This Week in Feingold's "Thinking About Theater"

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 6/14/13 at 11:02am

Ah, so refreshing to hear his voice again! Playwrights and audiences:

"I find, in tandem with the deepening quality of new plays New York has been seeing, we've been getting what strikes me as an increasing reluctance, on the most devoted theatergoers' part, to accept the complexities that a playwright might throw in their way as a justifiable part of the work. It's as if the desire for immediate responses and easy explanations that's been bred in us by the Internet — and by the whole wash of popular media engulfing us these days — has wiped out, or to some degree diminished, the cultivated audience's instinct to question, to explore, to ponder."
Part 1...Part 2 will come later.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 6/14/13 at 11:04am

Like an invigorating shower!

[macnyc]

Posted: 6/14/13 at 12:17pm

I wish he had at least mentioned the two plays he's talking about. Cliffhanger! We have to wait for Part 2.

[Someone in a Tree2]

Posted: 6/14/13 at 2:09pm

Well, it's an odd half-thesis, like a prosecutor stating his case without showing any evidence or even naming the defendant. I guess we'll revisit this in another week, when we've forgotten what we read this week.

[WhizzerMarvin]

Posted: 6/14/13 at 2:19pm

One of them obviously seems to be The Flick.

It was a great article and I can't wait to read part two.

[After Eight]

Posted: 6/15/13 at 1:24am

This stomach-turning article is in its own way heartening, for it shows that even months after these shows closed, the audience's independence of mind still has the capacity to rankle the self-designated arbiters of quality and taste. Why, the impudence of the ignorant masses who refuse to bow and scrape before what they are ordered to! Imagine that: audiences who won't docilely sit back and be stomped on. Why, the very nerve!

Well I say, good for the audiences! And even if the elitists go into overdrive to stifle dissent, as they successfully managed to do in the sorry Sondheim saga, they still won't be able to force audiences to like what they hate, such as three-hour bores that "entertain" us with discussions of vomit, excrement and body odor.

And to the members of the audiences who asserted themselves and complained about being treated so wretchedly, BRAVO!!! For standing up to those who stick it to you-- and us --- time and time again, you deserve our heartfelt thanks and admiration.

Indeed, you are the heroes of this or any other season.

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 6/21/13 at 11:51am

Um, yeah. Yay, populism. Anyhow, here's part 2:
The Flick and The Great God Pan

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 7/12/13 at 9:52am

"The idea of a theater that produces new and old on an equally bold scale, and marches into the past to bring back both familiar and forgotten works without a qualm, seems to have faded out of our consciousness. Even resident theaters around the country, which were often established for precisely this purpose, nowadays often confine themselves to new plays, occasionally reaching behind them to pick up one of the half-dozen classics that their subscribers have heard of, usually so they can smash it into unrecognizability through deconstruction, updating, or some demented directorial gimmick. In New York, the situation is even worse, since we mate our cultural amnesia to the lazy habit of subcontracting everything non-contemporary to the British, as if they were somehow more antiquated than we are. "

An Old Way to Play New Texts

Updated On: 7/12/13 at 09:52 AM

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 7/12/13 at 1:44pm

Or perhaps the concept of "Broadway" has become so all-pervasive that every theater piece is now viewed only in the context of its commercial viability.

We sure see that around here a lot.

[Consistency]

Posted: 7/12/13 at 1:56pm

"And even if the elitists go into overdrive to stifle dissent, as they successfully managed to do in the sorry Sondheim saga"

But thankfully we have brave heroes like After Eight to stand up against these fascist stiflers of dissent! By speaking their minds and telling us what the "the common people" (as represented by After Eight) think and believe, they really teach us elitists who pretend to like Sondheim (et al.) a thing or two about what we're allowed to like and not like (if we don't want to look like uh, "pretentious, dried-up eggheads")!

Updated On: 7/12/13 at 01:56 PM