Dolan on Wasserstein, again

Jill Dolan writes an extended critique on Wendy Wasserstein's Third, which she saw here in LA at the Geffen Playhouse. Go read her description and analysis of the play - she does it more thoroughly and better than I will.

The production is part of a season of the Geffen doing plays about women, only half of which are written by women. Two out of the three plays written by women criticize feminism, particulary academic feminism, and Third decidedly falls into that category. It's an intensely problematic play, Wasserstein's answer to King Lear reducing its female protagonist to begging forgiveness of a student in a dorm room and leaving academia. But while in Lear you witness the king's downfall and desperation as tragic, the play sets up Professor Laurie Jameson's humiliation as deserved and just, a victory over a too-rigid feminism. The play constructs this desertion of academia and feminism as a gesture of "hope" and a rejection of "irony" which is really intellectual critique.

In terms of the Geffen's production, I know several people who thought it was awful. Personally, I found it serviceable but in no way inspired. It presented without helping a problematic text. I was less disturbed than Dolan by the awkward blackouts and scene changes and transition music. I was, however, furious at Matt Czuchry's portrayal of Woodson Bull III. He came across as an overgrown frat boy completely without the insight and intelligence the character supposedly should have. He was awkward and arrogant. You'd think that my complete lack of sympathy for him would help me to identify with Christine Lahti's portrayal of Laurie Jameson, but honestly I spent a lot of time thinking about how her floral skirts and heels were completely inappropriate for New England in the winter and why in the world she was outside without a jacket. Because Bull was so utterly unsympathetic, there was nothing at the center of the play. If he is encouraging hope at the end, he has to offer some, but instead his moralism seems vapid. He doesn't offer a vision of a new kind of student with a critical awareness of privilege and lack of privilege but a resurgence of the Old Guard in a new skin, and that's where this play fails. It tears down feminism (without offering any sense of what feminism actually is), but offers nothing but a vacuum in its place. The "feminist" professors must be humilated, prostrated, and removed from the university, but what is left? Where is the "hope" the play espouses when no one is left? Everyone is removed from the university, but the institution stands, presumably in the hands of the old white men who were there first, but even this isn't seen as a tragedy in the play - it's almost seen as the way things should be .

Elvis was an Ass Man

I've been watching Elvis movies recently (for research purposes, of course) and I'm amazed at how often the entire focus of scenes is on Elvis' female costars' rear ends in tight pants and short shorts. This is most obvious in Viva Las Vegas where Ann Margaret's bottom is really the star of the film. I'm amazed at how blatently these women are portrayed based entirely on closeups of their behinds. In Fun in Acapulco, the blond girl who Elvis likes better is differentiated from the female matador who is also pursuing him by the fact that her pants are much tighter and her bottom gets much more screen time. That's how you know Elvis likes her.

The Busy Week

This next week starting yesterday is comletely insane. Yesterday after class stopped in the conference on the American Musical at UCLA (where I spotted The Playgoer in person and it took me reading his bio to figure out why I recognized the name). I ducked out of there early hoping to have time to buy a costume for my party tonight, but didn't manage that before I had to be back to UCLA to see Bill T. Jones "Blind Date" which was awe-inspiring. It was a brilliant anti-war piece that felt nuanced rather than strident. I felt like it asked what it means to be patriotic when capitalism and government combine to make patriotism a bad thing. Even the images of death and destruction were beautiful and haunting. Today I have to find my costume and dress for Backyard Drag, which could easily take all day itself, but I hope to drop in on the musicals conference again for a panel on gender and sexuality. DA Miller's paper on the subject yesterday was fascinating and contentious and I would be glad to see more of the response it provokes. That makes a perfect theoretical frame for dressing up for a musicals sing-along in my friends' backyard. I'm still not sure whether I'm going to just wear underwear and be someone from Cabaret (I have to find a bowler hat somehow) or if I'm going to buy a shiny gold lame dress that I have my eye on and be a backup singer from Dreamgirls/Little Shop of Horrors (racial issues notwithstanding). I also have the perfect dress to be a Shark girl from West Side Story, but West Side didn't make the sing-along. And I'm not sure I have the right shoes for any of these outfits. I'm just going to put my whole wardrobe in my car and hope for the best.

Doing Judy

Rufus Wainwright. Hollywood Bowl. 9/23/07.

Last night, Rufus Wainwright performed his last concert in a series that started over a year ago when he did a tribute to Judy Garland's performance at Carnegie Hall. The series began with two performances at Carnegie Hall on June 14 and 15, 2006 and ended at the Hollywood Bowl. He recreated both Garland's set list and even his gestures evoked Garland's performance style. He also performed the concert at venues in which Garland gave famous performances (the London Palladium, L'Olympia in Paris, and the Hollywood Bowl). A friend of mine commented that performing Judy's songs, re-creating her performance, is an awfully ambitious project. It's true, and it could have gone horribly wrong, but Rufus made it a beautiful tribute to an amazing performer.

The concert was quite fabulous, and fascinating to think about as an artistic tribute to Judy Garland as a performer and as a symbol of queer identification. First and foremost, it was a good show. Wainwright's voice is well-suited to Garland's music. He's the kind of singer I would gladly hear recreate standards and old favorites in his own style anytime. And this was a lovely mix of Wainwright's distintive voice and Garland's dramatic performativity. He made the songs his own, but used her arrangements. While he was by no means impersonating Garland, he used his hands and elbows in a way that suggested without mimicking Garland's expressive theatricality.

The highlight of the show for me was "The Man That Got Away," in which Wainwright captured the smokey darkness of Garland's voice and the strength and fragility of the song itself. The second half featured appearances by Lorna Luft in a fabulous bright pink gown, Rufus' mother, Kate McGarrigle, playing piano for "Over the Rainbow," and an absolutely beautiful rendition of "Stormy Weather" by Rufus' sister, Martha Wainwright. Rufus also sang one song, ("Do it Again," I think) in Garland's original key. His falsetto was strange and haunting and somewhat painful.

The closest Wainwright got to impersonation was in the encore, in which he sang "Get Happy" in an imitation of Judy's iconic outfit, a costume that was almost drag on her but certainly was on him in stockings and heels. But even then, he was performing himself, not her; he wasn't trying to pass as Judy or become her - he was citing her as an inspiration, a symbol, a patron saint, a diva, and perhaps a goddess. He was still very much Rufus under that hat, not a boy in a halloween costume or a drag queen camping for an audience.

The fascinating thing about the show was the way in which the crowd was behind it. So that it didn't matter when Rufus' voice cracked and failed toward the end of the show, or when "Putting on the Ritz" felt just a little off tempo to me. It didn't matter that while Wainwright took full possession of the big, tragic numbers, some of the smaller and quieter pieces got lost in the hugeness of the venue and the undertaking. What mattered is how much the audience wanted to love Rufus and love Judy and love them together. The fact that this was happening was more important than the exact details of how it was happening. The whole audience was caught up in the process of identification and celebration of an event that happened 45 years ago, and it was wonderful. I'm sad that the DVD of the performance at the London Palladium and the CD of the show won't be available until December - I want to take them home and relive this performance now. I've been playing the Judy Garland CD, but I'd like to have them both.

For a full accounting of the concert, read this very detailed Yahoo Music review or Harp Magazine's detailed description of the Carnegie Hall show. There's something off about the LA Times coverage of the concert - halfway through, the reviewer gets caught up in being condescending about drag rather than talking about Rufus and Judy. What the LA Times reviewer missed, and I probably won't be able to explain well, was that this both was and wasn't a camp performance. The show claims and embraces a culture that has claimed and embraced drag performances of Judy Garland as loving tribute and mocking mimickry at the same time. But this was about the music, and about a single performance that has been called "the greatest night in show business history". It was a challenge and a performance accomplishment and a tribute. It was a heartfelt embrace of Garland and queerness and the ways in which they go together.

Wainwright says "I've thought a lot about this, and I think the secret" to Garland's effect on listeners decades after her death, said Mr. Wainwright, "is that, when she sings, she is beautiful without being actually beautiful." In this TONY article, Rufus imagines Judy as an alternative to a Frank Sinatra swinging masculinity: "There’s nobody being the flip side of that, which is the hungry, lonely, desperate, crazy-person singer. So I wanted to pick up that mantle and try to be a little less cool." I think that these quotes, and his performance, demonstrate a wonderful, respectful appreciation of Garland, her music, and her life. Recreating that iconic performance and making it his own was a brilliant tribute, as well as a the ulitimate performance of gay male identity.

computer problems

Forgive me if my posting is light for a while. My computer isn't feeling well, and has thus been sent in for service. As a result, I'm temporarily using my mother's geriatric powerbook. Apparently, the version of Safari it runs doesn't get along with blogger. As in, I can write entries but not post them. I discovered this after losing a long post on feminism and theater that I may or may not feel inspired to recreate. This means that I can only blog on Firefox, and must log out of my email to do so (GRRR! I HATE this about blogger). Blogging becomes much more of a hassle and I'm much less inclined to do it. Hopefully my real computer will be back soon.

McCarthyism Now

"We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home."

I'm in the middle of watching The McCarthy Years, footage of Edward R. Murrow's See It Now episodes relating to McCarthyism (much of which was portrayed in Good Night and Good Luck. It's amazing how contemporary so much of the footage feels.

There's a point at which McCarthy questions State Department employee Reed Harris about a book he wrote in 1932 about higher education. Apparently, in that book, Harris suggested that professors should have the right to teach that marriage "should be cast out of our civilization as antiquated and stupid religious phenomena" if that's their educated and considered opinion. This, apparently, made Harris a communist.

It's interesting that even at the height of McCarthyism, the president (Eisenhower) defended due process of law and the right of defendants to face their occusers. If we could even have that much committment to liberty and democracy now, I'd be impressed.

I was personally amazed that McCarthy accused the left wing media of unfairly persecuting him. I thought that the accusation of liberal bias in the media was a recent fallacy, but apparently happened in the 1950s.

It all feels very familiar.

Irreverent or Reactionary?

Invasion! The Musical. Hudson Backstage Theatre. 9/9/07.

Invasion! The Musical is, as one might suspect, a musical (very loosely) based on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. More than that, however, it is an evening of dirty jokes and foul language that are sometimes hilarious and sometimes completely nonsensical. As potty humor isn't exactly my style, I found myself cringing as often as laughing, but I feel that the musical is perfect for perhaps slightly immature frat boys. The production seems to have originated as a project among USC undergrads and recent graduates; most of whom are quite talented and seem to be having a lot of fun with the show, but I definitely felt too old and too queer/feminist to be the ideal audience. Variety calls the show "the latenight handiwork of a team of drunken frat boys trying to top each other's nominatiosn for Ultimate Grossout between extended bong hits" and I think that's about right. It's also the intended audience.

While the show was dirty fun, where it fell disappointingly short was as a satire. The program claims the show will be "innovative material that is going to challenge contemporary social constructs." It fails, however, to set up those terms clearly so that when it tries to claim that it's ridiculing ideological extremism of all sorts, it ends up feeling just plain reactionary. It feels like conservatives trying to be campy, which strikes a sour note for me. At all points, the writers seemed to avoid plot development, character development, satire, and logical consistency in favor of disgusting or unpleasant side notes.

The production fails to use the sci-fi genre or the 1950s setting to develop its ideas. If it employed the 1950s small town setting as a shorthand for conservative values, racism, hypocracy or sexual repression and established that at the beginning, then the ending would feel less reactionary to me, but as it is, the ending is just plain offensive and I find myself agreeing with the show when one of the characters jokes that it's not well-written. I guess I'm disappointed because the production has a lot of potential to be clever and interesting as well as just funny, and it at every point turns away from being intelligent as well as humorous.

For such an aesthetically heterosexual show, there was a good deal of queer content, including Emily Pennington as Spencer Brewster, a possibly transgender-identified 10-year-old-boy with a crush on his babysitter. Pennington as Spencer was adorable and he and his babysitter, Steve Thompson (played by Cory Bretsch) were the two characters I would have been happy to see more of in the show.

My feelings about the butch/femme lesbian couple, newscaster Gloria Parish (played by Jenny Weaver) and her girlfriend/camerawoman, Janelle (Danielle Faitelson) were much more mixed. Janelle was portrayed as "a butch dyke with no future" content to follow around (and be mildly abused by) the high-powered femme newscaster. Their relationship was loving but dysfunctional, which unfortunately can sometimes ring true for lesbians and they did get a roll in the hay at the climax of the show. Unfortunately, butch seemed to be defined by a tool belt, flannel, a bad wig and large fake eyebrows. They were distinctly out of period, which is odd since the '50s is often considered the height of butch-femme bar culture. These two have their moments, but personally I would find it more entertaining if the point of the jokes surrounding them went beyond "she's a butch dyke with no future" and perhaps implied that someone in the cast had actually met a butch lesbian rather than just heard of them.

I did, however, actually like the random side plot of two National Guardsmen (Ben Giroux and Al Rahn) who arrived randomly, and did nothing, but had a lovely moment of Don't Ask-Don't Tell discovery of their love. The lack of queer sensibilty in this relationship made sense, and even though there was absolutely no need for these characters in the plot, I rather enjoyed their appearance.

I actually enjoyed writer/director Aaron Matijasic's appearance in the play as a nerdy scientist, but I wish the character had something better to do than sing about Toxic Shock Syndrome and get the girl. Will Harris as Sherrif Brewster actually managed to amuse me while singing an offensive anti-feminist hoe-down song. And Ian Littleworth, Carl Petrillo, Al Rahn, and Gabriel Oliva made a wonderful barbershop quartet who were tragically underused.

Basically, there were some good people and good moments in a show that desperately needs to be rewritten with more attention to a humor that goes beyond gross-out jokes. The best word to describe the show is sophmoric, but there's a lot of potential for something better. At the moment, there's no point to this play at all, and its vapid attempt to be postmodern and irreverant makes it, at best, offensive and reactionary.

A Perfect Night

Cohn, Rachel and David Levithan. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist. New York: Random House, 2006.

This is a book about two people meeting cute, then spending a delirious night doing and saying all the wrong things. Over the course of a single evening, they learn and change and grow and fall in love in a way that's full of youth and hope and passion. It's sweet and beautiful and perfect. I loved it. I loved it so much that I immediately sent it to my gay best friend (who doesn't have time to read blogs anymore, so he won't know 'til it shows up on his doorstep). I thought about sending it to two other boys I know and love, but I'm not sure I could get past their skepticism to get either of them to read it. Anyway, it was one of those books that's so simple and evokative that I just want to hand out copies to everyone I know.

Now, I love David Levithan and I have since Boy Meets Boy made me laugh and cry and kept me from screaming while I was stuck in Vegas overnight during the most miserable travel experience of my life more than two years ago now. I love him so much that I almost think he's wasted writing straight teenage boy characters when he tells queer stories so incredibly beautifully. But if I thought that, he proved me wrong with Nick and Norah because they are fabulous, awkward, realistically confused, endearing characters.

I don't know what it's like to be a teenager reading this book, but with my cynical adult perspective the book feels bittersweet both for how honest it is with the disconnections and miscommunications and bad decisions and for how hopeful it is. Because I want, with all my heart, for Nick and Norah to be together and stay together and never break each other's hearts. Because this book is just the beginning of their story, one perfect night with the future purposefully blank so that they never have to break up, grow up, change or move away. Even as I'm applauding their bliss, though I'm also mourning an inevitable loss that is beyond the scope of the book but looming nonetheless. It's a good thing when I worry about the future of fictional characters. It means that in the few hours when I was savoring the book (and it wasn't very long - it's a quick read), they felt like real people to me. I like that.

It's also a book that made me think about the people I've spent a perfect night (or perfect afternoon with). It made me treasure all over again the nights staying up late in cars and coffee houses in the suburbs with Prophecyboy just talking, not yet understanding that my love for him wasn't attraction. Or dancing to Madonna in a dorm room with a girl to whom I didn't understand that I was attracted. Or that trip to Santa Cruz with my first girlfriend where we got lost and flirted and ended the night with that first awkward kiss that changed my life. Or the afternoon I spent running errands with a performance artist I barely knew but with whom I talk so easily. Or those coffee dates that lingered for hours all last spring. Each of these moments is perfect unto themselves, whatever the future brought. They are moments of genuine connection with people who are in one way or another kindred spirits and any book that reminds me to appreciate them is genius in its own special way. And I want to give that book to each of them, and to everyone else who matters in my life. That's the kind of book this is.

If I lived elsewhere (or had time and money to fly)

There are two very exciting shows that I want anyone who happens to be reading this in New York or Seattle to know about. If I could afford to, I would be booking plane flights for both of these shows.

New York:
Wolves in the Walls
New Victory Theater
Oct. 5-21

This is the Improbable Theatre Company (who did Shockheaded Peter) and the National Theater of Scotland collaborating to adapt a children's book by Neil Gaiman. The story is verys simple, but I suspect the theatrical adaptation will be fabulous.

Seattle:
Becoming a Man in 127 Easy Steps
Capitol Hill Arts Center
Oct. 26-27

The Pat Graney Company and the National Performance Network present the world premier of Scott Turner Schofield's Becoming a Man in 127 EASY Steps. This piece is going to be amazing. Turner is my favorite transgender performance artist. He's a delightful human being, a true gentleman, and a fabulous storyteller. I've had the extreme privilege of reading an early text for this show and I'm super excited about it. Excited to the point that I've cleared my schedule just in case I can find a last minute cheap ticket to Seattle to go see it. If you happen to be in the area, you must go and report back to me. I insist.

So, if anyone out there feels like flying me all over the country to see shows (and review them, stage manage them, whatever), these are two that I'm dying to see. If they happen to be local for you, there's really no excuse to miss them.

Go to ...Hell

Zorro in Hell. Ricardo Montalbán Theatre. 9/6/07.

Culture Clash's Zorro in Hell is part folklore, part history lesson, part political rant, and part stand-up comedy, but it's all extremely entertaining. It draws on traditions of Chicano agit-prop theater (I particularly enjoyed the reference to The Shrunken Head of Pancho Villa) in order to dissect pop culture iconography. Plus, it was a love song to old California with its checkered history of exploitation, oppression, and revolution. While not every line was perfect, the fast-paced wit ensured that I laughed so much my face was sore.

Zorro in Hell is the story of a writer (Richard Montoya) who finds himself in a hotel that serves as a museum of old California with a proprietress (Sharon Lockwood) who claims to have seduced and inspired historical and liteary greats from Joaquin Murrieta to Jack Keroac. She and a cast of very queer characters seek to teach the writer the story of Zorro, taking him from a cynical aspiring screenwirter to a revolutionary in the Zorro mold.

Of course, this plot is only an occasional accessory to witty one-liners and a postmodern exploration of California histoy and Zorro mythology. Culture Clash places Zorro in a geneology of tricksters, thieves, and freedom fighters. While they assert that he's directly descended from the Scarlet Pimpernel and an inspiration for Batman, they also implicitly or explicitly link him to Robin Hood, Joaquin Murrieta, and Hannibal Lecter, and perhaps even Br'er Rabbit. The play explores the character's inauthenticity from pulp fiction roots through children's memorobilia. Zorro represents a long history of white and nonwhite children alike nostalgic for a California history that never really existed, but Zorro in Hell comes to the conclusion that Zorro is a character worth emulating despite his problematic history, because first and foremost, he stands up for the people against an exploitative and authoritarian Gobernador. He's a graffiti artist and a one-man rebellion, a terrorist in the most necessary way. Refreshingly, this play embraced the bi-cultural, the alliance between white, Native American, and Mexican as the basis for chicanismo and as the source of potentially revolutionary alliance. It wasn't a piece about how Zorro wasn't authentic enough but rather about how authenticity becomes irrelevant in the face of oppression.

The play is wonderful and I love it and highly recommend it, but no review of mine would be complete without an analysis of gender issues, and this production had some weird ones. First there was the 200-Year-Old-Woman, who was kind of awesome, really. This weird muse/succubus figure isn't exactly a representation of the female experience (she's more symbol than character), but she was a lusty and fiesty old woman (with an occasional inexplicable Irish accent) and as such was kind of fabulous. Of course, she only had one bit, so it got old by the second act, but that's OK really. The real issue wasn't Culture Clash's problems depicting women (for once) but with homosexuality as the foil to masculinity. Our writer-hero was, until he became Zorro, constantly in danger of being sexually victimized. He was kissed by a gay cowboy (and boy can those Culture Clash guys REALLY not do gay right) and raped by Kyle, his bear therapist (the big furry kind, no the big furry kind that lives in the woods). I know that part of this was a humorous take on the tradition of Zorro (and the Scarlet Pimpernel) masquerading as an effete rich boy to hide his secret identity and a performed resistance to the demasculinization and infintalization of any non-white men, but it was also a disturbing depiction of homophobia as the source of all humor. In this world, only Zorro is really a man and everyone else is lesser, as demonstrated by potential homosexuality.

With that being said, the play is overall much stronger than its homophobia and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It just got extended until September 30th and it is very much worth a trip out to Hollywood to see this wonderful exploration of California mythology lovingly and irreverently exploded on stage. Director Tony Taccone and Culture Clashers Richard Montoya, Herbert Sigüenza, and Ric Salinas have a lot to be proud of in this one, and they're working hard up there on stage. The lease you can do is go see it.

P.S. The show also had the best intermission and post-show soundtracks I ever heard. Seriously. I laughed. I sung along. They were all wonderfully appropriate to the show.

Lesbian Theater and Queer Performance Art

I recently read a myspace bulletin from Curve Magazine in which they asked for lesbian theater critics or actresses involved in lesbian theater. If you happen to be either, please respond to them.

But the posting made me consider whether I would call myself a lesbian theater critic or not. It's a loaded question, regardless of the identity issues. I write about queer performance art, and as a result, I see quite a bit of performance by lesbians and other queer women, but it's been a long time since I've seen anything that could strictly be called be called lesbian theater. I tend to know things about lesbian performance art, music, spoken word, film, and sometimes even burlesque, but what exactly qualifies as a lesbian play? And have I been ignoring them in favor of other forms of performance?

Is there lesbian theater here in LA that I'm missing? I tend to skip a lot of the performances at the Celebration Theater and the LA Gay and Lesbian Center as too expensive and usually gay male focused. Theatre Out is a newish gay theater in Orange County that I have yet to check out and Rude Guerilla also in Orange County often has interesting gay [male] programming while not strictly a gay theater. The LA Women's Shakespeare Company is a theater company that may be of interest to lesbians, but isn't strictly lesbian theater as far as I know.

And that made me think about gay and lesbian theaters elsewhere. I'm certainly familiar with Theatre Rhinoceros and Brava! Theater Center in San Francisco and the WOW Cafe in New York (Shakespeare in the Nude on Sept. 8 sounds awesome!) as likely places to find lesbian theater, but I can't say I've spent much time at any of these. Are ther other lesbian or gay and lesbian theaters I don't know about? What makes lesbian theater?

For those in NY

For any New Yorkers among my readers, I highly recommend that you check out Mastering Sex and Tortillas by Adelina Anthony. It's a hilarious piece in which Anthony performs butch and femme gender roles, discussing lesbian sexuality in a rowdy, irreverant solo performance. The intended audience is clearly Chicana lesbians, but the piece is delightfully entertaining all around.

MASTERING SEX & TORTILLAS!
Sept. 5th-29th (Wed-Sat @ 8 pm)
Teatro LA TEA
Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center
107 Suffolk Street, 2nd floor
(between Delancy & Rivington Streets)
Tickets: $15

Fall Lineup

I finally decided to splurge and plan ahead by purchasing tickets to several of those shows I know I should see this fall and that I was far too likely to put off buying tickets until they were sold out or I was too busy. So now I have all sorts of exciting shows to see this fall. Yay!

First of all, I succombed to pressure and renewed my tickets for The Mark Taper Forum. I know this is hypocritical, since I've been complaining loudly about how atrocious and boring almost everything I saw there last season was. But I was determined to see Sweeny Todd and it was cheap and easy to add on tickets to Avenue Q. The History Boys should also be fun. Yes, I'm totally a sucker for musicals. Of course, the seats will all be atrocious, and I'm a bit worried that I'll have moved somewhere before The House of Blue Leaves and School of Night happen, but I'm a sucker for a good Christopher Marlowe story. I find this a crazy season, and still really really white and heterosexual and male-dominated, but I subscribed anyway. Sometimes I fail to live up to my own ideals, but I think it's better to err on the side of seeing more theater rather than less.

More interstingly, I also ordered tickets for a few events at UCLA Live before the cheap student tickets sold out. So I'll be seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company doing both The Seagull and King Lear. I'll be seeing Ian McKellen as King Lear but William Gaunt as Sorin in the Seagull because that was the way it worked with my schedule and ticket availability. I'll also be seeing Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company's Blind Date. So I'll be getting a little bit of culture this fall.

I also purchased a ticket to Culture Clash's Zorro in Hell, which I totally put off to the last minute.

And finally, I'm going to see Invasion! The Musical, which I'm totally excited about. Maybe I can put it in my dissertation.

Speaking of dissertation, there's one more dissertation-relevant performance that I want to see: Rufus Wainwright performing Judy Garland's 1961 Carnegie Hall Show at the Hollywood Bowl on Sept. 23. My problem is that I haven't yet found someone to go with me to this one, and the Hollywood Bowl is one of the few places I'd feel really weird attending on my own. So my dilemma is, do I buy a ticket anyway and be alone and proud, buy two tickets and hope I can convince someone to come with me later, or put it off until I can find company. This is my eternal question, to attend theater alone or not, and it's often a reason why I put off seeing things. I tend to be reluctant to buy just one ticket, and hope that later I'll be able to find someone to go with me. So if there's anyone out there who knows me and is interested in Rufus doing Judy, I'd love company.

State of LA Theater

Frank's Wild Lunch points to this article in the LA Times in which Charles McNulty describes the problem with LA theater as a lack of directors and the general decline of the director as auteur. It's an interesting and in some ways incredibly insightful observation of the LA theater scene, from a man who admittedly has seen a lot more theater in LA in the past year than I have (hey, if I were getting paid to do it, I'd be there). But, while I think he's dead on in describing the LA theater as intensly (perhaps overly) actor-driven, I'm not sure the auteur-director is the solution. I think that there is a problem with a general lack of intelligent vision in theater here in LA. And I think McNulty does a pretty good job at pinpointing the major directors that we know to follow (Bart DeLorenzo, Jessica Kubzansky) and a few less well-known ones to watch. But in crediting the director, McNulty ignores the ensemble, which produces some of the better LA theater in my personal opinion. A creative ensemble can produce amazing work, while the vast majority of director-auteurs, brilliant or not, tend to be straight white men speaking from a position of ultimate power. While it's good to have someone intelligent making the decisions, instead of all of the actors' vanity projects running around LA, I think our local theater scene is designed around companies that need good playwrights, good directors, good actors, and good artistic directors working together. The problem for me is a lack of cooperation around a shared vision, rather than a lack of one person with a dominant vision. We need smarter, more dedicated, more visionary theater people of all stripes, but subsuming everone else to a dominant vision is not the answer. I agree that we have a lot of actors doing a lot of not-so-good productions here, which would be helped by more and better direction, but I think it's better to get more good people committed to a good project, rather than just skillfully but mindlessly following the vision of a leader. Theater in LA needs more passion from everyone, not just good directing.

I totally have to see this

OK, I've been hiding my head from the LA theater scene recently. I have absolutely no excuse for the fact that I haven't yet seen Zorro in Hell. I haven't even reallly been following the listings or reviews for local theater. But today, I checked the list of shows opening last week, and I was delighted to discover Invasion! The Musical. It's even set in the '50s!

Invasion! The Musical, with book and lyrics by Aaron Matijasic and music by Billy Thompson, is a provocative satire reminiscent of Little Shop of Horrors and The Rocky Horror Show, with a dash of “South Park” and a spritz of Mel Brooks thrown in. On a hot summer night in 1952, the residents of Tucker County, New Mexico are at a moral crossroads. Suddenly, aliens attack! Faced with their impending doom, the townsfolk seize the opportunity to do and say all the things they’ve been keeping bottled up inside. As one would expect, all hell breaks loose. Themes of discrimination, social immorality and political hypocrisy are skewered without mercy.

Just as I was wondering about sci-fi theater, along comes a sci-fi play just for me. I must see it. But maybe I should watch the 1950s Invasion of the Body Snatchers first.

Science Fiction Everywhere

I didn't know Frederic Jameson wrote a book about science fiction. Clearly I must read it. Even though I'm not a huge fan of Postmoderninsm, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. It's not because Postmodernism isn't brilliant; it is. It just seems to me (in my admittedly brief and superficial reading of his work) that Jameson really wants to claim that James Joyce is the epitome of all culture and everything after moderism is just a poor imitation. His aesthetics and biases seem very privileged straight white male to me. I could be wrong; this isn't really my subject. I wonder if his opinions on sci-fi are equally biased. But anyway, yay for academics writing about sci-fi.

Speaking of sci-fi, I just finished reading The Last Days, Scott Westerfeld's sequel to Peeps. I need to talk about it because I have a very conflicted reaction to Westerfeld's books in general, and Peeps in particular. I find them both brilliantly provokative and terribly unsatisfying. First, I must congratulate Westerfeld for writing female characters who are important to the plot and demonstrate skills and confidence in their chosen fields of endeavor. Peeps was dominated by the voice of Cal, the geeky male protagonist, and that might have been part of my problem. Also, the concept behind Peeps and The Last Days is excellent; it's about vampires but recasting vampirism as a parasite, so the book talks interestingly about vectors and infection rates. It's a mythology that I'd love to see in queer hands with echos of HIV and lesbian vampires. But while the idea is great, the book itself didn't always keep me engaged. It seemed like it would be great for geeky teenage boys, but not always for me.

The Last Days is set in the same world as Peeps, but it focuses on several teenagers forming a band as the infection comes to a head in New York City. And I also found it frustrating, but for different reasons. It focuses on the members of the band, with the world seemingly coming to crisis behind them, but the potential end of civilization was not quite threatening enough for me. While it's probably brilliantly accurate in describing how purposefully ignorant people can be about the crumbling of an empire or a civilization, I wanted the bigger picture. I wanted to see the loss of infrastructure and feel the world fearing that this really was the last days of the U.S. or technology or the world. I wanted the characters to experience what it would be like if cell phones and power grids and the internet were unreliable. I wanted to feel the power and hope and terror of teenagers facing the crisis by playing weird new music, or just going to clubs and hearing weird new music. Again Westerfeld's concept and world are excellent, but the story itself is not enough for me. I want more. I want a bigger picture.

I've also been watching Masters of Science Fiction on ABC, and I must say, I'm rather enjoying it. These one-hour TV sci-fi mini-movies remind me of The Twilight Zone, which is awesome. So far, I think they're a little too obsessed with being contemporary and politically relevant and risk making the storytelling secondary as a result, but overall I'm very much enjoying them and glad such things are making it to TV.

Plus, I watched the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with a friend the other night. I have thoughts on this, but I'm going to hold them until I've seen the 1950s version. I don't hear good things about Invasion, but I am curious.

Thinking about sci-fi across all of these genres and time periods makes me want to talk about theater. But I can't think of a lot of sci-fi theater that I've seen recently. Or at all, really. I remember in high school we did a project that adapted some Twilight Zone scripts for the stage. And I think I saw a stage version of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles also when I was in high school. And in college we did R.U.R. But I can't think of any professional theatrical sci-fi. Unless you count Evil Dead: The Musical. So, theater folks and sci fi geeks out there, do you know of any good sci fi on stage? Or have any theories about why we don't see it as much? Is it because of the fear of being cheesy? Lack of special effects? Some other demand of the genre? Is it really out there and I have just failed to see it? Does it happen places other than LA? What do you think?

Things to do

There are a couple fun events on my calendar, so I thought I'd encourage others to check them out.

Tomorrow (Saturday 8/18) El Vez, my very favorite queer Chicano punk rock Elvis impersonator, is doing a free show downtown at California Plaza. It's part of that whole revitalizing (and gentrifying) downtown project, but free shows are pretty cool anyway and El Vez rocks. Yay!

And then next Saturday, there's a night of queer performance about queer female sexuality. From myspace:

She/Ze Sex: the varying degrees of gender identiy and sexuality"
Saturday, August 25th
LA Gay and Lesbian Center's Village at Ed Gould Plaza
1125 N. McCadden Place Los Angeles, CA 90038
7:30 pm
$10 event
What is feminine sexuality? Our show will explore feminine sexuality (or not) through enjoying the work of high femmes, butches, FTM's and MTF's artists/performers. Join us won't you?

With emcee D'lo.

Lineup:
Gabriela Garcia Medina
Adelina Anthony
Ryka Aoki de la Cruz
Miracle Whips
Nova Jade
DJ Claw-d
Trannysaurussex (from SFO)

They're also screening a couple of short films and have vendors selling queer-friendly clothing. It should be a great show!

The Gay Debate

I just watched the Logo/HRC Presidential Forum. Yes, I'm a couple of days late.

I liked the structure of the event, with each candidate getting a short interview on a very specific topic. What the candidates actually said, however, was not particularly novel or suprising.

Since it was the HRC, the focus of the whole thing was heavily weighted toward marriage, which means that all of the major candidates (Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Clinton) spent a lot of time trying to explain that they were for fully equal civil unions complete with all the rights and benefits of marriage, as long as we don't call it marriage. Which is an inherently stupid and essentially indefensible position.

Personally, I thought Obama did it best, convincing me that he actually understood that this was a civil rights and equality issue. He said that the focus should be on legal rights under the law and not the word marriage, which I happen to agree with (even though I also firmly believe that separate but equal is not equal).

Edwards started his interview pretty badly, seeming stiff and uncomfortable, but he warmed up by the end. He did his best to dodge the marriage question by saying that he sees why the word marriage is an issue for gay people, but he's still not for it. I was impressed by his closing statement, in which he brought up immigration issues and antidiscrimination.

Kucinich was awesome. Total hippy. Actually in favor of gay marriage. Gravel was also in favor of gay marriage. They both talked about love and equality. Good for them!

Richardson was the loser in this 'debate.' He said more or less the same things as everyone else about marriage, but looked uncomfortable and unsupportive while doing it. And then, he got asked "is it a choice?" Which I personally think is a stupid question to ask a candidate. How would he know, really? Is there a good way to answer this? But he didn't deal with it well, said it was a choice and then mumbled something about science. Basically sounded dumb.

A lot of people apparently liked Clinton at this event. I wasn't particularly impressed. While she was in favor of civil unions and equal rights, she seemed to think it's OK to leave marriage up to the states rather than actually legislating for equality, which is honestly unconscionable when you have states like Ohio that keep working to take away rights for queer folks whenever possible.

Unfortunately, because everyone was asked to defend their position on marriage, there was very little discussion of other issues. They all seemed to be in favor of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell and the Defense of Marriage Act (although Hillary was rather defensive of both, but I guess she'd have to be because they're Bill's laws). Everyone seemed to be in favor of an Employment Non Descrimination Act that includes sexuality (what about gender and/or gender presentation?) Obama was asked about homophobia in the black community, and I think he answered that beautifully, saying that it's important to talk about gay issues not just in front of a gay audience but in all his speechs. Edwards got asked about whether or not he supports transgendered people, but in a way that he couldn't have said anything but yes. I think there could have been a much better transgender question*. I would have liked to hear everyone talk about immigration laws and health care and how to combat homophobia. What about asylum for people who are persecuted for sexuality in other countries? What about adoption?

Overall, I think the candidates did OK, and I'm still generally positive toward Obama, Edwards, and Clinton even though Kucinich and Gravel were the only ones with decent positions on gay marriage. I wish Biden were there - I would have liked to see where he fell. But I just keep asking, why the hell can't Obama, Edwards, and/or Clinton just come out and say, "I believe that men and women and straight people and gay people are equal, and must be treated equally under the law." Why, in 2007, is that still a position that is too revolutionary for a mainstream candidate? Why don't they support equality and civil rights for everyone, without exception? I don't even like gay marriage as an issue, but I do believe in equality and I don't think there should be a single presidential candidate (even Republicans) who should be able to get up in front of the nation and say that any law should treat people differently based on race, religion, gender, or sexuality. If men and women are truly equal (which they aren't yet) then why does it matter which one you marry? And since men and women aren't equal yet, how in the world can we go forward until they are? Why isn't this everyone's issue? Why aren't we talking about it in those terms?

UPDATE: Read this post at Pam's House Blend on trans issues and the debate!

Summer Movies

I saw Transformers this week. Honestly, I actually quite enjoyed it. it was pretty much what a summer movie should be. It had a serviceable but not particularly intelligent plot, but exciting battle scenes and lots of explosions. I feel like perhaps it got a little more attention than it actually deserves, but that's OK, it was fun. Annalee Newitz says it's ok to just enjoy the movie at face value, so I'll go ahead and do that. At least it gestured toward having a kickass female sidekick (Megan Fox) who knew something about cars, even though she didn't actually do much except look hot.

Speaking of summer movies, I'm super excited for Startdust, which opens tomorrow and looks like it will be a fabulous action-packed fairy tale film with witches and sky pirates and a fallen star and all sorts of fun things. I'm predisposed to love this movie because I'm a huge Neil Gaiman fan and I absolutely loved the book. It's sweet and clever and fun and I highly recommend the Charles Vess graphic novel version to anyone who's interested. The movie opens on Friday, and Neil himself is encouraging people to attend the opening weekend, since that's so important with films.

As appropriate for a summer movie, I attended Transformers on a date, and I must say that I was dissapointed that the parts where Transformers dragged didn't involve more date-related activities to keep me entertained. Stardust, however, seems like the perfect movie to attend with a date. It's got nice cuddly romance as well as fun action and adventure. Now, if only I could find the right girl (or boy) to take me.

On Genres and Media Recommendations

I read a lot of fiction. More fiction than is strictly justifiable for a grad student working on a dissertation and therefore morally compelled to spend vast quantities of time reading history, theory, and other non-fiction works. But I find solace in fiction, and I'm frequently reading several fun books at once. I read sci-fi and fantasy, queer literature, occasionally mysteries, graphic novels, young adult lit and, in the summer, chick lit. I tend to plow through these books pretty quickly and generally gravitate toward things that are fun and lightweight.

But at the moment, I'm in the mood for something different. I wouldn't say I'm interested in something heavy, exactly, but none of my usual standbys or the things in the "to be read" pile is really calling to me and I'm not sure what I want to read. I might want to read something more literary than my normal genres. Probably something by and/or about a woman. Maybe with some serious emotion. Perhaps I could use a tearjerker, I'm not sure. So, if anyone is out there reading this, tell me about your favorite novels. Can you recommend classics that I've missed in my education? Books with drama or romance or heartbreak? Amazing female protagonists? What should I read?