CollisionWorks

Isaac Butler has already noted his own case of Charles Isherwood fatigue as a reason for not dealing with the latest wince and eye-roll-inducing take on NYC Theatre from our boy What-The Fuck-Chuck of the NY Times, and I was pretty much in the same boat. I felt that I had dealt with my feelings on WTFC on enough occasions HERE and HERE and especially in the video/performance piece Berit and I created for The Brick's quinquennial party - a post describing it is HERE, and I might as well take the opportunity to embed the video portion here one more time:

( WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING AT? )

The new piece didn't bug me so much at first, once I got past the vomitous opening paragraphs - in the end, I just kinda felt, "Well . . . he's trying . . ." about this piece on the move to Off-Broadway of several OOB works. I had a discussion with some other Brick staff about it, and we somewhat came to that conclusion as well. He's trying, at least, even if OOB appears to be a wild, woolly, and lawless wild west zone to WTFC. There's some interesting info on ERS and Jenny Schwartz in there, and hey, I thought, if WTFC brings some audience to those shows, fine, I'll take the insults.

Maybe it's being an OOB artist who is used to having my level of theatre slapped around by the press that created that shrug and lethargic response to this piece. Garrett Eisler at The Playgoer, a critic who knows and respects his Indie Theatre, is not so sanguine about it, and got my blood properly boiling again with his take on the piece, "Ish Sets OOB Back 30 Years."

As Isaac did, I recommend Garrett's piece for a good explanation of why we should be so damned angry with WTFC for this piece. He's right.

So, as long as I'm posting video (as always now, behind cuts, for those with the browsers that crash), here's some others I ran into today and wanted to share . . .

flyswatter posted this Rudy Ray Moore trailer for a favorite BadFilm of mine (my friend Jim Baker introduced me to it, calling it "Plan 10 From Inner City"). Can you motherfuckers take the power of DOLEMITE?

( Goddamn, Mama, This Sure Is a Spooky Joint . . . )

(my favorite RRM film is still Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law, though)

And finally, courtesy Tom Tomorrow at This Modern World, a civics lesson as Penguin and The Batman discuss the American electorate:

( Remember, NO POLITICS )

Enjoy.

Continuing the thoughts previously explored in this post and the video/performance Berit and I did at The Brick's Quinquennial Party . . .

Our Friend What-The-Fuck-Chuck has given a rave review to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. All fine. All good. OK! I'm sure I would enjoy this show if I could afford it, from what I'm hearing.

However . . . (dilute, dilute) . . .

These lines from the review engage the gag reflex:

In other words, this isn’t theater-that’s-good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD.

You know . . . I like a lot of what's on TV. Berit and I don't watch any at home (we gorge on it when visiting my mother in Maine) - we have neither cable nor antenna here - because we don't like it in the home, where it sucks energy away from the work you should be doing as you wind up watching the not-good stuff just because it's there.

But we watch quite a few series on DVD as they come out on Netflix, and I've thought for some time that the hour-long drama has indeed been going through a golden era these past few years. There is certainly great TV happening.

That said . . .

OKAY. Maybe he's just trying to sell a "difficult" play to an audience he thinks (condescendingly?) might rather stay home and watch the DVR (we have already learned of WTFC's fondness for Friday Night Lights, which, given my feelings about current TV, I'm more than willing to believe is deserved). Maybe he's sensitive to the negativity thrown his way by audiences who went to see Thom Pain (based on nothing) ("theater-that's-good-for-you-theater"?) based on his review and wants them to feel they won't get burned again.

But. Still.

Am I completely off-base and/or snooty to like to think that the best standard to hold up a theatrical work to is not a television drama?

UPDATE: Not a minute after posting the above, I came across an interesting post re: WTFC from Lee Rosenbaum at CultureGrrl. A bit off the subject above, but interesting - and I mean the second item about WTFC, not the first, innocuous one. The one Rosenbaum refers to as "disturbing."

Also, I would like to note that now that I've read WTFC's review of the original Chicago production, I can express my dislike of his work on one more count - one of the oldest, lazy-reviewer tricks there is: dragging in quotes from, or examples of other, "similar" works of art in your opening, "topic" paragraph to supposedly give your review "context," when you are in fact stuck for anything interesting of your own to say about the work immediately in front of you. In the Chicago review, he drags in works by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Edward Albee (phew! - why not throw in Brecht if you just want to enumerate destructive theatrical mother figures?); in the NYC review, he pulls out Tolstoy and one of the most overused quotes you'll find for this kind of opening (hell, it was old when Nabokov parodied it in the opening sentence of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 38 years ago!)

The one time I tried this trick with my 10th-grade English teacher, Jim Block, he mocked me so severely with his red pen that I never tried it again (I think). Would that WTFC had had such a hilariously cruel instructor at some point . . .