Theater Ideas Newsletter
(November 14, 2024)
Dear Substack Reader — This is the first newsletter of my new approach to my writing life. As I mentioned in my Nov 5th missive (sorry about the wrong links—I’ve fixed them), throughout the week I will be writing shortish snippets on my old Theatre Ideas blog on Blogger, and longer items on my new Creative Insubordination blog. Each week, I will send you a compendium of my writing during the past week. My hope is to send that on Thursday around lunch.
I find archeologist, anarchist, and leader of the Occupy Wall Street movement David Graeber inspiring. This could be my motto:
“The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
-- David Graeber, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World: Essays (forthcoming)
Read more about Graeber’s ideas in essayist Rebecca Solnit’s article published in The Guardian, “‘It does not have to be this way’: the radical optimism of David Graeber.”
Henry James, quoted in Jed Perl’s excellent book Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts.:
“Art lives upon discussion,” he wrote, “upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints; and there is a presumption that those times when no one has anything particular to say about it, and has no reason to give for practice or preference, though they may be times of honour, are not times of development— are times, possibly even, a little of dullness.”
And retired Washington Post theater critic Peter Marks concurs:
My fervent hope is that this is indeed just a turbulent intermission in the evolution of a discipline that has been astonishing people since the plays of Euripides and Aeschylus. And that the collective energy in this dazzling field is marshaled in the cause of better serving the art and the audience. For this to happen, the theater needs more analysis, more debate, more audacious opining, not less. As part of that invigoration, it needs a healthy coterie of passionate skeptics, ironists, scholars and true believers to write about it. Also known as critics.
Theatre Ideas link 1 and link 2.
My first post on Creative Insubordination, in which a good friend and I compare a wonderful production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir at the Berkshire Theatre and an equally luminous streaming production of McPherson’s adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. The Weir cost me $60 for a ticket, and Uncle Vanya cost me $2.99. We discuss what about a theater production of a 4th-wall, realistic play justifies the price differential.
Compare to Glencoe Illinois’ Gillian Theatre’s production of Every Brilliant Thing, reviewed by Chris Jones in the Chicago Tribune:
Enter the reignited Gillian Theatre at Writers Theatre in Glencoe and you’re met with a blazingly sunny light cue from the designer Jason Lynch, likely a stark contrast with the gloomy fall evening outside. The show “Every Brilliant Thing” can be set wherever a theater wants it to be set, and the director Kimberly Senior basically picked a North Shore backyard. Or so it feels, and this beautiful theater piece by Duncan Macmillan happens to be all about how everything feels.
The set designer Izumi Inaba has built a world of grass, patios and strings of lights, wooden fences and layers of decks suitable for grills. There, as if at a summer barbecue, you are warmly greeted by the actress Jessie Fisher and you get to pick your own spot: a regular theater seat, perhaps, or a bench, lounger or folding chair. Most likely you will have a small piece of paper thrust into your hand. “Every Brilliant Thing” requires a great deal of gentle audience participation and, by that, I mean from most everyone.
Fisher explains the setup. As a child, she had a mother who suffered from depression and attempted suicide on several occasions. Since a young kid has trouble processing what all of that means and how to combat it, the unnamed character’s 7-year-old self decides to create a master list of all the reasons for living, some profound, most picayune. She begins with things that appeal to a young child (ice cream, water fights, staying up past your bedtime) and moves on more adult pleasures, which are strikingly similar, as it turns out. The show charts the progress of that list — as mostly read by members of the audience — with what we’ll call Jessie’s own life, replete with characters also played by people in the audience. The show demands you have skin in the game, for one thing, and you also leave the theater not just with a more heightened sense of your fellow theatergoer than is typical but with a beefy list of, to quote the great Ian Dury and the Blockheads, reasons to be cheerful, all the way up to 999,999. (With a few gaps. The show is just 80 minutes long and it flies by).
I'm not saying theater HAS to be interactive, just that it is one thing it does that is unique.
Much more at the Creative Insubordination link
Alan Jacobs quotes J R R Tolkien’s “About Hobbits” as an explanation for his (and my) approach to blogging. If you’re curious. And more interesting ideas from him (and the NY Times) in his post “On Linkage and Editorials.”
That’s it for this week. I hope you enjoy this approach—as you can see, this approach helped my writing production!