Get off of my cloud

“It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”

- Oscar Wilde, in a letter

I'm in the temporarily enviable position of having directed a show of which I'm proud and of having two contradictory (and totally different) reviews published about it. The positive review is in the local big broadsheet. As usual, it's more descriptive than judgmental, but also (as usual) it's relatively short and is a bit thin on context. The mostly negative review -- from the alternative weekly -- describes very little of the actual production, is much longer and positively dense with opinions, even in its characterization of the playwright and the playbill notes. The positive review feels personal and fleet-footed, the mostly negative one feels authoritative and deliberate. Take a gander for yourself here and here. Personally, I'm glad that the response to A Number isn't uniform: it may mean that something is going on in the room that defies categorization. Some people have been bemused, for sure, but a number of folks are coming more than once to experience the show again.

But why am I breaking the artist's code of silence and talking about the reviews?! No! No! No! Don't Do It! Don't worry, I'm not going to "review the reviews". However, this is a particular moment in the theatre evolution of Asheville, North Carolina.

A friend's popular local blog has encouraged review-writing for over two years in order to deepen the conversation about theatre around here. His project began with the observation that the local broadsheet reviews everything roughly the same way: community theatre, college theatre and professional theatre all get the same breezy and largely positive treatment. Some would say the writing lacks real local context; others might point out that local theatre needs all the good publicity it can get, and the writers are sincere enthusiasts.

The alternative weekly (which up until now has rarely published reviews) recently dedicated several staff members to write regularly about theatre. Its reviews are likely to be meatier, but only time will tell if they develop real critical sophistication, or if the paper will publish other non-review articles about theatre. It looks like they will also co-opt my friend's idea by providing an online forum for open discussion. Some kind of critical mass is being reached in Asheville as a "theatre town." It seems like a good time to weigh in on the subject of theatre reviews.

It is a strange feature of contemporary life that we relate to pop culture as something to experience, and to high culture as something to be understood, as though "the Arts" require a hypertrophic intellect in order to be appropriately appreciated, while to enjoy pop culture one only needs one's senses, willingness and personal interest. Why to we feel the need to know high art, but easily live pop art? What's the difference anyway? In the case of high art, it's all about a ubiquitous culture of interpretation. Not every theatre critic falls into the quicksand of interpretive myopia, but many do, and we are all their unwitting victims.

I've been reading a bit of Susan Sontag lately, and her insights still apply. Sontag writes that since the advent of criticism (or theory, i.e., in Plato and Aristotle), artistic activity in the West has been subject to obsessive interpretation. Furthermore, Sontag claims that applying interpretive rules to art displaces and depletes the artistic experience. In the case of canonical literature, this displacement of art with critical meaning happens when the moral agenda of the interpreters changes, but the political need for the text still persists. How much Freud or Marx can you see in Richard III? Even if we approach literature more "traditionally," we are encouraged to read it always for Meaning: as allegory, metaphor, political message, etc.

All of us have been conditioned to approach the so-called "high" arts from in an interpretive mode. It's a kind of educationally moral imperative applied to Cultural products. That old analytical mandate, to distinguish between "form and content," encourages abstract mental activity that distances us from the sensuous and immediate experiences available to us in the here and now.

According to this tradition, a work of art has little value in itself, in its own original and unified reality. The implication is that Meaning is is everything, but that Meaning lies somewhere "beyond" art, and it is only recoverable through astute interpretation. The result is that much criticism of art reflects the critic's views instead of evoking the realty of the art itself. We forget, don't we, that Plato and Aristotle were moral philosophers. They had an agenda: judging moral usefulness. These days, I would replace "moral usefulness" with political utility -- even if it is only employed on the level of professional activity. Is it any wonder that so many people shy away from "the arts"? They've been told they need qualifications to appreciate the arts (as evidenced by critics' and teachers' demonstrated erudition); they also are told by critics how they should expect to feel or think (as evidenced by critics' statements of opinion as fact).

In a recent post, I compared attending a play to being at a sporting event. Fortunately for fans and atheletes, sports writers are largely enthusiasts. Consider this excerpt from the NY Times on a recent baseball game:

There were nine relievers eligible for the Yankees on Saturday, so many that the bench in the right-field bullpen was too small to fit them all. They spilled over the side, watching starter A. J. Burnett bungle a big early lead and surely knowing that the game, again, would come down to them.

The Boston Red Sox torched the Yankees’ pitching on Saturday at Fenway Park, battering Burnett for eight runs and bruising the bullpen for eight more in a 16-11 victory. The Yankees scored the first six runs of the game, but Burnett lost that lead and the bullpen lost another.

“It’s unacceptable,” Burnett said. “To have the stuff I had out there today and the offense that we had out there today, the bullpen should have never even been in that game.”

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, the six-run deficit was the largest the Red Sox have overcome in a victory over the Yankees since May 16, 1968. Saturday’s game took 4 hours 21 minutes to complete, the same duration as Friday night’s thriller. Both teams can use the extra rest before Sunday night’s series finale.

The effectiveness of this writing stems from its intention to evoke, but not explain, an engaging narrative, while leaving the reader's experience in his or her own imaginative hands, so to speak. If I had seen this game, I could use the occasion of reading the article to relive my experience. If I missed the game, I can invent an experience, and stimulate my interest in future games.

Now imagine that the above description had been written by a typically interpretive theatre critic, who also confuses conventions of form with his own interpreted content (which is pretty common). It might go something like this:

The recent episode of the continuing saga of the Yankees' fall from grace was performed yesterday in an needlessly long re-telling of an old story. The outcome was predictable, but the trick to getting to the heart of material as cliched as this is to keep the action moving and streamlined. Unfortunately, the producers at Yankee Stadium presented a confused interpretation that should have evoked more dramatic angst than the attenuated sentimentality I encountered yesterday.

There were nine relievers eligible for the Yankees on Saturday, so many that the bench in the right-field bullpen was too small to fit them all. But crowding so many players on a undersized bench is a ham-fisted way of expressing a pathos already all too evident in the melodramatic plot. Spilled over the side of the bench, the relievers expressed, en masse, the desperate anxiety of fallen heroes with realistic ferver as they watched starter A. J. Burnett unrealistically bungle a big early lead. But if their gestures and movement had been more restrained, I might have felt more connected to Burnett's essentially Beckettian dilemna.

The Boston Red Sox played it straight in their depiction of a recently arisen, Phoenix-like team, torching the Yankees’ pitching on Saturday at Fenway Park, battering Burnett for eight runs and bruising the bullpen for eight more in a 16-11 victory. But the majority of the action focused on the Yankees, most of whom have been re-cast at this late point in the series. The Yankees scored the first six runs of the game, but in back-to-back redundant episodes, Burnett lost that lead and the bullpen lost another. Unfortunately, the middle of the action -- while the fans waited interminably for the Sox to bring more presence to the proceedings -- left me cold by the time of the inevitable turning point.

“It’s unacceptable,” Burnett declares plaintively half way through the game. “To have the stuff I had out there today and the offense that we had out there today, the bullpen should have never even been in that game.” But Burnett’s dialogue here gilds the lily of of overweening pride. If Burnett had bungled his lead with more depth, displaying a more nuanced and complex understanding of the game’s underlying theme of the impermanence of glory, the following moments of bullpen activity might have seemed less anti-climactic, in spite of the earnest if amateur efforts of the bullpen. It didn’t help matters that the stadium’s lighting was uniformly bright throughout.

The six-run deficit was the largest the Red Sox have overcome in a victory over the Yankees since May 16, 1968 -- the one statistically suspenseful feature of the game. But baseball now seems more culturally relevant in its backstory, before faux-irony was so trendy, and when depicting underdogs with conviction added mythic substance to an otherwise hopeless cause. Saturday’s game took 4 hours 21 minutes to complete, but if they had cut two hours off the game’s episodic meanderings, at least its insubstantial content would have been bearable as popular entertainment. Both teams can use the extra rest before Sunday night’s series finale. So can I.

Ha, ha, ha. But wait, you say, a baseball game is not a fiction, it's real, it doesn't need interpreting. I would counter with: so is art; art is real. Even in the theatre; even a film. Really. It's real, right here, right now. There is no over the rainbow over the rainbow. Or if there is, it is you and your experience. Or maybe the charged space between us.

In the case of theatre reviews, too many journalists feel obligated to explain their understanding of the script and then compare that understanding with their inferred interpretation of what was presumably intended by the artists--and then judge the "effectiveness" of the inferred interpretation. Plays are viewed as problems, not opportunities.

Many critics perpetuate this state of affairs, presumably because they seek to augment their interpretive prestige. This is probably unconscious, but to make matters worse, a great deal of interpretive criticism doesn't even supply its content cogently. Rather, the effect of such writing is often circular. The critic defines an interpretive premise to support his opined "evidence." This usually involves treating a theatrical performance as itself a form of interpretation, rather than having its own being beyond any interpretation. Or even more arrogantly (and commonly), the critic will interpret the predicted response of audience members by asserting his own opinions as fact, while only minimally describing the art or illuminating any context. Sometimes it is really you, the humble audience member, that is being interpreted: you are being interpreted, literally, as irrelevant. How does that feel? This kind of snobbery reduces criticism to base marketing for the critic's ego assertions. The effect is solipsistic, and positions the reader yet another step removed from the art itself.

Mostly, run-of-the-mill critics simply confuse artistic creations with their own analyses--as if they occupy the same space, one being equivalent to the other: the critique replaces the art through a kind of critical hegemony. Susan Sontag wrote, "Interpretation is the intellect's defense against art." As a theatre teacher, I have witnessed many times the way in which creativity is unleashed when a student stops judging. Audiences listen vitally and creatively, too, when similarly unencumbered. After all, audience members are part of the creative experience in the theatre: their listening gives substance to the silences. When I'm at work during previews of a show (and still rehearsing in between), it is the participation of the whole audience that helps me to feel a show's vitality.

Sontag wrote Against Interpretation over forty years ago. The end of this post ends with Sontag's assertions for what critical writing should do.

"Once upon a time (a time when high art was scarce), it must have been a revolutionary and creative move to interpret works of art. Now it is not. What we decidedly do not need now is further to assimilate Art into Thought, or (worse yet) Art into Culture.

Interpretation takes the sensory experience of the work of art for granted, and proceeds from there. This cannot be taken for granted, now. Think of the sheer multiplication of works of art available to every one of us, superadded to the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses. Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties. And it is in the light of the condition of our senses, our capacities (rather than those of another age), that the task of the critic must be assessed.

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.

Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art."

- Susan Sontag, from Against Interpretation