The curtain falls on Louise

I'd heard nothing from the rumor mill about it, so I was shocked, shocked to discover Louise Kennedy was departing her role as lead theatre critic at the Boston Globe (Don Aucoin, who filled in during a sabbatical last fall, will apparently take over, at least for the time being).

I know, I know - I might as well close the blog! My frustration with Louise's reviewing has fueled who knows how many posts at the Hub Review. I think I even rated a veiled reference in her farewell - a generally classy piece of writing, frankly.

Still, the issues that have bugged me for the past four years were very much in evidence even in her swan song. She admitted that "reviewing personally" was "the only way she knew how" - and then cited Kevin Kelly (a truly dreadful critic, far weaker than Louise) as her justification for this dubious practice.

Poor thing, so confused. Obviously all criticism is "personal" in some sense - but that doesn't mean the critic should stumble into simplistic equations between emotional response and artistic greatness. After the death of her father, for instance, Kennedy was moved to tears by Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice - which is (need I point out) largely concerned with the death of a father. To a bystander, this might have counted as merely predictable - but to Louise, it was proof positive of Ruhl's greatness; and it has taken her literally years to see through her mistake. Other examples abound - feminism is a core concern for Louise, for instance, so anything that could be construed as sexist was automatically suspect; she wasn't even entirely sure about that guy Shakespeare (and I think that case is pretty much settled, don't you?). And woe unto any playwright (like David Mamet) whose plot mirrored an event in her own life - if Louise took umbrage, well, clearly that playwright had made an artistic mistake!

But a penchant for the "personal" isn't actually what got Louise into trouble; ironically enough, it was her occasional brilliant review that drew raspberries from the Globe readership. Her critique of the Huntington's crassly-conceived Pirates!, for example, merely described the production accurately - but that accuracy led to an avalanche of invective from Huntington subscribers (egged on by that theatre's managing director, Michael Maso). The review probably counted as a high point in Kennedy's career - and the response, a low point in Maso's.

Perhaps that imbroglio made her shy further away from the controversial - for it must be said that in four tumultuous years on the Boston theatre scene, I can't recall her ever offering many (or any) salient thoughts on the pressing issues of the day. Nothing on Diane Paulus and the commercialization/destruction of the A.R.T.; nothing on the financial crises at Shakespeare and Company and the (former) North Shore Music Theatre; nothing on anything, frankly. Even she admits, in her farewell piece, that all she can recall from her tenure is a handful of impressions -"scraps," actually; she just doesn't seem to appreciate what that means.

Still, her list of the best productions of recent years is a solid one - and do I expect much better of Don Aucoin? Not really (I'm just glad the job didn't go to Joel Brown!). And frankly, I kind of doubt Aucoin will give me nearly as much material as his predecessor; if he strikes me as less error-prone than Louise, he also strikes me as blander. So here's something I never thought I'd say - I may actually miss Louise Kennedy.

Read it here first!

I know imitation is supposed to be the most sincere form of flattery - so why am I feeling slightly irritated? Ed Siegel is opining that Boston's major theatres should produce our major playwrights, while Louise Kennedy recently rewrote my posts about the A.R.T. Sure, it's nice to be the source of these people's writing, but really, can't they think of anything on their own? Of course it's interesting that here, on the Web, without a perch in the mainstream press, I'm actually more influential than ever. But at the same time, all I can say is - you can read it here first!

Who's on Third? Not Louise Kennedy

Last weekend Globe critic Louise Kennedy offered a rare essay in the Sunday arts pages, on a topic that I daresay she thought was daring: the true artistic stature of Wendy Wasserstein, the Mount Holyoke grad and beloved playwright who produced a long list of comedy-dramas centered on uncommon women and others (to borrow one of her own early titles). Wasserstein, of course, passed away two years ago, at just 55, and just after completing Third (starring Maureen Anderman, at left), currently on the boards of the Huntington (which had a longstanding "relationship" with the author's work). So perhaps it's time (or almost time) for a re-assessment of her output, now that plays centered on smart, engaging, educated women are no longer exciting simply because they're new.

And certainly Wasserstein's oeuvre is open to some obvious criticism. Kennedy's not the first to point out that its focus on a certain milieu (that of the articulate, career-oriented, educated Jewish woman) can easily be seen as a limit, not a strength, and Wasserstein's talent for, and comfort with, light comic dialogue meant her plays usually shrank from any kind of raw conflict. But the first thing that strikes one about Kennedy's critique is that with Third, Wasserstein essentially beat her to it.

For the opening scenes of Third cleanly lay out a précis of, well, What's Wrong With Wendy Wasserstein, or at least the women she writes about. As the curtain rises, Laurie Jameson, a professorial star at some unnamed blend of Smith and Mt. Holyoke, is holding forth on King Lear with a decidedly post-feminist spin - it's actually the tragedy of bad girls Regan and Goneril, Jameson insists, and Cordelia is the play's villain because she submits to her own "girlification." These wittily counterintuitive claims map amusingly to the first scene of Lear, it's true - but we wonder how, exactly, Professor Jameson expects to hang onto them once Regan and Goneril start poking out people's eyes and poisoning each other. And we imagine our factotum in this debate is going to be the eponymous "Third," or rather Woodson Bull III, a young, handsome, heterosexual wrestler who seems to have wandered into her seminar by mistake. Or at least Jameson imagines it must be a mistake - with his WASP-porn-star name and his preppie sports scholarship, she seems to see Third as an avatar for all the bull she and her sisters have taken from the white male establishment since they arrived on campus.

And so far, so good - an over-reaching feminist, a "living dead white male" with a jones for King Lear, and an archly, accurately treated milieu - it seems that Wasserstein is setting us (and herself) up for the kind of Shavian critique rarely seen in the theatre anymore. Throw in a subplot with Jameson's aging, Alzheimer's-ridden father (with whom she's playing the role of Cordelia, of course, not Regan or Goneril), and we likewise hope for a niftily rendered rapprochement between life and its duties and the limits of gender-based theory.

But then Wasserstein doesn't deliver on any of these counts. She's never been long on plot, true, but this time she even comes up short on substance. Third's thesis on Lear, it turns out, though insightful and provocative, fits quite well within Jameson's theories, whatever she may say; yet she's moved to call him up on plagiarism charges, apparently simply as vengeance for being smarter than he looks. We're willing to buy even this clumsy plot hook, of course, if it leads to an excitingly barbed exchange of ideas - but Wasserstein dodges this challenge as well: Third offers his defense of his paper in dumb-show, while Laurie yammers on (via internal monologue) about her hot flashes (which is roughly, we feel, what Rush Limbaugh or his ilk might suggest at this point). The play grinds on, with a slow come-uppance for Jameson, but sans any intellectual content other than the usual exhortations to 'live life to the fullest' and 'see people for what they are.' It's as if Wasserstein set out a road map for expanding the limits of her drama, but then refused to follow it. I suppose you could argue the playwright's overarching point is that the culture wars shrink in significance as one enters the last - yes- third of one's life. Perhaps the play is her mea culpa before the great beyond. (And she includes her own factotum, via a faculty member struggling with cancer, to underline this point.) But couldn't she have done this while giving both sides more compelling ammunition?


Maureen Anderman and Graham Hamilton begin to wrestle in Third.

Still, what's left of Third is often charming, and occasionally even moving. The Huntington has mounted a handsomely crafted, well-acted production (in its last weekend), with Maureen Anderman capturing just about every facet of Jameson's many contradictions, while being backed up skillfully by Robin Pearson Rose as the no-nonsense professor facing her last semester, and Halley Feiffer as Jameson's klutzily sincere daughter (not to mention Jonathan McMurtry as that mercurial Lear stand-in). In the central role of Third, however, Graham Hamilton is equally accomplished, but perhaps slightly miscast - if he had more slick, senior-class-president mojo, we might buy Jameson's reaction to him. As it is, we're too far ahead of the play's curve: we know from the start he's no scion but merely a nice, middle-class boy on the make, and that the entire play, therefore, is a kind of illusion.

But then what to make of Kennedy's critique? Does she, in a sense, get further than Wasserstein herself in her analysis of the playwright's oeuvre? I'm afraid I'd have to argue no. The trouble with Third, in a word, is that Wasserstein could tell she was imprisoned in her identity politics, but had no idea how to transcend them. She can't really imagine a scion with the smarts to competently oppose Jameson's ideas - in fact, she can't even conjure a scion who might hold onto our sympathy (so Third winds up being from the suburbs). Wasserstein may be attempting to stage a debate, but she can't begin to lay out the opposing brief.

And Kennedy makes precisely the same mistake. She seems aware of Wasserstein's structural limits ("for women who talk so much about all the things that women have to do, her characters don't do very much onstage"), but her argument eventually devolves to this position:

"[The plays] do have a lot to say about one kind of woman today: an educated, financially comfortable, liberal, now middle-aged woman who's trying to figure out how to get as much as she possibly can out of life . . . as for the generation of women, now in their 20s and 30s, who are younger than both Wasserstein and me, it's hard to imagine that these plays address their concerns and questions in ways that really speak to them."

In other words, she's not irritated with Wasserstein for being trapped in her identity politics; she instead wants her to write about other identity politics. Wasserstein's fundamental flaw is not her inability to imagine the inner life of Third, but instead the fact that she writes about her own generation of women, not the next.

I have to say I find this somewhat depressing. We in fact do not need a younger version of Wendy Wasserstein (even though I admit I find her appealing). Nor do we need critics who want to see plays about themselves or their children (which seems to be Kennedy's only-partially-obscured demand). What we need are playwrights, and plays, that can frame both sides of the debate, that can actually imagine "the other" (to borrow a certain loaded term from the academy). And somehow I don't see Sarah Ruhl or Suzan-Lori Parks filling that bill. I guess we're all still waiting for Shakespeare's sister to be born.

Persona non grata - cura te ipsum!

In case you haven't noticed - and only a theatre nerd would - Bill Marx (logo-ized at left) is finally back blogging (as "Persona non grata" on www.theartsfuse.com) following his mysterious fall from grace at WBUR (where he was replaced by the less-abrasive Ed Siegel, who had just retired from the Globe). And as usual, Marx is once again exhorting the critical community "to use the point of your pen, not the feather" (a favorite quote from Swift), and taking many of his former print colleagues (in particular Louise Kennedy and Terry Byrne) to task for recent puff-pieces.

Now far be it from me to attack anyone who's criticizing Louise Kennedy or Terry Byrne - they're skilled suburban-feature writers (to varying degrees) but neither is by inclination or talent a theatre critic (the Globe, for some reason, obviously thinks of its reviews as suburban features). Still, one does wonder why Marx imagines he's in a position to hurl critical brickbats - sure, he's smarter than Kennedy or Byrne, but is his own record really so exemplary? Let's take a look!

But first - yes, I admit there's all but an ocean of bad blood between me and Marx. Years ago, when I was trying to shape productions of my favorite classics from the local, non-professional theatre scene, he was something of a nemesis - but then he was everybody's nemesis, openly hated in the theatre community (as in people spat when they spoke of him). He was widely quoted as describing his job as "shutting down as many small theatres as possible," and he certainly seemed to take that duty seriously; I personally lost thousands of dollars in productions that he panned, and despite raves from other critics (including Anthony Tomassini, now a music critic at the Times), my little company never managed to gain much momentum. I was broke, the scene was moribund, and I gave up on that particular dream.

Of course said scene is different now - but is it stronger because of Marx's brand of criticism? I'd argue not - in fact, he seems never to consider (although I once ruined a fatuous symposium he hosted by pointing it out to him repeatedly) that as his influence - and the influence of critics in general - has waned, the Boston theatre scene, rather than withering, has blossomed instead. This is an irony I think he has to face: local theatre has done better without him (and perhaps without the rest of us, frankly!).

This dichotomy is all the more glaring when one ponders Marx's own history. In the bad old days that he gazes upon so fondly, nastiness was de rigeur (reviewers took their cue from the Globe's bitchy Kevin Kelly), with Marx, ensconced at the Phoenix, as its acknowledged junior avatar - and the theatre scene was basically a flatliner; Marx was like a surgeon scraping away for cancer in a patient that was already dead. Looking back, in fact, it's almost funny to imagine him styling himself as Kenneth Tynan or John Simon - but having to expend his acid on my productions, and others like them, in basements and church halls, starring recent college grads and community theatre types.

Still, if you imagine him as some incorruptible Robespierre, riding above the fray, think again; Marx eagerly fluffed major-league players like the ART, and was hardly above penning fawning puff pieces, such as one he wrote for the late Skip Ascheim's amateurish production of The Winter's Tale (Ascheim's company, ironically enough, fell before the point of Kevin Kelly's pen). Even now, there's a fluffy interview on his site with Suzan Lori-Parks, arguably our most over-rated living playwright.

Marx was, it's true, better at book reviews (he's really a bookworm masquerading as a theatre critic) and gained a positive reputation (and I think an award or two) in that field - but even this, I'd argue, is something of a debit. It's apparent that his literary nature, combined with his lefty politics (he's a Marxist in more ways than one) led him to unconsciously envious positions on several cultural fronts. Like many an armchair critic, for instance, Marx seems to resent the prerogatives of actual theatrical production; he just never thrills to live theatre - it's like a sad also-ran to some production he's got playing in his head. And so while there's still a certain urgency, at times, to his prose, it's always tied to critical issues, not in-the-moment aesthetic experience - in short, he loves criticism, not theatre. (He's not alone in that regard - does Carolyn Clay, for instance, love theatre? If so, you'd never tell it from her bloodless, pun-clotted output.)

There's an argument, I suppose, for valuing criticism for its own sake (even if it amounts to little more than an intellectual echo-chamber), but Marx's Marxism makes his position even more extreme: he seems disgusted in general by filthy lucre, and nothing sends him into a tizzy faster than the prospect of someone actually making money on a show. Indeed, in a widely noted dust-up with me over my rave for the Huntington's Love's Labour's Lost, he admitted:

I steer away from heavy-breathing statements of comparison such as "towers above" or "greater than" because they sound like ad copy.

Well the good Lord save us from ad copy! Now in that brouhaha, in which the Huntington quoted my rave in WBUR's online blog (where I posted at Marx's invitation) but credited it to simply "WBUR," Marx had something of a point - the Huntington, no doubt, was trying to insinuate that the famously pissy Bill Marx had been wowed by their show. Still, ponder, just a moment, how weird his outrage was, and consider what it means that he consciously avoids promoting even the shows he likes (and he admitted liking Love's Labour's Lost). If I had been Marx, I'd have certainly complained to the Huntington, and demanded that they specify the source of those quotes - but I also would have winked at their little gambit; they are, after all, trying to sell tickets, and I'm trying to get people to see the right shows. But Marx spurns both goals; for him, instead, it's all about the integrity of his armchair.

So okay, Bill disdains criticism's real-world purposes - but that still leaves the question of just how good his intentionally rarefied writing actually is; how gorgeous is that critical castle he's been building in the air? How much does he challenge orthodoxy - how often does he open new avenues of inquiry? How often is he a principled contrarian, how much do his insights surprise and enlighten? The answers, I'm afraid, are not often and not much. At WBUR, to be fair, Marx built an interesting and forward-looking web presence - his own contributions, however, were reliably intelligent, but little more (Debra Cash, who wrote on dance, was actually the far more interesting critic). He was also no great stylist, and it's surprising how often he marched in lockstep with the Globe and Phoenix. He learned to see through some of the ART's fatuousness, but was still bamboozled by productions that played to Marxist delusions (Olly's Prison) or 70's-era avant-garde posturing (Three Sisters). In short, he was sometimes slightly ahead of the herd, but just as often behind it.

And more and more, Marx's writing was directed at other critics - perhaps, some argued, as a kind of revenge-by-proxy for his career disappointments. Indeed, of his last ten posts, six have dealt with the decline in book reviewing in the mainstream press; three have dealt with the money scandals at the Wang (that filthy lucre!); only one has dealt with any actual artwork (a takedown of "modern classics," Ayn Rand, and H.P. Lovecraft). Surely the proportions here should be close to the reverse - who cares about some guy whose idea of incisive criticism is demanding that other people write it?

So I suppose my message to "persona non grata" is "cura te ipsum" - i.e, physician, heal thyself! Marx might more effectively stimulate thoughtful criticism if he took a crack at it. He could start by considering a question he raises, but never answers, in that hatchet job on Kennedy and Byrne:

How about looking at the ways the yeasayers do a disservice to theater and the craft of criticism?

Well, how about it, Bill? This would seem to be the question of the hour! Theatre seemed to get better as your influence waned - was that just an illusion? If so, why - and if not, then what exactly is your value-add, and that of criticism in general? And let's be blunt - simply being untainted by commercial concerns is not in and of itself a justification for criticism. There has to be something more - so what is it?