more on hello failure

Andy Horwitz

okay so first of all there’s a pretty animated discussion going on in the comments section of The Playgoer’s review of Hello, Failure. I’ve been holding back on commenting but I just want to quickly chime in.  I think there are so many things going on here, not least of which is that reviewers came and saw the show too early. One of the big problems with downtown theater -as one of the commenters notes- is that they don’t get weeks and weeks of previews. (this is part of the reason I’m starting my own space, more on that to come).  I think if you are familiar with the non-funded development process, particularly with innovative work, you know that these shows change a lot over time. NTUSA, Radiohole, ERS, Nature Theater, Jay Scheib – all the innovative theatermakers I know start with one show and usually end up with something very different. Its like the first time a band plays a song, it takes a while to really live inside it, to learn to navigate it, to know it so well you forget that you know it and inhabit it. So too with real, living theater – not the pre-packaged sitcom-level melodrama crap that passes for theater in most venues.

Also, I have to take issue with Helen Shaw’s somewhat dismissive term “realist whimsy”. Regardless of the similarities (or lack thereof) between Ruhl,  Schwartz, Kosmas,  Callaghan and Washburn – I think they are all meticulous writers and doing profoundly innovative work with language. To be honest, outside of Richard Maxwell, I don’t see too many male writers who are nearly as audacious or as concerned with the craft of  writing – its sounds, rhythms, the implications of silence and ellipses. Is it possible that there is a soft sexism here? I think that the close textual work and the subtlety of the human interactions, the lack of clear resolution, the nuance and the shading, are all characteristic of a decidedly feminine perspective. And not the easily commodifiable feminity of Candace Bushnell but the more intellectual femininity of Gertrude Stein, Jeannette Winterson, Maria Irene Fornes and Virginia Woolf.

All a guy playwright has to do is put a real blowjob onstage and people call him edgy, regardless of his writing chops. Or he can cop a Letterman-esque, Conan O’Brien Ivy League Ironic posture towards High Culture and he’s a “bad boy” of the theater. Or, if all else fails, just throw some video and computers on the stage to dazzle them with technoporn.

Attitude, insouciance and intellect are a quick ticket to “it-boy” status. As a woman, if you write funny sitcom-plays about your dating and apartment problems, you can be a huge success, but if you dare write something that is innovative, articulate, painstakingly crafted and wholly unexpected, you will be questioned and undervalued.

Just a thought…

(oh and just for the record, if you didn’t know, your humble Culturebot editor has not been directly employed by PS122 for some months. So while we will, of course, always continue to support our much-beloved alma mater, please remember that the opinions  expressed herein are our own, not those of PS122.)

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6 responses to “more on hello failure”

  1. sarahgancher

    You hit the nail on the head, Culturebot. Bravo!

    Reply
  2. Lisa D’Amour

    Hi there. I have not checked out the playgoer discussion yet but I will. Saw Hello Failure last Friday night and felt like I was floating the whole time – there is something really special going on there.

    Such clear cues given, the staging and design, as to how to listen and watch the play, most notably the evolving tableau / family portrait of women that materializes over the first two minutes of staging. I remember thinking, as they were gathering “oh, they are like specimens, like alien creatures, like a museum exhibit” which immediately made my brain shift into a different mode of experiencing the piece, not as a story but as a concert (of ideas, images and sounds). I too was surprised by the “realist whimsy” tag, in that there is something so SOBER about the piece, so MATURE in the way it both relies on and critiques a kind of contemporary excess of language – language as noisiness. I can’t remember the line exactly, but something about “we are just talking, we are just opening our mouths and these words are coming out”. I’ve been talking about the piece a lot since I’ve seen it, and keep feeling like I lack the words to describe my experience, which I think is a good sign. When I try, I say things like “my experience was trying to hold this whole set of ideas/sounds/people in my head at once….it was about an eerie accumulation of images (painted in sound, bodies, ideas)….i experienced it almost in the way I experience a Richard Foreman piece, where I find myself laughing or gasping in a moment and not quite sure why I am doing so…” See? When I try and put the experience into words I sound like a dumbass. But I am a happier dumbass for going to see the play. OK all for now. I think I will post this on Playgoer too. PS: There is more to say on this whole terms “whimsy” and how it is being attached primarily to women writers. Seems like an easy way out, perhaps a lazy way of categorizing? I need to think more on this…

    Reply
  3. Heidi

    To me August: Osage County is at the forefront of Realist Whimsy! This is why (I lifted this from my own comment on The Playgoer):

    It has all the signposts of a Great American Play (thank you, Eugene): Sprawling family drama in a sprawling family house with the requisite alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, incest, betrayal, parent-child alienation,big family dinner scene, some mystical connection to an earlier America, pedophilia, and poetry readings.

    I was entertained every second and yet AUGUST was clearly never taking itself so seriously – every big revelation, every familiar dramatic trope was played and written (I think), ultimately, with a knowing wink for laughs. In fact I might say it almost had a “whimsical” relationship to the standard ingredients that go into a big, serious American play. I wondered watching (and enjoying)this dazzling display – is this perhaps a fanciful and extravagant parody of the great American play? Realist Whimsy, anyone?

    Reply
  4. Aaron Riccio

    There’s a lot worth saying about and defending in “Hello Failure,” but I do think we should avoid anything related to “reviewers coming to see the play too early.” I saw the play on Monday, 3/10 (http://thatsoundscool.blogspot.com/2008/03/hello-failure.html), and as I tried to express, what I react to is that the play is too *AWARE* of itself (the characters are too, though they don’t address the play). I think that’s what leads people to assume that it’s whimsical — it tackles something serious, but not seriously, and the changes in tone throughout the piece (especially the direct address at the end) lead people to try to make connections (or sense) of things that are meant to just be felt. (I forget which reviewer said it, but I certainly found this play to be easier when I read it myself, with a consistent tone in my head.) Lisa grasps a great line though, that I wish I’d paid more attention to, about the use of language — there’s also another great part in the bathroom where they try to speak as economically as possible. I liked “God’s Ear” so much more because it drove that point about language into the core of the piece; with “Hello Failure,” it seemed to just be one more thought.

    Reply
  5. George Hunka

    I thought “Hello Failure,” far more than “God’s Ear,” was an exploration of the ways in which language specifically provides identity and a means of constructing the world in the midst of a painful sense of loss and loneliness. To disagree with Aaron, I think that the primary weakness of “God’s Ear” was in fact that language played only an ancillary role to the story and the use of pop culture icons. “Hello Failure,” with its minimal story (more a situation than a narrative) and resistance to pop culture, was far more a contemplative play about language.

    And maybe this is where the problem lies: that “Hello Failure” is in this respect self-consciously musical. Much of the critical comment about the play has had to do with this self-consciousness and the lack of event, but to me this was largely the condition of the play and its characters. I think it was Heidi who said that the true antecedents to “Hello Failure” are “Waiting for Godot” and “The Cherry Orchard,” and I think she’s quite right there — the music of the first, the experience of ennui and duration of the second. The characters of “Hello Failure” are self-aware, brutally so in some cases, and so is their language.

    Some theatre critics have lost that ear for the musicality of language (as have too many actors, playwrights and directors in New York), and so the response to “Hello Failure” has elicited a narrow, shallow response, by and large. Lisa’s points here are well-taken.

    There’s nothing whimsical about “Hello Failure” — phrasemaking aside (and I’m guilty of that too, and disappointed that nobody picked up on “Surrealism Lite”), it’s firmly rooted in the very real experience of its characters. The musicality of language is something that perhaps we’ve lost in contemporary realism (unlike the poetic realism of Chekhov and Ibsen; nothing whimsical about that work, either). But clearly, it will be harder to recognise with a generation of critics and theatremakers who care more to “tell a good story” (whatever that means) than to dive deeper into the emotions that underlie our situation, and to use that language as the drill.

    Reply
  6. Laylage

    Thanks, George. To me it is a play about being left to navigate through life alone and how ridiculously hard it is, and the language is written to most accurately communicate that reality. The language isn’t an “exercise” it is a struggle to articulate a piece of reality: to tell people about loneliness, ridiculously self-aware narcissistic suffering in the midst of fragile, lovely lives on earth. That’s what the play is “about”. The language is the means of communication. It isn’t a game.

    Only Kristen can tell us what’s what but does this make sense? It seems unfair to say the play is “about” its language just because the language isn’t the way we normally talk. No one says that TS Eliot or Rilke poems are “about language”. Great writing isn’t about its language–it is a wrestling to express inexpressibles in an inadequate medium. Therefore language is heightened, stretched, and extended outside of its ordinary use.

    It is curious to me that ariticulate language these days seems so foreign (threatening?) that it must be described as an end in in itself. Some formalistic exercise.

    The language is altered because the playwright wishes to be articulate about something in a way our normal speech does not allow us to be.

    I like all this talk and thank everyone for it.

    Reply

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