Good news from ArtsEmerson - and is Harvard's "populist" really all that popular?

The news is good from ArtsEmerson, even if the Globe doesn't want you to think so.

The Boston Globe includes an interesting statistic today - you have to look for it, though; it's buried in a hatchet job on ArtsEmerson by Laura Collins-Hughes. The article is clearly a response to the meme I first posited last fall - that ArtsEmerson's director, Robert Orchard, had pulled the intellectual rug right out from under the now-"populist" ART (his former employer).  By now I'd say that's the conventional wisdom - if you want to go to a baseball game, a strip club, or a Journey concert, you go to Harvard.  But if you want challenging theatre - that is, if you like Shakespeare with the words - you go to Emerson, which in one incredible year presented the dazzling millennial circus Psy, the hilarious Fräulein Maria, the stunning Aftermath, a brilliant social documentary by The Civilians, and a superb production of The Cripple of Inishmaan by the Druid Theatre. For a time, in fact, it seemed that everything Emerson touched was turning to gold - but of course, a few bombs eventually fell (like the Abbey Theatre's ridiculous Terminus), and the "big name" events, such as the visit by Peter Brook's troupe, or the tour of F. Murray Abraham's Merchant of Venice, turned out to be worthy, but slightly mixed, bags.

But you can't have everything, and even with those disappointments I still stand by my prediction of a few months back: the ArtsEmerson inaugural season did indeed prove to be the greatest theatrical season this town has seen in thirty years.

But anyway, back to why I'm jumping up and down this morning.  The Globe clearly has it in mind to question the staying power of ArtsEmerson - word on the street has it that several of their projects lost money, and judging from the announcement of their next season, they've slightly trimmed their sails.  Under pointed questioning, Orchard dodges the specifics of the program's finances, although he admits he'll be concentrating this year on fund-raising.  Still, he hasn't trimmed his seasonal sails by much, and even though ArtsEmerson is clearly relying on big-name draws from the BAM circuit (like John Malkovich) to boost their profile, they're also bringing back Kirk Lynn of the Rude Mechs and the great Civilians.  They're also betting on the super-sexy Circa from Australia, who blur the line between circus and dance (and whom I caught in Edinburgh a year or two ago; don't miss them) - and are finally bringing in (they promise) current Met bad-boy Robert Lepage.  And there is sure to be at least one more great surprise lurking among the acts I don't know.

But how popular will such a line-up be?  In other words, can Boston really support this much theatre for smart people?  Or do we need a little dumbed-down Harvard sugar - or scotch - to swallow what's good for us?

Well, as it turns out - the numbers are kind of encouraging.  We're not as dumb as Harvard and the Globe wants us to believe we are.  ArtsEmerson sold around 50,000 tickets last year, it turns out - trailing, it's true, the Huntington (at 106,000) and the ART (at 82,000).  And part of ArtsEmerson's box office was no doubt due to the drawing power of F. Murray Abraham (whose performance as Shylock was actually disappointing, but if he pays the bills, invite him back!).  Still, 50,000 tickets actually strikes me as a respectable number for a maiden season largely populated with unknowns.  And the news gets better when you look at the "membership" numbers - in one year ArtsEmerson has signed up 4,000 people.

Now an ArtsEmerson "membership" isn't nearly as large a financial commitment as a subscription would be.  Still - having 4,000 people sign up for anything cultural is a very good sign in this town.  (Compare to Celebrity Series's 2700 subscribers.)  Plus, ArtsEmerson members in many cases look like new converts to the arts - two-thirds of them don't overlap with any other arts series.  (Yes, you read that right, startling as that number is.) And the news gets better - the ART can boast far less sustained interest from its patrons: it only has 2600 subscribers for those 82,000 tickets sold.  Indeed, the real news in the article is the following statistic - the Huntington has nearly four times as many subscribers as the ART does (a whopping 10,000 subscribers!).

When I read that, I suddenly felt another rug being pulled right out from under Diane Paulus & Co.  I suppose the evil Paulus is up where she needs to be in terms of single ticket sales - but let's be honest, take out the horny kids who hit The Donkey Show over and over, as well as all of Amanda Palmer's Facebook friends, and I'd bet you good money the ART isn't selling many more tickets than ArtsEmerson did in its inaugural year (and maybe only two thirds of the Huntington's haul).  And that's even with the advantages of Harvard's incredible brand and social reach, along with really constant promotion in the press, and open threats to local critics who don't toe the line (as well as a slew of awards from frightened scribes who know better than to cross the ART's dragon lady!).

And yet with all that, it's clear Paulus isn't really getting any kind of traction; she's not building anything.  The young audiences the aging diva so covets aren't really committing to her vision.  I mean, I knew the Huntington was more popular than the ART - although you never read that in the paper - but still, Peter DuBois has gotten four times the commitment from the community that Paulus has?  That's kind of incredible; I've been raving about them recently, but even I'm kind of surprised.  I'd say that's Boston theatre's best-kept secret.

The excuse for Diane Paulus's meagre artistic achievement, of course, has always been that she's a "populist," that, as Paulus apologist Christopher Wallenberg put it in a recent article, her "whole mission" is to follow the audience.  (That's right: avant-garde theatre that follows the audience.  Can you spell o-x-y-m-o-r-o-n, Chris?)

But what do you have when your "populism" isn't really all that popular - when you're a series of flashes in the pan, when people check you out because they've heard you're dirty and loud, but then don't come back?  Well, I know what people like Christopher Wallenberg and Ed Siegel will prescribe - Harvard needs more Red Sox, more tits and ass!  Because after all, the millennials just don't commit, do they; they're so cheap they won't even pay for their favorite albums; so how could you expect more than an anemic subscription base for an organization targeting them?  You have to string the kids along from thrill to thrill, the way a video game or a porn site does.

There's some truth to this - but it's not the kind of truth that really helps Diane Paulus.  Because in the end memberships and subscriptions do point to the long-term health of an organization.  And somehow it seems the Huntington and ArtsEmerson, which are facing the same environment as the ART, are doing better at getting folks to commit; indeed, ArtsEmerson seems to be much better at pulling new converts into the high-culture fold - supposedly Paulus's specialty - and with real, not fake, art!  Which maps to a disconnect I've already perceived between what I hear informed Bostonians say and what I read in the print press; I never run into anyone, frankly - outside the Harvard/media echo chamber, that is - who takes Diane Paulus or the ART seriously.  When people say they like a Paulus show, it's always prefaced with an embarrassed little laugh that tells you "I know it was kind of stupid, but I'd drunk a little too much, okay?  So I kind of liked it." I'm beginning to realize that somewhere deep inside, believe it or not, people still know that Amanda Palmer can't sing, and that Aeschylus didn't write a rock opera, and that The Donkey Show isn't Shakespeare. And I believe Paulus's numbers reflect that.  And so I think - or at least for the first time I hope - that in those numbers I can finally see the light at the end of a long tunnel at the ART.

End of the line

Are we dead yet?  The cast of Terminus.

You keep thinking it has to be a joke.

You think that when the heroine pops out the eyeballs of the crazed lesbian abortionist who's brandishing a sharpened spear.  And you think it when she wakes up (after having been knocked out cold with a folding chair) to find a guy masturbating over her, ready to shoot.  You think it when the other leading lady reaches orgasm with a flying demon made of worms.  And you really, really think it when the serial killer is strung up by his intestines (which have been pulled out through his arsehole), and swings face-down from a construction crane, singing (I'm not kidding) "The Wind Beneath My Wings."

But it seems it's not a joke.  Indeed, it's deadly serious (even though the audience every now and then breaks out into guffaws).  "It" is Terminus, a new play by Mark O'Rowe, in a touring production by Dublin's Abbey Theatre, now at the Paramount as part of ArtsEmerson's Irish Festival.

And what I can say but - either you want to stay very far away - or you don't want to miss it.

The title alone tells you that Terminus is about the ultimate, the finale, the end of line.  And the play certainly stands as the ne plus ultra of pretentious bad taste.  It's a braided trio of monologues about horror and death, and hell and more horror and death, and more horror and death and hell.  Did I mention mental suffering and abject squalor and physical torment?  Maybe I did already.

And what's more, Terminus is also a rap.  Yes, hipsters - Irish rap!!!  Okay, it doesn't have an actual beat, but playwright O'Rowe is constantly bustin' rhymes of the "Christ/shite" and "fuck/truck" variety during his lurid descriptions of pissing lesbians and grotesquely deformed fetuses (since he keeps no steady rhythm going, however, this is pretty easy).  Yes - imagine the love child of Harlan Ellison and Dean Koontz working with Dr. Dre, and you've got Terminus.

Inevitably, you also find yourself thinking, "This actually could be great if it were made into a midnight movie, and people could throw rubber eyeballs at the screen."  Oddly enough, it's also so pretentious that it might work as an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.  On rollerblades.  Could somebody please forward the script to Sir Andrew?

Although I know what you're thinking - Jesus fucking Christ, Garvey, can't you tell you're inside a living graphic novel?  (Yes, I can.)  And that the playwright is simply pushing said form's adolescent tropes to their logical, if extreme, conclusion?  (Again, ditto, yup, I get it.)  Only the thing is - I'll just leave all that bullshit to the pop critics, if you don't mind.  I've got real novels to read and real art to review.  I don't have time to watch Junior doodle cartoons of worms eating corpses all day.

Because as "drama" - oh, God, where to begin with Terminus?  I mean,  please - it's so dull. Its Twilight-Zone-level irony never varies, and its droning tone never wavers; you could literally doze off to its background Vault-of-Horror hum (and one or two people around me did just that).   I knew from the Abbey's tour of Playboy of the Western World a few years ago that this troupe was a bit over-rated, but I had no idea they were such self-serious dorks.  You keep waiting for some slightly arch phrasing, some flicker of an eyebrow, to nudge the whole thing into the hilarious parody of current pop culture it's screaming out to be.  But no such luck; the stark lighting, the smashed set, the grim, downer line readings - they're taking this thing (and themselves) very, very seriously.  And so I just don't want to acknowledge the director or designers or even the actors - they may be taking themselves seriously, but that doesn't mean I have to.

And you don't have to, either.  Of course it would be rude to actually throw rubber eyeballs at the stage, but you can still do that mentally.  And to be honest, theatre geeks may not want to miss this show; it has the aura of legend about it, as Carrie and Moose Murders did.  People may be bragging that they saw it for years to come.

On the other hand, you'll never get these two hours of your life back.

So think carefully before you decide.

The actor's nightmare

You want to be an actor. And you know you have to get beyond your self-consciousness.

So your acting teacher instructs you to dance around naked, in front of a full house, with a big bouquet of helium balloons tied to your penis.

Think that's just some actor's nightmare? Well, think again - it happens in The Method Gun, by the Rude Mechanicals (this weekend only at the Paramount Theatre), a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the greatest acting guru who never lived, "Stella Burden."

And yes, the guys really do it (at left). Which gives you a sense that the "Rude Mechs" - a smart, laid-back gang from Austin, Texas, who seem a bit like the Elevator Repair Service on roller blades - are pretty much up for anything.

As for their mythical guru, "Stella Burden" - a kind of gonzo Stella Adler crossed with Jerzy Grotowski - she was up for more than anything; this hardly even counts as the most outrageous example of her brand of theatrical tough love. In fact her method - called "The Approach" - is a crazy quilt of exercises like "The Crying Game" and such Chekhovian demands as "there should ALWAYS be a loaded gun on stage!," which she inflicted on her acolytes over a rehearsal period of (wait for it) nine years. When her pupils requested explanations for her bizarre precepts, Burden would lock her answers in a box, then explain that they could be read if and only if they were also burnt at the same time. High-mindedly elusive and poetically contradictory, the guru's only commandment that really made sense was her insistence that "real beer should be drunk onstage all the time, no matter how early, no matter which brand."

And then she disappeared. To South America, people said - leaving her company stranded halfway through their nine-year rehearsal of her unique version of A Streetcar Named Desire - you know, the one that avoids completely the characters of Blanche, Stella, Stanley and Mitch. In other words, the version with only the bit players - a fact that perhaps weighed unconsciously on her intense little troupe.  But they decided to soldier on, and their struggle to realize the vision of a charismatic leader they never really understood - and who maybe made no sense at all - is the poignant subject of The Method Gun.

Clearly, whoever dreamt up "Stella Burden" - and I suppose it's author Kirk Lynn - knew something about theatre gurus; every form of method madness I can think of finds a funhouse mirror in his witty script. And just in case you lose sight of how "dangerous" all this navel-gazing is supposed to make the resulting theatre feel, a live tiger wanders through the audience every now and then (at right), musing that he might just kill one of the actors. Or maybe you.

Of course if you're not a theatre geek, much of this low-key but killer parody will either fly right over your head or under your radar. And even if you are, you may notice that The Method Gun is pretty loosely structured - I got the feeling different "exercises" might take the stage on any given night - and sometimes, unfortunately, a little under-energized. The Rude Mechs are long on conceptual wit, but short on the actual damaged intensity of the inbred, 70's-era theatre commune.

But all is forgiven during the show's lovely, haunting coda, in which we finally see (I think) Burden's vision of Streetcar. Or is what we see more of a metaphor for her vision of Streetcar? I wasn't quite sure - it certainly hardly grows out of her bizarre program of training. But that's okay - the performance is so precise, and yes, so beautifully risky, that this quibble not only doesn't matter, but rather may be central to the meaning of the evening. And in a sweet final flourish, the Rude Mechs enlist the crowd in a bit of audience participation (don't worry, there aren't any balloons!) that provides a touching tribute to every teacher who was both an inspiration and yes, a burden.

And so ArtsEmerson pretty much rocks on.