Theater Criticism 101 advises stumped
critics to ask themselves three basic questions: 1. What is the show
trying to do? 2. Does the show do it? 3. Was it worth doing? Jim
Bovino’s world premiere The Believers is a stumper—such
a stumper that I cannot answer the first two questions with any
confidence.
First, a bit about Bovino. He recently movedhere from Minneapolis
and wrote an introductory e-mail to The Stranger explaining
that he’s a veteran of the Edinburgh fringe festival, “trained
intensively for three years in Decroux corporeal mime technique,” and
ran a company called Flaneur that mounted plays lacking “fully realized
characters or a solid narrative structure.” In many cases, that would
be a criticism, but Bovino writes it as a simple
explanation—maybe even a boast.
His 2006 play The Believers comes straight from the Bovino
playbook. Unrealized characters? Check. Absence of narrative structure?
Check. The Believers is lots of words and little sense. Eight
actors splash around in Bovino’s philosophical puddle, wondering
whether reality is really real, whether “the whole city is one big
movie set,” and dropping in aphorisms like “imagination is the
intermediary between perception and thought.” (That’s Aristotle’s, not
Bovino’s.)
The play’s narrative fragments jostle against each other and the
list of characters reads like a Bob Dylan song, circa Blonde on
Blonde: gamblers, clerics, sinister members of the Historic
Preservation Society, a pushy film auteur, a geometer (I think—he
spends a long time fondling a compass), a detective, a woman whose
profile looks like pornography, her voyeurs, a lady trapped in an
asylum (or a prison or her own mind or something), etc. Occasionally, a
Rod Serling–like character played by Joe Feeney—thin and
ingratiating with a big-toothed smile—steps in, directly
addresses the audience with a few cryptic remarks, and disappears
again.
There’s nothing wrong with a narrative mess or a show that makes the
audience work for it. The last two winners of the Stranger Genius Award
for Theater—Implied Violence and the Cody Rivers
Show—specialize in narrative jumbles (Implied Violence to make
dense, thrilling, and disturbing spectacles and Cody Rivers to make
head-spinning comedy). Not to mention international puzzles like
Superamas, Romeo Castellucci, Dorky Park, and the rest.
So what is Jim Bovino doing? I don’t know. And I don’t think he
does, either. In his e-mail, Bovino says he wants “to engage the
audience’s imagination and provide the opportunity for a unique
cognitive experience.” The Believers is “a unique cognitive
experience”—but so is reading a menu at a diner.
For the record, Bovino’s shows were well received in Minneapolis. He
won some newspaper awards, and a review of The Believers in
City Pages stated: “Bovino is working with heady and
philosophically charged material here, and he deftly steers the ship
around from metaphysics and allegory to social commentary.”
What was good about this production of The Believers: a
bluesy, moody soundtrack by Minneapolis band Take Acre and the simple
gray set (a newspaper box downstage, a wall with eight windows upstage,
and a tangle of two-by-fours on stage right) designed by Seattle artist
Zack Bent.
The rest of The Believers is an exhausting series of
theatrical backflips to no purpose. Bovino doesn’t deploy his
experimental tactics—and force his audience to do all that
work—because he’s got something to say. The Believers is
superficial sound and fury, masquerading as depth.
Sorry, Mr. Bovino. Welcome to Seattle.
Ad hominem derision from self-important critic who thinks he’s schooling some rube from the hinterlands about the way it is in the big city but only ends up torpedoing a small, fringe theater’s budget in the process. Check.
Ad hominem derision from self-important critic who thinks he’s schooling some rube from the hinterlands about the way it is in the big city but only ends up torpedoing a small, fringe theater’s budget in the process. Check.
It’s criticism, not derision. “Self-important critic” is derision.
Now that you’ve posted a review of Jim Bovino, can we expect that you’ll also post a review of The Believers, at some point?
One gets the impression in reading this critique – perhaps contumely would be more apposite – that the knowledge that Minneapolis is a vastly superior performance town chafes Mr Kiley. Perhaps he ought to have dealt with his own inferiority complex before he decided to impugn Mr Bovino’s character and deride his work. Welcome to the real world of performance, Mr Provinces-Kiley.
What calumny!
@ 5 Doesn’t bother me a bit. Hooray for Minneapolis. (If I depended on Seattle’s reputation as a performance town for my sense of self-worth, I’d have pitched myself off a bridge long ago.)
And, for the last time, I haven’t impugned the man’s character. Just his work. Which, in this case, deserves impugning.
This review presents a positive quote from the City Pages: “Bovino is working with heady and philosophically charged material here, and he deftly steers the ship around from metaphysics and allegory to social commentary.”
But it is kind enough to omit the conclusion of the City Pages review: “the show’s discrete elements resist being fused together” and “one feels as though The Believers has taken a shot at a lofty vision and fallen short.” Obviously Minneapolis didn’t fall for it either.
My opinion:
1. it’s all fine and good to “steer around” and explore the wide ocean, but if a captain wants to get anywhere, he must have a compass… or at least affix his gaze to a single star.
2. this was a bad play and deserves a bad review.
Also omitted from the review was Bovino’s description of the play’s intent which was included in his introductory email, explaining that The Believers “asks questions about the ways in which specific narrative structures maintain power dynamics and alienates the individual from autonomous action” and how “our mediated reality dictates behavior”.
A bad review is one thing, but reading the concluding paragraph it is hard to not feel like the criticism is aimed at Bovino – who has creative intent – yet is made out to be a fraud.
“Ad hominem derision from self-important critic who thinks he’s schooling some rube from the hinterlands about the way it is in the big city but only ends up torpedoing a small, fringe theater’s budget in the process. Check.”
Whether the review is valid or not, it’s probably best to understand what an ad hominem fallacy means if you’re trying to be nitpicky about the abilities of others.
Not everything that we do not understand is crap Mr. Kiley. Perhaps it is your perspective that is skewed or too narrow. I did not see what you saw evidently.
But some things we do not understand ARE crap. A marvelous philosophy professor taught me to have the courage to admit when I don’t understand something and to know that sometimes it was the author’s fault.
I was having a devil of a time with some Kant and he said “it’s not entirely your fault you’re having trouble understanding. Kant did a bad job of explaining.” Life-changing moment, that.
Since you cannot answer the questions, Mr Kiley:
1) The show is trying to provoke the audience to question our concepts of identity and societal expectations, the nature of our perception and how it is mediated by culture and mass entertainment, and pay homage to the absurd theater tradition (you missed the reference to Ionesco’s The Chairs apparently) while having fun with metaphysics and reminding us that there may be an authentic self underneath the layers of the stories that we have been taught and internalized.
2) Yes, the show largely succeeds despite a few moments when the concept and connection between the actors doesn’t quite work. On the whole the inventive staging, and always intriguing and provocative and witty dialogue is powerfully effective (the audience of 25 or so on closing night laughed and gave the show a rousing round of appreciation). The show even mocks the idea of taking itself too seriously by saying that asking the question What is reality takes people away from the real, suggesting that our safe artistic and philosophical excursions into the nature of truth are ultimately merely diversions from the real thing. The visual ending is as emotionally resonant as any narrative-driven work and deeply moving.
3) It was infinitely worth seeing, and therefore worth doing. One can only be deeply grateful that within the often generic local theater scene of pat cutesy material posing as meaningful (Artifacts of Inconsequence), or interpretations of Albee’s Zoo Story so misguided and off-base that one imagines them doing Hamlet by having the actors imitate characters from Family Guy and take it seriously, there is a shining light of inventive imagination, dynamic and courageous acting, and beautifully realized production. My only regret is that critical ignorance influenced me to wait until the show’s final day and so I can only tell a story about what I saw. Which may be, after all, in keeping with the play.