Fight in words.
To my regret, I was unable to see the six-hour production of Strange Interlude that capped the Goodman Theatre's Eugene O'Neill Festival, directed by Neo-Futurist founder Greg Allen and starring a cast of talented Neo-Futurist stalwarts. I had intended to see at least half of the dress rehearsal last Thursday but got called in to teach, and then my commitments to TML and The Long Count kept me away from the show's short run.
Part of my regret here is reading about the numerous and varying reactions to the work, which has inspired both passionate detractors and defenders, and in not one but two separate performances provoked an audience member not to just leave, but to leave stomping, fuming, shouting back at the stage about butchery of the play.
I'd point out that butchery is an art...taking a dead mass of blood and muscle and turning it into choice cuts of meat. And I say this as somebody who no longer eats beef.
Speaking of things I stopped doing, I made a conscious choice awhile back to restrain myself from arguing against theatre criticism that I might deem unfair, whether or not I'm involved with the production. It's a dangerous path to take, fraught with the logical pitfalls that emerge when one's emotions keep grabbing at the steering column. At its worst, you get one of the most prominent theatre artists in the city calling a critic at home to lob personal insults.
In the case of Strange Interlude, I didn't see it, so I can't judge, and so I can't argue the merits or the flaws in the work. I can guess that, as somebody who once sat through the Goodman's reverent and complete production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and found it uneven, at best, plodding at worst; that I would have appreciated what Greg and the cast did with Strange Interlude.
Not responding is a discipline. It takes effort and determination.
And although I've gotten pretty good at it I'm having trouble, right now, eliminating from my consciousness the gadfly of Fabrizio Almeida's comment that the Neo-Futurists are a "puerile, one-trick pony of a theater company."
I can't be completely articulate as to why this particular comment is getting under my skin in ways that other, similar comments have failed to register. Maybe it's the word "puerile," meaning "childish." Maybe it's the fact that Almeida took his dissatisfaction with this one production, a production he failed to view in its entirety, and extrapolated it out to encompass the work of the entire company, a company that consists of a wide variety of performers and writers . Maybe it's the dismissive nature of the phrase "one-trick pony," a judgment that isn't supported by the twenty solid years of wildly ranging work that the company has managed to produce. Maybe it's the way he preemptively defends against the charge that he didn't understand the production by stating that his lack of understanding is simply a product of our pretensions.
Maybe it's all of these things. Whatever it is, I am compelled to respond, to fight back, against Almeida's charges. And it's silly, because if I've learned one thing about reading criticism is that it's next to impossible to get most critics to admit that they were wrong about anything. The certainty is part of what makes them critics.
So this isn't really an attempt to dialogue with Almeida. I'm not sure what purpose such dialogue would serve. I'd be indignant, he'd be opinionated. I'd trot out a few examples of work we've done that contradicts his perception of our aesthetic, he'd trot out a few examples of supporting instances. We'd walk away entrenched; nothing he could say would make me think "oh, he's right, I should leave this company so I can start doing more mature and varied work," and nothing I could say could convince him that there's more to offer from the aesthetic than "all-meta, all the time."
I'm going to hit the Post button and let this go now. That's the hope, anyway.
Part of my regret here is reading about the numerous and varying reactions to the work, which has inspired both passionate detractors and defenders, and in not one but two separate performances provoked an audience member not to just leave, but to leave stomping, fuming, shouting back at the stage about butchery of the play.
I'd point out that butchery is an art...taking a dead mass of blood and muscle and turning it into choice cuts of meat. And I say this as somebody who no longer eats beef.
Speaking of things I stopped doing, I made a conscious choice awhile back to restrain myself from arguing against theatre criticism that I might deem unfair, whether or not I'm involved with the production. It's a dangerous path to take, fraught with the logical pitfalls that emerge when one's emotions keep grabbing at the steering column. At its worst, you get one of the most prominent theatre artists in the city calling a critic at home to lob personal insults.
In the case of Strange Interlude, I didn't see it, so I can't judge, and so I can't argue the merits or the flaws in the work. I can guess that, as somebody who once sat through the Goodman's reverent and complete production of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night and found it uneven, at best, plodding at worst; that I would have appreciated what Greg and the cast did with Strange Interlude.
Not responding is a discipline. It takes effort and determination.
And although I've gotten pretty good at it I'm having trouble, right now, eliminating from my consciousness the gadfly of Fabrizio Almeida's comment that the Neo-Futurists are a "puerile, one-trick pony of a theater company."
I can't be completely articulate as to why this particular comment is getting under my skin in ways that other, similar comments have failed to register. Maybe it's the word "puerile," meaning "childish." Maybe it's the fact that Almeida took his dissatisfaction with this one production, a production he failed to view in its entirety, and extrapolated it out to encompass the work of the entire company, a company that consists of a wide variety of performers and writers . Maybe it's the dismissive nature of the phrase "one-trick pony," a judgment that isn't supported by the twenty solid years of wildly ranging work that the company has managed to produce. Maybe it's the way he preemptively defends against the charge that he didn't understand the production by stating that his lack of understanding is simply a product of our pretensions.
Maybe it's all of these things. Whatever it is, I am compelled to respond, to fight back, against Almeida's charges. And it's silly, because if I've learned one thing about reading criticism is that it's next to impossible to get most critics to admit that they were wrong about anything. The certainty is part of what makes them critics.
So this isn't really an attempt to dialogue with Almeida. I'm not sure what purpose such dialogue would serve. I'd be indignant, he'd be opinionated. I'd trot out a few examples of work we've done that contradicts his perception of our aesthetic, he'd trot out a few examples of supporting instances. We'd walk away entrenched; nothing he could say would make me think "oh, he's right, I should leave this company so I can start doing more mature and varied work," and nothing I could say could convince him that there's more to offer from the aesthetic than "all-meta, all the time."
I'm going to hit the Post button and let this go now. That's the hope, anyway.