Frank Episale is a doctoral student of Theatre at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a BFA from New York University and an MA from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. This is his blog. He's pretty google-able, if you'd like to know more.

Sunday
Aug292010

A note on my teaching philosophy.

Tomorrow is my first day of teaching for the new semester. I added the following "note" to my Theatre History syllabus today, and thought a few of you might find it worth reading. Or mocking, depending on your mood and your inclination...

*

For me, the course description above raises as many questions as it answers. As we move through the semester, I hope to challenge preconceptions and dominant notions about theatrical practice, theatre history, and the theatrical present, as well as the meanings of terms like “the West” and the role of theatre and performance in the larger culture. Questions I hope to explore include:

  • What is theatre? Why do we make theatre? Is theatre important?
  • Who is the “author” of a theatrical production?
  • What constitutes “good” or “important” theatre?
  • What does theatre tell us about the culture and politics of a given historical moment?
  • How can studying past events help us to understand the present and shape the future of both our art and our society?
  • What is “the West”?
  • What is the canon?  How do we choose which texts make it into a course on theatre history?
  • Whose stories do we erase by focusing on a handful of figures in a handful of countries?
  • Why should theatre practitioners (actor, directors, designers, etc.) care about theatre history and theatre theory?

I am much more interested in your ability to engage with such questions than I am in your ability to memorize series of facts. Unless specifically noted, you should feel free to consult your notes and texts for all assignments, including exams. Information is widely available. What is less common than access to information is the skill required to navigate, evaluate, curate, and interrogate that information. I am not here to dispense knowledge, but to facilitate learning

Wednesday
Jul212010

Wisdom from Bourdain

From Anthony Bourdain's Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook:

[T]he idea that basic cooking skills are a virtue, that the ability to feed yourself and a few others with proficiency should be taught to every young man and woman as a fundamental skill, should become as vital to growing up as learning to wipe one’s own ass, cross the street by oneself, or be trusted with money.

Back in the dark ages, young women and girls were automatically segregated off to home-economics classes, where they were indoctrinated with the belief that cooking was one of the essential skill sets for responsible citizenry—or, more to the point, useful housewifery. When they began asking the obvious question—“Why me and not him?”—it signaled the beginning of the end of any institutionalized teaching of cooking skills. Women rejected the idea that they should be designated, simply by virtue of their gender, to perform what would be called, in a professional situation, service jobs, and rightly refused to submit. “Home ec” became the most glaring illustration of everything wrong with the gender politics of the time. Quickly identified as an instrument of subjugation, it became an instant anachronism. Knowing how to cook, or visibly enjoying it, became an embarrassment for an enlightened young woman, a reminder of prior servitude.

Males were hardly leaping to pick up the slack, as cooking had been so wrong-headedly portrayed as “for girls”—or, equally as bad, “for queers.”

What this meant, though, is that by the end of the ’60s, nobody was cooking. And soon, as Gordon Ramsay has pointed out rather less delicately a while back, no one even remembered how.

Maybe we missed an important moment in history there. When we finally closed down home ec, maybe we missed an opportunity. Instead of shutting down compulsory cooking classes for young women, maybe we would have been far better off simply demanding that the men learn how to cook, too.

Thursday
Jun032010

Consumption, Destruction, and Sex in the Multiplex

I've never been a Sex and the City kind of gay.

Divas, excessive consumption, class envy, and dreams of an all-White Manhattan don't do much for me, and I've long been quietly frustrated at mainstream gay culture for being so much about such fantasies. My sexuality-related fantasies are much more queer than gay: about rejecting and destabilizing existing systems rather than fabulously infiltrating and inhabiting them. Drag, for example, is exciting because it deconstructs all gender as performance, not because it reifies gender categories. Difference is exciting because it points to ruptures in normative assumptions and ideologies, not because it allows high-end designers to cater to a wider variety of airbrushed skin tones.

While I don't often live up to my own ideals, I do believe that every purchase is a political act, that we have a responsibility to educate ourselves about where the products we consume come from, who makes them, and what kind of damage we're doing when we encourage more such products to be made. I believe that the accrual of wealth is, at the very least, ethically fraught in a world where so many have so little. Etc.

Sex in the City frames Prada and Manolo Blahnik as second only to long-term gender-coded monogamy (preferably with an emotionally fragile billionaire) in terms of the ultimate fantasy, the material expression of a fulfilling life.

Not my cup of tea.

I've long been baffled by Chris March breaking into worshipful tears at the chance to design (sans pay) for Sarah Jessica Parker, and by my moderately successful architect friend who lives in one of Manhattan's smallest apartments but loves it because it's just a block away from SJP's. When an out-of-town ex visited New York and wanted to see the first SATC movie while he was here (simulacrum, anyone?) I was troubled by the audience of women and gays who applauded and squealed in delight when Big built Carrie an enormous closet, and who gasped in horror when the depth of Carrie's despair was indicated by a shot of SJP without make-up. During a montage in which Carrie is trying to find an assistant, I was startled to see a seemingly ideal candidate dismissed as shockingly, laughably unsuitable because he was wearing women's shoes with his sensible suit, a disturbing about-face given the show's up-with-stereotypical-gays reputation. And I couldn't help but notice that the only non-whites in the movie were servants, and that the filmmakers tried to make up for this by giving one such servant (Jennifer Hudson) a heart of gold and wisdom beyond her years. Furthermore, while the series as a whole has taken a lot of heat from social conservatives for a supposed glorification of promiscuity, I've often found it to be a lot less pro-sex and sexually progressive than it might seem, though I'll refrain from detailing that argument here.

With the release of Sex and the City 2, which by most accounts may be the worst film of the year, I was considering jumping on the anti-SATC bandwagon as a means to rant against the increasingly irritating, increasingly commodified mainstream gay culture, a largely depoliticized subculture producing artifacts like this one at an alarming rate.

And yet...

The current backlash against all things Sex and the City has an ugliness—and arguably an hypocrisy—to it that I'm not entirely comfortable with. My friend Alex Morales has been following the backlash with irritation, bristling both at the gleeful attacks on a franchise that has provided him some escapist comfort over the years and, more compellingly, at the uncomfortable, genre-delineated sexism that seems to underly quite a bit of the criticism.

Before reactions to SATC2's ludicrous storyline, cultural insensitivity, etc. began to emerge, the film's negative buzz focused on the usual (and typically distressing) mainstream hetero complaints: SJP getting too old to be playing sexy; boyfriends being dragged to the movie by swooning, ditzy, fashion-obsessed girlfriends who need something to occupy them between Twilight films; etc.  People who found nothing insipid or offensive about Transformers 2 or Iron Man 2 railed against SATC2 in a way that implied that fantasies about traveling to exotic places and spending lots of money are only valid if you get to blow some shit up along the way. Destruction, violence, and sexual imperialism are fine, but high heels, cosmpolitans, and, well, sexual imperialism are corrupting, feminizing, groan-inducing. You can see the movie, but only if your girlfriend can't get her pet gay to join her. It's something you might have to put up with in order to get laid. And of course you'll have to pay for the ticket and probably won't be allowed to put any of that delicious butter flavor on the popcorn.

So this isn't a bandwagon I can jump on, I'm afraid. As much as I still want to rant against diva-obsessed gays whose greatest political ambition is to be the target of advertising for luxury products, I'm not willing to do so by playing into a misogynist uprising masquerading as a critical narrative. If I'm going to rail against mindless consumption, I should at least take a moment to recognize that spending all that money on overt violence and bombastic pyrotechnics is arguably worse than spending it on a tasty drink and a nice pair of shoes.

Thursday
May272010

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, and Enjoy

This month's CUNY GC Advocate includes my thoughts on Les  Frères Corbusier's Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson and the Play Company's production of Toshiki Okada's Enjoy.

Excerpts:

Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson, currently enjoying a twice-extended run at the Public Theater, re-imagines our sev­enth president as a post-punk, emo pop-rock star whose emotional scars drive him both to greatness and to geno­cide. There’s a touch of genius in framing Jackson as an emotional adolescent who over compensates for both his own insecurities and his distrust of authority by adopting a swaggering, hyper sexual confidence. As played by the ridiculously sexy Benjamin Walker, this Jackson wears skin-tight jeans and form-clinging long-sleeved t-shirts, brandishing his pain (and a holstered revolver) as a rallying cry against “Washington elites” as he rides his war-hero status and his populist rhetoric all the way to the White House. He wears black eye liner, he massacres the Creek and Seminole tribes, he cuts his arm in the manner of a bipolar teen, he balances the budget, and he sings power ballads.

Photo by Joan Marcus 

[...]Unfortunately, though, BBAJ is also a little smug, a little glib, and a little pat. While it pretends to challenge viewers to reexamine their preconceptions, it is actually designed to elicit self-congratulatory laughs and knowing nods from an audience that already shares its point of view. Its humor is almost entirely derisive and dismissive, particularly (but not only) when directed against Jackson and his admirers. Jackson is presented as with out redeeming qualities, not only anti-intellectual but down right stupid. His persuasiveness and charisma are reduced to, and dis­missed as, a result of the fit of his jeans and the cut of his pecs, a genuinely amusing conceit that cuts off any possibility of real engage ment with the strength and appeal of his persona and his rhetoric. The show’s vision of Jack son also leads to a certain amount of musical confusion, conflating emo with cock rock, and emo fans with frat boys. Neither of these genres is executed particularly well; some of the songs are catchy, but the ridiculousness, the intentional badness, is painted on in thick layers.

[...]

[Toshiki Okada's] Enjoy, which is just finishing its English-language premiere in a production by thePhoto by Carol RoseggCompany, follows a handful of temp workers at a manga café as they drift through their lives, careers, and relationships. They over-think the triv­ial in order to distract themselves from more pressing matters, including the identity crisis brought on by entering one’s thirties while working part time in a manga café.

Ogawa’s remarkable translation seems to capture Okada’s tone perfectly (think Waiting for Godot meets Clerks or Slackers, only in Tokyo.) This is a very Japanese play, but American generations X and Y will find much to relate to if they allow themselves to relax into the show’s static pacing. Director Dan Rothenberg (of Pig Iron) directs a solid, occasionally extraordinary cast with a deft hand. Okada’s work is poised to take on a higher profile in New York’s experimental scene (his 5 Days in March, which Okada’s company presented at the Japan Society last year, is about to open in English at LaMama); consider this your chance to know about him before all your friends do.

Full review(s) here.

Thursday
May062010

My Remarks at the 28th Annual Edwin Booth Award, presented to Charles L. Mee

I hope to find time to write a post recounting this year's Edwin Booth Award, which was presented to the extraordinary Charles L. Mee on Monday May 3rd at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. For now, though, I'm posting the text of my remarks (as prepared, not precisely as delivered).

*

In a particularly self-indulgent blog post a few years ago, I wrote that I needed to stop falling in love with the gorgeously fractured shells of broken men. I don't mention this out of a need to confess my extended emotional adolescence, or to offer a glimpse into my romantic travails, but because I was reminded of this post recently, while reading a passage from Chuck Mee's beautifully written memoir, A Nearly Normal Life.

Reflecting on how his struggle with polio has influenced his work, Chuck wrote:

 

I find, when I write, that I really don't want to write well-made sentences and paragraphs, narratives that flow, structures that have a sense of wholeness and balance, books that feel intact. Intact people should write intact books with sound narratives built of sound paragraphs that unfold with a sense of dependable cause and effect, solid structures you can rely on. That is not my experience of the world. I like a book that feels like a crystal goblet that has been thrown to the floor and shattered, so that its pieces, when they are picked up and arranged on a table, still describe a whole glass, but the glass itself lies in shards. To me, sentences should veer and smash up, careen out of control; get under way and find themselves unable to stop, switch directions suddenly and irrevocably, break off, come to a sighing inconclusiveness. If a writer's writings constitute a "body of work," then my body of work, to feel true to me, must feel fragmented. And then, too, if you find it hard to walk down the sidewalk, you like, in the freedom of your mind, to make a sentence that leaps and dances now and then before it comes to a sudden stop.

 

Aside from the gorgeously rendered prose, what struck me most about this passage was how much light it seems to shed on Chuck's plays. In many of them, of course, he takes this process a step further, shattering not one crystal goblet but several, and throwing in bits from jelly glasses, stained-glass windows, and cathode ray tubes.

Postmodernism, and the pastiche technique that characterizes it, are often criticized as being so referential, so soaked in irony, and so mistrustful of narrative that such works are unable to engage with emotion, with politics, with history. They are accused of being all surface, all product, and largely without conscience. If ever there was evidence that this need not be the case, it is the playwright we're here to celebrate tonight.

While it is difficult to apply any one phrase to all of them, Chuck's plays are often deeply personal, highly emotional, politically engaged conversations with, and meditations on: history and fantasy, war and peace, love and loss, art and life. His writing is marked by restless intelligence, relentless curiosity, and genuine compassion. Yes, he challenges the metanarratives of history and identity formation, but he does so in a way that respects and glories in story and experience, opening up the narratives—personal, cultural, historical, political—not to destroy them but to give them room to breathe.

--

When I saw True Love at the Zipper a million years ago, I didn't know much about Charles Mee. A friend of a friend had gotten his first off-Broadway contract, his first Equity show, and a bunch of us went there to support him. While I imagined myself an adventurous theatregoer at the time, the truth is I didn't have much of a context for the play.

But I knew I hadn't seen anything quite like it. The mix of high and low cultures, the on-stage rock band, the explicit references to Greek tragedy, the collision of a working-class vernacular with Chuck's trademark flights of philosophy and poetry, and my long-haired young friend roller-skating around the stage, and then dancing naked with the actor playing his mother, all on a set designed to evoke a run-down garage, "an abandoned gas station." Once I knew the playwright's name, of course, it was everywhere. True Love, First Love, Big Love . . . 

There's a joke in there, I'm sure, but I'm also sure someone else has already made it better than I would have, so I'll skip it.

Years later, I saw Chuck at a Prelude festival, here in this building. I was a new PhD student here, and my friend and classmate Kenn Watt—who we'll hear from a little later—was directing a play called Gone, by Charles Mee, whose work I knew quite well by this time, though I wasn't yet referring to him as "Chuck." After we watched the work in progress, the director, the playwright, and the cast took some questions. Chuck was very open about the fact that Gone was unlike anything else he'd written. He wasn't sure what it should look or sound like on stage. He wasn't sure it could work in performance. But he liked and trusted Kenn, and the enthusiastic young actors of the ensemble, and he was excited to see what they would come up with.

Everyone I know who has worked with Chuck—directors, actors, playwriting students, academics—talks about his generosity in that regard. Every time a playwright throws a fit about over-reaching directors as if railing against "activist judges," I think of Chuck, who writes his plays to be directed, who is not afraid of losing his identity as an artist just because someone else asserts theirs. He knows that his plays are not "finished' as written any more than the material he drew on while writing was "finished" when he found it.

They're broken. They're fractured. They're fragmented. They leap and dance before coming to a sudden stop. They're heartbreaking, and funny, and challenging. Sometimes they succeed spectacularly. And sometimes, frankly, they fail. 

Because: like the artist who wrote them, they're too smart, too ambitious, too interesting, and too beautiful to be perfect.