Woody Allen’s Recent Movies

by Kirk Woodward

[Like George Bernard Shaw and the Beatles (did you ever figure those two names would appear together in the same sentence?), filmmaker Woody Allen is a subject of some interest to Kirk Woodward, my friend of many years who’s been a prolific contributor to ROT.  Kirk’s last two posts on this blog have been about the great Irish writer (“Re-Reading Shaw,” 3 and 18 July, 8 and 23 August, and 2 September) and the Fab Four (“Now, Live, The Non-Beatles,” 27 September), and now Kirk returns with an article about reviewers (another favorite topic—he wrote a whole book about reviewing) and Allen’s latest films.  (Kirk also wrote about Allen before on ROT: he posted an article about “Bullets Over Bullets Over Broadway” on 29 August 2014.)  As in both “Re-Reading Shaw” and “Now, Live,” Kirk writes about his own take on things, based on his experience and observation.  And as with the recent past posts, you may disagree with some of what Kirk says in “Woody Allen’s Recent Movies,” but once again, I maintain that his thoughtfulness and perspicacity make his opinions and conclusions worth considering—even if you’re not a particular fan of Allen’s filmmaking.]                                                                                         

Woody Allen (b. 1935) famously does not believe in God or an afterlife. I hope he’s wrong, if only because I want him to be able to enjoy the critical praise his films are due, and I’m afraid he’s going have to wait until he joins the choir invisible for that to happen.

Many people, in the arts and in other fields, are taken for granted until they’ve passed on, at which point they are idolized. That’s likely to be the case with Allen. All his work – all 1100 or so hours of it – will (I’m guessing) then be issued in one collection, probably on some digital device the size of a toenail clipping, and films that are now essentially disregarded will be considered important for their imagination and creativity.

By my count, Woody Allen has been involved in some seventy-three films to date. He has written around fifty of them, directed forty-nine, and acted in some fifty-five. Obviously there is a lot of overlap here – I count thirty-eight films for which he was the (or in a few cases “a”) writer, director, and actor. (As best I can tell, I’ve seen about half of the total seventy-three.)

I’m not saying that Allen has been ignored, because obviously that’s not the case. He is the subject of a shelf of analytical books, mostly admiring. He is enormously respected in the film-making community, and actors say they consider it a career highlight to be in a Woody Allen film.

But the reviewers . . . ah, that’s a different story. Reviewers often write, so to speak, with their eyes on the rear-view mirror. In Allen’s case, they frequently don’t really review his current film, they review his past career.

A. O. Scott’s review in The New York Times (14 July 2016) of Allen’s most recent film, Café Society (2016), is a typical example. Even the headline for the review – likely not written by Scott, of course – reads, “‘Café Society Isn’t Woody Allen’s Worst Movie” – a reference to Allen’s career right there – and Scott goes on to describe the film as “neither an example of bad, late Woody Allen nor much in the way of return to form.”

Wendy Ide in The Guardian (4 September 2016) writes, “It’s not in the same league as Allen’s finest work, but neither is it a honking misfire like Magic in the Moonlight.” Adam Graham in the Detroit News (29 July 2016) says “. . . it doesn’t reach the heights of Woody’s best . . . .” Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post (21 July 2016) says, “With each succeeding year, Allen’s insular version of the past feels more eccentric.” Examples can be multiplied.

To my mind this is both this strikes me as both a lazy and an offensive approach for a reviewer to take. I say “offensive” because it patronizes an artist who has made significant contributions to film, to comedy, and for that matter to culture. I say “lazy” because what I would describe as a ho-hum attitude of superiority is an easy one for a reviewer to assume – unearned, but easy.

I maintain that a reviewer’s responsibility is to confront the work at hand. I want to know, as if I had never seen another movie, what this one has to offer. Only by approaching a piece of art that way, it seems to me, is a reviewer able to see and describe what might be new, significant, or even revelatory about a particular film.

The career-evaluation approach to reviewing strikes me as one step removed from the gossip columnists’ – “Old Woody isn’t the filmmaker he used to be.” What does that have to do with the movie at hand? But comparing past and present movies is an easy game. It’s also a bad habit.

No one’s art is the same today as it was yesterday. To take another example, Bob Dylan isn’t writing “Blowing In the Wind” any more. Why should he? He wrote it years ago. What’s he writing now? What does it have to offer? Is it valuable or not? Talk about what someone has done, and you won’t have to talk about what they’re doing.

As a result, a great deal of worthwhile work is overlooked. I would argue for the merits of a number of films by Woody Allen that are generally ignored – for example, from his middle period, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Small Town Crooks (2000), The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001), and Hollywood Ending (2002).

None of these are remembered as “Woody Allen classics,” and some were panned and/or did badly at the box office. All of them, I submit, would have been considered delightful work if they were not looked at as “Woody Allen films.” Under that burden they could not be “seen” for themselves.

Obviously I am expressing my own highly debatable opinions, but another point can be objectively demonstrated. There is no such thing as a “typical Woody Allen film” because his films are significantly different from each other. They are structured differently, they use different narrative devices, they have widely different kinds of characters.

Certainly elements recur. It would be remarkable if they did not, since one person, Allen, is their prime creator. (Recurring elements appear in Shakespeare’s plays too.) But Allen works hard to differentiate his films. He finds inspiration in numerous sources, and he uses a variety of narrative structures.

I would like to demonstrate this point by looking at five recent films that Allen has written and directed, and in some cases appeared in.

SPOILER ALERT: In order to discuss the various twists of these movies, I have to at least hint at some important – sometimes crucial – plot elements. If you haven’t seen Magic in the Moonlight and Irrational Man in particular, stay away from the following.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS (2011)

This delightful film was both a critical and a popular success; it won an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, and earned the most money among Woody Allen’s recent films. The narrative hook in this film is . . .

I TOLD YOU THERE’D BE SPOILERS! THERE’LL BE OTHERS! YOU’VE BEEN WARNED!

. . . time travel. Owen Wilson plays a writer in modern-day Paris whose favorite time period is the 1920’s. Having problems both with his fiancée and with the novel he’s trying to write, he finds himself traveling, each midnight, into the Paris of that era, where Hemingway challenges him to box, Gertrude Stein reads and evaluates his novel, and Surrealistic painter Salvador Dali visualizes him as a rhinoceros. From a narrative point of view, perhaps the most interesting twist is that a detective, hired to shadow the writer, gets himself stuck in an even earlier time period, and can’t get out.

TO ROME WITH LOVE (2012)

I enjoyed this film almost as much as I enjoyed Midnight in Paris, which is saying something, but the two are radically different. The mood of Midnight is romantic and serene; the mood of Rome is boisterous. A narrator introduces and closes the film (there is no narrator in Midnight). The film intertwines four separate stories told in differing comic styles; it crosscuts between the stories, but presents them in different time frames: for example, one may take a day, another one a number of days.

·         A not terribly successful opera director (played by Woody Allen) discovers a “natural talent,” a tenor who, unfortunately, can only sing when he’s in the shower.

·         An American woman and her husband, inadvertently separated, each become involved in potentially compromising farce situations..

·         Leopoldo, a staggeringly average Italian man, finds that for no apparent reason he has become a celebrity, with his every move, including what he had for breakfast, captured by the army of reporters following him.

·         Jack, an architecture student, meets John, a successful older architect, who accompanies Jack – visibly or invisibly, in fact or in imagination – as he tries to sort out his love life.

Together these four storylines form a sort of seminar on the possibilities of light comedy. The story of Leopoldo is particularly brilliant, in our age, when people frequently become celebrities for odd reasons (“reality” TV shows) or even for no reasons at all.

MAGIC IN THE MOONLIGHT (2014)

In this film, and the next, Woody Allen plays with familiar metaphysical themes – God, death, a meaningful universe. The center of this plot is literally magic: two magicians try to determine whether or not a medium really has supernatural gifts or not. More than that: the plot is literally an elaborate magic trick. I can’t say any more, in order not to spoil the fun for anyone who wants to see the movie, and I hope you will, but I don’t know any other plot that works like this, and it’s a brilliant idea. Some reviewers said the dialogue was uninspired. I suppose they mean that it doesn’t have a lot of gags in it – not that those would be appropriate for the movie, which is deliberately a period piece. A. O. Scott, in his review (24 July 2014), wrote, “Mr. Allen has had his ups and downs over the years.” Need I say more on that subject?

IRRATIONAL MAN (2015)

Irrational Man is a suspense film with a sort of Hitchcock construction to it, as a woman (Emma Stone) becomes increasingly aware that her philosophy professor, testing the idea that a universe without God is meaningless and therefore that every action is equally absurd, has committed a murder, and is likely to have to commit another one – hers. The climax of the action is brilliantly staged – it happens in the blink of an eye, and calls into question much that has previously happened in the film. Reviewers tended to say that the film was dull, which I don’t understand.

CAFÉ SOCIETY (2016)

Unlike the movies discussed above, Café Society is a thoroughly, almost novelistically narrated film, which allows Allen to skip a great deal of exposition for the large number of characters, and move quickly to their central dilemmas. The love triangle between young Bobby, eager to get out of Brooklyn; his uncle Phil, a major movie agent in Los Angeles; and Vonnie, Phil’s secretary, is a strong story in itself – and the way the characters find out what’s happening is skillfully presented – but the story also allows Allen to demonstrate without preaching that “café society” – the life of the comfortably rich – is not life’s ultimate satisfaction. The bittersweet ending embodies this theme: just because a person has everything, doesn’t mean they have everything.

Even a cursory survey of the five movies shows how different they are from each other. There simply is no sense – even if it were good practice – to view these films as basically one long movie directed by Woody Allen. I can’t think of any equally prolific artist who has produced so many works of such variety. Certainly Allen’s films contain themes, motifs, and even plot elements that can be tracked from one movie to another – as is likely to be the case with any artist over a long career. (I cited Shakespeare as an example; I could also cite Eugene O’Neill.) It seems pointless to stop there, and not look at the way Allen handles his material this time.

A review, I maintain, should consider and reflect the work being looked at – not at something else. Criticism, as opposed to reviewing, can take a broader view, and a critical look at an artist’s entire career may be legitimate for a critic. Reviewing has a different focus. It reports on the work at hand.

I could be belligerent and ask what the reviewers’ outstanding contributions to art that allow them to patronize, say, Woody Allen might be. They might properly reply that their contributions are in the field of reviewing, and that a reviewer is an artist too. I agree, and I have no right to look down my nose at their accomplishments. I see much to applaud in various reviews, looked at one at a time. I just want reviewers to review Allen’s movies according to the nature of each one – not as mere signposts in a career. That, I submit, is the heart of the artistry of a reviewer.

[Kirk’s book about reviewing I mentioned in my introduction, for the curious ROTter, is The Art of Writing Reviews (Merry Press/Lulu, 2009), available to order or download at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272; potential readers can also access this site through Spiceplays, Kirk’s own webpage, http://spiceplays.com/id7.html.  I also wrote a four-part commentary on Kirk’s book which I posted on ROT: “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward,” 4, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009.

[When the reviews of Café Society came out last July, I thought I spotted a similarity between the film’s plot and the plot of a Woody Allen play I’d seen Off-Broadway back in 2004, A Second Hand Memory.  I mentioned this to Kirk and he did a search to see if anyone else found the same connection.  Turned out, someone did: Don Steinberg in the Wall Street Journal of 8 July commented on the plot similarity and the blog The Woody Allen Pages remarked on the WSJ’s mention in “New Café Society Interviews Discuss Production And New York” on 7 July.  On 1 September 2014, I posted my 2004 report on Second Hand Memory on ROT.] 

Lady Gaga: Artist For Our Time

By Kirk Woodward

[Once again, I’m presenting an article from frequent guest-blogger Kirk Woodward. His last contributions were a discussion of theatrical music versus pop songs (“Theatrical and Popular Songs,” 2 October) followed by a consideration of pop songs in the context of a jukebox musical (“The Jukebox Musical,” 7 October). In that last article, Kirk raised the possibility that the songs of Lady Gaga might be in line for a successful treatment on the musical theater stage. Now Kirk returns to ROT with an interesting profile of Lady Gaga and her music (and considerable other talents and skills) and we can glean some of the reasons Kirk thinks her songs might work on the theatrical stage. I think you’ll find, as I did, that the exploration comes at its subject from a unusual angle as well. ~Rick]

One has to feel sorry for today’s critics and reviewers, faced with a dilemma that I reported in my book The Art of Writing Reviews (available at lulu.com). If you don’t mind, I will quote myself:

The fact is that the boundaries between art forms aren’t rigidly fixed, the way they (maybe) used to be. The visual arts, dance, poetry, all draw on each other. Conceptual art closely resembles theater. Poetry slams, those raucous celebrations of verse, resemble both theater and musical concerts.

The blurring of boundaries can confuse a reviewer. Earlier generations assumed that there were basic principles that applied to any art work of a particular genre. Is that still true? Are there any landmarks, any touchstones that the reviewer can rely on?

But then, should there be? Common sense says that the more you know about an art form, the better a reviewer you’ll be, but consider this: All education about art is looking backwards. It has to be – up ahead, in the future, there’s nothing to see. Learning the elements of an art is learning what’s already been done.

What’s wrong with that? Don’t tradition and craft matter? They do, but the problem is that artists who aren’t repeating what has already been accomplished, are striking out into unknown territory. Their work may be vital and important. It may also be garbage. What it won’t be like – unless it’s mere imitation – is what’s gone before it.

A reviewer learns – at least one hopes so – the fundamentals of the art being reviewed, and then – yikes – the fundamentals begin to shift! History suggests that these shifts used to occur gradually. If there were any reviewers in the Middle Ages, it might have taken decades for them to notice that figures in paintings had begun to acquire new dimensionality that gave them the appearance of being fully rounded. Today equivalent kinds of changes occur practically overnight.

The rise of electronic communication methods in the Twentieth Century, and an expanding range of materials available for use in art, led to the rise of almost instantaneous communication methods across the Internet in the Twenty-First, and the resulting increase in capacity has led to an overwhelming need for novelty. The comment in the New Testament that the intellectuals of Greece “spent all their time discussing the latest new thing” (Acts 17:21) can be said of us as well, in spades, and not just concerning products like TV shows and video games. Wikipedia’s article on “Contemporary Art” includes a list over eighty art movements from the 1950’s on, including many unfamiliar to me, such as (I select at random):

Bay Area Figurative Movement
Fluxus
Arte Povera
Bad Painting
Land Art
Demoscene
Institutional Critique
New Leipzig School
Stuckism

I’m sure there’s an excellent article, not to say a thesis or book, in the development of so many art movements over such a short period of time, but I want to concentrate in this piece on two, conceptual art and performance art, because they have direct bearing on the subject of this article. Conceptual art declares that the idea is the most important part of the art work – indeed, the idea may be said to be the work of art itself. An example is Telepathic Piece by Robert Barry, who said that during his exhibit he would attempt to communicate to visitors, mind to mind, a series of thoughts that were not either images or words. (Try it.)

In effect, one creates conceptual art by (figuratively) putting quotation marks around an idea, an activity, or anything else – singling it out, and then identifying that very process as art. This approach has a natural tie-in with the more physicalized art movement called performance art, in which any interaction between the performer(s) and the audience can be identified – conceptually, so to speak – as an art piece.

Although there are no rules for performance art – who would make them? – there is an implied suggestion that performance art impinges on “real life,” that it sets itself up in an unusual or unexpected relationship to ordinary existence, so it probably has a higher degree of spontaneity than a theatrical event such as a play would have. There is also usually implicit in the idea of performance art the principle that the event is basically not repeatable – that each encounter between performer and audience is unique.

An interesting example of this concept is the very funny “Over the Moon” sequence in the musical Rent, in which one of the characters, wishing to protest a real estate scheme, stages a performance art piece. This scene is a part of Rent, a scripted musical, and as such really isn’t performance art – unless, I suppose, one conceptually makes it so – but instead is about performance art. One could claim, in theory, that including a performance art piece in a musical is a piece of conceptual art. This is where I begin to get dizzy.

The art movements we are discussing have been around a while now, and their pioneers have been joined by members from new generations. One of the most notable, not to say successful, one who has most been able to take advantage of the opportunities offered by conceptual and performance art, one who has in fact transformed her public self into a piece of performance art, is the artist who performs under the exuberant name of Lady Gaga.

It is not my intention to present either a full biography or a full critique of Gaga (as I will hereafter refer to her, presuming an intimacy that I haven’t got). However, elements of both history and evaluation are useful in order to get a picture of just what she’s doing as she makes the rounds of modern commerce, culture, and art, all at once.

Gaga is 25 years old. Born Stefani Germanotta and raised in New York City, she appears to be, as a person, what the singer Tony Bennett called in an article in The New Yorker (September 19, 2011) “a sweet little Italian-American girl.” She is also a notoriously hard worker (an acquaintance who was in school with her said he had never seen anyone with such a work ethic), and she has the gift of apparently being able to throw herself wholeheartedly into any activity, no matter how risky, no matter how it makes her look.

Twenty-five is not terribly old for an established artist, but Gaga has packed that short number of years with plenty of training and experience to equip her for the role of a premier performance artist in our time. Among her areas of accomplishment are:

PIANIST – this was her first artistic activity; she is classically trained and didn’t know anything about popular music until her early teens when her father gave her albums by the Beatles and Bruce Springsteen. She was if not a prodigy at least highly talented, knows the classical piano repertoire, and frequently plays piano (not classical music, though) in her appearances.

MUSICAL THEATER PERFORMER – she played lead roles in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Guys and Dolls in high school, and has said she is particularly proud of her performance as Adelaide in the latter. She was accepted in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, in the highly competitive musical theater program CAP21 (Collaborative Arts Project 21), where she stayed for three semesters. I'm unclear whether or not it was through musical theater training that she acquired the skills of a . . .

DANCER – in the current style of concert/show, pioneered by Gaga's role model Madonna, a singer is surrounded by a group of impossibly agile dancers. Gaga holds her own, moving with remarkable physical control. In any case, one gets the feeling that the restrictions of the musical theater may not have been congenial to her, because she left school to become a . . .

PERFORMANCE ARTIST – most notably, she teamed up with another, more experienced New York performer, Lady Starlight, appearing wherever possible in free form performance events, often including appearances as a . . .

SEXUAL PROVACATEUR – wearing as little as possible, partly because performance art is intended to shock, partly to draw attention and crowds. However, many who have worn a bikini have not succeeded in the arts. Gaga is also a remarkable . . .

SINGER – she has a vocal range of several octaves, and to my mind is particularly effective in her lower registers, but she can raise the roof with practically any note she hits, and there are plenty of those. She is marvelous in her recent duet with Tony Bennett on the Rodgers and Hart song "The Lady Is A Tramp." But she doesn't have to depend on singing other people's songs, because she is also a first-rate . . .

SONGWRITER – her first professional job in the recording industry was writing songs for others, including Brittany Spears. (A producer who heard her demonstrating songs she wrote for others signed her to a contract as a singer herself.) She has had three best-selling, award-winning studio albums. But music isn't all she does. To my mind she also is a remarkably gifted . . .

ACTOR – she hasn't made any films, although one assumes they may be in her future someday, and she hasn't been in a play or musical since college, but as a performance artist she has demonstrated impressive acting ability. In particular I'm thinking of her spooky characterization of Jo Calderone, a slouching, smoking little male street punk who claims to be her boyfriend and is almost frighteningly believable. This particular role, incidentally, is one of the few times one sees her "dress down," since she is a major . . .

FASHION PLATE – her extravagant, boisterous, sometimes revealing, always surprising clothes – costumes? – are famous, or, in the case of her "meat dress," infamous. She seldom wears the same outfit twice, as far as I can tell; she has said that she keeps an archive of them, and they should make a valuable addition to the Smithsonian some day, if it can find a wing big enough to hold them. But it's not just clothes that define her look. She is also a remarkable . . .

MODEL – she has a real "photographer's face," meaning that she is capable, using makeup, wigs, and so on, of a variety of looks ranging from the frightening to the stunningly gorgeous, with numerous stops in between. Coming up with so many looks on one's own could be daunting enough, but Gaga is also a formidable . . .

CREATOR OF SPECTACLE – video of her tours can be seen on the web. They include remarkable stagings of her songs, and astonishing performances of them by her. I am also told that she is an important . . .

VIDEO ARTIST – music videos are hardly my field of expertise, but a friend who has studied the field says that hers have revitalized it. Fortunately, Gaga has help and support in designing her costumes, shows, and videos, because she is a . . .

TEAM LEADER – she has gathered her creative friends and associates in a collective called the Haus of Gaga, consciously modeled on Andy Warhol's famous Factory, which serves as an inspiration and brain trust, ensuring that she doesn't have to depend only on herself for ideas (although, as she told Jimmy Kimmel on his television show, "I didn't get here by agreeing with everybody"). She is also a . . .

FAN FAVORITE – she calls her fans her "little monsters" and has a remarkable two-way relationship with them, often over the Internet – they suggest ideas for outfits, many of which she accepts, and she is known for her graciousness to them. And of course she is in fact – and, as we will see, this is not irrelevant – a . . .

PHILANTHROPIST – she puts in extensive time, effort, and money for causes she believes in, notably for relief in Japan after the earthquake, and she campaigns against bullying and for self-acceptance among people whose self-image is battered. And speaking of time and money, she is an astounding . . .

MARKETER – her art is located firmly in commerce, and she works the marketplace like few before her. The campaign to make a number one hit out of her sensational latest album, Born This Way, was exhaustive – she did everything but sell CDs door to door, and I'm not positive she didn't do that. I don't follow her on Twitter (or anywhere else), but it wouldn't amaze me to learn that she'd tweeted, "Met a nice couple on Elm St. Sold 3 copies."

I've undoubtedly missed several components of Gaga's background, and who knows what else she'll come up with in the future. My point is not that she has a remarkable range of skills, although she does, but that, at least at this moment in her career, she uses these skills at the service of her central skill, which is that of the performance artist. She conceptualizes the various public encounters in her life as artistic events, and arranges live, one-time performances (except for concert tours, of course, where the staged numbers, however novel, repeat themselves) within those events, which she herself acts out. These performances are full of surprises in content and presentation that startle and awaken the audience. She seldom does what one would expect. She is hard to anticipate.

The observation that Gaga is essentially a performance artist is not exactly unique to me. It is important to make, however, for the reasons I outlined at the beginning of this article – because boundaries within the arts are continually shifting, and because a reviewer's or critic's first task is to understand what the purpose of the artist is. Thinking of Gaga, for example, within the traditional boundaries of "a singer" or "a songwriter," although not wrong, misses the main thrust of what she's doing.

A performance artist's purpose is to refresh the world, at least the part of it that the artist is able to intrude on. Gaga ambitiously wants to accomplish the purpose of performance art on a large scale, and she has the tools for the task. She may decide to use them in some other way later, but at the moment that's what she's doing.

And seen in such a light, her philanthropic activities and in particular her championing of people who feel odd, marginalized, and bullied, fit a pattern that makes it clear what her performance art is about. Much contemporary music, including rock in many forms, shares a common theme: "Look at me – and accept me for what I am." Gaga is very much in this tradition. In the title song of her new album she sings:

I'm beautiful in my way,
Cause God makes no mistakes.
I'm on the right track, baby,
I was born this way.

Interestingly, while many rockers have made this point by taking what we might call the low roads of grunge, animal passion, and glumness, Gaga makes the same point through the high roads of fashion and art. (In my favorite performance of hers on YouTube, a literally foot-stomping rendition on the talk show The View of her song "You and I," she wears a black and white patterned dress suit, for heaven's sake, with matching hat, purse, and sunglasses, although to be fair her piano is wearing the same thing.) She bypasses many familiar ways of shocking the public; in particular, her more outré costumes may be revealing but they are less sexy than they are about sex, her position on drugs (which she says she once abused) is responsible, and she keeps her private life remarkably private.

Gaga is sometimes presented in the press as, basically, a sort of flake. "Flake" is what she is not. She is purposeful. There is a concept behind each costume she wears, each public appearance, each presentation of a song. She aims for a deliberate effect in everything. The effect doesn't always come off the way she intends – the meat dress overpowered whatever intention she had – but she always has a plan. (For the record, she related the meat dress to the right to fight for what one believes in, and for her opposition to the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy of the military.)

So, leaving Gaga aside for a moment, what kind of criticism is appropriate for conceptual and performance art? Criticism of conceptual art is difficult because the "art work" exists only as a process. Reviewing of performance art, as an extension of conceptual art, is difficult because ordinarily a reviewer singles out unpleasant elements of a work for negative criticism, but in performance art the uncomfortable is the point. If a piece of performance art isn't irritating, it probably hasn't done its job. We may say that performance art "pushes the envelope" or "challenges the boundaries" but it really does more than that – it reaches out into "real life" and disrupts it in some way.

There is always the possibility that a piece of conceptual art, with its cerebral nature, or performance art, with its ability to irritate and disrupt, may simply be poor work. Almost any stupid idea can be justified as conceptual art; almost any baffling performance can be justified as performance art, a claim that one could make, perhaps, for example, for the singing of Florence Foster Jenkins, "famous for her complete lack of rhythm, pitch, tone, and overall singing ability" (Wikipedia). Is something a lousy idea? Call it conceptual art. Is it a lousy performance? Call it performance art.

Even with conceptual or performance art, however, the principles of reviewing are always the same, and they are what sets criticism apart from merely having an opinion. A reviewer first needs to experience the work at hand for what it is – not for what the reviewer imagines, remembers, or wishes it were. In the process the reviewer tries to determine what the purpose of the work is, and then whether or not it achieves its purpose. Finally, the reviewer is in a position to tell us whether the effort was worthwhile in the first place.

Eventually a consensus forms around ability, and listeners as different as Barry Manilow and Alice Cooper have said that they consider Gaga the genuine article. In general she's received terrific press, not to mention a cartload of awards, but it's interesting to look at negative criticism she’s received. The most extensive such piece I've seen, posted on Slate.com (September 11, 2011) by Nathan Heller, is titled “Lady Gaga: Pop’s leading conservative,” a title that strikes me as an overreach. Heller says in the article that she's conservative "every way but politically," which is kind of like saying that people in church are materialists "every way but spiritually." "Conservative" doesn't seem to be the right word anyway for someone who's designed and worn a dress made out of meat.

Heller does understand Gaga's core role as a performance artist, but he doesn't apply that insight to her songwriting. Instead he uses the hoary method of quoting lyrics to demonstrate a song's faults. Many lyrics sound silly quoted out of context, and a song isn't just a lyric anyway; it's also melody, arrangement, and the way the music and the words fit together and interact with each other, as well as the performer’s delivery of the material. More to the point, Heller doesn't seem to understand that Gaga's songwriting also fits under the heading of performance art. However genuine the feelings in her songs may be to her, she still writes the songs (frequently with collaborators) "as if" she were in a particular situation. Her songs are written, so to speak, within quotation marks.

But much of the negative criticism that Gaga receives simply misses what she's trying to do. For example, she participated in a recent awards show as her Jo Calderone character, and remained in that character throughout the show and on through the following press conference. One reviewer said she had stayed in the character too long – that she should have dropped it after using it once. No doubt from the standpoint of show biz that observation is canny. Gaga, however, was engaging in a piece of performance art, and its purpose was to disrupt and make uncomfortable (which it certainly did, at least for me), not to glide along well-worn entertainment paths. Similarly, she recently sang her song “Bad Romance” to Bill Clinton at his birthday party, raising many eyebrows. If you want somebody who will do nothing but carry in a cake, smile, and blow out the candles, Gaga’s probably not the one you want to invite.

A performance artist continually takes chances by risking offence. It can be difficult to be a performance artist and also beloved. (Laurie Anderson has probably accomplished this feat.) Gaga has achieved popularity despite the risks she takes, through her use of the attributes we've discussed, including talent, energy, and the ability to plunge ahead no matter what. Remarkably, she has used her skills not to make us comfortable with her, but to make us more alert, more uncomfortable, more uncertain what's going to happen next.

A lesson that performance art by its nature presents to the reviewer, the critic, and even the ordinary listener or viewer, then, is: listen first, understand next, evaluate intelligently, judge last if at all.

[For those interested in the book from which Kirk quotes himself, The Art of Writing Reviews, he’s mentioned where it’s available. For further thoughts on the subject, I posted a four-part commentary on Kirk’s book, “The Art of Writing Reviews,” 1, 8, 11, and 14 November 2009.]

The Case of the Purloined Paper

Two years ago, my friend Kirk Woodward was asked to write an essay on Tennessee Williams and Tony Kushner for a forthcoming book on Williams’s impact on contemporary playwrights. (That essay, “‘All Truth Is a Scandal’: How Tennessee Williams Shaped Tony Kushner's Plays,” is now published in The Influence of Tennessee Williams: Essays on Fifteen American Playwrights [Ed. Philip C. Kolin (McFarland & Co., 2008)].) 

Kirk and I are in frequent e-mail contact, and we chatted about the essay a bit as I asked him how it was coming along and what he was learning about the two writers. In mid-July 2007, Kirk asked me if he could quote from an essay I’d written five years earlier about plastic theater, a Williams concept Kirk thought would “fit wonderfully” into his discussion. 

My essay, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre,” was published online by the Tennessee Williams Annual Review (no. 5 [2002], but I did a Google search to see if there was also a printed copy available for Kirk to use. TWAR had gone online a few years earlier, but I wasn’t sure if they still put out a paper edition. 

The only paper version of my essay of which I knew was the much shorter rendition in my plastic theater article for The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (Ed. Philip C. Kolin [Greenwood Press, 2004]). That’s when I made a startling discovery.

On 16 July, two days after Kirk asked me about “‘The Sculptural Drama,’” I learned that the essay had apparently been published in some form in Harold Bloom's 2007 edition of his critical book on The Glass Menagerie. 

Besides the fact that I thought an editor had to get permission to republish something like that, and no one asked me (not that I objected, of course), I tried to find the book in any division of the NYPL or at Barnes & Noble, and I couldn't determine if the book even really existed. 

The library seemed to have only older editions of the book, before my essay had even been published, but B&N listed a 2006 edition, except that its table of contents was odd (online, at least) and didn't list the essays included. 

The Library of Congress listed the book, including a table of contents with my essay titled “Richard E. K***** on Sculptural Drama and Plastic Theatre.” Some of the other info on the B&N site was different from what was included in the edition that supposedly had my essay in it. (It had the same ISBN (International Standard Book Number) code, but I didn't know if that was conclusive.) 

I had no idea if the essay version in the book was even the same as the one published in TWAR or if it was an edited version or something. I had no idea how someone could reedit my work without asking me but, then, I didn't know that someone could even republish my essay without telling me, much less getting my permission. The whole thing was odd.

The next day, I went in search of the book to see what was going on, but no one around here (which at that time included the huge Strand Book Store and no less than three B&N’s), had the right edition. I considered ordering the book from B&N, but it was a $45 hardback, so I put that off until I ran out of other options.

The whole thing became confusing. Aside from the obvious--how someone could publish an essay of mine without asking me--there were other oddities. First, there seemed to be two different series in which there was a volume called Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie by Harold Bloom (1930-2019)--"Bloom's Guides" and "Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations," both apparently from Chelsea House/Facts on File. 

Second, one or both series reissued the title every several years with different critical essays in it. 

Third, there may (or may not) have been both a 2006 and 2007 edition of the "Bloom's Guides" book, the one that had my essay in it. The B&N website had the 2006 on it, but the table of contents didn't list all the essays, so I didn't know if it was the same as the 2007 that was in the Library of Congress and on OCLC (both of which listed my essay in the contents). 

Neither collection of the NYPL had the correct edition of the book; I hadn't yet searched other local libraries like NYU and I also hadn't looked in Books in Print to see what I could learn from that. I also hadn't tried BookFinder.com to see if I could buy a cheap copy of the book.

I wanted to figure this out one way or the other, but it could take a while!

The next day, my friend Kirk sent me the following message:

I just had an article in Living Pulpit magazine, and the agreement has a few things about republication:

"You grant TLP the right to publish the article in TLP as well as in any foreign language editions or anthology of selections from back issues that we might publish in the future.

"You grant us the right to include your article as part of any electronic and/or computer data base containing TLP articles in which we approve its electronic publication, including that of the American Theological Library Association, and to make the article available for distribution through such.

"It is the policy of TLP to permit reproduction of articles in church bulletins, newsletters, and other such non-commercial formats [underlining theirs]. We usually do not charge the user for such permissions and you are granting us the right to use your work in this manner without requiring us to make any further payment to you.

"Requests for republication by commercial publishers will be directed to you as the author and you are free to make whatever financial arrangements you wish with that publisher. We recognize that you have the right to grant other publishers permission to print your article, without any payment to us, including in collections of your own work. We request that if and when you do so, however, that you acknowledge TLP as the original publisher of this work."

The last paragraph seemed the applicable one to my situation. But I had never signed any such agreement with TWAR (though publication may have automatically subjected me to such terms). 

I noticed that the earlier provisions, which granted TLP rights to reprint Kirk’s essay, almost all pertain to church-controlled publications (except the very last provision, the underlined one, which is slightly ambiguous). 

Except that TWAR is published by a college, it had no similar affiliation or sister publications that might have had a claim on material published in the journal. 

(When Dr. Kolin, the co-editor of Studies in American Drama, 1945-Present, had republished my interview with playwright Karen Malpede in Speaking on Stage, a collection of past interviews from SAD, he asked my permission and even offered me the opportunity to reedit/expand it. I got to update the intro and to reinsert material I had had to cut from the SAD version.)

Next, I gathered more info, which only confused the matter further: I couldn't tell if the 2006 edition and the 2007 edition of the book with my essay in it were actually the same book. (Some references listed the copyright date, some the release date--which aren't the same when the publication happens at the end of the year as this one did.) 

The ISBN code was the same, but I didn't really know what that indicated. I assumed that each edition of a book (not printing, but new edition) got a new number, which would mean that books with the same ISBN code all had the same content--but I didn't know if that was true.

I also confirmed that though the two different books had the same publisher, Chelsea House, they were parts of different series. The one with my essay was part of "Bloom's Guides" (a blue or blue-and-buff cover, depending on the title); the other series was "Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations" (a cover of various colors, depending on the subject, with a black-and-white photo). 

Since none of the sites, like B&N or Amazon.com, that had "Bloom's Guides" provided a complete table of contents or list of essays included, I couldn't compare the "2006" Bloom’s Guide with the "2007" publication in the Library of Congress catalogue. (I wasn’t sure, of course, but it looked as if the brief table of contents on the B&N site may have been for the wrong book.) 

The only local library I could find that had the "right" book was Columbia, which is located mighty inconveniently for me.

Curiouser and curiouser.

(This is all beginning to sound like a postmodernist book I read back in the late ’80s: If on a winter's night a traveler, a 1979 novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino [1923-85].  Calvino created a novel that’s actually the beginnings of ten separate books by ten different fictional authors.  He lays a trail of incomplete works with false titles attributed to the wrong authors. 

(As soon as the Reader thinks he’s found the continuation of his last interrupted story, he not only discovers that it’s a different book from the one he’s left off, but that the one he was reading isn’t the one he thought he was reading at all.  That was virtually the world into which I’d gotten.)

On 22 July, about a week after I learned of the unknown publication, I wrote to Philip Kolin, the co-editor of SAD who had edited the Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia (where the plastic theater essay had originated as the article I mentioned earlier) and who had much more experience in the area of publication than I did. 

He was also associated with TWAR as the review editor. (In 2004, I wrote a review of some Tennessee Williams one-acts in Washington for him.) I recounted the saga as it stood at that point, and asked his opinion. His only advice was to contact the editor of TWAR directly, which I did. A week later, I wrote to Robert Bray at TWAR:

I have a dilemma you might be able to help me with--you have much more experience in this area than I do. You recall, I imagine, my essay on TW's plastic theater that was published on line at TWAR. That was 5 years ago now. I have just learned that the essay has been republished in the last Bloom's Guide to TW's Glass Menagerie. Now, I haven't been able to find the book so far, but both OCLC and the Library of Congress list it and a table of contents that includes my name and a version of the essay's title. The book was published in 2006 (the end of the year, apparently, so sometimes it's listed as a 2006 publication and sometimes 2007), so it's been out there for half a year or more. But my problem is--no one ever asked me for permission to republish the essay or even told me it was being reprinted. Is that legal? It's certainly not ethical, is it? I wouldn't have objected of course, but I should have been informed at least, shouldn't I? (No bookstore around here has the right book and edition--there's a different series by Bloom with a 2007 volume with the same title but different essays--and the only library in NYC that has the book is Columbia and I haven't gotten up there since I learned about the book, so since I haven't seen the book, I don't even know if the essay's been tampered with.) Does any of this seem strange to you? It does to me, but I don't have that much stuff out there, so maybe it's common practice.

Since TWAR is the only venue in which my essay, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theatre,” ever appeared, did anyone contact you about reusing it? Even if no one contacted me, someone should have contacted someone for the right to republish--at least I'd have thought so.

I have no idea what some editor might have done with the essay, but at least my name's on it. (Or, maybe I shouldn't presume that's a good thing. Maybe it's a bowdlerized version!)

I'd appreciate your take on this if you have one.

Dr. Bray sent this response the next day:

You raise a question that I must admit I've never thought of; that is, would a contributor to the TWAR object to having his/her essay reprinted. The Bloom people did contact me about your essay, as well as another (I think it was Gilbert Debusscher's). I gave my consent to the reprint.

As far as the legal side, once you contribute an essay to the journal (or any journal, for that matter), it becomes the copyright of the journal, so you basically relinquish rights to it.

As far as your other point, the "ethical" side, it now occurs to me that I should probably contact the original author to see if there is an objection to having it reprinted. I haven't done so before but will do so from now on. Perhaps this is an obvious oversight on my part, but I must admit I just hadn't given it any thought.

Hope this answers your question. On the bright side, the essay assures you that more people will be edified by and appreciative of your good work.

When I wrote Dr. Bray back, I explained that he seemed to have misunderstood me. I didn't object to the republication; in fact, I was quite flattered. My concern was only that no one informed me, much less asked me, about the reuse of the essay. I was glad to hear that the Bloom folks contacted Dr. Bray; at least they didn't just abscond with the essay!

I certainly would gladly have assented to the republication. I might have asked if it were possible to correct errors or update information (as I did when Dr. Kolin had rerun the Malpede interview), but I couldn't see any reason I would have objected. But it was a little like having illegitimate children I didn't know I had running around out there--it was a little disconcerting to find, almost a year later, that the essay had been republished. 

In this case, it's especially peculiar since I still hadn't seen the reprint. If nothing else, I'd like to include it in my résumé and list of published works--just in case I try to get a legitimate job somewhere sometime. (You never know!)

Well, the mystery was somewhat solved. Dr. Bray seemed a little miffed that I inquired--apparently no one ever questioned his giving authority to republish work from TWAR. According to Dr. Bray, once my essay has been published in TWAR, I had tacitly given up all rights to it. 

Even if that was legally correct, it still seemed to me that courtesy and ethics would have dictated that the journal editor at least inform the authors when he's permitting reuse of their work.

Finally, on 3 October, I stopped in at HSSL, the main NYPL facility on 42nd Street (the one with the lions out front). I had requested a copy of the “Bloom’s Guide” on Menagerie that had my essay in it and it had just arrived--assuming I got the right one. I was curious to see if the editors of the book had done anything to the essay without my permission. (Yes, I know: I had no rights once TWAR ran it.).

Well, I did get the right book, and what Bloom had done was excise the whole middle of the paper, the entire discussion of the derivation of the concept and term "plastic theater." The essay was cut from page 3 to page 11 of the typescript! That's eight pages of a 13-page paper. 

Bloom did no internal editing, it seemed, so painter Hans Hofmann’s term "push-pull" was left in, but the explanation and source of it was missing. It was part of Hofmann’s definition of "plasticity"--and the source reference was still in the biblio, which wasn't edited--but no one reading this version of the essay would ever have known that unless they had read Hofmann's writings on art--or my original complete essay. 

The reference to Williams’s novella Moise or the World of Reason, where the playwright invokes the name Hans Hofmann, was also cut, so the mention of the painter that led me to his writings was missing, too. 

Also missing was the reference to Williams's journal entry on "sculptural drama" which was part of my hypothesis on the evolution of the concept, but which also gave the essay its title. (Bloom didn't use the original title exactly, but he did include "sculptural drama" in his title; also, the original title was listed in the acknowledgments section of the book.) 

In my (admittedly biased) opinion, Bloom gutted the essay. (Mine wasn’t the only contribution that was edited--the edits were marked with ellipses--but I have no idea how much had been omitted from any of the others.)

By the way, in the section listing the contributors, Bloom said they made an effort to contact the writers. I'm not that hard to find--certainly Dr. Bray knew how to reach me--but I never heard from anyone. They seem to have gotten permission from TWAR, listed as the copyright holder in the acknowledgments, and gone no further. That may be legal, but I don’t think it’s ethical--and it’s certainly discourteous.

I don't know whether to be miffed or to be pleased to have been selected. What's that joke about the ox who's called a bull? Something like, "I thank you for the honor, but I'd rather have restored to me what was mine"? I think that's how I feel!

I had thought about writing the Bloom people, but I doubted, even if a letter would have reached anyone with real responsibility (a dubious assumption to start with), they'd do anything, either about the existing book or about their practices for the future. 

It would have been a fruitless effort; I'd even have been surprised if anyone acknowledged it at all. So I decided not to write. I thought of the joke about how many Jewish mothers it takes to change a light bulb: None . . . I'll just sit here alone in the dark and suffer. Well, I was like that: I sat home and stewed on my own.

As it happens, while I was searching for the availability of my “‘The Sculptural Drama’” (for Kirk’s use as a citation), I also came across a reference to it somewhere else. I didn't know what it was exactly until I had a look the day I was at the library, but I'm quoted in a reference book that's a lot like The Tennessee Williams Encyclopedia. 

The Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams (Ed. Greta Heintzelman and Alycia Smith-Howard [Facts On File, 2005]) has an entry on plastic theater, too, and the authors quote me and list my essay as "Further Reading." How 'bout that! I'm (not really) famous.

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 4

[This is Part 4, the final installment, of my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272).]

After treating the matter of reviewers closing productions with poor notices, Kirk raises the question of reviewers who know people connected to the production and fear their notices might hurt their friends and acquaintances. It’s hard, perhaps, for reviewers not to become engaged in the social whirl of the arts they cover. That’s probably more true in smaller markets than in large ones like New York or L.A., but there’s a danger here, too. I remember reading an article about New York Times chief reviewer Ben Brantley, who I thought had taken a pretty extreme action to avoid that--he literally absents himself entirely from the New York social scene. According to the report, he lived outside the city (though he may have moved in since then) and apparently doesn’t socialize with anyone connected to theater. (I thought this was extreme not because Brantley avoids the social aspects of the biz—that may be difficult but wise—but because, not living in the city he covers, he loses perspective on the atmosphere—political, communal, economic, cultural—that surrounds and informs the art about which he writes.)

The Times doesn’t permit its theater reviewers to participate in any awards program (editors and other journalists may, and I don’t know if reviewers in other arts are similarly enjoined) because the editors don’t want their reviewers even to appear to have conflicts of interest. A few years ago, Critics Quarterly (the newsletter of ATCA, which Kirk would insist ought to be called Reviewers Quarterly . . . or, maybe, Reviewers Review) did a series of articles, plus letters from members, concerning reviewers who got involved in other aspects of theater such as playwriting or acting. Some members felt this was a good way to learn more about the business, by seeing it from the inside while it was working. Others were vociferous in their opinions that this placed the reviewers in danger of becoming too personally acquainted with the artists they would be called on to criticize. I no longer was trying to act when I was writing reviews, but I still knew actors, directors, designers, and stage managers who were working in New York and there were theater companies run by friends and former colleagues producing plays I might have to review. The situation only arose once or twice, and I raised the potential conflict with my editor, but I was surprised when he said he didn’t really care. (I think the real situation was that he didn’t have that many writers on whom he could call and he couldn’t replace me.) It was very hard to be objective and I had to question myself very carefully when it came to writing about the people I knew, even slightly.

Interestingly, there’s an organization in New York City that was established essentially to address this situation. The Players, on Gramercy Park, was founded by actor Edwin Booth (in his last home, where his room is still preserved as he left it) to allow actors to meet the important citizens of the city on a social basis. He thought that members of his profession ought to know the people who supported the theater and the city’s movers and shakers in all fields, politics, finance, merchandising, letters, and so on, should know the theater artists who were so important to New York’s culture. (Theater was, at the time, the popular entertainment, much as movies and TV are today.) That is, all the professions except one. No reviewers could be members of The Players. Booth didn’t think it would be wise to put actors in the same room with the writers who from time to time may have said uncomplimentary things about them. Now, the all-male membership has been integrated in recent years, but the prohibition against reviewers still holds. (By the way, the organization is called The Players, not the Players Club.)

When he writes about reporting on the play’s plot, Kirk proposes, “We can ask, what happens to the characters? Do they grow, change, move from point A to point N?” This is very close to the question dramaturgs learn to ask when analyzing a script for their artistic directors: Who does the play happen to? It’s a way of determining which character is the focal one (which may not be the same as the lead role or the literary protagonist). It’s an interesting question to ask, even for a reviewer.

When it comes to the perspective of the spectator, Kirk reminds us that “not everyone in the theater sees—or hears—the same show.” It’s a fact of live performances that no two people see the same show and no two performances are the same. No matter where you sit in a movie theater, you see essentially the same movie as everyone else (barring sitting behind a pillar or a very tall person). But with a live performance, especially theater or ballet, there’s an element of Heraclitus’ tenet: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.” The corollary is that no two people can step into the same river because the water where one stepped is not the same as the water where the other did. (Besides, no two people’s experience of that river will be the same, either. That’s true of movies and television, too, of course.) The trade-off is that in live theater, I can choose where I want to look. In film and TV, the camera, under the director’s control, does that for me.

Kirk asserts that theater pros feel “that opening nights are the worst performances” of a play’s run. Openings are still the traditional night for reviewers and the press, despite the scheduling of “critics’ previews.” (No matter when the reviewer sees the show, the notice traditionally appears the day after opening.) I was never a first-nighter, so I had the luxury of seeing the performances after the play opened and settled down, and even now, I generally avoid opening nights. To be frank, openings are more social events than artistic ones and the company’s emotions are high and tight. Friends and family are in the house; agents and managers come to see their clients; the producers, backers, and investors and their invited guests are there for the festivities; non-reviewing press—editors, feature writers, cultural reporters—are covering the “news” event. Everyone backstage is on edge, you can bet. (When I first started to perform, I couldn’t eat before a performance. When I got more used to the experience, that was no longer so—except on opening nights.)

In addition to the emotional tension, there are the various production issues that affect the performance. It’s a truism in theater that no planned rehearsal period is long enough. You always need another week. In many shows, the first time everyone has gone through the entire play with full tech and costumes the way it’s supposed to be seen by the audience is the final dress rehearsal. On opening night, there will be acting and directing problems from both nerves and from not being quite ready yet. In new plays, it’s not unusual for new lines and even new scenes to be inserted within days of opening; new songs can be added to musicals. Because of the labor-intensivity of the rehearsal period plus the union regulations, technical adjustments are often brought in at the last minute: costumes don’t fit quite right yet, set pieces haven’t been tested, lights aren’t focused right. (I once actually went on stage with a set still wet with last-minute, improvised “paint”: pea soup!) No, opening night is not a typical performance. It’s more like the first time a cook makes a new recipe—it’s not really ready for primetime.

Still, I remember an occurrence that remains one of the strangest of which I have ever heard in theater. In 1997, The Scarlet Pimpernel opened at the Minskoff Theatre on 9 November. It received mediocre reviews or worse. New producers stepped in and bought out the old investors, closed the show on 1 October 1998 for retooling, and reopened it on 4 November. Talk about not being ready on opening night!

In debating whether reviews are “art,” Kirk paraphrases Will and Ariel Durant’s definition of art: “significance expressed with feeling through form.” (The quote is from Writing Reviews, not the Durants.) I’d like to add another, very similar definition from Susanne Langer, another philosopher: “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” As you can see, it’s nearly the same language. Let me add here another of Langer’s statements that I have found revealing—because it’s a comment about “beauty” in a context we should consider when viewing many new kinds of art. (This harks back to the remarks Kirk and I made about standards and new art not resembling the old.) Langer writes: “Beauty is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”

Beauty, I think Langer’s saying, ain’t always pretty. She also defines beauty as “expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some way. “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes. This interpretation of beauty, which may owe something to Heraclitus’ view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we’d regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure. Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness.” One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” It’s noteworthy that Marshall McLuhan calls “good taste,” often substituted for “beauty” in the judgment of traditionalists, “the first refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most obvious resource of the insecure.” Richard Kostelanetz, whom I quoted earlier, also submits that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”

In his discussion of “good art” and “great art,” Kirk remarks, “I could write a play that conforms to all Aristotle’s principles and has no value at all—indeed, many have.” First, let me reiterate here, in the words of Susanne Langer, what I said about poor art earlier: “There may be poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition. . . . . The result is a poor and helpless product, sincere enough, but confused and frustrated by recalcitrance of the medium or sheer lack of technical freedom.” Langer takes a harsher line with “bad art,” but making poor art is not a criminal act. Now, I’ll draw a literary parallel between what Kirk wrote about writing a mediocre play that follows all the rules and an old play to which I once introduced Kirk, Plots and Playwrights by Edward Massey.

The plot concerns Caspar Gay, a successful Broadway playwright wandering Greenwich Village looking for “an inspiration” for his next play. He meets young short-story writer Joseph Hastings in front of a boarding house. Gay explains his desperation, and Hastings suggests that there’s a play on every floor of the house and the two writers challenge one another. Hastings composes small dramas based on the intimate, but revealing, stories of the residents of each floor of the house, one scene for each apartment. Gay’s output, on the other hand, is complex and predictable, a contrived melodrama about all the house’s residents in improbable relationships. Hastings reacts in disbelief to Gay’s creation, and the famous playwright responds, “But it will run a year on Broadway.” “My God,” cries the enlightened novelist, “it has.” And that’s what can happen when you merely follow all the rules!

I do want to take small exception to one thing Kirk writes. Actually, I want to expand it a bit. The author notes, correctly, that “some works are simply better than others.” I’d add, “. . . for some people.” As Kirk continues, “Our criteria and judgments about art will always be subjective,” so each of us will see and feel things no one else will, and vice versa. Hence, art I think is great may seem mediocre or even awful to you and art you love may leave me cold. (Furthermore, taste, like the truth, changes over time. But let’s not get into that.) I’ll admit here that I don’t much like Harold Pinter’s plays. I’ll acknowledge that he was probably a genius, but his plays always just confuse me and leave me frustrated. I don’t enjoy those feelings. Obviously, though, mine’s a minority opinion since he won a Nobel in lit in 2005. As my father liked to say, De gustibus non disputandum est: There’s no accounting for taste.

When it comes to defining who’s an artist, Kirk quotes some lines from 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Allow me to add another voice, William Shakespeare:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Further, Kirk adds that someone who writes, plays, or sings isn’t automatically an artist: an artist needs “to create something that changes the way people feel, hear, and think.” Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck declared, “An actor who brings back from his adventures a moment of communicable penetration is a hero, the light of our lives.” It is perhaps noteworthy that the people who make commercials don’t call the performers who appear on the screen “artists”: they are simply “the talent.” I guess even the producers of TV commercials don’t figure it takes an artist to sell toilet paper or cars.

When Writing Reviews gets to contemplating how a reviewer actually goes about composing the review, Kirk addresses the question of whether or not to take notes while viewing the performance. (The question is less pertinent for non-performing arts, such as book or art reviewing, for obvious reasons.) His conclusion comes down on both sides of the question: “Take notes when you have to.” I’ve tried both ways, and a third in the middle (taking notes without looking at the pad!), and I end up in Kirk’s corner on this. You have to pay attention to what you’re watching and any distraction lessens your attentiveness. On the other hand, there are details that you recognize as potentially telling, like, say, a line of dialogue or a particularly revealing movement or gesture, and you know you can’t remember them for long without writing it down. Sometimes I’ve been able to keep the thing in mind long enough to jot it down in the lobby at intermission or right after the performance, which kind of splits the difference, but there’s no definitive answer for everyone; some people’s memories are just better than others' and some bits of performance are more memorable than others. You have to go with what works for you under the circumstances.

By the way, in an earlier paragraph, Kirk advises that “it is difficult for anyone . . . to take in an entire show at one sitting.” This is especially so if you’re taking notes while you’re watching. The trade-off is that if you don’t take the notes, you might not remember later what you did manage to “take in.” Going back, as some of the pros Kirk invokes suggest, is a good way to solve this dilemma, but that’s time consuming and, if you’re footing the bill for the extra tix, expensive. It also can get in the way of meeting deadlines. (TV reviewers have a much easier job here: they are usually provided with recordings of the program, several episodes if it’s a series, and can both pause the video to make a note and go back and re-watch parts or all of the show.)

I want to comment on something Kirk wrote near the end of Writing Reviews because I've always remembered it ever since I heard it. (I don't always follow the advice very well, but I do remember it!) In the "Reviewing your review" section, Kirk tells the reader to ask, "Can you say things more directly, cut out useless words, eliminate the unnecessary?" (That’s writing advice, of course, not just review-writing advice.) A teacher of mine used to say, "Kill your babies," meaning be willing to cut the things you like the most when they aren't really helping. Be ruthless, she meant. I often wish I could do that—but I have too much "ruth" I guess. But I hear her say that whenever I edit my work—especially when I come to something I know I should cut . . . but don’t want to.

Finally, one of the last observations of Writing Reviews is the statement that though we may “see a lot of bad art” over our lifetimes, “we’ll also experience things that enrich and possibly change our lives . . . .” Intentionally or otherwise, Kirk’s speaking of all kinds of art, not just theater or the performing arts. I could make a short list of the works of art, performances, texts, and visual art, that have moved me or showed me something so that I’ve never forgotten it or the experience. But I want to close out these comments by quoting an artist who made this point very clearly in his own way. I’ve written about the Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat before (ROT, 28 September), and I quoted this then: “If an artist draws a subject over and over again in different ways, then he will learn something. The same with someone who looks at drawings—if that person keeps looking at many drawings, then he will learn something from them too.” A wise, wise man.

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 3

[This is Part 3 of my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272). There will be four parts in all.]

On a less heated topic than reviewers' personal prejudices, Kirk notes that it’s almost impossible for a spectator to tell who’s responsible for what in a production. That’s true in general--though you can make a pretty good stab at who designed the sets and costumes. Because the program usually tells us. To be serious, though, a wise reviewer will know that the director probably had a great deal to say about the production design--and in some cases, so will the producer. Earlier I mentioned the formation of the American Directors Institute to try to help explain the work of stage directors to the public and even other theater professionals because so few people outside the rehearsals really know what the director does. I was only half joking when I said you could easily tell who designed the sets and so on, but the same is true of the acting. The actors are ultimately responsible for what they do on stage, but they worked with the director (and sometimes even the playwright) while they were developing the work that we end up seeing in performance. Theater is called a “collaborative art.” Nothing happens on the stage during the performance of a play, not even those monodramas I mentioned earlier, that hasn’t been shaped by many hands. I wonder how many people realize, for instance, that the character’s costume can have a tremendous effect on the actor’s work, both physically and psychologically. So can the set design and construction. Lines have been changed because of an actor (especially in TV); whole songs have been added or cut because of an actor’s work. Acting decisions can change because lines have been changed earlier or later in the script. We discuss a play as if the actors made all their own choices in a vacuum, that the designers all worked alone in their studios, and that the director . . . well, who knows what the director did. But it’s not true--it never was and it never will be. That’s precisely why no two productions of the same play are ever the same. (No two performances of the same production are the same, either, but that’s a different phenomenon.) That’s what makes theater such an exciting art form--at least for me. (It’s also why I used to love rehearsing. Performing was a reward, but rehearsing was where all the creativity happened and everyone you worked with was part of it. It was exhilarating.)

Aaron Frankel, the acting teacher whom I’ve mentioned a few times (because he had all these neat little aphorisms that have stuck with me) used to quote Martha Graham: "Don't come on stage to give; come on stage to take!" It sounds selfish and egotistical, but what I understand it to mean, for an actor, is that you take in what the other actors are sending you, you let it inform your performance, and you respond to it. Then the other actors respond to what you send out in turn. The most difficult actors with whom I worked were the ones who came to the theater with their performances all canned and ready. They were all closed off. I couldn’t change their performance no matter what I did on stage with them--they just barreled through with their plan. I’d have no choice but to do the same thing, and then we no longer had a live play but a kind of live-action video game. If we did it well, maybe no one in the audience would notice, but it wasn’t any fun to do.

Even if, as Kirk points out, you see two performances of a production with the same director and different actors, you can’t be sure whose contribution you’re witnessing. Sensitive directors will reconceive a character based on the contributions of an actor and rework the part even as the overall production concept remains essentially the same. Sometimes, the kit-and-kaboodle gets shifted because of the presence of new actors. If you read the re-reviews of continuing shows written when there’s been a cast change, you can sometimes see that old shows can learn new tricks. When Eileen Atkins replaced Cherry Jones as Sister Aloysius in Doubt, reviewers noted how different the play had become as a result of the new approach to the role. No one said that Atkins’s interpretation was better than Jones’s, but the difference was marked. It’s not really part of the same point, but now and then those changes can improve the production. Not too long ago, when the revival of Annie Get Your Gun was running on Broadway, Bernadette Peters (whom I saw do the role pre-Broadway in Washington a few months earlier) actually didn’t get such good notices. (Truth be told, she was a tad old for the part.) But when Reba McEntire replaced Peters, reviewers felt that McEntire suited the part better and the show was better for the change.

Writing Reviews also addresses the issue of “inside information.” Kirk warns that reviewers who put forth that they know things we outsiders don’t are often wrong, to begin with, and even if they’re not, the inside dope doesn’t really have anything to do with the experience at hand, namely the performance. In one example, Kirk writes, “Reviewers often claim to know why an artist did something, when even the artist may have no idea,” and he relates a story about John Lennon playing bass on a Paul McCartney song. Lennon played badly and one reviewer claimed it had been sabotage even though, as Kirk notes, Lennon was “simply a lousy bass player.” This all reminds me of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, whose plot centers on research a scholar is doing about Lord Byron. Using the family archives at a country house where Byron had stayed in 1809, the researcher puts together the evidence about what Byron was doing at the house and interprets it to determine a plausible scenario. But Arcadia is divided into two interwoven narratives, the other one being the same house in 1809 and we get to see what actually went on then. It turns out, despite the parallels between the facts in 1809 and the ones revealed in “the present day,” that the researcher has interpreted the evidence completely wrong.

One of Stoppard’s favorite themes is How do we know what we think we know? It is the central theme of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and part of the point of Jumpers and even Travesties. His characters almost always get the facts right but the conclusions wrong. One of his most fun arguments in Jumpers, in a speech about the existence of God that I used to use for auditions, goes this way:

Cantor’s proof that there is no greatest number ensures that there is no smallest fraction. There is no beginning. But it was precisely this notion of infinite series which in the sixth century BC led the Greek philosopher Zeno to conclude that since an arrow shot towards a target first had to cover half the distance, and then half the remainder, and then half the remainder after that, and so on ad infinitum, the result was, . . . that though an arrow is always approaching its target, it never quite gets there, and Saint Sebastian died of fright. Furthermore, by a similar argument he showed that before reaching the half-way point, the arrow had to reach the quarter-mark, and before that the eighth, and before that the sixteenth, and so on, with the result, remembering Cantor’s proof, that the arrow could not move at all!

An ideal example of perfect logic leading to an impossible conclusion. As reviewers and consumers of reviews, we need to be skeptical of such reasoning and the information on which it’s founded.

As a sort of addendum to this discussion, Kirk makes the point that his admonition about inside information also holds true for determining that “a work of art is a direct reflection of the artist’s life . . . .” Almost all artists use elements of their biography to inform their work, though that doesn’t make every artist’s work “autobiographical.” Some is, to one degree or another: Arthur Miller’s After the Fall is clearly a reflection of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe--though it isn’t an account of that marriage; most of Horton Foote’s characters are based on his family and neighbors from the Texas town where he grew up, but the plays don’t tell the history of his family. Kirk invoked Tennessee Williams as an example, and though Williams used aspects of his life in almost all his writing, especially early in his career, his plays aren’t autobiographies. (Knowing something about Williams’s life can help some in understanding some things about the plays, but enjoying them doesn’t depend on being a Williams expert.) At the end of that discussion, Kirk cautions us not to treat Williams’s plays “as chapters in Williams’ memoirs.” Of course, he’s absolutely correct. The plays (and poems and short stories) are self-contained works of art, no more accounts of the playwright’s life than The Lord of the Rings was an account of Tolkien’s life. But I want to add one remark, only slightly relevant (and perhaps not even that): Williams’s actual Memoirs, his published autobiography, is largely regarded as heavily fictionalized. Williams told so many tales about his background, starting with his name (actually Tom) and the year of his birth (actually 1911, not 1914 as he put out for many years), that I suspect he began to forget what was a yarn and what was true. My point? Not only can’t Williams’s fiction be taken as fact, but even his fact can’t be taken as fact! (I’m just sayin’.)

Kirk also addresses the issue of reviewers asserting that they can somehow glean how other people (including the artists themselves as well as other viewers) feel and what they think. Just recently, for example, in his review of the Brighton Beach Memoirs revival, Ben Brantley committed this fault when he said of one actor that “her performance is so subdued and inward-looking that when [she] finally erupts, you don’t believe it” (I added the italics). How does Brantley know what I will believe if and when I see the play? How does he know what anyone else, even his fellow spectators that night, believes? He can’t. He can only know what he himself believes. He has no business speaking for anyone else!

I took this problem up on ROT as well. What I proposed is that reviewers write in first person so that they are less tempted to make universal statements and maintain the perception that they are writing about themselves and their own impressions. (Brantley could have written, “. . . I don’t believe it.”) The problem is, of course, that editors and publishers seldom allow writers like reviewers to write in first person. Opinion columnists, and I maintain that that’s really what reviewers are, are perfectly free to write that way, but reviewers rarely are. It’s harder to do when you can’t use the grammatical first person, but the alternative approach has to be to make sure the “first-personness” of the review is rhetorically clear. (In which case, Brantley could have written, “. . . it’s hard to believe.”)

In a section about clever remarks, put-downs, and personal insults in reviews, Kirk invokes a famous reviewer “who most consistently writes in terms of insults”; he doesn’t name the writer, but most of us probably know who he is, and since ROT isn’t as vulnerable to retribution, legal or otherwise, I will name him: John Simon. I had a bit of a contretemps in print with Simon back in 1989, precipitated by his review of The Winter’s Tale at the New York Shakespeare Festival. I won’t repeat Simon’s revolting remarks about the actress Alfre Woodard, who played Paulina in the production, but I will characterize them as racist and mean, referring to her hair (which was a wig) and her vocal performance. Simon invoked the vilest racial images to make his points. (Simon also said some very insulting things about Mandy Patinkin, who played Leontes opposite Christopher Reeve’s Polixenes, making reference to some scurrilous Nazi caricatures of Jews.) Almost the entire theater community rose up in protest, with several columnists writing rebukes and well-known theater figures like Colleen Dewhurst, Eli Wallach, and Anne Jackson writing letters. I also wrote a long letter to all the press outlets in New York; it was published in a substantial excerpt in the New York Post (12 April) and in its entirety in the New York Native (22 May), where I published my reviews at the time. I wrote: “Invoking negative racial and ethnic stereotypes to make small points about coiffure or vocal technique . . . is completely outrageous in this supposedly enlightened time. Cruelty of this kind, regardless of the point Mr. Simon may have been trying to make, is inexcusable in our society.”

Simon’s review came out on 3 April. I had also written a review of the play which appeared on the same date but since the Native was a weekly, my deadline was long before I ever saw Simon’s notice. I had liked the production. On 19 June, however, my review of another NYSF production, Cymbeline (part of NYSF’s then-ongoing marathon of all Shakespeare’s plays over about a decade), came out in the Native and unbeknownst to me, the editors had put a banner headline on the front page of the edition saying, “Hey, John Simon: We Loved Cymbeline.” Simon had obviously panned Cymbeline (12 June)--it was a controversial production under the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis--but the banner was clearly more directed at my difference of opinion with Simon over Winter’s Tale. In any case, New York didn’t run my letter and I never heard from Simon in any way. I’m sure I was beneath his notice. (That’s all right. He’s beneath my contempt. One of his earlier reviews soon after I moved to New York City--I forget now which one--so incensed me that I cancelled my subscription to New York and have never gone back to it.)

By the way, in a later section on “The newspaper’s mistakes,” Kirk points out that “reviewers often are not responsible for headlines” and other accompaniments to their columns. That’s true not only of reviewers but almost all journalistic writers; there are editors whose job it is to oversee the composition of headlines and such. (Most of my reviews did appear under headlines of my own devising, however.) I not only had no hand in writing that banner about Cymbeline that baited John Simon, but I didn’t even know about it until the issue came out. Since my deadline was often 10 days before the issue date, I’d written my copy before Simon’s negative review of Cymbeline hit the stands. (As I said, I no longer subscribed to New York magazine and didn’t seek out Simon’s reviews anyway; I wouldn’t have known about his response to the play until someone told me about it.)

Following this discussion in Writing Reviews, Kirk also raises the issue of “color-blind casting,” another problem John Simon has. I raised an objection to his shortsightedness and benighted attitude in the same letter, but a few years later, in 1991, the magazine The World & I, published by the Washington Times (owned by the Moonies), ran an article, “Nontraditional Casting” by David H. Ehrlich, which took the same viewpoint as Simon--that roles should only be cast with actors of the same race specified for the character. (If no race is specified, the role is presumed to have been written for a white actor.) I wrote another long letter to the editor of The World & I, and though they never published it, the author of the article called me. I didn’t want to get into a debate with him, so I just suggested that his editors run my letter and we could have our conversation in print. What the arch-conservative publication didn’t print included this statement:

[W]hat Mr. Ehrlich’s essay, reduced to its most basic terms, really says is that African-American actors (and Hispanic, Asian, disabled and women actors, by extension) are fine, as long as they keep to their places. Let them do August Wilson and Spike Lee, and the occasional Othello (but not Iago); however, they had better stay away from White Plays. If that sounds like saying black people are OK as long as they do not move next door to me and marry my sister, you get full marks.

(The comment above about Othello and Iago was in reference to a production of the Shakespeare tragedy by the Folger Theatre Group, the forerunner of the Shakespeare Theatre Company, which cast Avery Brooks as the Moor and André Braugher as his ancient. Ehrlich had trouble with this pairing.)

In a related section, Kirk inveighs against reviewers who have an obsession with something and “drag it into review after review.” Kirk’s talking about general idées fixes, like Clive Barnes’s reputed preference for anything British, but sometimes they’re more transitory. As I wrote recently in an August posting on ROT:

I remember back in ’98 when Footloose opened on Broadway, Ben Brantley panned the show and ever thereafter, at every opportunity he had in subsequent columns, Brantley ran the play down in the most derogatory terms he could get away with. He seemed obsessed with this play and the low opinion he had of it.

I don’t know what was going through Brantley’s mind at the time, of course, but I kept thinking that he was actually trying to close the show. Despite Brantley’s efforts, however, Footloose (which I didn’t like much myself, though it never offended me) ran for a year-and-a-half and 709 performances. It was nominated for four Tonys and didn’t win any of them, so maybe Brantley could take some pride in that dubious accomplishment.

And speaking about closing shows because of reviews, in a section called “Worrying about effect,” Kirk addresses the matter of how reviewers cope with the sense that they may be influencing people’s futures. I just want to point out that this very question was the subject of my essay "The Power of the Reviewer," which I mentioned above. My conclusion, by the way, was that the power of reviews to close productions was largely an untested assumption and that there were many viable strategies that producers could use to combat mediocre press. (I related one earlier: the hoax David Merrick pulled--he liked to put things over on the press--that may have helped extend the run of the poorly-reviewed Subways Are for Sleeping. But there are more legitimate tactics as well.) And Kirk is right when he reports that some reviewers “deny that they have any economic effect at all.” In a 1969 survey (the last time I looked, there weren’t any newer ones), only two-thirds of reviewers (of all arts, not just theater), said they had an economic impact. On the other hand, another survey found that 60% of spectators questioned said that reviews were of minimal importance to their choices. A 1977 study by More magazine (now defunct) attempted to find a correlation between the quality of the reviews and the length of a play’s run. The results weren’t conclusive, but they found, “When the critics expressed a strong negative [i.e., a pan] or positive [a rave] opinion about a play, there was a marked correlation with the length of run.” (I had some reservations about this study, which I expressed in the essay.)

[Come back in a few days for Part 4 of my commentary on Writing Reviews. There’s still more to say.]