Joshua Sobol interviewed on "Sinners."

In February, The Arts Fuse's Editor, Bill Marx and I sat down for an email interview with Israeli playwright Joshua Sobol while his play, Sinners was being presented as a staged reading by Israeli Stage.

The play is a powerful one dealing with the fate of intellectually and sexually independent women in Islamic-fundamentalist societies. I hope that Guy Ben-Aharon gets to stage this play in the near future.

Sobol's answer to one question was particularly interesting-- since it revealed the degree to which political-correctitude often means an abandonment of humanist values:

AF: What were the obstacles presented in dramatizing a story that had neither an Israeli nor Jewish theme or setting?

Sobol: The main obstacle to overcome was the so-called politically-correct, recently established taboos. As a white, atheist male, I am told it is none of my business to deal with what’s going on in the so-called de-colonized societies enforcing their religious laws on their citizens. But as a human being, I cannot and should not respect that dictum, and as a dramatist, it is exactly my affair and my responsibility to give a voice to the voiceless victims of inhuman savagery. A woman sentenced to death for having loved a man who is not her husband, and thus being buried alive up to her bosom and waiting for a crowd of wild males to stone her to death, is the epitome of the voiceless victim, whose voice should shatter the fundaments of our world. The duty to carry this stifled voice from one end of the world to the other has nothing to do with being Israeli, Jewish, or Christian. It has to do with being human or giving up one’s humanity.

Review of "Voltaire & Frederick"

Meanwhile, over at The Arts Fuse as a follow-up to my discussion with Detlef Gericke-Schönhagen and Annette Klein of the Goethe-Institut Boston and artist-in-residence, Guy Ben-Aharon about German Stage, the Goethe-Institut's new initiative to bring German theatre to Boston audiences, I review a reading of Gericke-Schönhagen's play Voltaire & Frederick: A Life in Letters.

The reading, which is directed by Ben-Aharon and features Thomas Derrah as Voltaire and John Kuntz as Frederick II of Prussia, is touring both in New England and Canada.

[T]he letters frequently touch on issues as relevant today as they were in the eighteenth century: Voltaire’s objections to the repeated attempts of theologians to use state power to limit freedom of thought and expression echo powerfully in an era when creationists are attempting to ban the teaching of evolution or when Salman Rushdie lives under a fatwa for writing a novel. Voltaire’s arrest at the hands of Frederick’s government illustrates the degree in which leaders are imprisoned by the public roles they play. Frederick’s meditatations on the gap between his ideal of how the world should be and his responsibility to face the world as it is revealed an irony that Voltaire must have appreciated: the king had a strong distaste for the wars he was so good at winning.

There is also a surprisingly lively discussion in the comments section between Gericke-Schönhagen and my editor at The Arts Fuse, Bill Marx.

Photos from Arlecchino Am Ravenous at Behind the Mask Studio and Theatre

Another belated post.

A few photographs from my performance of Arlecchino Am Ravenous at Behind the Mask Studio & Theatre. Eric Bornstein had invited me to perform the inaugural show on the outdoor stage that was built earlier this summer. It was a sunny and the middle of the day, the show had been announced only two days before but we still managed to fill a good many seats.

Here, Arlecchino tells the story of the five little piggies. Photo by Kevin W. Fitzgerald who happened to be visiting from Brooklyn.

Arlecchino prays. Photo by Anya Malkina

Photo by Anya Malkina

After an interesting Q&A during which Bill Marx asked some good questions comparing my usage of the old lazzo, "La Fame dello Zanni" versus that of Dario Fo's, we broke for a light lunch and I went off to supervise my students' rehearsals at Open Air Circus.

This leads to an important announcement that I will make in the next blog entry.

Judicial Theatre Review of "The Overwhelming" at the Art Fuse

Bill Marx, Editor of The Art Fuse, is conducting a new experiment, the "judicial arts review." To quote Marx:

As coverage of the arts in the conventional, mainstream media wanes, critical discussion of the arts online has settled into two extremes: there’s the corporate dream of an omnipotent “Google” reviewer for all and the chaos of opinions fired off in individual blogs of varying quality and intellectual integrity.

My aim with the Judicial Review, of which there will be one a month in the coming year, is to fashion a mid-way between these two unsatisfying polarities — to create a flexible place where professionals and non-professionals, artists and amateurs can exchange views and judgments about the arts. This will serve as a model for a civil conversational setting that will invite independent discussion as well as encourage participation in the arts.

To this end, he has assembled a panel including myself, playwright Peter-Adrian Cohen, and Timothy Longman, Director of the New African Studies Center at Boston University, to review Company One's production of J.T. Rogers' play about the Rwandan genocide, The Overwhelming.

Drinking Kool-Aid with Dead Artists

The Boston Foundation last month issued a report entitled "Vital Signs: Metro Boston’s Arts and Cultural Nonprofits 1999 and 2004" where it suggested that smaller arts organizations consider "[e]xiting the market" (page 9.) Curious, as while the Boston Foundation is a philanthropy, it only gives grants to largest of arts organizations-- indeed as Bill Marx reported this past August, to the Citi Performing Arts Center whose internal financial dealings appear to be quite suspect.

Ian Mackinnon, in response, sponsored an "Art Die Off" at Outpost 186 where those of us in the arts community could apologize for not becoming bigger arts organizations and simply die. Purple Kool-Aid and chili was provided. Big RED, and Shiny's Matthew Nash reported and Christian Holland took photographs.

In an entirely extemporaneous speech, I apologized for co-founding a mime troupe in the Boston area, when clearly, the art-form in question was ultimately unacceptable, as evidenced by the failures of Pocket Mime Theatre Company, Mirage Mime Theatre, and Cosmic Spelunker Theater to become major Boston institutions. I apologized for the fact that Cosmic Spelunker created Waltzing to War before criticism of the U.S. invasion of Iraq had become mainstream, I apologized for performing in just the sort of spaces that the Boston Foundation feels should "[exit] the market." I even apologized for confusing the audience by often performing mime while reciting poetry-- it's bad enough to work in a medium or genre that does not fit into the appropriate disciplinary pigeon-holes but to combine it with another genre in a manner that defies expectations?

Ultimately, as the purple Kool-Aid took effect, I did die, landing on my back with a nice loud thud by means of the most elegant prat-fall I have ever taken.

Markus Nechay, and Alisia L.L. Waller of And So No Sin and Mobius Artists Group (which should "exit" because despite recently opening a new space, they are simply not large enough to be seen as viable by the Boston Foundation) also presented. Eric Zinman provided musical accompaniment.

We're dead, and all of you dance companies, small presses, tiny art galleries, and small theatre troupes are next.