Obies roundup

The Good:

Despite our deep ambivalence about the corporate restructuring at the Voice and the firing of James Ridgeway, we still have some friends over there fighting the good fight, and we hold that in terms of column inches and quality of coverage, they're among the best in New York when it comes to theater. And, as per usual, the awards were very generous to our beloved Soho Rep, with awards to Adam Bock, Annie Kauffman, and Robert Kaplowitz for last season's The Thugs, as well as to affiliated artists like Young Jean Lee, Michael Friedman, and Michael Stuhlbarg. Other awards went to a raft of artists liked and admired by us here at And Jason Grote Turned Itself Inside Out, including (in no particular order) Chay Yew, Andre DeShields, Ron Cephus Jones, Rattlestick Playwrights' Theatre, Peculiar Works, Heather Woodbury and the cast of A Tale of Two Cities, Judith Malina, Nilaja Sun, Matthew Maguire, and The Play Company. So - other than the snub of New Georges' gorgeous production of Dead City - there is no faulting the Voice's taste.

The Bad:

Let us be the first to say what seems to be on everyone's minds with a big, Best Show on WFMU-style "C'mon, Guys." The Obies are our awards, they're badass, reckless, drunken, slightly dangerous. Do you really want them to be Just Another Awards Ceremony? Sure, compared to the Tonys or the Drama Desk they're probably still a cross between Burning Man and Coachella, but we here at ATJGTIIO think of mainstream theater the way Fantagraphics' Gary Groth described superhero comics in the 90s: what is referred to as "mainstream" is in fact so far afield of what anyone actually cares about as to have become its own bizarre cul-de-sac (except that the men-in-tights nerd culture of comics has categorically eclipsed the men-in-tights nerd culture of theater, but we digress). Please, please, please find another venue. We went to NYU, and despite the fact that we received a decent education (for the price of a Midwestern ranch house), we hold that they are decidedly not cool. They are a real estate company which gives classes in order to keep its nonprofit status. We remember - recently! - Voice covers featuring the school as a caricatured monster devouring the Village. OK, so that battle's been more or less lost, and maybe the open bar at Webster Hall was breaking the budget. We get it. And we're resigned to the fact that no amount of blogging will shame you out of starting future events by thanking a long list of corporate sponsors. But the Skirball Center is lame. How sad is it that at 36 years old, we almost got kicked out of the Obies for smuggling in a beer from a deli? The goddamn Obies! Do it in a warehouse somewhere, cordon off a parking lot, do it someplace with a cash bar, but for god's sake let us drink. What happened to the days of a drunken Dustin Hoffman slurring f-bombs left and right? Now the most volatile bit of the evening was Adam Bock showing off his new belt. We all love Adam, and his belt, but you know. C'mon, guys.

Or at least have more food at the cocktail party thing before.

And another thing: we don't know what your guyses relationship is to the event publicist Gail Parenteau, or how far it goes back, but you might want to rethink it. We go back and forth about theater publicists - on the one hand, we find the whole PR industry vile in a general way, but on the other we've met some good and dedicated people who surely are not making loads of cash by shilling for theater, but on the third hand we're reserving a special kind of life-long, yet-to-be-manifested vindictiveness for those toadies who treated us like crap when we were nobody (not like we're all that exciting now, but you know what we mean) and then started kissing our ass when we worked at The Brooklyn Rail, but anyway:

We were with a group of people whom we can honestly say represented the Future of The American Theater, or at least a significant chunk of it; a dozen or so playwrights, directors, actors, and even the artistic director of an Obie-winning company. We were among the last ones in, and told by some poor clueless functionary to sit anywhere. The only available seating appeared to be two reserved rows which sat empty, so we sat in them. About ten minutes into the ceremony, Ms. Parenteau flew in, undergarments in a wad, and chased us all out for not being who the little printouts on the seats said we should be. OK, fair enough, but it was ten minutes into the ceremony, if these people hadn't shown up for the free food and drinks, they weren't coming. And who were these missing VIPs? Not sure exactly, but according to the seat back, our guy was from offoffonline.com, or something like that. So - no offense to the good people at offoffonline, with whom we have no beef and whom we might be misidentifying anyway - this publicist decided that it would be a better idea to let two orchestra rows sit fallow than to let the riff-raff take them over (never mind that it was the Obies. They're by, for, and about the riff-raff). And she wasn't even nice about it. So, you know, keep that in mind when considering a publicist for your next event. We know we will.

So, Village Voice, we've got plenty of love for you, and we hope we can still be friends after our little unseemly, self-serving rant. We need you. We need you as a palliative to the moribund state of our theater institutions, that fabulous invalid who isn't even really that fabulous anymore. We need your smarts and your willingness to take risks. We grew up longing not for an Oscar, not for a Tony, but for an Obie, and we hope we didn't just blog ourselves out of one. And Alexis, it goes without saying that you continue to rock. But we say this in the gentlest, most human way we can muster: c'mon, guys.