Current music:

MP3s from www.geocities.com/nikkirk/emilynssongs.html [4]

"But, since she's a princess / There's hints of a prince / In the end."

My weekend, two days removed: after finishing my first editorial letter, I was supposed to reward myself with the opportunity to sit down and write that theatre rant that's been festering in the back of my head since last week. Instead, most of Saturday was spent adamantly wanting to do nothing in particular. Okay, I cleaned the kitchen and did my laundry and sent some e-mails, but mostly I just succumbed to my desire to sit around and read my new, quasi-illegally obtained copies of Proof and Urinetown^[1]. The next day I went to MoCCA for my usual staffing gig, but instead of being productive, I spent at least two hours pacing around the museum, chatting with cmpriest. This mostly involved Cherie telling me cool ghost stories and explaining life in the South, me attempting not to succumb to my normal phone-related idiocy, and both of us being amused by the number of weird synchronicities in our lives (for example, the fact that we both get our corsets from the same Australian maker. Later on, this prompted me to revisit their site to engage in a little costume-lust, and become terribly pleased by the descriptions of their new "Gothic Shopping Tour[s], Corset part[ies and] Cemetery Tour[s]”). Cherie's had a good week, if the two mentions on Warren Ellis' diepunyhumans.com are any indication (the first prompted a Fed friend I hadn't spoken to in months to write to me in fanboyish glee, then Fast Fiction Friday put Cherie in the company of other fine writers such as the criminally charming literhottie Cory Doctorow).

All in all, said conversation left me pretty damn tempted to skip out on the beginning or end of WorldCon and fly out to DragonCon instead. All depends on whether I can scrounge up the plane fare and duck out of our Boston hotel room for a few days without anyone hating me. I'm amused to note that the DragonCon folks don't yet have a bio up for M. Ellis. I mean, it's not as if biographical information is that hard to come by, so I guess the tough part is coming up with precious lines like "Aside from making fanboys everywhere tremble with feelings they can't possibly understand, he has written and drawn more comics than you can fill a double-D brassiere with... so, stop on by and say hello to the comic book industry's King of Boobs."

Speaking of conventions, WisCon e-mailed me my final panel schedule last week. When I got the initial version about three weeks ago, I was either relieved or disappointed to see that they'd only put me on one panel. Then I get the version that “has gone to the printers”, and suddenly I'm on four. The "Square Pegs" panel is a bit eerily appropriate for me (nothing prepares you for a discussion on "why should geeky girls and women all be alike" like being the co-captain of the math and academic league teams, and the only chick taking computer science in your high school). Though I'm perplexed by my assignment to "Guilty Pleasures" panel--did they, like, go through people's websites specifically looking for lapsed English majors?--I can probably pull it off (does reading play scripts when you're supposed to be editing SF books count as a guilty pleasure?). The part that really scares me is the prospect of having to articulate my thoughts on dialogue on writing style on-the-fly. TNH is fond of saying that editors are some of the worst sufferers of imposter syndrome out there, and I'd wholeheartedly agree with her if I wasn't so sure that I actually am faking it.

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So, about that theatre rant: for any of you New Yorkers who care at all about theatre or comedy, you've got less than a week to catch Engaged, "An Entirely Original Farcical Comedy in Three Acts" by William S. Gilbert (yes, that Gilbert) at Theatre For a New Audience. Try as I might to take my dorkiness to its logical extremes, I could never quite muster more than a passing appreciation for G&S operettas, but I appear to be a sucker for Gilbert’s solo work. The play is brilliant farce, the sort in which the best lines are uttered seven or eight times and you can guess almost everything that will occur within a few minutes of the play's start... yet Gilbert somehow manages to keep it from feeling remotely repetitive or predictable.

Engaged, well-synopsized by the line “Cheviot, who is a young man of large property, but extremely close-fisted, is cursed with a strangely amatory disposition [and] a habit of proposing marriage, as a matter of course, to every woman he meets,” is a pitch-perfect, frightfully modern working-through of Gilbert’s sentiments about the degradation of marriage into a commercial venture, particularly apt in these times when the institution has come under such intense scrutiny. Oscar Wilde had reportedly given Engaged much thought by the time he penned The Importance of Being Earnest 20 years later, and it shows: Engaged has exactly the sort of magic that Ernest never held for me. It’s also one of those shows that gets funnier the more you know about its historical context. Although most 18th century drama is notoriously cardboard, and consequently infrequently revived, I know a bit about conventions of the period's sentimental romances from discussions about Frank Norris' McTeague in an American lit class. The rest was filled in nicely by a great post-show symposium with the director (Doug Hughes), a Barnard lit professor (Patricia Denison), and moderator / ex-Voice theatre critic Jonathan Kalb. I'm clearly either a lifelong student or a graphomaniac, for as soon as Hughes commented that "Every cynic is a disappointed romantic,"^[2] I pulled out a pen and started taking notes.

Toward the end of the talkback, my father somehow steered the entire theatre into a discussion about the culture of theatre criticism in New York City. For a city with so much great theatre, New York sure has a lot of awful reviewers. And most of the ones who don’t suck can only be described as "batshit insane" (read: John Simon)^[3]. The thing is, most New Yorkers know this, so reviews don’t tend to make much of a difference... however, when The New York Times pan something, they tend to do an enormously effective job of it. Now, I’d never go so far as to imply that the Times would allow the financial clout of a production to influence their judgment. But I will say that it’s not uncommon for them to treat hype like a self-fulfilling prophecy and give great reviews to middleweight shows like The Producers, Hairspray, or Wicked. As Hughes pointed out, "It's as if the sheer expense and energy involved turns cheap art into something legitimate.”

Anyway, aside from mostly failing to impress me and being occasionally wrongheaded, I don’t have much beef with Ben Brantley. But in the few short months Margo Jefferson has been second-in-command, she’s already inspired theatre folks to verbize her name: namely, when a show is killed by a review that’s particularly ignorant of a production’s cultural or historic significance, it’s known as "getting Margoed". As Kalb put it, "If you can't recognize the conventions, you can't recognize when they're being inverted or subverted." And this... this burns me. Given the breadth of productions put on in New York in any given year, there's positively no excuse for anyone who’s been a professional for that long not to have a firm grasp of theatrical history, and even less excuse for the Times to let someone like that ruin other people’s shows.

On the up side: despite everyone's frequent claims that theatre is too expensive (it's not, if you know what you’re doing), Theatre for a New Audience blows that excuse away by offering $10 tickets for people 25 and under... and I'd bet that a significant percentage of you plunked down more than that in the past month to see movies you expected to be bad. If you're free any time before Sunday, I encourage you to check it out, thereby supporting live theatre, defeating abhorrent reviewing practices, and laughing yourself stupid in the process. Now, that's my kind of political statement.

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[1] Speaking of Urinetown, I'm ridiculously psyched that someone has founded a New York branch of the Neo-Futurists so I can finally see Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind without going to Chicago. Ironically, word of this fact reached me at almost exactly the point when I realized I'd be swinging by Chicago on the way back from Wisconsin. However, whatever happens, I will definitely be seeing the Brooklyn production of Too Much Light at some point this summer, so let me know if you're up for that.

[2] Google indicates that that’s not an entirely original thought, but I’d never heard it before, and it’s one of the better six-word summaries of my life that I've heard, so I’m keeping it.

[3] Lest I get accused of being non-discriminately negative, I find myself agreeing with the (albeit sometimes scruffily written) reviews in Time Out New York more than anyone else's. Curiously, their recent article about how Caroline, or Change is doomed to fail despite its brilliance also claims The Producers and Hairspray as part of the reason why the stuff that's actually good gets so little attention. Sigh...

[4] ...link to Emily Lyn Brodsky, a pottymouth with a ukulele who was one of the openers for the MagFields at NYU. She isn’t exactly “good,” but there’s enough “something” about her that I’m practically addicted.