Dilettante

The Fortress of Jason Grote: Thoughts on Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries

2009-07-03T02:03:00.001-04:00

The Fortress of Jason Grote: Thoughts on Mark Kingwell's Concrete Reveries:

I've largely lost interest in the "does-theater-have-a-future" debate. It would be more salient, in my opinion, to ask if theater has a present. But, to the extent that the art form is going to keep developing, it will probably be by following the lead of art-forms that are not generally characterized as theater, per se: popular music, performance art, comedy, neo-Vaudevillians like Tyler Perry, theater as social work, big festival events like Burning Man, and so on. These events, unlike much of what currently gets produced in theaters large and small, often take advantage of the liveness of theater, the fact that it exists in four dimensions, the fact that it is finite and local, executed by live humans for other live humans, with minimal (or at least peripheral) technological mediation. For decades now (or at least since the American Right won this relatively insignificant battle in the culture wars), the institutional wing of the art form has been mired in the 19th century, a time in which certain conventions ("realism," the "fourth wall") mainly existed because their superior technological antecedents hadn't been invented yet.

2009-07-02T19:09:00.000-04:00

2009-07-02T16:27:00.000-04:00

2009-07-02T15:53:00.001-04:00

At Penobscot Theatre we ended the evening +190 dollars...in the bowl there were +4 $20 bills, +2 $10 bills, +10 $5 bills, and +40 $1 bills.

Back From The Beach By Train

2009-07-02T10:56:00.001-04:00

Daring Fireball Linked List: Meg Hourihan on the iPhone as a Computer

2009-07-02T00:55:00.001-04:00

Daring Fireball Linked List: Meg Hourihan on the iPhone as a Computer:

I love the first one, from Meg Hourihan:

Yes, iPhone = my computer, and $399 is worth it. Haven’t bought new laptop since late 06 and don’t plan to for long time.

This, to me, gets to the heart of the revolution at hand. A decade ago, my first PowerBook was a secondary machine to the desktop anchored at my desk. Now, my main machine is my MacBook Pro, but it feels a bit like an anchor now. My mobile secondary computer is my iPhone.

Back to the Futurists: Italy's first avant-garde turns 100.

2009-07-01T16:27:00.001-04:00

Back to the Futurists: Italy's first avant-garde turns 100. (1) - By Kate Bolick - Slate Magazine:

Literary pilgrims are like obsessed lovers: always hungry for more and better contact. Why else would we bother? When the news broke a few years ago that Iris Murdoch's 1,071-volume library was up for sale, I flew to London in a swoon: I am about to see Iris Murdoch's marginalia with my own two eyes. What will it look like? Cramped or florid? Pencil or pen? (A little bit of everything, it turns out, from an undergraduate's looping cursive to an elder academician's hurried scrawl. Even better were the small surprises: pressed flowers, bus tickets, cryptic inscriptions.) More recently, on a visit to Edith Wharton's country house in Lenox, Mass., I ducked into the empty living room and stretched out on the sofa, nap-style: Will regarding the ceiling from such an oddly intimate angle disclose a previously overlooked insight into the great woman herself? Only later did I stop to think that Wharton probably wasn't the napping type.

Unfinished Business (5)

2009-07-01T16:26:00.001-04:00

2009-07-01T00:24:00.001-04:00

Is the Curtain Closing on Live Theater in America? « Culturebot

2009-07-01T00:02:00.001-04:00

Is the Curtain Closing on Live Theater in America? « Culturebot:

The more I think about it, the more cheesed off I get that the 2009 Aspen Ideas festival is going to host a roundtable called “Is the Curtain Closing on Live Theater in America?”

The discussion is with Michael Eisner, founder, The Tornante Company; former chairman and CEO, the Walt Disney Company; trustee, the Aspen Institute, David Ives, playwright, All in the Timing: Six One-Act Comedies, Anna Deavere Smith, Pulitzer Prize-Nominated playwright and actress; professor, New York University; trustee, The Aspen Institute, and moderated by Dana Gioia, director, Harman-Eisner Program in the Arts, the Aspen Institute; former chairman, National Endowment for the Arts.

First off, it’s the wrong question to be asking. Secondly, these are not the best people to be answering the question anyway. The question isn’t whether live theater in America is over -which cannot be answered through a simple yes or no- but rather, how is live theater changing (or ought to be changing) to attract new audiences and stay relevant in these changing times? And then they should be inviting the people who are changing the theater – or live performance in general – to talk about what they’re doing. Not that there’s anything wrong with Ives or Smith, but they’re pretty conventional theater-makers. And I’m not sure what Eisner’s background in live theater is, outside of The Lion King and the rest of the Disney Theatricals properties.

2009-06-30T22:48:00.001-04:00

Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin | vanityfair.com

2009-06-30T15:29:00.001-04:00

Todd S. Purdum on Sarah Palin | vanityfair.com:

Whatever her political future, the emergence of Sarah Palin raises questions that will not soon go away. What does it say about the nature of modern American politics that a public official who often seems proud of what she does not know is not only accepted but applauded? What does her prominence say about the importance of having (or lacking) a record of achievement in public life? Why did so many skilled veterans of the Republican Party—long regarded as the more adroit team in presidential politics—keep loyally working for her election even after they privately realized she was casual about the truth and totally unfit for the vice-presidency? Perhaps most painful, how could John McCain, one of the cagiest survivors in contemporary politics—with a fine appreciation of life’s injustices and absurdities, a love for the sweep of history, and an overdeveloped sense of his own integrity and honor—ever have picked a person whose utter shortage of qualification for her proposed job all but disqualified him for his?

The Froomkin firing - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

2009-06-20T02:19:00.003-04:00

The Froomkin firing - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com:

Thus we still live in an era in which you have to have been wrong to be respectable. You’re not considered serious about national security unless you were for invading Iraq; you’re not considered a serious political analyst unless you spent the last 3 years of the Bush administration predicting a Republican comeback; you’re not considered a serious economic analyst unless you dismissed the idea that the Bush Boom, such as it was, rested on a housing bubble.

That’s why the firing of Dan Froomkin now makes a perverse sort of sense. As long as the right was in power, he was in effect the Post’s designated moonbat, someone who attracted readers but didn’t threaten the self-esteem of the self-perceived serious people at the paper. But now he looks like someone who was right when the serious people were wrong — and that means he has to go.

Encounters of the third kind

2009-06-20T02:19:00.001-04:00

2009-06-18T22:24:00.001-04:00

We're back in NYC for just a night, and headed up to Maine tomorrow for the second workshop of THE LAST CARGO CULT at Penobscot Theatre in Bangor, Maine. I'm really delighted to have Penobscot Theatre's support at such an early stage in the process, and it's very cool to be returning to where I come from in creating this piece.

The performance will be Wednesday, June 24th at 7pm. Full details are available here.

This could be another false alarm, but in theory (knock wood) a massive site migration will be occurring tomorrow for mikedaisey.com. Though I don't anticipate any outages or being frozen out of the site, the last time this was supposed to happen the site I got locked out for an unseemly amount of time. I'm posting this in case that should happen again...so if this post is still sitting at the top of the page days later, now you know why.

EC Girls (10)

2009-06-18T22:23:00.003-04:00

2009-06-18T22:23:00.001-04:00

On THE LAST CARGO CULT—first thoughts from an email I wrote:

I survived. I think we did well. As always, the first performance is like speaking into the darknesss, into the attention gathered together like lenses. Then the tracks dissolve, then the world dissolves, then I dissolve. It is the most terrifying place that is not a place at all, and the words cling and grapple as they pour out.

This one was born unfocused but intense, more emotional and kinesthetic than expected. Higher personal stakes, more than I expected. Rebuilding everything before Maine—much work, but with direction and momentum.

2009-06-18T22:05:00.001-04:00

2009-06-18T15:03:00.001-04:00

The Arts | N.Y. director to replace Bartlett Sher at Intiman | Seattle Times Newspaper

2009-06-18T13:19:00.001-04:00

The Arts | N.Y. director to replace Bartlett Sher at Intiman | Seattle Times Newspaper:

Intiman Theatre has named New York stage director Kate Whoriskey as its next artistic director.

2009-06-18T12:06:00.001-04:00

2009-06-18T00:25:00.001-04:00

Playbill News: David Hare's Power of Yes to Make World Premiere at London's National

2009-06-17T23:39:00.003-04:00

Playbill News: David Hare's Power of Yes to Make World Premiere at London's National:

The production will begin performances in the Lyttelton Theatre Sept. 29, prior to an official opening Oct. 6, and then continue in repertory. It will be directed by Angus Jackson and designed by Bob Crowley.

According to press materials, on "15 September 2008, capitalism came to a grinding halt. As sub-prime mortgages and toxic securities continued to dominate the headlines, the National Theatre asked Hare to write an urgent and immediate work to be staged this autumn that sought to find out what had happened, and why.

"Afer meeting with many of the key players from the financial world, he has created this work, which is described as 'not so much a play as a jaw-dropping account of how, as the banks went bust, capitalism was replaced by a socialism that bailed out the rich alone.'"

Seattle in Motion at Sunset

2009-06-17T23:39:00.001-04:00

Megachurch Musical | Slog | The Stranger

2009-06-17T23:35:00.001-04:00

Megachurch Musical | Slog | The Stranger:

Last weekend, 1,500 people flocked to Cedar Park to watch Generations, an original musical by Daniel Perrin, an evangelical pastor and doctor of worship studies (directed by Karen Lund of Taproot Theatre). Perrin spent 19 years writing his magnum opus, taking two research trips to Israel and one to Poland. The conceit of Generations: Jesus comes back to Nazi-occupied Warsaw to save the Jews. (Their souls, anyway—He did not offer to save their bodies.)

The result of Dr. Perrin's labors is a work of deep conviction and deep befuddlement—bombastic, evangelical dreckcellence. The music, played by a capable 22-member orchestra, sounds like Andrew Lloyd Webber and Meat Loaf spiked with klezmer and squeezed through a fine mesh of Christian pop. The plot scans like a three-way between Godspell, Cabaret, and a performance of Life of Brian by people who don't realize it's a joke.

The plot is confusing, to put it charitably: Jesus is a friendly local rabbi who lightly aids the folks behind the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In act two, the characters jump back in time to first-century Galilee for a scrambled tour of the Gospel's greatest hits. Flash-forward back to Warsaw, where the Nazis shoot Jesus. (Overheard in the pews: "Don't worry, He'll be back.") Jesus resurrects Himself and tells the lead Warsaw character: "Without God, all you have is a ghetto." The Jew converts, the music soars, and the woman behind me mutters: "Yes, Jesus! Awesome!" Generations seems to argue that the Holocaust was primarily a convenient time for Jews to find Jesus. (Because when isn't?)