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Reviewers who write with hard deadlines and limited word counts often don’t have the luxury to be critics, to do the deep culture work of parsing text, performance and history, giving context and building a lengthy critique independent of the life cycle of a given production. At the same time, I do identify myself as a critic, and believe I write reviews that contain some quotient of criticism—a little light amidst the facts and jokes. Well, I try. It’s a fast, reactive business, this. You see a show and communicate its ingredients, its flavor, its presentation and how it tastes. Then you move on. Now and then if you’re lucky—or especially alert—you see a bigger picture, or dots connecting in meaningful ways.
So it was nice yesterday to see blogger, nonfiction author and occasional stage director Isaac Butler quoting me in the course of his smart and elegantly written analysis of recent plays that might be practicing what I’ve called “dramaturgical normcore.” The American Theatre piece is called “The Great American Living-Room Play Gets a Remodel” and it's definitely worth a read.
Butler’s jumping-off point is my drive-by identification of a trend in which experimental playwrights try out the conventions of a naturalistic, fourth-wall, living-room domestic drama. I was first inspired by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, and recycled the term in my review of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men. Butler includes Will Eno’s The Open House (pictured) and Taylor Mac’s Hir, which I haven’t seen but look forward to—previews start in October at Playwrights Horizons.
At the end of the essay Butler touches on potential sources of the realist/antirealist tradition, from Ibsen to Pinter, but he leaves open the question of how long avant-garde American playwrights, specifically, have been appropriating the living-room drama to deconstruct it from within, or infuse it with disruptive energies. Was it Thornton Wilder’s groundbreaking Our Town, which projected the cosmic onto the mundane? Maybe it was later, say Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—a play which seems to obey the unities and take place in the real world, but is actually a deeply strange and coded ritual. Remember that in 1963, Albee was basically a downtown punk (albeit a dapper and well-spoken one) who was bringing his bitter brand of American absurdism to the mainstream. A contemporary point of comparison would be Eno’s The Realistic Joneses playing on Broadway—minus the frisson and ticket sales. Of course, the inescapable weirdness of Joneses, its refusal to let us forget we were watching a highly artificial, theatrical construct, doomed its commercial prospects—and apparently pissed off the Tony committee (zero nominations).
Another question that could be raised (and which I don’t have time to answer!) comes from a more cynical place: Isn’t a subversive conventional play easier to produce than a subversive experimental play? If you have a message (political or even aesthetic), it’s much easier to deliver that message in an attractive, familiar package. Even if your message is: Isn’t this cozy, familiar package bizarre? Or, more precisely: Isn’t it bizarre that you are paying me to write in this cozy, familiar package?