Even when they're right, it's embarrassing

"Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art."
-Konstantin Stanislavski

Ever since I first heard it, this quote has been at the forefront of my mind whenever I've encountered that peculiar animal known as the "theater person." We all know them; the narcissistic, mediocre, arrogant, big-fish-in-a-small-pond type that any person who pursues theater has encountered; the satiric target(s) of Waiting for Guffman. It is perhaps unseemly for me to pick on these types, but they've always treated me like shit. In junior high, the musical director of Guys and Dolls yanked me offstage by the hair. In high school I got my one line in Can Can cut because I was confused about the rehearsal schedule, and I was removed from The King and I altogether because I got suspended for fighting. In college, as a freshman theater major, I was snubbed so nastily by the upperclassmen that I wrote not one but TWO bad poems. Right out of college, I joined a play development lab in New Jersey - this lab is still around, and is run by some very kind and talented people, but when I first joined back in 1994, it contained more than a few mediocre hack director types who were so contemptuous and dismissive of me that they would actually read my stage directions with attempted withering sarcasm. This perhaps explains some of the vitriol in my dispatches from The Last Frontier Conference.

I have almost always found a way around this: in high school, I went to The Mercer County High School for the Performing Arts (literally the only reason I didn't drop out and opt for a GED) and performed with people who, for all our adolescent melodrama, were not "theater people;" in college, my best friend Mike and I pledged to treat the incoming freshman nicely, and I still count some of them as friends to this day; in said play development group, I latched on to actors and directors who understood that I was going for something, as half-baked and inchoate as it was at the time. Today, I am lucky to be able to easily avoid the occasional asshole who comes down the pike (and they do). Literally everyone I have the pleasure of knowing and working with is smart, talented, insightful, and most importantly, decent. Life has a way of weeding out the jerks.

So what, then, happened to all of those annoying "theater people?" Surely some of them have ventured into one of the big cities. One guess is they are now working for my second-favorite bete noire, the New York Times. I'm not even talking about the embarrassingly tone-deaf and dated pop culture references in the headlines, or that weird-ass thing the other day where Charles Isherwood makes his cats talk. But come on, is it any wonder that critics of other media think theater sucks?

I refer specifically to Ben Brantley's positive review of Les Freres Corbusier's brilliant and hilarious (and recently closed) Heddatron. To his credit, the play was a critic's pick. Yet Brantley still felt compelled to remind us of his own humorlessness by telling us that the play was sophomoric until it got profound. I mean, what? Is it a crime for a play to have been genuinely funny? I suppose the Times thinks that plays are only supposed to be funny in the way Avenue Q is funny, which is to say in the same way that most of Saturday Night Live is funny, which is to say not funny. What really kills me, though - and convinces me that Brantley belongs to the plague of "theatre people" - is his thanking Alex Timbers for rehabilitating the Bonnie Tyler song "Total Eclipse of the Heart," (which Heddatron uses to great, if somewhat overwrought, Gen-X/Y irony - it might have been the only gag in the show that didn't quite land for me). Is it any wonder theater gets no respect? I say to Mr. Brantley, with all due kindness in my heart: liking Bonnie Tyler is not the sort of thing you admit to in the paper of record, man. You look like a damn clown.

Sigh. It's enough to make me wish I was German.

AND A POSTSCRIPT:

I usually only go after Times critics because they're the only ones with the power to really damage artists' careers, but Sheila tells a tale of this breathtakingly misogynist review of Adam Rapp's Red Light Winter by Harold Kissel of The Daily News. Check out this winner of a line: Lisa Joyce has an unenviable task trying to make the whore believable, since nothing about the writing is. She does have very beautiful breasts.


E-mail Mr. Kissel and tell him what you think. He will respond (he told me "he was looking for something positive to say," and I told him that he was undermining his own credibility). He seems like a decent enough guy, and he had a sense of humor about the whole thing (he told me he didn't comment on the penises in Take Me Out because there were too many of them), but I stand by my assertion that comments like that one are out of line.