Tynan's Anger

Image via WikipediaToday, I wake up mad and with a chip on my shoulder, feeling bitter towards all of theater criticism, and thinking that New York critics are even more thinned-skinned than the artists they mock for being ultra-sensitive. I realize that I liked the Broadway revival of American Buffalo more than most people. I may have overlooked its shortcomings in my review, I admit, but that's only because I thought the play's social timeliness and display of Mamet's greatness was more important than any of the lackluster elements in the production itself. Furtermore, those shortcomings not nearly as egregious as Ben Brantley and others made it out to be. Rooney's review at least I could relate to, but when I read Brantley's review, I felt like I had simply seen a different show than him. It turns out, Brantley and the lot of New York critics may have let a botched press reception cloud their judgment—and as a result, American Buffalo is closing way too soon.

The New York Observer told the story of a lunch reception last Friday meant for critics was canceled without critics being warned. The lunch had been put together haphazardly; I received an email at the last minute, and couldn't make it anyway. But if that wasn't enough, the opening night reception was closed to critics. Except that it wasn't, and the publicists gave mixed signals:

"This is fucking moronic on their part! They don't have the right to ban anyone. I would have invited you. It wasn't closed because Michael Musto was there," Mr. Kornberg said, referring to the Village Voice gossip columnist. "Would you please forward me that email right away, so I can show it to a producer that is holding on the other line. I can't wait to show these people!"

So yes, there were multiple publicity screw-ups with this production. That's a mark against the publicity team. Fine. But my question is: is that the fault of the production itself? Should the actors and directors be punished by critics who are pissed off by how they were treated by publicists the production team had nothing to do with? More to the point, should audiences be punished by receiving false information about a show they may enjoy without having to deal with any publicity confusions?

If you read Brantley's review with the idea that his feeling may have been hurt, the review seems especially pouty, drama queen-ish and retortive. It would be one thing if Brantley was slighted by an egregiously awful production. But while this production may not have been perfect, it was not, by any normal standards of a flop, as bad as that review indicated.

The publicity team for a show has nothing to do with the show's audience and everything to do with its critical reception. This is another area where the showgoing experience is fundamentally different between audience and critic. But if critics did their jobs, they would look past incompetent publicity and give the production a review while their critical judgment was not compromised by how much (or how little) publicists pampered aided them.

What were the major complaints? It didn't establish a proper father-son dynamic? John Leguizamo wasn't vicious enough? Fine, those are legitimate complaints, but they don't make an epic failure of a flop in my mind. Furthermore, as even the pans were willing to point out, Buffalo is a much better play than Speed-the-Plow. Speed-the-Plow, need I remind you, didn't get the universal glowing reviews everyone liked to claim it received after Buffalo came out—that is if you read someone other than Brantley. So how much did critics hate on this production simply because they weren't invited to the cool kids' party? Unfortunately, we won't have enough time for the play to build an audience to know—an outcome no doubt influenced by Brantley's irrational slamming. Thanks, New York.

Related articles by Zemanta

• American Buffalo Goes Extinct on Broadway
• Arts, Briefly: Return of the 'Buffalo'
• Theater Review | 'American Buffalo': A Junk Shop Breeding Best-Laid Plans

Labels: american buffalo, ben brantley, broadway, david mamet, drama queenery, public relations, theater criticism

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.

Labels: ben brantley, david mamet, john heilpern, john lahr, john osborne, kingsley amis, michael billington, november, politics

Allison Krogan at The Guardian poses a question that's trickier than it initially seems: what is the difference, from a semantic standpoint, between "theater" and "drama"? She uses an interesting quote by Edward Bond to launch the debate:

"I went back to see it after it had been playing for a week and the actors were doing it as if it were Tom Stoppard. They were doing 'theatre'. But drama is not 'theatre'."

Her thesis, which I'm inclined to agree with, is that "the implication usually is that, while "theatre" is a vacuous, commercial or essentially trivial enterprise, Drama transcends theatre's vulgar origins and leaps into Art." One would be hard pressed to find someone who would call The Little Mermaid "drama (Ben Brantley certainly wouldn't), but it's certainly theater. I'd also add that unlike, theater, which usually implies "performance," "drama" is a text-based term, as if it could be a category along with novels and poetry. Krogan's use of Eugene O'Neill here is a particularly good example, although for the wrong reasons. O'Neill was a dramatist first and a playwright second. Of course, as many have argued, that made his plays much more forceful when read than when performed.

Now that I'm taking W.J.T. Mitchell's Theories of Media class, these kind of discussions interest me a lot more.

Labels: ben brantley, edward bond, eugene o'neill, the guardian, the little mermaid, theater vs. drama