Storefront Rebellion

3-2-1 Content

There's an interesting discussion going on at Tony's blog about whether we in the theater community/blogosphere/barroom discussion are putting too much emphasis on business models, nonprofit statuses and playwright demographics (to name a few) and not enough on the actual content on stage.

It's late-late-late enough in the evening of a long day that I can only hope for clarity, but I've had a few conversations in the last couple of days that relate to this and I want to get some unformed thoughts down before they get away from me. I think a lot of the things we've been talking about in recent months are (in)directly related to content in ways we may not realize.

"What is it with women playwrights?"

Seriously, dude? While some of us are trying to have an earnest discussion about the under-representation of female playwrights, Jim Rutter of Philadelphia decides that the reason he didn't like Marisa Wegrzyn's Psalms of a Questionable Nature is that it was written by a chick. Dude even manages to blame his ex-girlfriends.

I had my own reservations about the script in its Chicago premiere this summer, but never would I have thought to blame it on the playwright's ovaries.

(h/t Marisa herself)

Times on under-representation of women playwrights

The New York Times joins the female-playwright fray today, in advance of a town-hall meeting there organized by playwrights Sarah Schulman and Julia Jordan.

Reporter Patricia Cohen doesn't really have any new information or insight into the problem, but discussing it on the front page of the Times art section is a step forward on its own, I think.

See also my TOC interview with Jordan and my writeup of our own town-hall meeting on the topic, both from last January. A roundup of Storefront posts on the subject can be found here.

Tennessee Williams is in Hell

That's according to actor Nambi E. Kelley, writing on the Steppenwolf Blog this afternoon. Kelley is playing Laura in the upcoming Steppenwolf for Young Adults production of The Glass Menagerie.

If Tennessee Williams is in heaven (which I doubt knowing the troubled life he led), mayhap he’ll hear the gentle strumming of his words, from our lips to his ears. And if he is in the other place (which is more likely knowing the troubled life he led) mayhap the music will be so clear he won’t be able to escape it, even there.

A generous reading would presume that "the troubled life he led" refers to, say, Tennessee's problems with drugs and alcohol, and isn't meant as a veiled reference to his homosexuality. No matter what prompts Kelley's suspicions about the afterlife of one of our greatest playwrights, it's surprising to see a theater artist publicly announce such a thing. (One wonders if she has similar thoughts on the whereabouts of O'Neill and Miller. Perhaps she has a list.) It's even more surprising to see Steppenwolf publish such a thing.

Licentious licensing

This week's TOC Theater opener is brought to you by Microsoft Excel for Mac.

As I mentioned on the TOC blog nearly a year ago, a big chunk of my workweek is spent maintaining our master calendar of productions, processing the press releases that come in from companies all over town and entering them into the Excel spreadsheet that is, in large part, the engine that runs the magazine's theater section—we use it for everything from maintaining listings to scheduling reviews to generating story ideas. For this week, the Master List (as we affectionately refer to it in the office) suggested the story in a more literal sense. Every time I start entering a play title and author into a new row on the spreadsheet, Excel's Autofill feature tries to guess what I'm typing. More and more over the last several months, it's been exactly right—because the play was already on the calendar in a production by another company.

All told, there were six instances in the coming season of duplicate plays (it would have been seven if The Gift Theatre hadn't swapped out their previously announced production of Glengarry Glen Ross, which would have followed Redtwist's current mounting, for David Rabe's Streamers). In two cases, companies who had been the first to announce their productions as Chicago premieres—Theatre Seven with Josh Tobiesson's Election Day, and BackStage with John Kolvenbach's On an Average Day—were scooped by another company.

Multiple productions of Shakespeare's more popular plays are unsurprising, but two iterations of Peter Barnes's Red Noses? Overlapping renditions of Pinter's Old Times? This isn't a new problem—both Deanna Isaacs in the Reader and Kerry Reid in Performink wrote about the conflicting "premieres" of Noah Haidle's Mr. Marmalade in the spring of ’07—but I decided to see if I could get to the bottom of this problem. And I do find it to be a problem: If a theater company can't announce a show for its season, particularly one it's hoping to be a Chicago premiere, without a guarantee that another company won't steal (or at least borrow some of) its thunder, that's a major headache for artistic directors and a potential disservice to audiences.

Happily, execs from licensing houses Dramatists Play Service and Samuel French agreed to interviews with me. I couldn't get hard answers from any of them, as both companies claim to make decisions on production rights and exclusivity (outside of New York or L.A. at least) largely on a case-by-case basis. Contrary to popular wisdom among the theater community, even Equity theaters aren't necessarily protected, as Route 66 (the new, Stef Tovar-led Equity company that beat BackStage to the Kolvenbach play with its currently running production) and Remy Bumppo (whose Old Times will overlap with City Lit's production) demonstrate.

And the multiple-productions issue only scratches the surface of licensing issues in Chicago. Earlier this week, after TOC had gone to press, Strawdog announced it would be replacing its planned production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons with Curt Columbus's translation of The Cherry Orchard. The reason? As Strawdog's Nic Dimond told me today, it's because this fall's Broadway revival of All My Sons might—might—put out a tour, so Strawdog was denied the rights.

Read the print story here, and my TOC blog post about All My Sons here. And even if you disagree with my conclusions, let me know what you think.

Elsewhere: Further advancing my own preference for more process transparency among theaters, audiences and critics, the Tribune's Chris Jones, the Reader's Tony Adler and Kerry Reid, who writes for both publications, sat down for a really interesting podcast interview with Talk Theatre's Anne Nicholson Weber. Check it out here.

Dang-Blasted premieres

According to this brief item in Monday's New York Times, Sarah Kane's Blasted "will make its American debut at SoHo Rep as the first show in that theater’s 2008-9 season, the artistic director Sarah Benson has announced."

It immediately occurred to me that such a statement might come as a surprise to Chicago's A Red Orchid Theatre, which mounted Blasted in January 2007 (with Helen Sadler and Guy Van Swearingen, right).

And in fact, the most cursory research (i.e. the first page of results from a Google search for "Sarah Kane Blasted") returns evidence of a production by this California theater in 2004.

What gives, SoHo Rep? Or is this a Times blunder?

UPDATE: So it appears that Blasted has been produced in Chicago in 2007 and in both Dallas and LA in 2004, but the actual American premiere was likely by Seattle's A Theater Under the Influence in February, 2004 (this Seattle Times review refers to it as such). Blasted also just made its San Francisco debut last month (albeit in a British production).

Matt Freeman and the commenters at his blog (thanks for the link!) suggest variously that SoHo might have the "professional" (which to most licensing agents is a synonym for Equity) debut, that a production must be reviewed to be considered the premiere, and that terminology like "premiere" is simply contractual.

I can't speak for the productions in other cities, but A Red Orchid is an Equity company and their production last year was definitely reviewed (you'll notice I linked to one above). Isaac's theory, that it's a contractual thing, seems highly illogical and kind of shady—and therefore thoroughly plausible. If that's the case, Blasted has been seen in at least five cities around the country before making its "American debut." Still hoping to get this figured out for good.

UPDATE 2: Just spoke to someone at SoHo Rep's press agent's office, who said their release only calls it the New York premiere, and suggested it's a Times mistake. The press release regurgitators at Playbill make no mention of debut status. As much fun as I'm having being indignant, I suspect it's a combination of a mistake on the part of whatever intern created this page on SoHo's site, and poor fact-checking at the Times.

UPDATE 3: I'm not sure commenters here are allowed to use HTML tags (TypePad recently revamped things in ways I have yet to understand), so I should provide a link to Marisa's post that Bilal references below. Oh! Wait! As of 11pm central time Monday night, the NYT has amended a correction. SoHo Rep's production will be the New York premiere, not the American premiere. Guess that settles that.

Northern Exposure vs. Sarah Ruhl

Playwright Adam Szymkowicz wrote on his blog the other day about revisiting the early-’90s TV series Northern Exposure:

In the episode I just saw, Chris, the radio dj loses his voice when a beautiful woman stops by the station to ask for directions. His voice was taken by beauty. Sounds like a Sarah Ruhl play, no? He eventually gets his voice back after Maggie, the most beautiful woman in town kisses him…One of my favorite parts is Joel's increasing jealousy about Maggie who the town thinks is having sex with Chris to give him his voice back. The entire town waits outside her cabin to see if he will emerge with his voice.

And gosh, that does sound kind of like a Sarah Ruhl play. I was asked not long ago if I could explain my general distaste for Ruhl's style, of which I've made no secret. I blathered a bit about her affinity for wordplay that, in my opinion, serves to "sound pretty" more than it serves her plots, and about her reliance on visual symbols that I don't find, ultimately, to say anything (i.e. the paper houses in Dead Man's Cell Phone or those damn fish in Passion Play).

Then I referenced something Ruhl said in this interview with TOC last fall just before Passion Play's opening at the Goodman that's been bothering me ever since:

You’re part of a wave of playwrights interested in the whimsical—less naturalism than surrealism. What do you make of that trend?

I think people are bored of watching watered-down television onstage. I think playwrights are responding to that.

What do you mean by “watered-down television”?

What I mean is family dramas that take place in a house with furniture, and there’s an issue at the center of it and a secret that is ultimately revealed.

But couldn’t one say that this whimsy-playwriting—with its quick scene cuts, interior fantasy sequences, breezy dialogue—is influenced more by TV trends than by theatrical tradition?

I don’t really watch TV, so I don’t know. But I do think we live in a cinematic culture, so the concept that you might achieve more by juxtaposition of images than by linear progression through time—I think that’s definitely part of being in the Digital Age.

It's been nagging at me for some time, but I think what rankled me about that statement is that TV has actually been doing what Ruhl does for some time now. Whether it's the current critical hit Pushing Daisies, the mobsters-in-therapy and talking fish on The Sopranos, or the dancing babies of Ally McBeal a decade ago, popular television has been mining this whimsical vein for quite a while. Northern Exposure hadn't entered into this equation for me until Szymkowicz suggested it, but he's quite right about it. (There's also, for me, the fact that when so many non-MacArthur-grant-recipient playwrights are making their real livings on TV shows and the majority of cultural critics have come around to taking television seriously, the whole "Oh I don't watch TV" business seems elitist and out of touch, but we'll leave that aside for now.)

The question becomes: why am I okay with all of this whimsy on TV, where Pushing Daisies, The Sopranos, Ally McBeal and Northern Exposure are all series I enjoy to varying degrees, while it rubs me the wrong way when I see Ruhl and Noah Haidle and their spiritual kin putting it on stage? Is there something about stage vs. screen that makes a difference (because, let's be honest, I also love me some Amelie)? Or do I have a less critical eye toward the formats I don't write about on a regular basis?

To broaden the question: Are there things you dig in TV and film (or in books, visual art, whatever) that bug you in theater? Or vice versa?

Three quick things of note

One: The comments section on my post last week about the Hypocrites and Lookingglass renditions of Our Town has become, with no prompting or involvement on my part, a sort of referendum on the House Theatre of Chicago (and a welcome revisitation of the female playwrights problem). I'm staying out of it, but there are interesting points being made on all sides.

Two: Via Leonard Jacobs, Boston theater blogger Thomas Garvey charts his city's theater critics on a Cartesian plane. His axes: "Poorly Written" to "Well Written" and "Unperceptive" to "Perceptive." Will any hardy soul take this on for Chicago? Or, perhaps more constructively, are there suggestions for better axes?

Three: Also via Leonard Jacobs, further via the Sun-Times (hey look, they're still around!), performing arts majors now comprise the second most-populous field of study in Illinois colleges and universities. Fear not, Republicans: they're still outnumbered 2-to-1 by business majors.

Good Boys and false blurbs.

I still haven't had a truly irritating contextomy, though Steppenwolf's post-reviews ad campaign for Dead Man's Cell Phone, at right, is pretty amusing—instead of stringing together any two consecutive words from the show's reviews, the marketing team cherry-picked adjectives. From my review for Time Out: "Quirky." I probably don't have to tell you that, in context, "quirky" was not a compliment.

I bring it up because of Chris Jones's amusing new blog post at the Theater Loop. Chris cites a conversation at the Broadway rumor mill All That Chat about, as he puts it, "the most egregious misquotes of reviews in service of a show's promotion," in which his review of The Pirate Queen is cited—and as egregious misquotes go, it's a doozy.

Unfortunately Chris doesn't link directly to the chat thread, and my eyes glazed over before I could find it myself. But I did find something of interest that links back to Steppenwolf again. We've all heard by now that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa trimmed about 45 minutes and an intermission out of Good Boys and True between its world premiere at the ’wolf, which opened just before Christmas and played through February and which I quite liked, and its second production at Manhattan's Second Stage, which just closed. But despite the spies I sent to the New York production last weekend (Meg! Gigi! Where's my report?!) and some deductions from Isherwood's dismissive review, I hadn't figured out how the cuts affected the plot. But if this thread can be trusted (as much as any anonymous-ish chat thread can be, I suppose), Roberto's tweaks have changed quite a bit, and not, it sounds, for the better.

Congrats, Tracy

What Christopher said. Good news, and much deserved.