OF BALLYHOO AND BEACH BALLS

Imagine my consternation in the early days of Willy Nilly when a short green bus pulled up to the curb in front of Dixon Place, and a slobbering mob of propeller hat-wearing troglodytes began to stumble toward the theatre, a spectacle reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

“Those can’t be the critics!,” I cried, clutching my director’s hand until he fainted from a loss of blood circulation. But alas, they were. Our suspicions were confirmed when we saw that some of the creatures held memo pads and number two pencils in their trotters.

 

By the time the dust had settled several weeks later, we were satisfied. Several critical voices –a couple of them major – expressed delight at what we’d labored so hard to bring them, and we wound up with a page and a half of superlative pull-quotes. Ah, but those first couple of nights! It was as though we’d been set upon by a coalition of the blind, the deaf, and the stupid (but unfortunately not the dumb). The unkindest cuts came from a couple of second tier scribblers from two of New York’s top ranking critical organs, who brought their prodigious storehouses of cultural knowledge and keen descriptive powers to bear in the service of deriding a wayward beach ball, which had managed to accidentally bounce from the set into the audience on opening night. This ball was apparently a sort of bete noir to these critics, possessing all the malevolence of Moby Dick. Like toddlers, or perhaps kittens, they were mesmerized by it. It was the sun around which their reviews revolved. Like fops of the Restoration, each scrutinized the ball down his nose through a pince nez, laughing the ball to scorn. Unfortunately (for me), somewhere behind, underneath, around the ball – unnoticed — there had been a play.

 

This is the story of my life. The independent theatre artist, of necessity, must wear many hats in order to bring his work before the public. In my convoluted career, I’ve learned something of marketing, and I’ve found it to be a double edged sword that cuts deep.  I have serious things I want to say. I express these ideas through comedy. And then I get out there and start selling. And the hard selling I do almost always backfires in the end. Part of the audience, expecting the unchallenging spectacle the hype seems to promise, exits the theatre disappointed and perplexed. (Hey, man, what was that? That was just weird!) Another part takes the hype at its word and watches the play through the jaded lenses I myself have ground. This bunch never does see the play. They merely confirm what they’ve already decided based on the marketing material. In sum, rather than looking with their eyes, they believe just what they have already been told. It is especially depressing when purported theatre critics are guilty of that level of superficiality; but it turns out most of them are.

 

With Willy Nilly, director Jeff Lewonczyk and myself, by joint consent, decided to announce the show as an “exploitation” and mirror the techniques of the mainstream media apparatus in cravenly making entertainment out of murder. By doing so, we hoped to make people think. Our hype almost always serves a double function – genuine marketing, and a simultaneous parody of marketing. This time out, the promotions fulfilled their more quotidian agenda. Filling the houses turned out to be no problem, at least on the initial run. But the bit about getting audiences to think is a tough nut to crack. As a general rule, it turns out audiences and critics believe everything they’re told – hook, line and sinker. If you paint a canvas entirely red and call it “A Study in Blue”, damned if they won’t see the blue – and only the blue – in it. We announce a work of exploitation, and many reviewers therefore leave their critical faculties at the door. (Others, perhaps, never possessed such faculties to begin with). The result: a passel of reviews that ought to be more embarrassing to their authors than the admittedly uneven play should be to its creators. Certain of their lapses amount to critical malpractice. Thus, for example, the lyrics to Willy Nilly’s opening song “Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud Cuckoo-land” (the title of which is a Joycean style portmanteau phrase compressing “psychedelic mushroom”, “mushroom cloud” and Aristophanes’ “cloud-cuckoo land”)  “failed to impress” one reviewer. To another, the climax of the show (which illustrated social breakdown by setting a Living Theatre style contact improv to a sonic collage modeled on “Revolution #9”) “just fell apart”. A number of these whiz kids demonstrated a lack of awareness of pop culture so great that they plainly had never heard of either Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Tiny Tim – phenomena at the pinnacle of mainstream prominence at the time of the play’s events (youth is no excuse for such a level of ignorance—at least not in someone who presumes to don the mantle of critic). By the same token, a few equated the presence of a square, deadpan narrator with Rod Serling (apparently the only such character they’ve encountered) rather than Jack Webb or the hundred or so other white-sock wearing cop and D.A. types more germane to Willy Nilly.

And, as always seems to be the case, the play’s more serious underlying themes went completely unnoticed, even by the show’s many champions. Even a page and a half long monologue of deadly earnest content justifying the author’s intentions (a blatantly Euripidean device I often resort to, one that would make Neitzche spin in his grave) failed to clue scribblers in. All I can do is take solace in the fact that comical writers with serious aims are rarely “gotten” the first time around. To Shaw’s contemporaries, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was just a scandalous play about hookers. Unless you announce yourself as serious, and then act serious, and then shove your serious intentions down people’s throats and up their asses, most people will only register the foolishness. If you think this maddening predicament isn’t what inspired Moliere to write The Misanthrope, you’ve got another thing coming.

 

Moliere knew his misanthrope from the inside; he thought the character’s dark thoughts at times, or he couldn’t have written them. But he also possessed the wisdom not to give in to despair. Cooler heads prevail in the play, and Moliere went on to write many other brilliant comedies. We profit by his example by climbing back into the saddle with Kitsch, which opens at Theater for the New City on November12. It is a farce, based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s Twin  Menaechmi by way of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. We hope audiences will merely enjoy themselves. It is a machine to make people laugh. In fact, we hope audiences never bother themselves with this essay. It will ruin the show for them.

 

On the other hand, we hold critics to a higher standard. We hope they will bring to the table more than a superficial working knowledge of Top 40 theatrical hits.

 

A familiarity with ancient comedy would help; the play derives more from Plautus (by way of translation) than from Shakespeare. The play’s main architecture is classical: it is divided into five acts, and maintains a careful geometric organization of characters and events that owes more than a little to Aristotle.

 

A knowledge of the early works of Brecht would also assist the critic. (Happy End and St. Joan of the Stockyards were particular inspirations). Young Brecht was a parodist. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and even Bach, his technique early on was to vacuum up cultural products and glue them into his theatrical vehicles; so much so that he was often accused of plagiarism. Yet Brecht was a man of his time and place. In fact, he is the foremost advocate of a theatre oppositional to classical values, even to our own times. Like Eisenstein and Meyerhold before him, he sought a way to theatricalize the Hegelian dialectic; his Epic theatre would build not to some single satisfying climax as in the Aristotelean theatre, but mimic the variety theatre and the novel by containing strings of discrete moments, each with its own point, flattened out over a picaresque journey. The historical moment described in Kitsch­ – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the momentary culture clash between the twin materialist philosophies of capitalism and communism – provides fodder to explore the dialectic (embodied here in separated twins who spend their lives in the two warring blocs – half money-grubbing decadents, half over-regimented sheep). In Kitsch, classicism wars with Epic technique (songs, intertitles, direct address). Ideas are thus embodied in the silliness, for those able and willing to look beyond the veil.

 

And to quote the television pitchman: “But wait: there’s more!” For the play parodies Brecht. In plays like Happy End, St. Joan and In the Jungle of Cities Brecht had betrayed (intentionally or otherwise) an imperfect knowledge of the America he depicted (a knowledge gleaned almost entirely from Hollywood movies and popular songs). We do the same with our own sketchy, romanticized idea of Berlin. The play is written in the voice of a translator, as though from across a great distance. The fabric of the play thus describes a world where communication within and across cultures is at the very least troublesome, and at its worst, impossible. For the playwright who grapples daily with such problems of communication (spawning, for example, this essay), the theme is a highly personal one. But the Timonist in me fears that the majority of reviewers (let’s not call them critics) will receive precisely none of these elements I’ve described, having been distracted by some untied shoe or unbuttoned fly.

 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this editorial are solely those of the author. His professional associates, past and present, had no hand in its creation, and are just as annoyed as you are.