'The Theatre of Mixed Means' & 'The Theatre of Images'

When I was doing research on the avant-garde theater of the last decades of the 20th century, I found two books especially pertinent and helpful.  Since then, I’ve had occasion to refer to them a number of times (most recently for my article on Rick On Theater about Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, posted on 21 January). 

The books, Richard Kostelanetz’s The Theatre of Mixed-Means and Bonnie Marranca’s The Theatre of Images, are both relatively old, so many readers of this blog may not know about them.  So I’ve decided that it’s a good time to make a kind of formal introduction of them to ROTters.  Think of this as a sort of grown-up’s book report.

Let me do the bibliographic and biographic business first.

Both books appear to be still in print in later paperback editions.  The first of the two books originally had the formal title of The Theatre of Mixed-Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Other Mixed-Means Performances.  It was originally published in 1968 by Dial Press and was reissued (with the variant subtitle An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Presentations) in 1980 by RK Editions.  There also seems to be a 1981 edition from Archae Editions, the latest publication. 

The Theatre of Images, of which Bonnie Marranca is credited as editor, also has multiple editions.  First published in 1977 by Drama Book Specialists, it was rereleased in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press.  The Theatre of Images is a collection of texts of three performance pieces that exemplify what Marranca labeled “the Theatre of Images”: Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) by Richard Foreman, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974) by Robert Wilson, The Red Horse Animation (1970; revised 1972) by Lee Breuer. 

The Theatre of Images’ 1977 edition had an “Introduction,” composed in 1976 by Marranca, a discussion of the avant-garde theater of the time (almost a decade after Kostelanetz wrote about that scene in The Theatre of Mixed-Means).  Twenty years later, when she reedited the book, Marranca added an “Afterword to the 1996 Edition” which she called “The Avant-Garde at the Century Turning.”  In it, Marranca updated her assessment of the experimental theater as it was in the ’70s.

Richard Kostelanetz was born in New York City in 1940; he is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz (1901-80).  A writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields, including contemporary art and literature, Kostelanetz has a Bachelor of Arts degree (1962) from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Master of Arts in American history (1966) from Columbia University in New York; he’s the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, New York State Regents, and International Fellowships, among many other grants and fellowships, and studied at King’s College London as a Fulbright Scholar.  Kostelanetz has lectured widely and served as a visiting professor or guest artist at a variety of institutions.

Among Kostelanetz’s other pertinent writings are The New American Arts (Horizon Press, 1965; Kostelanetz edited and contributed two essays), On Innovative Art(ist)s (McFarland & Co., 1992), and A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (A Cappella Books, 1993; Chicago Review Press, 1993; Schirmer Books, 2000; Routledge, 2001).  He’s also worked in audio, video, film, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. 

Bonnie Marranca was born in 1947 in New Jersey and works in New York City as a writer, editor, critic, and publisher.  She received a B.A. in English from Montclair State University in New Jersey and an M.A. in theater from Hunter College of the City University of New York.  She also attended the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  In 1975, she married a fellow theater student from Calcutta (now Kolkata), Gautam Dasgupta (b. 1949), and the following year, they launched The Performing Arts Journal, which became one of the most respected and successful theater journals in the country. 

Now entitled PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, the triannual publication has a particular interest in contemporary performance art and features extensive coverage in video, drama, dance, installations, media, and music.  It eventually spawned PAJ Publications, the book division, which issued the 1996 edition of The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books on contemporary theatre.  Marranca’s writings have been translated into twenty languages.

Marranca is a professor of theater at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of New York City’s New School.  She’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the 2011 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, and was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the United Kingdom.  Marranca’s a Fulbright Senior Scholar who’s taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, the Free University of Berlin, the Autonomous University of Barcelona Institute for Theatre, the University of Bucharest, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means is a critical examination of the new theater composed of language, music, dance, light, kinetic sculpture, painting, as well as modern technology as it was emerging in the late 1960s.  Though many of the nascent performance forms, like Happenings, have mostly disappeared from the current scene, their influence on contemporary theater and performance was permanent.  The Theatre of Mixed Means predicted the kind of performance milieu the next generation of theater-makers would be entering and the kind of theater they’d be drawn to. 

Kostelanetz observes that the “recent development in American theatre represents such a great departure from traditional practice that it has acquired a plethora of new names . . .” (xi).  He lists “happenings,” “the new theatre,” “events,” “activities,” “painter’s theatre,” “kinetic theatre,” and “action theatre”; I have found myself using terms such as “performance event,” “theater piece,” and “performance piece” because the presentations are clearly not simply “plays” but something more—but what?  What can we call them?

After dismissing for solid reasons all the designations he listed, Kostelanetz comes up with his own answer: “I prefer to christen the entire movement ‘the Theatre of Mixed Means,’ a term that encompasses various strains of activity and yet makes the critical distinction between this theatre and traditional, predominantly literary mono-means practice . . .” (xi).  His “Foreword” introduces and defines this new theater.

Kostelanetz’s explanations of what went on on the stages and in the performance spaces of 40 and 50 years ago bears examining to understand what we’re seeing today.  Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (première, 1985; Broadway, 1986), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (première, 1991; Broadway, 1993-94), Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman (Off-Broadway, 2001; Broadway 2002-03), Golem from the London troupe 1927 (London, 2014; Lincoln Center Festival, 2016), and other multi-media productions on mainstream stages might not have ever been staged if the type of theater Kostelanetz describes had not been so influential.

The body of the book is a short “art-historical” introduction to mid-20th-century multi-media performance, followed by a series of conversations with artists on the edge of art and performance in the 1960s, such as composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912-92); painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance; painter, assemblagist, and pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), who essentially invented the Happening; and sculptor Claes Oldenberg (1929-2022), who was another pioneer in Happenings; among others. 

The mixed-means theater, as Kostelanetz defines it, incorporates “the means (or media) of music and dance, light and color (both natural and chemical), sculpture and painting, as well as the new technologies of film, recorded tape, amplification systems, radio and closed-circuit television” (4).  (Since Kostelanetz was writing in the late 1960s, we should add video and computer technology as well as digital sound recording techniques, all of which are currently used on stage.)  This line of development is continued by what Bonnie Marranca describes as “the Theatre of Images.” 

The mixed-means theater is not a new phenomenon and it’s linked quite specifically, like both 19th-century Romanticism and Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) concept, to “primitive ceremonies” which integrated singing, dancing, acting, sculpture, and painting (3).  Kostelanetz observed that the various arts probably became separated when societies began to see “Art as distinct from life” and a principle of the mixed-means theater—also a tenet of Native American epistemology, for example—is that life and art are not distinct, but rather “continuous, if not identical” (3, 34). 

“Not only does the Theatre of Mixed Means descend from the formally chaotic tendencies in the arts it encompasses . . . ,” asserts the author, “so it also contributes to that great modern tendency that would blur the traditional lines separating one art from another, in order to synthesize means from all the arts, as well as non-artistic technologies and materials, into a single, great, catholic super-art” (283).

In the final chapter of The Theatre of Mixed-Means, Kostelanetz lays out what he sees as the “critical values” applicable to mixed-means performances.  Kostelanetz notes that, at its beginning, such work was rejected by everyone except the artists as “ugly and chaotic” (276) because, he contends, “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful . . .” (275). 

(This statement echoes art philosopher Suzanne Langer’s definition of beauty as she explained it in her 1953 book Feeling and Form.  Langer, 1895-1985—on whom I posted a two-part article on ROT; the discussion of her views on beauty is in Part 2: 8 January 2010—was quite clear about what could be beautiful and what might not be:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

(This interpretation can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.)   

Both Kostelanetz and Marranca stress that the new theatrical conventions minimize text and accentuate visual and aural imagery in an Artaudian vein.  Ultimately, however, Kostelanetz observes that the mixed-means theater doesn’t altogether reject language, as did Artaud ostensibly, but opts “for a more elliptical, poetic, or simplistic use of words” (278). 

Bonnie Marranca, in her book, picks up where Kostelanetz leaves off in The Theatre of Mixed-Means.  She defines the “Theatre of Images” as the “particular style of the American avant-garde which . . . exclude[s] dialogue or use[s] words minimally in favor of aural, visual and verbal imagery that calls for alternative modes off perception on the part of the audience” (x). 

The avant-garde critic explains in her June 1995 afterword that her book “grew out of my own search for a new critical vocabulary to describe the art I was seeing” (160) in the 1970s, which she characterized as “a glorious period” (159) when “[a]rtists, critics, and audiences together created a genuine avant-garde community and an expansive discourse, which evolved naturally from all the performance activity and discussion about it in the air” (159-60).

Before presenting the three examples of imagistic theater texts, Marranca intends “to demonstrate the significance of this Theatre of Images, its derivation from theatrical and non-theatrical sources, its distinctively American roots in the avant-garde, its embodiment of a certain contemporary sensibility and its impact on audiences” (x). 

The editor adds that she “will perhaps suggest an attitude to bring to this theatre” and hopes also to “offer helpful, new tools of analysis—an alternative critical vocabulary—with which to view contemporary theatre” (x).  In these aims, we can see that Marranca and Kostelanetz share a belief that, at least in the beginning of the last third of the 20th century, audiences and critics alike were unprepared for the emerging theater they were describing.  (Nor were they the only critics of the contemporary theater and art scene who felt this way.)

Marranca specifically names several avant-garde companies she feels were the progenitors of imagistic theater, specifically the Living Theatre (Julian Beck and Judith Malina), the Open Theatre (Joseph Chaikin), the Performance Group (Richard Schechner and Elizabeth LeCompte), the Manhattan Project (Andre Gregory), and the Iowa Theatre Lab (Ric Zank).  She adds a few troupes with more political agendas: El Teatro Campesino (Luis Valdez and Agustin Lira), the San Francisco Mime Troupe (R. G. Davis), and the Bread and Puppet Theater (Peter Schumann).  Of course, the three artists whose work she presents in the book are high on her list of avant-gardists of the Theatre of Images: Foreman and his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and Breuer of Mabou Mines.

In the Theatre of Images, Marranca explains, “The absence of dialogue leads to the predominance of the stage picture . . . .  This voids all considerations of theatre as it is conventionally understood in terms of plot, character, setting, language and movement” (x).  Marranca links this imagistic theater to the then-newly emerging form of “art-performance”—what we now call performance art (see my post, “Performance Art,” 7 and 10 November 2013). 

Marranca continues: “Actors do not create ‘roles.’  They function as media through which the playwright expresses his ideas; they serve as icons and images” (x-xi).  You can see, I imagine, how this style of theater would attract visual artists like Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, and Kaprow to shift between painting and sculpture and this new kind of performance, and how performance art might be born of the amalgamation of the two art fields. 

You can also see how works like Richard Jones’s Hairy Ape and Judgment Day as they were mounted at the Park Avenue Armory (see my reports on 18 April 2017 and 16 January 2020, respectively) might spring from more conventional scripts from earlier in the 20th century after mixed-means and imagistic theater invaded the mainstream stage.  Marranca asserts that “the innovations of the Theatre of Images have filtered into the staging, performance styles, and design concepts of other older and younger generations, traveling off-Broadway, to regional mainstream theatres, to Broadway, and the opera” (184).  Her book, as well as Kostelanetz’s, connects the dots from then to now.

The Theatre of Images posits that on the imagistic theater, “the painterly and sculptural qualities of performance are stressed, transforming theatre into a spatially-dominated one activated by sense impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear narrative” (xii).  See if that description doesn’t approximate my depiction of Judgment Day earlier this month. 

You might even note that those who disparaged aspects of the production complained about what Marranca sees as an asset in imagistic theater: “Sound and visual images dominate in performance in an attempt to expand normal capabilities for experiencing sense stimuli” (xiv).

“The significance of the Theatre of Images,” declares the editor, “is its expansion of the audience’s capacity to perceive.  It is a theater devoted to the creation of a new stage language, a visual grammar ‘written’ in sophisticated perceptual codes” (xiv-xv).

Of somewhat less importance to my point here is Marranca’s disappointment 20 years after publishing The Theatre of Images, expressed in her 1995 afterword.  Less important because the book’s value to me is its real-time assessment of a vital and influential period in American theater and performance.  That Marranca felt that by 1995, that brief candle had gone out, as sad as it is, doesn’t detract from her description and analysis of what was happening in the theaters of the 1970s while she was seeing it.  Whatever happened later, that chronicle and explication is still there—and still true.

Marranca saw that the avant garde she wrote about in 1976 dissipated in the 1980s and 1990s when art ran into sociology and politics.  While artists like Wilson, Foreman, and Breuer continued to strive to make meaningful art—even extending their reaches—the culture out of which they had emerged had turned to entertainment and socio-political agendas (161-65).  It’s a sad commentary on the art-vs.-politics struggle in this country at a time when the culture wars (see my post of that title, 6 February 2014), and at the same time as Marranca was writing her addendum, I saw its toll on artists I knew (Leonardo Shapiro) and many more I didn’t (The NEA Four, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Ofili, 2 Live Crew). 

But even if the aura of the ’70s is lost, for one brief, shining moment, it glowed—and Marranca captured it for us today.  And so’s the influence that’s palpable in all the theater of the ’80s. ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s that we had (and have) that exists because of Marranca’s Theatre of Images and Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means.  Their books help us understand how that work got that way.

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 2

[This is Part 2 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.]

When Kirk sets out that the fundamental duties of reviews are to “experience, describe, and, finally, evaluate” what they see, he praises the reviewers who “start out by genuinely participating, through their imaginations, in the works in front of them.” Every theater pro wants spectators, including reviewers, to get into the world of the play, to enter into the performance so that they have a virtual experience in the theater. We don’t want someone to come to a farce, say, and demand logic and reason or to a 19th-century drama and complain because the characters aren’t behaving according to 21st-century codes. But letting their imaginations take over too completely can be a danger, too. I remember reading a play review by Ben Brantley a number of years ago in which he went to great lengths to specify the aromas he imagined wafting about the stage and he connected those scent images to his own associations. I suppose that’s fine for a spectator’s private experience--you make the associations that have meaning for you--but when the spectator writes about that performance for my consumption, I get the impression that the reviewer was experiencing this play entirely inside his own head, not in a seat at the theater where I might join him. I can’t share the experience he’s having in his imagination. The greater implication of this instance, which confirmed for me a suspicion I’d had about Brantley’s reviews--that he wasn’t seeing the same performances I was--is that it has made me skeptical of all Brantley’s descriptions because I wonder if he’s writing about what he actually saw on stage, or just in his imagination. However engaged in the performance we may get--and engagement is a good thing, even for a reviewer--a part of us has to remain in the real world. (That would be the real world of theater, not all that nonsense going on outside. Heavens! Who’d want that?)

After suggesting that the only way to be sure that “reviewers are genuinely experiencing what they describe” (see above) is to see the play before the notices appear, Kirk observes, “Some kind of artistic Heisenberg principle is at work here: being reviewed changes the nature of the piece itself.” This reminds me of something a director whose work I researched, Leonardo Shapiro, told me in an interview:

What changes the audience the most is the review. The New York audience is much blander and much more sophisticated and much less exciting after the reviews. Before the reviews, they’re really a lot like other audiences; they’re much more alive. . . . It’s amazing. I don’t know how they all get to read the reviews, but the change in the audience is so clear. When the reviewer comes and says it’s funny, the next night they laugh. I swear to you. It’s just like a script.

Throughout Writing Reviews, Kirk names some of the reviewers he admires (and some of those of whom he doesn’t think all that much) and these names come up several times. He spotlights Brooks Atkinson, the chief theater reviewer for the New York Times from the ‘20s through the ‘50s, whom Kirk calls “the Walter Cronkite of reviewing.” Kirk also praises music reviewer Whitney Bartlett of the New Yorker for his writing about jazz. I’d like to add a few less-prominent names to Kirk’s list. I’ve already mentioned Elvis Mitchell, a film reviewer for the New York Times from 1998 to 2004, who always had a surprising turn of phrase or an unexpected expression in his writing that made it interesting to read quite aside from his opinion of the film he was covering. I also used to admire Dennis Cunningham, who reviewed both theater and movies for WCBS-TV in New York from 1978 to 2000, because his theater reviews especially were little arguments for his perspective. By argument, I don’t mean that he got contentious over his opinions, but that he always presented evidence from the performance to illustrate or support his remarks. Another reviewer whose work I have liked is Marcia Siegel, a dance writer. I’m not a follower of dance, but Siegel’s reviews are always very clear, descriptive, and communicative, especially for a non-dance person like me. When I write about theater, I try to follow her example by writing for the reader who may see a play, but doesn’t know anything about the art itself--the uninitiated reader. (Full disclosure: Siegel was on the faculty of NYU’s Department of Performance Studies while I was there and I audited a class from her, Writing about Performance. It has had a profound effect on my theater writing.)

Oh, and that reminds me, speaking of Brooks Atkinson: He was the most important theater writer of his day, and he also had the most unique name among New York newspaper reviewers. (This was, of course, before Manohla Dargis joined the film department of the Times. Or Joe Dziemianowicz came to the Daily News.) Some of you may know the story of the famous 1962 fake-quote ad for Subways Are for Sleeping. For those who missed this wonderful bit of New York theater trivia, Press Agent Harvey Sabinson and Producer David Merrick hired ordinary New Yorkers with the same names as Walter Kerr; Howard Taubman; Richard Watts, Jr.; and the other major New York newspaper reviewers, treated them to the new musical--which had gotten poor notices after opening--and then wined and dined them. Getting the group to say great things about the show, the producer and his press agent wrote a display ad for the papers with appropriate laudatory quotations. Because the ad included photos of the ringers, only the Herald Tribune didn’t spot the gag and ran the ad. The pair had planned such a stunt for years, but could never pull it off because they knew "in all this world there is no other man with [the] name" Brooks Atkinson. They had to wait until Atkinson retired to pull the hoax. (This anecdote has nothing whatsoever to do with the art of writing reviews, but it has something to do with Brooks Atkinson! It was just one of those things the book made me think about when I read it. See what I mean?)

Kirk returns to the problem of reviewers who settle into a “comfort zone” and aren’t receptive to innovations that “may break new ground.” I’ve already noted the objections raised by Michael Kirby, Richard Kostelanetz, and Ross Wetzsteon. To return to Kostelanetz’s analysis, he saw that “the more imposing artists [of the experimental theater] have rejected traditional notions of beauty as too sentimental and quaint, and, in contrast, audiences and critics would sooner acknowledge the familiar than explore works of art they cannot immediately comprehend.” Kostelanetz, a poet who was also a champion of avant-garde art, attributes this inhospitable stance to the fact that the reviewer “feels more comfortable in reading from the past into the present.” One of the harshest critics of establishment reviewers in New York is Elinor Fuchs, herself a genuine theater critic (and sometime reviewer), scholar, teacher, dramaturg, and writer. In a 1989 essay in American Theatre, she remarked, “New York’s critical establishment seems ever more deeply establishmentarian,” privileging the traditional aesthetics of Western culture to the exclusion of anything non-Western or pioneering. Fuchs continued: “But the establishment critics are no laughing matter, for . . . they are literally driving innovative, daring theatre out of New York.” In conclusion, she wrote:

The lack of curiosity, the disrespect, the indifference--all go to show that the critics don’t seem to know whom to cultivate. . . . . Even in its own venues where it has a devoted following, the avant-garde, experimental or progressive wing (as some now call it) of the New York theatre world continues to be attacked by the press with a vigor one would think familiarity must have dulled by now.

“Reviewers sometimes worry that they’ll say that something accidental is important . . . ,” warns Kirk. Actually, I stopped worrying too much about this after I made note of just such an occurrence in a college show I reviewed for that theater criticism class at Rutgers. The production was Godspell and I described how felicitously the “splashing water from [a] spinning sponge echoed the painted spirals of the backdrop” in front of which the actor was singing “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.” Now I had said this was “perhaps a happy accident,” but the teacher of the class, Betty Comtois, told me that even if it had been an accident, it was still legitimate grist for the reviewer’s mill. So I always remember that feedback whenever I see something that I suspect might not have been intended by any of the artists. Kirk advises us, “You can only review what’s there,” but the opposite is also true: You get to review anything that’s there. If it happens on stage, it counts! (Reviewers have “prosecutorial discretion,” of course. We don’t have to mention everything that went on.)

Of course, nothing indemnifies us from writing something that’s just plain dumb. We’re all subject to that. I once wrote in a review of a play about Tennessee Williams that the actor playing “Bird,” as the playwright was called, didn’t have a very authentic New Orleans accent. Well, as I realized later (after the pesky review went to press) that Williams wasn’t from New Orleans; he was born in Mississippi and grew up in St. Louis, Missouri. He lived in the Big Easy, whose natives have very distinctive speech, but talked just like the Mississippian he was. Now that mistake is on the record for all to read, if they happen upon the review. (And, no, I’m not going to help you by naming the play or the periodical.)

Kirk also affirms that “a work of art has the right to the presumption that it’s coherent and meaningful.” Yes, it does. Or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put the proposition in his essay, “Art”: “And so every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.” When reviewers pan a particular work of art, that’s their right--in fact, it’s even their duty as reviewers to call it as they see it. (I once heard a TV film reviewer in Washington revise upwards his estimation of a movie he had previously given a poor notice because it proved to be popular. I lost all respect for him after that.) But when they disparage a whole genre or question the very right of the artist to do the work at all, then they are stepping over a line, I think. A mediocre piece of art is not painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa: no one’s destroyed anything. Poor art isn’t a crime against humanity. (See remarks later from art philosopher Susanne Langer.) The reviewers have lost a little time, but they get paid for that. And let’s not forget, too, that even an experiment that fails has value. Just move on.

When it comes to acting, Kirk tells us, “it’s meaningless to talk about a ‘good’ performance” because the term’s so vague. We should judge performances on their appropriateness to the production (not just the play, mind you) because a “’great’ characterization in one production . . . would likely be hopelessly out of place [in] another . . . .” Now, I’m sure Kirk is talking about different productions of the same play--where Miss Smith’s interpretation of Nora in one production of A Doll House is marvelous but if transferred to another Doll House would be unsuitable. But the same comparison is true of the same actor playing different parts in two plays, say in rep. I went to the Shaw Festival a few years ago and saw eight performances over a week in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. All of the members of the company perform in at least two plays so I saw many actors do two roles in plays that were often quite different in style and genre. Most of the performers were marvelously flexible and handled the shifts with aplomb. (Generally, the acting at the festival was excellent.) One actor, however, had a distinctive stage style that suited one role much better than the other. I won’t report his name here, but he appeared in The Heiress and then in Arms and the Man. I saw The Heiress first and the actor’s mannerisms and behavioral choices (especially his vocal patterns) seemed entirely fake. When I saw him in Arms, he displayed the same traits, but they worked for his character and the Shaw comedy where they hadn’t worked in the melodrama.

Kirk draws attention to the responsibility of the director, an artist whose work is hard to analyze for many spectators who have never acted or directed themselves. (That difficulty was the rationale for the founding of the American Directors Institute, a professional association whose newsletter I edited. ADI, sadly, disbanded after only a few years, but its stated purpose was, in part, to try to elucidate the work of the stage director not only to the theater-going public but also other theater artists.) Anyway, Kirk remarks that there are some directors “who seem to feel that their work is the part and the whole of a production.” I presume he’s referring to the so-called auteur director. (Film is full of that kind of director.) I guess that the models for this kind of director would be Vsevolod Meyerhold and, more recently, Jerzy Grotowski. In fact, Meyerhold, who often called himself the “author of the production,” said that “the art of the director is the art not of an executant, but of an author--so long as one has earned the right.”

When he makes a point about artists making choices, Kirk uses The Glass Menagerie as an example. It’s not strictly relevant to the author’s point, but it’s interesting to note two things about GM. First, Williams originally wrote the script as a screenplay (for Lana Turner) when he worked briefly at MGM. (When the play came out and was a success, MGM tried to claim the rights under the argument that Williams had written it while he was the studio’s employee. Williams’s stalwart, and sometimes quite fierce, agent, Audrey Wood, defeated the effort.) Second, Williams’s original concept for the play was quite Brechtian, with scene titles and other distancing techniques. The director, Joe Dowling, removed all that from the première production in 1947, in the belief that Broadway audiences wouldn’t accept the innovations. (Some recent productions of the play have restored the Brechtian elements, with some success, I believe.) Choices, as we see, are not made in a vacuum, and sometimes they’re made for reasons far from artistic.

And speaking of Tennessee Williams, he made a poignant statement that supports something else Kirk writes in Writing Reviews. Kirk cautions reviewers to resist comparing an artist’s work with what the artist had done earlier. In 1951, after his great successes with Menagerie and Streetcar, Williams had begun to try new things. But the reviewers wouldn’t tolerate the shift, insisting that the playwright stick with what he’d done so successfully in the beginning. Angry over the reviews of The Rose Tattoo, which had just opened, Williams wrote a letter to columnist Max Lerner, complaining about “the most demoralizing problem that the American playwright has to face.” The dramatist continued: “Painters have it better. They are allowed to evolve new methods, new styles, by a reasonable gradual process. They are not abused for turning out creative variations of themes already stated.”

Then Kirk continues by admonishing us, “An artist has no responsibility to improve.” That’s right, of course. Artists aren’t obligated to us or anyone to get better or move up or anything. (In fact, they’re not even obligated to continue. Remember Wit? Margaret Edson wrote this one terrific play, it won a Pulitzer in 1999--and a passel of other awards--and then she went back to teaching kindergarten in Atlanta. She said she had one play she wanted to write, she wrote it, now she’s done.) But this point raises a question. Actually, it begs the question, How do we measure improvement? How do we recognize improvement? Who gets to define improvement? What if Tennessee Williams had gotten to try out his new ideas--as he did eventually with Camino Real? Was his absurdist play an “improvement” on Streetcar or even Rose Tattoo? I don’t know. It’s different, I know that. I think it’s harder to perform successfully. But those aren’t issues of improvement, just of difference. The reviews of Camino Real ranged from confusion to dismissal, and the play languished for years until the rest of the theater in this country caught up with it. (It opened in New York a few years before Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which had its own problems with audiences and reviewers.) Aside from the question of whether any of that marks “improvement,” there’s also the fact that any artist must often stumble and fall a few times before moving on to new accomplishments. Improvement, even if we could measure it, wouldn’t come in a straight line anyway. (By the way, my answers to those questions above? We can’t. We don’t. No one.)

In this same discussion, Kirk states, “I hate to see the increasing number of competitions--literally--in the arts . . . .” Back in August I posted a piece about the Tony committee’s removal of the press from the Tony voter list. At the top of that column, I wrote, “I reject the whole idea of turning art into a competition . . . .” I’m less upset with the marketing awards and titles like best-sellers, Gold Records, and the Nielson ratings because, first, they’re based on concrete evidence and, second, they don’t pretend to be based on a judgment of excellence but only popularity. (As we all recognize, popularity doesn’t always equate with excellence. Just look at the evidence offered by some TV shows and movies.) But it offends me to see artists and their work placed in competition with one another. Art isn’t a sports contest. Obviously Kirk and I must be in a minority in this opinion because the contests and awards seem to be proliferating. (Especially in the music business--there seems to an award for every perspective or category anyone can devise.)

Writing Reviews also addresses prejudices among reviewers and its author warns that pet peeves are dangerous for a reviewer. He doesn’t say so, but the same is true of prejudices for a kind of work. I love the old-time musicals--Oklahoma!, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and even some less well-known ones like Donnybrook! and Little Mary Sunshine. See, the problem is that I have no objectivity, no distance from these shows. I started out with them when I was little--my first show on Broadway was Fiorello! when I was 10 (having already seen pre- and post-Broadway tours at the old National Theatre in Washington from an earlier age), and I can’t judge them at all fairly, even in a mediocre production. (A really bad one, I might notice.) Take me to Damn Yankees or Camelot, and I’m just gonna gush, almost no matter what. (On the other hand, I have attention problems with 19th-century melodramas, and I don’t much enjoy monodramas, with exceptions for extraordinary performances like Henry Fonda in Clarence Darrow or Pat Carroll as Gertrude Stein.) The thing is, when I’ve had to review shows with which I know I’ll have trouble, if I couldn’t get out of the assignment, I’ve always tried to admit right up front that I probably wasn’t the best person to assess the performance. Then I tried to confine myself to describing the experience more than evaluating it so I could let the readers make up their own minds about seeing the play.

There’s one subject for any performance--movie, TV show, or play--about which I have so much private baggage that I just stay away: the Holocaust. Kirk confesses to an “antipathy” for violent movies; I can’t watch any Holocaust story (or even look at a collection of Holocaust-related photographs) without getting so angry that I come close to losing control. (On a trip to Israel years ago, I had to leave Yad Vashem because I was beginning to shake with anger.) I don’t like feeling that way--it actually scares me--so I seldom watch that kind of stuff anymore. I certainly could never review a play or movie on the topic because my objectivity about the artwork would be nonexistent. (Interestingly, I didn’t have the same kind of problem with My Name Is Rachel Corrie. I didn’t like that piece because it was bad theater, inherently untheatrical and undramatic.)

[Come back in a few days for Part 3 of my commentary on Writing Reviews. There’s still more to say.]

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 1

In June of this year, my friend Kirk Woodward published a book on reviewing. I’ve mentioned Kirk before on several occasions. He’s a playwright, composer, director, teacher, and actor (and, most recently, a “guest blogger” for ROT--see 5 October), and we went to college together back in the middle of the last century. When he announced the release of The Art of Writing Reviews, I approached it with trepidation because . . . What if I didn’t like it? What would I say to him? Or, just as terrifying, What if he dissed everything I had done when I wrote reviews. We’d never talked about this except in passing, so I had no idea what he thought about writing theater reviews (much less any other kind). How would I feel if Kirk’s ideas about writing good reviews were basically the opposite of what I’d been practicing? (As a matter of full disclosure, I don’t consider what I post on ROT to be reviews. Kirk says they come close to “criticism,” but I demur. I call them “play reports” and disobligate myself from all the conventions and restraints of proper reviewing. What I published in the ‘80s and ‘90s were reviews.)

Well, okay, none of that happened. In fact, I couldn’t have agreed more with just about everything my friend--a brilliant analyst and commentator, clearly--said about good review-writing. (Both Kirk and I share the notion that there’s a profound difference between reviewing and criticism and that what we’re talking about here and in Kirk’s book is reviewing. I’ll let you read The Art of Writing Reviews to get a full definition of the distinction.) But I’m not going to write a review of Kirk’s book or even critique it in general terms. What I’m going to do is have a sort of one-sided conversation with him by commenting on some of the things he’s said in Writing Reviews that jogged my mind as I read it. It made me think about all kinds of things. That's a good thing, I think: When I used to teach writing in college, I told my students that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s). It's what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions. In an extended version, the "reader" would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on. Books sometimes respond to other books, too (though the process is longer). Well, this is a perfect example of that, and this post will be my contribution to the conversation.

First, however, let me include a little about the book itself, to set the scene, so to speak. Here’s what the author, himself, says:

Considering how many reviews are written each day--for newspapers, magazines, broadcast outlets, and, overwhelmingly, for the Internet--there is remarkably little written about the art of writing reviews itself.

This book considers the differences between reviews and criticism, and looks at the fundamental tasks of the reviewer: experiencing, describing, and evaluating. It examines some of the major problems, misconceptions, and bad habits involved in creating reviews, and discusses the structure of the review itself.

Finally, by placing reviewing in a larger context, the book becomes an exploration of the nature of art itself, and of our place in it.

As for anything more, I’ll address that as I come to it in my remarks here. Of course, to get the full impact, I strongly recommend reading the whole book (which is short, “an extended essay,” says Kirk--what I’d call a monograph). It’s chatty and easy to read--no academic language and little theatrical jargon--and only 61 pages long. You can read it in one sitting or, if you’re like me and impelled to make marginal notes and comments, maybe a couple of days’ sessions. You can order it or download it at http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272; it isn’t available from bookstores, Amazon.com, or BarnesandNoble.com (and I doubt it’s made it into many libraries yet). As Kirk suggests, the book has practical value for anyone who wants to write reviews, is already writing them, or is just interested in reviewing as “a form of writing.” There’s both sound advice and theoretical reflection in Writing Reviews and all of it’s worth reading, even if you end up disagreeing with Kirk and me.

As for my anticipatory trepidations, all I can say is that my first reaction was, Wow, what a good job! I’ve often copped to succumbing to Schadenfreude, taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But that’s only for people I don’t like. When a friend does well, I’m thrilled! So, let me take up the conversation in medias res, as the lit folks say, and jump in. I’ll just follow along with Kirk’s structure and sound off along the way, step by step.

At the outset, Kirk remarks that there are no books and few articles on the art of reviewing--“How To’s,” as it were. He’s right, as it happens, but there are lots of courses and academic programs on the subject. Yale even offers a DFA in criticism, I believe. (Jonathan Kalb of the Village Voice is a graduate of the YSD program.) What do they use for texts and reading materials? (In my one “criticism” class at Rutgers, where I got an MFA, we mostly read other reviewers--few works "on" reviewing.) There are a few articles by reviewers on reviewing: an entire issue of Yale/Theatre (the predecessor to Theater), "American Drama Criticism" (vol. 4, # 2, Spring 1973) contains essays by Stanley Kauffmann, Eric Bentley, Robert Brustein, and Martin Gottfried, among others; the September 2001 issue of American Theatre (Vol. 18, # 7) includes eight essays on "Understanding Critics" by reviewers like Frank Rich and Kalb. A more theoretical piece, which proposes a different approach to reviewing than is commonly practiced, is Michael Kirby’s “Criticism: Four Faults” (Drama Review 18.4 [T63 - Dec. 1974]: 59-68). (My own short essay, “On Reviewing,” was posted on ROT on 22 March.) But essentially Kirk’s correct; there’s no Reviewers on Reviewing or Critics on Criticism on the shelves. (I did considerable research some years ago on the subject of theater reviewers and critics for my essay "The Power of the Reviewer: Myth or Fact?" [Theatre History Studies 18 (June 1998): 13-38] and I covered the available literature at the time. There was little 10 years ago, and I don’t think the situation has changed much since.)

One of the first things Kirk says is that writing is a way of figuring out what we think. (He repeats this later, too, near the end of Writing Reviews.) That was another thing I used to tell my students (especially when I assigned a journal as a course requirement). I used to paraphrase Gracie Allen--maybe some of you remember this one: "How do I know what I think until I hear what I say?" I made it about writing instead of talking, but the sentiment's the same. I’ve certainly found this to be true of writing reviews (or, in my case these days, my play reports). When my friends first asked me to write them about what I was seeing here in New York, I discovered that I enjoyed trying to sort out what I saw and what my response was. Trying to describe the performance so that someone who wasn’t there can picture it, which is sort of my special focus, became a way to figure out what I’d experienced . . . and why. Sometimes--even often, I’d say--I didn’t know what I thought of a performance, at least not beyond a vague feeling, until I began writing my report. I knew I had to make the experience clear to people who hadn’t seen it, and that really focused my mind. Since the people I was writing for, before ROT, all knew my e-mail address and could (and often did) write me back with comments and questions, I also anticipated what they’d be thinking while they were reading my description. That was a particularly interesting exercise in writing for an audience: all the recipients were theater people, so they knew a lot on the subject, but one’s a former Brit who lives in Israel and another’s an Indian in Kolkata. I became very conscious of my pop culture references and my diction, especially slang and colloquialisms. So not only did writing help me sort out what I think, but it made me pay attention to how I express the thoughts.

Early in Writing Reviews, Kirk observes that the “blurring of boundaries [between art forms] can confuse a reviewer.” This is the same phenomenon that author Richard Kostelanetz discusses in some detail in The Theatre of Mixed Means (Dial Press, 1968). “Since the critic must now respond to dance, film, theatre, and music all at once,” Kostelanetz writes, “criticism of the new work has been sparse and, when in print, meager in perception.” Reviewers knowledgeable about only one performance genre are “monoliterate,” thinks Kostelanetz, which is the same as what Ross Wetzsteon, the late and esteemed Village Voice reviewer and theater editor, calls “illiterate.” Reviewers, Kostelanetz insists, must be “polyliterate,” and, faced with a theater that incorporates all kinds of new techniques, themes, and ideas, those who aren’t should “be humbled by our perceptual illiteracy.” Reviewing, Wetzsteon lamented in 1989, “has simply not kept pace with the theatre it claims to evaluate.” Not a few critics of newspaper reviewers find this a failing to be heartily deplored.

Kirk goes on to ask if there should even be “landmarks” and “touchstones” in the arts about which reviewers write. “Learning the elements of an art is learning what’s already been done,” writes Kirk. This is one of the “four faults” Michael Kirby recognizes in theatrical reviewing (he called it criticism, as most people do . . . but we won’t): reviewers who make the claim that they’re upholding universal standards perpetuate the cultural status quo by privileging “what has been thought to be ‘good’ and ‘beautiful’ in the past” while “stifling” innovation and experimentation. (If you didn’t know it already, you might guess that Kirby was an avant-garde playwright, among other things.) But whose standards are the ones the reviewers impose on the rest of us? Kirby insists they are the reviewers’ own, and so he calls them “arrogant” and accuses them of “fascism of taste.” We might remember that the very “standards” such reviewers praise and want to entrench were themselves once radical innovations, often condemned when they first appeared on stage or on canvas. (Ibsen’s Realism caused riots when it first appeared in print. But, then, so had Victor Hugo’s Romanticism. Go know!) The truth changes.

I do have one caveat, however. While holding only to old standards may be anti-progressive and destructive, we can’t forget the old just because something new has come along--even something new and great. The new is often built on the old, like ancient cities. Kirk writes, “What [new work] won’t be like . . . is what’s gone before it,” by which he means we can’t predict what’s coming down the road based on what we’ve seen already. Of course, he’s absolutely right. But note one axiom: Imagination is new combinations of things known. (I don’t know who said that. Actually, I do know who said it--an acting teacher of mine named Aaron Frankel--I just don’t know who said it first.) Almost nothing we can conjure up, the most horrible monster or the most fantastic machine, isn’t made up of bits and pieces of things we’ve already experienced. We create the new out of bits of the old. We wipe the slate totally clean at our own peril.

In his discussion of the differences between a critic and a reviewer, Kirk states, “In other words, a reviewer offers product advice, telling you whether you should spend your valuable time and your hard-earned money on a particular event.” That’s the “consumer reporter” mode of reviewing, and it’s one of the ways some reviewers see their function. According to surveys, most reviewers see themselves as journalists, that is reporters writing about a news event. Some see themselves as a kind of artist, a writer of the art of criticism. A few simply deny that they have any more influence than the guy who evaluates blenders and can-openers for Consumer Reports. Obviously, the way you see yourself in the profession makes a difference in how you will approach your craft and execute your responsibilities. Which is better? I don’t know; I guess it depends on what the reader wants from your efforts. I suppose the thumbs up-thumbs down consumer report is easiest. Covering the event of a play performance like a news reporter is harder but there’s less of you invested in the outcome. Reporters, after all, aren’t supposed to get invested in the story. Trying to craft a well-written piece of prose that expresses not just the facts of the event but some of the effect it had on you, some of the atmosphere surrounding the event, some of the . . . well, meaning, I guess--maybe that’s not the hardest approach if you’re a talented writer, but there’s more of your ego invested in the end result. I think that’s hard, but that’s what I’d go with. (Okay, editors and publishers have a say, but let’s pretend they don’t.)

As Kirk points out, things have changed on Broadway with respect to opening-night reviews. The “overnight” copy has gone with the copy boy and the press card in the hatband. Now that out-of-town tryouts are mostly a thing of the past (too expensive and too risky), replaced with previews right here in the Big Apple, reviewers no longer have to come to opening night and then rush off to the typewriter (okay, the wordprocessor--I’m hip!) and bash out their deathless prose for a midnight deadline. Now they all go to previews before the play opens and write up their evaluations with a little leisure. (Second-nighters have it even easier, of course. They have a week or more to write their reviews--but they always did.) Staff is shrinking and space is getting cut, but there’s more time now to do the work. But there’s a trade-off. Even when the producers charge the same for a seat at the preview as they do for post-opening tickets, they’re still previews. You’re watching a dress rehearsal, you understand. The cast is still working, and sometimes things haven’t gelled--might even be changed before opening. Reviewers who see a performance before opening night aren’t seeing the finished product. That’s why, in the old days, they had tryouts outside New York City--to give the actors, the director, and the playwright time to fix things that aren’t right. Costumes and sets have been known to be completely rebuilt overnight. It’s not different just because those preliminary performances are now in a New York theater instead of Philly, Boston, or Baltimo’. Even now that I’m not reviewing for anyone, I still insist on seeing shows after they open unless I can’t help it. I know I’ve seen shows that were different from the ones the reviewers wrote about--and not just because we have eyes and brains that aren’t calibrated the same. (See my remarks later on concerning Heraclitus of Ephasus.) Because they saw a pre-season exhibition game and I saw one after the season started--one that counted. (Kirk has a similar admonition later in the book when he writes about those out-of-town tryouts, which some reviewers attend.)

“Sometimes reviewers write both a daily review and a longer weekend-issue or opinion piece,” notes Kirk. The author suggests that the reviewers who do this use the longer column to expand on the thoughts they expressed more briefly in the shorter, daily review. Yeah, and sometimes they just use the second piece to nail a show they didn’t like one more time, just to be sure we got their point. On Thursday, 3 April 1975, for instance, the late Douglas Watt wrote in the Daily News: “Last night some young hopefuls . . . mangled Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ under the auspices of Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival . . . .” He went on at length in the same vein. But that wasn’t sufficient for Watt, so in the Sunday News on 13 April, he slammed the production again: “[The] week before last down on Lafayette Street at the Public Theater . . . a clutch of seemingly demented actors grabbed hold of Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ and flung it around . . . as if it were an idiotic farce.” A year earlier, Watt had done the same thing to the same troupe, writing first on Wednesday, 16 October 1974: “Bertolt Brecht is on us again, this time with a noisy and tiresome 75-minute construction titled ‘The Measures Taken.’” Once not being enough, Watt wrote again on Sunday, 8 December, that the actors “are sadly lacking, for the most part” and that the play “fails to involve the spectator in human terms.” It’s nice Watt, who died on 29 September (at 95), had the extra column inches to twist the knife a little.

Kirk claims that he wrote reviews but had “no skill or experience.” I take exception to that self-characterization. Okay, I understand he’s making a point, and I also understand that he literally had no background in review-writing. But he acknowledges that few newspaper reviewers have specialized training or backgrounds--they get it OTJ. What Kirk had, just as what I had when I did that job, is a pretty good knowledge of theater, especially acting, directing, and playwriting, and some skill as a writer. That's a sufficient background for a reviewer, at least to start with; we can gain more as we see more theater and try to do what Kirk describes in the book. There are reviewers who have not had even those qualification--I daresay there have been newspaper reviewers who never saw a live play before they got the gig, though they probably didn't write for a major daily at that point. There are many I could name who are terrible writers (I never thought, for instance, that Frank Rich, for all his authority as the Times chief reviewer, was a very good writer), even if they did have some experience in theater. (There was a Times film reviewer recently, Elvis Mitchell, who I thought was a terrific writer--but he left the paper after a stay of only six years.)

When I wrote reviews, the only special training I had was one class in "criticism" at Rutgers. I took it merely because we MFA-types were required to take one academic-type (i.e., readin'-'n'-writin') class in our two-year program, and I had the choice in the semester I decided to fulfill the obligation of a theater history class or criticism. (It was “reviewing,” but the department called it “criticism.” As I’ve told Kirk, you just can’t fight city hall on this.) I figured I'd had enough theater history at that point, so the process of elimination led me to the criticism class. That was the extent of my training--and no editors ever asked me about it when they hired me to write. (In one case I got in on the recommendation of a former professor alone; in another, I think I may have sent the editor some samples of my writing, but I may not have done even that.) When I edited Directors Notes, a newsletter for directors and artistic directors, I interviewed with the head of the organization, but he never looked at anything I wrote or examined my academic background, either. I certainly never edited anything, much less had a load of experience writing about theater--this was between reviewing gigs--and I ended up editing two newsletters at the same time! (I was appointed to the vice presidency for communications of LMDA when the post became vacant, and one ex-officio job was to put out the newsletter.) In both the reviewing jobs and the editing jobs, I pretty much flew by the seat of my pants, but I did rely on whatever skill I had picked up by then as a writer and my practical knowledge and experience of theater. I've occasionally looked back at some of my old reviews and I don't think I did half bad.

I think Kirk and I both had the requisite skill and experience to be reviewers. As a matter of fact, if we look into the backgrounds of the famous reviewers he cites, I'll bet we'd find that most, if not almost all, had academic backgrounds that had no bearing on theater or reviewing--if they had an academic background at all, as Kirk mentions. (Shaw, perhaps the best writer among all English-language reviewers, ended his formal education before high school. Frank Rich studied history and lit at Harvard, though he did work at the Crimson; Jonathan Kalb, as I mentioned earlier, has a DFA from the YSD. However, I already said I didn't think Rich was a good writer, and I didn't think he was a very good reviewer; and Kalb is arrogant and pompous in my opinion, so they're not such great examples of the profession, whatever their backgrounds.) I'll just bet that Stanley Kauffmann and Brooks Atkinson and most of the others of that era were newspapermen, reporters, before they got into theater reviewing.

[There’s more to come. The Art of Writing Reviews prompted me to many marginal comments and the next installment will be available in a few days. Tune in again for more theater pith and moment.]