Extra Criticum

An Experience

I once heard a talk by the Artistic Director of one of the country’s largest and most respected children’s theatres. One of the great benefits of writing for kids, he said, was the response of the audience. “For children,” he said, “theatre is not an aesthetic experience. It’s just an experience.”

Those words came to mind after I saw the Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman last month. However great most theatrical experiences are – thrilling or funny or heartbreaking – they usually are, for me, aesthetic experiences. I have an amazing time, leave the theatre elated, and relish it for days afterward. This production of Death of a Salesman, however, felt qualitatively different. It wasn’t like I’d seen something. It was like something had happened to me.

Failure

“Failure” is such a dirty word.

People in the arts talk a lot about bravery, about having the courage to follow your impulse no matter where it leads. What this means, in practical terms, is that you have to give yourself the right to fail. You have to accept failure, make friends with it.

Still, people don’t really talk much about failure. It’s considered rude.

The Soul Hungers for Beauty

I have a friend. It doesn’t matter what her name is. Let’s call her “Erma Duricko.”

Erma likes quotes. Lots and lots of quotes. She has quotes tagging the end of her emails. She posts them every day on Facebook. These quotes are usually of an inspirational nature. They are usually on the subject of how beauty and art and love conquer all.

A Boy Who Really, Really Liked His Horse

So…War Horse.

It’s a juggernaut. It won six Oliviers. It won five Tonys. It won Best Play on both sides of the pond. It has been made into a giganto new movie by Steven Spielberg that was nominated for two Golden Globes. It didn’t win any, but hey, you can’t have everything.

“Jooooooooooooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!”

In Praise of Francis Ford Coppola

The ways in which this country is fucked up are too manifold to go in to in this humble little blog. But I would like to take up, for a moment, the issue of this country’s relationship to art and artists.

“Uh oh. Another plaintive whine from an artist who feels he’s unappreciated. THIS is gonna be fun to read!”

Fear not. I’ve always felt that though a life in the arts is difficult, it is also a choice. No one put a gun to my head to make me a playwright. When I decided to do this, I knew more or less (well, actually less – but that’s another story) what I was in for. I don’t want to talk not about myself here. I want to talk about Francis Ford Coppola.

I am blogging regularly as part of a commission from the Blue Coyote Theatre Group

One of the Artistic Directors, Kyle Ancowitz, wrote a post about Todd London’s book Outrageous Fortune and asked us to respond. This was my response.

“Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is 3,720 to 1!”
“Never tell me the odds.”
– C3PO and Han Solo, Star Wars

Inspiration - Sarah Ruhl

I hate reading plays.

There’s no excuse for it. I’m a playwright. I have to read plays. But I hate it. A friend of mine, Paul Meshejian, is the artistic director of PlayPenn. He is taking the 100 semi-finalists for the 2012 conference with him on his winter sojourn to Puerto Rico. He’s going to read them all down there. I told him it sounds like torture.

There are good reasons for a difficulty in reading plays. Most plays are bad (though that’s also true of most fiction, non-fiction, etc.). More importantly, plays aren’t meant to be read. They’re meant to be performed and seen. These are the good reasons for not liking to read plays. They are not, however, my reasons.

Good Bad, or the Pleasures of Pan Am

We all know what makes something good. We’re equally clear on what makes something bad (hint- it’s the opposite of what makes something good). But what about that mysterious quality that makes something Good Bad? You know what I’m talking about. That movie/book/TV show/song that you love even though you know its total crap. What quality does the Good Bad work of art have that Bad Bad work of art lacks? What separates Good Bad from Bad Bad?

I guess I have to come clean now. I’ll just say it quick. It’s like pulling off a Band-Aid...

Getting Lost

Cross-posted on the Blue Coyote Commission Project Blog

It’s a little scary. At the very least it’s disorienting. You don’t know what time it is. You don’t know where you are.

It passes quickly, of course. The last time it happened to me, I found myself on NJ Transit. I was somewhere between Secaucus and Newark. It was around 5:30. I was on my way home.

PlayPenn Part III

“So the previous scene takes place at night. But then Marie-Helene comes over to the house, which would seem to indicate that it’s not night.”

This is Lucie Tiberghien, my director, speaking to me. I am perplexed.

“Well,” I say a trifle defensively. “What makes you think the previous scene was at night?”

Lucie leafs back through the script. “The last line of that scene is, ‘Good night, Aidan.’”

Ouch.

Play Penn Part II

A few years ago I was at a Christopher Shinn play at Playwrights Horizons. When I heard there was going to be a talkback after the performance, I decided to stay. It wasn’t that I wanted to hear the comments so much as I wanted to see how Shinn would respond to them.

The tone was conversational and polite. The artistic director would field comments and questions, then Shinn would respond. After about 10 minutes there was a lull. The artistic director said, “Okay, if there isn’t anything more…

An older man to my right thrust his hand aggressively into the air. The artistic director paused, then called on him.

PlayPenn Part I

My name is easy to misspell. The second “e” doesn’t effect the pronunciation, so it often gets left off. It doesn’t bother me, and is such a common mistake I usually don’t even notice. So I was surprised at a function here at PlayPenn when I woman I hardly know, someone who works for the conference, said, “Oh, they misspelled your name”

House of Blue Leaves (and the magic of less critical viewing)

When I was a kid, I saw the PBS telecast of The House of Blue Leaves by John Guare on American Playhouse. The production, a Lincoln Center revival, starred John Mahoney and Swoosie Kurtz. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was one of the seminal moments of my theatre life. There was something in that play, the combination of mad comedy and deep despair, that expanded my sense of what theatre could do. Later, when I became a playwright, I think I spent most of my early career trying to write my own House of Blue Leaves.

So when the recent Broadway revival was announced, I was thrilled. A friend of mine worked for the production, so I got free tickets to a preview.

All In

My most successful full-length play, Leap, is riddled with faults. It begins with a long monologue to the audience, a convention that gets inexplicably dropped in the middle of the second act. The main engine of the plot, something about back taxes coming due, is a MacGuffin, totally contrived. There is also a dream sequence that doesn’t make much sense and a few plot holes. It’s got problems.

But there’s a reason it was so successful. The reason is inseparable from the time in which it was written.