A Little Matter of a Conjunctive
At the end of her otherwise sympathetic review of Stopping Traffic, NYT critic Anita Gates writes:
"This is a show with a message (the need for openness about mental illness), but it's an entertaining, endearing one as well."
Is anyone else bothered by that three-letter conjunctive and all that it implies?
"This is a show with a message (the need for openness about mental illness), but it's an entertaining, endearing one as well."
Is anyone else bothered by that three-letter conjunctive and all that it implies?
Comments
One of the perils of being a critic is that one must always guard against these easy shorthand expressions ("but also entertaining") and the easy shorthand thinking that often lurks behind them. You need to become, in essence, a critic of your own criticism. It's easy to forget this, especially in writing for a daily paper (I know from experience).
I feel like she wrote this at the last minute because the bottle of scotch killer her memory of a deadline.
I write reviews for civilians, not the artists. And you might scoff at this, but it's a responsibility to encourage people to open their pocketbook based on your opinion.
Anita's closing sentence was shoddy, sloppy, uninspired. But she wants people to see the show. Most people don't want to be beaned in the head by agenda and message. Forget that it's arrogant on the artist's behalf, it's also boring. Hence her caveat.
It's entertaining and endearing.
People pay for tickets. With money they earn. Money they work for. In every blog that I read associated with theater, there seems to be a lack of sympathy to audience members.
I don't know. Just seems that going after a critic trying to tell her readers that Stopping Traffic is medicine and sugar seems pointless? Petty?
No, what I was commenting on was not the critic, but the use of "but" as indicative of what I think is a common belief: that messages and entertainment are mutually exclusive. I think this should give an artist pause. Aristotle said the function of theatre was to entertain; Horace, to entertain and educate. Neither left entertain out of the equation entirely. Don't like Aristotle and Horace? Check out Brecht's Messingkauf Dialogues, where he also puts entertainment first and foremost, but discusses what a contemporary audience finds entertaining. No, I think the "but" in this sentence should make us ask what we've done, as artists, over the past century or so to create this split.
I think that "but" could have just as easily been an "and."
As far as I can tell, there's no "split." It's just that theater with a message is a balancing act. You don't want to preach to your audience or make them feel like they just attended a lecture. No one likes to go to the Dentist, even if it's good for them.
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