The Badgeree's Complaint
Fate doesn't often hand me the opportunity to show off my superior manners. Recently, however, I had the good fortune to be cast in a small show, giving me the chance to set two very good examples for local theater artists.
First up, tact: A director friend was forced to call on her last reserves to cast a short solo piece for a new works festival. I was game, and wound up playing, for one night, the starring role in any critic's nightmare, with both cast and audience constituted almost entirely of people to whom I'd given bad reviews. Once my Stranger affiliations leaked, I was accosted by a wounded actor who demanded: "Are you the asshole who reviewed...."
"Why no," I lied.
"Good!" he said. "Because blah, blah, blah!"
Second, consideration for my friends: My short tenure as critic-cum-actor gave me the chance to not insist my friends come witness my performance. My girlfriend attempted the standard protocol, telling people, "You should see the show Brendan's in." I appreciate her support, but I take exception to her adherence to standard theater etiquette: bullying your friends into paying 10 dollars for what will probably be a tedious evening.
We conduct artistic experiments hoping they will inspire friends and strangers alike to admire our vision, intellect, and all-around attractiveness. Usually, we fail. Because none of our friends have the critical courage (or outrageousness) to say our shows are crap, they vote with their feet. Obligation is a serious disease in the theater community, an attempt to subsidize attendance that, like other kinds of subsidies, masks the true relationship between supply and demand--in this case, the demand for exposure to our genius.
If you do a show and none of your friends like it, it doesn't mean that they are disloyal. It only means that what you are doing is uninteresting. This goes for poets, painters, musicians, and everyone else--stop badgering people to show up. They still like you, they just don't like your art.
