The ICT Ain’t Got No Behavior – And That’s How We Like It (at TFPO)

Review of Let's Misbehave at Long Beach's International City Theatre:

The ICT launches its 2014 season with a treat: A Cole Porter soufflé. You can hardly go wrong with a production founded on music by a hall of famer in the Great American Songbook. Just put a CD player (or MP3 player, if that’s your thing) on an empty stage, press play, and Porter’s music is enough by itself to keep an audience entertained. In Let’s Misbehave, the ICT thankfully goes beyond a recording with a spirited production that ... Read the rest at The Front Page Online


Let’s Misbehave. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Book by Karin Bowersock. Musical Arrangements by Patrick Young. Directed and Choreographed by Todd Nielsen. On stage at the International City Theatre in Long Beach until Feb 16. For ticket information and showtimes, visit www.internationalcitytheatre.org or call 562.536.4610.

thinking about gender-neutral pronouns

There have been, and still are, many attempts to address the problem of gender-neutral pronouns in the English language – that is to say, the lack of such pronouns, and the result this lack has on how we define gender identity beyond the conventional dichotomy of male/female. The table below highlights two common ones:

	Subject	Object	Possessive Adjective	Possessive Pronoun	Reflexive
Female	She	Her	Her	Hers	Herself
Male	He	Him	His	His	Himself
Gender Neutral	Ze /zee/	Hir /here/	Hir /here/	Hirs /heres/	Hirself /hereself/
Spivak	E /ee/	Em /em/	Eir /air/	Eirs /airs/	Emself /emself/

I can’t say that I find either of them satisfying. The “hear” sound of the gender neutral set sounds forced when spoken aloud – the “ear” in “hir” is more stretched out than the “er” in “her” or “im” in “him.” As for Spivak, the object pronoun makes me think of Auntie Em, and while I kinda like “emself,” the fact that “eir” sounds identical to a real word – “air” – isn’t appealing. It just sounds weird and adds hot air to a sentence, as it were. I don't like "E" as a subject pronoun, either. It sounds too much like "He," for one thing.

“Them” and “they” are apparently in use as singular gender-neutral pronouns, but blurring the distinction between singular and plural strikes me as an invitation to confusion.

So what to use? The rules a new set of gender-neutral pronouns should adhere to are, I believe:

1. Distinct from gender pronouns.
2. Short phonemes; the pronouns should be unobtrusive in a sentence.
3. Easy to read, especially in relation to the common gender pronouns.

And so, my own humble proposal in accordance with these rules, starting with the Ze subject pronoun that actually works very well. I'll assume the pronunciation is straightforward...

	Subject	Object	Possessive Adjective	Possessive Pronoun	Reflexive
Proposed	Ze	Ez	Ej	Ej	Esself

Example, from The Scarlet Pimpernel:

"The terrible danger in which Percy stood, now that ze was actually on French soil, became suddenly and horribly clear to ej. Chauvelin was close upon ej heels; here in Calais, the astute diplomatist was all-powerful; a word from ez and Percy could be tracked and arrested"
- Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Ch. 23

And the original passage for reference:

"The terrible danger in which Percy stood, now that he was actually on French soil, became suddenly and horribly clear to her. Chauvelin was close upon his heels; here in Calais, the astute diplomatist was all-powerful; a word from him and Percy could be tracked and arrested"
- Baroness Orczy, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Ch. 23

Sure, it's strange at first...but I think one would get used to it after a few paragraphs.

What do you think?

empty, the master baits audiences with craft

If a B-movie is a film lacking in craft but overflowing with appeal, what should we call the inverse? A masterful bore? A well-crafted yawn? Whatever the label, The Master is unquestionably a beautifully crafted work, as one would hope for from the director who gave us the majestic There Will Be Blood. The cinematography is as crisp as the camera work is refined, with a hint of David Lynch’s ability to make the sunny seem indistinctly ominous. Performances feel elemental, almost primal, and that applies as much to supporting roles such as Amy Adams’s eminence grise as to the two characters the film orbits around, Joaquin Phoenix as an unstable war veteran and the L. Ron Hubbard-like figure portrayed by Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

But all the pieces of The Master do not add up to a masterpiece. If modern art transcends, or falls below, the qualities of representational art, it does so by shifting the burden of interpretation from artist to viewer. In too many cases, the shift is too radical and the work abstracted is to the point where the artist delivers an aesthetic experience that can be either meaningless or meaningful depending on the audience’s charity. This, to me, is why surrealist art is the most satisfying, because it seeks to evoke fluid and intensely personal interpretations, however paradoxical, without fully abandoning the tangibility of representational art. It is the logic of dreams and allegory more so than the logic of reason, and the result of a joint, mutually supportive effort on the part of artist and audience. It is a puzzle with parameters that frame interpretations without fixing meaning, an effort that provides fair game for viewers to play. But I digress.

Anderson’s abstract storytelling offers no parameters with which to interpret the film. His work consists of expression without content. Is Phoenix’s Freddie Quell unhinged as a result of wartime experience, or did the war merely aggravate a previously existing disorder? Anderson is not merely mute on the question, but offers nothing with which to achieve a subjective and personal understanding of the character. This is a film populated by characters without biographies and only the flimsiest of histories, speaking in scenes whose only connection is chronology – and even then, the thread is disturbed by flashbacks and fantasies. With characters detached from any sort of narrative cause and effect, individual scenes mesmerize, meander, and sometimes bore…all the while failing to cohere. And so we have an expressive film not only without content but without drama. We have characters who are constructed from scripted words, lacking humanity and delivered by actors through brilliant but homogenous performances rather than discrete portrayals that bend and flex with the narrative’s ebb and flow.

Thematically, and I use the word loosely, there are hints of psychosexual disturbances, sublimated homoerotism, and more amidst the power dynamics of the film’s relationships. Yet the film takes no stance and, worse, offers viewers no footholds from which to assume a perspective. Even the film’s similarities to Scientology, and the inspiration it draws from Hubbard’s life, achieve no force. The comparison between the film’s “Cause” and Scientology provides context, perhaps, but  is irrelevant and coincidental otherwise.

Just as Socrates commented that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, a film that leaves its topics and characters unexamined isn’t worth thinking about.  The Master baits audiences with the promise of profundity, but confuses emptiness for enigmatic.

dressed for laughter - a review of don't dress for dinner (at TFPO)

The ICT in Long Beach previously served us a dish of deep thought with Red, a study of artist Mark Rothko and his work. With Don’t Dress for Dinner, the company caps off its 2013 season with the sort of play that deliciously frustrates the critical writer, a production whose lack of substance is absolutely irrelevant to its quality and capacity to delight.

Written by Marc Camoletti and adapted by Robin Hawdon, Don’t Dress for Dinner offers no psychological depth, no culture critique, no dramatic insight. Nor does it constitute a political protest, act of provocation, morality play, or topical analysis. In short, this is not the sort of play to...

Read the rest of my review at THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE



Don't Dress for Dinner, by Marc Camoletti. Adapted by Robin Hawdon. On stage at the International City Theatre in Long Beach from October 9th to November 3rd, 2014. Thursday - Saturday at 8p. Sunday at 2pm. Call 562-436-4610 (M-F 9am – 5pm) or visit www.ictlongbeach.org for tickets and information. 

tylerr pery is no jesus, but he’s still a superstar (at TFPO)

Do the performing arts have an equivalent to dive bars? If so, Santa Monica’s Promenade Playhouse – tucked in a Third Street crevice next to a soap shop – surely must fit the bill. Lest you think that a condemnation, consider that it’s precisely in such raw threadbare spaces that one finds the greatest potential for surprise. We expect sophisticated theatre from marquee theatres with refined architecture. With dive theatres, we leave ourselves deliciously vulnerable to the genuine risks and rewards of discovery.

Such was the case a few years ago with Small Office, a cozy little cubicle dramedy written by Jeremy Evans – a Second City Conservatory graduate whose credits include performance at major comedy, improvisation, and theatrical venues – that offered a smart, often hilarious portrait of personal office politics. It was ideally suited to the space, authentic and genuine, showcasing skilled performers enacting a script that demonstrates the writer’s craft that led Evans to the semi-finals in the Edward Burns Feature Script Contest.

Fitting, then, that I should return to the Playhouse for Evans’s latest piece, the hour-long musical comedy Tylerr Pery Superstar. This time we find Evans in a...

Read the rest of my review of Tylerr Pery Superstar at THE FRONT PAGE ONLINE.

And go support independent theatre.