To say that CHAUTAUQUA! Is thought-provoking is to say that Lauren Caitlin Upton is stupid. (I heard that she is doing porn now which I find heartwarming in an odd Americun-type-o’way.) No seriously, folks… This show is dope! I took my Dad (yes the Vanilla is no longer in Manila) and he loved it for chrissakes. He thinks it is has commercial potential. Wow! Let’s hope so!!!

I have two theories (numbered 1) & 22)) resulting from my CHAUTAUQUA! attendance and subsequent viewing:

1) Mark Russell was the guest lecturer the evening I saw the show. (This conceit of guest lecturer is B) awesome and 3) commercially viable (and therefore endemic of the ideas drawn out in the little preface above and in theories 1) and 22)).)  Mark Russell is the former and first Artistic Director of Performance Space 122 and now runs the Below the Radar Festival via The Public Theater. It was both moving and fascinating to hear him speak about his experience running the place. And when I went to express my gratitude after the show, he looked at me through a glassy film covering his eyes and with a weak, vacant smile, uttered, “Thanks for coming out.”

My now revised feelings about him being a Wang are undoubtedly of my own frustrations with a lack of experimental theater stardom (read: career) or perhaps just plain ol’ Mommy-Daddy issues. The need for approval is only surmounted by my credit card debt. Placing my own iss-ewes aside, in recounting of the history of the former Public School there was a definitive moment, and feeling, when Mark described the transition from community-based arts collective to “one of the world’s leading arts institutions, an esteemed presenter of experimental and alternative performance.”  They painted the windows black, they put in permanent seating, they quintupled their budget… and that was the end methinks.

In order to survive, institutions, like people, must adapt.  What I find funny (Strange not HaHa) is the positive connotation of both these modes of necessity…  Survival and adaptation are not necessarily positive or good.  I mean what is actually being propagated? This was an amazing parallel to the play itself and a microcosm for Democracy, Globilzation and many other inflated, useless topics that will not lead you to get laid. Trust me.

What I find fascinating is that Vallejo Gantner, the current Artistic Director and Mark’s successor, has the same Johnsonian mystique.  Forget the fact that I was introduced to the new guy on seven different occasions, with two different identities and kept a very popular Blog on his Company’s website (Penis 122 and Cultureslut were incidentally once affiliated but no longer).  Each time I was met with the same preoccupied lip-services which takes one just enough off their game to want to keep playing. Let’s just focus on these guys’ as enablers of art that there is little to no chance of you seeing otherwise.  So don’t call them Pricks, just forgive them their mechanism for dealing with troves of sycophants such as yours truly.  It cums with the job.

22) The second theory is really long and dumb.  It has to do with the Death of the Avant-tard (which happened in the Middle of the Wooster Group’s Phaedra by the way) and Derrida’s ideas about Archiving (which I haven’t read and don’t understand.)  Plus Mr. Roboto wants short blasts. (He should just work the video camera over at my house some time.)

Just go see the friggin’ show!!! I  heard Juliana Francis is the guest lecturer tonight.  She is reason enough to go anywhere, let alone to wander the fancy historical brains and balls that be the NT.

Hasty Love~

IB