(no subject)

From linaerys originally, but this is seriously the best podcast on 50 Shades of Grey, possibly the best podcast I've ever heard on a book ever. Cause not only do they get their kicks reading out some sections of the book, but they also talk a lot about how criticisms of "writing style" and of romance tropes are often thinly veiled class criticisms, so that's not what is wrong with this book, but that it is badly done romance tropes. And there's quite a bit about what's off-putting about the sexual politics in the book which, as Twilight fanfic, not surprising.

Plus, they've got British accents. LISTEN.

I WILL NOT APPLAUD FOR THAT

Last night mithras03 and I went to see "Are You There, McPhee?" at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. This meant, for me, rushing to Penn Station and catching a train. I only did this cause a) mithras works in Princeton and could drive me back, b) the play stars Paul Gross, and c) the tickets were really cheap. There's a reason for that. At the intermission, I turned to mithras and said, "This is shit!"

( Walt Disney is God's apology for the Holocaust )

The thing with this play--oh, so many things, but the thing with this play is that the production was so expensive and so well done. Elaborate stage with many moving parts, numerous puppets, animated lobster, lighting effects, sound effects.

And the actors were trying so goddamn hard. Gross in particular. He talked pretty much continuously for almost three hours. You could see him using his diaphragm to project. It made me observe to mithras that in order to do that, night after night, and not lose your voice, as he hadn't, you have to have learned serious oratory skills. And he was putting so much ENERGY into it. I mean, he carries the thing. And a lot of it is supposed to be witty, so he'd deliver these lines and pause for effect and like one person would laugh. But a huge portion of his lines were saying things like, "I open the door," "I pour a glass of wine," "I go to the phone." And then there were these chunks of text, quotes from other things, that are repeated MULTIPLE TIMES and I don't care how much energy you put into your performance, NOTHING will animate this. It must be absolutely soul sucking. I mean, at some point in the second act, I started thinking of this as one of the little vignettes from "A Life in the Theater" where they're showing just how bad so much of theater is.

This play was so spectacularly bad--and not in a way that an amateur could write a bad play. This was a bad play only a pro could create. McCarter commissioned it, and mithras and I can only figure that they signed the cast before the script came in (cause how you could read it and agree to do it--I don't know). And they clearly had enough of an investment that it was going up goddammit and they were going to do the best job they could with it. And you've heard of good actors elevating bad text? Not possible here.

What this play was was lots and lots of technique--a lifetime of playwrighting technique. Repetition of things like references to Jaws, "The Internal Structure of Stars," the Holocaust, Walt Disney, as if mere repetition created a theme. It was all this technique internalized, digested, and then shat out. The technique was recognizably there--but it was still shit.