Taking a break for a bit

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To paraphrase my recent tweet: Blogging is easy for me; it's the real life thing that I find hard.

Asa result, I am going on an indefinite hiatus from this blog, Ho pefully, circumstances in my life will make my defintion of "hiatus" closer to M.I.A.'s definition of "hiatus" than, say, Sleater-Kinney's. I shall only return when I am able to blog more effectively. I love you all.*

-Ethan Stanislawski

*If you have any inquiries, please don't hesitate to email me at tynansanger[at]gmail[dot]com.

Fun times at the Guthrie

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So Tony Kushner a world-class playwright, wants the chance to develop a play like any workshop theater playwright can. He wants to do it at a major regional theater, in order to build up for the Broadway debut it deserves. The Guthrie mishandles its press release to critics. Some critics are already so pissed at the Guthrie that they will take it inevitably out on Kushner and everyone working on the show (they won't ever claim to if they do). Why are they doing that? Because the critics' jobs may be on the line if they don't cover it at the Guthrie.

This is how things work in 2009. Even in theater, the one medium where you can't hide behind a computer screen.

Kushner to critics: Please don't review my new play; Critics to Guthrie: Thanks for mishandling this [Minneapolis Star-Tribune]

Brain Detox Friday: Norm MacDonald just calls 'em as he sees 'em

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In a perfect world, Friday would be the day we stop worrying, shut off our brains, and seek the rest and relaxation we sorely need. Unfortunately, in today's world, we're using too busy getting drunk, trying to get laid, and worrying about if our jobs will be there on Monday. To help purge the bad thoughts,I will conclude every Friday on this blog with a story that will hopefully help to put things in perspective, and shut off the delta brain waves without the need for chemical enhancement, a moment Zen you won't get on The Daily Show.

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From Wikipedia:

Chairman of the Board is a 1998 movie starring Courtney Thorne-Smith and Carrot Top in which a surfer/inventor (Carrot Top) inherits and runs a billionaire's company. To some critics, it is considered Carrot Top's rendition of Billy Madison. It was poorly received by critics and moviegoers alike.

The movie cost an estimated $10,000,000 to produce, but made $306,710.^[1]

...The movie appears in IMDB's top 20 worst rated films of all time^[3]. Comedian and former Mystery Science Theater 3000 host Michael J. Nelson named the film the fifth worst comedy ever made.^[4]

So why does this merit Brain Detox Friday? Because Norm MacDonald, as usual, called it months beforehand, and broke all the showbiz rules in doing so:



I do hope Courtney Thorne-Smith has spoken to Norm since this night. I'd like to think she has a sense of humor about herself. Have a good weekend everybody

Brain Detox Friday: The Butthole Surfers, Nick Cave, Alex Chilton, and four-way acid tabs

Image via Wikipedia

In a perfect world, Friday would be the day we stop worrying, shut off our brains, and seek the rest and relaxation we sorely need. Unfortunately, in today's world, we're using too busy getting drunk, trying to get laid, and worrying about if our jobs will be there on Monday. To help purge the bad thoughts,I will conclude every Friday on this blog with a story that will hopefully help to put things in perspective, and shut off the delta brain waves without the need for chemical enhancement, a moment Zen you won't get on The Daily Show.

---

While my inaugural Maroon Voices blog is now defunct, a clip I once posted from Our Band Could Be Your Life by Michael Azzerrad on the Butthole Surfers still stands out:

The night of the [Butthole Surfers] appearance at the huge Pandora's Box festival in the Netherlands, [bassist Mark] Kramer went to fetch [singer Gibby] Haynes for a sound check. "It is firstly most important to state that, on this night, Gibby had eaten an entire handful of four-way acid tabs and drank an entire bottle of Jim Beam before the sound check had even begun," Kramer notes.

[Guitarist Paul] Leary was furious at Haynes for getting wasted for such an important show. "Fuck that stupid-ass motherfucker," he snarled to Kramer. "I hate this fucking band. I swear to fucking Christ on a stick, I hate this fucking band more than I hate myself. And that's a lot. I don't even care if we ever play again. If you can't find him, fuck it. FUCK IT!!!!" With that, he began smashing a couple of guitars with his bare fists.

The festival featured several stages, and Kramer eventually found Haynes at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds show. As Kramer tells it, Haynes was completely naked, repeatedly fighting his way onto the stage and charging at Cave as hulking security guards punched and kicked him off the ten-foot-high stage and back into the audience, where he would remain for a few seconds before trying to claw his way back onstage again. Finally, guitarist Blixa Bargeld came forward and kicked Haynes in the groin with a pointed German boot. This time Haynes did not get up.

Kramer pushed his way through the crowd to come to the aid of his bandmate, only to find him lying unconscious. "I bend over to see if he is still alive, but he seems not to be breathing," Kramer says. "I poke him in the shoulder. Suddenly, like a volcano, he bursts to life and swirls his fists in every direction, clipping me but good, along with a few innocent girls, and drawing the ire of their boyfriends and the enraged security guards, who are now motivated to leave Mr. Cave to his own devices, descend the stage, and join the boyfriends in administring a thorough and none-too-subtle beating upon Gibby's face, head and shoulders, until he is once again unconscious on the floor."

Or so it seemed. Actually, Haynes was only pretending he'd been knocked out, and as the hired thugs walked away, he rose to his feet and began screaming at them, "DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! GODDAMN FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT FUCKING TURD BURGLING FAGGOTS!!!! I FUCK YOUR ASS IN HEAVEN AND HELL!!!! FUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOOOOOU!!"

"The ensuing chase and capture was the stuff dreams are made of," Kramer says. "Stark naked like the day he was born, beaten, bruised, bloody, and tripping, this icon of modern music ran like Jesse Owens through the entire complex, down the halls, up the stairs, grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he went and throwing them down on the concertgoers below. A hail of beer cans, bottles, and miscellaneous garbage rained down upon the Dutch persons as I finally caught up with Gibby just as a throng of the biggest security guards I had ever seen caught up with him, too.

"At this time there were perhaps twenty hands upon him, holding him down, and although Gibby is completely crazy, he is not stupid. 'I'M SORRY!!!! I'M FUCKING SORRY!!!! PLEASE DON'T BEAT ME ANYMORE! I HAVE A BRAIN TUMOR!!! I CAN'T HELP THE WAY I AM!!!! PLEASE DON'T HIT ME AGAIN!!! IT'S AGAINST MY RELIGION!!!!'"

Haynes then made a successful run for the dressing room and slammed the door behind him. Kramer could hear Leary and Haynes screaming at each other inside, and when he finally worked up the courage to open the door, he found the two of them smashing guitars, bottle and chairs in what Kramer calls "the most potent example of bad behavior I have ever seen. To this day, more than fifteen years later, I have no more vivid memory of the effect a life in music can have on a human being."

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. "BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! Haynes screamed, eyes flashing in delerious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

"I'm Alex Chilton," the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and guestured at them as if to say, "Take anything you want."

Just before they went onstage, Haynes chugged an entire bottle of red wine; moments into the set he dived straight into the horrified crowd, which parted like the Red Sea. Haynes knocked himself unconscious on the floor, to warm applause from the theater's security team. "I look down at Gibby," recalls Kramer. "He tires to move, but the collapses as vomit begins pouring from his mouth."

After the gig Haynes was irate about having been unconscious for most of the show and insisted on getting paid within five minutes or he'd be "taking it out on your Dutch testicles!" Haynes snatched up the fistfull of guilders and stuffed them in a pair of pants in his guitar case, but almost immediately forgot that he had been paid and went on yet another rampage, streaking naked through the fesival complex and screaming that he'd been ripped off.

"FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!! A WHOLE FUCKING COUNTRY OF COCK-SUCKING QUEENS!!!! YOU FUCKING BEAT ME UP AND THEN YOU RIP US OFF!!! WHICH ONE OF YOU FAGGOTS STOLE OUR MONEY??!!!! FUCKING DUTCH FAGGOTS!!!!"

Yet another chase scene ensued, and yet another pack of Dutch goons wrestled Haynes to the ground, and yet again he profusely apologized. "After which he is released once again," Kramer says, "and once again dashes through the halls screaming obscenities while grabbing beer bottles from people's hands as he runs and hurling them against the brick wall."

"Those fuckin' Dutch," Leary explains, "they kind of get you pissed off after a while, man."

"We thought we had just ruined our careers by botching this show," [drummer] Jeffrey 'King' Coffey says. "Of course, the Dutch loved it -- 'The mayhem it is beautiful, it is wonderful, every song erupted into chaos!'" The next day the local paper ran an article about how the Butthole Surfers were the sensation of the festival. "So of course, every time when we came back after that and just played music, people would be horribly disappointed," says Coffey. "'[In Dutch accent] How come you do not beat up people?'"

[Maroon Voices via Poor Mojo]

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Characters of the Decade - Part Three: The Top 10 Original Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade: Nos. 10-6

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Yesterday, I continued with the top 5 historical characters of the decade. Today, I will begin the countdown of the Best Original Characters, going from #10 to #6.

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10. Laurence (Shining City, Conor MacPherson). Therapy is always an exceedingly dangerous area for playwrights to cover; it can so easily fall into a playwright's own self-absorption that most New York playwrights don't even bother trying. In the case of MacPherson's Dublin, however, the social stigma that afflicts therapy outside of New York City is still visibly present, and while the guilt-ridden Laurence admits his need for it, he feels the stigma as well. In MacPherson world, Laurence is the lynch pin between modern psychotherapy and the old Irish ghost story, where facing your personal demons can be as terrifying as facing demons straight out of hell. Laurence's unassuming ability to grasp this concept made him one of the most endearing characters we've seen all decade, and one who, in a perfect world, would be a role model for fighting psychotherapy's stigmatization outside the theater universe.


9. Matt (Red Light Winter, Adam Rapp) You won't find that many Angry Young Man in today's drama. You’re more likely to find plays like Red Light Winter, an excellent, Pulitzer Prize-nominated work by Adam Rapp that outlines quite clearly the problems with the modern approach to masculinity. In previous generations, characters like Matt would be the ones raging against a corrupt social. After these playwrights were fooled once in the 60s, and fooled again in the 90s, dealing with a corrupt society has turned would-be culture warriors into neurotic messes. On the other hand we have Davis, Matt's megalomaniacal best friend who cheats on the wife he has pilfered from Matt, treats everyone he meets as an object. In previous generations, Davis would be stuffing Matt into a locker. Today, Matt envies Davis' style, but secretly abhors everything about the way he thinks. Matt is the most vivid portrayal as the modern young man theater has produced this decade; he's Jimmy Porter with a self-inflicted castration.


8. Eleanor (Rock 'n' Roll, Tom Stoppard). In Stoppard's vision of Cambridge and Prague in 1968, a world where politics, philosophy, music, history, and attitude all combine in one sordid mess, Eleanor is the smartest one in the room. She's cynical enough to know when she's being threatened ("Lenka, don’t try to shag my husband until I’m dead or I’ll stick The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance up your rancid cunt, there’s a dear.”), but also one most grounded in the basic thrust of humanity ("Don’t you dare, Max—don’t you dare reclaim that word now, I don’t want your mind; which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine—I want what you love me with.") There were a handful of characters make me laugh and cry with a statement cut on a dime; Eleanor, dying of cancer, was the only one of those characters at peace with herself.


7. Lincoln and Booth (Topdog/Underdog, Suzan-Lori Parks). If August Wilson brought the African American experience its Death of a Salesman with Fences, Suzan-Lori Parks brought that world its American Buffalo and its True West in one play taking the Mamet world of con artistry and Shephard's brother-on-brother power struggle into an area no white playwright could bring it without resorting to stereotypes. With a sense of verbal rhythm on par with Mamet, a mysticism on par with Shephard, and a social conscious that may have even surpassed both, Parks connected the con to the culture of the present day, linked it to our nation's history (the brothers' names imply exactly what they are meant to imply), and, by my guess, the highly-coveted Universal Human Condition. By putting con artistry in both the real world its most basic theatrical form, Parks may have out-Mameted Mamet.


6. Katurian Katurian (The Pillowman, Martin McDonagh). Upon visiting Soviet Czechoslovakia, Philip Roth once said, "It occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters” (a sentiment Tom Stoppard has echoed). In the nameless totalitarian regime Katurian lives in, it's easy to see why. Katurian doesn't write for personal fame; of his hundreds of stories, only one has been published. Nor does he write for a social cause; there's no current events within the Pillowman universe for him to fight against. Instead, Katurian writes simply because he has to; there's something inside his private world that brings his instinct as a writer out of him, even if it takes the form of deeply disturbing stories about murdering children. The only thing that matters to Katurian is that his work is preserved; it's more important than a book deal, his brother, or his own life. The last to be completed work of McDonagh's famed wave of creativity, all Katurian wanted was a voice in a world not inclined to give him one; it helped that he, like McDonagh, was a fantastic writer. In fact, in debating whether this list was worth it, or whether it was a kind of pointless waste of time, Katurian's plight was exactly what convinced me to go ahead with it. Katurian would have given up everything to have the kind of freedom a blog provides. Of course, if he did have it, there'd be no Pillowman.
   

Characters of the Decade - Part Two: The Top 5 Historical Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade.

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, I listed the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade. Today, I am continuing with the top 5 historical characters.

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5. Willy Brandt (Democracy, Michael Frayn)

   Before there was Clinton, there was Willy Brandt, and in his case, the stakes were exponentially higher. In Michael Frayn's tale of conflicting allegiances in East and West Germany, where for all his flaws, Brandt was exactly the politician both sides of the Iron Curtain needed, Brandt's accidental, almost farcical political self-destruction is made all the more more frustrating.

4. George W. Bush (The Strangerer, Mickle Maher)

   Depicting the almost universally reviled (in the theater-o-sphere) current President as an existential anti-hero is about as daring as political playwriting got this decade, but the almost tragic resulting consequences for our opinions of Bush, America, and the theater couldn’t have worked without that kind of risk-taking. The sense of adventure that is celebrated in Chicago predictably confused audiences in New York, but Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck twisted current events and universal human strife by playing to experimental theater’s greatest strengths.

3. Charlotte von Mahlsdorf (I am My Own Wife, Doug Wright)

   Every heroic political and culture figure inevitably has some dirty laundry in their closet, and in the still somewhat underrated 2004 Pulitzer Winner, a pre-Little Mermaid Doug Wright knew that the ostensible hypocrisy that shocked post-Unification Germany was much more offensive than anything about Charlotte’s sexuality. I Am My Own Wife, aided by a deadpan performance by Jefferson Mays, turned Charlotte von Mahlsdorf's story into a reflection of the audience's own struggles with ethical consistency, all while still keeping Charlotte hopelessly sympathetic.

2. Orson Wells (Orson’s Shadow, Austin Pendleton)

   Backstage plays appeals to theater nerds first and foremost. Pendleton avoids this problem by taking Wells, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, one who Kenneth Tynan would flatly say is a better artist than Laurence Olivier straight to the ego-maniacal Olivier’s face, and putting him in the exact moment when his reputation fully disintegrates. Orson's Shadow a stunning examination of how not even the greatest artists know how to cope with their own genius, and, more generally, how no one, not even Orson Welles, could get by on talent alone.

1. Richard Nixon (Frost/Nixon, Peter Morgan)

   There’s not much that can be said for the role that hasn’t been said already, so let me just list the number of people Frank Langella beat out for the Tony award: Live Schreiber in Talk Radio, Boyd Gaines in Journey’s End Brían F. O’Byrne is Coast of Utopia, and Christopher Plumber in Inherit the Wind. Any one of those actors could have won the Tony any other year in one of the most stacked awards categories of any kind in recent memory, but Langella beat them all, with all the help from Peter Morgan’s savagely honest portrayal of Nixon that didn’t downplay his sins in the least (it may have even amplified them), but also depicted just how addictive presidential power can be to everyone who surrounds it. For someone who has seen nothing but Nixon parodies, Langella made it believable that a man that corrupt and with that little personality could command that much respect. Even with one of the worst presidents of the 20th century, there were a lot of good things about America that died with Watergate, and many of them were inherent to Morgan and Langella’s Nixon, bringing Frost/Nixon closer to The History Boys than anyone ever thought imaginable.

Characters of the Decade - Part One: The Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade.

Each month, I will be unrolling a top 10 list regarding English-language drama this decade. Last month, I revealed the best lines from English-language plays this decade [Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]. This month, I will be unveiling the best characters to emerge in Engish-language drama this decade. Because of the complications of such a list; I have broken it into three categories

1. Original Characters
2. Historical Characters (a.k.a. characters based on real life people)
3. Reinterpreted characters: Characters Who Are Fictional But Have Appeared in Other Plays or Media Previously.

On Monday, we begin with the Top 5 Reinterpreted Characters in English-Language Drama This Decade.

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5. Peter (Peter and Jerry, Edward Albee)
Edward Albee solves some unfinished business in his sequel to his 1958 classic Zoo Story—giving a character the chance to explain himself that Albee fans had craved for half a century.

4. Eurydice (Eurydice, Sarah Ruhl) Greek mythical heroes are being updated all the time, but by turning Eurydice into a sweet girl who’s tragic trait is being “interesting” is particularly inspired, especially since Ruhl manages to avoid getting too fey.

3. Moritz Stiefel (Spring Awakening, book & lyrics by Steven Sater) The character once deemed to disturbing to even touch the Fringes of New York theater became the decade’s biggest icon for depressed teenagers in American theater.

2. Franz Liebkind (The Producers, book by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan) Brad Oscar may never escape the life he gave to this character, but his performance and Brooks and Meehan’s reinterpretation may have been the only character to literally cause attendees to roll in the aisles on an almost nightly basis.

1. Aunt Esther (King Hedley II & Gem of the Ocean, August Wilson) Posthumously, we can look at August Wilson Pittsburgh Cycle in the fictional order; in real life we watched the death of the spiritual center of his body of work in his most obtusely tragic work; her role as one of the most crucial characters in African-American literature was sealed by her origin story seen just a few years later on Broadway.

"Please turn off your f-king cellphones" - Broadway openings adjusting to modern times

No matter what you thought of American Buffalo on Broadway last fall, there is one way in which it may have changed the theater going experience as we know it: It turned the pre-show announcement into a stylistic decision in its own right. The announcement was not written by David Mamet, either before or after American Buffalo, but it did invoke Mamet's most famous choice of word, one that can still shock a Broadway crowd, especially when they least expect it. Not a single cell phone went off the night I saw the show; not only was it clever, it was effective.

Contrast that with the worst-behaved Broadway crowd I saw all year at West Side Story in March. Granted, it was a preview audience, but the crowd would not shut up, the family in front of me kept texting, and my whole evening turned into completely unpleasant ordeal, mostly for reasons that had nothing to do with the show itself.

At that show, now announcement was made; it was a cold opening, in traditional West Side Story style. There's shooshing on stage as the Jets see the Sharks; in this case, I wasn't sure if the shooshing was coming from on stage or from various members of the audience. The cold opening was brilliant in the 1950s; in 2009, it completely offset when I should start paying attention to the show and not the audience.

I may have been with a better crowd in American Buffalo, but I certainly was not in Exit the King, where even on a Saturday night, I was surrounded by old people in the rear mezzanine screaming at each other, "I don't get it." Nonetheless, cell phones were never a problem. That show had a character come out in full theater of the absurd manner, holding up signs saying turn off your cell phone—and no texting either.

You may think I'm in full support of the first and third examples, but not the second. That's not the case; I want Broadway to be able a show however they damn well please, but the limitations of the modern audience have to be reckoned with. Even I have lowered my standards in the audience, I talk with whoever I am seeing a show with before the show starts much more than I use to; if an actor makes a casual entrance that would have once indicated for me to shut up, I am less likely to notice it. While most shows can make the traditional announcement, a cold opening is sometimes necessary—I have a hard time justifying a West Side Story production that doesn't use a cold opening, even if it hurts the initial reaction (I'm hoping that other audiences are better behaved than the one I saw.)

It's no secret that audience behavior has taken a downturn on Broadway. That may be a bad thing for an individual show, but it's worse for Broadway overall; it means that the people with no experience seeing a Broadway show don't understand why they can't keep there phones on or text during a production, and when someone calls them out on it, they're less likely to see a show again, thinking it rude or snooty of a person to tell them how to behave after spending hundreds of dollars on tickets.

While they're being rude, they're also being fair; it's not the job of some jerk like to tell someone how to behave on Broadway. It's the job of the people who work at the theater and make the show announcement. The American Buffalo announcement worked because the crowd was expecting a Mamet play; it would have been just as jarring, but less effective, at, say, The Little Mermaid.

There's one area where improvement can be made: informing an audience that turning a cell phone off means powering it off; not putting it on silent, not texting. Texting is rude to the audience members behind you who see your screen glare and hear you manipulate the keypad. It probably affects the actors somewhat as well, especially the closer you are to them. As a regular Broadway attendee, I can't understand why anyone would distract themselves by texting after spending hundreds to see a show they rarely see, even in you're in the corner in the last row, surrounded by your friends. The biggest reason I've seen people text is that they decide early on that the show is boring and that they have wasted your time. God help you if you are an overzealous new media advocate who thinks live tweeting theater is a good idea. "OMG Geoffrey Rush just said something crazy!!!" can wait until intermission.

I joke about live-tweeting theater, but in all seriousness it may be a growing trend; if Congressmen can live tweet during an Obama "state of the union speech," why can't an audience member tweet a Broadway show? There's an obvious rebuttal: Obama's speech was an important American event that millions of people were watching. Congressmen were tweeting because they knew this was a unique performance, and that millions of people would be following it on Twitter. The Obama speech tweets were more something of akin to Mass Observation, such as the one I helped work on for Inauguration Day.

Unless you're attending a Broadway premiere, and the show is completely revolutionizing American theater as you speak, I cannot imagine a tweet about a Broadway show that couldn't wait until after the curtain or act break; even then, I would at least let catharsis sink in before sending a Tweet. And even if the show is so boring you can't think of anything else to do—that's probably the case with more Broadway attendees than we like to think—napping, so long as it doesn't turn into snoring, is less upsetting for fellow audience members.

I would love to see Broadway require you to check your phone before entering the theater; I understand why they might not want to do that. Of course, they already have it in movie previews, but for different reasons; they don't want people taking unlicensed screenshots from their cell phone cameras. If AMC is beating Broadway to improving etiquette, that's not good. But until changes get made, expect more of these creative approaches to pre-show announcements to continue. And expect them to get more creative; that candy wrapper announcement hasn't been funny since 2000, dudes.

Text Me Later (Or: How Theater Isn't Baseball) [Critical Difference]

Get A Room [The Playgoer]

Theaters' worst acts take place in the seats [Denver Post]