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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Another Problem with Theatre Criticism

Another problem with theatre criticism, it seems to me, can be neatly encapsulated by an examination of Adam Feldman's review of A Bronx Tale. Unlike my views of Stewie's reviews -- in which I not only often disagree with the substance of the criticism but find that the substance has been torn asunder by a streak of vituperative bitterness -- I generally agree with Adam's reviews, meaning that I do not find substance being surrendered to cleverness. To me, though, A Bronx Tale slips as quality criticism a bit. His lede: "Nearly 20 years ago, when Chazz Palminteri first performed A Bronx Tale, many people assumed that this coarse, morally stunted solo play was a work of autobiographical nonfiction." I'm not clear that he was there 20 years ago; certainly he wasn't a critic. Frank Rich had nifty ways of clearing this hurdle -- he'd write that such-and-such element "recalls" some other element or he would otherwise artfully acknowledge that he hadn't seen the original production of Medea.

The meat of the matter for this post, however, concerns Feldman aiming at how the "risible climactic sequence involves, in immediate succession: a hate crime, a breakup, two murder plots, a rescue, a reconciliation, a fatal fireball, an assassination, a silent-scream sequence and an anguished cry of 'Nooooooo!'" He cries, "This is not a slice of life. This is a slice of processed cheese," and I do hear him -- in my New York Press review of the play, I wrote, "Credulity is stretched a little, sure, and I do wonder whether all of these things could have really happened—or maybe Palminteri’s well-told tale was just a little tall." The problem is that old nemesis, that old devil incarnate, suspension of disbelief. If we don't believe Cyrano or any man could have had a nose that size, Rostand's climax is risible, too. If we argue with regard to Long Day's Journey that all of those conversations, all of those confessions, all of those concerns, all of those discoveries, all of those speculations and emotional disfigurements, all of those cataclysms and superlative arias could not possibly have occurred within the space of a single day, O'Neill's best play (some say) is fruitless to fathom.

And this is the challenge critics face: What is the tripwire for dramatic plausibility? I'd argue that Adam may have one tripwire and I another -- vive le difference, as they say. To demean A Bronx Tale because it may indulge in literary or dramatic liberties with a set of known facts for for the purposes of storytelling, however, has to be viewed as a little bit hypocritical; O'Neill did rather the same thing.

In one of my graduate school classes, I raged about the utter improbability of Oedipus Rex -- it's ridiculous to expect anyone (except perhaps the Greeks) to believe that everything that happens to Oedipus happens in a single day. (We also know it's a single day because Aristotle argues that the play is the premier example of tragedy in the Poetics, and tragedy, he states, requires a unity of time.) Yet if we actively refuse to succumb to the ridiculousness -- if we relegate improbabilities and implausibilities to a status of being "risible" -- we effectively deny ourselves the opportunity to burrow underneath these tricky dramatic caverns and experience something satisfying, both as general audience members and specifically as critics.

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Yo, Give it Up for Time Out New York's Adam "Marvin Gaye" Feldman, Dawg

Dedicated to Randy Jackson, I'm sure:

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