Will play Schoenberg for food

In today's Exhibitionist, Geoff Edgers reminds us how lucky we are that the BSO is so expensive, and will remain so, thanks to its recent salary negotiations. Thank heaven we're not like Houston or Minneapolis, in which salaries were reduced! Only actually, in Minneapolis salaries weren't really 'cut,' as Geoff says - instead, wages will be frozen this year, and then rise at a slower rate over the next few years. Man, that's rough. Meanwhile, in Houston, musicians will have to take two weeks' unpaid furlough but a (small) pay increase will go through. Man, this recession's a bitch!

Only I wonder - the argument of many who supported the BSO's extravagant salaries was that orchestral salaries in distant cities were equally high. This was repeatedly described to me as "just economics." But if symphony salaries have slid in other cities . . . doesn't that same argument require that they should have slid here, too? (Well, maybe we'll have to wait until New York and L.A. begin to feel the pressure!)

The poster boy fights back, or The Decline and Fall of the Blogosphere, Part 2

Well, it didn't take long for Isaac Butler to react. Today he attempts something like a riposte to my post yesterday, in which he claims I made him "the poster boy for everything wrong with the blogosphere," but which was actually about the way his (self-admittedly) compromised position as a blogger made him unreliable as a web journalist. As I read his post, however, I found myself wishing he had mustered more of an argument - only because if he had, I might not have to slog ahead with my own thoughts about what is, in the end, a central problem of blogging, and an issue that could hold back its cultural profile.

But alas, he hasn't. Not that he realizes it. For as all thoughtful readers of Parabasis know by now, Butler is nothing if not fatuously self-congratulating. That's probably why I read him, actually; there's a certain charm, I admit, to checking in on someone who imagines you care that he's having a bad hair day. It's considerably less charming, however, to plug all the way through an intended self-justification and realize that, in the end, no real content has come to the fore. And what's more, that the post's author hasn't realized that.

But, wearying as it is, I'll briefly slice up Butler's "arguments":

First, he spends a good deal of time decrying that fact that I pointed out his self-interest is much like that of the corporations he has previously criticized:

"I would hope that most people can see very clearly the difference between what I'm talking about doing and what happened in the MSNBC-Fox-Olbermann-O'Reilly feud," he huffs.

But these differences - that he thinks we may have missed - turn out to be: a) Isaac Butler is not a multinational corporation, and b) he has no vested interests in the Iraq War. And these points are true. Forgive me, gentle readers, if you finished my post under the impression that Isaac Butler was a large corporation involved in the Iraq War!

None of this, of course, has any bearing on the principle involved in these two cases, which is, in a nutshell: self-interest. MSNBC and Fox News perceived that the Olbermann-O'Reilly feud was damaging their respective interests, so they silenced it. Butler perceives that criticisms of certain people would be a bad career move, so he doesn't post them.

But Butler adds:

"I'm openly discussing the dynamics that influence this blog and inviting people to further discuss them . . . Olberman [sic] is a professional journalist whose job it is to inform the public. I am an unpaid blogger who writes about issues I care about on a near-daily basis, etc."

Now the trouble here is that this isn't so much a valid justification as a re-statement of the problem. It's quite true that Butler has "openly discussed" the "dynamics" - i.e., the self-interest - that "influences" his blog. But as for "inviting people to discuss" that self-interest . . . well, what is there to discuss? It seems an opening statement might go something like, "Isaac, you really shouldn't let self-interest determine what's on your blog," to which he in turn would respond, "But that's not in my self-interest." Which would be true. And the 'discussion' would be over.

And let me add, in Keith Olbermann's semi-defense, that there's something mortifying about Butler's seeming belief that there's more honor in blithely admitting wrongdoing than in attempting to hide it. Can you imagine, for instance, Olbermann going before a camera and saying (as Butler did):

I've been writing about and engaging in the national political scene for awhile now and everyone knows everyone and I'm not exactly at a point in my career where I can afford to go pissing people off willy-nilly. So my choices become: attack a major politician (or their work) to whom I want access, or attack another journalist (or their work) that I have to work with. Shit where I live or fuck up my career. Those are the choices. Not being an idiot, and not enjoying bad either/or scenarios, I tend not to broadcast things that will fall into those categories. It's not that I don't think about those things, or have those conversations with friends. To give one example: there was a major policy based on false research that the administration was trying to push through Congress. Everyone who saw the bill that I talked to knew about it. Several of the people I talked to about it were journalists. But we talked about it in a bar. Not on the television. I don't really want to go slagging off an administration in which the general counsel and the majority whip are both friends of mine to the end of...what, exactly?

I only make this parallel to point out the speciousness of Butler's self-justification. It's hardly to his credit that he could airily talk in this manner; in fact, it's almost certainly to his discredit. Perhaps Olbermann's silence on his own compromises is due to some sense of shame, for heaven's sake. Which could prove morally useful in the future.

But Butler is only just getting going:

"I have no institution backing me up (unlike Dana Milbank or Judith Miller or David Broder)," he tells us. "Without an institutional stamp of approval, the only reason why anyone reads me is that I have proven myself to them over time. To me, talking about the dynamics that go into my writing a post is a way of exercising a kind of openness and honesty, and inviting dialogue. It's a way of creating trust between me and my readers. Actually, pretty much every post is a way of doing that, if it's done right. And that's one way in which I try to approach my posts here on the site. Generally my thinking is I have this thing I want to say. How do I say it in a way that is authentic, that constructively adds to the dialogue and that's interesting to read and also feels at least somewhat spontaneous. I don't always succeed in those things, but those are the factors i'm trying to balance . . . The proof, in other words, is in the pudding."

In its sheer discombobulated self-involvement, doesn't this strike you as somehow Sarah-Palinesque? Let me get this straight: Isaac's all alone out here (sniff!), and to him, talking about the fact that he's selectively honest in his posts is a way of "exercising a kind of openness and honesty, and inviting dialogue" . . . admitting that he's editing his posts out of self-interest is actually "a way of creating trust"! And as for "the proof being in the pudding" - the point is that you are leaving things out of the pudding, Isaac!

Oh God - maybe this puppy isn't so cute anymore!

I suppose it's true, of course, that Isaac has "never recommended a show on this blog I thought wasn't worth seeing." And yes, it should be said: he has "frequently talked about my problems with larger theaters . . . " Okay, maybe so; but probably only as long as he has no work prospects at those theatres, correct? In short, Isaac Butler has not openly lied on his blog. He has merely shaped and shaded the truth to benefit his career.

And then there's:

"There's also a difference between Thomas and my positions. I am a working artist. Thomas is a former professional theatre reviewer who cares about theatre and writes passionately about it on his blog. We're going to be coming at these things from different angles fundamentally."

Ah, what can I say, except - bingo! That's it, Isaac! You are a self-promoting ha- - sorry, 'working artist' - while I still try to hang onto some level of integrity and objectivity. That's kind of the whole point (it's also Matt Freeman's point). And no, there's no way for me, or anyone, to prevent you from blogging. Go at it!

The trouble is that, despite your protestations, you and your ilk are steadily seeping into the cultural space that used to be occupied by journalists. Who had plenty of ethical failings, too, it's true, but who at least pretended they had integrity.

The question is, of course: how to ensure the integrity of the blogosphere (if it has any)? Admittedly, that's going to be tough - for the Internet itself, despite what its promoters claim, is hardly a sphere of free speech or unimpeded action; it is, instead, a privately-designed construct, a kind of false agora, which tracks, and even attacks, its users constantly. As the former "bastions" of free speech - the print and broadcast media - stumble and perhaps fall in the Internet age, we'd best think long and hard about the limits and weaknesses of this brave new medium.

The Torch-Bearers doesn't quite burn bright

Ham on wry: Katie Finneran, Edward Herrmann, and Andrea Martin bring down the house (literally) in The Torch-Bearers.

The second Williamstown Theatre Festival offering I caught last weekend was George Kelly's The Torch-Bearers, which was clearly meant as the festival's summer crowd-pleaser - a neglected minor classic that recalls such seasonal favorites as You Can't Take It With You and Hay Fever, but still boasts its own wry (even cynical) insights and charms.

The crowd at the Williamstown Main Stage, however, was not entirely pleased, even though adapter/director Dylan Baker had streamlined the text, and cast such stars as Andrea Martin and Edward Herrmann as the amateur thespians at the center of the script. It turned out that star power, however, wasn't quite enough to get the production to gel; what was required was a certain technical directorial intelligence, the kind that can fill every second of stage time with a building sense of wit. In short, the show needed someone like Nicky Martin in the driver's seat, or perhaps the director of last year's Feydeau, John Rando, who could have constructed a gleaming perpetual-motion machine out of Kelly's keen-eyed satire. But while Mr. Baker has some skill (and he's actually directed Torch-Bearers before), he isn't in the same league as Martin or Rando, and it shows; the comedy's central set-piece, for instance - a saga of backstage calamity that should cascade, like Noises Off (a clear descendant) into something like chaos - never got any momentum going, despite some hilarious moments. And there were subtle, but persistent, problems in the ensemble: dropped lines and flubbed physical bits surfaced on more than one occasion, and in a parody of amateur theatricals, that's not a good thing.

To be fair to Mr. Baker, however, time and circumstance may have prevented the production from reaching a high polish: it lost two cast members over the course of the summer (rather like its production-within-a-production). And in subsequent performances, some loose ends will surely be sewn up: cues will tighten and the slapstick will brighten. The show already boasts a smart comic turn from Katie Finneran (as a particularly wooden would-be starlet), and an even better dramatic one from John Rubinstein, who lightly sketches both affection and something like contempt into his portrayal of a husband so appalled by his wife's emoting that he actually succumbs to apoplexy. Meanwhile, in the central role of Mrs. J. Druro Pampinelli, the solemn high priestess of the eternal mysteries of community theatre, Katherine McGrath has what it takes to be fine once she's steady on her lines.

But other performances are slightly disappointing. The lovable Andrea Martin (a late addition to the cast) nails her laughs, of course - because she's a great pro who understands where all her jokes should land; but she hasn't yet internalized a character for her character (a prompter who pulls focus by always needing prompting). Likewise Edward Herrmann hasn't come to full flower as the troupe's flamboyant star, Huxley Hossefrosse (although to be fair, he has his moments; his entrance through the flats during that central star-crossed performance may alone be worth the price of admission). Alas, other supporting performances feel muddled (Yusef Bulos), unclear (James Waterston) or just bizarre (Jessica Hecht). And in the role of that atrociously-acting wife, Becky Ann Baker (wife of the director) was sweet but muted, and unresponsive to the happy, intimate chemistry Rubinstein was all but pouring in her direction; thus the domestic comedy threaded through the script (which also foreshadows many an I Love Lucy episode) never took flight. Perhaps this was due to the perceived sexism of the nearly-century-old text; after her disastrous debut, our leading lady is patted back into her domestic role, it's true (and there are other hints that an unspoken battle of the sexes is being waged on the bohemian boards). But the way to deal with this issue dramatically is to make her character stronger, not weaker - and certainly not dazedly submissive. And able to realize that yes, she's terrible onstage (this important arc was all but missing from the final act).

If that sounds like a lot to fix - well, it is; but productions have had rougher opening weekends and nevertheless come together (as I know from experience). Williamstown has at least done the show up right; David Korins's set is accurately crafted (if not quite inspired), and Ilona Somogyi's costumes rightly mix bourgeois propriety, art-nouveau mysticism, and happy flapperdom. And certainly The Torch-Bearers bears reviving; its witty take on the innocent egotism of self-appointed artistic avatars (who are "bearing the torch" of dramatic art into the darkness of the suburbs) is as deadly accurate as ever. So here's hoping over its run at Williamstown this flickering production really catches fire.

The decline and fall of the blogosphere, Part 1

In between attacks, Isaac Butler (above) blogs about his hair.

The bizarre reaction in the blogosphere to my articles about Emily Glassberg Sands has made me ponder once again the central flaws in the concept of blogging-as-journalism. What struck me about the generally negative reaction to my analyses was that a) my attackers, almost to a man/woman, admitted they hadn't actually read the study in question, but were going to sling mud anyway; b) they were insulted by my politics (which they misunderstood), and my skeptical "confidence"; and c) they knew, or wanted to know, or wanted to work with, some or all of the people I was criticizing.

All this is troubling to anyone who imagines that the arts blogosphere can function as something other than a forum for self-promotion, log-rolling, or ignorant pseudo-argument.

Of course I know it was naïve to imagine that blogs could operate for long as an improvement on print journalism - but really, did they have to sink to, or perhaps even beneath, the standards of print so quickly? Already the local "blogosphere" is choked with "blogs" that are either adjuncts of print outlets, or p.r. vehicles for various producers. And many of the supposedly "independent" bloggers, like Matt Freeman and Isaac Butler, have begun saying openly that hey, they can't really be trusted on the issues, because they're trying to make a career in theatre, and so can't afford to offend anybody.

Take the following paragraph(s) from Isaac Butler of Parabasis:

I've been writing about and engaging in the NYC theatre scene for awhile now and everyone knows everyone and I'm not exactly at a point in my career where I can afford to go pissing people off willy-nilly. So my choices become: attack a peer (or their work) or attack a larger theater (or their work). Shit where I live or fuck up my career. Those are the choices . . . . Not being an idiot, and not enjoying bad either/or scenarios, I tend not to post blog posts that will fall into those categories. It's not that I don't think about those things, or have those conversations with friends. To give one example: A major off-broadway theatre put up a play earlier this year that was clearly unfinished and not ready for production on a script level. Everyone who saw it that I talked to knew it. Several of the people I talked to about it were bloggers. But we talked about in a bar. Not on the internet. I don't really want to go slagging off a show where the director and light designer were both friends of mine to the end of...what, exactly? It's not like the theater's lit manager is going to write in in my comments and engage with me on the issue of their shitty new work program that does plays that aren't ready for prime time. For what it's worth, I tried to corner their lit manager at the TCG conference so that I could ask him about it, but couldn't find him . . . Anyway, the point is is that I have to think at least a little bit strategically here. So this blog won't always say all the shit that goes through my head. Every now and then I gotta hold back.

"I gotta hold back." Uh-huh. (Amusingly, in a great post just a few days earlier, Butler quite rightly criticized MSM corporate parents for making the same calculations he himself is making.) Of course Butler isn't alone in this admission - Matt Freeman said much the same thing about my posts on Sands; he admitted he envied "the ability to be unfiltered."

So, if we know these guys' posts are "filtered" out of (understandable) self-interest, why, exactly, should we trust them? It's an interesting question - one solved, partially, by the MSM via the fact that it (once) had an independent source of income (subscriptions, advertising) which could support some level of editorial independence. As we all know, that model is collapsing. But it's also worth noting that the arts blogosphere has no model for editorial independence at all. So how can we really pretend that the blogosphere can "replace" the MSM? I sense another series coming on . . .

Sophomore slump

Wendie Malick and Betty Gilpin in another Noah Haidle opus that hasn't come to term.

Last summer marked Nicholas Martin's first season as Artistic Director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, and it proved a brilliant one (anchored by his sparkling Huntington production of She Loves Me). So perhaps it's understandable that his sophomore year should have been marked by a slump, according to many critics; maybe there was nowhere to go but down, at least in the short term. Still, I was keeping my hopes up as I ventured west to catch both What is the Cause of Thunder?, Noah Haidle's latest, and a revival of George Kelly's unfairly-forgotten comedy of theatrical manners, The Torch-Bearers.

Unfortunately, however, I discovered the negative reviews have been pretty accurate - and sometimes very succinct: an audience member summed up What is the Cause of Thunder? by wondering "What is the cause of this blunder?" in the lobby after the show. And I suppose the answer is, in a word, Martin's ongoing sponsorship of Haidle (he produced the disappointing Persephone at the Huntington two years ago, and before being struck by a stroke last fall - from which he has recovered - he was helming Haidle's Saturn Returns at Lincoln Center). Now I understand young playwrights need ongoing support, even through the inevitable misstep - thus Haidle's been getting a whole lotta love from the theatre community since the success of Mr. Marmalade some years ago (the lionized Bartlett Sher wrapped up Saturn Returns when Martin fell ill).

But Haidle hasn't returned the love with deeper, better-crafted plays. Indeed, so far he hasn't matched his first success, Mr. Marmalade, which may have been effective and original, but was hardly a masterpiece - thus, the thinking went, with attention and support from the literary departments of major theatres, and more money behind his productions, he might deliver something like a major work. But things haven't turned out that way - Haidle's scripts have instead been growing self-consciously pretentious in conception yet hopelessly slack in execution; What is the Cause of Thunder?, like Persephone before it, is a rambling tease derived from an interesting idea that might, with luck, have formed the basis of a surreally satiric one-act.

To be fair, that interesting idea does look like fun at first: we meet self-involved soap actress Ada (Wendie Malick, of TV's Just Shoot Me) as she's interrupted from prayer by a troubled nun who lets us know in no short order that the zoo animals have escaped, the priests have been fondling "the wee ones" (even Blind Thomas!), and God himself has died, His last words being "What did I do?" - a neat little book-end to Christ's penultimate lines on the cross. Immediately the stage is set for a smart Catholic comedy along the lines of Christopher Durang (another Martin favorite, btw), and at first Haidle seems to know exactly what he's doing. His ideas are hardly new, but they're sturdy - they're a skewed update of the realizations of undergraduates everywhere - and we sense his soap-opera conceit could prove fertile dramatic ground for the kind of horror-comedy that Christian theology always devolves into onstage. For as Ada herself points out, soap opera may revel in the wackiest evil imaginable, and be obsessed with sin, suffering, and redemption, but its victims always live on to suffer another day, and its villains are always forgiven: unlike in real life, nobody ever dies on a soap.

But then Haidle starts up with Ada's homelife, and we sense a growing lack of dramatic focus fueled by structural meta-shenanigans. Ada's pregnant daughter Ophelia - and indeed everyone else in her life, as well as on the soap - is played by the same actress (the versatile and resourceful Betty Gilpin), and her living room looks slightly surreal, as if it might be - wait for it - a mental, rather than physical, construct. Meanwhile Ophelia complains that Ada's always confusing her with her TV daughters, good and evil twins Bathsheba (who's prone to quoting Hamlet) and Harper (who tends to slip in and out of a coma). And just in case we've missed the point, she also sighs that "everyone thinks I'm a metaphor."

Indeed we do. That palindromic first name for our leading lady also raises a symbolic red flag - along with memories of the back-and-forth structure of Nabokov's Ada, which Haidle loosely apes. Clearly Ada's soap and her life are just two sides of an ongoing psychological complex, that kicks into high gear when management decides that yes, they're going to kill her off on the soap. But there's so much other cultural flotsam in this stew - a brief summary would include not only King Lear (the source of the title phrase), Hamlet and Ada but also Oedipus Rex and The Killing of Sister George - that we soon lose track of any coherent symbolic matrix or throughline, and so does Haidle. Does the "thunder" of the title represent God's death, or Ada's death, or just "death" - or perhaps birth? (Haidle tacks that one on at the last minute, when Ophelia's water breaks, onstage.) We can't tell, and we don't care - and even though Malick and Gilpin keep us laughing, intermittently, we know all the protacted goings-on are just another half-baked metaphor for our collective denial of both physical and moral reality, or something like that.

Which, pardon me, is hardly an original hook for a new play. Indeed, the problem with recent Haidle is that he becomes so involved in half-working out his fanciful paradoxes and parallel universes that he doesn't attend to the one thing we really care about - a tightly crafted, novel structure to convey his fun-but-familiar themes. What is the Cause of Thunder? plays like a rough draft, and of course it's the third Haidle play to surface in two years - so maybe it's time to hold off on the high production values evidenced here (the convolutions of Alexander Dodge's endlessly-morphing set hold us more than the writing does). When Haidle has actually finished another script - say, maybe two years from now - he may deserve another high-profile production. But right now, what I'd tell Noah is "Three strikes and you're out."

Next: a Torch-Bearers that sometimes shines, but more often flickers.

Meet the new Shepard Fairey

Posters like the one at left have apparently been popping up around Los Angeles and Atlanta. They're shocking, I know, but you have to admit they're devilishly effective. I wonder if the ICA will be giving this artist a retrospective in twenty years. Because frankly, in graphic terms his work is at least as punchy as the Shepard Fairey "Hope" poster, and equally inspired in its pastiche of the proto-fascism of The Dark Knight with "birther" racism (the Joker's whiteface does brilliant double duty here). In short, it's a great poster. So I wonder - will we soon see the emergence of a new, far-right form of "street artist," one that doesn't color within the politically-correct lines of the contemporary art world? I've long been telling Shepard Fairey fans that if they only stripped the politics out of his borrowed imagery, they'd perceive his work very, very differently. Maybe the "Obama Socialism" poster will help them see my point.

Get me rewrite!

Sorry for the misleading post a few days back (since deleted) on the Rose Art Museum imbroglio - but rather than unwind my slapdash compositional methods and woozily wishful thinking in public, I'll instead simply refer you to Greg Cook's blog, which has been following the ups and downs of this ongoing conflict in admirable detail. And I promise - no more posting after Beer Pong!