Channing Gray: This is Not the Show You're Looking For

Channing Gray is back with a review of Trinity Rep's Paris By Night that is as inoffensive as it is indifferent. That is, until the penultimate paragraph, when he unwraps this jewel of a reassurance. It glitters with tactlessness and curiosity:

And for those who are not big on guy-on-guy relations, not to worry. This is not a racy show. There’s very little face-to-face contact, and nothing like simulated sex or hard-core leather-bar action.

(Thank God, the doyens of the East Side exhale; if I have to sit through one more hard-core leather-bar musical at Trinity I'm just gonna puke.)

I love how this paragraph builds to an erotic climax, gratuitous and trivial. Don't worry about this show, he says; I'll give you something to get all bunched up about. From "guy-on-guy relations" to "leather-bar action," the paragraph swells with its own heated concupiscence. There are so many honest, discrete ways to say what he's trying to say, but Gray has an irrepressibly carbonated imagination. So it's not enough to write--as though even this were necessary--that the show is basically PG-rated; he has to vividly describe the salacious show from which Providence would have to be protected by his warning. But in the process of approving the show's character he actually impugns its provenance and genre: he limits the show by association. I suspect Gray was trying to allay theater-goers' concerns, but his effort is leering and disingenuous.

Therefore, as a service to the people of Providence, I offer a comprehensive, alphabatized list of all the other things that are not in this show: avacados, bears, cars, data, everything not related to the love story between Sam and Buck, flocks of geese, Gary Hart, Heart, imprisonment (except for the metaphysical, symbolic kind), Jell-O, karate, lassos, maps indicating Paris's numerous leather-bars, narcotics, origami, parakeets, quintuplets, Reaganomics, severed heads (!!!), terrorists, underpants, verandas, whipping of hot hot men with a cat o' nine tails and then tying them to a bed and going CRAZY on them all night, xeroxing of data, yogurt, zebras (duh).

These things were also not in such plays as Antigone, Much Ado About Nothing, and Death of a Salesman. (Oklahoma! did have lassos and, possibly, underpants, so it's not on this list.) Now you can decide if Paris By Night is really the show for you.

Hollywood, RI

A great article in the ProJo on the state's tax credits for film, tv, and commercial productions.

The issue at stake is whether tax credits extended to film and TV production companies really are good for RI. The article challenges the assumption that these credits encourage enough spending within the state to justify them. (The article also takes some shots at the quality of the films being made here: the Wesley Snipes/Cybill Shepherd vehicle Hard Luck went straight to video, Katherine Gregg writes, and Hard Luck Productions has since dissolved.) The problem is that much of the production cost of the films, TV shows, and commercials filmed in RI has been spent outside of RI.

New England states are so small--Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut have a combined population of about 14.5 million people and just one city with over half a million people--that one wonders if each state alone has the resources to fulfill a major production company's needs. Perhaps a NE revenue-sharing agreement would be a good idea.

All this talk really makes me want to see Underdog.

Finding Richard

One of my primary reasons for starting this blog was to generate a forum for serious and substantive thinking about Providence's arts scene. For whatever reason--the city's small size and relative intimacy; a peculiar aversion to intellectualism or an admirable distaste for pretension; an established, historical collegiality among local performative and critical organs--Providence's reviewers are remarkably gentle. What I mean is not that our reviewers always give "good" reviews, though they nearly always do, but that they rarely engage in the provocative and important work of critical rough-housing. It's not that I would have Bill Rodriguez, Michael Janusonis, or Channing Gray betray their honest impressions or their natures to give us gratuitously scathing reviews. But I would love for them to challenge us, and the productions they review (be they culinary, theatrical, or cinematic), with a vigorous intellectual curiosity.

Take, for example, Channing Gray's review of Trinity Repertory Theater's Richard III. After describing the "in-your-face" lighting and "gun-toting soldiers" (breathlessly hyphenated descriptions being the lingua franca of Providence arts writers) he informs us that this is "free-wheeling" and "muscular" Shakespeare. And what should follow these compelling descriptors but...a summary of Richard III. I understand the importance of summary in a review; and if I had not visited Wikipedia's Richard III article before seeing the show I would surely have been entirely shut out from it. But by summarizing the show--that is, by focusing on what Shakespeare wrote rather than what Trinity Rep gives us--Gray does a real disservice to this particular performance and to the people of Providence. We never learn what makes this show "free-wheeling" and we never learn if the show is "muscular" because of its moral conviction, its violent barbarity, or its rhetorical audacity. A serious review, in other words, would at least try to explain what Kevin Moriarty and the actors of Trinity Rep tell us about Richard III or our own elected officials or powerful public officials anywhere or simply power, wherever and by whomever it is held. On these questions, Gray is mute.

I was no fan of the show myself; it was unmoored from any place or time, and thus from any real character or consequence. Channing Gray notes that the characters carry "guns, not swords," and are dressed in "modern military getups." These cosmetic decisions, I guess, transmit existential truths; for Gray, they help make the play's "political message seem all the more relevant." And what "political message" is that? How does setting the play in an unnamed place in an indeterminate time reify its "political message"? These are the sorts of questions that matter; these are the questions that need to be asked to challenge audience members and troupe members alike. The glib bromide about Shakespeare's relevance getting a boost from guns and getup means nothing and provokes nothing.

Still, the show has real strengths. Brian McEleney's Richard III is more snake (or serpent) than wolf: his sibilant feints and manipulations work because he knows that they are all he has. In a world governed by natural law his physical deformities are a liability, so he must create a parallel world--a play, even, of which he is both star and director. Early in the evening I doubted this Richard's menace and his conviction--he seemed almost too theatrical to survive real slings and arrows--but by the time that Lord Hastings, confident in his standing with Richard, whispers to a fellow lord "I think there's never a man in Christendom/That can less hide his love or hate than he;/For by his face straight shall you know his heart" I had come to see his power to invent and to act as his only weapon. Jonathan Bate, in an essay for Harper's (April, 2007), suggests that "Shakespeare's most successful characters are the best actors"; McEleney, clearly, was thinking the same thing.