WHY SEATTLE IS UNCONDUCIVE
TO ARTISTIC CREATIVITY
With the imminent end of yet another season of burly athletes playing „territorial conquest“ as American Football is called I once again note that even a single local hero of that sport spraining as much as a pinky can be featured on the front page of the one and only remaining rag the Seattle Times, whereas I don’t recall, during my nigh 25 years in these precincts, seeing the name of a single artist on the rag’s front pages! And until at least the major artists are so featured Seattle will fail to be conducive to the arts, for a variety of historical and current reasons that I address below.
With the imminent end of yet another season of burly athletes playing „territorial conquest“ as American Football is called I once again note that even a single local hero of that sport spraining as much as a pinky can be featured on the front page of the one and only remaining rag the Seattle Times, whereas I don’t recall, during my nigh 25 years in these precincts, seeing the name of a single artist on the rag’s front pages! And until at least the major artists are so featured Seattle will fail to be conducive to the arts, for a variety of historical and current reasons that I address below.
PART I (THEATER)
to come:
PARTS II + III + IV
media, housing,
philistinism...
Seattle is rife with old women busy-bodies of all kinds, many of them guys, who spend their days fussing over dirt, pise-antish supervisor types,
it is a very anal city
I knew the word “provinciality”
of course, even felt that there were a host of provincial aspects to New York
City, but didn’t give thought to how provinciality comes about, didn’t really
have time until I was in the provinces.
If you are in Baja
California you are in a rural environment, at most a small circus might enliven
one or the other small pueblo. You do no plaint about provinciality in a rural
environment. However, Seattle is something else, because it has cultural
pretensions, it even had the buddings of a theater town, small troupes sinking
roots, in the last third of the previous century. But the roots shriveled as
they tend to in infertile environments. Too much television, too much on-line.
Exception at one time was
made to young musicians who took all kind of drugs to loosen up, and perhaps
exception is still taken there...
it is a city that is
cleaning at all times, the leaf-blowers
and big vacuum cleaner
trucks
are out even at night…
it is a city of
small complaints
other-directed,
breeders who reside in cottages
big and small, to which they do not invite newcomers, ever, not
interested. crossword puzzlers who turn to that challenge first thing of the
paper.
Most
of the theater folk here who are from here and have staid here all their lives
have stayed staid because there's no chance that they would be in the theater
elsewhere.
Quite a few fine people
have come... and gone… during the 20 + years I have been in Seattle, some
flee at once, others have contracts and then leave saying the provinciality
just runs too deep.
I did some reviewing my
first months here in the mid-1990s to
Became acquainted with
the audience as much as the shows
The audience still
applauds the sets
And titters even at the
bad jokes
And will run around
circles at a
Who-done-it..
Exceptions to this state of affairs are too few which is why the promise of the cultural revolution that set in
Exceptions to this state of affairs are too few which is why the promise of the cultural revolution that set in
The one local who really
understood theater would happen to be an evil thief!
===================
The death of Sarah Nash Gates
reminds
me that she was instrumental in stopping a once planned Peter Handke festival
in the late 90s that had all around support and would have been well-funded by
the Austrian Government. Gates was “not interested” as she told Richard Grey,
then the chairman of the Department of Germanics, and me once I got belated
wind of her opposition. That is what happens when scenic & amp;
costume designers achieve positions of power. Dommage for theater in
Seattle, and the U.S.A.
Below & amp; on
the Art Critic Blog you will find other critical takes on some matters in
Seattle which in other respects is quite perfect, e.g. its crows and other
feathered friends. x michael roloff
=A=
I recall that the only
theater piece to leave Seattle during the past twenty years is the musical First Date
A creation of
Seattle's Kurt Beattie-run ACT theater
&;
FIFTH AVENUE THEATER
FIST DATE provides NY
Times reviewer Isherwood a chance for wicked fun, as would the Seattle that I
could apprise him of if ever he comes to these parts.
“Does any of
the following sound familiar? An instant lack of rapport; a growing aversion as
the minutes pass; a mysterious sense that time has suddenly stopped; a
desperate hope that the apocalypse will arrive, preferably right this minute.
Magnify those feelings, set them to bland pop-rock music, and you’ll have some
idea of the oodles of fun I didn’t have during my evening at “First Date,” the
singing sitcom that opened on Thursday night at the Longacre Theater.”
Thus, it occurred to
me to dwell on, fathom, why so little of note worth exporting is created in
Seattle in the arts (welcoming imports is a different matter), what might
militate in the usual and more than usual American ways?
Let me focus on
matters theatrical first as I did already some time ago @
&
But let
me first revert (avert, revert, what's the vert next?) to the fine summer of
1994 when it did not rain from mid-June until November and everything East of
the Cascades burned to a cinder
&
I arrived in Seattle to
see some Green after about ten years of desert & semi-desert, to
contact relatives, descendants of immigrants of around the year 1900, and friends.
=B=
Matter did not start of
all that
badly
I contacted ex-colleague
&; agent Robert Lantz in New York, “Ah Michael, let me put you in touch
with the wonderful Dan Sullivan at the Rep. Sullivan at once turned me over to
his assistant Kurt Beattie, and we got along just fine, especially because he
had played Peter Handke's
KASPAR
@ THE EMPTY SPACE
in my translation.
I had published and
translated a lot of Austrian authors and the Austrians were ready to repay in
the form of helping fund a Handke festival. Kurt did yeoman's work in crunching
numbers. The idea went over well until I - by then visiting scholar at the U.W.
in Germanics - who had only wanted a library card - heard from the chair of my
department that the head of the Drama Department, Sarah Nash Gates, said that
they were not interested: well, she wasn't for sure, Steve
Pearson who then did a first rate production of Handke's
THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING
OF EACH OTHER
certainly was, as was
Burke Walker the first rate directing teacher & director whose
EMPTY SPACE
had gone belly-up.
However, it was my fault
in not apprising myself that I needed that Gates chair person's o.k. - matters
of that kind had never been a problem on the East Coast where I had arranged
several festivals of that kind at colleges, Smith & Bennington. A
belated attempt to convince Professor Gates - the damn thing could have been
called "Gat es of Hell Festival" for all I cared who made his money
from his translator's cut at such events) of Handke's importance did not
succeed.
Now that Handke is
acknowledged a the most innovative unique playwright since Brecht,
a playwright of
Shakespearean dimension
wouldn't it be a feather
in the U.W.'s shaved head
to have done a
full-fledged well-funded festival cum symposium at that time!
To get a feel for the
scene I did some reviewing (for two tickets, ah and the chick who wanted my
spare at the Fifth Avenue) for the organ of the disabled & thus made
the acquaintance of Seattle audiences that applaud the sets & giggle
easily - appalling compared to the children in Mulege in the Baja when the
Circus comes to the pueblo & you see genuine wonder, and not just on
the children's faces.
I had been going to the
theater since the 50s, and had read plays voluminously, beginning with
Shakespeare (courtesy of a Shakespeare-nut stepfather – no, not just
proverbially, conceive of hurtling in a Crosby automobile - Frigidaire-size,
post WW II vintage - through a suburban housing development with your
delightful stepfather elocuting the great monologues at the top of his voice!)
I had had had amazing
theater experiences - at the Berliner Ensemble, with Peter Brook, Herbert
Berghof, E.G. Marshal, and all the Handke in New York. The Seattle audiences
were something else – and they then seemed to claim sophistication, perhaps
because they drank cafè au lait.
In the process of trying
to get the festival off the ground, I came to know the crème de la crème of
Seattle off-off Broadway sprinkle. There seemed to be, or at least have been, a
lot of fresh shoots in Seattle, starting in the 60s.
There was still an
Autumn all around festival at the time where you could catch three shows at
tiny venues on Capitol Hill – that disappeared a few years after.
Meanwhile, other shoots
were dying out, too; I think it is a total of ten small and large venues that
have gone down, and I suppose it is a wonder that Kurt Beattie, with a lot of
compromises, has at least kept A.C.T. afloat.
My translation of
Dorst's
FERNANDO KRAPP WROTE ME
THIS LETTER
proved the final nail in
AHA Theater's coffin.
Reviewers, I quickly
realized, but for the redoubtable Roger Downey but of questionable character,
were a problem: not even what I regard as a fairly straight forward play
about machismo'sunhappy consequences for women &
ultimately, for Mr. Macho, seemed capable of being described halfway accurately
except by a freelancer whom Joe Adcock of the yet extant Seattle Post
Intelligencer allowed to sub, Misha Berson's sub at the Seattle Times, was a
flub (the sub a flub, sub-flubs) as was Longenbaugh at the WEEKLY – no Stranger
yet – at the English language premiere of a play that was done all over Europe
and was based on Unamuno's famous novella
Nothing Less than a Man.
And the sweet folk at
AHA - wonderful work over the years - had not built up a following to keep a
marvelous play of that kind from and early closing of its short run.
Ah if the audiences were
only as intellectually curious and adventurous as they are as foodies!
Upon Heinar Mueller's
death I arranged for a memorial reading and performances at the U.W. Drama
School. I had collaborated with Mueller's American translator the Berliner
Ensemble graduate Carl Weber on most of the translations.
Great attendance at the
Memorial which led to nearly nothing: a sweet kid, not even member of the Drama
School, then did Hamlet Machine way off in one of the
abandoned buildings in Magnuson Park's NOAA facility.
Neither Carl Weber
showed, his wife had this habit of falling ill whenever he wanted to go
somewhere, especially with me,
nor did Roger Downey,
whose translation of Mueller's Quartet appears to have been
the only other Mueller piece ever done in Seattle, at Kazanian's then still
extant Theater of the New City which is now the Hugo House –
Downey had claimed, to Verlag der Autoren, (A Socialist Author's house,
one of the few left-overs of 1968) friends whom I had represented in New York,
that he had exclusive
English language rights – the prospect of finding himself on the same stage as
Carl Weber, Mueller's American translator, had induced a diabetes attack (if
only it had been agenbite!) in someone who had vied to be a food rather than a
drama & opera critic of … actually … national talent, if only he had not
been a petty and vengeful crook besides! Domage!
- I was becoming privy
to Seattle parochialism & would encounter a lot more of it. David
Brewster, objecting to Downey reviewing shows at ACT because his wife was a
member of the board – David then apologized for his overly protective impulse.
Certainly one reason for lack of creativity & a low horizon.
In the course of trying
to salvage something of the attempt at a Handke festival,
Kurt then introduced me
to a few people each of whom proved to be a breaker of his word.
Arne Zaslove during the
course of a decade never read
WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
of which now modest
mouse me
had merely wanted to do
a reading. I was still in four-hour voice at that time & had done it at
venues such as Beyond Baroque
in Venice, Ca.
By then Arne had lost
his Bathhouse Theater because the prospect of hosting Theater Zan Zinni at that
location had alarmed the Greenlake Green Police! Arne was quite right that Kurt
couldn't direct himself out of a brown paper bag, which didn't keep him from
sucking up to him with projects. Parochialism! And Kurt then didn't do any
Handke as he had hoped he would when he inherited the artistic directorship at
ACT.
And it appears he has
not realized his deepest wish, to finally premiere Brecht's Mother
Courage
in a major venue in
Seattle before he retires.
He asked me whether I
wanted to do a new adaptation of the Thirty War Year-old Mutter Kurasch, for
years I had been thinking of doing an American Mother Courage,
and was quite ready, and not to do a Kushner or Steve Pearson, Mother
Courage as Cabaret version
(Imagine doing Death
of a Salesmen as a comedy, perhaps as Death of an American
Hustler!)
but, as an aboriginal
Brechtian, as of 1957, I was going to do it with full-fledged urmarxist tragic
pathos. What a mother that would have been!
John Kazanian (whose
work as a director of performance artists I admire) had sold the building that
housed his NewCity Theater and now only did shows at his and his wife's kitchen,
promised to read
WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES
and get back to me,
which he has not to date.
The best chance to still
do something spectacular along that line was provided to
Richard White @ Cornish
A half way decent
production in the early years of this century, of my proposition for CORNISH to
do Handke's highly controversial VOYAGE BY DUGOUT (THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM
ABOUT THE WAR) would have put Cornish on the map as it has not been for a
hundred years
...
Instead White, never got
back to me as he promised, and seems to have spent his time giving away money
for whatever never left an impression.
Parochialism to the Nth
power – the U.S. of A. the biggest parochial self-involved
country in the world!
Not that I didn't see
some fine theater while Sullivan & Sher & a few other notables
were directing who all departed Seattle for its provinciality.
Meanwhile I think a
total of ten theaters have gone down, including the Intiman that tried to
revive itself by reviving its once biggest hit
Kushner's ANGELS
IN AMERICA
&
currently is running a
competition for the next Kushner!
Pretty pathetic!
The Seattle Rep
had a play “in progress”
for some years
far worse than the
movie's
in “turn-around”
(the sure sign of death
a notice to the effect
of “in progress no matter with what artistic director you encounter it - a good
playwright gets the work done)
and Misha Bernson
mercifully put the stake into this attempt at a femme GLENGARY GLENROSS
http://www.seattletimes.com/
I imagine you could
throw millions upon millions into arts funding hereabouts and it wouldn't
change the fundamental provinciality that I have seen so many artistic
directors flee during my 20 years in these parts - theatre is an area in which
I am a bit of an old hand. But then it is an area without a building audience,
thus no great surprise that so many small ventures have disappeared, also for
reasons of mismanagement or grandiosity. Had I Paul Allen's resources I'd know
what it would take to be the right kind of Medici in that area, say like the HB
Studio in New York - Herbert Berghof Uta Hagen Studio to put names with the
initials - actor development, an uncompromising dose of truly
contemporary and classical theatre, do that for about 25 years and you have
something, as well as a loyal educated audience that realized that it had a gem
in its midst. A better newspaper would help but is not essential. Give it
another 100 years and Seattle will be just like told old-time Vienna!
=
SEATTLE-TIMES
ReplyDeleteRE: SEATTLE ARTS/ THEATER
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/seattle-fall-arts-2017/
https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/state-of-the-arts-how-seattles-growing-pains-are-impacting-the-arts-scene/
I am appalled at the shallow optimism & lack of even immediate hh istorical context of Brendan Kiley’s piece in particular and at the general coverage of the arts here.
To focus on an area a know a bit about: since I came to these part in the mid 90s at least ten theaters have bitten the dust, most importantly The Empty Space, The Intiman & Zaslove’s Bathhouse Theater & the Ahaha.
The most important work of the most important national and international dramatists is not and cannot even be done here – there are too few theaters left to do them.
Seattle’s claimed reputation as a theater town of any kind is entirely undeserved and ought to be confined to that brief aspirational period of the 70s to early 90s when what was called „the greening of America” also infused its color here, but evidently, for a host of reasons, without striking sufficient roots.
I have found the region to be fundamentally unconducive to artistic endeavor, as I carry on more specifically and at great length here http://artscritic.blogspot.com/2015/04/seattle-uconducive-to-artistic.html
No doubt the problem is not only a matter of tradition & psychology and of the cast of inadequate characters and the profound provincialitity of the audience but of economics and space pressure. Lacking also nearly entirely is a body of critics. There was such a one for a while in Roger Downey, in that respect a fellow of national talent, Misha Bernson was an adequote reviewer, and then there are a bunch of reporters. Moreover, there is a severe diminution in news outlets that is not compensated, best as I can tell by blog or social media discussion.
But let us not forget the best of the spaces and its inspirational foundation, Peter Brook doing theater in an empty basement space in post WW II Hamburg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Empty_Space