Reviews from Elsewhere: NYT Feature on Rude Mechs' Method Gun, February 27

Found on-line:

Many Methods to Collaborative Madness

By JOAN ANDERMAN, New York Times, February 27, 2011

IT began, as actors’ stories often do, with a guru. Her name was Stella Burden, a k a “the other Stella.” Ms. Burden created a risky suite of training exercises called the Approach, attracted a fervent band of followers and abandoned them nine years into rehearsals for a high-concept production of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” to be performed without Stanley, Blanche, Stella or Mitch.

What in the name of madcap Method acting is a company member to do?

That’s the absurdly literal and keenly figurative question at the heart of “The Method Gun,” a play about the creative process by the Austin, Tex., ensemble Rude Mechs, which since it was founded in 1995 has become one of the nation’s leading proponents of devised theater: works developed collaboratively by a company rather than an individual playwright.

“The Method Gun,” which comes to Dance Theater Workshop from March 2 to 11, is the most autobiographical of the company’s pieces. It’s satirical and celebratory in roughly equal parts, exploring ideas of togetherness and loss, the dynamics of being part of a tight-knit group and what it means to take care of one another.

While the show’s premise nods to celebrated acting teachers like Stella Adler and to extreme, emotion-based techniques like the Method, specifics are left aside in favor of merciless riffs on codified approaches to art. But the Rude Mechs’ wicked sense of humor tempers a sincere streak that the company wears like a badge of honor.

Read more at the New York Times on-line . . . .

Arts Reporting: Stanley Fish: Humanities Programs Under the University Knife, New York Times, October 12

Found on-line:

In a response to last week’s column on “Howl,” the movie about Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Charlie from Binghamton asked, “What happened to public investment in the humanities and the belief that the humanities enhanced our culture, our society, our humanity?” And he speculated that it “will be a sad, sad day if and when we allow the humanities to collapse.”

What he didn’t know at the time is that it had already happened, on Oct. 1, when George M. Philip, president of SUNY Albany, announced that the French, Italian, classics, Russian and theater programs were getting the axe.

For someone of my vintage the elimination of French was the shocker. In the 1960s and ’70s, French departments were the location of much of the intellectual energy. Faculty and students in other disciplines looked to French philosophers and critics for inspiration; the latest thing from Paris was instantly devoured and made the subject of conferences. Spanish was then the outlier, a discipline considered stodgy and uninteresting.

Now Spanish is the only safe department to be in. Russian’s stock has gone down, one presumes, because in recent years the focus of our political (and to some extent cultural) attention has shifted from Russia to China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq. Classics has been on the endangered species list for decades. As for theater, the first thing to go in a regime of bottom-line efficiency are the plays.

Read more at the New York Times on-line. . . .

Opinion: Theatre and the "Odd Man Out" syndrome, Charles Isherwood, NY Times, April 15

Found on-line, Isherwood's thoughts about reviewing theatre when your reactions differ from those of the audience:

Theater Talkback: Odd-Man-Out Syndrome

By CHARLES ISHERWOOD

“Am I missing something?”

If you attend the theater with any regularity, chances are good you’ve had the occasion to inwardly ponder that question at least once in the course of your culture-consuming adult life. You may also have found yourself asking it aloud, of a companion, as you hurtle toward the bar at intermission, or even hissed it, sotto voce, during the show itself. The query, usually arising with a prickly feeling of insecurity or mystification or angst, is a byproduct of a common but little-discussed cultural phenomenon: the odd-man-out syndrome.

This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears to be having a rollicking good time, while you sit in stony silence, either bored to stupefaction or itchy with irritation, miserably replaying the confluence of life circumstances that have brought you here. (“Curse that Isherwood!”)

The syndrome was perhaps most memorably dramatized on that classic episode of “Seinfeld” – and by the way, there are those who remained immune to that sitcom’s allure – in which Elaine is brought to the edge of nervous collapse by her distaste for the movie “The English Patient,” over which the Oscar voters and most of the rest of the world swooned. (For the record, I was right there with you, Elaine.)

The experience of seeing live performances – or movies — is both personal and collective. Everyone interprets entertainment through a distinct, idiosyncratic prism shaped by taste and experience, but we’re also exposed to the responses of the people around us, who are also interpreting the show through their own individual prisms.

Read more at the New York Times on-line. . . .

Arts Reporting: NYT: Where Musicals Can Dare to be Different, April 9

Found on-line:

Arts

Where Musicals Can Dare to Be Different

By CHLOE VELTMAN

Published: April 9, 2010

For those who dismiss musicals as the theatrical equivalent of cheerleading, the Bay Area arts scene is demanding that they be taken seriously.

The new musical “Scalpel!” at the Brava! Center for the Arts has a gender-bending cast dressed in candy-colored women’s business suits, singing about the joys of liposuction against a backdrop of free-floating body parts. The combination of bunraku puppetry techniques and drag performance makes for an unlikely and unforgettable experience.

At the Berkeley Repertory Theater, “Girlfriend,” a new musical opening on Wednesday and based on the pop musician Matthew Sweet’s 1991 album of the same title, plays with our expectations about gender and sexuality by recounting a romance between two young men, accompanied live by a four-piece, all-woman rock band.

The Bay Area has established itself as a breeding ground for musicals that go on to find audiences elsewhere, but many of these shows also buck traditional notions of what constitutes a winning work for the stage. In the world of musicals, where producers tend to favor mass appeal over experimentation, the passion for — and success at — developing quirky work in the Bay Area is leading many people to re-evaluate their opinions of musicals, attracting new audiences to the genre.

Read more at New York Times on-line . . . .

From the NYT: Reading the 2009 Plays Nominated for the Tony Award

Published in the Sunday New York Times, an arts writer's assessment of the Tony-nominated scripts, not of the play productions running currently in New York.

Last night's Tony awards recognized Yasmina Reza's The God of Carnage as best play of the season.

Critic's Notebook
Submitting to a Play's Spell, without the Stage

By DWIGHT GARNER
New York Times
Published: June 6, 2009

Not so long ago in America, keeping up with new plays was part of what it meant to be literate, and publishers did good business by stocking the drama sections in bookstores. New Directions published Tennessee Williams; Atheneum made a bundle from Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”; Random House issued many plays in hardcover, including “Oklahoma!” in 1943; Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” for Viking Press, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection.

If you didn’t live near New York, or couldn’t afford tickets, you picked up the print editions if you wanted to be part of the conversation. Those days, sadly, are pretty much gone. Readers’ eyeballs have fled elsewhere. New plays are hard to find in bookstores. They are issued, if at all, mostly by university presses and boutique publishers.

The excuses for not theater-going are easy to list: it’s hell to find a babysitter, Netflix is a lovely narcotic, and it’s hard to commit to loading that much money onto a Visa card. You could just about fly to Dublin and back for the price of a Broadway ticket and a decent meal. But what’s the excuse for not reading some of these plays?

This year, with Sunday evening’s Tony Awards on the horizon, I decided to, well, act. I got my hands on all four of the best play nominees and sat down to read them, having seen exactly none of the productions.

Click to read more at The New York Times