On Criticism

Too hot to wear the sweater.

Twenty years ago today, I woke up to find I Hate This (a play without the baby) had been reviewed in the New York Times.

We were presenting the piece in a walkdown apartment on West 11th at Greenwich that had been converted into a forty seat black box (the stage even featured a fireplace) as part of the New York International Fringe Festival. I’d had maybe a dozen audience members for that first performance, including several critics, and two days later I received a very nice write-up, front page of the Thursday arts section, below the fold.

Did this high-profile review alter my fortunes at the fringe? It did not. Audiences remained tiny, it was August, no one wants to see a show about stillbirth, etc. etc. However, many took note, and I was contacted by hospitals and bereavement centers around the nation, inquiring as to whether I might bring the show to them. Jason Zinoman’s review documented that this show existed, and gave it legs. I performed the piece, on and off, for the next several years.

Alan Barth said, “Journalism is the first rough draft of history,” but a theater review is the only draft of the history of a particular production. Decades from now, when I am dead and gone and all my social media posts have been deleted or wiped, that review will remain in the archives of the “Gray Lady”, the paper of record.

Last month, Cleveland theater critic Christine Howey attended several shows at the BorderLight Festival, and provided daily, online accounts of the proceedings for clevescene.com. That she attended and then turned around next-day capsule reviews for nearly a dozen shows was a feat, and provided a record of what was to be expected from the festival, as it was happening.

As a result, several artists received reviews, reviews which they may not even have been expecting! Reviews they can brag about for, who knows, maybe twenty years?

State of Siege (2003)

Drew Narten, Mindy Childress
(Bad Epitaph Theater Co., 2003)
Photo: Anthony Gray

Sunday night, I noticed I had a tickle in my throat. By bedtime, I was coughing. I decided to wait until morning to self-test, and all night I was achy and woke countless times. I obsessed about taking the test, and what the result would be. At six I took the test, which turned immediately positive. I have Covid.

By the middle of Monday morning I was weak and achy. I tried to sleep in, but was obsessing about my job, about the residency, the lesson plans I needed to teach – and how many actor-teachers may also have Covid. As the morning progressed, the news was largely positive, in that they were not positive.

I never imagined I was invulnerable, I never thought I was immune, I thought I might be immune, because who knows? In those apocalyptic plague stories there’s always a small percentage that never contracts the disease.

In 2003, Bad Epitaph emerged from hiatus with a production of Albert Camus’ State of Siege (1948) which he had adapted from his own novel, The Plague.

The play is a fable about a bad omen in the form of a comet over Cadiz, Spain, and how the people’s collective fear paves the way for a man named The Plague to assume the reins of power. It is the apocryphal quote from Ben Franklin, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety,” made manifest.

Drew Narten, Nick Koesters, Christine Castro
(Bad Epitaph Theater Co., 2003)
Photo: Tim Safranek

Bad Epitaph Producing Director Tom Cullinan chose to produce this piece because (1) he had long wanted to and (2) it was a response to the Patriot Act, when Americans openly encouraged the government to strip away at our civil liberties in the “war against terrorism.”

“Cullinan imbues the production with sinewy style and imaginative staging,” said Cleveland Scene theater critic Christine Howey. “All the actors wear half-masks, in commedia dell’arte style, which gives this parable a heightened sense of symbolism.”

Traditionally, anti-fascist plays such as this one are resolved when the people come together as one, eschew their fear, and cast out the authoritarian. Unfortunately, if this was ever something that happened in the United States, it does no longer.

For twenty-one years we have lived in a perpetual state of crisis, and the authoritarians are still winning, through division and fear, which has never been so evident as during the current pandemic.

Because we are still in a  pandemic. If you have any doubt, come on over and I will breathe on you. 

Source:
"Mask of Tyranny: Totalitarian governance is explored with style in Bad Epitaph’s State of Siege" by Christine Howey, Cleveland Scene, May 14 - 20, 2003

Christine Howey, playwright

Old Portelaine

Last June, six playwrights and I gathered to discuss the possibility of creating a new play inspired by Jacques' "seven ages of man" speech from Shakespeare's As You Like It for the Great Lakes Theater 2014 free outreach tour.

I laid down a few ground rules, deciding which characters would be available to them, and in what time period it was to be set. These four characters would use each other to tell tales inspired by (but not restricted to) one of each of these ages: infant, schoolboy, lover, soldier, justice, pantaloon and advanced old age.

Assigning each age was no big deal, everyone negotiated and came to an agreement. Area critic, playwright, poet and performer Christine Howey chose "second childhood and mere oblivion" or senescence, as the Bard describes, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Exact Change

Christine is having a good year, and it's not even February. Last weekend she wrapped up a three-week, sold out run of her new solo performance Exact Change at Cleveland Public Theatre. She was recently announced as a 2014 Creative Workforce Fellow, provided by the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture and funded by Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. And of course, she's a playwright for Seven Ages.

Interestingly, we could have booked Exact Change and repackaged that as Seven Ages and had our tour already in the bag. Chronicling as it does the playwright's own experiences from childhood to these later years using verse, video and startling costume changes to evoke a modern Tiresias.

Christine's tale opens our septameron -- beginning where we all conclude -- pitting old Portelaine, a man nearing the end of his days against those who would "cheer him up" or "put a smile on his face". It is a role and responsibility which has struck home to me on numerous recent occasions (including past outreach tours which have visited certain assisted care and nursing facilities) and one which I am still coming to terms with for this piece.

Criticism Is Dead. Long Live Criticism!

William F. McDermott
Plan Dealer Theater Critic 1921-1958
37 years, bitches.
In August, the Plain Dealer began a national search for a new "full-time theater critic" which has become something of a joke among the writers there. They have flown a few potential candidates into town for interviews, and the paper even sent representatives to PlayhouseSquare to meet with members of that organization -- the nation's second-largest performing arts facility -- and its newest tenant, Cleveland Play House (two major advertisers) to reassure them that there would be soon be someone on staff whose main responsibility would be to cover the theater beat in Cleveland.

Not that the theater scene was the main responsibility of Tony Brown. He, like everyone else in their shrinking bullpen of writers, was recently called upon to cover ... well, everything. Anything, really. Brown was also writing travel pieces and covering the trial of a serial killer at the time he was let go. The Plain Dealer isn't in the business of creating paid positions any more, buying out contracts from writers left and right, and shrinking benefits for everyone who remains. Besides, since June they have gotten along just fine handing out assignments to fashion editor Andrea Simakis, columnist and reporter Joanna Connors, can't-live-with-him-can't-fire-him columnist Donald Rosenberg, and freelancer Christine Howey.

In July Bob Abelman, critic for the News-Herald assured me that:

The theatre critics who write for smaller, more localized newspapers have and will continue to cover Cleveland theatre. The papers and their websites and blogs may not have the reach of the PD, but they are well positioned to offer the same coverage--and more--and take more creative risks. Cleveland theatre is being covered.

The paper Mr. Abelman writes for, the News-Herald, originates out of Port Clinton, and has a circulation of 2,910. However, spare-time critics like him and Roy Berko reach three times that number posting their work on blogs and through reposts on Fred's List.

It is, in fact, the online posting of reviews (and everything else) that has brought us to this pass. If the past fifteen years have proved anything, it is that no one ever bought newspapers to read the columnists. Well, they did, decades ago. But the idea that people would spend money to get any one specific person's opinion on anything has been a lesson hard-lost. Newspapers were purchased for the want ads and when these became freely available on Craig's List, subscriptions to papers like the Plain Dealer cratered.

Do we need a well-paid, professional, educated, savvy, full-time theater critic in Cleveland? The audiences should demand one (or at least one) because they write better, they establish long-term relationships with artists and companies, they can afford (time-wise) to see everything, to have the long-view, to judge growth (and its opposite) and to present a point of view and a consistent personality that the reader can judge themselves. And as Mr. Brown often reminded us, he was writing for his readers, after all, and not for the artists.

Do the theater companies need a full-time critic? Hmn. Tricky. Like a lot of artists, I am concerned that lack of attention to the arts by the media will kill interest in the theater. But media does still pay attention to theater -- a lot of attention. However, it is the new media, the personal media, the websites, blogs, and social networks through which theater companies connect with their audience, in a personal and sometimes exciting way.

Great Lakes Theater recently reported a 11% increase in ticket sales for the 2011-12 season. Eleven percent! Without a full-time theater critic at the Plain Dealer.

Here's the big question ... Why do you see plays? Why do choose this play or that play to see? Did you read a critical review? See an advertisement? Get something in the mail? Or was it because a friend recommended it, someone sent you a YouTube video, you saw a friend of a friend's comment on Facebook?

Does it matter, after all, who it is that recommends a show, so long as somebody does?

UPDATE: For the past several years, the most-awesome, daily, local NPR arts program "Around Noon" has started the New Year with a week-long series looking back at past year in the arts. Each day, for the entire program, critics and journalists are invited to comment on the year in books, dance, music, moves and theater. In Tony Brown's absence, "Around Noon" chose not produce a Best of Theater 2011 program.

The Vampyres (1997)

Seventeen years ago the world ended. And another began. The summer of 1994 stretched on until deep into November. I was playing games I would never play again, making foolish decisions which would define the rest of my life. I have few friends that pre-date that time.

One day in January, 1995 I came home from my shift at the pizza restaurant to find half of the house was empty. There was no longer a piano, a dresser, a bed. It was time to rebuild.

The music was dark, the house was cold. I boarded a train to New York on most frigid weekend of the year, to visit my new girlfriend. I had a PowerBook. I had destroyed my theater company, I had destroyed my marriage. I was full of hope, and I feared there would be no future. I started to write a play.


By late 1996, life was rich and decadent. Long nights of drink and smoke, producing crazy theater on Coventry, live music shows, late hours at new friends’ apartments. I got the green light fo The Vampyres in Dobama’s Night Kitchen. We had tapped professional musicians to write rock songs for the show. The production was the greatest attempt to incorporate a DNK show into the mainstage, our set melded perfectly with theirs, transforming the humble, mid-century home of Beast on the Moon into the dark and stylish coffee shop called The Night Kitchen.

Critics hate this play. The protagonist is a former actor who cowardly abandons his career in the arts to pursue on in medicine, but he can’t help but comment on everything, judging the girl he hasn’t seen since high school for wanting to be an artist (even though he still wants to bang her,) transparently hits on the teenage barista, and displays naked jealousy of the two musicians that frequent the place who may, or may not, be real vampires.

Maurice Adams, Brian Pedaci

In the end, this pathetic wanna-be gets literally and figuratively fucked up the ass.
Christine Howey called it a "misbegotten effort."

The Free Times called it, "more hollow than haunting."

Tony Brown said it was "juvenile" and "infantile blathering."

The original production in 1997 was too long by half. Cleveland Public Theatre produced an edited version in 2005, and I was very happy to have the chance to present it with the most of the flab cut from it, but it was still such a nasty piece of work and I was no longer in that place. I find it difficult to reconcile my disconnect with this work that I spent so much energy living in. It’s obvious who wrote it. But I cannot believe there was ever so much anger and hurt in me.


In spite of critical derision, or perhaps because of it, it was a very successful run. One of the best attended Night Kitchen shows I produced. Houses were full, there were small tables on the stage for audience members to sit at to give the impression that The Night Kitchen (the coffee house) actually had customers in it. Elizabeth (as Claire the barista) was onstage during preshow serving coffee and pocketed the tips.

Cool Cleveland called The Vampyres, "Sinister, sexy, perverse and hilarious."

Anastasia Pantsios said it had “an intensity that makes the waters in which it wades feel very deep and dangerous indeed.”

Dobama Artistic Director Joyce Casey didn't actually want me to produce the piece. She was concerned that it glorified cutting and drug-use. When I moved on from Night Kitchen, DNK Artistic Director Dan Kilbane produced Mark Ravenhill's Shopping and Fucking.

Cutting bad. Screwdriver-sodomy good. Got it.

Happy Halloween

Cleveland Public Theatre presents THE WITCHES as part of Test Flight, a showcase of new works, March 3, 4 & 5, 2022.