"When We Last Flew": Epic Fail

I just received an email from Sam Morris, Publicist who says he is a fan of my blog. However, the greeting on the email was"Dear Walt," so I guess he's one of those fans who, you know, doesn't actually read the blogs he's a fan of, or notice that at the end of each post there is a line that says "Posted by Scott Walters." (Note to other publicists who have been influenced by the drumbeat of social media marketing: you really piss bloggers off when you lie to them.)

Anyway, what Sam Morris wants to make me aware of is a production (or future production) called When Last We Flew, which is raising money online to do the show. Now, this is where not actually being a fan of this blog really leads to a lot of crap, because if Sam had read my blog he'd know that I am vocal proponent of rural and small town America, and that I get really annoyed by the condescending urban BS that passes for commentary. So Sam wouldn't know that the following description of the play would really piss me off:

After stealing his library's only copy of Angels in America, misfit teenager Paul begins reading and finds that his dull Midwestern life is about to take flight. Developed at Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Workshop, and the Sundance Theater Institute, when last we flew is a moving and humorous look at life in small town America.

 
So let's do a close reading of this two-sentence insult.

"After stealing his library's only copy of Angels in America..."

All you hip urban folks, I want you to get on the subway or the el or whatever city-type form of transportation you use and go down to a branch of your local library. And then I want you to come home and report to me exactly how many DOZEN copies of Angels in America you find there. Let's get serious: libraries are experiencing enormous budget cuts in our society, but even in the best of times very few libraries buy multiple copies of anything, much less a play. The implication is that only a rural a library would have only one copy of Angels in America. Nonsense. It's the norm. I love Angels in America -- I think it is the most important and best play of the past quarter century -- but libraries only need one copy of it. In the video on the website, Rivers, who apparently is from a small town (Manhattan KS, from additional research) and himself spent much time in the library where his grandmother was the librarian, speaks slightingly of the "small" theatre section. Well, welcome to the world. There is only one Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts, but for the rest of the US, well, people don't much read plays. And not just rural people -- ALL people. Even people who like to go to theatre don't read plays. Hell, from what I can gather, people who make a living in the theatre don't read plays. And so libraries don't have massive theatre sections.

"misfit teenager Paul begins reading and finds that his dull Midwestern life is about to take flight."

I know that "misfit" is supposed to make me identify with Paul -- all us people who went into theatre were misfits, weren't we? Being interested in an irrelevant art form?  I mean, all we have to do is listen to A Chorus Line to know that's true. But any sympathy I have (which was minimal, since I can see that this is another whiny "nobody understood me when I was young wah wah wah" play) evaporated when I encounter the insultingly cliched "his dull Midwestern life." This is just more Nylachi propaganda that paints everything without a 100-zip code as dull. Dullness is more about the individual than the place. It is a sign of lack of imagination and an inability to actually see and appreciate all of the diverse magic within any place. It is, in short, a sign of teenage-itis. Teenagers think New York is dull, too. Give me a break.

"Developed at Lincoln Center, New York Theatre Workshop, and the Sundance Theater Institute..."

Pedigree. New York pedigree. Lets look at this further. Playwright Harrison David Rivers (named after Harrison Ford) is an African-American from Manhattan KS, a town of around 50,000, so he is writing from experience (as we see in the video). He then attended the private liberal arts Kenyon College (the oldest college in Ohio), and then got his graduate degree from -- you guessed it -- Columbia University. In other words, he seems to be a carbon copy of every playwright making a living in NYC. His bio continues: "His work has been developed and produced at Lincoln Center, Atlantic Theater, Atlantic Stage 2, Second Stage, New York Theatre Workshop, Joe’s Pub, Ars Nova, HERE Arts Center, the 45th Street Theater, South Oxford Space, Dixon Place, 3LD Art & Technology Center, Manhattan Theatre Source and The American Airlines Theater (The 24 Hour Plays on Broadway and The Komen Foundation’s Pink Campaign on Broadway)." In other words, New York New York New York. And this production is being produced...in New York. But for some reason, the play needs to be set in a "small Midwestern town."

when last we flew is a moving and humorous look at life in small town America.

Or a settling of scores. In case you think I am being ungenerous (and I am somewhat), here is a quotation from Mr. Rivers' blog about his play Fell: "Second semester of my first year of graduate school my Playwriting II professor refused to comment on the first act of FELL, citing its copious stage directions as impenetrable and distracting from the story (which he had apparently missed both the first and second times he read through the play). He tossed the then fifty page script onto the table and said, "Call me when it's being produced and then I'll give you feedback." I emailed him the other day: "FELL is being produced. I want my critique." This man can hold a grudge, that's for sure. And for all of you dreaming of getting into the Columbia playwriting MFA program: you might want to consider this particular story. As well as this: "I finished writing FELL two weeks after this same professor insinuated that I was incapable of writing a play which featured African American characters." Sounds like a great education.

Suffice to say, I will not be contributing to getting Mr. Rivers' play on the boards. I don't know who wrote this blurb -- probably not Mr. Rivers -- and to his credit, Mr. Rivers does not slight his past in the video (although one of this producers does). I would like to see more plays about rural and small town America get attention, but I'd like them to be written by people who actually live in small towns, not "misfits" who used to live in a small town when they were teenagers and who now reside in NYC where "misfits" are tolerated and who have an ax to grind. It would be fine if these sorts of plays balanced out other more generous ones, but these portrayals of "small town life" are the only images that make it to the world. And I'm tired of it.

Orson Scott Card and the Tony Awards

I was forwarded a link to this blog post by Orson Scott Card, who (in the second half of the post) is grumpy about the Tony Awards -- or at least, about the plays on Broadway.  The person who emailed me (and I'm not identifying him only because I didn't take the time to ask if it was OK to do so) wondered whether this is "another dimension to the narrow roots of much of what we see." The short answer: no. What follows is a longer answer.

Card, who is probably best known for his novel Ender's Game, claims that -- oh, hell, I'm not going to summarize it. Here are the paragraphs I want to address:

Broadway has firmly aligned itself with the extreme left in American politics, to the point where they feel free to ridicule the values of most of the rest of the country -- the very people they expect to fly to New York and buy the tickets to keep the money flowing in.

Once upon a time, the theatrical community was one of the most open-minded and accepting groups in America; now it's rigid, exclusive, elitist, angry at nothing, and filled with disdain for people leading ordinary lives.

Oh, they'll occasionally cast a known conservative Republican, like Kelsey Grammer -- but only if he's in yet another revival of La Cage aux Folles and kisses another man onstage.

Once upon a time, the American theatre was one of our finest contributions to world culture. Now, judging from what we saw in this Tony broadcast, it's just a wholly-owned subsidiary of the contemptuous wing of the Democratic Party.

When Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams were writing for the American stage, we could go to New York and see greatness. 

This is a muddled mashup of pseudo-thought in which totally separate ideas are stitched together nonsensically with thread comprised of historical inaccuracy.

Before I discuss this, though, a disclaimer: I didn't watch the Tony Awards, nor have I been paying particular attention to the current Broadway season. I was in NYC recently and scanned the Broadway listings and opted for having dinner with friends, which I remain convinced was the better choice by far. So I can't comment on whether the acceptance speeches by the winners were filled with quotations from Lenin and Mao, which must have been the case given Card's undie-bundle.

In addition, the complaint, which Card makes elsewhere in his post, that there are so few new plays in a season that it is impossible to respectably fill out some of the categories has been made many other places as well, and is difficult to refute. But if you have to have an annual awards show (how else to market Broadway to the non-NYC public?), then you need to have nominees and that means you have to work with what you've been given. The lack of sufficient productions to fill the catregories ought to tell us something about the economic and creative bankruptcy of Broadway more than anything else. But why bring up the obvious, when you can grumble about liberals?

And his grumpiness about the Hollywood invasion? Yeah, take a number. I didn't even bother to quote these warmed-over cliches. Follow the link if you are a fan of stating the obvious.

But the part that requires a response I've pasted above.

Card seems to be grumpy about a couple things. First, that the Broadway menu is comprised wholly of fare drawn from the "extreme left" cookbook. I had to put down my Stalin-flavored sushi when I read that. I don't know enough about Card to know whether he is a tea bag nutjob who thinks anybody to the left of Herbert Hoover is "extreme left," but the the absurdity of this statement is beyond belief. Broadway fare is about as far left as the Chamber of Commerce. But exactly what is his beef? Is he cranky about Memphis -- are anti-racism and the Civil Rights movement "extreme left"? After half a century, I would have thought everyone along the political spectrum might agree about the immorality of prejudice based on race, Perhaps I am naive. After all, many people seem content to have sing-alongs from the racism songbook while changing the lyrics a bit to replace "black" with "gay."  Or is it Fences, perhaps August Wilson's most conservative play, that has him hitting the barricades? Hell, maybe there's just too many dark-skinned people winning awards these days, eh? Regardless, these plays are about as leftist as...well, the plays of O'Neill, Miller, Albee, and Williams (see below). Anyway, if he's looking for "conservative Republicans," I'd suggest that he should pay attention to some of the other awards -- the ones given to producers. I'm sure he'll find the scaled balanced if he just takes in the whole show. Or maybe he'd like a list of board members for the major arts organizations across America with which all those radical leftist artists have populated their organization's governance. Kind of hard to overthrow the government when you're reliant on Daddy Warbucks' bankroll to keep you afloat.

As mentioned above, Card then goes on to provide, by way of contrast to today's radical cabaret, the Golden Days of Broadway when "Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, and Tennessee Williams were writing for the American stage" and dammit, "the theatrical community was one of the most open-minded and accepting groups in America." What??? Surely he's not holding up Eugene O'Neill, who hung out with Greenwich Village Communists like John Reed and won the Nobel for radical plays like The Hairy Ape; Arthur Miller, who it is conjectured was a member of the writer's unit of the Communist Party around 1946 and who was an unfriendly witness before HUAC and who wrote The Crucible as a repudiation of McCarthyism; Tennessee Williams, whose homosexuality and drug addiction led to his early death; and Edward Albee, whose recent plays include one about having sex with a goat -- surely these are not the playwrights that Card holds up as a contrast to the "extreme left" plays of the current season, as the playwrights who reflected the tolerant values of "the rest of the country."  I know things look better through the haze of nostalgia, but this is total historical blindness.

But I do think he's right about the "contemptuous" part, but that has nothing to do with left or right -- both are equally contemptuous of the "values of the rest of the country" (whatever that means -- is this a code phrase for the "Real Americans" that Sarah Palin loves to refer to?), but that contempt takes different forms. Yes, artists are absurd who, with little intellectual or moral justification, see themselves as superior to everyone else simply because they make their living creating or interpreting imaginative worlds. This attitude is the energy shadow of the social shakedown that occurred during the Modernist first part of the 20th century, when artists declared themselves better than, well, just about anybody else. Read Ortega Y Gassett's The Revolt of the Masses for a primary source of this arrogance, or Lawrence W. Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America or Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class for a historical overview. (Nota bene: if you want to meet theatre's sneerer-in-chief, shake hands with Card's hero, Edward Albee.) But at the same time, producers (not just on Broadway, but in the offices of corporate arts everywhere) are equally contemptuous, insulting the intelligence of "the rest of the country" with their putrid, materialist pandering that exhibits all the moral values of Donald Trump running a BP shareholders meeting. Card needs to look a little bit closer at the values of American culture overall.

If my email forwarder friend is asking me to comment about the lack of diversity on our stages, then I would say that we have none, but not because of the simple-minded reason Card offers that there just aren't enough conservative Republicans around not kissing men in plays about homosexuality. It is because both left and right share the same classic liberal (in the REAL definition of the term, not the dopey use bandied about by FOX news) philosophy that what is most important in our world is the total freedom of the individual sans any responsibility to the betterment of the community. Nobody wants to talk about true "republicanism" (small "r"), which came from Jefferson, and was based on the sense of responsibility generated by having to have face-to-face interactions with other members of the community in order to solve problems and create a stronger place for everybody. No, we just want to do what we want to do and then figure out a way to sell it to other people. Our world has become a vast marketplace, and whether you are an "extreme left" or a "conservative Republican" artist or businessperson, you have that as a common ground. At root, you all believe the same thing: it's all about the commodity, the marketing, and the transaction.

You want diversity? It isn't about black and white, red and blue. It's about whether you believe that the individual is not part of a larger community, whether an individual has a responsibility to his neighbors.

Earlier today, over on the TACT blog, I posted these ten "hopes" that Wendell Berry delivered as part of a 1989 Commence address. If you want true diversity, create art (and a country to go with it) that reflects these values:

1. Beware the justice of Nature.

2. Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
3. Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
4. In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
5. Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
6. Put the interest of the community first.
7. Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
8. Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
9. As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
10. Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.

Lilly Awards

So last night was the Lilly Awards in NYC, which describes itself on Facebook as "An annual awards party to celebrate the work of women in the American theatre." Lest we forget the discussions we had surrounding Outrageous Fortune, let's take a look at the educational background of the six winners in the playwriting category:

• Melissa James Gibson graduated from Columbia University and from the Yale School of Drama with an M.F.A. in Playwriting.
• Chisa Hutchinson got her undergraduate degree at Vassar and an MFA in playwriting from NYU.
• Deborah Zoe Laufer is a graduate of The Juilliard School.
• Annie Baker graduated from the Department of Dramatic Writing at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
• Sarah Ruhl studied under Paula Vogel at Brown University (A.B., 1997; M.F.A., 2001)
• Young Jean Lee attended college at UC Berkeley, where she received an Phd in English. She went on to receive an MFA from Mac Wellman's playwriting program at Brooklyn College.
• Lucy Thurber -- I was unable to find any information on her educational background.

So here's the list in another form:

• Columbia
• Yale
• NYU
• Julliard
• Brown
• Brooklyn

It isn't that these playwrights are not deserving -- I'm certain they are -- or that they all have privileged backgrounds -- several of them don't. But rather that the track of success in the field is very, very narrow. If we are looking for diversity in our plays, we just might want to look at diversity in the way our playwrights are educated.

Posted Without Comment (No Comment Necessary)

Please, Please Stop the Madness (Part 2)

http://theatretact.org/?p=237

Pulitzer Checklist

So the Pulitzer Prize in Drama goes to...Next to Normal, a musical that Wikipedia says is about "a mother who struggles with worsening bipolar disorder and the effect that her illness has on her family. The musical also addresses such issues as grieving a loss, suicide, drug abuse, ethics in modern psychiatry, and suburban life."

So:

• Subject matter: middle class suburban life -- check.
• Playwrights
• Brian Yorkey 
• graduate of Columbia University -- check; 
• provided with conservatory training as a child at KidStage -- check

• Tom Kitt 
• graduate of Columbia University -- check; 
• provided with conservatory training as a child at Interlochen Summer Music Program for high school students -- check

But no, there is no such thing as a narrow track for privileged young artists whose parents can afford to send them to get training when they are young. Nah! It's all about talent and desire and believing in yourself. And it has nothing to do with diversity, as you can clearly see, since the subject of the play is about...well...middle-class suburbanites, but they're bi-polar suburbanites dealing with problems...

Right. Now I see.

Update: The Pulitzer Committee overruled the Drama Panel's recommendation. No, let me make that clearer: the Pulitzer Committee "at Columbia University's journalism school, where the prizes are administrated"... You know, Columbia University where Kitt and Yorkey got their degree... Do I smell Denmark?

Update #2: I just about dropped my teeth reading Charles McNulty's condemnation of the Pulitzer committee's overruling of the Drama Panel, when he said:

"I can't help being ticked off. Two points, in particular, rankle: the blinkered New York mentality and the failure to appreciate new directions in playwriting. The board had an opportunity to correct these long-standing shortcomings, and it blew it. In an era in which important new dramatic works rarely get their start in New York, the board's geographical myopia, a vision of the American theater that starts in Times Square and ends just a short taxi ride away is especially disheartening."

I'm giving McNulty an Honorary Membership in CRADLE.

On Unpaid Internships

Yesterday, I posted on the CRADLE blog a post about class and unpaid internships. I hope you'll visit. Summation:

"Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is a deeply corrupt system, one that consciously and shamelessly masquerades as a meritocracy while being, in fact, a plutocracy."