Re: RAT FW: [bigcheap] Theatre press/LA-Austin

["erik ehn" <shadowtackle@worldnet.att.net>]

Dear Mitchell:

     About distance, etc. in the critical community... Thanks for stepping
up, fomenting dischord, getting people in the room... Points made on both
sides, but in the end I think that while journalism does have a relationship
to drama (reporting on productions like traffic accidents or two-headed
calves), the real engagement is not even pretend-objective. I think we want
a partisan, conflicted, passionate press. In addition to box scores we want
a mad person predicting the Cubs take the series in five. For balance (if we
even accept balance in our lives) we need MORE press, a more disorderly,
art-drunk press... not a narrow and more sane press (objectivity is a code
word for efficiency which means a downsizing of the corps?). A sane press
can't  possibly keep up.

     Good critics can help create the sense of a scene - they participate in
the public understanding of a context beyond particular productions. A
reporter tells you about the accident; somewhere else in the paper you are
made to discover that cell phones as aspects of globalization are eating our
souls and atomizing our archetypes, turning our gods into advertisements,
and that our hope lies in, well once again, yes, physical mercy. Which
brings us to theater, where a reviewer will tell you if a play was good or
bad, even if it was good or bad absurdism, or good or bad for the particular
artists... but something bigger than a trade report can give you the sense
of how the piece is plugged in to the immediate Life or Death of the field,
can help you determine whether theater is indispensible or disensible.

     So we need articulate ranters, complicit in the art. There are going to
be conflicts of interest and much unfairness; ridulousness and whimsy.
Conflict and unfairness are at the root of some fine dramaturgy, with
ridiculoursness and whimsy too. The quest for objectivity is a nice leven,
but ultimately quixotic adn even digressive. If an awards panel were truly
objective, they would probaly just eat a good meal and go home to their
loved ones....

     Nice picture.


e