Ten Years On

Today, 16 March 2019, is the tenth anniversary of Rick On Theater.  I wrote the first post on this blog on Monday, 16 March 2009, an introduction to what I thought ROT would be like called “A New Venture” (http://rickontheater.blogspot.com/2009/03/new-venture.html).  At the time, I had no idea where this endeavor would go or how long it would last.  That it has survived for a decade, weathering computer glitches, breakdowns, and replacements; travels and other absences from home; the death of my pet dog after 15 years of companionship; local, national, and international disasters; the final illness and death of my mother (during which period I essentially moved in with her near Washington); and many other ups and downs, is astonishing to me. 

In that opening post, I explained the origins of Rick On Theater and tried to project a little of what I envisioned it would cover—including the fact that I would probably go off track and post about subjects unrelated to theater or even the arts.  That turned out to be correct.  I didn’t predict, at least not on the record, that I’d also be publishing writing by contributors and articles from other publications that I liked and found interesting or provocative.  Many of those latter have been examinations of stage professions about which most theatergoers know little, such as “Stage Hands” from Equity News and “Two (Back) Stage Pros,” a pair of articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post about one of the American stage’s most renowned and respected set designers and the designer and maker of the hair pieces worn by many actors (both posted in 2014).  Some of these republished articles look at theater theory or opinion (“‘Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?’” by Robert Brustein, from a 1988 New York Times and posted in 2011) or theater practice (“‘How great plays are (eventually) made’” by Jessica Goldstein of the Washington Post, published on ROT in 2013).

Among friends and acquaintances who’ve contributed posts, my friend Kirk Woodward has been especially generous as a guest blogger (84 articles as of this writing—he’s just sent me a new one—including 2016’s five-part “Re-Reading Shaw,” 2013’s four-part “Reflections on Directing,” and 2018’s three-part “Perry Mason”), and I have mined the New York Times (Phillip Lopate’s “‘Draft: The Essay, An Exercise In Doubt,’” 2013), the Washington Post (“Little Dancer, Inspired By Degas Sculpture, Premieres At Kennedy Center,” various articles in two installments, 2016), Equity News (“‘The Art of Being Seen: Perspectives on the Casting Process’” by Doug Strassen, 2018), Allegro (“Making Broadway Babies,” several articles posted in 2013), 60 Minutes (“‘Historic 1906 Film Captures S.F.’s Market Street,’” 2013), PBS NewsHour (Jeffrey Brown’s “How High-Tech Replicas Can Help Save Our Cultural Heritage,” 2017), and other news outlets for articles, interviews, or reports to republish on ROT (all fully credited to their original writers and publications, of course). 

The contributors not only have different ideas than I do, expanding the blog’s coverage and adding different voices to the mix, but they can write about topics I could never cover.  Kirk wears many hats, as you’ll see, among them, that of a musician, and writes about jazz, pop, rock ’n’ roll (with special emphasis on Bob Dylan and The Beatles), and theater music for ROT—and I’ve gotten pieces from people with backgrounds in dance (Oona Haaranen, a dance teacher and choreographer), a friend who writes about theater in Israel (Helen Kaye, who lives in Tel Aviv and covers theater and culture for the Jerusalem Post), and a couple of college teachers who’ve written about theater in academia (“The Theater Problem in Education” by Robert B. Youngblood, Professor Emeritus of German at Washington and Lee University, 2011, and “Teaching What Shakespeare Didn’t Write: A Dramaturg’s Perspective in the English Classroom” by William Hutchings, Professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2014).

I should say a further word or so here about Kirk’s participation.  I’ve contacted most of my friends and former colleagues and solicited articles for the blog, and many have come through with some really terrific additions to ROT (“Nobody Wants to See a Tired Bat on Stage” by Oona Haaranen about her 6-year-old son’s first stage experience, 2014, and “The Cheapening of the Standing O” by Erin Woodward, Kirk’s daughter and an actor, director, and theater teacher in the New York City public schools, 2015), but Kirk, who’s an actor, director, theater teacher, playwright, and composer-lyricist (among other accomplishments), has been far and away the most forthcoming with contributions. 

Kirk may have a greater incentive to help keep the blog up, however: it was largely his idea.  In “A New Venture,” I explained that I had been writing e-mail reports on the plays I’d been seeing for a small group of friends and acquaintances who used to live in New York City but moved away.  The reports grew over the years, and I also started sending Kirk copies as well.  My correspondents often suggested that I try to get the reports published and Kirk joined the chorus, but I didn’t think the effort was likely to succeed.  Kirk at that time was working in information tech and had a familiarity with the world of computers that I didn’t, and he suggested starting a blog as an outlet for the reports. 

Since I had no experience with that scene, Kirk volunteered to look into the field and scope out some possibilities.  Finding a likely host site that guided users through the process of creating a blog, he sent me the link and I logged on.  Before I knew it, I had a blog site all set up and was ready to post my first entry.  That was 16 March 2009, ten years ago today, and my introductory post was “A New Venture.”  So, my name’s on this blog, but Kirk’s a part-owner both in fact and in spirit.  I can’t actually read Kirk’s mind, but I suspect that he so avidly sends me potential posts (I have yet to reject one, it’s probably needless to add) because he feels a certain proprietary interest in Rick On Theater.  (He and I even have a private nickname for ROT that Kirk prompted.  I won’t reveal it—it is private, after all—but it has to do with the title’s initials, which I often use as shorthand on the blog.)

All told, this anniversary message will make 763 posts on ROT.  (There are something over 200 play and performance reports, some from years before I launched ROT, and some by other writers than me.)  That’s more than 76 posts a year—almost seven posts a month or one to two a week.  Not bad for a one-man operation, even if I do say so myself.  It’s been a challenge and sometimes way too much work for a non-paying occupation—but mostly it’s been fun as hell.  I’ve learned a lot writing and reading the posts on Rick On Theater, keeping an eye (or ear) out for possible posts or ideas for posts, and I feel a sense of accomplishment getting the blog on line each time with a new post. 

Picking a few representative articles from over 750 posts is impossible.  The play reports alone run the gamut from classics (Jean Racine’s Phèdre starring Helen Mirren, posted in 2009; Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart with Harriet Walter and Janet McTeer, 2009; Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Nathan the Wise with F. Murray Abraham, 2016) to standards (Oklahoma! at Washington, D.C.’s Arena Stage, 2011; John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger reported by Kirk Woodward, 2012; Design for Living by Noel Coward at the 2006 Shaw Festival, 2012) to experimental and avant-garde work (Jack Gelber’s The Connection revival at the Living Theatre, 2009; Ivo van Hove’s staging of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Teorema for the Toneelgroep Amsterdam, 2010; the British troupe 1927’s Golem, 2016).

I’ve also covered the awful (“Perfect Crime,” an execrable Off-Broadway mystery play that’s been running since 1987, and “Have a Nice Life (2010 New York Fringe Festival),” about which the less said here the better) to the wonderful (“The Hairy Ape,” 2017, and “Boesman and Lena,” 2019) to the astonishing (The Orphans’ Home Cycle,” 2010, and “A Disappearing Number (Lincoln Center Festival 2010)”). 

Plays covered on Rick On Theater are mostly current productions like By the Way, Meet Vera Stark by Lynn Nottage, which just closed at New York City’s Signature Theatre Company on 10 March, and Athol Fugard’s Boesman and Lena, running at STC until 24 March (both posted in March 2019).  The next show I have scheduled will be Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock, a famous labor musical from 1937, opening at the Classic Stage Company from 25 March to 19 May; my report is scheduled for posting on 15 April.  Other reports are ones I wrote before I launched ROT, such as La MaMa E.T.C.’s presentation of Andrei Serban’s Fragments of a Trilogy from 1976 (2011) and 2009’s recreation of Living Theatre’s The Connection.  They’re from what Kirk calls my “archive,” reports I wrote before ROT.

I’ve reported on many productions from abroad, often in foreign languages, such as Anton Chekhov’s Ivanov by the Katona József Theatre of Budapest, Hungary (2009), and Carlo Goldoni’s Arlecchino, Servant of Two Masters from Italy’s Piccolo Teatro di Milano as originally staged by the great Giorgio Strehler (2012).  Some of these productions, like Arlecchino, have been special experiences because they were presented by national companies performing the classic plays of their native theaters, like the Abbey Players of Dublin doing John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World (2019); the Royal Shakespeare Company of London and Stratford-on-Avon with The Tamer Tamed, John Fletcher’s sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew (2019); or the Comédie-Française presenting Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid (2019). 

Beyond the performance reports, which were the impetus for starting ROT and is its meat and potatoes, I’ve blogged on theater history, some of it obscure, like “The Group of Hissed Authors” (2009), an article about five 19th-century French authors (really four French authors and an “honorary” Frenchman) who had all seen their initial forays into the world of theater booed off the stage.  In 1874, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse Daudet, Edmond de Goncourt, and Ivan Turgenev formed a fraternal group for enjoying food, drink, and wit.  I also posted the two-part “Dueling Brechts” (2014) about the cultural tumult resulting from the simultaneous Off-Broadway production in 1962 of two versions of Bertolt Brecht’s Mann Ist Mann.  The theater press had a field day reporting not just on the two productions, one from the Living Theatre (Man Is Man), directed by Julian Beck and featuring Judith Malina and Joseph Chaikin, and the other (A Man’s A Man) staged by John Hancock with Olympia Dukakis and John Heffernan, but also on the rivalry of the productions and the two translations of different versions Brecht wrote of the play. 

In 2013, I published a history of “Performance Art” in two parts and in 2018, a history, also in two installments, of the “Caffe Cino,” the progenitor of Off-Off-Broadway.  (Kirk contributed a bit of obscure theater history, too, with an article on “Theatre Alley,” 2013—a real street in lower Manhattan, not to be confused with Shubert Alley, a private street in the Theatre District, or Tin Pan Alley, which isn’t an actual street name at all.) 

Occasionally, I editorialize when an issue arises that piques my attention—or my ire.  When a Newsweek columnist railed against the casting of an openly gay actor as a romantic lead in a play, I posted “Gay Actors” (2010), for instance, and when the producers of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark kept performing the play in “previews,” postponing the opening over and over again, preventing reviewers from publishing criticism of the play, I wrote “Reviewing the Situation: Spider-Man & the Press” (2011).

In the area of non-theater, I report on art exhibits such as Washington Art Matters (American University, 2013), Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey, 1934–1954 (MoMA, 2016), and History Keeps Me Awake At Night (David Wojnarowicz at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2018).  I’ve also profiled some artists whom I found especially interesting, such as Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat (2009), David Wojnarowicz (2011), and printmaker Lila Oliver Asher (2014).  (My article on “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater” in 2012 includes a detailed section on Hans Hofmann and his theory of plasticity—so there are cross-overs.) 

Beyond the theater and art coverage, in the category of what might be called “fascinating miscellany,” are some posts on personal matters, especially biographical.  I published a two-part bio piece called “An American Teen In Germany” (2013), examining the years my family and I lived abroad from 1962 to 1967, and an eight-part recollection of my two-and-a-half years as a Military Intelligence officer in West Berlin from 1972 to 1974 entitled “Berlin Memoir” (2016-17).  I also researched the history of a small Washington modern-art gallery in which my parents were partners from 1958 to 1962 in “Gres Gallery” (2018).  Kirk contributed a number of personal articles as well, such as “A Lawyer and a Life” (2010), Kirk’s memoir of his grandfather, a frontier lawyer in Kentucky during the first two-thirds of the 20th century, and a sort of exposé of his army tour of duty in Korea between 1970 and 1971, “A Year in Korea” (2011).

There are lots of other little surprises and lagniappes tucked away in the archive, including many guest posts.  My friend Rich Gilbert spent a year in Spain and Western Europe in 2014 and 2015 and I posted his e-mails as “Dispatches from Spain” throughout the year.  My friend Helen Kaye (who’s also a director and actor) occasionally sends me copies of her reviews and other pieces on her activities (“Acre (Acco) Festival, Israel,” 2012) and wanderings (“A Trip to Poland,” 2015); the JP reviews are posted periodically as “Dispatches from Israel”  (and she’s promised me more soon!)

As things evolved on ROT, my posts seem to fall into a number of identifiable categories.  First, of course, are the play reports (which I see as a sort of record, so they incorporate several elements that don’t go into standard reviews, which is why I don’t call them that); then other posts are history articles, usually based in part or in toto on research, and the production pieces, about how theater happens.  I’ve mentioned the editorial posts, which are opinion pieces in which I advocate for one position or another, such as funding for the arts, advocacy for arts in education, first-amendment freedoms and free artistic expression; and other issues of the day. 

I give myself permission to write about or post other authors’ articles on any topic that strikes my interest, whether or not it has any connection to theater or even the arts.  In 2009, for instance, I published, “Sailor on Horseback,” an article on Samuel “Powhatan” Carter, the only man in the United States to have held a commission as an admiral in the navy and a general in the army at the same time.  In 2012, I posted an article on New York City’s “High Line Park,” the elevated, landscaped walkway that runs along Manhattan’s west side, three stories above the streets of Chelsea.  One of my favorite posts is an article, from 2016, called “Ragamuffin Day.”  It’s about a uniquely New York celebration that occurred from the turn of the 20th century till about the end of World War II, in which children went about their neighborhoods dressed as hobos and bums and begged door to door for candy and change.  Sound familiar?  But this street event took place on Thanksgiving, not Halloween (which hadn’t become popular yet).

I make only one guarantee, unwritten until now: I will write something on every public theatrical performance I see.  I reserve one exception to that promise: I won’t blog about a show in which someone I know well is involved—as writer, performer, director/choreographer, designer, or producer; I feel it’s a conflict of interests.  For this reason, I haven’t written about any of Kirk Woodward’s shows—except to use some as points of departure for discussions of something wider, such as “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children’s Theater in America” (2009) and “Dinner Theater” (2015).  Kirk, however, has written about some of his own work, especially productions on which he worked in the past—for example, “Kirk Woodward’s King Lear Journal” (2010) and the two-part “Directing Twelfth Night for Children” (2010).

My main criterion has been to post things that are interesting; the second consideration is that the article be informative or revealing, especially about theater.  Of course, I’m the judge of what’s interesting and informative because . . . well, Rick On Theater is my blog and this is a one-person shop.  I’m sure I’ve made misjudgments, but the criteria remain in effect nevertheless.  That doesn’t mean everything is serious all the time.  I have, for instance, two posts called “Short Takes: Russian Jokes” and “Short Takes: German Humor” (both 2010)—the subjects, I think, are obvious.  I also republished Kyle Smith’s New York Post film review of Jackass 3D, “’Dante update neither divine nor comedy’” (2010), because he took such a humorous approach to his task. 

That’s just a taste of the previous 762 posts on Rick On Theater.  I have no plans to change things, though evolution is inevitable.  Overall, I expect ROT to continue pretty much in the vein in which it’s been operating up to now.  I have some articles in progress and in the planning stages.  Aside from the upcoming play report on Cradle, I started a small series of profiles of interesting people that began with Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy who had a profound influence on actor-director-teacher Michael Chekhov.  The profile was posted on 20 January and will be followed by a biographical post of Aleister Crowley, a British occultist and student of magic, who began his own religion he called Thelema.  The last name on the current list is Michael Chekhov himself, the nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and an important innovator of 20th-century theater and an influential acting teacher in Russia, England, and the United States. 

I’ve also been working on an article, sure to be posted in multiple parts when it’s finished, drawn from the letters exchanged by my future parents between their first meeting in January 1945 and my father’s release from the army after World War II in December that year.  (They were married in January 1946 and I came along the following December.)  This project has become a long task because not only are there nearly 200 pieces of correspondence I have to read closely, but each one usually requires me to go back to one or more previous letters, to pore through other family documents or mementos, or look something up—or some combination of all of those.  (Did any of you know, for instance, that Tax Day wasn’t always 15 April?  It was 15 March until 1955.  Mother mentions that in one letter.  Or how about that President Franklin Roosevelt’s birthday, 30 January, was celebrated from 1934 until his death on 12 April 1945 with a President’s Ball on U.S. military bases.  They were fund-raisers for the March of Dimes, which Roosevelt had founded to fight polio; the president had contracted the disease in 1921.  My dad wrote about preparing for the 1945 ball at his battalion at Camp Hood, Texas—which would turn out to be the last one.  I had to look all that up.)

Kirk, the co-founder of ROT, remarked when I reminded him that the blog’s tenth birthday was coming up:-

Rick On Theater’s value for me is that it is both comprehensive and perceptive.  I can’t imagine a better source for learning about the theater of the past ten years, and of course it’s not limited only to theater—anything cultural is fair game, and “cultural” covers a lot of territory.  But the heart of the blog is the reporting of performance art, and for me it’s unequaled. 

I’ll continue to try to live up to Kirk’s estimation and expectations.  I’ll also continue to stretch the limitations seemingly imposed by my own chosen title.  As the tag line beneath the blog’s title on its webpage states: “My unmediated impressions and thoughts on, especially, theater and perhaps other topics of interest to me.”  That covers multitudes—my only restrictions are that I won’t be covering sex, religion, and politics—the three topics you’re not supposed to discuss at dinner parties.  At least not directly.

So, see you around in Year 11 . . . and beyond.  As we say in the business of show: Break a leg!

~RICK