McSweeney’s has more than a hundred entries at its fiction section titled OPEN LETTERS TO PEOPLE OR ENTITIES UNLIKELY TO RESPOND The writer of the open letter to Vice President Cheney first offers condolences for the loss of Scooter Libby, then applies for the open Chief of Staff job. The applicant begins his list of qualifications with 1. I am pure evil. I can provide letters of reference from former girlfriends, as well as from my previous landlord, to attest…
The distinction between reviews and criticism, reviewer and critic, should be made. Reviewers have both space and time pressures imposed upon them. The reviewer has a “job†job. More often than not the subject/work is an assignment not a choice. The job also entails that something needs to be written even when nothing warrants it. The critic is not on assignment but begins with the subject/work that intrigues and excites, “something that needs to be written about.†The critic is…
AMERICAN THEATRE presents Weigh In on Cultural Power The August Wilson/Robert Brustein Debate Moderated by Anna Deavere Smith ************************************************** John Weidman and the Guild should have taken lessons from August Wilson and TCG before they tried to pick a fight with a critic. In a very methodical manner, TCG along with its magazine American Theatre, engendered and nurtured the smoldering feud between the playwright and the critic into a convoluted but interesting cultural polemic. The apotheosis was a public debate…
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar And the Hedy Weiss spectacle in Chicago ends in the way it began. Not with a bang but a whimper. Its only accomplishment was the denigration of both theatre and criticism. Theatre as an art form is…
The Dramatists Guild’s president John Weidman apologizes to Hedy Weiss in a Sun-Times’ Letter to the Editor. Well, not really. As we predicted, the public inquisition of the critic proceeds in the words of The Guild’s executive director Ralph Sevush “without pause and without apology.” So who is the “reliable source†that presented El Presidente with the faulty intelligence that instigated this whole letter writing campaign?  Before writing the letter, I confirmed with what I believed to be an…
Ezra Pound had the reputation of being the most well-read in literature amongst all his contemporaries. Remarkably, he once said “You don’t need to read an entire book in order to speak intelligently about it.” I am not sure if that “confession” made me think more or less of Pound as an arbitrator of literature. No doubt that Jeremy and Melissa have picked Ms Weiss’ winning offense. A perfect example of the hubris of the Critic, not to see the…
Thoughts and ideas can become dangerous so I always begin writing to the great metaphysical abyss with the salutation “Dear Editor.” It keeps me on my toes. The greatest fiction writer of the 20th century was of course Vladimir Lenin. The Editor especially enjoyed his pamphlet State and Revolution. In 1940 Leon Trotsky was in the study of his heavily guarded house near Mexico City writing the History of the Russian Revolution when The Editor embedded an alpine climbing axe…
I will often fall asleep at the theatre. My own snoring sometimes wakes me. Other times one of my companions might elbow me awake. I may then leave at intermission so as not to embarrass my unfortunate theatre companions further. “The performance put me to sleep.” “I left at intermission before I feel asleep again.” For me to claim anything else would be unethical. Whether or not that is an authoritative judgement depends solely on who does or doesn’t believe…
The NY Times article points toward how/where this controversy began. “The review came to the attention of a member of the Dramatists Guild of America, Jeffrey Sweet, who alerted other guild members.” What’s not so well known is that Jeffrey Sweet had an agenda here. As playwright he does not like the way Hedy Weiss reviews his plays. So Jeff has been trying to pick a public fight with Hedy for sometime now. Here’s his Letter to the Editor from…
Years ago Ross Wetzsteon, the theatre editor of the Village Voice, solicited a series of essays on the subject of the artist/critic relationship. He was asking for not just critics but also artists in the community to reply. I think I remember him titling the series “Crritic!!” after a Beckett quote from Waiting for Godot. VLADIMIR: Moron! ESTRAGON: Vermin! VLADIMIR: Abortion! ESTRAGON: Morpion! VLADIMIR: Sewer-rat! ESTRAGON: Curate! VLADIMIR: Cretin! ESTRAGON: (with finality): Crritic! VLADIMIR: Oh! (He wilts, vanquished, and turns…