"The Whammy" - We've All Felt it Before

In Something Happened, Joseph Heller described "the whammy," a condition that any one of us has felt when we've met someone famous who we meet. When someone gives you the whammy, you can't utter a coherent sentence in front of that person, and begin to sweat and babble. It doesn't have to do with that person's status or personality-the person could be as shy and accommodating as anyone else. It's just the awe of meeting someone you have worshipped so profusely that causes your brain to stop functioning properly.

Last night, my friend Claire felt the whammy head on. Visiting New York for only the second time in her life, I took this Kentucky girl to the IFC Center in New York to see 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (more on that film later). As we were waiting on line for that film, out walks the attendees of the New York premiere of 21—including Jim Sturgess and Kate Bosworth. Claire, who was a big fan of Across the Universe, didn't know what to do. She first took out her camera and dropped her battery, then stared at him with enormous eyes. Sturgess, who's presumably new to having adoring fangirls, initiated the conversation, shaking her hand and she introduced herself. Despite watching a deeply affecting, depressing Romanian movie about abortion, all Claire could talk about afterwards was that she had not been in New York for 12 hours and she was already meeting movie stars.

If I am going to make it as a journalist, I have to get over the whammy, at least to some extent. I always have good questions going into an interview, and I'm usually very knowledgeable about the subject. Too often when I go into an interview, I have a good question hidden beneath mumbling, stuttering, and incoherency. This may not be an issue as much with up-and-coming music acts, but it has been with the likes of Ellen Page, Richard Linklater, and Martin McDonagh. I don't know how I'm going to quite be able to overcome the whammy, but it will certainly take at least a few years and lots more experience to accomplish. Though part of me doubts I'll ever be able to overcome it.

Say it ain't so: Did I just accidentally join a cult?

I joined the group Theater Tribe thinking it was simply a collection of theater bloggers around the world. I may not have realized what I was getting myself into. I began to get suspicious when I heard of them promoting their "values." At first I just thought it was the value of promoting theater, but I may have been wrong. Turns out Theater Tribe is almost entirely the creation of Scott Walker of UNC-Asheville who has five sets of values he wants to promote for theater (among them are taking the emphasis away from major cities and to produce more of a collective control. I would like better regional theater, of course, but I still think it's worth it to have a few centralized locations to aim for in the theater world - by that standard, should the film world abolish Hollywood?

Perhaps more discouraging is the emphasis on Daniel Quinn's book beyond civilization. Daniel Quinn authored the Ishmael Trilogy which I have neither read nor heard of until a few days ago. The first Ishmael book was behind the movie Instinct, a movie that, coincidentally came out within a year of Battlefield Earth. And while there are multiple "Ishmael Community" and "Friends of Ishmael" websites, there's a surprising lack of secondary sources, but lots of absolute, seemingly manufactured praise, which is leaving me even more suspicious. It doesn't help that their websites compares themselves to the Ayn Rand Society, and that Wikpedia tells me that Daniel Quinn has been taken up by the "simplicity movement, the anarchist and the Anarcho-primitivism movement." So before I abolish my associations with the Theater Tribe, please tell me: do I have to promote the "Ideas " (capitalization scares me!) to be a member of the group, or can I just discuss theater with a series of serious and diverse thinkers about the subject, not those united under a single set of beliefs. Frankly,I'm reluctant to stay a part of the group even if members tell me I don't have to agree, but just to stop by, which is exactly what the Jehovah's Witnesses tell you. Because if that's the case, to quote Woody Allen via Groucho Marx via Freud, "I wouldn't want to be a member of any club that would have me as a member."

Feedburner now available

So after some minor computer and server surgery, we now have a working RSS feed of the site in a much more digestible Feedburner link. I'll add a link in the sidebar to the RSS feed as soon as we're done, but you can always click the feed logo in the navigation toolbar. An Atom feed from feedburner is also available. Hope this makes subscribing easier.

Not a bad gig after graduation for Nathan Jackson

Perhaps most depressing to me, shortly after realizing that I had fewer weeks left in college than current Chicago first years have academic quarters, was realizing that no matter what job I get after graduating, it will almost certainly not compare to that of Nathan Jackson. Straight out of the Julliard, Jackson is getting his new play, Broke-ology, added to the lineup of the 2008 Williamstown Theatre Festival. The Nikos stage is designed for new plays, but most playwrights have to at least wait a few years to get a production that big. The play is getting a smaller production at the 2008 Breaking Ground Festival, run by the Huntington Theatre in Boston, which is where Williamstown artistic director Nicholas Martin is coming from. I'm not doubting that the play is worthy of the slot, but it is important to note how ridiculously good an opportunity this is for Mr. Jackson, and how extremely jealous every other recently-graduated aspiring playwright should be (as an aspiring critic, my jealousy is separate, but related).

Is It Better to Be Challenged than to Be Entertained?: Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman Theater versus Funny Games

Yesterday I performed a sort of Brechtian exercise, the cultural equivalent of traveling from the beaches of southern France to a concentration camp. After seeing The Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman, a pleasant if rather bland play, I went to see one of the more jarring American movies of the past 3 years, Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Those who know me shouldn't be too surprised that I found the latter experience more worthwhile.

The Trip to Bountiful can be seen as pretty much the polar opposite of the Goodman's King Lear of a couple of years ago, a production that incidentally had a lot in common with Funny Games. While that King Lear was a challenging, thoroughly draining experience that no doubt angered some of the Goodman's more conservative subscribers, The Trip to Bountiful, as part of the Goodman's year-long Horton Foote series, is a much safer, accessible work for the blue-haired, Tuesdays with Morrie-reading crowd, with just enough literary significance to satisfy the culture vultures. Foote is something of a southern answer to Neil Simon, a populist playwright who is delicate enough to gain minor dramatic significance with a much more significant dent at the box office. Foote's relationship to Simon can be seen as a sort of parallel to Tennessee Williams' relationship to Arthur Miller.

That makes him ideal for a season-long series at one of the more prominent theater companies in the Midwest, but it also results in a less challenging show than we've seen from the Goodman of late. It doesn't help that The Trip to Bountiful, even as one of Foote's more recognized plays, is rather dull and dated (I also made the mistake of seeing it in a Saturday matinee, complete with elderly who don't seem to realize that you have to be quiet when actors are speaking). It's a play about an old lady rediscovering her country roots while escaping from the hustle and bustle of city life, a theme that was perhaps less played out in 1953 than in 2008. With a few notable exceptions (Lois Smith as the lead Carrie Watts has truly made the role her own), the performances are rather lackluster as well. The only other standout element of the show, David Cosler's excellent set design, is marred by transitions that tended to be extremely awkward. It's not a particularly bad show, it's just rather insubstantial, and it unfortunately casts doubt onto whether Foote needed a season-long tribute.

The audience interested in Bountiful is the opposite of those who would be interested in Funny Games, a shot-for-shot remake of Michael Haneke's 1997 film by the director himself, this time with a fully Americanized production. I have not seen the original, but based on chronology alone, the critique of American film violence poised by Funny Games has only become more relevant with the rise of the Saw/Hostel-style torture porn. Few films intrigued me more going into early 2008, and the initial critical response, as expected, was strongly divided. Few disagreed on the film's intentions, an exercise in draining all the entertainment from film violence and putting the onus directly on the audience as to whether to make it through the whole film. What has been heavily debated is whether the film successfully executes its premise, or whether it engages in the kind of sadism it intends to criticize.

Based on some of the negative reviews I read, I expected a lot more gore and violence than was actually in the film. Most of the violence is off-screen, and while there's certainly blood, stabbings and gunshots, there's no moments where the violence itself actually makes you cringe. While the film is certainly sadistic, I find the lack of gore to be the main reason why the sadism works for its intended purposes. It doesn't let violence be a thrill on its own, and focuses mainly on the repercussions of violence. The film is about 60% of Tim Roth, Naomi Watts, and Devon Gearhart crying and desperately, pathetically trying to find a way out of the situation. And unlike in Saw and Hostel, the film makes no argument for such a thing being entertaining. In the end, we're not rooting for the family to live, as Michael Pitt's torturous Paul poses to the audience early on, but we're rooting for them to die, quickly and painlessly, so we can get out of the theater and get as far away from this film as possible.

A key addition to this version of the film is an extension of the critique to our casual love of cinematic sexuality. There's a particularly disturbing seen in which Naomi Watts has to strip in front of her torturers, and she spends a significant portion of the film in her panties. In terms of performances, no one acts trauma quite like Watts (Estelle Parsons' Oscar-winning turn in Bonnie and Clyde seems childish by comparison), and Tim Roth, while somewhat underutilized, still performs excellently as the sad-sack "pussy husband."

I'm not surprised at all that the film has been a box office failure so far, and I'd actually be quite concerned if it was a hit. But by making American film audiences address their love of violence in a form as distorted as Funny Games, Haneke has without a doubt created the most important film so far in 2008, a film that's essential viewing for anyone with a stance on modern film violence, pro or con.

Relevant Links:
-For an excellent article on Naomi Watt's take on Funny Games, here's an interview with the London Times
-Pat Graham at the Reader's movie blog makes an excellent, and dead-on comparison between Funny Games and No Country For Old Men, arguing that Funny Games has the same idea as No Country taken to its natural extreme.

Purgmantonionitorio - Never Has Death Been This Hilarious

So this is pretty much the funniest thing Ive seen all day. An article fro August imagining Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni meeting in Purgatory. Kudos to my friend iend Anya over at for sending me the link.

Theater nerdery delayed by sports nerdery

My theater plans have been put on hold doe at least one night by the NCAA tourney, which in my mind is the one true day of sports mania that matters anymore in the U.S. (though I must say the most recent Super Bowl restored my faith in that event). There aren't many significant games to keep me from going out to the stage tomorrow night (hoping to get student rush tickets to Trip to Bountiful at the Goodman), but, tonight features Kansas State vs. USC, also known as Michael Beasley vs. O.J. Mayo. So um, yeah, theater's going to have to wait.

I'll be working (or avoiding work during the game), but to make it up to my artistic side, I'll try to finish the Osborne biography after that game's over.

Tynan's Anger gets welcomed to the (non-ethnic) Tribe

Kudos to The Angry White Guy in Chicago for linking me to the Theatre Tribe, an international collection of theater blogs from just about every perspective imaginable. I hope this blog will be able to contribute to the larger network in the future. The more online discussion of theater, the better.

This site kinda went under intensive surgery during the afternoon, causing its heart to stop briefly. It should be working without a hitch now, with the notable improvement of have the permalinks of each post linked in the post title. I'll work on fine tuning it some more once I get slightly more web design competent.

I've seen no better New Yorker cartoon related to me ever

Mark Cuban: A self-hating blogger?

Mark Cuban's been attracting a lot of controversy in the blogosphere for his recent explanation for why he doesn't allow bloggers into the Dallas Mavericks locker room. The main thrust of his argument is that if he were to be fair to all bloggers, he'd have to let in the working in their mother's basement bloggers as well as the more mainstream ones. He is also fiercely critical of newspapers starting blogs of their own, saying it's killing their brand. Of course there have been dozens of rants on bloggers by prominent media members in the past. The main reason his argument has been so divisive, in my mind, is that it's an anti-blog column in the form of a blog post, and it's by one of the more prominent thinkers of new media in America, for better or for worse. Kim Voyner at Cinematical (full disclosure: I use to work for AOL) has an excellent if ambivalent response.

Cuban is something of a mystery to me, both as a sports fan, a movie fan, and a thinker about new media in general. At times, he can be one of the most brilliant prognosticators on media around; he saw the Viacom lawsuit against YouTube coming before anyone else did. At other times, he can be a five year old, as his reaction to Will Leitch's interview with him was straight out of grade school. In my mind, new media is increasingly gaining a more prominent role in our society, and that eventually, everyone's going to have to deal with it. At the same time, old media is still more dominant than it gets credit for, and there are legitimately a ton of exceedingly idiotic bloggers out there. The main problem is that the whole idea of community, reader-created media has never really existed to the current extent, and no one, no matter how smart, really knows how to deal with it. I'm reserving judgment on whether Cuban's argument here is right or wrong until 10 years from now, though my instinct is bloggers will have to be reckoned with at least in some capacity.

My goals for Spring Break

-Finally finish the John Osborne biography, and get cracking on the David Mamet biography as well
-Rewatch August: Osage County with one of my best friends Claire in hopes of it giving her a life altering experience, as will The King of Kong
-Hopefully get a chance to see The Seagull, despiting a scheduling mishap on my end and a tepid review from Ben Brantley
-See at least one more play in New York
-Watch a Woody Allen movie I haven't seen yet
-Get started watching the John Adams HBO miniseries (starring personal hero Paul Giamatti) on Demand
-Watch the original Funny Games
-Watch one of the movies recommended in the Osborne biography

How important is David Mamet anyway?

I suppose I should address David Mamet's diatribe in The Village Voice on his newfound aversion to the left wing. He is, after all, arguably the most influential American playwright of the last 25 years, and I'd argue that an introduction to his work is bound to fuck up the styling of most young playwrights for at least a few years (Oleanna pretty much permanently castigated me to critical aspirations). Still, I feel immensely unqualified to write about it, as I did not see Boston Marriage, Romance, or November. I would feel worse about this, if I didn't hear such nearly universally terrible things about the former two. The latter play had all the indications of closing the store on Mamet's career, but I think I was not the only one surprised when it got a glowing review from John Lahr and did exceptionally well at the box office (perhaps the result, as Ben Brantley put it, of being a "David Mamet play for people who don't like David Mamet.") But because I haven't seen these plays, I'll focus more on the politics and past cases of lefty playwrights gone right.

Mamet's long had indications of his right-wing leanings, even in his earliest work, which had a frank honesty towards the brutality of dog-eat-dog capitalism, be it real estate (Glengarry Glen Ross) or Hollywood (Speed-the-Plow). He also fiercely criticized political correctness in my personal favorite of his, the aforementioned Oleanna. Even when his plays were scathing critiques of the culture of capitalism, there was a sort of acceptance of capitalism's logic behind it all. The biggest indication of late, of course, has been his right-wing Israel book The Wicked Son and his rant on Hollywood in Bambi vs. Godzila. He hasn't just been a contrarian, he's been an outright reactionary. It's arguably what we've loved most about him. Now we just have direct evidence of the fact.

Michael Billington raises the absolutely worthy consideration that his dogmatic conservatism may be making him a worse playwright, as he loses the moral nuance that characterized his earlier work. He cites Kingsley Amis and John Osborne as playwrights who suffered after there newfound conservatism. As an Osborne devotee, I must raise a red flag here, because as John Heilpern pointed out in his recent biography, Osborne was always more contrarian than conservative, and he certainly never had a political mantra as direct as what Mamet has provided here. So, I guess to sum up, I'm dissappointed by Mamet, though not particularly surprised, and I don't particularly expect all that much from his later career. It was nice while it lasted.

The Umpteenth Article on America's lack of political theater

You know when even The Daily Show is making fun of critics declaring the death of American political theater, the epidemic is getting out of hand. The last greatly exaggerated report of political theater's demise comes from John Longenbaugh of the Seattle Weekly, who sees the premiere of two plays from the Uzkbek (or as Borat calls it, asshole) playwright Mark Weil as an excuse for a diatribe on America's lack of political theater. He makes sure to convince people that America has no political theater by presenting ACT's director Kurt Beattle's assurance that the Uzbek plays make "no calls for workers to throw off their chains, or even the sort of superbly detailed study of politics the company gave us last season with David Hare's Stuff Happens." In other news, Longenbaugh is teaching a class in rhetoric at the University of Washington.

The most ridiculous part of the argument is the claim that "Even in its heyday in the 1930s, when playwrights like Elmer Rice, Lillian Hellman, and Clifford Odets dominated the stage, plays focused more on social criticism than full-throated cries for social change." I guess this means the cast of the Group Theatre was not yelling "STRIKE! STRIKE STRIKE!" loud enough for Longenbaugh's taste at the premiere of Waiting for Lefty. Maybe this post-Katrina take at the Cripple Creek Theatre Co. in New Orleans is full-throated enough. I also guess this means that full-throated cries for social change are more important than, y'know, actually having human characters and a coherent plot. All these years my priorities have been way off.

Seriously, though, America's lack of political theater has served the same role in the theater press that the steroids debate has in the sports press: it's an enormous, glaring concern for the press, but few other people actually care. It's a completely artificial concern, and people come up with the most ridiculous methods of criticizing it. I hate the Bush administration as much as anyone, but I have better outlets for that concern than in articles about the course of American drama. As much as I love Brecht, I'd rather just let theater be theater.

The inevitable Elliot Spitzer-"Revolution 9" mashup

I was dissapointed with the interwebs this week. The downfall of my home state's governor, the only promising-looking figure of the New York Democratic Party for quite some time, introduced the name "Client Number 9" to the masses. Yet, no one did ahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif sufficient job making the first, obvious mashup that came into my head: Clips of Spitzer and The Beatles Revolution 9. Some dolt even though "Piggies" would be the proper mashup track from The White Album. That's where I had to take initiative. Here's the result:



This won't get me a job, for sure, but someone had to do it.

The Holocaust film stands on its head

If you're as sick as Holocaust films as I am (I was raised to regard Schindler's List as Disney Does the Holocaust), you owe it to yourself to see the Counterfeiters. It's the only Holocaust film I can think of that completely inverts the traditional structure, with a tough, no-bullshit Russian Jew subtly manipulating the S.S. to keep him and his fellow prisoners alive. There are so many ways this could have been fucked up, but director Stefan Ruzowitzky helms the film brilliantly. Who would have thought that arguably the most mature Holocaust film ever made would come from Austria? Ruzowitzky has an excellent article in The Guardian addressing the larger political implications of the film in his native Austria, as well as how he expects it to be received in the U.S. and U.K. So far the reception has generally been good, but not good enough in my mind.

Coming around on Pinter

So after years of loudly and obnoxiously bashing Harold Pinter to anyone who cared (or to people who didn't) I'm finally starting to see the error of my ways. University Theater here at the U of C did a fantastic rendition of The Homecoming, convincing enough that I'm tempted to see it again on Broadway. My bias towards Pinter largely comes from my father (if you've ever seen The Squid and the Whale, a lot of my opinions come from the same vein as arguing that A Tale of Two Cities is minor Dickens), and the fact that my the first Pinter play I ever saw was his first, The Room, which, while mirroring the chronology of the theater world's introduction to Pinter, is not exactly an easy introduction to a playwright for a 17 year old.

Probably another factor was that I was exposed to David Mamet at roughly the same time as Pinter. While both playwrights tend to use dialog as a weapon, Mamet is much more grounded in reality and easier to digest, and hence I naturally felt the assert Mamet's superiority in the theater of menace. Now, of course, with four years of college in me, I can come up with more sources of comparison. I see the parallels to Beckett, Ionesco, and the Angry Young Man movement. I see more apt American parallels than Mamet, such as Edward Albee and Sam Shepard (Buried Child, in my mind, is Pinter with a Midwestern accent). I can even see parallels with the more comical but still emotionally jarring playwrights like Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. I still think Philip Roth deserves a Nobel Prize more, but I am less inclined to dismiss Pinter's Noble Prize outright. I also now really want to see Sleuth, and am frustrated that I don't have it On Demand in my apartment.

The Guardian Loves My Name

During my perpetual self-googling (no I have NOT seen this play), I have apparently gotten recognition from the Guardian's Noises Off Blog. Kelly Nestruck at the Guardian recognized the aptness of being in theater and having the name Stanislawski, and provided free publicity for this blog. He blogs at fence.blogspot.com, so I thought I'd return the publicity favor. Seriously, my last name is turning into the gift that keeps on giving.