Artfuckers
Written By Michael Domitrovitch
Directed By Eduardo Machado
Scenery By Mikiko Suzuki
Costumes By Oana Botez-Ban
Photography By Carol Rosegg
Posts Tagged ‘artfuckers’
Artfuckers Pictures
Friday, March 23rd, 2007
Artfuckers Review NYTheatre.com
Wednesday, February 28th, 2007Machado, an esteemed and accomplished playwright in his own right, directs Artfuckers with compassion, but also with a keen eye towards the chilly, self-involvement rampant in its world (his and set designer Mikiko Suzuki’s use of the cinder block walled theatre emphasizes this). Light, costume, and sound designers Lucas Krech, Oana Botez-Ban, and David Lawson, respectively, also make invaluable contributions. And, the production is impeccably acted by Asher Goodman, Tuomas Hiltunen, Jessica Kaye, Nicole LaLiberte, and David Marcus. All five actors inhabit their roles so thoroughly as to suggest that they are those people, not just actors performing on stage. This is very impressive work by everyone.Artfuckers is both hip and moving, and introduces a company of talented artists worth keeping tabs on to a hopefully wider audience.
Reviewing the Patriarchy
Tuesday, February 27th, 2007It is bad form to whine about a review and that is certainly not what I am trying to do about this one in the Times. But the value system underlying the review troubles me. I have no problem receiving a bad review. Many plays I have worked on have been critically received with substantially less than enthusiasm. What I do take issue with is the propagandizing of reactionary patriarchal politics in the guise of a legitimate theatre review.
Let’s examine some core tenets of the Worldview underlying this review:
- Women who enjoy sex are sluts.
- “Fuck” is unprintable.
- Theatre oriented towards a younger audience is less legitimate than theatre oriented towards a middle age audience.
- The passion of youth is worthy of mockery.
Now let’s look more closely.
1) Women who enjoy sex are sluts
Last I checked we were no longer in 1953. In fact I thought that of the many lessons we learned from the women’s rights movement was that women are in fact people. Not only are women people, they are people with the same rights and due the same respect as men.
Why do we know this attitude is propagated only against the female characters int he play? Well, as an example of ‘wry dialog’ a gay male fashion designer talks about exchanging sex for fabric. This is funny. This is healthy male sexuality. But a woman who enjoys sex is a slut. How dare a woman take over the male privilege of sexual enjoyment? /sarcasm
2) “Fuck” is unprintable
Seriously. This is absurd. Every listing has the title Artfuckers except the Times.
3) Theatre oriented towards a younger audience is less legitimate than theatre oriented towards a middle age audience.
Now this one really bothers me. Was the reviewer expecting Dinner with Friends? A quick internet search reveals that NONE of the reviews of that play for its many productions criticized it for ‘consciously writing for’ a middle-class, middle-aged white audience. In fact if such criteria were subject for legitimate criticism, then the lion’s share of plays produced would have that criticism.
True the play does not pander to the values of mainstay theatre production. It does not make itself easy for middle-aged middle-class white value structures. Is this reason to criticize it?
Dinner with Friends and its ilk hold little to no interest for me as an audience member. The value systems propagated in the plays have no bearing upon my life or experiences. Yet, this does not make them illegitimate works for their intended audience. In fact, they are right for their intended audience precisely because I have no way of relating to the characters or situations therein.
I have worked on many plays whose value structures do not reflect my own. Not that they are opposed, but that they simply follow a parallel if not tangential tack. I find these works to be interesting because I must learn to appreciate another value system. I ask questions like, “What is the play trying to achieve?” and “Does it reach those goals?” These feel to me more reasonable questions than “Does this reinforce my personal value structure, because if not then it is worthless?”
4) The passion of youth is worthy of mockery.
This last point comes in from an oblique angle. The given circumstances that set in motion the events of the play are a drug overdose by one of the characters. This is precipitated by a scathingly negative review of the characters work in Artforum. For a young man in his early twenties, obsessed with his art, passionate about the work, this could and probably would to many seem to be the final statement about his as both person and artist.
The play of course outlines the events leading up to this rather drastic action and shows the review to be a proximate rather than ultimate cause. The Times reviewer makes his charge in a pseudo-selfdeprecatory fashion asking “Who tries to kill himself over one bad review these days, when blog- and e-mail-fueled word of mouth has sapped the power of old-media critics?” While this is a bit of an overstatement, just as the character Owen’s actions are a bit of an overreaction, the generally full houses at the perfomances seem to prove it somewhat correct.
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Backstage has another review for those interested.
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I have probably now doomed myself to a life of poor reviews for writing this. Or at least never receiving mention in reviews. I suppose time will tell.
So You Want to See a Show
Friday, February 23rd, 2007Manhattan, NY
Artfuckers
Operation Ajax
The Last Word . . .
Delray Beach, FL
New York Theatre Ballet
Artfuckers is Open
Friday, February 16th, 2007Artfuckers is open. Ticket information here.
Written by Michael Domitrovich
Directed by Eduardo Machado
Scenery by Mikiko Suzuki
Costumes by Oana Botez-Ban
Sound by David Lawson
The unsung heros of the stage
Wednesday, February 14th, 2007I know a lot of people, often actors, who say that their job is uniquely difficult because of the live performative quality of it. They are the ones working in front of an audience. And it is true. As a designer you never have to worry about that. By the time there is an audience in the theatre, your job is done. But there is another person who performs a play or dance or opera. The stage manager.
The job of the stage manager might not be as glamorous as that of a performer, or even designer, but they are integral and essential to the proper functioning of a play. A bad actor can ruin their performance, but can easily be boueyed by their fellow performers. A bad stage manager creates a snowball effect that can destroy otherwise wonderful performances and design elements.
When sound or lighting cues occur in the wrong place or a followspot suddenly turns off on the lead singer, the entire delicate and carefully constructed world of the show falls apart. If the orchestration of scenic moves and lighting cues is less than flawless all the hard work that went into it is ruined and for naught.
A good stage manager is essential to the creation of these little worlds we put on stage. They make it seamless. They make the delicate appear strong and the thin appear solid. Their energy dictates the energy of a production more often than the director. A calm and collected stage manager can make the most temperamental of directors easy to work with. But this power works in reverse and even a room full of calm and organized people can stumble over each other when the stage manager is not in total control.
Working on Artfuckers has been wonderful because not only is the whole creative staff fun and easy to work with, but the stage manager is top notch and has everything well organized and running smoothly. Last Word was a breeze as Marci, the stage manager, who I have worked with once before, made everything go calmly and quietly. And this was in a situation that had a lot of potential for tensions with many intense personalities.
It is an interesting position to be in since the job of the stage manager is to make everything run smoothly and it is human nature to rarely notice that which runs smoothly. As a result these people are rarely given the praise they deserve. Yet without them lighting cues would not happen properly, sound would never work as it should, scenic elements would be out of place and props would be missing. Actors would not be called to the stage in time to be cued for their entrance. In short, the production would fall apart under its own weight.
We are only in the second day of tech for Artfuckers, not even all the way through the show and Eduardo has asked me to light his next play he is directing. Another production at Theatre for the New City called Paula. It sure is nice working with people you trust. They can offer you a show and you do not even have to read the script in advance to know you want to accept. I will of course read the script for the show, but I trust his taste to know I will have a good time working on the show.
I have work booked through July and with the exception of Operation Ajax and one assisting gig, everything this year is with people I have previously worked with. There is something really nice about that. It means I am not being hired only on reputation, or having seen my work on another show, but that my work and process are valued enough to be brought back. That I am valued as an artistically creative force in the construction of a work for performance.
Working in a collaborative medium like theatre or dance, the final product is only part of the picture. The process is as much the work as the product. And for me, who leaves the shows on if not before opening, the process is paramount in importance. I do not sit back and watch the shows for weeks or months on end. I am around for the technical rehearsals and then leave the show in the trusted hands of the stage manager. Thus it is very important to me that the people I work with are both competent and pleasant to be around. And of course doing artistically interesting work.
The show itself is, to me, something wholly different. I feel less ownership over the product as I do the process. Once the show is open it is someone else’s. The lighting is a gift. A gift from me to the director and producer and performers that they might share with an audience. Once the show is open it already feels more like a portfolio piece than a living work, because my work is done. The performance is alive and the dialog between the design and the performance is very much still in effect. But the evolution of the design, the construction of the contextual world of the play is done. It becomes a daily negotiation between the mutable and the unchanging. As the lighting, one of the most mutable of media, becomes fixed for the performance to resonate against.
I'll be here all week
Monday, February 12th, 2007
Appropo of what?
Sunday, February 11th, 2007The reviews for The Last Word are starting to arrive. General consensus thus far seems to be superb acting that outstrips the body of the text. There are still several reviews yet to come in so we shall see how things fill out as time goes on. The design of realistic works tends to get little to no notice, and this is no exception.
On the plus side, Lippard keeps things moving at just the right clip for the play to make its points without wearing out its welcome. (The intermissionless show runs about 80 minutes). Set designer Michael V. Moore has provided an appropriately sparse and dingy office for the Henry-Len discourse. Equally appropriate are Lucas Benjaminh Krech’s lighting and Kirche Leigh Zeile’s costumes. Hail also to sound designer Gabe Wood for those wonderfully realistic computer noises.
These kind of works are truly where design and direction are best when invisible. To make anything that stands out too much would be intrusive and detrimental to the show. This play goes farther and perhaps begs the question as to the primacy of the text. The show is not strong because of the language. This is not unique to this play, but is none the less the case. The play is about the acting. The characters as embodied by these two actors are made possible through the direction, design and text, but in the final analysis these elements are fuel for something else and in no way the core of the thing itself.
For a bit of a tangent, the listing in the IOBDB has my name wrong, so now I have different listings in the archive under two different spellings of my name. It might be easier to not use my full name, but I like my middle name. I think there is a good sound and rhythm to the whole thing. Plus, I feel it is a little too biting without the use of the middle name. It also gives me something to complain about.
The lighting has only been described as appropriate. It’s good to know I did my job. Perhaps sometime I should do inappropriate lighting just to get notice. MacBeth in pink and lavender tones. Heh. Working at the NYU Dance department in graduate school we would light, between the two of us, over one hundred dances a year. When you do that much work you inevitably fall into cliche just to make it through. In addition, you begin to learn how the other person is going to light a dance. So we played a little game. We would challenge the other lighting designer to not use whatever we knew their reaction would be. “No blue backlight” or “No grey sky.” Sometimes we guessed wrong. Sometimes we caused the other to have a total train wreck. Many times though, we would end up with some very striking and unusual solutions to various problems.
It can be difficult to experiment in the professional theatre. On the one hand the work must be artistically interesting, so there is a degree to which one must push existing boundaries. At the same time, you are providing a service and a product to a client and thus the work can not be too esoteric. The design must be artistically satisfying as a designer, but first it needs to be what the client(producer/director) wants. The Last Word wanted to be a realistic space. The director was very clear that with the play we never wanted anything about the physical environment or clothing to feel “designed”. It had to flow naturally from the clear given circumstances of the text. For this particular piece that is the right and ‘appropriate’ course of action to take. It may be conventional in that regard, but it sure appears to be popular with the audiences.
Some works are more experimental by their very nature. This is true of both Ajax and Artfuckers. This weekend I am in tech for Operation Ajax and that work is far more abstract in nature than The Last Word. Navigating through these different and changing styles is truly exciting. While I might get bored only recreating the look of a fluorescent lit room, so too would purely abstract works begin to take their toll. The differing styles of dramatic storytelling, of acting and text and design all make for a fun and engaging body of work.
Superficial depths
Wednesday, February 7th, 2007Its been a lot of work the last few days and not much time for writing here. This is too bad as I find blogging to be both relaxing and very helpful in terms of organizing my thinking around the various projects I am working on. There has not been much here in the way of theory but I have a feeling that will be changing again soon. Life, however, remains unpredictable, so we shall see what we shall see.
I have today off from the dance piece I am assisting on so its time for the other two projects going on this week. We are loading in Operation Ajax. The theatre is very small and resources are incredibly tight, but I love the play very much and am excited to be working on it even if my role can only be, by necessity, very limited. It is a powerful piece of political theatre and somehow manages to make the simple conveyance of historical information dramatically compelling.
After that I have a runthrough for Artfuckers tonight. I am really excited about this one from a design perspective as I am trying some rather risky things with it. I am using a kind of light that I have never used before and really can only guess at its effectiveness. I am fairly confident that it is the right choice, but have nothing empirical to back that up. And that to me is exciting.
The play too is quite interesting. It is very contemporary and rides a very fine line that risks falling into a self-indulgent trap. I don’t usually go for the “poor little rich kid” stories, but something about the text, by being faithful and at the same time objectively critical of the characters allows them to both fully be themselves and transcend the specificity of their historical occasioning at the same time.
In a way what I find most interesting about both these texts is how they take a material, a content, and manipulate it in such a way that it becomes something else. ‘Depth’ and ‘superficiality’ are not absolute things, but are relative and contextual states of existence. One can achieve either through use of the tropes of the other. Depth can be found through exploration of pure surface, just as drama can be achieved through pure fact.
Somewhere in the midst of all this madness of work and so on I managed to send off my NEA-TCG grant application. So now it becomes a waiting game. This grant is highly competitive as only seven designers from all four design fields are selected. Further, it is only offered every two years, compounding the competition.
There are some things about freelancing that are very difficult. A major one being the need to accept every project that comes along in order to do silly mundane things like eat and pay rent. While there is something good and powerful in developing work by doing so much, it concentrates your energy, forces you to be precise, distinct and efficient it also leaves much to be desired. I sometimes take on more than I can or should reasonably do in order to make money and at times it causes the work to suffer.
It is too bad that arts grants and general arts funding is so limited in this country. It hinders the ability of artists to truly give back to their artistic community. Even though I am and want to be a professional artist (I have no interest in doing this as an amateur) it can not be purely about the money. It needs to be about the art before anything else. A balance needs to be struck, clearly, or the work falls into self-indulgence, but at the same time, when it becomes so focused on struggle, it becomes about pure product. For me at least, the art comes first. First after eating that is.
New Technologies
Saturday, February 3rd, 2007I recently installed Quicksilver on my Mac. It looks very promising. Already certain aspects of my computer use have sped up. There is a lot to learn in order to make the process as efficient as possible but I am loving the results thus far.
A while back I mentioned I was looking for an app that would allow me to tag and thus search for images on my desktop. Quicksilver allows for just that. Plus a million other things like quick-launching files editing, tagging and moving multiple files. Sending and attaching to emails. Oh my goodness! And I have only just barely scratched the surface. Best of all it is contained within a single application that falls to the background when not in use and is easily brought to use.
The ability to tag and tag search the images and non-text files on my computer is essential. Text files are easy. Any operating system can search text files. But most of what I work with is not textually based. Further I do a lot of visual internet research and have no interest in renaming all the files with complicated tags. I want metadata and I want it now!
And now I have it. How wonderful. It also means I do not need to use a mouse except for a few specific things, like drafting lightplots. But everything else can be taken care of with keyboard commands, which is so much nicer. Quicksilver causes you to stop thinking “what application do I need to open in order to do what I want.” Rather you think in terms of actions, “I want to do this” and it makes that possible. One less step. Fantastic.
Ajax went very well both last night and Thursday. While still very much a work in progress, the audience appeared very receptive and responsive to it. We learned many good and useful things about the show, what more it needs, where it is strong, what was strong that we should go back to.
This weekend I have runthroughs for both Artfuckers and Operation Ajax. Next week I am assisting on a dance piece St. Mark’s Church, and then the two plays tech one right after the other. Once Artfuckers is open I get a few days off then it is down to Florida to meet up with the NYTB tour.
Artfuckers has done a fun thing with the web presence for the play. They have made a MySpace profile for the play and all the characters. You know its cool, because its on MySpace. Ha!
