The New Group Retells an Old Tale: Layoffs

Courtesy of Adam Feldman of Time Out New York, who on Friday emailed a few of us bloggers (I suppose I should go the extra step and remind the aforementioned that I'm print, Web and blog, for whatever that's worth) to spread the word that The New Group, in the wake of those wrist-slashing-inducing Mourning Becomes Electra reviews (here's mine from Back Stage), has been forced to cut back on staff...as in right now, don't wait, pronto, ASAP, and, for the Spanish speaking among us, immediatamente, por favor. Quoting from Feldman's cheeky squib:

It’s not often that a major company is forced to weather an epic fiasco like Mourning Becomes Electra, the New Group’s disastrously received attempt to revive Eugene O’Neill’s neoclassical tragedy. What’s a company to do? Step one: Cut your losses by closing seven weeks earlier than planned. Step two: Cut your staff. Of course, the man most responsible for the troupe’s after-Mourning woes is artistic director Scott Elliott, who directed the play himself. But the head honcho is almost never the first head to roll, so earlier this week the ax quietly fell on the company’s managing director, Barrack Evans, and marketing director, Darren Molovinsky.

(Very tiny note: neoclassical is not quite the right genre to describe Mourning, and no, a better one would not necessarily be the word "bad." I mean, sure, Mourning is neoclassical in the loose sense that it was a 20th century work inspired directly by a tragedy from antiquity, but in terms of an academic definition, neoclassical is largely a 17th and 18th century theatre term. I'd go on about Pierre Corneille and the French neoclassicists and all of that, but then I'd need Neosporin to cure the neoplasms in my brain, or at least a visit by Ne-Yo.

One must get something out of graduate school, right?)

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