Sensitive Subject

I just received a fairly unprecedented phone call from Glen Cullen, the director of Slide, in which he said that my review of Slide hurt some feelings and could I edit the entry so as to express, perhaps, a different opinion or express my opinion differently. I told him I won't do that, and gave him these two reasons: First, the opinion I expressed in that review is my opinion, honest and true, presented without malice and without ulterior motive. To edit that, to change that would be a sort of lie on my part. Secondly, because I feel that to simply edit what I wrote without saying anything about it would be a sort of cowardice on my part. It would be like an attempt on my part to gloss over something I said, without taking actual responsibility for it. For better or worse, I did write what I wrote.

So, without editing the text below to cover up anything, I'm writing this, which is a sort of apology for where I went wrong in my review and a clarification of those points I feel might have made my review sound less positive than I meant it to sound.

So, first things first, to anyone who had their feelings hurt by my review, please accept my apologies. If you know me, you know that I certainly didn't aim to do so, and you should also know that I didn't write what I wrote callous to the fact that people I cared about might read it. I understood clearly that might happen and that, in writing a review that wasn't universally praising, I might step on toes. It's a risk that comes with writing in a public medium, but I feel that if I start censoring myself to avoid controversy, I miss the entire point of having a blog to express my opinions on.

Where I went wrong, and what I will apologize for is this: I wrote the review below fairly hastily and in-so-doing, perhaps didn't make clear some of the arguments I was making. For that, I am sorry. There was a good reason for the haste (the computer I wrote it on has a habit of spontaneously rebooting, particularly when I'm on the last sentences of a long and unsaved essay), but still it would have been better of me to have taken more time and state my case in a more thorough fashion. I take responsibility for not having done so, and I apologize. This is, alas, a problem in writing time-sensitive reviews and such.

In rereading my review, I can see where people would think it was meant to be a negative review. It wasn't. I meant it to be a fair and balanced review. When I wrote that it was a little like a staged concept album, or something along the lines of The Darkside of Oz, I meant that as praise. Slide isn't an excerise in straight narrative story telling. It tells its story through flashbacks, through Pinteresque dialogue in which more meaning is contained in the unspoken than in what is laid plain, through the movements of its ever-present underscoring. Unlike, say, The Wizard of Oz or Carousel, the song lyrics in Slide don't drive the narrative directly forward. Instead they utilize deeply image-based poetry and semi-psychedelica to infuse the audience with the mood of a location, a character's emotional state, an idea, or just the rollicking good time of a rock show. In a couple of places, this made the show difficult for me to follow from a standpoint of story, but by and large I didn't mind. What I got instead of your standard musical story was a primarily visual and auditory experience, loosely bound with a story. The same sort of thing I would get out of, say, a concept album like Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (which is a fantastic exercise in sensory story telling, and I defy anyone who says otherwise) or a film, like The Wall (which has a plot, but not one told in anything resembling your standard narrative).

Where I was genuinely critical of the show, I stand by. The scope of the story is, in my opinion, far too large for the space it's in. That's no fault of anyone in the show or involved with the show. Tantalus Theatre Group is a small company with a limited budget, and we simply couldn't afford more. What we do have, the cast and director have, as I said in the review, used admirably. But on occassion, the limits of space did come through, and when they did, the stage seemed cluttered and I was jarred out of my pure enjoyment of the music.

Similarly, having worked on the writing team for the show, I can say that the script could have used a bit more time to develop. Kalena Dickerson wrote the script in less than a month, an extraordinarly short period of time for anyone to write anything (I've been known to take a year on just a few pages...a month to write an entire play would mean a marathon bout of writing for me). She did well with the time we gave her. She would have done better with more time. That's the pitfall of the Tantalus show. If I hadn't been quite so intimately involved in Ragnarok, I probably would have written something similar about it (and, in fact, I spoke with several people through the run and after, suggesting the same thing as I suggested for Slide: that we take it back to workshop after the run and iron out the kinks and fix what didn't work, tighten what did, etc.).

Finally, to anyone who still wants to talk about this with me, please do so. I'll be at most of the shows and I'm happy to talk to anyone about my opinions. Or if you'd rather not talk to me in person, feel free to e-mail me or discuss things on this blog. That's why I allow comments and that's why I allow you to post anonymously.