Point taken.

Unlikely source of this post #1: Tonight I attended a concert in the CSO's MusicNOW series.

Unlikely source of this post #2: WGN is currently showing a rerun of the Friends episode in which Joey tells Ross about his smart girlfriend: "She wants to go to all these cultural places, and I don't know how to talk about that stuff!"

Fair enough, Joey.

I don't know anything about classical music. I don't even know if you call it classical music if it's contemporary. Is it called something else? Orchestral music? Concert music? See, I don't even know that. TOC is a media sponsor of the MusicNOW series, via our marketing side, and so we were offered free tickets for staff and friends. I figured, why not take in some free culture of another kind? So I convinced my friend Jeremy to come along, and there we were.

The program was quite good. It consisted of pieces from four young composers; I get the sense that "young composers" in the music world is similar to "young playwrights" in theater, i.e. anyone not yet eligible for AARP membership is still considered "promising," but in this case it was quite true. On tap with 47-year-old composer-in-residence Mark-Anthony Turnage were 31-year-old Derek Johnson, 26-year-old Nico Muhly, and 19-year-old Mark Simpson.

As much as I enjoyed the music and as much as I was impressed by the wide age range in the audience, with a seemingly even distribution from teenagers to the older patrons one would stereotypically picture at the CSO, I was asking myself a lot of questions: Just because I liked the music, was I "getting" it? Why do we keep having to go through the ritual of applauding the musicians on entry, then the conductor, even on their fourth re-entrance? Why don't we applaud between movements in a piece (and thank god I remembered reading that somewhere at some point and refrained)? And what the heck was host composer Osvaldo Golijov talking about with "melody invading the space?"

In short, I realized how intimidating the arts can be to the uninitiated.

I found myself thinking of the "Theater 101" piece in Friday's Trib. While I found the story shoddily written and condescending (as did Chicagoist), I've now got a concrete reason to agree with Chicagoist that "there's actually a need for a good, smart version of this story."

Playwright Jeffrey M. Jones's essay on making theater accessible to audiences by contextualizing it, by giving them a vocabulary with which to understand it, came to mind during tonight's concert. Kerry has a valid point about Jones's use of "middle-aged ladies" as shorthand for "unsophisticated audience members," but Jones's larger point is still valid as well. The point of the MusicNOW series, as I understand it, is to open the art to a broader audience through low ticket prices and less-traditional programming, and though on sight it seems to be succeeding (although my friend Jeremy suggested that the audience was really just young musicians and their parents), it still assumes a certain amount of knowledge in the house.

I like to think that Jones's idea is kind of the way we operate in the Theater section at TOC: if we assume a certain level of familiarity and vocabulary among our audience, then we can proceed to talk about theater in the kind of vernacular, pop-culture-referential language we use to talk about everything else in the world. But is there more work yet to be done to establish that base level of knowledge?

---

I seem to remember a recent discussion somewhere in the theater blogosphere regarding the question "What makes a play a play?" but can't track it down now. I did, however, keep track of Matthew Freeman's post questioning the existence of performance on the web. My blog post at TOC today addresses both questions, a bit, vis-a-vis Steppenwolf's online-only entries in 365 Days/365 Plays. Check it out.

There are also eight new reviews for this week at TOC's online Theater section, including three 4-stars from me. Take a look online now and in print on Wednesday.

Comments

[owens]

really? wow.

[Kerry Reid]

Great post, Kris.

My objection to Jones isn't solely on the basis of the casual sexism and ageism he displays, though admittedly as a middle-aged woman, I've obviously got my antennae set for that (and I'm shocked, frankly, that the editors at American Theatre didn't call him out on it in the first place). I think it's the overriding condescending tone he takes -- "I had to take ART HISTORY classes to figure this shit out so where do these dames get off knowing about it?"

Leaving aside his blithe assumption that those women DIDN'T take art history classes at some point, lots of people know about stuff that interests them without ever taking a college course -- you know, they read up on their own, talk about it with like-minded folks, visit places where that stuff is on display. I know lots of people who have never taken a Shakespeare class who can talk about the canon all day long and never get tired of it, for example.

This really needs to be a whole separate discussion, but my concerns with the idea of creating dialogue around "difficult" theater are generally twofold:

1) Who decides what qualifies as "difficult" art? Is it difficult because of the subject matter? Form? Venue where it's being presented?

Subsidiary concern to this one: Much of what is considered part of the avant-garde canon in theater, as in literature, music, and visual art, tends to downplay or completely "disappear" female and minority practitioners in those forms -- and that's not because of lack of quality among these practitioners, it's simply that those who would educate the public are themselves in need of education. Maybe because women and minority artists in theater, even more than in literature, music, and visual arts, have been on the sidelines until quite recently. Or maybe because these artists weren't covered in their pricey private-school liberal arts curriculum. Who knows? So before someone presumes to tell me or anyone else what I need to know about "difficult" art, I'd like to know just how much time they've spent poking around in the dusty corners away from the Greatest Hits of "Difficult" Work. (Or would that be too difficult for them?)

2) Remember when Tom Stoppard was pleading with people last year not to be dissuaded from seeing "Coast of Utopia" just because some wankers in the press were suggesting it was impossible to understand without an advanced degree in 19th-century Russian history and economics? Yeah. Like that.

I do want to see lasting critical commentary with some bite, depth, and soul built around new work. But I don't think it will have much utility for building audiences over the long haul if it's coming from a place of "now we, the critics, shall make this difficult work accessible for you, the unwashed" or if it seems, frankly, too much like homework.

Anyway, I'm not saying that's the approach you're taking. But I definitely sniffed that tone with Jones, even without the dullwitted gibes about "little old ladies," so if he's the model, I'm damn leery.