#240626 ~ After TheJimmys, TheTonys, & TheSteves...
Brian Eugenio Herrera's #TheatreClique Newsletter for June 26, 2024.
WELCOME to #TheatreClique — my (mostly) weekly newsletter dedicated to encouraging you to click out to some of the most interesting, intriguing & noteworthy writing about drama, theatre & performance (at least, so says me)…
This Week's #TheatreCliquery:
For this week’s opener, I lift one of my favorite “character medley” segments from Monday night’s livestream capture of the 2024 Jimmy Awards. (If you don’t know what “The Jimmys” are, this NYTimes feature — from arts journalist/critic Elisabeth Vincentelli — covers most of the bases.) And, if you’re interested, the full show will be available on YouTube through this Thursday (June 27). But, for now, try to guess which of these eight young performers would have been my pick to win the night…
EDITOR’S NOTE: whenever possible, whenever linking to paywalled pieces, I “gift” the article to #TheatreClique readers. In other words, clicking out to articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal should neither present hassle nor burn through your monthly allotment of free views. Here’s hoping more outlets — hello LATimes! hi Philadelphia Inquirer! yo NewYorker! how’bout it Vulture!— adopt similar technologies for subscribers soon...
#NowClickThis…
Wherein I highlight a dozen or so of the most click-worthy links I’ve encountered in the last few weeks…
The Forward’s Talya Zax captures some “scenes from the Stephen Sondheim estate sale” while Slate’s Nadira Goffe gets some context from one of the auctioneers who presided over the event;
at Sherwood News, freelance theatre journalist/critic Joey Sims considers the possible implications of the arrival of ATG — the “British company backed by private equity” that now owns five Broadway houses — on the NYC theatre scene;
at INTO, freelance theatre writer/critic Christian Lewis asks “Is Broadway dimming the lights on queer and trans characters?”;
Rescripted founder Regina Victor offers “a renewal letter” as confirmation that the platform will cease publication;
in a Facebook post on the occasion of the Broadway opening of Mother Play, playwright/advocate (and my former college professor) Paula Vogel distills a valuable lesson about the fixation on “plot” in US theatre commentary/criticism;
at ETC Connect (the public-facing page of the events lighting technology company), my colleague, lighting designer and Tony winner (!) Jane Cox reflects a bit on her all women lighting team and her “ongoing philosophical conversations” about “how equipment relates to artistic processes”;
in a fascinating visual essay, The NYTimes’s Michael Paulson and Amir Hamja show how a developer renovated The Palace Theater by “hoisting the 14-million-pound structure 30 feet, making room for retail below and replacing the hotel above”;
TheNYTimes’s Katherine Rosman profiles Trey Curtis, J. Quinton Johnson, and Vincent Jamal Hooper to explain how three Texas teenagers grew up to be Broadway stars (and stayed friends)… FUN FACT: I actually saw Curtis and Johnson in that UT production of In the Heights, which I wrote about here — holler if you’d me to send you the pdf;
TheNewYorker’s Alex Barasch reports on what happened when the Stereophonic team “met up at a studio in Brooklyn to record the cast album”;
at Dance Magazine, independent arts journalist Sylviane Gold goes “inside the creation of Illinoise’s onstage—and offstage—community”;
Books of the Month
A quick survey of some of the books I most enjoyed reading over the last month or so...
Naomi Klein • Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2023 ) • One of those books I’ve intended to read since I bought it the week it came out and, yet, somehow a hard book to pick up. But once I did: boy howdy, what a ride… The brainspraining setup — Klein pondering the hard (rightward) turn of “the other Naomi” for whom she’s often mistaken — activates a fascinating “over the shoulder” glimpse into a concatenated circuit of countercultures, conspiracies, and controversies all seemingly fueled by opposition to the “the other.” The component chapters are thoughtfully-threaded but still seem ready to stand alone as separate segments, which makes the book read almost as a “para-memoir”... or not exactly a memoir, but definitely not NOT a memoir. The book’s core idea/question/provocative is emphatically generative, and Klein is a charismatic guide through the tangles, but I found the book perhaps most compelling as an intimately intellectual portrait of a person using the process/practice of research to work through some of their own sh*t. (I also remain convinced that Klein is “doing performance studies” in this book, albeit without the benefit of knowing it and, thus, without the benefit of knowing the literature of the field.) A fascinating, worthwhile read.
Robin Bernstein • Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder That Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit (UChicago, 2024 ) • The remarkable story of William Freeman, an Afro-Native teen in 1830s New York who — after being convicted for a property crime he insisted he did not commit — demanded wages for the labor he performed while incarcerated at the Auburn State Prison. This “challenge” by William Freeman is what sparks Bernstein’s remarkable account of his life, his actions, and the Northern, pre-CivilWar foundations of the for-profit-prison system that continues to thrive today. Written by a performance historian possessed of a keen eye for the experiential dimensions of every event, interaction, and gesture, Bernstein’s deft shifts between narrative and declarative registers make this artfully written book a propulsive (and presumption-shattering) read.
Judith Butler • Who’s Afraid of Gender? (Farrar Strauss & Giroux, 2023 ) • A collection of lucid and clarifying “thought pieces” — enactments of elucidating erudition, if you will — from one of the era’s defining thinkers. As I read, I wondered whether this might be the prose version of what it would feel like to ask Butler a question during office hours. And though Butler is clearly inclined to finely hewn academic argumentation, the guiding impulse behind this book seems to be their desire to be critically useful — which I think this book is, and which is why I’ll likely keep it handy. What struck me most is that Butler seems less inclined to convince but more invested in puzzling through *together*…which allows each of the topically varied chapters to read directly, even accessibly, with generous rigor, with clear political investment, and with Butler offering themselves as someone to “think with” on a variety of present day concerns. Butler’s discussion of how “performative” has come to be its own doppleganger is brisk, efficient, and definitive. A handy, easily excerptible resource.
Steven Salaita • An Honest Living: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries (Fordham UP, 2024 ) • A fascinating genre experiment and perhaps the most searingly accurate account I have yet encountered of higher education’s profoundly absurd yet insidiously destructive cultural norms. But, essentially, Salaita’s book strikes me as a deeply reflective work of critical autobiography (though Salaita might bridle at that characterization) and even as a Walden for the early 21st century. Salaita’s ruminative contemplations take on some ubiquitously banal — if rarely plainly discussed — structures of contemporary US life (sub/urban planning, prestige economies, hierarchies of labor, models of community, anxieties of self-worth, educational striving, etcetera). Though Salaita is avowedly disinclined to emotional self-disclosure, his writerly precision twines incisive social critique with novelistic detail to craft a book that is as quietly moving as it is critically illuminating. Highly recommended.