RAT Re: Criticism and Press

[nick <nick@ratconference.com>]

Thanks Mitch and Erik for pushing forward on this critic topic. The earlier
related article in the Chronical is interesting as well.  Austin's
incestuous pool of theatre workers?

http://www.auschron.com/issues/dispatch/2000-07-28/arts_feature.html

"Everyone's a critic."  Exactly.  I remember at the critic's round table at
the NYC Rat Conference, evryone was in a big circle at the Ohio Theater
space.  Going around the circle, everyone identified themselves as some
sort of writer.  Producing Rat Theater means you could often be a grant
writer, program writer, brochure writer, press realease writer, mission
statement writer, etc, etc.  Of course all these types of writing intersect
with press and criticism in a very real way.

The rat-list at its best has often worked as an excellent form of theatre
criticism.   

Following is the first installment of Seven Questions from Seven
Dramaturgs.    It's another attempt to give "critical mass" to a script and
playwright many in RAT are exited about.  Hopefully this will become a
continuing series of sorts.  Whoever is interested, please jump into the
fray.  I'll eventually publish an edited version at the Rat Conference Web
site.

We're interviewing Jeffrey Jones on his play Dirty Little Secrets soon to
premiere at Annex Theatre.  I wrote a first question and Paul Budraitis,
the actor in this production poses the second question below.  Jeffrey
Jones response to both follows.

You can download Dirty Little Secrets from Jeff's home page at:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Diogenes_/download.htm

--nick

************************************************
SEVEN QUESTIONS FROM SEVEN DRAMATURGS

Question #1
By Nick Manhattan 

 I remembered reading once about how Brecht in the 40's had tried to
articulate an aesthetic he dubbed the Theatre of Scandal.   In preparing a
question for you on Dirty Little Secrets I tried to find a reference to
this (what I remembered to be) expansion of the Epic theatre tradition that
Brecht and Piscator had initiated in Germany in the 1920s.  I never did
find the Theatre of Scandal reference.  But I did find material on an
interesting form of documentary theatre known as the Living Newspaper.  It
was developed within the WPA Federal Theatre Project from 1935-1939.

 (link to The Federal Theatre Project and the Living Newspaper By: Lijntje
Zandee)

 <http://www.let.uu.nl/ams/xroads/1theatre.htm>

 In playwright's note attached to the script you instruct that "the play
should be staged presentationally --anti-illusionististacally."   This
again brings to mind Brecht's Epic theatre and the Living Newspaper
referenced here, as well as numerous other forms of agit-prop or guerilla
theatre throughout the century.  But Dirty Little Secrets appears to be a
different breed of documentary theatre than the others.   

 Normally theatrical productions in this form of theatre would consist of
dramatizations of current events, social problems, and controversial
issues, with appropriate suggestions for improvement or cure. But Dirty
Little Secrets gives the tabloid version of the same.   Instead of
controversial issues and social problems, there are only controversial
celebrities with problems.  And the Celebrity is the living breathing
current event itself, awaiting capture by the paparazzi and his audience.
In this piece of documentary theatre, this Living Tabloid, the Stars and
their dearest Fans (lover, wives, and daughters) attempt to become "real".
     

 THE QUESTION   How is the paparazzi and his audience akin or different
from the audience in Annex theatre watching a production of Dirty Little
Secrets?


 *****************************************************

Question #2
By Paul Budraitis 


 Thanks for forwarding this to me. It's nice to see the Brechtian structure
of the play being plumbed. It makes me wonder how Brecht would approach
creating theatre today. In his mind, theatre was an effective form of mass
communication and thereby a potential agent for social change. Of course,
the current shape of theatre makes the idea of theatre as mass
communication ridiculous. On top of which, cynicism is rampant (due in
part, I believe, to the state of mass communications and it's effect on how
we eat, entertain and inform ourselves, vote (HA!), etc.), so the question
then becomes: what is theatre's place now? What positive ends is it even
capable of achieving, and how do you communicate to a cynical audience that
likely will tune out the moment they think they're being prescribed a
course of action?

 I recently had a conversation with Chris J. about an epic idea he has for
a cross country train play that picks people up and continues to evolve as
it travels. The scope of the thing is magnificent and insane (a pleasing
combination to be sure) but in today's world, WOULD IT MATTER? CNN maybe
does a minute-long piece on it, and it fades, and then what? Of course, I
realize one person reading this message performed a play in a teepee under
a bridge, but I'm wrestling with these things right now, and it helps to
sound it all out. What the hell are we doing? Does theatre as we know it
matter anymore? I fully believe that on a small scale, it can have a
profound impact. But what more? What about Brecht's vision for affecting
social change? Is that possible today without access to a goddamn broadcast
medium? Should theatre try to change to work within this new reality, or
should it resist that temptation and just do what it knows it
 is capable of doing? The WTO protest happened in large part due to loose
but highly effective organizing efforts over the internet. Very radical,
very disparate, and very motivated groups got no less than the world's
attention that day. Destruction was part of it, yes, and the effect of
that is a separate debate, but the question remains: Is there something we
should learn from this? What would Brecht have to say about N3099?

 Jeez, who put a nickel in me?

 I actually have a response to what this message was actually about as
well. A question for Jeff, that is. Here goes:

 Mythology has always been used as a means of cultural definition and
training. Its stories (not unlike urban legend), tell us about who we are,
what values we share, and what consequences exist when those values are
violated. In DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS, it could be argued that the audience is
being presented with a contemporary mythology, with our culture's
celebrities playing the role that was reserved for gods and their ilk in
times of antiquity. Do you agree with that assessment? If so, what are we
to learn from these modern gods? What are the lessons we should take away
from experiencing their stories?

***************************************************************


THE ANSWER
by Jeffrey Jones

This oughta be fun....

 There are so many interesting ideas that I hardly know where to begin.  So
I'll try to stick a series of thoughts together and, in the process,
address the questions per se, although the preambles and asides are equally
rich and interesting.

 What first caught my attention was the notion of social change: explicit
in Paul's remarks, implicit certainly in Nick's.  Of course, social change,
like growth and death, goes on all the time. When we use the term, we are
really speaking of directed or purposive social change, managed by us,
toward ends we desire.  This definition of change is so basic to our
understanding of politics and our social lives in their broadest sense that
we may forget how time-bound it is.  In fact, it has very little meaning
outside of the context of representative government (which is hardly the
norm throughout human history) and in Western history, at any rate, is
directly tied to the abolition of monarchy. Less obvious--except in its
historic context--is its ties to Christian thought. In particular, to the
notions of antagonism toward the state (which is really kind of paradoxical
otherwise), and the need for a moral basis for action (as exemplified, say,
by the worthy Mr. Ehn).

 Now why should art of any kind be an agent of directed social change?
There is precious little evidence of it: Music and Dance are out by virtue
of their relative inability to express argument. In the annals of the
novel, perhaps Uncle Tom's Cabin would count, but only if you believed that
the novel actually fuelled the Abolitionist movement, instead of being used
by that movement as fuel.  Poetry? Painting? Some people thought that
Blowin' In The Wind was a vector of change.  But if you think about the
arts as a whole, what they are really good at is celebrating the status
quo.  There  are any number of examples in painting and verse of works that
were created and accepted as expressions of shared identity (public or
private). This extends, especially in drama, to expressions of willed or
wished-for identity.  One way of thinking about melioristic (agenda-driven,
message oriented) drama is that is defines what the audience collectively
wishes to be, or to become.  As such, it is easy to assume that this art is
in fact driving the audience toward achieving that goal.  But again, I
propose this is just a simple mistake.  An audience which wishes itself to
be more virtuous than it is (in whatever way virtue is to be defined) is
really no closer to achieving that virtue than someone who commissions a
portrait which makes them look more magisterial, noble, handsome or assured
than they really are.  In fact, if the purpose of a great deal of art is to
express what we "are," it is almost by definition incapable of addressing
how we need to change.  Art strikes me as a lagging, not a leading
indicator.  Which is not a bad thing at all, unless your prime mission in
life is to effect social change.  If this is what you want to do, then
there are really far more effective ways of going about it--as the
conservative wing of the republican party, to name but one example, has
shown over the last 40 years.

 Now Brecht, while a great genius, was to my mind a rather malign genius,
and it is this malignancy--manifest in the rather constant cruelty which
lurks only slightly below the surface of almost all his plays--that makes
his work interesting to me.  As an avowed communist--and a German communist
from the 1930's at that!--his definitions of "mass communication" and
"social change" might be rather disagreeable to you and me.  What's more,
he's good and dead, which means among other things that he doesn't need to
trouble himself about the implementation of change any more (not that he
did all that much to distinguish himself as an activist under the East
German or Nazi regimes, either, when you think about it).  As far as I'm
concerned, Brecht had some very interesting ideas, wrote some reasonably
interesting ideas, talked a good game and otherwise pretty much conducted
himself as a louse, so it's hard for me to take him terribly seriously in
any discussion of social responsibility.

 The Living Newspaper (and American communists of the 1930's) stand in
marked contrast--both for the highmindedness of their ideals (for the most
part) and their vigorous immersion in directed social action (for which
they paid a much higher price than B. Brecht, by the way).  The first point
of difference between then and now, however, has to do with the role of the
newspaper.  Despite a full awareness of what people like Hearst and Luce
were up to (to say nothing of the rapid tabloid press of the day), the
Living Newspaper still represents a belief that somehow, somewhere, someone
is printing the truth on broadsheets and getting them into the streets.  In
 choosing tabloids as my source, I was by contrast quite aware that I was
choosing a medium known for its unreliability.  Tabloids pretty much trade
in two kinds of stories: astounding tales (of nonentities) and celebrity
gossip.

 Now myth is another term I prefer not to use.  The only kind of myth I
know anything about is Greco-Hellenistic-Roman myth, and here alone there
is a world of difference between the use of myth in Homer, Aeschylus,
Euripides  and Ovid.  Moreover, it's clear that myth in much of the
Hellenistic world subsumed what we would also call history and religion. So
I would prefer to use the much more common-sensical term, "Stories
everybody knows." Every culture is indeed defined by the stories everybody
knows--and those stories can (and do) include factual and fictitious tales,
parables, fantasies, histories, romances and so forth. Everyone from Jesus
to John Dillinger to Richard Nixon to Richard III. In fact, one of the
things that's interesting and obvious about these stories (and about myth)
is that while we tend to focus on the nature of the story, the material is
just as much about the "personality" as it is about any individual tale.
So Athena, if you think about it, takes precedence over all the stories in
which she appears.  The unifying factor, the most prominent element, is the
personage--not the story.  It might be more accurate to define myth as
"People everybody knows" or "Stories everybody knows about People everybody
knows."  And in that sense, DLS is definitely dealing with the same kind of
material.

 For the record, let me just point out the obvious: My method in writing
the play couldn't have been more traditional.  I simply set out to render
the interior life of my characters in sympathetic and emotional
terms--which is  my understanding of the avowed goal of the most common,
"naturalistic" school of contemporary playwriting.  I wanted my audience to
"care" about these characters. Of course, I was well aware that applying
this method to  the material I had selected was in fact quite subversive.
For one thing, these are characters we are otherwise predisposed NOT to
care about (one of the commonalities of gossip being the expression of a
shared contempt for  the subject of the gossip). And on a deeper level, I
wanted to encourage people to wonder, after they found themselves "caring,"
who it was they were actually caring about. The intended progress, in other
words, was from "I can't believe I actually found myself feeling sorry for
Pam Anderson and Frank Sinatra" to "Who the hell is Pam Anderson or Frank
Sinatra, anyway...?"

 So this is one principal point of difference between the paparazzo and
Jeff Jones (or his audience).  Not just that the paparazzo doesn't for the
most part invite one to "care" (though with princess Diana and a few other
figures, there is more of that than you might imagine.  And the interesting
thing there is how akin the emotions of sympathy (read pity) and contempt
(read envy) really are. They are both a kind of kitsch, and kitsch is
interesting because it is so protean and mutable. But I digress), but that
the photograph of the paparazzo does not encourage either examination of
one's own response or of the identity of its subjects.  

 Another point of difference, of course, would be the authenticity
conferred on the source medium.  But I think the real difference is that
the paparazzo's photograph is without irony.  It really is---has to be--a
picture of Bill hugging Monica (or Fergie getting her toes sucked, or
whatever). It has to be the real Bill and the real Monica or the point is
lost.  Imagine looking at a picture captioned "J. Edgar Hoover in a Dress,
taking it up the ass" next to a picture captioned "Frank Dell, dressed as
J. Edgar Hoover in a dress, taking it up the ass." Wouldn't matter if Frank
 Dell looked EXACTLY LIKE J. EDGAR HOOVER in every detail.  Wouldn't matter
if it was the SAME PICTURE!!! Knowing it's J. Edgar Hoover makes all the
difference.  

 Now in my play, of course, Pam and Frank never appear on stage... except
as characters.  This is so much the central premise of all drama that we
accept it without question.  The really interesting thing to me in working
with the material, however, is how these figures from the mediated world of
gossip behave--how differently, to be specific, their behaviour in a play
is from that of any other living historical figure.  Another thought
experiment.  Take any other living figure--even a figure who might be the
subject of informal social gossip (the Pope? Woody Allen? Hillary CLinton?)
 and try imagining them as characters in a play.  It seems to me you run
right smack into this basic credibility problem.  Because we know the pope
and woody allen and hillary as real people, we can ONLY accept a stage
representation of them as fake, as a character.  So we reject them.  In
fact, I think it might be just as hard to accept either of those three
people as a character in a play in which they played themselves.  That's
how strongly the force of dramatic convention asserts itself.  Once a
character steps on stage and announces that she is "Hillary Clinton" we
automatically answer, "No you're not, because you're in a play." Even if
the characters happened to be Hillary and Bill themselves in a limited
Broadway run of their play called "The Night Bill Told Me Everything."
This is very curious.

 But even more curious to me--and this was the main reason I opted for the
doubling--is how these peripheral figures (whom we sort-of know) can become
"real" characters--and I think it is because we only know them as  "fake"
(that is to say, mediated) characters anyway.  I had never thought about
this before, but it may be the same reason MC Kat (the little 12" stuffed
animal) can be a character on stage.  Just as it's impossible to render
anything "real" onstage because of the law of dramatic impersonation, so it
is possible to "convert" anything which is already abstract (or symbolic,
or synthetic, or virtual--whatever term you prefer) into a stage
character--because stage characters are also synthetic or virtual or
whatever... They are symbolic constructs IMPERSONATED by, manipulated by,
an actor.  We tend not to be aware of this because of our deep acceptance
of the broader set of dramatic conventions (which may go far to explain
their curious rigidity and persistence in today's culture). Because the
rules for impersonation are so codified, we accept them without awareness
of their artifice.  

 In fact, in the play, I create a distinction within the world of the
characters themselves between the celebrity "characters" they play in real
life and "who they really are." I did this instinctively--that is, all this
theorizing comes after the fact--but again I think it was because I knew I
could get away with it.  In fact, because the rule of dramatic reality
demanded and enforced just this sort of "distinction."

 Paul wonders whether theatre "matters" any more in a world in which
mediated experiences are increasingly the rule.  Of course I believe that
they do, but only because by virtue of being immediate, personal and
private they are necessarily below the radar of the mediated world.  I am
well on my way to being an old far, closer the grave than the cradle, so I
will probably join B. Brecht in the thought-free zone before the world
changes too much more.  But if you share an alarm about and profound
distrust of the mediated world, then you have to accept that our private
space HAS TO REMAIN UNMEDIATED.  I you are sitting in your teepee by
choice, you can only be terribly terribly angry and afraid if CNN wants to
do a one-minute piece. You cannot want a LONGER PIECE.  This is a deep
conundrum which our culture has only begun to wrestle with. All of our
models--whether for social activism or the making of art--share the
assumption that publicity is ultimately good.  We don't yet really know how
to perform these activities in a world in which publicity is inherantly
corrupting and destructive.  And our initial response is to question the
very value of these activities.  Can it still be possible, we ask
ourselves, to make theatre or work toward social change in a world in which
TimeWarner and Disney control the market/information complex?  

 Well, of course, it is even more important, but it is up to us to figure
out how and why.  TimeWarner will not tell us; but neither will Percy Bysse
Shelley or even James Joyce (certainly not Picasso or Andy Warhol!!). I do
not know any more than you do, except to feel that my own life is--has to
be--the first, best example; and that communication--honest
communication--one person's actual thoughts directed to the thoughts of
another person--is essential. Without that, we have only silence and I am
not quite Zen enough to be able to embrace silence.  Remember my first
distinction between social change and directed social change. History
informs us that the success rate of directed social change is relatively
low; that things rarely turn out the way people intend.  On the other hand,
social change is precisely the collective result of all the lives actually
lead.  If you argue that my vision is too quietist, I won't disagree, but I
would urge anyone who is deeply driven to affect social change to read
deeply in the history of change and to examine their own motivations
unsparingly.  I have no problem with living a hubristic life; one of the
great life-long joys of art is the sustained belief that one's own life and
thoughts and words have deep and lasting significance. But I have somewhat
less respect for the unexamined hubristic life. And I know very few
activists who approach their tasks with a Zen-like acceptance of the
likelihood of their insignificance. Which is too bad, as it would bring
both humor and humanity to what I find an all to christian (even if it is
the christianity that calls itself Marxism) endeavour. If you can seriously
say to yourself that you want to change the world--even in the slightest
degree-why should it be so hard to go one step further and accept that you
are probably a fool and that all your efforts will sooner or later come to
naught (if not worse) and that the whole damned thing is just one fucking
joke. Or at least best approached as such.

 And yes, that is my final answer.

 love to you all

 jj