Baby Jesus Is Coming!

The Baby Jesus One-Act Jubilee: Second Coming opens tomorrow at The Brick.

Berit and I have teched all the shows the last two days, and, amazingly, everything's run smoothly and the 12 shows look good - even with rushing each piece in and out of tech in 45 minutes. I'm pleased with my direction of Marc Spitz's Marshmallow World in the "Marys" program (and Aaron Baker, Alyssa Simon, Jason Liebman, and myself are all having a hard time not cracking up at each other's work - it's a funny piece).

Follow the link above for info on showtimes/dates - we basically run the next three Thursdays through Saturdays - and come on by if interested.

(you will also get to see Berit and I together on stage in non-speaking roles in The Bender Family Christmas)

Today I run around for the last props and costumes I need, and just keep running my lines for the Spitz piece, which I actually have down, but don't want to lose. Back on Friday.

Tracy Letts As Good As Several Episodes of Friday Night Lights

Continuing the thoughts previously explored in this post and the video/performance Berit and I did at The Brick's Quinquennial Party . . .

Our Friend What-The-Fuck-Chuck has given a rave review to Tracy Letts' August: Osage County. All fine. All good. OK! I'm sure I would enjoy this show if I could afford it, from what I'm hearing.

However . . . (dilute, dilute) . . .

These lines from the review engage the gag reflex:

In other words, this isn’t theater-that’s-good-for-you theater. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, to quote an immortal line from a beloved sitcom.) It’s theater that continually keeps you hooked with shocks, surprises and delights, although it has a moving, heart-sore core. Watching it is like sitting at home on a rainy night, greedily devouring two, three, four episodes of your favorite series in a row on DVR or DVD.

You know . . . I like a lot of what's on TV. Berit and I don't watch any at home (we gorge on it when visiting my mother in Maine) - we have neither cable nor antenna here - because we don't like it in the home, where it sucks energy away from the work you should be doing as you wind up watching the not-good stuff just because it's there.

But we watch quite a few series on DVD as they come out on Netflix, and I've thought for some time that the hour-long drama has indeed been going through a golden era these past few years. There is certainly great TV happening.

That said . . .

OKAY. Maybe he's just trying to sell a "difficult" play to an audience he thinks (condescendingly?) might rather stay home and watch the DVR (we have already learned of WTFC's fondness for Friday Night Lights, which, given my feelings about current TV, I'm more than willing to believe is deserved). Maybe he's sensitive to the negativity thrown his way by audiences who went to see Thom Pain (based on nothing) ("theater-that's-good-for-you-theater"?) based on his review and wants them to feel they won't get burned again.

But. Still.

Am I completely off-base and/or snooty to like to think that the best standard to hold up a theatrical work to is not a television drama?

UPDATE: Not a minute after posting the above, I came across an interesting post re: WTFC from Lee Rosenbaum at CultureGrrl. A bit off the subject above, but interesting - and I mean the second item about WTFC, not the first, innocuous one. The one Rosenbaum refers to as "disturbing."

Also, I would like to note that now that I've read WTFC's review of the original Chicago production, I can express my dislike of his work on one more count - one of the oldest, lazy-reviewer tricks there is: dragging in quotes from, or examples of other, "similar" works of art in your opening, "topic" paragraph to supposedly give your review "context," when you are in fact stuck for anything interesting of your own to say about the work immediately in front of you. In the Chicago review, he drags in works by Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Lillian Hellman, and Edward Albee (phew! - why not throw in Brecht if you just want to enumerate destructive theatrical mother figures?); in the NYC review, he pulls out Tolstoy and one of the most overused quotes you'll find for this kind of opening (hell, it was old when Nabokov parodied it in the opening sentence of Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle 38 years ago!)

The one time I tried this trick with my 10th-grade English teacher, Jim Block, he mocked me so severely with his red pen that I never tried it again (I think). Would that WTFC had had such a hilariously cruel instructor at some point . . .