The Importance of Biting Bullets

Some people tell me about this great theater company.  Some people whose opinions I respect.  So I go down there and buy a couple of tickets to one of their shows.  I buy them because it’s late in the run, and as a critic I can do them little good, which is the reason theaters give tickets to critics.  When the impresario says, “How did you hear about us,” I say, “I’m a theater critic,” and I mention that I write for Stage Happenings and Bitter Lemons.  And the impresario says, “Oh, you’re a friend of Colin’s,” and I say I am.  Neither of us suggests that I get in for free, because a small theater company is by definition a struggling theater company.  And all’s well.

My girlfriend arrives in the nick of curtain, as usual, and we go in and sit down.  A pretty girl in a chaste outfit, like a Kennedy-era Bryn Mawr student, strums a guitar and sings songs.  Some actors come and go, reciting before a curtain in an unadorned black box.  The actors are mostly in street clothes.  The pieces they recite have no relationship to one another, nor to the songs of the Bryn Mawr girl.  She smiles insipidly at each performer, trying not to look bored.  The lights go up, go down.  Some of the actors stumble over their lines.  One breakdances.  Another stands with his hands in his pockets.  One seems to have dressed up for the occasion of her own initiative.  No one seems to have directed the thing.  In less than an hour it ends, and for this we were charged thirty dollars.

My girlfriend and I go across the street to a family-owned restaurant that’s fifteen minutes from closing.  The woman at the register is clearly overwhelmed by circumstances to which we are not privy.  She wants us to leave.  She runs a hand over her face, distracted by goings-on in the kitchen, and when we place our order she mentions that some ingredients are not ready. We ask how long it will take to ready them.  She says it will take two minutes.  We remark that if so, we’ll still have over ten minutes to eat.  At this, the woman realizes that the sign on the door says “Open”, and she graciously takes our order and feeds us while her son mops the floor and his son chatters excitedly to us about the new monkey bars at his school.  Afterward I walk my girlfriend to her car – it’s very cold out here; we’re both shivering – and she goes home.  She has to get up in the morning; she has a real job.  I, however, am a theater critic.  So I walk back to the theater.  I wonder what I missed, whether I failed to get some important joke.  I don’t want to go away with this impression of this theater company, of which I have heard so much good.  There’s a late-night show going up in an hour and a half, so I ask the impresario whether he can comp me into that one provided I review it.  He asks me whether I write for an important paper.  I mention again where I write.  He somewhat reluctantly confers upon me the favor of seeing his late-night show.

The late-night show is well-directed, well-acted, and apparently written by a reasonably intelligent fourth grader.  In the middle of it, a propos of nothing, someone sings a song made famous twenty years ago on a TV show.  I feel humiliated, as you do when someone does something in front of you that is so embarrassing to him that you feel it too.  I leave without talking to anyone.

Walking to my car, I feel disgust and disappointment with the world.  This whole evening has been so amateurish, so insultingly half-assed, it is as if the theater had stood up and said “Fuck you” to me.  It’s even colder now, and I have to wait while my heater skims the frost from the windshield.  I drive home to someone who loves me and I taste my bile a little less sharply.

I write a review of the first piece.  The review reflects my anger and indignance. I can’t leave it at that.  I call the impresario on the phone and we talk about it.  I offer, on behalf of the good things I’ve heard about his theater, to not publish reviews of the pieces I saw.  He accepts the offer.  I explain my foiled expectations: my confusion at the lack of a coherent thematic, tonal or contextual line in the first show, my surprise at the lameness of the writing in the second show.  He says that I have seen the wrong two shows. He says,

“We put up 28 shows this year, we were tired, and yeah, those two shows don’t represent our best work.”

So there it is, the central question of my week: when is it okay to lower your standards?

Is it okay to lower your standards when you’re charging admission?  It is not.

Is it okay to lower your standards when when after all you’ve recently done good work?  No.

When do you get to lower your standards?  I think there is only one time you get to do this.  It is when you no longer care about your reputation.

I cannot stand separate from this rule. I made a mistake when I said that I would not review those shows; it was my responsibility to do so.  But I won’t for a few reasons, primarily that I said I would not.  For another reason, both shows are closing soon, I hope never to be seen again, and so my reviews would not do anything but contradict the three positive reviews apiece, written by critics I guess are motivated by my next reason for not reviewing it: my larger responsibility to the theater community to encourage those doing good work.  And despite what I saw, everybody says that my instinct was correct, and that those were the two wrong shows upon which to base my opinion of that company.

But, see, they’re the two I saw.  And I was only able to see them because the company opened the doors and said they were worth seeing.

So the next morning I get up and I go to a dance recital for girls from the age of two or three to perhaps twelve.  I have to do this because a very good friend of mine, a four-year-old named Kali, is in this recital, her first.  I am excited about this show, and I am not disappointed.  There is something about a stage full of toddlers that prevents the spectator’s attention from wandering.  They have abandoned their shyness or they have not; they will perform or they will not; they will get with the program or they will do what they want to do, which may be wholly unrelated to what anyone else wants.  And they’re not taking tickets, so they get to do that.  The previous afternoon, I saw another close friend, Kali’s 9-year-old sister Ruby, in a production of Singin’ in the Rain.  Some of the kids in that show didn’t remember their lines; some had trouble remembering the dance steps.  But those kids were mortified, and they tried hard, because they understood what some grown-ups have forgotten: that to put it up there, to ask for attention, is to request judgment.

hear me mumble and stutter about this very subject on the radio while sitting too far from the microphone

read my latest Stage Happenings reviews