This week’s opener is my personal nine-point wish list for New York theater. To regular readers of TONY’s Theater section, many of these desires won’t be too surprising (bolder programming, alternative Broadway spaces, better scores). I included a wish to see more arguing and risk-taking on theater blogs, knowing that said item would generate chatter. First to the conversation is the anonymous blogger at 99 Seats. I have no idea who this blogger is, but s/he is a playwright and someone who knows their way around the scene. 99 Seats has very kind words for yours truly and for this humble section, but takes exception at my wish that bloggers would engage and enrage the establishment (and each other). As 99 Seats points out, theater bloggers are already marginalized and hesitant to reinforce that outsider status. Moreover, 99 Seats opines that TONY’s own theater blog, Upstaged, is hardly a model of rabble-rousing. That’s not quite true. My excellent colleague Adam Feldman has stirred up more than a few hornet nests, and I’ve put out my fair share of invective and righteous indignation. Helen Shaw’s posts are brief but packed with wit and ideas. Yes, we have short, silly posts or basic informational ones (go see this show, etc.). Still, maybe Upstaged should engage more with the theatrosphere, with Isaac Butler of Parabasis, Garrett Eisler of Playgoer and others. Oh, maybe you also noticed that comment by blogger-theorist-playwright George Hunka, who sniffs that TONY isn’t to be taken seriously as a place for intelligent discourse on theater? George, you do not mess with my section.
Blogger, theorist and playwright George Hunka notes that our posts are usually as short as our reviews and they’re full of “bluster.” I happen to believe that we offer more wit and insight in a 300-word review than in rival reviews three times that length. And I seriously hope that Hunka isn’t holding up himself and his blog as the alternative.
What can you say about Hunka that everyone doesn’t already know? He’s a pretentious, quote-dropping snob who talks about his grand vision for the stage but seldom produces. His turtleneck-and-goatee manifestos are notable mainly for inadvertently lurching into self-parody. His nigh-unreadable theoretical dispatches are poorly written, pseudoacademic, hysterical, alternately obvious and obscurantist and lousy with bathetic tropes of death and erotic epiphany. They’re also weirdly dated. One colleague noted that his stuff reads as if it were badly translated from the German circa 1964.
His crimes against good, clear prose are legion. (As an editor, I can forgive many things, but not that.) No one else tortures English like Hunka; that is our blessing. He is fighting a lonely, unfashionable battle for transformative tragic theater, and for that he should be applauded, I guess. If he succeeds, we’ll have more half-naked women reclining on divans enunciating morbid, goth-chick poetry while staring inscrutably at the audience. Ultimately, Hunka is the sort of self-aggrandizing crackpot who seems to flourish in theater. He’d lead a cult of personality if anybody would follow. But it’s not the ’60s, and he’s no Grotowski.
Now I’m not mocking Hunka for what he believes or how he expresses it. Well, okay, I am, but the real issue is this: I love theater, and Hunka seems like a proponent of the sort of deadly experimental dreck that helps speed the art form on its ride to irrelevance. He can make bad theater on Monday, and on Tuesday publish a 2,000-word essay explaining why it’s brilliant. Sure, there’s a place for that: the university. He’s free to pursue it, and I’m free to laugh at him. Of course, by going on at such length, I’ve actually done him a favor.
Is that engaged and enraged enough? Comments are now open for death matches.
If you really believe in #5, then might I recommend that you clean up your Blogroll, and include only the sites that you think represent good long-form criticism (like HOT Review) and valuable debates/dishes (like Parabasis). Fix broken links (to Theatreforte), drop gossipish links (What’s Good/What Blows), and block “bad” writers like Hunka (Superfluities Redux). Why isn’t 99Seats, for example, up there?
As one of the leading resources for theater criticism (maligned or not for what some call brevity and others call wit) and with your blog as a potential hub for information, not just on shows but on theatrical conversation, Upstaged is poised to help provoke those conversations, but it can only do so by promoting them.
After all, the two examples you cite of rabble-rousing sprang from either print (the Irena’s Vow review) or other blogs (the Terry Teachout response). Personally, I don’t think using this platform to attack George Hunka accomplishes very much, but I can’t say it’s not entertaining.
I guess that’s the real question, though. Do you want these blogs, yours included, to be informative? Or entertaining?
My first, completely in-depth and contributing-to-the-conversation thought: Oh snap!
But actually, to Aaron– what’s good/what blows isn’t purely gossip - Rocco’s got smart and witty commentary to contribute. The last thing theatre blogs need is a homogeneous self-seriousness. Yes, they can contribute to exciting discussions, but dude, they’re BLOGS. There’s room for fun and diverse levels of scholarliness.
Entertainment and informativeness are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they reinforce one another. During the election I got a heavy proportion of my news from Wonkette. Is Wonkette silly? Yes. Dirty? Yes. Is that fun built on a foundation of valuable information and intelligent & informed viewpoints? Yes. Same goes for a site like what blows - it’s snappy and a little gossipy, but there’s also legit information and a real point of view and sense of taste. Don’t dismiss a blog just because it’s not overserious.
Sincerely,
The girl who left theatre blogging for lolcats
Okay, but also, to the actually-being-discussed Item Five - first of all, why do blogs have to be confrontational to be good? And second of all, wouldn’t many theatre bloggers be putting their careers at serious risk by doing so?
I didn’t meant to imply that What’s Good/What Blows is pure gossip, nor that I don’t think people should link to it. (I mean, I do.) I’m merely responding to point #5 in the same form as it was given, and pointed out that Upstaged itself sort of needs to lead by example in that regard, both in what it posts and in what it links to.
Again, in case it wasn’t clear from my earlier post (and I guess it wasn’t), I don’t really agree with the spirit, platform, or idea of #5, and again, the question really comes down to what you want: entertainment or information. If you can manage infotainment, hurrah.
A few thoughts over at my house.
I stopped reading Superfluities a long time ago but I don’t get how gratuitously dumping on Hunka’s blog (or defensively congratulating your own) is supposed to stimulate constructive talk about theater. Either debate his ideas or propose something of substance for people to talk about. I’m happy to have TONY assume a leadership role in putting forward worthwhile topics but I don’t think whose blog is cool and whose isn’t meets the substance test.
Jamie asks a great question: are theatre bloggers putting their careers at risk by being confrontational? I received a phone call from the president of the Broadway League, simply because she didn’t agree with an adjective I used in one of my blog entries for That’s Broadway. While I know I have the right to express myself on my own blog, I must admit it gave me pause before writing about the League again. That pause eventually evolved into a giant pat on the back for rousing the beast, so maybe I will employ confrontation a little bit more in the future.
Damn, what does beating up on Hunka really help? He got dumped on years back and then changed his blog - now more theory than events - maybe just to avoid this kind of flaming. Look, I’m all for engaging, and it’s really lacking these days, but I can’t see where enraging is anything but amateur or immature. Romanticizing Dadaist or Astor Place riots ain’t gonna bring back good times. The nyc theater community has serious issues, but someone’s gonna need to show me how this solves any of them. TONY has some of the best theater writers in the city, who’s talented may be wasted in a tourists’ listings magazine; so despite what they think they can say in 300 words or less, a little humility in that glass house might be called for about now.
Thanks for the shout-out and the blogroll add there, chief. I was happily enjoying a bit of a retirement, but I’m happy to dance for ya a little bit.
Since we’re focusing on #5 a bit here (since we can’t force certain boards to fire certain people), here’s another practical thought: how about an NYC theatre blog round-up? Once a week or so, throw up some links to what’s going on in the NYC theatre blogs. Let people know what’s going on. I’m sure you get a lot more traffic than a lot of individual blogs. Just putting it out there.
Jaime raises the real question in regards to theater blogging and the pros and cons of “engage/enrage” blogging. Engage/Enrage is great as journalism, but when you’re a blogger who doesn’t get paid for blogging, and an active professional in the industry, that’s a very fine line to tread, even for an anonymous blogger like myself. I’ve certainly had my fair share of uncomfortable moments due to stuff I’ve posted, and am very thoughtful about what I post and who it might engage/enrage. It’s a worthwhile entreaty, but a difficult thing to act on.
Attacking Hunka as an illustration of “more arguments, more dirt, more bloody knock-down-drag-out fights” is a teaching moment as well as a tragic one. Teaching in that Hunka, maybe, had it coming. My own argument/dirt/KDDO fight with him was over ethics — writing a full-on, Variety-style review of a play for which he acknowledged seeing only the first act, and in any event he was judging the third performance of a four-week preview period, well before the opening, which made the whole thing wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
While I know for some people my response to this on The Clyde Fitch Report put the “ill” back in “shrill,” Hunka’s defensiveness was equally unpleasant.
Yet, for all of that, I can’t help but to ask that we not slaughter each other for sake of slaughter. That includes me.
And let’s straighten a few things out. Arguments/dirt/KDDO fights in the theater blogosphere inevitably have a self-promoting quality. And they should: If you’re good, if you’re smart, if you’re achieving discussion, you ought to be all about building credibilty and readers, just like a blog on TONY. These blogs are brands and should be treated as such.
Obscure manifestos, sure, are a function of the same corner of the blogosphere. Or dysfunction, if you like. But it’s a casualty of a space unlike any other: Where else do you find Broadway-heads, musical-theater geeks, play freaks, downtown experimentalists, the odd academic (I know that’s redundant), and “bathetic tropes of death and erotic epiphany”? Oh, and fans, too. So, skip the obscure manifestos. I quoted Artaud once and I was embarrassed. I tossed my turtlenecks and gutted my goatee.
On an un-blog related note, I loved the Fixing New York Theater article. And, to add another point to the list: there should be more site-specific work in New York. I just came back from London where they use car parks and containers and anything/everything in between to stage work. Why is New York so staid and stuck in the (too expensive for little folks to even hire) blackbox spaces? Why aren’t we engaging with New York’s architecture and strange non-traditional spaces to make theatre? Are Americans too litigious and worried about tripping over a wonky floorboard to take theatre to the streets?
More thoughts at my house, too.
Leonard (do I call you Clyde Fitch?), I appreciate your words about the motley crew comprising the community of theater bloggers. It’s a strange and wonderful and new thing, and I’m thankful that blogging has provided a way for all of those oddball types to congregate in conversation.
David, this is just awful. I don’t know George Hunka, I don’t think we could pick each other out of a line-up, and I quit reading his blog a long time ago when I realized I would never understand what he was talking about…
But a man who’s writing 2000 word treatises on his blog and “seldom produces” is probably living a pretty unhappy life. You are the reviewer for Time Out New York, and you’re choosing to spend your energy beating up somebody who can’t possibly respond in kind, either with their work or their words. It’s the opposite of speaking truth to power.
You’ve always been one of my favorite reviewers, and you’ve always been exceedingly kind to my company and my work, but I find this really disturbing. Surely, this kind of thing doesn’t really fit into your idea for #5.
I suggest, if you could bear to look overseas (beyond London, I mean) that you look to the Australian blogosphere as a model. Some interesting long view discussion going on there, that plays vitally into robust discussion about theatre. And the bloggers don’t waste time in flame wars, maybe because we’re more interesting in arguing about theatre itself.
Let me put in word of defence for George Hunka, who is a blogger who shows me that an intellectual life persists in NY theatre. I don’t understand your spite, David. Thoughtful essays on Barker, Pinter, Kane, Foreman, Brecht, etc etc, merely pretentious garbage? I don’t think so. Although of course, if people think Artaud is just a waste of time, that’s their problem.
Immediately below this submit form:
“We reserve the right to delete any comments we find offensive, potentially libelous, or just plain nasty”
So can we reserve the right to delete this post? Or suggest that you insert an apology?
What gives you the right to beat a guy up like you’ve done to Hunka? You’ve got power, writing for TONY. Get some responsibility.
You champion engagement and ignore its bedrock - respect for other people and their opinions. He sniffed about your publication, he didn’t call you out personally. You argue for facility but end up just facile. His work is no crime - it will get whatever reception it seeks and deserves. But a lead theatre critic for an important and popular publication, indulging in cynical self-aggrandising trashing? Don’t you get what the best theatre is *always* about?
[I'm a month late, I know, attention only just drawn to this by Chris Wilkinson, I'm in London]