Read All About It: Local "Reviewer" Loves Self, Hates The Rest of You Fools!

You know how I love so very much to celebrate all of zee good things about Austin in my writing? Well this isn’t one of those times. Fair warning—as I am wont to do from time to time, I am going to once again exercise my Irish Buddhim and attempt (futilely I know) to provide a little enlightenment courtesy of cleaving le sphincter noveau. (For you little people who need help, that is my new term for “ripping a new asshole.)

Today’s lucky recipient of said nuevo porthole de butthole is a local “theatre critic.” This young fella – I believe he might be all of six years old —is quite fond (nay, enamored!) of using twelve words where one might do, and of selecting these twelve words from the Annoyingly Convoluted section of the thesaurus. (For all my distaste for his “criticism,” I must admit he’s a rather precocious six year-old, what with his propensity to tackle such a tome.)

Before I go any further, a few notes. First of all, I apologize if you find yourself yawning at what follows. Frankly, beyond alluding to him once before, I had purposefully avoided directly calling this terrible infant out in the past because in my experience, that is just what the terrible infants love most of all—they clatter their spoons about in their infantile attempts to manipulate those around them into paying attention. Okay, so this time, I’m picking up the spoon.

Let me say that this “critic” is a terrible infant to such an extent that I cannot even allow myself to affix to his sorry ass the more official-sounding title: enfant terrible. Because, even though, like TI, I, too, have the capacity to wield both a thesaurus and the occasional foreign phrase, I am far too fond of the Frogs to sully their beautiful language by even thinking about using it to describe TI.

Did I mention this is going to be a long one? (I feel it in my coeur!)

So, okay, awhile back, I wrote a post explaining why I was no longer going to be writing theatre reviews for the Austinist. My main reason was practical—I am way too fucking busy with my day job, my weekend job, and my novel-in-progress, not to mention my boyfriend, my three dogs, and my sorely neglected cat. I actually LOVE the Austinist and for some time I really enjoyed writing reviews.

Something else stopped me though. See, I have this belief that almost every production mounted in this town, is done so by people with their coeurs in the right place. While that is a very good thing, it does not always make for good theatre. But I am not from the school of Gleeful Bashing. Oh, maybe I was in my tortured, punk rock youth. But these days, I just do not want to make sport of trashing one production when I’d much rather spend my time pointing folks to the really good stuff out there. And there is PLENTY of good stuff. This town crawls with so much music/literary/stage talent that embarrassment of riches does not begin to describe it.

So while, in the moment of, say, enduring an excruciating Frontera Fest piece that appears to have been written by a male playwright solely for the purpose of getting the lead actress to prance around in a sheer body suit, nipples erect, for twenty-five interminable minutes, I think it might be fun to publicly condemn the playwright, something stops me. And that is this: I also see lots of lovely performances at Frontera Fest and on stages all over this city. Life’s short. I prefer to recommend the good rather than demonstrate some ability to hurl insults at the bad. (I mean, come on, people, I’m from fucking NEW JERSEY for Christ’s sake. We learn how to hurl insults before we learn how to breathe. It’s child’s play.)

In my post about why I wanted to stop reviewing for Austinist, I also noted that I sometimes feel in a bind. If I promise to review a show, and then I find wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, but then again I don’t want to give it a thumbs down, where does that leave me? Sure, I can list the strengths of a piece, but is that honest enough? Sometimes not. Which is why I have decided that my reviews will only be occasional from here on out, and only at my personal site, and (this post a sole excepton) only when I have something genuinely good to say to recommend a show. (See my Body Awareness Review, for example.)

BUT WAIT… there’s more. Also in that other piece, I noted that one thing gave me pause, prompted me to consider continuing my reviews. I went on to cite, in a very vague, non-identifying matter, one particular “reviewer” who, in an interview, praised his own work heartily (he also “directs” plays) and stated, for the record, that he hates every production put on by a particular theatre which I also did not identify. Sensing he lives to BASH anything he doesn’t have a hand in, I thought maybe I should stick around and offer some balance. But I overruled that thought, and got back to my novel.

Then, I read the Austinist “review” of Sleeping Beauty at the Vortex, written by the Terrible Infant. Before I get to my real point, first allow me to give you a sample of his writing “style.” He says in that review:

However blithe and aphasic it might be when finishing a thought, it is not actually confounding, which makes it an improvement over much of the Vortex’s fare.

Never mind that Blithe and Aphasic sounds like the name of some TV show that should star Shannon Doherty. And, to be fair, I suppose if one had the energy to wade through this tangle of proof that Terrible Infant studied his SAT vocab lists, one might argue that the sentence is almost complimentary. But forget about that, and listen to what happens later in the article. He goes full-on Ballistic Character Assassination Mode and proceeds, for no reason I can ascertain (beyond utterly transparent professional jealousy), to throw a massive tantrum over how the Vortex has such a big budget, and blah blah blah, and it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.

On the one hand TI is entitled to his opinion. Remember, opinions are like assholes—everybody’s got one. Fortunately, not everyone is one. Unfortunately, TI is not one of the ones who is not one (if I may phrase my sentence as he might, so that you can puzzle over it, and attempt to decipher it, and think I must be so smart, since I have stopped to make you think with my puzzling sentences that often run on and on and on.)

That Sleeping Beauty review garnered a lot of comments, which is what brought it to my attention. As I read the “review” I grew increasingly appalled. Because I remembered that the reviewer I’d anonymously referred to in my earlier post was this same little venom spewing man. And the venue that he declared to only and ever produce crap was the Vortex.

This, mes amis, caused me to instantly suffer from derriere rouge (chapped ass, people, look it up!). Because I think that if you are going to go on the record stating that you believe EVERY SHOW PUT ON BY A VENUE SUCKS then you have a duty to recuse yourself from reviewing shows at that venue if, in fact, you are trying to present yourself as a true “critic.” Not everyone agrees with me (surprise!) and some have gone so far as to suggest that by provoking so many comments, TI is doing his job to “foster conversation about theatre.” Uh, hello? Is it okay if I trot out the old bit about how I, too, could foster theatre conversation merely by hollering FIRE! (Oh, and speaking of rude noises in dark theatres—a little bird told me that at one performance TI showed up to review, he ATE A CRUNCHY APPLE DURING THE SHOW.)

One of my favorite expressions is this: to live outside the law, you must be honest (Dylan—Bob, not Thomas). Toward that end, you better believe I peed my pants with delight when I received an unsolicited invite to see a play directed by TI. To my further delight, I was at a wedding the other night, and ran into a playwright who shall remain unnamed, but who, too, has been the victim of TI. When I mentioned my “opportunity” to the playwright, the playwright noted that TI’s play was, in fact, written by Neil Labute. That didn’t ring a bell for me until the playwright told me Labute had written that misogynistic piece of shit movie In the Company of Men.

Now I was double-delighted because, oh meta-world!— I was feeling, I think, how TI must feel every day of his life. I was going to be heading into a production with preconceived negative ideas, and a set goal of hating it, even if I liked it. (Aside: I don’t have time to go into it now, but this calls to mind Sorry Fugu, a great TC Boyle short story about a food critic.) I knew, even if the play was somehow good, I would strive to despise it. Because, you know, don’t criticize a man til you’ve walked in his shoes. And donning TI’s shoes as I readied to critique his show required me to imagine myself a poseur, and walk around dismissing Hamlet, as TI did, because, as he says, the young prince is “not dealing with issues that strike every human being.” (Oh, how bold—to decry the Bard!)

So anyway, I dragged my poseur ass over to this fifty-cent production. It was held in a very tiny room. In fact, oh joy, it was three Labute plays in one—the first was directed by someone else. The second two were directed by TI. I walked out after taking in the first two pieces and I walked out for a few reasons. First, my life is too fucking short to have to endure writing like that. Labute reminds me of my high school students’ fascination with Chuck Ohh I Am So Fucking Shocking Palahniuk. How I wish this next line was mine, but it isn’t. It belongs to the playwright I met at the wedding who said, of Labute’s work, you can sum up all of his plots as follows, “I’m a man! No, wait! I’m a monster!”

I had to keep my laughter in check as I watched the first play and then the second bear this out. I’m sitting there listening to poorly drawn characters (not the actors’ fault—they did the best they could) detail despicable acts that outsiders might never think they had the capacity to execute. But big fat fucking surprise—THEY DID! Both of the two plays I saw involved murder— the first of an infant, the second of a gay man. And, for reasons I’ll have to ask someone with a Ph.D in English to explain, both also featured a heavy comforter. The characters are cliché and the males, in particular, are so despicable why would anyone want to sit through a show like this? Am I missing something? No, I am not. Labute got stuck in adolescence, and his sole goal seems to be creating vehicles that allow him to offer detailed descriptions of physical violence. Uh, hello? Isn’t that what we have Law & Order reruns for?

I looked for meta-clues, knowing that TI is soooo much smarter than all of us, wondering if I might be missing something, me, the critic who confesses to loving Broadway musicals. I found none. This was not a parody of cathartic moments in the lives of sociopaths. Far as I could tell, the players were directed to play it straight.

Which brings us to TI’s “directing” skills. Uh, okay, so it was a small room, maybe not so easy to work with. But for his portion of the show, the entire set was two wooden chairs. The actors stood up and sat down a few times. I’ve seen more dramatic action at Sunday night Mass back when Catholicism was forced on me. At least in church they also kneel, which action would’ve improved TI’s “direction” by at least 30%.

TI did offer his mighty view, spat down upon us from his perch on high, in the form of a note in the program. It reads, in part:

Shock value… when used in response to this concept we have of deceptive simplicity, this tendency we have to “humanize” by assuming that there are complicated, rational processes to undesirable actions, it’s a puissant reminder that we in fact do not always know what we “know.”

Boy I’ll say. I don’t know what TI knows, unless, it’s possible that—gasp—beyond cribbing from the thesaurus he knows utterly nothing at all. Speaking of thesauruses, I had to look up puissant and, to my surprise, it is not a reference to a James Bond movie. It means powerful, but if you ask me, it sounds an awful lot like pissant. Now that word, I know, as it has its origins in South Jersey. It’s just the precise term I’ve been looking for, lo these 2000+ words later, to capture my real feelings for the Terrible Infant.