The Trouble with the Times

Welp, as reluctant as I am to make announcements until the ink on the contracts dries, it's looking increasingly inevitable that 1001 is getting it's NY debut, and I'm thinking about my pledge from about a year ago that I disinvite the New York Times. I know the putative producers of the show read this blog, and are probably either chuckling or rolling their eyes at this (assuming they don't want to strangle me). I admit that it's strange: other well-known companies, like LAByrinth and The Wooster Group, don't invite *any* critics, but why single out one paper?

I don't think that I will have any success in my quixotic mission, but I have to address this, not only because the Times has such inordinate power, but because, by and large, their readership is not who I'm writing for. Let me begin by stating a few propositions (producers, especially commercial producers, are encouraged to skip ahead to number 12):

1) I don't hate critics, as the many critics who have met me can attest. I actually like them a lot, for the most part, and pity them greatly.

2) I don't have any personal beef with any of the critics who write for the NYT. They have never reviewed my work and have often treated my friends well and fairly, though not always. As pissed as I get at the NYT (the entire paper, not just the theater section, *cough* MichaelGordonishelpingfomentwaronIran *cough*), I have been trying to keep all my blows above the belt.

3) I believe the internets allow anonymous bloggers and commenters to beat up on journalists without fear of reprisal. This is why I have always made my comments publicly, with my name attached, and stand behind them.

4) The Times is an enormous paper, portrays a diversity of opinion, and has many excellent men and women writing for it, even if the only ones I can think of at the moment are Bob Herbert and Colin Moynihan. However, the paper - from the front section to the Arts to Real Estate, Business, and Style - is undeniably written from the perspective of articulate, privileged, somewhat out-of-touch, and sometimes arrogant liberals. I think this is equally true of the writers I enjoy and agree with as it is of the ones I want to defenestrate. The same editorial slant that creates two different standards - one for government or industry sources, another for those shut out of the halls of power - leads the NYT critics to fetishize celebrity. Power corrupts.

5) The NYT has no responsibility to theater producers or artists. Their responsibility is to their readership. If Brantley, Isherwood, Zinoman, et al gave much thought to their legacy, they might try to push the envelope further, but that's up to them. We can whine all we want, but the NYT is never going to replace the NEA, which brings me to:

6) The reason why the NYT has such power in the arts is due largely to neoliberal public policy; like much else (including our fucked health care system and the war in Iraq), great effort has been put into privatizing the arts. In the case of theater, this means that ticket sales trump all, which in a way justifies the NYT's celebrity fetishism: a large chunk of audience is going to shell out to watch Julia Roberts stumble around a Broadway stage, so why should Ben Brantley feel any differently? And, while the Voice and Time Out might have a younger audience, and the News and the Post might have a working class audience, and Variety and American Theater might be read by a comparable number of "industry" types, none of them reaches the same sizable, moneyed, theatergoing audience that the NYT does. However:

7) Aside from the "industry" types, the NYT readership is largely cranky and conservative, which is why, even when Ben Brantley or Charles Isherwood "go out on a limb" and endorse the likes of Sarah Ruhl or Will Eno, the audiences balk at being challenged, even remotely. I will concede that the NYT readers who venture into spaces like HERE, Soho Rep, St. Ann's, or PS 122 know what they're getting - in those cases, however, the NYT review counts mostly for the future of the play. A negative NYT review won't have much discernible effect, but a positive one might mean that that starving downtown artist might have a chance to start making a living at his/her work (though even that's pretty dicey).

8) So, depending on the style of play one is writing, even a positive review in the NYT can cause harm to a production. That said, I don't foresee getting a positive review in the NYT. Even assuming the best - that the reviewers there are ethical and won't take my blog into account when reviewing my work - I don't think they'll get what I'm after. To paraphrase Young Jean Lee's intro to the New Downtown Now anthology, they're into "boring, pretentious television scripts," and - even assuming the best of their intentions - my work would likely annoy and confuse them. I could probably write a preemptive NYT review of any play I've written, in fact. But, aside from a sort of naive faith in human nature, why would I trust that they wouldn't try to pull a hit job on me? I already excoriate the NYT on my blog, and I don't see a letter-writing campaign to Byron Calame having much effect, especially considering that he's got the defense of the paper's rush to war in Iran to worry about. Sure, I am tenacious and were I not treated fairly - not nicely, mind you, but fairly, as in consider disclosing any personal history before panning me - I would make a stink about it, but who gives a shit, at least in the near term? If Edward Albee has been going on about them for years, why should I make a dent? I mean, I know that I'll make a dent eventually, but I don't expect anyone else to.

9) This all might seem like narcissistic obsession, but I know that NYT critics have read this blog, if only by Googling themselves. I have a counter that tells me such things.

10) Why do I even read the NYT if it annoys me so? My wife gets it for the crossword.

11) This is not about age. Older audiences can be very adventurous and younger audiences can be very conservative. It is, however, a factor.

12) This is the part producers should read. The most direct route to success is a positive NYT review, but the work that is most likely to appeal to the NYT and its audience is much like lots of other work we've seen before, theater stuck in about 1983. Theater further sheds young audiences, who would much rather see a movie or a band or a gallery show, or stay home and watch TV or read (and who would blame them)? Other outlets might have younger tastes, but due to various factors - ticket prices, circulation numbers - they don't have the impact that the NYT does. As everyone knows, the audience that grew up with theater isn't going to be around forever, and the younger crowd that likes traditional fare is a fairly small group, probably the same size as people into, say, cabaret. What, then, is to be done?

My conclusion: I don't imagine that I will have much, or any, success convincing a producer or company to disinvite the NYT, which leaves one immediate solution - an end run around them. In the long term, the answer is to bring back a sort of Keynesianism that lessens the financial risk to theater producers. In the near term, however, the answer seems to be pursing a sort of event-driven theater that does what only theater can do, something akin to the crowds that have sprung up around Spring Awakening, Rent, The Blue Men, or Cirque du Soleil. The Denver Center did an amazingly effective job of this with 1001. The local papers were very kind to us, and an overwhelmingly large number of the older audience were very responsive, but reaching out to younger audiences via the local club scene and word of mouth made all the difference. The DCTC publicist told me that the cheap seats were sold out for much of the run, which is unusual for them - usually they're full for a week or two and that's it. This tells me that we need to take a page from hip-hop, punk rock, and the indie and rave scenes and reach past traditional media outlets, which are usually prohibitively expensive anyway, and we need to put something on stage that makes a difference to people whose lives reflect our own. I see too many plays by my peers that seem specifically intended to digestibly package the lives of twenty- and thirty-somethings for an older, wealthier crowd, one that might be liberal it its beliefs but is deeply conservative in its tastes and actions. Fuck that. I'm not speaking to people from Westchester, I'm not speaking to critics, I'm not speaking to the British, I'm not speaking to people who bought their Greenwich Village brownstones in 1965 (though I'm not not speaking to them); I'm speaking to the world.