WITH RANDY GENER
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Contents: June 3, 1998
[1] My picks: 20 Best Shows of the 1997-8 Season.
[2] Awards fever: the Drama Desk, Obie and Tony Awards.
[3] TCG appoints Ben Cameron new Exec Director.
[4] Andrei Serban directs Brecht and Shakespeare.
[5] Post script: Crystal Field's "Upstate" is a wacky landscape.
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Copyright © 1998 Randy Gener. Illustration by Sam Norkin.
RANDY'S PICKS FOR THE BEST OF THE 1997-98 THEATRICAL SEASON IN NEW YORK
In a perfect world, theatre awards ought to celebrate not only meretricious showbiz values but also artistic excellence. As a form of celebration, awards are bestowed as a measure of gratitude for artists who have expanded the creative potential of the drama--or who have expressed a unique vision of the world in terms that we might not have been able to express on our own. In the best of all possible worlds, awards are an expression of great love. They are a public recognition that cultural work is valuable to a fully functioning civilization. Implicitly, they are signifiers signifying great promise. Those who receive awards get them because they have shown, in explicit terms, their nascent ability to come through with their promise of giving us pleasure and insight and beauty. And by the act of winning, they also give a hope to those who have not won and yearn to throw their hat into the ring. Next time, it will be my turn. to be what I can be, hope you understand, this time it's for me it's my turn........Awards season is a spring ritual banquet in which ideally everybody is included and nobody is excluded. But our world is not a perfect world. In the dystopia we have created, awards are status symbols for which artists are made to compete. The Tony Awards, which air on Sunday June 7 starting at 8:00 p.m. on PBS and at 9:00 p.m. on CBS, benefit only those who have already reaped mightily by supporting the revitalized 42nd Street. (Note Rosie O'Donnell, a celebrity who has performed in only one small part in a musical, Grease, hosting the Tonys twice. Because of her perceived media exposure, she has replaced theater people of the stature of, say, Angela Lansbury.)
The Drama Desk Awards purport to cast a wider net by including Off- Broadway, but the proof is not in the pudding. Though token Off-Broadway shows sneak into the nominations list, the truth is that none of the assorted cranks and authortiative-sounding fawners who people that organization really could be bothered with what's showing below 42nd Street. (Note the shut-out for Hedwig and the Angry Inch when the awards were finally bestowed on the theatrical-poor, the awards-hungry, and the p.r.-wretched.)
The Obie Awards subverts all this competitive frenzy and categorical hypocrisy by simply giving out awards without even releasing a nominations list and by (supposedly) shunning Broadway altogether. But there is a cliquishness to the Obies, too. (Is it important that of the several Obie judges who awarded a couple of downtown shows, one is the literary manager of an Obie-winning production, and another is a playwright/librettist who basically owes her career to another downtown company?) A playwright whispered in my ear a harsher description: "incestuous." Of course, I told him that he was wrong. Yes, Virginia, Obie judges are really good at heart. (Of course, I probably was just overcompensating for the fact that I haven't yet been asked to be an Obie judge. I'm even angrier that the Obies have consistently passed over Francine Russo). Still, as I later told this playwright, all awards are, by definition, incestuous. I could say this with some authority, since I was a nominating judge for one of the above award-giving bodies this year. (Hint: Not the Obie.) Oh! darlings, the horrible, horrible things I could tell you as a recent nominating judge of one of the above award-giving bodies! I bet you would get aghast at all the nasty wheeling and dealings I witnessed. Oh! the horrors the horrors.
For more on the sleazy underbelly of this year's theatrical award banquets, I'll spill the beans only after several hard drinks and a couple of marijuana joints . For now, I'd like to get back to the subject and list my own preferences for the best shows of the 1997-98 New York theatrical season. This is a a very, very personal list. Approximately 337 theatrical shows have been considered from May 1, 1997 to May 1, 1998; that's the amount of shows I've seen. There were, of course, more shows which I missed. But with writing duties for different New York publications, plus my own theatrical work, I must apologize, in print, to those artists who called or sent press releases by mail or invited me to their shows or asked me to be a judge in their playwriting contests or whatever. Please try again next time. Please send those invitations, darlings. I'm always game to throw myself into the theater's bottomless vat of depravity, headonism, and ego-centric bacchanalia. I've got a head for theater, and a bod for sin.
This list was prompted by my publisher and editor, Jonathan Slaff, who most recently requested a 10-best list by email. Having been a film critic, I found the idea fun and intriguing. But as a theater critic, it seems rather appalling. Though it is nothing to take seriously, choosing a 10-best list is in theory a terrible idea. (Even Pauline Kael sneered at anyone who made up 10-best-fil lists.) How can anyone reduce the great diversity of the theater to just 10 stupid shows? And isn't choosing a 10-best list simply another indication of the theater succumbing (again!) to consumerist demands, marketing gimmicks, and insular Hollywood mentality?
Having said all this, I'd like to contradict myself by saying that I'm pretty proud of this list. First, because I've decided to subvert Jonathan by choosing 20 instead of 10. Far from being a source of regret and displeasure and heartache and failed visions, the theater is still a place that excites the imagination--a fertile ground for artistic creativity and growth. And since my romance with the theater has not quite ended yet, I am giving you this list with the hope that you can get excited by the theater, too. Embedded in this list is also, in the most profound way, a form of confession. You will most likely disagree with the shows I've loved, but they are also reflect, in a crazy-quilt way, a mirror of whom I am, what my aesthetic concerns have been in the previous year, and what kind of shows gave me pleasure. By this 20-best list, ye shall know who I am.
(1) GUYS DREAMIN' created and performed by Jean Claude van Itallie, Court Dorsey and Kermit Dunkelberg. (La MaMa E.T.C. and Pilgrim Theater and Shatigar Foundation)---Perhaps my favorite sequence in GUYS DREAMIN' happens when Jean Claude van Itallie comes out to his mom by taking her to Fire Island. Like most of the autobiographical vignettes in GUYS DREAMIN', this is a rite of passage in which men commit to things like parenting, caretaking, surviving, and spiritual searching. On the ferry, he found himself feeling entirely too self-aware and fearful. He was riding in a boatload of men in suits with his mom. All were going to a weekend getaway. As the ferry approached the beach, Van Itallie and his mom saw a bunch of flaming boys and cross-dressed men cavorting and partying on the beach. Though Van Itallie as a performer likes to underplay, this was clearly a high point in GUYS DREAMIN' because this is the precise (and unsentimental) moment when Van Itallie comes to reveal the depth of his love for his mother. On the way back from Fire Island, Van Itallie's mom turns to his son (I'm paraphrasing here): "I hope you don't become like one of those suits. You should be more like them," she says, pointing to the drag queens cavorting and having a ball.
More than any theatrical show of the season, GUYS DREAMIN' is a seamless, magical blend of movement, dance, song, performance-art, confession, and dreaming. Developed from Jean-Claude van Itallie's work with the non-profit foundation Shatigar, the piece invests the theater as the transformational site where artistic expression and spiritual healing occurs. Not all the stories told were queer. Court Dorsey tells of his rural Illinois days, while Kermit Dunkelberg unspools tales of hitchhiking across the country. Many told tales that were abstract and non-linear in form and substance. Percussionist Tony Vacca expressed himself through a West African balafon, and the music he played was unforgettable. For Van Itallie, on the other hand, GUYS DREAMIN' represented his acting debut, so it's intriguing that he deals primarily with coming-out as a gay men. Together, all the guys dreaming croon meditatively and piercingly about poetic flight, personal struggles for independence, and ritual escape. GUYS DREAMIN' compels the heart and imagination. It's the only play in the season that comes closest to bringing to theatrical life Spinoza's (philosophical) claim that all forms of art aspire to the condition of music.
(2) PRIDE'S CROSSING by Tina Howe (Lincoln Center Theatre)---By turns wistful, sassy, radiant and melancholy, Tina Howe's memory play rehearses the life of Mabel Tidings bigelow from 10 to 90, with Cherry Jones as the canny lead. Strictly in terms of playwrighting, this is the best new play of the season. Its seemingly random and discursive style is actually very smart and deeply purposeful, for isn't life a series of seemingly random moments? It's also a hymn about the bittersweet losses of aging, and though it arrives at no hard answers, Howe does bravely survey a life that was lived intensely and with great joy. There's a croquet sequence that out-Stoppards even Stoppard's own full-length reflections of order and chaos in Arcadia. Jack O'Brien directs with magisterial grace.
(3) BENITA CANOVA (GNOSTIC EROTICISM) and PEARLS FOR PIGS by Richard Foreman (Ontological)---Taken together, both plays contain much of Foreman's most Gertrude Steinesque metaphysics yet. My favorite: "Of course, we are losing touch with reality--that's our one point of contact with reality."
(4) PARTIAL COMPLEX SEIZURE by Rogelio Martinez (Playwrights Collective)---In which the Cuban playwright Eduardo Machado, playing a father who has forsaken and abandoned his American-born son, gets the Lorena Bobbitt treatment in the hands of his Russian transvestite best friend. Bloody brilliant. You had to be there.
(5) HIROSHIMA by Ron Destro with music by yoko Ono (Theater for the New City)---Ron Destro deservedly won a Kennedy Center Playwriting Award for this lyrical, harrowing meditation of the effects of Hiroshima on Japanese peasants and soldiers. Stunning.
(6) MAMBA'S DAUGHTERS by Dorothy and DuBose Hayward, directed by David Herskovitz (Target Margins Theatre/HERE)---The best directing work by David Herskovitz since Young Goodman Brown. Not naturalistic at all, this revival of the original 1939 Broadway play brings us a melodramatic play using an idiosyncratic frequency. Dorothy and DuBose Heyward, who wrote the novel and play on which Porgy and Bess was based, still gets to have their say, despite Herskovitz's ironic staging. Set in the late 1930s among the sharecropper shacks and swamps in the Gullah community of Charleston, South Carolina, the play loses none of its relevance and insightful core. Thomas Cabannis's sound design is witty, ironic, and inventive.
(7) CHRISTMAS AT IVANOVS' by Alexander Vvedensky directed by Karin Coonrod (Classic Stage Company/Arden Party)---Karin Coonrod's demonic revival of Vvedensky's play couldn't be topped. Loved those green conical figures that fell from the ceiling. Loved those spray of clocks which circled the theater. And loved the ghastly funny performances of the entire Arden Party cast.
(8) TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN directed and adapted by Phil Soltanoff
after John Cage's "Silence" (Gale Gates Et Al)---Quite simply
marvelous. Phil Soltanoff does a theatrical equivalent of those hallucinatory
photography in movies like (9) A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FILIPINO by Nick Joaquin (Ma-Yi
Theatre Ensemble)---A thrilling revival from the Filipino-American
ensemble. And the play by Nick Joaquin surprisingly stands up after all these
years.
(10) FRIDA K by Gloria Montera (Soho Rep)---Playwright
Gloria Montera and performer XXXX superbly capture the prickly feminist ethos
of the painter Frida Kahlo. It's a one-woman tour de force. And it's also a
backhanded love story between Diego Rivera and Kahlo.
(11) HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH by John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen
Trask (Jane Street Theatre)---Spectacular. Mesmerizing. With lyrics
by Stephen Trask that makes Ragtime seem puny and paltry.
(12) SATURN RETURNS by director Tina Landau and composer Adam
Guettel (New York Shakespeare Festival)---A fetching, lovely cabaret
concert for six singers and nine musicians. The songs beautifully meditate on
Greek heros and myths, with several hymnals thrown in, and the performers
(Jose Llana, Annie Golden, Vivian Cherry, &tc) are witty and engaging.
(13) BOB conceived and directed by Anne Bogart and created and
performed by Will Bond (New York Theatre Workshop)---Anne Bogart's
homage to Robert Wilson packs all the precision and droll humor of the Texan
auteur. It's beautiful and scary and hilarious, all at the same time, and
Bogart's theatrical evocation of Wilson's lyrical brand of modernism evokes
all the terrifying beauty of Walter De Maria's Lightning Field.
(14) SIDEMAN by Warren Leight (Weissberger Group/Roundabout Theatre
Company)---Warren Leight's unbearably beautiful tribute to the great side man,
Clifford Brown, profiles a jazz trumpeter whose tragedy lay in a kind of
stick-to-itive modesty. He never asked for much in life; he just wanted to
blow his horn. But as his family swirls into abject poverty, his obsession
estranges his wife and only child, through whose befuddled eyes this memory
play unspools. As Brown, Edie Falco is heartbreaking, subtly drawing fine
lines between genius, hubris, and obstinacy. Edie Falco as his put-upon wife
gives a brilliant turn in a role Linda Lavin could easily fit. Director
Michael Mayer tugs at the compassionate strings with his usual grace, farcical
style, and great sophistication.
(15) THERESE RAQUIN by Neal Bell (Classic Stage
Company)---Based on Emile Zola's naturalistic novel, Neal Bell's
dramatization gets a starkly expressionist take from director David
Esbjornson. Elizabeth Marvel is a stunner.
(16) THE SYMPTOM adapted by Susie Dennison, Clare Dolan, and
Meredith Holch from Chekhov's THREE SISTERS (Los Kabayitos Puppet
Theatre)---The three Prozorov sisters are portrayed by three flat,
handmade dolls, each more than a foot high. Masha wears a green dress, Irina
dark brown, and Olga dark blue. Later the toys alternate with the three young
and quite appealing female puppeteers (Susie Dennison, Clare Dolan, Meredith
Holch) who speak their lines and who fashioned them out of carton, wood, and
wires. (Lifesize dummies with crumpled brown paper bag heads slid into dark
suits portray the men.) After a brief synposis of Three Sisters using
beautifully painted backdrops, THE SYMPTOM swiftly moves through a playful
series of lyrical and ironic variations on a theme ("there's no poetry in
work, no meaning"). Each image invoke the sisters as a collective of gloomy
layabouts: staring out of a snowy window, protesting lack of love, struggling
to find relief from unhappiness, so completely lost in thought that they erupt
in crying jags, leaping with sweaty anticipation of a future journey to
Moscow. Depicting effects rather than causes, the scenes presents an ailing
portrait of growing self-absorption, spiritual malaise, and formless romantic
desire. There's more luminous feeling in The Symptom than in all of Moscow Art
Theatre's Three Sisters.
(17) A MADHOUSE AT GOA by Martin Sherman (Second Second
Stage)---Martin Sherman's highly allegorical play takes on highly
unfashionable themes (AIDS, cancer, nuclear fallout, the depletion of the
ozone layer), but it is ultimately about how artists get silenced. Directed
with panache by Nicholas Martin, the play inventively opens with artifice, and
then get downright revealing in the realistic second half, where Judith Ivey
simply flies.
(18) YOU ANC NOTHING YET! by Pieter-Dirk Uys (Brooklyn Academy of
Music)---Uys is really part of the previous wave, but if you haven't
heard of him, let's hope that Harvey Lichtenstein brings him back in the next
wave. With a delightful sense of humor and a drag-queen's gift for mimicry,
Uys calls a spade a spade in the new South Africa, and we're all the more
grateful for him.
(19) A MAN CALLED MACBETH (Daisan Erotica/Japan
Society)---Despite the failure of the English translation to make up
for the loss in Japanese humor and colloquial satire, the Daisan Erotic's
Yakuza-themed Macbeth is gloriously playful and stingingly funny. The most
memorable sequence: several Japanese actors throw darts at a screen which
displays titles of previous Shakespeare films by Branagh and Olivier.
(20) LUIS BRAVO's FOREVER TANGO---Sexy, sizzling
entertainment. Go!
The big winners this year are Julie Taymor for The Lion King and Garth
Drabinsky for Ragtime. In fact most of the awards will most likely be
portioned out among them. In both cases, there's some lessons to be learned.
The most important is that somehow Taymor's success has become emblematic of
how the avant-garde and the mainstream are simply blurring out of recognition.
Because her theatrical roots are exotic by Broadway standards, she's been able
to cash in on her supposedly avant garde roots and draw out of it not just
tons of money but also tons of recognition. Indeed, there is perhaps no
greater reflection of how Taymor's work has been co-opted into the mainstream
than her joining Disney. And the fact that the press continues to marvel at
this success--and to continually point out that she came from avant garde
roots--speaks only to the great extent to which the media itself fails to
understand what makes Taymor herself avant garde.
At the Drama Desk Awards, in fact, Taymor constantly referred to herself as
"a child of the not-for-profit theater." This is very interesting because the
not-for-profit arena is a very embattled field at this moment in time. Given
the resolutely for-profit prejudice of the Drama Desk Awards, her words rang
all the more poignantly. Still, that's as close to radical politics as Taymor
seems to ever get in a public forum. Her directing work in The Lion
King may indeed be a Spielbergian revelation and a blow-the-mind
spectacle, but her incredible success is really symptomatic of how New York
audiences will gladly pounce on the next auteur, while gladly leaving the
lesser privileged theater artists in the dust.
The success of Ragtime, on the other hand, is a tribute to Garth
Drabinsky's singular belief in the Hollywood model of production which is
basically a capitalist attitude. Like The Lion King, Ragtime
deploys an incredible amount of theatrical apparatus in order to prove that
theater isn't just big--it's also spectacularly better than film. Like The
Lion King, Ragtime appropriates (or steals) from a diverse strain
of styles and effects in order to basically say: "This is what the musical
theater can do which no other American art form can do . And the result, while
truly awesome, comes with an ironic reminder. When Drabinsky eventualy got
bumped off from Livent by some high-profile agents with megalomaniac ambitions
of their own, the existence of Ragtime also reminds us of the harsh
realities of the for-fame-and-fortune model and the fake hierarchicies of big
money and big influence.
No less spectacular, Foreman's Benita Canova and Pearl for
Pigs seems bo contrast very reactionary, when compared to The Lion
King and Ragtime. By being so non-linear, so non-literal, so-
obscure, and so uteerly perverse, Foreman's success reflects this dark
nostalgia among the contemporary downtown theater who willingly trade in a
gnostic eroticism that simply confounds. (Note the negative reactions by John
Simon and Wilborn Hampton at the New York Times.) Foreman's winning of the
Obie Award is also indicative of how there really is no avant garde left in
New York. Let's face it. Like David Mamet, Foreman has won many Obies before,
and for him to win another Obie is basically a sign of the regression and
stagnation of the contemporary theater scene in which there is no rear guard,
and the only ones left who are felt to be deserving of recogntion are artists
who have become, over time, simply on guard. (Note the activism of Foreman's
acceptance speech: "There is an art war! We must fight the art war!") It's
also symptomatic of the fact that none of the awards truly care about new
plays, new art, and new work. And so Foreman's Obie translates as something of
a gesture, a psoture, like flames signifying. The true radical act would have
been to award a complete unknown playwright.
In the end, I suppose, everybody wants to be part of a mainstream. (Note
Martin McDonagh.) The Tony and the Drama Desk may represent the mainstream,
according to old-style-thinking, but the Obies often seems like an alternative
mainstream. It now matters too much. The Obies is a much desired and much
coveted commodity by theater artists. The fact that many of its award winners
(like Marie Mullen for the dreadful, misognyist Martin McDonagh play Beauty
Queen of Leenane--which might be better retitled as Wait Until
Delivery of the letter, I mean) have similarly won or been nominated by
the Drama Desk and the Tonys--is a testament to how the Obies is effectively
as much an institution as anything else. As one friend tells me, "Obies, Drama
Desk, Tonys--it's all the same to me." Touche.
Welcome back to TCG, Mr. Cameron....Now about that article I most recently
wrote for your magazine. Do you think, Mr. Cameron, that the fee scale could
be raised just a teensy-weensy bit? $100 is hardly minimum wage. And have you
spoken to the National Writer's Union recently regarding monetary compensation
for electronic rights? And how about that issue which was not really addressed
last year regarding.....
So let's all give a collective thanks to Ellen Stewart and George C. Wolfe
for (at last) extending an invitation to one of the world's greatest director.
Recently closed at La MaMa is THE CAUCASIAN CHALK CIRCLE. And later in the
summer, Serban is staging CYMBELINE at the Public Theatre's Central Park Free
Shakespeare festival. Says Serban: "I live in New York and work at Columbia
University. We have an ideal theater where we do experimental work of all
kinds--but without the demands of public performance. Usually, the theater we
do is a demonstration of student work but it's a theater that's almost a
utopia. We don't have the Frank Rich-es to come and destroy us. It's true
people don't know whats going on, but I'm at the moment in my life where I
don't really aspire for immediate recognition in New York."
At Columbia University, Serban says, student actors are trained in the work of
the masters. "We just did Beckett and Ionesco, which was a change for us since
we usually work with Moliere, Marivaux, and Calderon. I feel that's my forte.
If the students get trained and learn the work od the their masters, they can
do any contemporary work by Mamet or whoever." Serban says his aim is "to
speak about life through the exploration of the great texts." He hopes "to
investigate life through the theater in which our lvies become clearer or
questions about life get deeper." "I feel the need to learn about the
technical aspects of what directing is," he says. "It's an incredible
challenge. More and more, interpretations that are so-called postmodernism or
deconstructions of text can be wonderful, but they also bring about a great
deal of self indulgence in regard to the work itself." Directors, Serban says,
have a responsibility toward understanding classical plays in its context and
roots before taking it apart. He likens the job to that of a painter who needs
to learn how to draw before taking a separate tack or direction. Directing,
Serban says, "makes me reexamine my own tools at the time I am staging a play.
It makes me question my technique all the time."
Regarding La MaMa's Great Jones Repertory, Serban says that it's become "a
symbolic name" for something that didn't in fact continue. "I know Ellen will
be very upset if she hears me say this. But what happened in the '70s when we
named it the Great Jones Repertory is that there was a moment where this
company did lots of classical work like THE TRILOGY or GOOD WOMAN OF SETZUAN
or AS YOU LIKE IT." But somehow, for reasons Serban is not quite certain,
Great Jones did not fulfill its original promise. "If somehow there were funds
solely allocated to the company, instead of La Mama giving money to a hundred
different companies of little babies of theaters all over the world, the Great
Jones Repertory might have had a longer life as a company." Supporting the
work of smaller theaters, Serban says, is "all great and wonderful, but there
was not enough time to grow into solid work of some structure. If that was
kept alive in '70s and '80s, we might have become a company possibly like
Mnouchkine's. We certainly have all the resources. We've got extraordinary
people, an amazing amount of talent. All the festivals in Europe that we go to
call us a great group. But it's absolutely imposisble to live on 50 dollars a
week." Still, Serban can only speculate as to what exactly went wrong. "We
didn't get more funding or either Ellen couldn't find it," he says. "Or she
decided she cant put emphasis on us. So the company disbanded."
All this changed, of course, a couple of years ago when THE TROJAN WOMEN
was revived to huge critical acclaim. And indeed Serban's recent CAUCASIAN
CHALK CIRCLE is a testament to how he has once again taken the reins of the
company and as a director is breathing into it a new, vibrant, theatrical life
so that all the world can see the singular truth: that the Great Jones
Repertory is, in fact, one of the world's great theater companies. Certainly
Serban is very happy of the recent windfall of back-to-back directing
projects. "I don't know if I'm happier more than when I'm rehearsing," Serban
says. "It's as simple as this. I feel like I'm in a continuous state of
rehearsal. Some people have the talent for the art of living. I'm not at ease
with living. I'm much more at ease with living in the theater."
Written and directed by Field herself, Upstate is a ramshackle
comedy about Richard Place (Slaff), a playwright who has received a commission
to write a children's play from the New York State Council on the Arts. Much
of the play centers around the hilarious, feckless shenanigans that Place must
undergo in order to finish this play. Place, however, never really gets to
finish the play, since his retreat to an old homestead near Rhinebeck, New
York turns out to be a disaster. The estate, where Place intends to write the
play, is swarmed by univited guests, unexpected caller, tourists, dancers from
a Native American dance troupe, real estate investors, and in a later more
surrealistic development, by the ghost of Nelson Rockefeller himself who steps
in to save what's left of Place's children's play when the old mansion catches
fire.
In other words, Upstate is a farcical comedy about procrastination.
It's also a charmer, a rollicking fairy tale that perpetually looks to the
sunny side of life. It's also, metaphorically, a comic reflection of the
downtown theater community as a crazy, wacky, dysfunctional family. And though
it tends to ramble and bumble along, its very loose structure is happily
reminiscent of the loquacious, all-over-the-place looseness of Shakespeare's
comic plays. Slaff is an unalloyed delight, particularly in the early urban
scenes. But once he reaches the country, his Place seems a little bit at sea.
That's because Field doesn't quite give Slaff enough material to chew on, work
on or develop; she seems stuck on piling up Place's adventures and
misadventures at Bard (a liberal arts college where I studied criticism and
journalism), leaving Slaff's hapless Place to simply react to what's happening
to him. Thank God, Slaff is a strong, take-charge actor who compensates
eagerly, and the scenes where he literally sees his children's play come to
life give off piquant, buoyant pang. Yet Field does give Upstate a
comic pop-up-book quality that grooves and tickles our nostalgia for a
bohemian life in a midsummer night's setting. Though the happy ending feels a
little contrived, it's a testament to Field's great generosity of spirit and
wacky sense of the absurd that she can unironically imagine a world where a
quote-unquote emerging playwright can continue to receive arts funding, even
though the play he is attempting to write remains unresolved and, like
Upstate itself, utopically frayed around the edges.
[Gener]
Copyright © 1998 Randy Gener.
AWARDS FEVER: HITCHING A RIDE WITH THE 43RD ANNUAL DRAMA DESK, THE VILLAGE VOICE OBIES, AND THE TONY AWARDS
"Everybody has his reasons," Jean Renoir says in THE RULES OF THE GAME. To
which the late Ross Wetzsteon added (I'm paraphrasing here): "I think an
engaging politics can result out of that." So if many of the comments I have
written about this year's awards season seems bitter, well, I've got my
reasons. And frankly so do the Drama Desk, the Obies, and the Tony Awards.
They, too, have their reasons. After all, we live in a world where awards
proliferate. In order for each to survive and thrive, each must therefore also
find their own niche--each must find their own reasons for staying around.
TCG APPOINTS BEN CAMERON NEW EXEC DIRECTOR
Ben Cameron is the newly
appointed executive director of Theatre Communications Group, the 36-year-old
national service organization for the American theatre. The celebration of his
appointment was held at the Virginia Theatre, 245 West 52nd Street. After
being rousingly introduced by Ricardo Khan, the president of the board of
directors of TCG, Cameron spoke with great enthusiasm. He expressed his wish
that he get to meet everybody at TCG in the near future. He said that he would
open his doors to everyone and hoping that they can all work together. Cameron
has had a distinguished career as a theater professional. From 1988 he worked
for the National Endowment for the Arts as the director of the theater
program. A graduate of the Yale School of Drama, with an MFA in dramaturgy, he
was most recently a manager of community relations at Target Stores, a
division of Dayton Hudson Corporation in Minneapolis. Cameron's appointment
comes after TCG recently restructured itself into three divisions: Programs
and Services, which handles various artistic and government-related
departments; Publications, which published American Theatre Magazine;
and Finance and Management, which deals with membership and customer service
issues.
A SPRING AWAKENING: ANDREI SERBAN DIRECTS BRECHT AND
SHAKESPEARE
Asked why he has not been consistently directing in New York, while opting
to do opera in Europe, the legendary Andrei Serban told me:
"It's necessary to get an invitation."
POST SCRIPT: CRYTAL FIELD'S "UPSTATE" IS A WACKY
LANDSCAPE
I neglected to review Crystal Field's delightful comedy, Upstate, when
it was recently produced at Theater for the New City last April. And since
Jonathan Slaff, the editor of this online publication, also played the lead
role, it would be simply awful of me if I let it pass without comment.
Randy Gener is a writer, director, and theater critic for The
Village Voice. He writes "Show & Tell," a monthly fine arts column for HX
Magazine, and regularly contributes to American Theatre, Stagebill, New York,
and other publications. His e-mail address is
RNDYGENER@AOL.COM.
