holding out for any of the theaters that you name and I don't know many other playwrights who are. And believe me, I know a lot of playwrights.

Feel free to return to producing good British plays after you have read a sampling of our work and determined it wrong for your purposes. I'm all for producing good plays of any nationality. I just feel it important to address the timid provincialism that the whole of the American theater must be represented only by work that has been successfully tested on New York stages.

Yours truly,

FWL

Stage Raw Quiz

2011-01-13T09:07:00.000-08:00

Steven Leigh Morris has a fun post up at Stage Raw regarding a "New Year Theater Quiz." The first subject is Sacred Fools' Marz Richards. Here's my favorite bit, mostly for the question, which has always stumped the hell out of me.

• Why is the Fountain Theatre always sold out when it just does plays about bitter musicians and graveyards?

Because the Fountain has consistently marketed their shows to an audience that doesn't simply travel from North Hollywood, to the Taper, and then back to Pasadena to await the early bird discount special at the Tallyrand.

Geography, geography, geography: Remember, San Francisco is a reef off Ventura County and the Tallyrand is in Burbank, not Pasadena. Five points off.

Read the whole thing here.

My souvenir

2011-01-07T23:19:00.000-08:00

From Varla Jean Merman: The Loose Chanteuse tonight at the Cavern Club. Thank you Ms. Merman! I'll treasure it always!

Writers on Writers

2011-01-07T17:23:00.000-08:00

Variety has a nice special feature in the Friday edition with writers commenting on notable screenplays from last year. Michael Cunningham, Adam Rapp, and Rajiv Joseph are represented. Here's a sample from Donald Margulies, writing about Winter's Bone.

"Winter's Bone" is astonishing for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was made at all. Films of such raw, unpretty beauty are supposedly not made in America anymore and yet here it is, defying our negativity. Debra Granik has done something remarkable: she has directed and written, with Anne Rosellini (from a novel by Daniel Woodrell), in a wholly American vernacular, a modern Greek tragedy. It is not an exaggeration to suggest that its 17-year-old heroine, Ree Dolly, has much of the grandeur of an Antigone, or an Electra. Ree is also one of the best roles for an actress of any age the cinema has seen in a very long time and, in Jennifer Lawrence's breathtakingly unaffected performance, is made unforgettable. The story of "Winter's Bone" may sound bleak in synopsis ("teenaged girl searches through the brutal Ozarks for her dastardly, crystal-meth-dealing dad") but the experience of watching it is nothing short of exhilarating.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh, and I saw

2011-01-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

a lot of movies, theater and TV last year, but I think "The Suitcase" was the best of the lot. At least the most memorable.

2010 Year in Review!

2011-01-06T18:17:00.000-08:00

I probably should've done this post last week; we've all moved on from our best-of lists and year-end reflections and gone back to talking about Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark. But there's so much that I really feel I must indulge. So I'm taking a stroll through last year's desk calendar; it's really pleasant. It has images of vintage wallpaper and is just darling.

January: I apparently saw The White Ribbon, which I remember liking. I went to the LAPhil too, but I don't remember what I saw (oh, here it is!). Also, bobrauschenbergamerica. A trip to San Francisco too. The wallpaper is for a nursery, with a Humpty Dumpty theme.

February: I saw a poor production of a L.A. premiere of a play. The critics loved it. I made myself sit through the 2nd act because they'd papered the house that night and I felt it my duty. Also saw that Orpheus Descending, which was lovely. Oh and The Subject was Roses, which was sweet, especially when the smell of waffles filled the house. The Green Umbrella was a highlight. I think this wallpaper is a kitchen motif, all blue-grays, yellows and pinks, with a tea kettle, a rooster and a fish.

March: Portrait of Jason! And a couple of world premieres I didn't much care for but all the critics loved. The wallpaper this month is bar-themed, as it has a bowl of lemons with some cocktail glasses and green olives.

April: I saw an opera! What was it? One of those Ring things? All my calendar says is "Opera." Plus Bengal Tiger at the Taper, and Thomas Ades at the Phil. Another kitchen motif, with a series of mobiles with salt and pepper shakers hanging from them on a beige color field. A little drab, this one.

May: I saw Sick, which I liked just fine. Something at Boston Court. Twentieth-Century Way, I think. Went home to Arkansas for Amanda's 100th birthday. A trippy calendar image -- an aquarium motif on a black background. No idea what room one would put this in!

June: I saw South Pacific and Merce Cunningham, and went to the Ojai Music Festival for JW's birthday. Just heard a single piece -- a 2 hour Messien piano thing. Very lovely with birds twittering and the sun through the trees. Deer and plants this month!

July: Ooh, busy month! Lieutenant of Inishmore, In the Heights, Lots of Outfest, something at Boston Court and/or REDCAT. I really should keep better records of all this. It's green and leafy print this month; I like the dragonfly in the upper left corner the best.

August: Milk Milk Lemonade, which was cute. Something else at Boston Court. Vintage cars on a cream background. Also the VW logo in red, for an odd bit of product-placement.

September: Another busy month! Three Bowl concerts: Candide, Diavolo and Pavement. Glass Menagerie. Irma Vep. Ruined. Something at REDCAT? A CTG world premiere. The Kids are All Right. And I even attended a reading of something that I WROTE! Then my car got nailed while parked in a residential area by a hit-and-run driver and still isn't running right. Very pretty blue floral motif this month; I'm sure it was a comfort.

October: Oh, Terre Haute at The Blank; that was interesting. Of Montreal. Overall a quiet month. Not much happening AT ALL. Another kitchen theme, a bland one at that.

November: Lohengrin and Lydia! Next to Normal too. My car, still unfixed, gets broken into! November features an idyllic country scene. Very brown.

December: Wooster Group Vieux Carre. I screamed at an insurance guy about my effed-up car. The rest is a blur. This month's calendar image is all booze. A great way to end the year, I say.

Onward! With snowmobiles!

Homage

2011-01-05T18:53:00.000-08:00

Brandy sent me this link from This Recording, a website I need to bookmark. The post is from last month, and is a nice collection of excerpts from Homage to Frank O'Hara. I like Barbara Guest's; I'll paste below.

Frank and I happened to be in Paris at the same time in the summer of 1960. I was staying there with my family and had been very busy with the Guide Bleu looking at every placard on every building I could find. and I had located the"bateau lavoir" where Picasso and Max Jacob had first lived and where they had held all those studio parties with Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin. And across the street was a very good restaurant. I suggested that we have lunch there, our party included Grace Hartigan and her husband at the time, Robert Keene. We had a "marvelous" lunch, much wine and talk and we all congratulated ourselves on being in Paris and moreover being in Paris at the same time - a continuation of the Cedar St. Bar where we had formerly and consistently gathered. After lunch I suggested that we cross the street to the "bateau lavoir," a discovery of mine and one I thought would intrigue Frank. Not at all. He did go across the street, but he didn't bother to go into the building. "Barbara," he said, "that was their history and it doesn't interest me. What does interest me is ours, and we're making it now."

Happy

2011-01-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

New Year everyone. Internet was spotty in Arkansas. Not everywhere, just where I was bedded down. I met someone from New England in the late 90s who asked me if we had the internet in the Natural State yet. I told her yes, although I understood her need to confirm, since we just got shoes a couple decades ago.

And now birds and fish are dying by the thousands in the Natural State. I imagine it's divine retribution for something, but I'm not sure what. Electing Boozeman? Something do do with the Sugar Bowl? I'm at a loss.

Alright that's all I've got for this evening. Regular posting will resume shortly. Or as regular as I can pull off.

Make me stay

2010-12-23T10:34:00.000-08:00

sharp and keen! Evergreen!

I'm reading

2010-12-21T12:11:00.000-08:00

Just Kids by Patti Smith, her memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. It's been on my radar ever since it came out in hardback, but I bumped it up to the top of my reading list when it won the National Book Award for non-fiction. That said, I'm enough of a cynic that I approached the book with some wariness. I've always appreciated her for her music career but didn't know what to expect by her prose. I shouldn't have worried; her romanticism is beyond infectious. It's a lovely read and I'm looking forward to finishing on the plane home to Arkansas this weekend.

Here's a favorite passage (so far). I both admire and envy her assurance here.

[Robert] never seemed to question his artistic drives, and by his example, I learned to understand that what matters is the work: the string of words propelled by God becoming a poem, the weave of color and graphite scrawled upon the sheet that magnifies His motion. To achieve within the work a perfect balance of faith and execution. From this state of mind comes a light, life-charged.

Elia Kazan in the New Yorker

2010-12-15T18:30:00.000-08:00

I keep meaning to post about this profile of Kazan by John Lahr that I read last weekend. The whole thing is worth a read, but my favorite parts involved his relationship with Tennessee Williams. Here are a couple of fragments.

Kazan didn’t just set Williams’s boundaries; he pulled the playwright out of his creative sump and showed him the way. On the opening night of “Sweet Bird of Youth” (1959)—a play that Kazan had to fight to keep the spooked Williams from closing out of town—Williams wrote to Kazan, “Some day you will know how much I value the great things you did with my work, how you lifted it above its measure by your great gift.”

[...]

For all the ambition in his films, there is also a fair quotient of melodramatic sap: Jean Peters as Josefa Zapata clinging to the saddle as her husband (Brando) rides off to his doom in “Viva Zapata!” (1952); Andy Griffith as an exposed populist, abandoned by the bigwigs and screaming into the night, in “A Face in the Crowd” (1957); the wavering and weak-willed Chuck (Montgomery Clift) proposing to Carol (Lee Remick), the war widow who loves him, as they lie face down in the mud after being drubbed nearly senseless by a racist thug, in “Wild River” (1960). “All my pictures are corn,” Kazan said. “But the best of them, through it, come out deep.” Still, sometimes, as with “Baby Doll” (1956) and “A Face in the Crowd,” they just came out corny. “You say that whenever I am in trouble I go poetic,” Williams wrote to Kazan. “I say whenever you are in trouble, you start building up to a SMASH! finish.—As if you didn’t really trust the story.”

In other anti-gay controversies

2010-12-08T21:44:00.000-08:00

The LAT reports that The Westboro Baptist Church is L.A.-bound over a production of The Laramie Project. The show is donating some of the proceeds to one of my favorite non-profits, The Trevor Project. Maybe the added attention will make it sell out.

A Fire in my Belly at Downtown Art Walk

2010-12-08T20:55:00.000-08:00

I'm hoping to go downtown tomorrow night for Art Walk so I can check out "A Fire in my Belly" at CB1 Gallery. Check out the LATimes article here for details. Stick around for the comments to read people screaming WHATABOUTISLAM?? WHATABOUTMOHAMMED??

LAT critic on Hide/Seek

2010-12-06T18:25:00.000-08:00

Christopher Knight writes a couple of smart articles in the LATimes about the David Wojnarowicz video and its misrepresentations.

In the first one from a few days ago, he addresses the issue of misinterpretations of it as anti-Christian. Here's a good excerpt--

Objectively speaking, an artist bent on making an anti-Christian diatribe would not spend just 15 seconds of a 13-minute video making it. Those images instead serve another function: To rebuke the same self-righteous moralism of those who are attacking the Smithsonian now.

Ants and bugs are an age-old artistic symbol that laments the frailty of human beings and earthly existence. As Ecclesiastes puts it: Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas -- “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” Ant-covered flora, bodies and animals turn up in everything from still life paintings in the largely Protestant 17th-century Netherlands to the silent Surrealist film, “An Andalusian Dog” (1929) by the Spanish director Luis Bunuel and artist Salvador Dali, a conservative Catholic.

In the Wojnarowicz video, the vanitas theme plays out on a crucifix not as a religious slur, but as a lament for earthly failures among those who should know better at a time of epic tragedy. Small wonder that some who failed then take offense at being reminded of it now.

And his article in today's paper calls out the anti-gay rhetoric about the video "bullying."

The anti-gay agenda is to pick bogus fights about art, free expression and federal funding, since those tactics were effective in the bruising culture war of the Reagan era. And it's being led by partisans who owe significant portions of their livelihoods to the money-raising power of homophobia.

I really appreciate that last quote, because I think it's crucial to understanding the extremity of most anti-gay rhetoric. It's all about money. Either that or poll numbers and getting out the vote.

The other thing that's interesting to me about these articles is their comments. It couldn't be clearer that the minions moaning about Islam and calling Knight a drama queen are being instructed to do by their demagogues. It all screams talking points, and it amazes me how quickly people sign up to peddle the message.

I can't even get outraged by these sorts of homophobic tirades anymore. What frustrates me is the insistence by our leaders, whether political, cultural or religious, on both perpetuating and pandering to this kind of strident, mindless BS for their own political and financial well-being.

More on Wooster in L.A.

2010-12-04T15:19:00.000-08:00

I already linked to Cindy Marie Jenkins' profile of the group at LAStageTimes, but I wanted to highlight a couple of nice quotes for those who might not click through and read. It begins with a quote by a Wooster Group veteran, Kate Valk, who says--

"REDCAT’s really great for us: the size, the sound, the space. The LA audience is very adventurous. They do not have a problem if you’re mixing some film and video elements into your theater.”

[REDCAT Director Mark] Murphy agrees with the appeal The Wooster Group has to LA audiences and REDCAT’s audiences specifically, who “exemplify an openness overall true of LA.” He recalls the Group’s trip to the West Coast after finishing a long run of Hamlet at The Public Theatre in New York City, where “the audience clearly wanted to experience Shakespeare.”

Los Angeles audiences, on the other hand, mixed traditional theater fans with visual and media arts fans, who “haven’t been trained in a rigid way of how a well-made play should be performed… They enjoy the highly visual, non-linear theatrical structures” The Wooster Group brings.

Also, I like McNulty's review in the LATimes, even if he doesn't know the difference between a thong and a jock.